Smart examples of GPTs at work, The most valuable media channels, How Brian Johnson sold for $400M, and more

21 Mar 2024 · 16 min

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Marketing School Podcast Episode Notes

Episode Overview

  • Podcast Title: Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips
  • Episode Title: Smart examples of GPTs at work, the most valuable media channels, how Brian Johnson sold for $400M, and more
  • Hosts: Neil Patel and Eric Siu
  • Episode Number: 2703
  • Main Topics: Utilization of GPTs, valuable media channels, Brian Johnson's business success

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Time-Stamped Show Notes

(00:00) Introduction

  • Overview of topics discussed in the episode.

(01:55) Examples of Using GPTs at Work

  • Custom GPTs are being utilized to enhance productivity and efficiency within organizations.
  • Example shared from Lenny's newsletter about a product manager creating a GPT trained to write project proposals.
  • Benefits include saving time and providing autonomy for the marketing team.

(07:51) The Most Valuable Media Channels

  • Discussion on identifying the most effective channels for engagement.
  • Focus on leveraging individuals with significant attention rather than just media platforms.

(09:47) Bringing People to the Point of Sale

  • The importance of capturing attention to drive sales.
  • Strategies for targeting the right audience for specific products.

(10:30) Partnering with Influencers for Maximum Impact

  • Importance of collaboration with high-engagement creators.
  • Example of selecting the right influencers based on audience alignment with the product being marketed.

(14:22) Controlling Attention and Selling Products

  • Discussion of using attention as a currency in marketing.
  • Examples of successful figures like Mr. Beast and Sam Altman illustrating the need to partner with those who have engaged audiences.

(15:37) Conclusion

  • Recap of key points discussed in the episode.
  • Encouragement to rate, review, and subscribe for more content.

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Key Concepts Discussed

Utilizing GPTs in Organizations

  • AI Working Group: Formation of a dedicated team focused on integrating AI to improve workflows.
  • Efficiency Over Profit: The goal is to enhance service to clients rather than merely increasing margins.

Valuable Media Channels

  • Engagement Focus: The most effective channels depend on identifying individuals who command attention rather than solely relying on traditional platforms.
  • Top Media Channels:
  • Email
  • YouTube
  • Online communities
  • Podcasts

Influencer Marketing

  • Partnering with influencers who resonate with your target market can drive sales and engagement.
  • Examples:
  • Charli D'Amelio as a high-engagement influencer.
  • CEOs like Satya Nadella as potential partners for B2B marketing due to their audience reach.

Brian Johnson's Success Story

  • Johnson’s journey from creating Braintree, which sold for $400M, to building a personal brand focused on longevity.
  • His strategy of controlling attention and leveraging that to sell products related to health and wellness.

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Key Takeaways

  • Custom GPTs can revolutionize productivity by streamlining content creation processes within teams.
  • Identifying high-engagement influencers is crucial for effective marketing strategies.
  • Attention is a valuable asset; businesses should focus on who commands it rather than just what platform they use.
  • Building a dedicated AI team can significantly improve organizational efficiency and client service outcomes.

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Additional Resources

  • For more insights, check out [Marketingschool.io](https://www.marketingschool.io).
  • Connect with the hosts on:
  • X (formerly Twitter): [@neilpatel](https://twitter.com/neilpatel) | [@ericosiu](https://twitter.com/ericosiu)

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Feedback and Engagement

  • Listeners are encouraged to provide feedback and suggest topics for future episodes.
  • Reviews and ratings help grow the podcast community.

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Transcript

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0:00So I read this cool blog post talking about GPTs at work. And so let me give you an example of some cool GPTs in here. This is from Lenny's newsletter. He's got an awesome product podcast. And so here's one. He gave a bunch of examples, like 20 examples of people using GPTs at work. And one thing I talked about recently was how Amazon does the whole narrative memo thing, right, where they write out ideas and they force clear thinking. And so the quote here says, I have made myself a clone GPT bot that is trained on how I like to write project proposals. roadmaps, and more. From the product manager perspective, this has saved me endless hours of work.

