Behold: My 5 Favorite AI Tools (As Of Today…)

This could become an at least monthly updated post...obviously, AI evolves much more frequently than that.

But I try to be thorough in my deep dives and how I involve new tools in my processes. Specifically, lead generation SOPs for:

• Data enrichment - automated 3rd-party data scraping
• ICP - driven personalized messaging sequences
• Sales scripts and outbound sequencing for video prospecting at scale
• Creating templates and in-depth SEO research at scale
• Blog creation at scale
• Image manipulation for asset variations
• Repurposing content

Not only do the tools I’m about to present enable insane efficiency in and of themselves, but I have established a flow between them that works as a comprehensive marketing machine.

Nothing to it but to get to it - here they are in all their masterful glory:

1. Clay.com https://lnkd.in/gvpySqyv: Clay.com: Google Sheets on steroids for lead generation. It allows you to begin with minimal information, enriches it through native 3rd-party data tools (50+ data providers, real-time scraping, and AI), and crafts hyper-personalized campaign sequences.
2. Chat GPT (but wait…there’s more) Advanced Analytics: It’s good ole Chat GPT, juiced up, next level. Turn on this feature and your competitor and keyword research capabilities just exploded.
3. Heygen.com https://lnkd.in/gB23sRKX: An AI text-to-video generator, with your clone or an avatar. Create prospecting videos at scale (using scripts from Chat GPT of course ?? )
4. Opus Clips https://lnkd.in/gwgYX7Kb An AI-powered long-form video content repurposing tool. Take your hour-long podcast and cut it into multiple short-form content instantly - then post directly to your channels from the UI.
5. Byword.com https://lnkd.in/guZ3VPXP: Byword is an Programmatic SEO tool that not only generates blog articles from uploaded keywords, it natively tracks what blogs are being ranked or indexed by Google. It reads your website map and does the dirty work of interlinking relevant articles on our site.

I’ll review how I use these tools personally - but these are BEHEMOTHS. The functionality spans as far as your creativity can.

1. Clay.com?

Data enrichment is now the status quo - yet not all enrichment tools meet the status quo. But Clay.com transcends it - WITH the added punch of AI.

It truly lives up to its name - the most malleable, versatile building material for your lead generation efforts. I promise - Clay.com will WILDLY improve your outbound conversion rates.

It arms you not just with comprehensive prospect data, but the tools to SCALE that data, and scale how that data impact your bottom line - wrapped into one interface.

At the risk of oversimplification, Clay.com is Google Sheets on steroids. You can build your lead list from scratch within the UI, or upload from a tool like Apollo.io.

Then, brace for hypersonic data magnification (and more free time after you come back to earth).

“Claymaking”

Clay’s native AI, 50+ data sources and real-time scraping will juice up your leads whether they like it or not. No API key? No problem. Use clay credits to access ALL the above.

This is "Claymaking":

1. Research & enrich your leads
2. Score leads
3. Craft hyper-personalized message Sequences
4. Trigger outbound campaigns & update CRMs

Let's zoom in on #s 1-2.

1. Research & Enrich:

Use Clay’s AI prompts (or your own) to unearth and organize the nuances of your leads, based on your Ideal Customer Profiles. Get those data points!

Example data Clay can furnish:

• Online Performance: Spotify store status, site desktop and mobile performance, # of blogs, keywords used, sitemap URLs
• Company Info: Competitors, employee headcount, tech stack details, recent business connections, active job openings, validated company emails by job title,recent news, fundraising data and even Yelp and Google Business reviews
• Personal info: Industry, location, job title, interests, skills, mobile number, personal email, work email, social profiles user data and follower count, recent linkedin posts

Add your criteria to the sheet, and turn the table on - then watch as it automatically and constantly updates across the board.

2. Score Leads

IT’S ALIVE! Constantly feeding itself, thanks to Clay. Why not let Clay score it, too?

