Today's guest is Shanif Danani, CEO and founder of Locusive, who shares his decade of experience using AI and machine learning in marketing. He provides tangible examples of how he leverages AI tools like Claude, Copilot, and ChatGPT as a solopreneur to automate content creation, code generation, and more. 5 key takeaways: Use AI to automate time-intensive marketing tasks like creating long-form SEO content. Leverage tools like TLDV and Vocal Video for automated meeting transcripts and video creation. Ask ChatGPT questions directly to get customized guidance on using AI in your business. Start small by using AI to save minutes per task before automating entire workflows. Focus AI implementation on high-impact marketing channels tied to your goals. This conversation provides actionable tips for marketers looking to augment their skills with AI. Shanif shares resources for learning and provides transparency into his own AI marketing strategies.
Shanif Dhanani, Founder of Locusive, is an AI, Software, and ChatGPT Consultant. He’s a serial entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in AI, data science, and software development. He helps businesses make better use of their data (especially with large language models) with custom software and machine learning.
Links Mentioned:
Timestamps
00:04:23 - Favorite AI Use Case: Long-form content creation
00:06:12 - Favorite AI Tool: Claude for SEO articles
00:09:34 - Best Automation: TLDV for meeting transcripts
00:11:56 - Favorite Prompts: Outlines for long-form articles
00:13:45 - Resource for Learning: Your content and newsletters
00:18:23 - Challenges in AI Marketing: Conceptualizing use cases
00:21:34 - Future of AI in Marketing: More advanced content generation
00:26:01 - Advice for AI Marketers: Automate time-intensive tasks
Conversation Highlights:
1. Favorite AI Use Case: Shanif mentions using AI for content generation, particularly for creating high-quality long-form articles. He also discusses using AI for social media content and video generation.
2. Favorite AI Tool These Days: Shanif mentions several AI tools he uses, including CoPilot for code writing, ChatGPT for generating SEO-optimized articles, TLDV for recording and transcribing meetings, and Vocal Video for video editing with AI.
3. Best Automation You Can't Live Without: Shanif emphasizes the importance of automating tasks that take up a lot of time. He specifically mentions automating content generation using AI tools like ChatGPT.
4. Favorite Prompts: Shanif discusses using prompts for generating content and outlines for long-form articles. He also mentions using prompts to query AI for information retrieval and search within his data.
5. Best Specific Resource for Learning: Shanif mentions learning from marketers who are advanced in using AI for marketing, like Chase Diamond and Justin Walsh. He also suggests learning by using AI tools to solve specific problems and tasks.
6. Challenges and Solutions in AI Marketing: Shanif mentions that some challenges marketers face include conceptualizing where AI can help and generating high-quality long-form content. He suggests starting with specific tasks that AI can automate and experimenting with AI for different channels.
7. Future of AI in Marketing: Shanif acknowledges the increasing interest in AI adoption across various marketing fields, highlighting its current applications in content generation, SEO optimization, and automation, and anticipates its ongoing evolution as marketers discover novel ways to employ AI for personalization, engagement, and efficiency.
8. Advice for Aspiring AI Marketers: Shanif advises aspiring AI marketers to learn the fundamentals of marketing first. Then, identify the channels they want to invest in and figure out how AI can automate efforts in those channels.
[00:00:00] Gen: All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the very first episode of the supermarketers podcast I'm, really excited about this. I have my good friend shanif danani who is the ceo and founder Oblocusive. Shaneef, thank you for doing me the honor of opening this podcast. How are you doing today?
[00:00:16] Shanif: Again, you're you're too kind man. It's an honor to be here. I'm I'm doing well I'm excited because we've been talking about podcasts before we've done a couple and so i'm excited to be on On your first one. Um, it's an honor for me. So thanks for having me.
[00:00:28] Gen: Yeah, so Everybody is an AI expert these days.
Everybody's talking AI, but you've been in you've been saying that for 10 years But can you just give it a little bit of a background of your, your professional background and then how you got here, what you're doing with Lucusive and your experience with AI.
