36. Transforming Marketing Workflows with AI and Automation with Reid Robinson

Because when I look to your background, you worked at HootSuite, now at Zapier, and your And these are very important platforms for marketers. That's why, I mean, like, I would like to ask questions about automation, especially, which is a big question mark, uh, especially on marketer's side. After some announcement say that 95 percent of, uh, marketing agencies will disappear. So it's all about automation and what will automate soon, what will not, and those type of questions.

So I would like to start with a broader question, and then we can deep dive to some of the practical things that can help listeners on this journey. So which areas of marketing do you think AI will have the most significant impact in the, let's say, next one year?

Uh, I think one of the things from, at least for a marketing use case is going to be around, uh, being able to personalize some customer communication in ways that, like, as you. Pointed out, I've worked in the world of like marketing tech for quite a while. And I feel like along that journey, personalization has been like a hot topic for a very long time.

And I actually think, you know, done it through various ways of, okay, we're personalizing the links in this email template, or we're personalizing the subject line of these emails. But with generative AI, you can really do. And an impressively wild amount of personalization, like you could do the entire email. And yeah, I think that's probably what I think I'm most excited about.

One of the initiatives I helped internally, uh, was doing like an automated marketing campaign to recommend additional use cases that did use like a generative AI step to help, in essence, hallucinate an additional use case for that user. But we actually ended up seeing a lift in activations by recommending additional use cases through a generative AI step, which was cool. Um, and I think that'll become more and more accessible and more and more commonplace.

Um, and I think as a user as well, it'd be nicer to start to see some comms come in that are like, Hey, we know you were tinkering with this and you tried this and like getting down to a much more personal level on how those comms get across. Um, it's gonna be really cool. I think of that more from an email side. I've yet to be clear on what that looks like from a social media side.

I mean, like you can understand by going through my social feeds, which type of project I'm doing, I'm either like, they are expecting me to have a baby soon because I'm checking kids furniture or, uh, they expect that I'm a tech, uh, SaaS marketer or something like that. It's really screws up. I'm a veno where I. Got into a project. It screws up my social media because we assume that, you know, this person is suddenly interested in for kids furniture. Uh, but it's, it's not the case.

I mean, like, I think in that case, social media is a little bit trickier to understand, I guess. If you don't know the context to that person's personal life, I guess.

Honestly, I probably don't have the greatest insights to say here, other than the fact that I really do hope for a future that does have like more transparency of what information you're like giving up from yourself to get more personalized recommendations. Um, I think that would be really cool to start to see in some search things of like, Hey, for this search, I do want you to understand my personal life, right? Whereas if I do another search, maybe that search is only my work information.

Uh, it's using for context. Um, could be cool to start to get that level of like granular control when you are looking to help from an algorithm or an AI model or whatever it is.

I know that a lot of marketers have already adapted them. Uh, but still, as I see from my friends and my colleagues. A big portion of them haven't adopted, uh, marketing automation yet.

And I'll give you an example of use cases would be things like you have a, an automation run where every time you add a. A work topic to like an air table, you know, if you put it to a certain status and air table or to a Trello card status, right, you can then kick off a kind of draft creation process where you might have given a something like a chat GPT step, the access to, you know, some sort of Information on how you typically

write what your company does what your angle tries to be Might as well include like examples of past blog articles and to try to mimic the style that you're going for And then you might in like the actual run might include some context of, Hey, we want to do a campaign about X. This article should be for Y. Can you help generate a draft blog article?

And then subsequent steps might try to convert that to a social media post and like for Twitter and the LinkedIn one, and then a Instagram recommendation, and then kind of output that to a marketer so that you have, you A lot of like, you're just at a closer state, I'd say at this point, definitely more of like a draft is the right way to think about it.

The other side, they would have saw it as like converting, um, I'm sure marketers here are very familiar with the concept of like taking a long form article and then repurposing it in various different formats. Uh, the models also pretty good at getting you further along, right? Like, Hey, our team or a company that we are partners with just published this blog article. Can you help recommend like what our take on this should be? You're like, what could tweet for this be?

I think back to the days at Hootsuite, we're like RSS feeds were a big thing where people were just reposting from an RSS feed and kind of like that. You can do something similar, but at least now you can find it. Start to personalize it and you can start to make it about your brand and you can start to make connections, um, and get it to a much closer state, um, than you would by just looking at a raw RSS feed.

