AI Tools for SEO and Content Engineers Can Trust

Damon Pistulka  00:03

All right everyone, welcome once again it is Friday and you know what that means? It is time for manufacturing ecommerce success. I am one of your co host Damon Pustaka. That pretty guy right over there. Curt Anderson, co host with the most is gonna be helping us today. And we’ve got Dale in the house today curl talking about him. Introducing we’re gonna be talking about AI tools for SEO and content. Engineers can trust I am so excited. I tell you what. Every time that video starts to play on Friday, it’s just like the first time for me, Curt. It’s I’m so excited for today. Oh,

Curt Anderson  00:45

to just get a good night’s sleep last night. Yes, I did. You went to bed early like I told you to. Yep. Okay, good because it’s the dude this is a Monster Monster program here. So I am just so honored and thrilled to introduce our dear friend Dale Bertrand . Happy Friday. How are you doing?

Dale Bertrand  01:03

I’m doing great and I can feel the energy so I’m so excited for the invite. I can’t wait to get into it.

Curt Anderson  01:09

Well, you know in what a perfect business name man I was mere fact that we need to dive into we’ve got the CEO from fire&spark. So we’re going to take a deep dive into AI and so guys drop a note in the chat box. Let us know that you’re there. You absolutely want to connect with Dale. We’re this this is going to be a monster masterclass on AI DL as we dive in, I’ve got a boatload of questions for you. We’re gonna have a lot of fun here. But before we get started, I have I do have one question for you. Is now you’re in New England guy is I understand right, boss? Yes, I’m

Dale Bertrand  01:42

up in Boston right now.

Curt Anderson  01:44

Okay, so question for you when you were little guy growing up. When your little guy grown up? Who was your hero? Who was your hero?

Dale Bertrand  01:54

You know, I think back to the 86 Mets because I was a big baseball fan. So I

Curt Anderson  01:59

think back to like, how they beat the Boston Red Sox.

Dale Bertrand  02:02

Yes, I’m up in Boston now. So I don’t want people to know that I started life as a Mets fan. But I think back to the 86 Mets with Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra and all the rest like they were really my heroes, because I was big into baseball cards and all that,

Curt Anderson  02:19

man, Doc Gooden. Yes. Man, what a great boy. Mookie Wilson you know, that was that was a great season. And they did you know, so any of your friends in Boston, we won’t let them know that.

Dale Bertrand  02:34

Yeah, just don’t mention the buckler ball. I mean, we just don’t want to go down that Yeah, we don’t want to

Curt Anderson  02:38

go down that that rabbit hole but All right, great. So Damon, we have a baseball hat. We’re huge baseball fan. So Dale love that answer. Document and strawberry. What? You know what, uh, what loaded season? What was it about that team that you found so inspiring. I

Dale Bertrand  02:54

just remember that we didn’t exactly have faith that they were going to be able to do it but they pulled it off in the end with all of the drama The World Series that year all the drama. Yeah, that’s what I remember.

Curt Anderson  03:08

Yeah. I think Gary Carter, I cannot like man, I can almost rattle off that whole team. Damon, you remember those? 86 months, right?

Damon Pistulka  03:13

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy, fun. Baseball time. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  03:17

they had they matter of fact, they run like they had thin thin ice. And then unfortunately, you know, Game Six broke loose. And the Mets end up winning the World Series. So Dell great answer, man. We have the 86 Mets on the show. So that was great. So let’s go here. So Dale is I understand are you Deema Did you know we have an ivy Leaguer here Dale, do I understand this correctly? Did you go to brown? That’s

Dale Bertrand  03:40

what I hear. Yeah, I met my wife there. So she have not been been together forever. And I have my 25th year reverse anniversary coming up. So it’s our reunion. So our 25th year reunion coming up? Not very

Curt Anderson  03:57

well, all right. So you go to Brown in electrical engineering. And as I understand bachelor’s and master’s degree, do I have that correct?

Dale Bertrand  04:03

Yes, computer engineering. So I spent half of my time in computer science the other half of my time in electrical engineering and a little bit of time in the AI lab and in grad school at Brown. So, so that was my academic training.

Curt Anderson  04:17

Well, awesome. So hey, Damon, we got a couple of friends. Yeah, we

Damon Pistulka  04:20

do want to say shout out to Gary wood today. Stop my Gary. Hi from Victor New York. Thanks for stopping by in Whitney Houston stopping by Happy Friday from Houston Whitney. Thanks for stopping by and dropping a comment.

Curt Anderson  04:35

Happy Friday guys. Hey, we’re here with Dale Whitney. You caught Dale at the industrial marketing summit in Austin, Texas. And so again, you’re out there drop us a note. Let us know what you’re here. If you have any questions about SEO, about AI or the combo of both we have the authority the expert, the guru on this topic here. Dale the CEO from fire and spark so Dale, let’s go here. So you go to brown. So Damon, you know we of not being the smartest guys in the room. We are absolutely not the smart guys in the room today. So you go to brown electrical engineering. How what? How did how does somebody go from electrical engineering to becoming an SEO expert? Can you walk us down that path? Oh, that’s

Dale Bertrand  05:15

a Yeah, that’s a long story. So I, I got involved with a startup while I was still in school. So I was just very lucky that have one of my professors knew someone was starting a company, so I worked with them. And that was in the chip space. So that company ended up getting sold like right after I graduated. So I was lucky that I had like, you know, a little bit of cash, like my some fu money, like right after school. And that allowed me and for those of you who don’t know what fu money is, it means you have just enough money in the bank that you can quit whatever job if you’re not happy with it. So you say fu to your boss and walk away because I don’t need this job. You can take it and shove it. But but other than that, so I’ve