[00:00:43] Shanif: Yeah, yeah. I'd like to say I'm a data geek.
So I've been in the world of software for about 25 years and AI and machine learning engineering for about 10 years now. Um, so, you know, most importantly, I built a company at TapCommerce where we were. Doing advertising. Lots and lots of ads at scale. And I [00:01:00] had built a platform that was serving those ads and using machine learning to price those ads.
We sold it to Twitter. So I did a lot of work at Twitter around, uh, predicting who's going to click on which ads and doing a lot of stuff like data science in terms of their product. And now I'm working on a product that basically helps businesses connect their data to AI so they can create more personalized experiences so that they can create more relevant Thanks You know, uh, experiences for their users.
So I've been in the world for a while, but it's cool to see. I've never seen the hype this much, this crazy before. So it's, it's an interesting time.
[00:01:33] Gen: Yeah. And we did have you skipped over the part where we did, uh, collide in terms of professional world. And so you were also founder of an e commerce. saas Yeah.
That's
[00:01:45] Shanif: where we first met for folks who are listening. So I was doing predictive marketing for e commerce and Gen was doing quizzes for e commerce. So that's where I was very fortunate. Now I get to meet you and sort of, uh, we were both sort of going on to interesting things now. Right.
[00:01:57] Gen: So right. I mean, that was, [00:02:00] that was kind of a marketing play maybe.
Uh, and right now seems like it could be. Uh, across the board, just a helpful general tool for a lot of enterprises are small to medium sized businesses, but you are a one person, one person team running the show, product dev, marketing sales. I'm really curious to know how you're using AI in your day to day in terms of getting your name out there, in terms of building a brand, getting lucusive into the hands or building the awareness.
With your target market, can you describe like what your use cases and favorite AI kind of like workflows are for locusive?
[00:02:40] Shanif: Yeah, I will say as a one person shop, you try to automate as much as you can. And AI is, uh, is very helpful for that. So one of the things I learned during our time in e commerce was.
Social media can be really, really impressive. Content marketing can be really, really helpful if you do it well. And I do it often. And so, uh, from the perspective [00:03:00] of marketing, one of the tools I'm using quite a bit is quad. And we've collaborated quite a bit on this ourselves. Again, you've been actually super helpful.
So folks out there who are listening to this again, is fantastic at creating long form content with AI. I thought I didn't think it could be done. And then he gave me a process. So I use QUAD which is a competitor to ChatGPT quite a bit to come up with. SEO optimized articles because I think that SEO is an area where, uh, I didn't focus a lot on it at Aptio and I wish I did, and it's one of those things I'm fixing now.
Um, ChatGPT is something that I use on a day to day basis, but I am a software developer, and so I write a lot of code and ChatGPT is something that helps me quite a bit with writing code. Uh, there's another tool out there called TLDV for those folks who do a lot of meetings. I use this tool to record all my meetings and transcribe them.
Again, one of the things I made a mistake at with my last startup was I wasn't keeping track of my conversations. I wasn't recording anything, and TLDV will do this for me automatically. And I'm also doing a lot of video testimonials now. [00:04:00] And there's this tool called Vocal Video, which is good at editing videos and creating them with AI.
And so a lot of the tools that I'm using now are really, really good at creating content that's designed to engage users, designed to draw people in, or in the case of ChatGPT, designed to create content in the form of code. I could probably list a few others, but those are the most important ones I'm using now again.
Yeah,
[00:04:21] Gen: that's really interesting. So can we dig in a little bit? TLDV. So you you're using that for customer calls. I've also, uh, been in there in terms of the conversations. I don't record them. I don't transcribe them. But like, what am I missing out on once you have it written and you're using AI to kind of like have a permanent record
[00:04:40] Shanif: of the call?
There's a really sort of interesting thing. That happens when you use these tools. One at the simplest level, they just force you to collect all of these videos in one place and record them. And by recording them, it forces you to think about the conversation and just get a sense for, in my stage, very early product, like searching for product market [00:05:00] fit, what were the key takeaways and what are, what should I be doing?
