Mastering the Digital Marketing Odyssey: From Evolution to AI Revolution with Miele Oscebo

Prepare to embark on a journey through the digital marketing landscape with Miele Oscebo, the pioneering CEO of Smart Finds Marketing, who mapped the trajectory from traditional to digital before many could even spell 'internet.' As a luminary who matched Google's stride into the public domain, Miele dissects the four A's of marketing—anticipate, accept, adapt, and adopt—with an intimate recount of how these principles paved his path through the dot-com boom, the social media surge, and beyond. The conversation reveals the relentless evolution of online marketing and how Miele's forward-thinking approach became a survival kit for the digital age.

Venture further into the marketing maze of the future, where artificial intelligence emerges not as a daunting adversary but as an invaluable ally. Miele illustrates AI as the maestro behind the curtain, orchestrating dynamic advertising, content creation, and conversion enhancements that redefine customer engagement. We'll unwrap the potential of generative AI to revolutionize visuals, from the written word to cutting-edge graphics, and muse over the stark reality businesses face: adapt to the rhythm of innovation or risk silence in the market. As we conclude, Miele offers a clarion call to action for businesses, beckoning entrepreneurs to connect for a continued exchange of insights and innovation in the digital expanse.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, Dylan Burke, also known as Deige, and I'm very happy today to be here with Miele Oscebo, CEO of Smart Finds Marketing. Welcome Miele.

Speaker 2: 0:26

I know nice to meet you.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Yeah, it's great to meet you as well, and thank you for being here today. So, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you ended up doing what you do today?

Speaker 2: 0:43

Yeah. So the background goes like this I started the company back in 1987. It's been 36 years. We're going into 37 years now. I started the, you know, back then it was your traditional marketing agency, especially in the Detroit metropolitan area. So, as you can imagine, it's the Motor City, the three largest automotive manufacturers in their headquarters sitting in Detroit that's why we call it the Motor City. And there's a lot going on and Needles to say. As the internet opened up, I started the internet group in 1994. We went 100% public. I would assess should say we went 100% digital as of 2004, which is the same time that Google went public. And for the last 19 years I haven't looked back. We don't do any type of traditional media anymore. It's all digital, from websites to, you know, to marketing, all kinds of marketing, all kinds of advertising, pretty much whatever is needed. So I spent the good portion of my career in this business.

Speaker 1: 1:59

That's amazing and I love the foresight that you must have had back then, because even today, people are struggling to adopt to a digital marketing strategy and you saw this like 27 years ago, which is obviously amazing, I think that comes from being an early adopter.

Speaker 2: 2:17

I like, I like, I don't for lack of words. I like new stuff. So you know, when there's new technology, I always enjoy technology as a hobby. I enjoy business, I enjoy marketing sales. You know the entire process. And so the internet. I remember a friend of mine who was working with Sun Microsystems. At the time he invited me to the Sun Microsystems office in the Detroit Metro area. You guys, you got to check this out and I said and so we'll get to the office. He goes, he pulls up Yahoo, he pulls up Netscape and he goes take a look at all these things that we can do. So that was pretty much the starting point of it all. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Yeah, that's amazing. Can you paint me a little bit of a picture of your roadmap of the first couple of years, because I'm sure it wasn't too easy to get a lot of clients on board, or am I wrong about that? No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 3:21

No, no, when we started the group, we kind of started the ISP area back in those days, but we weren't focused on residential, we weren't interested in dial-up accounts, rather we focused on businesses. And I remember we had one company that wanted high-speed internet into their office and back in those days you had to provision a T1 line. We had routers that were as big as a desk, cables that were really big I can't even begin to tell you and it was difficult to get companies to understand that they needed to be on the internet. They needed high-speed internet access. I remember the first installation we did with high-speed internet access and we got everything all set up in that company's office, got everything hooked up Netscape's working, yahoo's working, everything browsing the web is working and we went to the CEO's office and we showed them this great thing and the first thing coming out of his mouth was now what? And I said you have no imagination, that was awesome.

