Hello everyone. I’m Gabe Gotay, Senior Marketing Coordinator at SAGE. Today, I’m going to show you how to use AI tools to streamline your workflow. Welcome to Promo Perspectives, a new live stream podcast from SAGE dedicated to providing marketing strategies and unique business insights for companies in the promotional products industry.
If this is your first time tuning in for a live episode, welcome and thank you for joining us. We also publish the show everywhere you get your podcast, so please make sure to go subscribe. If you’re listening to the podcast version now, make sure to register to join us for the next live stream. Viewers, please feel free to interact with each other and ask questions in the Zoom chat. Our very own Bille Foreman, VP of Marketing here at SAGE, is standing by ready to help answer any questions you may have as we go through the show.
Let’s kick off with some discussion before I hop into my demo and let’s talk about some of the concerns and capabilities. Have you ever wondered if your Nest thermostat might decide to burn down your house? For decades, science fiction has depicted AI as the antagonist, from HAL 9000 to the Relentless Terminators. And these fictional portrayals have fueled anxieties about the dangers of AI. But the reality is AI is already here, and it’s not about killer robots yet. Today, AI is helping businesses like yours achieve real results. And of course, with any new technology, there are valid questions about security, bias, and ethical concerns about how AI is made and used.
Let’s start by addressing a pretty common AI concern: Does it make people lazy? The answer is no. Lazy people will be lazy with or without AI. AI tools won’t replace the need for human creativity and critical thinking. In fact, using AI effectively requires mastering those skills. Remember when teachers said calculators would make us dumber? They told us we couldn’t rely on them because we wouldn’t have them with us everywhere. Of course, we all see the irony in that now. Similarly, AI can be a powerful tool in your kit, but it won’t do the work for you. It’s about using AI to be smarter, faster, and more efficient, just like that ever-present calculator in your pocket.
Thinking about AI in that light, let’s talk about a thought-provoking analogy from AI pioneer Andrew Ng. He compares AI literacy to traditional literacy. Think back to a time when reading and writing was a privilege reserved for the elite. The average person didn’t require written communication for their work. But then think about the societal leap forward when knowledge became democratized through widespread literacy. Just like the rise of literacy fueled societal progress, widespread AI adoption will accelerate innovation in business and marketing. The more people who leverage AI effectively, the faster we’ll see this future unfold. Unlike ancient scribes and high priests, you don’t need a secret language or code to unlock these powerful tools. If you use a computer for your daily tasks, AI can be integrated into your workflow.
So, how can you leverage these powerful tools? I’m going to hop into a demo later, but first, let’s talk about the power of proofreading for your marketing content or just anything that you’re writing in general. How many times have you sent an email with a typo so embarrassing that you felt like the floor just swallowed you whole? We’ve all been there. But beyond just typos, proofreading is about ensuring that your message is clear, concise, and polished. It’s the final step that takes your writing from good to great.
Here’s the challenge: After you’ve stared at a draft for a while, it can be really difficult to see your own mistakes. We become too familiar with the text, and our brains tend to fill in the gaps. Think back to when you finished writing an assignment for school. You might have felt really confident about it, but then you come back to it later, maybe after it was graded, and suddenly you notice all these awkward sentences and unclear arguments that you completely missed before.
This is where AI writing assistants step in and become your secret weapon. These tools are like having a personal editor on call, available 24/7 to analyze your writing and provide insightful feedback. Popular AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google Gemini can be incredibly helpful for this kind of proofreading. You just copy and paste your draft into a chat window, and the AI will analyze it for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and even things like clarity, sentence structure, and idea organization. It can help ensure that your writing delivers the message you intended to convey.
Important to remember, AI writing assistants aren’t meant to fully replace human editors. They’re powerful tools that significantly improve your process. The best approach is to leverage both AI’s strengths and your own human creativity and expertise. Write your drafts, then use the AI to catch errors, highlight awkward phrasing, and offer suggestions. With those insights, revise your draft yourself and inject your unique voice and style. This AI-human collaboration can create exceptional outcomes.
Most importantly, never rely on AI blindly. They’re excellent assistants but can still make factual errors. If you don’t read what you’re looking at, you might end up using inaccurate information in your marketing materials, which is unprofessional and could border on illegal.