Simply use the "Score Row" integration to score leads upon upload, automatically. Give it your scoring criteria (up to 15) - guided by your ICP - and their corresponding values (its Chat GPT integration allows you to generate creative custom scoring criteria, too).

Clay’s 3rd party data and AI even helps target decision-makers at the best times. So what will you do with yourself now?!

So far, we've just started playing with Clay. The real creativity comes with #3.

3. Hyper Personalized Message Generator

"A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle" - Og Mandino

And that applies to Clay.com - a lead generation castle-building AI tool. It provides the foundation and walls of the castle, wielding its toolbelt of 50+ data providers AND AI to enrich your lead lists...

But it also designs the arches, the finials, the landscaping - all of the ornaments that create the curb appeal to welcome your target audience.

I.e. - the messaging.

And it requires a mere touch of your genius to build itself.

First, Clay.com allows prospecting research and data enrichment. Then, it automatically prioritizes your leads. Next, it crafts hyper-custom messaging for each of your prospects.

This is where it gets creative freedom! (That you supervise, of course).

After the grunt work of plumping your leads list, building the castle...it's time to meticulously invite your guests across the moat.

Programmatics

This is where ChatGPT shines - accessible natively within Clay. Together they can programmatically summarize literally any of the data you added to your sheet when building and enriching - juicy details like their individual interests, website performance and recent news headlines...

And it will generate not ONE email…but entire sequences, down to the subject lines. It references and inserts those hyper-personalized data points, like a handwritten letter.

Gone are the days of a prospect's name and company variables dynamically thrown in a template. Clay and GPT fortify you with the exact information you need to be irresistible to your prospects.

They empower you to call out any inefficiencies you identify and can help with, and to connect over deeper interests and circumstances. It also will save you from inserting the dreaded "Johnathan" when they go by "John."

It's the little things.

Deployment

I won’t say lastly, because I have not nearly brushed "firstly" with this mega tool. But after all of the above, Clay.com can trigger the deployment of the very outbound campaigns it crafted for you, via its integrations.

It can send those invitations to your lavish castle soirees. It can also update CRMs automatically, so your sales team doesn't skip a beat.

This "field of clay(.com)" does still need your human, "genius" touch to mold it into your castle.

Even though it does produce mega-custom messaging, you need to train the machine, you need to revise.

And even still, it has its limits: written campaigns.

As for the castle for keyword analysis and long form content creation - that's Chat GPT Advanced Analytics, and that's tool #2 on my list of AI tools.

2. ChatGPT Advanced Analytics

Chat GPT is holding out on you - hiding its most powerful feature behind a toggle in settings (oh, and a paywall). But it’s worth it.

Advanced Analytics is ChatGPT’s “wait, wait there’s more!” And it’s my second top favorite AI tool right now.

Advanced Analytics, formerly known as Code Interpreter, is THE data exploration tool. It's ChatGPT + data and file uploading and downloading capabilities.

It can read:

• Images
• Audio
• Video
• PDFs
• CSV & Excel documents
• Lines of code

...and provides insights, solves complex problems and generates reports.

Use Case Expansion

Advanced Analytics dramatically increases use cases for ChatGPT output. General examples include:

• Interpreting code (Python only)
• Performing advanced mathematical computations
• Reading, describing, analyzing, cleaning and manipulating data
• Visualizing your data - CREATING graphs/maps etc.!
• Basic image editing: Applying filters, color correcting, zooming, cropping, overlaying, animation
• Rudimentary video and audio editing

Here are some of my personal use cases:

1. Programmatic SEO research: I upload huge amounts of keywords and sort by category, then create SEO optimized buckets of keywords and questions to analyze millions of keywords at once.I then extrapolate focused keywords to move through next steps: creating SEO titles, blog tags, and ultimately hundreds of blogs.
2. Short or long form content scripts: Do advanced analytics on huge troves of keyword buckets and use them to create video scripts.
3. Reverse engineer a brand kit: Upload screenshots of a website or other PDF to find color palate and text fonts.
4. Create A/B ad test variations: upload a few ads and prompt to transform jpeg to svg, then to create an array of content variations based on color, texture, fonts and multivariable text

