Happy New Year, digital marketers and go-getters! The time is ripe for a mindset revolution, and I'm here to guide you through it. Imagine embracing AI in your marketing strategy while keeping that irreplaceable human essence alive and at the forefront. That's exactly the journey we're embarking on in this latest episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast. From resetting our digital tactics to welcoming a fresh perspective on content creation, you're invited to explore the transformative power of AI without losing your brand's authentic voice—think 'AI on the inside, human on the outside.' Plus, I've got a special invite for those keen to join the launch team of my upcoming book.
As we leap into the new year, let's unlock the full potential of tools like Descript, our AI Tool of the Week, and adapt to the changing demands of digital culture with insights like our Stat of the Week. But it's not just about the tools; it's about the wisdom to use them without overshadowing our expertise. Remember, if you're ever in need of a digital marketing compass, the digital first group coaching membership community, alongside a vast archive of podcast content and blog posts at neilshaffer.com, stands ready to empower your journey. Let's make sure your marketing strategies resonate with precision and a touch of humanity. Join me, Neal Schaffer, and let's amplify your digital marketing game together.
AI TOOL OF THE WEEK: Descript
STAT OF THE WEEK: Instagram is the 10th Most Googled Term
Learn More:
Happy New Year, digital marketers and go-getters! The time is ripe for a mindset revolution, and I'm here to guide you through it. Imagine embracing AI in your marketing strategy while keeping that irreplaceable human essence alive and at the forefront. That's exactly the journey we're embarking on in this latest episode of the Digital Marketing Coach podcast. From resetting our digital tactics to welcoming a fresh perspective on content creation, you're invited to explore the transformative power of AI without losing your brand's authentic voice—think 'AI on the inside, human on the outside.' Plus, I've got a special invite for those keen to join the launch team of my upcoming book.
As we leap into the new year, let's unlock the full potential of tools like Descript, our AI Tool of the Week, and adapt to the changing demands of digital culture with insights like our Stat of the Week. But it's not just about the tools; it's about the wisdom to use them without overshadowing our expertise. Remember, if you're ever in need of a digital marketing compass, the digital first group coaching membership community, alongside a vast archive of podcast content and blog posts at neilshaffer.com, stands ready to empower your journey. Let's make sure your marketing strategies resonate with precision and a touch of humanity. Join me, Neal Schaffer, and let's amplify your digital marketing game together.
AI TOOL OF THE WEEK: Descript
STAT OF THE WEEK: Instagram is the 10th Most Googled Term
Learn More:
Hey, what is your keyword for 2024? Well, mine is reset, and one thing that I want to help you reset is your understanding and how you utilize artificial intelligence. We're going to cover all that on this next episode of the digital marketing coach podcast.
Speaker 2:Digital social media content, influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking, linkedin, twitter, facebook, instagram, youtube, seo, sem, ppc, email marketing there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil on your side, because Neil Shafer is your digital marketing coach. Helping you grow your business with digital first marketing, one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neil Shafer.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, neil Shafer here, your digital marketing coach, and I want to be well at this date. I'm probably not the first, but I do want to wish you a happy new year and hope that you had a great break. As you can see from the gap between this episode and the last one, I had an awesome break, and sometimes you need to truly, truly unplug and disconnect so that you come back with even more energy, more enthusiasm, more passion, and that is exactly what happened. So thank you for understanding that and, yes, we are here in 2024 and this is episode number 348.
Speaker 1:This year, as part of my own keyword, which is reset and one of the big resets for me is this new book that I'll be publishing in a few months, if you're curious, I'm currently on the second rewrite. We already went from 80,000 down to 70,000 words and I'm working with my content editor to try to somehow get that down to 60,000 words, and then we're going to go into production and I'll have more information for you. But reset means a lot of things. It could mean resetting our health for the year, our relationships for the year, obviously, business as well, but it's also our mindset and, I think, one of the things that I have learned about you, and if you aren't on my email list, I hope you'll go to neilshaffercom slash events and you could sign up for my list. But I recently did a survey and I asked you what were the topics if I were to create a course, what were the topics that you'd be really interested in? And well, the number one topic was leveraging AI and marketing. And I want to deliver more. Hopefully, if you didn't take part in that survey because it's going to give you a chance to apply to my launch team for my new book you'll want to make sure you do by January 15th. Once again, go to neilshaffercom slash events. If you didn't get the survey. It is only being sent out to select people, but I want to make sure my podcast listeners get it. Make sure you send me an email letting me know. Neil at neilshaffercom any a, l, s, c, h, a, f, f, e, r. But nevertheless, that is going to be my guiding light, not only for my business, but also for this podcast going forward.
