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Marketing Automation Meets AI: Put Your Marketing On Autopilot w/Audra Carpenter
381 Plays9 months ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez talks to Audra Carpenter, an agency owner and digital marketing expert, about harnessing the power of AI to drive revenue and optimize workflows. They delve into the intricacies of automating content creation, integrating AI tools like Open Router and Make, and the challenges of staying current with evolving AI models. Audra shares her insights on the future of AI in marketing, the necessity of embracing automation to stay competitive, and practical tips for maximizing the impact of podcast content. Tune in to discover how AI can revolutionize your marketing strategies and streamline your processes.
Timestamps:
00:00 Nostalgic about missed opportunities in digital marketing.
05:25 Published 50 AI courses in speedy manner.
09:15 Case studies inspire automation and delegation.
10:07 Utilized social media to advance career.
13:52 Technology pivotal, automation increasing, oversight essential.
18:57 Posting challenges lead to app development.
19:50 Utilize RSS feed for efficient cross-platform content sharing.
22:55 Need affordable image automation tool for mass emails.
28:37 Revisiting make for customization challenges, but still necessary.
31:39 Editing process involves cutting, captioning, and organizing.
33:12 Struggling to streamline podcast process and distribution.
37:34 Check out Zencastr, smooth with clipping tool.
42:13 Automating follow-up process for recorded episodes.
43:56 Efficient for non-collaborative tasks, handling complex sequences.
46:26 Assistants enhance prompts for consistent, detailed responses.
50:39 Automates integration with Make for $30.
55:38 Keep up with AI, focus on revenue.
56:18 Embrace AI to stay competitive and succeed.
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Transcript
Introduction: AI Driven Marketer Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sánchez, my friends, Kami Dánchez, and I am still on this journey to master AI in 2024. That was getting exciting from learning a
Audra Carpenter on AI in Marketing
00:00:12
Speaker
ton. And I'm so excited to be joined by Audra Carpenter today, who's been an agency owner in 2009, has touched pretty much everything there is to do in digital marketing. Audra's done. Audra's been there executing it for herself and for her clients, and now is taking a deep dive in AI. And when I reached out on Facebook, to a group of people who are using high level, which is a marketing automation software specifically. Audra jumped in and talked about all the things that she was doing with
AI Automation in Marketing
00:00:40
Speaker
AI. And so, Audra, I'm excited to have you on the show and kind of unpack all the different little automation things that you're doing with AI. Because I find that's kind of the place where people need to go with the way AI. AI is very much like a transactional thing. And where I think it's most exciting is where you can automate it. So those AI and its intelligence and all the things it does just kind of happens on autopilot.
00:01:00
Speaker
But most people don't think about it like that yet. So I'm excited to unpack some of the cool things you've made with AI. So welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This is such an exciting time to be alive right now. If people really understood the value that AI can bring to their business, it's game over i mean we have just been given a golden ticket and to really dig in and learn how to use this to your advantage to your business advantage. Is really where we should be focusing any extra time that we've got our schedules.
The Transformative Potential of AI
00:01:34
Speaker
So there's ah oftentimes I'll think about like, Oh, I wish I could go back and do this thing over again. You know, you ever wish you could go back and do something over again. So you've learned a thing or two about the thing. You're like, I wish I could get started back when our marketing automation was in its infancy or even better back when Facebook ads had just dropped in the feed. You're like, Oh, I wish I would have maximized those 3 cent clicks better. You know, but ultimately I'd be like, yeah, but I don't have AI. right yeah but Even if I could go back, I don't know if I'd want to because I'd have to leave so many of the tools that I now like depend on to do so much in order to do it again. um like so That's what I think of when I think of like how exciting it is now. it's like I would not go back even in some of the right moments of what there's been some seasons in digital marketing that have been more ah guess profitable than others.
00:02:21
Speaker
um And even though there's not a particular channel, it seems like most channels and digital marketing have are pretty mature now, even TikTok, you know, ah very mature, hard ah hard to get easy, easy attention. AIs, the tool sets, not a channel, but as the tool set is the most exciting that can drive the most innovation, and can drive the most profitability, I think, back into businesses because digital's matured now. Agreed.
Audra's Journey and AI Evolution
00:02:46
Speaker
Agreed. So if you go back to when I started, so I opened my agency in 2009 coming off the real estate boom. I owned a title company before that. Did very, very well. Real estate started changing 2009.
00:03:00
Speaker
I got introduced to Dan Kennedy event yeah and started with social media as my build out. So that was kind of the first ah iteration of what social media was going to become. I feel like we're back there at that beginning Wild West. Let's just try stuff. Let's just see if this will work kind of ah playground, which is such a cool experience because I didn't know if I'd ever have another chance like this. But social media really was that. And now it's it's almost like this new evolution of what this industry is going to be. It's a whole new set of rules. It's a whole new process. And yet the crazy thing is, is as we're learning it, AI is changing so quickly that in a minute when agents are here, it's going to evolve again into something else. yeah And who knows what it's going to be after that?
00:03:54
Speaker
I don't know if there's like a big jump from AI now to agents, because... No? No. I think the way people are having to program program AI now, you you are the agent and you're just breaking down complex projects into the task for it. Pretty soon you can just delegate the whole project. It's just that your deleg your delegation right now you have to be very detailed in your delegation to AI. In the future, you just won't have to be as detailed. it You'll be like, hey like I'd like to go on a vacation to Paris. That's a pretty big project, right? in the in the Right now, you'd have to break down exactly what you wanted to think through in order for it to do anything. In the future, it'll be like, oh, cool. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. what How much do you want to spend on it? It'll like proactively ask you questions and then go and execute all the tasks and then check in with you like a human would. like a ah Not just a human, but like a director level human would.
00:04:46
Speaker
Like a super smart human. Yeah. Well, the other thing it needs to learn us. I think it'll be a bunch of baby steps on our way there though. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.
