May 21, 2025 • 32 mins
Welcome back to Digital Coffee: Marketing Brew! In this episode, host Brett Deister sits down with Ivan Vislavskiy—CEO and co-founder of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency—to dive deep into the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing and AI. Ivan shares his firsthand insights on how artificial intelligence is transforming everything from content creation to search engine optimization, automation, and lead qualification. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, you’ll learn why harnessing AI is no longer optional if you want to stay relevant and competitive. Plus, Ivan explains the growing importance of expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T), the changing rules of SEO, and what the future might hold as the next generation of consumers turns to new search platforms like TikTok and AI chatbots. Grab your coffee (or tea!) and get ready for a caffeinated chat packed with practical advice and actionable strategies to future-proof your marketing game.
Speaker Bio:
Ivan Vislavskiy is a forward-thinking marketing professional who has closely followed the rise of AI technology in his field. Even before generative AI tools like ChatGPT became mainstream, Ivan participated in industry roundtables where marketers discussed both the potential and risks of AI. Once tools like ChatGPT gained popularity, Ivan and his team began integrating them into their workflow, particularly for content development, keyword research, and SEO tasks. However, Ivan remains cautious about relying exclusively on AI-generated content due to concerns about search engine devaluation and authenticity. To balance efficiency with quality, he oversees a process where AI-generated drafts are carefully reviewed and personalized by human subject matter experts, ensuring all content meets high standards and resonates with audiences.
3 Fun Facts:
- Ivan Vislavskiy enjoys both coffee and tea, starting his mornings with coffee and switching to green tea midday, then winding down with herbal tea at night.
- Ivan's agency, Comrade Digital Marketing, built their own AI-powered system to analyze and qualify client leads by reviewing transcripts from chats, forms, and calls.
- Ivan predicts video marketing will be vital for SEO dominance in the near future, but points out most of his legal clients are too busy to create video content themselves.
Key Themes:
- AI’s vital role in digital marketing
- Balancing human expertise with AI content
- Google devaluing generic AI-generated content
- Automation of internal marketing processes
- Importance of specialization for agencies
- SEO diversification across multiple platforms
- The growing necessity of video marketing
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Marketing space, if you're not using AI just yet,
you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement it within
your process, within your processes, how to
tech enable your product, yours, you know, being a service
with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna be irrelevant
soon.
(00:32):
That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital
Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Deister. If you could please subscribe to
this podcast and all your favorite podcasts, you have to do a five star review.
It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. But
this week, we're gonna talk about digital marketing and AI, the thing that we can
never get away from ever ever. It's I mean, AI is
(00:54):
great to a certain extent, but we always have to talk about it. But with
me, I've Ivan, he's the CEO and cofounder of
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. He's a
respected digital marketing firm with prominent locations in
Chicago, Miami, and Austin. Recognized for his
visionary leadership, Ivan steers the company with a strategic focus that
(01:16):
keeps it at the forefront of industry trends with consist
with consistently exceeding client
expectations. Welcome to the show, Ivan. Well, thank
you so much, Brad. I'm glad to be here. Yes. The first question is on
my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Actually, both.
I like my coffee in the morning to get my energy low
(01:38):
up. And then midday, I usually go for,
green teacup as well. And then at night, I could I
could easily go with decaffeinated, you know, something
herbal. Let's call that fake coffee, but, I mean, it's each his own.
Yeah. But it goes well.
And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a
(02:01):
little bit more about what you do? Absolutely.
So as you mentioned already, I am the
c o CEO and one of the partners at Comrade Digital
Marketing. We, at Comrade, we help,
local service businesses grow using inbound marketing
strategies. We're truly experts
(02:23):
in search engine marketing, and we focus on three main
pillars. First, creating high performance websites that are
built for, conversions. Second pillar
is SEO and content marketing, and finally, a, paid
search that attracts top of the funnel potential customers.
Got you. And how has AI transformed digital
(02:45):
marketing strategies in the recent year, and what emerging AI technologies do
you see as a game changer for the industry? So
definitely AI has been a talk for quite some time. Even
before CHAD GPT, I was part of
roundtable, where various,
marketers were concerned with, potential power of
(03:07):
AI because of, all the developments, that were happening.
As soon as CHAD g CHAD GPT became popular,
obviously, we started using it as one of the tools.
We, number one, obviously, we use
it in content development, keyword research, and some of the
SEO deliverables. We don't write content
(03:30):
specifically with the help of KGPT
exclusively because we, we're concerned that eventually
Google is gonna get rid of, or is going to devalue all the
content that's generated by the robots. You know? And there are
ways to fake it. There are ways to make it more human, you know, and
so on. But our approach is we
(03:52):
use content editors who are real people, right,
and who are subject matter experts who review the drafts of the
content that's generated with, specs that are provided
by our team, and all the content that's then generated with
JetGPT, and then personalize it at various
necessary points and so on to ensure that it it it's,
(04:15):
you know, personal. The tone of voice is right.
It represents our customers. We we
say what we wanna say in the piece. Right? And we are very
deep in our piece. So we we feed, let's say,
ChatGPT or some of the, you know, AI, tools that we use for
content generation with very specific, very detailed
(04:37):
information as far as here's what we need to explain in this topic.
Here's why we're better than, let's say, our competitors. Here's how our process
is different from our competitors and so on. So at the end, our
piece of content is not generic, and that's what most of,
marketers get nowadays is they quickly generate a piece.
(04:58):
It's very generic. It's like many other pieces of content that's
generated by the same AI, and it doesn't have any
value. We believe that this content is no longer going to be,
prioritized by Google going to be devalued. So that's
obviously area where we had to jump with our, you know, with
AI because why wouldn't we? I mean, that's it saves us ton of
(05:21):
time. It provides us with ability to be more cost
effective. We, you know, had to
let, let go of few writers that were no longer
efficient. Instead, we're focused more on content editing
and so on. And then secondly, we use AI for our
internal automation processes, which, you know, AI
(05:43):
is great when it comes to repetitive processes or repetitive pieces
of work. So one of the areas where we have implemented,
AI successfully, which is great, we
every single month, we provide a report to our client,
where we explain what was done for the previous
(06:03):
month, in terms of activities as well
as what kind of results we generated over the past month. In that
report, we usually provide a breakdown of how many
marketing qualified leads we generated for specific
channels. Let's say it's paid search or SEO and so on.
