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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the 2x Webby Award Honoree Be A Marketer podcast!
On today's episode, you'll hear from someone who's using AI to save hours each week, and he'll tell you how he does it. This is the Be A Marketer podcast.
Dave Charest:My name is Dave, director of small business success at Constant Contact, and I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore what it really takes to market your business, even if marketing's not your thing. No jargon, no hype, just real stories to inspire you and practical advice you can act on. So remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave Charest:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining us for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Joining me as always, the wonderful Kelsi Carter. Hi, Kelsi.
Kelsi Carter:Hi, Dave. You're wonderful as well.
Dave Charest:Aw. Thank you. I'm feeling good about myself today. Thank you.
Kelsi Carter:You're so welcome. That's my goal every day.
Dave Charest:I love that. Alright. You ready? I'm gonna put you on the spot. What's something that you've recently kinda figured out to streamline your own life?
Dave Charest:Either shortcut or a system that's just made things easier for you? That could be work related, personal related, whatever it is.
Kelsi Carter:Streamline. I would say for me, it would be give me a second. I actually have to think about this.
Dave Charest:Well, I see the wheels turning.
Kelsi Carter:I know. I'm like because I feel like there's like because I don't really like have an automation setup in my life, but like not that I'm thinking of. Hold on. Give me actually a second.
Dave Charest:Well, listener, what's been going on with you, Al? As Kelsey digs deep into the
Mike Allton:Into my brain.
Dave Charest:Regions of the the brain. The deep
Kelsi Carter:deepness of my brain. I think maybe something with, like, notes, I guess, is something that I've streamlined recently.
Dave Charest:Oh, tell me about that.
Kelsi Carter:Where I have, like, a note taker going for, like, meetings and everything like that. And then it automatically is tied to that meeting. If that makes sense. So I can like find it within there and then I have a folder with all of my meeting notes within there. Mhmm.
Kelsi Carter:So that's something that's been super helpful if I have to go back and find something. Yeah. And they're named like directly with the meeting and includes like who the guests are, everything like that.
Dave Charest:Yeah. So an AI notetaker. Right? Yep. Okay.
Kelsi Carter:Okay. That's been super super helpful just going back because there's been a few times where I'm just like, I know we said this in a conversation, and then, like, if I can look at I remember, like, who was part of the conversation that's been helpful. So it just is good to going back and then just organizing my stuff.
Dave Charest:Yeah. That's actually a great point. I've tried to do that in a couple of meetings recently too where it's, you know, meetings where you're gonna go back to and you wanna make sure you get some action items out of it and all of that kind of stuff. So helpful things there. I bring it up because, you know, and I'm glad I was like, AI?
Dave Charest:There's something with AI? Because I feel like that's all we've been talking about a lot lately. And I feel like it's almost everything that everybody's been talking about lately, but I think rightly so. Because in many ways, when you think about what AI can do for you, it's empowering. Really, when you start to think about it helps you put systems, save you time, get things done in ways that, you know, maybe you couldn't do before.
Dave Charest:And our guest today has really embraced this idea as well and has set up some really smart systems into how he markets himself. And I think it's something that a lot of small business owners can really learn from. He gets into it as well as how he really does this stuff. And so what can you tell us about our guest today, Kelsey?
Kelsi Carter:Today's guest is Mike Alton, AI strategist and podcast host at the Social Media Hat, as well as the chief storyteller at Agorapulse, which is a social media management tool. Mike's based in the St. Louis area, and he's been in the digital marketing space for over a decade now, helping marketers make sense of everything from blogging and SEO to social media and now AI. He's also a Constant Contact customer with over 45,000 subscribers on his list.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Kelsi and I had the pleasure of hanging out with Mike a bit last year at Podcast Movement. It was a conference out in Washington DC. And, you know, what I love about Mike really is how passionate he is about helping his friends, his colleagues, his peers, all in the marketing space really with whatever they happen to be working on at a moment. Right?
Dave Charest:And as you mentioned today, a lot of his time is really spent on helping people get their arms and minds around the impact of AI in marketing. In our conversation today, you're gonna hear how Mike uses just four hours a week to run really a content machine that includes a newsletter, a blog, and multiple podcasts. The specific ways AI helps him go from idea to execution faster without sacrificing the quality, and really a smart way to grow and segment your email list using simple automations within Constant Contact. Let's go to Mike as he shares how he became an unofficial historian of sorts of social media.
Mike Allton:So I went to school for history and computer science.
Dave Charest:Well
Mike Allton:So nothing to do with marketing at face value. But I was gonna say of the things I discovered early on was that history, the study of history, allowed me to not only learn how to read and write really, really well. I mean, history exams, for those who don't know, these aren't multiple choice. You get what's called a blue book, which is a big stack of paper and you're assigned to fill it with whatever topic you're supposed to talk about. So I had to fill it with everything I knew about King Richard the third and his wars with the English crowd.
Mike Allton:So that was history. And it taught me to understand and kind of put the pieces together for what's happening at the subset of the things that we're seeing. So, like, we might look at Instagram recently released a new feature where if you are a teen using Instagram, they're going to immediately flag your account as being a teen account and that means certain things. So most marketers would look at that from a functional and technical perspective. Okay.
Mike Allton:What does that mean to me? What does that mean to my clients? I'm looking at it like, oh, why is Instagram as a platform and a business doing this? What do they hope to accomplish other than appease Congress and parents? There's got to be more to it than that.
