Chapters:

Links:

• DuctTapeMarketing.com
• Sara Nay on LinkedIn
• Duct Tape Marketing on X
• Duct Tape Marketing on Instagram
• Duct Tape Marketing on Facebook
• Duct Tape Marketing Podcast
• Unchained book
• Unchained Model Resources
• What users are saying about the StoryCycle Genie™

Popular Related Episodes You’ll Love:

• How EI + AI = ROI, Your Return on Intelligence With Dr. Robin Hills – This foundational episode explores how emotional intelligence combines with artificial intelligence to create competitive advantage, perfectly complementing Sara’s approach to elevating human teams through AI integration
• The Five Revolutionary Principles of Vibe Branding With Sean Schroeder & Park Howell – Discover how intuitive brand development transforms overwhelming complexity into strategic clarity, providing the classical wisdom foundation that supports Sara’s unchained marketing methodology
• The Generosity-Driven Storytelling Strategy for Small Business Growth With John Whitt – Learn how heart-centered leadership breaks through small business growth ceilings, offering the strategic mindset that complements Sara’s CMO+ framework for sustainable business transformation

Connect with me:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parkhowell/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BusinessOfStory
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0ssjBuBiQjG9PHRgq4Fu6A
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ParkHowell
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkhowell/
• Website: https://businessofstory.com/abt/

Transcript of Show:

Sara: Nay Transcript:

Here’s the full cleaned transcript with time codes removed, last names dropped, and first names bolded all the way through:

Park:
Hello, Sara:h. Welcome to the show.

Sara:
Thanks for having me on today, Park: .

Park:
Wow. So I’ve known your father for a while, I’ve done a little bit of work presenting story at Duck Tape Marketing many years ago now it seems like, been on your podcast a couple times and he’s been on mine a couple times. So it’s great to meet you. Now the CEO of Duck Tape Marketing, but you’ve been working there a long time, right?

Sara:
Yeah, it’s great to meet you as well. So I started at duct tape marketing back in 2010 as an intern and have had many different roles over the years. And then this last December, I moved into the CEO seat.

Park:
Now, did you study marketing in college? I mean, you grew up in it being around your dad, of course, but what was your journey to get into the marketing world?

Sara:
Yeah, honestly, I didn’t really know I was going to get into the marketing world. I was a psychology major in college. And then after school, I graduated and I worked at an email marketing company for about six months. And then I realized I wasn’t quite ready for a career path yet. So I took some time off and I was a ski bum. And then I traveled South America for about four months backpacking. And then after that, I moved back to Kansas City, which is where my parents were at the time. And I started at Duct Tape Marketing just as a part-time intern. Obviously grew up around my dad owning a business and being in the marketing space, but we never really talked about any of my sisters or I joining the company. And so we were cautious at first.

Park:
Huh!

Sara:
I part-time. I was also doing some other things at that time and obviously it worked out. So when I was starting, I had to learn a lot about business and also marketing. So I’ve evolved and grown up really with duct tape marketing over the years.

Park:
And for those listeners of ours that are unfamiliar with duct tape marketing, what is it exactly?

Sara:
Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve been in business for 31 years, which is when my dad originally started the company. And we are a fractional CMO business, essentially. So we have two sides of our business. We work directly with small business clients where we come in and we create a marketing strategy. We’ve been doing that for 31 years. And then we typically go into a long-term retainer where we stay in the fractional CMO seat and really oversee all of their marketing. On the other side of our business, we’ve been doing this for about 17 years now, we certify and train fractional CMOs, agency owners, consultants in our approach. And so they’re able to go out and work with clients in a very strategic and systematic way.

Park:
So it is all about that fractional CMO that companies, small and medium sized businesses, large businesses, anybody can come to you all and you help them with their overall marketing. But agencies and consultants out there that are already working, you know, kind of as a fractional marketing person for them, come in to learn your processes, your procedures around strategy development and how to work with customers. So you’re leveling them up as well.

Sara:
Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve obviously learned a lot in the last 31 years of being an agency ourselves. And so we teach our approach to marketing, but we also teach a lot about building, growing, scaling, maintaining profitability, hiring, all the things that go into owning a marketing business as well.

