Andy Crestodina: How to Leverage AI for Your Digital Content Marketing #214

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to leverage AI for digital content marketing. Today we have our guest Andy Kristadina joining us. Andy is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Studios, a digital agency based in Chicago. He has over 18 years of experience where he advised over 1,000 businesses on their digital marketing strategies. He also speaks at major marketing conferences, contributes to prominent marketing blogs, and is host of the Content Matters podcast. So welcome, Andy. Super excited to have you on the show today.

I'm glad to be here, Akeel. Thanks for having me.

So hot topic in today's market here, 2023. A lot of people talking about using AI as part of their, their marketing strategy. So, you know, founders or sorry, CMOs listening in, or even founders who are, you know, working with SaaS, their SaaS companies looking to start including AI as part of their, their overall strategy. How can they start thinking about, you know, one, including AI as part of their strategies, but also as part of their budgets in, in, in their, in this year?

Well, it's a huge advance in technologies that has a massive number of use cases. And there's research that shows that the best way to adopt it, it depends on your own needs and your own style. So—

Mm-hmm.

One of the things that I'm doing, just trying to be a leader in an organization, is to just talk to others who are using it and exchange or trade use cases to see what tricks they know. Can I teach them something? Can they teach me something? And that's working externally. I'm learning lots of, lots of amazing use cases, and I put together kind of a whole framework for it, which is super fun. But also just internally, to ask people about their perspectives, to begin to try to bring them forward in this technology. Because you, you'll find right away when you ask around, a lot of people are not using it or sort of holding off.

Mm-hmm.

In my mind, there's really 3 kinds of people. This is all, this has separated all of us into 3 groups, and I kind of, I've rhymed it. There's waiters, Haters and updaters. The waiters are people that are just gonna see, it's like, uh, maybe there's gonna be another one coming out, or maybe the tools I already use will add it on as a layer. I'm gonna see what the product development pipelines have for me.

Mm-hmm.

I don't advise that. The haters are people who are just sort of freaked out about the big picture, you know, the global apocalypse or, you know, labor market impacts. Uh, that is not, uh, the perspective that we need to have while working day to day, you know, when there's a productivity tool in front of us. And the updaters are basically learning enough about the tool to see what's possible and then asking themselves all day long, is there anything that I'm doing here in my day-to-day work that can be done faster, more efficiently, or more comprehensively with AI? So really just ask around and see what the perspective is and who's using it and gently push your team toward, you know, you just keep showing people around you what's possible and they will soon be using it in many more ways.

And, and in terms of the, the budget, you know, what, what are we looking at here in terms of some cost for how much we should be thinking about planning for including some AI in part of our strategy here?

$20 a month per person for ChatGPT.

Okay.

Claude, Claude from Anthropic is free. If, if you go and look at the tool, so there are pros and cons. If you take the personal approach and like, this is something I can use now, here, let's try it out. It's useful for these 11 use cases. I'm getting, I'm getting results. But the problem with those is that if you train a chat or a conversation with an AI to do something better for you, your team can't use that same chat. It's on your login. So the tools that allow for collaboration across teams are where you pay. So, you know, you're looking at like $500 a month probably for a lot of those. Okay.

So it's not a big investment here that we're looking at. So there's not much I have to push here. So now maybe talking about results here, right? So the people are on the hater side, but they maybe were— they're waiting it out. But maybe this is a chance for them to look at, all right, you should start looking at this, you know, from today and start incorporating it. Can you share maybe any results that you've seen with some of the strategies you work with your clients or some other SaaS companies or marketing agencies that are including it? And what are the results you've seen, you know, with now incorporating AI versus before? Are they, you know, saving money, saving time? Or is it, you know, leading to some meaningful results down the line in the pipeline?

Yeah, it, that is the question. I start with this perspective. I am looking for a productivity gain. I want to see if I can get a 20% efficiency gain. Start there because if it's— now I've got realistic expectations and I'm not, you know, expecting to like, you know, replace myself or, you know, triple the size of my business in a day. But, but if you start with that, with a, with a realistic perspective, Uh, and start using it, you will quickly find that there are many tasks where you can get that gain. Um, I taught this yesterday on social media. I showed a tiny video of me like, um, using AI to convert a podcast transcript into an article. Unbelievable. That's a really difficult job, as you probably know. Like, it takes like hours. Like, transcripts are dense and long and no formatting and no internal links and not like structured at all. It can actually turn a, turn a transcript into a pod, into an article, uh, in minutes.

