AI and Digital Marketing: Helping Small Businesses Stay Competitive

Transcription – AI and Digital Marketing: Helping Small Businesses Stay Competitive

(0:00 – 0:27) 

Hello, everyone. My name is John Overton, and I’ve got the privilege today of sitting with Stacie Porter Bilger. She’s the founder and president of Proof Digital Marketing Agency. This podcast is in collaboration with Round Table Recording. Thanks to them for this beautiful space. Today we’re going to talk about AI. We’re going to talk about marketing, and we’re going to cover a variety of topics that are pertinent to small businesses trying to get ahead in their respective industries. I’m going to do a quick little intro for Stacie here and kind of set the tone for the discussion.

(0:32 – 0:57) 

Small business owners and marketing managers across Indianapolis are navigating an AI landscape that changes faster than any blog post can keep up with. Most of what they’re hearing is either hype or theory. Proof Digital’s edge is that your team is doing this every day, running real campaigns, seeing what works, and dealing with what doesn’t. So I’m personally very much interested in this discussion. We kind of talked a little bit prior off mic. I’ve ran businesses.

(0:59 – 1:26) 

I’ve paid for marketing. So as we dive into this, I’m definitely going to be taking notes. But before we start, as you came here today, did you have anything specific that you really wanted to drive home in this interview that would leave people with more than they know now about either AI or marketing? A couple things. One, AI is moving fast and you can’t ignore it because it’s going to be the vehicle for your business to be found.

(1:29 – 1:55) 

It is changing on a daily basis and keeping up can be a little overwhelming. But the other piece is, some of the older marketing tactics still exist. You still also need to lean into what problem you solve and being clear on that. Blending the two, and being authentic. So there’s going to be a lot of change. It’s rapid. And sometimes you need some help to navigate it.

(2:00 – 2:31) 

But hopefully today we’ll get some small businesses some guidance on this. I definitely think we can add some value, and I appreciate you taking time to be here. So our first conversation is going to center around general marketing and then, as you said, layering AI into that. So before we talk about AI at all, what does a small business need to have in place for any marketing to work? Right, the basics. What are the non-negotiables? What problem do you solve, and how are you going to make the lives better of those who you want to buy your product or service?

(2:33 – 2:58) 

You have to make that extremely clear. Because when I’m going to a website, or if I see the message on AI, or if I’m going to your social, what do you do? That still needs to be in place. And then really be clear on who your customer is. The old school personas, those still are important because that matters no matter what tech platform you’re pushing your product or service on.

(3:03 – 3:33) 

So who do you serve, and what are the problems in which they need solved? The better you understand your customers, that is still the basic piece of marketing. So having those things in place, from a tech standpoint, your website is your home base. There’s some things that you need to do now even more on that website. But at minimum, your website should also be really clear about what problem you solve and your credibility.

(3:35 – 4:01) 

Trust and credibility. Brand clarity. And case studies and other things that demonstrate you can deliver on what you say you can. And how do I get in touch with you? How do we find you? How do we give you money? Making that easy. So those are simple marketing basics from the beginning of time that still exist. And the clearer you get on that, the more successful you’ll be across AI and general search.

(4:09 – 4:34) 

You’ve got to start with a solid foundation before ads or anything else, or you’ll waste your money on ads or investment in your site. Now, some companies have a challenge because they have so many clients, so many potential folks, but you need to identify each of them and then set priorities. Who makes the most money? Who makes you the most money? Let’s focus on them first.

(4:35 – 5:14) 

Prioritization. Some of that leads into my next question. A lot of small business owners might say, my website’s fine, it’s doing what it needs to do. When somebody says that to you and you’re tasked with finding out if that’s true, what do you find when you look under the hood of a website that could be improved or optimized? I’ve never found a site that was perfect. You have to remember that not only do humans view your site, but search engines and now AI bots read your site.

(5:16 – 5:41) 

A lot of times sites don’t have something called an H1 tag or a meta description. That means you’re not telling those bots what you actually do, and you probably won’t come up on search. That might not be a priority, but when somebody Googles your name, that’s what comes up: what you do. You just need to reinforce it. So a lot of times sites are not structured in a way to be found by search or AI bots.

