I was recently listening to a podcast when someone posed this question: “Would you rather be an expert in your field, or a jack of all trades and master of none?”

These types of hyperbolic questions can be a bit ridiculous because what we would ideally want is a balance of both, right? If I had to choose, I’d prefer it if everyone was an expert that we could reference as needed. Why? Well, think about it this way: Would you want to get your car fixed by someone who isn’t an automotive repair specialist? Or more vitally important, would you want a surgeon operating on you if they weren’t a specialist?

The same is true for marketing. In an age where anyone can build a website or generate social media
content it can be tempting to forgo hiring an experienced marketer, but that would be a mistake.

Knowing how to effectively market and influence your target audience takes time to master just like any
other skill, and you’ll get better results with a professional who specializes in this. Here are three
business reasons to hire a marketing professional:

1. Help Recruiting Efforts
   Good marketing can help you attract potential employees. Companies must effectively pitch
   themselves to potential employees to entice them to apply. A well-crafted marketing pitch will
   increase your number of job applicants.
2. Develop a Targeted Marketing Strategy
   What’s your niche? What are you doing that your competitors aren’t? Who’s your target
   audience, and how can you reach them? If you already know all of this, that’s great! If not, a
   marketing professional can determine these things and create a targeted strategic plan. Many
   business owners make the mistake of being too broad with their marketing approach and end
   up investing resources where they aren’t needed. A marketing professional will find your niche,
   analyze your competitors, and promote your products directly to your target audience.
3. Determine Return on Investment (ROI)
   There’s more marketing data available than ever before, but it’s only useful if you know where
   to find it and what to do with it. Seasoned marketing professionals know how to find and
   analyze data that can be used to determine the ROI of your marketing efforts. This allows them
   to fine-tune your future marketing investments, so your business gets the maximum ROI.

As a manufacturing professional, you probably already have more daily tasks than you can manage. Why overwhelm yourself with another that isn’t your specialty? Wouldn’t it be smarter to focus all of your energy on what you do best, and let the marketing professionals do what they do best, especially when it will help increase profits?

The team at Web Savvy Marketers specializes in marketing, specifically for manufacturers. It’s ALL we do. And although I’ve provided three reasons to reach out to our experienced team, there are countless others.
Contact us to learn more.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world around us, and these AI programs are making it possible for everyone to experience the benefits of this powerful technology. From writing and coding assistants to creative tools and productivity boosters, there is an AI program out there for everyone.

Would you believe me if I told you that that first paragraph was written by AI? Hello! A real person is typing now, but isn’t it interesting how with a simple prompt this AI could do my job for me? That’s what I want to talk about today. Not about how I want to be replaced but how this technology can help create more content quicker.

I’m sure you’re all keenly aware of the thousands of articles debating AI and the other half-dozen buzzwords surrounding these new technologies. From ChatGPT to Midjourney, there are dozens of companies vying for your eyeballs on their service.

But what if you’re not sure how this technology could be best utilized for your marketing needs?
Well, I did some research and I want to showcase one service (Bard) that could save you time and energy.

To start, I’d like to highlight some issues that you might be aware of with these experimental new technologies. It’s not all sunshine and roses but as my mother told me, “You should always hear the bad news first”, but if you stick around for the pros portion, you’ll find some great tips there.

Cons

Technical Accuracy
For manufacturers specifically, this is a big one. You could be dealing with terms or acronyms that could be very specific to your work that an AI might not know how to handle. This actually leads well into the second point where

Not False, but not specific.
I’m sure you’ve heard the tales. An AI program creating facts out of thin air with no idea where it got that info from. In my personal testing, Bard claimed things that were technically true but made for a bland story. In writing, specifics help ground and compel your audience and I often found Bard failed in that sense.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition!
The program is great at finding different ways to re-phrase the same points and that’s certainly a skill, but in reading over what it gave me as a whole, it wasn’t an asset.

Alright, now that we’re done with the cons we can get to the good stuff. How could we use this for your website, social media, etc. content? As a writer myself, I don’t want to advocate for a program that could replace me, but in my eyes, this is a perfect tool to market your company. Let’s imagine a scenario.

You’re sitting at your desk with a cursor blinking at you. You’ve created an amazing product but now you need to sell it. How do you sum up years of work into a simple tagline, slogan, or about section? The blank document stares at you as the deadline fast approaches. You know what they always say, “The hardest thing is to start”, but you just can’t.

That’s why we’re here. To find a way to use innovative technologies to help brand your business. We’ve started to use AI programs like Bard as an idea generator. Let’s look again at the cons I brought up in a different light.

Pros

Technical Accuracy
Imagine you have a ton of text full of these explanations that span pages and pages, and you know the casual viewer of your website isn’t going to want to read all of that. You need to hook them in. How do you do that? We can submit all of that text to Bard and ask it to make a list of the key topics. It might not be able to provide details, but it’s able to highlight content a casual reader would care about to draw them in.

Not False, but not specific.
In fact-checking these claims, I stumbled upon a 2022 report full of statistics about manufacturing in Connecticut with dozens of interesting statistics and reports on the state of things. Would I have found this great resource if I wasn’t looking for the exact number of employees in the manufacturing sector in CT? Probably not! Now you have a statistic to write a more compelling story/blog post.

Repetition. Repetition. Repetition!
The repetition highlights what the AI thinks is important. In this online world, key terms are vital to all parts of the writing process to get traffic. That’s how these algorithms work, right? And an AI knows that. So, a particularly helpful thing I’ve found is that Bard is great at creating lists. These can be full of ideas that will allow you to submit a bunch of text in your prompt and have the program narrow it down.

These types of new technologies are what we use to help make more new content faster and more effectively. If any of this sounds interesting to you feel free to ask us for help!

In the end, there are so many ways to use programs like this to help create more content. To start, we use AI as a brainstorming tool.