Episode 221 – How AI Is Going To Change Marketing For Small Businesses

All right, thanks for joining us today. I'm Paul from Changeescape web in St. Louis, Missouri, and joined by Jeff Stick of Telerika Marketing Systems in Austin and Ian Cantle from Outsourced Marketing in Toronto, Canada, and Ken Tucker also from Changeescape web in St. Louis. So AI is all over the place now. It's all a rage. And unless you've been living under a rock, it's something that you, you can't turn around without hearing about on, I mean, on a daily basis, on an hourly basis. And we've talked about it before on this podcast as well. Everyone seems to expect big business to be implementing AI technology, but I think a lot of small businesses don't think it's something that's really going to affect them. But it will, and it probably already has. So, Jeff, let's start with you. How can AI help small local businesses improve their marketing strategies?

Jeff

Yeah, Paul, I really appreciate that you started with this question because I think in the world of AI and things are moving so fast and you can't go anywhere online without seeing announcements of five new AI driven tools or platforms. I think taking it back to the strategy is a great place to start. So thank you for doing that. We're going to talk about using AI and implementations and a lot of different things later, but I think specifically from developing and validating marketing strategy, AI is a great research tool. There's access to these large language models. We're trained on large volumes of data. Now you can go in and you can start asking questions to do market research, to look for ways to differentiate your business to do ideal client Persona research. So when you start talking about, you know, the basics of a marketing strategy, who's your ideal client, what do you want to say that's different about what everyone else is saying and what do you want to ask people to do? That's a great first step with AI is just get in and start playing around, doing some of that research. Ideal client Personas are super important because to really effectively market a business, you've got to get in the heads of the people you're trying to market to. You've got to know what they value, where they're getting their information, what will resonate with them. And using AI for the Persona research is, is, is great because it has access to a lot of that data and then same thing, looking for what messages, what's everyone saying, what's resonating AI is great for that. So when you get into the deeper levels, the aspects of that you start talking about things like segmentation. You can take data of your own or data that you acquire elsewhere, you can start feeding it into AI and letting it look for those relationships that are maybe a little harder to spot. So when you look for the behaviors of certain demographics or the purchasing trends, AI is very good at ingesting information, looking for connections. So for instance, a coffee shop could identify the morning rush customers versus the weekend brunch visitors if they have that data of their transactions. And then predicting, you gotta be a little bit careful. You know, you don't want to generalize too much, but one of the powers of AI is predicting. If we see A and we see B and then C happens, then if something looks like A and something looks like B, something that looks like C is probably going to happen too. So you can start doing behavior analysis and predicting from larger groups or populations of data how subsets or smaller groups that look like those larger groups are going to act. So, you know, if you're an E commerce site, purchase behaviors, kind of generalizing time between purchases so that you can start doing targeted outreach, upsells, cross sells, those kinds of things all start to come into play. Then when you get into actually running your campaigns and you're working across multiple channels, of course, knowing what channels a given audience is going to participate in or respond to is important. And then optimizing how they play together, optimizing the messaging, these are all great applications of AI in the upfront, planning, strategizing before you get deep into the, into the implementation of the tactics.

Paul

All right, so anything anyone want to add to that or.

Ian

Yeah, great, great points, Jeff. And I agree with everything. The one, the one thing I keep bringing up with business owners that are super excited about AI is to caution them that AI is not a magic easy button. Right? It's, it's not going to do your marketing for you. It's at least not in the near future. Maybe someday we'll be able to get to that point. Right. But really what it can do is it can provide you with greater intelligence related to your business and it can equip the tools that people are using. So you're your marketing agency, your marketing partners can use AI to more effectively do what they're doing for you. The one caution I always suggest, and this is kind of a newer thought because people are so excited about AI, there's so much buzz about it, about how it's radically changing businesses, and it is, but the thing business owners need to understand is you don't want to suddenly become the marketing manager in your business, like, that's not what you're in business for. You want your marketing managers, your marketing partners to be better at what they can do. And the tools that they're using now that have more AI integrated with them will help them do their jobs better. The POS systems that you're using in your business, if they don't have AI in them, they will have AI in them eventually, which will help them. The person managing the POS system and trying to draw info and intelligence out of them will be better at it. The bookkeeper and accountants that will eventually have AI in them will be able to answer your questions, or maybe you'll be able to dig into them yourself with better questions and get better answers. But it's not like the one. The one caution is you don't want to give yourself more work because the. The enticement of AI is it makes work easier. But if you keep loading yourself up with more and more roles by going, oh, you know, AI makes the job easier for marketers, I guess I can be a marketer now. AI makes bookkeeping easier. I can be a bookkeeper now, of course. But do you want to be a bookkeeping expert in your business? Do you want to be a marketing expert in your business? Probably not. You want to focus. If you're a dentist, you want to focus on doing great dental care and managing.

Jeff

That's a great point, Ian.

Ken

The.