So we have team members that manually
(06:25):
review every single lead, qualified it,
and then, you know, tally it up altogether and
put it all in the in the form of a report for our client.
Using AI as sort of a machine learning
algorithm that can do it for us and,
replace, human beings, we build our own system
(06:48):
that actually captures all of the leads, reviews
the transcript of every single lead that comes through a
form of chat, form, or phone call,
and then analyzes, hey. Is this a lead, or is this some sort
of solicitation or repeat customer? Or
maybe, you know, some some someone else. And if it's a lead,
(07:11):
well, is this a good lead? Is this a three star lead, or is this
a two star lead? Or, you know, we don't have enough information to,
qualify it properly. So we we have the system that
does it for all of our clients, and we have a crisp reports that
demonstrate to our clients true ROI of our marketing
services based on actual factual data. I mean, it's
(07:34):
funny that you say Google's gonna be devaluing AI written stuff, but
they have their own AI called Gemini that writes the stuff for them.
So I feel like it's kind of a weird strategy for
them since they already have their own AI. Do it now. I
do say don't don't abuse it. But let's be honest.
We all kinda wanna automate a lot of things. Maybe we should look at
(07:56):
more blog posts a little bit more closely. We all we all
wanna automate more things than we we don't. And blog
posts are some ways I mean, for podcasters, show notes are really the
main thing that we automate quite a bit for with AI because, I mean, that's
the thing that we don't wanna spend the most time on. So, I
mean, it feels weird that Google's doing this, but I also understand
(08:18):
they wanna keep it authentic. But I don't
really know where they're gonna go with this because they do have AI,
and they're limiting AI at the same time. Yeah. And I and I
think, Brett, it's all gonna come down to EAT
factor, which is, you know, going to be very, very I mean, it it already
became super, super important in the, you know,
(08:41):
sort of, what content, Google values the most and
which websites, are being ranked. Because how are you going to
differentiate hundreds, thousands, you know, millions of websites if they're all
going to have the same generic content? The only difference,
Google needs experts. Google needs to show to its
users expert content. So how do you know which content is that
(09:03):
you know, was provided by expert? Well, by SIEM,
if the website has affiliation with, you know,
an expert author. We specialize on working with
lawyers a lot and, lawyers' health care and home services.
Home for home services, it's probably not as, not as important.
Well, but for health care and legal, it's
(09:26):
vital to have a content be provided by an expert
with the, you know, right expertise. Otherwise,
the this content can be harmful in some sort
in some sense. Right? So,
when when you work on content, let's say, using, you know, AI
tools like chat GPT and so on, I would certainly advise
(09:49):
you to ensure that you're investing in promoting
your expertise. Showing it to the Google that, you know,
it's worth listening to you because you've got, you're the
subject matter expert. Agreed. I mean, it it varies between different
industries. I mean, for, like, digital marketing blog posts,
a written by AI may be fine because, I mean, it's marketing.
(10:12):
You should always check it. But, yeah, for, like, laws, lawyers, and, like,
medical stuff, probably should actually have a human
actually be writing that content instead. I do I do think
it varies between industry and in the industry. 100%.
Yeah. If it's more generic, like, we have some
ecomm clients, and let's say we need to generate content
(10:34):
for thousands of SKUs based on specifications
and so on. That's a really easy, repetitive task. You
can easily offload it to AI, and AI will do a great job.
And you will probably save yourself, you know, hundreds of
hours by not writing yourself.
But if if it comes to topics like
(10:58):
health care, for instance, or, you know, legal for that matter
or anything that where EET is super super
important and even if you
use AI as your, you know, content generation
tool, make sure you feed it with the information first. Make
sure that AI is not just writing based on the data it
(11:19):
gets from all the resources and all the websites out there because it's
going to be super generic. Fill it with very specific
data. Explain your thought process.
And, imagine that someone is asking you a very specific question. Like, hey.
What would you do in this case or that case? How would you respond to
them? Feed this information to AI so that AI can provide a
(11:41):
more detailed, more crisp answer. Gotcha. And so,
I mean, moving on to, like, what are some of the
unconventional digital marketing's tactics that you found to
be surprisingly effective? Well, we always stick to the foundation. Right?
The foundation is, you need to make sure your
your content has a great quality. If it's not,
(12:04):
then most likely your dwell time is not going
to be good. And, Google will see it and Google deprioritize
those websites. Right? And things like backlinks.
Backlinks are super important still. I mean, it's it's the fundamental
piece. We see definitely a shift
in which backlinks work nowadays versus a year
(12:26):
ago. So we we prioritize
more of, citations and getting quotes from
the various, high quality, places
that have very high rankings. In the past, we would just
buy a ton of links from industry specific websites.
You know, mid tier link links, not very expensive, and it would
(12:49):
do the job. Now it doesn't work quite as well.
So we we have to rely on more of a organic backlinks.
So for many of our clients, what we do is we have all kinds
of statistics. For us, we do that as well. For
instance, we have blog posts, that are very
appealing to, places that cite our information.
(13:12):
So I was like, digital marketing stats. According to Comrade,
so and so many, websites are using blah blah blah.
So we generate those, articles, so that our
pieces can be picked up by journalists and so on.
So that's that's, as far as the backlinks. Technical SEO. That's
also fundamental, piece. We,
(13:35):
you know, Google constantly updates its algorithm. And recently, we
noticed that very slow websites have been prioritized quite
heavily. One of our main, websites for one of our
brands, we had have neglected for some time, and it's been working
fine. All of a sudden, it seemed a huge dip. So we
started digging around, and we found that it hasn't been the technology hasn't been
(13:57):
updated, lately. So the core web vitals are,
you know, quite low. They're not passing, so we had to work on that.
