Andreas Welsch: 0:30

Today we'll talk about mastering AI for marketing, and who better to talk about it than someone who's actively working on that? Leanne Shelton. Hey Leanne, thank you so much for joining.

Leanne Shelton: 0:41

Hey, thanks Andreas, appreciate it.

Andreas Welsch: 0:44

Wonderful. Actually, this is a very unusual time for me to go live and I'm actually having a chat with you in the future because you're not based in the US or in Europe. Why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

Leanne Shelton: 1:00

Sure. Yeah, so I'm based in Sydney, Australia. So I'm in the future. And my background is in copywriting and content marketing. Hence the reason we're talking about marketing today. But I only really moved into the AI space early last year when I realized that, ChatGPT hit the scene. It was my biggest hit. shiniest and free competitor. And my conversions had already started to drop from like the economic climate and let alone, now you've got a free tool that does the content for you. And yeah, and I thought, okay, what if I just put together a webinar, I could just run some training on the side about this topic and I had 150 people sign up to that webinar and I thought, okay I'm onto something here and fast forward to April this year, I officially created a new business, human AI training. And ultimately what I teach is prompt engineering. Cause I figured I have copywriting and words have always been my number one passion. So the copyright experience and word knowledge prompts are all about the words. So I figured I'll teach myself up and teach people how to use it to ensure the human touch and that there's high quality output and it's all about productivity, but you need to also make sure that it's actually serving you Your team and your audience and that's the step a lot of people forget about in the whole vortex of AI and all the excitement.

Andreas Welsch: 2:19

That's awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really excited and curious what you'll share with us. And like you said, it's very important we choose the right words and the right sequence, and many of these things. Should we play a little game to kick things off?

Leanne Shelton: 2:33

Sure, let's do it.

Andreas Welsch: 2:35

All right, so this game is called In Your Own Words, and when I hit the buzzer, the wheels will start spinning. When they stop you'll see a sentence, and I'd like you to complete that sentence with the first thing that comes to mind and why, in your own words. To make it a little more interesting, you only have 60 seconds for your answer. Are you ready for What's the BUZZ? Sure. As ready as you can be, let's go. And by the way, if you're joining us live, also put your answer in the chat and why. So here we go. If AI were a movie, what would it be? 60 seconds on the clock. Go.

Leanne Shelton: 3:13

I guess it depends if you want a dystopian movie, which there's already plenty of, plenty out there, or you want a positive movie. I guess if I was to create a movie about it, it would be Maybe a romantic comedy of AI taking human form or people, someone seeing it as a human, and they develop a romantic relationship. I'd probably create something fun like that. But I just think of I don't know if big band theory, Rajesh falls in love with Siri. That's the concept that has popped into my head. And cause that's where we could end up going. People trusting AI to to be their confidant, and that's a bit of a worry, but that could be a romantic comedy with AI and humans. Yeah, full on love.

Andreas Welsch: 4:03

I love it. I think that's the first that somebody talks about rom com for AI, even though that might sound a little futuristic. They're already the first signs there of people getting very attached either to their ChatGPTs as a productivity booster that they can live without or even more emotionally attached. It's not as far fetched or as far out, I think. But, you mentioned also this human touch is really important when leveraging AI and you mentioned you, you started your own business around that idea of, Hey, it's going to disrupt what I have been doing and what I'm really passionate about, but I can use this as an advantage and bring in my skills and my strength and help others figure out how to use these tools to the best extent possible, especially in marketing. So I'm curious, how do you suggest businesses find that balance between humans, AI as they are creating information.

