ERP103 - SMB Marketing and AI

If everybody's doing the same thing, you got to do something else. One way that you can kind of get around that system but still use your technical skills is I like to call it selling in your own backyard. That is focus hyper local. Not like I'm just going to advertise for my city like all of Metro Vancouver BC or something like that. You would be like, I'm just going to do Richmond. or I'm just going to do Hope. You know, like just this one area. Or I'm going to advertise, you know, a circle around the business park or the office building where my building is. You know, I'm going to do a 1 kilometer circle. and I'm going to focus all of my advertising money on that one circle. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. This episode is brought to you by Evolved Management training courses, a whole series of courses built specifically for your MSP training needs. There's a project management for MSP's course, an MSP service manager boot camp, MSP security fundamentals and an IT documentation done right course. Check out the full suite of courses at training.evolvedmt.com. or look for a link in the show notes. Welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. In this episode, I'm joined by my long-time friend and marketing expert Matt Rause. He's also the co-founder of Hook SEO and the author of Will AI take my job. Together, we delve into the world of small and medium business marketing and explore the fascinating role that artificial intelligence plays in this domain. From our personal experience in the industry to the essential strategies and tactics that maximize digital advertising ROI, we cover it all. We also reveal insights on leveraging AI tools to enhance SEO, advertising and content creation. So get ready to dive deep into the world of SMB marketing and AI as we uncover valuable tips and strategies for businesses of all sizes. Let's jump right in. Matt, welcome to the Evolved Radio podcast. Hi, thanks, Todd. Long time no see. Yeah, this is fantastic. We were just chatting before we got recording. I sort of figured out that Matt is probably one of my my oldest friends that I still talk to that is not family. So we did some some roll back the time machine and figured out like we've known each other probably since 1996, which feels like a long, long time ago. It is. Always awesome to to connect with you, Matt. I really wanted to have you on because I guess part of the reason I was thinking about how long we've known each other is you're someone that I've always recognized as being very keen and conscious about how you make money online. Like even when we when we met, when we were much younger and, you know, cabling lands in our office to to run land parties and play games and stuff like that. You were always very interested in and just sort of hustles and side projects on on how to make money online. which I think extends very naturally to what you do now, running a digital marketing agency, sort of this uh decades of collecting all of these tactics and strategies to to help others sort of leverage the internet for building a business. So, maybe uh just a bit of a lead in there if you want to give us a a sense of sort of your background and how you came to be a marketing master. Sure. I started my first online marketing, you know, let's quote company. It wasn't a registered business or anything, but the first time I got paid to do something on the internet was actually in 1996. Hey, there we go. And in 1996, a company asked me if I could make a website for them because they had heard of this whole internet thing. And they were like, everybody's sending us these, you know, CDs to get on AOL online and, you know, there's like you know, people starting to get on the internet through, you know, their bulletin board provider, their bulletin board service, if you remember the BBS days. You know, it was just becoming big. And they paid me $5 and a case of beer and I made their website. Humble beginnings, right? That is the humble beginning. And that was actually the third website that I had ever built and it was for a company that did large scale printing on vehicles like vehicle wraps for buses and motor homes and stuff like that. So quickly, like what was the feeling of that? Do you remember sort of like, aha, I can make money online? Like, like what was what was sort of your thought process as someone gave you five bucks in a case of beer? It was like, holy crap, I can use these 106 pieces of code that I know because that's all that was in HTML at the time. I can use these 106 lines of code and I can make money. I was like, this is a miracle, right? Like, nobody's done this before. And I mean, I thought nobody had done it before, right? You know, but uh yeah, and I mean, this is we're young then, right? I mean, I was at the time, I was like 24 years old. And, you know, working at the electronics shop, you know, hawking computers and car stereos. And, you know, trying to just sling boxes out the door for commission, right? I was like, there's this stuff that I could do on the side that makes money and it's so easy. Little did I know, it would continue to get more and more complicated every single year. Yeah, so that's that's probably a good lead into sort of more