AI Tools for Businesses of All Sizes

Imagine having the power to create a brand strategy that rivals those of industry giants, regardless of your business size or budget. 

Today, we’re diving into the world of AI-powered branding, where cutting-edge technology is leveling the playing field and enabling businesses of all sizes to craft compelling, professional-level brand messaging. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, a small business owner, or part of a marketing team, this episode will reveal how you can harness AI to elevate your brand, connect more deeply with your audience, and compete effectively in today’s crowded marketplace.

Joining us to unpack this game-changing approach is Ruheene Jaura, a true innovator at the intersection of creativity and technology. With 16 years of experience in visual effects for giants like Cirque du Soleil and Marvel, Ruheene has seamlessly transitioned into AI-powered marketing. As the founder of heyLevi.ai, she’s revolutionizing brand strategy development. Certified in digital marketing and emerging technologies, Ruheene brings a unique blend of creative vision and technical expertise to help businesses transform their branding through AI.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Ruheene Jaura about:

✨ AI Democratizes Branding: AI tools are leveling the playing field, allowing businesses of all sizes to access professional-level branding strategies.

✨ Efficiency Meets Creativity: AI streamlines the branding process, freeing up time for human creativity to focus on strategic decision-making.

✨ Adaptability is Key: As AI continues to evolve, businesses must stay adaptable and leverage these tools to remain competitive in their branding efforts.

Learn more about Ruheene Jaura

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Redefining Brand Strategy: AI Tools for Businesses of All Sizes with Ruheene Jaura

[00:00:00] Ruheene Jaura: I actually think that AI is here not to replace human creativity. I really think it’s here to help us be better and be more creative because when you’re coming up with anything creative, right, whether you’re writing content for your business or you’re trying to write a business proposal, whatever it is that you’re doing, there’s a, there’s a, it’s a mix, right?

It’s a mix of research and understanding best practices, understanding your business’s positioning, what makes you special, and there’s the creative part of it. Which is how you write all of that, how you convey and communicate all of that. But when you treat it in a way where it does 60 to 80 percent of the work for you, and then you come in with your creativity, your special sauce, if you will, and add that to whatever AI is giving you, that’s really the part that, that makes the magic.

[00:00:46] 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 the time to pick the brains of experts, keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas, additional marketing, and you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come on ahead now, imagine.

Having the power to create a brand strategy that rivals those of industry giants, regardless of your business size or budget today, we’re diving into the world of AI powered branding. We’re cutting edge technology is leveling the playing field and enabling businesses of all sizes to craft compelling, innovative, and innovative.

Professional level brand messaging, whether you’re a solar entrepreneur, small business owner, or part of a marketing team, this episode will reveal how you can harness AI to elevate your brand, connect more deeply with your audience and compete effectively in today’s crowded marketplace.

Joining us to unpack this game changing approach is Ruheene Jaura a true innovator at the intersection of creativity and technology. With 16 years of experience in visual effects for giants like Cirque Soleil and Marvel, Ruheene has seamlessly transitioned into AI powered marketing. As the founder of heyLevi.ai, she’s revolutionizing brand strategy development. Certified in digital marketing and emerging technologies. Ruheene brings a unique blend of creative vision and technical expertise to help businesses transform their branding through AI.

Hey, Ruheene, welcome to the show.

[00:02:48] Ruheene Jaura: Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

[00:02:51] Mike Allton: So glad to have you. Let’s start if you could by just kind of walking us through your journey from visual effects, which is super cool, by the way, to AI powered marketing.

How did that unique background influence your approach to branding?

[00:03:05] Ruheene Jaura: You know, it’s all about storytelling. I think we all know that whether we’re marketers or not, we all have a personal story. And when we become business owners and start marketing what our offers. It’s really all about now our customer’s story and how our products and services fit in with their story So it’s really at the end of the day all about storytelling And if you’re not telling a story with your products and services Then you’re missing out on a huge market because that’s really what people want to see is a story and they want to see themselves in that story.

So actually even before visual effects and Marvel I was, I was doing architecture. So I went to undergrad for architecture and it really, the whole storytelling thing, believe it or not, started with architecture because I realized that when you’re designing things spaces, physical spaces for people. It’s all about the stories that are going to be lived and experienced in those spaces. And so my brain just automatically started thinking in terms of stories right from my architecture days. And then when I went into visual effects and I started working with with, you know, companies like Marvel Avengers and all the bigger bigger productions.

I really started to see that come to life. I mean, even though, you know, we went from physical spaces to now Marvel movies, which are two totally different things. The one constant that that stayed the same is the fact that people can see themselves in that story. So when somebody likes an architectural space or a home, for example, when you’re looking to buy a home, it’s really when you’re walking through the home, you think about how you’re going to create stories in each space in each part of the home.

And that’s what comes to life in your brain. And you decide whether you want to live there or not, whether you want to buy the home or not. And again, when you’re watching a movie, you you ask yourself whether it’s a superhero movie or a documentary. It’s really about, do you see something about yourself in that story that makes you want to watch it through the end or not?