Curt Anderson  05:59

never had that problem, Dell, but yeah, I mean, university graduate

Damon Pistulka  06:05

problem. That’s

Dale Bertrand  06:05

what that is. Yeah, Curt is just like fu doesn’t matter if he has money. And so we I had a bunch of opportunities to work at some startups. So I ended up doing engineering, I was I was writing code. But back then, my specialty was writing software simulators of semiconductor devices. So I did that for like the first eight years of my career, but then I really hit a wall. And I hit a wall, in part because my boss at the time was a drunk, sociopath, but I just didn’t enjoy programming, and you know, sitting in front of a computer, and like typing all day, every day, you know, wondering if my boss was going to come over to my cube and say something inappropriate. But um, so I decided that I wanted a career that was more relational, like more people oriented. So I basically, I basically quit that job like I was burnt out, because at that point, eight years into my career, I had worked at three different startups. Those are like nights and weekends, just like a pressure cooker type environment. One of those startups, we built a supercomputer for the NSA, which is, which is a totally different story. But that that was the height of my engineering career. And so then I ended up moving over from like semiconductor manufacturing, to marketing. And I was able to make that move, because I had a technical background. And I did it at exactly the right time, when digital marketing was really starting to become a thing in the early 2000s. And because digital marketing was becoming a thing, they they basically wanted a technical guy that they could hire on to their marketing team. So I was hired on as a consultant to several marketing teams. And that’s how I got my start in marketing. And I kept that going and started firing sparks. So now we’re an agency and I’ve got a few people working with me. But in the end, people were hiring me more for SEO than anything else because of my AI background. Because I studied AI in grad school. So that’s how I ended up with fire and spark. Now we focus on SEO strategy and only SEO strategy. We don’t pretend to be world class at anything other than SEO strategy. And we we’re like, 20 people in Boston now. Wow.

Curt Anderson  08:21

Okay. All right.

Damon Pistulka  08:24

What what did he just say here, though, Curt? What did he just say? That just rings true with what you say all the time. Nice down until it hurts. Yeah, we’re only good at SEO. That’s awesome. Dale.

Curt Anderson  08:38

Yeah, I absolutely love that in combination things. Dean. We’ve got a couple more friends. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  08:42

Someone’s shouting out from snail Florida. Thanks for stopping by today. And we got lobbyists from Nigeria. Thanks for stopping by today.

Curt Anderson  08:53

Happy Friday. We’ve got a great Hey, and we got Dells got to see this comment here from Whitney. Yes, Dale session was mind blowing. I agree. So guys, we’ve got Dale here CEO fire aspire, highly sought after keynote speaker Dale, I have to I’m gonna I don’t know if I’m going off script or not. Ai, you did AI in college? Did I catch that

Dale Bertrand  09:14

correctly? Yeah. In grad school, what I was working in a lab at Brown. It’s the the laboratory for the engineering of men machine systems. But what that means is computer vision. So we were doing projects in the medical space, which was segmenting medical images to find tumors and then measure the volume of tumors automatically. And then also, we were working for the Department of Defense, like looking at, they were like images of airplanes. So we were building algorithms that would detect whether the planes were Friend or Foe where they military or civilian, that sort of thing.

Curt Anderson  09:47

Wow. So I mean, you’re truly on the cutting edge. I mean, it’s like AI is kind of in your DNA. You’re your pioneer here, right? Yeah,

Dale Bertrand  09:56

I mean, I’ve been following AI for a while. On time, I mean, the algorithms that I worked on in grad school are just obsolete at this point. Yeah. But I’ve been following it for a while. And more recently, we all know that Chachi T is a thing. And there are a number of large language models and other predictive models that are useful in the field of marketing. So we’ve we’ve adopted as much as, as we can. And I’ve actually gotten into AI consulting on top of the SEO consulting, to help like marketing, sales teams and operations teams, you know, implement AI and make the most of it.

Curt Anderson  10:31

Well, absolutely love it. I love that You’ve piqued my curiosity in the 2000s. When you got when your digital marketing, you know, again, you’re a pioneer in digital marketing, when you got your career started in that, were you heavy, were you right off the bat off the gate SEO, were you doing a lot with pay per click, but what was early 2000?

Dale Bertrand  10:50

So when I got into digital marketing, I was curious about everything. And I was coming from like, a technical and analytical background. So I did a, I built a bunch of websites that were hand coded, I did some projects for clients, there was one client where I built like a webinar system for them similar to stream yard, but with many, many less features, because they wanted their own proprietary webinar software. And I did a lot with analytics and AdWords back in the day, like advertising on Google. And then I also did SEO and content and email. But that was in the very beginning. I pretty quickly focused on SEO. Right?

Curt Anderson  11:30

Did you did you miss the electrical? You know, when you went to college for electrical engineering? I don’t know. If you, you know, saw where you are today? Did you miss that engineering side? Or have you been just purely able to incorporate that engineering side? As you’re targeting engineers? Oh,

Dale Bertrand  11:46

Big time, big time, I missed that. I still do. So I think like leaving the engineering profession and decided like, I had to go cold turkey, on programming, tinkering. So I tell people, it’s like, making that transition was like cutting off my right arm? Or was it really? Oh, yeah. Because that’s, that’s how I that was my identity was as an engineer, and my, how I related to the world was was through code. And even the way that I run my business now very process oriented, we’re obviously using technology as much as we possibly can for the marketing work that we do. So you know, my brain still thinks like an engineer, but I like to think that I’m engineering business processes and marketing programs and relationships. You know, more than back when I was engineering, you know, electrons moving through integrated circuits and stuff like that. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  12:39

I love this. So, you know, you seem very, you know, process oriented, you know, high energy, great speaker with an engineering mind. You know, I, as I understand you started fire and spark in 2008. Ish. Is that Yes. Okay. I don’t know about you. But like, there’s some scary times going on in 2008, maybe, you know, some people could say, hey, great time to start a business. Maybe not a little scary time. With your engineering mind. Was there any, you know, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, excited? Risky, scary? What was that? It’s all

Dale Bertrand  13:09

of the above all of the above? I had been thinking about what type of business I wanted to start for a long time. Yeah, around 2008, there was a financial crisis. And I saw that coming because we had some issues at my, at the startup I was working for, before the financial crisis really hit. And then also, that was right around the time that I got married, I knew that we were going to be having a baby. So I was thinking to myself, like, I’ve got to do something now before I have family and a house and you know, diminished job prospects keeping me where where I was, so I felt like it was now or never at that particular time in my life.

