What AI Can’t Replace in Marketing with Jamie Moffat

Welcome to episode 282 of the Business Development Podcast.

Today we're diving into a conversation that every business owner needs to hear what AI can't replace in marketing.

I'm joined by digital marketing veteran Jamie Moffatt who's seen it all from radio ads in the 90s to today's AI powered campaigns.

Together we explore why trust, create connection and human follow up still win every time.

Stick with us, you don't want to miss this episode.

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Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome to episode 282 of the Business Development Podcast and today it is my absolute pleasure to bring you Jamie Moffatt.

Jamie is a powerhouse in advertising and digital marketing, bringing over three decades of industry experience to his role as a digital marketing consultant at local IQ.

Since launching his career in 1991, Jamie has been at the forefront of transforming businesses through innovative data driven marketing strategies.

Specializing in AI powered solutions, Jamie leverages tools like Google Ads, SEO and social media to elevate his clients brands, drive leads and unlock untapped potential.

As Google Sales Professional and a member of the Sandler's President's Club, Jamie's accomplishments include winning prestigious Canadian Country Music Awards and delivering impactful results for clients across various sectors.

Beyond his professional achievements, Jamie is a dedicated community leader and endurance athlete, balancing his passion for business with a commitment to giving back.

Whether mentoring BNI members on digital strategies, pushing through 80k charity bike rides or playing the tuba in his downtime, Jamie's blend of creativity, resilience and integrity is always aiming to inspire and empower those around him.

Jamie's mission is clear.

To elevate businesses and lives with every interaction, leaving a legacy of positive game changing impact.

Jamie, it is an honor to have you on the show today.

Wow.

Thanks Kelly.

I really appreciate it.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out a way I can play my tuba and ride my bike at the same time.

The One Man Band Man That's a thing, right?

One of those big ones.

Right.

We've actually known each other quite a while.

I think our paths have crossed back when I was even just in business development.

I want to say it like angry inspection 10 years ago.

Really at this point, it's been a minute, but you've been in the industry a long time.

That's why I keep cutting my hair, so nobody knows how old I am.

Yeah.

You know what it is, Kelly?

It's.

I started working in advertising in the early 90s and it was like I was in my early 20s and it was like, this is a career.

I don't have to work weekends and nights like a keg or anything anymore.

Right.

It's got a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, a real job.

And I fell in love with it.

I fell in love with connecting with business owners and helping them find their customers.

And it's interesting, the conversations I'm having today aren't that different from what I was having in the early 90s, 30 years ago.

It's I talked to a business owner and nine times out of 10, their biggest problem is I need more customers.

How do I get more customers?

And that's what I do is back then it was using radio advertising to, to deliver their message and to invite people into their business.

Today, I'm using all the coolest, newest, fanciest technology available to bring them in through pay per click advertising and social ads and using artificial intelligence to make sure they're not missing out on leads and all of the stuff that we do.

And it's, it's been an adventure and a journey, but I still love helping business owners grow, really.

And a lot of the stuff that we talk about is stuff that business owners are doing themselves.

Quite often they can figure it out themselves.

And then it becomes, how am I spending my time?

Should I be spending my time adjusting my pay per click campaign or should I be spending my time building my business?

And so that's why most people hire us, is to save time and to let the experts do what experts do.

I love it, Jamie.

And I think digital advertising can be a really scary place for most of us business owners.

Right?

You're right.

We can play in that playground.

But like, how many dollars are we going to burn trying to figure it out too?

And it is an expensive place and you can spend a lot of money and go absolutely nowhere.

And so really pumped to talk with you about that today.

The other side of it is 30 years in sales, business development and advertising.

My gosh, I want to spend some time there.

I want to get to know Jamie Moffat.

Dude, take me back.

How did you end up on this path?

Take me back like 30 years ago.

How did you end up in this industry?

I could go back 40 years.

Let's do it.

You know, I was an out of work rock and roll musician and I needed to eat.

I wasn't playing in a band and I got a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door and my first sales job and I was selling Kirby vacuum cleaners and I'm knocking on doors and trailer parks in B.C.

and yeah, it was crazy.

That was quite the start.

Not gonna say I loved it.

It was fun.

I was 18, it was a party, we'd get in a van and drive around B.C.

but.

And I learned about presenting and I learned about how to listen.

I started to learn how to listen.

That's an ongoing process and that's one thing I've learned over the years is how to really listen.

And being a father of four, I also had to learn how to listen to my children.

And that applies every in my work, in my professional life as well.

And that's, it's a very holistic career being in sales because everybody's always selling all the time, whether you're in sales or not.

People are trying to convince others to see their viewpoint.

With my career, I was working behind the microphone.

After selling vacuum cleaners, I got a job as a disc jockey because I had cool voice and or a face for radio as we used to say.

And I really enjoyed it, enjoyed being a radio announcer and had a lot of fun calling backselling music and reading weather and sports scores and producing music shows and really enjoyed that.

But eventually I had to learn how to survive and being a radio announcer wasn't profitable.

It was hard to make a living.

And I found myself in Vancouver trying to figure out how I was going to survive.

And I ended up meeting a mutual friend.

Through the radio industry you get to know people, it's a small business.

And I was at a Christmas luncheon and I met this fellow, Bob Simpson, who was the sales manager for this radio station out in the Fraser Valley and they were looking for new sales reps and I was and they had just flipped format to a new alternative modern rock format radio station and I was listening to that kind of music and I was ready to go.

And so long story short, he hired me.

He gave me nine video cassettes in a box and threw me in the boardroom and said, here's figure it out kid.

Here's your sales training.

And I never forget Jason Jennings Radio Sales 101.

It was, it was cool, but it was consultative.

And it's funny, I remember it to this day.

I was talking to a real estate developer recently and I was remembering that segment of the Jason Jennings tapes from like the early 90s.

Yeah.

Where he was doing a role play, where he was doing, talking to a real estate developer.

And it was about how do we understand our clients?

Like, we need to get to know their business.

We don't have to be experts at it, but we really need to get to know their business and understand how, how their business functions, where their profit margins are, where their pain points are, where are the gaps and how can whatever solution that we're bringing to the table, you know, fill those gaps.

Wow.

Wow.

It's funny because you just reminded me actually when I worked at Visions like many years ago, probably back when I was 18, actually, I remember sitting in a room and being given tapes very similar to that on how to sell high end consumer electronics.

My gosh, dude, I had completely forgotten about them.

There you go, a flashback.

Hey, that's so funny.

So it really was.

But that was how we did it, right?

Like we just put people in a room, we're like, watch this video and go do that thing, go do that thing.

But that was what we had, right?

We had that and we had the people that we worked around to be able to watch them and learn from them, right?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Like for me, I guess it would have been, it would have been the late 2009, 2008 time, but I don't think, I don't think things had changed that much from 1995 to 2000.

Apparently they haven't.

Yeah.

That's funny.

So.

Yeah.

So fast forward.

What happened is I've.

I launched in my radio sales career and I've really looked for ways to connect with people and, and really again, coming back to that act of listening and whenever there was like a speaker coming to town, we were talking about earlier, Brian Tracy and some of these, these speakers who would come sales training programs, we would always take advantage of those.

And I was reading sales books and reading marketing books and I still have some on the shelf back here.

And just for reference, it's.

It, the message is pretty simple.

It's connect with people, build a relationship with them, earn their trust, and then solve their problem if you can.

And that's where integrity takes over.

And really sometimes when I was selling radio, advertising was very competitive.

Yeah.

And, and it was, it was hard because all the radio stations were competing for the same dollars.

So I'd go in to see a business owner and they'd say, why should I buy your station over this other radio station?

What's the difference?

And we have a different audience and we do the song and dance or the smoke and mirrors as I called it.

And really in the end it was customer would go a lot on gut feeling and on relationship.

And it's not so much on quantifiable data because really if you're buying radio advertising in the 90s, how is it measured?

Sure, some people are coming in said they heard my ad on the radio, must be working.

But now in the 21st century, as we're selling digital solutions and we're helping businesses quantify their marketing spend, there's terms like roas as opposed to roi, it's return on ad spend.

And you can literally quantify that.

You can look at all of the analytics and data and you can see how much data is telling what the data is telling you.

So we talk about data informed design and data informed decisions at Local IQ because we're really focused on how are we helping business owners understand where their customers are coming from and understand it well enough that they can go find some more.

Yes, to me, digital marketing is about brand awareness, right?

Like anything mass scale like that.

