Crafting Effective Strategies in Digital Marketing with Corey Morris

[00:00:00] Jim Banks: before they come on. You know, I used to kind of jokingly say to people, you know, when you go to someone, go to someone's LinkedIn profile and see how many shared connections you have. I always kind of think if you get above a certain number that really you should be like roommates, right?

You should share an apartment because you seem to be so closely aligned. And I think in our case, I think it's like, 85. And we know a lot of the sort of same people. Um, you know, I noticed that you obviously write for Search Engine Journal and, and again, I know Lauren, Loren pretty well. Um, you know, so, so yeah, I mean, obviously welcome to, to the show.

It's great to have you on as a guest. Um, you know, I, I see that you, 

[00:00:27] Jim Banks: I see you're from Kansas City, so what do you think? Do you think you're going to do a three peat this time or?

[00:00:32] Corey Morris: I mean, I hope so. I, it hasn't gotten lost on me that, you know, growing up where, you know, we were, we thought, We'd never see a Super Bowl. So between the Chiefs and the Royals, you know, World Series back in 2015, and then being back in the playoffs, I'm telling my kids who are 14 and 10, I'm like, this is not normal here.

You're living a charmed life for sports in Kansas city right now. So don't take it for granted. Hopefully 30 or 40 year span before it happens again. When this window closes,

[00:01:06] Jim Banks: the thing I'm always curious about, so, um, I don't, I, I know a lot of American people. I go to Vegas a lot to kind of go to conferences, PubCon and places like that. Um, the thing I'm always amazed is that, you know, like there's some sporting event going on like almost like 24 7, right? It just seems like there's always some sporting event that's kicking around in America.

And for some strange reason, all my American friends, it's almost like they can't sit down to watch any sport unless they've got skin in the game, unless they've got some money on it, right? What is the obsession with kind of American people in gambling? Do you, do you know?

[00:01:38] Corey Morris: know. I've, I've dabbled a couple of times in it, but I, I'm too connected to like my teams, um, and I'm huge into, you know, University of Missouri football and basketball too. So I'm, I'm very emotionally invested in it. So I try not to bet on my teams and I play fantasy sports. And so I, I, I know too much of the unpredictability of it, probably.

To place any bets, um, digging deep into, into players and, and all the things that go wrong with that, even. So, I don't know. It's, it's this crazy fascination and fixation on, you know, point spreads and everything else. When the Chiefs, two weeks ago, toward the end of the game, punter ran out of the back of the end zone, took a safety.

Just to, as a strategic move to kill clock, like the people were, all the betting community was up in arms because that moved to the other side of the point spread. And I'm like, if you're really that invested, maybe you have a problem.

[00:02:38] Jim Banks: Yeah, it seems that way. Um, so yeah, so anyway, 

[00:02:39] Jim Banks: like I said, I mean, I always like to have a little bit of dialogue before we sort of dive into talking about marketing, but primarily, that's what the audience is interested in. They're interested in learning a bit more about sort of the guests and their digital marketing journey.

I mean, definitely looking at yours, you've had quite a checkered kind of like journey to kind of get to where you are now. So maybe, maybe you can kind of just talk me through that. 

[00:02:57] Corey Morris: Yeah. This is the 20th year of my career, thinking back to when I graduated. I started, yeah, that was, you know, 2005 was before everything was open source. didn't know what digital was. We didn't call it digital yet back then and ended up in the digital spinoff of a traditional small agency here a few blocks away and, was a project manager and learned some HTML.

So. it was a buffer between designers and developers and clients. So I learned some, put some communication skills in a practice. after a couple of years of doing that, I felt like I was an order taker and wanted something else. So an opportunity to, uh, to learn SEO emerged. my new manager who was brought in wasn't going to do the day to day and, I raised my hand and said, can I move over there?

And so he sent me out to Bruce Clay's training in California. 

[00:03:48] Corey Morris: And that was, I'm so thankful for that investment because that was such a deep dive into, End to end, all things SEO, and kind of took it over there and did SEO, started informal leading, leading a paid search team, ended up coming over here to Voltage in 2013, to start a digital marketing team and more of a creative agency.

And now we're Fully digital agency. I went through a succession plan a few years ago, buying out one of the original co founders, I'd kind of worked my way up to president and then, went through a plan with him. And so now it's my shop. and in the last couple of years, I put into practice some of the things I'd been hearing and learning about and researching for a while about niching down and being a specialist because we were 20 something people trying to do everything from branding to.

websites to everything under the digital marketing umbrella. And we were spread really thin. And, naturally because of my passions and my, my, my experience, um, search was a big factor in that and, uh, web was too. So those are the two things we do today. Um, I started trying to figure out how to articulate our, our approach and, um, the importance of having strategy ahead of just diving into paid search or SEO or any of the other channels.

And so that led to me writing my book, which came out last year. Um, Forced me to get it into a five step process and be able to articulate it. And, um, we're pretty disciplined now where most of the time we're starting with the process, even if it's the, uh, the lightest version of it, if somebody is like, Hey, I just want search.

