Why Your SMB Needs a Data Strategy Before Adopting AI

Are you feeling the pressure to jump on the AI bandwagon? You’re not alone. As small and medium-sized businesses race to adopt AI, many are overlooking a critical step that could make or break their success. What if I told you that the key to unlocking AI’s true potential for your business isn’t in the latest chatbot or predictive analytics tool, but in something you already have – your data?

The problem is, while AI promises to revolutionize how we do business, without a solid data strategy, it’s like trying to build a skyscraper on quicksand. Many SMBs are rushing to implement AI solutions without first understanding and organizing their data, leading to disappointing results and wasted resources.

But here’s the good news: with the right approach to your data, you can set your business up for AI success. And that’s exactly what we’re diving into today with our expert guest, Tim Hayden.

Tim is the CEO of Brain+Trust Partners, a strategic consultancy that helps companies navigate digital transformation. With over 20 years of experience in building and managing successful companies, Tim is a pioneering business leader known for his expertise in data-driven marketing, customer experience, and emerging technologies. He’s worked with major brands like Dell, Bacardi, and AMD, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. Tim literally wrote the book on mobile commerce and has been at the forefront of digital marketing innovation for decades.

Today, Tim is going to break down why a data strategy is the essential first step for any SMB looking to harness the power of AI, and he’ll provide practical insights on how to get started. So, whether you’re just beginning to explore AI or you’re looking to optimize your current efforts, this episode is your roadmap to building a solid foundation for AI success.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton asked Tim Hayden about:

✨ Data First, AI Second: Understanding why a solid data strategy is the foundation for successful AI adoption.

✨ Quality Over Quantity: Learning how to focus on collecting and organizing the right data for your specific business needs.

✨ Start Small, Think Big: Practical steps for SMBs to begin building their data strategy with limited resources.

Learn more about Tim Hayden

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Why Your SMB Needs a Data Strategy Before Adopting AI with Tim Hayden

[00:00:00] Tim Hayden: It’s really a two way race for companies to build a system that is smarter and can think in every different direction faster than humans do. And while you can understand how that could be extremely valuable, valuable for research or to help you save time, but at the end of the day, the data that your company has collected that’s in your marketing automation system, your email, that what you’re capturing with social analytics, all of that data, you’ve worked hard, you’ve actually paid for it, right?

You have a tremendous amount of what I would call intelligence before it’s made artificial and automated. Why wouldn’t you look at where AI Your Way is possible and AI Your Way includes training it on your data, right? And making sure that what a model tells you, it’s telling you something that’s absolutely on brand.

Or it’s, it’s biased just in the right way to be brand centric and customer centric.

[00:00:56] 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, we’ll 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 used this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into content, advertising, social media, 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, are you feeling the pressure to jump on the AI bandwagon? Well, you’re not alone as small to medium sized businesses race to adopt AI. Many are overlooking a critical step that could make or break their success. What if I told you that the key to unlocking AI is true potential for your business isn’t in the latest chat pod or predictive analytics tool, but in something you already have, your data.

Problem is while AI promises to revolutionize how we do business without a solid data strategy. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper on quicksand. Many SMBs are rushing to implement AI solutions without first understanding and organizing their data, leading to disappointing results and wasted resources.

But here’s the good news with the right approach to your data. You can set your business up for AI success. And that’s exactly what we’re diving into today with our expert guest, Tim Hayden. Tim is the CEO of Brain Trust Partners, a strategic consultancy that helps companies navigate digital transformation with over 20 years of experience in building and managing successful companies.

Tim’s a pioneering business leader known for his expertise in data driven marketing and digital transformation. Customer experience and emerging technologies. He’s worked with major brands like Dell, Bacardi and AMD, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. And Tim literally wrote the book on mobile commerce and has been at the forefront of digital marketing innovation for decades.

Hey, Tim, welcome to the show.

[00:03:15] Tim Hayden: Hey, Mike, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. And thanks for all that wonderful hyperbole. That’s just pumped me up. I appreciate that. Yeah.

[00:03:23] Mike Allton: It’s my pleasure. Like I always tell folks, you’re the one who did all the good work to get there. I’m just sharing the results of those years of work.

So I appreciate you coming on here, taking your time. I know you’re at an event in Vegas as we speak, you know, speaking to that point about how you are a speaker indeed, but if you could start by just Explaining why a data strategy is so crucial and why in particular for SMB is looking to adopt AI.

[00:03:49] Tim Hayden: You know, I, I think what a lot of people seem to overlook is how language models, how public language models were built in the first place.

You know, there, there has been quite a bit made about what Chat GPT was trained on or what Claude was trained on or is trained on you know, and we see this rising tide of specifically for small and medium businesses, the opportunity for you to have AI your way with Llama and Llama 3. 1 most recently.

