A (4:21)

So. Okay, that opens up a few questions for me. One in particular. Over the past 18 months, how has the conversation with your clients evolved around AI, but specifically, has their level of savvy increased and. Or do they think they're ahead of where they actually are in understanding AI? Does that make sense?

B (4:43)

It does make sense. I would say that I feel like our clients are probably in the same boat as most companies are. Some of them are more AI curious than others. Some are in the same boat and feeling like they're a little bit behind. They keep reading about all these changes that are happening and this evolution that's going to take place, and now they're reading about job displacement, and it's almost like a paralysis feeling like, oh, we should be doing something. We don't know what to do, so we're doing nothing kind of thing. I do believe, when it comes to their marketing function, because we are handling it, and we do talk openly about that. We have embraced AI technologies and we use it and we're about to roll out some pretty new cool things. Like we're partnering with a company called DataBox that brings AI driven insights into analytics. It will give them real time analytics, the ability to query their analytics, to ask questions and get answers. And so through those things that we're implementing and conversations that we're having with them, they feel secure that we're keeping up to what's going on in our profession. So I think with regard to marketing, they're feeling pretty good. But I don't get a sense that overall holistically, as a business that most of our clients have like an AI roadmap, so to speak, of how it's really affecting their business, their industry, how they're going to continue to stand out from the crowd leveraging AI technology. But they can check the box on the marketing function.

A (6:18)

That makes sense. I've got 20 plus years of online marketing background and marketers are always like, what's that new thing? What's that, what's that analytics tool?

B (6:29)

Exactly right.

A (6:30)

So the adoption of AI early in the marketing department tracks with what we're seeing as well. So you know, there's people listening to this right now and they're experience is exactly what you described just a moment ago. So it was, you know, you see the, the client at the coffee shop, oh hey, funny seeing you here. And they say, hey listen, I gotta ask you about like what would your advice be to, to the, the, the potential clients who, or, or clients who are having those questions about is it a big deal or what are they asking, like specifically?

B (7:04)

Yeah, I think they are asking, you know, is this sort of a fad, is this a big deal? Is this a tool, is this a revolution of business? And you know, while we have those conversations, my opinion, again, it's just, my opinion is that it is, it's unprecedented technology. You know, having been in business a long time, I won't share how much and having my own business for 21 years, you've definitely seen a lot of things come into marketing and change like marketing automation, social media became a new channel. I mean there wasn't HubSpot or LinkedIn when I started Marketree. So all of these things kind of bring about change, but never seen anything like this before where it's set to displace human talent and knowledge work. And so, you know, since we do specialize in B2B services as one of our key verticals, a lot of our clients are starting to think, well, you know, how is this going to impact our business over time and how do we prepare for that? And we have gotten questions like, how, how did we start as a marketing company on our AI journey and our AI roadmap? Because 18 months ago, you know, when ChatGPT came out, I think most of my team was like, enamored with chat and like, wow, look what it can do. And it's gonna make our life easier. And my initial thought was, well, this is going to turn marketing on its head. We need to prepare. We've got to dig in and really start planning now. And so probably the feeling that I had 18 months ago, because knowing it was going to hit marketing early is probably where many businesses are starting to feel that now. And so my advice to them would be sort of the same that I started. My very first thing was to sign up for an MIT executive class to really understand what this is. It's not chatgpt, Right. It's. It's generative AI. But what is generative AI? What is it? How does it work? And just having that basic level of understanding was very, very helpful so that as you're reading things and hearing things, you understand the language behind it. So that I would recommend to anyone to take some sort of a course background so that you understand what you're reading. And then for us, we were lucky enough in that there was an institute called the Marketing AI Institute that specialize. Yeah, they're great. Paul Reitzer and Micah put. I love their podcast. I started embracing their podcast every week, listening to it. I read his book and through the helpful templates that they gave, that's really how we started our journey. He gave a template that recommended breaking down all the use cases that we do in our business. So say we were in a marketing business. For any business, you can, in every functional area, start documenting processes, key processes, key use cases. And then basically what it had you do is like, how beneficial would it be if you had generative AI that could help you make this use case faster, better? How beneficial would it be to your operation? And then the next question is, how hard would that be to do? And then you sort of come into like, what are quick wins? What are you doing? High value, like low level lift type of things. And those are the things that get those baby steps. You can start getting baby steps and getting momentum because you're like, oh, I just like kind of infused AI into a use case. I see on the R, I'm saving like 10% of my time. And that gives you confidence to keep going further and further.

