Marketing Against The Grain

for most people ai is making your marketing worse for a select few it's making it ten times better and it's especially true i see more slot marketing today than i ever had before and i wanted to get to the bottom of why that was happening on today's show i'm bringing on david epstein he's written three new york times best selling books his most recent book inside the box gives you the exact understanding of why ai is creating s and how we actually solve them so i want you to stick around because david's giving us real formulas and frameworks to actually do work with ai we're gonna walk you through all those in detail and you're gonna come out of the show transformed and how you think about using ai and how you're actually gonna grow your business i wanna ask you if somebody who's deeply looked at how ai is impacting how work happens in your book you talk about a concept that really struck me which is around going slow to go fast and as as a marketer myself i was struggled with that because everybody's yelling at you to do everything all the time mh and you feel like you're constantly behind it's very counterintuitive to slow down you know i was describing the work of a researcher named bent flu a danish guy who was oxford professor who studied projects of all kinds digital transformation you know solar farms you name it and he ended up with a database of sixteen thousand projects over decades and he found that very few of them coming on time and budget and very few delivered the expected results and coming on time and budget and and the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't he around was a pattern the the bad pattern was what he called think fast act flow where you just jump into producing stuff you maybe haven't to defined your problem that way well maybe having to defined your customer that well whether that's internal or external customer and you move into execution and so you you go through the thinking face fast and then you'll act slow because you'll start learning these lessons painfully once you already have momentum and everything will be slow the opposite pattern the successful one was what you called think slow act fast where you really put the brakes on you put some constraints on early you define the boundaries of what you're trying to do you define the strategic goal and then once you do move into execution you'll move really fast much faster because you sort of understand what the sandbox right it's like that they is saying from advertising give me the freedom of a tight brief like that that that kind of frees you up to work and so some of the interesting examples were like i spent a bunch of time with ed cat mall the c cofounder founder of pixar and he told me that they would keep directors is in story development for years like refining and simplifying the core of the story what is the message who are we trying to reach with this who's is it going to resonate with and and often stripping away characters to kind of simplify too and that's why they didn't end up having like shot and inside out because it was just getting too complicated that seems inefficient except what ed told me was that the costs and complexity only explode once you move into production that's where you get huge yes number of people coordination cost communication costs you know etcetera and so it actually was really efficient to do this slow thinking and i i saw that all over the place where i was interviewing top practitioners like one guy tony fide fidelity about legendary designer and entrepreneur he told me that the best advice he thinks he gives entrepreneurs because he mentors a lot of entrepreneurs today is to write the press release at the beginning of their project mh not at the end because that forces them to say who do i think i'm targeting what problem do i think i'm solving for them what are the most important features of this thing that you know only fit on one page and so i actually ended up doing that with my book because he convinced me and and and it does slow you down and it's kind of annoying right totally though but actually but but a lot of things that are processes that are annoying are good for us because they force us to slow down and really think hard and he he c founded the smart thermostat company nest and he forced the team to work inside a literal box where he had them prototype the packaging before the product is that this is what the end user is going to see this little box has to be able to communicate all the things that we think are most important so we have to get those su distinctly we have to understand what they are and if it doesn't fit on this box it may be some cool feature but it is not a priority now so it's going on the back burner so it both made them think about their customer how they could message in that small space that's the most important space they would have and ruthless prioritize what it was that they wanted to be focused on at least for that first iteration karen and i are doing a live ama at hubspot un bound event on september eighteenth at eleven fifteen am we want your questions please submit any question you have for us we are gonna answer them directly and honestly and the best questions are gonna get picked and answered on stage live in front of everyone and we'll give you a shout out so please click the link below and drop us your questions hey if you're enjoying today's show we have put together some of the best ai resources on the planet to help you get better at marketing with ai you can scan that qr code above or you can click the link in the description below and get those right now you could make an argument that the internet has made marketing way worse because it's actually dropped the cost of doing marketing or even building a company if you're an entrepreneur drastically and that's actually taken off a lot of the healthy constraints you're arguing should exist and so if somebody is out there and they're working in this environment where they're just move and move and move really fast like what's one thing they could do to maybe slow themselves down and start shifting into that you know going slow to go fast mindset i would start doing some of those things like tony said with with writing that press release and not quickly i mean this should be something that you're really thinking about you're putting on one page and should be detailed you should even write maybe the testimonials that you hope people will say at that time because that can give you clarity about what is it that you hope is popping out to people and i also think you should have multiple team members do it independently final jeopardy style because you've mentioned getting people on the same page right which i think is difficult you know maybe easier when you're small but also difficult when you're moving fast and when things are changing and i think if you do that you're going to see almost inevitably people have some different ideas of what it is that you're going for and how it is that you're going to message it and what they hope people say and so i think doing those things separately like no influence from one another then come in and look at them and say