Colin Ma on AI reporting, SEO and keeping content human
Colin Ma is the founder of Matcha Growth Marketing, an engineer-led team of senior specialists helping ecommerce brands and professional services get customers through SEO and performance marketing. This conversation looks at AI’s role in reporting, the limits of automated copy, and the agency’s early experience with leads arriving through ChatGPT.
AI can take on reporting and save 20 to 30 hours a month, but Matcha Growth Marketing keeps human review in the content workflow. Colin Ma also cautions against assuming AI can run every process end to end.
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?
Our founder started SEO by running it for his own business. As a former software engineer and winner of Google hackathons, he has brought his technical knowledge of programming and Google into the world of SEO to create effective and profitable marketing strategies. Our team is comprised only of senior team members.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of our business comes in from referrals due to the great work we are doing. We are working on scaling client acquisition through ads.
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?
AI is amazing for automated reporting, and this alone saves us 20-30 hours/month. We don’t let AI publish copy end to end without human review. It’s too easy to tell when AI has written it, and we want to ensure all content is humanized.
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?
Yes, we’ve had a few reach out through ChatGPT, but they were unqualified. We are working on optimizing SEO and AI Search on our own website.
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?
I would tell them to test AI with their own websites to better understand its capabilities and drawbacks. I would ignore the "SEO is dead" hype, and the belief that AI can handle any workflow end to end.
Thank you to Colin Ma and the team at Matcha Growth Marketing for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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