Beyond the Hype: A CMO's Guide to AI in Marketing

What people want in your personal brand is authenticity. When you're building a personal brand, a big time-consuming part of it is engaging with your network. And there are tools out there, AI tools that will comment on your behalf. But at this point, it's so obvious that they're AI comments that I actually think it's harming your personal brand. I guess my message is that there are areas where you can take shortcuts.

And then there are areas where, at least at this point, where we are in technology, you really need to put in the work. Because if people can tell that it's not you, you're having the opposite effect of what you're hoping for. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast, a show for the new generation of leaders. Join Melissa R. Skog as she speaks to a wide variety of guests that bring new insights into leadership, prosperity, and personal growth.

While no one has all the answers, by building a community of open-minded and engaged leaders, we hope to give you the tools you need to help you find your own path to success. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast. Today we're welcoming Amy Gendon. She's here with us to talk about marketing and the age of AI. Amy is local to Boston and an executive leadership coach to women. Thank you so much, Amy, for being here today. Thanks for having me, Melissa. It's a true pleasure.

Amy, let's talk about your journey from unpaid intern to CMO. Can you share with us your story? Yeah, so well, before I was an unpaid intern,

I actually was a therapist. And I worked in psychiatric emergency rooms and in schools and crisis centers. And after about three years, I just felt like this isn't the right career path for me. There was too much burnout. It was really intense. And so I took a bunch of career coaching classes and tests and over and over again, marketing have coming up for me as an option. And I didn't know anything about marketing in a business background. And I was like, I don't know, 27, 28 at the time.

And I thought, you know what? I'm just going to get an internship and try it out and see. I don't want to go all in if I don't love it. And that's what I did. I very humbly nannied on the side being a master's level professional and worked as an unpaid marketing intern and absolutely fell in love with it. Because for me, marketing is the psychology for business. And so I was working with people on the clinical side. And now I was thinking about it more through business lens.

And I spent 15 years in marketing, working for agencies and big tech companies and public companies. And some of it was my own merit working hard. And some of it was right place, right time. But worked my way up to chief marketing officer of a public company. So quite a fast trajectory, I'd say. And I feel like I've seen it all at this point when it comes to marketing. I remember when I was in college, people don't always stay with the career they study in college.

They say they switch their careers about 10 times. Can you share with us a little bit about your journey and how mental health has helped you become a successful marketer and leader? Yeah, I mean, I think that any job where you have to work with people, there is a skill in understanding mental health. I think that it made me a much more empathetic leader in understanding what people are going through and that life happens and that you can't really separate work in life.

It's all one big messy blob that we have to navigate through together. And then in marketing, you know, it really, I think, helped me understand the buyer a little bit more. I had some clients back in my agency days who had some of the most boring, square products that you could possibly think of. But they're still selling to humans, right?

And so at the end of the day, it was my job to somehow empathize and understand and make that emotional connection for them and really bring out the highlights of the products or the services that my clients were offering in a way that resonated. And I think that by understanding psychology and understanding mental health and what makes people tick, you're just that much better at anything that involves working with people.

I hear a lot people saying how expensive marketing is or being on Google or using different marketing tools,

but marketing is a must these days. Talk to me a little bit about how your business leverages marketing, either fractional or full-time and what marketing tools you're using that other successful business owners can leverage. Yeah, I mean, marketing looks very different depending on the stage of your business, your business model, who you're selling to. I don't believe that there's a one size fits all marketing plan for every company.

I've done marketing for startups on a $500 budget and I've done marketing for companies with a $5 million budget. And so depending on where you are and what you can afford, there are things that companies can do. For me, I'm a huge believer in building a brand. I think that storytelling and getting your credibility out there is so, so, so important to cut through the noise. There's never been more competition online than there ever has been before.

And so at the very least, without very much effort, you can be on social media. You can have a website that looks professionally designed. You can even grab templates from Wix and WordPress. I mean, you don't have to spend a lot of money to have a really sharp brand and message that resonates. And then, you know, depending on who your audience is and where they are, that can tailor the different channels where you show up. So, no, I'm a huge believer in everyone needs marketing in some way.

It's just that it's gonna look different for every business. Amy, can you share with our listeners a little bit about some of the marketing tools you leverage for your business and things they can leverage to get real time results for their marketing spend? I mean, I think the best thing that anyone can do is really understand their target audience and that does not cost any money.