Leanne Shelton: 4:55

Yeah, that's a really great question. And yeah, I'm writing a book and that's one of the chapters about balancing the human brains and the AI bots. And that's the thing. I think everyone needs to take a step back when you are embracing AI. A lot of people, like I mentioned, get very excited and think of the potential and the money saving and the time saving factors. But I think you just need to take a deep breath and consult as a team and not just be one person making decisions because there will be like, you don't think about what cost, right? If you brought in this AI tool okay, are you actually sacking humans? Why are you sacking them? You should actually be training them to use the tool and bring in, like with my situation, their experience and expertise bring that to the AI tool and then manage it effectively, oversee it, be a bit like tech support and train it up. And as things, change and whatever or if that's from an internal point of view, but also from an external point of view, you've got to think about how it's going to land with your audience. So that's my voice. Like people just going, Oh, look how much content, but for marketing purposes, I can pump out really quickly. And the thing is with that is that so many people focus on their own productivity, like internally, how does it help me rather than thinking about how it serves the audience? So if you're just thinking, I've got to pump out thought leadership pieces, I've got to pump out things to increase our brand awareness for SEO, The thing is, if that is generic robotic content, if you haven't put enough effort into training up to understand the business, your brand voice, your customers, the customer, we're already seeing it. We can tell if it's AI content. If it's just flat and bland, lifeless, has no humanness to it, no case studies, no personal anecdotes, we're just going to see right through it and you don't lose that know and trust the know and trust factor. So basically when you are using our tools, make sure that you have that balance. You are, the humans are managing the tools and basically if you use it well, it should be almost indistinguishable as AI. And that's, I put out some AI content, like articles. You would have no idea because it's been trained in my brain voice. And I've gone back and tweaked it. So that's the key thing really here. It's making sure the humans remain in control and you're not handing over everything to the bots for the sake of productivity.

Andreas Welsch: 7:17

I think that's a really good point that you're making. And I remember about two years ago when ChatGPT came out and I started using it for the first time, I had exactly that same feeling that you described. It's me. It's okay. It's pretty bland. It's okay. It's generic, I don't get out of this tool what I think I would get out of an AI tool. It's totally underwhelming. But then people started coming out with prompt cheat sheets and frameworks and different things to how to approach it and all of a sudden it became a lot more useful, became a lot better at using these tools. So I could see a similar evolution there as well. But I think especially that the part you mentioned about, think about who you're writing for or who you are using the tool for. Yes, for your own productivity, but mainly to communicate a point to your audience. And what does your audience want to know, to learn, to hear? It's not just about you. It's about you serving them. I really like how you framed that. I think that's a super important point. But I'm, I'm also curious. I was previously in marketing. We started to use tools like ChatGPT to help us create narratives to create copy for web pages, a little bit for blogs here and there, and to me, it was always important to encourage my team members. to use these tools and to also share how they're using them. What's helpful, what's working for you, what's not. And I'm curious, what are you seeing? What are some practical ways that marketing teams can actually start integrating AI into their content creation process in that sense?

Leanne Shelton: 8:45

Yeah. That's a hundred percent right. You should be integrating into your current processes before you go and create massive projects or say, Hey, we've always wanted to write this book and now I've got AI can just write it for us. I don't even think about that. I want you to think about your day to day tasks and honestly, how I personally use it is a starting point only. It's never the finishing point. So what I mean by that is I've helped use AI to mainly ChatGPT but really any generative AI tool is the same. Just say, all right, I need some ideas. Can you help me with some ideas for articles or getting started? Or here are my rough notes. Can you make sense of this and put this into an outline or create a social media post from this, or I'm running an event and can you please suggest an agenda based on the audience, the desired outcomes, all this kind of stuff. And that's how I use it. And then the thing is that people get this, there's like dopamine hit, like excitement. It may wear off. I don't know. There's dopamine hit of when you see AI generated content, the seconds pop into your screen, you get this excitement and you're like, Oh, wow, look at this. But what you need to do is not fall in the trap of going, how good's that I'm going to publish that or send that without a second glance. What you need to do is. Use that dopamine hit as fuel for your creativity and critical thinking. So then go, Ooh, okay. I like what's said there. Don't like that. Why don't I like that? And think about that. Or, okay, let's have some conversations backwards and forwards. I want to focus more on that aspect. That's a really good point that I haven't thought of that. And it's actually, it needs to be more of a collaborative thing. thing. And so you then might be prompting backwards and forwards, or you might then go, all right, I'm now going to take that and manually write the content from there, because I have a starting point. And that's a trap. I think a lot of people fall into as well. It's going, that's great. And just think AI is all knowing being that must be correct and just trusting that it is. Quality content, especially if you're not a writer, and this is why I get a bit frustrated when I hear about copywriters being sacked, because we know what quality looks like. The average, and the psychology behind conversion, copy and things like that. So that's what I want you to use it for, like to springboard ideas, plan ideas, but then the human takes over.

