Industrial Marketing Summit Preview: AI Solutions with Dale Bertrand

Curt Anderson  00:01

Hey, Damon, what’s happening, dude? Oh, we’ve got a special Wednesday edition with this new show. Man, is this special or what? So, hey, we are here. We we’re talking about, how do you stop being the best kept secret? And I’ll tell you, this guy is no best kept secret whatsoever. So Dale Bertrand, how are you dude Happy Wednesday? What’s happening?

Dale Bertrand  00:22

Well, I’m happy to be back, so I’m glad I got the invite. I remember we had some spicy conversation last time, and somehow I got invited back. So I’m excited.

Curt Anderson  00:32

So you know what? I talked to mom, and you know, we were heading she was like, Hey, could you have Dale back on the show? I said, Absolutely anything for you. And so here we are. So, you know, thank your mom. How’s that? So,

Dale Bertrand  00:43

alright, there we go. Yeah. So I know she, she did some begging, but, you know, it worked out,

Curt Anderson  00:47

yeah. So, you know, so that it’s always about the mom. You know, it’s always about the mom. So Alright, we’ve got a ton to unpack, lots of uncover, and I’ll tell you since last time. And as you mentioned, repeat offender, but founder, CEO extraordinaire, fire and spark. We’re going to talk about what you’re doing. You have a bunch of speaking gigs coming up. Can’t wait. I’m going to be in a front row seat watching you do a keynote at the industrial marketing summit that’s going to be coming up at the end of this month. But just for folks out there that are not familiar with Dale, just give us little background. I know, like you’ve been doing AI for what, like, a good two or three months now, is that right? Well,

Dale Bertrand  01:21

a little bit longer than that, but so my very, very quick background, I have an engineering background. So I studied engineering in school. I started my career working in electronics manufacturing with paradigm testers. And I also in grad school, studied AI, so I was working on computer vision research for manufacturing and medical applications. So that was in grad school. The technology was different back then, but it was fun. If you fast forward to today. Now I work in marketing. So now I run fire and spark, where we were an agency. We’re 25 people in Boston. We focus on SEO and search strategy. We only do SEO, so we don’t pretend to be world class at anything else. So we’re really focused on how search marketing is changing, how Google is changing with generative AI, and how consumer like search behavior is changing like the customers you’re going after are searching for information differently, and that matters.

Curt Anderson  02:21

So alright, man, I got so much to cover because Dale, I bet you I bring your name up like every week. Well, Dale says, well, Dale says this, well, I learned this from Dale. So we’re going to, we’re going to dive deep. So, man, everybody out there, get your, get your fingers ready to type, or if you’re a pen person, start taking notes, because this is going to be a wonderful master class on AI. Now, Damon, I, you know, I’m always the dumbest guy in the room. Now, Dale, we’re, I think, are you Brown? Did you go to brown? Aren’t you? Yeah, yeah, undergrad, undergrad, brown, you know. So we’ve got an ivy Leaguer in the house. Yeah, that’s such a such a privilege. Talk a little bit about AI. What were you doing at Brown is in your graduate as a graduate student, were you doing with AI back then?

Dale Bertrand  03:02

So back then, I mean, I was in the engineering department, and there was also an AI Lab in the CS department, so we were kind of bouncing back and forth. But primarily the work that I was doing was in the computer vision lab in the engineering department. So what we were focused on was these dedicated algorithms for vision. So what it was really doing was building these big databases of objects and then taking pictures of things for the military applications. It was taking pictures of airplanes that were flying overhead, and it would identify them based on the shape of the objects in the images by looking in these, this, these database of like, you know, 1000s and 1000s of objects that we had in the database. So there were military applications, healthcare applications, and then some more consumer applications. But for the military, it was really taking pictures of airplanes flying overhead and identifying them as friend or foe. So you can imagine where that goes. It’s like, shoot it down and don’t shoot it down. So that’s, that’s what, that’s what we were working on. But these were dedicated algorithms. The folks in the CS department were working on Neural Networks, which ended up being the the foundation of the AI technology that we’re all using today with generative AI, we were working on dedicated algorithms that were very, very specific, without getting into the technical details for computer vision, decomposing shape into matrices, so you could do like matrix multiplication And matrix operations on on the shapes. And that technology lost to to the neural networks like the the deep learning algorithms that we use today. Because I was 2025, years ago,

Curt Anderson  04:53

right? Did you were so goofy question for you, were you following AI, like the past 20 years, where you kind of. Keeping in the loop. Did you see what was on the horizon? Or, like, what was, what was kind of your AI?

Dale Bertrand  05:04

I would say yes, and no. I mean, my claim to fame is that I did my first conference talk on AI before chatGPT. And that’s usually what people want to know, you know. So inbound conference before, before chatGPT. So that is important, because we’ve had, we’ve had usable AI in the marketing space for many years. Now I know that I go to the marketing AI conference, and I know that the marketing AI The institute was founded seven or eight years ago, way before chatGPT, because their founders saw AI coming and and with, with image recognition and content generation all that, like, that’s actually been around for a while, predictive and generative AI for marketing.

