Transcript
Michael Stelzner (0:00)
If you're like many marketers, last year was very challenging, but this year doesn't have to be that way. Napoleon Hill said, the starting point of all achievement is desire. If you want to improve your know how, your results and your career prospects, then Social Media Marketing World is your solution. It's the place where smart marketers go to get new ideas and strategies that actually work. Get your tickets at social media marketing world.info and secure your future. I hope to see you there. Hey there, Michael Stelzner with a special episode for you today. The day was December 19th. It was literally just days before the Christmas break, and I wrote a post on the social platforms with the following words. Quote Most marketers have no idea what just happened over the last two weeks. It's so big that it's hard for me to wrap my head around. Unquote. That post resulted in hundreds of comments across Facebook, LinkedIn and X. And I went on to explain that many of the world's biggest companies had just done a show and tell. And this is what's a little strange about it. They decide to do it right in the middle of the holiday season. And as I'm sure you can relate, this is the time of year where it's chaos time because you're running around as a marketer trying to get all your stuff done, trying to promote, but you're also getting ready for potentially some time off, right? And it's kind of like the worst time to make a big announcement because you're competing with every company in the world that's trying to get the attention of consumers. Yet despite all of this, this is when all this big news happened. And I explained inside my post that these businesses revealed something that was nothing short of this changes everything. And I was very confident that a lot of the world missed it. Now, before I share the rest of that story, I need to roll back the clock a little bit and share some backstory. For most of 2024, I had noticed that marketers were really struggling, especially those who had agencies or were consultants or were solo operators. And I was attending events. And I just started noticing so many people were really struggling, trying to figure out where they should focus next. They were hitting a lot of brick walls. And frankly, I was also feeling some of the very same pain with my business. So I did something that initially I told myself I wasn't going to do. I considered exploring something new here at Social Media Examiner. So in the summer of 2024, I decided to run an experiment and we have an Experimental mindset here at Social Media Examiner. And it's an important mindset because it allows us to try new things. And you know that when you run an experiment, if you think back to the way it used to be when you were in school, you have a hypothesis, you do a series of actions, and then you measure the outcome. And it's okay when you're running an experiment, because if it doesn't work, then you can rerun the experiment, try something different, or just move along. And that mindset is what I employ here at Social Media examiner, so that when we try something new, it's not forever, and it just gives us a chance to kind of run lots of little experiments. So my hypothesis was that the small business marketing community, which is really our main audience here, was going to need help, and they were going to need help understanding how to apply AI to their everyday work. But I needed to be sure that my intuition was accurate, and that meant it was time to run an experiment. I went into this knowing that it might not work, and that was completely okay. So I started the AI Explored podcast back in May of 2024. And what I decided to do was not have a show focused on news in the AI space and not have a show focused on the tech side of it, because there's a really big audience out there for that. But instead, I wanted to focus on the practical applications of how to put AI to work. And what I was going to do is I was going to find and curate some of the best people that I could find and interview them in a way that made a lot of sense to a lot of people. And the concept was to launch with the most minimum viable show that we could do. So we decided to take the art from our bigger show, this social media marketing podcast, duplicate it, change up the font a little bit. Well, actually, just the same font, but change up the words and have it be a slightly different shade of blue. Now, if the experiment would be a success, in order for the experiment to be a success, that another way, we needed to get a thousand people listening to each of the first 12 episodes. Now, by the time we hit episode 12, a thousand people is not a small number. The idea that I could get a thousand people to carve out 40, 45 minutes of their life every single week was kind of a big deal, because those people would either have to stop listening to another podcast, or they would have to magically somehow discover this. And if we couldn't achieve this goal, the plan was to not proceed with the show. So we Started in May, and once we hit the five week mark, the fifth episode, which is actually about a month later, we took a look at the data and the data was really strong. I was really surprised that we had far surpassed the goal of having a thousand people just on the first five episodes. And I kind of did the math in my head and I said, there's no reason for us to continue this experiment. It's a raving success. We're going to go ahead and make the AI Explored Podcast a new permanent show in our lineup today. Eight months later, after we launched that show, the AI Explored podcast is now in the top 15 of marketing podcasts in the Apple Podcast Directory, with thousands of people listening to an episode within the first 24 hours when it drops. So I'm really excited to see what's happening with that show now. Taking you back to the story. So it's June at this point, my conviction is really strong. I feel like we're onto something. I. I felt that marketers, creators and entrepreneurs were eventually going to come around to this belief. AI changes everything. That's the belief that I was hopeful that a lot more of this audience would come around to AI changes everything. But I wanted more data. So I decided to conduct a research study. And if you've been following Social Media examiner for a while, you know that we've been doing research studies for over 15 years. And what I did was I put together a comprehensive study and I surveyed 1250 marketers from all around the world and I really wanted to get at where they are with AI and marketing. How often are they using these tools? What are they doing with them? What are their plans to do with them? The results of the study were pretty powerful. 90% of the audience we studied said that they either agree or strongly agree that they need to do more with.