Google's New Gemini is Revolutionizing Marketing - Here's How

I had dinner with 10 founders last week, all doing 8 to 9 figures per year. I asked how many of them are actually using AI daily in their business. 7 out of 10 hands went up. Then I asked what they're using it for, and the answers blew my mind. They're not using ChatGPT to write emails. They're not using Cursor to build entire products. They're using Gemini to analyze their entire marketing operation and tell them what's actually working. If you're not using AI daily in your marketing, you're already behind. Here's what the top 1% are actually doing with Google Gemini right now. Again, at this founders dinner, 70% of people are using AI tools daily. So Cursor, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, but not for basic stuff. They're building entire workflows and the pace is crazy because companies are rolling out AI across every department. One founder even said that we have 2 people whose only job is to find AI efficiencies. This isn't about the future. This is happening right now. Marketers who use AI will replace marketers who don't. So let's talk about the first shift that Gemini enables. So when it comes to research and strategy, you can get 10 times faster now. So building a strategy used to mean 3 to 4 hours hours of searching on Google, reading 20 articles, synthesizing scattered insights, and then you have half the info outdated or irrelevant. Now the beautiful part about Gemini is that let's say you have a bunch of articles that you like or a bunch of YouTube videos that you like. Well, why don't you take all of those, you dump it into NotebookLM, NotebookLM will make an audio podcast for you talking about all those sources. Okay, not only that, it'll make a beautiful infographic for you that's pretty damn good. It will also make a slide deck for you going through the talk. And so imagine if you have a 3-hour podcast and then you have a bunch of research paper talking about protein folding or something like that when it comes to AI, right? But you can have all these insights synthesized. You can listen to that podcast as well. And so you're able to collect that information a lot faster. Also, keep in mind Gemini's thinking model, just logging into Gemini by itself, having it do deep research there, it is extremely capable. And the beautiful part about Gemini 2 is that Google owns YouTube, it owns Gemini. And so when you ask questions about a YouTube video, it'll actually answer you there. And so all the information that you need, you don't need to open all these other things to do research where it would've taken you hours or days to do so. Now you can get these synthesized insights in minutes. Instead of hours. And this is the ultimate research partner that's read everything on the internet. I'll give you a fun example. So we did an annual planning with my leadership team last week, and I had Granola AI turned on on my phone. And Granola will listen to a conversation and it'll take notes from that conversation. It'll also give me the full transcript as well. So what I did, I took 8 hours of transcripts and I dumped it into NotebookLM. And NotebookLM then made me a slide deck on all the topics that we talked about. It also made an infographic as well. And so that is an example of me doing deep research on the work that we've already done and then synthesizing what action we should be taking as a team. What are the core Areas of focus, the highest leverage things each person can do to have a successful 2026. And so, for example, for me, it said Eric needs to stop opening the oven, meaning that I need to let the cake bake for a little bit when it comes to strategy. And that's good feedback. It said for somebody else, they need to stop being a pushover. They need to start to take control more in a meeting situation. Okay. For somebody else, it said, hey, instead of just doing their job at a very high level, they also need to learn how to build systems. And this is all relevant and fair feedback for people. And how does this change how I do things in the future? Well, because it's an AI giving this feedback, I'm not afraid to post all the brutal feedback that it has. And just say, hey guys, what do you think about this? And for the most part, everyone's going to agree. Sometimes people are going to disagree, but I'm just telling you that I would have had to parse through 8 hours of transcripts to get this information. And now I don't have to do that anymore. And now I can have cool audio overviews and say, hey guys, here's a podcast that talked about the key takeaways from our annual planning, right? So this is strategy work that I don't think I could have gotten done in even a day. I think I would have just given up because it would have been too cumbersome. So your bottleneck isn't information anymore. Now it comes down to just the quality and speed of your decision-making. Shift number 2, I'm going to go a little deeper here on the example that I just gave. So your data actually tells you what to do. And so the old reality is, let's say I wanted to have a better understanding of how much we can pay per sales qualified lead, per marketing qualified lead, per lead. How much can we afford to pay per email? Well, I'd have to go into our CRM. I'd have to talk to our data analyst. I'd probably have a bunch of spreadsheets everywhere. This type of analysis will take days, maybe even weeks to get done, and I might get the runaround. Okay? And at that point, I might just give up because I've probably moved on to something else. So campaign data, pipeline budgets, all this type of stuff, all that data is there, but pulling them out is like pulling teeth. Again, by the time you get to it, it might be stale. It might be too late to act, right? So what Gemini So I can upload all my messy data. You have different connectors in Gemini as well. I can ask simply, hey, based on all the numbers that you're seeing here in our sales pipeline over here, I can just say, hey, what are the key metrics