Neil Patel & Eric Siu's Holiday Productivity Tips

In episode #2895, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss their holiday experiences, the current state of affiliate marketing, tax strategies and lifestyle choices, and missed marketing opportunities for 2025. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Holiday Reflections and Productivity (06:00) The State of Affiliate Marketing (10:03) Tax Strategies and Lifestyle Choices (11:54) Missed Marketing Opportunities for 2025 (24:57) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot's Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. All right, so we're gonna talk about what Eric and Neil are doing for the holidays, or did for the holidays. I mean, we're still in the midst of the holidays right now.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And it's funny, because we just talked to Brad from recordeditpodcast.com

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  About how the holidays are

• 0:51Speaker 00

  a challenge sometimes. So let me go first. I was just you know Jordan Peterson, right?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Okay, he's the guy that wears a suit, talks philosophy all the time. But he said the mark of a successful man is if you drop him in the middle of a forest, he can't help himself but to take out an axe and start chopping trees, right? And that is like me right now. I try to relax. I try to sit around and do nothing. I can't do it, right? I just like, read a book. Okay, no, that's not enough. I have to actually be doing stuff, right? So we, you, your company, my company, we both give this week off. We're off until the second. So basically, Christmas week is off, and then we're off till the second, right? And so I think we should take this time to talk about how we're spending that time and how we're being productive with that time. Because I think for you and I, and even Brad here too, we can't stop thinking about work.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  It is hard. For me, my biggest struggle has been I have very few people to talk to on a daily basis. More so to bug our the sales numbers. What are we gonna end the year at? What's our pipe looking like for January? It's like, all right, I need to give people their time and their space. I have increased my texting to those people because I'm not trying to bug them on the phone, but

• 2:02Speaker 00

  That's still bugging them!

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, not as bad. They can text when they want.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  The good thing about Neil is he will keep doing it, right? I schedule my messages to hit. I even take into account like what time zone they're in and everything. And I'm like, okay, I should send this one on the second. I should send the next one on the third. But Neil is just like, let's do it. And I actually think that's probably the better way to do it.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  I keep into account the time zone.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  But I have people in all time zones.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Send later with iMessage. You know that?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I did not know that.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  See, I just saved your life.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  No, but I don't wanna schedule it later. I wanna sass right now. And you know, WhatsApp, iMessage, if they don't wanna be disturbed, they can put on Do Not Disturb and answer it when, you know, later on. And then I'll go check back, like, I sent the text, or they still don't do that disturb.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  So you're constantly thinking about work. You're not calling like you would normally call. You're changing it to text. What else are you doing?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Random dinners and lunches. I did a lunch meeting yesterday. I put air quotes in "meeting" because they're not really meetings.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I met up with one of my buddies, Yaron, and he owns a, what is it called? Breakfast joint called Fortelli's. He has two locations and...

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Why does that sound familiar?

• 3:08Speaker 01

  He's thinking about franchising, and I was like, oh, that's a pretty good idea. Really amazing breakfast.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Is that nearby?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  On Melrose, and then there's one in Marina Del Rey. Do their Uber Eats always has "Buy one breakfast burrito, get one for free", which I love.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Very good.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And then I also, I did a dinner meeting, met up with Dan Fleishman, Albert, and you know AJ as well. I don't think you know Albert, but yeah. And then today I'm doing this.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, this counts as a meeting.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, this counts as a meeting.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  And then I'll take the kids to Century City.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Oh, the mall?

