Create Your Own AI Success Story (Digital Marketer Podcast)

the ability to go from human to first level of AI creates a massive amount of volume that previously was unable and economically not feasible for business but now we have a version of AI that can pump out X amount of volume. So if every business for example is putting out a thousand blogs a week I'm sure at some point Google will be like okay chill because we have to find a way to combat this right and then that's one I think that when you stop ranking or when running a thousand different ads that's because everyone's running a thousand different ads that's so you're all playing on the same playing field or on the same level that's when again people again realize that brand action really does matter. Everyone this market grabs the president digital marketer and this is the podcast that keeps you up to date on everything you need to know when it comes to digital marketing. From the platform should be focused on the candidates tactics and tools they're working today. Today I have a very special guest Scott Clary the entrepreneur podcasting investor who actually interviewed me for my first podcast so before I had done I don't know how my episodes have done this is the guy that started it all so if you are not liking how I do things this guy is to blame because you have that podcast so welcome Scott. Well you were actually my first guest too so it was it was a first for both of us and and you were the first one to reply to the back so remember I was lining up a whole bunch of guests from my show and now I think 400 guests later I've still let gone back and listened to our show and I'm like it wasn't that bad I didn't know it was your I didn't know it was your first podcast it was it was definitely my first podcast but I didn't know it was your first podcast so that's really funny and I'm sure you had no idea of what you were doing and walking into either so it was like to like the blind leading the blind so to speak and it makes something unique you know it's like there was no structure yeah just talking about stuff those are the best all the best thank you for having me on man I appreciate it well so that was 400 episodes ago what have you been up to in the meantime a lot of podcasting I mean my background has always been in marketing which is really why I started the podcast is sort of why we're having this conversation but you know when we first were speaking I was CRO at a tech company that has now since been acquired I have started to build out my own private equity firm that's where the investor role in the in the in the title on LinkedIn comes from so I'm building out a private equity firm which is is not easy but it's an interesting thing to do because in terms of wealth creating wealth for yourself in terms of investing I mean when you talk to investors it's kind of like two things you can do you do the angel investing kind of start out route but I actually really like the cash flowing sort of de-risk investing owning businesses routes so I'm learning that process now we made a couple small acquisitions and that's sort of why I'm building out the private equity firm for myself is and I'm building out with two partners and then I'm also obviously podcasting still so I mean podcast has done well we've recorded about 400 interviews I think about 350 of them have been posted if we're not mistaken so it's awesome love it still still love it and I'm still an operator I'm still building out a company so after tech company I did a 180 to CPG and I'm CEO of CPG startup so very busy but that's kind of like the the gamut of stuff that I work on but yeah I mean everything I've touched has had a lot of anything that's been successful that I touched has really been in due to like marketing and learning marketing tech and staying on top of marketing trends and figuring out you know what's the latest and greatest so this is what we're here today I love that well I love how you'll have not just a marketers perspective but you have the investors perspective the content creators perspective and kind of a different outside view of how AI is both developing and how you're using it on a day-to-day basis because I think a lot of times people could just go off on their own you know like a story of how AI is developing or just the marketers story because you know marketers love AI but let's just let's just start there kind of like how are you using AI to kind of enhance all those you know various activities that you're doing so it's interesting because I have sort of three different perspectives the podcast is kind of like a solopreneur journey and now there's a small team but very very startup I mean building a podcast is building a business um the the CPG company is more traditional startup where you have a small team you have investment and then the investing side of my life is actually looking at boring businesses that have like no marketing so we're looking at brick-and-mortar that you don't even have barely a website so it's very different types of marketing required for all and also different types of budgets different types of scrappiness where does AI fit into each one of those so I think that if you look at even like my workflow for a podcast as a content creator so like a pure content marketing play I'm using AI for taking podcasts and then turning them into short little clips so I use opus.pro for that right now which is a cool tool for that also if I have a full podcast I'm trying to I don't replace anyone on my team yet but I am trying to train them to use AI to do their jobs better so um we leverage AI to pull out show notes and to write show notes for the podcast we uh so I actually that's not pure AI that's otter.ai which is a pre-generative AI tool for transcribing taking that and then putting in a chat GPT to take to put out some show notes and to put out some timestamps um there's an auto editing tool for podcasts as well um that my editor is playing around with but he's not using permanently yet he's still doing the manual but I've seen I can't remember the name of it now off top of my head but if you google like AI podcast editing it'll have a tool that I think you can plug into Adobe Premiere that auto cuts and and recognizes the face and then and then cuts in between two different cameras back and forth for like an interview style so it truncates the silence and then it goes back and forth between two different people so like a ton of like workflow optimization with AI for the podcast which is super super cool and then if you look at the other things that I'm working on a lot of the AI