This is the Influencer Entrepreneur's Podcast with Jenny Melrose, where I strategize with business owners on how to grow and scale their businesses to hit their income goals. This is episode 429 of the Influencer Entrepreneurs Podcast with Jenny Melrose. Today we're going to be jumping into AI in branding how to shape your business future with Adam North. I am super excited about this episode.
Speaker 1:Adam has an amazing tool that he is going to be talking about, called Blaze. It is something that is going to actually allow you to put the personalization back into AI for you. So you're definitely going to want to listen in and most likely sign up for a free trial of Blaze. But before we jump into that, I want to make sure that, if you haven't already grabbed my strategic growth plan, this will help you with how you are using any AI tool. As you move forward, you have to understand your positioning, your unique value proposition, the pieces of your business and the problem that you're solving, as well as who you are solving that problem for, and that strategic growth plan is going to help you work through that. So make sure, if you haven't already downloaded, that you pop into your podcasting app or hop over to the blog post and you can sign up to get that delivered right into your inbox. All right, let's dive in. Hi Adam, how are you? Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm great Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Of course, I am so excited to have this conversation about AI and branding. I think that this is always something that my listeners are very interested in any time anyone brings up anything about AI. But before we jump into that conversation, can you actually introduce yourself and your business to my audience?
Speaker 2:Sure Well, my name is Adam Nathan. I'm the founder and CEO of Blazeai. Blaze is the number one AI marketing tool for small businesses. We help what we call teams of one creators, freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, even small agencies create on-brand content in half the time, and what I mean by content is social media, emails, blog posts, websites. Blaze creates them all in your brand style and voice, and it's like a full-stack marketing solution. So it helps you plan content, generate it, publish it and analyze it.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. So we are definitely going to be talking about AI and branding and I'm going to ask you a bunch, probably about the company as well, and how it could probably be useful to my listeners and how they can get started. But what role does AI play in branding today and how is it changing the branding landscape?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I think there's a lot of misconception about what AI really is and what impact it's having on different types of businesses. I like to think about AI as just like the latest and greatest technology. Things that we used to call AI are now just commonplace, like mobile phones or GPS, and AI today is really about using these large language models, as what they're technically called, to help produce content or generate answers for you, if you used chat GPT before. And specifically when it comes to branding, what we see happening is kind of a bifurcated impact. In the market. For big companies, ai is helping them often cut costs or let go of people, automate functions that humans are doing today. I think about it as more of an efficiency story. I think it may have a negative impact on anyone who works at that company, but where we focus as small businesses, ai is a positive story and it's really helping small teams.
Speaker 2:Small businesses do a lot more than they could before. We have hundreds of thousands of customers and many of them are founders or owners of their own business. They're wearing many hats at the same time, and, specifically when it comes to marketing, they know they have to do great marketing and do great branding in order to grow, but they don't have the time and, more importantly, they don't have the skills to produce great marketing. And so they're in this Cap 22, where the most important thing to their business is something that they can't fully control, they can't fully do on their own and they don't have the time or resources to pay somebody else to do it or try to do it themselves. And so, for a lot of small businesses, ai is helping to level the playing field, helping them to produce a lot more marketing, go from zero to one on things like SEO or ads or social media content that help them grow impressions and customers and, ultimately, revenue.
Speaker 1:I loved your comparison of saying that a smartphone is really our AI of then. Right, I've never really thought of it that way, but you're absolutely GPS. Like I just said to my husband the other day, when we were driving and I had the GPS on my phone, I could actually see what speed he was actually going, as well as the speed he should have been going. So, yes, it is. It's that kind of like the trend that has happened and we just, with technology, continue to get smarter and being able to be more productive, get smarter and being able to be more productive. Could you actually give me an example of how we might?
Speaker 2:be able to use AI in branding. Yeah Well, I'd say our most popular feature at Blaze, or certainly our most loved, is a feature we have called Brand Voice, and so I think a big problem with AI, especially if you use tools like ChatGPT, is that it kind of sounds like Internet voice. It all sounds the same. It's easy to detect if somebody is using AI to write content or an email or a blog post, because there's no variation in tone or voice. It as a document, we can analyze it for seven different attributes of how you speak everything from your intended audience to your syntax, to your writing style and we produce it in an output that you can edit yourself so, in case we're wrong, you can modify it to your liking. And then all the content we generate uses that brand voice to personalize the copy, the text, so that it really does sound like you.