Curt Anderson  05:52

Yeah, excellent. Okay, let’s dive into fire and spark. I’m going to pull up your website, give us a little background. Like, I, what I absolutely love is how you niche. You know your superpower and is with your opening you’re like, you know what we do SEO, we don’t do all the things. You know, if somebody needs Facebook ads, you’re not the guy somebody needs. You know, you know everything else, right? Video, like you’re really rocking and rolling SEO for entrepreneurs out there, and I’m talking to myself, so maybe asking for a friend type of thing, right? Suffer from that shiny object syndrome. How have you done such a great job to stay so laser focused in your lane, on SEO without deviating into like the shiny object? How have you been so successful with that?

Dale Bertrand  06:32

It’s really just the fact that there’s so much going on with SEO, like even with the recent changes in SEO, there’s huge opportunity, because we all know our customers are searching for solutions to their problems, and we want them to find our solutions in the in the in the form of like, our products, our services, like that’s always going to be true regardless of how search technology changes. So because there’s such a huge opportunity, and there always will be a huge opportunity. There’s it’s worthy of focus, right? But also it’s changing quickly, like I thought it was changing Fast Five years ago, when, you know when, when YouTube was becoming a thing, Amazon was really starting to grow and become a search platform of its own. But now we have generative AI, like, full stop. It’s so much is changing. So you asked me, like, how were we able to stay focused on SEO? The reason why is because it’s such a big opportunity, and it will continue to be, and there’s so much to learn to get it right that, you know, it’s we’re not going to get distracted.

Curt Anderson  07:41

Yeah, I love it. So all right, let’s take a peek at your Can you guys see my screen? Yes, excellent. Okay, so I love, love this tagline right here. So we’ve got igniting growth through purpose and possibilities and my favorite words right there. So just walk us through a little bit about fire and spark. How you guys make the world a better place. Let’s talk about your team. Don’t be humble. Don’t be modest. Deal. Just share a little bit what’s going on at fire and spark.

Dale Bertrand  08:06

Well, I guess the the not humble explanation we we don’t focus on ranking. So I guess it really comes down to, like my agency, is my response to an industry that doesn’t serve clients very well. So you could imagine working with an SEO agency that you know, you pay them a bunch of money, they got you on a rigid retainer. You’re forking over the money every single month, and you’re just not getting the results that you need. There’s often a disconnect where your agency gets excited when you rank number one for something like you’ve got these rankings or they get excited when you get traffic to your website. But as a business owner or a marketer responsible for a brand or a product line, you know that that traffic and rankings is not translating into the business impact that you need, which is like revenue and customer acquisition full stop, like, I need new customers. I don’t need rankings. So the rankings and traffic are important when they’re the right rankings, when it’s the right traffic. So really, the first thing that we did with our agency is we’re reporting on on conversions and revenue, and then to a lesser extent, you know, here are the rankings that are going to get us there. Here’s the traffic that’s going to get us there. So when we start working with a new client, we need to make sure that they have the analytics where we can see revenue from organic purchases, or we can see organically generated leads and the revenue that we’re creating when those are, when those close, like, you know, what is the lifetime value of the organic leads that we’re generating so that we’re optimizing for organic revenue and customers, not just rankings, which isn’t going to get you there at the end of the day. So, so there’s a lot on the website, case studies related to. Anything that I’m saying, but that’s really the core philosophy, is that SEO is a tool that grows your business. And you would be surprised how most SEO agencies think SEO is a tool to achieve rankings.

Curt Anderson  10:14

Boy, that’s a that’s a powerful distinction. Yeah, I love what you’re seeing here. Let’s give a little shout out. Talk a little bit about, you know, people do business with people. You’ve got 25 strong. I’m sure you’ve had a number of people with you for a long time. Just talk a little bit about when somebody engages with you, you know, talk about some of your teammates and how awesome they are. Let’s, let’s hear a little bit about what’s going on

Dale Bertrand  10:35

underneath the hood. Yeah. I mean, so I’ve, you know about my background. I mean, we’ve got folks in the teams that have worked with some big brands, either they were in house at a big brand, or they’ve worked at some agencies where they were able to work with a number of big brands and understand the difference between how the brands operate the different markets, different tactics, and, importantly, how SEO integrates with your with your activities, your marketing activities, on your other channels. Because a big part of what we’re doing is not only making sure that organic is driving revenue and customers, but making sure that organic integrates with as a force multiplier with your other channels. So you can imagine like if you put $1 into online advertising, or you put some resources into into email marketing, or maybe some social media marketing activities, you want to make sure that your organic is multiplying the returns you’re going to get on those other channels. And that’s important, because we all know as marketers that when someone buys from us, typically, especially like in the industrial space and manufacturing, they’re gonna, they’re gonna touch our website or touch our brand multiple times. Maybe we meet them at a trade show. Then maybe they, they find some information on our website a few times. Maybe they, maybe they call us. Maybe they hit up one of our ads. Maybe they now they’re on our email list. They get some information or case studies through our email, those are multiple touch points before they ever actually buy something. So we need to make sure that all of those channels are working together well. And the mistake that a lot of marketers tend to make is that, like I’m investing in any one channel as a direct response channel, when most sales just don’t work that way. So we want to when, when we’re deploying SEO as a tool to grow your business. It’s not just SEO as direct response, meaning somebody types in this keyword and then they swipe their credit card. Sure, we love it when that happens, but real sales in the real world don’t usually happen.

Damon Pistulka  12:45

Yeah, and that’s what’s really different about the manufacturing space or the technical, technical space, right? Or the industrial space, because it does take these multiple points, multiple touches, information, gathering, multiple people, trying to gather information to really complete a sale.

