77. Getting Found Online By Your Guests And How AI Is Changing Everything

Speaker A: Hello and welcome. If you've ever found yourself wondering how on earth you're meant to keep up with the pace of change in the digital world, when you're running a business, then you are not alone. And today's episode is one you won't want to miss. We're tackling a very hot topic that's causing a real stir across the experiential travel world. From glamping hosts and retreat leaders to boutique accommodation owners, it's all about traditional SEO and, um, whether AI and AI overviews have pronounced it officially dead. With the AI search zero click results and Google's new overviews change in the way people find information, Website traffic is down across all industries by an average of 20%. So the real question becomes, what now? And, um, what should you be doing differently? To unpack all of this, I'm joined by the brilliant Kenny Ridgell from Ridge Media. Kenny works with some huge hospitality names, but what I love most is how grounded and practical his advice is. Especially for those of us building meaningful businesses without a corporate marketing team in our back pocket. We get into what these AI driven search changes really mean for the smaller independent brands, why the old ways of doing SEO just aren't, um, cutting it anymore, and what you can do now to stay visible, relevant and bookable in this fast changing landscape. We also share some incredibly useful tools, smart strategies to optimize your presence online and ideas to help you adapt even if you're doing all the marketing yourself. So grab your cuppa, get comfy, and let's take a big deep breath together. This isn't about panic. This is about empowerment. Because once you understand what's changing, you'll be ready to lead the way forward. Let's dive in. Glamping and unique holiday rentals are surging in popularity with the growing desire of customers to book holidays that deliver an experience. They are also the new business of choice for those wanting to improve their work life balance. So how do you build a strong business like this that gives you the life you need and a great investment? I'm Sarah Riley and I want to share what I've discovered after being immersed in this industry for over 20 years to inspire you to find out more about what's going on. Welcome. This is the business of glamping and unique holiday rentals. Before we start with the episode, I want to share something with you. For years, I've been guiding people to launch and grow their own unique glamping businesses and transformational retreat events. And honestly, I've lost count of the number of times someone said to me, this is great, but can you just do it for me? For a long time my answer has been no, but not anymore. Now I built a team, a hand picked collective of trusted creative experts who understand our industry. We've come together to offer done for you marketing and um, business support. So you can stop carrying it all on your own and start focusing on what you love most, creating beautiful experiences and lifelong memories for your guests. Because let's be honest, until now your team has been you. And that's just not enough. You wear all the hats, manage all the customers and still need to figure out the ever changing world of marketing, bookings, DIP algorithms, uh, shift. Competition gets fierce, you become less visible and it feels like you're carrying the world on your shoulders. But now you can expand your team without having to expand your payroll and finally get the help you need to take the pressure off and move forward. To find out more about the team you've always wanted but never had, head over to inspiredcourses.com team and learn about what inspired Collective offers. And let's get some of those to do's off your plate. But be aware that we only have capacity to work with a handful of people. So if you're interested, be sure to get in touch. All right, back to the episode. Kenny, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know that what you've got to say is really valuable. People find it very useful because we are in a huge time of change, massive time of change with AI, with digital, with SEO, changes with websites, with marketing, everything. It's just, it's crazy. So obviously you've got the big resort owners who are employing companies like yours to do their work for them. There are smaller and medium companies that maybe aren't, don't have that, that they can't afford that or they don't have that within the budget. They do a lot of the work themselves. So I thought it'd be really useful to get you on, to talk about some of the changes that were only just announced from Google and literally days. So this is brand new, hot off the press in how AI mode is coming in. AI overview snippets is happening. So this means that we are getting a lot of zero click traffic. So zero click traffic for listeners benefit is where someone will go to Google, they will search for something using keywords, they will have some information come up and uh, they will be able to get the answers they're looking for right there and then on the screen. They do not need to click through to a website. So this is meaning that we are having a drastic drop in click through rates from Google to business websites. It's a real thing. If people are paying attention to their Google Analytics and they will see their clicks have dropped, their traffic will have dropped. We're seeing it across the board. I'm actually very lucky that I get to see behind the scenes of a lot of smaller glamping business owners analytics. We're seeing it on their websites. We're seeing it on, um, the websites of the listing sites and the OTAs. We're seeing all, all of it. Everyone is suffering from this. No one is immune. So we talked recently in Greece, we were on stage together and that was fabulous. And I thought, you know what, actually let's get Kenny on the podcast and let's have a little chat about is traditional SEO dead and what can we do about it? How can we change and flex and benefit to the changing situation? How can we be fluid like water? So that's kind of why I'm now going to put it all over to you, Kenny. Come on, give us all the answers. It's a difficult situation, isn't it? I mean, what are you experiencing at the moment?

