Adapting to AI: Strategies for Staying Relevant in Modern Digital Marketing

Marketing space, if you're not using AI just yet,

you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement it within

your process, within your processes, how to

tech enable your product, yours, you know, being a service

with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna be irrelevant

soon.

That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital

Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Deister. If you could please subscribe to

this podcast and all your favorite podcasts, you have to do a five star review.

It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. But

this week, we're gonna talk about digital marketing and AI, the thing that we can

never get away from ever ever. It's I mean, AI is

great to a certain extent, but we always have to talk about it. But with

me, I've Ivan, he's the CEO and cofounder of

Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. He's a

respected digital marketing firm with prominent locations in

Chicago, Miami, and Austin. Recognized for his

visionary leadership, Ivan steers the company with a strategic focus that

keeps it at the forefront of industry trends with consist

with consistently exceeding client

expectations. Welcome to the show, Ivan. Well, thank

you so much, Brad. I'm glad to be here. Yes. The first question is on

my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Actually, both.

I like my coffee in the morning to get my energy low

up. And then midday, I usually go for,

green teacup as well. And then at night, I could I

could easily go with decaffeinated, you know, something

herbal. Let's call that fake coffee, but, I mean, it's each his own.

Yeah. But it goes well.

And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a

little bit more about what you do? Absolutely.

So as you mentioned already, I am the

c o CEO and one of the partners at Comrade Digital

Marketing. We, at Comrade, we help,

local service businesses grow using inbound marketing

strategies. We're truly experts

in search engine marketing, and we focus on three main

pillars. First, creating high performance websites that are

built for, conversions. Second pillar

is SEO and content marketing, and finally, a, paid

search that attracts top of the funnel potential customers.

Got you. And how has AI transformed digital

marketing strategies in the recent year, and what emerging AI technologies do

you see as a game changer for the industry? So

definitely AI has been a talk for quite some time. Even

before CHAD GPT, I was part of

roundtable, where various,

marketers were concerned with, potential power of

AI because of, all the developments, that were happening.

As soon as CHAD g CHAD GPT became popular,

obviously, we started using it as one of the tools.

We, number one, obviously, we use

it in content development, keyword research, and some of the

SEO deliverables. We don't write content

specifically with the help of KGPT

exclusively because we, we're concerned that eventually

Google is gonna get rid of, or is going to devalue all the

content that's generated by the robots. You know? And there are

ways to fake it. There are ways to make it more human, you know, and

so on. But our approach is we

use content editors who are real people, right,

and who are subject matter experts who review the drafts of the

content that's generated with, specs that are provided

by our team, and all the content that's then generated with

JetGPT, and then personalize it at various

necessary points and so on to ensure that it it it's,

you know, personal. The tone of voice is right.

It represents our customers. We we

say what we wanna say in the piece. Right? And we are very

deep in our piece. So we we feed, let's say,

ChatGPT or some of the, you know, AI, tools that we use for

content generation with very specific, very detailed

information as far as here's what we need to explain in this topic.

Here's why we're better than, let's say, our competitors. Here's how our process

is different from our competitors and so on. So at the end, our

piece of content is not generic, and that's what most of,

marketers get nowadays is they quickly generate a piece.

It's very generic. It's like many other pieces of content that's

generated by the same AI, and it doesn't have any

value. We believe that this content is no longer going to be,

prioritized by Google going to be devalued. So that's

obviously area where we had to jump with our, you know, with

AI because why wouldn't we? I mean, that's it saves us ton of

time. It provides us with ability to be more cost

effective. We, you know, had to

let, let go of few writers that were no longer

efficient. Instead, we're focused more on content editing

and so on. And then secondly, we use AI for our

internal automation processes, which, you know, AI

is great when it comes to repetitive processes or repetitive pieces

of work. So one of the areas where we have implemented,

AI successfully, which is great, we

every single month, we provide a report to our client,

where we explain what was done for the previous

month, in terms of activities as well

as what kind of results we generated over the past month. In that

report, we usually provide a breakdown of how many

marketing qualified leads we generated for specific

channels. Let's say it's paid search or SEO and so on.

So we have team members that manually

review every single lead, qualified it,

and then, you know, tally it up altogether and

put it all in the in the form of a report for our client.

