Artificial intelligence might seem like complex technology that’s best suited for large businesses. But Robert Mitchell disagrees — he thinks small businesses have the most to gain from AI.
Robert is the Chief AI Officer at WSI World, a digital marketing agency network that equips small agencies with the tools to grow and thrive, including AI. He helps WSI franchise owners use AI to create new revenue streams — and he’s thrilled by the possibilities the tech presents for small businesses.
“I think this is an amazing opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses,” he says. “The nimble companies are the ones that are going to leapfrog on this. You can do more with less.”
On this episode of Be a Marketer, Robert and host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, talked about how small businesses and their marketers can get started with AI.
Meet Today’s Guest: Robert Mitchell of WSI World
☕ What he does: Robert is the Chief AI Officer at WSI World, a digital marketing agency network. After more than 20 years in franchise development, Robert dove into the world of AI. Today, he helps WSI serve as an AI consultancy for its franchise owners — and helps franchise owners become the de facto AI consultants for their clients.
💡 Key quote: “You’re already seen by your clients as the most knowledgeable on the technical aspects of marketing their business. It’s a very small leap from that to AI… all you need to be is that Sherpa, walking them through the process of implementing it.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
Chapters
Artificial intelligence might seem like complex technology that’s best suited for large businesses. But Robert Mitchell disagrees — he thinks small businesses have the most to gain from AI.
Robert is the Chief AI Officer at WSI World, a digital marketing agency network that equips small agencies with the tools to grow and thrive, including AI. He helps WSI franchise owners use AI to create new revenue streams — and he’s thrilled by the possibilities the tech presents for small businesses.
“I think this is an amazing opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses,” he says. “The nimble companies are the ones that are going to leapfrog on this. You can do more with less.”
On this episode of Be a Marketer, Robert and host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, talked about how small businesses and their marketers can get started with AI.
Meet Today’s Guest: Robert Mitchell of WSI World
☕ What he does: Robert is the Chief AI Officer at WSI World, a digital marketing agency network. After more than 20 years in franchise development, Robert dove into the world of AI. Today, he helps WSI serve as an AI consultancy for its franchise owners — and helps franchise owners become the de facto AI consultants for their clients.
💡 Key quote: “You’re already seen by your clients as the most knowledgeable on the technical aspects of marketing their business. It’s a very small leap from that to AI… all you need to be is that Sherpa, walking them through the process of implementing it.”
If you love this show, please leave a review. Go to RateThisPodcast.com/bam and follow the simple instructions.
What is Be a Marketer with Dave Charest?
As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Dave:
Today on episode 34 of the be a marketer podcast, I'm talking to a chief AI officer focused on helping digital marketing agencies answer the question, how are you going to implement AI? This is the Be a Marketer podcast.
Dave:
My name is Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact. And I've been helping small business owners like you make sense of online marketing for over 16 years. You can be a marketer, and I'm here to help. Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the be a marketer podcast. On today's episode, we're focused on artificial intelligence for digital marketing agencies.
Dave:
So what does that mean? Well, if you are a marketing consultant working with small business clients, you'll wanna pay attention. AI, of course, brings yet another big change in the digital marketing space, and that means your clients are going to look to you for guidance. And so you may be wondering, well, what's the opportunity for small agencies when it comes to AI? Or maybe you want some ideas for becoming more efficient with AI and how you can help your clients do the same.
Dave:
Or at the very least, you may be curious as to what you must be aware of over the next few years as it pertains to AI and digital marketing. Well, we'll get into all of this and more with today's guest. Well, friend, today's guest is Robert Mitchell, chief AI officer at WSI World. WSI World has been around since 1995, and it's a digital marketing agency franchise that equips small business owners to be digital marketing agencies through partnerships and training through partner networks, including Constant Contact. As you might imagine, there's been a lot of change in the digital marketing space over the years, and WSI World has been there to help agency owners navigate that change so they can help their clients do better marketing.