Um, you could even add some like, I'll put the word intelligence in air quotes, uh, for anybody listening, uh, to that flow of saying like, Hey, you know, this is the RSS feed. Can you tell me which of these articles do you think are like relevant to our business priorities? Right. And then so you can actually start to like triage your RSS feeds of content as well.

So whether you want to automate responses to customer inquiries and give it information on like your, Business, whether that's the sales or supporting queries, uh, reviews, helping you automatically reply to customer reviews, um, things like that seem to be very helpful after that data extraction, this is more on like the, if anybody on the side is like a lead generation side of marketing, that's all those times where you have like

unstructured data that you just like kind of wish came to you as a form. Anytime you want that great use case. Um, so you can basically tell these models, Hey, You're going to get this sort of structure. Maybe it's like an email, but it's going to come in like a. All the text in one box, and I need you to help extract the subject line, the body, the first name, the last name, the company they work for, and like, give me values that then I can put to my CRM. It does that incredibly well.

Right. Um, And then, yeah, like I said, that kind of like air quotes again, intelligence layer for recommendations. Um, so you can give it information about yourself, your business, your role, the objectives. And, you know, when given a bunch of other text, you can say like, hey, help me whittle things down. Help me figure out what is, um, strategy there. So that's what we're workflows, to be clear.

But I think I'll touch on one other thing, which is like, Expanding your capabilities just as a, a worker or as an individual. Um, I think that's probably one of the coolest things for me. Uh, is the fact that you can leverage, you know, tools like chat to PT, Gemini, Claude, whatever, um, to just learn more and do more than you previously could do. Um, for marketers that might be learning how to use Zapier, right? Maybe in the past you've tried to use Zapier and it's confusing.

Well, now you can like talk to chat GPT. I built a, an automation consultant GPT. That's actually been used I think 35, 000 times at this point, which is just helping people learn about like what they can do with automations and it recommends Zapier workflows for them. Um, And things like that get me really excited because you can learn coding, you can learn like all sorts of neat things that you weren't previously capable of doing that now you can do.

I wish I could tell you more aside from the fact that it's a very interesting unknown right now. Um, for me, I think more of like, you know, an actual custom version of GPT for GPTs. It's. told to focus on Zapier and we give it a tool that helps it like build workflows for users based on their own description of what they're looking to do. That sort of thing for now.

Uh, platforms, because right now, if you don't specifically ask for a platform, uh, name, like bring me names of the best automation platforms, it doesn't, it sounds quite objective, but I feel that, you know, OpenAI Uh, Gemini, Google, uh, they're going to soon, uh, turn it into, I'm just waiting for the day when they're going to announce, okay, we are going to take, start taking ads and we are going to start, you know, it's not going to be like only an organic thing and so on.

It's going to be done. Paid at media as well. Uh, so that's full change. A lot of things when it comes to SEO, when, when it comes to how we do marketing.

I don't have too many resources because, you know, we know that at big companies, there are teams that are adopting, testing these tools and adopting it to, and cascading down these tools for the use of automation. other employees.

So, you know, when you are a part of a corporate company, big company, somebody will, you know, make the limitations for you and then we'll say, okay, we were going to use this automation platform, but in a medium or small size brands, there's probably one marketer that's sitting with a very small budget. And then everyone is talking about automation. And then you open web and you see like thousands of apps, thousands of people talking about. the new AI models.

So where can I start as a medium size brand that I have no clue where to start? It's everyone is using chat GPT and then you pay the subscription for chat GPT. But what else? Because we know that AI and automation is more than what's chat GPT offers or Gemini offers.

This gets slightly complicated because. They're, they're separate, like OpenAI's API access and ChatGPT, the product, are two separate things, um, first of all, but an example of the differences with ChatGPT, if you're trying to personalize an email campaign, right, you would be, I don't know how you would do that manually, but I guess you would like Get some insights from the, a new lead that came into your email, right?

Like you got a Facebook lead ad that came in, they gave you some information. You could take that, go to chatjpd. com, enter it, tell it some information about your business and ask for a good intro email, right? Or a good first touch email. And. Then copy that over to Gmail and send it with tools like Zapier, you can automate that whole process, right?