Crafting AI Prompts for Efficiency
00:04:56
Speaker
I do find that writing prompts and going through the different kinds of automations, it's very surface level. And I actually have to tell it, almost give it my workflow for it to be able to understand the amount of details that I expect it to produce. And it's easy to do when you're doing it on a topic that you're an expert in or you're at least familiar enough with to say, ah no, that's not exactly what I was looking for. Like you, I've i've published probably 50 courses using AI. Did it? Turned 30 courses around in about 45 days.
00:05:35
Speaker
Now, the reason why is one, I know this subject matter. Two, I just needed speed, right? I just needed it to write the content. I was quickly able to edit it, dropped it into Descript, put ah ah PowerPoint slides with it and a voiceover. and 30 courses later, you know you're able to do such things at speed. For me right now, we're at the AI place of speed, ah doing things more effectively so you can get better results, and then much more affordable, meaning I don't need a tech stack of 50 different tools anymore. i As long as I know what I'm trying to get to, I can typically work it out with
00:06:15
Speaker
you know a nice air table layout with make automations and my knowledge and I can get it together fairly you know very effectively without having to have five tools anymore. So it's ah it's been awesome. It's huge.
Automating Content Creation
00:06:33
Speaker
What are some of the things that you're finding you're getting the most out of um between marketing automation and AI? Like what are you automating with AI that's getting the most leverage for you? Um, let me think about that for a second. So when I started with AI, we were all out there chasing, right? Shiny tools, really cool automations, cool things, cool things. But then when I still found out, I'm still fragmented. I still got 20 different tools to try to get something done. I started going the other way around and said, okay, wait a second. I'm not going to look at the shiny objects. I'm going to look at what does my workflow currently look like?
00:07:11
Speaker
And then what what kind of tools out there can I use to make that automation work? And doing it that way instead of going out, just really building off of what I need or what clients need, excuse me, made this such an easier process. So an example could be, I have a client that needs content at scale. Maybe it's Summit content, maybe it's, ah They have a podcast or a YouTube channel or they produce a ton of social media content. Well, I can take the workflow that they're currently using and and take it apart and build it into an automation. So I have automations that post directly to LinkedIn or Twitter or your Facebook page. You don't touch it.
00:08:00
Speaker
you pick your categories you pick your tone of voice you set up your prompt and they run on autopilot so people that want to get content out consistently that solves it we can write blog post we can write ebooks i've got offer stacks for sales copy where we're gonna launch a new product we put it through the. offer stack, it maps out everything from your target audience to your messaging to your MVP, all of it all your copy for your sales pages. So really just taking in, okay, what are the tasks that I'm currently doing that are on rinse and repeat, right? Is staff doing it? Are you doing it? And is there a way to automate those steps to get it done quicker, faster, more affordable to get better results?
00:08:46
Speaker
And the better you get at finding systems, the less work you're going to do because now I'm just managing automations. I'm not in the weeds. I'm not having to develop everything from scratch every single time. Now I just got to manage the resources, which I've got all kinds of time to work on something else to actually talk to humans. And, you know, I'm getting much more consistent results as well.
Revolutionizing Marketing with AI
00:09:15
Speaker
So I always like to look at specific case studies because I find, yeah like I guess there's something you said that was really, really valuable. And it's what, what is currently, what are you currently doing that you can automate? right I mean, it goes back to like a book that revolutionized my marketing life was the four hour work week, even though it was written for entrepreneurs to escape their jobs. I took it as a marketer early in my career and it was like, Oh,
00:09:36
Speaker
I could use the same principle to just get 10x more done because he walks through. I think it's the first is is what we're doing even necessary. Can we eliminate it first? Then can we automate it? Right. Which is how it kind of led me into the marketing automation space. And then if not automate, how can we pre-write the process down to such degree that we can hand it over to the lowest paid person, which is usually like an intern or an outsourist like AA in order to delegate it? right that was his four That was the four hour work week formula. I was like, I just took it and essentially used it to jump up my career because I became way more productive than everybody else. right just and and Just being that intern handling social media earlier, I got to get the reps in and learn how social work before a lot of other people did. right
00:10:23
Speaker
Um, so starting with what you're already doing and automating it, but I find that there's another place too. Because if you're not from, if you're not sure what can be done, you'll never know what new things are possible of that you would have never even considered before. Then that's, that's a scary frontier to be in, but it's also the most exciting frontier. Uh, especially for marketers, because that's where you can do something fancy that gets people's attention is being able to do that fancier stuff that isn't The normal stuff that you have to do, but is the the cool stuff that I don't know get you
00:10:57
Speaker
Extra. I don't know. I find doing the new the newer thing can actually get a lot of attention if you do it well, fast. That's harder though. It is harder. But here's the other thing. The Chinese fun, but we're at the place now with AI that companies are saying, before I'm going to write you a bazillion dollar check, I need to see what is going to be the ah ROI for my money. So yes, ideas are sexy as heck. You can take them to YouTube. You can really make a name for yourself around that. But they still want you to be able to take work off their plate. And as long as I can go into a company, so typically the way for me, it's worked for the last 15 years, I go into a company, I look at their P and&L, and I find money, I find opportunities. Is it changing tools? Is it changing staff? Is it creating different workflows? Is it
00:11:48
Speaker
optimizing email campaigns or Facebook campaigns or their web traffic isn't converting, whatever that looks like, right? So I've gotten very, very good at that. So now when I go in, I'm really looking at what can AI do to enhance what they're already doing? Remember, there's a pretty good learning curve there. A lot of people only know their job, or they've got a very small team that's wearing multiple hats. to pick up something like we do and completely learn to the depth that we have is it's not realistic.
00:12:19
Speaker
Right. So I need to go in quick and I need to give you something to really buy back your time, buy back your money, but buy back your investment of doing the thing. Then they'll gradually say, OK, I see the value of this. I see the results of it. Let's go. And then really the purse strings open up and you can do whatever you want to do. And then you do all the fun, sexy stuff. But it really needs to be able to affect what am I doing today? How does this help me today? Um, and when I have the downtime, right? Keep the sales coming in, keep the leads coming in. Let me spend more time with my humans and then I'm open to whatever you can bring me.