Mike Allton:Right? So they're looking at their revenue streams, their advertisers, and they're trying to make a calculation as to how that will impact advertising revenue long term. Those are the kinds of things that I've been basically trained to look at and write about. So I've actually often dubbed myself the unofficial historian of social media because I've been writing about social media and its evolution and digital marketing, email, and SEO, and blogging as a correlator to that for years. And then the computer science portion of it, which I'm not a program anymore, so I don't use that, but it developed problem solving skills.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Well, I'm curious when you start to think about I mean, I guess you've got two levels. Right? You've got what you're doing with, like, the social media hat, and then you've got what you're doing for Agorapulse. And maybe we could focus a little bit more on the personal side of stuff, right, and what you're doing there.
Dave Charest:But talk me through, I guess, the things that you're doing to approach marketing for yourself, right, for the social media hat. What are you doing to just to kinda get the word out about that?
Mike Allton:So the first thing I do is I have to recognize that I'm a solopreneur. I don't have staff. I don't have freelancers. I don't have VAs. It's just me.
Mike Allton:Part of me likes it that way. Part of me realizes that's a constraint, but I have to work around that, which means I'm constantly developing strategies, tactics, and processes where that's the top of mind. Right? As an example, I cannot devote the kind of time it might take to be really, really great at TikTok and YouTube because of the amount of time it takes to create that much video content, all the editing that has to go in. You can put up video content pretty easily, but if you want to do it really, really well, you'd be paying attention to trends.
Mike Allton:You have to be doing cut takes and out takes, b roll, and all kinds of video editing things that I just don't have that kind of time to do. So that's where it starts for me is, okay, what can I do? What do I have the time to do? And right now, that looks like a podcast where I'm releasing at least one or two episodes a week and I have a really, really streamlined process for churning out these podcasts for doing the research as quickly as possible, that sort of thing. And I write a long form newsletter every single week using Constant Contact, which is fantastic.
Mike Allton:So that long form newsletter, not only does it promote the podcast episodes and any other content or webinars or interviews that I might be doing. When I said long form, I'm not kidding around. It's 2,000 words or more, which some people, it's a lot to take in and read that on a Sunday morning. But that's what I've been doing for years is building up this list, building up this habit of a long form Sunday newsletter, which I then turn into a blog post several days later. So anything I write for the Sunday newsletter, that gets published as a long form article to the blog.
Mike Allton:And so I'm also thinking about how do all these things work together? Right? What are the topics I'm talking to guests about on the podcast? What are the topics that I want to talk to my audience about on Sundays? And how is that going to help my overall site
Dave Charest:rank better and better and better for
Mike Allton:search for the topics and keywords that I want to be known for? Meanwhile, I'm just repurposing as much as I have time to for social media. So while I'm on social every day, I'm not necessarily posting every single day. And when I post, this is something where I tell people, don't do what I do. Do what I say.
Mike Allton:I don't post with engagement as a goal.
Dave Charest:Okay.
Mike Allton:Because I recognize I don't have the bandwidth to be good at responding to comments. And if you want to be engaging on social media, you need to be able to take care of your community. You need to respond to every comment and answer every question. And I just don't have that kind of time because I'm a solopreneur when it comes to my personal profiles. So I'm often sharing video clips from podcasts.
Mike Allton:I'm sharing them as vertical content. I use Agorapulse to schedule those out to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, Facebook reels, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and X. And then I also share it to threads. So the same content goes out to all of those channels. That's not ideal.
Mike Allton:Again, this is, you know, I know what I should be doing, but I also know that limitation. Right? Ideally, I would be crafting different posts for every channel. Yeah. I'd be timing them differently, having different kinds of content going out on every channel.
Mike Allton:I don't have that kind of time. So that's what I do. And for me, for the things that I'm trying to accomplish, it works. It works just fine.
Dave Charest:Interesting. I'm just curious as to maybe yes, this works for you. Guess, I mean, that's it at the end of the day. Right? Like, what is your goal and how does that work for you and help you support that?
Dave Charest:I guess my question would be, why not just focus on one or why do all of them, I guess?
Mike Allton:The newsletter is critical, I think, to the entire marketing process there because it's allowing me to connect individually with over 45,000 marketers as this community that I've built over the last decade. Because like I said, I've been doing the social media hat since 02/2011. And since almost day one, I've had ebooks and digital downloads and content upgrades and all kinds of wonderful lead magnets. I do events and webinars and all kinds of things. So I've had people coming into this community for a long time, and I want to continue to honor that and help them.
Mike Allton:So every weekly newsletter is designed to help them with something that I imagine they might need help with. Obviously, they don't all need that at that particular time. But the proof is the replies that I get to every weekly newsletter. This is great, Mike. Thanks.
Dave Charest:This is just what I
Mike Allton:need to know. Not everybody replies. And again, thank God for that because I couldn't deal with 45,000 replies. But enough of them do to to tell me at an anecdotal level.
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Mike Allton:Alright. I'm striking some chords. I'm helping someone with this content today. But then for also on the other hand, the podcast is also critical because the podcast is what's giving me video content and audio content. And it's allowing me to deepen the relationship both with the people that I'm bringing on the show.
Mike Allton:Just like you and I are having conversation right now, you're learning about me and we're having a nice back and forth. We're building rapport and, you know, maybe someday you'll take me out to dinner.
Dave Charest:I owe you one, Mike. I owe you one. I know.
Mike Allton:I'm not gonna
Dave Charest:let kiss. We'll get you.
Mike Allton:But the other thing that I know as a student of psychology and neuroscience, no matter how much time I put into the newsletter, it is still just written content. And I'm only hitting the people, and I'm only hitting the kinds of learners that will resonate with written content. So when I speak to them on video or the maybe they listen to the audio version because I do both, They can hear my voice. They can hear the pitch and the timbre of what I'm saying. And they can see my facial expressions.
Mike Allton:They can see my face point blank. And they can see my hand gestures. I mean, there's just so much nuance that goes into communication that makes video content more powerful. And the irony is, I don't like this. I'm an introvert.