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  I might go there after this.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  So I'll take them to Century City. I was telling my kid, I was like, "Dad needs a pair of white shoes." Because my favorite white shoe brand is actually Common Projects.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  They don't make half size, so they always hurt my feet.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  So then I was like, okay, Kohan has very similar looking shoes, half the cost. They're usually comfortable because Kohan is Nike. Probably won't look as good. Don't really care. I'm just not willing to have my feet hurt when I walk. I don't like care how bad something will look.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, okay. I mean, for, for me, okay, I mentioned earlier, like, I'm reading a couple of books right now. I was telling, do you use your nose to breathe or your mouth to breathe?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  My nose.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Okay. So there's a book called Breath that I'm reading right now. It's mind blowing, right? So I'm just reading a couple of books right now. There's another one, oh, on Napoleon, and he wrote, because basically how he conquered, how he thinks about business, how he thinks about dating. How he thinks about all these things, right? So I'm reading that book. So I'm just reading a couple of books simultaneously right now. And then I'm watching a lot of videos on YouTube and I'm and we're spending time making content as well. But I think more than anything, I'm spending time planning for the next year. And so I'll just sit and think about, okay, like, what's a bottleneck, right? A big problem with me, this problem with you too, probably. I have a lot of ideas. You have a lot of ideas too, right? And so I'm like, okay, but the problem with these ideas is I push a lot of these ideas through, but you can't do all the ideas, right? And I'm just like, okay, so what can we do to, to stop? Stop this, stop this madness from happening?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  That's largely coming from me, right? And so I'll think about things like that. What, like, what are the bottlenecks that are holding us back right now? What's stopping us from reaching? Like, what are all the things we need to do to fail? And this is a Charlie Munger exercise. He talks about invert, always invert. And by the way, I finished reading this book called Worldly Wisdom. I paid eighty-three dollars for it. It's a Charlie Munger book, it's only eighty, eighty pages or so. But in that book, he talks about how, and just in life in general, you should always think about not how you will succeed, but how you will fail, right? So let's say we have revenue targets for next year. Okay, what do I need to do to absolutely fail at doing this? And I list everything, right? So it's a lot of strategic thinking.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Go back, you have revenue targets. What do you have to do to fail to hit the number?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  What do I need to do to completely fail at meeting these metrics?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Got it, okay.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  So it's instead of saying, what are all the things I need to do to be successful? What are just all the things I need to do to fail? And then I'll just avoid those things.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  And when you mean by fail, are you talking about mistakes? Are you talking about like, if I don't do marketing, I won't get enough leads?

• 6:11Speaker 00

  It's basically, what do I need to do to miss the numbers next year? That's all it is. And he does this exercise all the time. It's way easier to think about all, what I need to avoid and I just won't go there. And so it's, it's things like, it's, it's so like, that's one example, but there's a lot of other examples because we're just sitting with our thoughts the whole time. And like I mentioned earlier, like, again, if you're dropped into a forest, all you can't, you're just gonna pick up an axe and start chopping, right? So we just kind of changed the type of tree that we're chopping during the break.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  That's all. Got it.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yep. So I got.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  I mean, that was a good topic from you. Let's go over to, you have a classic over here. So we're going to go over from the holidays. We're going to start with some classics and then we're going to go into some newer stuff. So you have this one over here on if affiliate marketing is dead. And I think it's an interesting one because I have a story to share. Because I just met with someone yesterday in the affiliate space. So you go ahead.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I know a lot of companies that are still making money through affiliate marketing, like Red Ventures, right? And it's a version of affiliate marketing in essence. They're, it's a better version. And there's a lot of companies still doing really well. There's a lot of companies like Forbes that aren't doing as well. And what we're seeing is the companies who are doing affiliate marketing and they're just purely relying on SEO traffic, they're not doing well. The companies who have built a brand, call it like the nerd wallets, they've done extremely well. And they've shifted their model from straight up just affiliate marketing to a lot of direct deals. And you've seen businesses like them do well. You may say, hey, well, nerd wallets stock is not crushing it.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  It's not going up and to the right really fast or anything like that. But generally speaking, it's a solid business that's printing cash.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's interesting. I actually interviewed someone on Monday, even though we have this week off, I still snuck in a couple of interviews, but this is for a job interview. And I was talking to this guy and he worked for, he actually used to work for Red Ventures. And a handful of people that used to work at Red Ventures now works for his company that he's at now. Here's the thing, they just laid off 60% of their staff. They basically copied the Red Ventures model and they laid off 60% of their staff. This guy was one of the cuts and he was a GM. He basically, you know, we talk about parasite SEO, which is where you leverage someone's domain authority like a Forbes and you make like a Forbes advisor, right? He was doing that for a couple of other companies, but the problem is. They all got hit and basically the board was like, hey, we don't, we don't think there's much of a business here anymore and we don't want to wait to find out. So we're going to