So it's it's it all comes down to fundamentals. It's not like
this there's one silver bullet, you know, item that you
can work on, and all of a sudden, it's gonna give you the results. I
(14:18):
AEAT is very important factor too. So,
you know, we we constantly sharpen our knowledge, and we constantly look at, you
know, how's the Google algorithm is reflecting
on the growth bar line websites nowadays, and what do we need to
change in our algorithm? What do we need to change in our process
to, stay on top of the trend?
(14:42):
I don't know if I'm giving you specific enough information. If you wanna dig in,
you know, deeper in any of those areas, I'm happy to. No. It's fine. It
seems like the unconventional is the traditional way.
The traditional way, but still realizing what Google does
nowadays because it it's still quite it it's changing. Right?
With the algorithm changes with, you know, the addition
(15:04):
of AI and so on. Like, you you have to be, you
know, little little more focused. You have to be a little more
specific and a little more intentional. With,
all the AI content now been showing in the Google search results
with search GPT coming out, we
as, SEO specialists, for instance, now faced with the
(15:27):
question, how are we going to make sure that our content is going to
appear in search GPT? Not only Google, but also search
GPT or perplexity, for instance. I don't know if you tested perplexity.
It's not quite as good yet, but I think eventually, it's going to
be a serious, competitor to Google. Yeah. I've I've
tested that, Claude, llama. I've tested quite a bit of the different
(15:50):
models. It for all those models,
especially AI, it depends on what you're gonna use with it. I feel like
sometimes Gemini is better for writing, like, template scripts
than chat, TPG. At times, it's not always one on one,
but like I said, it really depends on what you're asking it because
some are better than others about different things. So it's never like
(16:13):
a one shot. Like, it's always this one's always that good. It's like, oh, it's
good at specific things. But I I think they're
going to be and it's not just me. Everyone highlights the fact
that there's going to be behavioral change of how
users are using search engines and so on.
There are more and more Gen z, users
(16:36):
that are going to Instagram or TikTok, for instance, to
search for information. So we, as marketers, have to
adapt, and that's something that we look at. We're constantly
asking ourselves, hey. What what could put us out of the business in the next
three to five years? And we constantly have to adapt
because I believe the next three to five years are going to be quite
(16:59):
different for us marketers as opposed to
how it was, you know, the last three to five years. So is SEO just
becoming more segregated? Let's say you have TikTok SEO.
You have Pinterest SEO because Pinterest does have kind of their
own search function. You have chat search. You have
Bing. You have Google net. You still have Google, and
(17:21):
then I'm pretty sure YouTube search or whatever else comes out
for the actual SEO of the video side plus the written
side. Plus if there actually is ever SEO
for podcast, which could happen as well. Which could
happen. Yeah. And, now they call it everywhere
search. Used to be Google search. Used to be bank search and so on. Now
(17:43):
they call it everywhere search because you have to clearly
identify who is your target audience and where do
they shop. You know, for
our legal clients, I mean, so far so good. No one is looking
for a lawyer on their Instagram or their TikTok. That's
not gonna happen. They would still go to Google or
(18:05):
maybe search GPT when it becomes more relevant,
right, and going to give out more, proper information.
So we're quite secured there. But for more of a, like,
beauty products or, you know, any any of,
services that are, bought by Gen z,
(18:25):
for instance, audience, you have to figure out other
channels. Yeah. Otherwise, you're gonna lose the share. You're not
gonna become you're not gonna be you're gonna be you're not gonna be relevant.
So that that would be my advice to, any of the
marketing agencies that are thinking about the future and what to do,
(18:46):
that we we all have to watch out for
the max levels of AI because they're going to be a lot more specific
AI algorithms to conquer places, you know, things
like, how do I become more relevant, in Instagram
search, or how do I become more relevant in TikTok search? Yeah. I would
imagine, like, the lawyers and the doctors would be better served
(19:09):
through LinkedIn and through the content through there because
that's more specific to, like, the business side of
things. And since they now have vertical videos, they just switch
from square to vertical. It's probably more important
to figure out how to do the short form content through LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn
has never been a long form content social media site as it is.
(19:32):
Yeah. Unfortunately, we we don't explore much of
LinkedIn, Fred of this, as we should, and you rightfully
highlighted that. We're trying to figure
out what storage GPT is going to bring to the table when it's going to
come out, because I believe fair
amount of users are going to probably start using that. And
(19:55):
we don't know what's gonna, you know, what that's gonna do to Google, how
Google is going to react. I think Google is still going to be very much
relevant because they have, you know, been doing this for
twenty six years, and their content is very
much relevant, very much up to date.
When we've done our searches, with, you know,
(20:17):
AI, perplexity, for instance, it gives
you information, but it's not it's not always accurate
information. Like, it could be outdated information.
It could be, you know, not the intent might be not there.
And Google has done phenomenal job, and I think that would be the differentiated
point moving forward for Google. Always check your work, especially with a
(20:40):
with AI. Right. Right.
I mean, moving into that is just the personalization. How is that gonna play a
part? Because we just kinda talked about the SEO role and how
diversified it's going to be eventually. Is that gonna be even
more important in the next five to ten years where you're just gonna have to
figure out search strategies for all these different places just because
(21:03):
of the generational differences? And, plus, we don't even know what Gen Alpha is gonna
do for search either. That's a really good question.
And, I think it becomes really, really difficult
for generalist agencies. We have been a generalist agency
for for our first twelve years of our, development
(21:23):
of our journey, and it became quite difficult.
When you market an ecom that sells
beauty products or when you market a law firm or when you
market a health care, let's say, meth spot
practice, the behavior is quite different. The target
audience is quite different. The approaches are quite different. So
(21:45):
we we, build a focus
that we need to nest down. And I think that's what in order to be
successful, I think marketing agencies just have
to be just have to find their niche. Just have to figure
out what, you know, what does it mean in terms
of their industry? What does AI going to
(22:07):
do to their industry in the next three to five years? And start
preparing now. Start building towards it. But if
you're a generalist agency, there's no way you can be on top of all of
that. Instead of just saying you're a digital marketing agency,
maybe eventually they should look at being like, hey. We specialize in podcast
marketing. We specialize in AI marketing. We specialize in
(22:30):
SEO, local SEO, or whatever else comes
up. That that could be that could be one way of specializing, or it could
be vertical special specialization. It could be, hey. We
specialize in legal marketing, and we
know everything about that. We know how your
target audience is searching for you. We know how they make decisions.