Jeff

Well, two. Two aspects of that. One is the people that are looking for an easy button are. There are companies out there that will sell an easy button, but it isn't really. And it's. And if it is, it's gonna, you know, take a plumber that says, hey, I've got this AI tool. It's gonna do all my marketing for me. Well, hey, every other plumber in town can use that same tool and get the exact same marketing. So now are you really differentiating? So bringing in that unique voice, that. That unique differentiating factors of the business into it is important. And now you're back to the human role. And like you said, should the business owner be the marketer? Should the business owner be the accountant? And that goes back to the line from Jurassic Park. Just because we could doesn't mean we should. The business owners are best at being the visionaries, driving the business, making sure the business operates properly, not necessarily doing the implementation of every detail.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

If we have time at the end here, we're going to talk about some of the pitfalls.

Ken

I would like to kind of jump in though. I think two pieces to this that I think are really exciting. One is a business owner can use this as a way to do a sanity check on the recommendations that their current marketing provider may be offering to them. Like for example.

Ian

But how do they know if the sanity check is remotely correct?

Ken

Well, so it's like generate. So it's like if you're wanting to be, if you want to show up at the top of Google search results in these 10 cities, plug that into, you know, tool like Chat GPT and you say, give me a marketing strategy. Look, it's not the right marketing strategy, but it's a sanity check, right? So a business owner can plug in something like that and it can help them understand that we're just not blowing air, you know, or whoever they're working with may be blowing air, you know, because they're not doing four or five of the fundamental things that were recommended by AI because it's got access to a whole lot more data out there about what people are doing for a marketing strategy. So it's compo, it's looking at the components, right? It's not giving you the actual nuances of the strategy that are going to be the differentiators for you, but it's going to tell you you should be doing social media, you should be having a review strategy, you should be writing content, you should be doing this, doing that. And for a lot of business owners, honestly, they have no idea what to expect. So from one thing, I think that's just a great little exercise for, for anybody who's hiring a marketing company to understand what the true scope of services are really required to get you the results that you're asking for. And, and you know, you don't know the price. It's, I mean, it may suggest prices, but you know, those are going to vary widely for sure based. And there's no way to check quality or compare apples to oranges. But the other thing is, I think it helps to really flesh out things that under the right guidance of human experts who do this a lot, who are experts in creating marketing strategies. It's just, it's a good sanity check and a productivity gain for all of us, us as practitioners and, and strategists as well as for the business owners and, and, and whatnot, to just be more complete in what we're doing from a marketing perspective. And so from that, from that perspective, I think it's a nice productivity gain.

Paul

All right, so Ken, coming off of that, what role do you think AI is Going to play in creating, like, personalized customer experiences for small businesses.

Ken

Yeah, well, what Jeff said, you know, I mean, he talked about, you know, segmentation and, you know, some differentiation, obviously, behavioral analysis and, you know, and, and being able to identify trends and, and, you know, and recommending things. So how is that going to be manifested? It's really, you know, and this is, this is, can be done in, in real time or near real time now, which is, which is the big exciting piece of this. So, for example, email personalization, you know, every email platform on the planet, if it's not already doing it, will be doing it soon, where it will be able to gather information from the people who are on your list to deliver, you know, content dynamically to everybody uniquely, if you, if you want it to, based on, and personalize it based on, you know, what their experiences have been, you know, what have they clicked on, you know, what, what does it say they're interested in on their social profiles, things like that in a way that we've never had before. So, so you've got it manifesting through email marketing and communications like that, delivering content on, you know, on websites. When a visitor lands on a website, you can dynamically deliver content relevant, most relevant to that user, probably even organized better for that, for that particular user based on, you know, what AI is able to determine and discern about that person. Is it going to be perfect? No, it always needs to be vetted by human experts. It always, you don't set it and forget it and think you're going to be, you know, golden. That we may get to a point where it's so accurate that it's. That that really becomes less important over time. But it's still, for the very foreseeable future, a requirement that humans have to be involved. But an example would be, you know, a clothing store website might show winter wear that is popular in a particular region based on where that searcher is searching from and, and deliver that dynamically, you know, or, you know, the flip side is if, if it knows that maybe they're thinking about going on a vacation, you know, because they've been searching hotels in Florida or Arizona or Mexico or wherever they, you know, it may suggest, you know, and may display, you know, some, you know, some appropriate warmer weather clothing for them. So, so there's a lot of possibilities that are going to be happening and already happening. Another thing is loyalty programs Jeff mentioned, you know, that it can identify, you know, coffee shop, you know, whether people tend to be morning or afternoon customers, for example, if it can determine that it's going to be able to identify who are your best customers, what do they spend, what are they, you know, what do they tend to splurge on so that, you know, when you want to get them back in and you want to get them to buy a bigger ticket, you know, make a bigger purchase with you periodically recommend the favorite thing that they always seem to splurge on every four or five visits, for example. AI is going to be able to do that in ways that it's hard for humans to be able to do right now because we're not as efficient at processing and organizing and using all of that data. It's not going to be perfect. It won't always get it right. You're always going to have some weird results. But, you know, these systems are, they're going to get better and they're going to improve over time. So those are just some examples that, you know, pop into my mind in terms of how AI is going to deliver a more personalized experience. I mean, but just think about, you know, any, any channel you're talking about AI. As a matter of fact, Mari Smith mentioned this about Facebook and it's, and the new algorithm for 2025. It's no longer about followers and who your followers. You know, your content is not being delivered to your followers the way that it had, has historically previously been done. Now your content is being delivered potentially to people in their news feeds based on what their interests and their behaviors have been on that social platform. And if the Facebook algorithm can determine this content will resonate with somebody who has these likes, experiences, these, you know, demographic information, whatever is, you know, baked into the algorithm, it's going to display that whether they follow you or not. So it's, it's an opportunity. Actually, right now it's going to change, but right now there's an opportunity to seize upon, you know, these changes that are happening to, to be able to get in front of people that we haven't been able to, you know, even that we've got maybe all gotten a little frustrated with. And look, there's a lot of frustration out there right now about Facebook overall. But again, don't let your personal biases dictate your marketing strategies. If you always have to think about your ideal customer, it's not about that. It's not about you. It's about them. And so, so yeah, that's what I have to say.

