Tactics

How to effectively use AI to save you time

Billy Jones, VP Marketing at Hootsuite
✍️ How to effectively use AI to save time with Billy Jones  Read time: 5 minutes AI – it’s the topic on everyone’s lips. And more specifically, we all want to know how we, as marketers, can use it to help us be better at our jobs, and do a lot more with a little. […]
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✍️ How to effectively use AI to save time with Billy Jones 

Read time: 5 minutes

Table of Contents

AI – it’s the topic on everyone’s lips. And more specifically, we all want to know how we, as marketers, can use it to help us be better at our jobs, and do a lot more with a little. This webinar was a Q&A between Joe and Billy Jones – VP of Marketing at Hootsuite. They discussed:

🧠 How you can use AI in your marketing activity

🧠 How to write great prompts to get the most out of AI tools

🧠 How to navigate the ethics and legalities of using AI in business

Watch the full webinar back above, or read on for the key takeaways.

💬 For a marketer just getting started with AI, what is one piece of advice that you’d like to give them?

Billy – As a marketer who is super busy, works in tech, and who doesn’t want to get left behind, my advice is to not be scared of AI. Start experimenting and playing with it now, because whether you like it or not, these technologies are here to stay and will become part of your workflows over the coming months and years. Get a working knowledge of some of the basics so you’re prepared.

💡 What has been a lightbulb moment for you when it comes to AI?

Billy – I’m convinced that AI image generation is going to kill the stock photography industry. If you have a professional Midjourney account you can use it to articulate and illustrate ideas in minutes, for as little as $10/month.

⏹️ How much do you use AI as the end point?

For me, it’s not about using AI as the end point. I use it to get me started quicker. I use it to get me past the ‘blank page’ part of the creative process. AI helps me to work out where to begin with a brief, and then it’s up to me to curate the information it gives me and tailor it into something unique.

When I’m writing a creative brief for example. I like to use ChatGPT as a research assistant. Further down the line, I like to use Midjourney to help me – as a nonvisual executor – create something that articulates a concept I’m imagining and get it in front of the person who needs to create it visually. AI is a tool to help me get over creative hurdles – and do it faster!

🔨 What are the best AI tools to start playing with?

Billy then asked the same question back to the community. Here’s what some of you had to say:

👮 What are the risks you and the team have encountered when using AI for content creation?

Billy – I would suggest having a chat with your legal team before putting out content that has been generated with AI because I think there are different challenges in every industry. For me, I’m particularly aware of image generation from a quality perspective – making sure we don’t create ‘bad’ AI generated images. 

A note on security and data.

Billy explained how you can go into your settings on ChatGPT and block the tool from using the information you’ve put in from being fed back into their algorithm. This is incredibly important if you’re working with sensitive data.

🦉 Hootsuite is a company that has developed a version of an AI implementation, so what was your thought process in coming to that solution of AI? 

Billy – Our customers’ biggest pain point at Hootsuite is content inspiration. It’s facing a blank page. It’s the feeling when you need to come up with ideas. So before we came up with the AI tool, we created a tool called Content Inspiration which was designed to create prompts for our users using what we knew worked on the platform. Then, as they were pulling the project together, ChatGPT came out and Owlywriter was born. 

💻 How can you get better at writing prompts?

Billy – Start with Julian Cole’s How To Use Chat-GPT To Write Strategy Youtube video. My biggest takeaway from that was that AI understands frameworks. Tou can tell the tool to synthesise all of your specific data and inputs into a specific format based on a specific framework. Of course, you’ll need to refine and iterate on the result, but the fact that AI understands frameworks was a game changer for me. When you start playing with frameworks and adjectives and ways of speaking, that’s where your outputs get really interesting and fun.

I believe there is going to be a renaissance for adjectives because the key to getting great results from AI is practising how you use it and the prompts you put in. Practice, practice, practice and you will learn a lot.

➖ Is there any way to reduce bias within AI tools?

Billy – I think that’s going to be one of the most interesting philosophical questions of the next five to 10 years.

I don’t know of a way to get rid of the bias in the existing data but I think there’s things we can do to add some human elements to how we prompt to try to flip the bias. It’s incredibly important to remember that we kind of assume these machines are right and they’re not, their answers are still subjective. We’re speaking about how to use AI to save time but that doesn’t mean we should take out humans.

🧠 What isn’t going to change with AI?

Ideas are going to become more and more important. As everyone gains access to the same AI tools, it will become a buddy for tactical marketing – which means that it will be ideas that make companies stand out from the crowd.

So I’m training my team to know how to create work that is unexpected so we can drive attention. I’m going to spend more time on coming up with that bigger, better idea and then we can use AI to save us some time when it comes to implementing it.

Other resources shared by the community throughout the webinar: