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Automating Ai Marketing Tasks (The Right Way) w/Parthi Loganathan
236 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to AI-Driven Marketer, in this insightful interview, host Dan Sanchez sits down with Parthi Loganathan to dive into the world of AI in marketing. Parthi is the man behind Letterdrop, a tool that leverages AI to automate content creation and distribution for B2B companies. Throughout the conversation, they explore the ways in which AI is revolutionizing marketing automation, particularly in content creation and SEO. They also discuss the importance of understanding the limitations of AI and maintaining a focus on customer needs and authentic content. Tune in to gain valuable insights on leveraging AI for marketing and learn about the future of AI in the industry. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or new to the field, this episode will provide key takeaways to enhance your marketing strategy.
Timestamps:
00:00 Content marketing and AI fill marketing automation gaps.
04:18 Automating sales analysis with generative AI software.
06:49 AI analyzes content to optimize buyer trust.
12:13 Using AI to bulk write podcast articles.
13:55 AI excels at SEO analysis and content creation.
16:26 Enable sales team to become social sellers.
19:49 Marketers need customer focus, AI tools essential.
23:18 Marketers need to stand out with expertise.
26:04 Thank you for signing up for letter drop.
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Transcript
Introduction to LetterDrop and its Automation
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to AI Micro Skills. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I'm sitting down with Parthi Loganadin. AI is at a stance today where a lot of it's manual. A lot of people are talking about mid-journeying and playing with chat GPT and even using custom GPTs. But why I'm excited to talk to Parthi is because he has a whole tool to help you automate it. Like actually
00:00:22
Speaker
automate the inputs, use AI to create the outputs, and then bring the outputs to the right place at the right time for the right people on your team with this tool, LetterDrop. So, Parthi, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm hoping to dive into your tool today, even though this is more of around the use cases for AI and how-to around AI. I really wanted to dive into your tool because, again, like I said, a lot of AI is manually input. But I wanted to give the audience a preview of what they can do with LetterDrop specifically in order to use it in an AI case. And then I wanted to pick it apart as far as other use cases that I've thought of that I haven't been able to accomplish myself.
00:01:04
Speaker
and see if I could do it with LetterDrop or what you would see in the future for being able to automate AI. So tell us a little bit about LetterDrop and what it's currently doing. Yeah, absolutely.
Optimizing B2B Pipelines with AI
00:01:14
Speaker
So for some context, LetterDrop is a platform that helps B2B companies essentially build more pipeline through organic channels. That's namely content. So for B2B companies, the types of channels really matter to them, your website, SEO, your blog,
00:01:31
Speaker
LinkedIn, that's where all of your decision makers are sitting. And finally, getting your sales team to actually be champions of your content, use that sales enablement content. And so what we do is we help gather information from your sales calls, from your website, from who's engaging with your LinkedIn content, identify what's working, what's driving revenue, helping you prioritize creating more of that kind of content, actually planning, project managing, creating that,
00:01:59
Speaker
optimizing it for those different channels for SEO, for LinkedIn, for your sales team, and getting it out there and maximizing distribution in the world so it gets in front of more people, and creating that kind of flywheel with content, listening, creating, distributing, and doing that over and over again.
00:02:15
Speaker
It's funny because when it comes to content, it's been involved in part of the marketing automation world for a while. You being able to automatically send this content here or buffering it out using the buffer tool to schedule things. Content marketing has been around with automation for a while.
00:02:36
Speaker
But there's always been a big piece missing even when I was heavy into using small business software tools like Infusionsoft, an active campaign to automate the heck out of marketing. There was always this gap that you couldn't automate because you could never quite get the inputs to give you the outputs that you wanted.
00:02:54
Speaker
You couldn't take their name and just a little bits and pieces about them that you collected from a form and actually use it to respond to them or come up with customized content for them or even make really smart recommendations. Like even that's people were thinking like, oh, if only I could have an Amazon level tool to make a recommendation about what kind of content.
00:03:14
Speaker
But now with AI, or at least what's available now with the APIs available from OpenAI and Claude and all those other guys, I'm excited because it feels like it's finally filling in the gap where marketing automation missed it. AI is now covering in all those gaps. What are some of those cool workflows that you're seeing now with your tool that weren't possible before but with AI is making all new connections?
AI's Role in Reducing Human Labor
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Can talk through a couple of those. I think to your point with AI, generative AI specifically, there's more stuff that previously required a lot of human man hours to just figure out that AI can just do for you in minutes.