Speaker 2: 4:32

So, that was, you're right, though. It was not an easy thing to get businesses to understand that they needed to go down this road, and it would take another 10 years I mean literally until about 2004, before businesses woke up and realized they needed to, that they need to engage in the internet, in the web websites, marketing, etc.

Speaker 1: 4:59

That's awesome, yeah, and I love that you stuck onto it for so long before it became fully adopted. Can you tell me a little bit about how what you offer has changed since 2004 versus now, obviously with the pandemic changing the landscape. The pandemic changed the landscape of pretty much everything we do, and now AI has entered the mainstream and that's changing everything again. So tell me how you've adapted to these changes and how it's benefited, or not benefited.

Speaker 2: 5:34

Yeah, you bring up an interesting point, and I would say that over the last, well, 27 years to be pro-promenos with even during the 1990s as well One thing that I evolved into talking about because I'm an industry author you can punch my name in the Google, you'll find me where I talk, I'm on videocast podcast and you'll find me on search engine journal, for example, practically Commerce and a variety of other publications too, and one of the things I always talk about in my speaking engagements are my four A's of marketing, meaning that you have to anticipate change, you need to accept change, and that's usually the hardest part for a lot of businesses. The third one is to adapt to the changes and the fourth one is to adopt the changes, and I think that keeping these A's in mind, whether it's for our own business or whether for our clients, helps to put perspective on to the fact that there's never a point where things stop. It's an ongoing process. It's an ongoing marketing effort. All you're doing is changing what you're doing and your budget. That's how this process has worked, and you could think about it from 2004. 2004 means that Twitter wasn't even on the market yet and social media really hadn't started, it was kind of like your MySpace, facebook was starting to come into play, but how do you use it as a business? How do you make money utilizing these websites? So there's a lot going on there, but I can tell you that for the last 13 years actually no, I'm sorry, for the last 19 years the changes that have taken place includes a financial crisis in 2008, where Detroit metro area was ground zero. That lasted for a good two years. The good news is, during that same time frame, we actually got an award from the state of Michigan as a marketing agency, so we're quite proud of that. But then, yes, you're right.

Speaker 2: 7:49

If you take a look at, let's say, from 2010,. 2011 on, what are some of the other major changes that have taken place? Google Analytics changed. It started to provide more data. Google Search Console changed, provided more information about how Google perceives our website. A variety of algorithm changes, especially the one in 2013,. The Hummingbird algorithm was just a nasty change that took place. And then you go through these algorithm changes and you also go through changes in terms of the industry. Linkedin becomes more popular. Now.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Social media as a whole, not just a piece of it, becomes a significant force that businesses have to work with. You're dealing with the pandemic that comes into play in 2020. That changes the environment, too, for the better, to the extent that now everybody's talking on Zoom. I can't tell you how long it took me to get clients to not want to meet face-to-face, to not want to go to offices. It's like let's just get on to a digital platform and talk straight up, like you and I are doing right now. That took a long time, but it was the pandemic that impacted that, in my opinion, in a positive way for everybody to be more efficient in terms of our communications. I can get a lot more done sitting on my desk and talking to people over Zoom versus something else, and so these are some changes and, yes, you bring up a great point.

Speaker 2: 9:20

We've actually been using artificial intelligence for about four years ourselves. We use it specifically in our conversion rate optimization program, where we're impacting the number of leads a website can generate, or I should say convert visitors to leads. We've been using artificial intelligence for four years. However, once it got to marketing, it went public, like it did a year ago. The amount of changes that we've seen the last 12 months that AI has impacted is immense. I think it's for the better. This is AI 0.0 right now, so we shouldn't even think that this is 1.0 yet. We have a long ways to go, but the amount of changes that we've seen this in the last 12 months where AI has made things more efficient, it helps speed things up for businesses. It's helping to make everything more effective.

