Are you looking to make AI work for your small business? You have come to the right place. This week, our Small Business Matters podcast dives into AI with expert and author Pam Didner. Pam is a powerhouse in the marketing world. She’s not just a marketing expert; she’s a problem solver, a digital enthusiast, and a lover of all things tech. With a rich background in B2B marketing, Pam is a much sought-after keynote speaker and trainer for B2B marketing teams.
She’s the host of a popular podcast, B2B Marketing and More, where she dives into marketing strategies and trends that shape modern business. Pam’s also the acclaimed author of three insightful books: Effective Sales Enablement, The Modern AI Marketer, and Global Content Marketing. Each book is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering practical advice and cutting-edge strategies for marketers everywhere.
If you would like to learn more about AI and how it can increase productivity for your small business, be sure to listen and subscribe.
Watch Our Interview
Key highlights:
Understanding AI’s Capabilities and Limitations
Pam highlighted that while AI can significantly augment marketing strategies by providing tailored answers and insights, it’s important to recognize its limitations. AI operates based on the data it is trained on and thus can inherit biases or produce less-than-perfect outputs. Small businesses should utilize AI tools critically, ensuring they understand the technology’s scope and its potential biases.
Integrating AI into Marketing Strategies
AI’s ability to handle data and generate creative outputs has made significant strides. Pam discussed using AI for practical tasks like drafting emails and ideating campaign ideas, which can streamline operations and enhance creativity. However, she emphasizes the importance of marketers setting boundaries and refining AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with the brand’s voice and goals.
Leveraging AI for Data Analysis and Personalization
The discussion highlighted the transformative potential of AI in analyzing extensive datasets quickly and efficiently. For small businesses, this means being able to personalize marketing efforts more effectively if they maintain clean and updated databases. Pam stressed the importance of data quality, noting that ‘garbage in, garbage out’ holds true in the realm of AI, where the output quality depends heavily on the input data quality.
AI’s Role in Enhancing Customer Experience
AI can assist small businesses in various sectors by improving the customer experience, whether through automated communications, personalized recommendations, or efficient service delivery. For example, a dermatologist uses AI to manage appointments and communications effectively, demonstrating that AI can streamline operations in businesses of all types.
Future Trends in AI and Marketing
Pam predicts that AI will continue to integrate deeply into the marketing landscape, potentially taking on more autonomous roles in crafting marketing strategies and customer interactions. She also suggests that as AI tools become more sophisticated, they will offer unprecedented levels of personalization in marketing efforts.
Those highlights were just scratching the surface, and our conversation underscores the evolving relationship between AI and small businesses. We emphasize the need for strategic integration while being mindful of the technology’s current limitations. As AI continues to develop, it promises to offer more tools and opportunities for businesses to enhance their efficiency and competitiveness.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview:
Gary Stockton: Welcome back to the Small Business Matters podcast. I’m so thrilled about today’s guest and what we’re going to be talking about.
The first time I met Pam Didner, I had just listened to her talk about AI at the B2B Exchange Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, just prior to the pandemic. That was just over four years ago. And a lot has changed. Open AI with chat GPT. Claude and Google Gemini and other popular AI tools are now considered mainstream.
Pam is a powerhouse in the marketing world. She’s not just a marketing expert, she’s a problem solver, a digital enthusiast, and a lover of all things tech. With a rich background in B2B marketing, Pam is a much sought after keynote speaker and trainer for B2B marketing teams. She’s the host of a popular podcast, B2B Marketing and More, where she dives into marketing strategies and trends that shape modern business. Pam’s also the acclaimed author of three insightful books, Effective Sales Enablement, The Modern AI Marketer, and Global Content Marketing. Each book is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering practical advice and cutting edge strategies for marketers everywhere. Pam, Welcome to The Small Business Matters podcast.
Pam Didner: Thank you so much for having me, Gary. I love your voice. It’s so soothing. I was listening to it. I was like, Oh my God, this is, it makes me relax and I’m yelling in my voice. It just have this it’s like a bulldozer I tend to overwhelm people.
