The AI Secret to Marketing Success for Entrepreneurs

Reading Time: 30 minutes

Imagine waking up to find that while you slept, your entire marketing strategy for the next month has been planned, your social media content calendar is filled, and a dozen perfectly crafted email campaigns are ready to go. Sound like a dream? Well, it’s time to pinch yourself because this is the new reality for savvy solo entrepreneurs harnessing the power of AI.

In today’s episode, we’re diving into a world where your limitations as a one-person show become a thing of the past. A world where scaling your marketing efforts doesn’t mean sacrificing your work-life balance or burning through your savings on new hires. Instead, it means embracing a secret weapon that’s transforming the landscape for solo entrepreneurs everywhere: AI as your virtual marketing team.

But let’s be real for a moment. As exciting as this sounds, you might be thinking, “AI? Isn’t that complicated? Don’t I need to be a tech wizard to make this work?” This is where our extraordinary guest comes in to blow those concerns out of the water.

This is where our guest today comes in with a game-changing solution. I’m thrilled to introduce Niki Dunagin, a creative entrepreneur and the mastermind behind The CEO of Chatbots. Niki has revolutionized the way solo entrepreneurs approach their businesses by harnessing the power of AI. She’s helped countless creative professionals build custom AI assistants that handle everything from copywriting to brand direction, all while keeping the process fun and low-effort.

Niki isn’t just talking about using a few AI tools here and there. She’s pioneered a approach that transforms AI into a virtual team, capable of supporting solo entrepreneurs in ways previously thought impossible without hiring. Her methods have enabled creative professionals to scale their marketing efforts, fill skill gaps, and achieve results that rival those of much larger companies.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Niki Dunagin about:

✨ AI as Team Members: Understand how to view AI tools as virtual team members rather than just software.

✨ Scalable Marketing Solutions: Learn strategies for scaling marketing efforts without the need for traditional hiring.

✨ Personalized AI Integration: Discover techniques for customizing AI to align with your unique business voice and needs.

Learn more about Niki Dunagin

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Scaling Without Hiring – The AI Secret to Marketing Success for Entrepreneurs with Niki Dunagin

[00:00:00] Niki Dunagin: I talk about one of my students constantly, cause I’m obsessed with her. But she’s like, I know AI is the future. I want to be on this course. And I’m like, perfect. Took the course. I met with her about two months later and we’re talking about her team of chatbots that she loves. She’s built like 10 of them and she’s like, there’s so many of them.

I can’t manage all of them. And I jokingly said, you need an operations manager. Like you need a bot to manage your bots. She took that and said, yeah, I do. Built a chatbot to manage her chatbots and like that, beyond what even I’ve done, I keep my team small. I like a small team, but some people really do build their teams out to feel like they really have grown their business to like accommodate all these employees, but without the overhead, without the drama of hiring onboarding, which is like future firing off boarding, which is awful.

I’ve been there, done that. It really is really cool to see how creative people take their own teams.

[00:00:58] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode will break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

Now, imagine waking up to find that while you slept, your entire marketing strategy for the next month had been planned, your social media content calendar filled, and a dozen perfectly crafted email campaigns are ready to go. It’s not like a dream. Well, it’s time to pinch yourself because this is the new reality for savvy social entrepreneurs, harnessing the power In today’s episode, we’re diving into a world where your limitations as a one person show become a thing of the past, a world where scaling your marketing efforts doesn’t mean sacrificing your work life balance.

Some of you probably got triggered at that or burning through your savings on new hires. Instead, it means embracing a secret weapon that transforming the landscape for solar operators everywhere, AI as your virtual marketing team. Let’s be real for a moment. As exciting as this sounds, you might be thinking, Hey, I, isn’t that complicated?

Don’t I need to be a tech wizard to make this work? This is where our extraordinary guest comes in to blow those concerns out of the water. I’m just thrilled to introduce Niki Dunagin, a creative entrepreneur and the mastermind behind the creative co pilot. Niki has revolutionized the way solo entrepreneurs approach their businesses by harnessing the power of AI.

She’s helped. Countless creative professionals build custom AI assistants that handle everything from copywriting to brand direction, all while keeping the process fun and low effort. And Niki, isn’t just talking about using a few AI tools here and there. She’s pioneered an approach that transforms AI into a virtual team, capable of supporting solo entrepreneurs in ways.

