What ChatGPT-4o means for marketers, What signal-based selling is, and LinkedIn playbooks

Do you also want to end up describing the new ChatGPT?

Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. So have you used it yet?

I have.

Okay, do you have the app on your, on your, your iPad? No. Your Mac?

No.

Oh, you gotta get it. So, okay, um, this guy Min Choi tweets this: ChatGPT 4.0, what I like about it— I was walking with my mom at Huntington Library last week, right? And she, she like likes identifying the plants and all that. And then, um, now what I can do is I can take a picture of it. Like, you're gonna yawn again. No, this is cool though. I can take a picture Take a picture of the plants and ask what it is in Chinese and it'll explain it in Chinese. And sometimes my mom will want to say something to me in Chinese. Now I'm like, oh, when I speak to you in English, translate it to Chinese. And when you hear Chinese, translate it to English. And so imagine if you travel somewhere to like China or something or Taiwan, live translations, right? So I think what we're going to— and I've seen these ChatGPT-4o assistants talking to each other, right? So that reinforces the need for agents. Helping students learn in real time. Imagine if you and I, we have AI versions of ourselves tutoring people on marketing. So Sal Khan was doing something with his son, and then the AI corrected his son on a couple of things. Real-time translation, we talked about. So imagine you're speaking Hindi to me, I'm speaking Chinese. We'll just be speaking where we can understand each other. Meeting assistants that can take notes. And then did you see the one where it can tell your kids stories?

Yes, I did.

You sent that to me. I did?

Yeah, you sent it to me right away. I haven't used that for my children. But funny enough, the accents within the app are off. Have you tried, you know, when it talks to you, have you tried telling it to use a specific type of accent?

No.

It doesn't work well.

Yeah, I think it's going to take some time to get there, right? But I just think now that it's I think it's multi— it's, they call it Omni because in my, in my, my interpretation of this is it's because it's omnidirectional, it's multimodal, right? And so what Sam Altman says is how he sees it working is he usually just leaves it open over there and he's asking it questions. And I found it to be— I played around with it last week where I was just going back and forth with it. And you just have the internet there and it's going back and forth with you. So I think it being an assistant for you, a marketing assistant, is going to be pretty helpful.

I think it's going to be really helpful.

It's free.

Yes, and it's a great step in the right direction. You wait a year, I think this thing's going to be dangerous.

Yeah. Right now it's pretty good. I think in a year it'll be like, it's— It'll be really good. Next level. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the thing, like whenever I see all these things, and this is what Eric and I recommend to anyone who wants to learn marketing, the best way to learn marketing is to play around with these tools and try things out with your own websites and profiles on the social web instead of just being like, oh, I read about the new ChatGPT. Well, reading about it is one thing, playing with it is a whole different thing. And if you're not willing to play with it and get your hands dirty, you're not going to really learn how to use these new technologies that are coming around.

By the way, we need to give props to Google too, because Google, right after the 4.0 launch— and by the way, we should have talked about this last week, but it's okay, better late than never. But Google's showing that it's very serious about AI. Like, some of the things that they've launched, you know, they have their own version, their own assistant that could tell you like where your glasses are and like it'll help you calculate an equation. They're doing a lot of different things with with Gemini too. So, I wouldn't look past Google. I think they're pretty dangerous themselves.

Google will be. And Sergey Brin came out of retirement just to help them with all AI-related projects.

You know what I did for the Bryan Johnson interview? I was like, hey, you guys own YouTube and there's a lot of content you have around Bryan Johnson. Tell me 7 or give me a bunch of unorthodox questions I can ask him. And I would say 4 out of the 7 questions they gave me were pretty good.

Wait, I'm confused. You went to Bryan Johnson and said you own YouTube?

No, no, no. I went to Gemini. So, I went to Gemini and I asked— I said, hey, I'm going to do this podcast interview with Bryan Johnson. You have a lot of interviews with him and you own YouTube. Give me a couple of unorthodox questions I can ask. And 4 out of 7 were really good.

What was the example of one of them?

Here, let me pull up my notes over here. So, okay, here's one example. Okay, let's say you reverse your biological age to 18. What then? What kind of impact do you want to have on the world? You're taking care of your physical and your cognitive health. How about your emotional health? I didn't get to ask that question. So, stuff like that, right? Where these questions I haven't seen other people ask.

Yeah, they're good questions. AI is not bad. It can tell you— I think AI is really useful. Like what you just put in there is For it to help you with research.

Yep.

It's analyzing everything out there and it's giving you input based on what it's finding out there. Where I think AI is really bad is saying, go create me a piece of content around this topic, which is what a lot of marketers just result to. And like, oh yeah, AI can help me with content creation. That's one of the basic things AI can do. And that's one of the worst things AI can do. AI has so many more better use cases, like helping you analyze data in real time and making informed decisions. 'Cause marketers have tons of data, but yet very few of them analyze that data and actually make decisions based off of it.

You got to be— so earlier what you said about marketing, I think at the highest level with marketing, if you want to win, you have to be curious. And then with this stuff too, being curious means like the more curious you are, sure, you're going to ask stupid questions, but eventually you start to ask smarter questions. I think the base level of what you're saying is a lot of marketers tend to just default and stick at the stupid questions and they don't get to the next level. So it's taking a little more time and then learning to come up with better questions and then you get better results.

