#199 How AI Is Changing Marketing Forever (and What It Means for Your Business)

We were solving new challenges every day. And so it was really understanding how do we get our offline and online customers to shop the other way? So if we have online, how do we convert them to offline and make them a bigger business? If we have offline customers, how do we get them to engage with the website in a way that is more valuable to them?

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your Hey everybody, welcome back to the call.

I'm excited to have you on this episode of the High Voltage Business Builders. So as always, like, share, comment, engage, help me beat big tech by getting this out to the world so my guest today can be represented fairly and everybody can hear what she has to say. So I'm excited to have her on today because we're gonna be talking about building and digital marketing and businesses and what it takes to run a digital agency, um, in the world of e-commerce and online marketing. And the guest today has a lot of experience and background in that, so I'm honored to have her for, um, this conversation. Thank you. Oh, the next 20 or 25 minutes or so here. Let's get into the details. Courtney, welcome to the call and we'll dig in here.

Thank you so much, Neil. I'm very excited to be here.

Awesome. So where are you chiming in from today? Where in the world are you?

I am in Denver, Colorado.

Ooh, I love Denver, Colorado. Did I mention I lived in Denver?

I don't know if I told you that.

Yeah, I did. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

Love that area. Almost spent quite a lot of time there in the Castle Rock area, which is like the nosebleed section. We absolutely love it. Did you grow up there? Is that where you're from?

Yeah, I grew up in Boulder, so now I live in kind of South Denver. So I do—

That's a very big difference.

Very far.

But yeah. I know, but Boulder to South Denver, that's like granola crunch eating to high-tech industry. Am I not mistaken? Is that like—

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, I grew up.

Okay. 'Cause I got it right.

Yeah.

That's a— do you get back to Boulder very much then?

My parents still live up north of Boulder, so I do get a chance to go and hoping to go to a CU game at least once this season.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Very exciting. It's a good old downtown area. I enjoyed Denver downtown. I didn't enjoy the I-25 T-Rex corridor though, cuz it seemed to be in like perpetual fixing, all constant road construction or road destruction as my, my friend said.

Yes.

Is it still under road destruction? Is it still being—

Always.

Always.

Yeah.

Yeah. Always evolving with that many people. Well, cool. So your background in digital marketing, tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I started my career working at a digital marketing agency. And so I really had the opportunity with that to kind of learn with a lot of different sizes of business. So the agency primarily had clients that were fashion industry, all e-commerce. It was really cool to get to work on fashion brands when I was out of college, 'cause I got to talk about client names that I knew of.

Yeah.

Which is so fun. And it was a really good experience to kind of understand what traffic and marketing and digital business looked like for a lot of different sized businesses in that space, all B2C, really got my hands dirty with understanding like how analytics looks, how you can track these types of websites. But it kind of hit a point where I knew a little bit about a lot of companies and a little bit about web analytics from these different perspectives, but it was working at an agency. I was working on like the same types of projects over and over again, and I kind of just got a little bit bored of doing the same thing and not getting to dive deeper into bigger questions and bigger analysis. So then I went on to work at Arrow Electronics, which is a Fortune 150 company, and working as the lead of the analytics team there and managing a team over time there, became the lead of that team. And then I got to see B2B, sorry, and then really getting the depth of understanding, which was so cool to go from like knowing a little bit about a lot of companies to getting to know a lot about one company and really starting to see not just the marketing aspect and everything at the agency was so, okay, let's improve return on ad spend. Let's make sure that we're using these budgets well, but then going to Arrow, it was so much bigger, more into profit and how we could have good relationships with suppliers and making sure the right parts were on the site and working with millions of parts and trying to understand how we are showing different parts on different places of the website.

So your scope very much increased and the challenges obviously grew exponentially in that.

Oh yes. Yeah.

A lot of change occurred during that period, didn't it?

Yeah.

What happened to that with you? What was your experience in that change?

