DYC Studio (00:01.004)
Okay, Jackie, your kids are younger than mine. What did they do for trick or treat night? What was the?

Jackie Lipinski (00:07.162)
They were a ninja and my daughter was bluey and man, she's a trooper. She was like, she fell in two puddles. She was like, let's just get those candy. My son was like, take me home, it's cold. So it's always fun to see how the first born and second born react to Halloween differently.

DYC Studio (00:25.11)
Yeah, my youngest of my two boys is still like full on sprinting from house to house. And my oldest who's 12 is like, like I'll get some candy, but I just want to make sure I look cool going from house to house. That's the most important thing.

Jackie Lipinski (00:32.134)
Yeah.

Jackie Lipinski (00:39.14)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, mine forgot candy exists already, so I'm very excited to re-give that to them, maybe in their Christmas stockings.

DYC Studio (00:48.61)
I feel like we missed an opportunity to have a contest where listeners could send in videos of them stealing their kids' candy. I still love that whole thing. It's fantastic.

Jackie Lipinski (00:59.194)
I feel like it's a terrible prank. Like, I feel like a bad parent if I take one, but it's helping that.

DYC Studio (01:04.622)
Oh, let me introduce you then to what I call, because I'm a dad, daddy tax. Like whenever, wherever, last night my son got cheese curds from a fast food place and he just, like they stop arguing after a while because they're like, go ahead dad, take your tax. Like, yeah. Taxes. Yeah, here's life. I mean, you can learn about death later, but right now you're going to learn about taxes.

Jackie Lipinski (01:09.83)
Mm.

Jackie Lipinski (01:22.628)
I love that. It's like I'm just teaching about business in the future. Like this is for your own good. Here's life. It's not.

Jackie Lipinski (01:34.022)
I remember you telling me something you tell your kids years back and I've applied it to like me being a parent, like life is pain. Is that what you say to them? Yeah, and so every time my kids are complaining, I'm like, yeah, life is pain. Keep going. yeah.

DYC Studio (01:38.293)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DYC Studio (01:46.543)
Pain of discipline or pain of regret? All right, let's get started. Welcome to episode 412. I'm Kevin Oakley and with me today is Jackie Lipinski. We kicked Beth Russell off. She tried to show up, but she sounded like this and she looked like she was sick and the gig was up and we said, go, go sleep, please. Go get better.

Jackie Lipinski (01:57.286)
I know. We'll see.

Jackie Lipinski (02:09.05)
Yeah, I hope it's that and not packs and packs of cigarettes because it's...

DYC Studio (02:13.55)
That would be a problem. Jackie, what's your story time?

Jackie Lipinski (02:16.55)
And.

I have a sweet one. I have a builder and it's Q4. We all know what Q4 means. It's pain. know, life is pain, we were just talking about. And so this builder is feeling the pain. But I love their perspective of it. And they said, the view of the top of the mountain is beautiful, but the real growth happens in the valleys. And...

He said that and I was like, oh, this is lovely for the people who are in the valleys, who are doing the hard work, who understand sometimes you can potentially get high up at a company, but the growth and where you learn most, and I think everyone has those flashbacks in life of what helped them, it's these pain point moments that you learn the most from or create the most opportunity from. I think I mentioned last.

podcast is like, what are the benefits? Like there are benefits to the struggle and the learning. And so if you're feeling that right now, just understand that a lot of people grow in these valleys and you you could be projecting you want to be here, but this is going to be the moment I think you look back on of like, I succeeded during this time. This is where we pivoted. This is where we created magic out of nothing. And just, I really liked that perspective of the moment from that builder.

DYC Studio (03:45.283)
Yeah, I think, wow, it sets off lots of ideas in my head. The first is I probably haven't shared this story on the podcast in four years, so think I can repeat it. It was 2008, and it was the first time I went to the International Builders Show. And hotel rooms were $99 a piece in like the nicest hotels, because no one was going. And attendance for the show was free.

Like that's how dire things were. They're like, you don't have to pay to come here. We just need people to show up for all these vendors or else they're not going to want to be vendors at the show. So attendance was free and hotel rooms were 99 bucks. And so my builder was like, we're all going to this. And they actually expanded the number of people. This is an interesting idea. They expanded the number of people they took to the show because they thought this is when the team needs to get exposed to this stuff. And I was in the

Jackie Lipinski (04:18.214)
Hmm.