Using AI as sort of a machine learning

algorithm that can do it for us and,

replace, human beings, we build our own system

that actually captures all of the leads, reviews

the transcript of every single lead that comes through a

form of chat, form, or phone call,

and then analyzes, hey. Is this a lead, or is this some sort

of solicitation or repeat customer? Or

maybe, you know, some some someone else. And if it's a lead,

well, is this a good lead? Is this a three star lead, or is this

a two star lead? Or, you know, we don't have enough information to,

qualify it properly. So we we have the system that

does it for all of our clients, and we have a crisp reports that

demonstrate to our clients true ROI of our marketing

services based on actual factual data. I mean, it's

funny that you say Google's gonna be devaluing AI written stuff, but

they have their own AI called Gemini that writes the stuff for them.

So I feel like it's kind of a weird strategy for

them since they already have their own AI. Do it now. I

do say don't don't abuse it. But let's be honest.

We all kinda wanna automate a lot of things. Maybe we should look at

more blog posts a little bit more closely. We all we all

wanna automate more things than we we don't. And blog

posts are some ways I mean, for podcasters, show notes are really the

main thing that we automate quite a bit for with AI because, I mean, that's

the thing that we don't wanna spend the most time on. So, I

mean, it feels weird that Google's doing this, but I also understand

they wanna keep it authentic. But I don't

really know where they're gonna go with this because they do have AI,

and they're limiting AI at the same time. Yeah. And I and I

think, Brett, it's all gonna come down to EAT

factor, which is, you know, going to be very, very I mean, it it already

became super, super important in the, you know,

sort of, what content, Google values the most and

which websites, are being ranked. Because how are you going to

differentiate hundreds, thousands, you know, millions of websites if they're all

going to have the same generic content? The only difference,

Google needs experts. Google needs to show to its

users expert content. So how do you know which content is that

you know, was provided by expert? Well, by SIEM,

if the website has affiliation with, you know,

an expert author. We specialize on working with

lawyers a lot and, lawyers' health care and home services.

Home for home services, it's probably not as, not as important.

Well, but for health care and legal, it's

vital to have a content be provided by an expert

with the, you know, right expertise. Otherwise,

the this content can be harmful in some sort

in some sense. Right? So,

when when you work on content, let's say, using, you know, AI

tools like chat GPT and so on, I would certainly advise

you to ensure that you're investing in promoting

your expertise. Showing it to the Google that, you know,

it's worth listening to you because you've got, you're the

subject matter expert. Agreed. I mean, it it varies between different

industries. I mean, for, like, digital marketing blog posts,

a written by AI may be fine because, I mean, it's marketing.

You should always check it. But, yeah, for, like, laws, lawyers, and, like,

medical stuff, probably should actually have a human

actually be writing that content instead. I do I do think

it varies between industry and in the industry. 100%.

Yeah. If it's more generic, like, we have some

ecomm clients, and let's say we need to generate content

for thousands of SKUs based on specifications

and so on. That's a really easy, repetitive task. You

can easily offload it to AI, and AI will do a great job.

And you will probably save yourself, you know, hundreds of

hours by not writing yourself.

But if if it comes to topics like

health care, for instance, or, you know, legal for that matter

or anything that where EET is super super

important and even if you

use AI as your, you know, content generation

tool, make sure you feed it with the information first. Make

sure that AI is not just writing based on the data it

gets from all the resources and all the websites out there because it's

going to be super generic. Fill it with very specific

data. Explain your thought process.

And, imagine that someone is asking you a very specific question. Like, hey.

What would you do in this case or that case? How would you respond to

them? Feed this information to AI so that AI can provide a

more detailed, more crisp answer. Gotcha. And so,

I mean, moving on to, like, what are some of the

unconventional digital marketing's tactics that you found to

be surprisingly effective? Well, we always stick to the foundation. Right?

The foundation is, you need to make sure your

your content has a great quality. If it's not,

then most likely your dwell time is not going

to be good. And, Google will see it and Google deprioritize

those websites. Right? And things like backlinks.

Backlinks are super important still. I mean, it's it's the fundamental

piece. We see definitely a shift

in which backlinks work nowadays versus a year

ago. So we we prioritize

more of, citations and getting quotes from

the various, high quality, places

that have very high rankings. In the past, we would just

buy a ton of links from industry specific websites.

You know, mid tier link links, not very expensive, and it would

do the job. Now it doesn't work quite as well.

So we we have to rely on more of a organic backlinks.

So for many of our clients, what we do is we have all kinds

of statistics. For us, we do that as well. For

instance, we have blog posts, that are very

appealing to, places that cite our information.

