How to leverage AI in marketing: Learning & experimenting

Unlock the power of AI and how it can help marketers by embracing a mindset of continuous learning and experimentation. From understanding the basics of AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT to practical tips on how to incorporate these technologies into your marketing workflow, this session explores how to start leveraging AI effectively. Tune in to learn how to navigate the overwhelming amount of information, avoid common mistakes, and harness AI’s potential to streamline your marketing processes and enhance creativity. 

(00:00:45) Understanding the fundamentals of AI

(00:01:30) Humans plus AI – working together 

(00:02:40) AI education and policy adoption among organizations

(00:04:42) An overwhelming amount of AI information and resources to sort through

(00:06:46) Recommended resources for learning about AI in marketing

(00:14:17) Resources for learning about AI for HR tech

(00:14:46) Keeping up with fast-paced changes and advancements in AI tools and technologies

(00:19:03) Experimenting with AI tools 

(00:20:48) Crafting effective prompts to optimize AI output

(00:21:32) Be mindful of protecting sensitive data

(00:22:54) Exploration of features in AI tools and ideas for experimenting

(00:28:50) Starting your AI journey

The Demand Gen Fix is hosted by Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. Listen to our team of marketing experts and featured guests drop knowledge on how HR tech companies can maximize the success of their marketing for today’s B2B prospects. Learn more at www.growthmodemarketing.com.

Transcript

Jenni Geiser 00:00:01  Hey, everybody, it's Jenni from GrowthMode Marketing. You're listening to The Demand Gen Fix, the podcast where our team of GrowthModers and our guests discuss the ins and outs of demand generation and why we believe it's the key to long term sustainable growth, especially in the HR tech industry.

Deanna Shimota 00:00:21  Hi everyone. Deanna and Greg back for another riveting episode of The Demand Gen Fix. This episode and the next couple after it, we're actually going to focus on talking about AI. We know that is a hot topic, not just in the HR tech space, but for us as marketers, all of us trying to figure out like, what does this mean and how do we use it? So we're going to begin to that.

Greg Padley 00:00:45  Cool. Yeah, it's going to be fun. In this episode, we're going to introduce the fundamentals of AI, share some of our tips on experimenting with the AI tools in your marketing strategies. This one is basic, so it's good for people that are just looking to start understanding and working with AI.

Greg Padley 00:01:03  In our second episode, we're going to discuss some of the AI tools that we've been using, what's working for us and what is it where we're hitting roadblocks or stumbling blocks or still need to learn more ourselves? And then in our last one where we want to look at human AI collaboration, the importance of human oversight in using AI. And that's our will be episode three of our AI foundations.

Deanna Shimota 00:01:30  Yeah, so lots of good stuff as we dig in and share our experiences with all of you or wonderful listeners. And I got to say, if you feel like you don't know where to start with AI, you're not alone. I can tell you we've had lots of conversations with marketers. I've had lots of conversations with actually other agency owners when everyone's trying to figure out AI, what it means in marketing and quite frankly, in the broader Since obviously an HR tech AI is not something new, it's being built or has been built into a lot of technologies out there. And from an HR tech company perspective, many of you may be grappling with how to manage this new AI world from an HR perspective. We're going to look at it from a marketing perspective because there are lots of tools and things out there as well. And Greg, I know you had some research that you uncovered that talked about how many companies are using AI today. Tell us a little bit about that.

Greg Padley 00:02:40  Yeah, there's a great organization called the marketing AI Institute. And they've been around actually for 6 or 7 years now. And they do a yearly report on the state of AI and marketing. And their latest information came out just a month or so ago. And what they found is only 24% of organizations have any AI focused education or training and only 34% of them have any AI policies or guidelines. So obviously, everybody's in the early stages of understanding AI and trying to understand how to use it. So it's really important just for all of us to just stay curious and stay open to learning, have a learner's mindset and keep trying things out and testing things out. You just have to play around with it and not worry that you're going to break anything other than making sure you're not breaking any rules.

Greg Padley 00:03:30  If your company says you can't use AI because some companies do have strict rules around it, but most of them, obviously most of them don't. So as long as you're not putting any sensitive data in there or anything, go for it and try things out.