00:03:54
Speaker
I still think it's really important for there to be a human in the loop. If you get to a point where it's completely, truly automated, you get to a point where you start creating almost noise and people start tuning out. But what we want to do is essentially turn people into orchestrators, right? So they're essentially saying like, hey, like system, do everything for me. You're going to give me recommendations. I just say like, yeah, that looks good.
00:04:18
Speaker
tweak it a little bit and off you go. So I'll give you a couple of practical use cases we're seeing amongst our customers. So for example, one of our customers, PKNEI, what they use LetterDrop for is they hook it up to their sales recording software. And we essentially pull in a lot of their transcripts and we essentially look for data points in their transcripts to identify recurring themes, objections, pain points, things where people are just like not getting it,
00:04:48
Speaker
And we essentially help the marketing team understand what sales actually needs on the website in terms of sales enablement so they can actually create those resources.
00:04:59
Speaker
Normally, this is probably listening to hundreds of hours of calls. We just essentially drop that down to listening to an hour of calls a week because we pinpoint the exact instances you need to be listening to. So that's like an example of a use case where generative AI hasn't made it really easy for people to essentially automate away like many, many hours of work that we're just not getting done.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yes, I've sat down through the calls and painfully listened to the sales calls to find said things. But you know, the time it takes to analyze it properly, you got to map it out and put it in Excel sheet of like, oh, like it was mentioned here. And then maybe if you're being fancy, you might map it back to like the exact time of the transcript, and then start quantifying it in order to get a proper analysis to know to get a proper needs analysis of where people are getting stuck.
00:05:51
Speaker
Yeah, of course, we never did it nearly enough because it's such a time-consuming task. So that makes a lot of sense. What else do you get your customers using it for?
SEO and Content Quality with AI
00:06:01
Speaker
Yeah, the other thing I'd say we help people do is actually create really high quality content that is competitive from an SEO perspective or optimized for that channel. For some context, I used to be a product manager on the search team at Google about five years ago, even then we were just constantly fighting spam. So you see a lot of bad use cases of AI today where people are just like, oh, yeah, like,
00:06:27
Speaker
Let's toss in a thousand keywords, generate a thousand pages, and let it rip. And I think the problem there is you can do it. Your competition can do it. Google really doesn't like it and eventually penalizes that. What we try to do is essentially help people drop the friction in terms of actually creating something that people actually want to read and consume that's going to build buyer trust and actually help you go through the buyer journey faster.
00:06:54
Speaker
So we use AI to actually understand what's going on, what are you competing against when someone searches for a certain term, analyzing all those other pages. Instead of just thinking about things from the perspective of keywords, just being like, oh yeah, like use the term CRM seven times and you're good. We actually try to figure out like, okay, what are all these pages truly talking about? Like, what is something that one guy over here talked about that's really unique? Can you build on top of that? And so we help you figure out those information gaps and fill those in.
00:07:24
Speaker
So at that point, you're as competitive as everybody else. You've got things covered, but you need that something a little extra to actually rank on Google. You have to build a case for like why your page is going to answer that question better. And so with LetterDrop, we really believe that getting those insights from people is really important. So we make it really easy for people to request those insights from experts.
00:07:50
Speaker
and essentially turn those into videos that they can upload to YouTube, embed in their blogs, and have those kind of expert insights. In the same way that we're talking on this podcast, and we're really talking about these expert insights that you're maybe not going to find from like chat GPT, really thoughtful insights, we try to figure out, okay, how do we drop the friction in terms of getting that recording
00:08:13
Speaker
like uploading it, all that kind of stuff, and then getting those insights and turning that into text that you can now publish to your site for SEO. Okay, so many follow up questions. One, I got to come back to, are you using AI to write content to rank for Google, Google searches?
00:08:31
Speaker
We use AI to do research for you to figure out, hey, what's everybody else talking about? And we use AI to take stuff that's in audio format or something along those lines like this conversation and then turn it into something that's really easy to read and index by Google. What we don't use AI for is letting AI just run loose on its own.
00:08:54
Speaker
We think generative AI is a good tool for data transformation, right? Take a lot of data, summarize it, take an audio file, summarize it, and pull out insights. What I don't think AI today is good for is letting it do thinking on its own. That's when you start to get more nonsense.
00:09:13
Speaker
Do you do so it's interesting to talk to you with your background in Google, but like I've always obviously you don't want to just be like, hey, I need a 600 word article with this keyword mentioned in it optimized for ranking your next master SEO person, blah, blah, blah, then it writes a crap article.
00:09:30
Speaker
But if, let's say I'd optimized this podcast episode to rank for a certain search term or, and I understood what they are actually looking for. And I had already done the research on what was missing. And then I take the transcript, get it, ask AI to take this transcript because I've already ordered my questions according to what I want in this article. Right. Cause I I've done this before. Usually I hand that to then a writer to write.