Speaker B: I think you're totally right. Regardless of industry as well, you're seeing just a drastic drop. And I mean it might even be 15 to 20%. But at the end of the day, if you're losing 15 to 20% of eyeballs that are coming to your website, that's still a big number. That is concerning and it's definitely something to be alarmed about. And I would say that we're seeing the consumer behavior shift a little bit. I mean, if we go back to the trip to Greece, whenever my wife and I were making our plans, I went to Gemini and I asked, hey, you know, we're looking to dine in this area. This is where our hotel is. We have an infant. Where would be an infant Safe place to dine. Much different experience from a research like that you would do. Historically, even a year ago, whenever you went to pick out the restaurant, you probably go to their websites, you would go read about their policy on children, you would read about their menu. A lot of the research would have to be done. M. I mean you might read an article or two or three, you might read some influencers type of information, but you're, you're gathering information yourself. Today, it's no longer a gathering situation. People are going and they're trusting what's being fed to them through These AI tools. And like you said, with Google rolling out AI mode, I think we're all going to see it as like a new option in the next couple weeks is what they said. They've rolled it out in certain cities at this point, but at the end of the day, it's going to be even more prompting. It's going to be even more of a clarification situation. I read an entire New York Times article about this, and the guy, he used it to test if he shopped on just traditional search versus if he shopped with AI mode. And his own reference was, look, there might be a little bit of disconnect in terms of data being perfectly accurate, but the amount of time saved was worth all of the different, like, all of the, all the prompts that he put in. He was like, look, I could. I just tried to buy a car seat was the example he went through. And he was like, look, the car seat, the due diligence it did, the safety ratings, everything it could give me in terms of a full spreadsheet, a table for me to make my decision out of. He's like, how. How long would it take me to make a table to put the pros and cons out of the car seats? I never would have, uh, but at the end of the day, it helped me make a more educated buying decision. So that leads us to the next question. How do you become the car seat? Or if you're looking for the hotel or the resort to be recommended by these AI tools? I'll put it this way. It's no longer a situation of just write blogs, make sure you have your proper keywords. Because if we go all the way back to the beginning, SEO used to be a situation where we're looking for user habits. What are they typing in? What are the keywords? What are the trending keywords that are driving traffic? It's now it's much more of a prompt. It's a question people are asking a much more thoughtful, concise, detailed, informational type of request. So, for example, how I just talked through the restaurants and the way that I sought out what restaurant to go to, I gave a lot more detailed information than you may even have on your website. Like, what if you don't have a children's policy on your website? Because you just assume everybody knows, hey, we accept children in our restaurant. You really need to have content specific to every question that could be related to your business today. And. And then you've got to structure your website so that the AI bots can Read it first. So I'll put it one, one thing that I've seen that has been really, really, really unique that some of my clients have been able to do is they've actually put an internal GPT onto their website. Because one thing that I think a lot of people are not talking about now is the fact that website traffic is decreased. Your user engagement and your user experience once they get onto your website is actually going to become even more of a higher graded tool. Because if Google's, you know, they're only sending 80% of um, the traffic they used to send to websites, they care about where those people are going and what their experience is even more than they did before. So having a GPT custom built for your website so that if someone comes onto there, they don't even have to scroll around to look for children, they should be able to have their own AI, you know, say ChatGPT or they call them custom GPTs. You can build them out for your own website and it would sort through the information on your website. The best part about that is it will learn what prompts people are typing in on your website. So you'll know what type of prompts you might need to structure your new blogs or your new contents to come out for. It kind of gives you a little bit of the learning curve and takes that away because you're able to see what people are looking for on your website, why they come here. Because before you just watch what clicks they went to, you know, but if they didn't find the information, you just see, oh, uh, they went to, you know, our policies page or our settings page. But we didn't, we didn't know they're looking for children. Now we know specifically what they typed in, how they typed it in. So they're, they're giving you a little bit of information that you can then when you go back to your website, you set it up. How do we put that content together, how do we look at it? And I really think it's been a hybrid model for us as we've kind of adjusted to this period. But number one, you've got to restructure your website. You've got to have the schema markup, you've got to hide your meta tags or internal leaking linking and you had to have your site speed so that the AI crawlers can easily access and understand your website. Really a laser like the foundation for visibility for the AI tools. There's a program called Ally A L I AI that is a great tool for this. It's like $245 a month. It will restructure a website. Of course, we probably don't want them to hear me say this, but I would recommend that you do not have to pay it all the time. Right? You can. We, we've been doing it on a quarterly basis, so we'll install it, fix the website, restructure the website. If we make any major changes, we of course would pay for that month to restructure the website. But idea being, I'm sure they don't like you buying it and starting and stopping it, but I'm not a salesman for them. I'm just trying to help you be a little bit of, a little bit more knowledgeable on how you can set some of these things up. So, and the best way I would recommend step one, putting Ally on