We recently had the opportunity to talk with Tiffany Hughes from Meyco Products about the endless possibilities of AI content generation and how it can elevate marketing strategies and product development. And let us just say, if you want to be inspired about the future of content development and customer experience, Tiffany’s insights and ideas are a great place to start.
We’re so happy to have this time to talk with you - could you start off by telling us how you got into marketing, and in particular, within the manufacturing industry?
Let's just say "seasoned" is the right word to describe my experience - I have been doing some sort of marketing for more than 20 years!
Starting out in radio, I fell in love with the thought of being able to share products and services effectively with the people who need them. Radio was my springboard into the marketing world - I worked for a number of years in television doing promotions, graduated into selling and eventually moved over to the ad agency world working with key accounts and media buyers.
As that progressed, I decided that I was looking for a different kind of challenge and moved into the field of higher education doing marketing and public relations there. I realized how very valuable education is, especially in this field. After a number of years, I found an opportunity to go into B2C marketing for a private health and wellness company and loved every moment of that. On top of gaining more marketing experiences, I was exposed to great resources that help guide people in healthy living, which was an added bonus!
My current role was a new opportunity in an area I had not previously worked in, which was B2B sales and marketing in a manufacturing environment. I've been with my current company for more than ten years. We are in a very niche market, so we have very specific trade associations and industry outreaches that we do. But obviously we want to get our name and our branding out there to potential end users because we want them to ask for our product.
As you know well, the primary goal of marketing is influencing people to take action. When you're building content for your customers, how do you think about your go to market strategy and meeting your customers where they are?
It's an ever-changing environment, especially within our industry. We are experiencing a shift where the people who started the businesses are retiring out, and those are the people who our company relationships were built on. As they're retiring and transitioning their businesses to the next generation, we're seeing a changing landscape. We are going from a group who wanted to look at printed product catalogs and price books and who responded to direct mail, to a new generation who has a completely different outlook on how they want to receive information about your company, and how they want to interact with you.
We're now in a world relying on digital communications - texting, web chats, and FaceTime meetings in the field. They don't want the big printed book because they want to know what's happening right now.
We are shifting more and more into that digital approach. And again because we're very niche, we're targeting trade shows, trade associations and online forums. We're trying to meet our customers and potential customers where they are.
And technology is of course changing constantly. Customers are expecting things that in the past weren't even possible. And not just with marketing but also with faster shipping, order turnaround times, on demand instructional videos to assemble products, training videos on specific features and as I mentioned, chat opportunities.
We're embracing more and more of these tools with our customers. Our go-to-market product launches are now first and foremost announced through social media. Then it’s announced through our sales reps by texting images to some of our top customers and engaging with them. There’s a new “I need it right now, let me see it right now” kind of mindset.
An ongoing change in B2B marketing is that shoppers want to be anonymous for a while, and then when they're ready to buy, then they're more willing to share their contact information. Are you seeing that trend?
Yes, we definitely are. That's one of the things we've noticed in our chat features - we'll have people come into our sites and show interest in a product. We'll have a whole chat and they've given us no information. We're very cognizant of that and we'll give them as much information as we can, but we normally wrap up our offer with a request to send them something official.
We’ll request their email address, but often they don't want to get added to “another marketing list”. We’re very sensitive to that and try to only send content that we think would be of interest to them and their needs.
Is your online chat AI driven or do you use live agent chat?
Right now our chat is about 95% live agent, and we’re exploring opportunities to add more AI features into our chat, especially for simple, broad questions that can be answered more easily. Because we make a specialty product with many variations, it's not so easy to just plug in an AI and it suddenly starts answering all of your questions.
You have to teach AI what it needs to know. I took a great online class about AI and how it can be used - one of the clearest ways it explained it to me is to think of AI as a new college graduate that you just hired at your company. It's going to be a person who is able to talk and answer phones and be responsive, but they're not going to know that much about your product until you teach it to them. In just the same way, you have to teach AI about your product. And it's not a simple, fast process, just like training a new employee isn't a fast process.
We want our AI chat to be able to interface with our website visitors, but then also be able to understand when a conversation is getting more specialized and a live agent is needed.
Are you using AI to generate any of your other content? Not just chat, but also content like social media posts?
Actually we are - I feel like I have an intern at my beck and call. We even launched a new product last year and I needed a name for it that was catchy and impactful; something that would capture the goal of the project. I started with an open source AI, and kept going through iterations of it until all of a sudden, it spit out this list of some really cool names.
I use it for writing scripts and ad copy. I'll write a draft with the key pertinent, technical points and use an AI tool to create a persuasive email for this. I will then tweak and edit the copy, but it's so nice to have that type of fast turnaround time. It could be content that would have taken me half an hour to write, then suddenly I've got a fairly well written email in less than five minutes.
We have a wonderful graphic artist who works with us, and we get product photos from our customers all the time. Sometimes there's debris in the picture or someone standing in the way of a key point or just an ugly tree. Our designer has taken those pictures and ran them through generative AI. It's taken that ugly tree and created a beautiful green bush in its place. The debris is gone, or the piece of discolored siding on the back of the house is gone.
