VMP 246: AI Tools To Help Your Veterinary Marketing

(00:00:00) - Welcome to episode number 246 of the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage, and retain clients to your veterinary hospital using digital marketing. My name is Brandon Beshear, and thank you so much for taking the time to listen. In today's episode, we are gonna be talking about AI marketing tools, which has been a massive topic of interest on my part per about the past year. Been testing and, and trying out some AI marketing tools. And if you've been on any social network recently, you've probably seen a bunch of AI images that are coming out that are pretty cool. There's also a bunch of incredible tools that I think are gonna be amazing. Let's talk about what the impacts are gonna be for your practice, how you can use them. And I think this is gonna be a game changer for a lot of practices because one of the things that is, I think in my opinion, the biggest constraint upon practices is time.

(00:00:51) - This is gonna help you to get so much more done, and that's really exciting. And so, uh, I'm incredibly excited about it. I think it's a great opportunity. We'll talk about what the implications are, what the applications are, and how you can use it to just get so much more done. It's gonna be very, very exciting in my opinion. Before we begin, just a few things. First, if you haven't done already, be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast from. Secondly, I wanna mention this episode is being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used vet equipment.com and new vet equipment.com. And I just wanna take a quick second here, and if you listen to the podcast, be sure to head on over there and show them some love. They've been incredibly great sponsors to the show and I just want to give them a very heartfelt thank you because they're, they're awesome to work with.

(00:01:39) - And Brad is an excellent guy. His son, um, Brad Haven Jr. Runs new vet equipment and they're seriously the best people. So I want to give everybody a great endorsement of used vet equipment.com and new vet equipment.com. But for over nine years now, used vet equipment.com has been helping vets buy and sell used equipment. You'd be able to save money when you buy used veterinary equipment on cages, kennels pumps, X-ray equipment, lasers, ultrasounds, dental equipment, surgery equipment, lab equipment from Abaxis, idx and hesca tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vet boxes. What do you have to sell@usedvetequipment.com? We bring the buyer and seller together. Also, if you're looking for new veterinary equipment with amazing warranties, checkout new vet equipment.com where they show you the price upfront. They have digital x-ray equipment, dental, x-ray equipment, ultrasound equipment, l e surgery, lighting, surgery tables, autoclaves. When you go to new vet equipment.com, you'll clearly see the price on every item per sale.

(00:02:35) - You'll also be able to check the warranty so that you can buy without regret@newvetequipment.com. They show you the price and give you a great warranty. Also, they're just incredibly kind people and they will treat you really, really well. So, head on over there, they're very friendly. If you have questions, need help, they are fantastic. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. So the robots are coming, right? That's the, the thing that everybody's been talking about. And listen, this isn't something that's new. AI has been touted, I would say probably for the past five years as something that's gonna come and completely replace every single job. And this might be true, I don't know. Um, it's, it's really incredible to think about how far things have come just even in the past two years. Now when it comes to marketing and marketing automation, I think that there are some major impacts that are gonna be coming quickly.

(00:03:26) - And I also think that the more that AI improves, it's just gonna be an exponential kind of growth curve of improvement. And I think that's what we're starting to see right now. Or things are actually getting better and getting to the point where you can use them. There's really kind of four different categories of AI marketing tools. Okay, we have editing and it's mostly from the creation standpoint, content creation. There is some AI applications within ads. I'll talk about that in a little bit. I have quite a bit of experience with, uh, ad AI and AI scripts there. But, um, with AI we have a lot of content creation and um, creative creation help, which is awesome in my opinion. So we have, uh, video editing, which is gonna be incredible. I want you to think about you just upload a whole bunch of video clips and it'll automatically edit it together and put it in a way that's cohesive, that's awesome.

(00:04:20) - And you can choose different styles and all kinds of things. I'm sure a hundred percent sure those tools are coming. When you look at how Google and YouTube in particular looks at video content for audience retention, it's amazing what they're doing. They're going through, they're scanning every frame of the, uh, content so that they can see what's in the background. What's this video about? What are the objects that are going on here? What is the, anyways, it's amazing. So they, these algorithms know what works and what doesn't from an audience retention standpoint. And so if you think about that and re reworking what the end goal of these major networks is, which is to create content that's more sticky, more engaging, um, they'll be using those tools to help people get better video editing, which is gonna be amazing. Um, there's also audio editing now, which is incredibly cool.

(00:05:16) - Um, there is actually a podcasting tool where you can upload a transcript and it takes your voice sample and it makes a deep fake of your voice and it reads the podcast. So you could have podcast episodes without actually saying it, but it would be in your voice, which is amazing, right? So all of these tools coming out are gonna be incredibly helpful and it gives us a place where we can take maybe a blog post or a piece of content that we write and create and turn it into something else in a different medium, which is incredible to think about. Um, there's, uh, image creation and image uh, editing as well, which is really, really awesome. We have chat and text services that are gonna be communication, which is very cool too. So when we think about all of these tools and applications, I think it's important that we first approach it from a few perspectives.

