How to Use AI to Grow Your Business

AI Summary

The webinar focused on how businesses can use AI to grow, with a focus on generative AI tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Claude.
Rich discussed considerations when implementing AI like use cases, implementation, tools to use, competitor actions, customer perception, ethics, and risks.
He covered capabilities of AI including ideation, research, persona creation, content generation, meeting transcription/summarization, personalization, and pattern finding.
He demonstrated examples of using AI for persona building, content creation, SEO optimization, summarization of meetings, and more.
He recommended starting with identifying use cases where AI could help, choosing pilot programs, building a prompt library, exploring tools, and attending conferences like Agents of Change to learn more.
He emphasized the importance of having human experts involved to refine and enhance AI-generated content, not just accepting the raw AI output.
Overall the webinar provided a broad overview of AI capabilities for business growth and specific examples of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, MidJourney and how they can be applied. The key is using AI to augment human expertise, not replace it.

Transcript

Rich: All right, let's get started.

Welcome everybody to How to Use AI to Grow our Business. My name is Rich Brooks, I'm the president of flyte new media, and I'm going to be your host for today showing you different ways in which artificial intelligence can help you grow your business.

And I want to give a big shout out to the Institute for Family-Owned Businesses, which is helping us produce this webinar today. And with that, I'm actually going to turn it over to my friend Catherine Wygant Fossett, who is in charge of the Institute for Family-Owned Business, also known as IFOB, and she's going to talk about the Maine Family Business Awards before we jump in, and anything else IFOB related. So Catherine, take it away.

Catherine: Thank you so much, Rich. Thank you all and welcome. We're so excited to work with you. The IFOB is a nonprofit that helps family businesses succeed and we do over 50 programs for them, and we were excited to partner with Rich and his team for the AI program today.

Flyte works with us on a number of different things. We love working with them, and we'll attend the Agents of Change. They helped us promote our Maine Family Business Awards with their social media campaign. And we had over 500 nominations, we had 35 semifinalists, and 26 finalists. And then you come live to the show on Wednesday, October 18th at LL Bean’s new corporate headquarters, and we'll announce the seven winners.

So we'll have Maine Cabin mMsters as guest speakers, they won last year for first generation. We’ll have Amanda Hill from News Center Maine as our host, and it's a really fun night of celebration. And I hope you can come and join us you can buy tickets, or you can sponsor us if you'd like. Our new website is fambusiness.org. It's our biggest fundraiser, and it's a great celebration for family business.

And we're really excited to hear what Rich has to say about artificial intelligence. So I will toss it back to you, Rich. Thanks.

Rich: Thank you, Catherine. And I've gone to this event a number of times and it's always a great event and a great night out, and just some great networking as well. So put it on your calendar and make sure that you attend.

And Lindsey, I no longer have access to anything that I can't see on my screen. So if you wouldn't mind helping Catherine turn back into an attendee, that would be fantastic, and I'll get started with the rest of the presentation. Thanks.

I gave an opportunity for Catherine to introduce yourself. My name is Rich Brooks, as I said earlier, and I'm the president of flyte new media, we're a digital marketing agency here in Portland, Maine. I'm also the founder of the Agents of Change, which is a weekly podcast and an annual conference that we're bringing back this year for the first time since COVID, very excited about that, on October 4th and 5th. I'll talk about it a little bit towards the end. It's also a weekly podcast. And just by chance today, I dropped episode 500. That's right. We have 500 episodes of the Agents of Change Digital Marketing podcast. So if you've got a road trip coming up, now you know what you can listen to.

I'm also the ‘tech guru’ on 207, which is the evening news program here in the state of Maine, on the NBC affiliates here in the state of Maine. And I wrote the book, The Lead Machine – The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.

So let's talk about artificial intelligence. And maybe the best place to start is just by getting some definition so we're all saying the same thing. So AI, obviously short for ‘artificial intelligence’, is basically getting computers to mimic human intelligence and perform tasks like humans can.

Then there's also a subset of AI called ‘machine learning’. And this is a technique in AI that trains computers to learn and improve at tasks instead of directly programming. So the more data the machine learning model is exposed to, the more it can learn, the better it can do.

And then we've also got LLMs, which are ‘large language models’, the most famous of which is ChatGPT. But there are a lot of other ones we'll talk about as well today.

And then finally, Gen AI, short for ‘generative AI’. Which is again, the kind of AI that creates things or generates new things out of things that's already picked up from some of these data sets. And again, ChatGPT is a popular example, but Gen AI can also include things like audio, photos, images, and video as well.

AI has been around for years, so why are we suddenly talking about it now? Part of it is AI is in the news. It seems every single day, half of the news stories we hear are somehow related to AI. Either the opportunities or the challenges or talks about why the writers and actors in Hollywood are going on strike. Because a lot of it is related to AI as well. So we're seeing it in our news. We're seeing it in our inboxes.

Admittedly, I go out of my way to subscribe to a lot of AI newsletters, but even if you're not, probably a lot of the tools that you're using are telling you how they're using AI now, how they're baking it into their software, and just a lot of people are talking about AI. We also see AI in our ad platform. So Google ads, Facebook ads, almost any sort of ad platform online is using machine learning to get better at delivering your ads to the right kind of people.

