Why Marketers & Founders Should Consider Using AI In Their Marketing Plan | With Eric Vardon

So if I'm a SaaS marketer or founder of a tech company such as yourself, how should I even consider start using AI within my marketing plan or budget? So if I have a team, an SEO team, or somebody analyzing, somebody doing paid, But I want to use AI to automate a lot of that and remove kind of margin of error from human error. How do I even get started? I feel it's overwhelming.

Well, I would say Google is your best friend, but I mean, there are so many great software solutions out there and communities to kind of support it. But, you know, I would say there's also some infancy in knowing exactly where to go. I would say G2 probably continues to be the place where you can get a good sense. If you're a platform in SaaS, you're going to be on G2. If you're not, then that's a whole other problem. But, I think you usually start there to try to get some awareness of where you sit within your competitive side.

Mm-hmm.

I go there and I look for products that are recently deployed, and that's where I get a sense of what they're doing. I look for if they have low reviews. You basically can get a sense of, maybe how new they are. Why I like that is because, generally, they're more cost-effective. They're testing. They're open to cost-effective ways to test, or maybe some strategic partnerships. As any good SaaS person on a budget, if there's a deal to be had on both sides, then let's support each other and do that. You've got to know what it is that you're looking for. When we first started, we were using some sort of growth hacking tools to make HubSpot work. And, we found a few pieces out there that allowed us to kind of automate our LinkedIn lead gen through a couple other little tools that would automate it into HubSpot and allow us to automate into Slack. And so, we knew what we needed to do and we sort of searched for functionality and technology to help us with that. So, know what the holes are that you're trying to look for. You've got to be really hacky right now because most of us are still trying to build our awareness and credibility. You know, in the sphere. But I love to test and deploy and try new things. And I think you just got to be, you know, you got to be focused on doing the digging to try to find them.

So. It makes sense. And right now, as you see kind of with your agency and with what you're building, your marketing is driven by people. Do you think it'll be shifting to AI and be completely automated, or do you think it'll be a combination, you know, predictive plus human, maybe decision-making and just the judgment, the final decision, like, Okay, this is what it's telling me, and then I just say yes or no and let's implement. Basically, it's just a simple answer like that, or what do you think there?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, robots and machines are not coming to take our jobs. We, as an AI company, solely believe— our mission statement ultimately is to create freedom for marketers to be more awesome and happy. Our vision statement is really centered around a world where automation, creativity, and predictive analytics can all live symbiotically. For us, it is use machines in the best way that they can, remove the mundane, anything that is repetitive, create a machine that can do it, and allow us as humans to be able to be free to creative problem solve and to do what we do best, which is think and process. We will always need to educate and inform and train the machines to do what we need them to do.

Mm-hmm.

But, in terms of the compound effect of data and the pace and the speed of which marketing specifically and technology is moving, We have to use machines. We have to accept the fact that they need to live within our strategy, our AI strategy. If you don't have one, deploy or think about what that looks like to deploy. Absolutely, absolutely. I look at it as, if we can free up time and if we can ultimately do what we do best, then the machine side of machine learning and AI will actually allow us to be happier and more free to do the things that we love to do. To me, I take a positive approach on it. That's the way I look at it.

Nice. So there's a lot of new solutions of these predictive marketing softwares being built. I'm showing up to the office as a CMO. What's your take on how my job looks like, the future of marketing looks like? What am I doing there?

Yeah, I mean, I think it takes the ability to accept that machines are going to do a better job of crunching data, that that's not rocket science, but it is embracing it and learning it. I am not an engineer. I am not going to sit here and tell you that I understand half of what our doctor of machine learning, Nima, builds, even though every week or so we spend time on what's new in AI and how does our algorithm work, et cetera, et cetera. I know enough to be dangerous, but I've also spent my time learning and accepting and understanding how it functions within my environment of the business. I think any other CMO needs to do that. From an industry perspective, you're going to start to see a huge amount of consolidation across tool providers and solutions. So, with reporting, data analytics, CRM, etc., etc., there's going to be a lot of acquisitions, and I believe a lot of consolidation of bringing those together, because it is not— it's too fragmented, and so it needs to be holistically built together. That's going to take some time, but—

Sure.

In the future, it will be one organism that has a multifunction underneath of all of the things that you're going to do, and it's going to mean that your team of humans is going to be also doing different things. I have a rough idea of what I think that looks like, but I still think we're at our infancy. For right now, getting our hands dirty as a CMO, playing with these tools, understanding what they do is a big one. I would say the other thing is, don't expect the machine to do everything for you. There are definitely some expectations around, well, if I turn on something like Morpheo, it's going to solve all my problems. I mean, at some point in the long, distant future, maybe that's the case, but marketing is actually more complex than ever, and we know what it takes to launch a campaign. To be able to monitor that is going to mean that we, as CMOs, actually need to get our hard and soft skills back in alignment. So, a little bit of what I think is going on there.

Makes sense. And what is the rest of 2020? What are some features you guys are excited about adding on?

Yeah, so I think I touched on it briefly, but we've spent the last sort of year on this notion of protecting your spend and your budgets and your campaign performance and tell me when my cost per acquisition is out of line. What we've realized is there's a lot of noise that comes with that.

Mm-hmm.

And in terms of the noise, it's okay, you're protecting me and I'm seeing these anomalies, but now what do I do about it? And so our next evolution is all about, here's the correlation as to why your acquisition targets are up or down. Here's what's going on across all of your channels, so now you don't have to log in and out of each of those to find that information. Also, we're providing a suggestion engine to say, here are the things that you could perform. What we're really excited about is there's a feedback loop where we're going to provide our users to be able to say, this is how Eric would actually— I don't agree with what Morpheo is telling me. I could, and maybe I agree with 2 or 3 of them, but what I'm going to do is XYZ. We want to be able to store and create that feedback loop so that Eric can inform other marketers of what he would do in terms of execution and solving those problems. That's ultimately where we believe our tool will go, is to create an entire feedback loop of suggestions and an engine that will actually drive even faster opportunities for campaign success and growth. So, super, super excited about that.

Makes sense. You're using the feedback and the data to improve the neural network and learn. better, I guess. Makes sense. And does it connect with Facebook as well? Facebook ads, Instagram ads?

Yep, yep. So our main connections, exactly, as well as Microsoft advertising and LinkedIn too. And we're adding new connections all the time outside of Shopify and a few others.

Excellent.