(22:53):
So we built in, you know, the
process that, you know, builds every single
component, necessary component, in order to capture your audience,
convert your audience, then nurture your audience, and then eventually
sell them your services. That and that's what we're trying to
do. But the reason why we chose legal home service and
(23:15):
health care because the recipe is quite similar, and they're
still very much, local service businesses. EAT
EAT factor is quite important. Right? So
we we're able, so far, generate results with pretty much the
same strategy. In the future, it might not be
possible, so we might have to get even more deeper
(23:38):
and become, you know, specialists, not not
only legal, for instance, but very much in, like, subset
of legal. Let's say, just personal injury or subset of health
care. Let's say, just med spas or
just, eye surgeons, for instance. Right?
Because, you know, once again, there might be different behaviors
(24:00):
within the health care space or within the legal space.
But I think in order to be successful, you have to specialize. You have
to become hyper focused, and you have to
show your expertise. And when you speak with the potential
client or with the existing client, it's really easy to make an
assumption that, wow, he really understands our industry. He really
(24:24):
understands or he really understands, you know, our our gaps,
our our you know, what we're struggling with. And, you
know, the strategist or the specialist really knows how to
get me my results. And, I mean, when we're
talking about SEO and different ones, how important is video marketing going to
start playing when we're talking about SEO and video
(24:47):
and everything? Because everybody loves video. Everybody wants to watch video. I
mean, YouTube isn't popular because it just was YouTube. It's because there's
so much video and so much information you can learn or entertainment
as well. So how important will video marketing
eventually be when it seems like everything's being taken over
by video? Our team believes it's going to be vital in order in order
(25:09):
for you to dominate search. But that's that's going to be one of the personalization
factors. Right? Like, everyone can generate,
content, written content, but not everyone can generate,
an effective video content. If you have both, then you're going to
be a lot more effective and a lot more relevant. As a matter of fact,
you YouTube has been number two search engine for quite some
(25:32):
time and still is very much relevant.
So generating content for YouTube, optimizing content for
YouTube, there's a separate SEO optimization for YouTube videos. Right?
Like, super, super important. The
challenge with that is, for us marketers, if we work with many
clients, like, I'm not gonna lie. Most of
(25:54):
our clients are not going to generate, video content. They
just don't have time. Especially if we talk
about lawyers, for instance, they're just
don't think it's important. They're always busy in the court.
They always tell us, well, this is you know, content generation is your job, but,
obviously, we can't generate video content for them. So that becomes a problem.
(26:17):
How do you make a video content for,
you know, your clients? What what are the ways out there? And I
know there are AI tools in the video
content space that eventually going to help
us do that. Right? With you know, you can just plug in
some script, put a
(26:40):
video or a picture of your client, and then it's gonna look like
that, you know, person is
given the speech. It's not even it's not even that as well, but how will
people react to it when more of that becomes prevalent? Because
I've seen the tools. They do have virtual, like, presenters, I
guess, the best way of saying it that will you can tell what to say
(27:02):
and we'll say it to you, but how will people react to it
when it eventually becomes like a prevalent, mostly good
tool? I don't think they're that good right now. I think they still have just
like AI. They have a ways to go. I've used like AI
generation for video stuff, and the thing I typed in could barely get
it right. And it was just it wasn't good. It's not there yet. Yeah.
(27:24):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 100%. But, eventually, I
mean, if we if we're talking about three to five year horizon
now, I think we'll get there with how fast
the technologists are developing. So for, like,
for, like, those that are in the marketing industry or starting to get in, how
important is it for them to understand how to use AI right now? Because we've
(27:47):
been talking about it a lot, and it and it is a disruptor. Whether we
like it or not, it's a disruptor. Oh, it's a must. Oh, you
if you're in the marketing space, if you're not using AI just
yet, you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement
it within your process, within your processes, how
to tech enable your product, your, you know, being
(28:10):
a service with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna
be irrelevant soon. And, we're we're
going to see acceleration of AI
technology in the next three to five years. That's my prediction, and
I'm more than sure I can bet on it. So if
you're not implementing AI right now, it might be a little too late down the
(28:32):
road. I mean, some some agencies will probably relate you
know, keep the relationships with, happy customers, and
that's gonna work out great for them. But if we're talking about
future, if we're talking about scalability, if we're talking about
ability to acquire new clients in the future,
it's gonna be really hard because they're going to be other marketing
(28:55):
agencies, competitors with an edge over you
being an AI. They can produce content much faster. They can
use AI for personalization. They can use AI for, you know, in the
future for video generation or whatever else for, you
know, newsletters, whatever podcast maybe even.
And that's going to make them a lot more streamlined
(29:19):
and more effective. So they could easily drive the cost
down or they could drive the profitability up. It's up to
them. It's gonna be really, really hard to compete against them if you don't have
that edge. Is there any, like, tips to, like, how
to figure out how to do this? Because, I mean, I remember starting out. I'm
like, I don't know what I'm doing. What how do I do this? I mean,
(29:41):
there's prompts, but you have to tell it the right thing or it won't actually
do the right thing, like, when Google was new. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If
you don't have anyone on your team that's stack savvy, that
likes, you know, that like, likes to go
around, explore things, and can quickly demo, you know,
how AI can benefit your agency. I would advise looking for
(30:02):
roundup table or, meetups,
various agencies. I'm part of two, of those,
this type of meetings where, various,
marketing agency leaders are coming to place and,
share ours, you know, our stories or how we use AI or, you know,
various other subjects. And it can quickly give you some
(30:25):
ideas on how you can implement AI within your agency.
Not only that, you can easily, you know, set up a meeting,
coffee meeting with one of those agencies, and you can ask them, hey. Could you
help me out? Could you, like, share with me how I helped you,
how you implemented it within your practice? Right?
