Ever wondered how digital marketing can be a game-changer for your small or medium-sized enterprise? Harrison Ambs from Vectra Digital joins us to reveal just that, painting a vivid picture of the marketing evolution and how businesses can catch the wave. We discuss why your roofing company might need a different approach than your neighbor's accounting firm, and how the digital age is about targeting the shopper hunting for your specific product or skill. It's a fascinating journey through the complexities of online presence, blending data with creativity to position your brand where it shines the brightest.
Visit us at jenniferannjohnson.com and learn how Jennifer can help you build the life you dream of with her online academy, blog, one-on-one coaching, and a variety of other resources!
Ever wondered how digital marketing can be a game-changer for your small or medium-sized enterprise? Harrison Ambs from Vectra Digital joins us to reveal just that, painting a vivid picture of the marketing evolution and how businesses can catch the wave. We discuss why your roofing company might need a different approach than your neighbor's accounting firm, and how the digital age is about targeting the shopper hunting for your specific product or skill. It's a fascinating journey through the complexities of online presence, blending data with creativity to position your brand where it shines the brightest.
Visit us at jenniferannjohnson.com and learn how Jennifer can help you build the life you dream of with her online academy, blog, one-on-one coaching, and a variety of other resources!
Today we welcome into the studio Harrison Ambs, and he is with Vectra Digital. Welcome in, hi Jennifer. Nice to be here. It's fabulous to have you. Oh, thank you. So what does Vectra Digital actually do?
Harrison Ambs:Oh, that's a great question. Really, what we do is we generate value for SMBs through digital marketing?
Jennifer Johnson:SMBs are.
Harrison Ambs:Small and medium-sized businesses through digital marketing strategies. So think advertising on Google, Facebook, TikTok, Yelp, things like that, trying to show up organically higher on Google, trying to reach out to more of their customers via email text messaging, revamping their website, things like that. What we try and do is, at the end of the day, generate more business than we cost is the best way to think of it.
Jennifer Johnson:That makes complete sense. I hope so. Yeah, I'm sure it does to our listeners, because most of our listeners are small businesses and they're living and breathing this every day. How can I get more of this? How can I get more? Most of us understand that, but for those that don't, what is digital marketing and what does that all include? You just mentioned Google and Facebook. Besides that, what other?
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, that's a great question. The best way to think about digital marketing is, when people think of marketing traditional marketing, they think of the show Mad Men, right, like guys on Madison Avenue in the 50s and 60s. Yeah, they figured all this out. It's the right message, right person, right time. What you can do with digital marketing now is you can measure that. See, before it was just all about messaging and looking at sales three months down the road, but now we can see live fire. If we're running an ad with a puppy versus a baby, what does that look like? What's the engagement of it? How many clicks, impressions, leads, sales do we get out of that kind of stuff? Digital marketing is really a way to message your value to your customer base, primarily through screens. So TV, phone, computer, laptop, things like that. But really it's about getting the data back to make smarter, more intelligent and more valuable decisions based on what's going on.
Jennifer Johnson:It makes sense because back in the day it was all the digital that we had was TV, yeah, basically. We could do TV and radio? Yep, that was it.
Harrison Ambs:That was really it. Yeah, and billboards.
Jennifer Johnson:Billboards and the younger set is probably going. What is a billboard?
Harrison Ambs:It's that thing that you're ignoring in the car while you're staring at your phone.
Jennifer Johnson:People typically don't even pay attention to those anymore, but it's definitely obviously come a long way in even the last couple of years and there's so I feel like there's so much noise out there. How can a small or mid-sized business use digital marketing to grow their business? And I know a lot of it's going to come back to using that data.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's going to come down to what their business is like and things like that. The best way to do is to kind of think about your business. Are you the type of business where your customers have to find what you offer, or are you the kind of business where you have to take your message to them? So a great example of this would be, let's say, a roofing company. If my roof is leaking, I'm going on Google to find a company that can repair roofs.
Harrison Ambs:I don't sit around during my day thinking about the fun I'm going to have looking for roofing companies on Saturday, but, like last weekend, I had to get new walking shoes because we have Disney passes for the kids. I'm going to be there all the time. Yeah, by the way, the reason you get Disney passes is so you can leave in the middle of the day and feel great about it. That is a hi I'm going to be chasing for the rest of my years. It's the best.
