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well let's let's go ahead and get started everyone is not chatty today I did not see a lot of things in the chat but um to start I will introduce myself let you know a little bit about me and then I will um get over to our panelists and kind of what we're going to talk about today so I am Ashley Mitchell I have spent my entire career in marketing and Communications roles um started in franchising when I fell into it as most people do most of you probably did as well um in 2014 after a six or so year stint with the Walt Disney Company where I oversaw everything that Disney touched in Michigan and Northern Ohio um I've held several positions over the years in which I've been responsible for creating driving marketing strategy overseeing the growth of the business through all aspects of consumer marketing and communication contributing to overall strategic planning um as part of executive teams my experience spans consumer marketing franchise development marketing and mergers and Acquisitions both on acquiring other businesses and being acquired by and working with private Equity firms so a little bit all over there all over the place there um currently working with a handful of brands in a variety of Industries including youth enrichment uh Beauty Concepts qsr and B2B services so a little bit about me um our discussion today is really going to focus on Fresh marketing approaches how are you going to start the year on a high note with different marketing efforts um leveraging AI for marketing success I know AI is a big buzzword and that's what everybody is you know talking about but we're going to talk a little bit more about practical methods and how you can use it within your marketing efforts um and then just mastering key channels for 2024 what are maybe some of the more effective channels for attracting engaging new customers it's going to be different across the board depending on Industries I see we have a lot of different people in here people have started to wake up so that's good we have some Hospitality social media um handyman remodeling Property Management emerging franchises junk removal so a little bit of everything um which is great variety of different industries that we're going to cover here all right um first I also want to invite everybody to join the CMO peer talk Community if you're not already a member um it is a community you can scan that QR code and join there's a LinkedIn group we have a lot of online events a lot of offline events um our next inperson event is actually going to be at the IFA in Phoenix so if you are going to that and you more information please feel free to let me know um we're going to have an in-person event there with some different panels and discussions and things like that going on so everyone is you know welcome to join so if you want more information just let me know it's a really great place where you can ask questions learn from other people um you know continue the conversations of what's going on have some people that share in your same struggles this round table today is actually sponsored by promo Republic so promo Republic is a marketing platform for uh franchise growth and we do have someone with us from promo Republic today to kind of speak to promo Republic so Alex why don't you go ahead and take it away asy thank you so much for the warm introduction once again my name is Alex Harbin and I'm a local marketing automation expert here at promo Republic uh for those of you that are really unfamiliar with proma Republic and the first time hearing our brand we are the one marketing platform for all of your franchise growth needs we really help streamline the process across all of social media marketing reputation management and local SEO our AI power tools help enable marketing experts to attract more local business for their franchises I'll drop my zoom uh I'll drop my LinkedIn link into the zoom chat shortly and I hope to get acquainted with everyone and I'd love to pass the mic now back over to Ashley to introduce our wonderful panel of speakers today thanks Alex um yeah so I'm gonna let the speakers introduce themselves because they will probably do a way better job of it than I will so first I'm going to pass it over to Chad sure hello hello everybody so I'm the my name is Chad Palmer I'm the CMO here at United franchise group so we represent 11 different brands um and almost as many different Industries we're in the co-working space signer space promotional space business brokerage we're kind of all over the place um uh my role here at ufg is is uh helping all of our marketing groups so the kind of marketing teams when they need help with vendors like promo Republic or any other other things like that that tends to come into my role as well as strategy to help them so uh I'm an early adopter of AI so I'm excited to hear what everyone's using I I love getting on these and learning new tips and tricks and tools as well as sharing what we've learned and what we utilize here at ufg so uh again thanks for having me today look forward to joining the panel awesome thank you Lindsay you're up hi guys um I'm Lindsay Simpson I am the CMO for two Brands Athletic Republic and the Dog Wizard um I have a little over 20 years of experience as well always been in the health and wellness space um I'm from Southern California originally um I am currently in Parks C the Utah um which is my home and I love the outdoors I'm a mom of two and well three for babies count um totally so and um the last five years I've been in franchising um I specialize in emerging franchisees or franchisors um or reemerging franchisors so Al Republic is a 33-year-old brand um we're in sports performance training for youth athletes and adult Fitness and uh the Dog Wizard is a mobile dog training business um with nearly 100 locations worldwide with 160 territories sold um and growing fast and so um I specialize on both the consumer side and the Fran Dev side um absolutely love everything to do with franchising and especially love groups like this um franchising is so warm and welcoming and CMO pure talks like this is such an amazing way um to brainstorm together learn from different Industries