AI-Powered Growth Team: How We’re Leveraging Generative AI Opportunities and Passing All the Benefits Directly to Our Clients
While new tech and tools can sometimes seem like shiny new toys or passing trends, it’s evident that AI has created significant opportunities in growth and marketing, enhancing workflow, output, and results.
Over the past year, we’ve been experimenting with various AI tools to enhance the quality of our work for clients. In doing so, we’re constantly gaining insight into what AI can’t currently replace, where we need to focus our internal resources, and ultimately how to strike the right balance between strategy and execution. Our goal is to deliver the best work while passing on as many benefits and cost savings as possible to our clients.
Here’s an overview of how each team at Tuff is currently working and leveraging various AI tools:
Creative Team:
If creative production were a restaurant, we wouldn’t use AI to say, “Make a pizza,” because you’d get some sort of inedible round-ish shape that sorta resembles what we only can assume is supposed to be a pizza. We’d certainly not be able to serve it to a customer. We can’t even say, “Here’s the ingredients and a recipe… now make the pizza.” But with the right supervision and coaching, we can use it to prep the ingredients, making the process of creating a delicious pizza easier and usually less of a hassle. TLDR: It’s a great resource for sourcing sources.
Day-to-day, it’s an amazing tool for jumpstarting or reviving your creativity when you’re feeling stuck. It can improve average source files and assets, within reason. Plus, it’s fantastic at blending reality with fantasy (think of a DALL-E image of your product in space, underwater, or in Switzerland) to grab attention. It also helps us stay organized and cuts down on admin tasks, so we can spend more time on the fun stuff. Here’s how our performance creative team is using AI to speed up production while maintaining top-notch quality:
Tool |
Use |
| ChatGPT(most used by CSs) | Brief outlines, script outlines, starting point for copy, brainstorming brief ideas when the creative juices aren’t flowing, summarizing hard-to-articulate thoughts/ideas into external-facing blurbs, etc.Here’s an example of a creative brief we recently put together for a client. |
| DALL-E | Moodboards, storyboards, making boring comms more fun/visual |
| CapcutCaptions.aiSubmagic(most used by Motion team) | Instantly adds captions to videos. With a few minutes of tweaking, you can correct small errors and add branded colors/fonts. This used to take hours in Premiere or After Effects, especially for longer videos. It now takes minutes.While the built-in editing features aren’t as perfect as advertised, Capcut stands out as the most effective. It even allows AI to handle rotoscoping, giving us the ability to make more interesting edits without spending extra time. |
| WellSaid | Generates voiceovers to be used in audio/video ads. Requires a lot of editing/hands-on coaching to get the inflections and pronunciations needed, but a solid alternative to pricey voice actors. Perfect for social and other lofi channels, but would not recommend for CTV or higher fidelity placements. |
| Hemingway | When writing ads it’s easy to assume the viewer knows all the nuances of products/industries too. Hemingway helps edit ad copy to be more understandable in layman’s terms. |
| Photoshop features(most used by Designers) | Photoshop’s new AI features allow expanding photos/backgrounds, removing and replacing backgrounds, and combining photos with just a few clicks. This used to be an intensive skill that took hours of intensive retouching. |
CRO Team:
Our CRO team is all about helping our clients grow using a range of tactics like: landing-page optimization, customer-journey mapping, A/B testing and multivariate testing. They are also experts when it comes to email marketing, website design, and information architecture, bolstered by analytics covering tracking, and traffic analysis.
This team comprises a diverse set of experts, including web designers, UX copywriters, and developers. They leverage AI tools like ChatGPT, TurboScribe, Natural Readers, DALL-E, Figma AI, Jasper, and Asana AI. While they haven’t fully automated everything with AI, they’ve significantly accelerated and enhanced tasks such as content drafting and refinement, transcription, background removal from photos, image resizing, and more. This has freed up time to focus on strategic and creative initiatives.