We're still not going to just skip ahead and do search, unless the exception would be 30 or 40 percent of what we do is agency to agency as well, as we've narrowed our focus and positioned ourselves and been validated in it as an expert in it, some other big, large, full service agencies, including a global one, um, here in our region have brought us in as their SEO partner, paid search partner, web partner.

And so, um, that's been good for us as well. So we skipped some steps there sometimes if they've got. All the intelligence and research and things we need, but in most cases, that's our flagship where we start. I spun that off as a separate LLC intentionally because I didn't want, I wanted it to be able to stand on its own merit and not be looked at as just another marketing ploy by an agency to try to, to try to Sell something different.

So, um, it's its own entity. Um, technically the trademark and IP is in it, which I licensed back to the agency to voltage, um, for use as well. So started building the content platform for, for it separately and speaking and, um, and training specifically on it work well. And then if somebody wants the done for you or the guided version, that's where I'll funnel them over.

To the agency to, uh, to implement. 

[00:06:39] Jim Banks: everything has to sort of sit separately. It can kind of all coexist to an extent, right? I mean, it's kind of like they're, I always kind of say that some of these digital marketing kind of infrastructure, infrastructure, Infrastructures, they're sort of almost like the Olympic rings, it's like they all sort of intermesh with each other, but there's not sort of necessarily a complete overlap.

And, you know, I think it's quite, it's quite interesting that, you know, I see a lot of agencies do what you do, what you did, right? We're all things to all people. And I think sometimes when you're trying to be all things to all people, you ultimately end up being all Nothing to, to nobody. Um, and sometimes it's much better to kind of, to focus on the thing, the, the things that, you know, you are, you are good at, you know that you enjoy that pay well, um, and, and really kind of be, be known for doing that, right?

I mean, again, I, I started to kind of try and do a little bit of everything to begin with. I soon realized that I was probably not very good at SEO or it just didn't really float my boat as much as paid advertising did, so I really stuck with that. Um, but you know, when the opportunity kind of came to diversify from just plain vanilla PPC in the traditional sense of Google and Microsoft and start doing paid social, You know, that then kind of threw into meta, it threw into TikTok, Snapchat, you know, and then I got involved with programmatic advertising, you know, and again, that opened up another whole ecosystem for me.

So, so ultimately, I kind of really say we're sort of like, even though we're doing lots of different disciplines, they're all sort of interrelated, right? Because we tend, we tend to find that it's a bit like, you know, in an orchestra, you have the conductor, then you have the woodwinds, and the winds, and then, you know, every kind of like, Needs to kind of work cohesively, right?

Because people's journeys tend not to happen in silos, right? I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of businesses fail is they, they have their email marketing team that never talks to the SEO team, that never talks to the paid search team, never talks to the web development team. Right? And they're all doing their own thing, right?

And ultimately, businesses fail as a result of that. Whereas if you have a, you know, somebody who's calling the plays, again, it's like to go back to the football analogy, you know, you have an Andy Reid, that's kind of calling the plays, and then everyone's kind of executing the plays on that basis. Right?

And I think sometimes it's sort of like, you know, I see see agencies like us, with a sort of The defense with the offense or the defense kind of like in terms of what we're trying to achieve if we're trying to do troubleshooting because somebody's got into problems, we're there to help solve them. If we're there to kind of try and scale people where the offense and try and try and drive some creative stuff. 

So in terms of Yeah. Again, I take

[00:08:33] Corey Morris: love the analogy.

[00:08:34] Jim Banks: I take my hat off to anyone that's written a book, right? So, again, I know so many of my SEO friends have written books, um, and I admire them. A lot of them, it used to be I'd go to a PubCon and people would have written books and they're typically, quite often, the kind of SEO books that they've written were really thick, right?

So, um, I would arrive at PubCon with my laptop bag and somebody would go, Hey, I'll give you a book. They'd sign it inside, give it to me. And then another person would go, I've written a book, sign it inside, give it to me. And I'd end up with my laptop bag would be about 25 pounds. I'm like, Oh my God. And now I feel 

[00:09:06] Corey Morris: I can relate. Yeah, because I try to pack light with a really minimalist bag and I'm like, now I'm carrying books under my arms. 

[00:09:13] Jim Banks: know, and obviously you don't want, you don't want to leave them behind, but at the same time, you don't want to force yourself on people. So, um, so what's, what, what was the kind of like, uh, what was the driving force behind wanting to kind of write a book in the first place? Thanks.

[00:09:19] Corey Morris: Yeah, um, so, so I, I, I I'm a member of Agency Management Institute, um, so I'm in like a live peer group, but, uh, through, through that, you know, Drew McClellan, who runs it, um, and he co wrote a book with Stephen Wessner from Predictive ROI, who also serves the agencies and works with them on finding their niche.

And then establishing your authority position for your content. And so they co wrote a book and also called sell with authority and, and lead a workshop. And that was really good accountability for me because I've been reading about niching down everywhere and thinking about, well, how do I then plant a flag in the ground and say, this is what I'm about.

