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In the fast-paced world of growing service businesses, the dilemma between delivery and marketing is a constant challenge, especially for those who are at the point of reaching their customer capacity.
The need for brand relevance, consistency, and awareness can be overwhelming when you spend a lot of time providing your customers with a transformative experience. This gave my team and I the idea of testing relevant artificial intelligence tools to free up time for our marketing strategies.
Here's everything that worked – and what didn't – over the last 12 months when I used my coaching business as a guinea pig.
Related: Yes, you can use AI for marketing. But don't forget the benefits of human touch.
Does AI diminish the human touch or authenticity of our message?
A common fear is that AI will replace authenticity in marketing. A helpful reframing here might be to see this tool as an additional tool in “orchestrating” your brand.
Imagine this: Just as a conductor conducts the musical performance or symphony, AI can enhance your song without overshadowing your unique voice and the intent of what you want to convey with the song.
The song I'm referring to is your brand message. AI is just another tool that can be added to your marketing to increase your brand awareness. As long as you are clear about your ideal customers, your offering and your core message, you have the opportunity to creatively integrate AI into your marketing.
The biggest lesson I've learned over the last 12 months is that machine output will only be as good as the user's input. You are still the storyteller, the architect and the soul of the intellectual message.
The 3 biggest benefits of AI
1. The customer-centric brand message
A key advantage is the simplification of note-taking and the fact that we do not have to rely solely on our brains to complete all callbacks, especially during customer calls, events, workshops, etc.
Tools like Fathom on Zoom have allowed me to take detailed notes during calls without compromising my presence and focus as a trainer. The ability to condense and generate information, summaries and insights at lightning speed is groundbreaking.
From a marketing perspective, all AI-optimized notes can help improve the clarity and specificity of our message as we can now use real-time data (i.e. words coming from our existing or potential customers) to create the most effective message to target more of our people. To optimize call notes and summarize data, you should try Fathom AI or Otter AI.
Related: How to Integrate AI into Your Marketing Strategies (and Why You Should)
2. Make your content more dynamic and attention-grabbing
As you may already know, in today's social media landscape, capturing the attention of our potential customers is more difficult than ever. Nowadays, it's more important than ever to have compelling sales content, email headlines, and hooks that get noticed.
This is exactly why I loved using AI in my company. AI can work around the clock (unlike most of us who need eight to nine hours of sleep) to help you create different versions of attention-grabbing copy that will resonate with your audience.
Recently I needed help writing the landing page copy for my new workshop event, so I went to ChatGPT. I provided the context of this event, what I was trying to teach, ideal customers I wanted to reach, and let the AI do the rest of the magic.
The entire process took less than 30 minutes from start to finish and resulted in a 40% conversion rate on signups. Previously it would have taken me at least two hours.
This type of workflow works best when you are clear about the idea and just need help structuring it. Always trust your intuition to decide what feels right, and edit as you go to make sure it still fits your brand voice. Your intuition (human touch) is the beginning and the end, AI can simply speed up the process in between. For this use case, check out ChatGPT or Google Bard.
3. Be everywhere at once (omnichannel efficiency)
As consumers' content preferences evolve – from listening to, watching or reading content – AI's reuse capability offers us business owners endless opportunities to streamline this process to reach more people across different platforms.
If you prefer to create content by “speaking it out loud,” you can use a tool called Oasis AI to help you translate sound into various social content formats.
If you prefer to film content in a video environment, you can use a tool called Descript AI, which will help you add text to captions and cut them into short videos to share on channels like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, etc. to distribute TikTok.
We no longer have to spend countless hours manually editing or repurposing to be everywhere at once. All you need is some core content and let the machine do the heavy lifting so you can generate 10x more from that original piece.
Related: How to Use AI to Drive Growth and Improve Customer Interactions
The future of AI in marketing
A helpful reminder here is that artificial intelligence cannot aggregate information that does not already exist online. We are still the creators and innovators.
People live, people experience and people connect – robots cannot do that. Humans will be the moderators and conductors of the machine. The question is: Are you ready to learn how to become the best facilitator to help your business grow?
In the hands of a curious, open-minded and creative person, AI makes marketing output much easier and faster. Welcome to the next era of marketing.