A (10:46)

Yeah. Do you remember what some of those like early use cases were where you were like, I think AI can the templates. Tell me this will work. Let's give it a shot.

B (10:55)

Yes, they were all around content generation. Obviously when ChatGPT came out, the first thing people noticed is, wow, it can write blogs, it can write social posts. And so for us, it's like those were the easy wins for us because the technology was already there. I think in some other areas the technology's still evolving, but with regard to content creation, it was pretty good from the start. Start only getting better. And so our phase one of our AI journey was in the content use cases. So how can we write blogs? Still leveraging subject matter experts and original thinking, but leveraging the tool as a copywriter only. And so figuring out how to still create original, fresh, non plagiarized content, but leveraging these tools because these tools are really, really great copywriters. So those were some social media, creating email copy, anything around content generation were our quick wins.

A (11:53)

So the, the content generation, what, what my experience was is that without the ability to do that in a very short period of time at high quality, it just wouldn't get done in my business. It was something that is important but not urgent. Right. Was that kind of the situation that you guys were in with the content generation or was it fulfillment for client deliverables or what was the, the, the content that was being generated?

B (12:23)

Yeah, so we did actually produce to clients any AI generated content for quite a long time. I would say we waited about a year to start using it for clients. And the reason being is we're always to be the guinea pig. Right. And if something's going to go wrong, I want it to go wrong for my own company and not one of my clients. And so we started practicing sort of AI generated content for Marketree first and really worked to perfect that model over the course of a year. During that time, we continued to work with outside copywriters and really up until recently had worked with outside copywriters. We've made a strategic decision at this point where we are on our journey to hire a creative writer. And we're going to have our creative writer internally work with the large language models and the best practices now that we've built out to create just great, original, fresh content for our clients because we feel like we've nailed those best practices. We can do it really well and we can do it as good or better than we were doing it before.

A (13:30)

I think that's a great first place for anybody to kind of test with it what would be some of the advice you would say, listen, don't do it this way. We tried, it didn't work. What would you tell somebody who said, okay, I'm ready to get started with maybe some content generation at more than just dabbling. How does Deb do it?

B (13:48)

Yes. So one piece of advice I would say is, is not to share with everybody to start doing this. You know, I think we've seen things in the news recently where some of the larger players are like, hey, your job's at risk. You really need to lean into using AI. So I think giving any kind of a blanket statement like go use AI without giving any training or guidance is the wrong answer. I would recommend that they form some sort of a committee that is going to establish some best practices and do some testing around content generation to share some of the things that we learned. Is that you really don't want these models reaching into their training data to supplement thoughts. Because what happens is it's not going to sound like you. It could be false, it could be someone else's thoughts. And so at the crux of our best practices is that all the thoughts have to be put into the tool. So interview a subject matter expert or a subject matter expert. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't even have to be complete sentences. You just have to put all your original thoughts on paper. The large language models are very good at organizing it, creating a snappy title, doing subheadings, but the thoughts need to be yours. And so that's probably the biggest piece of advice that I would give to anybody that's using large language models or any of the tools to create content is don't shortcut the thought process. The thought process still needs to be uniquely human or it's going to end up sounding like everybody else.

A (15:32)

So what are your thoughts about using the dictation function and just like rambling, for sure.

B (15:37)

I mean, we have, for people that tend to get like blank page syndrome, we have like prompts that they can use that kind of guides through that creative process. I love to write, so I love a nothing more than a blank sheet of paper and just give me some quiet space. Like I'd love to be sitting out on that patio right now, Chris, just writing. And that's where I do my best, like just free flow writing hand paper and then I'll eventually like type it in. And that tends to be my best work. And I love the fact that I don't have to sit there and agonize over, does this sound sentence sound good or should I word it better this way or that way? But it can really just let the creativity pour pour out of me without having to worry about that. Knowing that the large language models are going to be much better at that than I am.