Jennifer Johnson:Anyway, I only go to Disney for the Mickey ice cream, but now you can buy those Worth when Target.
Harrison Ambs:Are you serious?
Jennifer Johnson:Target has. Well, I think they even have them at Publix.
Harrison Ambs:The Mickey ear ice cream they're probably not the same. They probably taste different.
Jennifer Johnson:They're not as big, I don't know. I don't know, maybe Because that's something they got to get you back in the parks right. Exactly, I have the experience at home, my bother.
Harrison Ambs:No, I got you. Yeah. So when you're thinking about how to approach digital marketing, it's best to break down your business on one of those two levels. Do people try and find what you do or do you have to take your message to them? And, depending on what you go with, that is going to be the strategy that you take, because if people are trying to find you, pretty much people go online and they look on Google, being now with AI tools, they do that too. They're looking for answers, they're looking for solutions, they're looking for what you offer.
Jennifer Johnson:Is that more of a?
Harrison Ambs:service-based business. In some cases, yeah, but in some cases no, because a lot of times you'll have a service like if you're an accounting firm you want to take your message to your customer to try and get them to switch to you or IT or something like that. So for the most part, I would say yeah, pretty much services might be looking for more Google ads, seo, search engine optimization, things like that, whereas with somebody who's trying to take their message to their customer like last week, I had to buy it. Like I mentioned, we're going to Disney now.
Harrison Ambs:I wore out my old running shoes, I had to get new walking shoes now. Well, I don't know where to go for that, and so, ideally, any brand that's looking to target somebody like me, they're going to want to make their brand available to me. Hey, try out these shoes. Try out these shoes.
Harrison Ambs:This is what you're looking for, stuff like that. So if your message in your marketing is more about finding your customer, then you're going to want to do things more around social advertising, more impression-based marketing, youtube things like that, where you're marketing out to people as opposed to trying to catch them when they come through.
Jennifer Johnson:Got it. So in retail business, we have used the Facebook marketing and all of that and we're searching for that customer. Yes, they're not necessarily. They may know, oh, I want this Louis Vuitton bag, and they're going to Google. And then they're going to research whoever comes up. Yes, but they're going to more. So use Google shopping than they are. I mean, I would. I don't know if the regular public would, but as a business owner of a resale store, I would go to the shopping tab. Yeah, absolutely, but I don't know if most people would do that.
Harrison Ambs:Well, I mean, you can look at it. You can look at where your sales are coming from and try and identify trends and things like that. You can also basically like specifically talking about your business, for example. The one thing I would want to do is I'd want to run a digital marketing campaign that hits three specific channels. One would be Google shopping. The other one would be taking my message to the audience on the advertising platform, specifically, Depending on your audience, which I don't know anything about either be Facebook, Instagram or TikTok and then the third component would be an influencer campaign.
Harrison Ambs:Now, the reason why I want to break these up into three pieces is because what I'm looking for is me as the chief strategy officer of Vectored Digital. My role in the company, my job exists in large companies. They have somebody like me full-time Think Fortune 500, publicly traded companies. My role is to sit down with a business owner and take their vision and provide them clarity so they can make the best executive level decision they can for their company. I never tell a client what to do. My job is to bring information to the client, be able to tell them look, you have option A, B and C.
Harrison Ambs:Here's the pros and cons of each. Which way do you want to go with it? Because I know marketing is only a small maybe not a small, but a component of their broader business, and I have to respect that. I don't do anything in operations. I don't do anything in billing, finance, hiring, any of that stuff. They're the captain of the ship. I'm down in the engine room. What I want to make sure is the only information that they need to see is what they need to know on where to go with the ship. The reason I want to break those up into three different components is because the thing I'm looking for is something called cost per customer acquisition. Basically, what that is is, if we put $505,000, $50,000 into each one of these three platforms, how cheap can we get that customer back? Because I don't know about you. I think Zuckerberg is rich enough.
Harrison Ambs:So I don't think we have to go around financing his next house.
Harrison Ambs:So let's, try and get more out of these platforms than we put in, and so that's why I want to break those up in those three things. It allows us to take our messaging to our customer, because the one challenge with digital marketing these days is there's a bunch of different technical terms for it. But basically it used to be people only listen to the radio and then became people watch TV and listen to the radio. Well, now you have a phone, a tablet, a laptop, a screen, a podcast TV, still have radio.
