Lead-Generating Content: What the Data Reveals About What Actually Works

Summary

In a comprehensive webinar, Neil Patel and his team discuss the pivotal role of content marketing in lead generation. They dissect how data reveals the effectiveness of different content strategies and digital platforms in driving leads and sales. By focusing on key metrics such as revenue and engagement rather than traditional metrics like traffic and impressions, the webinar offers a detailed analysis of current marketing trends and future prospects, especially in an AI-driven world.

Highlights

• Neil Patel emphasizes the importance of data-driven content strategies in marketing.📊
• AI is revolutionizing content creation but needs human creativity to shine.🧠
• Content fatigue is real; create engaging and quality over quantity content.😅
• Omni-channel marketing strategies can maximize reach and engagement.🚀
• Focus more on high-conversion keywords rather than high-traffic ones for better ROI.💡

Key Takeaways

• Content marketing is a crucial element of generating leads and sales.🤔
• High-quality, engaging content outshines high-quantity, low-quality content.✨
• AI-driven content creation is on the rise but demands human oversight for effectiveness.🤖
• Omni-channel marketing strategy ensures cohesive brand presence across platforms.🌐
• Tracking the right metrics like revenue and engagement is essential for success.📈

Overview

In the vibrant world of content marketing, Neil Patel and his team unravel the mysteries of what truly drives leads and sales. In their engaging webinar, they delve into data-driven insights and the rising tide of artificial intelligence in content creation. As more content floods the digital space, understanding what cuts through the noise becomes crucial. Patel and his cohort argue that it's not just about producing content - it's about crafting high-quality, engaging pieces that resonate with your audience.

Harnessing the power of an omni-channel strategy is pivotal. Neil and his team highlight the importance of maintaining a cohesive brand presence across various platforms, ensuring that every piece of content serves a purpose in a broader marketing ecosystem. By analyzing conversion rates rather than just traffic, brands can tailor their content to truly meet consumer needs and preferences, thus driving better engagement and revenue.

The discussion also sheds light on the future of search optimization, exploring how AI is transforming content landscapes. While AI can significantly streamline content creation, it requires the nuance of human input to truly connect with audiences. As marketers navigate this challenging yet exciting terrain, Patel’s insights offer a compass, guiding them toward data-informed decisions that prioritize meaningful consumer interactions and robust revenue growth.

Chapters

• 01:30 - 06:00: Introduction and Webinar Overview A repetitive transcript consisting solely of the word 'Heat' and background music, offering no substantial content for summarization.
• 06:00 - 11:00: Content Marketing Data Insights No content provided beyond music indication.
• 11:00 - 16:30: Challenges in Content Marketing The chapter titled "Challenges in Content Marketing" faces a unique issue where the transcript only contains the repeated word "Heat". Due to the lack of substantive content, specific challenges or insights into content marketing cannot be extracted.
• 16:30 - 25:30: Content Strategy and Optimization The chapter initiates with a warm welcome and expresses enthusiasm about the topic of content marketing. The focus is on understanding effective strategies based on current data insights.
• 25:30 - 39:00: Video and Multimedia Content The chapter titled 'Video and Multimedia Content' discusses the primary purpose of content creation, which is to generate more leads and sales. It emphasizes that leads can be generated for both B2B and B2C contexts. Collecting email addresses is highlighted as an effective strategy for driving sales across both domains. The chapter features Neil Patel, the co-founder of NP Digital, a global ad agency, who introduces Chris and Kim in the transcript and prepares for a further discussion on the topic.
• 50:00 - 65:00: Q&A Session In this chapter titled 'Q&A Session', Chris Hill, the content team manager at NPXL's small and medium business division, is introduced. He describes his role in overseeing the daily operations of the content writing team and working with Kim on content strategy, including generating content ideas and products.
• 65:00 - 70:00: Closing Remarks The chapter titled 'Closing Remarks' is presented by Kim Scapetta, the Senior Director of Content at MPXL. She explains her role working closely with Chris, overseeing both content departments and email marketing, focusing on SEO as well. MPXL, part of NP Digital, is a global ad agency operating in over 28 countries, collaborating with major brands. The discussion emphasizes the significant reach and expertise of their organization as they wrap up their conversation.

Lead-Generating Content: What the Data Reveals About What Actually Works Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat.
• 00:30 - 01:00 [Music] [Music]
• 01:00 - 01:30 Heat. Heat.
• 01:30 - 02:00 Hello. Hello everyone. How are you guys doing today? Um, thank you for joining. Today is going to be a fun webinar. It's on one of my favorite topics which is content marketing. And what we want to discuss today is what the data reveals about what's actually working. Because
• 02:00 - 02:30 with content, the overall purpose is to generate more leads and more sales. And when I say leads, I'm not talking only B2B. Leads can be for both B TOC and B2B. A great example of this is collecting an email address, right? Both B2B and B TOC generates a lot of sales by just sending out emails. So, my name is Neil Patel. I'm the co-founder of NP Digital. We're a global ad agency. And today I have with me Chris and Kim. Um Chris, do you want
• 02:30 - 03:00 to give a quick introduction of yourself and then Kim go right after? Yeah, absolutely. Um I'm Chris Hill. I'm the content team manager at NPXL, the small and medium business division. Um, I run the day-to-day operations of our content writing team. Um, and I work alongside a Kim in content strategy and sort of and and highing um content ideas and um product for our
• 03:00 - 03:30 clients. Awesome. And I am Kim Scapetta. I am the senior director of content at MPXL, also the small media business side. I work with Chris day in and day out. Um, I oversee both the content departments when it comes to SEO and also our email marketing division. So, NP Digital, we're a global ad agency, 28 plus countries. We have a lot of people that work um here. We work with a lot of major brands. The reason I bring this up today, when we break down
• 03:30 - 04:00 what's working in content marketing, we're we're pretty much coming from a place of real data and not just data of what we're seeing, but also what we're implementing, testing, and seeing results for as well. So, and if you need help with either getting more traffic or fixing your content, generating more sales or leads or if you need help with AI and integrating within your marketing or just running your ads or emails, even conversions, scan that QR code, take out
