From Hype to Trust-Marketing AI with Michele Nieberding

Overview:

In this episode, Michele Nieberding joins Kerry Guard to break down the growing trust gap in AI marketing. They discuss how marketers can move beyond surface-level messaging and hype to create clarity for skeptical buyers. Michele explains how she evaluates AI claims herself, why trust and transparency must be built from the product up, and the responsibility product marketers have to educate the market without overselling. If you're navigating GTM in the AI space—or trying to build messaging that actually resonates—this conversation is a must-listen.

Transcript:

Michele Nieberding 0:00

Yes, oh yeah, no, I think things like market research and competitive intelligence. So in a world where companies are pivoting really hard, or new companies are popping up every single day, and there's like noise from a market perspective, if you can automate the pulling of competitive intelligence or market research. So, for me specifically, I have automated agents that go out, collect information, and basically post it to Slack every week. So here's what happened. Here's why it matters for treasure data.

Kerry Guard 0:40

Welcome back to Back on Track. I'm Kerry Guard. We are here to stop the random acts of marketing and help founders and lean teams climb out of the growth Valley. Today, we are talking about the elephant in the room, AI, but we're not talking about the shiny silver bullet version. We're talking about how to actually use it to drive positioning and, more importantly, how to measure if your messaging is actually working. Joining me is Michele Nieberding, a Product Marketing Pro who isn't afraid to tell a founder the truth, even when it hurts. Michele, welcome to the show.

Michele Nieberding 1:15

Lovely intro. Yeah, I know it's taken a while for me to get there, but here we are. So thank you so much for having me.

Kerry Guard 1:22

So excited to have you before we dive in. I did promise. I did promise our audience that we're going to play a little game. Thanks to your inspiration. Michele has a love for cakes, and one of her favorite shows, and one of my favorite shows, is Is It Cake? I hope you all have seen it. It's wonderful. I me my son watch it, and we love guessing. You gotta guess whether it's cake or not, which one is the cake. And so actually, we're gonna play our own version, called is it AI? And we want you all to play along. I'm talking a lot and buying myself time, because I want to make sure there are people with us today. If you are here with us, comment, say hello, let us know we're here. I can't wait for you to play this little game with us. Is it AI? If you are not catching the show live, that is a Okay, join us asynchronously and still guess along. And we will comment and follow up with you, because we want to know what you thought. I actually had help with this. My little 10-year-old joined on in to help me find the right pictures. She was very clear on what was going to work and not work, and a little upset that I didn't ask her to do it for me earlier. She's like, Mom, if I had just Canva, I would have knocked this out for you. It's like, you know, you totally would have had it, and I should have joined. I know, I know. So it's not as fancy as what my daughter would have put together, but it is going to be fun. Alright, let me. I love it.

Michele Nieberding 2:53

10-year-olds are just like, yeah, just give me Canva. Or I know they probably play the skin better than I can. Like, it's amazing.

Kerry Guard 3:00

Yeah, she's a little Canva whiz, little creator over there, and my son, like loves watching. Is a cake with me. So this is great. I got to bond with both of my children over this. So thank you. Alright, I'm just being my own producer over here. I lost my producer. He went back to school. Oh, we got Hannah Pickering. All right. Hannah, are you ready? Is it AI? All right, first one you're gonna do, A or B, so A is on the left and B is on the right. I didn't label them. And then I'm gonna try and remember which ones you said. It's gonna be great. Okay, I know which ones are AI. All right, ready? Oh, my God,

Michele Nieberding 3:44

The pressure's on. Okay.

Kerry Guard 3:48

All right, A or B, which one's AI

Michele Nieberding 3:52

Gonna go with? A, okay, oh no, because it's cake. Oh no, um, let's do B.

Michele Nieberding 4:09

Oh, gosh. B, they've gotten better. Oh, wait, wait, wait, oh, no, I'm counting the fingers B.

Kerry Guard 4:25

Oh, all right, that is the end of the slideshow. All right, folks, happy, hot. It actually beginning. Oh, Kathy, I see you. All right. You guessed, you guessed a, and it is a, Yes, you guessed B, uh huh, it's a, oh no. They got to celebrate down. Oh yeah, different AIS, yeah, and it's not smudged or anything like that. Looks like a word that was actually ice, like you, Nana, banana. You were correct that the that this one's AI, which I'm surprised about, because they really nailed the dolls on that one, like they're Barbie dolls.

Michele Nieberding 5:17

There's something about I don't know, like the scanners, I don't know, something, something else got me on that one. I was like, I feel like a here is like, you can see, like, it's a picture my mom would have. I feel, I don't know, true.

Kerry Guard 5:31

We were thinking her face was a little bit, felt a bit doll-like. So we were hoping that would fade full people, but it did not. And this one, you're correct. Yeah, this one is, this one is AI, the one on the on the right with the correct one, on B Cathy had that one too. She did like she did. I'm Yeah, I think it's because they're too smooth where you can actually see texture and veins. But hey, AI has definitely come a long way, because they have all the fingers there and they're not intertwined in a weird way.