So even outside of just having them written down, uh, just being forced to record them and collect them in one place is helpful, but the fact that you can write things down or have things written down for you automatically. Opens up this interesting world where you can search through your previous conversations.
You can use AI to summarize the conversations and create a summary for every place for every customer. And you can then search this conversation because you can do things like use the bot that I've created or other tools. To search through the text to find something that's meaningful. And so by having things written down, you're able to, um, recall or search for things that you might, uh, have forgotten if you hadn't had them all in one place.
And in the case of TLDV, it also does the recordings, and so you can go back and watch the recording afterwards in case you want to see anything else.
[00:05:49] Gen: Yeah, that's amazing. Now, does it go toward, do you have it kind of templatized? Or you actually have to actively have to look for a certain transcript with a [00:06:00] certain conversation.
[00:06:01] Shanif: They They have a pretty nice website where they let you search for anything and then it'll bring up your video. They display all of your previous meetings in a grid. So it's relatively easy. Now one thing though that I do is, um, I've started using Notion to run the entire book Use of Business. And so what I'll do is I'll download the transcript and download the video.
And then move them over to a notion space where I'm keeping track of all of the, um, the meetings that I'm doing around product marketing, I'm sorry, product market fit and sales and customer development. So you can, you can keep them all in the TLDV website, but you can also move them to wherever you need them to be.
[00:06:35] Gen: Interesting. All right. So that's moving towards the next topic that I'm really interested in is. How you're setting up automations or what stuff do you have, like the triggers and then the subsequent actions, uh, that you have that simplify things as a one person business. I think,
[00:06:53] Shanif: you know, the, I sort of focused a lot on the things that take up a lot of time.
So to give you context, when I was at [00:07:00] Aptio, we had set up a Zapier automation between our Webflow forms and our CRM. And, uh, you know, we weren't. Unfortunately, we weren't getting thousands of people signing up to our forums, and so I spent a good amount of time, uh, hooking up these automations, when in reality, I could have just copied the people who signed up on our Webflow forums into Zapier.
So now at Locusive, what I'm doing is I'm automating the things that take up a ton of time. They might not be fully automatable, but I'll get a long way. So one example is what we've worked on again, which is creating long form content with AI. If you create these really high quality articles, sometimes they can take weeks.
You know, for me, I might be able to create an article... About a topic I really know about in maybe a few days if I'm not using AI. But if you're using something like cloud or chatGPT with the web search plugins, you can start to do things like creating these really high quality articles in a couple of hours.
Maybe add one or two more hours in to personalize them, create the right sorts of how to's and then the block quotes and the images that are that are good for them. And you can [00:08:00] have a really high quality article out there in less than a day. And that's something that by automating that I've been able to save a disproportionate amount of time.
Similarly, I use a tool called Copilot, which allows me to write a lot of code without having to write the code. It comes up with all of the code that it thinks I should be creating. And with just hitting a simple button, it writes all that code for me. And 90, 80 to 90 90 of the time it's correct and accurate.
And so that saves me several hours a week from having to code. And just like that, using ChatGPT can also save me a few hours to code. So really what you're hearing me say is I'm leveraging a lot of the content generation capabilities at AI to get rid of the things that used to take up a lot of time.
There are a few other things I've done as well. So the product I built is a search tool that lets you search across all your data. So I'm using that to be able to search across Google Docs and Sheets. We just are rolling out an integration for Notion, and I said I run the whole business on Notion. So I'm using that to be able to do things like automate the [00:09:00] discovery of a document that I knew I had somewhere, but I don't want to go find it or getting a quick answer from, you know, a document that lives in Google Drive, but it would have taken me a long time to find it.
And so those are the types of automations that are. Maybe they saved me five minutes here, six minutes there, but added up over the course of a month, that's actually a good amount of time savings as well. And these are the types of things AI is really good for right now, and I'm just excited to see where it goes from here.