Mike Allton:I'd much rather have the lights off, camera off, riding at my keyboard, but I recognize the power. I mean, are we doing this in video contents? This releases a video, but I don't know.
Dave Charest:We'll have clips of this as a video content, but like the whole
Mike Allton:thing will be So if you're watching this clip or you're watching in one of my other interviews and you see me and you see my hands in front of me, You aren't thinking about this, but the fact is our reptilian brains are telling you Mike Salton's trustworthy because I could see his hands. And that goes back to when we were cavemen. Because when we were cavemen, we'd want to see if somebody's walking up to us, can we see their hands? Or are they hiding their hands behind their back? And god, maybe they've got a spear that they're hanging behind their back
Dave Charest:Yeah.
Mike Allton:And they might be here to hurt me. That's what we were trained to do when we were homo sapiens. So those kinds of things come into play. And this is, I think, true for any business. If you can combine great video audio content with fantastic written content, that's going to allow you to instill so much more authority and trust in your audience.
Dave Charest:Got it. Got it. I completely get the and I love the process. I mean, we're doing something similar. Right?
Dave Charest:Like, you have kind of like your mode of creation, right, which is in the podcast plays really well with the newsletter and that. I was really thinking more along the lines of just from the social perspective. Right? Like, posting to all of those places. And again, to your point earlier, it makes sense because you just wanna show up, right, in those places and people see you there.
Dave Charest:For a small business owner similar to yourself, right, and doing some things and doesn't necessarily have the, I would say, the interest or desire to do it as much as, like, someone like you and I would, right, where this is kind of what we do, often trying to do all of that feels like spreading yourself too thin versus really focusing on one. So and I'm talking specifically social here. Right? But focusing on a specific social channel and really getting to know the nuance of that and making that work for you versus, again, trying to do all of those things.
Mike Allton:Well, and that's the beauty of the way that I'm doing it. Because again, you know, everybody listening, I gotta remind you, when we're talking about the social media hat stuff, I'm a solopreneur. I only have evenings and weekends to put into that and not a whole lot of time there. I've got a little bit of time. I've got two kids, but they're in dance and they're busy.
Mike Allton:So I've got a certain number of hours. I spend two hours on a Saturday morning editing, publishing, and promoting the podcast, and two hours on a Saturday afternoon writing the weekly newsletter. So other than the actual interviews that I might do on a weekly basis, that's the sum total of my marketing. Four hours. Yeah.
Mike Allton:A small business owner can do that.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Well, I'm excited to get into some of this stuff a little bit when you talk to, like, some strategies and things like that, and particularly how we can start to use AI to help us with this. Before we get there, though, I do wanna talk a little bit about you just Constant Contact and how you're using that. Right? I love obviously that you're doing it newsletter.
Dave Charest:What brought you to Constant Contact in the first place?
Mike Allton:Oh gosh. I believe it was someone on your staff reached out a few years ago and wondered if I was interested in partnering with Constant Contact. And the timing was perfect because I'd been struggling with my previous provider. I'd noticed that the email deliverability wasn't anywhere near what I would have expected it to be. And that's hard to know for sure because if you're not looking at other people's stats, you're just looking at your own and you're looking at the open rates going down, down, down, and you I I initially assumed it's me.
Mike Allton:Right? It's not you, it's me. The more
Dave Charest:I thought about it, the more By the way, I'm
Mike Allton:I'm Yeah.
Dave Charest:Thank you.
Mike Allton:You know, but the more I thought about it, the more I talked to other people, I realized it shouldn't be like this. And then I went like way back into my open rates and that sort of thing because I've been with that provider for years. And I could see that, you know, it had been a lot higher in the past. And it's not as though I'd been doing anything with that list. I mean, sure, you're hitting your list four times a day with sales messages, you're going to kill your open rate.
Mike Allton:But if you're doing a weekly newsletter, every once in a while you toss in a sales message, there is no reason why your open rate should suffer as a result of that. You're just doing value, value, value. And as Gary Vaynerchuk would say, every once in a while, you know, a left hook. So I was talking to this person. I took a look at Constant Contact, which I'd heard of you guys.
Mike Allton:I'd even talked about you on the blog because I talk about email marketing all the time.
Dave Charest:And
Mike Allton:I tend to be fairly tool agnostic
Dave Charest:Mhmm.
Mike Allton:On the side. I'll tell people, you know, here's some other great options for you. I was thrilled with how I could build templates for my emails. I have a very specific vision in mind for how I want my emails to look. And I had pushed the past vendor, the past tool as far as it could be pushed, and it wasn't really yet where I wanted it.
Mike Allton:And I saw that with Constant Contact, I was gonna be able to get to where I wanted right off the bat without really having to work all that hard. Honestly, it's not as though the things that I wanted to do were rocket science or even revolutionary when in terms of email. But for instance, I knew I wanted to have a lot of great imagery in my emails. With the previous provider, one of the strange issues was they could not display the emails by default when sent. Every recipient would always have to click on a button, show images on every single email.
Mike Allton:Even if they click always show images, didn't matter. Every email didn't have it. And so one of the things I have right now is I've got nice little images that are section dividers for the different sections of my newsletter just to make it look a little more put together and professional. And that's what I wanted. Couldn't get it with the last one.
Mike Allton:So you combine that with the open rate and other things. It was a really easy decision for me to switch to Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:I'm curious, you know, you kinda had this problem just in terms of, like, deliverability that you mentioned. What have you found since coming over in that area?
Mike Allton:100% increase in open rate. I was hitting low teens, sometimes single digits in open rates and that it immediately went 20 plus percent on average on every newsletter I send. And that's what I expected to be getting because that's what I was used to getting with this. It's an old list and that sort of thing. And I know I'm talking to people about AI today, for instance, and they may have joined the list literally fourteen years ago, maybe not even business anymore.