Andreas Welsch: 11:26

I love that. Really use it as a starting point and build upon it and edit it, make it better. And I'll take into account what you want to use it for and so on. So if you're in the audience and you have a question for Leanne, please feel free to pop it in the chat. We'll take a look in a minute or two and we'll pick up those questions. Now, there, there's so many tools in the market for so many different marketing tasks. On one hand, you have the ChatGPT, Cloud, Gemini, Copilot, more general purpose type of systems. You have some specific tools for copywriting, for marketing that have a bit of additional flavor or capabilities. I'm curious, what tools do you use for what? Because I get that question a lot. Should I use Gemini? Should I use ChatGPT? Should I use Cloud? And while there are some. Benchmarks and more technical benchmarks where the models excel. I'm curious as a professional in that space, what is your go to or for what tasks?

Leanne Shelton: 12:24

And that's the thing as well. People get very overwhelmed with which tools and, you can very easily subscribe to 20 tools and use two of them. I've actually I'm pulled back and I don't play with lots of tools, honestly, because for me, I've stick with ChatGPT is the original. I have dabbled in, Claude and Gemini and yeah, also people say that's really good for conversational content. But the thing is I've spent most of my time in ChatGPT. So therefore it knows me really well and the voice is really good. And so there's no point jumping across to other tools, different things, and this one knows me. And actually, curiously, I was late to the party with the custom GPTs. I was a bit hesitant because I thought the main thing knows me so well. I have since gone to GPTs to help me like write my book or create mock up materials. It doesn't have, it doesn't have the same knowledge base as what the general platform has because I've been playing around with it for, yeah, I guess 20, 21 months or something. So I've just gone back to the main ChatGPT and that just That's that serves me right. I have started looking into Cassidy, which is a more secure platform because you don't have to upload your content to it. It just scans your SharePoint or your Google Drive or whatever it is. So for my clients, so they're in like the legal space or, sensitive information. I've started recommending Cassidy as an option because then, it's safer. But for myself, I'm not doing a lot of sensitive data. So therefore I'm, I probably will have, I haven't actually signed up at Cassidy yet. It's a new one I've been playing with, but I probably will have that one just as a backup for when I do need to do sensitive stuff. Knowing though, the brand voice for copywriting for content purposes is going to be in the ChatGPT. So that's, I think just pick one, really train it up, like really get it to understand who you are, what you stand for, like sharing samples that, are accessible on the internet. You send out to your clients, whatever it is, and then just stick with that one thing. Because if you jump around, it's just not going to serve you. And this is where I get a little bit frustrated by it. A bit like the old school Clippy, Microsoft. It looks like you're writing an email. That's popping up everywhere. Meta messenger and on Gmail. And no, I don't want it writing stuff for me because it doesn't know my brand voice. It doesn't know me. It doesn't know my audience. So until, and this could be only a couple of months away for all I know, until all these pop ups integrate with. or whatever my main tool of choice is, I don't, I'm not going to use them. And I don't want anyone to use them either because then that's where generic content is going to come out. So my ChatGPT, it knows me so well that I can say I can even say to it, okay, I need to write this article on this topic. I know I've roughly covered it in these three articles. Can you now give me a plan that now speaks to this audience? And it's honestly like 80, 90 percent there. And then I just have to work through it. But just on that note, when I am doing articles or any type of long form copy, I always get an outline first. Then I say, draft the introduction, I tweak it. Take a Google Docs, whatever, tweak it, put it back in. Here's the updated version. Now proceed with the second paragraph, third paragraph, et cetera, follow that process. And that, it will then train itself up based on what you've previously written and make sure there's no repetition. You may need to confirm that. That's how I can now pump out articles that you wouldn't, you have no idea AI has helped me, but technically it's me. It's just reused my stuff. So that is how it should be used.

Andreas Welsch: 16:08

That's some really tangible examples and tips how to use it effectively. A lot of times we hear, Hey, take a sample email and put it in there or a couple of sample documents and say, write it like that. But hearing how you describe it and the results that you seem to get that's awesome. And especially, I think also for those of us who are not trained copywriters or authors Sitting there and having writer's blocks, staring at that blank sheet of paper or that blank open email. How do I say this again? How do I want to say this? Am I too assertive? Am I too soft? Is it right for this audience? I think there are so many ways to use these tools now. Outside of copywriting, are there any other types of medium or media that you use generative AI tools for?

