AI-Powered Marketing Strategy with Lauren Pawell

In This Episode

• [02:10] – Stephan and Lauren Pawell reflect on their transformative experience at the Heroic Public Speaking Training Mastermind and its impact on their presentation skills.
• [08:21] – Lauren reveals her secret to mastering AI prompting through low-stakes personal experiments like date night planning and meal preparation.
• [14:06] – Lauren breaks down her systematic approach to transforming long-form content into viral short-form videos using AI analysis and strategic video editing.
• [23:03] – Lauren unveils the AI-Powered Marketing Department, her comprehensive training program designed to fast-track marketing teams into the AI era.
• [25:50] – The conversation pivots to Gary Vaynerchuk’s revolutionary concept of “interest media” and why algorithms now prioritize content relevance over follower counts.
• [28:53] – Lauren showcases her most impressive campaign victories, including generating $250K from just nine emails with minimal budgets and lean teams.
• [31:20] – Both Stephan and Lauren analyze the evolving online course landscape and emerging strategies for adding value in an AI-saturated market.
• [35:11] – Stephan introduces his latest book, The Grateful Eight, prompting Lauren to outline a strategic video series transformation using AI tools.
• [38:06] – Lauren emphasizes the critical elements that make short-form videos captivating: visual hooks, strategic captions, and the make-or-break first five seconds.

Jump to Links and Resources

Lauren, it’s so great to have you on the show. 

I’m so glad to be here. Thank you so much. 

So we got to meet in person at the Heroic Public Speaking training. Mastermind. I don’t know what to call it exactly, but it was in-depth, and it was amazing and really helped all of us. I think you included level up in terms of public speaking. Did you get a lot out of it? 

What I loved about HPs was the theater background that Michael and Amy brought to the table. I think when you’re doing professional speaking for your career, sometimes it can be a bit dry, or people can be a bit static when they stand up on stage. So I just really loved the element of performance that HPs brought to the table. And I thought there was no substitute for everything they taught us. 

Yeah, that was really great. So if you could walk us through kind of your journey, how you ended up getting so immersed in AI and how you ended up doing fractional CMO work as well. That would be fun to kind of get a behind-the-scenes look at your journey. 

So, long story short, I got my International MBA over in Europe and started working for a medical device company. Learned a lot, but hated the job. To put it frankly, I’m afraid of blood, and I was in cath labs waiting for people to have heart attacks so that they could use the device I was marketing and selling. So I ended up pivoting that career. I liked the marketing aspect of my job, went and trained with a digital agency in London, got a very terrible job offer from them after that training, and then decided to start out on my own. 

AI won’t replace marketers. But marketers who embrace AI will replace those who don’t. Share on X

So I created a marketing agency back in 2011, and I was being asked to do a lot of things that weren’t necessarily marketing. In my opinion, people were focused on what I would call, at the time, a digital business card, meaning a website, but it wasn’t really about marketing. Just Hey, where do you get my contact information? This is more your world, probably, than mine. 

But eventually, I saw that all of my clients needed more strategic help than they needed. Hey, let’s go do this one marketing project, because often they were giving voice to “Hey, I need a website. Hey, I need SEO. Hey, I need a pay-per-click campaign. Hey, I need email marketing.” But they didn’t see the bigger picture of what the strategy is that we’re going to deploy online in order to bring new leads, new customers, new clients, into our world. 

So that’s really how I started taking more of a strategic lead. And I often saw that my clients had hired a number of vendors, but no one was really running the show. And then when they liked the work I had done, they started asking, “Hey, Lauren, can you kind of just lead all. All of our digital marketing, we still want you to work with some of the team we’ve hired, but we want you to help set strategy and help make sure everything goes smoothly, and then tie it to some business outcomes.” 

So I really enjoyed that work. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not that much fun to be a vendor where you’re leading a project like SEO or pay-per-click, and there’s some intangible business outcome that hasn’t been communicated to you by the business owner that’s really what they want, and the project can kind of go sideways. So I saw that a few too many times, where the business owner is expecting, “Hey, I expect business growth on the back end of the project,” but the vendor wasn’t always set up for success in terms of what they were going to be bringing to the table. 

