Summary
- I learned that marketing can be powerful and it's important to build a reputation by being honest and over-delivering.
- When starting in marketing, I realized that doing it myself was essential as paying others didn't yield results.
- Helping small businesses succeed can be more satisfying than big wins with large corporations.
- Planning for holiday promotions early is crucial; ideally, three months before the holiday.
- AI in retail can enhance customer experience and boost sales, especially during holidays.
- On average, 20% of holiday spending happens just before Christmas, so marketing during this time is key.
- Big companies often participate in holiday promotions to generate up to 10% of their annual e-commerce revenue.
- It's good to diversify marketing channels as most customers use multiple channels before making a purchase.
- Mobile shopping is growing, with 70% of digital time spent on mobile, so it's crucial to optimize for it.
- Personalized experiences can boost sales by up to 30%, so consider leveraging AI to understand customer preferences.
- I learned that self-gifting represents a large market, with 50% of holiday shoppers buying for themselves.
- Preparing for a holiday sales rush should ideally start months in advance, considering logistics like inventory.
- Utilizing AI to analyze data can provide actionable insights and improve KPIs rather than relying on manual observations.
- Dynamic and engaging ads, such as those using 3D imagery, can increase engagement by up to 50%.
- Websites won't disappear, but they should be part of an omni-channel strategy to reach more customers.
- It's important to check for plagiarism and be transparent about using AI, ensuring ethical practices are maintained.
Video
How To Take Action
I'd suggest that small businesses or anyone interested in personal growth start by over-delivering in their services or products to build a strong reputation. Be honest and always aim to give more than expected. This costs nothing and builds trust and repeat business.
Doing your own marketing can initially save you money and give you better insights into what works. Start small by managing your own social media and content creation. Books and online resources offer great low-cost ways to learn the ropes.
An easy, high-impact strategy for businesses is to plan holiday promotions well in advance, ideally three months ahead. This helps you tackle all logistics like inventory and marketing channels effectively.
Using AI can seem daunting, but tools and apps today make it easier than ever. For instance, AI can help with understanding customer preferences to offer personalized experiences that boost sales, which can be a game changer during crowded shopping seasons.
Consider diversifying your marketing channels. Today’s customers often use several ways before buying, so being present on multiple platforms increases your reach.
Mobile shopping is huge, with 70% of digital time spent on mobile. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly to catch this wave.
Finally, transparency when using AI is important. Always disclose when interactions or content is AI-driven to maintain ethical practices and trust.
Quotes by Author
"I help companies generate more revenue through digital marketing"
"Nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed"
"People believe marketing is expensive and difficult, fortunately that's not true"
"There is a formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body"
"My mission is to share this formula with you"
Full Transcript
[Music] he [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] my name is Neil Patel and I help companies generate more Revenue through digital marketing Entrepreneur magazine said I was a number one marketer in the world and they also said I created one of the 100 most brilliant companies I started my first first website at the age of 16 I took all the money that I earned from working at amusement park and I paid a marketing firm the marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone out of my frustration and from being broke I had no choice but to learn marketing my first client was a power supply manufacturer I helped him generate another $25 million in sales and from that point I realized the power of marketing I helped everyone that I could and I buil my reputation by being honest and overd delivering I've helped companies like Google NBC Viacom General Motors eBay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed I found a four multi-million dollar companies and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid I've written about them on Forbes entrepreneur Inc Fast Company and even on my own blogs it's so awesome to know that colist from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom over the years I've received awards from the president of United States the House of Representatives and the United Nations people believe marketing is expensive and difficult fortunately that's not true there is a Formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body you can get results and my mission is to share this formula with you [Music] hello everyone how are you guys doing today um my name is Neil Patel and we're going to have a little bit of a fun episode today we're having some te technical issues with the restream platform we have pretty strong connections on our end but uh for some weird reason me being in Hong Kong right now it's perfect for me but uh some of the other uh speakers are having issues with their Ram so let's dive in I do apologize for any of that in advance where's case scenario you'll just hear more from me um back one side Barbara so we're going to be talking about pretty much putting AI in real retail everyone talks about AI but how do you use it in retail to more so Delight your customers and drive more sales this holiday season and we're going to go over a lot of interesting stats and data and how you can use retail and some of the stats we're going to go over are going to reshape how you think of retail like for example most people don't know this but 20% of all holiday spending roughly happens around that Christmas period a week or two before Christmas um there's some interesting things that you'll learn throughout this presentation and it should help you perform better so let's Dive Right In so my name is Neil Patel I'm the co-founder of NP digital um we are a global Ad Agency and with me today I have Bethany and Eddie Eddie do you want to give a quick introduction of yourself and then Bethany you can do the same after yeah sure I'm Eddie uh senior director on the paid media side and I help lead the paid social team and hello everybody my name is Bethany I'm working as the Director of search here at NP digital on the paid media side so at NP digital we see a lot and when I say we see a lot you know we work in many different countries we have a good amount of people and this allows us to see a lot of Trends on the holiday season what's interesting though is a lot of our clients do different things and in different verticals so we're seeing tons of data and we're able to bring that to you so then that way you can have the best holiday marketing strategy out there especially when it comes to leveraging AI to maximize your sales this season in 2023 holiday sales reached a record $964 billion and it's going to be even bigger this year some of it because of inflation some of it because people are spending more uh it's a really really massive amount of money that gets spent literally in you know a few months if you had to think about it because it's actually maybe a month when you think about the total number of holidays