Niall Devitt: Hello and welcome to the Digital and AI Decoded Podcast, brought to you by the team from Content Plan. My name is Niall Davitt, and today I am joined by my colleagues Dennis and Sinead. Now, Dennis was on the first podcast, so I'm not going to get you to introduce yourself all over again, Dennis, but hi, how are you?

Denis Jastrzebski: Not too bad, not too bad, thank you.

Niall Devitt: And Alicia stepped out. She's on holidays in in Portugal. She sent me a beautiful picture of a a beach during the week and said she had to go to Portugal to to cool down, as it turns out. But in her place today and joining us is Sinead. Hello, Sineade.

Sinéad Walsh: How are you? You well, gentlemen?

Niall Devitt: We're good. So Shanej, seeing as you didn't get to introduce yourself the the last time around or on the first podcast, so you might just give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself, please, and what you do for content planning.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. So within Content Plan, I am a digital marketing and AI trainer, mentor, consultant, but the title field on this program didn't allow me to fit all that in. So that's fair enough. But yeah, basically what I do is I work with clients of all shapes and sizes. I suppose to bring them on in both their digital marketing activities and AI tactics and strategies as well. So yeah. Just take them by the hand and gently lead them through the forest of the modern workplace, I suppose is the nicest way of putting it.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely like us all, Sinead, you're a jack of many trades. but yeah, so just for for the audience or the viewers' point of view, so Sinead obviously delivers a lot of training in particular for us, and I would say she always gets amazing feedback to the point now that a couple of the clients that we deal with, Sinead wasn't available, and I suggested myself as an able replacement, but unfortunately they weren't too keen, they were more than happy to wait for Sinead.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah.

Niall Devitt: So this is podcast number two, folks. This is new to us. We're learning as we go. So something that we mentioned in the first podcast was rather than start with the technology, start with the people. And we talked about why sometimes that's a better way to approach the technology. So, as a kind of a follow-on from that point, today on today's podcast, what I want to talk about is not to start with the technology, but start with the problem because. We all hear this in one guise or another from clients, from people that we work with, people that we train, etc., etc. In other words, they come to us and say the technology is broken or the technology is not doing what it's supposed to do, what it says and the thing. But in actual fact, what's happening is they're using the technology to solve the wrong problem. So one thing that I often say to clients, and I'm sure you'll agree here, is technology can make a good process better. But invariably it's going to make a bad process worse or more messy. So when I suggested this podcast idea to you guys, I I I wasn't sure if you'd be enthusiastic about it, but you certainly were. So both yourself, Sinead and Dennis, were quite enthusiastic. So talk to me about that enthusiasm and why you feel this is a a kind of a valuable or a necessary conversation to have.

Denis Jastrzebski: So for me, I think it's one of the most common problems that we face. So whenever we're approaching any sort of project, whether it's it's something that's going to be once off or something that's ongoing, it's so easy to try to jump to solutions as quickly as possible, especially as we're hearing so many different tools and platforms being advertised all over the place, especially ones that are have AI, have AI now built into them. And it's so easy to think, this is just gonna fix everything that we have. whatever processes that are broken right now, this tool is gonna fix it all for us. We'll save countless hours. We won't have to look at it. but the reality of that is it's it it it brings a business down on a path that's going to to really derail any efforts, any strategy, all that stuff. It's just not gonna work. So you really have to start with basics and conversations at the beginning. So for me, that's something that I'm very enthusiastic about anyway. because to actually have a good result you do need to have that conversation at the beginning before you jump into even talking about any sorts of tools.

Niall Devitt: a and as someone who is specializing on AI with AI for us and obviously working with AI now, you know, pretty much every day and working with clients on AI, question for you, do you think AI is going to exacerbate this problem? In other words, make it worse.

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, I I think it already has. and like we said, all these different platforms, now there's even ten times, twenty times, thirty times the amount of amount of options for choosing a tool that you you want to use. But AI in itself, sometimes if you don't know too much about it, it might feel like a black box. It has all the answers and you kind of give it a a very simple question and it gives you this detailed response. So it must know everything, but it doesn't actually know your specific business use case and so on. So whether that's ChatGPT or any other platform, I think it's really easy to to try to jump into that too early and then just follow whatever strategy or suggestions it comes up with. While you you know, if you if you're not an expert in that field, you might not know that that's completely inapplicable to your industry or it's just not going to work in the particular, you know, environment that you're in. So I think that's a big one A AI is is making it a little bit more difficult to to know what's actually a good strategy or a good idea versus a bad strategy or a bad idea. Yeah.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, I think there's also this point is to a certain extent true, but also to a certain extent false. with the pace of AI and the potential impacts of AI, you know, there's a serious pressure not to get left behind. So people are feeling a a significant pressure to jump on the kind of AI bandwagon. Now, as I said, to an extent that's sensible, but to another extent it's not so sensible. I suppose that's one of the motivations for For me, so you see this, I'm sure, you know, most days or every other day is through training, through mentoring, through through some of the things that you do, Sinead. But again, going back to the kind of motivations, why does this happen? You know, what's the motivation in terms of the business owner or the person to kind of start with the technology rather than kind of figuring out the problem in the first instance?