Anyways, long story short, that is how I eventually pivoted into more of a fractional CMO. I really like coming in fractionally. A lot of my clients have tried to hire me full time, and I always say, “Hey, I’m here to get be your fractional kind of midterm person so that we can eventually get you to a place where you’re ready to hire someone full time who can dedicate all of their time to you and only you.” 

So that answered your question, I believe, about how I got into marketing strategy to talk about AI, so I’m going to kind of give you a roundabout answer here. But basically, when I was studying my MBA in Europe, we were being trained to have an international career where you moved from country to country and could really adapt culturally to what was going on. And one of the things we learned there was what’s called Hofstede cultural dimensions, and it’s basically six factors that help you understand a culture, and one of them they talk about is uncertainty or ambiguity, and how comfortable a culture is with this. 

And depending on America versus Canada versus Israel versus New Zealand, I’m naming a few places I know we’ve both been, cultures that have different levels of comfort with change, so I’ve seen the AI kind of trajectory coming down the pipeline. I knew once the cat was out of the bag, it wasn’t going back into it. And I just said, “I’m going to throw myself full force into this.” Because one, I think it’s an amazing tool for clients. Two, I think for a long time, marketing has been an enormous amount of work. Kind of tried to shove into a 40-hour work week, and I just think it’s been an overload of work for pretty much every vendor or team that I’ve been a part of. 

So I saw this opportunity on, “hey, we can do more with less, and we can shift the team into a more elevated role and pull some of the brunt of the admin work off our plates.” I’ve been kind of watching the space for a while. I really wasn’t super impressed with the tools in the beginning. I don’t think they were ready for marketing production work, but they’ve come a long way since then.

And so I’ve been on about a 10, maybe 11-month experiment at the time of this recording to basically just pull as much as we can off my plate, off my team’s plate, off our client’s plate, and move as much as we can to AI. I run a lot of experiments before we deploy anything for clients. So it’s a lot of fun, I would say, to run some experiments in your personal life, see the impact, and then figure out how you can deploy that into your work. So that is the way I started diving into AI.

All right? And what would be some examples of you applying AI in your personal life that you then pass on to your clients?

Garbage in, garbage out: if you give AI a poor prompt with no context, the output won’t be good.

Yeah. So I think just getting comfortable with prompting, and a lot of people will tell you, like, prompting is the key, but I would say prompting plus iteration. So, for example, something I like to teach is garbage in, equals garbage out. If you give a terrible prompt to AI with no context, you’re not going to have a very good output. 

So just practicing with things like, for example, I started planning all of my husband’s and my date nights through AI and getting comfortable with how I give enough context so that the output is really good, and it’s not something that requires 50 back and forth with AI to get the final product. 

So, for example, what most people who are new to AI will do is they’ll say, “Hey, help me plan a date night for my husband. I live in Denver.” Boom, and that’s it. Okay? Well, what AI is gonna do is it’s gonna go search for events around Denver or restaurants around Denver, and that’s kind of all it’s going to give you. It’s not going to understand your preferences, let’s say you have a budget, what you like and don’t like. How long have you? Do you have kids? Do you need to include your child on this date night? Or do you need to think about maybe childcare so you can only go during these certain hours when the child is napping, like there’s a lot that you need to give AI in order to get a great output. 

So I think a date night is a great place to experiment. I would also say that something that almost everyone can do is meal planning, which is also a great place, because you’ll often give your constraints. Maybe you eat a certain diet, or maybe you only have certain things in your fridge, you want to say, “Hey, this is what I have in my fridge right now. Help me create a meal. And I don’t want to spend all my night in the kitchen, and I want it to be like a one-pot meal.” So there are a lot of things in your personal life that you can do. And kind of hand off to AI that will help you understand how the technology works and how to make it work best for you. 

Yeah. And what are your go-to tools besides ChatGPT?

My favorite tool for marketing production work is Poppy. It’s created specifically for marketing, and I’ll kind of talk you through it. Basically, you can connect any sort of input that you want to Poppy and then help us use that to create a better output. So think YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagram reels. You can upload video transcripts. You can connect ads. So you can say, “Hey, these are the ads that are performing best for my competitor. Here is all of our information. Now help me brainstorm some angles for ads” through Poppy. 

So the other thing I really like about Poppy is that you can switch models. So I can use Claude for copywriting and Poppy, but then I can switch to GPT-4o mini for data analysis, and then I can switch to maybe Grok for some research. So it gives you a lot of flexibility as well, in that you get to use the best model for the task at hand, rather than paying for all of those subscriptions.