(5:50 – 6:15) 

When somebody is looking for you, you’re not answering the question of what problem you solved. A lot of things on websites aren’t in place to help you tell your story, and that’s on top of broken links and other issues. A lot of sites still don’t come back to the point: what problem are you solving?

(6:16 – 6:45) 

Who are you? What’s your clear mission? And how do I contact you? A lot of sites still don’t do those basics. Structurally, most sites miss out on that. Sometimes you want fewer words, and sometimes that’s not good for getting found either. So it comes down to a strategy about setting priorities for your site. I think that’s a huge point. You’re not only communicating with your customer, you’re communicating with the internet, and that’s what makes you visible or not.

(6:48 – 7:16) 

Most small business owners probably don’t think of that as much as they think about the customer they’re talking to. I get the question, “why don’t I come up on Google or Bing” or “how do I get found in an AI chat bot” all the time. There are lots of reasons behind that, but it really comes down to the details and making sure you’re set up correctly and communicating clearly. So let’s jump into this AI era we’ve just started to get into.

(7:22 – 7:54) 

When a small business owner has heard a little bit about AI and comes to you saying, “I want to start using AI in my marketing,” what does that conversation look like? More specifically, how do you identify and explain to the client where AI can positively impact their business? Well, first of all, AI is changing the way people find you. It’s no longer just keyword focused the way SEO marketing used to be. Now it’s about actually helping the AI help you.

(7:59 – 8:25) 

It’s your job to help make the AI LLMs better. It can only work with what you give it, so you need to make it better so it tells your story. You need to think about it as another salesperson for you, which means you don’t just give it keywords and a website. It’s basically information.

(8:25 – 8:59) 

You’ve got to train it like you would train another employee. What questions do those customers ask you? What are your competitors saying? What are they not saying? Understanding what people are actually searching matters, because people aren’t just going to Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude and stopping there. They’re prompting these chatbots and digging deeper. We have so many case studies right now of businesses changing because they got found in a chatbot for their product.

(8:59 – 9:27) 

It is really a sales partner for you, and you need to treat it as such, which means you need to have those questions about what people ask about your product or service, and your site needs to be set up to answer them. Where is AI genuinely making a difference for small businesses right now? Where’s the biggest ROI actually showing up? AI is helping small businesses across the board.

(9:32 – 9:57) 

We help from a standpoint of workflow implementation. We use AI across all types of workflows and help our clients identify that. But from a search standpoint, things change on a weekly basis. Think about how looking for a product even ten years ago is completely different than the search options you see now.

(10:01 – 10:28) 

You have Gemini right on the side if you’re on Google, giving you specific answers. The catch is you’re getting fewer clicks to your site sometimes, so the content people do click on needs to be more specific. Again, it’s a sales rep for you, working to get chosen. So companies need to think about where they want to be and set priorities around the products they most want to build content for.

(10:33 – 11:06) 

Is there a front-runner right now between Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT? They’re all valuable and important, but Claude is really killing it right now. I give them different personalities in my head. Gemini is more like the geek, really good with numbers and images. Claude is great with coding and I find it to be a safer platform.

(11:13 – 11:38) 

ChatGPT was kind of the Kleenex of the category, the first name people knew. They’re running through a lot of huge investment, and we’ll see if that pays off. They were one of the first to really blow up. I’ve been using AI for a long time, probably since 2014.

(11:40 – 12:06) 

It became mainstream, and now it’s been crazy. I think Claude is probably the front-runner. Gemini has Google’s backing, and there’s Perplexity and others out there too, but Claude is my favorite today. Even our studio engineer here loves Claude and is always talking about AI workflows.

(12:08 – 12:34) 

Can you explain what that word, “workflow,” actually means? I’ll give you an example that changed our business. The human piece is still going to be even more important in marketing, but I can have a Zoom meeting, and straight from the transcript, draft an email response based on the next action items and add it to my project management system.

