Business
In this episode dropped today, I interview Jerry Abiog, Co-Founder and CMO of Standard Insights - an AI as a Service growth marketing platform that enables businesses to: Execute data-driven omni-channel campaigns and Monetize their data to find lookalike customers on Facebook & Instagram. . This helps them target the right person with the right product/service, at the right time. . They help empower businesses to become more competitive in a data-driven world with marketing precision. . Prior to co-founding Standard Insights, Jerry had a consultancy that helped SaaS companies with sales and marketing initiatives. Some of his clients had successful exits. . One of his old clients was an AI start-up that failed miserably. He learned two things at that time: -customers want an easy to use platform and that -there was an explosive growth that was likely to occur with AI-powered business applications. . Now, according to some estimates, the AI market is projected to grow to $390 billion by 2025. ‘Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.’ as said, Winston Churchil. . Standard Insights was born from lessons learned from past failures. Through serendipitous events, an AI-powered start-up was formed where the co-founders have strong experience in: digital marketing, sales, statistics, and computer science. Their mission – to be the global Standard on how successful businesses prioritize and execute their re-marketing campaigns from Insights gleaned from their data. Thank you for being here if this is your first time listening to All Social Y'all. If you are a regular listener, thank you for coming back again. This is a very challenging time that we're in and so I've been doing a pandemic-related series and we're really going to get into business in this episode. I have Jerry Abiog. Jerry, am I pronouncing that right? Jerry Abiog: Yes, you got it. Carey Sperry: Abiog. I love your name. He is Co-founder and CMO of Standard Insights, an AI as a service growth marketing platform that enables businesses to one, execute data-driven omni-channel campaigns. So we're going to talk all data today and their company also helps people monetize their data to find look-alike customers on Facebook. This helps them target the right person with the right product and service at the right time. In the marketing world, we call this personalization. They empower businesses to become more competitive in the data-driven world with a marketing precision. Carey Sperry: So Jerry has been in this industry for 25 years. Prior to co-founding Standard Insights, Jerry had a consultancy that helped SAS companies, software as a service, if you all don't know what SAS means, companies with sales and marketing initiatives. And some of his clients had successful exits. One of his old clients was an AI startup that failed miserably and he learned two things at that time. That customers want an easy to use platform and that there was an explosive growth that was likely to occur with AI powered business application. So AI, we're going to get into what that means if you don't know what that means. But now according to some estimates, the AI market is projected to grow to $390 billion by 2025. Carey Sperry: Hello and welcome to Carey Sperry, All Social Y'all Podcast. I'm your host, Carey Sperry. On All Social Y'all, we discuss how to employ social to become truly customer centric. We identify how social is a fuel for business growth. And we talk with some of the best and brightest business leaders, entrepreneurs and digital marketers. Our guests share inspiring stories and effective tactics to discover, interact, and emotionally connect with customers where they are on social platforms. Carey Sperry: So Jerry, thank you for being with us. Thank you for being my guest today. Jerry Abiog: Hey, thanks Carey. Honored to be here. I wish we could meet in person even though we are living in the same city, but given the the light of what's going on, we've got to do this remotely. Carey Sperry: Absolutely. The power of technology when it works. So great. So tell us a little bit about your background and the story behind Standard Insights. Jerry Abiog: Yeah, so I've been in sales and marketing for 25 years and about nine years ago was my last corporate job, if you will. Started my own business consultancy to help small software companies with sales and marketing initiatives. And that was great. Had some great clients. And then the one thing, as they say, you learn the most from your failures. And I learn from another AI company that I worked for that failed miserably, so we learned from those mistakes and amongst our four co-founders, we all came up with Standard Insights. And our global mission or our mission, if you will, is to be the global standard on how successful businesses prioritize and execute their remarketing campaigns from insights gleaned from their data. Carey Sperry: Awesome. Yeah, I mean a lot of times failures, that is kind of the silver lining to what we're going through now is what can we learn and take away and how can we be better and stronger? And business has always been like that. And people like you that are starting companies based on needs in the market, what can you take away in the failures behind that and help companies? So I think, a lot of people don't really... I always say data is reality and you can have data right in front of your face and as an owner of a company, completely ignore it. So I'm really excited to be addressing this at this time with you. And AI, a lot of people don't know what that is. So can you break it down for us? Jerry Abiog: Yeah. AI, artificial intelligence simply put is getting a computer to think and act like a human. And believe it or not, Carey, we're already seeing AI applications in our daily lives. Two that come to mind are Amazon, when they give you product recommendations on what you're likely to buy as well as the Netflix when they present you movie recommendations that you're likely to watch. So it's been in our everyday lives for a little the last handful of years. Now it's nascent stage and now we're using AI to help drive growth for businesses. Carey Sperry: Driving growth. I love it. Yeah. So we hear a lot about data-driven marketing. How do you define that? What is data-driven marketing? Jerry Abiog: It's basically acting on the insights that your data provides. So it could be one in a handful of ways. It could go with scoring of your customers on their potential profitability. And what does the data say? "Hey, here are your top tier customers, here are your bottom tier customers," and then you execute campaigns based on that. You treat everyone