Dave:
Now if you've been paying attention, you may have also noticed that the next big change or should I say opportunity in digital marketing comes from the advancement in artificial intelligence or AI. Now after over 21 years of experience in franchise development, Robert took a deep dive into the world of AI. And today, he's charged with helping WSI's digital marketing agency owners create new revenue streams on top of AI. In his role, Robert essentially asks 2 questions. How can WSI be an AI consultancy for their agency owners?
Dave:
And if you are an agency owner, how do you become the de facto AI consultant for your clients? Let's pick up the conversation there.
Robert:
I think that the best way forward for marketers is to be seen as the AI consultant. Cause here's what I've noticed. I went to the marketing AI conference. Great conference. You've never been there.
Robert:
What I've noticed on a lot of the speakers, the common thread was that you're already seen by your clients as the most knowledgeable on the technical aspects of marketing their business. It's a very small leap from that to AI. They're going to trust you more likely than anybody else that they know already. So make that leap with them and say, you know, you don't have to be perfect. But as we say at WSI, all you need to be is that Sherpa, that guy that's walking them through the process of implementing it.
Robert:
You just need to know a little bit more than them as you're walking through the process, and that's easy enough to do. Right? So I hope that answers your question.
Dave:
Yeah. Well, so I'm curious then. What are you finding, I guess, on a couple of levels? Right? Because you have it's a little meta here a little bit.
Dave:
Right? Because you've got your agency people connected to you and your franchises there, but then you've got the clients that they're working with and the small business owners in that sense. So, I mean, guess, what are you finding 1 in terms of just adoption from your agencies in particular and then even how they're having conversations with their customers?
Robert:
That's a great question, and we deal with it every single week. We have a AI leadership committee that we've put together. It's, like, 60 people. 60 of our owners have said, I wanna be part of this conversation. And oddly enough, they saw that term, that topic or that committee is 2 different things.
Robert:
Some people saw it as how can I use AI to be a better marketer? Okay. Very valid. Other team of people, other owners and ICs, we call it Internet consultants of our owner base, they saw it as I wanna be a sorry, an AI consultant. I wanna help my clients identify holes, bottlenecks, issues in their organization, workflows that can be improved through the use of AI, in addition to my my marketing hat that I wear.
Robert:
So as we created this, I'm not saying we're having pushback, but we're definitely there's different levels of adoption. There's different levels of of people who are willing to embrace this. And I have some, I mean, people that are champions that are, hey, Robert. Whatever tool you want me to beta test, throw it at me. I'll beta test it.
Robert:
We have a whole team of alpha testers and beta testers that we use as we're rolling out our new program, which I can get to in a second if you like. But the other camp is looking, and and we're also helping the other camp with what tools can make you more efficient. Is it content creation? Is it SEO management? And there's a slew of products out there.
Robert:
And also, it's helping them understand what's going on with Google. What the heck is going on with Google? I mean, everybody's asking that question. It's infuriating to me and to our owners. They got an agenda they're not letting us know about, and I don't like it.
Robert:
I don't just mean s g e, which is search generative experience, if you're not familiar, which is gonna be their new paradigm. And how is that gonna parlay into our offering as marketers? How are we going to how is paid ads going to work? How is SEO going to work when SGE is the top of the ranking system? So, we need more from Google and they're not they're not really sharing enough right now.
Robert:
So we're helping both of those groups.
Dave:
Can you give me a little walk through just SGE? What is that necessarily?
Robert:
Okay. So if you were to go to Google right now and not on your corporate account, but on your personal account, and you were to see a little. Speaker on the top. Right. You can click on that.
Robert:
It's AI labs.
Dave:
Gotcha.
Robert:
And that allows you to turn on SGE. So what that does is every search now moving forward will give you a natural language or LLM based response. What's the best OLED TV at 2023? It'll give you responses that are generated by AI or specifically by a language model. And so, that right there is very interesting.
Robert:
Okay? Because one of our owners, our marketing agencies, did a test. They had a client. They put their client's name or actually the category. I think it was dog groomer, or we actually did the, law firm.
Robert:
And, usually, they're at the top rank of Google. Good job, marketer. Right? You're top link. They weren't even in the SGE.