Yes, dude, I'm with you. And yeah, like if you can use AI for research, data analysis, helping you to mundane boring tasks, there's a lot of useful things that it can help you as a marketer. Or like if you're looking for keywords, it can just end up telling you which ones are top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel. There's a lot of unique things it can end up doing. It can help you update your content. But the one thing that most marketers I wouldn't say avoid doing, but use with caution is just use AI to blanket, just create content for you at mass scale.

All right everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions, Personally, professionally, we'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside. So what I'm hearing is you can call it ABM. Some people like to call it signal-based selling now, but it sounds like of the millions of people visiting, there's going to be a small subset of people that fit your ICP. And then your salespeople will be able to spot the signals, how much they're engaging with your content, and then reach out to those people.

Bingo, you got it right.

Yeah, so signal-based selling, that's a new term, guys, but it's basically account-based marketing.

Yes, I still like the account-based marketing, but it works really well. And instead of being like, hey guys, we need to go create 30 pieces of content this week and get this many views, we're just like, okay, well, we do all that. Here's how many leads that generates when you have 4 or 5, 6 million visitors a month, and here's how much of that turns into revenue. And no joke, our traffic has gone down at least 2x, I would say, from the peak, but our revenue has gone up more than 3 or 4x from that time period. And what we learned through this, which was a hard lesson for us as marketers, as yes, traffic is great, but if it doesn't convert into revenue, who cares?

Yep.

So we started focusing on traffic that converts and we ignored everything else, even if that meant our rankings would drop for all the other terms. Sure, some of the algorithm updates didn't go Some of them did go our way, but it was more so we focus on updating the pieces of content that were actually driving revenue. We're looking at our lead sources and which lead sources were caused by certain content pieces, write more of those pieces of content, ignore the others. And what we found is the stuff that was driving the majority of the leads was like, or majority of the revenue, not leads, but majority of the revenue was like, we have a blog in 5 different languages How should we structure our blog? Or we have, we have a blog in multiple languages. How should we structure it?

That's an enterprise type question.

Yes.

It could be for small businesses too, but yeah.

Yeah, and those type of posts were driving the smallest amount of leads, the most amount of revenue. Most of our leads were coming from things like someone Googling digital marketing, SEO, and no joke, our close rates from those leads were pathetic. It was just non-qualified businesses that were like, hey, I just found out what SEO is. I want to hire someone. What can you do for $100 a month?

Yep.

And it just wasn't working. So we shifted our strategy to go after ultra long tail that's very specific to enterprise.

All right, look, if you're looking to hire additional marketers for your team, there's no better place to look than, well, hiring nearshore, hiring offshore. And we found that we've hired amazing creative people, we've hired amazing people that can help with execution on the marketing side, whatever it is that you're looking for exactly, we are helping with that. We have recruiters from our side, all you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/hire. Fill out the information in terms of what you need, and then we'll have our recruiters reach out to you to help you with the placement. And it should be great for you at the end of the day because you're going to save a lot of money and you're going to get the help that you need. So you're going to get help from a cost standpoint and also an execution standpoint as well. So again, marketingschool.io/hire, and we'll see you inside. Dude, speaking of which, so this actually dovetails well into— we've got these playbooks, these LinkedIn playbooks. So Adam Robinson, CEO of retention.com, who we've talked about a couple of times, These are a couple of ABM playbooks over here. Again, you call it signal-based selling. But if you're watching on YouTube, we should share a screenshot of this. But this is interesting. I'm going to share a couple of playbooks with you all. There's 6 here. I'm not going to read everything to you guys, but here's one. This is Samantha McKenna's thought leadership ad play. So one, on LinkedIn, you could promote a thought leadership ad to ungated content. So that can mean, let's say Neil works for my company, he posts something, I can run a thought leadership ad on LinkedIn which promotes his post. And then we can run that to like an ungated piece of content as a call to action. Basically, that drove 1,600 click-throughs to their site. And then retention B2B, just call it enrichment tool. So enrichment tool pushes site visitors to Slack, so it will enrich all the people. And then through Slack, it'll lead to warm outreach, right? So that's a form of, you can call it account-based marketing or signal-based selling. And then they booked a demo on the first campaign of doing that, okay? I'm going to read one more here. Michael Lieben and Taylor Heron's Clay Play. And Taylor Heron's actually been helping us with our warm outbound. And I think we booked like a couple of, not warm outbound, cold outbound. We booked a couple of meetings last week from it.

Oh, cool.

So I'm curious to see what else the team comes up with there. So basically Retention B2B, so, or any enrichment tool that you choose to use will push your website visitors to Clay. Clay's like a, it's like a sales— Neil's going to yawn because I'm making him tired. But every time I see it, I just call it out and Neil doesn't want to yawn. But Clay, you know clay.com, right?

Yeah.

Okay, so clay.com, it can help you like put in AI for your outreach. It can do a lot of different things, right? Clay.com, after retention pushes to Clay, Clay will sort by your ICP enriched with firmographic, technographic data. Okay. Clay then writes a ChatGPT email based on page views and who the visitor sells to. Clay then pushes to SmartLead and then SmartLead will push into like, you know, you might have like 5, 10, 20 different domains and it'll send emails out. So Michael booked one demo in the first 15 emails. Tailor is responsible for 20% of retention B2B signups, and they have an 11% conversion rate on this strategy. So I just wanted to give you guys 2 playbooks. Bless you, Neil.

Thank you.

And we can move on from this, but hopefully this gets you guys, your guys' engines moving a little bit. So anyway, that's it for today, everyone. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Marketingschool.io/agency. We're going to show you all how we build this community. And if you have an agency, we're going to help you build your agency faster. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.