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Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast
Ep 722: How to Build a Team of AI-savvy Marketers
00:27:37
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A
This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.
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The role of marketers seems like it's changing faster than even I can keep up with. I mean, I have a little bit of a background in marketing. I've done something, some sort of martech comms for 20 plus years working with some big brands. So I understand even before AI how difficult it was to be a savvy marketer. But I think generative AI and large language models have changed that completely. That's because the capabilities have changed and what any even entry level marketer can now do with the right AI tool at the right time. And I think far like exceeds of maybe what I could have done 10 or 15 years ago with a decent amount of experience. So for those people who are building teams, I understand how difficult it can be. But on today's show we're going to be tackling that head on with an expert on how to build a team of AI savvy marketers. So if that's something that's been on your checklist for 2026, today's show is for you. All right.
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C
Right.
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B
I'm excited to get started. Hope you are too. Welcome to Everyday AI. What's going on? My name is Jordan Wilson and this thing's for you. It is the unedited, unscripted daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me keep up with the non stop advancements of AI. How to make sense of it all, to grow our companies and our careers. So if you're trying to do that, sweet, me too. Starts here. We're doing this journey together, but to take it in the next level, make sure you go to our website, your everyday AI dot com. We're going to be recapping today's conversation in the daily newsletter as well as keeping you up to date with all of the other AI news that you need to know. All right, enough of me chit chatting. Let's bring on someone super smart. So you know, someone that's leading marketer marketing I think in a big way. So live stream audience, please help me welcome to the show Scott Morris, who is the CMO of Sprout Social. Scott, thanks so much for joining the Everyday AI show.
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C
Thank you so much, Jordan. Great to be here. Thank you.
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B
All right, so you've maybe heard of Sprout Social, maybe you haven't, but for those that haven't, Scott, give us the rundown. What is Sprout Social?
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C
Sure. So Sprout Social is basically a social media management platform. So quite simply, it allows brands to manage their social media across all the different networks. So to be able to manage your accounts on x and on LinkedIn and every place else, to be able to post and publish everywhere, manage the conversations, run analysis actually on what's happening, and manage influencer marketing as well.
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B
And you know, just, just so people know, I'm sure that you've sprinkled in AI in your platform, but just tell us a little bit about how you know on your customer side, because we're going to dive into your internal side first. But you know what AI features and tools are available right now for those people that are using your platform?
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C
Yeah, sure. Like a lot of companies, we've been introducing AI tools over the last couple of years, started typically, you know, the same way that you and I probably started using AI and agentic AI mainly around sort of content and helping people craft, for example, in our case, posts. Right. So we have AI assist that allows you to give prompts and gives you some ideas for social posts to help you craft those posts to basically publish content faster. So that's really where we started and then we sort of moved into, well, how can you also use AI to actually do a better job analyzing all the social data that you have and making sense and actually getting some insights out of all of that. And now we're moving into really the age of agentic AI in our tools. We introduced something earlier last year called Trellis. It's a, it's Sprouts AI agent and it's really designed to move beyond sort of basic assistance to a more proactive system that accelerates complex analysis. So basically think about this. As you're able to work with the AI agent, you're able to ask it a question. For example, it might have access to all of your social listening data and you might want to ask it a question. You could be at Honda and you want to, you have a social listening topic around electric vehicles because you want to stay on top of what's happening in the conversations in social around electric vehicles. You can actually ask Trellis a question around that. It will quickly analyze everything that it's heard via our social listing platform and come back to you with some insights.
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B
Oh, love it. So, you know, one thing that you mentioned there is, you know, I think a lot of people dipped their toe into AI with some form of content marketing because, you know, in the earlier days of large language Models, right. When it was kind of just chat GPT and obviously there were some tools that predated that. But, you know, we're simply just creating written content. So I want to fast forward and go to the end here, Scott, but then we're going to rewind to that. Answer the question. Let's do it. How do you actually build a team of AI savvy marketers when the AI tools are growing and expanding their capabilities so quickly? How do you get it done?
