237 Leveraging AI in Home Building Marketing - Jason Rhoads Oct 2 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. And welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Jason Rhoads. Jason is the CEO of Rhoads Creative. Welcome, Jason. Thanks for being with us.

Jason Rhoads: Hi, Greg. Hi, Kevin. Thanks for having me on. Much appreciated.

Greg Bray: Well, Jason, let's start off and just get that quick background and overview. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jason Rhoads: Yeah, sure. So again, my name is Jason Rhoads. I'm CEO of Rhoads Creative. We're a digital marketing firm based outside of the Philadelphia suburb, but we [00:01:00] work with partners nationwide. We're going to, I think jump a little bit into AI later and I'm really big into that.

I've been using it since 2019. I'm actually on the beta testing groups for OpenAI and Gemini. We get cool stuff from that. I get all the cool stuff before you do. And I'm a totally analytical and statistic-based person. So, we're going to dive into that more today, but that's me.

Kevin Weitzel: With that, to our listening audience, I just want to forewarn you that we are going to nerd out today. This is going to be geek-heavy. I mean, I've got Greg and Jason on this call, so I'm telling you right now, I am feeling like a fish out of water because these dudes spin circles around me when it comes to nerdy topics.

So, now that I've given that little lawyer speak at the beginning of this, Jason before we go into all this nerdy stuff, let's look at one factoid about you personally that has nothing to do with work or the home building industry or marketing or anything else. What's something about you?

Jason Rhoads: I am obsessed to the point I am a part owner of, I just own one share of [00:02:00] the Green Bay Packers. I am obsessed.

Kevin Weitzel: Cheesehead.

Jason Rhoads: Yes, I'm a huge cheesehead. I am a massive cheesehead. I own one share. Lambo is like my greatest place I've ever been in my life. I've taken all my children there.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. Best franchise player ever?

Jason Rhoads: You want to say Aaron Rodgers, but he's not a good guy sometimes.

Kevin Weitzel: A horrible human being. Yes, you're right.

Jason Rhoads: And then same with Brett Favre. My favorite player was actually Reggie White. That's how I became it, but let's go with Bart Starr. He's the one who started it all.

Kevin Weitzel: Starr. There we go. No, that's fantastic. All right. That's a legit answer. It's the easy answer though, because quarterbacks are always easier. You know, you get somebody says, Oh man, I'm a big fan because of this center or this punt kicker. You know, he really made this team, you know, he won so many games. That never happens.

Jason Rhoads: You were talking about nerding out if you want to talk about like Bubba Franks from the early 2000s, he was their tight end. That's what we can do.

Kevin Weitzel: I was hunting for that. I mean, how big of a fan are you? If you could name off Bubba Franks, or you know, some obscure weird player that just had these [00:03:00] oddball stats, now that's a true fan.

Jason Rhoads: I could. There's a guy, he's named Sam Congado. He played three games with the Packers in the early 2000s and went to get his medical degree and now he's a doctor. Like that's how much I know.

Kevin Weitzel: Wow. All right. So, now that we've gotten past the mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging portion of today's podcast Greg, bring us up to speed amigo.

Greg Bray: I gotta follow up though. I'm into super fans. I totally get that but shareholders, what perks do shareholders get?

Jason Rhoads: None. So, the Packers are publicly owned. You can buy shares. It's a fancy souvenir. They're not publicly traded. You can resell it, but it's just whatever that person says it is. I get to vote for the board of directors, but that's sort of a joke because I own one share. It hangs up behind me in my office and it's one stock share. It's like the coolest souvenirs.

Kevin Weitzel: Is it like the one square foot of land you get in Scotland to call yourself a Scottish Lord?

Jason Rhoads: That is a perfect example and a perfect thing. It's like, yeah, you're an owner. It's cool. You're an owner, but I don't have any power or anything like [00:04:00] that.

Greg Bray: I mean, next time we're watching the game and we see Jason leaning over from the stands at the bench saying, no, you should run. You know, we're going to know he's telling the guy I'm an owner.

Kevin Weitzel: He doesn't get like behind-closed-door meetings with the coach.

Jason Rhoads: No. No. Not to go too far. The NFL, when you buy a stock because you're technically an owner, the NFL sends a letter saying like, you're not allowed to make fun of or disparage any other teams because now you're technically an owner. I still disparage all the teams, but that's okay.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah.

Greg Bray: Okay. All right. Well, enough, about football, Jason. Tell us a little bit more about Rhoads Creative, the kind of things you guys offer, and who you're serving.

