Burn The Playbook - B2B GTM Strategies with Marc Crosby

AI Marketing for B2B: Predictive Scoring, SmartPress, Real ROI | Melih Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing

• Digital Rebels Consulting

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AI marketing for B2B that actually drives revenue, not vanity clicks. CEO Melih Oztalay of SmartFinds Marketing breaks down predictive scoring, active CTAs, chatbots, and SmartPress distribution so you can show up in news and AI surfaces.  If you’re planning 2026 budgets, this episode gives you the stack and cadence to win.

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Marketing and a digital strategist with over 35 years of experience helping businesses grow through smart, data-driven marketing. He’s a pioneer in building scalable marketing ecosystems that drive real revenue—not just website traffic. His agency, SmartFinds Marketing, has worked with major brands across manufacturing, professional services, transportation, and technology. Melih contributes to leading publications like Search Engine Journal and Crain’s Detroit, and he’s a recognized LinkedIn influencer with over 23,000 connections and a frequent guest on podcasts and digital media.

What you’ll learn

  • How predictive scoring builds a personal journey for each visitor and pushes them to action
  • Why “active” CTAs outperform static on-page buttons across your entire site
  • The right way to deploy AI chatbots trained on your content
  • Account-level identification vs contact-level guesswork for B2B
  • SmartPress: distribution to notable outlets, backlinks, and why twice-monthly PR works
  • GEO for AI: how to be cited in generative answers with credible sources
  • The 4 A’s framework: Anticipate, Accept, Adapt, Act
  • Sprint planning: align marketing and sales around weekly KPIs and 90-day pushes

Chapters
01:05 Who is Melih Oztalay, SmartFinds Marketing
01:32 AI in marketing: from experimental to essential
03:08 Predictive scoring and visitor journey funnels
05:24 Active CTAs and on-site personalization
07:26 AI chatbots that actually help buyers
09:43 Identifying accounts with tools like ZoomInfo and WebTracks
11:54 Where teams mess up with AI and automation
15:17 SmartPress: modern press release distribution
20:54 Who SmartPress fits and the twice-a-month cadence
24:58 GEO for AI surfaces
25:36 The 4 A’s to handle constant change
32:44 2026 planning: AI engine, CRM, analytics
36:30 Burn It or Build It rapid fire
39:27 Burn business cards
40:03 One actionable tip: 90-day sprints
41:43 Where to find Melih
42:35 Close

Who this helps

  • B2B founders and CEOs
  • Heads of marketing and demand gen
  • RevOps and sales leaders building a data-driven engine

Guest

Host

#B2BMarketing #AIinMarketing #PredictiveScoring #SmartPress #PressReleases #GEO #DemandGen #SalesAlignment #LinkedInSEO #BurnThePlaybook #DigitalRebels

Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:30)
Welcome in, I'm Marc Crosby. This is Burn the Playbook. My special guest today is Meili Ostelay. He is the CEO of Smart Finds Marketing and a digital strategist with over 35 years of experience helping businesses go through smart data-driven marketing. He's the pioneer in building scalable marketing ecosystems that drive real revenue, not just website traffic. His agency, Smart Finds Marketing, has worked with major brands across manufacturing, professional services, transportation, and technology.

Melee contributes to leading publications like Search Engine Journal and Cranes Detroit, and he's also a recognized LinkedIn influencer. Welcome Melee.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (01:05)
Great to be on the show, Marc. Thank you very much. That was a great introduction. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:10)
Thank

you and you did all the work as far as just having all those accolades for your career and I'm happy to have you on the show today and ⁓ Excited to unpack a lot of the topics that we'll get to the first one which is on the top of everybody's mind ⁓ AI and all that good stuff. How do we use it? How do we not use it? but for your business and marketing and Smart finds marketing

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (01:21)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:32)
⁓ how have you integrated AI into sales and marketing? How has this been a, like a primary driver of your business?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (01:40)
Yeah, as you can imagine, AI is knee deep in everything that we do. I don't care in any business, at any level, whether it's operations, whether it's sales and marketing, it doesn't make a difference. But I can tell you that we actually started using the beginnings of AI going back to about 2018, 2019. And what we were doing at that time is using AI to gather information about website visitors and figure out how do we develop

predictive scoring. In other words, and as I basically I should go this way, as time has progressed, and certainly about three years ago, when chat GPT went public, and all of a sudden, AI is starting to overtake the market. We know we moved from, let's say AI being an experimental thing, to becoming an essential element of marketing. In other words,

