Dave (00:00:00):
All right, Mastering AI-Driven Marketing: Tools, Tactics, Best Practices for Success. All right, so we have to first start with this. I'm going to ask two questions. If you're here to learn about AI or you're here to master AI. So raise your hand if you're here to learn AI. So learning AI driven marketing. Nothing wrong with that. Raise your hand if you're here to master. Okay, [00:00:30] there's a few. All right, so let's hop into it.
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First, who am I?? Why am I talking about AI? I'm a little more dressed up now than there. All right, so Nettra Media have been working with credit unions and national banks or regional banks for 10 years. So we do a lot. We're a digital agency, SEO. We usually outrank national banks locally for credit unions. We've been working [00:01:00] with AI content models for a whopping three years and you're like three years.
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Well, ChatGPT has been around for what, about a year? So we go back to ancient of days using AI to create content. And then of course we've won Top Credit Union marketing campaign from the Web Marketing Association. So the goal of this session is literally, I'm going to tell you how we do things for credit unions, [00:01:30] how we're able to write human written, AI helped great content so that you can take this back to your marketing department of one or maybe 10 and create amazing content to where your boss is like, "Did we hire two more people? How are you able to create this kind of content?" You're going to be able to do that after this or CUNA said your money back. [00:02:00] So are you still good with that? Yeah? No? Oh, no, no. All right, so forget that last thing, but you're going to be able to take this.
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I'm giving you practical, practical stuff. So hopefully you guys take a ton of notes. But here's the modern marketing peril when it comes to you as a credit union marketer. Actually, just so I know, raise your hand if you do some kind of marketing capacity for your credit union. So pretty much everybody. Okay, so [00:02:30] here's the problem. You probably were hired for two or three things specifically for your credit union, but you're probably doing that times three or four. You're probably wearing multiple hats and all of a sudden maybe your boss or maybe you on your own, like, Hey, maybe I should figure out AI. It's like, but I got to add that to everything else I'm doing. And so the goal of this session is to really show you how we do that, [00:03:00] not just with content, but with SEO, also with some other things that we'll hop into in a second.
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So what is AI? Obviously we've been using AI for years and years, and you either knew it or you didn't know it. Google Maps. If you use Google Maps, they use a grip of AI. That's actually where a lot of it was pioneered. Facial recognition with your smartphones, that is AI. And then of course when you use Google and [00:03:30] Google tries to complete what they think you're looking for, that's AI too. So whether you know it or you don't, you've been using AI for quite some time. Okay, so here's an overview of the session. The first is going to be content marketing and SEO. And again, I'm just telling you exactly how we do things. That's my goal, that you could take things and go back to your credit union and get it going and get it and see some results.
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The next is financial literacy. [00:04:00] This is a big deal. We find that most credit union websites, they'll have a list of all their loan products and services, but be very light when it comes to financial literacy. So we'll talk about that. Crafting ads, social media and email copy. This is where ChatGPT or we like to use Jasper. It's where both really, really shine. We'll hop into that. And then lastly, market research and chat bots, all with using AI.
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[00:04:30] So content marketing and SEO. And by the way, for questions, hold your questions to the end, just kind of take a note so you don't forget your question because I definitely want to answer it. I'll definitely have Q&A at the end here. All right, so content marketing's on the rise. So this is a study that Semrush did of 1700 marketers and business owners talking [00:05:00] about content marketing. 45% publish content more frequently. Ding, you might want to pay attention to. 70% use content marketing as part of their outreach. Heck, if you want take a picture of that slide, that's what you want to know. And 40% have a documented content strategy. Content marketing is a thing, and this is what AI can kill it with, [00:05:30] and this is what we're using it for.
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So here's the importance of what I'm about to give you guys, is that some people think, oh, well, you just go to ChatGPT, you let it write something, you cut paste that into your, let's say your website is WordPress and you publish it, right? That's all you do. That's pretty much it guys. So hey, have a great morning. No, no, you don't do that. And so this is a reflection, [00:06:00] this quote here. It says, this is somebody that runs content at scale. "AI tools like ChatGPT will help brands scale production, but generate tons of low quality content. Brands will need original, human research content to stand out." And yeah, amen. You can't just take ChatGPT or Jasper and just publish that. That's just simply AI. So the goal [00:06:30] of the session is to show how we do this.
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All right. So before we hop into specifics, I want to show you that what I'm conveying to you is not just stuff that I read on Twitter/X. I thought this whole transition of Twitter to X it should be called Twix, right? I mean, I don't know, I'm just not influential enough to get that in, but Elon wasn't returning my calls. Anyway, this [00:07:00] is a case study of content marketing that we worked with a company or a credit union called Valley Strong Credit Union, 290,000 members, 28 locations, 4 billion in assets. So when we started working with these guys, they had very little financial literacy, almost zero on their website. And despite their size, they did not rank on page one for any of their top keywords, which was surprising. Usually [00:07:30] even a blind squirrel finds a nut. Even if you're not good at SEO at all, you're probably ranking on page one for something because most of your credit unions have been around since probably the '40s, something like that.