• 8:40Speaker 00

  lay off a bunch of people. So that's what happened, right? And then yesterday, we, we talked to the, our GM that's running the agency owners association, Greg, and he was talking to an affiliate. I'm like, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, man. Cause typically like affiliates are very short sighted and they, they just look at money, which is, that's fine. That's what they're optimized for. And low and behold, the deal that he was putting together fell apart completely because this affiliate wasn't reliable. So there's two things, right? One, I think parasite SU as we know it might be on downward trend, but I think the way you're saying, if you adapt affiliate marketing is okay. You have to adapt. We agree on that.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yes. You gotta build a brand like a nerd wallet, a bank ray, a CNA, any of those. It may not be as big of a cash cow as it once could have been, but there's still a solid business there and you can still make millions of dollars.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  And these guys are real businesses because one of our four former clients, Fundara, they were bought by nerd wallet and our point of contact there is now the CEO of nerd wallet, right? And so they're, they're playing business. They're buying other businesses. They're looking at other, they're looking at going direct. Like you mentioned, you have to zig or it's not even zigging and zagging. It's more so you have to adapt with the times. The, the affiliates that I think are in trouble are the ones that don't adapt, that are still, that still continue to be short sighted, that are so money hungry that they won't go the extra mile and just be reliable. Cause a lot of affiliates I know are pretty unreliable people. And that's just how it is, which is why like we've played in affiliate space before, but we didn't stay very long.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. The most common thing that Eric and I see with affiliates is they want to work really hard for a few days a week and then chill. And then once they're making the money, they want to chill, travel, have fun.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Move to Asia, right? Nothing wrong with moving to Asia, but it's like, it's a different mindset.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Or Puerto Rico. We see a lot of affiliates focusing on Puerto Rico.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  They want to chill and it's cool, but uh, you're not wired that way and I'm not wired that way.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  No, but also when you look at why they moved to Puerto Rico, they are like, oh yeah, no taxes. You save money or very little taxes. And instead of thinking about tax savings, they don't really think about growing the net worth and increasing the revenue of their business. They try to just optimize on the savings end instead of. Focusing on how to double down and create a much bigger business.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  It's better to just grow and plus, at the same time, if you're saving the money, but you're miserable, then it's not worth doing it.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Now, that being said, we have friends that live in Puerto Rico that love it there. Remember, I almost moved there.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you almost moved there.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then I had all my stuff moving, uh, moving there already. It was in the process of getting moved there.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Wait, you already, you rented a place too, right?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  You had to back out.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  I had signed the lease and then I backed out. I basically gave up like three months of rent. I just said, just take it. But I redirected all that stuff to Miami and then I've lived in Miami for two years.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And so, why didn't you, why did you decide to bail on Puerto Rico? I'm assuming you were trying to move there for tax purposes.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but because I realized, I didn't think, however much money I save, like, it's not worth my happiness at the end of the day. And I think it's worth it, it's worth considering moving to Puerto Rico if you're married. I'm not married, right? And by the way, like, it's not good for dating because there's a brain drain. All, all the people that live in Puerto Rico, like, a lot of them actually ended up moving to the States. A lot, a lot of people actually moved to Miami. So, the point is, like, you have to consider, what we're both trying to say here is, you have to consider all the trade-offs, right?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  And a little tax savings isn't worth it to sacrifice my happiness.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Totally agree. And I also think Puerto Rico is a terrible place if you're married with kids because the education system is not going to be as good as the States.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, you looked at it before too, very briefly, I think.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  No, I never really looked at Puerto Rico.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  People told me about it.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And I've talked to people, but I've never thought about, hey, what does it look like? Should I move there?