alright what do we all think are the priorities here and where is there some mismatch because you really need to get on that same page and and slow down to make sure that that you're there so that exercise is probably not going to be fun you're going to turn up some different understanding because it will expose some assumptions that people have that they haven't really been talking about but it's one of those things i think that psychologist called desirable difficulty where it slows you down it might be a little frustrating but it it leads to a better outcome great strategy has to hurt has to be pain a good way to put it you know so that's what you're saying is like hey let's get the pain up upfront let's make sure the things that we disagree on we know those before we actually build anything so that the thing that we're building whether and that thing could be a product or that thing could be a website page or a landing page or an add doesn't matter but you have to do that up upfront where it causes ten x the pain down the road that's right pain up upfront vastly preferable to pain after you're doing this stuff right and then you have momentum then you have to change directions i mean that's you know let not as great for moral morale where when it's up front you know i don't think it has that that same impact and in that process i think you should also think about this other famous adage that people don't want a quarter inch drill want a quarter inch hole in the wall so it's like that not what cool thing can i do because you can do all sorts of cool stuff with ai or the product you're building or whatever right again never been easier to do too much but what problem am i solving for them whether that's a brand image that you wanna make them feel this certain way whether that's letting them know what this product really does in terms of solving their problem not that it's like a broom with a laser pointer also that that may be really cool but what is the problem you're trying to solve and so i think really slowing down to to make that very very explicit because i think with ai i mean i can see this even when i'm designing presentations right yeah i'm i'm fairly nifty with some of the graphical stuff and now with some of the ai i can like bells and whistles galore and so i actually did do one presentation the first one on inside the box that i did well i just over did it a little but i actually think it made the talk a little bit harder to follow for people who are hearing information for the first time i knew the information so it's stuff lying around no problem for me to follow but at that point i got a little seduced by the cool instead of doing what i usually do in my writing and my talks which is my audience doesn't know anything about this so i have to throw everything of mine out the window it made me just lose a little bit of track of my north star which is audience that knows nothing about these topics not me who has been spending years thinking about them too interesting follows on that one we do the same thing i think this is an epidemic of marketing right ai is making this worse right because it's like yeah i can pull from all of your product docs and capture every last little feature and that's not what people want the right level of abstraction and reduction of stories to simplify is actually what people want and i think that is can of german remain to actually doing great marketing today in a world of abundance you know real not scarcity but simplicity is gonna be more powerful than ever in clarity markings yeah yeah deep clarity and a real practical example of this just talking with a guest who has five to her marketing agency in the last year and she does a lot of content and writing for people and the one thing she does is she has a sub agent at the end of everything she does review cold just as a stranger to give cold feedback despite that like she and and whatever tools she's using have been going on and on she has some has another ai agent come in and just do it cold for that reason how do you actually get the level of just una unexplained knowledge and as marketers we all have knowledge that we just we think everybody knows and nobody knows that a very few people know it no now i was just gonna say that's such an important point because you know there's both scientific research showing this and i think people understand it and practice in the real world that basically everybody assumes that the person they're talking to knows more than they do about the same thing right there there's this whole context that we've built up over our life in our heads from all the things we're exposed to and you can see this in psychological research that people just talking in a way that assumes that the person knows more of what is in their head than they really do and you know the epitome of this is like when i'm reporting when i've been spent time at the military reporting or i've spent time with nasa and it's like i'm remember a one time in nasa they were throwing around so many acronyms so i'm just stopping and because my ultimate goal is to represent the reader even if i know what it is you know i'm supposed to ask the basic questions because i'm i'm serving the reader and sometimes i just stop and say what is that thing again and they would just throw them out and there was one point where one of the nasa engineers used the acronym squat and i'm like what all it's crazy to think i would have it like a star wars character by the way yeah and so i'm like like i had to laugh like i'm sorry because i was asking i was stopping them to ask about all these acronyms and i'm like what how do you spell that and what does it mean and actually the engineer said well nobody can remember what it actually stands for we don't know all we know is that for launch to be cleared the squat lloyd have to be green it's like something to do with windshield forces or something but i'm like it was so it had gotten so ingrained like they didn't nobody know they were talking about it anymore right and so i just think it's it's anything that makes you sort of over index on on realizing that this person does not know everything you know because that happens even with people in the same company working on the same team is they make assumptions about each other and they don't know so yeah i think it's a really important point one of the things that fa to be about people who make things like yourself is the through lines the themes across all of their work you know like you know the odyssey just came out and everybody's talking about how nolan who made the odyssey could used to be obsessed with time and time is kind of like the theme of all of his movies in one way or another know as somebody who's read most of your books i i look at them and it's like to me there's this theme of where you decide to play spend your time focus it's far more important than what you do was kinda like is is like a through line to me i don't know if i seeing that right like when you look at your collective work what do you see as your through line that like actually has kept you doing this for as long as you've been it yeah like what's the kind of thing that you're you're