Evolving Marketing Roles and AI Integration
00:13:00
Speaker
It's huge because we all know marketing is like a never ending black hole that you could always throw more time, money and energy and talent into, right? It's just never ending, which is my, it's my hope that that stays true. Otherwise Sam Altman's prediction of like 95% of marketing being done by AI in five years is terrifying.
00:13:18
Speaker
But I'm like, well, yeah, but will it still, will the black hole exist? Because will you be able to grow more and still throw more human resources into it anyway? Hopefully. Otherwise, a lot of us are going to be in trouble. Well, we shift, right? Except for those who master AI. We shift our roles. So it's been very, very manual for the last 15 years. I mean, luckily, technology like ClickFunnels was a big change for us in the industry. When Infusionsoft came out, that was huge. Just really, really- That's cool. Were you an Infusionsoft person? I was. I was. I have a background. That was my big, big break into marketing automation. Oh, nice. Nice. So, I mean, there's been very pivotal points, like you said, where the technology has changed so much to allow us to do much more because before this, it was all manual.
00:14:05
Speaker
So I think we're going to get to a place where much more of it will be automated, but you're still going to have to have overseers. You're still going to have to have somebody managing the resources, the automations. There's still going to have to be that audience of experts. that can look at something. Yes, chatGPT can tell you your email's not converting and you've got a 2% open rate, but you've still got to be able to be experienced enough to say, okay, to ask the right questions. Earlier, you said that. People just don't even know, where do I start? I don't know what I don't know, so how do I ask you the right questions?
00:14:46
Speaker
What are some of the cooler things you've been able to build with ah things like make and automation and in high level in order to get AI to actually fill in the gaps of where we ran into problems before with automation? Because like i I've run some pretty sophisticated like infusion soft campaigns that were tying into all the third parties and customizing websites and text messaging. And if they texted back, this email would kick off. And if they click this link, this page would change. and that kind of stuff. But there was always limitations there. There could only go so far at some point of just the limits of object-oriented programming, really. The out of AI is now filling in huge gaps of what you could and couldn't do before. So what how are you leveraging AI now in your marketing automation in order to make things more personalized or add more value?
00:15:34
Speaker
Well, even just a simple explanation or a simple example, say for content.
Streamlining Podcast Production with AI
00:15:40
Speaker
Now, when we create content, it always starts with one thing, right? Either a blog post, a YouTube video, a podcast, a newsletter. There's some one source. Typically, you know humans pick what that workflow is going to look like. They create the content. A writer does their things. A video editor does theirs. A designer does theirs. you know If you've got a team, if not, it's one person or two people doing that whole workflow. I've got an Airtable base built now. And again, pick your tools of choice. Whatever works for you is the right tool. right There's no hard, fast rule on any of this. I'm just finding for the automations, Airtable is is nailing it for what I'm trying to do. So yeah I can give it a topic for a blog post. I can um give it keywords. I can tell it the target audience I want to go to. I give it the tone of voice that I want it to write with. Then it'll go through, it'll write my article.
00:16:39
Speaker
then it'll generate the promotional email for that article. It'll write all the social media. It'll generate a ah an image prompt. It'll create the image. And then it takes all of that content content with the excerpt, with the meta description and all the stuff that would go along from an SEO perspective and posts it on my WordPress website and draft. So it's all there. So it's been edited. It's been reviewed. The content's created. It's ah now on the website. And then I can go in, do one last check, set it to live and it kicks off the emails to go out the social media to post and closes that loop on all the content being distributed. I can do that today and I can do it with YouTube. and airtable but Where are you clicking the approve button? Is that an air table? So it's connected to make.
00:17:35
Speaker
So the automations are built into Make. So yeah, so you have say three or four steps, five steps, blog post, then I've got a button that kicks off the ah Make automation that runs through, brings content back to error table, moves to the next step, next step, next step. And i I'm building out a virtual summit. So it'll go start to finish with a summit, YouTube videos. I mean, so really just digging into the meat of marketing. um I'll take this into, you know, I, you could post to LinkedIn, to Facebook, to Twitter. It's very, very sexy. And all of that whole process that I just explained is about three minutes.
00:18:19
Speaker
Yeah. it's And it's a lot of stuff in there, right? I mean, there's a lot of stuff. I have some audit AI tools that come up with all the content where my frustration with them is that they, it only pushes the football slightly farther down the field, but then you, you have another problem. It's cast magic. And I i bought cast magic back when it was an AppSumo deal and I'm like a thousand minutes for free every month. And I leverage the heck out of it. but I find I end up with another problem is that it creates all the content and I've customized all the prompts, but now I have this backlog of content not posted because if you're able to come up with, like I don't know, even 10 pieces of pot content per podcast episode, right the difficult becomes of now copying and pasting them over and all the individual channels that posting becomes a problem.
00:19:03
Speaker
And it even becomes a, even copying and pasting becomes a problem because now, now I have to schedule them, but I don't even know what the website yeah URL is going to be to promote it, which it's not going to be live on the podcast. but I want to promote people from social to the website and it's going live on the website automatically based on the RSS feed and it's an issue. Um, so I've been, I've actually been working on building a, an app, uh, from scratch because I can't find, but maybe it is automatable through making something like air table, but it's going to be based on almost built. Interesting. like cast i' like It should start from the RSS feed to the podcast because from there it should be able to go downhill because you can kill get the video, run it through, you know, trascribe transcribe it and then use that to kick off everything. Correct. Like there should be a sequence here that's really close to being able to point back to the original website where the video and the blog is located. no But it has to be based on RSS because RSS is old tech, but it's very reliable old tech.
00:20:03
Speaker
and It's very well organized. so If you can use one RSS feed to create all your RSS feeds, you can use those to power everything else. Of course, that you can use it to post to your website to the podcast apps with custom show notes in them. right um you probably can't You could use it technically to then go through Zapier to post on Twitter or whatever, but you through Make, you could just go straight to the API from there correct to post all those places. Now it doesn't do much for the clips. That has to be a separate process, but for the text posts, you should be able to automate all of it. I'm like, there should be a link between all these things. I can bring in the clips and images.
