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In this episode, Dr. Hales and Chuck discuss:
*The role of AI in content creation and its assistive capabilities
*Using AI to create content from interviews and establish topical authority
*Leveraging AI for content analysis, optimization, and adapting content for different formats
Key Takeaways:
“AI is a buzzword, but the way I think about AI for marketing is that it helps us do marketing smarter and faster. It’s an assistant to help us.” – Chuck Aikens.
Connect with Chuck Aikens:
Website: https://chuckaikens.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckaikens/
X: https://x.com/chuckaikens/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chuckisaacaikens/
Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Show website: www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com
Email: Barbara@TheMedicalStrategist.com
Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist
YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales
TRANSCRIPTION (164)
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today we have with us Chuck Aikens, founder of Tymoo and a seasoned expert in content marketing and leveraging AI. For those who may not know, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, a buzzword nowadays. With over two decades of experience in website development, search engine optimization, and digital marketing, Chuck brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in creating impactful branded content that connects with your target audience.
In this episode, he’ll share his innovative approach to content strategy and reveal how entrepreneurs and marketers can harness the power of AI to elevate their brand presence and connect more effectively with their target audience. Chuck will also introduce his Tidal Wave Content platform, a comprehensive suite of training, coaching, and processes that help brands create consistent, engaging content across multiple channels using AI-assisted tools. Welcome to the show, Chuck.
Chuck Aikens: Well, thank you, Barbara. What a great intro.
Integration of AI
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, there’s a lot to be impressed by. You’ve done quite a lot. Chuck, you’ve been in the digital marketing space for over 20 years. How has the integration of AI changed the landscape of content creation? Because that’s all we seem to hear about now. Nowadays, instead of creativity, it’s like the computer is assisting us in doing everything for us. What is your feeling about that?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so, you know, 18 months ago when OpenAI released ChatGPT, it did change the landscape. AI was around before that, and I had been using AI products in content development and marketing, but ChatGPT opened it up to everybody. It got everybody thinking about how they can prompt AI, how they can get rid of some of the work they don’t like doing, how they can plan their vacation, how they can find a recipe. So, yes, AI is a buzzword, but the way I think about AI for marketing is that it helps us do marketing smarter and faster. It’s an assistant to help us. It should not replace creativity. It should not replace the human element. At best, even years from now, I hope that we maintain a balance of no more than half marketer, half machine. We need to stay in control of marketing our businesses, brands, facilities, and practices.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Absolutely, but it does give us some good ideas. I’m waiting for the time when it does the dishes and vacuums the floor.
Chuck Aikens: Yes, it needs to put the laundry from the washer into the dryer and go to the grocery store for me. Then we’re onto something.
Foundational Work Before Using AI
Dr. Barbara Hales: Many people jump straight into using AI for content creation. Why do you emphasize the importance of foundational work before leveraging AI tools?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so all of us have probably tried it. We’ve said something like, not “Hey Siri,” but you know, “Hey Claude, hey ChatGPT, make me a blog post, write an email,” whatever it might be. And you know, when you access a large language model in generative AI, you’re accessing everything that has ever been written or thought about. Billions and billions of parameters in a large language model just put words together. The reason you need foundational documents, which for me include things like: Who is your target audience? (There might be multiple personas.) What is your brand promise to them? What are the pain points and value propositions? What’s your tone and voice? What about your practice or what you do as a doctor? All these inputs are built into foundational documents before I ever start prompting. Then, when I prompt the large language model or ChatGPT, it has a direction to go. It knows what I’m trying to do and doesn’t run off in different directions. It stays on-brand, on-message, on-point because you’ve taken the time to document that.
You do the same thing with an employee. If you hired a consultant or talked to your lawyer, you wouldn’t let them just do whatever. You tell them what you want, you write it down, you send an email. You have to instruct and interact with the large language models and ChatGPT the same way. So the real work is before the prompt, and by the time you get to the prompt, you’ll get better outputs if you’ve taken the time to put together a strategy, voice and tone, target audience, and personas. I work with businesses, brands, and people. The first step is to identify your audience. From there, we can do different things with your content marketing.
AI Naming
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, let’s be honest here for a moment. Have you named your AI?