• 04:00 - 04:30 your phone, you bust out the camera icon, scan it, it'll take you to the NP digital website, and then from there, you can fill out your information and we'll get in touch with you. And it doesn't matter wherever you are throughout the whole world. We have people everywhere and we help clients and companies uh globally. So now let's talk about the state of content marketing in 2025. I wanted to give everyone a reality check before we really dive into the meat of this
• 04:30 - 05:00 presentation. The first thing is there is way more content that's being created. And I'll show you this uh in a slide or two. And it's not just more content being created. People are noticing conversions going down because people also have more options, right? You can create a lot more content, but only so many pieces of content are going to be shown to people, whether it's from search or social. And if you're creating a lot, but you're not getting much more engagement, it's like you're putting in
• 05:00 - 05:30 all that effort and you're not really generating the sales, which kind of sucks, but this is the reality of where most people are in marketing today. And it doesn't have to be that way. Um, and we'll go on to how to fix it. But first, if you look at preAI and postAI, look at how many more pieces of blog content are being created by marketers each day. Same with images, same with video. And these numbers are going to continually increase because AI is getting better at content creation, which is making it easier. Now, the AI
• 05:30 - 06:00 based content isn't performing as well. Um, but nonetheless, this is why there's more noise and the content fatigue is really real. Uh, people are overwhelmed with information. This is why social networks have changed from showcasing you the content that your followers are posting or that the people you're following are posting to more so to discovery engines. They look at your interests and they show you the stuff that's getting
• 06:00 - 06:30 engagement in your space because they don't want to overwhelm you. They want to show you the best stuff and the rest even if it's from your followers they kind of just drown it out assuming the other stuff isn't getting the engagement. So in essence the high quality content is rising to the top and doing extremely well. The rest is not. And when you think about content you may be thinking well maybe the solution is just create less content. We still see that when you create more
• 06:30 - 07:00 content, you do better. We looked at the percentage of websites uh that rank on page one, page two, Google, page three, and page four and beyond. And we broke them up into two buckets. In blue are sites that generate 100K or more organic visitors per month from Google. The orange is sites with less than 100,000 monthly organic visits. As you can see, they both rank on page one, two, three. The big difference is though isn't
• 07:00 - 07:30 really where they're ranking. It's that the sites with more than 100,000 monthly visitors, right? These are the sites in blue. They tend to have way more content and that's actually the real key. The more pages you have, the more opportunities you have. Now, if you just crank out junk pages, it actually can hurt you. So, the key is to crank out quality pages um around not just keywords, but topics. And you don't want cannibalization in which you don't want 10 pages going after the term dog food.
• 07:30 - 08:00 It just creates confusion for Google and they won't know which page to actually rank for the term dog food. Then and marketers, they really have content marketing all wrong. If you look at this chart, this is where B2B and BTOC marketers uh place a priority when it comes to content. Right? As you can see, things like customer retention, sales, they really focus, which is great. They focus on organic traffic. They focus on brand awareness. Um, they
• 08:00 - 08:30 don't focus as much on email subscribers. But this is just their top priorities, right? And the reason I say it's wrong is look at the next slide. This is where their budget is going. Because when people tell you something's a priority, priority doesn't necessarily mean that's where the money's going. The money really tells you the true story. If you look at what their budget is going, like social media
• 08:30 - 09:00 posts, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be on social media, but look at the revenue contribution 6% versus where 16% of the budget is going. It and I'm not saying social media should be the budget should be 6% and match. You got to figure out the right balance for each business and it's going to vary but you want to make sure the areas that are generating a lot of the revenue like webinars in this case blog post this is for both B2B and B TOC um email if you look at where the revenue
• 09:00 - 09:30 is coming you want to make sure that you're maximizing those channels first which then grows the total revenue and total profit and then that gives you more um capital to spend in areas like social media or infographics or other things you may want to do. We love the onion strategy. When it comes to content, you want to start stacking different channels on top of each other. When we look at traffic over time by content type, blog posts keep doing well. So do videos. So do images.
• 09:30 - 10:00 It doesn't mean that you should just do blog posts because blog posts, you know, are generating the most amount amount of traffic. Keep in mind, videos are everywhere within SERs and so are images. So, you want to have multiple types of content that you're creating. And organic reach, it still matters. Google controls roughly 27% of the market share with 13.7 billion searches a day. But I bet you probably didn't know that Instagram gets 6.5, B
• 10:00 - 10:30 is at five. Snap is at 4 billion a day, Amazon 3.5. And you know what? When people search on Amazon, they're buying. Um, even the Apple App Store, 500 million searches a day. Search has now changed from Google to search everywhere optimization, right? That's what we call the new SEO. Instead of engine, we call it everywhere. So, when you do search everywhere optimization, if you're Louis Vuitton and someone's typing in a handbag on Google, you want to be at the top. You want to be at the top for images on Instagram of people showcasing their Louis Vuitton handbags. Same with
• 10:30 - 11:00 all the other social networks. Same with people doing reviews on uh YouTube. Um, maybe Amazon if that's your place that you want to sell or not, right? Probably not the ideal channel for Louis Vuitton because it's more high-end luxury, but you guys get the point. You want to be everywhere, including in the AI overviews or feature snippets because it creates brand awareness and content discovery. It really does happen on all platforms. I showed you the search data. We surveyed
• 11:00 - 11:30 people and we said, "Hey, how do you search for questions online?" Back in 2020, it was mainly just search engines like Google. Now, it is search engines, social media, AI, chat bots, and other platforms. And in 2024, you you'll notice that the percentages add up to more than 100%. It's because people use multiple platforms to search, and it's not just one anymore. And social search is really skyrocketing. It's forecasted to grow uh to 21% in 2025.
• 11:30 - 12:00 So what should you do? Well, first off, stop treating content like a silver bullet. It isn't one. And you want to start seeing it as part of the larger ecosystem. Don't treat as standalone. It should be part of your overall marketing strategy. And when you encompass everything together and it starts working together, um you start generating a higher ROI versus try treating uh different channels or content types inside.