So you don’t need to have a ChatGPT Pro subscription. You don’t have to use API credits or anything. It’s all part of the cost of Poppy?

Yeah, it is part of the cost of poppy. So you get a certain number of credits every month from Poppy. If you want more credits, then you will pay a little bit more to access more credits. So, for example, with the work that my team and I are doing, we kind of blow their standard credits out of the water, which is great for most users who are only working on one client. So we pay, I think it’s an extra $99 a month for additional credits. But no, you don’t need your own accounts for each of those models. Now we use ChatGPT for a lot of data analysis, so I have both accounts, but I would say I’m probably 85% in Poppy and about 15% in ChatGPT for marketing work.

So let’s say that you want to create shorts. Do you have a video editor who’s using Poppy or some other AI tools to generate those shorts? Are you completely doing it yourself by giving prompts to Poppy to create the shorts?

Prompting isn’t enough—prompting plus iteration is where the magic happens. Share on X

Yeah, so that’s a great question, so I’ll give you an example from one client and how we’re kind of doing that. So they do a lot of speaking, both digital and in person. So we’ll grab either the recording from those interviews or the speaking reel from the interview. We will upload it to Poppy, and oftentimes we will also grab the transcript as well, especially if it’s a long interview. 

So say it’s this interview and it’s 45 minutes, that’s a lot of video for Poppy to watch, but I can get the PDF transcript and upload it, and then what I’ll do is I’ll prompt Poppy and I’ll give it some constraints, but I’ll say, “hey, help me find the most compelling pieces of this to put it into a 90 second reel, and then I will have timestamps on the back end of that, and then our video editor will edit from there. 

And they use different tools that are AI-powered to help with video editing. But we aren’t doing the editing in Poppy, if that makes sense, but we are doing the work that used to be very, very manual, which is, hey, let me sit through and listen to this 45-minute interview and say, “Okay, here’s all the most compelling parts. And then now let me think about how it’s gonna follow that hook, body, CTA format that is best for reels, shorts or TikToks.”

You need to figure out how to evolve and deliver your highest value while leveraging AI.

Got it. Now, why wouldn’t you just use ChatGPT? Couldn’t that do as good, if not better, a job at finding the compelling bits to make into 90-second reels

You can, but I can also connect many other things in Poppy. For instance, I can mention that these three competitors, operating in the same space, performed exceptionally well, and I’d like you to take a look. Next, I can attach our brand voice guide and include additional information, such as customer data or social stats. I can basically attach everything and then ask Poppy to do it for me. Can you do that in ChatGPT? You can, but I haven’t found it does as good a job. So I think it really depends on your specific use case. I don’t think Poppy’s right for everyone. 

So, we’re doing pretty much any type of copy production. So, think like email marketing, blog posts, any sort of website, copy, sales page. We are doing a lot beyond just short-form video through Poppy, if that makes sense. I’ve just found that Poppy performs well even when I run some tests back and forth, and it performs better across the board. I can get some of what I need from ChatGPT, but as it currently stands, at the date of this recording, I haven’t been able to get everything that I need from it. So will these models evolve? Certainly, they’re evolving very, very fast. So if you ask me this in three months or six months, I may have a different answer for you.

Do you pay the top-tier price for any LLMs, like the $200 a month level for ChatGPT, or for Gemini or whatever?

I don’t need it because I’ve found that the Plus plan on ChatGPT, combined with Poppy, covers most of our needs. We also use Midjourney and Gamma for tasks like image generation and slide deck creation., I haven’t found that I need the $200 plan from ChatGPT.

How does Midjourney compete these days, in your opinion, with ChatGPT’s

image generation capabilities? You know, because it’s got DALL·E integrated into it now.

ChatGPT’s image generation is pretty amazing. Right now, I have been having a lot of fun experimenting with it. I think it’s doing a pretty dang good job. One client I’m working with has found that our best-performing social posts, image-wise, on Instagram are being generated from ChatGPT. Previously, this was a project that required hiring an illustrator. 

