Suzette Bailey, CEO and Co-Founder of SimpleMarketing.AI & CEO of Sensory7 Pty Ltd
Suzette Bailey is the CEO and Co-Founder of SimpleMarketing.AI and CEO of Sensory7 Pty Ltd.
Suzette is a bioscience graduate who built a successful multi-million dollar Australian IT company, which celebrated its 21st birthday last year as a recognised leader in delivering information and records management services to government and businesses.
In 2020, Suzette co-founded an AI startup to support small businesses with content marketing, a challenge that she also faced.
As a CEO, she has led the development of an AI Content Engine, which generates unique and original marketing content. Their AI content engine writes a range of content for their customers, including blog, LinkedIn and Facebook posts.
“Success to me is a very personal thing. It is being at a point where you are comfortable in your own shoes and life. If you are comfortable with who you are and what you are doing, I feel you've succeeded in life.”
Suzette Bailey
Suzette Bailey, LinkedIn
As a recognised expert in systems thinking for 20 years, Suzette has helped hundreds of large organisations to restructure and automate their systems to cut costs and refocus staff on higher-value tasks.
About five years ago, she tried to reposition Sensory7 to help small business owners systemise their operations. Suzette developed strong networks in the personal development industry but didn't break-through with her offer.
She learned a lot about the struggle small businesses experience trying to produce the volume of marketing content required to attract and engage customers.
"Most have to learn marketing alongside learning to run their business, which takes time. Writing marketing content consistently is hard and can take a small business owner over 50 days effort annually to manage active social media channels plus a blog, taking their focus from working in, or on, their business." She says.
Suzette used her systems expertise and experience to build SimpleMarketing.AI for these small businesses, designing it from the ground up to help them market consistently and successfully.
Tell us about your current role and what you like about your career/role or areas of focus.
I'm currently CEO and Co-founder of SimpleMarketing AI and the Managing Director of Sensory7, my IT consultancy business.
When looking at my role at SimpleMarketing.AI, I enjoy the opportunity to support millions of business owners globally to be more successful in their businesses by using our AI to generate marketing content.
In my Sensory7 business, I have built a strong reputation, and that business is the 'go to' for Australian government agencies seeking support with their information management, so they don't need to market. But when I tried to expand that business to support business owners with information management and systemisation, I ran into the content marketing dilemma.
While I have 21 years of demonstrable experience and had built a multi-million dollar business in the information management area, I struggled to write relevant on-point marketing content for business customers consistently and found that a combination of the blank page syndrome and lack of time made it difficult for me to gain traction, attention and business customers.
I did work with many business owners in a similar situation. Finally, with SimpleMarketing.AI, I am able to address this issue for other businesses and myself by using AI to generate relevant original content. In a second, that would have taken me agonising days.
In your opinion, what do you think it takes to be a business owner and which challenges come from an SMB/Start-up?
In my opinion and experience, business owners' biggest challenge in a small business or start-up is setting and working towards clear and measurable goals.
Some business owners find it easy to set the goals but difficult to stick to them with all the distractions facing business owners. Others have fantastic focus but struggle to set appropriately ambitious and measurable goals for their business and themselves.
Personally, I like to work collaboratively and via masterminds to both set and stay focused on my goals as the external accountability helps me stay on target. The other major challenge I find in small and start-up businesses is staying focused at the business strategy level rather than getting down into the business's weeds.
I have found that many business owners get very involved in the operations and lose sight of their business's big picture. This shows up often where they are practitioners and love using their tools. This is a challenge I have faced myself in the past and learnt from. Sometimes you must step back and allow your team to face the challenges.
Finally, and this is something I hope I am helping to solve, it can be a major challenge in small businesses and start-ups to simultaneously work on existing client work and undertake the right level of promotion to attract new customers.
There may seem to not be enough time in the day to do the work and generate new business. This is where my new AI company is already helping business owners get more efficient with their content marketing, generating marketing content in minutes rather than hours or days to focus on doing a great job with their current clients while continuing to attract and engage new ones with content.
How do you come across the idea of your business and why?
Developing marketing content is a bugbear for many small business owners and start-ups, and it is even challenging in bigger businesses with marketing teams and agencies. I faced a challenge when I decided to pivot my information management business five years ago, from working with the government to work with business owners.
I did lots of digital marketing courses and programmes. I technically learned many tricks for developing sales funnels, lead pages, email sequences and continually attracting and engaging potential customers via content marketing.
However, I failed to put these strategies into practice. At one stage, I was signing seven-figure deals with major government departments but losing sleep at night because I wasn't able to sell a $500 course to small business customers.
Knowing content marketing strategies isn't the same as implementing these strategies, and at the time, I refocused back on the government market where I could generate referral business easily without content marketing.