• 12:00 - 12:30 So, let's take a closer look at what we should be doing here. A lot of what we're arguing for is kind of an etch a sketch beginning. Take what you know, shake it up, and let's start looking at content marketing in a whole new way. First of all, let's start tracking the right metrics. For a long time, when it comes to content marketing, and for a lot of good reasons, we've tracked traffic and impressions and social shares. But what if instead we start tracking
• 12:30 - 13:00 revenue and leads and engagement? So, it's not just about how often you're getting shared. It's about how deeply your buyer is engaging with your product. In a moment, I'm going to tell you why that matters, but that's the first start. Let's shake up these metrics that we're tracking. It's not that traffic or impressions aren't important when it comes to content, especially blogs and things like that. Traffic and impressions are the gold standard, but we've got to look at at
• 13:00 - 13:30 content, like Neil said, as part of a greater ecosystem of digital marketing. Content isn't the closer in your marketing transaction. It's the opener. Content is what gets people in the door. It's how we build brand familiarity. It's how we build trust. It's how we build brand momentum. and product momentum across all channels. And it's all about consistency. It's not post a blog and
• 13:30 - 14:00 hope that it works. It's post a blog every day and watch it work. It's about consistency. It's about engagement over time. But what we've got to remember is that when it comes to content, creation is only part of the process. Most marketers spend their time on research and writing and very little time on distribution or
• 14:00 - 14:30 optimization. So, you're going to spend a lot of time writing a blog or creating a video, but then what are you going to do with it? Plunk it down on your website and hope people find it. Why isn't that going out across multiple channels? Why aren't we repackaging parts of that blog and sharing them on social media or wrapping blog content into video content or things that we know work that we'll touch on a little bit later on
• 14:30 - 15:00 today. The reality is that the average buyer engages with your brand 11.1 times before converting. That means that you have to reach them not one time but 11 times before they become a buyer. Which means that you either need a whole lot more content or a whole lot more channels to share your content on or both. As we're shaking things up a
• 15:00 - 15:30 little bit, we think that it's important to create once and then distribute widely. Every piece of content that you create should flow across multiple surfaces. Write a blog, but then share parts of it on your social media. Share links to it on your social media. Drive traffic to your website that way. Share it through email marketing. If you're not utilizing email marketing, you're missing perhaps one of the largest touch points for your potential buyer.
• 15:30 - 16:00 Make ads that point back to your your email list so that you can put more people on your email list and reach them more directly. Take a blog post, wrap it into a YouTube video. Optimize everything so that you're coming up in chat GPT and other AIdriven search engines. This isn't search engine optimization anymore. Like Neil said, we're talking about search everywhere optimization, and that includes places like email and YouTube
• 16:00 - 16:30 and your ad revenue. Let's take a look at what the data says. Don't just take my word for it. Kim, can you can you blow that up a little bit? Absolutely. Um, so yeah, let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into the data and see when it comes to content discovery, how do you make sure you're in as many places as possible and maybe looking at that awareness top of the funnel a little bit differently. So, we've laid out here
• 16:30 - 17:00 that funnel for you showing how these different marketing channels really help on different phases of the funnel, right? SEO, blog post, web copy, all of that is very, very top ofunnel. The first time people even learn you exist or understand that you have a service or product that could solve one of their needs, social and ads start to nurture those people in the middle of the funnel and then email really takes it from middle to bottom to ultimately conversion. And so the thing to keep in mind if like Chris said earlier if you're posting blogs and posting blogs
• 17:00 - 17:30 consistently that's great. you're going to have a really big top of funnel and a lot of awareness, but people need more than that one touch point in all in order to actually go from awareness to conversion. So, the key here is taking that content marketing you're creating for that awareness stage and pulling it through the rest of the funnel by leveraging these different channels so you can better nurture the middle and the bottom of the funnel as well. Part of that is something we've already touched on a few times today, search everywhere optimization. You need
• 17:30 - 18:00 to make sure that you are on all the places that your customer base is doing a search, right? So, people nowadays aren't just going to Google and looking up a question. A lot of people are going to Tik Tok or to YouTube to find video demonstrations of what they need. You have to be on all of these places in order to actually be discovered. People are starting to leverage all these different platforms. You need to be there. And what we're finding is that larger companies are really starting to leverage search everywhere optimization more, which makes sense, right? They have more budget. They have more bandwidth, but there's still not that
• 18:00 - 18:30 many large companies out there taking real estate in search everywhere optimization and even less so with smaller medium businesses. So, what this means for you today is it's not as competitive of a landscape. So, if we look at these numbers 6 months, a year from now, a lot more people are going to be doing things like YouTube and Tik Tok and having that more well-rounded search approach for you today. If you can get in on the ground floor, you'll see your dollar go farther and see more people discovering your business by taking that search everywhere approach
• 18:30 - 19:00 optimization. Digging it a little bit deeper in terms of how you actually take that content from the top of the funnel, whether it is Google, Tik Tok, Instagram, whatever, and using all the various channels to pull it through the funnel. This is where that promotion comes into play. So, like Chris mentioned earlier, we spend a lot of time on the research and the writing phase of our content, as we should, right? Google likes quality content. It wants to see that you're putting together helpful things that people want. But if you're not putting as much effort or thought into the promotion side, you're cutting off your nose to
• 19:00 - 19:30 spite your face, so to speak, right? You're putting content out there. You're putting it onto your site and then saying, "All right, that's it, right? People are going to find me and they're going to convert." We know that's not how that works. People find you, sure, that's touch point number one, but what about touch points 2 through 11? And that's where you can take the content that you're creating and promote it various places. This doesn't have to be a heavy lift. This isn't creating a million different pieces of content. You can post a blog and then link to it on your social channels, on LinkedIn, on X,
• 19:30 - 20:00 on Facebook, posting it back to your site. You can send it to your email marketing newsletters. And so one thing I find really interesting with email marketing, which we'll dive into on the next slide, is only 8% of people really use it to promote their blog content, but it is 82% effective. And we're going to dig into the why there. So what you really need to focus on is not just creating that content, but also getting it out there, repurposing it, and casting that wider net because people who are middle and bottom of funnel are on your social platforms, are on your
• 20:00 - 20:30 email list. take that content, let them see it as well, so you can get those touch points two through 11 to ultimate conversion. Digging a little bit deeper into email, it has a very special place in my heart. Um, but the reason I find email marketing is so interesting and so impactful is because the people you're talking to want to be there and they want to hear from you, right? If somebody's on your email list, they already discovered you. They came to your website, whether that was from SEO, ads, whatever. They liked what they saw.