Mostly about marketing, know gathering marketing data. That's the big issue. You know, how do you create the signals? You know, how do you make things talk to each other in such a way that? ⁓ You know, it's AI is not just a shiny object, but it's actually an essential element of you know, the the the ecosystem of marketing And how do we make sales and marketing work together? So

Digital Rebels Consulting (02:36)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (02:58)
From our standpoint, ⁓ has transformed, I guess the short answer is we went from AI being experimental to AI being essential. No question about it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (03:08)
Gotcha. Tell me a little bit about predictive scoring. What does that mean?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (03:12)
So predictive scoring, idea is, ⁓ perhaps an example would be, ⁓ we have website visitors coming to your website already, right? So the question is, how do you turn those into leads? Well, we use AI ⁓ in this sense to create a journey funnel per visitor. Now, since we are predominantly B2B, I can tell you that in most B2B websites,

the average website visitor will come back to your website assuming that they liked you the first time around. But if they liked you the first time around, they come the second. It takes them sometimes up to five visits before they decide to contact you or not. So my point is we're creating a journey funnel. That journey funnel is the predictive scoring. So we start off by saying that this person

Digital Rebels Consulting (03:45)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (04:04)
spent X amount of time, they spent X amount of time on these pages, they went to these pages, what topics did they go to? You're trying to figure out how do you personalize the experience for that visitor each time they come back for every visit. And essentially what happens with the AI is that we've set it up in such a way that as it's developing the score per visitor, in the beginning of this journey funnel,

it turns around and let's say is kind of passive, right? Hey, take a look at this video or take a look at this information package. Well, if the AI decides that by the time you get to the bottom of the funnel, which it determines to be your decision phase, it gets a little bit more aggressive, all right? At this point, I'm cutting it short here, it comes back and basically says, you need to talk to us.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:41)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, I was gonna ask you what does aggressive mean?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (05:01)
Yeah, hit

you up the head with a two by four. Here I come.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:08)
So as

far as the visit, you're tracking who's visiting the website, what they're looking at, and then I guess ⁓ what does it look like as far as that user experience, as far as what they see? Are you serving up different sorts of... ⁓

prompts or content to them based on what they've already seen. ⁓ as far as that, predictive ⁓ journey, as far as what you think they might want to see, what they're interested in, if they're clicking on like a blog post that was about AI or marketing, then serve them up some more of that. is that kind of what that looks like?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (05:24)
Yes. ⁓

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I let's let's look at it from this perspective. Every website has a call to action. Right. It's like call me click here or go to this page. Here's my contact page or there's a button that says do this. Right. All websites do it's been that way for as long as I've been developing websites with with my team. It's like you always have that call to action that CTA. Right. But

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:45)
Mm-hmm.

Or they should.

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (06:05)
With AI, we now are looking at those CTAs as passive. Okay? They're sitting there, and I say passive because it requires somebody to click a button, right? It requires somebody to click a link. Now, the AI scenario ⁓ is different. It is active. And what I mean by active is it's serving up regardless of what page that person is on. It doesn't make a difference. As long as it's tracking that visitor's activities.

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:18)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (06:32)
It actively says, check out this video. Contact us. Here's our form. Here's our phone number. Here's our PDF. Download this. Sign up for our newsletter. Whatever it is, we pre-package that up as you can imagine within the website. But we determine what is at the top of the funnel, what's at the bottom of the funnel, and it proceeds accordingly. So the AI scenario is about active call to actions versus

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (07:00)
the old version prior to AI, we can now say that those are passive, okay? Because they just sit there and they're waiting for somebody to do something, right? And it's only on that page, whereas the AI is the entire website.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:10)
Mm-hmm.

Gotcha. And then, is there any sort of like AI chat bots that are integrated into this, or is there an opportunity for somebody to reach out directly to somebody if they're interested, like right then and there, how do you capture that?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (07:26)
So AI chatbots, again, an additional amazing tool. It's not the journey funnel that we were just referring to. That's a separate AI. The chatbot's a separate AI. They're two separate activities and two separate pieces of either tracking or answering. The chatbot is, I love how the chatbots have evolved.

because the setup is horribly painful. But if you can get past the setup phase ⁓ of the chatbot, what you're basically doing is that chatbot, it's scanning your entire website. You tell it, let's say, all the pages you want to scan or exclude, it's up to you. You can add information to it, PDFs, images, whatever you think is valuable so that the chatbot can answer.