A (16:23)

I hope you're enjoying the episode. Did you know that while you're listening to this, competitors are already boosting EBITDA with Generative AI? If you're still stuck in pilot mode, margin and market share are leaking every quarter. ChiefAI officer.com guides executive teams to the three moves they need to be doing. Identifying the top AI plays that will lift revenue or slash cost within 90 days. De Risk adoption with team training, airtight governance and change management best practice and then building and deploying production grade AI powered tools. No extra headcount, full ROI tracking the results operators at scale generative AI cut process costs 22% last year let's talk claim your free private 15 minute executive briefing by going to chiefaiofficer.com and walk away with a board ready roadmap slots fill fast so lock yours in now. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, great bit of advice for anybody who's looking to expand their use of the tools even more. Where are some areas maybe where you tried and it didn't work out? Or the technology is just not there yet. But the concept is strong, the promise is there, but the tech hasn't matched up yet?

B (17:44)

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say we've tried a lot with image generation. We've tried Gemini's Imagen, even though they've made some strides. I wouldn't say any of the images that we've created are ready for any creative campaigns or ones that we would even include in social media. We have seen some promise with ChatGPT, some of the more advanced models with the image creation. But in general I would say the content feels so easy. The image creation for whatever reason doesn't feel as easy. And that could be because maybe we need to have a designer putting in prompts. Maybe a designer could put in prompts and knows exactly what to ask for. And that's something that we will continue to look at and work with our outsourced designers to see if they can get better results than we can as non designers. But just as like everyday people trying to get like really creative images, we haven't had a tremendous amount of success with that yet.

A (18:49)

Little tip, that was a rabbit hole I went down and where I settled was Ideogram in general, very good. And when 4O kind of kicked. They got rid of Dolly and they moved in some of the stuff that. So we have a big community of chief AI officers and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, some of the stuff that I'm seeing them produce from just like. Oh no, it was just, just a prompt. Like wow. So maybe give those two a shot. Yeah, for sure.

B (19:16)

Yeah. No, thank you for that tip.

A (19:18)

Yeah, but it's a good point. I mean it has the ability to create some amazing things, but marketing, right? Like you can't just hey guys, check this out. It needs to be production quality and yeah, until you get there, it's tough. Any other. Other areas where you guys have had that same experience? It's close but not there yet.

B (19:40)

I would say with regard to analytics, we actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the best way to pull data from all these different sour. So a typical client for us is one HubSpot. We use the Google Analytics GA4. We track organic search rankings and SEMrush. We'd like to look at social media. We're pulling from LinkedIn so that's like kind of the basic and then you can add on from there. And so for us, reporting is like trying to pull together all of these statistics and make sense of them and put together, you're putting together manual charts. About a year and a half ago we tried a tool called Click Data. We hired an outside vendor and you know, it just, it was clunky, it, it was clunky, it did like pull feeds. Some of it was a bit manual and unfortunately we just weren't getting like the AI insights. It's really what we wanted. Even its most basic forum we wanted because we're analysts but we didn't go to school for business analytics and we want that kind of level insight into the data. And so after, you know, carefully vetting a number of different. We decided on Data Box because the integration was very easy. There's really no manual like uploading of sheets or anything like that. And it does give you a really nice AI insight overview into the data and the ability in kind of natural language to quantify, query the data and get further insights. And so I think after kind of striking out with qlik data and have it not be quite the tool we thought it was going to be and maybe it's just a function of time. I, I think Databox has been around for a while. My guess is they've been working on their AI. It's just like all the technology platforms are working on their AI it just seems to be really strong. It's good. So I would not, I would say don't be discouraged. It's striking out. We, we've done a lot of striking out with things and we just kind of let it float right by and go on to the next and check out to really good learning, you know, makes us more understand, like understand more what we want and what we don't want, even if it doesn't work out.