Dale Bertrand  13:02

Oh, I love what you’re saying there. It’s even multiple people you order to set your SNAP is limited, right? Because it’s still multiple stakeholders gathering information to your brand, vet your products, and you’ve got to make sure you’ve got consistent messaging, the right messaging across all of your channels, and the right messaging for the stakeholder that that you’re, you’re touching, that’s that you’re, you’re you’re speaking to at that point, because the the CFO is going to need different messaging from an engineer versus the CEO of the business. But they’ve all, they all need to be on board with, with the with the transaction.

Curt Anderson  13:41

I love that, Dale, and so thanks for teeing that up. Damon, so let’s dive in here. Because one of the My biggest takeaways from your keynote last year, and of course, you’re on the show last year, was, you know, search understanding, human behavior in the search intent. Yeah, you know, I think, like, that’s been a big distinction of my learning from, you know, hanging out with you talk a little bit, if you could, you know, all right, you’ve got the CEO. Maybe you’ve got, you know, buyer Bob, or buyer Betty, or whoever it is, or maybe engineering, Ernie, engineering also, versus executive, like, from your SEO standpoint, like, how are you trying to tailor that to hit those different buyer personas?

Dale Bertrand  14:15

Yeah, I’m glad you brought this up, because this is what I talk about a lot. It roils me that a lot of marketers are kind of stuck in a different frame but, but I do want to talk about the traditional frame for SEO. Like the way we traditionally think about SEO is we’re targeting a keyword search. So when somebody types in industrial water filtration, I want my article to show up so they could learn about industrial water filtration from me, and then eventually buy something. There’s so many things wrong with that, like, that’s not the way people buy that’s not the way Google works. It’s just it’s just not. It’s just not what happens? So instead, if you think about it from the other way around, which is who? Who am I trying to get my message in front of who am I trying to introduce my brand to? And what are they searching for? And it’s not what keywords are they typing in, it’s what is their intent when they’re searching online? And intents begin with a verb. So it might be something like fix my broken water filtration system, or buy a new water filtration system, or they just need to get it certified, qualified or maintained for whatever, whatever application it is. Or maybe there’s a specific regulation that they need to make sure they’re in compliance with. So it would, it would be to get certified for regulation 5b whatever it is. But those are all the intents. And then when you think about the different people in the organization, let’s say one person who’s running a particular program within the organization has an intent to buy a water filtration system the CFO has an intent to verify the the total cost of ownership right, and then the CEO has an intent to understand what the compliance issues are going to be, or if it, if it even satisfies the compliance issues that the CEO understands, or something like that different folks within the organization. So those are all different intense they’re not keyword searches, they’re not blog article topics, they’re not keywords, they’re intense. So when we’re doing this customer centric SEO, we’re starting with these personas, like, who are we trying to get our message in front of what intents do they have when they’re in market? This is like their intent when they’re searching online. We can use those intents to filter keywords so that we can eventually figure out what keywords they might be typing into Google. But even when we have the keywords they’re typing into Google, we need to make sure we’re creating content that satisfies the intent, not content that has the keyword in it. That’s very important, because the way Google used to work is that if your buyer typed a keyword into Google, Google would find pages that had those keywords on it, and that’s why a lot of us are practicing SEO still, but Google doesn’t work that way anymore, like what Google’s doing is looking at the keyword that your buyer might have typed into Google, and in addition to that, pulling in a lot more information about the context of the search. What did your buyer type in the last 1020 searches that they did? What else does does Google know about your buyer, what they clicked on the last time they searched all of that and using it to figure out what the intent is. That’s why we start with intent. And Google’s finding content that aligns with the intent, not necessarily the keyword. And that’s the that’s the core,

Curt Anderson  17:53

that’s the that’s the big distinction. Hey, we’ve got a couple comments I’m going to grab here real quick. So Rasul says, AI, technology makes our work easier, and i My dear friend, Trish. Happy Wednesday. Trish, Dale has such great info. I saw him last year. He he is a phenomenal resource. Trish, we totally agree again. Anybody out there, drop a note, let us know that you’re there. Do yourself a favor. If I could politely request connect with Dale on LinkedIn. I’m telling you, he is an absolute powerhouse, gifted speaker. We’ve got a couple events that we’re going to be talking about. Dale’s going to be speaking at the industrial marketing summit at the end of the month in Austin, Texas. Dale, I cannot wait take us further, if you could. So for our marketing friends out there, and even for myself, help us, you’re making a phenomenal distinction between that, you know, the keyword and the intent. How? What are some little tips and strategies we could share for our manufacturing friends out there? How do we how do we take that to the next step? What do we do? So now we get the we have, the you’ve given us, the light bulb, the aha moment. Now what’s next? What can we do to fill that intent? Well, break,