(00:06:12) - Number one, I think that when the internet came around, it made information less valuable from a general's standpoint, right? Because everything was available. And think about this. If, if you have to think about it from a perspective of a map, for example, like when I was a kid, which is a funny thing to say, I was born in 86, but when I was a kid you had to have a map book, right? And you had to know your way around because if you didn't, you would get lost and you'd have to ask for directions. And so you knew street names, you knew directions, but if you don't have to memorize maps and directions, you just look it up when you need it. So the utility of having information at your fingertips has made it so that it's not valuable to no facts anymore, cuz you can just quickly look it up, it's at your fingertips.

(00:07:05) - I have a feeling that the same kind of paradigm shift is gonna happen when it comes to content. There's going to be such a tremendous volume of content that is created just because all of these tools help us to create a lot more quickly that it's gonna just churn out a bunch of mediocre content. It's probably gonna be factually correct, it's probably gonna be a relatively good in, you know, from a perspective of is it, is it actually any good? But the question is, if you have all of this content that's being created, especially blog posts, there's a lot of tools like jasper.ai for example, that you'd give 'em a topic and they'll write content. This can be really helpful because it'll let you get, pull out a whole bunch of content really quickly. And then if you're posting content, and let's say you tell jasper.ai or chat gbt, which are two chat input, um, devices.

(00:08:02) - Create a blog post about seven things to do in my town with a dog, for example, or create a blog post that tells you about how to potty train a dog, right? You can create this content really, really quickly and it'll probably be relatively accurate. But the thing is, I think there's a lot of implications here that we need to think about. First off, if you're using chat g p t or other AI tools to create content, people might feel misled because they think that the content that you're creating was created by another human and it was vetted. So first thing I think you need to do is consider that if you were creating content or if you're consuming content, you would want to know that a person made it or was this just a AI production that they're just churning out content. And I think the intent behind how you're creating content is going to matter just as much as the people that are churning out tons and tons of content that's going to basically only try to, uh, function as a volume filler.

(00:09:15) - So I think that is gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out because there definitely is going to be value into your insights as a veterinary professional. And I think that's incredibly important. If you can use these tools to help increase the insights that you have and share those insights in a meaningful way with your audience, I think that's the way that you're gonna be able to win when it comes to creating content that is good, that helps you to achieve your goals and also build a relationship with your audience. I think that's really, really important. Uh, and that's one thing that I'm excited about because I think the way that at least I'm going to be approaching these AI tools cuz I'm a hundred percent gonna be using them. I'll give you some quick stories here on a few tests that we've done.

(00:10:07) - Um, but the thing that I like about it is it gives me a good starting place that just lets me be further ahead, right? So if I use a chat prompt to say, you know, what are the, what are the three major, give me gimme three major mistakes that people make when they create ads, for example, and chat. G p t will go out and gimme, you know, a thousand word reply to that. That's a good place for me to start. It's gonna gimme ideas, it's gonna help me with, uh, structure and it's gonna be helpful, but I don't think it's as valuable as somebody who is experienced, you know, in working with hundreds of clients and millions of dollars of ad spend, right? That insight that I have, I think is more valuable. I also think that you can become a lot more specific laser focused in who you're trying to serve, what their main problems are, and then apply the human element to that, right?

(00:11:03) - So whether it's storytelling, whether it's, uh, adding empathy and sympathizing with the people that you're writing to or your audience and just really working to figure out what are the problems that you're trying to solve for these people and how are you trying to help them? And I think when it comes to content creation or video creation or video production, I think that's going to be really, really important to something that AI cannot do, uh, for you if you think about it. So let's talk about a few of these tools. So, uh, image creation, it, there's a tool that's called Mid journeying, that's probably my favorite image creation tool that is a paid tool that you have to pay for, but it's super affordable and it does really cool results. I'll post a few of them on my Instagram. If you go to a vendor marketing podcast on Instagram, I'll post those.

(00:11:58) - But you can take a look at just how creative they are and how beautiful they are too. It's really incredible to see what it can produce and, um, as you get better at working with the prompts and knowing kind of what kind of descriptions to give it so that it'll give you kind of what you're looking for, it's just really cool because you can create anything that you can imagine, and I'm sure it's only gonna get better with revisions and things. Right now what you do is you give it a prompt and then you give it some details whether you know what kind of styling you want, but you could do anything. You could say, um, create a portrait in the style of Monet, which is like an impressionist painting, right? Uh, of a panda surfing on a longboard in Hawaii, <laugh>, like you could get as crazy as you want, right?

(00:12:49) - And create all these really cool images. The, I think the benefit of that is that you can create content that is gonna be unique and attention grabbing and allow you to be creative and get your thoughts out, um, in a cool way that you've never been able to do before. It's just like when you know, the camera came out, you could take pictures instead of having to draw or paint and then the digital camera came out, which was an bigger step, right? So each one of these tools helps us to capture and explain things a lot more quickly. And so I think it's a really cool tool and that's called Mid Journey. There are a bunch of other AI tools. In fact, Canva has one as an extension that you can do. It's free. It in my opinion is terrible <laugh>. So, uh, I found that that mid journey is much better.