Yeah,
[00:09:23] Gen: that's kind of the mindset shift that I've realized is the way to take advantage of AI. It's not to think, Oh, there's a cool tool that'll help me create a presentation with just text, but more so like, how am I spending my time and being like really diligent about like, step by step, like say, for example, you are writing your long form SEO content.
Like, how does that start? Well, you can't just like write a topic. You want to kind of be data driven. So what does that mean? You need to find your target keyword, then what do you do with that keyword? Then you're doing your research, your outlines and so on. Uh, but being very specific. And I think maybe that's where your developer [00:10:00] background might be helpful because there's, there's, it's always kind of binary, right?
Like if this. Or it, right, like, uh, these rules and it can be overwhelming if you're just trying to find something to do with this universe of like tools and, you know, infinite ideas that you could do.
[00:10:18] Shanif: I would, I would never recommend somebody to try to force use AI. You can't imagine the number of people of CEOs who have come to me and they're like, Hey, we know we got to be using it, but can you tell us what we should use it for?
I'm like, no, I don't know your business. Like, you know, you, you should be telling me, Hey, this is what we want to use AI for. How do we do it? And so it's one of those things where there's so many tools out there. It's on you to figure out where are you spending the most amount of time and how do you automate it?
I would say if you haven't started yet, again, you made a good point. Like, think about where you're spending the most amount of time and automate the things you need to do there. That's a really good way to get started. And it's helped me a lot as well.
[00:10:54] Gen: Mm hmm. Now, you've walked through some of the tools you use, some of your processes.[00:11:00]
Now can we get into the nitty gritty of your favorite prompts? Now, of course, it doesn't need to be... verbatim, but what is an example of a favorite prompt that you use a lot? If you, you know, from your marketing hat and then how do you structure it? Like what's the thought process in how you're writing that
[00:11:14] Shanif: prompt?
You know, if you had asked me this before you and I talked a few weeks ago, I would have said something different and we're actually going to do a webinar about this, but one of my favorite prompts is. The lead up to creating a long form article The first thing that you got to do is you got to get a list of the you have to get an outline So one of the things taking a step back One of the things I was never able to do very well before we talked was creating a long form article That didn't sound salesy or robotic and also had a lot of personal information about myself or my company And I just I was never able to figure that out Uh now you and I have recently talked about this you came up with a great method for how to do this and the prompt is Essentially saying, Hey, look, please use these headings that I have found from my competitor articles to come up with an [00:12:00] outline for an article that I want to write about keyword X.
Obviously, you need some plugins to browse the web to come up with those competitor headings. The first prompt is, please come up with an outline for this particular long form topic on this particular keyword. There's a little bit more details, but, um, you know, getting it to understand, Hey, look, this is an SEO optimized article, getting it to understand this is long form, getting it to understand you want to, uh, maximize use of the keywords in the headings.
Prompt will say all of those things, but at its core, the prompt is saying, please give me this outline. And then the next favorite prompt I've gotten is once you've got that outline. Please write this particular section. So rather than having it write the whole thing, please write this section so that it can, uh, it'll then be able to provide you with high quality content for this section, and then you can iterate back and forth.
This is a prompt that I use on a weekly basis to, uh, to come up with long form content. Um, and then switching gears a little bit, I have also built sort of this [00:13:00] information retrieval and search system, and one of the, the most common prompt that I use is actually something like, here's my question, I have all of this context for you.
Please use this context to let me know if you can answer this question. If you cannot answer it, please just say no. Now this is actually a prompt that happens automatically in the bot that I've built. So I don't go to ChatGPT's website and type this in. It's actually done every time that I ask a bot that I've built a question about my data.
But this prompt allows ChatGPT to understand if there's enough context in the information that I've retrieved to answer my question. Uh, so those are two prompts that come, come in off the top of my head. The cool thing about these tools, though, is you can prompt them about anything, and if you're detailed enough and you're specific enough, they'll generally come up with a good answer for you.
