Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why My Marketing Career Needed AI—and Yours Does Too
436 Plays5 days ago
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez shares his journey from marketing automation to AI-driven marketing. He discusses his early experiences at Sweet Fish Media, Element 451, and Social Media Examiner, and how he recognized AI as the future of marketing. Dan breaks down his 30-30-30 framework for mastering a subject, reveals his automated podcast production workflow, and explains his AI-assisted book-writing process. If you're a marketer looking to streamline workflows and harness AI for growth, this episode is packed with actionable insights.
My Favorite AI Tools:
- ChatGPT - https://openai.com/
- High Level Marketing Platform - https://danchez.com/highlevel
- AI Podcasting Tools - https://danchez.com/podtools
Resources Mentioned:
- Social Media Examiner - https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/
- Sweet Fish Media - https://sweetfishmedia.com/
- Element 451 - https://element451.com/
- N8N (Automation Tool) - https://n8n.io/
- Suno AI (Music AI Tool) - https://suno.ai/
- Zencastr - https://zencastr.com/
- Marketing Experiments (Flint McGlaughlin) - https://marketingexperiments.com/
- Keap (Infusionsoft) - https://keap.com/
Timestamps:
- [00:00] - Intro: Dan Sanchez's background and marketing journey
- [02:00] - The "Ultimate Marketer" moment at Infusionsoft
- [05:30] - Podcasting, social media, and the Sweet Fish Media era
- [10:00] - The pivot to AI: Why Dan bet big on AI marketing
- [17:00] - The 30-30-30 framework: How to become an expert fast
- [24:00] - AI-powered podcast automation: The workflow breakdown
- [33:00] - Co-writing a book with AI: Process and best practices
- [41:00] - The five types of AI marketing and their impact
- [45:00] - The future of AI marketing: Trends and opportunities
Recommended
Transcript
Documenting AI Marketing Stories
00:00:00
Speaker
Every journey into AI marketing is unique. And this podcast has been me trying to document that story. But even then, I forget to share a lot of the important elements that happened before and during the creation of this very podcast.
00:00:13
Speaker
And I wanted to share that story in a more robust way because I find that stories have lots of lessons. It's the reason why I like to even read biographies of famous business leaders because there's so many business lessons in it you tend to remember it more.
00:00:26
Speaker
So I wanted to share an episode of that I just recorded on another ai marketing podcast called the AI Marketing Case Studies Podcast with my friend Fernando because he did a good job of asking questions to pull out all kinds of interesting parts of the story as well as some tactics that I'm using on this show that aren't AI related but are really helpful and I think you'll be very fascinated in what I'm trying to do with this podcast.
00:00:47
Speaker
So take a listen.
Dan Sanchez's Background and Career
00:00:49
Speaker
Hey everybody, once again in another fun episode of the AI Marketing Case Studies Podcast where we interview marketers doing really innovative and creative things with AI. Today I'm very privileged to have Dan Sanchez who is an AI marketing consultant, creator. He does a lot of AI stuff with Social Media Examiner. he has his own podcast called the AI Driven Marketer.
00:01:14
Speaker
He has worked with Sweetfish Media with James Carvery. want to We'll learn a little bit about that in the process of the interview. Where are you where where do we find you today, Dan? Where are you located?
00:01:26
Speaker
Near Nashville. Near Nashville. Okay, perfect. And I am actually in a Starbucks at Carrethano, Mexico. Long story. But this was the only makeshift studio I could do deal with right now and not the standard one where have all the perfect lighting and setup, etc. So if you hear ambient sound of all the jazzed up coffee goers with their caffeine and their brownies, you'll know what it is.
00:01:51
Speaker
So Dan, just for a little context for the listeners over here, run us through a little bit of about your background. So you you have a A pretty good experience there with marketing and with podcasting, et cetera. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today from your start in this world of marketing.
00:02:10
Speaker
I mean, like most marketers, I kind of stumbled into marketing. Like who who goes to school and thinks I want to be a marketer when I grow up? I literally just wrote a kid's book about that. so I needed more kids to know, at least my kids. But I stumbled into it from the art and design and kind of web design and again into digital marketing and it became full-blown marketer.
00:02:28
Speaker
And there was a time early in my career where I was at a a conference for a software called Infusionsoft. And they had this competition called the Ultimate Marketer. And they were doing these crazy automated campaigns, but they weren't graded just on like how much revenue they got, but the creativeness of it, had the efficiency of it, time savings. And I was i remember seeing this competition once.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I remember it was like a pivotal moment for me. So I was like, man. i I want to be that. I want to be the ultimate marketer. And something inside me when I was in my early 20s was like, i that's that's my calling. this I am going to be the marketer's marketer and I'm going to master all things marketing.
00:03:02
Speaker
So I did. And you know you take it a channel at a time and I went really deep on every single channel. until I had only a few left. And the funny thing was, is podcasting, like we're talking now on a podcast, it was one of my last channels. And that's where I ran into James Carberry, like you mentioned before, at Sweetfish Media. It's the largest B2B podcast agency in the world. And he saw the other marketing goodness I was doing. And he was like, dude, you got to come join my team. you are You are running circles around all these other marketers. And you're really you're not just good at one thing. You're good at all this stuff.
00:03:33
Speaker
Like that's our audience. You got to start getting up out there. And I wasn't even posting. I wasn't doing anything. I was like, oh, okay. I thought everybody did everything. He's like, no, bro. Like I've interviewed a lot of marketers. You got to come start talking about this stuff that you're doing. Cause I was crushing it at us at a private university and we tripled enrollment and we automated everything. was cool.
00:03:52
Speaker
But he pulled me in to start talking about marketing and got me started on LinkedIn and got me started on his podcast, B2B Growth, and taught me the ropes. That's where I really like... i think social and podcasting were like the last two big games I hadn't really mastered yet.
00:04:06
Speaker
And he fast-tracked me on that. i I picked up a lot of podcasting and did hundreds of podcast episodes and then did really well on LinkedIn because I had i didn't realize I had a lot to share after hustling, after...
Embracing AI in Career
00:04:17
Speaker
You know, when you find that core motivation, you know, that like lights a fire in you and you wake up 430 in the morning, enough mornings to learn how to do the thing and then practice it during the day, end up, you end up I'm picking it up.