We do it all the time. I get ideas all day long from
(30:48):
those meetings, big or small. And people listening to
this episode, and they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about
you or your company? Yeah. I you can always
email me at
Ivan@comradeweb.com.
You can always, find my LinkedIn profile on my website as
well, on our website, in the about us section. You might
(31:11):
write me a DM, a problem. I'll I'll be happy to respond.
And, you know, any questions you have, happy to
provide value. Any final thoughts for listeners? Tholes and
use AI. Those would be my two final thoughts.
Hopefully, that conversation was clear why. Alright, Ivan.
Thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing brewing, sharing your knowledge on AI and
(31:34):
digital marketing. Thank you, Brett. Thank you for having me here.
And thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your
favorite podcasts in the app. So you have a five star review. It will just
help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. And join me next
week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR industry. All right,
guys, stay safe. Get to understanding AI.
(31:55):
Just look at one and try to figure that one out first and then go
on to the other ones and see you next week later.
Marketing space, if you're not using AI just yet,
you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement it within
your process, within your processes, how to
tech enable your product, yours, you know, being a service
with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna be irrelevant
soon.
(00:32):
That's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital
Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Deister. If you could please subscribe to
this podcast and all your favorite podcasts, you have to do a five star review.
It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. But
this week, we're gonna talk about digital marketing and AI, the thing that we can
never get away from ever ever. It's I mean, AI is
(00:54):
great to a certain extent, but we always have to talk about it. But with
me, I've Ivan, he's the CEO and cofounder of
Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. He's a
respected digital marketing firm with prominent locations in
Chicago, Miami, and Austin. Recognized for his
visionary leadership, Ivan steers the company with a strategic focus that
(01:16):
keeps it at the forefront of industry trends with consist
with consistently exceeding client
expectations. Welcome to the show, Ivan. Well, thank
you so much, Brad. I'm glad to be here. Yes. The first question is on
my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? Actually, both.
I like my coffee in the morning to get my energy low
(01:38):
up. And then midday, I usually go for,
green teacup as well. And then at night, I could I
could easily go with decaffeinated, you know, something
herbal. Let's call that fake coffee, but, I mean, it's each his own.
Yeah. But it goes well.
And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a
(02:01):
little bit more about what you do? Absolutely.
So as you mentioned already, I am the
c o CEO and one of the partners at Comrade Digital
Marketing. We, at Comrade, we help,
local service businesses grow using inbound marketing
strategies. We're truly experts
(02:23):
in search engine marketing, and we focus on three main
pillars. First, creating high performance websites that are
built for, conversions. Second pillar
is SEO and content marketing, and finally, a, paid
search that attracts top of the funnel potential customers.
Got you. And how has AI transformed digital
(02:45):
marketing strategies in the recent year, and what emerging AI technologies do
you see as a game changer for the industry? So
definitely AI has been a talk for quite some time. Even
before CHAD GPT, I was part of
roundtable, where various,
marketers were concerned with, potential power of
(03:07):
AI because of, all the developments, that were happening.
As soon as CHAD g CHAD GPT became popular,
obviously, we started using it as one of the tools.
We, number one, obviously, we use
it in content development, keyword research, and some of the
SEO deliverables. We don't write content
(03:30):
specifically with the help of KGPT
exclusively because we, we're concerned that eventually
Google is gonna get rid of, or is going to devalue all the
content that's generated by the robots. You know? And there are
ways to fake it. There are ways to make it more human, you know, and
so on. But our approach is we
(03:52):
use content editors who are real people, right,
and who are subject matter experts who review the drafts of the
content that's generated with, specs that are provided
by our team, and all the content that's then generated with
JetGPT, and then personalize it at various
necessary points and so on to ensure that it it it's,
(04:15):
you know, personal. The tone of voice is right.
It represents our customers. We we
say what we wanna say in the piece. Right? And we are very
deep in our piece. So we we feed, let's say,
ChatGPT or some of the, you know, AI, tools that we use for
content generation with very specific, very detailed
(04:37):
information as far as here's what we need to explain in this topic.
Here's why we're better than, let's say, our competitors. Here's how our process
is different from our competitors and so on. So at the end, our
piece of content is not generic, and that's what most of,
marketers get nowadays is they quickly generate a piece.
(04:58):
It's very generic. It's like many other pieces of content that's
generated by the same AI, and it doesn't have any
value. We believe that this content is no longer going to be,
prioritized by Google going to be devalued. So that's
obviously area where we had to jump with our, you know, with
AI because why wouldn't we? I mean, that's it saves us ton of
(05:21):
time. It provides us with ability to be more cost
effective. We, you know, had to
let, let go of few writers that were no longer
efficient. Instead, we're focused more on content editing
and so on. And then secondly, we use AI for our
internal automation processes, which, you know, AI
(05:43):
is great when it comes to repetitive processes or repetitive pieces
of work. So one of the areas where we have implemented,
AI successfully, which is great, we
every single month, we provide a report to our client,
where we explain what was done for the previous
(06:03):
month, in terms of activities as well
as what kind of results we generated over the past month. In that
report, we usually provide a breakdown of how many
marketing qualified leads we generated for specific
channels. Let's say it's paid search or SEO and so on.
So we have team members that manually
(06:25):
review every single lead, qualified it,
and then, you know, tally it up altogether and
put it all in the in the form of a report for our client.
Using AI as sort of a machine learning
algorithm that can do it for us and,
replace, human beings, we build our own system
(06:48):
that actually captures all of the leads, reviews
the transcript of every single lead that comes through a
form of chat, form, or phone call,
and then analyzes, hey. Is this a lead, or is this some sort
of solicitation or repeat customer? Or
maybe, you know, some some someone else. And if it's a lead,
(07:11):
well, is this a good lead? Is this a three star lead, or is this
a two star lead? Or, you know, we don't have enough information to,
qualify it properly. So we we have the system that
does it for all of our clients, and we have a crisp reports that
demonstrate to our clients true ROI of our marketing
services based on actual factual data. I mean, it's
(07:34):
funny that you say Google's gonna be devaluing AI written stuff, but
they have their own AI called Gemini that writes the stuff for them.
