Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:00.568)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Jeremy Sharp, licensed psychologist, group practice owner and private practice coach.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (00:13.826)
Many of y’all know that I have been using TherapyNotes as our practice EHR for over 10 years now. I’ve looked at others and I just keep coming back to TherapyNotes because they do it all. If you’re interested in an EHR for your practice, you can get two free months of TherapyNotes by going to thetestingpsychologist.com slash therapy notes and enter the code testing. This podcast is brought to you by PAR.
The neuropsychological assessment battery offers the combined strengths of a flexible and fixed neuropsych battery. And now you can score any of the NAB’s six modules on PARiConnect, PAR’s online assessment platform. Visit parinc.com backslash n-a-b.
Hey folks, good to be here with you. Today we’re talking all about marketing, marketing and AI and how to keep your marketing quote unquote organic in the age of AI. You’ll get the reference as you listen to the episode. So this is all about, yeah, how to use AI ethically and practically and not kind of lose your soul in the process and just contribute to the AI.
nonsense that is just populating the internet all over the place. So my guest today is Jennifer Christensen. Jennifer is the co-founder and CMO, Chief Marketing Officer of Beacon Media Plus Marketing, which is a national digital agency partnering with visionary leaders to grow authentic, sustainable brands. Beacon specializes in ROI-driven marketing campaigns that deliver measurable impact for businesses and nonprofits.
The work that they do has a purpose and that purpose drives everything that they built. Outside the office, she’s a proud wife of 30 years, mom to three amazing adult kids and a passionate traveler who loves time with family and friends. So we talk about a lot of different things today. We talk about her personal connection, mental health, how it shaped her marketing career, different types of marketing and even just a definition of marketing in the context of mental health. We of course talk about AI.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (02:27.756)
and how it’s transforming marketing, practical ways that you can implement AI in your marketing if you want to do it yourself, lots of many other topics. So there’s plenty to take away from this, I think, as usual. And there’s even quite a bit of discussion for those of you who want to get into the philosophical aspects of AI and what it means for us. So lots to latch onto here.
Let’s see, at this point in the game we are in, it should be late July if my calendar is right. So there may be a spot or two left in one of the testing psychologist mastermind groups. It doesn’t hurt to check it out. You can go to the testingpsychologist.com slash consulting and book a pre-group call and get more info and see if a group coaching experience might be right for you.
In addition to that, of course, we have all the resources that we talk about in the episode today listed in the show notes. And Jennifer mentions in the podcast, she loves doing these 15 minute consultations with folks just to chat about AI and marketing. So you can find her on LinkedIn and schedule one of those if the desire strikes you. But without further ado, here is my conversation with Jennifer Christensen on digital and AI marketing.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (04:01.157)
Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Appreciate the invite.
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. mean, everybody loves AI and loves talking about AI. And so, you know, happy to have you on and take this different angle. We talk about AI in the clinical work quite a bit, but it’s going to be really interesting for me personally, and I think my audience to talk about AI from a marketing standpoint because I haven’t delved too much into that. So yeah, I’m just grateful. Good. Good. So I’ll start with the question that I start.
everyone with which is you know of all the ways you can spend your time and energy and life why why focus on this topic in particular
So as far as AI goes, I’ve always been just an early adapter. that’s like 16. Definitely was like the first girl in my computer class, Gen X. So was one of the first, very first people to ever buy dial-up, if any of you are old enough to remember that. I remember being like in line for that. I was like one of the first 50 people. And just, I love building and learning together. So those two things are like my core, what just.
Jennifer Christensen (05:09.272)
drives me. As far as like being involved in digital marketing and mental health, I have a really personal story from the mental health side that, you know, definitely my life was saved at 19 because of getting, you know, help in that area. And, you know, just, wasn’t enough talked about, like if I had known sooner, it wouldn’t have been quite such a dramatic experience. It just always stuck with me that when I would share.
My story with people, it was like so foreign for them to even talk about, you know, getting help or going to therapy. And thank God somebody stepped in and helped me with that. So to me, it was, I was actually going to go be a psychologist and that was my goal. And then I got halfway through school and decided, okay, I really don’t think I’d be great at this. So I think I really respect it so much, but I think I’d be better in business marketing. To be able to do the two is like truly, it’s a gift.
yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a cool marriage. You know, there are lots of ways to come at this and sort of like be adjacent to the field and still do a little bit of the work.
I’m really grateful.
That’s good to hear. That’s good to hear. It seems like that’s a kind of a familiar origin story for a lot of folks in like these ancillary fields, I guess, that specialize in mental health, know, like accountants or marketing folks or whomever, you know, we had a positive experience, which is always good to hear.