Chuck Aikens: I have. I have a piece of AI that I’m working on. It’s actually called CMO Charlie. CMO Charlie can send some emails, and there’s a little chatbot. But yeah, I’ve named my AI. I also have personas for myself that I use in my marketing and with clients. Naming and avatars and personas are a big part of marketing and should be a big part of content marketing. It should be something that you can give to AI.
Micro-Segmenting Using AI
Dr. Barbara Hales: You mentioned the importance of micro-segmenting your audience. Can you elaborate on this and explain how AI can help in this process?
Chuck Aikens: In that realm of personas, you could have a lot of different personas. It could be patients, for instance. That would be a persona. You could also have a persona for a front desk person or an admin if you’re putting out a wanted ad. This idea of looking at the different folks you want to interact with, whether you micro-segment your clients, your patients, or different people you might be interacting with, thinking about who is receiving your communication is key. You can’t do enough work with this.
Tidal Wave Content Concept
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that’s very good to know. Can you explain your tidal wave content concept and how it helps brands create more effective content strategies?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so the idea is that if you’re going to become an expert in your particular space, whether it be knee replacement or, let’s say, dentistry, you need to be seen as an expert and someone that’s helpful. To do that, I teach a concept of having a wave of content that is informational, answers all the questions, and explains how you’re different. It also lets people experience you, whether that’s via video or other produced content, so they can have that human connection.
What I’m actually doing is the classic marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. People go to the internet looking for the remedy or treatment for their pain. They have a lot of choices, so it’s about awareness of your services and ultimately deciding to visit you. This wave of content that needs to be produced includes search, website, social media, video, audio, and photography. It’s not just one prompt or one email; it’s all got to work together. That’s the approach the tidal wave takes in helping people market themselves.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Why is each content wave important in and of itself?
Chuck Aikens: So what I just explained involves three waves. There’s the awareness informational wave, which is usually simple things like FAQs or symptoms and treatments. It’s very informational, low effort but high frequency. The next wave is a bit harder; it’s about differentiating yourself and showing how you specifically solve pain points and why someone would choose you. This requires more effort and is less frequent. The last wave, which is a lot of effort but low frequency, might be a video of you talking or a Q&A with a patient. That human connection is why people would choose to reach out to you or become a patient. These waves have different goals—awareness, consideration, and conversion—and you need to think about each one differently and how you produce and market them.
AI Processing for Content
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you walk us through your process of using AI to turn a simple interview or conversation into a full content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, no, this is one of my favorite techniques. And it starts at that connection level, often through a 45-minute interview. By me just asking some simple questions and you answering them, hopefully with good answers and verbose, but coming from you, we can transcribe it and develop content that comes right from your voice and thoughts into video clips, social media posts, blog posts, or articles.
When you combine the words, knowledge, and expertise that come directly from you via an interview with the informational content that can be somewhat built through large language models and good prompting, the combination of these two types of waves goes a long way. It introduces people to you through a query that maybe they read something, but then they get to experience you, which is just something that has to happen. They need to know who you are. So that’s how I would start with an interview and then use that to create ideas. Instead of doing keyword research or topical selection, let’s figure out what you’re truly passionate and expert about and let’s go talk about that because that resonates with folks depending on what their particular situation is.
Competition
Dr. Barbara Hales: How can small businesses and solopreneurs use AI to compete with larger companies in terms of content production? You would think with their large staff that smaller companies and smaller businesses just would not be able to compete with them.
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so just using even the interview example, a large company has a hard time getting their CEO or visionary on video and then turning that into content. As a solopreneur or as a single practitioner or if you have a small practice, you can be more nimble. What used to take five or ten hours with AI can be done in an hour or two. So this ability to leverage AI to come up with ideas and give you some base copy or use it to write transcripts and extract ideas means you can be much more nimble and not need all the coordinators, staff, and fancy tools that larger content providers, like WebMD or Healthgrades, or even hospitals, use. You can compete if you niche down and have a voice, talking about what you can truly be an authority on. If you micro-segment your audience, the way you compete is by being nimble but also having a smaller target and then being the best in that pond. That’s a way you can compete and rise above the noise on the internet.
