Author Archives: Chuck Sink

How AI Changes Your Customers’ Online Decision Making

Have you noticed how AI is changing our online decision-making process?

Do you know what to do about it?

If you need to understand how to shift your marketing strategy to take advantage of major changes instead of falling behind, there’s one fact you shouldn’t ignore. LLMs (Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude), can only find and process information that is on the internet and their internal knowledge base.

This is one compelling reason why you need a robust company website as well as a multi-platform internet presence more than ever.

To answer user inquiries, the AI robots favor sources that provide consistent, repeated and multichannel messaging that is on topic. They prioritize authoritative web content that answers questions and search results, corroborated in a sense, by consistency on multiple online platforms, including links on other high authority websites and directories.

How is your online presence serving the LLMs?

Does your website contain multiple keyword focused pages containing over 500 words of content? Do you have a blog?
Does your company have partner profiles or member profiles on major customer or trade/industry websites, complete with links?
Does your company maintain messaging consistent with your website on 2 or more social media platforms?
Is your leadership team on LinkedIn with Profiles aligned with the company brand? Do they post relevant, content consistently?
How many searchable published articles cite your company, its leadership, and link to pages on your website?
Do you have customer testimonials and online reviews?

Thankfully, LLM’s still don’t perform word-of-mouth conversations or build relationships. Only you, your customers, and your team can do that.

But if you want to be found online by new customers, work on your total online presence to give your voice the authority it needs. Show AI why it should recommend your business as a top choice.

We’re helping clients now with this crucial aspect of business modernization.

Why a Blog is Good for Business

Small business owners often push back on my recommendation for building and maintaining a blog. I’ve often heard, “Nobody reads blogs…” Wait, nobody? Am I a nobody?

Yes, people do read blogs, and not just people. Google, ChatGPT and every search and AI generative engine reads blogs. These machines have learned a lot from blogs and cite blog articles as resource material. The “robots” read blogs as well as every other character and pixel of your website.

The Fast Track to Website Authority

This means your website needs to have better content to deliver the results you seek. Blogs are your highway to generating search-worthy website content.

Let’s face it, you have specialized knowledge to share, or you wouldn’t be running a business. If you blog often about it, offering more and deeper insights than your competitors, your business gains authority and your content is served more to potential clients who are searching.

You Want SEO? Here You Go!

Google and AI generative engines love content that informs, answers questions, educates, entertains, is newsworthy, comes from authoritative voices and promotes best practices.

So, if you still don’t want a blog on your website, try calling it something else like, “Key Facts You Need…” or how about, “The Answer Center…” or “How-to-Videos & Articles…” Blog content can be entertaining as well as informative.

When you make your blog dynamic and interesting for your target audience, it gets shared by links, and when those links earn a place on other authoritative websites and blogs, that my friends, is SEO GOLD!

The Go-to Blogs

Blogs are no longer used for content stuffing. Articles can be short and concise like this one, or comprehensive. They can even be short videos or full-length podcasts. Today’s blogs are often homes for regular programming like podcasts and journals that people subscribe to.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole idea of blogging and see it more as a crucial aspect of your company’s authority in your target market.

Why Some Advertising Succeeds and Why Some Fails

Getting Your Attention is Expensive

Think of how many ads you ignore, even for products and services you use all the time. Someone is paying good money for all the ads you ignore.

You ignore those ads because they are irrelevant. And why are they irrelevant?

Nothing is new.
They carry a generic, repeatable message.
They’re too hard to read.
Images are too small
Words are crowded.
Colors are dull.
Voices have no personality.
Music clashes with voice.
Audio sounds cheap and hollow.
The story or flow is fractured.
They say too much!
The message is unclear.

Get Permission to Succeed

You can’t skimp on quality and expect to attract discerning customers. Content quality makes the difference between success and failure in advertising, provided your ads are seen and heard. Find creative partners with a great portfolio and successful campaign track record.

Bottom Line

If you’re going to spend money in media on advertising, the ads must be well conceived and of high-quality production, or you’ll waste the money.

