EP01 - The AI-Driven CMO: How Melissa Cameron Is Winning the Local Search War

Melissa Cameron has been quietly building one of the most AI-forward marketing operations in self-storage, and in this episode she breaks down exactly how. From rethinking paid media budgets to containing 46% of inbound calls with voice AI across 1,050+ properties, she gets into what's actually working.

Transcript

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Welcome everybody to the Agentics CMO. I'm Dave Lehman from BirdEye and I am excited today to kick off our podcast series here in beautiful Palm Beach, Florida. This is the first in our series where we're going to be talking to CMOs who really get it, who go deep into AI and understand how to drive their businesses, especially in the multi-location world. Today, I'm joined by a fantastic guest, Melissa Cameron from NSA. Melissa, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Maybe give us a little bit on you and your business and why you're an agent at CMO. Sure. Absolutely, so I'm Melissa Cameron. I am the Chief Marketing Officer at National Storage Affiliates. I've spent quite a bit of my career building growth engines in the storage landscape and industry. And I oversee call center, web, digital marketing, product and software engineering. Wow. Wow, that's a lot for a CMO. Right. Is that even relevant at this point? What does the title mean? Yeah, we'll get into that in a couple areas, especially around the agentic and AI world. Listen, maybe just start with, you know, there's a lot going on in the world of AI. There's new models coming out every week, Google's changing what they're doing. It seems like every other day trying to keep tabs on it and almost ABCDE test every new feature out there. But what are you seeing in the world? You've got a consumer base that thinks locally, that is highly competitive in these areas. What are you see in this new AI world that's changing things for you guys and your customers? Everything is changing. And I would say, I think about it in the customer funnel. So it really is from visibility and the AI implications of what we're seeing in the visibility landscape, which is really search, right? So from AI search to how is that having an effect on SEO implications and paid search. And by the way, all the paid search and paid media strategies also. Are constantly evolving with AI strategies as well. And all the intelligence that we're gathering and being able to input back into how we're even spending the media, where are we putting our marketing dollars, your media mix, so that's all around visibility. And it is a massive change, it's changing very quickly. Even if LLM search is a small portion of your traffic at this point, look at the growth over a period of time, just over the past 12 months, quite frankly, and the conversion rate of that type of traffic. Because it is astronomically higher than any other source of traffic that we've ever, the conversion rate of that particular marketing source. Okay. So we're definitely seeing upper funnel visibility, right? And the whole purpose is to drive more visibility for the least amount of cost potential, right. So it's ROI. And that is how, you know, revenue, expenses naturally. But then you go to the next stage of the funnel and it's all about conversion and conversion rates. Well, I oversee the call center and I oversee web, which are two of the main channels, but we also have physical locations. Right. Sometimes these different interactions result in conversions through web, through call center, but sometimes the full attribution to an actual rental doesn't happen until they show up at a store. Maybe they started at a channel, but they ended at a story. There's so many nuances in this, especially for a multi-location business. So marketing, revenue management, and operations really own the conversion funnel. When you think about it that way, we drive the clicks and calls. And then we work together hand-in-hand to drive conversion, right? And there is huge opportunity in that with regards to AI, leveraging AI. And so whether that is at the call center, voice AI to be able to really drive better performance, but also drive more efficiency, there's huge potential there. We've seen it in action and we're already containing 46% of our calls at the Call Center, inbound calls. For service, so we're seeing it evolutionize, quite frankly. So I want to get to the internal side of it, but first on that top of the funnel, are you guys seeing like the SEM and the paid stuff, are those prices going up, we've seen that kind of consistently? Absolutely. And then have you guys put a budget aside for like paid on some of these new channels as well? Great question. This is where I think CMOs or growth leaders need to be able to speak effectively to the CEO, the CFO, and help them really understand the changing dynamic. Because the fact of the matter is, you can no longer just take last year's budget and assume a five to 10% inflation in Google costs or, oh, you know what? Meta is a the media mix should be dynamically changing on an ongoing basis, right? And when I say that, I'm not even saying the month end reporting tells me what to change. I'm talking about dynamic changes in the moment. And so yes, it is constantly talking to investors, talking to the board, talking to the executive team, helping to educate, because ultimately I have had to be very strategic in what I'm spending in the paid acquisition realm. And quite frankly, taking some of those dollars and putting it in the LLM search content strategy. All right. So lots changing at the top of the funnel, a lot of changing in the consumer behavior on where they're looking and how they're coming to you. Internally, what are you guys doing? How are you using AI, whether it's the platforms, new tools, new channels to engage people and get more efficient internally. That's a great question. And I always like to start with, don't just chase things because it's a shiny toy, right? Sure. And the point is, understand your gaps and your opportunities of where it's gonna help drive further performance at an exponential rate or efficiency where really your ROI is impacted. So we've obviously leaned in heavily in the visibility area because ultimately you need the awareness to drive the clicks and calls in. Nothing happens until that happens. So we focused a lot of attention and efforts there and financial investment quite frankly. Then about the customer experience, it really is this combination of operations, revenue management, marketing. Customer experience is really, we own all of it together. So what does that mean? So if you think about the conversion funnel, that could be voice AI, chat bots. It's also really important in a multi-location business. To get incredible reviews and get enough of them. It's both for the algorithms, right? To ensure that you're placed as effectively as possible from an organic standpoint. Which is driving a lot of the AEO, GEO stuff as well, right? As well, right? Absolutely, yeah. So as part of the customer journey, there's certain things that are really important, like the reviews. And yes, the reviews are important to the algorithms, which is not just organic, you know, and even local, meaning getting placed within the maps. It is key to those algorithms. It's also really important to the whole GEO, LLM strategy, AI search strategy. So it is critical to be focusing there. And what I love is we actually started to use BirdEye. For our AI search capabilities to get insights in terms of at a local level, market level, store level, what are we doing well, where's our opportunity to improve, right? So not only from just look at my rankings from an overall brand standpoint, but actually at a location base, how can