Top AI Tools You Need for 2025 with Kim Garst

Is AI just a buzzword, or is it the key to leveling up your marketing in 2025? In this episode of Rocky Mountain Marketing, I sit down with Kim Garst, an internationally recognized digital marketing strategist, to explore the transformative power of AI in business. We talk about why understanding AI is no longer optional and how tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude can make your marketing more efficient and impactful. Kim shares her best practices for training AI to reflect your brand’s unique voice, ensuring authenticity and relevance in every piece of content.

Visit Kim Garst’s social media pages:

Website: http://kimgarst.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimgarst

Katie Brinkley: Welcome to Rocky Mountain Marketing. I'm your host, Katie Brinkley.

Katie Brinkley: Join us as we dive deep with.

Katie Brinkley: The world's leading digital marketing experts every single Tuesday. It's all about giving you the strategies that are working right now directly from those who are making an impact. With my 20 years of experience, I'm here to help you navigate the world of digital marketing. Whether you're looking to sharpen your skills or transform your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started on today's journey to success.

Kim Gars is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence in digital marketing

Katie Brinkley: It's amazing to think that AI, really did not hit the, I want to say the mainstream until 2024. 2024, I feel like everyone was like, all right, yes, AI is here to stay. I'm using my kids. Teachers are using ChatPT to help think of different lesson plans. Marketers are using it all the time. An AI man, it made itself known in 2024. So, you know, 2025, this is the first episode of, 2025. And I'm so excited that I was able to bring in somebody that I followed them on social media for years. We spoke on Clubhouse stages way back in the day together. we had the opportunity to speak at Agents of Change conference in beautiful Portland, Maine together in 2024 and, and also we got to speak at Social Media Week Lima and a couple years prior to that. And today's guest is going to give us really, the toolkit for success in 2025. If you've been really sitting on the sidelines and if you're sitting here saying, katie, not another AI episode, well, folks, yes, it is another AI episode. Because the longer that you resist AI in your business, the further left behind you, will be. So I brought in one of the, top speakers, one of the top social media influencers in the industry. today's guest is none other than Kim Gars. She is an internationally recognized marketing strategist and speaker that's been pioneering the use of artificial intelligence in digital marketing. She really has a very unique eye when it comes to AI, and she's leading the forefront here with this AI in the digital marketing space. she's consistently embracing the change and exploring new opportunities. So when it comes to AI, we are in good hands for today's episode, folks. And I want you all, if you're driving, be, pay close attention. If you're taking a walk, maybe get the notes app on your phone out, because you're going to want to take a lot of notes because she has really an arsenal of tools. That you are going to want to write down and it's going to set you up for success in 2025. Kim's been doing this for over 32 years. Kim, thank you so much for joining me on Rocky Mountain Marketing today.

If you don't embrace AI in 2025, you're going to get left behind

Kim Gars: I'WAS so excited to be here and dating myself a little more. But, it's been 33. We're pushing 34 years now. Dang it. But one, I think one of the advantages of the fact that I have so much longevity in the Internet space is my ability to see the next thing. And so basically what you. I really want to hammer home something you just said which is if you don't embrace AI in 2025, or if you haven't already, or you're only using it at a you a baseline level, then you're going toa get left behind. It is here that Jeannie is not going back in the bottle. It's just like in the early days of the Internet when, oh my gosh, it was scary. Like, nobody will ever pay for something online with their credit card. Well, lo and behold, well, that was not true. And then social media came along and that was scary because, like, it's just for kids. No. Right. So my point is, don't believe the things that people are saying. It's not for. Instead, find out what it is for and then embrace it, use it and solve a lot of the problems probably that you're having potentially in your business right now. So it's here to stay.

