Efficiency Unleashed: The Power of Automation in Marketing with Rebl Risty

Welcome to the Growth Machine, your backstage past to the minds behind today's most successful digital marketing agencies. Each episode we unpack real-world playbugs are scaling revenue, delighting clients, and building cultures that last. The Growth Machine is powered by Dream Giant. The partner that sparks qualified interest turns leads into sign contracts and nurtures a loyal tribe of deeper buyers. Ready to think bigger, hit play, and let's Dream Giant. Hey everybody, welcome to the Growth Machine podcast. I'm your host Shane Miller. And today I have Rebel Ristie with me, quite the awesome name, the owner of Rebel Marketing. She owns a services agency and also has a SaaS product that just came on the market. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. Hi, I'm Rebel Ristie. And so, yes, we've got our full service agency, Rebel Marketing, and we just launched Rebel Labs, which is our AI-powered platform. So we integrate a number of different AI tools, everything from chat and claw, to perplexity, gamma, just all the latest tools to help marketers and small business owners create marketing content that actually sounds like them and bring some value. And drives traffic to their website. Gotcha. Awesome. No, it sounds great. So, you know, this whole conversation is around growth, right? So, like, how is introducing this product into your atmosphere, influence how you've gone about growing the services side and the SaaS side? Yeah, well, you know, the SaaS side is really new for me, so it's been a journey of a lot of learning, little by mistakes, you know, and kind of figuring things out as we go. So that's been interesting and fun. I really love AI. I'm very curious about how it's developing and how we can leverage it more. And so we're taking AI, we're creating automations in the background in our platform, and, you know, most of the people I talk to just, yeah, they get it. Maybe they're using chat or clawed, and they're having some success with it, a little write an email or write a social media post. But the reality that it isn't still saving them time, or it really doesn't sound like them, it's not really strategic or maybe, at least they're getting some content out there. But it just isn't quite working for them. And for me, where the magic is in the automation in the background, and then customizing those AI tools, whether it's creating a custom GPT or Gemini Dem or a cloud project. And now we've got MCPs coming on to the forefront where cloud can connect directly into your email. It's just, it's crazy right now with everything that's coming out. And, you know, people just have to remember, it's still a tool. So unlike a human, you can't just tell it what to do and go figure it out. You do have to be very specific. And when it comes to marketing, you still need your marketing basics. You know, who are you targeting? What's your messaging? What KPIs you're trying to measure? Chat unfortunately is not going to tell you those things, but it will help you figure it out. Got it. So walk me through this is I think it's a really interesting product. Like walk me through someone who just signs up how they integrate it into everything. And then how it helps optimize their campaigns or their, you know, their branding or whatever. Like walk me through step by step, how, how all of that unfolds. Yeah, so probably the simplest example is our blogging system. And we can go in and the system with a few prompts. Basically, what key terms are you trying to rank for? Who's your audience? What's your key messaging? And who are your competitors? We can really then have the system go out and it will do the keyword research. It'll rank you against your top competitors. It will then do the research around those key terms to determine what topics it should write about. And then from there, it actually. So, for example, we've got a keyword greater. Not like it's like mods, but it's not mods. I'm trying to remember what to use. Then does research like it uses perplexity and it goes out and does the research. And then it does like the initial versions through chat. And because we think clouds a better writer, we send it off to cloud and cloud kind of finishes it off. And they actually chat and cloud are talking to each other for lack of a better word. And we've got prompts in the back end and they're iterating. And they're iterating a lot a lot more than probably most people would want to sit down and do. And that if you've had to write anything with chat or cloud, the iteration part is really where you get to the point where the content sounds like you and you really have it dialed in and it's, you know, ready to go. So we've built all of that in there. And then it actually has an image producer. So it'll produce. We use gamma and it'll produce an image to go with your blog. And then it has a humanizer. So it actually ranks itself on how much. How much it sounds like a human. And then we can post it directly to your website or, you know, we have a dashboard where you can also go in and make edits and refine it even more. So that's really that's how people can leverage AI to really cut out time and processes. And what we've built in is best practices and methodologies and search engine optimization. So that you don't even have to know how to do those things or know the right prompts we've built it all in for you. And I think we're going to start seeing more and more of that where right now we've got the kind of these standalone products, but more products that are full service, fully encompassed. Another service that we have is to produce a full so we're calling our marketing assistant and it does a full content suite of your blog, your social media posts, your newsletter emails. And then with the upgrade, you can even do video AI avatars, which is where I really think it's fun. So it's scarce on people, but I really think those those are the fun ones doing the video avatars. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, it's crazy like I've been using or I like always been looking into video avatars and stuff like that over the last year and it's crazy just how quickly they're developing right. And just, you know, the content that we see like on my YouTube channel is all this random AI stuff that's like influencer interviews orcs in middle earth, you know, and it's crazy how real looks. And so I totally get it. And I'm just curious, you know, for all of the people and not as AI savvy, like what is the main difference between Claude and Chatchy BT? When would you use one over the other? Yeah. So Claude, I would say across the board is always been considered the better writer. So Claude is definitely going to be for us the one that we use to finish off writing a blog or an article. Call a paper, whatever that is that longer format content chat is just kind of all around the the product, the LLM that you can go do research. It will write it will help you work on strategy chat has the voice recognition, which is really fun if you don't know about this. So you can put chat on your phone and I can go hi chat. I'm on a podcast today with chain Miller. Do you want to say hi to an audience? Hey there, everyone. It's awesome to be here with you all. I hope you're having a fantastic time listening to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I do personally, I know a lot of people they'll just use the voice function when they're walking and you can iterate on ideas or you can if you got an idea in your head, you can pop it in here and save it. So I would say chats kind of like all around element chat is my favorite for just kind of every day to day stuff. Then you've got Gemini gems or Gemini and that so far was what I'm hearing from the crowd is more like the deep research. Functions needs to be really good in there and it's included in the package like with chat, I believe it's $200 now. And then there's perplexity that also does a really good job in research. So it's a little bit of pick your, you know, pick your path of where you want what tool you want to use, but I say pick one and go deep on that one, but just know that you can leverage them together. And if you figure that out through automations, you know, whether you're using make or Zaffir, you can really connect things quite well. Yeah, no, that completely makes sense. Like I think knowing which tools are best for which tasks is really important. