50 | 7 Steps To Building a Marketing Campaign Using ChatGPT by Andrew Bolis

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I've got an exciting show for you today. I talk to a lot of business people, business leaders, and marketers specifically about AI usage, and too many of them jump straight into generating content. Why? Because it feels, and it is to an extent, the low-hanging fruit. You can use generating AI, whether Chachupiti or Bard or Claude or a specific dedicated tool like copy.ai or one of those to generate content, right?

0:37You can generate images through Dali, you can generate blog posts, you can generate posts for social media, et cetera. But the reality is that's the final step in the marketing process, right? There's a lot of many steps before that actually generative AI does extremely well from the research phase to analysis, to defining the needs and the pain points of people and so on. There's multiple steps in which you can use generative AI to get better results than you're getting today and most likely faster than you're getting today. Our guest today, Andrew Bolas, has been in marketing his entire career, and I'm talking about a couple of decades.

1:19And he started as a marketing intern and he worked his way through the ranks, all the way to being a CMO of a SaaS company, and anything in between. He took roles and responsibilities of every aspect of marketing. So now when he's in this past year combining it with AI tools, he's not just, oh, I got this AI expertise. He brings in a very deep understanding of marketing across all its aspects and capabilities. And currently, he's holding fractional CMO positions in several different businesses across different industries, helping them implement AI in marketing to increase their efficiency and improve their results.

2:00So I find this very exciting. Grab a pen or a magic wand and get ready to learn some serious AI marketing magic. Andrew, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:52Thank you for having me on the show. Excited to be here and excited to talk about how to use AI for marketing. And as you mentioned, beyond just writing content or generating design, how to use it for sort of full-blown marketing. Fantastic. So before we dive into the AI stuff, Let's talk about the steps, right? I said there's multiple steps. I'll let you go through the steps before people actually write content. And to be fair, what happening after you write the content and share your stuff. So let's walk through the steps. And then let's dive into each step and how you can use AI, how people can use AI, what tools they can use, what prompts they can use in order to get results.

3:33Yeah, that sounds great. And actually, these steps, I came up with them from doing marketing campaigns myself. At one point, I was managing a team of campaign managers. So as we look at these steps, they work not just for campaigns, but any good marketing and even sales. You have to do these steps before you start doing anything really effective in business. So just to quickly say the steps, step one, ICP, research. Step two is ideation. Step three, campaign plan. Step four is copywriting. Step five is design. Step six, channels. Step seven is execution. And then there's a sort of a bonus step at the end, which is just looking at KPIs and how everything's performing.

4:21I'll say two things for those who are listening who are not marketers. ICP, the very first step is ideal customer persona. Basically, how do you specify your target audience in the most optimal way? And I'll say something about your last bonus step. In my eyes, that's the most important step in business growth is to actually understand what you're doing, how it's working, and whether it's working so you can make data-based decisions versus just shoot from your hip and follow your gut. And so I love your steps. And really, let's dive right in. So you started with ICP research. How do you use AI to do that?

5:04Sure. So you have to really understand your target audience, what they care about, what your sort of ideal customer profile looks like. And in this case, we're going to do this using chat GPT. So if you're going to use a prompt, it could be something very simple. Here's one that you can use. ChatGPT analyze and summarize the ideal customer profile for a SaaS business that specifically targets e-commerce companies and briefly summarize the key strength and weaknesses of my top three competitors in the SaaS space. So what this does is it allows ChatGPT to capitalize on all the publicly available information it gathered in the model.

5:55and find you all kinds of interesting insights specifically for that segment that you can then use later on in your marketing and sales and business. I like it. I like it a lot. I'll add two things. I don't know if you've seen that. OpenAI themselves share their best practices for writing better prompts. And two things that they're saying that are relevant to what you just said. One is to use external capabilities, not just in the model. So as today, ChatGPT can browse the internet. So when you give it your three competitors and you give their website links, ChatGPT can actually go and check out those links and see the data that's there.