the modern marketing tactics. So, you know, early beginnings, how did that sort of transition to, you know, where you're at now with the marketing agency? Yeah, well, you know, after I had kind of run that as a side business kind of on and off periodically for years. And then because of my web design experience and some of the other experience I had with some of the kind of Microsoft Office products and the upcoming products like the predecessor to SharePoint, stuff like that. I was able to secure a job in Oregon at Intel as a contractor. And from there, I found a lot of businesses were looking to get online. So I was making websites and then search engine optimization started to become a thing, right? Now there was businesses competing for keywords. You wasn't just put your website on the internet, try to get it on, you know, Dmoz, Lycos and Yahoo directories. There was actual search engines now. And you had to try and build content to make the search engines recognize you. So then I started doing SEO work and this is kind of a lead up to when, you know, advertising online had started. So, when I was in the United States, I kind of worked back and forth between several companies. You could only spend usually 12 to 18 months at a contract at Intel or Nike. And they would make you take six months off. So you would flip back and forth. You go Intel, Nike, Intel, Nike, Intel, Nike, right? You just go back and forth every six months. But on the side, I was still doing this other work and I'm working for these huge marketing organizations, right? That have billions of dollars. And I was able to learn a lot, um, working in those until finally, uh, 2014, I went out 100% on my own and in a little after that, my current business partner, Scott Burson, he was doing an e-commerce company and doing payment processing for companies and I was doing SEO and advertising. We were both making websites. We worked together. If my, you know, my customer needed payment processing, they would go to him. His customer needed ads, they would come to me. And so in 2016, we merged our companies together. And that is our current company. It's Hook Digital marketing. Okay, cool. So, let's uh test a few of sort of my hypothesis here around digital marketing. I think most people would kind of be aware of uh Apple changed privacy policies and really crippled a lot of sort of pixel and cookie tracking for for people. And a lot of people sort of sense that this was the end of the gravy train for digital marketing and uh you know, you could just spin up a product and hyper target it to, you know, the thousand or 10,000 people that would actually be interested in this and and uh through the miracle of Facebook and Google advertising, it would just sort of find its way to those people and you could uh create a unicorn kind of overnight as long as you had a decent kind of viral product and some some targeted marketing. You kind of pushed back on this idea and said like, yes, it's made it harder, but a lot of this is still possible. Like you want to maybe sort of expand upon that idea a bit? Well, it's also kind of important to point out that when Apple in iOS 14 and they said we're going to stop allowing third-party cookie tracking. They didn't stop their own cookies. Even if they was Apple's cookies on other websites. So, I know everybody's like, oh, Apple's so great at privacy, but you know, maybe not not as good as we would like. Okay. Yeah. Google started doing some other blocking, then they backed it out and said, oh, we'll do it next year, we'll do it next year. They still haven't done it. So, you know, there's problems because attribution is the problem, right? Where did the money that I spent on ads and someone became a customer, how do I attribute that someone came to a customer with which ad, was which targeting, you know, that kind of thing. That's what gets blocked. So it's more of a blind approach to some extent right now? Well, it was, but it turns out there's a lot of ways to get around it. So, a good example would be and this is a good trick for you folks out there who are handling integrations for your customers. If your customers running Facebook, Instagram ads, right, WhatsApp ads, anything that goes through meta and their cookies are getting blocked, you can use a program like Zapier, uh Pavly Connect, anything like that to essentially take all the sales from the e-commerce store or from however your tracking system uses them, load them back in and call it an offline conversion, which is what Facebook uses for like if you have a physical location and you want to advertise stuff and somebody walks in and buys something like a car or something, you could put that information in as an offline conversion. You could set this up with Zapier to automatically every time somebody purchases something, send the data back to Facebook, works for Google too, by the way. And then Google can still track who it was and what the targeting was even without the third-party cookie. So you can still get the same tracking. Okay. So there's there's always, you know, some work arounds, some some hacks. That's awesome. It's a good little tactical tip. Um, so the other piece I wanted to and this is maybe partly related to the same idea of like gravy train is