as many questions as possible. And it's amazing, especially in the B2B world. I remember I was just mentioning the visitor will come two, three, five times to the website, right? Well, somewhere along that line, they don't necessarily want to talk to our client. They're not ready yet, right? So they're like still teetering. Well, the chat bot creates that interim phase where they can ask questions.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:32)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (08:45)
get the information they're looking for, pretty concise, pretty specific, ⁓ and then allow them to make a decision. Now what's interesting is that we can move from the chatbot and within the chatbot for, I don't want to say force, but ⁓ present a call to action within it depending upon how those questions went. ⁓ What's interesting is that the Journey AI and the chatbot AI ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:49)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (09:13)
kind of overlap is a little bit as well because all of a sudden you can see the Journey AI pop up with something say, hey, you get to talk to us. It's a lot of fun. It's cool.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:21)
Nice. then,

and then in the background, let's just say somebody comes like one time and they go away, but maybe that's a good lead. Maybe it's a warm lead. Maybe it's somebody that's interested and maybe they just forgot to come back. They didn't get a chance to get served up five times as far as some information. Are you able to take at least that visitor data and give it to your client so they can maybe do a manual reach out? Is that something that you do?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (09:43)
Yes. Yep. Yep.

Yeah, I agree with you. And so the third element, if you wish, within a website nowadays is to identify at least what we call the account level. In other words, identify the company. And I distinguish that from identifying contact.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:52)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (10:04)
There are some services that will take it down to the contact level, but to be perfectly honest with you, how accurate they are is still a question mark, right? I mean, there's a lot of privacy laws, et cetera, et cetera, that are going on. ⁓ And so it's not bad, but I'm not gonna say that it's great. On the other hand though, identifying the account, in other words, the company, that's pretty much standard and that can be identified pretty easily. And so the way this works is,

I'm going to use two different examples. One is ZoomInfo. If you're using that type of platform, and there's a variety of other platforms like ZoomInfo, if you have their ⁓ script in your website, it is able to identify the account. The other one I would say would be a ⁓ platform called WebTracks. They're doing the same thing. Now the difference between a ZoomInfo and a WebTracks is WebTracks tells you what technically

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:53)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (11:00)
in terms of the accounts coming into the website, whereas ZoomInfo will give you the accounts, but then, obviously they have a pretty decent fee per year, you actually can identify the intent of that person. You can also identify all their contact information and thereby put them into some type of a recurring marketing program to reach out to them.

And so that would be the third element that helps to facilitate what you just asked about.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:32)
Gotcha. And it sounds like you're doing all the right things, at least for, for smart finds. And you've been doing this for many, many years. ⁓ but you mentioned the word bad before, as far as that may be a bad way to do it. So how, how are marketing companies and maybe just clients or customers, organizations ⁓ using AI and these sorts of methods the wrong way? How are they screwing this up and maybe turning people away from using their product?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (11:54)
I think the missing element with most companies is they put in what they consider is the automation and they want the automation to automate everything. And I'm saying, well, it only goes so far. So for example, when we talked about predictive behaviors and analytics and so on and so forth, at some point, a human being has to look at the data.

Right? I mean, the AI can give you as much as it possibly can, but that doesn't mean that it just, it absolves you from everything. You need to look at the analysis and look at the results and based on that, make a decision on what it is that you need to do. Right? I mean, a perfect example, A-B test, right? Well, you can do an A-B test all day long, but somebody has to sit there and look at the results of the A version, the B version, or the C version.

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:37)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (12:48)
And based on those results, you're going to have to make a decision and therefore you are going to have to take action. Now the missing link and missing piece in with what that I've seen is the lack of activity on the back end. It's like it's all fun and heavy in terms of setting things up and getting excited about it. But the back end is missing. It's like guys, you can't do this without, you know, being

Managing that, just because you have AI doesn't mean everything is automated, right? ⁓ You need that element that's going to ⁓ manage it, look at the results, make decisions, take action.

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:33)
It's interesting that you say that just because, well, from a marketing perspective, it's interesting because there's a, there's a common theme over the last few episodes of burn the playbook. And so the last one was a networking before that it was trade shows before that it was sales. And there's a common theme that you're just described by that you're adding onto is following up because whether you're at a trade show and you don't follow up on those leads or you're in sales, generally there's an issue as far as just following up at all.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (13:33)
What guy said?