You can actually now just say, Hey, every time I get a new thing from a Facebook data, send some information to chat to TV, uh, like an API call, um, and ask it the same sort of question. And then whatever it replies, put into either send that email right away if you're trusted or put it into a draft step which you could allow you to have like a manual step for you to review that content before it goes out. That's a key differentiation. I want to be clear to people.

I think I talked to people who are like early on who are struggling to understand the opportunities that are available when they start to kind of put this like under the hood or run while you sleep or any way that helps you think through that. That's number one.

Number two, go back to what I said before about like, you know, you mentioned like you saw Zapier a lot because of like our great content, that that's usually a critical thing and a huge bottleneck for companies, particularly midsize companies. So I would think like, how can you use it somewhere to either help you repurpose your content, accelerate that process, help you review it, you know, all sorts of things, but also just an internal process too, there is so much internal process within.

Companies, especially mid sized companies and larger companies, um, that is very tedious. So I'd say one is, you know, thinking of those times where you have to write up a proposal for a piece of content, right? Um, you might just have a general gist of what you want. And you then are sitting in front of a form with maybe like 25 different fields that you need to fill in.

That's a great opportunity for like a synchronous use case, or like a real time use case, where I would potentially take the form, copy and paste it over to chatGPT, and tell it the gist of what I'm hoping for a piece of content to do, who I'm targeting. What the objective is, right, like the information at a very high level that I understand, have it spit out responses for that. So then I can say like, okay, that was good. That was bad. Oh, I need to tweak this a bit.

Those things that will help you take, like, Minutes off the task that you're doing are, I think, great opportunities to try to get familiar with the technology as well, because then you start to say like, Oh, you know what, we have the same thing where things come into our Trello board, but then we need to convert them to Airtable records, right? Like, but they're not the same format.

The great opportunity to then be like, Oh, well, can I use an AI step here to say, Hey, these are marketing content requests. They come to Trello from our sales team because sales uses Trello, but in marketing land, we use Airtable and Hey, can you help us make, like, get these from one spot to the other. and

Um, and then actions would be like, Um, uh, sending emails, creating drafts, adding rows to an air table, adding Slack channel messages, um, all sorts of things like that. So Slack bots, again, you know, I'll pick on content requests again.

If you're a content request team, you could build a little Slack bot through Zapier that, um, When people message your team in Slack, maybe you want to say like, Hey, if this message is for content requests, can you reply to the user along with like our, I don't know, tips for writing content or tips for getting requests to help them formulate their request to our team better? And then it can automatically reply to that user or that employee in Slack, right?

Like you can have these AI steps used in Slack type workflows too, which really help internally. Right.

And then there's only one person in marketing who's trying to, you know, get the requests of all the sales team. Who's that person? Who is it like the IT or is it the marketer or. Yeah. Yeah. Chief Technology Officer, if there is,

You know, we could go all the way up to larger enterprise businesses, and for that, you do get into deployments that are like owned by it and then enabled across the organization, but I would say the ways happier typically starts in the business and grows is through departments and through the individuals, particularly folks like marketing ops, recruiting ops, any of those sorts of things where they're the folks who already understand how.

Like those workflows, uh, interact, and now they're learning that they can actually like automate some of those workflows or make them more efficient across their organization, uh, starts to open up a lot of possibilities.

Anywhere like that, where someone is like giving you their information and they want to be contacted about something, you don't just want to be like, all right, well, let's get back to them in like 48 hours when someone can call them. So that becomes a big thing with Zapier because the way that folks want to like Get that information into, you know, the thousands of serum tools that exist in the world, the spreadsheet tools they might want to reach out right away.

That's again where like AI steps we've seen, uh, be used where they're personalizing that first touch response. So it's not just the same email every single time. Yeah, so that's one of the strongest ones that we see a lot of, particularly from marketers.

And that breakdown is almost identically proportional across the entire company. Every team seems to adopt it to the same degree as every other team. Um, which is fascinating. We did not expect that result. And this is us with our own company, right? We didn't expect that result. So. I'm very curious to see, uh, as more and more data comes out in the world. How that looks for other businesses. I do think there are jobs that are certainly harder, uh, for these models to do today.

