AI is Transforming Digital Marketing - Here's What You Should Know NOW!

Speaker 1: 0:01

Artificial intelligence. Unless you've been living under rock, you know that this is the talk of the town. It's almost like the birth of the internet itself. But what exactly should the role of artificial intelligence be in your digital marketing? How are people or businesses using it today? How should you be using it And then? what are the pitfalls that you should avoid? These are the recommendations that I am to provide you on this episode of the live stream version of your digital marketing coach podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, vlogging, tiktoking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Schaefer is your digital marketing coach helping you grow your business with digital. First marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach and this is Neil Schaefer.

Speaker 1: 1:23

So let's first talk about AI in general, because there is a lot of noise coming out from everybody. If you are subscribed to a marketing tool, you have undoubtedly heard from various tools all the different things that they are providing. If you are following marketers on Twitter, on LinkedIn or wherever, they're all talking about AI as well. So there is a lot of noise out there and we really need to figure out how much of this is noise and how much of this is what we should actually be acting upon. And I say this because every year, especially in social media, there is something new that a lot of people talk about. Last year might have been Web 3 and NFTs, and the year before that it was Clubhouse and Social Audio. So there's a lot of people that are bouncing around different ideas, but obviously this one I think we can all agree is different. It's different for a lot of reasons that I am going to go through, but I also want to say that I'm almost reminded of a tool called Pingfm. I want you to raise your hand if you've heard of a tool called Pingfm. We don't talk about Pingfm anymore, but Pingfm was a tool in the early days of social media, when there were a ton of different social networking sites. There were like 50, 100 that just came out of nowhere. We had Dig, we had StumbleUpon Tumblr in its early days And the idea was just use this tool and just put your link and a title in there and it will automatically publish to like 50 sites all at once, or however many sites you wanted it to do at Now. At the time it seemed like a great idea. I can get all my content on all these social networking sites. It's efficient, don't have to waste time. But at the end of the day, is that the best solution? We know today? that is not the best solution And, in fact, pingfm is not around Now. That is not an example of an AI tool, but it is an example of a tool that, nevertheless, at the time, a lot of people thought was a good idea. So, with that same historical perspective, i want to take a look at AI. I think the other thing about AI is you probably know someone that, or you've read a blog post, that you have this feeling that, unless you're like this prompt engineering expert trained on chat, gpt to do all your work on autopilot, that somehow you're way far behind. I want to tell you that those people are out there, but they are very, very far in view and, like anything else, you are never too late for any of this. So it is not too late to get started today with all the advice that I'm going to give you. But I do want to say it is important to take AI more serious than ever, and the reason is the more you understand it now, the more knowledge you have, the more ways you will undoubtedly be able to see that it can help your business, especially your marketing. That's really one of the key messages that I want to bring you today. I think the other thing is your competitors. Right, if your competitors once you understand what people are already doing with AI, you begin to see that if your competitors are way ahead of you on this, then you're going to fall behind and you are going to lose any advantage that you have in the marketplace. So that is another thing, but I don't want you to use AI because of FOMO, right, you're not missing out, but you need to understand what is going on, and I think really the first place now. I've been talking about this on this podcast for several months now. I began in the fall winter of 2022, after the emergence of chat GPT, saying it's time you need to experiment. And then, after attending Jasperai's Generative AI Conference in San Francisco on Valentine's Day actually I said experimentation time is over. You really need to start doing this and figuring out its role in your marketing, and today is really an extension of that conversation. But obviously you hopefully have been already using chat, gpt and Google Bard, and I really want you to use it as your assistant, talk to it as if it was a virtual assistant, a personal assistant, and see what is possible. That's really the best way to describe it, because with AI, there's no rulebook for any of this right And it's really only your imagination that could hold you back on anything that you want to do. So keep that in mind. It's funny because when I have conversations with chat, gpt or you know, and prompts on any tool, i tend to use the words like please and thank you as if they were human. But I think that's really really a good way to think about it, because you will see many, many ways of using those tools. So I want to begin by saying I like to provide as much data as possible when I talk about AI and Jasper, who I believe are sort of the gorillas in AI marketing tool, today, just came out with their first AI and business trend report. Now, in this report they in late January, so this is already four months ago they surveyed 500 tech professionals across a dozen departments and a wide variety of age groups and company sizes to get their take on all things related to generative AI. This is the use of AI in content creation. Here's some data to think of and this is going to give you a good idea of where you and your business stand on this AI onboarding or on this AI technology roadmap. Those that are in one to 10 people companies 45 percent if they are a two to 10 person company are already spending up to $100 a month on GenIi tools. 