Jason Rhoads: Yeah, sure. Thanks. So, we call ourselves data-first, digital-only advertising. So we do three things, SEO, search engine optimization, online advertising, and websites. And we do it in what we call residential construction. Home builders are a large portion of our clients and we represent partners across the country, but also remodeling companies, outdoor living companies, pools. We say really anything you can build on your land. And we'll work with builders that are five homes a year to 500 homes a year. But it's [00:05:00] really those three things, totally digital and all based on data. That's what we do.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Now you already mentioned a little bit that you're big into the AI world, and that's where we kind of wanted to focus and tap into some of your experiences there. So, tell us about how you kind of got into AI and some of the things that you were doing before it became cool to be in AI.

Jason Rhoads: Sounds good. So, yeah, back in 2019 we actually started using some generative AI tools. One some people may know right now it's called Jasper. It's like a content tool. So, started using that back in 2019, very quickly saw how it didn't produce amazing content. It didn't give us the best headlines or the best, anything like that, but it helped us really springboard ourselves and start to save time.

And then when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT almost two years ago now, and everybody was like, wow, this is amazing, we really jumped into it and started to use it again as the next iteration, but to more see how it can be leveraged to help build out and do things that take us [00:06:00] a lot of time. I'm just really into that. More and more I want to use it for time savings. That's where we're implementing it.

Greg Bray: It's amazing it's only been two years. It's been talked about so much and we've all played with it so much. It just feels like it's been around a lot longer than that.

Jason Rhoads: I know. It does. It seems like way longer, but it's been like two years. Exactly. It's iterated itself so much too, but it hasn't even been two.

Greg Bray: So, is ChatGPT the tool? Is that the only one that, builders need to worry about right now? We see a lot of stuff being called AI and labeled out there. So, what is that versus something else and where does that all fit?

Jason Rhoads: Yeah, that's a great question. Builders should use what I call generative AI or an AI assistant. Does it have to be ChatGPT? No. I know a lot of builders will use Microsoft, which then comes with what's called Copilot. That's like Microsoft's brand of AI right now. That's okay.

ChatGPT, I think right now, if you look at their computing power, their server space, all that other stuff, they're the best because of all those kind of reasons, but it's more just use it. Whatever's easiest for you. It's more than a [00:07:00] content tool. It's what I'm really big on. It's more than a content tool. Anything you're researching and looking at data, you have to compile something for you, it takes some time, that's where you should be using it more of than just like, hey, write me a blog.

Greg Bray: So, should builders even be caring, or is this stuff too new, too hard, too complex? Should we even be worrying about it?

Jason Rhoads: Yes, they should be. They shouldn't be worried about it. Because people do get worried about it, right? They get worried like it's going to take over the world or take their jobs. I wouldn't say they have to be worried about it, but they should be using it. In a marketing sense, if you're doing anything where you're looking at large sets of data and trying to get analytics out of it or want to look at something that really no human could do, AI has the ability to do it a lot faster and about the same as a human. But the speed at which you can do it and what it can process that again, no human could ever do this kind of stuff, is what gives you that insight and gives you that leg up to spend more time doing other things. They should absolutely be doing it. And the best ways I've seen is really in taking information that would take [00:08:00] any human or any program way too long to process.

Kevin Weitzel: So, I'm scribbling down notes and you know what I wrote down? Jason Rhoads, and then in quotes, worry equal no, leverage equal yes.

Jason Rhoads: Yes. Please leverage. Leverage in a way that's not just write me a blog. We were talking quickly beforehand about how people just put it out there and you got to leverage it because if you don't, one, you're just wasting time, but two, also you're missing out on insights that you could be getting, all kinds of data you could be using, and even some time savings, just straight up time savings if you don't have to do this or that. You've got to leverage it, and if you're not, you're wasting your time and energy and not getting the full insights that you could be.

Kevin Weitzel: Do you think that the mindset of managers needs to change to where when you do add the speed of efficiency to it, that they can almost start rethinking the role and how they can better leverage and utilize that person versus just making sure they're doing an activity?

Jason Rhoads: That's a fantastic question point. Yes, [00:09:00] 1000%. Get creative. Think outside the box. To leverage this information, you've gotta think a little differently about what you do and how your role is and how to better utilize the information you're getting because now I've got this power to go do what I can do. AI is not going to change what you do. AI is not going take out your job. It's not going to do anything like that. It's just going to help you make better strategy is what it's going to do, a hundred percent help you make better strategy.

Greg Bray: So, Jason, you've mentioned a couple of times that just writing something seems to be where most people kind of start, right? They think this is something that can write for them. And of course, while it does an amazing job of writing, it doesn't actually sound like you without a lot of work. But you've mentioned a couple of times now going beyond that. Can you give us a more specific example of maybe a way that you've seen some data analysis or something just to help us kind of picture what you're talking about there?