And it's not just ad platforms. AI has now been rolled out to Microsoft Office. The brand name is Copilot, and we're seeing a lot of activity and a lot of interest there. And also, if you're a Google Drive user, you're probably seeing that AI has been starting to be baked into Google Drive. You'll find it in Gmail.

Just the other day I was listening in on a webinar on AI and the woman was saying she was working. I can't remember if it was Google Docs or an Excel spreadsheet, but as she's doing it, all of a sudden the AI said, “Are you trying to create a pivot table? Would you like my help with that?” So AI is really just starting to become part of all of our online tools as well.

AI is also fortified in our breakfast cereal. No, this is not true. I totally made that up. But it does feel like AI is everywhere these days. And why suddenly is it? For years AI has been there, but we've been in the backseat. AI was driving. We weren't necessarily hands on with these tools. Then all of a sudden, November 30th of last year, ChatGPT hits the market and becomes available to the public for the first time, and suddenly people are able to see just what AI is capable of.

And suddenly we find ourselves in the driver's seat, that we're actually controlling the AI, we’re interacting with the AI. Not from the backseat, but literally from the front seat. And we're in the driver's seat, whether or not we're quite ready for, as you can see in this image.

You may be wondering, why is the dash and the front windshield behind the kid driver. That's because almost all the images in today's presentation were generated by Midjourney, One of the AI tools that we'll be talking about. And it doesn't always get it right. And this was about the 17th try that I tried to get a kid driving a car. So I just decided to stick with this one. But as we'll see, there are limitations to this generation of AI tools.

Now, if we are planning on using AI in our business, there are a lot of considerations that we need to take into consideration. One is, how are we going to use AI? There are a lot of things that AI could do for us, but what one should we let AI run with and what one should we continue to do ourselves? How are we going to implement AI when we're bringing AI into our companies? It can be a challenge because there's often, depending on the type of company, there's often a few people who may not be ready to start using these next generation of tools. And I've talked with other agency owners like myself, and some of them have actually run into some struggles getting their team to adopt some of these new tools into their workflow.

So how are we going to go about it? How are we going to get our team excited about using these tools and see the opportunities for productivity and creating better final products, and not feel like their jobs being threatened?

Which AI tools should we be using? Every day I get two email newsletters that talk about new tools, and there's always five to 10 new tools a day that they're talking about. And that's just the ones that they're talking about. There are so many AI tools out there, and should you just let any member of your team use anything they like, or should you create an AI tech stack?

What are our competitors doing? If we're sitting there on our hands waiting for somebody to show us the way, are we letting our competitors get ahead of us and get some of these productivity enhancements and leaving us in the dust?

Another question is, what do our customers think about all this? Are they excited that we're using AI? Do they see it as a positive thing, like now we're using the latest generation of tools to help them? Or do they see it as a cop out, and maybe we shouldn't be charging as much because we're using these AI tools. And there may not be one right answer. It may depend on your industry, your business, and your customer base. But these are things to think about.

Should you be promoting your AI use right on your website and other marketing materials? Or is that something you should keep maybe secret or at least private until somebody asks? And then what are the ethical considerations about using AI? Because let's face it, there is a dark side to AI. And I'm very bullish, very excited as you can tell, about AI. Especially in the workplace.

But there are problems. One of the problems is bias. And I asked Midjourney, this image generator, to give me an image of a typical bank manager. And as you can see, four white males. Also, four white males who wear glasses like me. But then I said give me an image of a bank teller. And I got this image instead for women. And these women actually, at least the top left one looks like she really should be working in Vegas. And the bottom one seems to be part of an ATM. So again, problematic. But it goes deeper than that.

And there's been stories in the news, and actually NPR was talking about it this morning as well. But there's software that HR companies like ZipRecruiter or Indeed use to help match up job openings with resumes that are in their database. And these AI tools are specifically meant to be unbiased. But because AI uses patterns and data sets to find patterns, it doesn't matter how unbiased they are. If you have a company that's always hired men, then the correct candidate is likely going to be a man. And if you have traditionally been hiring white people over people of color, again, the evidence shows us that people with white sounding names are more likely to be matched up with jobs than people who have names that sound like people of color names. And that's obviously an issue that we need to be aware of as we're using these tools.

And this is something that happens in imagery. It happens in AI. And we just have to be very aware and go the extra step to make sure that we're not accidentally biasing the content we're creating, the people we're hiring, or anything else that we're doing with artificial intelligence.

There are also copyright issues. Just last week I think it was the US District Court that said that creations that are made entirely by AI cannot earn a copyright because copyrights require human intervention. Now that was one in District Court. I'm sure there's going to be counter suits. I'm sure it's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court. And in America, that's one set of laws. And in other countries, they found other things. So what are the copyright issues?

Are we going to be in trouble if we're using ChatGPT and ChatGPT was trained on pirated books? Or the New York Times, which happens to be in the process of suing ChatGPT saying you shouldn't be able to use our stories to train yourself, because now you're using copywritten material. This is a concern both from if we create something in AI, we can't claim the copyright, but also are we accidentally stepping on somebody else's copyright if we're using publicly available open LLMs like ChatGPT.

