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 tech degree or hire some marketing bro. I'm your host, Josh Thomas. You can find me on all social media.
We bring in regular business owners just like you, just like me to discuss practical strategies, ideas and perspectives about AI without getting too far into the weeds of the tech. BBAI is sponsored by Anabots. 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 9 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 Anabots AI to learn more. Once again, that's Anabots AI. Today's guest is RG Ensign. RG is an active duty sailor, investor, business owner, and most importantly, a mentor to the military and local San Diego community. RG owns Ensign media, a branding and digital marketing company focused on helping local businesses implement and integrate digital marketing tools into their brick and mortar businesses to scale their organic growth without hiring expensive, in house talent. RG, welcome to basic business AI. From your perspective, how is AI reshaping the future of your industry?
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so in the digital marketing space, I think AI has definitely helped a lot as far as, like, content production, you know, like basically integrating AI on, like, everyday lives as it is. You mentioned earlier about anabots, right. I. You can utilize it for your sales and marketing as a tool for you to essentially replace the human factor.
Obviously, you can complement with human factor, but essentially having it kind of like, take over some aspects of your business in a way that it helps you grow your business in a better sense.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And so taking over those tasks, and that's something that is becoming a theme in this, in this podcast. As I talk to people who are using AI, it's not so much about replacing you, it's about taking over some of your tasks. And so what have you found as a marketing agency? What have you found are some of those tasks that AI can take over, not so that it replaces you, but it frees you up for higher value tasks.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: First things first, I like what you said, and you can't really replace you, but I do believe that AI is there to complement the skills that you already have. Because it's like with copywriting, for example, you can't expect AI to create content for you and expect it to be great. Expect it to be able to sell your products, services, or offers or what have you, unless you know, what needs to be on there based on your.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Copywriting skills, for example, better inputs equal better outputs.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Exactly. You know, it's just kind of like you training an employee or hiring one. You know, you can't expect the best if you didn't train or hire the right person. So it's all about your inputs.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: But um, just something about that really quick because, you know, if we actually, when we train AI, we treat it like an employee. We even have our own framework we use called real, and it's the exact same way you would train an employee. Role. What is their role? Education, the actions they're going to take and the location of the resources and materials they need to do the job well. And if you don't do that to a human, if you just say, hey, I want you to go over there and do a real good job, like what do you expect is going to happen? Probably not. Like, well, what job am I even doing? Doesn't matter. Just go do it.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: No job title or nothing.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Just, just go over there and start swinging your fists and see what you hit.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: And grow our business.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: And grow our business, by the way, while you're at it.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: That's funny. But yeah, I guess like for our digital marketing agency stuff because we're mostly a service provider, slash, but we're also a hybrid software company. So essentially the marketing tools that we pretty much implement for small businesses that we work with are essentially our own software. So basically one of them is like reputation management, where we help our businesses get more reviews systematically. That way there's no awkward requests and all that stuff. But essentially the big thing for that specific product that we have is that, I know, I notice myself when like, I'm looking for like businesses, for example, on Google, right? And then there's, there may be reviews or they may be bad reviews, but the thing that's lacking is that businesses don't exactly respond to views. And what that signals to Google is that your business is not exactly active on social media, for example, because they're not really responding to those kind of reviews. And you got to look at reviews as a content for your business. It may not be your own content that you posted where somebody is talking about your business.
So that's one of the big things that we use AI for, especially for our clients. And another one is essentially what you mentioned. The real framework is that essentially we adapted AI to pretty much deliver solutions, custom solutions to businesses. But we're not really starting from scratch anymore because AI is there. It complements what you already have and what have you.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so I'm curious for you to tell me more about how are you using AI to handle online reviews for businesses? Can we dive a little bit deeper into that?