(12:36 – 13:02) 

It assigns tasks to the people who need to do them, drafts the next agenda item for the following meeting, and automates the whole thing. That saves my team an hour or two, so we can actually work on marketing and personas instead of project management for our clients. Those are workflows. We have workflows for competitive intelligence too.

(13:05 – 13:36) 

We have a whole AI hub, including workflows for time tracking as a business. We have a full structure for how we work with our clients: where is your time going, what’s eating it, and is there a potential AI automation for it? Workflows can run all the way from a client meeting to assigning tasks to following up with the client. It automates the whole thing.

(13:37 – 14:09) 

It’s synergistic too, because we’re using AI as a tool while educating our clients on how to use it. We’re constantly learning and trial-and-erroring our own company with it, which gives us a wealth of knowledge to share with a new client. Right now we’re helping clients think through not only how to help AI answer the questions consumers ask about their service, but also how to use these tools to run their business better.

(14:14 – 14:42) 

Another piece we love using AI for is predictive analytics and data. I’m a data person, I love it, and we help our clients make better decisions with data. AI helps us make those decisions even better. We’re building a performance hub to pull data from all our different marketing platforms so clients can access those data points faster and answer the constant small business question: what should I do first?

(14:47 – 15:12) 

These tools help you understand what to do first for the biggest bang for your buck. If somebody watching this thinks, “we need a company like Proof Digital to help us get AI integrated,” what should a small business expect to spend on a service like this? And does AI make that more affordable or less affordable overall?

(15:19 – 15:44) 

How much to spend depends on the business. I get this question all the time, and it really depends on the market. Different companies spend anywhere from five to thirty percent of their revenue. It varies a lot. It’s important to set priorities, and we try to work with clients who have smaller budgets so they can scale up over time.

(15:49 – 16:16) 

We ask, what’s the most important thing in front of us today, and how can AI help us leverage that? We’re still doing the strategy and the implementation. We’re just delivering more by spending less time on the things clients don’t necessarily feel from a marketing standpoint, because we want to spend more time on ad optimization and pieces like that.

(16:24 – 16:57) 

Clients need to think about their revenue and their revenue goals. If you’re an e-commerce site, you have to spend more. If you’re local and only targeting one geographic area, you can spend less. It’s really about figuring out where you fit and working from there, and that evolves over time. Setting priorities and then measuring is key, because the biggest concern small businesses have in marketing is not knowing if it’s working.

(17:01 – 17:27) 

Having clear KPIs and measurements of your goals matters, though it’s not always as easy if you’re not selling a product directly. It’s simple to say you spent this much on ads and made this much back. It’s less clear when you’re tracking something like how many forms someone filled out and whether those leads were real. So it’s about setting realistic goals before you invest.

(17:33 – 18:00) 

You want to work with your marketing partner to set those realistic goals, which is always hard. What are some other key pieces of data a small business should be looking at to see if their initiatives are working? First is traffic to your site. How many people are coming, and how many are staying once they get there?

(18:04 – 18:30) 

That tells you whether it’s likely a real person, since bots also come to your site and bounce off quickly. Are they going to multiple pages? Are they hanging out? There are tools you can put on your site to watch that behavior, see where people click and navigate, and use that to improve campaigns.

(18:35 – 19:04) 

Are they reading the page? Are they calling you? Phone calls are easy to track. On a more extensive site like e-commerce, are they adding to cart, are they leaving, are they adding more (which drives average order value), are they spending more money? There’s a lot we track. Have you seen small businesses try to use AI tools before they were ready, without help or supervision? What does that actually look like, and what goes wrong?

(19:06 – 19:31) 

Honestly, I think everybody should just jump in and try it. Don’t put it into your workflow until you understand what problem you’re trying to solve. But companies need to see the power of it, because it is crazy good. I gave you one simple example of a workflow saving us hours.

(19:37 – 20:02) 

Don’t be afraid of it, is my point. Ask it questions, prompt it, think it through. But before businesses go too far, they should have an AI policy: don’t put your social security number in it, and know what else not to put in.