Another concern is it's sameness, and because there are so many safety features built into a lot of the common LLMs and Gen AI tools out there, they're not really edgy. And unless you start really working them and training them the right way, you're going to get a very generic output. Especially if you are just basically the person who's write a blog post on carburetors, you're going to get a very generic, very bland piece of content. That is a concern. And that is a problem if you're going to be using AI to create content for you.

There's also a lot in the news about job loss. And in fact the person in charge of Open AI, Sam Waterman I think his name is, came out and said, there will be job loss. Full stop. So he believes that AI, which he's in charge of, is going to create job loss.

Now, I think that needs to be taken into context because throughout human history, whenever there's a technological advance, people lose their job. But that technological advance often creates new jobs, often higher paying and safer jobs than the ones that were destroyed. And one of the things out there right now, Paul Roetzer, he's the founder of the Marketing AI Institute, and he said, “AI won't replace marketers. Marketers who use AI will replace marketers who don't use AI.” And I've seen the same quote for copywriters, lawyers, doctors, what have you.

So every position, every profession out there is going to be touched by artificial intelligence. And what's going to make your job safer is understanding how to leverage these tools. And what's going to make your company safer and grow, is going to be understanding and implementing these tools as well.

Another concern is data security. When we have public AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney, we can open ourselves up to sharing our data or our client’s data with the world. Because as we're using these tools, they're using us as well to become smarter. Larger companies or companies that can dedicate money and resources to it can license AI tools and keep them on a private server, which has a lot of benefits. They can train it on client data for pattern recognition, personalization prediction, but that may be beyond the current reach of many small to medium sized businesses. We don't want our important data or our client’s data inadvertently falling into the hands of bad actors.

And then there's hallucinations. And hallucinations are the official term for when ChatGPT just makes stuff up. And many of you may have heard the story about the lawyer who put together a brief and submitted it and it looked great. He had ChatGPT write the whole thing, sent it in, and the judge just happened to look up some of the cases that he was referencing in that brief and discovered they were all made up. They sounded real, they backed up his arguments, and they were 100% BS. ChatGPT just hallucinated them into reality. And that's a real problem.

If you're creating content using an LLM and it starts making stuff up, you could really get into hot water legally. You could definitely hurt people if they're following these instructions. One of the things I just saw is a lot of people are using LLMs to basically create entire books and then post them on Amazon for sale on Kindle. And a few people have done one on foraging mushrooms. If you pick the wrong mushroom, that's a death sentence. So this is something that's really problematic and something that you need to be aware of. You can't just click a button and hope AI does a really good job with your marketing or communications. You need to have an expert there to test this out.

And then of course there's Skynet. Now, not Skynet per se, but there are very smart people out there who are very concerned about AI's ability to ultimately destroy humankind. And yes, this sounds like a sci-fi novel, but they're concerned that bad actors or rogue nations or just somebody with the best of intentions will let AI go wild and something terrible and catastrophic will happen. I can't help with that. I am not smart enough or powerful enough to do that, so I can't focus on that. I'm going to focus on the parts that I can make an impact on, which is sharing what I've learned about how we can use AI to run better businesses and grow our businesses.

So with that in mind, let's talk about some of the things that AI can do. AI can help us with ideation, with research, by creating personas, by helping us generate content, by transcribing and summarizing our meetings. By helping us with personalization and by helping us by finding patterns and predictions. Note that I keep on saying “help with”. That's because the people who think you can click and post are creating mediocre content that doesn't serve their audience, won't rank well at Google, and won't close the sale. And that's not what I want for you. I want you to understand how we can use AI basically as a personal assistant to make us better and to take away some of the repetitive, mundane tasks that we can do to free us up, to do all the things we want to be able to do and provide a lot more value.

So let's talk about some of the things AI can't do, at least not yet, because things are changing all the time. I went to a marketing AI conference at the end of July, and one of the things that all the speakers kept on saying is, the AI tools that we're using now are the worst AI tools you'll ever use in your entire life. That they're going to seem quaint by comparison for tools that will come out in a year from now or even less.

So AI can't share personal experience. It can fake personal experience, but it doesn't have any personal experience itself. It can't do thought leadership because it can't create a new idea on its own. it can just mix up old ones. It can't use its imagination because it doesn't have one. It can't use emotional intelligence because it doesn't have that ability. And it can't get hands right. I don't understand that. Why can't it get hands right? If you're looking at that hand and wondering what's wrong, it's got six fingers. I don't know why we can't teach AI how many fingers a typical human has, but that seems at this stage in time to be a bridge too far.

Let's give it one more try. Yeah, still no, still not working. A lot of what I'm talking about today is going to be around generative AI, and there's some other ways that we're going to be using AI, but there are companies out there right now who are using AI in really creative and interesting ways.