Robert:
So whatever formula that she was following to get her client to the top rank of Google, didn't get it into the SGE box, and that's infuriating. Right? So now we got we got new rules to play by. What rules are those gonna be and how do we get in that box? Because that, arguably, is going to be the new normal.
Robert:
Because as you know, Google is for years has been trying to keep people on that page more and more. And so this is another, example of that.
Dave:
I mean, this is where we're at at this point, right, where it's the same thing with social. Right? Social platforms are trying to keep you on the platforms versus linking off. Right? And so it's a it's a challenge across the board.
Dave:
That's interesting how you you get to that place. Well, there's a lot here. Right? So you're talking about, like, program testers. So, like, what are some of the things that you're looking at now, and I guess maybe some examples of things that are working well, and, like, where are people kinda going with some of this stuff?
Robert:
It's obvious that, you know, people that are listening to this podcast who are marketers, they already have people coming to them. It's not a, again, a huge leap. They see you as one of the experts already. Hey. Do you put up what's this AI?
Robert:
How can I use AI? They're gonna ask you that. They're already gonna have problems they want solved. And if they don't go to you, they're gonna go to somebody else. So why not help them with this?
Robert:
So back to your question, a lot of what we're seeing is low lying fruit solutions or we also call them the Trojan horses because if we can solve this little issue that they want, hey, I need a chatbot for my website or chat assistant. We hate bots. We want a chat assistant for our website. Why? Because that way they can answer questions that my customer service team is asking.
Robert:
And obviously, the the old bots are are terrible and they don't answer questions. Okay. We can make that happen. Now, the Trojan horses, we got in the organization. We provide them a plug and play tool, WordPress plugin.
Robert:
That's a like, Meow was one of them that was really good. It ties to OpenAI's API so you can access the GPT language model. It can be fed information on that company's widgets or whatever product and service they have. It can be trained on the website. Boom bada bing.
Robert:
Now you have a solution that that client came to you for. That's not the stopping point. That's the beginning of a consultative relationship where you can have years of finding bottlenecks. I'm not sure if you're the fan of, the theory of constraints by Eli Golrath, but it's not really a 6 Sigma. It's but it's a principle of every organization has bottlenecks.
Robert:
And once you find that bottleneck and you fix it, another one will rear its ugly head. So that's the beauty of AI is you're going to constantly find things in the organization that are slowing down or bottlenecking. And so getting that foot in the door with that Trojan horse with that when your client comes to you, which is what we're seeing back to your question, we're saying those clients come to us saying, you know, can you fix this? Can you help with this with AI? And sometimes we can't, because it's a little bit too robust of a problem.
Robert:
And some, it's like, let's pause that. Let me get back to you. And let's figure that together.
Dave:
Yeah. What are you seeing, I guess, in terms of like, again, this duality here, right? Where you have folks that are obviously using it. So your consultants, your agencies are using it for themselves in terms of helping with their productivity and things like that. And then also, yeah, how they're implementing that also for their clients.
Robert:
Yeah. So a lot of tools, I guess, for their clients and by proxy, I guess, like phrase dot io or market news, they can use for their existing business and their ability to test their website SEO from a marketers perspective. And they can also use that tool to test the SEO and the the content blogs or whatever they're writing, how it measures up to their competition and their AdWords. So there's tools that are AI powered that our owners are using to help themselves and their clients, if that's what you're meaning.
Dave:
Mhmm. Yeah.
Robert:
And obviously, there's a whole slew of content creation. I mean, you can go to chat gbt and do use that interface, but then there's tons of tools out there, writer, you know, dotcom. Jasper has been around forever, but that will help them do a lot of the content creation. Byword is a very interesting one. You can generate a hundred blogs and have it post like that.
Robert:
I'm not promoting that tactic, although it has worked for some, according to the Twitter post I've read.
Dave:
Interesting. So it starts to become an interesting conundrum, right. Where you've got this, because in many levels, like I can see one argument one way, right. Where in many instances, there's the creativity aspect of it, right. And the creator and all of that.
Dave:
And I think thinking of it through more of an assistant and kind of, like, a a way to kinda collaborate and brainstorm is a good way to think of it. Right? I think then there's the other side of it where it also becomes like a replacement for and the actual just the creator where you get into the situation where, well, now if everybody's doing that, where does the value come in? Right? So talk me through that a little bit.