DYC Studio (04:42.542)
taxi cab with Marty Gillespie, the president of company at the time. And the taxi cab driver the whole time was just complaining about the economy and how the tenants was low and things were really tough. And as we were done with the cab, Marty said, well, I choose not to participate in this economy and handed him like a $50 tip on a $10 cab ride. And so I say that because the Valley is inevitable.

Jackie Lipinski (05:11.323)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (05:12.278)
You don't have to know or accept or internalize maybe is a better way, like the full extent of that valley. But you do have to go through it. And some people say, well, that's just not living in reality. But we all have the ability to distort our reality to a point. I've said this to every builder I've ever worked for. If you told me that that builder had any quality concerns,

Like there's anything to be concerned about. I would have been like, let's go fight right now. That was my reality distortion field of what do mean? Like of course any builder has quality issues. Sure, ours might, but it's no different or worse, even though one of the builders I worked with had serious quality issues at the time. So you're gonna go through the valley. You don't have to fully internalize how scary the valley is when you're in it. That is the first thing. The second is...

Jackie Lipinski (05:46.854)
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Lipinski (06:02.918)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (06:12.074)
As humans, we tend to just understand that when we have peaks, you hear people say like, I don't know, I just get nervous because things are so good right now. It feels like something has to get worse. So we understand that. And yet we don't typically think about the fact that when you have, and the reason we understand that is because things normally mean revert, meaning they go back to the average state. So when you go up real good, times are good.

Jackie Lipinski (06:25.094)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (06:40.12)
You're like, it's probably going to get worse and it probably will because that's how things operate. But the opposite is also true, which is a couple months ago. found the podcast. I think I think I said that, you know, every every downturn ends in recovery. You don't stay at the bottom. You do. You do go back up. And oftentimes the amount to which you can rise is the valley that you've been in. So maybe those things even go together. As I'm saying it out loud is like

Jackie Lipinski (06:56.112)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (07:10.03)
You can accept a lower valley if you don't internalize it to the same extent. It's almost like pain tolerance. Some people have different physical levels of pain tolerance.

Jackie Lipinski (07:16.4)
Will the same?

Yeah. Yeah, I think that goes to something else with what this marketer said. I like, sometimes someone says something so lovely. You're like, I'm going to remember this for decades. But they also said when you live in dark, you see monsters. So be the flashlight. And I think that's what we're saying too, is you have to lead with conviction that like, yeah, this is what we've seen. That we see this, like let's move forward. So I just think that perspective is like you said,

opt in, you opt out, how you approach a situation and feel and provide to your team is just as important as how you want it to be perceived. Because I think emotions are infectious in good and bad ways. And so you want to make sure to isolate the good. I'm sorry, the bad from the good.

DYC Studio (08:12.556)
My story time is about the rate of change and how people like to talk about how things are changing faster and faster and faster. Okay, so first of all, I'm not certain that's true. Like going from a world without internet to a world with internet seems like an equally disruptive. It's hard to know when you're in it, I guess is what I'm saying is, is the world really changing faster and faster as I get older and older? It certainly feels that way.

But I don't, if I look at my son and I'm like, do you feel like the world is changing faster and faster? He'd be like, huh? We've always had a world with TikTok in it and we've always had a world with, I don't know. So I'm acknowledging that that might be correct or incorrect. I'm not sure, but that's the narrative is that everything's changing faster and faster. However, at the same time, I was watching an evolutionary biologist speak on this, which is that.

when the rate of change gets too high in microevolution or macroevolution, whichever one you wanna believe in, like it's not good for the thing going through it. And so this is like, I'm not an expert in this at all, but conceptually to explain it as like, when a couple things change in an organism, then time passes, like through survival of the fittest, some things,

Jackie Lipinski (09:19.75)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (09:38.351)
But if everything changes, that animal just stops being itself at some point and it can't adapt or the dominant gene can't be passed on because there's just no time. It's just constant change, constant change. And his point was really provocative in that when humans are going through too much change combined with too much stress, really bad decisions happen or consequences happen.