Katie Brinkley: It's here to stay. I couldn't agree more. And that's Honestly, Kim, like I said, we've had the opportunity to speak at a couple events together over the past five, six years now. But it really wasn't until Rich'event in Portland, the Agents have Changed conference that you and I sat down and started nerding out about AI blockchain. All of that were're not going to go that far down in the rabbit hole today. We're just going to stick, with AI today. But you said we've been doing this for 34 years. I started with social media, back with MySpace. It was my first introduction to HTML M code because I wanted to have a top 10 instead of a top 8. So I feel like you've been in the digital marketing world a really long time and like you just said, you've had the opportunity to see when things are on the cusp of really changing the game. And

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Katie Brinkley: that's why I'm so thankful that you were on Rocky Mountain marketing your episodes coming out at the beginning of 2025 because you've seen a lot change. You've seen a lot over the past three decades and you are saying, that AI this is the next big change. And there's so much more than just chatptt with AI.

Let's talk about why business owners should pay attention to AI

And I think that's where I want to start with our conversation today. You've seen so much change over the past three decades with digital marketing. People are starting to accept AI in some regards, but I think a lot of people are limited and think that maybe it's just the chatyptt version of AI. Let's really talk about why as business owners we need to be paying attention to so much more with AI other than just like how it can help us create social media posts.

Kim Gars: Yes. Well, first let's look at the landscape and the evolution because I think it's important for us to understand how we got here. It's like you go back to, like I've mentioned before, Internet was first launched and then you get the big next real big shift in, the online space with social media came about. There's been some other things in the mid, but we all understand the Internet started or then we got social media. We're now in that, I'll call it Web3 Space. The fascinating part is with the Internet coming on board and social media, it took a while for mass adoption and it took a while for everybody to embrace it and for it to evolve to where it is today with AI, AI is like on speed. And it is already impacting so many other aspects of, of business that you might not even understand or see yet. It's marrying itself to industries that, like in the medical field, blockchain, crypto, all of those spaces that are now able to do more faster and evolve faster because the AI is layered on top of it. So when I'm saying, and Katie's saying this too, listen, knock, knock, knock, wake up. Because it is not only on, it'not only here and is happening and it's here to stay, but it is on speed. Seriously, it is happening so fast and the ability for us to do things as marketers or business owners, maybe we don't identify as a marketer because some business owners have, they want to focus on what they do well. And so the marketing aspects sometimes fall by the wayside. So there are things you can do with AI that you don't have a skill set for. So that's the nice thing. But the point I really want to hammer home is the fact that this, this AI space isn't just necessarily about just the tool itself or even the marketing aspect. You're gonna see AI in so many aspects of our world. Like you probably already seen it, you just haven't identified it as such yet. Because like I say, things are happening so quickly and AI is just giving all industries across the board. I haven't seen any industry that's not been impacted yet by the layered on aspect of AI.

Katie Brinkley: I think that with AI its really given us the opportunity to see how fast we really can work. in a way for me it is learning how to talk to the computer. And I think that really trying to figure out what would be a good thing for me to give you, like what is a good question, what questions do you have? And just learning to back up a little bit with how I had been just barking orders at AI. The more I've understood the way to work with it, the better my outputs have been with AI.

Kim Gars: Well, I think when you're approaching AI, I think a lot of people have approached it through what I'll call a singular lane, meaning they just have a prompt. Give me this three social media posts or write a social media post about this. Or maybe it's hey, I want to blog post, three ways to do why or whatever. And there's really no context for AI. AI has all of this information. It does, it's like got every piece of information out there, but it doesn't have your information. So you have to train it in your voice, your business, I would say even your space. Because your niche if you will. Because at the beginning of starting to really leverage AI, if you don't do this, if you don't give it the U factor, then it's going to create a sea of generic content, which is exactly what I see out there. A lot of people are using it. I saw a stat the other day that like, I think it was like 74% of content on LinkedIn now as they generated stunning amount of content. Right. But the point is that most of it has no U factor, meaning there's no authentic version of you in that content. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of people are making when it comes to AI today is you do have to still it's great, but you're the creative driver,

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Kim Gars: you still have to educate it on you, your personality, the way you say things, if you have certain things that you say all the time, whatever that is, and that can be a variety of tools. It doesn't have to be like you Said a singular tool. Chat GPT. There's so many tools out there today that you can use to affect certain outcomes depending on what you're trying to do. But I really feel like it really goes back to those frameworks. AI is an evolution, it's not a singular prompt.