Jennifer Christensen (06:34.7)
It is, yeah, life changing for sure.
Nice, nice. Well, I’m glad you’re doing it. cause we don’t always have a great sense of what we should be doing from the marketing side, especially when the AI comes into play.
think it’s tough. didn’t expect quite it to be so like when we started Beacon, we were mainly working with small businesses, small local businesses, and then we did work with a couple mental health clinics that we still work with. But one thing I kept finding over and over again is many people that go into this field, it’s not like you go into it as a business owner, right? So it’s almost like an accidental business owner.
And there’s so much that comes with that. just have so much respect and, yeah, just empathy because it’s one thing to go into a business and know what you’re getting into and like all the things you’re going to have to deal with.
Great, yeah, I’m excited to talk with you about all this. So maybe we start with just some background and get the lay of the land, so to speak, with AI and marketing. This is not an area that I’ve delved into very much, so I would love to just hear your thoughts on what’s out there, what’s available, and how AI is even coming into marketing and mental health.
Jennifer Christensen (07:47.95)
Okay, absolutely. So I got into this about three, three and a half years ago, as I talked about being an early adapter, you I was pretty excited when I saw this coming. And at first I was really, really excited for what it was gonna do in marketing. There was actually already, you know, some AI tools out there, even 2022, when I really started getting into it. I did go through kind of a dark night of the soul about it in 2024, not gonna lie. About six months, I was just like,
I don’t want anything to do with this because I just can see some of the potential downfalls for sure. But I really have come back about the last six months and what I’ve really decided for myself and the reason I’m starting with this is I think it’s important for everyone to really think about their own mindset around it first and then the tools, but really decide what is your relationship going to be with it. So my relationship with it is I want to know it, understand it and use it for good and help other people use it for good as well.
That’s really where I’ve come to. It’s pretty basic, but it helps me stay on that course. There are tremendous benefits in marketing. I mean, it is a phenomenal tool. I’m using $200 ChatDBT. It’s a little bit more advanced on that. We’re using AI for editing videos. We’re using AI for brainstorming as part of our brainstorming for brands, for market research, for deep research. mean, there’s so many different ways that you can use it.
I think from a mental health perspective, as far as marketing goes, as I was talking about, so many of the clients that we deal with are accidental business owners or they thought about business kind of secondary. And so it can be a great tool to even understand, even just be having a conversation, because I think that’s, have to change your mindset with AI. It’s not about just getting answers like you do from Google, but having a conversation back and forth about.
hey, I’m trying to understand what would be the best way to mark up my practice, what are my competitors doing, what are the things I don’t know, ask me those questions back, you know, so that you’re actually having that can be really effective. And it’s not gonna replace all the execution of the work, but it can definitely give you a heads up on the reality of what’s actually happening in marketing. You know, so much about.
Jennifer Christensen (10:05.998)
So much about digital marketing is negative, and I understand why. There’s a very low barrier to entry for people to get into marketing, digital marketing in particular. And so there’s a lot of misinformation out there. So what AI can do is you can kind of test some of those theories yourself. And what’s going to make you better at really scaling your practice if that’s what you want to do, or just keeping it full, all those things, if you are going to work with somebody in marketing.
the more knowledge you can have of what success means, the better you’re going to be off. So even if you’re still outsourcing, does that make sense? You’re getting enough information that you can go, hmm, I don’t think that’s right. Let me check that. OK, that does make sense. I see why we need to, say, fix my website for a better user experience, right? It just gives you direct information and data that you can use to make better decisions if you’re talking from a marketing.
perspectives for sure.
Yeah, yeah. There are a few things that I want to highlight from what you just said. I love the idea of thinking deliberately before you jump into using these tools and think about what do you want to get out of it. I think that’s an important question with many things that we do, but even more important with AI because it can spin out very quickly and you can down some crazy rabbit holes. Yeah. And you know, my wife is also in private practice and does podcasting and
consulting, you know, and she was saying the other day, I came home and I was like, you know, how are you doing? How was your day? And she’s been using chat GPT a lot, but that particular day she’s like, I got totally lost in chat GPT and it was giving me these ideas and I was following these threads and I ended up somewhere in like two hours and I was like, this isn’t even helpful. You know, so it’s really easy to just go down those. Yeah. Get a little lost. So I love that you talk about being deliberate about how you want to use it right from the beginning.
Jennifer Christensen (12:05.326)
And I think it’s important from a marketing standpoint to just, it’s that balance between, you know, double checking all the information that you’re getting for sure. I do really like some of the deep resource tools or perplexity is really great because you are getting links to direct articles. You know, most of the clients we’re dealing with are very educated, so they know to look for those things anyway. So don’t feel like I have to give a lot on that for sure.