Mm-hmm.

So, so there's, that, that's one of hundreds of use cases. So yes, you're gonna find productivity gains and there's lots of them. The other thing though, and this is a fast win for almost anyone, if you go to AI and ask it to create a persona for your buyer by saying like, you know, create a persona for this job title, this company size, this industry, A person with this, you know, a business with these objectives. And in the persona, include the goals, the pain points, and the decision criteria for selecting a vendor in my category. It will make for you a nice persona. It's going to be wrong partly. You have to update it, change it, fix it. Start a new chat with that persona in it. Now, that new— in that new chat, say, you know, you are whatever, Akeem, or, you know, it'll give it a name. You are this person. Review the following web copy and tell me if anything is missing. Gap analysis for conversion optimization. It is brilliant. All you'd have to do after you built your persona is copy and paste in any of your webpages and just ask it what, what are the top concerns that you did not address? You will immediately see, like I did this the other day with a, with a friend. It's like a, like. A welding school, like kid, like arts, like an art school for young adults, like high schoolers, like going to welding school. Okay, great. Let's build a persona, you know, for a parent of kids of this age, and you're interested in the arts and you like, you know, these, these kinds of things. Make a, you know, tell me how you decide what, what art school or, you know, whether or not to send your kid to a welding school. And it gave us like 6 things. Then we copied in the webpage and it said, Your page does not mention safety.

Ouch.

Yeah. Automatic, immediate. Like, what? Oh my God, I can't believe I wrote a page that did not address like one of the top concerns of my audience. So that exercise is about a 3-minute round trip. The improvement can lead to maybe like a— I wouldn't be surprised. You know, you could say, you know, if it moves your conversion rate from like 1% to 1.2%, that's a 20% lift.

Mm-hmm.

You know, do it for landing pages, do it for your homepage, do it for any service page or a pricing page or anything. You're gonna quickly see where you missed on the conversion copywriting job, which is, by the way, bottom of funnel, super high ROI, big, big, you know, big lift types of changes.

Mm-hmm.

So that's one where I think anybody who uses this has to respect The opportunity that comes from having a super fast tool for just vetting anything you've written.

Got it. So the one side is the productivity side. So you're seeing, you know, 20, 30% gain just off the top of the bat. But then the other folks who are thinking about this from an ROI perspective, I mean, just from, you know, just if you improve your conversions through the copywriting improvements, enhancements you can plug in across your website, I think that would Justified on a lot of levels. Now with so many different tools out there, right? There's new ones launching every day. I just saw, you know, there's a new— there's new launchpads of accelerators just focused on AI tools. So there's gonna be hundreds coming out in the next years. But right now, you know, today, what are some of the best ones, especially, you know, marketing content pieces we should be creating and publishing with AI? What are some favorite tools, whether for, you know, video clips, blog posts? You mentioned podcasts. Is there— Besides ChatGPT, is there any other ones you like to use?

Yeah, actually, in that example of like, let's say, let's give it a transcript and see if it can convert it into a nice rough draft of an article. ChatGPT actually won't do that very well because the character limits are too small.

Okay.

So you're going to— you can't really copy and paste in a 4,000-word podcast or video transcript. It's going to choke. So, but as long as you're in the US, like US or UK, uh, at the time of this recording, Canada doesn't have access yet. But Claude from Anthropic is right behind GPT-4 as in terms of utility and quality and, uh, comprehensiveness. So, so for that, I did— I can't actually do that first suggestion in, in, uh, ChatGPT. Instead, I used Claude. So, uh, it is amazing and it's Basically the same. I mean, the UX is nothing. None of these tools have a UX almost. It's just like an empty field. Um, so yeah, I, I would, I'd recommend that. Um, I am also excited about the agent GPT-style tools that will come along and actually do things for you, like browse around on the web. And I mean, the future of AI is gonna be tools that don't just give you answers, but tools that can actually go do things and complete tasks and talk to other AIs to, you know, meet goals and, you know, you know, for example, identify influencers that I wanna collaborate with on this topic. Great. Now write a, now write a, an outreach message that would work well for these influencers. Great. Now reach out to those influencers and share the scheduling link. I want you to book time with them all. That's what's next. So the browsing plus the utility of the agent.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Uh, I'm, I don't have a recommendation for that yet, but I assume maybe end of the year you're gonna be using tools like that all the time. Mm-hmm. Um, for image creation, I'm using Midjourney. It's a little weird because you have to do it from inside Discord. Uh, you can, it's far better than DALL-E, which is possible to use through Bing Create.

