How to Leverage AI in Marketing: Human + AI Collaboration

Delve into the critical relationship between human oversight and AI to create more efficiencies within marketing. This episode explores practical steps and personal experiences from the Growth Mode Marketing team on leveraging AI without sidelining human creativity and expertise. From ensuring ethical data practices to refining AI-derived content, this discussion underscores the importance of a balanced approach to fully harness AI's potential while safeguarding brand integrity and customer trust in your marketing programs.

(00:00:35) AI's role in marketing

(00:02:45) Benefits of human and AI collaboration

(00:05:24) Enhancing creativity with AI tools

(00:10:15) The necessity of detailed prompts

(00:15:40) Continuous learning and team training

(00:18:12) Ensuring human oversight and quality control

(00:22:32) Maintaining data privacy and ethical standards

(00:26:55) Avoiding bias in AI-driven decision-making

(00:30:20) Transparency in the use of AI

(00:34:00) Balancing automation and human judgment

(00:36:45) Final takeaways on integrating AI in marketing workflows

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  Welcome back to the The Demand Gen Fix podcast, Deanna and Greg here, and we're excited to have you here for the final episode in our series on how leverage AI for nature tech in the marketing space. Over the course of the past three episodes, we've covered some of the basics and explored practical steps you can take to begin to leverage AI in your marketing. And we introduced some fundamentals and share tips on how to start experimenting with the AI tools in your marketing strategies. In the first conversation of our series, which was episode 69 of the Demand Gen fix, if you're looking for it in the next two episodes, which were episode 70 and 71, we explored some of our own. I use cases, so we talked about what's been working for us and some of the challenges we've encountered.

Deanna Shimota 00:01:09  So I encourage you to go back and have a listen to those as well. In addition to this one, where we're actually going to talk about how to leverage and marketing, specifically the need for the human, i.e. the people plus AI collaboration. Because as you probably heard in the last conversations, if you've been joining us for this series, it is not something where we recommend, from a marketing standpoint, you're using AI without having that human oversight.

Greg Padley  00:01:39  Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I can be a super powerful, but you always need to have human oversight. What's essential be to make sure that the AI is complementing rather than replacing marketing efforts and marketing thinking. So I guess we could just jump in and start to talk about how to think about that relationship between AI and the tools and marketing teams and and how to maximize results from that.

Deanna Shimota 00:02:06  Right. And when we talk about having a relationship between the marketing team, your employees and the AI, it's not about replacing the AI or the human people with the AI.

Deanna Shimota 00:02:20  I don't think AI is there yet. As marketers, there's a lot of creativity that's involved, and there's a lot of accuracy that's required in in the things that we write about too. Right? So I think with enhancing work, you can use AI, but we're certainly not saying it's time to replace anyone on your team. It's more about how to amp up their understanding of how to use AI, and how to help your team maximize the results from leveraging it to become more efficient so your team overall can get more done.

Greg Padley  00:02:55  Yeah, and you can use it as far as enhancing creativity to and using it as our sounding board or research tool. So can certainly help marketers develop ideas and think of new angles that they might not have thought of before. It's almost like having your own personal whiteboard or brainstorming session by yourself. So you can, for example, you know, it can help generating new ideas for content or suggesting images or suggesting other creative ways to approach a campaign. So you can really use it as a just throwing ideas at it and saying, here's what we're thinking of doing, and letting it come back with some other ideas that you can sort through and sift through and then develop the ones that you liked.

Deanna Shimota 00:03:41  Yeah. From a creativity standpoint, I think you can certainly help with generating new content ideas, suggesting creative ways to approach your campaigns, and even analyzing the data to uncover new trends that can fuel creative strategies. So it really is a partnership of like, I is not going to be my brainchild for me by any means, but it can help me think about things that can help identify things like those trends that maybe when you first glance look at something like five pages worth of notes, things like that, maybe it doesn't jump out at you. I can help with those things. So it should be seen as a collaborator in the creative process. But like we've said, certainly not a replacement.