you could be shoulder-to-shoulder with your biggest competitor and people are so open to sharing ideas because collectively we build franchising as a organization as an industry together and I just absolutely love that so I'm excited to to chat with you all today and um I'm very excited to see everyone in IFA in a couple weeks that was a great pitch for franchising um and yes if you are new to franchise ing reach out and ask people questions because you will be shocked that they will actually answer you and give you all of the knowledge that they have they want to share it with you so do not be afraid to ask that is probably the number one tip I have for anybody entering franchising because it is like unlike any other industry where you ask a question and people actually answer you so don't be afraid to start asking uh next we're g to pass it over to Danielle hi thank you I'm Danielle uthus I'm the director of franchise development marketing for Empower EMP power Brands and Empower brands has 10 brands a lot of them are in the Home Services type space um I'm relatively new to empower Brands but it is my 10th year in franchising I came from um large format printing Brands health and fitness Brands and Ace Hardware as well so kind of a mix variety of different types of franchises in my background before that I was in digital marketing on the agency side as well so seen a little bit of everything in franchising and um just hoping to contribute what I can give back to the franchise Network I am on the IFA committee for marketing technology and Innovation so Shameless plug for the session at IFA so I hope to see everyone there it's a digital marketing session at IFA as well awesome and last but certainly not least Crystal yeah hi everyone I'm crystalware managing director at location 3 um I am based in Denver Colorado and Lindsay dogs absolutely do count I'm mom to one little girl and two pups who are um old but still in puppy spirit I work for location three we're on the supplier side for franchising um we are a digital marketing agency been in business for 25 years um we'll be selling our celebrating our 25th year in business this year at actually um of those 25 years 15 or more of those years have been spent specifically in the franchising space um and I personally have been working in franchising for about 12 of my 15 years in digital marketing um and I I love the franchising space because of the collaboration and the opportunity um and our ability to influence small business owners um and so I'm really excited to be here today thank you awesome so yeah like I mentioned at the beginning these are our amazing panelists lots of different um areas of expertise we have the supplier side we have the franchisor side we have platform Brands we have individual Brands so we're going to get a lot of different perspectives if you have questions please ask you can put all your questions in the chat as we go if they make sense me to pull out I'll pull them out during if not we can save them for the end um do not hesitate to ask any questions so we're going to get through this we have a couple few different questions that we're going to ask all of our panelists it's going to be very conversational jump in you know they're going to jump in and kind of play off of each other I'm sure because there's going to be a lot of things that come out then at the end we're going to get into breakout room so just to give you a warning in those breakout rooms you're going to be asked to introduce yourself share something that you learned and then ask questions to the speakers so be thinking about that as we go through up first um what are your marketing goals for 2024 to generate new customers so Chad let's start with you what's your goals for 2024 to generate new customers across all your Brands sure we we we have a a couple it's kind of interesting with the kind of new year new me thing going on here uh I would say refreshing content using AI is is definitely uh kind of started in the middle of last year but ongoing uh lead generation as a sales organization obviously is got to be on your on your top goals and taking care of franchises uh and another kind of interesting thing that we're we're dabbling into is using some SEO optimization for voice search so as AI grows and as we're kind of all used now to say you know every night I get home and say you know Alexa turn on the corner light and we're getting used to that more and more people are searching that way um instead of just jumping on Google and there's some alternate search engines so uh we want to make sure franchising isn't late to that space like consumer electronics and e-commerce is already there a lot of people aren't even thinking about people start asking just general questions uh using voice search so we're experimenting with that a little bit but I would say lead generation always is the top of the list uh probably for all of us that are franchisors right we need we need new new blood coming into the system new excited entrepreneurs joining our organization as well as we need to generate leads for our existing franchisees so those are always you know making our franchisees successful is our number one goal always and forever it's really good that I don't have an Alexa device in this room it might be the only room in my house that I don't because when you said that it probably would have picked up your voice and it um yeah exactly all of a sudden I'm in the dark um Crystal you know a lot about the lead generation space obviously in the seat that you sit what are what's your perspective on this yeah so I wholeheartedly agree um all of our clients are hyperfocused on marketing value um and there's a lot of pressure to shift as much budget as possible into Revenue generating channels at the bottom of the funnel so we're seeing a lot of investment obviously on the search side but as a direct response mechanism um where social is still an important piece in that realm too although that is shifting a little bit um but we're also seeing some really great performance actually coming out of audio um like people are searching through voice people are also listening to podcasts all day every day and so audio is becoming a really