Deanna Shimota 00:03:44  And there are certainly a lot of tools out there from an AI perspective specifically built for marketing. And then there's the more general kind of things like cloud and ChatGPT. There's information overload. I think when I talk to people and we have conversations about AI, I overwhelmingly hear this from a lot of people. They're scared of it. They don't know what it means from a marketing standpoint, how it's going to change the game. And everybody in the agency owners group, I'm in there like this is changing the landscape of marketing so fast. How do we keep up with it? And I think that's overwhelming for people. And we're here to tell you like, yep, there's so much information out there. It's actually when you dig in, it's not as overwhelming as I think it feels like it is when you start to like, hone in on some things and look at ways that you can use it.

Greg Padley 00:04:42  Yeah. And it's gotten to the point where now the hype machine is in full swing too, because you start doing homework on AI and researching stuff and signing up for newsletters, and I've signed up for a few and I'm like, oh, this is just them trying to sell me X. They want to sell me. On how to become a AI consultant. They want to sell me on buying their class. Like I get emails from this one. I was getting emails that two times a day. You didn't sign up yet. Oh, and 15 minutes is going to be our next thing. And if you don't get there, you're not. You're going to miss out and get our ten free prompts. And I was like, Holy cow, man, two emails every day. At least I was like, and it was just selling stuff. There was some value to it. But so I think what people should do is just pick a few reliable sources to follow. Otherwise you're like drinking from a firehose, right? If you start signing up for all these things, the information just can be piling on and you're never going to get a chance to read it.

Greg Padley 00:05:44  So pick a few things. And then when they start to become like, no good anymore, like, okay, I already know this stuff or whatever, then you can peel off those ones and bring on some new ones. But I think it's. Don't hesitate to unsubscribe when something isn't good, because there's so many good things out there, you're not going to miss out, you know? So make sure whatever you're reading is providing value, or podcast you're listening to, etc., etc. and then you can curate your own list of things that you want to people that you want to follow. So we're going to come at it from a technology angle. Some will come at it from an HR angle, some come at it from a marketing angle. So maybe you want to pick 1 or 2 of each of those certain angles that you're looking for, so that you can get those different perspectives on AI and how to use it.

Deanna Shimota 00:06:35  Yeah, there's a lot of resources out there that talk about AI. And if you're looking for information specifically for marketing in AI, there's a lot of resources there, too.

Deanna Shimota 00:06:46  With the question for a lot of people is where do I find them? So let's talk about some of the key sources that people can get started with to dig in that we think are good quality sources that have great information they can share.

Greg Padley 00:07:02  The group I mentioned before, marketing, I institute, they I think they are terrific. They just have so much information and it's all really good. And they do a lot of research and they're connected with a lot of the a lot of the key players in AI and marketing AI. So they have blogs and podcasts and free classes online. And then also they do page things and paid classes. They don't force it down anybody's throat and they don't bang it over anybody's head. It's just like, here's all this free stuff, which has all been terrific. And then, by the way, we also have these things that you can pay for that are even more in depth. I think that's a great place to start. The guys that started that up also post a ton of stuff on.

Greg Padley 00:07:43  That's Paul Roser and Mike caput, and they're just always posting stuff and it's always really useful.

Deanna Shimota 00:07:50  So I think there's a lot of information out there, Greg, that you can find that kind of talks about AI and how to use it in marketing and beyond in very high level terms. And I think for a lot of people, when they sit back and think about it, they're like, okay, but how do I use it? I really like you're telling me, oh, you can use AI for marketing to do things with these different types of marketing activities, but that doesn't give you enough, like understanding, I think, to really dig in and know how to use it. Obviously, there are resources out there that are more of that practical hands on. And I know, like you're our at growth mode, our resident AI expert in training, on the marketing front, you have done some of those courses. So let's talk a little bit about that. Sure.

Greg Padley 00:08:44  There's a really great course that I took.

Greg Padley 00:08:46  It's the woman who organizes. Her name is Nicole Leifer and it's called Foundations of Generative AI for B2B marketing, and it's an online course. She also does post a lot of really good tips and tricks. So if you follow her, she's really good too. But the clients that's on.