Previously thought impossible without hiring. Her methods have enabled creative professionals to scale their marketing efforts, fill skill gaps, and achieve results that rival those of much larger companies. Hey, Niki, welcome to the show.

[00:03:42] Niki Dunagin: Hey, thank you for having me. I need to like steal that for my own stuff.[00:03:49] Mike Allton: I can tell people I’m very transparent. I have AI helping me write these, but most importantly, it’s you that’s doing the hard work to make these kinds of intros possible. Thank you for joining us on the show today. If you could start by just sharing your journey of discovering how AI can function as a virtual team for solar entrepreneurs or solopreneurs.[00:04:10] Niki Dunagin: Yeah, absolutely. So my journey began as I was working in nine to five, like most people are. And I really wanted to build my own thing outside my nine to five, but you know, a lot of us experience burnout at our nine to fives and we come home and we’re exhausted and you’re like, how can we possibly like do marketing and run campaigns. All these things we have to do for a business after we just worked a full day and I discovered AI and started using ChatGPT a little bit had it kind of write up some captions for me here and there, or maybe like a little section on our website for me or my bio, and I found that it made my life so much easier just having that second pair of eyes and a second brain kind of do that for me, took me out of it and I was able to move a whole lot faster. And so I decided I wanted to use AI to launch my own course, but there really wasn’t that much information about doing that. A ton of AI information about like doing content and blog writing, that kind of thing, but not really how to like, Build a system or build a process.

And so that’s how my own course came to be the CEO of chatbots. I decided to run it and train people on chatbots. Based on my nine to five experience as a director of operations for real estate team, I had experience with hiring and training and onboarding and all that stuff that goes into it. And so I was like, why don’t I just teach people how to onboard AI, which is for a lot of creative entrepreneurs, a whole lot more exciting than just learning AI.

I tell them like, Hey, you should learn AI, like do your systems faster. And they’re like, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to learn a new thing. I don’t want to create a new system. I don’t want to do that. And that, and I’m like, that makes sense. Actually. What if we kind of gave you a new assistant that you on board and they’re really talented, they’re built for you.

So they know your backend stuff. They know who you are. They know how you work. How much more exciting is that for you than learning stuff? And they’re like, absolutely. Yes. Like you give me an assistant, I will take it. And so that’s kind of how it’s all been going together. I launched back in February of this year and I’ve really been hitting, hitting the ground running with it.

And, but it’s been super exciting to kind of have my own way of handling AI and teaching it and just seeing how much it helps. So many entrepreneurs who have their own limitations, whether it’s time or skills, or if they have something going on in their life, but there may be sick or they have family or something like that.

They don’t have to worry about limitations anymore. They can just keep on going and their AI will fill in the gaps for them and make them feel very confident in what they’re putting out.

[00:06:51] Mike Allton: That’s such a great approach because you’re right. If you simply tell somebody, Hey. You should use AI, maybe even give them a reason because it’ll make your life easier.

That’s not enough. It’s not enough. I’m not able to wrap my head around how that’s going to be applied specifically to, you know, areas of my life where there could be improvement, but you give them very specific use cases and examples. It’s something that comes up all the time on this show, you know, where we’re talking about personalization.

Well, let’s get into detail about what that looks like. So, I’d love if you could share some of the key components then for building this AI powered virtual team and how that might compare to a traditional human team.

[00:07:31] Niki Dunagin: Yeah. So it’s really interesting is as I have been training people on AI, I’ve actually changed the way I train AI.

I’ve actually made it a whole lot more simple, thankfully. I believe that the tools like ChatGPT and Claude, people who run those tools, want them to be accessible. And it seems to me like they are really putting out new features that make it easier for everyone to get access to AI, to learn AI, to start using it quicker.

And so now I’m able to teach people how to use AI the same way I would teach onboarding an assistant. Which is you can hire a really, really amazing assistant who is really, really good at marketing or social media. But if you’re not taking the time to train them or give them materials that they need to be set up for success, they’re going to fail.

And so I teach it as let’s onboard your assistant. Let’s train them. Let’s give them. An operations manual or your SOPs or your branding guides, whatever you already have in your business, as most businesses should have some kind of documentation of how they run, how they do things, use those documents and put them in a chat bot.

