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Rich Brooks Practical AI Applications for Your Marketing Strategy with Rich Brooks
AI Agent

AI isn’t just another buzzword in the marketing world—it’s a competitive advantage that’s changing how we work. While AI certainly has its limitations (bias, hallucinations, data security concerns), the businesses who figure out how to harness its power will pull ahead. In this episode, I’m breaking down five concrete, practical applications that you can implement immediately to work smarter, not harder.

 

5 Practical AI Applications That Will Transform Your Marketing Strategy

Let’s get straight to what actually matters about AI – how to use it to make your marketing better and your life easier.

I’ve been testing various AI tools at flyte new media, and I’m more interested in practical applications than theoretical discussions. I want to know how this technology can help us work smarter right now.

Think of it like choosing between two home builders: One uses traditional hand tools – it works fine, but takes longer and costs more. The other uses power tools and modern tech to build better homes faster and more affordably. Most of us would pick the second builder, right?

That’s my approach to AI in marketing. There are legitimate concerns – bias, hallucinations (when AI makes up facts), data security issues. But the competitive advantages are too significant to ignore.

Here are five practical, tactical ways we’re using AI at flyte that you can implement today:

 

1. Creating Data-Driven Buyer Personas in Seconds

Remember when creating buyer personas meant extensive research, customer interviews, and careful synthesis? With AI, you can generate a detailed persona in seconds.

Here’s what I do: I ask ChatGPT or Claude to create a buyer persona for a specific product or service. For example, I prompted, “Create a buyer persona for a customer who buys high-quality spice blends online. Include demographics, cooking habits, pain points, goals, communication style, and where they get inspiration.”

The AI delivered a comprehensive profile in about four seconds. That same work would have taken me or my team hours.

When I asked the AI how it generated this persona, its answer boiled down to “an educated guess based on publicly available information.” It was a reasonable starting point, but still a guess.

That’s why the real power comes when you refine these AI-generated personas with your actual business data. Feed it information from:

  • Customer surveys
  • Purchase behavior
  • E-commerce metrics
  • Product-level insights
  • Analytics data
  • Social media engagements
  • Customer support logs

The more real data you provide, the more you move from educated guessing to actual data-driven marketing.

Once finalized, save this persona document and use it for future marketing. You can reference it in prompts like: “Based on the attached buyer persona, create an email promoting our new product line…”

 

2. Developing a Consistent Brand Voice Document

As companies grow, maintaining a consistent voice becomes increasingly challenging. AI can help capture and replicate your brand voice – if you teach it properly.

Start by gathering examples of your writing from your website, emails, social posts, and other content. Upload these to your AI tool and ask it to summarize your writing style.

When I did this for flyte, the AI noted we use a lot of aviation metaphors – which makes sense given our name. But it mentioned we used them more frequently than I preferred, so I asked the AI to dial that back.

You can use scaled ratings to fine-tune aspects of your voice. “On a scale of 1-10, how often do we use aviation imagery?” If the AI says “7 out of 10” but you want less, tell it “dial it back to 4 out of 10 going forward.”

Once you’ve got it where you want it, ask the AI to create a document specifically designed for use with AI prompts to ensure consistent voice.

This document becomes valuable – not to have AI write for you (which I generally don’t recommend), but to review and refine your writing to keep it consistent.

 

3. Leveraging AI for Comprehensive Competitive Analysis

Researching competitors used to mean hours of manual digging through websites and marketing materials. AI-powered deep research tools have changed that process entirely.

Instead of spending days analyzing competitor information, prompt an AI to do the heavy lifting. I recently asked Gemini Pro to analyze a residential propane company in Southern Maine, identify their competition, run a SWOT analysis, and generate marketing ideas.

The AI searched numerous online resources and delivered a detailed analysis including:

  • A comprehensive SWOT analysis
  • The most likely competitors
  • Marketing opportunities specific to their market

This deep research saves countless hours while often uncovering insights you might have missed. The key advantage is these tools search many different resources, not just the top few from a standard Google search.