Curt Anderson  13:53

Yeah. So so when you from starting your business, and as you just mentioned, 20 people strong now? Has it been? You know, do you feel like you’ve been, you know, rate net lane? Have you had like an evolution just as you evolve with new technology? Or what’s it look like? What does your business look like today, compared to 2008? Well, so

Dale Bertrand  14:11

the thing about the business, it’s like it very much is like a sole proprietor type of business, where it was just me in the very beginning. And now it’s, you know, 2020 less, and I’m the sole owner. So the business can really only grow at the rate that I grow in terms of, like my ability to sell and find new customers and how to manage the operations and all that. So So over that time, I think I’ve really been focused on my own growth as as like a business person, and trying to figure out how to how to get to where I want, but that’s the hardest realization which is like, you’re limited by your own, like biases, or, you know, disinterest in learning exactly what I need to learn next and yeah, and in also like, just, um I’m, I’m quite introverted, and I am the type of person still where I do my best work in front of a laptop by myself, you know, they’ll talk to me that sort of thing. And that’s a limiting factor when you’re trying to build a team. Yeah. So but all of that is limiting, and you have to figure out how you’re going to delegate around it or learn around it. Yeah. Speaking

Curt Anderson  15:20

of learning what I really, you know, I had the honor and privilege of catching your keynote at the industrial marketing summit this year. And what I really admire is your dedication to you know, you’re just a fierce educator. And so, you know, what, when did that start in your career? Has that always been a part of your culture, part of your DNA, from your business as an entrepreneur, that you’re going to be out there educating folks? What’s that? What’s that look like?

Dale Bertrand  15:42

Oh, that’s just fun for me. So I think I enjoy, I enjoy talking about things I’m excited about technologies that I’m excited about. So that’s just fun, like, who wouldn’t enjoy talking about what they’re excited about. And then when other people are also excited about it, and then they can take something from, what the information I’m giving them and make a difference in their day to day or the work that they’re doing. I mean, that’s amazing. That’s amazingly rewarding. So it’s, you know, it’s fun on the front end, and it’s rewarding on the back end. So that’s how I really fell into speaking and workshops and more education. Well,

Curt Anderson  16:19

that’s fantastic. Again, I want to drop a note to everybody, Damon, I

Damon Pistulka  16:22

think we have a couple more people stopped by we got a car she’s here from India, Thanks for saying hello got Sunol here or soon hail from? Yeah, United Arab Arab Emirate? Excuse me. But yeah, we got a couple more. Thanks for dropping by and dropping a comment.

Curt Anderson  16:40

Yeah, let us know you’re out there. Bring your questions, because we have an expert here. So speaking of SEO, so what I one thing that really piqued my curiosity, you have a, you’ve coined the term SEO for revenue? Can you just share with folks, you know, what’s the how is your approach different than say, maybe other traditional SEO firms? Or what does that look like? Yeah, I

Dale Bertrand  17:01

mean, SEO, we we’ve as marketers, we, as marketers have been doing SEO for a long time. And it’s always been focused on rankings and traffic. And started with keyword research. When you’re doing a campaign, you also start with like a technical audit. And SEO has changed so much in the, like, 1520 years that I’ve been doing it. So I really started to talk about it as SEO for revenue, because what you should really be focused on for SEO is customer acquisition. And when you’re focused on customer acquisition, for your SEO campaigns, but your strategies are different than if you were just focused on rankings and traffic. So that’s what I think is most interesting. And that’s what I talk about a lot. When I’m speaking at conferences.

Curt Anderson  17:46

How about can you, let’s take it further, if you don’t mind? Can you? Do you have any examples or like, give us you know, when you say, you know, the difference between like, you know, gee, I hate looked at, you know, you know, every SEO experts, like, Hey, I got first page ranking or whatever. Talk about that difference between that acquisition, you know, what does that look like? Are any particular tips or strategies for folks? Yeah, I

Dale Bertrand  18:06

mean, the first thing is, if you’re talking to a business owner or a business person, rankings are very interesting. It’s revenue and sales and customers that are interesting to folks who understand how business works, or are people who are accountable to business leaders, like that’s the first thing. And then when you get into the details of how you run the campaigns and how strategy changes, we we used to do keyword research and technical audit upfront at the beginning of an SEO campaign. And that made sense because we’re we’re targeting keywords in our content. And then also, back then it was true that if you made technical changes to your website, you could get more organic traffic and better rankings. But when you’re focused on customer acquisition, like you’re you’re focused on getting the right people to come to your website, people who are interested in buying the product or service that you have, or they’re researching a purchase decision related to your offering. So when you’re trying to get like the right people to come, then instead of thinking about like keywords, and traffic, you’re really thinking about searching tents, and researching your customers to understand what do your customers search for, like when I worked as an engineer, I was looking, I was online and Google looking for data sheets, reference designs, and the information that I needed to do to do the work that I was doing, because I was modeling these devices. So if you’re targeting someone like me, you’d have to understand what those intents are. I have an intent to find information about a part that I may or may not design into my system. Or Or I might be looking to purchase a product or an oven when we’re doing our reliability testing and stuff like that. So those are all different intents. And if you start with those intents that you want to target, then you can use those intents later on. To filter the keywords, you’re gonna go after the topics you might write about the type of content you’ll create. So starting with that those intents works a lot better. When you’re starting with keywords, you end up in a situation where you’re optimizing your content for keywords. But not everybody who is typing in that keyword that you’re that you’re optimizing for, actually has the intent that you need in order to convert them into a customer. So you end up with a whole bunch of traffic, but it’s the wrong traffic, then what you try you do some conversion rate optimization, you try to optimize your site so that more of those people are going to convert, but if they’re the wrong people in the first place, then like you really should have started by targeting the right people.

