Do you want to create more engaging content in your newsletters? Jared Loftus helps us to understand the importance of a fabulous newsletter.
Rasa enables marketers to create newsletters that engage customers through curated content that helps to build relationships. They give businesses a way to provide a real benefit regularly for everyone on their email list. And not just regularly, but relevantly. Through automation, companies can engage with a new level of frequency without spending more time, effort, or money.
Imagine doom scrolling through Netflix, looking for the ideal show to binge-watch this weekend. Not the mind-numbing, watch while playing “Candy Crush” content, but the great shows that you really want to burn through 24 hours watching.
After reviewing thousands of low-budget horror movies and sitcoms, you finally stumble upon a hidden gem that you enjoy… but wouldn’t it be easier if these incredible shows appeared automatically? Or if the entirety of Netflix was customized for your exact specifications? That’s what Content Cucumber does (Well, they sort of do this)
Content Cucumber is a writing company. Their clients are metaphorical directors since everything they create keeps the individual wants and needs in mind. Their subscription-based service even lets business leaders update their blogs without lifting a finger, giving them more time to focus on their company (or watch Netflix).
We speak with Chris Chasteen, the co-founder of Content Cucumber.
Transcript
All right. Welcome to this super content-filled episode of talk commerce. Today, I have Chris chess Dean. He is the CEO of content cucumber, and I had the pleasure of first meeting Chris a long time ago, 2018, maybe at retail, X, or IRC at the time. Chris, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing.
Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions.
Sure. Yeah. So just recently got the CEO title added on for the longest time it was just co-founder focused on growth, but I’ve actually now I’m working on all areas of our organization. So that means, running a contact, cucumber, running everything from finance to innovation, to growth the operations and making sure everything’s moving in the right direction.
And then as far as passion, I love music. I play music and I’m actually working on recording an album.
Oh, nice. So you could come out with another service called title turnip, or something like that for your
albums or? Yeah. I think that my indecision would get in the way of that one, but,
So just for, so everybody gets some background content.
Cucumber is a service that, that, that writes content for people like us. So I’ve been using your service for a number of years. And you have a staff of writers that help entrepreneurs and business people and content people on e-commerce people, great content for their site.
Yeah. Yeah. And I actually came from an e-commerce background.
The reason I started content cucumbers, cause I was helping grow an e-commerce store and I realized that we could reduce our ad spend and grow our revenue. If we just had focused a little bit on some organic.
Yeah. And I can just speak from experience that developing that organic content has been the best decision that we made in the last, four years now.
The the SEO traffic that you generate just from that consistent blog post, or just consistent content that’s being generated is something that Google really likes. Maybe you could speak a little bit to how how that service has worked and maybe some of the benefits that some of your other clients have seen from it as well.
Yeah. So just the idea of posting consistently and like showing, proof of life to Google yeah, I’m still here. We’re still here. We’re still here. That definitely is rewarded. And Google looks at you as a thought leader. The more you’re talking about CapEx, where you’re diving deep on.
And really in any business, if you’re starting to get some traction, content is a really great way to shift the focus away from the short term gains, like advertising and sales, and really start to focus up on long-term because it’s very much a long-term thing. Like I always tell people if they’re like, if they’re really fresh getting started you don’t want to focus too much of your time on content in the beginning because you need to get the wheels moving.
But once things are moving, it’s. Putting fuel on the
fire. Yeah, I would even argue that beginning phase, when you need to get the wheels moving is a great time to start building your content. It is also going to be the biggest time that you’re going to have a lot of ideas. And I know one thing we talked about in the green room is how you have.
Helped me or helped with Kento come up with some of those original ideas that then turned into content maybe speak to how merchants could use content to drive traffic to their products.
Yeah. So at the beginning and content totally plays a role in the beginning with the product descriptions, right?
That’s like where you first need to really nail your web copy is if you’re talking about, selling. Hairbrushes or whatever you’re going to go and sell. Having really compelling content about the item outside of just like what its dimensions are like, how is it useful? What have people what are the experiences?
And that’s, before you’re getting tracked and you don’t have reviews, like the best thing you could do is try to talk about this, that whatever product it is at lake. So yeah, product descriptions, I think are probably your first content pathway to take as a numerous. For sure.
What are you seeing then as a trend right now?
I know there’s some terms called compose, compose of composable commerce. There’s all kinds of now com commerce and headless. And w what are you seeing from adding content? Oh, on top of the regular content you’ve seen on a e-commerce store that content now has just become more important.
And I guess maybe speak to some of the things that you’re seeing in the industry around generation of content and the volume of that. You need to keep relevant.
Yeah, to really establish a brand authority on top of having your product descriptions well, maintained, it’s also having a blog of some sort and having some talking points that really establish you as the authority of whatever it is that you’re going to sell.
So we see people like the people we see of our clients that are the most successful are very much like you were. We know what our niche is. We know who we’re talking to. We know what they’re interested in, and if you just continually listen to what it is that your audience is interested in, and you keep speaking to that, you’re going to be going down the pathway that you really want to be going.
So I’d say regardless of the trends, always go back to who your target profile audiences and make sure that you’re finding and meeting them with.
Yeah. And I think to borrow a term from WordPress or some of the other content site, there’s always a pillar page that you’re trying to drive traffic to, or in the terms of a of a website that has a product or that product would be that pillar page.
And the goal is to generate content around that and then drive traffic to.
Yes. Yeah. And there’s, there’s all sorts of different ways you can do that, whether it’s I’ve seen people do it from a case study pit standpoint, where it’s like this one product can be used in five different cases.
And then your landing page is like, How do I use so construction materials, a great example. So let’s say caulking, which is where I came from and Silicon sealants. You can use silicone sealants around windows. You can use them in the bathroom. You can use them on the sidewalk outside. And the people who are installing those different applications are very different people.
But having, a landing page from the audience saying writing out your content like this is how you use this product in this space, and then you can have another one about that space. So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that too. It’s not just like one category page or one pillar page for all the product types that person might be interested in, but it’s also creating different pages for one product that targets different audiences as well.
So there’s a lot of different ways to approach that content creation.
So maybe talk a little bit about idiation as well. How you help or maybe talk about how merchants don’t have to have that full idea. You help them dig into it, come up with some more content and then follow on through even more content for.
Yeah, for sure. When you start working with any writer and a contact cucumber writer is a great example. If you have some rough ideas, share them with that writer, or even if you’re building a team make sure to share your ideas with your team. Cause like getting feedback on the ideas will help develop the idea.
And our, our service is a place where you can send us the roughest of sketches and we can help you hash that out, but always being on the lookout for bouncing your ideas off of other people I found is like infinitely helpful. Cause I see a lot of people they’ll be like, I have a thousand ideas, but then they just don’t.
Try to ask people like, is this a good idea? Cause they hold their ideas a little too close to the chest and ideas are free people aren’t going to steal them. And yeah, just
let the flow, just talking about Combs. I was going to get a subscription to a comb. But my wife said it would be a waste of money, so I don’t know why, but so the I guess the, to go in on that, a lot of, content is so important, but content can be expensive in hiring a full-time staff writer.
Can be can be equally expensive. So how do you help? How do you see helping with your typical e-commerce agency by supplementing that content? Yeah,
That’s pretty much the exact niche that I went to Phil because I, when I had silicone Depot trying to grow that business there wasn’t really a way to have a writer that was on my team.
But not like a freelancer, not like an intern, but someone who was a professional writer. And I could just borrow some of their time to dedicate to my project. And it was like Hey, let’s do that. And so that’s what contact cucumber is all about, is being able to access that professional writer for part of their time to basically help do that at a fraction of the
cost.
And you don’t just do blog posts, you’re helping generate content for any type of media out there.
Any type of written media and there’s some limitations to that. Like we can’t write your dissertation. We’re not going to write your homework. We actually, we actually did one of our first sample requests that we used to have a sample funnel where we’d let people make a free blog request.
Someone said, can you write a book report on where the Redfern group. And they’re like nice tribe, but no. So we’re not going to do your homework, but we definitely had some people, some pretty clever people that wasn’t the first one, because they came back the, I think the next day and put in another one, they’re like could you do a report on hurricanes and have it to me by midnight?
It’s oh, we’re not gonna do that.
So it does give you an idea if you wanted to help get through school, though. You don’t just say, Hey, I’ve got to write this blog post on. The the geology of rocks.
Yeah. Yeah, we can do a whole nother business specifically for homework, like homework.
don’t know. What’s a vegetable homework hummus, maybe homework, calmness. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, we just helped you. We help you figure out how to get your homework done
on time. And watch out for the dog. So it’s not going to eat it. So w specifically written, so helping with social media posts, just Twitter tweets.
Of course what was I just thinking of? Oh, email newsletters is a great example of something that’s needs to be done every month and is often overlooked. And I think that email right now, people are thinking is email really important, but Hey, I still get email every day and I answer it and I look at it
right.
And merchants, like that’s some serious like money on the table. If you’re not, if you’re not utilizing email, you ought to because yeah, that, that’s a really good place to engage with your audience and get people to come back and buy from you again. Or, email is an ex. Excellent source of doing that.
And we, we write tons of newsletters every month and those are really successful and also like on that. It’s not something we do, but something to think about for merchants, if they’re thinking about building. Their content points and how to reach their audience more. Definitely getting into SMS a bit.
I’ve seen a lot of e-commerce companies adopting more SMS marketing, and that seems to be going much better than email even. So something to consider.
Okay. So just adding on to, on, on what SMS is going to be shorter messages, but yeah, I can see how that was. That is going to help a merchant to.
To increase traffic and help get education around their products that they’re selling. Maybe we can just dive into the ways that merchants should measure some of this. Like how, what is your definition of success or do people come to you and say, how do I judge my success on my content?
Yeah. So there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Of course, in e-commerce conversion rate is king, right? That’s the thing. It’s straw, Kate’s driving traffic, but what percentage are actually converting into customers or it’s I’m sending out this email, but what percentage are actually converting into clicks and going to the website?
And for e-commerce I think conversion rate is probably the area where we focus on and we definitely see some blogs that if they get posted on the first page of that relevant result, they can see anywhere from, a two to 4% conversion rate, which for a blog post is pretty darn.
Yeah, that’s great.
So maybe talk a little bit about non the more, the broader idea of just developing content and then from an SEO standpoint, how do you measure success?
Yeah, starting from the topic gets, it definitely gets more and more vague, like the higher up the idea, the more vague it is.
And then the closer to the actual metrics, the, the more it’s relevant, but I would say a good like litmus. To try when you’re first developing your content strategy is look at what everyone else in your industry is talking about in is what you’re talking about. At least as interesting and Mo more ideal, more interesting than what everyone else is talking about.
And if it is then you’re on the right path. But if what you’re talking about, Everyone already knows that, some of that content is good, like reiterating terms. So Google knows that, you know what you mean? But don’t do a 2000 word blog on like how to drink water or something is like everyone already know.
There was like the benefits of drinking the quantity of water. And that’s why you should get our one gallon water thing, because you need to drink a gallon of water. Cause it shows that you’ll like sleep better and like you’ll not have to eat as much and your exercises will be more effective. It’s tell the benefits, not just the features.
And I think that stuff like that is really important when coming up with your
context, yeah. And I think the underlying idea to that is you want to differentiate yourself from other people. And especially if you’re differentiating yourself from say, Amazon, if you have a specialty product, or if your product that’s crosses over into that marketplace world, where Amazon might sell it, the more you can do to distinguish yourself as a leader in that the better your content is going to perform.