examining in different ways one thing that motivates me first of all is when i see what i think our explicit implicit mist translations of research about human performance i mean so my first book was about genetics and athletic performance because i thought almost every topic that related to that that people are usually talking about implicitly out in the world was misunderstood so one thing is is i really get interested in what i think our public misunderstandings of research on human performance and that in in in a way is the through line of all this stuff is how do people figure out what they should be doing in the first place and then how do they get better at it and so in some ways i saw my last two books range and inside the box as sort of companions or one following on the other where there's this deep literature in organizational behavior about what's called the explore exploit trade off and what that means is explore is like finding new knowledge you know developing new products etcetera exploit is taking the stuff you already know or the things you you you've already worked on and just drilling down on them and extracting whatever value you can out of them and with this big body of research says it's now been a being applied to people also is basically that you wanna be cycling between these phases of explore and exploit which can be difficult because once someone finds something of value they tend to go in on that and never come back to explore and then you get you know all sorts of things like the famous example of kodak which invented digital photography and sc it because they were like why would we mess with the thing that is already good going for us and so to me range and inside the box where like the explorer book is like how do you find out how do you broaden your horizons figure out what's you're good at what interests you you know getting this broad tool set having that power and then inside the box was the exploit which now you've got those things how do you put boundaries around it so that you can focus and leverage that power so i wouldn't have used that explore exploit stuff because it's kind of ugly language from the research literature but that's how i've viewed the through line really of of all of my books how do you figure out what your what you should be doing how do you build the tool set for it and then how do you focus it into achievement by the way this is the success of life for anybody is is doing what you just described and doing it and i would add doing around something you care deeply about and your passionate about so that the quality of effort and an output through those learnings are actually really good i think that's fascinating to me and i wanna actually kinda dive in a little deeper around the putting in practice and the exploding part of it because i was talking about inside the box with some folks on my team and they brought up a real conundrum and i was like i'm gonna talk to david about that and they're like oh yeah i understand that you want these constraints and i understand that we gotta slow to go fast but it's like i just don't think you're giving me enough to solve the problem i don't have enough time i don't have enough people i don't have enough money what have you and and they're like i think you're just passing that off constraints and it's actually i i'm i'm not resourced to actually do this thing how do you what would you say to that person yeah i think a few things so first of all people always want more of everything like if only i had more resources if only had more of that and there's a lot of evidence that that doesn't necessarily lead to to better work so let me go because i'm so interested in space let me go back to some of my nasa reporting where two things happen one so one of the first readers of inside the box was a guy named ed hoffman who was the first chief knowledge officer at nasa which means mean he sort of like a psychologist who's in charge of organizational learning from both mistakes and and successes and he was reading and said i have to tell you about this project called lc cross where the engineers ended up with half the time in the budget that they expected so what did they do well they complained and said we need more time and we need more money and then a team leader said well let's say we were going to solve this how would we do it and immediately that like flipped them into this mode of of problem solving and they said well we can't build from scratch so we'd have to borrow tech so they went and took imaging equipment straight off of army tanks and engine temperature sensors straight from nascar and they built the probe they confirmed water on the moon and that became part of their their work habit now if they had a quarter of the time and a quarter of the budget would that still have been true i doubt it so there's that you know there's a line but i think even that exercise of if i had less how would i get this done often boost people into this creative thinking i mean if you have nothing right it's a difficulty but nasa got away from some of that stuff which is why they started contracting with private companies who are still kind of frugal and small and innovative or the indian space research organization sent to probe to mars for less than the budget of the film gravity right because they they couldn't do it the way we could with like this huge rep repulsive powers they had to loop around the earth and send it to mars they became very innovative and so i think those exercises can be really important and and by the way so if people are con complaining about frugal say i visited with amazon mh in almost everyone i meant there this company that has like unimaginable resource literally endless money basically right and everyone there was complaining about resource constraints so i was got really interested in that and it turns out that frugal gall is one of their core principles and so they do resource constrain all these people because they wanna stay in that mode that they grew up with which is the way to innovate its scale is actually to to be really frugal and then you find these solutions in smaller ways and then we can scale them up instead of trying to do these sort of huge implementations so i think everyone's always gonna want more resources more time things like that but is the cognitive scientist dana willing has put it your brain's not made for thinking it's made for avoiding thinking whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly yeah and so if you're just given like you know all the resource and open field of possibilities you will default to what psychologist call a path of least resistance where you'll reach for the easy solution right the one that where you don't have to think is hard where you can just throw money at the problem etcetera that needs to be blocked for you to do innovative thinking so that's one thing and i think the second thing is people really underestimate how complexity explodes when they get more resources and bring in more people and things like that so this is known as brooks law from the famous computer scientist fred brooks who designed some of the computer systems that led the first moon