that we should be aiming for? Well, what do I have now? I now have the ability to make big decisions on how we go about allocating for our marketing budget. Because I know that, let's say, if we can pay $5 for an email, well, we can get a little more aggressive with our targeting, right? Because the name of the game with customer acquisition is who can afford to pay more? Well, if I know I can pay $100,000 for a sales qualified lead, and that's already pretty good, but I know if we jack our prices up more and I know if we're able to increase customer retention, we're going to do better as a business ultimately. So now I can make these decisions a lot faster. I don't need to have a data analyst on the team that we're paying, you know, 6 figures to, to do this. And maybe they're working on something else. These are the types of insights that I can get that I wouldn't have been able to get before because my data was too messy. And plus I wouldn't have known where to look. And plus people couldn't answer me in real time. So I just get annoyed and probably move on to something else. So you are now able to get these insights in minutes and then again, go to your marketing team and say, hey, these are the numbers we're trying to hit. Come up with a strategy. Let's go for it. Instead of having to wait, I don't know, a quarter, 2 quarters to get something done. Your velocity of moving now is company is just a lot faster. The third shift is that content creation is going to stop being your bottleneck over time. So the old reality is that creating content takes forever. You're the bottleneck on every campaign and good ideas die because executing them just takes too long. With Gemini, you can generate ad concepts, video ideas, email sequences in minutes. You can mine your existing content. So like for us, we have podcasts, we have webinars for dozens of new pieces. You can format it for, you know, different channels. Marketing School as an example, 80-minute podcast that we do every week can become 20 clips, 10 posts, 5 email ideas. And so an example for us is that we made a Gemini Gem. And the cool thing about Gemini Gems is like we have a strong strategist on the short-form side of things. So what we do with that was we take all the short-form scripts that this person has created for us, and we dump them into Gemini Gem, which is just like a custom GPT. And then I just say, hey, I want to create more scripts like this. And then whenever I dictate out a new script, or maybe I can post a YouTube video from like an 80-minute podcast that we did, I'll just say, hey, I want you to find the right moments and then give me the short-form ideas. It can literally copy the format of that script and then it can take the right moments from that 80-minute podcast. And then I don't need to wait for somebody else to get this done. And so what I'm looking at now, I'll just be very honest, is I'm looking at our brand team overall. I'm like, okay, well, are we constrained on the number of ideas? Are we constrained on output? Are we constrained on process? Like, what is it exactly? And so the name of the game here when it comes to content production is output. The more output that you have, the more shots on goal that you have. And Gemini with these different gems— so I have one for short form, I have one for long form, I have one for our email newsletter ideas. It has the formatting of how we write our emails as well. And so by doing this, it can just look at all the content we have and come up with ideas and I can just pick what I like. And more so, it shouldn't be you, but if you're maybe a smaller operation, it can be you. But you should have someone who's managing the brand side of things to pull all these things. And that's why I'm saying again, you got to be able to hire people who are very AI fluent because all the stuff I'm talking about right now, I expect myself to know this. I expect people that come in to work with me to know this stuff, to be Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to, you know, moving very quickly. Most AI writing tools were built by engineers who've never written a blog post in their lives. ClickFlow is entirely different. It's built by my team of SEO marketers and learns your business inside out. Delivering automated, scalable content that is optimized for search engines and reads like it was crafted by your own team. No more managing freelancers, no more babysitting briefs. Just press go and grow. So head to clickflow.com and get your first 25,000 words free. That's not a typo. 25,000. Go get them. Clickflow.com. Shift number 4 is that your team starts to run without you. So the old reality was that you were the bottleneck on every decision. You got junior team members constantly asking you, what should I do next? And your knowledge is trapped in your head, right? So that doesn't scale very well. So the beauty of Gemini with Gems is that you can now build these AI-powered SOPs and workflows. And so we take our recruiting process as an example. We take our standards of excellence, we just upload those documents into the Gem. And then when people have questions on, hey, we need to make this hire, well, they're actually forced to go to that Gem and say, hey, you need to first establish for this role, what's the mission, what are the outcomes, and what competencies do we want? And then from there, I'll create a job description, right? Also, let's say that someone comes through our hiring funnel and, you know, we had a transcript from the interview that we did with that person. Well, we'll run them through like an excellence evaluator to check if they check the boxes when it comes to our standards of excellence. Our AI fluency, all that type of stuff. And then I'll grade that person, right? Now get this, because you now have Gemini Flows, you can actually connect different workflows into Gemini. Maybe it's coming in from like a call recording tool that you're using like Gong and it's plugging into Flow. So Gemini has its own workflowing tool that