0:40It provides a lot of autonomy for my marketing team. I do not have to write content for them. For my product team, we can quickly take client conversations and rapidly return a proposal. This saves me countless hours of middle management. So basically what these people are doing is they're creating custom GPTs using ChatGPT. And it's just a couple of prompts, right? It's like, this is how I like it to be written. And then everyone just uses that custom GPT to write narratives the way this person likes the narratives to be written. And this person saves endless hours. And we've been doing a lot of narratives at the company.

1:10It's becoming like, if you want to pitch something, you're just going to do it now. But it does take time to write one. Dude, and this is why we have in our organization, a group of people that are just focused on AI and helping the organization implement it and making people more efficient. Explain how that works. Yeah. So we have a few people in our organization, like one of them is named Kyle. I don't know if you know Kyle or ever met him. there's a few people and they look at all the tasks that people do and the results that we're providing our clients so like in seo you could do things like write content build link keyword research the list goes on and on same with paid advertising and the conversion rate optimization etc so what we're doing is we're we're looking at where our individuals in the organization are spending their hours and we're seeing what kind of stuff can be done with ai to make their time more efficient, not for the purpose of being more profitable or not for the purpose of being able to take on more clients, but actually for the purpose of doing more for the client.

2:10And these are full time people just focus on AI. So I'll give you a made up example. Let's say you, Eric, work for NP Digital and you're doing SEO and you're spending a lot of your time doing keyword research and content generation, data research and strategy. Well, if we're able to automate four out of your eight hours and you just have to double check it. So then you save three hours because you're spending one hour double checking the work. So you have three hours. We don't want to take those three hours and say, Hey, Eric, here's another client to work on. Instead, we want to take those three hours and be like, what more can you do for the customer?

2:46How can you get them even better results? What can you do to have more phone calls with them, help their team with strategy or help them generate more links by doing more outreach. You have more time to do more work to get them more results. And we don't look at AI as something like, oh yeah, it just increases margins. We look at something like AI as it can help the individual become more efficient so they can produce better results for the customer. You know what Neil's talking about? We talked about this actually probably more than a year ago, the concept of having an AI working group. This is what Neil has, right?

3:20So this is basically, you have a team that's dedicated just to figuring out how to make things more efficient with AI. How big is that team? I think it's five people, if I had to guess, five full-time people on payroll that are dedicated to this. Yeah, something like that. That's pretty significant. I think. Yeah. But I also know they do other stuff. And the reason being is even though they're dedicated to making a lot of changes and impact with AI, they have to be involved in the business to actually understand what AI can have impact. At first, we thought we could just get someone who is all about AI being like, okay, go and make impact.

3:53But the issue that you end up running into is if they don't know what people are doing on a daily basis in the tasks and the different departments, how helpful are they going to be? So maybe 50-50 time split? Or maybe 70-30. 70 on work, 30 % on AI. It depends on the person. I know some people are way more than 70 % on AI. Or maybe it depends on the time too. Because what they do is they gather a lot of stuff that we want done. They work with the engineers and then they work on implementing them. and it just takes time. Then once that's done, then they go to spending more time on automating and helping individuals become more efficient.

4:26Yep. I'm going to give a couple more here. They have some on searching your wiki through Slack, which seems pretty basic to me. You can track your competitors through custom LLMs as well. And you can build a custom GPT to write product updates if you're like a SaaS company. And there's a bunch. Enrich new user signups. So I think the key thing here is, one, build an AI working group if you have a company. The second thing is build custom GPTs to try to make your workflow more efficient. That's something that's, I don't think it costs money to build a custom GP. I could be wrong. Maybe you have to pay 20 bucks for the chat GPT pro version, but that's what it is.

5:02This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately, our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat. And we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association.

