Give Your Marketing Strategy a Smart Upgrade

Give Your Marketing Strategy a Smart Upgrade written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Keith Lauver

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Keith Lauver, a seasoned entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the founder of Atomic Elevator, the company behind Ella—an AI-powered marketing platform. Keith has helped launch over six companies and raised more than $34 million in product funding. In our conversation, we unpack the concept of High Definition Marketing and explore how AI is transforming traditional marketing strategy into a precise, scalable, and execution-ready system.

Keith challenges the “more is better” mindset of many digital marketing tools and explains how Ella was built to augment, not automate. The goal? Better marketing, not just more marketing. With a focus on enhancing the roles of both seasoned marketers and fractional CMOs, Ella becomes a smart, always-on marketing team member that brings brand messaging, customer journey mapping, and tactical execution into full alignment. For small businesses that often lack in-house resources, this new marketing framework can drive significant business growth and improve sales enablement across the board.

Key Takeaways:

• AI marketing tools like Ella are not about automation—they’re about augmentation, helping teams produce better, more strategic work instead of just more content.

• High Definition Marketing connects multiple frameworks—brand, customer journey, value proposition—into one cohesive system.

• The Ella platform acts as a marketing team member, giving both experienced marketers and business owners a trained, responsive assistant that aligns execution with strategy.

• Real-world use case: A premium bag company stuck in flat growth for a decade saw 20% revenue growth and a 40% boost in conversion rates after using Ella to redefine their marketing.

• Fractional CMOs and marketing consultants can use Ella to deliver consistent, high-impact outcomes without scaling overhead.

• Sales enablement is the next evolution, with Ella set to bridge marketing insights and sales execution for even deeper business integration.

Chapters:

• 00:41 What is High Definition Marketing?
• 01:59 How Has Marketing Strategy Changed?
• 08:17 ELLA and DTM Partnership
• 12:52 ELLA Elevates Your Marketing Team
• 16:46 How are AI Tools Evolving?

Duct Tape Transcript

Email Download New Tab

John Jantsch (00:00.968)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Keith Lover. He's a serial entrepreneur and marketing strategist who has founded six companies, raised over 34 million in product launches. He's the founder and CEO of Atomic Elevator, the company behind Ella, an AI powered marketing platform designed to bring clarity and structure to modern marketing through what he calls high definition marketing. So Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Lauver (00:29.998)

Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:31.93)

So let's jump to high definition marketing. How would you, how do you define that? mean, I think it sounds like kind of a fun term, but you know, how do you make that real?

Keith Lauver (00:43.672)

You know, marketing has historically been fuzzy. There are different people touching different parts of that proverbial elephant. So some people, like a branding person, looks at the marketing problem through their set of lens and the digital ads person looks at it through their lens. And each person through the system basically is touching a different part. And what we said, first of all, is

Let's clear that up and let's define that. So point number one is we need to say what's in there. And that's essentially these interconnected frameworks that say, here's who customers are. Here's what a brand is. Here's what value looks like. Here's what a customer journey is. These are all frameworks that have existed. For goodness sake, John, you invented some of the classic ones that have been a big proponent of putting them all together. What we did was simply codify that. So step one is to say, these are the frameworks.

And then step two is to, within each of those documents, define them with precision. So we think that's what gives you the high definition. It's more pixels, but it's also more colors. So it's more vibrant.

John Jantsch (01:52.762)

So as I listened to you explain that, mean that 20 years ago, I would have said that's the definition of marketing strategy. So, so, so how have we changed? you know, is it really just technology has changed how we're able to view that?

Keith Lauver (01:59.82)

Yeah, right.

Keith Lauver (02:09.208)

I think there were proponents of this idea 20 years ago, like yourself, there were practitioners of it 20 years ago who said, yes, we need to do this. But what's happening in this moment is now it can become even more accessible and even more defined. And so at least speaking for myself, I didn't even understand the importance of all of these different frameworks and title about a decade ago. And keeping all of them in my mind,

while I was doing work on behalf of a client, even as I was starting to get training in them, even as I began to apply them, it's just an extraordinarily heavy lift. I'm a limited human, right? And so one of the things that's radically changed this is AI's ability to come alongside and help us keep all of those frameworks in mind at all times and help us define this at a much higher degree of precision than what we could have done at least without teams of people and months of time.

John Jantsch (03:07.646)

So it's really easy. lot of people are doing this today to lump a lot of these AI tools together. know, chat GPT, I like it better than Claude, but they do the same thing. You know, that, that kind of conversation you're hearing all the time right now, or worse in my mind, the 50 AI tools that every agency needs to use. How do you, when somebody, when you start explaining Ella as an AI tool to somebody, how do you.

get out of that characterization of, it's just another chat GPT. I know you've talked about it as marketing team in a box or, you know, a complete marketing system, a team member. mean, what, what, how do you differentiate, you know, how, how dramatically different Ella is than say the blank screen of chat GPT.

Keith Lauver (03:54.412)

Yeah.

Well, let's first start with what our objective was when we designed Ella. Most AI tools have an objective of trying to automate. And we said automation just produces more, and more is often more noise, more junk. And we don't think the world needs more. We started with an objective of producing better. We said, let's build a tool that augments, that doesn't automate.

So the first point is we want to honor and elevate those that are doing this work, whether they're a career marketer or somebody on a marketing team at a business, we want to help them do better work, not just more stuff. And that really provides kind of a fundamental difference, Within, yeah, go ahead. Well, I should say within the world of more, there are things that are also, you know, chat GPT, because it doesn't have any context about marketing, it's just trying to take

John Jantsch (04:38.632)

And now I've also, okay, good enough, go ahead and finish that.

Keith Lauver (04:52.002)

the center point, it's the average of everything. So the biggest design flaw, know, after you recognize, gosh, this thing's just trying to produce more, now it's going to produce more average stuff. And we think that's really where the big opportunity is. So we came in and said, you deserve to be exceptional, not average. We came in and tuned an AI system to the craft of marketing. We trained it on these specific frameworks and the business rules that supported it.

And then we let marketers actually teach Ella about each individual brand with thousands of pages of instructions for goodness sake, so that the work product that gets out of there really does let people be different and better and shine.

John Jantsch (05:37.0)

put you on the spot a little bit. Do you, do you, there a real world, kind of use case that you like to submit as here's what they did and you know, here's how much better life is for them.

Keith Lauver (05:44.45)

Yeah.

I love telling this story of one of my favorite brands that I first encountered as a customer. It's a company called Red Ox and they make these beautiful bags in Montana, handmade here. They're durable. Former military parachute rigger got the idea for this some 30 years ago and he's been making this high quality product. His brand had languished for the last decade. Sales had been flat for much of that time. It never really broken through a barrier.

And he signed up for Ella. Ella and a chief marketing officer of Fractional CMO came in and together looked at his entire data, looked at his website, helped him think about his business differently, defined this out in high definition. kind of the punchline is rewrote his entire copy, rebuilt all of his brand assets, rewrote his emails, his social posts. And now we're getting about 20 % growth.

on the business. Every visitor that's coming to that landing page is converting at a 40 % greater rate. Shopping cart value is significantly higher. This wouldn't have happened if we know it because for 10 years he'd been stuck if it hadn't been for Ella. So it works.

John Jantsch (07:03.506)

Yeah. And I love that too, for a lot of reasons. First off, it's not a startup. I mean, this is somebody that's been around. And I think that in some ways having those assets, you know, allows you to analyze those assets and analyze sales and analyze customer data. But the other thing I like about it is, you know, I've taken a look at, you shared that with me before and I've taken a look at their website. There's not cheap. I mean, that's a premium product, you know, premium brand. And sometimes those are harder to sell.

from a website without like that perfect messaging, aren't they?

Keith Lauver (07:37.716)

Absolutely true. We've got to gather attention or grab that attention and then we've got to convert that into action. And those are two different things. know, Google can get us in front of somebody if we're willing to pay the right amount of money, but ultimately people understanding why am going to pay more for this bag and how is this brand going to show up? Frankly, I think what had happened in a way is their company had almost become like a chat GPT.

They had been the average of everything. They took all their ideas over the last 20 years and were just blending them into this muted gray brand that wasn't engaging. And so this reactivated, re-energized, and has now set them on a totally different path.

John Jantsch (08:20.616)

So as you know, have said, I don't know, I've lost track. I'm going to go with 1,274 times. I have said, strategy before tactics, you know, trying to explain the idea that you don't just go out and start doing stuff, you know, without like, who are we doing it for? What do we want them to believe about us? You know, all those things. so we have my entire body of work or life's work has been about helping people understand strategy. with the shifts going on in AI, I find myself saying,

Keith Lauver (08:27.95)

Thank

John Jantsch (08:50.386)

Same idea, but now people are just grabbing the technology tools as tactics. so strategy before technology, certainly as something that, that is an evolution, I guess, of that same idea, with that in mind. and I don't know that you've announced this to a whole lot of people, but duct tape marketing and atomic elevator Ella, have formed a partnership to, to be kind of that one to punch of.