So I feel like it's kind of a weird strategy for
them since they already have their own AI. Do it now. I
do say don't don't abuse it. But let's be honest.
We all kinda wanna automate a lot of things. Maybe we should look at
(07:56):
more blog posts a little bit more closely. We all we all
wanna automate more things than we we don't. And blog
posts are some ways I mean, for podcasters, show notes are really the
main thing that we automate quite a bit for with AI because, I mean, that's
the thing that we don't wanna spend the most time on. So, I
mean, it feels weird that Google's doing this, but I also understand
(08:18):
they wanna keep it authentic. But I don't
really know where they're gonna go with this because they do have AI,
and they're limiting AI at the same time. Yeah. And I and I
think, Brett, it's all gonna come down to EAT
factor, which is, you know, going to be very, very I mean, it it already
became super, super important in the, you know,
(08:41):
sort of, what content, Google values the most and
which websites, are being ranked. Because how are you going to
differentiate hundreds, thousands, you know, millions of websites if they're all
going to have the same generic content? The only difference,
Google needs experts. Google needs to show to its
users expert content. So how do you know which content is that
(09:03):
you know, was provided by expert? Well, by SIEM,
if the website has affiliation with, you know,
an expert author. We specialize on working with
lawyers a lot and, lawyers' health care and home services.
Home for home services, it's probably not as, not as important.
Well, but for health care and legal, it's
(09:26):
vital to have a content be provided by an expert
with the, you know, right expertise. Otherwise,
the this content can be harmful in some sort
in some sense. Right? So,
when when you work on content, let's say, using, you know, AI
tools like chat GPT and so on, I would certainly advise
(09:49):
you to ensure that you're investing in promoting
your expertise. Showing it to the Google that, you know,
it's worth listening to you because you've got, you're the
subject matter expert. Agreed. I mean, it it varies between different
industries. I mean, for, like, digital marketing blog posts,
a written by AI may be fine because, I mean, it's marketing.
(10:12):
You should always check it. But, yeah, for, like, laws, lawyers, and, like,
medical stuff, probably should actually have a human
actually be writing that content instead. I do I do think
it varies between industry and in the industry. 100%.
Yeah. If it's more generic, like, we have some
ecomm clients, and let's say we need to generate content
(10:34):
for thousands of SKUs based on specifications
and so on. That's a really easy, repetitive task. You
can easily offload it to AI, and AI will do a great job.
And you will probably save yourself, you know, hundreds of
hours by not writing yourself.
But if if it comes to topics like
(10:58):
health care, for instance, or, you know, legal for that matter
or anything that where EET is super super
important and even if you
use AI as your, you know, content generation
tool, make sure you feed it with the information first. Make
sure that AI is not just writing based on the data it
(11:19):
gets from all the resources and all the websites out there because it's
going to be super generic. Fill it with very specific
data. Explain your thought process.
And, imagine that someone is asking you a very specific question. Like, hey.
What would you do in this case or that case? How would you respond to
them? Feed this information to AI so that AI can provide a
(11:41):
more detailed, more crisp answer. Gotcha. And so,
I mean, moving on to, like, what are some of the
unconventional digital marketing's tactics that you found to
be surprisingly effective? Well, we always stick to the foundation. Right?
The foundation is, you need to make sure your
your content has a great quality. If it's not,
(12:04):
then most likely your dwell time is not going
to be good. And, Google will see it and Google deprioritize
those websites. Right? And things like backlinks.
Backlinks are super important still. I mean, it's it's the fundamental
piece. We see definitely a shift
in which backlinks work nowadays versus a year
(12:26):
ago. So we we prioritize
more of, citations and getting quotes from
the various, high quality, places
that have very high rankings. In the past, we would just
buy a ton of links from industry specific websites.
You know, mid tier link links, not very expensive, and it would
(12:49):
do the job. Now it doesn't work quite as well.
So we we have to rely on more of a organic backlinks.
So for many of our clients, what we do is we have all kinds
of statistics. For us, we do that as well. For
instance, we have blog posts, that are very
appealing to, places that cite our information.
(13:12):
So I was like, digital marketing stats. According to Comrade,
so and so many, websites are using blah blah blah.
So we generate those, articles, so that our
pieces can be picked up by journalists and so on.
So that's that's, as far as the backlinks. Technical SEO. That's
also fundamental, piece. We,
(13:35):
you know, Google constantly updates its algorithm. And recently, we
noticed that very slow websites have been prioritized quite
heavily. One of our main, websites for one of our
brands, we had have neglected for some time, and it's been working
fine. All of a sudden, it seemed a huge dip. So we
started digging around, and we found that it hasn't been the technology hasn't been
(13:57):
updated, lately. So the core web vitals are,
you know, quite low. They're not passing, so we had to work on that.
So it's it's it all comes down to fundamentals. It's not like
this there's one silver bullet, you know, item that you
can work on, and all of a sudden, it's gonna give you the results. I
(14:18):
AEAT is very important factor too. So,
you know, we we constantly sharpen our knowledge, and we constantly look at, you
know, how's the Google algorithm is reflecting
on the growth bar line websites nowadays, and what do we need to
change in our algorithm? What do we need to change in our process
to, stay on top of the trend?
(14:42):
I don't know if I'm giving you specific enough information. If you wanna dig in,
you know, deeper in any of those areas, I'm happy to. No. It's fine. It
seems like the unconventional is the traditional way.
The traditional way, but still realizing what Google does
nowadays because it it's still quite it it's changing. Right?
With the algorithm changes with, you know, the addition
(15:04):
of AI and so on. Like, you you have to be, you
know, little little more focused. You have to be a little more
specific and a little more intentional. With,
all the AI content now been showing in the Google search results
with search GPT coming out, we
as, SEO specialists, for instance, now faced with the
(15:27):
question, how are we going to make sure that our content is going to
appear in search GPT? Not only Google, but also search
GPT or perplexity, for instance. I don't know if you tested perplexity.