00:04:29
Speaker
And then recently it's just been AI because i so I saw the writing on the wall maybe a year and a half ago and it was just obvious. I'm like, this thing's going to take over everything. That's it. I'm putting all my chips in.
00:04:41
Speaker
ai' is the thing. I'm starting a whole podcast about this. I'm reading every book I can find about it. I'm talking to every person who's doing anything cool with this on my show to learn everything I can. so I'm in full learning mode trying to get everything I can about this now.
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, i was actually looking at your podcast on Spotify and your first episode was December 4th, 2023, which was, you know that was pretty early on. Actually, I started meetup in Austin in June of 2023.
00:05:12
Speaker
called the marketing automation and AI meetup. And then Sharon DeCaro joined me as the co-organizer and now she's runs it. But that was really at the beginning of of this AI stuff. And December, I would say that that time from like about, you know, April, May, June to December of, 2023 was those really early days. I think that you were very prescient. You were very you were you were at the right time to launch your you know the AI-driven marketer podcast during that time. so but i
00:05:42
Speaker
yeah After Sweetfish, I joined a tech company and that founder had the vision. Immediately once ChatGPT came out, he like changed the whole roadmap for his product and got all into AI in spring of 2023.
00:05:59
Speaker
Following along with him, and I wasn't at that company long. It was called Element 451. It's a higher ed CRM and education company. But they were doing incredible stuff with AI way ahead of everybody else. And I think getting a vision from there.
00:06:11
Speaker
And then it still took me a few months for it to like simmer after I left that to figure out like, oh my gosh, this is going to be everything. Well, you but you know, before we get into the AI, which, you know, obviously this is the AI marketing case studies podcast, but, you know, from what you talked about, you know, how you decided, you know, all of sudden that you wanted to be the best marketer out there, it was at this FusionSoft conference, which now is Keap, right?
00:06:34
Speaker
That's right. But their complex automation, you know, slash CRM tool, et cetera. you and And then when James Carberry invited you to join Sweetfish Media, you know, that was when you'd said you were going to learn, you were learning social media and podcasting. So you essentially learn the complicated stuff first. And then you went into the stuff that was like, I guess, you know, on the surface, seems pretty straightforward. don't man. media is very complicated.
00:07:01
Speaker
The logical stuff of automation and direct marketing, much more straightforward. That's why, like, Ogilvy, like the OG marketer from, like, Mad Men era, he's like, I wish every marketer would start as a direct marketer first.
00:07:14
Speaker
I wish every marketer would be like Lester Wonderman, who was like the father of direct marketing. He's like, you need to start with that as the foundation. That's what I did. I Flint McLaughlin from Marketing Labs. No, not Marketing Labs. Marketing Experiments was kind of like the guy who taught me how to think like a marketer. His very direct marketing approach, maybe split testing, lots of value propositions and all that kind of stuff.
00:07:35
Speaker
Doing paid media, AdWords, SEO, inbound, drip sequences, lead magnets, and all the all the marketing automation, even phone call and inbound call center stuff, like all that kind of stuff was like as complicated as that is.
00:07:51
Speaker
Social media is harder. Like at least I can set that stuff or get it and split test it logically and just find winners all the time. But in social media, great, you have a winner. Well, you got to start again the next day. That's hard. It's a the creative skill in that, I think. I can see why it went last. If podcasting's on the other side, is I think is one of the easier ones. so The secret tool that I think most people don't understand about podcasting is that you think it's a content game.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I'm like, like it is and it can be. and But you know' if you haven't done podcasting, you really don't understand that it's the relational game that makes podcasting like oh absolutely worth it, even if you get zero content out of it.
00:08:31
Speaker
Because you'd be surprised how many people you can show up. Even authors of your favorite marketing books will say yes to being on your podcast, even if your podcast has nobody on it. It doesn't really matter. There's something about this like co-creation. and This is what I learned from James Carberry. He wrote the book on this.
00:08:46
Speaker
topic of I have the book that he wrote. You have the book so you know. Yeah. Yeah. Content-based networking. Yes. Content-based networking. It's so funny because when he coined that term, it was about maybe two or three years ago or something. He was talking about category design. I guess he had kind of come across the category pirates writings, you know Chris Lockhead and Eddie Yoon and all that kind of stuff.
00:09:10
Speaker
And I thought that was brilliant. I thought, damn, that's That's really, really cool. And i actually, he started practicing this thing where he would go to different cities and and have these networking dinners, right?
00:09:24
Speaker
You know, with people that had found him through the podcast. I went to one of them in Austin. I'm like, you've rubbed shoulders with James before when you started talking about the dinners. That was pretty before I even joined Sweetfish. I'm like, you go back when you've known Sweetfish for a while.
00:09:40
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Well, that's cool. you You've you sort of had a very high pedigree of education in the marketing space. But let's get into your you're your light bulb moment with AI. So you were, like you said, you were working at Element 451 where the founder really was doing some advanced stuff with ChatCPT way back, you know, as far back as, you know, you you started working there March of 2023.
00:10:07
Speaker
But what what, so from that point, when you were working there to your podcast, when you launched it in December of 2023, maybe you launched it, you
Focusing on AI Marketing
00:10:18
Speaker
started it before then, but your first episode hit, 2023, what was but you but triggered that? What happened in your mind?
00:10:26
Speaker
to to make you decide to go whole hog into AI? You know, a lot of good things come out of really hard seasons. And that was a really hard season for me. I left Element 451 on okay terms, but like they they pivoted. They hired me to grow an audience. They ended up letting me go and then just acquiring the audience rather than growing it in-house.
00:10:44
Speaker
So that's fine. But then I was forced to go solo and it was a rough transition. I ended up trying, like most people, when you're forced to, you're like, well, had enough people saying like, Dan, now's your time. you've You have an audience on LinkedIn. You should be able to make this work. And i was like, at the time, I was really trying to build a niche for myself around audience growth.
00:11:03
Speaker
And sometimes you go to market with a thing, with an idea, and find out that it just doesn't work. and it's not because the method doesn't work. It's not because you don't know how to do it. It's because people don't want to buy it.
00:11:14
Speaker
And as was that was the thing I heard over and over again. It's like, hey, costs too much. It takes too long. And the ROI just doesn't come back fast enough. And I was like, you know, it is a long game. Oh, and it just took too much time. So i was kind of like, all right.
