AI, Websites & Trust: How Contractors Stand Out | Wes Towers

0:00Get great Google reviews or reviews in any platform where they can't easily be faked or manufactured and they're more believable. Anything that can boost your credibility in that way and trust signals I think that's the biggest move of marketing right now Okay, welcome back to A Chat with Chat. My name is Aaron Husak. Today I'm joined by Wes Towers. He's the founder of Uplift 360 in Australia, and the host

0:30of Built, Trusted, Chosen. Welcome to the show, Wes. Thanks for joining us today Fantastic to be here. It's good to connect globally. People can probably hear my accent and as we were chatting with ChatGPT before the show ChatGPT tried to mimic my accent. So I appreciate the effort there, but hopefully hopefully we get through this show without too much shenanigans. Yes. Yes. There you go. Good. And so Wes, if I understand correctly you work with construction trades and industrial businesses, and you have a marketing agency correct?

1:05yeah. We're similar in a lot of regards, we-- Yeah, we-we've been tr- trading a long time now. The business is over 20 years old, and it's been a wild time. It's-- I've always said things change fast in our industry, and if I put the tools down for, a, a six-month period, coming back would be difficult because things have changed. Wow, the last few years the change has just been even more rapid than ever before, and everyone knows the reasons why, of course. But it's ex-exciting and terrifying times and I'm enjoying it. It's like a rollercoaster right now

1:37Absolutely. No to say that, years I, we're going through years it seems like. Every, every month is a whole year of difference from what we were dealing with before now and that, that was actually gonna be my first question. And initially I think if it was two or three years ago asking this question, it would've been over the last year, but I don't think that question makes any sense anymore. I think we're asking now, over the last three months what has changed the most with with your clients?

2:10Yeah people are reaching out for all different reasons, and we did search engine optimization for many years and we still do. But the parameters changed significantly. They've incrementally changed and the and the what people are wanting is changing somewhat. The good news is a lot of the strategies that apply to - the old school SEO do help with showing up in large language models as well for the most part. So but the changing way in which content surfaces, because everyone's got capability to use the same tools.

2:41So whilst publishing content at scale and perceived quality, you really do need to find an edge so you do stand out above, above the noise. So they're just new challenges. It feels as though all the tools are tweaking the way in which they surface information. So we need to stay nimble and keep our clients informed all the time Yeah. Yeah, now outside of, ChatGPT or Claude or any of the major Gemini,

3:12what other tools are you using now that you maybe didn't use before? The from a design, we do a lot of website design and only in the recent models was chat really good at some of that stuff. Previously it was pretty, pretty clunky and terrible. But just, I don't, I can't remember precisely when the, the latest when that all changed. It feels like it might have only been a month or so ago Yeah. the design work that it can output makes a lot of my skill set redundant.

3:45I was a trained graphic designer. I studied graphic design/multimedia back in, in the '90s, so it was a long time ago, and things were different back then. Websites weren't even really a, a thing back then. There were websites, but it wasn't as if every business had one. Sure And so I learned the the craft and the skill of designing things and all of that is… I feel for the, the people who are, have stuck to the lane of pure graphic design because it's go- it-- a- and this will be true of a lot of industries, but I feel as though there's just so much that can be done with the simple tools.

4:18That previously you might have jumped on a a platform that was more geared around website design because you had chat, but it wasn't doing a great job of design. But it's perceivable that one day we'll have one platform that does everything. I think everyone's speaking about that kind of scenario and it's it's amazing what's happening right now Yeah. Yeah. I think it was was it called Dreamweaver? Yeah Yeah web builder of what, 20, 15 years

4:49Yeah. You had to take classes. I remember they were offering classes at the community college to learn how to build a website with It and that was, like, the cutting edge tool. And to think of how much work it took to publish a website hours you had to put into it is just, Yeah. It's crazy. It was nuts the amount of time it took. And every every browser was a bit buggy in its own way, and so you'd try to explain that to clients, "Hey, this browser just doesn't cope with what

5:19we've done, and we've gotta simplify it." But they wanted something more sophisticated. And yeah It was it was the wild frontier back then that it, we didn't even have mobile. We didn't have to consider in the early days the mobile devices, it was just the PC as well. But yeah, handcrafting things and looking at code and figuring out what that translates into into the visual aesthetic. Things have changed somewhat. But curious e-enough we've built websites with WordPress, which is probably easily the most popular platform to build a simple website in.