ended. You know, the the the market for the podcast, the people that are sort of listening tend to be in the IT space, running small to medium businesses on average and trying to appeal to a local market for sure, like they've got a an IT MSP company in Chicago or Vancouver or somewhere in Idaho, right? So scattered around and they're trying to service their local market, but also somewhat regional. And, you know, don't tend to be sophisticated sales people. There are certainly MSPs that are run by people that are non-technical and are sales people. But the majority of the industry, I think is is technical founders that, you know, don't have a lot of history or skills or on the sales side of the world. So they the idea of just sort of making cold calls and things like that is really unappealing. And they would prefer to be able to leverage their digital skill set to to be able to focus on on digital advertising. So, you know, just as as far as like a that scenario of a person running a small business, you know, kind of doing between, you know, a million dollars a year and uh $8 million a year on average kind of thing. What should they be focusing on as a strategies and tactics to sort of maximize their their best return for their digital advertising to get that that uh collection of their regional market? So you've got several strategies. I think the biggest problem is when you have an industry that is essentially filled with technical people, they want to make a technical solution to the problem. But so does everybody else. So every IT company that I have ever spoken to, which is probably hundreds over the years, wants to write SEO related content on their website, maybe run a few paper click ads and that's their lead generation system. Sounds about right. It's not effective because everyone else is doing exactly the same thing and, you know, there's only one number one spot at the top of the page, right? And even if you look at it, I like to look at it usually from kind of like the Olympic medal version, right? Once you get past, you know, gold, silver and bronze, there's not much, no one really cares what happens after that, right? The majority of all the business is going to go to the top three. And unless you're in a place small enough that your business is in the top three IT companies, you are never going to hit those top three spots. Right? Unless you are just like a miracle SEO worker or you have a really, really, really deep ad budget. Most people don't. Right? So, if everybody's doing the same thing, you got to do something else. One way that you can kind of get around that system but still use your technical skills is I like to call it selling in your own backyard. That is focus hyper local. Not like I'm just going to advertise for my city like all of Metro Vancouver BC or something like that. You would be like, I'm just going to do Richmond. or I'm just going to do Hope. You know, like just this one area. Or I'm going to advertise, you know, a circle around the business park or the office building where my building is. You know, I'm going to do a 1 kilometer circle. and I'm going to focus all of my advertising money on that one circle. This is interesting as as a a first tactic because this actually this marries up really well with what I often advise owners and new sales people from a physical sales. is like like figure out what companies you have as clients in like an industrial park and just physically walk to every other office there and drop off a card or a gift basket or something, right? So you're basically taking the same approach in a in a digital version of just fence off a very, very small region and pummel it with ad dollars, right? I think if especially if you're in an office building or something like that or you're in a, you know, like a industrial park kind of setting like you said, we tested this, actually. So we had a cell phone repair shop that had three locations. And in one location, we had someone walk around and go into every single store and just say, hey, I just wanted to say hi, we're over at number 12 kind of thing. You know, I just wanted to see who else is in here, you know, I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just want to say hi. And they're like, what do you do? Of course, you're like, oh, I fix cell phones. And they're like, oh, my phone's cracked, you know, can you look at it? You know, the same thing would happen with IT work, right? Oh, they're like, oh shit, I can never get my computer to work, you know, and you know, now you got a customer, right? You know, it might not be the best customer, but you you'll find someone eventually, right? And that's the idea of selling in your own backyard. The other thing that you want to do is I feel like people ignore the data that they already have and that's a big problem, which is going back and looking at all your past leads, every email that you've ever had, you know, uh asking about clients and things and services and stuff like that. Go back through them all and and try to reconnect with those people. And this happens all the time, right? People say, you run into somebody, you haven't talked to them for a year and, you know, you ask them what they've been doing and they're and they and they go, oh, what do