Full Written Transcript of The Episode

MATT: If I was building a house, I could use a traditional hammer and nail, framing each wall by hand, pounding each nail into each individual board. Or I could use a pneumatic air gun. Now, this nail gun would streamline the process, building my house much faster with better quality, and allow me to do some cool, innovative things that I couldn’t do with a manual hammer and nail. However, that pneumatic air gun cannot build the house for me. Artificial intelligence is just the latest advancement in tools that you have in your arsenal.

Choosing not to use these tools is a mistake, but so is depending entirely on these new tools. In this episode, we’re going to break down how you should and should not be using AI with your marketing. Hello and welcome back to Midwest Mindset, the podcast that gives you the small business owner, the big agency Secrets to Marketing. I’m your host, Matt Tompkins, alongside my brother Ben, who’s here today. Hello.

The other brother. Finally. It’s about time there is another brother at two brothers Creative, where we believe that every business deserves affordable and effective marketing. I wanted to bring Ben on the podcast today because Ben is actually a robot and we’re talking about artificial intelligence today, so I’m.

BEN: Happy that you actually think I have intelligence that makes me happy.

MATT: It’s artificial, so. Oh, so yeah. So we’re talking about artificial intelligence today. Now there’s there’s traditionally been just one camp on this. It’s the end of the world. Yeah, right. Terminator two Judgment day. Ai is going to take over. It’s going to destroy mankind. But nobody talks about the other side, the benefits of AI taking over. Let’s be honest here. Human beings, we have not done a very good job of living over the millennia.

Right. Right. I mean, you look at the wars, the slaughters, the brutality, you look at pollution. There are so many things we could solve, so many problems we could solve. We’ve chosen not to do anything. So there is a flip side that could happen with AI, where I actually solves all these problems that human beings have created. Either way, it’s out of our hands. We have passed the point of no return. So AI is either going to it’s going to evolve to a place where I can write other AI like spawn itself and at that point better than humans. And then at that point it’s either going to be for good or bad. So we just got to enjoy the ride while we’re here, Right?

BEN: And you’re saying these are the benefits. That’s what you’re starting off with, So. Okay. I wanted to like it.

MATT: I wanted to terrify. Yes. Terrified people first.

BEN: Some good benefits.

MATT: Okay. So artificial intelligence can do some pretty incredible things. Point proven. Just this morning, a friend sent me this Instagram video and they took every conservative politician they had Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, and a whole slew of others. And they not only had I recreate, they did like facial recreation, like the deepfake deepfake of their face, but they put them in full drag and then recreated their voices saying all of these very supportive things about being in drag. It’s hilarious. We have the clip here for you.

Speaker3: Let’s make America glam again.

Speaker4: I’m the elephant in the room and I’m not afraid to sparkle.

BEN: They call it trickle-down fabulousness.

Speaker5: I believe in limited government, but unlimited glamour.

Speaker6: Don’t tread on me unless you’re wearing fabulous heels.

Speaker7: Gop stands for Glamour on Point.

Speaker8: I’m a fiscal conservative, but I’ll never skimp on style.

Speaker6: I’m here to cut taxes and sashay away.

Speaker9: Stars, stripes and stilettos. Now, that’s what I call liberty.

Speaker6: I’m here to filibuster with flair. Queen.

Speaker10: In God we trust. And in glam we must.

BEN: Good job, producer. Well done.

MATT: Now, if you’re listening to the podcast, you couldn’t see the hilarity. You can check it out. The link is in the show notes for you. Now, while that is hilarious marketing on the behalf of Brita Water Filter, put that out. Brita filter always on the cutting edge of their marketing. It is also, I guess, terrifying to those people featured in these videos. There are some real scary things. I could definitely do a lot of harm, but there are so many benefits too.

I mean, yes, there’s the extremes, but as a small business owner, you need to know what tools are available so that you can level the playing field. We don’t have these massive billion dollar budgets and we have to increase sales. We have to bring in new leads, qualified leads and sales. So today we’re going to give you some very practical things you can use AI tools for. I asked AI So everybody has their AI platform of choice. Mine is Brad. It’s Bard. Google has Bard and it’s their version of Chatgpt basically. And I call him Brad because Bard is a horrible name. It’s a great name.

BEN: Why? It means it means poet. Like Shakespeare was known as the Great Bard.

MATT: Sounds like barf. That’s what I think. So I asked Bard, I said, Hey, give me the benefits and the potential risks of AI. So here’s what the AI gave me. At least the AI was honest with us. I can help us solve complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of humans.