And the way you talked about it is like if the world you grew up in from zero, age zero to 25 is radically different than the world you live in at 35, that's not good because your whole life has kind of prepared you to live in a certain environment in a certain way. And then when all of that is changing too quickly. So here's where it took me. I'm not trying to stay in the philosophical. was like, OK, how there's a lot of insight here, but how is this applicable?

And to me, comes from, if a builder has not seen the outcome that they want, that obviously increases stress. The longer that that stress hangs around and that reality hangs around, the more stress builds. At the same time, there's this feeling of a loss of control that steps in at the same moment when...

Everyone is telling you that, you just need a little bit more technology and then you can have control. Like this idea that we are going to change our probabilistic world we live in, that's a fancy way of saying it's chaotic and unpredictable. And I can make everything predictable. Feels so good when you're in your state of stress and feeling like there's all this change that you can't put your hands on, can't really fully understand, you feel disoriented.

Jackie Lipinski (11:04.827)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (11:27.606)
And so that leaves you ripe for this feeling of, you know, the Pied Piper coming along. I don't know the analogy, but the person who's like, can, well, actually it feels like the monorail salesman in like one of the best Simpsons episodes of all time. Monorail, monorail, monorail. Go look that up. It's like, do we need this? I don't know, but we need something. Cause this whole town's just too boring. Let's build a monorail from this questionable company that we have no nothing about, but he sings a good song.

Jackie Lipinski (11:37.894)
Yeah.

DYC Studio (11:55.959)
That's where I leave it. I don't know what to do with that other than I think it helps to be aware that that might be happening. Because what you give your attention to is the most important thing. And this might, that will lead into something we're going to talk about with one of the articles to talk about today is like, can it be true that change is happening and you should mostly still pay attention to the present and the immediate future and not the long-term future?

Jackie Lipinski (12:26.458)
Yeah, I see the problem with some people is your, or some focus, I would say, is that they are either looking at their feet while they're running, which is gonna make them trip, or they're looking so far that it's gonna trip. There's a balance of like looking down and looking forward as you run. And so I think that's the balance in which you were pulled sometimes in marketing too is like, well, we have to be thinking about the future. But if you...

DYC Studio (12:40.878)
and

Jackie Lipinski (12:54.64)
Don't think about the now and what is working or not working. You also can't make adjustments that would be beneficial to you as a company. And I feel like you're right. There are people showing up at doors saying like, we have these amazing AI solutions for you. Use it or lose it, or you're gonna be dated. And that's not really what's working at this time. I know, I think,

Jen Barkett's gonna be doing a webinar here shortly, but they even talked about just these chat bot solutions on builder's websites. And we pulled the data and we're like, it's a terrible experience. And here's why, and here's what the data is showing us. So, you there isn't this balance that's needed that a lot of people are not understanding of looking up and looking down. And...

DYC Studio (13:46.607)
think it's all AI related either. I think it's just distraction. Meaning I know people who they're on their third website, brand new website in four years. And you look at it from the outside and you go, just don't, I mean, yes, everything can get better all the time, but I'm not seeing how this focus and this investment is something that makes sense when you just did that a year and a half ago. Or like you...

Jackie Lipinski (13:48.742)
Okay.

DYC Studio (14:16.364)
pick whatever you want to pick. It's just a lack of focus based upon this sense of control of it. Like, okay, I can't figure out how to get my lead to appointment ratio or appointment to sale ratio to improve, but I can redo my website or, but I can add this new technology on. And I just, again, we, so this, guess leads us into what I wasn't planning to do as our first story. no, I'll come back to it. I like to.

Jackie Lipinski (14:31.557)
Hmm.

Jackie Lipinski (14:45.924)
Okay, teaser.

DYC Studio (14:46.126)
I like to let things simmer. we'll go to the Datos search report, Q3 2025, Behaviors, Trends, and Clicks Across the US and Europe. is a, oh gosh, it's almost 40 pages in length. We have a link in the show notes to the full PDF that you can see in all access, along with some of my takeaways already. So we definitely can't go through all of this, but what...

Datos has done is they're looking at all the data that can be found and deemed trustworthy to say what's really changing when it comes to how consumers are searching. They're not focused on paid search and ads exclusively. What they're focused on is just what is the behavior of consumers? Because I think you've heard it and I've heard a lot of concern again about, well, I think my overall website activity is

Jackie Lipinski (15:37.892)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (15:44.207)
is lowering because people are just using AI tools and they're not going to home builder websites as much. And that might even be true in their own unique circumstances of how they're using the tools. does the data match that or not? so, good.

