E369 - Embracing AI: Revolutionizing Digital Marketing Agencies with Karen Hite

Hey there, boss. This is Jeff Mendelsohn, host of the One Big Tip podcast, and I am so excited to announce my new Agents of Pod coaching program, where I teach you how to fast track your lead gen by having more conversations with your targeted clients, even if you have no list, audience, or paid ads. Head on over to agentsofpod.com slash hero, and let me show you how to be the superhero in your own business.

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My name is Jeff Mendelsohn, and this is the One Big Tip Podcast. My guest today is Karen Haidt. Karen is the co-owner of Haidt Digital. She also leads a community of expert digital marketers called Master Hackers.

Her true passion lies in developing innovative solutions to complex problems for digital marketing agencies. Karen is passionate about helping business owners find clarity and balance, drawing on her background in operations and CRM implementation. With her husband, JC, Karen founded Height Digital, which is now a franchise model with 22 US franchise locations and about 200 employees. Karen also organizes a yearly event for agency owners called the Commitment Summit.

She is motivated by her family and driven to make a positive impact everywhere they can see. She strives to be a role model, embodying fearlessness, passion, and a commitment to making a difference through serving others. So this is going to be an excellent conversation today. My friend, Karen, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. I'm super excited. Obviously I care a lot about you and the relationship we've been able to build. So I'm really just pumped to have this conversation with you.

Oh, shucks. Those on the podcast won't be able to see me blush, but I'm definitely blushing right now. Karen, do me a favor. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what makes you so awesome.

Oh my goodness. Um, I think just what makes me awesome, this is a very difficult question sometimes for somebody introverted, but I think what makes me awesome is that I really want to see people succeed. And I really want to see people, um, live their best lives. And if I can help in any way, I feel like that's just that what, that's what brings me joy.

You know, what's interesting is that, uh, uh, what people may not know is that I went to visit the heights in uh in managua um in january january of this year and one of the things that really impressed me not only about your business but but also the way you care and and nurture the people that are around you you know like the employees the contractors you know you you guys strive to create this corporate culture which is so which is so inclusive and makes everyone feel loved and you know, his family.

And that's one of the things that, you know, you don't find a lot of anymore. You know, a lot of businesses, a lot of businesses are solely focused on, on making a profit, right? Obviously profit is a big, you know, is a big motivator, but if the people that are working for you are not happy or they don't feel fulfilled, who cares? Right.

And that's one of the things that I found from you guys that, you know, not only do you, do you talk about these concepts, but you also live them and breathe them, which I thought was really great. Thank you so much. That's so sweet. Tell us a little bit about Hyte Digital's mission.

I think that's something that people really need to understand here. You guys really went against the grain by creating a digital marketing agency franchise as opposed to just growing vertically in terms of getting more clients or expanding headcount. And there's a very nuanced view to what you guys are doing to the exclusion of everyone else. What is that all about?

How'd you guys come up with that? Yeah, honestly, I cannot tell you that we had an idea from the beginning that's honestly, we've just been so flexible throughout our journey. And that's where we were led to. As I was doing implementations for Salesforce in the past, I ran into the franchise model.

I used to do like this implementations for franchises for a case or specifically. So I got to like meet the model. And obviously, like JC and I were always like talking about ideas and just business like that. We're very entrepreneurship and what we do and we had height.

And so we're just thinking, you know, like this could be a way to be able to provide additional support to the agencies that we were working with, because we used to have a white label model in the beginning. Right. So we just decided to like test this out. we were very big on safety fail experiments.

And we were definitely like up for, you know, just like, let's see, like, let's, let's figure this out. And honestly, I never thought that not that I didn't think that it was going to like be a, a sort of like a, something that was needed, but, you know, we were just up for the challenge and in two years, you know, to be able to accomplish this together with with our franchisees has been like really cool to see you know all of the all of the growth that we have all had you know through this journey especially the team.

I think like we have all been so amazed. We've lived like nine lives in like those two years with everything, you know, like, cause it is very different. It can be very challenging. So, so yeah, I think we just like have always been flexible and would always been up for the challenges and, and just trying to like do something that adds value to people.

