#357: The Missing Layer of the Smart Home: How to Position and Sell Smart Ceiling Fans
In this week’s episode of AU, Patrick Laidlaw, AiSPIRE Sales Director at WAC Group joins Ron to discuss why smart ceiling fans represent a growing opportunity for integrators.
This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features our partner WAC Group in February 2026, titled “The Missing Layer of the Smart Home: How to Position and Sell Smart Ceiling Fans.”
As integrators continue expanding into lighting and environmental control, smart ceiling fans are becoming an increasingly valuable opportunity to elevate the client experience, improve energy efficiency, and deepen whole-home integration.
During this webinar, you’ll hear from myself and Patrick Laidlaw, AiSPIRE Sales Director at WAC Group.
We cover:
- Why smart ceiling fans represent a growing opportunity for integrators — from comfort and energy savings to aesthetics and whole-home control integration
- The evolution of ceiling fan technology, including DC motors, airflow optimization, and smart controls
- How AI search and large language models are changing the customer journey — and why integrators need to rethink their online visibility strategy to stay competitive in emerging categories like smart fans
- Practical marketing strategies to improve AI visibility, including building authoritative FAQ content that helps prospects discover your business online
Visit the episode page on our website to get the audio recording, full transcript, and video of the original webinar. Now let’s tune in and learn how smart ceiling fans have evolved into a meaningful business opportunity for integrators.
Transcript
Rebecca:
Sounds good. Well, welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us for an hour today on a Thursday afternoon. We appreciate your time, and we will do our best to get through all this content, have some q and a time, and then get you out of here within the hour. I'll do a quick introduction for myself. My name is Rebecca Sternlicht. I'm the corporate marketing lead at OneFirefly. So I work very closely with Ron to design and execute all of One Firefly's marketing. And one of my favorite parts of this job is working with some of our partners like Patrick at I Spire, WAC, to put on webinars like these. Couple housekeeping items before we get started. We are recording this, and everybody who is in attendance here as well as anyone who registered but couldn't make it, you will receive a copy of this recording in this deck. So keep an eye out for that in your inbox tomorrow. Additionally, our chat is open. Our q and a is open. We would love to hear from you guys throughout the webinar. So please drop any questions or comments you have. I will be keeping an eye out for questions during the webinar, and we'll do a q and a at the end. A couple of things, our agenda for today, where I'm gonna pass this along in just a minute to Ron and Patrick to do some quick introductions, and then Patrick is gonna kick off our content by talking about smart fans, smart ceiling fans, and the opportunity there and some of the specifics around these products. And then we'll pass it back to Ron to do a little marketing section about how you can be start being found and becoming visible online for this solution. And then as mentioned, we'll leave time for questions at the end and then get you guys out of here. So if we wanna get started with introductions, Ron, I'll kick it off to you first, and then Patrick.
Ron:
Sure. My name is Ron, CEO and founder here at OneFirefly. I have the pleasure of leading a a world class team that does both marketing for our channel. We have eighty marketers on our staff working with folks all over the country, really throughout North America, and, also lead our Amplify people, our hiring business. It's actually one of the fastest growing business units here at OneFirefly. We're we're helping, at this point, many, many dozens of integrators actively with their hiring. And, pleasure to be here with all of you. Pleasure to be here with you, Rebecca. And, of course, Patrick, I know that every time I listen to him talk, I learn something. So I'm I'm as eager as the audience to sit back and learn.
Patrick:
I appreciate that, Ron. I appreciate you saying that you you don't learn you you didn't say you learn not to listen to me anymore. So I appreciate that. I'm trying to bring some some information in a fun technical way that integrators could use. So I'm Patrick Lela, director of business development for WAC Group. I cover the Aspire channel along with WAC Modernform SmartFans. We work with the custom integration channel. We've been around since twenty nineteen, so we're fairly new. But but integrators are moving heavily into lighting, and this is a category that they seem to be either unfamiliar with, maybe not even thinking about, but it's a great opportunity for them to complete the client's home when we talk about integrating ceiling fans. So you can share with them how they can get found more by weaving some of this ceiling fan content into their websites, but I'll try to give them some tips and some confidence about talking about some specific things knowledgeably with ceiling fans.
Ron:
Love it.
Patrick:
So I'll dive right in, Ron, if that's okay. And Yeah. It's a floor.
Ron:
It's yours. I'm gonna hang back here. I might have a question or two, so I'll stay on camera. But, yeah, it's it's yours.