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, I think with SME owners, and I'm sure the three of us are familiar with it as well, but you know, your most valuable asset is time, but it's the one thing that you're constantly battling to find. And I think as a result of that, people are looking for a silver bullet to not only help them do more with less time, but also to fill in the gaps that they don't understand or they don't know. So I frequently hear things like, I'm not great with Instagram or I don't understand Google Ads or whatever. So I think, you know, and fair play to the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini and that kind of thing on marketing themselves as we can do everything for you, like enhance your business, bring it into the future. So I think there's there's that kind of dichotomy there where it's it's you know, an absolute lack on one side from the SME owners perspective, and then fantastic marketing from AI tools on the other. and I think one thing that I've noticed when we do our programs sometimes is that people are like, That's really cool. And I'm so glad that you walked us through how to create a prompt to do this. But what I'm actually looking for to do is X, Y, Z, la, la, la. And yeah, so I think it's overwhelm, really, to be honest. I think there's so much to be done all the time, and you know, SME owners are looking for a silver bullet, and I can't blame them, but

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh: That's not what AI is and that's not what tech is. and I don't think we're gonna do ourselves any favors by putting the cart before the horse, to be honest with you, in terms of getting the sexiest AI tool out there or technology or whatever, but not even fundamentally understanding what a content strategy is for your brand or what the point of social media is, et cetera. So yeah.

Niall Devitt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And and again it's something obviously that that that I harp on about quite a lot that you you you need to start with the basics or you need to start with the foundational element. So obviously one of the programs that we deliver for the local enterprise office is the digital marketing and AI program. That's a ten session programme. It gives you know the SME v owner a pretty solid A to Z in terms of digital and to a certain extent AI. But one of the points that I would always make to them at the very start, and it goes back to your kind of earlier point in terms of time, I think time Is a resource that the SME owner often doesn't factor in. So I what I often say to them, you know, you've that many things to be doing in terms of your business. If you can if if you know your time that you can devote to digital marketing is say two hours on the Friday afternoon, you've got to take the course in that context. So, in other words, you're not going to be able to be everywhere, you're not going to be able to do everything. You know, you need to pick the areas and the tactics and the contents and the things that you can put into that two hours. hours, but get the most value in in terms of your business. So I do think, yeah, there's a pressure I suppose on businesses that they need to be everywhere and doing everything. And invariably what happens if you try that approach, you don't do anything kind of particularly well. And in actual fact, what happens is it sucks up way more time than it needs to, and you get little or or or or no results. Okay, so moving it along then, folks. So obviously we've described the problem here. We know how it kind of manifests itself when we're dealing with with clients, when we're dealing with businesses, when we're dealing with organizations. And people, but I mean, how can we define the problem in the first instance? So you're on a you're on a a mentoring call with someone, Sinead. How can you take them back to basics? How can you help them to define what the real problem is, even sometimes when they wanted you to talk about the the particular technology?

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. So I think, you know, the first thing I try and get them to understand is that kind of root cause or root issue. So the first kind of questions I would ask are about identifying the symptom, right? So my sales have dropped year on year. or, you know, I am not getting as many leads as I was, or they I'm getting leads, but they're not converting, etc. So that helps me kind of pinpoint exactly where where the issue may lie, right? So I don't want to get too into marketing and sales funnel talk and that kind of thing, but I just find that a very, very helpful I suppose, framework or, you know, a visualization for the client to help them understand, okay, this is an awareness problem or this is a consideration problem or a conversion problem, etc. So how I get them to do that is like, like I said, asking a series of kind of diagnostic questions. So you know, instead of jumping straight into

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh: I think ChatGPT would be great for this because la la la. I asked them questions like, what are you trying to improve or where do you want to see that improvement? Are who is affected here? You know, so is if it's a process problem, you know, are you frustrated? Are your internal team frustrated? Are your customers frustrated when they're trying to get more information about a product or whatever? and then kind of trying to understand what's working, what's not working, what did success look like for them? you know, year on year last year, if we're talking about the sales dropping year on year, just an example. you know, and and where did that start to tail off? And then ultimately, what does success look like? What do you want this to look like for you? How what will make you feel better, you know, in terms of figures on a page kind of thing? So yeah, that's kind of where I push them.

Niall Devitt: Okay, so Dennis, I'm gonna throw it back to you. So obviously, you've been involved in in in web development, designing, development, developing websites on behalf of Content Plan. So again, I'm just gonna to box it as the problem. Client comes, says, I want you, I want Content Plan to build me a new website. My old website didn't work. It didn't deliver any customers, it didn't deliver any queries, it didn't deliver any sales. But when you build a new website, I need you to build me a website that will do all of those things. So again, and you know, that comes in kind of different guises, so to speak, but it's something that we we k we see approximately quite a lot. So how should or how would you approach that particular problem?