Michele Nieberding 6:07

Yeah, it's got me. I'm like, although the one, what does it look like? The index finger on B looks like an extra law. I don't know. Something got me on the one little maybe. No.

Kerry Guard 6:18

Suspect. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, that was super fun.

Michele Nieberding 6:23

I'm like, so I'm like, wow.

Kerry Guard 6:26

I knew the Celebrate was gonna throw people off. So got me all the other ones. Yeah. I'm like, not mad about that. Yeah, amazing. All right, folks, we're going to dive on in here. Michele, you've worked with founders who wanted marketing to test messaging, and test messaging to find out what kind of company they should be in your strategy spreadsheet. What are the three non-negotiable data points you need from the founders before a single test is run?

Michele Nieberding 7:00

Oh, my God. I mean, there are so many, when we're talking founders, kind of like you said, there are so many thoughts that go through their heads, and my head, right, my head. Now I'm an AI, but it's hard to have a conversation. I've never I've it's, it was very surprising. It was my first startup. I'll start with that, um, and I never been in a position where it was like, marketing needs to test kind of different avenues or identities as a company to then inform, like, the full product roadmap and like, where we double down in it's not a bad idea. And honestly, looking back, I'm like, it's such a compliment that they would trust product marketing to have that conversation, right? But when we're talking Okay, data points for them. What I wish I had done, looking back, I think two things. One, what? What does success look like to them? So if I'm there's a million ways to like test this, right? If you say, you know, you do an AB test on an email, or you have webinar topics, and some people come to one versus like, there are some ways to test this, but what does that look like? Success look like to the founder? Is it opportunities created? Is it like pipeline-generated? Specifically? Is it certain brands that we're trying to target? Like redefining what success looks like for them, and being really, really clear is so helpful for everything else you're doing. So let's talk about like, the world of AI right now, like every company is AI or they're rebranding as AI, there was this crazy statistic, and I'm trying to remember exactly what it was of companies that have just changed their domain name to whatever.ai from, you know, insert company name.com and the traffic exploded just by putting.ai now, those domains are expensive as they should be. So random pro tip, if you want to go buy some company.ai domains, you can make a lot of money. I shouldn't say that. But anyway, random fact, but just that alone. And then how do you, especially with all of these AI companies are, you know, founder-led, like, how do you make sure that you have the right, like you said, data points are things to consider as you're positioning in the sea of AI tools. I mean, I can make an AI tool now, right? Like, it's just, it's so wild, exploding. So again, like, back to, like, the core product marketing. This is why we're still necessary in the world of AI. Is who, who are you really targeting? What pain points are you truly solving with this tool? And what does success look like? Is it, you know, people signing up to try the tool? Is it people moving through the funnel? Is it the actual product adoption? I think something that we don't look at enough is the actual usage of a product, or is there somewhere getting that people are getting stuck? Or is there, you know, a barrier to entry where something's too complicated or too confusing to get people to the next step of using the tool? There are all these things to consider. But if we go back to that first startup company, I did develop a plan for like, here's three routes and three things to try and tactics underneath that, and reviewed that with the founders before I did anything else, because there were very, very different routes to take. And so you look at the competitive environment. In, like, niche areas of opportunity, like a lot that we can look at. Now, this was interesting because this I was doing this kind of as ChatGPT just started coming up. So it was, like, very manual to do some of this research. And now it's like, you know, you throw it into the plot or whatever. It's crazy, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm curious, like, if, like, one, what, what tool is your favorite? And two, like, have you come across founders that? Like, I mean, you've, we've mentioned this, right? You've had to push back, too.

Kerry Guard 10:27

Like, how do we do that? Yeah, yeah, not easily. I mean, so I, I've completely switched out of ChatGPT and into Gemini. So I'm completely that way, I think Gemini output is just significantly better. I think its ability to research is by far better, obviously, because it's sitting on top of Google's algorithms. I can't compare it to Claude because I haven't used Claude enough. In some cases. I was actually arguing with Gemini earlier today, because I don't think it codes as well as Claude. So I use a cursor for all of my coding, and I ran out of credits, and I was like, Oh, I don't want to pay for another thing. And so I was using Gemini, and I was like, oh, gosh, maybe I need to pay for another thing, because this is so painful. So I think each one sort of has its own thing that it's good at. Yeah? Like, yeah. I mean, I feel like you can know which one, like you can sort of tell which one produced the thing, if you're not really doing your due diligence of making sure that it has your own content behind it. And I think positioning and messaging is the is great to do an AI, because then it feeds everything else. Yeah. So yeah. And in terms of pushing back on founders, of being really, you know, they hire you to tell them the thing, right? So if you can align to their priorities, I love that. I love what you said. It's so true. If you can align to their priorities. Then, when you have to say the hard thing, as long as you say the hard thing aligned to their priorities, they can't argue. So, like, I just had a client who was like, I just want to boost all my LinkedIn content. And I was like, but your LinkedIn is your LinkedIn content, getting you the leads at, you know, from an organic standpoint, and the engagement you're looking for today, like it's good to boost, but you need to know like that. You need those leading indicators that you're on the right track. And he's like, well-known. I was like, so doing the positioning and messaging first to ensure that all your content is coming back to the thing that you do better than anybody else is probably the great first step to make sure that when you boost the content, it's gonna land. And he was like, yeah, probably they just want the clicks.

