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Hey crafters. Just a reminder, this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered advice.

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The views and opinions expressed our own and do not represent those of any company or business we currently work with are associated with, or have worked with in the past.

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Thanks for tuning in to the future craft marketing podcast.

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Let's get it started hey there.

0:29

Welcome to the FutureCraft marketing podcast, where we're exploring how AI is changing all things from brand to demand.

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I'm Ken Roden, one of your guides on this exciting journey.

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And I'm Erin Mills, your other co host.

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And together, we're here to unpack the future of AI and marketing.

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We'll share some insights, test the latest technology, interview industry pioneers, and talk to folks doing really cool things.

0:53

So Ken, what cool thing have you been doing with Gen AI? Yeah.

0:57

A few episodes we've been ChatGPT or Claude and what's better for what.

1:02

So I've actually been using Claude quite a bit to help refine my messaging.

1:06

So what I've been doing is actually uploading some persona information, some insights about the target buyer, the industry, and then giving it some topics I want to dive into more around some specific functionality, giving an idea of some messaging and then saying like, how could I refine this to talk to this level of buyer or this.

1:26

Industry in this specific industry.

1:28

And I'd say give me three options. And then from there, I can put together something that I'm actually able to use, because I know that's something people always talk about okay, can you actually use chat GPT for things? Yes, you actually can.

1:39

So are you finding that the quality is getting better as you're evolving your personas or, what's changed? Yeah, I think we have been talking a lot about personas, right? And I think as I'm getting better about putting more quality answers or information into the prompt and being a little bit more specific, I'm getting better answers, and I think I'm asking better questions.

2:04

I think one thing that I learned from one of our guests was before you ask it a question, tell it to read and absorb the information you've given it.

2:14

And that was a game changer for me as well.

2:16

I'm a fan of using Claude for messaging right now.

2:19

Who knows if that will change with the algorithm updates. But right now I'm good with it.

2:22

What about you, Erin What have you been doing with a I? I was really inspired.

2:26

I think a episode or two ago, you were talking about how you were creating custom GPTs.

2:32

And so I also created my own, was a lot easier than I thought it would be to create it.

2:37

But refining it is where some of the magic comes in.

2:40

And so what I did was created some of the we've been talking about personas.

2:46

They play into everything that we do and it's a good starting point.

2:48

So actually created a different persona for each one of the folks that we talk to.

2:53

And I think what's interesting is Nicole Leffer on our first episode had mentioned how she has that really great GPT you are.

3:02

I use that thing all the time, but this takes it almost another level to incorporate some of the other work that you've done in your personas.

3:08

So the outputs have been really cool. Yeah.

3:10

I think personas is something that we all should be trying to refine because I do think there's just a lot of good information out there.

3:17

So I have a little bit of a challenge to our listeners.

3:20

Let's try this out. Try using these personas and try and use ChatGPT or Claude for helping you build personas and let us know what's working and what isn't.

3:29

Erin, who do we have to talk to today? It's a great segue because you start with personas to develop your content.

3:36

We have Tahnee Perry on the show today, who is really an expert at content creation and productivity.

3:42

really excited to have that conversation and learn a little bit more about how to optimize and create more content workflows within your existing teams.

3:50

That's great. I really love her newsletter. Is it from zero to unicorn? I think that's the one.

3:55

It's great. We'll be right back with that in just a minute.

3:57

Welcome and buckle up for another Future Craft Marketing podcast interview where we dive deep into AI and marketing.

4:04

Today we have the privilege of being joined by Tahnee Perry, a trailblazer and leader in AI and marketing, and the author of one of my favorite resources, Zero to Unicorn.

4:14

You guys should all check it out. Tahnee is a leading expert in AI powered marketing.

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She helps businesses harness the power of AI to transform their marketing strategies.

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Tahnee is presented at major industry events and contributed to publications like Forbes and Medium.

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With over a decade of experience at the forefront of digital marketing innovation, tahnee is passionate about helping marketers stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly AI driven world, which is exactly what we are about here at Future Craft Marketing.

4:42

Tahnee thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

4:47

let's start off with something that's really top of mind for many marketers, limited resources.

4:53

It's an omnipresent topic, especially in today's economic climate.

4:57

Many teams are feeling like AI might be out of reach.

5:00

Can you debunk some of the myths and share some practical ways AI tools can be leveraged to build a marketing strategy? Yeah, I think AI has never been more accessible than it is today.

5:12

And I think that's what's so great, especially for marketers, because the barrier to entry for using some of these tools and taking an advantage of AI in your work is really easy.

5:24

So I think most people have experienced AI with the new large language models that are out there, like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, and they have free versions and even the pro tiers are fairly affordable.

5:36

And I think it's, there's no excuse now to not experiment and to not use these as part of your day to day.

5:43

And I think as marketers having the ability to get access to those and then figuring out how you want to integrate them into your work.

5:50

is really important because it's going to have a big impact on everything you do.

5:56

Yeah. And you've had some roles and worked with a lot of companies at that startups or scale phase.

6:03

What kind of recommendations or guidance do you have for smaller teams or, single marketers at startups, to get started with AI? I actually think that for startups and solo teams, it's perfect.