So I don’t know if that answered the question or, or if you want to, yeah.

[00:05:09] Mike Allton: Well, yeah. So, so, so take it further than that. So the next step is you started to delve into AI. Yeah. I used delve in person on purpose, but tell me how you got into AI.

[00:05:20] Ruheene Jaura: So after working on visual effects I really started to get in that’s when I started getting into marketing because while I was doing visual effects and in between projects I started working on You know, marketing spots for companies like Apple, Motorola, Radio Shack back in the day Amazon. So I was on a lot of their product launches as part of the marketing team.

And that’s how I got into marketing. And again, the storytelling part is just stayed through those, those years. But AI, you know, when, I’ve always used AI tools. I’m always looking for tools, whether they’re AI or not, to help make my work easier, help me be more efficient. And so when OpenAI came up with their API and made AI so accessible to everyone, I decided at that point to take all of the frameworks and the learnings that I had through my 16 years of work experience in film and in marketing and really combine those into an easy to use tool using AI that would help put that 16 years of experience into business owners and marketers hands that maybe don’t have that kind of experience and are looking for a little bit of help.

[00:06:30] Mike Allton: Love that. I mean, as the Chief Storyteller at Agorapulse, most of you listening, know that’s, that’s where I call home for my full time job. I literally just spent the afternoon today before joining you, Ruheene, in this recording, crafting our Agorapulse brand story and our storytelling guidelines, because there’s so many people in the organization that are part of the storytelling process of our brand.

It’s not just marketers, it’s sales team members, it’s not just. customer support team members, it’s engineers because to your point, right? They’re crafting a product that our customer stories are going to be told within that product. And so I was spending a lot of time thinking through what should our story guidelines be a storytelling guidelines and what makes for a good story.

And throughout that entire process, hand in hand, AI to help me turn that into a narrative and approach that the rest of our team could use. But I want to focus for a moment on some of the small businesses that you’ve been working with from that marketing perspective, from that brand perspective, what do you see some of the biggest challenges are that they’re facing, particularly when it comes to building and developing their own brand strategy?

[00:07:40] Ruheene Jaura: I think the biggest problem is that most marketers newer marketers and small business owners who are trying to market themselves because of a low budget they’re really, they’re struggling to understand how to grow their business from just a business into a brand. And so a lot of folks will think when they think of branding, they think of colors and fonts and, you know, all the things that make their, their pages, their web pages and their social media posts pretty.

But I think there are very few people who actually understand that a brand is so much more than that. Yes, the colors and the fonts feed into it, but it’s really the, Why they feed into it, right? So the reason those colors and fonts are important are because of the emotion and the experience that you’re invoking in your audience.

And so what is it that they’re feeling when they come across your brand? And so whether you, you know, whether it’s intentional or not, whether you’ve built a brand intentionally or not, you have a brand, right? And when it’s not intentional and all you’re focusing on are the pretty stuff, the colors and the fonts you might be missing the overall experience that your audience is having with your brand. So it’s really about again back to storytelling, right? So what is their story and how do you fit in with that story? so I always say that it’s the brand narrative is really your customer’s narrative And how you fit in as the expert in that story and that’s how you position yourself.

So I always talk about how branding goes hand in hand with positioning. It’s how you’re positioning yourself in the market and how you’re fitting in with your customers narrative.

[00:09:14] Mike Allton: I’m so glad you brought up the Why, because that is so critical. That’s why I was talking about a moment ago, how I spent the entire afternoon developing the Agorapulse brand story, because that is our Why.

Why do we do what we do and why do we do how we do it? In other words, you know, we’re doing things a certain way. Why are we doing it that way? Right. We’re helping our customers with social media. Yeah. We could say why we’re doing that, but the way that we help customers with their social media management is different from other people.

And there’s a reason for that. There’s a why behind that. And we wanted to make sure that that was articulated in a way that everybody in the organization would know, and then be able to infuse into everything that they’re doing. So when you’re talking to customers, small businesses, medium sized businesses, whomever, and they’re trying to figure out.

You know, their brand strategy, their brand story. How do you see AI technology coming in to help them with these kinds of challenges and kind of almost democratizing that access to professional level branding?

[00:10:17] Ruheene Jaura: Yeah. So this again goes back to my days working on the product launches that I mentioned earlier in particular Apple and Amazon.

And I love telling the story But, you know, there’s so much to be learned from the way Apple positions itself and its products and the way Amazon does it. And we both know they’re both amazing companies. They’ve both done so well for themselves, but we all know that Apple has built this like crazy fan following, right?

And it’s all because they’re all about brand led marketing. We’ve all heard of product led marketing, but I don’t think enough folks are talking about brand led marketing. So the way Apple has been able to create this brand. Now, Amazon has a brand and they have a very strong brand for sure. But if you look at Amazon’s launches, each of their product launches have been very product led and there’s a lot of strength in that, but really, it comes down to brand loyalty. Right? And the reason I say that is because someone like Apple, we all know that they’ve released products over the years. Some of them have been amazing. And some of them have been Right.