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, I think in in those situations you always have to zoom out on on a situation because a website, it is a central part of a sales and marketing process, but there's so much other things that feed into it. So you can imagine our website is like our sales engine, but you still have to kind of bring the fuel to it. So if you think of your social media marketing, whether it's LinkedIn, depending on the industry that you're in, you might have different ways of bringing people to your website. So if we build a brand new website. You spend lots of money on it and it looks amazing and it's optimized for all the things that that that are necessary for people to use it effectively and and and so it's nicely designed, all that stuff, but nobody's actually coming to the website. You're you're gonna end up with the same problem. So that's where zooming out is really the key, because you have to see, you know, how are we actually bringing people or how we bring bringing traffic to the website and is that traffic or are those people actually interested in? product or the service you're buying and so on, how do we maybe address that first before we think about the website? And when once you do that, oftentimes we find sure there might be a need for a new website, but oftentimes there is a need for actually a sales process, maybe looking at the the broader marketing that's happening within the company, within the organization to see, you know, is there something that has to be fixed or addressed first before we actually start bringing people to a new website. So sometimes that means you actually don't need a new website in the end. It's just that initial process your website currently will do, or sometimes it's both, but you really need to zoom out to make that make an effective decision really.

Niall Devitt: so again I always take it back to to way back to basics, right? And I think sometimes for certainly for a lot of SME business owners, there's kind of a misunderstanding of what a website is and what a website isn't, right? So as I always said to them, okay, what did you do after you built the website? So in other words, the building of the website is more often than not the easy bit, right? It's what you do after the website. That's the hard bit. And ultimately that's the bit that will determine whether the website is successful or not successful. And again, look, it it's not. It is so you might have an SME owner, they come from you know a relatively traditional space, right? They might have a retail outlet in some busy town in Ireland, right? And they apply some of the same thinking. So in other words, their shop is on the main street in Carlo or wherever it is, right? Now the nature of the physical environment is it's on the Main street, there's people passing up and down on the footpath, they see what you have in your window. Chances are they're going to walk in if it looks attractive. They think websites operate the same way, but I mean to use a physical analogy for a website, it would be like going up the local mountains and putting your shop up there. No one knows that the shop exists, right? So so the bigger job and the more important job.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah.

Niall Devitt: when it comes to websites is is what do you do thereafter. Right? and again, you know, I suppose from a web developer or web designer's point of view, right, you have to be honest enough with the client and say to them, Well, I can build you a lovely website. Right, but that in of itself won't make the website valuable to your business and lead to customers and inquiries and leads and all of that stuff. What's actually going to lead to all of that stuff is what you do after we build the website. Right. And I suppose something that that people don't don't necessarily always get. Okay. What other ways or what other kind of common problems? Do you kind of hear, you know, someone describes the problem, but invariably the the the the real issue is kinda somewhere else. I'll tell you another one that I get or that I hear quite a lot is that Facebook or Instagram or some type of social media ads are not working. They don't work. Right. And again, what I do is I always go back to basics, so depending on the client a little bit, but something that I mentioned in the last podcast was customer segments. So customer segments as a foundational step in terms of digital advertising, particularly social media ads, is an critically important first step. So rather than talk about Facebook or Facebook ads or content or any of that type stuff, I simply ask them for their customer segments. And more often than not, know the if they can provide me with the customer segments, either verbally or you know, in a document or something like that, at least they have some version of customer segment there. But more often than not, when I hear that Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, ads aren't working, and I ask that question, they go, Well, what are customer segments? Okay, and that kind of allows me to have that conversation. For you guys then, any other any other manifestations, I suppose, of this in terms of what you what you deal with day to day?

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, so I think your customer segment or customer segmentation thing is a perfect example there of of the very classic things that we see on a day to day basis. The other thing that always takes me by surprise as a kind of extension of what you've just mentioned there is budget and how many businesses I have met that have burned through money and not just small amounts, major amounts on ads and advertising platforms.

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh: That they don't understand, or as a result of them not understanding it, they have outsourced to other people at a huge cost. And it took them six months to 12 months to realize that that's not working. you know, and look, that's really, really tough. and I actually find it really interesting that, you know, it it I suppose the amount that they are willing to throw at the problem to just get it working, which for small to medium businesses is so risky because

Niall Devitt: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Sinéad Walsh: As we all know, sometimes you're only a couple of months away from like, you know, b making it or or going bust kind of thing. So, you know, I've worked for some of the largest companies in their sectors in the world, and those companies are nearly more careful with their budget than some SMEs I've met. And that's not a criticism, it's just desperation. And I think it's, you know, it's completely understandable in a lot of ways. But