5:37All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. on a side note you have something here that is called what are the most valuable media channels i would love for you to read it off because i'll tell you what i think the most valuable media channel that's how i plan on starting it off so what do you think the most valuable media channel is uh it is no channel okay the individual contributor who's getting the most engagement and you work with them to get the most engagement from that channel but you look for the creators who have the most impact and engagement on that platform so you're just saying it just depends on the no so or what i'm saying is are you talking about influencers kind of if you look at media channels right you can say all right there's things like television there's things like um email youtube exactly and what i'm saying is you gotta look who's capturing most attention so for example all right let's say there's this individual let's say there's an individual sam Altman, right?

6:46If Sam Altman has an email list and he has the most engaged email list, because everyone's curious what he's doing around AI and you're now doing something in AI, the most valuable media channel isn't email. It's Sam Altman's email list. And you got to figure out how to partner with him and get him to do an email blast talking about what you're doing. Or for example, some people say YouTube's reach sucks. If you have a million followers like me, it doesn't guarantee views. You'll see the same thing with like Gary Vaynerchuk, four plus million followers or subscribers, it doesn't guarantee views.

7:18They've democratized YouTube in which if a lot of people engage with your content at the very beginning, they'll spread it to everyone who's not your followers and they don't care. But if your video doesn't have the engagement they're looking for, you're screwed. Mr. Beast gets great engagement, for example, on YouTube, right? And what they're saying is, or what I'm saying is, your goal is to find the people who have the best engagement on that media channel and work with them. I understand what you're saying. So I would just, let's simplify this for everyone. When we think about marketing, marketing is still to this day, bringing people to the point of sale.

7:53And if you want to bring people to the point of sale, you need to get the attention of the right people. Right. So Mr. Beast gets the attention of an entire internet. Right. But if you're looking to sell enterprise software, you probably don't go to Mr. Beast. Right. You probably go to someone like, uh, like Aaron Levy. Like if you're looking to sell like enterprise software, like if you want to enterprise software audience. Right. Right. So this tweet actually came from one of the co-founders of Morning Brew and he's generalizing it. He's just stack ranking the most valuable digital media channels, highest to lowest.

8:20So I'll just go with the top three here. He's saying number one is email. Number two is YouTube. Number three is online community. Four is podcast. Right. You're saying it a little differently. It's just like, doesn't matter, like whatever it is you're trying to sell, go find who has the attention. And then that that's what matters. Yes, because and I put a tweet about this a few days ago and I said, why L 'Oreal, Amazon and Prada want to partner with the 19 year old girl who posts dance videos on TikTok. And this girl's name is Charlie D 'Amelio. And Charlie D 'Amelio. Charlie, what is it? Charlie D 'Amelio.

8:50Charlie D 'Amelio. All right. Eric can tell I don't follow her. And she's probably an amazing person. You know, I just don't look at me dancing. She's one of the first people that became super famous on TikTok just for dancing. Yes. And she happens to have 152 million followers and can get 27 million views just on a single video. The point I'm getting at is, dude, some channels may favor you. Some channels may not. But if you found the person who knows how to get the most out of that channel, work with that person and you can get your product or service out to their audience, assuming their audience is interested in your product.

9:22For example, Kylie Jenner gets amazing engagement on some social platforms. I would not want to partner with Kylie Jenner. I'm not saying she would want to partner with me in the first place either. But let's say if I could pay her enough money to make it worth her while, her audience doesn't care for marketing services, right? Maybe they're like, yeah, make me popular like Kylie Jenner, but that's not going to pay for the cost for me to partner with her. But on the flip side, if Mark Andreessen or Satya from Microsoft was willing to do a partnership and would say from the top of their voices.

9:58You got to work with NP digital. It's the best marketing firm. Look at the results they provided. That would drive tons of revenue. Doesn't matter whatever platform they're getting engagement on. And I would probably do it on LinkedIn with Satya because Microsoft owns LinkedIn. It probably would do well. Same with Twitter or X because a lot of people follow these CEOs on X and it would do really well. It's finding the people who have your audience and are getting the engagement on the platforms that you want to target. You know what's going to happen? People are going to start making deepfakes of Satya promoting their company.

