Attendees
Simon Gould – Founder – CEO at Sydney Digital Marketing
Nital Shah – COO at Mavlers
Transcript
[00:00:00] Simon: Since last century, since 1996. So I’ve seen a lot of change over those years, but this is like something that none of us had ever seen before. Over 50% of people are secretly using AI and not telling their boss. That doesn’t help anybody because it is a super powerful tool. One of the other important parts of businesses leveraging I is people don’t realize Google was like.
[00:00:23] Simon: Was number seven. There was like Lycos, ask Genes. Yahoo. What are the metrics that you need to measure? There’s a number of answers there. The first place to start is your.
[00:00:39] Nital: Hello everyone. Today the session is all about solving the biggest challenge in businesses face today, which is about leveraging AI for smart marketing cutting through the noise of competitive market and building long-term brand resilience in a rapidly changing landscape. [00:01:00] And that’s where we are.
[00:01:01] Nital: Very pleased to invite Simon Gould. Simon has been an influencer helping a lot of marketers across the world, especially in Sydney. Have an amazing network of marketers and he’s also very well connected with a lot of agencies in Sydney as well. So Simon is founder of Sydney Digital Marketing an award-winning agency that has businesses to achieve.
[00:01:27] Nital: Kind of five XROI through AI driven marketing automation and data backed strategies. With over 20 years of experience navigating through digital disruption over all these years, he has built a reputation for helping brands, still very sustainability with lower acquisition cost. And still stay ahead of the industry trends and the shift.
[00:01:55] Nital: So here we are to break down exactly how [00:02:00] businesses can integrate AI automation and strategic positioning to drive sustainable growth without overwhelming their internal team. So let’s dive in and welcome Simon. Really pleased to have you on this session.
[00:02:16] Simon: Thanks. Thanks Nital for the for the Almighty introduction.
[00:02:19] Simon: It’s it’s good to be on here. I’m looking forward to to discussing some of the things that, that you mentioned before and I think, everybody who’s listening to this is, will be well across the AI space. LinkedIn is blowing up with it every single minute, something new is coming out or somebody’s finding a new tool or a new way to, to leverage AI and the change, as you said I’ve been in the.
[00:02:44] Simon: Sort of MarTech online industry since 19, since last century, since 1996. So I’ve seen a lot of change over, over those years, but this is like something that none of us have ever seen before. Yeah. A as [00:03:00] exciting as it is, I love the new shiny things, and I go, wow, isn’t that amazing? I also, take my marketer hat off and go, wow, what, where is this going?
[00:03:10] Simon: Where is this leading? Absolutely.
[00:03:14] Nital: I think very similar observation and experience we have at Mavlers as well. We have been trying, testing a lot of different tools and it’s very shiny and it’s very tempting to get very optimistic about the accuracy of that. While it’s a journey but the pace, it is changing, the pace, the tools and their accuracy is getting refined.
[00:03:36] Nital: It’s very amazing. And yeah. So let’s deep dial. I think we start with that, right? So let’s start with AI driven marketing. Business growth. And I’ll start with my first question. The AI revolution in marketing scaling smart, not just fast, right? Yeah. We have helped business assignment to achieve five XROI.[00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Nital: Why early adoption of ai? So help us understand how can companies implement AI driven marketing strategies in a way that helps them scale. Grow without overwhelming their team. What are the top three tips, if you would love to share with the audience today?
[00:04:22] Simon: Yeah. No, it’s a great question. And look, I think there’s a number, there’s a number of answers there.
[00:04:30] Simon: I think the first place to start is, you know what, start with the problem, not the technology. What’s the start with the end o What’s the problem that we are, we’re trying to solve here? What are we trying to improve? What are we trying to make? Not only more efficient, but also effective? ’cause you can be efficient, you can get your work done, but if you’re not doing it effectively and it’s having the desired outcomes, then it’s net.
[00:04:54] Simon: You haven’t moved forward. So I think, the first thing is to look at the problems [00:05:00] rather than the technology. And then next is obviously, garbage in, garbage out. So get your data house in order first. There’s so many areas that you can use. These AI platforms, large language models for obviously creating content, that’s been the first one, the easiest one that anybody can do.
[00:05:23] Simon: True quality, the quality of the content, it still needs that critical thinking. It still needs that human intervention. I think anybody who’s using AI just to cut and copy is not using ai. They’re just being. Lazy. Really, you need to, I, I see it on LinkedIn all the time. All of these AI auto replies and it just, it cheapens your brand.
[00:05:45] Simon: Yeah. So I think, you’ve gotta make sure that if we’re just talking about content, that you are sticking within your brand guidelines, your brand tone of voice, and making sure that it doesn’t sound like it’s been written by ai. And there’s some [00:06:00] instant giveaways. I. To, to something that’s being written by ai.
[00:06:04] Simon: And then I think one of the other important parts of businesses leveraging AI is I believe it needs to be founder led. You need to have the guy or girl at the top saying, okay, this is how our business is going to leverage AI in order to stay relevant, in order to stay competitive, in order to stay profitable.
[00:06:30] Simon: And. I think when it’s founder led and when the founder has a very clear understanding of the potential, of the opportunity of the efficiencies that it can bring in, then it makes it very easy for the rest of the team to also come to them. I remember, last year. There was a survey that went out that said, I can’t remember the number, but let’s say it was high, it was higher than 50%.
