2357 - How Passion Fuels Business Innovation with Smartfinds Internet Marketing's Melih Oztalay

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0:46Josh Elledge:Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now is Meili Oztalay. Meili, you are the CEO and founder of Smart Finds Marketing. Your website is smartfindsmarketing.com. Meili, thank you so much for joining us.

1:09Melih Oztalay:Great to be on your show, Josh. Thanks a lot.

1:12Josh Elledge:Well, you know, before we start talking about the work that you do, and I always love talking with marketing geniuses, but before we get into that, and by the way, I'm going to point out you work with some really big companies. So I'm really interested in hearing some of your insights. I always love finding out what high-level leaders do for fun when they're not at work. What have you been into lately?

1:33Melih Oztalay:So what am I into lately? So first of all, I should say I'm an avid soccer fan. I used to be an old, I used to be a soccer player way back when until I ended up with a really bad injury. but outside of that I did pick up tango dancing to kind of mix things up and I certainly love skiing so I've been skiing since what since I've been seven years old something like that so so it's been a long time but I like I like being active I don't like sitting around doing nothing

2:04Josh Elledge:yeah yeah so uh when as a soccer fan now or a you know a football fan um who who do you have a favorite team are you following them or you just kind of do you follow a local nowadays i'm kind of

2:17Melih Oztalay:you know the good news is nowadays you can follow country and country by country right so um definitely you know the spanish teams um madrid barcelona your standard um you got your german teams frankfurt bayern munich right keep track of those guys um and uh outside of that i follow Brazil, Italy, and England a lot as well. Now you're going to say to me, well, why aren't you following Messi and the guys down in Miami? I'm a Floridian, I was going to ask. I kind of follow them. Not quite as much as I do the European guys, though.

2:58Josh Elledge:Well, it's just really, really quick. Do you mind talking about the difference between American and European leagues and just like what the fan experience is? Yeah, I think it's a different...

3:09Melih Oztalay:So, you know, the UK fans, a whole different ballgame, right? You can't compare them to anything else that's out there. In the core of Europe, the fan bases tends to be about the same across the board. And the type of playing is relatively consistent in terms of how the teams play and their strategies and the way that they move the ball. The US is different. I mean, I started getting into the U.S. soccer arena back in 81, and it was really early on. And really, it talked about being in its infancy, even though they tried a lot of different things. Nowadays, it's so much more advanced, so much better.

3:56Melih Oztalay:And you can see the U.S. team is involved in, you know, the World Cups nowadays. The U.S. teams are making it through the ranks to even qualify for the World Cup. So that's a good thing. These are all things heading in the right direction. It's still not quite the same that you would see in European soccer. But what's really fun to watch is Brazilian soccer. These guys move the ball like you wouldn't believe. It's a lot of fun.

4:22Josh Elledge:I mean, even if you do nothing, just watching them play, it's a lot of fun.

4:27Melih Oztalay:It really is. It's just a different style of playing.

4:30Josh Elledge:I tell you, I've been to several Orlando City games. And as much as I like watching the game, the fans are probably at least half the fans. I agree. Let's talk about your work with Smart Finds Marketing. Congratulations on over 21 years. That is a lot of longevity. You've seen a lot of stuff.

4:58Melih Oztalay:Yeah. The corporation is actually 38 years old. We started in 87 and we've had three different brands over the years, SmartFinds being our latest brand that started in 2004. Prior to that, we also had an ISP group, Speedlink Internet Solutions in the Detroit metro area. And then going back to 87 through 2004, we had just traditional advertising and sales and that type of thing. But obviously all the budget moved to the Internet. We moved right along with it. And we're up and running since 2004 with SmartFinds. Um, we are a, uh, I've got a team of 25. So we've got tech, we got marketing, we got writers, uh, we have creative, um, everybody's in the Detroit Metro area.

5:43Melih Oztalay:My current team, short of the financial crisis of 2009 and 10, uh, the current team has been working together now for 14 years, uh, which is, uh, quite a long time. Um, and there's, we're a B2B marketing agency. There's very little that we don't do nowadays. And of course, as you can imagine, we use all the regular strategies that are in the marketplace today, which includes artificial intelligence, whether some people like it or not.

6:14Josh Elledge:You've worked with some really big kind of legacy enterprise level brands, BASF, Penske, Wendy's, Z-Bart, Union Pacific. How, what is it like as an agency or consultancy working with some of these much, much larger brands as opposed to, you know, maybe doing work? I'm sure you've done plenty of SMB work as well.