that is involved in uh like a CPG startup or even like if we invest in a business and want to scale it up a lot of it has to do with with content creation so how do we uh use AI how do we first go into like a traps or mods look up keywords and then we use AI to augment like the content creation blog writing for those companies and then all of a sudden the well first of all the effectiveness of using AI for that definitely depends on where the company starting from so if I already have been SEOing a website uh like my CPG company for a while now it's going to be effective but it's going to be even more effective if I take a brick and mortar business in some small town in the middle of nowhere USA it doesn't even have a website and I have no local competition and then I do keyword research and then I can use an admin person to put out like a hundred different blogs that are tailored to the keywords that that business should be optimized for and then throw those up on a website after a little bit of human finessing so all of a sudden like AI can take a a no name brick and mortar and like put it first page Google in a relatively short period of time because they didn't have anyone working on any web presence and there's also no other companies in that you know certain region that are trying to rank on Google because of the type of business and they don't usually have marketing teams or traditional marketing teams would be too expensive for the profit margins or the revenues of a company of that nature so ultimately it can it's impacting literally everything I'm touching and doing on a day-to-day but it has not replaced anybody it's just improved their efficiency because everything at this point again we're gonna we're gonna time stamp it to like you know mid-year 2023-ish um everything at this point still requires human touch so even the editing will still require somebody to review the output of the podcast the blogs will still require somebody to I mean you have to do linking yourself manually and you still have to require somebody to look at the actual output and make sure that it makes sense it's cohesive there's no incorrect facts because also you know AI seems to like to make up facts sometimes as well so yes it sort of touched everything that I'm working on to a degree man that's huge while I love how you talked about the the breaking mortars because there's so many successful older businesses 10 20 30 50 years that have are doing an awesome job but the entire business has been built off of referrals and the fact that they've just been in business for so long but I think you're right those are the biggest ones that could scale because they haven't done any marketing at all and if you really just get them online in any capacity their business is going to scale and they're probably more prepared for that scaling than any new startup could be because they have no idea how to deliver yet much less actually it's actually wild when you think about it because the startups I've noticed this is something that we built into a thesis with the p from that we're building that we're building out if you invest in e-commerce if you invest in startups the general founder of those types of companies is a more forward thinking looking marketer so somebody you've built an e-commerce company or a SaaS company or some sort of startup I mean they they know about AI they they've already thought about how to use it in their marketing stack but the people that aren't as as tuned into emerging tech would be brick and mortar this is a huge generalization but it's not completely unfounded like the brick and mortar owner mom and pop is not tuned into generative AI and how to use it for their business so if you don't have a website and then you come in as a marketer as a as a consultant as an investor whatever capacity you come in and like the lift you can do in a short period of time is like insane compared to okay yeah we can deploy AI for the latest SaaS company but I can guarantee you the next whatever 50 companies out of Y-combinator are all going to be understanding how to use AI to augment their marketing efforts right everyone's going to know but there's a huge opportunity in these like 20 I love that referral business that does not know how to market does not have a website maybe they have a couple Google reviews whatever and there's other things you can do I mean even pre AI there was a huge opportunity there and I think these are the companies that again they're profitable they have systems in place to have referrals but like cogs like cost of goods are very high they're usually like you know if they're a manufacturing or something like that like it's expensive to make the product to sell it um sometimes service profit margins are a little bit better but still cogs are pretty are significant and there's rent and there's all these other expenses that like a software company doesn't have so they usually don't have like a in-house marketer on their team unless they're a certain size you know maybe 10 million in revenue and above but if they're these smaller ones they don't have that so that's where AI is like huge opportunity because you have AI plus no longer a marketer you have AI plus an admit assistant and all of a sudden you have somebody that can pump out like you know 100 blogs a week that's that's significant so well the cool part is you know the marketer is still going to be really good at executing that stuff hopefully better but you know at the end of the day the mom of pop who hasn't been tainted by the last 10 15 20 years of commoditized marketing which you know for the entire world especially the digital world has been paid media where it's like oh hey you need to get customers put five thousand bucks a day into you know Google ads or five thousand bucks a day into Facebook ads and you're going to make money and it's going to have nothing to do with marketing because what you're essentially doing is just a promotion and who gives a crap about the marketing side of it if the promotion is delivering everything you need which is new customers all the time now that's I think we were spoiled with that and that's why marketers kind of I think we lost credibility because it wasn't necessary to be a good marketer all you had to do was know how to do good ads or do good ad you know A.V. testing I agree so this is the whole other thing now so now you have lazy marketers that were really great at running Facebook ads or Google ads and now iOS update and now you know ccpa gdpr like no one wants to share their information because they didn't even know they were sharing