by Jim August 8, 2023
Welcome back, everyone! It’s great to have you here once again. This week, I’m diving deep into the rapid transformation that AI is ushering in, and let me tell you, it’s nothing short of astounding. The past month has been an absolute whirlwind for StewArt Media, and I’m here to share the groundbreaking developments that have unfolded. From cutting down processes that used to take weeks to a mere 48 hours, AI is redefining our approach in ways we couldn’t have fathomed. But that’s not all – there’s an exciting shift happening, where AI meets our expertise to craft strategies that accelerate growth. Join me in exploring this new era, as we unveil the power of AI and the novel paths it’s paving for us.
What I learned
- AI has transformed our processes at an unprecedented speed.
- The fusion of AI-generated insights and human expertise is a game-changer.
- Efficiency gains are massive, condensing weeks of work into mere hours.
- AI is not a mere tool; it’s a growth partner, optimizing tasks to our principles.
- Embracing AI opens doors to revolutionary approaches like the SEO triage report.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers, how you going? This week has been, well this month has been a watershed month for StewArt Media, and I said that to staff on Thursday *****. A lot has happened, especially it all just came together in the last week and a lot of things have come together for us and have just opened a whole new raft of opportunities and it’s mind-blowing. After 25 years of doing this, I thank you everyone for your support in StewArt Media in our 25th year and all the years up to that. This is the biggest impact I’ve seen to our processes in that time.
The Traditional Client Onboarding
So, I got a call from a client and talked to them about their website. I said all right I’ll go away and have a look, I’ll need to schedule some time into my calendar and then maybe take one or two hours to have a look at the website and then get back to you about what I think needs to be done or what other information I need. Typically, I must go back and say yeah, you’re going to need to show me Google Search Console or you’ll need to show me this or you’ll need to show me that, whatever it might be. That process takes just over a week, and I jot down all my notes and then I put them into an email and then I might, before I send the email, I might consult one of the other team members about what I’m looking at. I might have a quick look at the website, and they might say oh maybe include this, this, or this, and so then we take that, and I write up an email based on all that and send it back to the client. I’ll give the client you know maybe some estimate of time and the client will come back to say okay yep let’s get it done.
So, then we come back, and you know we’re already two weeks and then we must schedule a scrum, so we must find time in everyone’s calendar to do that, to have a talk about this new client and onboarding them and everything else. So, there’s an hour of everyone’s time to go and do the scrum prep then there’s the actual scrum itself, which is another hour of everyone’s time, everyone involved in the scrum and then from there the tasks get rolled out. That process takes about four to five weeks back and forth with the client depending on how long the client takes to get back to us, because you know they might be thinking about it and trying to work out what is important or not.
Experience plus AI
Last week we got that four-to-five-week process down to 48 hours. So, I got a phone call from the client, got off the phone, told one of the team members the domain name, and I had a report 30 seconds later. So, all the things that I would normally go and do, all that research and then consult another team member and then you know work out what’s important and what’s not important, I had that in my inbox in 48 hours. Now I could have just sent that to the client but to me it’s not enough, and I’m not going to rely on just this report. Now in this report you might say oh that’s good that sounds cheap; no, it’s 25 years of experience distilled into one nice package right, but that’s only part of it.
So, then I take that report, I don’t send it to the client. I take that report and review it to make sure it’s all correct. I’ve only gone and checked two or three other things as I did with this client but in version two, I won’t be doing that because that’ll be automated. Everything I do for a client I sit down and I think can I replicate this somehow with automation because we’re not only using the AI for some things but mostly we’re using it for creating the actual script, so helping us as a programming buddy if you like, and we’ll use it for things like report writing and those sorts of things, but you’ve got to make sure that’s accurate and the report writing itself is using all of our parameters that we’ve established over 25 years. We know what’s important, we know what’s not important, and that’s how we’ve focused on this.
Once I review it, check those one or two other things, then I write a list of my top tasks that I think need to be done. I can see what’s written up in the report as issues then I take both of those; the report, my synopsis, and extra tasks and then I put it through another process that will go and estimate the time for task roll out procedures and everything else based on what we do. It’s not random. Then I take that, and I send all that to the client and the client says in this case yes, and then we’ve already got our first two months of tasks ready. We don’t need to have a scrum yet, maybe in two months we will or maybe one depending on how the project goes, but right now we don’t need to have that first scrum, and this is just gold for me, this is just so valuable for me.
Fancy an SEO Triage Report?
So, when people ask if they can go through those, I said oh there are several parts to this, and I do want to test what I would call an SEO Triage Report. If you are interested in that let me know because it would be based on what we think is important, obviously considering what Google thinks is important as well, and so if you are interested in that as I said last week, just email me as I’ve had a few interesting ones already. Basil, thank you for your interest. I am getting back to you. I think you have a brand issue though and that’s another component we’re building into our tools, which is why these things are so exciting for us.
There was another exciting thing that happened last week around AI and staff speaking up and saying we need some processes around this, so we’ve started that as well. Processes as in training processes of staff so we’re now bedding everything down into training processes step by step for staff because this is all new ground and until now it’s kind of been running as fast as we can and breaking things and then seeing what works and what doesn’t work. Now we have some clear directions on where the power in this lies for us and that is in replacing a lot of the sort of the heavy lifting or grunt work that we would have to do, and we can focus on some other exciting things which I’ll be telling you about soon.
One of them, just one of them, is buyer personas. Go and have a look and see what Shopify and now BigCommerce are both doing with AI and product descriptions. We’ve got something that I think is better than that, but maybe not as easy if you just want to press a button, but for our clients it’s really exciting what we’re doing there, and everything’s focused through our 25 years of doing these things and knowing what’s important. Plus, typical marketing advertising basic principles that do not change that have been around forever right, look after the customer. Remember for us SEO is Shopper Experience Optimisation, if we optimise for the Shopper, we’re doing a whole lot more than what you do if you’re optimising for a search engine, because when you optimise for a search engine you’re not concerned that much with the Shopper unless the search engine tells you you have to be.
So, if you’re interested in one of these SEO Triage Reports, which is a Shopper Experience Optimisation triage then let us know. If you’re interested email me [email protected] Thank you very much, tell your friends don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
