2024 Concrete Coatings Marketing Plan + AI Integrations for your Business

Audio Transcription

Hey there, my friend. Welcome to another episode of Your Concrete Success Podcast. I'm joined by my one and only Mady. How's your day going so far?

My day is going great. Are you excited about heading over to, to the end of the year?

I am very excited about heading over to the end of the year. Yes. And starting a fresh. It's my favorite thing when you start like turn the new page.

That's right, a new chapter. And if you're listening to this episode right now, you're wondering, hey, what is this episode about? We're gonna be talking about a couple of different subject matters here. One of them is gonna be... what is it gonna be? So we're gonna be talking a few things. But one of the highlights will be the marketing plan for 2024, and also something else interesting—we're gonna delve into AI.

To kick it off, let's bring Danny AI into the mix. Christian, roll it out for us!

Exciting news! We're thrilled to announce our upcoming master class digital marketing strategies for growing your concrete coding business in 2024. In this one of a kind training, we'll be revealing all the latest ways to generate more leads from your digital marketing efforts. We'll be going over how to make your phone ring with targeted leads and project opportunities by leveraging targeted SEO, Google ads, conversion optimization, remarketing funnels to Facebook ads and TikTok ads. We'll also cover video advertising strategies you can't miss out on and a whole lot more. If you're a concrete coding business owner and you want to survive and thrive in 2024, register for our free master class. Click the link in the description. Now I look forward to seeing you there.

Wow. OK. OK. Let's address the elephant in the room. For those listening, you might not even know what's going on. You have no clue. So make sure you go over to the YouTube's Concrete Marketing Crew and find this episode specifically because you're going to have two things. You're going to have to analyze the way this Danny AI looks. And the second piece, I mean, are we going to ignore the fact that Danny AI sounds like a newscaster with this English accent? I mean, if you don't know who I am and never heard me, I guess. And you're listening to that, that doesn't sound that bad. It doesn't sound that bad. But I don't know. It looks cool. It's very real, it's actually very good quality. But for those of us that know you, there's something about it. Share your feedback. What does that look like for you and your business? And you can create training material? Think about this for a second, you can create content to introduce yourself to specific prospects. You can send this over for training presentations, etcetera for your team members. The capabilities of AI in video and voice format, they're nuts.

That's not including ChatGPT-4; it's not including the plugins, what you can do. There's so many ways to be able to leverage AI. What I'm noticing and I'll give you some observations, you share yours. I'm noticing here's the trend that I'm noticing: the amount of time it takes to get something done has reduced itself to almost half, meaning we can take a video like this and repurpose it and slice it up by leveraging AI tools. There's a tool called Descript, for example, you plug it in and it's able to add transcriptions. I mean, it's able to burn the words that I'm speaking over. It's able to get the editors to remove the "ah" and "um" in the videos, and that is in like two clicks. So what used to take someone hours and hours to do now with just logging into a platform, you can clean it up, you can clean up the audio, and get something done a lot faster.

So doesn't mean that you have to do less work. No, it means the expectation to get more done now is the norm. So how does that apply to the conversation of advertising and for our clients? Well, like you were saying, like, you know, if you're not leveraging AI in some capacity in your business, you're not staying current, you're behind. AI is not going to go anywhere. AI keeps getting better and better and better and better.

I mean, the other day we were sitting at home playing with ChatGPT-4, and you literally described our dog, you said something along the lines of like, you know, a mixed breed dog with black and white spots and brown on its face, right? Sitting on a flake floor and the picture that came out was perfect. I wish you had, do you have that picture? I'll send it to Christian and see if we can. I mean, it was so good, and it's crazy because I feel like maybe people even in this industry can use AI tools to crisp up your floors and make them look sharper when you take pictures of them and post them on social media. You can use AI for, like so many people are like, "Oh, I don't have time to create social media posts." Canva has AI tools that you can leverage to create social media posts for your industry and for your business. Some people are like, "Oh, I want to send an email to all my clients. For all the leads that I have offering them a special offer." Well, you can, you can use A I to generate a beautiful email that you can send to your leads to offer them promotions, and you're ahead of the game because it takes like what a minute or two to create that. It takes a prompt and that's what I want to drive in in today's conversation.

At Concrete Marketing Crew, we're getting every team member to get fully acquainted with. The technology does not mean it replaces them, although it will replace those that are not willing to adapt. That is a guarantee. So when it comes to advertising, when it comes to cleaning up images, we've talked about that. For example, Photoshop has the capability now to be able to clean up an image and you can ask it to, based on dimensions, to make that picture go into a full graphic. So if it's vertical, it can make it into a landscape format dimensions and finalize it. If, like, for example, we have stamped concrete clients, we're asking it to put grass around the stamped concrete patio. And now it goes from looking ugly into looking beautiful like a proper outdoor space. So the capabilities are incredible.