Mike Allton:They're not interested in AI, but for whatever reason, they keep opening the emails. And who knows? You know? So I've got people on the list who may be not interested in what I'm talking about. So I'm not expecting to hit forty, fifty, 60 percent open rates.
Mike Allton:But 25% is like the goal for me. Yeah. And a solid four or 5% click rate, that that's what I'm looking for. And that's what I like, immediately, like, bam. First newsletter sent with Constant Contact.
Mike Allton:Those are the numbers I was hitting.
Dave Charest:Well, happy to hear that. And thank you for making that switch over. So you're sending your weekly newsletter. That's what you're kinda doing on a regular consistent basis. How are you using automation at all in your account?
Mike Allton:Couple different ways. First, I have I use Constant Contact forms for virtually all the forms on my website. And like I said, over the years, I've created a number of digital downloads. I've got a Facebook toolkit. I've got a bunch of AI digital downloads and toolkits and social media planners and all those kinds of things.
Mike Allton:And just the newsletter itself. They're all Constant Contact forms, so they feed straight into specific lists within Constant Contact. So if somebody downloads my guide to their LinkedIn profile, you know, they want to spruce up their profile. They're not looking for a job. They want to use it for b b marketing, something like that.
Mike Allton:I've got a guide that just checklists and walks them through how to do that. So they'll sign up and we use the automation inside Constant Contact to automatically send them an email that welcomes them, gives them that. And one of the things that I talked about early on is that that initial email is the most important email you'll ever send because that's the only one you'll get virtually a % open rate. Everything after that's going downhill, you know. So you don't wanna skip on that.
Mike Allton:You wanna make sure that you're packing that email with additional value and that sort of thing. So it's so important to me that I'm able to customize each one of those emails depending on the asset that somebody asked for. Because somebody looking for my LinkedIn guide is not the same person that's looking for a guide on how to use AI to build up a marketing strategy. Those are not the same people. They're not doing that role.
Mike Allton:So I need to be able to customize those emails that way. And then I also have a welcome series. So then pretty much no matter how someone gets into my list, I want them to know certain things about me. I want them to know, look, I'm gonna send you some really long ass emails. So buckle up.
Mike Allton:You're gonna need to vote, you know Grab your coffee. Half an hour to reading these. Bring the coffee, put on some music, whatever. I just tell people upfront and I've had a couple people reply. I said, okay.
Dave Charest:Great. Thanks. That's not for me. Yeah. Okay.
Dave Charest:Great. No problem. That's fine. Yeah.
Mike Allton:You know, I let them know the kinds of tools that I use, the kinds of topics I talk about. And I've got a whole series of emails that walks them through that step by step, gives them opportunities to ask me questions, and we have it all time. Now, one of the things I'm really excited about that you and I talked about recently when we met, because I haven't had a chance to try it yet, is I know you now have a much more advanced workflow within Constant Contact and you're able to put more conditional things. Because that's really what I want to be able to do and I just need to carve out time to dig into that because that's exciting to me.
Dave Charest:Yeah. The old time thing, That always gets in the way here with all this Right. Marketing stuff. I'm interested so obviously, you mentioned how you kinda grow your list there and you're doing different things. One, I I wanna say actually before I get there that, you know, this whole thing with the welcome thing, like, is the thing I'm always kinda preaching.
Dave Charest:I'm like, look, if you do anything, make sure you're setting up this welcome email. I'm always surprised when people don't have that set up because it is such a missed opportunity when people join that list because you've got people at that highly engaged moment in time. Right? And I love what you're doing just from a welcome series perspective because I think that's really again, you're starting to build those relationships. You're starting to do those things.
Dave Charest:And again, weeding out people in many instances that, you know what, maybe it's not the right fit. Right? And that's okay. So I love how you're doing that and letting people know how they can even just work with you or know what they're gonna get in the value exchange with that relationship. When you start thinking about how you're managing your contacts, are you doing anything specific there just in terms of, like, segmentation, creating different lists?
Dave Charest:Like, how do you start to think through that, and are you doing anything specific to those lists?
Mike Allton:Yeah. I love this. This is something I started to do more and more as I realized how important it is. So there are lists within Constant Contact. So anytime somebody signs up for one of my assets, they're immediately put into a very specific list for that asset, and I just simply label it download, colon, whatever it is that asset.
Mike Allton:So I know, okay, that's how they got in the list. Every single email that I send out, every link that's in that email, I also segment those. So when you're setting up a link inside contact to contact, if you're listening, you're not really sure what I'm talking about. When you determine the link, you can choose to add them to a segment list. And so then I have a whole bunch of lists that I simply say interest colon, whatever it is, whatever that topic is.
Mike Allton:And that's allowed me to come up with probably 20 or 30 relatively core interests that my target audience is gonna have. Everything from AI to social media to webinars and all kinds of things like that. So first of all, that's allowed me to develop these subsets of all of my subscribers. 45,000 subscribers. Right?
Mike Allton:But I also know that of those, maybe I don't have the number in front of me. Maybe eight, ten thousand have expressed some interest in AI in the past. Yeah. Others haven't given me that indication for whatever reason. Right?
Mike Allton:But now I know if I really wanna do a targeted message, I've identified them because I'm not doing that on my forms. And I think that's a really important point. Right? All of my forms are first name, email, maybe last name. That's it.
Mike Allton:That's all the information I'm collecting upfront because you and I both know the more questions you ask on those forms, the least likely you are to get them into your system in the first place, and that's a problem. Wanna get them into the system and then I want to teach them about me over time, like through the series. But I also wanna learn about them Right. Over time. So I can do it that way.
Mike Allton:And then I can do some fun stuff like, hey, I'm gonna have a webinar later this year with my friend Chris. If that's something you'd be interested in, just click this link. I don't have to build a complex form or a wait list or anything. The link can just go to my homepage. But if I'm attaching it to a segment list, immediately, I know over time, oh, yeah.