Patrick:
Sounds great. So we know that ceiling fans have been around for a very long time. Utilitarian. They're used in a lot of tracked homes. In fact, most builders on home centers know what a builder fan is. It looks like the one on the left, five blades, you know, traditional blade irons. They just were basically in to create a breeze. And like anything, they become a commodity and become utilitarian to the point that I've even had people say to me, oh, I've got a fan in my bedroom. It it's been there for fourteen years. I got it from a home center, and it still works. And I say, well, when you lay down on the bed and you turn it on, do you feel anything? Spinning around is very easy for for Blaze to just spin around. But if the fan's really not doing anything, you know, is it really still working? So we've gone from that utilitarian kind of standardized commodity now to ceiling fans being incredibly architectural, aesthetically pleasing, part of the interior design of the entire space. With modern technology, we can combine performance along with the design. So DC housings provide much smaller motor sizes while still having an incredible amount of brute force. So they can we can get some really unique designs and some great blade designs out of current technology. Go ahead, Rebecca. If you don't mind, I think you're driving. Yeah. Thank you. So when we talk about the missing layer of the home, like integrators are already moving heavily in the lighting, and that obviously pertains to the visual part of the home and how a home is perceived, whether it's tunable white or dim to warm or static white light. They're already doing audio and sound, and in fact, there's many great lighting I'm sorry, audio companies out there that are concerned about how does your sound look. How do you want your sound to look, and how does it blend in with the interior? It's all about the interior of the space now. Temperature, climate integrators are already in control of that through the smart home system and smart HVAC, even automated shading and smart shading that tracks the solar, tracks the sun to manage thermal and light in a room at the same time. But fans are the spot that integrators haven't really moved into yet or thought about a lot. They think it's just provided by someone else, but it combines the aesthetics, the comfort of the room. So feeling cooler or feeling warmer. And we'll talk about how ceiling fans heat and cool. Actually, I'll talk about it right now. So ceiling fans can heat and can cool. The reason we say that is they don't produce heat and they don't produce air conditioning, but the direction you push the air creates the the comfort in the room and the environment. So for example, we know that you could blow ceiling fans down and feel a breeze. That's what we call the wind chill effect. If you sit outside in your patio chair in the sun on a hot still day, you really get hot. You can start baking sitting there. But if there's a breeze, it doesn't feel nearly as hot as what it would does without a breeze. So a ceiling fan creates the wind chill effect. How this saves energy or how this cools is if you're sitting in your recliner and you have the heat set on seventy two, but you feel warm, you would naturally go turn the air conditioning down and use more energy, turn it to seventy. But if you turn the ceiling fan on, which only cost pennies a day to run, you can create a breeze while you're sitting there, and now seventy two doesn't have to be changed. You feel cooler. And how ceiling fans heat, and we'll review this just one other time in the presentation, but how they heat is heat rises. We know that. We call it heat stratification. So it's always hotter at the ceiling. And if you've ever been in a in a situation where you've climbed a ladder, maybe out in your garage on a hot summer day, and you realize it's about ninety in your the garage attic, and it's it's much cooler down below. Same thing happens in your house. So your thermostat may be on seventy two in the middle of the height from floor to ceiling, but on the floor, it's maybe sixty eight, and on the ceiling, it might be seventy six or seventy eight. If your feet are cold, your body feels cold. So if you're sitting in your recliner, you have your thermostat still at seventy two, but you feel cold because your feet are on the floor at sixty eight, by changing the ceiling fan direction to blow up, It blows against the ceiling, brings the air around the room without you feeling a breeze so you don't feel cooler, brings it around the room, and brings the air up from the floor. So the entire room becomes one temperature or seventy two throughout instead of sixty eight or sixty nine, seventy two at the wall and then eighty up high. So ceiling fans pennies a day can help save a lot of energy, rather than adjusting your HVAC system.
Ron:
I I have a question, Pat Patrick. Does turning a fan or is a fan typically integrated into the HVAC control system? Like, for the integrators here listening, would they tie in an automated command to the fan to circulate one way or or the other, or is it always a manual command from the the homeowner that, you know, based on how they're feeling, they would activate it?
Patrick:
Well, they could they could automate the command to be spring and fall. That's typically when we do it. Spring, you blow your fan down and fall, blow your fan up. And you don't often change it throughout. It it pretty much just runs. Many people leave their ceiling fans running twenty four hours a day to keep the air circulated and fresh in the house as well as throughout. But you can do that through the smart fan system, either through the app or through the control system. Where previously, more traditional fans, have to climb up on a ladder or get a stick and you have to move a little switch on the body of the fan itself to do it manually. So this can all be automated through the control system or through the app if the homeowner decides they wanna do it, you know, at a different time.
Ron:
Got it. Cool. Thank you.
Patrick:
Yes. So where do fans show up at the home? This is pretty basic. Everybody knows we have them in bedrooms to cool when you go to sleep. You like to feel cooler. Ceiling fans can have timers on them, so they go off after four hours or two hours. There's programs built into ceiling fans now. Outdoor areas. Outdoor areas is a place a lot of people don't think about. So if obviously, down south they do because it can get quite warm and humid in the summer. And if you're sitting outside, you want that breeze. But if you think about in the north or anywhere there's outdoor kitchens, fans create movement and they create a breeze, which helps deter flies, mosquitoes, bugs. So they can also help increase your enjoyment while you're sitting in that space besides feeling a little bit cooler in that space. So living spaces and large open rooms, great rooms. Sometimes depending on the size of it's an enormous great room, we might put two ceiling fans in. We have ceiling fans that go all the way up to ten feet in diameter. We've done some amazing cool car garages where they'll have a Ferrari and a big eight foot fan over the top of that with some specialty lighting around it. So there's a lot of places that we don't often think about that that ceiling fans can actually belong and help improve the aesthetics and the, you know, the way you feel in that room. So again, it's not just about cooling. It's not about feeling cooler. Airflow, comfort, circulation, energy efficiency. Airflow is optimizing strategic movement. So that wind chill, feeling cooler. Circulation is maintaining the continuous air mix. So again, blowing it up where we don't feel a breeze, but we the room becomes warmer in one uniform temperature. Comfort is just creating perfectly balanced environment. We have what's called a breeze mode that you could put the fans into. So in Michigan, where it's cold in the wintertime, occasionally, we get a sunny day. And one of my favorite things to do is to sit in the recliner right in front of the window. We have a big great ten foot window, and I live in the woods, so I'll sit in the sun. I'll feel the warmth, but you can put your ceiling fan in breeze mode. So it will actually speed up and slow down sporadically to make it feel like you're sitting outside on a nice sunny day and you feel soft breeze, maybe a little bit greater breeze and then no breeze. So there's lots of different technology built into fans today that we've never had built in before. And then, of course, the energy efficiency I shared with you, that's running a ceiling fan for pennies a day so that you're not running your air conditioning or your your furnace. So there's there's great cost savings that can be attributed. Now we could do it while it looks great instead of the old traditional, you know, builder fans. So with modern form smart fans specifically, a lot of great smart fans out there, you can we use optimized CFM, cubic feet per minute. I'll talk about that in just a second. DC motors, whisper quiet. Quiet is key. The old AC fans used to they were they're alternating