If you have doubts about your ad’s content quality, you’ll risk spending your media budget on a dud. Before you launch any ad campaign, make sure the content you produce truly impresses you and your customer-colleagues.

Lastly, don’t count on AI to get the creative job done. It can “brainstorm” pretty well but has neither the understanding nor the wisdom that you have about your very human customers and your business.

Thank you for reading this article.

This is the place I’m supposed to put the call to action so here goes: Act now! Contact us for better content creation.

Fully Committed or Halfhearted Marketing?

Marketing is Sport. Get Competitive!

You won’t enjoy a good swim by just dipping your toe in the water to see how it feels. Neither will you enjoy a profitable return on a cautious or halfhearted marketing investment. Common sense makes this obvious and pattern recognition gives validation of real success for the fully committed marketer.

Being an Eyewitness

Veteran marketers understand this simple concept and apply it with intention and purpose. They grow and reach goals. I’ve seen this happen repeatedly for over 30 years.

Unfortunately, a lot of small business owners struggle with the fear of overspending. Cautiously holding back in a competitive market only curbs your commitment and selling enthusiasm. Flat revenue or anemic growth becomes the norm for the company. This too I’ve seen repeatedly. As a marketing consulting firm, we’re avoiding these situations, not because of small budgets, but because of predictably disappointing results.

Watching from the Bench

We’ve been blessed with several long-term clients who focus on what it takes to succeed and gain market share. They advertise! Just imagine a small business that dedicates a measurable percentage of revenue to marketing and advertising and gets strong results! Who ever heard of such a thing?

Sarcasm aside, a disdain for significantly adequate marketing budgets prevails among many small business owners. Why? Because in the past, they have only dipped their toes in the marketing pond and never dove in, or they didn’t swim with the right school of fish.

Winning on the Field (or at the pool)

The right marketing budget will be based on your industry and market size, and one that your business can afford on an annual or monthly basis. This could range anywhere from 3% to 15% or more of total revenue. Do some research about your own industry and you’ll discover one of the major reasons that some companies are growing bigger and faster.

Your Message Matters in a Sea of Digital Noise

It’s Your Message that Matters!

Have we reached an information saturation point? Has AI, fake videos, spam calls, and digital marketing overload clogged our media arteries to the point of audience heart (trust) failure?

Trust Test

When you open an unfamiliar website or email, are you occasionally afraid to click a link because you know you’ll open a malicious file, be tagged, followed, and sold to? Are you tired of getting irrelevant and annoying notifications, calls and emails on your “smart” phone?

You are not alone if you’ve lost some of your trust in some large brands. It seems they have decided to digitally bombard you for their own sakes instead of speaking directly with you as a valued customer. For example, try getting a Kohls card and see how much digital love you get every day…

Who Walks the Talk?

C-suite executives talk a great game about caring for their customers and building a community while breathlessly chasing AI technology to replace human interaction and real customer service. As a customer of any large corporation, your choices keep narrowing. Try finding Facebook’s or Google’s phone number. You can use a customer service chat feature, but they rarely understand your questions! They serve up keyword-based FAQ answers and hope you’re savvy enough to solve the problem yourself.

Getting Through

You can still find excellent customer service in some companies from individuals if you can get a live connection, but we are generally deterred or blocked from getting that far. AI service agents can only go so far because there’s no sentient fellow listening to your individual concerns.

Customer Service is Marketing!

Successful small businesses who excel at direct customer service get the best reviews and word-of-mouth promotion. Think of the several businesses you’ve chosen to use for home and business services. In my case, I know I can have a conversation at any time with a person, which can sometimes lead to more business for them. If the giant brand marketers could deliver customer service experiences as well as they do the hyped marketing overload to consumers, they might save combined billions in advertising costs.

When to Shout from Rooftops

The most frustrating thing to hear from a customer or business prospect is, “I didn’t know you do that!” after they hired a competitor for something you want to be known for. Hearing that would be a clear signal to steer your messages more strategically.

