[00:00:08.16] - Gordon Drayson
Hello.
[00:00:08.27] - Taylor Drayson
Hello.
[00:00:09.17] - Marc P Summers
Hello.
[00:00:11.02] - Caroline Ainslie
Hello.
[00:00:11.16] - Gordon Drayson
My name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:00:15.08] - Taylor Drayson
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:17.19] - Marc P Summers
And I'm Marc P Summers from the Automated Marketing Agency.
[00:00:20.24] - Caroline Ainslie
I'm Caroline Ainslie from Bubbly Maths.
[00:00:23.19] - Gordon Drayson
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon and Marc and Caroline," a special episode leading up to our 200th episode next week. This is the podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you for joining us. We have two guests with us today. We thought we'd make the 199th and 200th episode a little bit special, so we are pre-recording them. Do you want to introduce yourself first of all. Let's start with Marc. Tell everyone who is listening or watching who you are.
[00:00:58.21] - Marc P Summers
I am Marc P Summers I have spent the last 30 years working online on the internet, and I help small businesses succeed using AI and automated marketing techniques.
[00:01:12.01] - Gordon Drayson
We should also point out he's been on an aeroplane for 18 hours. So if he looks a little bit groggy or a little bit tired, that isn't how he normally is. Well, I say that.
[00:01:23.17] - Marc P Summers
I flew in from Austin, especially, to do this recording because the internet wouldn't allow us to do it, remotely.
[00:01:30.07] - Gordon Drayson
Exactly. The internet? Yeah. We're off to Blackpool, and so Marc is here for that. And we thought we'd take advantage to pre-record these special episodes. So this is being recorded back in February, and it's probably going to be going out in March by the time we get to it. So that's Marc. Caroline, introduce yourself.
[00:01:54.21] - Caroline Ainslie
Hello, again. I'm Caroline Ainsley from Bubbly Maths. It is my mission that every child on Earth, should love learning and enjoy mathematics. And I do it with shows, mathematical shows, mathematical workshops, science shows, science workshops using soap bubbles and balloons.
[00:02:15.23] - Gordon Drayson
So there we go. Welcome to This Week With... Let's get straight into our topics for this week. We are each going to have a topic and we are going to record two episodes. So it'll be this week and next week. So two of us will have our topics this week and then two next week. So let's see, shall we start with our guests? Shall we start with Marc? Would you like to be our first talker?
[00:02:39.07] - Marc P Summers
Absolutely.
[00:02:39.14] - Gordon Drayson
First speaker, off you go with your topic.
[00:02:42.11] - Marc P Summers
Oh, wow. Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about AI and what I'm using AI for one of my clients because I'm pretty proud of it, what we're doing. The client is a gentleman called Mr. Conway, Stephen Conway, and he runs a company called the Portrait Agency, which is an agency of making fine art portraits of people, pets, horses, that sort of thing. His wife is an amazing artist. She's drawn or painted, should I say? I guess, drawn, painted? What's the...?
[00:03:19.13] - Gordon Drayson
I think you draw and then you paint. It's normally in that order, isn't it?
[00:03:22.18] - Marc P Summers
I don't know. I'm an internet consultant, not an artist. But anyway, he markets her and other artists that are, and down-
[00:03:34.15] - Caroline Ainslie
Hazel Morgan.
[00:03:35.29] - Marc P Summers
Yes, Hazel Morgan is her name. And they down sell to the other artists that they have. And it's an interesting process because they're prospecting to find the sales, but they want to find people that can spend 30,000, 35,000 on a little, a little painting. So it's not your normal thing you're going to go just down the road to, I nearly said Target, but you don't have Target here, but down the road to Tesco Extra and "Oh, let's pick up a $30,000 painting." It's an investment. And so what they do is pretty clever. They use AI to look at the house value of their home address. In the sales form, they're asking for where will the painting be delivered to? It's advisable for this to be your home address to ensure that it gets there safely. They're collecting the home address, and then we use AI to go off and look in the states sites like Zillow and so forth and over here. Zoopla, I think is your one that we use, and it uses the estimate of the house value to work out means of that client.
