The AI Growth Engine: Accelerating Your Marketing Results

Imagine having a marketing superpower that could analyze mountains of data, predict consumer behavior, and optimize your campaigns faster than you can say “AI.” Well, guess what? That power exists, and it’s revolutionizing the way we drive growth in marketing.

You see, in today’s hyper-competitive landscape, traditional marketing methods are about as effective as using a flip phone to browse TikTok. But there’s a game-changing technology that’s transforming marketing from a guessing game into a precise science. It’s like having a crystal ball, but one that actually works.

Now, you might be thinking, “Great, another tech buzzword to add to my marketing bingo card.” But hold onto your hats, because AI in marketing isn’t just hype – it’s the hyperdrive for your growth strategies.

And who better to be our Jedi Master in this AI-powered marketing galaxy than the incredible Cathy McPhillips?

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Cathy McPhillips about:

✨ AI-Powered Precision: Enhancing targeting and personalization.

✨ Data-Driven Decisions: Leveraging AI for strategic insights.

✨ Scalable Growth Strategies: Automating and optimizing marketing efforts.

Learn more about Cathy McPhillips

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

The AI Growth Engine: Accelerating Your Marketing Results with Cathy McPhillips

[00:00:00] Cathy McPhillips: I’ve spent the past three and a half years as part of the team and it shifted the way that I’m doing my marketing. So when I tell folks like, how do I get started? How do you keep up on all of this? I actually leave it to Paul and Mike to tell me what I should be paying attention to. My day usually involves with getting into our Slack community for about 25 to 30 minutes a day, listening to the podcast once a week, going on LinkedIn, and then I can go to work.

You know, I don’t, I’m not an AI expert. I’m probably a little bit indexing a little higher than your average marketer just because of the business that I work for. I’m trying to find ways to use AI to help me do my job better. I’m not trying to be an AI expert. And I think we as marketing leaders just need to remember that we still have a job to do and using AI to help us improve is really our end goal.

[00:00:44] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode, we’ll break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown on prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come on ahead.

Now imagine having a marketing superpower that can analyze mountains of data, predict consumer behavior, and optimize your campaigns faster than you can say AI. Well, guess what? That power exists and it’s revolutionizing the way that we drive growth and marketing. You see, in today’s hyper competitive landscape, traditional marketing methods are about as effective as using a flip phone browse TikTok, but there’s a game changing technology. That’s transforming marketing from a guessing game into a precise science. It’s like having a crystal ball, but one that actually works. You might be thinking great. Another tech buzzword added by marketing bingo card, but hold on to your hats because AI and marketing isn’t just hype.

It’s the hyperdrive for your growth strategies. And who better to be our Jedi master in this AI powered marketing galaxy than the incredible Cathy McPhillips. Folks buckle up because Cathy isn’t just any marketing expert. She’s the Chief Growth Officer at the Marketing AI institute. And she’s here to blow your mind.

This powerhouse has been recognized as one of the 50 women in AI and a woman to watch in analytics. She’s like the Obi Wan Kenobi of AI marketing, but with better hair and a killer sense of humor. Cathy’s not just talking the talk. She’s walking the walk. Leading growth efforts for the AI Academy for Marketers and helping countless professionals harness the power of AI to achieve marketing results that are out of this world today, Cathy’s going to pull back the curtain on the AI growth engine and show us how it’s turbocharging marketing results across the globe.

Galaxy. I mean, industries, get ready to discover how you can leverage AI to not just reach for the stars, but actually grab them. So you’re ready to accelerate your marketing results to light speed. Let’s dive in with the amazing Cathy McPhillips. Hey, Cathy, welcome to the show.

[00:03:20] Cathy McPhillips: Oh my gosh. I’m going to follow, have you follow me around and introduce me wherever I go.

That was,

[00:03:26] Mike Allton: I will be your official hype queen anywhere you want. Happy to do that. Could you start though, by just explaining what you think AI growth engine means, what does that mean to you? And, and how does that apply to the context of marketing?

[00:03:42] Cathy McPhillips: Yeah. I mean, I think if you just break down those words, it’s just very, it represents like the integration of AI technologies into marketing.

So it’s enhancing efficiencies. It’s driving innovation. It’s achieving measurable results. It’s doing all the things that we are doing already. Just helping us do it better, faster, more efficiently, quicker, cheaper. Yeah. And in many cases, just better. So it’s taking all of our superpowers as marketers and helping us grow our businesses with the uses of all these technologies that are just improving with every single day.

[00:04:11] Mike Allton: So how do you see it actually transforming, like specifically growth marketing in just the recent year or two?