Robert:
You're kind of touching on the issue of we got a lot more crap out there now. Like, you're going to get to where the volume of blog posts is just gonna be nauseating because you're fighting for a space to sky and the crawlers are just fighting what is gonna be the best. I get it. That that's the inevitability of where we are right now, but then we're gonna go into more of a semantic search. We're gonna go from keyword based to does this website have more of a topical what do you call it?
Robert:
Is it relate topically to what the user is trying to search for? You can't just search for TV. It's gotta be TV for watching movies. So does your website or is it better optimized for that phraseology, which Google was moving that way anyway. But I think that you're gonna find that the language models are going to be pushing the search ecosystem that Google's dominated for many years, And it's gonna require marketers to help their clients with more of that first audience, like the audience that they generate themselves as opposed to ones they're they're stealing from other platforms.
Robert:
Right? So getting them to go to their website more and create an audience there, having a loyalty program, that's a new strategy that the in order to avoid being lost in this shuffle of SGE. You follow me?
Dave:
Yeah. I mean, that's I guess that's the interesting conundrum all around. Right? It's, like, how do you start to then get some of that stuff back, I guess, to you and as we've so for many years, really thought of, like, the the website as, like, the hub of your activities. Right?
Dave:
Where, again, we were talking about earlier, the bigger companies are trying to keep people away from that and get on their own platforms.
Robert:
I'm sorry. 1st party data is what I'm sticking of. Yep.
Dave:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, you know, I guess I think oftentimes, right? When you just think of AI too, right?
Dave:
It's oftentimes it and less so now as this is really accelerating. Right. But it's often been thought of as something that like large corporations are gonna use. Right. But when you start thinking about how smaller businesses and even, you know, your consultants and stuff like that, like how are they gonna use it?
Robert:
That's great. You may bring that up in franchising. We have this, belief that franchising is the great leveler. Right? It's the great equalizer, because it can bring somebody who's not really anything, they didn't have any wealthy parents and become a franchise owner, and they can create their own wealth through franchising.
Robert:
That's very common. Right? I see the same thing for these small businesses. So you mentioned like, well, this is something the large businesses or enterprise will use. Actually, no.
Robert:
Eventually, but in my truest belief right now, it's too much to turn that cruise ship. You know? There's too many workflows, too many departments, too many detractors, and all these issues. Right? The nimble companies are the ones that are going to leapfrog on this.
Robert:
So I think this is an amazing opportunity for those marketers who are listening to this call who have small, medium sized businesses. Man, you can really 10 x them. And I I'm talking 10 x multiple aspects of their business by using AI tools, AI in integrations so that their competitors, they can catch up to them because they're they're not nimble enough. They're too slow to move. So this is a great level or a great equalizer AI will be.
Robert:
And because you can do more with less, you don't have to have as many employees. You can have more automations put together. And so I think that's the big advice, or the big light bulb that should be going off in everybody's head, you can really help these clients in a way that we've never been able to before. And actually, it isn't that expensive either.
Dave:
Yeah. Well, you know, to that point, I mean, that's a great one, right, where you are more nimble and you can move quickly and you can do things that don't require approvals and things like that. So I guess, what are some of the ways then you're you're seeing people kind of start to implement that and take advantage of that fact?
Robert:
It's mostly in automation. So there's 3 main way areas that we're focusing on with our AI consultancy rollout. And, obviously, in the future, it might be much more robust, but we're focusing on 3 areas, education, AI, chat assistance, and automation. And when you think about those 3 categories, they're big buckets. Obviously some are more complex than others, But when you are looking at each category, education is is arguably the most important one because what you're doing is you're upscaling each employee.
Robert:
Like, we're working on a 3 part workshop. It's for very beginner. But the purpose of it, you know, is you you have your employees come to the workshop. It's 1 hour for 3 weeks. And we basically say, this is how you spell AI.
Robert:
I'm being coy. But the point is that you have employees that that just barely use email. Right? And they're not going anywhere. They're not retiring or quitting.