Dale Bertrand  18:59

break away from this, like blogging, yeah, mentality, right? So when you’re I just listed a whole bunch of intents that different folks would have if they might be looking for, like a water filtration, right? So you now, you need to think like, what is the right type of content to create for someone with that intent? And I’m really pushing my clients towards not blog articles. I want the content that we create for SEO to be content that Google’s AI cannot summarize, so that we don’t lose clicks to AI overviews or AI summaries. So I want that content to be interactive content or video content, or comparison content, even better data driven content. But people get confused when I say data driven content. They think data driven content means an article with some numbers in it that’s not data driven content. Data driven content is like a database behind maybe a piece of content with. Form in it, maybe you’re looking up statistics or part numbers or parts that are equivalent to this other part that I’m using, or parts that meet my thresholds, or something like that with with some kind of interactive widget. And obviously marketers are more adept at writing blog articles than they are at crafting interactive widgets on pages. But that’s actually not true anymore. Marketers don’t realize it, because AI allows you to create these interactive tools very easily. So one of the slides I was working on this morning is a tool. It’s actually a prompt. So it’s a prompt that I basically plug into any AI tool, and it spits out a quoting tool that you can put on your website. Like we’ve all seen these quoting tools, yeah, like, maybe you have a CAD file, or maybe it’s more of a configurator, where you’ve got a configurable product. It might be a parameterized CAD model behind the scenes or something, but these are quoting tools on websites that allow you to get a custom quote or a custom whatever. We used to license these quoting tools or pay for them. There are businesses out there. Don’t tell them, I said this, but there are businesses out there that sell these quoting tools, good money doing it. Now, as marketers, we can create these interactive tools with AI. I created one this morning with a prompt that’s like this long. It’s on my slide for my from one of my talks at international at the industrial marketing Summit. So I want marketers to realize that they can do it. You don’t need to know how to code. You type in the prompt, tell it what you want. You paste the the embed code that that the A gives you into your page. You’re done. Um, it’s really nuts. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  21:50

okay, let’s say this is powerful man. So Dale, let’s go here. So for the marketer out there that’s listening to this, and then like, hey, now you said, you know, like in the past, it was always blog, blog, blog. You need a blog. What you’re here now insane is like, you know, are you? Are you saying that they should, they still keep blogging? Or you’re saying like you really want to. Here’s the

Dale Bertrand  22:13

thing, if you are blogging is like a chronic disease for marketers, if, if you are still blogging in 2025 then, and if you’re blogging with educational content now, there’s still reasons to blog like maybe it’s it’s more like opinion pieces or thought leadership. I mean, I still do that so but if you’re writing educational content, then you might as well quit your job, drive to Google headquarters and volunteer to work for free, because what you’re doing is you’re writing training materials for Google’s AI. Training materials for Google’s AI. That’s not it’s not going to get you much traffic, because Google’s just going to give your customers the answer on the search results pages without ever introducing them to your brand for the most part. Right? So you do want to be creating content, because remember, we’ve got valuable search traffic out there, your customers. You need customers. Every business does are still searching for products and services, the same products and services that you sell. So it’s still very valuable traffic. We just want to make sure it’s the right content. And the problem is, like edge, the problem I have is with educational blogger. What we do is a lot of, let’s say, comparison content, comparing to products or services or maybe two different manufacturing processes, if, if I’m working for like, a Service Bureau does, like, 3d printing or injection molding, or, you know, something like that, right? So you want to make sure it’s the right content, and it doesn’t have to be interactive. It can be written content. It could be data driven content, like some of the best content out there is based on original research or a survey that you’re doing in your space. I mean, that’s wonderful, but that’s not educational content that you’re paying an intern to research.

Curt Anderson  24:09

Alright, let’s dive deeper into so you’re speaking our love language when you say configurators, we talk about that consistently on the show. We have some folks called like, a quote builder, configurator, a product builder, whatever it might be. But you’re really leaning heavy into that. For that search result is that what you’re saying,

Dale Bertrand  24:27

what I’m really leaning into is AI can generate interactive tools, and you no longer need a developer to help you create them. Yeah, that’s the message I want everybody to like, sink into their brain, and 99% of marketers just haven’t realized that yet. They they’re not sitting down when they’re doing their content calendar. They’re not identifying like one interactive tool a month that they’re creating for their website because they think they. Need a developer to do that. It’s just not true anymore. So we’re limited by just understanding that you don’t need a developer to do interactive tools that you just paste on your website pages. And we’re also limited by our creativity. Like, what can you think of is Is it a pricing tool? Is it? There’s so many different I don’t want to go too far with it, because you could personalize them. I have a friend in a different space, where he runs events for debate teams at high schools, and every debate team at every high school has a page on their website with their basically their schedule for the year, like the other teams they’re going to debate against. So what he did is he had, he just collected all the URLs to all these pages. There’s like 1000 of them that he has, and he created one of these interactive widgets for every single high school, and created a page on his website for every single high school. But he automated it with AI. And what that interactive tool does is it allows you, as the coach for you know, South Bay High School in Boston, to look at, you know, what your ranking would be nationally if you win these debates, but you lose these debates, just a widget you could play with, but it’s specific to your team, and he just generated 1000 of them. Were they on based on the schedules that are publicly available on all the different websites. So not only does AI allow you to create these interactive tools without a developer, it also allows you to customize them and personalize them at an insanely granular level.