One of them is actually a member of IFOB, and we work with them as well, it's Hancock Lumber. And Hancock Lumber is using AI in scanning the lumber. And I'm just going to grab something right here, so I make sure that I have it. And this is basically what it looks like. And this is what Hancock says, “In our sawmill division, our mills have invested in and leveraged artificial intelligence and grade scanning technology to grade boards and maximize the yield of each log. In the blink of an eye, the grade scanner looks at all four sides of the board and determines the solution to maximize the value of the raw material. Several cameras, lights, and lasers work to take images of all four sides of each board. These slices are then put together into one piece, and using proprietary image processing and defect detection, the board is then graded. The scanner appears to have unlimited time to see all four sides of the board and to make optimal grading decisions which are based on the solutions. Hancock inputs. Down the production line, fluorescent grade markers project down onto the pine boards”, so on and so forth. This is amazing.

In the past, it's been humans who've had to do this by hand, by eyesight. It was very time intensive. And now we've got AI that can do it in a fraction of the time, didn't wake up and have a bad day, can create consistent grading across all boards in a fraction of the time. Just one of many uses. If you thought sawmills, that's probably an industry protected by AI. No, AI is going to impact all aspects of our business.

So let's talk about some of the AIs that we're probably using or about to use. One of the most well-known categories is large language models or LLMs. And as mentioned before, the most popular one is probably ChatGPT by OpenAI. There's another one I actually use more often called Claude by Anthropic. There's LLaMA by Meta, which you can actually download onto your computer or server and run it yourself. And then Google has come out with Bard. So those are four popular LLMs, but there are hundreds more.

And another category of AI is image creation. So here you have Midjourney, which is the image creator that I used for, like I said, almost all the images you'll see in the presentation today, including this one. No, I did not paint this. I just described what I was looking for to Midjourney and this was one of the outputs that it gave me. Dall-E, which is also by OpenAI. Stable Diffusion, which is an open-source free software that you can download onto your computer and run, although there are a few instances that you can use it on the web.

Then here's an interesting one. Adobe has come out with its own image generator called Firefly. And what's interesting about this is it's been trained on all of Adobe's images. So everything that it owns the copyright for, it's using. So when you use Adobe Firefly, you know that you're protected from all the copyright issues that I referenced earlier. The flip side of this is because it's a smaller data set. It's only been trained on the images that Adobe owns the right to. It's just not as good a tool right now. Now that's going to change over time. It is problematic, but there are some nice features in Adobe Firefly that you're not going to find in other tools. So there's that.

And then even Canva. Canva has an AI tool that will generate images for you. And the nice thing about that is, if you're used to using Canva, you can take those images you've created, put it into social media or email templates that you've already created, make sure your brand colors are on top and all that other sort of stuff. Things that normally I would have to take out of Midjourney and bring over to Canva or Adobe Photoshop to play around with. Now Adobe Firefly and Canva give you that all in one place. Again, those tools aren't quite as good at generating realistic images, but they're getting there.

So getting back to some of the ways that you can use AI in your own business for growth. This is an example I found in a Harvard Business Review article. And what they were talking about is using AI, in this case Stable Diffusion, to generate ideas for new crab-based toy. And so basically they put in a prompt, and they got this, these images right here. And they sat down with the team and they're like, all right, this one could be a wall climbing toy. And this one could be a crab-based toy that launches a small ball. And this one could be a slow feeder dish for pets. So they use this just to come up with new ideas.

And I had a similar experience with this when we rebranded The Agents of Change and added three new agents, and I wanted to change the intro to the podcast as well. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to say as the intro to the podcast. And so I basically turned to ChatGPT and I said, “Write the introduction to a new movie that has six action heroes that are a diverse group of adventurers and have a slight steampunk vibe to them”, which is based on the illustration that our friend Josh Fisher did for us for The Agents of Change. And ChatGPT rose to the occasion. In a world where the boundaries between science and fantasy blur, where the gears of progress grind against the raw power of untamed nature, a band of six extraordinary heroes arise.

And so I thought that was cool. So I said, okay, write a 30 second intro to a digital marketing podcast, but do it in a similar style to your previous answer. So in other words, I'm continuing to have a conversation with chat GPT, and it remembers what I just said, “In the ever-evolving realm of digital landscapes where the lines between reality and virtuality blur a podcast arises to illuminate the path to success. Welcome to Cybermasters, the art of digital alchemy” and so on. I was like, all right, we're on the right track. Now make it about half as long, and the name of the podcast is The Agents of Change. And it went ahead and did it. Now, as it turned out, I didn't even use this version either. I ended up writing something brand new, but this gave me the starting point when I was looking at a blank page and I couldn't figure out what to do. I just basically use ChatGPT as a sounding board, somebody who I could just bounce ideas off of and get something. And then I created the introduction that we're ultimately using now on the podcast.

AI is also great for research as well. And so if you need to do some research, yes, you can Google things, but you can also talk to ChatGPT or any of the LLMs. So I asked Claude, provide me a list of Maine influencers in the food category. So if you're looking to get in front of Maine foodies, here's a list, not just of individuals, but also of some of the more well-known restaurants and other people involved in the food scene in Maine. These would be great people to reach out to if you're doing something in that industry. “Provide me a comprehensive list of health-based organizations that have annual conferences with calls for presenters.” And there it goes, look at that. The American Public Health Association, one of the largest public health conferences, calls for abstracts open in December. That's fantastic. For somebody like me, who likes presenting to organizations like that, I can just hand this off to my VA and be like, make sure that you submit me to all of these different speaking gigs.