6:18

in my work, I consult with a lot of companies and it's actually the enterprise level companies that are having a lot of trouble because they have bigger teams, they have more process, there's a lot more steps they have to go through to get the AI in the hands of the people who are making things.

6:33

At a startup with a smaller team, you're shortcutting all of that.

6:37

You're figuring things out and the approval process, you find that you talk to people about.

6:43

This is a good idea. And then they're like, let's do it.

6:46

And what I'm finding with my clients that are on the smaller side, like early stage companies is that the key is sitting down and figuring out, okay, what is it that you want to do? What's the outcome you're looking for? Being really clear about that, because I think sometimes people get frustrated when AI or an LLM doesn't do the thing they want it to do, it's because they weren't clear about what they wanted it to do.

7:07

And so if you can have that outcome created and defined, and then you find the right tool for that, and you experiment, you'd be surprised at how much efficiency you can add for a small team.

7:21

Because the key, I think, for something like ChatGPT is It really helps you do more across a lot of different areas.

7:28

So for a solo marketer, that's amazing because you don't have to now be an expert or a specialist in every single element of marketing.

7:35

Like you guys are marketers, think about all the different things that we have to know and understand and create.

7:40

It's huge. And the beauty of these LLMs is that they have the world's knowledge, like accessible.

7:47

So if you have a question or if you need to, Spitball an idea, ChatGPT or Gemini are really great for something like that.

7:55

You mentioned something that's got me thinking, what do you think about enterprise marketing organizations who aren't using AI? Is this a chance for, the solopreneurs, solo marketers to catch up with the big guys? Most definitely.

8:12

And we've seen research that shows that.

8:15

If you are already, an expert in your field, you are going to perform at a higher level than an LLM.

8:24

And if you are, beginning out or you're mid level, an LLM or AI can help you rise.

8:31

to the level of someone who's an expert. And so it's really, AI is not replacing people, yet.

8:37

Anyway, there's some rumors about that coming. But I do think it helps elevate people who are still developing their skills.

8:43

And again, that's the beauty of AI. It's accessible to anyone, everywhere.

8:47

And it really helps improve outputs across the board.

8:50

Yeah, one thing that's also interesting, aside from just being somebody that's more junior and then comes up and, can learn things faster.

8:58

It's also about your marketing game can travel a lot easier.

9:01

You don't have to have a significant depth of knowledge in a particular industry.

9:06

How might that apply with, the clients that you work with or what you're seeing with other people? what we've seen in some companies is either putting on the hold, hiring for extra staff or expanding their teams and experimenting with AI today to see, How they can increase the outputs or increase the types of tasks that they're tackling.

9:28

So I'm consulting with a company right now.

9:31

You have a team of about 65 marketers and they have a couple of specialists.

9:36

But what they're finding is ways for each of their teams and each of their groups to, it's almost like they have an AI assistant who plugs in where some of the other team members might not have that skill set or that knowledge.

9:49

And so they have a fairly big team and they have a lot of people doing a lot of different things and they have specialists, but AI is definitely there to help them when there's a gap.

9:58

So I'm definitely seeing that in some of the companies today.

10:02

That's such a smart approach. One of the things I think that's.

10:05

talked about a lot is niche marketing, guerrilla marketing, grassroots marketing, how to, get personalized and it can be incredibly effective.

10:12

If you think about how marketers can leverage generative AI to create targeted content that resonates, what are some of the tips that you would give marketers out there today? the beauty of AI is it's accessibility and it's affordability, which is a really key piece of, grassroots or niche marketing.

10:28

And again, great for startups who have small budgets.

10:32

And I think one of the areas that AI is great at is helping you, especially if you're a solo marketer, tackle more tasks than you could.

10:42

As a single person, there's only so many hours in a day.

10:45

And what you can do with AI or your favorite LLM like chat GPT is craft.

10:51

An entire marketing strategy, it's not something you'd want to cut and paste into your work, but it helps you think through all the steps to come up with your marketing plan identify your ideal customer profile and flesh out who they are and where you might find them and then you can identify what are the areas that I can tackle now.

11:13

affordably that's going to make a connection and raise the awareness of my solution over someone else's solution.

11:20

And I'm actually doing this with a client right now where we're pretty neat.

11:23

Their solution's pretty niche. They don't have a whole lot of brand awareness.

11:26

And what we do as a team is sit down and say, okay, What are we, who are we, and what do we stand for, and what is the product itself? And then I can go away and collaborate with ChatGPT and say, okay, help me come up with some programs that are easy and quick and don't cost a lot.

11:41

And then it gives me a list of 10 or 20, however many I ask for.

11:45

And then I can look at that list and say, okay, these three are actually good.

11:48

Because, everything you get out isn't going to be amazing.

11:50

We know that a lot of the stuff that returns back is subpar, but there's going to be maybe one.

11:55

Great idea that you didn't think of, and then you can integrate that back into the plan or the marketing campaign, whatever it is you're building.

12:04

And you'll find you'll get so much more and you get more momentum from using AI as your partner, especially when it's grassroots, than if you don't use it at all.

12:13

that's really interesting. And I have an idea of what you might say to this, with your copy and paste, comment, but, What are some of the pitfalls that people, or common mistakes that, that people are making and how can they avoid them? There are definitely a few.