And so, sitting down with your prospects and understanding what their pain points are, what solutions at your products or services are trying to solve and really crafting a message that's gonna resonate is number one, right? If you don't have that, then your marketing is never gonna get off-figure-owned. In terms of actual sort of tactical channels, I'm a big believer in content. We are consuming content and video, especially more than ever.

Video can be really expensive to do well, but it doesn't have to be. There are some actually some great AI video tools out there now where you can feed it, for example, a blog post and ask it to turn it into a one or two minute promotional video and it does a pretty good job with not a lot of feedback. There's one tool, I mean, I'm not being sponsored by them, but there's one tool that I've used in the past called Flixer that is like $32 a month or something, it's so cheap.

And I think getting content out there that really resonates with your audience, whether it's on social media, on email marketing, Google ads, Google will give you $500 free. The first time you start advertising with them. So these platforms are really trying to incentivize people to use their products and you can't make money without spending money. And so there has to be somewhat of an investment in marketing at some level.

The industry rule of thumb is typically five to 10% of your revenue should go to your marketing budget. Amy, how do you keep your marketing scaling and growing and staying relevant in the world we live in today? Is there any unique approaches you use that you can share with our listeners today? I mean, in the last couple of years, a position that I have hired for that has been critical to my team's has been a marketing technologist

because these days, unless you have someone on the team who is solely dedicated to keeping up with all the technologies that knows what's integrating with what, how much it's gonna cost, what data you're gonna get back, how to dashboard everything so you can bubble it up to the C-suite. I mean, you could really just get lost in a sea of opportunities and technologies that are out there.

And so I see a marketing technologist as almost like an engineer, like almost like a marketing engineer in a way. Like someone who really understands all the tech and can bring that together in house in a way that's sophisticated, but still simple enough to use and understand. And I think that that is definitely going to be a position that becomes more and more in demand as AI becomes more and more sophisticated. Absolutely. That's a great point.

We actually have to tell those marketing tools what to do. We can't just turn them on and make them work. We have to actually tune them and tell them what to do. How have you seen technology change since when you first started your career in marketing as an intern and CMO? Can you share with our listeners a little bit about what you're seeing now in the digital age and in your marketing journey?

Yeah, I mean, it's exploding and it's continuing to explode and it's not gonna slow down anytime soon. I mean, when I was a marketing intern, first of all, most of the data was siloed. You could get your social media data, you could get your email data, you could get your website data, you could get your ad data and everything kind of lived in separate areas. One thing that I've seen is all of that has really come together which is really nice.

So you can start seeing the fruits of your labor across channels and scale up and scale down in different places depending on what's working and what's not. But I think, you know, the other thing is that AI is really changing the role of marketers themselves. So for example, it used to be really important for a marketer to be a really strong writer. But now with things like chat GPT and Po, it's much more important for a marketer to be a strong copy editor,

right? You don't have to be the one sitting down and writing all the words anymore. You need to be the visionary and then the person to take a big draft of copy and then fix it and mold it and turn it into what you want. Same with graphic design, same with video editing, same with data analysis.

There's a lot of tools out there now that never existed before and it's becoming the job of the marketer to both feed and prompt those tools but also then interpret it versus doing a lot of that manual labor themselves. And so, you know, a tool is only as good as the person who's using it. So it's going to become incredibly important for marketers especially to really be able to understand the tools themselves so that they can get the outputs that they're looking for.

From your perspective, Amy, what are some pop skills CMOs need to have today? Well, for CMO, typically they're not doing a lot of the day to day work. They're much more on the management of people understanding the latest and greatest of, you know, where marketing is going, making sure that the strategy makes sense with the rest of where the business is going, working closely with the other departments to make sure that marketing is meeting the needs of those departments.

But within those areas, I think A, it's defining and redefining your marketing org. I mean, these positions are changing rapidly because technology is changing rapidly. And so as a CMO, you've got to always be thinking, like, do I have the right people for where marketing is going?

Because three years ago, we were doing X and now we're doing Y and in five years, we might be doing Z. And so there's a real challenge there when it comes to skill set and making sure that A, you've got the right people and B, you're developing the people that you have appropriately to be able to evolve with those changes. One of the biggest challenges I've had in management and in leadership is not everyone wants to evolve, not everyone wants their role to change every year.