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. And you know, I guess what are your plans for growing the SaaS products? Like what is the next six months look like for making sure it gets off the ground? Gosh, our plan really is to keep focused right now now on beta testing and getting customer feedback. So that's kind of the key thing right now or in our first phase, we've got the first kind of version lock down and that's the hardest part is not trying to not keep tinkering with it. If so I used to work for avionics engineering firm and we'd always or the engineering team would say always get a freeze the freeze the software, freeze the project and they could run with it, test it and then you, you know, update and enhance it. So right now we're in beta, hopefully we'll be done with our beta testing towards into this month on at least the blogging product, our social media tool is still very much in beta. And we're just going to keep growing from there and we're also because AI is evolving so quickly we are looking to partner more versus building things from the ground up ourselves. So how can we integrate other tools and basically provide a platform with the tools that we know work best in the in the workflows that work best. So that again we're trying just make it easy for other marketers and business owners so they don't have to guess they don't have to learn well they still need to learn but they don't have to get as in depth and what we're doing. Yeah, it makes sense and what like kind of you know what what inspired you to create this product was it something that you just kind of built internally and we're like oh this is actually really cool. We should try to sell this or where did you think like okay I want to create a SaaS product and like how did how did you know the whole thing go you know get how did the concept come to you. So I am part of a group called story brand I'm a story brand certified guide and one of the other guides that I was in a mastermind in cash over two years ago now we just stayed in touch and he was doing this automation stuff. And I really wasn't something we were talking about you know a couple years ago as far as like using it day to day and he was building out this blogging system and a social media posting system and I'm like oh this is really cool so over a year ago when we decided to finally start automating. We had another agency on board us to go high level and we really started trying to do our own marketing for once in this agency owner kept bringing up AI and what he was doing and so he started a small mastermind that I joined and that's where really got interested and could see all the possibilities of all the things that I could do and how you could. You know not just create content but ideate on ideas develop strategy faster just really having some this competitive edge and so from there I ended up partnering with this story brand guide who is in my group and he was really the automation expert in the background and we together started. Putting together a platform and it kind of happened organically we didn't exactly plan we're going to focus on the blogging but then we're like what about if we added social media and we could do this and do that and you know you just start to dream and likely he's been really great about being able to build out things and so that's kind of. A little bit of dumb luck but just trying things out mostly and for ourselves like what would we like what do I want to do as an agency owner what would other marketers you know find value out of what we're doing. Yeah, no it makes sense like I'm kind of creating are like I found myself using. Chatchy BT for a lot of random prompts and stuff so I'm creating an internal tool for my clients and then as we're creating it we're like oh crap this might actually be a really good product to sell so you know it's it's always interesting hearing how people you know find their products through the journey right. So yeah exactly and so I have two more questions the first one is called the magic wand moment and so what that is is if you could wave a magic magic wand and fix any problem you know your growth conversions capacity like what bottlenecks what would you fix like tomorrow. What would be what's the number one thing that you'd want handled just magically that I was not the bottleneck why do you can run everything without me that would be my magic wand. Yep it's so funny we I feel like delegating is so important right because we want everything to be perfect but you know it's so hard to trust other people to come in and do as good a job as we will. Yeah plastic dilemma yeah and processes and procedures you know when you start a business I always say it's probably good to be a little naive because you if you knew what you're getting into you might not do it. But yeah it's just nobody tells you like how to structure things where you know how do I build my team which they be doing like all of those things every business owner you know has to deal with with the beginning even when you become a fairly large organization there's still so many challenges and things to learn. Yep yep absolutely and my last question is you know what would be your biggest advice to anyone starting an agency or struggling to grow or anything like that like what's your number one advice. You know with AI now if I was starting agency today it would be easier I think in the sense of with the AI tools like the learning curve is so much faster so I highly recommend I would be building an AI agency to focus that's how you could differentiate. But most of all I guess the best advice is do what you're good at and what you feel passionate about then to the day don't start an accounting agency if you're not an accountant you know like that's not your passion if you're starting a marketing agency I would find a niche though like what's your niche. The all service agency is really hard to do even more now and I think the more you can be specialized whether that's in an industry or certain service that's going to serve you much better. Gotcha no I love that makes sense I mean that's that's the mantra I go by as well right specialize specialize specialize. So cool I will thank you so much for being here again this is rebel risky with rebel marketing you're going to be able to find some information about them and the links around this around this posting and yeah thank you so much for coming on really appreciate it.