Mike Allton:600 people click that link. They're interested in the webinar. When it launches, I have a ready made list of people who've already said, yeah. I'd like
Dave Charest:to know more about it. Yeah. I love that, and I love your point about really, I guess there's a couple of schools of thought on this. Right? Like, you can have your but I kind of agree with you on this for, like, you start to build the data over time.
Dave Charest:Right? You start to learn more and more about your subscribers versus and I can see the case for the other way too. You can also put up, like, a long form as a roadblock to make sure you're getting more qualified people in. But I think
Mike Allton:Yeah.
Dave Charest:In a situation like yours, right, like, you're kinda qualifying it's kind of the top of the funnel. Right? You're getting more people in and then qualifying as you go along, right, which I think also makes sense. I love that you're doing that. I'm curious as you've been using Constant Contact.
Dave Charest:I mean, is there something that stands out as like a favorite feature for you?
Mike Allton:Oh, yeah. I wouldn't have thought about it unless you asked, but I think one of my favorite features is the automatic resend. So Sunday mornings, this is, I think, relatively new. I think it came out maybe last year, the year before. Maybe I might be mistaken.
Dave Charest:Few years now, I think. Yeah.
Mike Allton:Yeah. So, you know, my emails go out Sunday mornings. I schedule them. It's always like seven, 8AM central time. And I can automatically set it when I schedule the Sunday send to automatically resend on Tuesday morning to anybody who didn't open the Sunday morning newsletter.
Mike Allton:Then I can change the subject line of whatever I want. Usually, it automatically puts in reminder colon the subject line, and I always just replace reminder with in case you miss it, I see you. I whatever it is. I see why am I. And so in case you missed it, Tuesday morning, that goes out.
Mike Allton:That always gets another 5% of my subscribers to open that email and send some more clicks and information. So I'm adding eyeballs on Tuesday morning with virtually no additional effort on my part.
Dave Charest:Yeah. Another simple way to just add some automation to your workflow and what you're doing. Right? So I wanna start to transition us into talking a little bit and getting more deeply into your area of expertise here just in terms of AI and those things. And so when you think of people with a little marketing background, probably very little AI background too.
Dave Charest:I mean, in many levels, we all have little AI background in some instances. Right? But, like, how do they get started thinking about using AI from a market or marketing research standpoint?
Mike Allton:The first thing I always like to think about is what are you doing today that's taking up a lot of your time? Where you could potentially bring in AI, whether it's a model, a large language model like Claude or Chek GPT or a very specific tool that can either automate some of those processes, speed the research, that sort of thing. I mean, just recently on my podcast, I was talking about a new Google tool called NotebookLM, which is a really fabulous tool where you can feed it entire research papers and documents and infographics and all kinds of highly technical stuff and then ask it questions. So imagine if you could have it just summarize that information and then have a conversation with it rather than you having to read a 40 page report on your industry or whatever it is that you're doing in your space. That's a really good example, I think, of the way that AI can help save us time.
Mike Allton:And the other cool thing about NotebookLM is it will create a podcast episode for you out of all the content that you create. It'll create two AI generated individuals who have a conversation back and forth about whatever it is that you fed it. So I created a notebook all about Notebook LM. I fed it everything that I could find printed about Notebook LM, all its FAQs and how to use it and everything. And it created a five minute podcast with two people having a very natural sounding conversation about this new exciting tool from Google.
Mike Allton:It's really mind blowing.
Dave Charest:And did it explode or something? Like
Mike Allton:because I know. Was very meta. Because one goes like Yeah. It was so meta. Yeah.
Mike Allton:And the girl's like, oh my god. And it was so natural and realistic sounding. So there's that kind of thing. But to go back to the original point, I love to find the areas where I'm spending a lot of time. So an easy example for me is podcasting.
Mike Allton:I've got my personal podcast, AI Marketing Impact, and I have five podcasts with Agorapulse. So that's six shows. And before I had all these shows, when I just started with one or two, I was spending two hours per episode on average researching the guests and thinking about what questions to ask and preparing all the documentation and then and then send it over to them. So that was two hours before the actual interview. Well, I figured out how to use AI to help me research the guests.
Mike Allton:And I taught the AI, here's the format and the flow and the style and the tone that I want to have for every single one of these interviews. Here's the show. Right? All the information I need to know. And it's able to help me craft the introduction, a custom bio that I read that really hypes up the guest, the questions, the takeaways, all of that.
Mike Allton:And we're able to do it together collaboratively in twenty minutes instead of two hours. And that's what's allowed me to all of a sudden do all these other shows. Now as a small business owner, you don't have do six shows. I'm just recommending you do one, right, where you interview one person in your industry. Could be a partner or, you know, somebody else, a customer.
Mike Allton:Those are the you want a really great podcast strategy as a small business owner? Interview your prospects. Interview the people you want to sell to as a business. And you can use AI to put together a really professional looking pre show document complete with questions and everything in fifteen to twenty minutes. And you do a thirty minute interview and then you use, like, a tool like Descript, transcribe that, turn it into a video and a podcast.
Mike Allton:Now you've got your content for your website, your content for social media, and then you can feed that into your newsletter. Now here's where we get back to the newsletter stuff because the way I'm using AI for the newsletters are twofold. First, I'll use ChetGPT to brainstorm topic ideas. Here's who I'm trying to talk to. Give me some ideas of what they would like to learn more about.
Mike Allton:And oftentimes, you're not gonna get anything that you might not have thought of yourself, but it will occur just in moments rather than you staring at a blank white page trying to come up with those ideas yourself. Yeah. I could come up with 20 ideas for a newsletter, but that might take me three hours. You know? In the meanwhile, I'm distracted and checking notifications and all that kind of stuff.
