How to Use AI in 2025 Without Losing Your Brand’s Voice [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 87]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:00
In the past, we said first hire for your marketing team, content manager, writer. But today, we're saying the first hire needs to be. ♫ Music

Alex Winter
0:00:12
Welcome back to Endless Customers. I'm your host, Alex Winter, and today we're joined by a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and a partner at Impact, Marcus Sheridan.

Alex Winter
0:00:19
Welcome back to the show.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:29
All right, man.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:30
Let's do this.

Alex Winter
0:00:31
Let's do it. Today, we're talking about the evolution of marketing and how fast-paced marketing involves in general and how that affects your marketing team and your marketing strategy and what you need to do to keep up with it.

Marcus Sheridan
0:00:41
Yeah. Well, the issue is a lot of companies, especially leaders, CEOs, they weren't taught, hey, this is what your marketing team should look like. So that in and of itself is a big problem. Now what's another big problem is with the entrance of AI into our lives, that's very much affecting

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:04
what your marketing team might look like. Another component that's affecting what your marketing team might look like is how buyers are changing and what they're demanding, what they want to, for example, see. If you look at the ask, you answer,

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:21
we said, all right, your first hire is gonna be your content manager, which was good advice because the content manager, their main purpose was to create all that written form content that makes your website so great, that was great for SEO.

Alex Winter
0:01:39
All the blogs, all that stuff.

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:40
Yeah, your blog articles, your pages. Certainly they could do social media as well and some other things. Well, okay, so what has changed? Let's first analyze that. Well, one component that's changing is

Marcus Sheridan
0:01:56
companies are getting less visitors through search, through Google search. And I've been telling everybody, don't build your house on Google search. We just don't know where it's gonna be. We do know that generally most websites

Marcus Sheridan
0:02:12
are getting less visitors right now than they were, let's say, a year ago. Now, there's exceptions to this, of course. Why? Because AI makes it so that a lot of people get the answer directly on Google without making a click. So it's that zero-click experience.

Marcus Sheridan
0:02:30
Hey, I got my answer. I'm good. I don't need to click on a website. A lot of people are using ChatGBT. A lot of people are using Claude. So oftentimes, the visit to the website isn't happening until they're further down that

Marcus Sheridan
0:02:45
buyer's journey and they're a little bit more informed than they were. So what might have started that journey on your website, now is starting a little bit later. So that's an issue. The other thing we're seeing is this. With the demise, if you will,

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:04
if we can use that word, of search and of Google, at least traditional Google search, we're gonna see an uptick in other areas. We're going to see an uptick in the importance of YouTube. YouTube is going to be very strong in the next five years. So stock up. YouTube, stock up. It's been strong and it just keeps getting stronger.

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:30
Yes. Social media, stock up. Because a lot of people are going to get their information, do their searches on social, TikTok being one of them. So, here's the issue though. If you're gonna be great on YouTube, if you're gonna be great on, let's say, TikTok, which, whatever you do, don't think for a second,

Marcus Sheridan
0:03:51
hey, that's not my business when it comes to TikTok. It absolutely could be. If you're gonna be good on LinkedIn, even, as a B2B, now, all of a sudden you're like, man, I've got to be doing video. I've got to be more like a media company. So whereas before we might have said, okay, depending on your business, you might have

Marcus Sheridan
0:04:13
the content manager, your first hire, we bring in a videographer in six months. Well now sometimes what we're seeing is we might bring somebody into a company because obviously this is what we do an impact. We help organizations become the most known and trusted brand in their market by helping them build a team that generates that massive trust in the market, right? That is a powerhouse sales and marketing team that doesn't need an agency to do it for them, which by the way is a dead-end strategy and you don't want to be playing that game, not

Marcus Sheridan
0:04:46
going forward. The future of the internet is really built on those organizations that can create their own content. If you're not holding the paintbrush, trust me, you're not going to create a masterpiece by someone else doing that painting for you. It's just not going to happen. So if we've got this shift from, okay, SEO, less important in terms of impact, well, that means we might not need to make that person our first hire. Especially if we have a visual product or service, could be that video needs to be the primary hire.