And it has to train on data, right? So that’s a, that’s a way of me starting with the end, the model, which everybody sees, right? That’s within their browser. That’s what their prompt engineering and they’re looking for that special, unique output coming from it. How did it get there and what makes it happen there?

Honestly, it’s, it’s the data and there’s about five other things we can talk about when it comes to security and data privacy. The way that when you go and make a media plan or you interact with an ad network or a demand side platform, probably the, the medium of this small and medium businesses certainly are going to have some experience with their agencies who use first party data to be very exact about lookalike audiences and also engaging customers that you’ve already had Data is the key to all those things. So I think you know the at the end of the day what we are going to see and this could tee it up for us to tear apart with some of these other questions that you and I put together but is is really a world ahead where companies large and small will have their own language models.

They will have their own AI models. They’ll have their own automation made possible through machine learning and AI. It’ll come in small amounts and small packages and small software systems. It’ll come in very large ones. But the future is certainly going to be, I think, an opportunity for more companies to control their destiny rather than just outsourcing it to a third party, the way we did with social media.

And and I’ll, I’ll hang it up there for you right now. But it’s a, it’s a big opportunity.

[00:06:04] Mike Allton: It is. We’re doing something like along those lines, I think at Agorapulse, where we’ve set up our own RAG system that is ingested all of our blog content, our, our support content, our stories. And it’s integrated in Slack so that our sales team can go to a Slack channel and say, Hey, this Do we have any resources about this?

Or what is the capability of Agorapulse? Those kinds of things, right? It’s all internal. And I know already Tim, you and I probably dropped a couple of pieces of jargon that, that some of you listening may not really know what we’re talking about, like when I say RAG or a different large language models or Llama hit pause.

Go down to the show notes, download my AI Marketing Primer. It’ll, it’ll just walk. It’s free to walk you through a lot of that verbiage and then you can resume because Tim’s got a lot more to share and I don’t want you to feel like you’re totally overwhelmed. That doesn’t have to be that way. So if you could start next, by just sharing what you think some of the misconceptions are that SMBs have about their data and its readiness for the kinds of AI applications we’re gonna be talking about.

[00:07:05] Tim Hayden: Well, I think you know, SMBs naturally have been afforded some extremely efficient technologies that, you know, that I put in the category of technologies that do something for everyone.

And I mean that with love. I do mean that in a positive sense. We’ve all built efficiencies. We’ve all been able to learn to do more with less through Google Workspace. What was, what was, you know, what was something different than that as Google has really moved in to help you build something you can manage and manage your business with?

Same thing with Microsoft and Outlook and the things that are able to plug into it if you’re a salesforce user or a HubSpot user you also have a cadre of apps a whole cottage industry that’s out there that can help you Integrate things in and out of your CRM. At the core of that You know You may be looking at the way you merchandised it earlier mike when you were talking about some of the tactical things that are in marketing operations. That’s fantastic.

Absolutely. But if you peel it back, what is driving all of the above? It’s data. And I think SMBs are a little bit lost right now because, very naturally, they have found it doesn’t cost much, you know, 20 bucks a month and you’ve got a, a Chat GPT Pro account, right? It, it, it doesn’t cost much for you to get out there and find something that can help you create content, can help you write recipes, can help you do a rough draft of an email that you want to send out to customers, all these things.

I think there’s two sides to this that I just would say is the data that you do have in your CRM that you do have in your email your email system or your email marketing system, marketing automation system. Talking about HubSpot or Marketo some of these others what you have in there, or even, even, even that which was in Agorapulse that you have via the T’s and C’s of Meta and, and X and TikTok and some of these others.

You know, you do have some ability to use data that you’re capturing with that system and, and to do so to make better decisions. So with that, I think, do we always want to back to Chat GPT, back to public AI models Ethan, Ethan Mollick at, at Wharton that I know a lot of people follow, right. He, he has said it best, I think, is that.

The thing you have to understand is, and I’m going to paraphrase what he said, but it’s almost, it’s almost funny that by accident, these companies are making millions of dollars with millions of users right now, when in fact they do not care at all about your use cases. They’re not building this for marketing.

ChatGPT was never built for marketing. Claude was never really built for marketing. That’s changing. I can I can talk about that a little bit later. But you know, these public models were are really on one course, right? Especially between Gemini and what we know is ChatGPT between OpenAI and Google and Alphabet behind Google and Microsoft beside OpenAI.

It’s really a two way race for companies to build a system that is smarter and can think in every different direction faster than humans do. And while you can understand how that could be extremely valuable, valuable for research or to help you save time and some of the examples you gave earlier, Mike, I think it’s, that’s fantastic.

