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- [00:00]
Sarah Nee
Foreign. Welcome to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Sarah Nee. Today I'm stepping in for John Jantz and I have a guest on the show, Dan Sanchez. So Dan is an AI marketer, consultant and creator with a passion of diving into the latest tech innovations. He specializes in developing cutting edge marketing strategies that leverage AI to enhance customer engagement and drive business growth. So welcome to the show, Dan.
- [00:35]
Dan Sanchez
Thanks for having me on, Sarah.
- [00:36]
Sarah Nee
Of course. I'm excited to talk to you today. We first connected on LinkedIn because you had been posting about AI and thinking strategically about AI and speaking to marketers directly, which all of that resonates with me. But when I reached out to you, I was commenting about one of your posts and I'm just curious, do you remember what you said in response to my initial message to you?
- [00:55]
Dan Sanchez
I don't know. Comments. I'm like, I don't know. I. I comment. I mean, I'm dropping 200 comments a day or a week on LinkedIn. Oh, I'm sure they all blur together sometimes. And I'm like, I don't know what I said when I said, no worries.
- [01:08]
Sarah Nee
I sent you a direct message and you talked about how Duct Tape Marketing was one of the initial blogs that you were following back when RSS feeds were a thing.
- [01:17]
Dan Sanchez
It was Copy Blogger, Duct Tape Marketing and Seth Godin were the three. I was transitioning from graphic design to being a marketer and a marketing kind of mentor. To me, he's like, hey, back when RSS was a thing too, he's like, go to create a Google Feed account and subscribe to these three blogs. You need to read them every day. And so I did for a very long time.
- [01:36]
Sarah Nee
I love it. I just, I just brought that up because I think it's very interesting. Like, you've obviously been in the marketing space for a while now talking about RSS and original blogs and, and now today the focus of this conversation is going to be all about AI. And so it's just interesting to think about the evolution that we've had over the last several years and the pace of the evolution that we're going through right now with all things AI. Well, great, then that's what I want to dive into deeper. I've noticed through your posts and the content that you're putting out, you're talking a lot about approaching AI strategically to avoid overwhelm. And at Duct Tape Marketing, we've been saying strategy before tactics for 20 years now. @ this point, we're saying strategy before technology because you need to have a solid strategy in place, but I would love to open that up to you. How are you advising? Because it can be overwhelming with all the tools that are being developed and all the, the stuff that's being put out there on AI. So how do you advise people to approach the world of AI strategically?
- [02:29]
Dan Sanchez
You know, there's a couple different approaches, but it's funny because I just got a DM yesterday and it was like, hey man, heard you did a Talk on the 25, like new tools for AI in your, your session recently. What tools should I use? And I was like, I don't know, like, what, what problems are you facing? It's kind of like that whole strategy thing. It's kind of like, well, like there's lots of tools, they can do lots of stuff and there's some general purpose tools that can cover a lot of different things. But what's the core obstacle you're running into your business with right now? Where's, where's the, you know, the choke point for your systems?
- [03:04]
Sarah Nee
Yeah.
- [03:05]
Dan Sanchez
What's causing you pain on a daily or weekly basis? Because those are the things I want to look for first as a consultant and see how AI might be able to help that. It's funny because a lot of times people actually don't need AI, they just need clarity, you know, and a strategic focus set. But I do find that AI is changing the game because it's allowing us not only to automate and do things faster or even better, but it's helping us think better and more strategically if you kind of know how to use it as a co pilot. So that's the first thing I'm kind of trying to help people understand is like, this thing becomes a very good strategy thinking partner. Even if you can kind of, you just kind of have to give it a start. It's not going to proactively come after you and be like, hey, so what's your plan for this? Hey, what's your strategy? Hey, what were you thinking here? But if you proactively ask it for feedback or for considerations, or ask questions that it can ask you and then give you feedback on, it's amazing how much more strategically you can think when you start using AI as a copilot.