Topical Authority
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that certainly seems like the way to go. How do you approach creating content silos or topic clusters to establish topical authority in Google’s eyes?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, it’s going to be similar to how you need to be relevant or resonate with someone who has a particular ailment or situation. You’re going to do the same thing with Google. All Google wants to do is put who it thinks is the best person, doctor, or practice at the top of the results. The way to do that is to show them that you know the most about a particular subject matter. So creating a content silo, which could be a set of five or ten pages or blog posts, starts to establish that you are helpful in your content production and comprehensive, making you a great resource.
Google uses a concept called E-A-T: expertise, authority, trust, and experience. I got those out of order, but it’s trying to find real people who have real experience and expertise that it can trust as an authority. The algorithm is looking for this. If you can put that out there as a doctor or as a small practice, you can be rewarded with search visibility on Google as a topical expert.
Leveraging AI For Opportunities
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you leverage AI to analyze competitors’ content and identify gaps or opportunities in your own content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, the easiest hack to do is, whatever the topic or specialty you’re in, go look and see who’s at the top of Google and see what they’re covering. See the words and topics they use. It won’t help you find a gap, but it will establish table stakes. If you look at the top ten results, which is where all the traffic from Google comes from, you’re going to have to replace one of these guys to be in the top ten. So you need to gather an understanding of how other websites, brands, practices, and doctors are covering the topic. You can either do the same thing or, more importantly, do it a little better or fill in a gap that’s not being covered. AI can help you analyze that. There are a lot of tools and technologies that will process large amounts of data quickly. With the right prompt or tool, you can find these gaps rather fast.
Chuck’s Strategy
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you walk us through your process of using AI to turn a simple interview or conversation into a full content strategy?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so specifically, I got watched you through it a little generically a minute ago, but yeah, just yesterday or in the last week, there was someone I was helping. They have a dog training business and are always outside training the dogs or the dogs are going in the kennel, whatever it might be. So I got him on the phone and said, just talk to me about the types of dog behaviors you are working on in adult dogs. He started rattling off all the things he does every day, everything he’s passionate about. Out of that came five blog posts and three video clips because I had him on Zoom just like we are right now.
Social media posts, this content silo around adult dog behaviors that a professional dog trainer can help with. One interview, 45 minutes of content, just little sound bites here and there led to blog posts where the owner and trainer was quoted, video clips, and different things. AI was able to read the transcripts, come up with the ideas, help me understand the timestamps for me to send to the video editor quickly, just help me work through it. It’s the same thing I used to do, but to do an interview to build that wave of content in the old days when I had the agency or if I did it by myself, you might be talking about ten hours of work. It now can be done in 90 minutes. That’s how AI can help you get more done. As an assistant, it does the same thing that we used to do, but it just took a lot more copying, pasting, and typing.
AI and Personalities
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you get your AI to speak in your voice and know your personality?
Chuck Aikens: There are a couple of ways. I’ve played with having AI do some of my work for me, like answering emails and stuff. In the email example, what a piece of AI software would do is go back and read the emails that I’ve written for the last two years. That’s one example. The other example, and they call it RAG, is the equivalent of having a knowledge base. If I want AI to write and sound like me, I can give it all kinds of examples. Right now, with Claude projects, you can load like 5,200 documents in this knowledge base written by you or examples of how you talk. I’m a pretty formal, structured talker, right?
You would be surprised if you know, like you would know if something’s coming from me, very linear, right? It would pick up on that. I can also give it instructions on how to write. Whether it is actual guidelines, voice, and tone that you can create, like writing this way, writing in second person, writing structured, whatever it might be. It can also just analyze things that you’ve already done to arrive at that. You’re not trying to trick AI or make people think that it’s you. It’s just easier to enrich and edit the copy if it starts out in your voice because it should always be behind you as an assistant. You should be reviewing, adding to, and taking things out of anything that gets produced. But man, it’s easier if you have a good starting point.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Have you ever heard your AI laugh at a joke?
Chuck Aikens: I have not. I’m not that funny.