landing and then founded the computer science department in university of north carolina his laws is known as when you add more people to a project that's already late it will be even more late because you think all we needed is more more people but we really underestimate the coordination costs the cost of ass simulating people to the team the communication costs all these things and so you'll just make it even more late so in the abstract more and more and more always seems better but it's it's just not the reality so our i think our brains aren't always wired for for again these are desirable difficulties right yeah this this is like the classic against the grain counter intuitive thing if you're a leader out there you want people complaining about right timelines and res sourcing you want that friction and if you don't have that friction then you're probably not pushing hard enough but you gave i think the leaders and the team is a good compromise point which is go through the exercise and understand is it possible yeah like do you have enough to actually find some way to do this with these constraints and if you don't then maybe you have to like tweak them a little bit to open it up but you're much better to start there than giving the team everything and then having them get down the track there's ton of complexity you're never gonna be able to kinda you know put the the toothpaste back in the tube right because it's just it's gonna just creep that's right you can add those resources later right if you and in in the process of that exercise you may find a solution for something that you didn't know before maybe the whole thing can't get done so then you add the resources but now you've got that innovative thinking where that won't happen if you start with all those with all the resources so you know do that exercise it will also force you to say look if we had to cut something out what would it be and that can be clarifying too this is kind of interesting a little bit related that i saw one ceo of a company that i i spent some time with where it was growing really fast and then they had probably overrun a bit mh and and had to pull back a little bit and so you know at at some point they were gonna have to cut some things out but they were still doing great right but they just probably overs shot a little bit and he came up with this exercise he called the legacy constraint where he he came went to his team and said if if we were going out of business in two years and nobody knew it but us we couldn't tell our clients or customers what will we do differently and immediately people started saying things like well i'd stop worrying about that thing that bothers me all the time or i would put less time on x and more on why because that's where the real value is or were my real challenges people started talking about using skills that they had that they felt were unused mh in the organization because it's like once you get into an existential crisis people will bring more to bear so they weren't going out of business in two years no way i mean they weren't going out of business period but they were going to have to do some cutting of projects but it was just so interesting to see what that exercise did to people in terms of putting them in this mode where they were thinking about prioritization and using more of their own skills i i do that with my teams a i'll i'll go in with a team that might be doing fine but i think could be doing amazing and i i'll often just ask them if we just rebooted this thing right now and you could just stop at everything what would be your new like bottoms up view of what what you should do how you should spend your time and i'll talk to them about it i was like how different from what you're currently doing and it's almost always vastly different right like it's not just like there's like oh we do this twenty percent more it's like eighty percent of what they doing they would stop doing and do this other stuff which is dramatic and shows you how systems can put people in bad situations yeah that's there's like two really interesting things about that one you're helping them combat i think maybe the most be doubling of all human biases which is the sunk cost that right like once you've gotten momentum in a direction whether because you've spent time you've spent energy you're gonna keep doing it even if it's not the best path anymore right whereas if you say if i were starting again today this is often with sort of investments and things where people will say would i make this investment if i were starting today and the answer is no then you probably shouldn't keep investing in that thing right it's just because you've you've sunk time into it basically but it's it's very hard for for people to stop right because once you've got momentum you've got momentum and and the other thing i think about what you're saying is you're helping people do a practice that sometimes called design freeze mh this is usually for designers where in order to combat like since computers have come more into design it's really easy to change designs like crazy there's actually a front page article on the wall street journal a little while ago about how the us went from being the world's leading ship builders to being complete lag where we're outsourcing it and a lot of it had to do with we never stop changing the requirements because you can add so many features that we never say like stop make the thing and that happens in design called the christmas tree effector or feature where it's easier than ever with technology to ad features so you just never stop and so the practice of design freeze is basically saying okay we've done some stuff everyone is stopping no more changes now we're gonna get together talk about lessons if it's something that we can test we're gonna test the prototype wherever it is right now and you do that repeatedly and so i think what you're alluding to is both helping people think about the sunk cost or sunk cost bias and also a form of design freeze we're saying let's just stop for a second and put our heads up and see if what we've learned and whether we should be doing something different i think that's right i i think there's moments in your life where you just something happens and it causes you to learn a lesson and for me i i think about back to the gosh what a decade ago whatever when when slack was getting started at atlas and had this product called hip chat we were big hip chat users and it was slack before slack and and hip chat started a couple of years prior to slack and it was a really good product we used it all the time and that business i think was growing like multiple hundred percents year over year right and slack comes along and it turns out that atlas just completely sized the opportunity that the market for this thing was not this small tuck in to their product portfolio but like should've have been one of one if not the core part of the product portfolio and it kind of gave me the lesson of like opportunity cost versus sunk cost it's like mh you waste all your time in the sunk cost and your whole focus needs to be is there an opportunity cost that i'm missing out on am i actually