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Will AI Replace Your Growth Marketing Team or Agency?

It’s true. The robots are coming for our marketing jobs. But the bigger – and better – question is this: How can we as marketers use this technology to better serve our clients? That’s the question we’re exploring and we’d love for you to join us. Come listen, learn, and let’s see where we end up!

In today’s podcast, Dean Denny from Owendenny Digital, Australia’s leading SaaS marketing agency, poses the question: Will AI Replace Your Growth Marketing Team or Agency?

After many weeks of testing the latest and greatest AI Marketing tools and pushing ChatGPT to its limits, Dean’s reached the conclusion that this is the most exciting time in human history to be a marketer.

While the technology improves every day, Dean emphasizes the importance of human oversight and interpretation of AI generated analysis and insights for successful campaigns. He also stresses the need to consider human behavior and emotions when it comes to writing creative content.

AI is wildly powerful when it comes to analyzing the data, make real-time adjustments to campaigns, and replace team members in order to improve targeting and segmentation. However, we’ve still got a long way to go (thankfully) when it comes to replacing your entire marketing team for a computer.

Show Timeline:

[00:00:00] – “AI Takes Over: Are Marketing Teams Obsolete?”
[00:02:11] – “Unlock Your Growth Potential with AI”
[00:03:25] – “How to Explain Tech to a 5-Year-Old (And Why You Should)”
[00:05:11] – “Revolutionize Your Transcription Process with AI”
[00:06:07] – “Data-Driven Marketing: The AI Advantage”
[00:08:56] – “Cut Through the Noise: AI-Powered Marketing Solutions”
[00:10:12] – “Revealed: What Your Customers Really Want (Even If They Don’t Say It)”
[00:13:08] – “Customized Marketing Made Easy with Contextualized Solutions”
[00:14:19] – “Take Your Skills to the Next Level: AI-Powered Marketing Mastery”
[00:15:23] – “AI Everywhere: The Future of Growth Marketing”
[00:15:53] – “Stop Wasting Time and Start Focusing on Strategy”
[00:16:07] – “Invest in Your Future: Learn How to Fly with AI”
[00:17:19] – “The Rise of Creative Marketing: How Small Teams Can Win Big”
[00:18:17] – “Intelligent Agencies: The Key to Tenfold Success”
[00:19:07] – “Open Source Growth: The Secret to Staying Ahead of the Game”
[00:20:32] – “Get Ahead of the Competition with AI-Led Marketing Support”

Liked what you heard today? Don’t forget to subscribe to Open Source Growth and never miss an episode. We’ll be back next week with new updates and insights on the world of AI. Until then, keep growing!

Hey everyone. It’s Dean here and welcome to Open Source Growth, a podcast about SAAS, founders, directors, and marketers, trying to grow their businesses online, using the latest in organic and paid marketing strategies, brand positioning, direct response advertising and so, so, so much more.

And in today’s episode, I want to cover the topic. Will artificial intelligence or AI replace your growth marketing team or even your marketing agency.

So, what we want to do today is discuss the role of artificial intelligence in growth marketing. Whether it will replace your team. The benefits, the drawbacks, and what’s the overall impact going to be on the industry as a whole.

Um, again, There’s no better place to start this podcast in regards to the fact that we need to have a really clear cut definition of what artificial intelligence truly is before we can then talk about its application within growth marketing, direct response advertising or anything to do with your PPC efforts or, you know, pay per impression efforts.

So if you ask Chat GPT, what is artificial intelligence? It will give you this definition, artificial intelligence or AI refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that would typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, language translation.

AI involves the use of algorithms and mathematical models that can analyze vast amounts of data to learn from patents. And improve performance over time. It can be applied in various fields, including healthcare, finance, transportation, education, and it’s taming among others. The goal of AI is to create intelligent machines that can replicate human, like intelligence, improve efficiency, productivity, and problem solving capabilities.

Wow. If it was me reading that definition of AI, I’d be thinking, well, it looks like everyone’s on borrowed time and the machines are taking over, but I don’t quite think that is the case. Because if you think about AI, it can really be translated to everything. Any good growth marketing person needs to do, needs to go about analyzing data.