So because we were doing a certain type of image, and man, we’re saving a lot of money and time, and I think it’s hard because people hear this coming down the train tracks, and they’re like, “Hey, my job is at risk. And I think the short answer is, it probably is, and you have to figure out how to evolve with this and bring your highest value while also being powered by AI.” And I think that’s where this is going back to what I said earlier. Comfort with ambiguity or change is important, and I think everything is changing in the world of marketing with the rollout of AI. And I don’t think it’s a matter of if this is going to impact my job. I think it’s a matter of when and how quickly. So I think ChatGPT’s image generation is amazing. 

Well, let’s talk a bit more about how we evolve in this wild new frontier here? So do we constantly proactively cut costs and charge less to our clients? Do we deliver twice or 10 times the value or output month to month to incorporate our cost savings into the value that they get? Or do we just keep charging what we’re charging, and then we are keeping the cost savings internally? I’m curious how you see it?

AI can accelerate work by analyzing top-performing content and bringing that data to the table.

Yeah, well, I think it depends on what your package looks like right now. So let’s take an example that I saw with a different client. So they were working with a copywriter, and the copywriter was really resistant to using AI at all. Basically, no, it’s always going to be better if I write it. And I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with that, but there was so much they could do and so much they could speed up by layering in some elements of AI.

So, for example, maybe they use AI to analyze past emails, talk through what’s performing best, and then bring that data to the table. And it only takes an hour, instead of, you know, whatever 20 hours it might take you. I’m exaggerating for effect, but it can take a long time to read through a copy, analyze what’s working and what’s not, and then use that analysis for the human-written version, or at least to help with an outline that the human then writes. For instance, we tested AI-written emails, which performed just as well, if not better. Then, we had to cut a team member after spending multiple months trying to get them on board. Hey, this is the brave new world. And so we need to experiment. It’s not about saying, “Hey, you must be right, do everything with AI.” Instead, we encourage you to experiment and run some tests, and be open to doing so. 

So in that case, if I were that person, what I would have done is reworked my packages completely and said, “Here’s how I’m going to bring more to the table, ideally with more or less the same amount of time, but you’re going to get better results. So my package is going to be priced a little differently, because I’m bringing all this to the table, and because I’m doing things that no one else is doing.” So I think there’s an opportunity to add value, save time, and maybe cut your costs, but I would also just completely rework your package to begin with, so it’s not comparing apples to apples, because then you get in a show called. 

Conversation around pricing that I don’t think any service vendor wants to get into, which is, well, maybe this should be a little less expensive, or this should be priced a little differently, because it’s basically the same thing. I think it’s just, “Hey, here’s a new technology. Here’s how we’re reworking our approach. We’re going to roll this out. Maybe you’re going to be a guinea pig, so we’re not going to bump your price until three months from now, when you’re really happy with this service, and then this is what your price looks like.” 

So I think you have to be really strategic. I also want to consider how I can demonstrate to my clients that I am forward-facing. I understand what’s coming down the pipeline, even if I don’t fully understand all the technology yet. Still, I’m willing to experiment and incorporate it so that I can help improve results for them, because if you don’t do it, they’re going to find someone else who does, and whether that’s now or six months from now, depending on how early of an adopter they are, I think you’d be remiss to say I’m just going to keep everything the same. I just don’t think that’s realistic personally. But I’d also be open to your thoughts on that?

Well, I’m curious because you have an unusual model. You’re not an agency. You’re a CMO for hire, a fractional CMO. When you mentioned cutting a team member, was it actually the client’s team member you were referring to?

Yeah. So the client and I had frank conversations in the background about, “Hey, we’re trying to get this team member on board, but they’re just unwilling. But let’s give it a try. Let’s try it a few more ways.” But yeah, I often lead teams that I either haven’t hired or have had a hand in hiring. My ultimate responsibility is to the client and their results, but I’m essentially a middle manager, if you will.

Have you changed your personal pricing? When you’re dealing with clients, you charge, I would guess, like, what a monthly retainer or some sort of, kind of like salary or something.

AI presents an opportunity to fast-track someone’s marketing education and output.

Yeah. So, I charge a flat fee, and my pricing hasn’t changed currently. However, we are bringing a lot more to the table than we used to, and that will probably be a conversation I have within a couple of months. But I’m also, speaking frankly, just happy to retain work and still do my job and do it, perhaps in less time, and get better results and also see team who’s not as overloaded, so I’m kind of in a different position than I would say most vendors are, and that my scope of work isn’t fixed. You know, I’m not coming in and saying, “Hey, we’re doing an SEO audit, and then here’s all the scope of work with that SEO audit, and then here’s, you know, the result.” My job is always, how are we using marketing to grow the business, and that scope of work can can vary so greatly, so I tend to come in for kind of, what I would say is a fractional salary rate, and that rate is going to stay the same, whether I’m leading AI or no AI initiatives for now, but that might look different in three to six months. So I haven’t quite got there yet. 