57 percent of solar pernurs are spending up to $100 on AI tools. Only 14 percent of solar pernurs were spending zero, meaning that 86 percent of solar pernurs were already invested in AI for their marketing. On the other hand, those that worked at companies over 1,000 people there were already a tremendous amount. I think the number is 25 percent were already spending more than $2,000 a month on GenIi and only 10 percent were spending zero. 90 percent of large companies are already invested, and $2,000 a month is not a lot for a large company, but they are invested and they've started their journey. I think it's safe to say that today, ai and marketing is clearly mainstream. The interesting thing is and I think you'll get a sense of this as I go through these use case scenarios that the smaller the business, the more impactful it can have, the more efficiency you can raise The fact that more smaller businesses are adopting AI more aggressively compared to larger businesses. I think it's something, a trend, that we're going to continue to see, as smaller businesses obviously can be nimble and, like I said, they have the most to gain from this. This is not large enterprise marketing. Ai is really for any business, even the solar pernurs that might be listening to this podcast or watching this live stream. Now one more data point from this report, and it's going to be a preface as to what I want to talk about today. What are the ways in which participants use generative AI? 45 percent use it to improve existing content. Take content you already have put it through a prompt and see how you might be able to improve it. A lot of my titles for YouTube videos. I am doing the exact same thing. I'm using a tool called vidIQ and I am putting the title that I think is going to be good in the prompt and it is giving me three alternative titles that I might want to use. Undoubtedly, one of those titles ends up just sounding better, something that I could not have thought of but that very much represents what I want to talk about. That's 45 percent. 43 percent to generate new ideas. I think this is something we can all agree on. If AI is tapping into the massive brain power of everything that's ever been published online, you're going to get a new idea. If you're asking an assistant, that represents billions of ideas, you're bound to find a new idea. 43 percent to generate new ideas. This could be as easy as I want to write a blog post on X. I want to give a speech on Y. I'm thinking about writing a book on Z. What are some ideas that I should cover if I'm targeting this audience? I want to talk about this topic. That really easy to imagine. On that note, 38% are using it to build content outlines. So if you're creating a list of blog posts, what are the 10 things I should cover? What are the 10 most important questions that small business owners have when it comes to AI and marketing. You can see how you can build a content outline in that way. I think this also ties into the ideation. 31% use AI to speed up content creation. Yes, it can definitely help you flesh out content When you have writer's block. It can help give you ideas and spur you to work faster. 28% use AI to optimize content for SEO. Huge fan of phraseai, that's the tool that I use Chat GPT alone, ai alone, does not give you SEO optimized content right, but there are more and more tools that will help you better align your content with what people are actually searching for or what search engines are serving up to internet users. This is really the way to think about that better alignment right. 27% use generative AI to automate editorial. Now, i don't know what that means. There have already been AI proofreading tools at Grammarly that have already existed, so maybe that's part of it, but that's the data point. 26% to defeat writer's block, and I think I already mentioned that. You can imagine how that is very, very useful. 26% as well, to generate bulk copy. You'll notice that was not the number one, the highest way in which people are using AI, and I think that the knee-jerk responses oh, we're gonna use AI to write all of our blog posts, and that's not what I'm talking about here, and I wanna get into with very, very specific guidelines as to where I believe you should and shouldn't use AI and content creation. But only 26% of these people that are using AI are using it to generate bulk copy. In other words, three quarters of AI users are not using it to create bulk copy Something to consider. 18% are using it to build custom images Even Google Bard recently now will give you responses in visuals And 17% and I'm sort of surprised this is so low to repurpose existing content. I'm a big fan of this. I've been using AI for this. So you see the different ways in which companies are or aren't using AI, and at some point, you're gonna need to create what I would call an AI policy for the creation of content itself, because there are some that are gonna be purists, saying you should avoid AI at all costs, right While others wanna replace anything and everything you do with AI, and I'm not saying there's one right or wrong answer here, but you need to figure out what works best for your company or for yourself and stick with it. Now I would avoid either extreme, but the problem is that if you have a narrow view of AI, digital marketing, you are going to lose out. So it