Jason Rhoads: There's two examples I use all the time. The first one's the one that's the best one. So, many builders across the country [00:10:00] use call tracking systems, whether that be Call Rail or a lot of them, it takes recordings of calls. If you're a good size builder, you're going to get a lot of call volume.

One of the things that we did with one of our partners that was super successful is we took a month's worth of phone transcripts and uploaded them to AI, to ChatGPT and said, what is going on? What are the factors? There was one subdivision or community that wasn't selling great, and what was the feedback they were getting while they were on the phone a lot of time from people?

We could have done that. We could have filtered it. We could have gone through it. But instead, what we did is we just took the conversations, which took like five minutes to get, put them into AI, gave it a prompt that took a couple of minutes, and then it starts spitting out information.

And by the way, what we found out is the lot selection was really bad. We're not going to tell the builder, but the lot selection is really bad. So, we knew how to overcome the objections and think through marketing strategy of how to overcome that. Literally there was thousands of conversations boiled down into about 15 minutes to get our insights out of it.

Kevin Weitzel: You can upload tons of stuff in there and actually have it extract some [00:11:00] sort of data response out of it. One thing we did at our company was that we have a lot of production people, a lot of introverts, and not very many people that talk like Kevin does, that have my diction, that have my way of delivering sentences to people, and the emphasis that I put on the word, or the emphasis that I put on words. How do you like that one, Greg? Emphasis.

Anyway, so, we actually put in several of my emails, personal emails, business emails, and everything, and then created a persona. So, then if you have more of a timid new salesperson, that doesn't have the jargon, the language, and the delivery method, they could literally punch in what they want to say and then put it into my persona and it spits out as if Kevin was saying it, and honestly, it was dead on.

Jason Rhoads: That's great. Yeah. And then to piggyback off that. Another example that we were talking about is we report over all of your CRM data. So, what they're emailing, what the phone calls are, what they're clicking on. Kevin, you should think about this. Then what it does is you port it all over and say, okay, who are my [00:12:00] A, B, and C prospects?

And then write a little script. If you're going to make a phone call for the salesperson in your voice, which is perfect, right? Like, you can automatically have it right. And then email the script to one of your sales reps or one of your sales managers in your voice, but it gives you line by line what you should talk to this person about because of what they're doing in CRM, what they clicked on on their website, what they viewed of, what you sent them through a download, what e blasts they clicked on, what emails they read through.

Because it's taking all of your information whether it's HubSpot or Salesforce or Lasso that builders get or anything, take all that information and say, okay, tell me who we think is best. And then write me a sales script on that. And like you said, you can say, write it in the voice of Kevin. Which is a really good idea. I'm going to take that one and use the voice part. I'll tell you that much.

Greg Bray: I think you could sell that. The voice of Kevin could become a product.

Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

 [00:13:00] Can we peel back a little bit of the how-to? I know that some of the frustration that I've seen with some of these tools is they hear examples like this, right? Well, you upload this, you, you give it this. And then you log into ChatGPT, and all you have is this little line to type something and you don't really know, as a newbie, how to even begin to go. Are there some tutorials you recommend? Or when you say loading thousands of recordings into ChatGPT, can you just give us just a little bit of the how-to behind that, just where to look for some of that?

Jason Rhoads: [00:14:00] Yes, 100%. I want to first say, ChatGPT, when you have that little box, you can upload, and all you got to do is drag and drop up to 10 different things at once. So, a thing can be a CSV file, it could be a video, it could be an audio file, it could be a Word doc, it could be a PDF, it could be anything. You can upload a code base, you can pretty much anything you can upload to it. So, that's part one.

And part two is you just have to get it. So, for example, with the transcripts, we logged into Call Rail and there was a place where you can just export them. It took 7 minutes for somebody to copy it all and paste it into a PDF. And we made it into a just a plain PDF and throw it into ChatGPT. That's about it. It's all it was, but it knew what the conversations were. It's really just getting it into it. You can upload Excel files, CSVs, Word docs, PDFs, anything.

Greg Bray: I appreciate that because I know that folks often they just see that box and there's not a lot of instructions about how to actually use it. And you hear these examples and it helps us. One thing that I was able to do just kind of playing around. I was able to take [00:15:00] a PDF of a bunch of names and addresses, upload it, and have it extract it out and turn it into a spreadsheet format for me, you know, and it was able to pull that data out. And you had to check it. There were a couple of times where it got the fields off and things like that. But we have to start thinking about these tools well beyond the, How do I write this better, you know, even though that's very, very powerful to write.