Speaker 1:Also, if you are a subscriber to my emails, you probably already saw this, but I also want to put a little bit more structure into how I do not just my emails, but I actually want to replicate that in how I record these podcasts. So I want to start the concept of having regular episodes, or I should say, regular shows within a show regular segments, I think, is probably the word I want to use which gives you a little bit more regular information on things that are really important to you. The two things that I want to go over are a start of the week and a recommended AI tool of the week, seeing that everyone is really interested in AI. So the start of the week is that Instagram is the 10th most Googled word in the world. Now I think that's pretty amazing, which just shows you and I'm sure in a year or two, if not this year, tiktok is going to be there as well that these social media sites have really become a cultural phenomenon. Not being on them is not an option. How you engage on them. I've already recorded an episode about authentically social content and I've recorded another episode about user-generated content, and I obviously have other episodes about influencers, but these are some of the primary ways in which we can be active and get organic growth from Instagram.
Speaker 1:But at this time, once again, if we reset how we look at social media and we reset how we do Instagram. We go all in on video, or as much in on video as possible. It's easy to post images on Instagram. It's hard to post carousels short from video, especially in the form of reels, but at least in stories, and that obviously is where the action's at. That's what the algorithm wants. If we want to be relevant on those platforms, that's what we need to do. So that is my start of the week, followed up by my commentary on that. You can find more powerful Instagram marketing stats if you go to neilshaffercom Slash Instagram slash statistics. Make sure that link is in the show notes as well.
Speaker 1:So the AI tool of the week that I want to share with you is Descript. Go to neilshaffercom slash Descript. That's D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T and you can get started with a free trial. Now Descript is a video editing, podcast editing tool that even before chat GPT was already leveraging AI and I could record a episode just on the different ways of using Descript for audio and video. But piggybacking off of my recommendation about going all in on short form video in 2024 is if you're going to do that, you need a video tool. What's really cool about Descript? Now?
Speaker 1:Some of you may find it really easy to record videos from your smartphone and if you're that person, you're probably already creating wheels left and right. But if you're not, that person Descript and they have a Mac app they also obviously have a web based solution. You can actually, using their recorder, make a record, a video from your desktop computer using a desktop microphone and then easily add captions and create a talking head reel very, very easily. I'm about to create a tutorial reel. How meta is that and how to do that? But the way that I started using Descript was you can edit audio and video like you edit a Word document. So if there's something you want to cut out of a video, like an A or an M, descript's AI will actually find that for you and can automatically take it out. Or if, for instance, I want to add captions and I say your digital marketing coach podcast and I want to capitalize the YDMC your digital marketing coach, I can go in and correct that and then wherever else there was a misspelling of that or miscapitalization, it will correct it. If it spells Neil wrong, the automatic transcription, I correct it once and it corrects it everywhere. It is just this Swiss knife of functionality infused with AI for audio and video editing that I highly recommend you get started with. If you do and you need some hand holding, let me know. Maybe I should create some tutorials around using it, but it really is that powerful and this leads very, very nicely in. Once again, that's neilshaffercom Descript D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T. We'll have the link in the show notes as well.
Speaker 1:This is really a nice lead into today's talk, which is about resetting our thoughts about AI. Now I'm going to have a dedicated chapter. It's probably going to be the longest chapter of my new book around leveraging AI and marketing, but if there's two things I want you to remember, well, let's see. There's three main things I want to point out today. A lot of this is going to be about mindset, and this leads nicely into talking about Adobe Max, the Adobe event for creators that I went to, I wanna say, two months ago in Los Angeles, and I've yet to give you my report on it, and I'm not gonna go into too many details on this, like I did my vid summit or some other reports that I've done, but I just wanna point out that at Adobe Max one of the hottest things that people were talking about both the Adobe people as far as new functionality of the product, as well as many of the presenters, many of them content creators, entrepreneurs and even corporate businesses was the topic of AI. You're talking about one of the most creative companies, which is Adobe Adobe Photoshop, adobe Premiere Pro and an extremely creative audience, right Of graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, and they were all in on AI. Okay, if the most creative people in the world can be all in on AI, so can you and so should you, and that's really the main message. If I was to summarize Adobe Max in one sentence, that's the message right, I give you permission, adobe gives you permission. In fact, ai can enhance our creativity. Ai can actually inspire us to do more. So part of this reset for 2024 is also how you view AI. Now.
Speaker 1:The second point I wanna make is with AI and I use this for the first time in my book, so you'll hear me say this in public for the first time, it's AI on the inside, human on the outside, ai on the inside, human on the outside. I wanna let that sink in a bit because, if you think about it, anybody can go out there and create any content you want. If you wanna create blog posts done. If you wanted to have an AI-cloned voice and create a script in AI and create the audio and create a podcast, you could. If you wanted to have an AI-generated video with a human looking avatar, you could, or you could use stock video. All of this is possible, in fact. There are AI tools and if you're interested in these, hit me up that will actually allow you to create a course all the way from choosing the title, all the way to actually creating the modules, the outlines.
