Local Business Growth: Neil Patel on Winning with AI

[00:00:00] Hey gang, on Today's Show I have the internet famous Neal Patel who is world-renowned in its

[00:00:07] internet marketing prowess and experience. He runs a marketing agency as well as other

[00:00:13] businesses. Very successful. Neal and I tackled this idea of AI and how AI is impacting business

[00:00:22] specifically local businesses that have local employees and staff and clients and customers

[00:00:28] and how they can leverage AI to grow their businesses and that it's not something to be afraid of or intimidated by,

[00:00:35] but something to embrace and be excited about. Tune in, strap in and let's go for a great ride.

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[00:01:09] stories, expert advice, and actionable strategies. Welcome!

[00:01:18] Today listeners welcome to the show. I have an amazing guest today Neal Patel. He is a New York Times

[00:01:24] bestselling author, a Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer in the web. Forbes says he's one of the top

[00:01:29] 10 marketers, Entrepreneur Magazine says he's created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He's been recognized

[00:01:35] all over the web as a digital marketing expert and entrepreneur. I'm just honored to have him on the show today.

[00:01:42] We're going to talk about some really awesome things that he's from the leading edge in. Neal, welcome to the show today.

[00:01:48] Thanks for having me.

[00:01:50] Yeah, you bet. Before we dive into the burning question on my mind and I think the minds of a lot of our listeners and clients today,

[00:01:57] just real quickly. What's your career journey? How did you get to be an intermittent marketing expert and entrepreneur to the level that you're at?

[00:02:05] Sure. I started in this space around 22-ish years ago. When I started off, it wasn't end marketing.

[00:02:14] I was looking for a job. I couldn't find one. I was like, you know what?

[00:02:18] I'm going to create a job board to help other people find a job created one and no one came to it.

[00:02:24] And then I paid a marketing firm to help me out, got ripped off. Then I had a learned marketing and I produced some decent results

[00:02:32] and I had a ton of fun. And then from there, I was like, I'm not having fun creating a job board but I'm having a lot of fun in the marketing

[00:02:39] realm. Let me just help other people with their marketing and that's how it started for me.

[00:02:43] Wow, that's funny how most entrepreneurs that I talked to and know about it have studied over the years.

[00:02:49] It's that accidental journey, right? You have this mission and think something you're going to do and all of a sudden there's an event,

[00:02:55] a problem, a challenge it occurs and then there's a pivot opportunity. And I think it seems the difference between the ones that become successful

[00:03:02] ones that kind of blather on in life or they seize that opportunity and open their mind to doing something different.

[00:03:08] Yeah, and you got to keep your mind open and try and you never know where it's going to lead you.

[00:03:13] Yeah, yeah, for sure. What I really wanted to get into today with you, Neil is this idea of we're hearing AI, artificial intelligence, large language,

[00:03:23] all these things are coming out and they're coming out fast and furious with chat and Gemini and you name it.

[00:03:30] There's probably a hundred tools a day coming out and refinements and half the world thinks that we're going to be taking over by robots

[00:03:37] and bots and whatnot. And you have a lot of small business people that are really just trying to grow their business locally, right?

[00:03:45] They're trying to build their clientele, they're trying to serve their employees in their community and their families.

[00:03:50] They don't want to get left behind and what's bring us up to speed what's going on there?

[00:03:56] What's the impact there? How can they leverage it? There's a lot there to unpack. And so I'm just going to throw that whole football and to you.

[00:04:03] Sure, so first off with AI, most small business owners from what we see, look at as a magic wand.

[00:04:10] They hope you can wave it and it solves all your props. That's not really AI in its form today.

[00:04:16] Maybe five years from now, maybe even two years from now or a year, maybe I don't know.

[00:04:21] But in the short run, I believe too many small businesses are overestimating AI but they're also on the flip side.

[00:04:29] We're seeing them underestimate the impact it can have to their business in the long run.

[00:04:34] So AI is super powerful and it can help them with things like ideation research.

[00:04:42] Think of what you would pay junior level people to help you do.

[00:04:47] AI can help you with a lot of that stuff for pennies on the dollar.

[00:04:51] And that's where we see the power of AI, especially for a small medium business.

[00:04:57] We can be an example of that ideation that a small business person. How could they leverage that?