What it's really great at is shining a big bright spotlight and saying, oh, here I am.

Like you mentioned before though, it's really hard or it has been hard at least historically to be able to be able to tell like how much of that brand awareness is actually turning into a sale.

Which is where for me active marketing has always been where it's at.

Right.

We need somebody actually picking up a phone, making a phone call, making your a real human to human connection, asking for a meeting that leads to a sale over time.

Obviously.

How do we differentiate that for Digital advertising in 2025 is very different than digital advertising was in 2000.

Let's talk a little bit about the evolution of digital advertising.

You've been in it for 30 years.

What was it like back then and what's the differences today?

It's interesting.

I was an outsider at first because I was a radio advertising guy and eventually I moved into radio sales management.

So now I was the trainer and the coach and the mentor and, and I was having client facing meetings in the early 2000s and then this thing Google happened.

People were using different search engines.

Before Google there was AltaVista and ask Jeeves and Netscape and places like that and Yahoo was around and.

But there was no consistency.

And so people would go, they would go to search for something online and then they wouldn't find it.

Then they go to a different search engine and then they would just bounce.

And then Google figured out the best way to deliver the best results.

And obviously they're a trillion dollar company today as a result of the work that they did early on and how they built that user experience.

The goal is to connect people with what they're looking for as quickly as possible.

And if you do that, they'll stay on your platform, which means advertisers are going to want to be there to put their message in front of people.

So everything changed, everything was disrupted in the early 2000s.

I'm from the generation that knows life before the Internet and remembers it.

I talk to my kids sometime and they're in their 20s, right?

And it's just, they just, we've talked a lot about it, so they have a bit of an ide.

But they didn't live it right.

You know, they said, oh, I wish I lived in the 80s.

I said, no, you don't.

But anyway, with marketing, it's really fascinating because now with that transparency of the Internet, you can see when somebody looks at your ad, you can see where they look on the screen, you can see how long they spend on your website and what is happening there.

So we still talk about the customer journey in marketing, digital marketing, traditional media.

We've always talked about that customer journey.

There's.

It always starts with some sort of life event, right?

I like to use the story of a personal experience I went through a few years ago.

I had a beautiful Volkswagen Jetta that I loved and it was well worn.

I had a couple hundred thousand kilometers on it.

I drove it everywhere and the transmission started to go.

So I'm like, okay, so what am I going to do?

I need to get a new transmission or a new car because it's a big expense.

So I found a guy who did all the work for a Volkswagen dealer in town here and he said, we can do this for about four grand.

New transmission, new clutch, your car is going to be good for another 200,000k.

I said, make it so.

So he goes to do the work, we order the parts and so on.

So I get this call from the repair shop saying, hey, we're going to have your car ready in the next day or so.

I said, great.

So I get the call the day that it's supposed to pick it up and this lady calls Me.

And she goes, hi, Jamie.

How are you?

And I said, I'm great.

How are you?

And she said, not good.

I said, what do you mean, not good?

She said, my husband took your car out for a test drive, and he got run off the highway, and your car's toast.

I said, what?

Is he okay?

Yeah, he's all right.

But, yeah, he was driving along the yellowhead here in Edmonton, was run off by semi, changed lanes or somebody, and he had no time to respond, and he hit a parked car at 100 km an hour.

Holy cow.

And I talked to him the next day.

He said, your car performed perfectly.

All the airbags went off.

I was perfectly protected.

He said, my glasses were on the back of dash by the time I came to a stop, but I was okay.

I got out because I was worried about who I hit, but it was abandoned.

Long story short, my car's done.

So I ended up getting a check instead of a car.

So in marketing world, we call that an event, a life event, a triggering event, some buying event.

So now I have to buy a car.

Wasn't planning on buying a car.

I had no idea what I was going to do.

I hadn't even been thinking about it or researching it.

It's not like the algorithms had picked up my vibe and was sending me car ads because I wasn't thinking about it.

So now I am.

Right?

And so now I go.

First thing I do, I go to Google and I start searching for cars, and then I talk to my wife and, like, what do we want to do?

Let's go with an SUV.

Okay.

Oh, my gosh, there's a million SUVs out there.

Do we want gas?

Do we want diesel?

Do we want electric?

Do we want hybrid?

How do we want this?

Do we want Korean?

Japanese, North American, German?

Anyway, long story short, I'm watching YouTube videos, I'm researching, I'm looking at Consumer Reports, and then I'm just getting inundated with ads.

Yeah.

Eventually, I narrow it down to Hyundai.

Okay, this isn't an endorsement for Hyundai, but it.

I love my Hyundai, let's put it that way.

So they had come up with a new car, a Tucson, which is a whole new redesign in a hybrid, which is what we ended up settling on.

So once, once I'd gone through all of this, I'd been on Google on websites and social media and asking friends.

That's a big decision.

And I got to the point, okay, I've decided on Hyundai.

And then I look, and there's seven Hyundai dealers in Edmonton.

So which one am I going to buy from?

Right, so now I'm looking at ratings and reviews and so on.

So the point of my story is I ended up buying a Hyundai from a dealer in Edmonton.

But what happened is there were so many different digital data points along the way to help influence me, to help me make that decision.

And so what I do is I help businesses understand those different data points, see where their customers are in that customer journey, and then help them place appropriate and targeted messaging in those different data points.

Every client's different, every conversation I have, even if it's the same business and it's the same, same type of people, they're trying to reach it, they have a different history, they have a different way of doing things, they're different people.

So it's very personalized.

But yeah, it's, it can be very complicated and very expensive.

And like you said at the beginning, you can waste a lot of money in marketing.

And we want to make sure that when we're working with our customers that we're really starting with the right data.

So we're all about what does the first party data say?

And Our company has 20 years of experience in delivering leads for businesses.

We've delivered hundreds of millions of leads over those 20 years.

So we've got a pretty good idea, depending on your business category, of what the trends are and what keywords work well and what sort of tactics work best.

And then we can start there and then we fine tune it from there.

And then once we're live, that's when the cool stuff happens because then we can see the data in real time and we can make fine micro adjustments along the way to make sure it's like, hey, these keywords are really delivering well.

These ones aren't working as well here in this market.

So let's move some of that budget over here.

So there's always these constant adjustments being required to fine tune a campaign.

That's cool.

That's cool.

So ultimately you look at what's winning, like what's actually working.

And instead of wasting your money on the thing that's not working, you double down on what works.

That's a hundred percent.

It makes sense to me.

We've literally developed technology to do it automatically.

So it was software 20 years ago.

It evolved into AI and about 10 years ago, which is funny considering everybody's talking about artificial intelligence now and we're on the forefront of that wave.

We've been using AI to manage search ads and social advertising for a long time now.

Me and you talked about that actually when we went for lunch and I was mentioning, I was like, Jamie, like, I feel like 2023 was like the year of AI.

And you're like, dude, we've been doing this a while.

Yeah, I have.

I work with some data scientists are really like.

It's like working with NASA.

It's amazing.

It's really exciting talking to these people and seeing what they've got on in the sandbox and what their plans are moving forward.

It's pretty exciting.

Super exciting.

I've had the pleasure of meeting with AI experts and stuff and it's crazy because it's like they know so much and they still.

It's very hard to predict what the.

Future will look like.

I ask each one of them, what does things look like five years from now?

And they're like, I don't know, like it's evolving so quickly, I can't even tell you.

Take me back to the customer journey.

I think that's something that we talked about briefly, but I think it's actually more important because I think most people, when they advertise their business, they just advertise their business.

They're not thinking about the journey itself.

Can you spend some time talking about the customer journey?

What is it?

Excellent.

Yeah, it's really important.

First of all, every business has their customers.

Eventually we want to look at the transaction and then reverse engineer backwards, right?

So what did this person do?

What problem did we solve as a business that made them come into our store or onto our website or whatever and actually do business with us, choose to buy our product or service and how did they get there?

And then you study that customer and what problems are you solving and what triggers along the way that brought them down that long and winding road that ended up with them becoming your customer.

And so that's where we have so much access to not only our own first party data, but there's such lots of great public information.

There's data from Google and from Meta and from Bing and so on that tell us so much about people who are online.

Facebook is.

I remember when I was selling radio software a dozen years ago, we were talking about, oh, Facebook's the biggest country in the world or the second biggest country in the world.

They have almost a billion users now.

They have 4 billion billion users.

It's half the planet is on Facebook every month.

It's ridiculous.

It's.

But what's interesting is Facebook has data on every one of their users.