5:50But more and more we're moving back to hard-coded websites. And one of the reasons is the security aspect. The, the PHP blow-up of the, the couple of vulnerabilities. Just yesterday. yeah, that's right. Nuts. And so the amount of emails I got, it wa- So we use a hosting provider that was on top of it right away even before I was aware they were dealing with it. So that's the beauty of choosing great providers that support you, because no one person can take, keep on top of all of this stuff.

6:20Yeah. Yeah, just some of the sites were built-- there's sites kicking around that we built maybe… yesterday actually, someone reached out because of the PHP thing, but their site had been kicking around on WordPress for 10 years. They chose to host it themselves and were going to do the maintenance themselves, but they hadn't touched it, and I looked at it. Is this website even still functional? How has it not been hacked? But he reached out because he saw on the news there might be a vulnerability. But moving back to, for people like that who are just gonna build a site and never touch it, never optimize it, never do anything, a hard-coded website, the

6:52old school method of just no, n-nothing that can be really be hacked, you know for those sort of small businesses. But that's not for everyone. But that's certainly an option for those that, you know, smaller companies who don't need to do much. Yeah. No, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah going back to Hardcoded Yeah. and For your team AI pretty much are you using it as kinda your companion? You're doing everything with it? Do you only go to it for certain things?

7:23H- how are you guys using AI right now? Yeah. For myself and the team we're always using it as just second nature. And I-- the biggest lever that I've… The biggest mind shift that I made was to start speaking to the device instead of… So the microphone's always here. Usually it's over to the side, so it's not interrupting me. But, I'm always speaking to it 'cause it's These are large language models. They appreciate language and content and substance, and you protect- you usually will give it more if you speak it out because we're lazy if we start typing.

7:54But if you speak it all out and guide it you get better output. So I think ma- just making it a habit to speak, e-every tool has its little microphone button and press that and record and you get far greater outputs. And so I've encouraged the team to do the same as well. Probably some office spaces aren't geared around having everyone talking all of the time. I don't know but ours is. Our spaces are perfectly fine for that. It's an interesting way of thinking about it Yeah. with the flow of consciousness just rambling on and letting AI sort out

8:27Yeah, h- here's all of it, yeah it's brilliant something you would do when you were typing Yeah. Yeah, it collates it into a logical sequence of steps that it'll action for you. And you can, I always like to prompt to ask, to make sure that it'll ask questions before it actions anything, just in case it hasn't understood or I haven't… 'Cause I've just rambled. As you said, I-I'll just ramble into the device, but then I'll always make sure, "Ask me questions if anything's unclear and make sure you get the brief precisely right."

8:57Give me some instru- O-oftentimes I'll ask for it to act like a, a senior whatever it is that we're doing, and ask me questions to make sure the brief's s-precise Yeah Yeah O-one of the things I've been playing with myself recently is I use Codex primarily ChatGPT, and got my computer left on, and I will be out and about,

9:27I'll be in the car, and I'll be talking to chat, and it will be able to do stuff on my computer though I'm not there. And that's been a whole different perspective on work and this last weekend we went-- I went out of town, and I didn't even take my laptop. And I-- There is no time the last, what, 15 years where I've left to go somewhere and not taken my laptop. And it all worked out.