Park:
Well, I like your new book. Love it. It’s fun. It’s interesting. And it begged one question from me. Well, many questions, but one in particular. And of course, I’ve been at this for about 40 years myself, like your father has. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. Well, these models used to probably work, I’m assuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be models. What has broken and what broke them?

Sara:
Hmm.

Sara:
Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging the book. I appreciate that. I’m a new author, so it’s exciting to talk about at this point. Thank you. So really I’ve been in the agency space myself. And as I said, served so many different roles in our company that for a long time, I felt like there were issues in the marketing agency space, both on our side of things. So as an agency, but also for the small businesses that we are serving.

Park:
Congrats with that.

Sara:
So we have completely shifted what we’ve been doing over the years to instead of just handling execution for our clients, we’ve shifted to coming in and creating the marketing strategy, in empowering their team with education and systems and processes. And so they can really take ownership of their marketing moving forward. And so I think the one of the biggest issues in the small business space, and I’ve been seeing this for a really long time because I’ve had a lot of sales conversations and just conversations in general with small businesses is they hire an agency to do their marketing and then they pay them every month and they have no idea what they’re doing or what kind of results they’re getting or if marketing is even working for them. So that’s a really common challenge. And so in that scenario, the small business is really being dependent on this agency to perform, you know, and get them great results for they really don’t even know what they’re purchasing.

And so the book is all about taking ownership of your marketing strategy based on your business strategy, but then finding is it a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some sort to really help you own the marketing strategy as an asset in your business versus completely outsourcing it to vendors or other solutions.

Park:
Okay, so when you say own marketing as an asset inside your business, does that require them to hire a marketing person, someone solely dedicated to that particular proposition?

Sara:
Not necessarily because I don’t think it makes sense for every single business out there, depending on size and industry to have a marketing person in-house. But what the business should own is an understanding of what is the business strategy? What is the business trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy that’s going to help us move towards our goals? And then an understanding of actually what needs to be done and who’s going to do the work. But on top of that, also owning any marketing accounts that are associated with what you’re gonna be doing from an execution standpoint. And so I hear these kinds of stories all the time is, you the other day, an HVAC company came to me and they’re like, we don’t know if our Google ads are actually working. And I was like, okay, who’s managing your Google ads? And they’re like a contractor and they own, the contractor owned the Google ads accounts. And then this HVAC company was paying them like $8,000 a month to basically run the Google ads campaign.

but the HVAC contractors had no idea what percentage of that $8,000 a month was going to the contractor and what percentage was going to the Google Ads account. And then on top of that, they weren’t happy with the performance and they were ready to move on to have someone else manage their Google Ads, but the contractor owned the account. And so basically they were handcuffed either to stay with that specific contractor or start from scratch, which Google Ads gets better over time.

to be able to build over again. And so I see that a lot. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years of, this marketing agency built my website and they own the hosting and everything behind it. And so if I leave them, I lose my website, which is one of the most important assets that a business should own. And so our stance has always been like, if we’re going to recommend a CRM or if we’re going to build your website, or if we’re going to build out AI solutions for you to use, we want you to own the accounts and then give us access to it.

Park:
Mm-hmm.

Sara:
because ultimately then you can kick us out when we part our ways and you still have these things that you should have as a business.

Park:
Okay, so let’s break that down. The interweb shows up, you know, in the early 2000s, Google advertising comes along and few years after that, and the old model was that small businesses had a hard time understanding Google ads, how do they work, how do you really make them effective? So the marketing model was that you would hire an expert to come in and do it, which makes total sense, right? Now, fast forward 20 years, and that model is such that you don’t need that expert, you, there are other ways that you can handle this internally and I’m assuming AI must play a role in this too, starting with a strategy first, which seems really obvious, but you’re suggesting in the book that most people don’t start with strategy, they start with, let’s just start placing ads, let’s go to tactical thinking. So that broken model now can be fixed with a new approach to owning this marketing internally, you don’t have to rely on consultants and outside agencies. It is, as you say in the book, an anti-agency model. Sara:h, I hate to tell you, you’re going to piss a lot of people off with that statement.