6:35And if you be more specific of landing pages that they have or specific marketing materials that your competition is using, you can refer ChatGPT to that. The other thing that they're saying that relates to the same thing is that if you give ChatGPT reference materials, you will get better answers. So this touches on the same thing. If you have your competitors or even your own marketing brochures, background on the business, the about page of you or your competition, anything like that, that you can add into the prompt, will get you better, more specific results, which is what you want to do when you try to figure out who's your target audience.

7:15Yeah, I really like those tips. I did see those. And I think a lot of them too are because it's a large language model so while it has access to so much information so much knowledge if you don't almost limit its options or give it very specific constraints often you just might end up getting something that's irrelevant or not really usable so yes I like those tips and I'm actually glad that they put them out because because before some of these tips were known but it was just other people theorizing about them or arriving to them from testing different prompts and seeing what works what doesn't work yeah i agree i i think it's best practice for everybody who are like you and me who does this every single day knew by reading and following and testing but the vast majority of population probably didn't so i'm glad they did yeah yeah no i'm glad they did as well so you know so with this icp research you can see here this is a demo this is some of the output that chat gpt will give you it'll talk about things like messaging value prop and obviously other aspects and then after this step we'll transition to the next step which is ideation so for this you're thinking of how to stand out what are creative hooks or angles you can use let's say for your landing page that you're going to build to talk about your product.

8:41And the prompt for this, again, these prompts are all simple. You can obviously make them a lot more fancy. It's Chagypt, brainstorm, and list five unique value propositions that would make my SaaS product stand out in the e-commerce sector. Can you suggest three creative hooks or angles that make my landing page more engaging? Cool. Yeah. Again, going back to what we talked before, the providing some reference material will make it better, but it's a great way to tell it what to do. And it's a great way. Again, I think the number one thing that these tools are great at is ideation, right? You can brainstorm because everything we're saying here, right?

9:25So Andrew is giving us like a starting point, but you don't stop there, right? You probably go back and forth 20, 30 steps deep and kind of explore the way I use ChatGPT mostly is really for these kinds of things of just brainstorming ideas. Okay, give me three ideas. Like you said, it will give you one. I'm like, oh, I really like the second one. Let's explore this further. And it gives you more details. And then you ask about one of these details. I'm like, okay, how do we look at it from that perspective and compare to this thing? So really look at it as if you hired a consultant and you just ask it questions and keep on going.

10:02And I think one of the mistakes people make is they write the first prompt. Let's say they just copied yours and you give them something that's okay. Okay, that's not great. Like I can't really use it for a marketing campaign. I'm like, no, keep going. You have to keep going. And so look at each and every one of those steps that Andrew is sharing with us as a starting point for a longer conversation on that particular topic. Yeah, and I really like the way you described it. it should be a conversation in that if you get output you don't like, then you try to either give it more context or more constraints and then ask it to basically give it the same request again after doing that.

10:41And generally you'll get better output. And for this, here's a demo of chat GPT brainstorming, landing page ideas and what that looks like and just different concepts it's suggesting. Because most people are not seeing our screen other than the people watching this on YouTube or some of the snippets on LinkedIn? If you can read some of the examples so people know what the outcome is. Sure. So the three here, like these are three unique value propositions it came up with. AI-driven customer insights. Implement advanced AI to provide e-commerce businesses with deep customer insights, helping them understand purchasing behavior, preferences, and trends.

11:23So that's the first idea. The second idea is an eco-friendly e-commerce solution, which is where you differentiate your SaaS product by emphasizing the commitment to sustainability and focusing on that angle for e-commerce businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. And then the third idea is a conversion boosting augmented reality, where you're going to integrate cutting edge AR tech into your SaaS platform to, again, help your customers stand out and give them more options in terms of products and things that they can do. cool yeah so this is as andrew mentioned this is just a generic example but obviously if you give it specific business specific fields specific competitors even like we did in the first step then you would get much more specific recommendations i will say one more thing that i like doing when i do these kind of things keep it all within the same chat meaning don't open a new chat for each step because then chat upt knows all the previous steps and it uses it as reference for the next step that he's going to do.