Speaker 2: 10:15

I think there's a variety of changes that are good. I know I've been through a lot of conversations, especially on LinkedIn, where you don't have people that have this fear factor going on or they're not happy with the fact that it's not perfect yet. I can go back to the 1980s, when the PC first came out. It wasn't perfect. The reality is technology and software development is always spiral. It has a starting point and it just keeps going changing, improving, updating, upgrading. These are all facts of life when it comes to technology. The fact that people are out there saying artificial intelligence isn't great because it's missing all these things. We're on version 0.0. We still have a long ways to go. I think it's for the better. I know on our end, not only have we been using for four years with our website conversion program, but more importantly, I think, what we've seen in the last 12 months is helping to make marketing more efficient. You can get more work done with less people and have a greater impact in terms of an ROI for the client 100%.

Speaker 1: 11:32

I couldn't agree more on that, especially what you said about the Zoom meetings. It took such a long time for people to get comfortable. My grandfather, for example, is a property advisor. He doesn't understand that you can close a deal without shaking another man's hand. He gets his whole team to travel from all over the city to come and meet them. That's just what he believes in.

Speaker 2: 12:01

He's 80 years old.

Speaker 1: 12:03

I don't think he'll change. Most of us have adapted and understood that we can get so much more done without the time taken to commute between meetings. It's amazing the fact that I can work.

Speaker 2: 12:20

I've got to give you an idea. I just had a prospect we talked to seven years ago. He actually called me on the phone yesterday, without an appointment, just thinking that I would just pick up that. Even that action is outdated. Nowadays, if you want to have a meeting with somebody, you're going to direct message them in some form, in whatever platform. You're going to send a messenger, whatsapp, go to LinkedIn, send a direct message, or social community. You're going to send a direct message first and say, hey, are you available on this day at this time? Then you set up a time to meet, send out the Zoom info on the calendar. Right, that's the process nowadays, the fact that somebody actually called me, thinking that I was going to be available, and leave me a voice message. That was the first time in maybe five years or more where I had that type of interaction. But some people are still hanging on to the old system, unfortunately. Needless to say, I play telephontag with this person because it didn't go well.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Yeah, I find that a lot too. It always just doesn't work out for people. The greatest thing I've found is that I'm sitting in Cape Town, south Africa, right now, chatting to you in Detroit. We're having this awesome conversation. It's like we're sitting face to face. It's amazing what technology has done.

Speaker 2: 13:43

You can hear me clearly. I can hear you clearly. Aside from a minor time difference in terms of what time we have versus what time you have, or seasonal changes, that's about the only time we're running Exactly.

Speaker 1: 13:57

It's taken globalization to a whole other level. I agree. Back to your business. If we were to sit down in, let's say, 12 months' time and everything has gone right, completely right, what has changed and what does the business look like then?

Speaker 2: 14:20

So, if I you know, we're a marketing agency, we have a creative team, we have a tech team, we have a marketing team, we have our own writers Everybody's in the Detroit metropolitan area and so, to that extent, considering the knowledge, the experience, the broad competencies we have, and never mind the fact that our ability to adapt to the changing environment and technologies and what's happening in the marketing world, I can tell you that we generally go into a larger corporation and we either become the digital marketing department or, especially if they're much larger, like some of our clients, we become a support team for the internal marketing team, and what usually what that means is that we're we're able to walk in and manage all aspects of you know from their server for you know, for their internet server, their website, their marketing, their advertising, their email marketing, whatever, especially nowadays with the AI tools where we can do use AI for advertising to improve how the ads that are being seen by an individual changes based on their actions, or being able to geographically target people within a specific area using artificial intelligence. Never mind the fact that you have all this intelligence and data that's out there that we can tap into and have AI take big data, summarize it all down for us so that we can actually take effective actions. These are all things that are going on right now and, from our standpoint, I don't see that what we as a company are doing in terms of, let's say, our CRO program, where we're helping businesses convert more visitors on their website to become leads or sales, or whether or not we're using our agency solution and managing and helping clients with their marketing and advertising efforts I don't think that's going to change. What's going to change is what we do and what strategies we employ. And so just now, in the last 12 months, as you can imagine, we're using more artificial intelligence as part of what we're doing, whether it's the content that we're writing, whether it's the optimization of a website and its search engine and its implementation components.