important um channel in the media mix for our customers um we're also really focused on lead quality um we obviously need to be filling the funnel and focused on lead gen but um our our owners don't have a lot of time to parse through dozens and dozens of leads so we're using AI solutions to really enforce lead quality verifying the lead quality through things like call scoring enh enhanced conversions from Google those sorts of things um we're also doing more in leading I I guess what I call strategic planning strategic business planning so um we just had a client come to us and say we you know we want to grow our our business by X um Ju Just for this example you know $10 million in growth next year and so he said okay what does that actually generate in terms of new customers and then we can use billing data lead data appointment booking data whatever that is to back into uh for this client specifically it was booked appointments to get to an ual conversion and and number um that we need to hit from our digital marketing efforts and you know we're all marketers in this room most likely or operations but um when you start talking in black and white like that in terms of backing into goals based on an actual business objective that's when we can start making friends with our CFOs um with across the companies so um that I think that's really important especially as people start to tighten their belt a little bit and understand how their Market marketing dollars need to be spent yeah definitely um one thing that Crystal mentioned that is you know podcasts and people listening to podcast just for fun while we're going through this Lindsay I'm throwing it to you next but before that if anybody has any podcast recommendations that everybody should be listening to put them in the chat um my favorites have nothing to do with business whatsoever um I love armchair expert and I'm also big fan of the new heights podcast because I'm a big football fan um and just going to throw in Go Lions because this is the only time that I've been able to say that in my life and people actually believe me so throwing that in there but Lindsay what are your thoughts I love it um well I'm incredibly excited for 2024 I can't believe January's almost behind us um the joke that January has like 57 days in it I'm feeling it for sure but that just means we get to draw out our New Year's resolutions and for those of you who made maybe personal New Year's resolutions I highly recommend that you actually make professional ones as well well um you know building your professional um brand and your networking and franchising um will help um build your career and will help build you guys personally as well so I highly recommend that but personally my goals for my Brands this year um are I've got three of them um one is to make sure that we're diversifying our marketing portfolio um I think often times the organizations are getting very dependent on certain channels and as we all know as marketers and probably why we love our jobs so much is that things are changing every single day we come in and the minute you think you've got something figured out the rug is pulled out from under you and you've got to figure out something else um and I absolutely love it it keeps me on my toes every day um but to make sure that we create a really healthy mix and media mix and that we're not so dependent in any one Channels with the rise of privacy and and cookie elimination um and more more power in the individual's hands um we as marketers need to be more creative and thoughtful and make sure that we're spreading our budget out to more channels so if you're a brand that's you know 50% dependent on meta for example I really recommend this year that you really hunker down and make sure to diversify your portfolio um the other SE the second one probably is maybe a little silly to others but um it's really to simplify I think as marketers we naturally over complicate things um and in everything that we're trying to do especially as we try to lead large franchise organizations and small business owners is the more we can simplify the easier they are to execute and uh this is a Shameless little plug plug I'm speaking at IFA on a panel and all we're discussing for the entire hour um on Monday morning is simplifying local marketing um strategies and so I think as we think about that and how we teach our franchisees that should be of the utmost importance um and we like to use the acronym kiss keep it simple stupid and uh so that is now on a bulletin right at my desk um as one of my marketing goals and the third is how do I become a better teacher um and I know you know these goals aren't you know as strategic as you might have wanted me to answer them but the better teachers we are um especially to our franchisees the more likely they are to execute um at one Trend I am seeing I think we're all seeing in 2024 is um how important Grassroots marketing is um there's so much we can do with AI digital marketing and everything but if we cannot teach the basics of Grassroots marketing and especially these days consumers are so desperate for human connection I think we'll really see a rise in Grassroots and so being able to teach those simple principles and being able to track the return on Grassroots is important to me yeah those are great points and I do think like working in franchising we all know that like majority if not all of your franchisees probably did not get into it to be a marketer so you need to make it as simple as possible or they won't do it if you don't make it simple for them to do if you need them to do something locally they have a business to run they didn't get into this to do marketing you did but they didn't so if you don't make it simple they're not going to execute and you're not going to be able to hit your goals because it does take that partnership um so I think that that is definitely something that is a huge thing that we all need to remember because I think Lindsay's right we do over complicate it and there's so much coming at us all the time and your franchisees are also getting all that at them as well um you know I know we're going to talk a little bit about AI here in a minute I'll never