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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent (00:02.882)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today have Jimi Gibson. He is the vice president at Thrive Agency. Jimi, go ahead, do a much better introduction than I've just done. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (00:13.601)
Yeah
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (00:17.449)
Yeah, sure. Glad to be here, Brent. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so Thrive Agency, we're a full service digital marketing agency. Been around for 20 years, which is kind of rare in the digital marketing space. I've been with the agency for five years, and I think I've had five different roles. I started leading their strategy department and then moved into operations of all the teams that do all the work.
And now I'm in a role where I get to go out and have great conversations with you Brent and talk about the lessons that we've learned. And maybe those can help some other folks who are struggling or want some insight into some secrets or tricks of the trade. And then you ask about a passion. I would say I use the word tricks of the trade because I was a former professional magician. still do magic shows and it informs kind of the way I see marketing and connecting with an audience and presenting.
a message in a way that captivates and helps them convert. So I live in Charleston, South Carolina, and we're having some pretty hot weather right now, but hey, that's what we signed up for. So we love to go to the beach and hang out outside and yeah, so thanks for having me.
Brent (01:27.98)
Wow, professional musician, magician, not musician. Maybe both. That's fantastic. Maybe we should, we'll have another whole content topic just about being a musician because I think it's super cool. So Jimi, though, before we get started, you have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke and all you do is give me a rating eight through 13. So here we go. A bus station is where buses stop. A train station is where
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (01:40.701)
yeah.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (01:51.147)
Okay.
Brent (01:57.614)
train stop. On my desk, I have a workstation.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (02:03.531)
but don't bump. I like that one. I'm gonna go for a 12.2.
Brent (02:10.03)
All right, 12 point, I love the granularity. That shows that you're doing some analytics in your marketing.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (02:16.682)
there's an algorithm involved. Yes.
Brent (02:18.72)
Yes, good. right. All right. So we we talked about some topics in the green room. One of the things you talked about was kind of a holistic approach to marketing. I think a lot of and specifically maybe around e-commerce, a lot of people talk about having multiple agencies that cover multiple things, especially when you have an e-commerce store. So kind of give us the approach that you have towards e-commerce marketing.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (02:47.711)
Yeah, so I've been in the agency world most of my career. I did have a couple of stints at an e-commerce brand that was all online. Fascinated with how that business operates, very successful high-end leather goods brands. And when I came to Thrive, I was also fascinated with the variety of clients. And the approach that we take, and it's kind of interesting because we have folks that
are desperate to get on a platform like Amazon or Walmart or, you know, some of the other offerings. And then we have other clients who are desperate to get off of those platforms for whatever reason. There's probably for every client, there's a different reason. And I'm sure your listeners are filling in the blanks there. But what we have really been able to niche down as far as e-commerce and you know, I would say it's not
a huge portion of our business because we are full service, but what we see and how we approach it is this multifaceted come at it from all angles, right? And so we have writers on staff, we have designers on staff, we have photography, we have video. Obviously we have folks that are subject matter experts and professionals within the various platforms. And then we also have...
Organic social and paid social. have email marketing. And so when you start to look at how do you drive traffic to your store, wherever that resides, how do you keep those customers engaged? How do you get repeat business? How do you address abandoned cart? How do you address user generated content? What is the approach that you would take for organic social versus paid social? I think when you look at it from that perspective,
It can get confusing to a shop owner to know exactly what mix of which is going to be best. And I would say we don't have any cookie cutter approaches. We talk with that business owner. say, Hey, what are your goals? Whether it's on platform or on your own website. you know, if it's off a platform, are you a WordPress site? Are you a Shopify site? What specifically, do you like about your site? Do we have to re-engineer some things? and I would say there are.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (05:08.385)
probably three indicators from the market that let us know whether a brand is gonna be successful in their approach or not. So yeah, I would say that's a big overview and happy to dig in on any of those points that you'd like to.