Marcus Sheridan
0:05:26
At the same time, because of AI, if someone knows how to use it, that's the key here, if they know how to use AI the right way, prompt it the right way, well, it can take a person that maybe is average at writing and it can make them much, much better.

Marcus Sheridan
0:05:43
Hi, I'm one of those people. Like you said, that might apply to you Alex. It does. And it probably applies to a lot of our viewers. And so the evolution is this, and this is where it gets tricky. It's a case by case basis when we're talking to a company as to whether we hire someone that is a strong writer

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:04
that can also do video, do we hire a writer and a videographer, do we hire a videographer that can do some writing, you see what I'm saying? Do we hire two videographers out the gate? Yeah, well it's really interesting the shift

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:19
because it used to be exactly like you said,

Alex Winter
0:06:21
content manager first, then videographer, and now we're starting to see this hybrid of the two, which is really cool. And that's the technology that is giving people the power.

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:33
That's what's possible. That's what's possible today. Now, it's not gonna happen though, unless you have a culture of experimentation with AI, unless your people learn how to utilize these things. Obviously, I've been talking a lot about it,

Marcus Sheridan
0:06:49
and obviously our team at Impact, we teach all of our clients, to the best of our ability, how to use AI within their sales and marketing so that they can be super efficient, they can be multipliers when it comes to their productivity. Because we want, realistically, a marketer today,

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:08
if they are great with AI, they can do the work that three or four people were doing five years ago. That's truth.

Alex Winter
0:07:17
That is the power of it.

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:18
That's the power of it. And I mean, if you're using AI, you know this. I'm using it, and I'm like, I can't believe I got that much done. Simple things, you know. There's a tool that I use right now called VoicePal,

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:33
which I really like. Okay. Let's just give you an example of how somebody that is organized, can do video, and knows what good writing looks like, but maybe they're not a great writer. So there's this tool called VoicePal.

Marcus Sheridan
0:07:47
The way VoicePal works is it will record you for up to 25 minutes. You just go. And then what's cool about it is AI transcribes it all and then it asks you some deeper questions so that you can expound further. So let's be hypothetical Alex, let's say you're a CEO and I am your content person. I'm a video stud, I can write, but I mainly am

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:18
using AI in my subject matter experts. I turn on VoicePal and I just get you to talk out loud to it. So we're having an interview and it's voice pal is picking up the whole thing. It transcribes the whole thing. It comes up with additional questions or I can ask you those additional questions. And then we take that entire transcription from the interview. We put it into AI. Let's say it's a Claude or let's say it's a chat GPT. You know, right now I'm using Claude, but that changes like every other week depending

Marcus Sheridan
0:08:46
on who's got the best update. Right? Right. And so we put it into Claude and we say, alright, we want to create an article, we want to create a social media post, whatever the thing is. We want to maintain the CEO's voice as much as possible. We want you to add structure and clarity.

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:03
But we want you to use as much of his or her words as possible. This is the type of thing that somebody can do. And so now, from that interview, we've got this great post. I mean, I was writing chapters in my last,

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:17
in Endless Customers, I would just take something out, I would riff it in VoicePal, and then I would say, all right, I want you to take this, I want you to maintain my voice, I just want you to add structure and clarity to it, and I would look at it and say,

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:34
okay, that sounds right, that feels right, that doesn't feel right, that doesn't look right. But it was me, it was all coming from me. That's the key, like my stories, my thoughts, my style, the way that I use my words. Because that's the key element,

Marcus Sheridan
0:09:48
one of the key emphasis of Endless Customers is be more human than others in your space are willing to be. That's one of the core pillars of a known and trusted brand that we talked about, there's four in the book. And so, this is what's possible. It wasn't possible five years ago.

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:06
So now, it's just incredible how quickly you can produce that blog article. You can easily today produce six blog articles in the person's voice today. In one day, you could do that if you wanted to. You absolutely could.