00:20:49
Speaker
You're auto clipping it through make. What, how does it make, doesn't do that natively. So what tool are you tapping into? No auto clipping it, meaning like descriptive, like creating shorts. yeah Yeah, creating the shorts. I can bring the URL in for a video and get it to post. I have not figured out the clipping part yet. So my current workflow say that blog post example I just kind of went through. Once I'm done with all of that, then it goes into a social one. Some of them we have to do manually, some of them are all automatic. But my goal is, there's one thing that my clients are really good at is getting content created first time.
00:21:35
Speaker
There's no backend system to repurpose content. And they're using 50 different tools, like you said. I've got some content in Descript. I've got some on my Google Drive. I've got some over here. I've got here. And the system that I'm building in Airtable is, so I use Airtable, Make. and Google Drive because i make does run into storage or AirTable can run into storage issues. But the goal is keep keep it as organic as you can with the least amount of technology. One, the more you get in, the more chances of breaking. But two, it gives you a much better workflow. So each automation kicks off to the next automation, bringing it back and storing it
00:22:20
Speaker
in field and air table, which makes it easier for it to process the information. But the so solving the cast magic thing, I'm like 70% done. It's almost finished where it will take that whole workflow that I just did and then post it to social media with images. Now you can do images with Placid is a good one for using make automation. Um, and there's a couple others out there as time gets a little bit better, we will get better at getting templates. I really wish Canva would open up and give us an API because that would solve everything. I'm so frustrated that there's no good image automation tool. There's only one that I found that I like, um, but it's really expensive.
00:23:02
Speaker
um I can't remember what it is but it's it's made for email marketing and you can essentially take like pngs and inject other images into it like maybe if you have a guest on your podcast and you can inject their photo into a specific point into the image and put nice customize the text with their names. um It's made so because you can essentially mass email a million people and customize every single image on the fly. Oh, nice. Nice. But I've learned that it's really just a yeah URL query away to customize and that's how they do it. you you You ping their servers and it sends you back the image really fast. um But you can use that for all kinds of automation purposes. But it's like 500 bucks a month for this email marketing tool that I've used for all kinds of different automations in the past.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yeah. But that's the only tool that I've seen that allows you to dynamically at least change text in some simple, like a photo and a graphic kind of a thing. Yeah, you can do. You could inject an AI generated image into a certain section of it and try to control it, but it's hard. Well, and you don't you can't really... Dolly's not good enough. I mean, you can connect Leonardo, has an API that you can use with Make, and it does design some decent photos. It gets pretty expensive though, if you're doing them at mass. Again, it's it's getting the least amount of tools that you need at the most best place to really onboard people, especially at the beginning when they're doing so much testing and getting their prompts right and that kind of good stuff.
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, I'm doing what you're doing is I'm having AI pre generate the prompts so that I then posted a mid journey. And then from mid journey, I pull into Photoshop where I have a template and I use the AI tools in there to like expand it where I need to expand the image. And then just I just manually change the text. end up yeah And you'll see it like when I publish your episode, you'll see your photo in there and the ai image generated but you'll you'll notice it's more than what i can do right now i'm manually doing them all but i speeds up the process but there's no way to really automate it it should yeah right not yet no um yeah it's funny is so many people that are not using i think that it's further than it actually is.
00:25:14
Speaker
But those of us that are in the weeds building things, it's like, eh, that didn't quite work yet. The technology's not quite there yet. But the gifts that we have been given to- It's getting close though. I think you and I see it and we're like, oh man, we're only a few years away from full automation. ah So cool. I'm building for that three person company. So as I build these automations, that's the goal. How how much time does this save? how How much better results do I get? And am I building it into a closed system where, again, content is such a huge part of marketing, regards what it is, right? Any kind of content. um I want to build it into a hub where people can rinse and repeat.
00:25:55
Speaker
I did a video six months ago. It's still relevant. How do I get it back out there? How do I have everything living in one place that makes sense, that's super easy to access? And I can quickly turn around the the calendars and all the content that needs to go with it so I can spend my time doing something else. Yeah, my goal is to do it with the podcast because i've had a theory that the podcast is the ultimate form of content because I can record video with it and it's easier than youtube videos,
Podcasting as a Content Powerhouse
00:26:23
Speaker
right? Having a conversation is just easier than pre-planning a script and then planning the cuts and it its tends to be um What I call audio first video like you don't have to see the video people will be listening to this and they don't need to see us talking but if they want the extra context and the facial expressions and the hand gestures
00:26:40
Speaker
You know, it's helpful. um So with that being that it becomes the ultimate pillar piece of content that you can then toss down and it become a wave of content afterwards. But I'm still trying to figure out, like, how can I automate this to the nth degree and then do a few pieces manually until those are able to be automated the image. I'm like even if I could just tweet out an image of like the cover art um because I spend a lot of time on just one cover art and I make it specifically so I can be cropped in for the YouTube. So it's a square and it's a thumbnail image all in one. So I only design it once and then I just crop it and it becomes everything.
00:27:16
Speaker
I'm like, even if I could just leverage that one piece, and if I make that piece really good, then it's worth putting out as a social content too, right if you make it good enough. um That's where I'm trying to get to, to the point where I can do it for myself and then even as an agency try to try to resell that and see if anybody else buys on that. right um It's worthwhile. Images is the last um area that is just not touched on quite enough where you can do autopilot. I mean I can use and make automation where I can go to Google Docs. Say I'm going to create a carousel.
00:27:52
Speaker
for either instagram or linkedin or something like that you can create the slides ahead of time you put the text on a google doc you run the automation and make actually takes the text and puts it with your template and then create and then turns it into a pdf and sticks it back on your drive and then you schedule that to go out automatically we can do all that now with no problem. So that's pretty cool. Getting their carousels are hard. Yeah. I don't do carousels on LinkedIn for reasons cause they just take too long. Yeah. But you could do that ahead of time. So you just set up your template ahead of time and five minutes later you've got a 10 slide, a very nicely designed carousel.