And then I asked it, if you're familiar with Reddit, Reddit is one of the most popular discussion forums on the web and the small groups within Reddit are called subreddits. So I asked, “What are some subreddits that deal with specialty diets?” And it gives me a list of all these subreddits where people are talking about specialty diets. If you've got a product that would appeal to them, or if you just want to understand more about what their thought process is so you can create a better product for them, this is a great place to start.

Now this is one of the coolest implementations I've seen of using AI, and it's to help you create personas. And for those of you who don't create personas or don't know what this means in business, basically we create personas of our ideal client. And there's a lot of science behind this, but here's a neat little trick that I learned. And this is a video that I'll talk through, but you can see this is a screen capture on the right-hand side. “Create a persona of my ideal customer. They're an architect who's interested in bringing down the carbon footprint in their buildings.” And ChatGPT starts creating this persona. Who they are, their age, their professional experience, their interests and values, their challenges and pain points, their goals, their buying behavior, their preferred channels of communication and how we should engage with this person as well.

Now, if you've ever created personas, that's a pretty good starting point. So then I ask, “How does Alex get information about new environmentally friendly products?” There's the professional networks and associations. Then they list them, the trade shows and conferences. Alex might go to the online research. Speaking of which, what are some Google searches Alex might run to find information when they are looking to design new environmentally friendly houses? And here are literally the keywords that Alex is likely to search on. What are some of the influences or thought leaders in the industry? And here they come.

So these are people maybe I'd reach out to for my podcast or for a blog quote, or maybe I'm just wanting to hire an influencer. What type of blog posts would Alex want to read if they're looking for new insulation products with low carbon imprint? And now ChatGPT is creating 10 blog posts with kind of an explanation of what they're going to be about for it. It happens to be that I am a wood fiber Insulation company. So look at that. Number eight, wood fiber insulation benefits installation and impact, copy and paste, and I asked the question, “Create a blog post outline for that topic.” I click submit. And there it is. The introduction, the H2 tags, what goes underneath them, everything else. And this is now a framework for a blog post for my ideal customer.

Now I will say this caveat, that we don't know that this persona is right. You need to do good research into your ideal client. And the more you do, the better this becomes. And I don't think this is a perfect solution, but I think this is a much better solution than just guessing. And again, a lot of that work was taken off of my hands, done by AI, and then delivered back to me. And I could have fed it some more details to get even a finer picture, a more higher resolution picture of who Alex is and what are the decisions and how do they make them.

Another neat trick that AI can do for you is train AI to speak in your voice. And this is my dad, Dr. Robert Brooks. And I went to a ChatGPT and I said, “What do you know about Dr. Robert Brooks, clinical psychologist?” And after a little hemming and hawing, basically it told me who my dad was. And then I said, “Yeah, that's the correct Dr. Robert Brooks. Analyze his writing style.” Accessible language, practical examples, solution oriented, positive and empathic tone, research based. Absolutely true about my dad. And so I'm like, “Great, write 500 words on resilience and economic uncertainty in the voice of Dr. Robert Brooks.” And this second sentence, “Yet, it is within these very challenges that we can find the seeds of resilience, that inherent capacity to bounce back from adversity.” I can hear my dad saying those words. That is literally the kind of stuff he says on a daily basis.

“All right, what would Dr. Robert Brooks write about resilience and the state of AI?” And I love this line down at the bottom. “The resilient mind looks at the changing job market and sees not a threat, but an invitation to learn new skills, to adapt, and to innovate.” Just fantastic. And so of course, after I did my dad's voice, I was curious about my own voice. And I said, “Do you know Rich Brooks, president of flyte new media?” “Yeah, I know him.” I said, “Okay, analyze his writing style.” “You'd need to provide me with a sample.” Now, this may be your situation. Now forget the fact I have literally 2,000 articles that I've printed online. For whatever reason, ChatGPT couldn't seem to find any of them.

If this happens to you, it's not a big deal. What you can do is just copy and paste some of your articles into a document and feed it to a tool like ChatGPT. I'd actually recommend Claude, because you can do more with Claude when it comes to big data sets. Train it in your voice and then ask it, “Analyze my writing style.” And if it comes back and it sounds, yeah, that sounds like me, then you can go ahead and ask it to write in your voice. You should still be double checking all the work, but this is a way to create some content for whatever you're publishing.

Speaking of generating content, this is something that a lot of businesses are using AI for these days. You can use AI to write blog posts. Give me a blog post framework on negative keywords in Google Ads, which is a blog post we just wrote. We actually wrote it ourselves. Rachel wrote it, she did a great job, you should check it out on her website. But it basically gives me the introduction, the keyword match types, all these important things that are part of the conversation, part of a good blog post about negative keywords when it comes to Google Ads.

Now, maybe there's a section I really can't write on my own or I need some help. So write out the section on preventing overlap between ad groups using SEO best practices. So in other words, make sure that the keywords are in there. Although in this example, I didn't actually feed it the keywords I was going after, but it gives you a whole bunch of content right there that you can pop into a blog post again. Make sure you're reading it. This is why you need human experts in there because it could be hallucinating.