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:58)
I'm even like networking, we're talking about that and following up on somebody that you meant with something simple. Same thing with marketing as you're describing as far as like, you, got all this stuff on the front end. You're using all these new shiny tools and that's great. Now what do you do with it? So there just seems to be a common thing that I'm noticing. Yes.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (14:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we love, we love you. We using the shiny tools, but listen, it's the

old adage, right? Garbage in garbage out, right? You're not using the information. What are you going to do?

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:25)
And I guess for it from the, I guess the example you're describing is for, marketing. You have this data. Is that just that people don't know what to do with it or are they just busy or maybe even lazy as far as just not doing anything with it? Like what.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (14:34)
I

think part of it is being lazy. Honestly, I'm just being honest here. ⁓ People, especially the backend work, it's not sexy, right? It's mundane, it's routine work. You have to sit there and literally you have to concentrate, right? You gotta sit down and whatever, block off a half hour, an hour, whatever the number is.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:39)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (15:04)
⁓ and it, and it's just boring work. Okay. And that just comes down and not you doing that just comes down to laziness. That's the end of the story.

Digital Rebels Consulting (15:08)
Right.

Well, that's

why they should call you and you can help them out with that. ⁓ as far as just recognizing that and then that's, that's the pitch. You guys aren't going to use the data anyway. So why don't you just hire me? I'll do it for you cause you're not going to do it. one of the other products that you have is called a smart press, which I think is interesting, ⁓ for, for press releases. tell me at least, ⁓ how that started. ⁓ and maybe what makes your press release process different than others.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (15:17)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, I, you know, as you can imagine, press releases have been on the market since who knows when. ⁓ Press releases in their original form were designed for publicly traded company to do investor relations, right? It was their way to quickly get news out about their earnings or activities that, you know, that would impact investor relations. That was the original intent.

As you can imagine, as time progressed, started getting used by ⁓ regular businesses that are not public. ⁓ It was a way to get my information into ⁓ the local newspapers in particular. If I go back to the 80s, 90s, we take a press release, we stick it into the fax machine, and we'd have all the ⁓ fax numbers of all the local ⁓ newspapers already build into a list, and you hit the button and it would send it, right?

Digital Rebels Consulting (16:34)
Mm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (16:36)
So that was one version of where we came from. ⁓ As time progressed ⁓ with the internet and the maturity of the web becoming a strategic business tool, the question is, how do you use ⁓ press releases in the digital form to reach out to not just the media and editors and publications, but the news networks at large?

⁓ Again, same scenario. We start off in one place and we have progressed and matured into an entirely different area. ⁓ Pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, huge changes, lot of differences out there. ⁓ And ⁓ the issue that I ran into is our clients are B2B. When you're doing a press release in a B2B situation, you have to have enough words to tell a story.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:31)
Hmm?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (17:31)
Well, press releases in their natural form are only 400 words. Well, 400 words might be good for investor relations. 400 words is just to get your story across. ⁓ You gotta hit about 650, right? And you have to have links. You have to have attachments. It might be a video, it could be a PDF, it could be ⁓ images, right? So how do I use all of that? And the problem is,

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:42)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (17:57)
the standard press release services, let's say they're 30 bucks, 50 bucks, 100, less than 500. What those guys are doing is mostly syndication to the internet at large. Now the problem with that syndication process is it doesn't necessarily get you into the high value, high target media outlets. Let's say Benzinga, right? Yahoo Finance, Market Watch, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And the ABCs, the CBSs, et cetera. So that's situation with the syndication.

Digital Rebels Consulting (18:14)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (18:25)
Versus, I'm going to use a different word here, distribution. So distribution says, ⁓ is a different form in which the company that's putting out the press release has to be verified. Which is not the case in the syndication. The syndication, I don't care what company you are, you could be fraudulent, you could be a normal company, it doesn't make a difference, it all goes out, right? But in the distribution scenario where you're using professional services,

Digital Rebels Consulting (18:48)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (18:53)
You get verified first as a legitimate business. And then the good news with that is it goes out into the high authority, ⁓ notable resources on the web.

That's an important part of this process. The other important part is being able to get and talk to the editors of the targeted publications directly. Just like we did with the fax machines where it went into the newsroom. In this case, I want that press release go directly into the editor's inbox. That's another important part of this. ⁓ The last piece of the puzzle is the ability to have some type of residual value.

