The Power of Unified Marketing: How to Create A Customer Experience That Will Empower You to Grow Your Business and Dominate Your Marketplace

Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of Ecoffee with Experts. I’m your host, Matt Fraser. And on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about the power of unified marketing, and how to create a customer experience that will empower you to grow your business and dominate your marketplace. With Jim LaSalle. Jim is the CEO of Keen Insights Internet Services, a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in New York, USA. He’s a serial entrepreneur, podcaster, producer and writer. His first book is a nonfiction professional book called Unified Marketing Strategy, in which he shares the processes and outlines the formula that has helped make his clients and his businesses successful. Jim believes strongly in the concept of Kaizen, the constant striving for perfection. Jim, thank you so much. Thank you for being on the show.

You’re welcome. My pleasure.

Jim, you’ve had an interesting journey so far. Who are you as a high school student?

As a high school student, I thought I was going to be a good baseball player. And then I didn’t hit a curveball. I found a little home in track and field. I was the resident high-jumper and did pretty well with that and then hurt my knee. And then I didn’t do it in college. So that was pretty much the end of that. But I was always a tall, lanky kid, started hitting the gym and working on getting a little bit bigger. I was insecure in that, you know, we were insecure in high school for different reasons then you kind of overcome that stuff.

Yeah. How tall are you? If you don’t mind me asking, then.

I am 6’1

Okay? Cause I’m 6’6. But I’m not as bulky. You never tell when people we’re just doing these sorts of things. So it’s all someone is limited by that. In your bio, you adopted the philosophy of Kaizen. Where did you first discover that? Just out of curiosity.

I was reading little pamphlets by Price Pritchett, I think his name is. And he had these little pamphlets. And in one of them, I saw that thought, it comes from the Japanese chi, meaning change and zen meaning good. And it’s, there’s no direct correlation, but it’s the constant striving for perfection. You work on little things and over time you keep adopting these little changes and they turn into big changes over time.

Absolutely. I first learned about the concept when I started working for Mazda Canada because that’s one of their philosophies in their entire company, is Kaizen to constantly be improving and they implemented it into their entire business, from manufacturing to the sales, training and everything, that you should constantly be evolving to do that. So it’s quite a powerful philosophy as far as I’m concerned. Have you adopted it into all aspects of your life and business?

Yes, it’s a core value. Number one. We press on all of our staff and we tell them to read and get better. You’re not just at work but it’s important for your personal life. You study what you want to get better at, mind, body, spirit kind of stuff.

That’s awesome. So you worked as a managing partner at Driven Local for over seven years. What was your experience working there?

Well, we started that company and there would probably be about four of us around a table when we got going. We ended up acquiring companies, we acquired two companies in 2013 and then ended up selling the company to a company called Scorpion Design in July 2017. And, a lot of stuff you learn about owning a business for sure, your first rodeo, so to speak, and whether it’s finding good people or getting the right people and then finding the right seat for them. Getting teams to work together. Just a lot of stuff to say, acquisitions to share the things in the acquisitions. When you acquire a company, the first time we had done it, the things that bite you are the things that you don’t expect to like. We had planned on the staff, we planned on rolling in the accounts and everything else and integrating their people when it was it was the silly things that we didn’t think of, like the integration of the billing software from all these other companies and getting them to merge into one where we then had to manually input all of their contracts and have people dig up the contracts for all of these companies to get the information because they don’t have the credit card information stored. So then you have to either send an email to the clients, you don’t want to do that because then it’s like that’s an opportunity for someone to leave or cancel or whatever. And so you want to have a minimal amount of that, but we were able to eventually get everything to kind of merge together, but that will always stand out as the biggest pain in the neck that we had at the time.

Wow, was there anything that could have been done to avoid it or was it just the time and the situation of the technology at the time?

Maybe a little bit of both. I don’t think we expected it. I think the platforms, you know, we were a smaller company at a time. The other companies that we acquired were smaller too. So we weren’t all using the same platform. And being able to pull the lists and upload them on our platform didn’t work. So we had to eventually integrate into a bigger solution that we were able to kind of have them help with the assistance of downloading everything and then uploading everything into there. So, there was a little bit of a pain in the neck, so the companies kind of operated even individually for the first. I want to say the first quarter we made it like one of the big things that we had to do over the first quarter. But I would say over the first couple of months, a couple of billing cycles, everybody was still being billed by the organization that they came on with and we figured out the banking and the other stuff that wasn’t that big of a deal.

