Tools & Strategies You MUST Use To Survive The 2024 AI Revolution

On this episode of Marketing against the Grain, we are going to tell you how AI is going to completely transform marketing. We're going to tell you the new skills marketers need to learn the new tools that are going to be coming out from marketers. And stay tuned for the number one thing we feel marketers should do today if they want to remain relevant in the AI era. Let's get into today's show.

On today's episode of Marketing against the Grain, we have a very special guest, Nicholas Holland. He is the GM of Marketing Hub at HubSpot. He is, I would say, one of the foremost experts in the world about tools and problems that face marketers. Cause all Nicholas does is talk to marketers every single day and look at new technology and use cases to help them. And so we wanted to do, to start off the year, a marketing technology deep dive. We're gonna talk to you about all the foundational technologies, cool new tools and use cases. It's gonna be a blast. Nick, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Hey, thanks for having me, guys. Gonna be fun.

Nick, to start off today's show, I'd love it if you just like set the stage for us. Like, what's happening out there in the mean streets of marketing technology land? Like, what are marketers coming up against in 2024?

There's a, I live in Nashville and there was an interview that Shania Twain did one time and they basically were like, oh my God, you're like an overnight success. And I remember her chuckling a little bit because she had been sleeping in her car and basically hitting up all the bars for almost a decade. And so she said, yeah, I'm like a ten year overnight success. And I think about that with marketing because it was almost three years ago where GPTs first hit. And I remember we internally were like, man, this is an interesting project. Not very good, but it's definitely interesting. And I don't know how a lot of the marketers feel listening to this, but I definitely get sentiment when we talk to customers about, man, this feels like it happened overnight. And really it's been a slow, steady progress of like the last decade to get here. So when I think about what's happening overall, I think, you know, for the stuff we dive in today, you've got first, marketing is dramatically changing. So I would say if I'm a marketer and I'm listening right now, I'm like, man, is this hype or is this real? And it's real. I think the second thing that's happening is you have effectively some new muscles to build. A lot of marketers don't know this, but new muscles will be really important in this next phase and we can jump into that. And then I think the last thing that's interesting is everything's happening so fast it's quite hard to understand what to even do next. And so I think that I'm seeing a lot of analysis paralysis out of a lot of customers right now. And what that ends up doing really is it benefits the incumbents because the incumbents, they just wait for their tools and things like that to basically catch up. So there's a little bit of risk if you don't have, have a high innovating or a fast incumbent that you're using. On the flip side, there's a little bit of myopic nature where if you don't look outside of what you're doing, you won't even know what's possible. Like a hot other horizon issue. So in general, I think right now, if I was a young marketer coming out boy, it'd be on fire because you can run circles. It's almost like basically when people didn't know about some of these things back, you know, the Internet, the digital marketing, you can run circles around. If I'm an older marketer marketer, I definitely need to basically make sure I don't have a who move my cheese situation which is this is how we do it. This is how we basically generate leads, this is how we work with our sales team. And then stuff changes pretty fast. So that's kind of where my head's at.

So you mentioned like marketers need to learn new things. What are some of the things you think are top on that list?

So the, there are a bunch of foundational things that I think I'm fascinated by. When I'm at Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family, I'm constantly checking in just to see like where the, the normal day to day person is. I think that search is changing. A lot of us know that. But until you actually get into it once again you have a horizon issue. It's, you know, I don't know how you feel Kit, but it feels like every year we're like search is changing, they're moving to single click. They're going to take our data, they're going to do this. But until you actually get into using the new forms of search, it's very challenging to understand how it's changing, I think.

But Nicholas, to interrupt you for just a second, I think that's the difference about 2024 is that search has been changing. It's kind of back to your Shania Twain story. It's changed over the last decade and now it just feels like it's changing all at once. But what's happening in 2024? Is there some actual alternatives? There are new tools that you could use and actually get a better result. And that hasn't really been the case up until the last like 6ish months.