Okay.

Uh, the other one for image creation is called Stable Diffusion. Which actually does sort of have a user interface with sliders and settings. Um, but no, it's early days. I mean, there's 1,000 AI companies launching per month. So, but that does not overwhelm me and I'm not, I don't really care. They come out with new tools as fast as they want. My job isn't to find, is try every new tool. My job is to do, is to get a 20% efficiency today. So if I have a tool that works for me, I'm gonna use it. If I had a limitation, like a character limit or something, then I'm gonna use it and, you know, reach for a different tool. But Right now, I can do most of what I need to do in OpenAI's ChatGPT and in Anthropic's Claude.

Claude. Perfect. Is there any other—

maybe entrepreneurs listening in looking for some opportunities to maybe build something here. Is there anything that you're pretty excited about? Maybe still too early. You mentioned one about the influencer outreach, but also as opportunity for the market that you think would be helpful right now that if you could start implementing within your agency or Or for campaigns for your clients?

Oh, I think the people who are, uh, really— I'm enjoying this conversation, but you should talk to people who are building on top of it because— so if you go to, uh, playground.openai— no, platform.openai.com, uh, you, you can get to the, the API for GPT-4 or whatever, GPT-3.5, and you can, you can sign up to buy tokens. be able to layer functionality on top of a— on top of their AI. These companies that are launching new AIs, they're not doing completely new LLMs, completely new large language models. They're just building on top of other people's systems.

Exactly.

And so, you know, companies like OpenAI are, are open because they've licensed the— their technology to anyone who wants to build on top of it. So Some of the smarter businesses out there are building sort of custom-trained internal tools to help them do a better job with their clients, or they are, uh, built doing custom-trained software as a service models. So you can sign up, like, I assume Jasper and all these things are just sitting on top of something else, but Grammarly and all those. Yeah. So, uh, that's really, really interesting to build a prompt assistant on top of OpenAI or build custom trained, you know, build, use, use tools that point at a specific set of data or build tools that are keeping the data separate from the rest of, of OpenAI. That's a big concern, of course, is, you know, you can't upload certain things to these, these tools. So people are setting up, you know, specific environments where they can crawl, like, you know, sensitive data like healthcare or financial data or sales data or, you know, You know, an AI that talks to your CRM and predicts future revenue or tells you exactly which contacts to reach out to at what times. Like, those are custom trainings and that's the future.

Love it. I wanna come back to this point we talked about, which is about, you know, the dollar, you know, conversion copywriting specifically around building and constructing landing pages. I imagine you've, you know, worked with many clients and helped design these, improve these, and improve conversions through their copywriting. Can you share a little bit, what are some important points? What are some important functionalities we should look at, how we can improve and create a high-converting sales page? And the reason I bring this up is because this is something that's going to generate dollar amounts that maybe people can take and use today if they're going to go out and start using AI, and probably should as soon as possible.

Sure. Yeah. Well, I'll start by saying that it's a completely different mindset than search. Which is query, you know, query result, query result. This is a chat. So we're gonna have a multi-step, multi-prompt process.

Mm-hmm.