focused in the highest magnitude areas and i think that's especially true for marketers because they kinda you get caught up in the river of marketing oh i gotta do my linkedin post i gotta do my website update this week instead of actually saying oh what is the couple of things that i can do that would really be transformative because that's what my where my customers are spending time or where maybe i have a unique ability to tell that story and i think you're framing around these lessons and the sunk cost fallacy is really really good do you know the origin story of slack stewart started but i forget how it actually started it was really a video game a game development company that and it was just their internal messaging system and the game development company was not going to work and i think it there was even a point where they said you know alright investors we we we can see that it's not going to work like take some of your money back you know which is an amazing call right but then slack which was their messaging system became the product so i think that really gets at what you're saying where it's like they sort of incidentally made this thing and saw that there was an opportunity or somebody saw if there was an opportunity so i just think that emphasizes your point of right it's like the thing you're doing may not always be the best opportunity in there times you should reevaluate that yes and and kinda calls back to an early part of the conversation sometimes people like to do what they're interested in versus what is the right thing and the right opportunity and you know in the slack case you know stewart and that team were interested in video games to start with they kind of missed and and event and in inadvertently discovered the big opportunity yeah so one of the things i like to do when i talk to everybody is understand how they work in this modern world and so you're somebody who's writing all the time mh and i assume you're using an ai and all these fun tools that everybody's using like what has changed about how you write and like what have you learned to be better at writing in this new world that you can maybe share with everybody watching this is having to write things on a daily basis what are the tips that you would give i mean i don't use ai for writing i i will sometimes put a paragraph i wrote into ai and say you know or a few paragraphs and get it to do its own version sort of and i'll see if i think it's better and if i do then i'll say you know i got gotta i have to do better maybe i'll look at certain phrasing and things like that the author who i i profile inside the box is a l day you know who sold eighty million books she said she like wrote some children's story and then it had ai right one with the same topic she gave and she thought that one was better so she was like it then pushed me to be better you know she didn't use it but but it pushed her to be better right i use it for other things for sure mh but i don't tend to use it for writing because one i like writing i mean i find writing quite painful it's very painful you know but one of the other things i love the most of my life i was college eight hundred meter runner that was very painful they eight hundred meters like the hardest race ever you you really love fame i'd ran track it's painful yeah so if someone had asked me in the middle of writing a book or in the middle of training of an eight hundred or something and said you know are you enjoying yourself and say are you insane it's torture but it's so engaging i find it's so engaging and that's how i find writing painful but very engaging and and i start to realize through the process which is really important because again i wanna write for an audience that is unfamiliar with this i wanna assume that they have not heard of any of the stuff that i've heard of you know except for maybe company names and people stuff like that but one thing i've noticed is i'm i'm pretty good at that but nobody is perfect at that and so i'll often you still have these assumptions of things you're familiar with because there's so obvious to you now if you've learned about them and so when i do the writing it starts to become apparent to me of what i don't actually understand well enough so to make it really simple and so that tells me okay this is where i need to go back and do more reporting or more interviewing or more research so the writing process for me is also really important process for figuring out what i think i understand but i don't understand well enough to really be writing it as well as i want and so i have to go back to to research like this psychology finding the illusion of explanatory depth where people will say they understand how certain things work and then when you ask them to explain it or draw it or whatever you realize they understand they realize they understand a lot less than they thought and so that comes out to me in the writing process so i think that's important to do and i enjoy it and and find it engaging so i'm for sure i'm using ai but you're using stuff you don't like to do you're doing graphics and slide deck presentations and that probably that kind of stuff more so than the actual core thing you like yeah and i can tell you the most like efficiency boosting use of it that i have which is not exactly writing but is using this tool so i first started using this tool called sykes dot a i s c i t e dot ai and then i sort of made a version of it for myself where you can upload a scientific paper because i'm i'm always reading tons of scientific papers you can upload the paper and it will first make a map for you of all the other papers that cite your paper and it will show which ones of those are highly cited so you can themselves you can start to get this trail of what is like the line of influential work and it will dump into a list what are called citation statements a little excerpt showing how all these other papers cite your paper of interest so you can quickly see is this a passing mention is it substantive is it ref mh it will try to automatically separate them into ref and confirming or just mentioning and i'd say it's right like eighty percent of the time you yourself to check but of course twenty percent is not tiny but that i used to do that by downloading tons of papers it manually only go go to the university yes control ethic my way through them so it turned a day you know in some cases into an hour so that's my most efficiency boosting use we'll work you're doing that's transformative i you're basically building a real time like kinda of knowledge graph of any pop that you're trying to go down and learn which is fascinating and and the thing it probably most helps with is sift out papers i would have read part of before realizing they were not substantive mentions help help you not waste your time yeah yeah going back a little bit further the thing i wanna make sure everybody takes away from this this little part of the show is i love what you said it helps me understand that i do not know this thing well enough to explain it simply right i think that's where most marketers fall flat it's like oh i work for some technical product some manufacturer