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. So by the time then they come to us or we're we're talking to them or they've chosen to upskill to try and get a grip on an advertising platform themselves, it's it's a critical point. And that makes it very difficult because you have no wiggle room whatsoever. And I think you mentioned it earlier, like SEO. People fall back on this SEO thing because they're like, Well, whatever about, you know, learning the technicalities of it, it's free. So that can only help me kind of thing, you know? So yeah, I I find that very, very difficult to wriggle around in, you know, because as we all know, SEO is such a highly technical area and it's not just one of those areas of digital marketing where it's one and done. You know, you have to keep tending to it.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, no, I I I do think it's changing and we need to see the impacts in terms of AI. But I would say for the average SME business, right, I actually think when it comes to SEO, I don't think you necessarily need to get too technical. I I think you need to do the basics and do the basics well and consistently. I think that gets you ahead of a lot of your competition from from an SEO perspective. So again, my approach in terms of SEO would be, you know, a client will come to me and say, you know, SEO, we got the web developer or web designer. To do all of the SEO. So again, I start at the very start. So I say, Can I see your keyword list? Right. And I know straight away if I'm provided with a keyword list, because that's the starting point fundamentally in terms of SEO, they've started to do SEO. If I can't, if I'm not provided with that, they've never they're under the impression. And often, like to be fair, often Professionals in our industry are are are a large part of the problem. So they've built some of the website, they've put metadata on the website, and they said, Yeah, your SEO boxes checked. So you can completely understand from the client's point of view that they feel, well, you know, my website has been SEO'd. There's there's nothing else that needs to be kind of done here. Okay, so I want to move on Dennis from kind of talking about the problem, you know, identifying the problem, all of that type of stuff, to when you have identified the problem, how then do you start to move on to choose the right tool, the channel, the technology, the approach?

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, so with that it it maybe feels counterintuitive with the the environment you're in with so many AI tools and so on. But the reality is if you're whether you're a business owner or you're within an organization, you have a particular role, you're going to to have the most knowledge about that role and the specifics of it compared to to an AI model or anything else. So my recommendation is always start with building a a workflow. So pretty much mapping out what you do in a particular scenario in a particular process step by step. So let's say if it's posting a social media post, what what are the steps that we need to get there? So we need to potentially source media, we have to write a caption, we have to do all those things. So before you start thinking, you know, how can we use AI for something like this, I think first you have to to make sure you know s what happens in that whole process step by step. Maybe there's other people involved in that whole process. so my my suggestion is always you kind of slow down, map things out, because if you want to add AI or any other technology, so AI is just the latest technology we can add into any sort of a process or workflow, but if you want to add any sort of technology, first you have to know how everything feeds into each other and what happens after the next thing. Does somebody have to review something before it it moves on to the next step and so on? So my main thing is is always to recommend just kind of stopping from going straight to technology. and looking at a at a workflow and mapping everything el step by step.

Niall Devitt: Can I just ask you a question on that? So if we talk about workflow, we talk about mapping, we talk about all of that type of stuff, right? to my mind, right, a c and often a kind of overlooked step, because sometimes you get kind of pushback in terms of it, is the actual now it can be documentation, it can be visualization, you can describe it in whatever kind of a way that you're more comfortable with. But Putting the workflow, putting the task, putting the steps on some type of you know, real or virtual paper in its simplest format, to my mind is again a critical first step because I'll often talk to people and you know, I'll talk to them about well, I I know my customer segments, they're here. I don't need to document. I I know them, right? So they don't they don't really see any value in that documentation of the process of the customer segment. Whereas in actual fact I see a tremendous amount of value in doing that. So just just talk to me about just that simple process and what kind of value that brings.

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah. No, you're you're exactly spot on. So putting anything on paper that's in our head, one it has so many different benefits from from the different angles that you look at it. But from a process point of view, if you sit down and start to map out step by step, so literally opening up in the most basic form a Word document, that's the easiest way to start. And you put it into bullet point mode and you and you start going, you know, we have to do step one, we have to find an image, we have to source an image, whatever. Going through that and go just the act of writing. And spending relatively a short amount of time, because if it's in your head, you will just bang it out and you realize, there's actually maybe one point I missed. But you you'll suddenly have a complete step-by-step of of what needs to be accomplished within that. And that in our minds, oftentimes we might realize actually we missed something, or or there's some inefficiencies here. Maybe that's starting to give us some ideas of what AI or some technology can do. But really, just mapping it out in a Word document, you don't have to go into a fancy

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski: word map or anything like that. But whatever whatever people find useful is is the best approach, yeah.

Niall Devitt: and this is completely non technology related. It's such a simple thing, but I've seen it again and again and again and again and again, right? Putting it down on paper, visualizing it, whatever the case may be, it allows you to kind of step back a little bit from it. So you can see it in its totality, so to speak, and you can see hold on, there's a gap there, right? Or there's something that I need there, or Step one doesn't necessarily lead to step two, or step four is creating a block for step five or whatever it is, right? So again, that very simple process before you go near technology, right, is a very, very worthwhile process. Sinead, for you. Choosing before you get to the technology, you want to choose the right one, the right foot for the particular problem. What's your kind of process? What's your approach to doing that? How do you help clients to get there?