there, letting it restructure your website, ensuring that it's set up so that when the crawler, the AI, uh, crawlers do come to your site, everything's structured in a way they can easily pull it out. The next piece is the content, right? So if you're going to write it yourself, you really need to at least be running it through an SEO grader. Or you can have someone start with an SEO prompt and basically write you some of your content deliverables and then you fine tune them. I prefer the second method. Surfer SEO or Market Muse is the two other tools that I would recommend. Between like the best tools, there's a million. If you search SEO content creation tools, AI, you're going to get bombarded. These are tools that we've tested and proven that work very well. They create and optimize rich content that's intent driven and it's the most important part. It's structured for AI extraction, so it uses bullet points. Similarly, you know, if you go onto ChatGPT and you type in a prompt, you get a lot of bullet points. You get like bold letters, you get summaries, you get conversational style language because really at the end of the day people are having conversations with these AI tools. So your language on your website now has become more conversational. So if you have a smaller budget, there is something called Content Shake AI you can, you can try and go in there and work with. But overall, you know, one of those three tools, Surf Re, SEO, uh, Market Muse or Content Shake AI, Content Shake just requires more manual input and effort and like time on your end. All the above are going to be extremely important and contents can be key. You've got to have a blog, you know, the day gone are the days where people thought, oh, I don't need that many blogs, I have five. I'm good, I checked the box. I have my blog. Blogs. Or uh, we'll do one every like half a year, we'll do two a year. It's still, it's changing. You're probably going to be end up doing like four or five blogs a month for the foreseeable future. And that might even be low. But the idea being that you're going to have to be putting new content based on what prompts you're seeing, what structured content you've got to have out there as people learn how to use these tools. Because if people learn how to use the tools, they're going to be more adapt, they're going to ask more intense questions. The AI is going to learn who that person is. The very end is there's a principle called E, E A T and that is an um, expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And that means that it's basically how Google is grading you. You've got to be well researched on your content, you've got to have citations. I don't know if you notice whenever you go through AI all it's, it's using citations. So if you're gathering information, Google's not going to just, or the, you know, the AI bots aren't going to take that as just upfront. Oh, Kenny and his company say this is true. So it's true. No, you've got a cite, you've got to have your author bios so the AI engines can rank and trust your content. So at the end of the day you've got to have the ability to use the EEAT again, that's the expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness through your well researched content. Citing the authors, citing the citations. And then at the end of the day you should use a tool like PEC AI we call it Peck. I probably pronounce it incredibly wrong because I know it's an acronym but it's P E C AI and it tracks your brand mentions and your citations and AI search results. So it gives you basically real time data of how many times you did show up in the AI search results, which I think at the end of the day that is like probably the most valuable tool here because if you're losing the ability to track when people come to your website, you don't know what people are searching on anymore about how they're finding you. You honestly, unless you're using a tool like this don't even know if you did show up in the GPT results or not or if you show them the AI mode or any of these other type of tools. I mean some people use GROK to go research. You want to make sure that any of these AI tools because I think right now are splintered. There's no like, I mean you have chat GPT is probably your biggest gorilla. But I don't think they have an overall whelming market share like Google does over m Microsoft research. Everyone's using different AI tools to do a lot of the research but you want to know which ones are showing up for you. Are you, oh, I'm ranking well on chat gbt. I'm not ranking well on Gemini. I'm ranking well on this one, I'm not ranking well on that one. You want to know how many times you're pulling what citations were used and then how many times people even specifically search for you and you came up. All the, all the above is very valuable. I do think that to answer the question of traditional SEO, it is dead is the way we know it. I think that is it has been flipped on its head. It's no longer a keyword strategy, it's a whole comprehensive plan. And I think the next step that like, you know, to go beyond SEO is search ads. Dad. And I think there's a big question of like, you know, I would say that unless people are searching specifically based on the industry, like put hotels in there, someone might type in hotels near me. It's not going to pull up an AI prompt. It's going to give you your traditional Google hotels booking engine, it's going to show your OTAs. But if someone's saying where is the best hotel near me? And I think that as the consumer behavior changes, more and more people are going to prompt it with questions like that. You'll see even those traditional keywords and searches go away. So I think that it's definitely going to affect the paid search as much as it's affecting the SEO at some point because people are going to get majority of their answers right out of the top of the search. They're not going to scroll down to see your search ads. The question becomes are these AI tools going to allow you to advertise within their response? We have yet to see an answer on that. I would imagine that just because it's a monetary adventure for Google as well, they probably will at some point put their pay per click campaign for you to be able to bid inside the AI search. But uh, as of now, that's not a capability. So even your, your pay per click campaigns are getting more diluted. They're getting, they're getting less like positive traffic, they're getting you less clicks, your clicks are getting more expensive because everyone's still spending the same amount of money in the market. It's. The industry right now is rapidly evolving, I think faster than we've ever seen it.