Deanna Shimota 00:09:03  I'm sorry. That's on late. That's on her. Yeah.

Greg Padley 00:09:08  I think she's been doing some stuff on TikTok lately too, but I don't. I'll have to ask my daughter about because I don't really follow on TikTok. But anyhow, the class was terrific. It was several different sessions. I think there was maybe a dozen. And she starts from the very basic how things were, how it's organized and where it came from. And then she gets into just like how to do things and ideas of how to do things. And she gives examples and she shows you how to do it. And then all the way at the end, she talks about how to integrate your AI with Zapier and create some basic automations.

Greg Padley 00:09:45  So it's really from the beginning to the more technical stuff. It's just a really good class. So that's definitely worth looking up. And then there's also.

Deanna Shimota 00:09:54  Hers was hers. I mean, her training was primarily on. ChatGPT or did she cover different things?

Greg Padley 00:10:03  Yeah, she just focused on that, particular tool instead of, you know, trying to talk about all of them because everyone's a little bit different. That was where she had the her focus, and that's where she's spend most of her time, I think. But now she's been saying on some of her LinkedIn posts about how she's been taking what's something that she does in ChatGPT and then trying it in Gemini or trying it in Claude, or then or having one tool check the work of the other tool to see what else comes up.

Deanna Shimota 00:10:37  Yeah, which is crazy. And I imagine someone who hasn't used, I like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or some of these other generative AI tools. This one's overwhelming. Oh my gosh. Now you're not only using one tool, you're checking the work across things like it can get a bit complex.

Deanna Shimota 00:10:56  It's not actually when you dig in. As crazy as it sounds, I think on the surface, but honestly, like my experience has been, you really have to dig in with the tool. And ChatGPT is a great one to start with because you can get the free version to play around with it. We can tell you from experience, the $20 a month for the paid version is significantly better. So if you really want to play around with it and get value out of it, it's worth the $20 a month investment. But once you start playing with it, you start to see like how it works well and how it doesn't work well, and maybe where some of the shortcomings might be and you'll learn as you go.

Greg Padley 00:11:41  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And there are other courses that you could take online too. There's LinkedIn learning courses. Obviously there's Coursera courses. Just look for who's putting it out there. Because on Coursera there's classes from institutions like universities and things like that. There's classes from IBM or Amazon.

Greg Padley 00:12:02  Just if you're going to take one, make sure taking it from somebody reputable and that you're going to get real value and real information out of it.

Deanna Shimota 00:12:10  Yeah, that's a good point because they think there's everybody's jumping on the AI bandwagon and people are trying to make a name for themselves. And some of them like it's really good content. And then there's some out there that it's maybe not as high quality. And you want to make sure you're finding the high quality stuff that really helps you. Yeah. Understand and learn from it.

Greg Padley 00:12:32  Yeah, yeah. It's the same even with when you're signing up for a newsletter or watching podcasts. Who are you listening to or reading? Some of my favorite content comes from this guy's name is Christopher Penn, and he does what he called almost timely news. He's a little bit tongue in cheek, making fun of himself there because it's almost timely, but he puts out a ton of great content. He's a data analyst, but he's also a marketer, so his point of view is usually really interesting and makes me think differently, which was part.

Greg Padley 00:13:07  Part of what we have to do with moving into a new technology is how do you think differently? And then another guy that I follow and he's more like a high level, he's a VP of product at IBM. His name is Armand Ruiz, and he talks about AI and how it works and how different, how different things work together. And it's high level and sometimes really techie, but a lot of times it's really down to earth, and he's coming at it from a different point of view than when I would, obviously, because he's a VP of product at IBM. He's really interesting. His email newsletter is called I with Armand A or M A, and D is his first name. He's really good too.

Deanna Shimota 00:13:51  And obviously we're focused on marketing today, but as our audience are HR, tech companies. There's resources out there to look at from an HR tech perspective, too. There's a relatively new resource called X files that is focused on AI for HR applications. We found that to be a really great resource for information and kind of thinking around how to use AI.