Jackie Lipinski (16:06.63)
Yeah, I gave the silliest, sometimes I feel like I have to tell the other coaches, I gave the silliest analogy story. Kevin, I think you might appreciate this. Cause I had gotten this email from a builder and the story I gave them was from the movie Joe Dirt. Have you ever seen Joe Dirt? Okay, no worries. There is a gentleman who has a struggling business to sell fireworks and he sells snakes and he sells sparklers.

And Joe Dirt's like, why is your business failing? He's like, well, don't, the guy's like, I don't know why business is failing. And Joe Dirt's like, cause you only sell snakes and sparklers. He's like, well, I like snakes and sparklers. And he's like, it's not about you. It's about your consumer. And that's the whole joke of we're getting people saying, well, I have changed my habits and this is how I perceive the change to happen. So I am going all in on how I search, but are you looking at your data?

And so this builder was like, hey, I'm searching AI first for everything. So let's talk about that and how we can project forward. I'm like, cool, let's look at what we've done. Let's look at what's happening on your website right now. And we'll talk more about the article here, but what we were able to show is less than 1 % of their total traffic in any span was coming from an LLM. And then 10%, 0.1 %

of leads were coming from LLM. So we're like, don't put 50 % of your focus on creating leads from this because that's not what your data is showing you at this time. That's the, that's the, he's running and looking forward, but needs to look at his feet analysis that we're talking about. Like we, let's look at our data. Let's look at our feet. We can project and think forward, but there's a happy medium and looking up and down and you have to think about, it's not you, it's your consumer.

And that's what this report was showing, Kevin, right? It's saying that everyone goes, well, I heard it in the news. I heard it from a friend. This is how everyone is searching now. So I have to be on top of that. But that's not what the results are showing, right?

DYC Studio (18:12.288)
No, not at all. And I would, again, recommend that everyone go grab a copy of this in All Access. But essentially, I'll just share some of the main takeaways that I have from it and get your thoughts. The first, like you said, is that search volume is stable. The amount of activity happening on Google, in particular, is essentially flat year over year.

Jackie Lipinski (18:39.302)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (18:40.588)
That means that anyone who's talking about traditional search or Google search is dying should be like, like why, why would, what's their motivation for telling me this? There has to be an innate motivation because what they're doing when they're saying that is if not an outright deception, a cleverly worded, carefully worded where like they're not technically lying that maybe there's been some little movement.

but that search is dead or dying, again, it's looking way too far in the future. So again, for clarity, because people who do say this like to kind of throw it back at us and be like, well, just, they don't want things to change. They want it to stay the same or pretend like it's the same. No, what I'm saying is that from the time the internet was invented to the time that Zillow like got.

Usage the population of the size of the state of the population of Mexico was a long time. And so if you would have in 1988 said, hey, there's this thing called the Internet and we need to shut down all of our retail stores and stop advertising and anything but billboard services, dial-up billboard services around the United States. You would have gone out of business and

So it's just, it is going to keep changing, but the hype about how fast it's changing leads into the narrative of people who are trying to sell you something, not the people, like I get, we don't make money off of any recommendations we make. We don't get a percentage of ad spend that someone chooses to invest in digital marketing. So we don't have a dog in the hunt here.

It's so fun to be able to tell people, you have enough opportunity with $5,000 less of what you're spending, so you can go use that money to spend and fix a different problem. That's wildly different than a traditional agency whose model is you need to spend more, you need to spend more, more, more, more, because it's good for them. Either it makes them feel more necessary to you, or they're outright getting a cut in terms of how everything is processed. The second is that

DYC Studio (21:04.426)
The real decline in website traffic from search is mostly to do with Google providing direct answers. Or you could say, and they've been doing this for a long time in different forms, but they stepped up more with AI overviews. If you're asking a factual question that's relatively straightforward and Google believes it can answer with a summary, instead of taking them off of Google, they just give you the answer.

Jackie Lipinski (21:31.963)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (21:32.333)
And so your enemy is potentially the way that you have, like the strategy you've been using of like, let's get all the questions people would ask that like at the very early part of their search where they just be like, how do you buy a new home from a builder? And you might have a blog post and an FAQ section and all the rest. That is now less important.