Speaker 2:And you can create multiple brand voices in Blaze. If you have different ways of talking about products, or you have different audiences you speak to, or you have different geographies you serve, or, if you're an agency out there, different clients, so you can create many, many brand voices in Blaze so that, depending on what you're writing about, it sounds different. We also have a feature called brand styles, which is a visual version of that. We can analyze your Instagram page or your Facebook handle for your content and pull out not just your logo but your colors, your fonts, your photo vibes, so that when we create visual content for you to post, it actually looks like other stuff that you've done in the past. And so it's a really cool way, I think, both to leverage AI to create content that actually looks and sounds like you and also, in the case of these specific features, overcome a big problem with AI that generic tools have, which is that it all can end up sounding and looking like everybody else's stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes, we've been placing such an emphasis on that whole idea of personal brand strategy, and that's how I always tell my content creators how AI is not going to entirely replace you, because you're still going to be able to need your voice, and now AI, with the way that you're doing it, you're able to actually infiltrate that. I love that you have that aspect to it, because that is, I think, one of the biggest things I hear from people is that they use cheesy words or they're. Empowered is always a word that we see constantly being used because it is pulling from the same sources. So it will actually take. Let's say, for example, my podcast episodes and the way that I write the blog post that goes along with it. Would you take the audio or would you take the blog post in order to create, like the social or whatever else I might put with it, just as an example, yeah, I mean we can actually do both in Blaze.
Speaker 2:You can take, for example, the audio file from this podcast, or you can take a YouTube video and Blaze will transcribe those, analyze the text and then turn it into up to 100 different types of output. So we can take this podcast episode and automatically generate a blog post, a social media campaign, a newsletter, a webpage for you and actually post all that content for you automatically. And so, blaze, we have a really cool feature around building out campaigns and, yeah, we use essentially that audio file like this podcast, or the video file like a YouTube video, as the source material, and so it's not actually pulling from the rest of the internet, it's just pulling from the content that you give us to generate more of that's so smart, especially the idea that you can actually take and like, look through, let's say, my Instagram feed and be able to pull the actual branding that I'm already using, the kind of signature way that I have set up maybe my covers for my reels or my carousels.
Speaker 1:It would just make things. I can see how it would make things much, much simpler.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a. I just spoke to a customer, I think, the other day in Georgia who was using Blaze to write emails to her husband and her husband didn't realize that it was an AI tool that was writing those emails. He thought it was her the whole time and it was just a great example from one of many customers about how I think, at least in our case, we really invested in features that allow the AI to look and sound like you case. We really invested in features that allow the AI to look and sound like you, so that all you're really doing is saving time and actually, you know, growing your site, growing your revenue, growing your customer base, without some of the risks you see from new tools where, yeah, it can end up sounding fake or generic or just bad.
Speaker 1:What are some common mistakes that you actually see with using your tool for creating AI in brand or using AI in branding that you would recommend people staying away from?
Speaker 2:It's a good question. Well, you know, you mentioned before some people being afraid of AI. What we like to say is you know AI won't take your job and it won't replace you, but a business that knows how to use AI well will take your job and will take your market share and will take your customers, and so, really, it's just like any other technology. The ability for you to leverage AI comes down to how much you're willing to invest into using it. I think the same thing is true for, like Google or Google Maps, where some people can't get from A to B using Google Maps, but some people use it to plan their entire vacations. The information is all there. It's just based on how well you can use the tool, and you can apply that metaphor, obviously, to any new technology, whether it's Canva or Camera or an AI tool. So, with Blaze, what we try to really do is design it for people who have to do marketing that aren't marketers, and so we really specifically focus on folks that may not be experts, and our goal is to make our tool simple and easy and fun to use, more like a game than anything else, and so my first tip is if you don't know how to use AI. Go start with a tool that's not designed for experts but that's designed for beginners, because there's a couple tools out there that are really focused on helping people who don't know anything about this technology start to get their feet wet and play around with it in an easy-to-use format. I think the second thing I would recommend is that you know you try a bunch of tools before you buy them. We have a free trial specifically for this reason. A lot of what we see the customers who retain with us we're the largest tool in our space and I think customers stay. I know customers stay because the output of the tool is really good and ultimately you have to test it and see if you actually like what it generates before, I think, putting money behind it. But what's really cool is once you get to understand how a tool works. In Blaze's case, we have the ability for you not just to generate one blog post or one piece of, or one Instagram post or one email, but to generate an entire month's worth. So if, for example, you're coming up to the holiday season and you have a ton of content, you want to get out there for Black Friday and then for the holidays. At Blaze. You can generate up to a month or more of Instagram, facebook, linkedin, twitter, blog, email content. It can write 30, 60, 90 posts for you, insert images for that inside them. It can schedule and post them and analyze them.
Speaker 2:So we have a lot of customers who actually use our tool to set and forget basically their marketing so that they can focus on other things that are important to them.