Wow. Interesting. What was the turning point that made you want to become an entrepreneur and start your digital marketing agency in 2008?

Well, one of my partners and I were working in the yellow page world and they were trying to figure out how to integrate digital solutions into or with the print product. And being close to the New York City Metro, the print product is bleeding more revenue at the time. So they started getting into Google AdWords or, search engine marketing as it was at the time and the way that they were incorporating it, we just felt what was it was wrong for the client where they were bundling in, whether it was their digital product, which was really an online directory and billing them for, for print as well, and putting together a package where let’s say of $2,000 a month, maybe 400 of it was going into Google. And a lot of them were saying, well, this isn’t really working and blah, blah, blah. And Google had an issue with it. And then we kind of said, you know, we can do this better and just incorporate just Google because we would not have to worry about a print product. So we kind of went our own way and, and started doing the search marketing. The opportunity really is what it came down to, and the problem and solving the problem.

Do you think that like Yellow Pages, the carrier missed the boat, like yellow pages in newspapers? I don’t know what they did wrong. They had the market. They had all of the opportunities. They had the lists, They were selling print classifieds and could have just as easily sold eBay classifieds, eBay classifieds could have been for the newspapers. Craigslist could have been for the newspapers.

I can tell you exactly where they lost the boat. They lost their work because the margins on their print product were so much higher than what they would be able to take on a Google AdWords thing. But there were these other digital agencies that they could have glammed up with platforms and technology because they were cash rich. They were still so hung up on trying to keep their print products going because of the margins. And they either thought they’d be able to maintain aspects of that or they thought that advertisers would continue on those platforms. And it just wasn’t the case. And a lot of them just died.

Wow. It’s just amazing how they. I don’t even know how they’re still in business today. Frankly, I just don’t.

I don’t think the Yellow Pages even exist anymore. I think a lot of them evolved like take Verizon, which evolved into super media and Dex which, I think they’re more thrive now but they had a merge. Joe Walsh was the CEO of Yellow Book. He went in, and he had left Yellow Book, went to decks, put together a deal for Dex to kind of acquire super media and ran them both kind of alongside each other. And then as markets then he would fold markets into to have one directory to have that kind of lasts a little longer. And then they finally got wise, and they went the route with Thrive, which is its kind of like a small business bundle for Internet marketing directories, reviews and all that.

Yeah, serving small businesses, I mean, obviously, small businesses make up such a large portion of the US economy. So it makes sense in some ways. Have you found any challenges? I know this is maybe off topic or I just we’re talking about small businesses and directories and so on, but like the challenges that small businesses face is that one of the ways to maximize their marketing dollars is by buying those such said products that you just mentioned?

I would say no. I mean, the proper solution for a small business would probably be to do a small Google ads budget, and get our general business page because, if you’re talking about like a real small mom and pop.

Yeah, I’m talking like 500 bucks months budget.

Yeah, they are probably best served to find a small business provider, like even a company of my size wouldn’t be interested in 500 bucks a month. We want two or 3000 a month. So they can find some of these services, you know, thrive out a good service. For those small types of budgets they can, they can do it on their own. It’s really taking the time to learn how Google AdWords works, put in your credit card and put in the keywords and, continually get better at it. You know, talk about and get better at that.

Exactly. Just focus on that if you don’t because not a lot of marketers want to take on a $ 500-a-month commitment. It doesn’t seem to be worth the time at least I found. But anyway.

It’s like the age-old adage of you have people with a business versus businessmen. The person was a business, really gave themselves a job. And they’re not acting as a big business owner, getting things done through other people. And they want their hands in everything. And it’s $500 that they’re given for the advertising. It’s $500 that they can go and pay their cable bill at home or whatever.

I guess you spoke about being a business owner with these and being a businessman versus a business owner or self-employed versus the cashflow quadrant by Robert Yassky talks about that, being able to which quadrant are you in or are you a business owner because you’re only a business owner if you don’t have to run the business. You have other people doing it for you, but you’ve started quite a few businesses like you also co-founded US History Repeated, could you tell our audience a little bit more about that?

