Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

Is Artificial Intelligence Changing The World of Marketing With Lillian Pierson

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 383

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we dive into the transformative power of AI in the marketing landscape with our esteemed guest, Lillian Pierson, a seasoned Chief Marketing Officer and data science expert.

Lillian shares her insights on the balance between leveraging AI's capabilities and maintaining human oversight in marketing strategies. She highlights the importance of integrating AI tools thoughtfully without losing the personal touch that resonates with customers. Lillian provides valuable perspectives on using AI for brand positioning and social listening to enhance lead generation and customer engagement.

Notable Quotes:

  • "AI can do amazing things with marketing, but you still need to have an oversight or a person paying attention." - [Lillian Pierson]
  • "We have to create so much content, we just have to pump it out. And what you're talking about is very interesting... we don't want to outsource the paying attention." - [Jonathan Green]
  • "In order to get garner attention, news is one of the bigger angles. So it's becoming a more important part of content strategy." - [Lillian Pierson]
  • "You have to have a movement. You have to have a manifesto. And from that sense, having a manifesto and a movement's very important." - [Lillian Pierson]

Lillian emphasizes the necessity of a calibrated approach to AI integration, ensuring that content reflects the brand's voice and values. She discusses the critical role of social listening in identifying potential leads and refining content strategies to align with audience needs.

Connect with Lillian Pierson:

If you're keen on understanding how AI is reshaping marketing and want to learn from an industry leader, this episode is a must-listen! 