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C
Yeah, it's. It's a lot to keep up with, right? I mean, for all of us, keeping up with AI can be difficult. And for anyone in their figuring out the right way to use AI incorporated into what they do, the right tools they use, even the tools. I mean, we onboarded some tools two years ago that were doing really amazing things for us, and in some cases we're not using those anymore because other tools have either emerged or some of the core platforms, like we're kind of a Google shop. So Gemini has advanced so much in the last couple of years that it can do some of the things that those custom tools were doing before. But for me, you know, I really, really focus on the foundation first. You know, I got to Sprout a little over two years, December of 2023, and people were experimenting with AI, but there wasn't like a coordinated strategy in marketing. So that's the first thing that anyone I think should do is experimentation is great, but try to come up with a clear set of objectives that you're trying to achieve. I actually created an AI council at Sprout. So we had a couple of the marketing team members on it, led by one of my team leaders, to really define the outcomes that we're looking for from AI, and then to encourage and manage and track and report on all of that experimentation that all those individual teams were doing so that we could get those learnings and surface those really at the highest level in the organization over time, then that's evolved. I mean, as you mentioned, you know, mainly it was like content creation at the beginning. So my content team, they were the first ones, obviously leverage AI to be able to craft blog posts and things like that. Very, very basic stuff. At least that's the way we think about it now. So fast forward to a couple years later, and we're really, really focused now on business outcomes. So a couple of examples of that would be it's not just about the amount of content that you publish, it's what is the impact on our pipeline or on our conversion Rates, when you get a trial list in, are they converting any faster to be a paid customer of ours? Those types of things. Also in marketing, our strongest partner is usually our sales team and then also our product team. And so really, how can you leverage AI to be a force multiplier for those things? So it's not just about the marketing team in a silo leveraging AI, doing their things. It's really about how the marketing team, sales team, the product team are together aligning around some of the same goals. And really thinking about it from a customer first perspective, I have a dream that we will get to the point where entire Customer journeys are 100% orchestrated by AI. Some companies are doing that today. We're not quite there yet.
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B
So you kind of walked us through what probably is feeling very relatable to a lot. I think a lot of the early days, 2022, 2023, teams were using AI to try to write more or maybe better content for blog, for social media, etc. Right. So as you started to make that shift internally, right when you started there in December 2023, what were the signals that you maybe looked for? Or what was kind of the writing on the wall that said, okay, this is working, but we need to bring this to other areas of the organization and we need to go deeper. What is that? Those key metrics that you're looking at that you can say, okay, yes, this is working, we're starting to get a return on what we're putting in.
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C
Yeah, Well, I think in those early stages, as I mentioned, you know, it was a little bit wild, wild west, right. And it was all about individual experimentation. And I think that actually is the appropriate place to start. Right. People needed to get their hands dirty a little bit with this technology and try different tools and just really experiment kind of in their own little area, in their, in their own little silo, if you will. But it became clear pretty quickly that while that was great, it was really hard to tie that to any really meaningful outcomes and metrics, you know, other than again, we could double the amount of blog posts that we create or something like that. So what? Right, so you can create more blog posts. Like, what's the goal of doing that and is it actually impacting the business? And so I think that's when we sort of made that shift and got into that next stage of how the teams were using AI and also focused more on what I would call structured workflow adoption. Right. So it's not just everyone kind of doing their own thing. It's like, how can we actually build systems over time and make sure we have things like our brand voice encoded into everything that we do? How can we create more repeatable workflows? Leveraging AI, of course. And, and how can we, you know, better train the marketers to really think about AI as a thought partner and as an extension of the work that they're doing as well?
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B
So you know, what were maybe some looking back at, you know, maybe where you are now, and you kind of said, you know, there's, there's still work to be done, but maybe where you're at now is, you know, far better than where you were at in 2023. December. Right. What were some of those key decisions that you're like, okay, when it came to in AI savvy marketing team, what were some of the decisions that you had to make that you can look back at now and say, oh, that was the right decision. But maybe at the time you're like, eh, is this the right way to go?