And, um, their model is really heavily on having some piece of cornerstone content that for a year or two or three that you can leverage. And then by. Trickling out cobblestones from it, and, um, the cornerstone, you know, could be a podcast, it could be a industry research that you do, a keynote speech that you're giving, or a book, um, or a really, really well done blog, or piece of just meaty content, whatever it is, and so, for me, I, we started down the path of, let's create, my team was excited, they're like, let's create the Wikipedia of SEO.

Um, and naturally by just doing that, even if it's,  none of it's controversial, it is controversial, right? When you have any POV and you say you're defining anything for SEO, I've learned that by being on the SEMPO board years ago. And how many arguments, if we ever talked about having even a neutral, um, like, You know, the accreditation program or whatever.

But, um, that was too much for my team to take on and for us to work through while doing client work. Um, I love to write. As you mentioned, I write for SEJ. I write for Search Engine Land as well. I've written for, for Forbes. I love to write. And so I'm like, I could write a book. I could put this together. We need to articulate our framework.

I'm just going to give the whole thing away. I've learned that transparency really works as well. And not sharing, not acting like there's smoke and mirrors behind it. So that's where I 

started. Um, 

[00:11:08] Jim Banks: that. I've always kind of said that, that the, um, you know, that there are a lot of people that feel they need to keep everything hidden. And I think in some respects, the more you're able to kind of convey your expertise in that format, right? The More people will feel, you know, this guy really sounds like He really does know what he's talking about.

The fact he's written a book about it, right, just kind of enforces that, right, because, you know, the barrier to entry for agencies is so low, right? I mean, it's always been comparatively low, and it's almost like got even lower again, right? You can, you can set up an agency now, you don't even need a website, right?

You can kind of like fire up a Notion site, you know, there's so many different ways in which you do everything cheaply, right? And You know, everyone's got a professional grade video camera in the form of a iPhone or, you know, Samsung phone or whatever, um, to create content. You know, there's so many AI tools now that can kind of make your audio sound great.

I mean, we're obviously here with decent, probably expensive microphones, but even that you don't even need that. I mean, I've been recording into my, into my phone. Uploading it to Adobe Podcasts, and they have like an AI enhancement tool that kind of cleans up your audio, and it makes it crystal clear, right, no matter how crappy audio was to begin with, right, it makes it absolutely crystal clear to the point all these external mics I've got to stick on top of my phone and camera, I don't even need to take them anymore, right, because it's so good.

Um, but, you know, but I think in some respects the, um, 

[00:12:20] Jim Banks: One of my clients very, very early on, I think they were a sort of an ISO sort of accredited company, and they did, they produced some sort of like medical device or something, right? And the guy asked me, he said, you know, Jim, if something happened to you, you know, like in your business, What would happen to it?

I'm like, well, I don't really know. And he said, well, what if you'd have been run down by a bus yesterday? I said, well, I don't know. He goes, you know, is all your, are all your processes written down? I'm like, well, no, they're all in my head. And he says, you need to get them out of your head and you need to get them onto paper.

And ever since then, everything that we've done, right, has always had a written down sort of 

I've always kind of maintained that, you know, if you have a process and it's written down, right, then if you train somebody on how to do that process, and they don't get it the first time, Find great, you can kind of show them again how to do it, but you know, if they don't get it again, then you have to kind of question their ability to be able to absorb that information.

But sometimes again, sometimes the the process needs to be updated because things change. I mean, what we think may have applied before, you know, it's almost like painting a bridge once you kind of get to the beginning of the start, go back to the beginning, start again. That's always the thing I've Maintained with writing a book, it's, you know, it's very dangerous when it's a kind of factual book, because so much of information will change, if people pick it up and read it, they could start calling you out saying, well, this is wrong and everything else.

So how did you kind of address that when it comes to, you know, making sure it sort of stood the test of time, time without having to go through so many rewrites? And that's it.

[00:13:57] Corey Morris: of order and don't mess up or overlook something.

But it's really the, the end result is about your own work in it going from strategy to the tactics, to the application, to the review and, and transformation steps. And so it's almost a choose your own adventure book in a sense. Um, But it helps you organize work that is just chaos, or you skip steps, or you just do a bunch of tactics or a checklist, and then you're like, well, where's the ROI?

So, that's, thankfully, that makes it a little bit more timeless, and even more relevant while we're as distracted as we've ever been with all the change happening right now, anyway.

[00:14:35] Jim Banks: So, that there are a lot of SEO, um, agencies that have, again, they've kind of got, they've realised the opportunities for them exist in, You know, specializing in a particular vertical, right? So they might do SEO for home service companies or SEO for lawyers. Does your agency kind of like specialize in a particular vertical or are you kind of more agnostic?

[00:14:54] Corey Morris: We're more agnostic, um, we do have, You know, some clusters of clients in different industries, um, where, you know, we've trended a little bit toward B2B, thought leadership driven, lead generation, long sales cycle, quality versus quantity, um, that's been a good spot for us, but we have some of our biggest clients are e commerce or, um, you know, a solar company in Southern California.