No matter what this tool is, if it's not developed strategically, it's bound or it's likely, I should say, to fail. So you want to talk a little bit about your thoughts on the collaboration between Ella's capabilities and the Duct Tape marketing community.

Keith Lauver (09:33.196)

Yeah, I mean, first, I could not be more excited about the fact that we can take this body of work, this OG status, as my teenage kid would probably call it, that you hold in the world of kind of marketing operating systems. That could be, and we could ask Gala for the very latest rendition of that. But you really define system. You really taught.

John Jantsch (09:46.546)

No, I'm sure he'd probably tell you OG is so old school. Nobody says that anymore,

Keith Lauver (10:01.342)

so many generations of marketers how to actually do this at a higher level. And now we can leverage and really supercharge Ella with that knowledge in there. So first of all, thank you. We cannot be more excited to take your knowledge and add that to the corpus in here so that Ella can continue to set people apart.

John Jantsch (10:21.236)

Well, our initial conversations, you know, with the market out there, there's a lot of hunger for this idea because there's definitely a lot of people hyping AI tools as the savior and, you know, fire your whole team and, and just run your business with this. I do, you know, my MO has always been, you know, is, it practical? How can it actually help me do what I was already doing better? And so, you know, for us, I think that the time has really come that

You know, this idea of, of, of bringing a team member, think, I think every business in, I don't know, a year or two years is going to, to, to really mainstream this idea of AI team members. It's going to be a part of how the world works and how we function today. So we're obviously very excited to bring a very practical solution. That's word I always love to use, you know, to people that, cuts through the hype and isn't based on, you know,

science fiction is just based on where the world is really going and how companies can actually get the right message out, which allows them to do more good in the world. Quite frankly, that's the way I've always felt about helping small businesses is that's the backbone of the world. And if this is a way that we can bring a platform that makes sense in a framework that still allows us as marketers to

do what we've always fundamentally done for good in the world, then we're obviously very excited about it as well.

Keith Lauver (11:53.006)

I love the fact that we share that mission and as I think about what you just described there, you strategy first There's a story that comes to my mind about five years ago There was a business that I had done a full strategy workup for I thought through all those things that you taught about the importance of getting this clear and defined and Last year I called that CEO and said how's it going? Are you using that that we put together?

And he said, oh, to be honest, I forgot you even had it. And so I think that gap, right, between strategy and execution, between knowing and doing, is still large for many organizations. And one of the things that I'm most excited about in this partnership is with your knowledge in there, we can build the very best strategic framework, and we can actually support the tactical planning and execution, the downstream work. When you ask Ella to write

John Jantsch (12:23.796)

I

John Jantsch (12:27.593)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (12:50.49)

a script for a podcast or to write a page for a landing page or to craft a social media strategy. She's going to do that always and consistently aligned with that strategy that duct tape taught us is so important.

John Jantsch (13:04.945)

Yeah. One of the things that we're already seeing, I think it's going to be a selling point, quite frankly, for folks is that this is, we develop strategy same way for a lot of times. And we've always had kind of a teaching mentality about it. So we're trying to teach the owners and their teams about marketing strategy as much as just develop it for them. And I'm very excited because I think this tool will be...

Keith Lauver (13:06.062)

Thank

John Jantsch (13:30.408)

like installing a very trained team member in the organization that's actually going to up level, whoever's there today, as well. I think that, that from a business owner standpoint, they're not just getting a technology or a software, they're actually getting training, for their entire team. And that, that's really a, an aspect that, you know, one, one of the challenges with most business owners is they really, they hire some marketers, but they don't really know.

Keith Lauver (13:33.517)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:59.484)

what to tell them to do, how to do it necessarily. So they're kind of left to their own devices. I think this gives, guardrails is the wrong term. It's really more, this gives them a very informed advisor that's going to help them do their job.

Keith Lauver (14:14.318)

You know, we tried to take the brains of 100 of the very best marketers that we knew and that wanted to build the same system, get those mapped in there so that anybody could at a moment's notice and in an unlimited way, tap in and ask them, how should I think about SEO in today's zero click world? How can I think about creating a message that breaks through in today's tariff heavy environment?

John Jantsch (14:34.377)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (14:40.706)

those kind of things. And I love the way you just described that. We had an agency that shared back with us the fact that their very favorite feature in Ella is actually nothing that we promote, but it's what you just identified. The fact that we are up-skilling on a daily basis, everybody on their team. And they said their team is doing twice as good of marketing in six months after using Ella than before. And that's really due to...

the brains and the generosity of others who said, let's come behind and contribute this knowledge into a system.

John Jantsch (15:12.274)

Yeah. I mean, you think, sad to say, but it's very, very typical. know, a lot of times marketing is, is an afterthought for a lot of businesses. And so consequently the qualification for hiring their first marketer was age. They were young. They understand all this social media stuff. And so, you know, to be able to actually now equip them, just as you said, with basically.

Keith Lauver (15:25.397)

Yes, that's right.

John Jantsch (15:35.538)

the brains without having to read all the books, you know, all of these frameworks, you know, is an amazing, you know, training tool. again, I know that we are going to certainly position it very much as that because I, again, I think there is a real temptation for it to get lumped in as software. And I think it's so much more.

Keith Lauver (15:56.824)

You know, I love the implication of that in two respects. One is the fact that we have experienced marketers and I don't want this message to be misunderstood out there. Experienced marketers can actually operate so much better if they can quickly tap into the brains of these other folks that are inside Ella, largely because they know the question to ask. And that's where wisdom and experience comes from.

The rookie, if you will, that person that's new in his or her career may not have done marketing before, can also quickly get in and begin to deliver value. So there's actually benefit to both the very experienced and the very new. The people to whom we'll never accrue benefits for are those that sit on the sideline and are afraid. And we also talk to those. This is disruptive.

John Jantsch (16:41.832)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. mean, I, I use it every day, some form of tool and, know, I, but I think of it more as a thought partner. just as you, you know, kind of it's about the questions and it's about challenging it to say, well, why is that a good answer? You know, as opposed to, as opposed to say, write me this thing. Yeah. No. So we've been talking about practical today. but as you know, this landscape is changing dramatically.

Keith Lauver (17:03.362)

Yes. Love that.

John Jantsch (17:11.716)

where do you see AI tools like LL evolving to support marketers and businesses, you know, a year from now? I don't know. I'm afraid to look past that.

Keith Lauver (17:20.686)

Yeah, no, I know it's so hard to predict what is happening, but I can tell you that the things that we're working on on our roadmap are things like continuously training Ella to do more and better things. And so an example would be as tactics change on social media in 2025 or tactics change in SEO because of AI and what's happening with zero click, there are implications and new training and system and

essentially frameworks that we can be building into Ella. So the first point is we want Ella to continue to be smarter. But the second thing is I think we're going to see a lot more and we're committed to investing in the integration of these tools. Ella also can't exist as a silo. Ella is part of a system, but maybe a business uses HubSpot or maybe they use MailChimp. Either way, they still need to get emails out there. So we see connectivity. The final thing I'll mention is sales is also connected.

John Jantsch (17:56.956)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:06.014)

Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Lauver (18:20.056)

to this world of marketing, right? It's a gray area where that line is. And as we start to think about that.

John Jantsch (18:21.81)

Yeah. Well, in a correct scenario, that's true. It's often not the reality, but yes.

Keith Lauver (18:28.45)

Yeah, okay. Well, fair enough. So what we want to do is try to find ways to support both sales and marketing to automate the attention gathering to maybe support salespeople. But essentially you'll see more from Ella in terms of sales enablement and sales support as well coming forward.

John Jantsch (18:49.414)

Awesome. Awesome. Beautiful. Well, you know, one of the things that we've had a lot of fun doing is, taking sales, transcripts, recording, sales calls. and, really using that, to help with messaging to certainly to help with training, you know, but also it's like, here, here's, you know, out of 40 sales calls, you know, 23 people mentioned these three things. Maybe we ought to be talking about those more. And so I, I definitely see a world where, you know, that sales enablement,

Keith Lauver (19:11.362)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:18.241)

can really be impacted by AI tools.

Keith Lauver (19:21.144)

for sure and being able to then like I do take every call that I have with somebody put it into Ella and have Ella recast back the value that she heard and not just have the knowledge of what that problem was but talk about how she solves that problem for somebody. Boy, that's given me a lot of scale so I can have two or three more calls and make sure I do my follow-up every day as well.

John Jantsch (19:42.802)

Yeah, great. Great for training that next person that needs to come along and do business development as well. Yeah. Well, Keith, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast again. We will have, you can see this as being an ongoing conversation with our partnership and listeners out there. will definitely have more information about ways that.