• 20:30 - 21:00 they signed up and said, "I want to hear more. I want to hear more from you. I want to engage with your brand." If you're not sending information to those people, you're missing out on such a warm lead because they want to be there. This can be as simple as once a month, once a week, once every other week, packaging up your new blogs into a newsletter and sending it out to the people on your email list because that's what they want to see. Those people are so close to making a decision that if you can leverage that content you're making initially for the top of funnel for them as well. Again, you're getting
• 21:00 - 21:30 those extra touch points and those people can then be pushed into the conversion stage. Similar idea when it comes to social media. You want to be showing up on all these different platforms where your key audience is. For the most part, we see X and Facebook still be the two most commonly used social media platforms. So, at the very least, taking the blog post, taking your content and putting it on those platforms is is key. But also keep in mind, who is your key demographic? If you're going after Gen Z and you're not on Tik Tok, you are
• 21:30 - 22:00 missing a huge opportunity to get in front of the people who really are most relevant to your business versus if you're going after baby Moors, maybe Tik Tok isn't as relevant. And again, it doesn't have to be reinventing the wheel here. Take a blog that you wrote a topic on, take that topic and make a short video to go on to YouTube. repurpose that video to go onto a YouTube short or an Instagram story. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, but the more that you can distribute that content, you'll get in front of more people, have more people discover you and ultimately build
• 22:00 - 22:30 more of those touch points that you need. And we talked about how you can just get discovered on Tik Tok and Instagram and all these different channels, but obviously AI plays a very big role here. Um, we mentioned AI overviews earlier. That's why when you type a question into Google and you see a collated answer right at the top, what we're finding is that AI overviews are more likely to show up for those longtail queries. So, think when you're just starting to research something or trying to fix something, like, how do I fix the coils on the back of my
• 22:30 - 23:00 refrigerator, right? Six or more word phrases that you're typing into Google. Those are the types of queries that are seeing more of those AI overviews. AI overviews are leading to more of those um zeroclick type of searches. So you might not see the impact on your traffic and your impression. But that's why to Chris's point earlier, you need to focus on things like leads and the actual revenue coming in because your traffic, your impressions, they're going to change a lot as this AI world continues to develop. But you're still getting awareness, you're getting your name out
• 23:00 - 23:30 there, you're still growing your top of funnel. As long as that ends up translating still to more revenue, you're fine. And on the topic of AI, obviously chat GBT has become a very big platform where people are searching for queries, especially those long uh tail ones. And that's really informational, right? People are at the top of the funnel. They're just trying to get an answer to their question. So, how this relates back to the content you create. Make sure you're putting together blogs that are for that very, very top of funnel. People who are just looking for
• 23:30 - 24:00 information, those longtail questions that are out there. These blogs might not be about promoting your business or your specific services or products. It should always tie back to what you do, right? And have that call to action at the end. But creating those blogs that are purely forformational purposes not only helps on Google, but now also helps on chatbt and other AI platforms as they come about. Sorry, I was totally muted. Uh, the next
• 24:00 - 24:30 Whoops. The next thing to think about is your content format. The reality is not all kinds of content work for the same reasons or for the same potential audience segment. Not long ago, I sat down with Neil on a on a webinar very much like this one and we talked about content preferences by age group. How do we segment an audience and how do we target that audience with the correct types of content? Different audience segments
• 24:30 - 25:00 want different things from their content. Baby boomers, for example, love an email newsletter. Well, Gen Z and Gen Alpha do not love an email newsletter. Everybody likes long- form and short form videos. The majority of your potential buyers like a blog and Gen Alpha doesn't seem to like a blog. Gen Alpha, I think, would prefer images or long form or short form videos. But depending on who your market is, make sure you're targeting the content you
• 25:00 - 25:30 create to that potential market. Next, consider your content lifespan. How long do you want your content to impact your business? because different kinds of content have a have more longevity in terms of potentially becoming leads and um and buyers for you. We're finding that interactive formats, long- form videos and SEO optimized blog posts will pay
• 25:30 - 26:00 dividends for years and years where things like webinars have a high impact for a much shorter period of time. That longevity seems to trickle off after days or weeks. Remember when we said that you need 11 touch points in order to convert someone? We're finding that interactive content actually does a
• 26:00 - 26:30 really great job of this. It almost doubles up on interaction touch points. Um, we're talking here tools and calculators and surveys and quizzes, things that get your audience to touch their screen or touch their mouse to your content. It's almost a it's almost a psychological thing. If you get them to interact with your content, then they're interacting with your brand. Um, we're finding that that those tools are
• 26:30 - 27:00 effective for for a very long period of time. comparable to like an SEO optimized blog. It'll pay dividends for years and years. So, it's worth the time it takes to invest. Not only that, but tools are also backlink magnets. If you want others to link to your content or share your content, make a tool, make a calculator, make some sort of interactive survey. If you can get folks
• 27:00 - 27:30 to interact with your content, you're not only going to engage your your potential buyer, but others who are going to recommend your tool or your content to other potential buyers. If you guys have a minute, go to uberscess.com for neilpel.com/uberscess or answer to the public.com. Look up the backlink count on those tools. It's ridiculous, but those are tools that require a lot more work. Um, what Chris is talking about is you can do something
• 27:30 - 28:00 as simple as a calculator. And a great example of this, if you go to the neilpel.com website, you click on tools in the navigation and you know, I don't know if it's on the homepage, but the navigation is definitely there in the footer on the homepage. Uh, there's things like AB testing calculator, which is a simple tool. And if you look at the backlink count, you'll see that they actually generate a lot of natural backlinks. It's because they're just free tools. Interactive tools are great. Blogs still
• 28:00 - 28:30 continue to be great. This is something that that Kim and I shout from the rooftops every chance we get. Blogs are great tools for digital marketing. But you can help them out a little bit. Give your blog post a leg up. Publish them at the right time to really impact your audience. We find that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the best times to publish. somewhere in the late mornings to early afternoons, we're at the office, we've had breakfast, we've
• 28:30 - 29:00 settled in and we're checking out what's going on in our industries and suddenly here's a blog post that speaks to exactly the search you just put into Google. It's brand new. It's high quality content. It hit at exactly the right time and you've got a touch point. And since blogs aren't going anywhere, obviously they are very important pieces of content marketing, we want to keep talking about the anatomy of a blog. How do you create a blog that actually gets the most awareness possible? And so we
• 29:00 - 29:30 find that popular blog posts typically they're fresh, they're unique, they have actionable content. All of this probably sounds a little familiar if you know double eat, experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. These are the types of ideas that Google looks at when it's ranking your sites because it wants you to have very unique takes on things. It wants your content to be relevant. It wants it to be actionable because it's supposed to be solving a problem. That's why someone typed in the question they did to begin with. So, we're going to dive a little bit deeper in terms of the anatomy of
• 29:30 - 30:00 the blog itself and how to best optimize your chances for ultimate awareness. Talking about the tone of voice. So, first I'm going to give a caveat here that no matter what the tone of voice that you use in your blogs and any content first and foremost should be consistent with who your brand identity is and what your audience is expecting. So, if you're in an industry where having a funny or cheeky tone of voice makes sense and your audience resonates with that, stick with it. That is not wrong. The numbers you see here are just
• 30:00 - 30:30 looking at a high level across all industries. What types of tone of voice do we typically see impacting conversions the most? And again, you'll find a trend here with that double eat, the tones that are academic, right? So, they have a little bit more authority. They're informative. Those types of tones of voice tend to convert better, especially when they involve senses of urgency because again, you have this problem, you search for it on Google or whatever platform. All right, let's get that problem fixed and let's do it right now. So, no tone of voice is a
• 30:30 - 31:00 one-sizefits-all. do what's best for your business at all times, but if you can incorporate that EAT into the way that your tone is put together, typically we see more conversions. And when it comes to length of your content, same thing. I'm going to start here with a caveat. There is no magic word count number. What Chris and I always tell our content team is if you have a topic that you're writing on, write until you have written everything you can about that topic with zero fluff and then stop. If that is at 500 words
• 31:00 - 31:30 or 2,500 words, it doesn't matter. You are going to look to get out all of the information you can on that topic without putting in useless information. So, don't worry as much about the word count. Really focus on creating quality content and a good user experience. But you can take into consideration what are your content goals and what should be a ballpark word count that I'm looking at. Are you looking to get more backlinks? Are you looking for search optimization, thought leadership? But again, take these numbers with a grain of salt. They're still very important in terms of
• 31:30 - 32:00 anchoring your content goals, but make sure every individual piece you write is really focused on the user experience and what the user and Google are going to benefit most from. And when it comes to the actual topics that you write, make sure you are staying original. We as humans have shiny object syndrome, right? It's just part of our psychology. We always want to see things that are new and fresh and that surprise us. We find that original content performs about three times percent three times better than reused or AI written pieces. And so when we say
• 32:00 - 32:30 original content here, what I don't want you to do is to find a topic that performed really well once of your blogs and then you just keep recreating that topic in different ways. Instead, I want you to look at that topic that performed well and kind of take one step up in the hierarchy and say, "Okay, what is that overarching theme?" And then what are those other subtopics I can start attacking and coming at from different angles? and then you become an expert with both breath and depth and create more of a hub and spoke model. So don't just keep taking the same topic and trying to repurpose it and repurpose it.