Sara:
And I always say when people bring that up, it is not saying that agencies are bad because we are an agency still. We train and certify a lot of agencies, but it’s,

picking on the model, essentially. And so I’m calling to all of the agencies that are part of our program that are attracted to tape marketing certification. We need to be more strategic. We need to be higher level. We need to be empowering our clients and not just always handling execution. So it’s a shift in the model for agencies, a call to that and not necessarily saying you never need an agency again, but to your.

point, I have seen a number of small businesses make the shift of, we don’t need agencies, or we don’t need contractors, or we don’t need outside solutions because we can do this with AI. So they bring in an AI tool, or two or three or 10. But they don’t take a step back and actually say, what are we trying to do from a strategic perspective? Then answering the question of what AI tools or solutions do we need to bring in? And then once you bring them in, you need to feed them

with your strategy in order to be able to use them effectively moving forward. And then you also need to have systems and processes in place to ensure consistent results from your team. So it’s not as easy as we’re going to fire any agency that we’re working with and just bring it all in house with AI. If you’re thinking about making that shift, then it’s still, it’s really important to take a step back and map out the marketing strategy, do a bit of a team audit. Who do you currently have in place?

and then analyze what AI tools can we bring in to up-level our humans, and then also to help us reach our specific goals. And that’s where you can be successful with AI instead of just creating a bunch of noise.

Park:
And so you had said earlier too, when we started this part of the conversation about how Unchained also looks internally and how that it can even help the systems that you are all using their duct tape marketing. Take us to that story in your book about your own experience having a newborn, as I understand it, and you were racing around coming to your, it kind of sounded like the dark night of the soul for you in the marketing world and tell us about that moment and how has it informed what you are doing today.

Sara:
Yeah, it’s always interesting because when you’re going through situations like that, that seems so hard in the moment, great things can come out of them. And so that was one of those moments. And so as you referenced, it was years ago, I had my daughter and she was, she was about six months old at the time. And she was home with me. She was in daycare, but she was home with me because she was really sick. And so, you know, a little tiny six month old sick, she was wheezing, having a lot of trouble breathing unless she was upright. And so.

I was actually sitting on my couch holding her on my chest. And at that point I was an account manager at duct tape marketing and serving as fractional CMO to most of our clients. So I was incredibly spread way too thin in multiple roles within our company. And so I was holding her on my chest and I distinctly remember I had my phone like behind her back and I was texting and like arguing with a client about a shade of blue in like one social media.

And so I just remember, you know, having that discussion with her and then setting my phone down and being like, something has to change on both sides of this equation. On my side, I’m spread way too thin and this model isn’t serving anyone well. But on the small business owner side that I was talking with, you know, she was losing control of her marketing and she was completely reliant on us versus being able to, you know, make changes and decisions on her.

own end. And so that was a big wake up call for me. And I actually ended up going on a walk out back. That’s where I do my best thinking because we have trails behind our house. And calling my dad actually, when I got back down and just saying, you know, something needs to change, I can’t sustain this, I’m going to burn out. There’s a lot of issues. And so that was my first kind of aha moment of like this model isn’t necessarily serving everyone as well as it could be. And so fast forward, we ended up hiring

account managers and fractional CMOs on our team. So we split everything I was doing across two different roles instead of just me. And then I was able to move in the COO seat at that time and really stay in my zone of genius. So that was the initial kind of sPark: , but then that’s always been kind of top of mind. And so that’s where we’ve continued to evolve even more and lean even more into the fractional CMO approach ever since that time period.

Park:
What’s the biggest mistake people make, your clients make, your UC to help fix for them in the current marketing environment?

Sara:
The biggest mistake that I see is you alluded to this earlier, like strategy before tactics should be so obvious, but there are so many small businesses that just dive into tactics because they’ve told that’s what they need to do. And so to your example earlier, maybe they launch a paid campaign, rather Google or Meta or whatever it might be.

but they haven’t taken a step back and created the strategy that needs to support that campaign. So they haven’t deeply understood their target market or messaging that resonates with their target market or what their customer journey looks like after someone sees an ad. So you can continue to build trust and establish authority. And so I see so many people wasting money on marketing tactics because they haven’t taken that step back. And then on top of it, all of a sudden they’re spread on all of these different channels. They haven’t set up

proper tracking or metrics. So now they have no idea what’s actually working, but they keep doing it because it’s what they’ve done for a while and they don’t really know how to untangle that mess.