In my demo, I’ll use some SAGE AI tools for promo industry uses and Google Gemini for language model-based marketing cases. There are numerous AI tools available, so let’s briefly discuss some options and why you might use each:
ChatGPT (OpenAI): Primarily known for conversational abilities and creative text generation (poems, code, scripts, music).
Gemini by Google: Assists users with professional tasks and workflows (research, writing, content creation). It can access and process information from the real world (through Google Search and other integrated Google products).
Copilot by Microsoft: Designed to assist programmers by generating code suggestions, complete code snippets, and identifying potential errors. It can also access and process public information from code repositories.
Each service offers free and paid tiers with different functionality levels. The best choice depends on your specific needs. Be aware of the privacy policies of each AI tool you’re considering. Do your research and make the best choice for you and your organization.
I was introduced to AI through Google Gemini’s beta program, so I’m most familiar with it. I’ll split my remaining time between these two tools: first, Google Gemini for general text-based marketing tasks, then SAGE tools for more promo-related tasks.
Let’s switch to Camera 2 and share my screen. Here’s the landing page for Google Gemini (first steps). How do you even get here? It’s easy – gemini.com. ChatGPT also has a simple way to get started – you go to https://openai.com/chatgpt/ and log in with your Gmail account. It’s a very basic text field, just like having a conversation.
These AI assistants are designed to respond and think like humans in the way they communicate. So communicate with them like a human; don’t think you need code or fancy technical prompts. Talk to them like you would talk to an assistant.
For the first example, let’s say we need help revising marketing content for an email. I have a saved notepad file on my desktop, so I can just copy and paste it to save you time. Here’s what I’m telling the AI: “I wrote the below copy for an email campaign going out to my customers. Please critique and review this draft.” By the way, these podcasts don’t normally have a lot of SAGE marketing, but I work in SAGE marketing and I’m giving you practical examples, so you’re going to get some of that today.
Here’s my basic content:
Introducing SAGE CRM client text messaging. This powerful new feature included with SAGE CRM Total Access allows you to seamlessly communicate with your clients via text messaging directly through SAGE Online and SAGE Web. Faster communication for happier clients…
blah blah blah blah blah.
Pretty dry, but I think it gets the product points across. I think it could be improved. Let’s see what the AI thinks.
Check this out. It gives me an improved version and explains what it improved. It changed the headline, used a stronger verb, made stronger word choices throughout, and also gives me considerations on additional ways I might want to change it.
This is pretty cool. Again, think about how when you proofread your own stuff, let alone however long it takes you to manually sit there and read it and type it, you might also need time to separate yourself from it because you might need to lose the forest for the trees. None of that time is wasted here with AI. You gave it what you have, and it immediately gave you something useful to help your marketing strategies.
Now, how can we make this even better? Well, just like with a human, you’re going to get better results the more context the AI has. Right now, this AI doesn’t have a lot of context. It has only what I gave it. It knows what I typed about the feature and it knows that I’m writing an email campaign, but it doesn’t know who SAGE is. It doesn’t know who our customers are.
So, how can we teach it? Well, really simply, I like I said, I saved this document, this text file, to my desktop because I keep this part here that I’m about to copy. I copy and paste this into Google Gemini every single time I use it to start the conversation so that we start from a place of understanding. So, I’m going to start a new Gemini chat here. It doesn’t remember anything we’ve talked about from that other chat, and I’m going to say, “I work for a software company in the promotional products industry called SAGE. Here’s our website. Here’s a URL to a page that details our Flagship software. Tell me about our company, our products, and our customers.”
Now, of course, SAGE, we don’t sell the same things that you guys in attendance sell, but you can describe to it what it is that you are selling and who you’re talking to. Give it your website, give it all these resources. And now, as you can see from this response, it understands who we are. It understands the products that we sell. It understands our customers, and it now has more context for who the target audience is when you’re asking it to help you write this content.
Let’s give it even a little more. I’m going to tell it, “One of the most popular modules in our software is the CRM. Here’s a page for it on our website. Tell me about the product, what the feature offers, and what pain points it solves for the customers.” Again, I know the answer to these things, but I’m making sure that it knows. And if you had a human assistant helping you with this, how long does it take for a new employee to really understand these things about a company? You know, they’ve got to go through all their training with you, and then they just need experience in the industry to really understand all of these kinds of things. Whereas now, this AI tool, just by copying and pasting a few things that I’ve got saved on my desktop, it is up to speed.