Like I’m an Apple fan, so don’t, don’t come at me for saying that, but I use a lot of Apple products. But let’s be honest. Like if you compare what Apple has released over the years, especially after Steve Jobs was gone what they’ve released over the years has been. Pretty crappy compared to some of the Android stuff that’s been coming out in parallel, right?

The Android products and the Samsung products that come out, if you’re really talking about technology and futuristic, you know features, the Samsung products actually have better features and more user friendly features than Apple has, has had over the past few years, but the reason why people who use Apple, including me, will not move away to another product that may be better or superior is because we have brand loyalty.

And so that comes with a lot of forgiveness when there are product launches that maybe aren’t so great. On the other hand, when Amazon launches products, it is on a product basis, right? If they launch a product that sucks, nobody’s going to buy it. Unlike Apple, when they launch a product that sucks, their fanboys are still going to buy it.

Fanboys and fangirls. And it all comes down to really understanding how you’re marketing yourself. If you’re marketing just your products and services, again, you’re at the risk of, yes, if you have a strong product or service, that’s going to be great. It’s going to work out great as long as you’re doing the right thing product led marketing approach, but at the core of it, you really want to think about how to build a strong brand, because if you release multiple offers or products or services over the years just know that if you’ve built a strong brand at the core of it you have a lot of forgiveness and those launches when they don’t go so well.

So all that being said, now we’re talking about Apple and Amazon and not all of us have the kinds of budgets that they have, right. To build that strong brand. And so. That’s where AI comes in, because when you feed the right context and frameworks into AI, now AI knows how to brand, how to kind of mimic some of those more popular brands, like Apple, Nike, Lululemon, if you’ve heard of that.

So those kinds of brands, even when they don’t have the best product, Nike has always had a good product, I think. But like Lululemon, if you’re, if you’re familiar with that, that’s like a clothing brand, right? Their quality sucks. But Here I am sitting in all lululemon because that’s what I again, it’s a brand thing.

And, and I pay top dollar for it, but again, it’s the whole brand. And I’m sure we have viewers right now. And my husband is one of them. Who’s always like, why do you pay so much money for a brand? That’s stupid. Buy a better quality product. That’s actually going to last you longer. And, and yeah to add context to that. He’s an Android user. But you see where what I’m saying as a business, regardless of whether you agree with that approach or not, you’re setting yourself up for success in the long run. If you’re coming from a brand led approach. Now to your question of, you know, how does A. I help kind of democratize that approach?

Previously You had to have a big marketing team or you had to spend quite a bit of money just to come up with a strong brand. Now what I mean by a strong brand is again, not just the colors and the fonts. Those are definitely part of it, but really your brand narrative, how you’re positioning your brand in the market how you’re connecting with your ideal customers. All of that feeds into your brand.

And so when you think of it more holistically like that, and you ask for AI’s help in helping you create that brand, and then from there, every piece of content that you create. So we were talking about social media, but really it’s whether it’s social media or a video script for YouTube or a blog post or a sales page, when everything feeds off of that core brand, like Apple does, you start to see that It kind of forms this experience for your users that they will keep wanting to come back to because they know what to expect, even if a product or service isn’t the best one out there isn’t the best on the market, they still want to stay with your brand ecosphere because of that brand loyalty.

[00:15:11] Mike Allton: Okay. First of all, you’ve just given us a masterclass on, on marketing strategy. Folks go back and re listen to this past segment a couple more times and really think about what Ruheene just said, because everything you said is absolutely correct. And I’ll ask you listeners, indulge me for a second, think about Apple and come up with some adjectives that describe Apple as a brand in your mind, and do that for 30 seconds, and then try to do that for Amazon.

And I think you’ll struggle. I think you’ll struggle quite a bit to come up with any really interesting adjectives, you know, other than maybe two day delivery. We don’t even know if that’s an adjective, right? There’s things that you could associate with that brand, but not adjectives about the brand. And that’s the difference between brand led.

And, and to your point, like I’ve already referenced a couple of times, I spent hours this afternoon working on the Agorapulse brand story and storytelling guidelines. And this was actually just the culmination of probably a three month project. I took on the role in, in the summer of this year. And that’s been one of the things I needed to do because we did not have an identified or documented brand story.

We had, to your point, brand voice guidelines. Color logo, some bit about how we communicate, right? But nothing really in depth documented. And so I had to go through an entire process of defining, you know, what is a brand story? What frameworks are we going to use? Cause there’s a lot of options, you know, to come up with, you know, there’s, there’s story brand, there’s Tamsin Webster’s red thread, which is ultimately what we ended up using.