Not like numbers is the biggest one, right? When

Uh, is anywhere where you, you're trying to use it over like data sets of numbers, difficult today. Um, getting better in the last year, it's been incredible improvements, but I think that'll be a much harder one than some of the more, uh, I don't know, freeform text type of things there. Other, in terms of team side, yeah, I don't know, because every team has their own, like IT for instance, um, you know, people may be like, what is an IT team going to do?

But a big use case that I had come up with a lot from folks in IT, Was, you know, Hey, we get a lot of messages from employees in Slack complaining or not complaining, but like bringing up issues with their laptops or with software they're running. Right. But those teams need to get those requests into an actual queue, right? Like an actual request management tool, like Jira or something.

Um, and again, as I was saying before, they, those teams were spending, uh, had one person do the math on this and it was an incredible amount of time that, because they would have to take that. The freeform text and put it into a structured ticket where it needed like, okay, who brought this request up? What was the issue? Who should this go to? Who should be triaged this likely, right? Like there was a lot of fields that needed to be filled in. And also

Um, and especially it was like menial hours where they were like just copying and pasting these values from, um, So anyway, just pointing out that there are these use cases that I think are relevant to all sorts of functions. Um, yeah, I think any, any time you're trying to deal with Data and numbers is probably going to be the slower things to see adopted. And of course, like things like sensitive information and whatnot. I won't, I won't get into that whole side of things with it right now.

If you don't know that, trying to automate it is going to be difficult. Right? Um, so just knowing that, like the source of the destination of your information within AI, the thing that becomes critical, I would say, is getting these models context, uh, typically in the workflows that are valuable, you're not running things where you're just blanket asking the model to give you something. You know, you're not just saying generate a blog article about automation. Right?

Like that's not going to get you a high value output. More likely, what you want to ask is, we're this type of business, with this audience, with this focus area, there's, you know, like mad libs, right? Like you want to do an advanced mad libs. And the challenge becomes figuring out where in your organization and where in the world, if it's the wider web, you can get the, Fill in the blanks, right?

Like if you're trying to do personalized email campaign, do you know where in your CRM you have information on, you know, things like that would be helpful, like job title, uh, what products they use? Do you have anything record about their use case, right? Like what can give you information that when combined and provided to like an LLM will give you an output that feels valuable. And typically that's going to come with context. Uh, but actually.

Being clear on where and how to get that context and those fill in the blanks, uh, becomes a challenge, but when I've worked with customers who do come with, you know, Hey, I'm familiar with our systems. We have this idea in mind and typically a good way to experiment with this, by the way, is like, um, is with chat to BT or with the open AI playground. If you like, can just. Right, what you're thinking about asking it and throw in the context of like a sample record, right?

Like it's maybe real data to start to get some confidence of like if it's possible You can just like try to test around with like, okay when we gave it Job title. It gave better responses when we gave it, um, that customer's list of existing products, it gave better responses, right? Try to get some semblance of what gets you a valuable response, depending on what you're trying to do.

Um, so that'd probably be number one, um, on the budget side. Number two, I would say try to be T is a great, like, especially they now they opened up the free tier a little bit more.

Like that's going to be really valuable for the business. Um, I think experimenting in that way can really help you because then you're not building a whole workflow and whole system and then trying to get, because that's a very difficult part to get right. I'll be clear. Um, and it's also the part that like. Once you can get right, I think makes it, it kind of illuminates, Oh, wow.

It was really good at doing, um, I don't know, like recommending the intro paragraph of an email, but it didn't do the rest of the body really well. Like maybe you could only get good confidence on the intro paragraph. Well, now, you know, like you want to build a workflow that's going to get you. That intro paragraph, and maybe you figured out like what sort of context fields are needed.

So that would be the other thing I would recommend is, and also the base models are, you can just talk to them about it too. They do seem to have a lot of information on Zapier and other tools. So just ask it as well. Be like, Hey, I'm a marketer for this business and I use these tools, right? Recommends things that I can do. That was why I built like our little automation consultant GPT, uh, that anybody can use as well.

Yeah, some funky things you can start to do to kind of, again, that's what I meant by like, you kind of stretch your capabilities because all of a sudden you might have access to a wealth of knowledge of automation and marketing.