There are so many menial, tedious tasks that we do as small business owners. And I mean, I think everybody, every small business owner wants another 24 hours in the day. There’s just not enough time. So this is a way you can really streamline your process. And we’re going to get to some specifics on how to do that and how to use platforms here in this episode specifically for your marketing. But everything from accounting, reconciling your books, you know, doing your taxes, just I mean, all these things, organizing projects. I mean, there are AI platforms for like one is motion that I use that will reshuffle my schedule as the day goes on. And I’ll just tell it, Hey, here’s all the tasks I need to get done this week and it’ll fit it into my schedule so that I, being the, you know, knucklehead distraction.

MATT: King Over here, Don’t forget to get something done right. I can automate tasks. That’s another thing. Free up our time for more creative and productive activities. Ai can help us make better decisions, provides us with more information. It can do research insights, I mean social media, analytics and things like that. That can take a lot of time for us to go through and process as humans. I can do that for us. There are some potential risks. You know, I obviously can job displacement is probably a big one.

Ai is going to sound kind of harsh, but I feel like the jobs that are always displaced by the latest form of technology, like did you really like deserve that? Is it really a job worth keeping if a robot can place you? You know, I mean, and I don’t mean that as an insult at all to anybody. Most of these jobs that are going to be replaced are going to be like, you know, tax people, insurance people, lawyers, attorneys.

BEN: There goes our tax accountant, listener base.

MATT: I mean, but the same thing was said with automation in, you know, when we had robots on on the floor of factories and we had all had these industrial revolutions come and come and come again. If there’s one thing that human beings are best at, it’s adapting. So I, I, yes, I agree. It sucks with the job displacement that will happen in certain areas. But the artificial intelligence robots can’t replace human beings in the in the in the the area of being a human being can come close can pull from data points through history. But I just feel like that’s often this big drum that’s beated and I don’t know how much. How is that different than in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s and so on. We’ve heard this over and over again. I could be used to create autonomous weapons that could kill without human intervention. Now we’re.

BEN: Talking.

MATT: I mean, aren’t humans doing this already though? I mean, we’ve created drones. I mean, how many people have human beings killed? This is like the argument of driverless cars versus human beings driving cars. There’s like one Tesla that gets totaled with a guy who is using the driverless feature longer than he should have been using. It gets totaled. It’s a sad, tragic story. And then everybody says, Oh my God, we can never have driverless cars.

How many people are killed in accidents by human beings in their cars every year? And then I could be used to manipulate people and spread disinformation. Now, I mentioned that video that we played at the front of this. It’s obviously it’s done. I think it works for marketing, even though it’s random that Britta put this out there. I mean, when I say Britta, I don’t think political.

BEN: Jerry You’re filtering out all the trash. Jerry.

MATT: There you go. They’re filtering out. Yeah, but I don’t think they didn’t really take a side. They made something that was just hilarious. It was such an exaggeration. Everybody knows that’s not really them. And so that’s what makes it funny. And it’s there’s so much irony and juxtaposition that it makes it hilarious and it works. But there are some real dangers. I mean, what happens when the next, you know, presidential election and you have deepfakes of a president saying something that he didn’t actually say. So those are the real risks that are out there. But do those really affect our day to day as business owners? I mean, other than global nuclear war.

BEN: Right. That’s you know, we’ll deal with that one.

MATT: We’ll deal with We dealt with that one in the 80s. All right. It was a movie about it and everything worked out. Got to have it play tic tac toe. You know, that’s the solution. So let’s get into the good. All right.

BEN: Because you’re really just winning me over with this whole conversation so far. Yeah.

MATT: So Ben is a creative person. He’s a great writer. He’s a teacher. He’s. I mean, not to humble brag, but he’s working on his mother here right now. Yeah. And so I don’t know.

BEN: What I’m going to do with it, but.

MATT: But you taught English. You taught creative writing. And, you know, when it comes to using AI for things that are in the creative realm, which is kind of where marketing marketing is, you know, formula plus creative, that’s where things get kind of murky. And so there are some good uses of AI specifically with your marketing that I want to hit on. You know, I can handle some of those tedious parts of putting things together within your marketing strategy, your plan, automating posting. I mean, everybody uses Hootsuite, you’re using AI, that’s all these are.

I mean, AI has been around forever. Ai is in your stoplights, it’s in your smartwatch, it’s in your phone. All it is is math. It’s just math that can learn and progress and get better over time. So that’s all that it is. So I think that this is the first good thing that I want to hit on today that people should use AI platforms and tools for because we spend too much time focusing on the formula and not enough time focusing on the message. And we’ve asked Jasper, which is an AI platform to write comedy jokes, and they are horrible. They are not remotely funny, right?