It's incredibly stressful. And so the people in my companies who've really outlasted are the ones with a lot of mental agility and flexibility who are willing to kind of roll with it and say, okay, I was a writer and now I'm an editor or I was doing email marketing and now I'm doing marketing automation and really just willing to continually learn. Let's talk a little bit about marketing yourself on LinkedIn and other social channels.

I know over the last few years, I've started to put myself out there more on LinkedIn and other social channels. Is there anything you could share with our listeners who might be on a budget on ways they can market themselves better online? - Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer in everyone should have a personal brand. You can never, I mean, I think it's a huge myth that if you're a W or two employee or safe

and if you're an entrepreneur, you're taking a risk 'cause at the end of the day, everyone can get fired. And so having a personal brand is so important because that is your credibility, that is your network. If anything were to happen or if you're not loving the direction of the company and you wanna go somewhere else, you have the power and the leg up to do that over someone who is not putting themselves out there.

I mean, in terms of building up a brand whether it's on LinkedIn or somewhere else, I'm a huge fan of Canva. I'm not a strong graphic designer, but I have an eye for design. Canva is such a nice tool because people respond to video and they respond to images. And all of Canva is these pre-made templates. You throw in the colors that you want, you choose your font and then you've got these beautiful images already created for you that you can download.

And you've already, you're already looking professional, but you don't have to hire a graphic designer or try to spend all this time designing something yourself in order to sort of be a cut above others who are putting themselves out there. I think coming back to content, the only way to build your brand is to have content. I mean, you know this, right? It's your podcast, it's your posts, it's videos, it's blogging, it's just putting your thoughts out there over and over again.

And so that, there aren't really shortcuts for that. You have to be thoughtful, you have to take time to really think about who you are similar to marketing. It's, but you yourself are the target audience. Who are you? What do you wanna say to the world? What value do you wanna bring? What legacy do you wanna leave behind? Really kind of digging in and answering those questions. And then, you know, creating a content platform that really touches on those areas.

So, you know, there are no shortcuts to personal branding in my opinion. I think that it's a long game and it's something you have to kind of continually work at over and over again, but it's definitely worth the effort. That said, you know, tools like Canva or social media scheduling, tools like Hootswee where you can schedule your posts ahead of time can certainly cut down on some of the manual time that you might be spending on it.

One of the things I love about LinkedIn now that I do on the weekend is I schedule my own posts during the weekend. So while I'm working during the week, my posts are actually going out and I don't even have to think about it. Are there any other tools that you can share with our listeners that you're leveraging that may be useful? Yeah. So one thing that I think is becoming fairly controversial is actually using AI tools to build your personal brand.

So there are a number of tools out there that you upload a photo of yourself and it takes your face and changes your outfit and changes your background and then gives you 40 different photos of yourself without having to pay for a professional photography shoot. But a lot of them at this point, you can still tell that it's AI and what people want in your personal brand is authenticity. And so I tend to steer clear of AI tools that are making, you know, are basically fake versions of you.

Similarly, when you're building a personal brand, a big time consuming part of it is engaging with your network and engaging with your community. And there are tools out there, AI tools that will comment on your behalf. But at this point, it's so obvious that they're AI comments that I actually think it's harming your personal brand.

And so I guess my message is that there are areas where you can take shortcuts and then there are areas where at least at this point where we are in technology, really need to put in the work because if people can tell that it's not you, you're having the opposite effect of what you're hoping for. - I love that you said being authentic.

I know a lot of times most of my posts in LinkedIn have been about business or cybersecurity, but lately I've been being more authentic with my posts and talking about my children, my family, my hobbies. And I think that's a really big part of being online social now is being authentic and sharing more about the other side of your life. I haven't thought about using AI for my headshot.

I know headshots are thousands of dollars, so that's a really good idea is to use AI to create more unique headshots for social. - I don't know. I mean half of them you end up with like six fingers or three arms and it's like, okay, this isn't even work, but it's challenging because people want, you know, it's like, they want polish but a little bit of natural.

It's like they don't want you to show up in your bath robe but they also don't want absolute perfection which is such a hard sort of space to fit in. And you don't want it to become performative either. I would say, you know, to your point about putting your personal life out there, I'm a big believer in everyone has a different level of privacy.

I know people who would never, ever, ever post about their family or post a picture of their child, I tend to be a little bit more open for better, for worse about those things. So I would never give people the advice like, you know, put your family out there if that's not something that you and your family are comfortable with. But I think there's a way to be personal without necessarily giving it all away either. It's an art for sure. I love the idea of using HootSuite across all the apps.