Okay, so if I'm gonna spend $1,500 on a professional press release that's going up to, know, through these high ranking, high authority and notable websites, it would be nice if I had some residual value. And the residual value in this case is if you have high domain authority websites with your press release and all your links, you now have all these backlinks for SEO purposes coming back to your website, helping to drive

value of your website, your brand, your authority on the web. And on average, I can tell you we'll probably get about a thousand or so websites that will continue to carry that press release for quite some time and benefit ⁓ the company long term. So that's the five major parts of what we've put together back in 2024. And we will officially launch SmartPress as of September this year.

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:12)
Mm-hmm.

Gotcha.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (20:27)
⁓ And we have found amazing results in the last year on the various ⁓ clients that we've used this on, that we've tried it and it's phenomenal.

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:40)
Nice. So I'm going ask you a three-part question. So who is SmartPress or PressRelease right for? At what point in time do I think that this would be a good opportunity for a press release? And how often do I do it after that?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (20:54)
So we specifically designed SmartPress for B2B companies. And the reason I'm saying that is for us it's a niche. And because let's face it, there's a dime a dozen services out there to do press release. We're not the first. You've got your PR news wires and your Cision networks. You've got your Globe News networks and so on and so forth. so...

There's a variety of options out there. We're not the only ones from that standpoint. But for us, it's about the B2B company. And for us, it's about being able to tell that story and to get that out. And so from my standpoint, the right company for us would be a B2B company. And you got to ask me your other question again. That was the nice part.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:40)
When do I decide

a press race is a good time and how, what's the frequency after that? ⁓ Is it once a year? Is it every month? So like when and then how often after that?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (21:44)
okay.

Yep. Gotcha.

Okay. So, ⁓ as far as the reasons to put out a press release, ⁓ first of all, I will tell you that the list is fairly long. It's not just about a new product or a new service. And it's not about the fact that you hired somebody into XYZ executive position, right? I mean, it can be about anything we want. ⁓ and let's face it from our standpoint, we put our creative hat and we come up with.

all kinds of ideas on why to put out a press release. ⁓ And why do I say that? And that kind of that will lead into your second your next question on that. ⁓ Our suggestion is to do a press release every two weeks. And it's a very simple answer. The reason being is you want well, first of all, let's just face it after the with and after the pandemic, there's more noise on the web than you can shake a stick at. Right.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:17)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (22:41)
And I say noise, I don't mean competitor noise, I'm just saying noise, right? And so how do you get above the noise? Well, the primary way to get above the noise is to be in the news networks. Everybody reads the news, regardless. The second issue over here is being able to keep your brand at a high level. A third one is not to rely on Google for traffic.

⁓ And ⁓ generating all those backlinks for SEO purposes and with some level of consistency is a good thing. Another ⁓ element to that is the media now starts to get, you get their attention. You're in there on an ongoing basis, right? Well, at some point, there's gonna be some reporters, some journalists, who gonna say, well, geez, let me call these guys and you're gonna get quoted in their article.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:17)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (23:34)
Well, this now helps to facilitate a notable resource, a notable source, so that you can get into Wikipedia, for example. ⁓ And mind you, notable sources is also what the GPTs are looking for. So if you want to get sourced in somebody's search, in chat, GPT, and Claude, and Gemini, and Copilot, and all these guys, ⁓ they also are looking for notable sources.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:43)
Nice.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (24:03)
in order for AI to suggest you, you got to have this type of activity. So effectively we're using ⁓ press release marketing for quite a number of reasons to get out there, but I do suggest it's with some frequency and the frequency being twice a month. I don't know that you need it more than twice a month, but twice a month is pretty good.

Digital Rebels Consulting (24:29)
Nice. That makes sense. And it's probably a more of a frequency than I would have anticipated you said, but I think everyone's ears should probably perk up when they hear this is how you can get into an AI search because that should be on the top of everybody's mind as far as what that looks like. I was actually looking at a stat recently and it said that only 25 % of companies even have an AI strategy, which is kind of alarming because you know, we're a few years into, you know, having these sorts of discussions. So if, if somebody wants to, uh,

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (24:51)
There he is,

Digital Rebels Consulting (24:58)
you know, getting to those searches, which is very important right now and will be for the future. They should probably think about maybe incorporating a smart press into their, their strategy. You coined an interesting phrase, which I've heard you talk about many times. It's what's called the, four A's. And I want to see if you can ⁓ talk a little bit about that, what that means to you, how you developed it and how you apply it to your business today.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (25:03)
⁓ yeah.

