Saturday, November 26, 2022

Weekend Favs November 26

Weekend Favs November 26 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

  • Vadoo – is a video hosting platform that helps brands and creators to engage and grow their audiences by uploading, recording, and sharing videos with just one click.
  • Universe – is an immersive EdTech solution where educators and students can simulate a real classroom experience online. They can debate ideas freely with a 3D audio feature, maintain high attention levels with breakout rooms and custom-made quizzes, and drive engagement by rewarding students with points.
  • Plask – is an AI tool that transforms videos of people into animated online characters in seconds. Just record yourself, drop the video into the platform and make the final edits to your animation. 

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.



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Saturday, November 19, 2022

Weekend Favs November 19

Weekend Favs November 19 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

  • OptiMonk – allows you to personalize popups, offers, forms, headlines, and embedded content in your website to enhance the experience of your website visitors, improve your conversions and boost your engagement rate.
  • Vouch – is a video marketing tool that lets you capture, edit and share authentic video testimonials in no time. Simply ask the questions you’d like answered, send a link with a request, edit the person’s response and easily share your videos.
  • Guidde – is an app that helps you create and record step-by-step videos efficiently. With their free Chrome extension, you can record your screen, customize those recordings and share your video through any channel with just one click.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.



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Monday, November 7, 2022

5 AI tools every content marketing pro should use today

5 AI tools every content marketing pro should use today written by Editor read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The global market value of artificial intelligence (AI) in the marketing world is projected to reach over half a trillion dollars by 2024. 

There is an AI tool out there for almost any marketing need, and the stat above proves that these tools will grow and develop to offer even more value to marketers and small business owners.

Using AI tools is just one way to help optimize your content marketing workflow. As you create your next piece of content, look at the tools shared here, and see what value they can bring to the table.

The more tools you plug into your workflow, the easier it will become to build great content, and deliver it in a timely manner. 

What are AI marketing tools?

AI marketing tools are platforms or systems that mimic human intelligence and help marketers improve efficiency, accuracy, and automate parts of their job. There are numerous AI marketing tools on the market right now, and odds are, you probably already use a few of them.

Benefits of using AI tools for Marketing

AI Marketing tools can take a lot of the work out of doing marketing for a small business. They’re often scalable to the size of your business, and quite easy to use. They also reduce the amount of manual work needed, meaning less human error and more efficiency. 

Best of all, AI marketing tools can cover every area of your small business marketing. As you’ll see in this article, there are AI tools for copywriting, design, social media, SEO content creation, decks, and much more.

Honestly, the biggest pain in using AI marketing tools for your business can be deciding the best to use.

Here are our 5 AI tools that every marketer can and probably should start using today. Check them out and see what works for your business:


1. Writesonic

Screenshoot of the instant ai writing features of Writesonic

A market leader, Writesonic offers marketers the opportunity to use AI to create written content of any kind. It has you covered from creating SEO-optimized long-form posts to sales emails, Q&A, essays, product descriptions, reports, and even ebooks. 

For blogs and SEO articles, simply enter a keyword or a topic, and it will give you AI-based options for your title, introduction, outline, and finally a well-written post in minutes.

Writesonic has a cloud-native, AI-powered system, that provides complete ownership of the AI-generated copy in your account, and integrates effortlessly with Semrush, WordPress, and other common marketing programs.

We use this tool at Duct Tape Marketing, and it has been a massive help to us with time-consuming tasks like topic research, crafting engaging long-form content, doing FAQs and Q&A pages, optimizing our SEO, and creating ad variations.

If you struggle to create written content but want to brighten up your online presence without spending much effort and time, then Writesonic might be helpful. With their generous 2,500 words free trial, it can help you build tons of relevant content in no time.

Disclose that DTM is a Writesonic affiliate: Disclosure: Duct Tape Marketing is a Writesonic affiliate and may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post. Duct Tape Marketing would never endorse products or services it has not test or does not use.


2. Lately

screenshoot of Lately platform for social media ai marketing tool

If you want the content of your social media to be created and tested efficiently,  Lately is the perfect solution. 

It employs a combination of your social media analytics, millions of data points from its own archives, and crowd testing to create organic social media content that your audience will love.

This allows your social media team to spend more time focusing on strategy, growth, or creating a better end-to-end experience for your clients online.

Try their 7-day free trial to create posts your followers will love and share.


