Entering the AI Frontier: Navigating Digital Marketing in 2025

Interview Transcription – Entering the AI Frontier: Navigating Digital Marketing in 2025

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Welcome to the Proof Point Podcast, where we decode digital success one click at a time. We share key takeaways fueled by data and insights that your team can implement today to drive growth. Now, let’s get started.

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This is Stacie Porter Bilger, your host for the Proof Point Podcast, where I feature B2B and D2C businesses and thought leaders, sharing marketing data tactics, AI insights, and sales strategies that kickstart your growth in this rapidly changing digital space. This episode is brought to you by Proof Digital. Proof Digital is a strategic and creative performance marketing agency.

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We partner with companies to create data-fueled marketing sales funnels. Today is going to be a little fun. We have on our podcast today, Chad Franzen. Chad is with Rise25. He’s done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, and we’re going to flip the script today, and he’s going to interview me. Chad, I appreciate you coming on to interview me. Thanks, Stacie. I appreciate you having me. I look forward to talking to you.

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You know, we’re heading into 2025, a new year here. Of course, everybody’s talking about AI, how it’s going to affect everybody’s lives, how businesses can use it, how marketing agencies can use it, how anybody can use it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

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As we move into the new year here, what can people expect maybe with regard to AI? I appreciate it. Yes. It is the hot topic, but it’s for a good reason.

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AI is changing the way we work, live, and do business. AI, from our standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, will be basically embedded in almost every strategy and every tactic around the marketing world. What’s in store for 2025? Personalization will be a big part, short-form video, voice, and something called GEO, which is Generative Engine Optimization. I’ll get a little bit more into that down the road. But things are moving quick. It’s a wild, wild west out there, Chad.

(2:26 – 2:40) 

We’re working to stay ahead of it so our customers can stay ahead of it. Can you maybe expand on some of those things like short-form video? We’ve had that before. How is AI going to maybe affect that? Yeah.

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Well, it’s going to be leveraged a lot, especially with automations and people also, as you’ve seen, short-form video is what gets people to click. It gets people engaged. So it’s still going to be… That personalization piece, short-form video will still be a hot piece in 2025. I’m not sure if I answered your question there, but it’s a visualization of search. Okay. Yep.

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So what are the things maybe people can do, especially in the business world, to prepare themselves for how AI will change the digital space? Well, a few things. Well, let’s talk a little bit about staying ahead first. The staying ahead, they need to understand that data is their friend now.

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So accelerating and understanding consumer behavior is going to be at their fingertips. And so able to understand large volumes of customer information in real time and valuable insights is going to be like no other. So businesses need to know that and also leverage it and be ahead of it.

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The fundamentals still don’t change, though. From a business standpoint, you still have to understand who buys your product and why. Business strategies will still be… And the fundamentals of marketing are still there, but you now have at your fingertips a lot more consumer data.

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And you don’t have to spend so much time gathering it. You also have to understand and up your game on your content. And we’ll get a little bit more into as we talk more about it, I’ll give some simple tips of some things that our clients and businesses need to be thinking about that, because these AI-powered search engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, all those are going to be pulling that content, and you need to make it easier for them to do that. They’ll be changing. Search engines are going to be changing. So you need to be ahead of that.

(5:12 – 5:26) 

You’ll see new platforms come on. And if you’re an Ecommerce business, you’re really going to see the personalization be key to add into your sites, your AI chatbots and a few other things. So customers are going to really demand more personalization and adaptive messaging on their sites.

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For marketers, what can AI do to help? And if you place too much dependence on it, how can it hurt? Well, there’s no question AI helps bring efficiency to whether you’re talking about writing a blog, a content, keyword research, all those types of things. So from a marketing standpoint, it brings efficiency to your process. But what doesn’t help is still getting to that core.

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What problem do I solve? How am I going to make your life better? Personalization that you need to still, the fundamentals of marketing will still have to come in play. AI might act like a human. It is not human.

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And so you have to make sure that you’re still bringing in that human voice into your content and making sure you’re positioning. AI doesn’t know where you’re positioning your product or service. So you need to make sure that that content is developed, but it accelerates the creation of content like no other. Oh, yeah. So you mentioned upping your content game. What do you mean? Tell me a little bit more about that.

