A.I. Marketing Strategies for Manufacturers Jam Session

Curt Anderson  00:00

Up in the ball there. So okay, so we’re letting some folks in. So hey, happy Thursday to everybody. Happy Friday. Eve man. Look at that. Handsome Devil. Looks like, looks like Bavaro and Lawrence Taylor is, is in the house here, right? Yes, sir.

Speaker 1  00:16

How’s it going? Guys? Hey Johnny, how are you brother?

Curt Anderson  00:21

So okay, we’ve got Melissa boss is in the house. We’ve got Carlene here, and so, uh, Casey’s here. So all right, guys, let’s go ahead and get started. And so I like starting on on on time, and so I’ll be letting people in. And I’m just super excited now, John, did you bring your singing voice today? Like, who can sing like? Lori, are you a singer? Either? Lori, you guys. Are you guys singers? Anybody you know? Melissa Basa, can you guys? Well, guess what? Today, everybody has to have their singing voice. Everybody take yourselves off mute. If you could, please take your uh, Melissa boss, if you want to, if you want to pop on, it’s Damon.

00:58

No way. You don’t want to hear me sing

Curt Anderson  01:02

today. It’s Damon’s birthday today. It’s a what? It’s a big day. So I don’t care how bad your voice is, we’ve got to sing Damon on three. You guys ready? 123,

01:17

birthday to you. Happy birthday.

Damon Pistulka  01:29

Happy birthday on the planet. Happy birthday. Thank you. Thank you.

Curt Anderson  01:32

Happy birthday, dude.

Lori Highby  01:34

We love you brother. I think that’s the first time I sang Happy Birthday on Zoom.

Damon Pistulka  01:40

Everything right? Every first time for everything,

Curt Anderson  01:42

for sure. Thank you. Okay, so, all right, hey, let’s dive in. We got a small crowd. I’ll be letting folks in as we get things going, so I’m going to give intros here. So, um, man, we’ve got a great, great crowd here. So, all right, Lori, hi, b You’re the first one I see. So I’ve got the Lori Lori show today. Not sure how I plan that, but Lori heiby, founder and extraordinaire of CEO of Keystone. Click, just this wonderful marketing agency for manufacturers in a great city of Milwaukee. Lori, how are you? My friend, wonderful.

Lori Highby  02:11

How are you? Oh, my

Curt Anderson  02:13

goodness, I couldn’t be doing any better. Hi. This is great. So you and I, we’ve done many programs together, lots of fun things you teach at universities. You have a great a great manufacturing marketing agency you founded in 2008 so again, strongly encourage you guys connect with Lori on LinkedIn. She’s just a powerhouse. Thank you for joining us here today. I’m going to slide over to my other Lori, so Lori tybon is in the house today. Lori is in Chicago. Lori,

Lori Tybon  02:41

how are you today? I’m doing fantastic. So happy to be here. Oh my goodness, crazy. So

Curt Anderson  02:46

we connected through IMEC. So Melissa is here from IMEC. So our friends at the manufacturing extension partnerships, MEPs and so Lori does an amazing job, wonderful marketer. As a matter of fact, if you guys don’t mind, I’m going to grab so here’s our program. Here’s Lori taiban. Strongly encourage you guys connect with Lori on LinkedIn. You guys, she actually has a little free LinkedIn audit here, right? So if you want to check that out. And then I’ve got my friend, Lori Highby  and then, of course, the birthday boy is here today, so we’ve got Damon follow Damon on LinkedIn. Thank you, Damon. So all right, I’m going to mute that person. Okay, all right, let’s get the party rolling. And let’s start with Lori Tybon, I’m going to come to you first where there you are, Lori, just share a little bit on what’s going on in AI. What are what’s happening the newest, the latest and greatest. What do you have to share with us? Yeah, awesome.

Lori Tybon  03:37

I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen, because I have a couple slides here. So let’s get this going. That should be up. You everybody see that we can Okay, awesome. So just a few things about what some of the business leaders are saying about AI. I always find it interesting to see what key leaders in the industry are actually saying about it. And these are a couple of quotes. One Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, saying, AI will enhance the way humans experience the world, and I think this is very relevant to above and beyond just how we use AI every day in our jobs and to be more productive professionally, but how it touches every single point in our lives. There’s a couple examples to think about. If you have like a nest thermostat in your house, AI can determine and be learned when you leave the house, when you come into the house, what temperatures you like, and handle all those settings for you. I’m a big fan of fitness trackers. I have one on my wrist. It’s a whoop. And it uses AI to be able to determine my resting heart rate, my physical activity levels throughout the day. It tells me what time to go to sleep and what time to wake up, and handles all of that automatically. So when you think about AI’s reach, it is really far beyond just chatgpt and claudin, some of those LLM tools that we think about, it really is touching every part of our life. But then, former CEO of IBM says AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI replace those who don’t. And it really goes in. Hand in hand with the next kind of the next quote from the CEO of Fiverr, who was talking about that easy tasks without tasks that were hard, will soon become easy, and then tasks that were impossible will become hard. And I see that a lot in my job as a marketer, there’s so much more that I’m able to get done some of those tasks that were hard, that would take days and hours and hours and days and weeks to produce. I can produce in a matter of minutes by using AI tools. So those hard tools are now easy, and it’s one of those things that, from the perspective of the marketplace and the business world that we’re going in, is using those tools really does help us become more effective, and we will quickly out place. Those who are not AI will quick. Those who are using AI will advance further and be able to be more productive and get more dumb. So I wanted to also share a little bit about what Sam Altman says about AI, because Sam Altman says a lot about, obviously, there’s a lot of quotes out there. You know, he says, this is the kind of the scary ones that he posts out there, and AI is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, and there will also be classes of jobs that totally go away. AI is also going to change the way a lot of current jobs function, and it’s going to create entirely new jobs. And I touched on a little bit about just how I see AI being used as a marketer, so much more being able to get done. So I’m really hoping that throughout this conversation and this session today, that we’re all able to think about new ways that we can use AI to be more efficient in our jobs and do them differently without any fear of AI and really just embracing it.