Mike Allton:Or I could just ask ChateapTea and get 10 ideas in thirty seconds. So that's the first way. And then I can have it help me outline them, do some research on those kinds of things. But the really cool thing you can do, if you're creating content outside of the newsletter, like podcast or blog posts or any other kind of content, particularly if it's interviews. This works so well with interviews.
Mike Allton:You can feed AI all the contents you've already created and ask the AI to identify trends. Like, I fed it 25 podcast interviews. Yeah. I said, okay. Here's 25 interviews I've done on the AI Marketing Impact podcast.
Mike Allton:Identify for me the top 10 trends where at least three guests talked about that topic and then pull out specific quotes from the transcript from that guest. And I'm gonna use that to build an entirely new newsletter that's talking about that topic and referencing my podcast episodes. Yeah. So it's new content, but I'm also now promoting my podcast, like, two, three, four, five times in that one single article, which, like I said before, is going to become an article on my website at the end of the day.
Dave Charest:Yeah. I've actually started experimenting with things like that, and I think it's pretty interesting. Because I think when you're creating things, I think the tendency is, like, you're always kinda moving forward. Right? So, like, after I interview you, I'm gonna go interview someone else.
Dave Charest:And it's often difficult to go back and because there's so much more you can do with that content. Right? Or in other ways, you can repackage it and do things with it. And similarly, I love this idea of being able to say like, hey, I know I've had this conversation. What did such and such say about this?
Dave Charest:Or who else said something about that? And be able to find the it's almost like having, like, like, another side of your brain. Right? That, like, knows all the stuff you've forgotten.
Mike Allton:Right? Right? Like, I
Dave Charest:know I did that, but, like, what did we talk about? Right? And you're able to kinda pull things from that. So I think that's actually really exciting. I love that.
Dave Charest:So when you start thinking about, in particular, let's say, you know, everyone kinda talks about personas. And I think to your point, you mentioned, like, talking to your prospects and things like that. I mean, I think your best persona is actually having conversations with real people, right, and understanding those. But let's say someone isn't doing that, and I think personas are a good place to start. Right?
Dave Charest:Because, like, it gives you an idea of which direction to go. And I think I would argue then you need to pay attention to who shows up so you can start to make those refinements on that stuff. But, like, think of a small business owner here. I guess, like, one, what are personas and how are they helpful? And then two, how can AI really help you kind of save time and help in that regard?
Mike Allton:I think one the things that you said was really important, which is that ideally, we're gonna talk to people. But we all recognize that as a small business owner, we may not have time to sit down or call a customer or prospect and have a formal interview. Even though that might only take twenty, thirty minutes, you need to have a process for it. You need to record it in a document in some way so that you can go back and refer to it and start to glean some of the details of it. And I say all that because I was having a conversation with another well known b two b marketer.
Mike Allton:And she was really pushing back on this idea of using AI to develop personas. Because her point, and it's somewhat valid, was if you ask the AI, you work with AI, and I'll tell you how to do this in a second. But if you work with the AI to develop a persona, how do you know what's right? No idea. We all know AI can hallucinate, and we could talk about why that is.
Mike Allton:It's probably not going to if you do it the way I'm telling you to do it. You still at the end of the day, you won't know how accurate it was until you do what you said, which is to try it and pay attention. Yeah. But the reality is, again, as small business owners, we don't necessarily have to do 20 interviews in a month. We're busy running the business or we're busy running the marketing department.
Mike Allton:So with that in mind, AI is a lifesaver here because if it's a choice between doing it with AI or not doing it all, I'd much rather you at least try to do it with AI and have something in place that can help inform your marketing and your product development and all of your other communications. It may not be amazing, but honestly, it's probably good enough. So it starts with having a conversation. And I'm putting it that way because I'm not going to tell you to do a fancy prompt. Don't think about it that way.
Mike Allton:Sit down in front of a paid version of ChatGPT or Claude, and I wanna emphasize paid version because that's gonna give you access to the most data and the most robust model. And you want it for these kinds of purposes. Sit down in front of a paid version and simply say, look, I'd like to develop a persona for my brand. Now the AI will know what that means. But in case you're listening, you're not quite sure what we're talking about, the persona is a visualization of who it is that you wanna talk to and sell to as a business.
Mike Allton:You might have referred to it as an ideal customer or an ideal customer profile or ICP. They're all basically meaning the same thing. Avatar is is another word that people use. It's who is it? You know, what do they do?
Mike Allton:What kind of business are they have? What are their goals or aspirations? What are their pain points? What are they struggling with? What do we know about them as it relates to our business?
Mike Allton:Their buying power. Right? Their typical journey. How long they're typically gonna be in that journey? Those kinds of things.
Mike Allton:That's what we wanna know about so that when we're crafting our marketing and our sales messaging, those are the people we have in mind, and we're actually talking to them in the messaging. And here is where AI can go a little bit short because ideally, you'll have the actual words and language they use. And that's where the interviews come into place. Right? If you're talking to somebody on the phone and they keep talking about something related to your business, they keep using the same words over and over again.
Mike Allton:That's a clue to you. Oh, I probably should use those same words in my marketing. Right? If they don't use workflows, we're not really gonna talk about workflows. If they're talking about replying, well, then we should stop about replying.
Mike Allton:Probably a bad example, but let's get back to the AI. So you're gonna have a conversation with the AI and you're gonna say, I wanna develop a persona for my business. And here's the trick. Say to the AI, ask me questions to help me develop a persona.
Dave Charest:Uh-huh. Okay.
Mike Allton:So you're not just feeding the AI a bunch of information that you think it's going to need and then expecting it to give a response. You're telling it to ask you questions, and this is a really key part. Most people don't understand how AI works, and I get that. You don't necessarily need to know all the technical details. But the reality is AI is developed to be as helpful as possible, at least today's models.