current. They're like a magnet with copper windings, and some of them, especially the inexpensive ones, didn't feature capacitors or speed controls inside for low, medium, and high. There was on and off and when it was on, it would actually turn on and off for medium and turn on and off for low and you could hear that humming. And if it wasn't a really well built fan, you could get a little bit of And if it wasn't fastened to the ceiling greatly, the ceiling became a tuning fork for any vibration in that AC motor. And you got this humming sound. It would drive people nuts. So DC motors are incredibly more improved for efficiency and and quietness compared to to previous fans. So let's dive into those just a little bit. We'll talk we'll start with CFM. So CFM is cubic feet per minute. It's how much air a fan moves, and it's a great guideline to judge the the quality or how much air a fan is gonna move, but it's not all inclusive. And the reason I say that is this is done in laboratories, in closed testing facilities to see how much the fan moves. There's lots of external factors that can determine how it's gonna perform in your application. How high is the ceiling? How high, you know, or low did you mount the fan? How big is the room? Things like that. But cubic feet per minute is a great thing to talk about the quality. And what determines cubic feet per minute? And one of the most, this is important for integrators I think to understand and my goal is out of this webinar, they learn a few tidbits that they'll feel comfortable talking about a quality fan. So one of the key factors in determining cubic feet per minute is what they call the blade pitch. So how much tilt to that blade when it sweeps around, how much air does it move? And the best way I found to share with homeowners when we talk about quality ceiling fans is to say, imagine yourself in a rowboat, and you put the oars out flat. You can row and row and row all day long. You're just slapping the water. You're not doing any work, so you don't require a big motor. You're not straining the motor. That's why that home center fan lasted twelve or fourteen years. It spins around, but it doesn't move any air. If you want to get across the lake, you have to tilt those oars. And the more you tilt those oars, the more water you push and the more work is required. So the bigger motor. So blade pitch determines how much air you really move, and it's it's measured or signified on the box with cubic feet per minute. You know? So how much is it moving all the time? So a good fan will have basically start at twelve minimum, but thirteen to sixteen degree blade pitch. You can buy fans at home centers with eight degree or maybe even Tmu, eight degree, ten degree. And here's what's important. For every degree of blade pitch, it's about ten to fifteen percent air movement at the same speed. So if I bought a twelve degree fan from a home center and I put in a fourteen degree fan or compare it to a fourteen degree fan and I run them both on low, that fourteen degree blade pitch will move twenty to thirty percent more air at the same speed. So it's gonna require a better a better motor and a better some more horsepower, and it's gonna last longer, lifetime warranty, etcetera. So when you're talking to customers and you talk about air movement, we wanna check the blade pitch. We wanna say, hey. Monoform ceiling fans or if you if you carry a different brand. Right now, we're currently the only one that's tying into home control systems that I'm aware of. So you wanna be sure that it's a good quality fan, and that equates to blade pitch, which also directly equates to the motor size. So better comfort in larger rooms, more circulation at a lower speed. Nobody wants to turn their fan on high and have this thing, you know, in their in their room. So and a greater impact than how the space feels overall. So DC motors, I we talked briefly about that, but they they're seventy percent more efficient. Pennies a day to leave your ceiling fan out twenty four seven. They're quieter. They're smaller. We can get smaller form factors. ENERGY STAR now is going the the move in ceiling fan regulation is to go to DC motors. So AC motors are eventually gonna go away, kinda like the incandescent light bulb did. You can get better control. Typically, you'll get six speeds instead of three speeds, and you can generate much more power, torque, horsepower out of a DC motor than you can in ace an old traditional AC motor. So indoor versus outdoor, this is pretty simple, but this is another thing I like to refer to. So if you're listening integrators, maybe make a note of this. Maybe not if you don't like the analogy. But there's dry fans, damp fans, wet fans. Ninety nine percent of the modern form smart fans are all wet location, but the rating is what's important. Because if you just go buy us a ceiling fan and you hang it outside on your patio, you're gonna get what I like to call the sad sack fan. You know? When you go into a bar that's been it's smoky, maybe it's outdoors, and and the fan's been hanging there for twenty years and the blades hang down and it looks like a sad flower bent over at at night or, you know, the those blades actually warp or tilt down. So inexpensive fans will use almost sawdust pressed together with, a wood grain sticker on them or veneer on them. And better quality ceiling fans will use either a solid wood, which is much more resistant to warping or a PVC that's you know, great care has been taken to make it look like a wood. And some of the fans that Modern Forum SmartFans offers, actually, you can't tell the difference. You can't tell their PVC until you hold them in your hand, so they last outdoors. But you wanna be sure you put the right fan in the right spot. And if you go with a a wet location fan, it could be used indoor, outdoor, you never have to worry about that that happening. This is just a chart that I threw in here for everyone to feel comfortable with. If you're watching this, you can screenshot this or you really truly can Google, how do I size my ceiling fan for my room? And these guidelines are readily available. So, basically, a lot of people are just uneasy about what's the size of the fan I need, and it's based on the room size. So if you have a hundred square foot room, let's say a ten by ten guest bedroom, a small bedroom, you could do a forty four to forty eight inch. You could go up to a fifty four inch. If it was a ten by ten room, I would lean more towards the forty four because the room's gonna feel bigger. If you oversize the fan, it's gonna make that room feel a little bit smaller. Kinda like we do with recess. Smaller aperture makes a room feel bigger than big giant holes in a kitchen. So this is just a guide I threw in to kinda help everybody if they want to. Something to refer back to at any time. And fans are definitely a design element. I think everybody understands that. So the housing and materials, we're using a lot of clear acrylic, so it appears the blades are are floating almost. There's some some really cool contemporary designs. There's some transitional designs. There's still some traditional out there. So the design of the fan is really geared around the motor, and the smaller motors allows for more more design. Light kits are becoming tunable or at least CCT selectable. The blade pitch and shape we talked about, even the length. Here's a common misconception I'll share, Ron, just in case anybody's out there wondering, does more blades move more air? Not necessarily. In night in the World War two, they found out that the enemies could hear b fifty two bombers coming. They used to have four propellers on them. And they went to six propellers. They realized the planes were much quieter, and they could get way closer to the enemy before they ever knew they were coming. So more blades, if you run a fan on high, will be less what they call wind chop. It'll be a little quieter, but most people traditionally don't run their fans on high very often unless maybe they're cooking bacon, something burned, you know. They're typically not running them on high. So a three blade is aesthetically pleasing design. It makes a room feel bigger. More blades like some of the larger fans just fit with more of an industrial feel. So they've got more blades on them. But it it still comes down to the blade pitch that determines how much air we move. And then flush mount and downrod designs, you see in the lower right hand corner, what we call a hugger fan or flush mount. You see the downrods in the center. Ultimately, if we have a choice, we always wanna go to downrod hung fans because imagine taking a box fan and putting it against the wall. It starves itself for air. You will always get more air movement out of a downrod. Now the Hugger fans that are designed by most quality manufacturers will still allow for air movement. But if you use the three inch or six inch downrod most of them come with, you're gonna get optimal air movement, premium air movement out of them. And then, obviously, scale and visual impact play a part in the design of the aesthetics also.