And the more traffic you’re gonna. I suppose the, one of the minimum things that somebody could look at is that their traffic is increasing over time. And also making sure that you’re you’re indexing those pages onto Google, your blog posts. If this that’s where you’re going to do, you’re going to expose this content to and measure.
What is more popular than that? Is this one more popular than this other one? One thing that we’ve done is on some posts put specific call to actions on those posts. And even in the past, we tried doing some kind of little internal ad thing where we’d have some ads rotate through the blogs to see.
Are we getting a lot of clicks and if we’re getting a lot of clicks, that’s a great place that you should be trying to capture some of those reads, right? Because I think was logged. So if you have a blog and you mentioned 2000 words, somebody is going to spend a, five or 10 minutes reading that’s a great time to get somebody to stick with it and then go somewhere else on your own.
Yeah. Always have a call to action of some kind, for sure. That’s a must do for every post should have some sort of call to action for sure. I definitely agree with that. And yeah, I of course. Like traffic is an important metric to keep in mind. But the reason why I don’t go there first is because it can be a little demoralizing because it takes so long.
If you don’t have traction to get the traction that you’re like this isn’t working. And it’s if you’re writing things that are as interesting or more interesting than everyone else writing about the same thing, you will get traction. It’s just going to take time. So that’s a big piece there because I don’t want people to give up early cause this.
Six to 12 months before you’re seeing the results that you
expect. Yeah. And I think ideally you’d like to do one per business day. So an average of 20 a month, I don’t know I’m being right. Or
that really depends on the industry that you’re in. Of course the that’s I was just laughing cause that’s our, our pitch, our first offering, was, you can get up to a blog a business day, but really, it depends on the industry you’re in.
And if you’re in a say you’re in the. I don’t know, medicinal space, that’s going to require more like say you’re selling supplements or selling some herbal teas or something. That’s really going to take probably longer form of content because your competition is higher. And because you’re wanting to attract the type of buyer who wants to read a lot about that thing.
Whereas if you’re buying, if you’re selling something a little more surface level, some people will want to do a ton of research on tires, but the majority of your consumers just want to know is it going to work in snow? Is it going to work in rain? Is it going to work in the summer? And that’s really all they care about and it’s not going to go flat very easily.
And it’ll fit my vehicle. It’s okay, great. So those can be shorter. So it depends on your industry. I’d say four. Good average, those at least try to get, somewhere around 15 hundreds, a week, 1500 words a week out at minimum, in some capacity, whether it’s, a combination of 400 word or 800 word blogs or.
One 1400 word blog, but just some kind of mix of content that adds up to that number is probably a good place to be. This
is Google looking specifically at the length of a blog post, and that was going to be my next question is 400, the best size, or is 800 zero. Is there a sort of a rule of thumb that makes sense for the length of your blog post?
Now you’re really diving into an area where you can. For SEO agency, people masterminds and they will argue that to the, yeah. So that, that one’s a contentious one. I think right now the hot topic is long form content. Like everyone’s more beating the drum of 1400 to 2000 words.
But again, it really depends on what you’re selling, because if you’re selling something that the consumer doesn’t really want to know everything there is to know about it, they just want. To know that it’s going to work for what they needed to work for. I would always urge you to meet your consumer where they’re at figure out who your customer is and always write to them.
If you think that they really want to nerd out about the laptop, then write 2000 words about the laptop. But if you think it’s no, I’m selling to someone who they just want to make sure that they can open Chrome and. You use the internet, they don’t care about gaming or anything. So just know who you’re talking to.
And Google will always reward you for staying on top of your audience. And that’s going to be a, there’s going to be SEO. People who disagree with that. They’re like no, 1500 to 2000 words. Like it really works. It’s yeah. Okay. It does work. But there does come to a point where Google’s goal in life is to figure out exactly what you want when you start.
And so sure right now, the long form content is performing well, but in the end, the Google’s AI is going to figure out every search and what you’re actually looking for. And so just work that out. If you’re going to go write a piece of code. What does the person who’s going to read this one? Do they want to sit down and read a 10 minute log or do they want a, three-minute answer to a very basic question, meet the people where they are, and actually with that advice.
And this is where I pushed back on the SEO. People’s I we’ve seen featured snippets because of that, where people write a short form, 400 word blog, and they’re the featured snippet, which that’s
huge. Wow.
We need
to put that on our website, honestly. Yeah. You need a featured snippet too, on your. So I, what I guess what I’m hearing is, there should be a mixture of sizes of content.
And just, let’s just say you, you work for one larger, long, long form a week and some smaller ones to fill in, or at least get that one blog post a week up there to help the keep things moving.
Yeah, exactly. Momentum is huge.
And then I, I know one thing that we learned in just in, in sort of the way you can help to generate more of this content is that out of that blog post it’s officially a long form blog post, you certainly can find tweets that are relevant to that blog post, and it’ll lead people back to it.
So quotes and things like that. And then one thing that I’ve noticed recently there’s WordPress plugins that will help you write a blog post. A podcast about your blog post. And if you were to do a weekly blog post, you could, I would say, read it back. I wouldn’t have, I don’t know how they do that generation, but it would be really annoying if it’s some kind of audio generated from a robot reader, but that, that content would make, usually make a great.
A great podcast or at least put it into some audio. And then what I’ve really seen, a lot of people doing now is turning it into a little bit of a vlog where you get on and you just either read the highlights or talk about the highlights from your post. Then let people go through and read that long post for
sure.
Yeah. And I think. Again, to dive into some examples of what you’re talking about. Sometimes video content makes a good appearance with like makeup tutorials. We see people who are doing that kind of thing, but then where you’re talking about the more like higher level overview about certain products, I dunno.
What do you think? What are some products? Do you think that audio pairs really nicely with a blog? What kind of products do you imagine?
Just audio or audio and.
Let’s just take the audio example where you’re going to, we’re going to write a blog and then you turn it into a podcast. What do you think?
What kind of industries do you think that works really well
for? Yeah. I think audio only would work, I think, excuse me, obviously, for audio devices, if you’re selling something, excuse me, selling something in the audio world that’s a great example, but yeah. Anything where you can describe it, anything where you don’t have to have a visual of what you’re doing.
So you mean you gave the makeup. That’s a great example, where you have to see somebody doing it, anything where you don’t have to see it, and you can capture somebody while they’re driving or they’re running or whatever they’re doing. And it’s a, it’s something that can be described. And I guess if we look at what’s out there from a blog or from a podcasting standpoint, everything in a podcast is normally.
Descriptive. If you’re talking about strategy of any sort or thought leadership and then if you can boil that thought leadership into what is it, what is Ted talk say 18 minutes or something? That is your, yeah. That’s your ideal things. Yeah. I don’t know how many, eight, how many words? 18 minutes is it must be 2,500 words or something like that.
But if you can concentrate on that and then I would even say you don’t have to do the whole thing. Like people like to hear shorter bits, like two or three minutes of it, and then it gives them a chance to read the whole post.
Yeah, no, that’s interesting. And something I’ve seen a lot on.
Newscasters doing these days, like you see it on the Washington post and things of that nature where they’ll have an audio format that just literally reads the article out loud for you. And I find that kind of interesting too. It’s if you’re researching a pro like anything and it’s just listen to this in audio form, then you can just click play and.
Open your emails and listen to it in the background. And yeah, that’s a cool idea. I like that. I think that’ll probably start encouraging our clients to think more
like that. Yeah. I think that’s where this idea that WordPress has that you could turn this this blog post into a, they’re saying a podcast, but I think the idea of just has a sort of a screen reader of some sorts that would read it to you would be a little bit better.
Then having a weekly. Podcasts based on a robot, reading your content.
And anytime you can try to give your viewers or your users more ways to interact with your content usually you’re going to see performance upgrade, but the one thing I would caution everyone, if you try the, these ideas. Don’t stop iterating.
So it’s if you notice by adding audio, it re reduce the amount of times people click on your call to action, then try it without it, and then try it with it or try it with the call to action in the audio. Always iterate. I think something I see happening with Al with our clients sometimes is they’ll get stuck into their pattern and I’m doing the same thing every week and it’s not doing anything.
I’m like let’s try some new stuff and see what happens. So I think that coming up with new ideas, this is super
important. Yeah. Testing and measuring is the most important thing anybody could do to ma to see how successful their content is. And I just had a conversation with an email person who said there is a Sending an email for a product is it’s great.
But at some point people get sick of getting your emails and you don’t, you’re not, you don’t have a success as you did before on that newsletter or that email list that you’re sending to because there’s a fatigue in getting way too much. I think from a content standpoint, though as long as it’s relevant content, you can’t, you.
You couldn’t have too much content unless you’re duplicating something across your own site or just plagiarizing somebody else’s
right. I do agree. I think that what I was the point I was driving home. More that try to change how your blog posts look and feel and mess with your call to actions and that kind of just the scientific testing and try different things out.
Like definitely keep posting content, like you’re right. Like anytime you get deep into a topic, especially if you want to be the authority on that topic, you’ll never run out of stuff to talk about, but just try different stuff on the blog and just see what works. Yeah,
we
found that effective sometimes get lucky.
Like I think we got we are, we ranked pretty high on layout shifts, the new web, one of the scores and web vitals from Google. And it was only because we wrote an early article about it and posted it. And then we’ve been following up on eat more of those web viatical, web vital web, what vital web core vitals, sorry, core vitals that Google has.
I don’t get it. I’ll get this right today. Don’t worry. But if you can beat your early on some of those topics, there’s not a lot of penalty you’re going to get from writing about a topic when it first comes out, you have a lot of upside. The only penalty you have is the time it takes to write that article, right?
Yup. If it’s something new, like the core website, That Google has now that’s the score in your website. And there’s some specific things that are, that Google is keying in on. And if you’re early to those specific articles, you’re going to get some early wins and then making sure that you are writing relevant content moving forward, that still has something.
That still connects to that original article. Cause that’s going to continue to show Google that you have some thought leadership on that.
Yeah, for sure. I think having those like anchor pieces that can eventually link to a bunch of other articles that go into depth as a really great or really great concept.
And we’ve seen that workout successfully for a lot of.
Just diving a little bit into your into your career now, or your entrepreneur journey, entrepreneurial journey, you started content cucumber when you were still in college. Are you still in college now? No,
No. I I dropped out of college and then starting to of take it over.
So yeah, I actually met my co-founder and my wife at university went one semester. Met both of them and then, thought Hey, I, I got a home run, so
yeah, just I can, I had the, I had a similar journey. I, but I went to school for eight years before I dropped out. Okay. So you got your master’s degree?
No, I don’t have any degrees, but I did go to school full time for eight. Oh, okay. Yeah. Full-time student and then decided that I wanted to go into business and here I am, it’s been quite a fuel hit quite a few years later. So how do you, so what does it look like now to content you cover? How you keeping things fun and exciting?
Yeah. Fun and exciting. I think one of the things we’re doing right now, which is really fun is we have this competition going on called the real rumble. And it’s this competition where everyone submits a reel in our slack channel. And may the best real win and the best real winner will get like a custom made real winner of content, cucumber t-shirt.
And we just try to do little things like that to have fun. And me and the video guy who is hosting and judging the competition, did a a sketch to inspire everyone where I played a lawyer basically saying that this real needs to be thrown out. And he played the other lawyer, the defense attorney and the judge.
Like it was really funny, a little bit where we were just going back and forth on whether or not we, this a real. Allowed to be submitted or not.
Nice. Cool. I know one of the things that I remember that you did at at one of those early IRC or retail X or whatever, the name they’ve changed to this year you had ice cream.