You can use it for social media. Write up social media posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to promote this article. And you see a whole bunch of ones right there. Okay, I didn't really love it. It felt a little dry. So let's add some more emojis and try and make it funnier. And there you go. And ChatGPT, or in this case Claude, is trying to make me happy. You can use it for emails. You are the world's greatest email copywriter, write an email that will get subscribers to click through to the article with urgency. And there you go. The subject line is “Boost campaign performance with this powerful Google ads hack”. And then it goes on to promote the article through email.

I can also use it and started using it to help me generate podcast questions. Create a series of uncommon questions around negative keywords I can ask a paid search expert on my podcast. And in here, there were a couple that really jumped out at me. How do you determine the right negative keywords to use when a client doesn't have historical search query data available? And what should advertisers do when they find negative keywords are blocking relevant queries too? How do you balance relevance with specificity? Those are excellent questions that I likely would not have come up with on my own.

And you can use it for landing pages and a million other things, too. Again, you don't want to just prompt and click and post. You want to use it as a way of getting you started. Now, if you are using ChatGPT, I want to raise an important tool that you can use. This is a Chrome plugin called AIPRM, which stands for ‘AI Powered Response Manager’. And basically it's a bunch of prompts that other marketers and salespeople have created that they found successful that you can use for free. Some of them might be at a paid tier, but you can see that there's a lot of different topics and activities that you can use these for design games, ideation, partnerships, outreach, the list goes on.

And I just decided to try one called ‘one-click Google ads target audience’, which basically helps you create target audiences for your Google ads. And I put in, one of our clients sells grass fed yak meat for delivery. And I can see we've got health enthusiasts. And it tells me the demographics, interests, behaviors, keywords, ad campaigns, and even imagery. If we're doing image-based ads as well, then we've foodies, eco-conscious consumers, and the list goes on. And this is great. It would work also for Facebook, but give me a sense of what are some of the audiences that we should be targeting that maybe I didn't think of, or maybe the client didn't think of themselves.

I've talked a lot about prompts, basically what we say to AI to get results. And one of the things that you start to use these that becomes very helpful is something called a prompt library, or a place that you can store all of your prompts. This is really great if you're in a niche industry. So you can basically start to use prompts that are very specific to your industry. It's great for brand consistency. If you have multiple people on your team working to create content, make sure that they're all using the same type of prompts. And then you can just store it in Google Drive or something similar, so everybody has access to it on your team.

So just some examples here provide a library of prompts for a social media manager that works for a minor league baseball team. And there they are just a great place to start create a spreadsheet of prompts for a busy social media manager that works for local hardware store. And you can see it's actually not just giving me a list, but put it into a spreadsheet, great.

Marketing prompts for an accounting firm. The firm is well established and works with high income individuals. It has an excellent reputation and operates in the greater Boston area. And then it gives me prompts for website copy,, for content marketing for social media, and more. So these are prompts that I can use over and over again, just tweaking them a little bit to continually get fresh ideas for content.

Now, a lot of what we've talked about so far are broad tools, but they're also specialty content tools. And these tools have been created for more specific tasks. And this is often referred to as fine tuning. And when we fine tune AI, maybe we can improve the difficulty, train it to do one thing, or we download it to our servers so we can train it up on our data so it knows our business really well. That's called fine tuning. That means it's going to get much better at that one task, but also get much worse at all the other tasks. So it's like a human, when you specialize in one thing, you have to let other skills atrophy.

So a few of the my favorites are Jasper for copywriting. If you are writing ads, Closers Copy is one you should check out. Copysmith for e-commerce, and Phrasee for email. But like I said, there are so many tools out there, I don't even really feel comfortable saying these are the best ones. Jasper is the one that I use on a regular basis. And the other ones, I'm very familiar with Phrasee. The other ones are fairly new.

Let's talk about SEO. Because for me, I love SEO, and it's a critical component of any digital marketing campaign. And I've been using AI tools to help create optimized content for a while, but AI is also poised to change the face of search engine results, which in turn will have a major impact on SEO in general. And you may have heard that Microsoft bought into open AI and now has their own tool from open AI based on ChatGPT, called Bing Chat. And you can see examples.

I asked, “If I like a hanger steak, what are some other cuts of meat that I should try?” And in these two sections, it's using the ChatGPT model to give me an answer so I don't need to click through. But the one interesting thing here is it is sighting resources, which is something ChatGPT doesn't do normally. So if I want to learn more or find out who said what, I can click on any one of those links to get additional information.

And Google has a similar tool that they've rolled out called Generative Search Experience or GSE. And here's an example how to play blackjack. And you can see that it's pulling from different articles and also to YouTube videos as well to create this content.

Now, one of my favorite tools for improving the SEO of any page or of any website is called Market Muse. And this is a paid tool, I've been using it for quite some time, and there's a lot of different ways you can use it. But one way is to use it for research. So if I'm that wood fiber company and I type in ‘wood fiber installation’, it's going to look at the top 20 results of all the pages that rank well for that search term, and then give me a list of the search terms that those pages use and how often they use it on average. So that gives me a guide on what I should be writing about on these pages and the kind of things that I can talk about. And then basically can also show me how each one of those pages do for that specific search term.

