Supercharging Marketing Success with AI Tools: A Deep Dive into Maximizing Your Potential

Hello everyone. Today we have with us Rich Brooks, president Flyte New Media. Rich is an author, speaker, podcast host, and consultant. Rich, thank you so much for taking the time for us today. Excited to have you.

Dawood. Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Rich before we, start bombarding you with questions and trying to get some knowledge bombs out of you, it would be great if you could introduce yourself and your company to our viewers.

Sure. I think you did a pretty good job. We are a digital agency called Flyte New Media. We’re located in Portland, Maine, which is the northeast area of the United States, and we turned 25 years old this year. So I’ve been doing this for quite some time now, running a digital agency. And then my side project is something called the Agents of Change, which is both the name of my podcast as well as an annual conference that we put on here in Portland, Maine.

We haven’t done it the last few years because of that whole pandemic thing, but we’re bringing it back on October 4th here in Portland, Maine. We’re gonna bring about two to 300 people in talking all about digital marketing for a full day conference. And then we’re gonna be doing some optional in-depth workshops the next day.

But we’re nervously excited about bringing back a live event after three years.

I think this last year some events did come back and They were a success. As long as you I think you have good content and good people. People are dying to come back.

Yes, there’s a lot of people, not everybody, but there’s a lot of people who are itching to get out there and I just got back from a couple of weeks of vacation and just like the lines at the airports and every plane is full. I think people want to get back to that, normalcy that we had before.

So hopefully we’ll have a full house this year and agents of change.

So just, to follow up on that. What kind of audience can one expect at, the conference?

While we get people from all over, it is, does tend to be more of a regional play. So I would say most of the people, probably 90% of the people are within a hundred miles say of Portland, Maine.

They tend to be business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketers, somewhere on the pecking order in the marketing departments at the companies they work with. And for the speakers, we get speakers. From all over the US and Canada, although we had speakers from abroad as well. It’s just a matter of getting them to come to Portland, Maine, which is a small town, admittedly.

The entire state only has one area code here in the US it’s not the biggest place in the world, but people love when they do get here. We have lobster. We’re famous for our lobster here in Maine.

I’ve heard about it. So I was born in Valez very small part of North Carolina, so I can relate to small places.

But I have some friends there and I’ve heard, about the famous lobster.

Excellent. Yes.

So Rich, you must have seen a lot of changes in your career, like a long career you must have changed, seen changes, trends, but how do you compare the new? AI trend as compared to the changes we have seen so far.

This is big. There are no two ways about it. That sounds silly. Of course, it’s big. But I don’t think people recognize how big it is. I don’t think many of us recognize how big it had become until ChatGPT. I had been talking about AI for several years, but I like for most of the clients we work with as a digital agency, they’re not touching AI on a day-to-day basis in a knowing way. They might be running some Google Ads, they might be running some Facebook ads.

And obviously, those platforms are using AI and machine learning to perform better, to put us in front of our ideal clients, but we’re not hands-on with that. It’s different, we’re not flying the plane, right? We’re just somewhere in Coach and all of a sudden we get our hands on ChatGPT, and the first time, I don’t know what your experience was like.

I’m like, this is magic. This is the jet sense. Like all of a sudden, like we just took such a leap forward. And of course then that brings out a whole bunch of fears. Not just things like Skynet, but also things like copywriters and content creators saying, what do you need me for if you’ve got this tool?

That is not my belief system at all. I think these are tools that every digital agency should be coming very familiar with, and you should learn how to use these in the same way you know how to use Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or an Excel spreadsheet. These are just today’s tools to make everything else easier.

And yes, it will allow more people onto the playing field, but at the end of the day, it’s just another tool for marketers to use.

And I think also let’s see, I mean I, consider the new AI trend with like you said with ChatGPT just, basically got blown out very quickly with no control on it and what all it can do.

At the same time, I think you know it, can still not take away that human element that is required in marketing, just that now you have tools that can help you do things quicker and you have more tools at your disposal you are right. I think I mean it’s, time for marketers to adopt.

The change, learn the tool to, to use it wisely. But I can already see, and even like, yesterday we were having this meeting with our content writers, even the AI detection tools they’re not that accurate right now. Even if it’s, let’s say a 100% human has written an article.

