BRAD KILGORE
0:03
Good afternoon, everybody. It’s Brad Kilgore here with another fun episode of the AI Marketing Experts. So this week we are going to dig deep into a few different areas, but I think what really ties it all together, and Laura and I were talking about this earlier, is how do businesses in today’s modern age and the AI media right now, how do you stay authentic? We’re going to kind of jump in of how you can leverage AI tools, save time, save energy, automate systematize, but still keep that level of real and human and authentic in the mix. And so, Laurie, I knew you and I were jamming out earlier about some of these things. Do you want to touch on some of the things that came up in our earlier discussion?
LAURA SUTHERLY
2:24
I like the way that you introduced it, that there are different aspects and it seems like AI, of course, is the buzzword. Everybody’s talking about it, but there’s no longer just looking to use AI because that seems to have leveled the playing field. And we’re going to get to a plateau or plane there where we’re not, that’s not going to be something that separates us. But if we think about how we’ve been successful, how our listeners, our viewers have been successful in their businesses, they’re authentic. You have your own stories that are truly only you and your customers, your clients, your growers, they’re doing business with you because of that reason. So if we take our, you know, thousand dollar computer out of our pocket and take photos of what the, you know, what we’re seeing, what projects we’re working on, what the conditions are in the fields, what we’re looking at when we are upgrading the tractors or the implements or installing. If you are doing your own videos and you are doing your own photos, that is a story that you’re, for me, their growers in that area are going to really gravitate to. I mean, Kris, when you have your companies out there taking pictures of roof damage or talking about why they’re on that roof doing that repair or how they do estimates, Jen, with your customers, there’s, oh, there, it’s their own stories.
LAURA SUTHERLY
3:49
Brad and John, same thing is that as any of our listeners or viewers, take their phones out of their pockets and take their photos, their videos, that is just authentic pieces that they can share. And two ways, if you’re kind of like, I do not want to get into editing and I do not want to get into that of how, you know, it’s going to be stored on my phone. How do I get it? Brad had a great suggestion earlier about Facebook Live or YouTube Live. If you really want to say, look, I’m just going to take that question I just received or I’m in this situation, I’m going to go live, talk about it and then it’s one and done. I know as a group we’ll talk about different ways that you can take these marketing pieces or you know, like we said, the videos, the photos and weave them into your messaging. But that’s what’s going to separate you. That’s what’s going to take you to the next level. You’re just not hitting a button to say write me content or build me a video and putting that out there because it’s something that speaks to your audience, it’s going to take you that much further.
BRAD KILGORE
4:56
That’s exactly right. I think another piece that’s important that I’ve been asked before is okay, yes, I want to keep it real. I don’t want to use a bunch of AI images and videos all the time. I may want to enhance some things, but part of what I’ve been asked is, okay, I’ve used my phone and I took videos and I took photos or what have you. And then I got back to my office and I’m like, okay, how do I get these out of my phone into my computer? Because I don’t know how to do that. And that’s perfectly normal. There’s a lot of people that just aren’t technical. But there are several ways to go about that, and some of it is very streamlined and straightforward.
BRAD KILGORE
5:34
I think one of the pieces, we use Riverside as a studio video, a recording studio for this show. We’re on Riverside right this second. Riverside has a mobile app. So if you were to do. If you were to use Riverside, then you can use Riverside out in the field from your phone. And then when you’re back, you can then have it automagically do your shorts, add your subtitles, do your editing, clean up the, clean up the audio, all these different things. If that works for your grade, there’s a cost with that because it’s a paid software. But the other flip side of that is I have.
BRAD KILGORE
6:11
I’m on. I’ve been on Android since day one. I don’t use iPhones, but. And maybe someone can chime in. But with Android, I’ve had Dropbox.com on my phone, the app on my phone, for probably 10 years. So anytime I take a photo, anytime I shoot a video at a concert or in a job site or whatever it is, when I’m done, it automatically goes right up to my Dropbox cloud. And then when I’m in front of my computer, I can take that, manipulate it, run it through Nano Banana or whatever I want to do because it went from my phone to my computer with. With zero effort.