Curt Anderson  20:44

Yeah. Wow, I love that. Yeah. trap the mic, Damon, drop the mic. That was, you know, I, we talked about that a lot here at Dell is you know, really laser focusing and targeting that ideal. The ICP, ideal customer speaking their language, you know, a lot of times, you know, we have internal speak, and cuz you know, what we talked about, you know, internally at the company, and customers just don’t know that language. They don’t know the acronyms or the buzzwords or jargon. And so, you know, I love what you’re saying, I want to slide in here. You know, you do an amazing job. As a matter of fact, when I chatted with you at the industrial marketing Summit, you just crushed it with your keynote. And I think if I’m not mistaken, you’re offline off to Miami for another keynote, Keynote or workshop?

Dale Bertrand  21:27

Oh, yes, I do remember that. Yeah, I did a full day workshop and flip. And

Curt Anderson  21:31

so you’re all over. So you know, you, you really, you do a great job on educating and like speaking to folks, what I would love to do is what I caught at the industrial marketing summit in I don’t want to put you on the spot. But you did a real wonderful masterclass on how you your team are applying AI. You know, with your SEO strategies. Can you scratch the surface a little bit on I don’t know, if you remember everything,

Dale Bertrand  21:56

I remember all of it, but not really resonated with you. What was like the aha moment, the

Curt Anderson  22:01

aha moment because I’ve been talking to people I’ve been bragging about you all week. And I’m like, man, and and I just talked to a woman yesterday who she was like, you know, I told my boss, I wanted to go to the industrial marketing Summit, and I couldn’t go. And I’m like, well, guess what I’m bringing the industrial marketing summit to you. If I’m not mistaken, if I heard you correctly, you said that you’re using AI for like, 70% of upfront content? Do I have that right? And then you’re kind of like, yeah,

Dale Bertrand  22:24

I remember like, what we’re doing in our agency is trying to use AI for the first draft of almost everything. So that might be writing an email, writing a report doing some brainstorming, or maybe a plan for a webinar that we’re running, or a strategy for, like an SEO campaign or influencer campaign. Or it could be a content brief or a piece of content, but try to use AI for the first draft of everything. And the point there is we’re figuring out how to use it, where it works. Sometimes it slows us down, because it’s an inappropriate use of the technology. But that’s the sort of thing that we need to figure out. So I love the idea of trying to use it for the first draft of everything. And then another. Another useful exercise is when you sit down in front of your computer in the morning, you know, you’ve got a full task list for the day, give AI the task list and ask it how we can help you with these tasks. And what I love about that is a lot of what it comes up with might not be that helpful at all. But there’ll be some gems in there, where that really helps you to learn how to use it for various tasks in ways that you didn’t expect. You could use it. But that’s how, that’s how I’ve been learning it. Perfect.

Damon Pistulka  23:43

Awesome. Awesome, right there. Because I’ve thought this a long time and the first draft part of using AI because for me, and a lot of people I talk with going from the blank page to something is is often the the real time because you don’t see the ideas to get your brain started or concepts that AI can often help you just kickstart that. And then you may change 75% of it into your language into other points that you want. But that first initial piece really helps.

Dale Bertrand  24:21

Yeah, we call that the blank page problem. If you’ve ever had to sit down and write an email, write a report write a short story. I don’t know what were you do in your free time but you know, poem? Yeah, there you go. So anytime you sit down to write like you’ve got the blank page, and we’ve all had that experience where we just don’t know what to do next. We don’t know where to start. So with with AI, the where you would start as you would describe to it what you’re trying to do. So you might say I’m writing a report for this audience on this topic. I want to cover these sections. Just give me the first version of it. And what I’ve actually been doing and he’s telling you like, give me the structure like, how would How do you think I should structure this, then it gives me a structure, then I say, well, actually, I don’t want to start with this, I’d rather start with this other thing. And then I get the structure down. And then from there, I might start writing because I feel inspired. Or I might tell it right, the first section for me, and I don’t use the first section that it wrote. But I’ll but I’ll use it as a template for and then I’ll go over to my blank page in Word or Google Docs, and I’ll start writing based on what it told me. But what I found to be really useful for anything that’s a long form is to talk to about the structure and have it help you figure out the structure before you start writing. Yeah. All right, Dale,

Curt Anderson  25:42

let’s go here. Can you talk a little bit? So let’s, you know, so we have folks out there that are maybe solo marketers? Or maybe you know, a small team, you have a team of 20? Can you share a little bit best practices, maybe challenges? Maybe you had some fails? How your team is maybe collaborating together? So I know, there was several questions, I guess, bottom line question is, how is your team kind of evolving with AI and finding best practices, what not to do, what doesn’t work? What does work? It’s

