Ep 39: 5 Ways I'm Using AI to Increase Revenue in my Business

Links

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Description

If you've been curious about AI but not sure how to actually use it for your Facebook ads and local business marketing — this one's for you. You'll learn five specific ways Nicole and her team are using AI right now, from writing better-converting ad copy and follow-up sequences to repurposing content and building SOPs that free up your time. You'll also get the scoop on three tools that have been total game changers behind the scenes. No fluff, no overpromising — just real examples you can steal.

Transcript

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Okay, I know, I know everyone and their grandmother is talking about AI right now, and you might fall into one of two camps. You might be sick of hearing about it, or you might be really wanting to use it, wanting to learn more about it, but feeling a little overwhelmed. A little frozen, since everyone is talking about all these different ways to use it. And honestly, I get it because a lot of what's out there is either way too vague to actually be useful, or it's just way too over-promising. So it's things like, "Get Claude to schedule your entire month of social media for you." And then you kinda take a stab at it, and the content is atrocious. It's not on brand. It's not finishing the job it said it would. Whatever it is. So yes, I'm doing an episode on AI, but I'm gonna be really clear about what this episode is and what it isn't. This absolutely is not going to be me telling you that AI is going to replace you, replace your team, or that you need to completely do everything with AI, automate everything, right? That's kind of what it sounds like in the interwebs that I am hanging out in anyway. But in a world where everyone's saying that they can fire their team and their employees and just have AI do everything, I'm actually hiring faster and more frequently than ever. Now, inside of my team, it is a huge topic of conversation on how we can all use AI to save time, yes, but more so to increase client results and increase the results inside of our own business. Because I hire really smart women, and I would love to free up their time from doing manual tasks like scheduling things or, even writing things from scratch, analyzing data, all of that fun stuff, if possible, because I know that that is only going to create better results for our clients because the outputs we're gonna be able to put out will be more, and ideally better quality too. So in this episode, I am gonna talk to you about five ways that me and my team are personally using AI right now in our business. Because here's the thing, I've been using AI for years, using ChatGPT, and really trying to get a process down with it, and it's only now, years later, that I feel comfortable enough to share with the class, so to speak. And things are getting so juicy that I'm like, "Okay, I better talk about this." So here's what we're doing today, five specific ways, real examples on how I am using AI behind the scenes. Let's get into it. Number one is the most relevant piece to you and me in our lives, and what you listen to me for, and it's improving your ad copy. So here's the deal. You cannot just tell ChatGPT, "Hey, this is a little bit about me and my business, and my goal is to get more leads. Can you please write me an ad?" It's going to spit out garbage at you. The big saying in the AI world, and lots of worlds, is garbage in, garbage out. Okay? You have to really train your AI, which you can use AI to do, which feels very meta, to go deep on your client and your message. And then you have to be able to train it on ad copy frameworks that people are actually paying attention to right now, because the way AI writes copy right now is so bad. And we're still not at a point where everyone can point it out, but a lot of people are being able to point it out. I kinda wanna do an example. Okay, I'm gonna pick a random past client and put in their website. And here, it'll be a really good website. I'm gonna use Big A's Pressure Washing. They're in Panama. They're a husband and wife duo that owns it, and the wife is actually a web designer by trade. So I'm gonna put in their website. And I'm just gonna tell ChatGPT, My husband and I own a pressure washing company, and we are going to run meta ads to generate more leads. This is our website. Can you please write three versions of ad copy that you think will convert to the most clients for us?" Okay. That's the prompt, and it has the website. Let's see what it says. Here's version one. It says, "Your house might be cleaner than your neighbor's, but if your siding, driveway, or patio is covered in dirt, algae, or black streaks, it still looks neglected from the street. That's the part most home owners don't notice until they see it cleaned. At Big A's Pressure Washing, we help howner- owners instantly improve curb appeal without expensive renovations. House washing, driveways and sidewalks, patios and decks, fast and professional service, and local and family-owned. The difference after a professional wash is honestly wild. Send us a message for a free quote, and let's make your home look brand new again." Okay. I don't hate that, but there is lots of things about it that aren't going to work as well as the copy tricks and tips that we use. First one being that there's no location in the hook, so people aren't even gonna know this is relevant to them. Also, that first line saying, "Your house might be cleaner than your neighbor's," that's a terrible first line to use in an ad. Your first line needs to draw in your exact right people for a lot of reasons. That's not the point of this episode. But, "Your house might be cleaner than your neighbor's," is not a line that's going to draw in people who may want pressure washing services. Same with this next version. It says, "Michigan winters are brutal on your home, salt, mud, algae, black streaks, green buildup." Which is so funny because This company's not actually in Michigan, but okay. It slowly creeps into your siding and concrete until one day you realize your house just looks dirty. The good news, most of it comes