BRAD KILGORE
6:45
You can use Google Drive, you can use other things. I’m sure there’s icloud and what have you. That is geek and ease to me because I don’t have an iPhone, but those are just some ideas. So who else has some input on some of these things of keeping it authentic and how you could use real life stuff, real life images, videos, what have you.
JOHN CLENDENNING
7:07
Yeah, I think what I’ll jump in because I just did a webinar a training in one of our master classes last Thursday on SEO and the massive changing landscape of SEO, Search engine optimization, how you rank and the word of the day is authenticity. Now. So it used to be manipulations, keywords, Google Maps would live in its own sort of set of work. And you know, you can do driving direction manipulation and this and that organic would be your website and keywords and backlinks and, and all of that. And, and then this whole new world of sort of AI mentions came out a year and a bit ago where Google released the sort of the, the Gemini into search. And that’s evolved so much now that we know what, where that’s going. End of the day, they’re all combined now. So there’s no one platform that, there’s no one tactic, one platform that you work with because real photos uploaded properly, Google Maps listing to your website, to your social, telling real customer stories, all of that on your website.
JOHN CLENDENNING
8:13
Being able to do what they used to call like eat your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, not faking it. We went to a new client that just signed up with us. He’s got pages on his website where literally the last web developer had on every single one of the pages. Here’s our experience, here’s our expertise, here’s our authoritativeness, here’s our trustworthiness. That was how they wrote the pages was literally we’re trying to write to eat, so we’re gonna do it sort of. And it was like, oh my gosh, like the content’s crap, it’s manipulated, it’s not authentic. Where real pictures, real review acquisition, you can have AI help you answer every single review, but you need to answer every single review. But ultimately, if you think of it this way, the old world, the you kind of manipulated.
JOHN CLENDENNING
9:02
You hope your, your agency could just do all the. I don’t, I’m not going to give you any stuff. Just go do your work. Go. You, you get me ranked now it’s like it’s got to be a partnership. No, you got to give me real pictures, you got to give me real stories. You got to tell me about your old yeller dog that died when you were 12 years old. Cause I want to put that in the blog post.
JOHN CLENDENNING
9:17
I want to teach our AI that helps write all about your local community, all about you in the local community. So, so I need your authenticity. And we will use AI to help enhance it, make it quicker, make it better, but we’re going to put the reel back into it. So for example, a carpet cleaner with a strong pet stain removal page on their website, written properly, really done well with real stories. That’s an authority play, right? So now AI picks that up. Google Maps picks that up, SEO picks that up. You complete now complete the gbp, your Google business profile with pet order services that Talk about pet order for services linking back to that page and your authority. Now you’ve got a presence, right? So you have, you have that mentioned around directories and then you real before and after pictures mentioning pet order, real happy customer stories, authentic pictures taken on the job site, put up on social with a story.
JOHN CLENDENNING
10:12
Not just a before and after slider, but an actual story. Now you’ve got the experience added in. So when somebody goes into AI or to Google at all or their chat GPT and said, who should I hire for pet stain removal in Boise, Idaho, guess who it’s going to pick? Because you added authenticity using AI to help enhance and maybe do it a little bit faster, quicker, better as you learn that from us and everybody else. But you’ve put again, I say every day now, how grandpa used to run the business, back before any of this stuff was invented, is how you need to run the business now. Literally go and flip pancakes and hamburgers at the local charity auction and stuff like that. Get your name listed on their website, have a little write up, have a little. Now I could pick that up. You see.
JOHN CLENDENNING
10:57
Oh shucks, you’re the good old boy back in the, in the town again. Because AI is now getting rid of all of the manipulation and going, no, I’m just really trying to find the real people that run real businesses that people really like. So it’s getting better and better and better, which means you have to be more real and not play games, not hope that there’s a tactic out there that you can let your SEO company or Nancy in the office do for you so you can, you know, go out, do your jobs, go home and eat Cheetos and watch Netflix. You actually have to run a real business again.
BRAD KILGORE
11:29
That’s a great way to put it.