Speaker A: I completely agree with everything you've said there. I love it, I love it all. Incredibly valuable. One thing I did find when I was doing my own research on the new changes that are happening, particularly with AI snippets, the overviews that Google will give you, it is starting to roll out now that you can now get your advert at the top. So where it's saying the summary of whatever the person who's searching has asked for your ad, if you go through Google Ads can be featured next to it. Uh, this is something that's being rolled out not all over the world, but in most places over the world at the moment. And so that's very interesting. And if you actually go into how do you do it? It's not as simple as you might think. You've got to actually do your research about what the best results are showing and how can your ad compete or at least be seen to be perfectly aligned alongside that. And that will give you the most probability of being feature. So it's. Everyone has to pay attention to these little details now. It's not as easy as just doing a quick Google Ad and then suddenly you're going to be featured at the top of the page. And I think that's the thing that has overwhelmed a lot of smaller business owners. And that's obviously why businesses like your own agencies who do this for people and for businesses are going to be, you know, thumbs up, you're going to be not short of customers, that's for sure. So what would you think out of everything that you've said there, because you've given us a huge amount of tips there, what would you say is the most important one? Would it be the GPT in your website that you think is the most valuable or any of the others?

Speaker B: I'll put it this way. If you have minimal amounts of budget and the only thing you can do is to step forward one time, make sure your website's structured so that if you do have the content on your website, it has a chance of being pulled. And then of course, at the end of the day, if you can't afford to Use these other tools to do the SEO and to write your own content. At least when you add new content to your website, it will at least be structured to where you have a prayer of being viewed. Because it doesn't matter if you work all this time on the content. If the website's not structured so that the AI can read it, you're going to be in a problem. And the perfect example would be some of the like, uh, like prompts you were just talking about. In terms of the advert, how you could put the Google Ad next to the search. We've seen that on our end for like I'll explain it from a hotel, I'll leave their name out of it. The hotel specifically is known as a uh, destination specifically as like a wellness and it is for a cycling. Right. But at the end of the day on the, on the prompt, our, our website is very cycling and wellness centric where some people might be prompting, looking for just like, you know, a nice. It is also a European type of hotel. So people might type in like European, like remote property. Next thing you know, our ad is pulling information from our website and it's talking about cycling or wellness. But this person just strictly looked for remote style, uh, European, like romantic vacation. Our ad, the language has to match or else our ad dollar was just wasted showing up next to there. So we ended up having to go back to all of our ads and rewrite all of our ads to create a new campaign to make sure that if it was a romantic or European vacation that it's going to actually match up. Because what used to happen as you could set up these, they had like 15 different types of like headlines and descriptions you could set up and they would automatically populate based on what people searched in. Right. It would fill it in. What's the closest example? But the problem is that only works on traditional search because it's taking your keywords that you're searching and it's throwing those words in there to match. So someone types in like best, like best cyclist hotel in the United States. Boom. Okay, our, our ads are going to say number one rated cyclist hotel in the United States because it knows they prompted this. We had it as one of our options. Problem is this advert is not technically coming across as a search word. It's more of like a performance max display type of campaign. So it's less A.I. uh, driven from Google's perspective to where it's not going to change the word and verbiage for you. So now you've got to have multiple ad sets, you've got to have multiple campaigns. You got to be really prepared to understand do I even want to show up on the romantic thing? Am I, does my website have the content for it? Do I have the right language? Do I have the right ad to even match? So it makes you even. Like you said, you're uh, paying attention to such granular details. Whereas before, thankfully for Google and a lot of their AI tools they've rolled out in the past, you could set those different headlines up, you could set the different like, you know, and let it be smart is what they call like smart search and it would basically trigger the different keywords. Of course we're seeing that be like it's a challenge now trying to match what people's prompts are to what your actual like ad is going to look like. Because last thing you want to do is spend money to have your ad there and it'd be completely irrelevant to what the prompt prompt was.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean one of the things, one of the things I've noticed about the Google Ads is that it's still a bit clunky. It hasn't changed an awful lot since it was, you know, originally launched. Do you predict that they may change that to meet all the massive changes that they're introducing across search? Do you think this is something that's going to come?

Speaker B: I think for sure the dashboard itself will change a lot. We're actually Google partners and we've gotten access to a new platform they're rolling out and it is definitely different reporting. It definitely looks very different on your Google Analytics as well because you got GA4 now as the new big shiny object basically be rolling away from that I've heard and we've gotten access to see some of the dashboard analytics you're getting there and I think that the way you even set up your ad campaigns the way you like look, it's like for example if you run a projections right now we're going to set up a new hotel. We would, come on, we would look up keyword projections. It would tell us the search volume on those keywords. Well of course as we just discussed, the search volume on those keywords is shrinking. So you're. And is the value is the data looking. It usually historically looks at a 12 month period. So as we know this thing is changing quickly. So the data from 12 months ago even relevant in today's environment. As you set up a deer research. Right. You almost need a smaller window of what your research looks like. So they've Got, they have to redo it. They have to re reset the situation. Google has always been very adept at being maybe not the first to market, but the best to market. I think that's they're probably waiting to see how some more of the cookies crumble and fall before they rehaul and overdo it. I think you're totally right that at some point you're going to see Google Ads get a new face, get a new look, get a new process, and it's going to be an entirely different platform.

Speaker A: Hm. So true when they say that about, you know, back in the day of the Wild west, the first that would be trekking out there would end up with a arrow in their back or something like that, you know, and yet the people behind them in the distance who might have been seen as being a bit sl, they learned so much from the people who went out first. So I think is definitely a bit of a wait and see. But it's not a, uh, wait and see and do nothing. It's definitely a wait and see what happens. But really get your ducks in a row in a, in a line. Start understanding how this is all going to work. Because if we don't understand, then there's going to be so many changes, you'll just get left behind. And that's one thing business owners should not be doing in terms of traditional SEO on a local level, because as we know traditional SEO, which we think is dying, it's definitely different to have the uh, general SEO and then to have the local SEO. So do you think the same applies to the local SEO or do you think that's going to be impacted, but maybe not quite as much as the general SEO. So to the listeners, so they understand general SEO is when you'll say searching for ideas to go glamping for my holidays this year. So that would be a general umbrella view. What can I do? And then a localized SEO search will be where can I go glamping in Somerset in 2025 in September? That's definitely more localized. So it's drilling down into the detail. So what do you think about that? Do you think that would be impacted quite as much or not so much?