Jackie Lipinski (21:56.368)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (22:00.738)
in terms of traffic because they're probably just gonna get the answer. And the reason Google does just give them the answer is because they want them to ask another question and spend more time on Google, which is actually what's happening. The number of Google searches continue to increase year over year, not decrease, despite the fact that less traffic is being sent away from the platform.

Jackie Lipinski (22:12.006)
Thank you.

Jackie Lipinski (22:21.392)
Yeah, it's the zero click content theory. They're just trying to solve an answer. And going back to the data and the data we're seeing, people are still taking action on your website. They're still digesting your content. You still need to focus on adding those details to your website because you ideally want to be the source. So you want to focus your energy to answer them, but just understand that the

like the attribution element of it will be more gray. And that's just something you might have to be understanding and okay with. And there are some things that, you know, we like when a marketer teams up with the online sales specialist and you're like, yeah, I've gotten this question 10 times in last 10 days. Like there could be a solution in there for, you know, marketing, adding some details to the website. But in terms of people changing their habits, we are still

at the beginning stages. And I think a lot of people, because of how much news is out there, think we're at the end stages. And it's like, no, no, no, we're still there. I mean, I remember when every builder in the world wanted to have glasses for the virtual, what was that, like Facebook world, the metaverse. And everyone's like, this is it. This is the next thing. Now, I'm not saying that with LLMs and chat GBTs and how things are searched, but it is like, don't.

DYC Studio (23:36.428)
Metaverse.

Jackie Lipinski (23:48.199)
don't put all your eggs in the same basket. Like you have to diversify. And that actually comes to the top domains visited by desktops for traditional search engines. It talks about 2024 versus 2025, and they really haven't budged at all.

DYC Studio (24:01.55)
No. And later on, there's a really interesting graphic too about the categorization of the search intent of Q3 2024 compared to 2025. I'm just going to look at Google. They look at all the main platforms. But Google had 62.5 % of all searches done had the goal of seeking information about a topic. So broad top of funnel type stuff. And in 2025, it's it.

Jackie Lipinski (24:25.254)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (24:30.754)
dropped to 62.2%, 3 % from 62.5. The next category is seeking information about a commercial product or service. That would be like Home Builders Near Me or New Homes In. That actually increased from 18.7 % of searches to 19.75. And so like even like how people are using it, because this would be an early sign, I guess, if things were changing faster.

Jackie Lipinski (24:45.008)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (24:59.572)
is the categorization of the types of searches people are doing would be shifting. What I mean is, if you're like, okay, I don't search anymore, I just go into chat GPT or perplexity or whatever, and I do all of my initial seeking information about a topic searches there, then that percentage of search intent would be shifting. This might not make sense while looking at the graph, but here's the four categories that are basically all about the same within a point or two. Seeking information about a topic,

seeking information about a commercial product or service, navigating to a particular website. Again, a lot of people just get to sites by Googling them. Still, they don't type in the domain. And the fourth one is intending to purchase a particular product or service. And that actually has increased on Google, not decreased, which again, the narrative would say that there's fewer people intending to purchase a particular product or service, because they're just going to do all the research on a different LLM tool.

Jackie Lipinski (25:39.312)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (25:59.695)
And then, and now, of course, you can just purchase it straight through that tool. So they're not even going to come. They're not going to. And what's again interesting is intended to purchase, and yet they're not just typing in the domain. here's what I mean. Sorry, this is so awesome and yet so difficult to describe in audio only. If I researched Home Builders for an hour in Chat GPT,

And then they finally said, here's the one. And I had intent to purchase a particular product or service in that category. If I click the link in ChatGPT, I'm not doing a Google search. So it wouldn't be in this data. Does that make sense? Like, this is people who just go on to Google as a search engine and with intent to purchase say, this is what I want. And then Google delivers it. And then they go to the site. anyway, we.

We could go through this forever. Two more quick things. Or maybe one more. We'll just do one more. The data also shows that when people use search the way that they are, which is again, 95 % Google, the top exit points from Google to other places on the internet are the following. YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia, Facebook, and Instagram.