• 32:30 - 33:00 Come up with something new, original, and fresh to put out there for your readers. And along those same lines, fresh doesn't mean it has to be every single time you start from scratch with a blank page and write a brand new piece of content. Don't forget about all those pieces that you've already written and are out there on your site. going back and refreshing them based on current keyword rankings, based on industry updates, even just things like relevant terms of phrase, right? Like how people are speaking today or or world events.
• 33:00 - 33:30 Updating your older content to include that breathes new life into it and can help boost your rankings as well. We find that content that's under a month old tends to perform best. and that content under a month old can be both brand new from blank content but also refresh existing content that you had out there. That way you can keep maintaining the work you're doing rather than always having to produce something net new. A minute ago, Kim mentioned AI content. We want to go on the record yet
• 33:30 - 34:00 again as saying that AI is not your enemy. AI can be your friend, but not all by itself. Um, in the in the graphic on the slide, the left hand column is an AI generated piece of blog copy all by itself. AI just wrote it. And as you can see, it it isn't great in terms of performance. It's not it's good for tone of voice, but in every other measure,
• 34:00 - 34:30 originality, uh, readability, SEO score, and engagement potential, it fails. But with human intervention, we can actually get those measures to match what human generated copy would do. The the graphic on the on the right shows a little bit of AI or AI written and human intervention. We're finding on our team that we're actually able to nearly match originality scores. Even you can see on on this particular
• 34:30 - 35:00 measure, the originality score is really low. But in the tool that we're using every day with proper quality human intervention, we can even match originality scores in the the tool that we use to evaluate our copy on our team. Don't be afraid of AI, but do be a little bit afraid of AI because people can spot AI content. When you place it side by side with human written content, 82% of people can
• 35:00 - 35:30 spot an AI written blog at least some of the time. And among ages 22 to 34, that rate rises to nearly 90%. People can tell. There's markers. And I'll tell you a secret. The marker for AI content has nothing to do with whether it uses M dashes or doesn't use M dashes. Whatever social media wants to tell you about the reality of that, that's not necessarily true. But there are markers. There are ways that that an
• 35:30 - 36:00 educated eye can tell AI cop not AI copy. AI images are maybe even weirder. Comparing sidebyside real photos with AI photos, US consumers can spot AI images 71% of the time. However, it's getting better. It used to be that you could count the fingers and know if something was AI because there are way too many fingers in an AI written or an AI generated human. It's getting better.
• 36:00 - 36:30 They're still weird, but there's not necessarily 12 of them for celebrity images, natural landscapes, and AI or and animal photos. People are really good at this because you could we're identifying AI images 87% of the time. So, be thoughtful with AI. Don't lean on it as your only tool, but certainly don't be afraid of it. The key is AI and human
• 36:30 - 37:00 collaboration. AI is a tool. It's not a replacement for human creativity. 79% of businesses have reported an increase in their content's quality when they incorporate AI into their creation process. Why? because you're letting the human brains worry about the quality instead of the structure. Or you're letting human brains worry about the the quality and the SEO optimization and not necessarily creating the the
• 37:00 - 37:30 organizational flow. It's just repackaging where the writer's brain lives. So, we find that using AI for drafting works pretty good, but you can't stop there. Next, use multimedia. Sorry, can you go back a slide? Thank you. Use multimedia to boost your blog traffic, but only if it improves the user
• 37:30 - 38:00 experience. Multimedia doesn't always improve the user experience. We're finding that that audience segments tend to like things like images. They tend to like video. They tend to like multiple media formats. And somehow audio not really popular. Uh so a blog with some audio in it doesn't seem to increase user engagement or user experience where video or images do. 35% of bloggers report better results for blog posts
• 38:00 - 38:30 with seven to 10 images, which is a lot, but it keeps your audience on the page. It keeps their eyes on your screen. Treat your content like a DJ for more views. Remix your best performing posts into unexpected formats. Take a blog post that's really, really driving traffic. Blow it out into a video. Blow it out into five short
• 38:30 - 39:00 form videos. Share them on your social media. Put them in your emails. Get that content out to the public in different ways. Don't just write a blog, stick it on your page, and hope. There's one kind of content that works across all social media platforms and it's video. Video works across every platform. You're seeing an increase in the in the graph on the slide. You're
• 39:00 - 39:30 seeing an increase in the popularity and the and the visibility of video marketing over time. We're even seeing video content show up in Google searches. We're seeing video content show up as links in AI overview searches. Make some video. Create video. Make it work with you. But also pay attention to what types of video content are getting the most
• 39:30 - 40:00 shares. Video content in general gets shared a lot. 52 companies that we analyze uh sorry 58 companies that we worked with uh gave us access to over 4,000 pieces of content that they published over the last 3 months. Videos got the most shares. Case studies got the fewest shares. If you're going to put your time and your energy and your money into one over the other, the one that gets the most shares has the
• 40:00 - 40:30 highest access to the most touch points to convert those folks to buyers. Long form video tends to fare better than short form video on some platforms. Short form video fares better on other platforms. A higher watch time equals deeper engagement. So, if you have time to really deliver deep engagement to your
• 40:30 - 41:00 audience, long form video is great. Um, if you're making what could otherwise be a short video and you're expanding that into a long form video, you're you may be missing the point. The audience will leave after a period of time. And it depends on your platform. On YouTube, the average watch time is 3 minutes. On Facebook, the average watch time is 18 seconds. So, if you're putting video on on Facebook, think short. If you're putting
