How We're Using AI at Our Companies

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about how we've been using AI at our company. So just full context here, Neil has his ad agency NP Digital, and then I have my ad agency Single Grain, and there are other projects that we work on as well. And we just want to share a couple of examples to just hopefully give you a couple of ideas. We're not trying to brag here. We're just trying to share the wealth because this AI news cycle. And as we share these examples, let's do something fun, Eric. None of the examples we share are going to be about us creating text-based content or video-based content or image-based content for social media or SEO because everyone already knows about that stuff.

0:37Let's try it. We'll see. I may be drawing blanks, but go for it. All right. So the first way that we're using AI is analytics. I spoke at a conference in London. I may have talked about this on a previous episode, but I asked the audience, how many of you guys log into analytics on a daily basis and are taking action based on that data. If you look at the majority of the marketing spend right now, it's not on people. It's actually on ad dollars going to Google, going to Facebook. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. And if you can actually take these, the ad spend, and you can analyze it in real time, or your marketing efforts in real time doesn't just have to be related to ad spend, and you can get insights.

1:15Because it's really hard to force people within a company to log in each and every single day and take action on it. And we noticed that with most companies we deal with at NP Digital, they do not, even if they have people who are in analytics, most of them are not logging in on a regular basis and coming up with actionable things to make changes with. You can use AI to help analyze your analytics. It's not perfect, at least for us, the way we've done it so far, it's not perfect. But what it does is it creates some insights. And then from there, our team looks at it on a daily basis. And they'll still log into the analytics, but it'll give them more ideas.

1:50And they'll just be like, yes, no, yes, no. And it'll figure out, all right, here's some things that we can prioritize to save money and then reallocate. And we usually look at it from an aspect of cut the areas that aren't working and reallocate to other areas that are working. And it's a really good way to use AI to just make things more efficient and save a lot. because most people look at AI as content creation. Content creation was never expensive in the first place. It's these other things like spending millions and millions and millions a month on Google ads, which is what's expensive. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it.

2:23It's just more so how do you fine tune a lot of these things in real time quicker so that way there's less wastage. Yep. So on my end, there are a lot of note-taking AI tools out there. So you can use tools like fireflies.ai. And what we've done to make it a little different is we use a conversational intelligence tool that we already pay for called Gong. And so Gong is usually used for sales, but we also use it for coaching client services as well. And so what we do with it is we actually score the sentiment of the call and we also note the action items afterwards. And then we also plug that sentiment score into a spreadsheet.

2:56And so for each week that goes by, each client call is scored on a scale of one to 10. If it's above a nine, then it's good. If it's a seven to an eight, it's neutral. But really if it's seven or below it, it's pretty bad, right? And so in the event that the calls go a seven or below for three weeks in a row, it's the client services person's job to call it out and say, hey, what's going on here? Because the client services team serves as checks and balances. And that allows us to nip the issue in the bud quicker for our clients and solve problems and ultimately our jobs to get results and execute for our clients.

3:31right? But sometimes when you have human beings involved, we're all emotional, we're emotional creatures and we're incentivized in different ways, right? But at the end of the day, the business, our job as a business is just to do a good job for our clients. And that's what it is full stop. So that's one of the things that we do. Another thing that we do is when you're creating creative campaigns, like we paid a company called bacon and eggs to create a video of people who look like me in an office, they were wearing a cap. And we filmed it and we filmed tons of different variations of it. And people do these like explainer type of videos or funny videos for e-commerce.

4:05A lot of times they don't do it as much for B2B, but it works in all segments. You just got to get super creative. And if you want a idea of what I'm talking about, just think of squatty potty and what the Harmon brothers did there. That's the type of videos that a lot of companies are creating. And even we are for some of our clients, but when we create these videos, we're not the ones actually filming. We just go through other companies who just specialize in that. You would typically go through three, four, five, six different variations. So you can slice and dice and have tons of different variations for your creative campaigns.

4:36What we're doing now is creating one or two variations and then using AI to come up with more variations from those. For example, you can change the background, the scenery, make it seem like you're in Sao Paulo, Brazil, instead of the United States, or instead of New York City. And you can do a lot of little things like that with AI, which saves you a ton of time and money on the creative and production side of cost and marketing. Yep. One other thing we're doing is we're actually leveraging Microsoft Clarity. Microsoft Clarity is a free competitor to a tool like a hot jar. And so it will come up with insights for you.

5:11So it will, you install a pixel, but it'll come up with insights and then you can basically go execute on those. So it basically will strategize for you while pointing out different things, give you different features like heat mapping and things like that, right? And you can see scrolling and rage clicks and all that. So I think that part is interesting. The other thing I'll add to is when we have leads that come into the single grain site, we actually add three insights for our salespeople, including a quick overview of what the company does. And I remember, I think I may have spoken about this, but I know I spoke about this at an event this week.

5:42But there's an e-commerce company that came in, and they were actually asking for Pinterest ads specifically. and interestingly enough the ai's we used open ai's api here and the three recommendations it put in were all tied to pinterest so it was all tied to pinterest ads i don't know if it read what they were interested in but i just think it adds a lot more or i know that it it changes the conversation more from just come buy our stuff and it edges it more towards the consultative selling piece another thing that we're doing too is a lot of you guys all use google search console great tool.

6:17We're getting data dumps of our Google search console from there. And they also have an API. We're getting data dumps every time we see new keywords, because there's just too many to manually go through. And if any of those keywords have a high enough CPC, so we look at it per industry, but for our space, anything that's more than like a$5 CPC for digital marketing, it flags those keywords. And then it runs through one of our link tools. And it looks to see how many backlinks people in that space have. And if it has very little backlinks, so for us, anything less than a hundred is really small amount.

6:54It's easy for us to beat sites with less than a hundred. With those two things, we then add it to a queue, get sent to one of our team members and they look, all right, should we start creating content around this subject? Should we go after this keyword? And the reason we look at multiple factors is one, you want to make sure it's easy enough to rank for two. If it typically has a high CPC, it usually means that the word is or phrase is valuable and you can generate quite a bit of conversions from it. Typically terms with low CPCs don't convert as well, or it means that they could potentially convert well, but the product usually is not too expensive.

7:31Toothpaste, for example, no one's going to spend an arm and a leg on CPC or cost per click for something that they're selling for a dollar, right? So it's all just relative. But in essence, this allows us to find more gold mines when it comes to SEO opportunities. And we're looking for keywords that are up and coming, keywords that convert well, and just a lot of people aren't targeting them on SEO, but they're targeting them on page. That's great. I want to try that. So the final one I'll leave you all with, and this one is kind of tied to content creation here, but we're looking at bringing back one of the features of a software that I had that shows your decaying content.

8:09And so when you're losing traffic on a page, well, it'll show you the decaying content, but also adding in the ability to one click upgrade these. And so we just want to give this away as a feature and more so we're splintering out the feature and potentially giving it away. So you can DM me on Twitter if you're interested in that. You can DM me also if you're interested in Neil's stuff, if he's doing any beta or anything like that. And then I'll relay it to Neil because he doesn't respond to DMs. That is it for today. Please leave a five-star review because it really helps us grow. And if this podcast has helped you at all, please help us and we'll talk to you later.

8:41Thank you.