Yeah. Selling to homeowners. So I say, I look at kind of a pocket of a sweet spot being in that more B2B, um, professional services. But at the same time, I don't want to discount where we do really good work in, in some of those other areas too. 

[00:15:37] Jim Banks: So I'm quite, I'm quite curious. Um, I mean, like, my agency, uh, has been around since 2012, so what's that? 13 years now? Um, You know, but I've been in the industry for 26 years, right? So, so, um, but my, my most recent agency, I sort of set it up and very early on, I mean, I put it into the sort of the HubSpot kind of ecosystem for everything, right?

So the website's hosted on HubSpot's ecosystem. And, you know, I really kind of like bought in and drank the Kool Aid for the whole inbound marketing methodology and everything else.  In light of what's happened with HubSpot recently, with the most recent kind of Google update, HubSpot getting absolutely crucified and battered, should, should other companies that maybe run their ecosystem on the HubSpot platform be concerned at all?

[00:16:18] Corey Morris: at it, my interpretation is it feels like it's more about the content.

[00:16:24] Jim Banks: D.,

[00:16:26] Corey Morris: the platform itself. Um, I haven't seen anything that has, and I know it's still emerging. And there were more articles even just yesterday following up on it. Um, but I hadn't seen any even headlines of things I haven't read yet about, um, any issues with the technical side of.

of, you know, their infrastructure versus it being more of an isolated content issue, um, or authority status issue with HubSpot itself. But it's interesting to think about as we've had clients on a range of platforms, but as a shop that does You know, the other half of our work is web based. We're a WordPress shop, and even for e commerce, we love WooCommerce because it seamlessly integrates compared to some of the other platforms that are, you know, may excel in, you know, the shopping cart functionality, but are harder to get to.

To get optimized when it comes to robust content on top of that. So 

[00:17:20] Jim Banks: because

[00:17:20] Corey Morris: we, we feel like,

[00:17:20] Jim Banks: you do, you do, um, like, you know, Again, people go on and go, I've got a Shopify site. Great, but you know, like Shopify is not particularly good for blogging. So it's like, okay, so we need a WordPress site. And then, you know, there's

[00:17:28] Corey Morris: right.

[00:17:29] Jim Banks: Shopify's not really good for emails and all of a sudden you need Klaviyo or something like that.

So everything's kind of seems to be like an upsell to try and get you to, again, just even sort of parity. Whereas you say like, you know, WordPress with Woo is kind of like a good integration because it all sort of sits within the same architecture that, you know, everything kind of is built on. for

[00:17:49] Corey Morris: what, that's what we've found. Um, and we've been pretty disciplined in staying in that ecosystem. Um, we're constantly evaluating things, obviously the WordPress and WP Engine drama.

[00:17:59] Jim Banks: day.

[00:18:00] Corey Morris: are always a good checkpoint for reevaluating, you know, what your, your tech stack is.

Um, you know, we use HubSpot as our own CMS, but we have clients who are range from, you know, Dynamics, Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and anything else you can think of, and a lot of email. Marketing tools and bulletins. We just had a intro conversation or a second conversation yesterday with a prospect who's a global company, massive company.

Um, and, um, you know, they've tried to streamline and be just like three different integrations and trying to reduce the number. And I always appreciate that. Um, there's a balance of not being. Putting all of your eggs in one basket, if something weird would happen or that, you know, it's hard to move them and, and, and move away from something if customer service fails or the tech fails or there's a controversy or something happens.

But, um, the, the, Fewer connected things you have and points of failure, the better, especially if you're trying to do marketing and you don't want the tech to hold you back, right? It seems basic, but we get wound up and tied into so many different platforms and want to bolt things on and test different things that it's hard to resist that temptation to,

[00:19:07] Jim Banks: remember going. Like I was, I was at a sort of bit of a crossroads and I went, I went interviewing for jobs, right. So I wasn't actually looking, I wasn't looking for a job. I was just curious to see what the process was. So I kind of applied for some jobs, went for some interviews and got talking to sort of one of the big UK based sort of agencies.

And I was talking to one of the sort of the leadership team. And I was trying to establish how they kind of managed their client relationships, you know, both in terms of, you know, like, Who they kind of faced with on the client side, but also what they had internally. And they had so many different sort of tools that they used in order to kind of manage the paid advertising, right?

But they're all different. And, you know, you had a team of people that would look after, uh, uh, Account A, right, with one tool, and then the team that looked after, you know, Account B with another tool. If people from Account A went on holiday, the people from Account B couldn't look after anything because they didn't know how the tool worked, right?

And they had about, I think, like six tools. And, and obviously, you know, there was this kind of, um, you know, sometimes there, there is that, you know, you can kind of, you know, Get up to speed much quicker if everyone is working and using the same sort of crib sheet to kind of deliver what they need to deliver.