We can use these tools to maintain our focus on the product, but change and improve the background. We try to be very cognizant that we are using AI to enhance the photo, but not create an unrealistic product.
And it’s not just for photos - we’ve used AI for voice overs for some of our videos, graphics for our social media posts, meeting notes, and to optimize our ad spend. I've used AI recently to help write job descriptions - I'll write down the key duties that this person needs to perform, and AI creates a very accurate job description, saving me time.
Most practitioners today believe that AI still needs hand holding - humans will be empowered by AI but humans will still be needed to maximize the potential.
In all of your experiences, have you run into any limitations or areas where you thought, this isn't exactly what I was hoping for?
AI is definitely still evolving. It's still growing and learning and it can only create based on the information that it has. So when we were trying, for example, to launch the new product, I tried to generate a picture of the product in a specific environment. It couldn't really do a good job because it didn't have anything to build off of. It had two static pictures, but it just was flat, it wasn't realistic at all.
We're working to create a knowledge base for our customer solutions team so they can very quickly help a customer out if they call with a technical question that they may not know exactly how to answer. Though we upload technical specs and product information, we realize it might pull out correlations that we didn't intend for it to do. In some instances, I see how the AI could come to that conclusion, but in reality, those pieces of data are separate and shouldn't be connected.
You're expecting the tool to absorb and comprehend, possibly hundreds of pages of data and then spit it back out. That's a lot of work someone's going to have to do to train it on how to interpret that data accurately and put the information together in the right order.
What will happen with AI is just like when camera film went away - new jobs were created within that industry. They might not have folks that process your film anymore. The world has evolved beyond that, but there are new jobs now. There are new careers now. It's incredibly fascinating to me to see how it's growing and progressing. My job has gotten more exciting.
Are you using AI as part of your either data collection or data analysis? When you're looking at web property performance or campaign performance, or customer data, are you using AI to help collect or even analyze that data?
That is my next step. I’m learning best practices for lead scoring for prospects, customer retention and analysis of voice-of-the-customer feedback. That's where we're going next - instead of slogging through spreadsheets and data, we can be so much more effective and fast.
It sounds like your dealer channel and sales team are starting to embrace AI from a content generation standpoint. Do you think they will feel the same way about using it for data insights and analysis?
Transparency is key. For example, some of the AI voices are really, really good. And if you're not careful, you could have people think they're talking to a real person. I really appreciate the companies that are clear that they’re using AI. I think the more transparent we are as a company, the more confident people can be.
We all know that our personal and private information is out there in the world, but I think the key will be for those of us in marketing to be transparent and open with how we're using it so that they can feel we're authentic and that we’ll act carefully with their information. I think most people will be respectful and responsive to that as long as we're open and honest with them. We want to be a solutions provider to our customers - the more we help our customers, the more we're going to grow as well.
It’s the idea of a value exchange - if you share data with me, I will give you something of value in exchange. This creates a balanced, reciprocal relationship.
Where are you excited to take AI into the future? Maybe some business problem that you have now or that you think could be solved with AI in the near future?
I am excited about so many things in AI. For example, we’ve used an excellent artist to illustrate some of our drawings for our installation manuals. He retired recently and we are looking at using AI to help us create some of those graphic illustrations of our products. That's going to allow us to do them faster and get them in the hands of our customers.
I see us leveraging AI to present our customers with product specs and resources that we could not do before. I even see capabilities of incorporating features into our website that will let our customers create their own customized product. If the system is set-up properly, then a customer could envision a product that we know we can create.
AI is going to give people a creative outlet to explore a custom configuration, as long as we train it well enough to stay within realistic expectations. I think it's going to give our customers resources they've never had before in the online world, and in resources they never had before from product support.
This is a world where we can speed up product iterations and product development on our end. We have people who are getting really creative in our product design and having this ability to play around with creative ideas and see what works and what doesn't is going to springboard them forward so much faster.
From the marketing standpoint, I see being able to really target and respond faster to customers online. That could include understanding sentiment from our customers faster. We’ll be able to track web traffic, Facebook traffic, industry forum searches, and by listening and finding patterns, we can hopefully capture new insights and bring them to market.
We have to be good stewards of these tools, but there's so much opportunity. There are ideas that I see in my mind that I can now begin to develop into drawings, images and more that would have involved several other people’s skill sets in the past. It’s cool for me to have that creative expression as someone who's not artistically inclined.
AI has the ability to change the creative and informational landscapes, to do research faster, and come to conclusions faster. It’s an exciting time to be in marketing, in my opinion.
I feel so inspired by your enthusiasm. If AI had a spokesperson, it should be you! What would you suggest to marketers who are just getting started with AI?
I'm taking online classes and there are so many classes that are free to take. There are a lot of resources out there for someone who's growing and learning like I am. People don't have to invest a lot of money, but they do have to invest the time to learn more about it. Don’t be nervous to take the first step.
Thank you so much for taking time today to talk with us about this. This has been really inspiring to think about the endless possibilities that are available to us through new AI tools!