Google has data on every one of their users.

YouTube is owned by Google, so YouTube has data on every one of its users.

And so what happens is that that data, that that Persona, avatar, if you will, is created when I'm online.

As soon as I dial in or as soon as I sign into something or I go to a website.

If I've been there before, they know I've been there before, and they know what my affinities are.

They know that I'm north of 50, that I'm married, I have kids, I like to travel, I like music, and I like riding bikes.

And.

And they know the stuff that I'm into.

And so then they target their advertising.

Advertisers can access that data and they can target me with messages.

I've got a couple friends with electric bikes and I'm seeing so many electric bike ads right now.

Black Friday's coming.

Oh, honey, I could get this bike for only $1,500.

And she just rolls her eyes and see whatever you want to do.

But the customer journey is it always starts with some sort of trigger event, right?

And so if I'm an H Vac company and it's June and we've suddenly gone to 35 degrees in Edmonton, so then suddenly the phone starts ringing, I need an air conditioner and I need it yesterday.

And the H Vac company guy's banging his head against the wall going, why didn't you buy them in February when they were half the price?

Because the consumer wasn't thinking about H Vac, that he was more concerned about his furnace than his air conditioner in February.

So what happens is some sort of event happens.

I need something, I want something, I need to go buy something.

And then it's that journey from there.

So they start doing research and so they're using search engines or chat.

GPT is, has become a search engine by the time this airs.

Who knows what the search environment's going to look like?

Sure, yeah, Google's been the king for a very long time, but there's, there's people that are chomping at their market share, and so there's a whole bunch of things happening there.

But people are going to search online, they're going to use voice search, they're going to ask Alexa and Siri and Cortana and whoever else is listening for help, and then they're going to go to social media and they're going to look on their social media channel for information, and they're going to search through social media and they're going to ask their friends on social media what do you think those community boards on social media are like coffee shops from 50 years ago.

People would meet at the cafe to find out what's going on in town and hey, do you know a good plumber?

Yeah.

Now we do it on Facebook and Instagram and that's another data point that advertisers can access and they can target those people.

So what happens along that customer journey?

It's about awareness and then it's about what of it and then you know who, it's more general at the beginning and then people narrow things down and eventually they get to the point with my Hyundai, okay, I've decided on an suv.

I've decided on a model and a brand.

So who am I going to buy it from?

So now I've got seven competitors.

So I've gone from a million cars down to seven dealers to pick from.

Talk to me about the buying decision because I think that's what a lot of us want to, want to better understand because I think many of us can drive traffic or have put out meta ads or Facebook ads or whatever else.

Right.

But what is it that actually takes the customer from an in, from information to an actual decision?

Because for me, this is where I kind of struggle with digital marketing because I feel like it's really hard without having that in person connection where your trust can be established for a customer to truly make an informed buying decision.

Now if we're talking Samsung or Google or like a brand that's been around forever, obviously the trust has been long established.

Right.

Samsung could release a new phone tomorrow.

We're going to buy it.

Why are we going to buy it?

Because we bought Samsung's before.

We love them, they're great.

IPhone could do the same thing.

But what about when you're talking about an H Vac company?

What about the H Vac company that maybe isn't as well known?

Right.

How can we convert more from digital marketing into an actual sale in with a brand that the trust has maybe not been established yet?

That's really good point, Kelly.

A lot of businesses are starting out.

They're, they haven't got the brand equity that the big guys have that the big popular companies do.

But that's where guerrilla marketing comes into play.

This was a great book that my dad gave me like 35 years ago, said, you should read this book.

And I was like, it was written by a couple of ad agency executives on Madison Avenue in New York.

And it's like, it's about branding.

What is your brand and how do you get your brand in front of people.

And if you, how do you compete with, let's say you're like you said, an H Vac company.

And how do you compete with the biggest H Vac companies in the world?

Purpose is to connect you with customers who are interested in what you have to offer and to start that conversation.

And H vac decision is a major decision.

People do them two or three times in their lifetime.

Yeah.

Like how often are we buying a furnace or an air conditioner as opposed to an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy or something?

We're doing that every couple of years.

So who do we buy it from?

I can't even remember where I bought my last iPhone.

Sure.

But the brand is there.

So with a local business owner, the challenge is, okay, how are you handling that incoming lead?

Right.

We've discovered recently because we track everything.

That's one of our strengths as a company.

At Local iq, we've developed a customer centered dashboard that it tracks every incoming lead.

Both phone calls, form fills, emails, chats, whether you paid for them or they're organic.

We track everything because it's data.

It's important information.

Yeah.

And we want our customers to see what's going on so they can make data informed decisions.

What we found was that up to 24% of calls were going unanswered.

So number one.

Are you answering your phone?

No.

Okay.

How's your voicemail up?

Is it working okay?

Are you calling people back?

Yeah.

The old sales adage, follow up.

Are you following up?

Did you follow up?

I love that because honestly, I get so much crap calls that a lot of the time now I do let it go to voicemail.

Absolutely.

I call back, but I can almost screen and I know I can hear people listening right now.

Like, I do that too because so many crappy calls now from telemarketers, scammers, you name, I swear to God, if my phone rings, Jamie, it's probably a scammer.

You know what's funny is so many people don't answer their phone today.

I love that about Jeb Blunt and his training.

I'm sure you're familiar with fanatical prospecting by Jeb Blunt.

And he talks about interrupting people's day.

Pick up the phone and call them.

And it's so funny because these things, they're telephones, people.

It's not just a computer.

It's not a gaming device.

It's a telephone first.

And I call me old school.

I still spend part of my week dialing for dollars, calling, prospecting, and it's interest because what the change that I've seen is that people answer the phone and they're like, hello, yes, what is this noise this device is making on my desk?

Not a scammer.

For real.

Maybe you're a real human being.

So it's actually easier today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

Agreed, agreed.

The interesting thing is with that, what we found is with the 24% of missed calls, it's not only missed calls, people not following up and marketing.

My earliest sales mentor, Bob Simpson, he was my boss and then he left and went to another radio station on Vancouver Island.

I ended up moving over to Vancouver island, working in the same office with him.

And the guy was so organized and so structured and he was the top guy in the company and he had all his files on his desk because it was the 90s and he had the FU file.

I'm like, bob, what's that?

And he said, follow up.

And it was always the fullest file because he always had stuff at his FU file.

And it was the first one on the pile.

Who am I following up with today?

And today in business is you've got leads coming in, you're paying money to bring in leads to.

You're doing email marketing, you're doing pay per click ads on Google, Bing and Yahoo and you're running Facebook ads and you're doing all sorts of outbound stuff.

But what happens when the customer comes to you and how quickly you get back to the makes all the difference in the world.

I remember working with an ad agency friend of mine and he was running some pay per click ads for his ad agency and super sharp guy worked with him for a couple of years.

And it was interesting.

I would respond to those inquiries.

People would come to the website, yeah, I want to buy some ads and I would phone them right away.

And people were shocked when I called them.

Like I just filled out a form online and you're phoning me what's going on?

And I said, you want some help?

I'm here.

Right?

And it was like they were so surprised and that what happened is they had probably contacted one or two other agencies before us, but I was the first one to reach out to them.

Yes.

And because I did that, I closed 50% more deals than the competitors just by being the first one in the door.

Yes.

I look back at when I, when I used to sell inspectors when I worked in inspection, and that was it.

It was, how fast can you get back if you were back within, I think it was 12 hours.

I think you were like 80% likely to close the deal.

Every you waited went down by like 20% past that, if I remember correctly.

Like it was massive.

It totally is.

How fast can you get to that phone and call them back?

I think for me the struggle that I have, Jamie, is that most of the calls I get are junk.

And so I do let them go to the voicemail.

If it's somebody serious, I know they'll leave a voicemail and I call them right back.

And I think a lot of people have that same mentality.

Just like you.

I dial for dollars.

I built a wholeness on it and it worked out really well because like you said, we're living in a time where nobody wants to pick up that phone, nobody wants to make that call.

We want to have email, we want to have socials, we want to have digital ads do all the work for us.

But there's still this like magical thing about just being a human picking up your phone and making a phone call.

I think you'll be surprised by how many meetings you book if you just do it.

And it still takes work.

That's the magic word.

You can spend all the money you want on advertising and create, you can create click funnels and you can do all this stuff right online.

But in the end you still have to talk to people, right?

Unless you're selling a completely consumable right.