Last year, when I saw the release of GPT-3 from OpenAI, an Elon Musk backed company, and saw what this AI could do to generate human-level content, I saw the opportunity.
I could see how this AI could help solve the content marketing challenge for millions of businesses globally, as it could solve it for me. With Covid-19 running around the world even more, businesses were being forced to move all their marketing engagement online, and they didn't have the skills or the funds to access the skills for it.
I convinced my husband, who worked in a senior role at a global IT consultancy and had a digital marketing background, to join me, and we recruited a third technical co-founder a few months later.
Due to my past failure and my other experience, I had a very deep understanding of the issues at play here. So, I coupled that with my experience with government and corporations around managing big systems thinking information and how people process.
I could see the synergies and the potential. I could see how we could solve this fundamental problem: small business and start-up's face of having very limited resources but needing to continually attract and engage customers, which has led me to today.
What is your project/company's mission, and how do you see it changing in the future?
Our mission, our goal, is really clear. It is to empower businesses to successfully and consistently attract and engage their customers via marketing content.
Our AI Content Engine supports them in generating the content up to a good first draft level, cutting the time they spend writing content enormously and focusing their time on edits and refinements that add huge value.
The rest of our service addresses the next challenge businesses face. In a world where AI can generate all the content your business needs to promote itself, how do you use that content effectively to attract and engage customers?
This is a challenge we don't see other AI content solutions really addressing yet. We also see them focusing on digital agencies and copywriters who understand marketing and copy.
Our focus has been on the 540 million businesses globally without strong marketing or IT knowledge. So we have created a Content Marketing Academy where we provide our paid users with courses and tools to help them use the content they generate effectively to win business, make sales and be more successful.
If we can use this approach to reduce the failure rate for businesses, particularly those impacted by Covid-19, I will be thrilled.
What is your favourite social media platform, and why?
Until recently, I had never found social media comfortable or very useful. I had a solid but small network on LinkedIn, hadn't used Facebook for several years and wasn't active on Instagram or Twitter.
My business was built on relationships formed in face-to-face meetings rather than on posts and videos. However, late last year, I discovered Clubhouse, and I love it as a platform.
The audio-based real-time nature of the platform speaks to how I like to build business relationships. I joke that my role now is to be on Clubhouse all the time, building business partnerships and sourcing customer feedback.
As background, Clubhouse is a new audio-only social media platform receiving enormous buzz globally through creating FOMO by being invitation-only and only working on Apple's IOS devices.
It has attracted huge names to talk on the platform, such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, while claiming a number of celebrities using the platform, such as Oprah, Drake and Jared Leto.
I have loved Clubhouse so much that in March, with a few colleagues, I organised and ran a three-day Content Marketing Summit on the platform involving 30 speakers and over 1,300 participants from more than 15 countries across 28 sessions.
We have an infographic with the details of the event at ContentMarketingSummit.Club. Now I run the fast-growing Content Marketing club on Clubhouse, and we're planning our next summit in a few months - stay tuned!
What are your thoughts on the future of social media and how it affects your business/company?
Right now, Twitter, Facebook and others are all working to create clones of Clubhouse due to its huge success. I think in the short term, social media is going to trend more towards real-time platforms where people can share unique life experiences with others around the world - via voice or video.
Past that, I think that social media will continue to evolve into full immersion experiences via VR and AR, but the older forms won't go away, and there will continue to be a lot of demand for the creation of content in all forms.
For our business, right now, our AI is focused on generating written words as content. I see this expanding to images and to voicing AI personalities that people interact with in real-time.
Eventually, we'll see AIs generating virtual environments on-demand that people can interact in and customised stories that people can feature in. Our focus will remain on helping businesses attract and engage customers - so we'll take that one step at a time.
What do you wish you had known when you started out?
If I think about when I started in business over 20 years, and what I wish I had known is how to collaborate with others and select appropriate business partners.
This is also one of the essential things that differentiate our start-up from other AI start-ups.
The experience I now have and bring in collaboration and business partnerships learnt over more than 20 years of business ownership and dealings.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience?
Success to me is a very personal thing. It is being at a point where you are comfortable in your own shoes and life.
That could be due to money or family or other things, but whatever it is, if you are comfortable with who you are and what you are doing, I feel you've succeeded in life.
Is there anything new that you are working on or involved in that you would like to share?
We have lots of new features coming to our SimpleMarketing.AI platform, but I can't share details of them yet.
We are planning for our next Content Marketing Summit on Clubhouse, which will feature some huge speakers and an amazing lineup - follow the Content Marketing club on Clubhouse or go to ContentMarketingSummit.club to get the latest details!