When using deep research tools, be specific about what you want and refine the parameters before starting. These searches take longer than standard AI queries – sometimes up to 30 minutes – but the depth is worth the wait.

 

4. Optimizing Content for Search Engines and Conversions

AI is transforming how we approach SEO and conversion rate optimization.

For SEO, specialized tools like MarketMuse can analyze top-ranking pages for your target keywords and help you understand what Google wants. It can identify content gaps, suggest optimal keyword usage, and help you create content that ranks well.

Even without specialized tools, you can use AI platforms to improve your SEO:

  • Ask AI to identify subtopics missing from top-ranking pages for your keywords
  • Request schema markup for your content (like FAQ schema)
  • Have AI analyze your page for optimization opportunities

For conversion rate optimization, prompt your AI with something like: “You are a conversion rate optimization expert. Review this URL and recommend improvements to increase the chances visitors will take our desired action.”

The AI will analyze your page and suggest improvements based on CRO best practices:

  • Enhancing calls-to-action
  • Simplifying forms
  • Adding social proof
  • Highlighting key benefits
  • Improving page layout

These suggestions aren’t guarantees, but they’re a great starting point for testing.

 

5. Building Custom AI Assistants for Complex Workflows

The most powerful application of AI for marketing might be creating custom AI assistants for your specific needs. These custom models – ChatGPT calls them “GPTs,” Claude calls them “Projects,” and Gemini calls them “Gems” – are fine-tuned to perform specific tasks better than general AI.

Custom AI assistants have two main components:

  1. Instructions: Specific directions telling the AI what to do
  2. Knowledge base: Documents you upload to provide context and examples

I created a custom AI assistant for podcast production that has transformed my workflow. I uploaded examples of previous podcast productions, show notes, listener profiles, and detailed instructions.

Now, when I upload a podcast transcript, within seconds the assistant generates all the assets I need: SEO title, meta description, intro paragraph, key takeaways, social posts, and more. This saves me at least an hour every week.

You can create custom assistants for nearly any repetitive marketing task:

  • Content review based on your brand voice
  • Social media planning and creation
  • Campaign performance analysis
  • Competitive monitoring
  • Customer feedback analysis

The key is providing enough examples and clear instructions to train the AI on your specific processes.

 

Implementing AI in Your Marketing Strategy

As you start using these AI applications, remember that AI is a tool – not a replacement for human creativity. The best approach combines AI efficiency with human oversight.

Start with one application that addresses your biggest pain point. Master that before moving to the next. Be willing to experiment and refine as you learn what works for your business.

Also, be mindful of the AI tools you’re subscribing to. My current toolkit includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, Magi, MarketMuse, Fathom, Descript, and Kaizan – not counting tools like Photoshop, Canva, and Microsoft Office that have integrated AI. Periodically assess which tools you’re actually using and adjust your subscriptions.

 

The Bottom Line

Businesses that thrive will be those that approach AI as a competitive advantage rather than a challenge. By implementing these practical applications, you’ll work more efficiently, create more targeted content, and make better decisions.

The key is finding the balance – using AI for time-consuming tasks while focusing your human creativity on strategy, relationships, and the nuanced aspects of marketing that truly require the human touch.

Want to see these applications in action? Check out my full webinar with visuals and step-by-step demonstrations at takeflight.com.

 

Practical AI Applications for Your Marketing Strategy Episode Transcript

The way that I create every podcast is that I start with the interview with the digital marketing expert who I’m talking to, and after that interview has been created and recorded, then I do the intro and the outro. Sometimes it can be weeks between when I do the interview and the intro and outro. So I’ve noticed that sometimes I’ll repeat a story or an anecdote in both the introduction and then also in the interview. I’m going to try not to do that in this case, but it has been a while since I’ve done one of these solo episodes, so I may be out of practice.

I may have already mentioned this, but I want to talk to you today about really practical ways of using AI, artificial intelligence, in your marketing and in your business. Because that’s really my focus right now. And as I may have mentioned, I had recently done a webinar for flyte, my digital agency, on AI marketing. It was called, AI Marketing in Action, A Practical Guide for Your Business. And that’s my approach. I want to give you some very tangible, tactical ways that we’ve started to use AI here at flyte. Some of them I’m kind of leading the charge here, but my team is also using it, and so really what I want to talk about is how to go about this.