Keith Lauver (19:47.086)

Yeah.

Keith Lauver (19:54.786)

Gosh.

John Jantsch (20:08.914)

that we can expose you to, this, whether you're an agency that wants this for your clients, or if you're a business owner out there saying an AI team member training with duct tape marketing strategy and this, this robust tool sounds like the way of the future for my business marketing. We'd love to talk with you as well. Is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you, Keith?

Keith Lauver (20:33.87)

For sure. Just please visit www.atomegelevator.com and we have free trials that are available. Mention that you found us on this podcast and we'll also be sure that you have first access to this duct tape marketing edition that we could not be more excited about. So John, thanks for leading the way. Thanks for partnering with us to make marketing better and faster and more impactful for these amazing businesses that we get the privilege of serving out there.

John Jantsch (21:01.62)

Well, appreciate you spending some time and hopefully we'll see you soon out there on the road again.

Keith Lauver (21:07.114)

Excellent. Look forward to it. Take care.

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ift.tt/7Sp2Kzu
via IFTTT

5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy

5 Ways Google Search Console Can Help Your SEO Strategy written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed myself—John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing, in a solo episode where I dig into one of the most misunderstood and underutilized SEO tools: Google Search Console. While many marketers chase rankings and expensive tools, they often overlook this free, data-rich platform that can radically enhance your search visibility, content strategy, and overall digital marketing performance.

I break down five practical ways to use Google Search Console to improve your SEO metrics, better understand keyword performance, and build an organic traffic engine rooted in real user intent. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO or a small business owner just starting out, these tips will help you rethink how to approach search engine optimization—with a focus on visibility, trust, and conversion.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover User Intent Through Performance Reports
  Google Search Console helps you see the exact search queries bringing users to your site. By filtering for pages with high impressions but low click through rate, you can identify missed opportunities for content optimization and adjust your metadata or headlines to boost engagement.

• Mine Long-Tail Keywords for High-Intent Traffic
  Even if some queries have low volume, they often reveal specific search intent. Optimizing content around these terms—via blog posts, FAQs, or service pages—can drive higher-converting organic traffic.

• Track Branded and Local Searches
  Monitoring searches for your brand name or competitors (e.g., “Your Business + Reviews”) uncovers how users validate companies. Use this insight to craft branded searches content like testimonials, review roundups, and Q&As.

• Focus on Visibility, Not Just Rankings
  Traditional ranking factors fluctuate, but your website visibility and trust signals—like total impressions, average CTR, and converting pages—offer a clearer view of true SEO performance. Think in terms of presence, not just position.

• Use GSC Data to Guide AI and Content Creation
  Feed your top queries into tools like ChatGPT to generate content strategy briefs and ideas that align with real user searches. This helps ensure you’re creating content that answers actual questions and builds credibility.

Chapters:

• 00:09 SEO is Not Dead
• 02:53 Intent and Content Opportunities
• 05:12 Local and Branded Visibility Signals
• 05:53 Measuring Trust and Visibility
• 07:05 Fixing Technical Problems
• 08:06 Guiding AI Content

Duct Tape Transcript

Email Download New Tab

John Jantsch (00:02.039)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I'm doing another solo show. Kind of on a rant here about new SEO. SEO is not dead. The old playbook is dead. SEO is still a very, very valid channel. We just have to think about it completely differently. So in this segment of this series on the new SEO, I want to talk about a tool and I know that this is going to...

For some people, this is going to be hard and dry and boring, but trust me, I'll first off try to make it not boring, but also secondly, this is important. This is something that you need to pay attention to because one of the challenges, frankly, in SEO is a lot of the reporting that you get or that agencies give is really doesn't tell you much. It maybe tells you rankings or some movement and keywords, but it doesn't really tell you what to do.

And the Google search console is actually the tool that tells you what to do if you know how to mine it, how to actually improve intent, how to improve click through the things that are actually going to lead to conversion. And let's face it, that's the point of all of this, right? Now, some of you old school folks, they've been listening to me forever. Remember that this data that's in Google search console used to be in Google analytics.

We used to be able to see what we were ranking for and how much volume each of these searches were sending us. Now that's just a big, nothing. It doesn't tell you what you, they took it all out of there. But it still lives in Google search console. So I find that it is one of the least understood and most ignored tools. And here's the beauty, it's free. There are a whole lot of tools that are built on the back of this that they charge $199 a month for.

If you just figure out how to actually tweak it and use it, it is a tool that can give you even better data, can inform decisions going forward so that you can improve your conversion, improve your business. So I'm going to go through five different things that I think, ways that you ought to be thinking about using Google search console. And don't worry if you're listening to this and you're like, my head hurts. I don't want to learn another tool. This is something that we do as part of our

John Jantsch (02:24.79)

Strategy first engagements as part of building a search visibility system rather than SEO. I'm calling it SVS search visibility because that's what really matters. That tool or that system is something that we can do for you. So fear not. If you hear something today, you're like, that's brilliant. I don't want to do it. Just contact us, Duct Tape Marketing, and we will help you find the answers to making this work for you. So number one, use.

Google Search Console to discover intent and content opportunities. So you want to understand what people are actually searching for when they find your site, first of all, and align your future content with those real queries. So there are a number of sections in Google Search Console. I won't do a tutorial, and I want to focus on the high impact things I think you can do today. But one of the sections is called performance. So if you go to performance,

search results queries, you're going to be able to filter in pages, filter your pages that have impressions, but low click through rate. Those are just things that are on there. It'll be very obvious to you what those are. It shows you the number of impressions that that page got in the last whatever period. But it also shows you the percentage of the people that saw that page that clicked on it. So it shows you the content you're showing up for, but not converting.

And often that means because your title or your metadata or maybe the content itself showed up for Google interpreted the intent, but the user didn't think that it meant what they were searching for. it just, it basically just gives you a roadmap to things you ought to be improving. You're already showing up for those. But now, you know, how do you improve that? You can mine for long tail searches. One of the things that I find happens all the time is that people today have gotten really good at searching.

Exactly what they want. I mean, and AI is making this even worse because you can write a book into AI and it'll give you the results. But people are doing longer searches, these very detailed searches. Well, a lot of times they pretty much show their intent in that search. And even though there may be very little volume for that, one of the things that I have found is sometimes when you look at pages that are getting traffic, what they're ranking for, it might be 30 or 40 different search terms that you're ranking for for that.

John Jantsch (04:49.102)

page, there just isn't much volume in it. the intent is so high that even if it's 10 a month, capturing those 10 and really optimizing your page for those with blog posts, FAQs, even Google business page Q &As, you start to actually capture more of that in more places. And that's high intent.

leveraging Google search for local and branded visibility signals. So one of the things that you want to be paying attention to is are there searches for your name, your competitors names, you know, plus reviews or plus type of service. And what that does is it tells you that the people are trying to validate businesses, types of businesses. So you create branded FAQs around those searches.

testimonials, reviews that actually address those. So mine all of your reviews and look for, you know, put those on your website, getting those kind of search terms in there. All right. Number three, use Google search console to measure the right metrics, not rankings, trust and visibility. So get away from ranking.

and think in terms of search visibility, click through rates, and your top converting pages. So if I'm an agency, I'm going to start showing clients their overall presence is growing. Because to me, rankings bounce around every time there's some update to the algorithm because of the way people try to manipulate them. But your overall presence growing, the total number of queries that are appearing in the top 10.

your average click through across all branded and non-branded terms. It really shows you how well your content earns trust, quite frankly, in the search engines and then your impression growth on new pages or sections. really overall presence, is something that, that, needs to be the new metric. It may be sound kind of fuzzy because it's like, what does that all add up to? but it's the growth of it. Getting that number to go in the right direction, I think is what's really key.

John Jantsch (07:15.854)

There are technical aspects that Google Search Console can help you fix. So indexing, crawlability issues, load time for your website. So you definitely want to take a look at, there pages that Google's excluding? Why? In some cases, you've told it to exclude those, but I'm finding that in a lot of cases, they can't get to pages or entire sections of websites. You know, are there URLs that really

Are the wrong URLs like, you you've updated pages and you've changed names. mean, people do things like that all the time. is the site map, updated, is mobile performance solid? That is a huge, huge one. I, know, it is. They never tell you what the ranking factors are, but I, I, I've seen it myself every time a site slows down because we haven't been paying attention or we haven't updated something or they've uploaded, somebody's uploaded a giant image that makes the homepage take forever to load.

rankings tank. there's clearly a direct tie. All right, the last one I want to talk about is

Guiding Google Search Console will help guide your AI Content or at least your AI content optimization, right? So you can you can do the you know, you can feed actually the data from Google Search Console right into chat GPT And then you know type in something like, know based on these queries from Google Search Console Give them a list of your top ten, right help create content briefs that

that addresses these questions clearly and builds trust for a small business offering whatever service you offer. That kind of thing is going to give you such a head start, not into just what content you produce, but the right content. And that's the best starting point. And so again, I've just scratched the surface on what I think are some of the key things that you ought to be thinking about from this highly underutilized tool.