Harrison Ambs:It's noisy, yeah, it's very noisy. There's a lot of different ways and avenues to get to your customer, and the main issue is there's only so much time in the day when you can. So by breaking up in those three audiences and those three avenues, we can best target the same audience and figure out okay, what's the best way, or maybe it's a mix of it that brings our total cost of customer acquisition down. So that way, when we're looking at the return on investment, it's as maximized as it can be, and this way it allows us to AB testing Absolutely.
Jennifer Johnson:And AB testing, let's tell her how to do that. That's a good question.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah. So you never want to run. So let's say we're running a campaign, at least we're running a campaign for you for that Louis Vuitton bag. You never want to run one thing. You want to run one thing against the other to see what's better. So we call that an AB test and we only test one thing out of everything. So if you can picture an ad that you see on Facebook, there is an image, there is text, there's a link with a button on it that has shop now, buy now, whatever. So when we AB test it, what we want to do is go okay, do people respond more when we tell them buy today versus buy now Seems pedantic but you'd be surprised, right.
Harrison Ambs:I agree. Yeah, so you want to test those side by side and see what goes on. And then from the winner you have that winner, you test something else. Okay, what if we did a shot of just the bag versus a lifestyle shot of somebody with the bag? What if it was a woman and a man on a date? What if it was a woman fishing out a big handful of goldfish crackers for her toddler? I don't know Like what's going to respond to your audience. And you do that by testing these things side by side.
Jennifer Johnson:And you know something about AB testing when we have done that I was so sure I mean I guess I wasn't, but I was they responded better when there was a person in the picture than when it was just a product.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, yeah, those kinds of things. I like to call them self inserts, because what they're seeing is your audience is seeing themselves in the photo and they identify with that. I want that. I want to be that person.
Jennifer Johnson:You're selling an emotion.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, like for me, it's for me. The one that really gets me is the Matthew McConaughey car commercials.
Jennifer Johnson:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, yeah. Seeing in the Lincoln, I'm like you know I have an Audi and I'm looking at that going maybe I should have bought a Lincoln. I can't believe this is working on me, this guy.
Jennifer Johnson:Because historically, I mean the younger set typically never bought a Lincoln until he started in. You know, and I can't tell you how many of my friends have a Lincoln and they have young families. Yeah, oh my gosh.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, it's weird, right, and you think like it's Matthew McConaughey. Of all people, like you know, this is Mr. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I'm going to be, or all right, all right, all right, all right, yes.
Jennifer Johnson:I'm not the younger kids, like my daughter's, 18, and we're looking for a car for her because she's at college and no way I would never drive a Lincoln Like that age group not happening, but parents.
Harrison Ambs:Yes, yeah, I can tell you that. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I can see that I was actually surprised that she's going for a car being 18. Like so many people I know that are around that age, like I'm thinking about, like my younger cousins and everything out of like maybe six of them, maybe one, as their driver's license, the rest just don't.
Jennifer Johnson:I know someone and I find that interesting too, but she is going to a college for architecture and she's there all summer and there's no transit. So she really doesn't have a choice.
Harrison Ambs:I want to go back to where we're talking about Mark Zuckerberg so. I want to talk about.
Jennifer Johnson:Facebook because I know, as a small business, a lot of small businesses really rely on Facebook and I, as a business owner, I embrace it. We advertise on it. But I'm cautious, I'm not sure what you're saying. I'm just so excited Because when you put all of your proverbial eggs in one basket, at any one point they can go. Well, we don't like your content, we're shutting you down.
Harrison Ambs:Jennifer, I'm so excited that you think that way.
Jennifer Johnson:We have to have this conversation because it's happened to a lot of people that I know. I just got word the other day that they're going to no longer allow Facebook groups to have live selling videos. That's why. But people are running scared and they're scared to like. As a resale store we will not put names of Brands, so if it's a Chanel handbag, you can't. We would not do that because we would not link to anything on our website because the algorithm is gonna pop you for advertising.
Harrison Ambs:Wow, they're shutting people down.
Jennifer Johnson:So I mean, it's a valid concern. So, yeah, outside, and and Facebook is owned by, you know, instagram, facebook are together Mm-hmm. You may get shut down in one, but not the other. Should we be looking at? I mean, I've done in Brice TikTok, okay, you know why not, I don't know it's. I feel like you can maybe be on two or three platforms really, really well, mm-hmm, and after that it just becomes unmanageable. You can't be great on all of them, that's fair, which I also have another question, but I'm gonna write this down so I don't forget, and it's about content. Yeah, no worries.