3. Photosonic

ai marketing tools image generator

Need some inspiration for new creative designs, concepts, or projects? PhotoSonic lets you create realistic or artistic graphics from a text description, using a text-to-image AI model. Just type in a few keywords and the software will produce several relevant images for you to choose from. 

This AI marketing tool also lets you modify existing images with text and filters, create images of any kind, and customize them with diverse attributes and details within seconds.

Photosonic offers a 15-credit free trial that helps you get an idea of how AI Image generators can boost your marketing.


Jasper

example of jasper ai tool writing a podcast description

With all of its combined features, Jasper is an effective AI Marketing tool that can help marketing teams break creative blocks to create amazing, authentic content faster.

Jasper has a Chrome extension that lets you create content directly on social media platforms. It also helps marketers write viral YouTube and TikTok video scripts, craft LinkedIn articles, Instagram captions, website copy, and write emails.

Jasper and Writesonic are built on the same AI technology, both have good customer support and can help marketing teams to create content more efficiently. However, Jasper doesn't offer a free plan and is more focused on writing short-form content like ads and product descriptions.


5. Grammarly

example of how Grammarly ai system works

If you create written content, then you have to check out Grammarly. This AI tool helps writers with grammar, spelling, and tone mistakes. Grammarly also offers a Chrome extension and smoothly integrates with commonly used tools like Slack, Gmail, GoogleDocs, WordPress, CRMs, and others.

Grammarly’s AI system processes reams of natural human language, a component of AI that involves teaching machines to understand human language. This method allows Grammarly to do sentiment analysis, score your writing, make styling decisions, and more.

There is a free versions and which corrects spelling, grammar, and tone mistakes in your writing. 


How to start using AI Marketing tools for your business

Choosing the right AI marketing tools can often feel overwhelming. There are often so many services and each with their own unique features. 

To get yourself through the process and find the best AI tools for your business, think about these 3 simple tips;

  1. Nobody knows your business more than you do, so really think about where an AI  tool might benefit your workflow. Is your content creation process slow? Are you disappointed with your social media efforts? Identifying your needs will help you target the right AI tool for your marketing.
  2. Test all the AI tools you’re considering. Most of the above-mentioned offer free trials, so take advantage of these. Make sure you like using them, and that implementing them will be as easy as possible.
  3. Does the tool save time and drive growth? If you do your research and test the product, you’ll know if it helps you or not. Don’t add too many tools and keep it simple.


Essential Workbooks for Small Business Marketing Strategy

rethinking customer journey workbook


You’ve hopefully come away with some new insights about AI marketing tools, the benefits of AI tools for marketing, and how to choose the right one.

Now, you’re ready to get out there and find the right tools for your business. 



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5 Ways to Start Using AI in Your Marketing Today

5 Ways to Start Using AI in Your Marketing Today written by Editor read more at Duct Tape Marketing

AI is the future of marketing.

According to a study by Quantcast and Forbes,  AI helps marketers to boost sales, increase customer retention, and succeed at new product launches.

This post will provide you with practical and useful examples to understand a bit more about AI and how it can help your marketing team do all of that and more.

What is AI?

The simplest way to think about AI is to see it as a tool or system that has the ability to learn and predict. It can comprehend what we want, or it can learn from its mistakes, and then predict what we might want the next time.

AI is all around us. Every time we ask Siri something, it learns and gets smarter understanding what we're asking, who we are, and what we want to know.

Anytime we ask for directions on Google Maps, AI processes and learns what is going on around us through traffic patterns and how cars are moving.

Siri, google maps and Grammarly. Three of the most common tools based on ai

There are some AI tools that use existing data to make new content. Article writers, for example, can create original content because they scan and take in all of the information available on the Internet.

There's also AI that uses trial and error. The AI-driven chess computer that gets better and better and eventually beats everybody learns from what the opponent did, and processes all that information to come to a better result.

The thing all of these tools have in common is that they take in information, learn from it, and can make informed future decisions all on their own.


AI and Content Marketing

Content has become a crucial part of digital marketing in recent years. In fact, content is now the primary focus for most marketing teams. 

The problem is that creating long-form content, On-page SEO, and social media posts can be extremely time-consuming. Even more challenging is coming up with ideas that your audience will find interesting and engaging.

AI tools are making it easier for marketers to streamline their content creation processes. From generating ideas to choosing images for your blog posts, AI moves the implementation work to a place where it can be done effectively, even with the smallest of teams.