A lot of small businesses know they could be bigger if they could get enough “qualified leads.” That really means easy selling opportunities, and who doesn’t need that?

Our most successful clients produce and promote consistently high-quality images and videos to surround their brands. We deliver consistently across a few select channels, and importantly, these clients deliver quality results that draw testimonials, referrals, and word-of-mouth buzz. It doesn’t hurt that they are also great salespeople!

Cookie Cutter Digital Marketing – Does it fit you?

Customer-centric advertising messages such as finished projects or product displays, customer videos, and testimonials need presence in the market! Not every business will find success with the standard digital marketing mashup commonly pushed to small businesses. It may sound familiar:

Custom Website
SEO
Social Media
Google & Meta Ads
Retargeting
Email Marketing

What Works?

Effectively delivering those high-quality images and stories to your target audience may need more than a blip or ping on an already noisy phone. Your messages may need to be seen in public places, land on desks, be heard on radio, watched on YouTube, placed in subscribed media, seen in sponsorships, heard on podcasts, seen and read in magazines… Having a top-notch website to land on is your brand’s central station. But no worries! You don’t have to do it all, but you do need to select several of the best media and stay consistent.

Customer Focus Works

When you really and truly focus on your best audience, the better customers, marketing becomes more natural and less stressful, especially when you and your own team earn a great reputation in the market.

People search for validating information today like never before. Start with your branding and your website. The better the quality of your website content and structure, the better your SEO results. Sorry to burst any bubbles in the profession, but on-page organic SEO is that simple, and simple works.

Brand Integrity Builds Brand Value

Brand Value Lessons Learned

The priceless value of a brand is well understood by most enterprise and big business leaders. Gap, Bud Light, Jaguar, Cracker Barrel… The list goes on for companies whose leadership made either misguided or pride-filled decisions about brand strategies and paid the price. Extend your brand’s message to new and diversified audiences and risk alienating your best customers… lose revenue fast! “Try to please everyone and you will please no one.”

Revenues and stock values can and often do plunge with bad branding decisions. Conversely, revenues and profits soar when brands are positioned squarely in the heart of their target audience’s lifestyle and values, and their products deliver as promised. Why is this concept lost on so many small businesses owners?

Small Business Branding Admonition

In my 25+ years of professional marketing work, rarely have I brought up the importance of brand strategy to a small business owner without blank stares and an immediate desire to change the subject. If I go high level, some clients try steering the discussion down to something like SEO, or social media, or “how do we get more qualified leads now?” When I get that kind of question, perhaps the best answer is another question such as, “What’s wrong with your company’s image and awareness that you have so few prospects interested in doing business with you now?”

First Things First

Our most successful clients have been open to branding discussions and will sometimes (to my surprise) bring it up themselves. They never waver from communicating their core strengths and values, and they stick to them! These successful clients invest in things like professional photography, video, graphic design, and advertising to sustain and continually build awareness. It is with these clients that SEO, social media, and lead generation campaigns deliver the best results for “more qualified leads now.”

“Ready, FIRE, aim” is a common small business approach that sometimes works in spite of ourselves as we work like crazy to earn our livings. But that approach will never work to build a successful, growing business in the long run. Instead, use the proven “ready, aim, FIRE” approach for your marketing, starting with your brand identity and market positioning. From there, let your authentic brand strategy guide all of your marketing and sales tactics. You’ll stay true to your customers who will respond in kind.

How to Apply AI and People in Marketing

Comparing AI Content to Authentic Human Creation

I’ve been using AI in marketing work since spring 2023 – about as long as anyone else who’s not directly involved in technology development. There are many in my field who have more experience and do more with it than I, but I work with AI enough to understand it’s present value and shortcomings. First, it’s important to consider what you’re actually getting in AI produced material.

AI generated content is not creation. It’s rehash. That’s okay!

This might sound a little negative but it’s really not. AI is wonderful for reducing time consuming research & analysis and handling tedious writing tasks. It can draft up anything you ask and it’s your responsibility to check every word for accuracy and to add your own layer of human expertise and authenticity; to give it real value for your human counterparts.