Michele Nieberding 12:44

They want the analytics. You know, it's like they do.

Kerry Guard 12:48

They just want to throw money at the problem. And it's like, Wait a second. Hold up, sorry, let's not burn your runway.

Michele Nieberding 12:57

Yeah, right, it's so I think maybe two things to go off of that. One is like, I mean, you talked about this before, but customer-like conversations and using the words that customers are using to go back to the founder and say, Okay, you here's a hypothesis. You think we need to be known as this type of company, whatever. But here's how customers are describing our tool, or what they like about it versus other tools, like you said, you know, chat, GPT versus Gemini. Like, there are very distinct use cases or things that they will say that you can come back with. And, you know, AI obviously is very good with synthesis. And like, taking all these calls and conversations and saying, Here's, you know, the key points that all of your customers are saying that, like, if you, if you disagree with me, go talk to them, right? I mean, like, I'm it's not my words. And what I think is interesting, where we're getting to after this is, is that's becoming even more important. So you see any website with products, right? I don't know, I was just on Nordstrom doing shopping that I shouldn't be doing, but you look at the product descriptions, I know, don't tell my husband, but you look at, like, the descriptions of the products. And, you know, I mean, this could be anything, and what LLMs are ranking now is if that product description is using words that customers use in, like, their reviews, for example. So Target's a really good example, a lot of really good customer reviews. If you can take those words and integrate that into your product descriptions, the LLMs are going to rank those pages or those products better than others, because you're using the actual voice. So I'm kind of like, this is a cool aha moment in AI, because, like, AI sees the importance of this. Founders should, too, right? It's an interesting movement in that way.

Kerry Guard 14:28

So yeah, and they with the shiny object they want to show up in llms. So I got to tell a really great I got tell a client fun story, because he I love working with this client, because he is all about, like, he gets it right. He gets the brand-building side of it. He gets the importance of the full channel optimization. I know, oh, the dream. And so I was really skeptical. I was actually really skeptical. He's like, we need to do social media, and I need to do videos, and I'm gonna hire this company, and they're gonna do all these videos. Of me and won't get them up on social. And I was like, okay, like, we'll try it, see how it goes. I don't know if that's you know really what your audience needs, but let's we don't know until we try, yeah, because he goes after an older generation. And so what I found I was like, Oh, I'm gonna eat my words here. What I found was that from a SEM, sem rush, was telling me, from an AI visibility standpoint, that what people were searching for was their name plus reviews. Oh, yeah, like, yeah, I would say those videos are working because people are know who you are, and they're asking for reviews about the company. Look, that's usually, yeah, I know. I was like, I'm this is amazing, right? And the engagement is really low, and he was really frustrated by that. And, like, it doesn't matter. I don't care. As if people are watching the videos and the right people are watching the videos to then go search about your brand, we're doing something, right? Huge, huge.

Michele Nieberding 15:55

Yeah. Like, so cool. This is where experimentation, I do think, pays off. I think video, obviously content, is becoming really important to have that data point specifically to know that something is working and you're not just like, sending stuff out straight into the void; it's huge. And like, I think people, I don't know the world of TikTok, right? Like people, the buying experience has changed. Where you want those little, like nuggets of information? If I see a beauty influencer on TikTok. I've gotten really into, like, Korean skincare. I'll go to that, and I'll go look at their Instagram, and I'll go look at YouTube, like, you have all these other, you know, touch points, but be able to tie that together, like, where are people going to next? And, like, that funnel situation is sometimes really hard to track to know that next step is reviews. I mean, that's, that's huge.

Kerry Guard 16:41

So cool, yeah. What a fun like ranking in terms of Yeah, it's yeah, it's pretty cool to see that that come come through. Let's talk about AI readiness. You talk about getting teams AI-ready? What is the first internal process a lean marketing team should automate with AI to actually save time rather than just adding more noise to their plates?