00:28:37
Speaker
Okay, so I need to go and revisit this and make because I've taken some runs through make and I'm like, it doesn't seem like it can do it quite there, but I need it. I obviously need to go look back into it again and see, see what I can do there because it's so close. Um, I still, I think I still want to build it from scratch just cause then you can. The problem with Make is that it takes someone like you or I to be able to customize it. And if you're listening to this and you haven't been in a tool like Make before, as soon as you get in, I promise if you're not used to dealing with these tools, you will be overwhelmed. Even though it's drag and drop, they are complicated enough to handle almost anything, but therefore complicated enough to be like Salesforce and is overwhelming pretty quickly.
00:29:15
Speaker
It is. It can be for sure. So what I suggest though, there's enough of us out there now that are building these templates yeah or make is called blueprints, right? So I could say I've got an automation that you want to set up. I can give you the blueprint. So then you're not building it from scratch. You're just taking what I already built and customizing it a little bit further. Maybe the prompt needs to be updated because you're in the restaurant business and I'm in the, um You know pet business or something like that So it will continue to get easier and easier as we go through these automations now Here's something when I first got started I would go to YouTube and I would watch and I would build out these make automations with the people that do them Still run into the same challenge my challenge as an agency owner For every single client I've ever had is having less tools in a more
00:30:09
Speaker
ah Better ecosystem where everything's connected. Like you said, I've got my writing over here. I've got my this here here Everything's very fragmented These employees of ours are doing ten other things Something is always going to get missed and the results yeah are not going to be as good as they could have been if you gave them a tighter system so all these little one-off automations are great and independently, but they don't hook to anything else. So yes, I can go to YouTube and I can watch a video on how to put chapters in my YouTube video. There's AI for that. It'll write all the chapters. It'll take your transcript, write your chapters, go back to YouTube and put in your description. Great. But everything's working in a silo still, which for me as a marketer, that's a broken system. If you work in silos, you do not you are not getting the best results that you could actually get.
00:31:07
Speaker
So mean I go back and challenge it. I worked for a podcast agency before going solo myself. And I was frustrated because i was ah ah I was on my audience growth side. So I consulted just on how to grow the podcast audience. But I was frustrated because it would take us two weeks to turn around an episode for a client. And I was always like, why? And then I, of course you dig into the process. Like, well, why? Because first someone has to listen to it, usually the writer. And that takes time. And then they have to come up with the title for it at least and come up with the show notes and then write the blog posts and then come up. And then that person has to then write the, the cuts. Cause we were, we were creating the shorts by hand and captioning them. And then it has to go over to the editor who has to actually make the cut, write the captions by hand.
00:31:52
Speaker
put and the producer is watching all this and collecting it in Google Drive. And then of course if edits, if any edits come back, like it's got to go to the right person at the right time. There's so many little pieces, oh, and the designer to design any graphics that come out. That's at the very end, right? After the writing and the quotes have been pulled and all that kind of stuff, there's so many different pieces that are pulled across so many different functions. It took two weeks to turn a single episode into the other pieces of content that they would, you know, frustratingly you load all that goodness into the Google folder, give it to the client, the episode will go live and then they never post any of it. When they're done that. Our clients at the time would not post any of the assets we'd make, even though they're paying for them. They're literally paying extra for the assets. Don't post them. It's a problem.
00:32:37
Speaker
It is a problem. But now, I mean, people people that are starting marketing today that don't have the legacy experience like we do, they have no idea how hard it was. So that whole workflow that you just described, I could probably do the same thing, same quality of assets in about four hours. start to finish all of it. Between images and cuts and blog posts and all that kind of good stuff with editing, I could easily knock out within four hours.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, right now my process has it down to 90 minutes and that's all I'm like, I'm trying to figure out just a few more pieces that not not just do the same thing in shorter time, but even do more and even less time. Like something I struggle with is like, I, it's so hard. You get all this work done just to get the episode done and then the distribution is hard. So that's one piece, but even following up with the guest. I'm like, come on, this is where high level is going to be. To me, um this is like my goal this week is to build out a guest sequence. So it's like yeah when episode goes live and I know it's going live because I'm scheduling it, I just need to fill out a form you know with your email in it so that you not only get an email with an like a link to the the episode, but then the day after, here's here's some tweets. I can pre-write it based on what you said and from your perspective, because the AI is like right from the guest perspective, her name is Audra.
00:33:59
Speaker
yeah okay You know, include, include my Twitter or my X handle or whatever, you know, it's possible to then schedule three guests, followups, and even maybe, maybe at the end ask for like, Hey, like would mean the world to me if you, you know, tab by five steal oh my show on Apple or Spotify, here's some links. Bam, bam. I'm currently not doing that, but I'd love to be doing that. I have that built into my podcast automation. So what it does is it reviews the transcript, pulls out five quotes from the speaker or from the guest. Then it, uh, sends them an email saying, here are your top mentions.
00:34:37
Speaker
with a way to take it and asset. Now, still goes back to them taking the extra step. yeah But we've provided them all the value that we could possibly give them between thumbnails and the links to the videos and social. That's about all you can do. And then it wraps up with ah here, you know, we'd love if you could write a review about being a guest or, you know, the value. It's huge. It's already. There's so much room for automation and marketing in this whole process that I'm trying to get it down to like being able to do a lot for very little time spent.
Repurposing and Automating Podcast Content
00:35:13
Speaker
And at the time you do spend gets maximized. like Creating that one image yeah you know becomes the cover piece for the episode, but also the YouTube thumbnail, also the the image that goes out to the guests so they can post it to social. So it's being leveraged, like at least the things you have to do manually. are like
00:35:28
Speaker
highly valuable. Let's put it that way. Right? Well, here's the next thing. You just did that whole work process. Now you want to repurpose that. So you want to set it up two months from now to go back out with a little different spin on it. um Hey, had this great conversation. And here's some more takeaways. Two months from now, people aren't going to remember. So it's a fresh content as long as it's. Yeah. Yeah. yeah That's that's on happy back yeah far ahead I'm just trying to make the most of like the three or four day promotion cycle um When the episode goes live I'm like if I could just make the most of that week when the episode goes live That'll be a huge step like following up like months or a year later would be the step two Or even compiling the episodes to come up with new content Because some episodes would have been on the same topic and like I've done multiple episodes on podcasting now
00:36:23
Speaker
I'm like to pull those together and then create new content out of the insights from multiple posts would be would be the next level up. Very nice. A buddy of mine has been in business 15 years. He's got 650 podcast episodes. And he's like, I've done nothing with it. And that's where it really got me thinking about how do I get it to a place where he can repurpose. He uses Cast Magic as well, but there is no way to do that, especially with older content that's not in there. So that's part of what I'm trying to solve with this. How do they take that stuff? It's still relevant. It's still very valuable marketing information.