Now I’ve had a number of conversations, not the least of with which with my older daughter Maya, about the efficacy of using AI, and whether or not AI is making us better or making us dumber. And I remember we had similar conversations years ago about Google. Does Google make you smarter because you have access to all this information, or does it make you dumber because you don’t retain any of it because you know, it’s just there whenever you need it?

And I do think that there’s an interesting argument to be made that the people who might benefit the most from using artificial intelligence well, are the people who already have a baseline knowledge or some sort of expertise in what they’re doing, as they can discern between good and bad outputs.

And the example in the presentation I give is the idea of home builders. And you may have two home builders you’re talking to, and one is a traditionalist and they used hand tools and they build everything to order and it’s very time consuming, but it’s very organic. And that’s one approach. And on the other hand, you might talk to a builder who uses power tools only and expensive software to make sure that everything is aligned, and the software gives them extra ability to plan and to modify their plan so that they build the house that’s exactly right for you. And by using these more modern tools, they can build it more quickly, they can make it more energy efficient, maybe even build it for a lot cheaper than the other person.

And if you’re trying to decide between which builder you want to hire, well, there’s no wrong answer. It really depends on what you are looking for. But chances are, the majority of people would hire that second builder who’s using all of those tools to build what is subjectively or objectively a better final product. And that’s kind of the way that I’m thinking about AI these days, is that it’s a competitive advantage for your business.

And I don’t want you to think that there’s not some real problems with artificial intelligence. We’ve talked about some of these on the program before. AI has bias. It has hallucinations, where it makes up facts and figures on its own. There are data security issues where you got to be very careful about the information, the sensitive data about your company or your clients, so not to upload it to these tools because you’re basically training the machines. There’s concerns around job loss. There’s real concerns about the environmental impact of AI compared to, say, traditional computing. And there’s real lack of human experience and maybe human empathy that comes from AI, even though it does a halfway decent job of faking it.

But again, it is a competitive advantage for those of us who want to figure out how to use it. There’s a lot of different ways in which you can use it as a business owner or a marketer. There’s speed and efficiency where AI can automate some time-consuming tasks for you. There’s ideation where it can help you generate new ideas. You can use it for research and forecasting. You can use it for content creation. You can use it for search engine optimization, for website optimization, and you can use it for personalization as well.

So there’s a lot of ways in which AI can make your marketing and your business perform at a higher level. The ways in which you can use AI to perform better, faster, smarter are countless. But today I want to give five concrete examples of how I am using AI in my day-to-day business.

And the five things that I’m going to talk about are buyer personas, number one. Number two, brand voice. Number three, competitive analysis. Number four, it’s really four A and four B, is search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization. And then lastly, custom AI assistance, which are custom GPTs if you’re using ChatGPT, Gems if you’re using Gemini, and Projects if you’re using Claude.

This was originally presented as a webinar, and in the show notes I’ll link to the webinar so you can get the full picture. But the webinar is very visual and obviously the podcast is not. So today, I’m just going to kind of be talking through some of the concepts, and some of them may be easier or more difficult to visualize, but we’re just going to go through this. And for the sake of today’s conversation, we’re talking about ChatGPT.

I actually used a lot of Claude. When I was putting together the slide deck for this, Claude hadn’t yet announced that you could now use Claude to surf the web as well. Now, that is a feature that was one of my big hesitations about using Claude because so many of the things I want to do, I need my AI tool to go online and look at things online. And Claude, until recently wasn’t able to do that. So I’m going to use ChatGPT, I think it’s a great tool for almost anybody who’s just getting started out.

So let’s start with talking about how do you build a buyer persona? And the way that I usually do it is you can just use a simple prompt. And the prompt that I used in this case was, “create a buyer persona for a customer who buys high quality spice blends online, include details such as demographics, cooking habits, pain points, goals, preferred communication style, and where they get their cooking inspiration.”

