5 Ways Marketers Can Play With AI (Without the Panic) with Michele Nieberding | Ep. 343

0:00Hey besties, welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. Now I'm the founder of PMM Camp, a community and newsletter for product marketing leaders. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun conversations with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today, I'm joined by Michelle Nieberding, the Director of Product Marketing at Treasure Data.

0:31Michelle is a marketer on a mission to help her peers ditch the fear, get curious, and have fun with AI. She's been hands-on with the latest tools, sharing experiments, wins, and lessons with her network on LinkedIn. It's some of my favorite content to consume. Today, we talk about how marketers can use AI to spark creativity, save time, and future-proof their careers without losing the human touch. Plus, we do a fun little lightning round where Michelle shares her favorite tools to solve specific marketing challenges I throw at her, leaving you with a list of new tools to try ASAP. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast.

1:14I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up.

1:33Michele Nieberding:Michelle, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. You are very welcome. I was so excited for this episode because I have been following your content and I cannot wait to pick your brain all episode long. For those that don't know, you have been really openly exploring AI, and specifically AI for marketers, and sharing what you've been learning along the way, mostly on LinkedIn. And I'm just curious, like, what first kind of sparked your curiosity for this in the first place? Yeah. So a couple of things. So I was at a 30-person startup, tech startup, because of course, and I was the only product marketer.

2:17Michele Nieberding:So a solo and founding product marketer on a marketing team of two. So my boss, like God bless them, I'm handling a lot of event logistics and some like paid digital things like totally out of my wheelhouse. But to support marketing slash product marketing at a startup, you kind of have to figure things out, right? And I was like, okay, I'm seeing AI everywhere and all these tools. And like, I just I love tech. I'm, you know, in tech for a reason, I guess. But I'm like, if this can help me do either the things that I don't love about my job or things that take a lot of time or speed up the process because like time is money.

2:51Michele Nieberding:And when you're at a start, you have to move really, really quickly to make sure, you know, you, you get the deals. And at the time we were focused on enterprise. So that's like a whole nother can of worms, but, um, it was just really fun to play around with tools and figure out, okay, what is actually going to help me do my job better and faster and like really make a difference in what we were doing as a very small team of two. Um, so I just got really into like, again, tinkering and learning and playing around. And at the end of the day, like, holy cow, this is going to make my life so much easier.

3:20Michele Nieberding:I just had a lot of fun with it. So it was kind of like out of necessity, but now it's become just like a fun hobby. I say I'm an AI enthusiast, not an expert. It changes every day, but enthusiast for sure. It's fun to play around with. I love it. And I'm sure everyone can already tell the energy that you bring to this. And I think, no, and I think that is one of the reasons I love your content so much because I mean, AI, it's freaking us all out. Let's just be honest, right? It's changing the job. As you said, every day it's changing. I think there's a lot of questions around what does this mean for marketing?

3:51What does this mean for tech? And so often people that I see covering AI take this more fearful approach. And I love your content because I say that it feels playful, right? And that you approach it from this place of play rather than panic. And so I'm just curious about, have you even thought about that as the mindset that you are taking? Or how are you advising other marketers to think about AI so that they're not becoming overwhelmed?

4:21Michele Nieberding:Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's this idea of like play and panic. I'm not sure. It initially crossed my mind, which is almost ironic as like an anxious control type A person. Like it's kind of funny that like I think my normal mindset out of and out of sight of my professional life is maybe panic anxiety and panic it's fine we're fine um but when it comes to AI I feel like if we're we're panicking that's when we go into like paralysis right like we're too afraid to try anything new um we kind of freeze we overanalyze and you it just becomes your worst enemy like it becomes hard to even you know try out kind of low-hanging fruit of maybe tools that you already have as a marketer because you're so, you know, worried about like, is it going to take my job?

5:05Michele Nieberding:It's like, is it going to mess up something in the database? I mean, we do have those moments. We have, you know, those ideas of like what is stopping us from really pursuing this. But when you take the playful approach and like inquisitive approach and just like try things, I've spent too many hours on AI tools that like don't work. You know, I mean, you're going to have those moments, but like when you find the ones that do and you get into like, you get into your AI groove and you're like, wow, why didn't I do this, you know, three weeks ago? It just makes all the difference. Like it's, I don't know, maybe kind of like sports.