[00:04:19] Cathy McPhillips: Well, I think, you know, we talked a lot about Chat GPT, you know, everyone’s like that when we think AI people are like, Oh, Chat GPT. And it’s, I, I truly think that writing and content is the least useful use of AI right now.

I mean, it’s, it helps us understand. It helps us break it down and say, Oh, I actually see a tangible result from my input and then this output that I receive. But we talk a lot about at the Institute that we’re all journalism majors. We’re writers. We are, you know, we let, we love writing, so we don’t use it to write.

We do things that we can’t do. Data analysis, you know, the amount of data that these AI tools can. Process and analyze and give back to us in formats that we can actually make, you know, are actionable is huge. So data analysis is a huge one. Personalization, hyper personalization with the messages we’re sending out, sending people, you know, we’ve said this for years.

When I was at CMI, when we had Content Tech, it was right place, right time, right message. And now that’s just become an expectation. You know I think automation. So many of the things we’re doing are repetitive data driven trying to make a prediction, trying to create something and all of those things that we’re doing that are so critical to the business.

But there aren’t our favorite things to do. Or there is that repetition that you’re like, there has to be a better way. Let’s let’s work smarter, not harder. Automation is a big part of that. And then efficiency, you know, there’s just so much to do. And everything that we’re doing and where can we gain efficiencies and where can we invest our time in other places, in better places for the, for the growth of the business.

[00:05:57] Mike Allton: I love that point because, while I’m not a growth marketer per se, particularly here, you know, with, with The Social Media Hat, my side hustle, I’m still finding incredible ways to use AI to help me do things that either I wouldn’t have done at all because I didn’t have the time or I would not have done them well.

Like I am not a copywriter. I am like you said, like a journalist. I like writing long form articles that help explain complex topics to people. Writing a landing page, that converts, that’s not something that I would consider in my skillset, and yet I can work with AI to develop my tone of voice, develop my target audience, and then craft really, really good

[00:06:35] Cathy McPhillips: right

[00:06:36] Mike Allton: landing pages right that far exceed what I would’ve just done on my own.

Quite frankly, they were garbage on my own, so I love that. What are some of the key AI technologies or tools that you think marketers really need to be aware of from that concept of driving growth?

[00:06:54] Cathy McPhillips: So I’m going to go back to your last question for just for a second. Cause you were talking about, you know, just efficiencies and filling a knowledge gap and just things like that.

So you might, you’ve heard this, me talk about this numerous times that the notion that I’m out in the public eye talking about podcast production is if laughable, if you would have known me four years ago, you’re like, Cathy, you’ve never done this before. You weren’t using AI, you weren’t producing a podcast.

Amanda at CMI was doing that and now I’m doing it and I’m talking about it mostly because, or all because I’m using AI technologies to help me do it. And Claire on our team has since taken over a lot of that process. So I don’t want to, you know, when I say I, I do mean we, but we’re using Descript to edit the videos.

I didn’t know how to edit videos. I had kind of done my children’s. I movie, you know, end of the marching band season videos, but now I’m producing a podcast. We are doing our videos for our webinars and things like that using these AI tools. So it’s filled a huge knowledge gap for me. It’s improved our efficiencies.

Claire, who has come on board, who has video experience, it’s accelerated her knowledge. The tool and she’s doing more exciting things with it because she can use the tool to do the AI stuff, you know, editing and things like that and make it even better. So I’m trying to focus on what are the use cases in my day to day that can help me achieve better results that can have me focused on things that I like doing, that I should be doing, that a human should be doing.

And that’s where we’re finding the tools to help us do all of these things.

[00:08:22] Mike Allton: I love that example because obviously I can relate to that a hundred percent. I have five. podcasts at Agorapulse four them active. And then this podcast, which is a side hustle, and I’m able to put out, actually publish two episodes a week.

And that’s thanks to AI. I’m using a custom GPT with either Claude or Chat GPT to develop the actual run of show and the questions and all that sort of thing. And then to your point, I’m using Descript to take the editing process really, really down to the bare minimum that I need to actually get it out and it’s incredibly revolutionized how I’m able to push out content and have. So many more valuable conversations to your point because I’m able to talk to so many more people and work on those relationships. Thanks to AI.

[00:09:07] Cathy McPhillips: And I think that’s something that you and I are both excel at. Not to like pat myself on the back, but I’m not a Dan. I’m not an analyst.

