AI's Impact on Video Marketing & SEO with Gwen Beren

Carlsbad, people, purpose, and impact, an essential podcast for those who live, work, visit, and play in Carlsbad.

Good afternoon, and welcome, everyone. My name is Brett Schonsenbach. I am the president and CEO of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce, and I am once again privileged to be your host. And today, I'm excited to have with me Gwen Barron. Gwen is the CEO and founder of Illuminus Marketing.

Good afternoon, Gwen.

Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

It's great to have you. You and I go back a little ways. We go back to my BC days. That's before Carl's bad days. Just to clarify.

So it's it's great to have you so we could sit down and have this chat. And as I was looking and preparing for today, I saw that you went to Palomar College. So did you grow up locally here?

I sure did. I grew up in Rancho Penasquitos.

Okay. So you're local, but then I did see you went off to Georgia for a bit, it looks like. Savannah College of Art and Design?

Yes. Also known as SCAD.

SCAD. Oh, yeah. Okay.

My family has well, I grew up here, but we end up going somewhere for a couple of years, and then coming back, we always end up back here in San Diego because it's home.

Go and come. Go and not not for military reasons or things like that.

No. Actually, for school mostly. My mom decided to go to UNC when I was in high school, and so we moved to North Carolina while she got her master's degree, and then then I decided to go to college in Savannah at SCAD.

Wow. You know, when your mom got her master's degree, I'm assuming at that time there wasn't as many, like, online options for advanced degrees, like, these yeah. Right. Like

Was the Internet even a thing in '92? I don't think so.

No. It was not. Yeah. Funny that you should mention that we were just this week, we were doing a program with middle school students called Future CEO on entrepreneurship.

Oh, cool.

And one of the entrepreneurs that we were really highlighting and and we listened to a a very short interview from was Jeff Bezos from Amazon. Mhmm. And he was talking about he was trying to raise in 1994 and 1995, he was trying to raise a million dollars for Amazon. And he got 60 individual investor meetings, and the number one question from every single one of them was, what's the Internet?

Oh my gosh. That's such a trip.

Even though he was

just trying to raise that amount of money and that they didn't know what the Internet is. Yeah.

Yeah. And out of the 60 people he met with, only basically 20 said yes. They they made $50,000 investments that can you imagine the people who said no?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Kicking themselves.

Kicking themselves now. Yeah. And he had to tell them what the Internet was. Now, I mean, it seems absurd now, but in '94, yeah, then that was the thing. Yep.

So your mom was committed enough to her advanced degree that you guys picked up and moved.

Yep. We sure did.

And it

was a really great experience. It gave us a lot of great perspective on how people in the rest of the country live and different cultures, and we were talking about barbecue before we started to record. If you say barbecue in North Carolina, they expect you to have a pig and a smoker Yeah. Not hamburgers and hot dogs or something like that.

Not a not a gas grill in our patio?

No. No. It's real barbecue.

It's a little different. And it looks like, you know, through your experience at SCAD and and possibly beyond. But you got into web design things pretty pretty quickly. That was it looks like early on was your jam, web design.

Yeah. So at SCAD, I was a photography major. And for whatever reason, wasn't getting the kind of photography career advice that I really felt I wanted for that direction. And one of our classes was to build our own website. So I learned Dreamweaver.

I started to learn about search engine optimization. And then when I left school, a local web development agency had a position for a project developer or a project manager. And so I was able to take that and really that really launched the trajectory that I'm on now.

Yeah. Wow. Fascinating. Right out the gate. And and so you spent before you started what you currently have, which we'll talk about, I saw a couple of different companies, United Webworks, Internet, Matrix.

So tell us about some of your experiences you had there before you launched out on your own.

Yeah. So United Webworks was the company I just mentioned that I was the I think it was director of projects, was the it was project manager.

Sure.

And I was only there for a short time before I was able to come back here to San Diego, and that was actually during the two thousand eight, two thousand nine Brutal. Crisis. So but it really that gave me a good platform to come here. I started off as a part time customer service person at Internet Matrix, and I was relieving people over their lunch breaks and answering phones and doing tech support for websites. But as I continued on my path there, I started to teach myself more about search engine optimization, and that was really the beginning of that whole industry of Yes.