AI might be amazingly sophisticated and its output well-presented, but there is nothing truly original in the content. Instead it provides unique and comprehensive arrangements of data, and learns from feedback, making it a valuable production assistant. For graphical/visual content creation, it’s just not there yet for reliable, realistic quality. And some of the output is downright weird, even after multiple correction prompts.

The “intelligence” is really a manifestation of automated algorithmic reconstitutions of available data. What’s really astonishing to me is how fast and how well the advanced AI models perform their prompted tasks. And in less than 2 years, myriad available AI tools are available to consumers and for now, many are free.

Lately, I’ve been comparing AI generated ads, graphics and videos to real-world human production and all I can say is AI looks like AI. It has a very creepy edge to it, and I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about.

Exhibit A: National TV commercial that ran during the 2025 NBA Finals:

I’ll refrain from commenting and let you decide if this kind of audio and pixel reassembly represents anything good for the online gaming industry. Is this what the betting community aspires to? Is this the kind of culture that represents a large cross section of the country? I hope not. Okay, I just commented and welcome counter points if there are any.

AI to Assist, Not to Create

Pick your tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Canva, Jasper, Freepik… etc. There is a nearly endless list of AI tools that can assist with various specialized tasks. And beware of the output details! Proofread everything carefully. Scan any graphic content for odd features and unexpected defects.

For example, this image was produced in Canva AI from multiple prompts but could not be used. At first glance the image might look like a real photo, retouched for production, but look carefully at the woman’s legs and the man’s hands.

People do notice these things, and I would caution anyone to think twice before replacing photographers and designers with AI tools! Real world optics and sounds might be faked or reconstituted but human to human intuition cannot be genuinely synthesized.

How to Use AI Now

For planning projects, creating lists & outlines, writing draft content, coding websites and more, AI is a reliable digital companion that saves much time and tedium. Working with partners experienced in AI and using intuitive, AI-enabled tools lets you take advantage of the ever-advancing technology while keeping your focus on high value, growth-oriented work. You’ll see projects get done faster and more efficiently so your customers will be better served.

How are you leveraging these new technologies for your business? Perhaps the best way to start is to work with people who know which levers to push and when to push them.

The Editors in Chief

Now keep in mind, not a word of this was written or assisted by AI, nor could it possibly be, unless copied in some fashion AFTER I wrote it. Hopefully this will add some perspective to the AI conversations happening in your world.

Advertising Success Formula: Simplify and Repeat

The first mistake in advertising is saying too much.

Company leaders and sales teams want every potential customer to know everything they can do. My own associates sometimes make this mistake as I often have, because we all have a strong desire to grow our businesses.

Growth results from value delivered with singular focus and repetition. In marketing, your clearest path to growth should concentrate on only one thing, not three, not five, but one. Let’s look at how some small businesses do this:

Meridian Construction builds dream homes on New Hampshire lakes – Build your dream.
Bow Auto Parts delivers the highest quality used auto parts – Save money on high quality parts.
SF Tools designs and manufactures the safest gas-powered heat tools – Control the heat!
Inception Technologies digitizes paper records and simplifies enterprise workflows – Work smarter.
Hunt’s Photo Education teaches photographers higher skills – Perfect your picture-taking.
Chuck Sink Link creates excellent marketing content – Attract better customers.

These are all successful and growing businesses that stick to a single core value offering and communicate it consistently. And this is done through various channels using a variety of images and words to keep messages fresh and dynamic. The same primary message can be repeated using various means, angles, and tactics. That way, your consistent message can engage wider audiences, longer.

Consistent and Dynamic

Keep your brand focused on the one thing you do best and keep repeating it so your market will easily understand and respond. It’s easier to know, like and trust one idea than multifaceted or complex messages.

Keep your advertising creative, keep it simple, and keep it going!

Video Quality Assurance for Your Brand

Video has become the expected norm for content that engages online audiences, so how can you jump into video production and run with the best?