Gary Stockton: That’s very nice of you to say, and I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say that about you because, as I’ve seen you present, you’re, just a really great communicator and also consistent, content creator. And I think that’s really what it’s about in our game is always being out there with, insightful information, helpful information.
Now you’ve been in marketing for quite some time, but what sparked your interest in AI and, how did you start integrating it into your marketing strategy?
Pam Didner: Yeah, that’s actually a great question. And, I think, I, the first time I heard about AI was back in 1997, long time ago. It’s basically when, IBM has this machine called Deep Blue. I think you probably know that and is like a chess machine that actually be the human chess master. I don’t know his name, Gary Kasparov. I think that’s the remember. So they actually have multiple different games, I think in 1996 and 1997. And of course machine did a fantastic job. And I was like, Oh my God, one day. One day this machine is going to do a whole lot more. I don’t know what that is, but it’s going to happen. So that’s how it got started. And, to answer your question. The second question, how did I start integrating it into say overall marketing strategies or implementation? Just like you said earlier, in November, 2022, Open AI launched ChatGPT that literally just took the world by storm.
I think a lot of us are using ChatGPT to get our questions answered and also find a way to leverage that to say to make our marketing a little easier. For example, writing email. And, or, ideate, with, AI about some of the campaign ideas. So when you ask AIs about questions because they search the whole internet, it tends to give you its best answer. It may not be right 100 percent of the time, but it helps tremendously when it provides just one tailored answer to you.
Gary Stockton: Yes, I agree. And I’ve been dabbling myself. I started using ChatGPT, I actually using Jasper, which was before. Yeah. So I’m a little old school. I’ve, I got dabbling in, in, Jarvis and Jasper and, introduced it around the business. And then people were like, Oh, this is really interesting. This saves us some productivity. But, it being a, I’m a writer, I like to write my own content. I’ve been in two worlds, since it’s come out. And it’s, good for the ideation side of things. I think, it really helps me with some subject lines. You can test different subject lines and titles and optimizing a blog post, but, I’m literally setting some own personal limits. What are some common misperceptions about AI that small businesses should be aware of?
Pam Didner: There are several things I want to share with everyone. the artificial intelligence obviously, is artificial intelligence and it is trained it because it was trained by human feeding massive amount of data to it. So they only know what they know. Like humans, we only know what we know, right? So they are, they only know what it was trained for. So the data sets that feed into AI is very, important. And, you have to understand it also has a bias like us. And not every single answer provided by AI is what I call perfect. And you need to have a point of view.
So AI has a bias. You need to have a point of view to know that you can gauge the answer they provided and number the last one is I doesn’t know your business. You do. And you need to make sure that when you use AI, you don’t use it blindly and have a point of view about it and then know that what to take, what not to take. It’s like what you said, Gary, you are a writer. So you’ve been writing for a long period of time, and you know what good writing is. You also know what writing is more like a business writing. You also know when you write for your clients, what clicks, what makes your target audience click or not click.
And having that point of view is very, important. When you say you set boundaries, I think what you meant is you have a specific point of view. Like when AI writes something, you will look at it and say, I don’t think so. And you modify, you edit it as you see fit. And that I think is the mindset you need to have when you work with AI.
Gary Stockton: Yeah. I agree. Put, your own fingerprints on your work. Someone that really uses AI, I’ve seen use AI in a smart way is Scott Galloway for his, newsletter. he has a great, he has a great newsletter that he does, on the weekend’s, “No Mercy, No Malice.” And he’ll get into a bit of storytelling in that, he did one on AI, but he actually talked about, the, Oh, the, the Luddites and, destroying weaving machines. Because they thought that was going to put all of the. texture work, textile workers out of, business back in the day. But he’ll start with that story and give, do some research on the Luddites and then weave that into what he wants to say about AI.
Pam Didner: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. And AI cannot do that for you. If AI wants to write the opening and, it’s just probably write a very common opening or very business like opening, but there’s no personal touch to it. Yeah.
Gary Stockton: So the title of your book, The Modern AI Marketer, suggests a transformative approach to marketing. Can you share a pivotal moment when you realized AI was going to change the game for marketers?