And now, marketing use cases from the horse’s mouth (ChatGPT):

• Summarize customer feedback: Use natural language processing and sentiment analysis from customer interactions, website analytics, social media data and more
• Topic modeling: Pull from the above sources to ID content planning opportunities
• Audience segmentation: Use clustering techniques to inform targeted marketing campaigns
• Predictive analytics: Forecast trends and customer behavior (i.e. sales, churn)
• Competitive analysis: Monitor competitor strategies and content to ID gaps

It truly is a remarkable feature that can transform your entire marketing strategy. A worthy paywall for the sheer power. It also feeds into my next, my #3 favorite AI tool - HeyGen for creating prospecting videos at scale.

3. HeyGen

Deepfaking has met its match. We can now deepfake OURSELVES! We can publish and scale AI-generated video and audio content of our CLONES.

Heygen.com makes this possible.

Making our way down my list of top 5 AI tools, and boy… Gotta say this one both creeps me out and astonishes me at the same time.

Heygen enables us to create videos from text in minutes via AI generated avatars and voices. Not just any voice, or any likeness - though they have hundreds of options for you. You can use YOUR likeness and voice for your outbound video prospecting campaigns - and beyond.

You give it permission by uploading a video of yourself, and in just two minutes of video, you’ll have your clone and the makings of a perfectly lip-synched talking head video.

It’ll “face swap” your face onto one of their avatars, and “voice clone” your voice. WILD!

Not only is it cheap to use in and of itself, but compared to studio space? Actor, cameraman, producer, and editor? Time rehearsing?

You’re saving buku, and doing something pretty darn fascinating for it.

Use Cases

• Product Marketing: Product explainer videos, releases and updates
• Content Marketing: Create short form video for social media, landing pages, email marketing and more to build value and connect with your audience
• Tailored Prospecting: Upload sales scripts to customize your prospecting video emails
• Training and Development: Create video content for onboarding and courses

Your Process

1. Choose from 100+ avatars, or create your own
2. Upload your scripts
3. Choose from 300+ voices in 40+ languages - or upload your own
4. Generate video in minutes

All Together Now

Let’s flesh out #2, in light of streamlining your content process: remember Clay.com?

You can take your hyper-personalized messaging sequences generated in Clay (via data enrichment and programmatic data summaries of your ICPs), and take them as sales scripts to upload into Heygen.

Baddabing Baddaboom, tailored video prospecting content for your SDRs and outreach. Chat GPT is another source for scripts, for short and long form content. It’s all connected.

It’s downright bizarre, and it’s downright revolutionary. The time, energy and money saved are priceless. The scale and conversion rate increase are undeniable. And it’s incredibly interesting and fun to boot.

Give it a try - and hang tight for my next favorite AI tool.

4. Opus Clips

Last year I created a community management course. It took 60+ hours of recording, editing, and written collateral creation.

Needless to say this was pre-ChatGPT - and Pre-Opus Clips (also powered by OpenAI).

I smile at how there was absolutely nothing I could have done differently before the AI explosion, but how much time I would have saved if I waited literally two more months?!

Chat GPT isn’t the only revolutionary resource that would have made that project unquantifiably more efficient. And boy when I tell you how, if I think too hard about it, this one frustrates the heck out of me.

The Genius

Opus Clips is a generative AI video clipping tool that repurposes long talking videos into shorts, in one click. It literally could’ve taken the longer videos I created and spent countless hours cutting, trimming and editing for each step in the course, and automatically clipped them for me.

Not only that, but it’s cheap. WAY cheaper than the hourly rate I paid my editor for her work, AND they have a genius lead magnet/first door offer:

Allowing you to get free clips from dropping a video link right from the homepage.

