7 Best Ways For Marketers To Use AI RIGHT NOW, The Right Way To Approach Event Marketing In 2025

0:00So let's do a classic. So let's talk about seven best ways for marketers to use AI right now. And I'll start because this has been a big week for for AI. So one thing obviously is with chat GPT images or Gemini 2.5. These are amazing models. I even made one. I didn't show you this yet, but I made one where I'm doing like fireballs and it's pretty crazy. So look, look at this. Look at this. You can't see this. Can you see that? Yeah, you can see this, right? You can see this. Yeah. So we'll put this up on the screen as well, but it's like a pixelated version of me doing fireballs and the next version of me swinging a sword.

0:30Look at that. Right. And I took a picture of me speaking at, uh, when we're speaking in Germany and it's, it's, I'm wearing that outfit and it took that picture and it made that right. So this is going to be, you've already seen it. It's crazy for creatives. Like someone took a picture of Adidas shoe and it made it into like an amazing ad. Right. And so I think the marketers now are going to be able to get their ad concepts out a lot faster. I still think you need designers like their last, last touch, last mile, but there's no excuses. Now, if you're a great marketer, you better be able to concept this before you can't just say oh i have this idea i have this idea now it's right in front of you that's one there was a company called is it design eye army or something design pickle no where they create eyeglasses and they've been using ai for a while now um their ads take pretty much half the time or no what used to take a month to create with ai take some weeks this was before the latest release um but i believe the technology was already good enough where it helps with advertising and creative like we've been using it in our ad agency for a while we created an ad for brown shoes purely through ai and we even won awards for it um but people have been doing it for a while i just think they have more variations but the new stuff that you're talking about it's more anime flavor from what i could tell no that's that that was because everyone was doing anime they didn't know any better right and so but this with this type of stuff i like i was very specific with the prompt i do agree this tech has been around for a while but this is now more available because gemini 2.5 is free right and in chat cheap images you can even use it on the lower tiers so i think for people like you and me who want things done quickly you just ask it and i think that this this the time to value is a lot faster now but like forget images we use ai to create full-blown ad campaigns that are video based so what's that called again what what technology we use yeah i have no idea my team just showed me our browns ad campaigns and it was i believe that through ai here i'm just talking purely images and i think we'll get to a place where videos will be just as easy as this.

2:25And I think this is the, it still takes a while to generate, remember? So I think I showed you a picture of, oh yeah, it was a picture of our podcast art and I made it into a South Park version. I made it into an anime version, right? And it looked pretty cool. Yeah. But yeah, you want to go for number two? Number two, this is boring, but this is where I think you're going to get a lot of ROI is using AI for data and analytics. A lot of corporations spend money on marketing. why aren't people analyzing what's really working in real time and I say this because every time I go to conferences and ask people how many of you guys log into your analytics every week or every day a lot of people raise their hands and then when I say how many people use it to make actionable decisions that help with your revenue growth literally a lot of the room raises their hands.

3:16But when I actually ask them, how many have you seen increases in revenue and profitability from the decisions you're making? Very few people raise their hand. And I think most people look at, I don't even think from what we've seen, most people don't know how to A, set up their analytics correctly and B, look and analyze the data and C, make informed decisions based on it. Yeah. You know, as a side note, the future that I see us going into, our plan with care is just say, hey, we've uncovered all these patterns over here. And then this is the recommended action. Do you just want us to do it for you?

3:51And I think a lot of stuff is going to go that way. Yes. And then, you know, with your blessing, you want to double check. So number three on my end is yesterday in our final agency owners association, which we can chat about afterwards, why we decided to move the group to something else. But anyway, that's a side note. But number three would be MCP. So MCPs are model context protocols. And so imagine if you're using ChatGPT, which is available now, or you're using Cloud, you can hook it with your Google Drive or you can hook it with your Dropbox and you can just say, hey, what's going on with this client over here?

4:22You know, how much have we uploaded over here? Or you can hook it with your QuickBooks. Hey, what's the LTV of our customers overall? What's the trend line been? Or you can ask it to send the email directly from your LLM. And there's just, you can pull from your Salesforce data. You can just start asking it questions, right? So what I've always wanted to do is ask an LLM, like, hey, what's our six-month LTV? Or what's our time to, our sales velocity right now in the last three months? How about the last six months or so? Because you know when you go to your finance team, sometimes it'll take them a little bit to get you the answer that you want.

4:50But these things are all at your fingertips now. So basically, it's an LLM that's talking with your other apps and you're able to get that in an instant. And that's what I'm gonna be doing after we finish recording day. This is my all AI day. I don't wanna talk to anybody. I'm going to eat my air one when I go home and I'm just going to work on AI that's all I'm going to do number four check out Santa Labs you can end up creating your own custom AI marketing agents oh cool it's not the best but they have integrations with other companies and think about all the mundane boring tasks that you're doing with AI and you can end up automating them somewhat through AI agents and the reason I say somewhat is you still have humans involved and And we're not really a time where you're seeing agents just be perfect and doing everything with any intervention.