Ron:
I have a question, Patrick.
Patrick:
Yes.
Ron:
How do businesses work with their clients on the selection? I mean, this is a a category of product. I'm just thinking reflecting back on my, working with my wife to to search for the fans for our outdoor patio. And, at that time, what we did is we went to a lighting what we went to a a lighting showroom that had fans and and lights, and we we ended up picking one. Yes. What's the the way or the method that you see the the the dealers here, working with a client regarding the design? Do they work through a workbooks? Do they work through an online portal? Do you do you want them ultimately to have product on display? What's the the the way they could most effectively have that design conversation with the client?
Patrick:
Sure. That's a that's a excellent question, Ron. So there's a couple of different ways. If they go to aspire dot com, which is the integrator only division of of w a c, so a I s p I r e dot com, we have Modern Form Smart Fans right on that website for them. That's so that's one way. The other way and the missus or the mister can go shop there. Absolutely having one on display helps remind the team that you do that. And also when you're giving a presentation, it reminds you to tell the client, hey, I can tie the fans into your smart home system. The very last slide I'm gonna show shows a white plastic wall control versus a nice basalt keypad. Homeowners are very, very discriminatory about the the interface and the wall plates they choose. And then to have a plastic remote or a plastic wall plate to control the fan just doesn't make sense. So they don't know that integrators have the ability to tie this in. So definitely a display to be able to talk about this. We have catalogs available, but sometimes a lot of people like to do digital so they can go to the website, have one on display. And then if there's an interior designer involved, I would certainly have a conversation with them upfront because sometimes the interior designer wants to choose it. Sometimes they want to sell it. Other times, they don't care. They care about how it looks. And if you sell it to the client, they're perfectly fine with that. So have that conversation with the interior designer specifically if if they're involved in the selection. Cool. Okay. So easy control. Obviously, we talked about in your question, Ron, which was great. Scheduling, you can use an app. So there is a phone app. Otherwise, you just tie it into the control system and schedule it. You can do multiple fans at one time. Scene integration. So the scene integration really just pertains to whether you want it on or off or what the light level you want set at just like you would any other item in the room with integration. And then they come with a remote and the wall control, but the beautiful thing about this for integration is you don't have to use those. So they be tucked away maybe for an emergency, but you don't have to use those at all. And then one of the go ahead. Yeah. Thank you, Rebecca. One of the reasons we're here is whole home control systems. So some of these the ones below the homeowner connections are there or be are in process of being put there. So there there's all those different typical integrations that everyone looks for in a in a basic ceiling fan. What we're here to talk about is how do we put this all together with the whole home control system. So that's that that's what's key. And I see looks like, yeah, Bert Herrera is saying they just sold some. They sent the client to the Modern Forms fans website and sold some that way. So the reason I I didn't mention that and thank you, Bert. The reason I didn't mention that is because sometimes people will get on there. They see Modern Forms lighting, and they'll say, can you give the lighting too? And so we have to do some a lot of integrators aren't doing the decorative portion or wanna be careful not to step on the interior designer's toes. So we put them on the Aspire website. If you only wanna go pick out a fan, it makes it easier to go that way. But that was a great comment, Bert. Thank you. So, again, we're here to to be able to tie them into the whole home control system. Thank you, Rebecca. And then this is a foam core board that we make that's nice and glossy. You could put these on a stand in your showroom, or you can actually you know, the little gumball glue pieces, you can put them on the wall. But basically, ask the homeowner, which do you prefer? You know? Do you and this is not a Modernform's remote, but they get the idea. If you choose a different fan, you're stuck with either a plastic wall plate or a remote versus the Basalt, Savant, Crestron, Lutron keypads that are that, you know, is what they base their interface on. So you have a lot of opportunities. Think about that. And I think, Ron, you're gonna share with them how if they participate oh, I guess there was one more slide, I apologize. Better client experience, you're doing the whole home, More control of the environment, obviously. Higher perceived value for you as the integrator because you do everything and expanded project scope. So you you make a few bucks on the side as well to cover cover your labor. So
Ron:
I I was curious. Bert responded, here with that question. Bert, if you'd be game to respond, how long have you been integrating fans into your projects? You know, from my point of view, I I don't know that I was that aware or I'm not that aware of integrators doing this. So this strikes me as new territory to take, new new wallet expansion opportunity as a a category. Patrick, from your point of view, is this common that integrators are designing this in, or is this, really a new category for them
Patrick:
to answer? It's new category. It's not common. I think, you know, it depends on where you're at. So Bert was in Florida for many, many years, obviously, hotbed for fans, pun intended. And Capital Technology Group in Texas, also another hot area, they've been selling fans for quite while. They do an enormous job. So other integrators are just starting to learn about this, get comfortable with it, and grow. But it is a new hotbed, and I think you're gonna share with them how that can attract more people to their websites too, how they can weave that in.