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. So I roll with a framework that is quite simply named the root cause framework. Okay. So once they kind of help me identify the symptoms, we then go on the exploration journey. And usually what I find is it falls into one of four buckets. Okay. So the issue is usually based around audience, like we were saying, you know, customer segmentation hasn't been done or properly considered. and look, ultimately like tech won't fix bad targeting. Okay. So that's one point. The other one is a messaging issue. So I've met so many incredible business owners who have like amazing business businesses or business ideas, but they're not communicating what's in their head or what their specializations are, right? And we understand that too. Sometimes you're so close to your business. And you don't really fully understand what your value is, you know, to your potential customers or clients. So the messaging can be a huge issue. and like that USP, identifying that USP as well. and I think at the end of the day, when people are using AI content to help with that messaging and they don't fully understand how to speak about themselves or their USP properly, I think It just makes everything more confusing. I think it gives you know gen generates, you know, generic copy, website copy social media captions that just don't say anything and it's all bluster. Then the other area where it potentially lies, and we see this a lot specifically with newer businesses, but is process, right? So as Dennis was speaking about, workflow is

Niall Devitt: Mm.

Sinéad Walsh: crucial to the success of many businesses. And a lot of the time we have very manual blockers in the way, or we do things because that's how we've always done them. Right. So fixing the workflow on paper or implementing a CRM, which an alarming amount of businesses don't do or haven't tried or haven't, you know, dedicated the necessary time to try and you know, make the CRM a fundamental part of their business. Thus, everything is on 17 spreadsheets. and then ultimately as well, a skill or a time issue. Like I said at the beginning, the team or the person just simply does not have the capacity or the knowledge and training they need. So by helping people understand that their issue lies in one or more of these areas is a really, really important step before we even talk about AI and tools and what that can offer. because ultimately, look, you're working with people so and I feel like that's a a people centred approach in my opinion.

Niall Devitt: Okay. And something that I 'cause I definitely feel and I don't know if you agree or disagree on this, Dennis, but I definitely feel where AI can offer a tremendous amount of value and and and particularly for the SME business is around process and processes. So to Sinead's point, you know, a typical SME has a lot of manual time or labour Intensive process and they work. It's not that they don't necessarily not work, but they just take up a huge amount of time. This is one of the areas where I feel AI can can bring a tremendous amount of value. Now, again, I go back to the earlier point. The process has to be working in the first instance. Yes, it's taken a lot of time. It's a manual process, but whatever the output is, it's it's at least doing that and doing that well. So that needs to be, I suppose, the starting point. But provided that is the starting point, then I think AI has huge potential here. But again, I I'd ask you to maybe speak to that.

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, exactly. So once you do have it mapped out, then there's a million different things that you can do. And there's other s kind of non-technological benefits. So if you think of a a single SME owner and that they run the whole business, if if you have to go on holidays, if if you you get sick, usually things start to fall apart in early after day one. But having processes and you know you start with one, keep it simple. But if you were to over time systematically create these different processes, It also makes it easier to start potentially thinking of bringing on staff and other things that that can start offloading some of that. So if you think of the non-tech benefit, that that's a person that can now, let's say, be responsible for this one process you mapped out and you just have to look over it at the end. And AI works very similarly. yeah, AI works in in the exact same way. So you're not handing it over maybe to a person, but you might be handing over either that whole process or a part of that process to

Niall Devitt: Yeah, and it yeah.

Denis Jastrzebski: an AI or some sort of an automation platform. And that's where the benefit comes in. But you can now have employees and AI working with you. So suddenly you're not kind of the bottleneck because you have to look after everything in the business. It's easy to lose time and if there's inefficiencies in the processes, there's lots of time that could be spent in a better way. So the the process, everything has to start with that. But once you have it, there's all sorts of things that you can do.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, and and I think I go back to Eilish's analogy on the first podcast when she talked about, you know, thinking or treating AI like an intern. All right. I actually think the same analogy can be used beautifully when it comes to processes. So you've mentioned it there, right? If you have a good process and you need an employee or you need someone else to do it, it's it's relatively easy to explain, to train, to get them to carry out that process. Right. If you've a bad process or you know, it's it's a much, much more difficult and invariably you just have to do it yourself because you can't you can't give it to someone else. It's the the same rules practically apply when it comes to the AI. So in other words, if you couldn't explain the process to to to an employee or an intern, right, and they couldn't pick it up, you know, relatively quickly, I would suggest don't go to the AI. You need to be at that point, albeit it can be manual and take a lot of time, before you kind of get in AI involved with that process. But again, I suppose ask you for your opinion there.

Denis Jastrzebski: No, that that's exactly it. so yeah, you you really need to have that at least in that one process, because you can you need to only start with one process, have that completely defined and make it easy to understand. And and while you're writing that process, you might find, like you said, inefficiencies from earlier that you might actually start to implement yourself that you're you're working on it. but but that's when AI can can come into that that process. and and the main thing around that is Because there's so many tools floating around, it's hard to decide what's actually going to be useful in this scenario. So what you know, I have a process now, but where do I start with what what AI is going to help us with? So what I'm going to talk about briefly is is using ChatGPT to help you come up with suggestions for those tools.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and again that's one of the beautiful things about AI. You can think you have the process at a stage where you can involve the AI, but a sensible approach there is to actually take the process to an AI, and it could be Chat GPT, it could be whatever, and get get get the AI's feedback.