forget when chat GPT first became the hot big thing and everybody was talking about it franchises were hearing that too and I had a franchisee come to me and say well when I search what is the best business in the world our business doesn't come up what are we going to do about that when I ask chat GPT it doesn't tell me that I'm like okay take a breath got to come up with a strategy um so they're hearing it too so you have to make sure that you're keeping it as simple for them and not getting letting everybody get distracted by the shiny things um Danielle what are your thoughts yeah I do I feel you on the chat GPT with the franchisees I formerly had a franchisee who goes oh yeah I've been writing my legal contracts I was like oh no don't tell don't tell me that like no ears for the corporate so um that does you know you have to be a little bit careful with it too but we'll jump into that but uh my goals for 2024 I mean we love our Brokers we love our fsos on the frev side but we're really charged with and me specifically working on getting the organic lead gen up for franchise development and that can be difficult because it is such a complicated business model and such a big commitment and people might be interested in starting a business but they don't really know anything about the franchising model they're not clear on all the support that we provide and the marketing tools and the technology behind it and all of those components that come with it so doing that education for people who go I want to start my own business you know there's a really entrepreneurial culture right now with everyone on Tik Tok and Instagram and on meta everyone's talking about starting business opportunities but a lot of times people think of franchising as either you know I need a full brick-and morar buildout of a qsr or I don't or it's you know they don't really realize that there's some options in between that are accessible at a lower dollar buyin so um just doing a lot of education and getting that message out and helping people to feel comfortable with getting as much information as possible so that they can understand the item 19 they can understand the tools we provide and they can get a good understanding of what franchising really is and they need a lot of that information before they'll ever fill out that form on the website so working a lot around that awesome um before we move on to our next question if you're not paying attention to the chat you should be because there are some great recommendations on podcast and there I'm just saying um all right next what new marketing approaches and channels do you plan to launch this year um Lindsay let's start with you you talked about diversifying your plan what does that look like as far as approaches and channels yeah I mean I there's a lot of fun stuff popping up right now um if you haven't dabbled in Tik Tok ads um or even CTV I'd say start to play with it start to experiment um if you have a um a franchise marketing Council um at your organization use them to try to test new channels I think it's a really great um strategy um even supplementing some of their spend so you guys can learn more about it and then use those as case studies to roll out new channels um but one thing that seems simple in Chad um we're taking a play out of your book um which is we're revisiting old content and then repurposing it um with AI um specifically shorts is so popular right now um the ability to create short snit bits of content that people are consuming in um YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram no what no matter what your channel is even LinkedIn if you've started to scroll through your LinkedIn feed um you can take a single piece of content and slice and dice it in so many different ways so if you're really a budget conscious um organization um don't think that you need to produce all these new items I'd say revisit the the old archive um find old video content and slice and dice it into shorts um I our team uses AI to help us multiply content from various channels so you could take one piece of content content for example it might be like a webinar like this or for us it's a webinar we host with our franchises and by using AI you can slice and dice at you can do a voice transcript which writes you a Blog which writes you short social content which creates you short video content um which helps you with you could do a podcast version all of a sudden in the next hour I've produced nine pieces of content and then off you go so that's how we're using Ai and I really encourage people to play with all the new social channels and shorts awesome what are your favorite tools that you use for that for sliding that content into shorts and you know multiplying it across what what platforms and tools are you using yeah so definitely if you haven't already just upgraded chat gp4 um and whatever next version they come out with it's worth it um it's just a small chunk of change and um uh if you're not plugging into any of these Zoom or Google AI assistance um that is the easiest single easiest way to do it right now um one it transcribes your meeting invites and very quickly you can find efficiencies on your team by it sending out notes or key takeaways um like that um but also then that allows you the content to then go plug into other AI tools to help you with um transcripts to blogging transcripts to podcasting um you can create AI videos so there is just a few of my favorites awesome question in the chat and I know you have a policy around this Lindsay so I'm going to ask you um how are you protecting your proprietary and intellectual property when you're using this stuff what does your policy look like private mode all the time um and also we built into our brand standards um that we have human review over everything um also if you're using Partners I highly suggest if you're reviewing any Partners or suppliers like um uh promo Republic on today or even location 3 partner with vendors that are starting to fold in um AI widgets into their tools but make sure um that you have control to make sure that you have sorry make sure you have control over approving all content so human edits before everything goes live make sure