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So essentially, for example, if you're a client, we onboard you to our software and then we pretty much match your branding and all that stuff and then plug it into your review funnel. Right. And then your review funnel essentially sends out the request and all that stuff. And then basically, once somebody drops in a review for you, our tool is integrated already with AI. And then you can just basically do a one click thing where you can tell the AI to respond in your tone voice, for example, based on your brand voice, and pretty much like, it does that obviously with like different languages and all that stuff. As you know, AI is super smart, so there's no where, you know, basically there's nothing to worry about because, like, the way we use AI is that we already read all those reviews that's coming in. We also identify what kind of business you have, where your business is located and all that stuff. And then AI pretty much like, just spits it back to that as part of the response to that review.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. And that's something that this entire show is built around practical strategies and ways to use AI without getting into the weeds of the tech. And so what it sounds like is you've got a software that sets up this kind of system to where when somebody sends in a review, then you automatically use AI to write a response to that review in the client's voice so that they don't have to do it. It's a necessary evil, but it's something that you don't necessarily have to do yourself.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And so what are some other things that you've seen kind of as a marketing agency evolve over the last couple of years because of, aih, maybe some things that are not so great that you've seen that have turned into a little bit of an issue with you that you have to combat.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: I guess, like, not exactly against myself or like, you know, our agency per se, but, and I'm sure you guys have experience with this, but ever since AI has exploded, there's now a lot of, like, content marketing agencies out there. But then when you look at their content, for example, like, you can already tell that it's generated by AI, right? So now there's so much more noise out there that in order for you to get to the. To the dream clients that you may have and you want to help and all that stuff, because, you know, you have the solution for that.
It's kind of hard to get to them because of that kind of noise. Right.
I. And I'm not saying that it's harder to sell, but it's just more noise that they kind of have to, like, see before they kind of, like, discover what solutions you're providing and that solution that you're providing that would help their business, per se.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: So we just got a lot more crap to sift through.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: You know, and I'm curious because that's something that I know I've been reading lately that Google's taking very seriously, and they're trying to crack down on it and combat it, but they're losing. They are not winning that battle right now.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I think that's probably why they're pushing so hard for their Gemini AI tool, because the more it learns, all the data that OpenAI, for example, or Claude, is getting information from, and they have all that data set. So I think, like, they're trying to fine tune Gemini and then pretty much, like, utilize some part of that AI model, and I'm pretty much, like, trying to, like, find the AI created content.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And who knows if they'll be successful, you know?
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Here's the thing about AI is, like, two months ago, we were not, like, in our infancy, but we were, like, barely learning to walk as a company, the anabots, the company that we have, and we took a strong stance against AI voice. Just not there yet. It's just not authentic. It doesn't sound right. It's not a thing. And then, like, a month later, we found this solution, and we found a platform, and we dug around a little bit. Lo and behold, man, it was convincing enough for us to change our tune and say, yeah, you know what? We will offer AI voice. We can do this. Because we had a standard. Like, no, this is below our standard. Just like, a few months ago, it was below our standard. Like, no, this is not good enough. And then suddenly it's, like, good enough. And it's, you know, it's crazy how fast it advances.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like, if you would have to hire somebody, it would probably take the same amount or probably a longer time than that.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: Yeah, indeed. So tell us a little bit more about what you do and who you help specifically.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah, so, basically, we're really focused on coaches, consultants, and small business owners, and we pretty much do, like, the full circle marketing thing for them, basically website design. And then what's next to that is that we help them get found on Google, which is the local SEO. When they get found through Google, what's next is basically we help them get more reviews. Then how do you use those reviews in order for you to attract more clients? And how do you really figure out how to retain those clients? So we also offer a rewards and loyalty program, instrumentation, which is another software that we own, and pretty much, you know, just do the full circle thing over and over.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And where can we go to learn more about this and get connected?
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Yeah, so basically it's Enzon media.com that's hands on media.com. they can hop in for a free consultation. And it's definitely not a pitch pass where you just sell you our products and services. It's definitely not the case. We pretty much like, do a deep business audit, will show you what's wrong maybe, and all the stuff. And then by another call, the guarantee is that you get one to two actionable tips that you can apply to your business in the same afternoon.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Excellent. Love that. Well, hey, we're going to wrap from here. Thanks so much to our guest, RG Enzon, for joining us for a practical conversation about AI and its potential for business and what's happening right now in marketing. You can learn more about the the marketing agency by going to enzyme media.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 on a future episode as well. We interview business owners of all levels of experience and exposure to AI so that we can represent all voices, especially the 90% of us who are curious about AI, but not trying to be tech geniuses. You can apply for a future episode by going to basicbusinessai.com. and one more time, if you want to install a sales and support team for less than 10% of the cost of an employee, get yourself an anabot. You can learn more by going to anabots AI. We'll see you next time here on basic business AI. And by the way, if you like this episode, tell your friends. See you later.