One day I was just talking to my sister, who was an AP US History teacher, she has two little ones now and she stays home to raise them. She was talking about how she missed teaching. So I said, well, let’s maybe make you America’s history teacher, and we’ll make a podcast, and we’ll put this together. You put together the content. I’ll figure out how to do a podcast and set that stuff up. And now we have 55 or so episodes. We try to do about 20 a year, we do like 10 in the spring, 10 in the fall and maybe a little bit more. But now we’re pushing out on email marketing, and some other things as our list has been growing because now we’re about 50,000 listeners.

That’s amazing. I’m going to listen to it. I’m interested in this. So, basically, she’s a teacher, and she’s teaching U.S. history. Instead of teaching it to school kids and having a job. She’s using her knowledge to teach through a podcast. Is there a YouTube show like a YouTube episode?

We haven’t put it on YouTube yet. You can listen to podcasts, people listen on Spotify, or they listen on iTunes. That’s where most of the downloads come from.

Amazing because I’m sure there’s an endless amount of topics. The US history is very rich, so I’m assuming there’s just an endless number of topics you can talk about in that regard.

And more as more history is being made every year.

Yeah, absolutely. So who inspires an entrepreneur like you?

Oh, gosh, there are so many. I try to read two books a month, I get ambitious with the audiobooks to try and get that to average three. But you can pick up these little lessons from everyone over the year.

I learned from Anthony Robbins. The one thing I learned from him is he said, if you want to be good at something, find someone good at it, learn from them, and then do it twice as much. So I’ve always tried that, instead of reinventing the wheel and trying to just learn it all on your own, which I think some people adopt that philosophy of just learning on your own. And I guess as a newbie, as a trailblazer, you need to do that if you want to learn something new. What do you think?

Yes, throw yourself into the fire. You guys hear yourself into the fire sometimes, but finding someone who’s done it before and listening to business, can be any business owner. They just have to be successful. Most businesses are the same. Everybody’s selling something, some product or service. They have a cost of production and what’s left is profit and managing that operational aspect. And in the book I talk about, sales and marketing. If you’re going to rank it from 1 to 10 and your operations if you rank that from 1 to 10, you add those two scores together and whatever the average is going to be your financial score. So if you have more poor core operations and you have strong sales, you’re going to churn a lot, and your financial gain is going to be on the lower side. But if you have both of them high, you can manage. So that’s why the balance between those two areas tends to lend itself to the most success.

We were talking about how off camera, pre show if you go out and get like 20 clients tomorrow and you don’t have the operations to be able to fulfill that, whatever business you’re in if it’s manufacturing or whatever, those two things kind of come to equilibrium. Is that what you’re saying? Like they have to balance one another for the growth of the company. One grows too much without the other. You’re going to throw your company on.

Correct. So you need to have a bench. You always have to hire even when you don’t need it. You have to have someone in the queue ready to go. Develop your salespeople and hope for the best as you go but planned.

Jim, how did you learn all this? Like it just did. Did you have someone mentor you earlier in your career, in your life? Or was it just from self-taught reading books and discovering all these things? Or was it from your own experiences like “I need to balance these things out”?

No. You know what? Throughout my career. When I first got out of college, I worked at ADP doing the payroll and tax filing solution and then went to the Yellow Pages. So I was dealing predominantly with small and mid-sized business owners. And in addition to talking to them about whatever product or service they were offering, I would always ask them, Hey, how did you get into this business? I always knew that I wanted to have my own business one day and asked all of these questions along the way, especially among the more successful ones. And they’re happy to talk about, their growing pains and how they got to where they are. And even now with marketing, I learned that much more because my clients today we’re developing content marketing for them. And some of the company’s story gets integrated with the customer journey. And we put together all of those things and how they got to where they are, did they acquire companies? Who were their mentors, and where were they picked up? So, I learned a lot through osmosis along the way by talking to all these business owners.

That’s awesome. How did you come up with the idea for the book?