Some AI tools, detection tools still say that it’s AI and then you have these writers or these clients that want a 100% human at an article and they’re using these AI detection tools to check AI. Everything is going on right now.

At the same token, it’s like I sometimes fail one of the capture tests. It doesn’t mean I’m a robot, it just means that I couldn’t tell what those letters were on that, or I clicked the wrong button on the buses, whatever it was. So, of course, there’s gonna be some false negatives. There’s gonna be some false positives.

The way that I’ve been talking to my team about this is to figure out how it streamlined your job. As we would never use AI to create a blog post that we would hand off to a client, but we might use AI to generate some ideas for blog posts or even a framework for a blog post, or after we’ve written a blog post to create some email subject lines or some social media posts like that kind of just stuff that you have to do, the Lotum and jets, some of your jobs that you don’t care so much about and maybe stresses you out.

My girlfriend is my virtual assistant, I guess if she lives with me. She’s no longer my virtual assistant. She’s my executive assistant. Anyway, she handles my transcriptions for my podcast, and I had tasked her for years to write out the introduction for each interview, and she hated it, and I always rewrote it.

Anyways, then now she’s using ChatGPT to summarize it and to come up with something.

It does a good job. Even if you like to train the bot, even you can give it an interview or, a podcast and the transcript and it’ll even come with you, like the three, or four main highlights that you can even use in your social promotion. You know so much you can do with it.

And I think it, it just gets better and as we learn these tools better, we’ll be able to use them better. Again, it’s just the fi as more and more people get comfortable with these. Tools, then what’s gonna be the differentiator? What’s gonna make you remarkable?

And it’s gonna be that human voice and the brand voice that so far these machines can’t do because I don’t know if you use ChatGPT a lot, but once you do, you start seeing kind of a similarity and a neutralness in the voice. And yes, you can say, I want you to write it like it’s a steampunk novel, or Yes, I want you to write it funnily.

But there’s still this kind of. Genericness to the copy that needs to be punched up, and that requires a skilled copywriter or brand voice expert to make that happen.

You are a perfectionist yourself. You took a public speaking course from Michael and Amport called Hero to Write, Public Speaking to perfect your craft. How was that experience?

It was good and humbling. Very honestly I had people before because I’ve been speaking for years and I had people saying, why are you taking a course? And I’m like because I always want to get better. It’s like I see myself and yes, I’m maybe better than the guy or the woman standing next to me, but I’m not at the same level as Jay Bear, who I look up to as a public speaker, or Pat Flynn or Amy Porterfield.

Like these people who I’ve seen who move me to want to be better, do better whatever. I want to get to that point. So for me, it was an important step forward in my career but it was humbling because they had a different approach. To the way to create presentations. Also, up until then, most of my presentations are more educational based here’s how to optimize your website, or Here’s how to increase your conversion rates, or whatever it would be.

It was about, generally digital marketing, and now I’m creating something more of a keynote presentation and big-picture thinking, and it was nerve-wracking. It’s like being out there on a high wire without a net. But I will say that both Amy and Michael are excellent at what they do, and the community that they create was very supportive I got a lot of help in working through my presentation, and something worth worthwhile doing.

If this is something that you want to do either to become a keynote speaker or TEDx speaker, what have you, or which is more along with part of what I wanna accomplish is one of our biggest lead generation tools as an agency is getting out there in public speaking. I can’t say enough about that we have conversations. I’m part of an agency mastermind where I get together with some other agency owners a couple of times a month virtually. We don’t compete with each other, and we just share secrets and how to run a successful business. And we talked about the fact that none of us do any advertising, but what we do is content creation.

And for most of us getting up on stage, because when you’re up on stage, you command that audience in a way where there is no competition, there’s no newsfeed that you’re trying to keep people from getting distracted. There are no other e-mails in the inbox. It’s just you on stage and you are as good or as bad as you’re gonna be.

That’s a great way to establish authority in the space, and it almost always leads to new business.

This is also like being the best in what you do. This also connects in one way with your remarkability formula. We wanna learn more about what it is, but also I’m sure there must be a story behind it, like how you came up with it.

So if you could let us know the story behind it.

Sure. So the Remarkability formula, for those who don’t know this is, this was the presentation that I worked through with Heroic Public Speaking which hopefully will be a book sometime in 2024. And I’ve just gotta sit down and write it.