Yeah, so I got a good story on this one. As you can imagine, unless you've been living under a rock since 1980 when the PC first came out, we know that every year something changed with technology, something changed with software. Let's just use Windows, right? I mean, do you remember those disked We used to get CD packs like this to update our computer.

Digital Rebels Consulting (25:36)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (25:43)
at, you know, whatever, twice a year at one point. ⁓ The reality is everything changes, everything moves forward, everything ⁓ is, whether it's technology, whether it's software, whether it's ⁓ impacting society, whatever the case is, there's always change. And with change comes some level of discomfort. I don't care what it is. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (25:43)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (26:10)
The story behind the 4As starts in 2013, August, when Google came out with the Hummingbird algorithm. And that algorithm turned a lot of things upside down. It was a very uncomfortable algorithm that was put to the market, impacted a lot of things. About 90 days later, I had a large corporate client of ours decide not to play the Google game. And I understood where they're coming from and

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:26)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (26:38)
I get it, you what, you invest in your web presence and everything looks great and then an algorithm comes out and all of a sudden you lose 30 % of the investment you had just put in, right? And of course that gets everybody upset. It took me a little bit of time, but then I went back to them and I explained this concept

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:44)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (27:04)
that eventually evolved into the 4A's. And I said, listen, I understand you want to get off the Google train, but your competition is still on the Google train. If you decide to get on that train again, it will cost you 10X or more to catch up. So that was like a come to Jesus moment for that client. All of a sudden they realized how to put this into perspective. Anyway, that was the beginnings of this concept.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:27)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (27:29)
Eventually, I to come up with ways to put ⁓ internet, technology, digital changes into perspective for clients. I started off with these forays and believe me, over time, I've evolved what each one means. So recently, I actually changed my ⁓ first day. So my first day is Anticipate Change. Now that sounds simple.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:45)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (27:54)
But anticipate change really means putting, setting aside a budget for reinvestment into your brand and your marketing. Okay, it's not about anticipate change saying, yeah, change is gonna come, right? Well, we need to put something behind that. Because to the point of this client example that I was giving you, their issue was they didn't set aside funds for when these changes come to impact.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:02)
Okay.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (28:21)
So anticipate change meaning you have to have some level of funds set aside to continue staying on that train. It's like buying a new ticket, okay? Now the second one is an emotional versus logical response. It's accepting change. Now accepting change in this scenario, what I usually find with clients is they will fret, fuss, and fume. And just like a two-year-old, have a temper tantrum.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:34)
Hmm? Hmm?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (28:48)
And you know that, right? And have a temper tantrum. I, you know, again, I use the same exact response that I did with the previous situation. It's like, okay, you can have a temper tantrum all day long, but your competition who is not having a temper tantrum is moving ahead of you. So get off your butt and you need to accept these changes. But it's also about getting off your butt and being logical. Stop being emotional about it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:50)
right

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (29:16)
It doesn't work, at least not in business, right? You still have to operate, you still have to generate revenue, and you still want to be competitive in the market. So stop worrying about this change. Say yes to it, and let's move on to the third piece, which is adapting to the change. And what I mean by that is, what do I need to change within my process, within my marketing, within my website, within my SEO, whatever this scenario looks like, right?

Digital Rebels Consulting (29:20)
Yeah.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (29:44)
Figure out what needs to be done. So that's the adapting part. The last A is adapting, which is the easiest one, which is now I figured out how I'm gonna adapt to these changes. Now I need to implement these changes, right? That's the behind the scenes story and what effectively is the evolution of my four A's over the last 12 years. But that's how we got to where we are. It's a method ⁓ to

put changes into perspective.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:14)
I'm just going to take a guess that most people get stuck on number two, which is accepting change for that temper tantrum moment. I imagine that takes probably a little bit time to at least for you to convince them that they need to accept these changes based on everything else. Is that correct?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (30:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

That it's usually that

one. And like I said, before we started a project, I always talk about the anticipate change, right? So don't yell at me when I come to you and don't shoot the messenger. When I come to you and I say, we need to increase your budget by X, okay? Let's talk about it right now before we start. So, but yes, beyond that, it's usually the accept, it's the toughest piece. ⁓ And it's the one where, ⁓ you know,

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:48)
Hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (31:01)
How do we lower the risk by building micro-winds? How do we build this into a phased approach so that we're going through these four A's? ⁓ what's a good way to put this? It's the speed of trust. That's a good way to put it. Speed of trust. mean, yeah. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:06)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, makes sense. I like that, speed of trust. That sounds good. I should use that myself.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (31:30)
I think that's

the way to put this. Because honestly, it is about trust, right? It's like getting over, mean, trust is an emotional issue, ⁓ trying ⁓ to engage with the emotional ⁓ part of not accepting change. It's also about moving from not accepting and trusting and hopefully doing it quickly.