But at the end of the day, the data that your company has collected that’s in your marketing automation system, your email that what you’re capturing with social analytics, that what you’re, you may have in another, another system or another marketing op system, all of that data, you’ve worked hard, you’ve actually paid for it, right?

You paid for it with media and time and marketing ops to get that data. And I think you’ve got a responsibility now to look at how you can do what you just said, right? With AgoraPulse having its own retrieval and augmentation operation, right? Its own RAG with its owned content, right? How do, how do you make sure that the Agorapulse, I think that’s what you’re suggesting, Mike, you can, you can tell me if I’m wrong, is that the, is it the sales team or the customer facing team of Agorapulse has, and you, and you explained that they can access it through Slack.

They have access to that, which is very brand centric content, right? And, and that would be my argument is that if you’re a small and medium sized business and that covers a lot of ground that covers, you know, what the federal government, a lot of folks say is probably 80 percent of businesses in the United States alone are SMBs.

You have a tremendous amount of data. You have you have a tremendous amount of what I would call intelligence before it’s made artificial and automated. You have a tremendous amount of intelligence on both your brand and your customers. And at the end of the day, it is your brand. That is the reason people buy from you and subscribe from you and read your email newsletters.

Because they believe in you and they believe in your brand, why wouldn’t you take control of that? Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you look at where AI your way is possible and AI your way includes training it on your data, right? And making sure that what a model tells you. Just as you said about Agora Pulse doing it right now, it’s telling you something that’s absolutely on brand or it’s, it’s biased just in the right way to be brand centric and customer centric.

[00:12:53] Mike Allton: And you make it such a great point about the purpose, the direction of the models. We’re recording this in mid October. The founder of Anthropic just dropped was like a 15, 000 word essay for his vision of not just where Anthropic Claude is going, but. A. I. In general, not just A G. I. But I in general over the next few years, I don’t believe he really mentioned marketing much at all.

That was not the point of that essay. He was talking much broader scopes about all the things that AI was going to do for us right as a society, which is just fascinating.

[00:13:25] Tim Hayden: Well, let’s be honest when we think about that, when you think about how Professor Mollick, you know, Associate Professor Mollick, let’s be clear.

So that was love, Ethan, I promise. But but at the end of the day, you know, the thing we have to understand is that these systems that PricewaterhouseCoopers is out there now trying to convince large companies to integrate an API from OpenAI with the business, right? I’m not sure where I sit on that.

I’m not sure what I really, you know, how much I trust that to come in there for the simple fact that OpenAI has no vested interest. In my business, right? They, they may put a account executive or a customer success manager against me if I subscribe to the, to their API and I’m able to build wrapper technology with apps and things, you know, tools that my team uses that’s powered by that model, but you come to, you become dependent on that third party.

Right. And we’ve seen where this has happened before. We’ve seen. We we remember the days where Facebook has gone down for many hours in a day and and cause the businesses who set up and manage real estate in Facebook, especially if they were running an e commerce operation there or they were doing customer service through it where you know, they’re handicapped they’re kneecapped for several hours in the day Or they’ll back in the old days the fail whales of twitter, right?

[00:14:56] Mike Allton: You

[00:14:56] Tim Hayden: know, it would paralyze It would it would paralyze people and and we have the same situation right now with you know people becoming very dependent on the other side of it, the part we won’t talk really go into, but a company that is just boiling through billions of dollars a bit rudderless because they never meant for people to be using it the way that they are.

It’s hard for them to forecast a budget and plan against that because people are doing so many things. Millions of different things with it, which drives up compute power and data storage costs and a bunch of things they can’t forecast now. So, you know, it, it, it just has question marks without me totally throwing them under the bus or, you know is I want to be clear is, is there’s, there’s question marks when all of a sudden you have now Llama 3.

1, which comes in several different packages. If you want to call it that you could even have it run on your iPhone, right? You could even have it run, talk about the data that’s on your iPhone. Let’s, let’s forget about the the SAS list I went through earlier. And just say, think about the deep, deep meta.

And I don’t mean that with is in Facebook, but all the gobbledygook that’s on your phone, that tells a story about where you’ve been and, and what you do with your life and, the correlation between the same person on your Facebook app and your and your email, right? Those kinds of things. Now you got a model that you can just talk to and start to say, Hey, help me understand the last five conversations I had with.

With Chad Smith, you know, whoever, I just made that up. I don’t know any Chad Smiths, but you know, so, you know, it’s there, but doing so you have it controlled all in your environment, right? That’s the, that’s the thing that I think is Especially interesting is that Facebook, for better or worse, excelled as a company by bleeding over the edge of privacy, right?