Yeah, I think just getting to know so deep into a business was so fantastic for asking like really complex questions and trying to solve bigger challenges. So with the initial agency, it was smaller challenges that we were solving. It was very, you know, like the same type of problems over and over. getting to go deeper, we were solving new challenges every day. And so it was like really understanding how do we get our offline and online customers to shop the other way. So if we have online, how do we convert them to offline and make them a bigger business? If we have offline customers, how do we get them to engage with the website in a way that is more valuable to them?

Yeah, without decreasing prices or, you know, Hurting one channel versus another, or even if you try to open new sales channels, not taking anything from existing channels, but adding on additional. There's always challenges in that because the buyer psychology is very different, isn't it, for each of those channels?

Absolutely. So different for each of those channels. So it was really fun to get to try to figure out how do we get to work with all of these different types of customers and different types of products and, you know, digging deeper into the data to try to find that like mix of person who might be like, What is the persona of a user that we might want to target for that type of behavior and things like that? And then what was so exciting was starting at Nimble Gravity, I kind of took both of those perspectives with leading my practice of web analytics. So we do some of the same projects every time where we're always starting with an audit of analytics for my web analytics practice. But then we also try to ask those bigger questions too. So we're not just surface looking at marketing, but also how do we get deeper into how do we drive more profit? How do we find those like niche markets that are really like the, you know, your 20% of your customers that are driving 80% of revenue or whatever that might be. And that's what's so fun now is kind of mixing those 2 background experiences. And kind of building my practice to try to incorporate both, um, to drive value for our clients.

Yeah. Yeah. They're very different experiences if you've never gotten to that level of depth of knowledge, practical knowledge, um, or application. You could still be a little too theoretical if you're, if you're not getting into it. Where, where did that change for you in your experience? Where'd you go from practic— from theoretical, theoretical to practical? Was that during the, you know, the clothing stage or has that really evolved in the, in the later stages of your career?

Yeah, it's been probably more later stage. Definitely a little bit at Arrow, definitely a lot now at Nimble Gravity. I've been at Nimble Gravity for 2 and a half years. We've grown tremendously since I started. I think I was employee 8 or 9, and now we have 90 people across a couple of different countries. And we've got— we've had the opportunity to work with a lot of different types of clients as well. So I think it's also kind of been in theoretical, you know, you kind of see how maybe a fashion e-commerce worked in my agency world. And then now working, I've worked with like pet insurance, which has some of the same mechanisms. People are going to a website, they're trying to buy something, but it's totally different. It's insurance. It's not like an e-commerce product. So kind of putting some of that like theory of e-commerce into Like the practical of, okay, now we have to think about it from a different perspective and really tailor what we're doing to the specific client and making sure that whatever it is that in my case with web analytics, we're usually tracking clicks and engagements and making sure that it's the data that's most valuable to that client so that they can drive their business with really, you know, interesting and helpful data points. Yeah.

So where are the data trends going? I mean, there's been a lot of change, and what I mean by that is there's been a lot of change in the last, you know, 3 years or so. There's been a huge amount of growth for online sales and dramatic changes in, in the amount of people that are getting online and buying. And obviously there's a lot of data and analytics you're driving into with each of your particular customers. Where are you seeing the trends? Like, tell me, gimme some insights into what you're seeing from your perspective that's more data-driven. Is there things that are trending up, stuff trending down? If I'm an e-commerce owner in this space, where can I glean some information from you on inside here for a moment.

Yeah, I think from my perspective, I'm always looking at it from the side of how can we get more valuable data? And a big trend is in, you know, things like Hotjar have been around for a long time. Session recording tools, FullStory have been around for a while, but they're starting to incorporate systems to make it a lot easier to actually get to the answers you're looking for. So it really is a tool that's becoming vital in a web analytics or even just a general e-commerce marketing analysis perspective is having a tool where you can do session recording. And some of them are starting to use AI, like Sessionstack is a tool that's starting to build an AI feature in so that it'll automatically generate some insights. Using AI instead of having to go watch a bunch of sessions or go look at heat maps and try to make sense of, okay, if the heat map's over here, but I don't have a button over here, what is it actually showing me that people clicked on?

Hmm.