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, yeah.

Niall Devitt: one thing that AIs are pretty good at, I would say, is looking at things from the point of view of an AI, right? the AI is invariably going to see things that maybe you yourself wouldn't see. So that will allow you, I suppose, to improve or refine the process so it's more AI ready. Okay, folks, so I wanna move on and I said before we would finish up that we would recommend one approach each, one framework, If you're a business owner, how do you approach this and how do you get to the to the right solution to the right technology? I'm gonna stick to a very traditional one just to balance things up. I'll leave that till the till the end. So again, want to go back to you, Sinead. So I want you to go through your approach. And please bear in mind here, you know the people listening to this podcast often don't work in our space. They may be not familiar with the lingo or the terminology.

Sinéad Walsh: the framework I would recommend is that root cause analysis framework. Okay. So I think that, you know, many, many digital problems are not technology problems. They fall into one of those four buckets I was talking about, right? So is it audience, is it message, is it process, or is it skills or time? So what I would encourage everyone to do is be brutally honest with themselves about where the bottlenecks are. and be so, so clear on, where the issue is really, really coming from. and then before you spend a single euro on a tool or a subscription, you know, that analysis needs to give you a very, very clear answer. And sometimes it's not just one answer. Sometimes the issue, like I said earlier, lies in one or more areas. So I often find that the cheapest and most effective tool Is the one you didn't need to buy because you fixed the process instead. So that would be it. And also just to touch on this, not that it directly relates to your question, but you need to be very clear where the bottleneck is. We also need to be very clear if you are implementing a new tool, what does success look like? Okay. What is the difference between this has worked and this has not? Whether that's a KPI or, you know, whatever kind of number you're using to track success. You need to be very clear on that as well, because how else are you gonna know whether you're getting value for money?

Niall Devitt: Okay. So I I'm I'm gonna give you a relatively simple problem or a simple thing that we get, and I want you to kind of walk me through your approach, so to speak. So I'm a client, I'm an SME owner. I'm gonna go use the shoe shop example as well. I'm fun to shoe shops for some reason. Right. I cut I'm on a mentoring session with you shenanights, right? We have a successful retail outlet, as I say in some busy town, we Spent a lot of money on a fantastic website there twelve months ago, you know, all of our stock all of our shoes. We wanted to broaden our horizons or our locality. We want to get people some of the locals are buying some shoes online, right? But we're not really getting customers from, you know, the next county over or Ireland or whatever the case may be. So what we did there is, you know, to try and boost the website and boost the online sales, we spent, you know, five grand this year on online advertising. It was Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is. You know, I think the website got sixteen or seventeen sales, and of the sixteen or seventeen sales, probably twelve or thirteen of those are locals that would have come into the shop anyway. Okay. So Facebook ads, poor. Facebook, Instagram. We spent a load of money. We've hardly got a sale out of it.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing I would do is encourage you to look at the data or I would ask the client what last month, how many clicks did you get on that ad versus how many people landed on your website versus how many people went and added the cart or bought the you know, completed the sale and that kind of thing. And I think I don't mean to sound boring here, but I think that data always tells you so so much. So for example, if you're let's take your Facebook ads there as an example. What is the reach versus the click? So if you have a particularly high reach but a low click rate, to me what that would say is your targeting is not on the money whatsoever. If your reach is good and your click-through rate is good, but you're not seeing the that translate to sales or add to carts or s email signups on your website, then what that would say to me is there's an issue with the website somewhere. And sometimes it's as simple as the product descriptions are confusing. The product page image doesn't you know, they're not high res enough, or they're too high res, or the load time is insane. and even there's been times I've seen a buy now button just isn't very clear. or th the cardinal saying, as we know we all know, is your mobile version is not at the races. and it's pretty much unusable for people who are clicking through, you know, especially if you're doing social media ads, right? Social media is so based around mobile. So That is what I mean when I say look at the data, go back to the data, because there's very simple rules of thumb there. You can smell a rap pretty quickly.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, can can I suggest to you based on my experience? So w when I hear that approximate problem from that approximate type of business, my general instinct is the issue is actually further back than that. Okay. so we're talking about social media advertising here, so we're talking about Facebook, Instagram, whatever it is, right? So, one of the first questions that I would ask them in that situation, forget about the ads. Right? Forget about the ads for a second. So, before you did any ads, right? Presuming you were doing Facebook, you were doing Instagram, you were doing whatever, right? Was that generating any sales for your business? Footfall, whatever. Doesn't necessarily have to be retail. And more often than not, they're not going to be able to answer that question. Right. So so my point is, and again it goes back to kind of an earlier point that you made, right? Right. If what you're doing without spending money isn't generating a result, just spending the money, you know, that's not going to generate the result. It just makes it makes the whole process a hell of a lot more kind of expensive, so to speak. So I I think you're right in terms of the data, but what I would always say to spee people in terms of say Facebook or Instagram ads or whatever, forget about ads. What's your organic content influen? So, to my mind, if your organic content is working, if it's generating sales, inquiries, and so on and so forth, and you plug ads into that, there'll be kind of an amplification or an acceleration type of an effect. But if the organic content isn't working, chances are ads are not going to work. And if the organic content isn't working, chances are right, you don't have a unique selling proposition or you haven't communicated with it properly. You're not using customer segments, right? You're not using content teams, right? Probably the content that you're using is not going to engage the particular audience that you're looking to engage. So w what I would say there is, you know, get all of those foundational or basic elements in place, get them working and working them reasonably well, and then, you know, plug your ads in. Because invariably what the ads will do then will will accelerate whatever result that that it is that you're you're you're you're you're getting. Dennis, for you, a framework or an approach that you would recommend?