I improve my content strategy there to get seen more effectively in quite frankly all of these areas, right. But yes, it's directly impacting LLM. So that's a big part of it is reviews help so many things. Helps the algorithms, helps the customer because the customer is looking. They actually are making decisions based on reviews. And you're being compared to your competitors right in the search results. I always tell the property managers that the... Digital environment, their digital asset is just an extension of their physical asset and they need to be owning that and understanding the value of creating the proper reviews, generating the reviews, getting strong reviews because that's how ultimately people are making decisions. All right, so you've been introduced to a lot of the new products that BirdEye has just rolled out. Things like the Search AI product, which you mentioned you guys are using right now. Marketing automation, which we built from the ground up for location-based businesses. You had some great input on that early on in that side. And then just the overall agents that we're releasing as well. Just love your thoughts on those takes on what you're excited about there or where you think the opportunity is I think it's really helpful to have a tool to finally help us understand at this early stage what to do with Search AI, right? Because I think we all know better content, make sure our citations are clean and all of that. But to be able to get the actual export of information and insights in terms of what I need to do at that particular store, on that facility page or store page, at Market page and all and make sure my citations are clean. It's giving me things I can literally go execute and then see the results, the impact, and how it drives performance improvement in that area. So I love that. In terms of marketing automation, I love the fact that BirdEye has finally put in place marketing automation. I'm sorry, Dave. I knew that we were sending review requests, we were setting survey requests, move in, move out surveys, and everyone in their different business model, of course. Are executing these different points of interaction with their customers. And BirdEye was already doing many of these things. So it made natural sense to have a true marketing automation platform where you can create these dynamic experiences, communication experiences with your customers in a relevant way. The whole point is meet customers where they wanna be met, right? And that is based on device, it's based on channel. So SMS, you know, email. All of it. And by the way, now it's all interconnected Dave. So we literally go from, I know the sequence from review requests, survey requests, and all the other campaigns I'm driving all together in one spot. Yeah. And we got the advantage of building this from the ground up for multi-location businesses because we know there's very unique, you know, when you've got multiple brands, when you got multiple regions, you got multiple individual locations all the way down to the individual. How do you personalize that is key. And then the other is we got the advantage of building this in an AI native way. Like we from from day one, it's, you know, you're prompting based on. You know, English, you know inputs. Hey, I want to build a segment that looks like this. Great, it'll build it. I want a build a workflow that looks like this, so sometimes building it a little later, I know you wanted it earlier, but building it later has some advantages as well. So what's unique about your product and what differentiates it too, is the fact of really understanding at the local level that there could be different segments, right? And BirdEye Marketing Automation is literally recommending certain segments, certain personalized messages to send at key points of the customer journey. And, love this, the AI assistance within the platform helps me not only identify particular segments that I wouldn't have thought of naturally, but also actually building out these robust, beautiful email campaigns and text message campaigns that it is making the recommendations to me. And I'm able to have my full conversations with the AI assistant to get exactly what I want. But ultimately the output is this beautiful end result of a campaign that most tools don't have right now. And just the last bit on this point, the agents that you saw, some of the things around review response, review generation, some of social agents, the listing agents, where do you think that's gonna be the most impactful, helpful in your business? You know, I know you guys don't have a ton of people running all these programs. To your point, marketing teams are generally lean, right? We're asked to do more with less. It is what it is, and that's not gonna change anytime soon. So it is critical that we use tools like BirdEye for these execution pieces, quite frankly. It is like digital labor. Like, you know, I had full-time people managing these. The issue is it is impossible for a single individual to manage that amount of review responses manually for over 1,050 properties, right. Let's go. And by the way, and having oversight and understanding that that's being done well, not just response rate, but that the proper responses are being put in place, depending if it's a positive review and a negative review, let alone the fact that your agents now actually escalate things. So yes, all these wonderful personalized recommended responses, but also taking those responses and taking action on them. Where we're able to bubble it up and I'm able to pass the baton to my operations partners and they're able go execute on those things now. And I've heard a lot of people say, I'd rather train my agents to do it the right way versus a hundred new people coming in or temporary workers or whatever, it's, you know. Or whatever it's you know. Well you just you have more oversight you have more accountability with it quite frankly because you've created the guardrails and it's doing it in every case not just some of the case and you're hoping for the best right now that is the benefit and I'm a big believer of having the humans still have the proper oversight and strategy with these AIA agents being the digital labor to support them. Melissa, you are clearly an agentic CMO. Maybe get your title changed on LinkedIn or something like that, we'll work on that. But what advice do you have for other marketing leaders out there, especially in the multi-location world? What do they need to be thinking about? What do need to do to become an agenting CMO? I think in location-based businesses, multi-location-based businesses, to become an agentic CMO, it sounds fancy, it's not, okay? It's leaning in to understanding how to improve performance and drive efficiency, leveraging the latest and greatest process and technology. My tip is to get started. And that does not mean that you have to be an expert and that you know how to do vibe coding and your using Claude Code every day. No, by the way, I wasn't, just recently. This has changed so quickly. My best advice is just get started, push yourself. And by the away, it is not that complicated once you actually get started. But also get started with strategy. So point is, where are the biggest gaps? Where are the bigger opportunities in both the customer journey, the customer facing journey, as well as the process flows supporting that. Find what those gaps are, and then really strategize about how you wanna start playing with it. How do you wanna test it? And by the way, I've leaned on BirdEye for a lot of that, helping me get to that next level. I love this partnership. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for spending time with us today on the agentic CMO. Look forward to seeing you next time.