Brent (05:25.58)
I know one of the big things nowadays is multi-channel, I guess, omni-channel, multi-channel, however you want to look at it. the idea of trying to market to all those channels has become even more important. So do you help clients who now have suddenly discovered that they have a splintered channel vision where they're Amazon and they're direct, they're TikTok, they're Instagram, they have all kinds of different channels that they're
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (05:31.049)
Right.
Brent (05:55.47)
pushing down, and they also need to keep their brand straight and their advertising cohesive. Do you help in that?
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (06:04.895)
Yeah. And I would say, again, that's an individual approach. And depending on how long somebody has been on the platform, you know, we've had some folks that immediately wanted to leave Amazon. And we look at their sales history, we look at the traction that they have, and we go, that wouldn't be such a good business move at this point, I think we need to have a bridge approach where we build up this other revenue stream. You know, one of the ones that you mentioned, whether it's on other platform, tick tock, YouTube shopping.
their own website and then have a specific plan and know what are your cost? You know, what is the cost of goods? Are you manufacturing? Are you basically brokering? There's some of this affiliate work that you're doing and then put together a pretty comprehensive strategy for every client that comes in the door. We look at 175 data points and then we look at how well they're doing in a particular area and so
you know, when you start to mention social, if somebody has been on platform for a while, they probably don't have a huge social following. And then to expect somebody to be able to immediately convert that into sales is not a good business decision. You know, I would say the things that we look at is how frictionless is your process. Consumers are very impatient right now. They want to make sure that
from discovery of your product through checkout is seamless. And so it could be, you know, we're digging into the mechanics of their shopping cart. And what is the technology behind that? Is there a particular type of consumer more spur of the moment is a low ticket offer that can be an in app purchase. We look at that. Are they using video? Video is the new storefront, right? And so many of these
in app purchases rely on the video experience because there's a lot of emotion. There's people, you can see them using the product, those types of things. And then, you know, how do you stay ahead of the curve with all of this AI stuff and trying to consult with clients on not chasing the next bright, shiny object to make sure that something has baked long enough? You know, Instagram tried their in-app shopping, didn't go so well. And so
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (08:30.165)
Just big, we like to have business discussions and those vary depending on the needs of the company. know, again, are you, do you have a distribution channel that is gonna change with this new approach?
Brent (08:48.258)
I know you just brought up AI. And one of the things that I wrote about recently was just agentic commerce, where you have an agent coming out. Last year, I was convinced that humans needed to write for humans. And then I learned this spring that, no, maybe we don't have to write for humans. We need to write for robots. How is that changing the marketing landscape when we suddenly have another type of entity that's going to purchase on somebody's behalf?
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (09:16.949)
Yeah. So I think there, we're all exploring this together. We don't know where this is going to end up. I would say the more you can educate yourself about exactly what those agents are looking for and to make sure that whatever site or platform that you're on has the ability to make that a smooth experience. just talked about frictionless. We talked about product descriptions. We talked about, you know,
pricing comparisons, all those types of things. I think it's just going to allow people, know, I have a friend who's had a shark tank podcast for quite some time. And one of the typical things that the sharks bring up is, you know your numbers? And so as long as you know your numbers, and you are you competing on price? Are you the only person in the game? How can you create an experience for these agents to be able to recognize what you're selling?
And whether it should be something that they put in their little robot pockets and take back to the person who initiated that search or that assignment is vitally important. We're seeing the same things happen related to SEO. And it's not so much going to be about your number one ranking. It's going to be about some other criteria that, yeah, we can guess what that is. We can reverse engineer. have access to seeing some data related to that, but
I would say now more than ever, we need to self-educate and make sure we rely on experts like yourself to be able to guide us in a direction that's going to be smart.
Brent (10:56.506)
From a content site, I hear a lot from clients that say they don't need marketing agencies anymore because ChatGPT will do everything for them. And I often think about just scale. Like if you had one person who could do your all your business, or do you really want to give your whole business to that one person, which effectively, even if you build out agents, you're kind of doing that. What do you tell people that they need to have some original content?