John Jantsch (09:21.538)

This is a part of what we call a search visibility system that we've created as part of the strategy work that we do for clients to help them really develop that whole content roadmap, to help them be focused on the right content, to really be focused on intent. And I think that that, if you take nothing else away from today, we need to be spending most of our content information around intent, around searches.

branded searches for the things that people are looking that clearly does determine that we can determine probably means they're trying to buy something. Spend our time and effort there on conversions. Don't worry about traffic. Worry about visibility and overall impressions. All right. That's it for today. Again, if you want any help, want to learn more about this, it's just John at ducttapemarketing.com. I'd love to show you what we do and hopefully,

Keep tuning into the duct tape marketing podcast and I'll keep talking about the new SEO among other things and hopefully we'll see you one of these days out there on the road

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ift.tt/w0vlhOZ
via IFTTT

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing

Outsmarting AI: Secrets to Human-Centered Marketing written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Mark Schaefer

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Mark Schaefer, futurist, bestselling author, and marketing strategist, about his new book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark is a thought leader in digital and content marketing, and in this conversation, he explores the intersection of AI marketing and what it truly means to be human in an increasingly automated landscape.

We dive deep into why human-centered marketing is more essential than ever, how shared experiences and emotional marketing can outperform cold performance metrics, and why creative branding—especially the bold and unexpected kind—is the antidote to the AI-generated noise. If you’re wondering how your business can stand out in the age of AI and shifting consumer behavior, this conversation is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Human-centered marketing is the competitive edge in the AI era. While AI marketing tools are powerful, they can’t replicate genuine human connection, emotional marketing, or brand experiences built around shared values and trust.
• Performance marketing has overshadowed the soul of branding. Mark challenges the overreliance on SEO, paid ads, and automation—urging marketers to reclaim storytelling, empathy, and creativity in their strategy.
• Experiential marketing is key to creating emotional resonance. Mark emphasizes the need for shared experiences—both online and offline—that tap into what he calls collective effervescence, a psychological state where people feel connected, inspired, and part of something bigger.
• Word-of-mouth marketing remains massively underutilized. Despite being one of the most trusted forms of promotion, most brands don’t budget for it. Building communities and customer advocacy should be a core part of any marketing strategy.
• In a world of sameness, be audacious. Whether it’s creative branding or marketing disruption, Mark argues that the brands who dare to be bold—sometimes even weird—win attention and loyalty. AI can’t replicate originality.
• Consumer behavior has shifted—and AI is influencing it. As consumers begin using AI to filter content and make decisions, marketers need to deliver clarity, brevity, and emotional depth. Attention is earned, not assumed.
• Start with wrong to spark innovation. One of Mark’s most memorable tips: disrupt your thinking by flipping assumptions. Instead of optimizing the old way, ask what would happen if you did the opposite.

Chapters:

• 00:09 Introducing Mark Schaefer
• 00:59 Where Do Humans Fit in an AI Dominated World?
• 04:09 A World Without Shared Experiences
• 07:00 How to Out-Human AI
• 09:44 Embracing Every Day Awe
• 13:08 How AI is Changing Consumer Behavior
• 17:25 Story of the Book Cover
• 19:17 Start with Wrong

Duct Tape Transcript

Email Download New Tab

John Jantsch (00:00.878)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mark Schafer. He's a futurist and the bestselling author of several influential marketing books, including the content code known and marketing rebellion. He's a marketing strategy consultant to many of the world's leading brands and acclaimed keynote speaker and a college educator. His blog Grow is one of the most acclaimed marketing blogs globally and his podcast, The Marketing Companion,

is in the top 1 % of all business shows on iTunes. But we're going to talk about his latest book today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. So Mark, welcome back to the show. You've been on several times.

MARK SCHAEFER (00:45.314)

Several times almost a regular

John Jantsch (00:47.76)

So I like to start with the title a lot of times. mean, what was kind of the genesis of that for you? Or is there something going on in the world today that says we need to be more audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (01:02.866)

Well, you know, when I, I never have a plan or a schedule to write a book. I only write a book when I see some problem going on that I get curious about. And the problem I see today is that we're trying to discern where do humans fit in this new AI dominant world.

And we have this technology that's nipping at the heels of our skill sets, in some cases nipping at the heels of our very careers. And so I really needed to unwind and unpack where are we going to fit, where are we going to thrive. So really the main idea of this book is to explore the

Parts and by the way, I mean, I'm not sugarcoating this saying Kumbaya. It's all gonna be great. I'm saying no, no Kumbaya You know, there's some serious things going on but there are some places that really are Uniquely human and it had been somewhat overlooked in the in the marketing

sphere in the marketing portfolio, I think we've become sort of intoxicated with performance marketing. And I mean, it's important. And I'm talking about SEO and ads and optimizing, you know, our content and our ad purchases. That's very, very important. But as we've kind of overcompensated with that, we've kind of forgot about the heart and soul of marketing.

which is this human connection. And so in the book, I look at things like word of mouth marketing, which we know is really important, but I would suggest almost nobody listening to this today has a line item on their budget for word of mouth marketing. I talk about experiential marketing and this idea of shared experiences, which are the, with this lonely.

MARK SCHAEFER (03:21.826)

depressed world saying we want more shared experiences and that again is a uniquely human thing and The overarching umbrella I guess is this word, you know audacious because if you're merely competent you're vulnerable competent is ignorable and Marketing really is is I have research in the book that shows in general how dull marketing and advertising

is and there is an opportunity to like shed that skin and really ignite something a little crazy because you know the bots are coming but we still own crazy.

John Jantsch (04:05.725)

You know, how much, again, I find myself blaming the pandemic for so many things on this show when I talk about changes. And, you know, there are societal changes that I think occurred during that period that, like I sit in a restaurant now waiting on my food to come and I watched the line and stream of people who come in and pick up their to-go order and run back to their car. And I,

MARK SCHAEFER (04:20.088)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:32.676)

That came, I think, from the pandemic, a lot of that. But I also, you know, we talk about this need for human interaction, but you almost feel like people are actually withdrawing farther by choice.

MARK SCHAEFER (04:47.134)

I agree with you. think remote working is another sort of symptom of something that occurred with the pandemic. This idea of maybe more comfort with isolation. I think the other thing is that today, each of us can be our own independent media streaming channel. So we can experience our entire world.

by ourselves through earbuds. We can stream all the movies and TV and music and books that we love. And nobody else even has ever heard of the things that we're experiencing. And that's a key idea in this book that compared to when you and I were growing up as kids, we have a world without shared experiences. You know, when I was a kid, you had to save your money for a record album.

John Jantsch (05:24.897)

News.

MARK SCHAEFER (05:45.634)

And once you got that record album, people would come over to your house to listen to it. You'd play it over and over again. You'd sing the words, you know, on the, on the liner notes. If you wanted to see a movie, you had to find somebody that had a car. You climb in the car and then you'd have pizza afterwards. And the whole thing is a social experience that is absolutely missing from an entire generation today. And they're, they're, they're, they're crying out.

John Jantsch (05:59.824)

You

MARK SCHAEFER (06:14.52)

for shared experiences. And that's something that we can add in our marketing portfolio. When you bring people together in a meaningful way, and it doesn't have to be an activation, it could even be the way you hold meetings. If you bring people together in this meaningful way, it creates some sort of electric kind of experience.

It creates this thing called collective effervescence. It's this emotional contagion of awe. It's everyday awe of being with people and creating something new. And I think that is one of the most overlooked opportunities in marketing today.

John Jantsch (07:02.872)

One of the core ideas of the book is that we have to think about out humaning AI. Did I say that right? So how do we do that? I mean, it's not through IQ. So how do we do that?

MARK SCHAEFER (07:09.698)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:19.244)

Yeah. mean, isn't that weird that when you think about it, that this is the first time in history where a technology has come along and we can't take another class to transcend it. Right. I mean, we're not going to be smarter than AI. And so, you know, the idea behind the book is one of the biggest issues. Well, it's the biggest issue for any business today or any marketing

John Jantsch (07:30.384)

Right.

MARK SCHAEFER (07:49.038)

professional today is how is awareness. How do we stand out as the signal against the noise? And again, you know, AI is, is making that even worse because there it's like an endless infinite noise. So, so how, what can we do? And what I did, John, is I got to meet the greatest creatives in the world. And there's a story in the book is kind of like,

John Jantsch (08:00.95)

Just make a little noise.