Katie Brinkley: I love that. I feel like that should be your quote for 2025, Kim. If you'd like, we can make a graphic for that from the podcast because that is, that's good right there. AI is an evolution, it's not a singular prompt. And I know that you have an AI community where you teach so much of this. What if people are interested in joining and learning more about AI? Where is the best spot for them to go to check out that community?

Kim Gars: Yeah, absolutely. You can go to kimgars.com community. It is a free community. There's no call, associated with it. There's some content there. You can ask questions, all the good stuff. So you can start dipping your toes in.

Katie Brinkley: Yeah, I mean, for the fact that it's free, that's even better. I can't believe it. S. That's awesome.

There's so many more tools out there for AI that can help you

So kimguars.com community and I know that you talk about a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about in today's episode in that community, but, are you okay sharing some of the, some of your favorite tools for some of today's. Okay, awesome. Yay. So I don't know if it was like, like, but it's free. But I say, I don't know if it's like a paywall thing, but there's so many more tools out there for AI that can help you. What are some of the tools that you think are the. I was goingna say like the gateway, for really taking your business to being more efficient, more effective and really harnessing the power of AI. In 2025, can we have maybe like a top five, AI tool list? Awesome. Okay, cool.

Kim Gars: We do it like, break it down into like, categories. Let's do the high level, like chat is competitors. Right. What would that look like? And so I, I think chat GPT is really great if you're using GPTs, meaning customized as. No, I hesitate to use, the word agents because technically they aren't really agents. But if you customize a GPT, which most people don't know how to do incidentally, but if you do obviously know how to do it, I think that's really great because you can teach it based. Teach it to do certain things in your business based on those customized you. But there's so many other things, so many other options out there. Claude. That's Claude. AI. I love Claude for conversational style content. I think it does just a more human vibe with your content. And so if you're wanting to write emails or things of that nature, I think it does a lot better job with stuff like that. So highly recommend Claude. It does so many other things. So I'm just brushing, brush stroking some of this stuff. One of my favorites right now. In fact I probably just did t all transparency. Hardly ever use JAT GPT anymore. I know, that's.

Katie Brinkley: Wow.

Kim Gars: I know, right? That's like what is happening right now. I never thought I would say that I've even thought about canceling my subscription because I'm like, am I using it enough? But one of my favorites is Perplexity and that is Perplexity. A the reason that I like Perplexity is primarily. I'll give you one core reason and I think everybody will get this. When you're using AI for anything, it's pulling information from everywhere. It's got all and you don't know if this information's true. You don't know where it got it. You don't know where am inn. How am I go going to fact check this? Let's say you're looking for stats for top 10 stats for your niche, right? Like for 2025. Okay, is this right? Is this real? Where did they pull this information from? So one of the things that Perplexity does is it will it search? It's a search engine. It's been my Google replacement. So it will search based on whatever input you give it and then it will cite those, those returns like whatever it returns to you as gospel. It tells you where it got that information and you can click on it and you can go to it and you can get more information. Or is this on track or is it on track target or do I need to give it more clarification so I get better information back from it? It's really good because garbage in, garbage out. But if you get good, if you give it good input, then it's going to give you good input and then if it's not quite right, you can see okay, well I didn't. My input wasn't as good as I thought it was. And so I need to clarify and you can give that, you have that back and forth with it. So I love that it also has a foldering system so I can keep track of my clients, I can keep track of my personal needs and things that I'm doing for myself, my business. And that's super helpful as well because unfortunately, which I don't understand why Chat GPT hasn't done that yet. So those are at a high level. Some of my favorites. Google is coming on

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Kim Gars: fast, which, who's surprised by that? So Gemini is absolutely, going to be a competitor. I would say we're going to see it be more influential in 2025 than it's been so far simply because it's integrated into their Google ecosystem and across the board, everywhere they are integrating it everywhere. And I would say that's true. Even with Microsoft Copilot, that's probably anybody that's in the Microsoft world, all of the AI, functionality that they're integrating it into, all of their GUI tools, their Microsoft products and things of that nature. So those are my big five.