(00:13:38) - Um, and I think there's just different kinds of, uh, AI image tools. One will create more artistic works, one will create more portrait styles, uh, and I think that as time goes on, there'll be more kind of niched products that are gonna perform different things. I'm sure there's going to be a marketing tool here in the near future that is, you know, really, really geared towards marketing. So that's kind of cool. And from an ads perspective, I think having new creative all the time is important because it gives people a new reason to click and it lets you test things. And so having a tool that creates ads for you quickly, um, that look really cool and are interesting, I think that's awesome. So I a hundred percent think that image creation tools are cool and will be beneficial. They also have, um, AI editing tools that are gonna help you to do things like take out the background, adjust um, your audio levels, uh, adjust your videos, do all kinds of really cool editing as well.

(00:14:45) - And I think that's gonna be a huge time saver. I'm certain Adobe will come out with a product that has AI built into it, um, for editing and make editing just a lot more easy. And in my opinion, that's a huge benefit because editing video is time consuming and it's, so if you can reduce the barrier entry when it comes to creating high quality content, that's awesome. Now, I mentioned that, um, there is a AI tool that lets you do deep fake voices of yourself. I believe it's called, uh, descript AI and I'm gonna have to double check that. Um, but I've been playing around with it and it is really cool, um, in terms of what it can do. It can automatically create clips of high impact parts of your, uh, content and just does a lot of really cool things. So if you've been thinking about doing any kind of podcasting, that might be something that's kind of cool. Again, I think people want, don't necessarily just want to hear from a robot that's talking to them. It's gonna be really, really interesting to see how the creator economy reacts to all of these new AI tools that are coming out and, uh, see what happens. But I think, I think it's just gonna be incredibly beneficial from the standpoint of reducing the friction to get into high quality content creation. Um, the other thing,

(00:16:17) - Now let's talk about some ad implications of ai. Um, recently I've been working with the pharmaceutical company and they have a product that is specific towards cancer treatment and um, they, we've been testing some different AI tools and there was this AI tool and an AI agency, which is interesting. They popped up and they said, you know, we run this AI script, it optimizes the ads and does all of these, uh, detailed different, um, calculations to figure out how to adjust the ads constantly. And it was really interesting. So we ran a test of my ad set against this AI ad set. And it's interesting because it does work constantly to try to improve the results. The problem that I see with it is that, and this is with most AI in general, is that it categorizes products in a more broad way. And what I mean by that is that they can only go off kind of what they know are vaguely related.

(00:17:23) - And if you think about it from the standpoint of like watching Netflix for example, Netflix has a pretty good idea of what you'd like to watch based on what you have watched. Uh, but typically what I find this ends up happening is that you don't really find too many cool new things, um, that you've kind of lost the freedom of discovery. Uh, and I think that these algorithms and these tools are very good at predicting kind of what is vaguely related by what has happened. And kind of what I mean by this is if, if a robot took a look at your business as a category, as as a veterinarian, they would say, this veterinarian helps sick pets and sick animals. So we see that they're getting good results with people searching for veter near me, for example. They're getting good results on urgent care searches, they're getting good results with, um, sick pet searches.

(00:18:24) - Let's start showing them to more pet owners. Okay, what a pet owner search for a lot of volume in specifically spays and neuters, a lot of volume in low cost vaccines. There's a lot. So they just try to expand into these sections that are maybe more volume, but probably less relevance into what you're actually looking to grow. And that's what we found with that test against the ai. They, we were a specific product for a specific type of cancer, only one type of cancer, right? And what it started to do was just show other types of dog cancers and pet cancers and then it started to go more broadly to pet owners. And all of these tools are typically set up to help you scale and expand, which is great if you're trying to hit a hundred percent market saturation, but for the most part, people don't have endless budgets, endless time, right?

(00:19:16) - You have to be focused, you have to be more niche down. And so I think, uh, the benefit that you can produce using any of these AI tools is going to be a really refined approach on exactly who you wanna be targeting, who you wanna be servicing. And that way you're gonna be able to cut through the noise that's gonna come out when it comes to either advertising, content creation, social creation, all of these different tools that you can use. I think you'll just have to really focus in on who it is that you ideally wanna serve, build not just content that serves them, but is actually helpful, useful, and provides insight and extracts that insight in a way that doesn't cause people to have to read through and make their own conclusions. So if you have just a huge volume of creative or content, if you can cut through that noise and distill down what it is you're trying to say and provide value quickly rather than in a long, that's a bunch of utility. And that utility's gonna help you to stand out no matter what. So I would love to hear what you think though. If you have any questions, comments, or need help with anything, please don't hesitate to reach out and I'll see you on the next episode.

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