We Asked CMOs How AI Is Actually Impacting Their Marketing

We've looked at some of the schools around here. They teach kids how to leverage AI and teach them. So dude, everyone's been talking about how AI is going to revolutionize marketing. You and I already agree that it's here to stay, but I start looking at our organization and I'm curious on your organization as well. And I've been talking to a lot of other founders and CMOs. When I talk to people about like, Oh, how AI has impacted your marketing? Everyone talks about, you know, how it's changed things in a really cool way. And I agree, AI is amazing technology. But when I ask them how it's changed their headcount or their organizational structure, I almost always hear crickets in which no one's really changed anything due to AI. I'm not saying that won't be the case a year or 2 or 5 years from now. I'm just saying right now, There's this tendency for everyone to talk about how AI has changed a lot of things in marketing, but when you ask them how they've changed their organizational structure, at least related to marketing, or how they do marketing, other than helping with quote unquote efficiencies, very few people have good responses.

I believe that. And the reason I believe that, and maybe this will go into— I think there's a couple of sides to this. There's a lot of variables, but I think Especially if you're talking to a big company, it's a big company CMO, you don't want to rock the boat too much because the CMO tenure is the lowest it's ever been, right? So you don't want to be the one causing problems. You want stability, especially if you have a family and stuff, right? So that's one angle of it. The second thing is I just had a conversation this week with a couple founders behind the scenes, and you talk— you and I talk to founders all the time. And so I was sitting in a private room. There's like 7 of us on that Zoom call, right? We do a check-in every like couple months or so. So the first person's like, yep, you guys don't want to adopt AI? Okay, boom, $6 million in payroll gone. Right. And then the other one is like, you know, I really like the idea from one of, one of our other mutual friends where he had like a, you know, an organization that's focused on cutting. They get bonus on cutting people. Right. And finding efficiencies everywhere. And so the founders—

Bonus on cutting or cutting with efficiencies?

Cutting efficiencies. And also they get bonus on cutting people. Finding efficiencies with AI, right? When you have the founders in an organization, they're going to try to push the pace very quickly and very aggressively because they're incentivized to just make sure that they're doing the right thing by the company. I think when it's a CMO that you're talking about, or we're talking about marketing leaders, they might not want to rock the boat as much, especially if it's a big company, because when you're a big company, you want to protect more than you want to push the pace as aggressively, unless you were talking about technology like a Google or Nvidia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dude, so my team has been using AI to write emails for a while. They use human intervention as well, but they use AI combined with humans and they've been doing this for a while. So I was talking to one of my presidents on my small and medium business division, her name's Sarah. So Sarah, you know, just like any other B2B company, she relies on leads. More leads she gets, more they call or portion want to, they'll call, portion get ahold of. The ones they get ahold of, if they're qualified, they pitch and a portion of them end up closing. It's that simple. So my team was telling me, or Sarah was telling me on the phone a few weeks ago, and this is when I made a change. She's like, yeah, some things have just been a little bit slower. Some things have been a little bit better, but just generally speaking, some things have just been hurting us lately. I'm like, like what? She's like, email just doesn't convert as well for us these days. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, we're sending out emails. Our email list is big. But we're not getting as many DCs, which you know short for discovery calls, as you know. And I was like, okay. I'm like, what are we getting? She's just like, you know, for a while it's been does where we're averaging three, and we have a copywriter on staff that's leveraging AI. So then I'm like, you know what? Let me just go and rewrite these emails. So now my team sends me. the emails that we're going to send out to generate more discovery calls, not leads, but a lead that turns into a phone call. And that it's turning into a phone call because we know if it's the right type of company from the industry to the revenue size to their marketing budget. And Sarah was telling me we're getting like around 3. And I get a text, no joke this morning, from Salo who runs Marketingverse. He's like, by the way, your emails generated 8 discovery calls today. Great job. This is triple the average. Technically it's not triple because 3 to 8, but it's more than double. He's like, using the same learnings from your last email, we refactored the ones on Monday and we tripled the results as well. So we'll adjust accordingly. He's like, will you send— we'll send you next week's, okay? And I said, yes, send me next week's and I'll modify the emails. So he sends it to me and the email he sends me, I'll read it to you. Where is it? And it wasn't bad, but his email was lengthy. It was like subject line is either A, you're missing 73% of search traffic, or B, the new SEO Search Everywhere optimization. Both of those we've talked about. I'm like, eh, it's not that you can't talk about the same stuff over and over again, it usually just doesn't convert as well.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Niels, agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

