AI-Powered Growth Marketing

In this podcast episode, host Dean Denny shares his personal success trip to Bali and how it gave him perspective on the world of marketing. He emphasizes the importance of critical thinking in developing a successful strategy and the potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on AI-powered growth marketing. Dean also touches on the shift in the digital nomad community and the growth of software as a service companies.

 

In this episode, you will learn:

1) AI-powered marketing is not a magic button that can solve all problems. It still requires skilled marketers to create effective strategies and execute them.

2) Critical thinking is crucial in creating successful marketing strategies. Don’t rely solely on AI to make decisions for you.
Incorporating AI into your growth marketing team can be useful for executing tasks such as creating content, voiceovers, video editing, and ad creatives.

3) Focus on delivering great strategy. Having an effective marketing strategy is still the most important factor in achieving business growth.

4) Don’t discount the value of data in informing your marketing strategy. Gather data effectively and use it to make informed decisions.

5) Don’t get caught up in the belief that AI can make do more than you’re capable of as a human.

 

Timestamps:

[00:01:24] – Rewarding success with a trip.

[00:03:40] – Sentimental journey to Bali.

[00:07:06] – Valuable marketing insights revealed.

[00:07:56] – Embrace AI, join the hype.

[00:09:03] – Understanding big marketing strategy.

[00:09:43] – “AI won’t solve everything”

[00:10:54] – AI-driven growth marketing strategy.

[00:11:26] – Bad Strategy, Poor Outcome.

[00:12:42] – AI-driven growth with 10x output.

[00:14:39] – “Unlock New Opportunities With GPT-4”

[00:19:00] – Real-time contextual data response. [00:20:04] – Build product for growth.

[00:20:19] – Level up with OpenAI docs.

[00:21:11] – Grow SaaS with us!

 

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Hey everyone. It’s Open Source Growth. Welcome. I’m your host Dean Denny, founder and director of Owendenny Digital. And in today’s episode. I just want to go about disclosing what I have been personally up to over the past two and a half weeks. And what it will mean for you as a marketer. So. Just to start off today’s episode, guys. I want to say a big, thank you. To everyone who is tuning into this podcast, we’ve had a few new subscribers and a few new listeners come here over the past few weeks. And it means a lot. I’m just a guy doing this out of his study in Geelong Australia, talking about software as a service marketing.

Uh, strategies and techniques and all sorts of cool stuff, which can help you grow your business. Like that’s the fundamental reason why I’m here, because I want to help you make your business blow up online and with the software as a service company. That’s all you really have. All you have is direct response advertising, a little bit of inbound content marketing, some strategy, some PR, some growth hacking this then the third, but you really don’t have the blessing and the privilege of having someone walk past your billboard and be like, I’m going to use you today.

If you’re big enough, you may, but that’s not the way it really works. Uh, but. Over the past two weeks, I have been blessed enough, um, as giving myself a little bit of a success trip now. If you haven’t heard of what a success success trip is, I’m going to happily describe it to you today. A success trip is a trip that I would give myself. If I met my targets.

Now, just to disclose with you December was the biggest month ever for Owendenny Digital. And it really enabled us to really be so fiercely proud of everything that we’ve achieved over the past 5 years, you know, this business started from very humble beginnings. As a freelancing operation when I was just literally on my own with a laptop, um, living out of my parents’ house because I was totally broke.

And I was literally freelancing and I’m like 30 or $40/hr.. And that’s how I managed to take my business for a while. Take myself off the couch. Um, you know, earning a good living, um, and then building and blessing others with this skill. Um, and you know, building a team of like accomplished digital marketers, but that all just started in a bedroom. It really did.

After a failed entrepreneurial attempt with an e-commerce brand. So. You know, We hit this wild milestone. I’m not going to disclose the figures but it was a massive, like 25, 30% increase from what we’ve ever done. In a month and we were so, so proud of that as we are now positioning ourselves to work with larger, more advanced, more sophisticated software company clients. And we’re just so freaking excited. So what we decided to do.