And it’s smart about its clipping. Using AI, it analyzes the video to ID your hooks and juicy highlights and pieces them together into cohesive, viral short videos. It also rates its virality potential.

To boot, its “Co-Pilot” feature allows you to be a bit more hands-on when selecting parts for your video, based on keywords and time stamps.

Other features include:

• Face following, to ensure your speakers’ faces are centered in frame
• Dynamic screen layout, shifting automatically from different angles, screens and people
• AI filler-word removal to pluck out your “ums” and “likes”
• AI emoji and keyword automaticity - inserts relevant emojis and keywords to highlight points and emotions
• (Beta) adds contextually relevant B-rolls to your videos to enhance storytelling

What’s more, you can post and schedule your content to your socials directly through Opus Clips!

No sense in dreaming about the “what ifs” - but I sure get excited when I think about my next course (or revamping the first).

Tools like this can be subversive to our “antiquated” processes…I’ll say it over and over again: with the right approach. With your human touch.

Just not 60 hours of it!

5. Byword

This next AI tool’s name is multi-level clever and apropos: Byword.com.

Byword, noun: “something cited as a notorious and outstanding example of something.” Nice.

BUT the wit goes deeper, as it is a programmatic SEO and long-form informational content tool - “word” is embedded in the brand! The wordsmith in me is impressed.

Byword.com generates large volumes of high quality, SEO optimized AI-written articles at scale. A bit of an oxymoron, it would seem - “high quality” and “SEO optimized” are typically opposites, at this point in AI evolution at least...

I digress. It’s a bold claim, but I think they have earned the title.

I’d say it is an “outstanding example and embodiment” of an AI tool - likely to become “notorious.”

And that’s why it made my list.

Google-Proof

Byword.com not only crafts blog articles from uploaded keywords (in the thousands) that rank, it natively tracks how their content actually indexes. And does it all undetected under Google’s nose.

Finding it hard to believe it can rank, AND be how they say, “high quality?” Think about this:

None of Byword’s client brands have been hit by Google penalties. Now, Google’s ability to flag AI content is not new; they have only used it to penalize low-grade content.

So, there’s a testament right there to their positive opinion of Byword content.

Features

Here are some features that cut Byword above the rest (yes, even ChatGPT for programmatic SEO):

• Algorithms that bypass major AI detectors that could dock your score
• Keyword research feature - find and aggregate relevant keywords to your site, and send them through their batch generator for writing
• Writing style control: customize your own, or choose from predefined
• Does all of the Internal linking to your website’s existing content
• Direct integration with and publication to your site: Wordpress, Zapier, Webflow CMS, and APIs
• Relevant image generation - no more sifting through stock photos
• Multi-lingual - nine, to be exact
• Large-scale programmatic SEO projects - Access tools designed to help ideate and build large-scale programmatic campaigns.
• Social post generation repurposed from their blogs and tailored to each platform

And you can test it out for free ??

Guidance

I found not only the language model and creation modes to be robust, but they also have some really great guides to go along with the tool. They give you “good,” “better,” “best” examples for training and directing its AI.

So you’re not left to your own devices, and can fine-tune from the beginning! Definitely a step up from Training ChatGPT. But as always - check its work ;)

Roundup

I have a feeling these tools aren’t going anywhere, despite the ever-evolving AI landscape.

All of them are mindblowingly robust, and leave few boxes unchecked. They also work seamlessly together as far as accomplishing most vital sales and marketing tasks.

That’s not to say there aren’t more out there, even yet to come - that’s why this will be an at least quarterly publication.

For now, I’ll rest easy knowing my SOPs are streamlined and if I could help just one other person reading this to do the same, that’s success!

#aitools #aiprospecting #aicontentcreation #aileadgeneration?

Tool Pages:

HeyGen OpusClip Byword Clay