3 Ways to Use AI in Your Marketing Right Now

How can I use AI in my marketing right now? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we are revisiting our good friend, artificial intelligence. We're not going to be talking about all the fun they're having over there at OpenAI, unfortunately, but we do have something cool today. Today, we're going to be talking about a few specific examples of how to use AI in your marketing to really speed up processes, improve your quality and, like usual, our main goal generate more revenue. Now we've done an AI series here on the podcast and we're going to have an extension to that series as well, but I just wanted to take a little bit of time to talk about a couple of specific examples, and today that's what we're going to do. So let's get right down to business.

When we talk about AI and marketing, we are at least right now in 2023, talking about using AI primarily in a few particular roles. So if you're listening to this later than in 2023, the landscape could look a little bit different. So right now, we're primarily applying artificial intelligence tools to assist with a few key areas, and those are decision-making, personalization, client interaction, predictive analytics and then a bunch of different content applications. And when we talk about things like decision-making and predictive analytics in particular. We're also heavily relying on machine learning. Now, we're not going to go into the details of all of that, but you should just know that not everything that glitters and says AI is always gold. Not that that's a bad thing, necessarily, but at some point you do need to have this understanding of the systems you're interacting with, because it will impact the way that you interact with the systems. So you do want to know what the balance is between artificial intelligence and machine learning with most of the software you're using. But let's go ahead and get to the examples, and first up is generative AI for marketing planning. Basically, this means using AI to make you a marketing plan or review your plan, and I actually did an episode about this and I'll put a link to that episode in this description and what I said in that episode. As of the end of 2023, that largely still stands AI is a fantastic tool for fleshing out ideas, giving you more detail on common practices in marketing and helping you understand where things fit in the big picture of a good marketing program. But Chad, gpt and most of the AI similar to that isn't particularly creative, so you're still going to have to do a lot of the legwork to fill in the details and then make that content ready to hand over to your marketing team.

So I did use Chad GPT to help write this episode. That's an example of this and it helped me define what those five key areas are where we can use AI in our marketing. It helps me come up with these succinct terms for using those examples. But then I asked it for the marketing examples that I'm actually going to write this episode about, and they weren't very good, so I wrote this myself In television. I think they call this breaking the fourth wall, but I'm going to let you in on a little bit of a secret. I'm going to keep using Chad GPT to ask it for more ideas and changes to my ideas as I write this script, and using what it says to help myself recall the variations of Chad GPT's ideas that I have actually used in practice with law firms and for myself. And even if I wasn't telling you all of this, I don't think I would consider writing this way dishonest. In general, the ideas that I'm sharing here are either my own ideas or their best practices that are usually supported by a bunch of people who are usually a lot more experienced than I am.

Okay, moving on. So, after generative AI to create marketing plans and to actually use it for content, the number two way and again these are not really in any order of priority, but the number two way after your marketing plan for actually using AI right now is for actual content creation. We can use it to actually create things. And yes, that is a little bit confusing, because I'm generally not a fan or an advocate of using fully AI generated content anywhere that Google can see it, or just or just copy pasting from Chad, gpt and your email marketing platform, and I'm still not a fan of that. I think it's bad and it's probably pretty dangerous for your business in the long run, but AI can still be hugely powerful for creating content. So let's again use me as a specific example.

I've done a couple of local SEO webinars, and if you're interested in getting access to those, just shoot me a message. Before these webinars, I had some slideshow presentations that ended up being about 30 pages each and they took a lot of time to prepare, and in the past they would have probably taken me a few days to create the idea, the format and then polish everything, but with AI we can speed things up a lot. So for my presentations I used Gamma. It's linked in the show notes and this is an AI-powered presentation creation tool, so I used this. To get started, I gave Gamma a detailed prompt about my presentation, including the specific topics to cover the tone, things like that, and I let it get to work. Gamma came back in a couple of seconds really with an eight or 10 page presentation I can't remember how many pages and it was complete with text and images and recommendations on things to edit, and I exported that out of their platform and then I used Keynote to continue working. Gamma would have actually allowed me to keep working within their platform. It does work that way and has some cool features, and they even have an AI to help you create more slides that are related to your content. But I found the whole system a little bit confusing and, frankly, I didn't have a lot of credits on the platform so I didn't want to use my credits up on their AI and I'm much more skilled with Keynote so I felt more comfortable there. But something like Keynote or PowerPoint or even Canva all of those would work.