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Well, so since we launched this campaign, and this is a screenshot of their blog post, which will get to a little later. So they now have a financial literacy library of amazing content on their site, their time on page, multiple page visits, which are some KPIs you want to monitor [00:08:00] for financial literacy, skyrocketed. And they currently rank on page one for all of their top keywords. So guys, that's worth, as you probably know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. You want a KPI, you try to justify SEO to the higher ups, it's like I say, hundreds of thousands of dollars because the cost of Google Ads to be able to rank that high and get all those clicks, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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[00:08:30] Another thing with Valley Strong, they've been aggressively expanding, purchasing credit unions and things like that. And what's crazy is you'd think that they would take a long time to rank on page one in these new counties of these new credit unions, they were not in before. They're at page one for many, many keywords from the beginning, right when they launched. So power to content marketing and financial literacy.
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Okay. So if there's one [00:09:00] thing to get from my session, it's this, I spend a ton of time figuring out how to convey this in a way that's practical and that makes a ton of sense. But it's what we've figured out over the last three years of using Jasper and ChatGPT. Raise your hand if you've heard of Jasper. Okay, roughly half of you. So it does cost money. We find it a little more helpful [00:09:30] than ChatGPT sometimes when it comes to marketing content. But we have a process here that I'm going to get into in a second. And the goal of this process is to use AI to use humans, yourself and take that, optimize that in a few steps and then publish that content. And so that's what we're going to hop into.
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So the first, there has to be somebody [00:10:00] in your marketing department that can do this. Here's a hint. Since tickets were what, $2,000 to come here plus air fare, plus hotel? It might be you. Can you imagine your boss? Yeah boss, we need somebody to do this. Where'd you learn this from? What did it cost to send you there? So whether it's you or it's somebody else, [00:10:30] devote one hour a week to what I'm going to lay out to you. And if you fast forward like two months, you're not going to believe the kind of content, the quality content and the amount of content, helpful content that you're going to churn out.
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So step one, yeah, it's probably you or maybe somebody, or you might be thinking somebody to delegate this to, that's okay too, but just give them an hour. All right. So it's all about the prompts. [00:11:00] It sounds like many of you are familiar with AI, everybody's experimented with it, but it's all about the prompts. If you give it a very simple prompt, let's just say ChatGPT, if you give it a simple prompt, you're going to get a simple response. If you get a very detailed prompt, you're going to get a very detailed response. So let's get a little more specific. Let's pretend that you were doing marketing for Navy Federal Credit Union. By the way, is Navy Federal here? [00:11:30] Good. All right, now we can get real. So all right.
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Okay, by the way, quick footnote, I hate it when speakers that are doing sessions like this literally read slides. If I'm you, I'm like, okay, I tell you what, sir, why don't you sit down so I could read [00:12:00] it myself. Okay, so that's not the goal is just sit here and read. But understand there are going to be things I do read because those are prompts and I'm trying to kind of show you differences between, so hang with me.
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So the first is just write about Navy Federal Credit Union's VA loans and how they're great for veterans. Okay, I'm going to get a pretty decent response from ChatGPT for that versus write a copy [00:12:30] using pastor framework to address pain points of veterans and a solution, identify qualifications, length of residency, tell an empowering story, include one testimonial. In other words, there's a lot more meat to that. All right. So the result is on the side here. I'm not sure if you've heard of the pastor framework before. Problem amplify story, testimonial offer response, but I'm just going to skim [00:13:00] this. But this is what ChatGPT created in a matter of 1.5 seconds, something that probably would've taken you an hour, me an hour. Guys, we've all been there. You're staring at a blank Google Doc at a blank Word Doc, and you got to come up with something.
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That's one of the hardest things about writing is where do you start? And man, that is what AI is so great for. So [00:13:30] anyway, problem. As a veteran, you faced many challenges and we understand that da da. Amplify. If these hurdles remain unsolved, it may prolong your journey to home ownership. Story. Let's take a look at Major Thomas, a retired army officer. Testimonial. Here's what he had to say, "When I approached Navy Federal, they walked me through the process, demystified the requirements." Offer. They talk about veterans. And then response. Basically, call us for a loan. But can you believe [00:14:00] that ChatGPT came up with that in a matter of one and a half seconds? Do you publish that? Of course you don't. But man, what a great start for writing sales copy.
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These right here are probably the most popular prompts that Nettra uses. I was talking to somebody earlier when she was saying she's getting targeted and retargeted about, oh, buy my prompts and these are the best prompts. Have you seen them? Like [00:14:30] a thousand prompts for $100 and all these things. These are the most effective prompts that we use and I'm giving them to you for free minus your admission, of course. Okay, so the first two, if you've never used AI in a marketing capacity or for your website, this is where you want to start. The first is auditing your website. And it's a great system. It's [00:15:00] a great prompt to put into ChatGPT to help you see what your site's doing right, what it's doing wrong. And the second is optimizing existing content. What content's out of date, what can be removed, what should be added to.
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So those two things are great places to start. But let's just pretend, "You know Dave, we've kind of optimized our site, technical SEO. We're good." What about writing content? So the last four really get into the process, and I'm [00:15:30] going to get a lot more specific to give you guys examples here. So the first is about developing blog themes, and then once you have a theme, hey, well let's go ahead and get some blog headlines for that. And then once you have a headline, well, can you help me with the outline? Have you guys ever written something and they say, Hey, write this, but you're given an outline to base it on. How helpful is that to already have an outline that you know wasn't somebody copied somebody else? [00:16:00] That's great. And then lastly, creating blog content off of that outline.
