Editor’s note: Jumpstart your mastery of AI tools with the Horsesmouth webinar “AI Isn’t Magic: Learn to Talk to ChatGPT the Right Way.”
The following article summarizes part of the discussion in a recent Marketing Mastermind Meeting, the monthly online roundtable for Horsesmouth Master Members led by Horsesmouth Associate Editor Devin Kropp and Horsesmouth Editor-in-Chief Sean Bailey.
Key takeaways from the discussion
- Focus AI use on tasks that would take more than five minutes to complete manually, using one of the three main platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
- Transform hours of personalized follow-up work into minutes by using AI to generate customized communications based on specific client interactions and conversations.
- For targeting clients aged 45–65, maintain a 60% traditional/40% digital marketing mix, as physical materials provide lasting impact versus fleeting impressions.
- Enhance event presentations by using AI to create interactive elements like quizzes and polls, while maintaining control over core content and messaging.
- Use specialized tools like Perplexity.ai for demographic research and Ideogram for custom imagery to create more targeted and professional marketing materials.
- Create multiple variations of event invitations and follow-up sequences to maintain consistent communication without repetitive messaging.
- Start AI implementation with event-related marketing, then gradually expand to other areas based on results and comfort level.
- Use AI to identify current client concerns and trending topics, but remember that the goal is to enhance rather than replace personal connections with clients.
A strategic approach to events and client communication
Despite the buzz around artificial intelligence in financial services, only 8% of financial advisors currently use AI tools in their practice, according to recent survey. But there are tasks that you may use now to dramatically improve your performance and interactions with your clients.
Sean Bailey: “Our core philosophy here is that every advisor should be bringing on AI as a co-intelligence as something that they work with. Whenever they’re faced with anything that’s going to take them more than five minutes, they should be turning to their AI model. When I say AI model, I mean ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini from Anthropic. Those are the three big ones. And that when you are able to cultivate an understanding of how AI models can assist you as expanding your intelligence or acting as practically like a very smart new employee or intern or even on some matters, your partner...you can use it in all sorts of things.”
Using AI to develop events
Devin Kropp, associate editor at Horsesmouth, described using AI to plan and design events.
The AI tool Perplexity.ai can jumpstart your work, she said. Devin describes Perplexity as “Google on steroids,” providing sourced, comprehensive answers rather than just links. This capability proves particularly valuable when identifying emerging concerns among your clients.
Devin: “Like you would be asking Google, what are the key pain points that this demographic is facing right now? What are investors interested in learning about? And what’s so powerful about Perplexity is it’s not going to give you a list of links like Google does. It is actually going to kind of write out an answer for you and it will source where it’s getting that information from so you can feel extremely confident that this is actual data that is coming from surveys that are out there or articles or reports that other people have done. But it’s putting it into a comprehensive report for you to read and then be able to look at those sources a little bit further.”
Devin continued: “If you really want to differentiate yourself with a super timely topic, something that’s really important to your demographic of your ideal client persona, then going to something like Perplexity and trying to figure out exactly what those people are worried about could be a really great option during the initial planning stages of what kind of event is this going to be.”
AI can also help you design the content of your event.
Devin: “If you want your presentation to be more interactive, you can prompt it to create maybe quizzes, little quiz questions that you kind of throw in during the presentation. If you’re doing a webinar, it can be those poll questions that pop up in person. You can simply ask the audience. That helps keep people engaged, keep them on their toes. It makes it more of an interactive presentation between you and the attendees.”
Sean said that you can use AI for help, including drafting introductions on your chosen topic.
Sean:
“You could ask it for some assistance in your opening remarks on that, or you could, depending upon the topic, ask for something humorous relating to it.…The AI models are trained so deeply and have become so fluent in their understanding that you’ll be quite surprised and even tickled.”
Sean described how an advisor taking part in a Horsesmouth AI training session talked about a shredding event being planned for October, complete with beer and an oompah band. Sean turned to AI, asking it to suggest some funny names for the event, one of them being “Shred-Tober-Fest.”
“The point is that you can have some fun with these things,” Sean said.
The marketing mix: Digital vs. traditional
Sean advocates for maintaining a significant traditional marketing presence alongside digital efforts.
Sean: “I would say you would lean like 60% traditional, 40% digital. Do not give up on print advertising. You cannot go 100% digital in my view, and really be remembered. You’re fighting for a line in somebody’s email box or a five-second view as people are scrolling through their social media feed...it’s the message that it delivers that, oh, Sean is sending me key financial data 2025, right? Sean’s my financial advisor, he’s on top of this stuff.”
Personalized follow-up at scale
One of the most powerful applications of AI involves post-event follow-up. Devin described how AI can transform this typically time-consuming process:
Devin: “You can have ChatGPT kind of create these custom personalized emails to send out to each possible referral instead of sending out kind of the blanket email that you’re going to give out to everyone. So maybe you have some notes about you talked to this person about this or this person about that. You can upload all of that into ChatGPT, have it create these personal follow-up notes where if you were going to do that or someone on your team was going to do that for 10 people, it could take you a couple hours to get those situated. But you could have it done in a few minutes with ChatGPT.”
Implementation strategy
Ways to start using AI for event-related marketing:
- Use AI to analyze target demographics and identify pressing concerns
- Generate multiple versions of event invitations with varying tones and hooks
- Create supplementary materials like quizzes and handouts
- Develop personalized follow-up sequences
- Generate custom action plans for different attendee segments