- [04:04]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of my early aha moments with AI is at first I was just using it or thinking about it as like a content creation tool. I was thinking it's something that like helps take stuff off my plate. But when I shifted to thinking of it as a thought partner and Started using it in my strategic thinking and planning. Like that's where my view on what AI can do completely changed. And I know you have a story that you talk about one of your early on experiences with ChatGPT. I think you call it your Mediterranean ice cream moment. Do you mind explaining what that experience was for you?
- [04:34]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, it's when ChatGPT first came out. I'd been a huge skeptic of AI before ChatGPT came out. I'd seen some of the early pre ChatGPT stuff like Jarvis, which was using it's like 2.5 API ChatGPTs. Back then it was like a copywriting tool. And I was like, okay, it's starting to get Things. But when ChatGPT launched, it woke everybody up, including me. And I remember sitting there and being like, well, is this thing just really good at regurgitating? You know, is it like. Because remember before we had like drift, you know, an AI chatbot, and we had intercom and like, they were all pretty bad. Nothing. None of them were good. Yeah. So I was like, you know, can this come up with original ideas? Most original ideas are usually a combining of two different things that don't normally come together. And humans do it all the time to come up with new ideas. So I was like, well, let's find something that doesn't exist on the Internet and just ask for it to create something. So I figured recipes would be hard because I'm like, well, that's a whole different dimension. It's got to understand taste and recipe and how it might like how things come together in order to form new flavors. That's pretty tough. And then I went searching, like, what's a recipe that doesn't exist? So I just put picked out two random flavors. I was like, ice cream, Mediterranean. I went and Google searched it, could not find it. And then cert and said, hey, make me a recipe for Mediterranean ice cream. And it punched out a bunch of ingredients. I was like, you know what? This would actually work. Yeah. And that's when I realized I'm like, it has the ability to come up with new things if you're willing to guide it, direct it. And that changed everything for me because that was the missing piece. That's what to me made it. Artificial intelligence is. It was able to actually think through and come up with a very kind of elaborate thing, because making recipes is kind of hard if you're not pretty familiar with it. And that was a big unlock for me.
- [06:13]
Sarah Nee
Did you try the recipe? Did you actually taste the ice Cream?
- [06:16]
Dan Sanchez
No, no, no. I did not make the ice cream, but I remember looking at the ingredient list and think that was workable. I wonder what else this can do. And then I moved on and started knocking out other ones. But that was. That was the first big one. I was like, ah, this isn't just delivering something back. This isn't just summarizing what it's found. Yeah, you can mash up new things with this together.
- [06:35]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, that's great. I recently, we have these big bushes in our backyard, and they've been bothering us for years, but not enough to actually do something about it. And we finally decided to rip them out. And before, like, I would have had to, like, go to gardening stores and figure out what to plant and, like, talk to a number of people and spend all this time, like, designing. But instead I took a picture and I put it into ChatGPT and I asked, like, you know, we're in Boise, Idaho, and this full sun and all the things that I needed to know. And I ended up, like, designing this whole space of plants to put in that. In that place. And while I was going through that experience, I had an aha moment of like, my role prop, like, problem solving has completely changed. Like, how I go about problem solving is different because now what I need to get really good at is prompting AI to help me solve problems and to push it for, like, further and to redirect things versus before, you know, I was going out and doing all that stuff manually. And so that was an example of just like an aha moment of like, how I solve problems is completely different than it used to be.
