It’s surprising to me how many organizations don’t have documents outlining their marketing foundations – things like descriptions of their target audiences, features | benefits | advantages analysis, common objections/obstacles and how to overcome them, and key marketing messages.
This documentation provides a consistent starting point for every marketing campaign in every channel – and helps capture and leverage institutional knowledge that you lose when a key team member leaves the organization.
My love of marketing foundations goes back more than 20 years, when I was lucky enough to work in a very traditional marketing department that had this documentation. Through the years I’ve helped clients develop this documentation – but it could be painful. Multiple hours-long sessions where I first have to explain what marketing foundations are and why they are important, then teach participants how to develop them.
I am so glad those days are behind me, thanks to AI.
But not just any AI – my own custom ‘marketing strategist’ GPT.
Over a year ago I began creating my own custom GPTs. It took some time to get the configurations right – it’s like training smart but inexperienced interns. But with time, patience, and micro-management, I’ve now got a team of custom GPTs that help me with day-to-day strategy, copywriting, data analysis, proposal development, and other tasks.
At a conference last year, a speaker said that ChatGPT was the ‘smartest one in the room’ because it had ingested ‘all the information on the internet.’ I don’t think that’s true. The value I find in ChatGPT and it’s custom GPTs is the ability to ingest a large amount of information and then synthesize/organize it toward a specific request.
I’m not asking my custom GPTs to leverage data from all over the internet; I configure them with in-depth knowledge on what I’m looking for from them and content from my own blog (to give them marketing expertise) and then focus them on my client’s website (to give it the industry-, client-, and product-specific information they need).
It’s not as easy as it sounds. It’s taken me a year of trial and error to get my custom GPTs to where I want and need them to be. And the output still needs to be vetted by key stakeholders (in my case, me and my clients). But it shaves hours off the process of creating marketing foundations.
Here’s a case study example that I use in industry presentations.
Let’s say you’re charged with marketing this Barbeque Sampler for 8 from Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque via Goldbelly.
It’s not that you and I could not work together to brainstorm and define the target audiences. We could. But could we get a list like this in less than 60 seconds:
Oh, but not just that. Here are all three of the target audiences my custom Marketing Strategist GPT defined for us in just 60 seconds.
Now, it’s not always perfect. When I started, I would take what the GPT delivered and then manually edit it to get it where it needed to be. But I’ve learned to provide feedback to the GPT and ask it to make the edits, which is now my preferred method.
Next week I’ll write about how I use my customer marketing strategist GPT to create a first draft features | benefits | advantages analysis for my clients.
Looking to learn how your team can leverage AI to handle marketing tasks in less time without sacrificing quality? Give me a call to discuss custom training for your organization – or sigh up for one of my 6-hour Workshops or new 2-hour Intensives.
Until next time,
jj