9:57It all-- It worked out okay. Yeah, it's brilliant. I do the same. Yeah I'll gear something up oftentimes at the computer, and then I'll go to gym, and then while I'm on the treadmill or something, or on the bike, something that I can use my hands and just monitor what's going on because it… Depending on the nature of what it is, I might be asking for it to get approvals on different steps. I was doing that. I was I was auditing a website, a m- massive website with lots of pages, and I just wanted to find, wanted it to look at every page and find any concerns missing

10:28alt text and it found a whole bunch of stuff that it flagged, but it did need to flag it because it wasn't sure that some phone numbers were not correct. That's pretty terrible, right? I didn't build the website in the first instance, but somebody did and someone mistyped a phone number somewhere, and obviously it translated into a whole bunch of other pages too. So it said, "Hey, this phone number on this blog post is different to everywhere else and it's on a few of this series of blogs. Do you want us to change it or is that correct?" And, man, I would never have found that, but I was just at…

10:59I was on the bike and I said, "Yeah, sure. That's… Thanks for finding that. Fix that please." And it was fixed, so pretty phenomenal. Yeah yeah. And so how are you, 'cause, n- not only for us but for our customers or prospective customers when someone comes to you and says, "Hey, chat said this or that about the website," yeah. you getting a lot of those types of questions now? H- how do you typically handle something like that?

11:29It's it is interesting, isn't it? So it's a-- And I think this is the core service that we're providing now is the expert knowledge and insights from a real person because everyone's jumping on tools and getting advice which can be s-somewhat true sometimes. But It's sometimes it's worth actioning and sometimes it's not worth actioning and someti- it's it can be a little bit wild depending on what they're using. And The amount of emails and so on that I get that I can see it's some kind of audit that they've run themselves in a tool and then I gotta answer the,

12:03answer this lengthy email because they'll be lengthy because they've used some tool to, crunch it out. So again I'll I'll take that and speak my answers because it's so much quicker and then it'll tidy it up Sure into a tidy email and I put in some action steps of here's what I think we should do and here's the reasons why and here's the things that you probably Depends on the nature of the business too. Some, some people are really hands-on with that kind of stuff and dabbling, and others are just leaving it to us to figure it out for them

12:37Yeah Yeah You mentioned about getting emails where you can tell and w- I've got, I had one prospective client where he would send me emails and I'm thinking to myself, "Did you expect a human to read this?" 'Cause it's six pages long. How, th- y- you didn't need all this. You coulda just said this in two paragraphs, Yeah And so yeah, that, that's been a big change where much are you reading the output? Are you reading the output?

13:08just to make sure that it's z- it's still in your voice 'cause otherwise it's obvious that is something has been machine-generated, if you will Yeah. Getting the brief or instructions spot on is really important. It's always been a, a challenge for of our clients. So whatever we've been working on, maybe we're designing a website. Someti- previously before AI, you'd get a long-ish email of rambling thoughts, which is fine, but sometimes they would conflict with each other.

13:40So it was just Would just think through and be typing as they're thinking, but then they have differing sort of thoughts and a lack of clarity. But now you can use AI and take-- If anyone does write like that still can take it and try and collate it into action steps that are practical in a, a sequence and give it back to them. So a reverse, reverse brief. So they've briefed you really clunky and you're not quite sure, so you take it and reverse, re-reverse brief it back to them, and then they say, "Yeah, that's what I meant," or, "No, that's not quite what I was looking for."

14:12And getting that brief bedded down so then we can action it really fast and make sure we do the right thing Yeah, that's a good technique 'cause yeah, things can get a bit off track pretty quickly. and yeah, s- it's repeating it back to them. I, I like that. I like that a lot. So that's a smart move. Yeah, especially when they-- Chet sometimes you've got a sequence of people, decision-makers on a project for a, a bigger company, everyone's having a, a say.

14:44And if it's anything visual, everyone's got a different opinion o-of what looks good or what they want. So trying to get agreement amongst so many different thoughts the AI tools are phenomenal at coming up with solutions around that and presenting it back to them. So yeah it's saving a lot of time Chad, I wanted to get your input. Any, any questions or thoughts that have come up during our con- conversation so far? Sure. Let me think for a moment Wes, what do you watch for when a tidy AI summary

15:17makes disagreement look settled? When you send that brief back, do you separate points of agreement from open decisions? Have you caught a misunderstanding that way before your team acted? For Aaron, when a six-page AI-flavored email lands, what's your quickest move to keep it productive without derailing the relationship Go ahead, Wes Yeah. Definitely we we find a lot of things that are not worth actioning. I tend to just focus on the things that we should action.