- [07:37]
Dan Sanchez
You. You actually don't need to learn how to prompt AI as. As much as you'd think anymore. The AI models before you did because it was a little squirrely. Kind of like if you've gone to. If you've done AI video right now, currently, that is very squirrely. Right? You try to prompt it and it's like it's all over the place and characters are disappearing and reappearing. You're like, my gosh, I got to really hone this thing and get what I want. But it was like that in the beginning. Like, it couldn't go that far without going off the rails in some way. Back in like 3.5 and early 4 chatgpt 4 but nowadays it's gotten so good at anticipating what you want that, yeah, I. I just talk to it like it's a person. I'm like, hey, ChatGPT, interesting question for you. My dishwasher is not working. And I've already tried to troubleshoot it through some YouTube videos, but it's, it's just not working. But here's, here's what I'm seeing and here's what's happening. It's turning on, but it's flooding with water, but things aren't getting cleaned. I don't hear it running. And it'll just start asking you questions and you just have dialogue with it. Almost like it's an expert in your pocket. You can call up anytime. And that was using the voice model. I was talking to it.
- [08:35]
Sarah Nee
Yeah.
- [08:36]
Dan Sanchez
But I find I'm doing it with like that all the time. Whether I'm assessing my own strategic position in the market, whether I'm just asking to come up with a LinkedIn post. I'm just talking to it like it's an assistant that I just need to give it some enough context in order to carry out the task.
- [08:50]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, that's a great point. I've definitely seen it's, it's improved drastically over the last, like, year, I would say, in terms of, like, not having to engineer as much with the prompting. I'm curious. We haven't shifted too much into the conversation of marketers, and so there's a lot of unknown in a lot of industries, but marketing is obviously being deeply impacted. And you had a great LinkedIn post that went out this week that I saw about, you know, AI tools are potentially going to replace humans in the, in the future. And so I would just love to hear your take on to the marketers that are listening to this. What do they need to be thinking of moving forward in their roles as marketers? Is there an opportunity to evolve and shift? Or what do you recommend? You know, for those that are feeling a little bit uncertain about the industry that we're in right now, there is.
- [09:32]
Dan Sanchez
A lot of uncertainty. And I tried to think about the uncertainty in, like, scenario planning methods, where it's like, okay, like, let's say, let's say it's. It is like we're going to lose 90% of marketing jobs. You're like, well, who are the 10% that do have jobs? And what do I need to be in that 10%? So I think about it like that, but I think about on the other side, like, let's say this is going to be like every other technology revolution. Well, there's going to be a whole ton of new jobs that exist. What's going to be in those new jobs? Well, they're probably all going to be AI Driven. So in either scenario, it's probably going to behoove me to become AI driven, right? And it's probably gonna land somewhere in between. It's probably not gonna be like this glorious thing. There's probably gonna be good, there's gonna be bad, there's gonna be some loss on some side. I just, I did recently post because a lot of people there's been this, this trending topic on LinkedIn that I really had an epiphany. I'm like, you know, it's not gonna be all that kind of like this idea that like, human first is going to be the one that powers it. Like AI frees us up to do the more human things. And I'm like, that will be true. There will certainly be a place where a lot of companies lean into being more human, more service oriented, and those will be great. And they'll win. There will be a whole nother set of businesses that win from just being more fully automated. Because somehow through AI, they create systems that deliver more value at just a much lower price. And you know what, people, a lot of people will do that. Like, it used to be that you'd have a tax filer help you file your taxes. And Almost everybody's using TurboTax now, right? Unless you have a company in some kind of more complicated tax situation and you are hiring a cpa. But I'd still be even a little nervous to be a CPA right now, unless you're like a really good one, you know. So I think a lot of businesses will be automated and there'll be people that go into the whole all human thing and the cost difference between the two will probably be pretty dramatic. But there will be a lot of ways to win. But I think what will help the most is trying to figure out what different paths will happen in the future and then finding like the common denominator around them. The common denominator I'm seeing is that AI skills are going to be a big piece of it.
- [11:40]
John Jantz
Hey, small business owners, let me ask you a quick question. Is your marketing actually working for you or just working you over? If you're tired of chasing random tactics and want real clarity, it's time for a strategy first approach. At Duct Tape Marketing, we help you build a marketing system you own one that fits your business and finally puts you in control. No more chaos, no more guesswork, just a roadmap you trust powered by smart strategy. And let's face it, a little help from AI today. You ready to shift from overwhelm to confidence, head over to DTM World/OwnIt. DTM World/OwnIt.