Thank you so much for explaining that. You know, one of the things I also found very interesting about your model is that you guys really are on the forefront of what drives digital agencies, how they get clients, what they can do to improve processes. You know, CRMs are a big part of that, right? You know, being able to, you know, not only collect all the leads, but implement the the automation and the, you know, the processes that go into serving those clients and producing, you know, producing the reports and of course, producing the results that they need.

Right. So one of the things that that does is that it really drives you guys to think out of the box, like, how are we going to make this happen? You know, what's something new and exciting that, you know, and what technologies should we, should we be thinking about, about implementing? because, you know, just within the CRM world, you know, you have 15 different products to choose from, you know, from simple to overly complex to, you know, overly useful and, you know, everything in between.

Right. So one of the things that I was really interested in is understanding how you guys are adopting, you know, some of the newer stuff that's coming out. One of them, you know, one of them is the adoption of artificial intelligence, right? So everyone's talking about chat GPT, like, Oh my God, I can use this thing to plan my trip to Amsterdam.

And I can use this thing to, you know, I can write letters to my wife now with this, and I can send letters to, you know, I can send emails to, you know, to my prospects and change it up. And, you know, it's also great. Right. But, you know, one of the, one of the more interesting things about trying to use this is that there's so much talk about why it's interesting.

Right. And people are trying to create different types of training and how to use it and how do you make it work for this business and that business, you know, if you put garbage into it, you're going to get garbage out. Right. And one of the more interesting things about this is that if you can master how to use this technology, it, it has the possibility of saving you a boatload of time.

Right. Absolutely. Talk to me a little bit about your journey, about what you have, uh, what you have discovered, you know, when first diving into this and then what was that light bulb moment? Like when you were like, Oh my God, this is going to transform everything.

I need to clear the plate and I need to, I need to implement this in my business. How did that look? You know, I I'll definitely tell you, I was not one of those people to be like, Oh, like AI is out. Like, let me go and like dive in fully.

Like I remember one of my friends, David, that you, that you met here in Nicaragua. Um, he was like, as soon as Chad to PT came out, like, it was like, okay, you need to test it. I was like, no, thank you. Like I don't, I got time for that.

Yeah. Shiny objects syndrome. Like I'm not going to fall in for that. Right.

Um, it was until I was actually like preparing for a mastermind, one of our mastermind sessions that I was talking about creating in-person events that I was like, let me play with this a little bit. Let me see what it can do. Um, it was actually after we had one of our speakers to do their whole presentation on chat GPT that I thought, okay, like there might be some potential to it. So I went in there and what I decided was like, let me test this out and see if I can come up with a presentation a lot quicker.

And like, actually I implemented this with creating an event. So like, I just took an example of like something that enjoy, which is the intensives. That's how we met. Right.

And so I was just like, okay, how can I make this a lot easier for me as I'm preparing and a lot more impactful, You know, how can I benefit from this so that it can be just the best thing ever? Right. So that's when I first started to take AI. And I've been like pleasantly surprised.

And I totally agree with you when you say that it really gives you what you put into it. So if you don't really know how to use it, you have to play with it for a little bit so you can get stuff out of it that is going to be cool for you to implement. And I will say it's not something I still don't believe that it's going to like fully take on the jobs of people. Like that's not where we're at yet.

But I do think that this is meant for us to like to save a lot of time and let's use it as a tool to help us in our day to day. So looking at this from a digital from a digital agency perspective, what are some of the ways that they can use this in practice? Not just the oh, you can do your flight plans with it or, you know, you know, some of the things like let's talk. about, you know, actual real world examples of how you've used it and how it was able to improve.

You were able to improve your business. How did that look? So I'll tell you, like from the digital marketing perspective, we've had a couple of things that we're looking into. For example, how do we help with our content team?

So instead of like focusing on hiring, you know, too many people, like now we're focusing on how do we help our current, our current content team to be able to write quicker, to be able to brainstorm some ideas in there and just take that and make it even better. When it comes to digital marketing, we were actually looking at SEO. We had one of our master hacker members come and share with us how he was using this tool ChatGPT to create the right prompts for SEO So that another great tool for you to use But I believe that anything that you do, you have to test.