Literally, all you do is drag and drop them these days, which is amazing. And your AI can read those documents and learn from them. And that’s how you kind of integrate them into your own business, where If you’re worried, they won’t sound like you or they won’t be on message for you or they’ll do something weird or something, train them to do differently.

And they are going to want to follow that. What I tell people all the time when they’re like really hesitant about like sounding like everyone else or sound like they use AI, AI wants to help. Like it really, really is trained to want to help everyone. We just have to take the time to communicate to them how they can actually help us.

So if you’re worried about it sounding generic or using words, you wouldn’t use tell it some of us, myself included, have to learn the skill of giving feedback. A lot of us don’t realize we’re not used to giving feedback until we’re in the position to do so. And then a lot of times people will just kind of.

Be like, Oh, I don’t like that. Exit out when really the really cool thing about AI versus other tools. It’s a partnership. You can talk to it. You can chat with it. You can say the weird, probably mean thoughts you have to the chat bot that you couldn’t say to a human assistant. You can tell it, Hey, that’s not good.

That’s not good. Copy. I don’t like that. I hate that pellet. But also tell it why you hate it and it will automatically go ahead and be like, okay, gotcha. Let me change it to this. Does this fit better? And when you start to have that one on one conversation with it, that’s where I find the magic really happens.

And then when you have the training behind it, Plus the feedback. That’s where you start to feel like you really have a business partner behind you and you can go a whole lot faster than you’re used to going.

[00:10:22] Mike Allton: I’m chuckling because I’ve said the same thing. If someone came to me and asked me to give them 10 more subject lines and then 10 more subject lines, and then 10 more subject lines, I would lose it.

I don’t have that kind of patience, but AI obviously will say, yeah, absolutely. Niki, I’m happy to give you 10 more subject lines. And if you can give them examples of the way you write, it will sound so much more like, You and it’s a fantastic approach, but I love the mindset shift that you’re actually suggesting here.

We did a previous episode with Andrew Davis talking about building your own clone or an army of AI clones, and it’s the same idea, but you’ve articulated even better where you have not just One A. I. Assistant because that’s something that people talk about a lot having treating A. I. As an intern, right?

But an intern doesn’t know how to do everything. You would not expect an intern to do sales and marketing and H. R. And P. R. And programming and anything else that you could dream up that would be helpful for you. But If you treat the AI as a team and you’ve got different chats or custom GPTs, and we’ll get into some of that stuff in a moment, folks.

But if you have different AI systems identified for different purposes, and you’ve trained each of them to that one thing really, really well, whether it’s marketing or a specific subset of marketing, like I have an AI assistant. Just for my podcast, they helped me set up all these podcasts and that’s all that it does.

I don’t go to it when I’m working on ads. I don’t go to it when I’m working on brand strategy or anything like that. Before we get into some more of those details and I want to come back to those, I’d love if you could give an example because that sometimes helps people really wrap their minds around what it is that we’re talking about.

Maybe a success story of a solo entrepreneur. That you’ve worked with and help them maybe transform their marketing specifically using this a I team approach.

[00:12:11] Niki Dunagin: Yeah, so I’ll give a human approach first. I think that’s how people give a real world example. When a lot of marketing people are hired. I’m in marketing when I was hired that marketing person.

We probably all have the experience of, okay, you’ve been hired to do our social media marketing, but we also need you to learn how to do video editing. We also need you to do ads. Can you do paid ads? We also do Google. Do you know Google’s local services? And I’m like, I thought doing social media, like, what are we, I can do all the things, but I’ll tell people I’m not guaranteed to be an expert on all of those things.

So with AI, I always tell people when they have these 50 ideas they want their AI assistant to do. I remind them, Hey, if you hire a human assistant and ask them to do 50 things, do you think they’d be really, really good at all that stuff? They may be decently good at them, but when you’re able to have a chatbot do one specific thing, it can be really, really good at that one thing and it can move a lot faster.

So an example would be, I have a client who she wanted to do. more YouTube and more blogging. And she was like, well, I have all these blog posts and I want it to be able to take these blog posts and turn into a script for me. Because when I do it, it’s like, I’m just reading a blog post. I’m like, that makes sense.

Your blogging voice and your speaking voice are going to be different. And then she was like, well, can I also write the blogs as well? And I was like, well, what you’re going to have is when you go to it and you say, Hey, I want to talk about It’s not going to know if it should write a blog post or if it should write a script.