The training that I would do for my sales team back in June local. It was based on putting together a marketing plan for the clients. So I had a kind of outline already, and then I was like, You know what? I can just help more business owners by putting this out if they want to figure out how to do all this stuff on their own. And so I kind of put together the defining your current state, where are you today versus where you want to be? Where do you have to ratchet everything up? Where the variance is between where you are now and where you want to get to. Know how much more you need to sell? And then you put together the marketing plan based on that. You talk to your salespeople. Here’s where you have to do it. Maybe have to hire some other people. Once you define that desired state and where they are in the current state, then it’s just a matter of, “hey, Let’s put together the plan to get you from A to B” and then that’s where we would talk to them. If you want the phone to ring more, then you got to do more search marketing because that’s a low-hanging fruit. People are looking for what you doing, but they don’t know where to go and get it. A longer-term strategy on that action item where people are doing searches for SEO, but that’s not going to be the immediate gratification of page search. And then once you maximize impression share, which in paid search is the percentage of time that your ads are showing up versus the amount of time people are looking for it. You can tell them that your budget right now is generating a 25% impression share or a 50% impression share. Yeah. If you want to get closer to 100, you can triple-double it and get closer to that hundred percent. And then once you get to that point, then you can start turning on other aspects of the marketing, which would be like retargeting, remarketing or maybe some social media top-of-the-funnel awareness or programmatic display and video. And you can kind of build on what you have. But if you have the phone ringing, that’s the key point. But the book is based on the training that I would do for my team and maybe go into a little bit more detail. And I had to take a year off when we sold the company. So it’s like, what can I do? Because I was bored. So I just kind of took that and started putting that together.

Has the book been an instrumental lead generator for you? How has writing a book impacted your business that’s what I want to know.

You know what? It turned into a really good business card. We don’t sell a lot of copies online. But when we have someone that we’re talking to, I’m like, “listen, here’s my philosophy. Here’s what we do. Take a read, and if you like what you see, then I’m your guy. If not, then you know you can go.” It has lent itself to bringing in some bigger clients with more complicated needs. So it’s worked out well in that regard.

Without making competition for yourself. Is it something you would recommend other consultants do?

It’s a lot of work to put together the book. I’ll tell you that. And I learned a lot about the publishing world and everything else. I mean, a lot of people would like to write a book. I would say have at it. But you’re going to have to have a unique perspective. You’ll have to take the time to put it together and certainly have it edited. But I would recommend, if you want to become known as a subject matter expert on anything, then write a book, and put something together. And if you’re not going to write a book, do a blog, just get in the habit of writing. And, you know, if they’re interested in your content, they’ll start to follow you.

In other words, you’re also saying that if someone like people doesn’t have enough content right now to write a book maybe, or they won’t even have an audience. Writing a blog and writing your content and sharing your content little by little. As you said, if you’re sharing a daily or twice a week or once a week or whichever, to put your expertise out there so that people can see what you have to build yourself up as an authority and then maybe you have enough content to turn that into a book eventually. Would that be a strategy someone could adopt?

Yeah, correct. Over time, if they accumulate that content, they might have to freshen it up over a few years because technology changes. But yeah, that’d be a good way to do it.

Absolutely. I want to ask you in regard to the customer journey. What’s your marketing software of choice to communicate with customers? Like there’s keep, there are various other active campaigns, there’s MailChimp, I may keep going off the top of my head, but is there any do you do is there any you specifically recommend to businesses or specifically that you use in regards to in your business?

Like we tend to gravitate toward El Champ and Orange just because my mouth is used to it. But ActiveCampaign is good, the campaign monitor is good, and constant contact is good. The key to any of those is that if you want to have just an email blast campaign, then you can use any of them. But if you want to have like a customer journey where you can have an email drip, drip campaign when they first sign to your list and then they get emails one and two and three and four in this series that you kind of developed. And you have to pick the proper platform, and it’s not going to be one of the free ones. You’re going to have to pay a couple of bucks for it because to get that kind of utility, you have to be able to use the proper tier. And that’s going to be based on the features of the tier and the number of people on your email list, and then they give you an amount that you pay each month.

How important then do you think it is to use something like that, like marketing automation and sort of all-in-one platform that connects your CRM and your email versus just using an email marketing platform like content contact?

It depends on how complex you want to be. If you have the wherewithal to put in automation, I will encourage people to do it because the more occupations you have, The less hands-on it’s going to be. And if, you know, if you have salespeople putting stuff into a CRM or you have operations putting customers into a CRM. When a contract comes in, you can segment the lists through the automation, and one goes to the customer, one goes to prospects, and you can have different journeys based on those customers are going to get a certain thing, and then you can drill down as deep depends on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. If someone signs up for, let’s say, paid search and you want to upsell them to SEO. The emails that you’re going to send to those customers are going to be about the benefits of SEO as a complement search, and you can kind of craft all of these things and set them up in a manner that you want to be able to do it.