MARK SCHAEFER (08:18.296)

how I started down this path and one door open and another door open. And it was just incredible gift, this amazing experience. And I got to learn what are the patterns? Is there something we can learn from their success that's scalable to every business? And what I found is that there is. So your marketing message, the story that you tell the world has three parts.

It's the story, the narrative, it's where we tell it, and it's who tells it. Now, what if we disrupted one of those things? We would be doing something that AI isn't really thinking about right now. mean, AI is looking at the whole world and kind of giving you the best average answer of everything that's happened in the past. But if you disrupt it,

John Jantsch (09:06.874)

Trying to average it.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:15.808)

and do something unexpected. Now you are moving toward a path where you're going to stand out. And so the book is full of case studies, full of prompts, big companies, small companies, big budgets, no budgets, nonprofits. So there's something in there for everybody to sort of like explore these patterns and apply it.

to a business or an organization of any size.

John Jantsch (09:47.536)

Give me an example, if you can think of one off the top of your head, of how a company or a brand can really embrace this idea of everyday awe.

MARK SCHAEFER (09:56.91)

every day off. Well, the example that I think is most relevant and personal to me, and I think this would be relevant to anybody, is so I hold a marketing retreat every year called The Uprising. And the problem I solve with this is, as you know, I used to this event called Social Slam. You were there. And I mean, I was having 600, 700 people

John Jantsch (10:21.486)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

MARK SCHAEFER (10:27.03)

And it was just a blur and it was stressful and I didn't like it. So I created this new event some years later. It's limited to 30 people. So it's intimate. And we're talking about our relevance in the future of marketing. Now I put my heart and soul into this and I think I did a good job. But when I got the feedback of the event, people told me something completely unexpected. They said this

was life-changing. I thought, what? What? Life-changing? mean, isn't that a little heavy? But I heard this over and over again. And I never really had an explanation until I connected the dots with this idea of collective effervescence. So in this group, these 30 people, we hike together in the woods. We eat together, gourmet food, and we

Actually, it's shared family style, right? We create every single moment is created to heighten interaction, to build on ideas. And as I read this idea of collective effervescence, I got this from this book called Awe by social psychologist, Dacher Keltner. And all of a sudden, OK, wait a minute.

That's the difference. It's this intimacy. It's this emotional contagion that's happening at my event that makes it unlike anything else. And so my marketing plan is add more awe. So it's like, how do I do it even better? How do I create even more of these magical moments that create

you know, new ideas and epiphanies in the people that are there. Just the pure joy of listening to music or, you know, singing together or something like that. you know, what, what can I do to even add more off? That's the marketing plan for my event. And so I challenge people in the book, you know, think about what you can do with your customer interactions, with your meetings.

MARK SCHAEFER (12:55.084)

With customer events, what if your marketing plan was add more off? How would that change the dynamic and make you into something different, something conversational, something unmissable, which is what we need to do today?

John Jantsch (13:13.552)

And the lesson of course for that is, I that's the brand people want to gravitate towards, right? And I think that one of the things that, you know, everybody talks about this platform or this new tool or this new technology and how marketing has changed. But I've felt for the last 10 years, the way people buy has changed more. And that that's what we ought to be paying more attention to. And I think that that's going to even be

More relevant, you know, because they're able, you know, think about how they could cut through all of the noise. Like they can take our 50 page ebook and say, give me the four. They can consume with AI as well as we can produce with AI. I think that that gives them even more leverage to only interact with brands that as you say, create every day off.

MARK SCHAEFER (14:02.242)

Yeah. And that's an extraordinary point that is quite profound, John, is that, you know, a lot of the conversations out there, a lot of the content out there is about how AI is changing our business and changing our workflow. It's creating a lot of new tools to perhaps unleash creativity. But we also need to be thinking about exactly what you're saying is that AI is also changing consumer behavior.

It's changing how it's going to consume our content. It's going to change how people make decisions. Because generally speaking, people don't want to do the work. They're averse to deep thinking. And so they're going to abdicate that in many cases to AI. I think the idea of truth is going to be sort of mixed up. And we may be turning AI to AI.

John Jantsch (14:31.472)

100%.

John Jantsch (14:47.172)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:00.846)

you know, to truth. So I think that's a very, it's a big idea and certainly a worthy conversation about how AI is going to be.

John Jantsch (15:09.102)

Well, why don't we just collaborate on another book, Mark, you and I will write that book. Well, let's write that book.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:12.494)

We should, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it.

John Jantsch (15:16.752)

Well, I saw some research the other day and they were talking about, just a year ago, you know, how people were using AI, you know, what, what, what was the biggest use case, right? So producing content stuff you'd, you'd think, and that already in 2025, the fastest growing way that people are using AI is as a companion. yeah. And therapy. so, so that behavior that you're talking about is happening and it will drive so much.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:26.786)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:36.504)

Therapy. Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (15:43.116)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that I saw that same study and it was sort of jaw dropping. And it's funny because the day after I saw that study, I did a podcast episode with one of my co-hosts and it was kind of a strange episode about how do you keep working? How do you keep leading a business when you're suffering? And so my co-hosts

John Jantsch (15:51.407)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:13.142)

relies on AI as a therapist. She's actually built like custom GPTs to encourage her and counsel her when she's suffering. I thought, wow, that is something else. I mean, that is really, I mean, okay, well, it's working for her.

John Jantsch (16:34.8)

Well, you know, the right AI bot's probably got a lot of licenses.

MARK SCHAEFER (16:43.256)

Well, and again, this also points to, again, the changes in consumer behavior, because think about it, there's also this emerging preference for AI, let's call synthetic relationships. And I think this research about the therapy is sort of a leading indicator of that.

John Jantsch (17:02.746)

Bye.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:10.208)

is that you can be in a relationship with this entity that always tells you the right thing. There's no compromise. You don't really have to work on the relationship. you know, wow, I mean, what are the implications of that going to be?

John Jantsch (17:17.296)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:25.808)

Yeah. Or worse always tells you what you want to hear, which is, becomes an enabler rather than a therapist. So, so there are many, many ideas in this book that, uh, that we're not going to get to, um, because I want to veer off to like a really goofy thing that you did. Um, and, and that's the cover. Um, so, so talk a little bit. mean, it, it's obviously very on brand with the book, but, but.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:29.592)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:33.974)

Yeah. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:47.687)

right.

John Jantsch (17:54.011)

explain the concept behind the cover.

MARK SCHAEFER (17:56.802)

Well, this is a first in the world book and I'm very proud of it actually because it sort of demonstrates the ideas in the book. And it demonstrates it in a powerful way because if you think about books have been published the same way for 200 years, it's almost impossible to disrupt a book. Believe me, I've tried. so this book, the cover of the book is a QR code. And what we did is,

John Jantsch (18:02.542)

Right.

John Jantsch (18:27.248)

For the video audience.

MARK SCHAEFER (18:27.306)

I uploaded. yeah, awesome. I uploaded the the book to a eye and uploaded some sort of generic art samples and a is generating. Abstract art interpretations of the stories in the book. So when you hover over the cover, it creates new covers endlessly.

based on the stories in the book. And we're actually updating it every week. So there's more and more stories that are possibilities for the cover. And people love it. It is different. And if you think about it, it's disrupted the story. It's disrupted where the story is told. It's disrupting who's telling the story. It's not even a human. And I'm getting feedback, that even children love

playing with the pictures on the book. So, yeah, so I'm very proud of that. And yeah, thanks for mentioning it.

John Jantsch (19:35.296)

You bet. let's wrap up today with like, if I'm listening to this and I'm thinking I need to do, I need to disrupt the narrative. What are like, what's like the, you know, everybody wants the, me the one thing I have to do. What's the one, two, three steps somebody ought to be doing right now to say, how do get ready for this?

MARK SCHAEFER (19:43.086)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (19:56.302)

Well, the one constant I saw in a lot of the creative thinking behind it is to start with wrong. And if you just sort of like think about iterating or changing a little bit, it doesn't really lead to creative thinking. And some of the best creative thinking comes from, let's flip the script and just look at what if everything was just wrong?

I I think the opportunity is this. If you look at most markets today, they're just dull. They're waiting to be disrupted. Every car commercial is the same. know, pizza, know, pizza is supposed to be fun and creative and the celebration. What's the most creative thing going on in pizza? In America, we have this ad, nobody out pizzas the hut. What in the world does that mean? Can't you do better than that? So look at, start with wrong.

That's where we got this US brand, Liquid Death. The number one lesson I ever learned in marketing class, never associate your brand with death, right? I mean, I encourage you to go to YouTube and Google some of their ads. They're shocking. They make you cringe. I actually was going to show an ad, one of their ads at a conference and it was turned down. They said, we can't show that. And it's a public ad.

John Jantsch (21:25.626)

Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:25.718)

Now, the guy who started that was not obsessed with water. He was obsessed with this idea of disrupting the market. And almost every market can be disrupted today because it's so boring, especially in B2B. So that would be one idea. But the book is filled with so many ideas. But that was definitely a common theme I heard in my research.