But the idea came from a couple of different things. One was my friend Pat Lemu, who’s now a client of ours, he works in an aeroplane refurbishing business here in the United States. He just told me, and I’m not gonna go through the whole story now, but he told me one of the first project campaigns he worked on for the company, and it was this video that he put together a series of videos where his they had been banned from doing this conference, sponsoring a conference because they were taking business away from the main person putting on the event. They were still invited to the conference, but they couldn’t spend any money on it. They wouldn’t like it, so what did they do? They made a video of basically the boss of their company being tied to a chair in the basement, unable to come to the event, and then put it on a little disc and sent it to the 300 or so people that were gonna be at the event.

So they all saw it first and they thought it was funny, but also it was the only way to get to the event was through a very small airport, I wanna say in Glasgow. They bought all the poster spaces around the airport and did up movie posters of the video they had sent. As you can imagine, nobody was talking about anything else at the event except for that particular thing, and I’m like, That is brilliant and that is not about a Facebook ad campaign or optimizing your, like that is true genius creative marketing.

So that was part of it. Like this idea that so much of what we talk about and what I talk about too is like the tactics of getting more links or increasing your email subscriber base, and those are all valuable things. But I think at this stage you talked about what have I seen change over 25 years at this stage of the digital marketing revolution or evolution.

Those are table stakes. Of course, you need to know SEO, and of course, you need to know paid search, paid social, and email marketing. Of course, you need to now understand how to use it. That’s ChatGPT. I was gonna say, that’s all the basics. To stand out, you have to figure out what makes you different and be able to communicate that to everyone in a creative way.

And I was seeing people come to us, and I’m sure you see the same thing in your agency. They come to you and they say, I need you to do this for me. And you’re like, okay. But that’s not what you need. Let’s take a step back and talk about who your ideal client is and what their pain points are, and where they go to get information to save these problems and let’s create something that speaks to that.

It may be that you don’t even need a Facebook page much less than a Facebook ad campaign. So all of those things started coming together in this idea of okay, if everybody knows how to run SEO and paid search and paid social, Then what do we do for our clients? To help them reach more of their ideal clients.

And so that’s where the whole idea of, okay, how do you stand out? And that’s not a new idea. I get that Dawood that like a million people have talked about this. There’s the purple cow and the Blue Ocean strategy. But my approach was how do you take the owner or marketing manager of a small to medium-sized business and help them come up with a way that they can sit down?

And figure out what makes them, as I call it, remarkable. And so that’s the origin story, if you will, of how I started to come up with the idea of the Remarkability formula.

Thank you so much for explaining it so brilliantly. Could you walk us through the four lenses of the Remarkability formula so that we know our audience exactly understands you know what it means?

Yes. So the four lenses, as I call them, are just a process that any business can use or any person can use to figure out what makes their business remarkable, what makes it stand out to their ideal clients. And the four lenses I’ve named and identified are, and I’ll go into each one, find, focus, forge, and frame. So find is there’s already something remarkable about your business, whether you know it or not, and it’s just the process of identifying it and then giving it a name. Focus is all about the idea of niching down. And this is not a new concept. We talk about the benefits of really continuing to niche down as John Lee Duma says, to niche down until it hurts.

And so that’s the second lens. And the third lens is, and those two lenses, everybody gets, the first time I say it, the third lens is forge. And this one gets a little tricky. It’s about creating something extrinsic to what your main offering is. But still in alignment with your mission and values.

And I can give you examples of all these. And the last one is the Frame. And this is just about how to better position what you’re already offering in a way that shows its value to your ideal client. So they’re more willing to seek you out and they’re more willing to pay a premium for your services.

So find, focus, forge, and Frame. And like I said I’ve got examples, or we can talk through any one of them. So let me know where you’d like the conversation to go.

I would like to go into some of them because like there are some common questions or doubts in a lot of marketers’ minds, like talking about niching down, right?

So many talk about it. I like we know some success stories of people that have niches down and they are like successful agencies or businesses right now. From a marketing agency point of view, does niching down on a service make more sense or niching down on an industry?

