There’s no shortage of AI tools for marketers to use.
But with so many options to choose from, it’s overwhelming to know where to start.
Which AI tools actually lessen workloads and increase efficiency? When and how should they be used?
We recently sat down with Cathy McPhillips, Chief Growth Officer at the Marketing AI Institute, in search of these answers. She shared her favorite AI tools and how her team uses them throughout every part of the event journey.
When explaining the benefit of using AI she said, “We’re using these tools to augment what we’re doing. It’s not replacing us. It’s just saving us a lot of time.”
Keep reading to learn all the AI tools Cathy finds most helpful and how you can use them to also save time before, during, and after your event.
Instead of overwhelming their entire database with irrelevant invites, Cathy’s team uses Hubspot AI to look at intent signals.
She shared, “We have 50,000 members in our database. Not all of them are going to be ready for, or able to, attend our in-person event. So we look at a lot of intent signals. Have they come to a webinar in the last six months? Have they opened up emails?
We’re doing this scoring model through HubSpot with some AI baked in to help us identify who we should be focusing on and what lists we should be pulling for emails so we’re not exhausting our whole entire database. It’s making sure we’re sending targeted, specialized messages to the right people with the highest success rate.”
Celtra is Cathy’s go-to AI tool for ad resizing. It comes in handy when you’re promoting your event across multiple channels, like an industry newsletter or a partner’s website, that may have different sizing requirements.
Instead of asking your design team for a new image, you can resize your ads yourself and then do it even faster next time since Celtra remembers your size preferences.
While speaker images with a beautiful beach backdrop or bright orange background may be fun to look at, they probably won’t match the rest of your event’s aesthetic.
Cathy uses Canva's background removal feature to align speaker headshots with the rest of her event branding. If you’re an Adobe user, they also have a background removal tool.
AI is about as close to mind reading as you can get. Cathy’s team asks ChatGPT and Claude how their email subject lines, event titles and sessions, and even their event abstract can be changed and improved to resonate more with their audience.
As an added bonus, she recommends using Agorapulse.ai to write emails and content using a specific tone or voice. For example, you can ask it to write an email as Guy Fieri or in Splash’s brand voice.
In a world of instant gratification, live updates are not just necessary, but expected.
Cathy’s team uses GlossAi to scrub their recorded sessions for key takeaways, then clips and captions them for social sharing. Cathy added that speakers love it too since they can quickly generate a series of speaker reels they can share on their own channels.
Cathy and her team like to run FAQs from their audience through generative tools like Jasper, ChatGPT, Copy.ai, and Writer to create first drafts of content they can then edit.
Afterwards, they drop the final copy into a shared document, which they quickly send out through email, social posts, or other channels they use for event updates.
How to Use AI for Post-Event Content
Cathy uses Opus Clip to quickly create shareable clips for her social channels. Her team uses these bite-sized event videos to give anyone who couldn’t attend a glimpse into the event experience and valuable content that was shared.
For a recent event, they included a CTA to purchase the on-demand recording in the clips, resulting in their highest-selling post-show recordings to date.
The Marketing AI Institute relies on Descript, an AI-powered video editing tool, to generate transcripts and clean up their post-event recordings. Cathy’s favorite feature? Whatever you delete in your transcript is automatically removed from your video. Descript also offers a dub-over feature so you can add or edit your video content on the fly.
To create content from your event, you’ll need transcripts. Cathy recommends tools like Otter.ai or video tools like Opus Clip, GlossAi, and Descript to generate these.
When it comes to writing post-event content, Cathy shared that her team specifically uses Writer to draft key takeaways. It summarizes conversations and highlights important quotes, which has cut Cathy’s blog writing time by 75%.
She cautioned that, like all AI tools, the copy always needs a thorough human edit, but a good amount of the legwork is already done for you.
When it comes to social posts, Cathy explained she’s constantly refining her ChatGPT prompts to get the best results.
Here are her top writing prompt tips for socials:
Adobe
Agorapulse.ai
Canva
Celtra
ChatGPT
Claude
Copy.ai
Descript
GlossAi
Hubspot AI
JasperAI
Opus Clip
Otter.ai
Writer
Note: If you have questions surrounding your company’s policy about AI and data sharing, contact your legal team. Marketers love an “ask for forgiveness, not permission” situation, but data privacy and security is not one of them.
To learn more about using AI in events, check out our full conversation with Cathy McPhilips. The Marketing AI Institute also hosts a free weekly Intro to AI for Marketers session.