Michele Nieberding 17:01

Yeah, I'd be curious to see in the comments for anyone that's live like, what you think this maybe use case would be, the cop out, right? Is it depends, like, every organization is different in like, their needs and what they're doing. Like, of course, but in your experience, yes, oh yeah, no, I think things like market research and competitive intelligence. So in a world where companies are pivoting really hard, or new companies are popping up every single day, and there's like noise from a market perspective, if you can automate the pulling of competitive intelligence or market research. So for me specifically, I have automated agents that will go out, collect information, basically put it into Slack every week. So here's what happened. Here's why it matters for Treasury data. It's really, I mean, we as if people are asking where to build agents, if it integrates with Slack, to me, that's like, such a winner. I mean, APIs are getting much easier, thank God. But that's like, my my holy grail. But back to like things to automate. I mean, I used to use, like, with Google Alerts, like things that just, you know, or email updates that no, like, I want executives to see this. I want salespeople to see this without me having to bring it to the table. Because it used to be such a manual process to find this to, you know, put it in a doc, and then keep it up to date. I mean, competitive stuff happens every single day. And there are tools, obviously, you know, clue, cran whatever, that can do these things, but you can just automate that workflow with an agent to consistently have updates to tell sales like, you don't know where every sales rep is in a deal cycle, or what competitors are up against in real time, or what, you know, nuggets of information can help close that deal. So with these automated Slack messages. I've had salespeople reach out. Be like, Oh my gosh. You know, we were in the final two with this person. This nugget of information really helped, you know, continue the process, things like that has been really, really good. So my general advice is, like, find a very specific use case that, like, what takes up most of your time, or what do you really hate to do? Like, I am not a competitive intelligence person by nature. I mean, I can do it, but I don't love it personally. So finding ways to then automate that process again with those two things in mind really helps mine.

Kerry Guard 19:14

Yeah, I think for me, I do the positioning and messaging stuff using AI, because I like to build gems and make that my backbone. So like, I have a gem for I have a marketing strategist gem that's built around each client's positioning and messaging. So for every single client I have, I have a marketing strategist gem. So whenever I'm writing messaging, and then I also have it, if it's founder, then I have another one that's, like, in the founder's voice, and I'll have them, like, check each other, like, I'll have, like, the founder write it, but then I'll say, is this on brand? And like, what's missing? So that's fun. Yeah, I love it, I really love it from that. That standpoint, like, because I can't always get a hold of the founders, and one of my clients travels a ton. So like, being able to sort of fact-check against is pretty cool. I also love it to code. I did say I was arguing with Gemini earlier, and I probably need to switch. I probably need to, like, actually buy Cursor, because it's so good. Like, I, you know, to be able to just say, you know, here's here's the code and here's the messaging. Can you merge these two, please? Is just an update the code to make sure it's on brand. Is just it's so fast, or if I need to update things, so like, there are just things I wasn't able to do before, because I'm not a true coder. I'm more front-end, HTML, CSS, and so, like, I was, like, I want this landing page to only have blog posts on it about this topic. And so it coded the component to then just pull in the blog posts that had any keywords related to that topic. Oh, my God. And then I just copied and pasted that on every page and changed the keyword. And so now the blog posts are aligned to the landing page, so just little things like that. Whereas I couldn't do it before by myself, and I have to bring in an engineer, I can, like, just knock a little these little things out that make such a difference again.

Michele Nieberding 21:21

I mean, so manual. And if other, like, trending keywords comes up, that's such a perfect way that you don't have to, like, go search or change anything. You're just, like, syndicating those, those pieces that have that topic in mind, and that's like, perfect. And back to the I mean, gems for like, founder posts. I I've worked with so many, or talked to so many founders that are just so, you know, they don't want to say the wrong thing, like they just, you know, want someone to double check their which is, you know, as a founder, I'm sure you take a lot of pride, and you want to say the right things, like you said, make, say things that land, and to have something that can check with the brand kind of guidelines. But also be, you know, a good first pass is that's, like, that's huge to say here, founder, like, here's say this or schedule it, whatever, and they can tweak it, you know, in their own way, fine, but that's, I mean, that's becoming such a important piece of the process, like buying processes, to see founders really being involved. And so what a cool I have. I, I will say, Gemini, gems for building agents is very satisfying. Like, I have enjoyed Gemini for agent building. I haven't, but now I've, like, gone down the rabbit hole of plot. I'm like, I just need to pick one and go all in, because it's, it's too much hard.

Kerry Guard 22:36

It's, it's hard, yeah, it's and yeah, to then switch between the contacts. It's so hard. Claude definitely has some really great aspects that keep enticing me to try it out. But I'm like, I just don't want to try it out, and then I'm gonna have to jump ship again. We're talking about a tool stack. So you've tested a million tools, if a founder gives you $500 a month for budget, specifically for AI. And maybe that's too low. And you can tell me if there's a better budget. But which two tools are you buying first and why?

Michele Nieberding 23:06

Yeah, so I would back to like, the Pro, whatever of the LLM that you choose is definitely number one. I do kind of back, I guess I would say, yeah, the battle right now is Gemini and Claude. I've been going deep down into Claude because they've had things like collage skills, Claude co Claude co work. So I would say they're doing a very good job innovating quickly in ways that are really compelling for how we need to work. Now, if they could, if like, Claude cursor and Nan or Nate and whatever people call it, if they could, like, bring that together, I think that would be huge so that so that's one is like, do the pro or enterprise version of like, the LLM of your choice. The second one I really love is lovable. I think everyone knows I have, like, an obsession with lovable. I turn everything into, like a lovable, interactive something at this point, things like road maps, playbooks, like verticalized playbooks for sales. I mean, true, like any kind of landing page you can imagine, truly anything, I make it interactive, active by doing. Love bowl like I'm obsessed. So that's number two. Oh my gosh, we'll have to play it will, like, blow your mind. It's just, or even if you want, like, a tracker for a founder to make sure he's posting, you know, once a week, and he can, like, check it, like, there's s,o or it has every post. It's so fun, but there are so many my founders to do that.