00:11:28
Speaker
Well, you know, after pivoting and trying out multiple things over and over again, that was in that season of December. I was like, man, I'm i'm making it. I got some podcast clients. I got some marketing automation gigs.
00:11:40
Speaker
I'm making it, but dang, this audience growth thing isn't working out. And that's when I was like, you know, this AI thing, I don't think I can make money on this right now. It's freaking early. But that's when you start wrestling with like, what do I want to be about?
00:11:55
Speaker
Every marketer knows you have to find a lane. Even if you you're you know all the channels, it doesn't matter if you're how good you are at all the channels I found out. What matters is you're remembered for something.
00:12:06
Speaker
When someone says, you can't just be passed around as a normal marketer a normal this or a normal that. You have to be known for one thing. And I'm like, this AI thing has to be it. i am I feel it. i and like My spidey senses are tingling.
00:12:20
Speaker
remember having that feeling about marketing automation when I first saw Infusionsoft back in 2012. And like, everything's going to be like this. This drag and drop journey builder thing, this is going to be everywhere. And it did.
00:12:31
Speaker
remember feeling it about 2010 about WordPress. Or maybe it wasn't even earlier. I think it was 2010. eight 2008 before wordpress was like the full-blown cms this the blogging platform i remember trying to build websites i was becoming a web designer and was like drupal joomla wordpress i'm like this wordpress thing this is special there's something about this and now it runs like 45 of the internet i remember i remember feeling it about tiktok before it blew up i didn't pay attention to it though i'm like man this thing's gonna blow up some people are gonna make a lot of money off this thing it's not gonna be me though
00:13:05
Speaker
So I've seen it, I've like, I've felt this thing so many times and I'm like, AI, I'm feeling it now. This is the moment. Yeah, I started getting into WordPress in 2007, kind of around around the same time time you were doing it. But no, that is that is really cool. It's like being known for that one thing, you know, and just kind of dedicating yourself to that. and And just a comment about, you know, getting out there into the field and figuring it out. Like you you first started to to talk about audience building but it but you realize that there really wasn't a market for your content.
00:13:37
Speaker
And then, you know, you kind of fit you pivoted to to ai You know, that first of all kind of harkens back to the, you know, the whole lean startup methodology that Eric Riesh talks about. And it also goes to something that I just saw recently, you know, was Lorne Michaels, the founder and and manager, CEO of SNL, talked about how,
00:13:57
Speaker
You know, that he didn't have any grand vision for us. And now they just went out and started doing it. Right. had an initial idea and they developed. They started developing all the themes and all the new you know things that are that they're famous for just by getting out there and the field and doing it. So, i you know, my comment to you is I think that you wouldn't have figured out that AI was the thing you had to do unless you until you had started going out there and trying to make a name for yourself after the kind of disappointment and low point of, you know, of your last appointment.
00:14:26
Speaker
I mean, some of us call that providence, but I look back on it. I'm like, man. It was really good that I hit that point because now now I'm glad that it forced me to really think about it, start investing in AI early.
00:14:36
Speaker
And I wouldn't even say AI hasn't matured yet. We're still on super early days, like super early. I'm glad I get to pioneer now pioneer it with Michael Stelzner, social media examiner, because he's also seeing the writing on the wall saying this is going to take over everything. And we've talked multiple times and he's like, this is really early. It doesn't have the feel of when social media was like really starting to like peak and social media examiner took off. He's like, but it will.
00:15:00
Speaker
And which is why I decided to work with him because obviously he's got much larger audience and way more resources. I'm like, I'm going to run with you on this one. He's like, I could go solo, but I think it'd be better if we did this together.
00:15:10
Speaker
So I want to, there's so many things I want to ask you, but you know, there's two general directions I want to go in. I think want to start off with, With your podcast, did you just did you just start experimenting with AI and then talking about it?
00:15:24
Speaker
So i want to talk about that, about sure about the the you know how you got the content of your podcast. And then I wanted to talk about how you're using AI personally within your whole marketing process. But let's talk about the but the podcast. Because the latest episodes you have is you know Customize Yet, GPT's Instructions and Memories Now to 10x Your Work Later.
00:15:42
Speaker
Open AI Operator, Three Many and the Need for Marketers to Lead, and then co-writing a book with AI. I'll have to talk to you about that as well because I've actually co-written three books with AI. One is my own and and two for some clients that I ghost wrote for. But let's get into like the you know how you're coming up with the content for your podcast.
00:16:02
Speaker
When I was working for Sweetfish Media, one of the top marketing topics that was new to me, because B2B was kind of new to me when I entered Sweetfish. And I had to, there was a few topics that I needed to learn everything about in order to understand B2B.
00:16:14
Speaker
One of them was account-based marketing. had to learn everything about that. And then another big one was thought leadership. I'm like, ooh. And there was something about it. Maybe it's because I'm like that INTJ, Myers-Briggs, like Enneagram 5 with the wing 4. And something about that was just really appealing to me. I'm like, this is interesting.
00:16:33
Speaker
You mean there's whole groups of marketing that just get like the whole idea is putting out original thinking and ideas and leading people's thinking. I'm like, that's the idea behind thought leadership. I'm like,
00:16:44
Speaker
So I went and read every book I could find on it, looking for a process and how to essentially become a thought leader. or how to i hate calling it that, but like it's still the appropriate term for it. You can call it authority marketing.
00:16:56
Speaker
You can call it point of view marketing, whatever it is. It's thought leadership. So I wanted to learn more about it. I had a hard time finding a process of what one would do in order to do that. So I ended up viv inventing one in the in the process of trying to figure it out.
00:17:09
Speaker
That became a really helpful thing for me that I now apply to AI and I call it the 30-30-30 Okay. Because every time you, if you want to become known for something, you don't have to become an expert. You don't have to be an expert in it right away.
00:17:21
Speaker
But if you start as a student and do the 30, 30, 30 plan, you could be gain authority of over and over time. And that's what I'm trying to do with AI marketing. It is 30 books, 30 interviews, 30 blogs.
00:17:33
Speaker
Okay. Whatever topic you're trying to dive into, go and read every single book published on the topic. If there's more than 30, Then it's too big of a topic. Niche it down further.