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Checking to make sure you're getting factual information with AI is important

Katie Brinkley: I think that with what you said on checking to make sure that you're getting the factual information is so important. There's been times because I like to have statistics in when I do a lot of my solo episodes, I'll sit down with AI and try and map out like. Okay, well, I'd like to share some statistics and I found that sometimes it just makes stuff up and it's so true. We have to be very careful with it.

Kim Gars: Sounds so good. The made, up stuff sounds so good. It sounds so realistic. It. This has got to be gospel. And so many people have been fooled by it. So, yeah, you have to do some research to make sure it's told or you have to let the tool do the research for you, which I prefer.

Katie Brinkley: I guess that's a great question. How do you know what's real and what's not when you are working with it?

Kim Gars: Well, that's why I'm using perplexity so heavily because it gives me like, it'll tell me, it'll give me like Fitz pulled a video, from YouTube. It gives me the link and I can click and I can go, I can even pull that transcript in and have it specifically pull, look at the transcript. Where's the direct quote for this? So that I can see that it's actually physically there. And I love that part. So it'll pull. And you can tell it, you can tell it to pull academic paper. So if you're like looking for like scientific information, you can have it dig into that like, arena. You can have it used, videos, you can have it search the Internet. it has really become my Google.

Katie Brinkley: So do you think that's it? Do you think that's why Google is investing so heavily into their Gemini is because you've been in this, like you said, you've been doing this whole digital marketing thing for a long time now. Kim, do you think that the days of Google and Google search is going to be going away?

Kim Gars: Yes, I do. And I think that's why we're seeing, we're already seeing it there. Those of us who have been blogging for years are already seeing, massive decrease in traffic. Why? Because everybody's using AI today to get their answers. As you know, in the past we've done educational content. At least that's from my perspective on my blog. And it's now there'snn be. There is already voice, search, right, that returns AI, results. So, and I find myself guilty of it, when I do a search even on Google, I'm looking at that AI generated response at the top instead of going down to the first page of their search results to see what else is there. Because the AI return is so good and why go further? So it is absolutely going to hurt Google from the traditional perspective of how we look for solutions to problems. it's also going to hurt us as marketers from a content perspective because it's going to be harder to be a part of that ecosystem.

Camim: Businesses need to embrace AI to help them reach prospects

Katie Brinkley: So in your crystal ball camim, if you're a local business who relies a lot on maybe traditional Google search, you rely a lot on the SEO. What steps can somebody take to set themselves up for success with this new trend of how people are searching using just AI? And is there an AI kind of shortcut that they could take or tool that they could use to set them up for success as the Internet continues to change?

Kim Gars: Well, one of the things I've found with AI is it does pull from, to generate that AI response at the top. It is pulling from the top blogs. So it'll pull content and information. I'm assuming because it operates so quickly, it's very fine. It may be through a series of blog content. So having your blog, your content at the top is still valuable

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Kim Gars: and there's still going to be old school people who just, they want to, they're not going to trust the AI are going to continue to go down through the results. But I think one thing that every business owner needs to embrace now is the opportunity for your business profile on Google to have a chatbot in it, an AI chat bot. So there is now an opportunity for you to literally right there in your, when your return on Google, when your business name pops up with your business hours or whatever you have there, you can have a bot where they can engage with you right there. Or the person looking at your profile or your Google profile at that point in time can ask questions and get answers right from you. So does right there in the moment. And I think that is something we all need to embrace. because the more opportun the people who, the reality is when somebody is looking for information, they want answers now they're looking to connect. I need to know your hours or I need to know if you do this or can you help me solve this problem or whatever. And if there's not an immediate return and this is to get, this is going to get worse and worse by the way because the more people who embrace AI and have those tools in place, prospects, they're going to gravitate to those people because they're going to see, they're going to feel seen and heard and therefore they're going to do more business with those people. I call it speed to lead. So if you can quickly respond to people in a timely manner, the average response time traditionally for a digital lead, 47 hours, you've lost them. That's stunning if you think about it. And so if you can respond within a minute or less, you stand almost 100% better chance of converting that lead. So we need to use AI to help us facilitate these conversations and serve our customers or our clients at a higher rate. Faster.