Again, whether it's the right tool or the most cost effective tool doesn't really matter. It's more about the efficiency rather than the cost, right? I've always maintained that if you have 10 people that have to use it, right, that's going to cost you a lot more than the tool ever will, right? So

[00:20:17] Corey Morris: Exactly. And to your point earlier, you talk about, you know, your experience with documenting processes, um, you know, you, that's, you know, tribal knowledge in those teams heads and, or, you know, in just how they operate. And so that's not easy to replicate. And if that happens on the brand side, that's dangerous too.

And what I talk about, if you don't have a Documented digital marketing plan. You know, it's now it's personal to the person doing it. So it's hard to challenge or make objective at where it's not accountable to the results over the longterm. But in many cases, you know, somebody leaves and we look at the shortening tenure of people in, in roles and how people move around.

Somebody leaves and that plan can't out. Outlive the person's tenure there. Then you're starting from scratch and the next person's coming in and now you're changing your stack or your process or your focuses. And, um, it's, it's just wasted money and wait, you know, time is in many cases, more valuable than the money.

[00:21:13] Jim Banks: Yeah, and I think, again, I think that's where, you know, tools like AI can really kind of come into play, right? I mean, I'm starting to, to kind of really embrace. I'm using AI internally for some of the kind of the management of our documentation, right? I mean, we have a whole bunch of documentation. I'm doing podcast episodes and, you know, YouTube videos and all sorts of stuff.

This kind of all over the place, you know, but what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to sort of store everything in, you know, So Google Drive, you know, get it transcribed so I've got all the transcripts, I can then interrogate the transcripts with AI and Notion and actually just kind of write a summary of kind of what's happened.

So every time we have a client meeting now, right, we've got sort of, um, you know, we'll use Google Meet, it'll record it, we'll do the note taking, we'll do the video recording, right, it'll get stored in the cloud, we can kind of then, you know, Like I said, we know what was agreed on the call, right, I don't have to have somebody there scribing what was, who was in attendance, what was discussed, what the points were, what the action points were, AI does that for me, right, so, you know, that's freed up a lot of time, made the process slicker, um, you know, and then obviously from that we can actually ask questions of the data, right, we're kind of using, we're giving up, The system, our data in which to kind of inform opinions, right?

So I can say, show me all the podcast episodes where we talked about a particular topic and just kind of give me a list of all of them, right? However many there are and wherever they are, I don't need to kind of worry about that anymore. Um, you know, and for me, it's been quite interesting to kind of do that.

[00:22:29] Corey Morris: I love that. And, and yeah, and I know we use Google workspace as well. And so in Google meet, yeah, I just saw that, you know, they just added by default, some new Gemini, um, tools. And so they're getting much better 

[00:22:45] Jim Banks: they were trying to charge you money to begin with, and then realize probably people weren't going to pay for it. And like, I will just give it to you. I'm sure it'll jack up the per seat price in due course, but.

[00:22:55] Corey Morris: Yes, it did, I got that notification right around the same time. It's going up, and it's just defaulted in there Um, And, you talking about systems, a great book that our agency is using in a framework is called Systemology, and it's really that The system for documenting systems. Um, so it's, it's one of the, the key takeaways from it is to make sure just when you do the thing, so what you just said, document it, um, the temptation is there for us anytime we start documenting that we want to go iterate on it and that's the danger is that we start iterating on it or, or we don't want to document it until we feel like it's perfect and it never gets documented.

It's, it's something we'll do the next day or tomorrow, or it becomes a bigger task. Just get it documented, create the framework in the library, and then you have the right. And, and it's much easier to come back and iterate on it. Um, and you don't have the risk of it staying in someone's head for a year.

They never do it, and then they leave. 

[00:23:55] Jim Banks: Yeah, and you know, again, I'm using tools like Castmagic. I don't know if you've heard of Castmagic. It's sort of like, uh, you basically can upload a video or import a YouTube video. Um, and it will kind of pull the information down. It'll give you a transcript. It'll give you titles, YouTube descriptions, keywords, um, you know, give you like suggestions for like a podcast, um, guest thank you notification to what to include in that, you know, questions to kind of put into, you know, Facebook group.

There's so much information you can put into it, right? But, but that's obviously one purpose that you can use it for that, right? But equally you could do it, you could have it. With every meeting that you have, right, you could literally kind of like do exactly the same thing. Have the transcript, have it sort of sent out as a kind of a document, um, have it summarized, you know, and you can just ask the questions if you wanted to kind of create a blog post, right?

I mean, I was talking to, uh, a guest I had, uh, the other day about Dean Jackson and Dean Jackson, um, One of the kind of greatest marketers I know, and um, and he kind of came up with this concept of, you know, he does a 90 minute interview. One of his team does a 90 minute interview, and on the basis of that interview, they can then write a book for you, right, based on that interview.

So you're basically talking like we are now. So we talk for like 90 minutes. There's probably enough words in our conversation, right, to formulate a fairly decent sized book, right? A lot of it might be complete crap, but who cares? That's, that's kind of by the by. But there's, you know, there'll be some kind of like points that we can put in there and go, right, that was discussed, that was discussed, that was discussed.

