Neil Patel Key Takeaways: Accelerating Ecommerce with Digital Marketing

At Pattern’s Accelerate22 event, the global ecommerce acceleration summit, participants learned from each other and industry experts about how to establish and build their brand presence for long-term, sustainable success on digital marketplaces worldwide.

During our Digital Marketing Acceleration Track, keynote speaker, influencer, and digital guru Neil Patel taught participants actionable strategies for improving their marketing performance, and, ultimately, growing their revenue, across their ecommerce strategy. His advice? Follow a one-by-one, omnichannel marketing approach. Optimizing your performance in each space with data insights and testing is the key to getting the most out of your digital marketing efforts.

How do you do that? Here are 5 tips from Neil Patel exclusively from Accelerate22.

Prioritize Data-Driven Decisions

Data obsession is a key superpower for Neil. With the right insight into what works, and what does not, he’s been able to recognize overspending, prioritize strategies that actually move the needle, and understand the true cost of optimizing brands online. It’s a trifecta that has allowed his partners to reallocate funds to other areas of their business for maximum profitability.

Without the right data to inform their decisions, companies are less efficient and far less able to understand how to improve their digital marketing strategy.

Practice Patience

During the discussion, a brand executive asked Neil how a great brand can win against competitors with inferior product offerings that simply know how to game the algorithms and systems.

Neil assured the group that “the good guy” will win long-term if they’re willing to invest their time and effort into digital marketing best practices. “It takes time for algorithms to work. It takes time to build a brand,” he said. Investing in digital marketing won’t bring overnight success. But if you stay patient, your customers will recognize your superior products, they’ll help you create momentum in the algorithms, and you’ll ultimately win over competitors.

Diversify Your Sales Strategy

A resonating theme of the session was Neil’s encouragement to avoid putting all of your eggs in one ecommerce basket. For instance, when asked whether one sales platform or channel yields better results than another, he told attendees that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer for any brand.

A better way to think about digital marketing is to take an omnichannel approach—you can’t rely on just Amazon or Walmart, but you can’t do ecommerce without being on Amazon or Walmart, either. Instead, view each channel as an essential tool within your digital marketing tool kit. You can optimize and scale your overall sales strategy by starting with your most useful tool, sharpening it to perform its best, and then expanding your focus to optimizing a new tool and so on.

Over time, you’ll have a full range of highly-effective channel strategies driving traffic and conversions to your products–the best-case scenario for any ecommerce brand.

Focus on What You Can Control

Different brands were interested in Neil’s thoughts about how platform updates would impact future digital marketing tactics. Neil offered this universal advice: “Focus on the things you can control.” In digital marketing (and, he added, in life) it’s never helpful to worry about or obsess over things you can’t change. As Google and iOS make updates to their algorithms and systems, all brands can do is focus on tried-and-true marketing tactics for all of the channels they use to promote and sell their products—another benefit of prioritizing a diversified sales strategy.

Optimize for Conversions

Finally, Neil heavily emphasized the importance of conversions over traffic. He said that, in his experience, where most brands are falling short and will fall short is in thinking of digital marketing as a way to drive traffic to products. They follow best practices for things like imagery and the copy in their paid ads, then move on.

Most brands are missing the opportunity to capture conversions because they’re not testing and improving their efforts. For the audience, Neil said that, based on a product’s industry, a brand could increase their conversions by 50% with truly optimized content. Better conversions mean lower digital marketing costs, too, and you can’t beat better results at a lower price.

Accelerate Your Brand with Pattern

The opportunity to connect with and learn from industry and global thought leaders and game changers like Neil Patel was one of the highlights of Accelerate22. As Neil so wisely said at the top of his session, “Never assume you know everything—you can learn from anyone.”

Are you ready to learn from the best and brightest in ecommerce? Join us on May 10-11th at Accelerate23. We hope you’ll join us in taking advantage of the opportunity to hear from world-class experts and collaborate with other executive brand leaders in an immersive, one-of-a-kind experience.

Register for Accelerate 2023 here.