Paul

See, that's why I don't do anything on Facebook.

Ken

Whether you know it or not, you.

Paul

Are Paul I'm a member of groups, I have no friends, I'm friendless. So Ian, how can small. And you know, Ken mentioned this about the frustration with Facebook and this. I see the same thing with Google is just you think these huge data companies, which is what they are, would have this figured out, but they have some really piss poor implementations of AI. But how can small businesses use AI to optimize their online presence and visibility?

Ian

Yeah, again, I'm going to sound like a broken record through this whole thing because I don't think small businesses should be doing this themselves. I'm convinced of that. I wasn't convinced of that when AI first started a year and a half ago, two years when it first started getting really publicly available. But the more I see businesses going down the path of ditching their marketers to do it themselves, I just see that they're producing more content, but it's crap content because they're trusting you. And I'm just putting that, I don't.

Paul

Disagree with you, that this is more to me, this is more like this is what's possible. No, they probably should not be doing it themselves. But if they don't know these things can be done, you know, it's like you don't know what you don't know for sure.

Ian

Yeah. So I'm just going to keep reinforcing that though, through this whole thing because I, I think small business owners have to hear that message and I don't think it's being broadcasted anywhere else. I've never heard any expert in the field talk about a caution of you, you don't want to put yourself, if any of you have read the E myth and you create an organizational chart for your business, you're not supposed to be the one in every single box of that organizational chart. And AI is kind of a lure to do that more. So that's why I'm talking like this, because I want to save people from ultimately doing that to themselves, but it's actually going to hurt their business and I've seen that happening. So some, some ways that your online presence and visibility can be maximized and optimized using AI tools. First of all, if you, if, if your person, your partner who's using, who's doing your marketing for you and your, your website development, your, your SEO optimization, your search, the generative search engine optimization. Now the generative engine optimization, which is really talking about how do I help my business show up in ChatGPT and Gemini and some of the other tools out there, the AI tools The large language models. A lot of the tools that we use as experts now have AI built into some form or another. You know, Ken's talking about some really aspirational stuff that we all see coming down the path. Right? Jeff talked about some of that too. It's not there. It's not even close right now. Like everything right now is bolt on AI, like they're like crap. We gotta, we gotta put AI in our feature list for our practice management software, for our SEO tools, right? And so everybody's doing that. Some of them are from the ground up, very few, most of them are bolt on. So some of the tools we use to help us first of all analyze data and optimize data for SEO are things like Search Atlas, Semrush. These tools, I've heard surfer SEO, which I don't use, has it as well. But any legitimately good SEO tool is going to have AI built into it to some capability now to help you analyze how to rank better, develop content that's going to help you rank better for the keywords, that even determining which keywords you should be ranking better for. But again, you kind of need the expertise to navigate these tools and to leverage what it's spitting out. Otherwise it's a little bit like, you know, asking ChatGPT, I have a toothache. How can I fix it? The options are fairly broad and you might not have the expertise to fix it, but there's a lot that can be done with these tools to make your marketer far more efficient. Things like voice search optimization. That's an area that's largely untapped by small businesses. We've been talking about it for years now, but because it's an additional part of SEO, a lot of businesses aren't doing that. Local SEO. How to help your business show up better, produce the right content for maximizing and optimizing your Google business profile. These tools can be extremely helpful for that. Because right now you go into your Google business profile, all Google shows you is a little profile like how much of your profile is complete. And even that's wrong half the time. So they're not helping you. But you do need to understand who your ideal client is. Ideal client, customer, patient, what they're looking for. Because that's the key part of it, because SEO is just a matchmaker. It's how even in AI, it's just who has the most resonant content that resonates with what you're particularly looking for at the time. And so you can use these tools to help you do that better, it's going to help you show up better online. There's a lot that goes on in that. And then a key part of that is AI can also help you consistently deliver good quality content. But it has like do not trust the content that AI spits out by itself. You as the expert in the field, your marketing expert needs to review all that to make sure it's good. Because we, we've, I think we all have anecdotal evidence even of marketers who got so, you know, they were surfing the wave of, and enjoying the wave of AI and they got a little carried away. They published stuff directly to their website and it was all wrong, right? Like it was crap. So we, we see that pretty strongly, especially with some of the trades who are trying to take some shortcuts and save some money and you know, let's just use AI to do this. But again, remember, there is no1 complete AI spot you can go to to get the right strategic guidance, the right implement implementation guidance and the actual ability to do it all. People still have to do all that. So.