I think in my opinion, like the way that it has helped me the most is with organizing events. So what I've done is that as I'm focusing, and this is something that we're actually talking right now in our digital agency hacker group, right? Like we talked about like how to create your own in-person events, Because I think like one of the things that we struggle with a lot when it comes to our businesses is how do we really become the authority in whatever niche and whatever thing we're focusing on?

And creating those in-person opportunities allows you to be able to break bread with people, to be able to build those relationships. I mean, like just from one intensive, I was able to get a great friend, which is you, right, Jeff? So I was just like really excited about being able to use this tool to help people create that. So what I have been implementing specifically is on how do you create the agenda?

How do you create? So let's say you have a topic for something that you feel comfortable sharing value on. How do you use AI to go ahead and define the topics, define what are the pain points that these people have in this industry? So it gives you that.

And then you say, okay, based on these pain points, let's create an agenda. It literally gives you even like the breaks that you have to have because it looks into like what other events have been done. so instead of you having to like go into an excel and just type every single thing you just create that command and just say transform this into an agenda and create it in excel a spreadsheet type of looks like and just copy and paste so it literally did that and then what i decided is like i want to go even deeper than that how i can create from this agenda the copy for the funnel how can i create the copy for the post and then based on also the agenda how can i create a workbook that would allow my attendees to make the most out of this event.

So like at every session, let's say I had a topic on finances, right? So how can I create a workbook that I could send in advance or have it printed out so people were able to like pay attention to what the speakers were going to talk about? So it really just like in a matter of minutes allowed me to create the whole plan for an event. And, you know, like just like super quick.

And then obviously I added my personal touch. And then I focus more on like adding value to that agenda, to that organization from the operations standpoint to make it even more impactful. You know, one of my prejudices against using technology, right? And I'll be the first to tell you, I suffer from shiny object syndrome worse than anybody, right?

But one of my prejudices for this was, you know, I tried this new product called Jarvis, right? And I'm actually dating myself because they since changed their name, I think, to Jasper or something. And one of the things that really bugged me was that a lot of people, you know, you go on YouTube and everyone's like, you got to use this tool. You got to use this tool.

Right. And I tried to do exactly like they said, type in the sentence and you'll get this out. I typed in that exact same sentence and I got crap out of it. Right.

And I was like, why am I paying a hundred bucks for this? Right. Why am I doing this? Like it was, it, it took me out of my, not only to take me out of my comfort zone, but it took me out of focus.

Right. Cause not only did I have to think about the prompts in order to get something into it. Right. Then I had to do all of this massive editing in order to, uh, you know, in order to get something out of it.

I'm like, I should just, I should just pay a writer. Right. Cause I value my time. Right now.

Granted, I'm going back about two or three years talking about this. Right. And really the nail in the coffin for me was that I, um, I thought I was going to be slick and go to Fiverr and commission someone to help me write an ebook. So I wrote out this like five page outline of, you know, all the bullet points I wanted to hit.

She comes back to me and she gives me this, you know, this, uh, this 20 page, you know, just, you know, like mini book, you know, based on the outline, like how to start a podcast, you know, in 2022, something like that. Right. Yeah. I think that the only sentence I was able to use was the first one.

Everything else was like, was such crap. And I was like, no, like, I'm like, did you really just use AI to do this? Cause that's not what I paid you for. Right.

Like I, I didn't need to pay you $500 to write me an ebook, you know, just to find out that you did it, you know, in 10 minutes on Jarvis. Right. And for me, it just really turned me off to the whole prospect. Right.

It was really just, all right, I'm not going to do this anymore. Now, granted, you know, fast forward, you know, 2023 and we're, you know, now we have a lot of, the tools are a lot better to do this. Right. Where do you see this going?

Right. So you already said like, you know, like, I don't see this replacing my content team anytime soon. Yeah. Right.