And there’s quite a few others. That was something that literally I was paid full time. As an exercise to think through that based on my decade plus of marketing experience. And to your point, now AI comes along and simplifies this and it may not necessarily be, you know, McKinsey and company level consulting quality, but it’s great.

It’s really, really good. Whatever AI is going to come up with and the more you’re able to put into it, the more you’re going to be able to get out. And I’d like to kind of go on a little tangent here for a moment, because I know a lot of what we’re talking about is what your tool does for folks. And I’d love for you to share a little bit more about what heyLevi does and how that works for brands.

[00:17:29] Ruheene Jaura: Yeah. SheyLevivi actually does a lot of what we were talking about. And just before I forget, Mike, one thing that you just touched upon is the brand voice, right? And even that is more than just fonts and colors. It’s really about the tone of voice, like your writing style, your style, the energy you have in your writing and in your content that also needs to say cohesive. That’s also a part of your brand. And so a lot of that is what heyLevi does, right? It recognizes and it tries to understand your unique brand voice and your brand narrative, your customer avatars both on a brand level and then on a product and service level, right?

Which are more dialed in. And Yeah. Understands that not just in terms of like when you when you think about customer avatars, right? Like tell me, actually, Mike, I’m going to put this question on you. What do you think about when you think of customer avatars? Like what do you expect to see on a customer avatar card?

[00:18:18] Mike Allton: I’m looking for titles. I’m looking for demographics for my graphics. I’m looking for an understanding of who within a specific organization and what that organization looks like. The brand, whether it’s my own or somebody I’m working with. They’re trying to target, right? So what verticals, you know, how big a company, what kind of company and who within that company, and then beyond that, that firmographic information, such as, you know, what do they want, what are they looking for, what are they trying to accomplish, where are they struggling, you know, what challenges are they facing that the brand may or may not have input in a solution for

[00:18:53] Ruheene Jaura: Great.

So to summarize that, would you say that you’re really thinking about demographics and pain points, but what about decision making drivers? What about their inner beliefs, their inner philosophical beliefs and their inner, like, stories that they’re telling themselves, their inner dialogue that they’re talking about inside their heads.

How are we tapping into that?

[00:19:18] Mike Allton: Yeah, and that’s the kind of thing that I would say is typically missing from, you know, if a business has a persona or an ICP at all. They probably don’t have that.

[00:19:28] Ruheene Jaura: Exactly. Yeah. And so that’s the gap that we work on, on filling. So we help you go like really, really deep into your customer avatars, right?

So not just demographics and pain points. Those are great. And those are necessary. Don’t get me wrong. Absolutely necessary. But unless you’re also understanding who they are on a deeper level, what their philosophical beliefs are, what their social wants and needs are how they think emotionally, we’re all emotional beings.

And I think we’ve all heard this, right? We’re all emotional beings. And you know, when you sell, you want to sell to the emotional part of a human being, but that’s where the entire demographics and pain points fall short because you’re not actually addressing their emotional needs. So when you start to think of your customer avatars as like holistic human beings that have flaws just like we do, that have emotional needs that usually trump our logical and wants and needs, what we think we want is usually not what we want.

When we go into a store to buy something, why is it that nine times out of 10, we usually buy something else? We don’t buy what we walked in there for, right? Whether we actually buy the thing that we walked in for, But a different style that we had in mind or a totally different thing. Or that thing plus five other things.

Like there’s a reason why we do that, right? We tell ourselves we’re only going to spend this much. This isn’t my budget today. And then we go and convince ourselves that no, this is really going to change my life for me. And so I’m also going to purchase this. So all of that comes down to if you are, you know, if you’ve ever found yourself trying to offer a discount in order to close a sale.

And I’m not talking about seasonal discounts, right? Those are great. But I’m talking about if you’ve ever been on a sales call and somebody has been like, Oh, but I can do, I can get the same thing somewhere else for like a hundred dollars. a lower price and you feel like you feel the need to price match in order to close that sale.

That just means that you haven’t really understood their wants and needs on that emotional basis, right? Because all of us are willing to pay more money, even though we don’t like to admit it. All of us are willing to pay more money for something that we emotionally believe will give us more satisfaction than we will spend on something that we know is a need.

And that’s going to solve a pain point for us, if that makes sense.

[00:21:42] Mike Allton: It makes complete sense because it’s 100 percent true. I don’t know if those of you listening know enough about my history. I used to sell swimming pools and hot tubs, and this was a long time ago. This is about 10 years ago, but I used to sell swimming pools in Northern Ohio.

And the thing is, people would not come in to, our warehouse to buy a pool, they weren’t interested truly in the width of the pool wall or how high it was or how many horsepower went into the filtration system. They were buying a backyard experience, and if it was a family, right, they were also buying things like safety for their Children, you know.

You know, being able to have experiences at home, rather than having to waste time, taking them to other kinds of pools, right? There were all these values that went into the play. And the moment I understood that and was able to reflect that and communicate that in my verbal, you know, sales that was the moment I became the number one salesperson in the entire organization, right?