5:36Michele Nieberding:Like you're learning a sport. It can feel really daunting at first. And like, you might not be amazing at it, but then you like start to get good. For me, I've been learning golf and you hit that one good shot and you're like, this is the most amazing thing ever. So I feel like you just keep that mentality as you learn anything new and it becomes more manageable. Yeah. I think like approaching with curiosity definitely makes things more fun. And I know even in my experience playing around with AI tools, and I've not done it to the extent that you have, but you start to hit those limitations, as you mentioned, and it's almost reassuring in a way.

6:09It's like, okay, it's not quite there yet, at least not for everything. Like I still have a place here, you know?

6:16Michele Nieberding:Yes, they still need me. I'm still, it's so, there's so many good stories of like them. So, okay, here, we'll take, we'll, we'll throw it back to like when first AI first came out and it was like image generation, everything, right? We're doing this for images. I just, there's so many like memes and good stuff out there with like the hands that are just like morphed into each other. I'm like, this is my vibe right now. Like, this is great. They still need me and my designers and my, you know, graphic people to actually make hands. Like, sure, yeah, it's going to get better. But even where we are now, I know a lot of people are using Google's Notebook LM for like taking text and turning into like a podcast style interview, something like this.

6:55Michele Nieberding:Guess what? they still need podcasts. So if you use Google Notebook LM, it's funny. So when I was testing it for like an internal enablement project, the like person A and person B, they swapped genders in the middle of the podcast. And it's like, oh, okay. Like that's not confusing at all. So yes, there's lots of stories where you're like, still need us. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yes. We are still required for a little bit longer. So today I want to make sure that in the episode, we go a little bit into how marketers can start exploring tools. But before we get there, I want to make sure that people are able to walk away with at least one thing that they can try before the end of the week.

7:36So I thought it might be fun if we did a little lightning round. So I'm going to give you a marketing task, and then you tell me the tool that you would try and maybe like one tip or something for making that tool work. Totally. How does that sound?

7:53Michele Nieberding:It's like speed dating. Let's do it. Exactly. Okay. Let's speed date that AI. Okay. First one, writing copy for a product launch email. So two thoughts here. One, if you have a video already, so you have a video with your product marketer, a product person, CEO, something like that. I would use, it's called Alphana, A-L-P-H-A-N-A. Put the video in and you get everything beyond just a launch email. You'll get everything you need for a launch. So press release, web page, FAQ, social copy, everything, including a product launch email. So the reason I like Alphana is you see it all together and you're like, yes, no, yes, no, like figure it out as a project, not just a launch email when a launch email is part of a brother launch, right?

8:37Michele Nieberding:So like amazing for that. If you want copy to copy, I don't know, kind of boring, but true. Gemini or Claude, I think, or sorry, chat gpt or clod are better for that um you can use gemini but um i think it's i don't know we have a love hate on chat gpt5 i don't think this is good for some of the like more in-depth um content but try that and so um tips on using that like give the tone give the style give like the output that you want to be very very descriptive on what you want to get out of that and when in doubt if you're not sure about your prompt you want to make your prompt better There's a site called Prompt Genie.

9:19Michele Nieberding:I hear there's one called Prompt Cowboy. I haven't tried it, but Prompt Genie will take, I mean, anything. If you just say, hey, write a product launch email with this, it'll make your prompt so much better for ChatTPT or Cloud or wherever you're putting that. So 10 out of 10 recommend. I love that. And Alfana is on my list of tools to try. I know you had recommended that to me before. Okay, I mean, maybe your next answer is also gonna be Alfana, but repurposing a webinar into social content. So see, here's where AI is tricky. Like there's a tool for everything. So for this one, I would actually recommend it's called Opus Clip.

9:54Michele Nieberding:You put in the webinar and what's really cool about it is it'll split an entire webinar. I think it's like up to three hours into little social snippets. So it's like 30 to 90 seconds. It does all the transcription and then it ranks every clip of what it thinks will be like most viral. So it'll give you like the topic of what was discussed in that clip. Again, the transcript, it's the transcripts on the video, but it'll rank it for you and you get to see why it ranked it from zero to a hundred on like how viral it'll go. But it's cool to see what it'll pull out. And you say yes, no, or like maybe I don't look good in that clip, go to the next one.

10:28Michele Nieberding:But it's all like full inventory library ready to go with just an uploaded webinar. I love that. I wonder how it like closes the feedback loop of what actually does go viral or get performance. That would be cool to like connect that. Yeah, an analytics layer would be interesting or even like an integration, right? Like if you could take that clip and then share it directly out to your channels. Right now it's like a download and then paste into your channels. But yeah, an analytics layer would be huge. We'll have to let them know. Yeah, we'll give them the feedback. We'll let them know, yeah.