Harrison Ambs:Okay. So, specifically about Facebook, meta, any of these social platforms when you're doing that, yeah, you want to be cautious on it, and the main reason why is because your Anybody that's doing this kind of thing. I'm gonna look right at the camera. So, the way, if you are advertising on social, that's not your audience. Okay, that's their audience. That's why they charge you for access to it, right, but your strategy, whatever you come up with, you have to come up with a plan to make that audience your audience as much as possible. So you got to get them on your website. You got to get them signing up for your email list. You got to get them signing up for, really, your email list is the best way to go about it. Text message channel. You want to get their contact information. You want to control that, because if you do, that means it's your audience and then you can market to them how you want, because, yeah, you bring up a great point. That's that actually happened to.
Harrison Ambs:So I I so I work with Vectra started a technology company in 2008 called stickboy. Yeah, it is stickboy. I Am not stickboy. I want to start that right now with two other people. So, basically, one of our clients on. There was a social media app for hunters and outdoors people. So you're thinking people that go hunt, fish, all that stuff, what do they all do? They hold up their catch right well.
Harrison Ambs:Facebook's algorithm started popping all these people because like, well, you can't have a dead animal on it, can't have a gun on it. And when I'm talking to this client and he's talking to me about the social media platform he wants to start, he's like, it's fair. I don't want like a, like somebody who doesn't want to see this, to see this like it's totally valid, but to your point, like they're not doing anything malicious. They're holding up a dead trout. But because the Algorithm that's built into it it's the way I always describe it is it's very clever, but it's very dumb, mm-hmm. It doesn't doesn't have context like we do. Like you putting up at an ad for a Louis Vuitton bag, you're not trying to steal Louis Vuitton's business, right, and so a human would see that and understand that, but an algorithm wouldn't and it's gonna go well. I'd rather be more cautious than less, because I don't want Louis Vuitton to come in and sue me right, because my algorithm didn't catch you Right.
Jennifer Johnson:Yeah, moral of the story is don't just rely on one single yes Place to advertise spread it out.
Jennifer Johnson:It makes complete sense. Is your closet overflowing? Or maybe your kids closets are as well? Or maybe you just want to redecorate your house. If you're wondering what to do with all that stuff that you've accumulated, bring it all to true fashionistas, or even ship it to them for free. All you have to do is bring your items in and then sit back and collect your money. You can reach out to them online at true fashionistascom. Come in at our store or check them on on Facebook or Instagram, and that's true fashionistascom. All right, friends, we are back in the studio with Harrison Ambs and he is with Vectra Digital. We're talking about digital marketing today, and it's been a very interesting conversation so far. Oh, thank you for telling me that I'm sitting here looking at the clock going I really hope I'm not wasting your.
Harrison Ambs:Oh my gosh. I think our audience is gonna get great, great content from this.
Jennifer Johnson:And talking about content, yes, okay. So I remember back in the day when Facebook and everything started coming out. They're like you can't post the same thing on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, it's just you should not. What are your thoughts on that? Um no, you can post the same thing, just not the same way you got to think.
Harrison Ambs:when your audience is on Facebook versus Instagram, versus TikTok, you got to think about the kind of content your ad is going to be sitting within if that makes sense. So, for example, superbowl is coming up right and Everybody that's advertising around Superbowl they're gonna be advertising around football. I just remembered that we were all good. Okay, okay, keep going. I can come up with another analogy.
Jennifer Johnson:No, no, that's fabulous because a Super Bowl is perfect Okay.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, perfect example, okay, perfect. So you gotta think. So when we're talking about advertising on the Super Bowl, everything's gonna be themed around football, like no one's gonna go in the Super Bowl and run an ad talking about, like the latest baseball club or something the audience isn't interested in that. So when you think about advertising on Facebook, instagram and TikTok and you're thinking about your audience on these platforms, again it comes down to right message, right person, right time. Right person is important here.
Harrison Ambs:It is when your audience is on those platforms. You need to know what are they looking at outside of my ads, right? What are the things that they're looking for and how can I make sure that my ads fit in that of what they're looking for but stand out enough that it gets them interested in what I'm doing, right? So when you're talking about hey, you don't want to post the same thing on every single one of these platforms, you totally can, but you gotta think how what somebody's looking at on each one of these platforms is going to be different based on what they're hoping to get out of it when they're on there. And we're kind of talking esoteric on here. But a great example of this would be like. One of the things that we found in a lot of our data for one of our clients was people that were going on Facebook, skewed a lot older for one of our clients that was going to be a question.
