The future of marketing is here. Here’s how AI will impact online business + how you can leverage it

With ever-growing advancements in technology, keeping up with the latest developments can be tricky and a little scary. In today's episode, I'm sharing a little about the latest advances in AI and sharing my predictions for how I think this will impact the online business world.

In today's episode you'll uncover:
– What GPT-3 is and how it could impact your online business.
– The benefits (and downsides) of using this technology in your content creation.
– How AI will shift the way you need to approach your content creation if you have any hope of standing out.
– The most important factor in getting good outputs from AI.
– What I'm testing at the moment and what I'm excited for in the future.

Mentioned in this episode:
https://soullesspodcastadvice.com/

 

Today, I'm talking about a slightly different topic. I'm talking about AI and the impact that I think it's going to have on the online business world, the marketing world, and how you can start to leverage it as an online business or not. And as somebody who potentially creates content or who leverages content marketing for your business. 

Now I know change can feel scary. When we see all of these things changing around us, shifting around us, it's totally natural to want to just bury your head in the sand and avoid it. I was a little bit like that when I first started learning about Web3, when I first started hearing about web three, I thought, no, I don't want to hear it. My brain is saturated. I don't want to learn anything new. 

And then slowly, I started to dip my toe in and it was like, oh, this is going to really impact the entire online world. And even though AI and Web3, aren't really related as far as I know, there's no interrelation between them. AI is another one of those big developments that's it's rapidly improving to the point when now AI can create content that sounds like a human has written it. 

So yes, change is scary, but we have to get comfortable with change. Especially since we are operating in an online world, we are operating in a world where so much of what we do as business owners are dependent on technology. And a lot of the change is really positive. 10 years ago, if you wanted to create an online course, you couldn't just go and set up Kajabi. You had to go ahead and create your own WordPress site. You had to make it self-hosted. 

And then every time WordPress updated, it probably would break your course. And it was a nightmare. Now there are tools like Kajabi, where you can just go and upload your things and it makes it pretty easier. Same with Canva. 10 years ago we had to go and use Photoshop, which was really expensive and you had to be a designer to know how to use it. And now anybody can design things in Canva.

So this kind of change can be really good. And I love the quote. I don't know who said it, but in a presentation that I was in at social media marketing world, someone quoted it in their slides and it was today is the slowest day of technological change that you will ever experience ever again. I might be paraphrasing it, but that was the gist of the quote. 

So you really need to get comfortable with the change that is happening because it's only going to get faster. And you have two options. You can bury your head in the sand, or you can do your best to try and stay abreast of it. You know, you don't have to embrace everything, but to understand what is going on, that gives you a better idea of the context within which your business is operating. 

 

What GPT-3 is and how it could impact your online business.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about AI, online marketing, and online business. So for context, now you may or may not have heard a little bit of talk about chat GPT in the online business space. 

A lot talk about it really, depending on who you follow in or Facebook groups you're in but especially amongst copywriters and marketers, because I think it's going to impact their jobs and their tasks a lot. But what actually is Chat GPT? So Chat GPT is built on a piece of technology called GPT-3 which actually stands for generative pre-trained to transformer three. 

It's a piece of AI that has essentially been trained to produce text. That sounds like it's been written like a human. So if you give it half of the sentence, it can complete that sentence, like a human, if you tell it to do something or ask it to do something, because even though it's AI, we need to be nice to it. If you ask it to do something, it should be able to answer you. If you ask it a question, it should answer you like a human. 

Now, this technology is created by open AI, which as a side note has recently been valued at, I think it was like $29 billion, something ridiculous like that. So they've created this technology, and now a lot of product developers have been using this technology as the basis of their AI products. So, Copy.ai is one example that comes to mind. They are an AI copywriting tool. Jarvis is another one. I think there are so many AI tools out there. 

And most of them are using the same piece of technology underneath them. Most of them are using this GPT-3. Then what happened in November 2022 was open AI started talking about the new GPT 3.5, which is apparently even more sophisticated than GPT-3. 

And that was when they released Chat GPT, which is a chatbot. It's a chatbot that everybody has been talking about on the internet. And Chat GPT is the easiest and so far, it's the freeway to use this technology where you can essentially just have a conversation with this AI bot in a chat and as an example for this episode, I typed into the chat. I said, give me a headline for a podcast episode about the impact of AI on marketing. And these were the suggestions that it gave me. 

So it gave me a couple of suggestions for exploring the future of marketing and how AI is transforming the industry. AI and marketing, harnessing the power of machine learning for better results. Marketing in the age of AI opportunities and challenges. And then the last one was revolutionising marketing with AI. How artificial intelligence is changing the game now. 

Those are pretty good. They're not really ones I would use for this show but they would give me an excellent starting point if I had absolutely no idea what to call this episode. 

