Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Basic Business AI, a podcast dedicated to simple AI strategies for businesses who don't want to get an advanced degree or hire some marketing bro. I'm your host, Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Annabot Prime. We bring on regular business owners like you and me to discuss practical strategies, ideas and perspectives about AI without getting too far into the weeds of the tech bb. AI is sponsored by annabots. Did you know companies that respond to customer inquiries in less than 1 minute have a 400% higher chance of closing the deal? Our AI powered assistants have an average response time of just 5 to 7 seconds. Meaning you can close more sales without generating more leads. No tech skills are needed and you can get started in less than five minutes. Go to annabots AI to learn more. Once more, that's annabots AI. Today's guest is Ivan Wieslawski. Ivan is the CEO and co founder of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency, an award winning digital marketing firm based in the usa. So Ivan, welcome to Basic Business AI or Ivan.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Either way. Either way works with me. Well, thank you so much for having me.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: So tell me from your perspective, how is AI reshaping the future of your industry?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Sure. Well, it's huge.
I think one of the industries that has been impacted the most was actually marketing and advertising.
First of all, most marketing companies already using AI nowadays to generate content. And that is content in the written form. AI website, copy, blog, copy ads, social media content and so on. As previously, we used to have copywriters and all kinds of editors generate content for us. Now we have AI, it easily saves us about 40 to 45% time and it's a lot more sufficient and consistent. And then second part is the visual content. Not only we can generate amazing written content, but we can also create amazing visual ads. Visual ads that are appealing.
Now here's the thing about AI. AI is not going to create an amazing ads by itself. It will be an amazing system based on what we see so far. But once you sort of show it that this particular ad works very well, AI can help you boost, it can help you generate various alterations of the ad that you can use in different places and make your advertising even more effective.
So I think AI is definitely already changing our industry. Not only our industry, but it's changing the world. Right?
Every single tool that we used to use in our production house now has some sort of AI capability built in. Whether it's content generation tools, whether it's as simple as meeting tools. When we meet with our clients, there is already a Recap with abilities to send next action items and so on. Whether it's working with databases or coding or design elements, everywhere you go there's an AI component.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Yes, AI is everywhere. And I like that you mentioned that it's a tool.
It's a tool not to get rid of your copywriter, but for your copywriter to do things better, faster, to augment their capabilities.
And what you're mentioning about now, every tool has an AI tool built in.
I think that's one of the things that maybe we all know, but we didn't realize that that's happening because it's happening so fast that for instance, I was talking to a friend a couple days ago now in Zoom, there's this AI companion and I didn't want like I saw when it appeared, but I was like, oh, AI companion. Like it was nothing for me because I'm already used to seeing AI everywhere, you know.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: So Ivan, tell me some practical applications that you use in your business with AI.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Sure.
Well, AI allows us to, as marketers to streamline our operations quite a bit. We deal with a lot of repetitive tasks on a day to day basis. And generative AI basically allows us to streamline a lot of the repetitive work.
First of all, it allows us to do it in some cases for free and instantaneously. Whereas previously, let's say a copywriter would take 2, 3, 4 days to generate specific piece of content. Now you can get it within hours, within minutes if you're ready.
But we went even further.
I can share with you one of the specific practical ways how we use AI or how we build AI enabled tech. Actually.
So here's how it works. We as a marketing agency, we create and launch various marketing campaigns for our clients to specifically market and capture a specific target audience that is interested in our clients products or services. Right.
So when we launch ads and someone clicks on them, then this person will fill out a form or we give our client a call to request more information about product or service. We call this person Ali. Right. Or whoever fills out filled out information or whoever called is a lead. So part of our job as a marketing agency was to mainly qualify every single lead.
And because we work with something like 130 clients from various industries, if you take every single client and if you take, you know, one client might have hundreds of leads monthly that are coming to their website or that are calling to them, going through hundreds of leads multiplied by 130 clients gives you tens of thousands of leads monthly. So we had a staff of four People doing just that. And at one point we were sitting there and we were like thinking to ourselves, wait a second, this is a lot of repetitive work. Why can't we automate it? We have AI for it and AI is perfect for it. Because AI does what it can do best for you. It can assist you. Right. So we build a tool. We'll build a system that basically scans all of the transcripts of all the forms that are coming in, all the calls that are coming in, all the chat submissions, analyzes the contacts and spits out the answer. Is this lead qualified or not? Or maybe it's a repeat customer and that way we're able to automate the process and do it instantly and basically hire, I mean, sorry, fire for individuals. Well, we didn't fire them, we moved them to other departments.