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  There's better ways to save on taxes. The easiest way to save on taxes is reinvest your money. And reinvesting could be hiring more people, which is an expense, or it could just be buying corporations, which gives you depreciation, right? I, I think if you think more long-term, if you look at the biggest companies in the world, they're not built in places like Puerto Rico. I'm sorry, right? I'm not trying to talk crap on Puerto Rico. It's just, it's hard to build a large organization in one of those countries. And I'm not saying Eric and I have built large corporations either, but we're trying to. And you have a better shot of doing that where you can find amazing talent.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. The ones that typically move there, by the way, it's like you have investors that live there. A lot of investors, whether they're Wall Street types or crypto types.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Um, and it's fine. Again, like, we're not poo-pooing on it. I think it's just, um, at least for me, I didn't, I didn't think I'd be happy there. So, that's what it is.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Um, you have this one over here, uh, 10 missed marketing opportunities to leverage in 2025. This one seems like it'll be juicy.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go over it. I'll come up with five. You know, I already have a lot of ideas and I know you do too.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  I don't, but you go first.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  All right. Um, one of the missed opportunities that people in companies should leverage is transcribing their video content through tools like HeyGen. So we do it for Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. We'll take my video content, the stuff that hits, and we'll transcribe it. If you have team members in these regions, we then send them the content. We let them post it on their social channels because their followers are within that region. It doesn't get as much traction as me posting it from my profile, but over time, we're seeing it drive brand awareness and leads.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  That's good. The next one I'm gonna go with is live shopping. So it took a while for America to catch on, but you look, China's been doing live shopping for a long time and it's worked really well. I think this past holiday break, I'm, we're seeing a lot more of it. You see it on Amazon as well. I think we're gonna see a lot more of it, so it's time to start adapting. This is one of those things where it's like, if you wait too long, you're gonna be behind, so you might as well start getting into it and looking at it now.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, number three. AI is really popular, but when you look at content marketing, people use AI in a really inefficient way. A more efficient way to do it is look at your website traffic and see what language you get majority of your traffic from. Chances are it's one language like English. If you optimize for all the other languages where you're getting visitors from, because you can see all the countries that are driving traffic, you can drastically increase your traffic by just using AI to translate and transcribe your content, have a human review it, use Ahref Lang, and then build links locally within that region. And what you'll find is