11:01The next one is analyzing customer feedback to find insights.

11:07Michele Nieberding:So I always laugh about this one because I'm like, it is shocking to me how hard it is to get access to our customers. sometimes like it shouldn't be. So I'll, I'll, I will leave that out there for the ether to, to think about. But, um, one of my favorite new tools for this is called Retelio. And it is like an analytics layer that you put on top of like your, your gong, your course. So your call recordings, your CRM and your support tickets. So it's like a nice way to collect all of the voice of the customer. But what Retelio does really well is it'll give you like prebuilt buckets, like templates to put all of, to categorize all of that information.

11:43Michele Nieberding:So all the customer feedback, qualitative data that you're getting, it'll pull out things like, what objections are you getting? Are there product suggestions, product recommendations? Are there bugs that need to be fixed? And they actually routes those bug issues to the appropriate place. Like it's really cool because it'll take all that and give you those categories. One of the best one for marketers, I just met with the founder, he's, he's seen a lot of marketers pick this up is customer testimonials. So like those gold nuggets that we all know and love. So it'll surface all of the customer testimonials and it'll tell you again, it'll rank it by like what it thinks is most social or what, you know, it's the best for social.

12:22Michele Nieberding:But what's even cooler, I think, I love a Slack integration. Like anything, God, like I live and breathe in Slack, like who doesn't these days, but it'll give a notification anytime a good testimonial pops up, it can integrate, send it straight into a Slack channel. And then you can even do like, bring all of this into a podcast. So your executives, if they want to hear like the best customer testimonials of the week or like what went wrong in customer calls that week, it'll collect everything, put it into that like podcast style section. And your execs can listen to like, again, all the good, all the bad, all the ugly every week, every month, how often that they want.

12:58Michele Nieberding:It's just kind of like an audio list that you just get through, which is like really cool. because again, you don't have to bring all that together. You don't have to go dig out these quotes. You just get the quotes, go to the customer, get approval, move on. Thank God. Yeah, I love it. That's like voice of customer like cranked up that I definitely will check out. On steroids, yeah. I like heard about last week. I'm like, yep, sign me up. Like, let's go. As a Gong fangirl, I just sent me some better analytics. I was using filters, just manual filters forever. And this is like so much cooler. It's a good time.

13:30Okay, a few more.

13:32Michele Nieberding:Uh, generating creative campaign ideas. So I have a lot of thoughts on this one because there's a lot of places you can get it again, like chat GPT or Claude, like, fine. I think when it comes up with creating creative campaign ideas, what's most important here is really the prompts that you're putting into those. um so for example if you want to take some of those testimonials or calls that you're getting and then put them into maybe perplexity or something a little more secure that's a whole other thing um but you want like the voice of the customer to then help come up or generate those campaign ideas that's a good idea to do it but again the prompt has to be like really really thoughtful here um because sometimes i think it gets everything starts to sound like everything else right similar to a blog post you put in like a traditional prompt you're going to get something spit out that's like everybody else.

14:23Michele Nieberding:So that's one thing to look at. And the second thing, it's not AI, but if you're going to do something on LinkedIn, you can literally look at LinkedIn ads and come up and you can see all of your either competitors, if you put in a company name, or if you put in a category or a vertical, it will show you all the ads within that space and their performance. So it'll show you the creative, the messaging that they're using in the analytics. So if you want ideas, just kind of like what's working on LinkedIn, easy way to do that. I love that. I've used Facebook ads before to go, but I've not done that on LinkedIn.

14:55So that's a great one. Easy. Yeah.

14:58Michele Nieberding:Full of them. We've got plenty. Okay. One more, and then we're going to go a little deeper. So the last one is tracking and analyzing KPIs. So I have not yet. And this is one I'm curious if anyone else has found a good one, found a good AI tool for this specifically. I'm still like, use your BI dashboards, your Tableaus, your product ops, whatever, marketing ops teams are still, I think, the best at pulling this together. Now, there's certain other things that you want to track outside of your kind of typical KPIs, right? Outside of your product adoption and retention and things like that, right?

15:36Michele Nieberding:There's one called Tribal. So that is really good at pulling out kind of stats around what is being said. So what messaging, competitive mentions, things like that. but it's more of like talk track. So if you want to know what talk track that's working and how that talk track goes through the deal cycle. So from, you know, first call to potentially close or close lost, you can kind of track what that message is for the calls that you're winning and losing more often. So that's kind of interesting. The other one that's interesting is there's a company called Alpha Sense. So not to be confused with Alphana, but this one will index all of your content and then index your calls to understand what questions are you getting asked the most from your customers and prospects and objections.