Pam Didner: That’s a great point. First of all, the book was written before ChatGPT became popular. So it was written in 2019. It’s a bit dated and I’m in the process of rewriting it. And, I think, when I realized it, really has, impact on marketing is I was looking at how Amazon and, or how’s Google actually use AI.
So way back then, I would say in 2015, 2016, or even earlier that, the using algorithm. To provide personalized, recommendation like Amazon does all the time, right? You purchase this, therefore you might be interested in that and you watch this film, so you, therefore you might be interested in that.
I think things got me interested way back in terms of recommendation and also in terms of how Google continuously optimize its search that will try to anticipate that the phrases that you will say when you type into a Google search, that’s also artificial, intelligence in training, but they are, but that’s more kind of enterprise usage. And that was not widely available to consumers or users, common users like us. And of course the open AI, ChatGPT opened that door for everyone.
Gary Stockton: Yeah. Data plays a crucial role in AI and as they say garbage in, garbage out. How can a small business ensure that they’re collecting and utilizing data effectively to feed their AI tools and, get the best results? Cause it’s, gone beyond just putting a text prompt. You can, put spreadsheets of data in there now and have it analyze What should a small business owner be thinking of there in terms of data?
Pam Didner: I think, this is a problem, honestly, that every single business encounters, it’s not just small businesses. Yeah, if you can take a spreadsheet’s worth of information and then upload it to an AI application and have them do analysis for you, fantastic. Or even write a summary of that, that analysis. Or you can just, get a bunch of data and dump into AI and, ask a specific questions, have them do analysis.
From my perspective, the most important thing is you need to make sure that your data is clean. And, this is an issue that every single marketer encounters, including myself. I have, I, I encourage people to subscribe to my newsletters. However, how often do I clean that newsletter database?
How often do I enrich that database with the latest information that can be associated with the people that subscribe to my newsletter? I think the most important thing for any businesses, including small businesses, is if you have a limited amount of data sets and you and it can be captured in Excel or in database and yeah, you use AI to do further analysis. Everybody can do that. How do you make sure that data set or that quality of data is being kept up to date?, that will be something that we all have to take into consideration if you want to use AI for further analysis, but I, me included, honestly, I’m just using myself as an example.
I’m not doing a very good job of that. So that’s something that I think moving forward will be faced by every single business.
Gary Stockton: Yeah. and I think also when it comes to personalizing campaigns, if you’ve been, dilligent and disciplined about, like you said, appending, data to your email list and just getting, whether it’s male or female followers or subscribers, and doing, you wouldn’t do, a clothing or a fashion, type of story or promotion. to, to males, if it’s, women’s fashion, so yeah, so it’s a great point. And also I think because third party cookies are going to be going away or being phased out, I think the marketers themselves really have to take some responsibility in, gathering that information on the front end. Would you agree?
Pam Didner: Yes, I do. In fact, I, when you mentioned about cookies at that time, I was thinking I wanted to talk about first party data.
So you brought a very good point. And, just for all of you watching or listening, obviously the first party data is the data you collect yourself directly from users in a very simple term.
And, not just with a party, I’m sorry, not just with cookie, going away, like Gary indicated is. Is your ability to collect the first party information directly from user and you always have to make assumption that your user are going to give you like more accurate information, but do you know how many times when I look at information I know it’s that user just doesn’t want me to know his or her first name. They just attach the last name and leave the first name field empty. And then with that being said, when you gather that information, there’s already one field of information missing. And the question is, what can you do as a marketer to gather that piece of information?
Moving forward, a lot of information that we’re going to gather from our customers, you have to earn it, they want to get something in order to give you something that’s assumed they want to give, right? So what are you going to do to get that information and hopefully the information they provide to you as a first party data is also accurate?
And I think that would be the challenge that the marketers will encounter in the future, which is just like you indicated. And, with that being said, we have to work harder. When I say harder, it’s Oh, it’s like we work in longer hours. That’s not the point. It’s working harder in terms of we have to think how can we get that information, but at the same time, that is not intrusive to our user and provide the information or, relevant information that they need. And there’s a fine balance. I think every single marketer is going to deal with that in the future, me included.
