Influencer marketing harder to scale, but it works really well: Neil Patel

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Neil Patel, Co-founder, NP Digital, delves into the company’s four-plus-year journey in India, exploring its growth, challenges, and unique strategies in the ever-evolving digital marketing sector, and much more…

NP Digital ventured into the Indian market in 2019, right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Neil Patel reflects on the challenges posed by the global health crisis, highlighting the initial difficulty in hiring due to restrictions on in-person interactions. However, despite these obstacles, the company has flourished, expanding its operations to multiple cities, with Mumbai being the latest addition. The founder emphasises India’s significance as one of NP Digital’s top three markets, attributing its success to the vast talent pool and the booming market potential.

He said, “India is a big market for us. It's one of the top three markets. And we see India as a big, booming region. When we first came to India, the purpose of coming to India was one – we saw so much talent. A lot of companies think of India as a place to outsource, and you can outsource here, but we look at India as a place to serve Indian customers and Indian companies, because the potential is here. If you look at a lot of the money coming into India, it is coming from foreign countries investing in India because it's such an amazing market. When we first started in India, we were an SEO shop. We did SEO, but now we’re full-service – from SEO to paid media to social media, to conversion rate, to app store marketing, to email marketing, text message marketing, and even web development and design – we’re full-service here in India. We’ve designed over 70 websites in just the last few years, and we are continually expanding. We even do influencer marketing. We pretty much offer all digital marketing services. When we started, we had zero employees, and now we’re over 180 just in India.”

Discussing the pre- and post-COVID growth trajectory, Neil Patel highlights the challenging start in 2020, but emphasises the company’s consistent and rapid growth in subsequent years. NP Digital’s global expansion is showcased by its presence in 20 different countries, with India playing a pivotal role in this expansion.

Neil Patel provides insights into the evolution of the digital ecosystem, emphasising the shift towards an omnichannel approach. In contrast to many agencies in India that specialise in one or two services, NP Digital advocates for a comprehensive approach, intertwining paid, SEO, and social strategies for maximum impact.

The client portfolio of NP Digital in India is diverse, featuring both global brands like ESPN, PwC, Tata, Swarovski and local names such as Black and Decker. Neil Patel highlights the recent collaboration with Black and Decker, illustrating NP Digital's ability to cater to international brands seeking a foothold in the Indian market.

About the influencer marketing dynamics in India, Neil Patel underscores the effectiveness of influencer marketing. He noted, “India is a very celebrity-based culture. India loves their celebrities, and influencer marketing provides a massive ROI. A lot of the up-coming companies use celebrities for promotion. Even the established brands use influencers, for example, Jio. Look at all the celebrities that were promoting it early on, and it really helped them Boom. Influencer marketing can drive a lot of conversions and sales and in many cases, we’re seeing the ROI being much better than paid ads from Google or Facebook. It’s harder to scale, but it works really well.”

Patel also noted a shift towards users posing longer, more complex queries to AI, resulting in a transformation of search engine patterns. He emphasised on the importance of understanding these changes for effective digital marketing strategies. He said, “With AI, the big thing that we’re seeing a shift in is when you typically do a search on Google, you may search for a keyword with one or two words, but now with AI, people are learning to ask AI a whole sentence and expecting the result. Search engines are making it where we’re seeing a pattern of more people starting to type in longer tail search queries that are not four or five keywords, but a whole sentence into Google. 15% of the searches that happen on Google each day are brand new, never been searched before and it’s changing a lot more because a lot of people are using AI, and that's causing them to be trained on that.”

Neil Patel unveiled a unique strategy employed by NP Digital, where the team analyses support logs, chat tickets, and search traffic metrics to create tailored content for clients. He shared the success story of increasing monthly page views from 20,000 to 58,000 in less than four months using this approach.

Looking ahead to the last quarter of 2023, he predicted, “We think in the future there’ll be a reverse trend where people will start manually writing their content again because that’s what is unique. Search engines don’t need more content written by AI that is duplicative. They want new, fresh stuff, kind of like what we’re doing here. You’re not going to get that from AI writing your content. And in the long run, we see companies who are creating their content manually, we think they’re going to win.”