around the world you know it may only make up a month out of the year and before we really dive into how to use technology and how to optimize this year you know holiday uh Revenue you need to First understand the current retail and e-commerce landscape so the first thing you need to know is what really drives holiday shopping right well there's a lot of things that really drive it um end of the year is the biggest holiday season uh then you also have Black Friday which is really massive as well and 40% of the leading brand secure over 10% of their annual e-commerce revenue from holiday shopping events so if you're not really doing holid promotions and I know a lot of people have issues with this oh Neil is going to cheapen my brand oh Neil you know then people are going to get used to the discounted pric and they're not going to want to pay the full retail price I'm telling you most big corporations do it it's effective if you don't participate in the holiday season even if you're in B2B you will lose out on Revenue even at Uber says and answer the public we run Black Friday offerings holiday promotions at the very end of the year and it helps us generate a good chunk of revenue for us it's not 10% we don't leverage all the holidays we only leverage two of them each year but it makes up extra 3 4% in Revenue every little bit adds up the interesting thing though is most people when they think about holiday shopping they think about okay it's getting close to Christmas it's time to optimize okay it's getting close to Black Friday we're a few days away it's time to optimize the holiday shopping starts way earlier than people think so for example for Christmas it starts no joke in October roughly each and every single year so if you start optimizing in October you can generate sales Black Friday events and Cyber Monday events start before as well and you can actually run promotions pre those days and post those days and still generate extra Revenue as well and it's also not too late if you haven't really started look it's okay I know we're more than Midway through October but you can still go after a lot of that Revenue next year start sooner but you can still start last year 42% of us adults wrapped up their holiday shopping after December 16th and 71% of consumers said they plan to shop online Black Friday and 70% say they will product uh they will proactively be checking for deals during cyber week and I mentioned the stat during the beginning of the presentation 20% of holiday spend occurs 10 days before Christmas that's all holiday spend that's a big chunk of Revenue right there in just those 10 days and consumers are facing you know a lot of options when it comes to uh shopping and what they're thinking about this year is hey we actually have less days right so not only do we have tons of options and people are running tons of deals because of things like you know bad economy globally inflation so a lot more companies are getting flexible some of them have excess inventory but they're only 27 days before Thanksgiving and Christmas so just keep that in mind it's more condensed and you're also going to have the election that is going to affect results um which I believe you may be able to see on the next slide so that may mean where you need to adjust how you shop uh people are also going to be shopping in store and online so you need to be hybrid in which if you have both don't be afraid to push people in stores and if you're have uh physical stores don't be afraid to push people online people like doing both at the same time uh we call it fital right in which they're going to physical and digital versions and they're both areas where you can make money you also will find that AI will play a big role for Shoppers two and five plan to use AI to shop for gifts this year and they believe a simplifies product Discovery think like Tik Tok Instagram it's their Discovery algorithms are trying to figure out what you like and they show you products and they also believe that AI helps in finding the best deals right so you want to make sure you're leveraging these tools and these Technologies to capture that Revenue as well and in 2024 you need to optimize multiple Avenues and channels you know it's no longer a game of hey Neil I was on Google I typed in this keyword and I bought hey Neil I was on Instagram I saw this ad for this I clicked it and I bought those channels do help with sales but what happens is is it was hey Neil I was on Instagram they recommend this product you know did some Google searches saw some sites that sold similar products I opted into email list on a few of the sites they sent me some offers and promotions um went to the site didn't buy uh added to the car got remarketed and then I ended up going back to the site and purchasing in essence it's turned into an omni Channel game it's not a linear path in which someone just takes one direct approach to buy so you need to understand that the user journey is very complex and you got to adapt with it and as I mentioned earlier it is election year I highly recommend people adjust a little bit of their spend going up to election period and a little bit after especially in the US because this will help you get the biggest bang for your dollars these presedential candidates have raised a lot of money with their packs so what you want to do is just uh adjust your spend a little bit because keep in mind they're targeting anyone over the age of 18 in specific States or region and this causes cper clicks to go up for all Industries including B2B so what holiday Shoppers are looking for in 2023 or 2024 technically okay so Omni Channel shopping is going to be extremely important the stats are showing that 76% of Shoppers they're using they're using online offline mobile and social so you want to have touch points throughout the entire day and some of the other stats are showing that 90% of consumers they switch devices throughout the day so 60% of those consumers they visit stores to see products before they buy online the four main areas here are in the morning the afternoon and the evening but it it really should give you a sense of how you're going to be displaying your brand and it's a really big reminder for Q4 in terms of social media being the most important it is now considered to be a full funnel Commerce driver so 52% Discovery 52% that's at the consideration phase and that's going to be a bit Blended the buying stage so holiday Shoppers their price activated they're not brand loyal 66% they prioritize deals over loyalty discounts Drive 74% of retailer choices and that makes your strategic pricing extremely crucial so during the holiday season you have to offer competitive deals or you're going to lose sales you've heard of cyber 5 what about cyber 12 so holiday sales are a marathon it's not a Sprint you want to optimize for the entire month of December not just cyber week There's Brands out there who are ready to even start having sales in October if you have noticed that on your side but the main point here is that people are ready to buy after s and you don't want to stop the offers you want to create new ones and even recapture the initial consumers who had the very first touch points before Thanksgiving mobile is the new storefront so about 70% of digital time is spent here and if you look at the stats the sales are just going to start skyrocketing it's going to hit a record 240 billion between November and the end of the year that's up 88.4% year-over-year so the main focus that you should have is is your site optimized to drive conversions streamline the checkout and are you leveraging I think Eddie got dis Eddie