is time to really broaden your view, because AI and marketing is not just content creation, and I think that that is the knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people have Oh, we're just gonna use AI to write all these blog posts. That's not what I'm talking about And I think that's the way it's perceived, whether it's college admission essays for high school students or college students using chat GPT for their essays. That is not what I'm talking about here, and I think that'll be really apparent as I get near the end. So I wanna talk about AI in the content creation process, outside of that bulk content creation. So where can you use AI as part of creating content without the actual creation of content? Well, i mentioned before content ideation and organization. Content ideation might be the biggest, i think, positive impact that AI can have once you start to get comfortable using it as part of your content creation process. We can obviously use it for proofreading. I mentioned Grammarly, where probably many of you are already using it for proofreading SEO optimization So I use Fray Surfer. Seo is another very popular tool, but this is another way in which we should be considering leveraging AI. One of my favorite ways of using AI is a little bit counterintuitive, but I am a fan of using AI detection tools. When I have a team of writers, when we provide content for clients, i am always putting that content not only through copiescape to check for plagiarism, but also through AI content detection tools. And the reason that I'm putting that through AI content detection tools is that AI content detection tools at the end of the day, yes, they're using AI algorithms to figure out if the content was generated by AI or not, but, more importantly, it's checking if the content sounds like it was written by a robot, and nobody wants to write as if they sound like a robot. So, at the end of the day, i believe that these AI detection tools actually are a great way of confirming how quote unquote human your writing is. So, even if you're not using AI to create content, i would experiment with putting my content through one of these AI detection tools And I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised. You may find that it suggests that you created something using AI, even if you didn't. And if it feels that way, you probably want to mix up your set and structures and vocabulary and I think you get the picture. So I believe that actually makes for better content. We obviously have creating visuals through Dali too. We already mentioned that. A lot of companies are already starting to do that. And what about video? So we talked about text, we talked about visual In audio and video. We can use tools like Descript or Recut. Recut is a tool that will go through your video and it will try to determine where there were blank spaces And it will automatically cut that out in the edit to save your time editing. It can also cut out and, together with Descript, another tool, can also try to cut out, like Oz and UMS, it can also automatically generate a transcript for you. So another great way of using AI as part of the content creation process is by editing what you've already done to try to save you time in the final publication of that without bulk. You know artificially creating content right. So now I want to get to and we should have a drumroll which is the actual use of AI in content creation itself, and this is where we really want to get back to that policy as to what we're going to do and what we might not do. So I believe that AI is best suited for short form content. It will give you a plethora of ideas that you probably haven't thought about, without strain, far from your brand or human voice. Now, what are examples of this? Ad copy is a great example of this. In fact, social media you know Google ads platforms are great examples of tools that have been using AI for many, many years. But ad copy social media copy is another one, another area in which you can definitely experiment with AI tools for content creation. Product description, for bullet points, is another great area. I help my clients use AI tools for, like Amazon, product descriptions. Once again, it's going to give you, based on your input, a combination of saying things in different ways, using your keywords and using the brand voice that you define to help really flesh out product descriptions in a much, much quicker way, based on those original inputs, the original information that you already have, that are already representing your product, your brand. So, short form content, without a doubt, ai, i believe, is going to be great for content creation. It could really save you time. And what about other content where it's OK to sound robotic. That type of content I would refer to as technical content, right? Technical manuals, technical FAQs. That is an area where there's generally not so much of a human or brand voice. Now, if your brand is doing something where you are creating technical FAQs in a very human and conversational voice, this might not be appropriate. But I know whenever I buy something around me in my room that is related to the technology and I get the manuals, it does not sound very human. In fact, most of the manuals don't say as much as I'd like them to. So this is a great way If you're thinking about AI for long form content, the more technical your content is, the more natural it's actually going to sound. So that's another great use case scenario. But for the other long form content, like blog posts and video scripts and ebooks, i believe this is where you probably do not want to use AI content 100%, as is You're going to end up. If you try to do that. You're going to go through before publication. You're going to spend a lot of time revoicing that content, making