Episode 243 – The 12 Hottest Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025 (And How to Leverage Them)

Jeff

An influencer mention can mean 5,000, 10,000, 100,000, 3 million people. I mean, get Taylor Swift to mention your product, you can probably retire.

Ken

People need to get over their fear of AI voice in particular because it's just a far superior solution.

Paul

management platforms that are outside of the ad platforms themselves can help you enormously get more out of your ad spend.

Ken

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast where we're simplifying marketing. I'm Ken Tucker from Changescape Web and I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I'm joined by co host Paul Barthel of Changeescape web in St. Louis, Jeff Steck of Tylerica Marketing in Austin, Texas, and Ian Cantle of Outsourced Marketing in Bradford, Ontario. Welcome guys.

Ian

Thank you. Good to be here.

Jeff

Good to be back. Yeah.

Ken

So today we're going to talk about some of the hottest trends in marketing that you really can't ignore in 2025. Now some of these may be more relevant to larger businesses, but you know what's going on there. Chances are there's, there's an opportunity for small businesses to still glean some, some elements of value out of that. So we're going to go ahead and just talk about these high level trends and kind of dive deep into them, ranging from generative AI and answer engine optimization to short form video, social commerce and more. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and grow your business in the age of AI and hyper personalization, this episode is packed with actionable insights you do not want to miss from our experts. So with that, Ian, I'm going to ask you the first question. How is generative AI reshaping personalization and marketing and what should small businesses do to implement it effectively?

Ian

Yeah. So I'm going to take a step back. I want to reinforce first why this even matters. Right. Personalization is so important. It's been an important factor that many businesses have tried to employ since way back in my days when we started doing direct mail and digital variable printing and that kind of stuff where you could actually print the person's name on a full color postcard in. Yeah, in the graphics. And the reason why that trend was happening was because the stats then, the statistics then were so high of how the difference between a personalized piece of mail versus a non personalized generic piece of mail. And nothing has changed in that now that we've moved predominantly to a digital communication group of channels. Personalization and hyper personalization is just as important in these channels. So I just wanted to share some stats first and then I'll get into the meat of the answer. But personalization boosts conversion and cross selling by 30 to 40%. So like right there we should be able to stop the conversation. But there's more. So you can even do like smart calls to actions, meaning you personalize a call to action, like instead of a download now on your website, if your website recognizes the person and says, you know, hey John, here's your free guide, download it here. It has a 202% lift, right? So super important. Consumers want it. 76% of consumers in a study said they were frustrated if personalization was missing. And approximately 65% of retention is driven by personalization. So some recent studies have, have been really interesting that, that way. And then in addition to the retention, 55% of conversion gets a lift in that same study through personalization. So personalization is super important. When I was preparing for this question, Ken, it reminded me of like, we're getting into the world now of like the Minority Report when Tom Cruise is walking through a mall and, and, and those 3D ads are popping out and they're like, you know, John Anderson, you could use a Guinness right now. You know, like stuff like that. Like, so we're getting into that, like sophisticated personalization. One of the videos you shared with us, Ken, was talking about how Fortune 500s are leveraging personalization right now, especially in the business to consumer world where it's E commerce, right? And they're investing a lot into that because the results are so profound. But there's also a big investment on their part. But how that's trickling down is that the sophistication? So those are very sophisticated systems. It's starting to trickle down to small business platforms now. And so what I mean by that is your, your CRM is the hub of personalization for your business. If you don't have a CRM, you should look into getting one. We talk a lot about CRMs on this podcast because especially CRMs like go high Level, which is kind of the, the undergirding of a lot of really great CRMs. Personalized CRMs, now HubSpot, some others have pretty good personalization in it and they're only getting better. But what's interesting is your, your question was specifically about leveraging AI for personalization. And unfortunately, most of these platforms are really poor at embedding generative AI into the actual communication process. Like a have now built in design or writing aids, meaning, hey, I'm writing an, an email or an Email template which will have personalization in it. AI, help me write this. Right. So there's lots of integrations with AI in that way, but the actual personalization of the communication is not really there for a lot of things. Although now we're seeing, you know, there's some really interesting stuff happening with Go High Level where it's, you know, direct messaging can now be AI driven communication, phone conversations can even be AI driven conversations. So that's where personalization is getting pretty exciting. But the integration with like the website and a few other like key places aren't really integrated well in a lot of these tools yet. But they're going to get there because that's where everything is leading. And the bottom line is that for any small business, like you should be thinking, how can I personalize stuff because of all those stats I shared? And the first step is like, hey, do personalized email templates or newsletter templates or just start and then see the lift that you're going to get from them.

Ken

Ian, is, are AI chatbots able to deliver some personalization?

Ian

Yeah, for sure. Well, it depends on the chatbot, depends on the system. Like, Go High Level has some really sophisticated integrations that are only getting better. A lot of the other platforms, platforms don't like. When I was digging into this topic, I was actually surprised how far back some, like every, every CRM system now will have like a, a section that'll say how AI is integrated into their platform. But some of them are like so Mickey Mouse, it's like, okay, you have like a chat widget within your. Within. Within the tool. That is like having chat GPT in the tool to help you do what you're doing. But it's, it's not significant. Like it's not a significant help for personalization. But yeah, like imagine like when I was talking about direct messaging or chatbots, like you can have a conversation and the chatbot can talk to you with your name now, and those AI voice agents can talk to you with your name now and be connected to your CRM, which is pretty exciting stuff.