Gary Stockton: So AI can help all kinds of small businesses or can it? If my business was a typewriter repair shop, I’m sure Ann Handley would be raising her hand to, to do business with that person, but perhaps a hair salon. Can, AI still help these kinds of businesses to grow?
Pam Didner: I think so, and let’s think about it. If you are a small business, and, say you are a typewriter repair shop or even you are a hair salon and, you have to think through in terms of what kind of, customer experience you want to provide to your customers.
That’s assumed that you are, you don’t have the website and, everybody comes to you is still word of mouth. And you don’t have a digital presence, but your business is booming. That’s just because everybody loves you. And then you, then everything is manual. The whole process manual and communication tend to be in person.
So you have to think through in terms of how you communicate with your audience and also how you get your name out. Once you understand that process, it doesn’t matter if it’s manual or it doesn’t matter if it’s digital. You have a solid understanding how that works, and then you can determine how AI can help you.
Is that helpful? I’m not answering your question directly, more or less, understand how your business works. Once you identify that process and you can articulate that very clearly, then you can see like how AI can help you. That’s number one.
Pam Didner: And, for example, I do actually have a, a doctor that I go on a regular basis and, giving, and I have a minor skin problem. So it’s dermatologist and, for this specific doctor is obviously a small business and serves the local area. And, It’s one doctor and one receptionist, and the receptionist serves as a nurse as well.
So the, it’s, actually a fairly decent sized business. He has a lot of patients, but there’s only two people. That’s it from my perspective. That’s amazing. And he got the process down. Our communication is always through text, It’s like the meeting, the appointment confirmations through text and, the appointment reminder is through text, even his, like instruction, like what kind of ointment I should use and the where to get it and how the frequency of it. It’s a through text. And so I can tell that everything is very digital for him. And, but it’s very interesting that, I respond to an appointment like I say, Oh yes, I will. I’ll come tomorrow. I will. Yes. But there’s a three standard email, honestly, three standard email that you just send it to everybody.
He can obviously use AI to personalize that if he chooses to, because he’s already have a process workflow build up. Now he just have to source possibly another tool or looking at the tools that he’s using right now and see if there’s AI feature that he can turn on. So, look at your workflow and look at what you do and then determine how you want to use AI to help.
And the best way to do it is looking at your existing tools and see if they have AI features associated with it, and then leverage that as much as you can as a starting point.
Gary Stockton: Very good. So you’ve been following AI for some time. What’s been the most surprising development for marketing or marketing use case that you’ve seen?
Pam Didner: It’s actually not necessarily so I want to share with you. It’s not necessarily a marketing case study. And, first, sorry, this is not like a marketing case study. But I thought when I read this specific article, I was like, completely in awe. Microsoft has this AI tool. Okay. actually, many enterprises they do.
They work with other enterprises. like the lithium batteries and the materials of building the battery and, is, is limited and for the enterprises and a lot of scientists are thinking about finding a new materials for, the lithium battery, according to the Microsoft AI tool, there are 30 million theoretical materials that can be used or substitute. If you think about it, because that’s 30 millions, if just a human has to go through that, it’s going to take months and years.
So Microsoft AI tool was able to actually narrow the 30 million materials option to 18 in just 80 hours. And I was like, whoa, this is amazing.
Gary Stockton: That’s incredible.
Pam Didner: This is awesome. This is to me from my perspective, like AI at the best light. And so that is something from my perspective that caught me by surprise in terms of how far AI can do for scientific research. And, I personally think if we use. AI or a predictive model correctly and feed them with a high quality data set, what marketing can do is really can really, dial up that personalization type of communication with our prospects. And I think that’s probably the ultimate Nirvana. All the marketers would like to accomplish, but it still requires a lot of work and our end to make that happen.
Gary Stockton: So you’re a prolific content creator in your marketing business. How are you using AI to maintain such high visibility for your consultancy?
Pam Didner: That’s actually a great question. So Gary, before I answer that question, let me, ask you a question. How do you use AI to maintain such a high visibility for, your content creation? What do you do?
