Santi says: “AI is changing the game for agencies.

My team and I ran a survey of over 200 digital agencies at the end of last year, and we found that AI is really changing the way that they do business. It's specifically changing how they go to market as well as how they speed up their most time-consuming workflows. We found that 87% said they expect it to really speed up how they do their job day to day, and that's specifically within the realm of SEO and implementation and content creation.”

How would you summarize where we are at the moment early 2024 with how AI has changed the game for agencies so far?

“So going back to this survey that we ran, at the end of last year, we asked them to look into 2024 and tell us what they expected. One of the most interesting findings, in my opinion, is that they expected AI to actually help them go down the market and serve more diverse clients. I think that's a real testament to the time and cost savings that AI can offer for an agency.

AI can really speed up some of those most time-consuming workflows, and give you that time back to offer more value to be able to reach more and different types of clients than you might have been able to do before. I think that's really exciting and it's a huge opportunity that agencies should and can be taking advantage of this year.”

I would have thought if you went down market, then you're probably opening yourself to more competition, more people doing the same thing. So do you not view it as a challenge to differentiate what you do if you do that?

“There's always a challenge with differentiation, especially when you're dealing with more price-sensitive clients, but I think that there are a lot of ways that can think about that.

So it may be an entry-level for your agency, where you can acquire clients at a lower price point with a goal to upsell them, nurture them, and build them up in the future.

With AI, because you can save 5 to 10 times the amount of uptime on things like SEO, implementation or content creation, you can offer those services to more clients. Yes, there's more competition, but at the same time, you can tap into a market that you weren't tapping into before, and you can use that as a kind of upgrade path or an upgrade flow.”

So is it something that you could potentially fully automate, but then lead them towards something that is more human-centric?

“Exactly, absolutely.“

Are there any activities that you would never want to use AI for?

“LLM AIs are good at certain things, and they're not so good at other things. So the main area that we're seeing agencies using AI today is in content creation and SEO implementation. There are a lot of tools available that make it easy to automate those particular activities.

Metadata implementation is a fantastic use case because it's something that takes a lot of time and is also something that maybe you don't even offer that yet as an agency. But with AI tools, you're able to do that very, very quickly. That's not even talking about ChatGPT, which you can use to generate metadata and copy-paste into your website building platform, and into the relevant fields and get that SEO metadata implemented very, very quickly. But you can actually do it even quicker with your website-building tool.

These tools analyze the content of the pages, which is something that AI is particularly very good at, as they understand and can summarize the contents of the page and put it into an excellent meta description for that page very, very quickly. There are some tools that can even do this in bulk where you can pull all the pages for your site and generate all of the meta descriptions, all the titles, all the texts, even, for all of those things at once, and then just review them and publish them.

But that's where the caveat comes in. So obviously, LLMs are good at summarizing content, making sure things are grammatically correct, punctuation is correct and everything like that. but there’s also things it's not so good at. So even though you might ask it to give you a meta description with a certain character limit, it's not always going to be within that limit. That's where it can speed up the time that it takes to generate that content, but you still need to review it, you still need to validate it and make sure that it's within the recommended limits. For me, that's a good example of where there's a lot of time savings but there's also some downsides.”

Would you always advocate being open and honest with your clients about what you're using AI for?

“I totally advocate for being transparent and open with your use of AI, but I think that at this point, it's expected. Our survey of agency owners found that 100% of them were already using AI to some extent, and we know that that's true with consumers as well, we know that everyone's using AI. So it's important to be transparent, to be ethical in our use of AI.

But I also think it's important for you to have human oversight, so that you’re not, for example, generating hundreds of meta descriptions without having someone look at it, fact-check it and tweak it as needed.

When I think of AI, it's not meant to replace you. They aren’t meant to replace human ingenuity, human creativity, and kind of our gut checks. It's meant to accelerate the process and get it that much quicker, but you're still looking at it, and you're still reviewing.

So we're not telling clients we're generating all these meta descriptions, but we're not looking at it. That wouldn't be an ethical use of AI.”

I'd love to get your thoughts on the optimal use of AI within content creation.

“My background is in writing, so I love AI and I use it every single day in many different ways.

One of the ways is we create an original piece of content, for example our webinars, and we'll record them and then feed the transcript into ChatGPT. That will produce a blog post or another piece of content from that original piece, which we can then tweak and post it.

We find that can be a great way to get content repurposed, to essentially create a lot of different pieces of content from one bigger, original piece. I think that that's a fantastic use case.