SEO with websites. And so as I started to teach myself, I started to talk to my managers about we should really develop some SEO programs here, for our clients. So that was the beginning of me establishing the professional services department at iMatrix, and that also then led into other services, like social media marketing Yeah. Video marketing, paid advertising. So we really developed a whole suite of services for that company.

And then, there was an opportunity to, develop the marketing department. They had had some trial and error. They had had some failed starts at the marketing department, and knowing the company as I did from having to really work myself from the the bottom all the way up. I knew a lot of the ins and outs. I knew the the what we needed to market, and so I developed the marketing department there Nice.

And really took them from a cold calling sales model to and more of an inbound marketing, content marketing model. And then at some point, I just got burned out on corporate life and said, I am done with this. So so it was at that point that I went out on my own, and I had a couple of people that I knew from that job and previous jobs. They were like, oh, we need marketing. We help over at my company or we need SEO help.

And so that is really the foundation of what happened for Illuminus Marketing.

Interesting. So I wanna I wanna kinda focus in a little more on the the burnout part. So you're so you're burnt out at your current job and you're like, I'm I need a break. I just need to take a step back or whatever. And so you do that and and so you're not not working anywhere at all at that point?

Mm-mm.

So you're just okay. Mental health Yes. Time out, and then people start approaching you. Is that is that pretty much what happened?

Essentially, yes. I think I had one freelance client while I was still working there, crazily, because I was working, like, sixty to eighty hour weeks at in corporate. And but it was actually a a friend of my mentor and my boss at the time. That's who I was doing freelance work for. So I was able to expand that contract, so that kinda got me over the hump.

But then Just like over the time again. Organically started to come in from other people that I had worked with.

Wow. So at least on LinkedIn, what I saw is that Illuminus Marketing from what it says started in 2013.

Mhmm.

So is that about right? Okay.

That was when I left corporate.

That's when you left corporate and took a step out on your own.

Yes.

And then so it starts humbly, but Yes. But you got a few clients. And now today, why don't we go ahead and just tell people in general what you do at Illuminus Marketing?

So Illuminus Marketing is a full service digital marketing company. We develop websites. We do search engine optimization. That's our core. That's my biggest passion and what makes my heart go pitter pat.

So but we also do social media management and video optimization, content creation. So we're able to really offer a full suite of services for our clients.

Okay. We're gonna take a brief pause, and we're gonna start to unpack some of this a little more in-depth after the break, so stick with us. We're talking to Gwen Barron, the CEO and founder of Illuminus Marketing, and we'll be right back. So, Gwen, before we took a break, we were just kinda going through your story that got you up to the point of launching Illuminus Marketing, and now you you were explaining some of the things that you do. Let's pretend that there's at least a few people out there that still don't know what the heck SEO means and what that, you know, is all about or how it works.

And tell people what do you actually do to maximize their SEO.

So search engine optimization, SEO, is optimizing your website presence for searches. And so my definition of SEO has really evolved over time, especially right now with AI and AI overviews and a lot of people changing their user behavior to turn to AI for searches or for information. It's really about making sure that your business is represented online everywhere that you might have a profile. So for the chamber, for example, you have your Google My Business location, but then you also have your podcast. So you have to make sure that your podcast is optimized Sure.

For searches on the podcast platform, and that your website's optimized for different Carlsbad events and different Chamber events. So making sure that you're taking stock of all of those different things and optimizing them for the most traffic that you possibly can so that you can bring people into your business. So that's really how I define search engine optimization. I think a lot of people think of it as just, I need to optimize my website so that I can get leads. And while that is a part of it, I think that's a smaller and smaller part of it with all of the other with the way user behavior has changed in technology.

And I like that you brought up the AI point because I was at a chamber conference, gosh, earlier this month, think it was. Time goes by. And, of course, you know, a lot of buzz about AI. And I had not been paying attention to some of the AI search tools. Mhmm.

But I learned there about Perplexity? Yes. Perplexity Yep. AI. And so I started to use it.

Mhmm.

