Latest / Exit Algorithms / AI Marketing Without the AI Slop with Adrienne Wilkerson (#88)
Transcript
- Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today I'm joined by Adrian Wilkerson. She launched Beacon Publishing and Design back in 2001 and built it into Beacon Media and Marketing, a three time Inc. 5000 award winning agency. That helps mental and behavioral health organizations grow nationwide. She's a keynote speaker, author, podcast host, and an overall badass. A Adrian, welcome to the show. Glad to have you today. Adrienne Wilkerson: Ha ha. Thank you, Pete. I'm really looking forward to this today. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, same here. ⁓ yeah, why don't we start off? Do you mind sharing for listeners a bit about your background and yeah, maybe some highs and lows in your in your business journey? Adrienne Wilkerson: Yeah, absolutely. There there's plenty of both for sure. so yeah, I started off actually in Anchorage, Alaska. That's where I was born and raised. And like you said, I founded Beacon Publishing and Design back in 2001. And I kind of had figured out at that point, honestly, I kind of sucked at being an employee. I was much better at being in charge. ⁓ or at least I thought I was at the time. ⁓ I found out there was a lot. more to it ⁓ than I thought back then as the company grew and evolved. But I really saw a lot of small businesses especially struggle with branding and messaging and the you know at that point graphic design and websites. Websites were brand new. ⁓ It was very much of a do I have to have a website? Back in 2001. You know, now we think that's just crazy. But back then it was like isn't my brick and mortar enough? And but I was realizing that everything was was shifting. You know, the internet was going to change the way that we advertised and we marketed. But in 2001, I had no idea what was coming, you know, with social media and all of that. And so I started working with small businesses and the idea that's kind of where the beacon name came from, as I saw so many small businesses just struggle with, I've got an idea, I've got this business I want to build. You know, and they go talk to an advertising agency, and ⁓ most advertising agencies, at least back then in Alaska, were not structured to help small businesses. They were really all going after, which made sense, the same kind of i group of enterprise clients. And so s there was a gap there for small and medium businesses. There was a need of somebody who could meet them where they were at, and kind of that beacon shining that light through the confusion. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: Of okay, yes, it would all be wonderful if we had a hundred thousand dollars to invest in our marketing up front. Most of us don't have that, you know, and that was pre-venture capital and that whole world too. So the whole market was different. And so it was more the idea of okay, what what is your budget? What's your vision? What can we do and meet you where you're at and grow with you? You know, here's the harbor, this is safe, that's the open ocean, that's where you want to go, here's the rocks. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: Don't go here, kind of a thing. And so the idea of kind of being that navigation partner with with businesses. And so we grew slowly. I kind of kept it small, intentional for a l for quite a while. But you know, early 2010, 2011, I was realizing everything was going to shift again. Social media was not going away and it was going to change how we marketed. We weren't going to need brochures anymore the way we used to. Yellow page ads were going to be a thing of the past. ⁓ TV advertising was gonna change, radio advertising was gonna change. And I'm watching in Alaska and I'm just like, nobody's talking about this. And now, granted, Alaska's like 18 to 24 months behind the rest of the United States on anything except maybe oil technology. So, you know, it it w it's just kind of the nature of it being remote. But I was watching this whole thing shift and change, and I met a lady at the time. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: That was one of the only people in Alaska that I was seeing have the same vision for what was coming ⁓ as I did. And so we merged her small business with mine and we launched Beacon Media and Marketing in 2012. And that was essentially the first digital agency in Alaska. ⁓ you want to talk about Wild West. It was crazy. We would literally learn how to do social media marketing, blogging, all of this at night. My co-founder and I, and we would teach our staff how to do it during the day. It was that raw, that new. Nobody knew what was going on, you know. So definitely the school of hard knocks. I think if there was a mistake, we made it in those early days. There wasn't a lot to work with. Nobody, there were no schools to go to to learn how to do social media marketing, ⁓ how to do blogging, how to do I mean paid ads didn't even exist then. And now they're a staple. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Ha. Hmm. Right. Adrienne Wilkerson: But they didn't even exist then. And so we learned a lot the hard way. There was a lot of experimentation, a lot of, well, that didn't work. And wow, that really worked. Why did that work? You know, and trying to learn and and evolve through that. So we've seen a lot change over the years. And 2016 or sorry, 2017, we expanded outside of Alaska, started working with companies all over North America. And then 2019, right before COVID, we made the ⁓ Didn't know it at the time, but very fortuitous decision to niche down into mental and behavioral health. And then COVID hit and that industry exploded. And so we exploded right alongside it. We went from helping under a hundred clients to over 500 in the space of about 12 to 18 months. We doubled, tripled our staff during that time. I mean, it was just insane growth. ⁓ Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: about twenty between twenty and you know middle of twenty one. So all the challenges that come with that kind of rapid growth. There was one time, one period where I was doing seven to ten interviews a day ⁓ for weeks at a time as we were trying to hire fast enough to keep up with the growth. ⁓ thankfully things have leveled out a little bit since then. So we've kind of niched down even more within our industry and Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Wow. Adrienne Wilkerson: We've reduced our staff too very strategically as we've kind of shifted some of our focuses in who we work with. So now we primarily focus on group practices, multi-location clinics that are growing and expanding into additional states and cities and that side of thing, as well as the addiction recovery side. So that that's kind of shifted some of the staff staffing needs that we've had over the years. So We're in a lot more comfortable place, I would say, of growth now. ⁓ a lot more manageable for sure. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. ⁓ I love that story. ⁓ awesome. Yeah, I you know, you mentioned you had to iterate along the way, learn and and change. ⁓ what were some of the biggest more most important pivots that you that you had to make? Adrienne Wilkerson: I think one of the scariest ones was when paid ads arrived. And so up until that point, and I I'm thinking Facebook specifically, that was one of the really crazy ones. So in the early days, it was all about the quality of content. You're trying to go viral. And if your quality, if your content wasn't, you know, engaging enough, if your graphics weren't engaging enough, then you just weren't going to get. any kind of traction. You weren't nothing was going to get shared. You weren't going to get comments. So it was all about quality and how well you were connecting with your audience. So all of our accounts were kind of, you know, doing this, steadily growing. And then literally from one week to the next, all of our accounts started tanking across the board. It didn't matter the industry. And we were pretty s pretty spread out industry wise at that time. And we could not figure out what was going on. We hadn't changed anything. You know, we're going through all our quality control and talking to like, what are we doing differently? Nobody's doing anything differently. It took us almost 10 days of digging, and actually it was my partner at the time who found an internal memo that Facebook had published that was buried, very, very buried, to where they stated that they were no longer going to be promoting or Their algorithm had completely changed, and the only ones they were going to be promoting was those that paid for it. And so that was the beginning of paid advertising, of boosting posts, and then they added ads later. And that was brutal for us as a business because we had to go back to every one of the clients that we had and go that price that you paid us last month. We can't do it for that anymore. Now you're going to have to pay us that same amount and pay Facebook. To get your material out there. That was not a fun era. It was not a fun bunch of conversations. Understandably, you know, what small business wants to hear? ⁓ by the way, your advertising is doubling overnight. Love you. Because Facebook changed. So that was one of the first huge hits, if you will. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And huge kind of revelations for us as a company that we were how beholden we were to these other entities, to Google, to Facebook. And when they changed something, it didn't matter whether we liked it or not. We had to find a way to make it work for our clients. And usually that meant more money for them. Very rarely did they ever structure it in a way that we're like, ⁓ we just put more a little more elbow grease into this and it'll work. You know, it's just like, no. ⁓ so that one was massive for us and kind of paid ads becoming such a keystone of marketing for a long time was an another big shift where it really kind of shifted away from organic and the quality of your content to your algorithm. How well can you play the game with Google? Especially, you know, how well can you work their algorithm? And now AI is as disruptive to our industry as we were to traditional advertising, you know, in the 2010s kind of a thing. So that's really forcing us to tighten up our game and to really dig deep. And how do we leverage this as a really cool tool to deliver not just more work to the clients, but better work. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Mm-hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And I think that's the big challenge that our industry and and really business as a whole is facing with AI right now, because we could fall into the trap of just doing more because AI facilitates that. But is it really quality? Or is it just AI slop? Which is, you know, this emerging term. ⁓ and so we're really trying to dig into no, how do we make it use it to do better content? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: better understanding of the data and not just more work, but better work, kind of a thing. And in but that's that's a higher road than just, hey, this lets me do 80 posts instead of 20. Yay. But are they good? Are they the right ones? Do they really connect with humanity, even though AI is helping us generate them? So we're navigating that opportunity but also challenge at the same time right now. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Right. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, another pivot. Luckily it it's nothing new nothing new for you. Adrienne Wilkerson: Mm-hmm. No, it's been yeah, tw ⁓ fourteen, fifteen years of pivots. Yeah, fourteen years of pivots. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: That's awesome. Yeah, and we'll talk a little more in depth about AI. ⁓ I wanted to ask you about niching down. You know, ⁓ I got this from Alex Hermozzi. He says, you know, the riches are in the niches. ⁓ do you have you found that that's the case? And how how did you decide to focus specifically on you know behavioral health? Adrienne Wilkerson: Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah, great question. I a hundred percent agree with Alex Ramosy in this one. ⁓ it is also one of the hardest things to do, I think. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to truly niche down. And that is something that we watched a lot of our clients struggle with through the years. You know, we preached it very heavily. My version of Alex Ramosy's statement is, you know, everybody is nobody. You can't be all things to everybody. And when you try, you really just disappear. And so when you try to reach everybody, you're really not going to reach anybody at all. And so it's, or you're going to reach people, but that doesn't mean they're the right people. So you ca you can cast your net too wide. And the hard part in marketing is that means that your marketing dollar gets really diluted. So the more you niche down, The farther your marketing dollar is going to go, the farther that investment's gonna go. So, but the fear always with us as small business owners is: well, if I take my stand and say this is who I work with, what about everybody else? And so what we tell people and what we've experienced is you're still gonna get those fringe ones. You always will. But when you Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Right. Adrienne Wilkerson: Really identify clearly who you really want to work with. And there's a lot that goes into that. It's not just money, it's not just who are your most profitable clients, but it's also who do you enjoy working with because there's a certain emotional value that comes with working with clients that Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: you really jive with. And someday I'm hoping there might be an Al AI algorithm I can help build that can quantify a little bit of that because there's less friction when you're working with somebody that that you enjoy. It doesn't mean there's never friction. There should be some friction. But there's there's a more of a flow and there's an understanding and there's a shared values. And that has a value. It just even in the amount of time that it saves with your team working with that person and so or that company. So there's that value that right now is kind of hard to track. It's kind of an intangible that is also a really important reason why it's good to niche down. And for companies like ours, what we didn't realize we were going to run into is every new industry we picked a client up in, we had to learn that industry. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: We had to learn the language in that industry, the terminology. We had to understand how that the people in that industry thought and talked and what differentiated one company for another. And so when you're jumping from med spas to roofing companies, to plumbers, to car salesmen, to tourist type things, we're talking a really wide, broad audience. And It was burning our staff out. And we couldn't provide the quality and the value that we wanted to as quickly as we wanted to, because we had this big learning curve every time we took on a new industry. And so that was really what pushed us into doing what we were preaching to all of our clients and choosing to niche down. So we kind of niche down to Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Huh. Adrienne Wilkerson: small and medium business, which really wasn't a niche. But that was kind of our that's what we were calling it, right? And we realized we really weren't. And so my husband my husband was a behavioral health counselor for many years. So he was in a the addiction recovery world. My father just retired after thirty years of being a therapist. He ran a medical and counseling clinic. It was one of my first professional jobs was doing medical billing. in in reception works. So I grew up in this world. I know what it's like to deal with insurance billing, wait 60 days just to get a denial letter or request for more information. And you know, sometimes it's six months before you see a dime, you know, kind of a thing. So I understand a lot of that. And like I said, I watched my father grow, you know, build this business. And one of the things he struggled with the most was marketing. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Got it. Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And he was an amazing therapist and he had some fantastic people working for him, both on the medical side and the therapy side. But he struggled to promote himself. It was this like not wanting to talk about him. And in therapy, it's all about the other person. It's never about you as a therapist. And so that was this interesting barrier that I watched him go through and a lot of his colleagues go through. They like, we don't know how to we we don't want to talk. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: ourselves. We don't want to promote ourselves. Like, that's just ethically wrong. I'm like, no, it's not ethically wrong. Somebody needs your services. They need your help. But it was this fascinating barrier that that just existed in the therapy, especially the therapy world. And so that was really what drove us to choose that niche. We had a lot of clients in healthcare in general, but Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: we were really enjoying working with our mental health clients, our behavioral health clients, and now addiction recovery. And so it was just kind of that combination, but a lot of it was watching our staff burn out of just like we can't learn yet another industry and do well in it. Like we can, but like now we're detracting. We're just spending so much time trying to overcome that hump at the beginning. Why not take more clients on? in industries that we're already well versed in. And mental and behavioral health is weird in marketing. We've got HIPAA compliance stuff that other industries do not have to deal with. we can't get reviews the way anybody else gets reviews. Addiction recovery especially, I mean you can get seriously in trouble with ethics boards for asking for reviews while they're still your patient. Understandably they're, you know, so Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. Well, yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: There's some very unique things that exist specifically in that industry. Not that all industries don't have some specialties, but there's some stuff that's actually really dangerous if it's not done well in mental and behavioral health. And so we really saw that as a sort of blue ocean opportunity of there just not being a lot of agencies, and I understand why, that wanted to specialize in that and deal with some of these extra. headaches, if you will. ⁓ but I kind of had a heart for it just based off of watching my dad struggle with it and you know, watching my husband experiencing the inner workings of the addiction recovery side and just I've always had a heart to help businesses who are helping others. And so that was kind of a natural progression, if you will. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Got it. Yeah. Great answer. Yeah. Bo both why to do it and yeah, and some practical insights how. It makes it make makes perfect sense. ⁓ of course you gotta know the the industry. The better you know the industry, the better you can serve your customers as well, right? Adrienne Wilkerson: Yeah, absolutely. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Awesome. Yeah, and ⁓ I guess we'll open up the can of worms here now with with AI. ⁓ let's start off, you know, ⁓ where do you see it affecting your industry the most and how are you leveraging it today? Adrienne Wilkerson: Ha ha ha. Yeah. yeah, it's definitely disrupting our industry heavier than most, I would say. ⁓ there was ⁓ a study that Anthropic put out maybe a few months ago. It was really fascinating. And I'm not gonna get this data, the statistics exactly right because I suck at that, but at least I'll get the hopefully the ballpark correct. So the theory is that AI could be replacing up to somewhere in the ninety percentile. of our day-to-day workflows. That's what all these AI CEOs are projecting, right? Work's gonna go away, jobs are gonna go away, we're gonna replace it all. Well what Anthropic found was that the majority of businesses, majority of industries, even right now, are only implementing somewhere in the 20 to low 30 percentage. Is act of is I AI actually used used to replace day-to-day tasks, workflows, that kind of thing. So the potential's in the 90s, but the actual practicality is more in the 20s and low 30s. Except marketing. And I think customer service was the other one. Marketing is in the 65 percentile. So that just draws kind of that really hit me because we're feeling that, but I hadn't actually seen any data behind that. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Already. Adrienne Wilkerson: So the parts that it's hitting us the hardest is in content generation. ⁓ about 18 months ago to two years ago, we had a lot of clients fire us for that particular service. Like they kept everything else, but they're like, ⁓ yeah, AI can do our blogging for us. We don't need you to do blogging anymore. We love you, keep doing our paid ads, keep doing our social, but we're gonna take over the blogging. And we're like, ⁓ no. Okay. ⁓ we'll see how this goes. So the hard part is you the quality that you get out of AI is only as good as what you put into it. And AI is the king of averages. That is what it does. It takes all this data and it averages it out, essentially. Takes the best, hopefully, of that, but essentially it's an average of that, even maybe an average of the best, but it's still an average. And that's what it spits back out to you. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: So if you're not prompting it well, if you don't understand marketing and you don't understand user behavior, what you're gonna get out of AI is more AI slop. And it's just gonna blend into the back of everything else that everybody else is getting out. So we saw this explosion of content, but a complete lack of quality. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And so we had a pretty much every client came back that had stopped doing blogging with us. They almost all came back for blogging. ⁓ because they were just like, My numbers are tinking. Why are my numbers tanking? I'm putting out more blogs than you guys did, but the keyword optimization wasn't there, you know, the user topics weren't there, they weren't connecting with people. So Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Right. Adrienne Wilkerson: That's where I see one of the biggest dangers of AI is it looks on the surface like it can replace marketing. But it really can't. It can do a lot of the low-level stuff very well. It can multiply what you're doing really well. But if your premise isn't on point to begin with, if the quality isn't there to begin with, it's then just duplicating the average. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And you just blend into everything else and you don't stand out. And now there's become that we're seeing this wave of backlash toward AI and a AI content. And the pendulum is swinging maybe too far the other direction, where I see a lot of people go, ⁓ that's AI slob. Forget that, you know, I don't like that brand anymore. And I'm like, is it really though? Or did you see one thing that looked a little like AI and you just made an arbitrary decision? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Right. Adrienne Wilkerson: But I get why people are making that decision because there is so much junk going out. So it's a hard time for consumers to really parse what is quality versus just AI. And the hard part is I think AI can produce quality when it's prompted well, when an AI, when a human continues to be involved. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: So we use it a lot for drafting first drafts for, you know, editing purposes. Do especially for me, I tend to add commas in where they don't need to be times 10. So AI goes through and goes, nope, you don't need that comma. No, you don't need that comma. But then it puts a bunch of ⁓ dashes and I have to go back and remove the ⁓ dashes, you know. So, but editing is a really good way to use it. Data collection, data analysis. ⁓ Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: So there's some really quality uses for AI. AI can duplicate a lot of stuff, but again, if the core isn't spot on, then it's gonna replicate a lot of junk. So we might use it, we create maybe one core ad, and then we might use it to create eight to ten different variations of that ad. Yeah, and that used to take us so much time. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: There you go. Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: ⁓ now it doesn't take our graphic designer as much time, which means we can actually provide better quality, better value to our clients because now we've got more time to spend on to go deeper into it. Instead of all our time is spent on just kind of rote duplication and tweaking and things like that. So once my team got over their initial fear that I was going to fire them and build a whole bunch of AI agents, ⁓ Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: They started to get really excited. They're like, wait, you mean I my graphic designer especially? She's like, You mean I don't have to spend eight hours recreating this one has the photo here. This one has the photo here. This has, you know, too much of this color vers you know, just that nuanced stuff that that is lower level kind of stuff. So AI has, I believe, helped us create better value for our clients when we use it this way. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: ⁓ but it is really challenging because a lot of people do think that they're going to get AI or quality marketing out of AI without really investing the human time to ensure that it's doing what marketing was always intended to do, which is create connection. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Love it. Adrienne Wilkerson: So yeah, it's it's an interesting time. Like you said, it's a can of worms. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: For sure. Yeah, and that garbage in, garbage out principle that definitely applies. ⁓ it takes time to learn how to use it properly, engineer your prompts, give it enough context. ⁓ I'm curious, you know, as AI floods floods the market, how do you go about, you know, keeping that that human human element, ⁓ especially, you know, in in your line of work and marketing. Adrienne Wilkerson: Mm-hmm. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: How do you stand out? Adrienne Wilkerson: Yes, that is the challenge right now. for us, it's really evaluating and almost splitting hairs a little bit. So content especially, we're seeing this challenge. So what we're seeing really work in content because SEO is basically dead. ⁓ it's now AIO, AEO, GEO, which alpha which other alphabet soup is your take your pick. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: But content still has to be connect to a human. So what we're seeing work right now really well, and who knows how long this will work for because everything's constantly changing, but we're really excited that this is working right now. So we're writing basically two types of blogs parallel with each other. One, we use AI for the draft, for the research, but it's 80% written by a human. From a human to a human. It's optimized for AI, but it's it's more in-depth. There's more stories. There's more things that really connect to a human heart, if you will. And then parallel, we're running what we're calling AI citation blogs. And that's really AI writing for AI. We don't those don't get much eyeballs on them because we have to churn through so much to make AI happy. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hm. Adrienne Wilkerson: There's still quality, there's still quality control checked, making sure they're not representing facts that aren't real. Whereas no, you know, as much as we can, we're eliminating the hallucinations. But it it's really, again, AI writing for AI. And how do we make sure that we're answering the questions that AI is trying to answer? So, what are people asking AI? And how do we make sure that we're getting the right answer in a way that connects? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Hm. Adrienne Wilkerson: and make sense to the AI bot so that it's recommending our clients and us and it's putting us into citations. So that's kind of an example of where we're running those two parallel because there's a little overlap, but not quite enough to really make the citation world happy right now. So that's kind of what we're doing. Video is still a really good medium to be able to communicate. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Got him. Sorry. Adrienne Wilkerson: That heart. And the part that we're leaning into that is not always resonating with all of our clients is that the founder brand needs to come front and center. More so even than the company brand. Who's the face behind the company? What's the story behind the company? Why did the CEO slash founder owner start? What was their heart in it? And getting that heart front and center. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. Adrienne Wilkerson: Before people and getting that story out because that's a connection piece. But not all founders are comfortable being in front of the camera. They're not always comfortable doing podcasts. And I I understand. Like you and I were talking about before we started this. Ma, I do not want to watch my first podcast. They were so awkward. you know, and so I get it. I totally get it. And a lot of founders, they don't necessarily want to be the spokesperson for their company. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: But people want connection even more so in this AI-driven world. And so that founder brand, that story, that heart that comes out, that why? Why did you start the company? What problem were you trying to solve? What what spurred you into that and into this world? That story and that ongoing heart, why do you keep doing this? Why do you keep having sleepless nights to make a company go and run? And that heart comes through. And that's a lot harder to replicate than to replicate like a company brand or something like that. So that's another thing that we're seeing gain a lot of traction. And I love it, but I like being in front of a camera. You know, so i I always have. I was always the kid that was like, I'll volunteer to present. I'll be the first one to present. I was a teacher before this, before I started doing this. I I love being to com able to communicate and share my heart and hear other people's hearts. So it's a fun part for me, but I understand that's not always everybody's cup of tea, if you will, ⁓ to be the va face of their company. But that is really Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Adrienne Wilkerson: becoming more and more a keystone of a successful marketing campaign in this AI-driven world is can your f is your founder comfortable sharing their heart and being the face of the company and really making sure that heart and that story is front and center in a brand and it's not just a cold company brand out there, if that makes sense. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. ⁓ awesome. Great great advice there too. A lot of good points. ⁓ man, this has been a a great incredible conversation, Adrian. I got one final question for you. If you could pick one practical tip for business owners to deploy an effective marketing campaign, what would it be? Adrienne Wilkerson: Yeah. Mm, I think I might have to go back to the founder brand part of it. ⁓ but however you do it, tell your story. Focus on your story and pick whatever medium you can be consistent on. So if that's LinkedIn, that's great. If that's blogging, that's great. Because consistency is still king. So don't try to do too much. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Adrienne Wilkerson: And do what I did when we first started doing podcasts and I'd do a few and then fall off and do a few and fall off. That's like the worst thing you can do. So whatever you do, start at a place that you can be consistent and stick with it. So like I said, if that's social, if that's only LinkedIn, that's fine. Whatever it is for your business and your target market, but understand your target market and start small enough that you can be consistent, I think would be My t my my main pieces there. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Well said. Yeah. Love it. So many good practical insights today. I really, really appreciate you coming on, Adrian. Where can listeners find you and learn more? Adrienne Wilkerson: Yeah, absolutely. we've got a great website with lots of resources on there, especially if you're in the mental and behavioral health space. And that's beaconm.com. I'm very active on LinkedIn. It's my favorite platform. You're welcome to come find me there on LinkedIn. And I'm happy to geek out on marketing all day long. ⁓ but yes, ⁓ please I've got a great newsletter that talks from a founder to a founder about the challenges we're all navigating in this AI world. ⁓ so sign up for the newsletter through LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn, check out our website. But yeah, love to keep the conversation going. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Great, I'll leave that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Adrian. It was great talking to you. Adrienne Wilkerson: Thank you so much for having me, Pete. This was great.