6:40Melih Oztalay:Sure. I mean, usually what happens with the SMB work is they tend to be referrals from our large corporations, especially like we used to work with McCann Erickson, you know, which is a large ad agency, a global ad agency. and our client there would call me up and say, hey, I need you to help this company, which is kind of code for you don't have a choice. You're gonna help this company. And so we've been down that road. But the biggest difference is the level of sophistication. The level of sophistication of understanding what is an expense versus what's an investment. Your marketing is an investment.

7:24Melih Oztalay:Your advertising is an expense. Your investment into your brand, into your company never stops. It just keeps going. The advertising, you start and stop however you want to, whenever you want to. Larger companies tend to understand this, and working with them to be proponents with is less stressful. Smaller businesses who are struggling, especially with their cash flow, with their revenues, with their sales, don't have that luxury of putting the investment in place. And with that, of course, their expectation on that investment tends to be yesterday. So it's a lot more stressful working with small businesses, let's say, less than 5 million, maybe even less than 10 million.

8:15Melih Oztalay:whereas larger companies, let's say 100 million plus, the interaction is so much different and you're still responsible for results, don't get me wrong, but how we get there, it has a different flavor in terms of the process, the way the teams work, the way the teams communicate, the process of making time to review the project. making time to have weekly meetings, right? Whereas when you're dealing with the smaller businesses, they don't make that time or if they think they want to make that time, they put it in the calendar and then last minute it gets canceled. Something else came up and you're up in a different direction.

9:00Melih Oztalay:So I'm giving you just bits and pieces of examples in terms of working with the smaller end versus the larger end. And the difference is the level of sophistication, the expectations, and how the project progresses. That's the big difference.

9:23Josh Elledge:Well, you know, at the SMB level, a lot of times, you know, your top level leaders are just, you know, they have so many responsibilities. You know, the bigger you get, you can start now. They have one hat after another, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, at those large levels, you can have one person is just an absolute best at the world at one very specific process or something like that. So that's always a luxury to have. So obviously, AI is a part of what you, you know, you do and you leverage AI platforms. Give us a little bit of a quick state of the union of what you've been seeing this year up until now.

10:02Josh Elledge:I mean, we're getting, you know, we're now approaching 2026. So where do you see the ball headed when it comes to that intersection between AI and marketing?

10:14Melih Oztalay:Yeah, I think I would say that 2025 has been the one year where the amount of AI being used in multiple segments of business has just ballooned. It's just all, it's literally, it's all over the board. And that all happened this year, 2024, 23, both those years were kind of like AI is working its way into it. I think we've all seen that there's more investment going into AI-related startups and more funding in that direction. I mean, just look around the buildings that are being built nowadays to support AI. It's not just football-sized facilities, it's even larger than that. And so the energy infrastructure has to go along with it.

11:02Melih Oztalay:There's all these different things going in that direction. Now, you might have heard, especially in the last month, there's a lot of talk about the AI bubble. I'm not suggesting it doesn't exist. I just don't know how much larger it's going to get before it pops. I think it has a little ways to go. I'm not sure that it's quite there yet. But if we take a look down the road, an area that I would suggest a lot of businesses to really engage in are the AI agents and the workflows. Use the AI workflows to help you become more efficient in your day. Have them do all the mundane things that you may not have time for or, for that matter, you shouldn't have time for.

11:48Melih Oztalay:Just let something else do it. It's not even about hiring a virtual assistant anymore. Use AI workflows to get the things done that you want done. Yes, does it take a little bit of work to set it up? But yeah, if you set up one agent a week, you're done, right? I mean, how much, you know, you're going to find that you're going to have more time because the AI agent's taking care of it for you. So as we go into 26, especially as the world of AI agents has grown and the workflow process has grown, that's where I think things need to move on as we go into the new year.

12:25Josh Elledge:Uh, mainly, um, you talk about AI agent, agentic AI, what are like one, two, one or two applications that you think, um, SMBs could be leveraging agentic AI. And if you could differentiate just a little bit of like exactly what that means, you know, what should they be using these agents put to work on? Like, what are some examples of, of tasks that are, do you think are just kind of a no brainer at this stage?

12:51Melih Oztalay:Yeah, I mean, I think the simple side of this would be, first of all, your website. You can install an AI chatbot that helps you become, you know, it becomes your sales agent.

13:06Melih Oztalay:That's number one, okay? Use a chatbot in your website. It's an easy item. It's an easy process. and it falls into the space of agentic AI, meaning autonomous agents. That's the idea, right? Autonomous agents where you have it learn and with limited human supervision, I should say, being able to do the work for you. Yeah.