Paul

Yeah, AI, we said it before, AI is another tool. It's not great. Love it.

Ian

I sound like I'm not, I'm just like be responsible in your use and it can be a wonderful tool to you. Just don't get sucked into the passionate growth of it that you lose your mind and start taking on more roles.

Jeff

Ian, following on that last point that you made about AI is a great tool tool. Keep in mind everyone that we are still in the very, very early stages of AI. AI right now is a lot of point tools and actually a lot of those point tools go back to the same large language models. There's dozens and dozens, hundreds of things that ultimately are just front ends into chat, GPT or one of the other several large language models. These large language models are very expensive to build, develop and train. So the model is, then you have a lot of other things that are front end but it's still very point tool oriented. And I think where we're going is the so called agentic or agents. When you have agents that you can build. Matter of fact, John Jantz just published a LinkedIn piece about the future and the direction and he talks about agents. When you start having agents that can accomplish specific tasks for you and the agents can talk to each other, that's the future. That's where we're going, it's not where we are now.

Ian

Yeah, yeah, there's the, I mean we'll, we'll get to this in the dangers. But, or, or pain points. But like there's even some really good, what do you call it, like institutions that are actually researching the AIs as they're being developed. And the really geeky people are saying the current large language models aren't even AI at this point. They're just gatherers of information and then spitter outers of information. There's not even a great amount of intelligence behind them at this stage. Except wow, they're incredible at taking large amounts of data and creating concise responses.

Paul

So Jeff, Ian talked about some things that I think kind of segues into the question I have for you. And you know, he's talking about small business owners using AI to, to do everything and now they're in all these little boxes like Ian said. So can, can AI powered tools help businesses reduce marketing costs? Knowing that again, what Ian keeps saying is that they really, AI cannot replace a marketing agency for reasons Ian touched on. But can, can, can it help reduce marketing costs?

Jeff

Yeah, absolutely. And I think this builds on what Ian said. You know, the analogy AI is a tool. It's not a be all, end all solution. It is a tool. And the analogy I would use is a house framer. Right. How much more productive is, you know, a team of carpenters framing a house when they use power nailers versus when they're swinging old fashioned hammers like they did in the 1800s? It's a tool that boosts productivity, but at the same time you've got to know how to use it. There are dangers, there are pitfalls, but when used appropriately, especially where we are right now with the tools, the current generation, you have access to a lot more information, you have the ability to do a lot more faster and that absolutely can help drive costs down, but it needs to be monitored appropriately. And back to Ian's point, should every business owner take it upon themselves to become an AI expert? Probably not. They need to recognize that the tools are there and they can be used and they should be looked into and then work with somebody that is even some of the major corporations, they'll have a now you can Google it Chief AI Officer. It's a thing at bigger companies, it's the person who's tasked with understanding the future in the direction are looking to see how to move into that future in that direction. So I think, yeah, absolutely, the tools can help bring costs down. They've got to be used appropriately though. So when we get into some specifics, social media, managing posts, creating posts, even creating the content for those posts, again, being able to survey a lot of information, see what other people are saying, see what people are responding to, and then saying, how do I use that in the context? And that's where context becomes very important for your business. In the context of my business, how do I use that information and craft my posts that have a different spin on it? So you don't want to be me too? AI has the danger of pulling everyone to what I call the mediocre middle.

Ken

Right?

Jeff

If everyone uses it blindly, it's all going to pull everyone to the same results and you're going to get the mediocre middle. You're not going to have the innovation, you're not going to have the thought leadership. So use it in social media to help craft posts, but you still got to put your own contacts and spin on it, but really use it to again analyze audiences, look for timing, look for sentiment, look for what's working and what's not working and adjust that. These are all things that we've done all along anyway. We've maybe gone to tools that have month old data and look at what they're saying. Buzzsumo is a great tool for analyzing sentiment and social media, but now with AI coming into some of the tools we use anyway, we can do it quicker and without having to buy a subscription to another tool. Similarly with social media, you can optimize ads. What's working, what's not working, which ones are driving conversions and use it to build on that, use it to help augment the AB testing that you should be doing in ad campaigns and then just generating content. I think AI is useful for long form content, but you've really got to monitor it. You've got to. I know Julie McCoy, you know, one of the thought leaders in content creation talks about writers have now become editors. So the AI can do the first draft writing, but you still got to put that context on the editing and producing better overall content and short form content. I think AI is great. It's incredibly powerful for doing things like SEO titles, SEO meta descriptions, generating social media posts from blog articles, email, kind of in the middle. Great tools that can get you closer to the goal line. But you still got to put a little bit of time and effort in terms of savings though. It's all about getting there faster, getting there with, you know, less requirements on expensive tools or expensive people. And I think AI is already showing a lot of, a lot of results in those areas.

Paul

And you know, going back to your experience example about the hammer versus the nail Gun. I can go online and watch videos on how to build a retaining wall, but there's always those nuances and details that only an expert's gonna know. And if you don't know that you're retaining wall may not retain.

Jeff

So yeah, and in the experience, my wife and I decided her, she's an older Honda and the headliner was falling down. We decided that we were gonna redo the headliner after watching a YouTube video. It's not as easy as it looks on YouTube, I'll tell you that. Don't do it.