Kerry Guard 24:34

Oh yeah!

Michele Nieberding 24:36

Just yeah, I'll, we can. We can brainstorm. Because it's like, I just Yeah, did one for, like, here, take your resume, throw it in the lovable and say, Hey, make an interactive landing page for my personal brand to send to, like, a recruiter or something like that. Like, there are just really fun use cases, and it looks amazing. It's easy to edit all those things. And I think it's giving people a new way to, like, be creative and how they show information. It can do a deck. And it can do kind of the standard stuff that you may need, even sellers, like a million other tools that can do decks, right? But if you can do it all unlovable, that's kind of nice. So that's number two and number three, I've really loved Glean. So the reason I like Glean is it takes, like, all of your internal information. So Google Drive, email, Confluence, JIRA, tickets, Slack channel information, and you can search it just like you would chat GBT, but it's all internal, and then it's not shared with like, broader llms, right? So if someone shares a ChatGPT message, it's not going to like, show up in Google, basically, right? But what's really cool about Glean is they now have templates for agents. So like, we built an agent for SDR outreach, or RFP responses, or things like that. So they actually have templates. If you've never built an agent before, or you're like, not quite sure where to start, it'll give you the outline of the template for that agent, and then you can fill in, you know, your data sources and your links and everything it needs to do to build that. So it's kind of like a fun, you know, it's like training, you know, wheels on a bicycle, like it'll get you interested in how it actually works. But the other cool thing about that is we use it internally for across the board. So, like product marketing, may build an agent. CS might have one sale. You know, every team can build their own agents. Everyone can use it. And again, you know that it's pulling from all these internal resources that you don't have to necessarily linger that, wouldn't, you know, like that one hidden Slack message where you had a really good customer story, or really good competitor nugget, something like that. It will pull in to any responses that you, you know, questions that you ask it. So that would probably be number three, and then that easily, you know, go over $500, but that'll, that'll get you started.

Kerry Guard 26:39

That'll get you started. Okay, I love what I love about all three examples, which I think is so important as we talk about AI, and we've, we've been saying it, but we haven't really called it out. So I'm going to be annoying. What's so important about everything you've been saying and about even the tools you're talking about is that the data you feed it and how it's all. Everything you've mentioned has been proprietary. You've not liked, other than doing your research around competitors, everything else has been about what you're building internally and how you feed that into the LLMs into Glean, into Lovable, to then create the thing, and I think that's where the AI slop, and the real ingenuity sort of rubber meets the road, right? So I just want to call that out, because that is really the difference of like, what makes i ai so awesome, but yeah, to give it, what, what do they say? It's like, garbage in, garbage out, right?

Michele Nieberding 27:46

So it's, I mean, it's more true. Here's, you know, like you said, I've tried a lot of tools, and I think, to your point, there's some very cool UIs out there, some very cool experiences of like, you know, someone's built AI rapper feels so like kind of cringe now, but like, you know, a really cool UI on top of a chat GPT, for example. So it's basically an integration with a better UI that you can, you know, have some preset use cases and preset agents that you're interacting with. At the end of the day, everyone using that tool is really using the same underlying models, like those models that these solutions are built on top of, are total commodities. You're going to ask the question about your company. Someone else is going to ask a question about their company. It could give you very similar same answers, like you're, you're all going to use the same stuff. You're building a marketing campaign. You're, you know, trying to talk about messaging and positioning, and it's all kind of going to merge into each other because you're using the same models, or potentially the same underlying data. So what really is going to be the differentiator are those proprietary sources? Is your proprietary data? What do you know about your customers that nobody else knows? What are those AI signals on your proprietary landing pages or within your product, like we mentioned, like, all of these peace points that are so important, and also when you're thinking about other tools you're using, because, like, you don't want to sound the same as everyone else, and so many of these tools are are kind of that. So you have to know what, what is powering the tools that you're using?

Kerry Guard 29:18

Yes, yeah. So important. I could talk about this all day, messaging ROI, everyone says Good. Messaging matters, yeah, but founders want numbers. What are two specific metrics you look at in a CRM to prove that the messaging pivot actually worked?