Denis Jastrzebski: yeah, so what I was talking about throughout the episode was was really what we'd call an SOP or a standard operating procedure. It's a workflow, it's a process, it's pretty much a page similar to what we're saying with the Word document, just with everything that's involved in this particular process. So there's lots of definitions for it. SOPs would be used in enterprises and so on.

Niall Devitt: So SLP stands for standard operating procedure. So so in very, very kind of simple terms, what that is is the steps, the process called out, right, to take you from A to B or A to Z. So to your point earlier on, Sinead, you said you know, focus in, describe the output, describe the results. that you're looking for. An SOP effectively talks about the steps to get from point A to point B, i.e. the the output or the result that you're looking for. I've gave kind of a simple enough, hopefully, explanation in terms of SOP. So so please carry on, Dennis.

Denis Jastrzebski: Hi everyone, Dennis here from Content Plan. We had a small issue with my audio being recorded in the latter part of the episode. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just fill in these sections that would have been part of the original conversation with Nial and Sinead. So the way you want to approach this is just take a very simple Word document. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a Word document, and detail your process that you're you're kind of looking to maybe improve the efficiency of or thinking where can we put technology or AI into this process? So just very simply a Word document and without using any AI or any other platforms, just detail what's involved in that whole process. Now, if you have other people that work along with you or that are part of that process, make sure they're also part. of of that little exercise or get them to review it and see if you've missed anything. And what you'll find oftentimes is that the the act of writing these things down in itself will flag some potential inefficiency. So there's that benefit. Then there's a secondary benefit to when you have employees and you have people that tend to to be let's say part of your business but you're still handling most of of the various processes. So it's really beneficial because that's a a way you can hand over Particular process once it's defined to somebody, and that's how you can really scale your business over time. Because if everything is tied to you, that's where bottlenecks can potentially come in. So there's those secondary benefits that you get from that whole exercise. But the main one being is once you fill in that step-by-step for this process. I'm going to have a very special prompt in the show notes for you where you can throw that whole process into whatever AI model you use along with the prompt. It'll ask you some questions, it'll help you work through that that whole process and then give you a recommendation of where technology or AI might be able to come in and be useful for you.

Niall Devitt: Yeah, yeah. And again, to go back to my earlier point, just the the sheer effort to do that for a lot i it will improve the process by just stepping back a little bit and seeing things that maybe you mightn't otherwise see. right? So We work in the marketing, digital marketing sphere. And again, you know, in in lots of instances, certainly in terms of training or the mentoring that we do, you know, probably the majority of the clients that we would work with in terms of training or mentoring would be SME clients, right? so often they'll come with problems like I have a lovely website, but it's not delivering anything for the website, right? I am running Facebook ads, I did my SEO, you know, it's all of this type of stuff, right? But again, particularly with an SME client. Right. I go right back to the very start. Right. And the very start when it comes to marketing for me is what we call your unique value or sometimes calls your unique selling. Proposition. to my mind, there's a very kind of a simple way to explain this. So I worked in sales, door knocking, selling insurance, and all of that type of stuff for for a number of years, way back in the day, right? So I had to take the time to understand sales and why people buy stuff and all of that type of stuff. Just to note I was an absolute shite salesman for the first six or twelve months, as it turns out. So I did have to learn how to do it. I certainly wasn't a natural sin. But if you think about why we buy stuff, and this can be anything, so long as it's a kind of a meaningful purchase, so not a cart and a milk or something like that. It could be a car, it could be a fridge, it could be whatever, right? And if you really think about it and you come at it from the point of view of you being the customer here, forget about being the business owner. What we buy ultimately at the end of the day is not sameness, we buy difference. So the reason you decided on the particular fridge or the particular car or the particular whatever it was is whatever point or point the differences that it gave you over the competitors. Right. And this is a very personal thing. This is why there's lots of different car brands at lots of different price points, etc. etc. So what's meaningful to me may not be the same for for kind of someone else. So again, if we go back to your website, right. Your website has a very, very short amount of time to communicate what your unique value or selling proposition is. They say about eight seconds. Right now, one place for me where it should sit is on the home page of your website. Now it doesn't have to be text, it can be visual, it can be communicated in a whole range of different ways. What's your unique selling proposition? Sometimes they look at me like I have two heads. Then sometimes I explain what it is to them. Right now, for some businesses, it rolls off the tongue. It's a very obvious thing. For other businesses, they're going, I don't know. Right. So the process Of deciding or creating or developing their unique selling proposition is a painful process. It doesn't necessarily kind of come easy. Sometimes you have to spend a bit of time on it, refine it, etc. etc. But to my mind, it's the start of marketing. So wherever you do your marketing, website, Facebook, local newspaper, local radio station, anywhere else for that matter, really all marketing is ultimately right. Is a way of explaining your unique selling proposition or unique value proposition. In other words, what makes you different? What makes you unique? Why the customer should buy from you versus the competition? Or another kind of simple enough kind of example that I use, if you imagine you know, in an elevator with your kind of perfect customer, you have six or seven seconds till you get to the next floor. How would you describe to that potential perfect customer why they should buy from you? Ahead of the competition in the six or seven seconds it's going to take to get to the next floor. So so to my mind, when it comes to SMEs, that's the most sensible place to start. So your customer segments, your customer teams, all of these types of things, they're just an extension of their really when it comes down to it. Okay, folks, I think that was a good follow up to episode one. obviously there wasn't a lot about technology in it, so maybe the audience will be disappointed but it it is definitely a critical first step in terms of identifying the problem properly because until you identify the problem properly you know you're not going to be able to know which technology or how the technology can help you with the solution. So before we finish up then folks, do you have any final words, final thoughts? First yourself, Sinead please if you like.