And so I put that buyer persona into ChatGPT with the idea I had a made-up company in mind, an online spice retailer. And very quickly, ChatGPT spit me out an answer that gave me demographics, cooking habits, pain points, goal, preferred communication style, and where Avery, which is the name of the buyer persona that ChatGPT created where she gets her cooking inspiration, a nice little summary all happened in about four seconds.

And it was interesting because I was kind of curious, even though I’d done this many times before, I was kind of curious how did it come up with this? So I actually asked ChatGPT, which is a great exercise, is just to sometimes ask ChatGPT or any AI to show their work so you understand exactly what you’re getting.

And so literally in the next prompt was, “How did you generate this persona? What sources did you use to create the persona of Avery?” And then ChatGPT gave me an answer. It basically said, “I created Avery by drawing on well-known buyer persona frameworks and combining them with common demographic and psychographic traits often observed in consumers who value premium food products, especially spice blends.”

And then it basically broke down the thought process including marketing persona, best practices, general consumer insights, common pain points and goals for home cooks, preferred communication, and content consumption patterns, and then it combined all of the above. In other words, it was a guess. It was an educated guess based on publicly accessible information. But at the end of the day, it was just a guess.

Now, keep in mind, that is a lot of what marketing is anyways, and this kind of research would take your assistant or yourself 5, 10, 20 hours to gather and synthesize into the buyer persona, and ChatGPT was able to do it in just a matter of seconds. So already it’s giving us hours and hours of our time back now.

There may be something that you don’t agree with when it comes back with your buyer persona. And so one of the things that I would recommend is just correcting it. Tell ChatGPT what you agree or what you don’t agree with. You actually may have some information because you’ve been in business so long where you know information that ChatGPT wouldn’t be able to gather from these resources.

So you might say, well, listen, ChatGPT, most of my customers are actually met. Or my customers tend to live in coastal cities, or they tend to order small samples or flights of products first before buying a bigger amount of product. So you can feed all that information back into ChatGPT or whatever AI tool you’re using, and it will then refine and improve your buyer persona to you get it to a point where you like. And that’s great. And that may be good enough for you. But if you want, you can take it even further.

And so I asked ChatGPT, “What information could I provide you, such as customer surveys or e-commerce data that could create a more accurate persona?” And ChatGPT responded, it said, “To do this, basically the key is to have specific, real-world data.” And it gave me a bunch of things that I might want to include, including demographics, purchase behavior and e-commerce metrics, product level insights, customer surveys, analytics, social media engagements, customer support interactions, and user generated content and reviews.

Now, even if you’ve been in business for a while, you may not have all of these things at least at your fingertips, but the more accurate data that you can feed the AI, the more you move away from well-reasoned guessing to data driven marketing, which is where we want to be.

And then once we have this done and it is to a point where we agree with this is an accurate buyer persona for who we’re going after, then you can basically turn that into a document, save it as a document, and then you can use it in future prompts. You can put it into your prompt library, or you can make it part of your custom GPT, which we’ll get to at the end.

Now to use this persona, let’s say that you’ve saved it as a document. You could then create a prompt in ChatGPT and say something like, “Based on the attached buyer persona, create an email promoting our new line of African based spices with a strong call to action to visit our e-commerce store. I’m also attaching the new product names, spice profiles, and introductory pricing.” You attach all of that to your prompt. You send it up and ChatGPT will then give you what I would consider a first draft of that email that’s going out to your ideal customer personas.

Another tactic that we like to use is creating a brand voice, and the way that we’ve developed, or the way that I’ve developed creating a brand voice, is by providing a lot of examples of the writing style. So maybe what I would do is I would go and grab pages from the website or grab pages from previous email newsletters, scraping the social media posts of a company, whatever it may be.  Also, sometimes if we’re doing this for a client, we’ll also interview them as well. How do you want to be seen? How do you want to come across? Do you want to come across – as friendly and approachable or authoritative? Whatever it is, so that we have a general sense. But I do really think that using examples is very helpful in this situation.