you do? And you go, you know, we're we're into IT and we do help desk and and, you know, security and they're like, oh, I just hired a company that does that, right? I forgot that you do that. So, this happens especially in um, you know, any kind of relationship marketing business, real estate agents, insurance agents, all that kind of stuff. Same thing goes for IT. If they don't remember what you do, they can't hire you to do it. And even personally, like if you have personal social media that you use, you're on, you know, Twitter X or Facebook or Instagram or whatever it is, Reddit that you like to use, right? You kind of want to make sure people remember what you do. So it's not a bad idea every once in a while to throw out, you know, every couple months, be like, oh, I was at work, you know, at my IT company, yada yada yada, this happened. So sort of like soft selling on social media, hey? Yeah, you just want to throw it out there, right? Because you don't want to be the person who, you know, your cousin goes and and opens a business and hires some other company to do their security, you know, or their their IT security or something like that. So maybe an extension of that one is like a lot of people will, you know, they'll they'll say, well, maybe I should build a newsletter. I usually caution people I'm like, it's a lot more work than you're probably thinking it is, but you know, if so a lot of people will often utilize sort of content subscription services and then they'll repurpose that content and send it out to people. Is that a pretty effective strategy as well though? Like if you have kind of a list of people or you just condense a bunch of emails that you have, a lot of this is potentially customers you already have, but maybe it's people that you've talked to in the past and just happen to have their email address, kind of helps you be sort of front and center again in their in their mind. Is that is that helpful as well? It is helpful, but the problem is people think about the newsletter as one single entity. I am going to write this one size fits all newsletter for everyone and anything that is good for everyone is actually good for nobody, right? Because it's not specific to anyone. You should have a separate mailing list for existing customers than you have for potential customers. Because those two groups want two different things, right? So, if you have existing customers, you can say, you know, we're going to give you every month we're going to give you a cyber security tip that you can share with your staff. You know, not opening these attachments, fishing scams, this is what's coming out. This scam is going around, you know, something like that. You can you kind of want to theme it, right? Or, hey, there's a big update coming out like Microsoft co-pilot's coming out. Here's three tips on using Microsoft co-pilot for your word documents or something like that. Now, some of that content does transfer over to a potential audience. But I think with a potential audience, you're kind of giving people, you know, a tip or something and then also telling them, you know, what is a service that you have that solves an existing problem that those people have and how can they get more information about it? And that could be, you know, protection against cybercrime, it could be, you know, backup, it could be disaster recovery, you know, all those things that we all know about, but the average business owner doesn't think about on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. I guess another one to sort of wedge against that as well. Like I think it's fantastic advice. The other thing I typically suggest for people like if you're going to run a like an AdWords campaign or something, and the landing page should be something hyper specific, right? Like you don't want to be just out there saying, hey, you want some IT? I got some IT here. But if it's like, you know, converting to a VoIP based phone system or implementation of like a particular product or or or software package, right? Like again, sort of like it's not generalized landing page for for something. It's like you're advertising for a particular service or product that you use as a wedge to get the attention of the client and then you could potentially expand to to full scope services. Does that sort of resonate with what you've seen? Absolutely. So, you're going to find in the IT world that there are also companies who only do one specific thing who are advertising each specific thing. who are not an IT company, right? So, if you have a company that is a phone company, they're going to advertise their VoIP services, right? Even though they're not help desk or they're not security or they're not selling appliances or doing networking or whatever, right? So, I would make your ads specific to the problems that people have and the keywords specific to those problems. So if somebody's searching for how do I hook up an office network? Then that would be your keyword, right? How to hook up a network office or how to network my office, how to network my office computers, those should all be grouped together. And then your ad should be, need help networking your office, right? And so, and then when they click it, it should go to a page, networking