Unlock the secrets of AI-powered marketing with Adam Nathan, the founder and CEO of Blaze, as we explore how technology is reshaping branding and leveling the playing field for small businesses.
IE 429: AI and Branding: How to Shape Your Business Future with Adam Nathan
Adam Nathan is the founder and CEO of Blaze.ai, the number one AI marketing tool for small businesses. Blaze creates personalized social media, blogs, newsletters, and websites in your brand voice and style.
They help “teams of one,” creators, freelancers, entrepreneurs, small businesses owners, and small agencies create on-brand content in half the time. Content includes social media, emails, blog posts, and websites.
Blaze creates them all in your brand style and voice. It is like a full stack marketing solution. It helps you plan content, generate it, publish, and analyze it.
What role does AI play in branding today, and how is it changing the branding landscape?
There is a lot of misconception about what AI is and what impact it is having on different types of businesses. Adam considers AI the latest and greatest technology. With technology, we continue to get smarter and more productive.
Things that we used to call AI are more commonplace, like mobile phones or GPS. AI today is about using large language models to help produce content or generate answers if you use ChaptGPT before.
Specifically, when it comes to branding, we see a fabricated impact in the market. For big companies, AI is helping them cut costs or let go people by automating functions that humans are doing. It is more of an efficiency story. It may have a negative impact on someone who works at that company.
The focus for small businesses is a positive story. It is helping small teams and small businesses do a lot more than they could before.
Blaze has hundreds of thousands of customers. Many are founders and owners of their own businesses who are wearing many hats at the same time. When it comes to marketing, they know they have to do great marketing and branding in order to grow but they don’t have the time and skills to produce great marketing.
They are in a catch-22 where the most important thing to their business is something they cannot fully control or do on their own. They don’t have the time or resources to pay someone else to do it or try to do it themselves.
For a lot of small businesses, AI is helping to level the playing field and produce more marketing on things like SEO, ads, social media content to help them grow impressions, customers, and revenue.
What is an example of how we might be able to use AI in branding?
Our most popular feature is called Brand Voice. A big problem with using AI is that it sounds like internet noise and all sounds the same. It is easy to detect if someone is using AI to write content, emails, or blog posts because there is no variation in tone or voice.
At Blaze, they can look at your website or a document and analyze it for seven different attributes of how you speak. This includes the intended audience, syntax, and writing style and then reproduces it in an output you can edit yourself.
In case Blaze is wrong, you can modify it to your liking. All of the content it generates will use that brand voice to personalize the copy and text so it sounds like you.
You can create multiple brand voices. If you have different ways of talking about products, different audiences you speak to, different geographies you serve, different clients, etc., you can create many different brand voices. Depending on what you are writing about, it will sound different.
There is also a feature called Brand Styles, which is a visual version of Brand Voice. We can analyze your Instagram page or your Facebook handle of your content and pull out your logo, your colors, your fonts, your photo vibes, etc. so that when they create visual content for you, it looks like what you have done in the past.
It is a cool way to leverage AI to create content that looks and sounds like you. These features overcome a big problem that generic AI tools have of all sounding and looking like everyone else’s stuff.
We have been emphasizing personal brand strategy. Jenny tells her content creators that AI will not replace them because they will still need to be able to use your voice. Adam can infiltrate that voice.
One of the biggest things Jenny hears is that AI uses cheesy words or constantly uses the word “empowered” because it is pulling from the same sources.
Let’s use Jenny’s podcast for example. Blaze can use both the audio and blog posts. It can take the audio, analyze the text, and use it for 100 different types of output. It can generate a blog post, a social media campaign, a newsletter, a web page, and even host the content.
There is a feature that builds out campaigns. They use the audio file or video for the source material. It isn’t pulling from the rest of the internet. It is using the current content to generate more content. By using the content from Instagram, the covers for the reels, or carousels, it will make things much simpler.
Blaze has invested in features that look and sound like you so you can save time while growing your site, your revenue, and your customer base without some of the risks you see with new AI tools that can end up sounding fake, generic, or bad.
What are some common mistakes that you see when using AI in branding that you would recommend people stay away from?
While some people are afraid of AI, it won’t take your job or replace you but a business that knows how to use AI will take your job, your market share, and your customers. It is just like any other technology.
The ability you have to leverage it comes down to how much you are willing to invest into using it. The same thing is true for Google Maps. Some people can’t get from A to B while some people use it to plan their entire vacation. The information is there. It comes down to how well you can use the tool. You can apply that metaphor to any new technology.