12:24

And the first one you've already mentioned, I would never cut and paste anything that you get out of a machine because it's going to be very generic.

12:33

you can get ideas and it can prompt, you in the right direction, but you want to add your own personal touch, whatever it is you're creating, whether it's a strategy brief, a blog post, a social caption.

12:44

It's always better when you take an idea from the AI output and then you personalize it.

12:50

The second thing is I would always check your facts because LLMs are known for hallucinating, and you never really know if what it's telling you is true, and some of the LLMs are really bad at providing a source, and so you're going to have to dig a little bit to make sure that your, what you're saying is correct, and there's definitely some examples out there where people have gotten in a bit of trouble And then the second is just be aware that anything that you put into the majority of these tools is not private.

13:27

And so if you have personally identifiable information for your company and you upload it in a CSV file, then that most likely will go into the training model and it could come back out anywhere else.

13:41

And so if you, there are cases where you can sign up for a tool or an enterprise program where you're in a walled garden, but if you were using the free versions of any of these tools, All of your inputs go back into the training model and can come out somewhere else that you're not aware of.

13:58

I really think that last point is really important, right? Whatever you input, it's not yours.

14:03

Be very mindful, people listening that to do that.

14:06

Broadening a little bit more to just content strategy in general.

14:09

You've mentioned before in your newsletter about using ChatGPT or generative AI to 10 extra content production.

14:16

What are some of the tools like ChatGPT or using other things to help with that content creation or other stages of that journey? I love tools.

14:27

And one of the things that I spend quite a bit of my time on is experimenting with all of the new platforms and tools that are coming out.

14:35

Indeed, the Martech report. Annual poll was just released last week and they stated now there's 14, 000 plus marketing tools available today, which just blows my mind.

14:48

That is so many, it's more than we could ever go through and assess.

14:52

But that said, there are some that rise to the top.

14:55

And so I'm always keeping my eye on what other people are using and recommending.

14:59

Piques my interest. I'll do my form of research where I'll look at G2 reviews.

15:04

I'll check if there are valid use cases, if they have a founding team, cause there are, you'll notice like some will launch a platform and there's not a whole lot of information about it.

15:15

You're not really sure if it works. There's just some cues I think you can keep an eye on.

15:19

Is this really a quality tool or not? And so that's the process I go through to select them.

15:25

And then when I've done that and I think it's, worth my time.

15:28

I'll go in, sign up for an account, either pay for the pro tier or use the free trial.

15:33

And then if I. get value out of it, gets integrated into my day to day.

15:38

So I have a couple that I wanted to share.

15:41

GPT 4 is my all rounder.

15:43

I test GPT 4, Gemini, and Claude on a regular basis.

15:48

And sometimes I'll go check out Copilot and see if it's getting better, but I haven't had as good results with that.

15:54

And GPT 4 consistently performs the best at the widest variety of tasks.

16:00

It can read images. It can, surf the internet.

16:03

It can analyze data. Gemini is pretty close second.

16:06

And then Claude, it's really good at written text, so if you want help with a title or a blog post, I will tend to go there to ask for its input.

16:16

But it doesn't do all the other stuff, so that's why.

16:18

GPT 4 is my all rounder. If you're looking to do SEO, especially, we're talking about content generation, you need to do things like keyword research.

16:26

SEMrush, I think, just still has the best and the most robust set of features, and they are really aggressive with integrating the AI into their platform.

16:36

If you do want a dedicated copywriting tool, I love AnyWord.

16:41

And the reason I like AnyWord is that it's the only copywriting tool now that scores your copy.

16:46

So you can go in there and you can score your title, you can score add, copy, it won't score a block.

16:52

It's a little bit too much and maybe that's coming later.

16:54

But what I like about it is it'll tell you. Why it thinks that's going to connect with your audience.

16:59

it will predict the success of it engaging.

17:03

And I think that's really helpful. 'cause a lot of times, like you create content and you're like, is anyone gonna read this? Is it gonna resonate? And so it's nice to have a little bit of information about that before you hit the publish button.

17:14

And then two more, on the design side, I love Canva because they've been really aggressive in releasing AI tools.

17:19

I love their background feature, when you start designing things, you don't realize like how often you just want to strip the background out and you literally click a button and it disappears and it's wonderful.

17:30

And then finally, Veed. io, which is a video platform and what they, I think their specialty really is taking long format videos and breaking them into shorter format that you can use on all your social media.

17:43

So those are my top ones that I love. Those are great.

17:47

That's very clever. Hey, one area that I think a lot of our listeners spend a lot of time on and I do too, is content creation, but.

17:57

I always find that the earlier parts of content creation are challenging.

18:01

How do you think about, using AI for things like brainstorming or the earlier stages of that content strategy? You're so right.

18:12

That blank page. Syndrome is a real challenge for content marketers and the beauty of a chat GPT is that you don't have that anymore because it can provide thought starters or it can give you some ideas of where you want to go and you can take it from there.

18:26

If you get stuck in the middle of a blog, it'll help you continue your thought and maybe you don't take exactly what it's given you, but it's a way to get the gears moving in your head.

18:36

But, I think a great use case that not a lot of people.

18:39

Using something like ChatGBT4 is taking all of your customer and audience insights and asking it to synthesize all of that data and help you come up with creative content ideas.