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So I like to use examples and I'm kind of glad I did screenshots of prompts with the internet issues right now, so this is good. This is me just knowing that there may have been internet issues. So again, I'm going to have to read this, but what are some compelling title suggestions for a blog post [00:16:30] on how credit unions are the best kind of business bank that target business owners? Okay, really quick question. Raise your hand if your credit union does business banking. Yeah, most of you. That's a big thing. I mean, in the last 10 years, probably half of you maybe couldn't have raised your hand. So that's a big thing credit unions are getting into.
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Okay, so I typed that prompt into ChatGPT, and here are some compelling themes. The one in blue is the one I liked, banking [00:17:00] secrets unveiled: why savvy business owners chose credit unions. So then I went back and developed three headlines for banking secrets. And the one I liked at the top is inside the vault: why top entrepreneurs are turning to credit unions.
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So you see how I started with one prompt? It's given me some answers and I'm taking their answers and I'm going down the line. I'm getting very, very specific. So now that I have [00:17:30] a headline that I like, time to focus on building an outline. And so you'll see that inside the vault at the top, and we're not going to read this whole thing. But intro: the banking dilemma for businesses. Credit union difference: a closer look. Real Stories. You always have to have testimonials. And then conclusion: making the switch from a bank to a credit union. This is an outline, guys. Imagine going from [00:18:00] a blank Word doc, a blank Google doc to having that. Where would you rather be if you're going to write something? And so this is when the human gets involved.
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So now, I mean, how easy is it? Hey, if I were to have you write three or four sentences on let's say the top intro, discuss the common challenges that businesses face with traditional banks, you could probably write that, three, four sentences. [00:18:30] And then just that same approach all the way down the line. And all of a sudden, guess what? You have AI helped, human written, high-quality content just like that. So now you're ready to publish, right? Okay, now you have that Google doc or you have that Word doc and you send it to whoever's going to publish on your website and say, all right, it's ready. Not quite, not quite. So this is part of the process here.
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[00:19:00] There's your Google, Word doc right there with your inside the vault content and stuff like that. Of course, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, they have their own version of Grammarly, if you will. Or maybe you may even have Grammarly as a Chrome extension, but we love using Grammarly on top of it. So just writing it out, don't rely on just tools within Google or Microsoft, using Grammarly. Okay, finally, [00:19:30] now it's ready to publish. Not quite. You're missing an important step. And that's the SEO value. This is fresh content with amazing keywords. This is going to enable your website to rank higher and higher. So we love a tool called Surfer SEO. Raise your hand if you've heard of Surfer SEO. Saw one right there. She had the no look. It was like, no, look, that's good. Surfer SEO. So one.
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What's [00:20:00] the value of Surfer SEO? Well, you see the same content, but then you see a rank. So see where it says 70, that's a score from 0 to 100 that this gives it. 100 is the best written content ever for SEO. So this is given it a 70, and then you'll see all those little words down there with a green, yellow, or red. That's identifying your top keywords you've put in and how well this article is covering those keywords. So it shows you keyword [00:20:30] densities, huge. Do not publish without using a tool like Surfer. There's other tools too, but we just like Surfer.
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Okay, finally, time to publish on your site. So this is actually how to develop an AI content workflow. So use ChatGPT or Jasper to develop an article theme, title and outline like we just looked at. Then you take that really robust outline and you [00:21:00] manually write each section out to your content. Then you take that content and you run it through Grammarly. Then finally, use an SEO software like Surfer SEO, then publish. That's it. That took us three years to figure out? Yeah.
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Oh, nothing like giving away your business model. Are there any agencies in the house? I know there's one back there. There you go, man. That's what we do. But seriously though, [00:21:30] I do want to say that this is something that your credit union can see amazing, dramatic results with, that it will look like you probably hired a content person. All right, so AI, we just covered content marketing, but there's a lot of other things that it can help you with. So creating a content calendar, raise your hand if you've created a content calendar before. Content calendar, yeah. Okay. In case haven't, this is a great [00:22:00] prompt that we've used, to give you some overviews on how to do that. So take a picture of that. Once you kind of understand what a content calendar is, this actually develops one out, as you could see what January 2024 personal finance resolutions, of course, because it's the new year.
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February, love your savings, of course, because of Valentine's Day. All the kind of cool things, like ChatGPT is amazing [00:22:30] at this stuff. It's amazing at this stuff. So definitely use it. Okay, let's hop into SEO. So there's three different facets of SEO that we're going to talk about and how AI can help you with each of them. The first is technical SEO. So that of course is your website itself, the code on your site, how fast does your site load? Things like that. Issues with your site. Technical SEO [00:23:00] is huge, and it's usually where we start when we help credit unions and other companies. We do a technical SEO audit, which we'll get into in a little bit. On-site SEO, so in other words, SEO tactics on your website, on-site, SEO, that's characterized with UX issues. How well can people go from different parts of your website?
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Google actually is really ranking UX issues very highly with their last two algorithm [00:23:30] updates. That's a big thing. The other side of on-site SEO, as you could imagine, is content, having fresh content on your site. Last is off-site SEO. Primarily off-site SEO is comprised of backlink acquisition. A backlink is one website linking to another and getting those from relevant publishers. We'll cover that too. So let's hop in.