But there are some great things. A lot of clients come to us and we’re on the lower end of the marketing agency world as far as we’ll take clients that are even pretty small because we want to help them scale. But a lot of times they can only afford a part of outsourcing. So it makes total sense. Like, I can afford this part, which would be helpful here, but I could do these things internally. And I think some of the best stuff you can do internally is some of your social.
writing content. I mean, a lot of people I’ve noticed in the mental health field actually are pretty good writers, researchers, right? So being able to take content that you would write even for kind of higher purposes and use ChatDBT or use one of the other tools to help you make it a little bit more optimized for the general public, right? There’s a lot of ways to use it that are really effective.
Yeah, I think that might actually be helpful if we just take a couple seconds to zoom out and even define marketing in this context. I I think that’s maybe a more well-known term in the business world and, you know, we don’t really have a great idea of what it means. So, what do you, when you say marketing, like what are the different avenues or paths that we might consider with this?
Sure. So marketing in general, is, marketing in general is broken up into different areas. So you’ve got marketing, which is more promotion, which is not something that is generally done in the mental health industry at all. So promotion is definitely more like the advertising side of what you would think of marketing. And then there’s more like the inbound marketing, and that’s my favorite. So inbound marketing is really what you’re doing is you’re showing up in the right places where people are already looking for what you’re doing.
Jennifer Christensen (14:23.31)
So you make sure that somebody is searching for a grief counselor near me and you show up as a possible avenue. So inbound marketing is really, I love it because to me it’s not in your face. When you think of like, it’s like the salesperson that you actually want to talk to versus the one that you don’t want to talk to. So you’re looking for something and you actually want somebody to help you, to me that’s inbound marketing.
The whole thought process around inbound marketing started about 40 years, 30 years old now. But the whole thought process around it is that the better you are at removing barriers for people to get the information that they need, the more likely you are to convert them. So, and I have found that absolutely to be true. So if you make it really, really hard to like connect with your practice, to figure out what you’re doing, to like…
People don’t know what you specialize in. They don’t know your availability. Any of those things, you know, they might find you, but then it’s going to be harder to actually have them convert into. So those are really the two different theories on marketing. I mean, there’s also kind of a story brand part of marketing, which is more just really telling a story behind the practice or really like sharing that part of it. And we do work in that area as well. So we do work in storytelling area as well, which I really enjoy that.
of our clients that are even doing their own podcasts like you are, that are really focusing on personal brand. And with the direction of where everything is going with AI, some of these things are changing pretty dramatically. They still have the same roots, but how you now interact with LLMs, large language models, or the AI tools is different than how you’ve been interacting with Google or Bing or any of those types of sources.
Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Marketing feels like such a diffuse topic that that’s like we all should know about, don’t really have a great idea of.
Jennifer Christensen (16:21.108)
I I have my definite theory. Like if you were to ask me to break it down, would say great marketing is converting conversations. it’s, you know, being in the right place at the right time, having the right information. and it should be a great conversation. It should not be manipulative. It should not be, you know, fear-based or any of those things. I’m against all of that. It does work in a short term as we know, cause you can, you see, get bombarded with it all the time.
but in a long-term relationship, especially in this field that is obstetrics, think.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I’ve always kind of thought of marketing as the lead generation, suppose, like getting people to, you know, making contact with people. And then at some point it transitions to the sales process where you’re actually like trying to convert them, so to speak, or like book them for an appointment, right? But the marketing aspect is kind of the, just like getting the people to interact with you and start that conversation. Is that fair?
I think that is, it’s not so much that way with inbound marketing. So if you’re doing inbound marketing really, really well, what you’re doing is you are actually, you actually are shortening the sales process dramatically. So you’re using your, yes, you’re showing up in the right places. So you’re getting that lead, right?
But there’s a huge difference between just getting somebody to your website or getting somebody to find you and then that next process of conversion. You don’t want to wait for them to call or to do that. You actually want so much information that they trust you, they know you. They’re pretty much already pre-sold. Right? So it just takes so much off that process. And people don’t want to talk to people on the phone anymore. So it definitely makes that different.
Jennifer Christensen (18:06.286)
So lead generation would be too narrow, I think, because then you’ve also got the full brand side, but lead generation is like critical. Like when people say, oh, it’s just about, you know, your awareness. I’m like, well, it doesn’t lead to a lead generation. Then like, that’s not good marketing either.
Right, right. Okay, that’s fair. Yeah, I appreciate that clarification. Yeah, there’s lots to consider here. So then that kind of leads me, you you’ve already touched on a few ways that AI can come into play in this whole process. You mentioned social media, you mentioned almost like thought partner, like kind of brainstorming, research, that kind of thing. Where are you seeing it to be the most, well, helpful?