Jason Rhoads: The writing is very, very, very powerful. It is. It's just going to get better. I had this told to me before that I and AI it's not AW. It's not an artificial writer. It's artificial intelligence, right? It's intelligence. It can go and find and do anything with data numbers faster than a human can. Okay. So, it is a hundred percent about not just content, but use it for everything else,

Greg Bray: So, Jason, because of that, what are some of the pitfalls or the watch out fors that somebody needs to consider as they start to use these tools? And especially the more you put into it, you suddenly get back a lot of [00:16:00] information and to double check it all can become a little bit overwhelming too.

Jason Rhoads: That's a great point. Yeah. So, first off, I always say, do a test first. Think of it like a science experiment almost, like have a hypothesis and then test it. The call example we were talking about earlier, what we did is we took about 10 conversations and put it through, and said, give us the answers and make sure they're right. And then also told it where it was wrong.

Again, of the big things I think is missed. We give it that little box and then when it gives you something back, tell it why it was wrong. Tell it what it can do better. Tell it how to improve because then it'll spit something out a little better and a little better. But you got to test it. When you're first putting in anything, you have to test it. Number two is you have to check it. You have to spot-check it.

The third would just be make sure what you're uploading, there are plans. We don't have to get too deep into plans, but each company has different plans about how you can pay for ChatGPT. Anytime you're on a commercial or a professional plan, they're not going to use your information in its learning spaces, but if you're on like a personal plan or something, it will. So, don't upload like customer information. Don't do [00:17:00] things like that. You got to check it and you got to make sure that your data is protected enough.

Greg Bray: So, you were talking about pulling out stuff out of the CRM and analyzing things like that. You're saying do not do that if you're using the personal unpaid plan.

Jason Rhoads: Don't do that. No, don't that. What it'll do is it uses it in it's learning. So, like, if you upload all your CRM data, and then a builder on the other side of the earth says, how many leads does an average builder get a month? It's going to use your information to inform it of that answer. You don't want that. Just make sure you're on a, it's an enterprise or a business plan and you're pretty protected.

Greg Bray: Yeah. And those are not crazy expensive either compared to what some people spend on software.

Jason Rhoads: I think it's 30 a month per user is about what it is. But for the time savings that we're talking about, and also the protection and all it's worth every penny, it's worth every penny.

Greg Bray: So we talked about testing. We talked about checking. Any other gotchas to watch out for, you know, as you use these tools?

Jason Rhoads: Some of the other gotchas would be, I have gotten some questions of like, oh, let's have it create, Kevin, you'll like this, this whole [00:18:00] rendering an image. And I'm just like, no, it's not there. Don't do that. Please don't do that. As smart as and as cool as it is, don't push it beyond its limits. You know what I mean? Don't try and create AI images, but they're not great. You can tell.

Kevin Weitzel: You can tell. I have seen some pretty impressive, extremely costly services that use it. However, on the big scheme of things, yeah, it's not there yet.

Jason Rhoads: It's not there. It's not there. Don't try and break its mold. Just don't. Use it for data. Use it for content. Give it time, give it space. It could be there in a couple of years, but do what it's really good at. It's very good at content. It's very good at data, but don't break outside of it, honestly.

Greg Bray: So, Kevin, I got a question for you because at OutHouse you guys actually put some formal processes in place to experiment and learn AI and how you could apply it. Tell us a little bit more about how you went about kind of deciding we want to do this. Because there's a lot of folks just kind of playing with things but from a company standpoint, I don't think that quite gets it to where you're going to make it part of your process very [00:19:00] quickly.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, we actually work directly with OpenHouse AI, Will Zhang's company. What we did was they created an overlay for interactive floor plans. So, not just what are people clicking because analytics tell us that and just the little cookies and everything else that are on there, but what it tells builders is why people are picking certain things and what group of people are picking these certain things.

It takes a much deeper dive into the whys versus just the what they're clicking. It was very successful. And I'll tell you what was funny about it though, was that Will, uh, let us know, oh, about a year ago, he said, Yeah, I'm scrapping that one. It's already out of date. I have to redo it and we're doing it again. We'll let you know when that new version is done.

That is how fast that technology is moving. So, what we learned is that if you're on a shoestring budget, you know, there's no secret, you know, OutHouse, we're a small company, but if you're on a shoestring budget, you can't just plop into the next thing that comes out from the woodwork as far as this new star fangled AI product.

Greg Bray: [00:20:00] That's a great lead-in. So, for builders who feel like I don't have time to keep up with this stuff. There's so much changing, what's coming next. It's just going to be different tomorrow, so why should I even mess with it today? What are some thoughts you have around keeping up with the change?