Deanna Shimota 00:14:17  Also, H.R. comm forums, they do have some AI focused HR content that we think is worth checking out as well. Whether you want to look at marketing, whether you want to look at how AI is being used for HR, like all of these resources, there's some really good ones out there that can help educate you and keep you in the know. Because I can tell you, since we started digging in on AI here at GrowthMode Marketing like crazy, how fast things change and how the tools evolve and how they get smarter and better over time as we've continued to play with them and dig in. And it's good to understand, like what's coming next as well. Yeah.

Greg Padley 00:15:01  Yeah. It's funny, I just read something the other day. It was I is the worst it's ever going to be. Like it's only going to get better.

Deanna Shimota 00:15:10  That's true. So that is that is so true in the grand scheme AI is machine learning. You've maybe heard that term machine learning in the past. And they're essentially the same thing.

Deanna Shimota 00:15:24  And what it's doing is you're training this machine. And the more input that it gets and the more feedback on what's good, what's bad goes into it, the smarter it gets. So even as you're using AI for your own company, for example, let's say you're building up a content database in ChatGPT. You're building up a GPT of all your content. The more you put in it and the more feedback you give it, like, yes, this hit the mark. No this dent, the better it's going to be at being able to give you what you need out of it. So it's pretty cool the way that it works, but it's certainly not flawless either. And I don't know if it will ever be flawless because quite frankly, and I know you've got this on the list for one of the upcoming episodes, Greg, we're going to talk about it, but you need that human and technology interaction like it's never going to be a standalone, we don't think. But then we could be wrong.

Deanna Shimota 00:16:26  I mean, I can tell you, like three years ago, I sat at a conference where it was a marketing conference, and they talked about how I was going to change the world of marketing. And I remember sitting back and thinking, hey, I will never replace designers and copywriters. And it has certainly changed the possibilities for designers and copywriters and can have an impact on how they work. For sure, it's important to understand how these tools evolve.

Greg Padley 00:16:59  Yeah. And you started to talk about in person meeting someone at the conference. And I think there's it's important to, if you can, that you should also see if there's anything like local that you can go to, like a local group that that talks about AI or something like that, because there there are some groups starting to crop up. There's a couple in Colorado, one is called the Rocky Mountain AI Group. And then there's also an AI builders community, which is more programmers and more of those techie type of people. And then in Minnesota, we've seen there's a new one that started called neural networking, and then there's also Minnesota AI community.

Greg Padley 00:17:38  So keep your eye out on Eventbrite and meet up and and obviously LinkedIn to learn about some things. Cindy can go talk to people instead of just being online and watching the podcast or whatever. I know a lot of the the online things I'm on. If they have the chat open, the chat is blowing up because people are chatting the whole time, but the presentation and they're sharing ideas and they're it's crazy. And then when I go on some of the other online webinars and stuff where they don't have the chance, it's like, oh man, this is boring. I think the presentation is good, with the chat going on at the same time is great if you can do any kind of in-person events. I think that would obviously be that type of person who wants to go to a in-person event. Some people don't. So that would be I think those kinds of things would be really helpful. And actually that marketing I group that I was talking about before, they do a yearly conference. So they just they just finish up, I think it was their sixth year doing it.

Greg Padley 00:18:38  They hold it in Cleveland and they call it the marketing AI conference. And they said they had, you know, well over a thousand people there and they have three days of presentations. Some of them were like running at the same time so that they have three different tracks you could choose from. It was it looked really cool. So hopefully we'll be able to get there at some point in the future and check that out.

Deanna Shimota 00:19:03  Yeah, and I think as you're building your AI knowledge base, it's time to start really experimenting and doing the hands on learning is the best way to get comfortable with the AI tools, because you can hear about all the theories of how it's used. You can even see other people who are like, I use it for X, Y, and Z, but I feel like just from personal experience, until you go in and you start to experiment and play with it, you don't really know what it can do. And there's this learning curve you and I. Greg, we're talking about this before we started recording today's conversation, just how we're approaching it.

