Stop Being a Slave to Your Admin: The AI Reality Check
If you’re running a plumbing business in Coorparoo or a law firm in the CBD, you’ve probably heard a lot of noise lately about AI. Most of it is fluff. You’ve likely seen people talking about "transformation" and "disruption," but as a business owner, you only care about two things: How much does it cost? and Will it get me more customers?
At Local Marketing Group (LMG), we don’t use AI because it’s trendy. We use it because it makes us faster, sharper, and better at making our clients money. We’ve spent the last 18 months testing every tool under the sun to see what actually works for a local Brisbane business and what is just a waste of time.
Most business owners I talk to are drowning in admin. They’re answering the same five questions on Facebook Messenger at 9:00 PM, chasing invoices, or trying to figure out why their last batch of flyers didn't result in a single phone call.
This guide is the exact “under the hood” look at how we use AI internally. My goal is to show you how you can use these same principles to stop chasing leads and start winning more jobs with less effort.
1. The Death of the "Blank Page": How We Speed Up Marketing
One of the biggest costs in any business is time. Specifically, the time it takes to create things—emails to customers, social media posts, or updates for your website.
In the old days (two years ago), if we wanted to write a series of emails for a landscaper to send to past customers, it would take hours. Now, we use AI as a "First Draft Machine."
How we actually use it:
We don’t let the AI write the final version. If you do that, you end up with robotic, boring content that sounds like everyone else. Instead, we feed the AI specific details about a Brisbane business—like "We’re a family-owned roofing company in Chermside that specialises in terracotta tiles"—and ask it to give us five ideas for a spring maintenance checklist.The Result: What used to take four hours now takes 20 minutes. For you, this means you can stay in front of your customers more often without having to sit at a computer every night.
Warning: Be careful here. There is a lot of junk out there. If you just copy and paste what a bot gives you, Google will notice. We’ve seen how cheap AI content can actually hurt your rankings if you aren't careful. Use it for the ideas, but keep the human touch for the final product.
2. Sorting the Gold from the Garbage (Lead Scoring)
Every business owner knows the frustration of spending thirty minutes on the phone with a "tyre kicker" who was never going to buy. It’s a waste of your life.
At LMG, we use AI to help our clients identify who is actually ready to whip out their credit card. We call this "Lead Scoring," but you can just think of it as a filter.
How it works in plain English:
When a lead comes in through a website form, an AI tool looks at the data. Did they ask a specific question? Are they in a suburb you actually service? Have they visited your pricing page three times in the last hour?Instead of you calling every single person, the AI pings your phone and says, "Hey, this person in Indooroopilly is a hot lead, call them now." The others get an automated (but friendly) email sequence until they are ready to talk.
This is how you spot your best customers without having to manually vet every single enquiry. It saves our clients hours of phone time every week.
3. The 24/7 Sales Person (That Doesn't Call In Sick)
Most local businesses lose money every weekend. Why? Because a potential customer searches for a service at 8:00 PM on a Saturday, sends a message, and doesn't get a reply until Monday morning. By then, they’ve already booked your competitor who answered the phone.
We use AI-powered chat tools that act like a receptionist. But not the annoying ones that just say "We will get back to you." These tools are trained on your specific business.
Real Scenario: We set this up for a professional services firm. A lead asks, "Do you do property law for commercial buildings?" The AI knows the answer is "Yes," provides a rough starting price, and then asks, "Would you like to book a 15-minute intro call with Sarah on Tuesday?"
It hooks into the calendar and finishes the booking. No human involved. This is how you get more bookings on autopilot while you're at the Gabba watching the cricket.
4. Making Your Ad Spend Go Twice as Far
If you’ve ever run Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you know it feels like burning money sometimes. You pay for clicks, but you don't always get calls.
Internally, we use AI to analyse which ads are actually resulting in money in the bank. Most people look at "clicks." We don't care about clicks; we care about sales.
AI allows us to see patterns that a human would miss. For example, we might find that for a pest control client, ads shown to people in The Gap on Tuesday mornings perform 40% better than ads shown on Friday nights.
We then tell the AI to automatically shift the budget to the times and places that work. You end up spending the same amount of money but getting way more phone calls. It’s about being smart with your wallet, not just throwing more cash at Google.
5. What is a Waste of Money Right Now?
I promised to be blunt. Here is what you should NOT spend your money on in 2024:
Fully Automated Social Media: If you see a tool promising to "handle all your social media with AI," run away. It will post generic, boring rubbish that your customers will ignore. People buy from people, not bots. Expensive "AI Consultants": Most people calling themselves AI consultants for small businesses are just kids who learned how to use ChatGPT last week. You don't need a consultant; you need tools that solve specific problems (like booking appointments or filtering leads).
- AI Video Avatars: You’ve seen them—the creepy digital people talking. They look fake. For a local tradie or shop, a shaky video of you on a job site filmed on your iPhone is 100x more effective than a polished AI avatar.
6. How to Get Started (Without the Headache)
You don't need a degree in computer science to start using this. If you want to see results in the next 30 days, do this:
1. Identify your biggest time-waster. Is it answering basic questions? Is it writing quotes? 2. Pick one tool. If it's questions, look at a simple AI chat tool for your site. If it's writing, start using a basic AI assistant to help draft your customer emails. 3. Set a budget. You shouldn't be spending thousands. Most of these tools cost between $30 and $100 a month. If they save you 5 hours of work, they’ve already paid for themselves.
Why Local Marketing Group is Different
We’ve seen dozens of Brisbane businesses try to do this themselves and get frustrated because the "tech" doesn't talk to their existing systems. Or worse, they hire a big agency that charges them $5,000 for an "AI Strategy" that is just a 10-page PDF of jargon.
We focus on the plumbing of your marketing. We make sure the leads coming in are high quality, that they get answered immediately, and that you have the data to see exactly where your profit is coming from.
AI is just a tool in our shed. The goal is always the same: More profit for you.