Ken

Yeah, you mentioned Go High Level and I just wanted to let you know, our listeners know. So Go High Level is a cr. I mean, I call it the Swiss Army Knife of marketing and sales. Yeah, I mean it does so many things and as you said, Ian, it's kind of the undergirding of a lot of offers. So I encourage our listeners. You know, if you're looking at a CRM, you know, if you're working with a marketing consultant, they better be telling you about high level. If not, they're not really up to speed with what all is going on because it is now the largest CRM on the planet in terms of usage. It's surpassed the number of users and instances that are out there. What's great about it for us as marketing agencies is we all can take that platform and build our smarts into it to deliver additional value for our customers, which we all do, full disclosure, but that's, you know, it is, in my, in my opinion, it is the game changer platform right now for small businesses. It's affordable, folks. You need to take advantage of it. You need to be working with an agency because you can only get it through an agency at this point and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

Paul

So yeah, they're very reluctant to individuals because they don't want to deal with the tech support.

Jeff

Yeah, if I can go back to the initial question and some of the things Ian said, I think we're on the verge of it. We're starting to see it now. The folks are following generative AI closely and what's going on. We're talking about it a little bit before we started. Agentic AI is the next step that is going to enable true personalization at scale. In other words, right now the AI that Ian was talking about, it's embedded in the tool, it's a chat. It's going to help you write your email template and your personalization is going to come tag, you know, dear, you know Curly Bryce's first name. Right. And it's going to fill that in or some note that you've made some custom field that you've created. It can go fill that in the email template. But it's not truly yet. Well, you take that back in the mainstream, it's not truly yet generating one off emails for every individual client or person. You still got to do the work to take it in. Now we're very close in agentic AI and by agentic AI, I mean build a workflow that brings in multiple components. It might use chat GPT for one piece, Claude for another, image generation for another. Hey Jen. For video creation. It's a workflow that stitches all this together. And now you, you can, we are seeing the ability to generate a one off video specifically for a client, a one off email specifically for a client. Now couple with that to doing research on that client where you're researching the things they're saying, the things they're talking about, which gives indicators into their mindsets. And their pain points. And you've got some real power for true personalization in your marketing communications when you can do a one off and at scale.

Ian

Yeah, when. I just want to tell you a funny anecdote that happened recently to me where I was asking ChatGPT to do some deep research on a prospective client I was talking to, or was I was coming up to a conversation with them. So I wanted to know more about them. And all of the information at the whole story it kind of framed around this person was all wrong. Like the geographical area where he said, where it said they were located was all wrong. The. The geographic focus of their business was all wrong. Like, it was just so funny. I was like, what on earth happened? You know, and. And these things happen, right?

Jeff

Like it was hallucinating.

Ian

I think it just found a piece of information like, oh, the person was born here, so therefore their business must be located there. But they moved halfway across the country when they were young and it missed that. So, yeah, it was kind of weird.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. I mean you need to vet everything AI produces. It's not just set it and forget it. Jeff, let's transition over and let's talk a little bit more about AI. But in this case, AI driven SEO or search engine options optimization. And how does Answer engine optimization, also referred to as aeo, a fairly new term maybe especially to many of our listeners, how does that change the game for SEO?

Jeff

Yeah. Yeah. So it's really two questions in one. AI driven SEO. I'm actually in a workshop all week. I hopped out of it early to come with you guys and record this podcast, one of the tools we all use, and it's specifically an AI driven SEO engine. So it connects into your website and it will go out and it'll analyze all the, all the verbiage on your website, even all the images it will generate AI optimized alt tags for images, headings, tags, title, as all the technical stuff you do in SEO content. It will suggest rewordings of content for improving connections between keywords that people are searching for and your content. A whole ton of stuff it can do. So we're seeing these kinds of things where the AI is being applied to doing SEO the traditional way. We would traditionally think of SEO, which is still very content heavy, content driven, backed up by the technical stuff and then all the other signals like getting backlinks to your site. So all of that still holds and applies, but AI is now being applied to doing it in a very efficient, again at scale way. The ability to go in and work on entire websites, in some cases an afternoon and tune it up for SEO and to stay out ahead of content generation. So there's that aspect of it, that aspect of AI driven SEO. And then the second aspect is you asked about answer engine optimization. So answer engine optimization is being found by the series and Geminis and you know, all the things, if I say their name, they'll probably respond because I've got two other ones in my office here. It's, you know, people are conversing with those devices and they're asking questions and you want to be found by those devices and the path to getting found, the path to being included and their large language models that they're pulling from when they're drawing their answers up is a little bit different. So you need to understand how they're working. And again, like a lot of things, you can't just stick your head in the sand say, well, that's all new. I've been doing it this way for 20 years, I'm going to keep doing it that way because if you ignore these things then you're going to start losing search share. You're already losing search share, probably to zero click searches where the algorithms are supplying the summary. And you've got to do a lot of work to be included in that summary because just being halfway down the page now where the organic results start isn't cutting it anymore. So we're seeing some traditional traffic drop offs and work you need to do be in the summary. So you're already losing that piece. If you ignore the answer engine optimization being included in all the digital assistants that are using AI under the covers to do their thing and figure out the answers they're going to give you, then you're really, really going to be missing an increasing share of the boat. So there's some things you've got to do that maybe weren't as important in the past. You've got to take advantage of every tool at your disposal. You got to make sure that your website, which is still where a lot of your content is going to come from, right? Make sure it's got good schema markup on it. Schema is a structured way of talking about what a page is about or what a section of a page is about, what a product on an E commerce store is about. So you want to make sure that you include all the schema markup that you can because these different engines are going to be drawing from it and you want to think in terms of how people are interacting with their devices when they're looking for information now probably still heavily Q and A driven. Right. So make sure you've got a lot of good Q and A oriented content. And it doesn't have to be just a list of 100 FAQs or SAQs on a page. It can be a page for each, it can be a blog article for each, it can be embedding the questions in the middle of a page of content. So you got to think through all of these ways that you're going to increase the likelihood of being found by the answer engines because you are the answer for what people are asking for. So think in terms of Q and A and then think in terms of being conversational. You know, the formal professor at the whiteboard lecturing speak isn't going to cut it anymore. When people are asking questions, they're looking for conversational answers. So maybe shift the tone, shift the voice, shift the language a little bit. And again, I'm not advocating going out and doing a wholesale rewrite of your website, but maybe experiment, you know, do some A B testing if you have the ability on your site to ab test pages or maybe try an alternate version of a page and see, you know, what, what kind of results you get and what happens. And again, the danger of not doing this is you're going to start losing visibility, you're going to start losing appearances in search. As the search methods are changing, you know, it's, it's a constant struggle. In some cases if you're the business owner that isn't really deep into SEO and doesn't want to be because you just want to deliver a great product or service, but it is a struggle to keep up with. And, and if you're not inclined to want to do that yourself, then make sure you connect up with, with somebody who is and who can do that for you because you want to stay out there, you want to stay ahead and the, oh, you know, what we've doing in the past has always worked in the past, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future.