Gary Stockton: Yeah. I can share that. I come up with ideas for blog posts. I look at, topics that we’ve written, about. And we do a gap analysis on competitors to see what our competitors have written about where we, may have got some gaps there. I use it for outlines for talks that I’m going to, give, I can whip up an outline for podcasts. If I were to be completely honest, this podcast that we’re doing here, I fed your bio into it and I asked it, what are some questions that, that would be good to ask Pam and I’ve done this with other, guests on the show. And I know it’s, I just want to make sure that, we have a good interview and we asked some substantive questions versus softballs, so those are some of the things I’ve been using. Yeah,
Pam Didner: I love it. So we follow similar paths. And, I use, chat GPT or even Gemini or CoPilot. I use, all sorts of, say, the AI chatbots because I want to test them out and then see the results, if you will.
So I do, whenever I write something and I was like, this is a very rough draft. I will feed into the AI and have it rewrite and see if they do a better job than me or not. And of course, a lot of time they do. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they don’t. So you were talking about building like an outline for your presentation using AI.
Interesting enough, I have I don’t have a huge success on that. I guess that just because the way I think about how I want to speak and how I want to do the opening and also ending. And I usually give a lot of thought about the opening and the ending. And, I have tried to use AI to come up with the opening and ending, but it tends to be very dull, if you will. So I have not had a huge success using that. And the other thing I use is, there is a tool I’m not here to promoting any tools and I’m not affiliated with them. It’s called Opus Clip and it’s basically you can just, enter the link of your YouTube or just any kind of TikTok link. It will do shorts for you, and I know that there are tools out there can do exactly the same thing. And so I’ve been using Opus Clip, just want to see if AI can do a bunch of shorts for me based on my long form content. And I can tell you the results are mixed and, they will usually give me, probably about seven to 12 shorts examples.
And, it still requires human editing to make sure that it’s very professional. You know what I’m saying?
Gary Stockton: Yeah
Pam Didner: So the cutting or the editing of the long-form video, it’s fine. But I don’t think it’s at the prime time yet. And for example, I using OpusClip and they come up with 10, 12 examples. I have to personally watch them. And, at the same time, you, I, my video editors still need to do some editing. There is a convenience to it, for example, the captions I can add that in no time and that you can modify, you can edit. They do actually have editing tools within the platform that was good, but it still requires human touch.
You still have to touch it, right? It’s not 100 percent automatic.
Gary Stockton: I’ve heard some good things about OpusClip and, getting the shorts out there. Cause I think the short form content that’s been very good for us. we use, Descript. I still do the edits, on the main video for the podcast in, Premiere.
But once I’ve got a finished edit I can put that into Descript and that generates the transcript for me. They’re billing that as AI. I don’t know if, transcription software is truly AI. but the thing that I like about, Descript is that you can ask it to write some social posts about that content.
You can ask it different questions about it. but, also you can apply those templates, the short form video templates to it. And that takes multicam output, like what we’re doing here with, Ecamm. And, do the camera changes. So it, it does save time, but, I think you do have to be discerning on, what it is that you’re putting out there and trying to put a really juicy, short form clip, a really great salient point.
I thought it would be fun for us to finish maybe with a quick lightning round. we’ll go through a few of these. If you have time, ChatGPT or Claude.
Pam Didner: ChatGPT. For me. Okay. Actually, by the way, can I, know his lighting. I also like Claude .
Gary Stockton: Mike Szelsner, he swears by Claude. He, told me all about Claude and I’ve been using that too.
Pam Didner: yeah, I, using, so I using both in interchangeably, like for example, easy writing. I tend to go to ChatGPT, a little bit more complex writing. I tend to go to Claude, so I use it a little bit differently.
Gary Stockton: Yeah. one, one thing that Claude did for me once, I fed, I was going to do a webinar and I wanted to know what industries, the folks were in.
Cause I didn’t have the, a lot of data handy other than just the email addresses. So I had it strip out the domain names of the companies. And I just asked it, I said, tell me what industry each of these companies is. And I created a crosstab and a chart showing. All of the industries that were gonna be, and the percentage of audience that were trade accounts.
Pam Didner: Oh wow. They, if figured it out.? That’s amazing.