The first thing that I saw that was the most helpful was definitely the internal side, which is like the recording, right? So like recording notes and like having that. And I’m sure we talked about that internally for your practices of how much do you use it for that. And so for us as marketers, like we’re on meetings all the time. So that immediately helps. And that helps even as you’re just keeping track of all of the different tactics, avenues, places that you’re marketing.
All that can be a little bit overwhelming. like having just a recording and being able to have a place where you have all that information. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Scribe, but that is a great tool, right? You can use that for, you know, just keeping track of all your SOPs for your marketing, which is great. So that was like the first thing I saw that was like, okay, that’s a great time saver. The next one was definitely the editing. Are you using for your podcast, like are you using some of the editing tools for the AI tools?
I use Riverside, which has some basic AI stuff built in, but nothing too fancy. Yeah. What, what are you saying?
Jennifer Christensen (20:00.118)
So captions is incredible and there’s quite a few that are really, really good. So what they do is, so a lot of people know that they need to do marketing tactics, right? So they know, okay, I need business, I need people to find me, so I need to be on social, I need to do a video, I need to be on YouTube, I need to have a website. So they know they need all these things, but then they do all those things and they really don’t get results. And because they’re missing the strategy.
Right? They’re missing the like, do they really know who your client is? Do they really know, you know, are they really communicating with their ideal client in the best possible way? Doing the tactics alone will not get you success. So what some of these AI tools like Caption does is it’ll take, like let’s say this video that we’re doing here and you’ll plug in the different things that you know about your audience or it’ll even go research your audience. Right? So it’ll even like figure that itself based on like your website or other traffic. And then it’ll tailor the short
clips to what would be most ideal for you to get the best results. Doing some of that strategy for you, right? You have to give it some information, but it takes it to a whole different level. And that’s what so many people really struggle with. I mean, that’s honestly why they come to us a lot, right? They’re like, okay, I’m doing the tactics, but it’s not working. You know, I’m doing what people, I thought I should be doing, but it’s not making the difference. So these are little things that you can DIY yourself that can help you. So that’s one.
That I think super effective and would recommend for anybody doing video to use that there’s a new one I’m testing right now called icon Wait, I’m not super. mean, I’m like test. I test things all the time So I’m testing like five different products right now, but icon will be great Maybe isn’t quite there now, but it helps actually create videos for you. It helps create ads for you Again, there’s this whole process where it helps you
but the strategy, it helps you actually tailor it so that it’s personal to you, so that it’s personal to your brand. And I think AI without that piece, it’s just gonna be another tool that you don’t get the best results from. And then the last one, like I said, I highly recommend you find either like writer, I would actually say the $200 version of ChatDBT is totally worth it. is also, well, it depends on if you wanna be HIPAA compliant or not, you don’t need to be with marketing.
Jennifer Christensen (22:23.63)
but depending on what information you’re going to put in there. Writer is HIPAA compliant, or you can do the paid version of Ploxity. But all of these, you should start developing your own brand, your own model. I’m actually creating my own agents now. So the agents are something pretty amazing so that you can create the agent to do the work for you. Why the up and going?
Yeah, there’s, I’m gonna pull on a couple threads here. Just real quick, just because you’re the first person on the podcast to have mentioned this, what’s the major difference between the $20 a month chat GPT and the $200 a month chat GPT? Like why would somebody upgrade, like a mental health practice owner, why would that be helpful?
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Dr. Jeremy Sharp (24:35.2)
It lets you administer the full battery, any of its six modules, or individual tests. And now the NAB modules are available for scoring on PARiConnect, PAR’s online assessment platform. Learn more at parinc.com backslash NAB. Let’s get back to the podcast.
my gosh, I love it so much. It’s incredible. It has so many extra tools. So it has the ability to connect. Let’s say you want to connect your interior CRM, customer relationship manager, you want to connect all that data, or you want to connect Canva, which would be like a design program, or you want to connect. And all of that connects directly into your LLM. Only at that level does it do that.
It also has an operator function, which basically operates like an agent where you can send it off and say, I want you to go do research on the internet and find these five things for me. And so while you’re doing something else, it goes and does that for you and then reports back. It has the deep research capability much higher, and it has a much higher, much higher ability to do even like more data pointed to like creating like a whole overall comprehensive plan.
So definitely this has a lot more options. I mean, I’m not saying everybody needs it at all, but for somebody like what I’m doing, or if somebody is like working in a practice and they’re maybe even, let’s say they’re even like an office manager, but they get tasked with doing marketing, or they get to write, because I know that happens a lot, it could be a game changer for them. Because you can keep all the things that the other version does, but much higher level on that. yeah. I it’s worth trying, at least for a month.
Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, there’s, it’s getting to the point. are so many options to choose from. It’s hard to sort through. Thanks for digging into that for a second. Yes. So yeah, I mean, there all these different ways that, that we could use the tools, I think. So people are always interested, I think, in, like you’ve mentioned, kind of DI approaches and then they’re done for you approaches.
Jennifer Christensen (26:32.524)
Right. Right.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (26:52.322)
Sure. But let’s start a little bit more, dig deeper into the DIY stuff. yeah, just interesting or applicable use cases, I suppose, for AI marketing for a practice owner at this point that they can handle themselves.
Yeah, so I think the first thing to do would be to, you know, don’t worry about there’s like five different LLMs out there. You know, there’s some that are a tiny bit better at things than others, but you know, first look at like what your requirements are as far as HIPAA compliance, if you, you know, who you’re going to share this with, like kind of those deeper questions of like how you’re going to use this, what you’re comfortable with. So first those questions.
Once you decide that, just pick one and go for it. They’re all good. You know, they’re all competing with each other right now. So just instead of like having that like, you know, splitting between 10 different things, I would pick one. I would not pick a tool yet because there’s so many people that are building AI tools on top of these LLMs. So in my world, I get like on Metta or Facebook, I get probably, you know, 20, 30 a day of new AI tools that are out there.
just every single day hit with them. So instead of going that way, I would really recommend going through one of the LLMs directly because you’re going to learn more, you’re going to get more from them. You can always add a tool on later. But basically the first thing I would start with is have it analyze your website, analyze your competitors. Where are the weak spots? What could you be doing differently? At least from a DIY perspective, like you might not.
want to do all of your own SEO work because that can be really technical and hard. And SEO is now changing into GEO, which is getting even more technical and hard. We’re like in the midst of that right now.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (28:41.57)
Wait, what does GEO stand for?
generative engine optimization.
Hmm. Yeah. So basically like maximizing search for LLMs.
Yeah, we have to, right? Because so much research is going there and we don’t want our clients to get left out or ourselves. we’re definitely, and it’s a huge shift to go that direction. We’ll be happy to do it. But even if you’re not doing some of that work yourself, you’re still going to want to know, okay, what are all the things I can do? So first of all, get your whole picture and then figure out, okay, where can I do better? Like where can I…
Where is there a hole in the competition in my area? Or where are people searching for help, you know, in a particular niche or something that maybe I do, but I’m really not highlighting very well on my website or my social. So first that, first the foundational. Then I would have it create me a whole marketing plan. From that, create basically ideas, you know, brainstorm back and forth and create ideas for social. That can be done pretty easily. Create ideas like an entire content plan.
Jennifer Christensen (29:44.11)
of what I could be writing about. And you could even ask, and it’s not always going to give you perfect information, but you can keep digging down and getting articles to link to to make sure you’re getting good information. But you can ask it, do I spend my time on LinkedIn? Do I spend my time on YouTube? For what I’m doing in my area, where is going to make the best? So first, the deeper questions. Try to get some strategy in there, and then have it help you execute your social.
Once you’ve got that, then you can go search for a social tool that’ll help you automate that. That would be the easiest way to do it. You could technically create your own social agent, but that’s we’re right at the edge of that technology right now. So it’s going to be pretty time consuming to do that. I would get your whole kind of package together. then depending on where you’re at, would definitely take that and
Find another tool that’ll help you automate it that’s what you want to do.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned agents. I don’t know. Maybe I’m underestimating my audience, but I don’t know that a ton of us are like into the stage where we’re like building or deploying agents, you know? But can you just say, again, you’re the first person to bring it up here on the podcast. So I’m going to spotlight you to just briefly tell us what an agent is and how that’s different from just like using an LO.
I would like to up since two o’clock in the morning working on this. So I mean, I know I’m a little bit about these things. So basically what an agent does at this phase, it’s going to get much different as it moves on, as the technology keeps improving. But what it does right now is you can create an agent, which basically is like its own operating AI piece that will basically automate processes that you do in-house all the time.
Jennifer Christensen (31:30.286)
So you can create an agent to say, every time I get an email that says this or relates to this, I want you to create a task for me that does this. Every time I get a review or a, I’m doing a very simple one. Every time I get a review or somebody comments on my social media, I want you to ping this person and then I want you to suggest this response and then I want you to do this and it will automate and do all that for you.
So those are some real basic ones. The one I just created does all the research that I do all the time. So I’ve created it to research every breaking news article related to mental health and behavioral health comes out. And then it gives me, based on the criteria that I put in it, it gives me the top three that then I can use for my newsletters and obviously read them and make sure that I’m curating the best content for clients that would be interested in that.