It's not quite as good yet, but I think eventually, it's going to
be a serious, competitor to Google. Yeah. I've I've
tested that, Claude, llama. I've tested quite a bit of the different
(15:50):
models. It for all those models,
especially AI, it depends on what you're gonna use with it. I feel like
sometimes Gemini is better for writing, like, template scripts
than chat, TPG. At times, it's not always one on one,
but like I said, it really depends on what you're asking it because
some are better than others about different things. So it's never like
(16:13):
a one shot. Like, it's always this one's always that good. It's like, oh, it's
good at specific things. But I I think they're
going to be and it's not just me. Everyone highlights the fact
that there's going to be behavioral change of how
users are using search engines and so on.
There are more and more Gen z, users
(16:36):
that are going to Instagram or TikTok, for instance, to
search for information. So we, as marketers, have to
adapt, and that's something that we look at. We're constantly
asking ourselves, hey. What what could put us out of the business in the next
three to five years? And we constantly have to adapt
because I believe the next three to five years are going to be quite
(16:59):
different for us marketers as opposed to
how it was, you know, the last three to five years. So is SEO just
becoming more segregated? Let's say you have TikTok SEO.
You have Pinterest SEO because Pinterest does have kind of their
own search function. You have chat search. You have
Bing. You have Google net. You still have Google, and
(17:21):
then I'm pretty sure YouTube search or whatever else comes out
for the actual SEO of the video side plus the written
side. Plus if there actually is ever SEO
for podcast, which could happen as well. Which could
happen. Yeah. And, now they call it everywhere
search. Used to be Google search. Used to be bank search and so on. Now
(17:43):
they call it everywhere search because you have to clearly
identify who is your target audience and where do
they shop. You know, for
our legal clients, I mean, so far so good. No one is looking
for a lawyer on their Instagram or their TikTok. That's
not gonna happen. They would still go to Google or
(18:05):
maybe search GPT when it becomes more relevant,
right, and going to give out more, proper information.
So we're quite secured there. But for more of a, like,
beauty products or, you know, any any of,
services that are, bought by Gen z,
(18:25):
for instance, audience, you have to figure out other
channels. Yeah. Otherwise, you're gonna lose the share. You're not
gonna become you're not gonna be you're gonna be you're not gonna be relevant.
So that that would be my advice to, any of the
marketing agencies that are thinking about the future and what to do,
(18:46):
that we we all have to watch out for
the max levels of AI because they're going to be a lot more specific
AI algorithms to conquer places, you know, things
like, how do I become more relevant, in Instagram
search, or how do I become more relevant in TikTok search? Yeah. I would
imagine, like, the lawyers and the doctors would be better served
(19:09):
through LinkedIn and through the content through there because
that's more specific to, like, the business side of
things. And since they now have vertical videos, they just switch
from square to vertical. It's probably more important
to figure out how to do the short form content through LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn
has never been a long form content social media site as it is.
(19:32):
Yeah. Unfortunately, we we don't explore much of
LinkedIn, Fred of this, as we should, and you rightfully
highlighted that. We're trying to figure
out what storage GPT is going to bring to the table when it's going to
come out, because I believe fair
amount of users are going to probably start using that. And
(19:55):
we don't know what's gonna, you know, what that's gonna do to Google, how
Google is going to react. I think Google is still going to be very much
relevant because they have, you know, been doing this for
twenty six years, and their content is very
much relevant, very much up to date.
When we've done our searches, with, you know,
(20:17):
AI, perplexity, for instance, it gives
you information, but it's not it's not always accurate
information. Like, it could be outdated information.
It could be, you know, not the intent might be not there.
And Google has done phenomenal job, and I think that would be the differentiated
point moving forward for Google. Always check your work, especially with a
(20:40):
with AI. Right. Right.
I mean, moving into that is just the personalization. How is that gonna play a
part? Because we just kinda talked about the SEO role and how
diversified it's going to be eventually. Is that gonna be even
more important in the next five to ten years where you're just gonna have to
figure out search strategies for all these different places just because
(21:03):
of the generational differences? And, plus, we don't even know what Gen Alpha is gonna
do for search either. That's a really good question.
And, I think it becomes really, really difficult
for generalist agencies. We have been a generalist agency
for for our first twelve years of our, development
(21:23):
of our journey, and it became quite difficult.
When you market an ecom that sells
beauty products or when you market a law firm or when you
market a health care, let's say, meth spot
practice, the behavior is quite different. The target
audience is quite different. The approaches are quite different. So
(21:45):
we we, build a focus
that we need to nest down. And I think that's what in order to be
successful, I think marketing agencies just have
to be just have to find their niche. Just have to figure
out what, you know, what does it mean in terms
of their industry? What does AI going to
(22:07):
do to their industry in the next three to five years? And start
preparing now. Start building towards it. But if
you're a generalist agency, there's no way you can be on top of all of
that. Instead of just saying you're a digital marketing agency,
maybe eventually they should look at being like, hey. We specialize in podcast
marketing. We specialize in AI marketing. We specialize in
(22:30):
SEO, local SEO, or whatever else comes
up. That that could be that could be one way of specializing, or it could
be vertical special specialization. It could be, hey. We
specialize in legal marketing, and we
know everything about that. We know how your
target audience is searching for you. We know how they make decisions.
(22:53):
So we built in, you know, the
process that, you know, builds every single
component, necessary component, in order to capture your audience,
convert your audience, then nurture your audience, and then eventually
sell them your services. That and that's what we're trying to
do. But the reason why we chose legal home service and
(23:15):
health care because the recipe is quite similar, and they're
still very much, local service businesses. EAT
EAT factor is quite important. Right? So
we we're able, so far, generate results with pretty much the
same strategy. In the future, it might not be
possible, so we might have to get even more deeper
(23:38):
and become, you know, specialists, not not
only legal, for instance, but very much in, like, subset
of legal. Let's say, just personal injury or subset of health
care. Let's say, just med spas or
just, eye surgeons, for instance. Right?
Because, you know, once again, there might be different behaviors
(24:00):
within the health care space or within the legal space.