00:37:01
Speaker
and just rinse and repeat. Keep doing it, bring the data back, tell you what's working, what's not working, push it back out again. Yeah. I mean, imagine with a show like that, you could, I'd imagine, I would probably go through the analytics, find the best 15 episodes, and then just run clips out of those like crazy. Even though yeah clips clips is time consuming, it's a lot less time consuming than it used to be, but it's still time consuming, so you have to go and watch them all. Right. um have you have you Do you use Zencaster or do you use a different tool for podcasting? Um, I use Zoom, believe it or not. Really? You should check out Zencaster. You'd probably like it. Yeah. It's got the clipping tool built into it and it's just really smooth. The thing I like about it is that it takes that, it does the extra step of like, if you like the clip, you just push, put in the, either post now or put it in the queue or schedule. And then I don't think about it again, because I hate downloading it and re-uploading it and coming up with the caption. It does all that. It comes up with the caption based on the clip. And then you just.
00:37:58
Speaker
I just publish, publish, publish, archive, publish, edit, publish. Very nice. It's just faster. That's what ZenCaster does well. It also is the recording, like we're recording here, but it also is the host. I never have to download it to edit it. Oh, good. Okay. And put it on Descript or whatever. I used Descript. Well, I used to use CapCut to edit the episodes, but now I just edit straight in ZenCaster because Riverside, you can edit it based on the text. Any mistakes that I make in the episode that I want to cut out, I just go and delete that text and then it deletes it. It also cuts out all the silences and you can add on the intro and outro automatically. You're like, yep, that's the intro. So because that's all automated and off to upload and download, which took a lot of time, that's all in one. That's what I like about this tool.
00:38:43
Speaker
that it does. Descript, I use Descript for quite a bit. So I have a membership site where I teach AI automations and I have to download it from Zoom, upload it to Descript. Now it is getting much better as far as, you know, I can go in, clean it up, take out any kind of extra stuff out of front and the back and export it out to wherever it's going to go, fairly to YouTube or podcast CO or whatever. tools, but it's still kind of clunky for some of that stuff. If Descript is your as it has a good workflow for you, you should check out Squadcast because that's their recording platform that they just purchased. And that workflow between those two things I imagine is good now and is only going to get better yeah because now it's becoming Descript is pretty close to becoming an all-in-one. It just doesn't have the publishing side. I mean, you can auto publish to YouTube from there and I think you can auto publish to something like ah
00:39:40
Speaker
captivate for podcasting. yes Yes. Not auto publish, but you know just click a button and it publishes the captivate. out And I think it it might might be even like include the title and all that kind of show notes from straight from Descript, so you don't ever have it to log into captivate. Correct. So you can do a lot of the workflow, but again, I'm trying to simplify it by bringing in one tool. Yes, zencast that's a good idea too because it's all in ones always have their their downfalls, right? Yeah, whereas Riverside might be better at recording and descriptive is better at editing But I just prefer the simplicity of one tool. Yeah. Yeah, great point. Great point Well, so tell me what you're working on that. Maybe I can help with or talk through I
00:40:21
Speaker
Well, I'm trying to automate as much of the podcast process as possible. okay I'm using custom GPTs for pre-production. But even then, I'm still trying to like cross over. like When someone but somebody books the the meeting, it all really starts with the booking, like that that calendar. like You filled out to book this episode. From there, like trying to build it so that it actually gives me an email. That's probably my next step is giving it, so it gives me the email with everything I need to publish right to the custom GPT. Because that's kind of a collaborative process, the pre-production. AI can't automate what I know I want yet. It's just not smart enough to look back through all my episodes and looked at what topics I've covered or not covered. It it can't contain all that context well. um So I copy and paste in your whole LinkedIn profile. So you probably saw me looking at your LinkedIn profile, right?
00:41:11
Speaker
um and then it does an analysis on you even does and does some web searches for other things you've done online to Understand who you are and it comes up with a summary. It's like cool. What would you like to? ah Talk to Audra about I give it an angle that I'd like to hit or I'd say oh like I don't know give me some angles And it'll extrapolate based on what it knows about you from LinkedIn and the search that it's done. Nice. And comes up with some angles for the show. I pick an angle, I'm like, yep, number three. And then it comes up with titles based on that angle, based on the premise of the show. um I pick a title or edit it or combine two of them. And it's like this collaborative process or it makes pre-production what used to take an hour and now it takes like five minutes.
00:41:51
Speaker
right And then it writes the questions based on the angle, based on the question, based on your expertise and the premise of the show. It's taken all those things into account to come up with the questions and the intro and the outro. and I used to have it write an email to send to the guests, but I find I just wasn't doing that enough, so I cut that out. And then it then it just waits for the transcript. And once I plug in the transcript, it writes the show notes. It already has the title. And it comes up with like essentially a summary and the timestamps. Now what I'm working on next is like, how do you automate high level to do the follow-up afterwards after you've recorded the episode to follow up with the guests at the right time with the right stuff that I've kind of outlined on a piece of paper that I've not actually built in high level yet, which is why I reached out to people on high level. I'm like, who's doing cool stuff on high level, especially with the AI and the workflow, I think is under leveraged. I think even they've stopped developing their AI stuff because people just aren't yeah leveraging it as much as they thought they would.