Is AI going to make us obsolete as marketers?

AI is not going to make agencies, marketers, or business owners obsolete, but it is going to make us more efficient. It becomes a competitive advantage if an agency can produce 10 times more content than before.

However, AI is not going to process emotion, is not going to be able to process an opportunity, is not going to understand a gut feeling you have or relationships that it can lean on, and it's not going to replace strategic thinking.

5 practical ways to use AI in your marketing today

 Use AI for your long-form content

wxample of an outline used by ai marketing tool to create long form content

Long-form content has become one of the hardest things for smaller marketing teams or smaller agencies to produce because it's so time-consuming and yet it is so essential for end users and the educational approaches that we have today.

Here are some of the ways to use Writesonic – An AI tool we frequently use –to helps create better long-form content:

  • You can use Writesonic to help you create a fully customized blog outline. The AI content tool does this by scanning the Internet and choosing content based on what people are searching for online. This allows you to then easily fill in the rest. 
  • Writesonic uses AI to make long-from content more engaging, relevant, and attractive for readers. This can decrease your blogs bounce rate and increase your overall visibility online.
  • Connect Writesonic with an SEO tool like Semrush to optimize your long-form content towards your target keywords and audiences.
  • If you are creating content for new clients, Writesonic can save you tons of time by completing the initial background research for you.

Spend more time creating a stellar experience for your leads & beat your competition

Disclosure: Duct Tape Marketing is a Writesonic affiliate and may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post. Duct Tape Marketing would never endorse products or services it has not tested or does not use.

AI for Metadata and SEO

Good SEO practice is a necessary process that takes time and effort. However, much of it can be repetitive and time-consuming. Tasks like creating SEO-optimized titles, creating the right meta tags, or keyword research can now easily be automated with AI.

How can AI tools produce better results for SEO?

screenshoots of Writesonic's features for seo

Doing keyword research manually is time-consuming. AI tools help you streamline this process by crawling relevant content on the internet and then giving you questions, keywords, and information that people are looking for in Google, so you can create more valuable blog posts or pages.

AI tools like Writesonic can also help you write engaging and optimized titles and meta descriptions in seconds by simply typing in an overview of the topic. It’s a great way to save time and free up your marketing team to focus on more innovative and strategic tasks.

Q&A is another essential feature that can boost your SEO results. With today's AI tools you can easily create highly relevant Q&A content, that you can use in Quora, Reddit forums, or in relevant Facebook Groups.

Add copy and variations

Google Ads now gives you the ability to create up to 15 headlines for your search ads. It takes time and brain cycles to write those ads.

AI tools can automatically produce these variations for you in the format that Google, YouTube or any other platform will understand. The ad copy will also be automatically optimized for higher click-trough rates based on past campaign performances. 

Additionally, AI recognizes that people on LinkedIn write differently than on Facebook, so you can customize tone based on the platform.

Examples of ai written copy for facebook ads

Below is another example of using Google headlines. Some of them are great, and some maybe don't hit the mark, but it gives you a quick sample of things to start working with.

By having 10 different ad copies to test, you whittle down and find the winner. It makes the creation of the ad variations much faster and efficient.

example of google ads copy written by ai in writesonic

Social Media Content

Brands need to create and publish content every day on several different platforms. 

One of my favorite ways to produce social media content is to break one big piece of content into many pieces. So, you can take an article that you've already written, put it into your AI tool, select the social media platform and the tool can generate weeks worth of posts from that one piece of content.

AI tools can also generate content ideas, hooks, and captions with just a topic or a few keywords.   

screenshoot of the benefits that ai offers for social media content creation

Some AI tools can even create complete posts for you, give you a mixture of Instagram captions, descriptions for your YouTube videos, titles, script hooks for TikTok, and more.

Content repurposing

Content repurposing has become a big topic. Constantly refreshing content can be a powerful way to impact your SEO without having to write new content. AI tools can easily accomplish this task in seconds. 

AI can also help you shorten content. For example If you have a blog post that people love, but you need to shorten it in order to repost to LinkedIn, AI can do that. 

Start using AI tools to help you create great content, and save you time, and money

AI tools are great for getting more content and finding easy ways to boost your SEO. Utilize these powerful tools today along with some editing and styling to boost your results in marketing.

It is not a 'cut and paste' solution, but it does get you closer to an optimal result.

Now that you know this, it is time to identify some aspects where you can improve your marketing efforts using AI today.



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