Michele Nieberding 29:35

Yeah, more than anything, it pipeline. I like to say I'm a recovering sales rep. I started my career in sales, and if you're not bringing in revenue opportunities, something is off, and it's historically been hard to figure that out, right? So if the pipeline isn't being created, what, what is, why is that? Is that because, you know, we're not differentiated enough that there's a competitor, we don't? Know about, like, it's, there's so many reasons as to why that, that might be the second number I always look at is movement through the sales funnel. So we can't necessarily, you know, influence, like deal size, or how quickly things close, like anyone that, any product marketer, that is kind of measured on sales cycle, I like run, in my opinion, because, like, you can't, you know, legal and all these other things. It's so hard, but how quickly they move from one stage to another can be influenced by us, right? What is convincing enough to get have someone be like, Oh my gosh, I'm like, I need to go into a proof of concept, or I need, you know, to get into the beta program, whatever it might be, to move them through the stage to actually sign the contract. I think we do have control over and there are better ways to track that, I think now as well. So there are a lot of tools. I've seen custom gpts to actually, I recall in from the we're not marketers, guys actually built a like adopt messaging adoption framework to pull in transcripts and calls and things like that. So say, is sales adopting this message? Are they actually using it? And then, hey, is it landing? Which you can look back to pipeline and compare the two, right? So there's tribal, you know, another tool, though it costs money. So they're like, there are things out there that can finally take these call recordings and transcripts and say, Hey, are people using this? And how is it working? You know, yeah. So, back to, I would say, pipeline generation. Like, are we getting deals into the funnel, and how quickly are we moving people from, Hey, I've raised my hand. I'm interested to actually, you know, moving through the stages, yeah, doing, doing the damn thing, right?

Kerry Guard 31:34

Like, doing the damn thing, yeah, it's interesting, because I feel like we keep going back and forth. I'm going to go on a tangent. It's gonna be so great. You're all gonna bear with me. I because the funnel is interesting, because I'm seeing conflicting answers on LinkedIn. This is like a big battle happening on LinkedIn, of like, people who are for the funnel and people who are like, app, like, could we stop talking about the funnel? It is not a linear process. There's a customer journey here, and we're trying to shove them through this thing that doesn't actually exist. So you seem to be a fan of the funnel. You just mentioned it. What's sort of your quote, unquote hot take on this conversation that's blowing up my LinkedIn?

Michele Nieberding 32:16

Yeah! I'm like, maybe the funnel is not the right word anymore, but I stage right? There's awareness, where people are poking around. There's, like, more serious conversations where they're actually, maybe connecting with sales, or maybe they've tried the tool, if you're a plg company, and then where they've actually, like, either bought it or adopted it, right? There are general stages that people go through. Like I said, I'll be on TikTok scrolling, I'll see something, then I'll see it on Instagram, and I'll, you know, maybe go there. What? Like, there are stages of just thought process that people go through before they actually do the thing, make the purchase, sign the contract, whatever it is. So I do think there are areas within each of those stages that we need to have a very clear idea of how we get someone from point A to point B, that being said, God, yeah, the buying process has changed so dramatically, it's wild. I mean, you look at like Comet, right? That can autonomously book a flight or a hotel for you personally, I do not want that. I want their control, right, right? So, like that is, but it just because there's potential doesn't mean people are doing it right. So I would say, while the buying process sure has changed, we didn't have autonomous agents that can book a trip. We didn't have, you know, LLMs to search and say, Hey, what's the best hotel in Portugal in the summer? You know, we didn't have some of these ways to do research again, even TikTok, some of the social media that we're seeing. So what I don't know, channels maybe isn't the right word, but the the ways of buying, the way we're getting information, is so vastly different, but how we as humans, I think, make those decisions are still similar. So while maybe sure that everything's dead these days, emails dead, the funnel is dead, fine. I don't care what you call it, right? But I do think there's, there's very clear stages of consideration, maybe that gets us from point A to point B.

Kerry Guard 34:06

So yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's really helpful, and it's a yes and right, yeah. So yeah, I feel like we need to, sort of, it feels like, in paying attention to the internet, we just need to split these things to two different they saw they, each solves a different problem. So the customer journey and how people go about interacting with your brand is they're in and out. They're all over the place, like, they come in, they go out, they touch high, they they touch low, like, it's just, it's not linear, right? But to your point, you have to have the right messaging within that customer journey, so that they touch the right thing where they are in relation to what stage they're in. They might move back up to, they might be like, okay, cool. Now I know more about this, but I'm not quite right, because I don't have the budget. Now I know what budget I need to go get. Now they're going to go head back out and know where to. And we're gonna keep it top of mind for them until they have the budget, and then it brings them back in, right? So I think it's staying fluid and making sure we have messaging to bring them along when they're ready.

Michele Nieberding 35:14

And so if you really, if you really come on a hot take, I think if you think of like the traditional customer journey, that probably anyone probably anyone who's done marketing here has done, right, something happens. It triggers something else. You know, it's, it is very linear. I think that's totally going to go away. I think that is complete, like completely going to get blown up. Because I think historically, we've been very limited by our technology, things like segments. If you think of a segment, it's still a segment, it's still a group of people. It's not, you know, Kerry and Michele. It's still a segment. It's a group of people, A and B, testing same thing. You're experimenting a couple different variables, because marketers only had time to create maybe two or three variations, right? Customer journeys. Boom. This happens. It triggers this. This happens. It triggers that. We didn't have a way with technology to do things one-on-one, to have different context clues, to, like, do things in real time. I think AI is going to completely blow that up. We're talking about, you know, contextual layers and all these different ways that AI can actually work for the individual. So, say, I don't know, I'm at a late night ordering food, and my husband's right next to me. We're both on GrubHub, and we're scrolling, and we're like, what do we want to eat? If it knows through context clues that I don't know late night, if I'm ordering, I care more about how quickly it comes, and maybe my husband cares more about how much it costs, right? Those like context clues that AI can get, versus, like, "you've shopped here before." Here's a list of places you've gotten food before. Like, very, you know, transactional, or, you know, click equals something happens or something is shown to you. It becomes such a different experience, knowing the why behind we do things, not just what we do, so we click, we order whatever, but why do we do those things? It's, it's the context that's being pulled into the decisions that AI is making, on a level that is more one-to-one versus like that linear, I almost want to say static, customer journey.