Ron:
You got it. That's right. Let's let's jump into it. So, you know, I I one idea or something that I want you all thinking about is how could you make your customers or prospects aware of this, this this particular category? You could also broaden it out to any of the categories of solutions that you offer, and that's what we're gonna talk about here because it really is a a pretty dramatic change in the way that customer experience and research is happening. And, we can go to the next slide. And that is, we're gonna start this with asking you all the questions. This is audience participation. And so, Rebecca's gonna put on the screen, we're gonna show the results live. And then I'm gonna compare what you all say with some of the, the findings and some research that's just come out. So I'm asking you if you're gonna produce or or do research because you're gonna make a luxury purchase for yourself. Maybe it's something for your home. Maybe it's a nice watch. Maybe it's a jewelry. Maybe it's a car. You you name it. You're going to do a purchase. Where are you starting your research? And so alright. Right now, everybody is acting shy and not answering. So I I know you're all here. I can start naming names. Let's everyone just jump in. What what's your first reaction today?
Patrick:
I'm guilty of Google, Ron. I'm the Google king. I carry it on my phone, and people will be talking about a conversation. I can have an answer almost almost instantly. So and I know I'm delving into AI. I'm starting to get more comfortable and deeper. But
Ron:
I I'm curious, Patrick, for you and your life, do you, do you have a ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud account?
Patrick:
I do not have a Cloud account. No. I've been using ChatGPT a
Ron:
little ChatGPT?
Patrick:
Absolutely. Yes. And just dabbling with some some trials, trial subscriptions.
Ron:
Alright. So Bert is typing his answer, so is DAT. Fill out the poll. I I wanna see your answers in this poll data. I don't think your answers are in the poll data yet. I want this poll data to be as accurate as possible. Right now, come on, folks, less than fifty percent of you have participated in the poll. It should be on your screen, and you can click. I've only given you three options. The options are Google, a large language model, or something else. You you call your aunt. I I don't know what you do. You you do something else.
Patrick:
Phone a friend. Yeah.
Ron:
You you you open the newspaper and go to the classifieds. Let's see here. Alright. So right now, we've got, sixty three percent of you participating. Few of more of you out there are listening. Maybe you're eating your lunch and choosing not to participate. I'll go in once. I I got a lot of live chats here coming in. I appreciate that. Oh, one time is on the phone. Maybe they're not oh, that's so interesting. Rebecca, are people on mobile devices maybe not seeing the poll?
Rebecca:
You know, I don't know. I don't know that we've ever
Ron:
Tested that.
Rebecca:
Tested that. Yeah.
Ron:
There you go. We're learning something new, folks.
Patrick:
We're
Rebecca:
gonna use something new every
Patrick:
I've never known Mr. Herrera to lie, so I'm gonna go with they can't see it on their mobile device.
Ron:
I'm going with they don't see it on their phone. Alright.
Rebecca:
That's You gotta cut people some slack then,
Ron:
Alright. I I'm gonna take it easy.
Ron:
Alright. I'll back off. Alright. Let's share the results that we have. And, there we go. You guys can see majority of this audience, at least those that participated in the poll said you go to Google. Some of you go to large language models first. Patrick, you said that your first place, if you're going to make a purchase, you're going to Google still?
Patrick:
Yes.
Ron:
Okay. What under what conditions in your life do you go to chat out of curiosity?
Patrick:
If I wanna go deeper than what Google offers, if I'm looking for some more background information for it to gather all that versus just giving me a list of people that might provide something.
Ron:
Okay. So if you're doing research
Patrick:
Yes. Correct.
Ron:
You'll go to AI. Okay. Yeah. And that's, I'm gonna pull this off my screen here. We'll we'll pull that result off. The idea is I I won't even say the idea. I'll say the fact. We can go to the next slide, Rebecca, is that today. And when I say today, April twenty twenty six, more and more people are going to this thing called large language models. You know, yes, They are absolutely going to Google. Google is still the king of search. Google is still eighty four percent of all search queries in North America. They're going to Google. Now what's interesting is that number is in decline. That number has been in decline for the last three years. So it's decreasing single digits year over year, but it is decreasing. And where are they going? Well, they're going into all of the various large language models that are growing exponentially, or they're doing both. Right? You're you're finding something in Google, or maybe you're finding it in AI, and then you're bouncing back over to Google to verify or validate what AI. Right? We we know AI can hallucinate. So we're trying to go back to Google and make sure that it tells the truth and fact check it. So this is I want you to put yourself in the seat of your customer, and I want you to think about what might they be doing, whether they're researching your business or they're researching how to run a better cooled or heated home, which is I e where this concept of smart fans could be surfaced. So let's, let's move forward, Rebecca. So I want you to look on the left. This is how you and I commonly use Google and the way we've used it for the last several decades, which is we type in a very simple phrase typically into Google. And, you know, think about the customer. Who's the best, home theater installation company in St. Louis? What's the best way to cool my home if I have a smart home? Right? It's a very simple one sentence query. And I want you to think about what does Google give you. We're gonna show you in a minute, I believe, but it gives you a list of pages. And what is on you now I'm I'm mindful. Google also can give you ads. Google also can give you, a gem a Gemini AgenTic summary. Right? So it's giving you an AI summary where maybe it'll give you some context or answers. And below that, it's gonna give you organic results. And then what do we, as the users of Google, need to go do? We need to go click on those results and do our own research. How is this different? This is really the the sea change, folks. How is the way you don't even worry about your customer yet. How do you use AI differently than the way you use Google? And, Patrick, I'll go back to you. When you're, doing research on whatever that thing that you're diving deep into, do you type a word or one sentence, or do you give it a little bit more context? Maybe a few sentences.