13:37Josh Elledge:I have one on my website. In fact, to our friends that are listening, You can go to Up My Influence and see. So I loaded it with hundreds of pages of transcripts of conversations and trainings and like our entire library. So you can go and talk to virtual. I call it Josh GPT. So you can go and talk to Josh at three in the morning and ask your deepest, darkest questions about my area of expertise. But I'm sorry, Maylee. I just wanted to validate. That's an easy one. That's an easy one. That's a no-brainer. And quite frankly, I think at the level which people expect now to engage with AI for the answers that they need, I think we are soon going to get to a point where if you don't have a chat bot on your website, people are going to be like, why not?

14:23Josh Elledge:I don't want to talk to a real human yet.

14:27Melih Oztalay:Well, you just nailed it. You said the word yet. That's an important factor over here. People that come to your website, and I'm talking about B2B websites, they usually make three to five visits before they make a decision. Okay, that's number one. Number two is if you can get past the first visit and they're coming back a second one, they will come back a third, fourth, and a fifth. But in the second visit, and maybe even a third visit, they're still not ready to talk to you. But they want more information about you. And that word you just used, yet, is so critical on a website that a chatbot becomes that tool for that person to at least gather some additional information, see if they're comfortable with the results of what the answers are, and then be able to move through the process of getting used to you and trusting you.

15:18Melih Oztalay:And so the chatbot is the easiest thing to add to your website. The other one I'm going to suggest, which is also on your website, is there are different AI tools that help to increase the lead generation. In other words, and I'm just throwing out a number, you're getting 100 visitors to your website, you're getting 10 leads. With the AI agent, you could bump that up to 30 out of the 100. That's the difference over here with the AI agent. The AI agent that handles conversion rate optimization, it has an entirely different job. It's creating a journey funnel for the visitor. And each visitor, based on where they are in that journey funnel, if the AI decides, it will feed an active call to action to that visitor for them to whatever, watch a video, send in information, provide them an offer if they sign up.

16:14Melih Oztalay:I don't know. Take your pick. right it and i say active because every other call to action that we have on a web page in other words a button that we're asking somebody to click that's a passive call to action because you're waiting for that person to do something in this case the ai is actively feeding that person regardless of where they are on the website something that says go do this so those are the two those are two very simple examples and they're out there that you can use to attach to your website or, you know, add to your website using a plugin, whatever the case might look like.

16:50Josh Elledge:Yeah. And mainly part of your agency or part of SmartFinds is you can implement that for your clients?

16:55Melih Oztalay:Yes, absolutely. We do already.

16:58Josh Elledge:Yeah. Share just a little bit more about like what SmartFinds does. And then, you know, we'll make sure that folks know how to get in touch with you as well. So I would say that you have to look at us as an omni-channel marketing company.

17:11Melih Oztalay:In other words, we're not here to say all we do for you is lead generation because that doesn't always work. You know, we've had a scenario where I got a case study where we did 198 % in lead generation for a client year over year, only to find out that the sales team was cherry picking the entire list. And we're wondering why they're not closing our accounts. Okay. So my point, though, is that you need a nominee channel marketing program because you need to hit the market from different sides, right? Is it press release? Is it PR? Is it content marketing? Is it social media? Is it LinkedIn? Is it email marketing?

17:52Melih Oztalay:Is it your website? Is it the AI tools? What is it that's going to help to generate the responses? Do you use things like Zoom Info and the intent-based marketing platforms where you can identify people that might be interested in what you're doing? My point is you hit the market from all angles. That's what we do best. Trying to come to us and say, just do this one little service. Yeah, we can do it. But is it going to get the results that you're looking for? And the answer is no. You do need to hit the market from multiple angles. You have to hit the market in different areas because you don't know where your clients are going to be and at what point are they going to find you and say, yes, I want to talk to you.

18:36Melih Oztalay:So for our purposes, we hit the market simultaneously from multiple directions. And that's why I call us a 360 marketing agency. We're a B2B marketing agency. and it's up to us to put the strategies together, meet with our clients on a week-to-week basis, communicate on an ongoing basis, make sure everybody knows what we're doing. We know what the client's doing, what they're seeing. They hear from us as far as what we're seeing and it's a constant improvement process to make sure that the marketing project keeps rolling and keeps improving and keeps getting better and better and better until we can hit the goals and the KPIs that everybody's looking for.

19:19Josh Elledge:Maylee, again, your website is smartfindsmarketing.com. When somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do?