Kerry Guard 37:07

We're getting more adaptive, sure, but I think, long-term, I expect it now. No, I actually, I totally expect it to like I go to the grocery store and I use this app every time I go in, so that, because in the UK, you get these lovely little handheld things, and you can scan as you go, and then just scan as you leave and you're out the door. I freaking love it. But, like, my iPhone should know that I'm at the store and I'm good at like, why isn't that app just not immediately front and center? Why do I have to go dig for it? Right? It's like, I'm actually, I'm with you. I'm actually expecting those things now, I feel like that's no duh that, and it's funny that it's not yet happening. So I'm with you. I think that's absolutely where it's going and where it has to go. It's where we all have to be thinking about what are those nuances are that people are going to care about in the timeframe that they're in and the decisions they're trying to make within, within that time frame.

Kerry Guard 38:06

We're almost out of time. I got so many questions here, alright? Human verse spot, where is the line? Give me one specific marketing task that you believe should never be touched by AI, even if the tech gets better.

Michele Nieberding 38:24

So I'll tell you one that I used to think was true until I experienced it, and then one I think is going to be true. So I used to think customer calls human to human. Like, the best way to do it you can read the room. You get, like, context clues, body language, all these things I was like, if I'm going to talk to a customer, what they like and dislike about a about a product, whatever it has to be human to human. Now, I actually just did a review of a product with an AI person interviewing me and asking me questions, and I almost actually preferred that, because I felt like I could say the negatives and like, not hurt someone's feelings, right? I was almost more open and honest, because I'm like, Okay, I'm not, you know, I'm not talking to the person that works, or that has built the product. And, like, you know, saying what I don't love about that. Maybe that's my Midwestern self being, you know, like, I, you know, I feel bad saying bad things. So it's a very interesting experience on my side, because as a product marketer, I'm like, I would never do that. And I'm like, you know, and it scales for companies like clothes that are doing this. Now, I actually, again, I was like, Well, I'd never do that. Now they can scale these conversations. Get way more information, the honesty from what they've said as well as has gone up, and the information that's shared, because it is not a real human, so that's an interesting one, and one that I was like, yeah, all high and mighty mountain, and that kind of switch, which was interesting. Yeah, I don't

Kerry Guard 39:44

know if I'd want to talk to about that would be, I'd have to. I haven't had the experience yet, though, so that's interesting. I have to, I'm, I'm still in the camp of, it's got to be a person. But you know, there's nothing worse than a phone tree. And you. Sweaty to talk to a person, so I still think I have to get over that trauma. Oh my, okay, but I put some there.

Michele Nieberding 40:08

Yeah, customer service is one of the most promising areas for AI, but no one has cracked the code yet. To your point, like, you'll go tell about all of your problems, it'll try and solve it, and then it can't. And then you get to a person, and they have no idea what you just chatted with the bot about.

Kerry Guard 40:21

Like, oh, I know it. We're getting there. Yeah, I called Chase the other day. Oh no, chase the other day, I had a person. I called a person. It was in my account, and it said, Here's your person. And I called the line, and she picked up. And I was like, what universe did I just landed? Like, what just happened? She's like, I was like, I didn't know I've been with Chase for 10 years. I didn't know I had a person.

Michele Nieberding 40:48

Wow, that's my grandfather, probably won the, like, most impressive tech people I ever knew. He was the first person that I knew could print, like, from his phone Bluetooth. And this was, you know, 1012 years ago. And I was like, You're the coolest guy ever. He had a direct line to Apple support, and he would just call them, just ask what he could do with his phone, like a human. And he would spend poor Apple people spend hours just chatting anyway. So I'm like, that's still so important to have that connection when you're struggling, and someone to talk you through what's going on. Because a lot of these, the way, the prompt chains of chatbots currently aren't where they need to be for things like that. So back to, you know, bots do anything. I also think back to, like, full circle. That is it AI I'm still really struggling with, like, AI-generated video content, so I know there are really good tools for, like, avatars, right? It gets your face, it can do your voice, like things like that, again, right? I can't, who is it reach we did like a B to B ads, kind of similar thing, of like, is it AI and a critique of these things, and it's cheap, it's much quicker, obviously. But again, you just miss that human connection that, like that. We would be, imagine, if this, this is all AI, right?