[00:05:02] If you want to create a video marketing your product, Sora can end up doing that for you.

[00:05:09] If you're looking for images, you don't no longer have to pay someone professionally.

[00:05:14] Sure the video quality, the image quality may be better but you'll be shocked on what firefly could do for you and it's pennies on the dollar.

[00:05:22] It's a night and day difference.

[00:05:24] So they could start with basically hiring a sort of free or pennies on the dollar technical assistant that can handle some of these tasks that they've had to outsource.

[00:05:34] And to clarify some of these penny on the dollar type of investments produce better results than paying the actual person.

[00:05:43] For example, if I want a really cool visual image, a lot of times I'm able to get better images from firefly Adobe's product then I am from paying a freelancer on upwork.

[00:05:57] Really wow.

[00:06:00] So you're crazy. Oh and by the way, I get it in seconds versus waiting days.

[00:06:05] So you've compressed your time, you've compressed the cost and you're getting a better quality product.

[00:06:10] First some things, not everything. A lot of people like, oh I could just have AI write me a thousand blog posts and do SEO.

[00:06:17] We're not seeing that work. Trust me, we tried it. It would be great if it worked that well.

[00:06:21] I hear a lot of people saying, oh, don't have to pay people to create social content. I don't even need to do it myself. I can just retire.

[00:06:28] I'm just going to have AI create a ton of social content for me. We did an interesting study where we tested out AI content versus human content images. Right.

[00:06:38] And we tested this out on, I believe it was 300 and four social profiles.

[00:06:46] It was 304 Instagram accounts. And when you look at these accounts are posting both AI content non AI content, they're non AI content. Right.

[00:06:57] They're AI generated images got 37.8% less likes and the non AI generated images not only got more likes but they also generated on average 34.7% more comments.

[00:07:12] So it doesn't always produce better results.

[00:07:16] Okay, so taking this idea of content for instance in leveraging AI because most of us have been taught in the local business that we want to create content to help drive traffic and SEO.

[00:07:30] And of course, again, this is your area of expertise but just blathering out there just tons of content quantity of content that's maybe AI created is not the answer.

[00:07:42] If people are looking for quality if you're a local business have amazing Google my business profile have amazing Yelp profile great looking images focus on getting a lot of reviews.

[00:07:55] Have your own website make sure the experience works for a phone as well as a desktop computer iPad but really focus on the experience and I'll give you a prime example of this.

[00:08:06] Okay, if you're local business let's say a restaurant.

[00:08:10] Why the heck would you have a menu listing all this food but no image next to the description or the text is easy to add right.

[00:08:20] We've been 2024 you could have done this stuff back in 2000. This is not anything that's novel or unique.

[00:08:28] Or if you have Uber Eats and people can select items include an image for every single item there so people know what it looks like before they select little things like this helps generate more revenue but people don't really do these little things that aren't that trivial.

[00:08:46] So it's not trivial little things that make up with someone says the little hinges swing the big doors right yes spot on and what we're seeing is a lot of local businesses they're taking things for granted.

[00:08:59] They have social profiles but often do post on it often do you respond to comments and engage with people after you running promos like there's a yeah we got an Instagram someone just post some random images with images suck and no one takes time to create a.

[00:09:13] And no one's a game with the community don't expect your social profiles to generate you any revenue.

[00:09:20] So you're saying that that attention to detail and focusing on it is important if you want to grow if you really want to grow that social presence because again a lot of these a lot of these local businesses have been they've been referral based and they've come from the traditional marketing way and that can change.

[00:09:39] Okay so I go to chiropractor here locally he's called chiro guy right he's well known on YouTube like just does a killing he's in Los Angeles it's not like his clients are going to come from even all parts of Los Angeles because Los Angeles is big and there's tons of traffic they're going to come from people around his sub area no one wants to drive even 30 minutes they want 10 15 minutes he still does really well.

[00:10:04] And he videotapes doing chiropractic adjustments whatever guest.

[00:10:09] And so what's the value of that so he's got this YouTube channel and he's got a local client base but he's got obviously YouTube I could watch his videos from here in Virginia so what's his reasoning behind that is rationale smart guy help him build up an audience and build up his practice and then he started expanding it and I was like good for you.