Greg Padley  00:04:27  Yeah for sure. Yeah, I think part of helping the process, right, is like you have to train your team. You have to let people know how to use the AI tools. Comm. You could use any of the tools ChatGPT or Grammarly or Jasper, all these tools that are out there, and they're all pretty intuitive, but you still really need to understand how to frame your prompts and then how to interpret what comes back and put a lens on it in your own personal lens.

Greg Padley  00:04:57  so that you're getting a good result from your eye. Whatever tool you end up using or tools. Because a lot of times people use.

Greg Padley 00:05:05  Them.

Greg Padley  00:05:05  To to get different points of view. Some tips I guess you could think about for training your team is continued learning, right? I mean the thing this AI is changing every day, so you always need to keep learning more and experimenting. So you have to support that and encourage people on the team to do that so that they can get the most.

Greg Padley 00:05:24  Out of it.

Deanna Shimota 00:05:27  I think those are great points, Greg. And at the end of the day, when you go into these tools, you're right. They're pretty intuitive on a user interface level. If anyone's gone into ChatGPT, you can see there's not a lot to it that you see up front on the user interface. But the reality is, if you go in and you just toss it at your team and you're like, hey, I figured this out at first glance, they're going to put things in and we've talked about this and some of the other episodes, but responses they're going to get back are only going to be as good as the prompts that they have.

Deanna Shimota 00:06:02  And so I think it's important for team members to know, going into it, that it's not as easy as just entering like one sentence and you get back everything you need, right? It might be about building custom ChatGPT GPT modules, right, for content that you're creating. To give information on the background of the company, let's say you're trying to create some outlines for articles, right? But then just saying, okay, ChatGPT, go and write me an article outline on this topic. It'll do okay. Right? But we found with experience the prompts make all the difference and the more details you can provide around that, the better. But even just using ChatGPT and some of the other AI tools that are out there that can assist with marketing. You learn over time, like there's the more detail and the more specific information that you feed into the tool, the better the outputs going to be. And sometimes when you don't get good stuff, it's like, is the problem the tool or is the problem? You're not asking the right questions of it and not giving it enough information for it to do a good job for you.

Deanna Shimota 00:07:20  And so it's really important for team members to learn those things. And I will say, even some of the prompts that I've learned to use, and some of the ways I've learned how to use AI tools have been from learning about how they can be used right, and learning from other people. And so I want to figured out some of this stuff on my own for sure.

Greg Padley 00:07:44  Yeah.

Greg Padley  00:07:45  Yeah, definitely. Can we do it here? Like when you find something that works and it's like, hey, did you know you could do this or have you tried this yet? So I think it's important as a team to be able to share your best practices. How did it work? What's working like? How did you set it up? Did you put in different steps? You know, you could even hold little workshops, right? If somebody seems to be a power user, let them come in and teach the other people on the cheek. This is what we're doing on over here and this is working for us.

Greg Padley  00:08:14  And how could you leverage it for your boys? You just get ideas from other people, and then you take it and run with it, and then you come up with new things and it's like it just keeps speeding on.

Deanna Shimota 00:08:23  All right. And as your team is learning it, I think there is value in sharing with each other the things you learn. So it's not everybody goes off by themselves and they try to figure it out. And this person figured it out. But this person has to Gracepoint you figure something out, share it with the rest of the team because it'll be a tremendous timesaver. And sometimes one person will think to try out this way, and another person will think to try it that way, and you'll be able to compare those results to see like, oh, when we did it this way, this is the output that we got. It wasn't quite what we needed, but when we did it this way, we get exactly what we need or we get to 90% of what we need.

Deanna Shimota 00:09:03  So let's make sure moving forward, you know, everybody knows this is how this works. Well, and these are the things we should try to do with that.

Greg Padley  00:09:15  Yeah. So I think it's also important to remember we touched on it already. But the importance of humor.

Greg Padley 00:09:21  She.

Greg Padley  00:09:22  Importance of humor. Just don't forget about her work. Right.

Deanna Shimota 00:09:25  Always.