Robert:
They're they want to be loyal to those employees, but you wanna increase their their ability to be more efficient. Because if you don't and your competition does, then you're left behind. You can't not do this. So education is key. Teaching them how to use the tools, the basic ones, just chat GBT.
Robert:
And then as Ethan Mullick says, a great professor at Wharton School of Business, bring it to every task, every conversation, everything you're doing, you bring that. And do you remember how often you just say, I Googled it. I Googled it. I Googled it. Whatever the concept.
Robert:
I haven't used Google. I don't know how long. I use ChatChippity for everything from recipes to I do I can do lots of ChatChippity cooking. My point is that if you bring it to every conversation, you're training your body and your mind, and more importantly, to adapt to the new workflow, the the new tool. If I give you a hammer to a person who's never had a hammer, I mean, now what can you do with it?
Robert:
I mean, imagine having to nail nails into a piece of wood without hammers. I mean, how hard was that? Now you have a hammer. Now you're so much more effective in at your job. Right?
Robert:
So the first element is education. And as marketers, you can create a tool to go into a company and train those employees just to be 1% more efficient or 2 or 5. Maybe it's emails. I didn't know how to respond to this jerk email that I got, But I don't wanna be a jerk back. I wanna be very professional, but I'm too emotional right now.
Robert:
It's throw it into chat gbt and spit it back out. Right? So that's a few examples. I'm not sure if that's where you were going with it, but that's one for education that can be really used to upscale those small, medium sized businesses. So
Dave:
that's the education piece. Right? So let talk through the assistance piece then. So what are you looking at there?
Robert:
So there are several different places for this. So we have there's 3 within 3. So the chat assistant has 3 different levels of complexity because you can't just go with the basics because that's not a need for everybody. So the first level is it's on the website. It asks answers all the basic questions that people aren't are too lazy to go to other parts of the website and look up.
Robert:
So it's like, how much does it cost? Or what's the size of the widget? What are the dimensions or whatever? And the beauty of those kind of tools is that you can keep them in bookends. They say, what's the president of United States?
Robert:
Like, I don't know. Like, you can tell it only answer questions on the data and on the categories that I've provided to you. So, that right there frees up time at the corporate office, frees up resources, and it makes it much easier for those customers to be informed on products that you're wanting to sell. And, of course, you can do a call to action within that channel interface that draws them to a a page that can make them purchase something. But let's change the gears altogether.
Robert:
Why not just make an internal tool? Like, just a chat interface just for the internal team, for your office. It could be something that HubSpot, which has integrated a chat solution that can say, you know, the last 10 calls I had were the 5 most important questions that were asked during these sales calls. I don't know. Build better, which is one of the AIs that I use on Zoom calls.
Robert:
I can we have it assigned to a team. So if you have a large organization that has, you know, a product team or sales team or accounting team, you would have basically all those calls recorded. You can have a project and this is complicated, I know, but let's say they're working on a project. You could basically do a hashtag for all those calls. And then you ask a question of all 20 calls they had over the last 5 weeks and say, what's the progress of this project?
Robert:
Or what challenges are they having as a leader? You're not on any of those calls. You can just jump into all those recordings. Those are just ways to better use AI tools by going back to the chat assistant. So we have the chatbot on the website customer facing.
Robert:
We have an internal chat assistant that's used for answering internal questions. And this is another one I just love. This is a it's a different one, not level of complexity, but it's a very unique one. If you have a very large client, like a tier 2 supplier to automotive industry, right? And you need to know what Nissan's specs are on a certain whatever widget.
Robert:
You can train that bot on your client's information so that when you're doing anything, you're informed before that even before that conversation, that call, that product demo. So it's like you're able to use tools internally. K? And then there's other ones that, you know, chat assistants can be trained on much more complex data on your end. So PDFs and but all this is gonna be a different conversation in 6 months when it's all rolled into Google and Microsoft.
Robert:
Right? This could be inside of those ecosystems. And I can't wait. Honestly, I think it's gonna be great. The beauty of marketers though is we're agnostic.
