AI's Impact On Marketing And Customer Experience

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Speaker D: You're listening to the Digital Marketing Dive podcast with your hosts, Seth Goldstein and Brian Griffiths. Hey everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Digital Marketing Dive podcast. I am your one of your two hosts, Seth from Podcast Mastery and Goldstein Media. With me is my good buddy, Brian Griffith. I always have to emphasize on this and really know people's ears A B, strong marketing. Hey, uh, what's going on and how's it going, buddy? And here's what we're going to talk about today. We are going to talk about AI, artificial intelligence impact on marketing and, and customer experience. Very thrilling topic, very timely topic.

Speaker E: It's all I, I see people talking about nowadays. You can't, can't go. If you're in a small business platform, um, that's all they talk about. Like three quarters of the questions are about AI, you know, positively, negatively, why people aren't using it.

Speaker D: Uh, why people are using it.

Speaker E: Yes, Some people complaining about it, you know, so it all really, um, it's a very, it's a very topical topic

Speaker D: and divisive too, I would say.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker D: So how you want, you want to, you want to set the stage here? Do you want to get started?

Speaker E: Let's, let's, let's get a quick definition. So AI is not sci fi, it's not robots. Um, it doesn't, isn't really intelligent, you know, meaning it doesn't act like a person. Um, but these are tools that automate, they predict, they personalize. You think of things like, um, email spam filters, chatbots, uh, on websites, uh, recommendation engines on Amazon. Um, so these things are a natural extension of the tech that small businesses already rely upon, like maps and social media targeting.

Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. And, um, the chatbots have gotten better. They've gotten a lot better since they started out, you know, when the chatbots used to be. They used to literally be a logic queue. Like if this person says this, say this now, now it's self thinking ish. I would say self thinking ish. There still hopefully are some guardrails on what they can. It can talk about, but it's a lot more fluid, it's a lot more helpful. I know for one of, One of my VPs is my virtual private servers is on hosting it. Hostinger. That's how you say it. And Cody is the AI assistant they have there. And at first when I had a question, I'm like, can I just talk to a person? Can I just talk to a person? Can I just talk to a person over and over and over again until I got to a person and then. And they're like, literally, they helped me. It's great. But they said, next time try Cody and see how it works. So next time I had an issue. Oh my God. It was really good.

Speaker E: That's fantastic.

Speaker D: I don't think it replaced the like things when it doesn't quite get you where you need to go talking to a human, but it gets you almost like, I would say at least that rendition or addition for that matter got me about 95% of the way there until I was like, well, all right, this, you know, shell code that I had to put in. Where's the shell? How, like the basics of like how to do that. I had to then go out to chat GBT and ask it to teach me how to use Terminal.

Speaker E: Yeah. I had a, um, an associate, a guy named Mike Heffley. He's got a business called Fulcrum Concepts that's within Lansdale, Pennsylvania. So a little, little shout out to him. He's a really fantastic SEO guy. But one of the things that, the last time I spoke to him face to face a few months ago is that he is doing, um, like AI voice automation. So what he's doing is, is that. So if somebody like, he's trying to focus, um, on contractors and a lot of times a contractor, while they're doing their work, can't stop to pick up a phone. Especially if they're like a roofer on top of a roof and so they

Speaker D: want to talk to someone.

Speaker E: And so what he's, what he was doing is he was using like an AI voice assistant where someone would, if somebody called in, it actually literally sounded like somebody was actually picking up the phone. And he, he demonstrated on the spot. We were sitting at the Starbucks and, um, he had Me call his phone number and. And while he was sitting there and not pick up and what turned. And so I. So he's got his own for his business. And. Yeah, what was kind of wild is. Is that what it sounds like? A young woman picks up the phone, and I'm having a conversation with her. The only thing that was a little bit odd, but I. But it's because I know a, uh, thing or two about communication. Like a little bit of personal study that I've done on the subject is that the voice chat didn't do things like acknowledge you. So, you know, like, in the natural conversation, like, even, like you go in that. That's a little bit of an acknowledgment that you've heard me. And so if I said. So if I said.

