AI Won’t Save Your B2B Marketing (It’ll Expose It Faster)

I just got back from Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World

and after seeing everything for a few days I came to one conclusion.

AI is not gonna save bad marketing.

In fact, it might almost expose it even faster.

Let's talk about that today.

G'day everyone, it's Michelle J Raymond here back from a week and

a bit in the US of A in Anaheim.

Yep, that's right, home of Disneyland.

But this time it was for Social Media Marketing World which also

incorporated AI Business World this year.

So for those of you who haven't been before, set the scene.

It's about two and a half thousand marketers, social media managers, business

owners all in the one place, all there to talk shop across all the social

media platforms and obviously how AI is impacting all of that was a big part.

So we have vendors that are showing off new tools which was

kinda cool to go and check out.

Um, but ultimately we had marketers, and I watched them, cramming their brains full

of new ideas for, the best part of what?

Two and a half, three days straight and I watched them furiously

typing and trying to keep up with everything that they're learning.

I guess if you saw them it's almost like brains exploding.

I know how they felt because I was doing the same thing.

Now I'm gonna share what I think actually matters in B2B marketing

right now based on the lessons that I learned while I was at the show.

But honestly I'm gonna have to say that my favourite part is still being in

the room with so many amazing people.

I'm going to share with you some of my key lessons from what I've taken away so

far with the disclaimer of this I suck at learning in a classroom style environment.

So having the most amazing speakers in the world, on stage, it is

still very hard for me to sit still and listen and take it all in.

My preferred learning style is reading.

And so those of you who are listening to this podcast, you're probably laughing

thinking, "Well, why do I do this?" It's exactly the reason why I do this podcast

because there are those of you out there, if I say, "Go and read this really long

blog or newsletter or post or article," whatever it happens to be, your eyes

are gonna roll back into your head and you're gonna go, "No, give me a podcast."

So that's the first thing.

I haven't watched all of the speakers back.

There are some that I've definitely tagged that I wanna catch up on.

But that doesn't mean that I didn't learn a lot, and that I don't have

anything that I can share with you.

So let's go into key lesson number one, and it's the one that I've been banging

on about pretty much all year on this podcast, and that is strategy matters

so much more now than it ever has.

And I know that obviously there are so many tools out there that

AI helps you to do so much more, but the volume isn't the goal.

And I think that that's what's happening right now is where AI tools promise

productivity and to give marketers back all of this time, we've actually

just swapped that time savings out into doing so much more stuff, and

keeping up seems to be part of the problem that we've got right now.

Now, my talk on Company Pages, five strategies that everybody misses for

conversion, was kind of built on the promise of if we go back to clarity

and we get that right in everything we do from the time we build the Page

through putting content out, engaging with our audience, that is gonna help

us so much more than just doing stuff at scale which lands, like, with a splat.

Feels like you've been slimed, right?

That's why I think there's so much pushback right now on AI content

and tools, and I've been guilty of that myself, because the volume

is there but honestly it doesn't feel like it's talking to me.

I miss that feeling when content I read it or I watch a video, whatever

it happens to be, when I go, "You're actually talking to me, Michelle J

Raymond. This is me. Are you reading my mind?" And so I think that's why the

content has become so easy to ignore.

And if we come back to how LinkedIn's changed right now, LinkedIn wants you to

be an expert on the topic of your choice.

You choose, but just make sure that you stay on track and make it

really, really clear what you do.

So coming back to strategy is, I don't know.

I don't know how many times I can say this, but it is so, so, so important.

And shout-out to all of the LinkedIn speakers that were there.

We had AJ Wilcox, Judi Fox, Louise Brogan, Mandy McEwen, and myself.

Like, go Team LinkedIn because we all were there to support each other, and

if you listen to each of our talks, you will actually find out that we were all

kind of saying, "Get back to strategy," because it's so easy to be distracted.

Lesson number two, I'm going to say that the general vibe is that most AI tools

are accelerators and not replacements.