00:17:43
Speaker
Most topics like subtopics is like within marketing. There's probably only 10 or 20 books on it. I promise because I've done this multiple times with multiple subjects because I'm a nerd. You could see a bookshelf behind me. I read a lot.
00:17:55
Speaker
I've done it with multiple topics of marketing. I love it. And Thought Leadership had about 15 books. So I went and read all the books on Thought Leadership. Like every one, even the unknown ones, even the ones that were like cheap throwaways that nobody buys. I bought it.
00:18:06
Speaker
I read it. You'd be surprised how fast you can read a book when you're reading them all on a very small topic. Because each additional book after the first three only has an incremental amount of new information.
00:18:17
Speaker
So the ability to skim through them and just look for the new parts, very fast. So it's very... And this is... The people are like... Some people definitely listen to this being like, 30 books? I haven't read 30 books in my life or something after since college, you know? I'm like, I promise it feels more like reading six books or five or six books. And what's that in a course of a year?
00:18:36
Speaker
Not much. So if you know everything that's been published on it, then you have a pretty good understanding of the field, which builds into the next one. Do 30 interviews with people who really know what they're talking about on the subject.
00:18:46
Speaker
Probably call and interview some of the authors you've read. Right. You're going to be able to go way deeper, actually yeah having real substantive conversations with the people who actually know stuff. And after you've read all those books, you're probably gonna have some questions. You're probably going to be able to go deeper than you would have in those interviews before because you've wrestled with the material.
00:19:02
Speaker
And then you need to publish some information. You need to actually like work through it. And I really like the process of like just answering questions. questions that people have. In fact, I like ranking for SEO. SEO was one of the games that I played that I was pretty good at for a while. So I know the process of finding the keywords people search and writing authoritative blog posts on the topic in order to get ranked.
00:19:20
Speaker
Write those blog posts, even if they don't rank. If you just try to answer those questions really well, you really master the fundamentals of reading all the information, interviewing the experts, and then answering the most frequently asked questions on topic.
Innovations in Podcasting
00:19:32
Speaker
And you do this all out and kind of like post about it on LinkedIn while you're doing it, being like, oh, I read this book. Here's what I learned. Oh, I just talked to this person. Here's what I like. Hey, I just read a blog post or a blog post about my journey into thought leadership.
00:19:43
Speaker
Here's what I learned. Here's how to become a thought leader on LinkedIn. All of a sudden, after some time goes by, people are going to look at you and be like, hey, dance Dan knows some stuff.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, When you actually have some original thoughts to offer, people are going to listen. And then thought leadership. So that's essentially been my process for LinkedIn. And why... and there's Unfortunately, there's no not a lot of books on this topic. As they come out, I read them.
00:20:08
Speaker
But why i use the podcast in order to learn. Now I do less interviews, though I still will do some in the future. But I'm now publishing more solo episodes as I wrestle with things and experiment with the AI tools myself and publish my own findings via the podcast.
00:20:23
Speaker
So when you, read when you interviewed these 30 people, was this for your podcast? Trying to take it through. It was about 30 between 20 and 30, the 30, 30, 30 is like, there's nothing magic about the number, but it does start to put into perspective, like more than five.
00:20:38
Speaker
Yeah. Like two dozen. and and Like, yeah. Yeah. And it almost feels like as though, especially if you like read the 30 books and interview the 30 people, it's almost like an accelerator for the 10,000 hour rule that, what's his name, came up with. The one who wrote Malcolm Gladwell.
00:20:55
Speaker
malcolm gladwell You know, it's almost like an accelerator for that. I actually love the 30-30-30 rule now that you mentioned it. Okay, well that's well, that's very cool. So tell us a little bit about how you're implementing AI in your own marketing processes. If you're, you know, like, for example, I know you collaborate with or you work with Michael Stelzer over at Social Media Marketing World.
00:21:18
Speaker
how you apply it over there. One thing that I've been working on for a long time is trying to figure out how to like speed up this whole podcast production system. So I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. And I've only recently, I figured out how to automate a lot of the pre-production in a really cool way. You could check out myshowrunner.com. I built a custom GPT. was one of the first things I did. I did it as a collaboration with Susan Diaz, who was talking about to me about her chat GPT pre-production process. And I was like, huh. And then over a weekend, I flipped it into a custom GPT and we both worked on it, made it better.
00:21:48
Speaker
So if you ever want to see that, I released the instructions for it so you can just totally copy it, rip it off. And I i promise, like if you haven't done a custom GPT yet, go to myshowrunner.com. Just read the instructions. It's very clear what it's doing and you'll learn how a custom GPT works.
00:22:02
Speaker
And this is a really robust one that I find get a lot of value. It speeds up the whole pre-production process. I use it for every interview I do now. But now I'm like trying to interview, trying to automate the whole post-production process. Hence, like why before we jumped on this call here, I was talking about how I use Zencastr, right? It's a more automated podcast recording and then post-production. Do I can publish the episode? But now I'm building a whole automated workflow so that it can take the podcast because i i run a video podcast, the video feed actually plays the video on Apple and then take that feed and then automatically grab the video from it and the title
00:22:36
Speaker
and upload it to YouTube, crop the square podcast thumbnails, upload a unique thumbnail for every episode, crop it, upload that thumbnail image, take that YouTube video video or actually take it transcribe it.
00:22:50
Speaker
So I have the transcription, turn that transcription into a blog post, put that blog post in my WordPress site, embed the YouTube video went into it, that becomes the header for that blog post. And then actually take it and run and scan it with ChatGPT again for the transcript and be like, here's three unique ideas. Then turn each of those unique ideas into a bunch of social posts.
00:23:11
Speaker
Right. So three unique posts per episode. and they just trickle out over time across most of the social networks. And that just runs on autopilot now. Every time I publish an episode, bam, bam, bam, bam bam bam bam done.
00:23:24
Speaker
Now I still have to, before publish the social posts, I do have to look at those and tweak them a little bit. I haven't crafted a prompt so good that I don't have to like test it a little bit, you know?