Alex Winter
0:10:23
It comes down to how you train it though. Correct. And I think that stood out for me from what you said, because we want to build trust, we want to be transparent and honest, and I think people say,

Alex Winter
0:10:34
like, but AI, that's not being transparent and honest, but it's how you use it. Do you use it in a trustworthy way? Are you training it so it really picks up your vibe and your style and your voice? And then are you also reviewing it?

Alex Winter
0:10:45
You're not just going to chat GPT, throwing something in, and then copy and pasting whatever comes out. You can't, that's not how this is, that's not how it should be done in my opinion.

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:53
Oh, 100%.

Alex Winter
0:10:54
If you want it to be authentic, you gotta.

Marcus Sheridan
0:10:55
Because it's gonna lead to distrust. Right. If, you know, we talk about signals a lot in the book and how, you know, there's certain things that signal something was written by a human versus written by AI.

Marcus Sheridan
0:11:09
And so, you know, we've got a, there's all these nuances that make something feel human. In fact, there's an entire chapter just on how do I write and sound human with the content that I am putting up on the screen. This is really important.

Marcus Sheridan
0:11:22
It's gonna become more and more important with time, but I'll just say it really quickly. The biggest way is to not have everything be uniform. To, in fact, have what isn't a grammatical error, but have one-word sentences right and and just mix it up and But a lot of personal story a lot of company story a lot of company experiences

Marcus Sheridan
0:11:46
It's just going to be here that should be like a requirement for any piece of content one other thing I want to say about your your marketing team though. Yeah, let's go back And this is you know we've talked about this to even an impact You might find okay. I've got this great person. They know how to use a guy we're able to produce a lot of his written content, especially using some

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:04
of the interview tools, and they're able to shoot a lot of the video, but then they spend a lot of their time editing video. Well, we're seeing more and more situations, and everybody's got different opinions on this, but I think editing video is something that,

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:21
there's people all over the world that can edit video, and can do a great job at a very, extremely reasonable price. Yeah, competitive price for sure. Like I have a personal videographer that does all my shooting,

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:33
but then we send that video to another editor that's in the Philippines. He works for me, 40 hours a week, he works for me. I'm paying him more than he could get anywhere locally in his town. And so it's really blessing him,

Marcus Sheridan
0:12:51
but it's also blessing me because I'm able to save in terms of what I'm spending. Now, some people might hear that and say, well, you should only work with people that are in your own country or whatever. But I think we have a worldwide economy.

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:04
And I think that person in the Philippines deserves to grow their skills and to use them and to live a life of financial prosperity just as much as the person that is down the street from me. So I don't want to limit anybody.

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:19
I believe in the meritocracy and I believe in the open market and I think it's all good things. And so as you're considering your marketing team today, you need to say, number one, what For us, that's at least at a 80% level of what we were doing before. And then you can come in and fill in the gap, okay?

Marcus Sheridan
0:13:43
Number two, you gotta say, is video or the written word more important to us right now in terms of our primary focus, right? Number three, should we be outsourcing any of this? And by answering those questions, any of this?

Marcus Sheridan
0:14:02
And by answering those questions, and these are the questions that we work with our clients on, now suddenly you can formulate a marketing team that is doing the work of a very large group of people in the past, where endless customers, they ask, you answer, might have not been very attainable for the sub-one-million-dollar company,

Marcus Sheridan
0:14:35
there's absolutely companies now that have a one-person marketing crew that are kicking butt and taking names because they're understanding how to use that worldwide economy, they're understanding how to use AI and putting those two together. They're doing the work of three or four people

Marcus Sheridan
0:14:53
That's pretty exciting

Alex Winter
0:14:54
It's it's pretty pretty darn exciting and it gives people the opportunity That maybe are just starting on their business journey or that are a smaller organization it gives them the chance to actually put their stake in the ground make their claims and And grow and become part of the become part of this world economy. I mean, that's a beautiful thing

Marcus Sheridan
0:15:09
That's what it's all about beautiful thing. So that's where marketing teams are today. Listen to, if you're listening to this right now, and you're just like, man, I don't, I still don't know how we stand, reach out to us right here at Impact. And like our team will happily give you recommendations

Marcus Sheridan
0:15:29
on how you should form your marketing team based on your business. You don't have to buy something from us for us to give you that answer. We want to help you with that. And so, reach out, let us know,

Marcus Sheridan
0:15:42
and we'll give you our thoughts.