So then you have to take the time. Yes, it’s only two seconds, but you have to take time. Say, Hey, I’d get a blog post. I need a script. I would rather you go in say like your minimal thing that you need to say. I need this topic today. And it knows I write blog posts or I write scripts. And so the more defined you can make your, what I call team members of AI chatbots, the better and quicker you can both move.

And I also find it makes it a lot easier systematically to know. Who quote unquote to go to. So I really build my team of chatbots just like I would build a team in an office where in my head they’re all in their own offices and I can just go into the office like, Hey, I need this or go into marketing, need this.

If I need brand stuff, I need to go into brand department. Having them separate also helps me to keep my ideas separate and to keep that kind of flow going a lot more natural as well.

[00:14:40] Mike Allton: So when, when Andrew was on the show, he was talking about, Almost exclusively using chat GPT. He’s only starting to touch on like cloud and some of them language models.

And he was pretty much just talking about using different chats for the different purposes. So he’s got a chat where he’s been working with chat GPT. He’s named his AI, by the way, it’s Giudini. And he has, he has a chat just for the promo videos that he does when he’s And then he’s got a different check for other purposes.

Is that your approach? Is that the model you’re using? Or, or what, how are you proceeding with these teams?

[00:15:12] Niki Dunagin: The way I teach it, I usually work with new entrepreneurs. And so they’re really trying to figure out a lot of stuff. They’re trying to figure out the entire ecosystem they need to build, which is.

I’ve been there, done that. So I have them build out their own copy and their own branding chatbots. And then I teach them, you can take these two chatbots and really make them into like their own teams. So like a content writer can become a blog writer, a podcast writer, a YouTube writer, an ad writer. You can really, once you have that one chatbot, you can duplicate it, and make it more specific each time you need to. I don’t go into too much with them at first Cuz the idea of building one chatbot is like whoa But once they have that one They’ve always always come back to me and be like can I also do this and also build this one? I’m like you can do that. I talked about one of my students constantly cuz I’m obsessed with her She is a brand strategist and she was one of my like early adopters.

She was, she’s like, I know AI is the future. I want to be on this course. And I’m like, perfect. Took the course. I met with her about two months later and we’re talking about her team of chatbots that she loves and she’s gone beyond what I told her to build. She’s built like 10 of them and she’s like, there’s so many of them.

I can’t manage all of them. Like, I don’t know how to like manage all these bots. And I jokingly said. You need an operations manager. Like you need a bot to manage your bots. She took that and said, yeah, I do built a chat bot to manage her chat bots. And like, that’s beyond what even I’ve done. I keep my team small.

cuz I like a small team, but some people really do build their teams out to feel like they really have grown their business to like accommodate all these employees. But without the overhead, without the drama of hiring onboarding, possibly future firing off boarding, which is awful. I’ve been there, done that.

It really is really cool to see how creative people take their own teams. And I find that it actually makes them feel more legitimate internally. I named my course as CEO of chatbots because most creative people don’t feel like CEOs. They feel like they’re just entrepreneurs that are, you know, running their fun little business.

I’m like, no, you run a business. It’s hard. You are a CEO. Let’s build you a team so that you feel like you’re the boss of some people. And they really do like gravitate towards that feeling to really start to learn how to do feedback, learn how to give feedback, learn how to manage and know what they’re wanting from their employees.

And then in the future, they could hire a human employee and be a lot more ready to do that. I’ve been in a position where I hired an assistant before and didn’t know how to manage her, didn’t know how to give feedback to her. She was amazing. Fortunately, she was very gracious to me and patient with me.

And so we made it work, but onboarding people and having them under you is its own skill in itself that people don’t usually have. And so I think AI, even in that sense is a stepping stone. If you’re not, if you know, in the future, you need to hire, but you’ve never done before, you’ve never managed a human being before, use chat to PT.

Trust me. It’s a lot easier to tell a chat to PT or a chat bot, whatever you use. I don’t like this, or can you do these 50 things for me? Versus a human or I know I’ve had an assistant and I’ve been like, I need her to do so many things. How do I even like approach this with her? Like, I don’t want to tell her if she needs to do like 50 things a day or else the world’s going to explode.

