How to Hire AI Marketing Agencies Properly

Mark Degrasse.m4a [ 00:00:00 ]Hey everyone, I'm Mark DeGrasse, CEO of AI Branding Academy, and I'm here this weekend at the BDSS Marketing Masters Think Tank, and we're talking everything marketing. And we talk a lot about AI, I specifically specialize in AI, practically applying it, because a lot of people think it's either magic or it's completely useless. And there is an in-between with what we're going through today, which is people using more and more AI all the time. Right now, it's estimated that between 50% and 60% of all online content is currently AI, and that's expected to increase to 90% to 95% by the end of 2025. So, with that in mind, I'm going to deliver something that I think is pivotal to your development as both a business going into the unknown world of AI, and also just as business and the economy changes in general to prepare you for what's coming. [ 00:00:50 ] And the biggest thing that I could say in order to get you ready is how to hire how to hire your marketing agency properly. A lot of people just churn through marketing agencies, hey, I hired this guy for TikTok, and it didn't work out, and so I fired him, and then got exasperated with the entire situation, and then I did the same thing the next year. This is totally typical at every level of business. I've worked with mom and pops that were starting up, up to billion-dollar publicly traded companies, and we all pretty much have the same issue. So, what I'm going to explain today is basically how to. Why the churn occurs, and then we're going to talk about how to solve the problem, which actually comes back to you as the business owner or the founder, or basically the person who has the most at stake with the situation. [ 00:01:37 ] So, let's go ahead and get into it. All right, so let's first talk about why marketer churn is so high. Now, the marketing C-suite, the CMOs, are actually the shortest-lived position you can have as an executive, and I think it's all positions in marketing actually share this same trait. And it's not really about, say, a marketer being bad or good. It's about how you manage that marketer and also about kind of your perception of how marketing works itself. Because if you really think about it, it's not the marketer that's the problem. It's actually the marketing that's the problem. You're trying different things. Maybe you're great at paid media, but you're terrible at content, and so you focus on paid media and you spend all your time there. [ 00:02:19 ] Maybe you're excellent at social media, but you're terrible at retention, and so you focus all your time on paid media. Maybe you're terrible at retention on social media. The fact of the matter is that because of AI, we can now create cohesive marketing programs that do everything and actually unify all these different siloed methods of marketing into a cohesive strategy, and then we can hire our marketers properly. So let me just explain how the typical cycle goes. So companies, you know, we have Bob up there, and Bob is a plumber, and he’s come up with an awesome new plumbing joint that allows you to, you know, and he’s come up with an awesome new plumbing joint that allows you to, you know, replace pipes without actually turning your water off. [ 00:02:57 ] And he doesn’t know anything about marketing. He just has this idea and he has the resources to do the product. So he’s going to go ahead and hire Steve, you see at that second position, in order to, you know, launch his product on TikTok. Now, Steve knows all about TikTok, doesn’t know anything about plumbing, but, you know, Bob doesn’t care because I just need you to do TikTok. So Steve says, Hey, Bob, tell me about the company. Like, what’s the pain points? Who’s the target market? Like, tell me what you’re trying to accomplish with this brand. Bob says, 'Steve, you know what? You're the TikTok person. You do your TikTok crap. I don't care. Like, just make us videos and get us some traffic. [ 00:03:33 ] And so Steve does his best and he takes his, you know, core, you know, program that he runs all his clients through on TikTok. And you know what? Sales didn't increase as much as Bob expected them to. So Bob goes ahead and moves forward. Now this, you could say, 'Hey, well, Steve failed.' He didn't get the results, even though it wasn't his fault, because he wasn't given the right answer. He didn't get the right information. But the fact of the matter is that even if Steve was successful at what he did, there was very little reason to retain him because you never understood what he was doing in the first place. And his strategy had nothing to do necessarily with your vision. So letting him go is okay. [ 00:04:11 ] So we run into the situation where no matter what happens, you're going to fire the marketer. And it could be something as simple as, you know, Sally, the new intern said that she loves TikTok and can totally take that over. And we'll probably get better results. And Steve's cheaper, so she's cheaper and you switch over there. So this is why we constantly go through marketers. It has nothing to do with their performance per se. It has to do with their management and the fact that they weren't given good information in the first place. So there's a bunch of different ways that you could, you know, think about the hiring. But at the end of the day, there's only one common element that is with all of these fired and hired marketers. [ 00:04:48 ] It's you. It's you, the business owner. And you think that these people should come in and they