Do you think that’s the future of where the marketing industry is going or for businesses?

I wouldn’t even call it a future. I would call it now, this new stuff is available now. You’re either adopting it, or you’re not. And eventually, you’re going to have to.

Yeah, you’re right. What do you think is the biggest thing hindering? Because I know a lot of businesses don’t know about it or they don’t have time. But I could say all these things. What have you seen have been the biggest challenges of people adopting this kind of technology into their businesses?

Ignorance and apathy. They don’t know. They don’t care. You know those. But I would say ignorance is the big one where they’re so busy working in the business about working on the business. We were talking about a guy with a business versus a businessman. So, if you’re able to spend the time working on the business instead of in it, then you’ll be able to do the research and find these tools and do the integration.

If someone were to come to you and say they want to make that transition from working in the business and start working on the business, like, are there any clients who have come to you and said that and what advice would you give them?

No one come to me and said that, I would say join a peer advisory group so that you can go and do that. I’m a member of one and a couple of other groups of business owners where we get together, share ideas, we act as each other’s advisory board. Everybody has different, different strengths, right? Like in the room, I might be the marketing guy, but someone else has been in business and acquired and sold his company for millions of dollars. He’s good at scale, or he’s good at incentivizing his staff. And they share that information. So if you want to do it, you talked to us before us. If they’re business owners that I’ve been inspired by, it’s the ones that you learn from that you surround yourself with.

That’s such a valuable piece of advice you just shared there about joining a peer group or would be a mastermind if you will. Is that sort of the same thing?

Yeah, You get into Napoleon Hill, my favorite.

Do you make sure that you’re there are non-competing businesses in there?

Well, in the peer advisory group, you don’t want to have any conflicts of interest. The guy who runs our group is very big on not having someone supplier in a group with whatever because there can be conflicts like that. We don’t have too much overlapping. I know a lot of the networking groups like a BNI or some of these others, but I don’t care for those types of groups because they’re just looking for referrals. It’s not my thing. They’ll keep it industry-specific where you only have one for each. It’s like one advertising guy, one lawyer, one this, one that so that there’s one guy to get the referral for any kind of legal stuff. One got to get the referral for any marketing stuff.

I then joined BNI, and it’s all about referrals. It’s not about the other parts you talked about, like a mastermind or a peer group. There’s more to it. Where could other organizations out there send an email to people with these sorts of things that you could mention?

There are a bunch. I am a member of Impel CEOs. They’re here in New York. If you go to compel CEOs.com. I did a website, by the way. That group is great. I’ve been in there since 2015. I learned a lot. I mean, they helped us with some aspects of the exit that we had when we sold the company on the right valuation and know some of the guys in there have had experience. They’re all over the place. You have a lot of bigger ones out there. Find one in your local market. Just look up to your advisory boards in whatever location you are in.

You know, you have bigger ones that are more national. I know, Compel is growing, and it’s probably a little bit more regional now. But yeah. And if you don’t find one, you can always start one.

Yeah, absolutely. You could start a small business network in your small business peer group or mastermind in your area and call it business owners. In your book, in chapter 14, you talk about the website a.k.a the destination and RASCIL factors. I haven’t had time to read your book. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? It’d be interesting to hear your thoughts on what that’s about.

So RASCIL is an acronym back from the yellow page days where when you’re building an effective ad, you would have certain calls to action or reliability factors, SDR and different things that you would be able to incorporate into the ad to make sure that you got the calls. And if you’re using your website, the website is the destination for anybody who will find you online. So it’s an electronic storefront. And the first impression that you’re going to make on somebody is your website. So it should look good. It should look clean. I always tell people websites should be like cars. You know you want to get a new lease every 3 to 5 years. I mean, there are updates. You know, whether it was, you know, in 2014, there was a big shift to responsive design, which was more because of the adaptation of smartphones. 2008 was the year that the iPhone came out. I knew that everybody had a smartphone. My mom finally got one in like 2015. And I was like, all right, I guess everybody’s got one now. That’s really what changed. It wasn’t Google that killed the Yellow Pages. It was the smartphone smarts. Now everything was at your fingertips. You know you can go, and you can look up anything right there. So the website is very important, and having those factors, I’ll give you a quick example. If you have it on your website, let’s say something as simple as the credit card logos, where now you see that this company accepts credit cards and you want to pay by credit card, and someone else that you look at doesn’t have the credit card logos. Instead of you having to Call. And ask the question, do you accept credit cards? You know, this person does, and you’re more likely to go there as opposed to the person that didn’t have it because of these RASCIL factors that you can put into ads and now you’re just putting them into websites. So calls to action and grabbing people’s attention and directing them on the best ways to contact you or the features they will be interested in. Someone with 50 years of experience versus someone who looks like a fly-by-night company. You’ll call the people with the 50 years you want to ensure these tidbits are in there.