your office made easy. Click the easy button, have somebody who knows what they're doing come do it for you kind of, right? You know, you want the information to be, we call it ad scent. Which means it smells the same from when they typed it in to when they get to the page. Right? Everything is consistent. I like that. That consistent ad scent all the way through gets them to the page and now this is the biggest problem with IT ads. And you've actually kind of nailed it here, but there's one kind of little twist, right? And that twist is that on a scale of, let's say it's 1 to 10, right? On a technical knowledge, you are a 10. And if you dumb it down 50%, you're at a five out of 10, and the most your customer knows is probably three out of 10. So you're using this language and they only understand this language. And this gap, that gap of knowledge is where you lose people. So you can't have them go, you know, even saying something like VoIP phone systems. Right. That is already beyond the average office person. Right. They may know what it is if they have one, right? But, you know, it's like if I talk to people about certain types of marketing, you know, or even certain types of social media. I say, oh, did you have you tried posting something on like stories or reels or shorts or, you know, and they're like, I don't even know what you're talking about at this point, right? They're just like, I put shit on the on the Facebook, you know. Yeah, on the Facebook, yeah. Right. You got to use the you got to have to use the language of your customer and you want to speak to the end result the customer wants. Right. They don't care about what type of cable you're going to use. They don't care about which devices it is. You know what they want? They want to download their file for client X from that computer to this computer fast and securely. Right. That's what they want. Yeah, so don't sell features, sell results. Sell results, sell the feeling that the person gets with the result. The emotion of the result. That's even more specific. I like that. That's right. So there's a good old example is, well, I mean, in the old days in like the 1950s and 60s in advertising, they would say, you know, if you want to sell a drill, you don't sell the drill, right? You sell the hole, right? People want, they want a hole on their wall, they don't want to buy a drill. Right. But if you really want to be modern with your advertising, you have to sell how good the person feels when someone tells them that their painting looks awesome that they hung up on the wall because of your drill. That's how you sell it. Yeah. Yeah, the other sort of old marketing uh uh sort of tactic I've heard is like uh you want to basically write at a sixth grade level or something like that, right? Like like to your point of like that knowledge gap. Yeah, it depends on your audience, right? I think if it's if it's corporate type stuff, you know, you could probably go like high school level, maybe even early college kind of thing, but Yeah, just the idea of like keeping it as simple as possible, not talking in your own language essentially, right? Right. Yeah. And you know what is brilliant for that is just put it into one of the AI systems, right? Your cloud or chat GPT or Bard or something, right? Give them the information that you want to say and say, can you rewrite this so a non-technical person would understand it and it'll go and then you can edit it as needed and there you go. Excellent. So, all right, perfect segue to the other half that we want to talk about here. So you, as I've mentioned sort of in conversations before with you that I I'm I'm amazed sort of like you being such a prolific author. Like you've how many books do you have now? Six. Six. Okay. Six and I co-authored another one, so six and a half, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, so uh got a a ton of great books, like very sort of actionable, tactical. And your your latest one is will AI take my job? Which I think, you know, tons of people in the technical industry use AI, they're fascinated with AI. Every product that they use is being is being uh sort of touted as something to do with AI, like so it is everywhere in the industry. And I've sort of mentioned this in a few of the emails that I've written that I predict sort of in that five to 10 year period. It's a little further out than I think maybe people think, but it's it will come fast and it will have serious disruptions to the current business model of IT. So you've written about this and, you know, the sort of the help desk and the customer service side of businesses is uh I think you said the first chapter because like it's the one that's probably first up on the chopping block here. So you want to dive into this a little bit? Yeah, it's one of the first industries that I cover in the book. And I go through, you know, it depends how you break it down, but roughly 30 industries in the book, you know, in 160 pages, so, you know, I I can't say a whole lot about each one. But offshore chat technical support is already starting to disappear. I know there's still a lot of it, but it's starting to disappear. One of the examples I used in the book was this company that they brought in an AI-based chatbot and they tested