00:23:35
Speaker
So on Airtable, I just have a little button I push when it's approved and then it takes it the rest of the way, but. You know, that used to take a long time. The next part I'm still working on is the newsletter. I want to integrate it so it pulls specific episodes, only certain episodes, has a little filter, and then pre-drafts it into the newsletter where I can then upload the images and send it out because I struggle to get the newsletter out every time, even though I literally have a whole podcast series.
00:23:59
Speaker
That's I literally record it so that I can repurpose it as a newsletter. But, you know, you improve these things over time for a social media examiner. I do a lot of little I do a lot of social media, of course, it's social media examiner.
00:24:09
Speaker
And I've built a lot of custom GPTs and projects just to speed things up. I have a series I like every time I come up with the social post or a video like you got to write all the captions for it.
00:24:20
Speaker
And you got to write different captions for different platforms because they all they all want something a little different, different lengths, different types of hashtags, no hashtags. URLs, LinkedIn bio. There's all these little rules for every social platform. So I'll upload a single social post or maybe the transcript for a short form video, drop it in something like a social media post writer. And it's just like, bam, bust them all out.
00:24:41
Speaker
base here's the Here's what you need to write for Facebook, X, for LinkedIn, for TikTok. And it just gives it to me. I post them into Google Drive and send it off to the editor just to double check, make sure didn't do something dumb.
00:24:51
Speaker
So it's a bunch of little critical processes like that that I use to automate workflows. I haven't really started digging deep into Social Media Examiner and starting to build like my podcast production workflow, but we actually have a really technical guy on staff that's that's building some of those more sophisticated automations. He's much better at it than me. So I'm like, I'll let you handle that.
00:25:10
Speaker
I do a lot of education for their AI business society though. So that's where I get utilized the most. Well, let's I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into your podcast production, your automated podcast production process. That whole thing that you mentioned is just, it's earth shattering.
00:25:27
Speaker
And I don't say that lightly. It's like, that's what I need for this podcast. Every podcast needs it. yeah I haven't published my whole workflow on it yet, though I started teasing it and because I'm still in the process of like perfecting and getting it up there and running it, running through it multiple times in order to make sure that it works right before actually like, hey, say, hey, this is it.
00:25:46
Speaker
I've been trying to work on this particular problem for almost a year now because we all like, I don't know, you have a podcast. We all know that the distribution of the podcast is everything because podcasts have almost zero discoverability.
00:25:59
Speaker
If you don't rank for some kind of keyword, Like B2B marketing, like B2B growth does for Sweetfish, right? they That's how they grew. People were searching for B2B marketing. B2B growth came up first. It was one of the first ones in there. You know, like that's the only discoverability you get in podcasting.
00:26:13
Speaker
So you have to repurpose it for social. You have to get it onto YouTube. You have to do all these things. And I know it's a massive problem for most people. And I've been trying to work on it. The problem is like Zapier can't do it. Make.com can't do it because the the video file is too big.
00:26:26
Speaker
You can't, write it's really hard to automate video because video files are gigabytes big, especially like this interview. This will be like three gigabytes worth of video once it's, even once it's compressed and finished.
00:26:37
Speaker
So I did find a program that does do it and it's nn.io. Fantastic little software. N, like the letter N, eight, the number, and then N, the letter again. It's stupid name. It's definitely named by some developer that didn't have any sense for marketing. But you know what?
00:26:55
Speaker
They built an awesome product, so here I am talking about it. Right. so So that's your, it's like you're a replacement for Zapier or for make.com, right? Yep.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yep. I don't use Zapier or Make.com because I just, Zapier is like stuck in the past. And Make, so many people are using Make and I just felt stupid using it. I'm like, I can't get anything to work in here. I feel like an idiot and I'm pretty good at this stuff.
00:27:18
Speaker
I didn't realize how bad Make was until I talked to that technical director at Social Media Examiner and he felt like an idiot using it. I'm like, dude, if you feel like an idiot, like Make broke in This is dumb.
00:27:30
Speaker
And I feel bad slamming make, but I'm like, dude, like it really is a struggle to get that thing to work. And I will say NAN is hard. Like this stuff's hard. It takes me an hour to three hours per node, which is all the little automation things that you set up to hook this and it goes to this and it goes this. It takes me a long time to set up each one, but I can actually do it.
00:27:51
Speaker
It actually, as time goes by, it gets longer and it gets better. I couldn't get it done. Wow. So, so, so you record the podcast and I know off camera, we we were talking about how with, with, within Zencast, right. You know, I use Riverside over here with Zencast, or you can kind of do some edits, you can do some automations to take, take, take out the ums and the ahs and the, trip you know, the, the uncomfortable pauses or what have you get rid of ambient noise and then you can upload it and then it could go to all the different podcast platforms. But like at what point or, or like,
00:28:24
Speaker
So like, what would you use an end for in that process? So, cause you want to, are you creating video shorts? on podcast exist You don't use it until after the podcast is live on all the podcasting apps.
00:28:37
Speaker
Gotcha. Zencaster takes care of you from recording to publishing on the RSS feed, right? And every podcast has an RSS feed. You hook that RSS set feed up to Spotify and to Apple and all the other podcast apps out there, right?
00:28:51
Speaker
And every time you update the feed, it's what happens when you publish it on your host. Who do you host with? Like Libsyn, Blueberry? I'm using the creators.spotify, the one that used to be Anchor.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, the one that used to be Anchor. Yeah, so Spotify puts out that RSS feed and they have their own in-house system for for video or for for publishing to Spotify. But they do publish an RSS feed that then goes to Apple and all the other ones. Now, Spotify kind of hides it from you, but you can find it.
00:29:19
Speaker
because if you get that RSS feed, you can hook that feed up to something like an automation tool, and it just waits, and it checks the feed every hour. It's what Apple does. Apple's just checking your feed every hour to see if there's something new.
00:29:29
Speaker
Once it finds something new, uploads it to Apple. So... home And that's how that's how I kick off that tool. RSS is a great way. RSS used to run the world of internet. Remember that? When back when people used to like subscribe to my RSS? That was a long time ago. Yeah, I would subscribe to RSSs of all these blogs. know I would do to just go to my RSS reader and just see all the latest blog posts.
00:29:50
Speaker
What was it? FeedBurner? We all use FeedBurner to aggregate the feeds. And we all subscribe to things via Google Reader or something like that. We're telling people how old we are here, dude. Back in the internet marketing days.