It seems like that. It seems like that doesn’t it, whatever it is this year, they’re
like, we’re not getting enough
traffic rebrand again, yearly rebrand again. Yes. Yeah, I still call. I like calling it IRCE, but reaching to that feels very oh, G right? Yeah. Retail X also seems okay now, but the, whatever the new one is I think it’s content retail, something like that, or
I can’t believe they’ve rebranded again.
I don’t know why they think that’s going to be the solution, but sorry, if you’re listening to this and you organize that conference. I’m sorry.
I think one of the things that you did earlier. So you had ice cream that you rolled around on a cart, which was, it was a great idea. You had a jazz concert this last
time.
Yes. Yeah. We had a jazz trio. That was really fun. We always try to do something super creative and out there to show everyone that like we’re creative people. We try to live that spirit because we see a lot of content writing companies. You show. And look like all the other super corporate companies.
And I’m like, what are you doing? We’re literally creatives, get creative. So yeah, we try to have fun with it. Actually the ice cream, there was like blog flavored and newsletter flavored and Facebook posts flavor. And so we made them like all the flavors and then, oh yeah. And then black raspberry.
That was the one that we didn’t give it. One of those silly titles. So we could riff off all the titles and then say, and black raspberry and that all. Usually got a laugh cause they’re like why is black raspberry on its own? I don’t know. He just thought it was fine.
In case you get a, in case you spam and get.
That’s king blacklist,
blacklist, respirator. There you go. That would have been hilarious. I have an idea so at and I don’t want you to tell us what your booth is going to be like this year at whatever the new conference is going to be called in Chicago, IRCE slash retail X slash.
Content content retail. But if you were at a corner of your booth, that just says the, my iPad’s that said here’s the AI content creation, people go talk to them and then they have to just talk to an iPad. It’s in the little corner of your booth. And then you have your real people that are talking.
Nevermind. It looked better in my head than it did. It’s
kind of funny. It’s like comparing the experience, like your here’s the robot. I was actually imagining, like we have like a. Like a little more dramatic. Like that idea makes me think you’d make a robot, how you do with like boxes and silver paint and then just put an iPad on its face.
And you’re like, yeah, try to interact with this and see if you can create something. And
it’s frustrating. I did try one of those services. I’ve tried a couple of the AI services that write articles for you. And I have had such a horrible experience. I even went for 2.0 of some service. I’m not going to, I’m not going to give their name, but they came out with this 2.0 version and you pay a little bits for every part of the article and it generated this article.
It give you like five different points and it put it. I put a bunch of content in there and it was like, every single point was completely wrong. It was so wrong. And it’s okay, I want to get credit for this. This is like the most useless piece of information that anybody has ever written for me.
Oh no I think I tried it for talk commerce. I think I wanted to just, Hey, let’s break this down. The one of my episodes and write a show summary. And so I had, like I said, it, all this information and then it came back and it said, It gave me all this crap. And I’m like, oh man, this is like the worst.
I can’t use any of this. I can, I could maybe use the outline, which I think I eventually did. And I had to write my own little thing. But I think what that maybe just speak to having a real person write an article for you. So you actually get real content that, does that make sense to people?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. A real person, they understand. What people like, they understand that people want things to be accurate and they understand creative writing is very much a a discipline. And so all of, pretty much all of our writers have some sort of creative writing or journalism degree.
So they’ve gone through the pathway of figuring out what it is that people will actually read. Whereas I think the AI is trying to drum up the right thing. Not necessarily focused on what people want to read, but. That it is readable itself. And it’s it’s it actually what AI content generators are good for, I think is coming up with title ideas, honestly, you can, have I wanna make a new title or I want to make some like a paragraph of copy.
It can help you with that. But once you get into long form content, it gets so out there. Cause it’s pulling from every corner of the internet. So it’s it’s also gonna pull from the parts of the internet. I really don’t know what they’re talking about.
Yeah. And then you need to go and do all the research on where did it find this?
Because I now I’m recalling that. I had a specific guest that I put in and it came back with a bunch of facts about this guest, which it happened to be nothing to do with the guest at all. It was something that was not even true, or I don’t know where it came up with the content, but it took me longer to figure out or to find where did it come from?
Then it did just the right again, just to write it myself. And
went down that rabbit hole,
trying to determine yeah, it was like, okay, you have a guest. And if I was, if I were to do something for you and I put it, I put Chris jets chestain and into Into the AI writer and it wants to write a short bio of everything that we’ve just talked about.
And all of a sudden it says, you were born in 1947 and you wrote three successful novels before you founded content cucumber in 2023, okay which part of this is real and what isn’t right now? Logically I know that. That you’re no older than 55, but that would also make you not born in 1947 and I’m now I’m joking.
Cause I can clearly see that you’re 18, but like at some point AI writers are going to make more work than it could be. Somebody just wrote it.
Yeah. Brent Peterson, the esteemed dolphin trainer from Sweden. It’s what? Wait. Where did you get that?
Yeah. Yeah, that was my job before.
Yeah. Swedish dolphins. They’re really common. Absolutely. Everybody knows about Swedish dolphins on. Now we have our headline of the show by the way. Sweet dolphins. Definitely. We’ve just gone through AI title generation
and it will give you stuff like that. And you’re like, okay. That’s good.
Not because it’s good, but good, because it’s not good and I’m going to use it because it’s not good and people are going to click on it. Cause it’s
funny. Yeah. Maybe we’ve got a few minutes left. Maybe tell us a little bit about what merchants should look at. Let’s just say I’m selling something to do with bathrooms.
What type of content would be the first step that they would take to get started?
Yeah, so bathrooms and let’s just assume it’s products like showers and toilets and sinks and plumbing and accessories and tile and everything bathroom. You’re going to help build bathrooms. And actually, it’s funny that you say that because we have a company that does something very similar to that.
But yeah, so essentially where you would start is you’d say, okay, who is it? That’s redoing their bathroom. Okay. It’s probably a homeless. Or an investor, or it could even be a renter, that it’s either going to be someone who’s living there or someone who wants to get value out of that because, so you have these two different audiences, so you can talk about how investing in bathrooms can raise property value.
And then you could also talk about how bathrooms are. A really vital place to have looking really nice and also just a better quality of life to have a better bathroom. So I would say like finding out who your audience is. And then figuring out what things are important to them. Also there’s the whole, like my toilet broke crap.
What do I do now? And it’s even if you don’t solve that problem, talking about it and saying, Hey, don’t panic, turn your water off. Call plumber. You’ll be fine. This is what you searched for. If you couldn’t find a plumber. So just providing resources for the people who you think, cause they, maybe they come to you to buy the toilet.
But. Just providing useful resources to the people who you want to come to your site. So you just work out okay, who’s all the people that I want to come to my site. And that’s where that’s your content strategy. And it’s really figuring out who those people are, where they’re hanging out and then writing to that and making sure they can find you.
Yeah. And then also making that little warning bubble that says don’t take a crap in it.
Yes. Yeah, of course. If it’s. If, yeah, if it’s not flushing, probably don’t try to put anything in it.
Yeah. I can see that this is, this whole conversation is going down the toilet right now. As we close out the episode, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug it.
What would you like to plug today?
Normally I’d plug contact cucumber, and. We’ve talked about contact cucumber so much. So I guess I’ll stick with that though, but yeah, consequent comer is a really easy way to get all the content that you need generation. It’s a month service.
You can get up to 2000 words a month. We have plans that you can tell us what to write. We write it. Or you could also do a hands-off plan where we do everything for you. We do the SEO strategy. We make the content calendar. We post it to your website, so you can have as much or as little involvement as you want.
And our whole thing is writing. And I guess lastly, to just steal one more shameless plug, check out Chris tasks. Dot com for updates on music stuff, which
will come later this year. All right. Yeah. And so just now I have to ask what type of music are you doing
so for this album, it’s going to very much be inspired by like seventies prog rock and eighties, piano
rock.
Wow.
So think Elton John Emerson, Lincoln Palmer stuff like that, but I’ll be posting updates and. Yeah. I also have a Instagram that I do all that stuff too. As Chris, Jesse musics.
What instruments do you play or instruments?
So piano is that I always say I’m a professional pianist because people have actually paid me to play piano.
But I also play guitar and drums and other instruments too, but people don’t pay me to play those.
Just a short story to end it off. My, my daughter went and got a degree in or went for a degree in vocals. And so she ended up meeting a lot of music, people, and she had a person over at our house one day who was just getting ready to do his his recital.
He had a piece getting a piano degree. And so he just you want me to play a few things and we have a grand piano in our living room. Granted, it hasn’t been tuned in like 10 or 15 years. It’s been forever. And I, it’s, there’s an electric piano sitting next to it too. Anyways, he plays it and he does about 20 minutes just out of his head.
It’s amazing. And then I’m like, would you ever what if like they asked you to play this? When you, if you went in for recital, he said I would refuse. It was so it was, sounded so bad. It was his recital sounded great, but our piano is definitely out of tune desperately needs help. So if you do come over, there is a, an electric piano.
You can also play in our house.
Cool. Yeah, that sounds awesome. Are you going to have someone come fix
up your piano? I was thinking about it. I think the soundboard is cracked. I think that’s the only thing. It’s like a 1940s, a grand piano. That looks really cool. So right now it is, it’s a big, huge piece of furniture that needs to be tuned.
Yeah. A lot of times old pianos just turned into old pianos or Swedish dolphin. And our sweetest dolphins. That’s true. I’ve seen that.
All right, Chris, Jess, Dane, we are going to see you in may. I’m excited. I hope you’re going to be retail X or whatever. They’re calling it this year. Maybe it later.
If I were to be really clever, I could come up. I’ll look up what it’s actually called and I’ll do a little boy silver and it’ll say.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You got to make it really robotic
too. This is my AI driven content that I’m going to inject into that into the audio part. And then I could like, if it’s, if we do put the, I’ll put a little thing over the top of our mouse, so people can’t mistake it for some kind of a mouth over anyway.
Chris J chesting content cucumber is the company. You deliver content and you deliver it every day. It is such a great service. I’m happy to be I’m happy to be a customer of yours. I’m excited to see you in Chicago at and I’m excited to see what your booth is this year.
Yeah. Awesome.
Yeah. W it’ll be good to see you. And I don’t know if you do live updates or anything, but it could be fun to do a live update. Yeah.
I think last year I saw one person doing a little podcast and I was thinking about, maybe I would just do some little short interviews at the show this year
and yeah, it is.
It’s a cool way to get to talk to your customers, to get some merchants in there and be like, so what’s been working for you
lately, yeah, exactly. Last year was like a cricket fan. Hopefully there’s more people this year.
Yeah. All right. Yep. I think so. All right. Thanks for having me.
Isn’t tax compliance fun? If you ever thought tax compliance was boring then you haven’t met Shannon Kelly. Shannon (pronounced Shanuuun in Galic) entertains us with his tax compliance antics and then we dive deep into partner marketing.
Our guest today is Kate Bradley, CEO of Lately.Ai, a social media marketing tool.
Lately uses artificial intelligence to help companies manage their social media accounts. In this episode, she talked about how to use artificial intelligence to manage your social media accounts and create content that resonates with your audience.
Plus, there are a lot more useful insights to learn from her so stay tuned!
Artificial intelligence is amazing and is progressing leaps and bounds week after week. We interview Kate Bradley, Co-Founder, and CEO of Lately.ai, and learn how the Artificial Intelligence tools help social media managers produce and distribute social media efficiently while saving hundreds of hours.
Brent Peterson and Kate Bradley discuss the importance of social media marketing tools in the industry, especially Lately.Ai.