it for 30 days. And it reduced the wait time for people from 5 minutes to under 10 seconds to get an actual like start of response. It was more accurate. People said that they liked it better. It actually got a higher rating than the real people did. And it was able to solve like a large percentage. I think they said something like 78% of the increase that people had automatically. So it was able to look up their order, it's able to tell them where their shipping thing is, you know, it's able to give them an answer, how to fix the thing, you know, how do you put this together, whatever it is. So anyways, they reduced their technical staff by about 50% for the first round. And another 30 days later, they were able to reduce that down to about 10% of their original staff. And that happened back in like March to July of this year. So, in a three-month period, they reduced their staff 90%. Now, that company is a US company who had offshored their technical support. Yeah. Right? So who did they keep of the 100%? They only kept 10%. Well, who did they keep? They kept the best 10%, right? The ones who can solve the hardest problems, who can figure out the weirdest solutions that need to be figured out, the people who can, you know, hold somebody's hand and and be empathetic with them and all those kinds of things, right? Yeah. So, the people who do the things that the machine's not good at are the ones who get kept around and the people who are on text chat or like text-based or SMS chat kind of stuff, I I would look for a new job, right? Like, I mean, or get really, really good at your job real fast. Because it's coming for you. But like you said, you know, it doesn't all go away immediately because we have Uber in most cities, but we still have taxis. Yeah. Right? And why do we still have taxis? Well, because some people don't trust Uber. Maybe the taxis are doing a specific service, like they do rides for people who have certain types of disability equipment, right? So there's there's a lot of use cases where the AI is not going to be able to take over. But when it's a kind of cut and dry use case, like it just needs to know all the knowledge-based data and data and be trained on all the old calls, connect it up to the ordering system and the shipping system. And you know what would be great is if your IT company would set those things up. Right? Because now you got something, you can come in to a company and you can say, look, I can help you solve for AI. Here is a use case where you can save money and serve your customer better and I can give that to you. This is an interesting approach. Like I'm kind of I'm I'm maybe a bit shocked I've not thought of this, but like AI consulting for small business could be kind of a boon industry, I suppose, right? You want to know some crazy statistic that I just heard on a podcast a couple days ago? I was listening to um the Marketing AI Institute podcast from uh Cleveland. I went down to their I went to that um Macon, which is the marketing artificial intelligence conference. They said, I may not get the the statistics exactly right, but I believe what they had said was 86% of their surveys of staff, people who work at corporations said that they have no guidance and no training on artificial intelligence at their company. And 4% of companies surveyed had any kind of solution, like they've come up with a policy or they have started a training program or any of that kind of stuff. That means 96% of companies of large corporations who have all of the dollars have no solution right now for AI. They don't even have like they haven't even told their people if they can use GPT or not, you know. So that is a massive market. That's really interesting. Yeah, because like, I mean, maybe the AI will tell you how to implement it in your business, I suppose, but you know, the the near-term options that I think are are pretty wild. Like it definitely moves you more into sort of that that um that consultative capacity. And this is sort of what I've generally advised people on historically before AI is like the the grunt work, the service work, the password resets, the the how do I do this in Outlook type questions. Like all of that is commoditized. It's not really high value. But having that personal connection and that consultative approach of working with someone's business and helping them through some of these hurdles and and consulting with them on those problems. Like that stuff will be really hard to remove and in some cases people will just want to deal with a human to give them some guidance. So that consultative muscle is a is a really good one to keep around for sure. Yeah. Right. And if we think about just just for a couple seconds here, we just think. What is a company worried about when it comes to bringing artificial intelligence into their company? They're worried about their data. Who's getting my data, right? Are they're also worried about are my staff using the AI without my permission, right? Are they are they out giving away my customer data or my other information? Are they taking, you know, like as an example, are they taking an export of all of the order data that we had and sticking it into chat GPT4 data and analyzer and handing all of their data over to open AI in one