16:23Michele Nieberding:And it'll like link it with your content to say, okay, is your content proactively answering these questions or objections? And it'll give you, I mean, I love a good like pie chart, right? It'll show you what that overlap is or what it isn't. So if you're like really under indexing on a certain, again, a question or objection, it'll tell you that. So you can then write content to proactively address that, which makes sales easier, which makes the whole process easier. I'm really big on trying to close, you know, make deal cycles smaller and faster, right? So that's a really kind of underappreciated gem when it comes to making sure your content's like addressing the right pain points and not just like continuing to write content to write content.

17:00Michele Nieberding:So some interesting other things to try and track. I love it. You crushed the lightning round. Good job. Tons of awesome tools that I'm sure people have not heard of before. So I'm excited for everyone to give them a try. But now I want to kind of pick your brain a bit on how we as listeners can really start to build this kind of muscle ourselves of exploring, playing. And so to do that, I want to dig into some of the content you do create. So you have these amazing, I'm going to call them series on LinkedIn. They're like little weekly things that you do. One of them's called PMM hacks. One is like prompt of the week.

17:39And I always look forward to them. I think they're awesome. So please keep creating. But I'm curious if you could share maybe one post or experiment that have been one of your favorites to share or that maybe your audience has resonated with the most.

17:53Michele Nieberding:Yeah. Oh, my gosh. So many thoughts and ideas here. I would say one thing as you're either dipping your toe in or learning what to explore yourself, how to get started, I would say two things. One, find a pain point. What are you really struggling with? Again, what takes a lot of time and then literally search, I mean, chat GPT or Google of like AI tools that do this image generation, customer journey mapping, journey optimization, whatever, like start there and try things out. The reason I say that is because one of my favorite things that I do that I think people appreciate is like comparisons.

18:28Michele Nieberding:Now, it's funny because as a product marketer, you know, I have a love hate with like feature comparison charts. Like there's I don't know, I have a love hate with then I don't know how you feel about it. But I do as well. Okay, okay. We're on the same page. But ironically, one of the favorite things I love to do is to compare AI tools against each other and what is good for what reason. Or if this one's similar to that AI tool, like when should you use it? Or what are the pros, the cons, the limitations, things like that? So even if it's as simple as pulling up a tab for like chat GBT versus cloud versus Gemini, right?

19:00Michele Nieberding:And putting in the same prompt and just seeing side by side what it spits out, like similar for tools, right? So if I know one tool is slightly better at one thing than the other, you know, those use cases start to like help deliver better results faster within that tool. Now, where things get interesting is how you start pulling that into workflows. So there's like custom GBTs, and then there's agents, and then there's workflows, right? They kind of like build on each other. And once you've figured out like, what tools are good, what custom GBTs are good, then you can start building agents. And then you turn those agents into workflows.

19:33Michele Nieberding:That's like when some magic happens. So I say that because there's just so much to test out. And some of the content I love, again, are those comparisons, what works well and what doesn't. But then if there's something that really doesn't work for your use case, you can really dig in and start trying new things. So like vibe coding with lovable. I have turned so many things into like fun vibe coding worlds. If you haven't tried it, like absolutely. I've done like bachelorette itineraries on lovable that are like interactive. So personal use, like try it for something fun just to like see what happens, like travel itineraries, things like that.

20:04Michele Nieberding:Because then you'll see how cool this can be used like in other ways. So I'm sure Jonathan Pepeks probably reached out to you or Zach Roberts from We're Not Marketers, like they've done some really cool things with lovable for product launches. So they turn it into like a microsite of like, here's the pre, during and post launch assets. And here's what to say. And here's how to share like, so I say this because there's so many cool ways that I'm starting to get more into like the workflows and the vibe coding world in terms of like content I'm sharing or things that I'm learning. But there's just like, again, so many fun things to try.

20:37Michele Nieberding:So if you're like, I'm not sure how I feel about this for work, try it for something personal. And I think you'll probably get addicted because it is really fun to play around with. I love that. Two things I'm kind of taking away from what you said. The first one was if you can isolate a problem that you have that you want to try to solve, that's going to give you a good starting point. Because I definitely resonate. Like sometimes I just have the mindset, like I need to use AI more or I want to feel more comfortable with AI, but it's like, okay, well, where do I start with that? So I think that's really great advice.