Dale Bertrand  26:10

all experimentation at this point. Like what I found with the training that I’ve done, because because I do AI training with marketing team, sales teams, operations teams, and what I found is they really need to start with understanding the capabilities. So some some training where you’re learning, some basic prompting, and then some other tools that you might decide to use, how you can use it to create visualizations and do data analysis. And then also using it for content and repurposing existing content and, and, and all the other things that we’re talking about, like you just want to see a taste of that, because that’s what helps you understand the capabilities and really get the ideas flowing in your brain. And then from there, move on to building like doing your work in a conversational way. So that is that is like we talked about, you know, helped me understand how I should structure this document. No, not really, this, I didn’t really want that, you know, while I want you to avoid these words, it sounds like a conversational way of doing it. And you’ll learn a lot by doing that. And then the third step is really automating individual tasks. So we would still consider this like individual acceleration, where you’re automating, or using it to automate the tasks that you work on the tasks that are time consuming, or that you that you would like to go away, not the fun parts of your job, not the rewarding parts of your job, but the part that you would love to go away. And then and just getting there is huge. Like when we got to that point, we had measured a 30% productivity improvement on our team. So that’s amazing. Like, it was wonderful. But there are much bigger fish to fry. Because from there, you start looking at your processes. And what what ends up happening is like AI is a tech technology tool, like like many other technology tools that we use, but you then you start to think of it more as technology driven process optimization, where you’re like improving your processes with these, these new technologies in mind, like with AI helping you. And when you’re when you’re completely reworking processes, you can see like huge jumps in growth. Like I, I had one meeting with one of my clients where they were, they’re writing content in the medical space. And they were spending three hours per article that they were writing and they had MDs, and PhDs writing these articles. And they came back to me like the next week, and they’re like, Yeah, we implemented some of those ideas. Now we’re down to an hour per article. And then I talked to him for an hour about like the next level of process improvement. Now, this isn’t automating the writing, this isn’t automating the brain. This is changing the process. And that’s where you get the big leaps, like they’re gonna get down from three hours to 15 minutes, because they’re gonna have a completely different process for for writing this content. And it’s written by MDs reviewed by MDs like it needs to be medically medically accurate. So this isn’t just like aI generated content. It’s a process that involves AI, human AI human and exactly how you put that together. And what we’re talking about yesterday was the UI that the humans used during that process to get it down to the 15 minutes. But we’re talking about a massive time savings when you get down from three hours to 15 minutes per article.

Curt Anderson  29:29

Okay, Dale, we have these things on our show. We have dropped the mic moments, but then we have moments of silence and we’re going to take a moment of silence Just to kind of let that sink in and just resume a medical team of MDS PhDs high level content going from three hours down to an hour down to 15 minutes, my friend that is just revolutionary. This is just such

Dale Bertrand  29:54

a powerful and I’ll tell you what I get excited about like when you look at that type of process improvement and how it can really They make processes of all kinds, like more efficient. One way to look at it is that we’re trying to change the process so that we can hire lower cost labor, or let’s say, less experienced labor. Like that’s, that’s one way to think about and there a lot of businesses that do that. But then another way to look at it is like what we’re doing in the last story I told you, which is that we’re trying to use the most expensive labor that we can find, which is like a PhD, MD, like this guy, went to medical school, and then went back to school and got a frickin PhD. You and I had trouble fitting through algebra class, you know. So we’re trying to use the most expensive labor that we could find and make it worth it by by 10, axing the output, that we get out of that labor, and making sure that you know, the content we get is medically reviewed, and medically accurate, and, you know, legal and regulatory, and all that, all that good stuff. So that’s been eye opening for me, which is you can get such high levels of efficiency, that you end up going after more expensive labor, more expertise and trying to plug that into processes, not less.

Damon Pistulka  31:07

That’s a great point, because it allows you to incorporate the best minds, but still come out at a competitive cost to others that have don’t have that experience. Don’t have that process. Don’t have that knowledge base that you’re working from. It’s huge. It’s huge.

Dale Bertrand  31:28

Yeah, you’re basically solving a different problem. Yeah. Because it because we, for a long time, we’ve been solving the problem of like, how do we get this process done cheaper? So that we don’t have to pay Mr. PhD to monitor the whole process, right? And then but now we’re like, no, no, let’s hire Mr. PhD, give him as much money as he wants. And because we’ve got these tools that are going to make them hyper productive, guys.

Curt Anderson  31:51

Brilliant, absolutely. Brilliant. That’s all I can say in how we’re, we’ve even heard that concept of like, No, we’re not going to hire, you know, more or less expensive labor, we’re going to do the polar opposite love that dealt for somebody that’s out there that’s completely brand new to AI, you’ve used the word prompt a couple of times, can you just save that if that word can’t that concept is new to somebody? Can you just kind of give us a one on one of AI? Like, what do you mean by prompting?

Dale Bertrand  32:18

Yeah, I think the best way to wrap your head around if you’re new, is that there’s predictive AI and generative AI. And predictive AI is predicting things. So like, what is the best subject line for this email, or how much new stock should I order for the store, but like predicting what sales are going to be over the next month, something like that. But then there’s also generative AI, which is creating things or summarizing text, and also understanding unstructured data, which is usually text. And generative AI is useful for summarization, or creating the first version of an email or report or something like that. And with with both predictive and generative AI, like you can use large language models. So these are AI models that are trained on basically everything that’s ever been written on the web so that they can identify patterns, and with the patterns that they identify millions and millions of patterns that we might not even recognize as humans when we’re reading the web. But they will recognize all of these patterns, and then use those patterns to either do prediction or, or text generation or summarization, or, or something like that. And these are pre trained models. That’s where the PT comes from in chat GPT. And the fact that they’re pre trained is huge, because you don’t have to train them. And I think people like lose sight of how big a benefit that is that these models come pre trained. So to answer to finally get to the answer to your question around prompting, and for anybody who’s used chat TBT you know, that you can give it commands or instructions that we call prompts. You can tell it what to do. And for the most part, it does it, which is absolutely amazing. It feels like magic. If you haven’t played around with chat, GBT play around with it so you can get a feeling for it. And and then like, it’s hard to wrap your head around all of the different uses for this type of AI for prediction or generation or summarization in in your business. And there’s certain certain types of problems that that it does really well for. But I guess one example I always like to give is when I was in grad school, we were working on Department of Defense Research, like, like I like told you guys at the beginning of our conversation, and what we were doing was predicting is it is this airplane flying overhead? Is it Friend or foe? And you can imagine using that prediction in a military setting to decide whether to shoot down an airplane or not like that is AI that needs to be 100% accurate. Yeah, before you can deploy it because it’s very high stakes. The AI that we have today, using chat TBT and all these other models. They’re not 100% accurate, like, in fact, you know, they make things up, they they might predict incorrectly, there’s all kinds of things that can go wrong, you have to understand that and bake that into your process. But it turns out that there are many, many problems, where 90% accuracy is good enough. And can can do things like like, like give you the results that I was talking about before. And then making it dramatically easier to write content or do research or to make predictions when it’s not life or death, like in marketing or sales and many other types of processes. The prediction and generation that that these models can perform is so cheap, that it’s just very attractive to try to bake them into your processes.

