Dojo of Marketing w/ Christopher Douglas | Ep. 166

In this episode of the Biz/Dev Podcast, David and Gary chat with Christopher Douglas, founder of Big Red Dog Marketing, about SEO, marketing, and how AI is shaking up the game. Has AI rewritten the rules, or is keeping it old-school the real secret to success? From timeless strategies to the ways AI helps—and hurts—businesses, we’re breaking it all down.

Links:
Christopher on LinkedIn
Big Red Dog Marketing on LinkedIn
Big Red Dog Marketing Site

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Chris: I don't see Google answering that question. I don't see Bing answering that question. 

[00:00:04] Gary: I don'tt see Bing answering any questions. 

[00:00:10] David: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the BizDev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined per usual by Gary Voigt. What's up, man?

[00:00:19] Gary: How you doing? Everything's going right over here.

[00:00:21] David: Can't complain. It's not cold here anymore, which is sad. I 

[00:00:25] Gary: Oh, it's really not cold here anymore. It's summer already.

[00:00:28] David: It's because you live north of hell. That's where you live.

[00:00:31] Gary: Yeah. In between hell and the sun,

it's 

[00:00:35] David: right. That's just right there outside of a space coast. All right. More importantly, we are joined today by Christopher Douglas, who is the founder of Big Red Dog Marketing, who is a results driven solutions to small and mid sized businesses.

Welcome Chris. How are you?

[00:00:52] Chris: Pleasure to be here, David. Thanks. We're doing good. It's back north of freezing and Falls Lake is finally unfrozen.

[00:00:58] David: Nice. Nice. So we are 

[00:01:00] Gary: in

the same area, right?

[00:01:02] David: Yeah, I think so. If you're in your falls lake, you're near me. I'm up in wake forest.

[00:01:07] Chris: Yeah. I'm on the south side of Falls, but yeah.

[00:01:10] David: Okay. Very nice. Tell me a little bit about a big red dog. How that got started. You've been doing it for about six years. Is that right? 

[00:01:16] Chris: Yes, so I had gotten laid off from a startup back winter of 13, maybe 14. And the short behind it was that I had a friend at church that had sat down with and was like, look, if you can find four people to take your salary divided by four, you create a consultancy. You lose one, it's a better way because you're really sharp at marketing.

And I had been working for a narcotics identification company. People think it's hilarious, but I used to say, I play with coke and meth all day because we sit here and we analyze it, figure out how to stop it. Legit. It was a lot of fun, met a lot of undercover officers doing darn good work, but they just couldn't answer things.

So I lost that job because the VC got tired of waiting for it to work. And so I started seeing the same things over and over again with small companies. I got three or four clients, two of which are still clients of mine today. That I sat down with and we I built a consultancy. I met a friend named great hire.

No longer with us. But he and I built big red dog with the idea that some agencies suck and they don't do right by their clients. They aren't loyal. They don't. Treat people, small business, especially because they're small business. We want to go after that. We want it to be that loyal type that doesn't take everybody in a vertical doesn't want to just go grab money, but actually build value for the businesses and build relationships and more like.

We named it after which was my red golden retriever at the time. 

[00:02:52] Gary: I was just going to mention that I don't know if this is just a trend I'm starting to see or things that I'm starting to read online, but you'll notice as things become more digitally optimized and as every website building tool now has a way to, AB test every single page and then AI will read it and rewrite and give you options and target specific, users or visitors with specific messages based on trends. A lot of that. And while it seems exciting and real, it's going to become, in my opinion, oversaturated to the point where every website is going to be the same. And so when you mentioned the brand story and then being a little bit more humanistic in the storytelling part of why you exist, that's something that I always found to be the backbone of good, not just marketing and advertising, but cause I did that for many years, but the the backbone of a good. Brand voice is the human to human storytelling. And I think that can resonate with people, especially in smaller businesses, a little bit better than all the. AI optimization, or at least it will. Right now

[00:03:56] Chris: And I agree 

[00:03:57] Gary: it's the tool, I think it, we're going to get to a point where it's okay that's enough.

Let's go back to reality now.

[00:04:04] Chris: and I agree with you greatly there because my copywriter is a journalism Or as a journalism major in college. And so she digs into it. We use AI mainly for ideation and kind of get some ideas around what we're looking at because we hop from accounting to property management to law and three different types of law, two different medical practices.