Paul

So Ken, I think we touched on this a little bit, but, and this is a big one. AI is gonna have an impact on content creation. What's, what's that going to look like? What kind of impact is it going to have?

Ken

Yeah, so I mean as Jeff, you know, just kind of talked about, you know, what he said about Julie McCoy, you know, that you're no longer really a writer, you're an editor. I would also say that, you know, you're, you've got to be a quality manager. So I mean editors, you know, should be quality managers. But you need, I mean somebody has to be, it's going to transform roles and so it's going to reduce production related roles and it's going to increase the importance of quality assurance roles, you know, and, and those roles that, where you can take the, the, the outputs and really make sure that it's aligning with the brand vision. The differentiation, you know, the important elements of, you know, as Ian was talking about from an SEO perspective, you know, are you, are you creating that content and then it, is it getting optimized to help you rank in the areas for the keywords and the locations and products and services, for example, that, that you care about. So from that perspective, the, you know, the job functions are, are changing very fast and, and they're going to continue to change very quickly. Jeff talked a lot about, you know, ways that it, it's reducing the time to create content. My, my, I guess my comment is don't think of it necessarily as a cost reduction because people who are using these tools are creating massive amounts of content and people who are doing this well are still creating mass amounts of content. But what they're doing is they've taken the production and they've, they've offloaded that AI and now they're using human experts to bake in the SEO to make sure that the differentiation is there, you know, to guide. You know, I mean you can put for example, content repurposing tools are one of the best ways to use AI. I think right now you can take a blog post or a long form video, slice it and dice it into so many different assets that you can use. You can turn it into email, you can turn it into press releases, you can turn it into short form videos for social YouTube or shorts or Instagram reels, for example. You can generate the text and even suggested images for social media posting. All this can be done by AI. Is it getting the right information though? Just because it can slice and dice and do things and suggest things way faster and maybe with insights that we don't, we wouldn't bring to looking at that when we were doing it manually ourselves? It still has to be reviewed and analyzed and you need to make sure that, you know, if it slices and dices, it doesn't cut off something right in the middle of an important concept. And, but yet you take that and you post it automatically to social media because it's like, I'm done, you know. No, it's not that easy. And, and it's easy to fall into that trap. I guarantee you it's very easy. I, I think we're going to see more and more content created. So I honestly think that 2025 is going to be a massive year for many businesses, including small businesses. Look, big businesses are making massive investments in AI. They're already doing it. If you're competing against, I mean, I, you know, I don't know this for a fact, but honestly, I would be shocked if some of the large franchisees or franchises of, you know, like home services contractors. We see this happening a lot in the world of plumbers and H Vac, where the local companies are being snatched up and they're being rolled up into these large corporate franchise models. And so the, the true local homegrown plumber or H Vac company is the, there are, I mean, it's kind of the Walmartization of the service industry. And so you're seeing fewer and fewer of these, well, these big operations that are snatching up all these, if they're not making massive investments in AI to help their local franchisees outperform all of these local companies, it's going to be happening very quickly. And so if you're not, if you're a local company that hasn't been snatched up and you don't want to be snatched up, but you still want to remain competitive, you've got to be working with your own team of experts that, you know, understand how to leverage content production, quality content Production for all of the right reasons on all of the right channels to reach all of the right people. And so that's the impact I think that AI has on content creation for local businesses. If you're not doing it, if you're not working with a marketing strategy focused company to help you do this, you're going to get left behind. This is happening on a fast, fast, fast scale. Whether it's visual content, whether it's written content, the repurposed type of content, text based content, you know, even text messages or email. Jeff talked about, you know, the SEO meta stuff, you know, with the title tags and alt tags, email subject lines. All of this is happening to gain better performance. And if you're not doing this and you're in a market where there are bigger competitors that are being fueled by large corporations, you're in real trouble. You need to get on the bandwagon. You need. This is not the year to crawl under a rock and hope you survive. You're, you have the opportunity to roll this year. That's just my honest opinion. I think 2025 is going to be a game changer year for even marketing companies. If you're a marketing company and you're not leveraging the power of AI in and doing it really well for your incumbent, you're going to get steamrolled. You are going to be, you're going to become a dinosaur. You're going to be extinct faster than you know it can.

Jeff

You know, as you were talking, a thought popped into my head and I should have addressed this on the last question is there's two possibilities when you increase productivity and what you can do on a given budget. One is that you save money. The other is that you can do more with the same budget. And if you really want to grow, you've got to figure out how to do more, right? So while the AI tools can help you save money, they can also open up new doors and new avenues and be able to truly be multi channel, if not omnichannel, where maybe before you didn't have the budget for it because you can get more of the production done. And what you said exactly, repurposing content and doing a piece of long form content and maybe recording video and then driving all the other content out of that is the way to do that. So with the same budget you can be much more productive and have better business results. That's another way of looking at it that I think needs to be brought out.