• 14:52Speaker 01

  whatever language you're in currently, over time, if you do it right, less than thirty percent of your traffic will be in your current language. Seventy plus percent will be from the expansion. So in other words, your traffic should start exploding.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  This is number four. We haven't done an episode like this in probably over a year.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  So I would say attribution's a big one, right? So when you think about B2B, for example, you might use a product like Hockey Stack. So Hockey Stack will show you how your different channels are influencing the other ones, right? So it shows you, I think they had a metric here where they said dark social actually affects 36% of conversions. So they have a lot of that data, right? So you can use Hockey Stack. Another one you can use is Haus, H-A-U-S. That's more for ecommerce, or you can call it mixed media modeling, that type of stuff, right? So I think attribution's a big one. I think a lot more people are gonna start paying for these products. So that would be number four.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  Number five, turning on YouTube ads. I'm not saying that YouTube ads will help you get more YouTube traffic, but when you look at your ads on YouTube, you can start seeing the CPMs. The content that creates higher CPMs usually means you're going after a better audience. It'll give you a direction on which videos are going after a better quality of consumers or buyers, whether you're B2B or B2C. And this will give you direction on what kind of videos to create more of and which ones to produce less of. Because if you're creating videos that are really popular, but they get really terrible CPMs, or even if they're not popular, they just get really terrible CPMs, you know that those people are gonna be harder to monetize. So you wanna create content that has much higher CPMs, because that'll tell you that, hey, there's much more money to be made.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Number six, this one's a quick one, but if you think about optimizing for large language models, so LLMO or GEO, generative engine optimization, ChatGPT pulls its search results from Bing. Perplexity pulls it from Google. Interestingly enough, I don't know if you saw me post this to Instagram, but I was like, what's the best marketing podcast on Gemini? The marketing school, I showed our pictures on there, right? I asked, perplexity, marketing school. I asked Claude, marketing school.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  ChatGPT?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  ChatGPT, nowhere to be found. We used to be found, but it's marketing against the grain now. And so I have to wonder, like, I wonder if all the other LLMs are pulling from Google, and then you have ChatGPT pulling from Bing, right? But my point of saying this is that number six is to optimize for Bing. Because ChatGPT is, at least for right now, they have, they had 50% market shares in LLMs. Now it's down to 33%, like, damn, that changed quickly. But they're still the big player. So when you're optimizing for search engines, don't forget about Bing, for now.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. A lot of people really do forget about optimizing for Bing. And if you look at ChatGPT, they are pulling heavily from Bing from everything that we see.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  By the way, Grok 2 also lists Marketing School as number one, guys.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Uh, what are we on? Number seven?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Number seven, most people send emails and when they're sending transactional emails, they drive people to a landing page. You can use a tool called Zaymo. I believe it is Z A Y M O.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Like Waymo.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Uh huh, Waymo but with a Z. And what it allows you to do is it uses the AMP technology to showcase your products, your services, whatever you're selling that people can buy online through the email, like literally in Gmail or Outlook. They can click a button, they can select the size, they can select the quantity, they can check out without going to your webpage and literally just buy it right then and there within email. Uh, it boosts conversions from what we've seen. The deliverability from what we've tested isn't as good as just sending HTML emails, but the increase in conversions from the revenue makes up for the decrease in deliverability.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yep. Number eight, leverage first-party data if you can. You can always, I mean, first-party data, if you have a lot of data, for example, Hockey Stack, they publish a lot of case studies around, um, you know, different attribution models, right? Um, or what tends to work. And, um, or you can also survey your audience too, which I guess you can call that first-party data too. Neil actually does a good job with this with his X posts. The ones I've, I've been reading mostly now, they're like, it's interesting stuff. It's like, what are the most profitable content channels, for example? How long does it take to be profitable there? Or, um, I, I find that actually has utility and that might not get enough, the reach that you want, it might not go viral, but at the end of the day, you have the right people that are looking at it.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Totally agree. And that's what we're seeing with our content in which when we get really focused and share data that we have, it doesn't get as much engagement as me talking about, you know, how Starbucks is reducing their menu and people are going to be pissed off. But the charts really do get us, uh, from what we're seeing, brand awareness with our right type of audience. And that caused me to go to number nine. I've been doing this a lot in 2024, more towards the latter half of 2024. Um, we're doing this heavily in 2025. We've seen, if you look at my personal social media profile on Instagram, at least the last week or the last two weeks. And if even if you go back a little bit, my images do better than my videos.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And what we're finding on a lot of social channels, including like TikTok. They want people to push out more images, but they're not. They're focused. Most people want to focus on videos, short form videos particularly. And we're seeing the social algorithms give you a lot of love if you publish images. And I think that's a huge missed opportunity. They're easier to create, especially if you're using AI. Like my team will take all the data that we have, that our tools spit out, that our researchers do. And have like ChatGPT or one of these tools help us out with creating charts from the data. And we're even dissecting the data and finding opportunities from it. If it wasn't for AI, we would not be able to crank out the amount of uh research pieces uh that we're doing on a weekly basis.