Yeah, I can do what I want. I can say what I want. It makes it a lot simpler. And so. That’s how I approach the team. It’s really based on what you need, what you need to delegate and then grow from there.

[00:18:57] Mike Allton: Yeah. I enjoy this so much because I work full time for Agorapulse. I’m part of a team. I’ve had direct reports in the past.

I’ve always enjoyed and want to keep The Social Media Hat as a solopreneur side hustle. I mean, maybe I’ll do it full time someday, but even then I, I love this idea of having this virtual team of AI assistants. So. For those of you listening, let’s suppose that, you know, we’ve determined the team members that we need and we’re starting to set them up.

What’s your process for onboarding and training the AI so that it understands the businesses, unique voice and needs. We kind of touched on this a little bit before, but I’d love if you could expand on that.

[00:19:35] Niki Dunagin: Yeah. So like I said, if you already have documents that you’ve set up when you set up your business, like SOPs, operations, branding guides, those kinds of things, use those as a guide.

Basically train it like you would a new hire, where you probably give them this giant binder of things. You’re like, Hey, read this today. And this is what we do. This is how we do it. That’s who we serve all those good things. If you don’t have those things. That’s where I would actually start is having the time to sit down and make your branding guide, make your voice guide, make those things that you would need for a new hire.

Because if you don’t have those things and you don’t know how to explain your own voice, AI is not going to be able to decipher what it needs to be doing. So definitely step into that boss role at CEO role where, you know, your brand voice, you know, who your target audience is, you know, Your messaging and your content pillars and all those good things.

Once you know those things, write it down in a document, drop it at AI. What’s really cool and what makes it feel like a partnership is if you don’t know how to explain your brand voice, that’s okay. Put it in your best words, have AI look at it and say, okay you can give it a caption you’ve written and say, how would you describe this voice?

Or how can I make my voice in this caption more like the voice of this competitor who I like their voice better? It can start to help you in making those documents as well, but really Hone in on your business and what makes it special. All those good things. In my course, I have an entire section called the operations manual.

It’s the longest section of it because it’s really detailed. And I walk you through all the things that you need to know and how to write it down so that you can just drop it into AI later, because that is a hard part for a lot of people is really documenting what’s going on. Who they are, what they do, their brand mission, their vision, those things that they don’t think is really important enough to do when they have all these million other things to do.

But once you have that and you start hiring quote unquote, either chatbots or humans, that’s where you start to get that business going and. It’s super important to have that really strong foundation as well.

[00:21:50] Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more. I wrote in a recent newsletter about how in my new role at Agorapulse, I needed to craft our brand story.

We’d never had an official brand story before. So I started by feeding Claude. I was using Claude in that example our, our vision document, our brand guidelines, which was voice tone style, that sort of thing. Some example, blog posts. And then I had a whole conversation with Claude about what was the What makes for a good brand story?

Why should we use it? How to build it? What frameworks we went back and forth and what frameworks to use. And we, you know, we set it on Tamsen Webster’s framework with a little bit of a tweaks from Donald Miller. And then we built together the actual brand story. And by the end of it, this was like a two day conversation, but by the end, it was an amazing conversation.

Brand story, absolutely phenomenal folks. Go to the newsletter. You’ll be able to see how that works, but we’re talking with Niki done again about integrating AI so well into your business and processes that it feels like a member of the team, and I want to drill down into some of these ideas. But before we get to that, let me share a great platform for you to use, particularly as a solopreneur to better leverage AI.

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With your audience, don’t just market market smarter with Magai tap the link in the show notes. So Niki, one of the things that I love is when new tools and technology are able to level the playing field, so to speak, and they allow solopreneurs, smaller businesses to really compete with larger ones. How do you see this approach to AI helping smaller businesses compete at that level?

[00:24:18] Niki Dunagin: I really feel like when I go back to my like first day starting my own course, my own brand, that kind of thing, I just already felt so behind. And I think a lot of people don’t recognize first, how long the people you’re looking at have been in the business. A lot of people that I thought have been brand new to the business or have been into a year have really been in for like five to seven years.

It really is. You may not be able to see, and also a lot of people have teams or support behind them in some way. So when you start out and you’re looking at people who are really successful, you can just feel very behind. And on top of that, you have so many things to do. You have content to get out, you have the products to build, you have the website to build, you have the systems to put in place.