• 41:00 - 41:30 video on YouTube, you can think longer and deeper. And not just that, the interesting thing is if you look at the chart, YouTube has more watch time for a long video than LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook combined. So when you have longer form content, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't use it on LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, or Facebook. Something's better than nothing from a view perspective. But you may want to consider posting first on
• 41:30 - 42:00 YouTube and leaving it there exclusively for a period of a week or two weeks before you start pushing it on the other platforms. Um, and you know, your engagement should be better on YouTube. uh you're training people to go to YouTube to go find your longer form content when you push it out there and if you notify them on the other social platforms and it'll just help your YouTube video get more love, more reach um within their ecosystem. And again, you can still push the long form on LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook. But something that we do on
• 42:00 - 42:30 our end is we just delay it by roughly two weeks. Short form video is equally good for engagement. Um, in fact, short form video is the ad spend lead. If you want to know where people are allocating their ads budget right now, it's going to short form videos. Um, 28% of of ad spend is going to short form videos. Why? It's because it's what everybody
• 42:30 - 43:00 wants. If you go back, don't go back in the slides, but if you were to go back in your head to the slide where I talked about audience share and audience preferences, every single audience demographic likes ranked short form videos as a five out of five in terms of their interest. That's where spend is. But all that
• 43:00 - 43:30 said, don't ignore infographics, podcasts, and webinars as potential formats for your digital marketing. All of these have impact in terms of sharability. Infographics are deeply sharable. They're easy to to share. They're easy to um to to put on social media and get a lot of engagement with. Podcasts are great for engagement, for long, deep
• 43:30 - 44:00 conversations with your with your potential buyer. And webinars, well, like this one, are a great way to get people together on a Tuesday morning or Tuesday early afternoon and talk about what's going on in your industry. Great. And with all that said, that was a lot of information. We want to try to boil everything we just went over into how to actually apply this to the work that you're doing. and how to bring this to life in your content marketing
• 44:00 - 44:30 plan. So the very first thing, this is always going to be the first piece of advice I give anybody when it comes to marketing. Audit audit your existing content. Look at some recent conversions that you got and understand, okay, what was the final touch point that made them convert? Okay, what were the three or four touch points before then? Okay, what was the first interaction they had with my brand? Start to understand the funnel both from a macro level, right? So on a whole you see most people coming from this channel versus that channel. But I'd also suggest looking at it on a
• 44:30 - 45:00 micro level. Handpick b random a few people who have converted on your site to buy your product or service whatever it is and look at their exact customer journey. See just how many touch points they required and where they got those touch points from. That will very clearly help you see okay the middle of the funnel is where we're really missing out. How do I repurpose some of the content I'm using at the top of the funnel and make sure I get it on the relevant social platforms for example? Second thing you should do once that audit is done, you've seen where
• 45:00 - 45:30 the gaps are, start to create content that makes sense or repurposing the existing content that you have. And the key here is to work smarter, not harder. That's what we all want, right? Make content that is going to go further. So things like tools and video, like Kristen mentioned earlier, they have a better longevity, more interactivity. you're going to get more engagement. These are the types of pieces of content that don't only work at the top of the funnel, but also ultimately cause more of that return on investment, which is what we're looking for when it comes to digital
• 45:30 - 46:00 marketing. Third thing, repurpose and promote. I kind of just touched on that a little bit, but you really want to make sure that all of the content you're putting out there is reaching the breath that it really, really can. So, putting it on your different social channels, putting it through your email newsletter. If you create a piece of content, don't put it out onto your blog, on your site, and be like, "All right, done. Here comes a ton of money." Right? You have to put it on your site and then really find the different ways to promote it. So, you can have those different touch points that you need to ultimately help your bottom line. Along those same lines, optimize
• 46:00 - 46:30 beyond Google. We've said it so many times today, but people are now searching on Tik Tok, YouTube, Chat, GPT. Google still has a very large market share. Don't get me wrong. Do not start ignoring Google. You need to start taking what you're doing for Google and repurposing that across all these different platforms to have that search everywhere optimization. And lastly, make sure you're measuring what matters. Going way back to the beginning of this webinar, we talked about looking at things like revenue and conversions and leads and
• 46:30 - 47:00 engagement, not just traffic and impressions. Yes, that's very important. Without a top of funnel, without good traffic, you're not even going to have a middle and bottom of funnel. But if you have great traffic and just great traffic because you're not doing anything at the middle or bottom, you're not actually going to see conversions. And what we all want from marketing ultimately is revenue. So you should see a correlation between increase in traffic, increase in impressions, and increase in revenue. And if you're not, there's somewhere there in the funnel that you need to readjust your content marketing
• 47:00 - 47:30 strategy. And that's basically the full content engine, right? We audit, we create based on that audit. Whatever we're creating, we're repurposing, we're promoting different places, we're optimizing it for all these different channels. And then ultimately measuring, okay, did what I actually do worked? And the thing with SEO is it's never a oneandone. You constantly have to go back and audit and see, okay, what's new? What new platforms have come up in the past three months that I need to start being on? It's a consistent process to make sure that your content marketing is really having the most reach that it can.