Deanna Shimota 00:19:43  We think of things. We go and try them. And when we first started, I was like, had I have tried to use ChatGPT numerous times and everything I get out of it is garbage And everyone else was like, oh, it's amazing. We're using it, blah blah blah. As I learned more, I've found there are some practical applications to use it and it does get better. So there is really something about just getting in there and playing and and trying stuff. And it's not going to be great at first. But yeah, but as you learn more about it and as you try different things, you'll find that some things work really well and some things you're like, well, this wasted half an hour trying to make this work and should have just approached it manually to begin with.

Greg Padley 00:20:31  Down the road, you'll figure out a different way to ask, a different way to prompt it to get what you want. You have to be able to think about and it just comes from practice, right? Like, how am I going? How are we going to ask for what I need? I've heard people say it's like having a AI is like having an intern.

Greg Padley 00:20:48  You have to give them the right information, and you have to give it the right directions to get what you want out of it.

Deanna Shimota 00:20:54  So true. And I have learned that the prompts make all the difference and you have to learn how detailed you have to get in and how specific. And we'll talk about that next time. When we talk about our own experiences and digging in and the different types of projects and work that we've tested on it and how that's all worked. But it's absolutely about figuring out how to make the AI work for you, because it's not as like, easy as saying, write this article for me. You will. But the quality you'll be like, oh, that was pure garbage. Yeah.

Greg Padley 00:21:32  It'll delve into things. Freedom. But not necessarily things that you want it to. So the one thing just to keep in mind as you're play around, especially if you're using a free version of that AI tool, is that you don't want to put anything it's proprietary or sensitive information into there because it could be training off of what you're doing.

Greg Padley 00:21:55  So you just want to make sure if you make everything anonymous and don't put anything sensitive in there before you start playing around and testing things out.

Deanna Shimota 00:22:04  Right? Because essentially you take a clod or a Gemini or a ChatGPT, which is generative AI, you're building this massive database and it's taking all of the inputs that everyone is putting in there to become part of that database. if you have paid versions, you can check a box to make sure your information is not getting built into the master universal database of the tool, but on the free versions you don't have that. So like Greg said, it's important to be mindful of what you put in there. If it's proprietary information, maybe don't do that. But if it's something that it's you know, what if this makes it into that general universal database of ChatGPT, so be it. Then you're fine to play with.

Greg Padley 00:22:54  Some of the things you could start playing around with if you're using ChatGPT. It has this really cool feature where you can take a PDF or a picture and upload it, and then ask it to extract a text from that document.

Greg Padley 00:23:08  You can route notes or something like that from a meeting, and then you want it to type them up. Instead of doing that, you could just take a picture and upload it to ChatGPT and ask it for the text, and it'll give you the text so that you don't have to sit and type type things out. Or same thing with a PDF. If you have a PDF with a bunch of information that you want, then you could take it out that way. Or you can pull it out and say, make this into a bulleted list and it would do that for you. So just a time saving little thing, but it's fun to play around with. And then you have to remember that that works and that does that. Because a lot of times I'll start typing something and retyping something and I'm like, oh, that was stupid. I could have just taken this, taken a picture and done it in two minutes instead of typing for ten minutes. So just silly things.

Deanna Shimota 00:23:55  I've actually done that.

Deanna Shimota 00:23:57  and it is amazing how well it works. I've gone to a conference where all of the sessions I took notes on the learnings that I was getting out of that, and I came back and I wanted to share them with the team, and I was like, I'm ready. I'm gonna have to find time to to type these up so I can share it with everybody. And then someone said, why don't you see if ChatGPT can make the notes for you? And I said, it ain't gonna be able to read my writing. But I took a picture, uploaded an asset to create notes, and stored them and put them into a bulletin format. And I will say it got it probably 90% there. And then I just had to do a little cleanup and it was ready to go. So it was a huge time saver. And yeah, those are the things when you think about I don't know how to use AI. It's like, where are there time consuming things that maybe you can make more efficient by having a little help from AI tools?

Greg Padley 00:24:49  Yeah, that same vein, it's you can take two files and upload it, and then you want to compare.