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Yep. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Number 10, I mean, speaking of using AI to crank things out, I've used it for, I've mentioned this. I use Claude, I use ChatGPT, I use the ChatGPT 01 model, the Claude has the 3.5 on it, I believe. But just putting in, putting in, let's say I want, I want help with a marketing campaign, for example. Or even a couple of days ago, I was like, hey, um, you know, in marketing, there's impact confidence ease. That's, that helps you prioritize the projects that you want to run or the tests that you want to run. And I came up with, it came up with a new model. I worked together on this. It's like, you know, impact confidence ease is great. And what I mean by that is you score an idea, one through 10, 10 being highest, on, on the impact you think it'll make, the confidence that you have in that idea and the ease, right? But I'm like,

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Something's missing there. I'm like, okay, we should add reach. So we added in reach. That's a multiplier, right? Reach is like, that's kind of common in marketing, but then we also added alignment. Because you might have one goal that you're trying to work towards, but the problem with marketing teams is everyone comes up with all these random ideas. But if you add an alignment plus reach multiplied by the other three added up, that's where you get a real score, right? And so, but I wouldn't have done that if I didn't have ChatGPT with it. And then it does good with making charts as well. It does good with, by the way, if I looked at a video from, I think it was an Alex from Ozzy video. Like, it was the one where he was talking about social channels, but I forgot how he scored the channels, right? So I pulled up Notebook LM, the Google tool.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  I dumped in the link there and then literally it just gave me all the scores in like a span of like 20 seconds or so. So when it comes to research and things like that, I think the missed opportunity here is not leveraging AI enough. Because what AI is actually doing is it's augmenting our intelligence. For sure, it's made me smarter. It's made you smarter too. And so I think people that aren't looking at that stuff now are the ones that are really going to be behind.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And when I think about AI make me smarter, for me, it helps with research and just knowledge consumption. But overall, you know, I don't, I think I'm getting dumber over time because my memory is fading compared to when I was much younger, I was much sharper. But the big thing that I've noticed with AI is it makes me way more efficient. And if I didn't have AI, I would have to hire way more people to help me with this kind of stuff. And in reality, we just wouldn't do a lot of the stuff, but because of AI, we're cranking out more. And I think that's where businesses get it wrong. It's not about using AI to save money. It's about using AI to do more with the same money that you're spending so you can get better results and grow faster. And I know we said that we're only going to give 10, but I'll throw in a bonus number 11.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I've been playing a lot with this over the weekend because I've been bored.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  It's not even the weekend. It's Friday.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  But it feels like a weekend.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Cause it's all holiday time, right?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I'm like, man, it's such a weird week.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  I know. I've been doing, so when you're doing Instagram and Facebook, you know, you can end up collecting leads through them. But what most people don't do in B2B is if a lead's qualified, you can end up popping up like a Calendly and have them schedule a call. So they don't have to go to your website. I don't have data yet. I know it is much cheaper than sending them to a website and collecting a lead and getting a scheduled call. But I don't have data yet on the conversions because no salesperson wants to work right now.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Wait, wait, wait. You're sending a link to...

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so when you run Facebook ads, let's say you're collecting a lead in B2B. Most people want to send them to a website because like, oh, the quality's better. And I get that. And they also believe that if you send them to a website, it's better because then you can pre-qualify and the ones that are qualified, show them a Calendly link or whatever tool that you're using, like Chili Piper or Hot Piper. I don't know what the names of all of them are.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Chili Piper's right.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what I had a developer do is make it so I can run a Facebook ad or Instagram ad with their forms. And then if they're qualified, show them the Calendly or the Chili Piper, whatever you want to call it. So they can schedule a call right then and there without having to go to your website.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  That's great. Well, let's see what happens there.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  And the cost per lead is significantly lower. It's like 2.4, 2.5 times cheaper, somewhere in that range. I need more data as I scale up. But I don't know what the conversion is to actually a close.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  This is actually, uh, this could be 11B over here. So what Neil's done, this is kind of the side effect here. If you're a founder who actually knows marketing, it's in your best interest to be involved with the marketing because it's going to move a lot faster. Anytime I've gotten too disconnected from it, things just move a lot slower and then people kind of just like look around. You've got to inject that founder mode into your marketing. So, so that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. And don't forget to check out marketing school.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster and we'll see you tomorrow.