you got disconnected uh you got you want to repeat the slide again sorry Eddie oh sorry about that so um the the main aspect here is that if mobile is going to drive a lot of sales throughout the year especially November through December then focus on having a mobile optimized experience streamline the checkout leverage your exclusive promos during this time period mobile is going to Eclipse desktop it represents about 53% of holiday sales uh you want to focus on convenience so everyone's talking about how to optimize your site but the the the simple Point here is that you focus more on desktop mobile should be the Crux of of your Q4 um is it optimized for the user is it fast and does it make it easy for them to understand the the pain that it solves and then can they buy quickly without friction data driven personalization it unlocks about 10 to 30% sales lifts that's what's working on Amazon side but 75% of Shoppers they're willing to pay more for personalized experiences here and how can you really focus on this aspect it's it's making sure that the messaging makes sense on the channel that they are most frequently visiting that could be mobile it could be website and could even be your socials emails and some other secondary channels like podcasts YouTube and other messaging apps as well like WhatsApp we chat and messenger self-gifting is a really big aspect that many Brands forget about so self-gifting um it represents a really big chunk right 50% of holiday Shoppers are also buying for themselves so tap into the me time purchases it's emotional retail therap therapy 60% it's to buy to uplift mood 40% for even personal rewards um that can change your messaging you could even test it with different landing pages as well everyone's been talking about AI so let's let's dive into how this is going to impact the holiday season so it really is focusing on three aspects it's speed efficiency and accuracy you can use AI to predict Trends different outcomes um to iterate any of your workflows your processes and to even make your personalized shopping and if you didn't hear the last part it's also to make your personalized shopping experience a lot more accurate as well and then AI for the holiday prep okay so AI has helped predict the cpms during the Olympic season that's one of our findings that that we've discovered at the agen predict the cpms during the Olympic season that's one thing that we found at the agency that many clients have taken advantage of it it gave them the heads up that they should be more efficient maybe spend less in certain channels and then once the Olympics ended they cranked up the volume um it's also pulling in data from public ad spend as well I know there's a lot of other brands out there that are using the public information of what's being spent in the elections and Neil mentioned how much is being poured into from the packs as well Google is also a really good resource so Gemini is going to be your go-to if you want to get Social context from Reddit what about Dynamic pricing so um some stats are showing that Aid driven Dynamic pricing it unlocks 10 to 15% of Revenue growth through real-time Market optimization and um how does it really help you it helps secure your competitive Advantage especially if you you have to respond very quickly to what your competitors are doing sometimes they have one-off deals time sensitive deals and you want to stay on top of that customer insight and personalization this is probably the the best use case for AI in terms of being able to analyze your historical information figure out how that matches to your real-time audience and then also feed you information on who your customers really are how much time they're spending on your site instead of doing this in a manual process this is how you incorporate one really big stat is that AMX American Express they used AI powered customer segmentation and it apparently boosted their sales by 25% through targeted campaigns the promos are really important as well some three three really good promos especially on the social side Nike they tend to do sneaker holidays and it's Instagram exclusive deals Disney is known to do Facebook exclusive deals 12 days of magical deals Lego has something called a holiday building challenge and that's where they incorporate ugc that's how you just to inspire you to think about the different brands that are focusing on a certain Channel and they want to have a campaign or a deal exclusive to that channel and as you know Amazon tends to do 48 hour sales that's Black Friday Cyber Monday and during Christmas everyone's going off of the 12 days of deals 12 days of savings as well so that's something that you can incorporate into you cut out there Eddie I'm not sure how much of that cut out was it was it half of it yeah okay um you want to try the Google uh link sorry everyone in the private chat eigor added it uh you can join while that with that link link and it should sync up in the Google link okay eigor does he keep them both up or he can mute you on one end but uh go for it try that out maybe that'll help solve it yeah he can mute you and if that doesn't work I can just take over the rest of your slides so with AI I'm going to go for a minute while we're waiting for Eddie but uh with AI you know it it can analyze data so fast it just makes it easier to make realtime decisions when in reality if you ask anyone internally Within your organization on the data and analytics side hey how many of you guys actually look at data analytics each and every single day a lot of people will raise their hand but then when you ask them how many of you guys are actually making actionable changes that are improving kpis based on that data very few people raise their hand and for that reason you want to use AI to analyze a past promotional data pass uh data on holiday seasons or just general marketing and then you can end up making realtime decisions based off of that let's go to the next slide eag you there all right so two putting AI in your website experiences Eddie are you all up and running or if not I can just keep continuing yep I'm here all right go for it now hopefully this works I hear an echo on my for you I'm just gonna go I'll just finish the rest of your slides I think you go to what 42 something like that all right so let's talk about creating a dynamic ux 71% of consumers expect personalized experiences but the issue is is not everyone is looking for the same thing and I'll give you a great example of this if you just sell high and shoes right uh that go really well for I don't know um gowns and Galas and you know uh Mission star restaurants you're selling like highend you know high heels for women well what is applicable for one may not be applicable for the other even if you're limited on what you sell right now chances are you sell more than just one product but the reason I like giving that example is if you're selling high-end high heels it could be very applicable for someone who is let's say going to a mission Star Restaurant would be very different than someone who's doing a wedding right it's two different products even though they both are heels and what you want to end up doing is what you want to end up doing is figuring out how people are interacting what pages they're engaging with what pages they're viewing more what they're scrolling more and this can help you quickly show them more similar products that other users are into based on similar searching patterns so you can track that data internally and then adjust what you're showing people you also want to boost conversions with programmatic cro you want to AB test a lot you want to