They, they did what they could. We’ve heard, we’ve all heard hundreds of stories of people talking about Cancun at a Super Bowl party, and then they wake up the next day and go to Facebook, and there’s a bunch of ads for resorts in Cancun, right? Whatever Facebook has done in the past, they are a knight in shining armor right now, the way that they’re showing up to empower people to build their own models, to build their own language models and to control their compute power and to, and to have uptime and that, and then that, that biased output that we really want.

You know, that is so specific to our brand and specific to the audience as we want to serve

[00:17:41] Mike Allton: Really interesting parallels, as you mentioned, I mean, folks like Joe Polizzi and I’ve been railing for years against folks to lean, you know, don’t lean too heavily on social media, particularly not on a particular social network.

You’ve got to own your content. And now, basically, we’re coming around circle and saying. You need to own your data, right? And it’s funny that you talk about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Obviously, he felt that walled garden of the Apple iOS system. And now, like you said, he’s our champion. But you know, most of the folks that we’re talking to aren’t working with, with PwC.

They’re, they’re small to medium businesses, mid market businesses, right? HubSpot, absolutely. Salesforce, like you talked about, they’re using, you know, Constant Contact and other email systems. They’re using Google analytics. MailChimp.

[00:18:25] Tim Hayden: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:26] Mike Allton: MailChimp. Yeah. You know, walk us through what you think some of those key components might be for someone in those situations, whether it’s a business owner, the marketer, and they want a solid data strategy as they’re moving into this AI revolution.

[00:18:40] Tim Hayden: You know I think every data strategy has got to start with security. And when I talk about security, not everyone’s going to be able to afford to have a sock to in place and and do monthly or quarterly penetration testing against their business. But what is possible is that you start to understand password hygiene across all of your employees, for instance and, and I’m, I’m trying to, I’ll go down the low hanging fruit here for you, Mike.

And and the, and the SMBs out there is looking at, at, at apps like LastPass or Dashlane, for instance, they do two different things. One, they allow you to have a different password for every single app or every single website. Or, or system or portal that you log into including your, your bank accounts, including your suppliers.

When you, when you go fill out order forms with them when you’re, when you’re doing anything with anybody via e commerce, right, you’ll have to log in with a username and a password. Let’s make sure you’re not using the same password in one of more than one place. There’s, there’s that it’s 2024 and we still have to remind people in companies, large and small, that that has to be done.

Secondly is think about do you have a screensaver on your computer? Is it the default one that came with it? Can you, if you work in an environment where lots of people could be passing by your desk, right? And you may have sensitive information, which could be just customer information, just an email address.

A quick reminder for everybody. With an email address and a cell phone number this is why cybersecurity is so delicate right now. The bad actors of the world, they surely would like to get their hands on credit card numbers and social security numbers. But with just an email address and a cell phone number, they can find out anything they want to about you.

They have ways of being able to bounce that against data brokers that many times operate on the dark web to find whatever they can associated with that combination of an email address and a cell phone number. So if you have that kind of information on your computer, if you’re storing it on your computer, think about the simple fact of making sure that no one else gets their hands on it and not even just walking by your desk.

So screensavers, password managers. Think about the things that you have in place to monitor other vulnerabilities vulnerabilities such as are your employees Actually updating the operating system on their on their desktops or their notebook computers with regularity because each one of those operating updates operating system updates.

Pardon me, you know, comes in and it will actually give you the bug fixes in the patches security patches that you need as the world of cybersecurity changes and shapeshifts. So you know, these are these are some table stakes. There’s three ideas right there. There’s three things that I’ve. I like to share with people.

And then from that is start to think about the reverse motion that people went through with custom audiences. If if everyone can remember the days when it was really simple for us to just download a CSV from our CRM and then go to Facebook and create a custom audience or everybody who liked our page and everybody that’s in our CRM.

You know, think about think about that motion today. Do we really want to share our all of that data with with Facebook in that situation? Go backwards from that and think about how you can download all of your LinkedIn connections, right? You can download all of that information from linked in. You can download it all from some of the other social media networks that you work with.

Your follower lists any of that you have your CRM some of the things we mentioned earlier your marketing automation or your email system anything that you’re using it has customer information in it and you have the opportunity to bring it together and build a golden record if you will and salesforce and hubspot both have matured greatly In the past two years if I want to stay in that Smb lane Both of them have really matured in terms of their ability to go through what’s called entity or identity resolution to say that you have the same customer.

That, you know, follows you on LinkedIn, who has bought something through you from you via e commerce, perhaps through an e commerce system. They say their name is Robert here and Bobby there. They use a credit card that says their name is Bob and that’s in your payment processing system. There’s data in your payment processing system.

All of that. You can bring that in and HubSpot and Salesforce and then some of their partners will actually be able to help you clean that up and say that’s not five different people. It’s just one person that create that one record for them. What does that do for you? It basically put you in a spot where you’re not sending three catalogs to the same house or four emails to the same person or worse.