Park:
Mm-hmm.

Park:
You know, it’s that old line, keep doing what you’ve always been doing and you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten or something like that. Well, duct tape marketing is what, 30 years old, thereabouts. When you all started as a fractional CMO for many clients and then teaching agencies how to do that too, were you not strategy first led or did you find yourself drug into more tactical thinking and execution without strategy because…

Sara:
Exactly, exactly.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Park:
customers think that’s what’s going to make the till ring and that’s going to demonstrate results as fast as possible.

Sara:
Yeah.

Yeah, we’ve always led over those 30 years with strategy before tactics, but where we were being pulled, sorry. We’ve always, okay, I’ll start over. Okay. We’ve always led with strategy before tactics over the 30 or so years in business. But what shifted is when we would move into retainers with clients previously, we would

Park:
Watch your hands, Sara:h. That’s okay. Go, yeah, pick up right there, please.

Sara:
be pulled into just the execution. So they’d see us as the execution team versus staying that high level advisor and leader. And so that’s really been a huge positioning shift for us because even the fractional CMO term, people didn’t know what the heck that meant five years, six years, seven, years ago. And so we’ve really evolved in the retainer side of things where if we’re gonna stay on and execute for a client,

we are staying on as a fractional CMO. That’s like a note, like you’re absolutely gonna get a fractional CMO to lead the strategy into oversee, because that’s what you need. And then the execution side of things is an add on. And so we can execute for our clients or we can train your internal team or help you hire roles to be able to execute moving forward. But that fractional CMO seat is something that we always include now.

Park:
and you call it CMO+. What can you describe that for us?

Sara:
We do. Yeah, there’s a lot of different marketing models in the space. And so I think that’s where a lot of confusion happens with small businesses trying to figure out the best solution for them. But we’ve really combined, I would say, two models into the Fractional CMO+. And so Fractional CMOs, the traditional model is a Fractional CMO might work with

two, three, four clients, and they’re really just dedicated to those clients. But a lot of times the traditional fractional CMO doesn’t have an execution team if their clients need help with execution. Swinging to the other side, the agency space, a lot of agencies don’t lean into strategy as much as they should, and they do dive directly into tactics. And so what we’ve done is combined the best of both of those worlds to say we’re fractional.

CMO, plus we can execute, plus we can train your team, plus we can help you bring in partners or vendors. so it’s really, it’s strategic leadership and then figuring out how to get the execution done based on the business’s specific goals, needs, revenue, size, all of those things.

Park:
So you were saying one of the first pitfalls small to medium sized businesses encounters lack of strategy going directly to tactics. What would be the next downfall? The thing that’s tripping them up that they really need to be aware of.

Sara:
Yeah, the next one, and I mentioned earlier is the not understanding what metrics to track and not understanding how to track it, whether they’re doing it themselves or I’ve heard a lot of stories of small businesses outsourcing to an agency or a contractor, whoever, and basically the agency or contractor sends them a monthly report of these metrics and they have absolutely no idea what the reports mean.

And so it just looks like foreign language to them. And so that’s where, when we’re working with clients as a fractional CMO, we do communicate on a monthly basis and a quarterly basis and a yearly basis metrics, but we’re always educating our clients on what it means and why we’re tracking it and how this is actually turning into revenue. And then we’re having them report back to us.

their numbers as well. And so that’s another key area I think a lot of businesses struggle with either they don’t understand what to track if their team’s handling their marketing execution or they’re not partnered with outside solutions that are taking the time to educate them on what the metrics actually mean.

Park:
Is that the definition of the, as I love this term in your book, the vendor vortex?

Sara:
Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Park:
So they fall into this vendor vortex, they go there for help and they end up screaming, help, get me out of this and what can I do next? All right, take us to number three. What’s the third biggest challenge that listeners may be experiencing that they can rectify through a CMO plus approach?

Sara:
Mm.