if you have brand standards or digital guidelines for your brands that you're making sure you're teaching your franchisees that they have to do the same um if you're nervous about them using AI tools like writing legal contracts um you know even consider putting in a forcible approval rules that everything runs through headquarters before it goes live Chad do you have anything on that knowing how much you are an adopter of AI yeah yeah you're you're talking my language so the first thing I think I saw pop up in the corner in the chats uh but Opus clip um kind of for what for what Lindsay was saying like you can get a a testimonial that was you you know from from last year and chop it up from a a f minute testimonial from a franchisee into 30 second social media clip super easy um it just does the work for you it's amazing so I would definitely experiment with that um on the on the kind of uh security side I guess you could say uh internally we we kind of have a policy that nothing gets loaded or up into chat GPT that has confidential sensitive uh information that we would not want a competitor uh to know and or we would want all over the Internet even in private mode uh there's so many there's so many ins and outs and plugins and and open holes in chat GPT right now people kind of feeding data and and pulling data from it um even in private mode I don't personally trust it yeah I want to trust it but I don't yet uh there's been too many stories uh of of large I won't say the name of the phone company because they've been dragged through the mud enough on it but a competitor was able just to go ask chat GPT for some code and basically got millions of dollars of intellectual property because someone had uploaded it and like said you know format this for my PowerPoint presentation or whatever they did and boom once they did that it's in the cloud it's there forever so I it's an amazing tool it's not going away I don't want franchisors or or franchises to ever be afraid of it but like anything else you have to be very cautious with new technology and and be smart with it you don't you know you don't want to take something that you're seeing as a competitive advantage and turn and turn it I use I was on a panel last week and I gave up one of my big tips which is I jump on chat GPT and research all of our competitors to see what they've put in there I just ask like is there FDD in there is there operating manuals or are those in there you would be surprised I've gotten full marketing plans from from other companies things that I it's not me maybe even necessarily highly confidential but things that I just wouldn't go throwing around just you know on a competitive Viewpoint we're we are in franchising and you're absolutely right we all do kind of stand shoulder Tosh shoulder and share all kinds of stuff but at the end of the day it is a business so you just want to be wise uh with that the the other thing I would say as far as approaches go um you know for a scrappy young brand having an AI the ability to like auto text leads or Auto call leads is a GameChanger it's a leveler like we're kind of fortunate that we have 11 Brands in-house we have an in-house franchise development calling team um that does a lot of that but the the ability to kind of go down the funnel one level of take this like you know the Sea of leads and say let's say here's a 100 people here's the 20 that are actually interested and jump right to those 20 because they reached out to make an appointment um I think for franchising for the last five years I haven't seen anything as exciting that levels the field more um and also just from a time and efficiency standpoint even if it's not leveling it if it's just your day-to-day day job you're you're able to focus on some higher level things instead of just just picking up the call making H 100 calls and nobody answers so it's a that alone if you don't use anything else AI That's that's definitely something that I would recommend awesome Crystal I know you have thoughts on all of this yeah no I love all of this so I just on the Privacy stuff I wanted to make a note that as a company we we have built an AI policy that we make our teams agree to and it very much outlines everything that Chad just talked about um and I think that's really important don't overlook um updating that manual and those policies as it relates to the use of these tools we also created a standardized like vetting system because we don't want to suppress people from going out and trying new tools and Technology but we want to make sure they're being vetted to the highest standard before we bring it into the organization is something we want to use so we created those vetting standards um and those go through our AI committee we asked um team members to volun ER for that um who share that interest and they help kind of Forge the the vetting process and the growth of AI within the company it's it's a lot of fun um and it's a really nice way to um share the workload because AI is huge there's so many applications for it um and so it helps us find new avenues that way um I also wanted to just double down on what Lindsay said about shorts um short content especially video content across um reels shorts uh snap all of those is very popular we're seeing a lot of traction on those a lot of really good performance metrics um tied to customers um we also I think it just goes back to this idea that customers just really want to interact with brands that they have an affinity for that they feel like they could be passionate about um I personally I'm a millennial right millennial Z not and younger we we really um want to know that the brands that we're spending our money with are doing things that align with ourselves and those shorts and getting your brand out there in a in a positive meaningful but fun way is really important um we've seen a lot of success with next door and Reddit I think those two channels are sometimes overlooked Reddit people tend to get to be afraid of um because there can be some s some spicy things happening over there um but if you um you know if you if you maintain your brand standards and kind of lock down content it is full of Rich context that you know with us