He needs to develop. Creatives needs to make. Good decisions based on high quality data, et cetera, et cetera, it could probably provide you with the strategies, but. It’s, it’s not quite that clear. Cut. So with AI, we know that there are so many great tools out there. And I want to name a couple that we are using in our agency to help bolster our own internal growth marketing efforts and also the growth marketing efforts of our clients.

So how are we using AI at Owendenny Digital? Well, first things first we’re using open AI chat, GPT, um, and Jasper pretty much on a day-to-day basis when it comes to content creation. If we are getting lost, when it comes to determining and understanding a topic, we can use CHATGPT to simplify complex ideas. A good example is that we work inside the GRC, which is the governance risk and compliance industry and alongside cybersecurity professionals. Now, more often than not, I’m constantly scratching my head when it comes to, okay, what does this standard mean? What does this abbreviation mean? What does that mean? And how does it impact this, that the third and the other.

And what I find myself doing is asking open.ai chatGPT, what is this? Explain this to me as if I was a 10 year old. Make this easier for me to understand. How does this relate to X, Y, or Z? And that’s where ChatGPT can really simplify things for the marketing team. So then they can develop some really clever marketing messages. When it comes to blog content for our clients and our agency. We are using jasper.ai and we’ve been using it since 2019 to go about writing high quality blog contents. Which is ultimately very human directed, but it’s AI supported. See, if you want to write quality blog content, you really need to understand your customer. And sometimes you can’t feed all the necessary inputs into, um, artificial intelligence. So you often need to really just get in there, um, make some minor changes, direct AI in the right direction, and then pretty much point at where you need to go to go about creating these things.

When it comes to video editing, we used Descript and we’ve been using it for very long. In fact, this podcast is recorded on the Descript and it’s really helping us, uh, go about editing things easily. In fact, I edit a lot of these podcasts myself, and I’m no video editor. Like it is just on believable. It is transformative. Uh, for our team to go about creating amazing content for good people like yourselves. Um, we use, um, Too Long; Didn’t View (tl;dv) for our Google meets to go about getting live transcriptions of every single, po.., every single meeting that we do. And that’s all recorded and transcribed using artificial intelligence.

You know, Google. Um, Google mail uses AI to go about determining what you need to say in an email based on the language you’ve programmed it with. So, you know, AI has been used everywhere. As in chatbots, in automated email campaigns, but where we find it most exciting, um, is in its ability to sift through data that’s meaningful.

Now, I’m not sure about you, but if you’re a creative marketer in your SAAS business, or if you’re an entrepreneur looking for the latest amount of not the latest, but as many users as you could possibly obtain, or if you’re just a growth marketer wanting to just go for it. But sometimes you can just have way too much information, way too much data and it’s so, so, so difficult to actually really put your finger on the pulse, unless you have a really high quality CRM of course, and determine what’s going to push your needle forward. And where I see the value of using artificial intelligence in your growth marketing efforts or your lead generation or your demand generation efforts is in be able to go about defining and determining what really matters most in your business, and then doing the data crunching to do such a thing. We’ve been doing a fair bit of this using up the ChatGPT, um, platform and we’ve had some truly amazing results.

So, if you think about it, artificial intelligence is really going to 10X your productivity at the very latest. Now at the very least. I don’t know why latest came up, but you know what I’m saying at the very least, and it will enable you to be able to make human-like levels of personalization too. So like, that’s kind of what we see happening in the open AI ChatGPT, artificial intelligence infused marketing world that we live in.

So like, What, what are those overriding benefits going to be? Well, I personally believe AI is going to help us analyze so much more data than we’ve ever been able to analyze. Especially if you’ve got multiple data warehouses, all sorts of different types of information, being able to synthesize the data and develop meaningful business insights and identify the patterns to improve your targeting and your campaign segmentation. That’s where it’s going to really, really improve things.