15:47So we'll clarify what we are doing and focus on that, and then potentially mention those things that we don't think should be actioned, but quickly start focusing only those things th- that concise. So we're just trying to make it things as concise and as digestible as we can. So boiling it down to the practical things that they actually need because I know they're… If it's too long, they're not going to read it themselves either. They're just gonna run it through a tool.

16:17So all of a sudden you've got tools talking to tools, and has anyone ever actually checked exactly what we're doing? Yeah, it's … are we May as well just have my email speaking to their email and figuring it all out. But who knows what comes of all of that? Yeah. Yeah. And that's, and, for if I'm getting five or six-page emails, that I'm going to feed that into chat to see it thinks of or summarizes from conversation.

16:50So at that point, yeah, we've got our agents just talking to each other. Which, depending on the nature of the conversation or what it's around, I think if it's about creatives there could be a real misunderstanding there what they're trying to describe, which is often the challenge in building websites or doing kind of graphic design, to what they're really looking for. And I don't know that model can can appreciate, that nuance or those

17:23distinctions at this point in time. And yeah that? can definitely create some, some challenges for you Yeah. I always like to, if it's a design-based thing, because people will use words in different ways and mean different things. So I always like to ask, "Hey, is there a website that kind of demonstrates what you like or what you're looking for?" Or in fact, a website that you really despise and hate as well sometimes. And sometimes it's, "Hey, we love the header and the footer of this

17:53website, and we love the, the content area of this other one, and but we don't like blah, blah, blah," the fonts or whatever, colors. That's really great instruction because it's something that's clear and specific. So we're just trying to get as clear and as clear as we possibly can, so we understand precisely what someone mean, means by their words, which in the d- design world, it's always been a bit of a challenge And, the focus of AI search and GEO lately as you mentioned earlier, not too

18:26dis- different from the SEO work that we were doing, but I- a lot of the focus that I've heard recently is on, unique content and for the contractors, that typically means, their experiences on certain job sites or the work that they did in this neighborhood that was unique to that s- particular neighborhood. H- how are you pulling that information, or i- is that something that you've started to gather from contractors more now than in the past, or is this

18:59something that you've always been doing? It's de- it's definitely more and more focused around that. What I try and encourage people to do is send the projects that they're actually working on, and it doesn't need to be a marketing piece, but if we're publishing something to the blog, case studies are really powerful because as you say, it's something that only they can talk about. It's it's information gained. So many people are just leaning upon the tools to publish generic content, which sounds okay, but it's a collation of everyone else's ideas. That's all it can be.

19:30But if it's a, an actual project you've delivered, and that's the beauty of trades and construction. They're often building something that's tangible, that's physical. You can photograph it, you can speak of it, and it's in a local community as well, so all of a sudden you can speak about the location, which is helpful. So sometimes w- we're just trying to simplify it as much as we can for the end client. So they're already out doing projects, and they've got some form of recording of what they're doing, so a, a project description or even sometimes invoices.

20:01So I just speak to them about what can they send us that we can understand what the job is and then massage it into something that's quality content or unique content. So it's all of a sudden like a case study, a story example. There's a plasterer who he does the, Do you call it plasterer? Plasterboards, like the gyprock. Some people call it gyprocking. The, yeah, drywall. Yeah. Pl- Yeah. Yeah. That's, So he just photographs the jobs as he finishes them, and he just sends me

20:33it on the phone, the SMS, just photograph bang, a before and then after, and then two, two or three sentences of what it was, location and stuff like that, and we can come up with a pretty well-crafted piece for his blog, which is really powerful for his optimization and search and showing up in all the right places Now you mentioned something about using the invoices. How would you typically utilize that for the content?