Ken

Yeah, I think, you know, right now there's a little ray of sunshine for local businesses who are serving a local area where they're not being hit as hard by some of the zero click searches, you know, with the AI summaries and whatnot. But still everything that you mentioned, Jeff, is really just a best practice and a future proofing strategy for your website because all of this is coming and eventually it's going to roll downhill all the way. And so I think if a small business takes advantage of this stuff, now that you just mentioned, schema, questions, conversational style language, they're going to be in a much better position than most of their competitors because their competitors are not paying attention to this stuff.

Jeff

Yeah, I think, you know, you, you mentioned the local business maybe not being hit as hard. And I think I go back to what Perry Marshall calls the bleeding neck. You know, if you have a bleeding neck, you're not searching for, you know, you know, what are some causes of a bleeding neck? What, what are some different options for treating bleeding neck. You're looking for emergency doctor near me. Right. And those kind of searches are, are different types. They're not information. The informational is really the ones that are being hit. The more transactional or commercial intent searches are not being hit as hard yet, but I think they eventually will be. But I go back to take every tool at your disposal to rank everything you possibly can as well as you possibly can, because it's cumulative. It all adds up. If you're tailing off in one area, if you can boost that up, it's going to improve everything, not just that one area. You know, example, if you've got a certain service that you offer, the page in your website's just not getting any traffic, but the rest of your website's doing okay. You boost that one page up, you've just raised your overall site traffic. The overall stature of your site improves. So even the pages that we're doing okay then can do more than okay now. They can do better because you've changed, you know, one area. It's all relative and, you know, focusing on, you know, the weak things certainly has merits. But don't, you know, put all your eggs in one basket. Don't ignore it because you don't think it'll have any effect. It's, it's. What I'm trying to say is it's all cumulative and all ties together. So even if a local business isn't being hit hard now, doesn't mean that Google, you know, isn't going to change their algorithm next week. And all of a sudden, surprise, you know, they've had six months they could have worked on these things and they didn't. Now they're being hit for it, you know, take every advantage to use every tool at your disposal to make the highest, best ranking site that you can.

Ian

Yeah, and there's just the thing I love about this, this particular conversation that we're having right now is that all of the things that you talked About Jeff, have actually been true for the last five years in, for local businesses in highly competitive markets that do not exist in a bubble. So if you're butting up against your competitors in a local business and you put these into play and your, your competitor didn't, which is what we've been doing as agencies for a long time now. Right. It, it's just that the a, the AE engines, the answer engines are now pushing kind of the, not posers but the, the people that were a little bit lazy in their SEO efforts or didn't invest enough time, energy or money into it. They're, they're paying the price now because they weren't investing in the proper things that they should have been for years now, especially in competitive markets. But yeah, you should be pulling every lever you possibly can because your business does not exist in a bubble. Your, your competitors are stealing your market share. If you're not doing this stuff for sure.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. Paul, I'm going to wake you up so I got a question for you.

Ian

Wake up Paul.

Ken

Why is short form video dominating right now and what platforms should businesses prioritize for short form video?

Paul

All right, well don't take this the wrong way, but it's short, it's short attention spans. I mean it, that's what it comes down to. And as far as what platform, same kind of answer that we've, we've talked about similar things in the past. Where your target audience is, if they're on TikTok, then you're going to be on TikTok. If they're on Instagram, it's going to be Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and that this comes back, we've talked about this in the past that you have to know where your ideal customer is, what platforms are using and that goes in, goes to research but you know, no one wants to read anymore. They want to watch a video and they want to watch a 20 or 30 second video and that, that's just where things are going good, bad and different. That's just how it is. And video has become extremely important. And what I found interesting is in looking at like the top content formats that deliver roi. Just a couple years ago, two, three years ago, user generated content was all the rage. It was like the magic bullet. Now it's not so much now, it's, it's short form videos and images are still fairly important. But even like live streaming video is kind of in the middle because people want to watch stuff on demand. You know, if you do a video, like people aren't attending webinars. They might sign up for them and then they'll go watch them when they, when they want to watch it. They're, they're not going, generally speaking, they're not going to, to live webinars. So it's short form videos and the platform is wherever your ideal customer is. That's kind of the answer to that question.