Speaker 2:And I think what's really cool about AI is that you can ramp up that learning curve pretty quickly and the ability to use technology to just automate a lot of busy work that you'd rather not do.
Speaker 2:That's boring in the first place, and not a high leverage use of your time. It can really, I think, help people scale themselves and do more of the work they have to do for their business. So you know, I think ultimately investing and learning a tool and figuring out like how to get leverage out of it so that you can save not just like one or two, but hundreds of hours we have a tracker in our tool for every customer about how much time you've saved. You had the number of hours and so far this year we've saved customers 110,000 hours, which translates to basically $5 million in save time, which is really, really critical for small businesses, especially where you know time is money. So you know I, yeah, I would probably say for anyone out there, I would just start get started and play around and see what you like. But I'd probably say for anyone out there, I would just start get started and play around and see what you like.
Speaker 3:Hey there guys. My name is Melanie from Mostly Under Control and I am a member of Jenny's Influencer Entrepreneurs Insiders membership. I've been a part of it since 2017. And over these six years I've taken full advantage of the weekly trainings that Jenny offers and the monthly group coaching. The group coaching is probably my favorite part of the membership. Jenny has taught me so many things for my business. She helped me niche down and write and teach about what I wanted so that I wouldn't burn out. In addition to what she teaches, the networking I've done with other members has been invaluable. I recommend her membership to all of my online business owner friends because it is worth every single penny. To all of my online business owner friends because it is worth every single penny.
Speaker 1:So now, if we were to sign up for Blaze, we'll make sure to link to it. Obviously, especially since you offer a free trial, we will have that linked in the blog post as well as in the app. But if we were to get started with Blaze, what would be one of, like, your top features that you feel people should get started with to really get a good feel for what they can potentially do with it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so right in our onboarding flow, we ask you, basically from the moment you sign up, to create one of those brand voices and brand styles I was talking about, and that's a really good way for you to assess whether we're doing a good job creating personalized branding and marketing content for you. In our tool, we create, I think, over 200 types of content, but the top three are social media posts, blog posts and emails, which are obviously the most, I think, high-frequency types of marketing and content a lot of folks put out there, and so I would just start with whichever one of those sounds relevant to your business. If you're already producing Instagram content, create an Instagram post on Blaze. If you have a big email list that you never email, try writing an email copy. I mean, I use Blaze all the time to write my own content. You can probably follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I'm always surprised at not just how fast Blaze is, but actually how much better the ideas are.
Speaker 2:And the cool thing about Blaze is it's built on a real-time document editor and designer, similar to Canva or Google Docs, and so our goal is to get you content. That's 95% to 98% good, but we still want to let you modify it and improve it on your own to get it to 100% of what you're liking, and so the benefit of the tool is you can actually edit it by yourself, with your team. It's not just like ChatGPT where you're going back and forth in a chatbot, it's actually an editor that you're used to, and so, yeah, I'd recommend just starting with something that you're already doing and compare it to the content that you'd write and see if it's better or not. And if it's, you know, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be, but if it's not, of course we'd like to hear from you and hear what we can do better. But it's just, I think, amazing the kind of leverage that AI is providing, especially to small businesses that don't have the time or skills to do everything they need to do on their own.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely. So a lot of the concern that we've talked about, of course, a little bit in the past. It's the idea that some people have, like ethical considerations that are being taken into effect when they're using AI, but what it sounds like to me is that the way that you're using Blaze, it's pulling our voices and our content already into it, so you're really avoiding ethical concerns. Am I looking at it correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And one more feature that I'd mention is called source materials, and so inside Blaze, you can essentially create a knowledge base where you give us access to, like even just your website, your public website, that we can scan. But you can also upload or add documents, things like ways to describe your products or how you brand your services or your About Us page. And so not just does Blaze sound and look like you and it generates content, but it's actually generating content from specific information about your business, and so it's not just using the internet to find stuff about you or to write content, it's using your specific knowledge and information, and so we have customers who upload hundreds of documents into their knowledge base of source materials. So that plays writing hyper-personalized copy for you. The other thing I'll mention just on this ethical topic is like, again, there's, I think, a difference between how large companies and small companies are approaching AI. I think for a lot of large companies, corporations, there's ethical concerns, intellectual property concerns about certain information being used internally versus externally and stuff being shared across companies. If they're using the same tool, you know Coke doesn't want their documents or knowledge to be used by Pepsi. If they're using the same tool. Coke doesn't want their documents or knowledge to be used by Pepsi if they're using the same product that kind of thing. But what we see for small businesses is not just that we obviously have good ways to personalize knowledge for you, but that the alternative to using something like Blaze is that they're doing nothing. Today it's not like Blaze is competing necessarily against other tools. It's competing against what I call non-consumption.