their information before so now you have to be a good marketer even before we jumped on like companies didn't have to worry about they should have but they didn't worry about lifetime value because they had like a 14 x row as on on the initial sale because their cap is so low so like now you have companies that actually have to build the brand that have to worry about the lifetime value of the customer that I read as I read a I can't remember where I read this it's like if you are are a positive row as on on your first customer acquisition as opposed to like on the second or third purchase or whatever on the upsell it's like now you're a unicorn because nobody at least from what I've seen very few people have significantly positive row as and are profitable on that first acquisition so now you have to be a good marketer you have to get people to actually care about you well not just that but you have to deliver a good product you have to have good customer service you have to you know go above and beyond on the experience of what the customer is going to have because if you don't have these components then hey I can find another jerk in it with an hand yeah yeah you can be a commodity and you can be replaced yeah hey everyone I want to quickly interrupt the podcast for a special announcement if you're listening to this podcast because you want to become a better marketer then I want to share with you what I believe to be the most comprehensive digital marketing program on the market today it's called the digital marketing mastery certification you'll learn to leverage the tools and channels to predictably and profitably drive awareness leads sales and referrals everything you need to know to become a true master of digital marketing we'll take an in-depth look at the core digital marketing competencies including content email social media community digital advertising data and optimization and more after earning a digital marketing strategy certificate you'll have the tools to effectively reach your target audience through a full scope marketing strategy get started today at digital marketing.com slash strategy search well and the other side is that the cost since you know the paid outside is actually getting easier to do because of these new AI tools now you're having a lot more businesses start to realize like oh I could run ads online it's super easy and that's going to drive the cost of paid ads up through the roof and now any business that's reliance on that is going to be in trouble plus who cares because who cares if you've made a hundred bucks on the first sale if they never come back because now you have businesses that will take that hundred dollar sale that they made and turn you into a lifetime customer because they know how valuable you are so I think it's I think it's the dawn of a new age of good marketing answer I think so too it's going to be but there's going to be a point where marketing gets worse before it gets better so what I mean by that is the first movers are going to take advantage of volume so they're going to be they're going to be putting it out again like a hundred blogs a week you put out a hundred blogs a day you could run a thousand different assets because of now AI gives you that scale but first movers will take advantage for a period but then all of a sudden there will be a point where I don't know where that point is but there will be a point where you can no longer compete with volume anymore because the ability to go from human to first level of AI creates a massive amount of volume that previously was unable and economically not feasible for business but now we have a version of AI that can pump out X amount of volume so if every business for example is putting out a thousand blogs a week I'm sure at some point Google will be like okay chill because we have to find a way to come back this right and then that's when I think that when you stop ranking or when running a thousand different assets because everyone's running a thousand different assets so you're all playing on the same playing field or on the same level that's when again people again realize that brand actually does matter and there's a lot of tangible things that aren't just again that first point of acquisition that really really do matter and you can again a smart brand would be looking into using these tools not just for initial customer acquisition but how do we leverage AI to create a more comprehensive post sales support system how do we create how do we you know upload our company's knowledge base into a tool that allows for like generative AI chat for post sales support where you're thinking like the customer success piece is still important I'm not just leveraging AI for like top of funnel I'm leveraging it for like the entire customer journey I think that's super important too and that's here and the part I like with AI is that you can actually set prompts in place in order for anybody in the organization to have a consistent brand voice like you don't have to rely on hey I'm going to teach the team my brand voice or the brands you know how we want to display the brand in terms of text or media or whatever it is you could literally give them a prompt so you could say hey you know you're writing your posts for the day on Facebook don't just write the post based on what you're trying to convey run it through chat GPT using the brand voice prompt and now you have a consistent messaging consistent voice consistent tone and feel and now all of your components within the organization get very uniform so that when anybody communicates with anybody you know it's this brand because now you're using AI you know it's a generate and make sure that it's on point I love that every every sales rep that I've ever worked with especially now obviously now I mean the stupid thing to say there was no AI before every every sales rep that I'm working with now I always push them when I'm onwarding them to just learn how to use chat GPT because even if it's not for that exact reason I want them to understand like the power of okay say you're sending let's do like a B2B enterprise product so say you're sending outbound emails and you know you're not getting open rates you're not getting the you're not getting the you know the the clickthroughs the responses that you want whatever like some people the creativity doesn't always flow when you're tired when you're stressed out when works happening when life's happening so what I find chat GPT does is it just it prompts a little bit of creativity so it gives you so you say you put in the chat GPT for example like give