Jeff

Yeah, it's a lot about the engaging nature of it though. I mean, I get sucked in. I am on Facebook more than I would like. But, you know, I'm marketing consultant, agency owner, fractional cmo, AI marketing strategist. Which hat am I wearing today? So I'm on Facebook several times a day, checking things out, looking at things, responding to things. And every time I get on, I get sucked in for an extra five or ten minutes looking at, you know, the short form videos. They're, they're just engaging, they're eye catching. There's a whole, you know, carousel of them up top. And you're like, oh, I wonder what that's all about. You click on it and you click the next one. You click the next one, you click the next one. They are addictive. And the algorithms have figured that out. They figured out that I like aviation, they figured out that I like invention, that I like science. And they're showing me some really cool stuff that I won't really have time for right now. But, but again, that's, you know, it's working, it's getting people in your right, Paul. It is because of the shorter attention spans, but the shorter attention spans can turn into longer sessions. But you, you gotta be there because, you know, your audience is there, is, is the key. And they're not terribly hard to produce. Anyone with a, with a smartphone and a little bit of software can, can produce it. And you know, if that's where your audience is, you got to be there.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

AI can be used to generate a lot of this stuff. And I think that's part of it too, is that you can use AI to generate something. Like Ken said it, everything has to be vetted because it's.

Jeff

Yeah.

Paul

Ian was saying earlier, I think before we started the podcast that he did some research and everything was wrong. And it, AI is not perfect. It is a tool, but it's not perfect. And it's the same thing. Like in program they call garbage in, garbage out. And if AI gets a hold of the wrong information, it's going to give you the wrong answers.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah.

Ken

I mean, you know, AI is massively beneficial for short form Video. I mean, I've gone through a process where I picked my core six services that we offer and I created 82 pages of scripts with different styles of content, how to's motivational, you know, informational. And from that I literally copy the script, paste it into heygen, where I've got my AI video clone, and in a matter of seconds I've got a video that I could post on all the major short form video platforms. I Personally don't do TikTok, but Instagram, Facebook and YouTube shorts. YouTube shorts is massive, folks. If you're not using YouTube shorts, you are missing the boat because it appeals to Everybody. I mean, YouTube is probably video wise. It is the universal video platform, so you got to take advantage of that. The statistics that I see are overwhelming compared to long form video versus short form. And here's another thing. You can take long form video and turn it into all kinds of shorts to promote watching people watching that long form video. Or Paul, as you mentioned, a webinar, you know, if you have highlight reels where you've got quick hits of, you know, the real essence of the information and key points from that webinar, you know, and then when you post it and you have a link, you know, for a call to action for people to, they may not need to watch the entire webinar to say, you know what this is, this point alone is worth me making this investment in this solution. Jeff, let's come back to you. So you were talking earlier about something I think is a little bit related here. But you know, I wanted to kind of explore micro and nano influencers and how they're starting to drive bigger value, more value, I should say, than bigger influencers. Can you talk a little bit about that and why is that happening and how is that beneficial?

Jeff

Yeah. So in general, let's define that for our audience in case they're not tracking influencers or thinking about working with influencers. An influencer is somebody who has decided that they want to publish content and make a name for themselves. And they're typically in a specific content area like, you know, travel or cars or fashion or whatever, food and, or location and, and they're gonna start becoming an authority really on that. They're gonna start getting a lot of interest. And I think, Ken. Yeah, that's how you find your Realtor. Right. Your realtor is essentially an influencer. We have, we've had him skip on the, on the podcast a few sessions back.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

So somebody who says, look, I want to spend the time and energy to put out a lot of information, a lot of content about a certain topic, then starts to build an audience. So they're building an audience of their own. And then the goal then is as the business, if you can find the right influencer to tap into it now, you can just grow your audience. All of a sudden, an influencer mention can mean, you know, 5,000, 10,000, 100,000, 3 million people. I mean, get Taylor Swift to mention your product, you can probably retire, you know, so that's, that's the goal now is go out and figure out what influencers are also aligning with the audience that I would like to attract and then get their attention. Unfortunately, some of the bigger influencers now getting their attention means writing them a check. I did a consult for an organic skincare products line, great company, great products, small batch, locally produced. And they had an influencer mention them. This is four or five years ago. And their sales in the short term, like over a 1/4 period, basically doubled. But then it tailed off again because the influencer wave had passed. They had some boost, but not everyone stuck around. So then they were like, well, how do we get more influencers? And they started digging into it. And while the influencers have figured out if they've got a big audience, charge a lot to tap into that. So it became a pay per play situation. However, there are a lot of influencers who are starting out that are small micro influencers, you know, in the thousands, 10,000, maybe up to 100,000 followers. Nano influencers, you know, up to maybe, you know, 5,000, 10,000. Yeah, they're smaller audiences, but they want to grow their business too. You almost approach it like a joint venture, right? They want to grow their audience so you get exposure. If you can go to them, say, look, I want to come on your channel. I want you to mention me on social media. Let's do a joint venture. I'll provide some products, send you a sweatshirt that says Burkhart, whatever the gimme is, to the influencer. And in return, can you talk about it? Can you give me his mention? And I'll let all of my constituents know that I was featured on your channel. And you'll get more visibility and I'll get more visibility. So one minute it falls into that joint venture realm almost. Those people are starting out and they're trying to build their channel so that they can monetize it. So you can probably have a lot better chance of connecting with them and getting something done through them than you would going to a big influencer. Not, not a better, a better chance for doing it low cost is what I'm trying to say. You go to a big influencer, it's pay per play. You go to a smaller influencer, you can get the exposure for helping them get exposure and grow their channel. They still have viable audiences, they still have a following that conjures a lot of trust and a lot of authenticity among their people. And especially if you're looking for a younger demographic for your ideal clients, then the influencers makes a lot more sense. Influencers, some of them probably make sense for boomers, but if you're looking at Gen Z, millennials, Gen Z, it's probably heavily influencer dominated in terms of what they do on some of the social channels. So instead of looking for one big influencer that you got to write a big check for and, you know, putting all the eggs in one basket, look for those nano or micro influencers that you can partner with and help them grow together and then do some campaigns, go out and see, see what you can do. You don't have to spend a ton of money. You might be giving them some product, you might spend a little bit of money, but you can spread that around and do a lot more nano and micro influencer campaigns than you could looking for that silver bullet with the mega influencers that are all about racking up, you know, big, big checks from their channels.