Robert:
So, we can say, client, what do you use? We use Google. Don't worry, I can have a training session on training your people how to use Copilot. I'm sorry. That's that's Microsoft.
Robert:
But whatever, Vertex AI and Google and teach you how to use it and all this other stuff, access the power of that. The beauty of marketers right now is we're gonna be able to be those Sherpas because there's so much to learn. I mean, only, like, 5th is it 14 or 15% of people polled have used Chat GbT? And it hasn't been for business. It's usually for fun stuff, like making me look like Iron Man or something.
Dave:
Yeah. True. I'm curious just to talk through, you know, the assistant piece here just a little bit. So you're using BuildBetter, right, in this call, for example. So what are you using it for in this call?
Robert:
Well, I know my boss is gonna ask me, how did that call go with Dave? Well, I click a button. It it already it summarizes the call for me before the call is even done. Gotcha. I can send the summary, but also it gives action items.
Robert:
You can say, these are the follow-up action items that Du said he would do and Robert said he would do. So and but I didn't say that. Well, he did. It recorded it. So, like, if you forget something and so but also the recording of calls is gonna be commonplace.
Robert:
Right? I just started recording calls last year on Zoom, and now the fact that you can transcribe them. So let me give you another use case. Okay. So this has to do with our AIBA.
Robert:
So our AIBA stands for artificial intelligence business analysis. And it's basically the spearhead of our AI consultancy arm. We start with an AI readiness survey that the client takes is basically a lead gen tool. We have our marketers send it out. And if you had a conversation over coffee about AI, you say, hey, we'll take the AI readiness to see if what your level of readiness is.
Robert:
That tees up the AIBA interview. Okay. So I won't go into too much detail, but the first interview is with the CEO or the owner. It's recorded on audio or on Zoom. It's transcribed.
Robert:
And that transcription is fed into AI later because it's interview. You're asking questions and answers, and then it's fed in to produce an output based on their responses. So it's automating the analysis piece, but we're training on the framework of that analysis. So we don't just have it willy nilly, open the eye, whatever they want. We say this is a framework I want you to follow based on our expertise in this industry or in this space.
Robert:
And I want you to analyze the answers to these questions and provide solutions and a framework and a current state future state analysis of these topics. So, by having the transcript, there is no missed data. And we have the context of the question and the answer and everything around it. That's pretty brilliant in my opinion.
Dave:
You know, you bring up an interesting point how it's really gonna be part of of everything that we do from a consumer perspective, from a business perspective. Like, it's just really gonna be ever present, which is interesting. I guess question would be, I guess, you know, how do you when you have people that are, I guess, starting to implement this, right, like, what are some of the challenges that people are kinda facing as they're starting to kinda embrace it a bit more?
Robert:
It's a lot. If a client came to you and say, I wanted to chat assistant for my website. Good luck. There's 100 out there. Like, we had to physically create a division of our company called AI Labs.
Robert:
The whole point of AI Labs is to test all these tools and find out which is crap, which is not. And quite frankly, which ones are well funded and will be around tomorrow. If I put you in bed with my client, I gotta make sure that you're not gonna leave and and not be able to do updates on the software. Right? So the biggest challenge I think people are up against is that it's white noise of products out there.
Robert:
And it's good to get, you know, some good recommendations, follow the right YouTubers, follow the right sub stacks. And I'm constantly reading to determine the best tools out there. I think that's the biggest challenge right now is really which tool to work with. And then, of course, finding somebody to implement it. This is a even with WSI, I mean, we have a huge supplier network for our base core deliverable digital marketing.
Robert:
But when we went to that same supplier network and say, hey, what is your experience with AI tools? They're like it was like crickets. So, we had to develop a whole another virtual deck of of suppliers that have that competency. Right? These aren't programmers.
Robert:
I mean, to be clear, these are no coders that are specializing in certain tools. And that's kinda what we're we're building a bench right now, these people.
Dave:
So let's talk about just kind of, like, as we move forward and kind of, like, as trends start to move and evolve, what do you think your agencies and really just small business owners in general really need to be aware of over the next few years?