Curt Anderson  06:42

Yeah, yeah, excellent. All right, well, let’s keep and then we’ll come back to you in a minute on the train. The dragon is Edward. Okay, so hey, you know, and do me a favor, guys, you know, we’re all connected here. If you’re not connected on LinkedIn, you’re you’re missing out some wonderful people. We got Casey. We’ve got John Casey. I just gave you a shout out yesterday. I was at a webinar at the new one of the New York MEPs. Did a wonderful webinar, and somebody brought up the global spec research project that you and your team at true so I’m going to shoot and so tell Wendy. I put, there’s like 50 people on the webinar. I put your I dropped your research project in there, and it touches on AI. So I’m going to encourage you guys in the chat box. Two things, please drop your LinkedIn profile. Love for everybody here to connect. We’ve got one people that could be friends. So I’ve dropped Lori, Lori and Damon’s LinkedIn and chat box there. Drop yours in there, so we could all connect. Secondly, Casey, I just dropped the state of marketing for engineers research report, which touches on AI. So that’s a great, phenomenal report, if you haven’t caught it. Wendy and I did a webinar last month at Purdue. MEP, so there’s a lot of great information there. So I’m going to slide over. Let’s go back to Lori. Heidi, so Lori, let’s talk a little bit about like you have a great marketing agency working with manufacturers. What’s AI? What are you doing? Latest, greatest? What’s going on in your world? Oh, man, there’s

Lori Highby  08:01

so many different things. There’s, there’s looking at what we’re doing internally, from our workflow processes. There’s things that how we’re leveraging it with our with our clients, and educating them on how to create efficiencies within their organization. You know, it’s really, it’s, it’s so fascinating, and it’s somewhat overwhelming because of how fast it’s moving. But the biggest thing you touch on the word fear. And I always, I hear a lot of fear and reservations around it, but I think the biggest thing is to start small, start with one thing. What is one repetitive tasks that you have, or one roadblock that you’re experiencing and seeing? If there’s a way that a tool or the technology or an LLM of some sort can help create an efficiency instead of trying to do all the things at once. So that that’s a little nugget that I always like to share, but we’ve been using it for ideation. I would say that the writer’s block, like that, that word should be obsolete now, like that, phrase should be gone. No one should ever have writer’s block ever, or any sort of creativity blog, because leveraging these tools for inspiration and ideation has been extremely helpful and created a lot of efficiencies, especially when we’re creating, you know, branding or, you know, messaging marketing plans for our clients, and just throwing in some point data points about the business, and it’s, you know, bringing ideas to the table that we have, but also above and beyond what we’re we have to, I love leveraging the tool for competitive analysis. There’s lots of specifically chat, when I chat, GPT when I talk about that, because that’s probably the one that we use the most right now. You know, a lot of information that can be gathered and streamlined, where we used to take, you know, hours and days to collect this information, and it’s kind of just being aggregated all in one slump. And I know this is kind of a question you may ask in a little bit here, but creating a custom GPT to create some of that efficiency, where it just kind of does all. Homework for you on a snap of the fingers is quite, quite fascinating, but I will say that you still need to do your due diligence and double check and fact check the information because it is not 100% accurate.

Curt Anderson  10:15

Yeah, great point. So let’s do this. If you guys could do me a favor, I would love in the chat box, if you just, you know, maybe just share like, where are you with AI, do you feel like, Are you pretty Are you newbie? Do you feel like you’re pretty experienced? I know Casey, you guys are crushing that at true John, love to hear what you guys are doing with everything that you have going on at a test. Where’s my I usually have my at some mug right next to me. John, I don’t have it right here, but my, I bring it to the gym every day with me. So it just share AI junkie using it daily. What else you guys got? Like, Lisa, where you at with it? If you guys want to just drop a note, give us an idea. Because what we want to do is we want to give you as much value today. So like, if you’re at this level, we don’t want to be down here. We would love for you to get some tips and strategies that you’re walking away with. Lori’s an AI hype girl. So any other anybody else want to Laura Carlene, Melissa boss, if you guys want to drop a note in the chat, just let us know, like, where you’re at. Number one. Number two, is there anything that? And again, we have a small group any questions that you guys have. Man, we’d love to dive into that. So. Damon, what? What do you want to share? As far as, like, where I know, like, Dude, you’re like, a AI, even being a birthday boy, you’re an AI junkie. Where are you at with AI? Well,

Damon Pistulka  11:23

I like Lori. I agree 100% with what both Laurie said about this. And the thing that’s really amazed me is the progress. And I’m not a Claude user. I play with Gemini once a while, mainly chatGPT because I started building custom gpts, and I’ll say eight months ago, or something like, as soon as they started coming out and and really been geeking out over that and and how much you can, you can really affect the results and the responses from your chatGPT. But, man, the advent of deep research with chatGPT, and I’m sure you guys will talk about more, is incredible. What you can do with two, a two, simple, two paragraph prompt to ask, it goes out for 10 or 15 minutes and does a whole bunch of research and comes back with a a report that would take you, I don’t know if you could do, you know, just take a good analyst a lot of time to put it together. And that’s really interesting. And the other thing that’s interesting to me, just pushing the envelope, is how it can. It can look at things differently than we can as humans, right? It can take complex data sets and reason through them. And I think John, like you guys, in scheduling or something like that, there’s just an incredible opportunity, because we can’t see in the multiverse of all these different possibilities and how they come together. And I’ve actually got an internal experiment that I’m doing now that is going to be just just seeing what, aggregating knowledge together, data together, based on video, because we’ve done so many videos, how that can create a like a super custom GPT that knows you so well that it’s scary, because then, when they come out with the next phases of this and it can start to reason and do some other things for you, I’m really excited about how we can leverage our data, that We’ve got to really create things that that do help execute things. Love it. So, alright, so let’s