So it, so imagine this, you've got some data that has which of your landing pages are how effective, and you take your top 5 landing pages and in a very long prompt, copy and paste those landing pages into ChatGPT and say, What do these 5 landing pages have in common in their structure? And then it will give you back a structure for a high-performing landing page. You could give it many, any landing page in this, you know, in theory. And now it's going to miss something probably. So you're going to edit that. I'm going to keep saying that, edit it because you can't just trust the tool. Tool's not going to do your job. You still have to edit this thing. Okay. So now you have a structure for a generally high-performing landing page. Then say with using that, you're following prompts after you've improved upon it, you're following prompts. Say now using that landing page structure. Create a new landing page for this offer and copy and paste in any webpage. Now it's gonna write a new landing page using that structure for that offer. Now edit it. It's probably missed something. You have to go check, you know, were those testimonials accurate or was the data complete? You know, what was missing? Should I add other examples? So that is a, you know, you could do, so let's say that you're at, that you're doing paid. And that your ad targeting is targeting kind of some more general phrases. And you have this idea, well, I could save my ad spend and lift my conversion rates by instead of buying one general ad for, you know, library furniture, I'm going to make 5 specific ads for library chairs, library tables, library shelves, library bookcase, you know, just make a bunch of different pages. Hey, wait, that's a bunch of work, right? How am I going to make all those landing pages? You're gonna do it in 10 minutes through, through AI. So it scales. You're gonna make, so, you know, you can, it's a way to, to just, you know, you can do more before lunch than you could have done in 3 days, you know, with the manual process. So it's, it's a, so that, that, that's an example of both an efficiency and a conversion rate lift. But you have to learn how to build the chat by teaching it. First, you have to teach it the landing page, another, the landing page structure, and then you give it the offer. Similarly, if you're a copywriter or content marketer, you know, say, go find your top 10 headlines and say, read these top 10 headlines and summarize this style. It does that lovely. Read it if you like, change it if you like. Then in the next prompt, say, using that style, Write a headline for the following article and copy and paste in the article. This might sound exciting and interesting to some of the listeners. This is a basic skill. It sounds novel because it's only, you know, it's like mid-year 2023. If you are earlier to learn these exact prompts I'm giving you today, uh, you'll, you'll have an advantage sooner. But a year from now, I think this is going to be, uh, table stakes. So I'd move quickly to ramp up your skills, try different use cases, and implement some of these before it becomes kind of a standard.

Yeah, it becomes standard. A lot of things are going obsolete, or this becomes, you know, like classes how people are learning Excel, but now have to, you know, learn the same, you know, formulas and prompts of how to using this as a tool itself, right? So, okay, so we talked about landing pages, and then you also mentioned a little bit about search, which I think It's probably the biggest part of this, you know, and I see a big, you know, there's a lot of opportunity now. A lot of people are using, a lot of jobs have been eliminated, you know, marketing has been adjusted to, uh, specifically around this. So what can we do without and with AI for content optimization, I think, which is, is important, important, or, you know, content creation as part of our SEO strategy, if you can talk a little bit about that.

Well, I'm using these tools to Uh, in several ways. If you have— if, uh, so, so let's take SEO. So I've been in SEO for like 20+ years. SEO is not about using the target key phrase in the title, header, and body text. SEO is about making a very comprehensive page that touches on all the related subtopics and answers all the related questions.

Mm-hmm.

So if you're good at semantic SEO and you can scan through search results and look at the People Also Ask box and read the Google suggested phrases and find all the semantically related phrases, Make a list of them, go look at your content and see what you missed. Uh, then you can update the page to, to rank higher. I saw one this morning. I moved from, you know, position 17 to position 3 with one round of semantic SEO. It's like basically like on-page SEO edits. So the, uh, uh, there's tools that like MarketMuse.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Uh, uh, that will do that for you. But then, you know, in the end, your job is gonna be to enhance this page, add depth, add detail, add comprehensiveness. So without changing the existing copy, a prompt that can help with this would be simply, you know, write an additional 3 sections for this webpage that incorporate the following 7 words.

Hmm.

And it will, and it will generate an additional piece of copy that you can, you know, kind of slap on the bottom of the, of that.

URL.

That isn't really, that doesn't feel fun to me because it's just, it's a, it's not really reader-focused.

Yeah.

So a better way to do that would be to do it within the prompt, within the persona prompt and say, improve the following web copy by adding additional sections that address the concerns of this persona and touch on these following 3 topics. You give it kind of the, the general topics, like cluster— like topic clusters. And then it will write copy that is really focused on the audience. It's much— it's still using an algorithm to talk to an algorithm, but you're at least, you know, thinking more about the human, the human visitor in the end. Uh, so that's a simple example where it's like semantic SEO done with, uh, some, you know, AI and prompting for higher rankings. Um, probably more, uh, the more advanced approach would be to give GPT-4's code interpreter, a CSV file exported from Google Search Console, and let it analyze keyword performance, telling you which key phrases have above-average click-through rates.

Mm.