I’m a communicator and I like talking to people. And if I can invest time in these AI tools, learning them and scaling them across the organization, I can be talking to our customers. Going to events and that’s what, where I thrive and that’s what I love doing. And I love, you know, and that’s helping us convert other parts of our business because I’m not sitting there doing things slowly because I don’t know how to do them, you know, or even if I do, is that the best use of my time?

So to go back to your question about what kind of tools are out there, you know, predictive analytics is huge. You know, we’re trying to figure out what our customers want, what they need Google analytics, Adobe analytics which brings up the point of. Are there tools that are already in your tech stack that you’re not taking advantage of all of the capabilities?

So before you’re like, let’s go find a tool, first I’d say go find a use case for, for finding a tool. And then go to the tools you’re already using and say, can you do this for me? What’s changed in the past three or six or twelve months? What can I be doing better with the tools that I, I’m already paying for?

Natural language processing HubSpot and Marketo are working on like content creation. And, you know, we’re trying to use some of the AI tools. We were a HubSpot company, so we’re trying to figure out ways we can start using some of the things that are out there that we’re, you know, again, we’re paying for.

social media analytics, you know, there’s just so many opportunities to grow the things that we’re already doing and looking at those analytics instead of just broadcasting our, you know, getting our blog post out a million places or our video out or our podcast. It’s like, is this a good use of our time?

You know, those analytics are so critical to all the things that we’re doing because we need to make sure that we’re optimizing all of our marketing because there’s so many things we could be doing right now. You know, I was just talking to someone recently about when I started my career 33 years ago, it was like, do you want to be on TV, radio, outdoor, print?

You know, that was it. And now it’s like, we have so many opportunities, but back then it was like, you just kind of, you had Nielsen, you had Arbitron, you had things like that, but now we know, we know precisely what’s going on and we have so much data and how can we use AI to help us. Sift through it all.

[00:11:30] Mike Allton: And to your point, because of AI and because of the focus on digital marketing, small businesses, medium businesses have so much better access to that information than they ever would. When I was working with small businesses a couple of decades ago, we were looking at billboard advertising. Well, it was, you know, 600 bucks a month.

And now we hope it drives us in business. We won’t ever really know, but we hope it does. Kind of a situation, whereas today there’s just so much more options available to us. And I loved all the points that you just made. I wonder if you could share some examples or a case study or success story, whether from your own organization or customers or companies that you’ve worked with about how they’re effectively using A I to accelerate their marketing results.

[00:12:16] Cathy McPhillips: One, one that I really like talking about is Coca Cola. They’ve used a lot of predictive analytics to get to know their customers better. The whole share a Coke, you know, was, was AI based. And then another one I was just at MAICON this year. I talked to Mike Conley at the Cleveland Cavaliers and Go Cavs.

And he was talking about they’re using Perplexity. And. They’re scaling it across the organization. And what I love about this story is that a team member of Mike’s, when they were looking at what tool they were going to scale across the organization, I think his name was Ben he went through every department that would be onboarding this technology and found use cases specific to that or to that department, trained them and showed them if we onboard this tool in this way, here’s how it’s going to benefit you specifically.

And having that. understanding what each of these departments were doing, how they’re going to use this tool, how they can improve, how they can scale all of that before the tool was purchased. And then onboarded is like genius, you know, because this has been happening for decades. You know, we onboard technologies, AI or otherwise, and if they’re not onboarded and trained the right way, they’re, you’re not going to see the ROI that you were hoping for. And then you just don’t purchase it the next year. You don’t really, you don’t renew. And that’s such a missed opportunity for so many folks and the way that the Cavs were doing it, it’s just like, that’s amazing. So there are better, there’s better marketing, there’s optimized marketing, there’s better customer experiences, the fan experiences out of this world.

And all of that is because they’re using this tool the right way.

[00:13:54] Mike Allton: Love that example. And a little personal context for all of you listening. You may know that I live in St. Louis, but I grew up in a little town in Ohio, just 45 minutes West of Cleveland where Cathy’s at now, she’s talking about MAICON, the Marketing AI Conference, which is the premier event, if you’re a marketing and you want to learn about AI, you’ve got to go to this event in 2025. They just had their 2024 edition, which was fantastic. I could make it this year. I will absolutely be there next year, because that is the event to go to. And of course, it’s the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers for the premier NBA team.

So thanks to you for sharing that story. That was terrific. I wonder if you could do a little myth busting for us, because a lot of people come to these shows, you know, some people they’ve been listening for a long time and they get it, but other people, they might be, this might be the first time they’re listening to the, this podcast, it might be their first exposure to, you know, how AI is truly impacting marketing.