Connect with Jonathan Green

Artificial intelligence is changing the world of marketing can be great or can be terrible. We're gonna find out to avoid those critical mistakes with today's amazing special guest, Lillian Pierson. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, where we make AI simple, practical, and accessible for small business owners and leaders. Forget the complicated Tech talk or expensive consultants. This is where you'll learn how to implement AI strategies that are easy to understand and can make a big impact for your business. The Artificial Intelligence Podcast is brought to you by fraction aio. The trusted partner for AI Digital Transformation at fraction A IO, we help small and medium sized businesses boost revenue by eliminating time wasting non-revenue generating tasks that frustrate your team. With our custom AI bots, tools and automations, we make it easy to shift your team's focus to the tasks that matter most. Driving growth and results, we guide you through a smooth. Seamless transition to ai ensuring you avoid costly mistakes and invest in the tools that truly deliver value. Don't get left behind. Let fraction aio o help you stay ahead in today's AI driven world. Learn more. Get started. Fraction aio.com. Now Lillian I'm excited to have you here because there are so many amazing things and ways to use AI in marketing, but sometimes we get overly excited or cut corners and say, oh, I can replace my entire marketing team and we can go too far in one direction or the other. So there's people that say, I'm never gonna use ai. Don't trust it. It's not real. And there's, people say, I'm gonna fire everyone and just use AI and it will run everything. I don't have to pay attention. One of the things I've noticed, and that's very critical in my business is like signals. So sometimes a DM or a comment on social media seeing that really affects my business and I need to see those messages. So there still needs to be an element of like oversight or paying attention to what's happening. And I think that's a critical element that sometimes businesses go too far down the AI path and there's a calibration element, which is like trust but verify or build. You could do amazing things with marketing, but you still need to have an oversight or a person paying attention. Can you talk a little bit about that and your theory as a chief marketing officer and what your approach has been to building AI systems? Sure. Yeah. So the AI systems that I build I have two systems right now that I'm offering to clients and one of them is building, basically taking the brand and positioning strategy and using that as input variables to build very compelling captions and, newsletters. So it's not just built off from ChatGPT, but it's actually built from each and every part of your brand and positioning, strategy, case studies, movement, everything. So that is one of the use cases. And then the other one is essentially social listening and finding leads using ai. And so in terms of. Set it and forget it. Now there actually, this is an interesting conversation and I always have to have this caveat as an, as a person who's been teaching data science and AI for 12 years, is that we have been using AI for everything for a very long time. So when I talk about this, I'm just talking about generative AI tools and. The second thing is I don't have the experience honestly of having any any of my clients just get a bunch of AI systems and turn them on and start them running. That would be exceptionally dangerous in my opinion.'cause the brands I work with are like. I think that most people really care about their business, but I work with in some industries where it's, like I say, if you're serving the investor market or in a finance world and stuff like that, you can't just move up. You can't just have a system out there running without human oversight on every level. Yeah, and I think that's an important starting point because for some people, especially for smaller companies who are trying to be more agile or earlier in the startup phase, they think you just hear this, strategy. You have to be on every social network. You have to have content everywhere. You have to pump out 50 posts a day, 20 posts a day, and this creates this pressure on you that the only way you can find leads is through tons of content. Especially right now when everyone is hearing oh, SEO doesn't work anymore and paid advertising is shifting because of ai. There's this increasing pressure on marketing or lead generation teams that I think leads to this well. I have to create so much content. And I have worked with clients that have done this. They're like, we have to create so much content, we just have to pump it out. And what you're talking about is very interesting. I do wanna dive into social listening, which I think is super important because it's, that's I think, the critical thing I'm talking about, which is we can use AI for a lot, but we don't wanna outsource the paying attention, which is the paying attention to responses and listening to what people says and using AI defined and sort. Where people say they have the problem that you solve, I think is super valuable. I think that's a really interesting use case people don't talk about very much. So let's dive into that concept because not everyone is familiar with social listening and maybe when people hear that, they start to think about like clubhouse, right? Which was social audio. It's not the same as social listening. It sounds similar. And talk about what this means and how it can help a company to find people that are. Further down the buying cycle. Like they're already saying, I have this problem, or I'm looking for a solution. And so that's very interesting. Let's dive into that a little bit. Yeah, actually I do need to set that up to do, to use to use AI for looking for people who are posting that type of thing, like where they're posting need for the type of problems I solve. But the type of social listening tool that I have is more of just being able to filter through comments to find. To