[00:13:46] Gen: Yeah. Now, when you're, with, with your tool, it might be different because maybe you have custom instructions or kind of perpetual prompts to tell it not to do certain things. But if, say, you're, you're me and you're starting [00:14:00] ChatGBT, how can I... Ensure that chat GPT does just says, I don't know, as opposed to hallucinates and tries to attempt an answer, uh, and then therefore give a wrong answer.
Yeah,
[00:14:13] Shanif: this is, you know, hallucinations is one of the biggest things businesses face. So there's this concept, uh, it's called Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG for short. And the idea is, if you don't want ChatGPT to hallucinate, you have to give it some source material that it can use to find an answer that's specific to the question that you're looking for.
Now, you can easily do this, and then say, if the answer is not found in this material, say, I don't know. ChatGPT will, will follow that information. Downside is you can't do this if you're not giving it any context. You can't just ask chat GPT. Hey, who wrote this book or who won this game? And in the world series.
But if you don't know, say, I don't know. And the reason you can't do that is because it's been trained to provide an answer. It's been trained to [00:15:00] really serve, serve its human users really well, which means that it doesn't want to disappoint them. And hallucinations can be a big problem here without that context.
So really the best thing you should be doing is if you don't have context to provide it, ask a question, but then go and double check the answer that it gives you. Double check the facts or double check it on Google and see if it's, if it's actually the truth. Use it as a starting point for your research rather than taking it as gospel.
[00:15:26] Gen: Mm hmm. That is a great point. And if you actually, you know, you're saying go to Google and verify, um, I mean who knows because you're finding it on the internet. But Bard does actually have an option to, uh, to check. So you just click the little Google icon if you're using Bard, and then it'll highlight the parts that can be verified in green, and then the parts that, uh, don't have a source, and then it shows up in orange.
Um, so Bard is simplifying that. Maybe ChatGPT will roll that out too.
[00:15:52] Shanif: Yeah, it's a cool
[00:15:52] Gen: tool. Yeah. Uh, now for marketers who want to learn more about [00:16:00] AI, how to use AI to augment their, their, uh, capabilities with AI, what are some helpful resources, some ways that you've learned, maybe some like newsletters, YouTube channels, whatever else Twitter follows, I'd love to hear where you're learning from.
You know, marketing
[00:16:15] Shanif: is, is one of those things that's relatively new to me. My, my background is in software and tech, and so I've been trying to get spun up. Most of the marketers that I've been following before this year never used AI. You're, I think you're probably the first one to do it like at scale and in a way that's really effective.
So, you know, I'm, I loved following your, uh, LinkedIn posts and, you know, your email newsletters. I know that I say this all the time, maybe a little bit embarrassing, but I think you're probably the marketer I've met. That's the most forward and advanced thinking when it comes to AI. Now that doesn't mean like there are still a lot of really good marketers out there.
Who will teach you a lot like chase diamond. When we worked in e commerce, you probably came across him. Fantastic marketer. Um, he does a little bit with AI. He's given me a few prompts, but I, [00:17:00] I think his approach works really well. His approach is add value, give as much as you can provide a lot of content.
And then when people really want your services, they'll come to you. Not nothing in there about AI, but he does give you a lot of good tips. And one of the tips I've taken from him is post frequently on social media, but post valuable material. Now I could take that one step further and I can give AI a bunch of information about myself and my product and say, please come up with the next 10 social media posts that I should be posting.
I haven't done that yet, but that's certainly something that you could do. Um, and then there's the other, some of the other tools I mentioned earlier, like vocal video and TLDV. They don't, I haven't seen the marketers who are promoting those tools, but I came across those tools because they had good SEO and they had good word of mouth referrals.
And so, yeah. From my perspective, you know, what I'm doing is I'm understanding the different parts of marketing that I need to tackle. And then I'm trying to find the best processes and tools to tackle them. And I think that as, as the world, [00:18:00] uh, sort of continues forward in this space, I'm going to find additional marketers like yourself, uh, again, but right now there aren't that many, which is unfortunate.