Harrison Ambs:So what we did is we did some research to find out, okay, when people are skewing older on Facebook, what are they looking at? And for the most part is it going to sound really kind of basic it's pictures of their grandkids. So what we did was when we ran marketing ads on Facebook, instagram and TikTok we're talking three different audiences. Tiktok, they were tall form videos, usually with somebody's face on there, as much as possible very handheld sort of there's industry terms for them trying to avoid using, but basically we want this to seem like it's almost somebody shooting it themselves, not in a studio environment. Instagram, it's more lifestyle kind of shots. And then for Facebook, we're running these ads.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, we use pictures of like older generation with babies and things like that, like grandparents with their grandkids, because that was the audience that was on there, that was the audience that they were targeting. That's the reason why they're on that platform, right, and so we want to do speak to them for that reason. And so when we're talking about digital marketing, this kind of interaction that we're having with our audience, right, so we're talking on Facebook, we're showing elderly people interacting with grandkids, everybody's having a great time. That kind of thing is only available because we have the data that tells us this is the type of person that's on here. This is the kind of message that we're resonating with.
Harrison Ambs:And this is when we want to hit them with it. And so that way again it just comes back to, I'm telling you, madison Avenue. In the 50s they figured it all out.
Jennifer Johnson:This is bright person. Right message right time Right, exactly Now we can measure it Right, and that's a really critical part. You know you don't want to just be throwing your money away.
Harrison Ambs:No.
Jennifer Johnson:And I think a lot of people do that because they are told that you need to be on this platform or this platform, and then they just start spending money. They boost their posts, which should we talk about? That? Sure, should we be boosting our posts.
Harrison Ambs:Sometimes I really hate that I don't have any different events. There's for a lot of these things, but that's okay.
Jennifer Johnson:I mean, it's all again subjective to what the situation or the ad or what you're trying to do.
Harrison Ambs:So basically, the way I look at it is Facebook, instagram, tiktok and whatever new social media platform comes out in five years at torpedoes, everybody.
Harrison Ambs:They all figured out the business model, which is companies want access to this audience and we're willing to pay to do it. So it is pay to play. Right Now it just comes back to the return on investment thing we talked about earlier, which is if I'm going to be giving this platform money, I want to make sure I'm getting more out of it than I put in. So if I'm going to boost something, even if it's five, 10, $15, like we're talking small dollar bills how you do one thing is how you do everything. So whatever budget we're going to put into this thing, I want to make sure it leads somewhere, that I'm going to get value out of it. So a post that I would boost to be something like signing up for a newsletter or a loyalty program that I have set up, because I know what I'm doing is I'm giving Facebook money to get access to this audience because what I want to do is I want to take those people off this platform and I want to bring them under my own umbrella.
Jennifer Johnson:I love that you said that, because that's so important. Yes, you want to and I don't want to say it like that but you want to own your audience.
Harrison Ambs:Yes.
Jennifer Johnson:You don't want Facebook to own it, and that's the only one, of the only ways to do it.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, pay to get them off? Yeah, so you want to take them out, take them out of there and make them your own.
Jennifer Johnson:Exactly, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was like that's so awesome.
Harrison Ambs:No, no, you, I tend to bloviate. So the fact that you summarized it that well was really good.
Jennifer Johnson:Well, we started talking about that earlier and then we you know you dropped it in and I just wanted to pull that out a little bit because I thought, you know, our audience is really going to get value from that, because a lot of people we think that everybody knows that because I mean, I do all my own advertising stuff and that's the business you're in, so you get it, I get it, but a lot of people don't get that.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, and you got to think like and they don't have to like, that's the thing.
Jennifer Johnson:There's people like you. Yeah, and get it for them?
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, exactly, and you got to think like there's a million different things they got to do in their business and their day to day and the idea of going through and figuring out their content calendar and what they need to boost.