Ken

Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Yeah. One thing too, I want to say is you know, the thing that I'm most excited about right now with AI is AI voice assistance. Every small business, every business needs a better phone answering solution. Answering the phone live is more important than it's ever been. And in order to make that experience useful and meaningful for the caller and to, for and, and to, to get those people from the point where they're just literally asking a question to where they become, you know, a likely customer and maybe even probably, hopefully an advocate of the business if you train that AI voice assistant well to provide superior customer service every single time, which right now humans can't do and aren't doing. We, we talked about that, you know, with Ian mentioned, you know, the horrors of some of the call recordings we've listened to. We've all heard it. What it's doing is it's driving the need for you to put content out there that maybe you've never created before. You know, there's a, there's a mindset with a lot of small businesses, which is a really bad mindset that I don't want to put my differentiating information out there on the web because somebody's going to come along and steal it. Well, you know what? Nobody will ever find out about your differentiating information if you keep it all to yourself.

Ian

So.

Ken

AI voice assistant to answer those questions and provide such a superior experience when people are calling in just to find out, do you take insurance, you know, do you have certifications for your key staff members, you know, before they want to come in and give you their business? You have the ability to do that, but you only do it if you train the AI voice assistant with the information that it needs, which means frequently asked questions should ask questions and an order of magnitude that small businesses have never thought about before. And obviously, here's a news flash that's also fantastic for search engine optimization. So take advantage of this.

Ian

I wanted to springboard off of something you had mentioned earlier, Ken, about the franchises and large businesses leveraging AI ultimately to crush the small businesses. I've actually seen the opposite too. Where. And I think this is what you're talking about too, because I think you, you said this is the year that they need to change and they have opportunity. I think, I think business, small businesses, whether it's plumbing, whether it's dentists, hearing aid practitioners, you name it, like if you're up against franchises. And the reason I say this is because we've been up against franchises with our clients, right, is, is that you have a unique opportunity because franchises are always watering down their message across all of their locations. So, yes, they have what's good for.

Ken

Them, not what's good for the local.

Ian

Yeah. And, and purely from an SEO standpoint and an online visibility standpoint, they almost always suffer because of that, because they cannot optimize things locally like you can as a primary local business. Maybe you have one location, maybe you have multiple locations, maybe your service area business, but you have a unique opportunity, and if you get your act together and, and do things well, you can easily outperform some of these bigger players, for sure.

Ken

Yeah. And, you know, that's a great point, Ian. I'm glad you mentioned that, because I, I love competing against franchises because franchises kind of rush to the middle. They do what's really good for the majority of their franchisees, but it ultimately, it compromises and it waters down the effectiveness. So while they've got the economy of scale to do certain things, it also really hurts and limits their ability to do other key things. But here's, here's the thing that's possible now with franchises, if they make the investment, is that you can use AI with, you know, with custom fields and custom variables now in a way that you haven't been able to before on a scale that you've never been able to do before to deliver that localized, personalized experience. And so, you know, if you're looking to join a franchise or you're looking to franchise your business, to make your franchisees wildly successful, you got to hire a company that gets the whole AI thing to help you bake that in and implement it. Because right now, as you said, Ian, franchise franchises, they're. While they have certain benefits, they have certain bells and whistles and tools and things like that that you get out of the box, it's pretty general stuff usually.

Ian

And you know what, they're sometimes pretty horrible at what they do.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, so.

Jeff

So they're great at what they do, which is selling more franchises.

Ian

Right. But they're marketing absolutely dreadful.

Ken

Yeah, that's. Their focus is to sell more franchises. It's not to be the best, you know, the best solution to help your local business. Show up on Google search, for example, or show up on social media, for that matter.

Paul

So, Ian, how can AI help businesses with customer service and engagement? Because I think that's a big part of this whole equation as well.

Ian

Yeah, yeah. I think first of all, the, at the core of this is the CRM. I think if your CRM system has AI built into it. And again, we're so in the early stages of this, that it's hardly even touching this. In most CRM systems, even if they have AI baked in right now, it's really like a bolt on and it's not really doing what we want to see it do as marketers and as business owners. But ultimately where it's going to get to is where, you know, when, when somebody calls you up on your business line, your AI CRM system is going to. And some smart CRM systems will pop up the person's record, right? Like, you know, practice management software sometimes do this. You know, really good CRM systems sometimes do this. It'll pop up their record. But what, what where it's going to get is it's going to be monitoring the call as well as it comes in. It's going to be able to give you some guidance, right? If somebody's talking about a particular issue with a particular treatment they had or a particular job that you were performing, it's going to be able to help equip your customer service person with the information they need in order to give appropriate answers and to help serve the person better. Right. If somebody's asking a particular question about the business, it will help facilitate that with, with the real person. Where it gets really exciting too is what Ken was talking about. And he stole kind of my, some of my thunder, but I forgive him. But AI call agents that I think most of us on this, this panel are at least playing with, if not actually implementing right now, are incredibly powerful. And it's because a lot of call centers, especially low cost call centers, especially after hour call centers, if you've ever called one of these call centers and been disappointed, especially if you're the business owner of that particular business the call center is trying to serve, they're horrible. They do not answer the questions properly. If you ask them are they accepting new patients or new customers or whatever it is, they'll be like, I don't really know the answer, but I'll have somebody get back to you. That is the standard line. They may not speak the language very well. They don't know the answers. Oftentimes they even get confused between the different customers that they're serving. Like which business, which hat of the business am I actually serving at the moment? Like it's disastrous. And so these AI call agents can be super powerful. You train them once and of course you're going to be optimizing it over time. But I love the saying that somebody mentioned and it's absolutely true and we're seeing it that the current AI Call agents are as bad as they're ever going to be, but they're not bad. They're incredibly powerful. They work incredibly well. We are having so much fun with them, just testing them and offering clients an alternative to bad call centers because the whole point of them is to keep the buyer's journey going. That's why you have call centers is that somebody gets a live person or gets the answers they need and moves them through their buying decision. And so these can be very, very powerful. Then if you kind of take the next step down, you've got AI chatbots which again, can do the same kind of thing right. On your website. They can even be in the back end through your CRM system. I know some of us use a very intelligent CRM system that can actually answer questions through your direct messaging, through Facebook, through Instagram, through some of the other channels. Super powerful, you know, and then there's things where you start to get into like conversational AI, where you get into sentiment analysis so that your CRM is actually looking at how things are going with a particular, particular contact. And yes, lead scoring is really important to help your team know, like, should I reach out to this person? Maybe eventually AIs will do the reaching out. Who knows which, which poses a whole bunch of other weird things because I don't know if you guys have experienced this where somebody dms you, but it's actually their AI DMing your AI. And then they have this little conversation. You look at it afterwards and you're like, well, that was dumb. But you know, it is what it is. But the bottom line is that all of these technologies, these AI technologies, have the capacity to help people at the time of need and which positions your business as the ideal provider of the service or product that they're looking for. And that's what it's all about. Right. Like you're trying to help people when they need the help and answer their questions and move them in their decision making.