Katie Brinkley: Yeah, it used to be, what was it, like a three second attention span. Now it's like a 1.3 second attention span and it's getting faster and faster. And I think that AI has only made it. Back in my day, I remember I had an entire bookshelf of encyclopedias And I would have to go and sit down and I would go through my encyclopedia to find the answer. Those days are long gone. My kids now, they just ask Alexa, you know, like, hey Alexa, what'the blah blah blah answer to this? And we're used to that instant answer, that instant gratification.

You gave us your five favorite AI tools that people can check out

So you gave us your five tools that people can check out. Will you list those off again there?

Kim Gars: So they were, of course, Chat GPT. I won't discount that because it's still at the top of most people's list. I think a lot of people though stop there and I don't realize there are other options out there. They still have the majority of the market share. But I think Claude AI is amazing. Perplexity. I probably use it more than any of the other tools at this point in time. Gemini and Microsoft Copilot is another as well. all the bigs primarily. But I think Perplexity. A lot of people don't know about perplexity yet and I do highly recommend it. I was hoping that Chat GPT, search GPT when they roll that out would be competitive, but I just don't feel like it is competitive. It's not as robust as Perplexity.

Do you train your community members on how to use AI chatbots

Katie Brinkley: Now in your community, Kim, do you guys do help train the community members on how to really ask the right questions? Because I think that is, there's times where I'll sit down and with my team and I'll say like, well, you're jumping too far ahead. You are. I don't know if you've ever seen Andrew Davis speak and he has a great talk about how to talk to a GPT, but it's almost like the GPT gets squirrel syndrome. And it's like you ask it a question, it gives you all the answers. I don't want all the answers. I just, you went too far too fast. So do you kind of help train, like train people in your community on how to talk to these AI?

Kim Gars: So like most communities there's always the free, side of things and there is content in there that's totally free inside of the community. But we also have our authority Creator Insider Community, which is a monthly membership. It is a workshop that's specific to a specific outcome. So maybe it's how do you use it to create a high converting landing page, or how do you use AI, to create amazing graphics or whatever the effect is for that month, what we're trying to help people do and then we do a step by step process for it all. My entire framework for whatever that outcome is broken down into a series of prompts, essentially. And then. But it's again, step by step. It's not like one generic, let's just get there kind of thing. It's a piece by piece to your point, so that you literally get a really good quality output versus just the generic same thing that everybody else has. So that has been very helpful for a lot of people. And we have. I think we're in our 13th

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Kim Gars: month, so there's 13 or 14 maybe workshops that we've done. And of course, when you join that, you get all the workshops, so you get access to everything we've ever done. so you don't have to pay for them. You do pay for them, like one at a time, essentially. But you get them all when you. You decide. If you decide ultimately that you want a little more, a little bit more meat can definitely do that.

Katie Brinkley: What we learned in 2024 is that AI is not going anywhere. And it's really, I wish I got the iPhone 16 for Christmas, but I did not this year. I still have my iPhone 14, but it's built in now. AI is s built into the iPhone and Gemini is built into the Android system. I mean, all AI is not going anywhere. And there's tools out there that are going to expedite your success as an entrepreneur. And I didn't even think about the AI chatbot for Google search and trying. That I think is a great takeaway. And if people are wondering like, well, how do I set this up? Is it pretty easy for them to set up this AI chat bot to help?