Yeah, certainly an interesting time to be out there in the marketplace. Can you tell us a little bit about the AI-powered marketing department?

Yeah, so often my clients used to say to me, “Lauren, we just really love to clone you. Could we clone you? Could you give us more time? Could you give us more hours? Could you train our team to do what you do?” I kept getting this question repeatedly, and then I would have a team underneath me that I would be leading, who would say, “We want to do what you do.” We aim to either transition into a similar role, expand our experience, or gain more expertise. 

And the reality is, I found it very hard. I could train on something very specific, but to give them the breadth of knowledge that I’ve had over my career, I mean, it’d be like me coming to you, Stephan, and saying, “Hey, I want to be you in terms of SEO expertise. Make that happen.” You know, it’s just very hard to do, and what I saw with AI was an opportunity to take maybe someone who didn’t have the same background as me, but give them almost like a fast track in terms of marketing knowledge, because you could set up, “Hey, here’s everything you need to know from a high level about how email marketing works. And then here’s some prompts you can use to help generate emails using AI” and basically fast track their education and output. 

With AI, you can shift into more of a creative and strategic director role than you might have before.

So the AI-powered marketing department has been my way of putting forward, facing training to all the training I’m doing behind the scenes with my clients and their teams, which is, how do we uplevel our skill set? How can we enhance our output without compromising results or quality, leveraging AI to tap into the expertise of individuals who may not be copywriters or graphic designers, but can still direct the work? They could edit the work, test it, understand the results, and then say, “Okay, here’s a new test we’re going to run on the back end of that.” They’re now kind of, I’d say, with AI, you can be in more of a creative and strategic director role than maybe you used to be.

And so the AI-powered marketing department was my way of putting together a training that all my clients and prospects have been asking for and giving it to them in a self-serve way, because I’m doing an enormous amount of training behind the scenes right now, and that is really fun. And also, I was looking for a way where I could just plug my clients’ teams in and say, “Hey, go watch this. And then let’s chat. Go watch this piece about sales pages. Go watch this piece about social media, and then let’s chat about how you want to incorporate this into the work that you’re already doing.”

Something I heard recently from Gary Vaynerchuk on a video was that he doesn’t like to refer to it as social media anymore. He refers to it as an interest media. You’re not caring what the Facebook follower accounts are. You care that the algorithm considers you relevant to particular interest and then puts your reel in front of a bunch of people that are not followers of you, but are interested in the exact thing that you have a video about so I’m curious to hear what your take is on that, and how you might be applying that with your clients.

I think that’s an amazing description. So, if you think about TikTok specifically, the TikTok algorithm works a lot differently than what you’re used to on Instagram and Facebook, in that TikTok serves you content from people who aren’t your followers based on your interests. So, let’s say I like hiking, and my TikTok feed shows me some hikes, people who are showing off hikes in Colorado, because that’s where I live. Okay, well, I can follow those people. Still, suppose I engage with those videos in any sort of way. In that case, I’ll continue to get hiking content in Colorado from people I don’t know, which I think is incredible. It enables creators and businesses to reach new audiences without running ads, a challenge that has been particularly tough for social media platforms historically. Given TikTok’s significant growth, I estimate that 50% of the American population uses it, especially considering the potential ban earlier this year. 

But essentially, Instagram and Facebook saw that and decided to start implementing similar things. So do they have the same interest-based algorithms? Not the same, but they’re certainly moving in that direction. So oftentimes now with social media, you’re just thinking about, “okay, are people who are interested in this niche going to find this video interesting, compelling”, et cetera? I agree with that.

And I think if you have an incredible amount of customer data, maybe Google Analytics data, any other sort of tracking tools or email marketing data, you can take everything you know that works with your existing customers and audience and pair that with some of what’s performing well on Tiktok or Instagram and say, “Hey, help me create my version of this, and then do super well with it on social media, so or interest media, if you will.” But yeah, I think at the end of the day, it’s about capturing attention and interest and then taking them to the next step.