TikTok holds number eight and Walmart is number 15. So when people do this first category, which has the largest seeking information about a topic searches, it's either giving them a zero click answer or it's telling them, here's where you can go watch videos about that on YouTube and consumers are clicking it. Here's where you can go read about that and ask questions and interact with a community on Reddit and they're going there. Here's where you can go.

add to cart and purchase this, Amazon. Here's where you can go learn from a more factually correct source, Wikipedia. And yet, so many builders don't have robust YouTube strategies, even fewer if any have a strategy on Reddit whatsoever. And yet, that's where they're most likely, they're not gonna go to your FAQ page, most likely. They're gonna go end up on YouTube or Reddit.

Jackie Lipinski (28:19.994)
Yeah, I'll even put things in Google, like best home builder area, Reddit, because I want to see un-builder biased opinions certain times. So I think there is value in that. And one of my favorite builders who actually is thinking about Reddit and Reddit marketing is they are less the voice needs to come from us, but the voice needs to come from our champions. And our champions, they've determined, are their home buyers having great experiences?

who then have influence. in terms of your marketing budget, that's not really, it's hard to articulate that, but it's also about that customer experience is part of your brand and it helps build those champions on those platforms. So there's a balance of marketing, there's a balance of outsharding bad reviews, and there's a balance of creating those champions through just relationship building and great experiences that needs to be factored into. But I would say any marketer who thinks in the next,

six months you're going to get roasted on LLM or search or things like this. It is a beefy PDF. It is going to empower you extensively to read this. So don't discredit it. Don't put it in chat, GBT, and have it write a summary for you. Go into this one. It is valuable.

DYC Studio (29:38.479)
Okay, so let's just take a little aside, a little palate cleanser before we go on. And I shared this with our team in Slack, but I got an email from a lovely lady named Allison, and it made it through my spam filter, so good for her. It says, Dear Kevin, I'm Allison from Passport Title Services, and I wrote you a poem. In Pennsylvania, where dreams take flight. It still thinks whatever she did. Anyway.

I don't live in Pennsylvania anymore. I was in Pennsylvania. Kevin Oakley crafts homes with pure delight. At Do You Convert, your designs shine bright, turning visions to reality, a true guiding light. But when it comes to titles, don't stress or fret. Passport titles here, your perfectly safety net, your perfect safety net. Let's partner together, your success is near. At Passport, we help attorneys and small title agencies handle, then like, would you like to find out how to partner together to achieve this goal? Cheers, Allison.

I'm 99 % sure later today or this weekend I'm going to reply back with a poem that says how your AI is, your approach to use AI in a creative way sucks. Cheers, Kevin. Just to have fun with her. I doubt she'll read it because apparently she doesn't have time to do any part of this process manually. But it's just like, wow.

Promise you Allison is on a panel somewhere in title service industry land talking about how she sent out a thousand emails while taking her kids to daycare without having to lift a finger and how smart all this is. All right.

Jackie Lipinski (31:23.462)
This email though, I love how you're like, how would you respond to this and perspective, but I don't know why this article I read years ago still comes to mind where it was scammers specifically send mistyped words and emails because they're looking for the suckers. And so to me, this reads as not you responding with AI, but like, yes, they're already impressed.

DYC Studio (31:38.811)
yeah, to trigger people.

Jackie Lipinski (31:53.711)
if I did this, so anything I do will impress them if you don't have enough thought inside. But no, I agree. you can't write a... As soon as I read something that I feel like is AI in an email, I don't even read the rest. throw it in spam folder, so kudos to you for reading this. It is creative. It is different, but it doesn't... I feel like it's more like cool. Everyone's being cheesy, so...

DYC Studio (32:16.93)
Yeah. All right. One more article and then a tease, and we will wrap it for this episode. The next article from do you convert dot com is by Brandt on our team about posting to Google business profiles and untapped realm in the building industry. And I mean, it's a good headline. I'm not sure if it's completely untapped, but most builders don't do it. I just for fun.