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Well, you need to first make sure your content is accurate. And you also need to start printing old content, helping AI find what’s important and to the point. So when it’s pulling into those AI bots, when it’s pulling your content, one, it’s accurate, one, it’s to the point.

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So those are some things that you should do, making sure as you’re improving your site content or your messages out in the digital space, think about those two things. It also be important to, from a technical standpoint, that you’re implementing structured data, which is, people in my world often use the word schema, but it’s basically code on the back of your content to tell bots that, you know, what the article’s about, what the event’s about, reviews, so they understand more deeply. And so when they’re pulling in that content, they’ll choose your content over others.

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You also, on side note, you need to monitor your digital assets more, especially your site monitoring traffic. I think I was talking to you earlier about, we’re seeing a lot more nefarious folks out there, actors on sites. And I mean, I just blocked, I think yesterday, a guy named Joe Smoe. I think he is not real. And so you got to keep an eye on those bad guys too. So  it’s moving fast and it can be overwhelming, but if a business starts with, okay, we need to be accurate.

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We need to be concise on some of our content to make sure that we’re making sure what’s important is clear to search bots and others. So schema, is that something that a lot of people are aware of? That sounds pretty important. It’s very important.

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Schema markup. I mean, some people are, people in my world understand what it is, but there are tools on sites that help you expedite that markup, or we do it sometimes manually on some content, but it’s basically a code format on your content so that Google or others crawl it. And you’re going to see, I mean, Google has been a dominant player, but I think you’re going to see some rise of new search options in the coming year or years.

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Example, Microsoft, they own Bing. So you think chat GPT has some power. So anyway. What are you most excited about maybe with regard to using AI in digital marketing? And are you interested in exploring, what are you most interested in exploring further? Well, one, our company difference serves small to medium-sized businesses. I’m excited about their ability to get some of those data points that some of the bigger guys always had. AI with, that we leverage, I mean, you can put a lot of data and you can understand the personalization pretty quickly.

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And so that now is, can be leveraged if open, those small to medium-sized companies can move quicker in real time to really get some valuable insights of consumer behavior, marketing trends, potential opportunities, and optimizing their marketing efforts that they didn’t have before. That’s exciting. Bringing efficiencies into systems, bringing efficiencies into their business so that they can scale and faster without putting on a lot of burden on administrative costs.

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But those are exciting things. Now, there’s no question. There’s challenges and scary things.I mentioned the various folks who will also be using these tools, as well as it does take a lot of power to put behind AI. So those are the problems that I’m not solving. I’m helping small and medium-sized companies use it.

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It’s here. But there’ll be some challenges that we’ll all have to address. So I’ve used a few. I’ve used Perplexity, Claude, Google Notebook, LM, and ChatGPT. I think a few of those, depending on what I’m doing, a few of those are my favorites. Do you have some favorite tools that you like to use for content strategy? Yeah.

(11:30 – 11:52)

For content, a couple of them. Claude is developed by Anthropic.I think it has a little bit more nuance to the content than ChatGPT. However, I do use ChatGPT, especially from Data Gemini. Also, Spreadsheets, Google Sheets, Gemini is great. They’re all slightly different, but they’re all very powerful. So I use them all. But I would say Claude may be a little bit better for content today. Next week, it might be different.

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Do you think… Can you take the same approach with all of those platforms? The same inputs will generate the same type of thing that you’re looking for? Or do you have to…Should there be nuance in how you approach them? So there is nuance, too. And it’s also kind of crazy and weird, to be truthful, on how you approach them. So they are… What I mean by that is, they’re sensitive to how you ask the question.

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Prompts are really important when it comes to AI. Prompts is kind of having a conversation like we’re having here. You’ll ask it a question, and it’ll give you a result, and the result might be halfway there.So you have to ask it another question, and you have to do nuances with it. Crazy things about it. Sometimes it responds better if you actually threaten it.

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I’m serious. So if you say… Or if you’re like, I’m on Star Trek mission, and my life is in danger. I need you to come up with… You’ll get different results. And sometimes better when you’re in a mode, or if you’re on a Star Trek ship. I don’t understand that, Chad. And that might not be next week.