[00:04:59.27] - Marc P Summers
Then we use AI to go off and look in LinkedIn to find their position and whether they're a company owner and that sort of thing. By the time the salesperson has looked at this particular prospect, they've actually looked at so much information about this person that the internet has... Now, it doesn't work for, as far as the, we call it the private eye information, that second part. It doesn't work for everyone because some people are obviously private and don't have that information out there. But a lot of these business owners that are looking for these type of portraits, do have LinkedIn profiles and so forth. They fill in the form and then within seconds, it's already found out all this information. So it's really kinda cool.
[00:05:45.23] - Gordon Drayson
It is. It's very good. I like that. And if you have found a company that they are connected with on LinkedIn, you could then search through the company and go to Company's House in the UK, find out what the position of the business is. Just so that you're not wasting your time approaching people who just can't afford it.
[00:06:06.02] - Marc P Summers
Exactly.
[00:06:06.17] - Gordon Drayson
The first thing is, can they afford it? The second thing is, are they interested in what we do?
[00:06:13.06] - Marc P Summers
Yeah. I didn't really like the idea when Stephen first suggested that he wanted to do it because I'm like, Well, surely you're making a decision whether they are going to spend this. I mean, you don't know whether someone living in a $200,000 house hasn't just been given some money for... A relative just died and so they want a picture from a painting. $35,000 is not bad for an investment of a million or an inheritance of a million.
[00:06:48.02] - Gordon Drayson
It's more of a guideline, isn't it?
[00:06:50.11] - Marc P Summers
Exactly. That's how he uses it. Also, he uses the responses. If they respond quickly, whatever the house value, then obviously they're still interested, whereas they don't respond very quickly, then he down sells them right the way down to an AI-driven painting that's then taken from photographs that creates the portrait and then printed on canvas. So you can go from selling a $35,000 painting right the way down to selling a $250 painting that is completely AI-driven and printed. It doesn't have any people doing it at all.
[00:07:37.14] - Taylor Drayson
Very cool.
[00:07:37.23] - Caroline Ainslie
Okay.
[00:07:38.21] - Marc P Summers
AI is really good. ChatGPT, Perplexity. There's a whole range of systems out there. Apple...
[00:07:49.03] - Gordon Drayson
Apple Intelligence?
[00:07:50.21] - Marc P Summers
That's the word, yes. AI, yes. I think as business owners, we should be looking at what do we do on a repetitive basis that we can automate. In Stephen's business, his salesperson was going off and finding all this information and then putting it into the fields of the CRM manually. Now... And that was taking five, six minutes per contact, now that's done for them. So they're saving that five or six minutes. So as business owners, what can we do in our business where we're automating that? For example, you have someone filling in a form and there's a new venue that you've never been to before.
[00:08:35.14] - Marc P Summers
You could have AI, a prompt of AI saying, "This is a new venue. Can you go off and find all the information about this venue?" And so now you've got a description of the venue, hopefully some photographs of the inside of the venue, that AI has brought that back into your database automatically just because it's a new venue and you haven't had to go off and do that research.
[00:08:57.25] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah. We talk about automating things a lot on this channel, and the more we can automate without... If it's customer-facing, it still needs to look like it's human-driven because people don't like talking to computers, they don't like talking to robots.
[00:09:15.09] - Marc P Summers
Yep.
[00:09:16.03] - Gordon Drayson
But AI and automation is something that is definitely going to be here to stay. It's already started, and the smart people have already started using it to their benefit. And I think if you haven't already looked at how AI and scraping the internet and automations can help your business, then now is the time to jump on board. Do you use it for anything other than this particular customer?
[00:09:46.26] - Marc P Summers
Yeah, we use it for chatbots and so forth. Chatbots, like you're saying, you have to be careful when it's customer-facing because they're representing your customer. But the nice thing is with most chatbot systems, and I use my It's our own CRM system, my automated marketing app, which the link is just here.
[00:10:07.15] - Gordon Drayson
It's not, but we will put it in the show notes for you.