Well, we should talk about quickly what we're talking about. In your Google Business profile, you can post updates. And he recommends doing things like showcasing new model homes, highlighting available QMI houses, educational content, promoting different amenities, almost like a call out. And I did a little search for poultry homes near me, found a communities listing, and

Jackie Lipinski (32:46.79)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (33:13.774)
to the point of it's not untapped, but almost no one does it. It appears like Pulte did it for about a year and then stopped in 2024 because there was regular posting updates as Brandt is describing. And then someone somewhere said, no, not worth the time and stopped doing it. However, what was really interesting to me, and I'm not picking on Pulte, it's just what I saw, is that all of the content updates that were pushed

Jackie Lipinski (33:17.552)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (33:42.595)
were kind of super high level, corporaty, like here's why we're great. It wasn't about what you would want to see on a listing page for a community, which is the stuff that Brant's talking about. Specific homes, specific floor plans, specific incentives potentially, if that's your thing. was a mismatch of the kind of, but.

Jackie Lipinski (33:46.544)
Mm.

DYC Studio (34:08.994)
But again, I'm sure from policies perspective, like, what are we really are gonna, and this is where again, it's tempting like, is AI the answer? I need to push updates on a regular basis at the community level when I have 600 communities. How do I manage that well?

Jackie Lipinski (34:28.71)
Yeah, I think it's a great tool and it is one of those things where sometimes you're like, how do I beat the big guys? And over and over again, it is through frequency, through trust and through information. Like nothing takes personalization too. Yeah. What, what takes down trust is you visit a builder site or there's like, I just went to a website this week and it was like the last blog post on this website was from, I think it was like June. I was like, Oh, well.

DYC Studio (34:40.258)
Yeah, personalization too.

Jackie Lipinski (34:55.48)
I don't trust them to have updated information, but if you're seeing that they're searching these communities or things are showing up and you're seeing very updated things about the posts, I think you're so little builders are focusing on it or have this as an action item within their list of things to do that it's just, it's really low hanging fruit. And one of the things he talked about and discussed with Brent too is

this is information that is grabbed by the LLMs. This is like, yeah, these events are coming up. you're gonna wanna do this. here's what we can tell you about that information. So don't discredit how valuable it might be. Don't put it as number one priority. We have to do other things, but make sure it is on your list to be checking. The locations are accurate. The addresses are accurate. And I think when I chatted with him, we were talking like once every two weeks as a...

check box of making sure something is new on that would be something that he would recommend. So you don't need to have a whole new employee. And Kevin, what came to my mind is when you said it stops, that to me is like someone left who was responsible for that. And they're like, OK, we're done. But there is absolutely value with maximizing your updates and having a third party or brand but brand adjacent informational portal.

for people to get this content and context from.

DYC Studio (36:19.064)
Yeah. Yep. All right. We're going to link to a post by Seth Godin talking about trust and its importance. For sake of time, we won't go down that entire path. But essentially, his argument is trust is the thing that's being hacked in today's world the most, quote unquote, effectively by AI tools and by our

Jackie Lipinski (36:40.134)
Mm-hmm.

DYC Studio (36:48.854)
Again, fake connection that we call connection. So I'll just read the opening two lines here, talk about a little bit more and then we'll move on to one last thing. The first, the others in the village, trusting that you could get a good night's sleep, trusting that what you heard is true. We've expanded the village from 20 people to billions. And what he's saying is like, everyone's hacking this feeling of, I'm connected to them on LinkedIn and...

all of a sudden whatever they say like can affect me and we don't fully understand. I'm gonna go a different direction actually as I'm saying this out loud since we're not gonna cover the whole thing. There's a gentleman named Ethan Malik who I recommend you follow on LinkedIn if you don't. Ironic that I'm telling you to follow someone as I just talked about like the dangers of following too many. But he shows this incredible graph that

shows the length of proposals in words, pre-LLMs and post-LLMs. His example would be like proposal of a cover letter to be hired or to take on a job. So like you might have a boilerplate section of a contract or proposal, like the part of the front that's personalized per one. Prior to LLMs, the average length of those proposals were about 70 words.

Now, the average length of those proposals is about 160. And his point in sharing that graph and the change is that there used to be this symbol of how much someone would write about something was an indication or a signal to us about how much thought they put into something. And now that is no longer a valid signal. Does that make sense? you know what I'm trying to say?