All right, what are some examples you’re particularly proud of, whether it’s the use of TikTok in various campaigns, email marketing, or even direct mail? I’m not sure what campaigns or initiatives come to mind when you think of your best work. 

Subject matter expertise remains irreplaceable, but AI can enhance how courses are marketed and presented.

Yeah. So, I think one thing that is a common thread with all my clients and the work I’m doing is that we often have very lean teams and budgets. Speaking frankly, we often try to achieve a lot with very little, which can lead to facing some really challenging constraints. So, for example, the campaign you mentioned in my bio was something I’m super proud of. The client was initially wary about the content marketing world, but we generated a quarter of a million dollars for them through nine targeted emails. 

So, after that, they were like, “Okay, great, let’s throw more budget at this.” So I think oftentimes this work I’m most proud of is perhaps our biggest experiment in that you are saying, “Hey, we’re going to try this. I have a really good hypothesis on how this is going to turn out, but I think it might not turn out that way.” And. That’s the work I’m most proud of. So, I’m thinking about how to get super creative with what’s available and make the most of our budget. So I don’t know if that fully answers your question. 

I think it’s really about how we stand out without the budget of Google for marketing campaigns. For instance, I have a friend who worked on the Barbie movie campaign, which was an amazing campaign.  And I was like, and we’re talking about her budget, and I was like, that looks a lot different from budgets I’m working with. So, I think it’s about figuring out how to make the most impact with what we have. And that’s the stuff that I’m most proud of. And sometimes that happens on one platform or another, but oftentimes it’s a multi-touchpoint campaign. And how do we take people from one spot to the spot we want them to go, which is buying a product or service,

Any apps that you’ve coded without coding? 

No, we don’t get involved in that side of things. I’ve helped hire developers because I have some web development training, but I haven’t done any vibe coding or similar projects yet. Have you? 

No, but that’s not to say it’s not coming. It just hasn’t been on my priority list. 

Yeah, I get that we’re typically not doing that, but I’m sure someone else has some great stories for you.

Courses are about delivering information quickly, but the landscape is changing, requiring constant adaptation.

Yeah. So how about courses? You mention developing courses around topics like the AI-powered marketing department, and I imagine these courses have been part of your clients’ initiatives at various times. But then you see on social media that some people are saying courses are dead. They think you need to do something more in-person or engaging, because it’s easy to create an entire online course with just a few prompts using ChatGPT or Quad or something. So, what’s your stance on where courses are and where they’re headed?

Yeah, I do think it’s a hard moment for courses, especially in certain industries. I think there are certain industries or niches where people want the information and are happy to pay for it. You may have to adjust the price point. You may have to add a coaching component. You may need to add an in-person event. There may be other things you need to do to bring value. 

But I do think subject matter expertise is subject matter expertise no matter what, and that isn’t necessarily something AI can replace. Still, you can make a product look pretty exciting with AI-powered marketing, but that may not accurately reflect its actual appearance on the back end. So, my position is that you have to add more value to courses nowadays if you want them to sell, or you have to adjust your price point because there’s so much information out there.

But I also think that’s been the case with the internet for a long time, in the sense that you can go find 20 YouTube videos that may have a lot of the same information in a course, but is it in the right order? Or how much time does it take? You know, courses are really about speed, I would say. But I think everything’s changing. So I think you do have to adapt. We’re adding either live Q&A sessions or coaching, or we’re packaging things differently. For instance, we’re now offering a lot of content in virtual workshops where people can engage live, or we’re hosting in-person workshops. 

So I think it’s about taking the information and finding different ways to present it that feel like they have more value than just I’m sitting on my computer watching this information, I feel like I could have done the same thing on YouTube or ChatGPT or wherever you’re getting your information, or just by scrolling Tiktok and going down a rabbit hole in a certain niche. 

We’re not talking about social media anymore. It’s ‘interest media’—where relevance beats follower count. Share on X

So I think it depends. I also think about taking some previews from your courses and packaging them as an e-book or a PDF that’s low value, so you can show, “Hey, here’s all the value you get for 999, now, come take the course, because it’s going to add so much more. I think you just have to think about how you build trust a little differently upfront, and maybe think a little bit more about tripwires as well.

So do you take videos and turn them into e-books, or do you take e-books and turn them into videos, or both?

Both.