And I think like the AI aspect of that's gonna be, you know, everywhere soon, but that's kind of making it more simple from a web analytics standpoint too, in an e-commerce, you know, driving growth for your e-commerce business. Because we're starting to see a lot more of those insights automatically populated. Even Google Analytics 4 is starting to provide insights that are actually helpful. In the past, they had alerts that you'd have to set yourself. Now, I got an insight the other day of, oh, your events are way up and we tracked something new. But it was nice that Google alerted me like, why are your events way up? You know, and that is becoming like a much more impactful side of e-commerce business and a big trend to kind of help business owners grow their business.

So where do you see things going in the next year with e-com? Where are you taking your clients and what are you leading some of them towards?

Yeah, for me, a lot of the focus is on GA4 with the Universal Analytics being sunset this summer. Now with GA4, it's, it's been a little bit slow to get people to adopt everything with GA4, but really focusing on tracking the right data for them, making sure that they're utilizing the tool to its full capacity, and in general, just helping businesses see that there's a lot of opportunity to track really unique data points for every website because every website's a little bit different. The types of data you might want to track are a little bit different on every website. And so really filling out that data profile so that you can uncover, you know, have all your dataset put in a really nice place, set up really well, you know, get dashboards that help you make bigger decisions for your e-commerce business. So making sure that you're identifying things like certain marketing channels that are high performers and kind of identifying those insights so that we can help them target those channels better. get better return on ad spend and just making sure all of their data is like tracked cleanly so that you can make bigger decisions there.

So for those who are maybe not familiar with this, on the direct-to-consumer side, Google is making changes to its tracking and analytics. If I'm not mistaken, it's about privacy and changing or basically pulling back on a lot of analytical and data mining they've done in the last 5, 10 years because there wasn't laws against it and everybody was, you know, now yelling about privacy. So they're pulling back out of pixels and pulling back out of A lot. Is that summarized correctly? Tell me if I'm missing this, but it has to do with data and privacy, does it not?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's, yeah, it's with that now on every website you get that cookie consent that says, do you accept cookies? It's very much related to that and making sure that they're protecting user privacy so that when I'm looking at Google Analytics, I'm not able to pinpoint specific data about any particular user.

So we've come back to the full display marketing. More, which is kind of circling all the way around. Like they say, history repeats itself, right? So we started out with display marketing, which meant you just had to hit a broad audience of say 18 to 65-year-old people. And then you had to have a message and a copy that resonated well enough for them to actually be attracted to it versus saying, okay, I'm targeting a, you know, 24 to 25 age group and they have to have this, this, this, this, and this, and this, and this data point. The hyper-targeting things are sort of gone, which means the, you know, good offers are going to stand out. The good products are gonna stand out and the bad ones are gonna die. Is that a good summary?

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Well, the end result is those who are in the world of data and marketing, those who are direct-to-consumer marketing across, you know, AdWords, Google, Meta, other places, you're going to have to get smart with your e-commerce offerings. You're gonna have to get smart with your marketing because the systems that are smart are now going to go away. Now, at the same time, things like I've noticed the other day, Meta and A+ Advantage is actually doing pretty good. I, I think part of this is that they have enough data now that they don't need us to necessarily direct all of the types. Is, is that's what's happening, isn't it? The AI is now becoming so advanced that they don't necessarily need us to pinpoint the data points for ourselves anymore, do they?

Yeah, absolutely. Everything is modeled now, so In all of the tools, they're starting to incorporate more data models to help kind of fill in the gaps.

Yeah.

And in some ways, this gives us more insight than the very specific data tracking we had before.

Yeah.

Because especially as most people are using their computer while they're sitting at their desk, and then they get up and they go do the same thing, but on their phone. And before, there was never really a way to try to match those up or make any sense of that data. But now with the data models, they're actually doing a much better job of getting that clarity of what is it that people are actually doing across device, or what is that journey more clearly looking like from a marketing channel perspective.

Yeah.

So even in Google Analytics, their data-driven model is based on really giving you a better sense of like true attribution based on Their modeling of how people are actually engaging across devices and across different channels instead of trying to say, this is exactly when the person did the thing and we have no idea what else they did, but we know they did this thing. And it's kind of not a true picture of how users actually—

Dummy advertising has certainly changed from our shotgun approach to marketing once upon a time to now the systems are so smart, we were starting to wonder when our, you know, need for using them is going to be relevant anymore, or if we're not just going to have the AI do it all for us. How, how much do you incorporate AI into what you guys do at the, at your agency now?