21:04So is-- they're only useful if they've described precisely what they've done in the description and some will and some won't. Like a, a bigger construction firm will probably have a, a pretty detailed project, like a description of what they've actually done, so that's helpful. We're just looking for a description of what they've already done, and it's probably recorded in their processes somewhere along the line. Depends on what they use To run their jobs. Some of the guys, they'll just they'll just have handwritten notes and

21:35just photograph that, what they've scribbled down a whole bunch of things. And it doesn't feel like it's going to be a useful content piece when they're, when they've done it. But by the time we use the AI tools to understand it and comprehend it and know all the, It can even dig into the the research on all the all the legalities. There might be things that involved that, the reasons why something was done a certain way or things that I wouldn't have known about, but it will instruct it to do a deep dive on all of the specifics of why the project might have

22:09been done a certain way and so on, and we come up with something substantial. So it's still drawing on insights from AI, but it's, it's-- the basis of the, the content piece is unique because it's an actual project that was delivered Yeah, I'm, most of the projects that I'm working with are on the residential side, but I could see how the commercial side would be even further down the road on using or leveraging technology because they're having to draw up a bid

22:45with a very specific description now AI could be leveraged to do that and it's probably also being leveraged to review bids as well. Is that what you're seeing? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. A l- a lot of that stuff is, th-those, those companies that go through a tender process, those tenders were a massive piece of work. But everyone's able to do it so much faster now. But those tenders, there's a lot of substance in there.

23:15Someone has still gone through the process of considering what would be published in there. And even anything like that, we can repurpose really fast. We can take something, some meaty content like that, that was intended for a proposal, a tender, whatever it was, and reconsider it into a marketing piece. It's beautiful when they've got those sorts of resources and it, it's-- it minimizes so much time on the client side because they've already g- they're already sitting on a wealth of knowledge.

23:45It's just finding that knowledge, those knowledge pieces and re-rethinking them into a marketing piece Yeah and that, I think that's a benefit of working with the commercial side because of the challenges that most maybe a fair amount of residential contractors have is that the technician that's on site doesn't do a good job or a good enough job of entering in why they're recommending for, whatever the repair or replacement,

24:18options they're providing are. And so a customer takes that bid, and it's similar to only one homeowner is home and they try and convey the message to their spouse of why they need to do the repairs, and the person that's not home is always gonna be, more apprehensive to whatever's happening because they didn't get the full explanation. And so now you're feeding this into AI, and AI's wondering or is gonna need to know why are we making these recommendations?"

24:50And yeah Yeah I could see that being a huge advantage on the commercial side Hey ' cause they're used to writing these longer proposals, whereas the residential I think that's missing most of the time. Yeah. Yeah, in those smaller ones where there's just not much recorded information about anything. The micro ones where it's a, a couple of guys in, in a truck can be more challenging. It's oftentimes a matter of just getting them on the phone and recording that. You put them on speaker and record it so you've got the transcript

25:23of what was said and take that into some some blogs and so on. But it's still time… the, the one thing is to, to… if you can encourage them to make a call because they will be between sites in their car lots of the day, typically. So it's about setting up habits so that they remember, "Hey, between these jobs, give Wazza a call and and he'll and we'll talk through the job," and I'll try and glean some interesting facts out of it.

25:53It's certainly easy with the bigger guys because they're recording a lot of information but the smaller ones, you need to draw it out of them some way. Yeah. Yeah, no that's a good point. Now with all of that information, the, the phrase search everywhere optimization has become more and more popular. Is that something that you're talking to customers about? Is that a phrase that you're using on a regular basis now? Is it, Do you guys end up with something like that? Yeah that's the one we use and simply because it's still SEO and it's easy.

26:26It was easy, an easy transition. So I s- I ki- leaned into that one. But yeah, absolutely people are trying to show up in the large language models. The, the difficulty is, The you can't track it like you-- The old school days were cool because you could track the keywords you're trying to rank for and track the, the traffic and and easily, show some beautiful charts and so on, which was cool that if your brand is showing up in chat, let's say, and it-- you might get recommended, someone might ask for

26:57it, "Who's the best plumber in town?" Or whatever it is. And you don't necessarily know that you've shown up and you don't know the reason why someone's made the call. But I would say to, to businesses, small businesses, it's always been helpful to understand where the-- what prompted the customer to make the inquiry. And these days more than ever, it's probably needs to be a conversation from if you've got salespeople to ask the questions so you can understand what's, what, why they're coming.