losing cookies contextual targeting is really important and so you can find they may be small but really rich Niche markets in Reddit um that could be a Powerhouse for your company yeah Crystal makes some really good points on um one working she comes from the supplier side working with when you are talking to any of your current vendor Partners or new vendor Partners do they have these policies in place from a privacy standpoint and are they using AI in a way that is not going to be detrimental to your business are they doing it just because AI I mean I said at the beginning AI is the buzz word it's what everybody's saying are they saying we're incorporating Ai and they're incorporating it just because they feel like they have to or are they doing it in a responsible way because if they're not then it could hurt you so that's something that you know have if you've not had those conversations with your vendor Partners yet you need to do it now you're behind on it because they could be doing something that you don't know um you want to trust them but not everybody's going to do things the responsible way that's unfortunately the way of the world it's G to happen um and also not losing that human aspect as Lindsay talked about too you know there's always going to be human eyes on it there is still humans behind all of this you have to tie into that emot otal connection to the brand that's what people want people are going to see through it if you're just running things through any sort of AI and just putting it out there and not making sure that it still represents a human and your brand um so that's something that is also super important um we've kind of already started digging into this as we got into the strategies and things but you know how you're using AI in your work and what you would recommend we've had some great recommendations so far um Danielle anything on your end that you're doing that might be different or you can back up anything that anyone else has said sure on AI I'm looking into how can we use it to dial in our personas better and the visitors to our website better um you know everybody a lot of times we'll work with an agency the agency will go okay this is Corporate Chris he wants to quit his corporate job and get you know and that's our Target persona but with some of the AI tools that are out there you can really do some more analysis on okay who really are both our current franchisees that we already have and get more granular info on them and then also who are the people that are in the lead pipeline get some more info and demographics on them as well as visitors to the website so actually I think with the without the cookies there's a lot of changes and all that kind of thing but in some ways it can make it actually a little bit creepier in terms of how much uh you can dig into the visitors to your website and who these people are and get as much information on them as possible you know I like AI in terms of messaging and using it in content creation but I'm also a little bit skeptical of it because I'm sort of an SEO purist diard SEO person so you know when everything's being scraped I don't want there to be a day where then Google goes okay well everybody use the same the same blog post and the same content so I do like to do some human review on it and I like for our partners to be upfront if they are using chat GPT to generate our blog post so I will run those through an AI Checker to see if the whole thing is completely chat GPT you know especially if we're paying a monthly like retainer for that content or whatever do you have a favorite AI Checker that you use on chat I think it's chat gp0 or zero GPT I think um just to kind of see what's going on get a feel for if the whole thing is is um you know you chat generated or not um to to touch back on Reddit I've tried that a little bit too um just in terms of awareness I think it that's it's an interesting one to look at right now as well aome is anyone else on the panel doing anything from a checking standpoint or worried about how you know AI is affecting your SEO yeah so there there's a tool called uh I hope I don't pronounce wrong it's called likea or SEO na Sona it's a newer tool and it basically uses AI to to go through your site and check like your meta tags your meta descriptions some of like the backend stuff that we kind of set it and forget it right like we we build a website we we think we're really smart when we do that and then the reality is overtime certain keywords that were awesome for us six months ago maybe aren't now um so we're experimenting with that just kind of again we were talking about using AI just kind of a refresh to to kind of regenerate content that's an interesting tool that's that's come out that uses AI um specifically on the back and it kind of goes through and says hey you said this is the sentence for your description if you change these three words you'll probably rank higher um you could do some you know tons of used SCM rush or use keyword Checkers and things like that but it's awesome just to go hit a button and it does you know like for us we have 11 Brands so I have 11 consumer sites I have 11 frev sites there's 22 sites right there it's very unwieldy to to get to that level down the checklist of important stuff that I have to do in my day-to-day job um team that's not all you all I do yeah I wish that's the fun stuff um yeah so but to to have a that's one of the really cool things with AI that is to have tools that do that kind of I call it the grunt work but also uh we're we're at the stage now especially going into this year where these tools are going to do a better job than we can do um like I have an SEO purest heart um as well as Danielle I'm kind of from the old school and I I I feel myself holding on to that and we definitely have levels of protection and we check and we have humans look at everything I I'm trying to get better in my my uh OCD control side of of realizing these tools like exist for a reason and they they can do some things better than we can not just faster than we can do them but they can actually do them better um because they don't have the same biases that I do and I have to you know sometimes go okay let's