Like you've got an online store and it's e commerce generated and you don't need to talk to people.

But if you're in any type of service based business, you're going to need to talk to people because they're going to want to interview you, they're going to want to know more about you and how you work well and that's it.

You build trust through human to human interaction.

This thing about trust is it still really does require a human at least at some point if the trust is established long ago, sure.

But I guarantee you, even back then there was a human referring it to you, reviewing it for you, helping you make that buying decision.

Like people are still required to establish trust.

And that's the best part about what we do is those relationships.

That's what I love about what I do is I'm, I'm working with business owners.

I've got, I don't know, about 50 clients that I'm working with actively right now.

And it's great because I have regular calls with them and we're meeting to talk about their campaigns and how things are working but coming back to that, communicating with the customer.

And that's a gap that we notify noticed right away.

And there are tools available.

We didn't invent this.

We've created a tool that basically listens to every incoming call, whether you answered or not.

And it scan and it summarizes it transcribes the call, summarizes it, and then categorizes it and says, hey, this follow up's needed on this.

And you get a notification or a text right away saying, you need to call these people back right now.

So it takes some of that.

You don't have to do the call screening yourself.

AI can do that for you.

You can get AI to literally answer your phone for you.

Answering services are still a valuable service that I think is underutilized in the marketplace, especially when you're working with like home services companies where you've got a guy or a gal and they're in their truck and they're managing a crew of 10 or 15 or 20 or 100 people and they're still out there on the tools.

They're not always answering the calls.

They're not quick enough to get back to them.

But as a consumer, if I have an issue, if I have, you know, a request or I need something in this day and age, I expect it to be solved right away.

Yes.

Whether that's right or wrong, that's just the way it is.

Right, right.

So how quickly you respond and how you respond is critical.

Okay.

And then the other side of it too is like the auto attendant.

Like what type of auto attendant are we getting to being the other side of it?

I've been through like the ringer with auto attendance where it's please wait, please press 23589.

Oh, by the way, this call just dropped.

You've been waiting for 30 minutes.

Oh my gosh, I can't even remember.

There was a company the other day, a very large company that I was trying to get through to because I had, we just moved and I wanted to get, if I wanted, if I remember correctly, I wanted to get my thermostat set up up.

I you not Jamie.

Four times I got dropped in that auto attendant cycle trying to get through to somebody so that I could change over my thermostat to my name and register the damn thing.

And then there was a glitch in the auto attendant system.

And every time I would get to a certain point it would just drop me off.

But unfortunately it was like 20 minutes in.

So I spent like an hour trying to talk to somebody at this company, well known, large company.

I was just like, this is ridiculous.

This is the balancing act.

Right.

What size of company are you?

I mean, I, I've, yeah, we've all had those experiences.

Yeah.

I've had moments where I'm like, are you kidding me right now?

This is really happening.

Like I've just spent half a day trying to contact somebody for a really not a big deal, but I need to get this fixed.

Yeah.

Or I get this dealt with.

And it, just because of the way their system set up, it doesn't function.

The beautiful thing about artificial intelligence is that intelligence piece.

Right.

And it's not perfect, nothing ever will be.

But what's interesting about it is it learns and it evolves in real time.

I know our technology, of course, because we use it, our clients are using it, and I've seen it in action firsthand and it's really cool.

You get like a 10 minute call with an agent, be it an answering service or maybe one of your employees takes this call from a client and they're furiously writing out notes.

But the AI attend, listens to the whole call and it'll go through all of the different points.

They'll say, hey, wait a second, this person's looking for a quote and they're looking for information here.

And then you get a notification right away as soon as that call completes and then you can text them back because that's how people like to communicate today.

And so there's all sorts of tools available, but you need to learn how to use them.

I've spent many moments coaching my clients when they're buying digital advertising.

I had this one customer who bought a campaign with us and we were running ads and they were getting leads and I'm looking at, I get, look at the reports and I'm saying, hey, this is pretty good.

It's a pretty high end service that they were offering.

And, and I phoned her up and I said, hey, things are going really well.

How's it look on your end?

And she goes, oh, yeah, no, I, they were okay, but I never really got any business out of it.

And I'm like, really?

And I said, so what are you doing?

She goes, oh, I just email them when they send me the request.

I'm like, okay, the system's already doing that for you.

So now they've gotten two emails from you and they've already talked to your competition by the time they get the second email.

And so I, it was a coaching moment.

I said, look, why don't you try for the next month when you get one of those notifications dropping everything you're doing and phone those people and let me know how that works out for you.

So she did and we know what happened.

All the difference.

Yeah.

It comes down to, and it's funny because my show today actually is on human centric approach because I genuinely believe that if 2023 was the year of AI and 2024 seemed to be the year of personal branding, I genuinely think 2025 is going to be back to basics, back to the human centric approach.

We want to be treated like people, not like machines and robots.

And I think we're being sick of marketing or not being marketed to, but being spoken to by a robot and not a person you look at like, let's call it 100% of social posts at this point because it's almost 100% of social posts that you're seeing on LinkedIn are created at least partially by AI.

I actually last week, Jamie, I did a little trial and error for myself because I was realizing this is ridiculous.

I've used AI at least to a certain extent for the past past year and a half, two years in every single social post I put out.

Has it been a time saver?

Yes.

But has it completely restricted my ability to connect as Kelly Kennedy?

Yes.

And so last week I just, I put out a couple posts completely hand typed, mistakes and all Kelly and all, but fully human.

And I was just like, I'm doing this, I'm going to make it an effort from this point forward to at least once a week, at least one post a week will be written only by Kelly Kennedy, handwritten mistakes and all.

And I'm gonna hope for the best on this because I think we are craving real authentic communication and connection.

100%.

Absolutely.

Connection is everything.

Again, what I love about what I do is connecting with people.

I've got colleagues working virtually, literally, they're doing all of their meetings by zoom and online and telephone and so on.

And I'm out there crushing appointments face to face, going for coffees, getting like by 4 o' clock I'm like all wired because I've had three lattes, I'm talking about a hundred minute and.

But it's a side effect of my job.

But at the same time I'm going to networking events and I'm going out and I'm meeting people and I'm becoming recognized and I'm recognizing people.

And I learned early on, I think it was dress for success, I believe was the book I read back in the 90s that said 90% of communication is non verbal.

Yeah.

And I was like, nah, there's no way.

And then I started to think about it and I looked at it and it truly is true.

It's a fact.

Even virtually, like I can give you some impression of who I am virtually.

But the way my camera's set up, I could be 5 foot 2 or 6 foot 2.

I'm 6 foot 3, by the way.

And you don't know that much about me.

Right.

I could be wearing pajama bottoms.

I'm not, I'm wearing pants.

But that's the zoom world, right?

The, the virtual world.

But when we meet face to face, you can sense who I am.

We're all intuitive creatures as human beings.

So we can, we can tell when somebody has good intentions or not.

We can feel that.

And so I love that about what I do because I'm an honest salesperson.

I'm going to tell the truth, even if it's hard.

I'm a man of integrity.

I've been very successful in my career.

I'm not like a billion writing books and riding in jet planes.

But I've had a great career, I have a great life, I have a wonderful family.

And it's all been because of the work that I put in as a salesperson.

And I've got a good reputation.

I don't worry about running into people because I've never done anybody wrong when it comes to advertising and sales and what I do.

And so it's, it's been a real gift to me to be able to do that.

But it's all because of the relationships and that face to face time, like true FaceTime where we're meeting face to face.

Like when you and I went for lunch, that was a highlight because we got to spend some time together just being in each other's presence and that's really what people are craving.

And the digital tools and digital advertising and digital marketing are tools.

They're resources.

Right.

They're AI is not a living entity.

It's technology.

It's using language based models.

It's using data to basically connect you with the right people.

People.

And that's always the goal is like I said earlier on when I was running a. I had a client who had a pizza restaurant on Granville street in Vancouver, Did's Pizza.

This guy was great.

It was a super popular spot for after hours and late nights on Friday and Saturday nights.

And he ran ads with us and he had lots of people Coming in saying, hey, I heard you on the radio.

That was how he measured his success today.

He can count how many pizzas he sold online because of the technology that we have, but it's still the same thing.

People want that pizza because it tastes good and it makes them feel good.

Talk to me a little bit about a company like that versus like a B2B company.

I know I get lots of questions about that.

Most of the stuff we talk about on the show is B2B.

That's my world.

But I get that B2C is very much digital marketing driven.

It really is.