Mike Allton:They're developed to give you the most logical response based on what word will most likely follow the next word and then will most follow the next word and so on. So first of all, some might see that as the most average of responses. That's something to keep in mind. We might need to push the AI a little bit to think more creatively more out of the box. But more importantly, whatever you ask the AI, it's gonna try to help you.
Mike Allton:It's gonna try to answer your question. So if you simply say, write a persona for my business, it's gonna do it even though it won't do it well. So you say, ask me questions so we can develop a persona together. And it will start asking you, okay, what's your business? What do you sell?
Mike Allton:Who do you sell to? What are the some of the things that those people struggle with? What do you know about your target audience? And it will make you think about that stuff and maybe some things you don't know, maybe you do. But you're gonna start feeding the AI all that information, and then you can have that conversation, that back and forth.
Mike Allton:What else do you need to know? What else should we consider? What should be in a great persona? I mean, it was amazing. It's like talking to a consultant.
Mike Allton:And that's what I want to really have people remember. If you're treating AI like a really important strategist or consultant that happens to be free and you go into that with the mindset of having a conversation, the output that you get at the end will be so much better. And developing something like an ICP or a persona should and will take a little bit of time. So just be prepared to, I'm gonna invest couple hours at least, maybe a couple days of back and forth to make sure that the end, we have a terrific persona or maybe more than one persona for my company.
Dave Charest:So I love the way you the concept of asking it questions Because I often struggle sometimes with, like again, like, it creates its own blinking cursor problem because I don't know what to ask it. Right? And I like the idea of, oh, wait. Have it ask me questions so then we can get to something that's working, like, together. And I also like the idea of just that exercise alone.
Dave Charest:This is sometimes the things you don't think about. Right? Like, you just kinda go with, alright, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. But to your point earlier, like, the whole idea of knowing who you're talking to impacts how you're going to position things, how you're gonna say something. I always kinda give the stupid example of, like or I should say silly.
Dave Charest:Right? But, like, if you're gonna explain quantum physics to someone, right, the way you explain it to your mother, your best friend, and a five year old is all gonna be completely different. Because not that I can explain quantum physics, but it's just you're talking to different people. And so they're gonna have different needs, and how you do that is gonna be different. And it's the same thing when you're marketing something to different people or a specific set of people.
Dave Charest:And so I I love that idea of just that exercise alone even helps you think about some things you should probably be thinking about. Right? I wanna go to thinking about and you mentioned some of this. Right? But so let's say we have the persona, and now we know who it is that we're talking to.
Dave Charest:How then can you leverage AI to start help you thinking about content ideas that might resonate with that particular persona?
Mike Allton:The order of your questions is perfect because the persona is absolutely where you wanna start and use that as a building block then for everything else that you wanna do. Let's say at the end of the end of the end, what your ultimate goal is to create better newsletters. And you want to create subject lines that are gonna get opened by your target audience. You wanna deliver content that they're gonna find really, really valuable and they're gonna open, they're gonna read it, maybe they're gonna share it to other people and
Dave Charest:get those people to subscribe to your newsletter.
Mike Allton:From a business point and from an email marketing point, that's probably our number one goal. But you can't start by opening up ChatGPT and saying, hey, give me 10 subject lines for my next newsletter. You can, and that's the fatal flaw with AI models today. Because like I said before, it will answer that question and they will be crap. And if you don't know that they're crap, you might use them and it's gonna make your marketing suffer.
Mike Allton:So instead, start with building the persona. And what you can do with the large language models today, two things. The first thing you could do is work with the AI to develop a persona, copy and paste that into a Word document or an Evernote note or someplace where you can then copy and paste that back into a new AI chat and say, this is our persona. Today, we're gonna work on a new newsletter, and we wanna start with some subject lines. Or we're gonna work on social media content or a blog post or whatever it is.
Mike Allton:But you start by telling the AI this is my target persona because it won't remember it. Even if you go back to that same chat, eventually, will begin to forget everything that you talked about a long time ago. So we wanna be able to give it all the information right from the start. And it's also usually fairly convenient to kinda separate your chats and have, you know, one chat for this, one chat for that. The tool that I use is called Magi where it's a wrapper for all the different large language models.
Mike Allton:So depending on what I wanna accomplish, I can start a new chat and I could choose ChatGPT and one of the specific ChatGPT models like four o or whatever or Claude or Gemini. And there's different reasons why you might wanna use each one of those, but I can organize all those in different chats. And the other thing you can do is have custom GPTs or personas where you've told the AI, whenever I'm talking to this part of you on this topic for this function, here's all the information you need to know in advance before we even begin. So you don't have to copy and paste that in Right. Every time.
Mike Allton:So you could have a custom GPT if you were using ChatGPT. That is your marketing newsletter persona, and it's already been programmed. You just copy and paste it. It's not complicated, but you just copy and paste in your persona.
Dave Charest:And anything else
Mike Allton:that you wanted to know about that particular task? So if we're talking about newsletters, you probably have a format that you like to have for your newsletters. You're not completely reinventing them every single week. I hope that you've got some kind of template that you've chosen. Maybe you've got different segments.
Mike Allton:You tell all those things to the Chetchippity when you send it, how often you send it, all the other preferences. That way then when you go in today to start building this week's newsletter, already has that information. You don't have to copy and paste it from a document. That's how I built out my showrunners for my podcast. I have a custom GPT or persona, like I said, Magi where I go to it.
Mike Allton:And in my case, I wanted it to follow a step by step process. So I told it in the custom GPT, I'm gonna start the conversation by saying, we have a new episode. And I want you to ask me who's our next guest. And then I'm gonna tell you who the guest is. And then I want you to ask me, great.
