Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S4 Ep09: The Sales Chicken and Marketing Trends 2026
16 Plays3 days ago
In this podcast episode, the hosts share a heartwarming story about 'Knock, knock,' a chicken that became the sales team mascot at BizzyWeb. The story begins with Mary's unique birthday gift, which ultimately saved the chicken from being eaten. The hosts then delve into their favorite aspects of 2025, highlighting their experiences with AI, and discussing the significant role AI plays in modern marketing. Key themes include Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) versus traditional SEO, loop marketing, first-party data utilization, and the importance of well-designed, fast, and functional company websites for both customer engagement and recruitment. They emphasize the ongoing evolution of AI in marketing, including tools like Google's Gemini and the increasing use of AI to improve customer experience and operational efficiency. The hosts also touch on integrating AI into business processes while maintaining human oversight to ensure quality and accuracy.
Show Notes:
00:00 Introduction and Favorite Moments of 2025
00:40 The Story of the Sales Chicken
03:45 AI and Marketing Trends of 2026
05:26 The Rise of AI in Everyday Life
05:55 Special Guests and Sponsor Introduction
10:08 SEO vs AEO: The Evolution of Search
19:48 Loop Marketing: The Future of AI-Driven Strategies
24:32 Human in the Loop: Ensuring AI Accuracy
25:34 Google's AI Tools: Gemini and Beyond
26:18 AI in Marketing: From Ideation to Execution
28:48 Notebook LM: Custom AI Solutions for Clients
32:43 AI's Impact on Entry-Level Jobs
34:05 First Party Data Strategies
36:39 The Importance of a Modern Website
45:50 Future Trends: Agentic AI and CRM Integration
48:01 BizzyWeb's AI-Driven Marketing Approach
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to dial it in a podcast where we talk to fascinating people about marketing sales process improvements and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me Dave Meyer and Trigby Olson of busy web as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:26
Speaker
Let's ring up another episode.
BusyWeb Traditions and Mascot Story
00:00:30
Speaker
Before we get into what we're going to be talking about this episode, can i talk about, i think one of my favorite things of 2025? Yes. I want to talk about our sales chicken.
00:00:43
Speaker
Oh yes. Our sales chicken. This is a great story. So I think this is one of my highlights of 2025. So we hire a woman to work for us as a BDR. Her name's Mary.
00:00:58
Speaker
She's fantastic. She's bright. She's smart. She's thoughtful. And it was her birthday, i think about two months ago now. So as is tradition at Pizzy Web, you get a little something for your birthday. You don't get a big thing. You get a little something.
00:01:15
Speaker
So I figured out how to buy her a gift card to her favorite pizza restaurant in the town she lives in, which is in the Philippines. And they specialize in hot mango pizza.
00:01:30
Speaker
Ooh, that sounds yummy. It sounds hearable. ah But she swears it's great. Okay, fine. So we gave her this gift card for her birthday. The next day, she and I were on a video call together.
00:01:44
Speaker
And there was a strange sound and I'm well aware that it's the middle of the night for her. So I was worried about it. Cause I, we didn't know each other that well at that point. So I didn't know she had a husband at home and things like that. Security base.
00:01:57
Speaker
So I said, well, what's that? She said, oh no, no, don't worry about like, no, I'm worried about it. Are you okay? And she's like, okay, it's my chicken. We said, what? And she said, yeah, we we have a ah chicken.
00:02:10
Speaker
And then, and I said, oh, does it have a name? And she goes, well oh well, yeah, my daughter just named it today. And she said, I said, well, great. What's the chicken? And she said, oh, well, knock is chicken in our language. So she named it knock knock.
00:02:26
Speaker
So what I didn't say to her at that time was you named your chicken and chicken, yeah but okay. So the chicken's name is knock knock. And she said, you know, my daughter actually really likes you because thanks to you, and ah we were going to eat the kill and eat the chicken for, for my birthday. But because of you now, you know, we got to go out for pizza. So now, and now knock knock is here.
00:02:52
Speaker
So. As my wife likes to say, if there's a possibility for me to make something weird, I'm probably going to find it. Yep.
00:03:03
Speaker
And I did. And so Knock Knock is now the the mascot of the sales team at BusyWeb. because if you're going to have a chicken, it really needs to have ah a really amazing name, like not. So.
00:03:15
Speaker
That is correct. It's beautiful. And as a postscript to the story, we did find out that Mary did get a second chicken. And of course the name is. And the name is who's there.
00:03:26
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. So she has knock knock and who's there. So. It was just beautiful. I think it's got to be irritating because she went through a typhoon and so she called and said, I'm okay. it was like, that's fine. But is the chicken, are the chickens okay? Yeah.
00:03:40
Speaker
And she's rolled her eyes. So what was your, what was one of your favorite things in 2025, Dave?