And it goes, most marketers still chase visibility on Google, but this channel accounts for less than 1/3 of total daily search activity. While Google sees 13.7 billion searches every day, platforms like Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, and TikTok collectively host over 37.1 billion. That means 73% of users find their information outside of Google and you need to capture their attention on all platforms. Any links capture all attention on all platforms? I'm guessing that's going to a landing page. Then he shows a chart which just shows the number of searches per platform. And then he's just like, it's an approach we call search everywhere optimization and helps our clients secure visibility in a world that's no longer Google first. This strategy works so well that Google gave us Agency Excellence Award for it. And it's why we're recognized in the Campaign Global Agency of the Year Awards for the 2nd consecutive year. Top brands like Sony, blah, blah, blah, listing logos already on board. And now you can try too. And then there's a link. It says, let's discuss your search engine optimization strategy and fill your visible gaps. We've reserved some available times to chat. So simply pick one or select another date on our calendar here. And he has calendar buttons. No pressure. If you like what you hear, We can work together. If not, take insights and run with them. Cheers, Neil Patel. And then they have a PS. So I rewrote it and I did, I changed it up and I just put subject, this is why SEO doesn't work. There's no subject B, that was just my subject. And it took me less than 5 minutes to write this email. And I said, everyone knows SEO drives more traffic, but have you noticed that your revenue doesn't go up as your traffic goes up? This is because people focus on traffic-rich keywords, which tend to be 1, 2, or 3-word phrases. But look at the conversion rate from a visitor to a customer based on keyword length. And I have a chart that shows the average conversion rate for a visitor from organic search based on, or technically search traffic, doesn't have to be organic, based on keyword length. It's organic and paid. And then I say, as you can see, 6 to 7 word phrases convert at roughly 10.7x more times than 1 word keywords. In essence, SEO works, but only if you target the right keywords. the ones that convert. So let's stop wasting time. Click here, and that'll be a link to book a call. We'll analyze your site and determine the right keywords to target to generate revenue. Cheers, Neil Patel. P.S., you have nothing to lose. You don't have to commit anything. Just book a call to learn how you should be doing SEO in order to generate revenue. And there'll be a link in there. It's just shorter, simpler, and more direct.

And are you tying this in with the AI piece that you started with?

Yes, in which I removed the AI and I just wrote it myself.

So they used AI for the initial one and then you wrote the second one again?

AI combined with humans.

AI combined with your writing style or AI combined with just AI assisted?

They take AI, they train it on my tonality because I have so much public content.

Yep.

They have AI spit out content based on data. They feed AI because we have tons of data and charts.

Yep.

And then a human goes in and modifies it on our team. That is a copywriter, not just any marketer, but a copywriter.

Yeah. You do it. By the way, on the AI piece real quick, I started testing this yesterday. So you want to know how you can instantly get the best AI prompts?

How?

Okay, so basically you, you write a prompt. You could dictate out a prompt using like Super Whisper or something, just talk it out, right? And it talks it out and then it writes it out. And so ChatGPT, you'll say, hey, improve this prompt, right? Like whatever you just said. So it'll spit something out, doesn't matter. Then you go over to Grok or some other LLM or Claude and do the same thing. So you just put the same thing, say make this prompt better, right? Then you pit them against each other. So you take the Claude output and then you put it over to ChatGPT and say, hey, That's not that good. Claude said this, this seems to be better. And then it makes the prompt way better. And you do the same thing on the other one. And I'm like, whoa, this is incredible because we do a lot of prompting, right?

Yeah.

Like there's a lot of prompts with our workflows and everything. And most of the prompts you and I would write as humans just aren't that good. But when you do it at that level and when they compete with each other, for some reason they take it to another level, right? It's almost like human competition. So I think that that's just a little thing to add in there. But I do agree, it's hard to replace the human element because also at the same time though, like, you know your audience and we've, we've, we, we know copywriting pretty well. We know human psychology pretty well.

Yes. We also know our business really well 'cause we've been doing it so long.

Yeah.

And this is where I think experience really does matter. You can feed anything you want into AI and you can tell it to learn from 10, 15, 20 years of history.

Mm-hmm.

And I do think it's actually very helpful and it can help guide you. But individual experience that you have in a field, especially if you're good at what you do within that field, I think it's very hard to replace that, but it's not hard to replace the people who have very little to no experience.

