Standing Out in a World of Generative AI

Speaker 1: 0:58

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Bethany. She is joining us from Dallas, texas, and she works with one of the best content marketing agencies in the world, verbatim, and she has a couple stories for us today, actually, about some of the great marketing work she's done. Welcome to the show, bethany.

Speaker 2: 1:20

Hey, thanks, eric, I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:24

So let's start by you sharing a little bit about the marketing that you're doing yourself, because I thought that was pretty interesting and unique, based on what most people are doing today. Why don't you tell us a story about some of the marketing that you've been doing yourself to win clients?

Speaker 2: 1:44

Sure. So, as a lot of us in marketing are writers, we have to be, we have to write a lot. And so, as we've watched the rise of gendered AI, there's always that question of hey, when I say something is using text, is anybody going to believe that I wrote this? Or are they going to question an AI with this AI, some generated tool, you wrote this and they're going to skip over me. So I just got a. I had that same feeling that a lot of marketers are feeling like, not am I going to be replaced? But more like, how do I stand out? Do I get good AI? Do I become a prompt engineer? What do I do? So I started. I began sending messages, just like work conversations, to my clients and to my agent in voice memos. So I got pretty good, getting to the point, organizing my thoughts, wrapping it up and then hitting send on audio and voice memos. And then I got laid off from my agency and so I turned that skill into all my cover letters now became audio visual. Audio visual little video snippets that said hey, I saw your job post. You just thought I'd give you a face with the name. Here I am my name is Bethany Schaefer. And here's my resume. Hope it doesn't get lost in that Folks would click on that and watch my video or listen to my audio. So, yeah, it landed me a job at Verbatim. It just helped me really stand out among a lot of a lot of clients. I think my actual expertise in marketing got me through the funnel at Verbatim and so now I'm on that team. But boy, the job market was a lot easier and I stayed really busy with lots of freelance clients in the meantime, and that's I do attribute that to a high response rate on my job applications when I was looking for gigs or roles, and that came from a lot of audio and visual, and so I kept a full roster while I looked for a full time role.

Speaker 1: 3:39

That's a very interesting story using audio and video messages to stand out in a world of generative AI, where I've heard so many stories of. What people are doing is they are using AI to generate hundreds or thousands of cover letters and resumes and they're sending those automatically generated texts documents out to potential employers. But what's ironic is, on the other side, they're receiving such a high volume of them that employers are using AI to process and automatically review all these things. So really we've evolved in a world where the robots are talking to the robots about who should be working where, and using audio and video to stand out is a pretty amazing tactic to break through the generative text world we live in. That's a pretty awesome story.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Yeah, and what I found also was that once I did land a role at verbatim and really got my feet under me I've been there about five months now I kept that practice going of contacting folks and reaching out to folks, responding to folks using audio visual. They just like to hear my voice. However, nobody has time to hop on a call because they don't know whether they'll be able to get out of it. But they do have time to click on a one minute video from Bethany sharing her screen. If, whenever it comes in right now, I'm going to finish what I'm doing and then look at it, they can watch or listen at their leisure, and that also is another thing to help. That helps, and they know I won't hold them hostage when I'm on a call with them. You never know what you're getting into with phone calls these days, but a one minute video or 30 second audio clip really helps people feel like they connect with you without getting, I guess, stuck with you.

Speaker 1: 5:31

So tell me, were you able to use tools like some of the simple tools out there, like Lume or Descript, to create some of these simple videos, or did you just do it with your phone? I'm just curious, what tools did you use?

Speaker 2: 5:47

Yeah, that's a good question. So, with Slack, if I was on any kind of freelance team or the internal verbatim team, my full time team now they use Slack and that's an app that you can take on your phone with you as well, so there's an option there where you just hit the microphone. Now this is the same option you can use on text. If I'm walking the dog, I can send a voice memo via text to anybody I want to as well. But, yeah, when it came to time to share my screen and toggle around the six or seven tools that I'm using to show somebody my research at work or as a prospect, prospect clients, I do use Lume. That's exactly right. Other AI is another good one that I've been using because it cleans up my and all those filler words that happen, and so Otter has been another good free tool that I use. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.

