You no doubt have heard about artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can do all kinds of stuff for you. Us too.

People have asked me if I’m ‘worried’ about AI taking our jobs as marketers. But much like drag and drop websites didn’t get rid of web designers and prefab houses didn’t get rid of house builders, I think AI will not get rid of marketers but become another tool in our toolkit and allow us to do our job more effectively in many ways. Because let’s face it, we’re smart but we are not collective-intelligence-of-millions-of-people-and-lots-of-data-that-learns-over-time smart.

We’re hosting a pay-what-you-want workshop about using AI technology to help with marketing tasks. You should come! It’s virtual, you and stay in your pjs! 

Happening tomorrow, link below! (And yes if you can’t come live, you’ll get the recording if you register!)

In the meantime, we gathered a few useful resources to get you warmed up (they are in the presentation but just a small part). Check them out and let us know how you end up using them for your business. Nicole and the Breaking Even Team

Three AI Tools For Marketing

It’s estimated that 34% of businesses in the United States, Europe, and China have already adopted AI. And if 90% of content will be generated by AI by 2025, what’s a forward-thinking business owner like you supposed to do? Use this new technology to save your or your staff’s time on tedious marketing tasks and get ready to see more of it in the future. Here are three tools we know about… our presentation so far has 20 we’re going to be talking about so this is just a taste!

1) Autocreate Images with Dall-E 2 (Or Midjourney, the new cool tool!)Type in a detailed description (what is called a ‘prompt’ in the AI world) about what you want and it will generate an image. Above is what it came up with when I typed in “Pop art style picture of a woman with brown hair drinking coffee from a travel mug at the beach looking at the ocean”. To be fair, these were the two best ones, it gave me two weird ones too. The ability to refine/give details and feedback is key to making AI work for you so don’t try to get it all right the first time!

2) Autocreate videos with Lumen5You give Lumen5 a link to, say, a blog post you wrote and it will generate a video with images, pictures, etc. as slides. You can edit overall design like fonts and colors (free version is limited) and you can adjust designs on individual slides to create the exact look you want (ex: change out the background image in one slide and edit the text of another). Most AI technology is not completely free to use or only it’s free to a limited extent. Just because a person isn’t behind it doesn’t mean it didn’t take money to develop or doesn’t take money to maintain so be prepared to spend a little on AI to get some of your or your staff’s time back.

3) Write long form copy with Chat GPT.I asked it to “write a business review for a web development business where we had to ask for everything we needed and nag to get work done but we need to say something nice about them.” And it wrote the following:

"Working with this web development business had its ups and downs. While the final product met our needs, the process of getting there was a bit frustrating. We found ourselves having to consistently remind the team of our requests and follow up on progress. However, the developers were able to deliver a functional and visually appealing website. They are also very good in troubleshooting."

Pretty good! And that summarizes what AI is right now in 2023 — the technology is pretty good… but you still need a human being the project manager and creative director of the marketing work.

We see AI as taking away the more tedious tasks for marketing and allowing us to use our time for client work to be more creative and look at large scale marketing operations more closely.

Note: we do want to be careful as it is unclear who ‘owns’ what is generated by AI… the laws are not caught up with the tech just yet. So if you want to copyright something, do it with your brain but if copywriting doesn’t matter (ex: generating ideas or helping you write an email), this is where AI can shine.

Tasks for AI:

• generating higher performing ads

• generating multiple versions of the same ad

• rewriting short format and long format copy (if can even use different copywriting frameworks to do it!)

• summarizing meetings, videos, or other long form content

• editing content to be in a different tone (or for grammar)

• generate a first draft or outline of long format marketing materials like an email or blog post

• Much much more!

Sign up for our upcoming AI in Marketing Workshop

Other Fun Stuff On The Internet

If a monkey takes a photo but the photographer set up the shot, who owns the image? It’s one of the cases in court right now that might affect who owns AI produced content

A completely self-serving article about why you shouldn’t cut marketing during a recession (that also has some very valid points)

Every Official (and Non-Official) Holiday for 2023 - Fill up those social media content calendars!

What does and doesn’t affect SEO? Here is a definitive list of what Google does (and does not) care about.

Data versus storytelling? Nah, you can combine them for even more effective content.

 We do free consultations. If you’re thinking of doing something new with your marketing, schedule one!