AI Insights for Agencies | Samantha Bedford

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Samantha Bedford, founder and CEO of Pico Digital Marketing. Samantha is an award-winning digital expert who provides SMEs and B2B marketers with sophisticated web analytics and data analysis expertise to coordinate effective, trustworthy marketing and sales actions throughout the B2B customer journey. Samantha's ability to integrate customer experience across every department of an SME stems from extensive knowledge with SEO, PPC, lead generation, customer experience and conversion rate optimization. Samantha relies on a tried and tested methodology perfected throughout her award-winning career in media planning, search engine marketing and social media, spanning more than 25 years. Samantha, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Samantha Bedford: Thanks so much for having me. David McBee: It's always fun to hear your bio read by someone else, doesn't it make you feel special? Samantha Bedford: I know. I'm sitting here and I'm like, "Wow." David McBee: "I'm kind of a big deal." Right? Samantha Bedford: Yes. David McBee: Well, I want to just jump right into your expertise. I know that you have worked with big agencies in your career and now you're more of a boutique agency, so you've had that breadth of experience across small to large. So what do you think is the biggest issue that's facing marketing agencies of all sizes in 2023? Samantha Bedford: Oh, I think it's everywhere at the moment. Not just agencies, but obviously AI is a pretty big deal out there and I think being ready for it, being set up for it and being adaptive to it and changing the historical ways of how we've done things. David McBee: Dive into that a little bit. What are you doing that's different or unique? Samantha Bedford: I guess the biggest thing is just looking at how AI can improve our use of time and enable us to actually use our time a lot more strategically instead of using the time for grunt work. And how can we use AI to improve that? So I think a lot of what I'm investing my time in right now is looking at prompt engineers and all of these different prompts that you can use in ChatGPT, for example. Say you've written a responsive search app and you're sitting there and you're like, "Oh gosh, 15 headlines, that's a lot." And using ChatGPT to guide maybe the final 10. You give them five, they maybe spit out another 10 and help you get to that 15 number. And it's enabling us to test faster and learn quicker. And that's what I'm enjoying there. I think the big challenge though with all of this is essentially the silos that exist. Obviously in smaller boutique agencies, there's not as many silos as large agencies. But with AI and machine learning, all of it, if there is silos within your agency, the problem you're going to have is that you're going to have your marketing team out there designing campaigns for search social, et cetera, and then you've got your design team over here and if they don't communicate properly, you're not going to win at this game. And also the speed to delivery as well, I think you have to be quick, you have to be on it and you have to have a good testing strategy. And then I think the other piece of it, obviously with it being automated, the large piece is going back to those basics and making sure that what you want to track is being tracked. So really analyzing that customer journey and pinpointing, these are the things that I want to track, but from an algorithm standpoint. So Smart Bidding in Google, for example, or Meta, if you want to implement any of that algorithmic Smart Bidding, it needs to make sure that it's optimizing to the right conversions. And I think in the past we've been so, "Oh, we'll track a phone call." It doesn't mean that that phone call's a sale or generated any revenue, it could just be a support call. But in the past we would be okay with the algorithms optimizing to something like that. But now that everything is becoming so much more automated and more driven by what you put into the system, it's more important today to make sure that you go back to those basics and be like, "Right, this is the only primary conversion events that I want AI to function on." David McBee: So you're speaking from the point of view of a boutique agency owner. Let's assume that I am a brand and I am torn between going with a boutique like yours or a large brand. And I say, "Well, they've got so many more people on their staff, they've got so much more expertise, they've got a wide breadth of knowledge." What is your take on that thought process that leads brands to the bigger agencies? Samantha Bedford: Yeah, I think bigger agencies obviously have a lot more people. So that's the big difference, it's just the people, it's not the skills. If anything, you will find those smaller boutique agencies are a lot more passionate about their clients because they're smaller. I mean, the only way we are going to make money is keeping our clients happy and that's it. There is no other options. And everyone's a lot more invested in the success of the clients and the companies. Larger agencies, for example, I mean a lot of their staff, I mean, they're there for a payslip. I wouldn't say they're not invested in their clients, I'm sure they've gone into these careers being passionate about the careers. So at least I'm hopeful with that. And I've met a lot of great people in large agencies, but I also find a lot of large agencies miss the... The bigger you are, the more red tape, the more silos there are, the slower the processes can be because you've got to slot in. And if you're not their biggest client, even if you're a large client, you might not be their largest client. Love your tattoo by the way, "Be awesome." To be awesome, exactly. To commit to be awesome for the clients, then we have to be upfront with them straight away, we have to be transparent. And if this client's going to take a lot more hours than we can push to them, then we're not going to be the right agency for them. Even if we know we can maybe do a better job, it's just not the right thing to do. It's all about time. If we don't have the time, we won't take on the client. David McBee: All right. So before we go, I like to ask all my guests, do you have a favorite podcast or a book that you feel has helped you become successful? Samantha Bedford: The biggest things that I always go to is just obviously Search Engine Land, I eat sleep and breathe it. I'm on it all the time. I don't know if anybody's attended it, but SMX Advanced is amazing. Some great materials there. David McBee: If our viewers want to reach out to you, how can they do that? Samantha Bedford: Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn, so you can just find me on LinkedIn obviously, so Samantha Bedford. And they can also obviously take a look at my website, so it's Choosepico.com. And then obviously feel free to send me a message, email me, it's Sam@choosepico.com. And I would love to connect with you and even if you've just got any questions in general, I've been doing this for 25 years and I'm happy to help out anybody. David McBee: That's very nice of you. Thank you so much. Thank you for being on my show today. I appreciate you. Samantha Bedford: Yes, thanks for having me. It was good chatting with you. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time. Samantha Bedford: One of the best books I've read recently is basically The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. And just rethinking priorities, but that was more in my personal life situations. But I was very disappointed, the movie's out at the moment on Netflix and I was like, "No, that's not for me." But the book was brilliant. David McBee: That is one of my all time favorite books. I absolutely love that one, so I'm glad you recommended that one. All right- Samantha Bedford: Yeah. It's a good book. Good chuckle.