Tool |
Use |
| ChatGPT | Drafting emails, reformatting briefs, rewriting clunky content, analyzing data/finding patterns, audience exploration, task prioritization, organizing to-do lists, creating reports, developing project plans, brainstorming content ideas |
| DALL-E | Content ideas, creating mood boards, generating images of friends’ pets |
| TurboScribe | Transcribing meeting recordings or videos.
“I’ve been able to completely outsource all transcription work with TurboScribe. This is an incredible resource because I can actually listen closely during meetings instead of worrying about taking extremely thorough notes. I’ll know EXACTLY what was said in every meeting and have a paper trail I can refer to later.” |
| Natural Readers | Used to time out video and audio scripts. |
| FigjamAI | To help the initial beginning of visualizing a user flow and suggestions for direction. |
| Jasper | Helps edit, adjust tone, rewrite, shorten, and lengthen copy created by me or ChatGPT. |
| Asana AI | Summarizes my weekly tasks, which can be used to give an update on project statuses during team meetings. |
Paid Media Team:
Our paid media team sees AI tools like ChatGPT as great for enhancing your work rather than replacing you. They’ve had the most success using AI to:
- Perform research, like coming up with initial keyword ideas for search campaigns
- Uncover insights in large data sets to inform media budgets and campaign optimizations
- Generate inspiration for ad campaign copy
Using AI for these tasks saves time, allowing them to focus more on our accounts, make efficient optimizations, and dive deeper into overall media strategies. The paid team mainly uses ChatGPT for these tasks:
Tool |
Use |
| ChatGPT |
|
SEO and Content Team:
Here’s our SEO and Content team’s take on using generative AI for content and SEO:
We strongly believe that unedited AI-generated content shouldn’t be used for customer-facing material, especially not for long-form pieces or in B2B settings. People can easily spot AI content, and we don’t want our brand to come off as lazy. So, that’s a firm no from us.
However, there are a few tasks where AI tools like ChatGPT have been really helpful:
- Meta Description Writing: It’s tedious, boring, and short. Plus, Google often rewrites them anyway. Let the machines handle it!
- Content Excerpts/Executive Summaries: Perfect for summarizing existing content for blog previews or for giving a quick overview of a brief/outline to clients.
- Suggesting Alternate Content Titles: While we still tweak these a bit, it’s now much quicker and easier to brainstorm ideas.
Tool |
Use |
| ChatGPT | Brief creation; content ideation; content outlining; rewriting individual lines/grafs of content for cohesion, brand voice and tone, or similar; analyzing data/finding patterns, basic calculations for reporting, audience exploration, content summaries (summarizing entire blogs posts or podcast transcripts, for example), getting help with tools (getting directions for advanced workflows in Sheets, GA4, etc., rewriting headlines or section titles |
| Grammarly | Content rewriting, content edits, AI plagiarism checker, spell check |
| TurboScribe | AI-enabled keyword research (personal difficulty score, topical authority metric, and keyword strategy builder) |
| Ahrefs | Meta description generator |
| fireflies.ai | Recordings, note taking, and automated summary generation |
AI is a big help for our SEO and Content team by taking care of the most tedious and repetitive tasks that don’t show up in the final copy. It’s great for things like writing meta descriptions, summarizing content or topic ideas, and rewriting small portions of text.
AI is also fantastic for brainstorming. It can suggest keywords when you’re out of ideas, and then you can check those suggestions with tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
Conclusion: Let AI Handle the Tedious and Repetitive Tasks
We’re always testing new tools, and here’s our takeaway as a growth agency right now: use AI for the boring tasks that don’t add much value but need to get done. This way, we can improve the quality and speed of our work, deliver better results to clients, and free up our time for running more and better experiments.
By freeing up time, we can continue to repurpose that to deeply understanding our clients’ products, audiences, and business models, which enables us to create and implement strategies for sustainable growth. And ultimately, the more tasks we can streamline, improve, or outsource to AI, the better we can adapt our operating model to meet our clients’ evolving needs.
Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing. She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.