AI in Marketing: Present and Future
00:03:45
Speaker
I think there's been a lot. And one of the fun things that I get to do in addition to running BusyWeb and working with the fine folks in our community is I'm also a speaker for Google.
00:04:00
Speaker
And I got a chance to get out on the road a little bit again this year for AI. And just yesterday, as a matter of fact, I was in Chicago for a large restaurant association meeting.
00:04:15
Speaker
And the stories and the applications that folks are using AI for... especially around marketing is really getting interesting and exciting and just the fun parts of those conversations are that people's eyes are really opening as to how much technology can help you do more better faster and with higher resolution and so we are having a ball with that so that's one of my favorite things and it really was the theme of this past year was ai and all of the grand things um but the general consensus seems to be you haven't seen nothing yet or you ain't seen nothing yet i'm very interested to see what's going to happen in the next year as we continue to see ways that you can just
00:05:07
Speaker
get better results by having an always on assistant intern, if you will, and being able to collaborate at speed and at scale with tools that can help you just think smarter, better, faster. It's super interesting. So I know i broke down and I bought a pro license for chat GPT and I'm constant. I have the, the star key turned on.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah. So you remember a couple of weeks ago, I cut my finger with the mandolin? Yes. And it was pretty bad. And I had the whole thing on my thumb. And my JGBT still makes jokes about, you sure that's a good idea or mandolin safe? so Right. And Trigby Olson gives it one and a half thumbs up. Exactly. Because I'm i'm glad you mentioned Chicago, because that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today, because our special guests today are us.
00:06:05
Speaker
I love us. Before we get to our guest stars, special guest stars, do we have a sponsor for today's show?
Sponsor Highlight and 2026 Marketing Insights
00:06:10
Speaker
You know what, Trigv, we do. And today we are sponsored by fractionaltactical.com.
00:06:18
Speaker
As a fractional CMO, your number one goal is to deliver success to each of your clients. With limited time and resources, you need marketing solutions that are data proven, easy to execute and repeatable.
00:06:30
Speaker
BusyWeb understands the unique challenges fractional marketing executives face. That's why we offer customized solutions for our CMO partners. You tell us the results you need. We create the strategy and MarTech stack to get you there.
00:06:43
Speaker
You have a concrete plan. Your clients get measurable results and you look like a rock star. Everyone wins. Visit fractionaltactical.com to find your fractional tactical marketing partner today.
00:06:55
Speaker
You do the strategy. We get busy. Thanks, Dave. As I said, our special guest star is us. Do you do you have a bio of me you want to read? Trig V. Olson is one of the luminaries of the sales and marketing spaces in the upper Midwest and across the U.S. As a nationally acclaimed speaker and trainer for HubSpot and the...
00:07:20
Speaker
sales bootcamp at HubSpot's Academy. Oh my God, are you reading this or doing off the top of your I'm making it up on the fly. All right. I'm doing pretty saucy today. I've had way too much copy. We're recording, so let's keep going.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yes. Trigby is one of the best voices and the person that has inspired the most creative dials on new clients in the country.
00:07:47
Speaker
Thank you, Trig Olson. Trig Olson Thanks for having me. My guest today is also Dave.
00:07:53
Speaker
So, okay. First question.
00:07:58
Speaker
Beautiful. One of the things that you traditionally really like to do, and it's really important to you, is in addition to doing the podcast, we also do a monthly webinar.
00:08:09
Speaker
And your favorite one of the year traditionally has been the ah the hottest marketing trends for the next year won And so because you had to go to Chicago, i had to pinch hit for you.
00:08:25
Speaker
And I did it, but so this episode is affectionately called Dave's Revenge, where we're going talk about some of the same stuff, but we're going to do it it again. Perfect. And I didn't get a chance to really weigh in all that much, although we collaborated to put together the deck a little bit. I'm excited at the chance to get a chance to weigh in on what's coming up. Because I think, as I mentioned, everything is changing rapidly this this coming year.
00:08:53
Speaker
So I think thematically as I look back at 2025 and what really is gonna happen in 2026, I heard somebody say this, that because of AI, everybody in the world was issued a machine gun.
00:09:09
Speaker
And as a result of that, now most everybody, the only thing that they can really hear ah in the B2B marketing space is the sound of machine gun fire.
00:09:22
Speaker
And there's automation all over the place, all of which is sending some variation of the same email, which is hi, first name. Let me tell you what I do. Can I have 15 minutes of your time?
00:09:34
Speaker
Right. And which really isn't the way to do it. And so, look and it really doesn't do anything other than really tick off people you're going to be working with. So.
00:09:47
Speaker
The big takeaway that I gave on top of our collaborative sharing was that in 2026, marketing is going to be louder than ever, but if you know what you're doing and you're deliberative in your process, marketing can be smarter than ever.
00:10:08
Speaker
Agreed. So the first thing I want to spend some time talking about is a e versus ok SEO. Sure.