Curt Anderson  26:36

Wow. I mean, it just just mind blowing. Do you remember? Do you remember a speaker last year at IMS? You remember Carla? Gregory, Bonnie? Chance Did you meet? Yes. So Carla was on the show last year, and she was actually showing us, like, almost exactly what you’re describing. She was taking, like, HTML, I’m sorry, Google Sheet code and, like, convert it into HTML. Like, you know, she did it right on the show for us, you know, basically with like a configurator, as you’re describing. We’ve got a question here from our dear friend Melinda marks. Melinda Happy Wednesday. She says, how about a buyer’s guide? Does that help with

Dale Bertrand  27:09

intent? It’s the right thing. So one of the things that we’ve done is create what we call niche buying guides, and it really depends on who we’re working with, but you could imagine an organization that has a pretty deep product line, like a lot of lots of products that they offer. Yeah, I can think of one in the consumer space that sold curtains, and it’s like blackout curtains, and then every other kind of Curt you can imagine. So you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t write a curtains Buying Guide. You would write a blackout curtains Buying Guide, and then 50 other ones, right? And the reason why that helps is because it forces you, as a marketer to really go deep into what type of information could we offer that is based on our experience, our unique perspective, our opinion, on a super niche product category, and now all of a sudden, we have unique content now that doesn’t protect you from Google just training its AI on it, yeah, but, but what it does is it makes it much, much more likely that when Google gives a an AI summary at the top, and we’ll call that zero click surge, Google is going to cite your website as a source for that, for that answer, which is, which is what you want, for those informational searches, excellent. Okay, and just to be super clear, the reason why you’re in that scenario, you’re much more likely to get cited is because you’ve got that super niche, super unique answer to or information on the super niche product category that nobody else is writing about in that level,

Damon Pistulka  28:47

right? Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, you could get a design guide on blah, blah, blah skateboard wheels for the winter or something, you know, you could get really crazy about the how far you niche down with that stuff, and it would, it would position it differently, that’s for

Dale Bertrand  29:04

sure. Yeah, we did one once again. This is in the consumer space, but a while ago we did one that was what to wear on Safari. So it was, like, high end women’s clothes that you would wear when you go as far as, like, Wow, that’s pretty darn niche, yeah. So well, like, it’s sold product, and it’s so product because it was the only page on the internet about what to buy when you’re about to go on safari.

Damon Pistulka  29:29

Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, that’s a great example. And it’s a that’s a total consumer product too. It’s not like, necessarily an industrial thing, but it’s

Dale Bertrand  29:40

the same products, right? That’s all they need. Safari products, yes, you know, so, so going back to like, the industrial water filtration, like, you know, there’s 1000s and 1000s of different applications for water filtration, so you could imagine a buying guide for each and every one of those different applications. And. And it’s tough, and that’s what get that’s what’s hard for marketers, right? They’re thinking, well, I’ve got this one product, so I’m going to build this one Buying Guide for this one product with all the strengths and, you know, benefits of my product. It’s like, No, you’re not thinking like your customer, your customers thinking about their application. So what you need to be doing is writing a number of different buying guides for all of those different applications. And I’m not saying I’m the only market ever think of that, because we see those all the time, but, but what I would argue is to get even more niche, because we see, we see a lot of websites that are doing what I’m talking about by industry or by application, so they end up with maybe a dozen industry pages and a dozen application pages. Well, what would those industries be if you had 100 of them? And I’ll give you another example. I talked to a manufacturing company last night. They do contract manufacturing for three printing and low volume manufacturing, and he was telling me 70% of his business was in automotive. So he wants to, you know, figure out, alright, well, what, what should we do, be doing for online content, for automotive? And I said, Well, you really need to dig deeper into automotive. Like, who are you selling to? Are these, like, the big the big car companies. Are we talking about? Tier one vendors, tier two vendors are these, like electronics, like, what is it like? Because we need to break that up so that we can really get niche into those different spaces. So it wouldn’t just be an automotive page on his website. We would want to have 20 of them, 20 of into those different niches. To just really get specific,

Damon Pistulka  31:38

yeah, because if you had niche down into, you know, low volume, 3d production for steering wheel component, electrical components, or something like that, right? And, or the design of, or manufacturing considerations for, or

Dale Bertrand  31:56

you’ve got a lot, it’s, it’s the process, the material, post processing the the industry, the application like, there’s so much you could do there, and all the cross products of that use, you just have to figure out the right ones like, and the right ones. So many of us on this call, like, might have a more technical background, so somebody like me thinks, all right, wow. The cross product of all those things, I could create 1000s of different pages, and it’s like, well, slow down, dip. Like what we really want to think about is, how are our customers thinking about it? And our customers might be thinking and you got to talk to your customers to figure this out, but our customers are probably thinking about it in terms of like they might be looking for different paints and finishes for automotive applications. So that’s a certain type of material for an industry, even though, and that’s what we would go after, like different different industries, different materials and those combinations versus every combination we can think of, yes, because those are the combinations that are cut. Our customers are thinking that we’re top of mind for that. That’s what they’re searching for. That’s

Curt Anderson  33:10

how they’re searching. I absolutely love this, and I’m going to, I’m going to put my buddy Trish. So Trish gave you a shout out. She was at IMS last year, and had a great time with Trish, and she loved your speech. She does, she does translation services. So just kind of an example would be like, if I’m hearing you correctly, and please correct me if I’m not going the right direction here, Dale, instead of, like targeting, like, hey, translation services overall, for for manufacturers, which is great, but maybe like specific languages, or like, kind of like niching that down look like, what type of manufacturers or like specific languages or specific countries, like is that kind of the direction that you’re going? So yes, and,

Dale Bertrand  33:47

and, everything you’re saying will help us brainstorm ideas, please. But the and is we need to talk to our customers to figure out which of those

Curt Anderson  33:56

are good they’re looking for. Got it. Got it.