Curt Anderson  13:25

slide over here. So it seems like everybody’s pretty well versed. So I say we’re, you know, you know, I don’t anybody claims to be an AI expert. I’m like, Man, really like, how can you be an AI expert when it just came out? Right? So I think, but, you know, we have a passion and trying to stay ahead of the Curt. Lori taiban, let’s go back to your presentation. You were talking about how to train your AI. Let’s dive into that. Yeah,

Lori Tybon  13:46

let me get let’s kind of move that over, if I can see the Share button on my screen. All right, yeah. So, okay, so how to train dragons. This is, tell me you have kids without telling me you got kids here, right? So if anybody saw that movie, as soon as you saw how to train your AI thought of that. So a couple of different updates recently with this is chat with chatGPT and open AI is that now offers has, the addition of doing deep research, that capability is added, as what Damon touched on. So when you if you haven’t, if you haven’t seen that, when you log into chatGPT and go into your screen, use now I should, hopefully you’re seeing my chat GPT now, I has this option for deep research. So if you need to do something that’s competitive research for your product, you want to, for example, I’ll give you an example of my day job. Christian, here, we’re looking at launching some additional product features and working on our product roadmap. Well, I was able to go out and ask chat GPT to do deep research on other competitive products, looking at their feature about their feature benefits and feature set, and do an analysis compared to our products, and then also do a research on the market share and the market opportunity. And it delivered back within about 15 minutes, a lot of information that then I you. Shaved off hours and hours and hours of research myself by being able to do that. So yeah, Deep. Deep research is the first thing. The second thing I want to mention is that now it allows you to edit in a canvas in the chat, so if you haven’t used that feature yet, so when it gives you the chat back, you used to have to just type in a whole new prompt. Now you can go into that message that chat, and you can edit it like a canvas, so you can edit what chat GPT gave you back, and then it’ll take that and refine it from there, so it makes it much more interactive and user friendly. And also added the ability to reference chat history. So that’s something that’s new. You used to have to go back and remind it things, but now it can remember, and it can also recall from other chats that you’ve used. So if I just go back to mine for a quick second, you can see I have a whole bunch of different, I mean, all the way down the side. I’ve got a whole bunch of different chats. So I could go back to February or something, and I can ask it something that I have done months ago, and it will remember it and also recall it. So that’s very helpful. So Damon Curt, do you want me to go into some more specific of these training tips here right now?

Curt Anderson  16:14

Yeah, why don’t you knock down a couple of training tips, and then we’ll, we’ll grab, we’ll grab Lori hibe to chime in. Okay,

Lori Tybon  16:20

cool. So the first one is to be specific. When requesting something in chat, sometimes people go in and just say, like, write me an email. And if you, for example, sort of asking for a LinkedIn post, you’re very casual saying, write a casual, insightful LinkedIn post for B2B marketers about why consistency beats trends. Keep it under 200 words and use my tone, warm, smart and a little bitty. So again, you want to be very specific with what you wanted to do, especially when it comes to the output, because if you if I specify 200 words, that’s what it’s going to give me, give or take, versus giving me 10 words or a dissertation, right? So you want to be specific on that, also providing context. So you want to give chatGPT or whatever LLM you’re using, I use chatGPT. You want to give enough background information to understand the situation, the nuances of your request. I type to chatGPT like I speak. It is very casual. It’s not very eloquent. I don’t think I just type in my random bus, and sometimes it’s a little bit of a word salad that I’m typing in there, but it gets enough information and background information to let it know what I’m trying to do. So often I’ll say I am trying to do X, Y, Z, and I’ll go into a lot of details about it. So I say that and share that, because I don’t want anybody to be fearful. You have to be super eloquent or super technical in your prompting, you can just speak like you do, and it will, because it’s the way that the model works. It’ll produce the results for you. And then the third one I’ll mention right here is use action verbs, such as research, analyze, create, suggest, summarize, compare, because those action verbs are going to tell chatGPT what to do, and it’s going to give you different results based on those action verbs. So if you just imagine, you’re going to get a very different result back if you’re asking it to research something or analyze and compare something versus summarize something. So always think about those action verbs and your prompts as well, wondering if maybe, yeah, Laurie wants to jump in, or

Lori Highby  18:26

anybody, yeah,

Curt Anderson  18:29

great tips. I love all that. So, you know, a couple of takeaways right there. And, you know, write a LinkedIn post, write a, you know, Facebook, like, get specific, be, you know, research this, analyze this. Those are phenomenal tips. Lori hyby, and by the way, just so everybody knows fierce hockey skater, right hockey player, right here. So any hockey players out there connect with Lori. Lori Highby, what do you want to as far as like helping to train your AI? What do you want to

Lori Highby  18:55

add? Yeah, these are all great. A couple things I’ll share. And you kind of touched on this a little bit. Lori, but the quality of the information in equals the quality of the information out. I mean, just no different than, you know, old school CRM systems and whatnot. So you the more information, the more input you’re providing. As far as what the executable is, the better that output is going to be. And using some of those, you know, action words is going to help for that, I like to remember the acronym race when building prompts, which is the role that it’s supposed to play, the action you want it to do, the context, which is like the the input, the the data points, and then the executable. So for example, the example I always like to share is like, Oh, you stayed at an Airbnb and had a really bad experience. Look at all the things that went wrong. Is the action, the context is the list of all the things that were bad about it. And the executable would be like write a review for that. So just remembering that simple acronym of race helps you build kind of that structure and that foundation for a really good quality prompt. The other thing that I really like to do. You, and I shared this with my team internally, is I tell chat to ask me additional questions in order to create the best output. So I say, This is what I want to do. What additional information do you have? Do you need from me in order to create the best output at the end of the day? And that has been a game changer with regards to the quality of the results that we’re getting from from leveraging chat. The other thing that I did is I created a custom GPT to help me write a quality prompt. So I say, this is, this is what I’m trying to do, and I have it right the quality of the prompt on a scale of one to 10, and it continues to ask me questions and refines the prompt that I’m trying to ultimately create to have the best output. And it continues it’s structured in a way that if it rates it anything below an eight, it’ll continue to ask me questions in order to craft the best prompt possible.