Because then I’m talking to these customers about what they really want to accomplish and not wasting time talking about trivialities, like, you know, That don’t really matter, right? It’s, it’s, it’s features versus benefits in a lot of ways. So that’s amazing. And let me make sure that myself and everybody listening understands correctly.

So with heyLevi, there’s, I’m assuming some kind of a process where I feed it information about my business and that it helps me to develop this really thorough target persona. Is that right?

[00:23:15] Ruheene Jaura: Yes. And so you start, the whole app is again, centered around your unique brand. So you tell it four pieces of information which are, what do you do for your audience?

What do you stand against? So really like what, you know, you always want to juxtapose, haven’t used that word in like years. I feel like, uh, you want to really compare what you do versus what you stand against. What are you really good at versus what your competitors are doing, right? And so it’s really understanding that.

What do you do? What do you stand against? What do you do that nobody else is doing? And what is that core thing that people that, that you do that they’re not going to get anywhere else. So once you can answer these questions clearly, I mean, that’s the part that we’re relying on you to actually know about your business and most of us do.

Right. It’s, it’s putting those into words and actually pulling that into all of our content that we stumble on. But as long as you can give the AI those pieces of information, it will create an entire brand narrative for you. So it will identify who your brand customer avatar is. Again, this is not as dialed in as your product level, because we’re not at a sales level yet, right?

So your products and offers, think of those as things that you’re going to sell. So your brand is not something you’re selling. That’s the experience that we’re building, right? That’s the core of who we are. So at that level, your customer avatar is this broader customer avatar. We’re still talking about there, we’re not talking about decision making drivers because we’re not trying to get them to purchase anything just yet. But we are trying to understand them in terms of social, emotional, and philosophical beings, even at the brand level. So what it does for you is it helps you identify that it helps you identify what their story is Including pain points, but really what their overall story is and how you as a brand would position yourself in that story. Where do you come in as the expert?

And how you’re going to lead them to success or that ultimate goal that they’re looking for. Now we all know a good story always comes with the fear of what may happen if things don’t go as planned. So that all, that’s also something you always want to include in your brand narrative. You know, if, if you work with us, for example, this is the journey that will lead you through, but if you don’t take action today, this is what could be at risk.

So it helps you dial in all of that and your, your colors and your fonts and all of that as well. So it helps you build all of that. That then gets saved as your brand messaging playbook in your heyLevi account. So you always have that to reference whenever you’re creating any, any piece of content from there.

When it comes to sales, now you would create a more detailed product level. Which again applies to whether you’re selling a product or service. It’s really your offer. We’re just using product a little loosely. But it’s really any offer that you offer. It’s about what makes you different, how you compare with your competitors, how your customers are perceiving that value difference between what you offer them versus your competitors.

And if you’re listening closely to this, you might be Start to see how this can also help your sales calls or sales conversations. Because when you’re trying to have that sales conversation, when you’re on a sales call and somebody says, well, so and so is giving me the same thing for like half the price.

One thing to note is that they’re there with you for a reason. So just because they’re saying that is not a clue for you to lower your price or price match. But as long as you’re clear about what that compared to offers and how you’re That’s the time when you want to present that information. And when you do that, you’re helping that customer see themselves in your story and vice versa, right?

That you’re also helping them see how you would fit into their story. And then price doesn’t matter.

[00:26:54] Mike Allton: I love it. And you know, I love that you’re working in, you know, NLP triggers like, well, what happens if you don’t? That’s fantastic folks. We’re talking with Ruheene about building terrific brand strategy and documentation and putting that into place using AI.

In a moment, we’re going to talk about how these methods compared to traditional approaches. But first let me share with you the tool that I’m using to prepare this podcast, help me with newsletters. All of my other marketing and business tasks.

This episode of AI in Marketing Unpacked is brought to you by Magai, your gateway to making generative AI incredibly simple and accessible. Wondering how to seamlessly integrate AI into your marketing strategy without getting bogged down by complexities? That’s exactly where Magai shines. It provides user friendly AI solutions that empower marketers just like you to innovate and elevate your campaigns without needing a degree in science.

Imagine having the power to generate creative content, insightful marketing data analysis, Or even personalized customer communications, all at the touch of a button. Magai isn’t just about providing tools. It’s about transforming your approach to marketing with AI that’s tailor made to be straightforward and effective.

So, whether you’re looking to boost your content creation process, or want deeper insights into your marketing performance, Magai makes it all possible with a few clicks. No fuss, no gain. No hassle, just results. Ready to simplify your AI journey? Visit Magai today to learn how their solutions can revolutionize the way you engage with your audience.

Don’t just market, market smarter with Magai. Tap the link in the show notes.

So just to draw a distinction between what you guys just heard. Magai, the tool that I’m using all the time and heyLevi, with Magai, you’re, you’re looking at a wrapper for the other large language models. It’s a blank canvas on which you can talk back and forth with them.