AB test fast that scale and you want to maximize conversions by catering to specific users there's one thing that you need to know about personalization in cro though you know we're talking about showing people what's relevant to them and if someone is getting married they want to see high heels for a wedding dress versus high heels for a sweet 16 party or high heels for a nice fancy dinner but if you start personalizing too much and and here's example of this okay this wedding is going to happen in Los Angeles California here's going to be the type of venue that it's going to be so the pavement is going to be smooth or it's not it may be outdoors with grass so you need these kind of high heels that work well with this kind of grass like when you start personalizing too much you don't really see too much of a lift of conversions you want to personalize enough to and you'll you'll see it with your AB testing and what is the exact level I don't know what's going to vary per business but the point I'm getting at is personalizing too much has diminishing returns so personalize track your Roi from it when you're doing your AB testing but if you start seeing diminishing returns and you're not seeing too many more gains you don't have to personalize as much you also want to leverage AI review summaries look there's a lot of Shoppers who read reviews majority of them do and a lot of review can be extremely long or there can be 3 four 500 reviews sometimes we've even seen products with 15,000 Plus reviews and you want to help Shoppers quickly get the info they seek you want to optimize your product descriptions based on common feedback you want to uh make it easy to understand what objections people have and you can use AI to help you with this so go through all your comments have ai help you dissect it and tell you what issues people have adjust your copy and eventually fix your product too if you can to answer those objections because if you answer those objections within your copy it's one of the biggest conversion hacks it's nothing fancy nothing crazy but people usually don't buy because they have some sort of issue or concern or something that's blocking them and those are called objections if you answer those objections within your website copy whether it's through text or whether it's through videos or whether it's through social proof or whatever it may be or images it will help you get get more conversions and it helps you get more conversions than just saying let me just change the color of the call to action button from blue to light blue or from light blue to red right that usually doesn't help as much as just answering people's objections now let's talk about augmented reality and virtual trions this is huge people want to see how it looks on them you know um a product that looks good for one person may not look good for another person we all have different skin types colors body types right and we're all different sizes some of us are really tall some of us are short for example you want to let people try it on for example we've worked with a lot of jewelry companies over the years and one of the big reasons they do a try on is a lot of people don't want the ring to seem too small on their fingle right I'm not talking about just the diamond size I'm talking about the width of the band uh to you know uh how it looks left to right does a diamond cover up a lot of their skin and diamonds a three karat isn't always the same three karat some of them are taller some of them are more narrow and all this affects how things look on people and virtual trions aren't just for um you know products that people wear for example if you're selling rims for cars or tires you would want it where people can select the make a model of their car the color and show them the rims and just put it on there because there's so many car images it's not hard to do and funny enough we did this for a automobile company uh a company selling rims and tires and what they found was we saw nice liftting conversions it wasn't crazy but 7% extra liftting conversions is better than nothing it all adds up chat Bots and virtual assistant are also huge people will have common question questions and you can do these automated chat Bots but the reason you want to leverage AI versus something that's generic is you have customer service you have people that have emailed you use all that data input it into the chat boot for training look for what people emailed and what a human responded back with as an answer right then you also want these chat Bots and virtual assistants to crawl your website but when you do a combo of both of them and you're inputting all your past data from your support because you should have logs of it it trains the AI chat Bots and the virtual assistance to be way better and more humanlike and we find that the conversions from someone chatting with the bot to buying is much higher and then being more satisfied with the Positive customer experience three putting a on your email campaigns so email is not fading a lot of people are saying email's dead well if email was dead into it would an never bought MailChimp I think it was for like 11 or 12 or 13 billion I know it was more than 10 I'm pretty sure it was less than 13 either way that's a very large number and people use email especially in the workplace and there going to be 4.6 billion users of email by 2025 91% of Americans use email it's a primary channel for the US market according to statusa the average open rate for all Industries is 16.97% uro should be at 30 plus per. that is what we optimize for my emails are anywhere from high 20s to sometimes mid-30s um but we're averaging something like I think 31 or 32% and it influences a lot of decisions right um what's cool is through amp technology there's companies like like Zoo z a y m o where you can make it within the email you can run a holiday promotion and let them select the product the color and click buy all within the email and to to clarify on this they're not clicking a link and going to your website they're not inputting their payment somewhere else literally in the email that you're sending someone an Outlook or Gmail they can buy all through that experience not like a website or it's kind of like a website but it doesn't look like that it's just more user friendly and simple and it's just narrowed down to the product that you're sending them within the email right it's not a catalog of everything you'd want to email them one or two products let them select select the size color boom and they're off into the races and the big part that people don't talk about when it comes to Ai and email is segmentation you want to segment your lists put them in groups based on location are they bu buyers are they firsttime buyers right so are someone buying from you multiple times are they firsttime buyers are they brand new people have never bought from you uh you know what's their engagement rate are they reading and opening up your emails this is all important you do not need to have 50 different segments though you know typically most businesses can do well with 10 or less segments and I want to emphasize this most of us are not Amazon you do not need hundreds or thousands of segments again too much personalization what you'll find is the ROI doesn't increase drastically and with your email list wow them stand out right personalize the content you can integrate deals countdown timers within the email itself that actually matches up to the website not a fake countdown timer you can do offers you can do Dynamic content showing how much inventory is left of a product we see that help create urgency