John Jantsch (00:00): This 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 learned simple evidence back tips to help you kick bat habits, get a raise, and grow your business. In a recent episode, Phil tested a thousand dollars on some marketing principles, some work, some don’t. Uh, guest Nancy Har Hut, who’s been a guest of the show as well, and Phil put these principles to test in a set of real life experiments. You’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, 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. I do not, 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. It makes us smarter, it helps us, uh, think of things that we perhaps, uh, forgot. So what I thought I would do is, I mean, you’re probably getting bombarded.

(01:46): It in fact is 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 gonna talk today very specifically about the ways in which we are using, uh, AI tools to help us create, uh, more potent marketing strategies for clients in, 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 gonna give away for free at 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, is really kind of how you get output. You tell it to do something that’s called a prompt.

(02:39): 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, you know, very potent page of prompts that I’m going to share with you and give away that, that really kind of break down the whole process of how we develop strategy. So by following these prompts, by seeing how we’ve broken up the prompts into certain pillars, brand industry leads, CX customer experience, it, it really gives you a, a very good feel for how we view strategy in general. So if you’re somebody who is working on strategy, if you for your own business, if you are someone who does strategy for clients, as you know, we have the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.

(03:40): We’d love to certify you, uh, in our fractional CMO process. And this will give you a real taste of how we view strategy, how we’ve, 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. So the very first section of prompts that you’ll reach, we typically do, we do study the online presence of a client that we are 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, 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 is businesses is a, it’s a very significant aspect of how we are seen by the market.

(04:34): And so we certainly wanna start there. The next thing we do in strategy is help people narrow the focus of who their ideal client is. Uh, let’s face this, as cliche as it sounds, you know, the 80 20 principle is alive in business. Typically, what we find is that some 20% of of a customer’s clients produce close to 80% of their business. Repeat business referrals, profit in many cases. And so, and yet, you know, we’re all nervous about narrowing focus because we’re thinking, oh, we’re gonna exclude these other people. But you know, 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. So we have a couple prompts that really get into, you know, empathy mapping process around buyer personas, but also concerns, you know, that 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, you know, lie awake at night, , and we could ask the, the tool to actually give it in first person and make it emotional.

(05:45): 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 to be strengths and weaknesses of a handful of competitors. So, 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, you know, a, a low paid virtual assistant that you found online, you certainly wouldn’t just take it as gospel.

(06:32): 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, you’d learn what it does. 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 it goes there , but essentially it is your strategic promise. It’s your brand promise. It’s, here’s the problem we promise 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, uh, one-on-one interviews. That’s a great way to certainly get across this idea of, you know, understanding the problem that you solved for an actual client.

(07:18): But 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, you know, 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? Uh, what are some things that that, you know, seem to really be addressing problems that we solve? So, pretty easy to get a headstart there. We can then play around with the creativity in the tool and ask it for some core marketing messages. Maybe even parrot down to seven to 10 word kind of tagline, maybe some marketing headlines for promotional materials. Again, 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?

(08:05): It’s not gospel , it’s not cut and past, uh, but it’s certainly, uh, very helpful.

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(10:02): Another couple little kind of throw in, uh, 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, but you can certainly use it to ask it to give you industry trends, threats, opportunities, you know, for businesses in that industry.

(10:20): It could be really eye-opening to, if nothing else, to hear it in the language of your client. That’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, uh, presentations, you, you are, you’re putting ’em 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, no, like trust, try by repeat and refer. And a lot of what we try to do in that hourglass is try to understand, you know, what would, what are tactics or processes or campaigns that we need to be intentionally, you know, putting at each stage, regardless of what industry we’re in, obviously the industry may dictate many of the tactics of, you know, how somebody comes to know about you.

(11:21): You know, what they would, what would mean trust to them in order to buy. We can use the tool to just brainstorm, uh, a list of those, uh, stages in the customer journey. One of the things that AI does or has the ability to do, because it is essentially been taught, um, the, the, the everything that’s put into it is, um, if there are processes out there, if there are frameworks out there, like the marketing hourglass that people have written a lot about, um, it, it will actually be able to access that, uh, content. It 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, uh, brands or identify individual, uh, say experts on topics.

(12:13): Um, and you can actually ask it to access, you know, their bank of knowledge and put it into a certain way that you wanna 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. We produce something called content hubs. And these content hubs are a completely different way to view, um, producing content. We still use blog or content management system technology, but we don’t use it in the, in the sort of fa linear, chronological fashion that people come to think about blogs on. So I have written, um, probably talked, um, in a previous show about that idea.

(13:06): Uh, we’re able to quickly put together outlines. I will say that, uh, ChatGPT wallet 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, it’s actually very good at that. It will also take, and this is pretty clunky, but you know, 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, uh, very specific, uh, platforms like video. And you can take maybe post content you’ve already written and say, give me topics, that would make great videos.

(13:53): 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, it’s saying a blog post or an a webpage or something, it’ll draw from that and turn it into a video script. It’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, uh, 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.

(14:39): Highlight the firm’s expertise. Those 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, uh, to hang out, for example. Well, sometimes it’s a lot of work to go find those groups , but, uh, the AI tools can actually, you could tell it, give me 30 Facebook groups in this industry with contact details and you’re gonna get 30 Facebook groups. Now it’s still up to you to go check ’em out. Does it seem like a, a group I wanna be a part of or a group that I wanna participate in to share my expertise, but it’s a headstart. Same 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.

(15:26): Again, the research to find the top 30 podcasts related to your industry with contact details can be some work. Put your, your informed automation assistant, ChatGPT to work for you. We go into, in this, uh, 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, I’m, I’m doing these two things, what else could I do? Uh, great, you know, channel recommendations, specific tactics for each customer experience, again, for a particular type of firm, you put in the, 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. Create, you know, onboarding, retention plans, employee recruiting plans, you know, all again, won’t be rocket science, but it’ll be a headstart.

(16:19): And then finally we end up this particular group of prompts that, uh, 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. You 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 till 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 2000 prompts to do blah, blah, blah, and they, you know, the prompt says, write a blog post , or, it’s just random stuff.

(17:04): 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. And 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, uh, you know, is very, if nothing else, is very eye-opening to, you know, some of the ways that you might use prompt. But I think, uh, 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, uh, this kind of tool, our strategy first approach.

(17:53): So that’s it for now. Thanks so much.

(18:18): 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 @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.