One thing it doesn't do is it doesn't take into consideration the domain ranking of that website or the expertise of that website, which is a huge factor in SEO. So this is just for on-site optimization, but it will help you create more valuable content optimized for the searches that your clients are likely to do, and then it can give me a heat map of those 20 pages as well.

Another way that we can use it is by optimizing a page that already exists. So I can grab a page on our website that's well written, but maybe hasn't been ranking very well. And this one's on Facebook ads, and I just grabbed the URL and I tell Market Muse that I want to rank well for Facebook ads and here's the URL. It pulls the copy automatically into this page, tells me a few things. It gives me my content score, which is a 19, the average of the top 20 pages, which is a 21, so I'm below average. And then the target, which is 48. And then I can see in the right-hand column, my distribution of these words. I'm using Facebook ads one to two times on this page, and the suggested is 10 or more. So I know I need to start using that term a lot more on this page. And I can go through this and make those changes right here in the document, and then upload it back to my website. And I can see in real time my score getting higher and higher. Like I said, this isn't the only aspect of SEO, but this will help you create better copy, which is obviously a major impact of SEO.

We can also use AI to create images. Here is a series of blog images that I could use. As you can see, I still am having problems with hands. Everywhere I look there's too many fingers or too many hands. This woman has her hands folded and she's got her hand on her chin. Again, AI just is not there. If you're curious to know what image or what prompt I use to create this image, it was “unhappy couple at a breakfast table with a Wes Anderson vibe”. And then the little tag there tells it to use version 5 of the software. If you're looking for images for your email, you can basically just do the same thing.

This was “rock musician with his arms raised in front of a huge crowd of ecstatic fans”. You can use it for social posts. This one, the prompt was “young girl with a sketchbook in hand wearing headphones and staring out at a rainy window, anime style”. And you might notice that this is an image that is vertical because at the end I typed in “AR 9 16” or, I want the aspect ratio to be 9 by 16. So that's going to give me something that maybe is better for Reels or Stories.

You can even use AI for logo ideas. This was “clean, simple, modern logo for a day spa”. Now, would you ever show any of these to your client or to your boss? Of course not. But again, if you're looking for ideas, this might spur you to create something brand new that's really valuable, especially if you're just staring at that blank page.

You can even do the same thing for page layout. This is, “homepage for company that sells cotton candy, color scheme is pink and teal.” Now, if I'm looking at this, this does not look like cotton candy to me. This looks like very strange cupcakes to me. But it's fine because I got the color scheme right. It gave me some ideas on layout of how I might want to lay out the page. And again, this is just taking away some of the first steps and just making it easier so I can be more productive and focus my value on the thing that matters.

If you're using Midjourney, there's ways that you can also tweak the image. So this was “hedgehog in a puffy red jacket”. And I really liked that top right image. So I can click on the ‘upgrade’ button and now I get a higher quality version of this. And then, yeah, I like this, but you know what? I want to use this as a slide. So I want to push the image so there's more space on the right so I can put words in. So I click on this image and now I get four versions that I can choose from of the hedgehog with more space to the right so I can add some text in there.

Now, if all this feels overwhelming and you're like, I would never be able to come up with the prompts that’ll make a difference for me, here's a trick whenever you're not sure what to do in AI. Ask AI. So here it is. “Write a good prompt for an AI powered image generator that will create a lifelike illustration of a young girl in an old-fashioned library setting in front of rows of books with one of those sliding ladders so she can reach the higher books, she should be faced away from us”. And then Claude comes back and gives me this. I copy and paste it into Midjourney, and this is the result that I get.

So very often we can use one tool to help us with another. Just the other day I asked Claude for some help on a framework for a blog post. I sent it over to ChatGPT. I asked it how to improve this. I took that version, I brought it back to Claude and I said, “Can you improve this further?” It did. And then I used that framework to write out a blog post. If you are using Midjourney, one of the things I always see people struggle with because Midjourney, for whatever reason, uses Discord as a platform. It's crazy, I know, but that's what they do.

And so there are so many people in each one of these rooms creating images. Sometimes you lose track of your own work. So here's a little hack for you. If you click on the inbox icon in the top right corner, you get this kind of pop-up window of all your work. And then you can just click on ‘jump’ when you see the image you want, and it'll bring you to the right place on the page.

Another neat trick in Midjourney is if you get an image you like, and maybe you want to create more similar images like it, instead of using the image prompt, which is how you first ask Midjourney for an image, use the ‘describe’ prompt. So I took one of these images I put in ‘describe’, and then it gives me four prompts that may have generated this image. And that's just a great way to see how Midjourney thinks about images, what artists you can reference, and a whole bunch of other things, again, just to get better at creating these tools.

We're also seeing more AI tools that can help us create video. This one was made with Runway, and I just put in a prompt. I think it was “man standing by on the Maine coast with seagulls in the background”. And this is what I got, slow mo. Honestly, it only gave me four seconds. It's not that impressive. Quite honestly, I can't even tell if this is just a video that it superimposed a person in. I guess that's supposed to be a seagull.