I also use it a lot as a starting point. I use it a lot for initial first drafts, for example, if I'm writing a case study, recording that conversation, and then I'll feed that into ChatGPT and have it produce a transcript, have it kind of organize it a little bit. After that I’ll take it and move it to the next level, because it's really not telling the story.”

Are there any particular AI tools that are most appropriate for agencies at the moment?

“In the survey that we ran at the end of last year, we found that most people were using ChatGPT. Since then there's been a lot of new tools that have come on the market, and there's a lot more adoption.

The AI tools which are especially helpful for agencies are normally embedded within the tools that they're already using. So an example would be things like their website builder where you can write some copy in ChatGPT and then copy-paste to your website. You can do all of these things with different tools, but when it's really embedded within your workflow in the platform that you're already using, that’s when you can compound the time savings.

There are a lot of different platforms that do this. Social media posting platforms like Hootsuite have their own AI integration that allows you to generate social media posts right within their platform, and then you can tweak it and add to it without task switching, without switching platforms, all within your existing workflow. You can do that on the website building side too.

Another place where we see a lot of time savings for agencies are with these integrated content assistance features within AI SEO tools. They're already analyzing the content of the page, they already have integrated prompts, and you don't have to spend a lot of time engineering prompts they're already kind of built-in. That allows you to populate the content on the site very, very quickly.

Obviously the majority of these should be used as a starting point, because it's a better placeholder than ‘lorem ipsum’, which is, a lot of times how we're filling out sites with placeholder content when it's not ready. You can use AI to create that placeholder content very, very quickly, and it's a great starting point that can then be edited and revised going forward.”

How do you actually keep on top of what the best AI tools are to use?

“The challenge of us being in marketing is that there are so many options out there.

One of the great ways to start is by looking at the tools that are already available to you, like the things that your existing vendors are providing. That's a great starting point to kind of spark your idea of what's possible, what you already have access to, and what you can already be taking advantage of, because you can't know everything.

It’s also just good to talk to your colleagues, share information, and plug yourself into local AI and marketing groups to hear what others are using and where others are seeing success.”

What is the future of the agency model when it comes to AI? Is AI disrupting agencies and making more people go in-house or is it simply just changing agencies?

“There was definitely a fear of that. It's something we heard when ChatGPT first launched over a year ago. We heard concerns, and as a writer, I heard some concerns about AI going to replace this function too. However, as I’ve worked with AI a lot more, I’ve learned that really, I don't think it will replace, it's more about embracing AI.

I run a content team at Duda and that's the approach that we've taken. We've jumped right on board and adopted AI within our workforce, and we've seen the limitations and seen that you really do need human oversight. You also need someone to provide the comprehensive marketing strategy that then guides the tool. AI is really just a tool, it’s essentially just like marketing automation and any other tool in your arsenal. It's the outcomes that you get that are very dependent on the person that's using it.

So if are you able to provide that comprehensive strategy and provide value beyond what AI can provide, then I think that's the real differentiator for agencies. If an agency can use AI to help them accelerate their processes, then they can reallocate that time to focusing on delivering real differentiated value that AI can't replace.”

What are some agency tasks haven't been impacted by AI so far, but might be impacted over the coming year?

“Some of the big case studies we're already seeing are things like SEO, content creation, image generation, and content personalization. But where I'm starting to see a lot of people using AI in really cool ways with custom GPTs is really to help manage their clients and the whole client lifecycle from start to finish, from getting them onboarded all the way to managing them and having an ongoing process for that.

One of the ways that you can do this is when you first onboard a client is having an opening of a chat for them within ChatGPT and putting all of the information and context that you need within that chat function.

There are also ways that you can use the APIs of your existing tools, like SEO tools and your web builder tools, to feed all of that information into one dossier for your client that allows you to continue prompting and getting more and more valuable content or recommendations from the AI chatbot that is customized to your client.

Doing something along those lines can be a really great way to help accelerate your workflows to help you build out client management that's a little bit more automated, but still has that human touch.”

What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“I think a lot of SEOs and agencies are obviously worried about how AI is going to change the search game and I think that it can be counterproductive to spend too much time worrying about that.

It's important to consider the implications and keep up to date with what's happening in the SEO industry. But at the same time, go back to the basics, and create great content that's truly valuable and helpful for your customers whether or not you're using AI to produce that content.

That's really what it comes down to: creating truly valuable, useful and insightful content.”

Reminds me of the age-old trap for digital marketers: don't be led by this fancy new tool that's come along, be led by your customers and your own strategy that you're putting together.

Santi Clark is the Director of Content and Communications at Duda, and you can find her over at duda.co.