Robert:
They need to be aware that their usefulness and value will be challenged on a regular basis. I was at a company a year ago and I had an internal marketing department and I can't tell you how many months I had to wait for a stupid flyer to be designed. Right? It was so aggravating. Or the the copywriting for the website, it was a bottleneck of other needs throughout the organization, I guess.
Robert:
But now, I just do that myself, clearly. Like, I do it myself. I don't need that team. Now I'm not saying anything that a lot of people haven't already said about AI is coming for your work. But as an agency, if you don't pivot, you're going to be left behind.
Robert:
There's 2 types of companies that are gonna be around the future. Those who use AI and those who are closed. Right? I've said that a lot as a role in an organization. That's more important.
Robert:
But you need to understand is the roles in the organization also need to be looking at themselves and their tasks, and how many can be automated. Yeah. So it's not coming for your job, but if there's 3 people in your department and half of your tasks are taken, half of the next person, the next person, well, your full time equivalent just got gone. So, whoever's best at using AI is gonna be the one that's kept. So, that's why you need to really dive into it because that's the value you're gonna bring to that organization.
Robert:
But as marketers, as marketers, I feel like a lot of these tools have the capacity for making you much more efficient. Your output can be, you know, much faster. So you're gonna have to think about your how you charge. Do you charge based on hours? Hope not, because you're gonna be in trouble.
Robert:
And you start charging based on output and value you bring to the company. Right? That should be your rate you're charging because whether it takes you 5 minutes or 5 hours doesn't matter anymore. It's the value you bring and the fact that you know how to use that technology and they don't. That's how you're going to leverage it.
Robert:
But I said, as I said before, marketing and AI are gonna be 1. I think it's gonna be 2 years. That's the that's the the road map, and they're gonna be mailed meld together. And that's a good thing because now, gosh, can you imagine how strong the marketing department, marketing agencies will be if they have that level of value to bring to organizations? To me, that's exciting.
Robert:
But people who are wanna stick with what their deliverable is, they're gonna be have a sad awakening, I guess.
Dave:
So let's say I have an agency. I'm working with small business clients. Anything else you think I should know as I move forward?
Robert:
You have a responsibility to that client to protect them from the impending AI wave because it's not just marketers that are gonna be impacted. One of the elements of our AIBA is in now analyzing that client's business for how they get customers. And so when you're working these small and medium sized businesses, help them because they might be gone next year if you didn't. And it it might be self serving interest, but it's also just, you know, fiduciary responsibility almost. So you go after them and say, look, let's do this little analysis for your business.
Robert:
Let's see where we can let's see where you're getting your customers and see if they're using AI to satisfy the service that you're currently providing, like a tutoring business. Right? That's hard up, you know? That's gonna be something that a lot of, you know, Khan Academy or Coningo, they're creating some great AI tools. So I guess my point is these marketers out there, they're working with small and medium sized business.
Robert:
It's not just about the marketing that you can get better at and help your client better at, but you can help them be better at their business and protect them from being made redundant by AI technology.
Dave:
Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, AI presents opportunities for you as a consultant. Now as a trusted adviser to your clients, Robert highlights that it makes sense for you to act as their Sherpa. Help them make sense of the ways they may be able to use AI to not only improve their marketing, but also the business processes that may be causing bottlenecks. Now there's potential for AI to open new service offerings for your agency.
Dave:
Number 2, bring AI to every task. Now as Robert mentions, thinking in this way allows you to train your body to adapt to a new workflow. You can become much more efficient in your daily work. And as an agency owner, what would it mean to train your clients and their employees to use AI to become more efficient as well? And lastly, use your smallness to your advantage.
Dave:
Now as a small agency owner with small business clients, you can move more quickly to implement AI solutions. Now this may allow you and your clients to catch up with bigger businesses. AI truly unlocks that potential. Now is the time to explore the possibilities that AI may bring. So here's your action item for today.
Dave:
If you're interested in growing your own digital marketing business, be sure to check out WSI World. I'll include a link in the show notes. Or if you're looking for a digital marketing agency to grow your business, I'll include a link to WSI's digital marketing services. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
Dave:
You can email me directly at dave.sherast@constantcontact.com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.