00:42:46
Speaker
but I'm looking for case studies on high-level AI workflows because I feel like there's more possibilities here than I than i know yet. There are, but at the same time, what I found using their workflows is we're still a little bit limited as to what kind of data we can actually give it.
Challenges and Opportunities in AI Workflows
00:43:04
Speaker
And until that opens up, I mean, they've got a very, you know, your, your email responses, your text messages, you want it to take this action or mark this box, or it's got all the rudimentary stuff that typical workflows have automation wise, but it doesn't, it hasn't become very creative to allow us to say,
00:43:24
Speaker
I want it to actually take my transcript. I want to pull out the top five things. I want to do this. I mean, we it's go high level. Oh, we could do that. We could do it. Well, in this whole workflow of everything else that you're trying to trying to build out, I've not found that I can get good enough stuff out. I'm still finding myself having to go over to chat GPT to answer something or um the outputs are just not an ah Enough meaning not really what i'm looking for just yet and What I find it can do well is things that are not that don't need to be collaborative like You know if you just run the sequence it's gonna right it's gonna work But you just need the end output even if it takes multiple steps You just have to run it back through multiple times Because it's based on the one prompt and then you have to include the context of the last prompt
00:44:14
Speaker
that the and the answer in order for it to keep going you just have to stack it um i don't know what the limit is on high levels fields because that's where you can run into an issue but i stuck a 45 minute podcast trans trips and it it took it all so i was like well it's a lot I'm surprised. I'm actually surprised. i haven't had I haven't had great stuff come out of it yet, so that's good. that's i've been You're definitely figuring out. I've only done one course with it. okay and like You check it out. It's aidrivenmarketer dot.com. slash course and It's an email course based on a couple of episodes I did. I strung together into a five-day typical email course with the video embedded into it.
00:44:51
Speaker
yeah But the cool thing I did with it that I'm hoping to find more case studies like of things like this is where I took on the form to get into the course and ask for like your your job title, your industry, and who you sell to. And it takes that piece of information and it injects that into the prompt with the course transcript. nice for that for that video transcript of that day's lesson and it says hey create a custom lesson plan um based on this information give me a beginner step based on the lesson and what and their unique attributes as a student and give me a beginner step an intermediate step an advanced step taking advantage of the lesson uh what what i taught in the lesson
00:45:29
Speaker
Nice. And it does a really good job because it it gives different and gives a different lesson than if you're a CMO of a beauty industry selling to teens versus if you're an email marketing specialist working in a tech startup selling to higher ed. Very different. That's awesome. And the output's different, though it's still based on the lesson. But naturally, it took me probably like 20 iterations of that prompt in order to get it right. And those are single prompts for each lesson has its own prompt, but I copied and pasted them, like, and just swapped out the transcript for each one. So once I had it prompt written well, once that just changed the lesson for each day and left the dynamic parts dynamic. Now, are you using agents or assistants or are you just using the prompts?
00:46:13
Speaker
It's just, it's just, it's not agents. It's not the assistants. I actually don't know how to leverage the assistants. Have you? No. I see the assistants in the backend of OpenAPI in their API section. I'm like, this is cool. I have no idea how to leverage it. I'm like, I don't know. Yeah. and Think of it like it what it does is it allows you to take a prompt and really go in and explain it further. So if I wanted to go back to your podcast idea, if I wanted to create a different kind of workflow, but it's not staying consistent, the output, what I can do is I can go into an assistant, use that same prompt, but then maybe I'm going to upload some knowledge documents.
00:46:52
Speaker
or I'm going to give it the things not to do, or I want to give it some examples of what kind of output I'm going to do, I can add all those in the assistance. And then what you're doing is you're just taking the record from there, and you're going to use that as the input. So instead of doing like a chat completion, it's just saying, Hey, just access this assistant and read everything that's in there before you respond. And that way you have a little bit more control over the consistency of it. um What I find sometimes with prompts is, yes, they'll work great in small chunks. But when I try to expand on it, it starts even with the temperature turned down, so it's not so creative. I want it to follow my process step by step. It still goes off the rails a little bit. so
00:47:39
Speaker
If I expand it and use an assistant, I could say, here are the things I don't want you to do. Don't use markdown. Don't use quotes. Don't use all this silly stuff. This is what I'm looking for. Stay here. Then I can get more consistent stuff. That's the, that's the thing with automation. If, if I can't produce a consistent result, it didn't really work. I mean, it got stuff off my plate, but if I still have to go back every single time and edit it, it's not really doing what I need it to do. Yeah. I think. it
00:48:10
Speaker
I'm doing some some of that stuff within the prompt and it's like a it's just a huge super prompt because i mean it's got a whole transcript in there as one prompt. Technically, you could take this prompt and just pop it right into chat GPT and it it'll output the right answer. um the The only thing you don't have in chat GPT is the temperature thing, which is a really nice little tool for those dealing with the API. You can give it some more clarity on how... I guess you could probably even include that in the prompt, what the temperature would is, if you want to hack it that way. You can. So it's a super long prompt and I have an example of what the output should look like. Good. But it's not, it's a general example. I have a, I mean, I call it the step method. Like you have to include the con, uh, I forgot, I broke it down to an acronym. I'm like struggling to remember my own acronym. Um, part of it is include a template and include an example of the T and the E. And of course the P is the the prompt or the super prompt. Um,
00:49:04
Speaker
So if you give it the, in every single one of those lessons, I give it a template. Like here's the template to execute. Here's an example of it executed. So the results are pretty consistent, but there's, I use, there's certainly examples in custom GPTs that I've made where I have like, I don't know, like a hundred title examples for it to pull from. That would be stupid to put in a super prompt. Yeah, you need you need it as a reference dock and it wouldn't work in that example. So yeah being able to tap into Assistance but high level can't tap in into assistance yet. Yeah, I haven't seen that they've ah allowed us that kind of access just yet I've heard they're going to do it Yeah, I hope I definitely hope so little by little as these pieces start coming in like you said you're building it kind of from scratch it's going to be very easy for you to take that and and spin it into, you know, some of these other platforms once they catch up a little bit more. um I recently so when you build make automations or you're using Zapier or whatever it is, when you start when the new LLMs come out, you have to actually go back and manually update every single one of those automations. Yeah. And then you've got to test it against your prompt. Because what I found was if I had set it at 3.5 for chat GPT,
00:50:22
Speaker
or one of the earlier models for Claude, my when I updated it to Opus, say, or to 4.0, the prompt breaks. yeah So I found a tool the other day, it's called Open Router AI. Are you familiar with it? No, I haven't heard of that one. Oh, you got to check it out. So what it is, is you got it there's a plugin, or not a plugin, there's a integration, and I think it's maybe 30 bucks, um but what it does is it integrates with Make, And now when I do my automations, I no longer have to ah pick which model. The model's actually just, so what open router is, is all your LLMs, all the different levels, all in one interface. So I only fund open router now. and ah And whatever automation I set up, whatever machine I picked, it just goes through that one account. So I don't fund chat GPT anymore. I don't fund Claude.