12:31So if initially you talked about figuring out the ICP and the pain points in the ICP and stuff like that, it will be a lot easier for ChatGPT to help you come up with the right value proposition and differentiator in this step because it already knows everything that happened in the previous steps. And if you do it separately, then you'll have to give it some background information in order to do that better. yeah i think that's that's a great tip another thing i like to use in prompts too is at the end of the prompt saying ask me any questions you have yeah and that's a good one because then even if you're using a short simple prompt and you haven't given it context then it'll ask you a lot of context specific questions yeah that's an awesome tip i do that a lot as well it It helps a lot.

13:20First of all, it will come up with questions you didn't think of. And second, it will provide ChatUPT exactly the context it needs in order to give you better results. So leaving it as an open-ended, first, ask me any questions you have in order to get me the best results. It will ask you a bunch of two to 10 questions. And then once you answer those, you'll get a much better result in the end. Great tip. Another thing that you can use if you're doing this for the same business every single time, you can use some of your company slash product data in the, whatchamacallit, it's slipped my mind, the custom instructions.

13:53So you have at the settings of ChatGPT, you can give it some background instructions that work for every single prompt without you having to write it again and again. So if what you're doing is always around the same company, the same product, the same service, you can put a lot of the background information in your custom instructions, and then it will use that as reference, regardless of what you put or not put in the prompt itself. Yeah, I really like that because you just do it once. And then even if you create different chat threads, it always knows and has that context for you. Yeah. Awesome.

14:28So we covered ICP research and finding out pain points and who they are and what they want. And then we did some ideation on what is the value proposition that we want to offer these people based on what we found in the first step. What's the next step? Exactly. And so the next step is the actual campaign plan. And this is where we ask ChatGPT to help us create the plan. So for this, it's again, another simple prompt. ChatGPT outline a detailed four week campaign plan focusing on driving targeted traffic to my new landing page. List the key milestones and deadlines I should aim for in the next month for my landing page campaign.

15:09Same thing here. It's consider this a generic example, right? The more information you're going to give it about exactly what you want, about the channels you want to use. So I want this campaign to be just on Instagram. I want this campaign to be across multiple channels. I want this campaign to be for whatever other, like you said in the beginning, you said either restraints or specific context will help you get better and more detailed results. Exactly. And I don't know if I have this in these slides, but another good constraint too is to give it your budget and say, hey, my budget is X. So what are some good channels or tactics that you'd recommend?

15:54plan that's a helpful one too because that budget is typically the the limiting factor for for companies yeah so and this is so this is the demo what we're looking at here is the output of the last prompt from chat gpt and as you can see it gave us the four-week plan it starts with week one and it's even breaking it down by days so day one through two is keyword research and SEO optimization. Day three to five is content creation. Day six to seven, social media teasers, and obviously you can go on from there. But this is pretty nice because now you have a campaign plan, something like this when I would do it myself or when I was even leading a team of campaign managers.

16:37You'd start from a template that we spent a lot of time building and customizing the template and putting in pieces, taking out others. So the fact that you get this instantly is pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely. And now we'll move on to step four, which is copywriting. I love copywriting. It's one of my favorite things in marketing. In fact, I think if you're getting started in marketing, if you learn copywriting first, it'll make everything else easier for you. It makes you think through the lens of what the user would be interested in the most crystallized way, right? Because in copywriting, you're not going to write three pages, you're going to write a sentence and that sentence has to capture everything.

17:18So yes, I agree with you. It's the essence of marketing. Exactly. And if you're a good copywriter, it's easy to learn a new channel and figure out how to get attention and keep attention on that channel once you learn the technicals of that channel. So first up for the copywriting, this is a chat GPT prompt for this as well. That goes chat GPT, write a compelling headline and sub headline that encapsulate the unique value of my SaaS product for e-commerce businesses, generate three different calls to action for my landing page that encourage signups. Again, this is a very basic prompt for copywriting too.