[00:06:53] Simon: Over 50% of people are secretly using AI and not telling their boss. And that doesn’t help [00:07:00] anybody because it is a super powerful tool and if you are using it to help get your work done faster, but you can maintain the quality and increase your output or increase the quality of your work, and that’s gotta be a good thing for any business.
[00:07:16] Simon: The other challenges that I’m seeing and we are seeing internally, we, we had a an all hands meeting presentation just a week or so ago, and I ran everybody through all of the tools that I’ve been using. ’cause I’m right down the rabbit hole again. I’ve been when mobile phones started back in 1987, when the internet started in 1997, and then when digital marketing started in 2010.
[00:07:39] Simon: So I’ve seen a lot of these, consumer facing changes that we’re seeing and the effects they’ve had on business. But I went through and I explained to everybody, this is Claudes. This is how we use Claude. This is chat, GPT. This is how we’re using chat. GPT. This is perplexity. This is Google Gemini.
[00:07:55] Simon: Google Gemini. This week is at the top of the pile in terms of the [00:08:00] smartest, fastest. Able to do the most work, it can deal with sort of 750,000 words now in, in one. Prompt. Prompt, which is amazing. Yeah, most business books are only sort of 50,000 words, so Google’s you know it every single week one of these platforms is leapfrogging the other, and then some businesses are, some enterprise businesses. They’re Microsoft houses, they’ve got copilot built in. I didn’t mention copilot ’cause we don’t use it. It’s like AI, I guess with guardrails on, and I understand that from a lot of privacy, security, governance perspectives within Enterprise.
[00:08:37] Simon: Yep. But the biggest, one of the questions that my team had was how do I remember. Where I’m doing this work, how do I remember whether I did it in Google or did I do it in chat, GPT or Claude? So my point here is I guess get to know these platforms. Get to work with the ones that you feel are going to work the best for you, that give you the [00:09:00] best output.
[00:09:01] Simon: Some are really good at coding, some are really good at writing, some are really good at, delivering images, chat, GPT. Now their image creation as part of four oh is very good. Very quick, very fast, very exact. Then you’ve got the other ones obviously mid journey and that’s, I guess talking to the main, frontier or foundational models.
[00:09:23] Simon: To, to your point, we’ve been using AI in the, the tools that we’ve been using have been using AI in the background for years and years. Of course, they’re just now accessible. That’s right. That’s right.
[00:09:34] Nital: Yeah. And very well point pointed that it’s a top down approach.
[00:09:39] Nital: Like any organizational level change has to be top down. Couple of things works really well for us, because we have a large team and team is distributed remotely across India. We have been running those quarterly teams, so this quarter for our development team, it’s all about.
[00:09:59] Nital: [00:10:00] Efficiency. Now it’s an internal competition and there is reward and recognition program associated with that. In a best possible way. And that helps us to set up those milestones, which becomes an expectation for the larger team from the following quarter. And yeah, from for the next quarter, it could be, okay, who’s gonna leverage AI in a best optimal way by running some automations?
[00:10:29] Nital: Yes, with get with. Is automation, is this an automation as, or it’s an ai. A lot of people call it an ai, but there’s no ai. It’s just an automation. An automation. But yeah. How can you leverage that to make your, let’s say, keyword research or your meta tag writing fast, effective, and accurate? Yes.
[00:10:48] Nital: And when we run that more like a theme. Then entire a hundred people of search marketers are working towards that. Putting all their brain power to, into that, assessing [00:11:00] different tools. And towards end of that quarter, we discover that these are the three amazing ways to leverage it. Brilliant.
[00:11:06] Nital: And implement it with a clear use case in the business. So I think. If it’s top down as an organization you can move much faster towards the objective you want to achieve. So I think it’s very well covered, Simon.
[00:11:20] Simon: Yeah and I think the other thing is, obviously we’ve talked about content production, that seems to be getting the most oxygen.
[00:11:26] Simon: I’m not a developer, so I’m not gonna talk to the effects that it’s having on software development. That’s just not my wheelhouse. In terms of being able to use it for. Getting started on something. Those things, they sit on your task list, everybody says, do that at hard when you get up.
[00:11:43] Simon: When you start work in the morning. Just do the hardest task first. Yep. Great. It’s great in theory and it obviously takes a lot of discipline and commitment to do that, but where I find it really effective is just helping me get past that procrastination. Here’s my problem yesterday. I [00:12:00] came across a little bit of an issue that had been bugging me for a while.
[00:12:02] Simon: For some reason, when I send an email to somebody for the very first time, sometimes it goes to, it sometimes goes to their spam folder. I said, and again, I’m not a technical person, but I knew there was something wrong with like our SPF or our D kip or DI email setting somewhere and put the problem into chat, GPT.
[00:12:24] Simon: It asked me a few questions. I gave it the answers. It taught me where to go and fix it, and I fixed it and it’s been bugging me for months and it’s just one of those things I hadn’t been able to get to. But again, solving problems. I think it is brilliant for solving problems. Absolutely.