And it can just feel like I really like a lot of people who I come to me are creative people. They really want to do brand design or they want to do social media management and that’s what they really want to be doing. They have so much behind that they have to get started with. They’re like, I don’t really know where to go with this.

I think with AI it can feel like you’re bridging so many gaps that stop a lot of people. So for me, I don’t feel like I’m the best content writer. I don’t feel like I’m the best like caption writer, and so just being able to go to AI and say, Hey, I need 10 captions for next week, and just having it write that, and then I can go in and just edit based on what I know would sound a little bit better or sound more like me.

Really saved so much time. It also is such a great tool for like looking at things that you don’t know how to do. So a lot of people in my course, they need to build a website to go to AI and say, Hey, I need to build out this one tool or this one form and my website, how do I do this? And they can say, I’m in show it, or I’m in WordPress or whatever I’m in and AI will just tell them like, Hey, this is how you do it.

And they’re like, Oh my gosh, like that was so easy. It really is. Just making those gaps smaller for everyone, especially when you’re starting out and you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have a lot of time. Making things faster and easier makes that difference for a lot of small entrepreneurs to keep on going.

Cause I know for me, I could have stopped a lot of times, but I was overwhelmed. AI just really kept me going. And. I think that’s so important. I see a lot of people being like, Oh, with AI, people are making birth content. You can make movies now with AI, but they’re not like the same as a human made movie.

People have been making bad businesses and bad movies forever. That’s just the reality. That’s always been happening. The difference is they had resources like money and time and connections that are out of reach for a lot of people. AI on the other hand is a resource that everyone has access to. And so it’s, I think it’s time for a lot of people to realize.

Use what you have access to as your resource. Don’t feel guilty about using a tool that makes you run faster. A lot of people feel like they’re cheating with AI, which is so strange to me. But I do get it, especially with creative people. They feel like they’re so ingrained in what they do. They’re like, well, if I use AI, I’ll lose my creative touch or I’ll lose my personal touch on it.

And I’m like, well, if you were to go to like a CEO and a high rise corner office, And he’s like, Hey, I’m going to hire an assistant. Would you tell him that he was doing a shortcut? No, you would not still work at nine to five and use AI to write a caption faster. Would you feel like you were cheating? No, you would not just because you’re running your own business for yourself and you are really integrated into every little thing.

It doesn’t mean you’re cheating. It doesn’t mean you’re doing a shortcut. It just means you’re making your own life easier so that you can keep building your own business, which is the important part of it.

[00:28:00] Mike Allton: I have to be transparent and honest for a moment because the first part of what you were talking about really, really resonated hard with me.

I have been in digital marketing for almost two decades. I’ve had The Social Media Hat, it’s an award winning blog since 2011. I’ve spoken on international stages and yet I can’t help but feel inadequate and behind, particularly when it comes to AI marketing. And there’s, there’s a, there’s a guy in our space who is, I’ve met him in person.

He’s a super nice guy. I know he owns multiple businesses, including an AI startup, and he has a huge Facebook group and a huge following. And I, I see his posts and I see is just the sheer, Volume of engagement he’s getting on his content. And I feel a lot of, you know, insecurity and adequacy, you know, compared to him.

And I know I’ve been in the business longer than him. And so that I struggle with that and I know I shouldn’t. So that’s, that’s a great reminder to all of you listening that we’re all on our own journeys and these tools are here to help us. So thank you for sharing that.

You mentioned a couple of benefits that people talk about all the time.

It saves us time. It allows us to do things we wouldn’t necessarily even know how to do. So it’s that almost a research assistant and strategist and consultant that can sit next to us. What are some of the unexpected things Benefits that you’ve seen either in your own work or other folks come up when they’re using AI in a team for marketing.

[00:29:29] Niki Dunagin: I think the one that always gets people is when I tell them, so I have a client right now who are building out two bots for her. She runs a really great community for entrepreneurs that she’s wanting to really build out to be what she wants it to be. So we’re building her a community manager that will help her come up with ideas keep track of her schedule for the week of what should be in the community.

It’ll also look at our analytics of what’s working, what’s not working each week to help her kind of really streamline that community. And then she also wants to build out a content creator. Most people really want a content bot because we have so much content out there. And so we were talking about this and she was like, well, should I also make a chat bot for creating content for the community?