off way easier than people think. Big A's Pressure Washing helps home owners bring their property back to life with professional pressure washing services that will make a massive difference in just a few hours. And yes, your neighbors will notice. Message us today for a free estimate before summer books up. Okay. These are not the worst things I've ever read, but the first couple lines are. So I will give it that. Now, I'm gonna talk about my trick here, and of course, I just used ChatGPT when we've actually been using Claude a lot more. But what we're doing is we're taking decent copy, and then we're putting it into Claude and saying, "Hey, we are actually trying to service this type of client," and we explain what it is. We explain exactly who it is. Can you help us come up with specific copy angles for this type of client?" For example, my client Danielle does residential cleaning. She's looking to target more high-end buyers, people with large homes and that have higher incomes. Okay, so I said, "What angles can we try and hit hard for these types of people?" It spit out seven angles that I got to pick from. So one was the I've been burned before buyer, for people who've tried cleaning services and have been disappointed. Claude said, "You can hit hard on consistency, the same trusted team every time, accountability, no excuses, because this audience is skeptical and needs proof over promises." The next one was the luxury real estate or high-value home angle. Lead with something like, "A million-plus dollar home deserves more than a $99 clean." Okay? The next angle was the time is currency angle for high l- earners who think in terms of hourly valule- value. Another angle was the dual income household with no bandwidth angle for couples where both partners work demanding careers. Another one was the always host ready angle for people who entertain frequently, dinner parties, out-of-town guests, holiday hosting. Okay, and it gave a couple other ones that weren't as good, but I picked the ones that were my favorite and asked it to write copy versions for those and said, "Here is copy that works pretty well already. Can you riff off of this?" And it did, and the copy it spit out was really good and really specific. And then Danielle came on our next Hometown Advantage call and shared that the leads that are coming from this copy specifically, 'cause she's actually still running the old copy and this one, are insanely good for her business. They are huge houses. They are people who want cleaning at least once a week, so huge lifetime value on the back end of her ads. Now, I just put together a quick Google Doc training on this that has the prompts and has the examples and has some ideas of how you can use it. So if you go onto my Instagram, and you comment the word prompts, speaking of AI, a little AI bot will send you a Google Doc training with this. You don't even have to put in your email. I'm just sending you the training right in the DMs. Okay, so that is strategy number one. Strategy number two is to write our follow-up sequence copy. So sometimes we send ads to Meta forms, and we have people who come into our program who don't even have a website because you don't actually need one to advertise on Meta. And most of the time, I'm actually going to suggest that you start by using ad strategies that keep people on the platform, so not sending people to your website Because the second you do that, you have so many people drop off. But there is a time and a place for sending people to a certain webpage. You never send people straight to a homepage. That's just silly. Again, you lose people because there's just too many distractions, and we wanna get people from point A, add, to point B, book with us. But when you send people to your homepage, you're giving them route C, D, E, F, G, and then by the time they get through all that, they don't come back and book. So if you are going to send people off of Facebook, you need to send them to a dedicated landing page that's laying out your offer and really selling your offer, even though we're still just getting name and phone number usually, and email. So I've actually worked with another agency owner who's studied AI much more than me, and she has helped me with some prompts to write extremely good landing pages that convert, as well as text follow-up flows, email sequences, et cetera. We have some templates for that, so we're able to give the templates that we already know work for businesses to Claude. Give them the information about the individual business and have them change out the text flows, the email sequences, et cetera, based on your business. Now, I don't have this in the Hometown Advantage program yet because this is another one of my behind-the-scenes projects I've been working on. But we've been doing it in my own business for done-for-you clients, and it's coming very soon. Basically, it's going to be a much stronger support system for your follow-ups from your ads. A third way we're using AI is just to repurpose one piece of content into many. So if you follow me closely, which I'm not... I'm sure not many people do, but if you do, or you can start to look now, you can see how I really repurpose things to produce more volume So the last podcast episode I put out was about my Q1 reflections and my plan for Q2. And from that, I used AI to write, I think it was five carousels and one email. You as a local business owner could do this with any content that does well for you or any ads that do well for you. So let's go back to Danielle, my cleaning company example. She has an ad with a hook that says, Phoenix families are fed up. That has been converting for her for six plus months. She could put that into Claude and say, this hook converts really well, but it's starting to die out because maybe in this case it is. Can you help me write other hooks that may do the same thing? Or she could put the whole B-roll copy because it's a B-roll reel and it flips from clip to clip and then line to line. This does really well. Help me write something that's similar but different enough that it's starting fresh. You could write one carousel that talks about your different services. Say you have three signature