And I have to honestly say I really like it. And some of you listening are way ahead of me, but if if you haven't heard of Perplexity, instead of going to Google and doing a search where I feel like the first five or 10 things on Google or somebody paid to be there Yep. Based on what I typed in. But in perplexity, it's not like that. And I can I can ask a question, and it'll give me an answer, and then I can refine my question, and it'll hone it in even better?

And I really like it.

Mhmm.

And so I'm hearing though that are you are you seeing that that kind of trend of people moving off of the traditional Google thing is is a thing?

Definitely. And I think that's it's been a trend for probably, I'm gonna say the last, like, eight years even before AI, because Google was trying to provide even more context in their searches. So how we like to separate our SEO efforts for people is into categories of intent. So if you're doing an educational search, like something you might do on Perplexity, so if you're searching for, you know, best chamber in North County or something like that.

Oh, I gotta try that one. I never thought I was searching for that.

So if you're searching for something like that, if you're searching for or best chiropractor, let's just

say. Sure.

You're probably gonna get a bunch of map results in a Google search. But in a perplexity search, you might get more contextual results. So talking about what would what would define the best chiropractor. So it's gonna give you more informational and contextual things when you're using a platform like Perplexity. Now, on the other hand, Google has really evolved to with their AI overviews that you'll see now a lot of times at the top of a search result, they are starting to pull context into the search.

So there's a difference between an educational search, which might be you're obviously trying to educate yourself versus an intent to buy, a transactional search, versus a brand search. If someone searching for Carl's bedchamber, then you, you know, you guys come up very well for that.

Sure.

So so there's different kinds of searches, search intent, and people use different platforms for those different things. So that's really where the strategy comes into building kind of a really good content plan and SEO plan. So over the last year, I've kind of said, oh, we're an SEO first agency, and then that really kind of freaks people out because they have no idea what I'm talking about. Yeah. So now, it's more of, like, we are a user first agency.

We're we're looking at how people are searching for your business and also topics related to your business. Are they using AI? Are they using, you know, Google My Business searches? Are they using Yelp? Or how what are they doing to Right.

Find your business? And then when they get to your website, what are they doing on your website? And all of those things kinda can come together to make a better user experience and then ultimately generate more money for the business.

Right. Yeah. Fascinating. I noticed on your website Mhmm. Also focus on something we haven't talked about yet, but video marketing.

Yeah. Talk about, you know, where that's at because it seems to be pretty hot topic, maybe not quite as cutting edge as the AI discussions, but it's pretty much pretty high up there. So Yeah. What's going on with video? How do you guys see it, and how do you use it, etcetera?

I think video has been the biggest game changer for our business and for our clients in the last three years, other than AI, of course. But they're they're a little bit related. But with video, it's so important, I think, that people can see who you are when they're trying when they're deciding whether or not they wanna work with you. You know, I have a couple of clients who are coaches or profitability coaches or they're, leadership executive development coaches. And so those types of people are it's really important to be able to see who you're talking to, and to see who you might be working with, and to hear what their philosophy is.

And video makes that so much easier than someone reading paragraphs and paragraphs of text on your website.

Yeah.

So so it's really important. Plus, it it allows you to have a little bit more fun. And honestly, I find it way easier than writing content. Because you could if you're a domain expert and you a subject matter expert, and you could just talk and talk and talk about your area of expertise, it's so much easier to do that than to sit down with the cursor blinking and and try to write it yourself. So from from the client perspective, video is great.

And then from the, you know, customer perspective, you get just to know the person that you'll be working with. And and it's also really great for search engine optimization, because YouTube is the second largest search engine, also owned by Google. But Right. If you're putting videos onto YouTube, you have the ability to show up and search over there as well.

Yeah. It's wonderful. And, I mean, sometimes when I feel like some of our members or small businesses or whatever hear, oh, I gotta do more video, they think big expense and big production and hassle, but it seems like we've all gotten pretty comfortable with just somebody popping out the smartphone and taking, you know, videos that way that the quality has gone way up on the capabilities So

good.

Yeah. Talk about that.

Yeah. So I mentioned I went to school for photography, and I was telling a client this the other day. When I was in school for photography at the beginning of the February, I purchased a camera that it was a top of the line camera for, like, $5,000, and it was 12 meg pixels. Megapixels? Yeah.