00:09:56
Speaker
an excellent article that's going to be ranked because it's based on your expertise and my expertise as a host combined together and it's going to get something that chat GPT can't do. But if I give it to chat GPT to write, do you think I'd get like, is that still credible content considering it's based on original material, not something created by AI?
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah. So that first use case you mentioned, which is just like, Hey, chat, if you write something for me that that's like, Hey, it might even make stuff up. You don't even know if it's real. It'll give you something that seems feasible, but it's not really going to do anything for you. That second workflow you just talked about, that's, that's the kind of stuff that we enable. So first thing you mentioned was like, how do I answer search intent for that search term? What questions do I need to ask? What, what, what stuff do I need? That's stuff that letter drop.
00:10:42
Speaker
Like we pull and we figure out, okay, like here's all the stuff that you might need to be asking or talking about. Now you go actually ask somebody like you're doing right now, ask somebody who knows about that topic to answer those questions for you. And so now you have those unique insights. Now, how do you take those unique insights and actually turn them into text once again, so that's easy to index and search and like easy to digest. That's also another good use case of AI, which we also do is like we take this recording,
00:11:11
Speaker
We know like, hey, like what are you kind of going for? Break it out into sections and give you the right stuff at the end. So now if you actually publish that, there's a really good chance for that to rank because it does answer the question, answers all the right questions, has all the right information. And it's actually credible because it's coming from somebody who has lived experiences. It meets Google's sort of like expertise eat criteria.
00:11:35
Speaker
And as an end user, as a person who's actually searching for information, I'm much more likely to trust somebody who's done something before than just like, hey, here's something from chat GPT, unclear if this is real or not, but this is the answer I got, which I think a lot of people, and a lot of people have to learn that you need to go beyond that. The only content that's worth creating today is content that is going to truly answer questions and people trust.
Enhancing Content Marketing with AI
00:12:05
Speaker
No one should be creating content for the sake of creating content like that is That like that bar has been crossed by AI and no one should be giving that anymore I've thought multiple times, but I haven't seen anybody actually do it is using a podcast to create articles But then using AI to write 80 to 90 percent of that article and then filling it in of course editing it where it went off that I haven't seen but it seems plausible like you'd be able to knock out with
00:12:30
Speaker
a great amount of authority because you could just find the experts and link to their stuff and then prove that this is written by somebody authoritative because I see obviously like on LinkedIn, people are just smashing Google all the time for the shallow articles that surfaces everywhere.
00:12:47
Speaker
You have MailChimp blog. I remember coming across the blog written about how to vlog on YouTube. I'm like, this person hasn't never touched a camera, has never uploaded a video to YouTube and knows nothing. I'm sure it was written by a human from some other place in the world that knows how to write for algorithms and doesn't know anything about the content.
00:13:08
Speaker
But Google's full of stuff like that. I'm like someone with the podcast is going to come and clean up around a topic. And then of course, they also get the embed of the video, which proves that it's legit because you have the experts. Yeah, I think to your point, the embed, the actual video actually having a face to it is going to be really important. We'll see like how that changes in probably like a year or two. I know the deep fakes are coming like you can get you can take a recording of yourself and like essentially make it look like you're saying anything. So
00:13:38
Speaker
Will will figure out like what that world looks like but for today I think it's very important to actually have a real person being able to say something so you can at least verify that to your point a person who's actually Done a vlog before knows what they're talking about as opposed to like a wall of text and it's not clear like who this is from
00:13:55
Speaker
So I've done a lot of SEO work and I've actually used chat GPT to do a lot of what you're talking about. Your tool is probably better at it because the problem with chat GPT to do SEO work is it has access to Bing, but not Google, which usually you're optimizing for Google, but you're like, well, okay, go pull the top five articles ranking for this keyword on Bing. Tell me what, well, first do an analysis on this keyword. Tell me what you think based on your search results, people are actually looking for.
00:14:22
Speaker
Then go read everybody else's stuff tell me what's missing because then that becomes your angle writing the article right it's actually really good as i do it manually and then just do it side by side so good actually analyzing it saying what the intent of the search probably is and what's missing from the current five articles ranking remarkably good at coming up with it.