John Jantsch (21:46.735)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.87)

Yeah, yeah, I laugh. My kids love like, you know, their refrigerators are full of liquid death. I'm like.

MARK SCHAEFER (21:59.918)

It's just water!

John Jantsch (22:02.946)

Water! But I will say, you know, I mean, the message there is, you know, it's the brand. It's a connection to the brand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mark, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you'd invite people to connect with you and find out more about Audacious?

MARK SCHAEFER (22:12.814)

Fastest growing beverage brand in America. Yeah.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:26.282)

easy to find me. All you have to remember is businesses grow. That is my website. You can find my blog, my podcast, and my social media connections and the book we talked about today, Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.

John Jantsch (22:43.726)

Yeah, and it's Schaeffer with one A, two Es and one F. I mean, I have to look it up every time. I'm sorry. There's so many ways to spell Schaeffer.

MARK SCHAEFER (22:48.844)

Yeah. Well, the other day I was checking into a hotel. I said, name is Mark with a K. She said, your name is Cark?

MARK SCHAEFER (23:01.72)

So nobody can sell Mark, let alone Schaefer. So don't confuse him, John. Just go to Businesses Grow.

John Jantsch (23:08.088)

Okay. All right. Awesome. Again, it's so great to see you, my friend, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

MARK SCHAEFER (23:15.31)

Thank you, John.

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ift.tt/KDHF6zY
via IFTTT

How to Think Strategically About AI Tools

How to Think Strategically About AI Tools written by Jarret Redding read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Dan Sanchez

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Dan Sanchez, an AI marketer, consultant, and the creator behind AI-Driven Marketer. Dan has a deep passion for exploring how artificial intelligence can be used not just for automation, but as a co-pilot in crafting better strategies, solving complex business challenges, and enhancing marketing productivity.

During our conversation, Dan shared powerful insights on how AI is transforming the role of marketers and why approaching AI with a clear strategic mindset is more essential than ever. We explored the pitfalls of chasing the newest shiny tool and instead emphasized focusing on core business problems where AI can truly add value. Whether you’re overwhelmed by the flood of new tools or just starting out, Dan’s advice is rooted in the philosophy of strategy before technology—an ethos that’s been central to Duct Tape Marketing for over two decades.

Dan’s grounded approach to integrating artificial intelligence into marketing underscores the importance of being intentional and strategic. Rather than seeing AI as a threat or a gimmick, marketers can embrace it as a powerful tool to elevate their impact and performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Start with strategy, not tools. Focus on identifying bottlenecks in your business processes before selecting any AI tools.

• Use AI as a thinking partner. Tools like ChatGPT can enhance strategic thinking, not just content creation.

• Go deep, not wide. Master one tool—like ChatGPT or Claude—instead of juggling a dozen, to get real value from AI in marketing.

• Deep research is underutilized. Tools that simulate 20–40 hours of human research can drastically improve marketing strategy and productivity.

• AI can reshape problem-solving. Learn to prompt AI effectively to assist with everything from competitive analysis to content ideation.

• Stay focused, not overwhelmed. You don’t need to be an early adopter of every tool—start with meaningful experiments and scale from there.

• AI will shift marketing roles. Embracing AI skills will be key to thriving in the future of marketing and business growth.

Chapters:

• 00:09 Introducing Dan Sanchez
• 01:57 Approaching AI Strategically
• 04:04 Creating New Things with AI
• 06:36 Evolution of AI Prompting
• 08:50 Humans Changing Role in Marketing
• 11:38 Developing Skills vs Delegating Tasks
• 13:51 AI Agents Affect on Marketing
• 17:50 Advice on Using Deep Research

More About Dan Sanchez: 

• Check out Dan Sanchez’s Website
• Connect with Dan Sanchez on LinkedIn

Duct Tape Transcript

Email Download New Tab

Sara Nay (00:01.468)

Hello and welcome to the duct tape marketing podcast. This is your host, Sara and a today I'm stepping in for John Jance and I have a guest on the show, Dan Sanchez. So Dan is an AI marketer, consultant and creator with a passion of diving into the latest tech innovations. He specializes in developing cutting edge marketing strategies that leverage AI to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. So welcome to the show, Dan.

Danchez (00:27.64)

Thanks for having me on, Sarah.

Sara Nay (00:28.978)

Of course, I'm excited to talk to you today. We first connected on LinkedIn because you had been posting about AI and thinking strategically about AI and speaking to marketers directly, which all of that resonates with me. But when I reached out to you, I was commenting about one of your posts and I'm just curious, do you remember what you said in response to my initial message to you? No, I put you on the spot.

Danchez (00:48.364)

I don't. If we're talking about the comments, I'm like, I don't know. I comment, I mean, I'm dropping 200 comments a day or a week on LinkedIn. And so they all blur together sometimes and I'm like, I don't know what I said, when I said it.

Sara Nay (00:56.36)

I'm sure.

No worries. Well, I sent you a direct message and you talked about how duct tape marketing was one of the initial blogs that you were following back when RSS feeds were a thing.

Danchez (01:02.882)

or the direct message. Yes, no.

That's right. It was Copy Blogger, Duct Tape Marketing, and Seth Godin were the three. I was transitioning from graphic design to being a marketer, and a marketing kind of mentor to me. He's like, hey, back when RSS was a thing too, he's like, go to create a Google feed account and subscribe to these three blogs. You need to read them every day. And so I did for a very long time.

Sara Nay (01:29.33)

I love it. just brought that up because I think it's very interesting. Like you've obviously been in the marketing space for a while now talking about RSS and original blogs. And now today the focus of this conversation is going to be all about AI. And so it's just interesting to think about the evolution that we've had over the last several years and the pace of the evolution that we're going through right now with all things AI. Well, great.

And that's what I want to dive into deeper. I've noticed through your posts and the content that you're putting out, you're talking a lot about approaching AI strategically to avoid overwhelm. at Duct Tape Marketing, we've been saying strategy before tactics for 20 years now. At this point, we're saying strategy before technology because you need to have a solid strategy in place. But I would love to open that up to you. How are you advising because it can be overwhelming with all the tools that are being developed and all the

the stuff that's being put out there on AI. So how do you advise people to approach the world of AI strategically?

Danchez (02:24.27)

You know, there's a couple different approaches, but it's funny because I just got a DM yesterday and it was like, hey man, heard you did a talk on the 25 new tools for AI in your session recently. What tools should I use? And I was like, I don't know, what problems are you facing? It's kind of like that whole strategy thing. It's kind of like, well, there's lots of tools. They can do lots of stuff. And there's some general purpose tools that can cover a lot of different things.

Sara Nay (02:44.892)

Yeah.

Danchez (02:51.822)

But what's the core obstacle you're running into your business with right now? Where's the choke point for your systems? What's causing you pain on a daily or weekly basis? Because those are the things I want to look for first as a consultant and see how AI might be able to help that. It's funny because a lot of times people actually don't need AI, they just need clarity and a strategic focus set. But I do find that AI is changing the game because it's allowing us

Sara Nay (03:00.774)

Yeah.

Danchez (03:20.982)

not only to automate and do things faster or even better, but it's helping us think better and more strategically if you kind of know how to use it as a co-pilot. So that's the first thing I'm kind of trying to help people understand is like this thing becomes a very good strategy thinking partner. Even if you can kind of, you just kind of have to give it a start. It's not going to proactively come after you and be like, Hey, so what's your plan for this? Hey, what's your strategy? Hey, what were you thinking here? But if you proactively ask it for feedback,

Sara Nay (03:26.93)

Mm.

Danchez (03:48.608)

or for considerations or ask questions that it can ask you and then give you feedback on, it's amazing how much more strategically you can think when you start using AI as a co-pilot.

Sara Nay (04:00.528)

Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of my early aha moments with AI is at first I was just using it or thinking about it as like a content creation tool. was thinking of it as something that like helps take stuff off my plate. But when I shifted to thinking of it as a thought partner and started using it in my strategic thinking and planning, like that's where my view on what AI can do completely changed. And I know you have a story that you talk about one of your early on experiences with chat, GBT, I think you call it your Mediterranean ice cream moment. Do you mind explaining what that experience was for you?

Danchez (04:26.838)

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's when ChatGPT first came out. I'd been a huge skeptic of AI before ChatGPT came out. I'd seen some of the early pre-ChatGPT stuff like Jarvis, which was using its 2.5 API ChatGPTs back then. It was like a copywriting tool and I was like, okay, it's starting to get things. But when ChatGPT launched, it woke everybody up, including me. And I remember sitting there and being like, well, is this thing just really good at regurgitating?