00:30:04
Speaker
so So I think i i so I'm doing it kind of backwards then, Dan. Because what I do is I'll download i'll download the... And I don't even use the account level within Riverside that gives you the transcript. That's another level up.
00:30:16
Speaker
I just use the first tier paid version. I'll download the video. I'll put it into Descript to get the transcript. And then I'll put it. Then I'll get the video shorts from Riverside.
00:30:27
Speaker
And then with each one of the video shorts, you get the transcript to do a social media post. And it just it seems a little labor intensive. compared to what you're doing. But what you're saying is after you get it off onto the RSS feeds, you know, and you and you get it onto Apple or to Spotify or to Google Podcasts, et cetera, then that's where NAN comes in to do its magic. And so are you creating video shorts for YouTube shorts or Instagram or what have you? Well, it doesn't create... NAN doesn't create shorts. It just comes up with the text post. And because I have a graphic that loads with every single episode, which I i put i put more and more time into because...
00:31:02
Speaker
having one good graphic per episode because that YouTube thumbnail is so freaking important, right? But I'm like, if you're to put that much time into the YouTube thumbnail, you might as well, i design it as a square, but with like, I designed it in mind that it's going to get cropped from the top and the bottom and become a horizontal image.
00:31:19
Speaker
later on. So I put a lot of time into that image. If you go to my website, like danchez.com and scroll down, you'll see the images and you see like, I put more time into it than normal. And I use a combination of MidJourney and Photoshop, those AI tools in order to make those. So I do that. Now, NAN does do the resizing of it because it's way too big of an image for YouTube. It has to resize it, then it crops it, and then it sticks into YouTube.
00:31:41
Speaker
So that way I don't have to spend extra time uploading the video, writing the title, copying and pasting the description over. I just automatically loads in the whatever the podcast description is. It goes to YouTube, adds it to the podcast playlist for my podcast on YouTube, and then sets the thumbnail. So that's done. I don't have to deal with YouTube.
00:31:58
Speaker
And then the blog is another thing. It'll... publish it, publish the blog post. And it's just using the transcript to make the blog post and then the transcript to make the text for the social media posts. And on some of the social media posts, I'm also using that podcast cover image as like a graphic that posts with Because again, I put a lot of time into it. So it becomes a nice little social image.
00:32:15
Speaker
That way I'm getting all the use I can out of that one freaking image, right? So that's what I'm doing. And why why are you spending so much time on the, you know, you did mention that people spend a lot of time on the on the YouTube thumbnail, so you might as well do the same thing with your podcast. but what To you, what is the importance of that, the the the episode image?
00:32:32
Speaker
The click-through rate. I mean, you want more people to have a first listen, and a lot of people, like YouTube, YouTube is driven by thumbnail images. That's why Mr. B spends about $10,000 per image, and he makes multiple images per video.
00:32:45
Speaker
The image is almost like as important as the video. It's like the hook in a LinkedIn post or in a blog post, right? or Or a title. you know what is that What is the thing it called? I think it was maybe, was it Eugene Schwartz just who talked about this or Joe Sugarman who talked about the slippery slope where 80% of the people will see your your headline.
00:33:07
Speaker
Joe Sugarman. So you got to get them to at least read the first line. And then the first line is going to get people to read the second line. So you got to spend an inordinate amount of time on the headline, the opening hook.
00:33:18
Speaker
If we talk about LinkedIn posts or the thumbnail or your, you know, episode image, that's, that's really critical. The episode image, the point that's using Joe Sugarman's language, the the point of the episode image is to get them to read the headline. The point of the headline is to get them to click play.
00:33:32
Speaker
That's it. Exactly. It was Joe Sugarman. Okay, perfect. Perfect. So i would I noticed that one of the episodes that, and I'm gonna i'm goingnna listen to this as soon as we hang up over here, but is how you're co-writing a book with ai I've actually co actually did two ghostwriting gigs for two clients of mine from Mexico.
00:33:56
Speaker
they they have They both have outsourcing companies providing you know developers and other things, other types of skillsets to people, to companies in the United States, and they want to expand their marketing efforts in the United States. And they thought that writing a book would be a good idea. And so what I did was I you know interviewed them and i and I leveraged AI to come up with initial drafts of the book. and then of course you have to have a human in the loop.
00:34:19
Speaker
You know, the, you know, as it Russ Honeyberry said is, Russ Honeyberry said that AI is kind of like a ghostwriter. But you've got to go in and you've got to edit it, etc. But I was wondering if you could tell tell us a little bit about your AI book writing or co-writing process that you talked about in
Co-writing a Book with AI
00:34:36
Speaker
your episode there. Yeah.
00:34:38
Speaker
I do find the better you get at using AI, the better it can write for you. And it works just like a ghostwriter. Like you've done some ghostwriting and working with it. I've i've worked i've had some friends as ghostwriters. I know the process.
00:34:49
Speaker
Like you come up with idea and they have to interview you They have to suck it out of you. Right. And then you give them the first you give the baseline story. Like, oh, here's the idea. Here's the top line. They're like, oh, cool. Well,
00:35:00
Speaker
That's not enough. Now I have to go and find out what the, tell me more about that. That seemed like a critical point for you. Like that's why I even started with that story about the conference and me wanting to become an ultimate marketer. I know that because AI and I've sat down and it's interviewed me and asked me like, Hey, tell me more about that story. It seems like that was a critical part. and that's why I tell it now. Cause AI has pulled it out of me being like, you should talk more about that. I was like, dang, AI is a great coach or consultant.
00:35:24
Speaker
The funny part is you have to get it to prompt you. You have to like, almost like lead, like lead it, help it lead you. And it's really good at that. So what I'll do is i'll I'll give an initial pass of the outline. And I set all this up in a chat GPT project. This is the best way to do it right now.
00:35:38
Speaker
Because in the project, all the separate chats you have, remember conversations from past chats within the project. So if you have one project for your book and have one chat per chapter, it can maintain much more of the context from chapter to chapter, which you weren't able to do until that project's feature came out recently. So that's a new thing.
00:35:57
Speaker
Before that, I'm sure it lot harder. But now you can be like, okay, here's the general idea from the book. And here's some of my basic content. i'm going to load that in as instructions and material in the project. And then from there, i just I take a first rough pass at the outline. I'm like, hey, here's my first rough outline, chat GPT.