Trying to execute a media by and putting way more display ads and paying for too many clicks around the one individual that you only needed to put two things in front of or maybe two touches within a week in front of you know, cleaning up things that way as well. And what I’m talking about there, too, is, is as I said earlier about things becoming economically feasible or more cost friendly down market into SMBs, this technology has been around for the better part of a decade with enterprises, with customer data platforms and master data management systems, we’re starting to see more and more.

Systems that you can use that don’t cost you thousands of dollars a month, but may cost you less than 500 a month that will help you bring your data together and manage that data to, to build those records and to do better segmentation with your audiences. And the last thing on that too, is a lot of these systems are actually moving forward with.

More sophisticated and ways to orchestrate your email campaigns, even SMS campaigns or noble, pardon me, mobile push notifications, which that all falls in the category of what I think you were giving a nod to earlier. Mike, and that is, you know, how do we, how do you go peer to peer with your customers?

How do you, how do you not operate through an intermediary? How do you, how do you protect data at the same time being able to meet the customer where they are without having to. Pay Facebook to reach them or without having to pay Google to reach them. I mean, these are, these are real, these are real opportunities that people have had, and I would argue they’ve had them since probably 2014 or 15, when 80 percent of people started carrying a smartphone.

But. Now there’s software that I think will scale down if we want us to call it that for SMBs to be able to manage much more interpersonal and direct relationships with customers than they could before.

[00:25:54] Mike Allton: That’s exactly right. It starts with security and data hygiene. And then we have a whole raft of tools that are available today at much, much lower budgets, so they’re much more accessible to SMBs.

And I think probably Tim and I will get into those in a moment, but we’re talking with Tim Hayden about the importance of having an actual data strategy, before you start to get into trying to implement AI across your entire organization, and we’ll get into some of those tools and tactics, like I mentioned, but before we do a quick word from my sponsor.

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So Tim, one of the approaches we take on this show all the time is to talk about specific examples and use cases. Cause we’ve, we’ve often found with AI, since it’s a technology and not a tool, the ways that you can implement it or not are just enumerable. And so in this case, I’d love if you could share an SMB that either you’re familiar with, or maybe you worked with directly and how they’ve successfully implemented a data strategy before adopting AI.

[00:28:01] Tim Hayden: Yeah, I mean you know, one of the, one of the examples that I love to talk about is my family has a, has a pizza problem or better yet a pizza habit with East Side Pies in Austin, Texas, and You know, one of the things they, they do the ultimate in personalizing your pizza, you know, you have the left half and you have the right half of your pizza.

And you can just dial up. You can’t change the dough contiguously across a pizza, but everything that goes on top of it can be different on each half, right? There’s, there’s, there’s that, which they do with personalization, but there’s, there’s that on the other side of it, too, that from a telematic standpoint, when you call in to order a pizza, and, you know, The way that it extended that to toast and favor, which allow you the opportunity to do a pickup with, you know, with pickup with toast, you can do either a pickup or a delivery with favor, it’s going to be delivery.

Right. But with that. Your ability to look at your past orders, right? Those apps are doing that for Eastside Pies in that situation. But what Eastside Pies does is if you call them your customer profile comes up on whatever they have in front of them, a tablet or a POS system that basically says what your last five or six transactions were.

This is, this is. Early A. I. This is this is machine learning to a certain degree, but this is definitely artificial intelligence. That is allowing that business to pull in what you most recently done. And if you work at a small bank or you’re a customer of a small bank, you’ve probably started to see just in the last two or three years that when you call the bank they may ask you to confirm a last couple of transactions, or if if they sense that you’re coming in with an inquiry or a complaint.

They may have a I that’s already dialing up exactly what the problem situation may be. So I’ve seen a couple of banks start to do this. And you know, and it really think about this is when you call the bank. It’s no longer a situation where I have to give you my mother’s maiden name and tell you exactly what my challenge is.

I may have to do something else to confirm my identity, but at the end of the day, the people in the contact center have got everything that they need in front of them and they can preempt me and say, Hey, Tim, are you calling about this charge that’s on your account from last Tuesday? Right? Are you, are you calling about it?

Because it, It’s it’s fairly big, and we’ve never seen it before, right? They may know that just from internally. They sent me an email asking me if I knew about it, right? Because a lot of banks are doing that to say, confirm this or not. But the fact that they’re bringing it all the way back to the other side, it’s a systems integration story.

But it’s also an AI story to say, let’s surface to the top based on what we know on, you know, when, when it is, what day it is. Mhm. And how many days since the transaction or those kinds of things to correlate that a regular CRM is not going to do for you, right? And marketing automation has not been able to do this for us is allowing a I to be able to take a couple of disparate signals, put them together and put them in front of someone to serve you better or for you to self serve yourself better.