But once I had that presentation in Keynote, I started to flesh things out further. I only had eight or 10 pages and that eight or 10 pages wasn't going to take up the hour I had blocked out for the webinars. So I fleshed things out more. I duplicated the slides so I could expand on some topics, and I reworked some elements of the design and I even created some new slides using some of the formats that Gamma had created, but sort of meshing them together in a way that I liked. And then I filled in the rest of the text using a combination of my own writing and snippets that I got from ChadGBT that I then reworked and put into the presentation. And then I filled in any other graphics I needed using Canva and I use Canva Premium so I can create things, but I can also access their stock photos and a bunch of premium features to help create new designs. Canva also has some integrated AI and I can use that to help with organization or to touch up phraseology. That maybe ChadGBT didn't give me and maybe it's a longer infographic and I can use Canva's built-in AI to help me with those.

But when all was said and done, like I said, I ended up with about 30 slides from those initial eight or 10 templates that Gamma essentially created for me, and the presentation was about an hour long, including the questions and all said. I probably only had to spend five or six hours on the actual presentation prep. I already knew all the ideas. It's just a problem of getting that from my brain into the presentation. And compared to creating a presentation from scratch, I probably saved at least 50% of the time I would have spent on that presentation and I think I retained all of the ideas and concepts I wanted to share and the design looks a lot better than if I had just worked from a template.

But let's talk about idea number three if you're still not convinced. And the idea number three is chatbots. There's a lot of buzz in the marketing world and the business world about chatbots and AI, and it's pretty well deserved. They're doing pretty cool things. Whether we use these bots as a marketing tool or if we use them as internal tools to improve efficiency chatbots that are powered by AI they're going to become a pretty significant part of many of our lives in the next couple of years. We've all already interacted with chatbots or some kind of live chat panel that's powered by a human or it has some kind of machine learning or decision tree on the back end, and these do work pretty well in some situations, like customer service, but they don't always work really well for an internal scenario and they often aren't going to be knowledgeable enough to actually improve the efficiency of your staff and save you some time. But with AI, the chatbots can get a lot deeper into our training. We can train these bots with all the knowledge that we have and that we have access to, and we can train them on all of the subjects that they're going to be talking about, so they'll know as much as we do, if not more.

There are examples of these kind of chatbots and tools that you can help build chat. Gpt based chatbots on springing up every single day, but what I'll do today is give you a specific tip on one of these tools, and that tool is Emma. I'll put the link in the show notes. Emma is kind of just another chatbot creation tool, but the way that they're building things and the markets that they're going after, they give me some really interesting ideas about where we could implement chatbots within law firms. So, just to start, you could plug in Emma to your existing business software, whether that's your CRM, your email, your calendar, your to-do list, whatever and then you can ask Emma questions something like how many clients do we have right now with open cases, or are there any clients who we haven't emailed in the last week? And you'll immediately get information that can start to assist you with sales or marketing general managerial tasks.

The sky is really going to be the limit here, and Emma may not be the best tool for some types of chatbots, especially if you need information or training for the bot. That isn't going to change like case law. But if you need an assistant that's knowing everything as it happens, then something like Emma or I'm sure there are 10 more products since I started recording this one of those tools is going to save you some time and money. And the best thing with working with these tools now is that all of these companies are in a race. They're in a race to capture users and capture revenue. It's kind of like the race we're all in with our businesses every day, but with this race, we are also going to win, especially if the company or product that we choose wins.

In a situation like this, with the AI market really hot and we don't really know who the winners and losers are going to be. Yet I definitely do urge some caution when it comes to partnering up with companies or developing some kind of dependency on their software. These companies can, and many of them will, fail and they can go away, but that shouldn't discourage you from testing this out and figuring out how you can implement AI in your practice. Today, even if Emma or whatever company you choose goes out of business or gets acquired, you'll know what you need and you'll know how to build it already and you'll probably have some data on it. And when there is a synchronizing or consolidation of AI companies, you'll already have built your roadmap for AI implementation within your practice and you'll save hours or days on switching over.

And, of course, the chat bots. Here in the example, we're getting all the same benefits we would normally get from a chat bot. We get the 24 seven service, we get the filter for our marketing funnel and we free up a bunch of staff time, which is good for our bottom line. So AI may not be the feature that really is actually the most beneficial in example three here, but, like with everything else, it's going to change the game for all of us and understanding how it works is going to be really critical in 2024. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenavertisingcom for more Thanks.