You know what's interesting? So I agree with that. But on the flip side, um, Aaron Levy's Boxes Aaron Levy tweeted this this week, and I didn't think about this, and I don't— I'm pretty sure you haven't either. Um, I'm giving you discredit too. Um, so, so, so If you think about it, you and I have worked in the workforce without AI, but all the kids in college right now are using the crap. Like, I would use the crap out of AI. I would cheat on everything, right? And so they're very experienced with AI. So when they're coming into the workforce, it's like when you hire interns or whatever. I was talking to like a YPO today. He's like, yeah, it's cheap labor. But the way you sell it to them is you say, you're coming in as cheap labor right now. We're going to upskill you. We're expecting you to figure out all this stuff with AI, and then we're We're going to make it where you're uncheap labor and you're highly paid labor. Right. But point is understanding that these people coming in now are much more superpowered than people like you and me who have bad habits from, you know, the old way of working. Right. But on the flip side, you and I have a lot of experience, so we know better questions to ask. So there's a trade-off on both sides.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think you and I, uh, combined with the right people, uh, who have grown up with the technology. It's like little kids. Little kids have grown up with Alexa and all these voice search devices. Hence, when we look at the data, it shows that they search more from voice search and they think it's archaic that we type in. Like my kids ask me like, why are you typing in a question into a computer? Why don't you just ask Alexa or Siri? That's what they think is normal. So they're, they're like confused.

They think technology— So how do you explain to them that the tech isn't quite there yet on the voice search devices?

They, they—

like Alexa. Alexa sucks.

They don't believe that because for their questions that a little kid would ask, it typically answers most of the things they would want, such as what weighs more, a beluga whale or a white— a great white shark? These are questions my kids ask. That's how I know. So like things like that, Alexa does really well. Or like my son's newest thing is he wants a Bugatti.

What?

He's 3. I don't know where he got the idea of Bugatti for. And I was like, how about a Tesla? Um, 'cause you can buy a Tesla for—

Does he also not like Elon Musk?

No, he doesn't know about any of that. I was like, how about an electric car? 'Cause electric cars, and I'm just saying Tesla, not 'cause it is a Tesla, but electric cars tend to accelerate really fast. And he was telling me, he's like, no, Teslas aren't that fast. I'm like, you don't even know how fast, uh, uh, Tesla is. So then he goes and asks, uh, it was either Alexa or Siri. And he gets the answer and then he's just like, see, 150 miles. Bugatti goes over 200.

Dude, he even knows what a mile is at age 3. I didn't even know what a mile was.

Well, no, Alexa ends up telling me.

Oh, okay.

So, so he's gonna get a lot—

like, your kids are gonna be way smarter. Our kids are gonna be way smarter than us. It's just how it is.

Yes. But they, if you look at the people right now that are going into the workforce that are young and they don't have the bad habits that you and I have, They don't really have the good habits that come with AI either because they didn't grow up with it from when they're a little kid. Our kids are growing up with AI because Alexa, Siri, and all these devices already have AI integrated. And when they go to school, no joke, we've looked at some of the schools around here, they teach kids how to leverage AI and teach them. I'm not saying the schools do an amazing job because it's new technology, But it's kind of crazy to think about how they will grow up in a world where it's AI first, just like it's voice search first.

Yep.

And they truly will not have the bad habits that even these college kids have right now, dude.

And then the kids after that, they're going to grow up with a world of robots. They're going to grow up with a world of Neuralink where you can think and it just happens. And so it's going to get crazier and crazier. And I think if we're learning anything right now, it's we're just getting things done a lot faster because even on the marketing side where people like to say, Oh, 80% of AI is used for content production and research, but that like most of the stuff in the workforce is content and research. Like you and I talking right now is content, right?

Yes.

You and I communicating on the phone with someone is, is content. So I think we're just, the rotations are gonna happen a lot faster. I mean, I, I think, um, I mentioned to you over the weekend I used O3 to, when I get these churn reports or these gross revenue retention or net revenue retention reports, you usually have to wait for that stuff, right?

Yeah.

I don't have to wait for that stuff anymore. It tells me exactly what to pull in and I pull it in and it makes it exactly what I want it to do. Where that previously, years ago, might have cost me, if I used a contractor, days or weeks, if not thousands of dollars to get done with the contractor, or you might have to have full-time headcount dedicated to it.

Dude, I agree with you. And especially when you're looking at things like cohort analysis and churn and net negative retention. When, you know, whenever I talk to marketing about this kind of stuff, they calculate, they work with developers. their numbers change depending on how, what formula people use or how they calculate, which varies business to business. I know there is a formula to calculate, but the way people look at data can be different. I find that when I ask AI and I double-check it with, you know, data scientists on our end, it tends to be more accurate and I get it quicker and I'm able to make more informed decisions in the business versus when I have a team do it, it takes way longer, costs more, and I see more inaccuracies.

Yeah, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.