Leanne Shelton: 16:53

I've played around with there's Gamma, which is great for creating presentations and even the free version you can create, it can create 10 slides for you. You put in a basic script or just a couple of lines and it'll populate information in pretty slides. That one's been pretty cool. I personally I do a lot of slides. I'm the type of person that has like a new slide every like 30 seconds. So even the paid subscription wouldn't give me like 60 slides. So I stick to my Canva, which that's Canva though, not the AI in Canva. That's still in its infancy and I don't trust that yet. So Gamma is really cool. InVideo is great one for like little video clips and things. You do have to upgrade to not have the watermark and everything like that. But that one's. Good for creating, because it can create TikToks or YouTube videos and things like that. I need to explore that a little bit more coming into the new year, but I'm gonna look at that one. I know Opus Clip, I've experimented once or twice, but I know a lot of people highly recommend that one for cutting up videos as well into that. A fun one is Suno. So Suno, and that is for creating text to music. So you can create fun little jingles that then may be at the back of your presentations or at the back of, backing those videos and things like that. That one is very cool. It's just in seconds. You can Just have this song created for you obviously the more input you put in, you can control the output. That's what I play around with, and obviously things like Otter, like for transcribing and summarizing meetings, that's always been really helpful for like briefings or just, fathom is also really good. I've been on the receiving end of a Fathom transcript and summary, and it's spot on. Rather than going back and watching the recording and having to take notes and go, Oh yeah, what do I have to do again? Yeah. So there's a few little things like that, but

Andreas Welsch: 18:45

Good. I think those are some good tips. And I'm sure there are some tools that maybe those of you in the audience might not have come across yet. So do take a look there as well. Now what are fellow writers, fellow copywriters, saying when they are seeing that AI is advancing so rapidly and that you're going all in and you want to help people use this. Isn't there some kind of a concern that you're maybe even contributing to the accelerated pace and adoption of AI? And how do we work with that effectively? What are some of your peers saying or what are they concerned about and how do you help them?

Leanne Shelton: 19:23

Yeah, so it may seem like I've gone to the dark side, but...

Andreas Welsch: 19:26

No.

Leanne Shelton: 19:27

No. Honestly, there's, yeah, all my copywriting buddies and things, quite often they're going more into strategy and looking at more big picture strategy because you need to have that strategy. So if you are gonna use AI, you have that in mind to brief the platform to get quality output. And that, and honestly, that's why I moved into this space initially. It was like, can't beat them, join them. And I figured people are going to be using AI to write their content. I can at least put my copywriting hat on and teach them what quality content looks like and how to do that. Cause I personally, yeah, bought one of those a thousand prompt guides at$57 early last year, just to check it out. But the problem is, and be aware of this, every time you see a prompt shared online or one of those guides, the thing is that prompt, is just like a skeleton, right? It's, it, everyone's got a skeleton, but our exterior is very different. You need to think about adding to that prompt to personalize it and make it yours. Because those prompts otherwise make no sense without any context. You need to say who you are, at least do all that training in the background before you attempt these prompts. You've got to think as well, a lot of these prompts are just AI generated without a second thought as well. So take it with a grain of salt and think of that. Test them out. You need to go, okay what do I actually want? What I say is think backwards. What do you want the desired outcome to look like? What kind of impact do you want that to have on your audience? What are their needs? Think about that. And then work backwards with your prompt. So when, with your initial prompt, the instructions I want to create This article that ultimately convert people to my team training. It is, it needs to really speak to the fears that they're still having on this. And I want it to be roughly around, a thousand words. I want to also, whatever it is, really get clear on that context rather than. Write me an article on this topic. And you'd need to, this is where the copyrights can come in. We know what needs to go in, like the fun, relatable stories, some statistics may need to go in. Some case studies may need to go in. All that we need to add layers to the content. And this is where a lot of people don't do this with their, AI generated content without the copyright knowledge, because I take it at face value, but it is usually surface level content, and if it is regurgitated, From wherever, sometimes unethically of however it's been sourced. You just don't know if you can trust it or anything. So what I do say, and I say this to my copywriting friends too, look, we still know how to, you need to find the right resources. And then tell it, only use these resources to write this article, which helps with the SEO practice with backlinks and everything like that. You need to do the old school research. You need to put a critical eye, look out for repetition in the article. Like it's every sentence serving you, and this is where I think, yeah, a lot of copywriters can come in and say, all right, I can help you. So they need to learn the tools themselves so that they can become coaches and probably a whole bunch of AI coaches who are copywriters. I know of at least a couple that have done that. Just to make sure people understand the nuances that go into good content. And that's the thing as well, like being in Australia, we like certain things about content, very different to say US audience, we hate being sold to. So if you're being way too promotional, you don't lose us. AI has been probably predominantly trained up on American content. A small fraction of that's giant stuff. So you need to be wary of this and have that human lens. So that's the thing that comes down to just checking it.

