AI for small business marketing: scotts cookies keeps strategy human
michael scottinho is COO of scotts cookies, which sells cookies. The company also built a simpler, flexible marketing service for small businesses with transparent pricing. This interview is worth reading for a practical look at where AI saves time and where the team still insists on human-led strategy.
Use AI for repetitive first-draft content and research to save time, but keep client strategy and recommendations human because AI misses context and nuance. Invest in reputation and genuinely useful content, and ignore most of the hype around every new AI tool.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Q1 – We started after seeing how difficult it was for small businesses to find reliable marketing support without committing to expensive agencies or long-term contracts. We built a simpler, more flexible service focused on practical results, transparent pricing, and strategies tailored to each business rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Q2 – Most of our new business currently comes from referrals and word of mouth. We’d like to generate more consistently through organic search and content, so we’re less dependent on referrals and have a more predictable flow of new customers.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
Q3 – We’ve handed over a lot of our first-draft content and research work to AI, which has saved us a huge amount of time. We tried using it to handle client strategy and recommendations too, but quickly went back to doing that ourselves because it was missing too much context and nuance.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Q4 – Definitely. Customers seem to do a lot more research before contacting us now, so they often already understand our services, pricing, and even some of the alternatives. We’ve also had a few people mention that they found us through ChatGPT, which is still a small percentage but something we weren’t seeing at all a year ago.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Q5 – I’d tell them to use AI for the repetitive work where it genuinely saves time, but not to automate everything just because they can. I’d also focus on building a strong reputation and publishing genuinely useful content that helps people find and trust the business. I’d ignore most of the hype around every new AI tool and focus on a few that actually improve how the business operates.
Thank you to michael scottinho and the team at scotts cookies for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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