Speaker B: I'll even take it one step further. I think if people are searching for specific areas like Somerset, then it will be impacted a lot. I think if people are searching near me where the maps feature still is in play, I think that you still, that you won't see as much adjustment or change on the hyperlocal near me searches. But that's again, like uh, I guess that's a half answer to your question. Because people, people who are looking at specific areas, right? If I'm like, I'm going to Jackson Hole in a couple weeks for a wedding, okay? If I'm looking for what to do in Jackson Hole or go to Yellowstone Park, I want to go see different things. That is going to be much more driven and changed by this AI implementation. Whereas while I'm in Jackson Hole and I'm like, where's the best burger spot near me? I think you're still going to have. Your map is going to play a large role. Your local SEO is still going to be remotely the same. It's not going to be prompts, it's going to be much more of a searching on the map type situation and doing a little bit of homework. I can't say that they won't change that too for us. But as of now, I think the hyperlocal near me searches I'm looking in, basically using your GPS location to look around you has not changed as much. But if we're looking at other areas where we're traveling to and researching in that market, I do think it's going to be much more prompted and heavily driven by the AI. Uh, it's, it's crazy. I would put it this way though. As a small business, now is the best time to catch up and make ground on some of these big companies. I mean take a Marriott, think about how many pages they're going to have to change on all of their websites. Think about how many different hotels, locations, cities, prompts, blogs are going to have to write. All these different incredibly time consuming efforts they're going to have to make. The big ships are going to have to turn and they're going to turn slow. Right now this time is a little ship. If you're a little ship, you have the best opportunity to make up a cavetta advantage, even get a head start. And I think the best way, it's leveling the playing field because everyone's starting from ground zero. Obviously if you have a 25 bedroom hotel or you're a glamping property with 11, 11 different cabins, you've got an opportunity right now you can, you can react quickly, you can, you can pivot, you can be agile, you can make changes. Whereas you got some of these big gorillas in the room. They're going to, they're pro, they have all these different like levels of approval they have to go through, they have to. And all on the local level is going to have to be approved all the way up the chain through the corporate ladder. It's going to take them time to adjust and Google's not waiting for them. So right now is the best chance. If you're a small, if you're a smaller guy, not a big corporate person, smaller woman, doesn't matter. Sorry to use a sex term, but at the end of the day, if you're a smaller business, right now is uh, your best chance. Like, like you have a huge opportunity, you can create a lead for yourself. You can be one of these people that these AI tools are looking to, that they're gleaming their information from. And I don't think there's ever been a better time in marketing today to really gain ground on something like that other than like maybe when TikTok first launched an organic reach was insane and Instagram first launched an organic reach is insane. This isn't one of those intersection points of right now is like basically Google's like your organic reach can go viral, you can blow up. Same way as like people became influencers overnight. You can be a uh, basically an influencer on Google, on AI search. If you make the changes right now and you put yourself out ahead because then you're going to build brand trust, you're going to build a, you're going to build loyalty with Google. If they see that your stuff is continuing to work, they're going to keep going back to you. That's one thing they are good about doing is if they find a source they trust that source becomes a very reliable source for them. So you want to become one of those sources today. Like don't, don't sit around and wait on it. I think it's that thing that's a big thing that needs to be said is it's a huge opportunity right now. Don't be scared of this. Just think, thankfully you're not married out with like 1300 properties worldwide where you have to write 1300, I mean 1300 times, five blogs a month. They're gonna have to all change. They're going to change all their websites. They're gonna have to. I don't know how expensive it's going to be for some of these big people, but they're not going to snap their fingers like some of us have the luxury of doing with these smaller properties independently owned. So I think you'll see a playing field that is open right now.

Speaker A: M so with content, because you were talking about how you really need to get your content on your website needs to be a blog you need to get that changed regularly. Regularly. We are always looking at how we can save time with that. And many people go out and they use AI tools. Yes, definitely need AI tools. But would you agree that it's important to have your own human element? So when you're looking at AI, just plain written AI, write the, get the AI to write the blog, copy and paste it into your website. I'm assuming you wouldn't recommend that and you would recommend that it must be an element of storytelling, personal branding and other bits and pieces that are added in by a human.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. The way we have it listed out in our office is number one, structure website number two, create content, Number three, human oversight. That's literally the words we use. Like we cannot just take number two and plug it into the website. You can't take the content that's pre written. I personally like the way that you can do it two ways. Right. You could rate your own and then ask it to structure your words into the way that it's going to be written in terms of the bullet points, the AI extraction level with the summaries, the conversational intelligence, and then have it basically restructure your words. I personally find it's better to let the, the AI tools write it, pre prompt you and then you turn it into more human language. You leave the structure the same, leave the bullet points the same, leave the, like the bold lettering, the ital, leave all those pieces in place. But be sure to put your own spin on words. You cannot just leave it. If you're doing that, then at the end of the day you're running into a situation where all of your competitors have that same tool. They might have that exact same one. But you're really becoming apples to apples. You've got to make sure you're separating yourself. If we're all, if we're all using AI, then no one's actually having a human element. So someone can rise to the top by being just that little bit more creative, that little bit more having a better touch point, having a little bit more relatability. So I think the one thing that's happening quickly is people are becoming able to detect when it's written by AI quickly now, right. A lot of times I get emails from people and I'm like, oh, ChatGPT wrote this.

Speaker A: Ah,

Speaker B: I know. For example, I think people are gonna look at your blog and they're gonna think the same thing if it reads like, if it reads like a robot. So you've gotta have the human elemental touch. So Regardless of how you do it, whether you start with your words and let them reframe them or if you let them start them and you, you rewrite them, make sure that it has your own personal element of touch on there. If you're going to just take it and post it and copy and paste it. I'm not saying it won't work. I just don't think it's a long term solution. I don't think it's going to give you the results that you're looking for because people will see straight through it.

Speaker A: M I think better results will definitely come from the human element being added and yeah, I agree with you. So if somebody wants to get an internal GPT set up on their website, how would they go about that? What would you recommend?

