I know that seems like a bit of a paradox that you would talk about more technology and being more human at the same time but I think there are ways to start using these tools to help us be ourselves in front of our customers in front of our audiences more and if I was going to have another particular talk another name for this particular talk or this video I would call it stop picking one extreme or the other when it comes to Ai and Automation and all the available tools that are out there hence you can see how why I went with the first title when I think about sort of picking these extremes right so not using any AI tools not using any automation tools all of that kind of stuff I think about like Etsy creators you know the people that are handcrafting things at their house and you can specifically get your name embroidered on something or you can specifically have something personalized to you and there's obviously a ton of value in that I order from Etsy on a fairly regular basis um because I do find that I can go beyond just what I can get off of Amazon or what I can get from any other company I can have this kind of level of personal touch and that's fantastic there there is a lot of value in this very handcrafted approach then I also kind of look at these sort of bigger companies and see all the advantages they have and the way that they're able to serve more people the way that they are able to have a broader reach and so when I think about that in terms of AI tools and Automation and all of those kinds of things you know you've got some companies that are that are trying some of these different like journalism companies that are out there trying to go all in on AI and then having to backpedal because the the AI tool wasn't really a wasn't really attuned to all of the things that it needed to be considering like making sure all the facts were correct and making sure that uh all of that stuff was was squared away in the way that it needed to be so there are advantages to using technology there are disadvantages to using technology but as marketers especially in a regulated environment we need to look at how we can use them responsibly we do need to look at how we can integrate them because I do feel like there's going to be a segment of marketers and companies that are going to get left behind if we don't learn the new tools that are out there if we don't start adapting our mindsets to how we can start approaching all of this so what I want to do is just give some examples just start talking about ways that we can use technology use these different tool sets that are out there to be more human because there is a way to combine these two these two aspects these two seemingly conflicting ideas let's jump straight into Google Trends here to talk about one of the ways that we can use tools to be more human so Google Trends is a very well-known tool and I'm using this because it is so well known but one of the things that we can look at when it comes to content writing is understanding how how much people are currently talking about the thing that we want to talk about so I use the example of AI writing tools and what's really interesting comparison and this isn't wasn't something that I set out to prove or something I set out to show as I was going into this particular video but look at how the interest in AI writing tools is kind of steady it's kind of up and down with like a little bit of a pickup at the end for the United States you do have some sort of level of Interest here of course there are a lot of people that are trying to figure this out trying to figure out how to use these tools or not so this particular topic here's what the us is thinking and then look at what it looks like on a worldwide scale worldwide this topic is drastically increasing in importance now is that a good or bad thing that's that's up for another debate that's that's up for something that um I think that there's a lot of value to it but you can see where there would be abuse in it you can see where there would just be this kind of churning out mediocre content or content that's not really serving people as well as it could that said just looking again at what this tool can do for us here is a tool that is using a vast sum of information so the purpose here isn't to prove the value of whether AI content writing is a good thing or a bad thing necessarily but just to show that these are tools that are already in our wheelhouse that we're already using to better understand what people are doing right like this process of writing content for for other people this is the way that we can get in there and start seeing um what people care about what people want to hear about I I confess that I don't go through Google Trends with every single video that I write or every single piece of content that I write but understanding where people are at in terms of interest and in terms of how they feel about things these are things that we should be paying attention to right and we'll take a look at this a little bit more when we start talking about some audience research but these are tools that help us be more human they help us relate uh in a more important way if you were at a party if you were in a conversation you would be listening to what people had to say before you just started blurting about whatever it is that you want to sell whatever it is that you want to pitch whatever it is that you're trying to communicate to people you would read the room you would listen you would you would take some time to think about how you can be a part of this conversation and then you would talk about whether this this is important or not whether you should even bring up the topic or not so there's a lot of a lot of ways that we can be more human I've I'm kind of poking con poking fun at content writing with AI tools but I don't think that it has to again be an all or nothing proposition I want to show off just a quick view of of a tool that we're using there's no sponsorship none of that kind of stuff with it but I just wanted to show you the Jasper AI tool that we're playing around with one of the things that we're using to to help with this particular tool is I'm using it for things like uh for title tags for writing meta descriptions for putting together some different pieces like that some kind of small pieces one thing that I did was I was using something like a title tag or using some sort of like advertising bit of copy and I just generated like a dozen you know maybe two dozen different titles and two