Amen, brother. Apart from the neuroplasticity part, thats my experience too. Everyone was breaking rocks, as my mate once described most businesses marketing themselves in our industry 15 years ago. I got my head around the magic online marketing formula:
- Write engaging real life articles on WordPress for humans, but make sure Google bots found it useful too IE good SEO, and building a few columns IE categories with lots plenty of reinforcing content.
- Take snippets from the article and reach out on Twitter, which til 2014 was an excellent place to hang out before it evolved into troll-ville.
- Eventually you build an online community which then drums up enquiries. That was the part we really nailed.
The industry norm was to keep potential clients hanging waiting for days if not weeks for a call- back or quotes. We set ourselves up so we could call back within 2 hours and get the quote out within 24 hours.
The face-to-face interactions reinforced the online picture we presented. We actually delivered what we claimed online. People appreciated that and trusted us. Securing work was like falling off a rock.
It's a tried and tested way that works. There are many efforts to try cut corners or do things better - like dump websites and the blogging which most people find tiresome, and build a company with a FaceBook business page. To think you can build trust with one liners and a photo twice a day is pretty naive, but while it was a trend, just had to hold my tongue.
Anyway, I'm sure AI is going to spawn many short cuts and do just fine til everyone realises the points you are making. I wanna do business with people not robots.
Sorry if that was a ramble.