And that sort of thing, in order to create a marketing strategy or a brand strategy or brand story, you’d have to know what you’re doing. You still have to be able to ask the right questions and evaluate the responses and work with it back and forth. So I used Magai and Claude to develop, you know, a lot of Agorapulse’s documentation for their storytelling guidelines and so on.

But I knew what I was doing. I was aware of Tamsen Webster’s red thread framework enough to Talk to the AI about that and say, Hey, look, I’d like to compare story brand with the red thread and see what are the differences between those two frameworks. I know I want to use a hero’s journey approach with most of our storytelling, but I want to look at some other options, right?

All that information was already baked into my head with hey Levi, you don’t need to know all of that information to your point where you’re just going to answer those four questions. And that may require a lot of thought. You might need to go to some other team members and think about it, which is, which is good.

You should put time and thought into those kinds of approaches and making sure you’ve got the right information up front about who you are, who you’re targeting, that sort of thing. But at the end, you get this fantastic playbook or series of playbooks that you’re able to employ. So that’s one of the differences between an AI assisted approach and kind of a more traditional approach.

What are some of the differences that you think of when it comes to branding and it comes to like time, cost and effectiveness with its AI versus traditional?

[00:30:12] Ruheene Jaura: I really like what you just said about you know, having to know what frameworks you want to use for your use case versus not knowing. And I think this ties into both, you know, smaller business owners who don’t really know much about marketing or newer marketers, but also the more experienced marketers because as marketers, and I’ve been doing this again for over 16 years at this point, but I’m You know, I we have over 60 frameworks.

I think 70 frameworks at this point built into the app. Over 150 prompts built into the app, but that’s not to say that that is an exhaustive list, right? These frameworks are evolving constantly. They’re growing. They’re morphing into different frameworks. It’s really keeping up with what’s working today because what worked two years ago, five years ago may not be working today, or it might be.

And it’s really being aware of what’s working versus not working. And so that’s some of the heavy lifting that hey Levi takes off of you is it, you know, you’re not on the line to constantly be keeping up with you know, the latest marketing strategy or the latest prompt technique and all of that stuff.

And, you know, I’m in this, I’m in a few AI groups on Facebook and something that I saw when 4. 0 came out and then again, 2 months after it came out, which was just a few weeks ago, actually They’re constantly evolving their models, right? And to get a little technical on you here. They’re constantly trying to save people money, right?

And so they will consistently not just optimize their models, but they’ll try and pointed to cheaper versions of their models, which Is good because it’s saving you money. But the part that sucks is that when you have a prompt that is working really well with one version, it may not translate. And usually nine times out of 10, actually it won’t translate.

And then, so people will come on and be like, Hey, I have these prompts that were working great in Chat GPT. Has anyone else noticed that they’re not working anymore? And so really what you need is, you know, you need this digital team, unless you have a budget to hire an actual human team to keep up with not just marketing frameworks, but prompt techniques and all of this, right.

When you’re using AI and, and even if you have the budget to hire this big team, they’re also using tools to keep themselves more effective and more efficient. So. In terms of the playbooks that we were talking about, you know, once you build out your brand playbook, once you have all of your product and offer playbooks let’s be honest, I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever created a playbook I don’t know how often you actually use it or look at it.

We all, we all like create playbooks with the best intentions, right? They’re, they have so much good information, but actually going through it and getting your entire team on board with, you know, constantly looking at that and being aware of what it has and any updates that you make to it. That’s where the challenge comes in.

It’s really easy to make a good playbook. But it’s really hard to a, keep those playbooks updated and then be, have your entire team or even yourself. completely familiar with that playbook where it’s like that, right? It comes out in all every piece of content that you create. And so that’s also the part that heyLevi does for you.

It stores all of your playbooks. It’s easily accessible. You don’t have to go through an old Chat GPT conversation to see where you gave a context about your customer avatar to try and change it. You can simply just edit it just like you would in a Word doc, for example. And it already has that context moving forward.

And whenever you need to create any content, you just pull those playbooks in and it automatically has all of the context without you having to remind it or tweak it on the spot.

[00:33:31] Mike Allton: That’s a really great example with The Social Media Hat and this podcast as a, as a solopreneur, right? This is my side hustle.

I I’m leaning on these documents to help me. And I’m leaning on these processes to help me execute faster and stay on brand and message and so on. But that’s also one of my fears, you know, with Agorapulse and other large companies that I might work with, where we do create all this great information, whether it’s with AI or not, and we worry that it’s going to become shelfware.

Right. A document that’s just put on a shelf someplace and maybe they’ll look at it again in 12 months. Like, Oh, wow. Yeah, we did all that back in 2023. Maybe we should do something again with that. And so I love that that’s built in now. And that’s part of the process because I was going to remark earlier as fantastic as it is to have those personas and those playbooks developed.