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:33)
Is that?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (31:57)
So we don't lose time and we don't lose ⁓ our competitive. ⁓

What's the best word there? ⁓ Competitive position in the market space. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:08)
Competitive advantage. Okay.

Speed to trust. I like that. ⁓ As people are, I guess, moving through those four different phases as we move into 2026, ⁓ what do you, guess, propose to your clients as far as the tools, the channels that they should be using that we haven't discussed today as far as the website traffic, the AI adoption?

Press releases where should you know as people are planning their budgets were in q4 right now for next year Where should they invest those dollars to have the biggest ROI?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (32:44)
Um, first and foremost, I'm to go back to a comment you made earlier, which is they need to get on the AI engine as quickly as possible. We were talking about the Google train. We're about getting on the AI engine. Um, so that's step number one. Um, and I don't care what AI you want to use. It doesn't make a difference. There's so many ways to use AI, but first and foremost, especially as we're going into 2026 and at the speed that which AI developed in 2025.

I mean, honestly, you gotta be living under a rock or you're not accepting, you're still having a temper tantrum, but not wanting to use AI. It's like, come on, get off it, get with it, right? ⁓ So ⁓ first and foremost would be that. The other part of it is how do I take AI? How do I take my data and integrate it all into my CRM? How do I use the tools like a ZoomInfo?

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:25)
I

huh.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (33:43)
and integrated into my marketing process, which obviously ties into my CRM. ⁓ The other thing is, ⁓ honestly, use AI to ⁓ facilitate analytics. ⁓ Let it figure out how to do that predictive lead scoring and the content optimization. ⁓ Honestly, you're at a point where you can copy and paste. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:48)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (34:08)
Perhaps another thing that I see, with AI, here's what I've seen. It's not just a temper tantrum of not accepting AI, it's also a fear factor of AI. And that fear factor, I think, is ⁓ unfortunate. The cat's out of the bag, that AI thing, okay, it's not going back in the bag, guys, all right, it's out.

⁓ It's being used at all levels. mean, ⁓ pharmaceutical companies, ⁓ Biotech companies, et cetera. mean, health in general is using AI at various levels right now. ⁓ It's not just in standard business. It's not just on your laptop. It's being used in many different forms. So this idea of being afraid of AI, I think people need to get past that as well. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (35:06)
And that might be a harder one to bypass compared to the temper tantrum. ⁓ But no question about it, in 2026, it's all about getting on that AI engine, making sure that you integrate it within your ⁓ ecosystem. think you'll find, I look, I know somebody who's a chief AI officer. I mean, that's a thing now, right? People who have...

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:11)
Hahaha

Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (35:33)
⁓ in the last, especially in the last three years, have embraced AI and understand how to do digital, well, let's just call it transformation within an operation. ⁓ And making sure that businesses will, ⁓ can use AI effectively as an operational tool. But then there's the part that we are involved in, which is using AI for marketing, branding, advertising, etc.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:01)
Gotcha. Well, there's still a lot of work to go. As I mentioned before, we're only 25 % have a strategy at all, which means that they probably don't have a chief AI officer. Um, so there's a lot of work to be done at least in 2026 and beyond for AI. Um, but let's pivot over to, uh, our burn it or build it rapid fire segments. And so what I'll do is I'll throw out a topic and then you tell me burn it or build it and maybe a brief reason why. So we have about 10 questions. Are you ready? Melih go.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (36:11)
Hahaha

Here we go.