JENNIFER CREGO
11:31
I want to jump in because I have a lot of clients who they, they, they are like, I, I just want to run my business. I don’t want to be the face of the business. I don’t want to, I don’t want to deal with photos and videos and I just want to run the business like I did in 2002. And I mean, they don’t say 2002. That’s my, that’s my adaptation, my me paraphrasing. But if you want to grow your business online, like doing those things is just necessary these days. So I live in a rural area and I’m noticing more and more like, I mean, a lot more on the busier streets and like kind of highways or something. There are a lot of, of not billboards.
JENNIFER CREGO
12:27
Like they’re smaller, smaller than billboards, but they’re like maybe, I don’t know what is it plywood size or, or smaller. That’s like a painted sign and it, you know, has the information, but it’s, it’s not the person that like lives in that place. It’s not, it’s not theirs. Those homeowners are actually renting out that space. Like you can put a sign in my field by the highway. I don’t know how much they charge. I would be very interested in asking someone. I’m sure it’s different depending on how busy the road is, but that is one that one of many ways to get, you know, new customers for, for a small business to get new customers.
JENNIFER CREGO
13:17
And I mean it, I don’t know if it’s a, like a very good lever as far as that you can pull to get new business or anything, but it, it’s definitely a pull in the water. As we like to say with market.
JOHN CLENDENNING
13:31
It’s a brand awareness moment. Like it’s. You need, you need 20 touch points before that ad shows up, the flyer shows up. They see the pre roll on a. Like they’re watching a streaming service and you put a video out in front of there all like, what is the thing that got them to come in? Google calls that Z mod zero moment of truth. You see 11 touches before you buy the. Pull the product off the shelf or call the roofing company. Now it’s 20 to 30, they say.
JOHN CLENDENNING
13:56
So it’s a pole in the water. I got a guy. I just thought it was a weird story. I’m just gonna jump in for a second. He, he’s a contractor. He’s doing some work on a friend of mine’s house. We had a chat. I was over there chatting with him and helping out and stuff, like looking at some things.
JOHN CLENDENNING
14:09
And I just, I’m on a busy road. He goes, john, I noticed you have that sign pole on your, you know the, the one part of your property, right, Big enough property, old farmhouse kind of thing. You’re right on the main drag on the away of town. I’ll pay 100 bucks a month if I can hang my sign on it.
LAURA SUTHERLY
14:25
There you go, there you go.
JOHN CLENDENNING
14:28
Didn’t know that was a thing I would never like. It was from my old business, like the one I sold. So I took the sign down a long time ago, four years ago, almost five years ago now. And it just, I’ve got the, the frame. And he goes, yeah, I’ll hang my Sign there.
LAURA SUTHERLY
14:40
I’m going to jump in to Jen’s point regarding how they don’t want to be on video or on camera. That’s an excellent place to get employees involved. And that’s what I’m finding out, is that there is going to be a shining star amongst the team. And then you also, you get the team, they’re looking for content for you. They’re excited about doing the videos. And that’s one less thing as a business owner that’s on your plate now. Now you’ve got the team. That’s their shorts or they’re doing video clips that you can review, but that’s content because they are face to face with the growers, they’re face to face with clients, so they know what questions are coming up after they might be on the job, they can go ahead and record that or have that interaction, ask for the testimonial.
LAURA SUTHERLY
15:27
But companies are finding that those team members that are willing to be on camera, there’s a generation that’s very comfortable taking selfies, doing the videos, jumping on live. They don’t think anything of it. It’s just in their natural communications. But the other thing, too, if we think of some of the other episodes that we’ve done to talk about branding, it opens up the dialogue for companies to have what is our, you know, value proposition, what is our brand messaging? And then you can make sure your team is up to date. Because a lot of that, as business owners resides in our own. And we have not had that opportunity to have conversations. That’s what I hear from my companies, that they say, oh, yeah, we know what we stand for, but we’ve hired many members since, and we haven’t exactly revisited that message or as they may have updated that message. So this also gives an opportunity to say, hey, if you’re doing the videos for me, here’s X, Y and Z.
LAURA SUTHERLY
16:32
Here’s what we need to make sure that is, you know, that we do have that infield service. We do have the weekend availability. We have, you know, we can come to you or we can bring your equipment to us. So I think that that just opens up a wonderful way to stay authentic and to have, you know, we know that the customers want to do business with real businesses.
BRAD KILGORE
16:56
That’s right. What do you think, Chris?