Harrison Ambs:It's like look, understand the value of it, understand what the goals are, understand how it fits in your business, but in terms of the execution, find somebody that can do it. Yeah, either, either. Either either delegated somebody inside your company you feel confident that can do it, but ultimately, it's one thing. It's one thing I always drill into a lot of our clients and it's because of my role inside Vectra is you have to think of it this way Bob Eiger, who is the CEO of Disney I can guarantee I don't know much about his day, but I can guarantee you he doesn't walk around the audience, walk around the office asking people hey, how many people came to our parks yesterday? How many people streamed the Moana movie on Disney Plus? He's not running around asking those things.
Harrison Ambs:That information is coming to him and that's what business owners need to understand is, when you're trying to execute and operate these things, you need to set it up in such a way that the right information is coming to you for you to make those decisions on what you need to do. You can validate, you can follow up, you can ask, you can probe, you can confirm. But that shouldn't be. That should be the exception more than the rule.
Harrison Ambs:And a lot of times when people are doing this kind of thing, and the reason I'm sharing a lot of this is because if you understand, like look, I understand how a car engine works, but I can't fix anything in my car, like I know roughly how it operates. But I mean, if you open up the lid and I'm like, okay, I don't know what any of these tubes do, but I kind of know how this thing's supposed to work. I put gas, I put the pedal and it good and it lights up whenever it's mad. So that's all I need to know as a driver. Right, then I take it to a professional and they're the one that digs into it Again.
Jennifer Johnson:It goes back to what I tell my audience all the time is hire for what you're not good at or what you don't like to do, because you're never going to do it. Well, if you don't like it or you're not good at it, always hire you. Yeah, exactly.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, hire your weaknesses absolutely and then make sure that. But don't think and it's one thing that I think you do a really great job of is, when you say this kind of thing, you're not outsourcing the responsibility of it right, no you're still responsible for it.
Harrison Ambs:You're just bringing in somebody that's much better at it than you, so you need to make sure that they're accountable to you, that you understand what they're doing, and the information that they're giving you is what you need to make sure your business is operating the way you want it to, and you do a really good job of clarifying that with people.
Jennifer Johnson:I just I look at it as leveraging the expertise of other people to operate my business. Absolutely, it's smart.
Harrison Ambs:It's like if you wanna be effective, it's the only way to do it. And, whether it's marketing or accounting or million other things, you need your business to do. You're absolutely right. Like you're the hub, You're the one that's making sure. You're the captain of the ship, so you need to make sure that everybody's doing their job Exactly. You're still responsible for everybody doing their job. Just because you hired a company to come in and do your ads doesn't mean okay, well, it's done now I don't have to deal with it anymore.
Jennifer Johnson:Fix it and forget it. Yeah, fix it and forget it. It's not a crockpot, people. In rounding out our podcast here, I wanna talk about the future of digital marketing. Is there anything that's new on the horizon, anything that we can put our pulse on right now that could move the needle for us?
Harrison Ambs:Sure, pullback is gonna be, I think, the theme. What is it? Pullback, pulling? I'll explain in a minute. Pullback, I think, is gonna be the theme of 2024.
Harrison Ambs:We saw a lot of expansion over the past two to three years in digital marketing in two specific areas. One was the use of influencers. The other one was the use of AI. What we're seeing now is a latent distrust in the audience.
Harrison Ambs:Whenever you have something like this right, a new technology, a new, anything that gets thrown into it, there's always a rapid expansion of whatever it is we're talking about. And then a pullback right. We saw it with mortgages, we saw it with banking, any industry. This is just how apparently human beings wanna run business is. We wanna run out and gold rush it as quickly as we can, and then there's a bunch of people walking around with empty shovels. So what I think is happening, or what I think is gonna happen over the next two years and we're always starting to see it now is a pullback on this. There's gonna be a latent distrust of your audience in some of these platforms. When it comes to influencer marketing and when it comes to the use of AI, we're seeing AI. Meta is floating a tool that is going to be. I think it might actually be out right now. It's a tag that they're adding to AI generated images.
Jennifer Johnson:Oh, yes, yeah it uses.
Harrison Ambs:It's imperfect. It uses metadata baked into the image, so if you strip that out and you upload the image, the tool's not gonna work. But this is version 0.2. Like, this isn't the fight. This isn't the end of the road for this kind of thing. It's clear meta's testing things to do this because the audience, because people, are having an inherent distrust. All this AI hit, it went fast, right, everybody had it, and then now there's going to be a pullback on the trust that everybody's going to see on the platform and when you have that kind of latent distrust, it's bad for the platform. If every time you go on Meta, every time you go on Facebook and Instagram, you distrust what you're looking at because you think it's a fake image, how likely are you going to be staying on the platform to look at the ads that Jennifer's running trying to sell Louis Vuitton bags?