And I was like, no, you can just start with one of them and then bring the other in the room. And she’s like, what do you mean? I was like, okay, well, let’s say you’re with your community manager. You’re talking about what works, what doesn’t work. And you have a guest speaker coming in next week, have it, write that all out.

You can say at content writer thought, look at this and write our content for the week for the community. And she was like, I can do that. And I was like, yeah, you can do that. It feels very much like. And I miss this working nine to five in an office. When you are sitting at your desk and you feel very alone, you feel very trapped and you’re like worrying about something like an email or something.

I would always pop my head over and be like, Hey, other person in my office. Can you look at this? Can you help me with this? Like, what do you think about this? Having that ability with chatbots to be like, yes, you can bring them in the same room, which is very cool. It can make people feel like they’re back in an office space where they’re not so alone in just like the way their eyes light up when they realize that is so fascinating to me and really cool.

But it also, that’s how you can make things work faster. Cause she was wanting to make another chatbot. And I was like, no, just have them talk to each other. I think that’s one of the benefits that I always like forget people don’t realize they can do, but also just, I never expect how happy it makes them to be able to do that.

So that’s definitely one of them. I think for me, just being able to ask the small questions like, I’m in my car. I’ll go to ChatGPT and be like, Hey, what’s this light on my dashboard mean? Or honestly, when I got my new car, I couldn’t figure out how to open the gas tank, which was very embarrassing. And I’m at the gas station.

Like, am I an idiot? Put in ChatGPT, my car model, how do I open the gas thing? It told me those little things that really start to add up in our day to day where we have these little questions and we just need answers to, that’s where you save so much time and for entrepreneurs, your time is money. And it’s also your energy.

And anytime you can save your energy towards something else I don’t think enough people recognize a lot of people don’t recognize the huge benefit of delegation when they’re so ingrained in their business. Delegation really is the first step for a lot of people to get their time back, which is really exciting.

[00:32:40] Mike Allton: Those are all huge benefits. I love, you know, the, the fact that we’re basically training ourselves or retraining ourselves now to turn to. AI when we just had the simplest of questions. I mean, you know, we didn’t grow up with Google and then eventually we figured out, Oh, we have search engines in the internet.

We can start to search those things for. So for those of us of a certain age, this is going to take some repetition, but I’m training my nine year old daughter to have conversations with PI all day long. So she’s going to grow up used to just simply turning to AI anytime she needs a piece of information.

And I loved your tip about. Bringing custom GPTs into existing conversations with other custom GPTs. This is something Molly Mahoney talked about a lot in a previous episode. I’ll link to that in the show notes is fantastic things that you can do when you start to chain together these different things, but what are some pitfalls or some challenges that folks can kind of expect, maybe should be aware of when they’re relying on AI for marketing and how can they be mitigated?

[00:33:40] Niki Dunagin: I do think that as we’re relying more on AI, People naturally, and I have this as well, people naturally feel like they are disconnecting from what they’re putting out. So let’s say you use AI to make all of your captions for the week. You can start to feel like these captions aren’t from you anymore.

And so what I do is I have it write out a lot of content like blog posts and captions and my posts, all those things, but I still put my own self in them by editing what I find. And when I tell people constantly, especially creatives. Your AI is never going to be as talented as you. It is just like hiring an assistant.

When you hire an assistant, you’re not replacing yourself. You are just getting help so that you can be better at your own job and in doing what you enjoy doing. And so I always remind people, like you need to continue to step in and still be that boss to that chat bot, because I think as more people use AI for content specifically.

You are going to notice those patterns of behavior in the same language, the same words. It’s gotten a lot better over the last couple of months, but it’s going to happen again where people can feel they’ll get that like kind of literacy skill around it, where they can kind of pick out what’s AI written.

And I think as that happens, as we all, as Humans kind of learn that skill. I think that’s where people are going to really want that true connection and constant, especially in marketing. So I would say be ahead of the curve by using AI authentically, keeping yourself in it so that you don’t feel like down the line, it’s even harder to put your own self back in your content.

That would be one thing. I think another pitfall would probably be Not and I had this recently Not looking at other options for a long time I was anti claude to be completely honest because I was like I built my entire business in ChatGPT I learned ChatGPT like I know this one thing. I don’t want to continue to learn other things but by using both i’m actually able to Kind of put them head to head.