SEO Evolution and AI's Role
00:10:17
Speaker
So traditionally, really when ah seo really became relevant was about 2005, 2006. And that was kind of the keyword era where Google would come by and we use Google sort of affectionately because Google is was the command of the search engines at that time. And there was ah other obviously other ones, but.
00:10:38
Speaker
The keywords that you had on your site, then that, depending on how many you had, then that would matter because then you'd turn around and say, okay, how many did you have? And then when somebody is looking for it, that's how Google would define whether or not you're the best fit.
00:10:55
Speaker
What you ended up seeing is people, number one is understanding that, and then number two, abusing that. So you'd see people do some funky stuff like repeating things over and over and over in a process that was called keyword stuffing.
00:11:09
Speaker
So something like, hey, for Minneapolis's best plumber, the people who are looking for a plumber in in Minneapolis are looking for a good plumber in Minneapolis. So what I just said makes absolutely no sense, but said the word plumber in Minneapolis half a dozen times.
00:11:25
Speaker
So Google moved away from that into sort of the second phase. What would you define the second phase as? Yeah. So really the second phase of SEO and I'll help us bridge into AEO in a second is we focused on making sure that search was as useful as possible instead of just looking for signals that would serve as matchmaker.
00:11:53
Speaker
So in essence google and one of the reasons that google has become the search juggernaut and really the internet juggernaut that it is that it made sure that you were doing more than just serving up so sludge yeah and so keyword stuffing doing white text on a white background in order to fool the robots into serving up your pages that's not user first, that's not user forward. And if you click on something expecting something like, so if you're clicking on Minneapolis plumber and you go to a page and it's a dumb page that doesn't have anything to do with what you're actually looking for, you're not going to want to use certainly that link.
00:12:37
Speaker
or the tool that you got there from ever again. right so Google's vested interest is in making sure that search is as useful as possible.
00:12:48
Speaker
So there's this stuff out there called search engine optimization and the SERP, the search engine results page, is a constantly evolving and no time faster than now where wherever you have by based on search intent or what you're trying to do whether you're just researching something whether you're ready to buy whether you're interested in um looking for alternatives to something that you've already got or you're transactional where you're just like literally clicking you have slightly different needs and so now
00:13:27
Speaker
The answer engine optimization or AEO or some call it AIO is more realizing that people are just talking to their devices, to their machines, or using answer engines like ChatGPT or any of the other large language models, LLMs to serve up content.
00:13:50
Speaker
Google is taking it a step further inside of their search and using AI powered by Gemini on top of it to basically give you more context before you ever click on a page or a post.
00:14:05
Speaker
That's good news and bad news for businesses because that's largely if you can find the answer to what you're doing. So if you type in, if you're looking for that plumber because you have a leaky pipe or a leaky toilet,
00:14:19
Speaker
If you type leaky toilet, Google's going to try to help you fix the leaky toilet before you click on a page to go to a website. So we're seeing about 20 to 30% less traffic coming from Google than and we have before. But by the time people do go to pages and websites, that traffic tends to be much more transactional, meaning that they're more bought in and they're ready to buy.
00:14:49
Speaker
I have a really good example, my life that I used for a answer engine optimization this year. So my wife is typically very, very hard on cars. That's don't write us emails. I'm not saying all women. So she's typically very hard on cars. We had to do a fourth brake job and 50,000 miles on her SUV. And finally we had said, Hey, this is enough. This would just have a bad car.
00:15:14
Speaker
So. What I had learned through a friend, we'll call him Brendan de was that most people are using AI right now to help with decision-making. So in typically what we would call the evaluative process, people are looking for answers. Right now they're going directly to the answer. So in my case, what I did is I sat down with my wife and my AI and I said, what do you want out of a car? She said, would like a hybrid and like a third seat. I want leather seats and i want, I want a moon roof.
00:15:51
Speaker
And that that's it. I said, okay, great. We asked AI, came back with three different options. Said, okay, great. What's the one with the most headroom? And it told us that because I'm like a big roomy car. And we got that. That was the car that we ended up buying.
00:16:12
Speaker
So we went with what, what was really noticeable, I think, is that the idea of thinking about what we wanted and we went right to the actual decision. we didn't look at We didn't look at four or five cars. We didn't go to different car dealerships. We didn't meet four or five different people and all that jazz. We went one place, we bought one car, and that was the end of it.
00:16:37
Speaker
So i think that's I tell that story because I think as we're dealing with businesses who are wanting to take advantage of answer optimization, and that's what we mean by answer engine,
00:16:50
Speaker
It's sort of a catch-all term for all AI is how how can you really take advantage of this? You can't stop doing SEO because that matters, but you also, in addition, need to be considerably more specific.
