Enhancing Marketing Strategies with AI Assistance

0:00This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You ever noticed how the smallest changes can make the biggest impact? On Nudge, you learn simple evidence-backed tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested$1 ,000 on some marketing principles. Some work, some don't. Guest Nancy Harhut, who's been a guest of this show as well, and Phil, put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments.

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0:52Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and I'm going to do a solo show. That's right, no guests today. I'm just going to rant and rave about a topic near and dear to my heart. That is strategy, marketing strategy. Now, don't tune out if you think you've heard it all before from me. As you know, we have also been working using the AI tool, ChatGPT, to enhance our work. It is not a replacement tool. It is a research assistant. It is informed automation. It is an idea generator. So it really supplements the work that we would do by hand, but it just makes it faster.

1:36It makes us smarter. It helps us think of things that we perhaps forgot. So what I thought I would do is, I mean, you're probably getting bombarded. In fact, it's probably the 10th time today you've heard somebody talk about AI. I tend to take a much more practical view of these things. And so I am going to talk today very specifically about the ways in which we are using AI tools to help us create more potent marketing strategies for clients, in some cases more developed, more richly enhanced with research. But again, it's just a tool to help us do that. So I thought I would go through what I did is, and I'm going to give away for free.

2:21at the end of this I'll share a link there will be a link also on the show notes for this that gives you a group of about 50 prompts you know prompts for those of you that aren't using AI are really kind of how you get output you tell it to do something that's called a prompt it then outputs what it thinks you want based on that prompt so one of the keys to really getting good output in AI is good prompts. And so we spend a lot of time testing and retesting prompts. And so I've created what I think is a very potent page of prompts that I'm going to share with you and give away that really kind of break down the whole process of how we develop strategies.

3:10So by following these prompts, by seeing how we've broken up the prompts into certain pillars, brand, industry, leads, CX, customer experience, it really gives you a very good feel for how we view strategy in general. So if you're somebody who is working on strategy, if you're for your own business, if you are someone who does strategy for clients, as you know, we have the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. We'd love to certify you in our fractional CMO process. And this will give you a real taste of how we view strategy, how we develop strategy. Obviously, this isn't the entire instruction manual, but I think that it'll give you an idea of how comprehensive we think about it.

4:00So the very first section of prompts that you'll reach, we typically do. We do study the online presence of a client that we were working with. some of these tools make it actually very easy to get an assessment of a website, keyword research for an industry. So it gives us a head start at looking at content and reputation and social media and just even SEO under the hood. And so that's something that we do in every strategy. We want to get a sense, you know, our online presence today as businesses is a very significant aspect of how we are seen by the market. And so we certainly want to start there.

4:36The next thing we do in strategy is help people narrow the focus of who their ideal client is. Let's face it, as cliche as it sounds, the 80-20 principle is alive in business. Typically, what we find is that some 20 % of a customer's clients produce close to 80 % of their business repeat business referrals profit in many cases. And yet, we're all nervous about narrowing focus because we're thinking, oh, we're going to exclude these other people. But my contention all along is if we focus more attention on that top 20%, we focus on finding more of them, really everything is going to be better off.

5:20So we have a couple prompts that really get into empathy mapping process around buyer personas, but also concerns. We can write a prompt in a way that will give us, say, a list of the top 20 things that make people who are our ideal clients lie awake at night. And we can ask the tool to actually give it in first person and make it emotional. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that it's the voice of customer. It's the stuff that people are saying out there. So that's certainly one area. Competition. You can actually use these tools to do a pretty good job of assessing what seem to be strengths and weaknesses of a handful of competitors.

6:00So it makes it very easy to do this kind of research. This is probably a good place for me to note, it could all be wrong. It could all be inaccurate in these AI tools because that's just where we are right now. So use this as a tool, but test, read, don't just, don't copy and paste anything here because there's certainly a long way to go. but it's a great assistant. It'd be like if you gave some of this work to a low-paid virtual assistant that you found online, you certainly wouldn't just take it as gospel. You would hopefully give the assignment and you would get work back and you'd hope it was good, but you'd certainly test and you'd learn what it does.