Sinéad Walsh: You really really put me under pressure for a mic drop moment here.

Niall Devitt: I'm not Sinead is a comedian and a very well known and successful one, so it should be no bother to you, Sinead, by the way.

Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Come up with the punchline. Come up with the punchline. No, I would say, just to finish off, and it's one of your favorite sayings, Nial, go back to basics. Okay. Go back to basics. Doing things like putting things on paper, drawing it out, you know, looking at data, all of those things are so, so much more important than Googling what AI tools can fix, X, Y, or Z. So that would be

Niall Devitt: Yeah.

Sinéad Walsh: my key takeaway point that I would like people to to have.

Niall Devitt: And I I do appreciate Schnitt. I am like a broken record. I do appreciate it. It's not lost on me, I can assure you. Dennis, your final words, please.

Sinéad Walsh: You're not No

Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, the the best way to approach this whole process is start with something that you don't particularly enjoy doing. So the process that you choose to map out and then think about where where technology is going to be inserted into that, start with something you and your team don't particularly enjoy doing. and that's gonna make it easier for everyone to kind of work along with it. There'll be an an incentive, there'll be a want to to do that. and also the other thing is it it'll motivate other people. to potentially have some more ideas and and think about that from their own perspective. And suddenly there'll be a drive to automate more processes that everyone doesn't really enjoy working on. So that's the best way to approach it.

Niall Devitt: and again it's something that I kind of and again it's by extension, but I suppose oftentimes the best solutions for a business are not they're not the complicated fixes. They're more often than not the simple fixes. So I would say is you know, solve the small problems, albeit consistent problems that take up quite a lot of time. Right. Solve those problems first. Before you attempt to solve the more complicated problems. Because invariably, what kind of happens a little bit in my experience is if you solve lots of small problems, that kind of takes care of the bigger problems. So solving nine small problems is often a better way to attempt to fix a big complicated problem than starting with the big complicated problem, if that makes sense. I want to thank you. Sineade for for for your time, your your energy, your enthusiasm, your advice, your wisdom. today it's great to have you on the podcast with us. We'll get you to do some jokes and stand up as we as we move along on technology and AI. Sinead, there's a there's a challenge for you, right? Right. No, you make you can make me the butt of all the jokes, Sinead. I'm more than happy to play that role, right?

Sinéad Walsh: That is a challenge. No

Niall Devitt: Dennis, thank you for joining us on podcast number two. again, folks, this is a work in progress for us. So, you know, we're we're delighted for anyone who's listened to the first podcast. We're thrilled if anyone has listened to the the two podcasts. You know, to a certain extent this is planned, but we're making some of it up as we go along a little bit. If people have any thoughts, any questions, any suggestions, any tools, technologies, problems, processes. they'd like they'd like us to talk about an address. We're more than happy to hear all of that. So the podcast will be available on the website. We'll be available on all of the main podcasting platforms. I know Dennis you do a resource page which is fantastic with each and every episode. So you might just walk us through that before we finish up.

Denis Jastrzebski: Each podcast has its own dedicated show notes page where you'll get all the resources, the overview of the episode, as well as the transcript, and also links to all the podcasting platforms that we're on. So you'll find that prompts that I mentioned on that particular page, along with anything else Sinead or Noelle have mentioned as well.

Niall Devitt: Thank you very much, Dennis. Thank you very much, Sinead. For anyone that's reached out between episode one and now episode two, you know, WhatsApp over the phone, got a few emails, some comments and stuff like that. Very much appreciate your feedback and and and and your commentary in in terms of that. So again, looking forward to to to to seeing you guys again on podcast number three. Thank you very much.

Sinéad Walsh: Thank you guys.

Niall Devitt: And we'll see everyone again. So thanks very much, folks. Bye bye,