Speaker B: Honestly, one of the best things I have found to do this is based on your industry. Of course. We're talking about hospitality here. I would say start with like a Grok. I know that sounds insane but go, go and look on the different programs and ask them how to best start it. I mean I know that at the end of the day like custom GPTs can be made. I just did a quick Google search about it. Um, naturally it comes up and it pulls up an AI overview and the first thing it says that really you want to start with custom GPT AI. That's the best website to go to. That's where we've gone. But it's funny because it goes in here and it tells us like how to streamline the test. You know it gives me like a five step process of how to do it. So honestly there's some called a hotel chatbot. You have different ones that like we've used where you can basically just go straight to chat GPT and set it up. We did ours through hotel Go high level. I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with that but it is like it's basically a uh, CRM email marketing automation tool that you can plug in. It's like $79 a month to get the base plan. They have a full custom GPT built out that you can talk to it. It will actually even you can upload your emails, you can upload your website, you can upload videos you've pre recorded of yourself and it will try and create not only the knowledge on your website but take the knowledge from your internal communication and apply it to the GPT. Um, so but I would say like based on what you're trying to do with your GPT and what kind of content Information you have start with an a high tool. Ask it where the best place to go like whether it's custom GPT, AI or if it's go high level. I personally like to go high level because it already has all of our emails are integrated. It was easy for us to do. I could easily just say hey, read all my emails, read all Sarah's emails, read a couple of other team members that we know speak on a highly educated level about what we do and let's like create a ridge media custom GPT using our top five like producers in our company and the thought leaders of our company to create basically our encyclopedia of knowledge. But at the end of the day we were in a lucky position because we'd already had our emails integrated in the CRM we'd had all this stuff is already connected so it was an easier step for us to just choose that one as the. As opposed to if you have to build this from the ground up, there may be better solutions that could be time consuming. I mean less time consuming but get you to the same result. The main idea is the more information you feed this the better. I think the best one I've seen recently is Neil Patel. He just rolled out his own avatar and he's built out a full avatar that's a video version of himself that you can actually schedule appointment and have an interaction and have a conversation with him. But he was able to do that because he had so much video library logged footage to where he was able to just take all these like previously filmed. I mean he probably has hundreds of hours of videos, right? He's been a huge content creator. All you need to do is take his content creation, plug it into this chat custom GPT. It could reassess all the stuff he's ever said and make basically an avatar that's filled with his knowledge. So um, any. But the problem is most of us don't have hundreds of hours of recordings of ourselves. So uh, it depends on your position and where you're starting from. I'd imagine he used a much more advanced tool than I did because he wanted to make an avatar with a video person, whereas all we really wanted was to have it on our website to where if you searched you'd find all the information looking for. We're about two weeks into it, we've tested it out, we're rolling it out maybe in the next like three or four weeks publicly. So if you go to our website today, it's not there but basically we're making sure that it actually Answers the questions we want internally. Yeah, I think that's the main thing is like it's a fear of just unleashing this animal. Then you're like, or this beast on your website and you're like, I hope it says what we want it to say. So right now we're basically calling it a liability test. We're doing our liability testing on it.

Speaker A: Well, you say that it isn't on there at the moment. By the time a listener listens to this episode, it might be there. So where do they go to have a look at it? Mention your website address.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's ridgemediallc.com so that is ridge R-I-G-E media llc.com yeah, and we're fixing to roll it out here soon. The idea would be definitely if you have the capabilities to put your information on a custom GPT, I think that's going to be one of the next few because if people are going to get more and more custom to just using a GPT, asking questions and that's another way to separate yourself, put yourself out in the front. It's something not a lot of people are doing right now. I've heard of people using them internally for like a question to ask situation and like for basically management tools. Okay, we have a new employee. How do we train them? They have this question. Rather come to the manager, they can go to the GPT internally. But it's time to turn that out and make it outward facing and make it. As the consumer behavior changes, everyone gets more comfortable doing this. If you're one of the websites that has it on there, you're going to get a lot more customers in terms of just people being comfortable with the process and how it works.

Speaker A: You also mentioned about influences. So I'm assuming you still think that there is a place for influences in the hospitality world.

Speaker B: Yes, I definitely think there's a huge place for influences in the hospitality world. I think at the end of the day you've got two different types of influencers. It's almost back to your like SEO question. We like to think of them as local influencers and we like to think of them as like an industry influencer. Right. So a travel influencer. I mean my wife is like a new mom, so we, we have, we have a ton of like mom influencers.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Like half of our meals are made because some mom, um, or parent found some like quick meal that she could make that would be very good. So it's, it's all different based on where you're like you're, you know, your consumer consumption is. But the more niche these influencers can be, I think is going to be better. You've got to pick a lane and get into it. It's no longer going to be like, like, I mean, I think Kim Kardashian's kind of been like a driving force of, like, the evolution of an influencer. Right. She used to just be like, you could pay her to post whatever. Now she's kind of taking on this, like, health and beauty and wellness and, you know, she's doing skims and she's doing her like her sister's got the skin care product. They've picked a niche in a lane and they feel like that, you know, this is our. We're a makeup, health and beauty company. This is majority of what type of influences. She's not diluting it anymore with posting about random stuff. Whereas five years ago you might have Kim Kardashian posting about X, Y or Z because some company just paid her for it. Now they're picking their lane, they're picking their model. They know their followers are looking for specific tips and information on this type of, uh, like, content. So if you're an influencer, go ahead and pick your niche, drive all your content there. And I think that's going to be from a brand perspective. The most important part whenever we go assess an influencer or their likelihood for success as a partner is what is our audience? What is their niche, and does that align with who we're trying to talk to?

Speaker A: And, um, one of the things I wanted to talk about as well was customer avatar. So this is something that a lot of people struggle with about their own avatar of their own customer. Very important when you're talking about influencers because you judge whether it's a good idea to get involved in an influencer depending, uh, on who their audience is and whether their audience fits your avatar. So it's about saying, okay, what is my avatar? And how do I figure that out? So have you got any tips there that somebody could use of understanding who their traditional customer might be and whether there is a defining avatar that fits around who that is for them?