Ken

I think the other thing I like about the micro and nano influencers is there's a, there's a, an additional level of personalization. I mean, those folks are much more likely to have personal relationships with many of the people that are their followers. Not all of them. I mean, obviously thousand followers, that's not going to be possible. But you know, it's the authenticity, it's the craving, you know, as we're rushing into this world that we, that everybody seems to fear with AI about being impersonal, robotic and all that stuff. This is a great way to still bring back the human element.

Jeff

Yeah. You know, when it goes to the third party credibility too. You know, when you talk about reviews and all the things, having other people talking about your product means more than you talking about your product.

Ken

Social proof. Yeah, absolutely.

Paul

Well. And you know something else with the smaller influencers, I mean, I've never really been influenced by the influencers, but if I know someone's getting paid to mention a product or a brand, that kind of takes the authenticity out of it for me, it's like, of course they're going to mention it. They're getting they're getting paid $10,000 to mention it, you know, whatever.

Jeff

Like, like, what did George Foreman really know about girls?

Paul

He knew we got paid to talk about them.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

You know that I, I recently did a presentation at my BNI talking about how we can as, as businesses collaborate on social media more. And one of the things that I talked about was really all about it's the same concept as micro influencers, where if you collaborate with another professional in your area that might be like a strategic partner in some way, like a, a mortgage broker combines with a real estate agent or a family lawyer, real estate lawyer or something like that, where you can actually create content where you're, you're just almost like you would with a micro influencer, but you're actually doing it in a much more natural way. You're trying to inform and educate people, which is kind of what micro influencers do a lot of the times where they're trying to educate people about your product, but they're obviously trying to sell it because it's beneficial to them as well. Where, so I think people should think too about leveraging just collaboration with other professionals where you can, you know, potentially get a lot more exposure because of your, your, your unified social channels.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. Ian, I think this kind of leads into the subject I want to ask you about a little bit, and it's one that we don't really talk about a whole lot, but that's the role of E commerce and social commerce. So what role is social commerce having on the future of online shopping?

Ian

Yeah, I mean, it's huge. And it all, it all relates back to how every single platform wants to own the personal experience of the people, but also own where the money flows. Right. So advertising, for instance. Right. Meta wants to own it, Google wants to own it, TikTok wants to own it. But in the same vein, they want to also own the shopping experience. And so pretty much with every single social channel, you've got TikTok shops, you've got Instagram checkouts, you've got Facebook, Facebook shops, Pinterest product pins, YouTube shopping integrations like, and a lot of these even integrate with platforms like Shopify now, which is fantastic. But it's the, the beauty of this system or, or these social commerce sites or social commerce experience experiences is that first of all, it creates a very fast purchase decision, right? You, you've just reduced all barriers to purchasing because they see something, they see, you know, a photo of somebody wearing a shirt, they click on the photo, it opens up the actual purchase page. For that shirt. It asks them what size they want, it asks them for their information and their credit card information, or it already has that information a lot of times because they've purchased something else. They click, click, buy, boom. It's done. Like, you can't get a faster purchase than that. You don't even have time. It's almost like you're reducing the thoughtful approach to buying things in some ways, which is dangerous for the consumer. But for businesses, it's getting your products and services because you can do this with some services too, but it's getting your products and services out in front of people in their natural habitats, of the social networks that they prefer to be in. And so it's just a fantastic way to get out there. And it's growing, right? It's just a growing area of commerce that I think every business needs to be aware of and test it out, try it out, dabble, do a pilot program, try to sell something through there and see what happens.

Ken

Yeah. It's interesting because affluency is actually part of the reptilian brain because it's about joining the right social group. You want to keep moving up in the right social group because as you do, there are implied benefits, connections, things like that that help deal with the fundamental needs of humans. Safety, security and whatnot. It doesn't sound like it would be. It sounds like getting that higher level, like a Rolex or a Lamborghini. Seems like it would be something that is not really reptilian, but it very much is. And so if you can kind of shortwire that and eliminate the obstacles, which is what I think social commerce has become really effective at doing, it can be incredibly powerful.

Ian

Yeah. And going back to what Jeff just shared, right? If you, if you combine the power of that of social commerce with the power of micro influencers, bam. Like, it's such a winning combination because it's all about, you know, how do you. Everything about, you know, E commerce and marketing is about how do I connect with the people that want my product or service at the time when they want it. And right there, like, social commerce can be so powerful because if, if somebody, you know, a lot of very popular stuff, especially with teens or young adults, relates to, you know, videos about products. Like, you know, a person doing a makeup tutorial or doing a review on a particular type of, you know, product, and then if you can buy it straight from that tutorial.

Jeff

Wow.

Ian

Like, that's pretty powerful because they've already spent, you know, some time watching the video and being convinced by it. And now they're ready to buy it. They don't have to go off site.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah.