Megapixels. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And that was like, oh my god. This is such great quality.

And now no. That's that's laughable. That's like probably what comes in a kid's toy Yeah. For them to take pictures on their watch or something like that. So

Crazy.

Phones have increased so much in the quality that they're able to produce. And then also, the technology around editing your videos and putting them together and getting them published has really they've made the user experience so much easier to be able to actually edit video, that it's it's really they've the bar to entry has really been lowered Yeah. So so much. And you can make a great quality video without having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a huge production.

Nice. Yeah. That's that's good news.

Yeah. It's great news.

And then so, you know, we were talking about SEO and, you know, optimizing your website for the different purposes, like you mentioned. I really like that. But there was an interesting statistic on your website that I would love for you to kinda explain.

Okay.

It says you guys have a 927% ROI on organic revenue generated. I think that's what it said.

Yes. So What does that mean? That was for one of our clients who was in the industrial they were in manufacturing shelving space.

Okay.

So that was a very niche space. But when they came to us, their website wasn't converting very well. And so this is really where the user experience part comes in. And so we were able to put tracking software on their website that showed us how people were struggling to purchase the right to find the right thing that they wanted to purchase on the website. And so through tracking the, conversion rate optimization or conversion rate on the website, we were able to determine, okay, we need to move these things around on the website to make it easier for people to find them.

And so we were able to make those website changes, and between that and the search engine optimization that we put into the website, In relationship to the spend that they were paying us, they achieved a 900% ROI on on the investment that they made to make those changes. That's amazing. They had originally come to us and said we dropped off the the first page of Google, and we're bleeding 40 to $50,000 a month because we're not getting that traffic anymore. So we're we were able to get them back to where they were, and then increase it much more from there.

Amazing. Amazing. And thing you talk about, and you've mentioned it a little bit in passing as we've been talking, but this term content marketing.

Mhmm.

Yeah. Talk to us about what does that actually mean to the layperson?

Content marketing, how I simplify it for everyone is this is just all of the content that you're creating. You're whether you're creating a blog post or an ebook or even videos. I also I now put videos into your content strategy because you have to think about what's gonna work better on a video versus in a blog post. Like I mentioned, you know, instead of reading paragraphs of text Mhmm. Somebody might wanna watch a two minute video to be able to understand exactly what they're looking for.

People's attention spans, as we all know, are not very long, so the easier that you can make it for people, the the better you're gonna be in that respect. So for content marketing, what we like to do is we like to when we're doing your research, your initial research for your project, we're not only bucketing those keywords that are transactional, like I mentioned, where we're talking about, you know, best chamber in North County, but then we'll also do we'll also look for terms that other people are searching that are those educational things, like, what do I look for in a chamber of commerce Sure. To know that it's gonna be the right fit for me or something along those lines. So so your content strategy should definitely pull in your or or kinda work with your SEO strategy, and it can include a lot of different things. Your web pages, your blog posts, your ebooks, all of those things, because you want people to search for them.

You don't wanna just create them and have nobody see them. You're not building a billboard in a desert.

Building a billboard in a desert. I'm remember that. One of the things I saw on your website spoke about how you guys employ curiosity.

Mhmm.

Creative problem solving.

Mhmm.

I thought that was really interesting because, like, you just gave us an example of a a shelving manufacturer or something like that. I mean, that super niche, but

Yes.

But everybody's got their thing that's kinda unique to them. And so everything I'm hearing from you speaks to this where you guys are willing to really take the time to learn about them before you delve in with strategies.

100%. Yeah. Most of our projects start with an audit of the brand, which also includes competitive research. What is everyone else doing? What's working for them?

What's not working for them? And so, yes, we really start from a place of curiosity of what's out there, what can we do. But we also employ that with our current clients too, because you don't want your marketing for some we've had clients that have been with us for ten years. So you don't want that to get stale, you wanna continue to stay up with market trends. And so the curiosity part and the creative problem solving really come into play when we're thinking about how can we refresh this?