18:55

A great example is, let's say you're responsible for producing all of your advertising, all of your, let's say Facebook advertising, and you've got to come up with a title and your call to action and your value prop and the supporting graphic.

19:10

AI is a great partner in that because you could take all of the research you've done with your customers, and that could be reviews that you have on G2, it could be surveys you've conducted, it could be just your ICP or your persona map, and you feed all that in And then you start to ask the LLM questions about the data you've inputted.

19:31

And it does a really good job of summarizing and synthesizing and connecting different parts, and then coming up with creative ideas, you can, if you can feed enough information into it, you can start to get some really good outputs when you're asking it in a conversational manner.

19:47

It's not like you have to be a data scientist to get it back.

19:50

And so you can ask it, here's my information about my idea or customer profile, give me 10 ideas for an ad campaign, and it'll just, right there, you've got 10 ideas.

19:59

And so instead of you sitting there smoke coming out of your ears because you're trying to think of that next creative idea, ChattyBT can help you get there.

20:08

I think we've all been there with the smoke coming out of our ears.

20:11

Assuming you've passed the death by blank page and you have all these great ideas, how can marketers really ensure that their, content that they're producing or even just brainstorming with a chat AI has their brand voice and tone? I think it depends a little bit on the tool that you're using and how you're using it.

20:33

If you could go into the free version of ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, for example, what you're getting back is very generic.

20:41

And I hear from a lot of people who are frustrated With AI they're like, it doesn't work, and I'm like you gotta just go in and write a simple prompt, because what you get back is the most basic and generic of what an LLM has to offer.

20:55

Instead I would say, you either have to create a custom GPT, this is why I like ChatGPT, because it has the ability to go in and create custom GPT's based on your instructions.

21:08

So I have a whole set of clients and they're all a little bit different.

21:11

They have different value props, different customers, different brand and style guides.

21:15

And what I've done is I've created a custom GPT for each of them.

21:20

And they need different things. So one of my clients does a lot of, they're like an e commerce brand and they need a lot of Shopify product descriptions.

21:29

So in their custom GPT, I'd have a template of what I want a product description to look like.

21:37

And I lay it out, word for word. Here's how it should sound, tone, style, format, headings.

21:43

It's information that you need to include. And then when I sit down and they have a new product they want to launch, all I need is bullet points and I'll sit down with the founder and she'll give me three things like the color, the style, what it's made of, and I'll plug that into ChatGPT and then I get a full page's worth of beautifully written product description.

22:04

If I had just put that in without having tuned the LLM first, I don't think I would be happy with it.

22:11

So what I would say is you need to do some of the pre work to get to that ideal outcome.

22:17

And custom GPTEs is one way to do it, and there are tools out there, some of the copywriting ones in particular, like Anyword, Jasper, Rider, I think we've heard of those.

22:26

They also have a portion of the tool where you set it up.

22:31

You can even load your brand and style guide and it will then read through it and then it saves all of the instructions as part of the entire platform.

22:40

Yeah, it's pretty incredible what you can do, but I've heard so many people say Oh I try to didn't work.

22:46

And it's but what did you put into it actually, before you got the answer that you didn't like, right? One thing I saw you post a couple weeks ago was around, are we losing the human touch in our marketing with generative AI? I remember you referenced, a Grammarly ad.

23:03

That you're like, even this AI company puts the human touch still in their marketing.

23:08

And what I'm curious about is like, how can the marketers use AI to help with their writing and content creation, but still keep that human element in their brand voice? It's a great question.

23:20

And I think something we'll probably be debating forever.

23:24

Conversations with copywriters and content creators, and I'd say 99 percent of them agree that what you get from Gen AI is not as good as what they can write.

23:37

But they're also specialists in their field.

23:39

And the research has shown that if you're a specialist and you're really good at your job, AI is never going to be as good as you.

23:46

I think where AI really excels is if you're maybe an amateur copywriter or English is your second language.

23:53

And AI can be really helpful for you because it can bring you closer up to a professional level of writing.

24:01

That said, I'd never argue that you should cut and paste out of, chat GPT or Gemini.

24:07

It just, it's not you. And then so it's not human.

24:11

And I think Grammarly was a beautiful example because you could tell all of the taglines that were really clever, they were on point, they showed off the value prop but in a really short, catchy way.

24:24

In my experience, when I've asked ChatGPT to give me something great for an ad, it never does.

24:31

I'm usually like, oh man, that's so cheesy.

24:34

It's like cringeworthy, but usually I get an idea from the list of 10 things that's given me that I can then riff on myself.

24:43

So it's a partnership and not a replacement.

24:46

And I think that's how you keep the human element is by using AI for the elements of your work process that are frustrating and boring and not helpful.

24:54

And making sure you inject you into the areas where AI is not good, which is creativity, originality, authenticity.

25:02

And there'll always be a place for that, I think.

25:05

Yeah, I think so too. I'm curious to get your thoughts about existing content development process for a lot of these companies and how do we incorporate these tools without disrupting the workflow? Obviously, we can get some efficiencies, but would love to get your thoughts I think it depends on the size of the team.

25:20

If you're a solo marketer or like a freelance copywriter, it's really easy to integrate these things into the parts of your workflow that make sense for you because you can just decide like I'm going to do it for this or I'm not going to do it for that.