Speaker D: But that's simply tweaking. Yeah, tweaking of the AI model. It's less like, you can't. Not that I can't do it. It's more like he decided to tweak it to say, be more personable.

Speaker E: Yeah. So, I mean, and so that's the only. That's the only bit. But it really sounded like another person. And what's really funny is that he. He used to work in it, and so he's still friends with his old boss who has a. Has a business in town there. And the boss called up, uh, got his voicemail, his voice assistant and actually thought he was talking to a real person and commented, oh, wow, in it.

Speaker D: And this person's it.

Speaker E: The person. The guy commented on it, too, to Mike, saying this, hey, great that you finally got yourself, like, a receptionist.

Speaker D: That's awesome.

Speaker E: And so this. But the point, the whole point is that you don't miss calls so you don't end up missing, uh, like, you know, getting your clients who. Or potential customers who end up calling somebody else because you weren't able to pick up the phone at that moment.

Speaker D: I love it.

Speaker E: It's actually really smart.

Speaker D: It's more personal. It's more personal. I'm very big on the ethics of it, where you say, like, hi, this is Joan or Don or whatever, so. And so's AI assistant. How can I help you? Like, don't try and fool people, because it's just icky. I feel like it's in also in acknowledging. It's showing his saying. They're in saying, hey, how'd you like the experience? I can help you build your own, you know, look all action at the end of it.

Speaker E: Yeah, I'm very big.

Speaker D: I'm big. On those where it says, hi, this is, this is Seth's AI assistant. How can we help you today? He can't get to the phone right now. How can I help? How can I help you? Or something like that.

Speaker E: Sure, sure. Let's talk about how AI is being used in marketing today.

Speaker D: Yes, I mean for better, for worse, they're being used verbatim for blog posts. Not a good idea. Use it to kind of outline your blog posts and stuff like that. But they're doing social posts, ad copy, and it does save time. Even if you just get to give you an outline of an idea that you're kind of fleshing out, it works really well. It also does a pretty good job on editing stuff, especially if you're using an AI like Grammarly that is like it's in the name, folks. You know, it corrects your grammar. Um, but I'm very much a very big proponent of use it as a tool, not as a replacement. What do you think, Brian?

Speaker E: Oh, I think it's great. Um, but the thing is, it's like we have to be able to actually one, give it. Give um, it good prompts. So it's not just write me a blog post on X, you know, like Remy blog post on whatever it happens to be. And then you said verbatim it. When I use it, I, I use a block of like I, I use a very similar. Like when I'm using it for social media posts, I use the same block of, um, of text as a prompt. And I met some of you guys. Won't be able to see this unless you're looking at it on screen, but it's literally about that thick.

Speaker D: And then you'd say about an inch and a half.

Speaker E: Yeah. Or a couple of inches. A couple of inches. And you know, probably about six or eight. Six or eight lines of uh, instruction. Then I turn around and throw in a whole bunch of text underneath of it for it to write upon. So what, uh up. Because usually what, usually what a lot of times I've done is, is I have asked like how I use it personally is I sometimes have say written out like an entire response to somebody that might be like a paragraph. And I think this would make a great post. But to save time, what I'll do is I'll take that block of tax, uh, and so which basically says make a post like this, but do this, but don't do this. Use this sort of voice.

Speaker D: And then you're collaborating, you're collaborating with AI. You're not verbatiming yeah.

Speaker E: And then I paste it underneath, hit it, let it generate it, then pull it over into a document and then edit the hell out of it until it says what I wanted to say.

Speaker D: I love it. It's, it's like you said, it's a timesaver.

Speaker E: Yeah, it's still me. A lot of times I've actually written the post myself and just have it rewrite it just to make it smoother, you know, not. I have a tendency sometimes of my writing. My own personal writing style would be very direct and so sometimes.

Speaker D: Yeah, sometimes any more flower something needed to not be as direct. A little bit more around the.