[00:12:40] Simon: Absolutely. Yeah. And my team, when I spoke with my team and they were saying, oh, we don’t want to be we are not going to be leveraging AI to write all of this content and everything. Yep. We’ll use it to ideate ideas, but we still want it to be human led. Have that human touch. And I said, fantastic.
[00:12:56] Simon: And I’m all for that. Yeah. But it’s we are [00:13:00] focusing too much on this writing content with AI and AI created. If you like, it’s not just for creating content, it’s for solving problems. It’s for getting a different perspective on.
[00:13:15] Simon: How can you help me solve this? Giving me some different perspectives. And I think the power to be able to do that, and the biggest issue I think we face right now obviously is the privacy and the security of the information that we are sharing. Particularly just from what I hear and read with with open AI and chat GBTI think there’s a bit of a trust.
[00:13:35] Simon: There’s, I don’t think there is a massive trust issue out there.
[00:13:39] Nital: Yeah, like with recent updates, with images, with ai it’s going on around right now. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:13:46] Simon: Yeah. So there’s, there, there’s definitely privacy and security concerns there. Obviously, you’re not going to unless you build something on your own server and it is, a proprietary platform using the APIs.
[00:13:59] Simon: I [00:14:00] think that for businesses that. Looking at this going, how can we take advantage of it? But we don’t want to share our proprietary information. I think that’s, that’s always a good solution because the fundamental platforms are there. Metas Lama, is it 3.4? I think 3.5, yeah. Open source.
[00:14:21] Simon: There’s still that argument about whether it’s gonna be. Closed and proprietary, like open AI and Google and and Claude or whether it’s gonna be open source. So I, and I don’t remember if you remember back to the days of 98, 99, you’re prob, it’s probably a little bit before your time, but when the internet was taking off, and there was pet.com and there was this massive scramble for everybody too.
[00:14:44] Simon: Grab arrow,
[00:14:46] Nital: search engine days, right? Yeah. Like you, you had search engines like like mushrooming, right? Yeah. Who like us? Yeah. Yeah. Eventually things got consolidated. Similar things possibly gonna [00:15:00] happen the way currently things are shaping up. Yeah. Like deep seek has created major disruptions ever since they launched.
[00:15:06] Nital: And the pace they now capitalizing it. So I think it’s gonna be an interesting space for next few years.
[00:15:12] Simon: Hundred percent. And don’t forget, people or people don’t realize Google was like, was number seven. There was like Lycos, ask Js, Alta Vista, Yahoo, several others, Google didn’t come into the picture quite late, but with a very different approach.
[00:15:29] Simon: And then, they, yeah. Yeah.
[00:15:31] Nital: They’re, yeah. Great. Simon. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. I’m sure it’s gonna be very insightful for the audience. Moving on to slightly go towards the marketing automation side of things, right? Would love to know your views on balancing personalization at scale.
[00:15:49] Nital: What are. Like, according to you, what are the biggest mistakes companies make when using automation and how [00:16:00] they can refine their approach to enhance personalization, both for efficiency as well as for customer experience? Because it’s always do you do things? For efficiency to make things faster, but then you lose a touch of personalization and giving that experience.
[00:16:20] Nital: So what are your views on that and what are the biggest mistakes companies do when they try to capitalize on marketing automation?
[00:16:29] Simon: Look, we are we’re a HubSpot house. We’re a big proponent of HubSpot. Been had HubSpot internally in the business for eight. Nine years and been a partner of theirs for probably six or seven I think.
[00:16:41] Simon: So HubSpot’s got a very good system in terms of that marketing automation piece, autoresponders, workflows, triggered events, lead scoring. So we put the tools aside from it and put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. People now expect a response [00:17:00] from. The business or the brand in less than an hour.
[00:17:06] Simon: I read a report literally 48 hours ago and saying, today’s expectation is that if they haven’t got an immediate response via say, SMS, they might have emailed. If they haven’t got an immediate response to acknowledge receipt, they’ve moved on to, to get in touch with the next provider or the next service provider or the next product.
[00:17:24] Simon: So we do live in this world, where everything is instant. Our expectation now is everything is instant. So how do businesses then capitalize on that? Firstly, obviously they need to ensure that they have some some form of. Auto response that comes out, to, to an inquiry saying, Hey, we’ve just received your inquiry, and somebody from our XX team will be calling you from this number because no one answers their phone anymore to an unknown number.
[00:17:55] Simon: So really from the get go, just [00:18:00] giving that customer experience where the customer is. Oh, great. That was quick. Okay. Simon from Sydney Digital Marketing is gonna be calling me on. From this number in the next hour. So instantly you, you created that connection with them from an automation perspective.
[00:18:19] Simon: You need to be able to obviously segment your database, and by segment really segment so you can really personalize according to does this person like to receive texts? Would they prefer to be emailed? Would they prefer a phone call? Or would they prefer to speak with with with an AI chat bot or something.
[00:18:37] Simon: Start to ask people, my son’s a perfect example. He’s 26. I’ve been s telling this story for years. I call him, he doesn’t answer. It goes to voicemail. He texts me two minutes later, Hey, dad, what’s up? I’m like, what’s up? Is I wanna speak to you? Is what’s up? So I’m more for, making a phone call.