So now, let’s try that first example again. I wrote the below copy for the email campaign. It’s that same copy I gave it before, and bam! Not only is it giving me a lot of the same kind of general tips for improving, but it’s actually providing specific messaging that it knows is tied to my target audience. It’s quantifying how things are faster. It’s creating a more impressive and on-message piece of content for me to use.
Like I said, I never recommend using this kind of stuff whole cloth. Use it to generate ideas. Copying and pasting this revised text and turning it in is a good way to make sure that your content does not actually meet your messaging. Use it as a tool to improve your own work.
Okay, how can we take this a little further? Let’s say that we are done with the email. We’ve gotten everything we want out of the AI. We’ve improved it. That’s done. But we’re doing a marketing campaign for this new feature. What else are we going to include? Let’s say we want to include a banner ad in some kind of email newsletter. That’s going to be a format, right? We want to get across all this same messaging, but that’s a format that’s going to have less words and a shorter CTA.
So, let’s go ahead and tell Gemini, “Thanks, that was great. We’re done with the email.” By the way, you might notice the way I talk to it. Like I said, I talk to it like a human, and I may be a little more polite than you would expect somebody to be for a robot. There are a couple of reasons for that. The biggest one is, just in case the Terminator stuff does come to pass, I just want them to remember who was kind to them.
So, all right, we’re telling it, “That was great, thank you. We’re done with this email.” And then going to say, “We also need to design a banner ad. This will be a small, wide image in an email newsletter with limited space for text. Please come up with some imagery, a very brief tagline, and a CTA for this ad.”
It understands exactly what I’ve asked it to do and it’s given me not just the text, like we said these are language models. We know they can come up with great text. It’s given me a nice, concise tagline and a great CTA. But beyond that, it’s described in words the imagery that should go into the design, which is part of what I do as a marketing project manager. I am describing in words to my graphic designers the kind of thing that I want. And this is helping get my gears turning. Again, probably not going to use this specific example, like I’m not, I don’t think that the mobile phone with an order confirmed thing is the best, but it’s a good starting point. It’s getting my gears turning, and it’s helping keep the creative process moving along.
But let’s say I just don’t like it at all. What if I want another example? Well, you can just ask it again. I could just say in the prompt, “That’s pretty good, but I want a few options to consider.” And bam, it gives me another couple of options. I could do that by asking it, or if I’m lazy and I don’t want to talk to it, you can always just ask the AI to regenerate. So, if you come up here, almost all AI tools have something like this, you go to the drafts, you can see for one it considered a couple of different things before it sent me what it did, and I can look at those, or I can just click this regenerate drafts button. And bam, it takes my original prompt and just thinks about it again. And it’s always going to be a unique response because it’s not getting these responses from some database of canned answers. It’s listening to you like a human and responding to you like a human.
Do one more example here on Gemini. So, let’s say again, “We’re done with the ad. That’s great, thank you. Great ad. Now, what else would we need to do for this?” Well, we might want to create a marketing or training video for this. Now, talking about context, how is it going to have enough context about this feature to create a script for a training video? All I’ve given it is the highlights and the benefits. It doesn’t use our software. It’s never purchased our products. It doesn’t actually understand how to do these things.
This is one of my next tips: Get creative with where you’re getting the context that you’re giving the AI. So, something I’ve come to do recently that I found to be very helpful is to use transcripts from two places: Zoom and YouTube. Let’s say you held a webinar, like we did when we released this feature, where we explained exactly how it works. We shared our screens and we walked step by step through how to use this feature. That video exists on YouTube so that our customers can go back and watch it. Now, I as an employee can go into the YouTube, and YouTube creates an automatically generated transcription of that video. So now, I have text I can copy that is explaining how to use the feature.
So, I’m going to tell this AI, “We need to create a training video for this new feature.” I’m also going to tell it, “We also want to create a marketing video for this feature, which is going to be different because the purpose is not going to be to show how it works in detail, but to show in say under 20 seconds how it benefits the customer with voiceover, motion graphics, and screen recordings.” And then I’m going to tell it, “Below is a section of a transcript from a recent webinar where we unveiled and demonstrated the feature.” And now, I’ve already copied that transcript from the webinar. Just paste it in.
There you go. It takes all that context. It just read a 30-minute webinar in about two seconds and it has created a well-formatted marketing script and training video outline for me to get started on these projects. I’m not going to go through all this. I think you’re starting to understand the power of using language-based AI models to help you with creating stellar marketing content.