or each group as unique individuals. And the last thing you want to do, especially in today's day and age, is to have a blanket spray and pray approach with your marketing initiative. Today, it has to be pinpointed and mean something to the customer in order for that customer to convert or buy from you again. Carey Sperry: Yeah, that's super important because we always say before you have a social strategy to really define your brand and get specific with the words and the tone and everything around the culture of your company and how you treat your customers and then bring it into personas and put a face to the image that the brand has in their mind of who their customers are. And really just you want people, when they interact with you, whether in any of the customer journey, whether they're discovering or they're making a decision on the purchase or they're actually doing the purchase, going through the purchasing phases and then awaiting their product or actually enjoying it immediately if you're a restaurant or something like that, which unfortunately we're not able to enjoy that at this very moment. Carey Sperry: But if they're actually enjoying it now and then you want to help them become a loyal customer and then interacting with them and in every interaction, helping them be familiar. So I always say like, Jerry, do you think of it this way where if you have a friend that calls you on the phone and says, "Hey, I'm going to stop by your house," and you already have immediately a feeling in your mind of what is going to show up as a person. And that is with the brand as well. You want to get that minute. And so AI really helps almost, not automate it, but yeah, maybe can you speak to that? We're having to do this as owners and business people ourselves very manually and knowing it, but with data, how do you extract those insights, would you say? Jerry Abiog: Yeah, so the devil's always in the detail, right? And today's customers are more savvy than ever before and if you're not targeting them with what they're likely to purchase or what they're interested in, simply put, they're going to go to your competitors. So that lowers your revenue, decreases your market share and to look at things or the model of your ideal customer... So I'm here, I live in Grand Park, you live in the Alpharetta area and yeah, we live in the same city, but two different behavior patterns. And you as a business owner should recognize that if the Atlanta market is your target. And a couple things you can look at and you can look at your buyer persona. Could be their demographic behavior, geographic, psychographic or behavior data. Jerry Abiog: And while a person can look at a spreadsheet and figure this all out, I mean there's just tons of data available nowadays. You could have 200, 2000, 200,000 or two million customers and how are you able to synthesize this quickly and efficiently and then act on it? Now with artificial intelligence, once you get everything connected, they can spit out the analysis in a few minutes and then you can take that analysis and immediately within a few clicks of your mouse execute campaigns. That could be an email, text or social media. Carey Sperry: Wow. It sounds magical. So the paper that you wrote on AI Driven Doppelgänger, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. Doppelgänger? Jerry Abiog: Yeah. Doppelgänger. Yeah. Carey Sperry: Marketing. So AI Driven Doppelgänger Marketing. The next wave for Facebook, what is the next wave? Can you connect those dots for us? Jerry Abiog: So yeah. So what that paper is meant to say is that we're giving the business owner, we're empowering them to take ownership of their data. And what does taking ownership of your data mean? It means that you know the nuances of your customers so you can better target on Facebook. Right now Facebook allows you to create your customized audience. But I want to ask you, is that customized audience based on your best guess or is that based on facts? And that's the main driving factor, best guess versus facts. So I just want to give you an example. Jerry Abiog: One of our customers, they sell sunglasses online. They're a small to midsize company. They're not the big guys like Ray-Ban or Oakley. They have roughly 2000 customers and 100 sunglasses that they sell online. Prior to us meeting them, their customized audience was veterans and people that rode motorcycle. What we were able to break down for them using artificial intelligence is that we were able to predict the top three selling products in each city and state. So now when they're running Facebook campaigns, it was much more precise that sunglass A, B and C tend to sell better, will sell in Atlanta versus sunglasses D, E and F that were predicted to sell in Boston. So when you're getting that precise with the creation of your customized audience, you get more on your return on ad spend. And as we all know now that Facebook ads are going up in cost. Carey Sperry: So yeah, I mean we were saying all of 2019 buy ads now, because it is going to go up and it's a real thing and there's more and more businesses that realize, gosh it works and so spend is going up. So the sunglass company, can you talk a little more about maybe breaking down how they knew their persona before versus after, kind of a little more detailed to help visualize? Jerry Abiog: Yeah. Yeah, so they're a veteran-owned sunglass company, so they just put a generic, customized audience of veterans. And then part of their sunglasses, instead of it being a bunch of different sunglass offerings, I think they had sunglasses for golf, for running, and a one for sunglasses when you're riding motorcycles. So to just put a generic ad out there for people that love motorcycles and for veterans. And it was just too broad of an audience or too broad of a customized audience. And so what we did was we broke it down for them for their top selling city and state. And so we went with a geographic-based segmentation and broke everything down. So now out of their 100 products we can pinpoint the top selling products and they were able to execute data-driven campaigns based on that. Carey Sperry: Super powerful and it sounds like they got great outcomes from that too, like a difference between... Jerry Abiog: Yeah. Yeah. Carey Sperry: Because you want people as soon as they interact with you to be like, "That's me." And that's not easy to do. So, that's awesome. Jerry Abiog: So that's the difference between a best guess and then something that's really precise and targeted. Carey Sperry: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's just a really uneasy feeling guessing and