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So with technical SEO, it's [00:24:00] really about making your website as search engine friendly as possible. So look at it like this. If you're Google, you want to show somebody searching for best auto loan by me, the best search results, because you fear if you're Google that, I don't want somebody using Yahoo, they're still in business, right? Yeah, yeah. Bing, right? [00:24:30] So of course Google is all about relevancy, okay? So you want to make sure that your website is relevant, but that it also works incredibly well and it loads fast. I mean, Google loves websites like that. They rank sites like that higher.
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So we look at things like site structure and website speed, optimizing your site for mobile because probably more than half of your members access your site on a mobile device. It's a big, [00:25:00] big deal. Duplicate content is another huge thing. Whenever we do audits of credit union websites, we find a ton of duplicate content. And what's the harm in that? Well, maybe there wasn't harm when your manager or your boss asks you to do it, or it's just been like that for five years. But in Google's eyes, you definitely do not want duplicate content. And then of course, assessing the quality of your backlinks.
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So how do you do this, Nettra? I mean, because I don't know how to [00:25:30] do it. Well, what we do is we'll use a couple tools. Screaming Frog is a huge one that agencies use, or just technical SEO mavens to assess all of these things. And it gives very in-depth Excel reports on here's what your site's doing well and not so well and the not so well reports. You could take them as a laundry list and start just going through all of them, and then start to see your website rankings [00:26:00] improve just based on that. Ahrefs, Semrush, those are two other awesome tools you can use.
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So once you have that audit in place, and here's what I'm going to do, make sure that you have some kind of benchmarking in place. Like, okay, these are my top 20 keywords that I want to rank for. And I'm not doing very well right now. Maybe with a couple I am, but for many I'm not. I know a lot of [00:26:30] credit unions with business banking are trying to break into ranking for that, very, very competitive ranking for business banking. Anyway, benchmark your rankings where you are before you implement the audit findings because of course, you want to justify your work and justify your time to yourself, but also to your manager.
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All right, so let's move on. So a huge thing that we find with, I'd [00:27:00] say, well, I don't think there's been a credit union site that we've audited that hasn't had this, so chances are yours has it too. All right, so a meta description. Well, what is that? Well, a meta description should be up to 105 characters, but it's basically describing a specific web page for Google as Google crawls millions and millions of websites. This is telling Google what this page [00:27:30] is about. What we often find is that credit unions will have duplicate content for meta descriptions. They'll have no meta descriptions. You know what? Google, I tell you what, you're so sophisticated. You figure it out, it doesn't work.
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Or they'll have some kind of gobbledygook language that whether Jack Henry or WordPress, wherever your site's hosted, [00:28:00] they could spit it out automatically. So here's a great example. You guys see this screenshot here? So this is a company called Vessi. They sell waterproof shoes, which actually sounds kind of cool. These are three different search results. The first, waterproof shoes. The second, 100% waterproof shoes for men and women. The third, Women's Weekend Asphalt Black, okay, those are three separate web pages, but do you see what's highlighted. That's the meta description [00:28:30] for each page. It's the same. That's not good. That is not good, especially if you want to get found by potential members, that is not a good thing. And so we see this quite a bit when we audit credit union websites. Okay, so let's move on. That was off-site SEO. There are three facets of SEO off-site.
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Now we're about to hop into on-site SEO. So the first is [00:29:00] UX issues with your site. So again, something ultra practical that actually is very interesting if you haven't used it before, is Hot Jar. Raise your hand if you're familiar or have used Hot Jar before. All right, less than 10%, okay? What Hot Jar is basically it's a pixel or a code that lives on your site, you embedded on your site, and it's just a gigantic heat map that goes over your website. So for instance, if you go to Google, Google Analytics [00:29:30] and say, how many people clicked on my Apply now for an auto loan button on my home page? Oh, you had 2,700 people click on it. Okay? But what Hotjar is going to show you is the actual clicks. People will click on an image thinking it's something, or they'll show the actual clicks and how they cluster together.
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And the more areas where they click, it gets hotter, which of course is a heat map, but it's very qualitative kind of data. But it's awesome. [00:30:00] And Hotjar is so inexpensive, it's definitely something worth looking into. Google Analytics offers something similar but not nearly as robust as Hotjar. Okay? So that's one part of on-site. SEO is UX, but the other side of course is keywords, content on your site. Google loves fresh keywords on your website, but the hard part is, like I said, you guys are wearing 10 hats.
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Actually, no, [00:30:30] that was two weeks ago. Now you're wearing 11 hats, right? That's your job. And how do you, on top of that, now I got to write a 1500 word blog post. How do I fit that in? So what you want to do is first figure out what keywords are the most important. And so keyword research, that's what on-site SEO is all about, understanding what are the keywords I want to rank for? Because there's [00:31:00] no way you're going to rank for every single thing. And so A-Refs, Semrush, Ahrefs, those are two tools that we use to assess how well your site's ranking for keywords and also what's keywords you should be ranking for.
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And so what's really cool is using ChatGPT for keyword research. Don't just rely on Google search Console, Google Analytics. Don't just rely on that. Don't just rely [00:31:30] on what Ahrefs or Semrush tells you. It's really interesting on using AI ChatGPT for instance, to figure out, okay, how do I dig deeper on content on keywords I should rank for? Okay, that's what this is up here. So again, we're going to keep that business banking theme as we've been kind of asking ChatGPT up to this point, business banking kind of prompts. Okay? You see the top one, it says, what are the 10 [00:32:00] most popular subtopics related to business banking at a credit union? Okay, well, it gave me 10, and spoiler alert, I chose merchant services.