So there’s a lot, I mean, that’s super basic. It’s like I said, gonna get really, really good, but even now it’s still helpful.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of talk about agents and a lot of confusion at the same time. Like, how do we use them?
This is cool. So we talked about some DIY options. What about more advanced, you know, if someone did want to move up to more of like a done for you kind of situation, you know, what, again, how are you kind of deploying these tools and maybe take, take that to the next level for a, you know, practice.
Jennifer Christensen (33:04.622)
So we made a decision, I was telling you the whole dark night of this little time that I have.
Yeah, by the way, let’s hold on. Let’s pause there. What was that? Dark night of the soul. That’s a pretty descriptive term. What what happened?
I was just speaking about AI everywhere. was, like I said, pretty ahead because I started really playing with it and coming and learning about it and believing it was the next thing even before ChatGBT came out. So I kind of had a little bit of a head start. So when ChatGBT came out, I was getting speaking engagements everywhere and really focused on it and excited about it. I was seeing all these possibilities. The more I got into it,
and then read some books and, you know, watch some horrible videos of some people that want us to go our transhuman route. Oh gosh. I mean, really, it’s horrible. It just like was hurting my soul. Literally, I’m like, do we want to be a part of this? Because, you know, I’ve seen over the past 20 years what social media and internet has done to our culture and specifically kids. And there’s some serious negatives, right?
I mean, we that from a mental health situation. So really it was wrestling with, I even want to stay in an industry that has anything to do with AI? And if I do, what’s my position on this? The worst book I read was actually by late Henry Kissinger. And it was between him, like he wrote this right before he passed, between him and the founders of Google. And it was just such a terrible dystopian-type future.
Jennifer Christensen (34:47.959)
that they were kind of pointing to, right? And that was kind of what pushed me over. But as I came out of it, I decided to stay in it and I really was like, okay, so if we as the little guys, you the small businesses, the independents, the individuals, if we don’t learn this, then all of the control will be from like the large corporate giants, right? So I just was like, I have to, if I’m going to do this, like I have to have that.
Yes.
Jennifer Christensen (35:17.56)
thought process behind it. So that’s what brought me here.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I especially agree with that point that we have to have some versatility and some understanding of this concept, you all these concepts to even know what’s going on. Be controlled.
Yes, exactly. want to have some autonomy. I want to have some agency and be able to help others do the same.
Sure, sure. Okay, so thanks for taking that little detour. Yeah, so let’s get back to, yeah, those more advanced maybe tactics that y’all are working on.
So, yeah, so after that, we made a decision internally of, how do we want to bring AI into Beacon? On what level? You what are our values around that? And so we decided to do a lot of agencies have laid off with a lot of staff members because you can speed up production, right? You can use AI to supplement and or they’ve basically kept their business the same, but not told their clients that, things are easier now.
Jennifer Christensen (36:15.704)
So we decided to not take that approach. So we basically told our entire staff of 35 staff members, and we told them we want everyone to keep their job. We want you to be here a long time. We even want to be able to hire people, but we’re not going to be able to do that unless we all get on board with AI. And what that means is if we don’t want to lower our prices, if we don’t want to lower the prices, then we actually need to deliver a lot more value.
And so that’s really the tactic that we’ve taken. And so it’s worked pretty well so far. Like we’re just delivering faster, we’re delivering better product, we’re getting better results. So we haven’t raised our prices, but we haven’t lowered our prices, but we’re just delivering a lot more. And I think it’s going to be that way for a little while. And then there probably will hit a point where, you know, if like web is completely transformed, it goes a different direction. We probably will move more into like the consulting.
where we’re helping, we’re still doing some of the work that people don’t want to do, like let’s say the GEO stuff, which is pretty difficult actually. But if people can do more and more stuff themselves, then we’re really just helping them consult, learn, and grow so they can do it. I do see a pathway through now, which feels like a very good pathway where it still helps people a lot, keeps the staff, and it actually gives better results.
That’s really good to hear. Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s so many paths. mean, well, there’s two paths you can take. Like you said, you can either, you know, use AI to do everybody’s job and fire everyone or.
What some people are doing, yeah. yeah. I think there’s a real cost to that, not just the human cost of jobs, which we didn’t want to do that, but there’s a real cost to that and that part of what makes it work so well, and this is the caution on the DIY, is that what part makes it work so well is that you know the right questions to ask and you know what success looks like.