I was kind of saying when I, when I get to the, the transcript and it kind of gives me the timestamps, I can always look at the timestamps to know, How good a podcast episode was based on how many of those there were, right? And what it actually says in terms of what was discussed, right? Because, you know, I think that's, that's where, you know, those are the sort of jumping off points.

Because if somebody, let's say you get to 40 minutes, 45 minutes, a lot of people won't necessarily listen to a 45 minute podcast episode. There might be three bits in it that they find of value, right? And I'd much rather they can cherry pick the ones that. They feel relevant to them rather than having to go through the whole thing right from the beginning to get to the point where, you know, they can kind of get the information that they want.

[00:25:51] Corey Morris: That's how I operate. Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, my wife and I, she's a scientist, and, she and I both, a couple weeks ago, just, it was a Friday night from 7 to midnight, sitting in front of the TV both on our laptops, just playing around, testing, doing more testing in ChatGPT and seeing what we can do.

And, um, just nerding out together, um, excited about some of the things that And just two years ago, I was considering looking at a VA to go do some of these tasks and to help me be an extension of, of myself for things I didn't have time to do or felt very manual. And, and now I kind of laugh because I can have that feedback in real time and I don't even have to have another person, right?

And it's, and I don't give them the full context. And so it's, it's. Just, it's amazing what, what just, uh, the past several months I've been able to figure out in my day to day, uh, to, to get through some things I hate or not have to do the things manually that I hate to do. 

[00:26:49] Jim Banks: I still enjoy, still enjoy going out and walking, right? I mean, I find it very cathartic to kind of get out, get some fresh air and blow the cobwebs off, right? And I sort of would go out and sometimes I'd listen to music, sometimes I'd listen to podcasts, right?

But one of the things I've kind of added to that queue now of things that I can actually do, , is I use, um, there's, there's a service called 11 Labs. It's kind of, you know, and I can upload a blog post. So like you've just kind of published a blog post, like right now, that's gone up, I think, on LinkedIn, right?

So I could basically grab that, copy the URL, And it would basically read it to me while I'm walking, right? So I don't even need to read it, right? Cause you know, I, I've fallen over a few times recently where I've been on my phone, looking at stuff and tripped over the kind of sidewalk. And, you know, I'm thinking, well, this is like, obviously a bit clumsy of me, right?

Whereas if I've got headphones in, I can actually. I can consume the content, right? So you've written it as a blog post, great, or a LinkedIn post or whatever it might be, but I can consume it in a way that suits the thing I'm trying to do at that point. So I can probably consume maybe eight to ten blog posts, right?

While I'm walking for an hour, right? Whereas, you know, like if I was trying to read them, it would take me probably 45 minutes, I may end up like being distracted by ads. I mean, again, SEJ has got loads of ads on it and everything. I find sometimes I kind of, you know, oh, shiny objects, I'll go over there. 

Sometimes that's where I end up, right? And I think, you know, again, having the ability to be able to kind of just get into the zone and focus on on the words 

[00:28:03] Corey Morris: I love that.

[00:28:04] Jim Banks: make a huge difference.

[00:28:05] Corey Morris: that's the solution for having a hundred tabs open of the things you're going to come back to later. Right? And that you never come back to because you're working. 

[00:28:13] Jim Banks: You know, you know, you, you look at um, sort of some, some, again, some of the ability like you, you can, you can use, I mean, I use a system called mymind, right? So I can basically grab images and text and everything and put it in there. And rather than it just being a, you have to force it in. Like, I used to use Evernote a lot, right?

Until I gone and got disillusioned with it. 'cause it was just, I clipped so many things that I never, ever went back to. Whereas with mymind again, it just puts it sort of all in one place. I can kind of look at it, uh, however I want, but I can also. And export it to Notion. So, you know, there's so many different things that you can kind of do to grab information.

I've always kind of said, you know, you'll sort of read. An interesting snippet, so you can just kind of grab that snippet, send it straight to Notion, send it straight to MyMind, you know, that then becomes something that potentially is something you can use like Notion AI to kind of interrogate what you have, right?

So you can say, go into the ideas and find me three ideas about this, um, and you can kind of do so much with that. So, so

[00:29:00] Corey Morris: I love it. The nerd in me loves it.

[00:29:04] Jim Banks: of the things that, again, I was kind of keen to talk to you about is you've done a lot of speaking. I'm looking at your lanyards behind you. You clearly have attended a lot of conferences, right? Unlike me, I used to kind of save the lanyards and then it got to the point where I'm like, this is crazy. I've got way too many of these.

So I end up, I think I normally throw them out in the hotel before I even leave the hotel. Um, but, um, you know, what sort of things do you look for when it comes to kind of attending a conference? Do you kind of exhibit? Do you? Speak, do you kind of just go as an attendee? Are you there to learn?