you can take, like I said, very manual applications to addressing people in ads. But if you really have the data, that's what is... You have to sometimes put ego aside and what you've been doing for however many years you've been in business, sometimes owners try to rely on what they've been doing in the past and think that it's going to work today. And just, things are moving too fast. So data is the real deal. That's what I say, the real deal. Jerry Abiog: Yes, not always. It's not always easy. I mean we're all humans. We act sometimes in emotion. So it's kind of a balancing act, "Hey this is what the data says, but my gut feel..." So it's never an easy process. But I think the more we educate people on the value and the power of data, hopefully businesses take that into account. Carey Sperry: Absolutely. So what impact do you see AI having in business and in society with especially everything we're going through right now with the pandemic? We're going to come out of this a different society. I mean in a better way, I believe. And I know you do too. What do you see with being straight in the industry of the impacts that it might have? Jerry Abiog: Yeah, so a couple things. So I think AI is going to be crucial now and in the next foreseeable future. So there were two studies that were put out, one by Grand View Research, and I think we mentioned this in the beginning, that AI is projected to be a $390 billion industry by 2025. And then Accenture put out a study late last year that failure to scale AI could put up to 75% of organizations out of business by 2025. And we are already seeing AI applied in things like marketing, sales, inventory forecasting and improving customer experience to name a handful of the applications that it's going to be used for. Jerry Abiog: And just on a side note, I know this is more geared towards social media, sales and marketing, but think about what's happening right now in the world and particularly here in the US. We had data on this late last year and we failed to act on it. And I'm not here to blame anyone or what have you. I myself didn't take it seriously until my basketball games were canceled. That's the emotion side of things. But we as a society, whether it's in business, sales or in the medical profession, if we take a look at the data and act on it, maybe we would not be in the place we are right now. Carey Sperry: Yeah. Jerry Abiog: We could have maybe mitigated the current situation. So my thing is, "Hey, do not let your business fall in the same mistake. Act on data not on emotion." And that's sometimes easier said than done. Carey Sperry: Right. Yeah. I mean, like I said before, it's a real thing and it's just setting aside the time to really take a look at what's available and what is relevant. And when you and I first met on LinkedIn, I love that we met on LinkedIn, Jerry and you and I connected on email and got on the phone. I've never really worked with data-driven tools like you offer and I've learned so much from you. And I think the timing is really key for people right now to be able to have the opportunity. And I honestly thought that for small and midsize businesses, a tool like yours is just incredibly unaffordable and I was wrong. Carey Sperry: And so I'm really happy to be able to introduce A, the knowledge and content that you have with all the years of experience that you have being a founder of a really intelligent company that you guys are offering. And you have a niche in the market that other solutions are not addressing. And I think, the fact that it's affordable for small and midsize businesses and easy to work with you all. And now with the timing of everything, business owners and just individuals are scared and uncertain of the future. We still don't know what next week's going to look like. But having people and companies like you that are giving us some power and some... Power, I guess, is the best word I can use to able to explore what they can do to connect with their customers better. Jerry Abiog: You're absolutely right and you have to really be focused and be hyper-personalized, if you will. And just to give a... I mean, obviously we're going through what we're going right now, but you probably have seen the memes on LinkedIn where someone has bought a product from a company three, four years ago and that company's sending them a generic message, "Hey, we're here for you," and they've only bought from them once like four or five years ago. So you know that company is sending just a generic message. And what AI can do, it can segment your top tier and bottom tier customers and really focus on the top tier, the old 80/20 rule. They're the ones that are going to help you through this and not so much the customer that bought from you once and never hear... So that's just one little example on how AI can help things, help companies move and survive and be competitive in the situation we're in right now. Carey Sperry: Yes. So Jerry and I put together a special offer for any of you that would like to explore what data-driven insights, marketing insights can do for your company by a landing page that we created on our socials website at socialxeno.com. It's S-O-C-I-A-L, X as in xylophone, E-N as in Nancy, o.com/data. And if you go there, you can learn more about how very quickly just to get a consultation, I guess you could say or demo with Jerry and- Jerry Abiog: Sure, just quick demo. Yeah, just a discovery call. Carey Sperry: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And just see, take a look, 15, 20 minutes, maybe 30 if you have the time. And so go there. We appreciate, Jerry you giving us this information in such a timely way and more related to the pandemic but some things that you guys can take action on for your business now. So thank you, Jerry. We really appreciate you being with us. Jerry Abiog: Yeah. Thanks, Carey. Carey Sperry: Okay. Have a great rest of the day everybody Jerry Abiog: So hopefully we can meet after April 30th. Carey Sperry: Yeah, we can get face-to-face. And yeah, actually, everyone talked about doing a segment two on this to maybe do a little more deeper dive because I mean, we could literally talk all day long about data and data-driven insights. So stay tuned. We might have a second episode on this. So thank you everyone. Have a great day. Jerry Abiog: Thanks Carey. Carey Sperry: Thank you. Carey Sperry: Thanks for listening to the All Social Y'all Podcast. For free resources and materials head over to allsocialyall.com. That's all social, Y-A-L-L.com. Also, we'd love to hear from you. What subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram at All Social Y'all.