Was, you know, I spoke to my wife, Hannah, who is also the copywriter in our business as well. I was like, honey, if we hit say this monthly recurring revenue, We’re going to, we’re going to book a trip to Bali, and I remember writing down. This literally about 14 days before we did it. And I was like, oh, we’re not going to be able to hit that. Whatever.

Little did you know, BAM, it was all sorted. It was all done.. We blew through the, um, we blew through the goal in like, Two seconds flat. It was just the most surreal feeling. So here we were at the end of December thinking holy smoke. We’re going to have to book a trip to Bali. This is amazing.

And, you know, Bali for me has such sentimental. Um, What’s the word, this. There’s such a sentimental place in my heart. With Bali too, because whenever you go, when I went to Bali, the first time I went was to not only visit a client. Um, in Bali as they had retail outlets in Canggu but it was the first time I was truly introduced to the digital nomad community and I was a digital nomad for a very short period of time living there. In 2018, the nomad lifestyle. Isn’t for me. Right. But. I just was, I just reminded me of all those times and all my youth when I was a single, like,

You know, carefree guy or whatever, it just reminded me going over there to Bali to see all that. And it was so, so exciting. Um, So, you know, the last two weeks have been awesome. I got really sick though. Um, That’s one of the worst things about Bali. You don’t know what you’re going to get. Um, I ended up on an IV drip even, uh, it was pretty crazy.

But. You know, Like.

I think Canggu has changed. Like I really do believe it has changed when I was in Canggu. In 2018, Canggu was definitely the, it was definitely the heart and soul of, you know, digital marketing on the planet. I would say it’s right up there with Silicon valley is like, One of the key outposts of e-commerce and digital marketing and SEO.

Everywhere you went when you were at say dojo, Bali. Um, or any of the other. You know, great coworking spaces, you would see like-minded hardcore digital marketers like there, and then living their best life drinking from coconuts, smashing Facebook ads. It was just. It was, it was such a vibe, then. It really was.

And. Going to Canggu again and going just through Seminyak I just really does kind of feel as if things haven’t really quite picked up after the COVID 19 pandemic. Um, you know, Bali’s infinitely quieter. Um, going through, going through Canggu, It didn’t feel the same crowd was there seemed a little bit more like the cool kids from Seminyak.

Pushed across to, to Canggu and then the kids in Canggu jumped across and an hour in Uluwatu. And in fact, I felt those same digital nomad vibes in Uluwatu, that I once felt in Canggu. So I think there’s been a real shift where the digital nomads are. Uh, camping out. In the whole. You know, being digital nomad and live in Indonesia and live in paradise thing and, you know, do the whole currency slash wide job.

Uh, triage thing to live your best life on less than $50,000 a year. So that’s kind of like where we’ve been for the last two weeks, but what’s been awesome about that going there, obviously as a married man with my beautiful wife, Hannah. Um, As been that it’s able to give me some perspective on my business and perspective on what’s going on in the world of marketing and.

How we are starting to see things and what’s really valuable, enable. Well, what’s valuable in enabling us to become the best version of ourselves, but also create the best version of our organizations.

Which. Has now got me thinking about the whole AI powered growth marketing team. Like is, is AI powered, marketing, the best thing for us. Will you get great results with AI? Um, And. The more I think about it.

Especially with. The way things are. I am going to be fully cognizant. All of this and I’m going to own it. I believe that I’m probably like a lot of you. Getting swept up in the hype. Of AI.

Because.

AI gives you this illusion that. You can just click a button and it’s all done. It’s not going to be like that for a very long time.

Or AI gives you this illusion that you’ll be all mighty and powerful. Because you know, everything before anybody else knows about it, that’s not going to happen either. You still need to be an accomplished marketer. And if you want to do, if you want to do amazing work, if you want it enable your business to achieve T2D3 growth on your terms, you know, triple, triple, double, double, double growth.

Um, Double double level three times, right? Um,

You still need to be an absolute gangster marketer to begin with. So.