shot. Right? So these are these are privacy problems, right? Now, the other thing is, is there any kind of training or anything like that for my staff to understand what they can and can't do with these tools? The other thing is, can I build a model in house that I can use to protect my data? And what does that require, right? Is it is it cloud-based or do I need infrastructure? Do I got to buy a eight cluster of A1, you know, a bunch of servers to get this whole thing up and running like about to A100s or something, right? Or like and once you get that running, who has access to it? And when who has access to it, what is it allowed to tell them and not tell them? What are they allowed to use it for, not allowed to use it for? And then which data is it trained on in the company? And then how do you prepare the company's data, right? Because the data needs to be able to get into the model and somebody has to work with the developer. And I can tell you after talking with hundreds of marketers and and managers and middle management people and stuff, they don't understand what the developers are talking about, right? You are that you're the bridge between these people, right? So, I mean, you're talking about data security, you're talking about servers, you're talking about cloud, you're talking about all the things that go around this and that's all help desk, that's all IT management. None of that is in anybody else's hands. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's interesting. Like you come into this sort of thinking like like all the jobs are going to go away, but as is always the case, like, no, it just means like these jobs are going away and there's sort of job creation that comes as a part of it. I like the expression AI contrary to some of your book, but uh uh the or at least the title, AI won't take your job, someone who knows how to use AI will take your job, right? Well, actually that is probably one of the biggest parts of the book is that somebody who is well-trained productively using AI is is going to take your job if you're in competition. But if you have a, let's say it's two small businesses, one of them is getting even a 10, 15% cumulative productivity boost from AI and the other is not, the one who is not is not going to be in business much longer. Right. Yeah, so I mean, I guess the takeaway is is start to leverage this stuff very early on because like it'll be a game changer. It'll either sink you or it'll create a competitive advantage if you're able to to wield it properly, I suppose, right? Absolutely. You know what? Let me give you an example. If I take a video like this one that we're we're shooting right now, okay? And I I take my video from my podcast. I take that, I use a tool called runway ML, which is an AI for video. I use that tool to transcribe the podcast. It does transcription with time codes, which is what you need to upload into YouTube. I use chat GPT to translate that into several languages. Usually I put it in English, French, and Spanish. So it translates all the closed captions for me. So I upload that all into YouTube. But I take my transcript and I put it into chat GPT4 and I have some prompts that I've developed to give it. What is the best SEO title for this and what is the description and what hashtags should I put in when I upload this into YouTube? All that is AI driven. I push that stuff into YouTube. I take it from YouTube, I put it in another AI tool, it's called Get Munch. Get Munch cuts 12 to 20 vertical videos out of this video. Automatically does the closed captioning, automatically puts the words at the bottom, puts the titling across it, automatically highlights the words as they're said. Also gives me a tweet, a title, a description, and hashtags for every single clip. Now, I've only done about 45 minutes of work at this point. Right. And I've already got my YouTube video in three languages, I've got transcripts, I've got my 12 to 20 vertical videos. And from the transcript, I say summarize this into three main points. Write me a blog article about each point. Write me two social media posts about each blog article. Now I've exploded this video into like 30, 40, 50 pieces of content. That used to take, well, I mean, we couldn't do it before. We didn't have enough staff. Right. Now, I'm doing all of that myself in about two to three hours. It's incredible. It is. So now imagine a marketing company next to me who's still doing it the old way and they have a team of writers and they're doing all this work, right? I can knock this out the door and charge my client, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month. They as for the same client, they have to charge 20 grand a month. The client's not going to stay with them. Right. The true power of leveraging AI, right? That's right. And I don't need to hire a bunch of more people to get all this stuff done. And the people I do have are spending their time on high-level work. They're like working on, you know, editing my book, my writer does editing for the most part and proof reading, comes up with ideas and stuff like that. She's not spending her time, you know, writing 40 different, you know, social media posts about chairs. Very cool. It's incredible. It really is. It's uh so yeah, I guess