25:31

But for the bigger teams, it's something you have to sit down and plot out.

25:35

So the client that I advised for that has the 60 team, 60 marketer team, there's lots of different people who are part of all these campaign programs and every person has a part and then they have to bring in the collaboration piece and the approval piece.

25:53

And if you just rip out something, and without telling anybody, it's gonna create some chaos.

25:59

So my recommendation is that you sit down and you figure out what are the use cases that you want for AI, and then plot them out and compare them to what you're doing today, and then come up with a change management plan.

26:12

Because you'll need to say, here's where we're going to start to integrate it.

26:15

And here's where we're not. And then make sure that each person who's impacted as part of that process knows what's happening and when, because if you try to make the change too quickly without making sure that everybody knows what's happening, you're going to end up with miscommunication, duplicate work, people are going to get frustrated.

26:34

And this is where we've found, when I'm consulting, that.

26:38

AI integration fails is when you're not spending enough time in that setup phase, thinking about how, where, and when, and making sure you have a really tight plan for it.

26:51

If you don't think through that and you don't have that laid out and everybody's in agreement, you're going to Usually what happens is the company is like, this was a disaster.

26:59

We're not doing it. And now let's go back to how we were doing it before.

27:02

Have a plan. That's the main thing. Change management, I think is one of the biggest hurdles folks have.

27:09

And especially as things move faster and faster.

27:11

So let's say, whether it's the 60 person team or the.

27:15

two person team or five person team has taken all these gems and incorporated it into their strategies and the content development process.

27:24

How would you say they could use Gen AI or AI in general to get that content out to their ICP? you can take a lot of information about your ICP, who they are, what their pain points are, what solutions they're looking for.

27:38

If you can identify the job to be done what's that thing, that outcome they want, you can then create content that they're going to find useful, whether it's educational or maybe entertaining.

27:52

So AI can help you identify that, give you some ideas for the content to create.

27:56

And then for the distribution piece of it, I don't know that AI is having a big impact on it yet.

28:02

You want to go where you're. audiences, and that's probably still the same places.

28:09

It's today as it was yesterday or a year ago.

28:11

It's, the social channels, what social channels are they using? Are they attending events? Are they in a certain location? Like outdoor advertising is not being impacted that much by AI except maybe in the media buying phase.

28:25

If outdoor advertising is having a big impact for you, I'd say keep doing that.

28:29

I would say one use case, there's actually two use cases.

28:33

That AI is having an impact and it's on personalization.

28:38

So if you're a SAS company, a really great tool to check out is Mutiny.

28:43

And what they help you do is personalize your landing pages as a one to one kind of scenario.

28:49

so you can go in and you can say, when someone, if they're cookied, if someone comes in, or if you invite them in through an email campaign, it will identify them and know who it is.

28:59

And you've created content using the Mutiny AI helper, because it makes it dynamic and it will change the pages, the shell of the page is the same and then there are key elements, it will change and that's dynamic based on who's visiting the page.

29:13

It's really cool. And I think, yeah, so the distribution, they're coming to the same place, but what you're doing is that you're personalizing it to a much more granular level than you ever could before.

29:26

The other example I was going to mention is programmatic SEO, which is very similar.

29:30

So I think it was DoorDash that did this.

29:32

Here are all the cities that we think we want to target, and we want to build out personalized pages that highlight the top three restaurants in a location when someone visits.

29:45

They built out this big table that had ChatGPT write the descriptions and also source the names of the restaurants.

29:53

And then when someone visited from Chicago, they got Chicago's top three restaurants and New York and LA and so on.

29:58

And they did this for 1300 cities.

30:00

It was absolutely amazing. And because it's all automated and they're using chat GPT to write the content, it just happens.

30:07

It would take months for a human person to do that.

30:10

Yeah. It's really, it was going to not only expedite how work gets done, but the end user, our buyers are just going to expect things to be more personalized, more tailored to what we're looking for.

30:22

And if not, I think we're going to, leave the website, I think the other that's interesting is we've worked in B2B.

30:28

it's that whole consumerization of experiences.

30:31

Having it served up in my inbox to, all the different touch points.

30:34

I think that's going to be what we see too.

30:37

Yeah. I think B2B buyers are going to expect you to hand them the solution on the homepage.

30:43

They're not going, they're not wanting, they won't want to dig for the answers anymore.

30:47

if you don't tell right then and there, like this is how this tool could work for you right now, they're going to go somewhere else.

30:54

Yeah. Okay, Tahnee, I have to be honest, video mutiny.

30:59

You mentioned the MarTech landscape.

31:02

There's just a lot of tools out there.

31:05

And if a marketer were to buy all of them, their MarTech budget would be insane and they'd probably be overwhelmed.

31:11

So what advice could you give to someone? And, how to think about a criteria for making a decision to actually purchase a tool and can you share your thoughts on that and what shouldn't they spend their time on? Yeah, it's a great question.

31:27

And I think something a lot of my clients are wrestling with is.

31:31

How you can get tool overload, or tool bloat, as they call it.

31:37

And the first thing to do is to assess what you have already.

31:41

I'm finding a lot of the bigger players are furiously developing their own AI functionality.

31:47

So if you are a HubSpot user, Salesforce user, Adobe, all of those, they have some great AI functionality built in.