• 47:30 - 48:00 Look, we're living proof that content marketing works at NP Digital. Um, it not only works for us, but it works for our customers as well. Content marketing isn't dead. It's just that people focusing on creating content in automated ways without putting in any manual effort. Um, you know, you can call that lazy content. That's pretty much dead. to win, you got to leverage not just human content or not
• 48:00 - 48:30 just leveraging technology out there um like AI. What people don't really focus on with content these days is something that's unique. What can you talk about that no one's already talked about on the internet that tends to perform well. On top of that, you got to blend in creativity and you got to be very consistent. So now that you got to talk about new things, you got to get creative. Uh it could be with the way you design your content, the way people
• 48:30 - 49:00 interact with it. Um you know like we have quizzes as content which are very effective. We have tools which is a version of content as well. And you want to be everywhere. SEO isn't just about Google. It's about Google. It's about Facebook. It's about Instagram. It's even about Amazon or even X or ChatgPT. And people say, "Oh, I'm posting on Facebook. I'm posting on Instagram." Yes, but are you optimizing so that it ranks on those platforms as well? And usually the cases are no. And when
• 49:00 - 49:30 people like, "Yeah," and they're like, "Okay, what do you do? What's your rankings?" You know, people don't have much to show for that. And this is why you got to focus on search everywhere optimization. It's the way to make content marketing work in today's world. If you need help with your content marketing, you can just bust out your phone, scan that QR code, and when you scan the QR code, it'll uh you can end up going to the NP digital website or you just follow the link, put in your information, and you know, we can talk
• 49:30 - 50:00 about working together and we'll analyze everything and you can take that data and do whatever you want with it. Or if you want to work with us, great. But it doesn't cost anything for the call. We also have an upcoming webinar uh on the top mobile strategies that work. Um we're going to end up breaking down what you need to do from a mobile aspect to generate the most amount of revenue. Uh I think a month or two months ago, maybe
• 50:00 - 50:30 I'll go with a month. We also acquired a mobile marketing uh company called Yodel. Uh you should check them out if you haven't. and they specialize in app store optimization and making the most from mobile uh revenue as well. All right, Colin, let's answer some questions. Good stuff. Thank you all. Some good questions. We're going to start with Neil. We always talk about omni channel and mo multi-channel. Um a question from
• 50:30 - 51:00 a viewer. Are you saying that it's better to focus on several marketing channels specifically for a small business? I've heard it's better to focus on one channel at a time because a limited budget. What do you think? Give me some thoughts and guidance, sir. That's for you. So, omni channel is where it's at. And keep in mind, there's a difference between multi- channelannel and omni channel. Multi- channelannels being on all the platforms, but they work independently in silos. Omni channels, you're on all the platforms,
• 51:00 - 51:30 but they're working together to help you achieve the same goal. You're taking learnings from one campaign and using it for other um and you're doing that across platforms. What I recommend if you're a smaller business is to start off with one or two channels and then repurpose and expand from there. Um but eventually you need to go omni channel. It just may be tough if you don't have the budget or the resources or time. If you're a larger business, you should figure out how to go omni channel as quick as possible. The reason being is
• 51:30 - 52:00 it's not as competitive on most these channels. Word. The more the marrier. Kim, Chris. So, we did a webinar on this not that long ago. So, for the folks that asked this question, go check out the replays for sure. But there were a couple of questions about just getting included in Google AI overviews. So Kim and or Chris um and ladies first maybe maybe just give you know like your two
• 52:00 - 52:30 cents on some best practices to get that visibility um in the AI overviews. Yeah, I'll give a quick response and I think Chris was actually on that previous webinar so I'm going to let him speak even more to it. Um but yeah, like with AI overviews, we're typically finding it pulls in information for those longterm queries, right? So the longer words, six words or phrases. You want to make sure you're creating content that is very very top offunnel. And something we run into a lot with the clients we work with is, you know, we'll create blogs that
• 52:30 - 53:00 are answering a question and not necessarily promoting their business specifically. That's the point. That's something you need to do to answer questions that people are looking for on Google. So AI overviews really pull you in. Chris, I'll let you speak more to it since you were on that previous webinar. Oh, Kim, you said it first and you said it best. uh answer a question. Um figure out what your content is intended to answer and answer it. Um if you're not sure how to rank for AI overviews, go look at something. AI overviews is great
• 53:00 - 53:30 at answering a question. That question can be a fiveword question or a six-word question. It can be a whole sentence. It can be a short two or three-word question. Probably not two. That would be hard to make that a question anyway. Um but but then deliver an answer. However, if you want to rank for that answer, do it better. So see what's on there. See what your competitors are doing. See how AI is pulling in. What what AI overviews is doing is they're scouring this large language model for
• 53:30 - 54:00 answers that seem correct. So give it an answer that seems more correct, that's more thorough, that's more thoughtful, that's more engaged directly to the question. We've done things like encouraged our our clients to put TLDDR sections or summaries at the beginning of their blogs because we know that AI is going to to scrape those and go, "Hey, this answers that question in a really concise, fast way that we can grab that and plunk it down at the top of Google and move on."
• 54:00 - 54:30 TLDDR. Too long, didn't read. Too long, didn't didn't read. I love that one. Uh, let's see. Kim and Chris again. So, this is a good one and probably just some some tips on maybe how some of our clients address this or how we help our clients address this. How do you accelerate content publishing and distribution while still having to run through the approval red tape? like any
• 54:30 - 55:00 any tips on I don't know like style guides or tone like h how do we publish stuff like quickly for for companies that do have red tape because at the end of the day legal and compliance and marketing like needs to sort of you know check off and approve what what's going out there any tips there and we can start with Kim again. Sure. Yeah, this is the story of Chris and my life I feel like day in and day out. Um the key
• 55:00 - 55:30 thing that we found that works with clients when they have things like legal or me to QC is setting up a very tight process and in that tight process you have like okay it first we interview the people at the company to understand exactly what they know and exactly what information to include. That way the piece we create is already on the right track. Then from there it goes to the legal team to review and then it goes to the marketing team to review and then it's ready to publish. with that even having that tight routine, it's still going to take more time than just write
• 55:30 - 56:00 and publish, right? You're going to have a longer um a longer leeway. So, what you should do is have multiple content pieces going at once. That way, when one is in the writing phase, another one's in the QC phase. That way, you're not waiting months to get out another piece of content. It can still be pretty continuous because you have multiple ones going at the same time. Chris, what would you add on for our clients? I was going to make a point of the pipeline that you just mentioned. Um but but I would like the the more of those stakeholders you can get in the room at
• 56:00 - 56:30 the beginning of the process the better. Um we do things like content gathering p templates that we use so that that our clients can frontload information to us so that we can write for them from a brand approved sort of a standpoint. Yeah, great great responses there. Um, I know content clusters are something that we do a lot of and we kind of like get approvals on, to your point, Kim, like multiple topics, etc., you know, before