Jackie Lipinski (38:44.464)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

DYC Studio (38:46.402)
And that's just one example of all these ways where it's gonna get you these little wins in the short term, but cess point is in the long term, no one cares what anyone writes about for the most part, because it's no longer a signal. It almost made me think like the signal today is being on stage talking to people or one-on-one talking to people or in small groups talking to people because that's clearly real. And then,

The other part of my brain said, yeah, but there's a lot of people today who just simply pay either with their outsourced influence or monetarily pay to promote an event or be part of an event so that they can also speak at it. that even like, it kind of goes back to what Seth's talking about of this hijacking of signal of what to trust and who to trust that I just find really interesting and compelling since I feel like we've turned the corner on people broadly realizing, Jackie, that trust is critical to marketing success.

Jackie Lipinski (39:42.673)
Yeah. Well, even I see it with the OSCs where they'll write a note like this person is very, like the park is very important to them. And then referencing that park again, people just want to feel heard, you know? And I think that's extremely valuable. In fact, I actually wrote an email today about a Looker Studio report and I was like, hey, I'd love to beef this up for you. And it was like, would you like to change this to this lengthy thing and a corporate term? And I was like, no, I would say let's beef this up. Like, I feel like that is my voice. So I want to make sure.

DYC Studio (40:10.648)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Jackie Lipinski (40:11.59)
I think that's what it is. It's a flattening of information. Bore was people too. So you have to be unique, but uniquely you. So, which is a hard balance.

DYC Studio (40:22.05)
Yeah, and you've referenced this before too, where just reminding everyone, like implicitly, I'm a real person. You know, it's...

Jackie Lipinski (40:29.914)
Yes. The amount of OSDs who say, hey, I'm a real person. This is not an AI video. Like I'm here to help you. Luxury is the definition of utilization of someone's time. Like we are in this together. That makes people feel seen. don't think. I think it's the balance of trust too, if they see a builder taking shortcuts here in this communication level, where else are they taking shortcuts? And so there could be just underlying.

DYC Studio (40:36.856)
Yeah.

Jackie Lipinski (40:56.646)
that gets broken immediately that we just want to continue. So, but I love Seth Godin. He's a goat.

DYC Studio (41:03.918)
I'll probably post this on All Access just because it's fun to do. it was pretty common for a long time to people say, how did you get that artificial background that's in your videos? And then I would do this and I'd walk.

DYC Studio (41:22.314)
come back and you can just tell like instantly the assumption was that's not real. It looks quote unquote too good, you know, and then when I would do that, they just be like, wow, and I'm not saying that translates into anything other than like even. I would say my guess you can fact check me live here, Jackie, and then we'll wrap up my.

Jackie Lipinski (41:45.53)
Commitment. Yeah.

DYC Studio (41:49.929)
My guess would be that 90 % of Do You Convert employees use a real background on their calls, maybe more. And it just is kind of hitting me now even that, like that's kind of cool because so many people that you interact with or hop on calls today, their background's all artificial. And even that is kind of the strange signal of why.

Jackie Lipinski (41:58.779)
Mm-hmm.

Jackie Lipinski (42:15.332)
It's like holding your phone when you're talking to someone, you know you don't have, like, I don't know. I think it's an underlying distrust that is powered of this person could be anywhere. And when you can be honest with someone in very simple ways, like that oddly does build up trust. So we do it few and far between where we have fake backgrounds, but that's why, like there is beauty in...

saying things like you would say things and being real to yourself. In fact, I posted something on LinkedIn and one of my friends texted me and they're like, I could tell, I just want to tell you, I know when you write your things, like that is your voice. And I was like, thank you. That is strange, but I love that you said that because there is value in being uniquely you and even saying beefed up Looker Studio report is valuable to how people interpret how you.

provide them info. So I think as builders.

DYC Studio (43:12.696)
All right, here's the hook, the big tease, so you pay attention to the channels in your podcast feed. I've been asked to do it, so I will. There's this little kind of, I guess, scandal is a word you could use going on right now around Matterport tours, homes.com, slash, CoStar, and Zillow.

I've had builders sending me all different letters and communications and drama, Inman's done reporting and everything, but I will be recording a solo episode just kind of sharing my thoughts and perspectives on what's happening and what might be happening that people aren't talking about. So stay tuned.

Jackie Lipinski (44:00.23)
It'll be fun.

DYC Studio (44:02.296)
All right, that's it for this one. We'll see you next time.

Jackie Lipinski (44:05.03)
Keep it going.