Using AI for Headlines
Dr. Barbara Hales: How do you use AI to craft compelling headlines that capture both the essence of the content and entice readers to click? You know, how do you get that hook?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, hooks are hard, but AI can be clever. If I have the copy all done and I might take it to social media or I’m looking for an email subject line or maybe it’s a LinkedIn headline, whatever it might be, what I tend to do is ask AI to brainstorm between seven and nine. If we have to pick a number, let’s go with nine. Look at nine hooks for me. Then I look at them and pick three of them and say, “Okay, I like these three. Now write the one for me.”
This process of having it brainstorm and then telling it what you like a little bit to make a final selection is a good process to go through to arrive at the hooks. Only you are going to have that intuition as to what might creatively hook somebody. AI can take direction and be creative and try to do a hook, but you’re going to know a good joke, a good hook when you see it. Even if you don’t pick the best one, you pick the second-best one. If you start with nine, get down to three, and pick one of them, it’s probably going to be a better hook than if you just randomly thought of something and didn’t go through the thought process real quick.
Strategies for Adapting Content
Dr. Barbara Hales: Can you share some strategies for adapting content for different formats like blog posts, social media, or email newsletters using AI tools?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah, so I have prompts for, and there’s prompts out there that, once you have something that’s long format, by using prompts. You can produce an excerpt for your newsletter, a LinkedIn post, Facebook post, or even a tweet. This ability to take a large format piece of content and then shrink it down to different formats is something that AI does really well. You can even say, like, “write me a 75-second video script so I can do a talking head about the blog post concept.” So you have the ability to take long form down to short using prompts and tools. But in the interview process or a quick sound bite or video clip, I can also expand. If we’ve talked about something like a wave of content, I could take 30 seconds of a video clip, feed it into AI and have it write a blog post around the concept that I was talking about for review. This ability to compress or condense and also expand out concepts is something that AI does really well when prompted.
Chuck’s AI Tips
Dr. Barbara Hales: Okay, so our listeners may be saying, I have no experience with AI. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know how to use it. Do I actually need it? I’m at a loss here. So for those people, could you give us two tips that they could implement right away to bring them up to speed?
Chuck Aikens: Yeah. So first you got to use it. Go to OpenAI, go to Claude, set up an account. I would even encourage you to spend the $20 a month because that is cheap for what you’re accessing, but start out with a free account. First, just do it. Now, where I tell most people to start is not in their business, it’s in their personal life. Just take something from your personal life, or even something you don’t like doing in your email or answering somebody. Take these real simple use cases and try to plan a vacation, build a shopping list, just learn how to talk with it. Like, you know, how I had to learn how to talk to my teenage daughter. You just need to learn how to interact. There’s no right or wrong way. Just understand how the interaction takes place.
When social media first came out, we all had to figure out what is Facebook? What is IG? What is TikTok? You have to understand the ecosystem. Just interact with it, and then pick simple use cases. I encourage people, don’t start with trying to grow your business. Start with getting rid of the things you hate. We all hate different things. Some of us hate creative work, some of us hate vacuuming, some of us hate planning a dinner party, whatever it might be. If you can start to use AI for things that you’re trying to solve, things you’re trying to get rid of, you’ll eventually be able to understand how it works and then move over into making it an agent of change, something that can make your business and your life better. But it often starts with just solving simple problems.
Dr. Barbara Hales: And the second tip?
Chuck Aikens: The second tip would be, if you’re more advanced and you are ready to start thinking about this from a business application, start with the foundational documents. A little bit of a pitch here, but there’s no money involved. I’ve built free tools on TidalWaveContent.com. If you sign up and go to tools, you can build a persona. I ask you 10 questions. You answer them, and you have a persona. If you want a voice and tone, I take you through some word choices and some pictures, and then you have a voice and tone. I believe that having these helps you start interacting with AI. So I’ve provided those tools free of charge, and just by signing up on the website, you can get access to them.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Which is easier? AI or teen talk?
Chuck Aikens: Oh, boy. Actually, for me, AI is easier, but I’ve learned a lot. She’s 17 now, and I’ve had a couple of years of practice, so I’m doing pretty good at the teen talk too.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, this has been thoroughly fun and interesting speaking with you today. This is another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. We’ve been speaking with Chuck Aikens. Thank you so much for being here with us today and till next time.
Chuck Aikens: Alright. Thank you, pleasure. Bye.