27:27It w- it was cool when it was all clickable and trackable and keywords and really simplistic from an SEO standpoint, but it's more complicated now i-in terms of tracking. And then also the, the privacy rules have all dialed up, so you've got that challenge as well, it's interesting times Yeah. It's definitely something that is changing frequently and it is, it's a little more murky than it certainly used to be, so yeah, I can appreciate that.

27:57So if you've got, say you've got a client that comes to you, maybe they already have a website, and they're saying, "Okay, I've got a limited budget." W- what are you, what's your typical advice to people to get started i- if they could only do one thing in marketing, if you will? W- where are you directing them at this point? Yeah. So I still believe the, there's a lot of people saying websites, we won't need websites in the future because, for a variety of reasons we won't visit websites

28:29anymore That we might visit them less, but I think the content is being pulled from some- somewhere that, in any platform. So it may as well be, may as well be pulled from your website. So you want the large language models to be firstly even considering your site and then understanding all the published content that you've got there. So whilst I, I still believe people will visit websites, particularly when they're going to make a significant buying decision.

29:00So if it's, let's say it's a, a construction a home builder, dr- building your dream homes. Now, you're going to do all the research you possibly can about the company before you choose who you're gonna choose because it's a service and there's varying degrees of the quality of the outputs and the timing and all of these things can vary significantly. Now, if you're selling a, a widget that's the same as everyone else's widget that's an impulse buy. That's a different thing, so people just shop on the cheapest price. But if you're selling something of quality and a, a service that

29:33varies in quality and people really wanna make a good decision, I think they'll still visit a website. So I'm still encouraging people to f- to, to focus their attention on the website as the key pillar behind everything they do, and to try and draw people back to that because it's the one area you control. You control all the messaging. You could be on social media, and that's cool. But the other thing too with social, y- firstly, you don't control all the messaging. You- you've got something there, and the next second they're on something else.

30:03But so it's a noisy space, but also the user intent. People are there not to buy your thing. They're there to catch up with your friends, what activities and the news and whatever other ti- things we waste our time on social media for. So the user intent really important. So user intent of someone visiting a website is, yeah they're probably likely they're in the market to buy something and something that you're selling. But you've really gotta build trust. It feels as though trust is being eroded fast. We don't trust what we read.

30:33We don't trust what we see. We know the videos might not be genuine. It's exciting and terrifying. We've all seen political videos, and it turns out the politician wasn't even, didn't even say those things and it can cause chaos. But what it what it does mean is we don't trust anything we read or see necessarily. So you've gotta do everything you can from a marketing standpoint to build trust. Get great Google reviews or reviews in any platform where they can't easily be faked or manufactured and they're more believable. Anything that can boost your credibility in that way and trust

31:05signals I think that's the biggest move of marketing right now It's great. Absolutely. Completely agree with trust signals and that the website is still gonna important. Chat, did you have something you wanted to add in there? Yeah, let me just gather that I'd add that the strongest trust signals give people something specific they can check. Who did the work? What the job involved?

31:35How they handled a problem? Reviews help, but no platform makes them impossible to fake. For a contractor's site, I'd ask whether a customer can see the people behind the business, understand what happens after they call, and find examples relevant to their job. Wes, when a site makes all the right promises but still doesn't feel credible, what do you look for? Yeah, it's a great question. So I would say to… One of the things you can do is to humanize the business as much as you can, because we're moving further and further away from that human connection

32:08and relationship, and I still think the best sales are done human to human. It was always a a, an idea of marketing was to to be known, liked, and trusted. You've gotta get known, liked, and trusted. You've gotta get found. I think having photographs of the key people in the organization is really powerful for us, particularly a small business because it's a, a significant advantage a small business has over a large business. It can be found online, and it can ha- have a personal brand behind the, the

32:39company brand, and that person is probably likely involved in their community in a whole bunch of ways outside of business. They might be involved in the local sports club. They might be involved in the local church community or any other interests that are not business, but they're known in their community for a bunch of reasons. So to have the photographs of the people running the show, working in, particularly if they're working in your home, you're gonna see these people and it… You'll realize, "Hey, this is the person I know from the foot- football club."