So what are some common misperceptions that they might have, particularly when it comes to implementing AI with their growth strategies?

[00:14:55] Cathy McPhillips: I think complexity, I think people think, you know, how can I even get started with this? And I think that goes back to, we do annual research every year, the state of marketing AI report.

And, you know, a lot of folks, lack of training is the number one thing when it comes to people’s lack of getting started and they think it’s just so hard to do. And it, it can be, you know, there are certain things that can be, but if you’re looking at like onboarding AI across your organization, if you’re looking for some big tech to scale across the org, Sure, that takes some time.

But if you’re trying to look at like quick win pilot projects, look at some use cases. My podcast production is a great example where you just go through and you just itemize. Here’s the 15 things I do every single week for the podcast. How can I find one or two places where that will have the highest value for me?

And what are some ways that we can onboard this super easy? So maybe data isn’t the best place to start because you need to get approval from people. IT and legal and do all the right things from a compliance and governance and, you know, that sort of standpoint, but can you take a press release and use Chat GPT to turn it into social posts to turn into a blog post?

How can you use some of the things you already have? and repurpose, then you can show those results. It saved me two hours a week and I use those two hours to do this. And so showing, and then going to your leadership team and saying, here’s a quick win I just had, here’s an example of AI, can I do more? So if you are in a regulated industry, don’t worry about that because there are other ways besides diving into your data that you can start trying some things.

Off of that data privacy is a huge thing. You know, our customers data is our most, is our most important asset. And how can we make sure that we are the stewards of that data? And it’s working with legal, working with IT before we’re doing anything, putting data into some of these tools. It’s knowing that our customers data is going to be protected, our company data is going to be protected. So that’s a challenge for sure. That’s a huge roadblock in a lot of companies, but there are ways to work around it. So working with legal is critical. And I think the last thing is job displacement, job loss, that the AI is going to come take all of our jobs.

So I think we just need to get ahead of that, you know, upskilling, reskilling, figuring out how AI can work side by side with us. So preparing for that because it’s here and it’s not going away. So how can we make sure that we are doing the best we can with these tools, learning how to use them, learning how to scale it and just protecting ourselves or even creating jobs for ourselves that that aren’t going to go away.

[00:17:34] Mike Allton: Those are all a lot of terrifically valid points. The one thing that I’ll add is that I know a lot of marketers who haven’t really gotten into AI yet, they’re looking at all the, jargon and the nomenclature and the options and they’re feeling overwhelmed because there’s a lot to that and if that’s you, I’ve got two recommendations for you.

First, I’ll link in the show notes my AI Marking Primer, it’s free. Just walks you through, you know, what are the different large language models? What does that even mean? What’s the difference between Claude and Gemini? Things that you should probably know, just to give you that basic. Primer understanding of Mark.

And the other thing that I recommend is the podcast that Cathy was just talking about. That’s The Artificial Intelligence Show. And I’ve talked about a lot on this show because that’s, that’s my go to podcast every single week. It’s, it’s a little over an hour. So set aside some time every single week, but we’re talking about Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput their breakdown every week. What’s happened this past week in the world of AI, that’s usually the extent of what you should know when it comes to the overall AI technology and industry. You don’t necessarily need a certification. You don’t need to go into the details.

You don’t understand all the tech and the why. That podcast will cover, I think, most of what you need to know. Folks, we’re talking with Cathy McPhillips about how AI is impacting and accelerating growth marketing. And I’ve got some more questions you’re not going to want to miss, but first, a quick word from our sponsor.

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Cathy earlier, you talked a little bit about predictive analytics and that sort of thing. How do you think AI can help marketers better understand and predict customer behavior to drive growth?

[00:20:15] Cathy McPhillips: I think there are quite a few ways, you know, I’d start with identifying patterns, you know, some of the things that we think are patterns might be anomalies and we don’t, might not recognize that.

So I think, you know, AI can surface those things. I just, like I said, I remember the days of like, we need more data. We need more data now. It’s like, we have so much data. Where do we even get started? And AI can help us break that down at these superhuman speeds that we just wouldn’t have the time or the knowledge to be able to do that.

So AI is helping us surface some of those trends. It’s helping us optimize our strategies. It’s taking it, it’s just, it’s just. Giving us in superpower, such an overused word when it comes to AI, but it really is true. It’s helping us focus on the things that we know, the institutional knowledge we have about our companies, our brands, our clients, and help us fine tune all of those things like creating targeted campaigns, things like that.

But it just is giving us the ability to let AI do the work on the analytics and the analysis, and the humans do the work on the strategy and the prediction.