Curt Anderson  21:01

Okay, that was a drop the mic right there.

Damon Pistulka  21:04

I’m right so fast. I can’t even, yeah, let’s,

Curt Anderson  21:07

let’s pause for a minute. All right, let’s take a moment of silence, right? Like, that was, that was a lot to digest right there. So I do, I’m going to put it out there. You guys are comfortable when we say custom GPT is everybody like, you know, does anybody want us to go deeper? Or you’re like, No, we’re way past that. Because, like, we could touch on that a little bit more. But Lori, I’m going to recap. So you said race. I’ve got, if I wrote this down fast enough, I need my AI to cover it right, I’m telling you. So I’ve got role action context and executable. Was that?

Lori Highby  21:37

Yep. Was that right? That’s correct, yep. So, all right, that’s a great

Curt Anderson  21:40

tagline. And then just talk, walk us through again. You flew through that pretty quick. The question, but like, how you’re actually having a conversation with chat? And it’s almost like chat, what am I not asking you to do? Type of thing? Is that what I’m hearing or like,

Lori Highby  21:54

yeah, so I’ll share with you. So I’m going to do a presentation a little bit later today, so I’ll just share kind of what I I’ll just share my what I use it for this morning. Let me share my screen so I call my my gpts. Laura Cole, so as I’m just laughing at myself here, thank you for putting up with me. But basically I said, So I created one called for presentation. So basically I’ve trained the custom GPT and my presentation style, and I’m happy to walk through kind of how I built that in a little bit. But basically I whenever I’m creating a presentation, I use this specific GPT, right? So I said, Help me craft a presentation for a 10 Minute Webinar. This is the topic. And then what other questions do you need from me in order to out to put the best presentation together, right? So then I said, great, and it’s 10 minutes, you know, it’s for business owners. And here’s a bunch of questions that it asked me, and I just simply answered the questions quickly, and then it built out the whole outline for my presentation based on, you know, how I want to move forward. So this has saved me a significant amount of time, because I do a lot of presenting, and, you know, a bulk of the presenting is actually building the deck. So, yeah, I just found that this is something, again, look at one thing that you do often that takes a lot of time and figure out a way to leverage the technology to create efficiencies in it,

Curt Anderson  23:32

double drop the mic so that any questions, any thoughts, comments I did, was that good or what? So Lori, let me. Let me. I’m just, I’m, I’m gonna play a little dumb devil, devil’s advocate. Is there anything that you’re as you’re going through, like, say, on presentation? I’m digging that, because we do a lot of presentations. Is there anything that you found that, like, AI, like, not so helpful, or, like, I needed, I’m just going to do this on my own. Is that, I don’t know if that’s a goofy question, but is there anything that you’re finding AI is not helping you with anything or with, yeah, the

Lori Highby  24:00

one thing, and I know there’s ways to do this, I just haven’t taken it to the next level yet, is actually building the presentation for me. You know, I’m very particular about the branding and the look of the slides and everything, so right now I’m personally doing that, but I know that that functionality does exist. I just haven’t taken it to that stuff yet. Yeah, yeah, you’re

Curt Anderson  24:18

at a whole different level than I’m like, pink pen with my presentations. They look like Frankenstein. They’re a mess. So, you know, I guess I haven’t gotten there. But all right, John says, so did you just copy and paste and format the slides off the output? Any editing or tweaks?

Lori Highby  24:32

I definitely, yeah, I always edit and tweak, but I just find that it’s, it’s a lot more efficient, and this is just a quick little 10 minute thing. When I do deeper ones, I obviously give it a lot more context about who the audience is, how many people are going to be there. The key points that I want to make sure are addressed, but I’ll leverage it for so the example here is, I’m talking about call to action. So I’m further on, I’m like, what are some great call to action examples that are out there that I should consider including in the deck and. Yeah, and then, you know, I’m putting my own spin on it, in my own voice, but I just found it’s really that bulk of like, what is the information I want to share and what is the proper flow for this and chat has been really helpful to taking, you know, an hour or two off of my plate to build out the outline. Absolutely

Curt Anderson  25:21

love it. So Damon, any thoughts that you want to piggyback off of that? I

Damon Pistulka  25:26

just think this is really, I mean, when you look at it and going, you said blank page certain A while back, and this is really how it’s how it just cuts right through that. Because, as you said, you got to edit it. You have to edit it all. I mean, I’ve not been able to get anything out of it that you don’t certain amount. But just to go from blank page to what you showed in the matter of five minutes, it could take you hours, you know, and that’s the thing that’s so cool about it. And then if you don’t like it, you can keep iterating, have it iterate for you. If it doesn’t have the right tone, if it’s not, you know, dressing the audience the way you want doesn’t have the right call to action, or the call to action sounds too harsh, or not, not strong enough, or whatever you want to do. It’s so cool how you can just keep iterating with it. Totally love it. Yeah?

Curt Anderson  26:13

Awesome. So Lori Tyne, why don’t we pick back up on How To Train Your Dragon, AKA your AI, why don’t we slide back there.