Patrick:
Yes. So full as as descriptive as I can get, meaning specific. So if I was looking for someone, might say, who's the best integrator within fifty miles of Hersey, Michigan that does, TV and networking? Or or
Ron:
so There you go.
Patrick:
I try to include as many specifics as possible.
Ron:
Right. I had I have another home, and I have these technologies. But now that that my dealer from that market doesn't work in my new town, and I want all these and more. I wanna know the latest and greatest. Who are the top five companies that I should consider and why? Right? That's and then it's gonna say something. And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna respond, and then it's gonna say something, and then you're gonna respond. That's the paradigm shift, folks, is that you're now you and your customers are having a conversation, and you're having a conversation with your consultant, your AI consultant. And it's a very different modality of research than we are all used to when we think about how people use Google. So let's let's keep moving here. A lot a lot of ground to cover. So the latest research is sharing that thirty seven percent of consumers consumers are now starting their research in AI before they go to Google. Now we've been running webinars here at One Firefly for the last month on this subject, and our audience data is actually typically right in that same thirty to forty percent range. Today, we didn't have the whole population of attendees able to participate, because some of you are on mobile. But today, it was at eight percent. So I'm gonna call that out of, out of the norm for at least our recent polls and what the national data is stating, which is a lot of people are going to AI. I know a member of my team, Julia, was just telling a story in a meeting this morning. She was buying a new sofa. She did she worked with her ChatGPT account. It gave her an answer, and she ended up going and shopping for that sofa at a store. She had never been to that store. She purchased that sofa, and now that sofa is in her living room. And all of that happened from AI. I'll give you another data point. Here at one Firefly, nine out of ten inbound inquiries to our firm are coming from AI. When when we talk to you and you say, where'd you come from? Or you fill out a form, nine out of ten. I'll give you one more data point. For all of the hundreds of businesses that OneFirefly manages marketing, we've had more inbound referral traffic to our clients' websites from AI, from LLMs in first quarter twenty twenty six than we did in all of twenty twenty five. There is a pattern here, folks. The the this is this is a rocket ship in terms of a category where your customers are doing research. So let's keep moving.
Patrick:
The beginning.
Ron:
What is that?
Patrick:
And it's still only the beginning.
Ron:
Oh, we're at the beginning of the beginning. Yeah. We're in a whole new era. The world's gonna be very different in the not too distant future. So I just want you to I want you to, know, even if you get all your work through referral, I know most of you here would tell me you get your work through referral. I don't think there's any changing that. I don't think there's any denying that. I want you to think about when that customer is then going to validate that referral, or they're gonna go do a little extra research. Where are they gonna go online? And I'm just letting you know more and more of them are actually going into AI and having conversations. So now it's more than that. They're not just having a conversation. They're often asking AI, and who should I contact? Who is the best fit for me and why? And how would AI know? AI doesn't know you. AI doesn't have a relationship with you. AI, where is it getting its information? So not to get too technical, but AI, there's really two components of AI you have to think about. One is, for example, I'm just now recently playing more and more with Claude. And so for for example, there's, Claude's Sonnet model four point seven, and there's Opus four point seven, that have come out, and those are called training sets. So the best way to show up in this training set is that you were doing the work online last year because that training set was trained last year. But the other way AI finds you is that whatever the prompt interaction is, it prompts AI to go do a live crawl of the Internet. And what it's doing is it's crawling your website. It's crawling your social media. It's crawling your review platforms. It's crawling the Internet anywhere that it can get a signal of who you are, what you offer, whether you're good or not, what makes you different, what makes you better than alternatives, and whether or not you have answers to questions that are relative to the chat dialogue happening in AI. So in that regard, you are very much in the driver's seat of controlling the narrative and your visibility in AI. Let's keep going.
Patrick:
Crawling your website. It's crawling your competitors' websites also.