Andreas Welsch: 23:09

I really liked that part that we need people with skills to review the information, to make it better, to make it tangible, to also localize it in a sense to the audience that they were trying to reach. I'm curious that you mentioned a number of great examples. Give it give it examples of how you write. What is your tone? What is your style? What is your brand voice? Are there any other ways or recommendations that you have? How we can make these tools sound more like us? Maybe if we don't have that much content yet or some other recommendations.

Leanne Shelton: 23:44

Yeah. So there's a couple of ways, like if you've already got a style guide, then obviously you say, here's my style guide with my brand voice. Can you review it? But then always test it because what the humans think that brand voice is could be very different to how the AI bots translate it. So you might think our content is professional and conversational, but when the bots. They take those words to completely different meaning. So what I do recommend is, yeah, if you've got a style guide, then play around with it and say, actually, I want it more like this, want it more like that, tweak it. Thank you. Now, can you provide me an updated brand voice? And then you share that with the rest of your team. So everyone's got that consistent voice. So that's one method if you've already got. That brand voice sorted. If you don't I recommend putting in samples of stuff you have written or even someone you would a brand that you feel like it's the feel that you're going for. And then share samples of that and say, all right, here's some samples of my writing style. Could you please create an analysis and tell me what that style is? You need to remember this going forward. Say this is a human edge brand voice. for like future content and you'll get better and better. And, I still get to this day, some content at first glance. I'm like, it's not really sounding like me. I'll just say, Oh, can you rewrite the human edge brand voice? Oh yeah. Apologies. And the next version is much better. I feel like it's doing that a bit lately. Who knows why? But yeah, that's where you've got to just review it and go and read it out loud and think, Does this feel like the right fit? Obviously speaking to the entrepreneurs or, if it's your business, your voice, you'll know if it feels right or not. Or if you are part of a team, just check with everyone else. How does this sound to you? Do you think this represents where we're coming from? But yet you want everyone from the same company to be using the same brand voice. You want, we've got that now, like before you may be told, Hey, everyone, we're bubbly and this. But one person's bubbly wouldn't be someone else's bubbly, especially if their personality is not that. So this way with AI, you can ensure that consistency, but you've got to train up first.

Andreas Welsch: 25:51

Great point there, right? It's also about standardizing how we do sound and how do we how we do want to sound in our brand to sound. Excellent there as well. Now we're getting close to the end of the show, and I was wondering if you can summarize the key three takeaways for our audience today before we wrap up. It's been super insightful so far, by the way.

Leanne Shelton: 26:10

Yeah, thank you. Okay. I'm going to bring in three things that I was at an AWS Girls Tech Day recently, and I just, these are three very simple things to just remember. See AI as your friend. Okay. This is what I said to the kids. It's your friend, and you don't get your friend to do your homework for you. So please don't get AI to do your homework for you, do your work for you. But you can do research together and collaborate on a project. So that's how I want you to see AI, like a friend, like an intern as well, okay. Let's bring it up to the corporate space. Like an intern, treat it like a human. So also use please and thank yous manners because we want to get keeping that habit. And obviously this is a security point of view as well. Don't upload anything that is highly sensitive just because you don't know where it's going to go. And yeah, and I guess ultimately this comes down to you always checking. The content, make sure you are managing it. You're not handing over power to the AI tools. There's a big fear about humans being replaced by AI and it's becoming a self fulfilling prophecy by some of the actions and some of the tools that are coming out. I literally heard this morning about an AI tool. That's helps you humanize AI content. And I'm like, yeah, so just, yeah, you review it, stay in control.

Andreas Welsch: 27:22

Awesome. Wonderful. Leanne. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us and for sharing your experience with us. I really appreciate you spending the time with us and sharing what you're seeing on this journey.