00:17:04
Speaker
right So in the case that, in the example that I give, I needed somebody that said, this car has third row seats. This car has leather seats. This car had he has heated seats because she now has figured out an Apple CarPlay. That was the other thing that she wanted and was a hybrid those five things. And if those five things weren't in the schema and the presentation of the website, we never would have found the car.
00:17:28
Speaker
So having those things as specifics means that then when you look using an AI search engine, it's going to give you a specific result based on exactly what you want.
00:17:39
Speaker
Right. And I want to go back to a super high level thing that I said earlier about just search in general and AI is You got to think of AI and really anything online now as people are leaning on this like they're college intern, that they're not doing anything. So your job as a marketer or our job as marketers is to make the job of the search engine or ChatGPT or insert your tool here as easy as possible.
00:18:14
Speaker
So... if you write your website's content in exactly the same way that people are going to be asking. So if you list those attributes for Trigvi's wife's car,
00:18:28
Speaker
on your website in clean language and plain language, if you offer up Q&A formats because people are going to be asking questions and you're going to be giving them answers, that's when you will be more likely to show up in an AI-optimized world.
00:18:43
Speaker
So make your website as easy as possible for people to use, and AI is going to Hoover that up, they're going to serve it up, and they're actually going to answer the question pulling right from your website And so, like I said before, people are more likely to just click to buy once they get there because the AI is doing that heavy lifting. That intern has done all of the research for you and is now going to serve up the right answer.
00:19:10
Speaker
So it's your job to backload that tool with all of the right answers. And there's more to it, but that's that's definitely something that we're going to see a lot more because the the ability to get a click through, I think statistically I heard that 60% of all searches don't don't resolve in a click anymore.
00:19:28
Speaker
Right. So people are finding the answer they want, but they're not necessarily going deeper unless you invite them. So that's really the first big trend that we had identified as really important going into 2026.
Loop Marketing and Data Accuracy
00:19:41
Speaker
And the other one is, the next one I should say is, what exactly is this whole Mobius strip of marketing now, Dave? So the big thing that we learned with HubSpot this year is what Trivi's alluding to, and that is that you can now use AI to enhance and speed up the results that you get from a marketing perspective. And so this is called loop marketing.
00:20:07
Speaker
And instead of the old way that we used to promote was basically the flywheel of inbound marketing, right? So you attract, you engage, you delight. And by attracting more people, you're able to engage those people. And then you delight those people. They come back for more and refer more business, which leads to attracting, right? So.
00:20:26
Speaker
Now there's another wrinkle, and that wrinkle is rapid redevelopment or red but redeployment over AI. So I'm going to go through the four steps because TrigView was nice enough to put together a slide that handily puts this put this together for us. But you go from express to which is the act of simply sharing the content that you're trying to get found for. So you could think of this as the attract phase, but you're literally expressing what the problems are that you're trying to solve for your clients, what the content is that's most likely to deliver those good leads in B2B or those purchases in B2C.
00:21:08
Speaker
And then from express, you move down to tailor. So you're customizing to each individual market by the kinds of people they are, but also their search intents.
00:21:20
Speaker
So search intent, are you trying to research? Are you ready to buy? All of that stuff. So how close are you to the willingness to pull the trigger or to fill out a form?
00:21:31
Speaker
That's Taylor. And then you go to Amplify. Once you have that right market, it's your job to backfill with advertising or additional content or any of the other things that can lead to more traffic.
00:21:45
Speaker
And once you've amplified and you get that traffic, you start converting people, then you go to the fourth and final phase of loop marketing, and that's evolve. You're looking at AI and you're saying, what else am I missing?
00:21:57
Speaker
I say this a lot from our friends at Atomic Elevator and their tool, are our radar, is an AI tool that helps you basically optimize your marketing tools.
00:22:10
Speaker
And what they really focus on is evolving messaging over the course of rapid iteration. So you're literally saying, what am I missing? And help me increase the resolution or identify additional opportunities or find blind spots that I'm not considering.
00:22:28
Speaker
And so you go through those four phases, express, tailor, amplify, evolve over and over again. And you go instead of just building content and then engaging with your clients, you're vetting that content constantly to make sure that it hits on multiple angles for multiple ideals.
00:22:50
Speaker
and that you're looking for additional ways to serve your customers at all times. So it's more comprehensive and also faster because you're not running a series of A-B tests that it takes weeks to get back on or get data back from, but you're literally running rapid data and asking this massive large language model, this big algorithm, what am I missing and what else should I consider?
00:23:17
Speaker
There's a caveat that's really important though, which is if you're dealing from a data set that's incorrect or messy. Yes. It's going to get whole, so much bad worse or whatever. like kind of say Worser. It's going to get worse because if you do it well, then you're going to present the right thing at the right time to the right person.
00:23:42
Speaker
him If you don't have the basis set up, you really need a CRM in order to do this. Right. So, If you don't have that data that you're pulling from, it's going to be the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.