Paul

Don't use AI to DM people.

Ian

Like outbound DMing. I think it's happening because I certainly see some of those.

Jeff

Is.

Paul

And that's. It's going to be horrible. Interesting to see what kind of regulations they place on that in the future.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

And you said bad call center. Is there a different kind?

Ian

You know what? I, I actually do think there are like, I've seen some in like, it's a funny thing you ask and I know you don't even mean this to go anywhere, but I would just say like traditionally there' very Expensive call centers, like especially I'm thinking on the dentistry side where they're actually trained to some degree in like dental terms and common issues and they're not there to provide dental guidance. But at least they can speak the language. At least they can ask probing questions in the right way. And at least they can pass the information on in an appropriately helpful manner to the actual dental clinic. And, and, and that's a vast distance from where some of the other lower bad call centers are, where they're. I don't even know what purpose they serve. Sometimes I think they hurt more than they help.

Paul

Yeah. So we're, we're at 50 minutes now. So I do have a few more questions. Do we want to go through them or do we want to hit on. Because I think the, the pitfalls and drawbacks are important too. So what does everyone want to do? Go through a few more questions or have everyone kind of round tables something.

Jeff

Pitfalls and drawbacks would be a good, good way to kind of round table and wrap up.

Ian

Yep, same here.

Paul

All right, so I think I'll start with something that I think everyone has mentioned is that it's not a magic button. We use a. And this goes back to where it not set and forget it. We use an AI powered SEO tool. It's really awesome. But goes back to what everyone has said is that it will give you suggestions and you can use this tool to automatically implement those suggestions. We have a client that their commercial painting, that's all they do, nothing residential. And yet it will spit out keyword suggestions related to house painting, residential painting. It's like, well, where did this come from? Because there's nothing on their website about that. So this goes back to. You have to vet these things. You can't just hear AI did it, I'm done. Boom. It doesn't work like that. I think that's one of my, my biggest things that you know, with it, the over reliance on AI can do more harm than good. That's, that's what I had on that.

Jeff

Yeah, I think kind of springboarding off of that. Not only over reliance but just putting too much trust in it too early on. I mean it, there's a learning curve and AI is not perfect. AI has a well known problem called hallucination, which is, you know, a fancy way of saying it makes stuff up. And that's, that's part and parcel of the day the way it works. I mean people make stuff up too. But the problem with hallucination in AI is if you over rely on it or if you trust it too much that it's everything it says is correct, it isn't it. And it can't be fixed easily because if AI could know when it was hallucinating, it wouldn't hallucinate. So obviously it can't be fixed easily. It's going to be a problem that's there for a while and that comes back to the importance of the human control of it is a tool that needs to be used by people that provide the context, that provide the sanity checking and not just the easy button as we mentioned earlier. And then recognizing it will drive you to the mediocre middle if you let it. You know, got to put your own value add into it and use it as the basis, use it as a productivity enhancer. But always, always, always be bringing in your own context and your own insights. AI doesn't have any insights yet. It can look for relationships, but relationships aren't insights.

