AI – Marketing Content Gold or a Dangerous Trap?

You're listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard. Are you ready to master your marketing so you can ditch your reliance on the online agents and grow your direct bookings?

I'll be sharing with you exactly what it takes to grow your direct bookings and the simple marketing steps to get more profit in your pocket. Hello, hello, hello, your host, Sarah Orchard here, and it's time for another episode of the Get Fully Booked podcast.

It's great to have you here today, today. So do let me know what you're doing while listening in.

Send me a DM over on Instagram, let me know whether you're taking the kids to school, walking the dog, doing a changeover, doing your ironing. All in a typical day as a host. Well, today I am diving into a very juicy and hot topic that's everywhere right now, AI and marketing.

So is AI your new best friend for creating content or perhaps a sneaky tech trap that could actually hurt your business brand and even get you into some hot water? I'm going to be sharing sort of three key things to help you decide how to use AI smartly in your marketing.

And I'm also going to share some surprising facts with you as well. So firstly, let's start with some positives. AI can really help speed things up in terms of your marketing. It can be a massive help in that regard.

Brainstorming content topics for blogs, emails or social posts. Fantastic for that. Maybe even creating a very polite and professional reply to a negative review or an awkward customer complaint or inquiry.

We've actually used AI, a tool called Perplexity to do some competitor pricing research.

And what would typically have taken Ade, probably half a day to sit and go through and look at the sort of bank of five competitors that we benchmark against. It took him less than 20 minutes. So AI definitely can be a very helpful helper. And, you know, how many times have you sat and stared at a blank page?

Maybe you're writing, you know, blank computer screen, you're writing your monthly email, or you're trying to come up with a blog because, you should do that from an SEO point of view.

But instead of sitting there and spending probably two hours trying to work on your email, why not ask AI to give you 10 subject lines based on your seasonal theme or offer? AI can be a very good trusted assistant, but it certainly is not your replacement. And I think that's the difference.

That's how to think about it. Use it to do some of the heavy lifting. Use it to break the ice when you're feeling stuck.

And also to when you've got content that's done really well, whether it's a social post or maybe it was a blog post that's done really well. Get AI to repurpose that. I'm a huge fan of repurposing content and definitely AI can do that for you.

The second thing I wanted to raise really was about the danger of sort of bland, sort of what we might call cookie cutter content. So that, I suppose that's the trap with AI.

If you're simply, copy and pasting what AI has generated into your blogs or socials, you risk producing content that is very generic, it sounds like everyone else. It has zero personality.

If anything, it has a slightly, especially if you're using ChatGPT, it has a slightly over enthusiastic teenage personality, lots of emojis, lots of exclamation marks and some very superlative adjectives generally used. But it can often lose your brand voice so that your business and how you sort of stand out from the crowd can be completely lost.

We also risk the content that's inaccurate as well, or even out of date because AI has what they call hallucinations.

So that basically just means that when it doesn't know the answer to something or it's run out of data sets in terms of the data that it's basing its feedback to you on, it simply makes it up.

So you do really have to take all of the content that it creates with a, with a massive pinch of salt and make sure that you actually edit and repurpose it. Which is why I'm saying it's not a replacement for you, it's an assistant to do the heavy lifting.

And I think also these days is that most of us, including Google and us and our guests, are all getting very good at spotting AI content a mile off due to the formatting, some of the repetitive ways it structures or phrases. Content can be a real, I suppose it likes the hyphen as well. It can be a real like giveaway that content has come from, from AI.

And I'd urge you to remember that ultimately people book because of your unique story and your brand personality. You know, you're trying to stand out from the crowd so you don't want to be blending in and looking like everyone else.

AI can't replicate you and what you do.

It also, although it may look at points of reference in terms of everything that's out there in terms of data online, and it may look at things like your website, it also can't bring your guest experience to life because it, it cannot physically go and visit your, business as a guest and experience it. But you actually can train AI to sound like you and to understand your business. And that's all to do with how you actually customise it.

If you're struggling with using AI or maybe you've had a little dabble and it frightened you or you feel like it's something that you should embrace.

Within my membership, The Fully Booked Business Club, I have in depth trainings on how to prompt AI and how to create literally like a week's worth of content in 20 minutes.

So there's some scripts and things that you can lift that will get you started in a confident way and, and definitely making sure that the AI content that you create actually feels like your business. I've got an interesting fact for you. Did you know that AI is now writing some news articles for major outlets?

But the studies have shown that readers can usually tell the difference between the AI written pieces and those created by a normal journalist. The AI written pieces tend to lack emotional nuance and personal anecdotes. They can't actually replicate you.

And I think that's why in hospitality where emotions and we're actually selling an experience and that's what matters most. You cannot hand over the keys completely to AI. So my final point is. Okay, so how do we get AI to work for us in the right way?

Well, first thing, as I said, it should definitely be a co pilot and it isn't like putting a plane into autopilot. It definitely needs you to drive it. But I've got some tips for sort of safe and effective use. I use AI a lot in my business.

Both businesses, both for Get Fully Booked and the Hudnalls Hideout Treehouse. And this is what I've learned in terms of how I can make it work for me, not against me.

So the first thing is to customise the AI tools and to have really good prompts. So the usual adage of garbage in, garbage out. If you don't give the tools a really good prompt and you don't customise it, you will get rubbish back.

You'll get generic cookie cutter stuff back. So that's why in The Fully Booked Business Club, my membership, basically we have in depth trainings on this.