So, you know, I think You know, I’ve, I’m fascinated but I have question marks around it by the many companies now that have made their own GPTs with Open AI, right? They have no control over the base model and the, and the base model is only trained on, I just, I want to talk about, you know, I think most people want to think of that as AI, and it’s not limited to that, right?

But I’ll go in that direction for those of you who, who luxuriously enjoy your prompt, your prompt engineering prowess, right? I’ll, I’ll, I’ll hang, I’ll hang with you a second, but, you know, as you’re making a chat GPT, as you’re making a GPT wrapper or your own jobs, GPT, or one of these other things that I’ve seen people talk a lot about, You have no, you have absolutely no control over that.

You’ve been able to put some swim, swim lanes against it, some business rules against it, and create a bit of a user experience with it. But at the end of the day, the base model is the same thing. It is not customizable, not trained on your data. And I think that’s where we’re going to see more and more companies that experience great growth in the AI era are going to be the ones who invest in that which can be very bespoke with their data, with their customers, with their employees, their products and their operations. All of these, if you were to look at them separately, are sources of signals and intelligence. Again, data is intelligence. They are, they are sources of it. And they actually, because you might have a way to reconcile that against certain performance metrics, whether that’s clicks and follows and downloads and subscriptions, or if it’s actual purchase data, you’re able to correlate things over time.

And I’m seeing a number of small businesses that are able to. Correlate things like I’ll see in my Facebook memories maybe the way the weather was a year before and just happened to notice that two or three of these local boutiques that, that I’ve bought clothing from before and Austin have just nicely timed you know a message to me about a sweater or something like that, you know?

So you know, You know, maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m assuming something there, but you know, this is this is what being really smart about marketing is about. This is about understanding that a language model and a public language model. Will not have all the answers for you and it certainly won’t do it in a custom super hyper relevant or bespoke manner and that’s that’s again where I think the whole market’s going to go and You know I’ve mentioned Llama three or 3.

1 a few times I would love for smbs to kind of look at it as the Toyota Camry of public models. It is It meaning that you can drive it anywhere and you can easily find people who can support it in terms of You customizing it, configuring it and training it on that data. We listed off a couple of data sources earlier that you have for you to be able to do that to have.

A very in the right way, biased and relevant chat bot, one that is specific to your brand or your business and to your customers. I mean, I think that’s that’s one way that’s just one Avenue. I think that we’ve got an opportunity to do that.

[00:35:07] Mike Allton: I actually love the East Side Pizza example. Not, not only because I love pizza in Austin, Texas, but because you know what they’re obviously doing there is they’ve got a Point Of Sale System and or something else that’s riding alongside of it that’s tracking customer orders and tendencies and trends and that sort of thing so that the next time you call, you can either already have your favorite pizza loaded up with one click, being able to put that in your cart, which eases your ordering process. Or if you don’t order it, they can recommend it. Say, Hey, Tim, did you forget? This is what you usually order. Do you also want that pizza? Which ensures not only are you making sure that you’re upselling the orders whenever possible, but when Chad Smith opens his pizza place down the street, you’re going to be less likely to order from Chad.

Because Eastside’s already got your favorite pizza ready to go with one click. So that’s, that’s, that’s such a boon to small businesses. Now we’ve been talking about, you know, Claude and Llama and that sort of thing. Are there other tools or technologies that you recommend for SMBs that can manage and execute?

Analyze their data in preparation for bringing in a I or is it really just you’re looking at the large language models themselves,

[00:36:20] Tim Hayden: you know, and I, I mean, I’ll probably share a few things here that are fairly common and known. But I mean, if you’re if you’re having a lot of remote conversations as we’re using Stream Yard here, but using Zoom or or Microsoft Teams some other tools, Video conferencing tool if you’re doing that If you’re not using read.

ai or you’re not using otter or one of these other transcription services You’re missing a big opportunity there to be able to transcribe your conversations in real time Allowing you and the person you’re talking to to be able to see notes being written as you as you host the conversation Which I think helps with recall in the moment it certainly does But the thing I love to I personally do, right, is if I’m not discussing anything that’s sensitive or private, or is confidential information with a client or a prospect is I’ll use Read. ai on my Zoom calls and when I’m done, it does a fantastic job of sending me a summary and what the takeaways or next steps are, and then it gives me access to the full transcript. I’ll take the full transcript and then I’ll go to Claude and I’ll ask Claude to, and I’ll say. This is who I was talking to.

It’s a, it’s a fairly long prompt, but I’ll say, this is who I was talking about, this is what we were talking about. Here’s what my goal is. Can, can you do me a quick job and a quick favor and draft for me an email to them, you know, that is you know, 80 words or less recap of what we discussed and then the five ideas that we shared and the two things that are next steps.