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (11:20.351)
Right.
Brent (11:24.856)
don't just go to chat GPT for your original content, because it's actually not original.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (11:30.005)
Yeah. So we have this conversation quite a bit because we will get into a discussion about writing product descriptions, product titles, website development, and they say exactly what you just said. No, we we've got that handled. And when it comes back, it's very obvious that it's chat GPT or some other large language model that's creating that. And you're right. Going back to my background as a magician, I would call
And we'll just use chat GPT as an example, probably one that most people are familiar with. It's a really bad mind reader, and it's a very nice, really bad mind reader. It has a lot of information, and it's trying to predict based on what you put into it, what it should give you back as a response. And obviously, the more information you give it on the front end, the better it comes out on the other end. But it's also very polite. It's very nice. It's not going to be
polarizing in the way that it talks about things, it's going to not talk about the struggles and the scars that you got in starting this business, it's not going to have the history of, you know, if you have a product that was inspired by somebody in your family, your grandfather's story, those are the textural things that are very emotional that connect people and connect them in a sticky way to your brand, and they'll choose your brand over somebody else.
You know, obviously we have product reviews and they're extremely important, especially in e-commerce, but the tone of language, the customer stories, the testimonials, those types of things. You can't turn that over to a robot because it's, it's just going to fall flat. And when you have everybody else thinking that's the easy button, if you don't think it's the easy button and you actually spend some time making it unique to yourself, you're going to stand out. So
Not only is this a great warning for people who are relying on this, but it's also a huge opportunity for people who say, no, I'm going to use it for what it's good at, but I'm not going to let it take over the personality of my brand.
Brent (13:41.326)
Yeah, I had a, I've been doing research on this subject about humans versus AI or humans and AI. And I just recently, uh, talked to a person who said that, yeah, they've switched to chat GPT and in the, in the context of the chat, does a great job. It gets his voice exactly blah, blah. And then all of a sudden he runs out of context, which people don't always understand what that means, but then he restarts completely over again and retraining it.
And I often think about that idea that, this is fantastic in the moment, but what is it going to be like in a month? And everybody was around, not everybody, but people, the people that are around that recognize the beginning of chat GPT know how far it's come and how much changes have happened. And that is still going to constantly happen. How do you address people that say that, but don't go down to the point of saying,
Yeah, actually, I gotta reset this every week.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (14:40.841)
Yeah. Well, again, what is your expectation of it performing the way that you want? I would say the benefit is if you are highly educated about whatever topic it is, you can recognize number one when it's hallucinating, because it will come back and be very convincing that it's giving you correct information. But it's not. If you're not experienced with your product line, the measurements, the various components or features,
it's just going to fill in the blanks because it wants to give you a response. And so I would say approach it with caution. Realize that sometimes doing it at this point, and of course, I'm not a futurist, I don't know what's going to happen in the next year, because the development has been exponential over even the last six months. But having to go back and redo things, check things, verify things can actually get you in a loop that
takes more time than if you just started to do 80 % of it yourself, used it for proofing, used it for comparing versions of things. There are a number of things that you can have it do in the back end. mean, let's be honest, a lot of these platforms that folks are optimizing on, especially, you know, if we talk about Amazon, their ad platforms have been using AI for years to help figure out the best bidding structure, pricing, all of those things.
but
Do a test case, select a portion of the business that you do, try to do it all AI, try to do it the normal way, figure out how many times you have to hit the reset button and understand where its benefits are and where it's just sort of, you're on a merry-go-round and you get frustrated.
Brent (16:32.012)
Yeah, we don't have time to get into people getting lazy and just autopilot publishing content. But I think the last subject that I wanted to kind of dive in on is the AI chat bots that happen on websites that partners or agencies would help clients implement. And now these bots have become, let's call it quote unquote smarter. But just like in 20 or 10, 20 years ago, we ended up into loop.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (16:37.267)
yeah.