00:36:14
Speaker
Help me flesh this out based on what you know we're trying to accomplish here. And it'll take a pass and it'll flesh out the eye outline a little bit more. I'm like, great. I'm going to go ahead now and give you all. I'm just going word vomit. I'm going to dictate all the stuff that I know that needs to go into this chapter. and I'm just going to use this outline and talk.
00:36:31
Speaker
Right. Because there's nothing easier than just looking at a bullet point less than just like word vomiting. Everything you know about it as you work through the list. Exactly. Right. And that's what you do with the ghostwriter. It's exactly what a ghostwriter is going to do is it's just they just needed you to talk and they're going to take notes about you talk and go back and they're going to record it and listen to the recording and painfully go through it again until they get a coherent draft.
00:36:50
Speaker
So I give it all that. and But before I have it write a draft for me, I'm like, OK, Chachi PT, I've just given you a lot. Ask me some questions of details you need still in order to make this good. And that's where the real magic happens. I have it ask me additional questions based on the stories and the the the the case studies that I'm giving it.
00:37:08
Speaker
And then it asks me multiple questions. And then I go through just another round of dictating and I answer them all exhaustively as much as I can. It's just one long freaking prompt. Bam. And then it's like, okay, you've done a good job of filling these in. And I'm like, is there anything else? And it's like, it'll either say like, oh, think it might, it always asks some questions, but I can tell when it's got it.
00:37:26
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, write a draft. And each draft is only about a thousand words at a time. So literally it's painfully writing a thousand words at a time of which each chapter for me, I'm walking through that whole process two to three times, sometimes four or five, depending how long the chapter is in order to get the content out. Right.
00:37:43
Speaker
So chapters about four or thousand words. working on not the whole outline for the chapter. I'm working on just a section of the chapter at a time. Bam, bam. And I have to go through word like word dump and then question and then answering the questions and then it come up with the draft and I might edit some things. But honestly, usually when you walk through a process like that,
00:38:01
Speaker
pretty freaking close. Like you don't have to edit it a lot if you've prompted it well and you've given it all the context to work from. And that's just with 4.0, man. When 4.5 comes out soon here, like this could be flying.
00:38:16
Speaker
That's amazing. So getting back to, so with a project, is a project similar to a custom GPT, but it just has that bigger context window so that you can remember previous chats or? It is remarkably close to a custom GPT because you get instructions. You get to load an instruction with it and you get to upload documents for it to reference.
00:38:33
Speaker
So the one difference is you get to contain, imagine with each custom GPT conversation you have, every new conversation you have, it doesn't remember any of it. But in a project, it groups alls all together. So it has the context of all those.
00:38:46
Speaker
Now, ChatGPT is getting sophisticated to where even if you're having like a plain Jane Vanilla conversation with ChatGPT, it can still reference past conversations you've had or at least recent ones, even if you don't have them in a project.
00:38:57
Speaker
But by but containing them in a project, it knows like, hey, these are related and you can call, it you can force it to call back and be like, hey, remember when we talked about in chapter two, can you pull some of that material into this and reference back to it right here? It'll be like, okay. And it does.
00:39:11
Speaker
Because it remembers. And sometimes it'll do it without even being asked. It'll just be like, it'll just start bridging it together. It's really fascinating. I'm hoping the context window gets larger because that becomes a limiting factor for something as long as a book, but it's still pretty dang good.
00:39:26
Speaker
So in those instructions and the documents you set up, I think you mentioned this before, but I wanted to just kind of like clarify this for my mind. Do you upload samples of your writing or did you maybe try and write an initial chapter or section of a chapter by you know by yourself as a say, hey, listen, can you model all your voice and style and et cetera, speak at an eighth grade or fifth grade level based on this or whatever? Or how did you set the instructions for the voice? I had already done that long ago and made my own custom Danchez GPT like a writer. So I just took that and took some of the instructions from that and stuck it into the instructions for this book project.
00:40:03
Speaker
But I gave it more context, like, hey, this is what we're writing for. Here's where I want the style to go. Because how you write for a blog is just different than a book, right? So like i I modified it for that. But I took a lot of my key writing style tendencies and just transferred it over to the the instructions for the project.
00:40:19
Speaker
So are you were you doing did you do any research, like any third-party research? you know or Are you using any references to studies or to other books, et cetera, for your book? Or how are you handling that? How are you getting to... Yeah.
00:40:30
Speaker
So this book in general is about the five types of AI marketing. when we're pioneering new stuff, the new thinking needs to come in and help, uh, create categories. I find that the process of creating categories or taxonomies helps clarify what the land looks like. If you ever played settlers down, you know, it's organized into like different, uh,
00:40:51
Speaker
hexas you know you got You got your forest over here, your mountains, your rolling hills, your wheat fields, like every new land. And that's what we're dealing with. Like we're dealing with a lot of unknowns. So I'm trying to come in here and bring some clarity, shed some light in it by grouping it so that when we can deal with it with groups. i mean, that's why you have the whole animal kingdom are broken up into groups, even though there's some oddballs that, you know, cross lines sometimes as as with all taxonomies.
00:41:14
Speaker
So the five types of AR marketing is what the book's about. And it's essentially me trying to bring some clarity. I've already published LinkedIn posts about this. i've already published blog posts. already done episodes about this. But I'm trying to bring it and bring some more credibility to it and some more case studies to give more examples and to package it all into a book so that people don't have to go and find all the stuff everywhere. They get it all in one nice little tidy package and they can listen to it or read it.
00:41:37
Speaker
So that's the the purpose of the book. I'm trying to remember. I like somewhere in there. I'm like, wait, what was this question again? Yeah, it was the external sources, like third-party sources. Oh, third-party sources. That's right. yeah Of course, I'm leaning on a lot of personal experience. The early chapters are like how I got into it. A lot of the story that I've shared here is part of those setting it up. I do a lot of time defining what AI marketing is, what it's not, other people's definitions.
00:42:03
Speaker
But then I have to get into the five types, which are going to be like a more traditional business book where I need case studies. I have lots of case studies. I did a lot of interviews. So those I'm using first. Those are my primary sources.