00:14:44
Speaker
outlining it from there I've struggled with. But are you able to pull from Google and you're kind of doing the same process? Is that right? Yeah, we do a similar process. Some of it is sort of generative AI, like you mentioned, some of it's actually more traditional AI techniques. So what we will do is we'll go take the top pages ranking on Google for a certain query. We will essentially read all of them and then we'll
00:15:08
Speaker
say like, hey, this article is about these five points from these five places. And we kind of cluster them across all the 10 into saying like, essentially across the 10 articles, these are the 20 things that matter and everything else is just like fluff.
00:15:23
Speaker
So you need to be covering these 20 things. And then we'll also go back to your point of like, hey, what is the search intent? What is missing? Or like, what are other ways in which you could be talking about stuff? We do categorize it. So we'll do things like what are ideas of people to ask our surveys to conduct or what's a new vertical you could segment this search query into. But it's essentially a tuned version of like what you're saying.
00:15:51
Speaker
Man, it's an exciting time for what's coming to content marketing in general. You guys are a step ahead of what I've seen from other people so far when it comes to using automation to do marketing the right way, because obviously everybody's using it to do it the wrong way right now, but you're one of the first AI tools to see, even do SEO and approach it the wrong way, get the right expertise in the right places, using AI to fill in the gaps. To move beyond SEO though, what else are people using your tool for?
00:16:19
Speaker
with AI being like a central role to fill in what wasn't able to accomplish before with just automation.
Transforming Sales Teams into Thought Leaders
00:16:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think the last bit of this is probably figuring out how to enable your sales team. So for B2B companies, your sales team is really, they're really the face of the company to all of your prospects. And I think as every channel gets more saturated, right, as every salesperson is
00:16:44
Speaker
sending more email a lot of a generated email more linked in dms it's more important than ever for sales teams to essentially become social sellers for them to essentially come thought leaders consultants and so with letter drop we're trying to help.
00:16:59
Speaker
People do is essentially turn your your sales team into those kind of thought leaders by repurposing your content and making it really easy for them to use those insights to track customers. So things you can do in letter drop are add in.
00:17:19
Speaker
templates of what different people sound like. And so you can say like, hey, like, here's, here's like a product launch template, or here's a thought leadership template, we will take video, we will take long form content. And then we can essentially transform that into a LinkedIn post using that template. So it kind of sounds like you usually gets you like 90 95% there minor editing and script to go.
00:17:41
Speaker
You say sounds like you and like the text, the tone of the text. You're not just giving samples of you saying the same stuff. Yes, exactly. And then, um, and then we can connect to your entire team publish on behalf of your sales team. And then we can also like get everybody else to also engage with it. Right. So without you having to ask your team, Hey, like, can you guys. Upload and comment. It's like the LinkedIn version of like, and subscribe on YouTube.
00:18:09
Speaker
We can essentially automate that for your team as well. So every salesperson looks like, okay, I posted this thought leadership piece. My entire company is behind me here and sharing it with their network. So that's the first way in which we help essentially your sales team show up as thought leaders, trying to drop the friction that use in AI, as well as like normal, just like software workflows.
00:18:35
Speaker
The second way in which we help sales teams essentially use content and show up as a well-informed consultant to their prospects and customers is when you get off a sales call, what we do is we take the transcript of the call, we listen in and figure out, okay, what are the questions that that customer asked? And then we look through your inventory of content, your case studies, your blog posts, all that kind of stuff.
00:19:03
Speaker
And then we suggest to the sales rep saying, hey, they asked that question. I think one of these two pieces of content might be useful for you to share with them. And that's going to move this deal forward. It's going to make you come off as more prepared and help you educate your customer better. So that's the last way in which we're using AI to actually help the sales team distribute that content and move their sales cycle faster.
00:19:29
Speaker
Two more questions for you. One, what would you recommend for marketers who are trying to learn marketing? Somebody who comes more from an engineering perspective, someone who's running a MarTech company for marketers, you understand marketers well. How should marketers be approaching AI before they're left in the dust by tools like yours?
00:19:49
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like most marketers need to really focus more so on just understanding their customer and having a point of view and a perspective. That is actually your job. And then tools like LetterDrop or other sorts of like MarTech tools, sales tools with AI are really going to automate a good chunk of everything else.
00:20:15
Speaker
Differentiator for people is just gonna be like marketing basics in a way. We're almost going back to like 1980s era jingles era basics. Do you really understand your customer what they care about and then everything else like the tactics?