Curt Anderson  35:47

All right, man, that’s like it’s Jonathan Mike after Jonathan like here. Now, this is just so good. I want to do I want to go here. Small manufacturer, you know, you’re at the industrial marketing Summit, great keynote speaker. Again, we’re here with Dale, CEO of fire and spark strongly encouraging welcome, you invite you, implore you connect with Dale on LinkedIn, you’ll thank us for doing so. Dale, a small manufacturer out there, maybe 2030 employees, there’s a solo marketer on staff, they’re kind of you know, starting from scratch, and they come to you like detail, you know, this whole marketing, I’ve been living on trade shows, I’ve been on the road doing cold calls, you know, for decades, this whole digital marketing thing is just new to us. Any tips or advice for folks have, you know, kind of the, I’m going to down a little notch. Any tips or advice for that new manufacture? Mark, that manufacturer? that’s new to marketing? What would be a Yeah,

Dale Bertrand  36:39

yeah, yeah, cuz you’re mentioning two transitions, and conflating them, which is why it’s hard for the tax for, because one is moving from like offline marketing to digital marketing. Like, that’s hard enough. But now the industry is moving from digital marketing to AI marketing, which is further complicating things in that scenario that you’re taught, because I’ve worked with so many manufacturers that have, you know, a marketing manager, and the marketing manager may or may not, you know, different levels of experience, let’s put it that way. Really, what I would do is I would invest in training for the marketing manager on using AI tools for marketing, because that is one area where you can get some some pretty solid bang for the buck, with everything from your your communications to your website, to content that you’re writing, when you’re when you’re doing I do a lot of trade shows, like when you’re doing trade shows you still there’s still applications for AI trade shows, things like taking pictures of, of business cards that you get, and then automatically having those processed and stored anywhere in any system that you might want to keep them. But AI should be doing that automatically. And then and then also generating any content that you might want to bring with you to the trade shows, and even doing design and layout for any content that you would want design that you’re bringing to trade shows. One thing that I do when I attend to attend a trade show is I have one of my AI automations. Take a look at the website for the trade show. And tell me about who’s going to be there, what they what they do. Specifically, I want to know, are there going to be any other agency owners there? Are there going to be any businesses there that fit my current client profile. And that’s what large language models like the current generation of AI are really good at, which is looking at unstructured data and doing natural language processing? And then you can answer questions, or it will answer questions about about the website. So I just wanted to throw that out there. There’s a lot of uses for today’s AI, even if the only thing you’re doing is going to trade shows. But assuming that you are that you do also have a website. And you have like a marketing manager that’s doing some digital marketing, you want to very quickly train your marketer to be an AI marketer. And what that means is they understand the capabilities of AI tools so that when they see a problem, they they’ve got a complete tool belt, a complete tool tool chest on, on how to solve that problem. And that might be a problem. Like, you might go to your marketing manager and say, Hey, I’m going to this trade show, let me know if there’s anybody who’s any of the sponsors here that I should hook up with, that the problem is perfect for AI, then you would want your marketing manager to know that. And right now, none of them do it because this stuff is so new. So you just have to find some simple I do training, so feel free to call me. But um, you definitely want to train your marketing manager so that they understand the capabilities and then get them using the tools. And then the next step is that they’re going to want to invest in some dedicated AI tools, maybe for email marketing, maybe for blog writing, maybe for managing the website or for trade shows. Like who knows what that’s gonna be. And then once you have one person on your team that is effectively using AI and you’re gonna measure a 2x productivity improvement so so for the time and money that you put into the This is gonna be well worth it when your marketer is twice as productive as they were before, so you’re gonna get a huge ROI on it. It’s going to be slow going, though, because there’s a lot of learning. But once you have that individual on your team who’s proficient in AI, that individual can lead the way in deploying AI tools for your sales, your Business Development, Operations and everything else that you do. Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  40:23

well, and then too, as you said, if they’re if they’re twice as efficient, then every other marketer you bring on in that company, if they’re a decent, if that’s a person is good marketing leader, every other marketing person they bring on, and the other, the halo kind of effect all the other parts of the business, because now they know AI, they see the trends, the efficiency improvements. But I mean, just like in the MD example, if my if my AI tools allow my marketer to be twice as effective, that means I can spend more on that person, and I can get more people and get more productivity out of out of them, as well. I mean, it’s a huge if you’re, if you’re sitting here today, and I’ve got six manufacturers in and one of them’s got that kind of thing going for him, their marketing is going to leave everybody behind. Yeah,