let's try it the other thing that I would just add um to the conversation that we were kind of talking about with using partners and using Ai and all of that thing is uh not not just giving away like um your your company's information to them you know like I said they could run if they're doing your blogs they can do the same thing that would damage you of running things through but even something as simple as like uh talking about transcriptions for meetings like using fireflies or or one of the other ones that transcribes meetings they're really cool tools for taking that and then running it through chat GPT and saying hey what are the three key takeaways from this meeting and who's responsible for them and say you know like at the end of this talk if we had a transcription we could say what were the three tools that that team talked about the most and that is awesome from just a meeting efficiency perspective and again I always tell my team the caveat is as long as you're in a meeting that you're not talking about confidential data or numbers or things that you don't want out there um you can do that so sometimes we'll get a transcription I'll scrub a couple numbers off of it just to be double safe because I'm paranoid and then run it through and get the get the benefits from it so don't trust all these tools at face value I would say um the only other last thing I would mention with that is we kind of talked about I I love the idea Crystal of having like a vetting process of of like what AI tools to use because especially for franch es there's hundreds of them every day um my kind of new policy with that that I tell franchises and I kind of try to use here if I'm if I'm experimenting with a new AI company it's different than anything that I've done before where I'm signing a year contract or you know I'm doing this I basically tell them straight up we need a short-term contract to test and experiment if you're not comfortable with that you're not a good fit for us like we're just we're just not interested into a business because the reality is their tool may be the most amazing thing today and then on Friday the most most amazing tool comes out that blows it out of the water for half the price and you don't want to get locked in um just the speed the speed of AI is is so exponential at this point you you need to as a as a as a vendor and I think you know also as as you know for the the other people on the team that are suppliers you need to be aware of that too just so you're sensitive to the other sides kind of need so you can balance that out and be smart with decisions we want to try all the the cool new to we don't want to lock up all of our marketing funds and then feel like an idiot when you know five months from now the most amazing thing comes out and it's like puts chat GPT it's like gemin out now what's chat GPT right that that's it's just inevitable that that's gonna happen with the the speed of uh AI yeah it's moving so fast and you have to I think on the franchise door side as you're thinking about budgets if you can if you have the ability to keep some money in like an innovation fund um hold some of that back because you never know know what's going to happen I mean a year year and a half ago we all would have never thought that we would be investing in all of these AI tools that we are that was not in anybody's budget was to have the you know up the paid version of cat GPT and all of these different tools and things that you know have these monthly costs that come along with them yes there's a lot of benefit but none of us had that in our budget and we had to figure out how to get it in there because it was important that we do um so that's something to keep in mind too as you're having those conversations um we had a question in the chat do you do you see AI replacing people or freeing up people to pursue other tasks and opportunities what are your guys' thoughts on that um I I can actually jump in on that one because it kind of led to a thought I was having so we're we are really looking at AI as a way to amplify our team not replace our team right so how can we amplify lower level tasks that they were doing amplify their their bandwidth and set them off into things that are um just frankly more important and should have human brain power behind it right so an example of this is again I'm on the marketing side we do regular audits of our accounts because those audit audits are repeatable processes we went to the table and said anything that's a repeatable process we can probably build a tool to do it for us so we built a system that every day every single campaign that we that we have in house is audited against a set of parameters there's obviously a human element that backs that up but it amplifies what we would normally be getting out of our teams and I think that's really important um right everyone's probably in the same boat where when chat GPT came out and all of a sudden we don't need writers anymore well of course you do right but everyone was afraid and fearful of their job and so we've just been really adamant that the message that we're bringing to our teams is AI is here to help you not replace you um and so however we can reinforce that messaging is is really important to us yeah I think it's super important what you said about like it replaces some of those more like mundane tasks that have to be done and allows your team then to take that information instead of having to scrub it figure it out then analyze it and be strategic the scrub it figure it out is done for them then they get to look at it and then dive in a little bit deeper and be strategic so they can probably get you know I would assume you're getting a lot more done in a lot quicker time and allowing them to do other cool things that they probably enjoy more than doing that scrubbing everything Ashley I just one last word I um I think the staff members that are going to win are the ones that use AI to help them innovate you mentioned Innovation early so if we have um hope if we have an AI tool listening our number one takeaway this year our 2024 goal should be Innovation and using tools like this to help you innovate um I came from a world a technology um world