10:31And then they're just going to be like, oh, I didn't know. Someone made a deepfake promoting us. I don't know who did it, right? You're going to see a proliferation of that. You know who's a good example, by the way, of someone that built their audience from scratch for two years? It's Brian Johnson. So Brian Johnson, he started Braintree. I think he sold it for$400 million or whatever. And now he's all about, he has this book called Don't Die, right? Right. And is that the guy that transfers blood from his son to him to live longer? And then from him to his father? Yes. He does all these crazy things.

11:01He's like, doesn't, I don't think he eats meat. He eats like mush. And then it like a lot of olive oil, a lot of supplements. I think he takes a ton of supplements, right? He's like super pale. He does. I don't think he tries to get son either. I could be wrong on that. Um, so he looks like, he kind of looks like a, kind of looks like a vampire, right? Um, but he looks really fit, like a fit vampire. So aren't vampires fit? I don't know. Are they? All the vampire movies I saw, they're fit. They can throw people across the room. They're really strong. Have you seen Twilight? No, but I've seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

11:31I saw Twilight one, two, maybe three at the theater, and I fell asleep during all of them. There you go. Buffy's more entertaining. I didn't go by. It wasn't my choice to go. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio.

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13:09One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? launch your site for free at framer.com and use code ms to get your first month of pro on the house that's framer.com promo code ms framer.com promo code ms rules and restrictions may apply oh got it well okay going back to brian johnson so he's growing a pretty big audience now on twitter and on youtube and then just recently so he spent two years building his audience like where's where's this guy going maybe he's just like he wants to give back right he just launches olive oil he just launched like all these supplements and all these things.

14:06And so that's another good example of like, he controls the attention or a lot of attention around longevity now. In addition to like, does he have a longevity company? It's basically a longevity company. Now, if you go look at all the stuff he's selling, it's like supplements to just increase his life. I think he sells like a metformin. There's like all these things people take to, to, to these pills that decrease your like biological age or whatever. And he's like biologically, he's like 21 years old or something. But point is, he spent two years building that audience and then now he controls the attention.

14:36He just sells stuff himself. And he just labels his own stuff. That's cool. I'm going to go try buying some of his products. Really? I almost bought the extra virgin olive oil yesterday. And then the two people, Billy and then my other friend Anna that was there, she's like, don't buy it. Don't buy it. It's like no different. But I was like, but it's from him. It's like, you know what I mean? It's like - It's marking. I don't think I'll buy the olive oil, but like if he offers something that I can't find on Amazon from someone else, Yes. Because like some of the things I'm not saying he's wrong.

15:05He knows more than me. Like I'm not going to take my son's blood and put it into my body. Yeah. That's true. He's really young, but if it's proven to do well and it doesn't harm him or affect his future negatively, it's good in a negative way. And maybe I'm open to it, but like the thing I see as a father, and I, again, I'm not a doctor. I have no knowledge on the subject. My fear is taking stuff away from my children can harm them for me to live longer, which I'll never do. Guys, this just goes to show you again, this third to fourth time saying this in this session, do your own research. Because even though Neil and I are talking about drinking glass water to avoid plastics, there's plastic linings around the caps over here.

15:43So who knows what we're actually getting, right? Dude, both our bottles have plastic lining. Anyway, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to apply to the Agency Owners Association. That's where Neil and I are going to help you grow your agency faster and you can hang out and drink glass water with us. We'll see you tomorrow.

From the publisher
In episode 2703, we delve into the utilization of GPTs to enhance efficiency within organizations. We examine the significance of dedicated AI teams and the implementation of AI for productivity improvement. Additionally, we discuss the concept of an AI working group, emphasizing its importance in comprehending the tasks and requirements of various departments.   Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube!   Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT)    TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Today’s topic: Smart examples of GPTs at work, The most valuable media channels, How Brian Johnson sold for $400M, and more (01:55) Examples of using GPTs at work. (07:51) The most valuable media channels. (09:47) Bringing people to the point of sale. (10:30) Partnering with influencers for maximum impact. (14:22) Controlling attention and selling products. (15:37) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more!   Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:    Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel  X @ericosiu   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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