00:42:14
Speaker
But it's not enough and I need more. One of the great tools that just came out that I'm using right now is deep research in order to go find them. So I've been using deep research from Google when it first came out. But now that OpenEye got one, I might start using that one because it's deeper and better.
00:42:30
Speaker
So I'm using deep research. I'm like, hey, i AI, these are the types of case studies I'm looking for in this these kinds of markets using AI in these ways. Go and crawl the internet and find them for me and link back to the sources so I can find them. Google is really good at pulling a bunch of them for me.
00:42:45
Speaker
Also, because I know where a lot of them are, they're on OpenAI's website. They're on Google's website because they want to showcase all the best websites. the best possible case these things. And of course, some of the types of AI marketing that I have are a little thin because it's like one of the types is a AI analysis and forecasting.
00:43:02
Speaker
But that's still a very premature field right now. We're not, not a lot of marketers are using it for analysis and forecasting. There's just little bits and pieces of it. So that chapter is going to be a little light I'll have to come back and update me sometime. But for the most part, a lot of them are pretty easy to find case studies.
00:43:16
Speaker
So I'm using Google deep research to go and find ones that I can't find. I'm also just finding ones from my from my own podcast and then supplementing some with like from the big AI companies that have already have pretty solid published case studies in order to pull.
00:43:29
Speaker
Well, that's very cool. So when is the book coming out, Dan? It's a good question. I was going to try to sprint it and get it out by the end of February. And then I was like, part of me wanted to spend a little bit more time getting a little bit more case studies firsthand in order to do it well.
00:43:43
Speaker
So I slowed down a little bit and it'll probably end up being somewhere around this summer, but I'm really looking forward to getting it done. And it's not like it takes that much time in order to put together with the process I just outlined with you at GPT, but I wanted more firsthand case studies in order to pull from.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure you're going to do the, like the pre-launch, you know, get a a pre-launch list together so that you can have people who can who will already have read the book and will you write for the reviews by the time the book is launched, et cetera?
00:44:09
Speaker
Maybe. Yeah. I hate that process so much that I'm probably won't do it. I should do it, but I don't want to do it. I'm just like, so much work. I just want to put it out. I'll even give it away. Like, I really, I just want to put the information out there. But part of me is like, like, if you don't, I know, like, if you don't charge money for it, people won't read it.
00:44:26
Speaker
You know what saying? It's like, if you gave away a course, they they wouldn't, they would never just watch it. so you have to charge something for it. That way you get some buy-in to actually like consume the material. But I'd rather just publish it on my podcast for free. That's what I'd really like to do.
00:44:40
Speaker
And the time we have left, and look at this, it's 47 minutes, and i yeah I can't believe it's been 47 minutes. It feels like it's been 15 to 20 minutes, right? Tell us about what you're excited about right now in AI-driven marketing.
00:44:56
Speaker
If there were no more innovation coming to AI, we would still have four to five years of like breakthroughs of how this stuff's going to impact marketing. And I mean, like no more models come out, no new stuff.
00:45:07
Speaker
We just have what we have right now. 4.0 is as good as it gets or like the 03 mini thinking model. It doesn't get any better than that. we would still have years of of innovation of what we have to come because we're barely keeping up with what we currently have right now. Yet new stuff's going to be coming out next week or in a month. It's coming out so fast.
00:45:26
Speaker
So I'm just excited because I'm like, man, now's a good time to be a marketer. There's just so much new stuff coming out. It's going to lead to so much innovation. Some people are crying about it being... limiting creativity or even making us lazy. i'm like, man, I feel like i'm more creative than I've ever been before. Being able to write books, I'm like, dude, totally with the way videos go out, I'm like, I'm to make my own documentary this year. This is going to be a thing. I've already put out a whole music album and I'm not a musician and actually like listening to it on a regular basis. I did that just this last November through Suno, that AI app. It was fantastic and I listen to it all the time.
00:45:57
Speaker
So like the creative ability now to mix and match and all these things and put out really cool things is going to get better. And the people who are not afraid to wrestle with it and come up with good stuff. And as the models get better, the projects will get better.
00:46:09
Speaker
Like someone's going to make a blockbuster movie in the next couple of years, just with AI. And it's going to be fantastic. Yeah, actually, i said this to somebody front of mine that 2023 was kind of like the the Pearl Harbor moment for marketers with AI because first we were shocked by it.
00:46:29
Speaker
So many of us were laid off because of it. Agencies either had to pivot it or close their doors, you know, like content marketing agencies literally had to reinvent themselves. But then after we got over the shock, after marketers got over the shock, I think, and this is, and I've I can witness this by all the people that I've interviewed in the short lifespan of this podcast, that marketers have been on the cutting edge in terms of finding innovative uses for AI and marketing, just like you mentioned right now.
Enthusiasm for AI's Potential
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:57
Speaker
So great. Well, listen, Dan, you know there's the obligatory thing about where can people find you? I know where people can find you. Dan, Danchez Sanchez. So there's on on LinkedIn, you have Dan and then brackets. Danchez. dan My name's Dan Sanchez. My friend's call me Danchez and DanSanchez.com was taken. So had to figure out something.
00:47:15
Speaker
And that was a nickname. My friends have called me for a while. So that's what I go by. Well, it's fantastic. And your and your podcast is the AI-driven marketer. That's right. Master AI marketing to stand out in 2025 when you can find it on all the major podcast platforms.
00:47:33
Speaker
And YouTube, course. And YouTube. Okay, YouTube. Perfect, perfect. And you'll be speaking at Social Media Marketing World coming up here, March 31st in beautiful San Diego.
00:47:46
Speaker
I remember going to a traffic and conversion conference in 2018 in San Diego. And as we were leaving, there was all these other internet digital marketers flying in and thinking, wait a minute, you're a little late for traffic and conversion.
00:48:00
Speaker
No, we're coming in for social media marketing world, which is even bigger than TNC. Yeah, it was even bigger than TNC. I was like, oh my gosh, I should have stayed another week in San Diego for that.
00:48:10
Speaker
But you're speaking at the conference, which is fantastic. And it's just been a privilege to have you here, Sanchez. We both have Hispanic last name Sanchez and La Bastida. So that's good. And we will see everybody in the next episode of the AI Marketing Case Studies podcast.
00:48:27
Speaker
See you then.