Customer Success Playbook Podcast S3 E54 - Katie Smith - How to Use AI in Marketing Without Losing Your Brand Voice

In this final part of the Katie Smith trilogy on the Customer Success Playbook, we enter the brave new world of AI and marketing. Host Kevin Metzger explores the promises and pitfalls of generative tools with Katie, who brings her thoughtful and grounded take on how businesses can embrace automation while fiercely protecting their authenticity. If you’ve ever wondered how to use AI effectively without sounding like a robot, this one’s for you.

Detailed Analysis: AI isn't going anywhere—and that's exactly why it's time to get strategic. Katie Smith walks listeners through the essentials of adopting AI in a way that enhances rather than dilutes your marketing. The episode kicks off with her advice on building internal AI policies: what your team will use AI for, what it won’t, and how to protect sensitive data along the way. Her mantra? Be proactive, not reactive.

Katie also shares her go-to applications of AI in the creative process:

• Use AI as a co-creator to spark content ideas and draft early versions
• Train AI with your brand’s voice and tone to maintain consistency
• Stay vigilant about hallucinations and homogenized content

She emphasizes the importance of human review at every stage, especially when publishing customer-facing materials. AI is a brilliant assistant, but not a final authority.

The discussion evolves into deeper insights on lead generation and real-time responsiveness. Kevin adds his own tricks for applying brand tone through prompt engineering and post-processing, offering a compelling use case that blends Claude, GPTs, and content repurposing magic.

Finally, the two zoom out to a broader question: How do you optimize your brand for AI-driven search and recommendations? It’s an emerging discipline with massive implications, and Katie teases what’s to come from leaders in B2B and digital strategy.

Whether you're testing the AI waters or already building internal GPTs, Katie’s thoughtful approach provides the guardrails needed to preserve quality and trust in a world of automation.

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Transcript

Kevin Metzger: 0:05

Customer success. Welcome back everyone to the Customer Success Playbook podcast. I'm Kevin Metzker. Again, Robin's unable to join us this week, but today we are wrapping up our series with Katie Smith, the queen of the Customer journey. Katie has taken us through the importance of sustaining customer engagement and the power of cross-functional teamwork between marketing and customer success, and really across the business. And now we turn to our final episode. AI and marketing and how to keep it real while embracing technology. Katie, AI tools are everywhere. They promise better targeting, faster response times and deeper analytics. But how can marketers harness this power without losing the human touch and brand authenticity You value so much.