Ken

Paul, let's talk about another element too that I think is really kind of helping to move things forward and accelerate the pace, and that's the use of AR and VR, so augmented reality and virtual reality for immersive experiences that drive engagement. You know, I think this is, this is something that is really interesting, you know, when we talk about marketing. Marketing is ultimately about transformation. You know, in its simplest form. I've got this problem over here and this is the state that I want to get to over here. And marketing is the promise of how that transformation is going to happen to get you to that state. What better way than to be able to, to see it, literally see it, you know, through augmented reality and virtual reality. So, Paul, what do you think about that?

Paul

Yeah, it's very interesting. Of course, now, when I was younger, augmented reality meant something completely different.

Ian

But.

Ken

Well, still does to you, doesn't it?

Paul

But I think it's very niche. But I think that being said, it can be very powerful because it, I think it's the younger generation that's going to be using those and especially like the gamers are going to be, are going to be using those kinds of things. So I think it can be a really good way to reach that audience. But I think it's a, it's a smaller audience and right now I think it's bigger companies that are really using this. That doesn't mean it won't, won't filter down into smaller businesses. I think it will eventually, but. But yeah, I mean, you can use AR filters on, on social channels like, you know, Instagram I believe has them. I'm not a big Instagram user because I'm not a big Facebook user either. But yeah, I think it's. Right now, I think it's very niche, but I think it's something you probably should be aware of because I think is that audience is going to get bigger. You probably don't have, you know, the 65 plus crowd using a lot of AR and VR, but the generations that are growing up with that, that's just gonna be the way they engage. So as this younger generation starts moving into the marketplace and buying products, it's probably something you're gonna have to. Have to start using.

Ken

Yeah, I would say though, that, you know, even though, you know, the older folks, you know, 60 plus or whatever, they may not directly use it themselves. Many of them will, but some of them won't. But the companies that they're buying from.

Paul

More and more are.

Ken

For example, if you're a painting contractor, I guarantee you the painting supply companies, Sherwin Williams, Bayer, you know, Pittsburgh Paints, they're all going to give you tools to help you, for color consultations, present an augmented reality of what the room is going to look like with that new paint color. So it is, you know, I think it's, there's, there's a lot of opportunity there, you know, so, you know, a local painter in, you know, any city, United States or Canada is not going to have that system that they've built themselves, most likely. Although now that AI is around, that's becoming more and more possible. But the companies that are their suppliers are going to have those capabilities and they're using those. I mean, yeah, because they have the.

Paul

Resources to do it. But like you said, if you're a local plumber, you're probably not going to have that. Or a local remodeler, you may not have that, but that doesn't mean it's not coming.

Jeff

Yeah, it's in some cases it's here or been here for a while. Earlier form what you talked about, Ken, the ability to, I know Sherwin Williams had a tool 15 years ago you could upload an image of a room and then use a paintbrush to change the color. And now you can just use your meta glasses or I don't know if that app exists, but just for sake of argument, use your AI augmented glasses that's projecting on the screen in front of you and wave your hand and boom. What you're seeing is something different. I know realtors, you talked about generational high end realty projects have been doing this for a few years where they will go out and visualize a mountain field overlooking the valley and the mountains in the distance below and boom, you use your cell phone and now you're seeing it through your phone and all of a sudden the house that you're thinking about building is sitting there. So yeah, those kinds of things are here. And it's only going to accelerate. It's only coming on strong virtual reality. You know, I'm mentioned earlier, one of my interests is in aviation. I'm a pilot. I fly flight simulators. And having the goggles on where you can be looking around and, and you know, the view is changing with you. It's incredibly immersive. It's like the night and day difference. It's like, you know, looking at a 2D image of a Rodin sculpture and then going up to a Rodin sculpture and walking around it. I mean it's, it just can't compare. And that technology is here, it's coming in immersive is, you know, is one of the keys and people are looking for, looking for something new and different. I think as a marketer that's one of the reasons it will stand out is if you're on the, the early edge of that it's something new and different. I think we've mentioned it before our friend that does the 3D pop up cards. I mean that, that is old in the sense of these things have been around forever but new in the sense of how you apply them to business. And again noticed because it's new and it difference. It gets noticed and it gets talked about. And those are two things you want in marketing.

Ken

Yeah. So we're running up on time. I'm going to skip a couple of questions here. Is there something I definitely want to get to? Let's see. Paul, let's have you talk about AI voice and chat assistance. What's going on there and why has that become so important?

Paul

This is something else where AI over the last year or so has just come on like a tidal wave. And it's because especially if you're a small business and you don't have someone to answer the phone or you know, you're out in the field or you only have one person, they can only answer one phone. They can only have one conversation at a time. And so an AI voice or, or AI chat assistance can, they can answer the phone, they can answer questions, they can book appointments and the AI chat can even go deeper into that. There's a lot more options. It's the AI chat is more powerful than AI voice, although AI Voices is catching up with that. But if you have three people call your office at one time and you only have one person in there, you just miss two calls and they're probably not going to leave a voicemail. Whereas a voice AI could answer that call. If someone goes to your website, they can interact with that, with that AI chat there. Some of them can even can take payments. And then you have things like Google, Amazon, Lex, you know, Manichat that they're being used to deliver 24. 7 support. Although they're not perfect. A lot of them have the option that hey, I want to talk to a person because you're not, you're not helping me. But it helps personalize things. It helps from a financial standpoint. It can save you money over say an answering service. And people aren't Leaving. We talked about this a couple podcasts ago. They're not leaving voicemails. They want an answer to their question. They, they want to book an appointment. And if an AI voice or a chatbot can, can do that, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you do that? And there's a statistic I think you put in here. The Gartner, by 2026 says that 70% of consumer interactions will evolve or involve AI tools in some way. And that's, that's a lot when you think about it.