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C
Yeah, I think so. One of them was, you know, what tools do you actually make available to your marketers? Right. There's so many out there. There are AI specific tools. Increasingly, of course, all of the sort of platform platforms and tooling that marketers use have AI built into them like our own. Right. Like Sprout's own. And so I think one of the first things was getting some tooling into the hands of all marketers that could be used with the wide variety of use cases so that we could also invest in education across the entire marketing. Org. I have about 130 marketers on my team. So by, by putting some tools in their hands that everyone had access to, it allowed us to scale the education and the training that we would do with them. Right. So that was the first thing that we did. And then we started introducing more use case specific tooling. Right. Something for the SEO team to use. There's a product called Air Ops, for example, that the team uses to really scale content leveraging AI, but that's not used by the PR team. Right. And so looking at tools that would make sense for each of those individual teams and then see what sort of interesting outcomes they can get from those as well. So those were some of the things we started doing.
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What were some maybe decisions or initiatives along the way that you made and at the time you're like, yeah, this, this is going to work, but maybe decisions that didn't pan out the right way. Right. Like what are those mistakes when you're trying to, you know, make your marketing team more AI native. What are the mistakes that you made along the way?
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C
Oh, well, there are many. One of them that I will talk a little bit about is, you know, I sort of thought at the beginning I thought of AI as being a bit of an end to end solution for our marketers. Like, oh, look at what this can do. If you just put this AI in the hands of the marketer, they're going to be able to have really, really fast output for a really high quality product. And what I definitely realized is it's more of a middle to middle type of thing with AI, right? It really is about training and educating the marketers in terms of how they get started. The prompt engineering is so important, as we all know, and then also getting them to understand that what it gives them is probably not the final output. Especially if they haven't actually leveraged something like, you know, a Gem in Gemini or something like that that has our brand voice embedded in it. They might get something that doesn't sound at all like it actually came from Sprout. And so that's one of the things that I definitely learned early on is that it's really more of a middle to middle type of solution.
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B
You know, one thing myself with a little bit of, you know, marketing experience, I was actually thinking about this, you know, last week when, you know, speaking of Google, you know, their new Pimelli photo shoot feature, right. Like I remember, right. I used to work a lot with Nike and Jordan brand and you know, I look back and reflect on some of these projects where, you know, I was the, the T shirt designer, I was the photographer, I was the illustrator and I did, you know, all these different things and, and now one tool can do it way better and sometimes 1% of the time, right? How can you keep up and project kind of that, you know, skill building moving forward when sometimes, you know, these tools come in and yes, they're extremely, extremely useful and can create, you know, a lot on the business value side. But you know, even for someone that's maybe built their whole career, right on, hey, this is my identity as a marketer, right? And then all of a sudden now these set of tools do it way better. How do you kind of adjust to that?
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C
Yeah, so that's an interesting one, I think. Let's talk about creative specifically, right? You gave a couple of examples there and I think that's an area where in the early stages of Gen AI it sucked. Like, let's just be honest, right? The output that you would get really did suck. And so it was one of it. My creative team, in fact, was not at all that they were the slowest to adopt AI, but the tools that were available to them, when you compare that to the quality that you would get from someone who had spent, you know, years studying, you know, graphic design, etc. And then the output they would get, you know, it just, it paled in comparison to some of the other use cases for AI. That has really changed a lot in the last six to 12 months. I think that there are so many great tools available that have come so far in terms of the quality of the output. So it is tricky, right, because you have to. It's a difficult situation to be in if you're someone who's been trained to do that and now you have technology that's doing a lot that can do a lot of that for you. So again, it's really about teaching them how to use the AI and how to extend their own workflows. Another thing that we've done is we're creating a bunch of roles within marketing that are very specifically focused on helping the teams better adopt the AI workflow. So I'll use the example of creative and my creative team, we created a new role, a senior AI and creative technology strategist. And his only job is to basically be evaluating tools all the time, looking at how we can integrate those into workflows to extend the work the teams are doing and building systems that are again, repeatable that the entire team can tap into. So I think that's a piece of this that people should not disregard is it's not just about putting AI in the hands of all of the existing team members. You should think about. Obviously people are thinking about org structure and what, you know, how many of each role are even needed when you have AI to support the work that they're doing. But also these net new roles that can be created that will help accelerate and advance the work you're trying to do. I'm doing that in other areas as well. We're, you know, creating a director of AI marketing transformation role who will help like kind of manage all of this together as one package as well.
