AI Marketing Consultant · Des Moines, Iowa
I am Ryan Doser. I run a six figure marketing agency out of the Des Moines metro, solo, on the same AI systems I teach. Ten plus years in marketing, most of it before anyone called this AI. If you want more customers and less busywork, that is the work. If I am the wrong fit, I will say so on the call.
Start here
I searched for my own category the way you probably just did, then opened every result and checked the address on it. Here is what was sitting at the top in September 2026, because knowing this changes who you call. Results move around, so check for yourself.
One of the top results is a "locations" page for Des Moines. The address on it is in Overland Park, Kansas, and the phone number is an 816 Kansas City area code. The page is real marketing work. It is just not local, and nothing on it says so.
Another top result is a genuine AI consultancy that lists no Iowa address and says 60% of its work is building custom AI solutions. If you need a model fine-tuned, they are a serious option. If you need more customers, that is a different job.
Built In, Clutch, and a state-level "best of" listicle fill several page-one slots. So does a syndicated press release sitting on a newspaper site. None of those are a person you can hire. They are pages that rank for the search you just did.
The number one organic result belongs to a long-standing Iowa tech firm. It is a real company with a real office here. Its page is about machine learning and data services, which is a legitimate thing to sell and not the thing most owners are actually shopping for.
None of that makes those companies bad at their jobs. Two of them are genuinely good at theirs. It does mean the search engine is not answering the question you asked, which was who can help me here, so it is worth checking the footer of any site before you fill in the contact form.
Actually here
Des Moines Area Community College is Iowa's largest college. I have taught AI marketing systems there, in a room, to people who ask questions when something does not make sense. That is a harder audience than a sales page gets.
I studied marketing at the University of Northern Iowa, and my corporate years were at Meredith, whose headquarters sat on Locust Street downtown.
The honest version
Let me argue against myself for a second. For the work itself, where I sit does not matter much. Everything happens on a call and a shared screen, and the best marketer for your business might be in Denver.
So here is the real case for local, and it is smaller and more useful than the one most location pages make.
I know the market you are selling into. When you tell me your leads come from a referral network on the west side, I do not need that explained. When you say hiring has been hard, I am not hearing it as an abstraction.
And I cannot disappear. We have people in common. That is a real constraint on my behavior and you should want it. Most of what goes wrong in this category comes down to a vendor who stops answering once the invoice clears, and that is much harder to do to someone you might run into at a conference downtown.
What local does not buy you is better AI. The tools are the same everywhere. Anyone selling you a Des Moines specific advantage in the technology itself is selling you a story.
If someone across the country is a better fit for your problem, hire them.
Brands I've worked with
Receipts
I do not have a case study PDF. I have a website I built from nothing in February 2026, with no backlinks and no domain history, using the exact systems I would teach you.
Before any of this I spent years in corporate marketing at Meredith, running paid media for People and Better Homes & Gardens. Big brands, big budgets, and a useful education in what a real marketing operation costs to run.
I went out on my own in July 2019 and have worked for myself since. That is the photo on the left, and there was nothing impressive about it at the time.
The AI part is recent. The marketing part is not, and that order matters more than anything else on this page.
Who it's for
Your clients are asking about AI and your team is improvising an answer. I show you the workflows I run in production so you can deliver the work yourself instead of reselling someone else's tool.
You have a team, a budget, and a mandate to "do something with AI." I help you pick the two or three places it actually pays, and say plainly which pilots are not worth the meeting.
You are not trying to become an AI company. You want more calls, more booked jobs, and fewer hours lost to busywork. We start with the marketing problem and work backwards to the tool.
You want to ask a specific question about your business and get a straight answer from someone who has done the work. Not a ticket queue, and not a dashboard you will never open.
What the work looks like
Search still sends customers. What changed is that a growing share of those searches end in an answer instead of a click. I work on both: the rankings you already understand, and being the business the assistant names. If you want the mechanics before you ever talk to me, I published what ChatGPT actually cited when I asked it to recommend a local business, and the answer surprised me.
Most content plans die because they assume a staff you do not have. I build systems where one person produces work that used to take three, with a human approving everything before it ships. Volume without quality is expensive noise, so the review step never comes out.
Reporting, repurposing, follow up, the same five emails. This is the least glamorous part and usually the fastest payback. If you want the framework I use to pick which task goes first, it is in my walkthrough on implementing AI when you are not technical.
Fit
I would rather lose the sale here than on month two. If you recognize yourself in more than one of these, we are probably not a match.
AI made producing content nearly free, which raised the bar for what gets noticed rather than lowering it. Pointing a model at your business and asking for fifty blog posts produces fifty pages nobody reads. AI multiplies expertise. On top of nothing, it multiplies nothing.