And also these models, as I understand, it's briefing. The model is one of the most important things, just like working with an artist or a creative person, the way, how you brief that person is so important that if I brief that person, or if someone else briefs you're going to get two different creative work. And so that's the value that we add as PSPRO. That's why I believe that who facilitates is as important as the model itself.

Uh, although I, I'm really positive about like all this, um, you know, technological advancements of chat GPT or, sorry, that I keep on, you know, promoting chat GPT, but generative AI in general and AI going forward. But yeah, I also believe in the, who, Facilitates that conversation and that work actually, my last point would be around social media because you have, you are a student of social media because you have been in the social media world for so long.

How do you think that all this automation, how do you think things will evolve in social media? Like, will there be any change on how we communicate or how we are going to use social media?

I hope we see better use cases over time. Um, Yeah, like I said, I think for me right now, what I'm seeing, it's like converting and being able to repurpose content. Um, video, right? There's a big one. There's a lot of tools right now that are trying to help you take existing video assets and use AI to splice them into TikTok formats, right? It's why you see a lot of TikTok videos these days that feel a bit like choppy and split. Yeah, it's, and it's cool, right?

Again, I recognize, you know, a lot of people are team of one on their efforts or they're being asked to do things that like, they're like, I never created a video before. Like, I don't know how to do that. And so yeah, if there's a tool that can get you something that feels like 80 percent good, you know, probably gonna use it. Um, so I think we'll see. More and more of that, I think we'll see like AI do a lot more in like ad creation, ad delivery as well from the platforms themselves.

Um, I think that'll be a pretty cool part is when that kind of like model runs happen on the user level.

Posts and my comments sounds really like AI and I'm afraid because it's so generic And there was like a laughing moment, yeah

So in that case, I see an opportunity here because as a brand, if you don't overuse AI and then you try to make things different than how AI platforms are doing, then you have the opportunity to stand out in the crowd because everyone is, you know, It's probably adopting the same, same automated models and same automated formats, like, you know, TikTok formats that everything is very clear, same captions, same graphic design or so on.

So that's how, I mean, although I'm a big believer of AI in terms of facilitation and in terms of helping out in projects, when it comes to tools. Too much of doing that, too much of automation, too much of, uh, relying on it. Uh, I think it's gonna, you know, create a lot of, uh, mundane and boring stuff, uh, that the companies that are not using it too much or just using it with this in mind, then they'll stand out. That's my personal take on the social media thing.

But it's like, I don't know what it is, but like that act of, It sounds horrible to say this out loud, but I guess that act of judging its output kind of gives me a better path to forming my own ideas. Um, because I'm like, oh, it said that very poorly. And then I'm like, okay, well, what would be a better way to say that? Um, and then it kind of helps me get going. So sometimes I can find myself get unstuck by getting a horrible output and then at least in motivating me to do a better job.

Um, one of the things that I often get involved with is kind of like ideation and that from like both a product and use case side of things. Sometimes it can be really challenging to like think through these, I don't know, interesting ideas with new technology, right? And it was fascinating to me to read a book from an author focusing on this concept of creativity and fostering like creative endeavors and thinking.

Which was like, she was very focused for I think the readers who are mostly people who wanted to write books. But it was cool because you know, it's like, Something like I would absolutely have never, like never think about writing a book, but it was cool to think about how, um, she thought about her creative process and to think through the parallels of how that relates to, you know, even something as mundane as like the creative process of a LinkedIn post. Right.

And like, what might be a relevant and fun thing to think about and ideas and even use cases. Like I. Um, I'll give you one really, she had a very interesting concept of like ideas for books was her thing and how they like, she had this concept that ideas kind of float around the world and they just like bounce into random people and stick in their heads and if you don't, you know, it might hit someone else as well. Um, and the interesting thing for me, though, was this concept of.

Acknowledging the idea and processing it and being comfortable to say no to the idea and move on. Um, cause I think one thing that's challenging with a lot of the tools that are out there and just the pace of things too, it's like, Oh, I want to, I want to try this. I have this idea for this. And then you might need to say like, all right, you know what? It's a cool idea, but this idea is not for me. Like, thanks for coming to me idea. Go have a great day.

I hope you find someone like cool out there to work with you. Um, really? I mean, that's,