[00:10:11.18] - Marc P Summers
That uses a training system. You put it out, you give it some information, it scrapes your website to find out its own stuff, and then you ask it frequently asked questions, and it responds to you, and then you rate those answers, but then you can also let it loose and have live training. But you need to be aware of what it's saying. At that point, you can say, "Well, that's a great answer, but I'd prefer it if you said this." Stephen's been using that as well quite a lot in just training it to be more accurate, more friendly, all those sort of things. "I don't like that phrase you used. This phrase means the same, but it just sounds a little bit more human." And you can train that. And so next time it just goes, Oh, my boss said last time it didn't like this. And the nice thing about this is now it's working 24/7 for you. So you're not paying someone to sit on a chat window. You're not paying someone overseas who, again, has language issues, just different language issues, more geographical language issues rather than humanoid language issues. But the training really does help that.
[00:11:34.22] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah, and if you want to try something like this out, go to thisweekwith.co.uk, and we have a chatbot on our website that has actually been trained with the transcripts of every episode that we've had. So you can ask it questions about anything we've said, and it should be able to answer it, or at least direct you to the episode in which we spoke about it. So, yeah, I think the takeaway from this is if you haven't started looking at how AI can help you, then you should do, because it's here to stay. I mean, it's getting better and better by the week. We have Deep Seek, which has just come out and is now supposedly the champion. And next week, there'll be another one that's probably even better. So they're leapfrogging each other. And these large language models are getting to a point now when you would be silly to run your business without it in some way.
[00:12:34.05] - Marc P Summers
Yeah.
[00:12:34.19] - Caroline Ainslie
Yeah, we're using it in... I came all the way from Wales. We're starting Maths Week Wales. There's Maths Week England, Maths Week Ireland, Maths Week Scotland. We're starting Maths Week Wales now, and we've used AI to research all the possibilities of funders and AI comes up with ideas we've never even thought of, and to write funding documents, and to find schools, to find all the people that we want to network with in order to make Maths Week Wales happen. And we're using it to write a book as well. A colleague and I are writing a "Science of Bubbles" book aimed at the normal person in the street and young people, because there's nothing out there using that language. And we're using AI to help us find the right language. And then, of course, we're getting it checked by proper experts, but AI is helping us with the language for that.
[00:13:34.10] - Gordon Drayson
It's a good basis. It's a good start, isn't it? Instead of sitting there with a blank text editor in front of you and thinking, "where do I start with this?" It's a really good way to start. Excellent. That's really interesting, Marc. Thank you for sharing that with us. I'm going to talk and have a topic now, and then next week we'll have one from Taylor and from Caroline. But my topic this week, we haven't gone to Blackpool yet, but I want to talk about print marketing or different ways to market your business that's completely separate to the way Marc has just recommended we go and investigate. And the way I'm going to be doing this is my other podcast, FACE: The Podcast, which is for family and children's entertainers. So it's a very, very small niche of people. And I've decided that as I'm going to a magic convention, and there's going to be lots of family and children's entertainers there, it'll be really nice to get the word out as to what my podcast is about to all these people that could become new listeners for me. This is not something that's earning me any money.
[00:14:47.29] - Gordon Drayson
In the future, there may be sponsorship. In fact, I'm going to tell you about something I'm going to be doing in Blackpool that is part of a sponsorship, and it's the first one I've had with FACE: The Podcast, so I'm really quite pleased with it. There is a gentleman whose name is Rob Gaffney, who I think we all know. Rob Gaffney does really, really wonderful embroidery. He does embroidery on clothing similar to Taylor's. He actually did one for Taylor. This isn't one of them, but he did one very similar. But he's also now got into print, which is something that Marc used to do a lot of. I've had him print some stickers for me, and it's the FACE: The Podcast logo with the website address in it. And I haven't seen them yet; I pick them up in Blackpool. And they're about 10 centimetres in diameter because they're circular-ish design, but they've been die-cut, which means that for those who don't know what die-cut is, it means that they've been cut, but the cut is an irregular shape. So it's going around the logo, which makes it look much more interesting than just a round circle sticker, which is very common.