The first month is usually spent finding the real bottleneck, and the useful version of that answer is rarely the one you walked in with. If you have a launch in ten days, buy ads. That is the honest answer and it costs you nothing to hear it.
I am in Des Moines and I will meet you in person when it is genuinely useful. Most of the work is not a meeting. If your definition of local is a body in a chair on a schedule, hire an agency with an account team. Same answer if price is the deciding factor, because there are plenty of generalists here charging a fraction of $999 a month.
Most of what wins here means changing something real: how a page is written, how a task gets done, who does it. If every change needs a quarter to approve, the plan sits in a doc and nothing moves.
I am a non-technical marketer, which matters more than it sounds. I do not have a coding background, so everything I build has to be simple enough that I can actually run it. That is the same bar your team has to clear, and it is why the systems I hand over tend to survive contact with a real week.
I teach all of it in public, on my YouTube channel and in a weekly newsletter. You can watch me do the work for months before you ever pay me anything, which is the point.
The offer
Most people start with the AI Concierge at $999 a month. One 90 minute working call, on your real business, plus access to the community between calls. It is direction and coaching, not done for you.
That price is deliberately under the going retainer rate, because you are buying my judgment rather than my hours of production. If you want the full picture of what this market charges, I published the 2026 rate card with my own numbers in it.
Not sure whether you need a consultant, a coach, or something else entirely? That is a fair question and I wrote the honest comparison, including where my own offer is the wrong answer, in AI consultant vs AI coach.
Either way, the first step is a conversation. If it is not a fit you will know by the end of it, and you will still leave with the two things I would do first.
Two questions I get a lot
The metro is easy for me to reach, from West Des Moines and Ankeny out to Urbandale and Waukee, though plenty of my work is with clients well outside the state. Wherever they are, owners tend to open with one of these two.
Almost certainly less than you think. The loudest AI adoption numbers come from self-reported surveys, and the measured ones are far lower. Urgency is the oldest lever in this industry. Being deliberate now beats being early and wrong.
Often better. The less glamorous the category, the more likely it is that the competition still writes everything by hand and nobody has touched their site in three years. A crowded market is harder than a boring one.
Questions
Yes. I live in the Des Moines metro, I studied marketing at the University of Northern Iowa, and I have run marketing for local businesses here alongside national clients. Meeting in person is easy when it is useful. Most of the work happens between meetings, so I do not pretend proximity is the thing that makes it work.
An AI marketing consultant finds the specific places AI can remove hours or win visibility in how you already get customers, then helps you build those things and keep them running. In practice that means content systems, search and AI search visibility, and automating the repetitive work around them. The useful version of the job is narrow. It does not mean handing your marketing to a chatbot, and a consultant who cannot name which two or three workflows they would change is selling you a strategy deck.
Independent AI consultants generally publish $150 to $350 an hour, boutique firms sit above that, and Big 4 or MBB work runs $500 to $1,000 or more. On monthly work, advisory is commonly quoted at $2,000 to $5,000 and a managed retainer starts around $5,000. My AI Concierge is $999 a month for one 90-minute working call plus community access, which sits below the usual retainer floor because it is coaching and direction rather than done-for-you delivery. I break the full rate card down, with sources, in my guide to what an AI consultant costs.
For the work itself it barely matters, and anyone telling you a Des Moines consultant has better AI than a Denver one is selling you a story. What local buys is accountability and context. The practical warning is that you cannot tell who is local from the search results: when I checked page one for this term, one of the top agencies published an Overland Park, Kansas address and an 816 Kansas City phone number on its own Des Moines page. Open the contact page and read the address before you assume the top result is nearby.
It can move the odds, and nobody honest will promise more than that. When I logged what ChatGPT actually cited while recommending local businesses, Google Business Profiles were not among the sources. Your Google Business Profile still matters a lot for the Google map pack, which is a different surface with different rules. Anyone selling you a guaranteed placement inside a model they do not control is selling you something they cannot deliver.
Mostly the second, on purpose. The Concierge is coaching and direction: we work through your real situation on a call each month and you leave knowing exactly what to build next. I also take on a small number of done-for-you client retainers for SEO and AI content systems, and we can talk about that on the call if teaching is not what you want.
Technically yes, practically no. I run a six figure marketing agency solo, on the same AI systems I teach, so there is no account team and no junior handoff. That is a real limit and worth saying out loud: I cannot staff a twelve-person campaign, and if you need that, Des Moines has several good full-service agencies. What you get instead is the person who actually does the work, on the call, every time.
Yes, and I am happy to when it earns the drive. I am in the metro, so coffee or a session at your office is easy to arrange. I will also tell you when a call would be faster for both of us. The monthly Concierge call runs on a screen share because we are usually inside your actual accounts, which is hard to do across a table.
Book a conversation and we will look at where you really are. If I am not the right person, I will tell you on the call and point you somewhere better.
Book a conversation