[00:18:58] Simon: A lot of kids, a lot of the younger generations, [00:19:00] a more messaging, instant messaging, dms, text messages, they don’t wanna talk to people. They’d much rather just. It’s not that communication without having to engage with someone, yeah, it’s a whole different discussion, but without having to actually engage with the human.
[00:19:19] Simon: So I think that generation is perfectly set up to deal with a AI agents, which are coming, which are now rolling out this year. This year. Yep. Perfectly set up to deal with AI chatbots where you can just go in and be able to query a chatbot on a website with any question, and it has full knowledge of the business that you can’t get from a website.
[00:19:44] Simon: So those sorts of things are easy, low investment, low time to market. Tools that you can implement now to keep things personalized to yeah. To automate things [00:20:00] and then start to see some efficiencies, start off with one or two areas. Yeah. Within the business where you can actually automate something.
[00:20:07] Simon: I’m just looking at getting setting up an AI receptionist specific digital marketing using 11 labs. Their voice, their AI voice is very good. Sounds like you’re talking to a human. And you’ll be able to book an appointment in my calendar or one of the team’s calendar over the phone or even via the website.
[00:20:27] Simon: You just click a button and you can start a conversation with this ai receptionist who will also be programmed and will also have our knowledge base. On what we do, who we do it for, best customer fit, et cetera. So they should almost be able to qualify a a new caller before handing them off into an appointment.
[00:20:49] Simon: It connects to my calendar in HubSpot, so it automatically updates HubSpot for me and drops the appointment into both the call is calendar and into mine. For me, I think, that’s an [00:21:00] easy one to implement in terms of automation. But personalization as well. People expect personalized service now, they don’t want to receive a one size fits all approach.
[00:21:12] Simon: Back to the AI tool, I would be going in there as a business and going, okay, look, here’s our customer journey. Inquiry comes in, it gets received by so and it gets passed on to this person within X amount of time. This person has spoken with them. They get updated in our CRM. Book a maybe a discovery call or an initial chat or something.
[00:21:37] Simon: Yep. We send a proposal, so put, build out that customer journey and then ask for the areas where you can personalize that, improve the personalization. And if you, again, garbage in garbage act, you give it a really good prompt and it can help you step through that process and say to it, guide me through how I do this step by step as if I’m a.
[00:21:59] Simon: 10-year-old or [00:22:00] something.
[00:22:00] Nital: Yeah. Very true. Very true. And a lot of time it’s the journey, right? Depends on, in my experience, depends on where you are. As a business. If you’re currently not at all into automation, then first is let’s start automating things to start with, and then as you correctly mentioned, you start observing your audience and start segmenting and then start creating personalization.
[00:22:25] Nital: Yeah. A lot of, we have also seen. When you try to overcomplicate things right, it’s very hard to get through. Yes. Sometimes you don’t have that enough volume to overcomplicate things as well. Yeah. So it depends on which phase of journey you are in. When it comes to automation and personalization. Yeah.
[00:22:45] Nital: Our personal experience and we have seen amazing shift of the time we automate. A with HubSpot and then with integration with make.com. Some of our inquiries of prospects [00:23:00] inquiring on a website, how can we make sure that we revert to them within 20 minutes?
[00:23:07] Simon: Yes.
[00:23:07] Nital: Earlier it was two hours SLAs for a person to revert and open up the conversation as a human.
[00:23:15] Nital: Because 20 minutes you can’t assure that SLAs because person might be on a meeting, on a lunch. Yes. Away. Now we have changed that with automation first phase with 20 minutes SLAs of someone reverting on that inquiry. With that hope that person inquiring for a service might be still on their desktop.
[00:23:40] Nital: Ing through other options or working on other things.
[00:23:45] Simon: Yes.
[00:23:45] Nital: And probability for you to book a meeting with them in that 20 minute span is much higher compared to losing them. With the two hours or three hours or response time. Of course. And [00:24:00] once we correct that, we have seen our booking ratio has gone up by 28%.
[00:24:08] Nital: From the past. And then we started working on personalization that, okay, now how can we add personalization into that automation? Yes. In terms of what they’ve inquired, which page they have landed on the website, which page they’re inquiring from. Yes. So as you mentioned it’s a journey and you have to look at both segments by giving equal weight.
[00:24:31] Simon: Yeah and it’s important to, what really are the metrics that matter? What are the metrics that, that you need to measure? As you said, dropping that gap from two hours to 20 minutes and having that in there, as as a KPI for your team. But again, how does that then affect.
[00:24:48] Simon: Bottom line as well. If your if your bookings have gone up by almost 30%, that should have a significant effect just from that one little change. Of course, [00:25:00] nothing different other than getting in touch with people faster, servicing them faster, giving them a better customer experience.
[00:25:05] Simon: And I think, technology yes, competition, yes, but. By giving them the very best customer experience that gets them talking about you and gets them you, you’ve solved their problem. They’re sitting there going, I have a need, I have a problem. Who’s gonna solve it for me? And as you said, they’re going from one to the next.
[00:25:29] Simon: So if you can have that conversation first, you’ve got a much higher chance of of forming a business relationship and closing the deal.
[00:25:36] Nital: Very true. Great. Great. I’m enjoying the conversation. Such, such an amazing insights. Simon. You are big on authenticity as a business, right?