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And then that's the next prompt. What are the 10 most popular subtopics related to merchant services? And now look, you see credit card debit processing with a little description, point of sale system and all the way down, you could base blog posts on each one of those, you can [00:32:30] multiple blog posts on each one of them. If you wanted to, you could take number five, high-risk merchant accounts and pop that into ChatGPT again, "Hey, give me five headlines for this." All of a sudden you've got five ideas for five new blog posts. You guys see, this is how to use ChatGPT to your advantage.
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Okay, so we've talked about technical SEO, we've talked about [00:33:00] on-site SEO. Now, lastly we're going to talk about off-site, those are the three facets of SEO. So really what off-site SEO focuses on is gaining quality backlinks from publishers, industry specific publishers. So a backlink is simply one website linking to your site. So for instance, an example of a great backlink would be the CUNA website that Google recognizes is a national website [00:33:30] linking to your specific credit union, that is a backlink. And Google sees that because the CUNA obviously is your industry. So that makes a ton of sense, and that's what backlinks are all about. There's over 200 ranking factors that Google looks at when considering how to rank a website or specific pages in a site.
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And backlinks are a huge factor. [00:34:00] Why? Because it's almost like one site, one website vouching for the other one. "Hey, look at me, I am CUNA. I'm this national organization, been around for years and years and I'm linking to this particular credit union." In Google's eyes they go, well, that must be a very legit credit union for this national organization to link to it. That's why backlinks are so, so important. And so, well, how can [00:34:30] you take AI to help you with this? And again, this is that, remember I said it starts with designating one person, which might be you or somebody you delegate to.
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Well, this takes that person reaching out to your local newspaper, which of course they have an online version of their paper. Or if there's a business journal or some kind of business magazine that's local to you using a current event, but then wrapping it around some kind of promotion you're about to run, or maybe [00:35:00] how you guys really affected a community, or you're about to open a new branch or something like that, you're trying to create some noteworthy story, you reach out to a journalist that writes for that particular publication and that'd be great if they just take it and run.
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They write something, they link back to your credit union, that's a great backlink. Or they might even say, "Well, can you do an op-ed piece where you can write it and we can publish you in our publication?" [00:35:30] Sure, I could do that. So that's when you go back to that content workflow I showed you on using ChatGPT to even help you write that. And the goal is to get that backlink. For credit unions though it's death by a thousand cuts. Most of you guys probably have 150,000 backlinks as it is, but the goal is to get relevant ones. You have just a ton of backlinks as it is. But if you're getting relevant backlinks, new [00:36:00] backlinks every single month, that does make a big difference.
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All right, so let's hop into the second section. And that is financial literacy. And like I said, the majority of websites, credit union websites that we see, it's kind of a laundry list of how you list your different loan products and things that you're doing and offering, but not a ton when it comes to financial literacy. And a lot of you use [00:36:30] services like Bonsai. And so this is a local credit union to us that we don't work with, Noble Credit Union, but they have Bonsai here and they have an article working with the mortgage lender. So what Bonsai does, as you probably know, is they'll kind of skin your site to make it kind look like you're still on your site. But actually no, you're on the Bonsai site.
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First of all, Bonsai is a great, great tool. There's a ton of great financial literacy like quizzes and things like that. [00:37:00] So I'm not discounting Bonsai at all. But when you see working with the mortgage lender, that kind of content is awesome financial literacy content, and yet you're sending the traffic that started on your website and you're pushing them off of your website to go to Bonsai to read about that. No, you want to keep them with your content. You want to develop out a kind of library. And so this is what I wanted to show you. This is a blog [00:37:30] post that one of our clients Valley Strong. And so you'll kind of get the idea.
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So you'll see these different kinds of blog posts that they have here. They kind of serve three masters, content marketing, SEO and financial literacy. And that's what's so great about it. But you guys have seen these kinds of articles. I'm sure maybe you guys are even doing these kinds of articles, but man, this is really the focus of [00:38:00] AI, of how you can leverage AI. So financial literacy is a little different though. So we have our classic sales funnel. All right, raise your hand if it's been a month since you've seen the classic sales funnel. A few of you.
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In other words, I'm preaching to the choir. You guys know what a sales funnel is? The thing is, most of your marketing [00:38:30] tactics, especially digital, they focus down there at the bottom of the sales funnel. Now you guys probably know there's acronyms, BoFu. You guys heard of BoFu? Bottom of the funnel, middle is MoFu, middle of the funnel. You guys like tofu. I don't like tofu. ToFu, yes, top of the funnel. Most of your digital [00:39:00] tactics, digital marketing tactics focus on the BoFu, on the bottom of the funnel. And rightly so, a Google search ad for an auto loan when somebody types best auto loan near me, your ad's right there. But as we know, Google Search Ads are some of the most expensive advertising tactics.
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But when it comes to financial literacy, I'm going to drop a new word that you've probably heard maybe, but financial literacy marketing. So pretend you have all of this ultra [00:39:30] helpful content. Think of the last time you made a big spending decision. Let's say buying a car. Did you just like, "Okay, I'm just going to buy the first car I see?" Probably not. Okay, let's pretend you didn't work for a credit union because of course you're going to use your own credit union to finance that car, right? But you're probably going to research rates. That's what financial literacy marketing is all about. It's acknowledging [00:40:00] the fact that people research their interest level is top of the funnel. They're not ready to buy it. They're not at the action or even desire, but you want to get your content in front of those people.