As Lately’s CEO, Bradley shared how wonderful this tool is and how it can help social media managers in their work. Enjoy this episode and gain insights into social media marketing straight from the pro!
Lately’s A.I. learns which words will get you the most engagement and turns video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts. Unlock which words will get you the most engagement with artificial intelligence that studies what your audience wants to read, hear or watch. Lately’s A.I. content-generator will then atomize any interview, webinar, conference panel, podcast, blog, PDF, word document, or newsletter into lead-generating social posts that get next-level results. Because that’s the power of artificial intelligence.
In addition to her success with the Artificial Intelligence tools from Lately.ai, Kate’s appeared as a guest speaker on hundreds of sales, marketing, and entrepreneurial podcasts and has led presentations for Walmart, National Disability Institute, IRS, United Way Worldwide, SaaStr, SXSW, Content Marketing Institute, Harvard University, Columbia University, NYU, and others.
Stay tuned and enjoy this Talk Commerce episode.
A notable quote from this podcast:
“What rules certainly shouldn’t be broken? Because so we can evolve and do better. But like, how can you find enough sanity in that one confined space so that the chaos, which is mostly good chaos can continue to reign? And that you don’t lose your mind at the same time?”
Key Takeaways
[1:49] – Guest Introduction
[8:57] – What do entrepreneurs think about AI?
[15:56] – The AI Power of Lately
[18:26] – Your Brand Voice Despite AI
[24:42] – Finding the Right Channel
[32:12] – Leveraging Engagement
[33:51] – The Role of AI in Sales Conversion
[44:38] – AI Does Not Equate to Cheating
[54:04] – The Role of Google
Ideas/Quotes by Kate Bradley
I’ve raised $3.4 million, but I haven’t actually raised over seven years, so I have actually raised a full-price round where all that money comes in at once. It’s been a trickle, trickle of income, which means it’s really hard to really do anything meaningful, because you’re constantly cash-constrained, right. And this is part of the plight of any entrepreneur and certainly, female founders, we’ve harder time than men raising, which is BS, but it is what it is. So we had, you know, kind of come to Jesus with ourselves.
And what’s amazing to me, Brent, is how, how many different kinds of patterns can appear like you think you see one, but then you just tilt your head a little bit, and there’s a whole new slice there. And that’s the thing that’s so important is like, once you know that trick to constantly as well, like a kaleidoscope spinning your head around. So you’re making sure you see all the different ways that those patterns can be evolving or appearing. Because that’s, I mean, that’s the puzzle, right? Because it always will change like you think you solve one problem. It’s the, they say welcome all, which is cliche, but it’s so true.
When if it’s creative writing or something like that, you know, you’re suddenly making yourself less creative because you don’t have the space. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe some people are more creative in that aspect.
Right, right. And we create a writing model based on the words and key phrases and sentence structures in those posts that have the most engagement. And then, so this is part one. And this is really important because AI can’t work by itself. It has to learn from something so in part one, it learns from you. And then you feed it long-form content, like this video, or any audio or a blog text or something like that. Again, it has a second learning arena. And this is so important because it’s a child. So it pulls from that content. And it’s looking with the writing model as its basis to try to find the same quotes, right to assemble and pull into social posts and clipping up the video that goes with the quotes and all those kinds of things
Brent: Welcome to the show today. I have Kate Bradley. She is the CEO and founder of Lately. And that doesn’t mean just Lately. She is the founder of Lately. Not Lately. Kate, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us what you do. Day-to-day and maybe one of your passions in life.
Kate: Hey there, brent, kudos to you for like totally not outing me on not knowing which state that was, but my idea I’m just
Brent: such a silly, I think you said New Jersey.
Brent: I said, no, it’s Delaware.
Kate: I’ve got a, like 40 states before. I didn’t even get there, but you’re so kind and patient with me. So yes, it’s true. I’m the CEO of Lately, which, my team does call me Kately, Brent. I don’t know if you’ve heard them do that before. It’s pretty funny. I’ve got investors who are like, yeah, just call me Peter Lee.
Brent: My, one of my nicknames was Brentley and I do have brent.li think I’m also a, I’m a domain name junkie
Kate: oh, really? My uncle Chris was the first domain king. He was the first guy to buy up a whole bunch of domains and make his money that way, which is, that’s some foresight right there.
Kate: don’t know if that trickled down to me, but so before Lately I used to be a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM satellite radio. And somewhere in between there, I also owned a little marketing agency and our first client was Walmart. You guys know them.
Kate: And I got Walmart 130% ROI year over year for three years. Amazingly what I learned from both of those experiences. And we’ll dive into this later, I’m sure. Help fuel the bedrock for how Lately is artificial intelligence works, which surprises me, right? I’m 47, Brent. So I’ve lived enough life where the S the zigzags are now making a straight line to at least in my mind, which you hope will be the case.
Kate: You want all the dots to connect
Brent: minor circles even better. Yeah. And they don’t connect. That’s the odd part.
Kate: More like a spring,
Brent: a spiral. Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird.
Kate: Ladies and gentlemen, Brent Peterson. So good.
Brent: What, tell us what do you like what are you doing right now day to day and what is something you’re super passionate about?
Kate: Honestly, Christmas at the moment, it’s in the way, I’m trying to just do what a lot of people are doing, which is licking stamps and getting things out the door. And I’m always too late about it and planning a menu and just all that kind of stuff. But, With Lately, we just launched three new products.
Kate: And when people say that you’re always like, oh, that sounds nice. Or whatever. I don’t know what people really think, but for us, we’re doing something crazy. Brent, we’re actually turning, I shouldn’t tell you this maybe, but we’re turning the company inside out. Because we’ve been learning and listening and learning to you and so many others what you like, what you don’t like, and what’s in our capacity to change, right?
Kate: We’re a small company, I’ve raised $3.4 million over seven years. But I haven’t actually raised a full price round where all that money comes in at once. So it’s been a trickle of income, which means it’s really hard to really do anything meaningful because you’re constantly cash constrained.
Kate: And this is part of the plight of the, any entrepreneur and certainly female founders. We’ve had a harder time than men raising which is BS, but it is what it is. So we had a come to Jesus with ourselves. This summer, a confluence of like really crummy events happened and I’ll just touch on what that means for people.
Kate: Like number one, I discovered a $240,000 accounting error, which, Eight months ago. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to say that, but I’ve met so many founders. Who’ve had worst things happen to them since that, like now I know it’s just par for the course. Those kinds of hurdles, I can’t even say, I can call it a hurdle now it’s obviously cataclysmic.
Kate: That gets you to look closer. And see what’s really wrong. And so we did, we zoomed in, and some of the things that we thought were wrong were, but they were bigger than we thought. And so we banged our heads against the wall and I certainly cried a bunch.
Kate: And then, had the wherewithal to put myself in, into a couple of situations that I knew would change the channel, right? How do we get out of growth? How do we get into growth mindset and move from scrape mindset? And so that’s what we’re doing now is taking all this information, just totally flipping things on its head and changing the channel.
Kate: And so that’s, what’s on my mind, like I’m constantly thinking, am I doing the right thing? Is this gonna work? Oh God, Jesus, please let it work. Do I have the right team to do that? Pretty sure I do. My team is amazing. Do I have enough runway? There’s three months right now for a couple of us, don’t take a paycheck.
Kate: But that’s always the case. And then I think to myself, are you crazy? Oh, good. You still are. Okay. Then keep on. Yeah,
Brent: I think we all, as entrepreneurs, you have to have a little bit of craziness in it. I guess there is the accountant entrepreneur, who just goes.
Brent: It goes by the numbers and does it, because the numbers say they can do it. But then there’s the other, the flip side of, and I’m, I guess I would be at the flip side where you just run headlong into it and hope that it’s a wall, but it’s going to be a soft wall and you’re going to crash through it.
Brent: And it’s not going to be a hardened steel wall that you’re going to bounce off of. And then there’s the middle ground and probably you enter the middle ground after you’ve been at it a little bit. You decide, oh, I probably should start tracking some of these things and I should measure some of these things and I should define success.
Brent: And especially if you have investors that you’ll have to define some success and some objectivity in that.
Kate: It’s true. Yeah. As you’re speaking, you reminded me something, one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever gotten and, people give you lots of free advice and there’s a reason it’s free because most of it ain’t very good.
Kate: But one good one was to look at all the data you have and always searched for the patterns in the data. And then, what to double down on or obviously double down off. And what’s amazing to me, Brent is how. How many different kinds of patterns can appear. Like you think you see one, but then you just tilt your head a little bit and there’s a whole new slice there.
Kate: And that’s the thing that’s so important is once that trick to constantly as like a kaleidoscope spin your head around. So you’re making sure you see all the different ways that those patterns can be evolving or appearing. Cause that’s, that’s the puzzle, right? Cause it always will change.
Kate: Like you think you solve one problem. It’s the, they say whack-a-mole, which is cliche, but it’s so true, and then like on a personal note, just to answer that question a little more I’m really thinking about I’m not old, but I’m older and I’m thinking about my sanity and like, how do I maintain this level of stamina?
Kate: It’s already waning. To be honest with you, like the equation of self care to like work has definitely, there’s more self care needed every day, to keep going. And I don’t know about you or, your listeners, but for me, that can come in so many ways, like massages and acupuncture and working out and all that kind of stuff.
Kate: And then, meditation, or even just diet and vacations as we were touching on earlier. And then I also think about who am I surrounding myself with? Do I have people around me, either my team or my friends or my family who (a) make you smile? Cause you can’t do any of this
Kate: if you’re not laughing at yourself, cause it’s painful, you gotta be able to crack some jokes along the way. But then are they people who will force me to tilt my head and get that other perspective?
Brent: Yeah, no, that’s a great point. And I I agree that you have to be constantly reevaluating, but I think you also have to have a point in which you can move forward and have some space to be able to move forward in and feel comfortable in that space without constraints or without it feeling like it’s the end of the world, or this is the biggest disaster that has ever happened.
Brent: And let’s go into firefighting mode. I’ve found those to be not very productive, especially when you can’t do some strategizing and be creative. I think you lose a lot of that creativity when you put that pressure on and you have to either deliver something or solve something it’s ironic that we often wait till the end of our term to deliver a term paper.
Brent: When, if it’s creative writing or something like that, you’re suddenly making yourself less creative because you don’t have the space. And maybe, I don’t know, maybe some people are more creative in that aspect. Yeah.
Kate: I agree with you. You just reminded me when so I was taking some poetry courses.
Kate: Don’t roll your eyes people. Cause I was a fiction writing major and so I love words and the sound of words, but what I actually did a shoot like poopoo poetry for a long time until I realized. What was interesting to me is there’s rules, very set rules and a lot of poetry and that they too can be broken.
Kate: And so I was interested in breaking them. And I remember one professor actually assigning me the task of cause I was really going so lawless out there and he was like, okay, you’re going too far. So I want to sign, you, make up your own rules, make it be more rules but keep within your own rules, if you don’t want to conform to the rules or set preset rules, and it was a great task because it gave me the understanding of how much work one would take just to actually stay within the confines of those rules.
Kate: And so I had a lot more respect for poetry as a genre than I had before. I think about that with. Certainly Lately, or even I’m onboarding a new CRO right now and poor Nick, like he’s coming into our, you call it a I call it a fire hose, but like he’s coming in. We’re just waterboarding that poor guy, like all day long.
Kate: You know how it is, right? There’s so many things wrong, of course, that this is part of startup life. There’s a million things wrong, but you have to decide I’m going to drag out the fire metaphor and spin it around a little bit. So there’s 50 houses on fire, which one gets water. And even the one you decide that gets water, you’re not going to put it out.