sure it actually represents what you wrote or what you talk about on that subject, because AI does generate what they call hallucinations. So actually, for some, it ends up being much faster, but for others, it actually might end up taking you more of your time to edit and revoice that final product, which might not, at the end of the day, represent you or your business. This is why I personally do not use AI for long form content creation, and whether you do it or not is really going to get down to the AI policy. I know that there are some, including some of my clients, who spend just two. They are not natural writers. They spend way too much time in content creation and swear that AI makes them more efficient, gets them 80% of the way there and saves them a ton of time. Now, i don't know how effective the final product that they're creating is going to be, but it provides them that output. So if it's a landing page where you don't care if it ranks in SEO or not, then maybe that's going to be very, very efficient. Now, how emotionally attached are the readers going to be when going through your landing page using a technology that is not good at creating emotional content? I don't know, but these are the things that we need to consider when we use AI for long form content. So there is no one right or wrong answer here. You set your policy and you go, and this is why the smaller the company, the fewer the resources, the fewer writers that you have access for or budget for, you can see how more impactful the technology is going to be. Now I also want to talk about AI in digital marketing outside of content creation, because, like I said, we often have this very, very narrow view of AI of just writing books and creating blog posts, and it's really my intent to show you It's way more than that And there are way more use case scenarios that I think most of you listening would probably agree are ethical Or no matter what you thought of AI before you can consider using it in that way. So let's look at some of these things And I will say the broader your approach to this, the more obviously you and your business have to gain. So, number one forecasting and predicting outcomes. We know that AI is getting better at predicting stock prices. I think maybe you've seen some of these articles in the press, but there are tools, for instance, talking about YouTube, like TubeBuddy. Tubebuddy, when you upload a YouTube video, you often upload a thumbnail. It's going to look at your thumbnail and it's going to give you a predictive score as to how likely your audience is going to respond to that thumbnail, based on your previous results. So that's a pretty cool way of predictive analytics with AI. Tweethunter is a AI-generated tweet tool that I use, and they also, based on your tweet, before you send it out or schedule it, they are giving you a score of how they think your audience will respond to your tweet. Once again, we're using AI for forecasting and predicting outcomes. Now, this is an example of if you're just using chatGPT, you can't see this, and this is why my approach to leveraging AI and marketing is leveraging AI in marketing tools. I'm not going direct to chatGPT for all this, although for ideation I tend to use Google Bard but for all these other things, you are going to see more and more marketing technology, the technology that you're already using, begin to introduce this functionality, or there's going to be new technology that arises that is going to help you with this, and this is really where we're going to see those marketing technology companies that are more aggressive in a good way, about AI and those that are way far behind, and I think that that's almost an analogy of companies that really leverage AI and those that don't. So forecasting and predicting outcomes, i think, is a very, very powerful way of using AI. What about number two? better customer service. So I talk about phraseio as being this tool for helping me optimize my content for SEO, but phrase has always had a customer service chatbot tool that you can install on your website. So, as you know, with chatGPT, we know that chatbots are getting much better at talking like humans. But what phrases chatbot does? what more and more of these chatbots are doing is they're indexing your website's content And therefore, when someone comes in with a question, it is doing its best to provide them an answer using AI, based on the content that you already have. This is something I hope to do in the future for Neal Schaefercom. Someone comes to my website. They want to ask me a question. They can ask my chatbot a question and the answer is going to be from all the content that I've already written. So you can imagine this is helping your customer service chatbots and your FAQ chatbots get smarter and just take on more of that workload before it has to be transferred to a human person. So this is an absolute no-brainer. And what is this? marketing or not? I mean, it's quasi-marketing, it's customer-facing, although some of this obviously is customer service as well, but nevertheless, this is another easy way in which we can consider using AI for marketing. Another very, very traditional way of using AI and digital marketing is personalization based on purchase history. This is mainly for e-commerce companies, but there's been this technology out for some time. Companies like Covia, zuvu there's a bunch of them will provide this technology so that when you're in your shopping cart or connected with your email, it's going to give you recommendations, not only based on your purchase in history, but everybody's purchase in history, as to what other products you might want to buy. Here's another use case paper-click ad management. There are tons of tools out there that, using AI, will automatically manage and