And we're in like 20 different verticals, and we try not to go. In one given area, we don't take two clients, so we're constantly hopping between them. So we'll ideate with that. We'll even let it come up with some bullet points, but she's the one that writes it. And the reason she writes it is, I trust her judgment.

Especially with law you do not let an AI write law because it'll try to cite cases that don't exist. They have not fixed that problem yet. Do not do it. That is one of the biggest mistakes you will make. The lack of personalization, you're dead on because if you haven't talked to the business owner, if you haven't talked to a couple of the customers of the business owner, you don't know how it plays. 

[00:05:06] David: So let me, I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit on the AI front. So I get. What Gary and you are saying, if I am a services business, such as us, that story, that brand, that authentic authenticity, that you're trying to reach your client all a hundred percent. But if my job is to sell a widget. Isn't AI going to make it so that it, that widget is, they don't care about your story.

They just want the widget. And I'm wondering if AI has a role to play there. I was reading the thing the other day. So they were talking about, and it was really interesting. They were talking about how Google and Microsoft and open AI and all them, they're collecting gazillions of dollars to create a product that no one knows what it is yet.

They're trying to make money off of, they have solutions that for problems that don't exist. And. That they're like, okay, there's that one side and then there's meta is spending that same amount of money. They're not trying to sell anything, right? They're giving away llama. And the only answer to that is, is they have figured out what their product is.

And what that product is advertising and social media ads and all that. And they're imagining something like you are Ford and you want to sell a Bronco for instance. And You create some generic copy for it. You give us some images and you tell them what kind of person you want to target with this ad right on meta and meta uses their bazillions of dollars of servers and AI to say, okay, I'm going to give Gary a different ad.

I'm going to give David a different ad. And I'm going to give Chris a different ad. We're going to make your own copy. And it's just for you based off of your, the knowledge that AI has collected about you, and that is their product rather than trying to sell you a chat bot, which man. That's powerful and scary all at the same time.

So

[00:06:58] Gary: I will add to that as a user targeted ads are noticed immediately. And it just feels after a while, just okay, yeah, I've had enough of this.

[00:07:09] David: I agree with you to a point. And I guess where I S I don't use Instagram 

[00:07:13] Gary: but if you're playing the numbers game, like you're saying, and you're advertising the product, the widget or whatever, to, a million people with personalized targeted messages, the chances are you're probably going to resonate with more of them

[00:07:25] David: I'm just saying like, when I would do Instagram, this was years ago. Again, I haven't used Instagram in a long time, just cause it's not my thing. I was amazed how good those ads were targeted to me. Like these were things that I was definitely interested in, just nerdy gadgets and gizmos and things for my wife and whatever.

And they

[00:07:40] Chris: It's gotten a lot worse.

[00:07:41] David: They nailed me and I would buy so much stupid stuff. They nailed me perfectly that I've, if I've, if a targeted ad is good enough, and I'm not talking about, Hey Gary, you want a fraud at Fort Bronco, right? That's creepy. But if they know, Oh, Gary does this, and this, maybe he wants another beanie.

And they target that beanie. That look on your face is good. They target that beanie just perfectly. You're going to be like, Oh, I do want that beanie and I think I don't,

[00:08:09] Gary: Or is it someone wearing a beanie that I like standing in front of a Ford Bronco and it's

[00:08:13] David: and then you're like, I need both 

[00:08:14] Gary: Oh wait, 

[00:08:15] Chris: the problem 

[00:08:16] Gary: beanie looks cool in. front of a Bronco. 

[00:08:18] Chris: When, especially for someone like me, the ads suck because I'm looking at 50 different things an hour that have nothing related. 

When it comes to selling a widget, let's talk about a can of water, Liquid Death. They came up with an amazing brand story.

[00:08:36] Gary: Yeah. Their company exists on branding. Like

you could eat, they're selling water. 

[00:08:41] Chris: can of water.

[00:08:42] Gary: a premium rate in a premium can, and they're making like so much money off merch just because of that brand

[00:08:50] Chris: Huh. 

[00:08:50] Gary: Yeah. They are 

[00:08:51] Chris: genius.

[00:08:52] Gary: what I meant by that. The humanistic storytelling and then finding 

[00:08:55] Chris: But they've done it, they've done that on top of amplifying with digital. And that's the genius. Because they've been on point on social, they've been on point their ads are pretty darn solid. They've got, and they've even been able to back down because they've gotten so much earned traffic through, organic search.