Gary Stockton: Yeah. And it did it with very little effort. it, was, maybe the whole thing ran in less than 60 seconds.
Pam Didner: It’s interesting. there’s a tool I’m using called Magai. It’s M A G A I.
Gary Stockton: Yes, I’ve heard of it.
Pam Didner: So they actually, they put all the, LLMs into kind of the friend, which is the friend user interface and, you can choose which, which one you want to use. You want to use Gemini, use Facebook’s Llama, you want to use Claude, you want to use, say, chat GPT. You can choose which one you want to use and then you can enter your prompts and then you can see what they come up with. So I’ve been using Magai which is M A G A I, and then just tested, because they build a user interface already and that you can access basically any different, large language models. And I just try it different LLM and see what kind of results that I get.
Gary Stockton: Yeah, we got to leave a link to that in the description for the show. That’s a good one. What about podcasts? What’s the best AI podcast for marketers?
Pam Didner: The MAICOM, which is the marketing, AI institute and by Paul Roetzer it tend to be pretty good. And, they did a fantastic job from my perspective. Yeah.
Gary Stockton: Will AI be more transformative than the printing press?
Pam Didner: Oh, totally. I think printing press was very transf transformative at that time. And, but AI, look at, AI is in everything. Everything we do you buy something on Amazon. There’s a recommendation coming to you. You listen to a music and there’s a Spotify will tell you and what else you should listen. You when you drive Wayze is that it’s tell you which route to take. And, and, my husband listens, actually search online and then, and say, Oh, yeah, you know what, Google said, or, the recommendation said it, we should go to that restaurant. We literally listen to AI, almost every single second, if you think about it.
Gary Stockton: Yeah.
Pam Didner: So I think the, it’s, definitely very expansive and also, that weave into our daily lives more than we think and realize.
Gary Stockton: Should I use AI, an artificial video presenter or film myself?
Pam Didner: Like a lot of people use, avatar or this, synthetic, type of, figure. Gary, can you imagine, moving forward, 10 years, two years down the road, it doesn’t have to be 10, like, when we have an interview, we don’t interview each other, it’s actually AI, Gary’s AI talking to Pam’s AI.
Gary Stockton: Oh, no. maybe it would be a little bit better looking, maybe, Take five, 10 pounds off. that’s the draw for me.
Pam Didner: Gary, you look fabulous. I wouldn’t worry about it. Seriously.
Gary Stockton: it’s such a transformative time. And it really feels like in real time that, everything is changing all at once. What’s your prediction for how AI will transform marketing in 20, 20, 34, in the next 10 years?
Pam Didner: Oh my god, I hate prediction, Gary, you put me on the hot seat. it really depends on, like open AI they were talking about to develop humanoid. like a physical form of robots, not just like this software embedded into your computer or your mobile devices. So can you imagine and that there is a humanoid, but is that do marketing functions?
It’s not just okay, they are doing the daily tasks. But they actually can perform marketing functions like a physical form. That is something I feel, it’s going to change, marketing forever. But if we’re just still part of embedded into kind of computer or the devices, it’s basically software.
If they are just software inside and that there are things they can do for us, but they are, they don’t have a physical form like you and me to take over to manually move things from one place to another. And that means that AI’s contribution to marketing is still very limited.
Gary Stockton: Yeah,
Pam Didner: but there’s a physical form, then that’s a completely different story and conversation.
Gary Stockton: Pam, as a fellow marketer and AI-curious person, I’m feeling less anxious about using AI in my business. Tell our audience where they can learn more about you and where they can reach out to work with you in some way.
Pam Didner: Great, pamdidner.com if you are interested in terms of the services I offer pamdidner.com is a great place to get to know me. And I’m also very active on all social media channels, like Gary indicated. So connect with me on LinkedIn. YouTube. I have a YouTube channel if you want to subscribe to learn more about B2B marketing, and I’m also active on TikTok.
Gary Stockton: Awesome stuff. Pam, thanks very much for your generous responses to those questions and thanks for taking time out to come on Small Business Matters.
Pam Didner: Thank you so much for having me.