18:00And this is an opportunity to touch on other AI tools, I've found that Claude by Anthropic actually tends to be really good at copywriting in the sense that by default, the text it generates is more conversational, feels more human, and it actually adheres to constraints more. So if you're ever given it like a character limit or a word limit, for some reason, Claude is actually better found than ChatGPT. So that's an opportunity to also try out that tool. So quick question about that. First of all, I agree with you. I use Claude for a lot of the writing that I do, including social media, including blogging, including a lot of other stuff, even some of the emails.

18:43So I use it for many things and I find the same way that it's easier to get it to capture my voice and the direction I wanted to go, like in my head, versus ChatGPT. I did do the effort of training ChatGPT to my voice and got better results, But out of the box, I agree that Claude did a better job. I want to ask you about, since you started mentioning other tools, do you use with it just for your staff or for your clients, other tools, like some of the professional writing or research tools that are out there, or you mostly focus on the large language models? I mostly focus on the large language models.

19:20The other tool that is pretty good for both copy, but beyond copy is actually copy.ai. A lot of people know Copy.ai for copywriting or writing, but now they have these full-blown automations in there. So I can go into Copy.ai, say, I want to start reaching out to people on LinkedIn, and it creates a full sequence of steps. It's going to scrape the profiles, use that to write a personalized message, and then give me all the messages at once. So you can just do more sequences, which is pretty interesting. I know you could do that in other tools, but what's nice about their tool is you can describe the sequence using a prompt and get like seven steps and just quickly edit or modify each step as needed.

20:06So I think that's a good tool. But yeah, as far as I think between Cloud ChatGPT and Copy.ai, I haven't had to learn anything else. If you can train ChatGPT, it is better because it has internet access and because of the plugins. So I think in your case, as you learn ChatGPT, if you can train it in the long term, it's probably better. I imagine at some point, Cloud will catch up with plugins. But the fact that it has plugins and you could also connect it to other tools easily and do all kinds of stuff in there makes, I think, ChatGPT like a better investment for your time. Yeah, I agree. And you need to remember that when we're saying about investment, the tools themselves are 20 bucks a month, right?

20:48It's not like a serious investment. And even if you have a team of four in your marketing team that all must have access at the same time when you need four licenses, which you can share a license, but let's say you need four licenses, it's still 80 bucks a month. It's still free from a business marketing expense perspective. And there's multiple other tools that you can explore. And I think the biggest difference is the more specific tools like Copy.ai, like Jasper, like writer, all these tools provide you specific frameworks already to work in the steps that usually marketing teams use. So if you're going to use copy.ai, if you're going to use writer, you will get frameworks that you used to from a marketing team, from the research, through ideation, through execution, through review of the bullet points, off the overall thing you want to say, from that to writing the copy of the different segments and all those different steps already built in.

21:43When in ChatGPT, you got to do this yourself. And then it's really up to you which one is more comfortable for you to use and compare that with the expense you got to put in there. You can do more or less everything you can do in the fancier tools in ChatGPT if you built your own framework around it. Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I have heard that for people new to AI tools, using some of those existing AI writing tools is easier because of the frameworks and the templates. Whereas you're right, like with ChatGPT, some of the best landing page prompts I've seen, you're giving it the entire landing page structure in this mega prompt.

22:27And it has 10 or 15 different sections. And it's obviously the prompt works, but those tools almost turn those kind of things into frameworks and you can quickly add the framework. So they are, I think some of those tools are more user-friendly and accessible for people who are just starting out. Yeah, absolutely. And for teams, right? So if you want to work in a team and you want some place that manages the process and the handshake between the people and the different steps and multiple things of those running in parallel, then these tools are built for that, right? They use the same AI tools they use in the back end.

23:04Most of them use either ChatGPT or Claude or a combination of those. Most of them do not have their own large language model. They just have trained it for very specific marketing tasks, which means on those specific tasks, it will be better than ChatGPT out of the gate. Not if you trained it yourself, but then you get to the same thing, but you have to invest that process. but it also helps you manage the process across multiple people and different teams, which is a big benefit if you are an organization, not just a one-person marketing team. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense because then a lot of the things you can, let's say your brand voice and style and things like that, you can set once and then all your team members sort of access that.