That’s just the beginning, right? The next step is you help your reader. Yeah. Users use that information in every step of the way in terms of building a marketing strategy in the various pieces of content and copy that they’re going to have to create. But you mentioned humanity a moment ago, and I wanted to ask you about that, right?

How do we make sure that humanity continues to be a part of these processes and how do you see that evolving as you know, AI becomes more and more prevalent as part of branding and marketing?

[00:34:50] Ruheene Jaura: Yeah. I actually think that AI is here not to replace human creativity. I really think it’s here to help us be better and be more creative.

Because when you’re coming up with anything creative, right, whether you’re writing content for your business, or you’re trying to write a business proposal, whatever it is that you’re doing, there’s a there’s a it’s a mix, right? It’s a mix of research, And understanding best practices, understanding your business’s positioning, what makes you special.

And there’s the creative part of it which is how you write all of that, how you convey and communicate all of that. And so when you use AI as a tool to help with more of the logical aspects, right, which it’s great at it cannot mimic human emotion and human creativity just yet. But when you train it in a way where it does 60 to 80 percent of the work for you and then you come in with your creativity, your special sauce, if you will and add that to whatever AI is giving you, that’s really the part that, that makes the magic.

I’m not going to sit here and lie that, you know, it’s the AI that’s creating the magic for you. It’s just, Let me put it this way. I can either be like a task manager and I can get a lot of stuff done. If I have a checklist, I can spend one day and just go through my entire task list. But I cannot be creative at the same time because they’re using two separate parts of my brain.

And so where you come in is the creative part of your brain needs to be relieved of all the non creative tasks so that you can be more creative. So that you can you can bring that special sauce out in every piece of content or writing that you do

[00:36:25] Mike Allton: love that. That’s that’s a reflection of, you know, one of the use cases I’ve talked about a lot on this show, which is the show itself.

I’ve got many podcasts with Agorapulse. I’ve got this podcast on the side. I used to spend two hours researching and preparing for every single interview. And now that I’ve got a custom GPT and an assistant in the A. I to help me as a showrunner. It’s 20 minutes instead of two hours to prepare for each individual episode, which frees me to find more guests, spend more time talking to them, spend more time exploring the stories and the expertise and so on.

So that’s fantastic. I’d love if you could share a success story of one of your customers or businesses that you’ve worked with and share how they’ve significantly improved Their own brand presence using AI tools.

[00:37:12] Ruheene Jaura: Actually, I’d love to share the story of heyLevi itself. I mean, we we launched our first version of our app two years ago.

Actually exactly two years ago now it was October, 2022. And we were called iGen. We had a totally different name, totally different brand, really no brand. That was one of our, like, we’re just going to build a product and not focus on the brand so much. And so for a year we tried to sell that.

And we, we had a great, like, I would say. pilot program. We really were just looking for 10 people to use it, give us feedback. We actually ended up selling 34 of those like what we were calling pilot licenses, which were really cheap. We ended up selling 34 of those and 31 out of those 34 users actually became paying customers into the fuller version of the product when, when we launched that.

So that was great, but we couldn’t get past that. People who would come in and actually use our product loved it and they would stay on. But it was really trying to get new people to try it. And so we struggled with that for for a good part of a year. And it was only in October 2023 now. So a year ago, we decided that we really were lacking the, the brand.

And so, You know, that’s actually when heyLevi. heyLevi was just a content generation tool initially. But I really started to think about all the things that I’ve learned over my 16 years of experience, thinking I have not used any of that in this product. We were just looking at a pain point of content creation on frameworks, and we just kind of built in these frameworks and content creation and made a promptless version of this of an app of an AI app.

But we weren’t really doing it justice by really it coming from a brand strategy from a core brand strategy. And so that’s when we took a step back and I was like, okay, so me and my business partners, we were actually up till 3am this one night trying to come up with ideas. We were like, how about we do this?

How about we do that? And it was at 3am and I’m so embarrassed to even say this. But it was at 3am when I realized like, We have built all of these frameworks already into the app. So let’s have iGen at the time. That’s what it was called, right? So we were like, let’s just have iGen rebrand itself, right?

Rebrand and reposition itself. And so that’s what we did. Like we, we got nowhere that night. We had some great ideas, but we found flaws in all of them. And so the next morning I opened up the app and I just had it rebrand itself. Reposition itself, come up with a positioning strategy for itself. And we followed that entire strategy to the T.

And within that quarter, this was October, 2023. And by December, 2023, we had quadrupled our sales.

[00:39:42] Mike Allton: Wow. It’s funny because it’s almost like a a page out of the book Menagerie where it was October 15, 2023 at 4 a. m. When iGen became self aware and rebranded itself, say Levi,

but I love it. That’s a fantastic story. And to go back to our earlier point of how important it is to have humans in the loop. My last question to you is one of the ones that that Claude came up with. And I always laugh when Claude wants me to ask this question because a human wouldn’t ask it. Claude wants to know, looking ahead, how do you envision AI further transforming the landscape of brand strategy and marketing in the next 5 10 years?