[00:25:48] Nital: Yes. And would love to know your intel on as agencies, growers they often risk becoming too corporate or losing their personality [00:26:00] that made them appealing at the first point, and you always emphasize. And how big the authenticity plays a role in a decision making in any business relationship.
[00:26:14] Nital: Yes. In fact, I’ve also read your post where you mentioned how 88% of the customer value is when deciding what brands they want to trust. So we’d love to know. What are your suggestion on how can agencies maintain that authentic personality while scaling up and expanding into larger markets?
[00:26:40] Simon: Look, I, again, I cannot, I can only speak from my personal, I. Experience, we’ve seen some agencies and you would know them as well. Certainly locally here in Australia, just explode, go from 10 to 20 to 30 to a hundred to 200 staff. Yep. And, a amazing I can only imagine the [00:27:00] stresses and the strains that must put on a business internally as well.
[00:27:03] Simon: I think, yeah, authenticity from a. People buy from people. We’ve gone are the days now, big brands and small brands are coming round to this realization now that it’s not about having the investing, hundreds of thousands of dollars unless you’ve got that sort of budget into shiny videos and shiny sort of content and creative.
[00:27:30] Simon: Being authentic just means you are. You’re not gonna resonate with everybody, but you’re gonna resonate with the people if they’re, if those people are resonating with you, then they’re the sorts of people that you wanna do business with and you’re probably gonna get along with anyway. We’ve all come across people where sales gone really well.
[00:27:47] Simon: They think it’s all gonna be a great partnership, a great relationship. And then like any relationship, whether it’s personal or professional for whatever reason. It goes sour it goes downhill. And [00:28:00] more and more companies, more and more people that I’m seeing certainly on LinkedIn where I hang out the most from a social media perspective, are saying that they’re just getting very choosy now on the types of people that they want to work with.
[00:28:15] Simon: And so being authentic, upfront, telling your story. Putting yourself out there. I put that reel up last week and I rolled over, 12,000 followers on LinkedIn and look, and looking back over that, I was like, wow, man that’s a lot of video content that I put out. But what happens is over the years of doing video on Facebook and YouTube and predominantly now on LinkedIn, people come to me and they say, you know what, Simon, I’ve been following your stuff for two years, possibly even longer.
[00:28:46] Simon: I haven’t been ready to have a conversation with you, but now I’m ready to have a conversation with you because they feel like they’ve made a connection. They feel like I’m turning up consistently every single week with a piece of content that [00:29:00] resonates with them. And I’m on the journey too. I’m building a business.
[00:29:04] Simon: You are building a business. They’re building a business. So I think to be able to get out there and not put on. What I would say heirs and graces and just to be able to tell it how it’s, I think that’s important. And I think that does resonate with people that are looking to cut through the noise and the BS that’s out there.
[00:29:26] Simon: And so that has worked really well for me and I try now to encourage others on LinkedIn to go out and or whatever platform it is to do the same, tell their story, tell their business story this. So many amazing people out there running amazing businesses that you’ve never heard of and you don’t know their story, and they’re stuck at $2 million a year or $3 million a year, or $1 million a year.
[00:29:50] Simon: They just can’t bust through. But suddenly we have this platform where we can get out and tell this story. So I think authenticity is hugely important [00:30:00] in today’s, in today’s world, full stop, but in, certainly in today’s business world.
[00:30:04] Nital: Yeah true. And as much as important, the authenticity as you, as a person, you as a business, it is I think in a today’s competitive world your value proposition is also very crucial. Would love to get your opinion on value proposition framework, right? That framework which defines your value proposition as a business. And there’s a we I believe we happened to talk earlier as well, that there is a. Strategizer, which is the business model.
[00:30:38] Nital: Ken also talks about value proposition, Ken, and how it helps businesses to stand out. Yes. I would love for you to share to the audience what are your views on that? Can you walk us through how senior leaders can utilize that framework to craft the killer value proposition [00:31:00] and leverage that to grow their business?
[00:31:02] Simon: So John, I think we take it back. A step I’ll talk to per, I’ll talk to my experience with that and trying to define that because for a lot of business owners, founders, leaders it becomes really difficult when you are in a competitive marketplace. What makes us truly different?
[00:31:19] Simon: Some people say, oh, it’s our people. But you know what the people down the road, they’re saying, what makes us different? It’s our people. So we all have the best people in the world. We all have the best team in the world. So sadly, that is, it is a differentiator of course, but it’s not one that you can go out and differentiate.
[00:31:37] Simon: Differentiate yourself with. Yeah, price is another one. Obviously, you can say we’re the cheapest. The next person is gonna come along and they’re gonna, they’re gonna be cheaper. So that’s always a race to the bottom. So we start now. Dig. I think digital marketing obviously has changed over the last 10, 12, 13 years or so before, when Facebook was first monetizing and Google ads were, was so easy to throw up Google ads and you’d become a [00:32:00] millionaire in a month.
[00:32:01] Simon: Become much more competitive, much more complex. And much noisier. The smartphone has just taken all of our attention of all ages. So how do you cut through so you know. The first thing is to understand your audience. Know exactly who your buyer is, whether you call it a persona, an ICP, the ideal client profile.