Context is Everything!

First ask yourself, will my video be viewed in the context of spontaneity, storytelling, brand-building, promotion, or as a public announcement? This consideration will determine how much of an investment you may want to apply toward optics as well as voices and background audio quality.

The raw video coming out of today’s phones can be impressive… especially in the hands of a pro who knows when and how to use them… and when to bring in the DSLR’s, drones, and cine cameras.

Whip out the phone!

For spontaneous moments at shop or office, most phone cameras will record video that’s fine for social shares. This is true for on-the-spot promotions, especially in retail sales.
Expert advice, tips & tricks can easily and immediately be steamed to your online social/business networks effectively from a phone.
Updates from the field and visual progress reports can be efficiently captured on phones by available mobile agents.

Bring in the gear!

Telling a story with video, designed to elicit feelings and move an audience, needs to be planned and strategically executed. Experienced video producers understand the conception, scripting, and storyboarding steps, and how to assure that the right story gets told.
Competing in the advertising market is neither for the faint of heart nor the penny pincher. Producing a commercial video that positions your brand among the best in the market requires advanced skills and equipment to produce it.
Your brand-building and public relations messages beg that you put your best foot forward, especially your visual communication assets. “Portrait” quality photography and “cinematic” grade video are the ideals to strive for.
Homepage and flagship landing pages should include only premium quality videos. Custom “snippets” of full-length videos can add content value in multiple online channels to get more bang for the buck.

Let’s look at a few commercial video examples in the context of their respective purposes:

Brand-building, Storytelling…

Promotional Advertising…

Promotional Demo…

Homepage Capabilities Video…

The samples offered above all required careful planning, scripting, site reviews and preparations, a skilled camera and assist, and the right equipment for each venue – both indoors and out.

Ask the Experts

If you have a video project in mind or the need to improve your content quality in a significant way, you can always get a sense of what the process would look like, and a range of costs to produce what you want. We who’ve been through multiple video projects enjoy helping business owners lighten up their brands with great videos!

To Scale or to Grow?

Almost every cold email or LinkedIn spam that I receive assumes I want to “scale my business.” There’s a notion that every entrepreneur’s dream and duty should be to “grow at scale.”

What the heck is scale?

Blind Ambition

You hear about growth rates of triple, 5x, 10x, “add a zero” and the like. Sounds exciting but what’s the end game with scaling versus growing? Do you want “scale”, or do you want growth?

When I think “scale,” I think that everything must radically change to serve a rapid multiplication of new business with duplication – ideally, automated duplication of product and service delivery. Sure, technology can do that but who are your best customers and how will they respond to your scaling?

When a business discovers a way to scale and implements it, customizing deliverables to meet unique and sometimes nuanced client needs is replaced with finite product options or service levels. Dies (cookie cutters) are cast and production multiplies while administrative concerns grow.

Customization versus Duplication

If you’re in a professional services business, how can you maintain customization when duplication is required for scaling growth? Yet I’m constantly promised that I can scale my business if I will just install this AI tool or that marketing automation platform.

First, I don’t want rapid growth nor a radical change in my business approach. Second, my clients rely on our ability to focus solely on their unique market positions and customize plans that work for them, and only for them! Any choice within a 3-tier service level package I could devise and automate would not deliver the value that our exclusive focus gives our clients.

Do I want to scale my business? No. So why assume that I do? Because the scaled, AI-enabled, automated message bots fail to understand me. Sales cadence tools generate emails ranging from silly and irrelevant to creepy and presumptuous.

Know Your Niche

My point is that growing at scale through automation and duplication doesn’t work in our niche. Yet I’m bombarded with messages that promise we can scale our business. Ironically, most of them are from startups trying desperately to scale. Perhaps they need to learn an old concept like understanding your target audience.

If marketing tech folks want to sell to Chuck Sink Link, maybe they could first learn what business we are really in and lead with that.

If your prospective clients require a unique communication style to engage them and help grow your business, give us a call and we will have a real, 2-way conversation. We’ll both be smarter for it.