[00:21:17] Mike Allton: No, that makes complete sense. In fact I love your, your, your. Little example there of identifying anomalies as anomalies. That’s really hard for us as humans.

And a corollary to that was, we had Andy Crestodina on the show early on, and he was talking about using AI in analytics for content gap analysis because it’s kind of the same concept as humans were going to be challenged to identify what’s missing, what’s not there. I mean, he’s talking about looking at a thousand articles in your archive and determining, well, what haven’t you talked about yet?

That’s your target audience. Your target consumers or customers would be really interested in. And that’s really hard. I mean, I’ve written all the content for my site, but for me to think through the thousand plus articles that I’ve written in 10 plus years and think about, okay, what haven’t I written enough about yet?

That’s that’s really hard for me. And I’m intimately familiar with everything that I’ve written. Imagine, you know, as a consultant or just, you know, a different department of the same organization trying to do that analysis as a human. It’s challenging, if not impossible with AI. Not only can we feed all of it, all that data into the AI, but to your point, we get the result in seconds.

And then we can have that conversation back and forth, which I really, really love being able to do.

[00:22:33] Cathy McPhillips: And it takes out some of that bias too. You know, sometimes we’re looking, we’re looking for a nugget because we kind of know what we want to do. And you know, the AI kind of level sets that and says like, no, no, this is actually the better, the better way to be doing things.

[00:22:48] Mike Allton: That, that’s a really huge point because as a marketer, I may have been and probably was really invested in that campaign that we ran a few months ago. And I really not only wanted it to do well, I needed it to do well.

[00:23:02] Cathy McPhillips: Right.

[00:23:03] Mike Allton: But maybe it didn’t, and maybe I need the honesty and clarity of AI to say, well, look, this is what actually happened.

You know, this is the results that you got. These are the people that you reach. These are the things that you can look to, to improve for the next time, which is great learning. But. Yeah, we need that that non rose speckled glasses look at everything that’s happening. But speaking of campaigns, how do you see AI helping us to actually maximize our campaigns and improve them, get more ROI, just make them better in the future?

[00:23:35] Cathy McPhillips: Yeah, for sure. So I started my career as a media planner at an agency here in Cleveland. And so much of my time was spent doing budget allocation. We want this much, you know, here’s the weeks we’re flighting TV campaigns or, you know, at the end of my career there, time there, it was analyzing or flighting digital campaigns.

And then it was like, okay, let’s layer that on top of sales and, oh, the TV must’ve worked because our sales are up. So now it’s like. Again, to your point, Mike, just matching up those things, but now with, it can help us with budget allocation because it’s, it can actually tell us more data. It can tell us more of the analytics, but also it can give recommendations.

So taking those recommendations and then going in there and, you know, doing our due diligence, making sure that that makes sense for the business. So budget allocation for sure. More AB testing. So in all of our CRMs, we can, you know, AB test subject lines, AB test copy, all of those things and get results faster.

And even, you know, an email campaign that I was doing and say in HubSpot previously where I would say, okay, here’s my lists, here’s my segments, here’s my messaging for these different groups. Let’s get the results. Let’s build new lists. Let’s build, build new segments, more email copy. So it’s always the human doing all of those things.

But now there are tools that can take the, you know, you send your first email and then the second email. It’s just going to do it for you because it knows what your goals are. So the human is still built, you know, here’s what my goal is. Here’s what I want to be doing. Here’s what I would want to be saying to these folks.

And the AI is like, got it. You know, I’ll just do it for you. So it’s taking out a lot of that manual work. And giving us better results because it’s optimizing it for us at a speed that is faster than what we can do.

[00:25:24] Mike Allton: Love that example. But to your point, the human still needs to be involved when I’m working with, yeah, when I’m working with clients, we have an entire framework for integrating AI, the H.U.M.A.N. Framework that really emphasizes making sure that the humanity is kept and retained throughout.

So I’m wondering how you see see that evolving in the very near future. How do you see that role of human marketers evolving as AI becomes more and more prevalent, particularly in, in growth strategies?

[00:25:51] Cathy McPhillips: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot about, you know, do you remember when like e cards were a thing, you know, and we were like, Oh, we can send cards via email.

Like who wants a card via email right now? You know, it was great at the beginning. It was this hot thing. Magazines went away for a minute. We love and books. Like we love, I love my Kindle because I can read in the cold with one hand under a blanket and one hand on my Kindle. And I like taking eight books with me when I go somewhere thinking I’ll actually read eight books in a week, but, and I like having that in my pocket.