It’s a great question. I don’t know if there’s a right answer to that. It really if you find that you are so good at SEO or so good at social media content creation, then you can use that as your area of focus. But also if you happen to be good with it. Public accountants you could decide that we’re gonna offer a lot of services, but we’re only gonna work with public accountants, or we’re only gonna work with family-owned, public accountants, or only family-owned public accountants that live in Nebraska.

Whatever it is you can keep on niching down until you are the only company serving that audience. And I see so many examples of companies that have made this work for them. Even. This is a strange example, but there, when I moved into my new house about a year and a half ago, I was looking for an oil company and I discovered that not everybody knows what an oil company is, but here in the Northeast oil is like often the way that we heat our homes.

And so oil trucks come by, deliver to these tanks we have in our basement. Anyway, I was looking for one, and of course, I’m looking for the cheapest one because oil is oil and I find the cheapest one out there. And I notice they have a very small delivery area, and we’re like on the line. And so I called them up and I asked them, and they’re like, sorry, you’re outside of our delivery.

And I’m like, I’m literally like one block away though. And maybe even judging, by the way, Google Maps says it. I’m actually, they’re like, no, sorry, we’re not gonna do that. And I respected that because the only way that they could keep their prices so low was by not driving all over creation to deliver the oil.

Yes, they couldn’t expand unless they were gonna open up another shop. And that wasn’t really in the owner’s interest but he was able to have the lowest prices and still drive a lot of value for his clients by doing it that way. That’s just one example where he niched down by shrinking his delivery area much less than anybody else would do.

We see examples of this niching down. The issue is just we get so afraid of giving up any business. Especially when we’re first starting. So it’s oh, I don’t wanna give. My answer to that is when I say niching down, it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t serve two audiences. It just means that you can’t serve everybody.

And the other thing is when I was doing this research, into the presentation, I found this interesting piece of, information called Physicians in America, I think this was from 2019, the average American physician made a very healthy $249,000 a year. The general practitioner.

Which sounds great, but then the average specialist made $399,000 a year. So $150,000 more for arguably knowing less and being able to help fewer people, but they became an expert. So if you tear your a c l, you need a doctor who is focused entirely on that. She is the expert you’re gonna go to or you or your insurance company are gonna pay a premium for that service because they’re the best.

And that’s how I think we should look at our businesses. That we can’t be everything to everyone, but we find an audience that’s big enough to support us and we hone down on that audience, and maybe it’s two audiences, but hone down and just become, whether it’s, I’m only gonna do paid search, or I’m only gonna do digital marketing for this type of person, whatever it is.

That’s how you start to become an expert in the field and suddenly people are chasing after you because they wanna work with that company that only does X, Y, or Z.

Correct. And I think that this is one problem. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially people that are starting new agencies come across as you don’t want to say no to business initially.

And then once you start getting clients, you realize, okay, fine. I need to fire this client. I need to fire this client. But yeah if you can do that from day one, it’s just so much more stable and the growth can be much faster as well.

Absolutely. And obviously, there’s gotta be enough of those types of customers out there to support you, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take on other jobs.

It just means that when you’re out there marketing yourself, communicating to your ideal customer about how you’re a fool, that’s what you’re talking about. If somebody comes to you and says, I need you to do this, and this may be just a little bit outside, you could say, look, some companies specialize in this.

If somebody came to me and said, I need you to do a video. I’d say, look, we don’t do video. If you need a quick little thing, I can help you with that, but I think you need to go over to this other company. If it’s something that you might be able to do, maybe you take it on, but you don’t promote that.

You just listen. We’ve all been in a situation where we need a little extra cash flow in our business, and so we’re willing to take on that job, even though it’s got red flags. But try and do as little of that as possible, and your message to the world is, we do X for Y to achieve Z, and that’s what we do.

I’m sure you must have come across a lot of such cases working with businesses that, you know when you tell them about the Remarkability formula and you tell them about fine focus forge in the frame. Sometimes businesses don’t know what sets them apart but, every business has something unique.

How do you help them understand that and communicate that effectively to their audience?

So that’s a good question. So first they have to identify it themselves. And usually, if I’m working with a client, we take them through each one of the four because it may be that there’s something unusual in one, something in another.

And then when you start to layer them together, that’s where you start to uncover that remarkability. And also it’s gotta be something that. Their clients care about. It’s like beauty. It’s in the eye of the beholder. If your customers don’t think it’s remarkable, then it’s not remarkable. So it’s more about how people perceive you, but you have to own it yourself.