5:38Yeah. And so we kind of touched upon this yesterday. Before I go to number five, a lot of people like to talk about agents. We don't truly, to me, I think to Neil and I, both of us, I'm speaking for you. An agent is fully autonomous where it's actually like a worker that can just listen to you. Right now, there still needs to be a lot of handholding, which is fine. I'm still getting a lot of value from it. But I think later this, maybe in the next 12 months or so, we'll start to see real agents. We're almost there. I think. But number five from my end is, so we've talked a lot about 11 Labs. So they just came out with an upgrade yesterday.

6:09So the upgrade now is when you have a machine take a script, usually it's not good with the pauses, the intonations, or like increasing the voice up and down when you're telling a story, right? Like that's outrageous, right? But now you can do that. You can actually take, you can upload a script and then you can actually narrate out to the AI and it'll work with the intonations with whatever voice that you have in there. So So I'm going to be playing. That's lower on my priority list for today. I don't even know if I'm going to get to that this weekend. But I'm like, oh, that's another thing I can play with.

6:38So yeah. You play with your kids. I play with AI. Number six, we've been testing ChatGPT quite a bit for link building emails. So when you're doing prospecting and you have your list, we all know that writing custom outreach emails works the best for link building versus sending the same generic email that everyone's getting. Marketers don't like doing that because it's a pain in the butt. But with ChatGPT, you can train it with existing scripts based on what's working, have them customize a script based to each and every single website you want them to message out. And then now you've got a custom email that you can end up sending to all the people that you want to head up for link building.

7:21We don't have data back on if it converts better or not. We've been testing it. But the hypothesis is that it'll convert a little bit better. How much? who knows but we think it'll at least convert 10 20 better all right last one number seven last but not least so i've talked a lot about manis ai they actually came up came out with their paid versions the other day so actually yesterday i think it was yesterday or the day before it was uh the pricing came out was like 279 for the pro version and a 50 for like a lower tier version and then they just matched the price of opening eyes and that's 199 and i think it's 20 for the lower tier version um but manis ai is now available you can pay for if you've made it through the wait list.

7:58I have a code for you actually, if you want to do it. But I think there's like one more you can use. But the cool thing about Manus is the other day I was looking through our SEO agentic platform. So let's just call it carrot SEO. So we have carrot ABM, we have carrot SEO. And it does a lot of cool things, right? It does like, you know, find internal links or upgrade content or consolidate content. It does a lot of these SEO things. But I'm like, guys, there's a problem with this thing. So in our dashboard, we have no reporting yet for that because we use it internally for our clients, right? I'm like, guys, we need to know what's happening with this thing.

8:32And then, and I was like, if the weekend's coming up, I'm like, I don't want to wait. So you know what I did? I made a loom and I said, Mattis, watch this loom over here. And then I want you to make a dashboard. And it made the dashboard and the dashboard looks, these three dashboards look amazing. And I'm assuming you sent me something, but you didn't send me something. Okay, cool. But this dashboard, Manus made, it made three different dashboards. I sent it to my CTO and he's like, wow, this is great, right? And this already gives us ideas for what we should do with reporting for Carrot ABM as well.

9:02So my point is, you have Manus that can actually be a very thoughtful AI partner to you, like an assistant. And it also did a really good job with my slides too. So our slides designer was like, oh, it's going to take me until next week. I'm like, why wait until next week? So I made another loom. I said, okay, here, can you do this? Can you reorganize my slides based on the storytelling I'm trying to do for the marketing summit that we have next month? And it reorganized everything and followed this same design. And I can dump it into gamma.ai. This is a bonus. But that's that. So anyway, those are the seven.

9:35Have you sent your marketing size already for the summit? For your deck? No. Those are already due. yeah but it's my summit so whatever i turned mine in did you yeah i'm the one that's reviewing them anyway so you know what's funny they're making me review slides for my summit and making me talk to everybody if there's any issues with i'm like guys i know all these people so that's a side note you're like i don't have to review it's like guys i've done this already but they're like making me do things their way so dude with my slides it breaks down i didn't know what my team was going to end up creating because they're going back and forth on the subject and i know there wanted to be somewhat of an agency focus and non-agency focus and helping.