Greg Padley  00:09:27  So it's important to remember that human oversight is key, right? AI is fantastic at doing a lot of different things and processing large amounts of data, but you always have to have human oversight to make sure that whatever comes out is, you know, aligned with the brand guidelines, ethics or anything. You want to make sure that everything is accurate. So whether it's copywriting or creating other marketing assets or analyzing data we always have to have. She went. Oversight. Somebody always has to review it because you just never know when something is going to come out that isn't the way you want it to be. Can't just take it and send it out like ship it without looking at it.

Deanna Shimota 00:10:11  Right? For example, you could use AI to generate content, specifically copy for different marketing assets that you're creating. But I would never take that copy and just run with it. And you definitely need your marketers to refine that content. Make sure they're adding in the brand voice, ensure it aligns with campaign goal, make sure it's accurate. There's no hallucinations in there. For example, I've seen when I've asked for information from ChatGPT, for example, and I'm like, pull some statistics into this copy that you're writing and then, you know, it does. And I'm like, oh, this is a great Rate statistic. What is the source for it? It's actually come back ChatGPT and said, oh, I made that up. So you have to absolutely look at those things and, and make sure that it doesn't sound like it came from AI. Like maybe when you're having content created by ChatGPT or any of the other AI tools out there, Grammarly, there's a lot of options from a marketing standpoint that you can leverage that it does sound like it was written by your team and not by the AI.

Deanna Shimota 00:11:25  When it does carry your brand style and tone and any of those other elements that you need to take into account. And it's accurate as well.

Greg Padley  00:11:35  Yeah, yeah. Obviously for any data analysis or anything involving that type of work, it's really important to make sure that everything is correct. Sometimes it doesn't calculate, sometimes numbers get wonky or that it doesn't come out accurate. So you just have to double check everything. It's just if you think about it. I mean, we've been using the search engines for so long, it's ingrained in our head that, okay, well, I'm on this website, I'm searching for this. Do I trust it or not? Like, do I need to verify this? We already feel that way about searching. So it's the same thing with AI. It's only as good as the human who's overseeing it, right? Like it's the same with the Google search. You could say, well, I found this on Google. Well, that doesn't mean it's true. And we all know that, right? But so it's the same thing with AI.

Greg Padley  00:12:20  And it's just vital to keep people in control of decision making and checking and making sure that everything is correct.

Deanna Shimota 00:12:28  Absolutely.

Deanna Shimota 00:12:28  And another factor to think about with AI and why you need that people oversight to it is data privacy and even understanding. You know, what you need to know around data privacy as it pertains to AI, because I think it's a critical component, obviously, as HR tech companies that are building out AI solutions you're no stranger to the fact that there are some ethical things, there's some data privacy things that have to be taken into consideration. And I think as you're using different tools, you need to understand what their data privacy policy is and how that adds an extra layer of complexity in how you're using those tools. Given how that tool may or may not use the data that you input into the system.

Greg Padley  00:13:20  Yeah, I say even with that doesn't even sound right. Like creating content, just writing a blog post or a LinkedIn post or something like that. It's like you need to make sure that your whatever you're doing with AI is in line with your company policies or verse and corporate guidelines or privacy regulations that the company has.

Greg Padley  00:13:39  You want to make sure, first of all, that you're complying with all of that stuff that exists. A lot of companies don't have that yet, but obviously in HR tech space, more of them do because they're more sensitive to that. But a lot of companies don't even have rules yet. So I think what you need to keep in mind. Top of mind, is you never want to put any sensitive information, personal information, proprietary data into a especially a free AI tool, right? Because, I mean, it's just like everything else. If you get something for free, what are you giving away? Right. So you're putting data in there. So if you're putting in proprietary data then your free and your free thing is really not free. It's taking your own data. So I want to be careful not to put anything that's sensitive into a free AI tool. And even with ones that you're paying for, just like LinkedIn recently changed their policy, right. And all of a sudden, everybody has automatically opted in to share their data with LinkedIn and their partners, unnamed partners, whoever they happen to be.

Greg Padley  00:14:40  Right? So basically, whoever they decide to sell your data to, to train AI off of your LinkedIn posts, whatever, be put there. So for the same thing with AI, you always want to go back. Every once in a while. And just make sure that they didn't change the rules on you. Like double check. What are my privacy settings? Still the same and my sharing anything that I don't want to share. So you want to just keep checking that every once in a while, like you're almost put a reminder on your calendar once a month, and you make sure that nobody's changing things on me.