Speaker 2:Before Blaze, people weren't publishing any blog posts, they weren't doing anything on social media, they weren't engaging their audience via email, and so for a lot of our customers I'd say more than half they're just actually using Blaze to go from zero to one, to go from doing nothing to doing something and then to start to up-level from there. You know, any ethical considerations I say are outweighed by the fact that now a lot of small businesses that weren't pulling all the levers they had to grow are doing so, and so that the growth benefits in terms of awareness, new site visitors, improved conversion and, most importantly, more sales are super significant. And yeah, again, I'm not really. You know, as I mentioned, we have hundreds of thousands of users on the product every day and, yeah, we haven't heard anything about ethics, at least from our customer base.
Speaker 2:I think the most of the feedback we get is really around yeah, you're helping me grow a lot faster, and how can I better use the product? Are there other ways to even move up the curve, to become more of an expert? But I think that's the question for a lot of small businesses out there especially is are you happy with your growth? Would you like to do more if you could and save time in the process? I think that's the question a lot of our customers are asking themselves versus like am I worried about information? Because in a lot of cases, they're not even on the internet. Like, 30% of our customers didn't have a website before Blaze and so they're not even on the internet for people to steal their knowledge or content or branding. And so that's the key change, I think, for a lot of small businesses.
Speaker 1:Yes, no, that makes sense, and I love the way that you're talking about up-leveling right. Like each time you start having actual output, you can find another feature within to up-level and really start to hone in on your actual, not just consumption but production of content. Now are there also data? Is there data being tracked? So can I get a better idea of, like, what's working really well and what's working not so well from Blaze?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is a feature we're about to launch next week, and so today in Blaze, as I mentioned, we can schedule and post content automatically for you across social media channels like Instagram, facebook, twitter, linkedin, as well as blog posts, blog CMSs and email send platforms. What we are now building is the ability for you to actually see the performance of all the content that you share on those platforms and channels not just content that you schedule and post through Blaze, but also stuff that you may post on your own or through other tools. And the really cool part about this I mean, besides the fact that everyone loves analytics is that we can generate more content like your best performing content, and so we can see here are your top 10 posts on Instagram in the last 30 days, and we can generate 5, 10, 20 more posts like that. And so the virtuous cycle that happens in marketing is when you actually repeat the stuff that's working and you have insight into.
Speaker 2:Okay, here's what's performing, here's why and here's how I can generate more of it. So you don't want to just keep guessing month over month over month about what's working, but more do more of what your customers and your community are already loving. And so in Blaze we can actually turn your marketing from more of like a funnel or a production process, like you mentioned, into a cycle where we're planning, we're generating, we're posting and then we're analyzing your best stuff so that when you go plan and generate more, you're dialed into what people are already loving, what's converting, and you can actually grow faster.
Speaker 1:So smart. I love it. So now I'm sure they're all chomping at the bit to figure out where the best place they can go and start their free trial and take a look and test out Blaze, where is the best place to go to grab that? We'll make sure that we link to it in the show notes as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so everything I mentioned is at Blazeai and I wanted to mention that. Well, the product, I think, costs $34 today. You can basically get back a month's worth of Blaze in an hour using the product in terms of what you can generate. That's something we hear from customers all the time is that it feels like a deal, but we have an annual plan deal where you save up to three months of Blaze, or you save three months of Blaze just by buying into the annual plan. It's a way to get even more value out of the product and I would encourage people, after they try the product they like that to upgrade, because you can save even more dollars that you can put towards something else in your business.
Speaker 2:And for folks out there that are just curious about how Blaze works or how to just get their feet wet in AI, we have a really big YouTube channel with hundreds of videos that help people go from zero to one on AI, and it's another great place just to try and just explore how the product works. We also have weekly webinars that we have, I think, hundreds of people who attend every week and many of those are people who haven't tried any AI product before and just want to see a demo, and I do some of them myself. We have an amazing team that also works with customers every day to help them get on board. So, in case there's folks out there that are listening that just want to learn more, I'd encourage you to either come to one of our webinars or watch our videos on YouTube to see how I can help you.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with me, as well as my audience. I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, there you have it. I hope you're just as excited as I am to hop over to Blaze and start testing it out. The fact that you can personalize it with your content that you've already created gets me so excited. Think about those YouTube videos, those podcast episodes, that book that you've written, and how you've always wanted to create a product that goes along with it, whether it's a planner or a book guide or a workshop that's going to go into this. There's so many options that you can use this Blaze for, and you're going to want to make sure that you take advantage of that. As always, I appreciate you all so much for listening in and I will see you all soon.