33:11It's really helpful. They might… If you've got a photograph, they'll, they might recognize you, which is helpful. But even if they don't recognize you, if they see a, a friendly human face, that can be really, it can be really powerful because there's more of a trust thing. If the services we're talking about, you're inviting people into your home as a customer, so you wanna know that they're good people, and the one thing I think a lot of the small trade-based businesses, the home service businesses neglect is- Oftentimes it'll be a husband and wife or a couple running the

33:43business and typically I know it's-- I'm generalizing, but typically it'll be the man on the tools and the woman doing the back office stuff, the administrative stuff, the invoicing, answering the phone, all that kind of stuff. I know I'm generalizing, but that's often how it is. I think a missing piece of the puzzle is you should showcase both of you as, as a, a couple or have a bio of both people. Reason being, it just, it shows a lot of people will relate. The buyers will often be women and there's, if there's no woman on the

34:14website, you've missed out on the opportunity and you'll always relate to certain people more than others. And so-- And the other thing it shows is there's some, somewhat of stability in the guy on the tools because he's, at least he's got a, a wife or a significant partner and there, there's stability in hi- his life and therefore he's probably… It's a signal to suggest he's a good guy, so all of these little signals can really be helpful Absolutely. Yeah. No, thank you for that. We got one more question before we wrap up.

34:44Is there something that you think businesses should be asking about in terms of AI and marketing that we haven't covered today? Yeah, interesting. I know the the rise of the video. Videos have always been powerful on the social platforms. I wonder where it all goes because, you've got HeyGen and a bunch of other tools that are creating videos that look super polished and real. So I wonder if that's going to diminish somewhat the the

35:15effectiveness of video marketing. But I would say right now people should really consider getting themselves in front of a camera and recording and being the face of the brand and publishing that as far as you possibly can. The, the reach is so much greater than a static image or graphic on the social platforms. Typically, it's more engaging and it humanizes the brand. I would say it's better to have a real video, even if it's clunky and it's not the best lighting and all of these things.

35:46If you're i-in some form of home services, it's just you authentically doing your work and speaking out what you do. I think that's in some ways more effective than the really super polished AI version of you. So but I wonder how it all goes with all the noise that the video tools are going to impact on Yeah. No, I think you've got customers if you're a contractor, get in front of the camera and like you said, Yeah.

36:16it does not have to be perfect. It just needs to be you. And that's-- at the end of the day, that's what people are hiring. They're hiring the person that's on the other side of that camera, especially if you're still in a truck or if you're the person that is taking phone calls or any, any connection that you have with the customer they wanna see that and they wanna know that it's real because, you may have AI answering the phones which is becoming more and more accepted. I think, Wes, what you said is absolutely right.

36:47They still want that relationship with a human when it comes down to it or they need to be able to talk to a human to resolve their issues, they're not interested in talking to AI when something goes wrong. They, need to know that someone is backing up the work. So Yeah. Yeah. Some of those phone answering services and AI they're phenomenal now. Like I, I was looking at it in the early days, it was pretty archaic and, there was such a big pause before the answers and so on.

37:17It was a bit annoying. But these days it's really good. And the way I like to think about it is it- it's better if a real hu- human can answer the phone, of course it is. But those AI platforms are a step up from, "Hey, dial one if you're interested in this, dial two." What are… those ones. Man, they're Yeah. annoying. So if AI is answering, if doing that piece instead it's miles better those frustrating dial one, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me.

37:47Where can people go to find you learn more about your company, or listen to your show? Yeah, uplift360.com.au is the the website. AU being an Australian website. We do serve clients all around the world. And the show Built, Trusted, Chosen, as you mentioned it's on all the platforms. You'll find it from the website as well. But yeah, Spotify and everywhere else, Apple. So yeah, j- join in and they are q- the show's there Excellent. Excellent. I wanna thank you again, Wes, for joining us, and I wanna thank everyone

38:19for listening to A Chat with Chat. if anyone else that you can think of that might be interested in this show, go ahead and share that with them and tag them. Of course and subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback on what you think about the show, and we'll look forward to the next episode. thank you again, Wes Thanks, Aaron. It's been brilliant