You can also upload your own images. So I took this photo of my buddy Jeff, who's making a funny face, and I put it into Runway and I press ‘play’ and I got this. And is that not creepy? That's really freaking me out, right? Is that freaking you out? So I think we're just at the beginning of this, but I even saw more tools today that will allow you to create all different types of videos, explainer videos, that sort of thing. So we're going to see all of these tools being used to help us create content more quickly, content for marketing, content for sales, and a whole bunch of other ways.

And then one of my favorite uses, it seems so basic as transcription and summarization tools like Otter, Fathom, which is my personal favorite, and Descript, are just a few of the many tools coming out right now that you can use to record, transcribe, and even create summaries of your meetings. And I am using this now on almost every client sale. Every client call on Zoom and every sales call on Zoom as well. I always ask permission before I do this, but no one's turned me down yet. And I just explain it's for note taking purposes.

Now, this example you see right here wasn't actually a sales call. I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing that in this webinar, but it was a podcast interview that I did. And you can see when it's done, I got the video recording, I've got the transcript. There's actually a search box in there. I could search, if I remember, that the prospect said something about SEO, I could go in and find out exactly what he said by searching on ‘SEO’. But there's also this button, ‘AI summary’. So I click on that, and it generates a summary of that whole call.

And the first time I used it, I was on the phone with somebody, and she was all over the place. She had a lot of different ideas. It would have been a nightmare to create notes. I used this tool and I couldn't believe how well it summarized all the major themes of everything that we talked about, including with timestamps. So I could then go find the conversation as well. And sometimes what I'll do is I'll just take these notes, clean them up a little bit and send them off to the client and be like, here's the summary of our conversation.

Another powerful way to use AI is in personalization. And here are some ways that AI can help you with your personalization, especially when it comes to digital marketing websites. It can create dynamic content. AI tools can change website content in real time based on user data and interactions. And this allows for customized homepage, product descriptions, messaging, and more. We can use it for predictive analysis, so AI can analyze user behavior and preferences to deliver personalized content, product recommendations and offers. And this creates a more tailored experience for each visitor.

Which is why I used Midjourney to generate this image, which only after I put in the slide deck did I realize this kid's vest is on the outside of his jacket, which is either a very cool futuristic fashion statement, or just Midjourney being Midjourney. Custom recommendations, customer segmentation, even chatbots. I was just testing out a new AI delivered chatbot which will read all the content on your website and other documents you feed it, to be able to have more intelligent conversations with your customers. And what we've talked about today is just a fraction of what AI can do for you.

And obviously, being a marketer, I was more focused on some of the marketing aspects – communications, sales, and the generative AI. But you saw from the example with Hancock Lumber, there's so many different ways. And one of the things that I'm starting to look into is using AI to take a look at our P&L statements to help us create a forecast for 2024.

So there's almost nothing that we can't figure out a way to use AI. So looking into our crystal ball, what comes next? How can you take what you learned today and maybe start using it in your own business? The first thing I would suggest is generate use cases. When I came back from that marketing AI conference, I told my team for the next two weeks I want you to write down every time you're doing something that's data driven, that's repetitive, that's mundane. Whether or not you know if AI can solve that problem, I just want you to write it down. So at the end of the week, you'll have a list, 5, 10, 50 different use cases. And then, let's choose some pilot programs so you can do something very similar with your own team, getting them to identify some pain points in their own workflow that AI might be good for. And then you can choose those pilot programs and maybe find the right software that can help you accomplish this.

You can start a prompt library with your team so that you can have consistent, high-quality prompts for all these different tools. You definitely want to explore the AI tools that are available to you and start playing around with them so you feel more comfortable with them.

And obviously you should attend The Agents of Change Conference on October 4th. This is our 9th annual Agents of Change Conference. We're very excited about this. As you can see, we've actually expanded our roster of agents to include AI on the right-hand side there. We have digital marketing experts from across the U.S. and Canada coming to Portland, Maine on October 4th to share their expertise on topics like AI, local SEO, paid search, Facebook ads, GA4, and a whole lot more.

Plus, on Thursday, October 5th, we've got six deep dive workshops that you can select from the topics of video, SEO, AI, Instagram strategies, Facebook ads, GA4, paid search. And these are three-hour, hands-on, small classroom workshops where you're going to be working hand in hand with digital experts to take your skill to next level. So make sure you bring your laptop or tablet or smartphone, depending on the session you're going into, because you're going to walk out of there with some real hands-on knowledge.

Now we are running a summer special that goes on right now. It actually ends at the end of August, so literally tomorrow is the last day. Tickets are $100 off for our regular conference tickets, or for our VIP passes. And $50 off a digital pass, which is great if you can't make it to Portland, Maine on those days. However, the summer special does end tomorrow. So if you're interested, grab your ticket now. Plus you can save an additional $25 off any ticket at any time if you use the promo card, “AIwebinar”, all one word, case insensitive.

So that's our AI webinar. And also when we send an email out, I'll also include it there. That's all the content I had for today. Apparently a little bit more content than I expected, but that's what we've got. And now I guess I'm going to stop sharing and see if there are any questions for either me or for Catherine, if you have any questions about IFOB or questions around the Family Business Awards show.