So I was like, digital marketing stats. According to Comrade,

so and so many, websites are using blah blah blah.

So we generate those, articles, so that our

pieces can be picked up by journalists and so on.

So that's that's, as far as the backlinks. Technical SEO. That's

also fundamental, piece. We,

you know, Google constantly updates its algorithm. And recently, we

noticed that very slow websites have been prioritized quite

heavily. One of our main, websites for one of our

brands, we had have neglected for some time, and it's been working

fine. All of a sudden, it seemed a huge dip. So we

started digging around, and we found that it hasn't been the technology hasn't been

updated, lately. So the core web vitals are,

you know, quite low. They're not passing, so we had to work on that.

So it's it's it all comes down to fundamentals. It's not like

this there's one silver bullet, you know, item that you

can work on, and all of a sudden, it's gonna give you the results. I

AEAT is very important factor too. So,

you know, we we constantly sharpen our knowledge, and we constantly look at, you

know, how's the Google algorithm is reflecting

on the growth bar line websites nowadays, and what do we need to

change in our algorithm? What do we need to change in our process

to, stay on top of the trend?

I don't know if I'm giving you specific enough information. If you wanna dig in,

you know, deeper in any of those areas, I'm happy to. No. It's fine. It

seems like the unconventional is the traditional way.

The traditional way, but still realizing what Google does

nowadays because it it's still quite it it's changing. Right?

With the algorithm changes with, you know, the addition

of AI and so on. Like, you you have to be, you

know, little little more focused. You have to be a little more

specific and a little more intentional. With,

all the AI content now been showing in the Google search results

with search GPT coming out, we

as, SEO specialists, for instance, now faced with the

question, how are we going to make sure that our content is going to

appear in search GPT? Not only Google, but also search

GPT or perplexity, for instance. I don't know if you tested perplexity.

It's not quite as good yet, but I think eventually, it's going to

be a serious, competitor to Google. Yeah. I've I've

tested that, Claude, llama. I've tested quite a bit of the different

models. It for all those models,

especially AI, it depends on what you're gonna use with it. I feel like

sometimes Gemini is better for writing, like, template scripts

than chat, TPG. At times, it's not always one on one,

but like I said, it really depends on what you're asking it because

some are better than others about different things. So it's never like

a one shot. Like, it's always this one's always that good. It's like, oh, it's

good at specific things. But I I think they're

going to be and it's not just me. Everyone highlights the fact

that there's going to be behavioral change of how

users are using search engines and so on.

There are more and more Gen z, users

that are going to Instagram or TikTok, for instance, to

search for information. So we, as marketers, have to

adapt, and that's something that we look at. We're constantly

asking ourselves, hey. What what could put us out of the business in the next

three to five years? And we constantly have to adapt

because I believe the next three to five years are going to be quite

different for us marketers as opposed to

how it was, you know, the last three to five years. So is SEO just

becoming more segregated? Let's say you have TikTok SEO.

You have Pinterest SEO because Pinterest does have kind of their

own search function. You have chat search. You have

Bing. You have Google net. You still have Google, and

then I'm pretty sure YouTube search or whatever else comes out

for the actual SEO of the video side plus the written

side. Plus if there actually is ever SEO

for podcast, which could happen as well. Which could

happen. Yeah. And, now they call it everywhere

search. Used to be Google search. Used to be bank search and so on. Now

they call it everywhere search because you have to clearly

identify who is your target audience and where do

they shop. You know, for

our legal clients, I mean, so far so good. No one is looking

for a lawyer on their Instagram or their TikTok. That's

not gonna happen. They would still go to Google or

maybe search GPT when it becomes more relevant,

right, and going to give out more, proper information.

So we're quite secured there. But for more of a, like,

beauty products or, you know, any any of,

services that are, bought by Gen z,

for instance, audience, you have to figure out other

channels. Yeah. Otherwise, you're gonna lose the share. You're not

gonna become you're not gonna be you're gonna be you're not gonna be relevant.

So that that would be my advice to, any of the

marketing agencies that are thinking about the future and what to do,

that we we all have to watch out for

the max levels of AI because they're going to be a lot more specific

AI algorithms to conquer places, you know, things

like, how do I become more relevant, in Instagram

search, or how do I become more relevant in TikTok search? Yeah. I would

imagine, like, the lawyers and the doctors would be better served

through LinkedIn and through the content through there because

that's more specific to, like, the business side of

things. And since they now have vertical videos, they just switch

from square to vertical. It's probably more important

to figure out how to do the short form content through LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn

has never been a long form content social media site as it is.