Yeah, I think another big challenge and we touched on earlier bringing in AI. A lot of people are bringing in AI, but not again, approaching it strategically. And so there’s so much just generic content out there online. Pick on LinkedIn, for example, there’s a lot more people posting a lot more frequently now because they can. And so I see a lot of businesses struggling right now with

bringing in AI and not just causing confusion. And so a lot of that goes into, if you’re gonna bring in a chat GPT, for example, as a solution for your team, great, but you need to be really proactive at training chat GPT on your business and your brand and your tone of voice and your ideal clients and your messaging and all of those things. So you have to know that first in order then to be able to produce

decent content on something like ChatGPT. And so one of my favorite ways to use ChatGPT to help with all of those things is recording videos, for example, or recording sales calls when I’m talking about our program, and then using that to train ChatGPT to start understanding how I think and how I talk and how I go through and navigate solutions with clients. Because if you can give AI all of that stuff,

on the front end, ultimately will be able to get closer to nailing your unique style when you are going to use it for something like helping to produce content moving forward.

Park:
What about prompt engineering with general AI, chat GPT and whatever, and people having to really learn how to do that because there’s so much nuance in prompt engineering to get that GPT to do the thing for you. How do you help people overcome that little hurdle?

Sara:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And honestly, one of the best tools that we bring in for clients is called Ella from Atomic Elevator is the company. And why I mention it here is because Ella is a marketing tool built by marketers for marketing only. so Ella comes pre-trained on marketing frameworks, best practices, ways of doing things. And then when you sign up for an account with Ella, you spend

about I would say two weeks building out what they call a brand bot. And so they have a very set process for you to train Ella on your company and brand. And so then when you start executing, prompt engineering isn’t even a thing on Ella. And so literally a client, once we’ve trained Ella on their business and we hand it off to them, a client can go into there and say, hey, Ella, write me a blog post on this content or on this topic. And she will write an incredible blog post.

Park:
Mm-hmm.

Sara:
They call her she will write an incredible blog post on topic on brand nailing tone of voice because of all of the thoughtful training that has gone into building out Ella as a platform. And so if you’re going to use, know, chat, GPT, which is an excellent platform as well, like you definitely have to spend time learning about prompting and engineering and saying the right things and pulling the right reports to get you the results. Ella takes a lot of that stress off your plate.

Park:
And you say to build that brand bot, they spend about two weeks infusing it with content and so forth. Do they have to answer a bunch of questions or how does it work? What does the interface look like?

Sara:
Yeah, you basically submit a series of documents that you’re prompted through Ella and answering a bunch of questions. so you, you, that’s where again, strategy before AI is helpful because if you show up and sign up for something like Ella, they do a two week free trial. But if you signed up for something like Ellen, you don’t know your ideal clients and their pain points and what keeps them up at night. It’s going to be really hard for you to train an AI solution on that type of stuff. Or if you’ve never really thought about

your brand and how you’re gonna be seen in the world and your tone of voice and all that stuff. It’s gonna be really hard to train AI on that. It’s almost like think about training an assistant on stuff like that. And so that’s why again, creating that overall strategy to understand those things will help you train something like Ella more effectively. So that’s where the deep thinking is really important on the front end.

Park:
Yeah, something that we’ve been talking about lately too is ROI, return on investment. A twist to that in today’s market is ROI, return on intelligence because of AI, artificial intelligence. But first, if I’m hearing you right, Sara:h, is you got to start with your own intelligence and the strategy behind developing your business and your brand and get that straight even before it sounds like you start working with Ella.

Sara:
Yep.

Park:
so that you can give L.S. it’s not garbage in garbage out that way.

Sara:
Yeah, absolutely. And then even when you bring your expertise and all that information and insight and you start working with an Ella, like your expertise and insight is still important. And so we always say, you know, the human input on the front end and then you use an AI system or tool and then you need to edit and get it across the finish line and bring your own perspective and experience on the back end.