I think that AI in time, we’ll be able to help you make real time adjustments to your campaigns. Like real time personalization. It’s a really improve your performance. And to be honest, I think that AI will replace a lot of team members in your team. So you may just be a small business. You may be a solo hustling, SAAS founder, and you’re thinking that you need a six person marketing team. Well, maybe you only need to make one good hire. One good strategic high-level thinker in your team that can go about setting up a whole heap of automations using Zapier and particular triggers. And then getting them to execute on the strategies. See, there’s going to be an explosion of noise in the, um, in the world we live in, people are going to believe that there’s so much more content that’s getting created and consumed and et cetera. And the worst part about it is that the number of impressions is probably going to stay the same. The only thing that’s going to differ is the number of pieces of content or the websites or sources who are fighting for those same impressions. So, it’s going to be increased noise. More, you know, more content on the internet, but just the same amount of impression time of every human that’s participating, unless we double the amount of humans. We’re going to have this really noisy world, which we need to be able to cut in from.

Now. If you think about that. Yeah. You’re okay, cool. Now we need to get better. And this is where there are drawbacks when it comes to your implementation of artificial intelligence in your growth marketing stack. So, like, what are some of the limitations of using AI and AI-led platforms and programs? Well, If you’re in an undefined industry, if you’re in a truly blue ocean industry, you need to truly understand the impact of human behavior and emotions when it comes to writing high quality creative that converts. I’ve spoken on a previous podcast, you know, “Should ChatGPT replace my copywriter?” I’d check it out. You haven’t seen it. That ChatGPT doesn’t know what it doesn’t know because it’s only leveraging content pretty much all the way from 20 all the way up to the, from the advent of the internet, all the way through to 2019. It still won’t understand really what makes people cry? What makes people excited? What gets people up in the morning, et cetera, et cetera. What’s not being said by your customer that they’re thinking about every single day. What’s, what’s to socially unacceptable the same private, no, into, in public, but you’re screaming in private.

You know what I mean? And if, like they are the sorts of, that’s the sorts of insights you need and an understanding of your customer avatar, and what’s going inside the psyche. And if you understand that, ability to, to locate that in connect with that. That’s when you can make some really amazing gains as marketers. And that’s when you can have those winning promotions, but if you don’t have that, you’re going to have some real challenges. And that’s where using AI, we’ll not really enable you to create the best promotions on the planet earth, but it will be able to, help you create, say a six or a seven or even an eight out of 10. Um, in the promotion development game.

So that’s one of the many drawbacks.

The other thing I believe when it comes to another drawback and a failing of AI is that you will miss and make mistakes. And you’ll, you will often get led down the wrong path, because if you’re heavily dependent on AI, you may just be, you may not. It’s kind of like this. Instead of traveling at 10 kilometers an hour and being able to quickly correct back to the course, you need to travel. You’ll be traveling at a thousand kilometers an hour. So you go so far in the wrong direction that you’ll need to start coming back. And you’re only going to be as good as the inputs you providing AI.

So I think that. If people are making mistakes in the strategy level, in the inputs level, in catching the insights around the human psyche, which is relevant to their product and service, especially in their software. Um, I think that’s where things will go really skewed. And these wildly, executed campaigns mades not result any, um, any leads, any demos, any trials or anything which is relevant for your software company? So, that’s really going to be one thing.

And then the last thing I really want to just mention here, in terms of artificial intelligence. Um, is that there is always going to be a need for human oversight and interpretation of anything, which is anything to do with AI generated analysis and insights.

So again, It’s never going to replace the fact that you do need people to look at the data and do need people to vet things. And you do need people to review and analyze and give things the final tick of approval. We can’t just abdicate our responsibilities as growth marketers and, and SAAS founders and everything that, um, is encapsulated within this direct response advertising and growth marketing sphere. We do need to be there. Um, And this isn’t me just fighting for my job or fighting for my agency or whatever, but it’s. It’s under having like, the reason why you’re working with a marketing agency or if you’ve got a marketing team, is that everybody recognizes that every business is different.

And every business needs contextual, re…, well-reasoned and well-structured well-researched um, evidence and insights to compose a well-structured, hi..high likelihood of success marketing in advertising campaign. And that’s where humans. Uh, the best at this stage.

What is also interesting as well, is that. AI won’t be able to really do. Uh, AI, weren’t take the Liberty of taking what you see inside of one vertical and then transforming it to another. And that’s where being human is really going to reign Supreme. So, again, this is what we are talking about inside of our agency at the minute.