23:47And so that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and now we're just showing a demo slide of what ChatGBT generated for the landing page. Nothing surprising here. It's a headline, a sub-headline, some potential calls to action news. Cool. Yeah, one of the things that I've recorded an episode a few episodes ago, and I've started using it regularly since with Audrey. So the episode was with Audrey Chia. She's amazing when it comes to creating landing pages using AI. But what she showed me and we shared with the audience, and now, like I said, I'm doing this all the time, is you can take your own landing page and run it through ChatGPT to analyze it.

24:26And you can compare it to really good landing pages of people that you follow that know that convert very well. And it will tell you what the differences are. This one has this before that. It has a bigger font. It gets your attention to this point before it does that. It has a more clear call to action, like all these different things. It will tell you what the other landing page is better than yours. and then you can tweak your landing page. So in addition to getting this initial recommendation of what your landing page can be based on all the previous steps that Andrew shared with us, you can actually compare the landing page, including its design, like the actual graphics and everything, to a page that works very well because it's a competitor of yours that knows that's done very well.

25:11It's a person that you know that those very good funnels and very good landing pages. So you can use that as a benchmark to improve the initial results you get straight out of ChatGPT. Yeah, I really like that. By the way, I do know Audrey. She's great. So I think for copywriting with AI, she's probably one of the best people out there. What's nice about what you're describing is that sometimes when I'm thinking of my writing style or tone or how I even structure things, it's hard for me to think how to put it in words because I just have learned to write a certain way like that over the years of doing it.

25:50So even when I take my own writing and tell ChatGPT analyzes for voice, style, structure, sentence length, simplicity, flow, and anything else that you find, and then it goes through and then it gives me the analysis. It's very interesting because it's like a lot of those things I just haven't thought of before, but now I know how to describe them. And now I can almost have it as a script to where even if I had someone else helping create some content, if I give them the script and they put it in, they'll get something very similar to how I'm going to say it, which is actually pretty cool. Yeah.

26:30So going back just to describe the tactics, the practical aspect of what you just said, when I work with my clients, I recommend to all of them to create a prompt library and the prompt library will have a million aspects of different prompts doing different things. One of them could be this, right? One of them could be a prompt that analyzes the tone and the flow and the style of the writing. So everybody in the business, when they create content will sound aligned with the company guidelines and brand and so on. And once you figure out the prompt once. So analyze the following text for the following things.

27:08Here's three samples of the way we want it to come out. Here is the actual guidelines that we have in a PDF somewhere and so on and so forth. You can use that and then save it somewhere. And it doesn't have to be a fancy tool. This could be a Google Sheets. It could be a Word document. It could be a shared folder in a task management tool like Monday, or it could be I use a Chrome plugin called Magical that allows you to save little short versions of the long prompt and then use those, but you can share them across people in your company or your organization. So now anybody who writes something can type, let's say, brand guide in one word.

27:51So it doesn't do that every time. And every time we will run brand guide in one word, it will spit out this whole prompt that could be a page long. And now all you have to do is attach the new text. So in zero time, you get that feedback that Andrew is talking about. So it's not a lot of work to get all that effort. It's a lot of work to develop it once, but then you and your team can use it moving forward a million times. Yeah, and I really like that. I also like the example of using those extensions in your browser. What is nice about the extensions is that you don't even have to switch the different tab.

28:27It's just right there. And I know a lot of people find those convenient. So with that, we'll move on to the next step, which is step five. This is the design step. So for this, for context, this was written before Dolly was integrated into ChatGPT. So now that Dolly is there, there's obviously a lot more you could do with this, but the prompt is simple. ChatGPT suggests three color schemes that evoke feelings of trust and reliability for my landing page. Recommend two layout designs that are optimized for conversions and user engagement. Again, this is referencing the landing page. With Dali now being built into ChatGPT, there's obviously a lot more you can do now and things like that.