who's doing this hard thing and i kinda understand the science in the process but don't really understand it and it turns out it's very hard to teach somebody else something if you don't understand it really well yourself and i think in the ai world people are outsourcing that more and more and it's actually making the problem worse not better and i i think your push for people to go deeper there and use ai eye to automate maybe the the learning and info gathering side of it is really smart well thank you and and i think you know we're still it's still early days but we're seeing some of the first studies on how ai affects human cognition and there are some causes for concern where the shorthand i've been using is that ai can often look like gps for your brain where if using gps you don't really learn how to get around if you're always relying on it and i think there's some similar evidence with ai where if you're using it for that really some aspects of that learning phase it's like you just don't work as hard as you should be to learn this stuff like you have this feeling of fluency i'm going back and forth i'm really learning fast but then when people are sort of tested in various ways they didn't learn as well as i thought they did so i think that's a a danger to be aware of to kinda close out the real reason i wanted talk to you today is because i thought inside the box in this notion of constraints was like perfectly timed in a world of abundance and ai and people being able to do everything and ever everybody should read the book before they read the book what is your like biggest takeaway for this ai tech marketing world in terms of like the framework concept of the book that you think like oh i'd really encourage people to be aware of this keep this in their head because it's gonna help them make smarter decisions on a daily basis a behavioral constraint brain first tool second when it comes to ai do your thinking first and this has been shown in studies where if you use tool first brain second you will not learn the same way that if you do brain first tool second so it doesn't mean not the tool but brain first tool second and i think that's really important because it is so s to not do that very much so and so that is one of the main kind of behavioral constraints i've put on myself with whatever it because so s productive just go playing around prototype things and that's great like prototyping stuff is fast but use your brain somewhat first and and somewhat you use your brain first and then tool a second karen who who does the show with me who's who's out today for the tool first brain second we're kind of starting to call that being an ai s because you're just like you're just writing a bunch of stuff in you're having it generate this document that you don't really read and then you're moving that other document to do something else with it and sooner like ten steps into something you've actually not thought about not paid any attention to and you're just kinda being an ai s yeah have you ai slab i like that i might the have have you seen that cartoon where it's like someone on one end says yeah it's great i gave it these four bullet points that turned into a six page memo and the person on the other side is was like yeah it's i got the six page memo and i turned it into four bullet points right and that's the example of like those two those are two people are doing tool first us not brain first yeah yeah absolutely and and i also think something i've been doing for myself that that i that's based on a like a cutting edge genetic lab that i wrote about in the book is subtraction audits where it it people have a natural what's called additive bias us like we always add yeah solve problems instead of taking away and i think that's accelerated in the age of and so i will for myself do what this lab did where put all of my current commitments projects on post it notes on the wall quarterly and then i'll say if i had to cut something out this quarter what would it be and then i do it because otherwise it just grows and grows and grows and so that's always painful because it wouldn't be up there if it wasn't something i wanted to do but also you know i have a finite lifetime and a finite energy and you just can't do everything you wish you could first of all i love that i'm stealing that second of all anybody watching this hey think that's like the ultimate career hack right now is if it and not just doing that for yourself but actually being the person within an organization doing that and saying hey i think we should stop this one thing so that we can focus more on these couple of other things that are more important i think if you do that a handful of times you'll be right and you'll see your career velocity really engage because you're gonna stop yourself and your team from being spread to them completely agree okay well david this was awesome everybody should go and check out your books i really did love range and inside the box i love how you framed them as like explore and exploit now that you you said that i that's how i'm gonna think about them from now on really appreciate you joining us today we'll see everybody really soon on the next episode thank you for having me let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support ticket emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow at him it's

we are back with one of our favorite guests on marketing against the grain we've got barbara j giovanni chair she was on a year ago one of the most popular episodes we've ever done and because she took us behind the scenes of how she was scaling her one person agency with just her and ai and she's back and the crazy part is her business it's grown five times and with that has come a whole host of changes systems tools and she's gonna walk us all through those today but most importantly she is giving you all the exact process that she runs to actually scale her content work for her clients it's gonna be a free skill you're gonna be able to download it you can check it out right below she's gonna walk you through how to set it up how to use it so you can use it for yourself thanks for coming back and joining us thanks for having me it's great seeing you guys after a year well first of all before getting anything how has business been it's been great largely thanks to your guys episode it really did the numbers so we've had a lot of activity lot of excitement i've been needing a lot of people and thanks to a lot of the new models particularly claude a managed to five x the business in the course of one year with still remaining just one person manager the business so it's still just me five x and still one person is really really impressive congratulations like you should be super super proud of that thank you barbara like i remember our conversation a year ago and you were like doing most everything in chat gp you know you had skills and workflows but they were like all pretty reactive versus proactive and like that was the summary of what i remember how much is that all changed in in a year's time wow massively i don't think i knew what a scale was back then like i'm non technical i'm just a marketer so i was