[00:32:23] Simon: But really get to know what are the things that keep them awake at night? What are the motivations? I put that post out a couple of weeks ago as well. I wanna, I ride electric skateboard, I wanna upgrade my electric skateboard. I might be marketed to for speed and power and flashing lights for something.
[00:32:41] Simon: But my underlying motivation to upgrade my skateboard is that I take my daughter to school on it once or twice a week. I’ve done for the years, and she’s getting older, she’s getting bigger, she’s getting heavier, so I need a stronger skateboard, not necessarily a faster and more powerful one. So I wanted to use that to [00:33:00] demonstrate, there’s always underlying factors that drive our purchasing decisions.
[00:33:04] Simon: What are we trying to solve? So going through the exercise and we do a three hour discovery workshop now with new clients that come on board and we pull the business apart and then we get to the audience section. Age. Yep. Where do they live? What’s their income? What do they do for a job?
[00:33:22] Simon: That’s all the basic demographic stuff, but the psychographics, why would they buy from you? Why wouldn’t they buy it from you? What problems are they looking to solve? And then how do you solve those problems? And once you compile all of that information, that’s a, that’s the audience part. Then we start looking at the business.
[00:33:44] Simon: What is it that you actually do? Let’s really nut down on that USP, that unique. What’s unique about your business? And then we go to see, it’s the a b, C methodology. We go to see which is the competition. What are the other guys doing? Let’s have a look over the fence. [00:34:00] Who’s winning? What keywords are they using?
[00:34:02] Simon: What’s their website performance? The website experience? Like maybe what tech stack do they have? Once we’ve got all of that information, then you are able to articulate your difference directly to your audience who, because you now understand their pain points and their challenges and why they would need you.
[00:34:22] Simon: You can, now it’s looking at my saying, but I’d love it. Dan Kennedy. The message to market match. So it’s messaging, getting your messaging right to match your market. That has made all the difference to the success of our campaigns as an agency in the last five years versus the first five years. In the first five years it was, yep.
[00:34:44] Simon: Build a campaign. We know Facebook, we know AdWords, we know digital marketing, we know SEO, let’s just go for it. But over the years, it’s got far more complex and the psychographics the psychometric. Part of the marketing piece has [00:35:00] become so much more important now before you spend a dollar on, before you give a dollar to Google or give a dollar to Facebook or LinkedIn.
[00:35:09] Simon: So I think any business that hasn’t done that work and is trying to scale and trying to market is going to, is. Is gonna struggle. I don’t wanna say fail, but they’re gonna struggle. They’re gonna keep saying, why isn’t my marketing working? Oh, we have this agency and they promised us the world. And then a year later, all we get is an invoice and a report that says they sent us 10,000 visits or something.
[00:35:34] Nital: Very true. It’s like any other startup, right? You go through a. PMF stage of figuring it out. Your product market fit. Yeah. Before you apply a GTM strategy, go to market strategy to grow your business. And when you are in, when you are at A PMF stage, very crucial is to understand the [00:36:00] audience which is.
[00:36:01] Nital: The right audience for the problem. You’re trying to solve their pain areas, how your solutions fits into their needs. Yes. And turning their pains into gains. Yeah. And leverage those solutions then to scale when.
[00:36:26] Nital: We follow a website called Strategizer. Who has two, two frameworks. One is called Business Model Canvas. And second is Value Proposition Canvas. The Business Model Canvas is all about. Identifying who’s the ICP? Your ideal customer persona is so that before you start investing and start thinking of scaling, you need to have a clarity on that because a lot of time you may be good at acquisition and you may acquire those customers by burning a lot of money, or [00:37:00] even, let’s say, investing a lot of funds.
[00:37:02] Nital: But then if you’re not able to serve them, if they’re not your ICP, you won’t be able to grow them or retain them. Correct. You’re not gonna get your ideal lifetime value from those customers. Ultimately, you’re gonna realize after six months, one year, two years, that for what I have done all this investment for, and the value proposition is constantly looking at what pain areas your ICPs go through.
[00:37:32] Nital: And how do you alter your solutions or modify your solutions? Like you mentioned earlier in the conversation that we are living in a world where one size fits all doesn’t work. So how can you constantly figuring it out what solution works? Against the pain areas your customer is going through, and then you define your value proposition canvas from that.
[00:37:56] Nital: So yeah, amazing insight and a great example of a [00:38:00] skateboard. You going through that journey of figuring it out, your need changes and how do you adopt and. Skateboard for you.
[00:38:09] Simon: Obviously, analogies are a great thing, but I use it because it’s something different, not many 57 year olds I know, ride an electric skateboard, not many 57 year olds.
[00:38:18] Simon: I know I’ve got an 8-year-old daughter. So it’s something I feel that can stand out and tell a bit of a story with an analogy to just to get people to think, okay, what are the things that keep me awake at night when I make your decision? What are the things that would keep my customers awake at night before they reach out?
[00:38:35] Simon: And I think one other thing, just to add to that piece as well, yep. Is a lot of businesses, marketers, businesses, more, the marketers focus on this. 5% of people that are in market at any one time, it doesn’t matter what the product is. Somewhere between three and 5% of people are in market for your product or service at any one time.