And of course, once I do that, and I’ve uploaded that transcript. It’s, it’s a matter of, you know, two to five seconds, the drafts in front of me, I’m able to copy it, paste it into the email client and then wordsmith it and send it sounds like it’s more steps than it needs to be. And it’s more steps than it will probably be a year from now, because we’ll start to see a combination of these tools working with your email client in real time, but for now, Just think about how you, you just can’t miss a beat when you do something like that.

You, you’re able to cover the high points, the low points, the next steps for you in terms of responsibilities in terms of the actions that you signed up for and committed to delivering. It’s helped me with accountability, but it’s also put me in a position to where I’ve got that recall. I’m able to put back in front of the prospect or the client to move matters forward whether it’s a new statement of work, it’s a new project or the consideration for them to expand the work they do with us.

So, you know, at, at the, at the end of the day, I think there’s, there’s, there’s low hanging fruit like that. And then there’s. You know, Notebook LM before you actually go talk to a new customer or if you’re in recruiting and before you talk to a candidate, take the LinkedIn profile of that person and, and go to Notebook LM and ask it to whip up a nice podcast for you.

And then those podcasts laughs anywhere from, from what I’ve seen in my experience and what people have been sharing. 10 to 15 minutes. They’re not very long, but get that as a preamble, some storytelling about who you’re about to meet in that recruiting capacity with the candidate. But better yet, if you’re in sales and you’re trying to go meet somebody and trying to understand everything you can about them, if they’ve been great about sharing content on LinkedIn, which is not always the best place, sometimes their website would be another link or a different link that you’d want to, you’d want to provide there.

But by doing that, you know, you’re actually able to have Notebook Lm very quickly give you an audio file that you can listen to as you’re driving across town or perhaps as you’re picking up your rental car at the airport and driving to. The prospect meeting. So I, I love that, you know, and then, you know, tactically with content, there’s, there’s that where Canva going, you know, and what, what Adobe even announced today, right?

I mean, just, just they’re going deeper into AI, deeper into generative AI. And and having it come in and, and basically fast, you know, fast track the creative process back to my, you know, my, my text file with Claude and saying, draft an email for me, you, you’ve now got a number of tools that can allow you gamma is another one that I use with old PowerPoints that I know I had content.

Actually when Joe Polizzi would have me come speak at content marketing world, a lot of what I would talk about with mobile strategy is directly related to what I’m trying to tell people to do with AI now in terms of control and peer to peer you know, controlling your data and not having to operate through intermediaries, a lot of those old decks that I would use, I’ll go to gamma and I’ll say, would you You look at look at this deck that that we made last week and then look at this deck that’s eight years old nine years old and would you would you grab what you want to from it and And you know make make what’s on each slide a little more colorful or just give me some language to work from I do that with gamma i’ve played around with Canva with it, too, but To the point I think you’ve already made is this this deck This takes things that would have taken me hours to do before now, just minutes.

And, and that’s, that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s not about the content itself. It’s not about the reasoning of the model or the problem solving to your point about the Anthropic executive document that’s floating around right now. You know, Claude or, you know, Anthropic is a company, certainly OpenAI is a company.

Google with Gemini. They’re out to cure cancer and give us world peace. They’re not out to do anything in the interim. They’re really not. They’re just going to use us to train those models to think differently and get more advanced so they can go solve big world problems. So I like some of these smaller little apps and smaller little operational tools that are starting to come up that are just helping us with that.

Not really cut corners, but you know, be able to shave a few minutes off of a job or an hour off of some task. And and the opportunity to do it that way.

[00:42:38] Mike Allton: Yeah, those are great examples. I love Notebook LM. I did a whole episode as an example of Notebook LM. I’ll link to that in the show notes below.

And I’m using Read AI probably every day at Agorapulse. I have it tied into my Google Meet system. So every time we’re doing a one on one meeting or a group meeting or a Tiger squad meeting, whatever. I’ve got those automated notes. And to your point, that means I don’t necessarily have to be quite so diligent in my note taking.

I don’t need to make sure I capture each and every action item that’s all going to be captured for me by the assistant. It’s just important if you’re not meeting internally, if you’ve got external folks, I think you should ask them and let them know, Hey, are you okay? You know, my artificial assistant and gosh, don’t have the A. I join for you. Have the A. I join with you. Paul Roetzer has railed on that a couple of times already on his show, and I couldn’t agree more. That’s totally agree. That’s totally agree. No, no. Yeah. But I think to your point where we’re moving is having these systems with their agents that are, pervasive and doing all these things for us.