Dale Bertrand  33:58

Okay? You will, you will hear. You will, it’ll just all click when you’re talking to your actual customers. Yeah, some of us who are on this call today don’t have access to our customers. And you know, sometimes we talk about crimes of humanity, crimes against humanity in the news, but a crime against marketers is not giving marketer direct access to the customer, because, in the sense of like, maybe setting up some one on one calls, or inviting marketers to sales calls, or the your marketing manager needs to be at the trade show so they can have some conversations, whatever that is, right? We want to make sure that as marketers, we’re not practicing digital marketing in such a way that we’re hiding behind analytics. And the tools that we’re using are Google and GA four and maybe SEMrush SEO dashboard, right? And it’s like, Okay, those are cool tools, but what happened to like talking to your customers because, because that’s where, that’s how you answer. That question. Curt, right, yeah,

Curt Anderson  35:02

I God, I couldn’t love that more. That’s so David for a shameless plug. That’s why we love doing these LinkedIn lives. Yes, we feel like this is a great way to a AI proof your business is, you know, create this interactive content, like Dale said earlier. You know, get on video. Get your customers on a LinkedIn live, or a Facebook Live, or whatever social media that your clients are hanging out and interview them, you know, shine a bright light on how awesome their business is. But in the same time, man, you’re discovering a lot of one, a wealth of information about your customers.

Dale Bertrand  35:31

So yeah, and I’m going to take it one step farther, if you don’t mind me making a strong statement, please, like, if you’re a marketer listening to this and you’re at an organization where maybe you don’t have access to your customers, that means you’re not doing your best work, and you got to figure out how to solve that problem. Hopefully you can solve that problem where you’re at but there’s some cases where you need to move on because you’re just not going to be able to do your best work, right? And then there are other marketers who are at an organization where they can’t use AI for various reasons, sure, and that is another situation where you need to solve that problem, because you don’t want to wake up 234, years from now, and basically the profession has moved on without you. Because when the change happen, you just happen to be somewhere where they didn’t invest in that capability. That’s

Curt Anderson  36:26

a direct to Mike moment right there. So, yeah, you know. So if you don’t mind, I’m, I’m going to pull our friend Melinda, she’s with a company in Chicago, and they do, they made in USA, wonderful products. It’s a heavy duty outdoor power pedestal. So say, like, they, you go to, like, Ritz Hotel in a beautiful landscaping, and they need outlets. And it’s so instead of, like, just this wooden, you know, bad outlet, it’s a nice heavy duty, you know, industrial steel outlet that, you know, flips up, you can plug in that type of thing golf courses, you know, if she were to do a buyer’s guide, would we be and again, like, I’m just kind of putting, you know, putting on a spot a little bit. But would she be thinking about, like, you know, power, you know, power sources for hotels, power sources for golf courses? Like, how niche would she want to get

Dale Bertrand  37:13

it? The answer is, of course, it depends. But I would want, I would want to talk to our customer, customers, yeah? Like you want to get niche, but not too niche is always the right answer, yeah. So you want to get niche enough that you don’t have much competition, yeah. So imagine niche enough that there are only a few other companies out there writing on that topic, and you’re going to do a better job so you win. But it doesn’t have to be zero, because you run the risk of getting two niche Yep, excellent. Hey,

Curt Anderson  37:49

we got a comment from say, Eddie says, AI, technology simplifies our lives. I agree 100% they I could keep you here all day. I know you’re busy, man. You’re traveling all over you’ve got a big gig coming up for the for in Kentucky, and I’m going to dive into the industrial marketing Summit. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to spear, I’d like to talk a little bit about, just give everybody a preview of the industrial marketing Summit. Now I’ve got you right there. There’s that handsome devil. So just, can you give us just like, a little sneak peek of, like, what are we going to be talking about in this one? You’re doing two sessions. What are we talking about at this one?

Dale Bertrand  38:23

Yeah, so when it comes to the inbound marketing playbook, like, what’s going on there is that inbound marketing, popularized by HubSpot, is all about this partnership between marketers and Google. Marketers generate a ton of educational content, and Google supplies the traffic, right? Google needs the content in order to get people to search. Like if the web didn’t have tons and tons of content that was constantly being published and refreshed, the web wouldn’t be that valuable, and people wouldn’t search, and Google couldn’t make advertising dollars, you know, and and the founders wouldn’t be billionaires, you know, 100 times over. So inbound marketing was this partnership between marketers and Googles, but it’s changing, right? So I’m really gonna be talking about the rise of inbound marketing over the last 20 years, and then the fall is AI hits, but then the rebirth, and the rebirth is a beautiful thing, because inbound marketing is not dead. HubSpot is still a, I don’t know, 100 billion. I don’t know what they’re worth, but many, many billions, and they’re still growing, and they’re they’re still growing because inbound marketing is still a thing. It’s just changing going going forward. What marketers need to do is make sure that your content is cited in the AI overviews and the generative AI platforms. And we need to make sure that you’re creating content that Google’s AI can’t summarize. Those are the content formats that I talked about. And you also need to make sure that, just like the time that we were all focused on creating as much content as possible, going forward, it’s not gonna be as much about content. As it is about attention. So we really need to refocus on where are our customers hanging out? And that might be Google searches, it might be Reddit forums, it might be private communities, it might be in person events, but, but they’re still searching. We need to get in front of them wherever they’re at. And we need to re rethink, you know, so that we’re focused on intention rather than generating as much content as we possibly. Gosh, great,