And so you upload all those documents and then you basically can say something like, “Please summarize the writing style for this brand.” And ChatGPT will come back, and it will basically summarize the voice. And maybe you agree with everything and fantastic. Maybe you don’t. In the case of I did this for flyte, one of the things I noticed, it spent a lot of time talking about how flyte had a lot of aviation metaphors, which makes sense, because we do. But let’s say that I felt like maybe we use too many, and as I want to develop this AI brand voice for flyte, I want to tone that down. So I could ask it a question. I could say, “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most, how would you rate how often we use aviation imagery?” And let’s say it said 7 out of 10. Well, I could be like, alright, great. “Going forward, I want you to limit it to 4 out of 10. I want you to kind of dial that back.”

So you can use a 1 to 10 scale, or even a 1 to 100 scale, although that seems a little excessive to kind of ramp up or ramp down certain aspects of your brand voice until you get it to a place where you like it, and you may even ask for samples. So it’s like, does that sound like you? And when you get it to a place where you’re like, yes, this makes sense. Then what you can do is you can basically say, “Please rewrite this as a document that I can use with AI prompts to ensure any copy created is in our brand voice.” And then it will basically spit out your brand voice prompt. You can save it to a document and now you’ve got a document that’s going to ensure that whatever content the AI creates or reviews for you can be put into your brand voice.

And then one of the things you could do is, let’s say now we have two bots. We have one that’s going to be our ideal customer profile, and another one that’s going to ensure brand voice. Now, I don’t like AI to write for me, but if I go off and do some writing and then come back, I can run it through either both of these prompts or through a custom GPT that uses both of these prompts. So I can always ensure that our writing is being written for our buyer persona as well as in our brand voice.

The next thing I want to talk about is doing research. And obviously with now Claude and before ChatGPT, you can just ask questions and it can go out and search the web for you and bring you back answers in like 15 seconds. But you may want to do deeper research, and all of the companies have a product to do deep research. Google has it through Gemini. ChatGPT has it, and then also Perplexity has it as well. All of these, they’re all called ‘deep research’. All three products are called, ‘deep research’, which is ridiculous.

But anyway, I was using the Gemini one, the Google one. And so basically I go to Gemini, and I pull down and I find the ‘1.5 Pro with deep research’. That’s the model that I’m using that does deep research. And then I can basically ask it to do whatever I want. So I could use it to do some competitive research into another company or competitive research into one of my clients to get a better understanding.

I could ask it to do research into what are different places where I might want to speak this year and pull that back. And so you basically pose a question. In this case, I said, “I’d like you to perform competitive analysis for this company, which is a residential propane company in Southern Maine. Here’s their website. I want you to identify their toughest competition and run a SWOT analysis, and then generate some marketing ideas.” And basically what these tools will do is then confirm that they understand what the requirements are. And sometimes I’m like, well, actually I don’t want you to do that, I want you to do this other thing over here.

For example, I was asking it to do some research into some artificial things that I was looking into, and one of the things that it wanted to do is come back and show me all the tools. I said, I’m not really interested in the tools. So you refine the research before you have it go off and do the research, and then you send it on as merry way. Where usually the responses come back in seconds. These can take minutes. It can take 5, 20, half an hour, depending on how much research is needed to be done.

It goes out, it scours all these different resources online, comes back, synthesizes the information, and then shows it to you. And basically, in this case, it gave me a SWOT analysis of this company. It listed the most likely competitors, and then it gave me a list of all of the marketing opportunities that this company had. And that’s a very simple prompt that you can easily run yourself for your own business.

And again, this is using one of the deep research tools out there. Certainly you can do it without it, but I think it’s much more valuable when you have it search so many different resources, not just the top couple resources that are out there. So definitely check out deep research when you’re doing your market research, or any kind of research you’re doing for yourself or for a client.

So shifting to search engine optimization, which has always been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember, is helping our clients or even ourselves rank higher in the search engines. And I’m going to take a step away from some of these large language models like ChatGPT and Claude for a minute, to talk about a product that is specifically fine-tuned for search engine optimization. And that’s called Market Muse. And this is a tool I like quite a bit. And there’s two main ways in which I use it.