Talk to me a little bit about the advice that you give for B2B companies versus the advice you give for B2C companies.

Is it the same?

Are there contrasts?

It depends.

It.

It depends on the ticket item, right?

If you're, like I say, an ATRA company or a car where it's a major purchase that's made every couple of.

There's a lot of thought and a lot of research goes into the purchase as opposed to, who are we ordering pizza from tonight?

That's different.

It's like, even then, it's, hey, what was the name of that pizza place?

And you're on Facebook asking that, that new pizza place.

And then people are chirping in and I see it all the time as, hey, I'm looking for a plumber, know somebody.

And then 30 names show up.

With B2B, it's about relationship.

It really is.

And it's a long sales cycle.

It's a long process to get there.

Digital marketing can be a solution for it, but again, you're not going to get.

You turn on the digital ads and suddenly your phone's ringing off the hook and you're booked solid for the next year.

That's just not based in reality.

I look at B2B marketing as a fitness program for somebody who's out of shape.

Let's say I'm 50 pounds overweight and I'm going on a cruise in six months and I want to be in better shape, shape.

So what do I have to do today to get to that point in six months?

It's not.

My cruise is in two weeks and I need to lose £50, so I better starve myself and I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.

You can't do that without training.

And so that's what marketing is for.

B2B is.

It's like training.

It's ongoing training where you're constantly sharpening a saw, making yourself better, making yourself more Aware.

Posting content on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram or wherever your audience is, and getting messaging out, creating podcasts, writing papers, white papers that you can share with people.

We do webinars at Local IQ once or twice a month.

Just we're sharing information we're not selling.

And that's something in B2B marketing.

You have to remember you can't always be selling.

It's about building a relationship, building trust.

And it's a longer.

It just takes longer in B2B.

Right.

Because if I'm going to engage with your company, for my company, this isn't a transaction.

This isn't a one and done thing.

Thing.

I'm going to want to use your services.

I'm going to want to see how that is going to benefit my sales team.

For example, let's say we talk sales training.

Right?

And so I've got a dozen salespeople and I want to bring Kelly on board to teach them about business development, how to be an effective bdr, and how to be how the SDR team can do better at getting appointments and so on and so forth.

But this is not a one and done thing.

I'm going to bring you on as an employee.

In a way, I'm going to pay a contract.

It'll be a monthly retainer.

You're going to be working for me for the foreseeable future.

Probably the next 12, 24, 36 months.

That's a big decision.

Yeah.

If I'm buying tickets to a concert event, that's a one.

Okay.

Yeah, we'll go.

Was the concert great?

It was okay.

All right.

But it's done.

But working with Kelly, I'm going to build a relationship.

There's going to be lunches, there's going to be dinners, there's going to be training, there's going to be.

There's going to be ups, there's going to be downs.

Right.

There's going to be turnover.

I'm going to have salespeople coming and going that are going to have to start over again at the beginning.

And so there's so many different moving parts.

So when it comes to marketing, you need to tell your story over and over again.

Because some of the people in your audience know your story and they need to be reminded.

And some of the people in your audience have never heard of you before and they're like, oh, who's this guy?

And you're doing a great job of it.

As a marketer, I admire the work you do because it's phenomenal.

Like this Podcast.

Thank you.

Every time I talk about the business development podcast, I'm like, it's unbelievable.

You guys gotta check.

Appreciate it.

This guy, I don't know when he sleeps.

Right.

But it's really great because you're building a brand, right?

You're building that brand awareness and it takes time and it's frustrating.

You have good days and you have bad days.

Yeah.

You're looking at if I have I created maybe this.

I'm going to schedule a white paper for this month and then having an email marketing such an efficient tool.

And it falls under digital marketing where you can create good, valuable content that people want and you send it out weekly, bi weekly, monthly, whatever cadence works best for you and your market.

Understanding your audience, understanding the problem they have, having a solution to solve that problem and then just keeping that message in front of them constantly is really the trick to B2B marketing.

Yeah, it's a long game.

I've done many shows talking about business development.

It's not overnight like you have to get ahead of the need.

And I think that's what people forget sometimes that if you're getting people at the time of the need, that's not actually the right time to get them.

You really need to get them ahead of the need.

Because if you're getting them at the time of the need, you're competing against Tom, Dick and Harry down the road and everybody else that they Google in that moment.

That is not the place you want to compete from.

You want to compete from a place of trust has already been established, a relationship has already been established.

You can have two way communication, you can negotiate on price, you can do all sorts of stuff that needs to happen before the need.

And in my mind that is where good digital marketing and good business development really can combine together to do something pretty crazy effective.

Absolutely.

Having a YouTube channel and posting content, it's about consistency.

And I come back to the losing 50 pounds.

It's about consistency.

If I want to lose 50 pounds in six months, I'm going to have to work workout pretty regularly.

I'm gonna have to watch what I eat.

I'm gonna have to stop eating ice cream at 10 o' clock at night.

I'm gonna have to make some changes.

And that's the same thing if in business to business marketing you're gonna have to make some changes and you're gonna have to pick a plan and a path and you're gonna have to start it and it's gonna be scary and you're not gonna see any Results out of the gate.

And then you're gonna wonder, what am I doing?

Why am I spending all this money when nothing's happening?

But then six months down the road, boom, you're gonna start to see land, right?

Because you made those connections, you built that trust and that brand equity in the marketplace.

I love that.

Can you take me into that then, Jamie?

Because I think you, me and everyone and their dog is receiving messages from people saying, oh, we can get you 50 leads overnight.

It's going to be great.

Your company's going to blow up.

And experts out there these days, aren't there?

How do we pick a reputable company?

How do we know which one?

How do we cut through the.

The mess?

Oh, absolutely.

It's funny, I was having this conversation recently talking about the different types of regulated industries like financial planners.

They have to go through a whole bunch of certifications.

Dentist obviously has to go to school for 10 years and they have to be licensed and then they.

Doctors have to recertify every year.

And there's just all these professionals, plumbers, H Vac, you've got a pipe, fitters.

Professionals have to have a ticket to become a digital marketing agency.

All you have to do is say, I'm a digital marketing agency and poof, voila, you're a digital marketing agency.

No requirements, no certification, no boards watching it, managing it, and so on.

So there are certification points, right?

You want to make sure that if you're working with somebody for Google Ads that they're a Google partner or a Google Premier partner, which means that they have a reputation with Google.

They're recognized by Google as the highest quality of agency or partner, as Google calls them, right?

We're a Google Premier partner because of the size and volume of business that we do with Google.

But we follow the rules.

Rules.

We dot the I's, we cross the T's.

When Google says jump, we ask them how high.

Right?

We follow the rules.

When people say, oh, guaranteed I can get you to the first page of search results.

That is impossible.

It could happen.

Maybe.

But I guarantee, what if I'm an H Vac company and I only want to spend $5 per click?

Yeah, not a chance, right?

Cost per click in Edmonton's 30, 40, $50.

Right now it's like you're just not going to be there because.

Because you can't see what your competition's doing.

So having that some sort of credibility is really important.

Experience is important.

Reputation is important.

It's the same as picking, picking a realtor or picking a A financial planner for your personal finances.

You're not just going to Google somebody and the first guy that calls up say, okay, here's my portfolio, tell me what to do.

You're going to interview them, you're going to get to know them.

And it's the same thing with a digital marketer.

And it's about that certification, whatever certification they can bring to the table.

Reputation.

Talk to their other customers, interview them, find out.

Do you have referrals, do you have case studies?

Have you ever worked with businesses like ours before?

What kind of data are you bringing to the table?

What does your team look like?

Who's going to be building my website, who's going to be managing my social ads?

Who's.

What are they like, and what experience do you have?

So it's a lot of work at the front end, but the goal is, with B2B especially, it's, you don't want transactional clients, you want relational clients.

So you need to focus your marketing in a relational way as opposed to a transactional way, if that makes sense.

No, it definitely does.

It definitely does.

I just think, yeah, it's one of those things where there's a lot, like you said, there's a lot of digital marketing agencies, and I think there's people being reached out to you by virtual assistants or whatever else.

Like, the pop of virtual assistants in 2023, 2024 is massive.

And I think people just aren't really sure where to spend their dollars.

And I know you, I know local iq.

Like, I, I know you.

So I, I feel like, do my digital marketing.

But there's so many people who don't have that relationship.

And I think digital marketing, like you said, is in this, like, weird space where finding a trusted digital marketer or digital advisor is harder than most would think it is.