[00:38:57] Simon: But there’s 95, 90 7% of people that. [00:39:00] Aren’t in market for you, but maybe at some time drop into that 5%. And you would guys would’ve seen this as well. The cost of performance marketing has increased dramatically over the last 12, 18, 24 months. So investing in that brand piece, investing in that, hi, here we are, introducing us.
[00:39:22] Simon: This is what we do. Not asking you to give us your email address or anything just yet, but just, that building that brand awareness piece is so important because if you can make your budget, if you’ve got budget to invest in that very much top of funnel or brand awareness piece, that’s gonna pay dividends down the track.
[00:39:39] Simon: It’s not gonna pay dividends this month or next month or the month after, but six, 12 months time you’ll have been in somebody’s face. A little bit like my videos, turning up every single week. Putting them out there, trying to add some value. And then when the time comes, people get in touch and they say, Hey, I’ve been following your videos.
[00:39:58] Simon: We’d love to, we’d love to have a conversation. [00:40:00] So I think doing that A, B, C, understanding your audience, really getting to know the, your unique, your USP within your business. Knowing what the competition are doing, but then not just going, okay, cool, let’s go to market and go for everybody who’s searching for, near water bottles or something.
[00:40:15] Simon: ’cause you’re just gonna, you haven’t built any trust. No one knows who you are. Why should I buy from you?
[00:40:21] Nital: Yeah. Yeah. No, very well, and that also brings me to another question, Simon. You are always big advocate of brand building, like you mentioned. How can businesses stay on top of mine for the right persona, even if they’re not having the buying intent today, eventually where they’re gonna give reach to the buying intent if your brand is on top of the head, right?
[00:40:47] Nital: Yes. That’s where a brand should desire to be. There’s also an interesting. The terminology going on from last couple of years. It’s called zero click Marketing. With the amount [00:41:00] of content we all consume yes on social media there is a cookie Less world we are entering into that audiences not necessarily landing on your website where you can cookie them or retarget them or see them as your visitors sessions.
[00:41:16] Nital: Right lot happens with zero click marketing. Yes. And in a cookie less world where brand building becomes very crucial would love to have your opinion. And what are your strategy? Or is there any brand building framework would you suggest to your customers where, what should a brand do to stay on top of the audience?
[00:41:44] Nital: And is there any specific framework or tips or suggestions you’d like to share?
[00:41:49] Simon: Look, I think first party data is critical for any business. We’ve been, there’s two sides to the story, consumers. [00:42:00] Internet users have been followed around the internet by cookies for far too long.
[00:42:07] Simon: It’s very different now in, in the eu. But certainly if I’m just talking from Australian market perspective and our data has been used for, yeah, obviously digital marketing purposes but for all sorts of purposes. So I think the move away from cookies is a good thing from a privacy su perspective.
[00:42:26] Simon: We back in the early days, 2000 10, 11, 12. Likes on Facebook, followers on on Facebook was enormous. How many followers did you have on Facebook? I remember building pages for clients of ours, 50,000, a hundred thousand, 150,000 people. Suddenly they had this, an enormous audience of people to talk to, and then Facebook just switched off.
[00:42:48] Simon: We spent all that money in time investing in content and creative to build that audience and access to that audience. Facebook just went to, to monetize everything and said, now it’s pay to play. [00:43:00] And we became the product and still are. So we are at the mercy of these platforms.
[00:43:06] Simon: No one owns their audience. If you’re on Instagram, you’ve got 3 million followers. They almost shut TikTok down earlier in the year in the us. So owning that first party data is critical. Owning the ability to be able to email somebody, whether it’s email or phone number, to be able to have that one-to-one conversation so that we’re not having to pay Google and Facebook and all of the platforms all of the time in order to to appear to appear there.
[00:43:30] Simon: The other thing I would add to that is probably context, like where are your ads or your content being shown, I see. Clients that come to us. I go around the internet all the time and I see their display ads being shown. I go, oh, those people just, obviously I get shown their ads because I just went onto their website to check them out.
[00:43:48] Simon: Yep. So I’m being retargeted. I’m going, man, that ad on this website, that makes no sense at all. Because you know the GDM network just, if it’s not managed properly, it just. Yeah. [00:44:00] Throws out everywhere and the agency sends you a report and goes, we surfed up a million impressions, how’s sales going?
[00:44:06] Simon: And you’re like yeah, you surfed up a million impressions on this site where I would never want my brand to be associated with. Sure. So I think I, I think it’s important that you pay attention to the context in which your brand is being seen. But the key here, as we move to ulu, whenever that is, it’s been pushed out and pushed out.
[00:44:25] Simon: First party data owning that first party data.
[00:44:27] Nital: Very interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. And that’s where I think the hotspot coined term like revenue operations bringing customer view is becoming very crucial because now you don’t look at the customer from a single dimension like you look at.
[00:44:45] Nital: Your marketing channels, your sales acquisition, and your customer success and growth. Afford, yes. Combining it all, how it is helping and contributing towards your rev ops or revenue operation initiatives?
[00:44:58] Simon: Yes. Yeah, [00:45:00] a hundred percent. The power of HubSpot that it’s created just for us as an agency let alone our clients, by just keeping my agency hat on, how does it help us? We see the quality of the leads and inquiries coming through into HubSpot if we’re running campaigns, and then we are able to see which one of those. Results in a sale in a paid customer or a subscribing customer or purchase.