Dale Bertrand  41:21

absolutely. I mean, it sounds too good to be true, I would say, it sounds too good to be true. Well, AI sounds too good to be true, because it is. And the the caveat to all of this is that it takes time to get there. Yeah, you can’t just hand somebody a tool and say, figure it out, like they really do need some guidance. And then also they need support at the organizational level, which means they need some time to figure these things out, it’s going to slow things down initially. And then and then also to be realistic, not everything is going to work. So I would say that I got excited about AI tools, or like really applying them to what I do a year and a half ago. And I would guess that probably half of the stuff I tried actually worked in that like I continue to use AI for that particular task or that particular process. So there’s a lot of time spent trying trying different things where you basically decide, ah, no AI is really not helping me in this area. So I’m just gonna move on and try something else. So there’s definitely some work that needs to be done. Like, you got to think of it as change management, more than like just some software you’re gonna buy, that just makes everything better. It’s change management, because it’s going to require people to do the hard work of learning, and they may not be interested in doing that, just to be honest. So you’ve got to give them a reason why, like the future with these tools is way better than then the way that we’re working now to get them excited. And then give them the support, like pay for the software, give them some time to learn it. And then when in inevitably, what they’re going to do is they’re gonna come back to you, and they’re gonna say, Okay, now that I understand how to how to use these AI tools, we actually need to work differently. And it’s little things like, hey, I need I need you, when you’re at a tradeshow to take pictures of the cards, don’t just put them in your pockets, right. And that’s a small small process change, but there are going to be much bigger process changes. But but the benefits are huge. Have

Curt Anderson  43:18

Dell have you seen or do you foresee companies where though they’ll have a dedicated AI person is that that might be a dumb question. Yes,

Dale Bertrand  43:27

it’s interesting, because you can call that person like a c ai Oh, Chief AI officer, oh my god, say that three times in a row. If you next time we’ll do we’ll do a drinking game every time. And that’s the end we’ll just go into Corazon CIO CIO. We’ll do that next time. So you can think like, you can think you can hire a fractional like, Chief AI officer. Nowadays, and I’ve done that for a few organizations. And that is the the right thing to do. When, when you’re when we’re trying to when you need somebody to really dive deep into your processes and kind of an interactive, map them to the technology to figure out what the opportunities are. But there is also another model for it. Because really, at the end of the day, you want to get to the point that an expert or multiple experts on your team have the epiphanies where not only do they have that subject matter expertise in what you do and how you do it. But they also in the same brain, they understand the capabilities of the AI tools and how to apply them. And when you get those two things in the same brain, that’s when most magic happens. So you really want to bring in a trainer or a fractional AI officer or something like that, to get your people to that point rather than to think that you can bring somebody outside who’s going to learn enough about your business that they can AP the technology capabilities to the expertise and get things done. That’s really going to be somebody on your team team with the expertise that’s going to have those big aha moments on how things can be improved. Wow, okay,

Curt Anderson  45:15

absolutely love it having the product, you know, the subject matter expert internally, combining, you know, what a what a, what a mind blowing combination, that’s gonna be right. How valuable is you know, you want to be valuable in the market and create job security, that’s a great way to do it right there has become that subject matter expert tied in with being an AI expert. Man, we could keep you all day, I’ve not even paid attention to the clock. I know, I want a couple of things left here, before we wind down. You’re a big proponent of building communities for marketers, can you anything that you want to share as far as like how a marketer can work better at creating community, whether, you know, through digital marketing, AI, anything that you want to share their? Yeah,

Dale Bertrand  45:55

I mean, it can be very difficult to create a community. But we all know, like digital marketing is changing, especially with AI. So we it’s getting harder on a lot of channels to get in front of your audience. The trade shows we’re talking about are more expensive and more exclusive. But also, if you’re doing Google advertising, that’s more expensive. And SEO is getting more competitive. All of that stuff works better when you’re building a community around your brand. And that means something different depending on where people are at we one company I work with GrabCAD, that maybe some people listening, have used if they do CAD design for manufacturing. But GrabCAD was a startup that I worked with as their marketer a while back. And we built a community around the brand, which was engineers that were doing mechanical engineers that were doing CAD design, and we got them into the community by offering them opportunities to, to basically like, do a contest where a big company like Boeing might come in, and they need, like a particular part designed and the engineers on the engineers in the community could submit, basically submit to this contest. So there were a lot of other things where they could meet the CEO of some of these companies, and also, and also collaborate on designs on the platform. But But the whole point there was we were building a community around the brand, not just doing, like traditional marketing. And anytime you have the opportunity to build a community around your brand, it’s just gonna make everything else easier.

Curt Anderson  47:31

Right. Phenomenal example. Yeah. Absolutely love that example. And when when you did your community, where did you Where did you have them? Where the website where the I know, of Facebook group LinkedIn group, like, where did you get all

Dale Bertrand  47:45

of the above work on the boat almost doesn’t matter. The reason why we had them on the website was because we were building specific web based software tools for them to use to collaborate on these designs.

Damon Pistulka  47:57

Yep. Okay. Absolutely.

Curt Anderson  48:01

Great, man. I mean, this has just been pure gold. From the AI standpoint, building the community. Dell, one last questions I’m going to dive into is scalability, you’ve had you know, you have read on your LinkedIn profile, you’ve talked about how you’ve scaled folks up $10 million in sales from from a marketing program. Any tips or advice that you want to talk about? Like, how do we get scalable with your marketing strategies? Well,

Dale Bertrand  48:24

on the efficiency side, like it’s AI, like figuring out how you can use it for for what you do. But then sometimes when I’m advising startups, especially in the manufacturing space, they don’t really have product market fit in the sense that they don’t know how to talk about their products. So like, regardless of what you sell, and who you sell it to, you want to figure out how to get to the point that if you mention that this product exists, using the right messaging, so you’re mentioning it in the right way, to the right customer, whoever your target customer is, they basically have an aha moment like you want them to see themselves. Oh, where have you been my whole life, like I didn’t know this product existed. And if if you’re not getting that reaction, you don’t have product market fit or you’re describing your product as a commodity product, maybe it is a commodity product. But you really want to get to that point. And that’s what’s really difficult. But when you have that product market fit, and you can feel it, and it makes everything else easier. It’s once again, it’s a force multiplier. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  49:28

absolutely love it. So alright, community scalability, efficiency gone from three hours down to 15 minutes, just a tons and tons of pure gold. But if you’re just joining us encourage you connect with Dale on LinkedIn, hit the rewind button and just replay just go step by step. Dale, you just laid out a full blown blueprint for us, as we wind down parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you know, anything that you want to share with folks out there to Yeah, I