and you can use generative AI to help you save time when it comes to content creation as well ai's answer to cart abandonment is pretty simple it looks at perfect timing you know when you do cart abandonments and you just send an email that's fine um and you can send an email whenever people abandon their C but if you can time it right when they're most likely to look at their email so then that way it's at the top of their email list versus uh at the bottom for example if I'm in Pacific Standard time I'm in Hong Kong right now but generally I'm in Los Angeles time or Pacific Standard time you wouldn't want to end up sending me an email at 3: in the morning if you do by the time I wake up what's going to happen I'm going to have a lot of other emails I'm not going to get to it right away less likely to convert and of course AI crafted subject lines are great too it can look to see what's working what's not and then run a lot of ab tests for you um you know writing compelling subject lines is really important they say you're most likely opened up emails if your mom sends it to you it doesn't matter what subject line then friends and if you notice a trend with your mom or your friends it's usually more casual so having too formal of a subject line usually doesn't produce as great results just keep that in mind we've tested this quite a bit and you can also extend ai's reach right we talked about Predictive Analytics we talked about automated AB testing um you know there's performance analysis if you were to use AI for one thing you know based on this whole presentation I would tell you guys really try using it for analyzing your data and giving you insights on what to do in real time you don't want it to make the change for you and a crazy example of this is if you're running a Google campaign a will tell you right away hey this is not profitable turn it off spend money on a different Channel well you know that your campaigns take time to learn and ramp up so in 40 days from now 60 days from now it can be highly profitable right AI over time is going to get better and better and know all this kind of stuff but in today's world where it's at right now it'll give you some false positives or it'll give you some negatives and tell you you know same thing but false posit it'll tell you to do stuff that you shouldn't be doing and vice versa um but you still wanted to analyze the data cuz some of those nuggets are really valuable I don't know if this is your section Bethany or if I'm supposed to keep going I can do either one but the only reason I mentioned this is I am doing Eddie slide so I have no clue are you there Bethany all right I'll just keep going four putting AI in your ads so when you think about Ai and ads we did a fun test where we had AI create ads and humans create ads humans actually generated a higher conversion rate from their ads versus AI but most people would have stopped there so then what we did is and this was over with with over $7 million worth of spend then what we did is we took the creatives that won with humans fed it into AI had them create more variations on the Fly and that beat everything else right so is the winner humans is it Ai No it's actually a combo of both of them and human generated creatives outperformed AI creatives 68.3% of the time but the winner Real winner was AI comboed with human or AI combined with human and when you look at the variations that we ended up doing the total win rate was 75.7% of the time that's huge right think about it a 1.61% versus a 1.54% every little bit adds up but when you look at each creative individually the AI when it used the winning human variations and creating more variations from that 75.7% of the creatives that I outputed one it beat the human generated version in other words The Learning lesson here is if you guide the AI and you help it out you're going to get a much better output than if you think it can just do everything on its own without help and AI you know when you think about it it's not going to solve all your problems it's not perfect but you got to use it to work smarter not harder and it can help you with a lot of things like that are here on the screen um but what I really want you guys to do is think about kpis right so yes you can look at time save uh you can look at output and the quality outputs but what are the main key performance indicators which is what kpi stands for what are they in your business is it traffic is it leads is it qualified leads is it more sales and if AI is helping you move those numbers you're using it in the right way way if it's not and you're like wow look at all this cool stuff I'm doing but it's not really improving your kpis then you're doing something wrong and you need to readjust how you use AI again it's not about just saving you time you got to work smarter to help you hit the goals and help you make the numbers move up and to the right the you also need to think about creative optimization right I don't know if this is your slide you're here now go for it if you want to I can hear you amazing it wouldn't be remote work without a technology issue so hopping in here and happy to take over thank you Neil for covering the start of my slides here but yes we can talk a little bit about you know trying this process for yourself this is the general AI creative process process road map that you should start out testing so first process testing multiple variations of visuals headlines and description analyze what's performing the best and then the last part is actually putting the winners into the AI tools saying this is what we found is already working make me more things similar to this or tailored to this type of user or demographic or industry and that's how you're ultimately going to have the best creatives coming out of your AI tools and let's talk about ads that Captivate so shopping people are shopping with their eyes having something Dynamic that stands out is is automatically going to get you ahead of the competition that's that's really what it comes down to so when we're looking at products with 3D imagery you know Google has done a few case studies imagery with 3D Graphics you know like with the shoe rotating is going to get about 50% more engagement compared to competitors which is a 2D image there so already you're standing out your ad is becoming more clickable more engaging you can create your 360 video by uploading five high resolution images and Google will take use their Ai and actually create the 3D system or the 3D image for you so you don't have to get an advanced technology all you need is images plug in and Google will do the rest for you looking at virtual Tryon as we talked about a little bit earlier clothing makeup eyewear Furniture um a lot of times with purchasing foundation on the beauty side you don't know if it's going to actually match your skin tone so being able to do a try on and try to match your uh product with the individual leads to an increased add to cart rate and a decreased return rate meaning that giving people more of that personalization also reduces return opportunities or potential which a lot of people are looking to to also uh fix and then on the very last one AI video tools for product listing ads you can turn existing product images into a dynamic video super fast with customized text audio and enhanced visual so really really exciting new tools that have come out to make your ADS stand out pop and engage with users all right and then let's talk about AI powered Raz optimization so one thing to note is AI when we're talking about Raz optimization especially when it comes to Google ads we're actually talking