Speaker 1:I haven't got to flesh out the content yet, but you can do all this right. But here's the thing what if a client wants to hire you? What if you're invited to speak? What if you have a potential customer that reaches out asking for more information? Is there gonna be a disconnect between what they hear from you and the content they're consuming of yours? So if you're not an expert at it, then it's not gonna be to your benefit. You might get visibility, you might get exposure, but at the end of the day, you gotta deliver the goods. And that's one of the key messages I wanna let you know.
Speaker 1:For instance, in my book and you've heard me talk about the concept of library of content we're really providing our most resourceful informational, educational content out there, feeding both the search engines as well as prospective customers, because we want them to trust us. We want them and the search engines, the CSS and authority. It is that important. If I was going to create a masterpiece, would I just tell AI to do it for me or would I actually create it? What is my value as a human being in the whole ecosystem? So that's why, in my book, I talk about areas where it's smart to use AI. I also talk about areas where you know what. I don't know if it would be that smart to use AI in those situations, and that is the sort of AI literacy that I think we all need to have at some point, the sooner the better. I'm not saying that I'm perfect either, but I think I'm on my way. I'm educating myself as much as possible.
Speaker 1:So, with that in mind, what is the number one way to use AI? Well, the number one way is really ideas. It's that creativity, the inspiration it's getting. You know, I'm thinking of writing a book. I'm thinking of this title. Do you have any other title suggestions? I'm thinking of writing a blog post on this subject. Are there any areas that are relevant to entrepreneurs that maybe have not been covered so much in the internet. It's having these sorts of conversations with AI. If you use a chat-based AI like a chat GPT or a barred or a clod, then that is the way I want you to think about AI to expand your horizons, expand the possibilities of what is possible, and that alone is intense value.
Speaker 1:Now there are other areas in content creation, like short form content creation, where you could use AI. For instance, I'll give you a very good example. I applied to speak at an event recently and the event wanted certain type of information in a certain format. Now I know what I'm gonna speak on, I know what the content's about, but I didn't have like a three paragraph description of what we're going to be, the exact things and the exact takeaways for people. I had a good idea what they were, but I needed to structure content in the format that was being requested. So by giving the prompts of the information that I already know that I plan to speak about, I can easily output that information and instead of spending an hour doing those two to three paragraphs, I can spend five minutes on it. That is a great, and you know what it's not. It is not mission critical, because they may or may not accept my speaking and even if they do accept me as a speaker when I'm on stage, it's not AI, right, and the content is not being generated by AI on stage. So that's some ways we can think about it, like ad copy. Or if you look at the description for this podcast, or when I share this podcast in social media my tweets, my LinkedIn posts, my Facebook posts that's all 100% AI generated.
Speaker 1:I'm checking it. I'm not only fact checking it, I'm also looking for potential plagiarizing. But I'm also making sure I'm damn well making sure it actually represents what I talk about and it's relevant and it's on point. And that ain't always the case, and if that's not the case, then I revise it. But even if I have to revise it, it's still saving me time. That time I can spend on creating more content, creating better quality content, creating more products, spending more time with clients and spending more time with you and engaging with you.
Speaker 1:Right, it is a plus minus situation. Time spent here, you can't spend there, and that's the other key thing about AI. Outside of that, inspiration is the time saving, especially if they are really really mundane tasks the Descript app that I talked about. It can automatically delete a's and um's and other words like this. So, mm, it can delete that. Or there's like blanks, right? My podcast editor's already doing this, but if there are blanks over two seconds, it can just automatically delete it for you, using the AI to find out those gaps, right? That is a brilliant use of AI that's actually helping not only save time and improve quality, right? So AI is nothing to be afraid of.
Speaker 1:Ai is not gonna take your job, right. What's gonna take your job is the person that knows AI better than you do. So this is really the year to reset. It's not rocket science. A lot of AI is just getting experience reading blog posts. We're sort of all in this together, and I do plan to have more resourceful content around this subject as well. But I wanna give you permission to do more with AI this year, but be smart about it. Have your own AI policy, use it with ethics, in an ethical way, but I'm hoping that it saves you more times, that you have more time to unplug, to disconnect, so that, at the end of the day, whatever you end up doing and the reason why you end up leveraging all the digital marketing advice that I teach you, that you can spend more time on what matters in your business and, ultimately, what matters in your life. So that is my message to begin 2024. I am extremely hopeful about this year. As I said, this is the year reset. You're gonna see a lot of reset for me.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed these segments on the quote and the AI tool today, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line, neil at neilshaffercom, but if not, I thank you for listening. I thank you for subscribing. I thank you for those of you that have reviewed this podcast on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Thank you for that as well, and I wanna wish you just a kick a year ahead, and I hope that I will be there to serve you, and I hope that if there's any other way outside of this podcast that can help you, that you'll reach out to me and let me know. Once again, that's neil at neilshaffercom. Until next time. This is your digital marketing coach, neal Schaffer, signing off.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to your digital marketing coach. Questions, comments, requests, links. Go to podcastneilshaffercom Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and neilshaffercom to tap into the 400 plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.