All the data about your, your, your, your positions and click-through rates are in Search Console. So if you export that from current Search Console, upload the CSV file to GPT-4's code interpreter, it will process, it will chomp through the CSV file and find correlations for you. If you can identify which key phrases have higher than average click-through rate, higher than expected click-through rates, now you really know what to optimize for because those are going to be phrases for which the search results pages aren't super crowded with piles of visual noise and videos and ads and maps and The problem with SEO is that it's just gotten so visual and click-through rates keep declining. So the smart SEO is very targeted in, in their, uh, key phrase, uh, research, and they, they choose phrases for which, you know, the click-through rate's going to be good. So Code Interpreter will actually do that for you. It's very tedious and manual to, to find correlations in a CSV file, but just, it is a, it is beautiful to watch what Code Interpreter can do with A spreadsheet, and it will tell you what key phrases you should likely prioritize.

And, and then when it comes to, so that, that's kind of the optimization side. And when it comes to, you know, let's say creating new content. So if we have a, a content calendar, these are the keywords, we've done our keyword research, now we wanna start ranking for, for this. So traditionally, you know, a lot of writers were involved in, in this process and a lot of people now shifted to using, you know, AI as part of that. Maybe, you know, Just kind of a lot of new websites are also being created with this or entire businesses around it. Should we be publishing all of our content, all our written content using AI in order to rank for SEO?

Or is there—

or maybe a better question is, is there reason not to, right? Is there instances where we shouldn't be?

Yeah, I think that it comes down to like the very first thing we said was that Uh, for the best productivity gains, you have to look at your own time and just ask yourself what you, what you want to do or which use cases are good for you. Because this is like, there's infinite use cases for this. So, uh, in the end, you know, it's like, should I use it to create content? If you break that down, there's actually many different tasks within creating content that you may choose to get help from AI. Examples, audience research and brainstorming ideas. That, that's the same persona prompt where I'm leaning heavily into that one chat where I built my persona because then I can go ask it what its concerns are and ask it what topics it would read based on those concerns. So that's part of writing. And then there's writing the, and then I can, you know, writing the outline. AI can help with that. Train it to write in your style and then add, ask it to write an outline. Writing the first draft, writing, creating social media posts, creating the visuals. Using Midjourney, writing email marketing copy, doing SEO edits, which we just described, writing meta descriptions, uh, converting between formats, right? Just to do the first draft from a long transcript, or just editing. Take this article and make it sound— it's like, for non-native speakers, it's a brilliant tool, right? It's like immediately going to naturalize the language. Or for anybody, you know, if you're long-winded, it's like, hey, rewrite this to make it more concise and brief. You know, so these are all— writing is not one thing. Mm-hmm. So you have to decide which of those use cases you like. So when it comes, you know, for, for me personally, I use it for maybe half of those. Uh, I've tried it for many of those and I consistently use it for maybe a third. That's what I like to do.

Mm-hmm.

And so it just comes down to whatever use cases, you know, where do you wanna reach for a tool? It's sitting there, you can grab it anytime. But there's still lots of parts of the process that I like to do personally. I do by hand. I enjoy. So it's, it's really just, it's a question of preference.

Final question here around this, Andy, before we shift to the kind of personal rapid-fire question, which is maybe, maybe around kind of managing this process, right? So maybe, you know, CEOs don't have time to go in or maybe marketing managers to, to learn all these prompts and start You know, creating all this content around there, 'cause this is a new process they have to learn versus where they were working with writers or their own process. But now this is a completely new role maybe that within companies that for folks who should be maybe using this to develop their content. Now, what would be like, in your opinion, who are you hiring for or adding to your team to, you know, start publishing all this content and managing these tools?

Yeah, it, it doesn't, it hasn't changed the HR mix at all. I think it will be a, it'll be a while before we see that. I, I've had, I have friends who have agencies who tell me that they're getting such productivity gains that they've slowed hiring. They're not letting anybody off, but they've slowed hiring.

Right.

I know people who work with networks of freelancers, and they surveyed all their freelancers and said, who's, who's using AI? And They are shifting work toward those freelancers who are, you know, producing more comprehensive content or being more efficient.

Mm-hmm.

But for what we do, project management, yeah, AI can help you, you know, kind of with some of your communication tasks. But that, I still need high-touch project management. For developers, yeah, AI can help debug code. And, you know, there's tools within GitHub that They're using now and, you know, even code interpreter for things. It writes, it can write scripts. But I still need developers. For copywriters, so basically it can support all the different jobs. Copywriters, SEOs, you know, developers, project managers, designers, they all can find application and use cases. But I don't know that, I don't know of anybody who's hiring a specific role for it. It's just one of those things that is so useful in so many ways that it becomes part of— a little bit part of everyone's job. And in the long run, should make us all more efficient.