Speaker B: That is a very loaded question. But it is also one of the most important questions that I think that exists in digital marketing today. And I actually had a call with someone, uh, at the conference this past week. They're starting a new resort, right? They aren't quite sure who their avatars are going to be. They aren't quite sure who their core customer is going to be. So it's a little bit more of a, you know, experimental whenever you don't have the existing property versus if you have one. So let's play it on both angles. If you have a property, you at least have customer data. You have like previous background information. I would highly recommend exporting your customer list using some AI tools to basically identify core segments or core groups or unique commonalities between these audiences and find out what they were. I think I gave the examples. We have a plastic surgeon client and we were looking at basically what was the commonality between all of their patients. Starbucks was the number one thing that I think that we found out was the most common piece. Who would have known that? The plastic surgeon people. Basically the biggest commonality between all of our patients there instead of customers, would have been specifically Starbucks drinkers. They drank them all drink Starbucks on average more than three days a week. So they were avid Starbucks drinkers. That's crazy. But at the end of the day, uh, we would have never gleaned that information by just assessing our data. You've got to use a data extraction tool, you've got to upload this stuff and you've got to basically do a little bit of homework and research in terms of who your customer is. Now on the other front, if you don't have the customer data, you don't have the ability to upload it. And you're basically starting from ground zero. We always like to stay. Let's start with, let's start with four different avatars. What we're going to do is we're going to talk about four different marketing messages, basically based on your pillars, your core missions, your values of your company. And let's try and drive down. So your number one is going to be like, we're being honest, transparent, like sustainable. Okay, well what's honest look like? What does someone who cares about honesty look like? What are they into? Where are they living? What are they going to online? Where are they operating online? So number one is online behavior. Number two, it's like demographic. Where in the world are they? How much money do they make? Are they family members? Are they parents? You know, so you're driving down, you're drilling deep and you almost got to take each avatar and then drill deep into each one. And we actually have a large set of questions that we kind of walk people through. Not gonna lie to you. AI helped us come up with this question. So we went to AI, uh, hey, we're trying to help our customers pre opening identify their avatars. Like, how can we work with them to make our best educated guess as what their customers are going to be? Of course, you're going to have to change this as they really open. But it helped us come up with the prompts. I think one of my favorite ones was, if you're. If your business is a movie character, what movie character would you be? I love that question because it gives you an idea of the voice, and then it gives you an idea of once you get the voice. You know, some people are going to love, like, the humor in this. Okay, well, now we know we want to be a humorous character. We want to be like, we're from Anchorman. Okay, well, now let's draw. Let's drag that down, and let's say, like, what kind of people? Like Anchorman. Now you can help utilize that character voice to determine who your audience is. Like, maybe scholars aren't going to be the most active to fit in with our anchorman. Like, humorous Will Ferrell style of advertising. But. But in the day, like, you know, maybe, like, it's a younger audience, it's going to be more of an active audience. They're going to be. They're going to be enjoy. They're going to enjoy comedies. They're going to. You know, you could basically pick up on bass. Once you take that voice, I think that really gives you, like, ability to drill down in terms of who you want your customer to be. But I love that prompt. I mean, who. I would have never thought to ask somebody, hey, as a business owner, what do you, uh, what's your. What's the movie character that represents your business best? I came up with Jerry Maguire for mine. I know that might not be the

Speaker A: most, like, show me the money.

Speaker B: Show me the money. We care about our smallest guys. We care about our biggest clients. At the same time, we. We. Our success is your success. So that was where we came up with Jerry Maguire. But at the end day, it kind of bodes well as we like to look into our avatars of our customers. You know, like, we want to help business owners. We don't want to work with corporate people. We're not looking for the biggest person in the room. Like, I don't want to marry out. I want to work with a guy who's, you know, starting as our woman, uh, who's starting their own property. They're getting it growing. They're. They're building it, and we want to, like, be along for the ride and watch them grow. Like, you know, we want to celebrate their successes with them and at the end of the day. But that's. That's totally different than some other agencies. They want to work with corporate clients, and they might be a whole different voice. And I think once you can figure out who you want to be and how you want to portray yourself now, you can figure out who's going to resonate and, like, relate to that voice.

Speaker A: So when we're talking about all of this, what do you think the future holds for the smaller business owner? Uh, do you think it's a future of craziness, or do you think it's. Do you think it's going to settle down? Or do you think we are still just beginning this journey of new developments and changes?

Speaker B: I think we're just beginning this journey of new developments and changes. I mean, now they're coming out these virtual reality glasses. As you walk around, feel you're going to be able to, like, take, like, basically, like look into different things. Kind of give you readily available information based on what you're viewing and seeing. I mean, it's. It's going to be crazy. I'll put it this way. I don't think we can even predict what's going to come next. I think that we're just getting onto a bumpy ride. And that being said from a small business owner, I think the main thing we have to remember, because I'm also a small business owner, is that we can't do everything. You've got to pick an area, do one thing at a time, do it very well. Once you master that area, there's no shortcut for hard work. There's no shortcut for, like, time invested. Right. If you spend a thousand hours, you become a master. Or 110,000 hours, you become a master, suspend your 10,000 hours, drill down into one area, really own that area. And I think that's going to be the way that we've got to approach this thing. We try and wrap our arms around the big bear that's moving away from us. It's going to be a battle, and we're probably going to get bucked off that bear. We need to just try and pick, okay, we're going to go for one individual thing and try and be really, really good at this. Once we master that, let's add a secondary column. But we've got to build the ground up from, like, a strong foundation perspective and not try and build a house too quick. I think that's going to be something to remind myself even of. Is as we grow, things are. And it's not going to be the same. Everything changes so much. Many years ago today, if we'd had the same conversation June 4, 2024, would we have even been able to predict how much AI has already changed the website traffic? If you'd have told me all of our websites are going to go down by 20% in the next year in terms of site traffic because people are prompting A.I. i'd be like, that seems unreasonable. There's no way. But at the same time it's playing out right before our eyes.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: I think it's definitely, I think we're just getting. It's just hyperspeed is happening. I don't know if you ever watch Star wars whenever they flip on like uh, we're going into hyperspeed and then like the world starts zipping by. I feel like we're hyperspeed just turned on.

Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And actually I think it's going to be quite a ride. But you know, I'm hanging on for dear life and everyone else is. I think we're just kind of seeing where this is going to take us. So uh, it's just crazy. And like you said a year ago I was speaking to some small business owners and we were all saying okay, this is how we need to use it. And it was, we were keeping it small and careful and controlled and all that kind of stuff. And now it's like so many options. There's so many things you can do. It's like no million miles an hour now. It's yeah, crazy but amazing as well. I mean it's definitely keeping us all on our toes, that's for sure.

Speaker B: Like I said earlier, it's a good opportunity. I feel like you can either be like, you can either view it as like a glass half full or glass half empty. And I think at this point if we could be optimistic about the opportunities that it has created for us to basically even the playing field with some of these massive uh, companies. We need to remind ourselves like pinch ourselves. This is we, this is our time. We have the opportunity. Let's go for it. Let's like, let's pick our lane and go. I think the main thing is don't over analysis is paralysis is going to be the most tempting thing to do now is like just freeze yourself because you're trying to consume too much information, you're trying to learn too much. Just pick one thing and go. And I think the more you stay active, but we've been talking about it internally is just staying Active because so many times you get obsessed with. I'm going to listen to these podcasts, you know, like read these articles. I'm going to talk to our rep at Google. We're going to have these different, like nuanced conversations. You still got to execute, you got to go do something. So just keep trying, keep learning, keep experimenting and the more you like, basically put yourself out there. Of course you're going to have failures, but you're going to learn, you're not going to learn without having the failures.

Speaker A: M. Yeah, couldn't agree more. It's just been so brilliant speaking with you again, Kenny. Absolutely loved our time in Greece together. And again this time now, you've given so much valuable information. I couldn't be more grateful that you've shared it with the audience here. And I can see probably that you're going to be coming back on the show time and time again. I'm going to keep picking your brain for information. So what's your, what's your optimistic view of the hospitality industry?

Speaker B: I think that you're going to see a splintering. These brands are going to have to make more sub brands. They're going to have to uniquely identify themselves. I think experiential visits, experiential travel, especially as economic economical situation gets potentially tighter for all of us, people are going to really pick what is like a place that creates memories, what is a place that is unique. Unless you're your business traveler who's going on a like constant travel and they're having to spend and watch their dollars based on a room rate they're given from their like, you know, their boss. People who are traveling for either uh, leisure, the business leisure traveler, the family traveler, the just the found adventure travel. I think people are going to go and be feeling comfortable going to the places that have much more of a unique identity. They have more of the experiential immersive feel. And I think at the end of the day hospitality is going to be turning away from that traditional just hotel box that we all are so accustomed with and not to name any brands. I know I've picked on Marriott, sorry, Marriott. But at the end of the day there's a ton of different. These like large hotel corporate chains like I think Marriott to give them a kudos. They have done a good job of splintering their brands. They've got the autograph collection, they've got the Romanos, you know, they're beginning to understand that uniquely independent branded concepts that have this more of a boutique type feel that has more of this experiential piece and component to uh, it. They're basically trying to compete and portray themselves as an independently owned boutique hotel. So the best part is as an independently owned boutique hotel or glamping property, anything along those lines, you don't have to make it up, you don't have to create this facade. So uh, I think right now they know like these big guys know that they're getting like they're basically taking their feet out from underneath them as being the small guys. We're creating more of a better experience, we're creating better customer service, we're creating a better memory that people go home with that they post about online. Most importantly post about, they write about, they tell their friends about. Most people don't go, stay at these big box hotels and come home like I had the greatest stay at the Holiday Inn last week. But everyone comes home and they, they tell the story about the, the unique adventure that they, they captured and found and went. And you know, it's discovery is a huge part of it. I think people like to discover something new. They want to go to somewhere that people haven't been, they don't want to go. And I think you can even see the American traveler doing that in Europe now. You're like hotbed spots have become like they're still hot but you're still in um, like the ancillary islands of the Greek islands. A good example they said Mykonos and Santorini are like 20, 30% down. Whereas you got Crete and Spetsies and some of these other islands that are having an increased rate of American occupancy because people are on this discovery path. So I think in the hospitality world it's, it's, it's changing. We just got to make sure as the small players in the, in the world and in the game that we're going to take advantage of the opportunity we have to basically capture those brand loyal customers and not let the big players rebrand and subsidize their branding and make them have appear to be the same as us. We've got to make sure that it's a clear separation of what our. And I think the more you can be personable in your connection and your communication rather than being more AI bot driven is going to help drive that message home. So uh, I think the hospitality space, it's a huge, it's a huge growing, changing world right now. But I think there is a huge growth opportunity for the smaller people to lean into who they truly are. No reason to try and combat with the large players. Now, be yourself. Be, like, ostentatiously unique and go for it.

Speaker A: And on that note, Kenny, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I'm definitely going to see you again soon.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you, Sarah. Look forward to.