Kate: You’re just going hit, hit the first floor a little bit. And I’m watching him struggle and I feel all the guilt of being a terrible onboarder. But then it’s the way it has to be because he’s going to have to figure out kinda what rules are rules, what rules are meant to be broken, what rules certainly should be broken cause so we can evolve and do better, but like, how can you find enough sanity in that one confined space so that the chaos, which is mostly good chaos can continue to reign and that you don’t lose your mind at the same time.
Kate: Yeah, no,
that’s
Brent: a metaphor. Is there? Yeah, no, it’s good. Yeah. Which leads us into our next discussion about AI. How do you keep all that together? I, full transparency. We we were an early adopter of Lately. We were early as opposed to late. He’s killing me.
Brent: Sorry about that. Yeah, it was called early when we first started. And I’m a believer in it. But I’ve also, I’ve continued to embrace this whole idea of AI and I’ve recently. Also signed up for a writing tool that helps you write. I won’t tell you which one I did,
Kate: but I want to know so that you can compare notes and tell me,
Brent: is this one of your new products?
Kate: We have the AI, our AI actually does write for you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So
Brent: You’ve heard of Jarvis, right? It’s not Jarvis, but it’s similar to Jarvis. And it, what I’m finding is that if you have a very factual based article that you would like to write, do not depend on any AI right now, because it’ll give you a whole bunch of, oh, you know what?
Brent: I’m excited about this. Cause I’m going to put in a bleep, it’ll give you a whole bunch of bullshit. I’m going to bleep this out later, but it’s so it gives you, breaks down into sections and then writes it for you. And I had one that was. Five sections of this article and none of it was right.
Brent: It was like, it was so wrong and it sounded so real. It, went on to say, Mike was an early founder or co-founder of this new product and blah-blah-blah, and it was nothing to do with it. So AI can be completely wrong and it can lead you down the wrong path. And in that case, it actually didn’t help at all.
Brent: It made it worse because suddenly you have this thing in your head that, oh, this is the way I should go. And you got to pivot and go somewhere else.
Kate: Yeah you’re right. On the scale of AI, would I like to think of it is, if AI was a human, we’re looking at a three-month old, it’s a baby a wee sweet baby, and it needs a lots of guidance and it needs to be fed and it can’t even walk yet or hold up its head really. And no, I’m not surprised if that’s the case like with, and I can define Lately, not as a commercial, but just so that people understand.
Kate: So Lately uses artificial intelligence to first learn your brand voice. It studies all your social content and it’s looking at what gets you the highest engagement. And we create a writing model based on the words and key phrases and sentence structures in those posts that have the most engagement.
Kate: So this is part one, and this is really important. AI can’t work by itself. It has to learn from something. So part one, it learned from you and then you feed it long form content like this video or any audio or a blog text or something like that. And again, it has a second learning arena and this is so important because it’s a child.
Kate: So it pulls from that content. And it’s looking with the writing model as a basis to try to find the same quotes, to assemble and pull into social posts and clipping up the video that go with the quotes and all those kinds of things. So the reason I wanted to say all that is in our world, we made a really important stance to insist that AI and humans must co-exist right.
Kate: Cause we could see that the AI would run off the rails and it’s only a robot, and humans are slow, right? So let’s put the two together and make them work out. So one of the things that’s been interesting to learn is like how little humans care, so we insist that you come in and tell the AI what’s wrong or right.
Kate: Cause this is how it learns, but a lot of people don’t even want to do that. And so then it’s often its own. We can see, like I select the T’s Alex is one of our customers. Like I can see Alex just pushing the button and letting the AI go. And I’ll be like, Alex, you gotta like step in here. But what’s been interesting.
Kate: Brent is to learn. So here’s the secret, which is we have a second level of AI, which we’ll introduce in about two weeks that can read any content and summarize it on its own and use your isms in the summary. So it’s not just quoting anymore is writing and it’s pretty incredible. Like it needs a lot.
Kate: It has to have at least 10,000 pieces of content to learn from. So that’s a lot. Cause it’s really trying to get it right. And instead of swearing I do swear like a sailor in real life, but I try not to. And so I come up with other ways, so I might say jumping Jehosaphat or holy hot pickled jalapeno pepper, stuff like that.
Kate: And so the test of the AI on my voice does that, for example. And it gets some stuff wrong. Like I can see it hashtag weird things in the middle. Cause it’s trying to guess what you would like, that’s the thing that we have to all remember is that A, the human has to be involved for the AI to get it right.
Kate: But B even no matter how far we take the AI. It doesn’t matter, whether it’s his driving cars or writing copy, is that humans just like you and I are do here. Like humans provide that vision to say qua Brent, that AI can never replicate. And it shouldn’t like, so even if we managed to get it, as far as it can, like right around 99%, I say would be the dream.
Kate: Except for this one little factor. And the factor is the thing that, I really want to have a beer with you or a cup of coffee. You’re cracking me up over here. You’re and I can see I’m detecting the looks in your face. I can see the smirk on your slow, dry sense of humor. Like all that is reaching through the screen on me.
Kate: And a robot can’t replicate that.
Brent: Yeah, hopefully
Kate: no way.
Brent: When we first started with Lately about three years ago, the main tool we still use is we it’ll pick apart our blog posts and put it in a nice social media snippets, which is a fantastic tool.
Brent: And more recently you’ve come out with it’ll actually Go through a podcast and come up with a snippets and as well as video. So I think those are two really valuable things that people can use. And so I think that this whole idea of writing something, I what I haven’t seen is from the content AI, tools is that idea of when it does give you a wrong answer to infatically, just say, Hey, don’t ever give me this again. This is so wrong. I think what you’re, it sounds and I haven’t used your new or your newer tools yet. But one thing that I haven’t seen anyone do so far is that learning model where even if it doesn’t know your voice, if it just writes something to write it for the sake of writing a blog post, let’s say, and it comes up with 800 words that are completely wrong.
Brent: Like it doesn’t do anybody any good. And if you don’t have as the user, the ability to go back and say, here’s what I’ve meant. Okay, if you breaks it down into your three main headings, of a blog post in the intro and a conclusion you want your three main headings, right?
Brent: And then if it gets all three of those wrong, great to go back and say, Hey, here’s what you got wrong. Here’s what I meant. Like then the human takes some time to say, here’s what I was going to give you. Please look and learn about this. Yeah. That’s
Kate: I think that’s probably the hardest part it is. And it’s the part nobody wants to do.
Kate: We’re all lazy, which is so interesting. But you think about it, like with Spotify or Pandora, like you thumbs down the channel, when, if it’s playing your song, you I’m like, so there’s this idea of the human, interfering in a good way. I like to make the couple of metaphors, like one is, it’s like an electric toothbrush Brent, right?
Kate: It’s still going to hold the damn thing up to my teeth. But perhaps more interestingly is there’s a great Betty crocker story where, you know, Betty crocker made cake mix. And at the time it was all powder. Even the eggs were powdered eggs and the Housewives, which who was buying marketing to at the time they didn’t feel as though they had made a cake because so much was already in there.
Kate: So they took the powdered eggs out and they made it so that you, the human had to add eggs. And that was the thing that worked. So now they actually felt that there was a human roll here. See?
Brent: Interesting. Yeah. Oh, that’s good. Yeah. I’ve never thought of it that way.
Kate: Yeah. And that’s the thing.
Brent: Oh, sorry. Yeah no I think you’re, you’re exactly right there. The idea that I think right now, AI is still in its early stages and people think it should do everything.
Kate: Yeah. It’s amazing what we expect. I remember demoing somebody a long time ago and they’re really like, oh, that’s all.
Kate: And I was like, do you know how hard this is? It’s amazing. I think I went to, I was in radio for a long time. When in small town radio. And then when I was at XM, suddenly I could get tickets to much larger shows. Like I’d never been to see ACDC or the rolling stones or anything like that.
Kate: And I managed to get tickets to the rolling stones and which is another great story for us to have over coffee. And I took my husband and the show was amazing. And then right afterwards, he’s can we get Paul McCartney tickets? And I was like, Jesus, we just
Kate: give you a second, man. Don’t tell him I told you that. But yeah, the other thing I wanted to touch on here too is get to getting back to that. The, je ne sais quoi part, the magical, human part which I want to further emphasize, because this translates to sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, like all the things, right?
Kate: So that special indescribable component that only you bring to the table, right? Whatever you’re working on. So one of the things I learned in radio Brent was how the neuroscience of music works when you’re processing music in your brain when you’re listening to it.
Kate: So when you hear a new song, Brent, every other song you’ve ever heard instantly gets pulled forward by the memory of your brain. And it’s trying to index this new song in the library of the memory of songs in your brain. And it’s looking for familiar touch points. So it knows where to put that song, right?
Kate: And so by pulling that library forth, it triggers emotion and memory. And the stallion, this is why music is so powerful right now, those three characters all must exist for trust to happen. And trust is why we buy anything. It has to be there. And when your voice acts similarly, right?
Kate: So when you write text, whether it’s, you’re texting your wife to pick up cash at the bank, or if you’re slacking your employee to fill out the form, or you’re emailing a sales target, People read that text and they hear your voice in their heads. This is the theater of the mind a little bit here. Right?
Kate: And when they hear your voice is like a musical note. There’s a frequency to it. It’s a note, write it. It does happy frequency. So that same idea happens. It’s your job as the author to help guide the reader and fill in those blanks with the nostalgia and emotion and memory, like putting those familiar touch points.
Kate: So a trust is triggered, right? Same idea here. You do it by putting the shape of your state behind you. I’m doing it with some Pac-Man here. We’ve did it right away. And we were connecting and laughing about how we met each other. And I forgot. And we were touching on all of these familiar touch points now because the listener
Kate: it’s multifaceted. And I’m trying to give them many avenues. You’re trying to guide me into doing the same thing here, right? Because we want people to not only listen, this is the thing I really want to emphasize with people. It’s not just listening here. You want people to evangelize. I’m assuming you do.
Kate: I do. Because listeners who become fans are infinitely more powerful than just a listener, same way a customer is an evangelist, and the only way to do that is by optimizing the humanness of the thing, right? This mystery character, this third party, the theater of the mind,
Kate: all that.
Brent: Yeah. I want to just dig into that humanist of the thing, because I can say from my experience so I’m I’m on Twitter and I like to I like to send out different, jokes and stuff. And I found that people know, I guess you can see on Twitter where it’s, where it generated from.
Brent: I used to, pre-load like a quarter’s worth of a joke a day or something like that or whatever it is. And then it would just go out. And I think, honestly, Lately is a great thing for this, but there is a, there’s a bit of humanist and I and I think this is where you ha you can’t a hundred percent rely on AI.
Brent: Like the engagement part of it, people know. When it’s a BOT and when it’s not, and even early on, I think it was x.ai or something like that was like a tool that came out five years ago. That was just automated scheduler and you could register Amy. Oh yeah. Amy and Alex or something like that.
Brent: Amy in Ingram and Alex
Brent: idioms of the bots. Yeah.
Brent: And it’s one of my clients figured it out. Like I sent this out and I probably made 50 appointments and 49 successfully. And one of my clients like was just screwing around a pain, it’s just like back and forth
Kate: the poor robot. Nah,
Brent: I feel bad.
Brent: Yeah. So I think what, w what I’m learning as an AI human wait, am I artificial intelligence
Kate: now? We’re second guessing.
Brent: I think a lot of people would say that, you can, I guess you are artificial, if you’re depending on a tool to send your tweets and never engaging in real life, right?