about uh close relative of AI which is machine learning it still needs the data input in order to make the informed decisions to use your real- time data actually find um the right time the right type of user the right type of demographic uh and to serve you into the right auctions in those ideal moments so um it is a smart bitting tool that does use Ma machine learning and will use your realtime data to actually find the best the the ideal moment when somebody is in the buying mood and not just in the research phase so another really powerful tool when it comes to Google ads and smart bitting Strat IES and let me talk a little bit about contextual advertising which improves ad placement so for example we talk about traditional contextual targeting it would typically go for reach over relevancy um you know let's pretend that you're selling I an iPhone 16 uh screen protector uh in the past you might be looking at mobile enthusiasts and you're looking at um you know maybe Apple users but those two are separate and different and the way your placement could align it could be showing to people that are smartphone users it could just be showing to people that engage with gadgets and Tech items now with the AI contextual targeting it puts those two variables together and actually is going to put you in an ad placement that aligns with both somebody who is a techie mobile Enthusiast and also is an owner of an iPhone based on other signals that it's pulling in and reading so the new AI contextual targeting much more powerful than the traditional version which was segmented audience groupings now it's looking for that combination user user which is going to make your ad placement much more relevant and hopefully getting in front of that Right audience faster and this is a really exciting script so anybody who's running performance Max campaigns I'm sure have heard have heard about Mike RADS he has a performance Max Insight script there's an additional element that has been added in which is an AI whisper script which is plugging in your performance Max data into your AI tool of choice you plug in your API key it pulls in your performance Max data directly in to the AI engine and from there um it's you're able to also put in some predefined prompts which will actually give you a readout on your exact data what next steps you should take an incredibly powerful tool again it's move it's taking the human element or in this case your first-party data performance Max pairing it with AI and coming out with a more personalized insight for you Additionally you can create assets both for both for internal facing teams and external facing clients and use a voice professional enthusiastic simplified engaging storytelling logical so you can really give a voice to your asset that you're generating an incredibly powerful tool utilizing scripts has been one of the main ways that we're able to really Peak under the hood of performance Max and optimize with it and adds an AI overview so AI overviews you know they showed links to resources and support information in a snapshot format um so you could dig into the topic a little bit deeper uh this is something that you know will show automatically there's nothing that you have to do to change this AI overviews will show for search shopping and performance Max campaigns and it's trying to create a more relevant experience based on that search query is plugging in and in most cases it gets a little bit deeper into the discovery phase where people are starting to uncover products that are specifically more designed and tailored to the query that they're plugging in to the search engine bar and that's ultimately what what Google's trying to do surface products that are the most relevant for clients so AI overviews really exciting new feature and something that you're just automatically opted into which is really cool and one quick thing to think about is when you're looking at the AI overviews in ads Google AdWords had a case study with a beauty company someone trying to remove dark circles under eyes so what they were doing is they were just sending people to a it was a large publicly traded company and they were just sending people to a page where you can just buy products that remove dark circles under eyes wasn't effective uh there was their campaigns were going they weren't able to scale it up but then when they sent them into an article on how to remov dark circles under your eyes and then they broke down the solutions right from everything what's causing it you know how to solve it here's some products that can help more people started buying it the CPA went down total traffic went up overall Revenue uh was much higher you wouldn't think about it that way because you're like wait they're going through some extra steps instead of just showing them the product this is in essence what they're doing with AI overviews and it makes people more comfortable before they buy let's talk quickly about AI in your social media campaigns so looking at the new search Powerhouse 80% of users say they discover new products from platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok um using hashtags and influencer posts and video recommendations and influencers are also are not just in the Ecom space every niche in Industry out there will have thought leaders that you can lean into and really Powerhouse That Word of Mouth advertising which people do tend to trust over other forms of um just you know advertising that might be out there other types of reviews word of mouth is one of the one of the most powerful decision-making uh tools that we have at our disposal so really exciting opportunities to get your product or service in front of more people and get it appraised by somebody who is in the industry and a thought leader um you've all heard this before I'm sure this new phrase t talk made me buy it um that didn't just come out by accident people are investing and shopping on Instagram Facebook Tik Tok 20% of consumers will buy gifts through these social medias this year gen Z is two times more likely to purchase through social media as well and the more tailor that add is to their interest the more you're going to see that spontaneous purchase process where it's something that they're interested in it's eye-catching they jump in and they purchased it they weren't planning on it unlike on the search side it was a spontaneous moment um BAS on being inspired by content that they're seeing on social media so it's going to be a big ping buying platform this year uh for the holiday season and then leverage some AI tools um Tik Tok Symphony creative Studio generates engaging videos to highlight products uh and generate voiceover multiple languages meta Advantage Plus shopping campaigns optimized across creative targeting placements budget and destinations there are a ton of different AI tools out there and the recommend my recommendation is to test them all for yourself see what's working what's not how you can tweak and and leverage it for your specific industry uh because ultimately the AI is the future and the more you get comfortable using it the better your chances are for success and of course we talked a little bit about influencers ahead of time but influencers with AI um again find the right partners for your brand I did a test run with this where I pluged into chat GPT um looking for I'm looking for people with high followers in these types of Industries and it gives you ideas to use to research and find um you know using Twitter and Linkedin and Facebook how do you find these types of in influencers that are in your Niche and reach them so AI will give you the