31:55

And if they don't have it right now, it's on their roadmap.

31:58

So my first suggestion is, explore what you have today instead of immediately rushing out to get the new shiny thing.

32:06

That said, there's always going to be some niche outputs you want that are not addressed by some of those bigger players.

32:13

The video space, I think, is wide open for someone to capture because there isn't really a big player there, except maybe Adobe.

32:21

They have some functionality, but I think what I've heard, at least from my clients, is It's hard to use.

32:26

It's a little bit inaccessible because of the cost. And that's why you're seeing things like Descript and Video bubble up because they're affordable and they're making it much easier to process video.

32:37

So first step is assess what you have.

32:39

The second is if there is a gap, identify what the gap is and what kind of outcome you want, and then you can go.

32:46

And look for something to and then make sure that the company looks like they have some roadway in front of them because, it's easy to build a solution today.

32:56

So make sure you think they're going to be around in 12 months.

32:59

That said, don't sign a long term contract. Make sure they can integrate with the tools that you have today and make sure that they're easy enough that you'll get, from your internal users.

33:09

Cause I've also seen cases where you get someone who's super die hard.

33:12

They're like, this tool is amazing. And they onboard it and then no one uses it.

33:16

And they just go back to their old workflows.

33:19

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think the implementation part is going back to Erin's point, like the change management is actually one of the most.

33:25

Challenging parts. Could you share a few of the pitfalls or struggles that, you might run into implementing AI technology and what marketers can maybe do to avoid them? yeah, change management is the hardest part of this because there's always that human element and it's dealing with a psychology of changing someone's day to day.

33:46

Workflow. That can be scary, especially when someone feels like their job might be at risk.

33:51

So you really have to address that psychological factor this is a safe place, we're not replacing you.

33:57

This is to help you do your job better. And here are the tools and how to use them.

34:01

One of the clients that I consulted with, we did some workshops where we said, here are all these amazing ideas and use cases, but the company didn't give them access to anything.

34:09

And so they didn't really make any progress because.

34:12

They were either forced to use the free version of GPT, which was against their company policy or nothing.

34:19

So I think it's really important for companies and teams to make sure, yes, you make it a safe space for people to experiment and try new things, but then also give them the learning and the tools they need to actually make it happen.

34:31

And then if, something doesn't go well, take a step back, assess why that happened, and address it and figure out, what's the right way to move forward? Was it a policy thing? Was it a training thing? Or was the tool not the right tool for what we were trying to do? So I think if you can do those three things, then you'd be in a good space.

34:47

Yeah, that's great advice. we touched on resourcing a little bit earlier and certainly these tools are resource, but really thinking about time and, our time probably being the most valuable limited resource.

34:58

How can AI tools help marketers manage their time a little bit more effectively? And, if you had to think about some of the strategies.

35:05

that they can use to prioritize tasks, and really focus on high value activities.

35:09

What would those be? I love AI for this.

35:13

Exactly. I have to do so many different things.

35:16

And I have a pretty high task switching cost.

35:19

And AI really helps with that because it can help me plot out my day.

35:22

So I use a tool called Reclaim, Motion is another one, and it's an AI calendar manager.

35:29

And what I do is I connect it to my calendars, it keeps track of all my meetings, and then I also input my tasks, and it just figures out for me when I should be doing things and for how long.

35:39

And then if someone books a meeting on top of a task block, it will reorder my calendar to make sure that it gets done by the due date.

35:47

And if a due date starts approaching, it's no longer a flexible item.

35:50

It becomes, okay, you have to do this now.

35:53

And I found as a procrastinator, this is like the best thing ever because I will find a hundred things to do instead of the task I should be doing.

36:01

And Reclaim helps me manage that, habit of my own.

36:04

So I really love, Reclaim.

36:06

I think there's other tools that you can integrate into your day to be more productive.

36:10

I love, meeting transcribers like Read.

36:13

ai, Fathom, Auto's another one.

36:17

And the reason for that is that you can, when you attend meetings, you're in the moment.

36:21

So sometimes it's hard to keep track of your action items or what somebody said.

36:24

With a tool like Read. ai, it gives you this amazing summary, plus the action items, when they do, and you can go back and you can watch the video if you need to get more detail.

36:34

So I think finding ways to include things like Reclaim and Read.

36:38

ai or Fathom into your day to day makes you more efficient incrementally, but in enough places that you find that adds up.

36:48

So for me, I found that using AI, I probably get two to three hours per day more out of what I can do.

36:57

It's like a three X me, which is amazing because I'm a solo practitioner.

37:01

So that makes a really big difference. Imagine what that would be like if you did it for a team of 10 It'd Yeah, that is incredible.

37:08

I think we almost had to pick Ken's jaw off the floor when you were talking about Reclaim.

37:14

We're definitely going to have to check that one out.

37:16

You talked a little bit about your personal productivity.

37:20

Would love to get any other thoughts you have in terms of others, especially solo practitioners out there or small marketing teams that are looking to harness Yeah, I think the first thing you have to do is you need to figure out where you're going to apply AI to your life or to work.

37:38

And there's, I have a business partner, Liza Adam, who's created this great framework and I can share that with you and you can post it in the podcast notes.