Brent: Yeah. Symbiotic. The point is that you can’t a hundred percent depend on AI, and like you said, 99%, if it’s effective, but what you still need is that real, like we’re here to, for a reason, and we’re marketing for a reason. And at the end of the day you end up talking to a bot on your chat and it’s just give me a representative for you.
Brent: Like you’re on the phone. What you like? Yeah. Zero, zero. No. Like calling the cable company. Oh my gosh. I didn’t hear you. Did you say you want to disconnect your cable? No. You would like to go to the, oh, you’ve been upgraded the 10 gigabit. Your new bill is $12,000 a month.
Brent: Thank you very much. But that, that interaction and then that humanist is such an important factor. And maybe you could talk about how you’re doing, how are you doing that with Lately? Like with your own. Business and making it better. How are you constantly improving that?
Brent: And do you have the thought in the back of your mind when you’re adding features and developing your own platform?
Kate: Yeah, we do. I’m so glad you asked this question because I think it’s a fun one to answer. So first just to put some proof in the pudding for anybody questioning it.
Kate: So we only use Lately to market Lately. We don’t do any cold calls and no cold emails and no paid ads. So only organic and only with the AI. And we have a 98% sales conversion. And I’ll just say that again, 98% sales conversion. So in case anybody wonders, if it works or not, this works. Now there’s a little more into that process.
Kate: And so you asked about that and I’ll tell you here’s the secret? So first, because I wrote hundreds of commercials, thousands of commercials, and I was a fiction writing major. I’m good at writing. And so I write all the social posts from my own channels are by me by hand. They’re not Lately, it’s all me.
Kate: I write them when I think of them daily. And then Lately studies me first as a best practice. And from my social posts, I created about two dozen writing rules that I passed on to my team. So we’ll auto-generate content from Lately. The AI will give us a bunch of social posts. My team takes the rules that I gave them that are based on how I write and applies the rules to augment what the AI gave them and help it learn, help it get better and better.
Kate: And then we publish all of that on our brand channels and also on our employee channels, right? So the more the merrier and then the AI learns from there, it’s studying our brand channels and employee channels for best practices as a second layer. And then the next layer is, of course what you bring to the table and in your custom voice, it creates from you now, then collectively, it’s got all of our employees, our customers, and it’s looking at that data as a whole best practice as a whole.
Kate: So there’s four different layers there for it to, get smart on. And the goal is for us to be able to assemble this data. And then for you Brent, to be like, okay, Lately new Lately V two V3, whatever it is, I want to have a sense of humor. And I want to be able to use all the keywords that are going to appeal most to mortgage industry companies smaller than 100 in Minnesota, for example,
Brent: yeah, that
Kate: sounds fun. I think it’s pretty fun. It’s a little wacky. But it’s interesting because the problem we’re talking about is people writing is hard it’s not only knowing what to say, but knowing what to say, that’ll get a reaction, but the reaction is what we want.
Kate: What we all want. You want someone to do something for you? Every communication has this as its baseline, right? And there’s no shame in that. It’s very clear. Take out the garbage, water the plant, sell the damn thing, whatever it is, right? Exchange my robe that I don’t like customer service. So when you know, that’s the case, then you can really work backwards and thinking about, okay, and this is what the writing rules are about.
Kate: Like very practically speaking. I hate it when people are. Be more engaging and you’re like, duh how is the thing? And so what I thought a lot about is what’s the psychology that goes into how to get people to react with what you write, right?
Brent: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Brent: I know that Grammarly is another tool that is used to at least, check your spelling get rid of the red squiggles. And Grammarly does break it down into the type of voice you’re using. Are you going that far as to and I just saw a report. That’s what it reminded me of.
Brent: It says, you have an optimistic conversation or you’re confident. Mine always says feeble. That means? Do you incorporate that many, that, that part of it to try to match that style and then, for me, and I’m sure I’m not unique, but like do you have Spotify?
Brent: I do. Yeah. Spotify gives you the end of the year, most listened to songs for the year. You know what, my number one song was for last year, it was it was Neil diamond and it was sweet Caroline. And it’s come on, are you kidding me? Yeah. And there’s a reason why, but it wasn’t because I love the song.
Brent: It’s just because it was like a number one their thing. If you do it, it just plays the same star
Kate: algorithm.
Brent: And then number two was Cake. I love it. The band Cake right there. Aren’t even related. I think if Lila Down, she’s a Mexican singer.
Brent: Like these are my three top artists. That’s fascinating. So then how do you fix, how do you fit that in? Yeah. Like how do you call it? How do you say. How do you have a voice? I definitely have a different voice when I wake up and I’m going to have some coffee.
Brent: Like when I was in Hawaii for the last six weeks I started work at 5:00 AM and I literally rolled out of bed. I had the coffee maker going, so I could get into meetings right away. And I, try to be awake. You have a different aspect of life then as you do later in the day when I’m half asleep.
Brent: That’s true.
Kate: So yeah so it’s called tone of voice is the term that we hear and use. And Watson has API for that. And I don’t know if that’s what we’ve tapped into. I can’t remember. Cause we do integrate with IBM Watson and a bunch of other things, but in the new product, there is a tone of voice.
Kate: I just saw it actually yesterday. I forgot that they were doing that by they, I mean my tech team and I was like, oh yeah. Cause other people ask about that center sentiment, is the other thing. So we’re just dabbling with that right now. And, with the music thing, what’s interesting to me is, so the format that I was in Brent is called AAA or adult album alternative, which is a rare format.
Kate: It’s all the bands you described by the way. So new music and old music, and usually deeper cuts stuff, that’s in your actual album collection. And it runs the gamut from folk to rock, to blues, to, to world and everything in between. And like the music you might hear on, I hate to say this on NPR, if I’m, I don’t want to alienate anybody.
Kate: And in cooler, like he’d be Dave Grohl or Weezer, that kind of stuff, too. But what I love about that format is that it thinks about humans in a way that’s not one dimensional, whereas most of radio, so here’s the here’s, boom, we pull back the black curtain for people. So radio operates on, let’s play the same song over and over and over and over and over again.
Kate: And it relies now on charts for research, as opposed to asking people what they like. So Lee Abrams, who invented XM, he in the seventies, he used to stand outside. This is his idea. I’m going to stand outside the concert and ask them what their favorite song was. So human did this, right? So we would know what song to play off the record.
Kate: Now everybody reads charts and the DJs don’t even actually listen to the songs themselves. So there’s no tastemaking involved. They’re just like, oh, they’re telling me to play in a play this, which is asinine. But in. Format. We were on live. We were actually on the radio live. Oh my God, this never happens anymore.
Kate: So the human could make the judgment and a human could take you on a journey. Cause this is part of what you do every day right here as you hold the mic, Brent. But if you’re doing your job, you’re making the listener feel as though they’ve got a voice with you, right? This is that je ne sais quoi thing we’re talking about here.
Kate: And so with adult album alternative, because it’s looking for multiple ways to turn you on. It’s actually creating the evangelist. We talk about this is that long tail. This is why I believe in long tail. I’m going to give you guys just another example here. So the marketing forever used to say consistency, and that’s not wrong, but it has evolved.
Kate: So you can’t really say have a Coke and a smile to everyone anymore, because it’s not, what’s going to turn them on our friend, David Alison is proving this. He’s a consultant to the United nations to prove him. Whereas a series of statistics that they’ve referred to now as value graphics versus demographics.
Kate: And the idea is that Brent and I can be in different countries. We could have a different ages, different colors or races. We could have all kinds of different backgrounds, but we care about the same things. And so if you market to people based on what they care about versus how old they are, what color hair they have, the likelihood of you having an understanding of their predictive behaviors and turning them into evangelists goes up exponentially, right?
Kate: So it’s the same idea here with I’m talking like a crazy person, but back to Lately. So the reason Lately doesn’t give you one message instead gives you dozens is because we know this, we know that your customers are going to engage with multiple different kinds of messages and the likelihood of them
Kate: sharing, which is you want to click or share. But sharing is a little bit more powerful because sharing goes farther and people take credit for what you wrote. It’s all about the ego. They want to look cool and be the person who’s the taste-maker and just like music. And so that’s how you get that proof, social proof and the trust.
Kate: See how this all, so again, I wouldn’t say this against the people can hear this. The hard way is the way this is what we do. And we have a 98% sales conversion because of it, right?
Brent: I think too, that, like you had said earlier that you write all your own content, which I applaud you for that and getting into that habit is.
Brent: For me is a, it’s very difficult to do that, especially if I think, Hey, I’m going to be creative for an hour in the morning, and I want to try to use that creativity for the rest of the week. And then I’ll schedule those out. I suppose it’s a little bit still writing your own content, isn’t it?
Brent: But then scheduling it is, I don’t know if that’s cheating or not.
Kate: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s cheating. I think it’s being resourceful. The only reason that I it’s funny when I was a marketing consultant, I would do that for other people. Exactly what you said scheduled spend an hour, schedule it out from a week and be done with it.
Kate: But because I’m flying by the seat of my pants, like I’m just trying to think. I don’t think I’ve brushed my teeth yet today. It’s 2:52 PM here and it’s not because they’re not fuzzy.
Brent: I didn’t want to say anything now that you brought it up. I can barely get it together to put my yoga pants on here.
Brent: I’ve got the, I’ve got the smello-o-mic and he’s coming through breathing through the mic on you.
Kate: Yeah. And, the other thing I want to say here is as we’re talking, like I’m thinking of all, this is my nature. I’m thinking all the things I could be doing better. I’m thinking of what quotes can I give the AI to you right now? What am I one-liners I’m thinking of all the crutches I have.
Kate: How many times if I said right to end a sentence with you?
Brent: Yeah. Yeah. I use another tool called Descript and I know lightly does this too, but I use it to do my, I use it to just, to give me my transcripts. And I just like I did, I just said we’ll pull those out for you, which is really nice.
Brent: And often I listen. I watch some news shows and I’m very intentful and listening to the announcers and they are very good at not ever saying But if they have guests on or, I think if they have other people on it, doesn’t, there’s not a, it’s not a set pattern, but it seems like the, and I suppose they’re reading off a teleprompter and that’s really where they’re winning, right?
Brent: The ones that are doing it off the cuff, or putting in some of those ums and soes and right. And and it’s like this and blah-blah-blah, and
Kate: it’s more powerful. So I listened, I just did it again. I’ve been listening to Smartlist. I love that podcast and I love that the advertisers are giving Sean and Jason and Will Arnett, Bateman, and Hayes the.
Kate: Pat, they’re empowering them to read to ad-lib for the commercials. This is a novel idea. And the result is I, listen, I stay through the commercials, I’m dying to know how they’re going to do it. It’s hysterical. And I, in like McDonald’s is having the wherewithal to do this, that whoever is running that show way to embrace, technology and evolving with a new mindset.
Kate: That’s
Brent: pretty incredible. Maybe I should do some live commercials for Lately on this show. I would love that. We’ll see how it goes. In a past life. I had a computer retail store and I had a radio host sponsor and his name was Jesse Ventura. Oh. And then Jesse had to quit because he ran for governor, we paid for one minute spots and he would go on and on about, he would bill for number one, he’d come down to the store and he’d interview talk to people and he would learn about us.
Brent: And then he would do these spots and he would go on about these guys with a Coke bottle class. I’d come fix my computer. He’d gone for five minutes and we had more business from his one minute spots than I can imagine any prerecorded spot. It was fantastic. He did such a great job.
Kate: Yeah. I’m going to use that because people still don’t believe that a sprint. They, you conveyed to them. Use your vernacular be casual try to loosen the stiffness, loosen the tie or whatever it is. Take off the clip-on earrings here, people and be yourselves and the people are still so nervous about they’re still so afraid.