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And the total win when it comes to content marketing is when people are doing research on what's the best home mortgage to get or what should I consider before getting a mortgage, when people are doing that kind of research on your website [00:40:30] versus just some other random website because then you got them, you're the expert and it's easy to advertise your low rates because they're on your website. So this is what financial literacy marketing is all about.
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Now, you want to pay attention to this last bullet point. So financial literacy marketing, where can you actually do this? Well, there's a few that make a lot of sense, but there's a few that you [00:41:00] probably haven't thought of. The first is the homepage. If you guys have a current blog, but I have to click on three things, menu bar, click on resources, scroll down to blog, then I find the blog. And then there's no way to categorize blogs. I just got to scroll to find the... you're making it too hard on people. But if you were to have a really helpful financial literacy piece of content, you put it on the homepage, a section on your homepage, advertising [00:41:30] it, you're going to get a ton of people clicking on it.
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I mean, the average credit union website has like 70,000 people on it every single month. You're going to get a lot of people seeing that piece of content. So home page is a big one. Email marketing, everybody's struggling to come up with great email marketing topics. Well, this is awesome. If you already have a piece of content that you could promote. Social media posts, of course you could do a post, even a social media ad. Again, the ad isn't, [00:42:00] Hey, come to XYZ Credit Union, we have the lowest auto loan rates. No, it's, Hey, what are the three things you should consider before buying a car? They click on that ad and it goes to the financial literacy content piece. Again, these people are in the top of the funnel or the ToFu.
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And then lastly, how about connecting it to the real world, to the branches? What if you had three pieces of great content or [00:42:30] financial literacy and you had QR codes in the branch? So people that are in the branch, if they're maybe at the loan officer's desk or something, they scan it and now they're reading it. But it's a great way to connect the kinds of marketing. So you definitely want to make sure to pay attention to that last bullet, FYI.
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So crafting ad, social media copy, email copy. This is an exciting part of using AI and I'm sure that many of you have some experience [00:43:00] with this. So the research I found is that many marketers spend 15 hours or more on digital ad campaigns a week. That's a ton. It's in a sense kind of job security because of course you know what you're doing, but it's also a ton of time and this is where AI can significantly reduce that. So some of the things we'll cover is how do you generate new ad ideas or even creating new [00:43:30] display or social media ad variants. AI is great with that and I'll give you a live demo for that.
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And then creating content for social media, whether ads or posts. And then lastly, sequenced email outreach, not email marketing. Most credit unions need a lot of help when it comes to email marketing. And so I'm going to show you what usually helps a ton of credit unions. So the first is search [00:44:00] ads. Raise your hand if your credit union is doing Google Search Ads. Everybody pretty much. Okay, so Google Ads, Google Search Ads, as you know, uses something called dynamic insertion. So dynamic insertion can actually take a bit of somebody's search and insert it into your Google ad, right? That's AI. That's their AI, which is great. It makes your existing search ad that much more relevant [00:44:30] to the person searching. They'll also come up with some variants to that as well.
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But you don't just want to rely on Google to give you those ideas. That's where ChatGPT kills it. So for instance, I have a prompt here that says create two Google Search Ads for each of the 10 merchant service subtopics. So I just took that giant list of those merchant services and just popped it in. Again, we're kind of [00:45:00] going on the same prompt chain here. Make sure the Google Search Ads have three lines of text. And as you know, you can't have more than 30 characters on line one and up to 90 characters in line two and three. And then, so here we go. Now can you just cut and paste these and make them Google Ads? I mean, I guess technically you could, but the point of it is not just to cut and paste and throw it as a Google ad, it's to give you new ideas. And imagine it gives [00:45:30] you 10 and you just type into ChatGPT, give me 10 more, give me 10 more. It's awesome, awesome, awesome. So you definitely want to use this to bolster your search ad efforts.
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Okay, so let's move on to crafting ad copy. This is a huge one everybody. This probably where you cut your teeth. If you've used AI before, this is probably where you cut your teeth, where you started to say, okay, [00:46:00] let's see what ChatGPT can do to write like a social media post. So of course a prompt like act like an experienced social media manager, create a campaign to increase awareness of Navy Federal Credit Union's CD with a 4% return. Okay, that's pretty straightforward and I'm sure you guys have done that. Content calendars are another huge thing.
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When it comes to social media though, I'm sure many of you post [00:46:30] on social media. And so you know that captions are huge and hashtags, oh my gosh, it's all about the hashtags and ChatGPT kills it with this. Have you guys ever used ChatGPT for hashtags? If you haven't, you should. Also responding to comments. As a credit union, you get a fair amount of comments and reviews and responding to them. You'd be surprised at [00:47:00] how well ChatGPT can actually do that.
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Okay, the last bit of crafting ad and email is email sequences. So most credit union marketing campaigns, this is a big one too. There's no CUNA logo at the bottom here, but definitely take this and run with this, take this and run with this. Most credit union marketing email campaigns aren't that great. You send [00:47:30] one email to pretty much members past members. Some credit unions have taken the time to segment lists, and this is where we want to go, segmenting lists based on current auto loan people or members past auto loan and things like that. Because then when you send an email to somebody that used to have an auto loan, well, your content can be very specific. "Hi Mary, I know that you used to have your auto loan with us. By the way, we have some great rates. Are you thinking of buying something soon?" [00:48:00] That kind of thing.