You know, is it like, because remember before we had like Drift, you know, an AI chat bot and we had Intercom and like they were all pretty bad. None of them were good. So I was like, you know, can this come up with original ideas? Most original ideas are usually a combining of two different things that don't normally come together. And humans do it all the time to come up with new ideas. So was like, well, let's find something that doesn't exist on the internet and just ask for it to create something. So I figured recipes would be hard because I'm like, well, that's a whole different dimension. It's got to understand taste and

recipe and how things come together in order to form new flavors. That's pretty tough. And then I went searching, I'm like, what's a recipe that doesn't exist? So I just picked out two random flavors. I was like ice cream Mediterranean. I went and Google searched it. Could not find it. And then search and said, hey, make me a recipe for Mediterranean ice cream. And it punched out a bunch of ingredients. was like, you know what? This would actually work. And that's when I realized, I'm like, it has the ability to come up with new things.

If you're willing to guide it direct it and that changed everything for me because that was the missing piece That's what to me made it artificial intelligence is it was able to actually think through and come up with a very Kind of elaborate thing because making recipes is kind of hard if you're not pretty familiar with it And that was that was a big unlock for me

Sara Nay (06:07.035)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:10.812)

Did you try the recipe? Did you actually taste the ice cream?

Danchez (06:13.125)

No, no, no, I did not make the ice cream, but I remember looking at the ingredient list and thinking like that was workable. I wonder what else this can do. And then I moved on and started knocking out other ones, but that was the first big one. I was like, ah, this isn't just delivering something back. This isn't just summarizing what it's found. You can mash up new things with this together.

Sara Nay (06:19.3)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (06:32.038)

Yeah, that's great. Recently we have these big bushes in our backyard and they've been bothering us for years, but not enough to actually do something about it. And we finally decided to rip them out. And before like, I would have had to like go to gardening stores and figure out what to plant and like talk to a number of people and spend all this time like designing. But instead I took a picture and I put it into chat GPT and I asked like, you know, we're in Boise, Idaho and this full sun and all the things that I needed to know.

Danchez (06:57.485)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:00.254)

And I ended up like designing this whole space of plants to put in that, in that place. And while I was going through that experience, I had an aha moment of like my role, like problem solving has completely changed. Like how I go about problem solving is different because now what I need to get really good at is prompting AI to help me solve problems and to push it for like further and to redirect things versus before, you know, I was going out and doing all that stuff manually.

And so that was an example of just like an aha moment of like how I solve problems is completely different than it used to be.

Danchez (07:34.734)

you actually don't need to learn how to prompt AI as much as you'd think anymore. The AI models before you did because it was a little squirrely. Kind of like if you've done AI video right now, currently that is very squirrely, right? You try to prompt it and it's like, it's all over the place and the characters are disappearing and reappear and you're like, my gosh, I got to really hone this thing and get what I want. But it was like that in the beginning. Like it couldn't go that far without going off the rails in some way back in like 3.5 and early for chat GPT-4.

Sara Nay (07:43.196)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:03.182)

But nowadays it's gotten so good at anticipating what you want that I just talk to it like it's a person. I'm like, Hey, chat, you put interesting question for you. My dishwasher is not working and I've already tried to troubleshoot it through some YouTube videos, but it's just not working. here's, here's what I'm seeing. And here's what's happening. It's turning on, but it's flooding with water, but things aren't getting cleaned. I don't hear it running and it'll just start asking you questions and you just have.

Sara Nay (08:09.777)

Yeah.

Danchez (08:28.652)

dialogue with it, almost like it's an expert in your pocket. You can call up any time. And I was using the voice model as talking to it. but I find I'm doing it with like that all the time, whether I'm assessing my own strategic position in the market, whether I'm just asking to come up with a LinkedIn post. I'm just talking to it like it's an assistant that I just need to give us enough context in order to carry out the task.

Sara Nay (08:34.311)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (08:49.904)

Yeah, that's a great point. I've definitely seen it's improved drastically over the last year, I would say, in terms of not having to engineer as much with the prompting. I'm curious, we haven't shifted too much into the conversation of marketers. And so there's lot of unknown in a lot of industries, but marketing is obviously being deeply impacted. And you had a great LinkedIn post that went out this week that I saw about AI tools are potentially going to replace humans in the future. And so I would just love to hear your take on

To the marketers that are listening to this, what do they need to be thinking of moving forward in their roles as marketers? Is there an opportunity to evolve and shift? Or what do you recommend for those that are feeling a little bit uncertain about the industry that we're in right now?

Danchez (09:33.036)

There is a lot of uncertainty. And I tried to think about the uncertainty in scenario planning methods, where it's like, OK, let's say it is like we're going to lose 90 % of marketing jobs. You're like, well, who are the 10 % that do have jobs? And what do I need to be in that 10 %? So I think about it like that. But I think about on the other side, let's say this is going to be like every other technology revolution. Well, there's going to be a whole ton of new jobs that exist.

Sara Nay (09:34.695)

Yeah.

Danchez (10:01.09)

What's gonna be in those new jobs? Well, they're probably all gonna be AI driven. So in either scenario, it's probably going to be who's me to become AI driven, right? And it's probably gonna land somewhere in between. It's probably not gonna be like this glorious thing. There's probably gonna be good, there's gonna be bad, there's gonna be some loss on some side. I did recently post because a lot of people, there's been this trending topic on LinkedIn that I really had an epiphany. like, you know, it's not gonna be all that.

Kind of like this idea that like human first is going to be the one that powers it. Like AI frees us up to do the more human things. And I'm like, that be true. There will certainly be a place where a lot of companies lean into being more human, more service oriented. And those will be great and they'll win. There will be a whole nother set of businesses that win from just being more fully automated because somehow through AI, they create systems that deliver more value at just a much lower price. And you know what people, a lot of people will do that.

Like it used to be that you'd have a tax filer help you file your taxes and almost everybody's using TurboTax now, right? Unless you have a company in some kind of more complicated tax situation and you are hiring a CPA, but I'd still be even a little nervous to be a CPA right now, unless you're like a really good one, you know? So I think a lot of businesses will be automated and there'll be people that go into the whole all human thing and the cost difference between the two will probably be pretty dramatic, but there will be a lot of ways to win. But I think...

Sara Nay (10:57.607)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:11.824)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (11:25.89)

What will help the most is trying to figure out what different paths will happen in the future and then finding the common denominator around them. The common denominator I'm seeing is that AI skills are going to be a big piece of it.

Sara Nay (11:39.952)

Yeah, absolutely. I heard someone talk recently about if you're a marketer, really anyone in a role is basically writing down everything that you're working on on a regular basis and then doing a bit of audit on that work saying, like, is this increasing in value because of AI? Is this decreasing in value because of AI or is this staying consistent moving forward? And so if you thought about anything like that, auditing your time and your skill sets to see what you should continue to leverage and grow on versus maybe start delegating the different tools and solutions.

Danchez (12:09.336)

For me, it's probably a little harder because I'm an AI educator. like I, I, for my job, I literally get to waste some time experimenting and using these things so that I can report on whether it's actually helpful or not. I find the process of auditing on a regular basis to be pretty burdensome. I'm like, like, I wish I would just like audit my days more. In fact, I've even thought about going into making a project in chat GPT to be like,

Sara Nay (12:12.294)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.144)

Yeah. Yeah.

Danchez (12:36.642)

here's what I thought I would get done, here's what I didn't get done, here's some extra stuff and just dictate into it real quick to kind of keep like a daily journal and kind of a little bit of a coach. It's gotten way better at that recently. But it's, I don't know, I don't think I would do that. I think on larger projects, I think it's really helpful, especially if you can bring some of that data back into AI because it's learning now and can remember things across different chats now and it will get better over time. I think that will become a strategic advantage. But yeah, I...

for anything new in businesses, you do have to start small and kind of test your way there. I will say it is probably like, there's enough effort and a momentum in society going towards AI, especially with businesses right now that I promise it's worth at least just going deep into chat GPT. It's the main one. And I heard somebody say even recently like, like I know chat GPT, but like I want to go beyond beginner. And I'm like, no, like trust me, all the pros are using chat GPT too.

Sara Nay (13:08.764)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:29.308)

Hmm.

Danchez (13:31.958)

Like if anything, they're only spending more time in that tool because they're finding it more and increasingly valuable. Just don't waste time learning all the tools. Like literally learn that one. And then if you have time and you have a need, start learning some of the other ones. But time spent learning how to leverage Chat GPT specifically. And if you like Claude, go with Claude or Jim and I. Like pick one of the main ones and then just hone in that one craft in order to make the most of it.

Sara Nay (13:58.074)

Yeah, that's how my brain works with it all as well. Like I've gone all in on chat, GBT, and that's where I typically live every day. but I know other people out there, they're like, I use this for this, this for this. And I'm like, how do you have time for all of those things? Like I have to go deep in one to actually be able to use it to some of its potential versus, know, going through all the different tools. So I think that's great advice. I'm curious, I'm part of a mastermind and AI mastermind. And were talking last week about how

Danchez (14:09.442)

Yeah, I don't know.