instructions or the blueprint to follow to find the right types of Industry of influencers in your industry and embracing chat Bots we also talked about this before um one other additional recommendation Google just had a retail prep uh webinar that came out recently and one thing they definitely um that they talked to is how do you reduce returns post holiday season one of those opportunities is to plug into chatbot chat Bots when people are coming and they're starting to engage with your bots on site offering a credit or an exchange for a product via your chat bot before they get to the return phase it's faster to do it's an instant gratification and it will reduce return rates um post holiday season so they gave a little bit of a tip to test out there but just generally people want that instagratification they want to feel heard they want to be able to reach out to support immediately and embracing chat Bots is the way to do that quick case study for Lego um they use chat Bots to tr hide to customize the shopping experience by providing recommendations this is especially helpful for giftgiving I have a nephew who's four he loves Harry Potter um what type of product do you think he would absolutely love I want to be the best ant ever uh here's some recommendations from the chatbot that are based on the age range difficulty level theme and topic uh this worked out phenomenally for Lego but something to also consider leveraging with your chatbot as well recommendations create a personal shopping experience online the same as you would if somebody walked into the store and started asking a sales associate so really exciting stuff on the Lego side uh and then the very last topic here is product dis um putting AI in product Discovery getting your brand mentioned by AI models which is the largest topic that seems to come up on the SEO side of things how do I get my the the AI to offer my product and solution as the best for XYZ um this is very very top of mind uh and and Neil I don't know if you have any uh insights on the SEO side how we've been leveraging this for some clients but extremely extremely hot topic and definitely something that you should be considering if you haven't already yeah definitely with AI we have a try there you go it's on the screen right there the next slide those are the main factors that really help we looked at I think it was like 80 something factors it's you know my eyes are getting a little bad and I'm on an iPad but I know we looked at 80s something factors if I'm not mistaken uh to see what causes recommendations with AI and the ones you know as you can see here relevancy brand mentions reviews age Authority recommendations these are the factors to focus on this doesn't mean AI is going to recommend the product the next day but you got to build this up and as you build this up over time you're going to start getting recommended more by chat GPT from what we're seeing age is like the age of your company your products your service relevancy to what they type versus what you offer reviews are you know do you have 500 reviews 200 reviews what are the star ratings how many people are mentioning your brand online recommendations like um are people writing articles just about your car like oh here's a Tesla overview this is why I love Tesla and they're going in depth on it uh Authority is you know the overall Authority kind of like backlinks and domain Authority but a little bit different but similar and then focusing on sense search um a a quick use case for this you know voice search is becoming more prevalent 50% of consumers are utilizing it and Google lens and visual search is becoming more powerful as well a very quick uh anecdotal story um my daughter was having trouble uh enjoying or or adopting a sippy cup from the bottle at daycare they said hey this sippy cup she seems to love we have no idea what branded is I took a picture of it I plugged it into my favorite AI tool and said what sippy cup is this bam here's the results we know this because of the shape the size the color and you know what I went and I purchased six of those sippy cups and they did no marketing whatsoever it was just the fact that I was able to say I love this I have no idea what this is take a photo how can I find it what's the name of it bam sale the sale was completed you're going to see that coming out um becoming a larger Factor as we get more and more even into 2025 and 2026 so something to keep in mind as well as well and the very last slide here is talking about profit oh there's two two other slides here so talking about profitability focusing on long tail question keywords harnessing the power of broad match 76% of voice Searchers are looking for something that's near me or local um and again voice friendly copy which is ensuring that ad copy is concise easy to understand as V Voice results will favor it as clear and direct results so focusing on some of those elements will make it will make it easier for you to move into this new realm of opportunity with the sense searching and then picks payoff so Leo leveraging um Dynamic ads directly from your catalog maximizing by putting putting images into your performance Max campaign um 25% of all visual searches in 2024 were for commercial intent Advanced targeting so targeting users based on previously used tools like lens or Pinterest um and then interacting with products in real time Via Mobile camera I just had this experience on Amazon where they let you put the product on your countertop I wanted a bread box I opened up my camera I put the product on my camera and I said that's not going to fit there's no way I'm going to buy that product next and then I was able to find one based on that as well so pictures do pay off and utilizing these tools will get you a sale but most importantly we'll make sure that it's the right product for that consumer and that you're reducing your return opportunities as well and that is everything on my hand Neil pass it over to you for key takeaways all right so uh we're going to skip this slide because we're running out time want to get to more Q&A go to the next slide we do have uh if you need help with your holiday campaigns you can always scan that QR code or go to NP digital um we would love to work with you next slide and let's just get into some Q&A Colin you there yep can you hear me we can hear you okay sorry for all the technical issues y'all and thanks for sticking with us we dropped a few viewers but a lot of folks seem to uh to tough it out no matter how much you prepare you can never be prepared for technical issues so lots of questions thank you everyone for those um one that kept happening over and over again and I'm not sure that there's a great answer for this but when is the ideal time to start planning for the holiday sales Rush is it uh do you do it all along or is it something that you just start doing in Q2 and then there was a followup to that given all of the changes over the last 12 months do is is the data from the last 12 months and the previous holiday season tell us anything because there have been so many changes any thoughts there so what I like doing is I like preparing months before it starts so think about all the holidays that you create a holiday calendar you can find it for whatever region you're targeting you should be planning each one at least a month on the low end if not two to three months before that holiday starts so you can get things prepared that are harder to do uh as a Spur moment for example you may need more inventory sometimes that takes months mons in advance to prepare for but I usually try to prepare three months before any major holiday