Absolutely.

It is.

So what you want to do is look for somebody, like I said, who you know is if they're going to be doing Google Ads, they're Google certified.

They've made thousands of changes to their algorithms in the last 12 months.

Some of them have been really significant.

If I'm building search ads from 2020 versus 2025, the rules of the game have changed.

So you want somebody who's Google certified.

If you're looking at social advertising, you want somebody who's Facebook blueprint certified, which means that they have taken the most current Facebook training available to manage and handle your Facebook ads, your Facebook meta, Instagram, that whole universe.

So you want people who are certified who are experts at what they do.

And then as far as companies to work with, again, you want a company company that is preferably, they're a Google partner, they're a Facebook marketing partner, they're a Bing partner.

They recognize that there's other publishers out there and that they can do the work.

And who have they worked with before?

Again, it's like talking to a financial planner.

Who have you worked with before?

What's your, let's see, your license and your accreditation?

We don't have that in the digital marketing world as a mandatory, but you could certainly ask for it.

Yeah, yeah.

What about, I guess, obviously, referral is how a lot of us find business these days.

Right.

I imagine referral is probably also a good option if you know somebody who's gotten good results.

One of the other questions that I have for you is with there being so many platforms and again, that like, some of them are integrated with other ones.

Like you mentioned, Google and YouTube are the same.

Facebook, Meta, Instagram, all the same stuff.

But are there platforms right now that are standing out as more effective than the others?

What are you pointing people towards these days?

We find it's a challenge.

It comes down to the customer's goals.

Right.

What is it you want your advertising to do for you?

First of all, people ask me early in my career, so, Jamie, when should I advertise?

And I always respond with the question, when are you open?

Seven days a week.

Then you should advertise seven days a week.

Oh, I can't afford that.

I said, you have a sign, don't you?

I said, yeah, that's advertising.

Do you have business cards?

Yeah, that's advertising.

Marketing, advertising.

Interchangeable there.

But really, when it comes to which platforms to use, it's interesting.

We've got a podcast this week that's talking about what's the best platforms to use in 2025.

What I'm seeing, and this, my own personal data from working with my own customers is a combination of search ads and social ads on multiple platforms.

Multiple publishers is really the best bet.

We've created technology using machine learning and AI.

Of course, we call cross media optimization.

And we basically, it's built based on the end.

Begin with the end in mind.

What is the goal?

So we have a brand piece where you can build your brand using all sorts of different publishers and tech and tactics.

Or there's lead gen, which is really where most of my clients are focused.

And lead gen is Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yelp.

And so it's okay, great.

So we have seven publishers.

How much do I put on each publisher?

And it's like Facebook has four or five tactics you can choose from and there's retargeting.

So there's different types of tactics.

So what we've done is we've created this technology using first party data and machine learning learning that will take a look at the marketplace and it'll say, okay, based on, I'll use H Vac as another example.

So based on, you're an H Vac company in Calgary, Alberta.

All right, so you want to market just within the greater Calgary area.

So we're going to do a 30k radius around the center of Calgary.

So that's going to be just Calgary.

Strathmore is out of range.

Okotokes is out of range.

Anyway, so based on all of the information we have, we're going to take your $10,000 monthly budget because it's H Vac and about 83% of it is going to start on search ads, which will be dispersed between Google, Bing and Yahoo and Yelp.

And then the balance will be on social ads.

And then as the campaign rolls, the budgets are going to move based on where the conversions are coming from.

And a conversion is a phone call, a form fill an email, a chat, a text they've made connection with you.

Which we spend a lot of time talking about what it do once that happens.

Happens.

But really we're in the lead gen business.

Right.

How do we get people to that point?

And so then the budget's going to adjust based on what's happening.

One of the things that I've seen is it's there's no really hard and fast rules when it comes to which platform to use.

Kelly.

Which is, that's what makes it so hard to do.

Well, for example, I've got a customer who, a client of mine who they have a typical drop down in the winter and then it picks up again in the spring and their year goes like this.

Yeah.

And so they, they were, before working with me, they were like, okay, we're going to advertise when it's up here, but we're not going to advertise when it's down there.

And then we started working together and we said, you know what, let's try and compress those using advertising and marketing so that when even though the market's down, it's just the pie is shrinking, it doesn't mean that it's gone away.

So people still need your service, just aren't as many people.

But if you maintain your Share of the market.

When it gets smaller, when it gets bigger, you're going to have a bigger share.

Yeah.

Because you have a bigger slice of the pie.

And so what we did is we used that cross media optimization technology I mentioned and what we was really interesting to see is it started out, it was very search heavy during the peak seasons.

So when people are, I need your Sir, I need your help.

I'm googling it, I'm Yahoo, Siri, I need to fix this, whatever those keywords.

And then as the season slowed, we started to see the budget shift towards social ads and they started getting more and more, more leads from social advertising and fewer from the search ads.

And then as it goes through the year, so it adjusts based on the market so they got a nice consistent growth to the right.

It was really cool to watch and they're really happy and they're still working with us and they've given us many referrals as a result.

Amazing.

And this definitely sounds like something that's very hard to manage as an individual.

I don't think you can do that without, without proprietary technology like you just spoke about to be able to make that switch.

Because most of us, if we're buying digital ads, we're picking, okay, this month I'm going to focus on meta and next month I'm going to focus on LinkedIn and maybe I'm going to do more with my social media the month after.

Whatever, take your pick.

But what you're saying is that you don't have to pick one or the other.

You can hire a company like Local IQ with proprietary technology who can essentially not only cross promote those ads across multiple platforms, but when one way is starting to work better than the others, double down that investment to get you the best results possible.

Absolutely.

It's all about optimization and efficiency.

Right.

If I'm spending $5,000 a month on advertising, which is three to five grand is the average for most businesses, if I'm spending $5,000 a month, I better be seeing 25,000 or more in return because really advertising it 5 to 1, it should be your target.

And if you're not quantifying it, of course, then you know, you have no idea.

Which unfortunately, two thirds of business owners have no idea how their marketing's working for them.

But yeah, coming back to the most efficient and effective way to market your business.

Business cycles change weather, you get a snow event in September and everything changes.

People respond to the world as the world is, as we go through the every day and so we Want to make sure that your advertising and your marketing solution is sitting in front of them.

The traditional way of doing that.

Ad agencies do this all the time and they have experts in house who monitor and manage your ad campaign.

And I've seen it firsthand.

And so they'll have a search ads person who looks after all the search advertising for all their advertising clients and they'll look at the ads once a week and they'll look at the trends and they'll make adjustments and tweaks and they'll fine tune and they'll adjust keywords and like you said, they'll double down on the words that are winning.

What our technology does is it, it doesn't replace that so much as it speeds it up.

And so now we're working in real time, so computer time instantly, as opposed to waiting week to find out.

What we found is there's adjustments are required all the time with ads, advertising and especially with digital advertising because we're getting real time feedback all the time the time.

So we're seeing how people are responding to the ads.

We're seeing that ads that worked really good two months ago are suddenly in the tank.

So we need to make those adjustments.

So what our company and companies like ours are doing is we're trying to find ways to speed up that process and narrow those gaps.

So when we start to see things trending downwards, we've got something that's trending back upwards.

And that's really where cross media optimization comes into play, is we're moving budgets around based on performance.

Performance.

Talk to me about the content itself.

Do you guys create content on behalf of your clients in house or is this something that you guys are having to ask the clients to provide for you?

How does that work?

Ideally, it's a combination of both.

I remember early on in my advertising career, content is king.

It's all about content.

When I was selling radio ads, I was three months in or something and my boss sat down with me and he said, okay, pop quiz.

Who are the two most important people in this building for you?

And I said, being a brown noser, I am.

I said, you and the general manager.

And he said, wrong.

I said, what do you mean?

He said, the creative director and the traffic manager.

And I was like, what?

He goes, if you piss off the creative director, they're not going to write good copy for your clients.

Oh, okay.

And if you treat the traffic director kindly and you're good to them and you follow when they ask you for something, you help them.

The traffic Person schedules the ads, they'll make sure that you get preferential scheduling for your clients.

So be nice to the creative director and the traffic manager.

And content is king because you can be like blaring from the top of the mountaintop, but if the message is wrong, you're wasting your time and your money.

Yeah.

And we spend so much time talking about targeting and data and how are we going to pick and who the Persona is and so on.

But if we send like a bad message, it's just going to crash and burn.

Absolutely.

What's the call to action?

Action.