[00:45:24] Simon: And then we are able to use that data to feed immediately back into some of the campaigns that we’re running. So we’re always optimizing to sale rather than optimizing for lead. And if we optimize to sale, it means we’re optimizing to quality, which means sure, you might get a few less leads, but the quality of them is, 80% up.
[00:45:44] Simon: Eight outta 10 rather than getting, a thousand leads and they’re three outta 10.
[00:45:50] Nital: Yeah,
[00:45:51] Simon: True.
[00:45:52] Nital: Okay. Simon, I think one final question, and I know it’s gonna be a little bit broad, but a lot of businesses have gone [00:46:00] through a very uncertain time over the last two, three years with a lot of shifts.
[00:46:07] Nital: From a global economic standpoint, a lot of shift with AI automation standpoint. What are your opinion? Are there any strategies, tips, suggestions you would love to suggest? For. Businesses to stay most effective while balancing their growth along with profitability and keeping that long-term brand resilience at center.
[00:46:35] Simon: Because
[00:46:36] Nital: there’s always a chase, right? Do you wanna chase profitability? When the markets are tough. Do you wanna focus on growth or how do you balance in the juggle of profitability and scale your long-term brand resilience and brand value?
[00:46:52] Simon: Yeah. Growth definitely creates.
[00:46:56] Simon: Stress points within the business. As we say in Australia, you [00:47:00] might be outside Australia as well. You can walk the walk because you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? And, it means that anybody can create a story and to great selling, but then when it comes to the execution side of things, everything falls apart or expectations aren’t being managed.
[00:47:15] Simon: So I think. You need to, from a growth perspective, building on if I use the analogy Lego blocks, build maybe your tech stack as you are expanding, you want your tech stack to be like Lego blocks. You don’t want it to be like a beautiful sculpture or something. You want to be able to pull things out and to be able to pull, put things back in.
[00:47:36] Simon: So always, I guess planning for that growth planning to have future proof is a little bit tricky to use at the moment because the future is so un, it’s so uncertain. So good luck if you can future proof your business. I think yeah being able to have. Key components of your business, whether that’s sales, service, marketing, [00:48:00] retention, all of those things all need to be talking to each other.
[00:48:04] Simon: And you need to be able to identify where the stresses in the business are going to come from as you scale. Is it gonna be in execution? Is it gonna be in delivery? Is it gonna be in, if you are selling a product physical product, is it gonna be in that? How does that experience, land with somebody, they’ve ordered something and instead of it taking that two days, it’s taken five days. ’cause you’ve got so busy and you haven’t been able to fulfill the the order quickly enough. So from our perspective, clients to client to manager ratios, how many clients can a key account manager manage before that, the quality of their work starts to drop.
[00:48:42] Simon: So being. Very aware or having people within the business that are aware, that can see perhaps those stresses coming. Open communication with your team is obviously the first place to start. But, that those would be the key, main things. And I think that the other thing is, coming [00:49:00] back to the main theme of this conversation, which has been AI is.
[00:49:04] Simon: Get onto YouTube or get onto some clever AI influencers on LinkedIn. Sign up to some of the LinkedIn AI groups with, hundreds of thousands of followers. They’ve got good content in there, and really start to grasp what the opportunity is for your business. As well as the threat that AI is going to bring.
[00:49:26] Simon: And I’m not talking about the fact that we can make pretty pictures like that and funny pictures like that and create a 2000 word blog post, but really, what are the threats to your business that all of a sudden, one person. And set themselves up with a team of AI agents and they’re just sitting there managing those AI agents to get out there and do the work.
[00:49:46] Nital: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, so to summarize it you very well covered. So three things. A look at the business fundamental or tech stack as like Lego blocks. Look at which areas requires the most [00:50:00] attention. In your growth journey ahead and try to structure it, which is more stable, more stronger, but at the same time you can take off the blog and replace it with the new blog.
[00:50:14] Nital: But your fundamental and structure remains in tech. You mentioned staying. Across the business hearing from your people, being observant on where they’re struggling where they’re gonna burn out. So basically look at the critical metrics of the business to ensure that you are going in the right direction towards growth.
[00:50:37] Nital: While maintaining the profitability and because we are. Yeah.
[00:50:42] Simon: And the quality. And the quality
[00:50:44] Nital: and the quality is maintained and has been delivered to what customers are experiencing or what customer has been promised. And the third thing, because we are going through that phase of.
[00:50:57] Nital: Pragmatic changes. So [00:51:00] staying ahead of the curve by being part of these AI influencers AI groups, following AI influencers absorbing content to always stay vigilant on what is coming, how it is going to disrupt your industry, your business, and how can you drop that timely to stay ahead of the competition compared to all of the competitors out there today.
[00:51:25] Nital: Amazing. So glad to have you, Simon, and I really appreciate you joining us. I know you’re not keeping a hundred percent from the health perspective under the weather a little bit, but we really appreciate you contributing to our audience, and I’m sure the the intel and insight you have shared with some very tactical tricks on how to start implementing it straight away into the business.
[00:51:52] Simon: Fantastic. Fantastic. Thanks. Always good to catch up with you. Thank you.
[00:51:57] Nital: Yes.