Speaker E: Yeah, like how?

Speaker D: A little bit more.

Speaker E: Yeah, I write, I write like how I write an email. Sometimes it's a little.

Speaker D: Exactly. You need to loosen it up a little bit. Like, and literally you can tell AI like Claude, hey, loosen this up a little bit. Make this a little bit more friendly. Make this a little bit more approachable.

Speaker E: Exactly.

Speaker D: This consumer.

Speaker E: Now have you used it for um, SEO at all? I actually, I love it. I've not used it that much. Um, I view, I use it for

Speaker D: the stuff that is, I use it for the stuff in SEO where it's, it's kind of mind numbing. Like give me a 155 character title tag for this copy. Here's the copy that give me that. Now give me. No, it was 60 characters for title. Give me 155 for the description and it gives me that and that. I love that. And there's a tool in um, most of our um, WordPress sites now that you can get through Rank Math and Yoast and all those out there where it will do it within WordPress. You don't have to go out to chat GPT and throw it in. It already has the copy and has it can prompt it and set the focus keywords for you. I love it for SEO.

Speaker E: Sure. Now what's your, what's your opinion on um, on visuals and images? I think, I think we're seeing a lot of overuse of images. Um, okay, so I'll give you, I'll give you a funny example. Okay, so last week, um, this is the, for the second week of um, September when we're recording this. So last week we went on vacation, my family and I to Gettysburg for five days. Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, if you don't know about it, is the site of one of the biggest, most uh, important battles of the US Civil War in 18

Speaker D: July 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

Speaker E: There you go. Because you used to live out there

Speaker D: and no, I'm also was a history major in college.

Speaker E: Oh, okay. So I didn't rise up. I figured you're a journalism.

Speaker D: Uh, no, no, no. There was Civil war was my concentration. That's my thing. It's my thing.

Speaker E: Super cool. Um, yeah, I'm learning all this stuff about it now. I, I once went there when I was like 9 years old, 40 years ago and I don't remember like anything about it and so it was great going back. Oh, I remember that in town there pl. There's a very historic property that's called the Dobbin House. Now of course I'm now following like 18 different businesses and, and, and, and organizations and stuff like that that are in Gettysburg. On Facebook, somebody from the Dobbin House posted a picture that had as an AI picture of the inside of it with a person and uh, somebody in the comments said enough with the AI images already. It didn't make complete sense because you know, you have the, the properties right there.

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Speaker E: Someone to stand there and take the picture of them.

Speaker D: Uh, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like, it's easy and, and there's no shortness of like period where to put on too because I mean, go next door to the souvenir shop. Like Brian has one of his pictures on LinkedIn. Go look at it. Him in a union cap, looking um, dorky and all.

Speaker E: Oh, uh, it was a totally dorky picture of my corgi.

Speaker D: Uh, you and your corgi are. He's corgi. Biggs is Biggs. The corgi is smiling, rolling his eyes at his dad who's, you know, has,

Speaker E: he's probably, he's probably rolling his eyes at his mom who was Taking the picture?

Speaker D: Uh, probably, yeah.

Speaker E: But the other side of it, I'll tell you something interesting. I've done with it recently. So I'm working on a redesign of my website. Uh, don't go there yet because I'm still working on it.

Speaker D: Please don't.

Speaker E: But conceptually, like, to communicate certain things, you know, because, like, because certain services that I'm, That I'm working on are a little bit more. It takes a little bit more conceptual understanding than just saying I do search engine optimization. You know, it's. And because it's certain types of consulting services that I'm. That I'm working on pages for. And so I kind of did this little funny thing. So I'm working on this in Cloud, and since it already knows everything about the page, I say, okay, so I want to make it. I want to generate an image. Cloud doesn't do an image generation, as far as I know right now.

Speaker D: It looks at you and say, what do you want me to do with it?