Alex Winter
0:15:43
Absolutely, I got one more question for you. Where does the quantity versus quality piece come into this conversation for marketing teams that are out there? Because I think this gives you the power to produce a ton of content,

Alex Winter
0:15:55
but then it's like, where do you find the balance of, is too much content, or what seems to work the best, or where's that balance out?

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:01
Well, the reality is most companies aren't particularly good at producing high quality until they have produced high quantity. It's from the reps that you gain the skills to produce something that's really impressive. So I might have, like when I started way back in the day, which for me was 2009, my first bit of content, was 2009. If I had said, man, this is gonna be a 10 out of 10 quality level, well, guess what?

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:33
I mean, maybe at the time that was good for me, but I look back on it today, it sucked, right? I mean, it was low quality. I didn't know that at the time. I was doing the best I can, for the most part, right? And to this day, I say this, listen,

Marcus Sheridan
0:16:49
if it's like a seven, eight out of 10, ship it. Just like, put it out to the world. Iterate, learn from it. Now, make sure you got good audio. That hasn't changed, right? We've gotta have good audio.

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:03
People need to be able to hear the thing clearly. But outside of that, in terms of overall production and the visual as edge. I mean heck we were shooting videos today on our cell phones. Yeah, because that's The creative edge that sometimes is needed to make a video pop off Different oftentimes is better than better. Mm-hmm. And so

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:28
You might say well we could we've got cameras here that are 5,000 bucks. Why would we use that over a cell phone? Because showing a vertical cell phone video with interesting footage and interesting style, well, different is better than better. And so you have to think like that as you are creative going forward.

Marcus Sheridan
0:17:55
I mean, if you look at the great story of Liquid Death, the one that I'm just so fascinated with. Yeah. I mean, they became one of the biggest beverage brands in the world. Their marketing team is five people, the creative team.

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:09
Wow, I didn't know that.

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:10
Five people.

Alex Winter
0:18:11
Okay.

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:12
Nuts.

Alex Winter
0:18:13
That's nuts.

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:14
That is nuts. Yes. And, but they are constantly breaking rules. And so what's more important than the size or the makeup of your team is are you willing to break the rules in your space that you've been given? Willing to be courageous, audacious, take leaps of faith, get a little nervous when you hit publish?

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:36
That's living, baby.

Alex Winter
0:18:37
That is living.

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:38
And that to me is business ownership. That's what great marketing is all about. That's art. And I would challenge anyone listening to this to do just that.

Alex Winter
0:18:47
So for the closing thought here, what's the one thing people should take away from this conversation? What's the one thing that you think is really imperative when we're talking about marketing and the evolution of where it's going?

Marcus Sheridan
0:18:58
Well, nothing ever remains the same. We're evolving, the world's evolving. Don't complain about it. Lean into it. Don't say, well, but it was like this three years. That's what it was.

Marcus Sheridan
0:19:12
But today, this is where the market is. So just keep evolving with it. You have to have people on your team that can evolve with the market. If you just have that content writer and all they want to do is write blog articles like it's 2010 and they don't want to use any tools and they don't want to maybe learn anything to do with video and they don't want to learn HubSpot, they're gone.

Marcus Sheridan
0:19:35
They're not a good fit. They've got to be willing to evolve their skills, grow their skills. And if you've got somebody like that, they're always going to have a place, let's be honest. They're always going to have a place.

Alex Winter
0:19:47
Agreed, yeah. Great insights. Thanks for sharing and thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate your time.

Marcus Sheridan
0:19:52
Yeah, good times.

Alex Winter
0:19:53
Awesome. All right, for everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. Catch you on the next episode. Catch you on the next episode.

Alex Winter
0:19:57
Bye!