So, let’s go ahead and move on now to some SAGE-specific AI tools, because we’re all in promo here. If you have SAGE, if you’re a SAGE member and you log into SAGE Online or SAGE Web or SAGE Member, these features are already here and ready to be used for you.
The first one I’m going to show off was the first AI feature I believe that we introduced. It’s still one of my favorites. We have something called the Ideas Generator. So, if you’re in the product search and you know you have a client with an upcoming event that they’re going to want some promo for, and you have some pretty basic ideas of what you want to include, or maybe you have no idea yet, it’s a slow morning. You haven’t had your coffee yet. So, click on the Idea Wizard. And bam, you’ve got a space here to tell it about the event.
Talking about context earlier, the coolest thing to me about the SAGE AI tools is so much of that context is already baked into the tool because SAGE knows that you’re a promotional products company. It knows what promotional products are. We’ve trained it on so much of this context that you don’t have to go through all those hoops that I just showed you how to jump through for a more basic AI tool. So, I can tell this thing, “A client is having a company party on the beach.” I don’t know, maybe it’s a really cool company party. And it’s going to sit there, it’s going to think for a second, it’s thinking about everything it knows about companies and parties and beaches. And look at this, it’s come up with some really great beach-themed ideas. And more than just looking at the ideas, you click on these search buttons. It actually opens a SAGE product search that uses all of the search criteria needed to look for exactly these things.
But let’s say you want some more ideas. You just click this, “Get more ideas” again. And this is just like that regenerate drafts button back in Gemini. It’s going to give you a great response. Or let’s say, “Hmm, this is all beach-themed stuff. The party’s on the beach, but I want the promo to be more professional.” So, I’m going to change my thing to, “A client is having a company party and wants to provide professional promo.” It’s going to think again, and it’s going to bring up new ideas. And while this one does so much of the work for you, including giving you a button to start looking at the products, you can also just use this for inspiration. Use the AI only as much as you need to be as efficient as you need to be.
All right, let’s take a look at some of the other SAGE AI tools. So, I’ve created in here a SAGE project for a fake company, ABC Company. They’re having a party, and I’ve put in all the same metadata that you’re going to put in when you create these projects. I’ve given it a title, this client exists in my CRM with all of their information. I’ve given it a description of the project that they want some professional promo, and that I know one idea they’re heavily considering is flash drives.
So, then I’ve now created a presentation based on this project. So, talking about context again, not only does SAGE AI know that you’re in promo, but it looks at all this metadata you’ve provided. It looks at who your client is. It looks at the description of the project. It looks at the description of the presentation. It takes all of this context, and now when you come to this introduction section for your presentation, you can click, “Create intro for me,” and it is considering all of those things and delivering you content that you didn’t have to sit there and write. And again, take as much of this as you need. I always insist on just using it as a first draft. Don’t just blindly trust it, but you’ve got it.
Let’s say you’ve read through it, and there’s some specific things you want to change about it, like it’s close but no cigar, right? That’s where the next SAGE tool comes in, the AI Enhance. I’ll show you all the other places this appears, but it’s amazing. So, you can use this to take text that either you wrote yourself or that the AI created, and have it expand on the idea, make the idea sound better, make it shorter, longer, translate it. By the way, “Make it sound better” is my favorite enhance prompt because it’s it’s kind of funny that if you received that feedback where somebody just said, “I don’t know, just make it sound better,” you might be a little frustrated. That’s not very specific. But the AI is not an honor employee. It’s going to see that and go, “Okay, I’ll make it better.” And it’s just going to do it.
That SAGE Enhance tool exists all over this presentations module, by the way. Everything from the actual descriptions of the products, you can enhance those because sometimes the way that they’re entered, it might be a little dry and you want something a little more marketing focused. You can enhance your closing document, your headers, footers, terms and conditions, everything.
Where else is SAGE using AI for creative generation content? Well, let’s switch over to SAGE Member. Let’s say you are using one of our SAGE websites. Let’s say you’re creating a blog. Now within the SAGE blog, you can use AI to generate entire blogs. Same deal here, give it a prompt. Let’s say a blog about how using AI can improve business workflows. It’s just a random example. I don’t know why I thought of that. And it’s going to think for a second. But again, how long does it take you or one of your peers to write a blog? Certainly a lot longer than the few seconds that this thing is going to spin. And bam, a really cohesive, well-organized, well-structured blog with no grammatical errors and no factual errors that I’m seeing browsing through here. Again, I’m going to kind of glance through this as I’m using it and really make sure that I like the text that it’s giving. And again, I can enhance it. I can make it better, expand on it, make it shorter, make it longer, translate it. All these things.