CHRIS HUNTER
16:59
So I 100% agree with y’. All. And. And just to kind of tie this all back to AI because we are an AI, you know, podcast here, right? Is. Yes, you can. You can in. In all of those things. You should be doing as a business owner in, in your marketing department should be asking for those things, right? I mean, we, what I coach all of my clients on are, are we need photos every single month, right? Job site photos.
CHRIS HUNTER
17:28
We need drone photos, right? Just for some B roll, right? If we put together a video, we want some B roll to go along with that, and we want it to be authentically created with your content, you know, kind of a thing. Yeah, definitely. You need all the information. But to tie it back to AI, what you really need is, is you need this, this brain, right, that understands your business when you create all of these things. Okay? You need this. You know, we’ve, we’ve called this our master prompt, right? And I have a master prompt that I use. But what I’ve been really digging into this week with Claude code is how do we build. Let’s go beyond that master prompt and let’s build a brain for the business so that, for anything that we create, right, with, with AI, that it’s, it’s going back and it’s referencing that brain so it understands what you stand for, what your business stands for, what services that you provide, what tone of voice, what brand messaging do you typically use, what, what colors, what logos.
CHRIS HUNTER
18:39
All of these things are tied into essentially what is in your brain as a business owner. But we need to take all of that information and put that now into an AI brain so that it understands and can produce the content just like you and sound just like you. And when, when you combine that with your authentic pieces of videos and, and, you know, pictures and even your own stories, you could tell half of the story to Claude and have it create this really nice story piece to go along with something, right? Because it knows everything about you. And, and that’s really, to me, I think that’s the, that’s the framework piece that we all need as we’re, as we’re trying to tie all of these different pieces together inside of this AI ecosystem. Right. Last week we talked about, you know, Paperclip and, and how it created all these agents and, and. But the problem that I found as I was working with that is that it didn’t truly understand my business. You know, so if we can create this, this, it could be a database.
CHRIS HUNTER
19:54
And that’s essentially what, what I’ve come up with here with Claude code is, is that we’re going to build this database that’s going to be able and, and onboard people into this AI operating system as we pull them in to build out their agents. We have to Know absolutely everything that there is about you, your business, why you even started the business, you know, why. What. Who is your ideal customer profile? Who. Who do you love working with? Who do you hate working with, right? It’s got to have all of that information in one singular place that can be referenced at any given point by any agent. And I don’t care if it’s whether, you know, because we’re starting to build these agents out and we’re starting to build these things out. We’ve got an executive assistant agent, you know, that we’ve talked about hope. And I’m working on a new hope, right? Star wars reference, working on, On.
CHRIS HUNTER
20:50
On. On an easier way to deploy her, right, that is going to have access to this, this AI brain, right? But as we add other agents, it’s got to have access to that too. Now, it might not need to know everything, but just like an employee, it’s got to know a little bit. It’s got to know something about your business, about you, about why it’s. It’s there, why it’s even working. So anyways, that’s my thought. On, on this whole authentic authenticity piece is really, let’s tie this all together with AI and it’s got to be through a brain.
JENNIFER CREGO
21:26
The, the. The wacky. It’s really the soul. It’s the soul of your business. Just like how we were talking, I don’t know, a week or two ago about the. What was it? The w. The wacky. The wind thing.
JOHN CLENDENNING
21:37
Like, wavy, wackable, waving arm.
BRAD KILGORE
21:40
Yeah, yeah, yes.
JENNIFER CREGO
21:41
The, the more context, the more, you know, whether that’s in. In text, in photos and videos, you know, and all of those things, the more context that the AI has for you, the more your business moves from a paper doll to the wacky thing that blows in the wind to an actual solid, like, entity that, like, can, you know, be a full soul of your business.
BRAD KILGORE
22:13
And I think, to make it even simpler, I think what Chris is talking about is super awesome and powerful. But for some businesses, maybe Notebook LM would be a better choice because again, you’re putting your images, you’re putting your documents, you’re putting your videos. So you’re creating a brain, essentially a source, a source area for all of your data. So then when you’re creating things, you can pull that into Gemini, you can pull it into different things because NotebookLM is where all your assets exist. So cloud code, agents, all those things are really cool. But for some people, that’s going to be too much.