uh some key takeaways, right? I'll sort of roll back a couple of things here. So we talked about the the marketing angle, sell in your backyard, use your own data as a marketing strategy. Any others on on the marketing angle? You know, I know a lot of people have tried business networking in different ways. I think that one of the best business networking strategies is to just show up to like an event where the people who are going need your service, but other IT people generally don't go there. It's my favorite marketing strategy. Oh yeah, absolutely, right? Like, go to the dentist convention. Get a booth. It's going to cost you two grand to get a booth. You'll make that back on the first dentist who comes up and talks to you. Yeah, because everyone's going to be like, oh my god, you understand our business. Like, can I get your card? That's right. Go to the the accounting convention. I think a booth in Toronto, the booth was like 1,300 bucks. You're you're going to talk to 600 potential clients in two days. Yeah, way better than cold calling. Yeah, try and spend 1,300 on Google Ads and see how many clients you get. Right. Right? You'll be lucky if you get two. Yeah. Yeah, that's the key, I guess from a marketing angle, we'll tell people to stick around for the uh the the knowledge bomb at the end of uh the end of this interview, right? That's right. Yeah, and then the AI piece, I think is really fascinating. Like get get keen to it. You know, be cautious about sort of how you're leveraging it. I know people that are sort of loading client data into chat GPT or or some of their their ticket requests. And like that is not private information uh or or protected information. They have a private enterprise version. And your IT company should know what that is. Exactly. And what it entails. And you should also say, do we need to spend 40 grand a month or can we, I don't know how much it is honestly, but, you know, do we need to spend this massive amount of money on this? Or can I use an open source model like, can I run a 7 billion parameter llama open source model trained on the company's own data and, you know, let it loose on the staff, right? Yeah. Yeah, and then that lends exactly to, you know, like a sort of a bit of green space on AI consulting and helping people to understand sort of the mysteries of this and how they can leverage it for their business, you know, we're we're barely sort of breaking through on digital transformation for for uh customers in the industry. And I think like once that one starts to really pick up and become hyper competitive and that AI trend, I think will be probably right on its heels as uh the new marketing or uh new uh business opportunity from a consulting standpoint. So that's a great one. Absolutely. And you know, if there's there's one other kind of quick tip I could give on the marketing side that works for IT really well is uh a strategy I do we call it gifting. But it's just giving people stuff, right? And the trick with gifting is there's there's two ways you can do it. Either get something that's really nice that pretty much everybody wants. You know, like we're going to send a few bottles of wine and and some some sweets or something to the office and just send it to everybody kind of thing. If you have fewer clients, it's easier for you to personalize it to each person. An example of that. We have a defense attorney as as one of our clients and I sent them the 19 crimes wines, a set of each wine that has like, you know, the picture of a criminal or one of them has like Snoop Dog on the front and stuff like that. They just thought it was hilarious. Yeah. You know what happens? They remark about it. It is literally remarkable. Right. So they tell their friends about it and that's how you get referrals. Yeah. Yeah. Just take that extra 10 or 20 minutes to personalize something and the the dividends are huge. Yeah, that's a great one. And you keep your client longer. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, because they feel like you understand them and that you actually care about them as a person, right? Right. And it's even better if you do. Absolutely. You got to do it out of because you actually care. Yeah. That's right. All right, this has been fantastic, Matt. I really appreciate uh your time and your input. And uh we'll throw some show notes in for to link to your your book and your company as well. Any parting words of wisdom or asks of the audience? I would say get on the AI train right now, especially if you're in IT. It is I I I hate to use the euphemism of like the gold mine, right? And you're not the gold mine, you know, you're not mining for gold, you're not supplying the shovels. You want to be the railroad track that takes the shovels to the stores that they sell to the gold miners. I like it. You are the infrastructure that allows the AI to make the business profitable and if you're the one who puts that in place, that's really going to galvanize you in the eyes of your clients and that I mean if you are delivering huge productivity and huge value to your clients, they're just going to tell everybody they know and then you won't have to worry about marketing. Perfect. Awesome, Matt. Appreciate it. Thanks, Todd. Part of the MSP Radio Network.