Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In the fast-paced world of scaling service-based businesses, the dilemma of delivery versus marketing efforts is a constant challenge, especially for those who are at the point of maxing out on their client capacity.
The need for brand relevance, consistency and awareness can feel overwhelming when a lot of your time is dedicated to delivering a transformational experience for your clients. That sparked the idea for my team and me to dive in on testing relevant artificial intelligence tools to help free up time spent on our marketing strategies.
Here’s everything that worked — and what didn’t — in the last 12 months, using my coaching business as a guinea pig.
Related: Yes, You Can Use AI for Marketing. But Don’t Forget About the Benefit of Human Touch.
Does AI diminish the human touch or authenticity of our message?
One common fear is that AI will replace authenticity in marketing. A helpful reframe here may be to see this tool as an additional instrument in the “orchestration” of your brand.
Picture this: Just as a conductor directs the musical performance or symphony, AI can enhance your song without overshadowing your unique voice and the intention of what you want to convey in the song.
The song I’m referring to is your brand message. AI is just another instrument that can be added to your marketing to spread awareness for your brand. As long as you are clear on your ideal clients, offer and core message — then the playground is yours to integrate AI creatively into your marketing.
The biggest lesson I learned in the last 12 months is that the machine output will only be as good as the user’s input. You are still the storyteller, the architect and the soul of the intellectual message.
The 3 biggest benefits of AI
1. The client-driven brand message
One key benefit is streamlining note-taking and not having to solely rely on our brains to do all the recalls, especially for client calls, events, workshops, etc.
Tools like Fathom on Zoom have allowed me to take detailed notes during calls without compromising my presence and focus as a coach. The ability to condense and generate information, summaries and insights at lightning speed is a game-changer.
From a marketing perspective, all the AI-streamlined notes can help enhance the clarity and specificity of our message because now we can use real-time data (a.k.a words sourced from our existing or potential clients) to create the most effective message to attract even more of our people. For streamlining call notes and summarizing data, consider trying Fathom AI or Otter AI.
Related: How to Incorporate AI into Your Marketing Strategies (and Why You Should)
2. Making your content more dynamic and attention-grabbing
In today’s social media landscape, capturing the attention of our potential clients is more challenging than ever as you may be already aware. Now it is more crucial than ever to have compelling sales content, email headlines and hooks that stand out.
That’s exactly what I loved using AI for in my business. AI can work around the clock (unlike most of us who need eight to nine hours of sleep) to help you craft different versions of attention-grabbing copy that resonate with your audience.
Recently, I needed help writing the landing page copy for my new workshop event, so I went to ChatGPT. I provided the context of this event, what I was trying to teach, ideal clients that I wanted to reach and allowed AI to do the rest of the magic.
The entire process took less than 30 minutes from start to finish and resulted in a 40% conversion rate for sign-ups. This would have taken me at least two hours in the past.
This type of workflow works best if you are clear on the idea and just want support in putting the structure around it. Do always trust your intuition to decide on what feels right and edit as you go to ensure it still fits with your brand voice. Your intuition (human touch) is the starter and the finisher, AI can just speed up the process in between. For this use case, check out ChatGPT or Google Bard.
3. Being everywhere at the same time (omnichannel efficiency)
As consumer’s content preferences evolve — from listening, watching or reading content, AI’s repurposing functionality offers endless possibilities for us business owners to streamline this process to reach more people on various platforms.
If you are someone who prefers to create content by “saying it out loud,” you can use a tool called Oasis AI to help you bring the audio into various formats of social content.
If you are someone who prefers to film content in a video setting, you can use a tool called Descript AI to help you add text-to-captions and cut into short-form videos to distribute to channels such as YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels or TikTok.
No longer do we need to spend countless hours editing or repurposing manually to be everywhere at once. All you need is one core content, and let the machine do the heavy lifting to help you generate 10x more out of that original piece.
Related: How to Use AI to Drive Growth and Improve Customer Interactions
The future of AI in marketing
A helpful reminder here is that artificial intelligence can not aggregate information that doesn’t exist online yet. We are still the creators and innovators.
Humans live, humans experience and humans connect — robots cannot do that. Humans will be the facilitators and the conductors of the machine. The question comes down to this: Are you willing to learn to become the best facilitator to help your business expand forward?
In the hands of someone curious, open-minded and creative, AI makes the marketing output significantly easier and faster. Welcome to the next era of marketing.
Jessica spends 12 hours a day on the internet managing security for web assets and loves her macha tea