Blaze was designed for people who have to do marketing who are not marketers. They specifically focus on folks who may not be experts. Their goal was to make the tool simple, easy, and fun to use.
If you don’t know how to use AI, the first step is to find a tool that isn’t made for experts but instead designed for beginners. There are a few tools out there that are for people who don’t know much about this technology but are designed to help people get their feet wet and play around with it in an easy-to-use format.
The second thing Adam recommends is to try a bunch of tools before you buy them. Blaze has a free trial for this reason. The reason people stay with Blaze is because the output is really good. You have to test it and see if you like what it generates before putting money behind it.
Blaze can help you generate one month’s worth of blog posts, Instagram posts, and emails. If you have a black Friday special or holiday content, you can generate a month of Instagram. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog, and email content. It can write 30, 60, or 90 posts for you instantly, adding images inside them.
It can schedule, post them, and analyze them. A lot of customers use Blaze to “set and forget” marketing so they can focus on other things. There is the ability to learn quickly and automate a lot of the busy work that you would rather not do because it is boring. It is a high-leverage use of your time.
It can help people scale themselves into more work that they have to do for their business. Investing in learning how to use a tool and figuring out how to get leverage out so you can save hundreds of hours.
Blaze has a tracker that can track how much time is saved. So far, they have tracked over one hundred and ten thousand hours which translates to over five million dollars in saved time. That is critical for small businesses, especially where time is money. Get started, play around, and see what you like.
If someone were to start with Blaze, which top feature would you recommend so people can get an idea of the capabilities of Blaze?
From the moment you sign up, in the onboarding, you are asked to create a brand voice and brand styles. That is a good way to assess if Blaze is doing a good job of creating personalized branding and marketing content.
Their tool creates over 300 types of content but the top three are social media posts, blog posts, and emails. Start with whichever one sounds relevant to you. If you are already creating Instagram content, then choose that. If you have a big email list that you never email, try writing an email copy.
Adam uses Blaze for his content. He is always surprised at how much better and quicker the copy is. Their goal is to get you copy that is 95-98% good but you can still modify it using the document editor to get it to 100%. You can edit it by yourself or with your team.
Start with something you are already doing, compare it to the content you have, and see if it is better or not. It is amazing the leverage that AI is providing to small businesses that don’t have the time or skills to do everything they need on their own.
Some people have ethical concerns about using AI. By inputting your voice and your content into Blaze, you are avoiding ethical concerns.
Another Blaze feature is called Source Materials. Inside Blaze, you can create a knowledge base where you give it access to your website to scan, upload documents, add ways to describe your products or services, and more so Blaze can generate specific content about your business.
It is not just using the internet to find stuff about you. It is using your specific knowledge and information. Some customers upload hundreds of documents to create hyper-personalized copy.
There is a difference between how large and small companies approach AI. For large companies and corporations, there are ethical concerns and intellectual property concerns with certain information being used internally, externally, and being shared across companies because they are using the same tool. Coke doesn’t want their documents to be used by Pepsi.
For small businesses, Blaze can personalize content and it is causing the businesses who weren’t doing things before to begin publishing blog posts or social media, engaging their audience through email, to get their business doing more.
Businesses who weren’t pulling all the levers they had to grow are doing so. The growth benefits in terms of awareness, new site visitors, improved conversion, and more sales are significant.
The majority of the feedback they get is that Blaze helps them grow faster and uplevel. People are asking how they can better use the product to become more of an expert. Before they came to Blaze, they may not have even been on the internet so they weren’t worried about people stealing their stuff.
Is Blaze tracking data to determine what is working well and what is not?
Blaze can schedule and post content automatically across social media channels; Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog posts and email send platforms. You will have the ability to see the performance of all the content you share on those platforms and channels. This will include both the content you post on Blaze and anything you post on your own or through other tools.
This can be used to generate more content that is based on your best performing content. Blaze can see your top 10 posts on Instagram over the last 30 days and can generate 5, 10, or 20 more posts like that. The virtuous cycle in marketing happens when you repeat stuff that is working.
You have insight into what is working and why to do more of what your audience loves. This can create a cycle to plan, generate, post, and analyze your best stuff so that when you go plan and generate more, you are dialed in to what people are already loving, what is converting and you can grow faster.
Free Trial of Blaze.AI
You can get a 7-day free trial. If you like it and want to purchase it, buy the annual plan, you get 3 months free! There is a YouTube channel with hundreds of videos to help learn and grow your business.
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