37:46

But what it is, it's a spreadsheet. It's fairly simple, but it allows you to define work cases where there's a lot of friction, or you don't enjoy that work, and what you do is you write it all out, you describe what it is, what outcome you want from it, and then its impact on your day.

38:06

What's really helpful is if you plot, say for a week, you plot all the different tasks that you're doing and you assign a time to them and a frustration level.

38:13

Did I enjoy doing this? Did I hate doing this? And then you can take a look at your week and you can say, okay, there are three areas where this one task or these three tasks I have to do, I don't enjoy at all.

38:25

And they're having a big impact on my outputs or my day.

38:28

Those are perfect for AI.

38:31

So can I use AI in some way? To make it faster or to take it off my plate altogether.

38:37

And I think starting from that kind of like high level analysis, it really helps you figure out in a systematic way, how to use it as opposed to just being like, Oh, I'm going to use it for This more methodical way of taking advantage of all the different ways AI can make you more productive.

38:55

And you'll find if you can apply that to more parts of your work, you'll be amazed at how much you can get done.

39:00

It's very cool. Yeah, that's incredible.

39:03

It reminds me a little bit of fair play.

39:06

Have you guys ever heard of that? It's for families and couples, and it's about dividing the tasks of housework.

39:15

And it's a similar concept of, who.

39:17

Likes to load the dishwasher. How painful is that? I hadn't thought about applying it to marketing as much as you think, but it's actually a cool way to think about it.

39:26

Wow. Then someone should build a tool up. All right.

39:28

Hey, ideas, for the next, the next tool that we can all incorporate.

39:32

Lisa is a good friend of our show and she's the guru of amazing frameworks.

39:38

talking about how, we're evolving and being more productive, you posed a really insightful question on Zero to Unicorn about one thing is clear, AI is shaping, reshaping the job landscape in complex ways.

39:50

The key question is how do we adapt? And I thought that was so smart.

39:55

I really liked that you framed that question up, but how would you answer it yourself? It's a great question.

40:00

I think that it's an evolving topic because AI is changing every day and it's changing really fast.

40:05

And when I talk to my fellow marketers, what I hear a lot is Oh, I feel like I'm falling behind.

40:10

So I follow an AI expert called Ethan Mollick.

40:13

He is a Wharton professor and the author of One Useful Thing.

40:18

And he's a quirky guy, so he has some interesting things that he thinks about and then he writes articles.

40:25

And so I follow him religiously because he's one of those thought leaders in the space.

40:30

And he conducted a study with BCG Consulting.

40:34

they took. A group of consultants and they gave them AI as a collaborator, then they gave a set who did not get AI, and they gave them 18 tasks to complete in a certain amount of time.

40:46

And what they found is that the consultants using AI outperformed those not using AI by 46%.

40:54

It was a huge difference. But there was a nuance to this study that I found really interesting.

41:00

The consultants who handed over the tasks to AI without checking or collaborating performed worse Then the ones with AI and the ones without.

41:12

And what that said to me is that humans who collaborate and keep their hands on the wheel and are paying attention are always going to be valuable resources to their company.

41:23

People who sit back and are like, I'm just going to let the AI do it or not.

41:29

Because their outputs won't be as good. And I know there's some talk in the industry of AI replacing us, and then we need to figure out like what we're going to do with ourselves for the rest of time, we're not there yet.

41:38

So I would say that the one thing you can do to adapt is to make sure that you understand how to use AI, you understand where it works, where it doesn't work, and that you're experimenting with it every day.

41:49

Because if you don't, you're going to get to a point where you're going to just be so far behind.

41:53

It's going to take way too long for you to catch up.

41:55

So lean in now, because now's the time. Because no one knows.

41:58

What's happening. So this is the perfect opportunity to be one of the people who's figuring it out as it evolves.

42:06

Exactly. I think that's exactly why we're all here, right? We want marketers to lean in and really try to understand this stuff so that.

42:13

We are in a way, future proofing our jobs and we're ready for whatever direction this is going to take us as an industry.

42:20

I'll just have to say one of the ways to future proof yourself is to listen to this podcast, right? I love that.

42:27

We'll be using that as a sound clip. I'm sure that's why you picked the name, right? That's exactly right.

42:33

That's exactly it. So this conversation has been awesome, but I know we have to let you go, but I just have Some quick hit questions for you because at future crop marketing, we're all about practical tips and tricks.

42:44

So I'm going to ask you a few questions and just give me your quick answers.

42:46

Okay. First one. What's your best AI quick tip? my quick tip, my best AI quick tip is to sign up for the pro version of whatever tool you're using, because the pro version is always a better model.

42:59

And so if you're using chat GPT, sign up for GPT 4, if it's Gemini, get their pro plan, et cetera.

43:07

What is your best cron workflow or GPT? It's really simple, write this in plain English.

43:15

That's a good one. That's so good. ChatGPT in particular, you ask it to write something that's flowery and it gives you like five paragraphs and it's like way too many adjectives.

43:25

When you say plain English, it writes back to you like a human.

43:29

It's amazing. That's a great one. What is your best tip for keeping up with all of the news about AI and R today? Well, subscribing to my newsletter, of course.

43:39

Zero to unicorn. 100%. Shameless plug there.