And what tools do you use, and how do you do it?

Yeah, I think content that people find valuable is going to be valuable whether it’s in video format or whether it’s an e-book format. It’s more about how people like to consume the content. And do you have what you need to turn it into a video? If not, then I would lean on the e-book. And if you don’t have what you need to turn it into an e-book, I would lean on the video. How do we do it? So good question. Do you want to give me a concrete example, and then I can kind of walk you through how I would tackle that? Do you have an e-book you’d like to turn into a video, or vice versa?

The first AI-generated output is rarely the final version you should use.

We’ve just published the Grateful Eight e-book, which is, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the movie The Hateful Eight, but this is The Grateful Eight. We selected eight marketing speak podcast guests to feature, discussing how gratitude served as a key cornerstone to their success, and how this applies to you as the reader. We don’t have a video for that. Frankly, it didn’t even occur to me to create a video until just now, when we’re talking about this. Still, I’d be curious to hear if you think there’s value in turning it into a video, and then what tools would be required to turn it into a video that people would watch on YouTube.

Yeah. So, I think it depends on whether you’re creating a long-form or a short-form video. And I think in this instance, I would probably turn it into a short-form series of videos that you might put on Shorts or TikTok or Instagram. The reason I’m thinking about that is that attention spans are so short, and I see this lending itself to that format better. 

So, if I were you, I would go into Poppy and upload the e-book. I would also grab the PDF transcripts from those interviews. I would upload those as well to Poppy. Then I would look for anything that you have found that is performing well on Instagram or Tiktok around the same or similar topics, meaning, maybe it is not exactly about gratitude and entrepreneurship, but something else bigger picture around entrepreneurship or around marketing, or maybe even I’m just thinking about some people like Simon Sinek who talk about the why, or some other adjacent content. And I would say these videos performed well on TikTok. 

I aim to adapt the concept from this e-book, along with select clips from the interviews, into a series of short-form videos for a social media platform. Help me identify the most compelling points and their rationale, and then let’s follow the hook, body, CTA format. Next, we’ll outline what a short-form video series around this topic might look like. And then, ideally, once you’ve kind of have an outline and you like it, I think you would be pulling maybe some videos of you speaking, but then also the interviewee speaking, because then you can kind of tag them and use them as collaborators and help expand your reach that way in the short-form videos. So that is how I would do that.

AI enables more A/B testing with fewer resources, allowing marketers to refine and amplify content effectively.

Gotcha cool. And how would you suggest testing and refining so that you end up with the very best shorts or reels, and not just go with your first cut?

So, first of all, I would think about what’s happening visually, meaning, is there enough visual interest to keep someone’s attention? So, think again. Maybe this is a concept you use in your SEO work, but consider the KISS concept: Keep It Simple Stupid, or keep it stupid simple. I can’t remember which one it is, but we want to just make sure it’s as exciting and as visually interesting as possible. In other words, unless the information is truly exceptional and can’t be found elsewhere, or you hold such authority in the space that people will naturally watch your talking head. 

We need some visual intrigue, because that’s the direction these platforms are heading. So I would consider that. I would also ensure you have captions, as many people watch these videos with the volume off. Additionally, I would make sure to capture attention in those first three to five seconds and keep people interested throughout. 

So if you get the first feedback from, let’s say you’re using ChatGPT and not Poppy for this, and you’re like, “Wow, I don’t even want to read this content little and see it in a video,” then that’s probably a good sign that you need to keep working with it. And I would just say, in general, the first output is not going to be the final output that you should go with with AI right now, especially with ChatGPT, AI tends to be very agreeable and will hype you up a lot and be like, this is the best thing you’ve ever created in your life, and it’ll be the first version, and it might be terrible. So you really want to use your critical thinking skills and say, “Is this really the best version of this? Or let me read through it and see, is this the right video?”

But also, I think you can experiment. You can say, “Hey, help me create three tests of the same video.” I’m going to send it to my video editor. I’ll have them create three tests, and then we’ll upload them all to social media. See which one performs best. I think the beauty of AI is that you can do a lot more A/B testing with a lot fewer resources than you used to be able to.

Authentic, less polished content often outperforms highly produced material in today’s social media landscape.

I think so much of what I’ve seen with my clients, at least, of marketing work, gets stuck in the production that we forget about all the promotion and all the testing and all the amplification that needs to happen on the background, and really should probably be the bulk of the work, where I think up until now, because there’s so much work involved that production can take up 80% of the work. 