Katie Smith: 1:00

This is such an important question. We're kind of on our own right now with how to deal with ai, with our policies, with things like that. So I think there's, there's two things that you need to do right away, which is create an AI policy within your company so you can work with your lawyers, look at your brain guidelines, look at what that says, and then kind of figure out. How you will use it. This will change as things change, but it's just really good to know how your company plans to use ai. Written down things that you will do, things that you won't do, especially if you're dealing with data, especially customer data. So that can look like, um, if we. Use AI to analyze data. We will take out any identifying information like name, address, website, things like that, any identifier so that you know, you can just replace that with like. A, a naming convention or a code that you have the code to. Then it's also thinking about like what kind of quality do you want? So I like to think about AI as a co-creator when we're talking about marketing, things like that. It's really good at being kind of the middle, right? So you have the idea, you can. Freeform your idea in there, or you can ask it for ideas, it can organize it, but then you need to be there, there to, um, to read it through, to make sure that everything is correct. Um, you know, we talk a lot about, uh, chat, GPT, hallucinations, things like that, coming up with, with, um, information that's incorrect. So, so you need to be there to. To, to outline it. And you need to put that into your policy of like how things get checked and approved that have been used. Ai. So that's really important that you kind of have a plan going into it because nobody is setting that plan or regulation for you. And then it's, okay, how are we gonna use this efficiently? So there's a couple ways I always suggest getting the paid version. So if you're using, um. If you're using one of Chad GPT or Gemini, um, use the paid versions and read through their documents to see how they might use your information to train their, um, these LLMs. Because we wanna make sure I don't want my information training this model, and I don't want my client's information training this model. They may not want that, so I always pay for it. And I look for Gemini right now is kind of the one that I think has the best privacy policy. Nothing is, I think we can say guaranteed, but I wanna be doing my due diligence and actively understanding how they're using my data. Um, just like if you're going to use AI in any of your other programs, read through their privacy policy and learn how they're going to use your data, if they're going to use your data, and if there's a tier that you can protect your data from being used, that's super important. So those are kind of the, like the rules, I think. For protecting yourself, protecting any clients, protecting your, your customers, um, or your company's, um, intellectual property. So really important to look through that. So that's kinda the boring stuff. Now, the fun stuff is how do you use it? So I like to use it as, uh, a co, like I said, a co-creator. It's really good at generating ideas, and it's really good at generating first drafts, so you're gonna have to take some time, but take some time to train it. So you, if you've purchased the, the higher ones that say they're not going to use your information. You know, load all of your company stuff into it. Um, your brand, your website. You have to teach it on your company. Teach the. The tone, um, the, you know, all of those pieces and then you can start asking it to kind of come up with different ideas. So content is a really great co-creator to use. You know, you can use, um, chat as a co-creator for that. And you can come up with different, you know, custom GPTs for your marketing. You have a social media one. You train it, you know, you, you make sure you get the right prompts. You can look up prompts. Um, you can just Google good prompts for marketing. Uh, Pam Diner has a couple of really great AI books out right now if you want marketing prompts. Uh, she's wonderful and she's got a whole book that's just marketing AI prompts that are really helpful. Uh, if you're not sure if you're new to using prompts. Just Google it. Whatever you wanna do. I wanna write a LinkedIn post. What are some prompts I can ask? I want to write, uh, several blog posts. What are some good prompts? Um, look it up and then you can, you'll kind of get the rhythm of how to write a good prompt. Um, and then it's trial and error. So you try it out, you read it, you ask it to change, and you'll get better. But also it will get better at, at learning your program. So. Use it to come up with ideas, use it to write your messy first draft, and then you come in and you edit it, make sure things are correct. Um, and then it just, it takes that content creation time. You know, it cuts it in half and then you can start asking it for more ideas. The, the only thing you wanna be careful of is if you're, you don't wanna just ask it to write its own blog post. And if you're gonna do longer content, sometimes it's good to ask it, you know, like if you're gonna. Write a blog post, you'll get better results if you ask it to write it in snippet. So here's the first bullet that I wanna have my blog post. Ask it that one bullet and then you can tell it how short or how in three paragraphs, and then you can break it down. If you ask it to do kind of like long, long content, it will, it'll just, it just gets kind of vague and it sounds like everybody else. Um, and that's where you get the kind of content that just. Doesn't, people are, it's just not good. Um, but if you work with it, use it as a co-creator, then it'll cut your time in half. But you'll still keep the personality of your brand. You'll still be creating new things.'cause those ideas are gonna be coming from your brain. And, um, and you'll, you'll be able to, to. Kind of jump over the traps that people are falling into with ai.

Kevin Metzger: 7:42

I think that was a, a lot of really good content. As somebody who's spent a lot of time in the AI space and focus, you obviously have spent time learning about it and like it's really a lot of great tips that you kinda ran through there. I have a couple questions and, and actually a suggestion that I'm interested to see whether you've used yet or not, but something. You might wanna try, if you haven't, one of the things that you can do is create a GPT based off of the tone and voice that you want to speak in, and then you can apply it post. So like if you're writing a blog post, you can actually at that GPT and say, please apply this to the post after you've. Created it to make sure that it's written in the correct tone and voice. So it's a really good way of, especially if you have content that you've written over time. The little trick I use is I feed that content into Claude, ask Claude to do an analysis of it, and gimme all the, the gimme an analysis of what the tone of this writing is like, and then take that analysis and make that into my prompt. For how I want my, so it's kind of, it's a little bit meta, but it kind of, it works really well. Oh, that's a

Katie Smith: 8:58

great suggestion. Yeah.