I’ve even had my custom chat bot write something. I’ve had Claude write the exact same thing. If Claude was better, I copied and pasted it to my custom chat bot and said, Hey, This is better for this reason. Can you update your training to know that I prefer this for this reason? So use this, use all the resources you can don’t get too complacent in one, but also at the same time, don’t constantly chase the new shiny object.

I think the really awesome thing right now is that all the AI tools are competing very heavily. They’re all trying to race each other. We’ve seen it over the last year, especially. ChatGPT will do one feature and then. One or two months later, Claude will have it. One month, Claude is really great at writing, but then the next month, ChatGPT will be like, Hey, I have a new thing.

Check it out. And it’s really, really good. So don’t feel the need to constantly chase after them as either really learn one tool, because when you learn one tool, it’s easier to learn everything else. But you can also feel like you’re not constantly having to learn something every single month or every single week as well.

[00:36:55] Mike Allton: That’s a really good point. I often talk about Magai. I had the mid roll video a moment ago because I like that. If I’m using Magai, I can pick and choose which model I want to use depending on the purpose. Dustin Stout’s, a friend of mine, he found a Magai. He’s got all of the different versions of chat GPT, all the versions of Claude, all the versions of Gemini, right?

So if you know a model is better for one thing than another, you can pick and choose and you can slip back and forth even within the same chat. And then he also has His version of custom GPTs are called personas, which those persist across all the models. So if I’m using cloud for something, I can switch back to using chat GPT with the same persona or custom GPT.

But to your point, there’s always certain things that are almost better if you do them inside of those models themselves. So that is a bit of a challenge, particularly for solopreneurs to wrap their heads around what the models can do. What the tools can do. I do recommend, just like you said, for people to keep it simple and not try to do all these things.

Particularly again, if you are a solopreneur or a small business owner, what final advice do you give somebody like that who’s maybe just starting their journey into AI and AI and marketing and they don’t necessarily know where to start?

[00:38:10] Niki Dunagin: I think my biggest advice is just to start. I feel like a lot of people just starting is really hard for them.

I would say pick a tool that you enjoy being in. And I say that because right now the biggest ones I’m seeing are Claude or ChatGPT. And if you were someone like me who you just need to feel comfortable in the space, Pick the one you’re comfortable in. It does not matter which one it is. Just pick one.

And then from there, learn how to train them the easiest way, whether it’s dropping in a document, making custom GPTs in ChatGPT, but definitely taking the time to learn how to train and give feedback is the biggest thing. Because I find when people go a little bit too hard in just prompting or worrying about the right prompt, those kind of things, that’s where they get really overwhelmed.

Learn how to really chat with the chat bots and have that back and forth. If you’re getting that answer that you don’t like, tell it why and build that skill set out. And then also I recommend everyone keep a tab open with whatever tool you use. That way that you have that reminder of a time you pause and you’re annoyed about a task or you don’t want to do something or you don’t want to look something up.

Just drop it into that tool and see what it does. It can’t guarantee it’s going to do exactly what you need to do. It may not give you the right answer, but just being able to see what it can do nine out of 10 times, I still find myself being very surprised by what it does. And so building that habit, even for myself to remember to ask it that’ll go a long way in building those habits as well, which is really important.

[00:39:47] Mike Allton: Terrific advice. Great points. Thank you so much, Niki. This has been absolutely amazing. For folks who want to learn more, maybe learn more about your course, where should they go to find and connect with you?[00:39:58] Niki Dunagin: Super simple. The Creative Co Pilot on Instagram and threads or the creativecopilot. com.[00:40:04] Mike Allton: Awesome.

Thank you, Niki. Thank you all of you for listening. I’ll have all of Niki’s links in the show notes. And remember, if you are truly just getting started in your AI journey, I’ve got a great resource for you, an AI marketing primer. That’s going to help you understand, you know, what are we talking about with these language models?

What is a custom GPT? All that basic information. That’s just going to arm you for everything that you need to know going forward as a marketer on the link to that in the show notes below. That’s all the time we’ve got for today, friends. Please, please, please find the AI in Marketing: Unpacked podcast on Apple and drop me a review.

I’d love to know what you think. Until next time, welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in Marketing: Unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies. You enjoyed the show. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have. Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing. Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

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