Lori Tybon  26:21

All right, yeah. So one of the things I found helpful is to break it into small steps as well. So you can even prompt AI to ask you what steps you would need to work through for whatever project you’re working on, and it will produce results like what Lori had showed and tell you what the steps are that I will ask it to do each step at a time, and that way, it allows me to be able to go back and iterate each of those and re prompt it, go into the canvas, do some edits, make sure it’s really delivering the results that I’m looking for. So if you think about that quote that I put earlier on, that it’s how humans will use AI, right? So the content isn’t just AI regurgitating something out from a single prompt. It’s me as the human, and my 20 plus years of experience going back in and re prompting it and crafting it and directing it the way that I wanted to produce the end result. So bringing in the small steps helps defining the role the voice or the audience or point of view. So you can tell it to act like a viral content creator, or you can ask it to write in the from the perspective and point of view of someone who’s Gen Z, totally different generation than me. So it produces very different results that way. And then positive instructions are very helpful. So you focus on asking it to do what you want it to do versus what you don’t want it to do. And that’s one of the limitations that I have personally found with some of these AI tools, is that if you tell it not to do something, it doesn’t understand that as well. It sees the words that you’re using, and sometimes you’ll end up getting what you wanted to not use. So funny story, I recently signed up for daily look, which is like a wardrobe styling thing. It’s like the Stitch Fix, if you will. If you’ve ever heard of any of those, but they use AI to create your style. So I had gone in there and I had asked it, no black. I don’t like to wear black. So I said, No, black. I don’t wear black. I must have said, no black three times in it, I got three boxes and they were all black clothes. Well, clearly their AI was just picking up on the fact that I used the word black three times in my profile. So it gave me that. So there are some limitations. So I always tried to say, Use positive instructions of what you want it to do versus what you don’t want it to do. That tip also works with kids. And then experiment and iterate. You can prompt multiple times and keep iterating to produce the best results. And I think that’s something that where a lot of people will stop, they’ll put one prompt in there, they’ll get a result back and they don’t like and then go, oh, AI, is not working for me. It’s not giving me the results I need. You do have to add that human part of it, that human insight, and keep prompting it into the direction you want it to go in. And then Lori, the other Lori, my friend Lori over there, talked about this too, using these meta prompts, or reflective prompting, which is super helpful. It’s letting AI help you, help it. So you asking, what else do I need to prompt you to produce the result I want? What else do you need for me to improve this? What key info is missing from my concept? So there’s things that you can do. I’m not very technically inclined when it comes to fixing things around my house, but I’ve actually used AI and chat GPT to say this appliance in my home is broken, and I put the model number and the make and model number in it and briefly described what wasn’t working about it. And then what else do you need to know in order to help me fix this product? And I’ve used chatGPT to help me want. Through replacing replacing a part in an appliance and get it back working. So it’s really kind of cool. You just ask it what you needed to do, like I wouldn’t have been able to do that myself. Otherwise,

Curt Anderson  30:12

awesome. So Hey, John, our dear friend John baglino asked a great question, and so Lori we can so I love this question. Have you all seen success by using it to update marketing message by persona C, suite versus it versus end user? Lori, type on, since you’re since you’re starting then. Lori, Highby, I’ll slide over to you. Lori, how would you answer John on that question? Oh, absolutely.

Lori Highby  30:36

100% Yeah. I mean, there’s, I actually know an agency, a marketing agency, that built a custom LLM, and they trained it on behalf of their one of their clients, that the CEO all of their messaging, all of their articles, letters, presentations, so that the team can help craft all the messaging and just take some weight off of the CEO shoulders. And it’s, it’s probably gotten about 85% accuracy as far as voice. So it just saved the CEO a ton of time. And, you know, take something off their plate so the team can help craft the messaging for for whatnot. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  31:18

yeah. Lori Ty, what do you think? Yeah, absolutely.

Lori Tybon  31:22

So a lot of I’ll use example for Christian Technologies, a lot of our client, our ICPs, our process engineers and engineers, so a lot of our messaging is direct, is written for them. But we also know that as part of the sales cycle, there’s a lot of other key state the sales process. There’s a lot of other key stakeholders, particularly those that are in operations and finance. So I went into chatGPT, and I was able to feed it back in and say, Okay, now take my product and my ICP and write me messaging specific to those who are making financial decisions and those who are coming in and key stakeholders and the sales process from an operations perspective. And then it gave me, and I’m actually looking at it here, it gave me like all these different pain points for what the finance individuals are feeling and what operations teams are facing. So what it’s done is it’s helped us in our sales process to then be able to also speak the language of the other key stakeholders when we’re presenting and helping work with clients.

Curt Anderson  32:28

Absolutely love it. So alright, so shamelessly I’m going to show i So, John, since you mentioned that, I have a fun little example. I’m going to show you guys real quick, and then Lori, Heidi, I’m going to be coming back to you. So this, we have this little cheat sheet that we use with every single one of our clients. We call it the digital game plan. And plan. And so this was a client, any any baseball fans out there? Lori hybe brewers, like in I know Chicago, we got cubs White Sox. Apparently the Pope is a White Sox fan. I can’t believe that word. So alright, if you’re a baseball fan, what we’d love to do is like we bucket our clients and buy bases in a baseball diamond. So what this client did is she created, like, this was her single, you know, this person that’s going to buy periodically. Then she created, like, this was her double, and she’s a direct to consumer brand. And then this was her triple. This is like, you know, she’s a tea manufacturer. This is Greg the OG premium tea drinker. And then this was what we call, like, our home runs. So like, everybody has like, Oh, this is my single, my double, my triple, my home run. And so then what the client does is, everything is based around, like, hey, what keywords or like, what questions is my single asking? What’s my double? So, like, I have a powder coater in Chicago. Like, he texts me, but like, dude, I’m going after my triple. He’s a like, so he’s all fired up, like being laser focused by basis which customer and or what persona, and because we’ve used AI to kind of create those personas now they know, like, their keyword strategy, what questions those folks are asking? What content should we put out? What social are they on? So we’re having a really fun time. Lori, hybe, what are your thoughts? Or any more, any any more additional comments to those? Oh

Lori Highby  34:02

yeah, absolutely. So I haven’t done this, but I heard someone, and I’m intrigued by by it. So first off, we use Fathom to record all of our calls. I don’t know if anyone’s using any tools like that does a fantastic job with the transcripts. But what I’ve heard, and I’m I haven’t again, done this yet, but some folks have uploaded, you know that, and built the personas and saying, This is the client, get to know them and understand them, so that next time I have to, you know, have a tough conversation with them, or draft an email like the the AI is going to help you speak in a language to them that’s going to ultimately resonate with them the best.