But, but there is going to be a tectonic shift, right? Yeah. What is, what do you see that looking like? Not only for your agency, but for, you know, for the big, you know, the bigger question of marketing in general.

I think just efficiency. I think that's the main thing that we're going to be able to get out of this. Like we're looking at the way that we do our day to day, even even the way that I work with some of my teammates. Today, we were just having a conversation on an email that had to be sent out that is like sort of like a very interesting topic, like or a very detailed thing that we need to like send out for one of our clients.

And we like why don we just use AI to like get the first like you know sort of like the script for how this email is going to look like And based on that we can build it out And it was very interesting because like that is something that we have taken us like hours to do you know just like how do like looking at a blank space you know just like okay how do I even start this conversation? So just like requesting that from from AI, I think that's just something that it's super helpful.

So like that efficiency to be able to save time, I think the most the impact that I'm getting that we're all going to see is that, you know, there's activities in our day to day that really do not require us to like do it ourselves. Now, where can we add value and just sort of like becoming more efficient in how we use our time and the skills that we all have. Some people are like very creative when it comes to like the writing. Amazing.

Let's just save some time in like that first like draft and then just add to that. And I do think I'm not the best at, you know, just giving the prompts. I have learned a lot from just using the tool, but what I would say is just like do it based on the need and do not confuse it for a shiny object because i think like that is when it becomes really discouraging if you don't have like something like that is going to be um very helpful for you today in your day today um if you're just playing with it then yeah like i mean you're gonna get whatever you put into it so i think just efficiency overall you know that uh that was actually a great point you just made that if you're just gonna play with it like you're going to get playful stuff back.

And if you don't have an end game in mind, if you don't have, you know, something to look for, you know, something to look for, this is the result I am looking for. How do I achieve this result? This will remain a shiny object, right? And it'll be something that you're not going to use.

And, you know, maybe you, you know, or you may not use it to your full potential. Now, you know, is this something that you'll be able to, you know, like I said, you know, replace people and all that maybe, but, but I think also those were probably the people that needed to be replaced anyways. Right. You know, that's one of the things that I, you know, that I think about because we do have, you know, stronger and weaker people on our teams and, you know, we want to be able to help everybody, but at the same time, you know, we all have businesses to run and we want to, you know, we want to help our teams get the most amount of efficiency, you know, out of them.

And if that means giving them a tool that, you know, does 80% of the writing, then they just need to edit it. I'm game. Why not? You know, but, you know, just make sure that you're doing it in a way that, uh, that they are going to be able to be productive and using all that time savings to actually do something else that impacts the business.

So Karen, thank you so much for sharing that. How can they learn? How can the people on this podcast, learn more about you and where can they reach out to you directly if they want to learn more? Yeah, I would say, you know, like obviously reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn, of course, since we're in my profile over here.

But definitely I want to make an invitation for everybody to join us in the commitment summit. So like we are very much about intentional, like just face-to-face relationships. That's the one thing AI, it's not going to be able to take away from us. It's just like building those human relationships.

And I think what a better way of doing that than in Costa Rica. So we're actually coming all together next month. It's going to be 200 people. You can check the link in there for the commitment summit.

com to find out the speakers, but really just agency owners coming together in Costa Rica with amazing speakers like John Maxwell, Molly Pittman, Kevin Harrington, Rachel Miller, and so many more to talk about how to continue to grow in a balanced way. So if you are interested in really getting to meet not only myself, but all these amazing speakers and our attendees join us at the Commitment Summit in Costa Rica next month. I love it. Karen, thank you so much for joining me.

It's been a lot of fun. I love nerding out on this stuff. And I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today. Thank you so much, Jeff, for the invitation.

I love you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the One Big Tip podcast. If you're a six to eight figure entrepreneur, business coach, or speaker who would like to be on this show, we need to talk.

The audience for this podcast is hungry for experts and professionals who want to share their knowledge with this world. So if you're ready to share your actionable and measurable One Big Tip, please go to onebigtip.com slash guest and let's get your story out there. I am also crazy excited to announce my new Agents of Pod coaching program.

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