[00:16:10.02] - Gordon Drayson
It just stands out a little bit more. And so as part of the sponsorship, he has printed and cut these stickers for me so I can give them away in Blackpool. Now, it'll be really interesting to look at the stats to see after Blackpool, if I get new listeners; if I get an uptake in people listening to past episodes; if I get people who subscribe to hear about new episodes because of it. The reason I'm doing it is because I wanted to try and encourage someone to come and sponsor it. I spoke to Rob and he is a children's entertainer or was a children's entertainer for a long, long time. It's something close to his heart. So I thought he would be a great fit for this. And it's not something that I've done before, and I thought I'd give it a go. You never know, these things sometimes work really well. If nothing else, you're going to have your stickers that are out there in the world somewhere. You never know where they're going to end up. I can imagine where some of them will probably end up. But even if you get just a few into the right place, it's worth doing.
[00:17:24.01] - Marc P Summers
I just got an idea for your sticker, which we saw a photograph of them over lunch. And what you could have done, because you're looking to get more listeners, what you could have done is had the sticker, and then underneath the logo had a QR code that goes to all the places where they could listen to the podcast. But have that kiss cut, which is like the die cut, but it only goes to the backing and not all the way through, so that when they peel off the actual sticker and put it on their laptop or whatever, it only puts the logo on there. But to follow up and to actually subscribe, but they just need to scan that QR code that is given to them with the sticker.
[00:18:05.26] - Gordon Drayson
In my head, I had this QR code in the middle of the sticker, and I was thinking, when you peel it off, you're just going to have this square shape that's missing. But if it was to the side, then yeah, that would make a lot of sense.
[00:18:17.10] - Marc P Summers
Yeah, it would probably use up more because I'm sure when Rob makes them, he nests them so that it's using up less paper. But maybe make them slightly smaller and then you'd have those text issues. But having that QR code so it was given with the thing, then they're not having... You're making it easier in print marketing for them to then go and actually follow up.
[00:18:43.25] - Gordon Drayson
Depending on where they put this, if they put it on a notice board for a magic club, for example, having that QR code will make it easier for people to find and listen to the podcast. Now, there's no monetary value in the podcast at the moment. That's not the reason I'm doing it. I'm doing it because I feel it's important for children and family entertainers to be spotlighted because they don't get spotlighted very often. And so it's difficult to be able to put a monetary value on how I see this being a success. So normally, if you're doing some sort of print marketing, you would say, "I need to earn X amount of money for this to have been a success. And I know that this is a success and all the money has come from this marketing because people are being directed to a certain place that you can then track and analyse." And I haven't done that on this occasion, but I do want to try and get the word out. So it's just a test for me at the moment, and it's something I haven't done. And that's why I mentioned it, because I thought that maybe if you are running a business and there's something that maybe you haven't tried, is there a reason why you haven't tried it?
[00:20:04.10] - Gordon Drayson
So for me, the print marketing with stickers is something I haven't tried. And I haven't tried it because there's a cost involved and I couldn't see the results and the return on investment for me. But by doing it as a sponsorship, I've got nothing to lose. And if it works really well, then I'm more than happy to spend money on it to get more people in. So have a think about your business. Is there... Lumpy mail is something that we've spoken about in the past, which-
[00:20:30.22] - Marc P Summers
Still works.
[00:20:31.15] - Gordon Drayson
Which still works, and it works probably even better now because it's less done by people. You don't see many people sending lumpy mail out. Whenever I take a booking for my shows, I always send a confirmation pack in the post, and people aren't expecting that. And it's a really nice thing to receive in the post. It gives people peace of mind. It shows I'm professional. All the details are in there. It's got extra things like hints and tips and a planner for your guests to see if they've replied or not. All these little extras that I haven't told them anything about. And it's just really nice to give them that, "Oh, he's going over and above. He's giving extra value."
[00:21:17.07] - Marc P Summers
And it doesn't cost very much, but it raises your level of professionality up in one, two, maybe even three stages just by that little envelope full of-
[00:21:26.17] - Gordon Drayson
Full of stuff that's relevant to them, yeah. I mean, the biggest cost, I think at the moment is the postage stamp.
[00:21:33.09] - Marc P Summers
Right.
[00:21:33.23] - Gordon Drayson
Because the postage has gone up a lot recently. But my prices have gone up and I've put them up a little bit further to cover the cost of that. So it's not actually costing me any extra than it was before. It's been covered by the costs involved.
[00:21:48.15] - Caroline Ainslie
Is it just paper that you put in or do you put in a little gift as well?