Jennifer Christensen (38:20.942)
So like you do need to understand like what does a great user-friendly website look like? How does it perform if you just tell chat jbt make me a website? I mean, I’ve seen them. They’re they’re not good. So I Mean, I’ve heard it said by multiple people now that the difference once we all become AI operators on some level will be taste and I think there’s some truth to that like your knowledge and everything that you’ve learned and
your experience will help inform whether what you’re doing is good or not.
That makes a lot of sense. I was going to ask you this question since we went down this path of, you have any concern that these tools are going to essentially replace professionals? Maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s blogging, maybe it’s whatever. Maybe it’s neuropsych report writing, like what we do. But at least from your perspective, how do you approach that in terms of these tools just getting more more advanced and user-friendly?
Absolutely. I think they’ll replace like 80%. Yeah. Yeah, I think it’ll be a lot. So I mean, obviously we’re trying to position ourselves in the 20%. I think there’ll be a lot of new jobs that come out of it, you know, different types of jobs for that. But no question that like, if I was an agency and we were focused on blog writing, I would be really worried right now.
like really worried because that’s just not, they already are replacing some and they’re producing better. So it doesn’t mean you don’t, so it’s not like you get rid of completely the human element because maybe you one person to write 20 blogs a month before and now one person can use AI and write a hundred great blogs a month, right? So it’s not that you don’t have any humans involved, but it definitely changes the trajectory.
Jennifer Christensen (40:15.52)
of what that looks like. mean, that’s four jobs, technically, right? So, I think anybody who says it’s not going to, like, they’re just not looking at the what’s happening right now. It’s already happening.
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (40:28.704)
It sure seems like it, yeah. I mean, the optimist in me, and I am an AI optimist, the hope is that it helps us to utilize our higher level capabilities, right? So maybe we’re not creating a lot of minutiae and just like generating content for content’s sake. Maybe we get to evolve into kind high level editors or something like that, know, versus where we’re really thinking critically about the content and can tweak it.
just enough to be really, really good. That’s the optimistic.
After I came out of my dark night, that is actually where I’ve ended up too. And I’ve seen it now over the last six months. So I’ve seen Beacon transform into a much better company because our team is spending so much more time on strategy and so much more on really thoughtful design and execution and campaigns. And they’re just at such a higher level.
And that’s only been six months. So I’m really excited now that I’ve actually seen it play out a little bit where people aren’t spending their time on like that admin, you know, stuff that is just mind numbing. Right? Right. And then the other thing that I told you about the book I’m writing. So I think, I think it’s hard for us to even conceptualize yet, which is why I’m more of an optimist now too, because we really are like coming out of the information age.
where the information age, we were just unindated with, we still are, we’re unindated with information and most of it is not valuable. And we’re moving into, I really believe the age of intelligence where emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, expertise, all of those things are gonna have a much bigger role. And that part I’m really excited about.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (42:26.958)
Yeah, yeah, it’s good to hear you say that. I hope that, I mean, I think that’s probably true. I hope that’s prob-
Yeah.
Jennifer Christensen (42:34.05)
I hope so too, for sure. want to be, well, I’ll put it this way. I think we have a choice, right? That’s why I want to be involved in it. So I think the more we, we have to decide how we deal with this. So we can choose to use it for good. We can choose to encourage others to do the same and respond to that. So yeah.
a great point. Now, with all that said, we should probably talk about some of the downsides here, you know, and ethics and challenges with using AI and marketing. I’ll start with a question I think that ties back to what we were just saying, which is, do you have any fear, especially from a marketing standpoint? And I know there’s a lot under that umbrella, but, you know, there’s a lot of talk of just how the internet is being flooded with this AI slop, you know, and it’s muddying everything and diluting the quality of everything on the internet.
what, do you have concerns about that? If, if so, I mean, how do you think about that?
Yeah, and it’s been going on a long time though. Yes, I have concerns about it. I see it on LinkedIn, especially. I used to love LinkedIn and now it’s like, ugh. Like, you know, you can tell like 80 % of the stuff or none there is air. I definitely have concerns about it. I think we were already there though with like so many people just writing social or just writing blogs just to try to fool Google.
but they’re not writing anything of value, right? They’re just repeating the same thing over and over and over again. So it’s different in that it’s more obviously something you can tell that it’s just off. Yes, they definitely have concerns from, I probably have more like societal concerns than I do marketing. Because marketing kind of already, forgive me, but marketing was kind of already in the toilet.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (44:17.216)
Okay, yeah.
So it’s like what I try to do every day is do something different than that. And when you do something different than what the norm is, you actually stand out. If you put out really high quality content and a message that really resonates on a deep level, does tend to stand out. So I’ve already kind of been in that mindset. But yeah, I’m more worried societally than I am even from a marketing standpoint.