Speaker E: Well, what you do is you turn around, you ask Claude to create the prompt for the image, then you copy it, and then you take it over to ChatGPT and you use the proper image generating GPT on it and then paste it in and then turn around and go back and forth with it to make adjustments. So I got these really cool, like, painterly illustrations that, uh, conceptually made, like these kind of slightly app. Somewhat abstract, uh, illustrations that look like somebody painted them that are not immediately obvious that they're AI.

Speaker D: It's scary how good the graphic tools

Speaker E: are, but it's a cool way of doing it. You see, you know, it's not, it's not like the, the. I think the real problem with, um, AI images is that they're too perfect.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker E: The hair is always.

Speaker D: All the women have like the button noses. Yeah.

Speaker E: Yeah. The light is always soft and, and diffuse. You know, it's like I have a photo. I'm a photographer, you know, I, I know that.

Speaker D: Yeah. So you see that? You see it? Exactly.

Speaker E: Yeah. Like the shadows are, uh, there's never sharp shadows. It's always soft and diffused. It's.

Speaker D: You know why? Because there's imperfections under those and they're trying to cover it up.

Speaker E: Exactly. So it looks like everybody's on Ozempic or something. But, You know, so let's talk about. Since we had our title of this being about, um, part of it is the customer experience. Let's, let's move on to that.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker E: So.

Speaker D: Absolutely. So AI and customer experience. Is very important because you think that you can hire a bunch of people to be customer service agents and all that. And I'm, um, not, you know, AI. That's one of the things that AI is going to change is that maybe for the worse, maybe for the better, the chatbots are going to make it. So like uh, for example hosting here that we talked in the beginning was that, you know, it's pretty good if you put all your knowledge base in, into it and it can refer to it and give you answers where, where it isn't good is when it either goes off the reservation from the back of off the guard rails and, and starts making stuff up, but if you have a tie down loosely and it reaches the end of its knowledge, it sends you to a human. That's a great way to do it.

Speaker E: Yeah. How, what do you think? There's a lot of people who complain about them. Uh, you know, what do you think about that?

Speaker D: Like, I feel like it's the future. If you like it or not, we're gonna have to suck it up and deal with it. I feel like that. I mean some of the things, like one of the things in our show is, you know, we're saying like small businesses can now deliver Amazon style. You may also like experiences without the budget of Amazon. And it's kind of true. Like it can pull from the database of all your, all your E commerce in your Shopify store or your Woocommerce store and say hey, you looked at X, here's look at what A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And you know, and it can also, it can also pull it into AI where it's going to then chat with you saying hey, have you looked at this? Maybe this is a better solution for you.

Speaker E: Yeah, and I uh, and I've seen these things. I actually haven't used um, chatbots yet. I just, I've read up on them a little bit. Um, yeah, I just haven't had a customer who's needed one. Um, I don't need one yet on my website. At some point I'll probably create a knowledge base and let it draw from it. But what I've seen it is where it will literally take like all the text on your entire website. And so that way, so when somebody asks a question, you know, so what is your, what is your hours? And um, you know, like what do you specialize in all these other things. And so it makes it easy because look, you know, like, you know, you might have. Most small businesses have 5 to 10 page websites but what if you had a 25 page website? What if you had blog posts, you know, like, what if you, you know, some, some businesses are big enough that they have very in depth websites with very in depth knowledge based systems. And even at the small business level, you sometimes get these things. You kind of need something that would filter it for people when they, when they really just don't want to go looking through 25 pages with three different levels of thoughts.

Speaker D: It's so much better to just ask, Ask a bot, saying, here's my issue. How can you help me? I mean, because you don't need a human necessarily for that because you have the knowledge base there. They can go dig through the knowledge base if they would prefer to read. A lot of people just want to find and replace, find control f or open Apple f and go find it. So if you can ask the chatbot, it even makes it even that much simpler. That's kind of the benefit.

Speaker E: Sure. And that's when we get into things like speed of response, um, like routing, uh, inquiries faster, um, and then just generally leading to higher satisfaction. That's what I was saying earlier with Mike and his, uh, chatbot or his voice, uh, bot. That, that's a great example of that.