00:23:55
Speaker
Full step. Right. Or it might just be, so it might just be wrong because that's something in that it shouldn't have. Right. And there was an old, or not an old, it's old now because it's more than six months old, but there were some folks in the,
00:24:09
Speaker
that that were running a large lawsuit. And they went to their chat to PT and they filled it out and asked for some examples, some case law that would give examples for why they were right. And one of the samples that was, or one of the cases that was cited was finders versus keepers. Yeah. You're actually talking about Michael Cohen.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah. Donald Trump's former lawyer did finders versus keepers. Yes. So not great. Right. So you need to keep a human in the loop approach. you need to vet all of this stuff and look at it and say, is it actually right? I think I've told that story half a dozen times. And I think literally half the time I tell that somebody says, so was that not a real case?
00:24:51
Speaker
Jack and Jill were also it's like, yeah, it was like the time my son told the visiting pastor at my church, My middle name is Joseph. Do you want to know what my dad's middle name is? And she said, sure. And and he said, my dad's middle name is danger.
00:25:06
Speaker
And she looked at to me and went, oh, is that Czechoslovakian? No. I guess it's Don j Yeah, no. and I think the neat thing about Loop is that if you do it well and you do it right, it's going to be considerably more impactful.
00:25:21
Speaker
Right. But the the most important thing is to have your data set, right? Pulling and data data organization, data governance is really the key word for 2026.
00:25:33
Speaker
Absolutely. I want to move to the next one because I know you you've been speaking with Google and you know a lot more about, and you even alluded to it, how people are using AI. I'd love to hear some of the stories you heard about the application of AI. Yeah.
00:25:47
Speaker
For sure. First and full disclosure, I am a speaker and trainer for Google and I show people how to use Gemini to launch and get the most out of their marketing and their businesses. Part of what I do is partially colored by a deep affection for Google's products, but all of the LLMs, large language models, all of the AI that you're here about run essentially the same.
00:26:14
Speaker
So when I talk about any of these, I'm talking about all of them. So really what AI is doing, especially in the marketing space, is it's accelerating the ability and wiping out the terror of the blank page.
00:26:31
Speaker
So there's no more writer's block or there's no more excuse for writer's block. You can ideate, brainstorm, come up with ideas, chat. You can literally talk to tools like Gemini and ask it, what are the things that I'm not considering?
00:26:47
Speaker
And I have a number of case studies in the trainings that I deliver where business owners are literally going in with the problem and talking to these tools and grabbing their cameras and taking a picture and asking it, what am I missing or what do I need to consider for these things? So it's multimodal, meaning it's image-based, it's audio-based, you can upload code, you can go to websites.
00:27:13
Speaker
And so it's exactly like having a quote unquote human that you can just collaborate with in this space. Although that human happens to have much of the entire tabulated knowledge of the universe built into it.
00:27:31
Speaker
So if if you're a Marvel fan, it's like Jarvis, right? Where, you know, Tony and the Soot is shooting through the air and Jarvis is saying you have an 18% likelihood of surviving through this and then it keeps going down.
00:27:47
Speaker
These tools are doing the same thing where they're telling you, okay, here are the things you need to consider. This is really ranging from people that are at the easiest level, just help me find or help me brainstorm five new blog posts that I can do to engage potential plumbing clients or people that are shopping for mommy SUVs in the Midwest up to help me code a interactive platform quiz that will answer the questions and gently guide people toward my particular service.
00:28:26
Speaker
So it's so crazy. And one of the things that I've learned and really come to enjoy is it's not so much the overall AI tools or Chad GPT or Gemini as a whole that are exciting. It's the limited or the specific applications for those.
00:28:48
Speaker
So one of the things that we're nerding out about had busy web right now is we are setting up notebook LM notebooks for each of our clients. And notebook L M is a subset of Gemini that only works against specific data. So you load up, for example, we load up all of our clients marketing results.
00:29:12
Speaker
We load up all of their blog posts. We load up a few of their competitors and we load up the overall strategy and the personas into this tool. And then we can ask Gemini through notebook L M,
00:29:26
Speaker
Tell me what I'm missing. Tell me how we're performing. Tell me the things that I could do to pivot against what my competitor just started doing. And instead of going to the entire universe and offering you things that aren't relevant, it's actually pulling from your data.
AI's Impact on Jobs and Communications
00:29:44
Speaker
And it'll create a podcast for you where you can interact with that podcast and break in like a radio caller. And it'll do videos and presentations and all kinds of crazy stuff. So it's so much more interactive and so much deeper.
00:30:00
Speaker
And you can also list this out. So there are business owners that instead of getting calls from their team all the time about HR things and operations manuals, they load up the operations manual into Notebook LM in our in this example.
00:30:17
Speaker
And then their team can just ask, Can I take off a half day on Friday and what do I need to do? And it'll go right to that part of the ops manual and deliver the answer without that without that executive needing to go through and answer 18 emails that day.