Jason Rhoads: That's a great question. It seems like there's a lot of change, but we just talked about ChatGPT is almost at two years and it's still the best tool. My kind of secret trick is look in financial industries and things like that, that's where it's on the cutting edge. They're going to try it first, whether it's financial services or consulting companies, they're going to be the ones to try it. And when you see that news, it trickles down, you'll know what works. You'll know what works.

Kevin Weitzel: When you said that ChatGPT is one of the best or the best, you know, there's Claude users all over the globe that just gasped in unison.

Jason Rhoads: Best for home builders.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh,

Jason Rhoads: Here's a tip. I use other ones more often. I use different ones for different things. I think that of what's out there right now, OpenAI's product is the best for [00:21:00] home builders because of the industry's lack of knowledge of this space yet. They're all not great when it comes to user experience, but they have the most built-in features right now.

Greg Bray: All right. So, what are your two other top tools, and what use cases push you to those other tools instead?

Jason Rhoads: Sure. That's a good question. For content, one that's called Anthropic, I think it's actually better. Okay. It's just better content though. It's not better at data. It's not better at anything else. Anything else, it's ChatGPT. Images, for a builder, Photoshop's tools, those are the coolest tools that are out there right now of editing and taking photos. There's a video tool that I love. What it does is it takes a full-screen video and makes it into tiny clips of 10 to 15-second clips. We use it all the time and it is fantastic. This is the kind of stuff you can do with AI. It's really, really, really neat. It's called Opus.

Greg Bray: So, tools like that, it just kind of highlights and we'll probably continue to see that there will be specialization that happens across these various tools, and as you get into specific needs, you're going to have a different [00:22:00] set, but we already have that. We don't ask Microsoft Word to be a spreadsheet, right? I mean, there's people that do tables and you can do formulas in Word if you really wanted to, right? It's possible, but it's not, it's specialty, right? You want to be an Excel for that, so.

Jason Rhoads: Yeah, I think, and you're a hundred percent right. I think the more specialized, the more they can tweak their models and their algorithms to do exactly one thing, the better it will get. It might mean we have to sign up for more services, but in the end, it'll get better.

Greg Bray: Well, fortunately, they're all still in that under 50 a month type range for so many of them, not hundreds or thousands of dollars. Well, you mentioned being in some of the beta programs. What's on the horizon?

Jason Rhoads: Yes. So, right now OpenAI is on model four and a half. They're saying it's going to be released next year, it might get released earlier. This one isn't going to be the jump that this four and four and a half will to be totally blunt. It'll just get better at what it's doing. It'll have voice. One thing they're really working on is the voice, right? So with four and a half, you can talk to it and interact with it.

I was talking to a builder a couple of days ago who was in their car and needed help. They were just doing a presentation for land that they had to do for township, and he was putting [00:23:00] the outline together in his car because he's talking to ChatGPT. That's really big. But right now, it's incremental improvements. The big thing was that Apple has AI coming out September, October. The word on the street is everybody's sort of waiting to see what that is. It could be groundbreaking or it could be nothing, and I don't think there's going to be a middle ground, honestly.

If it's groundbreaking, it could change the way people really look at it, which then makes the other companies pivot. So, we'll see. Most people thought Apple was actually going to buy into just OpenAI, ChatGPT, and use their technology in the new operating system with this app layer and they didn't they built it from the ground up mostly. Everybody's sort of waiting on that one to see what it's really going to be like.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, we will all eagerly await. Thanks for the heads up. Well, Jason, it's been great to have you on and to chat a little bit about this. Any last thoughts or words of advice you want to leave before we wrap up?

Jason Rhoads: Just try it, just try it. Everybody give it a shot. I know it can be scary, but if it takes 10 minutes and it can save you an hour a week or an hour every month, why not take the 10 minutes? Just try it. Upload it. If you're out there and you're [00:24:00] marketing and you're looking at a spreadsheet and you want to know, how many leads did I get from this one town and it's a spreadsheet of 2000 towns, throw it into ChatGPT and just ask it instead of building a pivot table and then filtering it out. Just try it, you know, it's the kind of stuff it does and it will do it in 30 seconds, like it's that kind of quick, just try it.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, Jason, if somebody wants to learn more and connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Jason Rhoads: Yeah. Thanks. You can email me. It's jason@rhoadscreative.com. We spell Rhoads a little weird, R H O A D S. Or our website, same thing, rhoadscreative.com. And you can always call us, numbers on the website, but yeah, feel free to get in touch.

Thank you guys. Thank you both.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you again, Jason. And thank you everybody for listening today to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:25:00]