Speaker D: Oh, it's a fantastic example of that. And then one of the big benefits to small business is that it saves time, which is, I mean, like, you know, like you said, your friend there, you know, he's like, he can not only get a message from the client, but maybe the client didn't really need to talk to him. Maybe they had a quick question that the AI could, could go into the knowledge base and answer real fast. Therefore he saved 20 minutes. Nothing against talking to your. I'm not telling you not to talk to your clients, but sometimes they're like, well, when was my build though? And again, I mean that's maybe a little bit too much personal information to have a, uh, chat by do. But something like that, like pulls up the, pulls up your records and says your, your thing was due yesterday or your thing is due in five days. It's not something you have to then call and tell. It could just do it. Which is kind of neat.

Speaker E: Sure, I'll give. Actually kind of a funny personal example is that my apartment complex, um, uses one, uh.

Speaker D: Oh, really?

Speaker E: It's kind of like customer service slash rent reminders.

Speaker D: Oh, hey, by the way.

Speaker E: Oh God. Yeah, it's especially, especially kind of funny because, uh, if I pay by checking, it doesn't register right away. So like if I Pay on the first. You know, we have a typical, you know, rental agreement. You know, you have up to five days. And so it doesn't usually pro. The check usually doesn't process till the 4th. And so I keep on getting these reminders. It says, hey, by the way, you know, this is Abby. I, uh, just want to see you, you know what your thoughts were on paying your rent this week. You know.

Speaker D: Well, your thoughts are. What your thoughts are on paying rent.

Speaker E: It's something.

Speaker D: It's something that'd be funny if it said that. What were your thoughts?

Speaker E: Well, I've had converse. I've had, um, I've had conversations back and forth with it. And it's actually, I've gone like, okay, is this really a person? Is it not? You know, because I think I asked it directly and it didn't really kind of answer. But I'm pretty. I'm pretty sure that they're. That Abby's.

Speaker D: They're probably using Shop.

Speaker E: But the one time I had to check to really absolutely make sure that they had my rent, that it was actually going to process. And because it went through on the 5th or something like that, they weren't like processing and checking for the fifth.

Speaker D: It's not per. It's not perfect yet.

Speaker E: And I just needed to make sure that it was going to work. And sure enough, it routed me over to an actual real human being who, like somebody in the office. But on, uh, one side of it is, yeah, it could be kind of a pain in the ass a little bit. But the other side of it is, is that my complex where I live, it's like a thousand or more residents. Imagine having to follow up.

Speaker D: They need. They need a stopgap measure to answer silly questions. And then if they can remind people and remind people. Can you imagine walking around to a thousand people saying, you rent stew on the fifth, or wasting paper, for that matter? And we're talking about the environmental effects of AI on, um. It's twofold. It's the environmental effects of AI, but it's also an environmental effect of not using AI for something as simple as asking people for the rent money. You don't have to waste postage. You don't have to wait. You're actually kind of saving money in that way because you're just sending an email.

Speaker E: Sure. And. And even that. Like this company, the company that owns this place owns like eight or ten other places.

Speaker D: Oh, yeah. So scale wise. Absolutely.

Speaker E: Sure. Let's talk about. Let's talk about more of the benefits that small, uh, businesses get from AI.

Speaker D: I mean it's cheaper. You don't have to pay for health insurance and you know, and salary for people. I mean upfront cost is probably more expensive to get developed correctly and then test it and dog food and all that stuff. But you know, you can get these big brand, you know, AI tools now are now kind of being commoditized and you can get it for your small business now.

Speaker E: Sure. You know, and things like Chat GPT and the paid memberships for on like things like chat GPT and quad and perplexity. It's usually like $20. There's a lot uh, of AI programs out there so they can, a lot of them can vary. I use a marketing specific AI that's called Jasper, that's like $60 a month

Speaker D: and but it's specific to what you need to do. So it's specialized and you normally pay for more specialized stuff.