That’s reasonable. Yeah. So maybe that does segue into the conversation about downsides or challenges, know, using AI and marketing. Yeah. What’s top of mind for you as far as challenges.
well, marketing slash society, guess the, when I think of, you know, messaging being put out, put out that can really hurt people. Right. And we’ve already seen that over the last, you know, 10, 20 years, social internet. you know, whether it’s bullying online or messages that are definitely lies and not true and you can’t tell and it’s hard. like all of those things hurt us as a society from a trust standpoint.
I think the worst thing now is that people are using AI now and replacement of people, right? Relationships. like that to me is just like you’re continuing down that really kind of scary trajectory of we need each other and like AI cannot replace that. So that’s my, that’s probably my core piece right there.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (45:49.927)
I think that resonates with the mental health folks, And there are some pretty sophisticated options out there for… willing to pursue.
So the one encouragement, I know we’re talking about downsides, but the one encouragement I give to the mental health community is that I like to think about the fact that organic food did not even exist as its own entity or its own, you know, we never talked about organic food when I grew up, right? Well, like processed food became the norm. Like there was no room to like highlight the value of organic food, which has become more valuable.
than what we see in regular processed food, right? Definitely more expensive. And people value it higher as far as if it’s real food. I do think that will benefit a lot of mental health providers and that people will see the value in having it in person. I think it might take a little while, but that will be the natural comeback to having so much online and so much automated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel the same way. I have not come up with an elegant metaphor like that, but I really like that, the organic food comparison. You don’t even know what’s better until there’s something worse to compare to.
Yep. Which is like, do we have to go through the worst to get there? You know, I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but, but I do think we’ll get there because people naturally, I see it in my husband’s business every day. He owns a tour company and you know, it is like taken off now around the world where people want to travel and connect and meet with other people. And you know, that it’s a kind of a newer trend, like how much people are wanting to do that. And I think it is just our natural desire.
Jennifer Christensen (47:32.674)
to connect with human beings and not screens. So.
I I agree. Well said. So we’ve talked about a lot of different things. like we said, there’s plenty of ways to utilize AI on your own if you want to. You’ve given us some, I think, fantastic concrete ideas. If people do want to go to the next level and maybe work with a professional, like yourself, how will they do that? What’s that process?
Now
Jennifer Christensen (47:59.278)
I would say first thing, even if somebody just has a question and they want to reach out, I have a 15 minute calendar that I open up on LinkedIn. I love to do that. get quite a few opportunities to do that now on a weekly basis. And somebody can just reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I will take 15 minutes, and we’ll talk through a problem or an AI thing they’re looking at. So love to do that. So that’s one thing.
don’t have to do anything with Beacon. That’s just a free gift. And then if they want to reach out to Beacon, it’s beaconmm.com. And we have a great in-house team that’ll talk to them, give them a free discovery. Even if they don’t work with us, I think we have about 60 people that reach out a month, and we only take on about four clients a month. But you’re still going to get that same, here’s where you’re at, here’s what you could be doing. You’re going to get a lot of information, and then you get to decide whether it’s a good.
I could sit, you know, not.
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that. And we’ll make sure to put your LinkedIn and other contact info on the show notes so folks can check that out. I appreciate the conversation. This, I will say, took some different turns than I expected, but I like that we dipped into some of the philosophical stuff and, you know, some little nuances about these different AI programs and so forth. Yeah, this is really fun. It’s good to connect with you, Jen.
Yeah, same with you. Thank you for letting me go down a couple of rabbit trails. I spend way too much time in my head working on all this stuff and thinking about it. So it’s nice to share a little bit.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (49:32.312)
Definitely. I feel like we’re at the stage with AI. Maybe it’ll be a long stage, I don’t know. But it’s like you can’t discuss it without dipping into some of those areas, know, and the philosophy behind it, and what’s it going to do to society and all those things. So yeah, thanks for playing along.
Absolutely. Yeah, thanks for the time.
All right, y’all, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. Always grateful to have you here. I hope that you’d take away some information that you can implement in your practice and in your life. Any resources that we mentioned during the episode will be listed in the show notes, so make sure to check those out. If you like what you hear on the podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you’re a practice owner or aspiring practice owner,
I’d invite you to check out the testing psychologist mastermind groups. have mastermind groups at every stage of practice development, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. We have homework, we have accountability, we have support, we have resources. These groups are amazing. We do a lot of work and a lot of connecting. If that sounds interesting to you, you can check out the details at the testing psychologist.com slash consulting.
You can sign up for a pre-group phone call and we will chat and figure out if a group could be a good fit for you. Thanks so much.
Dr. Jeremy Sharp (51:14.488)
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