00:30:33
Speaker
what are what's What's the most helpful thing that you've used AI for this year? For me, I think it is notebook yeah because i tend to be a little bit deeper and nerdier in what I do. I would love to say that it would be things like images and Nano Banana or any of the other big image generators, but there's still a lot of...
00:30:54
Speaker
problems with image generation or video generation gosh trigly we were going through in our last strategy session at busy web and you were crafting full songs for us based on themes that we were discussing if that's it's it's If you can imagine it, you can come up with some rough draft of it using AI now.
00:31:21
Speaker
So the fact that we now have a rapid development prototyping tool is super exciting and it speeds things up. It also makes it really dangerous for people that are either not taking the time to vet that content in the finders versus keepers modality. Yeah. Or that are taking it at gospel or at face value.
00:31:42
Speaker
And there's copyright issues with that stuff. If you just grab something off of chat GPT and tell it, write me a blog and you republish it, that's not your content. You can't copyright that. If someone else rips that page from your website, it's you can't claim copyright on that and tell them to stop using it because you didn't have the right to copyright. You didn't write it in the first place. Yeah. Or if you use Nano Banana to generate a logo, you need at least seven like substantive changes to that logo in order to make it copyrightable.
00:32:17
Speaker
True. Otherwise... competitor X can just swipe your logo because you didn't own it in the first place. So there's all kinds of stuff that go into this. You need to maintain a brain and make sure that you're looking and offering that human in the loop kind of extra expertise.
00:32:36
Speaker
So I think the, and I'm going to get a little soapboxy here for a second, but for the i guess owarts yeah The thing that's most likely to be dramatically affected in the near term for AI is like entry level jobs in marketing or basically across the board because AI is doing the things that interns used to do.
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. no It's easy to get dumb answers from AI. What's less, what's more rare and still essential is expertise.
00:33:12
Speaker
And so like I have two college kids and I'm trying to get them to the point where they can become experts as quickly as possible because that's where their next job is going to be or their first job.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I think the most useful thing that I found is understanding the nuance of language. In my job, ah I get inflammatory emails and sometimes they come out of left field. And so what I've been doing that I find has been really helpful is giving it to giving it to ai and saying, where are they coming from?
00:33:47
Speaker
And then get a ah pretty dispassionate, reasonable, Hey, this is where this is the, what this person is really saying and what they're concerned about and what, where, what you need to think about your response. So.
00:34:01
Speaker
We've been chitty chatting for a while. We got so much so much more to talk about. Do you want to jump into first-party data strategies? Sure. Yeah, I think, and we can go through these at more high level because some of these are the ones that we were most excited about. I think we front-loaded Trigby. Yeah, AI especially.
00:34:17
Speaker
Yeah, you obviously I could talk for hours about this stuff and I do, but first party data is important in the world now because there's just no substitute for real data. And that's the difference between like coming up with content that you own and not having the real
00:34:49
Speaker
Just, we have a wall between us now and real data and content. So if you're looking at your phone data and opens in emails, for example, right?
00:35:02
Speaker
iOS, like five years ago now, made it so that any email that is received on an iPhone shows up as an open. So open rates in email marketing are essentially useless.
00:35:17
Speaker
because all of a sudden you're like, oh, all of my open rates went up by 80%. That just means that 80% of people are now looking at their phones when they're looking at emails. So first party data, getting connections where you're actually connected, where there's not a cookie involved or there's some sort of a ask app not to track in there, is that means that you actually need to get a real click or a real interaction from someone.
00:35:45
Speaker
in order to know if that data is actually useful or usable. So you can't just go by what the devices are telling us anymore. You need to actually work on and focus on actual interactions.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. And I know there's a lot more into first party data, but it's basically that it's that old concept of the giver's game. That the most valuable thing is that there is the thing that somebody gives you.
00:36:13
Speaker
Right. And you you have to show some value for that. And then you're off to the races, but lying lists, artificially inflating yeah anything yet There are places you can get a thousand YouTube followers for 20 bucks.
00:36:28
Speaker
They're not going to stay. it's it If you need to lie with statistics, figure out a better way to do it. Right. It's just yucky. And AI makes it easier to do it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:36:39
Speaker
I think the one that, the big trend that we you saw a lot this year that I think is going to happen more in 2025 is, 2026, excuse me, is is the continued doubling and tripling down on the importance of a website.
Website Quality and Brand Perception
00:36:53
Speaker
Yep. And it's not just as a lead generator, but it's also as a retention and recruitment device. Because if you've got an old website and your website doesn't render great, then that's it indicative of your culture.
00:37:10
Speaker
Right. That you're not an innovator, you're not focused on moving forward. And so statistically, what I found was that 25% of all job seekers right now are rejecting opportunities based on a website's usability.