00:20:30
Speaker
like tooling and software is going to do for you. That said, you probably want to get on that software bandwagon sooner than your competitors, assuming like you have the fundamentals down so that you can actually execute on that a lot faster. If what's keeping you from creating more, publishing more, and getting in front of more prospects is just like execution, I think that's where AI and a lot of software tooling is going to just help you outpace
00:20:59
Speaker
your competition. The second thing I would say is just don't be lazy about using AI. I think a lot of people try to think like, oh yeah, AI is just going to do my job for me. You have to be very selective in terms of like how you use AI and understand what it's good for and what it's bad for. I think we talked a little bit about that today, where I think a lot of people operate under this misconceived notion that AI is actually truly intelligent. And what it says is
00:21:26
Speaker
is truthful. I've seen people ask chat GPT for keyword data and be like, oh, it says like, x people are searching for this term. I'm like, no, it doesn't know that it just like had to give you a number. So it made up a number. That is, I want to see fewer marketers doing that and more marketers figuring out how to use AI intelligently.
00:21:44
Speaker
It's interesting because in order to know that you have to know a little bit about how it's working to know that it doesn't know that. And you have to be knowledgeable enough to know how those numbers are known in general, because like how does Moz know how does a trash? No. Well, you have to know where they kind of get their data. So you kind of need some industry expertise in order to know where the word
00:22:03
Speaker
where the ais gaps are right which kind of comes back to our seo thing like ai will make up stuff and if you don't have the experience of the expertise people probably aren't going to trust your content because the experts will know and the experts will see it and either agree with it and give it more cloud on social or they won't or they'll call it out even worse and to finish off this interview
00:22:25
Speaker
Where do you kind of see things going over the next, say six months?
Trust and Authenticity in the Age of AI
00:22:28
Speaker
Like what's on the near horizon for your company and where you think marketing is going in general when it comes to AI automation in this world?
00:22:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think a progress in AI is just scary. If we were to have this conversation even a year ago, it would probably sound very, very different. I don't think I could have foreseen where things are today. I think in the next six months, we're going to see a lot more multimodal
00:22:56
Speaker
use cases of AI, it's just starting to cross that threshold of where image and video creation is starting to get reasonably good. So I think we're going to see a lot more emphasis and focus on that. I think a lot of people are also going to start
00:23:13
Speaker
getting to a point where they wonder like what's real and what's not. And so you as a marketer need to really be thinking about, okay, like how do I build brand? How do I build trust? How do I build expertise? Because when everybody sort of has access to the same tools and can sound the same and create the same stuff, it just becomes a sea of noise. And so your buyer is just going to start tuning out a lot of stuff. So you need to figure out, okay, how do I cut through that when everybody has
00:23:43
Speaker
AI tooling. It's kind of like that scene from the Incredibles, the movie, Disney movie. He says like when everyone's super, no one is super. And that's exactly what's going to happen right now. Everyone has tooling.
00:23:54
Speaker
Well, that's equivalent to nobody having tooling and so you need to really figure out how to stand out. In terms of what we're working on is a lot more emphasis on video, just trying to figure out how do we get those expert insights from real people, put that in there. So video is definitely something that's top of mind for us. I think the second thing is
00:24:15
Speaker
Understanding that marketing ultimately is about pipeline generation and revenue. I think there's a lot of people focused on vanity metrics. They're focused on impressions. They're focused on audience. And I'm not saying those are not important. Those are the precursors for revenue and pipeline. But we're trying to help people actually connect the dots and figure out, okay, what does it mean for people to comment and like your
00:24:40
Speaker
LinkedIn posts, that's signal for you. What does it mean when somebody reads your blog post? Identifying that person, that's signal for you. What does it mean when they ask your sales rep a question that's signal for you? And so you can essentially build this profile on an individual intent data essentially in terms of what they care about.
00:24:58
Speaker
And we want to help companies essentially understand people better with AI and use that to tailor their content, tailor their messaging, retargeting so that people get more signal, less noise. I believe it. After what you've told me about what you're doing with LetterDrop, you guys are approaching AI the right way, actually leveraging it for the power that it is rather than trying to dupe people into doing some hacky moves that makes it look productive, but actually doesn't get results.
00:25:26
Speaker
So it's exciting to see where things are going.
Where to Find LetterDrop and Parthi Loganadin
00:25:30
Speaker
Where can people go to learn more about you and get a demo of this software we've been talking about?
00:25:36
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You can visit letterdrop.com and you can book a demo or even sign up for a free version of the product. And you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there and I'm also a power user of our own tool to get that kind of reach on LinkedIn. Just search for Parthi Loganathan on LetterDrop. I'm sure you'll drop in a link or something so that people can actually spell my name.
00:26:04
Speaker
Well, thank you so much. I'm going to be signing up for the free version of this to start playing around with your SEO content part here. I'm excited to try it out. Everybody else take a look at letter drop. Um, I'm sure it'll add a ton of value to your marketing program. Thanks for joining me.