dozen different ways of saying something very similar and saying them in different voices and saying them all these different kinds of ways and I didn't verbatim use any of them but it gave me a lot of good ideas on how I could work with this particular content on the ways that I could frame it so that ended up being very helpful for me it helped me rapidly go through the different ways that I could be human with a con and it really made me think about what emotion I'm trying to get across what promise I'm trying to make with the content that we had written so these are some interesting ways that you can kind of play around that um one thing that that we do even with like video uh content is so I'll take a transcript of this particular piece of content I'll run it through temi t-e-m-i and get the transcript of the content I'll download that and then run it through something like Jasper AI to put together a YouTube video description so you can see even in like a regulated environment you wouldn't necessarily have to seed all control of your writing process you would be able to still have a very factual very contained sort of information that you're trying to process in a different way that you're trying to help speed up with that content writing process these are the kinds of advantages you can get if you if you do start playing around these tools if you do start adapting and look there are there are tons of great articles out there right now and tons of great LinkedIn posts about all the different ways you can use these tools in massive ways and I really encourage you to play around with all that kind of stuff but I don't want you to completely miss everything that these tools can do because you don't want to go all in when we talk about sort of that in between when it comes to using these tools or not using these tools what we need to look at is how we can differentiate right we don't want to just be the same voice over and over and over with just slight modifications we don't want to just use these AI tools so much that we lose the ability to write that we lose the ability to talk about what does make us different so how can you take these sorts of suggestions and still run them through your voice really doubling down on what differentiates you and what separates your company from all the others that are out there this is where I don't like to just completely depend on these writing tools but you do want to um look at what kind of unique information you can supply that's going to help you write content help you summarize content whatever it is that you need to solve with that particular moment so I talked about audience research just a little bit and again when it comes to audience research I mean there's so much that is already out there about quantitative research versus qualitative research you need both if you're going to be able to really understand your audience and to be able to make sure that you're incorporating enough opinions that you're not just you know using a sample size of one especially if that sample size is your own opinion so I think everyone Falls prey to that at some point but we need this kind of mix again of very human content but we also need this mix of of quantitative data as well so one example that I found that was really interesting Mark Shafer responded was sharing some information about this in one of the communities that we're in and he was talking about you know in the rise Community he was talking about how he was able to take a large number of of individual survey responses and run them through something like chat gbt to get a summarized view of what all of these people had to say right so that's not going to be like everybody likes it or everybody doesn't like it but you get this kind of condensed view very quickly I mean that's hours of research to go through and to have to read every single one of those so again as we look at how to be more human taking something like qualitative research running it through a tool like this to get a summarized version you've saved a drastic amount of time now you're still going to need to go back through some of that qualitative research in more detail later on it doesn't completely remove all work that you could possibly have to do you shouldn't lay off large sectors of your Workforce based on something like this but you can see how we can be more efficient we have the way again to be more human and you can use tools like this you can use tools like spark turo another way of understanding what your audience is interested in we've mentioned Google Trends earlier there are ways to incorporate what people want to hear about what they're actively looking at what they're looking for in a way that can help you be more human with your content writing so again this doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach let's talk about marketing reports so I'm going to be honest I really thought about writing a whole article about marketing reports doing a whole video about marketing reports and the problem with marketing reports is that everybody knows how important they are but nobody wants to think about them all that much right there's a thing that kind of get they just become so standard and such a part of like what we have to do that they're not fun to necessarily think about on their own but so so many reasons so many times the reason why they're not fun to think about is that it's just kind of a Mindless churn of information here's your Google analytics report here's your your advertising report and it's just this one performed better or that one performed better and that's not helpful right it it's marginally helpful but it's not really going to help you make a business decision so there are all these different ways that that automated tools are already being Incorporated in your reporting especially if you're doing advertising on something like Google ads or LinkedIn or all these different things there are ways that can help you see what's working and what's not and these different tools will give you prompts on hey take a look at this particular factor is this important is this helpful but the thing that these tools aren't doing is they're not necessarily showing you that here's why traffic to this particular article is going to be helpful for your business here's why this email open rate is going to help you win over the hearts and minds of this particular segment that you're trying to focus on so as we're talking about ways again to be more human with reporting we have to look at what