Speaker 2: 16:47

There are changes that are already taking place in the last 12 months relative to this being able to take artificial intelligence and create a website visitor journey, a funnel where you're able to track that individual and base the call to actions actively, right then and there, while you're on the website, based on what they've done. I mean, these are all. These are the changes that have taken place Now. I can only imagine that we're going to continue to build on this over the next 12 months. I expect more artificial intelligence to come to the market. I expect more things, for example, like generative AI becoming improving, taking that to another level, both in terms of images and graphics and photography, let's say, as well as in the direction of content and video. So you're going to find AI is going to expand all those areas and we're going to be able to tap into more marketing channels. I expect additional marketing channels to open up. You know 100%.

Speaker 1: 17:58

I believe the next couple years, or the next 12 months even, is going to be game changing for businesses. As long as you are open to new technologies and taking advantage of them.

Speaker 2: 18:11

You bring up an interesting. I think it's worth mentioning something that I've run into with businesses that are resistant to these changes. It usually goes like this I have to explain to them that they need to accept the change and move forward. They can gripe all they want, they can fuss, fume and have it hisseep it, but it doesn't change the fact that that change has taken place. It's on the market, it's moving forward.

Speaker 2: 18:41

Now if the businesses fusses and fumes and says I don't want to do this, that's great, but guess what? Your competitors are moving forward, number one, and all you're doing is keeping yourself exponentially behind. So that's not a good thing. And the second part is the industry is moving forward. In other words, your target audience has already accepted this change. They're already using that change and therefore you have to be with them. Your target audience is going there. You have to be there. Your competitors are moving forward. You need to be competitive. This idea of just sitting around and saying I don't want to participate, this doesn't work, and that's something that I've seen quite often in the last 10 years, especially the hummingbird album 100%.

Speaker 1: 19:30

I'm ready to crush the next year. I'm taking a little break now and I'm coming in hot. These guys in Magic Mind I'm not sure if you can see that. They send me a bunch of their products and it's amazing. I'm super excited to crush the year with Magic Mind next year.

Speaker 2: 19:48

It just helps you with productivity and energy.

Speaker 1: 19:50

It's like a coffee supplement. It's really awesome. And that does bring us to the end of our show. Amile, it was great chatting to you. It was great to chat with you too. Before we go, what advice would you like to give to other business owners looking to succeed in this ever changing world.

Speaker 2: 20:11

Let's build on the concept of what I've been talking about. The first thing I'm going to say is step the change, Step out of it.

Speaker 1: 20:19

Amazing. I love that.

Speaker 2: 20:22

That's my suggestion.

Speaker 1: 20:24

Amazing, and is there any way for, or what is the best way for, people to reach out to you if you have any offers for them or if they're looking to take advantage of your services?

Speaker 2: 20:37

Yeah, I think the best thing to do, like a lot of people do, is. Number one is contact me on LinkedIn. That's the best place to reach them. You can punch me in my name, maley Ostele I'm assuming we're going to end up having that show up someplace. Or you can look on LinkedIn for our company, smart Finance Marketing. You'll find me through there. Just as a quick FYI, I have over 20,000 really close friends on LinkedIn. Usually, if you connect with me, you tag me on your posts. I'm able to help you expand your reach. So I'm always there to help my network. I always suggest for them to tag me because I can get their expand their reach through a very large network, including other people who have large networks. So, first of all, contact me on LinkedIn. Second of all, just direct message me on LinkedIn, happy to engage. I think that's probably the best place to find me.

Speaker 1: 21:36

Okay, awesome. Thank you so much, and if you want to try out these Magic Minds, you can head over to your other listeners. You can head over to magicmindcom and you can get up to 6% off, with growing 20 as the coupon code. Thanks so much, thanks so much we're done.

Speaker 2: 21:58

Talk to you later, deige, bye, bye.