Gosh, I love touching paper, you know? And I think, and, and to that point, we love… humans, so, like to communicate with other humans. So we relate to each other. We relate to our emotions, our connections and all of that. So we don’t want to talk to AI. We want to talk to a human. We want to read what a human is saying, but we can, we’re able to do more with AI helping us.

So I think, and, and just, Let’s just not even skip over the fact that a lot of stuff that AI is doing is wrong. It’s giving you, it’s trying to predict what it thinks you want to hear versus this is factual. So we need to make sure that everything, every output, whether it’s copy, whether it’s data, whatever it is, a human needs to look at that and make sure it’s right.

A human needs to put it into the voice of your, your brand. It needs to, be in the voice of what your customer wants to be hearing from you. So every single step of that needs to be updated. And the more you update that, the more, and then you put, put it back into the system. They’re then learning, okay, here’s what I’m going to do better for Cathy next time I do an output.

So, you know, I’ve have this, relationship now with Chat GPT, because every time it gives me something, I then go back and say, here’s what I ended up using. And then it’s used using that for next time. So when I ask for something else, similarly, it kind of knows my style. It knows my format. It knows the things I’m changing.

So if I went into Chat GPT and I said, tell me about Cathy McPhillips. You know, here’s what she does for a living. She writes in a very fun, friendly, human, engaging, conversational tone, relatable. I’m like, yeah, that’s totally what I’m trying to do. Cause I’m trying to, well, one that’s me, but I’m trying to relate to other marketers saying, I’m a thousand percent in your shoes and going what you’re going through and now Chat GPT is learning that’s my style and it’s now giving me things in a format that like yeah, this actually really does sound like me

[00:28:09] Mike Allton: That is such a huge point the default programming for Ai is to be helpful, which in a lot of cases we love they don’t complain when we ask them to give us data 10 more subject lines and then 10 more subject lines and then 10 more subject lines.

I mean, if you asked me to do that three times, we’re done. Do your own subject lines. Chat GPT is like, sure, Cathy, happy to do that for you. But then I

[00:28:30] Cathy McPhillips: apologize. I’m like, I’m sorry. Could you just do that one more time? Could you slow down and maybe just think for a second? And it’s like, no problem.

[00:28:37] Mike Allton: Yeah.

It’s so happy to help. But if you aren’t explicit about what you want, it will be too helpful. When I tell it to summarize a podcast interview, like I will do this, this will, this will show up as a LinkedIn newsletter that I, you know, very transparently say is written by CLU, my AI assistant, but the first couple of times I worked with CLU to develop these podcast interview summaries, I would say, you know, pull out some quotes from the guest.

It would make up quotes, or it would quote me. I’m like, no, no, no, no. I’m the host. I’m not the guest. Cathy McPhillips is the guest. Pull her quote directly from the transcript, which you had, I had to be very explicit about that. And it’s like, Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah.

[00:29:17] Cathy McPhillips: Or it’s a quote that’s so out of context.

You’re like, okay, that’s actually not really a quote. You know, here’s the message I want to give to our readers. What are some key takeaways? You know, you have just the more, you examples you give or the more detail you give. Like I just spoke to some eighth graders last week and I said, you know, imagine you’re talking to someone in a house with no windows that, and they can’t see outside and you say, what should I wear today?

Clothing. Okay. Well, it’s raining out, but it’s still warm out. I’m a, I’m female or what, you know, just the more detail you give, it’s like, Oh, okay, well, you know, wear this and this and this, but if you start with something basic, you’re going to get something basic. And, you know, out of it and

[00:30:01] Mike Allton: they were all like, Oh,

[00:30:02] Cathy McPhillips: that makes sense.

[00:30:04] Mike Allton: Yeah. This is such a great mindset shift. I think particularly for, you know, marketers who are new to AI, you know, they’re, they’re just jumping in. They don’t realize that the limitations perhaps, or the, or the, you know, boundaries that you need to place around AI, the pre work that you can do to help AI understand the context.

What other advice would you give folks like that?

[00:30:23] Cathy McPhillips: It also helps, you know, if there’s reluctance, you know, saying like, I like writing, I am proud of my work. I like, you know, digging into the data. Using these tools involves so much strategic thought and so much critical thinking that you actually are probably using your brain more the way you want to be using your brain than you were before.

So just have that shift. Of so yeah, I think that’s an important thing to focus on is like all the ways that you like, you can be really smart with these tools and find new ways to use it and be innovative with, with AI.

[00:30:58] Mike Allton: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So that’s great advice for folks who are new to AI, or maybe they’ve been doing it a little bit wonky for a while.