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It also… If you don’t put a period or question mark, those things can impact your results on some things. So it’s not… It’s interesting to watch, but I am… Every month, every quarter, the results and its generative answers to problems that I would bring a team together and spend hours on to come up with a game plan can happen in seconds. What about if you’re polite? When we communicate on Slack here at Rise25, I always say, can you please do this? Or please do this, blah, blah, blah.

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I always say, please help me with this on ChatGPT or whatever. Does that make a difference? I think… The thing is, I don’t know if you’ve done this. I build GPTs. Sorry, my mic just decided to move. I build GPTs. Do you know what GPT stands for? No.

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It stands for generative pre-trained transformer. And transformer is that it can transform into multiple different things. And so it could be an assistant, it could be a business partner, it could be a content creator. So it transforms into different things. And so I create GPTs to help answer different things. And so I build a relationship with it.

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Back to your question is that I will say, thank you, have a good night, those kinds of things. And you’re building that relationship. So I think, who knows? I don’t know. So when you have to use an AI tool for a specific task, and there’s a number of them out there, how do you determine which one is best for your needs? The tool? Yeah. Well, you test them. To be truthful, I’m always testing all of them.

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And they’re not cost-prohibitive right now, to be truthful. So I’m using mainly the big ones. And then there’s…Again, it’s a wild, wild west. So you’re going to be using… First of all, I use the ones that I’m currently already embedded from a business standpoint. Zoom, they have great AI tools, right? Transcripts, notes, great. I’m going to continue to use Zoom.

(15:27 – 15:38) 

There’s Canva. It has great AI tools, but it’s from a graphics standpoint. ChatGPT, Gemini, mainly because we’re Google partners. Gemini, I’m keeping an eye on Gemini. So we watch the big guys though. You’re going to see Facebook actually make some progress.

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It made some investments. So you’re going to see Facebook make some progress with AI. So we’ll probably be testing them too. So there’s no question that Chat, Gemini, and Cloud are probably my top three. For business owners that are just beginning to explore AI, are there any free tools that Proof Digital or you recommend and how can they help companies get started with AI? Well, Chat’s got a free version. ChatGPT has a free version.

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And Gemini, I mean, you can just basically go to Google and you’re using Gemini. So those are right out of the gate. If you’re using Zoom, that’s already part of it. So those are all good steps. And then I think ChatGPT, it’s like 30 bucks a month to start out with individual. Now what you need to do as a business owner though, you also need to put some guardrails a little bit.

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I mean, don’t put customer data in it, right? Because you’re putting into… So make sure it’s a confidential discussion as well from a business standpoint. I want to throw that out there. So don’t just start putting data in there because then you’re putting all that confidential data into the digital space world.

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Anyway. Is there anything that we should know? How do you leverage AI to extract actionable insights from marketing data? Well, first you have… From a standpoint actionable, one is how you can leverage Google Analytics, other predictive analytics, and you put that data into some of the tools. That can spit out pretty quickly about where opportunities exist in your marketplace.

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So where it would take long to analyze a spreadsheet or general data, you can input some of those data points into AI tools and you can get a lot of insights of where you can spend your time. So that’s a really big opportunity for small to medium-sized businesses. Yeah.

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So when a client, a small to medium-sized business, comes to you, I know you guide them through the process of integrating AI into their existing marketing workflows. How do you do that? Well, first, again, you have to start with, what problem do you solve? And what are you going to make… How are you going to make the lives better? 

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I mean, I always say that over and again, but who would buy your product? What problem do you solve? You still have to start, again, the fundamentals. Once you know that, and who are your competitors? So one of the things that you can leverage AI, or even existing tools that we’ve used for years, what are some opportunities in the marketplace that they can penetrate to get some momentum so that when they want to go after some of the more competitive opportunities, they’ve made some progress? So you can use data and those tools to identify where opportunities exist.

(19:02 – 19:10)

Then you use those AI tools to speed up the production of content and also optimize that content. And so those are some things that I mentioned before. So FAQs, those are great things to start with, because that’s a really important piece for AI of answering questions.

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So that’s a low-hanging fruit right out of the gate, which we will always kind of push because those are… If they don’t have those in place, that’ll be important going forward. Okay. Sounds good.

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Well, hey, Stacie, this has been very informative and interesting. Really appreciate you sharing all this stuff with us. Thanks so much. Yeah. Great talking to you, Chad. So long, everybody.