where they used to have hackathons anyone ever remember those 24 hours they'd lock developers in a room and then they'd come out 24 hours later um you know they'd shut business down and allow them to invent anything they wanted in 24 hours and came out and it was this beautiful Innovation opportunity um if you haven't done that early this year with your team take them out of The Daily Grind give them tools like this to innovate ideas and strategies and be creative and I think that an exercise like that would be such a great way of getting phenomenal ideas and creativity out of your team and use these tools to help do that um otherwise it's January 57th remember all of us are already in the grind and um let's not get stuck and come up with some really cool and exciting ideas this year yeah and that's hard to do it's really hard because we all have a lot going on right it's really hard to take your team out of the dayto day and lose lose a whole day but losing that day or two is going to reap rewards and pay dividends later you just have to remind yourself that because it's really hard and I would say to picky back on what Lindsay said lock away don't let people be distracted and don't let them it's really easy to say oh we're going to do an offsite meeting and we're gonna you know whatever and then somebody's over there oh I have this email that's coming in and I need to answer it like turn all that distraction off or you're not going to get the best out of your team um and make it fun and make it you know there is no bad idea that whole brainstorming of it like really lean into that for at least a portion of time because that will help you in the future even though it seems like you're stepping away from your business for a little bit you are but those Clarity breaks are something that are great um another question in the chat that we'll answer and then we'll get into the breakout rooms um is anyone using any similar tools for optimizing visual content just in addition to text so going away from just the writing and the text and SEO and all of that but anything to improve visibility and design is anyone doing anything with that um so improving improving design not so much but we we have been testing a tool that we're pretty excited about um it's called ad creative.
So um this this it it's pretty interesting it allows you to scrape a URL and then it will use the content and the assets on that URL to build creative for you so it's a way to leverage your existing brand standards you know that everything it spits out is going to be something that's already approved by you um and it will compile different assets and give you like 30 40 50 different creative options that you can then choose from this is really important for us because it leads to the personalization that we need if we're running marketing across you know dozens hundreds of individual locations right so um that's a it's kind of a way to get creative that's already within your brand standards and should be up to Snuff cool anyone else doing anything visually with AI yeah we we have one of our um one of our brands in New Zealand I actually just saw the page today like 10 minutes before hopping on the meeting um they do they do signage so we we own sign arama and they have a really cool uh they're very transparent it says AI generated like images and what it is is it's AI created a bunch of like this is what this van would look like WRA this is a building sign and it's basically like a little Gallery kind of like a hey here's like a it's kind of like looking at pictures of your dream home um but they they've utilized that to not just we we and up to now we always would do like oh these are examples of our work right this is this is the sign that we just made yesterday and here it is on the website so it was one of those aha like oh yeah we can actually show what we could make using AI uh we don't we're not limited by just Graphics that we've already created um and it looked amazing it blew me away I was like this is this is definitely the the future um of what's going on awesome all right cool well now we're going to jump into the breakout room so you will be randomly assigned to a breakout room we're going to have about 10 minutes until the end you will get to introduce yourself share a learning ask questions to the speakers the speakers are going to be the hosts of the breakout room so any questions that you have feel free to drop them in there um and put right in the chat if you want to change rooms for some reason maybe you have a burning question that you really want to ask Danielle so you'd love to be in her room you can drop that in the chat and the team will make it happen everybody's trickling back in um I know some people probably had to jump because we're a little bit over the time but um appreciate everybody coming to this today hopefully you got some good nuggets of information I know that I did um I learned a lot from our panelist so huge thanks to Chad Lindsay Danielle and Crystal um thank you to you guys for all attending asking questions engaging um reminder if you've not joined the CMO peer talks group please do so um free to join lots of cool resources and stuff there and if you are going to IFA and want to um be part of the inperson event that we have feel free to reach out to me or anybody um on the promo Republic team I know they'll know about that as well um but any questions and hopefully see you guys in about three weeks which is crazy that it's already IFA um but we'll see you guys there we got booted all right there we go were you guys still talking all right oh yeah we were having a ball well you missed the thank you so we'll do we'll do another little wrap up because you guys were still talking um just thanks to our panelist lots of great information um lots of great tools and takeaways recordings for this will be available um probably by the end of the week so keep an eye on your email that you registered for and you'll probably be posted on LinkedIn as well but if you have questions for any of the panelists I'm sure they would be happy to answer them if you reach out to them um via message on LinkedIn so thanks again everybody for coming thanks so much thanks everyone bye