that I'm doing campaigns for yeah I would say you're already late to this holiday season because I like to time it um I would actually say a month before Prime day which already passed us already so um with if Prime's already jumping on it people are already shopping they're trying to purchase fast now it is an election year so there is a little bit of BU hesitation leading up to the election so you're not too late for 2024 but when you're looking at 2025 you should have those promos locked in um end of August start of September and and have that plan fully fleshed out so a related question that can maybe help with some of this which AI tools can we use to help predict those Trends and and implementing Dynamic pricing for example like any tips or tricks because that was mentioned early on in the deck I don't know Bethany or Eddie if you have any for dynamic pricing yep I can jump in here um Claude Sonet is really good at sourcing from URLs and also meta AI is extremely underrated it's it's now starting to pull in sources and you can start asking it to compare the 2023 versus 2024 sources and it can list out everything that it's pulling and give you direct links as well so would incorporate some tools Beyond chat GPT because that's that's definitely what everyone's using but Claud and meta they're very underrated right now and underutilized word my only other recommendation on the Google side of things if you haven't looked into automated discounts which is a beta that just rolled out from Google it will automatically set your prices um by auction so that you are showing your best price possible you input your cogs into the feed itself and you say this is the lowest threshold I'd be willing to go on this product but I'm willing to beat out everybody else in the auction up until that threshold so look out for automated discounts and reach out to your Google reps if you haven't already Neil are you cool going just a few minutes over we got a couple more and given all the tech issues all right so here's another one what ethical considerations should retailers keep in mind to ensure they maintain I mean trust is huge right but what what things from an Ethics perspective should retailers keep in mind any thoughts from you Neil Eddie Bethany the biggest two are when you're using AI to create stuff for you just double check for plagiarism uh there's a lot of tools out there like uh copy Escape that can help you check uh you can do a reverse image search for any like images that it may end up creating for you on Google to see if there's anything that's too similar out there the second thing that you need to worry about is just being transparent so if you're using like AI chat box and things like that to communicate with people let them know that it is automated and it's AI powered versus it being human powered so don't try to tell them hey this is Bethany talking to you or Eddie or Neil when it really isn't right on uh let's see what else do we got oh this one came up more than more than once with all of these platforms adding the ability to shop within their own platform including some of the stuff Neil that you talked about the ability to kind of personalize and customize even within email are websites slowly being diminished thought I mean can of worms I know but like any thoughts there websites aren't being diminished we still see it driving a huge chunk of Revenue but what we see is being diminished with all these changes is one channel marketing you need to take an omni Channel approach for things to work it's no longer one channel can drive any of your revenue and it's been going that way for a long time Facebook grewed through email invite flows Dropbox grew through uh social invites and some of these businesses like Yelp grew just through SEO but over time it's changed where the channels are still effective but you need to combine a lot of them and now it's becoming where you need to combine more and more channels over time to really grow awesome and I don't know if this question is maybe for Eddie or Bethany but there were I mean we're talking about selling stuff in the holiday season how can I use these strategies when selling only on Amazon like any tips or tricks AI tools that are maybe more specific to to Amazon than let's say search or social well I not I'm not familiar with a specific tool on Amazon that you can use for Amazon but I can tell you that you can use performance Max link it with your Amazon store and you can actually drive ads from your search campaign directly to your Amazon storefront so there is a way that you can try to drive some more awareness and some more traffic for non-brand keywords to your specific products by leveraging performance Max in Google ads and this is a new feature that just rolled out um for just in Q4 of 2024 so really exciting new feature to explore if you haven't and two other Amazon go for Eddie no you can go ahead Neil uh two other things that you can end up doing with Amazon one costs a lot of money Amazon when they create their own series they can do live product placements like they can switch it out so you can buy it per like x amount um so if you're selling water I don't know water can I'm drinking here in Hong Kong but um it can automatically swap it out and you can pay them per impression or you know however many views or whatever the deal that you can end up striking with um so that's a cool way they have technology or AI that helps them uh do that the second thing is we talked about this in the presentation use AI to analyze all the reviews that you're getting the good the bad the ugly and you you know answer objections for all the negative stuff and then fix the product stuff related to all the negative feedback as well and that should help you with your Amazon sales too awesome well let's let's wrap there thank you so much everyone for sticking with us we will share out a replay of this we will turn on close captions so we can understand what everyone's saying given the audio issues that we had thanks so much for joining yeah and if you guys need help with your marketing check out NP digital thank you everyone and sorry for the technical difficulties my name is Neil Patel and I help companies generate more Revenue through digital marketing Entrepreneur magazine said I was the number one marketer in the in the world and they also said I created one of the 100 most brilliant companies I started my first website at the age of 16 I took all the money that I earned from working at amusement park and I paid a marketing firm the marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone out of my frustration and from being broke I had no choice but to learn marketing my first client was a power supply manufacturer I helped him generate another $25 million in sales and from that that point I realized the power of marketing I helped everyone that I could and I built my reputation by being honest and overd delivering I've helped companies like Google NBC Viacom General Motors eBay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed I founded four multi-million dollar companies and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid I've written about them on Forbes entrepreneur Inc Fast Company and even on my own blogs it's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom over the years I've received awards from the president of the United States the House of Representatives and the United Nations people believe marketing is expensive and difficult fortunately that's not true there is a Formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body you can get results and my mission is to share this formula with you