00:37:26
Speaker
Because if you can't get the website right, you know, you're not going to come back, you're not going to want to but do that. You're not going to want to go there. You're not even going to want to give people the time to die. Right.
00:37:36
Speaker
which I think is really a terrifying subject because there are so many people who just want to rest on their laurels and think that, oh, AI is going to solve everything for me.
00:37:47
Speaker
Yeah, but AI is pulling from things. It's pulling from data sets. It's pulling from your website. you The website is the thing that you have the most control over your own brand narrative. And if you're not getting it right or it's hard to use,
00:38:04
Speaker
then that's almost impossible right to really be effective. So the things that we've been preaching that are more important than any anything really is number one is making sure that your website is readable and fast on mobile devices because people are going in and out way, way, way too fast and they're moving way, way too fast. If it's hard, they're gone.
00:38:30
Speaker
Yep. Finding what you need is important. I know this is something that Andy on our team really appreciates and preaches. And I added those two extra ums in there just to screw with him because he also edits the podcast.
00:38:45
Speaker
But really be able to figure out what people want to do and where they want to go as quickly as possible. Sometimes we refer to the refer to it as the buyer's journey. And I think in 2026, it's going to become more clear than ever the importance of that.
00:39:00
Speaker
And then making sure your design's accessible, making sure that it's modern, making sure that it's good looking and that people can, you want people to do things when they come to your website, they need to be able to figure out what that is quickly.
00:39:15
Speaker
Right. And as somebody who sells websites has sold websites for a long time. One of my tests that I give people is i load their website up on a, on a computer and say, okay. And I put their laptop in front of him and I timed them say, okay, what am I asking you to do here?
00:39:34
Speaker
And they'll go.
00:39:39
Speaker
but Oh, no, I mean, I want to do this. that Too late. your Your customers are gone. so Making that clarity, easy forms, don't be using a lot of things, having live chat that can do some things for you.
00:39:55
Speaker
I'm still, I think I'm still waiting. I'm still 272nd in line on Disney Plus in order to pick up Google. I'm sorry, pick up Hulu. And then not just leaving it.
00:40:09
Speaker
Doing a continuous improvement, continually getting better, continually using data in order to improve. So fundamentally though, as we're talking about this as a recruitment, as a recruitment and a retention device is have you asked your employees, do you like our website?
00:40:28
Speaker
Right. Would you feel comfortable sharing our website and would you do so with pride in your voice to say, hey here's where I work.
00:40:38
Speaker
And the, and if the answer is no boy, it's sure cheaper to change your website than it is to change people. Right. And at the end of the day, what you're really trying to provide is, is lifetime value, not only in your customers, but also in your employees and using that value as a North star. And so if they're proud in it, they're sharing it when they're looking for new people, when you're looking for new people,
00:41:07
Speaker
They're going to actively help in that. But if the website sucks, man, you're just kind of done. Right. So I think everybody's sort of focused on using AI to make websites quicker, quicker, but they're not good, good, good. And at the end of the day, it needs to be a source of pride for the organization just as much as the logo is.
00:41:29
Speaker
because it's gonna be on everything and it's really your entry point in the whole world. It's a softer and much deeper touch now. And so having the ability to Have your website not only look good and be proud be something that you're proud of, but something that does a job and the job should be helping you to grow and scale your business is important, especially in the kinds of businesses that we work with. We mostly work in business to business and services.
00:41:58
Speaker
And so those are harder questions. It's not, you're not going to Amazon and saying, do I want to buy this? Click now and you're done. for most of our clients we're building trusts before we make several hundred thousand dollar purchase yes and if your website doesn't instill trust because we haven't thought about it in years you're missing out on massive opportunities to grow Or if you have a customer that's 50% of your world and you say, I don't need a new website because I have a customer that I've had for 20 years, that customer is begging to be cherry picked by somebody who actually cares about them and what their needs are and to give them a better customer customer experience than you have.
00:42:45
Speaker
So. it Wrapping it up, it really means that having a really championship caliber web website now because of AI, because of recruitment strategies, because of retenment ah retention strategies, trend-wise, it it's even more important.
00:43:04
Speaker
Agreed. So bring it all together for us. What is what does a really integrated approach look like for marketing and coming up in the next year?
Key Marketing Strategies and Future AI
00:43:14
Speaker
So there's probably four big things that we need to look at. We've talked about most of them already, but as we're looking towards 2026 and beyond, I think there's some themes. First of course is AI is here and it's not going anywhere and you need to write and update your website.
00:43:34
Speaker
to take advantage of search that's happening in a more conversational tone and across other things than just traditional Google so listings, Google search.
00:43:46
Speaker
Because not only is Google now competing with ChatGPT and Anthropic and all kinds of other things, but... Google itself is delivering content differently and it's trying to help more and getting more content in front of the customer before they click on your website or before people click. So you need to be more useful and thinking about AEO as well as SEO is super important.