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AI moves too fast to follow, but you're expected to keep up. Otherwise your career or company might lag behind while AI native competitors leap ahead. But you don't have 10 hours a day to understand it all. That's what I do for you. But after 700 plus episodes of everyday AI, the most common questions I get is, where do I start? That's why we created the Start Here series, an ongoing podcast series of more than a dozen episodes you can listen to in order. It covers the AI basics for beginners and sharpens the skills of AI champions pushing their companies forward. In the ongoing series, we explain complex trends in simple language that you can turn into action. There's three ways to jump in. Number one, go scroll back to the first one in episode 691. Number two, tap the link in your show notes at any time for the Start Here series. Or you can just go to starthereseries.com which also gives you free access to our inner circle community where you can connect with other business leaders doing the same. The Start Here series will slow down the pace of AI so you can get ahead. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, even talking about, you know, roles that don't exist now, and I think that's smart, right? So if you're out there listening, if you're the CEO and you're trying to grow your marketing department, you know, I, I think what Scott just said there is extremely important. It's something I've talked about for, for years, actually. I think a lot of roles are gonna maybe turn into more tastemaking roles, right? Providing agentic systems, you know, good input and context on the front end and then really having to have that tast back end. And in doing that, Scott. Right. We talked about some of these, you know, tools now, you know, large language models, agentic by nature, right. They can do, you know, stitch together multiple things. Now, whereas six months ago, us humans had to be the duct tape in between those things. Does this even change who can be a marketer? Right. Can an AI savvy marketer be anyone? Or do you think you still kind of need that, you know, foundational, you know, experience, you know, educational background to really be an AI savvy marketer in the future?
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C
I think the answer is probably yes and no, Right. Like a lot of other things, I think that it sort of depends on the discipline within marketing. I think there are some where people could step in without a marketing background, without that education that traditionally they've had, and they would be able to, through the use of AI tools and other things, be able to pretty proficiently be able to do the work that historically maybe had been done by someone who specialized in that. But then there's a lot of other areas where I don't think that's the case at all. I think there's certainly a lot around intuition. I think, you know, people, good marketers, know, good marketing. And I think that AI can't necessarily replace that even on the ideation front, you know, which is an area where gen AI can actually do a really good job. I haven't necessarily seen some of the same level of breakthrough ideas that I get, for example, from say the creative directors or the campaign team that I have. So I definitely think that it maybe opens up marketing to be more accessible to folks. And especially if you're at a small business where you're not going to be able to have, you know, a million employees, all with specialized roles, and you have to have people who are kind of jack of all trades. I think it gives AI will make it easier, easier to do more of the marketing activities than maybe you could do before on your own. But I certainly don't think it completely replaces the marketing team, including some of the specialty areas that we have.
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B
You know, one thing that I think about a lot when it comes to, you know, content, right? Because in the end, marketers create content, right? They do more than that. But you know, from a straight output or deliverable, that's usually what is, you know, the start of the journey. But you know, one thing I'm always thinking about is, is the consumerism, right? Because the input and the output of what a smart marketer is going to do, that's always going to change. But in the end, right, it still needs to resonate with the end consumer, the end client, etc. And you know, there's obviously because of AI, there's been this surge of work slop, right? Seeing the same low effort, low quality type of creative that sometimes originates in a marketing department. So, you know, moving forward and kind of planning for a future where, you know, I've been saying this for years, I feel like I'm just drowning, you know, in AI work slop sometimes. So how do the smart marketers, you know, really still use AI but have enough of that, you know, human touch that is like, okay, this isn't like the other 9,000 pieces of content that you probably saw today that were AI generated.