Kerry Guard 42:06

This conversation was AI, but then why? Then AI can just watch the AI, and then let's, yeah, we're going to be end up people, if we go down that route, let's not, oh my gosh. I have all right, I'll choose one more.

Michele Nieberding 42:23

I know we really could talk forever.

Kerry Guard 42:26

Okay, last one, the keep going scale, once you find a message that converts, how do you use AI to modularize that winning think strategy across five different channels without losing the brand voice? Yeah. So I for content. We haven't really talked too much about that.

Michele Nieberding 42:45

Yeah, um, yes, and no. Like, it's definitely helpful with a first pass. Like, so getting whether you use AI not to get that message again, I would say, proceed with caution, so you don't sound like everyone else. Because sometimes the words, depending on what you use, all the words could be the same, and it isn't actually that different. It is interesting, though. There was an AI tool that I actually I used this morning that would take value props on my website and suggest better ways to say that, what that was like more differentiated. It would actually give it a differentiation kind of score to say if my value prop the way it's written on a website, if that's actually differentiated, I actually put in my competitors and the links to their product pages or homepage, and it would like score it, which was very interesting. It isn't content generation, but it's like, you know, critiquing me on, on my messaging, on my website.

Kerry Guard 43:33

So it's like, I asked Gemini to critique my LinkedIn posts all the time. I just, yeah, almost a hidden gem, like, I almost, really just wrote this, but tell me, but you're almost afraid.

Michele Nieberding 43:40

Sometimes you're like, I don't know. I don't want to know what it thinks about it, you know, I don't know. But it's, it is cool in that way. I'm sorry. We were talking, like, off on a tangent. We were talking about con Oh, messaging,

Kerry Guard 43:54

How do you scale it? Yeah, yep, to how you scale.

Michele Nieberding 43:57

I will put, I will actually put, once I know my messaging Doc is, is good and solid, like, I feel really good about it. I will put it into tools, like gamma, which is a great example for PowerPoint slides. I'll put it, this is actually a gut check more than create creating the content. But I'll put the messaging doc into Gamma and say, Hey, build me a five to seven slide pitch deck, and I'll see what it'll pull. Because if it pulls the right stuff, or it feels really good. One, I know the messaging Doc is strong. And two, I could use some of that to start building a new pitch deck again, if it's a new concept, a new product, whatever. But getting that foundation of that messaging positioning right, it really helps scale it anywhere. You can build thought leadership blog posts. You can put it into, you know, you could create toward videos. I've done those podcast-style sales enablement things where it's like sharing, you know, Q and A, AI-generated Q and A, that's like podcast style, but for internal enablement, not for like, external content. Um, so, yeah, I think once you have that foundation, right, the possibilities are almost kind of. Endless into how you can use it with AI tools that are a lot faster now, always, always, always review it. You know, always have your hands in the mix. I've seen some more junior PMMs that are just like, put it in and clawed whatever. Here's a blog post. They don't even look at it, and they're like, my blog post is ready. I'm like, oh, like, maybe just take a look. But again, there are just so many cool ways to use it.

Kerry Guard 45:25

You're a plethora of AI information. I could sit here all day, and we've and we've covered so much ground for the founders and the and the smaller marketing, learner marketing teams that are listening. Yeah, out of everything we've talked about, maybe we didn't cover it. Maybe we did. But what's the one thing, the one actionable step that they should take today to get their marketing, positioning, and messaging, any of it, all of it, back on track?

Michele Nieberding 45:50

Yeah, I think, you know, give if you're like, a newbie and you're not sure where to start, like, give it a try. Like you said, have it. Have it, critique your messaging, get customer input, and then take it to the founder. So it's, it's a team effort. You're not just going to set it and forget it with AI, as someone who was a sole and founding product marketer at a 30-person company. Like, it is amazing what AI can do to help scale things. But at the end of the day, to get back on track, you need that validation from real people that are buying your products, that are actually using it, before you do anything else. So like that, validation is hugely, hugely important.

Kerry Guard 46:31

Send this conversation to one of my clients. It's gonna be great. Oh my gosh, Michele, where can people find you? They want to learn more. They want to stay in touch. They want to follow you.

Michele Nieberding 46:42

Yeah, LinkedIn, I think there's only one Michele neighboring, but yeah, if not, you know, I'm posting all the time, so yeah, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

Kerry Guard 46:50

Click on her picture here and go follow her. Make that happen. She's also got, I'm gonna, I'm gonna blow your Michele. But she also does have an Instagram of beautiful pictures of a cake she used to make, and they are awesome. So go find her over there. Michele , I'm so grateful, so so grateful. Thank you so much. Seriously, could talk to you all day, all day, awesome.

Michele Nieberding 47:09

Thank you.

Kerry Guard 47:12

As I'm going to have you back, don't you worry, folks, she's going to be back if you're feeling stuck in that growth. Valerie, remember, stop chasing the shiny objects. Think, ready, activate, calibrate, and then, and only then, keep going. This episode is brought to you by MKG Marketing, and we'll see you next week.