Ken

Well, it is. You know, I mean, I think a lot of people get freaked out about the whole concept of AI voice because they think it's going to be one of those horrible robotic sounding phone tree systems that we've had to deal with for years where you get stuck in loops and you can't get out and you can't get to the, the right person and half the time it hangs up on you and all that. You know, it's, it's absolutely not that. And there are a lot of different scenarios. Like, you know, I know a lot of people pride themselves in having somebody who can answer the phone live. Look, personal human interaction is always, you know, likely to be better, but not always because, you know, that person may not be the greatest at answering the phone and being able to answer the questions or steer the conversation to get it to the right person. You can train AI to do that with the cumulative knowledge of the entire organization and it's consistent in its answer every time. And you can monitor it if it does go off the rails a little bit and it calls somebody, Douglas instead of Dave, you can go in and you can do a little tweak and fix that in a matter of minutes because you're getting transcripts for everybody every phone call. You can, you can have it. I mean, Paul, correct me if I'm wrong, but you can have it be your primary phone system. You can have it be a backup. So if somebody calls one number and your live human person is busy, the AI voice can pick up the other calls that are coming in so that you're not risking people not leaving a voicemail and moving on to your competitor. It reduces the cost substantially. I mean, it can eliminate the need for an entire separate phone system. Possibly not necessarily, but it could. It can certainly be a lot cheaper, massively cheaper, and much higher quality you know, answering calls after hours than the traditional call services, which if you're not listening to those call recordings, you should, because they're bad nine times out of 10, they're not very good and they're not giving you the outcome that you want. So, you know, and then, and then, you know, AI chat is very complimentary because not everybody wants to pick up the phone and call and talk. Some people just want to go on a website. You know, do you have a gluten free menu? They don't want to look at the, you know, they see you have a chat, they're going to have a restaurant, they're going to type in, did you have a gluten free menu? Yes or no? Okay, great.

Jeff

You do.

Ken

Where's, how do I get to your location? Do you have free parking? Why would you want to have one of your restaurant employees answering those questions when you can't even hire enough people to run your restaurant in the first place? I mean, people need to get over their fear of AI voice in particular because it's just a far superior solution. It doesn't replace and eliminate the need for human conversations. It just makes sure that those happen in a much more timely and efficient and cost effective manner, in my opinion.

Paul

Yeah, people used to freak out over email too, because it's. Why would I email someone when I can call them? But yeah, and it can also be set up to answer after hours. And like you were talking about the answering service or call service, whatever you want to call it, they, they're working with multiple businesses, multiple industries. So pretty much what they're saying is, well, they're closed right now. Let me get, take your information and I can get back to you tomorrow, you know, or someone can get back to you tomorrow. Whereas that AI voice or AI chat that can be trained specifically for your business so that if someone asks a question, it can get them an answer, it can collect their information. And like I said, they can. Not all businesses are in a position to have the customer self booked, but there's, there's ways around that too. But it can do all those things that an answering service can't do.

Ken

Yeah. Ian, I want to come over to you. I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curve, but I want to ask a question that originally set up for Paul and that is how is AI changing paid media optimization and ad performance? Because I know you deal a lot with, you know, managing paid ads for your clients and you see the repercussions of this stuff quite a bit. Can you talk about that?

Ian

Yeah, it's. So we can look at this from a few different ways. We can talk about the integration of AI right in the Ad platforms like Meta has it, Google's had it for a while with performance max campaigns and stuff like that. You know, I'll probably be briefer than I need to be and Paul, jump in. Jeff, jump in, can jump in. But the, the thing I would say is that AI, the built in AI with the platforms is first of all always suspect by the marketers because you're relinquishing control of almost everything, all of the different levers you have at your disposal to let the platform spend your money or your clients money the way it thinks it, like it should. Right. And so the way it's presented to you as the business is that this is going to provide you higher ROI and reduce costs and spend. The fact is, is that all of the platforms are built to spend all your money that you allow it to spend as fast as possible. Sometimes it'll spread it out if you tell it to, but it suggests ways to spend more. Yes, and, and oftentimes this is from my experience, especially in Google Ads, oftentimes it will suggest ways that are actually bad ways. It's getting better, right? It's, it's. They, Google is learning over time how to do this, but they're also making it slicker in that now they'll send you an email and say hey, there's some optimization opportunities on your ad account which you as the marketing agency will receive. But oftentimes the clients will receive this email as well. And don't click the, you know, I forget what the actual terminology is on the button but like learn about these optimizations or something like that or optimize now but what it's actually doing. And once you go to the page, Google will say you are putting into place automatic optimizations that of course you can change at a later, later date. But you're basically saying any of my recommended optimizations in the future we will automatically put into place without you even seeing them. And I'm like this is bad. So there, there's good AI stuff. Some of it I would say use cautiously and, and do it with knowledge like you know, you have to know about the ad platforms to really understand how to get the most out of them. The second part of my answer to that Ken, is in relation to how different platforms, especially ad management platforms that are outside of the, the ad platforms themselves can help you enormously get more out of your ad spend because they understand you're actually paying those platforms to say, you know, help me optimize my ad campaigns to reduce cost per clicks, get broader return on investment from my ad spend. And that's what those tools are designed to do. And so we see, you know, pretty rapid innovations on both of these sides. But again, I just, you know, I would caution people, don't relinquish all control of your ad spend to the platforms because that just seems like a ridiculously bad thing to do. And again, Jeff in the past has talked about the mushy middle where AI kind of creates this level of mediocrity amongst you and your competitors. And I think in the ad side that's a prime example of like, okay, if you're horrible at ad campaigns, maybe giving Google control of your, of your ad spend might work for a little while but you'll get to the point where like you just won't be able to out compete your competition.