Is that every team member needs to become more strategic. Every team mem.., every team member has to get off the tools or understand that you have to now watch the tools in action, edit and develop higher level strategy and project management skills. So. Again, We’re now increasing our input. We’re now, you know, we are now doing things 10 to 30 times faster.

Our team’s getting our life, getting their lives back. It’s overly really exciting. But again, there will always need be that need for human oversight and higher level of strategic thinking in order to get AI to truly work at its highest potential. So. What does that mean for the future?

Like, is there a future for artificial intelligence and growth marketing?

It is an over whelming. Yes.

If I thought. I knew what this would look like in the next five to 10 years. Like I’m not going to try and be Nostradamus here because that would be a losing, um, that would be a game I’m going to lose instantly. But. When it comes to the role of AI in growth marketing and the role of AI in SAAS. It’s going to be everywhere you go. It will be in your chatbots. It’ll be in your support, in your help desk, it will be in your data, crunching your business analysis work, it will be in your bookkeeping. It will be everywhere, but when it comes to your growth marketing, I think that your days as a purely executional practitioner, uh, are numbered. You’re on borrowed time.

But. Where your time will come. Is that if you’ve been investing your time and energy in learning about how to build. Uh, StoryBrand or blue ocean strategy or anything done by Jack trout, or like any of those great marketing type of people when it comes to positioning marketing, pricing, advertising, like you’ve, you’ve done the high level understanding and study.

It’s your time to go. It’s your time to fly. If you understand how SEO works, if it understand how direct response advertising works in a strategic level, this is your time because the barrier to. Moving on. Everything has completely dropped. It has almost vanished. So if you’re able to go about building a marketing campaign. You’ve got all the tools you need . It doesn’t take you a hundred hours to do it. And only now take you 10 it’s so, so exciting.

How will our industry change?

Well, I think that. I think our marketing agencies will get smaller. Personally. I think that marketing teams that used to require a hundred people then shrink to about 10.

But the 10 that are kept on are going to be exceptionally good. So again, it’s going to be a case of reducing the size of a lot of marketing teams. And then those team members may, this is assuming that the output required stays the same. If the output required stays the same, that marketing team will shrink probably to anywhere between, look a hundred to 10 is probably a little bit over. That’s right, but I’ll say it go for about a hundred to 30 people. Um, The team will be required to be more strategic, more high level. Better understanding and better insights around the humans, themselves, the people that they’re selling to. Marketing will become a lot more creative, a lot more authentic.

And it will be. Uh, world, especially in the software. Um, industry where we’re begging for it. Where creativity, authenticity and, um, strategy reign Supreme. And I’m so excited about that. That’s what makes. The next 10 years of marketing, I would say the most exciting. They have ever. Um, that have taken place in that world.

So. I think that. In the agencies that are intelligent. So I’m going to say that. They’re going to maintain the same amount of teams. They’re going to be able to offer solutions, which are 10 times better for their clients. They’re going to be able to make more profit with those, um, these solutions where they can offer 10 times the result at say five times the cost. So again, people are going to be winning here.

Market, is it going to need to retrain in terms of how to understand, um, if this, then that or Zapier or any of those automation tools that are going to have to understand triggers? They’re going to have to really value qualitative data once again, which is super, super exciting. If you’re a direct response advertising, not like myself.

And. I think that. They’re going to need to. Just embrace it. Or they’ll be left behind.

So. There’s 20 minutes of me. Jabbering away on open source growth. Talking about. Artificial intelligence. And the implementation in growth marketing. In SAAS, software marketing. Online products, et cetera, et cetera. Should you be scared? No.

Should you embrace it? Absolutely. Will it replace you? No, but it will replace certain parts of your job function. The most effective approach always will be a combination of both humans and machines. And enabling the machine to do the data analysis, enable it to do the real time campaign adjustments and the real-time personalization.

Where the humans provide the inputs, high quality capture of all the qualitative stuff that they need in order to really tap into the customer. And more importantly, humans have got to bring that authenticity and that. Ah, that that creativity we’ve been begging for.

Digital marketing has been an exceptionally boring craft for many, many years. And it’s time to bring back the love and the joy and the energy of the 1950s, sixties and seventies with the Ogilvy Mathur campaigns and those big, long form advertorials like, do you make these mistakes in English and the desperate nerd?