BEN: I also have a test for if you’re a good songwriter like Willie Nelson, if you say write me a song in the style of Willie Nelson and it sounds like the the songwriter that you’re trying to mimic, then that person is not a good songwriter. So if you type that into Bard or Jasper or Chatgpt.

Willie Nelson songs are really, really hard for AI to write because they’re very poetic. They have these very kind of abstract, poetic images. Typically, AI pulls just generic rhymes, A, B, B rhyme schemes, and they use certain words that are synonyms. So like for head, it would use the word dome for a head. But Willie Nelson would never use that word. But if you ask Chatgpt or AI to write a song in the style of like Luke Bryan, then it typically writes a song in the exact formula that Luke Bryan writes, because those songs are very formulated, very easy to write when it comes to poetry and creative writing. I don’t think that AI is anywhere close to being able to actually create something that a human can create. And I think it’s important to understand.

BEN: You have to categorize. We look at I like we look at socialism in the same way that everyone jumps to this idea of socialism. So bad dreams. But we have socialism in our lives every single day. We take advantage of socialist programs in our own government all the time, but we don’t even know about it When it comes to AI. We have to separate the social aspect of this doomsday scenario.

And then I think that’s a question that a lot of business owners would have, is how do you separate it? So you have this societal aspect of AI and how it affects relationships and us working with one another and communicating with one another. But then that’s different from how AI can benefit your business and how it can help a business. And I think clarifying that to business owners is something that needs to be done because right now when you hear AI, the first thing you think of are all those doomsday things that you just said. Yeah, and it’s important to separate those pretty immediately if you want to use it effectively. And there.

MATT: Are extremes. We see this with other marketing firms and agencies and individuals with business owners who they take the extreme position and say, I can do everything just as good as a human, therefore I’m going to have it do all of my stuff. So all of my social media posts, all of my copywriting for my ads, my Google ads, Facebook, Instagram ads, it’s going to write all the copy on my website. In fact, you know what? I’m just going to use a cheap AI platform to build my website in just a few minutes.

And that is that is an extreme in the business world. That is a major mistake to make. It is a huge mistake because it’s just like with the extremes socially. And these cultural discussions we have is at the end of the world or is it going to save mankind? Like those are extremes. That is an extreme In the business world. It’s a little bit smaller scale. You have to look at I like a tool because that’s what it is. It’s just a tool now. It is a very advanced tool, but you can do some incredible things if you’re using this tool correctly, if you’re just avoiding this tool because it’s scary, intimidating or for nostalgic reasons, there’s a lot of people who just I’m not going to let it help me with my writing or research like I’m going to do it all myself. Okay. Well, that’s just a that’s an equal mistake because now you’re letting your own ego get in the way of a tool that can help you create and write something better.

You know, the human still has to be involved in it. And that’s like the big thing. The next thing I wanted to hit on is why marketing is unique and marketing, creative writing songs, music. I mean, no offense to Luke Bryan. I know he listens to this podcast. He’s going to be crushed by your analysis. I’ve talked to him about it already. Yeah, he knows. Yeah. I mean, there are so many, only so many words you can rhyme with, you know, truck and dog, right? And country Road come up.

BEN: With a new country.

MATT: Song. Yeah. So the thing is, is marketing. Marketing boils down to feelings. Marketing is all about the feeling brain and not the thinking brain. We use the thinking brain after we’ve already made our decision based on the emotions. It’s all about an emotional connection. And I don’t care how much you want to argue, it’s about the facts. It’s just the facts, ma’am. It’s the specs.

You’re. You’re kidding yourself. You know, we use the facts to justify the emotional decision we’ve already made based on feelings. And so how this is a this is a bad area, a bad way to use AI. How can you expect AI to connect with and resonate with other humans, with your message, with your marketing, if it doesn’t know what feelings are, let alone how to feel them in the first place? If marketing is all about connecting on that emotional level and I cannot feel so, how does it know? That’s why it can’t write jokes. It doesn’t have a sense of humor.

All it can do is pull from things that it’s found online and say these are things that other people are saying are emotional or sensitive or comical, but it can’t connect in a genuine, real way. So if you are using AI ChatGPT, whatever your platform of choice is, then you’re having to do all your stuff. That’s a mistake. That is just a major mistake that you can make. Now look, in just a second here, I want to kind of go through a couple of ways business. Small business owners can use this platforms in very specific real ways as a tool. That’s smart, that’s a smart use of this new technology, I think.