Damon Pistulka  34:40

Yeah, and I think that the example that you brought up before about the CEO, one of the things that we’ve used is do CEO interviews about the origin story of the company, their values, the mission of the company, and that their personal values get more about them, and do that with a lot of stakeholders in the company, and pretty soon you’ve built a curt. Custom GPT using those transcripts that really understands the company and the feel of the company more than than it would without it, and it makes a huge difference in the responses and that the I just think, if you have more of that type of content to feed it, one of our challenges is, how do we get enough content to really maximize the utilization of the tool, because the more you feed it about that kind of stuff, the more as a marketer, you can then, as Laurie Tai said, you know, focus it in on the multiple people in the buying process. You can focus it in on on a different segment in the market. It just makes it so much easier.

Curt Anderson  35:46

All right, so let’s, let’s go here. I have a burning question. All right, any questions again? Drop them in the chat. Love the hear what anybody has to say. Any anything. Uh, Lori dropped her prompt into the chat box. So if you didn’t see that, please copy and paste that. Save that. So, we I was at the industrial marketing Summit. My dear friend Casey, her wonderful team at true marketing, and Joe Sullivan at gorilla 76 they put on a wonderful program. If you guys haven’t I got to see Lisa. Lisa, where are you? Lisa, you’re here somewhere, right. There she is. She’s still here. Lisa Buchanan, so she was actually there. So I got to meet Lisa in person there today this year. And so a lot of folks were talking about like, SEO. Is SEO dead? What’s going on with SEO? Do we need keywords anymore? Lori Heidi, I want to start with you. Do you have an opinion like, what is what’s the future? What’s the present, and what’s the future of SEO from your perspective? Great

Lori Highby  36:39

question, and this is something we’re spending a lot of time on right now. So the big message I’m communicating is that the customer journey is changing, and it’s really changing on the front end, not necessarily the back end. The front end is people are using, you know, the the AI tools to go for their problem solving needs, right? And that’s been the whole core around SEO. What is the problem that someone has, and how do we, you know, prove that we’re the right solution to solve that problem? So SEO is changing. Google Analytics is proof that the site visits and whatnot has dropped across the board. I mean, we see this for a lot of our clients, because, you know, Google has their own AI answer that’s showing up right now they, you know, they’re, they’re on the AI train as well, just like everyone else is. So what’s important is understanding that that conversation that’s happening in AI you can still show up as a result. I mean, I was just using, I use base, I use chat, GPT now as my search engine, pretty much. And I know this is still early adopter stage, but the trend is going to continue upwards. So I was trying to find some new cold gear to wear from my hockey activities, and just figuring out what are my options for that. And then chat actually said, Would you like to meet a rec you send you some links for some product recommendations. So I was just blown away that that experience happened, and that really kind of started making me think about how this is impacting all of our clients, you know, in the world, and the whole customer journey. So we’re actually in the final stages of building out an AI optimization audit that will is looking at Claude and perplexity and and chat GPT, and figuring out and analyzing how you’re showing up in alignment to your competition for the phrases and the messaging that your ideal customer is going to be entering into. These tools. So 100% important to take a look at the positive, I would say is that a lot of the tactics are very similar to kind of historical SEO when it comes to quality, value add, education is the type of content that’s going to show up. And I would really reinforce, and this kind of is, is somewhat of a double edged sword, but having that unique position is going to be a lot better than you know, doing your typical FAQ content that is the same that everyone else is publishing, because then you’re not differentiating yourself. So it’s having that human content is still going to be really important to show up in AI, which I think is ironic.

Curt Anderson  39:21

So let me put this out to the panel right there. Okay, so when you think about with what you just said, right there? Lori, phenomenal answer. So think about, you know, how many of us, either agencies or been involved like you? I think many of you been on our live show. John, you’ve been on. Lori, you’ve been on. Laurie, you’ve been on. Casey’s been on. So you know, live streaming, podcasting like uh, Damon was talking about origin story. So I’m going to put it out to any who, whoever wants to grab that. Like, how important is it to maybe do some of these alternative things videos, who wants to grab that first? Lori Lori Damon. Lori Lori tybon, has her mouth open. Lori tybon, you grab it?

Lori Tybon  39:59

Yeah, sure. I. You know, I think that it’s, you know, what’s interesting is that there are a so there AI is enabling contents like never before, and it’s definitely impacting SEO. There’s a lot of people can go on and make an ebook now in like 10 minutes, you know, by a couple of props. Do I want to read an ebook that somebody put out in like, 10 minutes and didn’t put any didn’t do any iterations to it, didn’t put any of the original thought behind it, not really, right? So I think part of the the whole thing is making sure that we’re using the tools it to help us get to things faster, and especially with that ideation process and the research process that can make a direct line and a shortcut to get us there, but there still has to be the human piece behind it. And having said that, because there’s so much content out that’s out there, and buyers, especially in B to B buyers, are different these days. Like they’re they’re doing research, they’re looking at things before necessarily picking up a phone and calling somebody. And I’m old school, like, I like to pick up a phone and call and talk to a real person. I mean, that’s even hard to do these days, because you got the chat bots and got the AI agents, and you got all this other stuff out there. So having a lot of content out there, having a lot of content in different formats is definitely important, doing video, doing blogs, doing articles, posting on the social channels, the more multimedia approach that you can have, the better, especially with AI and like Lori, I also use chat GPT as my search engine now. So for the most part, I generally go into chat GPT and do all my questioning and all my searching in there, depending upon what it is, I’ll sometimes also go to Google. I do a lot of it in chat GPT, and I think that one of the things that I’ve noticed is that chatGPT seems to pull more recent and relevant data, more so than the sponsored and the sponsored and the ads that come up, and the SEO keyword, rich keyword stuffed articles, it seems to pull up more better direct references in my my experience has been using chatGPT. So anyways, answer to the question, yeah, I definitely believe that having a multimedia approach and having different media formats out there is going to be better for an SEO perspective.