(20:03 – 20:28) 

There are safeguards you should have in place around what not to put into these tools. If you want your team using it, you need a business structure around it, because there’s real room for mistakes. You should have policies and systems in place, and use a business-tier subscription rather than just the pro version, so there’s more protective use of your data.

(20:35 – 21:02) 

Your policy should also cover things like whether you put client names into it. Privacy is key. Don’t put sensitive things into Google either. Keep those security guardrails in place. Having a policy matters, and that’s not just for companies. It’s universal regulation for this new technology.

(21:03 – 21:33) 

If you’re playing with it from a personal standpoint, just ask it questions and understand its power before you put anything sensitive in or make it official. But having an actual AI policy is important. What types of businesses or industries do you think are benefiting the most from AI right now? I’m excited about medical businesses and anything security-related. There are going to be some great innovations there.

(21:37 – 22:04)

It’s going to change businesses like law firms too, because they’re information hubs. I think all businesses can benefit from workflow improvements, and I also think businesses that rely on the human touch, service businesses especially, need to lean into that side of things. Those are safer businesses to be in.

(22:09 – 22:35) 

Some businesses will struggle in this shift, including businesses of mine. I’m not worried about us because we’re ahead of it and helping people navigate it, but if you think it’s not going to change marketing, it will. Without giving away any secrets, how do you stay ahead of that? How do you safeguard against your own disruption?

(22:41 – 23:07) 

One thing is I have a team fully dedicated to AI. I’ve invested in that as a company from a growth standpoint. We meet weekly: every Monday to talk about what we’re building, and then a Friday standup on what we learned that week. Even though we’re ahead of most, it’s still moving rapidly.

(23:12 – 23:41) 

The Friday standup covers things like how we’re using it for a development project, what the latest release on Gemini was, what we’re seeing on search. We work to stay ahead, but it’s crazy how fast it’s moving. You can think you have one thing figured out, and then a new capability comes out and you have to rethink the whole approach.

(23:43 – 24:08) 

The important thing is it goes back to your own systems, not just jumping into whatever is new. It’s about your current systems and how you’re leveraging AI within them. Even with search, there are a lot of names for it now. It’s GEO, or other names. Right now I just say search is everywhere. GEO stands for generative.

(24:08 – 24:36) 

It’s like the new SEO, which is a term people use, but really it’s search everywhere. Those tactics are still the same. You have to dot your I’s and cross your T’s, do the details, help your clients answer the questions people are looking for, and make sure you’re set up for success to be the answer, anywhere someone is searching.

(24:37 – 25:03)

Your role and the role of your company are vital, because the average small business owner doesn’t have time to research this to the extent you do. So six months to a year in, if a company has done this right, marketed well, and layered in AI thoughtfully, what does good look like for that company? Where do you see the most improvement?

(25:05 – 25:33) 

Obviously sales and visibility, but what can they really expect if they get this right? I can only point to case studies. I’ve had clients get found on generative AI nationally and land some of the biggest clients they’ve ever had. That changes a business. That might be exciting for some companies and a little scary for others, but you have to be ready for it.

(25:33 – 25:58) 

If you do it right, it’s about being there when somebody is looking for you, and having the trust and everything else already in place when they find you. That’s the way people will be looking for a product or service going forward. It still depends on the business, though. You have to set priorities. If you’re in a relationship-driven business, like construction, that matters even more.

(26:02 – 26:29) 

You should look at how you can improve your RFP process through system workflow. That might be a place worth investing in more than other places. AI will become more of a trust-building piece around the projects you’ve done and how you get found for them, but you still have to look at your specific business and how you’re found. If you’re a relationship business, lean into that. People are afraid AI is going to take the human element out of things.

(26:33 – 26:58) 

It’s not going to take it out of everything. It’s still very important to be client-facing as yourself, without AI. I think AI is a great tool for the busy work of operations for a lot of companies. There is genuine fear about what it will take and how it will change things, and that’s fair.