our stakeholder audience cares about most we have a section of our business where we end up working with Physicians directly we help them with their marketing their practices it's called P3 practice marketing one of the things that we used to do when we were talking about some of the different reporting metrics from advertising and that sort of thing was we would say hey here's which ad is working the best people are going to this piece of content the most isn't that great and in so many opportunities we were just greeted with silence because people didn't really care they weren't that excited about what we had to say so trying to drill down on we saw this many people click on this particular ad they went to this particular page and this is how many times somebody from that experience actually booked a patient repointment request or they you know asked to learn more in some way so getting down to what does the practice care about what does this particular audience care about they care about how many new patients are coming in the door so it's looking for how you can sort of relate your report your analysis of what segment of marketing you're you're creating and working on and tying that to something like Revenue tying that to overall interest in the business uh you know how much attention are people paying to you right now because they may not be ready to buy today but if you're getting regular attention from somebody you might be able to convert that into Revenue later on so again there are a ton of great tools out there we're already using Automation in a lot of ways with all of these different tools but we have to make sure that we're putting the human element in there for it to actually matter so again here are ways that we can just combine these different tool sets to create something that's useful for the stakeholder audience for one last example let me talk about automation just for a second and there are so many ways that you can talk about automation there's so many different tools that are out there that are doing this but one of the things that I think about are chat Bots I think about CRM sequences and all the different ways that that can work well and can work poorly um and then you know how can you take that and then try to introduce a more human element so chat Bots man you you can love them and you can hate them right I I think of so many times I've tried to reach out to my bank and have been on a call and they give you you know the 19 different options on the way that you can engage with them over the phone and I'm just hitting the zero as many times as I possibly can saying please let me speak to a human please there are times when I do want to use the automated tool set but there are times when I just need to speak to a human I did look at your website I did go through all these other steps so there are a lot of ways that you can frustrate people right I think we all know that and there are examples of how we need to kind of walk back from some of these different Automation and AI tools that are out there but again there's an in-between there doesn't have to be an all or nothing uh so many systems you are able to answer so many questions with some sort of automated sequence with some sort of process it will kind of let people pick through find something when it's two o'clock in the morning and nobody's available to answer them here's a way to to make that process run smoother I think about it in terms of even how we're doing some advertising on LinkedIn as a company and that may even be where you've heard of us for the first time is just getting an ad in front of people at a way that's beyond the network that I can reach personally and my organic Network getting an ad out there people subscribing to something us sending out our sort of initial interaction with thank you for subscribing um you know we'll be sending you this new piece of content soon and then they're receiving another piece of content within the next day or so all of that process is very human centered right I wrote every single piece of content that's in there to help make sure that people are hearing from us and in a way that is uniquely us but I don't have to sit by my computer just hoping that another email lands in my inbox so that I can rush and write them an email so again these are kind of obvious examples but what I'm trying to show is that we're already doing this to an extent new tools like AI tools new tools that are out there they're going to keep coming I mean think about how much marketing has changed in the last 10 years I've been in marketing for approximately that long maybe 10 12 years or so and just the variety of tools that we're using Tick Tock is a thing now it didn't exist that long ago all these different ways that search engine optimization has changed all of that stuff is has dramatically shifted this is another time of dramatic shifting upon us and we can either be like the old Disney cartoon where Paul Bunyan is chopping trees as fast as he can and then the other you know machine comes along and displaces them and he goes off into the sunset in this kind of disgraced you know way of of responding and that it's so tragic to me because how much Better Could Paul Bunyan have been if he had also been using the tool along with the strengths he had and so um it's it's a silly example but there are ways to incorporate these things without having to just again pick some sort of extreme um I I live in Tennessee now and one of the the kinds of phrases that my dad would use as somebody from Kentucky and Tennessee quite a bit is you know eat the fish and leave the bones and there are things about all these new tools that are coming out that are going to be very helpful for us and they're going to be disadvantages to all of them too we have to keep looking at what we can do to incorporate so that we can keep pace so that we can even outdo our competitors and how we use these new tools and how we're serving our community but at the same time there's going to be there's going to be negatives too that we can leave behind so this was just again just a quick overview of all the different things that are out there it's certainly not an exhaustive list if you read the accommodating article that's going to go with this piece I'm going to try to include a lot of interesting examples that I've seen and would recommend that you try again we don't have to take an extreme let's give it a try let's see what happens when we start incorporating these new tools into our workflow
2023-03-13