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So that's one side of email marketing, but that's not quite email sequences. So an email sequence is a number of pre-written emails, email one, email two, email three where they've got rules in place where when you send email one, if the person doesn't open or doesn't respond, email two is scheduled to already go out to them, let's say five days later, something like that.
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[00:48:30] What we find is that credit unions that do this kind of sequenced email outreach see a huge spike in conversions and in return some by up to 40% versus typical email. So email marketing, we see huge results with sequences. So if you've never done one, it's definitely time to start looking at it. Chances are that email [00:49:00] software that you're using currently can do email sequences. So it's not something you have to run out and buy, test it, maybe a two email sequence. So what does that look like?
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Well, by the way, ChatGPT is great at writing email sequences. So this prompt, write an email sequence for Navy Federal Credit Union's new 4% CD. We'll target current members with CDs that will mature soon. Use an informal tone, but [00:49:30] don't be too informal. Make sure the emails have at least four sentences. And so you'll see, we won't read it all, but fresh off the press and the subject line, new 4% alert, first name. And that's one cool thing about sequenced email is you could have people's names and different customized fields to make that person that gets it feel like somebody sat down and wrote this to me. That's why they're so effective. Hope you're doing great, your CD is about [00:50:00] to wrap up and we thought it'd be a perfect time to introduce you to our latest offering.
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And then of course, email two, did you catch our latest? And then just floating by to remind you about this new 4% CD. You guys get it. You guys see these emails all the time, but have you used them for your credit union? Probably not. Huge, huge, huge return, especially since everybody's talking about CDs right now. Great way to create CDs. We've [00:50:30] had clients that have seen big time returns doing these things.
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All right, last but not least, market research and chat bots. Okay. Market research, obviously you may have some paid versions of market research already that you guys do, but let's first focus just on ChatGPT, like what can ChatGPT do? [00:51:00] You could give it open-ended data or unstructured data points to find relationships with those data points. Yes, there's more sophisticated AI software that you have to pay for that we'll get into. But start with ChatGPT. Why pay money if you don't have to? Let's see, what can ChatGPT do? And so what would that be like social media posts. If you take a ton of, let's say three months of social media posts and responses and [00:51:30] upload them to ChatGPT, say, what is the sentiment of these customers? What are the main things that you're seeing? And it just tells you in a second, how long would it take a human?
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However, the lowest person on your marketing team, Hey, here's a bunch of spreadsheets of comments we want you to go through and just tell us what they're saying. Oh my gosh, it's going to take them hours. So anyway, this is what's great about ChatGPT. [00:52:00] Just focused on ChatGPT, there's three main things that you could use it for. Data interpretation, like we talked about. Competitor analysis, you could take blog posts of competitors or offers that they have or sales copy to get some insights and you'd be amazed at what ChatGPT can come up with. And then last is content testing. Let's say you use ChatGPT, the workflow to create amazing sales copy. You could put it back into [00:52:30] ChatGPT and ask ChatGPT, who is this targeting to see if it's aligning to your demographic, to your audience avatar and making sure that it does. But it's a great way to use ChatGPT, but it's also kind of pushing ChatGPT about as far as it goes when it comes to market research.
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Past this is some paid options. I'll just give you two. Poll the people. Raise your hand if you've used this before. [00:53:00] We've got one. Poll the people is awesome. So imagine 200,000, 300,000 people that you could ask a question to. So it's almost like if it was all your members asking them questions, but instead it's a little bit more randomized, go to poll the people. You can create poll questions and have people answer them. So it's immediate feedback like I want to do a CD, we're [00:53:30] promoting our CD. Should I talk about it like this or should I talk about it that? That kind of insight is invaluable. And poll the people is very inexpensive, definitely something to look at.
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Something a little more robust is Canvs AI. This is where when I was saying you're uploading data and you're trying to get unstructured data, things like that, you're trying to get valuable data points, this is going to give you something much more robust than ChatGPT will. So I would definitely recommend these guys. [00:54:00] And Awario, same thing.
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Okay, chat bots. So why am I even talking about chat bots, right? Because you guys are marketing, you guys might be thinking, well chat bots, that's a little bit more focused on the loans department and customer service. Well, yes, but one big thing that chat bots can do is promote products. Of course, customer service, operational efficiency, you [00:54:30] guys could read the whole thing, but product promotion's a big part of it. This dives in a little bit more, I'm a little short on time here. Of course there's a couple out-of-the-box solutions for chat bots.
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Really quick, raise your hand if you're using the chat bot. Your website uses a bot as it is. About 50%. Okay, so we have a couple options for you. The first CUNA councils awarded this chat [00:55:00] bot Best in Show. What do you think about that, Catherine? It's pretty hot. So interface.ai is pretty sweet. It does everything that I mentioned. Another just to be like not promoting one is Abe AI. That is a big one as well. So the summary, and we'll get to Q&A here in a sec. The first, and this is a big one, as I said when I started, is that AI content workflow. If there's one thing you get out of this guys, [00:55:30] I guess I'm in the business of giving away business models because this is what we do. This is what people pay us to do.