The next, and I think this is probably one of the most exciting new features that we’ve added in a while, we can now create images from scratch using SAGE AI. You might have seen some of this stuff going around the internet. You’re starting to see AI-created images, and there’s all kinds of different tools that do it. But this tool is baked right into your SAGE account. You can actually do it here from the blog page, or you can do it from the file library. So, you click on “Generate image,” and it’s going to pull up another prompt window.
So, let’s go back to my fake company party here. I’m going to say, “A professional in a suit on the beach with office-related promotional products.” ‘Cause I think that’s a funny image. A professional in a suit on a beach, that’s classic comedy, right? Click “Generate image.” It’s going to think again for a few seconds. But man, you think it takes you a while to write a blog. How long does it take you to create a brand new illustrated graphic? This is not something where it’s taking something that exists and changing it or a design. This is a new image. It doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet. There’s no royalties that you have to be afraid of violating. It’s just there, and it’s yours. You can use this however or wherever you like.
Now, let’s take a look at how this specific tool actually did this. So, you see here, there’s this other text box. Even though I thought it was pretty nice, the prompt I gave it is actually a little vague. And what I talked about earlier, how AI thrives on context, the AI image generator also thrives on context. But we have used AI to enhance AI. So, it takes this basic prompt that I gave it and it creates a much more detailed prompt. “A professional South Asian woman in a dark tailored suit with her hair pinned up in a clean bun stands on a pristine beach with blah blah blah.” It’s so much more detailed so that it can generate an image like this. Wow, I think that’s great. But let’s say there’s something I wanted to change about it. You can click this little copy button here, copy and paste the improved prompt, and make any changes that you want.
So, let’s say that I want to make it a man just because I want to have… I’m going to save this image, but then I’m going to make another one with a man on it too. So, I’m going to go make that man… his all kinds of things… his hair is also going to be pinned up in a clean bun. I’m not going to change all that. Some men can have long hair too. And it’s going to regenerate all of these things.
There we go. And there’s our handsome man on the beach. He’s even got a desk out there. I don’t know how he brought it out. But you can include this image in your blog. You could include it in a presentation for this project that I was working on. All kinds of things. This is all promo-related SAGE AI tools. I think this stuff is super cool.
That’s kind of the end of my practical demonstration. And there are so many things that I really didn’t have time to dive into because we are just about out of time here. But like, for example, I talked about using transcripts from Zoom meetings. One more tip to throw in there: If you’re having meetings with your team and you’re assigning tasks and you’re discussing things, sometimes those meetings can feel like a waste of time if a week later you don’t remember exactly, “Oh, was I supposed to do something about that?” or “Where is this that happened?”
You can take the transcript, feed it to an AI like Gemini or ChatGPT, and say, “Hey, create a meeting minutes report. Summarize the meeting. Summarize what everybody said. Summarize the goals we came up with. And give me a detailed list of what everybody needs to accomplish and by when.” Zoom actually has this functionality baked in now, so I haven’t had much of a chance to play with that Zoom technology yet. But I’ve been doing this with the transcripts for a long time.
I’m excited to see what new AI tools come out. I’m excited to see what ways you guys start to use AI. Like I said, there’s more to talk about than we really had time for. But luckily, we are going to sit down myself and Bille Foreman after this episode is over, and we’re going to record some bonus audio-only podcast content. So please make sure you go and subscribe to Promo Perspectives anywhere that you listen to podcasts, and we’ll have that extra content there for you.
This episode will be published next Wednesday. So, if you wanted something really entertaining to listen to while you’re driving out for your Fourth of July plans, we’re here for you. Make sure to tune in on July 31st. We’re going to be joined by Jessica and Halayne from our tradeshows marketing department, and they’re going to be talking about how promotional products distributors can use trade shows to boost their business.
Thank you again for joining us today. I hope you guys got some practical advice out of this. If you have any questions, you can drop them in the chat. Hopefully, we’ve been interacting with that. And you all have a great day. Thank you for joining us.