Kim Gars: I would like to say yes, because the reality is a chatbot can be used in. I gave you one instance of where how you could use it, but you could use a chat bot in so many instances. You can use it on an organic social. Like, you've seen all these posts where, oh, comment, comment. So and so. And I'll send you my latest podcast episode or whatever, right? And that's usually affected through a tool like mini chat or something like that. And it's an if this, then that. If they say comment this word like podcast or whatever it is, then they're gonna get the link for the latest podcast. And it's the same for everyone. Like, everybody gets the same mix, right? If somebody says podcast, they get exactly the same conversation flow. The nice thing about a bot is once it's trained and this is the differentiator, there's a lot of it, I call them out of the box solutions for chatbots but the magic really is in the training of the bot. So training it to do what you in your business, in your offers, in your voice, your vibe. And then when somebody says, hey, I want that, it's going to engage with that person in the moment. which is no different than some of the other tools like Minchat for example. But the differentiator here is that it is going to engage with that person individualistically every time. So every engagement with the next person is going to be unique to that person. So you re really are creating relationship style content or conversation, if you will, with a bot, which is, fabulous. But it's important that you train it right. And I think that's the missing component for most people is that's, well, how do you do that? Like, I don't know how to do that. And there is a framework for that that we use to educate someone's, bo. But you can use it for organic social, you can put one on your website, you can use them to book appointments. If you're a coach, there's just so many things that you can do to help. If you're a coach, for example, and you're getting ready to launch a mastermind and you. Maybe there's people who are interested, but they have questions like which people do and if they can get questions answered in the moment, in real time, and feel like they're talking to a human, even though they know they aren't, but it's just that connection. They're like, oh, they see me, they are answering my question directly. And you can educate somebody to a point where they're like, yeah, this is for me. I can tell this is for me. You can have them book a sales call and you have the final call. They've already made a decision. They're just finalizing it by booking a call. And you've done, your bot's done 90% of the heavy lifting for you.

Katie Brinkley: Yeah. And I think it's so true. It comes down to training the AI. that's the very first step that I think that everyone needs to take into, take away from this episode is that you need to train the AI with what your offer is, how you talk. you need to train the AI about you. And once it understands you inside and out, despite whatever tool it is, whether it's Perplexity or Chatptt, once it knows you, you're going to be able to then add on different layers, like, up an AI chatbot, What then adding on more and more different tools and I know you talk about all this like I said in your community kimgars.com community go check it out. It's free. It'a no brainer if 2025 we'just kicking it off. Get started with an AI strategy this year and get the tools to set yourself up for success.

Kim Gars joins us on Rocky Mountain Marketing to discuss digital marketing strategies

Kim, I can't thank you enough for joining me on Rocky Mountain Marketing today. I know you're just a wealth of digital marketing knowledge and you're always hitting the stages throughout the. So, if people want to connect with you other than joining your community, what's the best way for them to keep up with all things Kim Gars?

Kim Gars: Absolutely. Well, any place where I'm on social, on all the socials, I think for under KM Gars so

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Kim Gars: just Google me. You can find me Instagram wherever your social platform of choice is, whether it's LinkedIn, I Kim Gart there Twitter same. Does anybody go to. Yes, yes, people still go to Twitter and Instagram. say all the socials. My username is Kim Gars. Just look me up. I'd love to hear from you.

Katie Brinkley: Amazing. Well, Kim, thank you so much for joining us on Rocky Mountain Marketing.

Kim Gars: Thank you.

Katie Brinkley: Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Rocky Mountain Marketing. I hope you're leaving with valuable insights and the inspiration to lead your market. If you've enjoyed our time together and found today's podcast episode useful, I have a small favor to ask of you. Please hit that subscribe button to stay updated with the latest episodes. And if you know someone who could benefit from these episodes, maybe a fellow business leader or an aspiring entrepreneur, go ahead and share this episode with them. Let's spread the knowledge and grow together. Also, I'd love to hear from you and continue the conversation beyond the podcast. Visit me [email protected] to connect, to find more resources, or just to share your journey. And be sure to pick up your copy of my new book, the social [email protected] book. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Katie Brinkley and I can't wait to dive into more strategies and stories with you on the next episode of Rocky Mountain Marketing. Let's keep on taking your marketing to new heights.

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