• 56:30 - 57:00 we start really cranking stuff out. And I think that that certainly helps to streamline, too. So, here's another one. Um, man, we're just going with Kim and Chris. I got I swear I have some for you at the end. Tim and Chris, how do you approach content for a very niche or technical industry where the audience is super small but also like very high value? So there may not be, you know, a lot of people looking for stuff, but maybe it converts at a higher rate. Any
• 57:00 - 57:30 tips or tricks there? Yeah, you got to know your data and where your people are first and foremost, right? all of the tips that we gave today about the different adult social media platforms, all of that still applies. You're still going to find even if it is a really niche audience that they cluster certain places. The other thing um because I think kind of what the question is getting at is that traffic might be um smaller for these types of keywords related to that industry. So the SEO phase might be a little bit more difficult or a harder challenge. Focus
• 57:30 - 58:00 on those other channels. If you can get more people coming to your site, even if it is a smaller traffic keyword from SEO, from paid ads, and get them to sign up for your email lists, now you can start to have those touch points via email and convert them that way without solely having to focus on the keywords and optimizing for Google or any of the search platforms that they're on. Top offunnel content still works here, too. um like more general interest top
• 58:00 - 58:30 offunnel evergreen content can still be really effective in this sort of a technical market. Um the idea is you're casting a broad net and assuming that that's going to catch the one or two big fish that you're looking for instead of casting a tiny net and hoping that that those fish come near it. Yeah, good good advice. And and I think it sort of ties into this next question nicely. the longtail keywords. If they're over six words and they're often not coming up with much traffic in
• 58:30 - 59:00 Google keyword planner, no competition, etc., should I even be focusing on on the longtail? Um, my response to that is the longtail is really long and there's like lots of longtail terms out there. And while the search volume might be low, the competition probably is too, but guess what? The conversion rate might be might be higher. Um, so here's here's another one. Um, well, to go back to that one really quickly, we have a
• 59:00 - 59:30 chart somewhere on my X profile where I actually break down the conversion rate by keyword length. And I actually have it right now. This is going to be hard for you guys to see. And I published this on 5325, so May 5th. But one word conversions.17 uh.17 uh two words.35% three words 1.02% four words 1.61 five words 1.58
• 59:30 - 60:00 six words 1.94 seven or more words 1.83. So it just goes to show you longer tail keywords tend to convert better for sure by a lot by by a lot. Uh, again, this is about shifting the metrics that we're tracking. If you're if you're posting a sixword longtail keyword and assuming that's going to be a huge clicks and impressions driver, that's a miss. But if you're looking at and tracking your conversions based on
• 60:00 - 60:30 that keyword, that can be a real win. Yep. Let's try to squeeze in one more. We're we're right at time, but this is a tough one. And Neil, this one is is for you. And this one came up a couple of times because we're talking about content and content in different forms, etc. How do you balance content for brand awareness with content designed specifically for conversion? Like any tips or sort of rules to live by there. That's kind of a
• 60:30 - 61:00 tough one. It it's actually a mixture of both. Just like you create content for different types of topics and keywords, you create content for some for brand awareness and you create some that are focused on conversions. I'll give you a great example of this. On the neilpel.com blog, we have articles like what is SEO? We're not going to get a customer from that. We've ranked on page one for SEO for a long time. I don't know where we are today, but let's call it we're not on page one because we started shifting our strategy from
• 61:00 - 61:30 ranking for quote unquote terms like what is SEO to more specific terms like um or more specific queries like how to optimize a blog. I'm making this up, but I know we got a client that's a Fortune 100 company from this uh how to optimize a blog in uh for multiple languages in multiple countries, right? That is very little traffic. But that one article, we have an article on that subject. It does
• 61:30 - 62:00 not exactly call that, but it's generated us probably around $45 million in revenue over the lifetime of our company. All right. The what is SEO page has gotten us a lot of people infunnel where they learn about us, but they come back later on, a year or two later, and then convert. The point I'm getting at is depending on your strategy, how you're doing keyword research, you ideally need to put different types of content in different buckets, just like searches, right? Um, some searches
• 62:00 - 62:30 areformational, some are transactional, some maybe even navigational. You start putting content in different buckets and you create it for different purposes and intent and then you'll start focusing on all aspects of the funnel. I see us right at the top of page two for what is SEO. So, we got a little we got a little work to do, but that's pretty darn good. Yeah. And and then you got to also figure out how to optimize. Like at our company, our blog traffic used to be call it three four times more than what it is today. Some of it you could say is
• 62:30 - 63:00 algorithms, but the real shift in strategy is our business when it was three four times larger than what it is today was probably around 16 the size of what it is today. So, in essence, we're roughly six times larger. We stopped focusing on keywords that were bringing in people that would pay us $1,000 a month and we started focusing on keywords that were more targeted towards companies who have budgets in the six figures, if not seven figures and even eight figures a year. There's not as
• 63:00 - 63:30 much volume for those keywords, but that's where our business is shifting. So, we adapt to what works for our business. And if we look at our RFP count, when we were getting, no joke, I I I know this one for a fact, back of my hand, at one point, we were getting seven times more traffic than we are right now globally, okay? Um, across all our channels and in the marketing industry, there's something called a RFP, request for proposal. Those are typically how you get the biggest
• 63:30 - 64:00 contracts. We used to get maybe one or two of those a year when we had seven times more traffic. Uh in 2023, just in the United States, we had 16. 2024, we had 25. If I fast forward to today in 2025, and you be like, Neil, you get less traffic. May 13th, which is when we're doing this webinar, no joke, we're already at 22 RFPs for the year. So, we've shifted our strategy on the type of keywords we're
• 64:00 - 64:30 going after and the type of traffic we're getting. There's not as much volume, but it generates way more revenue. So, you got to, you know, Chris talked about this a lot. It's about vanity metrics, you know, like what are your real metrics that you're optimizing for? We're optimizing for revenue. We don't optimize for impressions and vivids for our customers. We don't optimize for impressions and visits. We optimize for revenue. Some of that revenue comes from being at the top and getting brand awareness. Some of it is
• 64:30 - 65:00 very specific queries where you get clicks onto your website and that generates revenue. You got to pick and choose your battle. But I recommend that people shift away from focusing on how many visitors I get this month versus last month to how much more money did we make? And when my when we shifted the strategy internally, our team's like, "But traffic's going to go down." I'm like, "Who cares if traffic goes down one/10enth? If we make five times more money, that's all that matters. And that's what people get wrong in SEO. They really get their egos going with
• 65:00 - 65:30 like, I need more visitors. I need more visitors. I need more rankings. But if those rankings never create a dollar revenue, like we used to rank on page one for how to get more Instagram followers. Who cares how to get more Instagram followers? No one's going to read that article and give us 300 grand a year. Like, it just doesn't matter. And that keyword was the most popular keyword we've ever ranked for. more traffic than anything else. Never a dollar in revenue. Yep. So, that was my rant. But if you guys want to work with us, check out
• 65:30 - 66:00 npdigital.com. We're really good at focusing on the most important metric, not traffic, revenue. And let's work together to grow your revenue. Appreciate it, everyone. Take care. Thanks, Neil. Bye all. Heat. Heat. [Music]
• 66:00 - 66:30 [Music] [Music] Heat.