43:43

I would say if, follow all of the thought leaders in AI, depending on what field you're in or your specialty, there's tons of people who focus on different elements of marketing, there's people into design, into video, into copywriting.

43:58

Find out who they are and follow them because those are the ones that are like passionate and they're going to be the ones that you'll learn from the most.

44:05

Okay. And last one, what technology should our listeners check out that they may not know about now? Yeah, I'm going to list three that I haven't talked about.

44:13

The first is, if you're into localization or translation, check out SmartCat because they have, I think a really great model where they use machine translation, but they pair it with real human translators.

44:26

So again that's my entire philosophy is like humans and AI together.

44:29

So if you need to localize or translate, that's a great tool.

44:32

Hey, Jen, if you want to experiment with AI avatars, so you can create an avatar of yourself, or you can use one of their prebuilt ones.

44:40

So if you need to create case studies or if you're doing an SDR outreach.

44:45

Your SDRs can use it and we know video works a lot better than just written.

44:49

So that's a good one. And finally, Taplio is a newer social media management tool that is leaning really heavily into AI functionality, so they help you manage all of your content creation, your distribution, they have an AI writer, they help you, source, and they also have this really cool hook generator that helps you come up with ideas for better hooks, and so I've been using that myself and it's working really well.

45:11

Those were all great. I'm going to try all of them.

45:13

I know I'm contradicting what I said earlier. I will end up trying all of them.

45:17

I know we said don't run out and sign up for a hundred different tools, but I can't help it.

45:21

I love all these tools because they all do different things and some of them are really great.

45:24

So I probably use at least 50 tools a week.

45:27

It's mad. I'm the same. Yeah.

45:29

Even building this podcast, our tech probably rivals some of the companies that we've worked for.

45:36

Oh, it's insane. Thank you so much, Tahnee for joining us.

45:41

I have learned so much. It really was so insightful to not just hear about the tech, but actually how do we implement this and how should we think about scaling, AI into our businesses.

45:51

So this has been really valuable for me and I'm sure valuable to our listeners.

45:55

Thanks so much. Erin what'd you think? thought it was awesome.

45:59

I love the idea of 10xing the content production.

46:03

I think that we all struggle with is how do we create quality content, not just quantity.

46:07

And I think Tahnee had some really great ideas on how to both solve for the quantity aspect, but maintain high quality and a personalized touch.

46:15

But I also am definitely checking out Reclaim.

46:19

Keep expanding this tech stack. But what about you? Yeah, I would say that I agree she just knows so much about what's out there from a tech availability.

46:30

And I think there's all of these tools I want to go check out and maybe trial them before we buy from them just for, Saving on our wallets a little bit, but I really thought her tip at the end around right in plain English as a prompt or as part of a prompt, it's the simple stuff that's gonna start moving you in the right direction.

46:49

And it's also, she's not gonna be able to tell you, marketer in this specific industry at this specific size company, what exactly your prompt could be, but that's one that we could all use and leverage.

46:59

So I'm going to try it out and I'll let you know how it goes.

47:02

But that was A great interview.

47:05

I feel like I learned so much and also I'm like, I have so much more to learn.

47:09

Yeah, I think that's the other thing.

47:11

Talking to these folks that have so much experience and are diving in every day as a main focus of what they're doing and just being able to take those little nuggets that really apply to any industry or any level of marketing is really cool.

47:25

Yeah. I think it's like coming together for me now.

47:28

We've done a few episodes I think we're starting to see Hey, there's actually a community out there of people who are really passionate about this.

47:34

Like we are, it's just been really awesome to get to know all these people yeah.

47:39

And I think Tahnee had some really cool, she told us about a lot of cool tools, But we have another one that you're going to talk about today.

47:46

What are you going to talk about? Yes, I'm going to talk about Opus Clips and Opus Clips is a tool that is near and dear to my heart because what it does is it will take video and edit it down for you into small clips, caption it, optimize it with headlines as well as transcribe it, and give it a score on how.

48:11

Viral it could go based on the words that were used, the voiceover, the quality of the video.

48:18

So it really cuts down on that. Hey, I did a webinar or I did an interview.

48:23

I need to splice this stuff down. Opus Clips does it for you.

48:27

Wow. That sounds really fun. So on a scale of one to 10, I'm going to go with nine.

48:31

Whoa. Yeah.

48:34

So I did the free version, you get a certain number of credits and I was able to create 25 clips in about 30 minutes with no editing just processing and setting up a few parameters.

48:49

I can put out brand elements, I can add specific fonts we want to use.

48:52

For enterprise organizations or if your brand's important and you can really tee it up for that.

48:56

Then switch to the paid version. I can set clips for 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 6 minutes.

49:02

So then I've got content for Instagram, I've got content for YouTube, as well as YouTube Shorts, and then I can do Vimeo, and I can do TikTok.

49:12

This took me maybe 2 hours to do one video.

49:16

One podcast interview. So I'm saying that it's saving me a ton of time.

49:21

Is it perfect? No, but nothing's perfect.

49:23

Impressive. that's it for today.

49:27

Really excited to check Opus out.

49:29

And thank you again, Tahnee Perry for joining us and thank you listeners for joining us on this journey into AI and marketing.

49:36

Until next time, let's keep crafting the future of marketing together.