So if you go through all four stages and you literally can’t find anything that makes you remarkable. That’s a struggle. You will always struggle because you are an average company in an average industry where it’s just a matter of price. So you know, you want to be able to stay away from that, and actually, that’s where Forge can help.

So Forge you can create after the fact. To give yourself a differentiator. So if we were working with a client and they were struggling to find out what made them remarkable, we might take a look at what are some things that you could do that are outside the main offering that could help you become remarkable.

And so some examples that I’ve used in the past, one is the agency of Change, right? So that’s my podcast and conference, and. I’m not saying that there’s no other agency that does things like this, but here in Maine there isn’t. So it wasn’t the reason I started Agents of Change. I was going to things like blog world and Social Media Marketing World, and I’m like, we should just put on a smaller version of this here in Maine.

And so that’s literally why I wanted I just wanted to do that. But now I’ve discovered that when I’m up on stage as the mc, but also President of Flyte New Media, people see the association between this conference that in years past, that 400 people and a whole lot of hollow blue and a lot of energy and all these marketing experts from around the country and the world coming together in one place.

And there’s Rich Brooks on stage with them all. Then Flyte New Media has to be one of the agencies we talk to when we’re thinking about doing this. So you don’t have to go to Agents of Change to Hire Flight, and you don’t have to hire Flight. If you go to Agents of Change, those are completely removed.

It’s extrinsic, but because of the agents of change, which is information to reach your ideal client, and Flyte, which is an agency to help you get there. Their missions are so similar that it’s a great example of the forge. We’ve forged this and now we get calls from businesses who never would’ve considered us because they’re interested in working with a company that puts on agents of change.

So that’s just one way in which you could create it. But scholarships are another great idea. If you’re passionate about something, right? We always, especially in this day and age, And especially younger people love brands with a social cost. So if we can create something that speaks to what our mission is and it resonates with our ideal co-clients, that can also be a form of remarkability as well.

Right. Talking about shame it’s easy, yet difficult because businesses might Think about framing and positioning their business the way they want to. But I think it’s more about thinking from your customer’s perspective. So what is the actual right way of using the frame lens to position your brand?

And I guess I should say that it would be a rare company that would find something in every single category. So you need to go through these and maybe. You don’t have a focus or maybe you don’t have a frame you’ve gotta figure out what it is. And the other thing I wanna say is, very often you could take one piece of remarkability and put it into one category or another category.

So these tags that I come up with are just to help you through the process. That being said, so a good example of you being 100% right is that positioning is all about your client, not about yourself. But one of the examples that I talk about in my presentation around Frame is a story from The Introvert’s Edge by Matthew Pollard, and he’s a business consultant and he’s talking to this woman who had, a very successful Business teaching Mandarin out in California and she was teaching in, she was making good money and she had people working for her, and then all of a sudden, thanks to the internet, suddenly there’s a lot of low price competition out there.

There are even people on Fiverr who are from China selling these services, and there’s just no way she can touch that price point, right? She’ll go out of business. So she sees her business shrinking, sees it going outta business hires Pollard. And as he’s going through her clientele list, he sees two people who were business people who had been transferred to the China department within their company.

They’re being repositioned or, moved over there. And he’s talking to her about it. And it turns out not only is she teaching them Mandarin, but she’s also teaching them Chinese business practices, like how to behave in a business meeting in China, all these sorts of things. And she’s also working with their spouses and children because that’s another big thing.

It’s very expensive to move somebody overseas. And if they’re, if their spouse and children don’t acclimate. And they say I can’t do it. I have to move home. That’s a huge loss for the business. So she was working with them too, and this is all part of her service and he is wow, you make people successful going to China.

And so he rebrands her as the China success coach. She didn’t do anything extra. It was all the things she was already doing, but suddenly she is not competing on price with a bunch of similar companies. She is the China success coach. She charges what she wants to charge. She does it for a very specific audience.

So it’s a little bit of focus in there too. And although this wasn’t part of the story, they also then go after all the HR departments and HR referral people who help people relocate to China. So, then all of a sudden she’s getting this steady referral fee as well. So it just, it was a great example of how you take something you’re already doing and reframe it to show off the value that was always there, but to a very specific audience that recognizes and is willing to pay for that value.