Kevin Metzger: 8:59

So yeah, little, little something that if you haven't done that yet, you might wanna try. Have you used it? So I, sitting in a, I went to Atlanta, had Atlanta AI week last week. So there were three days of speakers and sat and listened to, um. Different ways they're using it. Um, I think marketing is actually one of the most effective uses of AI right now. Right? Customer outreach, customer, the ability, and, and I was just watching something before we, uh, before we sat down the number. I, I don't, I'm not sure I believe the number that he gave, but the number he gave was like 394% increase in lead conversion based off of using bots to respond to a lead. As soon as it comes in within a minute. If they, if they respond within a minute, as soon as the lead came in, they're responding. They're using chat, chat functions either through, uh, messaging or through one of the. WhatsApp or something like that, running it through a bot to try and basically convert the lead to the next step. And um, they said they were seeing like a 394% conversion. I, there was somebody last week that was presenting that had another. Appointment bot. So I think he was talking, he was focused on real estate leads, so it's a kind of a very, maybe it's possible in that market. But last week there was a bot that, um, I'm not gonna say the name of the company, but this company was basically bringing in lead conver, doing appointment setting as soon as the lead came in. So following up via, via email or via a bot on the site directly to schedule appointments immediately so that the lead wasn't sitting and getting stale while the customer went off and started thinking about something else. And they, they were saying that they were having a 97%, uh. By by engaging right away, they were seeing a 97% increase in lead conversion. So have you started playing with any of those things? Are you seeing that, are you hearing that in the industry yet? What, what, what's your thoughts on that?

Katie Smith: 11:22

Yeah, so I was at a conference last week too. It must be conference season. Um, and we were talking about, so I have a question for you after this, but Sure. So we're seeing that, and, and that can be. A huge resource to your customer, right? So I really, when I think about marketing, I try to think about. What's the best thing for my customer? Because if I think about what's the best thing for me, what's the best thing for my company? I miss things or I can do things wrong. So I always try to have the view of how is this gonna help my customer? And this helps your customer because they don't have to wait. They can respond. You know, somebody is responding to them quickly and that's really what people want and they don't want, you know. Decision fatigue or the extra work of having to go back and check in. Um, if we can eliminate that with a custom chatbot, that is actually helpful, that would be great. Um, I think it's good for, for specific things like, okay, let's help you book an appointment. Um. That can be really helpful if you have a chat bot for asking questions. You know, that takes a lot of time and development, but one of the things that we talked about was, do you disclose that it's ai? Because you don't have to, but

Kevin Metzger: 12:38

you do the answer. The answer is you do always, because as soon as you don't and the AI makes a mistake and you haven't disclosed it, then people are gonna get upset. I, I mean that's universal at this point.

Katie Smith: 12:51

Yep. Yeah, I think that's part, that transparency I think is really important. I think the other thing that we need to be careful of with those is that, so what we're seeing is like AI is now getting trained on itself, and so we have, we have to always be looking out for it to become more and more homogenized because that's what we don't wanna do with our companies. So I like, I'll know. Because I use, um, I use these LLMs a lot and I know what they're doing. The first thing they present me. It's like it's got all these, it has these specific symbols and it, and the structure's the same, and I have to say, okay, let's change up the structure. Something like that. But other people who don't, I know immediately that it's AI, what they've written, because it's exactly what AI gave me. So we have to be aware that even though. We are, you know, using it with our specific prompts and our specific company information. Everything is just kind of getting homogenized. So you have to check in on anytime. AI is not, is kept coming face to face with your customers that they're still holding on. They haven't started to like homogenize your brand voice, haven't started to like make things flat. I think that's one of the biggest. Downfalls we can have with the way the AI is working right now. So you just have to be vigilant about that, that you're not kind of, it's not slowly like bringing you back to midpoint.

Kevin Metzger: 14:22

Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the other things that it's, it's interesting you're talking about. Using AI to for brand identity and how it might bring your brand identity down. But the other thing that really is about to, I think, start exploding now, all these ais are doing search and they're making recommendations. So now how do you optimize your brand for ai? And I think that's a science that we are about to really start getting into and exploring.

Katie Smith: 14:54

I feel like it can, it's an opportunity to, to do better for people to get, I mean, how many times have you done a Google search and then you're like, this isn't really what I wanted, but you can get so specific with what you want. AI to do with your questions, and because it knows you, it's more of like a two-way interaction. So I'm really excited to see, um, I'm not gonna be the one figuring that out, but I, you know, I really love following people like Chris Penn and, um, some of the other, like B2B. Marketers, you know, Rand Fishkin is always interesting to hear what he has to say about what's going on with search. So I love to just stay abreast of what, what folks are doing and then be able to bring those best practices back. But I think it's a pretty exciting time. I.

Kevin Metzger: 15:44

No, it's definitely, definitely is, and thank you so much for showing us how AI can be a major asset when used strategically and ethically to maintain authenticity. That's a wrap for our three-part series with Katie Smith. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or find out more about her work at Wild Path Consulting. If you love these episodes, please subscribe, rate, and share them with your team. It helps us keep bringing you actionable insights. We'll see.