A (22:00)

So you mentioned a couple of, of the data sources that you guys look at for your own business and for your client businesses and some of those were SEO performance related. Where are you going for Geo or what are you calling the term of like the Generative Engine optimization. What are you hearing it called and where are you going for that info?

B (22:20)

Yeah, so early on we didn't even know, so I would say a year ago we didn't even know if tools had existed for this. And so we were just really doing queries in the large language models to see how we were showing up and our different clients were showing up. What questions were being asked around our clients, like after we would get basic information, like what were some of the questions that were being asked? And so we were using that as like initial input into what these large language models were looking for. And what we found was that they were pulling information directly from reviews on Glassdoor, reviews on Google. Like I would see them, oh Marquetry is very good at this because they do xyz and I could see that was pulling from a review. So I'm like, note to self, we need more reviews, we need more third party proof points because it's looking out to draw conclusions. Shortly thereafter we hired our first full time PR person in house. Like we're not an agency, we're a consultancy. But we knew that every single clown is going to need third party credibility and proof points. And so now every one of our client has a PR program however small. We know that like pulling from outside sources to get information about company is really, really important. So that was one of the early things that we discovered just from being curious and just going on the large language model. So I would suggest to everybody is to go on a bunch of them, go on chat, go on Gemini, go on Claude and ask like tell me what, what, who are the top 10 fractional marketing companies in our case? And then we would see how, what are the pros and cons of working with each one of these companies and just see what they say and that's going to give you a lot of information about where they're pulling information about your company and about your competitors. However, we have seen some tools come out recently that focus more on this AIO or LLMO or whatever people are calling it. So we've been testing Scrunch AI which we actually really like to give some really good information about Scrunch, like a, like a scrunchie Scrunch AI and basically it allows you to kind of put in various prompts related to your business and see sort of how you're faring for these various prompts on all the different large language models. Or you can say, you know, I only care about these three large language models and it'll only focus on these three. It'll also give you some recommendations of things that you can do to have more favorability in these large language models. Another tool we tested really good too was called Revere. So those are. They've just kind of been born in this new generative AI era. But we've also talked with some of our other providers like Semrush that we've used for quite some time for Google Insight and keyword rankings and they have now their own kind of AIO platform that you can upgrade to as well. So I would say look at outside tools, but also look at your tech stack that you currently have. More than likely they are building something for that purpose.

A (25:44)

Are you saying that SEMrush already has some like tools in their ecosystem for.

B (25:49)

Yeah, they have like a new. So they have their base which really focuses more on organic search and Google and keep rankings. But now they have an upgrade so you can upgrade to their AIO model and just truth, truth speak. It. It's not an expensive yet. It's not. Well, I'm not saying it's not there yet because I haven't tested it but, but it's not inexpensive. It is pricey, very pricey. Go up to that tier and then because they basically make you go to the kind of the enterprise level to kind of get that tier. And then if you want the combo which sounds so appealing of the SEO and the aio, you're on the enterprise level. And again it's, it's going to be an investment and it could be well worth it for your particular business. But for now for MarketFree, we've been pretty happy with Scrunch and we're going to move in that direction. We think they're tracking pretty well as far as giving some good information and insight.

A (26:46)

That's cool. That's a topic that in our community Is it's been discussed for I don't know, three or four months at least but the discussion is getting more frequent or that topic is coming up more often. Right. Is that something that market tree had a A like you guys were strong in SEO for a long time?

B (27:06)