Deanna Shimota 00:15:10  Right? And a lot of the free tools, they're going to automatically share your information to help build the database to help train it. That's how ChatGPT cloud, Gemini, all of these, that's how they work and how they get better and better as they're taking everyone's data. Right. And there's probably some things that you enter in there that you don't mind if that gets shared and trained with the public, but then there's a lot of information that may be more proprietary that you need to be mindful of before you share.

Deanna Shimota 00:15:43  Or like Greg said, you need to go in and check your settings and make sure in that tool that you have it marked that you will not share that data. I think also you need internal guidelines to govern how I interacts with customer data. So even in marketing, a lot of times we are working with customer data as we're building campaigns. So you want to be careful about implementing or inputting anything like that into the system as well, and ensure that any AI driven campaigns are transparent about data use to build trust with your customers. So if you're taking their data and you're inputting it in any way an AI, you want to build that into the disclaimers on on your marketing content so they know this is how we use your data.

Greg Padley  00:16:32  Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, right? It's all about protecting the customer privacy and protecting your proprietary data. It's got to be a priority. So you got to figure out what's your best practices, what's your company policy for privacy and compliance.

Greg Padley  00:16:45  But then just you have to make sure you're safeguarding your brand at the same time, because you don't want to start mixing your messages because you're using high and it's changing up your, you know, the way your company is so perceived.

Greg Padley 00:16:59  Right?

Deanna Shimota 00:16:59  So another thing to think about is avoiding bias in AI driven decision making. So AI models are trained on historical data, and that essentially means that they can unintentionally perpetuate existing biases. So for us as marketers, this can lead to a biased recommendation, customer segmentation or even ad targeting. So it's essential to recognize this risk and take steps to mitigate this. And why don't you talk a little bit about how to avoid the bias and an AI tool? Sure.

Greg Padley  00:17:36  Yeah. I mean, it goes back to what we're talking about with this episode, right? It's like you have to have human oversight. So the human oversight is to obviously regularly review everything that comes out of the eye and make sure that there isn't any bias or any patterns of bias that you can recognize.

Greg Padley  00:17:54  You could also use different data sets or different AI models to double check, or to use different things and reflect some variety in your in your campaigns. I know a lot of people will run their product through two different or three different eyes, and to see how each one changes it, or they'll send it to three different ones, the same prompt, and see what comes out to make sure that there's no bias or anything with that in there. Again, it's always using human judgment to evaluate what comes out of AI, and especially when it comes to your targeting and messaging. So there's no bias in there.

Greg Padley 00:18:31  Yeah.

Deanna Shimota 00:18:31  And I think as a marketer using AI, it's important to build trust by being transparent about when and how AI is being used. For example, customers appreciate knowing whether they're interacting with the chat bot or a real person. and this transparency builds credibility.

Greg Padley  00:18:53  I think it's important to clearly communicate when AI tools are being used in customer service and marketing automation. I know sometimes when you're for me at least, sometimes I get on and there's a chat bot and it's like you're not getting really the responses you want, and you're like, what is? I hope this isn't a real person.

Greg Padley  00:19:11  And then other times you're getting these great responses and you're like, gee, I wonder if this is a real person. But it would be nice to know because, I mean, think about it. That's part of your brand experience, right? Is with this chat bot where this human. So I think it's important that they know we so that they can say, oh okay, well this chat bot isn't performing well for me. Can I talk to a real person now? So sometimes people prefer the automated responses and they don't want to have to communicate with somebody.

Greg Padley 00:19:38  So the thing.

Greg Padley  00:19:39  Is important for them to know what they're who they're talking.

Greg Padley 00:19:42  To.

Deanna Shimota 00:19:44  For sure. And I think transparency in the creative process. Two also builds trust internally. So when your team knows how AI is being used in their workflows, it allows for better collaboration and alignment, and teams can more confidently leverage the AI without feeling displaced and knowing that their creativity is central to the final product. Because I think this is a big one.