But I think in order to be successful, you have to specialize. You have
to become hyper focused, and you have to
show your expertise. And when you speak with the potential
client or with the existing client, it's really easy to make an
assumption that, wow, he really understands our industry. He really
(24:24):
understands or he really understands, you know, our our gaps,
our our you know, what we're struggling with. And, you
know, the strategist or the specialist really knows how to
get me my results. And, I mean, when we're
talking about SEO and different ones, how important is video marketing going to
start playing when we're talking about SEO and video
(24:47):
and everything? Because everybody loves video. Everybody wants to watch video. I
mean, YouTube isn't popular because it just was YouTube. It's because there's
so much video and so much information you can learn or entertainment
as well. So how important will video marketing
eventually be when it seems like everything's being taken over
by video? Our team believes it's going to be vital in order in order
(25:09):
for you to dominate search. But that's that's going to be one of the personalization
factors. Right? Like, everyone can generate,
content, written content, but not everyone can generate,
an effective video content. If you have both, then you're going to
be a lot more effective and a lot more relevant. As a matter of fact,
you YouTube has been number two search engine for quite some
(25:32):
time and still is very much relevant.
So generating content for YouTube, optimizing content for
YouTube, there's a separate SEO optimization for YouTube videos. Right?
Like, super, super important. The
challenge with that is, for us marketers, if we work with many
clients, like, I'm not gonna lie. Most of
(25:54):
our clients are not going to generate, video content. They
just don't have time. Especially if we talk
about lawyers, for instance, they're just
don't think it's important. They're always busy in the court.
They always tell us, well, this is you know, content generation is your job, but,
obviously, we can't generate video content for them. So that becomes a problem.
(26:17):
How do you make a video content for,
you know, your clients? What what are the ways out there? And I
know there are AI tools in the video
content space that eventually going to help
us do that. Right? With you know, you can just plug in
some script, put a
(26:40):
video or a picture of your client, and then it's gonna look like
that, you know, person is
given the speech. It's not even it's not even that as well, but how will
people react to it when more of that becomes prevalent? Because
I've seen the tools. They do have virtual, like, presenters, I
guess, the best way of saying it that will you can tell what to say
(27:02):
and we'll say it to you, but how will people react to it
when it eventually becomes like a prevalent, mostly good
tool? I don't think they're that good right now. I think they still have just
like AI. They have a ways to go. I've used like AI
generation for video stuff, and the thing I typed in could barely get
it right. And it was just it wasn't good. It's not there yet. Yeah.
(27:24):
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 100%. But, eventually, I
mean, if we if we're talking about three to five year horizon
now, I think we'll get there with how fast
the technologists are developing. So for, like,
for, like, those that are in the marketing industry or starting to get in, how
important is it for them to understand how to use AI right now? Because we've
(27:47):
been talking about it a lot, and it and it is a disruptor. Whether we
like it or not, it's a disruptor. Oh, it's a must. Oh, you
if you're in the marketing space, if you're not using AI just
yet, you have to do it. You have to figure out how to implement
it within your process, within your processes, how
to tech enable your product, your, you know, being
(28:10):
a service with the help of AI because you're gonna you're gonna
be irrelevant soon. And, we're we're
going to see acceleration of AI
technology in the next three to five years. That's my prediction, and
I'm more than sure I can bet on it. So if
you're not implementing AI right now, it might be a little too late down the
(28:32):
road. I mean, some some agencies will probably relate you
know, keep the relationships with, happy customers, and
that's gonna work out great for them. But if we're talking about
future, if we're talking about scalability, if we're talking about
ability to acquire new clients in the future,
it's gonna be really hard because they're going to be other marketing
(28:55):
agencies, competitors with an edge over you
being an AI. They can produce content much faster. They can
use AI for personalization. They can use AI for, you know, in the
future for video generation or whatever else for, you
know, newsletters, whatever podcast maybe even.
And that's going to make them a lot more streamlined
(29:19):
and more effective. So they could easily drive the cost
down or they could drive the profitability up. It's up to
them. It's gonna be really, really hard to compete against them if you don't have
that edge. Is there any, like, tips to, like, how
to figure out how to do this? Because, I mean, I remember starting out. I'm
like, I don't know what I'm doing. What how do I do this? I mean,
(29:41):
there's prompts, but you have to tell it the right thing or it won't actually
do the right thing, like, when Google was new. Yeah. Oh, yeah. If
you don't have anyone on your team that's stack savvy, that
likes, you know, that like, likes to go
around, explore things, and can quickly demo, you know,
how AI can benefit your agency. I would advise looking for
(30:02):
roundup table or, meetups,
various agencies. I'm part of two, of those,
this type of meetings where, various,
marketing agency leaders are coming to place and,
share ours, you know, our stories or how we use AI or, you know,
various other subjects. And it can quickly give you some
(30:25):
ideas on how you can implement AI within your agency.
Not only that, you can easily, you know, set up a meeting,
coffee meeting with one of those agencies, and you can ask them, hey. Could you
help me out? Could you, like, share with me how I helped you,
how you implemented it within your practice? Right?
We do it all the time. I get ideas all day long from
(30:48):
those meetings, big or small. And people listening to
this episode, and they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about
you or your company? Yeah. I you can always
email me at
Ivan@comradeweb.com.
You can always, find my LinkedIn profile on my website as
well, on our website, in the about us section. You might
(31:11):
write me a DM, a problem. I'll I'll be happy to respond.
And, you know, any questions you have, happy to
provide value. Any final thoughts for listeners? Tholes and
use AI. Those would be my two final thoughts.
Hopefully, that conversation was clear why. Alright, Ivan.
Thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing brewing, sharing your knowledge on AI and
(31:34):
digital marketing. Thank you, Brett. Thank you for having me here.
And thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your
favorite podcasts in the app. So you have a five star review. It will just
help with the rankings. Let me know how I am doing. And join me next
week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR industry. All right,
guys, stay safe. Get to understanding AI.
(31:55):
Just look at one and try to figure that one out first and then go
on to the other ones and see you next week later.
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