The Marketer Show

In this episode, we are going to cover new media, modern SEO, and AI in marketing. I spoke with Michael Cahill about this and more. Michael works with DTC and Health companies to grow revenue through SEO, Content Marketing, and SEM. And he’s helped grow search programs at dozens of companies. Let’s dive right into the episode.

In this episode, Jordan Crawford joined to chat about:

AI in Marketing and Sales

- AI will significantly change how we think about marketing and sales
- It is important to experiment with AI tools and find ways to work with them to expand capabilities
- Both the cost and time to perform tasks with AI have gone to near zero
- The challenge is asking AI questions that don't include nuance and can't be operationalized
- To work effectively with AI, we need to break down work into smaller chunks that it can do well

Using AI Effectively

- The focus is on how to use GPT Four in processes without worrying about its hallucination problem
- People who are not reinventing themselves are at risk of being replaced by someone using AI.
- To use AI effectively, one needs to provide creative constraint and context. Andy Grove's framework of "if the board fired me today, what would my replacement come in and do?" can be useful for thinking about how to use AI.
- AI is good for operationalizing, but one needs to work backwards and feed it the right inputs and training sets to make it work effectively.
- The speaker's company uses AI for programmatic outbound campaigns, feeding it website context to determine the top ten data points for targeting customers.
- Ideas generated by AI include employee turnover rates, gender diversity ratios, and presence of employee research groups.
- The speaker believes that in order to define prompts, one needs to invert their thinking and break down the process into discrete steps.
- By breaking down the process and having a clear understanding of the steps involved, the speaker is able to evaluate the AI's suggestions and identify which ideas are good or bad.
- The speaker recommends dissecting one's process by writing it out on a whiteboard to gain clarity.
- The speaker has campaigns using AI in a targeted way where they can trust the output.
- The challenge in automating this is that a wrong result can have high stakes and the pain is too high if it gets it wrong.
- The speaker is thinking about creatively constraining the automation to ensure that if it gets it wrong, it's a harmless mistake.

Using Creative Constraints with AI

- The speaker played around with an AI-generated sentence, which seemed like a human wrote it but was actually a lie, and warns against the weaponization of such technology.
- Many people consider AI as a productivity hack, but the author thinks that the real opportunity is using it to do things that would have been impossible before.
- The author has created a product that uses AI to identify the perfect moments for a company to sell their products and services.
- The author uses AI to write effective sales emails quickly and efficiently, using creative constraints and contextual understanding.
- This approach can be done at scale and can give companies a significant advantage over competitors who don't have sales teams of similar size.
- The speaker doesn't trust AI to write a complete email or to act on their behalf. 
- They believe that AI can't write a great email, except if it's trained on how to write five discrete sentences with specific steps and then summarize the email. 
- They don't trust AI to handle anything that involves requiring truth. 
- The speaker thinks the problem with AI is that people don't know how to use it or deploy it effectively, and there is a need to ask the right questions and to refine the process. 
- The speaker recommends clay.com as a useful tool for refining data by having conversations with ChatGPT on a per-row basis.
- The speaker has spent a lot of time tinkering with the tool to test its capabilities and come up with use cases.
- The speaker advises others to play around with the tool and think about what perfect thing involving language they could accomplish with unlimited time, and then consider how AI could help them achieve it.
- ChatGPT is a tool that can help you break down complex questions and tasks into smaller, discrete steps.
- The best approach is to ask the tool to give you the smallest possible steps to accomplish a goal, even if someone without context on your business could understand.
- By following these steps, you can audit them at every point and make sure they are correct.
- The possibility with ChatGPT is not just to save time but to have a person work on a creative task with nearly unlimited time, energy, and focus.
- The concept of constraint can help people go deeper and achieve higher output than they normally would.
- The guest gave an example of a big process they have built using constraint.
- The guest is asked if there are other examples of their process that have been automated and systematized due to constraint.
- The speaker has operationalized AI for a specific process, but only for pieces of it so far.
- They believe that the bar for successful AI implementation is high because it can begin "hallucinating" and making things up when given too much freedom.
- An example of this is when AI was tasked to build SEO pages for 10,000 companies without creative constraint and started making things up.
- The speaker believes that AI needs creative constraint and to be broken down into smaller processes to be successful.
- They are aggressive about killing processes that don't meet their standards and advocate for breaking down tasks into smaller, explicit steps similar to talking to a fifth-grader.

In this episode, Nick Shackelford joined to chat about:

Facebook Advertising and Alternatives

• Company still spends 80-90% of advertising budget on Facebook
• Focusing more on Google and Google shopping due to higher intent and quicker purchase ability
• Testing turning off Facebook advertising but couldn't get away from it

Building Brand and Growth

• Personal inbound leads and content creation as the main ways the company has achieved growth
• Use of Twitter and LinkedIn for brand authority and business development
• YouTube videos as B2B touchpoints for potential customers
• Consistently building and talking about brand to attract and retain employees

TikTok Advertising

• Demographic of buyers on TikTok is specific and different from other platforms
• Organic development of content and community building
• Creating videos of people using the product or providing examples, rather than just product stills, to work on TikTok
• Attribution software such as Triple A or Northview is not necessary
• Not an effective platform for paid media currently

Marketing and Advertising Strategies

• CRO is often overlooked and should be addressed earlier in the process
• Hiring a full-blown agency is not necessary for managing a channel
• Focusing on AOV is important
• Emphasis on having the right fit for a team or agency partner to avoid demoralizing the team

Virtual Assistants for Agencies

• 60-70 full-time employees including virtual assistants and offshore workers in Mexico City and South America
• Use of virtual assistants for various tasks such as media buying, ad design, graphic design, implementation, and strategy for email
• Difficulty in hiring virtual assistants initially due to quality issues and other concerns
• AI may make industries more efficient and faster but virtual assistants lack context, creativity, and strategy

Other Advertising Industry Insights

• Policy dealing with CBD and THC advertising on various platforms
• Changing landscape of Facebook/Meta's suite of products
• Use of on-demand editing design team, agencies, and US-based tools
• Difficulty in finding American or Canadian talent in multiple time zones for US-based tool
• Cultural fit, integrity, and internet access are important factors for successful virtual assistant partnerships.