Where I am now stacking my own. Effort and opinion these days is into. Understanding big marketing strategy. Like I think that’s going to be the biggest thing. The most underrated, the hardest skill set to teach is going to become the. It’s always been an. Uh, well-paid commodity. No. It has never been a commodity. It’s always been like that.

The treasure trove of the chest, you know, it’s been the thing that everyone really needs to pay for. But it’s almost like, it’s almost like love you. Can’t put a price on it, but it’s the most valuable thing in the world. Um, you need to have your strategy chops. Right. Absolutely Dialled in and squared away.

Because if you don’t have those chops, like going forward, y’all gonna be in shit. But the fact of the matter is I still think that that whole argument around O I R is just going to do everything. Content creators gone, blahdy, blahdy, blah. That’s still a moot point. I’d still don’t think it’s going to be a thing.

However though. Um, If you are. Looking at building a growth marketing team. You’d be crazy not to incorporate it. In the sense that hey, we need lots of content. Great. You need jasper.ai. Hey, we need to do some voiceovers. Okay. 11 labs. Hey, we need to do a whole heap of video editing, et cetera, et cetera. Use descript like we are.

Oh, yeah, we need to go get a pump out whole heap of ad creatives. Okay. Ad creative.ai. Um, You know, there’s so, so, so many things that you will still need to incorporate, incorporate and use to get ahead of your competitors where you know, your competitors are only publishing three things where you can publish 30 with the same amount of effort.

All right. So. Like you, if you are going to build a growth marketing team,

Like hard code it so AI is like right there in the execution front. Right? But. Don’t think that you can shortchange yourself on the critical thinking that needs to happen before you execute that strategy. That is something. That will not happen like that please do not shortchange yourself. Otherwise you’re going to be experiencing some pretty.

Nasty ramifications of poorly thought out things and beautifully executed is still a poor outcome. Right?

See it’s funny. I always had a mentor. Tell me it’s like Dean, you can have a really bad strategy, but you can execute a beautifully, you still going to have bad outcomes. And. That there’s never been a time, which that’s rung more true than ever.

You know, what’s funny, like I think with AI, we’re going to have this. Belief that we can do so much more. We can run so much faster. We have all the data right at our fingertips. We can crunch the numbers and develop insights yeah. And that’s all true. But there’s going to be this. Desire for us to think that we could do more and more and more and more and more.

But. You know, As a human, you could almost do more and more and more and more without the assistance of a machine for the most pragmatic sense of the term. You know, you didn’t always have to create 40 more social assets to get. 10 times more hair like. You may only need to create five social assets. If you create, you know, say 50.

You may only receive 10% more. Um, 10% of it. The marginal gain may be there, but you know, you’ve done 10 times more output. So like, I think where I’m starting to lean with this whole AI powered growth marketing. Debate. Is that we need to, and I repeat, we really read the really need to just focus on delivering great strategy. Like please do not discount having an incredible marketing strategy to begin with, which has been, you know,

Where the data has been gathered effectively. Um, with a custom avatars to be profiled correctly. We’ve done the SWOT analysis. You understand the competitive landscape. You know, the value proposition that you have, it’s dealing and catering to the gains needs, desires, challenges, and. The financial barriers, which our customer may experience.

You know, um, that’s where, you know, that’s all the classics, you know, You know, The four P’s of marketing, all that stuff. That’s what’s going to be really important. Because the execution. You know, the barrier to entry is almost, it’s almost non-existent to be a creative nowadays. Um, I probably switched over with the video, editing myself, but you know, that’s why I have a good team that can help me.

So, you know what I’m saying, guys, like that’s where I’m sitting at the minute with AI powered growth marketing.

But. As always, it’s probably going to be a bit of a twist in this episode, because we’re about to now disclose what may be the biggest.

This may be the biggest change in marketing and.

Anything that uses AI right now that we have ever experienced. And it is ChatGPT 4.

What does this mean for you? As a white collar, professional or blue collar professional, anybody who has a heart, a soul, a pulse and the ability to wrestle with a keyboard and a mouse.

This is going to be the most powerful thing you will have ever seen on the planet. What chat GPT version four or GPT four. Is going to provide people to the marketplace with is contextual information in real time.