Now, I have to confess something.

I got the chance to speak to a couple of the AI speakers, and this was offline,

as I said, in some of the corridors, which is where the magic happens.

And one of the things that they said to me is, "Yeah, this is really cool.

I went down a rabbit hole to learn this for eight hours, 12 hours, days at a

time" to learn how to be good at the skills that they brought to the event.

And I was just thinking about the B2B marketing teams that I work with, and

I'm wondering, when do you guys ever get eight to 12 hours to just go offline

and learn how to do these skills?

And that's why I think there's a lot of hesitancy around adopting AI

tools, not because you don't like them, and I had that conversation

with a lot of people, but if it takes too long to master, then you just

don't have the time to give to it.

So That was kind of interesting for me.

And another interesting thing was, yeah, that's really cool to have all of these

tools, and the AI is great, but I'm not allowed to use it within my business.

So for instance, a lot of people are only allowed to use Microsoft Copilot,

and they don't wanna lose their jobs because all of a sudden they're putting

proprietary information into these other tools, and the repercussions

of that nobody wants to risk.

And so that's another reality for what's going on with marketers.

And I would love it if you are watching this on YouTube, leave me a comment, let

me know what's going on in your business.

Is your business fully supportive, or are you hesitant because you don't wanna

do something that jeopardises your role?

Now, that also applies if you are running your own business

and using your client's IP.

And that's something that we discuss in, our business right now is,

are we allowed to use this stuff?

Now, it's great for me.

I can use whatever tool I want.

And that is something that I, you know, try to reel it in because

there are so many different tools.

I was trying to think of examples, but I was reading someone that

said today, you know, we don't have every single streaming service.

You know, we don't have a log-on for all of them all at the same time.

That's a lot.

Now, in fairness, I do have quite a few.

But it's about picking and choosing the right one for the right time.

So I think the plan here is, and the important nuance, is that most of

the AI team were saying it's useful for repurposing, interesting for your

workflows, but it still requires strategy and obviously editorial judgement.

Lesson number three for me was that the human perspective is

definitely becoming more valuable.

If I had a dollar every time I heard someone speak about authenticity

or storytelling or emotions things like loneliness came into play in

some of the, speeches that I heard.

When you think about that, if we come back to it, it's your lived

experience Which is so valuable.

Now, for some people, you might be high-fiving and excited about

that, and I am one of those people.

I love that opinions matter right now.

I love that the more you show that you understand your customer,

the better off that you will be.

And original thinking does matter.

But I also think from this is that there are a lot of people out there

that will hear things that I've just spoken about, and be honest, does the

thought of being more human and share your thoughts as a marketer or as a

business owner or as a social media manager, do you get pushback on that idea?

'Cause I'm not convinced that everybody wants to be out there storytelling,

and storytelling sometimes gets confused for sharing personal stuff

when it comes to LinkedIn especially.

So I know that I've spoken about previously the power of thought

leadership, the power of employee advocacy, how company Pages and

employees work together, the power of two, how powerful comments are,

how important conversations are, how much we value real expertise.

But I'm still not convinced that there's anything more than a few percent of

people in any business that are prepared to put themselves out there and do this.

And I think that fear factor, which we don't talk about on those stages enough,

is the thing that is gonna hold a lot of people back as individuals and as the

business, and that comes from the top to the bottom and everywhere in between.

So does AI help with this?

Maybe.

But I'm not seeing that those who didn't wanna create before all of a sudden going,

"I've now got AI tools. Get out of my way. I can't wait to do this." So that was

another thing that I've been pondering.

And again, DM me on LinkedIn.

Let me know, what are you thinking about all of this stuff?

That, as I said, has been my favourite part of the whole three days in

Social Media Marketing World, having conversations with real-life marketers

that are doing this day by day.

So if we are not connected on LinkedIn, please make sure that you reach out.

Let me know that you listen to the podcast.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how AI is in reality in your day-to-day

jobs because, yeah, I don't know.