Ron:
Amen. And so I I just I'll give a horror story. I was talking to an integrator that I won't I won't name to protect the guilty, and they are the dominant leader in their market by far. They've won numerous decades, won numerous awards. They're considered the best, certainly one of the best in that marketplace, if not the country. And I was with them couple days ago, and we were talking about marketing. We're actually talking about Savant marketing program. It had nothing to do with AI. And the the conversation went there, and I said, well, let's pull up ChatGPT. That was what that individual used. And I said, like you're a homeowner, and go ahead and punch that interaction into chat and ask it who it recommends that you should contact. And all of you, by the way, could go run this experiment. And what showed up were all of his competitors, and his business was nowhere to be found in the recommendations. But yet he's the market leader. So how does that happen? I can tell you how it happens. He is the market leader, and he has wonderful relationships with builders and designers and architects. And he, in his case, has ignored his digital footprint. His website had not been updated in quite a while. He had minimal to no reviews online. His social media was inactive. In other words, there were no signals on the Internet for AI to pick up, discern, and then compare his business versus others to say this is clearly the leader. So if you aren't proactively doing that, then you're opening the door for your competitors to do that. And it is a bit of an arms race in that regard. The businesses that are proactively defining their narrative online are the ones that are showing up, not just in AI, because the benefit, if you do the right work online and build trust and you build authority and you put original content with opinions online, it also benefits your organic positioning. So it actually becomes a double edged sword of a a set of tactics. Now one of those little weapons is to put FAQs, put yourself in the mind of the customer, and all the questions let's use our example about HVAC and smart fans. Think about from the client's perspective, all the questions and conversations they might have, and you want to know what is the question and what is the answer. What is the question? What is the answer? And you want to be that source of truth. Because if you are that source of truth and if your website is appropriately configured, here's a little nugget, meaning your robot text file on your computer invites crawls crawls, c r a w l s, crawls from ChatGPT, from Claude, from Gemini, from Grok, from Perplexity, and you've invited those crawlers in to crawl your site. You've made it easy for them. You can also, by the way, add markdown files into your code to give them really clear, easy to understand AI language, make it easy for the AI to understand who you are and what you do. But, anyway, if your questions and answers are on your website, then now you are increasing the probability of your business being the one that gets presented in results. Keep going. So I want you to think, what is the question? Think about all the solutions you offer, All of the brands you recommend or offer. Think about consumers. I know if you've listened to other education we've offered up on Firefly, we talk about the buyer journey. When a customer's at the beginning of their research journey, that's different if they're more advanced versus if they're now ready to hire somebody. So you have to think about the audience, the topic, or the brand, and their positioning in all of those phases of the buyer journey, And you wanna be architecting that content into your website, into pages of your site, into your blog articles, as we'll get to in a minute, into your Google business profile. You wanna be serving up those answers clearly showing our AI overlords, not just the web not just the humans visiting your site. You wanna show AI that you know what you're talking about and that you are the expert. And if you do that, you will be indexed for that. And if you're indexed for that, you're gonna start showing up in your Google organic search results. You're also gonna start showing up in your AI search results. So what should you be building? What are the questions? What's the answers? What's your unique perspective? You do not wanna copy paste what answer from Patrick's website. You don't wanna do that. You wanna take the answer from Patrick's website or maybe the transcript from this call where you've learned from Patrick, and you wanna add your own color commentary, your own opinions, thoughts, ideas, perspectives, stories. That makes it unique to you. That makes it unique on the Internet. So it's your unique answer to that question speaking to that customer. That is better than a copy paste answer or, god forbid, asking AI to generate all the questions and all the answers and copying and pasting that onto your website. That will equate to garbage. Garbage in is garbage out. But if you add quality, original, authoritative, opinionated content to your brand and marketing voice online, you'll be recognized for that in search. So now let's look at some of the places to do that. Naturally, you want to architect this strategy into your website. There are what's neat is the the principles. I'll I'll I'll throw down the categories within SEO. You know, if you're working local SEO, on-site SEO, technical SEO, off-site SEO, and you're nailing all of those categories and you're putting the effort for example, you see a FAQ here on the GHT website, then you're increasing the probability of your website getting crawled in both Google searches and AI searches. And there's the cheat codes I gave you about robot text files and markdown versions. If you add that to your code, you're gonna increase the visibility of your site. And now to scare you all, what's right around the corner is what's gonna be called the agentic age. So right now, we're talking about large language models, and they they are exploding. What is around the corner is agents. So your customer, their agent, actually out on the Internet doing research and reporting back to them answers. Right? So right now, we're we're in a, we're in step two. They're punching into LLMs. Stage three, and we're it's gonna start happening this year in twenty twenty six, and it's gonna continue in the coming years, which means your online visibility needs to be more and more ready for this agentic age. This robot text comment markdown comment are both two of the multiple strategies you need to implement to increase your visibility. You also can impact, your visibility. Google has put tremendous energy over the last, call it, three or four years, and it's increasing every year, the importance of your Google business profile. This is a free environment from Google, but you have to configure it and you have to maintain it. This is the place, by the way, that you would drive your your reviews. This is the most important place on the Internet for reviews for your business. But you can now load, segments of content into your Google business profile, and you can test and measure the types of content that are then impacting your traffic flows and your click through rates from GMB into your website. Blogs, blogs are, blog is nothing more than a type of web architecture. So I could draft a blog, and the blog just has pretty pictures, or I could draft a blog that has a hundred words. The blogs that are gonna still be relevant in the way the Internet's working today are gonna be long form, rich, authoritative, original content. So if you're still playing the game of thinking you can punch in a question and get an answer and from from ChatGPT, drop that into a blog and think that that's gonna impact your visibility, it's not. But if the content is, focused on a particular buyer persona, on a particular solution within a certain geographical search, and you load that page with context and originality and additional keywords and content, we would call those cluster content that's relative to that page, then you can actually make whether it's a blog page. This by the way, this comment works for blogs or just general pages on your site. It will make that pod that page significantly more visible for search in both cases, for Google and for AI. So the reason you would likely want to consider doing some of these things is that the audience that is doing research in ChatGPT or Claude or whatever your platform is, and they're having a dialogue with their research buddy, they have a lot more conviction that when it names you as the answer, that in fact you are the answer. And the way that this is proving out in