should be able to reinvent your whole company and make you successful on TikTok, even though they have no idea what your overall strategy is. And that's a problem. It's actually a problem, not just for your marketing. It's a problem for your HR. It's a problem for all of your operations. It's a problem for your executive management, because nobody has essentially been told what they're supposed to do. Worse, they may have been told that their vision or their ideas are just as important as the executive team or the owners of the company. And so what ends up happening is, because you didn't define your brand, your brand is being defined, just not by you. [ 00:05:28 ] It's being defined by your executives, by the agencies that you hire, by your interns, and worse, by your customer. That's who's defining your brand, which leads to no control and no cohesiveness. Now, what we have today is AI that could actually take all of these problems and make them go away with almost zero effort. We call them the brand pillars. And the brand pillars are basically nine distinct elements of your brand. And it's a lot. It's nothing special. You've heard all of these terms before. It's your brand name, your slogan, your values, your customer avatar, your brand avatar, and on and on. I'll actually send you a link to all of them. But the most important part that we start with is literally the vision. Now, because you might say, like, oh, I've done this before. [ 00:06:10 ] I have a brand guide. And you probably do, but you haven't actually used that guide and given it to your employees in the form of a GPT or some kind of accessible software in order to derive decisions from. And so this is where the misstep between establishing your brand and executing the brand comes into play. Now, the most important part of it, I'm not going to go too much into all those different pillars. And honestly, what we do at the Academy is we have what we call the AI Brand Blueprint that actually adds in a lot more components than that, specifically five style guides that cover your visual elements, written elements, your community elements, your interactive elements, and your experiential elements. And with this, we basically build the ultimate AI to make decisions. [ 00:06:52 ] And then we basically just take this AI and hand it to an agency and say, hey, whatever questions you have about our brand is contained in this AI. So you don't have to talk to us. We don't need to brainstorm. This information is approved, and we agree with it. And now you could take any question you have, feed it into the AI, and it's going to give you a consistent answer, even if you're not talking to the owner. And even in that regard, even if they could talk to the owner to get their questions answered and stay in line with the vision of the brand, the owner changes. You know, we're all changing, evolving people. And so we're going to be as inconsistent as anybody else, which is why we have to define the brand. [ 00:07:30 ] So I'm going to give you a tool just to get you started on that path, which is your vision. And so we always say, you know, without vision, there can be no clarity. And without clarity, there can be no consistency. And so this is typically why you see most brands are so inconsistent, because there's just no chance that they could be consistent because all the questions are getting answered by a person who is probably changing as well. So this is why your branding matters. And it starts with the vision, just like I've said several times. And so what I'm going to give you is a method of creating a core vision that you could use to actually not only get people excited about your business, but really define what you do. [ 00:08:06 ] And what we do, you know, this is the definition, which is to craft a compelling and effective brand vision. It needs to be both ambitious and quantifiable, ensuring it inspires and can be realistically pursued through measurable steps. So it's not some, you know, woo-woo statement that's going to, you know, you know, you're going to be about you saving all the ducks on the planet. Instead, it needs to be ambitious and it needs to be quantifiable. And these two things are massively important because if it's not ambitious, you're not going to get anybody excited. And I'm not just talking about your customers. I'm talking about your executives, your employees, the contractors you hire. Nobody is going to be excited about your brand if it's not ambitious. And then finally, quantifiable. [ 00:08:45 ] We all know, especially in marketing, that quantifying your results is pivotal in order to making sure they're effective. And it can grow, but very few of us do with our vision. So you have to have a deadline and you have to have a number. And so what I'm going to give you is what I call Vision Craft. It's essentially just our brand vision GPT. We have nine GPTs for the pillars. So if you're interested in that, you can check out our course. But just go to this, the Vision Craft, and all it does is a GPT that'll ask you a few questions and you'll get a solid answer. And this will give you more of an idea of what you're going to do with your business. And who you serve? And how are you going to accomplish that than almost anything else that you can do at least within two minutes, which is all this takes. So go and check it out and let me know how it goes. Again, I'm Mark DeGrasse and I am the CEO of AI Branding Academy. If you want more information about really branding your business and preparing for the future, please check us out.