What you can now do with the GPT four solution is provide. Provide, you know, GPT four, um, with an image and it will then be able to delineate who each of the people are in the. In the image and then how they may be interrelated. GPT four can also. View and analyze information of live things on the internet. In real time, you can pretty much copy and paste a YouTube link into GPT four.

And it would then. Spit out. A summary of the. Of the video in seconds saves you having to pump out. A 57 minute. You know, Jordan Peterson lecture, you can just go watch it all there online, and it would be. Fricking unbelievable. You know, It is truly unbelievable.

I’ve always struggled with describing what chat GPT three can do. Um, because. It’s a lot like Alladin’s lamp. See with, if you wanted to talk about those products, which have such crazy value propositions.

They’re always super hard to describe, you know, when you’ve got Google, right. That was such a wild thing. It’s like, I have any question I can, I want on the internet, I can type it into this thing and then boom, there’s going to be an answer. An SEO optimized answer, but there’s going to be an answer nonetheless.

See, it goes that step above it in the sense that it’s like, not only can it provide me with an answer, but it can also create an, it can create an informed answer and decision for me, based on information, I provide it. And then not only do you provide that information, you can then feed in live contextual information. Like.

This sort of, um, this sort of technology could change so many professions. Like you can change, you know, it could, it could change the financial trading desks. It could. Poof. It could, it could change the way we handle pandemics. It will change the. You know, it could change the way, you know, airplanes fly through the sky or on autopilot.

Who knows where this is leading. Um,

Wow. Aye. Aye. Aye. I’m. I’m just I’m gobsmacked by how this is all going to play out. Don’t miss on this, just get in there, get into the platform and have a real good go..

See how all of these things can. Help better. And influence your day-to-day life as a product founder or product leader.

The last thing I do want to speak about though. And this is what I think is really exciting.

We’re now able to see, okay, cool. We can do all these crazy things, but how many people are actually getting in there and doing the work? I don’t really see too many people doing anything. Which is great because if your counting in your game, you can just go for it. So. Kudos to you. If you’re that person.

However.

The thing that I believe that’s probably going to Trump GPT four in terms of its ability. To really change the game is the fact that GPT has been super freaking clever. And what they’ve managed to do is create an API, which every single developer can discuss. Bootstrap into that product. I think this is what’s most exciting personally right now.

Because if you have a great product and you want to be able to embed contextual information based on data that you’ve fed a system that can pretty much respond to you in real time. This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. See, my biggest criticism of Jasper and please, don’t get me wrong and don’t get misled. I’ve been using jasper.ai for a very, very long time. I love that software.

I was using, I was using that software when it was called Jarvis. In fact, I was using it when it was called conversion.ai. I don’t even know why they renamed themselves personally.

With Jasper. They failed to create an API. I’m not sure whether they had the opportunity to create it because I do believe they’re built on the open AI technology. But.

Chat GPT has one. If you’re a developer. Figure out how to drill, how to use it, how to interrogate it, like do whatever you can to have functional outputs come from this system and build a better product. You know, We always talk about, you know, product led growth or just do it so well, build the product, which marks before rolling fricking will blady blah. But like seriously guys, this is the time to start leveling up your products. If you haven’t already check out the developer documentation, which the guys at open AI have created. So you can then go about figuring out a way to implement this in your product. Um, so that’s it guys. That’s that’s today’s episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed tuning in. I know it’s been a bit of a ramble. So our hope, this has been fun. Um, don’t forget to like, and subscribe to this podcast. Really appreciate. Um, anyone who tunes into this? Um, podcast again. I love you all. And please do stay safe out there. Um, again, if you’ve got any further questions, feel free to shoot me a message. My email is Dean.Denny@Owendenny.com. Um, otherwise feel free to hit me up via Instagram, Dean Owendenny.

You’ll see me there. Check out our website owendenny.com and if you need help growing your SaaS product online. With the latest cutting edge, direct response advertising techniques and SEO led strategies. Hit us up. We’re here to help. God bless. See y’all soon.

 

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