Greg Padley 00:24:55  Was this document the same as that document, or what's the difference between these two documents. And you can load them both up and it'll read both of them. And that'll give you you could say give me a bulleted list of what's different or something to that effect, and it will tell you what the differences are in those two documents. If you were, you know, maybe one was the newer version, one was the older version, and you didn't know which was which. You could find out pretty easily without having to sit and try to read through it and see, oh, okay, that's where we change that word or that product name and change the date or something like that.

Deanna Shimota 00:25:29  It actually works great for proofreading too. When you have a document, you can upload it and say, find the typos and the grammatical errors. And we've used ChatGPT for this. It'll go through and it'll make a list and say, this word was mistyped at this spot in the document. Like it works pretty slick.

Deanna Shimota 00:25:47  Yeah.

Greg Padley 00:25:47  Yeah, definitely a time saver. Just the other day I was playing around with it and I was brainstorming some ideas. And you're having a chat with T tea or whatever, and just asking it questions to come up with an idea or come up with some strategy ideas or an event or a webinar. And then again, you can ask it to organize those ideas into bullets or into a table.

Greg Padley 00:26:19  Just for brainstorming ideas. It's actually fun because you can. It comes up with things that you a lot of times had thought of yourself. And then you can build off of those ideas just like you would in a regular brainstorming session. So that's that's a pretty neat thing that you can do. And then again, for fun, you can do stuff personally. Like you can give it a list of items that you have in your pantry and say, what should I make for dinner? Here's what I have in my pantry, and it'll give you ideas of what recipes you could make with what you have on hand.

Greg Padley 00:26:51  That's pretty interesting. Or the other thing, you know, because we're crazy at our house and we have music on all the time and we're always wondering what's. What song is this? Or what are the correct lyrics or who sings this? And you can put that instead of going to Google. When you do that on Google, it takes you down this rabbit hole of all these weird responses and things, and you can ask AI and it seems to give a better, more direct answer. Instead of giving you a bunch of websites that then you have to go through and like search to find the factual thing that you're looking for. So that's fun. We play around with that at home, and I've heard I haven't done it myself, but I've heard of people using it to plan their travel itineraries and even using it when they're on a trip and say, I'm in blah blah, blah town in this state, what are some things that I could do? And it'll come back with a bunch of things that that you could do.

Greg Padley 00:27:44  And as you play around with that, more and more you get more specific with your questions, or you have stuff that's in your memory of your AI that'll help to direct your itinerary. So that's cool. It's neat you play around with at home, too.

Deanna Shimota 00:27:57  If you're dipping your toes in and you're not ready to use it from a work standpoint, maybe doing the home stuff to see how you can use it and leverage it is a great way to start to experience I, and it's crazy to think people try to plan their vacations with AI, but I've seen those posts on LinkedIn too, and thought, I'm someone who research researches the heck out of things before I go to them. It never occurred to me that I could just ask AI to find me the coolest places out there.

Greg Padley 00:28:30  Because what happens? You start searching for that stuff and then it takes you to TripAdvisor and then you get a story there, and then you go to find the thing, and then you get to see if it's good, and then you just get so many darn websites to look at like ChatGPT helps for.

Greg Padley 00:28:42  That's what I use at least. But then it just helps cut down some of that amount of searching around and clicking.

Deanna Shimota 00:28:50  Yeah, so there's lots of ways. Obviously you can use a I think in closing for this conversation, I would just say start your AI journey by curating your own personal list of blogs, newsletters, podcasts and find the ones that provide value to you. Begin experimenting with AI at home and at work, because the more you engage and the more you see how it works, the more confident you'll become. And make sure to tune in again next time, because our next episode, we're going to discuss some of the AI tools we used, what's working for us, and where we've hit some roadblocks when we've been playing around with AI at GrowthMode Marketing.

Jenni Geiser 00:29:36  Thanks for joining us on The Demand Gen Fix, a podcast for HR tech marketers brought to you by GrowthMode Marketing. Hope you enjoyed it! Don't forget to subscribe for more perspectives on Demand Generation and B2B marketing strategies. Plus give us a like. Tell your friends. We'll see you next time.