No. Hire out by Gary Hall, but I’m just, oh, I am so, so, so excited. Now, if you do need any assistance, when it comes to determining, whether you need any AI led marketing support. Feel free to hit us up again. My best email is Dean.Denny@Owendenny.com. You can shoot me an email, ask as many questions as you like, because again, we are really developing this AI led marketing function within our business.

We’re unapologetic in the sense that we love AI. We’ll be using it as much as we possibly can to deliver amazing results for our clients. The moment it doesn’t yield results. We’re back to pen and paper guys. But the truth here is that AI is the future. We’re all going to need to embrace it. And if you are a small business owner, a small software company,

This is your opportunity.

Let me put it to you this way. If you actually follow your competitors every single day.

And this is going to be a gold nugget, I know it will be.

If I give you a pro tip here, hope you implement it. Set up an RSS feed of your competitors and watch their publishing strategy. If their publishing strategy doesn’t get any better. You know that they’re publishing. Is not up to scratch. They’re not embracing chatGPT or openAI or jasper.ai or copy.ai or descript or anything. Right.

I look, if you’re not embracing this stuff here and your just doing sweet FFA. As we like to call it in Australia. You’re going to be left behind. See, with a little bit of hustle right now, you are going to have the opportunity to make leap years of change in your business. And if you do this, you will be so far ahead of everybody else. This is there’s a first mover advantage, here, which is taking place at Lightspeed. You have to jump on the enterprise and go with all the Trekkies to the, to the moon. You know what I’m saying? So if you don’t have that, Um, drive or that energy, you need to Frickin’ find it. Right. It’s so, so important. If you don’t find that drive. To get yourself out of bed, learning these platforms exploiting all the different prompts and things that ChatGPT can do.

Here’s a hint.

It can pretty much do anything. Or using jasper.ai to develop amazing blog content and lifting yourself out of the ghetto with your rankings. Like you were, you, you were crazy. You are cooked, like just do something for yourself. Do yourself a favor, set up an RSS feed. Follow your competitors. Every single move.

And if you can out publish them right now, you are going to be so far ahead of everyone. In the next five years.

And we’re going to eat our own dog food there too, because that’s what we’re doing. And it’s working.

So guys, thank you. So, so much for tuning in this is open-source growth. If you did like this episode, please like this episode, if you’re watching it on YouTube or share it with a friend, if it makes a difference to you.

So in conclusion, AI will never replace your growth marketing team. It will reduce the size of your growth marketing team. If you need the same output, it will just make your growth marketing team 10 times more effective. And. As we’ve mentioned, the true limitation of AI is that there is always a need for humans to see what the hell’s going on and devise better strategies, bringing authenticity and creativity to just get things working together.

And that’s why you engage a marketing agency like, Owendenny Digital. We are the top ranked SAAS marketing agency in Australia, in Melbourne, and in many, many, many cities around the country. And the reason why we’re able to get there is because we provide unique approaches to businesses just like you. And we eat our own dog food, and that’s what gets us amazing results. Whether it be PPC results with our clients. We’ve got enterprise software clients, which are absolutely crushing it with Google ads right now. Facebook ads as a Facebook marketing partner, we’ve got some amazing campaign’s going with one of our AI led chatbots startups. Or you can talk about just our local services, businesses that were helping with this brilliant strategy, amazing web development and Google ads. Like we’ve got end to end marketing happening right here.

And, you know, what. It’s exciting and it’s all working. And again, That’s why you have humans in your team because they can see where you are. I understand the context and make things work. So again, That’s us. That’s how we’re saying things. And that’s how we believe that what we are doing right here right now in this world of artificial intelligence is telling you to make hay whilst the sun shine’s. It’s not going to replace your growth marketing team. It will only 10x it.

It’s been great guys. Thank you so much for tuning in God. Bless. Stay safe. And please do everything you can to make this opportunity of a lifetime yield in your favor.

Peace!

CONNECT WITH US:

Connect with Dean Denny, host of Open Source Growth and Director at Owendenny Digital

Owendenny Digital, Australia’s #1 SaaS Marketing Agency

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