[00:29:29] Corey Morris: there, there's, there are definitely seasons for things, right? So, I, I attend, um, an agency focused one called Build a Better Agency Summit, uh, in Denver in May each year. Um, and that's where I really work on filling my tank, um, and being around peers. Um, I have done, you know, spoken at SMX and Search Engine or at Digital Summit, um, and other regionals.

Um, And that's awesome to being with and attended for everything from PubCon to SMX and those as well. So both sides of it there and just nerd to nerd filling my tank there and just being with my people, essentially.

My focus is more streamlined now, um, on getting, even if it's an audience of one, um, into a room or onto a show or where I can, where I can openly share, like we talked about earlier, the concepts of the start planning process in digital marketing success plan.

That's really helped me stay focused on and not have, you know, all these, A hundred different random topics, whether they're helpful or not and be experimenting, but to stay focused on what I feel like saves brands money, helps them not waste time and not be frustrated with the agencies of being able to understand from the start, how to, how to work through a framework and not, um, not just go do a checklist or whatnot.

So that's really the subject matter for me this year and probably even into 2026 as well. Because it's, it's, it isn't about the timeliness of where we are and in all the things with AI, it's more, it adapts and is adaptable and customizable to that. But it's really about not getting burned, not, Taking shortcuts and, uh, having a strategy that's documented and accountable, but also adaptable.

So that's really my focus because again, that's where I start so many conversations naturally anyway. And I kept the, the content close to home. Um, I didn't make it a crystal ball forward 10 year where we're going to be book. Um, But really my whole thing was where am I, where can I best help people versus, you know, trying to be the breaking news expert or, or the cutting edge person out there.

And so it's got plenty of that and room for that. And I have to stay, I have to stay close enough to the, the, the cutting edge, but at the same time, there's so many companies, especially those that are tied down more in regulated industries or have a lot of compliance connected to them. Just need an advocate or just need someone to tell them where to start or how to bring things forward.

Um, and don't necessarily need to be on the bleeding edge of where AI is at the moment.

[00:32:22] Jim Banks: If I was going to go to Amazon and sort of look for your book, I mean, obviously there'd be a link to that in the show notes after we come off the call. Um, who would be the kind of the best people to kind of go and read? I mean, I know you're going to say everyone, but like, is there a specific group of people that you would say it's more beneficial for them to kind of read it rather than others?

[00:32:41] Corey Morris: Yeah, I would definitely say marketing leaders in organizations. Um, I've personally Spoken to startup groups and small businesses because it's a framework. If you've not started anywhere, even if you haven't been burned or wasted money yet, um, to prevent it, but in many cases, um, medium to larger sized businesses, so whether it's a CMO or a C suite person, um, or a marketing director, marketing manager, um, it's really, unless you feel like you've got, Digital marketing dialed in and or have a really well documented plan.

Um, you know,  it can serve as your framework to do your entire plan, start to finish, or if you've given up on certain marketing channels and you're scared to get dip, you put your toe back into the water. It's a great resource for that. Or if you've got even with a robust planning, you just want outside perspective to think, you know, where do we have gaps in our current strategic planning process.

Um, it'll be great too if there's one thing, you know, of the five steps, one step where you feel like you're light on what you're doing to give you some perspective to, to advance. to amplify your process as well. 

[00:33:53] Jim Banks: Yeah, I've found, I mean you're a 20 year vet, I'm a 20 plus year vet, it's kind of like, you know, I still, I still learn every day about digital marketing, something right, there's always something that I'm like, wow, I didn't know that before. Right. And obviously, we're in a, I think, I think we've, we've kind of hit, hit, hit You know, there's, there's sort of the bottom end of a slope that's pretty steep, right?

And nobody really knows kind of what's at the summit of it with, with the whole AI thing and how that's going to impact everything that's kind of going on, you know, with all the sort of generative AI and agentic AI and everything else. And it's sort of, again, so exciting, but so scary in some respects. I kind of like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm nervously excited about kind of the, um, the next three to five years in terms of what's in store for us already.

[00:34:26] Corey Morris: Yeah, no, I, I share that sentiment. Um, you know, 

[00:34:28] Corey Morris: I'm really excited about the cool things we can do today and where it's going. I also see an opportunity, um, with more diversified traffic sources and having to, to double down on, you know, expertise in whether it's SEO or paid search or whatever of where it's going.

Um, Like a lot of changes over time, people who don't adapt will get kind of left behind and will be able to recognize the old tactics that we still see some people doing. Um, and just like anything changes, there'll be new people jumping in thinking this is an industry to disrupt and I'm going to AI my way through it.

But what gives me confidence is that leveraging my time in the industry and seeing how many, the constant of change and how many things have changed. The human problem solver and, and thinking about how to connect this all to business outcomes and not just be a set of tactics in marketing channels, that value will remain.

And, um, whether I'm advising clients or hanging out with, We're all leveraging that experience, maybe in new ways, but being able to be at the controls and be able to navigate that and coach and consult through that. It will be the key. And so, um, Yeah, it's, it's interesting, you know, watching, you know, the, the zero click and the, and the trends with Google sending less traffic,

those weren't just an AI driven thing.