But I think the beauty of if you can bring in AI tools like this and use them, really the goal is to elevate your time. And so you’re not stuck in tedious, repetitive tasks. You’re able to free up space to be more strategic, to be more creative, to be more human, which I think is the area that a lot of us need to be focusing on. And I talk a lot about that in Unchained as well. We’ve never thought of AI as, we’re going to…

know, fire everyone on our team and we’re going to be so much more profitable. Like that’s never been our approach or thinking it’s okay, let’s analyze who’s on our team. Let’s analyze their specific skill sets and strengths. And then let’s look at where we can layer AI below them so they can grow and future proof really their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s an important, a lot of people think of AI as be more productive or be more efficient or just do more and more and more.

And I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it. I think if you think about it as how can we elevate and be more human, you’re gonna make more of an impact.

Park:
Absolutely. So really what you’re doing is replenishing the workforce versus replacing the workforce because so often, you you’ve got a one person band marketer trying to do all these things. If they use AI right, all of they’ve got six to 10 new people on staff, you know, metaphorically. They don’t actually have people there, but if they’re using AI properly, it levels them up into having that kind of bandwidth and being able to have that sort of marketing muscle.

Sara:
Exactly.

Park:
where before it was just them and like you were saying, you know, there with your newborn, arguing with a customer, trying to get them figured out, whatever. Well, with AI, you can really circumvent a lot of that anguish and get right to it.

Sara:
Yeah, and I think that’s how AI is impacting the org chart a bit in the small business space because before, if you would have asked me as a small business owner, what should I do for a marketing department?

I would have said you can’t expect one person to do it all. And I still don’t think you can expect one person. But I think if you have a marketing leader that’s owning the strategy and then you have someone that understands and has marketing experience and then you layer AI tools and solutions below them, like they can manage ads now, they can manage SEO now, they can handle a lot of content production because you can repurpose a lot of stuff. And so I do think it

I’m not saying again, go fire everyone on your team, but I do think you can stay a little bit leaner, especially in the small business space when you have a tighter budget than you’ve ever been able to before, which I think is exciting for small businesses as long as you’re approaching it the right way.

Park:
Yeah, and Unchained in your book, you talk about it’s not just a read it one and done thing, but you really approach it as a workbook, something to keep by your side to keep going back to what are the major takeaways readers will get from Unchained?

Sara:
Yeah, so the book, it definitely is more of a workbook that I hope that people take action on. So it comes with 48 worksheets and resources, four per chapter. And so the idea is you would read the chapter and then access the resources and work through the resources so you can start applying and brainstorming and talking about what the sections were about. But really it’s broken down with three different parts in the book.

The first book is Timeless Foundations. That’s where I talk a lot about marketing strategy and understanding your ideal clients and messaging and stuff that hasn’t changed over the years. And I would argue it’s becoming more and more important now. Then part two really goes into kind of what’s broken with the agency model on both sides of things or both sides of the equation. And then part three is then, okay, now that we understand all of this, here’s the playbook moving forward.

And so my goal is, you when someone goes through Unchained, they get an understanding of the why and the what in terms of what’s important still, but then they also have a playbook on how to actually take the information and apply it to their business as well.

Park:
Yeah, that’s very cool. How long did it take you to write it? Because it sounds like it’s full of lots of great content.

Sara:
It took me quite some time. actual like sitting down and writing it, I would say it was about a six month process, but it’s honestly been something that I’ve been writing in my head and talking to with clients and working with our team on for years now at this point.

Park:
Yeah, something you’ve experienced so you can speak from it firsthand.

Sara:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of stories in there about, you know, working with clients and also working with our team and helping our team up level as well. So there’s, there’s a lot of, experience and stories and examples brought, brought to the book as well.

Park:
And what is maybe one of the major ahas you got as an author when you’re crystallizing, coalescing your thoughts and getting them down on paper that impacted the operations of duct tape marketing of how you were showing up every day internally, not externally, but just operational wise.