 

The benefits (and downsides) of using this technology in your content creation.

How is all of this going to impact content marketing and online business now? I think it's got its pros and its cons. First off, it's going to make big parts of content creation much easier. It can give you podcast titles. You can ask it for suggestions. I've been using it to get content topic ideas. So, this was pre-Christmas where I fed it a bunch of answers that my audience had given me around things that they were struggling with. And I asked chatbot GPT to give me some content topics based on the things my audience was struggling with. And it gave me some pretty decent ones. I mean, I probably would use about five out of 20 of them that it gave me. 

You can also ask it to outline blog posts. You can use it to write article titles. You can actually even use it to write the entire article, but we'll get there in a second because it's not great. So the downside of all of this is that it means we're going to have even more content saturation. You know, if you feel like standing out online is hard at the moment, it's going to be even harder because now you're not just competing with content that humans are creating. You're also competing with content that machines are creating. And even though I still think at this stage, human-created content is better. 

Machines are able to produce content at a volume that humans aren't. Now if you're a business that's creating content, you can potentially use it to create content cheaper. But I don't know if that content is going to stand out. And I think with this content saturation, it means you're going to need to really up your game, if you want any hope of standing out online. 

So I think as a side effect of this, we're going to see a big shift from creating content for content's sake to creating less content that's more meaningful. Content that shares a unique perspective content that is true thought leadership content that synthesizes two ideas and creates something new rather than content that is just a generic piece of nothing really.

 

How AI will shift the way you need to approach your content creation if you have any hope of standing out.

And here's the thing. When you are creating content with AI, the outputs it creates are only as good as the inputs that you feed it. So, if you don't quite know what you need it to give you that it's not going to give you anything good. So like the headlines that it gave me for the podcast episode, all I said was to give me a headline for a podcast episode about the impact of AI on marketing. 

It gave me pretty generic titles, but if I now said to it, give me a headline for a podcast episode about how AI is going to radically change the marketing world. And it's a must-listen for marketing owners, it might give me something completely different. 

And you can't really do it so much with chat GPT, but you can with some of the other tools. And if you get a little bit techie and play around with the API and all of that, you can train it to create outputs that are a lot more along the lines of what you are looking for. 

 

The most important factor in getting good outputs from AI.

I've seen people who have tried asking it to write a sales page and it's not pretty, you know, if you say, Hey, write me a sales page for my course about launching. So I think that maybe you could give it the right inputs and you briefed it correctly, there might be potential that it could write one. I think at this stage as a human with a good strategy understanding, if you understand the strategy behind a sales page, I think you're still going to outperform chat GPT or any of the other GPT power tools. 

So, how am I trying to use it? How am I playing around with it at the moment? So I've been testing a few of the other tools, the ones that are built on top of GPT-3 because they give a little bit more flexibility than just talking with a chatbot and a lot of the developers have trained them in certain inputs, so you can give it certain inputs and it'll spit out a blog outline better than if you were just chatting with it. 

 

What I'm testing at the moment and what I'm excited for in the future.

I've been testing how we can use it to repurpose content. So for example, how we can say the same thing in different ways, because sometimes when you're trying to explain a concept if you keep saying it the same way, and it just doesn't quite sink in with people and you say it a slightly different way, that can be the light bulb moment for them. 

A really fun one I've been using is on word hero. And what they do is you can generate analogies for concepts. So I've been putting in a concept and it's been giving me an analogy. For example, I was talking about how fear is something that points out to us what is worthwhile pursuing, fear shows us where our growth is and the analogy that it spat out was fear is the compass for our growth. 

I was like, huh, that's a really nice little metaphor there. I can use that. Now, there are so many different tools out there and you could very easily waste a lot of money on them. So if you are going to invest in them, get clear on what you need at full first. Try and make use of seven-day free trials and always remember that the output is only going to be as good as the input. So if you're feeding it really average inputs, it's going to spit out really average outputs. 

Now, I built an offer idea generator. So essentially what somebody does is they fill in who the ideal client is and what their ideal client is struggling with. And it gives them a bunch of different offers that they could potentially add to their business. Now, at this stage, it is only a bonus for my Offer Less, Sell More students because it does cost me like 20 cents or something each time somebody submits it. 

But I'm testing it with them and it might be something that in the future I add as paid offer or something. The other thing that I'm doing is I'm building a kit of tools for podcasters. You heard it here first. This was literally something I came up with on the weekend but it's been a really fun world for me to explore. 

So that's going to be really fun. That's like a fun little side project for me because I'm weird. And I like doing things like that for fun. What I'm really excited for the possibilities that it could bring us around project management. 

A lot of people are building new tools. And it's really exciting to see what is coming up. So I hope this has given you a bit more of a context around what is going on and how it's going to impact us as business owners.

 

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