- [12:22]
Sarah Nee
I heard someone talk recently about if you're a marketer, really anyone in a role is basically writing down everything that you're working on on a regular bas and then doing a bit of audit on that work, saying like, is this increasing in value because of AI? Is this decreasing in value because of AI, or is this staying consistent moving forward? And so have you thought about anything like that? Auditing your time and your skill sets to, to see what you should continue to leverage and grow on versus maybe start delegating to different tools and solutions?
- [12:50]
Dan Sanchez
For me, it's probably a little harder because I'm an AI educator. So like I, I, for my job, I literally get to waste some time experimenting and using these things so that I can report on whether it's actually helpful or not. I find the process of auditing on a regular basis to be pretty burdensome. Yeah, I'm like, like, I wish I would just like audit my days more. In fact, I've even thought about going into making a project in chat GPT to be like, here's what I thought I would get done, here's what I didn't get done, here's some extra stuff and just dictate into it real quick to kind of keep like a daily journal and kind of a little bit of a coach. It's gotten way better at that recently. But it's, I don't know, I don't think I would, I would do that. I think on larger projects I think it's really helpful, especially if you can bring some of that data back into AI because it's learning now and can remember things across different chats now and it will get better over time. I think that will become a strategic advantage. But yeah, I, for anything new in businesses, you do have to start small and kind of test your way there. Yeah, I will say it is probably like there's enough effort and a momentum in society going towards AI, especially with businesses right now that I promise it's worth at least just going deep into chat GPT. It's the main one. And I heard somebody say even recently, like, oh, like I know chat GPT but like, I want to go beyond beginner. And I'm like, no, like, trust me, all the pros are using chat GPT too. Like, like, if anything, they're only spending more time in that tool because they're finding it more and increasingly valuable. Just don't waste time learning all the tools. Like literally Learn that one and then if you have time and you have a need, start learning some of the other ones. But time spent learning and how to leverage ChatGPT specifically. And if you like Claude, go with Claude or Gemini, like pick one of the main ones and then just hone in that one craft in order to make the most of it.
- [14:36]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, that's how my brain works with it all as well. Like, I've gone all in on ChatGPT and that's where I typically live every day. But I know other people out there, they're like, I use this for this, this for this. And I'm like, how do you have time for all of those things? Like, I have to go deep in one to actually be able to use it to some of its potential versus, you know, going through all the different tools. So I think that's great advice. I'm curious. I'm part of a mastermind and AI mastermind and we were talking last week about how websites and marketing in general is going to have to shift because of the AI agents world, where right now we're designing websites for humans and ads for humans and eventually, you know, it might be agents going to these different website to make buying decisions for, for their people. And so have you thought or talked much about how marketing might shift in the next, I would say six months to a year, with the idea of agents becoming more of a, a thing or more of a focus?