Ken

Yeah, I'll jump in and I'm going to stress resistance to change. Again, I think there are a lot of people who are thoroughly freaked out about AI and look, everybody should be a little bit worried about AI because the nefarious potential uses of AI could be catastrophic. I mean there's no doubt about that. But right now, if you look at it as a productivity tool set to really help your business get ahead in ways that maybe you haven't been able to do before or you haven't been patient enough to do before, or even have the financial resources to do before, you may now be able to do that. Don't let your personal biases dictate your marketing solutions. I can't say that enough. I see that over and over and over again. Look, AI voice is a great example. People get freaked out about that because it's like I don't want to have that AI answering, you know, and representing my company to everybody who calls my, my business number. It's like we know what most business systems that have been out there that are IVRs or you know, the phone tree type systems, automated systems, they are, they're robotic sounding voices. They've been out there for a very long time. People don't like them because sometimes you, you can't get to where you want to go. You know, medical practitioners are particularly bad because before you can even do anything you have to listen to like 10 gazillion. I mean, I swear, sometimes it's like a 10 minute spiel about all of the stuff about what they do and then before you can even say press One, for accounting press two to, you know, to book an appointment. It's like, you know, if you don't already know those numbers, it's maddening, right? But here's the great thing. AI voice actually gives you the ability to ask a question to kind of circumvent and get right to the point of what you need in ways that, that we haven't been able to see before. Get over the fact that it may sound a little bit robotic, that people may realize that it's AI, it's coming fast and it's superior, it just flat is superior because if it's well trained it's going to give better answers and more consistently and more concurrent answers than you have the capacity to do today. I mean these systems for example, can answer 200 calls concurrently. You know, where, how many, how many concurrent phone calls can you have today currently with your current phone system? So, so don't let new technology or your fear of new technology limit the use of it. Having said that, the next big thing that I think is a huge pitfall is lack of training and lack of understanding of, of what these tools are and what they can do and how to best use them. We've all talked about it. I know Jeff, you have been a big stickler about it. Don't run to the mediocre middle. If you just slap stuff in and yank the results out and slap it on a website or in a social media post, it's going to be mediocre at best, at least 50% of the time. Here's a fun exercise. Ask Ask Chat GPT to write you a joke. See how good that works out for you.

Ian

They're usually awful.

Ken

Yeah. So it's not perfect, right. It's not great for every situation really. You know, and as Ian mentioned, you don't want to become that marketing manager. You, you've got other important things that, and roles that you have to fulfill in the business. So make sure that whoever is running your marketing is thoroughly adequately trained and ex honestly experts at the use of AI, where to use it, how to use it, when to use it. Otherwise you're going to run into, into some real trouble. I think.

Paul

Yeah, can a couple things. Well, I was using Chat GPT. This is just when you said about the GPT joke to generate a little bit of content and because I wasn't clear in the prompt, the answer it gave me was kind of, well, X rated. So I won't go into that here.

Jeff

But what content were you writing?

Ken

Yeah, really?

Paul

I'll tell you after the podcast.

Ken

If you want to hear the answer, schedule a consultation with Paul Barthellow.

Ian

There you go.

Paul

But see here, if phone trees piss people off, they certainly piss me off. And if you don't want to implement this technology and because of that, you're not answering the phone and your competitor is, guess who's going to get that business? So think about that.

Ian

Yeah, let me, let, let me add two real quick additions to the pitfalls. The first we didn't get into like the ethical side of AI. Right? So there, there is an ethical side that I think all humans have to think about and understand and, and, and wrestle down a little bit. But the, the part is more a caution because we have no idea where this is going. But I'll, I'll add an anecdote to this, but it's the manipulation of people via AI created content and, and also highly personalizing. That just real quick was watching the SpaceX launch last week, didn't realize because it was called SpaceX, the channel I was on didn't realize it was actually a counterfeit SpaceX channel. It was showing the launch and then partway through it suddenly switched to Elon Musk at the Tesla plant, talking about his new SpaceX Bitcoin that he just launched. And of course I looked into it and it was all AI generated, It was fake. It's this other country company trying to capture some bitcoin business, but highly manipulative. And to me, it gave me a little bit of a taste of how AI can be really badly used by posers. The other one I wanted to mention, the other pitfall is, I think because of the easy accessibility and low cost of it right now, that it's going to generate a lot of, or create the opportunity for a lot of bad marketers. Because there's, there's always been bad marketers. I mean, you guys experience it all the time where you have to fix the stuff they've broken. But bad marketers trying to do everything with AI but doing it really badly. So it's going to actually compound the problem in some ways. And the problem to the small business is they won't know that it's bad marketing until the, like, until the results start to snowball and it's delivered a giant opportunity loss. And you see that when they invest with a bad marketing company who's not good at what they do. I see it all the time with website development and they say they're SEO, but they don't know SEO, all of that kind of stuff. I think are just pitfalls that we all, as business owners and marketers, are going to have to navigate in the near future.

Paul

Jeff, anything you want to add real quick.

Jeff

Now? We're coming up on time. Just real quick. I'd say the counterpoint is don't be afraid of it. The whole it's coming for our jobs. Oh, no. Something like 200 CEOs and AI researchers have basically said that all jobs as we know them are going to be gone within 100 years. I don't know that I completely agree with that. But look at 100 years ago and how many of those jobs exist today. So things change. AI is just part of that. You know, look at it, consider using it. It does have a lot of advantages. It does have to be used appropriately, as Ian just said.

Paul

All right, so like you said, Jeff, we're coming up on an hour. So, Ian, you want to take us out?

Ian

Yeah. Awesome topic, Paul. Thanks for all of our marketing guides, for sharing their thoughts, their premonitions and their expertise. And until next week, folks, keep calm and mark it on and spread the word about our podcast. Bye for now.