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C
Yeah, AI slop is definitely a problem, right? And if we just look at social, for example, because that's the space where my company, you know, helps brand manage brands, manage their social, you know, social feeds, you could argue are turning into AI slop, right? We've all seen so much actually.
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The comments, right?
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Especially the comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because AI is making content easier to produce, which of course is resulting in some of that AI slop. But what I think is interesting is that what we've seen at least is that marketers, creators, brands are also leaning harder into authentic, human driven content because that's actually what audiences value the most. And I think at the same time you've got platforms like Meta and TikTok that are labeling AI generated content, are investing in detection tools and transparency measures to reduce maybe the more misleading or low cost quality synthetic media that you might see. So, you know, I think it's, it's a real mix of things, but you know, how you actually deliver really, really high quality. Leveraging AI is, is, is sort of an ongoing struggle that, that will always be something we have to balance.
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B
Yeah. So, you know, I've, I've spent every single day for the last three years covering AI, all the advancements, you know, thousands of hours using all of the tools. And I'll say especially the last three months, I've felt a shift both in term of the accessibility for AI tools, but also the increase in quality for the outputs. And obviously a lot of those would fall under the marketing category. Right. So you kind of walked us through your journey of the past two years of, you know, steps that you've taken at Sprout to build an AI savvy team. So I'm not going to ask you to crystal ball it here, Scott, but as you look at the next two years, you know, number one, are you seeing and feeling this same recent surge in, you know, AI's output capabilities and quality and then two, if so, how can you even plan ahead to make sure your team stays AI savvy?
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C
Yeah. You know, I was just having a conversation with someone the other day about that and we were talking about projecting out sort of even, even like the org design of the future. Right. And what will the marketing team look like, you know, three years from now? And it's like three years from now, like six months from now, it's going to be so different. Right. Just because it is, it is changing so incredibly quickly. Yeah. So what are. So I think everyone knows the tools are going to get better and better and everyone knows that the output that you're going to get from them is going to be higher and higher quality. So I think it really is about just how do you always try to stay one step ahead of that and you feels like you're running really, really fast if you're trying to stay one step ahead of that. I do think, you know, really encouraging a culture of learning and innovation around AI tooling and be willing to experiment with it. That's super, super important. I Do think, as I mentioned earlier, having some of these dedicated roles where people, they spend all of their time thinking about what that's going to look like six months, a year, two or three years from now. I think you need to have people who can kind of set aside the brain to be able to do that, because you're never probably going to be able to do it all entirely on your own.
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All right, so, you know, Scott, we've covered a lot in today's conversation, from using AI on the marketing side to, you know, being a force multiplier, not working in silos, you know, emphasizing the role of authentic human content, you know, but what's your one best piece of advice for decision makers moving forward who know that they need to create a team of AI savvy marketers? What's the one most important decision that they can make today to get that process started?
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C
Oh, the most important decision they can make today. I would say I would go back to what I talked about earlier around being a force multiplier. I would say as you think about how you're going to invest in AI for marketing teams and how you're going to be building those skills, you are going to get so much more value out of those investments. If you don't think of it sort of myopically and only focused on that marketing team and what the marketing output will be and if you really back it into business outcomes. And that's where I talked before, for example, making sure if, you know, in a B2B environment like I'm in, and you've got a sales team and you've got a customer success team, you've got a marketing team thinking about how those teams are going to be working together from a customer point of view to deliver better experiences, that will give you really, really great business outcomes you're going to get, that's going to pay off for you many, many times more than if you really, really just focused on how do I make my marketers more productive.
- [26:46]
B
Scott, some great advice for some questions that a lot of business leaders are probably spending a lot of time on. So we thank you for taking time out of your day to join the everyday AI show. We really appreciate it.
- [26:57]
C
Thanks so much, Jordan. Great to be here.
- [26:59]
B
All right. And if you miss anything, y' all, don't worry. We're going to be recapping it all in today's newsletter. So if you heard Scott say something, you're like, wait, what was that? Yeah, we're going to have it for you. So if you haven't already, please go to your everydayai.com Sign up for that free daily newsletter. Thank you for tuning in today. We hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'.
- [27:17]
A
All. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.