Deanna Shimota 00:20:08  I know a year and a half ago, as in a marketing agency here at GrowthMode Marketing, when we first started talking about, let's look at AI, our copywriters and designers on the team, they were a little panicked about this. Like, that will never do as good of a job as I can. And and we had to kind of take a step back and say, okay, let's talk through this. This is not about replacing anybody's job, nor do we think any time in the near future that this is just going to eliminate the need for you and you and you, right? It's more of a how do we use this as a marketing team? These tools to help us become more efficient and to reduce some of the tasks that are really time consuming, but maybe aren't as value added. And so can it help speed up the creativity process? Because that means we can get more done in a week to help move the company forward, right? So you've got to be mindful of that.

Deanna Shimota 00:21:10  If you're a marketing leader and you're looking at AI, how your team members might react to it and where their head might go, and you just want to make sure you position it with them. So there isn't this fear and avoidance of using AI. There's more of this mindset of let's get creative in how we use AI, and let's really test it out and see if we can increase the output of work that we do as a result of this, because you can't get more time back in the day, there's only 24 hours in a day, five days a week. Eight hours of work. You can't really, no matter how much you need more, get more. Right? But if you're trying to move fast and you're trying to get a lot of marketing work done, this may be one way without hiring additional people, that you can keep the same team level of people on the team, but get more output. And I think that's especially important in this economy when budgets are tight and it's not as easy to go out and make additional investments to get more work done.

Greg Padley  00:22:16  Yeah, you can definitely have that. Think of it. We talked about it once. You think about the I as an intern that helps you to get things done, as long as you can give good direction, whether it's doing a task or creating an outline or writing some basic copy for you like it's just another part of the team. So you just have to realize it's really a collaborative sort of a collaborative effort with budgets where they are not necessarily a human, but they can help you get more work done and maybe helped you come up with some new ideas.

Deanna Shimota 00:22:47  Another thing to think about as you're getting your team to embrace AI is making sure that you're avoiding kind of automation bias with generative AI, and that occurs when people over rely on AI generated outputs, assuming that they're always accurate. So I feel like when you get AI and it starts working well, this can potentially lead to complacency and missed opportunities for improvement. So you want to make sure to avoid that automation bias that you're encouraging your team members to always question AI's outputs and verify data before implementing or using whatever outputs you're getting from it, and also always making sure that there's always a human review process in place to catch mistakes, to refine, to edit, to smooth out all of the AI generated content.

Deanna Shimota 00:23:41  Because if you're just taking what it produces, you're probably going to miss something like hallucinations or the wrong tone for your brand style. I mean, there's all kinds of things you need to look at to make sure that.

Greg Padley 00:23:56  It's.

Deanna Shimota 00:23:56  What you need it to be, and that you're always kind of learning what works and what doesn't. With using the AI tools and just getting better and better at using it and making it more efficient.

Greg Padley  00:24:08  Yeah, it's funny because it's you start getting some good results, right? And you're like, oh, this is working great. And then it's easy to let it flip and not spend the extra time to go back and double check it. And because you've been getting good results, but you can't be just like if you had an injury, you still have to double check what they're doing. So it's always when they have a critical mindset and look at it with the work you said for you and I.

Deanna Shimota 00:24:34  Absolutely. So on this episode, we've explored how AI and human teams should work together to create more effective marketing content programs contains all of the above, right? I hope the key takeaway is that a is a tool designed to enhance, not replace, your human marketing expertise.

Deanna Shimota 00:24:53  And by maintaining the right balance of automation and oversight, we think marketers can harness the full potential of AI while ensuring campaigns remain creative, ethical, and customer centric. If you've enjoyed this series, make sure to follow or subscribe to the The Demand Gen Fix and stay updated on future episodes. And if you have any questions or want to share how you're using AI and marketing, we'd love to hear from you.

Jenni Geiser 00:25:21  Thanks for joining us on The Demand Gen fix, a podcast for HR tech marketers brought to you by GrowthMode Marketing. I sure hope you enjoyed it! Don't forget to subscribe for more perspectives on Demand Generation marketing strategies. Plus, give us a like. Tell your friends we'll see you next time.