AI Revolution in Marketing: Embrace Your Superpowers | Tom Winter

Ann Kraus: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is Tom Winter. Tom is driven by his desire to support SaaS companies in their global expansion. He's a firm believer in the power of collaboration to achieve mutual growth and success. As an experienced founder, he has built a company from scratch, reaching customers in over 100 countries. Today he's focusing on a new SaaS tool, SEOwind, which utilizes AI technology to help create SEO-optimized content. Tom, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Tom Winter: Hi, Ann. Great to speak here. I'm really thrilled to be here live with you. So thank you for the invite. Ann Kraus: Absolutely. And this topic of AI, this is a hot button topic right now. Tom Winter: It's not going anywhere. Ann Kraus: No. Well, from books and movies and advertising and of course marketing, is AI going to end marketing as we know it? Tom Winter: Probably yes. I think it's a hot topic, as you mentioned, because AI just came to us not that long ago. I would say the first AI, ChatGPT, was launched in December, and GPT4 was launched in March. So from then, it's only four or five months, and we see a lot of things happening. So what I see already that marketing is changing, but in my opinion, it's changing for good because what we see, AI starts to help us with the work that we do. AI is basically a large language model, which is trained on big data sets and what it's perfect with, it's really great with analyzing stuff. So basically it helps out to analyze a lot of things that are repetitive. So in my opinion, what I see that most of the jobs that are repetitive in marketing will come to an end, unfortunately. But we can grow from that. There's plenty of ways to help ourselves out and to find ways to work with AI not against it. So in my opinion, we as humans, we have superpowers. AI has its own superpowers, but if we combine these two together, we can create really something that is amazing. Let's use the superpowers of analyzing stuff from AI. Let's use our super strengths with strategic approach, with making decisions, with adding value on top because we have a lot of experience that AI doesn't have. So we can use it all to grow and be better, at the same time increasing the productivity that we have. But if we think that nothing will change, unfortunately, I'll say it out loud, "Sorry, this is already gone. We have to work with AI." Ann Kraus: Okay, so you said it. It's here, this is happening. But how do you calm the nerves of marketers who work in these agencies who might be listening to this, that the future of their position is potentially in jeopardy? Tom Winter: It is in jeopardy in the way we see it today, but it's not in jeopardy when we see that we can learn to grow, that life is changing. The beginning of an internet changed a lot of things, and it was about 30 years ago, which is a lot of time. But looking at the whole history of time, it's such fast change that is happening. So what I would do right now, I would focus to embrace AI and find ways to use it in marketers' jobs. Definitely don't go to LinkedIn and say, "AI will not take over our jobs." Probably AI will not, I agree. But as the NVIDIA CEO said, AI will not take your jobs, but people who use AI will. So we have to find ways of being more productive and we can do it using AI. So all the repetitive jobs that we're doing, we can automate them. So we can already see in performance marketing, Google implemented so many features that are based on AI. We don't even know that we're using AI when we're doing performance marketing. But the same goes with content. When creating content, let's not do the research if AI can help out with that. But be cautious, be a human, use your brain, and if you will use your brain for making things better, then you'll have your job. You will outperform your results from the last year, you'll be much better and you'll bring a lot more value to your company and also to the market. Ann Kraus: How can marketers and how can these agencies use AI for this to generate more content? Tom Winter: From the perspective of content, as you mentioned, I'm a founder at SEOwind. So we tried to embrace all the methods that we used as humans to create content, and we tried to add AI on top of that. So we're trying, for example, to do the research using normal techniques like scraping techniques that were there in technology for the last decade or even more. But what we're doing, we are combining it with AI. So we're feeding it to AI to help us make the decisions. But you can do the same things using ChatGPT. It's all based on prompting that you have. And by prompting, I mean feed it with data, because most of the prompts that I see on LinkedIn, for example, my best LinkedIn prompts for something, I can see a two-liner. So basically there's an ask to ChatGPT like, create me an outline for this and that. Forget about prompts like that. Start feeding it with data, provide it with your knowledge, provide with your ideas so it has context. AI doesn't read your mind. This is something that people don't understand. It will understand you if you will provide it with the knowledge. In marketing, there is something that is called brief, and it's there for probably 50 years, but nobody likes to do it. So for example, you create a brief for a new logo. That's an example, and it's so helpful right now to know how to write the brief because this is exactly how you write prompts. You define what you want, what's your goal, how you want it to look like, and you provide all the knowledge that you have, your ideas, your additional things. And this is exactly how AI works. You have to provide it with knowledge. The more knowledge you will give, the better the output will be if you are trying it just to predict what you think, no, it'll not work like that. If you want AI to work for you, as you, and you click just one button, sorry, it'll not work like that. Ann Kraus: So I have a follow-up question to that because it seems like you're talking about this and some people are going, "Ooh my God, he's gone to the dark side, right? He's talking about this taking over." But you're right. You're asking us to basically look at this through a new paradigm. So you're kind of changing it. So can AI then become that subject matter expert on different things within agencies that people could go to confirm things? Tom Winter: At the moment, in my opinion, no, because it doesn't have the experience you as subject matter experts have. So for example, if I have a product and I talk to my customers, I have a lot of knowledge from my customers about my product and the difficulties they have, the values that they're looking for, the problems that they went through and so on. All of these things AI doesn't know about. If we don't feed it from our perspective, AI will not make them up. They don't use your tool, for example. So as I mentioned, use AI and use your superpowers together. Then you'll get to a different level of content. Ann Kraus: I am so happy that you have pointed out that we all have superpowers because I think that that's a good morale boost for a lot of people who are getting nervous about this because the way you are putting it does seem to make a little bit more sense that it can't work alone. It can't work in a vacuum, right? Tom Winter: At the moment, no. And I think it'll not do it for a long time, but do we have to change our approach as marketers? Unfortunately, yes, we do. And there is no way back. Ann Kraus: This has been great, Tom. Thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing all of this guidance with us because it is a little nerve wracking for some. So in all of your founding of companies and different things that you're doing, do you have a podcast or a book or something that was kind of instrumental and very valuable to you that you'd like to recommend? Tom Winter: I would recommend Zero to One. I love the book. It shows me exactly the path of the founder, how you should approach things, and how hard it is. So this is the one that I would recommend. Ann Kraus: Excellent. And if anybody wants to learn a little bit more about you or your company or anything, where can people go to learn more about what you're doing? Tom Winter: So either you can go to LinkedIn and I basically live on LinkedIn, so find Tom Winter at LinkedIn or go to SEOwind.io and find me there. If you have any questions and you want to talk. I really love to help people. So you don't have to talk about the product with me. I'm open to chat about everything. Ann Kraus: That sounds great. I am guessing you're probably going to get a couple visitors. Who knows? Tom Winter: Awesome. Thank you. Ann Kraus: So thank you so much, Tom. Tom Winter: Thanks, Ann. Ann Kraus: And thank you everybody for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for watching. I'm Ann Kraus, and I will see you next time.