Sara:
Yeah, it’s a good question. I realized actually while I was writing the book, I was pretty early on in the book, that I am talking to a lot of other people about these concepts, about AI and not as much to our team as I should be.

we talk a lot about AI. like, I’m not saying we never talked about AI. Like everyone on my team has bought in, they’re using AI every day. it’s, but I never really talked to them about, you know, why we’re bringing in these different solutions to duct tape marketing and how we’re hoping that they continue to up level and upskill and grow. And it was almost like, just assumed they knew that’s why we were doing it, but that’s not a good assumption. And so, while I was almost finished with the book, I actually had our team go through one of the exercises.

which is essentially future proofing your career. And so I had him each take some time to write down the skills that they do on a regular basis and then basically rank them on like, is the skill something that’s growing in importance that humans should own? Is it decreasing in importance because of AI or is it staying stable? And then also analyze those skills based on things that they enjoy doing or that they actually think they make an impact on. And then all of that

led us to then having everyone write future bios for themselves moving forward in the age of AI. And so it was a good, you know, was writing it and I was like, this, this is something that I, we need to do more as a team, not just saying, okay, here’s another new AI tool, or this is, know, but taking a step back and helping not just duct tape marketing future-proof with AI, but helping individual team members future-proof with AI as well.

Park:
Yeah, because that sounds like a great exercise for your clients to do for their own people internally that are, you know, frightened of AI. Rightly so. Am I going to keep my job? Am I not going to keep my job? But to get them to open up to the prospect, I call it the dinosaur in the headlights and the headlights on that license plate is AI coming at you. And it’s here, folks. It’s not going anywhere. And it will replace lots of jobs. But

There are also tremendous opportunities of what you can do with AI in your current role to level you up. It may be in a little bit different direction than you initially thought, but I like to say AI doesn’t bleed. Humans do. When you’re bleeding, I’m talking about what is your passion, your curiosity, and how can you really embrace AI to help you amplify?

your passions and curiosities and what you bring to the world through productivity.

Sara:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think in any company, there’s people that are into AI and they enjoy it and they’re excited for it. There’s people that are just kind of in the middle, like they haven’t had a ton of success yet. And there are people that are absolutely fearing it. And so the more conversations I think you can have with everyone as a group, like the people that are excited and diving in will hopefully be early adopters and help kind of bring everyone else along to, because it’s here and it’s not going anywhere. And I think the best way we can become

irreplaceable in the age of AI is just continuing to learn about it and experiment with it and test it and think of it as again, like we’ve talked about this whole podcast, how can it help me grow in different ways and excel in different ways? So I think more conversations you can have with your team, just to get everyone aligned and on the same page and comfortable, the better off you’re going to be moving forward.

Park:
What, Sara:h, has surprised you the most about AI in the marketing world?

Sara:
I mean, it’s just evolving so fast. So I feel like I’m surprised with something almost every day. There’s something new that it can do. And so there’s, I wouldn’t say any like one thing that it surprised me with the most, but I’ve really just enjoyed learning the different capabilities for myself. I am not the person that tries to learn every single tool and every single solution because I’m more in the mindset of I want to go deep.

on a few core tools to understand exactly what they can do for me. so Ella is a great example for that. And so I just am surprised all the time of what I can do with a solution like Ella and just continuing to learn more in there. So another way we use Ella, just to give you an example, is we have a certification program that we talked about. And every time I have a sales call now, we’ll record and transcribe it, ask for permission, of course.

And then we’ll use Ella to help us create marketing content based on that prospect and their words and their tone of voice and their story that they told. So we can continue to reach people that are in their similar stage. But also within Ella, we then get feedback on how we can improve as a sales team moving forward. And then finally, we have a bank of all of our previous case studies and testimonials. And so we’ll say, help us craft an email.

that pulls out the most relevant testimonial that’s aligned with this person, and Ella will help us do that as well. So I’m just always in awe of how can we improve our processes? How can we better communicate and better personalize with prospects and clients through using these different solutions?

Park:
And does Ella create the strategy for them as well?

Sara:
Ella does assist in strategy. So they think of Ella as a strategy and execution platform. And so you could go into Ella after your brand bot is built and you could say, create a social media strategy for the month of September. And Ella would create the social media strategy and then you would basically have conversation back and forth, tweak it till you felt good about it. And then essentially say, okay, great, create all of these social posts.

for September as well. So it’s absolutely a tool that can be strategic and aid in execution as well.