There’s, so much we can talk about and go into details. But since we have less time overall when you’re working with a business and you’re trying to take them through all four stages, which is the part or parts where you think businesses make the most mistake?

So that we can focus more on that particular part.

Where do they make the most mistakes? That’s an interesting question. There I see some stuff in all of it. A lot of times businesses don’t recognize that they’re already remarkable. So in the fine category, they’re like, eh no, that’s, nobody cares about that.

But maybe that’s the very reason why. So one of the first mistakes that businesses make is they think they have all the answers. So I will usually tell them, to go out for an interview. Five to 10, depending on the size of the company and the number of clients they have. It could be three, it could be 30 customers or clients who are either using you or have used you in the past and just do a short survey to understand why did they choose you.

Why would they refer to you? What may, because very often you’ll hear some stories like, oh, I had no idea that was a value to you. And so that’s one of the biggest things is like thinking that this is all about you, when in fact it’s all about your clients and the people you want to serve.

So, that’s a big mistake too. And also not when it comes to focusing, not niching down enough, and I’m. As guilty of this as anybody else. We hate to say no to business. So sometimes we take on the wrong type of projects or promote the wrong type of projects. I think the next kind of mistake people make after you’ve gone through the process and you have a general idea of what makes you different, is not being able to craft the language that quickly explains to the other side.

Why do you provide so much value to people just like them? So I think that’s another big piece of it. And sometimes that requires an outside agency or copywriters, to hone that message for you and make sure that you’re on point. And then the final stage is just when you know what makes you remarkable and you have your message honed in and you’ve identified named.

What makes you remarkable is, do you understand digital marketing, How to get that message in front of your ideal client. Do you know what the customer journey is? Are they going to social media to seek out results? Are they going to search engines to seek out results? Are they talking to their friends?

Understanding that customer journey and making sure that you’ve set up information booths along that customer journey so they can find you based on everything you do, and all the work you’ve done to this point. That’s when it really starts working, and if you don’t take that final step, then all the other stuff doesn’t make any sense.

Rich, one like takeaway that you would want the audience to go with today.

I guess. Take the time to do this for yourself. You don’t have to hire an agency, although I’m happy to talk to anybody. You don’t have to hire an agency to do this. You can sit down with your team and go through this, but just make sure that you’re also talking to your customers to get a better sense of why they chose you in the first place and what makes you remarkable in their eyes.

That’s probably the most important piece of it, and then I think the rest of it will start to gel together for you.

Rich, in the end, I like playing a quick rapid-fire round of three to five questions.

All right, I’m ready.

Perfect. Favourite book?

Favorite book. Your questions are Rapid fire. Will My answers be Rapid Fire? I would say for the longest time it was Turn of the Screw, which I was assigned to read in college in a gothic hard novel course. I still think that book stands the test of time, but I haven’t read it in about 25 years.

Are you a morning person or a night person?

I would say that, damn, I’m both, I’m just not an afternoon person.

It’s when I get really tired, but I like working, waking up early, going to the gym, getting my stuff done, and I like staying up late, playing video games after my girlfriend’s gone to bed. It’s the middle of the day that I start to slag off a little bit.

Your last Google search.

I didn’t do a Google search this morning, so now I have to think what it probably did if Google Maps counts. I did I needed directions to go to a client’s place in Bangor, which is two and a half hours away.

Okay. If a movie was made on you, what genre would it be?

Probably slapstick comedy, unfortunately.

I wish it was an adventure. I wish it were action, but it’s probably slapping a comedy, me walking into a wall or a door, or something like that.

One thing you like the most about your work?

That one’s easy. I love sitting down with other business people and learning about their business and coming up with new ways to market and promote their business.

It’s like this riddle that I, or puzzle that I get to solve, and every business is like this and I just. It’s my favourite part. I’m not good at the details. I’ve got a team of people who are much smarter than me, much more on the tactical side. But I just love listening to people’s stories about how they started their businesses, where they are right now, the challenges they face, and how we get them to where they want to be.

That’s by far the best part.

Rich, thank you so much. It has been amazing, having you today.

It’s been an absolute pleasure, and

hopefully I’ll have you back soon.

Sounds great. Thank you so much.