So how would someone who is just starting then get a professional website but they have no credibility? Now what I mean by credibility is let’s just take into point a home renovation company guy who’s just wanting to grow. He started out doing kitchens, and now he wants to get into more bases and for full renovations. But, he’s just starting, and even though he’s got five years of experience working for someone else, he’s got no Google reviews. How would you advise him to overcome that hurdle?

Oh, typically, guys like that are going to have done some work on their own before branching off and just starting on their own. I would get a few client testimonials. I would get the same clients to leave reviews online, and then you can showcase those on your websites. So you kind of give people that confidence to give you a call.

At least have some credibility and then slowly build up those reviews over time. It’s amazing. You mentioned how the website is like the central destination. And it’s incredible how when you pair marketing automation with your website, whether it’s built-in or not or it’s so closely built-in if you have a CRM that can manage the workflow or the customer journey. When your project is done, you can change the status of your salesperson or whoever it is, change the status automatically over a few days, or it’ll enroll them in a review campaign. And please leave us a review campaign. So is that a recommendation you would make for people as well?

As much automation as you can put in that you’re able to manage. Like one of the things people have been putting on their websites more so now is online chat. And you have a number of services that do that. And it can be anything from where you log on in the morning. And anybody that gets to your website gets a little beep, and you can communicate with them or have someone in your office communicate with them live. You have like those, those chatbots, which I don’t find to be very effective because you have to have a set question they can answer that can not answer or they’ll just say, I don’t understand. Can you please ask again? And what they’re trying to do is get a specific question that they’ll have an answer to, and you’re better off dealing with a live body. And then for the higher end result with that, you have companies you can pay to engage folks when they get to the online chat. So they install their chat, and then they have a team of people that will be there and interact. And what they’re doing is they’re gathering lead information. So they’ll get the email address or the contact information, and they’ll forward that over to the business owner, which is really what you’re looking to get out of the online chat anyway.

In other words, what you’re saying, if I hear you correctly, is that automated chatbots aren’t as effective as live operators engaging with the visitor.

That’s been my experience, and if you have a great AI and automated chat, which I haven’t found any that are there quite yet. And believe me, I’ve looked around because I love integrating as much automation as possible. But, if you have someone sitting in your office anyway, they’re not busy 24 hours a day. And if there’s no one to contact, then it just goes to like a little online form. Even when I engage and I can tell right away when it’s a chatbot, I’m just like, oh!

Oh yeah, I don’t like them personally. You mentioned AI. What part do you think is going to play in regard to marketing?

This is a holy grail that everybody’s kind of after. I joke with my wife, and I put this in the book don’t talk in front of Siri or don’t talk in front of, hey, Google, those microphones are always on, even Alexa, Amazon. Amazon gets hit all the time whenever there’s, like, let’s say, murder in someone’s home. And they find an Alexa there, they’re trying to get access to the Alexa recording to see who’s there because it’s always listening. When you say, Hey, Alexa, it engages, right? Or Alexa play whatever, then it engages. So, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to decipher the human conversation and tie that into a particular product. So if you have it on your phone with Siri, you have it at home with Alexa. So or hey, Google or, any of these that we have in our homes all the time. They’re all they’re always listening. I tend to unplug them. I’m a little paranoid. I know how it works. I was talking about like something with a tracksuit. And I started seeing ads with tracksuits, and I was like, Jesus Christ.

I know my wife is pissed off about that, too

But you tend to see relevant ads, though. So it’s one thing you just. Where’s the line?

Yeah, true. And that’s what I found like the cookie-less world is coming, and I don’t know how we’re going to deal with that. I don’t know if you want to talk about it or not, but. I can be frank. There are ads that have targeted me that I am so glad they did because there are products I’ve bought and things I bought that I would never have found out about before.