Go.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:30)
⁓ AI chat bots on the website.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (36:32)
Build, no question about it. ⁓ It's going to ⁓ help more than it's going to hurt.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:43)
got it. Number two, buyer intent metrics.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (36:46)
Build, they reveal timing, ⁓ not just interest, it's about intent scoring.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:53)
zero click content

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (36:55)
⁓ build Visibility beats clicks. No question about it when the story carries authority. You know, this is the LinkedIn SEO blends. Well, I should say social media SEO plan. So yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:00)
You

Number four, AI outbound at scale.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (37:13)
⁓ build. it's about personalization. ⁓ let's keep things, ⁓ at a human level.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:21)
Makes sense. ⁓ What about real time on site personalization that's driven from your CRM?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (37:28)
Yeah, definitely build. ⁓ It's where AI creates that genuine customer experience, right? That's what people are looking for. And that doesn't make a difference if it's B2B or B2C. You're talking about a ⁓ dynamic site case, basically. But yeah, build.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:44)
Gotcha. I love that. What about GEO for AI surfaces?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (37:49)
Definitely build. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:51)
Gotcha. Yeah, we talked about a little bit as

far as just, it's important now to show up and be able to at least, to plan at least, your strategy around how to show up. ⁓ but, yeah, it's certainly something that we need to build. I think we're six for six on building. We got to burn something executive podcast, executive podcasting as a pipeline lever

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (38:11)
⁓ Executive podcasting as a pipeline lever I'm going to say build and I know we can go either way on that. ⁓ My thought here is the executives of a company ⁓ are the ones that tell the story and bring the brand to the market.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:31)
Makes sense. And then what about executive ⁓ thought leadership like on social, like LinkedIn, something like that? Should they be there?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (38:36)
⁓ yeah,

would just tie that right in. Yep. Build. It's about ⁓ creating trust currency, earned media.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:45)
gotcha Number nine, brand spin during a downturn.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (38:50)
Okay, ⁓ I know everybody's gonna say Burn It, but I'm not in favor of that. During a downturn is the number one time you build, number one time you invest, the number one time you get ahead of your competition.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:05)
Well said. think we've been talking about that for the last few months, especially on this podcast is not just a wait and see approach. ⁓ invest, invest in your brand, invest in your people, invest for 2026. If you want to kick off Q1 with the bang final question on burn it or build it is business cards. Are we still using business cards today?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (39:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

we can finally, we can all

I finally have a burn. We're burning it. We're burning it. You got all this digital in our hands. We don't need to print anymore. Honestly, replace it with digital identity tools. Come on, guys. ⁓ We're burning that one. No, no. ⁓

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:27)
We're burning it! Gotcha.

Get rid of the business cards. All right, we're burning one. I thought we were going to go 10 for 10 on build it, but we did not.

it's all good. But you get the final word, Melee, as far as just one actionable tip that you B2B leaders to take away today that they can deploy tomorrow when they sit down with their executive teams. What's your advice for them?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (40:03)
I.

Most businesses try to chew off more than, bite off more than they can chew, okay? My suggestion is take things in small sprints, 90 day sprints. That tends to work out very well. ⁓ You want to align your marketing with your sales. You want to ⁓ align your marketing and sales around identified KPIs. ⁓ I would suggest,

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:17)
Mm-hmm.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (40:32)
coming up with some type of a weekly structure ⁓ where you can review outcomes on a regular basis. know that we meet with our clients weekly. ⁓ 40 years ago, we may have met once a month, but nowadays that's not the case. Things are changing and they change rapidly. think weekly meetings tend to move things along faster and makes that sprint and that 90 day period more effective. ⁓ Momentum.

I will tell you builds clarity, clarity drives growth, right? And so if we take a look at everything we talked about today, I would say that AI plus accountability, that blend, that implementation, that creation of that ecosystem ⁓ is going to help move you into 2026, well, gonna make your 2026 more effective, I can tell you that. And of course, last but not least,

adopt and work through these forays.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:34)
Nice, I love it. And then where can people find you in case they want to do a press release or learn more about the 4A's or do business with Melee?

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (41:43)
Sure.

So number one is visit our website, SmartFindsMarketing.com. Nice and simple. That'll take you everywhere else in terms of our social ecosystem. But in terms of me, best place to find me is on LinkedIn. ⁓ I guarantee you I'm the only male host there. It shouldn't take too long to find me. ⁓ Number two is, as far as LinkedIn is concerned, I've got 23,000 really close friends. So whether we're connected or not,

tag me on your posts. When you tag me, I get an email, it becomes a to do for me. I'm more than happy to react, put a solid comment in with hashtags to help you expand your reach through my network and hopefully generate some response to you.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:30)
Very nice. Well thank you for joining Burn the Playbook, Melee.

Melih ("may-lee") Oztalay, CEO, SmartFinds Marketing (42:33)
It was great to be on your show, Marc. Thank you very much.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:35)
All right, cheers.


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Marc Crosby - Digital Rebels

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