How We Approach AI Tools as a Brand & Marketing Agency

“Mike, what are you doing with AI at BB?,” “Mike, what do you think we could do with AI?”

Right now, these are the most common questions from my clients, and I’d say it’s for good reason. AI is rapidly transforming how we work, especially with content and marketing. And it’s only just begun.?

Like many businesses, we’ve been trialing tidbits of AI for ourselves, trying to answer the same questions.?

For me, it’s a bit like seeing the internet itself become ubiquitous in the late 90’s and early noughties… Or watching the growth of social media in the last decade. We are in the very early days of AI, meaning there is a lot of BS and hype flying around. Conversely, we better be on top of new technology or opportunities are going to fly by fast.?

I don’t pretend to know the bigger impacts nor the more philosophical arguments, I’ll leave that to others to comment on. For us, AI is about efficiencies and work flows, and that’s where I see its value for service based businesses. For most creative things AI is still rubbish, and as a creative agency first and foremost, that suits us just fine.?

What remains important for me as a business owner is using what we can, implementing what we can, and not being left behind. As with everything, we want to also be able to show clients how they can use tools to be more profitable and more productive.??

So, what are we doing with AI at BB??

For now, we tend to use AI mostly to improve our processes, and give us the opportunity to do more with our content to reach a bigger audience. Most of the time our interaction and usage of AI is through applications we already use which have started to build useful AI tools into how they work.?

Here are two specific examples:

1. Opus Clip - We use it to create dozens of short form videos to post across all social channels.?

What is it??

Opus Clip is a piece of software we use that helps create short videos from longer clips.?

Essentially, the AI goes through your longer clips, and cuts them down while providing a “score” based on how good the topic is, how good the initial “hook” is, and how it thinks it will perform on social media. It also provides a transcript and a summary and you can edit the video on their platform.?

How and why do we use it?

The how is easy. You upload a video, or provide a YouTube URL, and in about 20 minutes the AI will send you back a number of clips (with captioning if you want).?

For years I have made long form content for our podcast but never had the resources or time to cut it all up and use it properly. Some platforms like Tik Tok prefer volume posting in their algorithm, so this is a way to grow a channel with that volume while keeping the quality high. The cuts aren’t perfect, it does require some editing but it is a huge time save and brain saver (it really is great at finding the best bits, even if it needs editing).?

How has it improved what you do?

I’ve decided to invest time in high quality long form video for every podcast now, because I know that we will then be able to generate enough volume from that single piece.?

In the past, you had to worry that every single piece of video would perform, now you have many more chances to reach an audience with the same core content cut up into smaller bits.?

This means we can both improve the quality of our content by investing in better longer pieces, and reach more of our potential audience. For a small business like ours, reaching more people and increasing the size of our potential audience within the industries we serve is critical for growth especially in a higher competition market. It opens up possibilities to reach more local and international audiences and ultimately build trust - that’s not something most smaller businesses have ever been able to do because of cost.?

We are just rolling this out in June with the new season of the Beyond Billables Podcast so I will share results soon!?

1. Descript for our podcast content?

What is it??

We use a piece of software called Descript which is an excellent editing tool for audio and video.

Descript has been around for some time now – and isn’t an AI tool per se. What it does do now though is incorporate elements of AI to help you edit and improve your audio quality (amongst other things).??

Why do we use it?

First we start with the raw audio file. Using the softwares built in AI it allows me to remove pauses, remove “umms and ahhs”, upgrade the overall sound quality to “studio sound”, and create a transcript.?

When that is done, Descript has its own AI assistant that you can then create show notes or a blog post.?

Most of this will need review, but it does a great job and saves a tonne of time.?

How has it improved what you do?

For starters it has given us more control over simple elements of editing. It has also allowed us to create things like Chapter Lists which we never could have before given how much time they take to do. It also allows us to put transcripts into blog posts which is useful for accessibility reasons.?

Final thoughts

The impact of AI for our business is already significant, but it has only just begun.?

Keeping engaged, using tools as they become available and staying ahead of the curve is just part of doing business - the adoption and use of AI is no different.?

Where will this all lead??

Who knows, but I’ll be writing about it more because it is critical to all businesses branding, marketing, BD and content strategies just like the internet, social media and the relationship management applications that we all now use are.