Episode #199: How to Optimise User Experience with Neil Patel - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2019-01-28T00:00
Neil Patel has been on my wishlist of podcast guests for quite some time now. He’s the co-founder of so many amazing tools that all of us digital marketers use, like Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Ubersuggest. He gets over 3 million hits on his website per month! And if I had known inviting him was as easy as sending an email, he would have been in the guest seat much, much earlier. Luckily for us, he’s here today on WP Elevation Podcast, and in this episode we talk about how to optimise user experience on your website.
The Personal Brand of Neil Patel
If you ask Neil how he feels about personal brands, he’ll tell you that corporate brands are far more successful. He just fell into his own personal brand by accident. When he was first starting out, he couldn't afford Google AdWords, so he started blogging. That Quick Sprout personal blog ultimately built his name as the personal brand we all recognize today.
It was through blogging that he shared his experiences and frustrations with online marketing. He even taught himself SEO strategies and blogged about those too, which is something I found to be personally valuable at the time. But if he was given the chance, he wouldn’t have created such a personal blog or a personal brand. It’s so much easier to scale a personal brand when you’re first starting out, as Neil shares today, but as you try to grow, it becomes much harder to scale.
Neil’s Foray Into Online Marketing
When it came time to scale his personal brand, Neil focused on what he really liked to do. He enjoys consulting and figuring out how to help people build traffic to their sites. As an SEO master, he’s really into finding out what strategies work and why. And it’s that “why” that made it easier for him to scale and build the personal brand empire most of us recognize today.
In the online marketing space, Neil talks about our responsibility as marketers. It’s our job to solve a problem people don’t realize they need solved right away! That sounds kind of ridiculous, but it’s all about thinking ahead of your customer so you can bring them exactly what they need exactly when they need it. But you can’t figure out what they need until you actually talk to them. At the 10-minute market, Neil breaks down how you can start a sincere conversation with your customers.
“If you don’t dig deep into your customers and find out what they really want...you won’t be able to optimise for their user experience.”
Only after you understand your user or your customer can you truly build a successful marketing strategy. Too often we assume what our users want without asking them. And asking them is easy. Simple emails or surveys can bring in the answers to the questions you need to know in order to optimise your marketing strategy and ultimately boost your bottom line.
Offering Both a Product and a Service
Many of us listening right now are entrepreneurs. We either off a service, such as consulting, or a product, like a site building tool. For Neil Patel, he does both. Product-based businesses are much easier to scale, but Neil loves consulting. He’s more active in the agency than in the product business because it puts him in direct contact with his customers. With this kind of personal interaction, Neil is privy to data from all sorts of different industries and clients. It’s as if he’s receiving a well-rounded education from all the different people he works with. He’s better able to help his clients and it gives him a chance to see where he can grow his own brand and his own business. Ultimately, it’s all about becoming a better marketer, and you can only do that when you actually get to know your customers.
Whether you are already offering or plan to offer a new product or a service, it’s important to find out which your users would prefer. You don’t want to create a site building tool nobody wants or offer a service nobody needs. Cover all of your bases first and find out what your users truly expect from you so you can deliver on exactly what they need. Even if you don’t have the time to invest in building a personal brand like Neil did, you can still see success by paying attention to the user experience.
But, just like us, not all customers are perfect. Setting boundaries is necessary so that you can deliver success to your ideal clients. At around the 14:40 mark, Neil talks about the customers he won’t work with and how he establishes those boundaries so that they are clear to any and all potential clients. It’s one of the hardest lessons to learn in this business, but it’s also one of the most important.
The New Year and the New Neil Patel v. 2.0
2019 is going to be a big year for the marketing industry. The new WordPress will be launching, and Neil Patel is offering some new features in his suite of tools in the coming weeks. What’s great about these new features is that he plans on giving away many of them for free! So if you’re listening, keep a tab open on Neil’s website so you don’t miss any of the amazing offers that’ll be coming down the pipeline at the end of this month.
Neil will also be launching a new brand - NPXL - in February of next year, so keep your ear to the ground!
Links
Check out Neil’s suite of tools at Crazy Egg
Get to know your users by making a survey with Survey Monkey
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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