Hmm.
[00:18:08] Gen: Yeah, I mean, they're, they're, uh, I like YouTube and I do like Chase Diamond as well. Um, and so a couple of things that I've learned from Chase. One is he was very smart. He was very early in launching a LinkedIn page specific around AI. So it's called AI evolution, I believe. And that's just kind of curating, uh, some high popular, uh, threads or posts from other people on social, social channels.
He credits them, uh, but it's kind of like one way that curating is helping his thought leadership, but then actually he's learning as well. And then one thing that I've heard is that he said he's, he does, he's very transparent with his strategies. Is he will have new thoughts, but then he also will, uh, kind of repurpose older stuff.
And of course, social media moves so fast, the, uh, the half life of a post is super short. So a lot of people, even though it could be a [00:19:00] really great idea, might not see it. So he will just kind of almost do what meet Edgar does and recycle old posts. But one, one twist that you could add is, all right, if you know that something has been validated and it has.
Um, has engagement, you could just, you know, use a, use a good prompt to repurpose it, you know, get this, but rephrase it in a different way, or maybe you're shifting the niche. So instead of e commerce marketers, you're focusing on B2B, uh, copywriters, for example. Uh, so he's, he's constantly putting stuff out and then he's also reusing what works.
Um, so it's, it's just a really great way to amplify his message.
[00:19:37] Shanif: I follow a guy named Justin Walsh, you've probably heard of him and he suggests doing the same thing. Take a tweet that works, change a little bit of the tone or the, uh, of the target and push it out there. I love the idea of using AI to do that because I was trying to do that with one of my other tweets.
I couldn't figure out, Hey, look, like how do I re, revoice this or reword it so that it's, uh, the same thing, but different. And I, I think AI is a great opportunity to do that. I'll, I'll definitely try [00:20:00] that next time. All right. So
[00:20:02] Gen: some of those markers that you might be encountering. Who are trying to find a I we've kind of touched on this a little bit, uh, where do you think that people are finding the most challenges or, uh, falling short in actually seeing that aha moment of how a I could be implemented in their day to
[00:20:19] Shanif: day.
It's funny because like folks like us, we are so entrenched in this world that for us, it's obvious, but a lot of people still don't know what chat GPT is. I came across a guy who didn't even know what it was. And then there are folks out there who know what it is, but they are either worried, um, or they're, they don't know what it can be best used for.
There's a lot of concern questions among CEOs today about where can I actually use this for my, my business. And so I think that there's still a lot of uncertainty around where this could actually help. Because this is specifically we're talking about LLMs and text processing and Gen AI right now, a lot of people feel like they can probably use this [00:21:00] in long form generation or social media posts or Uh, you know what they call training their data on training chat GPT on their data, but they don't know how or where to get started.
And so I think one of the things that people are having trouble with right now is just conceptualizing where they can actually use this tool to gain productivity gains. What I would recommend to them is just start using it the next time you have a question or start using it the next time you've got a particular query or request or something that's going to take more than a couple of minutes and see if it can help you.
If it can, you'll be able to grow from there. And if not, then you'll say, Hey, like, maybe this didn't work for this use case. Try it for another use case next time. Um, a lot of people to use it for content generation, as we've talked about a lot already. And I think people are having trouble with that despite the massive number of tools out there that are.
Helping you write long form blogs. I think that high quality long form blogs take a lot of work. And I don't think that people have seen a lot of success with this. Talk to a few marketers, um, who just haven't been able to, [00:22:00] to, to get a lot of success with that. Uh, And then there's a lot of people out there who are trying to figure out, Hey, how can I, I just mentioned this earlier, but how can I train chatGPT on my data?
How can I get my own domain specific LLM to do what I needed to do? And that is, it requires a little bit of more technical work. And so a lot of folks are falling. Falling short there. And so I could probably list like 20 other areas where people just are having trouble right now. But I also think that there's a lot of interest and people are trying to figure out how to make it work.