10:12So my team, because we have an agency, instead of just having a pure agency focus, broke down our story on how we cause our own growth and what people can learn from it for agencies and not agencies and what they can copy. Can I give you an angle if I were Neil Patel for this event? What? Okay. So it doesn't matter. I'm pretty sure a lot of the attendees won't be listening. Maybe a couple will listen to this, but 40 % of the attendees are going to be agencies. So that is an angle for you to somehow subtly bring up the fact that you're acquiring agencies and then that's how you bring inbound without coming because here's the thing with YPO you cannot be you can't solicit right so you can't say hey I'm buying agencies right here's what we do so you can't say you know you guys should work with you so be careful about that right so I warned you about that but I do think there's an angle if you because you're staying 23 24 like 40 percent of our agencies you'll get a good amount of inbound there that would be my angle yeah but I want to make sure the presentation was applicable to everyone.

11:06I'll take a look at it. I'll let you know. I'm pretty sure it's good. It is. We just ended up talking a story, but my team created the slides. I went through it. I only had like two changes. I was like, good job. And that was really it. Yeah, that's good. By the way, maybe that's worth touching upon really briefly too. So you and I used to just do the slides ourselves and then send them to a designer. But over time, that has modified a little bit where it's moved more and more into text format. And we just send it to our designers after that. Well, you and I were flying to Dubai. I don't know if you recall.

11:36I remember. You were working on your slide deck. Yeah. And I showed you my slide deck. It was a Word document. It was a Word document. Slide one, two, three, four, five. With bullet points. With just bullet points. And when I say bullet points, typically one line per slide or two max. And Eric was just like, this is what you send to your team. I'm like, yep. They figure out the rest. Send it. Boom. It's done. But now it's changed where I don't do that. all I do is we brainstorm a topic idea together I would say around 20-30 % of the time the rest they just go on their own and even if I give them the topic idea they just do it on their own and then I just review and then I say yes or no or what changes I want but keep in mind I've been doing this for years with the same people and it's evolved all the way from helping them with ideation to telling them very detailed and thoroughly what's on each side to then just giving them a few bullets for each slide to now just only helping them with ideas sometimes and now they're usually just good on their own that's actually important too because it seems like this team has been consistent for four or five plus years right same people for five plus okay so that's important because they know how you work they know what makes you tick and all that stuff and it's taken many years and even on year five call it they're still not perfect yeah well it's fine right i mean look um we're working with noah here we've known noah for a very long time and no one knows what makes us tick and he, we know what makes him tick.

13:01So it works. Um, by the way, one final thing before we move on, cause we're talking about events right now. So you and I, we started this year saying we're going to decrease events. And then, um, you know, you, I think you're, you're increasing again. And then the last couple of weeks I've been invited to a couple of things. Um, and there's travel involved and they all sound fun, but so, so what's your updated, uh, outlook on this? I won't match the number of events that I did last year, which was 200 days traveling right it was in your uh uh slide deck for the conference i'm presenting i think it was 30 something or 40 something and those were main events that doesn't count corporate events yeah on top of it we're like it's a lot we're getting customers and stuff like that so i had for more than half the year i had events and if you add those in it's probably get closer to 50 ish, which is a ton.

13:54I won't be last year, but we're doing events this year. We're just being more picky. And what I mean by that is we're looking for events with thousands and thousands of people and we're doing a better job vetting. I had a talk with my team recently because I went to an event in Florida somewhere. And when I went to this event, they said, yeah, it's one of the biggest home services event and home service clients are really great for our SMB division I did not get paid for speaking you know we got sponsorship didn't care for the speaking revenue we're like wait this is gonna be like fishing with dynamite right event I went in there I spoke no joke maybe 10-15 attendees that were customers the rest were agencies and maybe 30 40 people in the room total and i told my team i'm like we need to do a better job vetting it's not about the money it's not about us getting compensated like they paid for airline ticket and hotel it's not about any of that i rather have paid our own dollars which we're doing for the right events and you know some of these events i'll speak in front of 5 000 attendees at my speech, like not the conference has 5 ,000 times.

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17:43So that event then you thought it would be fishing with dynamite, but it wasn't. Yes. But when we look at our hit rates of selecting events like that, this one came inbound. We're usually doing a lot of outbounds for the right events. this one came inbound and the inbound's like dude i know you you know like so forth it's on and i'm like man that's actually a good call out because we do get a lot of inbound because we we we we create content right um but i think when you understand where you should be in front of for so for example for carrot abm i should be speaking at the abm conferences right you actually have to actively reach out yes um and then once they take a look at you once they took a look at your resume it's like oh okay he's got a youtube channel he's got a podcast okay he's been around for a while they generally will know who you are in the marketing space right um i think that helps give you a leg up but you actually have to take matters into your own hands because the events was like i think hubspot's you know decent for us right i think um you know speaking at some other marketing software company events this year that'll be okay but i think i need to be at the abm events yeah so we put them in buckets so we look at hubspot as a really good event we look at web summit as a really good event uh there's a few other ones like that like uh de mexico there's a few others that one's in germany that we look at as really good events some of them though like the hub spots web summits we look at them as really good events for branding and brand recognition and getting our name out there in the space we look at certain other events like uh de mexico i think it's called that where it's a really good event to pick up customers so we put them in buckets and then we split our time and it has to be a really good event for branding or a really good event for customers when it's a really good event for customers we don't worry too much if it has a thousand attendees or five thousand attendees we don't want a hundred attendees unless they're all potential customers and they're the right fit but that's usually our bottom tier limit is like 100 and then we will speak at all of those events for revenue and then any of the branding ones we don't evaluate based on how many people attend the event we base it on what stage am i speaking at and how many people can the stage fit and then we look at how many people attend a total event because then you you do rough math on how many people you think will show up and that we want to target at least a thousand if not if it's international because internationally you make less money per customer because they don't spend as much as the u.s i don't mean that in a bad way i'm just saying it's reality uh international we want thousands of people listening on a speech while in the u.s if it's a thousand people in the room that i'm speaking to we're okay with that you know the one thing i think we should add to when we both spoke in dubai um we they they handled travel, but we also got a situation where we said, Hey, we want introductions.