optimize your ad spend for social media ads, for Google ads, for Amazon ads. I don't need to mention company names here. There's a ton of them out there. I'll link in the show notes to one of my blog posts about Facebook ads tools as an example of different tools that can help you manage your paper-click ads. Dynamic pricing Dynamic pricing using AI has been around for some time. I mean, go to kayakcom, go to any one of these sites, go to Amazon, you'll see prices change all the time very dynamically, and this is being done using AI tools. Obviously, if you're an e-commerce similar to my, talking about personalization based on purchase history, you can see how AI can be an absolute powerful asset for your digital marketing. Marketing automation Now. Marketing automation has been around for a while, but the use of AI is going to allow for greater automated personalization, lead scoring and nurturing. I would reach out to your CRM tool of choice, your marketing automation tool. Ask them what features they have now to take advantage of AI. What features are they developing that will take advantage of AI on their roadmap? Image recognition is another area. When I wrote The Age of Influence, the final chapter was all about AI and influencer marketing and using visual AI. At the time, i was talking about a tool called Open Influence that has this technology, where they are visually trying to understand what makes influencers influential, what makes content engage worthy, and therefore try to predict influencer marketing campaigns with visual AI at the center. Talkwalker is a social listening tool that has always had a visual AI component so that, even when your brand name isn't mentioned in a social media post, if it is in the picture, it is going to do its best to find it. So I think we're going to see a lot more with that sort of technology. And then we have sentiment analysis right. Social listening tools are trying to look at the various conversations and they're trying to judge if that conversation is positive or negative, and AI is going to only allow them to do that even better. All right, so I have spent a long time and I don't want to be considered an evangelist. No tool was paying me money to talk about this but really, as your digital marketing coach, it is my responsibility, my duty, to tell it like it is And this is how I see it. So it's not a question of if you will use AI, but what tools you will use that support what AI functionality to help improve your marketing and grow your business. If you have not done a tools audit, i always recommend my clients every 90 days, go out there, see what's out there, see what new functionality and what new companies are out there. We're in a period of unparalleled entrepreneurship when it comes to AI. There are tons of new companies that are out there and some are thinking from scratch. You know I talk about digital first marketing. They're thinking AI first tool. So we're going to see a lot of exciting things in the pipeline. I'm truly excited for what the future holds here And that's why it's important. This podcast episode, or if you're watching this on YouTube or LinkedIn or Facebook right now, is an example of keeping yourself educated on what is possible with AI. If you're thinking about future proofing your career, you know that that's a no brainer. But also for your own business, it is critical that you keep educated on the topic. Keep reading blog posts, attending webinars, have conversations with your marketing technology vendors. What are they doing about this? Do searches for new tools that will support your AI ambitions. Pinterest AI tool it exists. Linkedin AI tool it exists. Twitter AI tool it exists. I am doing my best to my blog, neal Schaefercom, to create lists well, listicle posts of various tools that I have vetted, i have audited and that I recommend you look at. I've already started posting a few of these. I have a lot more to go, so stay tuned for that and you're going to find a lot of very, very cool technology And then be ready to adjust that content creation policy as the technology and your options increase. Now I'm not going to name names, but there was one tool that I was using where I thought the output and it was a tool for social media wasn't that good. And then GPT-4 came around and they added more functionality. And then, boom, now I'm recommending it to my clients. It's that good And I'm starting to use it as well, and so far I've seen very positive results. So things are moving fast. You need to be nimble in your thinking about all this as well. And then, most importantly I've already hinted at this you've got to keep an open mind. Get out there, have conversations with your peers online, at your company, in your industry, at conferences, at local networking events, in your chamber of commerce. Ai is something that's truly impacting every business, and I'm not just talking about marketers. In every function, people are trying to figure out how AI is going to impact what they do, what their company does, what that function does. So have conversations, understand what everybody has. I've just tried to give you a snapshot of where I see AI in digital marketing today, but hopefully this gives you some ideas. Hopefully it makes you less afraid but also more willing to do more, but, most importantly, realizing that AI for digital marketing is not just that content creation piece of just using it to both create content. That, i believe, honestly, is 1% of the value, and that is the part of AI that I actually do not use and I do not recommend my clients use as well. Well, i hope you've enjoyed this conversation about the role of AI in digital marketing. This is your digital marketing coach, neil Schaefer, signing off.

Speaker 2: 31:35

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