It’s definitely effective. The balance between privacy and that’s why on the bottom of most sites that do engage cookies, you’ll have that little disclaimer on the bottom and you have to accept. And that was a European. GDPR that kind of made that hot. And now everybody’s been incorporating it because they successfully sued. I think it was Facebook and Google just because of those practices. So now everybody has to have those disclaimers on the bottom of their Web site.

But isn’t Google going to be stopping that completely in Chrome? They delayed it until 2023. They were supposed to do it this year. They’ve delayed into 2023 to the point where cookies don’t even matter anymore. So I’m just wondering how we’re going as advertisers and marketers and how we will work. I know some people have talked about putting cookies on server-based tracking and tracking it right from the server. But then you’re still permitting me.

But that’s the next day. And then you can just read, and it’ll be server based because you can get anybody’s IP address. You just don’t know where they are. Yeah. But you know, having a cookie on the browser or having the IP address. Having the IP address means that you probably don’t even have to. You can serve it to all devices within the IP address, which is better than just having it on somebody’s laptop or whatever because it’s a multi-device world. And you also have the connected TV, and you have good OTP, and you have all these places now where, you know, you can have video content. And, you know, through streaming channels, they want to be able to hit the entire home. So I think the cookies going away or the delay in them going away is just waiting for the other shoe to drop on the capabilities of targeting the entire IP address and everything under all the devices within that home. That’s where the future’s going.

Yeah, absolutely. Have you had the experience? Like, I’ve never done this before, but I’m going to ask what your experience is about it. Like the marketing automation tools where you can use an identifier, user ID. And I think this was in Google Analytics, and I haven’t been there for a while, but connecting a user ID from analytics into the CRM, there are various ways you can do that. Upon submission, like they sign up for a lead magnet, give you their email address, we know their IP addresses, and then you can assign a user ID to them to identify them better. Have you had any experience doing anything like that? Because I would just like to know if you have. I haven’t.

No, I have not.

Okay. No problem. There was another question I wanted to ask you, which I found very interesting that we were talking about. Speaking of AI, what do you think about the future of A.I. platforms regarding content and things like Jasper.AI and Wordsmith.AI, that domain is available for sale. It’s not a real product by the way. These things that are enabling marketers to create content faster. What are your thoughts on this?

My concern with some of those platforms is that back in it was 2013, maybe it was 2012, where Google had the updates called Panda and Penguin, where they started penalizing people who were putting up fluff content. And that was the Panda update. So if people were just, you know, pushing out information or whatever, then they got penalized, and it wasn’t rich content. And I think these AIbots will eventually get flagged because it might be a good short-term solution, but I’d rather have my copywriters and have them put together a publication schedule and put out content that’s real from the customer rather than using the short shortcut. Because what starts as a shortcut tends to have Google saying no mass email. They’ll flag that, and then they’ll be able to tell because while it might be unique to you, they’re probably reusing this content in a bunch of other places and changing the order of the words or the sentences or whatever. So I think in the long term, that’s going to be something that gets flagged for SEO purposes. So I’m trying to stay with the wider height practices and not take shortcuts.

Okay. Fair enough. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate your insight on that. What’s one question I haven’t asked you that I should have asked you? If at all.

Well, I dont know. We went down a bunch of these things.

I was just wondering if there are any other questions. Yeah, I haven’t asked that I should have asked.

Now, listen, I could talk about I love talking about the marketing business in general, so anything that these want to do is we can do this another time, too.

Right on. Great. I want to thank you for being on the show. And absolutely, if you’d like to come on again and we can talk about another subject that you’d like to talk about. I’ll review your book a little bit more and make some nuggets out of there. That being said, how can our listeners connect with you online if they want to?

They can find me on LinkedIn. My Twitter handle is Jimmy LaSalle, too. But I think the websites, whether it’s Keeninsites.com, Jimmylasalle.com, which is my author website, I have JLaSalle.com, which is my consulting website, and then it’s okay through us just to repeat it if you’re interested in that kind of stuff if you want to go on that email list to find out the latest and greatest because Jim is always doing some cool stuff.

Yeah, That sounds neat, that’s for sure. Well, I’ll make sure to put those in your addresses and show notes. And again, I want to thank you for being here.

Thank you. Pleasure being here.

Yeah. Thanks very much.