Yeah, I would say we're strong in SEO. We always like to kind of build, build for the long game like understand what our clients go to market strategies are and make sure that they're well positioned from a content standpoint to rank organically. And I wouldn't say we're disbanding like all organic search rankings. I would say we are changing our content strategies because of generative AI. So for example, if you think of like a full funnel content where you have top of the funnel educational content that not salesy at all, not related to a product, just information, your middle of the funnel which is more consideration starts to bridge the gap between education and solution and then bottom the funnel, more sales. We are focusing less on the top of the funnel because our feeling is, is that almost any question you could want information on is at your fingertips with these large language models and they're going to give it to you and you don't have to click anywhere they may cite you, which is great. It's also being served up by the AI overviews in Google as well. So we have really started to focus more on the middle of the funnel and case studies, things that are uniquely yours that we know. Also the large language models really like those kind of proof points. So think about case studies, think about reviews, testimonials, storytelling, anything sort of in that middle funnel that can only be uniquely your companies but also kind of gives that third party credibility is where we're kind of honing in. That's not to say that they're not top of the funnel content pieces that are still there to be created. But I would say if you are going to write educational, make it, make it wow. Make it entertaining. Talk about something that you cannot find on a large language model and that's only going to happen because you have the experience and the breadth of experience and the creativity to create something that generally people want to read.

A (29:11)

Cook, that was great. That was great advice actually like so you know you were talking about SEO being that playing a long game. For me it feels like AIO or however they're calling it that it might be like if you're playing it now you're playing for a really long like it's a. Is it too early do you think or do you are you already seeing clients that are like, hey, we're noticing that traffic's coming from a hundred percent search engines.

B (29:37)

Oh yes, for sure. In the past couple months we have seen across our clients like a 20% drop off in organic search. And we can see, you know, in the sources, like if I had a lead come in for Marketree last week and I. First thing I do is scroll down to the bottom of my HubSpot feed to see where it comes from and then say refer from Chat GPT. Talked with another cross.

A (30:02)

You're being cited in a result in ChatGPT and they're, they're clicking through on that citation to your site.

B (30:08)

Yeah, so I, in, in HubSpot, it will basically it, it's coming in as like referral traffic. It'll say referred by ChatGPT, referred by Gemini. And so you're seeing.

A (30:23)

My question is if somebody, if I'm in a search, I see your, your company and then I go to like Google and enter it, it's not going to show that that was coming from Chat gbt. So this must be meaning that in the results that ChatGPT is giving this individual with the query, it's including a hyperlink to your site.

B (30:42)

That's exactly right. And what I found out through talking with those prospects, because they'll say, I understand you found me on ChatGPT, is that correct? And they'll say, yes, I did a search for the top fractional marketing companies and you were one of the top. So they're using that list and they're clicking over to the sites.

A (31:02)

So these people using it almost as a replacement to Google.

B (31:05)

It's a listicle. Yes. Every single case that I've asked about that scenario, it's been a listicle. They've asked for the top companies. So they're at, they've already done all their homework. They generally know what they want. Now they're asking ChatGPT to give the best, the top sources and they're going to those sites.

A (31:24)

So the reviews definitely matter.

B (31:27)

They matter so much.

A (31:29)

You have a review strategy?

B (31:30)

Yes, we do.

A (31:32)

Is that something that you do for your clients?

B (31:33)

Absolutely, yes. Encouraging them. And you know, we have some clients that are like so humble and they really don't want to bother their customers to give reviews. And I'm saying, you know what, you do great work, your clients don't mind, your customers don't mind giving reviews. And it is going to be critical, absolutely critical to showing up in those top search results. I would say also, you know, I'VE never been a company that's into like the self promotion and the best of awards. But I have to say, you know, it's crossed my mind that I think we might be applying for some more of those awards and those PR opportunities because it's going to be pulling from those two.

A (32:14)

That's another nugget. That's a great idea, huh? Team, please be taking notes. Right? This is great stuff. Okay, nice. I'd mentioned before we got on that I wanted to kind of discuss change management because it hasn't been a problem for me. I think that the narrative in the marketplace is that there's a lot more fear about it than I've encountered necessarily. But I'm also, I'm not doing deep dive surveys into client companies when we, when we come and go on bringing AI. So I'm not the best source. But what is your experience with hesitancy, reticence, Anything related to with your clients at least like, oh, you're using AI, hey, wait a minute, let's talk about it. Or clients saying, hey, we'd love to use AI but we're getting pushback from the team.