services or something. And then you could tell Claude, hey, can you turn this into 10 more posts? Maybe it's three carousels. Maybe it's five carousels and five reels. And Claude can go in and just break up all of that content and like dial in on certain pieces of it to make one singular post out of something small. And you can have it get way more detailed by saying ask me more questions you need to be able to write this correctly or how I want it. So you don't even have to come up with all the prompts on your own. You can tell it to prompt you to help it. So if you have an offer or an ad or a post that seemed like it did particularly well, tell AI why you think it's working well and ask it what other ideas it has to replicate those results, right? Okay, for number four, we're moving away from marketing, but this is so important for me to share with you. And it is for creating standard operating procedures or directions. Because here's the deal, so many people want to outsource, but they don't even know themselves how to do the things that they want to get done. And it's okay if you're gonna outsource to an expert. So with advertising, for example, you may outsource to an expert advertising company who's charging 25, $3,500 a month or more. Because they can charge that for their expertise to come in and do things exactly for you. But when you're not ready for that, what you should be doing is hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants are usually more generalist. They don't have like years and years of experience in a certain niche. And you can hire them for 15 or $20 an hour to complete tasks for you, but you have to be able to explain and show them exactly how you want things done. One book I highly recommend reading if you haven't yet is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. That book, mixed with hiring my operations manager, Jill, is what has gotten me so obsessed with operations and creating standard operating procedures. Because I've talked about this in some of my content before, but I have hired a lot of VAs, and it wasn't until I started taking this seriously that they actually started really buying back my time and making me money instead of costing me money, right? So now, even though I love ads, and I want to be the main ad manager in my own ad account, if I'm going on vacation for a week, my virtual assistant can take over my ads because she has a standard operating procedure to live by. I don't ask her to come up with the strategy. I don't ask her to create all my content for me from scratch. She goes in, and she knows when to turn certain ads on and off. She knows how to duplicate ads to scale because I'm trying to scale my budget up. She knows when to do that, when to scale it back She knows how to create my reels and my carousels based on what I write first. So I write out the copy and what I want to be said, and then she has templates, and she can just fill in the copy. Alls I have to do is type out in a Google Doc, or actually we use a software called Airtable, the words I want it to say, and then she formats it all pretty in Canva, 'cause that's what takes me a really long time. So every single thing I do, I record it, I put the transcript into AI, and I tell AI to write out the directions very simply. Ask me if I need to provide links, what have you. And now every single thing I do or try or master in the business has directions on how someone else can do it for me. So this has been huge for scaling because I could run a million dollars in ad spend a year, and I would not be able to scale without really solid procedures and training for my team, because I would not be able to have the capacity to support all the people I wanna support without their help, and they wouldn't be able to help me correctly if they don't have insanely clear instructions on how to do things. I even use Claude to help me come up with the how-tos in the first place. So here's an example. We just finished up a launch where I offered for my team to create two reels for you when you join Hometown Advantage. It- it's over now. So that offer has passed. But I knew I wanted to offer it, but we had never offered that before, and I was expecting twenty-plus people to join the program, which there is. And if you do the math, twenty to thirty people, two reels each, it means my team, over the next couple weeks, is gonna be creating forty to sixty reels. I don't know how long it takes you to create a reel. I'm sure it takes my team a little bit shorter, but Still, it takes time, right? Not to mention the work we have to do on the back end to just gather what we need from clients to create good reels for them. We need a lot of background information on their business, and we need them to either record content or get content to us, and the communication aspect of that was what I was nervous about. So I just went to Claude, and I literally said what I just said to you, and I said... First of all, they already knew a lot of the systems we use and how we use Airtable and how we use these different platforms. But I said, "How can I systematize this so it's easiest on my team and easiest on my clients to get what they are promised to get?" And Claude really helped me talk through a process of what we could do. Some things I was like, "No, I don't wanna do that, but this sounds better." And they were like, "Okay, perfect. We'll switch that out." My team needed some swipe templates on what to say to clients in certain situations. So fir- you know, their first introductory message, "Hey, I'm so and so. I'm gonna be creating your reels for you. Here's the form we need you to fill out." Or, "Hey, have you gotten those videos recorded yet?" Or even, I was just on a call with one of my newer girls on my team, her name's Lily. We were going through some of the reels copy that she had written for some of these clients, and she asked me a question, and I was like, "Actually, that's a really good question for the client that I did not include in the form," which Claude helped me come up with the questions for the form. Go ahead and just reach out to her and ask her, and then I'm gonna add this into the standard operating procedures for next time. If there