Kate: And they think how can I do that if I own a bank or, and I’m like, listen your customers are still just people just like you, they still just want you to talk to them. Yeah.
Brent: A couple of a powder milk biscuit. And there you go. Are people going to just put my, I just put myself into a demographics just going
Kate: to say, like right here, did we just,
Kate: it’s amazing. So yeah, the good news is not everyone will have caught onto that. And so then we’ll continue to shine because. That’s what stands out. So it’s I want to teach the world to sing, but I don’t at all because
Brent: I think we can still teach them to sing okay, maybe not in key, but at least they’ll sign. And if you get enough people singing, it doesn’t matter if they’re in or out of key. That’s true from my experience because I’m a Lutheran and where we have a choir. So you know how that works anyways. Now
Brent: we’re at way off target here. So coming back to AI I’m excited about that. The tools that you’re developing and we’re using where do you think it’s going? Like where do you think content creation is going? And I see often now I publish a blog post and there’s a tool that says, make this blog post into a podcast.
Brent: And I think myself, are they seriously going to have some robot read through this podcast or read through a a blog transcript and make it into a podcast. For me, it’s the other way around is so much easier. But do you think that’s where we’re going? Do you think there’s going to be some, Happy voice.
Brent: And I guess, I just switched to the Irish version of Siri and it’s, it works, it only goes until 10 and then it’s the pub,
Brent: even if you knew that one was coming to kill it. But, and actually see obviously Siri does a pretty good job at that. There’s still those weird things. If you’re in Germany or you’re in like in Hawaii and there’s all these funny, long names it’s going to get most of them wrong.
Brent: And then that’s where people really figure out that it’s a robot reading it instead of a real person. And yeah. Coming full circle into what you said. You have to have a real person there to moderate it, or at least to help it along to make it real. Yeah.
Kate: The w what is the phrase go to air is to be human, right? And that’s the magic. It’s always going to be the magic. I think your question of where it’s going is interesting, because there always be like the sharper image of AI tools, right? So the stuff that seems like, the electronic juicer that first, you have to tip a domino for, it’s going to go hit the squirt gun and then dump the can of oil onto the squirrel.
Kate: Who’s going to jump over and crack a nut. And then, whatever, I call this crazy stuff. Because people, self included were lazy. People are lazy, and they’re always looking to avoid the work. And writing is so hard. It really is a hard thing. And so many stages, right? But you know where the mindset is what’s shifting to is to understand that if you don’t have AI in your toolkit, you’re going to be a dinosaur pretty quickly.
Kate: It’s evolved now, at least in marketing, from analytics and automation to this content piece, because we saw this early on, but it doesn’t matter how good your social media management platforms are or your analytics. If what you’re putting out there, you can’t put lipstick on a pig, as they say you have to have some, something of quality to measure and analyze.
Kate: My goal is to move from getting people 75% of the way there. That’s where we’ve been to now 90%. And I thought it was going to take about five years to do that. And it looks like we’ll be doing it while we’re doing it right now. It w it went live to nobody on Friday. And we’re going to work the kinks out and people will start seeing it live.
Kate: I think December 28th is our goal. And again, it’ll take us a little while to, to learn and not have people go. Huh. I’m really curious about how we are going to get better and getting the human to be involved. That’s gonna be. The next hurdle for me. And that’s the solve?
Kate: That’s the end all solve. All right. It’s like, how do I get you to be willing to do something that’s hard to do and get excited about it, to feel rewarded about it? This is the thing. Going back to the first question you asked me, this is what keeps me up at night, Brent, because I don’t have that answer.
Kate: And I’m experimenting.
Brent: Yeah. And I, we don’t have much time left, but I think, and we’re going to have to do another session because we have so much more to
Kate: talk about. I’d love to, and I have to laugh more.
Brent: Google sees content as king and the more, I hate to say it, but the more content you can have, the more possibilities that people are going to see you and see your site.
Brent: And I think so I think one mistake people make from the AI tool is like I thought earlier, a I’m just used as tool to write articles. And if I’m writing an article and I’m letting the tool to everything, and you’ve writing a bunch of bogus content, you are hurting yourself more than you’re helping.
Brent: So that’s the bad side, but the curated side, I think where you’re going or where your, what we’ve been talking about is we’re using it to help supplement some of that grunt work or some of that harder work or, in my case, I think it’s really helpful to have some of those stimulus in terms of what should the headers of my three main parts of my posts be, what are some good topic headers within my main title?
Brent: And if your AI tool can get you that far, maybe that’s a good step. The point is that all of this content we’re creating helps users and especially marketers, because you can create more of it. The key is making good content instead of just create crappy content.
Kate: Yeah. Unfortunately there will always be noise out there, because people just think more is better and it’s not the case. That’s why I always tell people. You do have to be everywhere all the time you do, but it’s impossible. So just pick one thing, just pick one thing and be really good at it, and then figure out the next thing.
Kate: That’s such a good, that’s like my life, my husband will be exploding about all the dues we have to do for getting ready to do on a trip or something that, and I’m like, dude, your only job is just to get out the door I’ll pack the bags, man. Okay.
Brent: Yeah. That’s such a great point.
Brent: And I think, in the entrepreneurial world, there’s this concept of the shiny object, whereas an entrepreneur you think oh, I’ve been wildly successful as a marketing person. I am going to go open up a restaurant and I’m going to sell bagels. And I don’t know the first thing about it, but I saw somebody doing it on TV and I can be great at it and suddenly
Brent: you’re doing two things and maybe not so great at either one of them.
Kate: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Not everyone’s a drummer. They can do it. All right.
Brent: Yeah. The other one that I just recently heard is in the term of triathletes, if you’re a triathlete at all, why not do three things, mediocre when you can, instead of doing one thing really well, that’s the flip side, do it right.
Brent: If you can swim and run and bike, just okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know where I was going with that anyways. Was that
Kate: 10,000 hours guy. So every, I dunno if that’s totally true, but now that what you’re getting to, I think a little bit is that we like to science things to death, all of us do.
Kate: And when you do that you remove the human element to it, by the way. So not everything is going to check all the boxes and not maybe it shouldn’t, but end it shouldn’t right. We have to allow the room again. We’re seeing the same thing over and over again, but the room for the human to get in there and either make the mistakes or, the best advice I ever got in from my radio mentors was to make mistakes, to leave silence, like silence on the air.
Kate: You think deadly, but guess what? Brent.
Kate: People turn it up,
Brent: who is going to blink first? Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah, trying to fill in, I’ll put in one more comment, but then we have to try to close up here. We, we do these meetings called level 10 meetings, and there’s a certain format where you have a finished in an hour and blah, blah, blah, have all these different things to do in the meeting.
Brent: And it they’re really, they’re very effective from a business standpoint, but one of our, I was in a developer meeting and one of the guys said because everybody’s not engaging. And he said some people talk and other people are not going to be other people don’t feel comfortable and they need to be asked and then they’ll give you some of that, that they don’t feel like if somebody is dominating the conversation, they don’t feel like they’re going to jump in and do that.
Brent: So I think part of that is, is very important to know the types of things we have and the types of people and this all goes back to AI and how it’s going to learn. And I don’t even know where I’m going anymore. So we should
Kate: probably I’m with you. All right. I think where you’re going is everybody needs permission.
Kate: And when you give people permission to be a part of the conversation in any way, like w one way is when you wield the mic, as we said before, and you make people feel as though they have a voice, even though they’re just listening, like that is permission to participate, and to lean forward, giving their participant permission to lean forward or permission to DoubleClick or permission to reshare.
Kate: And that’s what call to actions are all about, right? So the best call to actions actually do that. They’re not learn more. Check out. Those are vapid call to action. So don’t make me feel anything. And so by laying that groundwork, and it all comes back to trust, making evangelists do you want customers who buy you and throw you away?
Kate: Or do you want customers who work with you for free? I want that second kind.
Brent: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The ones that are going to talk about it and talk about you and that’s, I think that’s where influencers come in and there’s so many other places we can go down the road here. All so we have a negative five minutes left.
Brent: What parting advice can you give our listeners today? Or what did, what are you excited about? What what do you think is new?
Kate: I think what’s new is what’s always old, which is to You know this sentence, so boring, but stick to the basics. And so my basic is air checks.
Kate: I’m always telling my team and myself to listen to what you’ve done, go back and listen to it. It’s always there. You can always learn from yourself, especially if you’re being embarrassed by rewatching a demo or listening to a podcast, you were just a host of, and I’m interested in the sound of words, you know this right?
Kate: So one of the easiest things to do in addition to going back and listening is just to read what you’re writing out loud. Get getting to that oral space. When you do that, Brent, it’s the immediate autometer of bad and good, because if you’re tripping over it, if you feel in any way awkward coming out of your mouth, it’s awkward for your listener and when it’s awkward for them or your reader, the tank’s trust.
Kate: So just try it like, this is why, like I have resting bitch face in writing. I like to say, so I have to use lots of emojis and smileys and italics and bold and different ways to really make sure that what I’m saying is clearly communicated as people read it. And that’s when you make that extra effort, the hard way is the way, right?
Kate: Just that extra effort gets people to do what I want them to do.
Brent: Excellent. Really good. Yeah. And we need that sarcasm tool as well. Yes. Sometimes people don’t understand the sarcasm bit. All so as we close out, I give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug.
Brent: Is there anything you’d like to plug today?
Kate: Of course, come on and visit us at Lately. DubDubDub that Lately.ai. And ask for Lauren, she’s the best as you probably know, Brent we are humans and we like to talk to you and meet you. And we love to hear, where you heard about us.
Kate: And so I guess that’s the most shameless thing, but I’ll say one more, which is there’s a little band I love. And they’re called the dam Wells dam and w E L S. My husband is a guitar player and they were our favorite record at XM, which is how I met him. Job hazard, Damwells.com.
Brent: Nice. Excellent. And I will give my small shameless plug. We are doing a conference, an unconference in Florida on January 21st. It is a unscripted UnConference, no speakers. So if you do email and ask me about what kind of topic can I speak about and are you taking call for papers? No, it’s an unconference anyways.
Brent: Kately from Lately, I appreciate the time today. It’s been fun and we’re going to have a second conversation as a follow-up to do the rest of our thoughts. And yeah, I think I would like to plug Lately because it’s been such a great tool for us.
Brent: And it is such a great tool to organize there’s and I’m glad we didn’t do a sales presentation because people get turned off by that, but, analytics, and it does that all for you. It’s a great tool and I highly recommend it Lately that AI Kately from Lately Kate Bradley, the CEO and founder of Lately.
Brent: Thank you so much for being here today. I love ya.
Have you thought about an influencer for your brand? What does it mean to have an influencer and how do you pay them? (If anything?) Cody Wittick helps us understand how influencers can help you in your business and how important they are to build your brand. Learn how you can find and retain influencers in 2022!
Cody notes that they work with D2c brands.
Cody mentions that the mission is to educate brands on the right way to do influencer marketing.
Cody says there are influencers that have zero social following and their job is to get influencers to rally around their brand. Cody talks about how influencers are choosing to represent you as much as you are trying to represent them. Cody mentions that there’s a long-term consistent vision and mission for that relationship.
Cody and Brent overview whether social media platforms have changed. Cody talks about how there’s more access into their lives through social media. Brent notes that the market has grown for influencers by the fact that you can become an influencer by going to your iPhone and embracing a brand, taking pictures, and pushing that.