Curt Anderson  40:29

brilliant advice, man. I I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to be here. I want to go your your keynote speaking the close out. Let’s on Friday of the industrial marketing Summit. Again, if you just join us, we’re here with Dale Bertrand, the founder, CEO of fire and spark. He’s speaking at the industrial marketing summit at the end of end of August, end of February, in Austin, Texas. Can’t wait to see you there, Dale, what’s the what can we expect on a So for people that like sneaking out early of the conference, man, if you do, you’re gonna miss that. You’re gonna miss, like, the the grand salami at the end. What are we talking about as you close it out. So

Dale Bertrand  41:08

first of all, like, I like to applaud the organizers of the event, because they put the best keynote last. And so this is, this is about, like, all of the expectations that we have on us on our shoulders as marketers like we are expected to increase our output, to increase our results, to single handedly grow the business while, I guess, while everybody else kind of sits on their hands and does whatever they do, and there’s there’s just a lot of pressure to do more with less as marketers right now, fortunately, we have new tools. We have new AI tools. We have the AI mindset, which is more important than just the tools that will allow us to be more productive and do better work. Going forward, what we’ve measured on our team is like a 40% productivity improvement over the last two years applying not just AI tools, and this is what’s important. It’s the AI mindset, so that you’re you’ve got aI open in front of you all day, every day, while you’re working, you’re turning to it to help you brainstorm and plan, to help you delegate, to help you remember things that you’ve squirreled away to help you brainstorm when you’re writing, to suggest changes to documents and emails that you’re writing, to help you reformat things so that you can take a screenshot and it creates a spreadsheet or a table so that you don’t spend time on that. And that’s how we at my agency were able to get a 40, 40% improvement in productivity, which is measurable, right? That means we can spend our time doing other things, which tends to be the things that I enjoy doing, like strategy and ideation and brainstorming with my team in front of a whiteboard, not formatting a spreadsheet or a document or copy and paste. That’s like, control C, control V. I used to do that. So that’s, that’s what I’m talking about in terms of, like, how AI and the AI mindset can help you just, you know, get more Zen in your work life as a marketer.

Curt Anderson  43:19

Yeah, absolutely gosh, I can’t wait, man, this is gonna be, gonna be awesome, you know. And you know, when they say, like, big shoes of or, like, you know who you follow, Damon, like, I he’s gonna be following this guy right here, so that crazy bald guy right there. So we set the bar, really, Dale, so there’s like, there’s no, there’s gonna be, like, no issue of, like, you know, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, I’m gonna set the part so low you blow it away at the end. I’m

Dale Bertrand  43:45

starting to rethink the whole thing. I didn’t know I was going after the crazy ball guy. Nobody told me this. Can you not in the contract?

Curt Anderson  43:52

Can you, can you get a razor? Dude? Like, can you, can you help me out? Man, like, David off and like, we’ll be, we’ll be brothers. How’s that? Well,

Dale Bertrand  43:59

it’s Texas, so I can grab some something, some protection while I get down there. That’s

Curt Anderson  44:04

right. So alright, we’re going to start winding down one, one thing I did want to ask you is, you mentioned the word you you’ve said interactive multiple times. So we’ve talked about configurators, like, quote builder, you know the intent. What are any tips advice? Like, which do you have a social strategy? Like, when you say interactive, are we talking user generated content? You know, are we talking LinkedIn content videos like, what are some tips that you would share?

Dale Bertrand  44:30

It’s all of the above, everything, plus original research. Do a survey. Do research. Scrape some website. Like, the easiest way to do research is scraping some websites that have information. Another easy way to do research is grab some data sheets off competitor websites or a bunch of different brand websites, and say and start to do some comparisons. Make some broad statements about the industry. Make some broad statements about the products in a particular product category. So. That’s easy, right? Like you’re downloading some PDFs, right? So, yeah, I just want Oh, and then there’s Google deep research. And then there’s a new one open AI is, I forget what it’s called. It’s also called Deep reach research. But what that does is it makes the research even easier. I’ll give you guys an example. I did some original research where I was basically looking at zero click search. So right now, 60% of the time people search, they don’t click on anything, or at least they don’t click outside of Google. They might click to a Google property or something like that. So I went to Google deep research, which is an amazing tool. And I said, I want you to find all the statistics that have been published over the last 10 years anywhere on zero click search. And it basically found 30 different websites that mentioned it, and it filtered them down to 10 different studies published over the last 10 years. And it gave me a table with all the different numbers that showed that roughly over time, that number went from 30% to 60% over the last 10 years. And then this data is published in a lot of different places, right? And this was done automatically for me in four minutes by Google, deep research by Gemini. So if you haven’t used this particular tool I’m talking about, you need it, yeah, especially for the type of research that I’m talking about. Like, Curt, you asked me a question like, how do you create original research? You can have Google deep research, do it for you. And what I just described is more of a meta analysis, where you’re grabbing research from a number of different places, aggregating it in a way that’s adding value, generating some visuals, which is what I did for my presentations, and it’s very useful, and then putting some insights on top of it. Now you’ve got something original that nobody else has based on other people’s research, but you’re aggregating it and adding value in a useful way, and you’re using an AI tool, Google deep research, which cost me $20 a month to do it for you in four minutes. It’s like a no freaking brainer, if you once you realize how to, like, learn how to use those tools,