What problem are you solving?

And so we work with our clients if they have assets, creative assets available.

I want to get as much local content as I can, especially when it comes to visual things like Facebook and YouTube and Instagram.

But at the same time we want to write the right words.

Right.

And we have experts who are trained again, data, informed design.

We use that in our, in our design elements, making sure that the image makes sense, that the text on top of the image makes sense, sense to the prospect and that it's going to respond.

And then we ab test.

Right.

We're constantly testing creatives against each itself.

So creative is very important.

It's often overlooked.

We have a creative design agency in house.

The beautiful thing about a company of scale like ours is we have access to the biggest tools and the best tools.

But that being said, like I, I still encourage businesses to shoot their own videos.

Video is 20, 23, 24 really.

Video took off.

Take TikTok, Snapchat, short form videos, YouTube shorts.

When YouTube and Facebook and Instagram start to adapt their platform based on their competitors, that their competitors are onto something and they adapt it to video.

Really encourage companies to invest in video.

There's some amazing video production companies locally in any market.

I know some great ones here locally that I'll refer to.

We can do it ourselves as well.

We've got some tools as well.

But video content is great.

Ideally you want some really good, strong, high resolution images of products of your business, of whatever it is you're selling.

You want to have an array of images of the different products and services and then you want video and you want to use a combination of all of those images when it comes to creative.

And then as far as the pay per click advertising, which is text based, you want to make sure that you're using the right text and you're following Google's rules and Yahoo's rules and the search engines rules because search engines are pretty particular and they can Flag stuff very quickly if it's, if you're trying to bend the rules.

Right.

So make sure you follow the rules when you're placing search ads.

Use good keywords.

And a keyword is a phrase, it's not just a word.

Use lots of them and test them.

And there's lots of great tools out there.

We've got tools that can help you figure out a keyword strategy.

We've got tools to figure out how your Google Ads are performing to see where you're wasting money.

Because that's the other side of it with search ads is I've seen businesses that were spending half of their budget advertising out of market and they didn't even realize it.

Yeah, they're getting all these clicks from overseas and I'm like, are you advert?

Like, are you doing business in Mumbai?

And they're like, no, I'm doing business in Alberta.

I'm like, then maybe you should, you know, perhaps not do this.

They didn't know, right?

They, you know, they belted out, they belted out and they, they forgot.

So, yeah, that's having.

Coming back to an earlier question, you know, finding somebody who knows the space, who understands the space.

And if in my case, I can't know everything, I've got lots of experience working with businesses and helping solve those problems.

But I have a team of really remarkable people who do the hard, heavy lifting.

These are the ad experts, these are the pay per click experts, These are the YouTube experts.

These are my social media marketing people who create amazing, engaging content for my clients that allow them to build their audience online and, and so on.

You know, we started out this conversation, Jamie, with your past and working in radio yourself, and I feel like I can't continue this conversation about digital advertising, passive advertising, without bringing radio back into it.

Is radio and television advertising still relevant in 2024, 2025?

It really is.

It's changed.

Yeah.

I've definitely watched disruption happen.

I remember when Netflix was a red box at Safeway where I could go grab a dvd.

Yeah.

And now it's a trillion dollar company that, you know that I gets 20 bucks out of my pocket every month.

You bet.

You know what, with radio, it's.

Radio's strength is in its local focus.

Talk radio is still real popular because if I want to know something that's happening right now, I can go on online.

I can check here, I can check there, but I can listen to the radio and I still believe in radio.

I think radio is a great partner to digital marketing.

You can promote Your website.

Through radio you can cross cross market radio advertising.

You can run really interesting promotions on radio, you can run promotions on digital as well.

But with radio advertising I have friends in the space who are still at it.

The challenge with radio is when it comes to music is we all have so many more ways to consume music.

We've got Spotify and Apple Music and pretty much everybody I know has a Spotify account and I do, I have a family Spotify account that my wife and my kids, we all use and I've got a Sonos in my living room and I've got, I've got an Alexa in my bedroom and I've got, I've got a Google over here and I've got music wherever I want.

When I go to the gym, I've got my iPhone and I put my headphones on and I say I Want to listen to 80s hair band metal because that's what pumps me up when.

I'm at the gym.

Me too.

Exactly right.

More Metallica.

For radio, it's tough because it's still personality driven.

But what they've done is as, and I don't agree with some of the things that radio has done.

They've tried to digitize themselves but they're not.

It tends to be a bit self serving sometimes.

Not all cases for sure, but some I've seen it where it's a bit self serving.

I'm going, so what you're telling me as an advertiser, if I advertise on the radio, you're going to put some ads on your website?

How many people come to your website?

Yeah, I didn't even tell you the last time I went to a website for a radio station.

Radio station website.

It's like the newspapers did that early on too.

I remember, oh, we're going to give you like a half million impressions a week.

And I said, yeah, but nobody's there.

People are on Google, they're on espn, they're on Facebook, they're, they're playing video games.

It's like, where's the traffic?

And it all comes back to eyeballs.

But with radio advertising, again, it's a good motivator, it's good for brand awareness.

Jingles still work.

I definitely would consider it as part of a full media plan.

With television targeting again with television you want to be local radio, it's local, local.

I think for national advertisers it's a brand play.

I don't know how efficient it is or how effective it is.

I don't know what I don't know what the stats are on radio in 2025, but looking at radio today, I know my own personal habits.

I listen to radio a little bit in the car, but nobody has a radio in their house anymore and they haven't for years.

And.

And I don't.

I hear some radio stations promoting it.

Hey, add us on your smart home device, right?

Yeah.

I don't know many people who do that.

Again, I don't know what the data says.

Radio streaming again, is it profitable?

I can't see how it is.

I think it's a real struggle because how do you compete against Facebook and Google?

It's funny because when I look at radio and my radio listening habits, I've listened to AM stations so I listen to talk radio.

Right.

If I'm listening to radio, it's typically I'm not listening to an FM radio station.

I'm listening to 8:80am it's now changed.

I guess it's 6:30 now.

But I'm listening to talk radio if I'm listening to radio.

So in my mind, if I'm going to spend advertising dollars on radio, I'm going to spend it on talk radio.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

8:80, 14:40.

And we live in Edmonton.

We're hockey crazy here and it's all Oilers all the time and we're listening for news and sports.

And that's what I listen to too.

When it comes to music.

I listen to Spotify.

I have Spotify.

Exactly.

I know what I want to listen to.

Yeah.

One of the things that I've noticed so I see it a little differently because I've spent so many years in radio and is new music, where am I finding new music?

And that's the challenge from that.

This is, I'm putting my musician hat on now is how is new music getting out there and how is it getting.

How am I getting exposed to new music?

It used to be, and I remember back in the day be listening to the radio.

What was that song?

That was cool.

Yeah.

And then we start listening to that.

Oh, did you hear that new song from Metallica on the radio or.

Probably not Metallica, maybe Three Dog Night or something.

But what we want to do is how can we use radio to.

How can its relevance stay relevant when it comes to music?

And it's tough.

It really is tough for me.

Middle aged white male, I'm listening to talk radio and I'm looking for local information.

I listen to CBC.

I listen to 880, I listen to 1440 KJR which ironically enough, I used to work for that company many years ago.

So I know the station and they've gone sports.

But it's so funny because the signal's so terrible sometimes because it's AM and I understand how works.

It's interesting that I literally downloaded the radio player app in my carplay in my car and now I listen to it, I stream it in my car.

So I'm using digital to listen to analog radio.

There's about a 30 second lag so I, if it gets to the point where the signal's bad, it's okay.

I'm just gonna stream it.

Yeah.

And then it's what sounds great, but it's.

There's that lag.

Yeah.

Radio's.

Radio's in tough.

I think from my own experience and having, having worked as a vendor to radio stations for many years, I sold streaming software to radio stations and I've worked with radio station owners across Canada and the United States.

I think local, focus on local, be relevant locally.

That's the only way radio is going to remain relevant.

Yeah, we're all working with limited marketing budgets.

That's the thing, right?

You know it, I know it.

Companies are reluctant to part with their hard earned dollars on marketing.

And it's one of those really tough things because me and you both know if you don't part your money with marketing, it's pretty tough to find new people.

And that doesn't matter whether you're buying business development personnel or whether you're buying radio ads or whether you're buying digital advertising.

You're going to have to spend a little bit of money to get those incoming leads.

I guess the question that we everyone's asking is what is the best way to spend my limited marketing budget?

And you touched on it early on.