Park:
Yeah, interesting. Well, what do you think, final question for you, you know, is we’re all right at the heart of AI. What is going to keep chat GPT six, seven, and or eight to come in and just take over everything we just talked about and saying, you know what, you don’t need duct tape marketing. You don’t need Park:  Howell in the business story. You don’t need Ella. You don’t need the story cycle genie because now

Sara:
You

Park:
chat. GPT-7 can do all of that for you.

Sara:
And I don’t think we know, no one knows where it’s going. I think there is a lot of discussion and there is a lot of stuff that we do in the marketing space that I think once agents are officially functioning well, cause I think they’re still kind of evolving right now is my perspective on them. But when they’re officially functioning well and you could go to an agent and say, you just with one thing, like go to all this research and build the, the social media content and then schedule it out on my profiles and optimize, you know, you, you’ll be able to direct an agent to do a lot of that stuff

Park:
Mm-hmm.

Sara:
in the future. But again, I still believe that you’ll need humans to oversee it all and to be strategic and to think like humans and to be empathetic and to be focused on connection and to be authentic and to make some mistakes because that’s now standing out. And so my hope, because who knows, is that we will still have a space being strategic and doing those things, but not be

Park:
Right.

Sara:
pulled down into the weeds of execution when it comes to marketing specifically.

Park:
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Well, Sara:h, thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on your new book, Unchained. Say hello to your father for me. It’d be great to chat with him again soon. And yeah, one last thought for our listeners. What should they do next after listening to this show?

Sara:
Thank you. I will.

Sara:
Well, go buy Unchained. I had to say it, but honestly, honestly, there’s a lot of overwhelm right now, um, in the small business space or just business space in general, when it comes to marketing. And so my advice is if you’re feeling overwhelmed, if you’re feeling lost, if you don’t know what to do, especially with AI entering the scene, um, just take a step back and just do some deep thinking of what is this business at? What is our business actually trying to accomplish? What are our specific goals? Where are we at now? Where do we want to be in a year from now?

how can we get there? And taking the time to pause and reflect on those things will give you clarity on the best approach moving forward.

Park:
great advice. Thank you, Sara:h. I appreciate you being here.

Sara:
Thanks for having me on, Park: .

Park:

If you’ve been listening to the Business of Story this year, then you’ve heard a lot about our StoryCycle Genie™. I have all of the respect in the world for what John Jantsch has created with Duct Tape Marketing and how Saray Nay has been and will be instrumental in its growth. But you might be confused about our StoryCycle Genie™ and Atomic Elevator’s Ella platforms, so I asked our Brand Intelligence Genie to compare and contrast the tools. But don’t worry, the StoryCycle Brand Intelligence Genie does not default to selling itself. It speaks only the truth when it comes to analyzing both products. Here’s what it found…

Both platforms solve different problems. Ella gives you on-brand content from templates – systematic and efficient.

StoryCycle Genie™ gives you an ecosystem of experts that becomes smarter with every interaction. The only platform that uses Cognitive Mesh Architecture, because we invented it, the Genie amplifies your business intelligence to create narrative foundations, brilliant marketing strategies, and captivating content so you can get to market fast.

And the StoryCycle Genie™ is the only narrative-driven platform built on proven storytelling frameworks that have been used for more than 20 years to grow brands by as much as 600 percent.

It immediately reviews your website, assesses your brand story, and activates 24 specialized agents that learn from your expertise.

This way, you can build your brand brain in minutes, not weeks. Create brilliant marketing strategies in a flash. And instantly produce always-on-brand content.

The result? A living, breathing ecosystem that grows smarter with every project, building on your professional intelligence.

That is the enthralling promise of the StoryCycle Genie™.

Check it out at StoryCycleGenie.ai.

Thank you for listening and sharing this show with anyone you know who needs to get stop renting their marketing and start owning their brand storytelling success.

Join me next Monday when brand positioning expert, Laura Reis, daughter of the legendary Al Reis who wrote many consider the bible on Positioning called, well, Positioning, joins us to share insight from her new book, The Strategic Enemy: How to Build & Position a Brand Worth Fighting For. You’re not going to want to miss it.

Until then, remember that the most potent story you will ever tell is the story you tell yourself, so make it a great one.

Listen To More Episodes