JOHN CLENDENNING
22:47
I was going to Mention notebook. LM sorry just because I was going to tee that up for you Brad. So you kind of jumped ahead for me because that was good because I was saying like Laura talked about sort of like make sure your whole team knows the, the messaging and all of that kind of stuff. So good, better, best, best way to think of it. We’ve talked on these shows about these individual pieces. Chris has just given the, the congealed view that we should all be the utopia, we should all be hiring or heading towards finding people that know how to help you with that because that’s where companies will need to head. But in the meantime if you’ve got a company master control doc like just build that once you don’t need your whole like your second brain go there like I mean Diego Forte watch his whole thing on second brains as well and, and like you can go deep. They’re 3, 4, $5,000 lessons to learn how to do it.
JOHN CLENDENNING
23:35
It’s like that big of a thing but simple level. You have your company control doc which my entire team has my version it took me you know a weekend to build and now it’s available for everybody and they drop that in. We could drop in our brand guide and a training and have notebook LM create an audio overview, create a study guide create and then we just take the team member go go they go go refresh, learn new team member do fill out the quiz, come back to me now. You know before you do this new project for me, you know before you’re going to create some tick tocks about carpet cleaning Mr. Technician, you know sit in the back, we’ll pay you for the hour. Go through the, the notebook LM training and you’ve just dumped it in there. It took you minutes now and it, it now trains your, your employee without you having to build an entire training program and things like that. So AI the big lift is have it have context available to drop.
JOHN CLENDENNING
24:33
The fact that you have context available means that when you are ready to build the big second brain, the big company brain, you’ve got SOPs, you’ve got brand guides, you’ve got company control docs, you’ve got you now have all the pieces that somebody can help you put together into Hope 2.0.
LAURA SUTHERLY
24:49
Yeah and that’s one reason why that I’m glad that all these discussions happening is because that’s what I’m finding out when I’m talking to those business owners because they are the only ones that know it from A to Z that having them talk it through and to your point, bring it into one master prompt, one area. They all sudden feel like, wow, that’s the clarity that they have been striving for for years. They are so glad that now they have one place to go where they can edit or update as they go through when their team may say, well, wait a minute, what about this situation? What about that scenario that allows the messaging not only to be organized, but more consistent and giving them traction because you can use it throughout so many different areas of our business. So again, the stories, once it gets down, they’re authentic to that business. There is no other business out there that can say the exact same things. And I think that’s what we’re trying to really mention. As you said, go back to the basics. And you know, that strong business foundation, our businesses are all unique.
LAURA SUTHERLY
25:59
And by the fact that we take the time to go through to build these very valuable assets for our business, they become fun to do so. And we know it’s going to lead our business forward in the direction we want and not just be here to there.
CHRIS HUNTER
26:20
100. Yep. So, and I just want to tack on to that real quick. It’s not rocket science to create this master prompt, right, to start with. It’s, it’s basically, you know, what are, what is, you know, anyone need to know about you, right? What are your goals? What are your, what businesses do you have and all of these kinds of things, right? So we’ve been onboarding as we onboard clients, and we’ve been doing this for the past year, year and a half, I think maybe two years at this point. Every client that we onboard, we go through this list of questions to create this master prompt, right, that we can feed into any AI. And we’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve iterated on it, but it’s just essentially, who are you? What, what, you know, what is your role, what are your companies, what are your goals, what are your rocks this quarter, let’s say, right, I feed mine, I, I have to update mine next week, you know, on my new rocks for this next quarter and, and feed that into all of my AI prompts, you know, if you will, AI tools. So, but just what, what we found that works best is to just, we use Zoom for all of our meetings and all that kind of stuff.
CHRIS HUNTER
27:40
It’s real easy to hit record on that, okay? Hit record. It will create a new transcript for you now based off of that meeting. Take that transcript, feed that into AI, whatever tool that you’re using, whether that’s Gemini, whether that’s Claude, whether that’s open AI, sorry that you’re still using that, but you know, is that your new,
JOHN CLENDENNING
28:02
new one to Aron?