Speaker 1: 6:38

That's great. So tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done working for one of the best content marketing agencies out there. Tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done for a client.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Yeah. So when I realized I could speak and I could if folks would be able to listen I was able to organize my thoughts and get to the point and deliver the value that they're looking for Then I added that to my list of offerings as a webinar host, an online almost small event host or discussion moderator for I've done melting I don't say ice breaking, ice melting activity for new employees, for onboarding, things like that I started adding that to my list of offerings and then, along with that, I began evangelizing that story that I told you hey, everybody in marketing, you know that you're worried about generative AI as well, both being found and finding the right answers out there to the content that you're looking for. So why don't you join me in getting excited about in person and analog more like in person, as you can see and hear me more person to person content, like we're doing right now, and so that became. That resonated with other marketers and when I say other marketers, folks with budgets, so my clients it resonated with my clients when they said, wow, yeah, person to person interactions are valuable and it might I always say it temporarily will be the answer to the generative AI garbage the robots talking to the robots problem that you mentioned, and so I've gotten a lot of clients also excited about that and a few have begun doing webinars as a response and, in I don't know, in part as a response to that challenge of robots speaking to robots and that building trust. One of those clients is called Topolty. It's an AP automation solution FinTech client. They've been doing really interesting webinars and they host practitioners who finance executive and finance leaders in enterprise and commercial level organizations who employ technology like theirs, just to explain how good it is. So they as well as another client I have, oracle, just did a webinar last week to interview folks who have used their product, their FinTech consulting arm, argonome. What that does is it's almost like a case study, but you can actually see and hear the enthusiasm and the folks presenting their case. These are successes that I believe are going to be standing out as they publish those things. We had over 130 attendees live to these live webinars and these are executives of massive companies with massive budgets listening very carefully to extract the value from the guests on these webinars. But yeah, I have seen a lot of big name companies jump on board the human interactions that they can listen in on, and my favorite part about that is that, humans, you don't have to be a big corporation to speak well or to speak with enthusiasm about your product. Every small business has just as much power and in their voice, as an Oracle.

Speaker 1: 10:00

So human to human instead of robot to robot wins is what you're saying, because it actually seems like, from a content perspective, people have limited time and if AI can generate, the robots can generate so much volumes of text. What I'm actually seeing is some people are taking these volumes of text and they don't read it. They upload it to the AI and they ask the AI to summarize it and say tell me the 10 things I need to know about this. Again, we're back to robots and robots, but at some point, because it's not completely accurate, because it was trained by us and we're not perfect and sometimes it just makes things up. There's also issues like that. It just seems like finding ways to connect with people. That's, I think, one of the big themes. Some people will call it being authentic. You're saying human to human and using audio to video is a different way of going at that, because you can actually experience the emotion of other people, which somehow is starting to feel like a memory rather than a real, if you believe it.

Speaker 2: 11:20

Yes, yes, man, when I heard the frustrate in these case studies, you get to hear the frustrations of the people who are recalling what it was like before they found the product. Then, when they were searching for them, they were listing requirements and they were trying to find their way and finally they found the relief. It's just not captured in text, let alone, especially not in AI generated text.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Yeah, I think. Just one more comment on the robot to robot versus human to human is I think there's growing frustration in the market when a human doesn't understand something and needs to talk to another human about it at a company and they can't actually get to a human because of the voice robot, ai, ivr menus. I understand why those are so effective for companies in a lot of cases, but I literally have often seen people just melt down when they can't actually talk to somebody to try to understand something or work through a problem that isn't a common problem, right?

Speaker 2: 12:32

Yeah, and that's especially, and I think we're going to be finding our way here soon. I think there's been an over reliance on AI because those kinds of bot, customer service folks and stuff like that, and I think that smart marketers and customer service folks are starting to work together to solve for that, give people the self-help that they want. Sometimes I do just want to go look in the information bank and be like how do I X, y or Z Read it for myself and then go do it and not talk. I don't want to talk to somebody, but if I can't find that information, heavens boy, I'll say, yeah, chat now, chat now. And customer service rep I need a human. I'll start. But yeah, you're right, I go from one to 60 as a customer myself, as a user of software myself, so I do expect marketers are. I think we're on it. It's bad now, you're right, it's ugly, but I think we're working on it. Have you seen it in the same way? Because as marketers, we're also users, we're using software, we're using tools too, so we are in the customer issues a lot of times. I am seeing it every surge in a human centered at least, maybe like where AI and humans work together.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Let's hope for balance in the customer experience going forward. That would be really great. I think that's how it's related to marketing, the customer support. People are really frustrated by the customer experience of getting help on their products. They're not going to be a long-term customer, they're not going to buy more, they're not going to recommend you to other people. It's generally this is where the customer success and the marketing folks have to come together and providing that balanced experience of letting people get automated help when they want, but then when you have something that the bots can't figure out, you can get to a human to sort it for you. Let's hope for that balance. Thanks for making time to share these great stories with us today. It's great advice. I hope everyone listening share these stories with your friends. Share this episode. Would ask everyone to rate, review and subscribe so that we can have great guests like Bethany come to the podcast. Bethany, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing these insights.