I'm not sure that it's living up to the hype.

What's the next lesson that I take away from Social Media Marketing World

that I think that you need to know?

I think that B2B marketers need to find a way to make sure that they

don't burn out and don't live in a constant state of being overwhelmed.

And I really got the pressure to master AI, the pressure to

post more, the pressure to be experts across all platforms.

I was having a chat to one person, shout out to Erica, and when she told

me what a day in the life was for her role, and we spoke about this in

depth, it's definitely the standout conversation for me over those three

days, my jaw was on the ground.

I was thinking how do you do comms?

How do you do social?

How do you do thought leadership for leaders?

How do you do blogs?

How do you keep it updated?

And she just shrugged and she's like, "That's my job, Michelle. That's

the requirements of the job that I have." And I could see just by how

many notes people were taking during the sessions, they were typing away.

We had people that had recording devices, which is a story for another day.

But ultimately, at some point you become the own bottleneck to your leveling

up, and I think the key here is to come back and just pick one small problem.

What is one thing that you could implement over the next three months?

And let's have realistic timeframes 'cause most of you are in back-to-back meetings.

Is it that you could get better at repurposing?

Or is it that you could now learn how easy it is to add captions into your videos?

Or clipping tools, like maybe that's something that

you haven't checked out Opus Pro,

which makes this process really easy and I'll shove my affiliate link into

the show notes because I think it needs to be part of the arsenal of tools

that you need in today's creator world.

And I think then there's also tools that can help you with research or

obviously meeting summaries are out there but, and you can use them for content.

But also how are you gonna organise your content?

I think they're the things or types of topics that if you just pick one, right?

Just one.

Just breathe in, breathe out, and make this happen over the next three months.

And unrealistic timelines are the thing that's probably gonna kill most

people because you think it's so easy.

Everybody else appears to have this under control.

Yeah, I'm telling you in the conversations that I had I'm

not so sure that's the case.

If I had to wrap up the podcast episode today and talk

about what surprised me most,

what surprised me most is that a lot of the talks went back to fundamentals,

back to getting strategy first, back to things like authenticity,

back to things like building trust.

I don't think, marketers, that there is anything new right now in

marketing that you missed out on.

Every talk was about getting back to fundamentals because it's like that whole

concept of putting icing on a mud cake.

If you don't get the base built right and you try and use AI to make

up for that, you just get exposed quickly, and you go back further

faster than any of your peers that maybe aren't even trying these things.

The best marketers that I met at the conference were strategic thinkers.

They were looking for one piece of the puzzle or answers to something

within their business that they could take back, rather than, as

some other people described it, drinking from the fire hydrant.

Honestly, there is so much information in those three days

that I'm not sure that you could take it all in, and you certainly

couldn't go away and implement it.

So those that don't chase trends, those that look for, "How can what I'm learning

build on the strategy that I've already built?" Those that are open to realising

that they've drifted off course and need to go back and course-correct,

they're the best marketers that I think are gonna have the most success.

And from that perspective, I challenge you listeners this week to go back...

And this is a example of one of the tasks that I gave in my presentation.

Go back to your profile or to your Company Page and ask somebody else who

doesn't work closely with you, give them 10 seconds, set a timer, and ask them

to come up with what you do, who you do it for, and what makes you different.

Even if they can answer one of those three things, you're way out in front And

it was so fun to talk to a group of page admins after my presentation who asked

me to do that on each of their Pages.

And what we realised was their Pages were the most bland version of

what their businesses had achieved.

So if you discover the same thing, you know what you need to fix.

If you need help, you know where to find me.

But ultimately, marketers that are listening to this, the thing that you

need to know is getting back to strategy and as part of that clarity is the thing

that is the most important lesson that I took away from Social Media Marketing

World and the one that I think is going to improve your results on LinkedIn

more than any other thing that you'll learn this year, more than any algorithm

report, more than any research report.

Get back to strategy and in turn clarity.

Until next week, cheers.