6:40A big part of what we do is develop what we call core messages. A core message is not a tagline, something pretty to put on a business card. Maybe essentially it is your strategic promise. It's your brand promise. It's here's the problem we promised to solve for you, ideal client. Here's a problem that matters to you that we're going to solve. So what we want to do with that now is start testing it. So one of the great things that we have today, I mean, we do still do one-on-one interviews. That's a great way to certainly get across this idea of, you know, understanding the problem that you solve for an actual client.

7:17But today, Google Business Profile Reviews is also a great resource because people turn there and they typically talk about what a great experience they had or the problem they had or what they're not getting from other people. So we can actually ask the tool to scan all through the reviews and give us some sentiment, like what are some themes that are coming up? What are some things that seem to really be addressing problems that we solve? So pretty easy to get a head start there. We can then play around with the creativity in the tool and ask it for some core marketing messages, maybe even pare it down to seven to 10 word kind of tagline, maybe some marketing headlines for promotional materials.

7:57Again, based on going all the way through the reviews, we're simply saying in the voice of the customer, you know, what are some ways we should be saying some things? It's not gospel. It's not cut and paste, but it's certainly very helpful. And now let's hear a word from our sponsor. You know, companies are under pressure right now. I mean, pressure to get more leads, close deals faster, get better insights to create the best experience for customers. A CRM can help, but not just any CRM. One that's easy to set up, intuitive to use, and customizable to the way you do business. And that's where HubSpot comes in.

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9:39by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. Another couple little kind of throw-in opportunities is you may not, especially if you're a consultant, You may not know that much about a particular industry of a client that you're working with. You can certainly use it to ask it to give you industry trends, threats, opportunities, you know, for businesses in that industry. It could be really eye-opening, if nothing else, to hear it in the language of your client.

10:24That's another thing that I think it really does a good job of, is picking up the vernacular of a particular industry so that you're saying things, you know, even in your presentations. You're putting them in the words that make sense to the industry or to the client. We have a very, as many of you longtime listeners would know, we have a very specific approach to developing a customer journey. It's something that trademarked IP that I call the marketing hourglass. The marketing hourglass relies on essentially guiding seven behaviors, seven stages. Know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

11:00A lot of what we try to do in that hourglass is try to understand what are tactics or processes or campaigns that we need to be intentionally putting at each stage, regardless of what industry we're in. Obviously, the industry may dictate many of the tactics of how somebody comes to know about you, what would mean trust to them in order to buy. We can use the tool to just brainstorm a list of those stages in the customer journey. One of the things that AI does or has the ability to do because it has essentially been taught, everything that's put into it, is if there are processes out there, if there are frameworks out there like the Marketing Hourglass that people have written a lot about, it will actually be able to access that content.

11:54It will know what the marketing hourglass is, for example. So you can pick any framework that you're familiar with out there. And there are many consultants who've produced frameworks. You can actually put it, you can actually identify companies or identify brands or identify individual, say, experts on topics. And you can actually ask it to access, you know, their bank of knowledge and put it into a certain way that you want to see it. content is essentially a tactic, but it shows up in our strategy approach because we quite often are asking people to rethink the way they viewed content to really look at it as a strategic element to look at it as something that is going to be a useful resource rather than just another challenge, marketing challenge.

12:42We produce something called content hubs. And these content hubs are a completely different way to view producing content, We still use blog or content management system technology, but we don't use it in the sort of linear chronological fashion that people come to think about blogs on. So I have written, probably talked in a previous show about that idea. We're able to quickly put together outlines. I will say that ChatGPT, while it is not great at writing actual content, meaning like, give me a thousand word blog post. It is very good at outlining things. if you give it a topic, a kind of big, broad topic and say, you know, create an outline for the ultimate guide to X.