BEN: Yeah, the growing pains of you just don’t know how to use it. Similarly with social media, and that’s a problem. I’m sure a lot of businesses are at risk for, especially businesses that maybe aren’t that savvy when it comes to technology is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for people to take advantage of businesses when it comes to things like AI, because it’s a surface level thing you can have, it can write you a very surface level. This looks like a great script or a great blog or a great whatever, but there is no depth to it.

And that’s where the human aspect comes into play. When you have those some businesses that just don’t understand that it’s easy for them to get taken advantage of and be manipulated by whoever’s using this AI. So I think that’s a big concern that I think a lot of businesses should have. And knowing that what they’re getting when they’re getting AI and knowing that it is, it’s not a one stop shop when it comes to whatever you’re having it create. The human aspect still has to be involved in the process.

MATT: And there are there are so many different ways to use and misuse tools. And like I said, AI is no different than any other tool. I mean, I could use I use the analogy in the beginning of this episode of a hammer versus a pneumatic air gun, a nail gun for framing a house. I mean, yeah, you could use a pneumatic air gun too much and it could cause issues. It’s not going to build the house for you. But to just overlook it is, is just I think it seems to me it’s more out of fear. Ego seems to be the reasons people aren’t using these tools. But like with any other tool, though, you need to research how to use the tool, you need to read the manual.

And I don’t think many business owners are. They’re just following what other people are saying on Twitter and social media channels, and they’re hearing this national discussion of Chatgpt is replacing everything and they don’t really know what it’s capable of. So I wanted to spend the last few minutes here in this episode literally walking you through a very specific example of how you as a small business owner can use AI platforms to level the playing field. Now we’re going to use the example of SEO because a lot of companies, SEO is one of those things. We’ve done episodes on this in the past. It’s it seems like it’s very complicated. It can get very complicated, but the basic premise is that you want to show up in Google searches for certain words.

MATT: If you’re a cupcake factory in Omaha and you’re selling cupcakes and you have a counter and deli or whatever, then you want to show up for searches that are related to your business locally especially. But if you’re a national vendor, then you. Want to rank for those specific keywords. So that’s really all it’s about. I mean, it is the power of the written language. It’s the power of words.

Just changing a couple of words can have a huge difference. So how can you use ChatGPT and barred Chatgpt and barred? Ah, I would say Chatgpt is more advanced than barred from what? At least from my personal experience. But if I’m going to side with any AI platform when it comes to SEO, I’m going to use Google’s because Google is what, 85% of the search engine market. So you want to do what Google tells you to do. And for those right now who have heard like, well, I’ve heard that Google’s suppressing AI, creating content, you’re right.

You have heard that they haven’t specifically told us how they I don’t know how I don’t really know how they are suppressing it. A lot of people have said that it’s just a bluff of we’re telling people we’re suppressing it. Other people, they’re telling us they’re suppressing like Chatgpt and others, and then they release their own AI platform, basically giving it a big endorsement for AI.

BEN: Oh, sneaky guys.

MATT: So a number of different maneuvers here by Google. I don’t think the way that they describe it, they don’t say I created content. The way to describe it is they are going to reward quality content. In other words, if your blog article or your website reads like a robot wrote it, that’s not going to be the best quality, right? And so that’s really what you need to focus on. Is this relevant to other people with SEO? And this is where using AI as a tool comes into play. Seo is all about getting picked up by the sensors, the AI in the algorithms for. I mean, really what you’re doing is like you’re writing content so that AI will see it and then place it in front of humans, right? So it’s like the AI on for search engines. It’s like a gatekeeper in a way. Um, the gate, it’s like.

BEN: Those big sphinxes and never ending story.

MATT: Yes, the topless ones.

BEN: The topless ones. Yes, exactly.

MATT: That always freaked me out that.

BEN: A picture of those on.

MATT: The screen? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don’t know if it can anymore. I don’t think we can get away. Oh, I wonder who pitched that idea in that movie. You know what we need on these giant sphinxes? Okay, let’s get back on point. All right, so we’re using Chatgpt as an example. You’re using Bard. You know, Jasper. There are others. So here’s how you can use it. So SEO. So you want your website to rank for content, you need to be putting out content.

Blogs are your super secret weapon highly effective. But let’s say you don’t have a lot of time to write these blogs. Okay, let’s say maybe if you’re doing a podcast, you want to take the transcript, you can just copy the transcript, paste it into Bard and say, Bard, this is called a prompt. You give it a prompt. You are now Matt Tompkins. You are an expert on content marketing. You own two brothers, Creative, a content marketing company and podcast production studio in Omaha, Nebraska.