Speaker E: Exactly. But there's, there's a lot, there's a lot of programs out there and a lot of them are relatively inexpensive.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker E: Let's talk about decision making.

Speaker D: Oh now that can be, I would say you don't have to rely on people's decision making when you use AI. You generally don't. It doesn't have to say oh you're not paying your rent, could jump off a cliff. It's not going to say that to you. But overall it's, you don't have to worry about the human factor. You know the space between the ears, the brain and them saying something because it has its data in there and if you write guardrails in there it's going to stick to that data and it's all there is to it.

Speaker E: Sure. And, and data analysis can be used and virtually lightning fast. I will give say this, take it with a grain of salt though. At the same time, I mean there's some really super cool things that you can do with this. Like I'll give you, give an example. Um, somebody gave me a non disclosure agreement.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker E: A few weeks back and it wasn't the best and I had Both Clyde and ChatGPT go through it and both of them gave me the same thing. That this was vaguely worded that if and if the person decided to push it you can lose like all the techniques and approaches that you use and then it would belong to this, to this woman. Um, I don't think that was her intent. Her intent wasn't protecting her brand. I'll tell you what, she didn't need to protect her brand that deeply Because I'm sorry, nobody gives that much of a crap about your. You're using a uh, AI chatbot for your insurance business. Well, that's not docs her, but I'm m just saying, I mean she's a nice person. I mean actually she went on to, she went on to a lineable after we decided not to work together and gave me like a pos, uh, recommendation for my integrity. So we're, we're on good, we're on good terms. We're on good terms. But it was just she would not move on a single comma on her NDA. And I, I and I used um, chat, GPT and quad to analyze this for me and look for um, to look for possible points of clash of disagreement. And it gave me a pretty good, it gave me a pretty good analysis of the situation. The other side of it is, is that uh, there are certain professional things like don't be writing legal briefs with these things, you know, or start.

Speaker D: Well I'll take, I'll pull back on that. Start with something like that. But then double check your sources, check case president, you know, rewrite it, don't again, don't take it verbatim. And that's where a lot of these legal scholars, lawyers for a better word, are just being lazy. I mean you're getting paid a thousand dollars an hour work for it.

Speaker E: Exactly. Let's talk about, it's that simple. Let's talk about leveling the playing field. So I think one of the things that this does is by automation and don't over automate, which we'll get into the uh, challenges section of our, of our conversation. Don't over automate. You don't want to completely lose the human touch. But at the same time this can very much level the playing field. Uh, I've sometimes have heard people say I'm a roofer. AI is never going to replace me because until you can get a robot that goes on a roof, I'm gonna fall off. I'm gonna call BS and see the reason, the reason is, and the reason why even people in physical trades need to get this eventually is that you're going to have a competitor who's going to outpace you because they're going to do these things. So you're going to get some guy, you know, you're going to get like some 35 year old who's really, you know, who, who might be a plumber or might be a contractor or might be a ah, roofer and they're going to say Hm, this is really cool. And they're going to turn around not only know the crap out of their profession and their business, but they're also going to get all the automation, the marketing aspects and how to integrate AI together. Or they're going to hire some 22 year old who's going to do it for them and you're still out there with you, a truck, a cell phone and a stubby pencil. By the way, I've met those people in the last like few years. You know they still exist that still are operating. It has no website, no Google business profile. And um, and your email address is a Yahoo or an AOL address that they've had since 1999. The first guy is going to kick the hell out of the second guy most likely as long as they're both delivering quality service and good customer service. You know, like, yeah, AI might not be coming for your, your job personally until somebody figures out a robot that can go on a roof and do that. But yeah, yeah, but you're gonna outpace your, but you're also going to level the playing field with those got with the, with the big players in your space who aren't using it.