13:26It's actually very good at that. It will also take, and this is pretty clunky, but you can tell it to give you a 90-day editorial plan and say, include social posts, include newsletter topics, include blog posts. And again, it will give you a bit of a plan. Then you can start diving into very specific platforms like video, and you can take maybe post content you've already written and say, give me topics that would make great videos. You can follow that up and say, okay, I like this topic, write a two minute script on this topic. And if you've already got the topic written, say in a blog post or on a webpage or something, it'll draw from that and turn it into a video script.

14:06It's pretty cool. We certainly, you know, for a lot of industries or folks that come to us, you know, webinars and LinkedIn and Facebook groups are important places for them to access. So we often will use it in the same way to outline, certainly to create webinar topics, but then to outline those webinar topics as well. I would never cut and post these, but you can actually tell it to give you some detailed LinkedIn posts, for example, for your industry. You certainly can give it continued guidance. So you don't want these to be promotional. So you tell it, make them primarily educational, highlight the firm's expertise.

14:41Those quite often can be, you know, a lot of times when we're working with somebody, they don't know what to write on their LinkedIn profile. So we can give them 10 idea starters, for example. Sometimes Facebook groups are a great place to hang out, for example. Well, sometimes it's a lot of work to go find those groups. But the AI tools can actually, so you could tell it, give me 30 Facebook groups in this industry with contact details, and you're going to get 30 Facebook groups. Now, it's still up to you to go check them out. Does it seem like a group I want to be a part of or a group that I want to participate in to share my expertise, but it's a headstart.

15:17Same with podcasts. If you are a business that needs to be on podcasts, and frankly, I can make a case for many people to be podcast guests. We put it in most of our marketing strategies. Again, the research to find the top 30 podcasts related to your industry with contact details can be some work. Put your informed automation assistant chat GPT to work for you. We go into in this sheet that I'm sharing the prompts I'm sharing lead generation and lead conversion. These will be basic tactics, but again, it's a great place to start if somebody's thinking, well, I'm doing these two things. What else could I do?

15:53Great channel recommendations, specific tactics for each customer experience. Again, for a particular type of firm, you put in the name of the industry of the firm and then you, or I'm sorry, the name of the industry that the firm you're working with or your firm, And then, you know, you tell it to act as a marketing consultant and create, you know, onboarding, retention plans, employee recruiting plans. You know, all, again, won't be rocket science, but it'll be a head start. And then finally, we end up this particular group of prompts that overarching strategic initiatives. Like if we want to, you know, act as a marketing consultant, create a list of more than or no more than five key strategic initiatives that would give blank industry firm wishing to grow a competitive advantage.

16:37You know, questions like that or prompts like that will get you started on some ideas, on some projects, on maybe some campaigns. Maybe it'll tap into some trends that they see as opportunities. You never really know sometimes until you play with it. But I invite you to get our AI prompts for developing marketing strategy. There are a lot of people out there that are producing all these. You've seen them. 2 ,000 prompts to do blah, blah, blah. And they, you know, the prompt says write a blog post. Or it's just random stuff. What I've tried to do with this gift, if you will, is to make it very focused on you're trying to accomplish a set result really with these prompts.

17:14And they're not just kind of random one-off things that you might use some of, you might not use others. So hopefully this approach, you know, is very, if nothing else is very eye-opening to, you know, some of the ways that you might use prompts. But I think additionally, I think that this is a tool that could be very useful. in developing marketing strategy or could give you some insight into how we develop marketing strategy. We'd love to work with you if that's something you need for your business. And I'd also invite you to, of course, check out the fact that we license our methodology for building really what is a fractional CMO practice using this kind of tool, our strategy first approach.

17:53So that's it for now. Thanks so much. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics. Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it at marketingassessment.co, not.com,.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co. I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.