[00:10:29] Yeah okay okay so outside of ideation from a small business standpoint how else do you see AI as being a factor going forward maybe not today but maybe six months now 12 months for now that you need to be thinking about maybe where it could be going.

[00:10:43] Yeah so it'll help you more with video creation it'll help you more with text based creation it'll help you more with data analysis hey here's the spreadsheets for my business what's trending up or down here is all the data for the last 12 months in business what are worst months and our best months one type of customers make up our best type of repeat customers here the channels they came from it can help do a lot of analysis to help you figure out also where to spend more of your marketing dollars and where to spend less of it.

[00:11:10] So data analysis going deep on what you've already done with your business to look back because yeah so when you start looking at if you have three four five hundred customers or more that's a pretty decent size data set right for AI to start taking a look at.

[00:11:24] Correct yes.

[00:11:26] Yeah it's obviously not tens of thousands that you'd have in a large business but how many small business people are gonna take the time themselves or even to be able to draw those trends and parallels right.

[00:11:38] Not the AI will for them and it won't cost them much at all if anything.

[00:11:43] Is this something do you think that the local business person should attempt to learn like your chiropractor should he try to learn how to use AI and leverage it himself should you find somebody that's an expert in what's how do you see this playing out.

[00:11:57] You can play with it on this spare time or she could play with it on their spare time or you could just have some of the people on your front desk help you off.

[00:12:05] Because they like to surf the web anyway exactly.

[00:12:10] And you should assign some things to them and get them to learn it.

[00:12:13] Yeah so instead of them checking their Facebook page or whatever you know when they're waiting for the phone to ring or the during downtime they can start doing some of these AI tasks and learning.

[00:12:22] And maybe even bring some creative ideas back to you as the business owner.

[00:12:26] Yep exactly.

[00:12:28] Do you see so a lot of our clients also real estate investors do you see AI impacting that in a global way or even down to the local level how can that be leveraged.

[00:12:38] I do but not in a way that is going to change a building sure maybe eventually robots will help build a building.

[00:12:45] But when I say a is impact on it I think it's going to be more so like you ever real state.

[00:12:51] You're going to put in a Starbucks in there cool you can create technology to help automate a lot of their ordering processes or same with the McDonald's or same with the chiropractor why can a lot of things be done on a touchscreen these days.

[00:13:06] And the AI that tells the doctor hey these are the issues maybe to look for or if there's a surgeon he's wearing glasses and AI is detecting stuff and giving suggestions not telling the surgeon what to do or not to do.

[00:13:20] So more so than suggestions and helping avoid complications or issues that could arise.

[00:13:26] So I know like along those lines when you watch professional sports today like football and it's sort of thing or golf and there's all they're all down infatuated with talking about analytics on like football.

[00:13:38] It's third down and fourth down and one should they go for it or should they punt the ball and they always are now talking about the analytics say you should do this.

[00:13:46] So what you're talking about is maybe even going deeper in him AI bring up the pattern to that physician or whatever and say the percentages the analytics say hey you need to check a B and C because this is really what we're seeing.

[00:13:59] And clearly it might not be the right answer the coach has the opportunity to say no we're going to go for it.

[00:14:04] The physician will make their own call but having that should date that there doesn't hurt some to the physician if they want to use it.

[00:14:11] So it's another tool adding a more insight to the situation and so here's the thing too.

[00:14:16] So some people think I think with this new AI that they think that they're going to be able to hit a button and sit on the beach and it's going to do everything for them but what I'm drawing out here and understanding is it's going to be another tool to add to the arsenal to maybe super charge your ability to maybe think and analyze and be creative right.

[00:14:40] Totally and it will just help level yourself up think about all the things that are your weaknesses and imagine a helping with them doesn't mean you're going to be at the top 1% for all those things know that it'll be better off than where you were before.

[00:14:56] You can get downtown a lot of ways right you can walk.

[00:14:59] You can ride a bike you can ride an electric bike you can ride a motorcycle you can drive or maybe the helicopter can get you down there this they're all going to get you downtown one way is going to do it faster than another right okay that's it's exciting time are you excited about the world and where we are now with this.

[00:15:15] I can't wait for 5 10 years from now when it really gets in advance.

[00:15:19] I think 22 years in the web and marketing and seeing the experience and there was never a slow ride it's always like something is fast and then it's getting faster and the pace of change seems like accelerating.