And the question is how do you get yourself to leverage the skills and learn the skills to utilize it? You start with the most immediate use cases. So you're not gonna go and become a prompt engineer per se overnight. But what you can do is download the app ChatGPT. It is worth the $20 a month if you pay for the upgrade, you don't need it. On my phone, I have the free version, totally free version because I want to be able to coach our clients to utilize the free version. And in our teams, we have the paid version and it works great. So when it comes to creating follow-up messages, text messages, you can literally say, "Hey, give me a follow-up response for this client who gave me this objection." Type it in, it's gonna give you a response, and that response is probably gonna be better than what you would think of. And you can give us some scenarios and it's going to give you a full response. That's not it. You can go over to your data and say these are my hard costs on the product. If I want to sell, this is how much my overhead is. Give me a calculation of how much I should sell per square foot if I want to be at this profit level, gross profit. And then, you know, it's gonna give you some answers so you can give it and feed it as much information as you want. And it's gonna be able to calculate.

Now, on the other side, I don't want you to trust the AI; you still have to check the information. Dennis H is one of my friends, we were doing some video recordings in Kansas City and he was asking Bard, which is the Google version of AI, to translate times. He's like, "OK, I have a presentation at this time. I think it was like at night in the afternoon, the day before and then the following day in the morning time. And he's asking what time would that be in Pacific?" And Bard would not get the times right. It actually got the times wrong translating the times. He took that information, same prompts, put it right into ChatGPT, and then he got the right times. So depending on what machine you're using as far as prompting and asking questions, you're gonna get a variety of things.

Another example is our content team. We have SEO tools that enable us to leverage AI to run calculations, run metrics, run prompts so that we can create better content. It's sped up the time that it takes us to write content. However, we still need a content editor to go through the content because a lot of times the type of content we get is accurate. So that is where you get to refine the engine and give it prompts and there's so many ways to go in the advanced levels to feed it facts. And that's the beautiful part about this. It keeps learning over whatever you give it. So it starts with the prompt.

What are some of the best use cases for it in your case?

Well, I don't know. I was gonna say, let me get back to—let me say something really quick. Can I say something really quick?

Yes.

AI is a tool. It is a tool. It's not gonna replace me or you, but it is something that replaced me in that video. But what I'm trying to say is that you had to prompt it; you had to prompt it. And even though it replaced you in that video, it didn't replace your voice yet. Is it going to in the future? Maybe it will. But the point is that if we are the people, like the AI doesn't control us, like we control the tool. So we're always going to have that upper hand with these tools. Like, we're always going to be the people that if we have the right prompts and the right way to use the tool, it's going to be something that will only make us better, you know what I'm saying?

So how do we use it? Well, like you said, I love the way that our graphic design team sometimes will have, for example, someone else on the picture and in the right corner will be like a bucket, and you could literally tell AI to remove the bucket. Or like, um, like you were saying the other day, we had this picture of a beautiful stamped concrete driveway and then on the edge there, there was no grass. It was just plain dirt and we added grass and it looked really, really pretty. We can. That's one of the things that we like to use and also using it to analyze data. Like you were saying, that's a very good way to use the tool personally. Can I tell you how I use it personally? Can I?

Yes.

OK. So I create meal plans for my family using AI and grocery lists. AI is just something that you just have to leverage. That's the whole point. It's a leverage point, and you get to speed up, and the applications are only going to improve by the day. I don't see this slowing down. And this is the commitment of our team. I had a conversation with our team in the Monday H all was about, like, hey, these are the expectations. We're gonna 2X to 4X what we're currently doing in 2024. That is the expectation. Now, I'm not giving our team unrealistic expectations. I'm giving them those expectations based on the foundation that we should always be improving, learning, and applying and using the best practices and tools became part of the conversation. It's like, hey, you know what, it's a... that's actually pretty doable if we just learn how to do this and that. So you have the automations and then you have AI, and those two components in a business scenario can make you a lot of money.

Now in the conversations of concrete coding and that of concrete, like how can you use that right now? So let me just give you an example. You can take any of the specific prompts that I've given you here or in past episodes when it comes to sales and marketing, and you can take that and go over to ChatGPT and ask it for a question. So for example, "How do I do a database reactivation for my concrete coding business? My business name is ABCD Concrete Codings. And I wanna offer 10% off for anyone who books an estimate or books their job before the end of the week." Right? And you run that, ask it to do a text variation, an email variation, you gave it some specific feedback and now you go and do your database reactivation. So you can go from a concept into an executable idea. And now you can take that into your email system or your inbox or if you're using CRM like what we provide our clients and then you create that email and send that text message as well. And before you know it, you start having momentum, whereas before you would have to wait for a marketing agency or for someone that knew how to write better than you did. Like now that you know, you can take that into Grammarly and it's pretty much ready to go. You can also ask it, "Hey, use 6th grade or below grammar level," and it's gonna be able to clean that up for you. So do not be limited by just basic uses.