CHRIS HUNTER
28:04
New? I’ve been saying that for months, man. Yeah, yeah, so, but feed it into that. Say, hey, create a master prompt based off of this transcript of an interview that I did and I talked about my businesses, myself, my, my goals and so forth. Create a starting point, right? Something that you can add to. Because that’s the thing, is that this is a document that you upload. I save mine in Google Drive, so I have access to it anywhere at all times. And, and I can, as I come across a new AI tool, I just simply upload it, say here, you know, when it starts asking me questions and doesn’t understand me and say here, here’s my master prompt. You know, commit that to memory or whatever, you know, depending on the tool.
CHRIS HUNTER
28:51
So anyways, that’s just a quick tip there. Record yourself, take the transcript, add that to whatever AI tool that you’re using and say, create a master prompt.
BRAD KILGORE
29:04
Nice. Jen, were you going to chime in a minute ago?
JENNIFER CREGO
29:09
Well, I think that, you know, I mean, we started the, this episode talking about authenticity and, and bringing authenticity into, you know, your visibility, you know, how potential customers might be seeing you. So that authenticity combined with AI and really, I mean, AI is there to, to help us. It’s doing so many fantastic things, but at the end of the day, people like doing business with people. And so that authenticity, it’s, it’s just so important for connecting with your potential customers. The, the gold though is that you can use AI to, to, to do that in a maybe easier or, you know, more effective way than you could years back. But, but you still need the authentic, authentic pieces, the video and photos and stuff like that, and even the, you know, the master prompt, those things like it’s get. It gets more complicated to get more simple. People want to do business with people.
BRAD KILGORE
30:27
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, if you think about it, the old saying is people do business with people that they know like and trust.
JENNIFER CREGO
30:35
Yes.
BRAD KILGORE
30:35
And so that ties right into authenticity. And if you think back, you know, in my case a lot of years, I’m probably the oldest one on the show. But if you think back about different advertising things you’ve seen over the years, whether that’s TV commercials, whether that was, you know, print ads or whatever the case may be, even a local billboard, you know, you see it so many times and you have for years and years of A figurehead or a group of people. And so I don’t think it’s changed, it’s just a matter of how do you amplify that now? Keep your authentic self or your authenticity going, but still build your brand, as Jen would tell you, showcase and show off your people, your projects, your skills, your claim to fame, whatever that is. But now with all the tools we have, all the systems we have, all the automations we have, it can just be supercharged. Like if you’re in John’s world, my God, he’s like a mad scientist. This guy over here has got systems and, and like he’ll show you, he’ll show you a Google Doc and you’re like, oh my gosh, how did you create all that? Because he’s staying on point with what he builds, what his brand is, what his systems are, what his, what his services are. All these different things.
BRAD KILGORE
31:56
But because of AI now he shows me things that when him and I, you know, became friends five, six, seven years ago, he was showing me some of these crazy things and I’m like, oh my God, dude, you are insanely smart, right? And now he’s turned that into something that’s just like, you look at it, it’s a monolith, right? It’s a behemoth. But that’s what you can do now with the AI amplification, where you’re turning your brand, you’re turning your personality, your offers, your services, all these different things, you can now really just supercharge them to the next level because of technology. But you watch what John does. He’s still true to himself, right? People know who he is. They know like and trust him. So what do you think, John? You like that little intro?
JOHN CLENDENNING
32:41
Thank you, man. But yeah, and I just, I think it put a pin in it is AI actually amplifies authenticity. We think AI is. Oh my God, we’ve gotten more artificial. More artificial. The weird point that we’ve been, I think we’ve all been noticing as, as open clause and this and that all come out is that and the paperclip and all that is AI amplifies authenticity. Build it real, build it right, do it thoughtfully and you can iterate at the speed of light. Don’t do that, don’t add the authenticity.
JOHN CLENDENNING
33:20
Try and fake even more. Try and play the shell game and you’re making garbage at the speed of light and you’re, you’re eroding your brand and your, your abilities and all that faster than ever before. So yeah, it’s just an amplifier.
BRAD KILGORE
33:38
Yeah, exactly. Well, as we kind of come to a close, does anybody have anything they want to pop in there? I think we covered a lot. So with that, guys, we’ll wrap up another fun, exciting and thrilling episode of AI Marketing Experts.