But with our scalability and we add clients every single month, it allows us to build it with scalability in mind and consistency. Because what we realized that our AI built tech allows us to qualify leads with 80% accuracy with manual qualification.
We did not achieve that. We were close to 70%. Because human beings are always messing up when you do repetitive work time after time after time after time. Just getting, you know, you get in, bugged out and you're like, yeah, qualified. Nah, not qualified. Yeah.
So it was huge. It is huge for us right now. And it helps us to show our clients how well our marketing campaigns are working for them.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Yeah, us humans are unreliable and very expensive because, I mean, AI didn't have an argument with their significant other the night before, or AI is not feeling sick or AI doesn't need, I don't know, had, I don't know, a break. AI is there 24 7.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Ivan, you mentioned that you're doing videos with AI. What's your favorite platform to use to do videos with AI?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: As far as attending meetings? I use a tool called Fathom.
It's great. Our client satisfaction, client communication team uses it as well. And it basically gives you a very quick synopsis on what was discussed, what are the next actions, all the main highlights, and so on. I use it for multiple reasons. Number one, sometimes team members would send me a recap of a meeting. I don't have to watch a video nowadays, whereas previously I would have to watch an hour full, you know, hour, hour and a half, sometimes video of our team members discussing a specific subject. I can now quickly review the highlights, click on a specific highlight that is of interest and watch that specific segment. So it's huge when it comes to time saving and then sometimes when we have a meeting with the client or with someone else, for instance, if I'm involved and I have to follow up with them, maybe in a week or two weeks time, sometimes I have to remember what is that we discuss. So I can always come back to that recording. I can always review the highlights. I'll be like, oh, you remember that we discussed so and so and so. And here was the list of action items that I would send. Right. You know, following the meeting to the client or to that individual. And it would streamline, it would save a lot of time.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I use it too. And I love it, Absolutely love it.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Oh, you use FOM as well?
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah, sometimes I, I feel like FOM is very nosy because it goes to all my meetings and I'm like, no, don't go to this one.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: But no, it's, it's a lifesaver sometimes because sometime I don't remember what happened in the meeting or I was like, you. I mean, you can take notes, but multitasking is not. I'm very bad at multitasking.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: But then you focused on taking notes, you're not focused on the conversation. Right. That's where AI is amazing when it works as an assistant for us, not as a creator.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: So I think a lot of people are confused. A lot of people think that AI can create and they get disappointed very quickly because AI is just not there for creation purposes. But Y is amazing when it comes to assistance.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Yes, it's amazing to augment, augment our powers. And it. I loved how you framed it because you said, yeah, now you're not focusing on taking notes, you're focusing on the conversation. You're focusing actually in the human to human relationship while AI is just helping you remember what happened.
So I loved how you framed it. So Ivan, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Yeah, so we, as a marketing agency, we work with, we've been a generalist agency for about 15, 16 years, ever since we accepted an agency. So we used to work with every single industry. And then we figured that we need to specialize. The reaches are in niches. Right. So we looked through a roster of our clients and we figured that we do best with local service providers. A lot of professional service companies are using us. Lawyers, home service companies, healthcare, doctors, physicians and so on.
Those are the companies that we tend to help the most and we try to specialize in that area.
So if anyone is interested and anyone wants to reach out to us and see how we can help. They can go to our website which is comrade web.com there's e@ the end of word comrade. Some people misspell it and you can definitely let us know what is it that we can help you with. We're not going to charge you anything for the consultation. We're always happy to just advise you and let you know what we would do if we were in your shoes.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, we're going to wrap from here. Thanks for your guest Ivan Bislavski for joining us for a practical conversation about AI and its potential for business. You can learn more about what he does by visiting comrade web.com that's comrade web.com if you run a business of any size and you have some ideas or strategies around the topic of AI, we'd love to have you in a future episode as well. We interview business owners of all levels of experience and exposure to AI so we can represent all voices, especially the 90% of us who are curious about AI but not trying to be tech geniuses. Apply for a future episode by going to basicbusinessai.com and one more time, if you want to install a 24.7ai sales and support team for less than 10% of the cost of a single employee, get yourself an anabot. Learn more at annabots AI. See you next time on Basic Business AI. Oh, and by the way, if you like this episode, tell your friends. See you later.