Cody talks about how the ability to create content consistently has made it easier for influencers to become influencers. Cody notes that people end up buying fake followers or trying to speed up the process. Brent says the goal as an influencer would be to influence a idea to promote it. Cody notes that there’s always at least one influencer in your space.
Brent mentions that if a business is looking for help from influencers, they could be an influencer. Cody says they want to get the product into those influencers hands. Brent notes that they follow hoka and see reviews for shoes online.
Cody says if the influencer is not thinking of them, they would be outreaching them, dm-ing them, or emailing them to get ahold of them. Cody mentions that if they are a runner, a consistent runner, and they’re putting out captivating content, they will attract running brands. Cody notes that the best way to scale is just the more people that have your product, the more relationships that are going to be able to build.
Cody says working with genuine advocates is the best way to scale. Brent notes that they find something defective or not great about the product. Brent says they should think about the customer experience with their influencer marketing.
Cody notes that they want a longterm community of influencers that are talking to their audiences consistently. Cody talks about how the time is transactional one-off posts with influencers. Brent notes that brands constantly are trying to hit this, like one-off drug.
Cody says if brands are investing in tech talk, that’s something they need to be doing. Brent talks about how it’s easy to create content for multiple channels.
Cody notes that they identify 500 influencers on a month to month basis, get them the product they search after they get them, and see their organic performance. Cody says they run facebook and instagram ad accounts. Cody notes that their role is to keep growing the business as co ceo.
Cody says they want to be judged on sales. Cody mentions that a lot of the leverage of influencer marketing is starting. Cody says they’re measuring the amount of content. Cody mentions that the metta dashboard on facebook is giving you all the metrics. Cody talks about how you’re not going to see direct, this came from this influencer.
Brent mentions that it’s an invite type of thing where you’re identifying people that are generating certain amount of content or influence in that industry. Cody notes that most merchants and brand owners that come to them are looking for a lot of ugc or creative, and therefore leveraging that content within facebook. Cody says they’re producing a pool of people that have proven to post free of cost without us even asking.
Brent and Cody say that the best influencers are people that the product and brand fits into what they’re already doing and talking about. Cody notes that most of the time, what they catch them off guard with is that we’re not asking for anything in return.
Cody mentions that when they get the product, they feel obligated to return something to the brand. Brent says they see more and more influencers saying they purchased the product. Cody mentions that stats show it doesn’t make a difference.
Cody says apple has made it harder for facebook to track checkouts, add to carts, and the reporting. Cody notes that the roas is down 50%. Cody mentions that ios 15 has been with email updates. Cody notes that certain effects on email marketing will be in display through apple.
Brent asks what would they overview to a brand if they would like to get started on influencer marketing. Cody says they’re ready for influence marketing because it’s the same thing you want that first impression, second impression, and third impression to be awesome. Cody notes that they’ve worked with startups all the way from the m and m’s of the world.
Cody mentions that their sweet spot is top line revenue of two to 30 million, and they’ve worked with b2b brands before. Brent inquires if there is any difference between promoting their product and sending a physical item to influencers. Cody notes that they have an influencer marketing course called influencer blueprint.
Cody says they give away all of their templates and communication flow and worksheets budget, calculators, and everything in between. Cody notes that they’re active on twitter at cody widdick and instagram at cody widdick. Brent says they are an influencer marketing consultancy agency.
Imagine 10 years ago, you are standing in your kitchen and you say “Alexa order more dried lima beans”. I know what you are saying. Who eats lima beans? Would you have imagined then that this is a reality? Brent and Dick overview where the future of commerce is going. And it’s V but not virtual, that’s V for Voice Commerce. Will Siri get a commission on every dollar that gets sold? Join us for a great episode on marketing and where we are going in the future.
EPISODE NOTES
Dick Polipnick is the founder and CEO of Online Growth Systems, and competes competitively in parkour.He believes that the next iteration of commerce is V-Commerce or voice commerce.
Based on his research, Siri is going to integrate with commerce and speculates that they’re going to get a commission on every dollar that gets sold through Siri. Voice commerce is going to be big and, most importantly, a lot of Ecommerce companies have already seen traction in those areas. His suggestion? Optimize your current Ecommerce site to be integrated with voice buyers, This, combined with virtual and augmented reality, is going to be the future of commerce.
Brent mentions how coaching and business coaching can be done virtually and that the next thing coming from voice reality is voice commerce. Merchants worry about Alexa looking at the amazon store first and subsequently, all the rest of the list.The best way to optimize for SEO is to write it in a way that people would speak as well as ranking your keywords that are written the way people speak.
Dick recommends that Ecommerce companies consider subscriptions. Everybody is familiar with dollar shave club, and that’s a company that’s competing for a commodity, it’s disposable, and your lifetime value is greater. Dick mentions that you can put a unique spin on this and make an e-commerce brand or Ecommerce company with a monthly subscription. Part of the value is that you know what you’re going to get every month.
In mid-2019, Jay made the difficult decision to switch Fera’s focus to something new: PRODUCT REVIEWS. With all the FAKE and fraudulent stories, he believed that merchants needed to help to show the world that they were legit. To support his new focus, he added automated review requests, 3rd party verification, and every other feature you’d expect in a reviews app – and then some. It took over a year to get there, and today Fera is the BEST REVIEW APPS for Shopify and BigCommerce, with nearly THREE THOUSAND 5-star reviews.
The Fight for Legitimate Reviews
The battle for your reviews has just begun. In 2019, Fera spent a lot of time dealing with scammers and con artists. They wouldn’t spend any time on the “good reviews” they promised, but they had plenty of the bad reviews.
In a blog post about Fera’s war on fake reviews, we discovered when fake reviews are floating around on the internet. It makes it so much harder for customers to buy a product with confidence!
Today, Fera is fighting back by:
Automating Review Requests and Verification
Automated Reviews on BigCommerce
Removing User Comments
What This Means to You
To have a thriving business, you need reviews and endorsements. But with all the fake reviews you’re getting from confused customers, reviews apps like Fera are a great way to boost legitimacy. You can even prevent fake reviews in all of your marketing and customer service.
Jay El-Kaake’s Struggle
In late 2016 Jay realized there was a problem in the market – and a BIG problem. He set out to build the solution in the spring of 2017 – that solution being Fera. When the plan was first evolving, he had been running Jay El-Kaake Art Productions and doing freelance marketing and art for clients. He was producing full-time work, creating more than 500 paintings per year and selling them in the gallery and his website, and performing marketing for other art and design clients.
The motivation to create Fera was driven by a recent business failure. On a previous job, Jay was contracted to do online marketing for an ecommerce store, where the owner neglected to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to promote their website.
Automating the Fight for Legitimate Reviews
Also, in late 2019, Jay’s team released a new application, HYPREP, to scan for fraudulent reviews and improve the effectiveness of paid advertising. Now, when a user visits a website for the first time, the app scans the site for hundreds of new, relevant social media profiles and automatically adds these accounts to an advertiser’s campaign. It’s the first on-site solution to take advantage of thousands of new potential human sales agents for every campaign.
Today Jay and his team passionately help merchants harness the social proof and urgency psychology of customers to increase sales. Fera is already being used by over 100,000 merchants worldwide.
Conclusion
If you’re a merchant concerned about the security of your reviews, worried that the numbers of reviews were going to be inflated, or have received false reviews – stop worrying. It’s easier than ever to create, manage, and track reviews, whether it be on Facebook or a centralized site. With Fera Review (and similar products), you can prevent the most egregious violators from being able to abuse reviews and ultimately stop the fake ones from being a detriment.
Industry guidelines and best practices (such as the FTC’s) still require 100% of reviews to be legitimate. And your company should set goals of a 5-star rating – to make it easy to distinguish between good and bad reviews. But, Fera is the perfect tool to handle reviews with the least amount of effort.
Tis’ the season to give! We interview Andrew Forman with Givz.com. Offering a discount isn’t always the best idea when enticing people to buy. Andrew walks us through how offering donations and giving to charity instead of discount codes increases your conversion rate. We discuss why discounts are problematic for the long-term profitability of a business and how brands are embracing the move towards social good. Andrew explains how giving away money will outperform a traditional discount – It is true! This is a timely episode as we are coming up to Give to the Max Day.
Why Offering Donations Instead of Discount Codes Increases Your Conversion Rate
Money is king. A massive portion of your company’s annual profits is made through money spent on direct mail, promotional, and ad spending.
One of the most significant issues with discounts is that it’s just a temporary hit to your bottom line, and all it does is increase your expenditure on mailing lists.
Why is Money Really King?
A recent article from the Financial Times revealed that the average luxury brand spends around $3 million on mailing lists alone. This doesn’t take into account the amount of time people spend browsing their emails.
Offering a discount code is a quick solution to an easily solved problem by having an intelligent email list manager build out your prospect list.
The Problems With Offering Discount Codes
The best online stores that we interact with daily are giving discount codes simply because they want to be part of our daily lives.
Giving away discounts to get users to do things they don’t want to do is like training a dog to do a specific task without the owner’s consent. If you are preparing a dog to pull a wagon, is this ethical? Is this ethically right if you’re training a dog to do something more helpful, like picking up litter?
Discount codes are a privilege to be had because most of us are content to give them away.
The Benefits Of Offering Donations
Of course, to offer up a donation instead of a coupon, the first question you should ask is why you’re doing this. Why not just use your standard discount code?
This is where you get into the whys, when, where, and how. It’s essential to figure out why you want to offer your customers a donation instead of a discount code.
It’s All About Impact
One of the most popular reasons to donate your discount code is because the customer is already involved in your business’ cause. In fact, 35% of customers are willing to support charities even if the cost is higher.
By offering them the opportunity to make a donation, you increase your impact and customer experience. You’re also making it easier for customers to make a difference, which you always want.
How Brands Are Moving Towards Social Good
Discount codes have been around for years, and it’s not a new concept. Yet even though this model has worked for so long, the times are changing, and brands are no longer interested in protecting profits at the expense of social good. In fact, there is a growing trend of brands taking the drastic step of totally boycotting discount codes in favor of generous approaches, such as promoting donation schemes.
Looking at this trend, it would seem that the future of a brand lies in focusing on making a social contribution. In order to do so, a brand needs to use every tool at its disposal, especially discount codes, to draw consumers to them. Some brands are so committed to building social value that they have abandoned discount codes altogether.
Conclusion
The rise in digital technologies and marketing innovations means that traditional ways of doing business will struggle to compete against the multi-channel and omnichannel environment created by companies in the modern era. While a move away from offering discount codes will initially see competition increase, those that adopt a different approach may be able to build long-term relationships with customers that work to their advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
We interview Chase Clymer with the Electric Eye Agency. Chase helps brands scale on Shopify. Chase also hosts a podcast called “Honest eCommerce” where he interviews brand founders. We talk about Shopify and who is the right fit for a Shopify project. We talk about agency/client relationships and what is a good fit? We go over educating a client on their respective platform and how to get them up to speed on that feature. We go into detail on what platform makes sense for what merchant and talk about why a merchant needs an agency to help them. We discuss some differences between On-Prem and SaaS and even dive into some SaaS vs Open Source.
This week we interview Maureen Mwangi, CEO of Starward Consulting who has over 10 years of experience building, growing, and scaling some of America’s biggest brands.
In a world where all the “expert” growth strategies seem catered to the service industry, it can feel impossible to figure out what it takes to turn your product brand into a market leader.
But as a brand growth strategist who’s worked with many of those big brands, Maureen Mwangi knows first-hand that they didn’t get where they are today through trial and error or piecing together fragmented strategies. She uses the data that companies already possess to develop a growth strategy