Paul

Yeah, Google is taking more and more control away and their answer to everything is spend more money.

Jeff

You know, there's another consideration too which is the AI is only as good as the data it's drawing from and the context you give it to constrain how it operates. And the best example I can give of that is if you let Google look at your website landing page and generate an ad to drive traffic there, but your website landing page sucks. It's going to drive questionable traffic to a landing page that probably isn't converting and charge you for it. So I think we have this part where the AI tools, we talked about this earlier on how we're moving toward agentic but this point right now where the AI tools are very point focused. The ads tool is good with the ads. The video tool is good with the video, the copywriter is good with copywriting. But it's all of the things working together. And this is still the human ad, the business experience, the, the business positioning, the strategy, the unique value, the experience of whoever's driving all those tools to make it all work.

Ian

Yeah, the one, the one thing I would say too, and this is almost never done in Google Ads or any ad platform at kind of the starter rudimentary level of advertising, digital advertising. But, but if you can do this, you will start to see better results from the, the built in AIs. And that's connecting the, the value of a sale within the platform. But if you don't do it properly, right, like if you set, you know, here's, here's what my cost per click is, I'm going to set a ceiling to it. And this is what my rough value of a sale is. If you don't do it properly, you're actually feeding it really bad information that it will make decisions on in inappropriate ways. So you have to be really smart with how you, you know, interact with these systems.

Ken

I think one thing that's really important to share too with our audience is that these AI driven elements in these ad platforms, as you said Jeff, they crave data, right. So they're actually driving and forcing businesses to spend more money to get the same level of results. Plus, the overall cost of ad spend has gone way up. It's probably doubled or tripled, many cases even worse since COVID over the last four to five years. And so the reality of being able to run a $500 Google Ad campaign, even if it was targeted to a single zip code, is really becoming an obsolete way of thinking. It's very, very difficult to do that and get any substantial results with these ad platforms. I mean, the recommended rule of thumb for most marketing experts that I talk with for Facebook ads, for example, is you need to budget $40 a day. Now that doesn't mean you're going to spend it, but you need to be prepared to spend $40 a day because Meta's algorithm is going and its AI is going to be able to optimize the delivery of your ads and it wants to deliver it to people who it thinks has the most interest in what your ad is about. And so targeting on those platforms has become less and less important because this is all driven by TikTok, because TikTok has this virality element that other platforms have been craving and so they're building in TikTok like features that largely are triggered by interest and attention based kinds of things instead of pure demographics and targeting that historically was available through some of these other platforms. So just keep in mind, advertising is way more expensive than it ever has been and you need to be prepared to spend a substantial chunk or you're not going to get enough data to make good decisions to keep investing. It may be unnecessary evil to do for a short period of time to kind of boost some initial sales. But you know, if you can't continue to invest deeply in ad campaigns, you know, thousand, two thousand plus a month, you know, you might want to look at some alternative channels.

Jeff

Yeah, even that depends a lot on your target keywords. Right. If you're a personal injury attorney, good luck. But you know, their, their value of a client is much higher too, but.

Ian

Or you're heading into geography, right?

Ken

Yeah, yeah.

Jeff

I think the notion, the, the days of the test, the waters with $300 is over.

Ken

Yeah. So Jeff, Last question that I'm going to ask today is about conversational marketing. Talking a little bit about what that is, why is it so important? And it kind of follows on with, you know, many of the things we've already discussed today. But I think it's going to be a good way to kind of wrap up this episode as well.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah. So again, conversational marketing is just really, in my mind it's plugging into, at a, at a deeper level with your ideal prospect, your ideal client in a, in a conversational manner. It's not lecturing, it's not let me tell you everything you need to know and then you'll obviously want to choose, choose to do business with us. It's plugging them at a very real, very meaningful, authentic, deeper emotional level. Now there are tools, as we've talked about, that you can use to do that more personally and start at least leading in that direction more than the phone response tree or the scripted chat. Pick one of these three things you want to know about Bubble on the website, but it's, it's getting into the, the notion of, of really getting into your clients heads and helping them get the answers they're seeking either directly through how you're positioning, how you're talking or through using the automated tools. So it can be AI driven chat, it can be text messaging, it can be, you know, social media, personalized emails, all of these things can come into play there. But you know, the ideas that it needs to be very easy to use from the user's point of view, very natural. It can lead to immediate engagement, it needs to respond quickly and not just as Paul was saying. You know, even a phone answering service can say, oh gee thanks, we can't help you, somebody will call you back tomorrow. No, it needs to be more again conversational on the spot, engaging in drawing people down that funnel. If you do it right, you can use the technology to kind of pre qualify to again make an efficiency force multiplier so that by the time it gets to a human, the person is in a better space because they know more, they know what to expect and the person it's getting to has a warmer lead so they're kind of prepped for it. So really you're combining these ways of doing personalization, the way of making it more conversational, the way of making it more authentic in using automation to augment where you can and then get it to a human when it makes sense. And again, it's about being more genuine, more authentic and more engaging in my view.

Ken

So with that, I mean, we covered a lot of space today and appreciate you guys, insights and knowledge that you shared with everybody. Ian, do you want to take us out?

Paul

Sure.

Ian

Thanks, everyone, everybody, for joining us today and for engaging with us in this conversation. And thank you, Ken, Jeff, Paul, and Ian, for all of your amazing thoughts. And as we always say, you know, if you like what you hear, share it with other people. And punch that subscribe button. Punch it. Yeah, hit it. And be sure to check out more of our podcasts for tips, tools, tricks, resources, and all that good stuff. So until next week, folks, keep calm and mark it on. Bye for now.