Right. All right. It's just like, you know, using, you know, Google Doc or Google Excel. Everybody has to, you know, they have to use this whether you're sales, marketing, you know, developer, or, or, or leadership role. Yeah. Makes sense. Any, any last things you wanna chat about here, Akeel, in regards to AI? You know, whether there's recommendations on— you mentioned a few tools or, Anything you wanna mention that, you know, people should think about around using AI or be aware of?

Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll just kinda try to recap that conversation by saying there's, for the marketer, there's 3 main applications. One is train it to be like your audience, and then you can talk to your audience day or night to figure out what, you know, more about its needs. You can train it to be like you and to write in your voice and to write headlines and copy and emails that sound like you.

Mm-hmm.

And the third is to use it to quickly process data and find insights and upload spreadsheets to it. And then, and then, uh, you know, get to answers faster. Which of my articles has higher than expected performance in, in social? But, you know, or which of my articles are the most engaging but get the least traffic? It'll tell me that in seconds. So now I know what to promote on social media anyway. So yeah, those, so I would just, there are so many applications.

Yeah.

But, uh, if you just straighten it out in your mind and say basically there's 3 things here. I think that'll help.

Love it. Cool. Andy, let's shift gear to the personal rapid-fire questions. You ready for that?

Sounds good.

Yeah. All right. All right, Andy, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

Akeel, you know this about me now. I'm a bit— getting on the bike.

Yeah.

You know, just, I try not to sit in cars. Traffic is a huge— speaking of productivity, traffic is a huge time suck.

Mm-hmm.

Traffic only bothers people who create it. So you're actually part of the problem if you're bothered by traffic. So get outta your car, ride a bike, put on a pod— you put on a head, you know, a podcast or an audiobook that is healthy and stimulating and sustainable and, you know, just, just better for your emotional state. Absolutely. You're gonna get off that bike and you're gonna be ready to create something great instead Instead of just suffering through road rage and getting less healthy and contributing to some of the world's biggest problems.

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how wintertime goes when it's freezing out there and you're still on your bike, but I imagine it still gets you into flow state. It's still better than being in traffic, right?

I can still do it. I ride the bike year round, 4 seasons, man. And I'm in Chicago.

It works. Impressive. Impressive. Andy, what's one piece of advice you wish you had known if you can go back, you would tell your 20 or 25-year-old self?

Oh, that's going way back because I'm like 50 now. Okay, uh, well, I majored in Mandarin Chinese, which is a popular language even more so now than it was in the mid-'90s. Uh, in hindsight, I wish I had studied Spanish. This is a weird— so because I go to Spain every year, I teach a class in Spain every year, I don't speak Spanish. This is going to sound strange to people because I know that it's so It's like this trending popular thing to learn Mandarin, but Mandarin is really all— at least today, Mandarin is really only useful unless you plan to live in China or Taiwan.

Yeah.

So it's not—

you're—

if you've got some, you know, high-performing kids and high expectations, and just take a minute, really, where do you think your kids are going to use Mandarin? I have a degree in Asian language and literature, and I use it never. And if I knew Spanish, I'd use it all the time.

Maybe start doing, you know, set up an agency up in, uh, up in China, right?

Yeah, if you want to live in China, I guess. If you want your kids to live in China, then teach, then have them learn Mandarin. If you want your kids to be, you know, part of North America, uh, you know, maybe Spanish.

Yeah, yeah, Spanish makes sense. Uh, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue your agency, the Orbit Media Studios? Meaning, you know, what keeps you up at night these days, if anything?

Uh, I worry about my team and remote work with my team because I've seen HR issues and people like flare-ups where I, I ask myself like, I don't think that would have happened if we were all still together eating ice cream and pizza once a week.

For sure.

It's not the same. Uh, so I, I worry about those team members who are— I literally worry about them, uh, because I can tell that there are people who are very isolated and I'm not sure how to get to them. Expecting them to come into the office is not what they want me to do, but I also think that it would be good for them. So I'm— I've got 53 employees, and there's only, you know, 4 of us in the office on a good day. And— but I think there's probably 12 who should be here more often.

Yeah.

Car culture, you know, doesn't agree with that, but that's, um, I worry about my team.