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Actually, I have two clients in the room right now. They're like, "Oh, that's what you do. All right, we'll see you." But no, what I'm trying to do is tell you exactly how we do it. There's processes in place, but I want you guys to run with this when you get back because now you've got the tools to do it. Number two, AI can drastically improve SEO [00:56:00] and going through off-site, on-site technical SEO. And then of course number three is the financial literacy marketing approach. That tofu, the BoFu really targeting top of funnel, people researching. It's an awesome way to market to get your brand and your content in front of people researching. Number four, of course you can use AI to create digital ads, get ideas [00:56:30] for digital ads, definitely use it for that and email sequences. And then the last is the market research and the chat bot. So that's pretty much my summary. I think I'll stop it right there. Is there any questions?
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When it comes to using AI, all AI is doing is grabbing prior data or prior [00:57:00] written word by humans. So if I look at an article from somebody else and say, let's post that on my website, that's not authentic to you, that's authentic to the person that wrote it and that's your point. But what's great about AI is the line's blur when it comes to what's authentic and not. If you were to simply go to AI and copy and paste, that's not authentic to you. But like we went through, you're going to get [00:57:30] outlines that AI gives you, but then you write it and you make it specific, especially to your brand voice. Most of you have established brand voice, you make it authentic to that. It's still humans writing the content. AI just helped you to get there. AI helped you with the outline, but it's the humans writing the content.
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In the future, where is it going to be? Well, most credit unions don't have a ton of great content on their site because it's hard to scale that. But with credit unions [00:58:00] using a workflow like this, fast forward three, four or five years, we are going to see a lot more content on credit union sites, but it's still going to be authentic to that credit union because it was written still by humans, the human control the whole thing. AI is just a tool and it's what I try to show you with this session is how to use that tool to just amplify your brand voice.
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So the A/B test itself would happen on the ad platform. Let's say it's Google Search Ads and you're coming [00:58:30] up with variants for that, but I would look at ChatGPT, it's where you create the assets for those variants and then you collect them all, but then you input them into Google Ads as you're controlling the ad variants and you're seeing the data coming from those ad variants and then going back to ChatGPT for more ideas and it gives you that you put into Google Ads. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 2 (00:58:52):
That makes sense.
Dave (00:58:54):
Yes. Screaming Frog will show that to you. Semrush [00:59:00] will show that to you and Ahrefs will show that to you. And there's Moz is another one. There's probably 20 that I haven't even mentioned. But yes.
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I feel because it's kind of for marketers, I feel the content can be more robust, especially if that's an end that you're kind of focused on or from a marketing perspective. It's not 100%, we use Jasper, [00:59:30] but we've been using it for three years. That's why I say we've been using these for three years because ChatGPT's only been out for a year. We use ChatGPT as well, but we find, yeah, we get really high quality stuff from Jasper. The last time I looked at pricing, I think it's like $100 a month. So that's why I've primarily focused this session on ChatGPT because it's free. Or if you have ChatGPT 4, [01:00:00] it's like 10 bucks a month.
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By the way, Google Bard, man, talk about dropping the ball. You guys see how when they were about to launch and they showed a little screenshot of Google Bard and it was talking about some data point about the solar system and it was wrong, and Google literally lost over billions of dollars in stock valuation [01:00:30] in that first couple days. Of course they got it back. Don't worry about Google. But we continually put Bard up against ChatGPT, and it is like the iPhone 1 versus the iPhone 15. It's crazy. Google's had a five or seven year lead in AI and for the startup OpenAI with ChatGPT to just run [01:01:00] circles around them, it's really remarkable.
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The king right now is probably Midjourney in creating. So I have a client that, on her email signature is this real AI generated picture of a Pomeranian dog with fall leaves, and it's just like, I don't know. So Midjourney, it's [01:01:30] funny, it seems like you could spot an AI generated image from a mile away, and that's more of the drawing kind of stuff. AI sometimes struggles with humans, as you've probably... have You guys seen AI image fails where somebody's got three hands or their arm just disappears. Okay, what's that? But I would say right now, Midjourney is probably the best at AI generated images.
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So [01:02:00] really quick, pull out those phones one more time please. So Nettra has started a credit union monthly newsletter where we give you marketing tactics and tips. It's a short e-blast that we send out once a month. And by entering Spark growth, you're automatically entered to win an iPad and we will notify the winner on Friday. It's going to be [01:02:30] pretty much instant gratification with an iPad.
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So what will AI be in the future? A lot of times this is a conversation that this goes into, where are we going to be? And I put like two years because who could go past two years when it comes to AI? Where are we going to be? How's it going to look? AI will not replace your jobs. I repeat, AI will not replace your jobs. But if we could somehow go back to 1998, it [01:03:00] was a similar discussion about, I don't know about the internet. I mean, it's whatever. I kind of have my own workflow. I don't really need the internet.
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Well, you might have a hard time finding employment 5, 6, 7 years in the future if you refuse to use the internet, right? So it's similar to AI, all AI, it's a tool. And I know there's some nefarious uses and there's things that kind of have people concerned here and there. But [01:03:30] really for all purposes, it's a tool that you can use to do your job better and more efficiently.
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Guys, I hope I gave you a bit of a, I don't know, meat sandwich of how you could use AI in marketing and see some big results. So thank you for giving me your attention.