BEN: Sounds like the beginning of a terrible sci fi movie.

MATT: It does. In Chatgpt and Bard. You can paste like, I want you to scan my website and consume all of the content on this website so that you have an understanding of my past writing style, who I am and what we do, and then say, you know, let me know when you’re ready. Now that prompt you create that once and just save it in a Google doc saved in a word, doc. And then every time you’re writing content for yourself, you start off your chat with that prompt. So that prompt you start off with, okay, put the prompt in.

Now it’s going to write as you. Now the more input, the more information you give it in that prompt, the more accurate it’s going to be related specifically to you. But then let’s say you take like this episode of this podcast, we could take the transcript from this, which is just just an AI is going to create a written transcript of every word we’ve said. And you paste that in a bar and say, I want you to summarize this transcript into an 800-word blog article, and we want to rank highly for SEO for the following keywords.

And those keywords would be artificial intelligence, AI artificial intelligence for marketing. Ai for marketing. Ai for content creation. Ai for content marketing. And you say go boom in seconds. It’s going to create the first draft and that is important. It is not the final draft, but it’s the first draft.

MATT: And it is based on unique content that we’ve created. So it has a human perspective, human insight, those feelings that that Chatgpt can’t emulate on its own. And it has that. But it’s going to just quickly structure this and lay this out. Now you can take that blog rough draft and you can use the blog writing SEO checklist that we have. You can download it for free today. The link is in the show notes and you just run through it.

You add your external links, your internal links, you add some photos, you just do the little things that you need to do, your H1 title tag, H2, your metadata, and you’re good. You have a blog article now that’s going to as long as it lives on the Internet for the rest of its life, it is going to pay off. It’s like real estate to your investment portfolio. It’s just going to keep on paying. And how much did it cost you? It cost you a few minutes, a few minutes of your time, a half hour, maybe. Most. I mean, I did this. I was. Just messing around with Bart. In two hours, I wrote 17 blog articles, 17 blog articles, and then I spent the next two hours going through. We used some website called Semrush and it has a writing assistant so we can really dial in the SEO, get a highest score as possible in four hours time.

MATT: We had I think eight of those 17 were ready to be posted ranked high and are currently ranking in searches right now. So I’m just saying as far as using it as a tool, it is a major mistake to just say, No, I’m not going to use it, I’m not going to learn about it. I’m just going to you know, if I ignore it, it’s going to go away. It’s a passing fad or whatever. All right. This isn’t my space. It’s going to be here forever. It has been here forever. So use the checklist we have in the show notes. If you have questions about AI, you have questions about your marketing. Obviously you can hit us up all the contact information in the show notes as well.

But I think the important lesson today would be the takeaways don’t go to the extremes. Don’t ignore the tools that are at your disposal right now because those tools I’m telling you, you get 20 blog articles up on your website. You’re going to start leveling the playing field in the area of SEO for your company, you know? And how much did it cost you? It cost you reading, learning and some time. I mean, that’s that’s really that is such a minimal investment for us to commit for a major, major reward that we could that we can reap the benefits from.

BEN: And I think separating the societal impact of AI and the future of AI and those initial growing pains that people will take advantage of it and people will abuse it. As we learn more and more about this, just like in any new age, but then separating that from the business side, you can’t because it’s such a dramatic issue and scary issue and fun issue to talk about. It’s easy to lump it in and just get scared and back away from it. But there is a clear separation from the benefits AI has on a business side and a marketing side, and then the benefits and disadvantages it presents to a society as a whole. They are they are separate things. So that’s important to keep in mind.

MATT: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s hard to separate those two, but you have to think about what’s best for your business. I mean, if they came out with a new product, a new tool of any kind, they came out with a new mop and this mop is going to clean your forest floors. I mean, the new the little electric electric Roombas, the vacuums. I mean, would you say, you know, you know what? No, it’s that that Roomba may try and kill me and take over the planet someday. I’m just going to steer away from that that seen.

BEN: Some of these Roombas Matt Vicious.

MATT: Just you have to be you have to learn. You have to you have to evolve along with the technology. Otherwise, as a business owner, you’re just going to be missing out on major opportunities. And so we use AI as a tool, just like you should be using AI as a tool. Don’t over use it. You have to be smart and you have to kind of wait on a case by case basis. All right. Thanks once again for joining us today on Midwest Mindset. Don’t forget, in the show notes here, there is a link. You can download that checklist for writing the perfect SEO focused blog article. We’ll have more resources for you if you want. If you want to read up on AI in the show notes for you as well. And we’ll see you on the next episode.