And have you thought of moving back everybody to the office, or are they remote and all over the place that wouldn't be feasible?

Yeah, that's not going to happen now. They're all— I mean, people have moved all over the place. And even people— it would kind of be weird, right, to have the people who are even local to say, you got to come in, unless it was a company-wide policy. And then why am I telling that one person they have to— I don't know. It's just hard. It's a tough time. But there are lots of people out there. If you're listening to this and you— and You know, work from anywhere includes an office component. It's not really work from anywhere if there's no office. Uh, yeah, and you just feel like, uh, some, you know, some face-to-face time would be worthwhile. I mean, get on your bike, go to the office, see who's there, and, uh, uh, you know, it might have a— it might be one of your, you know, do it twice a week. Those might be your good days.

Andy, um, who or what are some of the best 3 resources? This can be books, mentors, or people you just follow in the space who you'd say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Well, in the most recent time frame, Chris Carr, the founder of Ferrotec, uh, he invited me to be the, the, um, guest host on his— like, co-host on, on his Digital Marketing Masterclass podcast. And, uh, my conversations with Chris over the last year have really— or just the last 8 months They've taught me tons and tons about AI.

Mm-hmm.

He's pushed me toward this and I've learned a lot and he's made, made me aware of some of the tools I've mentioned I learned from him. Foundation, smartest person, like knows what's gonna happen in the next decade. Like this guy is like correct on all topics. Mark Schaefer.

Mm-hmm.

Mark Schaefer just wrote a book called Belonging to the Brand, which has made, which has made the case that community, speaking of getting together, is the last great marketing strategy. You really can't argue with that no matter what else happens in Google or, you know, Twitter rebrands or whatever weird thing goes on. Community, people who have a community, who've built a community are safe. Like there's, that's a secure long-term strategy.

Mm-hmm.

And then finally, uh, Jo Wiebe, Joanna Wiebe, the founder of Copy Hackers and the, and, uh, the pub, the, maybe, you know, Jo, she's got one of the best courses out there about conversion copywriting. So many people have learned so much from Jo. Uh, she's speaking at my conference later this year. She's an old friend. I heart Jo Wiebe. She is one of the smartest people on the topic of marketing psychology.

Love it. Andy, what does success mean to you today?

Whether that's personally, through your business, financially, life, family, I guess there's no right answer. I measure— one of my key metrics is in getting to do breakfasts and dinners with my kids. I've got a 7 and a 5-year-old. So the pandemic was good for me because I don't have to fly around and speak at conferences so much anymore. Uh, I get invited to speak places and mostly don't go because, uh, I mean, unless I can do it quickly. Um, but I don't want to be away from Eli and Ada. So, uh, it's all for me, it's all about being there in the morning and reading books at night. So breakfasts and books, uh, these are my, my main metrics for, for lifetime success. And, uh, I'm proud to say I'm doing pretty good.

Wow, that's beautiful. I love it. I mean, it's so simple, but it's so powerful in so many ways for you and the future of your family.

And Akeel, honestly, very common. I'm one of a million people who just really prize time with their families, and it's not weird. It's not a weird answer, but—

You'd be surprised. I mean, I've asked this thing for over 200 guests now. I mean, I don't always think that's the case for a lot of entrepreneurs, but I mean, it's good you just found a way to know what you value. All right. Yeah.

Glad to offer that. Yeah.

Cool. This, this has been great, Andy. Thanks for, thanks for sharing all these insights. Great knowledge for folks who I know suggest to get into the AI world. But if anybody wants to, any founders, marketers wanna get in touch with you, learn more about you or your agency, where's, where's the best place to go?

LinkedIn. I'm gonna invite every listener here to actually connect. The blue button says follow, but if you click more, you can find the connect button. Then if you tell me that you heard this podcast, I will accept it. Uh, there's a flood of— LinkedIn's a noisy place right now, but yeah. Um, I'd be happy to connect with anybody on LinkedIn and help however I can. I write a newsletter there. Uh, it's simply called Digital Marketing Tips. orbitmedia.com is where I publish, um, all the originals. So that's the actual main blog. Um, and then, uh, my book is called Content Chemistry and it's available at Amazon and everywhere.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Andy. We'll add all those links to the show notes if you guys want to check out, connect with Andy, or check out his book as well. That'd be great. So thanks again, Andy. I really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks, Akeel.

So great. I love this. Thank you. Thank you.

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