Sara Nay (14:24.614)

websites and marketing in general is going to have to shift because of the AI agents world. Where right now we're designing websites for humans and ads for humans and eventually, you know, it might be agents going to these different websites to make buying decisions for their people. And so have you thought or talked much about how marketing might shift in the next, I would say six months to a year with the idea of agents becoming more of a thing or more of a focus?

Danchez (14:52.13)

Yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I don't think it's going to change much in the next six months. AI agents, in my opinion, they're just not a thing right now for the most part. we're calling, what most agents are, or what are labeled as agents, they're not agents. There's a few exceptions, and I'll talk about those in a second, but most agents are what I'm calling intelligent automation. They are just automated sequences, like we had before with marketing automation, know, like the little drag and drop builders. They're just that.

Sara Nay (15:00.455)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (15:13.906)

Mm.

Sara Nay (15:18.257)

Yep.

Danchez (15:20.086)

with one of the modules being ChatGBT. That's it. Some of them are slightly more sophisticated because you're giving a little bit of autonomy to AI to choose between a few different tools and maybe it's not injecting a prompt, it's actually got access to a database. that's starting to feel more agentic, but it's not like this fully autonomous thing that can go out shopping for us. It's just not. Now there's some precursor tools out there that you're like, that's definitely agent-ish.

but they're not good yet. OpenAI has operator baked into chat GPT. You gotta pay the $200 a month license to get access to it. It doesn't work well. Manus is the big one people are talking about from China. It also doesn't work well. There's just too many holes in the system. It maxes out too often because the server space isn't ready. The memory isn't ready. We have all the ingredients to make agents right now, but we're still...

The cost of compute needs to come down a little bit. The context window needs to go up a little bit. We need to be able to give it more access to more things. know, all these, there's a lot of talk right now about giving it access to like, Google just launched its agent to agent framework so that it can interface, different tools can interface. Agents can work with other agents from other tools. You know, like these kinds of standards and models have to be developed to create the infrastructure for it to happen. Right now, it's not happening. The one agent that I've seen that is actually good,

It's agentic and it's worth, it's like one of the most underutilized AI features out there right now is deep research. It is going and doing a lot of work. And I love it. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. If you're a chat GPT user now, you're paying for plus and you're not using all 10 of the instances of that you get every single month. You haven't figured it out yet. I promise the best advice I give is like upgrade just for one month, upgrade to the $200 a month one. So you can get 120 instances of it.

Sara Nay (16:49.744)

Yes.

Danchez (17:12.462)

and just throw everything you can at it, practice at it. You get 120 of them, like throw away things at it and just try it. It's different than using chat GPT because it's going and doing like 20 to 40 hours worth of human work for you, which means you kind of, like I said, prompting wasn't good a minute ago, but for deep research, prompting actually is more strategic because it's less of a prompt and more of like a mini project charter if you think about it.

Sara Nay (17:18.545)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (17:36.294)

Mm-hmm.

Danchez (17:37.676)

you kind of need to put some barriers on like where you want it to go, what you want it to do, what you want it to accomplish, where you want it to not go before you give it 40 hours of work. Even though it's doing it in 20 minutes, you got to remember these reports are so sophisticated. You're like, that would have taken a human a long time. But that's the most agentic thing that I've seen out there. That's remarkably good right now.

Sara Nay (17:46.649)

Yeah, yeah.

Sara Nay (18:00.004)

Yeah, I use deep research a lot for things like competitive research if we're working with a client or if I'm creating a new presentation and I want some data to like back it up, I'll have it create initial research to put together that. I'm curious, do you have any other examples of how people might start wrapping their head around using deep research?

Danchez (18:18.796)

out a few. There's one prompt that I fell in love with and it went like super viral on LinkedIn. It's like my most viral post to date was a deep research prompt and it's really useful. So it is, I will give it to you to script out. I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's kind of long, but I'll give it to you. You can put it in the show notes, okay? But it's essentially a prompt that goes and collects all the questions your audience is asking about your expertise, okay? And it goes and searches Reddit.

Quora, forums, and social to go and find them all and then organize them into categories and then rank stack them so that you can get at a glance, what are the most frequently asked questions your audience is asking about the thing that you do or the thing that you sell, whatever category that is. And that's just so helpful to see. And it actually like not only rank stacks it, but actually gives you a header for each one and then put bullet points of the exact how they're wording the questions with the link to the source so you can spot check it.

It's so helpful because as a content marketer, it's a lot of things are still done by content, right? Like that's like my planning path. I don't, I used to have to just have a lot of conversations on social or put out polls or just talk to a lot of customers. Now I can just extract it from the internet in 15 minutes and have a pretty dang good path of like what I need to be talking about on social or on podcasts or blogs.

Sara Nay (19:42.226)

That's amazing. It was a great example. We've, this isn't a deep research thing, but it's chat GPT thing. We've started recording a lot of our sales calls and that's just been really great content to put into GPT as well to analyze not only from a, can our sales team be doing better, but also a marketing content perspective, because now we're capturing exactly, as you said, exactly how prospects phrase certain pain points and things they're struggling with. And then we're able to create marketing content that speaks directly to them moving forward.

So I love that example. All right, Dan. Yeah, give me one more. Give me one more.

Danchez (20:13.922)

I got one more for deep research, unless you want to wrap up. Because the deep research prompts are a little bit more sophisticated, something I've started doing is if I want to use a deep research prompt to dive deep, and maybe I'm thinking about launching a new product, or I'm about to do something big, and I don't want to just do it willy nilly, I want to have a substantial conversation with AI about it, I will start it off in 4.0, just talk about, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Help me build a prompt that would do really well in Chet GPT's deep research.

ask me some questions. This takes time. I'll tell it generally what I'm going after. It'll ask me some questions, get clarity. It'll craft the prompt. Then I'll switch it to the O1 Pro model within that same window or the O1 thinking model. And then on deep research, I'm like, hey, that prompt above, go and do your thing. It's like, because it's already crafted the prompt for me. Then it'll go do the deep research, come back with the refindings. I'll read it and switch it back to 4.0 or maybe even a different thinking model.

Sara Nay (21:02.556)

Go do it. Yeah.

Danchez (21:12.238)

depending on what you're going after, and then have a conversation about the research and pick it apart. But now it's got this like big research report in there that then you can have a conversation with AI to be like, okay, well, it looks like this, like, what do you think? And then you can have a conversation and dialogue about the research, which is kind of a fun way to do it is chat GPT, deep research, and then going back to talking to chat GPT about it after the deep research report.

Sara Nay (21:15.952)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (21:36.508)

Yeah, that's really interesting because you're using it in that sense in that example as a research assistant with the deep research. And then you're going into more of the thought partner co-pilot mode when you're going into conversation. Very cool. Well, thanks, Dan. Is there anything else that you want to share before we part ways today in terms of anything on the topic of AI overwhelm and strategic thinking?

Danchez (21:43.02)

back into copilot mode. Yeah.

Danchez (21:57.294)

For anybody that's listening to this and thinking they're behind on the AI train, you're not behind. It's still very, very early. I promise. I've just got back from a conference just two weeks ago. People were asking all kinds of questions and I could tell just from the types of questions and their hunger they had that this is still extremely early. Like it is not too late. I know the hype has been crazy over the last two years, but as far as marketers actually using it in a meaningful way on a weekly or daily basis, very few. So.

It generally pays to be early on these trends, but don't be overwhelmed with trying everything. Just taking some of the things we've talked about in this episode and practicing it and finding use cases that are meaningful for you. Again, look for those daily or weekly things you use all the time and start experimenting with AI and count it and write it off as like education time rather than, I wasn't as productive as I was hoping it would be. Your first couple of swings at it are just going to take time. It took us all time to learn how to Google. It took us all time to learn how to actually write our first blog post.

It'll take you time with AI, but it's early and putting in the reps now will pay dividends later.

Sara Nay (23:00.402)

Yeah, that's great advice. I always like to think we're all learning together right now on this. We're all learning together. Well, where can people connect with you online, Dan?

Danchez (23:04.12)

That's right.

Danchez (23:08.648)

You can find my podcast wherever podcasts are, AIDrivenMarketer.com. Sorry, it's anywhere you search AIDrivenMarketer.com on any podcast app. It's also on YouTube. It's a video podcast. And LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com slash ian slash digital marketing Dan is my most active social network.

Sara Nay (23:27.026)

Awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Dan, and thank you all for listening to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. We will see you next time.

Scroll back to top

Sign up to receive email updates

Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.

powered by

from Duct Tape Marketing https://ift.tt/Ngs0Hhv
via IFTTT