Jeff Harrison (Swingpoint Media) argues local businesses should hire a practitioner—not someone who calls themselves an "expert"—because digital marketing continuously changes and requires ongoing learning. He contrasts static "expert" thinking with a practitioner mindset, uses examples (his golf-teaching past, his wife’s hair-salon education) to show continual skill development, and emphasizes digital marketing’s testability versus print’s permanence. He describes adopting AI (six-week staff course) and using client avatars to produce content at scale without interrupting clients. He positions Swingpoint Media as a specialist for HVAC (and sometimes plumbing) companies and closes with a call-to-action to contact him for practitioner-led marketing.
Chapters
Sam.
Has someone ever said to you, hey, you should hire a professional or an expert? Or have you thought to yourself, what I really need for this job when I'm talking about marketing is I need an expert. Well, before you go down that path of an expert, I want to share something with you that I think may get you to think about who you need to hire a little differently. Hi, my name is Jeff Harrison with Swingpoint Media. We're a digital marketing agency. And I am not an expert. I am.
Not an expert. I think of myself as a practitioner. Now, let me explain something. A few days ago I asked, I was in a group and somebody introduced me and they said, he is the digital marketing expert. And I corrected them and said, well, I'm really not an expert. And they said, well, what do you mean? Well, the reason I say I'm not an expert is because things are constantly changing. Every day, literally every day, I'm learning how to do what I do at a higher level or differently to get my customers a better result. And I think of an expert as someone who said, hey, they've reached the pinnacle of what they do and there's really not a lot more they can learn. And I'll give you a perfect example. I used to be in the golf industry and I was a teacher and it got to the point where the laws of physics, we understood them, or I understood them in such a way that I knew that if somebody did X, Y would happen and I could correct that. In other words, I was at the pinnacle of what I did. When it comes to digital marketing, one thing I notice is it's always changing. So if you have somebody as an example who says I'm an expert at digital marketing or anything else, I would ask them, are you evolving with your industry? There are often times where I'll run into people. In fact, I've even interviewed young people coming out of college for interns as marketing, you know, for working for the marketing company here at Swing Point Media. And what I found was what they had learned was no longer applicable today. It was kind of old fashioned. It was like, well, let's, let's create some TV and newspaper and print advertising for your company. And I'm like, yeah, I just, I just don't go down that road because we can't track the results. And, and once we put things in print, that's forever. Where something digital we can change, we can test it and it's very inexpensive. But the big thing I want you to think about today is whoever you hire in Whatever you're doing. But specifically in marketing, are they a practitioner or are they calling themselves an expert? I would probably want to get involved with somebody who is a practitioner. They are constantly learning and doing what they do to improve themselves. I'll give you an example.
My staff and I were involved, my executive assistant and I were involved in a certification process right now. And I think it's a six week course and it's specifically how to leverage the power of artificial intelligence or why? Well, because that's where, as Wayne Gretzky said, that's where the puck is going, not where it is. And so for me and my staff, we look at it and say we want to go where the puck is going. So that when we suggest something to our customers, we are doing something that is going to help them be successful quicker and get better results. So if I were an expert, the chances are, and again, this is my definition, an expert is, hey, this is the way we've always done it. We're going to use these tools. And if I had my admin on here with me, Melissa, she'd probably say, Jeff seems to change things on a fairly regular basis. But one thing we don't change is to do at our very best and to get our customers the very best results we possibly can, we use a simple filtering process. With all the artificial intelligence coming down the pike right now, we look and ask the question, is this going to improve our customers results? If it's not, then it's just noise. It's like anything else. It's that background noise we don't want to get involved with because quite frankly, we could be like Alice in Wonderland. We could go down that rabbit hole and we would spend all our time down there just chasing, well, rabbits and our tails. And it's not very good for our customers. So one of the things I want to share with you today is seek out a practitioner. Are they constantly learning? I always admire this about my wife. She's been in her industry, she's a, she owns a hair salon and she's been in industry now for about 35 years. And every year she would go to some, you know, cutting classes and she's always going to color and cut and she kept fresh and she saw what was going on on these new things. And I always thought, well, how many ways can you cut hair? But what happened is she was always on, no pun intended, she was always on the cutting edge. And her customers, her clientele appreciated that because they didn't find themselves being stale with the way they looked for us and our customers. We say, hey, you know what? Artificial intelligence, something that's coming along. I'll give you one example, and then I'll be done.
About maybe six or seven months ago, we started using avatars for our customers. And so what we do is we create the avatar for our client. It looked like them, it wouldn't sound like them. We couldn't use their voice, but we would use their likeness, and we would go through a process where we build an avatar for them. Well, this allowed us now to create content, I'm going to say content at scale, because now we could create a script for something that we wanted to put out for them, and we could, using that artificial intelligence, in this case, an avatar, we could create content for them nonstop. Well, this made it so much easier for our business owners because we didn't have to pull them in or interrupt their day and say, hey, we have this video we want you to shoot. No, we would now just send the script over. They would approve it. We would go back into our program, type in the information, and boom, we had a video. So if you're working with an expert. And again, I don't. Everybody, you know, this globalization of, well, all experts are bad. I don't want to put that in the case. I just want you to ask that question of whoever you're working with, even if they call themselves an expert, Let me ask you, what are you doing to push what you do to make yourself better? In other words, are you continuing that continuous education of what's going on? Are you and your staff understanding all the nuances and changes that are coming along down the road? Because if you're using an old method, that expert is using an old method. You know, the old saying is, if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten. That's not true in marketing anymore, especially in this digital space. If you keep doing what you've always done, you will see that you'll keep. You'll get less than what you've always gotten. It will continue to drop off. So you want to make sure that your staff, whoever you hire, your practitioner is always looking at saying, hey, how can we push the envelope? So that's the question of the day. Are you hiring an expert or are you hiring a practitioner? If you're interested in hiring a practitioner, get ahold of us. My name is Jeff Harrison at swingpoint Media. You can get ahold of us at jeffwingpoint Media. Be more than happy to chat with you. Now, we don't work with everyone. And I don't say that jokingly. I mean that seriously. Our ideal customers, they have heating and air conditioning companies, sometimes with also the plumbing feature in there. But heating and air conditioning companies, why? Well, let's face it, if you are going to have your knee replaced, would you go to a general practitioner or would you go to someone who specializes in replacing knees? Well, we specialize in helping heating and air conditioning, called H vac companies, do what they do better when it comes to marketing, because when we replace a knee, we want it to be a good result. So, again, have a great Friday. We'll talk to you again soon. Again, my name is Jeff Harrison. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thank you.