find individuals who are aligned with our business in terms of either ICP or referral partners. And I can also deploy that for my clients as well, which is something I'm probably going to be proposing with some of them. In short order. But there are a lot of, I am talking to one of, one founder, he's building a startup with, it's basically a social listening tool with for news, for the latest news things, which doesn't sound all that exciting, right? Like you could just get onto X or whatever. But it, it is, it's a becoming a. A larger part of content strategy because we used to just be able to post like evergreen content that would be adding value for a long time and it would retain its value for the business. But with chat GPT and LLMs people don't really need that. Because they can just use ChatGPT. So in order to get garner attention news is one of the bigger angles. So it's becoming more important part of content strategy. But these are the use cases that we're using social listening for. What about you? Yeah, I think that something I think about a lot, an example is like Quora, where people ask questions. The active form of core marketing is you go to, you try to answer the question and be the top answer, and it can drive a lot of leads. I've actually bought something based on someone else's response to a core question that I would've asked. But you can also, a lot of questions get asked all the time. In B2B or B2C questions to be different things. Like people ask Encore all the time, and it used to be Yahoo questions before that, before they went out. And it would be like, how do I quit smoking? And you'd see 50 people a day ask that question. So imagine if that's your niche, that's your business, right? And every time one of those people pops up, you find them, you find their social profile and you can start running, whether it's retargeting ads to them or. Marketing to them. Or you can start to see what people have in common at those different phases. Or when someone says, oh, we hate our tech, I hate my tech support company. How do I find a new tech support company? Imagine if someone posts that on core and while everyone else is riding along answers, you email the person right away or you call their business. So that's where I think there could be something really interesting. And it can be the same on social media that, we sometimes either only look at comments based on our content, our own content, but if someone else is commenting, but it's relevant to your business, I know we have systems that like look for the keyword, if someone says the name of your business, but if someone has the problem you solve and they're talking about it, that's really relevant. And where people do this has changed so much. Like it used to be on a forum, right? There might be a thread where everyone is complaining about the same thing. And I've seen this in different markets when I was working with a few clients in the romance novel space, there's a huge thing in romance about if a, if the book has a happily or after or not. And if it doesn't, people are enraged. If you don't warn them. It's like a guaranteed one star. It's such a big deal. It's the original sin of romance novels. So in the description you have to say no happily ever after, which is HEA. You have to say to the top of your description. It's a really big deal and I found this out 'cause there was like a romance novel forum and one, it's like every post had a hundred replies and then one had 25,000 replies of top. That's how I found out about it. So just by sorting by the number of replies, like that's a way this used to reforms aren't as popular anymore. Now you look for, sometimes you'll see a LinkedIn post that has like. 25,000 replies that tells you either the person's spam botting or there's something that people are really drawn to from that post. And that's what I'm talking about is like what the more we can use AI to sort massive amounts of data.'cause the problem is that. With so much content being generated by AI and even people using AI to reply, it's almost like I wanna use AI just to sort out and see what people are actually saying and actually thinking. And shift through it.'cause I have seen people that, like you said, they're using evergreen content and they just have it constantly repeating and they're saying things that are no longer relevant. Like they'll talk about technologies that don't exist. Like they're still posting about Tumblr even though no one uses that. And that could be a mistake or. We are reusing content that stops making sense, or when people start to notice, like someone I followed, I could tell they started using AI, I write their content and it was like a real dip because they avoided the first thing you talked about, which was like, I. Really going through that training phase to make sure the AI knows your brand positioning, knows your philosophy, knows the things you believe knows. Yeah. The thing you talk about.'cause that's, you might as well rewrite. It's like what it produces without, with you have to, you'd have to rewrite the whole thing or hire a conversion copywriter. People think, oh, we're getting like great. Like it can make our social media copy. Yeah. If you wanna put something generic out there that doesn't sell your brand and isn't going to produce any sort of measurable outcome for your business, except for get people to stop listening. So one of the core, sorry, it's just what happens. It's just what happens. No, you're so right. I love this. This is what I wanna talk about, which is one of the core philosophies of ChatGPT is to be inoffensive, right? Which means it never takes a firm stance, and in order to stand out as a business, you have to have something you believe in, right? ChatGPT, if you say, I love flowers, and he goes, I love flowers too. You go, actually, I hate flowers. He goes, I hate flowers too. Like it's super agreeable in that way. That's why your content, and there are certain stances that you wanna have that are a little bit controversial or that you have a strong belief in. Like I'm not really a big