What other advice would you give to marketers who are relatively new to AI or AI and growth marketing?

[00:31:12] Cathy McPhillips: Yeah, I said this earlier, but it bears repeating. Start small, start with a use case that you say, okay, I, it might be something like, I hate writing subject lines. I need to, every week I am taking a blog post and creating 10 social posts from it.

That takes time. You know, even if it, even if time is a measurement for you, you know, it takes me two hours a week. Can we get that down to 30 minutes a week? How can I be reusing that time? So start with a small project, find a tool. So many things are free right now, or have free two week trials, Chat GPT, the 20 bucks a month is the best 20 bucks a month we’re spending as individuals within our organization and start small. Measure, you know, how much time did it take me before? What were the results of those social posts? How much time did it take me now? What are the, what are the results of those social posts?

And even if it’s strictly a time savings, we could totally, and that’s a win. That’s a huge return on your investment of that time. So where can you reinvest that time for maybe it’s creating more content. Maybe it’s talking like again, talking to your customers, diving into some data. Doing something you didn’t have the time to do before and surfacing a whole new project, a whole new revenue stream, a whole new something for your company because now you have more time to be doing that.

So while I think we can go well beyond efficiency gains when it comes to AI, I think finding some small efficiencies is a great way to begin. And it’s a great way to get buy in from your organization if you are hitting a wall with people saying, we’re not going down this road.

[00:32:40] Mike Allton: That’s, that’s huge. And to your point, you don’t have to spend a lot of money.

I use and recommend Magai because it’s 20 bucks a month. And with that, I get access to paid ChatGPT, paid Genesis, paid Claude. I can use DALLE-3 or Leonardo or any other image generation tools. So, you know, just a great, easy use case is when I’m writing articles for my blog, instead of using stock photography, the way I go into DALLE-3 via Magai and have it create an image specifically from my blog.

And I’ve got a style that I’ve developed that I just changed a little bit for every article. And people have told me now when they see my funny bears in those Star Wars settings, they know it’s my content. So I’ve successfully achieved some brand awareness and connectivity, right? With the brand voice for pennies, really, you know, and I’m not having to pay for stock imagery and I’m not using stock imagery.

That’s so not me has nothing to do with my brand because it’s stock imagery.

[00:33:35] Cathy McPhillips: And you’re also, you’re, you’re not pretending that you’re not using AI. If people look at it, they know you’re using AI, but you’ve built a brand from it and you could also just use some of these tools for simply for, you know, my husband works at GE lighting on the East side of Cleveland and he was trying to create a logo for their CES booth for one of the, not for a product, but for kind of this fun thing they were doing.

And he got, he put some of his thoughts into Chat GPT, he got an image and he was like, Oh my gosh. And I, I’m like, well, you know, you can’t use that lead. You know, you can’t copyright that. He’s like, I don’t want to copyright this. And he said, Norm, I, the designer, but he said, I can give this, this is, he’s like, I gave enough detail that I was able to get something that I wanted.

All the words were spelled wrong. DALLE-3 stinks at spelling words, right? But he took it to his designer and he said, this is what I’m picturing versus done this back and forth of this designer that you’re paying for to create this image for him. And he’s like, I kind of, I was able to verbalize What I wanted just by showing him this piece of paper or, you know, sending him this JPEG of here’s kind of where my head is, make it, make it ours, make it better, which is pretty cool.

[00:34:46] Mike Allton: Yeah. We did a whole episode just about how you can use AI for prototyping. And that was a central point of the episode or just how much time and money you can save, whether you’re the business that needs the asset and you’re working with a consultant, or maybe you’re the consultant, the agency, the graphic designer, right?

And you want to quickly draft up some ideas and show them to a client. So what do you think about these? Is this the direction you’re looking at? You could do that real time on a discovery call before you actually go into the actual, you know, back and forth in the process. So that’s a that’s a great example of time savings.

Thanks for sharing that, Cathy. What about looking ahead? What kinds of emerging AI trends are you seeing that you think are going to have the biggest impact on marketing growth? And I’m not going to ask you to look five to 10 years in advance. AI is always trying to get me to ask these questions. And I’m like, this is again where the human needs to be involved, right?

Cause the human knows, no one knows what’s going to happen in five years with AI. Five weeks, maybe. What do you see coming up?

[00:35:47] Cathy McPhillips: Well, to that point, Paul talked about something at MAICON this year. We put the video on YouTube last week and someone wrote, this is outdated. So I went back into YouTube and changed that link to say, we know it’s, this was recorded on September 12th.