I remember sitting at SEM PDX in Portland in 2019 and Rand Fishkin was presenting data back then of the trend line was already going that way. Um, and so, Be able to adapt to the more diversified search sources and, and not just settling into what the best practices are with Google or everything being reliant on what Google's whims are.

Now there's, there's, you know, the need to change and adapt, but there's also a big opportunity to take it to the next level and be there and be positioned where our target audiences will, will be found.

[00:36:35] Jim Banks: was interesting that, um, I mean, Wil Reynolds gave, uh, one of the keynotes at, uh, the most recent PubCon that I attended, and he was talking about, you know, his search Lead Volume has dropped by like 40 percent but his lead volume hasn't dropped at all right. So you know obviously that's impacted by sort of  ChatGPT and you know people finding a different way to kind of get their information so the whole 10 blue links kind of out the window.

Interestingly enough I watched a friend of mine Ethan Giffin who is the CEO of Groove based out of Baltimore and he kind of posted a video the other day where he was basically saying that you know, He was talking to somebody and basically they had gone to ChatGPT and they typed in a query that basically said, you know, like, what sort of things do I need to kind of do to find a good agency and who would you recommend?

And his agency came up as one of the agencies that ChatGPT recommended. And obviously that's throwing a whole different complexion in terms of how people potentially can use GPT to find people, find you, right? So, you know, it's almost like you've gone from being in the Google index to being. Sort of a recommended source, uh, by, you know, by, by being omnipresent, being, you know, helpful and, you know, adding value, 

[00:37:39] Corey Morris: yeah, I actually was just thinking about this the other day. Um, you know, it's totally different models, but I thought about how 10 years ago, uh, 2015 landed a client, um, who found us, who found a recommendation for my agency on Reddit. And he's like, how did you do that? How did you influence how, like I didn't, right?

Because the Reddit ecosystem and community is much, much more, uh, uh, protective and policing, you know, commercial content and, and things like that. And, and it feels like, you know, as we're going through that, I mean, it's, it's, Totally different, but in mymind, kind of similar to some of those scenarios of how do we get in there?

And, you know, right now there's, there's best practices emerging and there's a lot of research from, you mentioned Will and, and Mike King and others. And Rand has a ton daily that seems like are coming out as the picture emerges, um, It's being adaptable. Um, I was talking with a friend yesterday about the need to not just say, okay, for 2025, this is where our audiences are and where our tactics are going to be, but you got to revisit that and be constantly watching.

And, um, I just saw a MarTech, um, article about Google, you know, introducing a new So uh, Media mix measurement model. Um, and then, you know, the, a lot of even more confusion with the new updated version of Chrome coming out on whether we're going cookie less or not, or if it's still very murky. Like, there's just so much.

Out there and upheaval. And you mentioned my article, um, LinkedIn article that went live this morning, featuring my, my search engine land article from last week. It's, it's like, we gotta not get distracted by the things that work. You know, from the things that work today, by what's to come. But at the same time, we can't bury our head in the sand and ignore it.

So there's gotta be that level of balance. I joked about, you know, or talked about, you know, testing sitting, you know, in front of the TV on a Friday night, that was fun for me, but for some people it's not fun and it's overwhelming, or some of us can. Waste half of our day testing and take our eye off the ball.

And so it's about getting that, the finding balance I personally, and as organizations too, to make sure that we've got intentional, defined testing time set aside. So whether we're wired to be testing all the time to keep put it in a box, and if it's, if we're not, and it's the thing that gets pushed out to the end of the day or the end of the week, it never happens, making it intentional and putting it front and center.

And so that's, I think. Probably one of the biggest challenges for everyone, because even friends who are, who own software companies and are on the cutting edge of some of the AI things that they're developing, even some of them feel like they're behind. And I think we all feel like we're behind and we could fall into this weird imposter syndrome as well.

When we see other people doing cool things and, um, it's just dangerous to, to, to fall too far on one end of the spectrum.

[00:40:48] Jim Banks: Yeah, so Corey, it's been fantastic to have you on today to talk to talk to me on digital marketing stories. I've actually got to go and pick up my grandkids from school. So I got sort of delegated granddad duties. Fantastic, right? So, um, yeah, otherwise I'd kind of like to say, well, we can just kind of carry on talking, but, um, I'd love to have you on and talk to me again to see if some of the predictions you made for 2025 materialize.

You mentioned about moving into 2026. Love to have you on and come talk again. And obviously, if we get the opportunity to, um, you know, to kind of meet in person, again, I'd love to kind of like, um, you know, buy a drink and just catch up. That'd be fantastic.

[00:41:22] Corey Morris: I would love it. I will nerd out with you anytime, Jim.

[00:41:27] Jim Banks: And obviously all the links to your book and everything else will be in the show notes as I mentioned. So, uh, make sure you kind of follow the podcast and we'll see you on the next episode of Digital Marketing Stories. Take care. Bye for now.