00:51:22
Speaker
I just fund that. Some of my automations, I can use chat 3.5. Some of them I need Opus. And I set the level of the LLM in Airtable now. So I never have to go back to Make because the module I'm using is not chat GPT anymore. It's an open router. And it it will save hours of doing this. I won't have to update it. Yeah. Such a great find. It breaks based on the API connection. It's not based on just the prompt changes because the model is different. Um, it changed. So I'm, if I change it in air table, say I was running on four zero or four point, I was on four.
00:52:05
Speaker
And then I want to change it down to 3.5 or I want to change it to Claude. I can still run it from there. Just that specific automation, if it works fine, right? If it doesn't, then I could take a look at the prompt. But I'm not going back to every, some of my workflows, I may have 10 different chat GPT widgets in it and 10 different cloud widgets. Because I used to have to build two levels. I would say, okay, for this automation, I want you to run on chat GPT. This next automation, I want you to run through cloud. So I had to do doubles of everything. Now I just build one straight. I could have the first half run through chat GPT and the second half run through cloud or vice in versa or any other model that's in open router.
00:52:53
Speaker
Yeah. I actually don't use any other model other than open AI. Oh, really? That's the only thing I use. And a lot of people have told me that like, Hey man, you got to check out cloud. And I'm like, Hmm, cloud is so much better for copywriting. That's what I keep hearing. It's so much more human. It sounds so much more conversational. It's so better at telling stories and really making it sound like a human. I do much less editing on my copy when I take it from Claude than when I take it from chat GPT. Yeah, eventually I'm going to have to go over there. Yeah. Or just check it out. Yeah. Just play with it a little bit. You can do the free side of it. And that's how I used to do it. I would pick a task. Say I'm going to create an offer stack for a sales page. I would paste it in chat GPT and one in Claude and then take whatever gave me the better output, but more times than not Claude was better and faster. Yeah. That's what I hear over and over again.
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's definitely worth playing with. I find I, I don't know, it's one of those things where it's like, you can only learn so much. And I've just decided, I'm like, uh, I'm just going to stick to the leader and just maximize what I have there because there's so many new developments happening all the time that I'm like, I don't want to, and when especially when people start to know, start to know you're into AI, they start telling you, have you checked out this? Have you checked out this? Have you heard this? You're like, nope, nope. I pretty much just work with chat GBT and a few other tools. And that's it because there's so many new innovations and most of them are just like, They don't matter. Yeah, they're not even useful even if you wanted to make them useful. They're not useful yet. They're they're edge experiments Yeah, yeah agreed agreed. That's what I find most of the like third-party websites are They're just putting a really nice UX over jet GBT and can do a little you know manage it more from a retail side But for me, I don't find a lot of value in that I would rather build it at the core and again, to tie it all together, which is super important
Achieving Full Automation: Insights and Advice
00:54:49
Speaker
for me. If I still have to cut and paste and cut and paste and cut and paste to get it to work, it's not really an automation, is it?
00:54:56
Speaker
um yeah No, trying to get to full automation is the goal. I mean, I think there's a couple of us working towards this, but I, I find that what you're doing is pretty rare. Like I've not, even after interviewing, I've probably interviewed 30 people on this show. You're probably, I think you're the first person that I've found is pushing it as far as you're pushing it. Yeah. So we'll have to, I've been looking for you. you like I finally found you. I love to show you what it looks like. I mean, we won't do it on screen because at some point I'm going to sell this, but love to just give you a visual of what it looks like.
00:55:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, we could definitely do that sometime. Audra, is there anything else you think my audience should know of marketers that are curious and learning more about AI to really 10X their performance? There's a lot of moving parts out there right now. AI is moving fast. Tomorrow our morning we wake up, there's going to be something else new. Don't get caught up in that. what What you should do is look at your business. Where are you currently making money? How do I use AI to make more money? right Conversation changes when revenue comes in. If you can get to a place where you're generating more, then you can bring in some of these people like us that are in the weeds, setting up this
00:56:06
Speaker
automation, really optimizing and taking advantage of AI. ah you You don't necessarily need to learn it, but you need to be able to afford people like us and recognize the value that it can do in your business. And I think if you could just focus you know here, this is what I do every day to make money. How do I use AI to help me get better at it? then you'll be able to stay competitive and not miss. you know It's going to be tough to catch up if you really say, oh I'm not going to do it. I'm going to stay in the weeds of what I'm doing and worry about it later. I think later might be too late for many.
00:56:43
Speaker
So let's stay ahead of it. Let's become AI driven as it comes out, right? let's Let's continue working and growing and learning how to maximize it to continue to be better marketers. Because we all know for those who were caught in the digital revolution, like a lot of people were like, nah, Facebook and Twitter are for kids. It's pretty much now marketing, right? Like yeah digital marketing is marketing. And that that'll be the same thing with AI. AI marketing will just be normal marketing. It'll reset the standard. That ah Twitter is only about posting food or what was it back then? Posting what people ate for lunch? Yeah. um that That little state with theirs made me millions of dollars over the years. so yeah yeah Don't count it out. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for joining me. All right. Thanks for having me.