Yeah. Unfortunately, we we don't explore much of

LinkedIn, Fred of this, as we should, and you rightfully

highlighted that. We're trying to figure

out what storage GPT is going to bring to the table when it's going to

come out, because I believe fair

amount of users are going to probably start using that. And

we don't know what's gonna, you know, what that's gonna do to Google, how

Google is going to react. I think Google is still going to be very much

relevant because they have, you know, been doing this for

twenty six years, and their content is very

much relevant, very much up to date.

When we've done our searches, with, you know,

AI, perplexity, for instance, it gives

you information, but it's not it's not always accurate

information. Like, it could be outdated information.

It could be, you know, not the intent might be not there.

And Google has done phenomenal job, and I think that would be the differentiated

point moving forward for Google. Always check your work, especially with a

with AI. Right. Right.

I mean, moving into that is just the personalization. How is that gonna play a

part? Because we just kinda talked about the SEO role and how

diversified it's going to be eventually. Is that gonna be even

more important in the next five to ten years where you're just gonna have to

figure out search strategies for all these different places just because

of the generational differences? And, plus, we don't even know what Gen Alpha is gonna

do for search either. That's a really good question.

And, I think it becomes really, really difficult

for generalist agencies. We have been a generalist agency

for for our first twelve years of our, development

of our journey, and it became quite difficult.

When you market an ecom that sells

beauty products or when you market a law firm or when you

market a health care, let's say, meth spot

practice, the behavior is quite different. The target

audience is quite different. The approaches are quite different. So

we we, build a focus

that we need to nest down. And I think that's what in order to be

successful, I think marketing agencies just have

to be just have to find their niche. Just have to figure

out what, you know, what does it mean in terms

of their industry? What does AI going to

do to their industry in the next three to five years? And start

preparing now. Start building towards it. But if

you're a generalist agency, there's no way you can be on top of all of

that. Instead of just saying you're a digital marketing agency,

maybe eventually they should look at being like, hey. We specialize in podcast

marketing. We specialize in AI marketing. We specialize in

SEO, local SEO, or whatever else comes

up. That that could be that could be one way of specializing, or it could

be vertical special specialization. It could be, hey. We

specialize in legal marketing, and we

know everything about that. We know how your

target audience is searching for you. We know how they make decisions.

So we built in, you know, the

process that, you know, builds every single

component, necessary component, in order to capture your audience,

convert your audience, then nurture your audience, and then eventually

sell them your services. That and that's what we're trying to

do. But the reason why we chose legal home service and

health care because the recipe is quite similar, and they're

still very much, local service businesses. EAT

EAT factor is quite important. Right? So

we we're able, so far, generate results with pretty much the

same strategy. In the future, it might not be

possible, so we might have to get even more deeper

and become, you know, specialists, not not

only legal, for instance, but very much in, like, subset

of legal. Let's say, just personal injury or subset of health

care. Let's say, just med spas or

just, eye surgeons, for instance. Right?

Because, you know, once again, there might be different behaviors

within the health care space or within the legal space.

But I think in order to be successful, you have to specialize. You have

to become hyper focused, and you have to

show your expertise. And when you speak with the potential

client or with the existing client, it's really easy to make an

assumption that, wow, he really understands our industry. He really

understands or he really understands, you know, our our gaps,

our our you know, what we're struggling with. And, you

know, the strategist or the specialist really knows how to

get me my results. And, I mean, when we're

talking about SEO and different ones, how important is video marketing going to

start playing when we're talking about SEO and video

and everything? Because everybody loves video. Everybody wants to watch video. I

mean, YouTube isn't popular because it just was YouTube. It's because there's

so much video and so much information you can learn or entertainment

as well. So how important will video marketing

eventually be when it seems like everything's being taken over

by video? Our team believes it's going to be vital in order in order

for you to dominate search. But that's that's going to be one of the personalization

factors. Right? Like, everyone can generate,

content, written content, but not everyone can generate,

an effective video content. If you have both, then you're going to

be a lot more effective and a lot more relevant. As a matter of fact,

you YouTube has been number two search engine for quite some

time and still is very much relevant.

So generating content for YouTube, optimizing content for

YouTube, there's a separate SEO optimization for YouTube videos. Right?