Brent (17:01.524)
phone tree loops, or you just could never talk to an agent. We are now experiencing endless bot loops where the bot may engage with you and you would talk to them and then they would tell you that you have to do this and you do it and it goes back in a loop. And I am a firm believer that you lose people because of that and you'd be better off not even having a chat. What's your opinion on something like that?
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (17:27.573)
Yeah, we really have smart consumers now and they're able to recognize what's real and what's not real. was two examples. I was speaking with a client the other day where their team had actually cloned the owner's voice to include in voice mail messages. And I'm as curious as the next person who is interested in AI. So I actually cloned my voice. I
create an avatar of myself using some of the higher end tools. And yeah, it's okay, but it's very, again, robotic, not smooth. The voice sort of sounds like me, but doesn't. And if you're trying to pass that off as the owner, they're going to be able to sniff that out, right? Another client has basically a financial tech app that is going to help people and they've loaded into this database a lot of financial information.
to help you with financial planning. And they said, try it out, we're proud of it. And so in my brain, I'm go, I'm gonna try to break it. And I asked it some questions that just like you said, it couldn't answer, it gave me a placated response. And so I would say, you've got to have a pretty smart team, you've got to have folks putting input in and see what comes back out.
And then talk to your consumers. You know, there's all sorts of ways to A-B test a website, have things come up for a certain group, have things come up for another group, and to be able to know whether it's increasing efficiency, whether there's frustration, if people engaged and then don't end up completing that purchase, all sorts of things. So I would say we're still in the early phases of this being, and also to build in some escape.
clause, if you will, in contract language, or escape route to be able to get to that live person. And sometimes it's better that you let people know they'll get you get back with them the next day instead of the risk of deteriorating your brand because once they get frustrated, they're not going to come back to your store.
Brent (19:40.622)
Yeah, I have an example that I spoke to somebody about there. They had a chat via SMS that would help reengage customers. And it turned out that this person chatted the entire weekend with the chat bot. the rep came in or their operations person came in in the morning on Monday and wondered why their
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (19:47.945)
Yeah.
Brent (20:07.02)
why there's so many charges for their SMS and literally they had more than 100 texts back and forth. And the chatbot went and talked about football. It talked about cooking. It kept wishing him a good day. And it was just an endless conversation that went on from a Friday night until a Sunday night. And finally the person said, I'm going to have to stop now. And that was the trigger for the bot to know that they need to.
not reply anymore. So I mean, I've heard of people asking for recipes from different bots and things like that. And I've in fact, I've done that before too. And I think you're right. People do. People are going to be way more savvy in terms of discovering or listening to that. And even when I asked somebody on LinkedIn, they'll ask me, are you a robot? Which I think is a great question. I think it should be, you could answer it. You could ask that all the time, because I think it'd be authentic. You might as well be authentic about it.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (20:50.751)
Yeah.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (20:58.721)
sure.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (21:06.057)
Yeah, I think that trend probably started with some of the outsourcing of customer service to maybe people who weren't as familiar with the geography of where that company was residing and people got a little bit of a tainted view of the company in that regard. And then now you're taking it to the next level with a robot who, you know, can't look out the window and tell you what the weather is to confirm that they're actually sitting in that office where
they're supposed to be quote sitting.
Brent (21:38.326)
Yeah, so true. Jimi, we have gone through this time very quickly. It's been a very enjoyable conversation. But as we close out, give you a get everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (21:53.117)
my goodness, a shameless plug about anything, I would like to give a shameless plug for people to go to my LinkedIn profile and just look at the content and give me some constructive criticism. I am wanting that because I, I believe it's a great place to share knowledge and connect with people. And yeah, just kind of roast my LinkedIn profile.
Jimi Gibson - Thrive Agency (22:28.757)
Thank you, Brent.