It's been like yeah, exactly. I think it's been like a battle of like it's. Everything's constantly changing. I think it's been like a step function change. I'll give an example is like if you haven't used there's two things. If you haven't used the paid version of Chat GPT where you ask it to search the web, you probably don't know what we're talking about. Or if you aren't using Bing Copilot, you probably don't know. But an example I was thinking about is we've got some snow down here in Nashville. I had some winter burn on my trees and usually I would do something like a search query like how to prevent winter burn on your trees. And then you would scroll through SERP results. You would then click on a few, you would get past some of the modals and the chatbots or the pop up modals you would get down. Then you would scan through the article, you would try to find a piece there and then this is the big aha. It then typically either is a very, very well thought out long pillar post to which they were thinking of all the things or you're left with another question and you have to repeat that process all over again. What's really changed is being able to go back and forth. And so I'll give you an example. I asked about winter burn, how to prevent it and it says you should cover your plants. I went out and bought some stuff from Amazon. So weird that drove a commerce cycle over at Amazon. Then I was like well damn, how long do you cover the plants? And I really had no idea because the article I read didn't tell me now do I keep them wrapped up for a night for a week? Turns out that you keep them wrapped up for almost, almost the whole winter season. But then more importantly I then went through and there's like different ways to wrap it. And so then I actually took this is true story, I copied and pasted the entire Bing chat thing and I sent it to my yard guy who won. Ironically over text goes, what is this? And I was like, this is my conversation with Bing. Here's what we need to do about the bushes. But just look at that cycle. I basically had to talk back and forth with it for a while to get what I was wanting. I then took that, passed it over to another person. It drove a commerce cycle. Like, it's just wild. And what's even crazy is like right now I was thinking to myself, I didn't click on any source links, so we can get into that too. Like, I really do believe that like as big believers in inbound, I also believe we're going to have to change inbound muscles. Because right now, yes, I don't mean this to sound mean and then this is a little harsh, but the AI companies by their very nature have to basically, some say steal, others say incorporate your knowledge. But right now, if you begin to basically, you know, help people by writing thoughtful pieces, what you've inadvertently done is you've basically made Google smarter or Chat GPT smarter or Claude smarter or being smarter. And by doing that now they don't have any incentive to come back to you because I'm trying to chat back and forth. And so it's going to change a lot of muscles there. But that's like a foundational one. I'll pause there for a minute.

There's a couple of things in that. So way back when the very first time kind of chatGPT was launched, Kip and I were talking about it, its impact, upcoming impact in search, which is really like 18 months ago now. And there was one thing that we really honed in on, which is the speed of iteration. That's what I was trying to describe to people is like the speed that you are able to iterate through questions and answers is like grades better than a traditional search engine. And you're going to start to see people gravitate towards there because it's just a better, a better experience. And I think that's what, that's kind of what you've seen. You've seen that through ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT, the problem they have is, I don't know if you've noticed, the latest updates mean that they are really sensitive to copyright. So there is some, I think, degradation on their quality, but perplexities. These other ones are just like a better experience. So that speed of iteration and it's really just like the way to understand this if you have not tried it. And this blows my mind, like I've posted about this multiple times. I have the search people come in. Google's a better experience, but they haven't actually tried these. These kind of different options. Right. They're still kind of trying to work on the traditional search engine. But the thing to really think about is what, what it's like is you just having a pretty smart people or person go do the search for you, look across all these things, retrieve the information and then provide you the best and most coherent answer. And I think the final nail in the search engine coffin, which is like the traditional search engine coffin, is today the argument against these kind of tools as a replacement for Google is just the inaccuracy. Right. And hallucination people see as a bug. It's not a bug, it's actually part of a feature. It's why AI is like to solve. Can solve problems in a creative way because it is able to like hallucinate and think that way. But it's not great as a component of a search engine. If you listen to what Sam Altman said over the weekend and last week about GPT5, one thing he said is the reliability is a big thing that they are focused on for the next.