Speaker D: Well, let's now move on to challenges and cautions because we don't, you know, we're up on 30 minutes here so you don't want to take over everyone's day with all these tips. You know, we close to part two at some point but on um, the challenges, there's a lot of challenges still. So let's not ignore this. I mean over automation is a big one. Going too deep into it, removing the human touch. You need to make sure that customers can still get to a human if they need it because eventually nothing's worse than getting into, for lack of a better term, a boot loop of like, here's your answer. That's not what I want. Here's your answer. It's not what I want. It's the same answer you just gave me. Here's your answer. Stop doing that. And someone like literally taking a sledgehammer to your AI.

Speaker E: Exactly. And then we get into ah, quality control. Um, a lot of times this is what people complain about. That AI content can come off as generic, it sometimes hallucinates and it's actually wrong. It's off voice, um, it can sound, it can throw in a repetitive amount of words. I'm doing um, work with a software development company and I will tell you, AI loves the word system. I have sometimes created an entire page of content for the Software development company that has used the word system up to 30 times on the page.

Speaker D: A little much.

Speaker E: You need to check these things.

Speaker D: Yeah. And re rate stuff and get your hands into it. Also, don't be wary of this hipaa, gdpr, ccpa. You have to be careful about how you're using your customers and information. And you should get a real human, a real lawyer who doesn't use AI or uses AI smartly to look at your data protection. You know, terms of service, uh, it's expensive, but if you're going to go down this route, you should at least spend an hour with a lawyer, write up the content and spend time with the lawyer. You know, customizing your terms of service and your data retention policy. Because otherwise it's more expensive to get hit with a fine, exponentially hit with more money than just paying a lawyer to make sure everything's buttoned up.

Speaker E: Yeah, those fines could be insane, you know. You're not talking like 500 bucks.

Speaker D: Um, no, we're talking about like a 500,000 bucks.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. Like, uh, your business, um, and your

Speaker D: life for that matter.

Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. And then as in anything, any innovation, avoid Shiny Object syndrome. Um, you don't have to buy every tool. You don't need 200 of them. Base it on your goals, base it on, you know, your actually usage of it. I have three. I spend 100 bucks a month between the three that I, I get. They're, they're all three of them do different things and they're very versatile and they're fantastic. I there. I, I keep on hearing about new ones every time. If I talk to, um, anybody who knows AI, they'll bring up another five or 10 tools I've never even heard of. I don't use them. Um, you know, it's useful.

Speaker D: I'll dabble, I'll go look at them, but I won't buy them. I think I have Chat, GPT, Claude, and then a Gemini. Because of Google Workspace.

Speaker E: Yeah, I, I have Gemini too. But again, Google works.

Speaker D: So you have four then. There you go.

Speaker E: Right now.

Speaker D: Yeah. Okay, so, but, but that's also part of the problem with Shiny Object Syndrome is that it's pr. It, it's practical. It's, there's, and there's a low barrier to entry. 20 bucks for a month to try out something. And oftentimes the free version is halfway decent enough to play with the first place. So you can always say, well, I'll just get this free version of Mistral, which is a French AI and eventually you're like, I really like this. And there's another one you have in there, there's another one before you know you're going to have 500. AI is helping you out and maybe not be the most streamlined approach.

Speaker E: So sure. Well, a lot of small business owners, uh, you know, they want a practical, low barrier way to start. What would you suggest?

Speaker D: Always chatgpt or. I actually suggest Chat GPT over Claude because it does more than Claude. I think Claude's great for coding. I think it's better for coding than Chat GPT but and also sometimes writing, helping you come up with a blog post, it's great. But Chapit GPT5, which a lot of people panned it when it first came out as not that good. I thought it was fantastic.

Speaker E: I think it's doing fine.

Speaker D: Honestly, I think it's fine. I think they shouldn't have taken away the other models that fast and let people kind of not, not rip the bandit, the proverbial bandaid off right away. But you know, overall I think Chat GPT is probably the easiest one to jump into. The free model. The free version that when you sign up for an account is not that limited. Surprisingly, if you go haywire with image generation, it'll stop you and say, hey, cool it for a little while.