B (33:05)

Are you hearing that different for different clients? The clients that tend to be in more regulated industries like our CPA firm, clients really want to understand like what we're doing to make sure that we're not at all putting them at risk. And for the most part we're doing marketing so we're not uploading confidential information, client data, anything like that. So those are the things that they're concerned about. I would say from our clients, they're more curious, they're kind of hungry for information. I recently did a webinar and most of the folks that attended the webinar were our clients. They wanted to hear about, you know, how to. This one was on like how to make business development easier, embracing the seller doer model. So when you're like a partner at a firm and you have to bring in business, like how can you save time through using some of these tools to like gain information about a company or monitor industry trends to create thought leadership. So I had high attendance, I would say more curiosity than fear. But when I read, and I read a lot, I definitely read more fear than I do in some ways, enthusiasm for AI. I think the AI enthusiasts such as yourself, I am too. Like we've gotten a little bit more comfortable with it and it's, it's exciting and sure, there's a little fear factor in there somewhere, but it's more exciting than fear. If you're not, if you haven't been reading anything, if you don't have the knowledge of even what large language model is and. But yet you're reading these articles about job loss and everything. I think there's just this proliferation of fear and there just needs to be more AI forward thinking within companies. There needs to be somebody that wants to stand up and form a council to say how can we make folks within our organization more AI literate? Who's going to help start having conversations? It doesn't even have to start with a plan of how you're going to change the organization. It may start with just simple education about what it is and how folks can start becoming more comfortable even with the language around it.

A (35:20)

What would be, I don't know, like a dipping the toe in the water exercise to say, hey guys, we're going to start talking about AI.

B (35:27)

And yeah, we started by having everyone sort of assigned to one of the tools at the time. So we had a ChatGPT team, a perplexity team, and what we asked is that they would just spend a week doing some experimentation collectively as a team so no one kind of felt alone and then come back a week later and share their findings. What was Perplexity good at? What was Gemini good at? What was chatgpt? What did they find in terms of like prompting that got better results? And so that's really kind of how it started, was just to start to use the tool in a non professional way. We weren't using this on clients, we weren't using it on ourself. There was zero pressure. It was really, you could look at it as play. We were just playing with the tools. And with that, with no expectation of getting a result, it feels very safe to go and start to play with the tools. Tools. And then you're like, hey, this is pretty fun. And then we have people in our organization start to like design. One of our employees started to like design dresses for her daughter. They would sit there and design dresses in the tool so they found like pleasure out of it. And I think once you start doing that, you become less fearful of it.

A (36:43)

I think that's great advice. Hey, listen, I don't know what would be the best way for me to reciprocate the generosity of time that you've shared with our audience today. But if people want to. I've taken away several nuggets from this just of like, did she just. What? So some great stuff. How do people plug into what you guys are doing and continue to get access to Marketree's like experience based wisdom.

B (37:10)

Yeah. I would recommend people go on marktree.com we have a resources section. I would say a good a third of our content right now is about AI. We are hosting a series of webinars this summer. We've had one. We're having another one in July on reimagining the marketing department where it's come from in the 1990s and where it will be in 2030 so people can tune into that. And there'll be more to come this fall as we launch a couple more service lines around AI. So just visit our website for the latest information about our events and blogs and resources.

A (37:49)

Can I ask Deb because I'm personally curious is is the replay of that one that we've missed, is that available on the website?

B (37:55)

Yes, of course. Just send me an email dandrewsarktree.com I'll get you the recording.

A (38:01)

Awesome. That would be fantastic. Hey, thank you so much for popping in here.

B (38:04)

Thank you. It was great talking to you.

A (38:07)

You as well, Deb. So everybody, this all the links that we talked about in this episode, they'll be in the show notes and I would encourage you to check out Scrunch and some of these other ones because the nuance that was shared by Deb when it came to oh, we see the AIO working because of these things, that was priceless. So thanks everybody. We'll see you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in to Using AI at Work. Don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work and a special thank you to our sponsor, Chief AI AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for a free AI Readiness Assessment and AI Strategy Guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chiefaiofficer.com. so thanks to our producer Evan Desaunier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingaiatwork and visit www.usingaiatwork for free resources to help you harness AI in your role.