Curt Anderson  47:07

right? Gosh, alright, man. Damon, this like, how much Dale we like, how much we owe you for, like, this masterclass, yes,

Dale Bertrand  47:16

probably $1 million well, hey,

Curt Anderson  47:18

check the mail, my friend, $1 million and that’s Can I just I do my Doctor Evil impression? That’s alright, so let’s do this. Dale, um, I have a couple quick questions before we let you go work. You’ve got some speaking gigs coming up. We’ve we’re really super excited to catch you at the industrial marketing Summit. You’re going to be speaking next week in Kentucky. Do you have other speaking gigs that you want to share with folks that they can

Dale Bertrand  47:42

find you? Yeah, well, I would say, Look at my website. So fire and spark.com all spelled out. If, if you want to talk SEO, what I love doing. I love talking about this stuff. So I love to take a look at people’s website. Take a look at the existing content you have, and I can give you some pointers on how to update it for, basically, for the future of search, for 2025 that I’ve been doing a lot of that it’s fun for me. So let’s take like, 2030 minutes and just, you know, let me volunteer some time to just take a look at your website, take a look at your content, and I’d love to give you some advice so you can hit me up at Dale, at fire and spark.com all spelled out. So I, I’d be happy to talk to anybody. So yeah, that’s that’s really the best way to connect with me. And connect with me on LinkedIn, because try to post a bunch on LinkedIn. Connect

Curt Anderson  48:32

with Dale on LinkedIn. I And I love you’re always posting like your speak. I love following your speaking here, speaking there, all over the place. So just admire your work. You know, you become a dear friend. And I just can’t describe my respect, admiration for what you’re doing, for AI and for marketers that are just really, it gets overwhelming, intimidating just trying to figure this thing out. So please connect with Dale on LinkedIn, fire, fire and spark. That’s his website. Check it out. All sorts of wonderful information there. Go to the industrial marketing summit in Austin. Love to see you guys in person. Get there now. Dale’s going to be speaking. He’s going to he’s got a work session, and he’s the close out keynote speaker. Dale, you’ve been an entrepreneur for many, many years. Question that I absolutely love to ask you best business advice that you personally have ever received. I think I asked you last time on a bit you again, best business advice that you’ve ever received or that you’d like to share with a young or new entrepreneur as they’re starting off their journey.

Dale Bertrand  49:29

That’s really interesting. I think I’ve had a great mentor that I started working with early in the 2000s Bettina Hein. She’s like a serial entrepreneur. She’s been great to me, and she at the time, she confided in me, but it was really, just really good advice, where she said, Dale, most of what I’ve done, most of what I’ve tried hasn’t worked, and I’m looking at her like, wow, you’re my entrepreneurial. Euro. Like, you’ve launched three businesses that you sold for many millions of dollars each. You’re, she’s on Shark Tank in Europe. It’s like the Shark Tank. She’s one of the sharks. It’s called Dragon’s Den. Yeah, most things I do fail, crashing bird like most of everything I’ve tried, yeah, no good. I just give up on it, yeah, but a few things work, and that’s been good enough, yeah? And I’m like, Huh? That’s interesting. And I can say for sure for I’ve been exactly the same way, yeah,

Curt Anderson  50:34

I tell you it there you go. Drop the mic right there. So this was amazing. So Dale, first off, thank you, heartfelt. Thank you. Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule. Damon, thoughts, takeaways as we close out, no,

Damon Pistulka  50:47

I just thanks a lot. Dale, it’s awesome talking to you and getting your perspective, because you’re doing it every day, laying out things that work and you understand, AI enough to explain it in terms that, thankfully we can understand and really help people do this, because it’s a, it’s a constantly changing course, like you said,

Curt Anderson  51:06

yeah, it’s, it can be very, you know, and for folks out there, it can be very intimidating. But I think, Dale, that’s a gift of yours is that you, you know, you’re staying at the forefront of the cutting edge of AI, but you bring it down to a level that people can like a guy like me, if I can understand, it, I set the bar pretty low. If I can understand it, hopefully everybody else out there can understand it. Parting thoughts, closing words as we close out anything else you want to share with everybody. Well,

Dale Bertrand  51:29

thank you for the invite, and I’m looking forward to when we could do it again. And I’m going to see in person pretty soon, so we’ll grab a beer. And, yeah, yeah. And like I said, I’m excited to talk to folks if they want my opinion about what to do with you know, the content they already have, getting it updated for

Curt Anderson  51:46

for 2025 I think it’s gonna be mandatory, Dale, we need to have you back every so often. As matter of fact, we’re gonna be going live. We’re gonna be doing our live show at the industrial marketing Summit. Yes, on that Thursday, I would love to have you there, being that you’re a repeat offender on the show. As we close out guys again, please connect with Dale. Do yourself a favor there. But the other thing is, go out and just be someone’s inspiration, just like our dear friend Dale was, for all of us out here and Damon, how about a big stand innovation for Dale for just crushing it. Dale, thank you, dude. Appreciate you. Hang out with us for one second. I wish. I want to thank everybody in the chat. If you missed this, if you came in late, I encourage you, I invite you, I implore you, go back. This was a an absolute AI master class. This was a gift. This is why Damon, I, you know, come out here every week doing this, just to bring wonderful people like Dale, just to kind of give everybody a little sharper edge. So Dale, thank you and you guys. Have a great rest of your week. We’ll see you guys on Friday. Bye.