Dale Bertrand  49:59

would say I would say connecting with me if you’re interested in in AI or SEO, I love talking about this stuff. If you have any questions, another big thing we didn’t have a chance to get to is the fact that like Google is changing. So Google is going to be adding some generative AI features. And we’re all trying to figure out like, what that’s going to mean, for sites that are getting organic traffic. So So for anybody listening, like if you are getting organic traffic, now, you might want us to take a look at I’m happy to take a look at around how Google’s Ste might affect your website. Because what Google is going to do is give engineers and searchers have all types, the answer, rather than sending them to your page. And that’s, that’s something the way that we’re optimizing for that is we’re building what we call pull through content. And these are content types that Google can’t summarize and just give people the answer. Imagine if you if you need the datasheet. Or if you want a datasheet, that compares, or a page that compares to two parts that you might be, you might be researching or something like that, like that’s a piece of content that Google is not going to just summarize in an effective way. But there’s many other types of pull through content. So you want to make sure that you continue to do SEO because people are going to be continuing to search for your products. But you want to do it in such a way that it’s future proof and we know that there’s some big changes coming in the way that Google works

Curt Anderson  51:26

future proof your business Damon takeaways for you today. What

Damon Pistulka  51:30

do you want? Oh, man, it’s just been a masterclass listening. I got two pages in the notes from this day, I was so great, you know, just hearing your ideas how you’re using AI and then the results the results are incredible and and your strategies to help companies get their marketers up to speed and really see some of those benefits. Thank you.

Curt Anderson  51:51

Yeah, this has been just phenomenal. I had I I had really high expectations, you completely crushed it again, guys connect with Dale on LinkedIn, fire and spark CEO. Ken, if you ever Dale, do you have any speaking gigs coming up on the horizon?

Dale Bertrand  52:07

I do. But um, I mean, Europe, actually. A few different events there. I’ll be back in the US at hub spots in den conference and then Content Marketing World, in San Diego. So those will be a lot of fun. Yeah. And

Curt Anderson  52:21

now, it is worth every penny. I think. I don’t know if I said this. I think I said it when before we went live. So I saw Dale speak at the industrial marketing Summit. And I just told somebody this week, if I only went to the industrial marketing summit to see Dell speak, and I didn’t catch notice suspect because they were amazing speakers. Every single one of you I love you. As matter of fact, they are a bunch of them. Carlo. Gregory was just on the program Monday, we have a bunch of speakers coming up from Deus or marketing some of dude, you were worth the money of just traveling to Austin just to catch you live. So if you guys get a chance to connect with Dale. Dale, I have one last question for you, my friend before we wind down. Sure. And lo and behold, I don’t even need to ask you if you’re a baseball fan, because you opened up with Yes, see 86 Max, man that was oh, you won my heart over without. So Dale, let’s go here. I have a hypothetical question for you curious what your answer would be and maybe you could use AI for this. Okay.

Dale Bertrand  53:17

Oh, you’re talking to the AI deal right now. You didn’t realize that

Damon Pistulka  53:20

David sent me the real deal.

Curt Anderson  53:22

It’s like yeah, yeah, he’s

Damon Pistulka  53:23

offered something else. Dell. Let’s

Curt Anderson  53:25

say that the Mets are playing the dreaded Yankees man. It’s a Subway Series and it’s a bottom of the ninth tie score. Okay, tie score. Guy in second base bottom line to outs, we need to run the Mets need to run to like get get this game over with okay. Manager is on the bench looks down the looks on the bench says Hey, Dale, grab your helmet, grab your bat get up there hitting the winning run. So you walk over slap on your helmet. You grab your bat, you’re walking up to hitting the winning run to beat the dreaded Yankees as you’re walking up to the plate. What’s your walk up song?

Dale Bertrand  54:04

Oh, that’s so fun. So probably the same as when I’m on stage with someone like Who let the dogs out? Who loves because I’ve had that in real life.

Damon Pistulka  54:20

That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, I

Dale Bertrand  54:23

can arrange it. That’s fun.

Curt Anderson  54:24

That is fancy. All right. Great answer. Appreciate it. Demon. We got a couple more comments here if you want to just show yeah, we

Damon Pistulka  54:29

1. We got your Rs here. Happy day with you learning new ideas. And Sian scuze. Me thanks. He had a couple comments. He’s missing the initial part. But he’s gonna go back to and connect and go back to the beginning. So thanks so much, everyone. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  54:45

so we’ll close it out. So guys, thank you, Dale. Thank you. We appreciate you in boy anybody’s spending hanging out. It’s a great opportunity to give a round. huge round of applause for Dale. absolutely crushing it today. We appreciate you guys we thank you guys. Most importantly, Dale, we thank you. Yes, we’d love to tell everybody man just go out and beat someone’s inspiration just like Dow was for us today. And you’ll just make the world a better place. Dale Thank you Damon, take it away. Let’s close it out for the day.

Damon Pistulka  55:13

Yeah, thanks Dale for being here today. I want to thank everyone that made the comments put comments in the in the box there so we can see you’re listening. Thanks to all those people that didn’t comment. We’re listening out there. We appreciate you stopping by and listen to us every week. Wow, what a master class today in AI. I’m so excited. Gonna go back and listen to this and I think you should too. If you got in here late. Get back to the beginning and start this thing over. Thanks for being here, everyone. We’ll be back again next week. Have a great weekend.