me like five examples of this is my product it's my service is a little bit about my company give me five examples of you know outbound cold emails that may get a high response right and it's going to give you five examples and then like all of a sudden you didn't have to do that creative lift upfront so now you don't just take and copy and paste that you still have to finesse some you have to put some personalization into them but I mean it removes a lot of like the the heavy lifting so that a sales rep if something isn't working they don't have to come back to me for ideas and they also after a long day maybe they they're tired out they can just put some prompts in and test something new in the morning without spending like four hours trying to ideate through new cold outbound sequences so it's like it just helps the human do a lot more like I mentioned before I can't remember if it was when you're recording or not but I haven't let anyone go because of AI I've only given them the tools to augment the work they're already doing and yeah I think that's the perfect use of introducing people to the concept because I think initially everybody's kind of scared of it like I don't want it to you know take my job or take whatever and it's like now just use it like you would a shovel so instead of taking a hole with your hands here's a shovel it's better and it didn't take the need to dig the hole away you still got to do that but I think it's you know when you can shift that perspective and that's an excellent way to do it also you know it democratizes the skill set of writing because you know I hate to say it but most people do not know how to write very well they don't know how to convey ideas they don't know how to formulate you know the concepts that they're trying to convey and then they just don't say anything and so this actually allows those people to be like no you don't need to think a ton just vaguely describe what you want it'll spit out the template like you're talking about and now you could just modify and now is it your idea is it their idea you know is it where people are human right like at the end of the day you're on to write a really important email to a customer just run it through and spell check like it's like spelling and grammar like like super super simple thing I mean there's other tools that can do this for you but it's just it's just another tool it's a little bit more complex and a little bit more powerful and I want more people to use it like that as opposed to being afraid of it and I think it comes from I mean there's going to be a lot of people in organizations that are excited about using it but I think this has to be like okay your leader has to be okay with you learning how to use it and like promoting you to explore new tools that make your job easier as opposed to saying oh we don't include that in our organization like like give your sales reps the tools any or I mean that's my background of sales but give the people that work for you the tools they need because there's not a single job process that exists in my opinion that the chat GPT that generative AI wouldn't wouldn't make easier even if it's just acting as like a more robust more specific Google that's it there's so many use cases for it so I think this is where you know again this is a point this kind of like it's been reiterated a few times but AI is really just a tool and you know the cliche is you won't be replaced by AI you'll be replaced by somebody that uses AI right so that's that holds true in my opinion well and a little bit you said about just you know more robust Google search because a lot of times people don't realize that when you're doing these Google searches you're not just like oh I need an answer and you click there's the answer it's like no you know get an answer you get 300 million results and you get videos and you get core of forums and you get even the top ranking content even if it's good content because people will sometimes say like oh AI is biased like it's giving you biased answers I'm like nothing's more biased than individual person and that top ranked article is an individual person so if you want bias that's the only thing that you get when you do Google research so why not just get an aggregate average solution and a single answer and that's what you go with chat GPT which will save you I mean in terms of me doing an article an article that may have taken me eight hours before I could get done in like 30 minutes because the research component is done you know and by the way chat GPT at this point does not have it had web access they're removed temporarily they'll put it back eventually Bing or Edge does have web access if you use there if you use there which is actually chat GPT for with web access which still functions through the Bing browser or Edge whatever the yeah whatever it is but and then and when you when you so I think a lot of chat GPT is actually built on on search results because if you actually search a topic or you do research with any sort of generative AI that has internet access then it actually at least with with Bing it starts to give you the references that it pulls from so it starts to actually site the references that form to the output that you're seeing and then it's another actually you know we're talking about AI there's a new one called cloud which is like another one and that allows for some ridiculous amount of text input much more than chat GPT or Bing and that I don't even know Bard it's like I'll deal with that next week but I try it every like few weeks and I'm always disappointed so I'm like I am too actually which is really sad but this cloud one is not bad and it allows you to put in like like full papers or documents or transcripts and then it will use that as like the the training information or data that will eventually then give you the output so if I want to I'll give you an example I'm doing a podcast this afternoon I opened up a YouTube video with the woman I'm interviewing and I copied the whole transcript put it into cloud said cloud give me the top talking points from this podcast gave me the talk the top talking points now I have top talking points that she spent an hour and a half talking about and now I've done a research so I can at least say bring those up without having to listen to an hour and a half show so like like a use case like that it's awesome that's fantastic well and I have another one it's called elicit.org and this one actually well it only researches or only uses research papers in the results so if you're trying to justify an argument and you want to make