using chad in a way the most marketers did which is like just a chat box essentially like i even remember we attached like a prompt sheet to our last episode and i'm like i don't use prompts anymore that's crazy it was only after claude kind of became a little bit more popular mid end of twenty twenty five that i switched everything from chad to claude and i figured out what claude coat is and kind of sort of building on top of that and now that is the only thing i'm using i'm dabbling back into codecs a little bit now so i can text it yeah i've i've been hearing from people so right now it's mainly just the challenge of having everything in claude and then like i have to like transfer stuff and like try out this new thing but very very different instead of just using it as a chat box and you know kinda like you said very reactive very manual a lot of editing i now have like dent systems for most of the client work and you know there's still some parts that are the same especially when it comes to written content there's still some foundations that are like this is how you make ai sla and this is how you make it better so there's definitely still a lot of a judgment and taste involved but the foundation is definitely much more different i rarely find myself kind of having to prompt as a chat anymore and every time i do i kind of stop myself and i'm like is there like a skill or a process that i need to create for this to not be like that because it usually produces better quality content when i actually have a process so our audience can follow along what are the key services that you're offering through the agent system basically anything related to marketing gt claude has allowed me to fan that a little bit further than anything that i could do last year so you know in terms of content that is definitely kind of written content linkedin post twitter post blog posts but now that i have claude i can dabble a little bit more in like specific outreach used tools that it would just take way too much time in twenty twenty five i would have to do everything manually like for example linkedin outbound that would have been you know there's tools for that but i would have had to set everything up manually and nowadays is just like an mc and cloud connector so i can just control everything from claude so yeah there's still a lot of written content but you know video editing anything related to kind of building a growth channel using content what would be a typical client implementation they might be looking for a specific output meaning we want to turn our founder into a kind of founder led growth channel that's usually done through like linkedin or x but they don't really know where to start and obviously most founders don't really have time to dedicate to like let me write a whole batch of linkedin post for the next week which you know if you have time for that as a founder that's maybe not you know where your time should be spent and then nobody on the team wants to take it on because it's it's too much work because obviously some of this content it needs to be good quality it needs to be authentic it it can just be ai s a lot of people just struggle setting up that process and then maintaining it and then for some teams i you know even dive into kind of team trainings developing like a specific process that i then onboard a team too and they could keep running it you know think like programmatic seo and like nowadays a g or whatever you wanna call it very cool before like two years ago somebody is in the situation you're in barbara you just you're just posting and creating and you're getting some feedback from the client you're maybe looking at some comments and then maybe like once a month you're looking at some data right and now it's like no no i've got this just repeatable system that is making literally the entire process you just outlined smarter on a daily weekly basis i found that most people i talk to they're willing to do stuff they just don't know how to rebuild the workflow or how to build the process right and i think that's what you're saying it's like hey yeah part of it i go do stuff for people but a lot of it is also just like i help people understand what is now possible and build a processor system for them that they can go do and kinda build on and use themselves and like get them from zero to one and i actually get them making some basic progress in a new way yeah exactly i think a lot of marketing nowadays you know we're maybe rethinking how marketing teams function especially internally within a company so i think a lot of people are opting for an ic as an individual contributor who can just manage a lot of these different channels and create a lot of output in terms of like content and specific pieces that are needed to kind of run that ecosystem so that's basically what they use me for instead of like a full time higher or like a full marketing team i think it's kind of shifting like that a little bit so it's interesting to see how that works within startups one thing i i wanna make sure we hit on is i think that the like ai doom loop of people posting on x and linkedin i did this cool amazing thing that's magic and everybody commenting being like how do i do that i wanna do that and then like you go and try to do it and see they're like really technical or it's actually not scalable or cost of julian dollars like maybe just give us a report from the real world like separate all the hype that people see online and what are the things the over the last year you think of gotten really great because of ai and that everybody should be doing with ai in their marketing now yeah there's definitely a lot of that online and you know it's like that meme of like i automated my entire linkedin comments it's like yeah we can tell it looks terrible it's we have a bad quality here ai linkedin comments more than like life itself oh my god the of where did they all come it's crazy it's so bad yeah i think that's gonna kind of self correct over time once we all become sick of it or we burn linkedin down it's gonna be one or the other but this is really interesting because i mostly help founders post more on linkedin and x and when you look at content on x the reason why most of us are still there and really appreciate the platform is because it doesn't have that ai sla like you're not gonna grow if you're posting kind of random generic content it really needs to be authentic and kind have a purpose on that platform so once you kind of see a platform like that you really have to think about how you use ai and what your process looks like and it all comes down to the basics that i think i spoke in twenty twenty five as well which is you need insights and knowledge that are genuinely interesting and valuable to share before you start thinking of how can i scale this potentially with ai so my first kind of tip is to usually use ai for any kind of brainstorming or anything like that because just automated content for any platform it's still very difficult to do in great quality this episode i'll show you guys how to make a scale that can kind of create that founder writing style tone voice but the foundation remains the same if you