[00:15:32] It's getting faster and faster it's not even getting it's not even steady I believe it's going crazier now for trajectory.

[00:15:39] But that creates opportunity right yes who I honestly believe that a eyes can get rid of a lot of the dumb many mean things that maybe we do now so we have more time and energy to focus on the higher level things right like the relationships in the thinking part and whatnot.

[00:15:55] Like why do you need a loan process or I don't know what their exact name is for the mortgage like a risk credit why can they just log into the bank count and do the analysis themselves and be like approve disapproved here's what's wrong or.

[00:16:08] Not even a proof or disapproved this one's fine this one has issues question about x y and z if it's because of this it's past if it's not then question about a bnc you know it can just speed things up robots are already flipping burgers.

[00:16:24] There's nothing new about that there's even robots companies that move on like again there's nothing new about that where you're going to start seeing it as you're going to start seeing a lot of the white collar jobs.

[00:16:36] What give me an example that you think marketing design engineering ID security like a lot of these things sectors will have more AI implemented management consulting like it'll impact most industries.

[00:16:51] I can see management consulting for sure if you as AI develops and particularly in an industry specific knowledge.

[00:16:57] You have questions if you're CEO or a CTO or something you're like okay I'm back to your ideation thing in just saying hey okay this is what I'm considering what are the pitfalls what's around the corner what I don't see what are the patterns and to try to maybe identify some of those blue ocean opportunities that are out there right in that famous book outside we're not swimming in the sharks where it's everything is.

[00:17:20] Red ocean blood in the water which is an exciting place to be I think so basically the upside the takeaway here is Neil from you is this is something to be embraced and excited about right yes not nervous about be excited about let the law make it.

[00:17:39] Let them figure out all the legal aspects that's not to worry about but use for what you can if you don't your competition is and they're going to start taking your market share.

[00:17:48] There you go there you go just wanted down here I appreciate your time tell me one one thing here what do you do outside of AI technology but how do you personally stay on the forefront of your own personal development and success obviously you're leading businesses and you're leading companies and you have to sharpen your acts right how do you do that what are your some of your habits and go to strategies.

[00:18:15] A lot of it comes out just reading reading relevant articles or news or anything like that on top of that is in addition to reading is going to events and then experimentation those are the three ways I stay on top of things okay so you read your associate you go to events and then you're and then you apply right and then you feedback says always a feedback loop right.

[00:18:38] Yep good marketer good engineers going to have a feedback right you got to have a result feeding back in to make sure you can make adjustments along the way.

[00:18:45] And so results are great sometimes they suck but you got to learn from an adjust.

[00:18:50] I think Tony Robin says it's just a result whether you fail whether you succeed it's just feed it's a result and so you succeed do more of it if you failed and do less of it and change something exactly.

[00:19:01] Awesome look wanted down here is there anything else that you want to add about that or what you're focused on today and in how how we can add value to you with our listeners and our clients again people that are their business owners they're building local practices they're growing their companies how can we be a value to you how can you serve.

[00:19:21] If you guys have more information I blog at neopatel.com my social handles are Neil Patel and I have an agency called NPE digital stands for my name Neil Patel digital where we help companies with their marketing even local mom pop shop so however we can help.

[00:19:37] Beautiful so they can just reach out to you there directly exactly awesome.

[00:19:43] Neil look I really appreciate your time today this has been a lot of fun and talking to a guy of your internet fame and status is great so every day we get a super rock star on our show so excited about that.

[00:19:55] I'm honored to be on thank you guys for having me hey gang just wind it down here day thanks for listening to the show and as always if you need capital to grow your business you're looking to purchase commercial real estate or build a building or invest in commercial real estate you're looking to acquire a business or.

[00:20:12] A competitor or just need growth capital we'd love to talk to you we fund businesses all day long our mission is to help entrepreneurs win and a fund their businesses and fund their dreams so that they can make an impact in their community reach out to me today go to our website click the button schedule 20 minute conversation discovery call.

[00:20:31] We have a quick conversation see if there's a needs here there's a fit and we can take it from there the website is VPC Victor Paul Charlie dot capital that's VPC dot capital alright there's no dot com on that it's VPC dot capital as always keep crushing it and hope to see you soon around here take care.