I know one of the things I struggle with personally is trying to post on all these channels. The beautiful thing about Instagram is if you post on Instagram, it also posts on Facebook. But I think HootSuite's a great idea and I'm definitely gonna check it out and consider using it across my social media profiles. - Yes, but the caveat being that you don't necessarily want to have a copy/paste message across all of those apps because each app has its own sort of criteria, right?

Like Twitter has a certain number of characters and, or I guess it's X now, has a certain number of characters and hashtags work better there versus Instagram, versus LinkedIn, and also your audiences might be different too. So especially depending on your business model, you might have like a B2B2C business model and in those cases, you're talking to the consumer on one app, but you're talking to the buyer on another app and so your message might be different some of the time too.

So even though it's more time consuming, I think it's better to really craft for the platform. And like in my case, for example, I am on every single platform, but I spend the majority of my time on LinkedIn because I know that's where my target audience is.

And so if you wanna be everywhere, but you don't have a lot of time, my recommendation would be to choose one social media platform where you can really go all in, you can engage with your target audience, you can understand the best way to optimize your content and your profile and be there, versus doing kind of a crappy job everywhere, it's not gonna get you what you're looking for. - That's so funny and I really agree with it.

I am new myself to X and I just got my own profile recently and you're right, it is so different than the other social channels. LinkedIn's been my primary social media that I use and it's a whole different language now on X. So for our listeners, can you share with them the top three things that they need to know when building their own brand online? - That's a great question. I think number one is know your story. People just intuitively respond to a story.

They wanna see themselves and other people, they wanna connect, they wanna feel normal. And so if you know your own story and you know how to tell that and you know how to tell it in 10 seconds and 30 seconds and two minutes and 10 minutes, even better, but I think knowing your story is probably the most important thing because that is what's going to drive all of your content and your voice and your tone and who you are and where you're going. I think that's number one.

I think number two is get out there. It's so uncomfortable. A lot of people don't want to be creating a digital footprint for themselves, but these days you have to. And so even if it's awkward, I promise you, no one is cringing except for you. No one cares as much about you as you do about yourself.

And so taking the step to put yourself out there on social media to maybe it's build a personal website, maybe you've got a passion project on the side, but put it out there and share it with people, I think is huge.

And then I think the third thing is know your audience and know where they are online and be where they are and meet them and talk to them and get to know them because you just will never be effective unless you know not only yourself, but who you're talking to and whether what you're saying is resonating for them.

At the end of the day, we all have value that we want to add to individuals or to companies or to whomever and without having those critical conversations, we just, we won't know our value. So to me in a lot of ways, I think the future of marketing is getting back in touch with marketing foundations and making sure that you're doing a lot of the things that they teach in MBA schools.

Now the same question for businesses, what are the top three things that businesses need to know when branding themselves?

Yeah, I mean number one is don't cut your marketing budget. (laughs) I, there's so many companies out there they think marketing is a nice to have and not a must have. But the truth is that if you have great marketing, it's going to shorten your sales cycles. It's going to create demand. People are gonna want what you have. So I stand by my five to 10% of revenue should go into your marketing budget, no matter if you're B to C or B to B or B to C. That's, that's key for sure.

And then I think, you know, higher the marketing technologist be smart about the tools that you're using. It's so easy to just have this overly complicated tech stack where you don't know how the tools are using. They don't communicate with each other and you're creating way more work. So make sure you have someone on the team who is really on the up and up with what's happening technologically and can figure out what your company needs based on your strategy.

And then I think the third thing is like, to me, like marketing is such a great department because it sits at the intersection of all the other departments, right? It works closely with products, it works closely with sales, it works closely with customer success. And so, you know, really understand what the other departments need to be successful and be that support system for them.

So many people in my career have had complaints that, you know, markers say they don't have time for me, they don't have time for me. So build a team that can support the rest of the organization and then everybody succeeds. I love that those were both great things to share personally and professionally on how people can build their personal brand online. I wanna thank you for being here today, Amy, and being on the Executive Connect podcast. That's all for us. Thanks for joining.

- You've been listening to the Executive Connect podcast. If you have questions or ideas on how to bring leadership to the next level, email us at Executive Connect podcast at gmail.com. And don't forget to subscribe so you can catch every new episode. Until next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)