Speaker E: But yeah, I think, I think, I think Claude is really good for things like ideation, content creation, um, coming up with strategy. Cloud seems to be smarter to me. Um, it's also more limited. It has chats that will just suddenly run out on you when you over when you've gone too long on the chat. Chat GPT won't do that to you. Chat GPT will just get abominably slow if it's got like an enormously long chat, but it doesn't just turn around and cut out on you.

Speaker D: And that's kind of nice.

Speaker E: Good Swiss army knife.

Speaker D: It is, it is.

Speaker E: It's a good production tool. It's not always brilliant, but it's a good production tool.

Speaker D: Absolutely. So looking ahead, where do you think AI is going? Where do you, Brian O Wise One, think that AI is going to go?

Speaker E: Well, I'm looking forward to things like, um, hyper personalization and predictive marketing. Um, I like, I like the idea of tailoring advertising, email marketing offers to the individual. I think that's super cool, you know, because that's always been edge cases is always what has always been where marketing has fallen down. It always tries to go for the center of the bell curve as this is what we think Everybody wants or needs. You know, it's why they come up with like ideal customer profiles and stuff like that. Because you're trying to get like, what's that average ideal customer look like? Well, with hyper personalization, it's going to literally be different for each person. And I think that's fantastic.

Speaker D: I think it's, you know, remember, remember P U R L S, pearls. You know what, it would be like a database and it would customize the direct mailer to you say, hey, Brian, you know, it's a different font because it's, you know, mail merged.

Speaker E: I remember this is a mail merge

Speaker D: on a much better, higher level.

Speaker E: I remember being so impressed by that when somebody really showed me like a high level version of that back around 2011. This is going to go way beyond that 2011 tech. Um, dude, I love it. Predictive marketing, you know, I, I again, you're looking at, you know, different systems and software that's going to suggest when a customer is ready to buy again. Sometimes those things can get creepy because there's been times where you've heard where people found out that they're pregnant for an ad.

Speaker D: Oh, and it chases you around the world. Exactly.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker D: But here's the thing. Humans and AI can get along and they can partner, they can partner together. But remember, AI is there to assist, not replace people. Like really, let's let that sink in. It's here to assist us, not replace us.

Speaker E: Exactly. I've heard horror stories at the enterprise level of people. Um, I remember one time I was on Threads and I saw a conversation on this where a company fired their entire marketing department, including the person who was making the post, and, and bought a 20amonth chat GPT, uh, account and. Yes, and stuck the head of sales. Oh yeah, the head of sales doesn't have enough problems dealing with salespeople. And now he's got to be a marketer, which he has no background on. ChatGPT does not replace a knowledge of marketing.

Speaker D: It doesn't, it doesn't. So, but here's something you can, but here's the thing, don't be intimidated. Try this stuff out. If you don't try this stuff out, you're gonna be left in the dust. I mean, start small, one or two tools, even the freebies, just try them out and give it a whirl. Reach out to us. We'd love to hear how you're using it too. And think of it as a digital assistant, not a digital replacement.

Speaker E: And that's how you think. And you're going to, you're going to, you know, you're going to scale your time. You're going to improve your customer care. You're just going to better your business and stay up with the technology.

Speaker D: That's awesome. Well, Brian, as always, this has been a great time. Always love chatting with you, my friend.

Speaker E: Sure.

Speaker D: Oh, as if you don't see enough of each other as is because, uh, rolling up the street from me. But you know, we do have a voice line if you want to call in. Leave us voicemails. We'll figure out how to get them into the show. You can always email us, you know, the link will be in the show notes as well. And we will see everyone next month.

Speaker E: All right, see ya.

Speaker D: That was a great show. If you're enjoying digital marketing dive, please review up in the podcast directory of your choice. Again, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. I'm not giving up.

Speaker E: I am selling the building.

Speaker D: The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded.

Speaker B: Everything's either going to be okay or no stop. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned, but we have each other.

Speaker D: FX's the bear, the final season, all episodes now streaming on Disney. This podcast is heard along the marketing podcast network.

Speaker E: For more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts.net.