fan of college anymore. I talk about this a lot. I used to teach at a college and I'm like, I don't believe it's the same path to success. It used to be a hundred years ago, and that's a strong opinion I have. That I think especially 'cause it costs like half a million dollars now or a quarter of a million dollars, you can start 10 businesses or 20 businesses with that same amount of money. So I tell, I tell my 9-year-old because she's dead set on college and I'm like, but I don't even know there's gonna be college then. But she's I'm going to college. I have a master's and nobody would know. If I don't say it I have to wear a shirt, say, 'cause no one would know because it doesn't make the same difference a hundred year.'cause now everyone can do it. It's only if it's rare. But that's a strong opinion. Whereas ChatGPT would never write an article about why college is a mistake. Because these AI tools are designed to be inoffensive. They don't take strong opinions and that's why the content is generic because it never one of reasons. But yeah, there's many other ones. Yeah. And it's. People will either, even if people disagree with you, they go, at least they stand for something. Like when someone doesn't stand for anything, they switch, whichever way the wind is blowing, then you, for they're forgettable and you have to have whatever your business is whatever your belief is. Like you talked about when your client is building a tool that Yeah, you have to have a movement. You have to have you have to have a manifesto. And even like the clients I have that are. The brand's never gonna build a movement. And that's fine. That wasn't the, that was not the point of building the movement piece. It's actually part of the content strategy because the content needs to resonate with the right people and dispel the wrong people. And so having that basis for the AI to build off of is the thing you need, like what are the principles you stand for? What do you stand against? What can you all as a, as you and your ICP rally around? And and from that sense, having a manifesto and a movement's very important. So that's why we do it. Yeah. And I think that's a critical step that a lot of people, like when we see badly generated AI content, we all see like the worst images on social media platforms that are so fake. This person has 15 arms, or it's a cake with 7,000 candles, and it's like. The content that's generic and good content rise us to the top. Even if it's AI generated. Like I, I was, I watch a YouTube channel that I'm pretty sure it's AI generated, but the content is good, so I don't share. Yeah, I don't think, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's AI generated or not, so long as you know that you can trust like that the, it's been, it's engineered with precision and that the information's coming out as trustworthy and it's entertaining. But we will actually, we're switching over to, for, we're not gonna be running. Every single graphic is from my brand is now going to be produced by a designer in Figma, from hand, not Canva anymore. Just to really stand out against the crowd because of AI to have just that one extra level of detail that shows that, okay, this is actually created by a human being. So I'm excited to test that out. I think that's a really good idea, which leads to another part of marketing that I've been thinking about a lot. I think, I don't know if I was talking to you about this last week or someone else, but what can happen is that when everyone starts to do something, it's no longer interesting. So I was one of the first people to have a really good AI generated image of myself for my LinkedIn profile two years ago. And that was really, now everyone has'em and there's like a range of, so last week I actually, a couple days, I think it was, yeah, last week I switched to a real photo of myself. I go, I gotta switch back. Now. Having a real picture of yourself is actually the, is going against the curve. So you have to just like these different ways, like how do you stand out? It's by not doing what everyone else is doing and Exactly that is you can use AI content, but the thing that I see happen is that people use the first image. Make me an image of this, and then they just use it. Whereas I always say, make me 40 images and I'll pick my favorite, and if it's not good, I'll do another. I always do at least a batch of 40 to even get before I start editing the image. And you have to. Have this cultivation element, like I think that one of the promise with a lot of AI automation systems that I see out there is they're all built on this full. It's either you don't automate or you fully automate. They don't have this step of man in the middle, which is like where the automation creates the post, and then you look at it and then approve it. It needs to to be expert in the middle. I think in my opinion, it needs to be expert in the middle who understand, because it's not just okay. You have to understand the full implications. So I guess if you're just having, I mean if it's a designer and they understand the full implications of the brand, but it should be expert in the middle. Not just because the systems, the AI agents I built they QA themselves. So they already are going through and checking that they followed all of the rules and correcting their outputs before they return any final results. So you don't need a human to do that, but you do need a human to really understand. The deep caveats that can't be checked by, that can't be overseen by a piece of software or that, and just for safety reasons. Yeah, it's if you, I posted this thing last year on LinkedIn, which was like, if I accidentally post a racist tweet, but then I tell you, ChatGPT wrote it. Am I not in trouble anymore? At one person replied and goes, yeah, you're not in trouble anymore. I was like, oh, that's the one person who's gonna find out the bad way that like, it's not, we don't forgive that. So you, you can't. Post something that you regret and then say AI made it and it's like you still get credit for it. I see this all the time. Like