- [15:29]
Dan Sanchez
Yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I don't think it's going to change much in the next six months. AI agents, in my opinion, they're just not a thing right now, for the most part. Yeah. What we do have, what we're calling, what most agents are or what are labeled as agents aren't. They're not agents. There are, there's a few, there's a few exceptions, and I'll talk about those in a second. But most agents are what I'm calling intelligent automation. They are just automated sequences like we had before with marketing automation, you know, like the little drag and drop builders. They're just that with one of the modules being chat GPT, that's it. Some of them are slightly more sophisticated because you're giving a little bit of autonomy to AI to choose between a few different tools. And maybe it's not injecting a prompt, it's actually got access to a database. Oh, that's starting to feel more agentic. But it's not like this fully autonomous thing that can go out shopping for us. It's. It's just not. Now there's some precursor tools out there that you're like, oh, that's definitely agent ish. But it's not, they're not good yet. Like Open OpenAI has operator baked into chat GPT. You got to pay the $200 a month license to get access to it. It doesn't work well. Manus is the big one people are talking about from China. It also doesn't work well. There's just too many holes in the system. It maxes out too often because the, the server space isn't ready, the memory isn't ready. Like we have all the ingredients to make agents right now, but we're still. The cost of compute needs to come down a little bit. The context window needs to go up a little bit. We need to be able to give it more access to more things. You know, all these. There's a lot of talk right now about giving it access to like Google just launched its agent to agent framework so that it can interface different tools can interface. Agents can work with other agents from other tools. You know, like these kinds of standards and models have to be developed to create the infrastructure for it to happen. Right now it's not happening. The one, the one, the one agent that I've seen that is actually good, it's agentic and it's worth. It's like one of the most underutilized AI features out there right now is deep research. Yes, it is going and doing a lot of work and I love it. The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. If you're a ChatGPT user now, you're paying for plus and you're not using all 10 of the instances of that you get every single month. You haven't figured it out yet. I promise. The best advice I give is like Upgrade just for one month. Upgrade to the $200 a month one so you can get 120 instances of it and just throw everything you can at it, practice at it. You get 120 of them. Like throw away things at it and just try it. It's different than using chat GPT because it's going and doing like 20 to 40 hours worth of human work for you, which means you kind of. Like I said, prompting wasn't good a minute ago. But for deep research, prompting actually is more strategic because it's, it's less of a prompt and more of like a mini project charter. If you think about it, you're. You kind of need to put some barriers on like where you want it to go, what you want it to do, what you want it to accomplish, where you'd want it to not go. Before you give it 40 hours of work, even though it's doing it in 20 minutes, you gotta remember these reports are so sophisticated. You're like, that would've taken a human a long time. But that's the most agentic thing that I've seen out there that's actually remarkably good right now.
- [18:35]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, I use deep research a lot for things like competitive research if we're working with a client or if I'm present, like creating a new presentation and I want some data to like back it up. I'll have it create initial research to put together that. I'm curious, do you have any other examples of how might people might start wrapping their head around using deep research?
- [18:53]
Dan Sanchez
I got a few. There's one prompt that I fell in love with and it went like super viral on LinkedIn. It's like my most viral post to date was a deep research prompt and it's really useful. So it is. I'm, I'll, I will give it to you to script out. I'm not going to read the whole thing. It's kind of long. But I'll, I'll give it to you. You can put it in the show notes.
- [19:12]
Sarah Nee
Okay, thank you.
- [19:13]
Dan Sanchez
But it's essentially a prompt that goes and collects all the questions your audience is asking about your expertise. Okay. And it goes and searches Reddit, Quora forums and social to go and find them all and then organize them into categories and then rank stack them so that you can get at a glance what are the most frequently asked questions your audience is asking about the thing that you do or the thing that you sell, whatever category that is. And that's just so helpful to see. And it actually like not only rank stacks it, but actually gives you a header for each one and then puts bullet points of the exact how they're wording the questions with the link to the source so you can spot check it out. It's so helpful because as a content marketer, like it's a lot of things are still done by content, right? Like that's like my planning path. I don't, I used to had to just have a, a lot of conversations on social or put out polls or just talk to a lot of customers. Now I can just extract it from the Internet in 15 minutes and have a pretty dang good path of like what I need to be talking about on social or on podcasts or blogs.
- [20:16]
Sarah Nee
That's amazing. It was a great example. We've this isn't a Deep research thing, but it's Chat GPT thing. We've started recording a lot of our sales calls and that's just been great content to put into GPT as well, to analyze not only from what can our sales team be doing better, but also a marketing content perspective. Because now we're capturing exactly as you said, exactly how prospects phrase certain pain points and things they're struggling with. And then we're able to create marketing content that speaks directly to them moving forward. So I love that example.