Jennifer Johnson:It's the fake news kind of deal.
Harrison Ambs:Exactly yeah.
Jennifer Johnson:I remember them talking about specifically like plastic surgeons and all this cosmetic stuff, and that was one of the reasons, perhaps, why they started really digging into this because people were seeing people that looked absolutely stunning and be like here's your before and after, and they weren't really before and afters like that, it was just not.
Harrison Ambs:They don't have pores anymore for some reason.
Jennifer Johnson:I'm like just everything is gone. Yeah, Porcelain.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, yeah, they do. They look like they made out of porcelain. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The other thing is with the influencer thing there's actually it's becoming a thing. It's not a major thing right now, but I only think it's going to grow and that is a sort of they call it anti-influencing or anti-reviews. So the idea is, if you wanted to sell Louis Vuitton bags, you can find some good influencers in the area. Drop a few G's and get that product moving.
Jennifer Johnson:Really quickly, Then they're done. Then it didn't work.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah, see, a lot of times what's happening is audiences are looking at these influencers, creators and things like that, and they're going all right, I'm not really trusting what it is that you're doing. So what we're finding is that there are a growing audience. There is a growing audience of these influencers that pride themselves on one, they don't take any money for reviewing a product. And two, they will bash the hell out of this thing if they don't like it. And that's getting a growing audience because, like I said, there's the expansion, now there's the pullback. So what does that mean for your SMB? Right? Like this is cool for a podcast.
Harrison Ambs:For me, who thinks about this thing all the time, how can someone use this for money? What I would do is one anytime someone's coming to you with AI powered anything going with like a level of not distrust, but just a cautionary eye. We use AI all the time in our business. We developed our own AI. It's called Vita. I call it my third daughter. It was my brainchild from like six years ago. We use it, we've embraced the technology, but we understand its limitations, and so we're very careful on how we apply it.
Harrison Ambs:The other thing when it comes to, let's say, marketing influencers is not only do you have to know who your audience is, you have to know who the advocate's going to be and how they're going to talk about it. Right, you don't want to handcuff them, you don't want to tell them oh, this is your script, this is what you want to talk about, because any influencer that agrees to that is going to be low quality and they're going to be cheap. If you want to use the right people, you have to go in trusting that this one, trusting that your product is going to resonate not only with this influencer, but with their audience as well, because you don't want any blowback, because this influencer is talking about a product that they don't believe in, and what's going to happen is you're going to get like secondhand embarrassment Of course you know what I'm talking about.
Harrison Ambs:Yeah. So what you're going to want to be is, while we're going through this transition period, as this new stuff hits, it kind of settles back. It's going to settle down into a rhythm. That kind of works. Same thing happened with Instagram, same thing happened with Facebook, same thing happened with TV, radio, newspapers. It all kind of settles into. Okay, this is how you apply this for now. While that kind of settles in, you want to be a little more careful now, because audiences are being inherently distrustful not distrustful, they're being inherently cautious about what they're seeing.
Jennifer Johnson:And that makes complete sense, oh. I hope so it does. Well, it has been a fabulous conversation today and I'm sure our listeners walked away with a wealth of information. If they would like to contact you, how can our listeners get a hold of you?
Harrison Ambs:The two best ways to do that are to go to our website, vectradigital. com V-E-C-T-R-A digital. com. Fill out the contact form. Those go to our team. They'll write me in. The other thing is you can always follow me on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn, Harrison Ambs. There's a very Photoshop version of my face on there.
Harrison Ambs:I didn't look like that. When we got the headshots done, the photographer pulled me aside. She's like what do you think I'm like? It looks great. I don't know who that is, but it looks great. Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn talking about this stuff all the time, but yeah, feel free to hit me up there, ask me any questions more than happy to answer.
Jennifer Johnson:Thank you so much for being on today. Thank you for having me. Thank you, my friends, for joining me today and every week here on the Confident Entrepreneur, brought to you by True Fashionistas. If you want to take your business to the next level, order my newest book, Grace and Grit Becoming a Confident Entrepreneur. It's available on Amazon. Also, check out my website at jenniferannjohnson. com to sign up for my emails or connect with me. Have a fabulous day.