00:44:14
Speaker
Loop marketing is a great theme and something that we should think about.
00:44:21
Speaker
Yep. And while the police drives past Dave's office. Right. They're down now. So loop marketing is incredibly important. Search for you continues. Yes. and They have not found me yet.
00:44:32
Speaker
Customer experience makes and breaks companies. And so thinking about this and making sure that you look great, that you serve all of the themes and that your website and all of your marketing is really important.
00:44:47
Speaker
built to help you converse and do the job of your business. Websites aren't brochures. They were never brochures, you know after like 1999. Except for that one guy who paid us to make a brochure.
00:45:01
Speaker
Exactly. But you need to your rule utilize the entire power of the web, especially as people there there's millennials, Gen Z, Gen alpha but are just digital native and they're going to just use their phone and, or probably just talk to their device instead of doing a traditional search. So, isn't it interesting how we've, we've gone in the, in our.
00:45:30
Speaker
Because we're old now. in Phones have gone from being something that you talked to people on to being something that you only used to play games and text to now we're getting back to talking to people. i can Well, you're not talking to people as much as you're talking to machines now. You're talking to a personal robot.
00:45:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's a pair of... One of the things that I didn't get a chance to talk about, Trigby, is the next thing that we're going to see and that's going to pop next year is agentic AI.
00:45:59
Speaker
Yes. So you're not only going to ask Gemini or ChadGPT, what's the best option for this or help me find this? If you were Trigvi and his wife looking for a car, they would do more than just tell me what. They would say, find me a car.
00:46:21
Speaker
Call the dealership of the best car and broker a deal and then connect you when the deal is ready to be signed. So there's Project Astra at Google that is just fascinating on this, where you're literally talking and it does all of the things that we've been talking about today.
00:46:39
Speaker
um There's another project, and I'm blanking on the name of it, but it includes drones. So you know that's five or six five or six years out, think. Is that Amazon actually delivering my package, my drone?
00:46:53
Speaker
It's basically that. Yeah. But in in Dallas and a couple other markets, they actually have delivery services that it just, it goes into a preloaded drone delivery service where it connects the boxes and it drops it off on your doorstep. And then they go back and they recharge and the next box is preloaded into the box.
BusyWeb's AI Projects and Conclusion
00:47:14
Speaker
It's just nuts. Yes. So this is getting even faster and crazier. So agentic is something to think about and to know about. And then of course, making sure that your data is aligned with your content, which is where CRM comes in, is going to be incredibly important because the more you know about your customer and the more you can serve the customer before they're your customer, but also after,
00:47:41
Speaker
the better you're going to be able to take advantage of new things as they arise. I think that's the critical thing is keeping your customers needs at the forefront. AI is not going to replace you. It's going to help you deliver her on the promise that you made to your customers.
00:47:59
Speaker
Correct. To keep them coming back. Correct. So, Trigvy, when we round these out every episode, you give us the opportunity to or you give the guests the opportunity to do naked self-promotion. Yes. I'm going to do us one better, and I'm going to promote Trigvy because Trigvy delivered a very similar topic set to what we've just talked through.
00:48:22
Speaker
And that presentation, that busy webinar from last from two days ago, is available on our YouTube channel. So if you go to youtube.com slash busyweb, you can see Trigvi in all his glory going through all of the slides with the actual content um up on here where presented visually.
00:48:41
Speaker
So make sure that you subscribe to that. I'll also say, if you haven't checked out the blog on BusyWeb at marketing.busyweb.com, I'd love for you to check that out because we go deep on a lot of these things now. We're trying and we're doing, we're very much, to use a semi-grotesque phrase, we're eating our own dog food at BusyWeb. And we use everything that we do for our clients, we try first through BusyWeb.
00:49:10
Speaker
So if you want to see examples of a company that are really taking ai first as at 100 strength look at the kinds of content that we're putting out because we go deep and we try to be as useful and helpful as possible i'm really proud of the work that our team is doing on our blogs on our videos i think the podcast is doing great and so if you're not subscribed to the things that we do Certainly if you're listening this long into our podcast, I hope that you are, but check us out and make sure that you're subscribed to us everywhere because we, one of our core values is education.
00:49:48
Speaker
And we really do believe that the more we can help people and educate and inform the better off we're going to be. And the better off you're going to be. i think most people are listening at this point for gratuitous Rob Felber.
00:50:01
Speaker
chan So there it is. Yeah. Well, thank you, Dave. And I, hopefully I did it justice. You did. That was great. I listened to it. So loved it. Great. Wonderful.
00:50:13
Speaker
This has been another episode of dial it in with our special guest stars, us. He's Dave. I'm Trigby. And we are, as always produced by Nicole Fairclough and Andy Watowski.
00:50:24
Speaker
And with apologies to Tony Kornheiser, we will also try to do better the next time. Thanks everybody.