Yeah, so in my practice, it's primarily looking at those data-driven tools, but Nimble Gravity also has data science, digital transformation, e-commerce and strategy, as well as engineering. So we have a lot of practices. Our data science practice is very focused on a lot of machine learning and AI projects right now. Which is super cool. So it's constantly a topic of conversation at our company of like, what's the newest AI? How are we able to use systems that are already in place and build something new and cool for clients? Or we had a lot of clients come and say, I want AI. I don't know what I want, but I want something because it's cool.

Yeah.

And also helping to guide them of like, well, this one already exists and maybe we can utilize it and You know, use their APIs. But yeah, it's amazing. It'll be cool until it takes your job.

I've heard it argued, and maybe you would agree, that most of the, the AI threat is gonna be for that mid-range analytical job types that, that need to really level up because that skillset or that type of analysis or analytical engine that, that's required for people at that level of business is no longer gonna be needed because AI can replace it versus the Everybody's afraid of AI automation, like, you know, McDonald's and stuff. And I'm like, no, I think you're missing the point. Um, you need to look at what they're doing to replace the corporate side of that from these kind of— would you agree with that? Or what's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it's interesting because I can see, at least right now, you can, you know, go to ChatGPT and say, can you write a regular expression for this crazy thing I wanna do? And it'll populate it in 2 seconds and it's, Probably 80%, right? You might have like a couple typos, or you might wanna ask for some code, but it's still in this state where you have to be able to understand whatever it is. Like, I want SQL for this thing. You know, I'm trying to do a BigQuery query and I want ChatGPT to write it for me. You still have to have the knowledge to check it. So right now it's still in the place where like I have to know enough SQL that if I asked it for SQL, I can check it and know that, okay, it did this wrong, it made something up, I don't know what's going on here. But it's definitely a threat for those types of jobs, especially like the kind of low jobs where people would have to learn and do just a lot of SQL crunching to learn SQL. Now it's more just you have to be able to maybe read SQL and then, you know, interpret. Yeah, interpret. So it does kind of it'll make it harder for people to really gain those school— those skills.

Yeah.

Because it's so easy. It's like a, you know, I don't have to know calculus because if I want to know a calculus equation, I can Google it. It's the same thing of like, I don't have to know how to write SQL code because I can Google it. Yeah. And it's kind of gonna get like that over time.

It's gonna, it's crazy how fast that's going, right? Absolutely. And, and watching people on, on my Twitter feed doing some testing on You know, programs they writ— have written with AI that, you know, they're not programmers, but they got it to create an application. And I'm like, wow, okay, things are, are changing dramatically fast.

Yeah.

In many types of, of agencies and world and just jobs and everything in the business. I mean, we use AI to time compress activities that we've had processes for.

Mm-hmm.

And we've pulled in certain AI tools and stuff to condense those processes down to, you know, 2 to 3 hours or 4 hours, what took maybe 2 or 3 days. Before, just because of its ability to crunch numbers and, you know, follow the process and, and make it work faster.

Yeah.

And I could see that, you know, not necessarily replacing certain skills, you know, skill sets as much as requiring, you know, certain people with skill sets to know how to use it correctly. I'm even seeing some job recs for prompt engi— you know, prompt engineers over $100K a year already, or more if you can understand how to create those prompts well. So there's just so much opportunity and digital marketing is such a frontier, isn't it? It's always ever evolving and changing.

Yeah.

And it sounds like your experience has, has led you to a position to understand that as well. Is there a question maybe I didn't ask you, Courtney, that you'd like me to ask you?

Yeah, I think one other item I'd like to just chat about is kind of along the sidelines of like AI and how a lot of these things are getting more simple. Yeah. I think something that is also really interesting to talk about is just how everything's getting more global. So at Nimble Gravity, we have teams in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, as well as the US. And how it's been so interesting getting to work with all these people in all of these different countries.