when a celebrity gets in trouble for a tweet, it's like the odds they wrote that themselves are so low, it's probably one of their friends from high school. Like I used to watch this show about Diplo and at the beginning of every day he would take his phone and throw it to one of his friends and go, you're in charge of socials for today. And it's if that friend posts something stupid, it doesn't matter. And I was thinking about that and I have some friends that are like in bands or different, I go, I know they do that. I am sure that like one of your friends, I don't think every movie star, maybe they do some, but they probably have their friend do it or something, or they have a VA. It doesn't matter. You still get blamed for it. Like you can't just go, oh, my friend posted on my account. People go, we don't care. Like the I got hacked. Excuse doesn't work. So I. Exactly. Having an expert who understands your brand or understands the intent and understands how things will be interpreted. It's so important. Like I work with a lot of clients writing their first book, done a lot of ghost writing coaching over the last 10 years and sometimes I'll point out one sentence, I'll go, this is the sentence you have to take outta the book as people will, someone will misread it and you're gonna get a hundred complaints about it. People will misinterpret one sentence and this, and it's something, it like, it doesn't make sense to the author sometimes 'cause this is what I meant. They go, yeah, that's not how you only need one person to misread it. And then they post about it on Twitter and then you've got a hundred complaints and all these negative reviews and it's I. That element of expertise is so important to notice what can be misinterpreted or like how people will misinterpret an image and how things have different meanings in different cultures. Oh yeah, that is, that is actually very true. So that's something I took away from a recent project where the founder had a very strong voice and that's super important. But then one of the team members mentioned that like the ICP could consider that with taking a stand, it could be like, you're taking a stand against me. As diminishing. And when I thought about it, I thought actually that's very true. Like when you're writing for, especially, I've seen a lot of I. A lot of content that comes out that's supposed to be contrarian or like calling things out is taking a strong negative tone, like a blaming tone and if you're doing that, but then the individual that. Is being called out is the actual your ICP, then that is not going to land well. And so it's okay, like I get, there's two things of you wanna have this strong voice, but then there's the other thing of having compassion and saying things in a way that is not blaming. And so it's a fine line, but this is more of like brand voice and content strategy. You're talking about something I actually think is really critical, which is calibration. I was watching sometimes I watch a YouTube video where someone's reviewing someone else's view and they calibrate too mean, and I don't like that. It's like you can talk about the project, but when it starts to sound like you're insulting the person, I don't like that tone and it creates a negative feeling.'cause it's you know that feeling. Obviously we married a long, like long before I was married. When you go on a first date and the person just bad mouths all their exes and you're like, you know what I mean? That could be me one day. And it gives you that feeling. And that's the thing with sometimes when I'm creating content that's calibrated to me, it becomes too snarky. I think it's just designed to do that. I see a lot of that with AI content and I'm having to like back it up a little bit or my team will do something and I'm like, no. Actually we're not writing. He like, no, they're not it's just that's not it. And anyone who identifies with that and likes that is going to be, not someone I think is gonna be a great person. Exactly. You can accidentally attract the wrong people. And that's something I, it's a calibration issue. So like. When you are a smaller business, you can joke, you, a small business can tell jokes about a big business. But when you're the big business, you tell the same joke about small business people go, Hey, that's not cool. Yeah, you're the big bully. And that's the calibration. And I've, no, there's something I've noticed in just the past few months, and maybe it's like a new thing they put in where it's like AI does not get humor very well. And so it writes something that like doesn't, it's like a meaner version of myself and I'm like, no, I wouldn't say it. Because I would never want to insult someone, even if I'm like like critiquing. Someone's yeah, too binary. Too binary. Like most, instead of many, too binary. So a lot of the things I like about just talking to you in general and I feel like I, 'cause I have channel specialists that work in my business and with, bring into my projects and stuff, and so they are more. Following the trends of what's working in different channels, which is great because no one can be an expert on all the things and, but I do see a lot of misconceptions around marketing online where people say the thing, marketing is basically just it's like seeking Alpha once it's, once alpha has been established, once someone has found something that works, it only works for a while to everyone else. Finds it and then taps it out, and then you have to find a new thing that works. And actually, so just because we're having this conversation, I wanna make a distinguish distinguish that is growth hacking. Is growth hacking. And so what I do is not that. And in fact, I should do some more growth hacking. And I used to do a lot of growth hacking, like I grew to 750,000 followers and I think that was a big part of it. But like I'm building like the overarching strategies for long-term, targeted strategic growth through the short term and long term. And it involves like infrastructures and conversion rates and the infrastructure build in the teams. In