So if you want to grab some of that, you can come in just for a month. It's £35.00.

You can grab those trainings, you'll get those scripts, you'll get those templates, and then you can stay on or you can leave, but I think you'd find that really useful. I'll put a link in the show notes. Use AI for research as well, for brainstorming and for sort of first draft.

So you're using it to, like I said, to do the heavy lifting to actually get you started, get you that sort of outline that you can then edit, tweak, adjust and make sure that your brand voice is not being lost in all of this and you're not sounding like everyone else.

There's also some settings in AI that when I talked about customising as well, that I'll come on to talk about sort of making sure that your content doesn't then get reused by everyone else. So another point is always edit heavily.

And I mentioned this, you know, you need to inject your own brand personality, your opinions, your own stories. It's not going to know what's going on in your business all the time. It can only lift from the data sets that it's got access to.

So make sure that you can pull that into the content that you create. Really importantly, double check the facts. So I mentioned about that if it doesn't know something, it makes it up. It's called AI hallucinations.

If you've got the paid for version, obviously it can go and do live web checks for you and pull stuff back, but you're still going to have to sense check what it comes up with. I said this before, but keep your brand voice consistent. You know, give AI some example copy to work with.

So in your customisation settings, you know, make sure you go in and give it some sample copy.

So if you've got some copy on your website or copy maybe in a listing that someone's written about your business that you think is really good, a really good tone of voice, put that into the AI tools so that it knows your style and your, what we call tone of voice in marketing, so that it actually has something to base the content on.

And try and keep all of your conversations with the AI tool in one chat, you know, one thread, so that it you don't have to keep telling it this stuff time and time again. It's like it learns from what it's written for you previously that you liked and if you didn't like it, you can tell it that you don't like it.

I do find myself having conversations with ChatGPT and Claude, which is slightly worrying, but I do thank it when it's done good work. I also tell it off when it hasn't done very good work. I did tell it the other day, ChatGPT GPT, that it had done a bit of a poor job with something.

So when the machines take over, obviously I might be on their hit list to come and get because I was rude to ChatGPT. So we'll see whether that comes back to bite me at a later date.

But yeah, you do want to give it some, some feedback when it does a good job and then it will learn it. You know, it's computer learning. It will learn and modify what it brings back to you.

Next time, do make sure you switch off some of the controls in the tools.

Not all of them have this, but it will use your content for learning and what it describes as improving the model for everyone, which means that other people will end up with the same content that it's written for you.

So that's really, really important to make sure that you switch that off so that you're not your content that you've crafted and all those lovely prompts that you've written and you've got it to come up with some really great stuff and then it gives it to everyone else and then that's how we can all end up sounding the same. Another couple of points, really.

I mean, AI can be very biased because based on where you are in the world and culturally, and you know, it has bias towards the data sets that it's been basing all of its information on. And I do tend to find it's quite US centric, it's quite white Caucasian centric.

So if you're in a particular niche in terms of probably less so relevant for our sector in terms of hospitality, but maybe you are specialising in getting guests to come and stay with you with accessibility issues or who are neurodivergent or LGBTQ, it's like that's not the people that are behind these tools, that's maybe not their makeup. So when they're putting all these data sets into these tools, it does have a certain amount of bias.

So it may not be that sympathetic to your offering. So just something to bear in mind, and lastly, you know, content isn't just about producing masses of volume.

It's about producing content that builds trust and connection with your ideal guests. So it's about producing quality content.

So I wouldn't look at AI as just a means of rapidly generating lots of, like I said, cookie cutter, really bland content. So overall, the sort of key takeaway is, is that businesses that win with AI are the ones that know what its role is.

And at the moment, its role for me is to be your marketing assistant. It's to go off and do research, it's to go off and get your content ideas.

But you're still the CEO, you're still the marketing director, and you still have to edit it and sign it off and make sure that your brand personality and your brand guest experience is conveyed as it should be. And that's a non negotiable.

So to wrap up and to answer my question at the beginning, is AI marketing content gold or is it a dangerous trap for your business? I think it's a bit of both, really. It's gold if you use it wisely for your marketing. Like I said, it's your marketing assistant.

Think of it as maybe an internal. So it's in training. It definitely is not fully fledged, it's not definitely well qualified.

You know, I'd like to think that my 30 years in marketing and the fact that I'm a chartered marketer and I've, you know, I have to stay current and all of that stuff is worth something still.

Because ultimately as a human being, I can interpret information, I can look at multiple sources, I can then form my decisions based on my experience. And 30 years adds up, I think, more than possibly what an AI tool can come up with. But it's definitely your intern, it's in training.

But the trap is if you hand over complete control to it and you just see it as a way of just churning out volumes of content, I think you will lose your brand voice and your authenticity. And your guests, they don't want just content, they want you. They want your brand voice, your brand story, your hospitality.

You know, it's the name of our industry that we're in. So definitely let AI do the heavy lifting for you. But don't forget to always add in a little bit of your own marketing sparkle to it.

So thanks for tuning in today. I'll be back next week. So if you've enjoyed this episode, I'd love it if you could leave me a review.

You know how much us hosts love those five star reviews. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to Get Fully Booked with Sarah Orchard.

If you want to see if you are ready to ditch the likes of Airbnb and grow your direct bookings, put your business to the test with my free direct booking Roadmap quiz. Head to my website www.get-fully-booked.com/quiz and let's get you more direct bookings and more profit it in your pocket.