Yeah.

You know, so far away, it takes like 24 hours to visit some of them, but we're all in the same time zones, very similar time zones, and how easy it's been to communicate across these different countries and have similar experiences and shared experiences. Because we're all exploring the internet and doing things with e-commerce, and we're all buying stuff online. And how cool it's been that in this digital age, especially in the last couple years, it's gotten so much easier. Everyone now knows how to use Zoom and Teams calls and all of these after— You know, we've been forced to in the pandemic and everything, and it's been really impactful. And I think it's gonna keep making the world like a little bit smaller.

It is.

But I just think that that's another aspect too. You know, AI is kind of an interesting change in how we work. And so is like the globalization of how easy it is to talk to people around the globe.

Well, it's transforming, you know, they say a picture's a thousand words, right? And one of the things we've been in line with what you're saying is, is changing the way we adapt photo shoots and, you know, photo results or hyper-realistic results with things like Midjourney to create products and prompts that literally can put, you know, your product in any situation with any kind of model in any environment. And we've been playing with this a lot. And I have a, a person who I've known since 2016 who has kind of taken that to the next level because that's how his brain works. And I've actually got him coming into our private mastermind in a couple of weeks to talk with our people about, you know, how he's doing what he's doing to literally get their products in all of these photo shoot locations that don't exist. And they're so hyper-realistic that without the right, you know, tool or the right realization, you're not even gonna recognize that it's not real. And it's just fascinating that it's gonna transform e-commerce. I don't think anybody recognizes it just yet, but it's about to happen, especially on places like, you know, Amazon, which is a very visual front for purchasing and products and looking at the graphics and things is a very big driver of that psychology. of an Amazon buyer. And this is going to transform a lot of the things we're doing next. And it'll compress time down because now we don't need a $5,000 photo shoot at a high-end Airbnb for a kitchen product. We can literally place our product in a photo shoot through AI in maybe 2 days that did it for a fourth of half of the cost without actually having to go do it. There's some things that are just transitioning. AI is going to be fascinating in that way, in my opinion. And it's just videos I've been watching a lot, and maybe you have too. marketing videos and videos of complete AI-driven sequences that are just getting more and more involved as it goes along. But yeah, from our perspective, for sure, I agree with you 100%. Uh, the market's shifting and changing. We watched some of this stuff over the last couple of decades change in the e-com world and are watching it evolve. Just things we couldn't do less than 5 years ago are now transforming how fast this is moving. What could people do in your opinion to keep up with it without over, you know, become overwhelmed by the stuff we're literally talking about today?

Yeah, I think it's just staying aware if you're using certain tools already, keeping up with any release notes, just staying up to date and things like if you follow people on LinkedIn or on Twitter, which is now X, I guess, but just kind of keeping your ear out for different cool things that you hear of. And not being afraid that AI is gonna take over, but rather my biggest tip is to figure out how you can utilize AI for making your life better and—

Yeah.

Helping you advance what you're doing with your time. 'Cause there's a lot of really cool tools out there that can really help streamline the processes you don't like doing in your day. So really don't be afraid of it. There's a lot of really cool things that can come out of it too.

Yeah. Well said. I noticed you'd mentioned, you didn't mention listening to this podcast and staying tuned in and subscribing.

Yes.

So that you can follow experts like Courtney through the process. So make sure you guys do that at this point to chime in. Any final words? I mean, you said it really well then. I don't wanna put any on the spot for anything else, but if anything else you'd like to share, please do.

Yeah, I guess my big final takeaway that I will always share if someone ever asks me for a final takeaway. Is that data's really powerful. There's a lot you can do with it and always ask really good questions of your data and you can find some really cool answers.

Yeah, absolutely. The numbers don't lie, as we say.

Yeah.

When it gets down to it, follow the numbers.

All right.

Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate the call and it's been wonderful speaking with you.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right folks, again, like, share, comment, offer some love, ask some questions of Courtney in the comments. All the show notes, information, links to Nimble Gravity will be down below. Please check that out. Go see what she's doing. And as always, guys, like, share, subscribe. Come back for another great episode next week on the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Take care. Have a good one.

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