the systems. And the growth hack is a thing that brings the eyeballs at like the first. And there's a place for that. But somehow people think that's marketing and I guess it is a part of marketing, because you have huge infrastructures and systems running, that is actually not the thing that makes marketing work at all. Because it's, if you don't have the underlying systems in place, you're not gonna con, none of that's gonna really convert. You're just gonna get a bunch of attention and then you're gonna fizzle up. Yeah. I think that a lot of companies and people want. The wrong metric and this can happen, and you go, I want views. And then you'll get a post with 4 million views. I I know someone that was on Dr. Oz and they got a million downloads of their free book from being on Dr. Oz. That sounds amazing, right? They generated $7 of revenue because they didn't have the underlying systems in place, or maybe they didn't build the book to act as a lead magnet in their funnel. All of these things the wrong audience. Oh, that's even worse. They're freebie seekers. You can, that's the thing. It's so exciting. If you look at the wrong metric can be so exciting. Like I had a post on LinkedIn, get 400,000 views, which on LinkedIn is, you don't get that very often. And it, which went viral and. It generated 13 new followers. So you, if you look at the first metric, it's so exciting and that's very important with your marketing to think about who is my ICP? Who do I actually want following? Who's my audience? What appeals to them? Because when you, for something to go viral, it has to appeal to a wider and wider audience, a lot of businesses are struggling to figure out how to find their voice right now and still stand out when there's so much AI generated content and there's so much pressure to use AI tools, be faster, more efficient. What is that right balance of getting out enough content and kind of being consistent but still astounding like yourself, or standing still being consistent with the beliefs and core values of your business? Actually. This is super easy. So what I've done, actually, what I and I do with my clients too this is a layer in the AI age and I build, so we train the, we have the brand voice. So for me, for example, my, I've written books at 14 books. And so I just took half of a manuscript from one of my books and I use it as the brand voice example. And then I have another cell, which is brand voice adjectives. And it describes also the who we're writing for because the book was not written for the same audience that my content goes out to. So I give context into who we're writing for, and here are the brand adjectives and here is an example of. The brand voice. And then when the AI writes, it writes in that same voice, it writes in that same perspective, and then after it creates something, it goes back and it checks to make sure that what it's created adheres to that brand voice. So then the quality is exceptional, but it's trained on probably 20,000 words that I wrote. And so if you don't have that just take you have 2000 words and you really make sure that you didn't write something generic, that your voice is in there strong. I've done that with clients and it works really well. Yeah. One of the clients I work with set me like 200 hours of their sales calls. And it had there, and it was him, just him, not salespeople. So it was his voice, his belief. So all the questions anyone ever asked about the product or how it worked, all the answers were in there and it allowed us to create, find his voice. So you might have the asset without realizing, especially now that people transcribe everything and then do nothing with it. This is what you can do with all the descriptions. Did that work? I'm interested because people speak differently than they write. Did that work for you guys? Was it good enough? Proxy. This is a great question. It was actually writing scripts for him to do on YouTube, so it was creating spoken to spoken. Okay, great. I didn't You're smart. So it worked for me. That's such, I didn't think of that, but he was really pleased with the result that because he was still speaking, so I don't, haven't thought about that. I do speak differently than I write, so I haven't seen that transition. I think that could make a difference, but in this case, at least it gave it a starting point. I think even if you were writing articles. You know what you did is perfect because it's spoken to, spoken, so you would wanna train it on your speaking.'cause the way you speak is completely different and structured differently. And readers also need that structure in writing and they don't want that structure. It's too rigid for speaking. So the way you did it is perfect. Thank you. So people that are really interested in kind of some of the tools you've been talking about and kinda the amazing work you've been doing. I know you've worked with a couple of clients I'm friends with as a chief marketing officer right now. How can people find out what you're doing? I know you have this huge following on LinkedIn, this amazing newsletter. How can people see some of the amazing stuff you're doing and find your website? Yeah, you can always connect on LinkedIn. It's Lillian Pierson on LinkedIn. And then also I have a private newsletter which is where I share all of my more proprietary frameworks. And so that is at data-mania.com/newsletter. And yeah, I think that would get you connected with the entire ecosystem. That would be a good starting point. Perfect. We'll put the links in the show notes and below the videos. Thank you so much for being here today, Lily, and I know your time is so valuable, so we really appreciate it to hear from the Artificial Intelligence podcast. Thank you for having me, Jonathan. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and strategies on how to leverage AI to grow your business and achieve better results. In the meantime, if you're curious about how AI can boost your business' revenue, head over to artificial intelligence pod.com. 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