So even just thinking about producing a podcast, it’s an enormous amount of work to find an interviewer, schedule, think through what your questions are going to be, and move on to producing all of the audio and video so that you can put it out on a channel. Well, what happens once you put it out on the channel? There’s a lot of work that needs to happen on the back end of it. And I think there’s an opportunity now to do a lot more promotional testing and see, “okay, where are we going to get traction most with these three versions of this video. Okay, now we’re going to double down on that one. We’re going to publish that not just on TikTok. Now, we’re going to publish it on other platforms, and we’re going to put ad spend behind it.” 

So I just think there’s an opportunity to test a lot more. And sometimes what you think is going to perform will flop, and sometimes what you think is going to flop will perform, and we don’t always know what’s going to take off. And I think you’d be surprised now, a lot more organic, less produced stuff tends to do better than anything that has a lot of polish to it. 

Yeah, that authenticity, soon we’ll be in a place where you won’t know whether it was AI-generated or human. It’s crazy. We may already be there.

Have you seen some of the video clones that are being put out there? They are still there, but I’m not sure if the average person can tell. I think if you’re in this world, you can tell, but I’m not sure my grandmother would notice the difference. Well, soon no one will be able to tell. Yeah.

Yeah. Veo 3 is amazing already, and it’s just come out. HeyGen will get indistinguishable from the actual human that is based on Yeah, crazy times.

It is.

Yeah. I know we’re out of time, so I wanted to make sure we have a minute to share your website and social media channels that you want to send our listeners or viewers to if they want to learn more or potentially work with you. So where should we send them? 

If you want to learn more, visit bixamedia.com. There, you’ll find links to our AI-powered marketing department, more about us, and our social media profiles, which are @bixamedia on Instagram and TikTok. Probably anywhere else you are playing right now. 

Awesome. And where are you most active on social?

On LinkedIn.

Okay, awesome. All right. Well, thank you, Lauren. Appreciate your time, and you’re doing some cool things. So keep it up and maybe share in the future another amazing leap forward in AI usage and marketing departments in a future episode. All right, thank you and thank you, listener. Go out there. Make it a great week. I’m your host. Stephan Spencer, signing off.

 

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

• Practice AI prompting with personal projects before client work. This hands-on practice helps me understand how to provide enough context for quality outputs before applying AI to marketing projects.
• Use Poppy for comprehensive marketing production over ChatGPT. Connect multiple inputs, such as competitor ads, brand voice guides, customer data, and social stats, to create better marketing copy.
• Transform long-form content into short-form videos using AI analysis. Upload 45-minute interviews or speaking engagements to AI tools along with transcripts, then prompt for the most compelling 90-second segments with timestamps. This eliminates the manual work of reviewing hours of content to find the best clips for reels and shorts.
• Restructure my service packages completely when implementing AI. Don’t just add AI to existing services; create entirely new package offerings that showcase enhanced value delivery.
• Test AI-generated content against human-created content systematically. Run A/B tests comparing AI-written emails, social posts, and copy against human versions to measure performance objectively. 
• Create content for interest-based algorithms rather than follower counts. Focus on whether people interested in my niche will find my content compelling, not my follower numbers. Use customer data and analytics to understand what works with my audience, then create similar content optimized for algorithm discovery.
• Leverage AI for competitive analysis and performance insights. Upload competitor content that’s performing well along with my brand materials to AI tools, then ask for analysis of what’s working and how to create my own version.
• Scale content testing with AI to optimize performance. Create three different versions of the same video or piece of content using AI, test them across platforms, then double down on the highest-performing version with additional promotion and ad spend. 
• Implement multi-touch campaigns using lean budgets and AI efficiency. Design campaigns that move people from discovery to purchase across multiple touchpoints, using AI to create more content variations and test different approaches without the traditional resource constraints of manual content creation.
• Connect with Lauren Pawell for AI-powered marketing training and fractional CMO services. Visit bixamedia.com to learn about the AI-Powered Marketing Department training program and fractional CMO services.

About Lauren Pawell

Lauren Pawell is a Fractional CMO who turns marketing chaos into AI-powered growth. From ballet to medical devices to a $260K email campaign, her path is anything but typical—and neither are her results.