It's not free, it's

[00:09:17] David: but it isn't, I find myself playing devil's advocate and I don't really mean

[00:09:20] Chris: Oh, that's fine.

[00:09:21] David: Liquid death is a one in a million shot. Before that, it was a dollar shave club, right? There's always been, and Dr. Squatch,

[00:09:29] Gary: dr. Squatch. Yeah.

But 

[00:09:31] David: been a 

[00:09:31] Gary: point is not. 

[00:09:32] David: I'm just

[00:09:33] Gary: I think I know where you're going with this. Go ahead.

[00:09:36] David: saying it's, you're finding the best of the best, but that's not, that whoever's behind those ads, I don't know who they are. I think there's actually Brian Reynolds was behind some of those, the maximum effort thingy, but anyway I find that. We always point to those same examples, but that's not where most people are ever going to reach.

That's they're brilliant. Those ad campaigns are brilliant, but that's not what the your pool cleaner and your widget seller can really aim at, right? 

[00:10:05] Midway Ad: Gopher is your app to get whatever you need, whenever you need it. From deliveries to errands to help around the house, make a request for almost anything and a gopher will accept the job and get to work. Download the Gopher app on the App Store or Play Store. 

[00:10:24] David: I read a thing, that deep seek stuff all exploded last week and last couple of weeks, and one of the things I thought, Was really interesting. This is, it was a podcast and I thought they were really smart when they said, one of the reasons why deep sea caught the attention of everybody for the first time, really like of the average Joe was because everyone started talking about it.

And so they all tried it and they all realized how good it was and they hadn't realized cause they probably hadn't tried any of the others in the last year or two. It's last time Chad, GBD exploded. I'm talking about average Joe's, not nerds.

And they haven't realized that all of them advanced so much.

Like I w I was playing with their, Oh, one model. This is chat GPT's reasoning model, which deep seek has one now as well. And people ask, this is the one you have to pay 200 bucks a month to play with. And we were playing with it and we were like, what is it doing? And the way, best way I could describe it is instead of asking a question that gave you, 80, 000 words of drivel and bullets and craziness.

And it was just a word dump, which is what AI has been really good at. This thing would give you one tight paragraph. It was really impressive. Like it had thought it through way more. And that's a weird word. You'd better put quotes around thought it through, but it's advanced. AI has advanced so much that a lot of those issues.

The drivel that you're describing have largely been solved. And I'm not sure if marketing, I'm not saying humans don't have a place. Please don't get me wrong, but the, I, the idea that the marketing copy is automatically, it's AI. I think we're past that.

[00:11:57] Chris: I agree. You can get it pretty close. The problem will lie 

[00:12:02] Gary: a lot of finesse though. Yeah. Okay.

[00:12:04] Chris: the finesse. Gary, you're dead on there. Like the finesse, it just. I don't know. It's the gravitas, the finesse. You know it when you see it. You just know it. Because I can look at a site and I go, who are they really writing to? And there's a lot of websites out there that need just a little bit of help, but they do so much better.

But 

[00:12:26] David: I think the human side of it, though, correct me if I'm wrong, obviously I'm not a marketing guy, but the human side of it is still determining who the target is, determining who the audience is. Once the human has decided that, I think there is a place for AI to then write the message to that audience. If you give the AI the right audience, I think in the end it will make great copy for you.

[00:12:48] Chris: It's also and this is a bad pun here, but it's like, What is the meaning of is? The machine thinks one thing, it writes about it, and you're like, you're close, but you're 20, 30 degrees off here. I think it's, I think it's there. also how you write the prompts. It's also how you do it.

Cause DeepSeq, the thing that drives me nuts about it is nobody looked at what DeepSeq was really doing when it was thinking, because it was scanning your entire computer and reading all your documents. Did you see that in Wall Street Journal?

[00:13:18] David: I saw that there was some evidence that there was some weird

[00:13:21] Chris: It failed all the security tests and it was pulling data 

[00:13:25] Gary: the browser version, but if 

were downloading the 

[00:13:27] Chris: through and I hadn't tried DeepSeq yet, but I read that article. I was like, yeah, I'm going to wait and see on this. Cause I want to know more because I'm usually an early adopter.

Okay. Okay. I drove people in my neighborhood crazy with doing solar, but I, that was me. I love the idea of using AI to. To look at the realm of possibilities, tell me what we can do. Here's one, here's two, here's three. Here are my ideas. I still think, honest to God, if AI could solve the laundry problem, the dish problem, making my kids clean up, that would be the biggest benefit in my life.

Okay that, honestly, I want those tasks handled. The creative process, honest to God, when I watch a 24 year old copywriter, With a journalism background, dig into it, do a couple hours of research and say, here's what I think with a little bit of guidance from a couple of 30 year olds and nail it in 2 months later, that page is getting double the traffic to me.

That's that is what marketing is about. I get the idea that you can tell a I. The audience and where you're writing and all that kind of stuff. But the percentage of what it leans on, I'm not sure yet. And 

[00:14:38] Gary: I think, 

[00:14:39] Chris: especially in regulated industries, honestly, a little nervous sometimes, cause I have to read it three or four times if I would write copy with it.

We use it, we try it, but it's good. But like I said, It's,

[00:14:50] Gary: well, there's a difference to, just to add to this, there's a difference too, between copywriting for your brand story, and then product copy for a product that your brand is selling or a service that your brand is, trying to sell to people. And so the integration of AI, it can be used after a more humanistic brand stories that are already established. And then once you get the ball rolling with some of the services, the way you speak of your brand, speak of your services, speak of your products, you mow that foundation. That could be the integration between the human and the AI. And then the further you go with more products or more services that you offer, once that foundation is solid and the finesse is there, that's when the AI can really help speed up time. And I'm not going to say they're going to nail it a hundred percent of the time, but they can get you maybe closer the more you use it. There's definitely a difference between the brand story and the brand, copy versus the product copy. And, those 

[00:15:43] Chris: and I think it 

[00:15:44] Gary: need to be in the same spot can also be integrated.

[00:15:48] Chris: And Gary, I think it goes back to, I don't know who said this, who was first attributed with the statement. It's trust, but verify, you better QA it harshly. 

[00:15:57] Gary: So when you started Big Red Dog and from where you were then to where you are now, I'm sure you've learned a lot. As far as a business owner. So what would your top three pieces of advice be to anybody starting a business or, an entrepreneur that's looking to start a business? 

[00:16:13] Chris: Number one, figure out who your real customer is and who they're influenced by. You've got to know these are my core people. These are the people I serve. This is why I do it, all that kind of stuff. And that can change over time. Secondly, you're gonna learn a lot. Fail is not a word.

It's first attempt in learning. Make the mistakes, own up to them, be honest. And fix the problem and go on. People will forgive you because especially with technology changing every day, the stuff we did last week may not work anymore, especially with Google. And then 3rd thing really is part of more of the 2nd thing is keep experimenting. And, the agency world is really about relationships. It really is. Whether it's in person, digitally, like we had to do during COVID. But it's about relationships. Like David living close, I'm going to try and, I haven't gotten on his coffee or beer appointment list, but I'm going to try, the value of this is knowing.

There used to be this book, 65 Ways to Sell a Man. It came out in the 30s. It's a little sexist, but the personification and the aspects of it, is he married, does he have kids, what's his relationship status, or, that kind of stuff. And you know this point about this person.

So you put yourself in their shoes. If you know the relationships, you know who you got professional relationships with, you know about these people and their struggles and their walks, you know how they think. If you know how they think, you can help advise them better. That's what I try to do every day, and honestly, it's from a new client to an old one.

I want to know who they are, what, how they are where they want to be. And that's what I will tell you right now. As a business owner, your biggest struggle is finding your core customers and figuring out where they are in their walk, in their life. And how can you help them make one part of that life better? Just one part. Because if you fix one little thing, people will respect that. And now they're like, Chris fixes this. 

[00:18:13] Gary: Nice.

[00:18:14] Chris: That's my two cents. 

[00:18:15] Gary: All right. If anybody wants to learn more about you or bigger dog marketing, where can they reach out?

[00:18:21] Chris: Hit me up on LinkedIn. Pretty active there. David actually found me on there, so that was cool. Or Big Red Dog Marketing. So bigreddog. marketing, not dot com. But 

[00:18:32] Gary: we'll put the links in the show notes too, so people don't have to. Try to write them

[00:18:36] Chris: I appreciate that. But guys, this was a pleasure. It's nice getting to meet you both. Gary, you need to come down south and enjoy some southern hospitality.