20:45That was your idea. And then also we want to, we want to have a booth, right? And then they would hook you up with a booth. And so we both did that for our respective organizations. And I think that's a good thing. Cause sometimes they might not have, they might not have a speaker budget or they might have a speaker budget, but you'll say, Hey, you don't need to give me the speaker budget. Just give me a booth, give me some introductions and I'm good to go. Cause you're going to make a lot more off of that anyway yes but let's go back to the dubai event right i won't do any more of those same here and we won't call it out yeah it wasn't for it wasn't for our customers no because what ends up happening is is we go there speak no customers it's branding but there wasn't enough people in the audience for um it to be worth it for branding and it was international so those customers aren't going to pay as much as they would in the US or UK.

21:31And then the conference wasn't our ideal customer profile type. So the booth didn't pay off and the introductions didn't pay off either. On the flip side, if I look at, and this is not even flip side. If I also look at the Germany event that we both went to, I won't call it out either. We don't have to pay for anything. I won't do events like that either it's branding but not enough and the reason i accepted that is we have a german team and i've never met the german team so i was like oh this is a good opportunity and it's good brand recognition to get the name out for our german team but when i look at that not really our ideal customers were there and then there wasn't enough people for it to be good from a branding aspect?

22:18I think a good happy medium is probably HubSpot. So HubSpot's a great one because they have 20 ,000 people over X amount of days or whatever and you had, I think you were main stage. So you had like three or 4 ,000 people or something like that. And in my stage was like 700 people. So it's a pretty good amount of people. I don't look at HubSpot as a good happy medium. I look at HubSpot and WebSummit as like the gold standard. Okay, go on. Because I've been at enough events, it is hard to find the sheer number of qualified marketing employees in an organization that you'll find at, let's say, like a HubSpot.

22:54Because if another conference has 5 ,000 people listening on your speech, and let's say HubSpot has 3 ,000, 4 ,000, what makes HubSpot better is, from a branding standpoint, they're all marketers. Most events, when you're pulling in that many people, they're not all working in a marketing division. They could be entrepreneurs looking to hire marketers, but the reality is, is if you look at the best marketing contracts that come out of a business, they tend to be run in an RFP format. They tend to be, you first get included from either procurement or people who work in the marketing department.

23:28So our play on HubSpot is, if you keep speaking enough, a lot of those employees keep switching from company to company, which is reality. eventually they land out from and hubspot's going upstream but a lot of those players eventually go to work for fortune 1000 companies especially in a bad economy because they tend to have more money than startups and then you end up picking up a lot of business because they end up having budgets at those corporations versus at the smbs that they're at didn't you speak so adobe summit's a pretty big conference didn't you speak of that no i got paid to be an influencer okay Well, okay, let's not talk about that one because it's not related to this.

24:07But this is our little kind of right way to approach event marketing in 2025. But we do a lot of corporate events. Like I've done AbbVie, you know, like the big pharmaceutical that's worth like$100,$200 billion. No. Imagine a Pfizer. They're another Pfizer, right? I don't know what their market cap is, but you get the point. Like literally it is an AbbVie stock price. it's worth 363 billion dollars and they do roughly 56 billion a year in revenue yep so that was a corporate event where i spoke to all their um marketing team see that's worth it those are worth it i'm doing another one in san francisco or oakland but we don't count these speaking gigs get paid for them uh yeah that's the best part about the corporate ones we get paid really well from and i go there we bring a few people from our team literally are talking to every single one of their people in marketing from either regional perspective like us or they fly people in like the one i'm doing in oakland has i think somewhere between 130 to 200 markers just from their own corporation they're publicly traded of course we'll bring a few people from our team or just i'll bring nick who you've met and we'll build relationships with them and we land and expand because they're global and they have so many divisions.

25:24So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.