And the human in me laughs at that because nobody knows what’s happening in AI in 5 10 years. We’re lucky if we can predict 5 10 years. To 10 minutes, right? I mean, things are changing so fast in this particular industry, but the, the, the gist of the question is fantastic. I’d love to end with you sharing what you think is coming next, whether it’s with your project or the industry overall.

[00:40:49] Ruheene Jaura: I’ve been seeing this one thing about AI and I wonder if it’s still relevant. I feel like it still is. And so I’m going to say it again. But when AI was like still kind of new about a year, year and a half ago, there were a lot of people that were very anti AI and there still are. And I get that. I get why.

But You know, to me, I has always been like the Internet, right? It’s brand new. And when the Internet came out, by the way, I have a news clipping somewhere, which I’ve saved, which I thought was hilarious when the Internet was a thing. I can’t remember what year this was now, somewhere around 2000 or before that.

I can’t remember. Can you imagine that we actually lived through a time when there was like no Internet? Anyway, so when that, yeah, it was way before that. Anyway, whenever that was, there’s a newspaper clipping that says the Internet is a fad.

And it’s not here to stay. And it’s really hard to believe that because it seems so silly to have and say that out loud. But this is what people believed. And so when people started saying that AI is a fad to me, it just reminded me of that. Like, it’s not a fad. It’s not good or bad. It just is. And it is how people are going to live.

And no one’s going to our next generation. My kids are not going to understand how anybody lived without it. Yeah, it’s gonna be like how we can’t imagine that people lived without the Internet at some point. It’s just there, right? But just how the Internet didn’t replace anyone. It helped a lot of us become more effective.

It helped us connect with each other. That’s really what is going to do as well. right? It’s just taking it to another level. And so when I said earlier that A. I. Is here to replace more of the logical tasks for you, but it’s not here to replace your creative side, right? We still need you to have that creativity, that special sauce, the life experience that you have.

We still need you to bring that to the table because that’s what’s gonna make what A. I. Is giving you actually resonate with your customers. They don’t want to see content from you that they could have just as easily also generated in Claude or Chat GPT. They want to see you, they want to see how you can relate to them as human beings.

And so when I think of where AI is going, of course, like you said, there’s no way to look into the future and AI is changing every single month at this point. But I think it’s really come going to come down to the way you’re using it. If you’re trying, if you’re using it and you’re trying to learn how to prompt it because you’re worried that you’re going to get become obsolete if you don’t use it that may or may not be true depending on what your business is, right?

If you’re trying to become a prompt engineer and give those services or offer those services to other business owners, that’s great. Absolutely. Learn how to prompt it. But if you have a non prompt type of business or offer a service, what you want to think about is how can you make that better by using the right AI tools that are going to help you still get to that end goal and still help you connect with your customers without like replacing you, if that makes sense.

So it’s really about how it’s going to make, depending on how you use it, it’s going to help you be more creative and actually win at the game of business, if you will.

[00:43:50] Mike Allton: Oh, a hundred percent agree. I I’ve often talked about how we’re in the fourth industrial revolution. In fact, I did an entire solo episode that I’ll link to below about how AI is the fourth industrial revolution, how that compares to the previous three industrial revolutions.

And the one cautionary tale that I want to share that’s a little bit of a pushback is that, you know, when. In the 1800s, before we had electricity, cities would use gas lamps on the streets to light people’s way, and the cities would employ gas lamp lighters to walk around at dusk each evening and light those lamps.

And when electricity replaced gas lamps. Those gas lamps, those jobs were eliminated. Those people had to find and reskill other kinds of jobs. And that is a potentiality for every industrial revolution. There is certainly a potentiality for people’s jobs to be replaced, less jobs to be needed, even if it’s the same role, due to A. I. So something to really think about to your point is, you know, making sure that you’re looking at how you can bring A. I. Into your roles every single day and upscale what you’re doing and pivot if you need to. But Ruheene, you’ve been absolutely amazing. This has been such a fun interview and such a deep dive into not just A. I. But like I said before, just really, really smart approach to marking strategy for those who want to learn more. They want to connect with you. Where can they go?

[00:45:17] Ruheene Jaura: You can find me on Facebook, Ruheene R U H E E N E. Or you can reach out on the heylevi. ai website as well. We have a little chat widget that comes straight to me.

So yeah, either way, heylevi. ai is probably the easiest way to go.

[00:45:32] Mike Allton: Terrific. Thank you so much, Ruheene. Thank you all of you for listening. We’ll have all the resources and links that we talked about today in the show notes below. And just one quick reminder, if this is kind of your first foray into AI for marketing specifically, I’ve got a free resource linked below in the show notes called the AI Marketing Primer that will help you understand what are the different language models? How can AI be used? A lot of the lingo and the jargon that you might be hearing on this show and other sources help you get that leg up that you need to stay relevant in your role from today going forward. That’s all we’ve got for today, friends. Thank you so much. And 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.

Related