Mike Allton:What's their LinkedIn URL? Because I'm gonna look at their LinkedIn and then I'm gonna do a Bing search. And all that's just typed very conversationally. No programming language, no HTML or anything like that in the customer GPT. And it's step by step how I want to build out my podcast.
Mike Allton:The newsletter could be the same thing. You could have different segments, other things of consideration that go into building your next email campaign, whether it's a newsletter or something else. Right? And have it ask you those things and build that so that at the end of the end, you've got your subject, your pre header, all the different segments. You maybe even have prompts for images because if you do a lot of images in your newsletter and you need to create them on the fly, you can ask AI, alright.
Mike Allton:Here's our newsletter topic. I wanna insert an image here. Give me a prompt for an image that would work really, really well in that spot, and then you can copy and paste and throw that into Leonardo or Dahlia three or whatever image generator you'd like to use.
Dave Charest:Very cool stuff. It's amazing how I mean, this is all evolving so quickly too. Right? And all these different things that you can do. And once you find you know, I do love but I think, you know, people may be getting just started to, like, sometimes this can be a little overwhelming.
Mike Allton:Yeah.
Dave Charest:But I think it's, like, even just play around with, like, you know, again, constant contact, for example, what we have in there. Right? Just see what it can do for you and see how it can help you in small places to hopefully get you to maybe try some other things. And so I guess, maybe my last question for you would be, what do you believe is the most important kind of mindset shift that people have to make just in order to start embracing and integrating AI into their marketing strategies? And I guess, how can they overcome those fears and resistance that they may have to it?
Mike Allton:There's two parts to it. The first is I want everyone to understand that AI is not a tool. It's not an app like Canva that you know before you even open it. Oh, that's for images. I know constant content is for email.
Mike Allton:It's a technology. It's an underpinning to everything that we're doing today. It's like electricity or the Internet. It is everywhere. It's permeating every aspect of our society.
Mike Allton:We are literally in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, the AI revolution, where everything we do and know as a society is literally changing. And that's not just hype. That's actually what's happening right now. And it's hard sometimes for people to see it. And it's hard for people sometimes to be okay with that because to your point, they might feel afraid.
Mike Allton:They might feel overwhelmed. They might feel suspicious. Or they might just feel like it's all hype and it's gonna go away like cryptocurrency or the metaverse. It's not going to. This is different.
Mike Allton:And I'm gonna harken back to what I said at the very beginning of the show, which is that I've been the unofficial historian of social media and internet marketing for almost two decades now. I have seen social networks come and go. Google plus Blab, Vine, Periscope. These places have come and gone. And I've seen people hype them up.
Mike Allton:I've seen NFTs gotten hyped up on the Internet. And I could see the difference between what we're doing and talking about today and how AI is impacting all of society, not just marketing and what you and I are talking about today, but all of society is being impacted. Health care, finance, so much, education. So I need people to understand that because I need them to understand that bearing our heads in the sand is not an option. You need to know about AI.
Mike Allton:You don't need to know how it all works. You don't need to understand tokenization and rag or any of other detailed parts of that AI technology, but you do need to recognize that it is changing everything. And I need to know enough so that I can continue to move ahead in my career, move ahead with my business, not get caught unawares, not fall behind my competition because that's a key consideration. Something I recommend that all do. Think about how AI is being used inside the business.
Mike Allton:Think about how AI can help the business grow, whether it's through features like what you guys are doing, which are great, a constant contact or just through processes and workflows. But thirdly and most importantly, how is AI disrupting my industry? That's obviously gonna be hard for people to predict, but it's something you need to be actively thinking about having conversations internally because you might find in twelve months that the way you're doing business today is no longer necessary thanks to AI. Think about the Internet and streaming and how that impacted Blockbuster. Blockbuster had a choice.
Mike Allton:Netflix chose wisely. Blockbuster didn't. They were both in the DVD business when the advent of streaming media came about. Right? And Netflix is now still here as a multibillion dollar company.
Mike Allton:So that's the first thing. Think about that. And then once you wrap your head around that and you say, okay, fine. Mike, I'll do it. Drink the Kool Aid.
Mike Allton:I'll start reading about AI a little bit. I'll start learning a little bit. And that's the second point, and that's exactly how I want you to start. Start learning and reading a little bit and start simply. You made some great points earlier about how AI is already built in the Constant Contact.
Mike Allton:You don't need to go looking for new tools to help you leverage AI to improve your email marketing. Just look to see what Constant Contact's already doing for you. Regardless of what tool you're using or what tools you're using in your business and your marketing, odds are they found some way to at least put a little bit of AI into their tool to help you on a day to day basis. So start there.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number one, start with a welcome email. As Mike mentioned, it's the most opened message you'll ever send. So make it count by delivering real value, like delivering the thing you offered in exchange for their contact info and setting expectations. This simple automation is a great way to start building those relationships.
Dave Charest:Number two, use segmentation to learn as you go. Mike mentioned he builds lists based on what asset people download from his website. Then he tracks what people engage with to build more targeted segments over time. Now he has subsets of people based on interests, which allow him to be more targeted with messaging when necessary. How can you use segmentation to make the messages you send better?
Dave Charest:Number three, treat AI like a collaborator. Let it ask you questions, brainstorm ideas, or summarize content. You'll save time and get better results. And if you just wanna get your feet wet, try the AI content tools within your Constant Contact account. It's a great place to start.
Dave Charest:So here's your action item for today. Set up a welcome email if you haven't done so already in Constant Contact. This is an email that automatically sends when someone joins your list. And Mike's right. This is the most important email you'll ever send, and Constant Contact makes it easy to personalize based on how someone signed up.
Dave Charest:I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Please take a moment to leave us a review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/bam. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show. That's ratethispodcast.com/bam.
Dave Charest:Well, friend, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.