So like even five days sometimes is, is too long. But I think a couple of things, I think, you know, the way we are. Searching on the internet now, you know, we’re going to perplexity for Google, for searches instead of Google, how we’re using, you know, How SEO can be, how AI can improve our SEO, ethical AI.

I think ethical AI is like such a critical and important thing. You know, how are we using these tools? There’s so many ways this could go South with and I think there are more good people in the world than there are bad. So we just need to be The leaders in the marketing world who are doing it the right way, using these tools the right way, being ambassadors for the tech and for for all of this, these processes that we’re using.

And I think hyper personalization, I think people are expecting. To not receive something irrelevant from the brands they’re following from the, you know, companies are looking into. So the more personalized without getting overly creepy, how we can use AI to to deliver personalized messages when people want them through advanced analytics and things like that is really huge.

[00:37:06] Mike Allton: I love the point about not too creepy. That was something we talked with Zontee Hou about in an earlier episode and how much fantastic data personalization you can do today, but still brands have to be careful and aware. She shared a story of, you know, Target identifying with AI expectant mothers, well before they would traditionally, you know, tell people and make announcements and that sort of thing is, you know, I understood the idea.

The idea was to make sure that they’re getting in front of these expectant mothers before they’re even ready to start buying all the things that they have to buy. And so now target’s top of mind, but imagine now they’re sending direct mail pieces to expectant mothers. Who at that point actually probably haven’t even said anything to the other people in their household.

And now it’s Target that’s sharing the news that this person is expecting when other people didn’t even know yet. That was a problem. That was a miss when it comes to using

[00:38:05] Cathy McPhillips: And you know you’re a parent. You wait, like, you wait three months because you’re crossing your fingers that everything goes well.

[00:38:12] Mike Allton: That’s exactly right.

[00:38:13] Cathy McPhillips: Yeah,

[00:38:14] Mike Allton: but they used AI to understand that even though you haven’t said anything publicly in that first trimester, your spending habits and things that you’re buying, I don’t know what it was, if it’s supplements or what, but you start to buy things that are strong indicators. Oh, okay.

This person’s expecting. Yeah. That was a big mess, but those are the kinds of things that are happening. And I love that you’re bringing up so many valid points for folks, but I know we’ve just touched the surface. And for folks who want to know more, they want to connect with you. They want to learn from you because you’ve been amazing.

Where can they go?

[00:38:46] Cathy McPhillips: So marketingaiinstitute. com. That’s our website. I would say a few free places that I would start with us is the marketing AI or no, we changed the name. We rebranded. It’s the artificial intelligence show. It drops every Tuesday morning. Paul and Mike do an amazing job. And as a marketer, like I said, I’ve been doing this for a few decades.

I’ve spent the past three and a half years as part of the team. And it shifted the way that I’m doing my marketing. So when I tell folks like, how do I get started? How do you keep up on all of this? I actually leave it to Paul and Mike to tell me what I should be paying attention to. My day usually involves with getting into our Slack community for about 25 to 30 minutes a day, listening to the podcast once a week, going on LinkedIn, And then I can go to work.

You know, I don’t, I’m not an AI expert. I’m probably a little bit indexing a little higher than your average marketer, just because of the business that I work for, but I’m trying to find ways to use AI to help me do my job better. I’m not trying to be an AI expert. And I think we as marketing leaders just need to remember that we still have a job to do and using AI to help us improve is really the, our end goal.

So. That’s the ai, the artificial intelligence show. Once a month we have an intro to AI class that Paul does, and I am on there fielding all of the audience questions, which is amazing. And so once a month, it’s just intro to Ai. I forget the website. I don’t know. I’ll add it to the show notes and we’ve got blog content.

We’ve got research. We’ve got tons of free stuff on our website. And then if you’re interested in more, we’ve got some paid educational offerings. We have MAICON that’s next October. Or just reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you have questions, I would love to help you in any way that I can.

[00:40:22] Mike Allton: Love it. In fact, I love your mindset so much, Cathy, that, that might be the first time that I use that closing segment as the opening segment of the show, because I think that was so valuable.

So thank you for sharing that. Thank you everyone for listening. That’s all the time we’ve got for today. But like I mentioned before, this is your first foray into the world of AI and marketing. I’ve got that perfect resource for you. That AI marketing primer designed to quickly get you up to speed. I’ll have that linked in the show notes along with everything else.

That Cathy and I talked about today. In the meantime, welcome to the grid.

Thanks for joining us on AI in marketing unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review. We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have.

Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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