sure that there's a legit organization that provided data this only pulls from research papers and so you know there's a way to do you know there's tools now where you no matter what the research is you could get it done like almost instant and sound really smart that smart and that's actually a good tool to use I didn't know that existed but that's important because again most of the other ones at this point the numbers aren't solid so I think there's some when it pulls hard numbers or some data it's incorrect so it's good that they actually have a tool that only pulls from like peer reviewed journals or whatever so that you know the information and the data points especially when it's like an important argument or an important point in trying to make sure that's the industry you know yeah because somebody who's in like the medical device industry is not going to be able to fluff statistics you do you hear about the lawyers that use chat GPT for an argument and then it pulled made up court cases and then they presented that in front of a judge and the judge is like these don't actually exist yeah they do yeah so you have to be careful with that don't don't don't use it as like a legal replacement completely yet exactly now there's there's some verification that you should probably do on anything that's super I do it for presentations I do online because I'm like I don't want to quote a iStat and then just to find out that there's nothing back in it of course you know with the stats that you find online sometimes you'll try to click on the source link and the source link will make like a circle and you'll come back to the original article and you're like yeah I know so like listen even internet pre AI was not perfect but always do your research if you do the work well that's where the person comes in where it's like you know what even because I actually made a prompt for our customer value journey you know our eight stage process basically we build every course off of this one process I built the ability to make one within one prompts all you have to do it put in the prompt put in the business and it spits out in a complete customer value journey now that's really good however it doesn't tell you how it works why it works you know the principles behind it the you know experience that I have using it and that justifies the actions that it suggests taking so there's still a person has to be involved and the more knowledgeable the person is about how you would manually make the process better their execution is going to be so there's always people you know I love that very very smart well this has been this been fantastic I think you know you you just outlined really specific and useful approaches to doing it you know I think you've really taken some of the fear away that people have like I'm not going to have a job anymore it's like no you'll have yeah whatever you want because now you could learn using AI you can totally learn you can totally learn and it's silly to think you'll be out of a job I mean there's so many examples of when you introduce technology it doesn't get it doesn't it doesn't take away jobs it always creates new ones always always I mean like like the things you use every day like like laptop computers like internet like none of it takes away jobs ever ever ever so this is just another tool this is just like another tool in your arsenal I mean and then like I'm really starting to to push the boundaries of what AI can do as as a marketer so now I'm trying to learn so now I've got the whole content strategy but to your point like how you build out prompts so we built out for this is something that we're testing internally so we built out prompts to create blogs and from those blog topics then you write newsletters and then from the blogs you write tweets and then from the blogs you can create like a whole bunch of scripts for social posts that you could record yourself we've taken it a step further now and we're actually testing out turning those blogs into podcast scripts and then using voice training to actually create a human voice with like inflection and tonality and read out the podcast script so it's like the things you can do and the scale you can achieve with this is actually remarkable but ultimately it's still bleeding edge tech so you still got to figure out where it fits in your business model but there's a lot it can amplify oh yeah well and in terms of you know none of these individual tasks matter if you don't have an overarching strategy where it takes somebody from a ignorant you know a potential customer into somebody who's not only buying your product but promoting your product and becoming a marketing channel themselves like that's it's still a process you need yeah exactly a little bit you know like you were saying you could do a thousand blog posts a day but who cares unless they have some end purpose if they have a funnel attached if they have lead magnets attached if what's the point you know and now now I think you're able to send you you could do all this work pretty quickly now you could worry about that it's not just about execution it's now about strategic execution yeah focus on things that matter now yeah nobody why those boring data jobs anyways exactly well this has been great thank you so much for coming on Scott I think you know your insights especially outside of just the traditional marketing at a lot to the podcast where can people find out more about you all the social is at Scot Declary and then at Scot Declary.com and just reach out anywhere he's busy well that's fantastic love your insights I think we definitely have to have you back in in six months and just kind of say like how did go yeah exactly I took over yeah all right no one has a job anymore I regret not well thanks a lot Scott really appreciate your time and we'll definitely have you back soon my pleasure now all right thank you so much for listening be sure to hit that follow button so you can notify when all of our new episodes release please share this with that friend who's coolest about digital marketing and don't forget to visit digitalmarker.com where we can access all of our courses, certifications and training programs thanks again everyone and we'll see you next time get ready for the two easiest ways for you to generate product photos for your e-commerce store I'm Lauren Petrilo founder and CEO of Mongoose Media and digital marketer academy faculty I've managed over 50,000 SKUs for over a hundred different e-commerce sites and I cannot tell you the importance of quality 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