One is to do research for a topic. So let’s say that I’m writing for compounding pharmacies, I could drop ‘compounding pharmacy’ into the research box. And basically a lot of what Market Muse does is it takes a look at the top 20 results for any keyword that you might be looking to rank well for. It takes those top 20 results and it reverse engineers what’s going on to tell you what Google is expecting for a top-ranking result, and then helps you basically create that content.

So it’s similar to doing keyword research if you’re used to using a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, which are SEO tools, you can do the research using Market Muse. But it also is a feature that’s great called, Optimize. And with Optimize you can put in whatever keyword you’re looking for. In the case of the webinar, I use the idea of ‘compounding pharmacy maine’, and then you can actually pull a page from the internet.

So in this case, I grabbed a page off of this particular business’s website, and as soon as I put it in there, what Market Muse does is it pulls an editable version of that page into your browser window, and it highlights all the keywords that those top 20 pages are ranking for that appear on your page. And then you get basically a rundown in the left hand or in the right-hand side of how many times those words are being used on your page, and how many times on average they’re being used by the pages that appear in the top 20 results.

So for example, one of the phrases was ‘specialty pharmacy’. Well, it turned out that this company didn’t use that phrase on their webpage at all, but their competitors that were ranking well were using it one to two times on the page. Or there was another one, ‘compounding’ was a word that they were using about three to five times, and their competitors were using over 10 times on a page. So that gives you a sense of what Google is ranking well, and you can actually update your page right within right within Market Muse. It won’t update the live page, but as you’re making these changes, it will continue to update your scoring, so you can kind of use this as a way to get to a point where you should be able to rank well for those keywords.

Now, there’s more to SEO than just this. There’s the focus of the page. There’s how long it’s been around, how many links are coming in. Lots of other variables. But as far as taking care of the on-page optimization, Market Muse is a really powerful tool for that.

Now, Market Muse does cost a little bit more than some of these other general use tools. I think the minimum is $1,500 for the year. That may be overkill for your needs, but I do have a couple of things that you can do in the large language models for SEO that you might find beneficial.

One of the things we’re always looking for in SEO content gaps, what are our competitors not writing about that our prospects are searching for that we can take advantage of? So I go into ChatGPT and I prompt, “What are subtopics missing from top ranking pages for ‘compounding pharmacy’?” And so then ChatGPT goes off, does the research, comes back. Not the deep research, but research nonetheless, and gives me a list of things that a lot of these sites are either not talking about at all or barely talking about, including things like quality assurance and testing protocols, patient education and counseling, and the list goes on.

So if you are creating content and you want it to rank well, this is a great opportunity to find those content gaps using AI, and then start creating content around it. And of course you could use ChatGPT or other LLMs to do some of that research for you and even write the content, although I always recommend against that. But these are ways that you can really optimize your workflow when it comes to SEO by using AI.

Another important aspect of SEO, and especially true when it comes to optimizing for AI and large language models, is schema. And we had a great conversation with Crystal Carter on the show before about schema. But I can go to ChatGPT and I could say, “Generate FAQ schema markup for an article about brown tail moth rash.” And basically, ChatGPT will give me that. So if I’ve got an FAQ page on my website about brown tail moth rash, that’s going to basically write the schema markup that then I can just update with my own FAQ section.

And there’s a benefit to having FAQs on a lot of your service pages. So this is an opportunity to really improve your search engine visibility, and hopefully also to get found by more of the AI powered search engines, whether they’re LLMs or whether they’re straight up AI powered search engines like perplexity.

Okay, next up is conversion rate optimization. Because one of my favorite things is to help a business improve their website, to improve their conversion rate optimization, or the amount of people who are going to take the next logical step or the next desired step from a business standpoint.

So I go into ChatGPT and I prompt, “You are a conversion rate optimization expert.” I always like to give it a role, and I always like to kind of fluff it up a bit, make it feel good about itself. “You have been provided with.”, and then I gave it a URL and asked to provide recommend improvements to increase the chances that site visitors will download the three parts spec, which is the takeaway, the download, the lead magnet. “Please provide a list of recommended changes.”