Like I can’t imagine Google won’t soon have its own AI agent that can sit inside of Google Meet and then it’s already connected to my calendar and my Gmail. So it can automatically send a summary with action items to everybody who participated in the meeting, if that’s what I’m looking for, what else do you see coming on the short term?

And I know we’re almost out of time. So this is gonna be my last question to you, Tim. You bet. Particularly when it comes to data strategy and AI evolving, what should SMBs be preparing for?

[00:44:18] Tim Hayden: Well, I think it, you know, your, your data is your ticket to the future. Your business is going to change. AI will slowly push some people out of jobs or, or certain operational roles.

That you have within your organization. The bigger halo effect that’s going to have is that companies themselves are going to find themselves you know, where they have to make a decision on whether or not they keep selling things and building things that they sell the same way that they always have.

So your data is your key to the future. It is the intelligence that tells you you. What your customers want, how they behave, what their preferences are. You’ll increasingly have tools that will come from many of the vendors that we’ve discussed here, not the public models, but many of the just standard operational tools, software as a service.

That you’re using more and more of that software as a service is going to not just have a co pilot, but have AI on the back end, which is helping you correlate information and have better, clearer insights on what to do. Think about revenue diversification, right? Think about what else could you do to sell something different to the same audience?

Your data can tell you that your data has those answers. And then it can, it can be further enriched through surveys and polling and other types of research. But you’re sitting on a gold mine already, right? You’re sitting on what your customers have trusted you to manage and to learn about them.

And with that, if you want to iterate your you know, iterate your business, if you wanna iterate the, the way that you make revenue through different means, it’ll be the data that it tells you to do it. It’ll be the data that leads you into whatever’s next after that. The big, the big answer to you are your leading first half of that question, Mike, is, is AI agents where pretty soon we will see the ability for SMBs to start to build custom agents that actually perform actions for you as a business owner or as a, as a manager or a leader in an organization to you know, be able to execute certain tasks, be able to go and grab certain data or insights and bring it to you at certain times of day.

So you know what to say before you walk in a meeting, before you, you know, start to go to the whiteboard and figure out what it is you’re planning to do next week or next month based on what’s going on in the business at that moment. I think you hear me say that, I don’t think anybody out there really has their head wrapped around AI holistically.

I don’t think anybody has their mind totally wrapped around where AI agents are going to play a big role in business, but know that they’re coming and it’ll be for you back to my point about customization and custom configuration of what is a very malleable technology form. If we want to call the category of technology, we want to call AI that.

It’s, it’s much more than that, but if you want to think of it that way, you’ve got every opportunity in a malleable way to make it work for you and make it work for exactly what your geography, culture, customer behavior, product, vertical position, market position, all of these things that are unique to you.

You’ve got an opportunity to leverage it and you’ll have more opportunity to do it over the coming months.

[00:47:51] Mike Allton: And I just love how you started that answer because we don’t like to fear monger or trigger people on this show, but the truth is some roles, some jobs, some tasks, lots of tasks are going to be rendered obsolete.

And we need to just know that we need to be prepared for that. And so I appreciate you laying out many of the next steps for SMBs, but I know folks are going to have even more questions. They’re going to look for more answers. Where can they go to connect with you, Tim, if they want to start to pick your brain and work with your company?

[00:48:23] Tim Hayden: Well, you can always find me on LinkedIn. I am I’m one of several Tim Hayden’s that are out there. If you are you familiar with if you’re familiar with Linkedin, we’ll we can probably put it in the show notes, but Linkedin. com forward slack swash in forward slash saddle up. That’s me likewise our website brain trust partners and you know, I tell people if you can’t find what you’re looking for in either of those places, just hit me a message on Linked In and we’re constantly looking at things.

I mean, our core business is customer data platform and master data management implementations and configurations. We do that. Upscale with what I would say medium to large scale businesses and enterprises. But as we do that, we are basically exposed to tens of thousands of different kinds of software as a service and systems that people are using.

And with that, I think I’ve learned a lot and certainly my team shares a lot and reports back to me on the things they run into. I’m happy to pass along some of the things we’ve learned or seen. And you know, want to be a resource it’s out there for folks, because it’ll take a village for all of us to get through how AI is going to change what we do and how we operate.

So for all boats to rise, we got to work together.

[00:49:40] Mike Allton: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Tim. We, of course, we’ll have all of Tim’s links in the show notes below and thank you all of you. For tuning in, that’s all the time we’ve got for today. But as I mentioned before, if this is your first foray, this is the first time listening to this podcast or thinking about how you’re going to implement AI in your own business, check out the AI Marketing Primer that I have linked below. It will help you get started. It will ease a lot of those concerns and worries and FOMO and everything else that’s going on with AI. That’s all the time we’ve got. Thank you so much. Welcome to the grid.

Thanks for joining us on AI and marketing unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies. If 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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