our marketing data is that the traffic visiting your website from AI is converting four hundred percent better than traffic from Google. Take this fact. Go to AI. Go to Google and Google it. You'll find that it this number is only increasing, And it has to do with human nature and the fact that when you had gone to AI and done a search, do you value what it's telling you today in April twenty twenty six, and are you acting on it? A lot of your customers are acting on it. So I'm gonna ask you again. If you're not being presented in the answers for all the solutions and all the brands that you care about, then your competitors probably are. And you actually can just go punch into AI and find out. You don't have to wait. Keep going. So in terms of understanding, if you're working with an agency such as one Firefly, we're actually now incorporating at an accelerated rate AI visibility reporting. So this is actually reporting. It's different than than Google organic reporting, which is more about rank. In AI, the transformer and GPT doesn't work that way. It's not so repeatable. So what we're looking at is what is the buyer persona? What's the category of search? And then we are developing multiple types of search phrases and then running that across an entire matrix of LLMs. ChatGPT, various models, Gemini, various models, Claude, various models, and we're aggregating that data into overall visibility. When that topic is searched, what percentage of the time is your business showing up? And that's the KPI that we're now tracking month over month, quarter over quarter. Again, just a demonstration that the game's changed. So I just wanted you all we're finding that our team at One Firefly is having a lot of conversations about some of the confusion and lack of awareness around what's changing in the customer experience and their research journey. We are here to help. We have a a great program with Patrick and Aspire. One Firefly puts into the pot credit for all of you if you're an Aspire customer. Patrick shares with us your dealer levels. And if you are in these dealer levels, then you have this credit that can be applied to new services at one Firefly. Even if you're a brand new Aspire dealer and are just at the beginning of your journey, in volume with Patrick and his team, we still put money, there in the in the in the pot. So that there's the press release. You can, you know, reach out to us, have that conversation, take advantage of the credit. And then we do have an offer for all of you that want an AI visibility report for yourself. I guess I'm gonna do that on the next slide. I wanna remind you all that we have the industry's longest running dealer focused podcast, Automation Unplugged. I've been running this podcast with my team since April two thousand seventeen. We put out a show every Wednesday. It is a significant commitment on our part to interview dealers, interview manufacturers like Patrick, and other, experts in our industry to get their story, their background, and their feelings and thoughts about current events. You can listen. You can watch. We do the show for all of you. And then last is gonna be this offer. We you can scan this. You can connect with Aspire. There's a QR code. You can email us, but we're also gonna send you an email right after this webinar. If you want, it's totally free. There's no strings attached, but we'll run an AI visibility report for your business for a service or solution. Maybe you wanna do it on smart fans. Maybe you wanna do it on some other category that's important to you. We'll run it in your market. There is a cost and a burden, not only manpower or person power on our team, but there's actually AI credit fees that we pay to run these reports. We're willing to do that for you to help raise your understanding and visibility of how you're currently showing up across all of the large language models. So please take us up on this offer. Let us give you a little more insight so you can share that with your team. Rebecca, back to you.
Rebecca:
Yes. Everyone, I dropped the link in the chat. If you would like to request this free visibility report, you can just follow that link. It'll take you to a quick form. It should take you just about a minute to fill out, and we will get that going for you and be in touch within the next couple days. Additionally, as Ron mentioned, we will be sending out this recording, this deck, and this form again so you can request that at any point. We have had a couple of questions come in. And if you are here and still have some, please feel free to drop them in the chat or the q and a for for me to grab. Patrick, I'm gonna start with one that's come in for you. In terms of smart ceiling fans, like, where and when is the best time to start introducing these into a project?
Patrick:
Well, I think as early as possible. Just like integrators are trying to get on the project as early as possible, I think letting them know first of all, you're starting to let them know that you do lighting. You do lighting control, and you're also providing lighting that integrates with the control systems seamlessly. I think the next step along with lighting and lighting control is seal smart ceiling fans to integrate that with the whole home control system. So anytime you're starting to have the the the conversation about aesthetics in the space is another great time. So if they're talking about keypads and they're worried about the aesthetics and how things look, you know, that's a great time to start saying, hey. As you move throughout the house, we're gonna be doing ceiling fans too. We offer a a line of smart ceiling fans. We can integrate a home control system and match some of the finishes up with what you're already looking at. So I think there's several various ways to slip it into the conversation because we gotta let them know right now that you have this availability and you haven't had it before. So if people don't think of you for that, they're not gonna ask you. We've we've gotta find ways to to work it in the conversation.
Rebecca:
Yeah. Great answer.
Ron:
As I learned early in my career, you have to show, tell, and sell. So you have to show it, you gotta tell them about it, and then you get to sell it.
Patrick:
Exactly.
Rebecca:
Alright, Ron. And then we had one come in, on the marketing side. If I'm interested in starting to build out, like, FAQs on my site, where can I start collecting these types of questions?
Ron:
I mean, there's lots of ways you could go about it. One is I'd probably, I'd I'd make it a team effort. I would probably maybe in your leadership meeting or with your salespeople, make it a fun brainstorm where you ask them to put their selves in the seat of the customer and collect the types of questions either they receive a salespeople or they could imagine their customers asking. That's probably where I would start, human first. There also you can go to your Friendly AI, and you could build a buyer persona around your typical customer, and then you could feed that back in and say, great. Now what types of questions would this type of customer probably have about and then insert the name of all of your solutions, all of your brands. And you'll probably nicely quickly get overwhelmed with questions. You then filter them. That's the human in the loop component when you have AI. So now you put your own human context and experience layer on that, figure out what actually makes sense to you, and then you go answer those in your voice. That's my recommendation versus asking AI to answer it. I would say you're the expert. You go answer it. And then if you want AI to maybe polish it for you, that that could be something you do. Inversely, you could say, hey, AI. Can you help me brainstorm what I should consider putting into these answers? Don't make it write the copy, but make it you know, AI is a great brainstorming partner. Then it might give you ideas and words and thoughts that then you could go craft into answers that become truly yours. And then I would put those on your website and on your GMB profile.
Rebecca:
Awesome. Well, thank you. Well, guys, that's all the questions that we've gotten we've gotten in. If you have more later, please feel free to send them, to OneFirefly or to Patrick directly, and we're happy to get you some answers. Again, thanks everyone for joining us. Thank you, Patrick and Ron, for a great presentation, and, I hope everyone has a great rest of your day.
Ron:
Thanks, everybody. Patrick, it was a pleasure. Thanks, Rebecca, and thanks, audience. Have a great rest of your week. Yeah.
Patrick:
Thank you, Ron. Thanks, Rebecca.
Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.