So, um, yeah, those are just some of the things that I've seen. But I'm sure you've seen a bunch as well, again, on your side.
[00:22:36] Gen: Yeah, I think even just one small shift in like, Hey, I don't know how to do something. I'm going to just Google it. The shortcoming there is you are stuck with what people have written and Google ranks well, but if you are doing a, you're instead even going to a chat based AI, let's say perplexity.
ai or bar or chat GPT. And then you frame it more so like, how can I use AI to help me do this? Or [00:23:00] how can you chat GPT help me, uh, figure out how to write a Google sheets formula to pull this column into this column. And there's an example I had to do recently. And I think like that could actually be really helpful if you're saying, how can AI help me and you're actually asking AI, so to get meta in there.
Um, but if you change your thought process and you're trying to always look for opportunities to, to, you know, those shave those seconds off those minutes off from your workflow, then you can start to unlock like, okay, this saves a lot of time or this. Helps me a lot. I see where this can be helpful at scale.
So like that's been one change in my behavior. Less so Google, more so, uh, chat based AI.
[00:23:45] Shanif: And as a quick add on to that, I don't know if you've heard of this, uh, this website stack overflow. Which is where, you know, all the developers used to go whenever they had bugs. I don't think I've been to Stack Overflow since I started using ChatGPT.
Because you can just ask ChatGPT the question now and it'll tell you exactly what to do for [00:24:00] your exact situation. It'll even write the code for you. You have all of these new opportunities now to, like you said, shave seconds, shave minutes by using AI to solve your problems, which include trying to figure out how to use AI for your business.
[00:24:13] Gen: Yeah, uh, there was, there was a post earlier, I believe it was like May or something, Stack Overflow had lost 30 of their traffic and it was pretty much, you know, in conjunction with the release of ChatGPT. So there are a ton of people like you who are using AI instead of forms. Um, so closing out here. Advice for aspiring AI marketers, and we've kind of talked a little bit about this, but if you have one takeaway that you want to share with people to help them kind of get to your side of leveraging AI, what would that
[00:24:46] Shanif: be?
Well, I think, you know, the assumption here is we're talking about folks who have perfected or mastered their craft. Like if you're, if you're a marketer, who's been doing this for a long time now, how do you get into AI? That's a separate question. Then, [00:25:00] Hey, I'm getting into marketing. Can I start using AI tools right off the bat?
I'd always recommend, Hey, learn the fundamentals. Cause that's what I'm doing. I'm not somebody to be. To be lecturing on marketing. I'm learning the fundamentals. I'm learning about what it means to understand your customer, what it means to understand how to reach them where they are, talk their language, but let's assume you've already done all that.
I think that you take a look at what's taking up the majority of your work, the majority of your time, and you start to see where AI can automate it. For me, it was content generation, particularly long form content generation. I identified that it was a channel that I wanted to. invest in I identified that it has long term potential, but I also identified that it takes a lot of my time.
And then I started using AI to cut down on the amount of time it takes to generate long form content. This could be applicable to anything. It could be applicable to social media marketing. It could be applicable to video generation. It could be applicable to community building. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is understand what [00:26:00] channels first that you want to invest in.
And then start to figure out how do you automate your efforts in those channels, using AI in a variety of different ways.
[00:26:09] Gen: Fantastic. It's Shaneef Dhanani. Thank you so much. Uh, first episode in the books. I really appreciate it. Uh, so what's the best way to contact you online?
[00:26:19] Shanif: Yeah, I'm always happy to chat.
If you guys have questions, let me know. My email is Shaneef, that's H A N I F at Locusive, L O C U S I V E. com. That's Shaneef at Locusive. com. Uh, website, L O C U S I V E com And I'm on LinkedIN shanifdhanani I post a lot there. So always happy to connect. Hell yeah.
[00:26:39] Gen: Always a wealth of knowledge and super generous with your time.
Thanks so, so much, Shanif And thanks for listening. Awesome. Thanks
[00:26:46] Shanif: again.