You should expect exponential results for your marketing dollar spend.

You talked about that early on.

5, 5x you said, is what people should on average aim for.

I would agree.

Commercial completely.

But talk to me.

Companies are reluctant to spend those hard, hard earned dollars.

What amount in your opinion should companies be spending on marketing?

Whether that be digital marketing or radio ads or something else.

Yeah, that's a great question.

It's interesting though.

One of the things is if I'm making a 5 to 1 return on my investment, you can have all my money.

Of course.

Yeah, I don't have a budget anymore.

How much can I handle?

And I asked that question today.

I sit down with a client and they say, yeah, I've got X amount of dollars.

And I'm like Okay.

And then I'm looking around the business and I'm going, okay, so if we turn the tap on, who's going to answer the phone?

Yeah.

Because the last thing I want to do is deliver more leads than you can handle.

Right.

So it's about setting the temperature.

Right.

It's like setting the temperature in the bathtub.

Right.

I want to get the right amount of hot and cold water to get just the right temperature.

With digital marketing or any type of marketing budget, if I'm a $5 million a year business, I should be spending anywhere from 3 to 5% of my gross sales on marketing.

Right.

If I'm a low margin, high volume business, I'm probably spending higher, like up around 10%.

Like electronics, like you worked at Visions, right?

I worked with A and B Sound, if you can remember those guys.

I do.

They were one of my biggest clients in radio back in the 90s, right?

Yeah.

And they would spend buckets of money, Right.

Selling cheap stereo equipment and records and, and they did great.

And we'd do remotes every Saturday afternoon at A and B Sound.

And they were just, just, they were a big budget advertiser.

But what was interesting is their margins were slim.

And I always scratched my head, I said, you got such slow margins.

How do you make money?

It's volume, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So if you're in a low margin, high volume business, you probably want to be spending 10% of your revenue on marketing.

Right.

If you're a traditional business, probably 3 to 5% is standard.

And then marketing includes designer on your store.

Right.

Marketing includes your membership with the chamber of commerce.

Marketing includes your business cards.

Yeah.

Right.

Advertising, of course, is a piece of marketing.

And so that would be buying radio ads, doing sponsorships of things, buying search advertising and Facebook ads, YouTube advertising.

Social media marketing.

Hiring a social media person to manage content for you or hiring an agency to do it for you.

There's all these different people pieces, Right.

So it, we always look at it from three different points.

There's the awareness, like what's your digital presence look like?

We haven't really talked about it.

But does your website do tell your story?

Yeah, it's the first point of contact for a lot of people.

How good is your website?

How fast does it load?

Even in 2025, people still have old websites that take forever to load or they're problematic.

Get your website fixed.

First things first.

Get a good website.

Make sure that it's functional.

Make sure that your phone number's at the the top.

I don't know how many times I've had that conversation with clients.

My phone's not ringing.

I'm like, what's your phone number?

I don't see it.

That's a bit sassy.

But still, it's your website should be, it's a point of contact.

What do you want your website to do?

So you want to focus on those things.

But it's really important that when it comes to budget that use your money smart.

Be smart, but be patient.

Rome wasn't built in the day.

You're not going to lose £50 in a week.

It's going to take you a year.

And really people, you know, I get pushback sometimes.

We start new clients and they say, can I try it for three months?

I said, yeah, but we're barely going to be getting started.

Yeah.

And I use this analogy when I used to sell radio ads.

It's the same thing.

It's.

We're starting an advertising campaign for a new business.

So this is all new for everybody.

So we're overcoming inertia.

So it's like having a fully loaded 7:37.

We're flying from Edmonton into Toronto.

So we've got to fly 3,000 miles to Toronto at 500 miles an hour and we're starting from zero and we've got a full airplane with 50 people on board plus all their luggage, plus some cargo.

And so what are we going to do?

We're going to light the gas on fire because we have to get this thing moving and it's going to take us a while to get up and then we'll hit, we'll get airborne and then we're going to climb for a while until we hit 40,000ft and then we're going to pull back on those of throttle and it could take us like it can take a year to get to that point with some businesses.

And so you want to make sure that you're consistent and that you put some money into it and that you're prepared to not see any results for a while.

You will see results.

Some of them will be good, some of them will be bad.

We're going to get you pointed in the right direction.

We're going to use all that first party data to get started correctly.

But you still have to put gas in the fire and you have to keep feeding signifier.

Yeah.

For a long time.

And if the buy, if the, if the customer journey is typically 12 to 18 months, guess what?

You should advertise for about two years before you're going to start to See full time results.

If the buying cycle is three months, you're going to see results in about six.

It's like you have to learn too.

Like there's learning happening along the way.

Like you're going to learn through the algorithm what works, what doesn't work, able to double down that extra money there.

And over time you'll have like you said, a well oiled machine machine.

But it takes time and I think I talk about this in business development as well, is that it's not immediate.

People hire like business development people and think I should have orders next month.

That's not how it works.

It takes time to establish the relationships, build the leads, get the opportunities.

You might even make an incredible impression in business development.

But they don't have a need for another six months or a year.

What are you going to do?

You can't do anything about that.

You have to wait for the opportunity and the time decline.

You can't sell air conditioners in February no matter how hard you try.

You can't sell furnaces in July no matter, matter how hard you try, no matter how much sense it makes.

Right.

It's the same thing.

It's when the market is right, when all of the stars are aligned, so to speak.

If you've been marketing effectively, the goal, and this was something we did in radio all the time is how do we build top of mind awareness for your business?

Yeah, you have to be there consistently.

Jamie, this has been incredible.

We're closing in on the end of our, of our episode.

This has been an incredibly long episode but it's been very enlightening as well.

Thank you for the incredible deep dive into digital marketing.

I think we've helped a ton of people.

People.

Let's talk briefly about local iq.

If there's people that are listening, I imagine Canada and United States for local iq.

Yeah, absolutely.

We're, we're part of Gannett Corp. Gannett Corporation owns USA Today and the USA Today network.

We're the digital marketing solutions team for Gannett.

Local IQ was born as a brand.

A couple of years ago Gannett had a problem.

They were, they own USA Today and 256 other daily newspapers across the United States, plus newspapers in the United Kingdom and Southeast Asia and Australia, New Zealand.

We're a global company but of course in the newspaper business they're like their clients.

They have thousands of advertising clients are asking for help, saying can you help me with my website, can you help me with my Facebook page?

I need to get some Google Ads.

What's A Google Ad, that sort of stuff.

So what Gannett was doing is they were trying to solve that problem using some white labeled off the shelf solutions.

And then they took a step back and they said okay, this is not serving our customers.

And so they vetted about 50 companies worldwide and they settled on Reach Local who I started with and WordStream and Thrivehive.

And they acquired these companies, they wrote big checks and they brought them in board and then that's where the brand Local IQ came from.

And so we're full service digital marketing technology platform.

So we do everything from websites to search engines to SEO to social media management.

We do targeted email marketing in the United States which is really effective of course and we do full fully blown promotions, full blown, fully blown brand plays, et cetera.

So we can solve all of your digital marketing needs in one place.

And the goal is to put people like me, who have lots of marketing and media experience into each market.

So we have a, there's a, we have three here in Edmonton, we have a pair in Calgary, we've got six in Vancouver.

That's the Western Canada division.

Amazing.

And you're based in Edmonton.

What's the best way for people to reach you?

Can you handle all of Canada?

If someone's calling from Ontario today, could they call you Jamie or do they need to call a different person?

I've got lots of customers in Ontario.

I've got a couple in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, B.C.

mostly in, in Alberta.

But yeah, I can work with anybody in Canada.

I've even got a couple of clients in the US that are Canadian based owners.

So yeah.

And then if I'm not capable or able to, I have, there's about 200 of me across the continent so I'm happy to refer you to somebody.

I've got colleagues in from Seattle to Miami to Boston to San Diego.

Amazing, amazing.

And if people are hearing this and they want to reach out to you Jamie, they want to talk about local iq, what's the best way for do so?

All right, they can reach me at jmoffetcaliq.com so jm o f f a t@local iq.com you can phone me at 780-803-3067 and check out localiq.com and if you go to localiq.com and you're interested you can fill out a form there and you'll be connected with me or somebody like me.

Amazing.

Jamie, it has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for the 101 on digital marketing.

Thanks Kelly.

It's been awesome.

Until next time.

You've been listening to the Business Development Podcast podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.

For more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

see you next time on the Business Development Podcast.