Curt Anderson  42:25

Excellent. Thank you. Lori taiban, birthday boy, what do you think? Well,

Damon Pistulka  42:30

I just think we need to be realistic, and we have multiple buyers of one multiple to look at things different ways, people ingesting our content. Right? YouTube is so popular now, if you’re not, if you’re not turning at least some of your content or starting it out as video, I think you’re missing out because it is just so crazy that, you know, as as as the people that were 20, you know, 10 years ago, they’re now 30, they’re in decision making positions in business. They are. They’re controlling a lot of money. I mean, I look at my children that are just going into that age, YouTube is everything. YouTube is everything, I mean, and you look at people my age, we still watch the damn nightly news, right? And that doesn’t happen anymore. And so we really have to think about that as as in manufacturing, especially because it’s going, it’s, it’s going away from that, and hiring reps just doesn’t do it.

Curt Anderson  43:28

So, alright, so a couple things I want Lori hybe, you know? So we do a lot of training with clients, and you know, a lot of them, I’m a Gen Xer. They’re a lot of Gen Xers baby boomers. Like, we’re still explaining how a Google page works like, they don’t know that, like, I’ll say organic, and they’re like, I don’t know what you mean by that, like, sponsor, you know. So the thing is, like, what are, are we still, you know, like, for those folks that are so laggards on Google, let alone getting on on, you know, what does that do for us? What does that do? And I know you do a lot of paid ads. Lori Tybon just mentioned paid ads. How do we deal with manufacturers that are these Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, maybe these laggards? A is my question. Then B, I’m going to slide in like, what’s your approach with paid Are you changing your paid strategy with your clients? How’s that? I’m throwing two at you.

Lori Highby  44:14

Yeah, no. I mean, education is the most important thing, and I’ve been speaking a lot about AI right now, and that’s always been my approach, anyways, to everything we do. Because, you know, in digital marketing, everyone thinks it’s voodoo black magic on how it works. So it’s all about education and demonstrating, you know, and just showing people how it works, and by pulling up the actual, you know, LLM and walking him through an example, because if I just talk about it, it’s doesn’t hit his home as effectively as actually showing them that this is happening, the world is changing. But there’s still a lot of reservation in that, and that’s, I think, a constant struggle. It’s been a struggle to show people how Google works for the last 20 years. So. Um, you know, there’s a lot of, a lot of folks in the manufacturing space that, you know, it’s, it’s the good old boys club, it’s walking in and it’s shaking hands and and that that world is changing significantly. So it’s just, you know, pushing that message out there and being an advocate for as much as possible. That’s, that’s all I gotta say about that one. So with the paid ads game that God, that world has changed a lot too. I mean the word, the way that you can, you know target and adjust the messaging to get in front of the right person at the right time is just so insanely awesome and scary at the same time. And someone asked me on a podcast recently. What I think, you know, our ads going to start to show up on these AI platforms, and I very much believe so, because, I mean, everyone’s here to make money, and advertising is the easiest way to make money. You look at, you know what happened to Google? You know, when Google first came out, and I was doing SEO in the super early 2000s I was doing SEO for 10 different search engines at one time, right? And right now, I think that’s the same kind of ball field we have right now. Is we have a bunch of different platforms that are out there, and eventually one’s going to rise to the top right. Same thing, that’s what Google did. And then when Google rose to the top, they said, we’ve got the market share. Let’s really maximize this and and now you can spend money with Google a gazillion different ways. So I imagine that that’s going to be what happens in the future, but I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, as far as the way we do ads. I mean, I think we’ve leveraged, from a research perspective, a little bit, you know, the messaging, you know, the positioning the audience, and we’ve done a little bit with that. We haven’t necessarily loved kind of the AI built into the ad systems right now, because I know, like, Google’s really pushing that, but we find, you know, they’re, it’s, they’re in a very trial and error stage at this moment, so it’s still very manual as far as how we’re managing that. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  47:03

and I failed to mention you by chain. I mentioned podcasting, live streaming. You have a wonderful podcast. What’s the name of your broadcast? By the

Lori Highby  47:12

Yeah, broadcast for manufacturers. Myself and two broads talk broadly about manufacturing. That’s right, so

Curt Anderson  47:19

check it out. Connect with Lori on on LinkedIn. She had her and Chris Harrington and Aaron Courtney have a wonderful podcast, the broad b, r, O, A, D and capital letters broadcast for manufacturers. It’s a wonderful program. Lori Ty bond your thoughts as far as like, where we’re going future, SEO, pay like, anything that you want to we’re going to start winding things down. How do you want to tie up anything in a bow here, from your perspective? Yeah,

Lori Tybon  47:44

you know, with AI being built into the Google paid ads, is that is game that is changing things a bit, and it’s be to be the world and manufacturing is a lot different than buying, you know, lip gloss or makeup or, you know, just anything a consumer product. I’ve the the ability to be able to so what Google’s doing with their paid ads is using AI, and they’re taking your keywords, and they’re finding whatever gets the most amount of clicks, and they’re just trying to really maximize, I’m overly simplifying it, but they’re trying to maximize the amount of clicks, right? Because it’s pay per click. So you know, if you’re selling microwave generators for industrial use. And every time somebody clicks microwave, you don’t want to, you don’t want to be paying for that, because a lot of people are out there shopping for their home micro to fix their home microwave. And that’s just, you know, one example when that’s where that Google AI is being used, and it’s trying to, you know, Google wants you to let them plan where your ad is being shown into what customer audience and what segment is being shown. And I think that’s an example of where the human experience and where human oversight is really important, important, especially in manufacturing and B2B right now, because if you’re paying for an ad, you want to make sure it’s being shown, shown to your audience, your target audience, and not somebody else. So, yeah, I think that it has a way to come yet from Google Ads perspective. But you also mentioned, you know, when we talked about, just to wrap up on the multimedia and being in different places, you know, B2B buyers and their their the journey is very different these days. And they’re shopping over on YouTube. They’re putting things into Google search, they’re putting things into chatGPT. They’re looking on LinkedIn, you know, they’re looking in the industry publications. You do have to be in all places, it seems like, and have this omni channel approach with your market. And I do think that there’s brings us back to the use case for AI is that we can repurpose content a lot quicker. We can create content, repurpose content, make it very specific for the channel, make it very specific for the media. And by using AI, we can do it a lot faster. So it’s a great use case for that.