(26:59 – 27:24) 

It will change some industries, but I do think people will always crave somebody who picks up the phone when they need customer service. A company that does that well, and figures out how to keep doing it, will still win. Personally, what’s something about AI and marketing that you believed a year ago that you’ve changed your mind about today?

(27:27 – 27:52) 

I’m not sure it changed my mind so much as expanded it. I had one toe into AI, and now I have two feet in. It expanded my thinking on how much it will impact business as we know it, and how much more curious and rapidly companies need to move.

(28:01 – 28:38) 

It’s moved faster than I anticipated, and not everybody sees what you see, so that’s probably frustrating at times. We’ve built an AI platform that does competitive intelligence on competitors, and what it can produce in seconds is crazy. One thing worth watching, though, is the cost of AI over time.

(28:47 – 29:15) 

It might not make financial sense for some companies to use certain tools once cost is factored in, so that’s worth watching in the coming months and years. Robotics is another area, not my expertise, but you see some genuinely innovative things coming, new examples on Instagram every day.

(29:17 – 29:42) 

There’s a lot of change coming, and it’s already here. People need to embrace it while understanding the cautiousness too. It still goes back to the old small business fundamentals: systems. Don’t rely on only one LLM.

(29:47 – 30:12) 

Don’t rely on just one platform, because next month it might change. Make sure your foundation is built around the system, not the specific tool. Is AI impacting social media too, and how important is social media versus a website versus Google? You want to be visible and show brand clarity, trust, and credibility everywhere, but websites should still be your home base.

(30:13 – 30:41) 

You own your website. Social media is a platform you do not own or control, so know that going in. It’s a tool in the toolbox, but your website should still be number one, and you want to drive people back to it. Social media has evolved, and honestly, it’s a love-hate relationship. It goes back to leaning into what’s authentic, because there’s going to be a lot of AI-generated content out there, and people have to be cautious about that.

(30:43 – 31:14) 

There are fully AI-run Instagram accounts now. The line between what’s real and what isn’t will keep blurring. Lean into being authentic as a company, telling your story to reinforce the problem you solve. Use it for case studies. We see great success with a hospital client telling the stories of how they’ve saved lives or changed lives.

(31:18 – 31:47) 

We have nonprofits telling the story of their community impact too. Lean into your people and your team’s stories. That’s still the way to go. As a consumer of this content, you need to be cautious, because there are bad players out there. Be vigilant, do your research like you would with any product, and don’t trust just one source. From a business standpoint, it also depends on the type of business you are and how much you can invest.

(31:53 – 32:20) 

You only have so much time in a day, so ask whether a platform reinforces your mission. You don’t have to be on all of them. Some platforms have a bigger impact on search and AI than others. Pinterest, for example, has been around forever but doesn’t get talked about much. It has a unique authority in certain markets.

(32:22 – 32:50) 

All these platforms can be overwhelming, which is where a marketing company like Proof Digital takes some of that off your plate. It comes down to seeing where your biggest return is and focusing there. If you’re targeting 50-year-olds, Facebook is probably not a bad place. If you’re targeting a younger audience, Instagram and TikTok are probably better, especially if you have good video production.

(32:52 – 33:19) 

If you don’t have the bandwidth, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Focus on what’s going to help you get sales, and the rest will come block by block, sale by sale. Last question, at the risk of being a little repetitive: if you could tell a small business owner starting out today one thing about marketing in an AI world that almost nobody tells them, what would it be?

(33:22 – 33:59) 

It goes back to this: AI can be a salesperson for you now. Getting those things in line from a marketing standpoint and treating it that way is what matters, or you’ll be left behind. And if you rely on any type of leads from an online standpoint, you need to make sure your website and your messaging really tell the story.

(34:00 – 34:26) 

In detail. And you need to understand your customers even more. Stacie, thanks so much for sitting with us and sharing your knowledge. I want to give you the chance to tell people how to find Proof Digital if they’re interested in learning more about this. Thank you, it’s been a lot of fun. You have a great setup here. You can find Proof at proofdigital.com, and we’ll be happy to have a conversation.

(34:33 – 34:34) 

Awesome. Thank you.