- [20:47]
Dan Sanchez
I got one more for Deep research.
- [20:48]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, give me one more.
- [20:49]
Dan Sanchez
You want to wrap up?
- [20:50]
Sarah Nee
Give me one more.
- [20:51]
Dan Sanchez
Because the Deep research prompts are a little bit more sophisticated. Something I've started doing is if I want to use a deep research prompt to dive deep and maybe I'm thinking about launching a new product or I'm about to do something big and I don't want to just do it willy nilly. I want to like have a substantial conversation with AI about it. I will start it off in 4o. Just talk about like, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. Help me build a prompt that would do really well in chat GPT's deep research. Ask me some questions. You know, this takes time. So like I'll tell it generally what I'm going after. It'll ask me some questions, get clarity. It'll craft the pump prompt, then I'll switch it to the 01 Pro model within that same window or the, the O1 thinking model. And then on Deep Research, let it. I'm like, hey, that prompt above, go and do your thing. You know, it's like it's already crafted the prompt for me.
- [21:37]
Sarah Nee
Yeah.
- [21:38]
Dan Sanchez
Then it'll go do the deep research, come back with the refinings, I'll read it and switch it back to 4.0or maybe even a different thinking model, depending on what you're going after, and then have a conversation about the research and pick it apart. But now it's got this like big research report in there that then you can have a conversation with AI to be like, okay, well it looks like this, like what do you think? And then you can have a conversation and dialogue about the research, which is kind of a fun way to do it. Is Chat GPT Deep Research and then going back to talking to Chat GPT about it after the Deep researcher part.
- [22:10]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, that's really interesting because you're using it in that sense in that example, as a research assistant with the Deep research and then you're going into more thought partner co pilot mode when you're going into conversation. Very cool. Well, thanks, Dan. Is there anything else that you want to share before we part ways today in terms of anything on the topic of AI overwhelm and strategic thinking?
- [22:30]
Dan Sanchez
For anybody that's listening to this and thinking they're behind on the AI train, you're not behind. It's still very, very early, I promise. I've just got back from a conference just two weeks ago. People were asking all kinds of questions and I could tell just from the types of questions and their hunger they had that this is still extremely early. Like it is not too late. I know the hype has been crazy over the last two years, but as far as marketers actually using it in a meaningful way on a weekly or daily basis, very few. So you generally pays to be early on these trends, but don't be overwhelmed with trying everything. Just taking some of the things we've talked about in this episode and practicing it and finding use cases that are meaningful for you. Again, look for those daily or weekly things you use all the time and start experimenting with AI and count it and write it off as like education time rather than oh, I wasn't as productive as I was hoping it would be. Your first couple of swings at it are just going to take time. It took us all time to learn how to Google. Took us all time to learn how to actually write our first blog post. It'll take you time with AI, but it's early and putting in the reps now will pay dividends later.
- [23:33]
Sarah Nee
Yeah, it's great advice. I always like to think we're all learning together right now on this. We're all learning together. Well, where can people connect with you online, Dan?
- [23:42]
Dan Sanchez
You can find my podcast wherever podcasts are at any anywhere you search. AI driven market on ePodcast app. It's also on YouTube, it's a video podcast and LinkedIn@LinkedIn.com in digital marketing, Dan is my most active social network. Awesome.
- [23:57]
Sarah Nee
Thank you so much for being here Dan. And thank you all for listening to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. We will see you next time.
- [24:09]
John Jantz
Hey small business owners, let me ask you a quick question. Is your marketing actually working for you or just working you over? If you're tired of chasing random tactics and want real clarity, it's time for a strategy first approach. At Duct Tape Marketing, we help you build a marketing system you own, one that fits your business and finally puts you in control. No more chaos no more guesswork, just a roadmap you trust powered by smart strategy. And let's face it, a little help from AI today. You ready to shift from overwhelmed to confidence? Head over to DTM World/OwnIt. DTM World/OwnIt.