Curt Anderson  49:59

Love it. Dave. In your your thoughts as we start winding down?

Damon Pistulka  50:03

Well, we haven’t talked about it, and I’m not going to bring up a big subject, but if you haven’t already, and if you got chatGBT, you should install it on your phone and talk to it. I’m telling you it is. It is a game. It create. It keeps the text too, so you can go back and see your conversations. But you know, it really is. It’s it’s weird, and it’s cool, because when you’re just ideating, and you’re just talking into it, and it’s asking more questions, and you get that, it also has helped me to prompt better, because I know by it’s asking me questions, what I need to keep, keep doing. But, you know, I really see as we go forward, the more that talk, talking directly to an AI agent can get you results. I wonder what that’s going to do for search. I wonder what that’s going to do for the kind of things we we do. I mean, even the the Google Assistant, how Google Assistant will shoot links to your phone, and those kind of things you can see, it’s just going to be interesting how this progresses forward, and not to mention the AI agents that actually can do stuff for us. It’s just those, those two things are just going to be crazy as we as we move forward.

Curt Anderson  51:13

So all right, some great takeaways today, right? So, uh, Damon, great, great tip there. Add it to your phone, you know, especially for guys like me that don’t have many friends. Like now, I got a new friend that I can talk to on my you know, like AI can my new buddy, right? So, yeah, you know. Alright. So Lori, hi. B wants to take us home. Tie things up in a bow. Any parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share from your perspective.

Lori Highby  51:38

The biggest thing that I do with every single task my plate is, I start with, how can AI help me with this?

Curt Anderson  51:46

Yeah, do you see Shopify is not hiring right now without forcing their managers to say that you’ve exhausted every option with AI, then we’ll consider hiring that’s that’s pretty, pretty profound. So all right. Couple minutes. John buglino, any thoughts, comments, questions, anything that you want to share, anything, anything from your perspective, dude,

John Buglino  52:07

this is awesome, and I do appreciate the insights. It’s moving so quick. I was on the marketing AI Institute with Paul roaster yesterday, that event. I don’t know if you guys were on it, but he was said, by the time we’re done with this conversation, he goes, it’s outdated, right? It’s just it’s moving so quick. And I was at the event last week, Damon, you mentioned, you know, about supply chains or remanufacturing. Like, there was couple, like, Google was there doing their agentic AI and showing, like, how they’re, you know, programming to recognize boxes. And Uber freight had an AI agent that was negotiating how much a driver was going to get in real time. Like, you know, I’m five miles out. Like, oh, I need a $1,200 and it’s like, no, how about 1100 I’m like, negotiating. So it was pretty cool to see that, but, but Yeah, honestly, it’s, it’s moving very quickly. And I think it’s, it’s also now that I’m in, like, Product Marketing, that’s all I’m asking about the persona, right? Because it’s one of those things where, like, oh, I mean, what it what do I say? I’m like, Well, I’m gonna get you an answer really quickly. So that’s always asked about the success, like, is it actually working? And we’re testing that out now and then. Right before this, I was on what our agency asked him. I said, What do we need to plan for? I was like, what? Was like, we’re having our best months, best months ever on the website, but now that traffic is going to change. Now what do we do? And really, well, we don’t know. I’m like, okay, at least we don’t know, right? At least we didn’t miss anything. But no, it’s good. It’s a daily thing. It’s reengaged me in marketing, which is fantastic. I definitely appreciate your insights, guys, and the prompts and the examples. And I have a lot of work

53:47

to do. I

Curt Anderson  53:48

know it’s daunting, you know, but just, just gotta embrace it. Casey, anything that you want to add from true perspective, anything that we didn’t cover, or anything, any questions on your end. No great

Kasey Tyring  54:00

job, you guys. I was laughing to myself, and you said you don’t use AI in the Google ads space. It’s always right on that side. And you’re like, okay, you don’t know what you’re talking about yet. Continue with our traditional way of doing things. So it’s not quite here there yet. But one thing I noticed, I haven’t tried it out or tested it, but apparently chatGPT does have, like, some shopping links now, so that’ll be interesting to see how that evolves, too. Yep,

Curt Anderson  54:27

excellent. So I so Casey, hope I didn’t see if you didn’t, please drop your LinkedIn and profile. Love for everybody to connect with. Casey. Laura Carlene, Melissa Basa, any questions, thoughts, comments that you guys have as we’re closing out, not to put you on the spot, but feel free to come off of mute if you have any questions. And Carlene, anything on your end. Laura, anything on your end. And if not, okay, let’s wind out, should we? Should we sing again now? We won’t, we won’t sing again. So Damon, what’s what? What are you doing for your. Birthday, dude, what do you what are you doing for the big it’s a big number, right? Is it a big number this year? What is it? Are you on mute? Damon, are you on mute?

Damon Pistulka  55:09

In less than an hour, I’m going to be on the road to the beach, going

Curt Anderson  55:13

to the beach. Man, his his beautiful bride has taken him to the beach. Go. What beach you going to? Seaside, Oregon. Seaside, Oregon. So all right, dude, hey, we wish you. Send you tons of love on your birthday. Have an amazing birthday weekend and just enjoy every minute of it. Guys. How about if we give a huge round of applause for Lori? Lori Damon, for our friends here, just sharing their passion, their expertise. Appreciate you guys. Lori, wishing you tons of success with everything you have going on. Lori Tybon, she has a daughter going off to college this year. Lori Highby, she’s going to be she’s find her on the skating rink anytime, because she’s like, she’s checking people so you can find Lori uh, I’ve dropped everybody’s LinkedIn and profile in the chat. Please connect with everybody. And again, my name is Curt. Appreciate you guys. Thank you for spending this lunch hour with with us, for those of us on the East Coast, John, great to see you. Casey, great to see you, and we’ll see you guys next time. Thanks guys. See ya.