competes with like AnyDen, it competes with Zapier. So that's cool. It has VO3 for its video models. It has Google Nano Banana, right, for the best image models that are out there. The fact that you can vibe code using AI Studio, they are shipping so quickly right now where all the things, all the things that you want to be SOPs you want it to be able to scan videos that you have as well. I just think Gemini, Google specifically, is so far ahead of the game right now that it would be remiss for you not to take advantage of it. We got to talk about SEO as well and why speed matters here. So 95% of AI citations come from content less than 10 months old. If your content is old, you're invisible to AI search. That just means that SEO playbook has evolved quite a bit and it's going to continue to change. So the old game was that you rank once, more or less, you get traffic for a very long time. The new game is that you're constantly publishing, you're constantly updating, and AI search rewards fresh content from brands publishing frequently. I'll just give you my take on how this is changing my content strategy. So earlier today, I logged into my YouTube Studio and there's actually an Ask Studio button, I believe, or Ask YouTube button. And you can ask about, hey, in the last 90 days, what content has performed the best? Or what content should I be creating more of? And show me the data that backs that up. So you can actually ask directly inside of YouTube Studio. That's going to inform my strategy. Today was even calling out, well, you know, you need to focus more on, you know, higher click-through rates for your thumbnails. And then here's some ideas for what you should be attacking based based on your goals of driving more conversions from your traffic while also getting views as well. Okay, the other thing I'll say too is earlier I talked about NotebookLM. When I'm speaking at conferences now, when I'm about to put my decks together, there's a lot of things that I watch and there's a lot of data that I want to implement, right, or add into my talk. And so now I can make a NotebookLM project on the talk that I'm about to do. Maybe it's talking about the latest news when it comes to B2B marketing, and I have a lot of stats in there, right? It's going to create different infographics for me. It's going to look at all the podcasts in there, it's going to look at all the YouTube videos in there, it's going to look at all the documents that I upload, some of my documents as well. And then from there, I can take those slides and send them over to design to make sure that we're following our brand guidelines, and then we're good to go. Now, I can take that infographic and disseminate that information to my team so they know what I'm talking about, because infographic is very easy to digest. And I can share that podcast with people if they want to pick that up. So to me, my content is now going to be more in-depth. Okay, I now have better insights. And I don't need to have a bunch of spreadsheets when it comes to pulling data and insights from my YouTube channel. It also informs my not just YouTube long form, but short form as well, that one for my short form strategy, which might impact how I go about targeting for Instagram and TikTok, right? SEO is very much a search everywhere optimization game. It's not just talking about ranking for Google anymore, because that game is so complex. Now ranking number one Doesn't mean that much anymore, especially sometimes you rank number one, you might not even pop up in AI mode. You got to get cited on a bunch of different sources. You got to be on a bunch of different websites, right? So that stuff is changing quite a bit, but I'm making use of all the tools that are available. So internally for us, we use our product ClickFlow to create content. We use it to update content as well. We use it for internal linking. And so that's the traditional SEO side of things because that's not quite dead yet. But my feedback to you would be that you can't just publish once anymore when it comes to your blog content, and you got to play the everywhere game, which is good because marketing is getting harder. But you know, that means you also have to get stronger as a marketer overall. The AI train has already left the station. Us As leaders, our job is to make sure that we equipped our team with what they need to be successful with AI. And then from there, I mean, we can take a horse to water, but we can't make them drink. And so we're going to do what we can when it comes to hiring the right people. And this is also a question of firing as well. Like if people can't step up, then unfortunately, like we're going to have to make room for someone that, that is very AI fluent, right? And so that's where things are going. For me personally, I'll say that Gemini is very exciting because, you know, this is the worst that it's ever going to be. And the image models, the video models are already incredible. I look at it as it's going to change how we go about making ads, how we go about making short-form content. The ideas that I'm getting for packaging around YouTube right now is incredible, right? And so I'm excited to be able to train my team and hire the right people that can carry this AI torch forward. They're able to do a lot more faster. And I think, you know, Gemini has kind of really come out, you know, guns blazing here after kind of being left for dead for a little bit. People thought they were just falling too behind. So I'll just say this in terms of what you need to do this week. I would just say pick one area, okay? Any of the areas that I mentioned— research, data analysis, content workflows— use Gemini for it. Not once, try using it for every single day for a week. And after that, you can report back in the comments on how it's going. on for you. And yeah, before you go, you can check out this talk over here, what I did at the HubSpot Inbound event on how we're going about using MCPs for marketing to help us grow our business faster.