[00:21:52.09] - Gordon Drayson
No, it's just paper. So it's not lumpy mail as normal lumpy mail would be. When we say lumpy mail, it's normally, there's something in there that makes it lumpy. That's why we call it lumpy mail. But no, there's no actual gift in there.
[00:22:07.06] - Marc P Summers
So one thing I made for Caroline over the summer was, you know those Starbucks clutches that you like doing the magic trick.
[00:22:16.24] - Gordon Drayson
Oh, yes. Things that go around the cups to stop you burning your fingers.
[00:22:20.20] - Marc P Summers
Yeah. I made some wooden ones for Caroline with her details engraved in.
[00:22:30.08] - Gordon Drayson
Oh, that's nice.
[00:22:30.17] - Marc P Summers
I mean, it's not really relevant in the birthday party confirmation, but you could do something like that. So some little magic trick or whatever.
[00:22:42.23] - Gordon Drayson
I do send... Again, we were talking about automation before. I do send automated emails out, and one of the emails, one of the first emails that goes out is for the birthday child. It's the same video that everyone gets, but it's designed to be really personal to that birthday child. It's me talking straight into the camera saying, "I've just heard I'm coming to your birthday party. It's going to be great. We're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to have lots and lots of fun. I can't wait to see you."
[00:23:13.03] - Marc P Summers
What you could do in that video is say, watch out for the confirmation pack is in there, adding a little extra magic trick, and then you show them the magic trick, whatever it might be. Having something cut out of cheap wood and lasered is so cheap to put in. Again, cheaper, like the paper and so now they're like, "Mum, has it arrived? Mum, has it arrived? I'm so excited. Magic Gordon is coming to my party. Where's the mail?" And every five minutes, there he is asking, "Mum, has it arrived?" And the energy is like...
[00:23:43.10] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah. And thinking about it, if I do for my deluxe parties, which are slightly more expensive, if I do a 3D print, which I can do easily, that might be quite a nice thing to do.
[00:23:55.22] - Marc P Summers
Yeah. You could do the same thing with 3D print. Yeah. Takes a bit longer than laser but...
[00:24:00.04] - Gordon Drayson
Yeah.
[00:24:00.09] - Marc P Summers
It's something you can do in house.
[00:24:01.23] - Gordon Drayson
But it's something I have available to me. Yeah, exactly. So there we go. The takeaway from this is have a think about any marketing avenues or ways that you haven't tried yet and have a think about why you haven't tried them and maybe consider giving them a go, because until you do it and you test and you measure, you won't know if it's any good or not. And you might find it's a brilliant source of new customers, new viewers, whatever it is you're looking for. Anyone got anything else they wish to say?
[00:24:36.18] - Taylor Drayson
I don't think so.
[00:24:37.18] - Gordon Drayson
No?
[00:24:38.09] - Caroline Ainslie
I think you've done a marvellous job.
[00:24:40.14] - Gordon Drayson
Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is episode 199, We've got our episode 200 next week. Who'd have thought, Taylor, we'd have been here having 200 episodes. I can't get my head around it, really. And we will be back. And just to make sure that you don't get confused, we'll all wear the same clothing so that you know who we all are.
[00:25:08.10] - Caroline Ainslie
But we're actually going to swap places.
[00:25:09.20] - Gordon Drayson
We're all going to swap places, apparently. There we go. It's just for those who are watching. Those who are listening, it will make no difference. So yes, thank you for joining us. If you would like to like, share, and subscribe, we're on YouTube. We would very much appreciate that.
[00:25:25.08] - Taylor Drayson
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes.
[00:25:29.26] - Gordon Drayson
And of course, we're on all of the regular podcast platforms, if you would prefer to listen to us instead of watch us, which I can fully understand. We'll be back with you for our 200th episode next week. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:25:44.19] - Taylor Drayson
I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:25:47.09] - Marc P Summers
I'm Marc P. Summers from Automated Marketing Agency.
[00:25:50.14] - Caroline Ainslie
And Caroline from Bubbly Maths.
[00:25:53.00] - Gordon Drayson
We'll see you next week. Goodbye.
[00:25:55.02] - Taylor Drayson
Bye.
[00:25:55.08] - Marc P Summers
Goodbye.
[00:25:55.12] - Caroline Ainslie
Bye.