is a next time. We'll see. So far, it's going really well thanks to my SOPs, okay? Okay, and the fifth way we use AI, I am venturing away from Claude now altogether to tell you about three different tools that have been actual game changers. I am so resistant to bringing in different tools for my team or for my clients because I do not want to overwhelm people. I don't want you to be navigating between a hundred different apps and websites and all these things, but these have been so worth it. The first one is Whisper AI. If you haven't heard of Whisper AI, it is an AI tool that is made for doing Like talk to text, like transcribing your talking, right? And you can use it on your computer, on your phone, wherever you can write something, you can use this. So I use it for email, I use it for Slack, I use it for writing ad copy, social media captions. There's a button you hold down on your keyboard, and you talk, and it will transcribe it and format it for you at the same time. So if I'm writing an email to, let's say a new client just joined and they haven't booked their kickoff call, I might hold down my little shortcut and say, "Hi, Olivia. I'm so excited to get started with you. Just noticed you haven't booked your kickoff call yet. Here's the link to do kickoff call link. Sincerely, Nicole." I can have shortcuts set up so that when I say things like kickoff call link, it actually puts in the real link for me. It formats my emails so that, there's enters between, "Hey, Olivia." It goes enter, next line. Sincerely, next line. It has the comma. You also can tell it to put in emojis, like I might say, "Sunshine emoji," and it will put in a sunshine emoji. Okay, this has been incredible. And it learns your voice and your corrections over time. Oh, it does corrections too. So if I say, "Hi, Olivia, so excited you just joined. I just noticed you haven't booked your call yet. I just noticed you haven't booked your kickoff call yet," it'll go back and delete the first thing I said and re-put in the retake for me. So you really can riff, and it will kinda clean it up for you. This has been huge. It gives you fun stats, like it told me how many words I've dictated so far. I'm gonna try and find it. I've dictated over thirty-two thousand words. It says I've written seven legal contracts. I don't know what that means, like if that's as long as seven legal contracts. I've been using it for seven weeks. I've used it in eleven different apps. Oh, it says that I talk at a hundred and seventeen words per minute, which is top three percent of all Whisperflow users. Look at me. Okay, so this has been a big one. And for all these tools, I do have affiliate links that will get you some sort of deal on them. So I'm gonna put those in the show notes. Or you can reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook or email and ask for affiliate links for any of these, and we'll be happy to send them over. Okay, so that's the first tool, Whisper AI. The second tool is called Fixer.ai, and it is email management software. This one sorts your emails for you, tags your emails for you, and writes drafts responses for you. And just like with Whisper AI, as you kind of tweak their drafts, it learns how to talk like you better and better. So when I show up in the morning, all my emails are sorted. The ones that I need to respond to are at the top. Draft responses are written. I just need to tweak them and send. Huge game changer for me as a type B business owner who sometimes lets my email rack up to several hundred unread emails. Even though I don't let emails go unresponded to, I just can operate in that kind of chaos of having that many unread emails and still being able to make sure I respond to people. But this just frees up brain space, right? And the cool thing about it is we have two inboxes. We may get more, but we can use this across all of our inboxes. So this comes back to my VA. She's managing the support inbox, and this is freeing up her time so that she can do other higher... What's the word I'm looking for? Higher stakes tasks for us. The last tool we use is called Submagic, S-U-B magic, and this is to create reels. So Submagic is a tool. We've been using it for face-to-camera reels where you can upload your face-to-camera video that you record. It can have retakes in it. It can have pauses. It can have all these things. With the click of a button, it'll take all that out. It'll add captions. It'll add a text hook, and you can add B-roll overlays. So that means just, like, when somebody's talking and you see their face, and then all of a sudden it cuts to a different video, but the person's still talking and the captions are still coming up. It does all of that in a couple clicks... Actually, in one click of a button, and then you have to go through and, make some refinements because it doesn't always pick the best B-roll videos. They do have their own B-roll videos that you can use. They're like stock videos. You can upload your own as well. We have been using those for creating really engaging reels ads. Okay, so we have script formats we use- We have specific types of B-roll ideas that we like to use, but we can use this Submagic AI to bring it all together for us much faster. It's on my list to do a training on this inside my community because I think it would really help with creating really engaging reels ads. Okay, that is enough talking about AI for me. If you enjoyed this or got anything from this or you feel inspired to try anything from this, please send me an email or a DM, let me know. Don't forget to go comment Claude prompts or message me Claude prompts to get the Claude prompt training for ad copy specifically. And just know, if you are ready to take your local ads to the next level, Hometown Advantage is always open to join. In fact, when you join by the end of May, you actually get a one-to-one onboarding and strategy call with me, where we can go through and create your whole ad strategy together live. You can ask questions. We can go over any ads you ran before. This is not normally a piece of the program. Paid calls or one-to-one calls with me are extra, but for, till the end of this month, they are complimentary when you join. Until next time.