Like, super, super important. The

challenge with that is, for us marketers, if we work with many

clients, like, I'm not gonna lie. Most of

our clients are not going to generate, video content. They

just don't have time. Especially if we talk

about lawyers, for instance, they're just

don't think it's important. They're always busy in the court.

They always tell us, well, this is you know, content generation is your job, but,

obviously, we can't generate video content for them. So that becomes a problem.

How do you make a video content for,

you know, your clients? What what are the ways out there? And I

know there are AI tools in the video

content space that eventually going to help

us do that. Right? With you know, you can just plug in

some script, put a

video or a picture of your client, and then it's gonna look like

that, you know, person is

given the speech. It's not even it's not even that as well, but how will

people react to it when more of that becomes prevalent? Because

I've seen the tools. They do have virtual, like, presenters, I

guess, the best way of saying it that will you can tell what to say

and we'll say it to you, but how will people react to it

when it eventually becomes like a prevalent, mostly good

tool? I don't think they're that good right now. I think they still have just

like AI. They have a ways to go. I've used like AI

generation for video stuff, and the thing I typed in could barely get

it right. And it was just it wasn't good. It's not there yet. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 100%. But, eventually, I

mean, if we if we're talking about three to five year horizon

now, I think we'll get there with how fast

the technologists are developing. So for, like,

for, like, those that are in the marketing industry or starting to get in, how

important is it for them to understand how to use AI right now? Because we've

been talking about it a lot, and it and it is a disruptor. Whether we

like it or not, it's a disruptor. Oh, it's a must. Oh, you

if you're in the marketing space, if you're not using AI just

yet, you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement

it within your process, within your processes, how

to tech enable your product, your, you know, being

a service with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna

be irrelevant soon. And, we're we're

going to see acceleration of AI

technology in the next three to five years. That's my prediction, and

I'm more than sure I can bet on it. So if

you're not implementing AI right now, it might be a little too late down the

road. I mean, some some agencies will probably relate you

know, keep the relationships with, happy customers, and

that's gonna work out great for them. But if we're talking about

future, if we're talking about scalability, if we're talking about

ability to acquire new clients in the future,

it's gonna be really hard because they're going to be other marketing

agencies, competitors with an edge over you

being an AI. They can produce content much faster. They can

use AI for personalization. They can use AI for, you know, in the

future for video generation or whatever else for, you

know, newsletters, whatever podcast maybe even.

And that's going to make them a lot more streamlined

and more effective. So they could easily drive the cost

down or they could drive the profitability up. It's up to

them. It's gonna be really, really hard to compete against them if you don't have

that edge. Is there any, like, tips to, like, how

to figure out how to do this? Because, I mean, I remember starting out. I'm

like, I don't know what I'm doing. What how do I do this? I mean,

there's prompts, but you have to tell it the right thing or it won't actually

do the right thing, like, when Google was new. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If

you don't have anyone on your team that's stack savvy, that

likes, you know, that like, likes to go

around, explore things, and can quickly demo, you know,

how AI can benefit your agency. I would advise looking for

roundup table or, meetups,

various agencies. I'm part of two, of those,

this type of meetings where, various,

marketing agency leaders are coming to place and,

share ours, you know, our stories or how we use AI or, you know,

various other subjects. And it can quickly give you some

ideas on how you can implement AI within your agency.

Not only that, you can easily, you know, set up a meeting,

coffee meeting with one of those agencies, and you can ask them, hey. Could you

help me out? Could you, like, share with me how I helped you,

how you implemented it within your practice? Right?

We do it all the time. I get ideas all day long from

those meetings, big or small. And people listening to

this episode, and they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about

you or your company? Yeah. I you can always

email me at

Ivan@comradeweb.com.

You can always, find my LinkedIn profile on my website as

well, on our website, in the about us section. You might

write me a DM, a problem. I'll I'll be happy to respond.

And, you know, any questions you have, happy to

provide value. Any final thoughts for listeners? Tholes and

use AI. Those would be my two final thoughts.

Hopefully, that conversation was clear why. Alright, Ivan.

Thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing brewing, sharing your knowledge on AI and

digital marketing. Thank you, Brett. Thank you for having me here.

And thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your

favorite podcasts in the app. So you have a five star review. It will just

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guys, stay safe. Get to understanding AI.

Just look at one and try to figure that one out first and then go

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