So then ChatGPT goes and it takes a look at that page and it basically gives me a list of things that I can improve on that page – enhance the call to action,  simplify the form. It felt the form was too complex. It said we need to incorporate more social proof, and it gave me some suggestions on how to do that. It says I need to highlight the key benefits. So there’s a lot of things that you could take so you could run one of your landing pages or service pages through ChatGPT with a prompt like this and start to get suggestions for improvements that you can make on your own.

Now, that does not guarantee that these pages will actually improve their conversion rate optimization. These are, again, many times based on best practices, but if you’re not sure why a page isn’t performing at the level you were hoping for, this is a great exercise to go through, implement those changes, and see if you don’t see an uptick in conversions.

And the last thing I talked about in the webinar was the idea of creating these custom AI assistants. Like I said, it’s custom GPTs and ChatGPT projects, and Claude, and Gems, and Gemini. They basically all work the same way, where you are fine tuning the large language models to do one thing but do it better than it otherwise would do.

And basically, these custom AI assistants are made up of two main points. One is the instructions, and the other is the knowledge base. So the knowledge base are documents that you can upload. Maybe these are transcripts, maybe these are web pages, whatever it is. But these can be much longer documents where the instructions can’t be too long. And then basically in the instructions, you tell it what you want it to do, and you also reference those documents.

So for example, I now have a custom GPT for my podcast production. And I basically took what I used to do, and I documented it all. And I took examples of previous podcast productions, the show notes, what have you, and I uploaded them as part of the knowledge document. I uploaded the, quote unquote, ‘buyer persona’ for the Agents of Change podcast listener, all this information, so it would better understand what I was asking for.

And then in the instructions, I basically told it exactly what I wanted it to do. Which included things like, giving the blog post that’s associated with it an SEO title, to write a meta description for it, to pull out some of the best quotes, to write an introductory paragraph, to write social posts for me – which I never use, but I still like to see what they’re going to create – to pull out the five key takeaways, all the sort of information.

And then I discovered from using ChatGPT versus Claude, that I really prefer the Claude output in this particular case. So I tend to do it in Claude. And then basically within just a few seconds of uploading the transcript, I have all the assets ready to copy and paste in this document. And so this saves me an hour, at least, every single week as I’m going through my podcast production.

And we’re starting to implement more of these. I mentioned before, you could use it for reviewing or copy editing any copy that you generate by having it take a look at your buyer personas and have it also ensure that you’re using brand voice. So there’s a lot of different tools or different ways that you can use these custom GPTs for these multi-step processes when you want more than just what a simple prompt could provide.

In the webinar, I also shared what’s on my current subscription list when it comes to AI tools, and I was a little bit surprised by how many I’m actually paying for right now. That list includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, although it is a free trial. Midjourney, Magai. We actually just had Dustin Stout on the show the other day, great episode, check that out. Market Muse, Fathom, Descript, and Kapwing. And that does include tools like Photoshop, Canva, Microsoft Office or Google Drive, which I was using already, but now it implemented AI tools into them. So these are straight up AI tools. At some point, I’m probably going to fine tune this list, maybe drop a couple things as I find myself using one tool over the other. But for right now, that’s currently what I’m using.

So again, today we talked about some very specific ways in which you can use AI to improve your marketing workflow or even just your workflow in general. We talked about buyer personas, brand voice, competitive analysis, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, and finally, those custom AI assistants. Now, if you thought this was valuable but you’d really need some visuals to go along with this, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put a link in the show notes that will take you to the entire webinar, video slide deck, transcript, and everything else.

So if you thought that this was great, but you want to dig a little bit deeper, go ahead, take a look at that webinar. It’s on demand at the flyte new media website at takeflight.com. And if you have any other questions or if there’s certain things that you’ve been looking to accomplish using AI and you don’t know how to do it, do me a favor. Just reach out to me. I’d love to talk to you about what you’re looking to accomplish and see if I can’t help point you in the right direction. Thanks.

Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.