How can we make sure that this is relevant to new audiences and to current trends? So, you know, when Instagram started becoming a big thing in 2015, everybody, all of our clients were on Facebook, and then, oh, everybody's gotta now we've gotta go to Instagram. We've gotta come up with a new Instagram strategy. So that's really part of what makes our job fun is that we're constantly able to learn. We're able to learn from our clients.

We're able to learn about new digital marketing techniques. And it doesn't hurt that, you know, I have an art degree, and then I'm very left brain, right brain, so I'm able to take both of those approaches and kinda meld them together for a path forward.

That's great. The other thing that I noticed and it's clear from listening to is you you mentioned on, again, on your website about how you employ measurement. You're gonna measure everything which, you know, if somebody's investing, they wanna know the results. Right? So talk about that.

I think that a lot of strides have been made in the ability to report on different things lately, which is great through whether it's Google Analytics or other analytics platforms. I think that it becomes really overwhelming for people to pull information from all of these different places and try to make sense of it. So we have incorporated a new reporting style that allows us to see all of these things in one dashboard. Nice. So we don't have to go through three or four different things, and also so that people don't have to look at a spreadsheet, you know.

Spreadsheets aren't fun for most people.

Right.

So True. And on that same token, we do wanna make sure we're trying to make decisions based off of real world data. So that's why we do the research upfront. We find out where are these people, what are they searching for, how are they behaving. And then we also after we do those things, we go back and say, okay, what was working?

What didn't work? What performed the best? What hasn't performed? And so we're really trying to instead of making decisions based on how I feel, we're trying to make decisions based you know, what is the data showing us that we need to follow so that we can get results for our clients.

That's great. I love that. We talked about AI earlier, but I also saw you you got an AI certificate from MIT.

Mhmm.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. It was this was in 2018. Yeah. So I actually went to a conference, think, in 2015 where one of the speakers totally blew my mind. His name's Christopher Penn, and he's a AI thought leader these days, AI and marketing thought leader.

And he told he's told the audience that the singularity could be achieved within ten to twelve years, and that's basically now. Yeah. And and I didn't even know what the singularity was. I'm not really a sci fi person. But at that time, it really intrigued me, all the things he was saying where if you can put a process to it now, AI will be able to do it in the future.

So that really got me thinking a lot about AI, and when I saw this opportunity to do this MIT certificate program for AI for business applications, I was really trying to future proof my business by thinking how is there something that I could develop that would help us be more productive and help us have an edge on the competition? And the answer, of course, was yes. It was yes, and you'll need millions of dollars to do it.

Oh, my.

If anybody is up to date on, like, you know, the amount of money that ChatGPT is raising for all of their, you know, developments, it takes quite a bit of money and quite a bit of resources. So that really gave me a good basis though for understanding how AI works and how it impacts our world, and also some of the, you know, downsides of AI, you know, it's unless you train it properly, it can give you really terrible results of a for a lot of different reasons, for a lot of different things. So so it was really interesting to learn about that in 2018 way before chat GPT or any of these other things. And now that we have all of these wonderful tools, it's given me a good basis for how we can ethically use AI to enhance what we're doing without taking away that human creativity.

Yeah. Fascinating. And it's evolving ever ever. I can imagine having a certificate in AI feels like you gotta get another one and another one and another one because it just keeps changing. But no.

That's awesome. And I'm sure that's a huge value to the clients that you work with as well. Well, if somebody's listening in and they're like, oh, this is very interesting. These guys they're exactly what I'm looking for. Best place to start with you guys might be your website?

Yeah. You can definitely go to illuminousmarketing.com, and you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Gwen Baron on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to, you know, make connections and talk about what the needs are for the business, what the business goals are. That's really where we strive to create strategies around what you wanna achieve in your business.

So that's illuminousmarketing.com or Gwen Beren, b e r e n, on LinkedIn. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come down and share about all your expertise and your company and all the great stuff that you do. We really appreciate you being a part of our chamber and our chamber family.

Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity.

It was my pleasure. Thanks for joining us today on our Carlsbad People, Purpose, and Impact podcast. If you got value out of our episode today, please hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app, and please tell a friend. Can't wait to see you next time on Carlsbad people, purpose, and impact.