just don't really have anything interesting to say ai is not gonna help there it's not really gonna give you an idea or like a hook or a point to your post it's just not gonna do that for you and there's a lot of tools now that i see that kind of try to scale without knowing what exactly you're scaling and most people are just not giving enough to you know produce anything of good quality and that's where most people kinda get you know stuck and start hating on all ai content thinking that it can actually be good let's get into look at stuff it's show us what you're building these days i'd love to see it so in twenty twenty five i was largely still using it as a chat box and it was very very simple compared to now where i have a dedicated agents a system or process a lot of context stocks for each client and that's kinda how i organize everything in folders so that clock can use it very effectively and you know it's very funny to think about twenty twenty five where in chad i'm pretty sure you still had like a limit of five docs that you can attach to each message and that's kinda where it was pulling information from which is hilarious think about now when i have hundreds of docs that a agent needs to surface for every single client when it's writing content in order to make sure that everything is accurate that everything is correct that it's not hall any information about the product or the company so that's kind of the main difference and then obviously in terms of just the business it has allowed me to scale without hiring any additional people and a lot of this time saved comes from very small things like kind of automating my sales process and kind of project proposals and stuff like that that i do for clients which i still did with chad between twenty twenty five but it was still that kind of classic like you go into the chat and you put your transcript in and then you create a project proposal and then you have to edit it so i could take on like maybe two three sales calls a week which was crazy after your guys episode landed because suddenly i just had so many call requests that i had to kinda space them out but nowadays i you know i could take ten plus sales calls in a week without any issues because i have these processes running so you can scale your business and you can also scale kind of the content that you're working on for clients with claude and codecs and some of these agent systems nowadays that at least i didn't know in early twenty twenty five and i don't think any other marketers were really utilizing agent systems back then most businesses think they know their customers they have the data the records the history but it's scattered across three teams and four systems which means no one can actually use it hubspot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation into one platform every team can work from so when sales talks to a customer marketing and already know the full story and when you know more you grow more check out hot hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses very cool if you're kinda going to build that linkedin how do i make great content for a founder what is the first step in terms of building the system could you bring us through the steps so people can get an idea of how you kinda of put that workflow together yeah definitely so one of my first steps and this depends on kind of the team and how comfortable you are connecting different tools in your cloud but i find that it's the biggest unlock when you can actually connect everything that you're using for work into your quad so for me this is all that i'm using every single day from claude itself so these are the tools that you can connect through an mc p that i have with applaud and i know that it sounds a little daunting but it's really not you just go into settings and there's extensions here that you can just connect so whatever you're using google drive gmail can they most of them have it now and you can just connect that which means that cloud code can res surface everything that you're using here so for example for granola that's all of my call transcripts so with clients i have different calls and then i use those transcripts to generate linkedin content blog post things like that and instead of having to kind of copy paste and keep all of those transcripts in like a google doc or something of folder claude already has all of that knowledge for each of my clients and that kinda keeps building over time so after working with the clients for like two three years i have a lot of knowledge that i can use for content and that makes content higher quality so you'll go into a client and say okay i'll connect these mc p's into a claude instance if you have a hundred clients are those a hundred clients all being pipe into your same claude instance or like how do you set that part of well so there's a limit here in terms of what your cloud can do so my claude is connected to my granola account so when i have a call with the client it picks that up but a lot of the times i need other transcripts from clients and other context stocks and a lot of clients are very willing to like share their sales calls or their internal calls because they informed content as well you know if you have a weekly stand up with your founder you're probably talking about what's happening in the company what's happening with a product what you guys are working on right now and then i can use that for content but obviously i wasn't on that call so claude doesn't actually let me connect a bunch of different granola yeah accounts or whatever transcript tool you're using but you can make you know a bit of a hack where i work with most of my clients through slack so once they have a call their granola or whatever they're using for a meeting transcripts directly sends the transcript into my slack channel that's dedicated to that client and myself and then my agent can res reserve it so it does like a daily check of like okay what was sent to me in my slack and where in what folder does it need to download it and add it because i have a folder for each client so it's a bit of a work it's not ideal but there are workspaces nowadays online that you can connect everything to each client i believe type is one of them there's a couple ways you would do this right karen is you could do it barbara you're just saying which is use slack as file sharing in like kinda agent context you could also if you're working with slightly bigger companies probably all of them would have kind of like enterprise cloud license or you know insert your ai tool choice doesn't need to be cloud and then you you would just have one of those enterprise seats that you could log out log into and access all the context there a lot of it probably just comes down to like the sophistication of the company and like how much work you're doing right if you're doing a massive amount of work and you need a lot of context you probably need that like dedicated seat in their environment versus if you're doing a lot of what you're saying which is like hey this is a startup up they're trying to go from zero to one i'm trying to get a ton of information parse out the the best ten to twenty percent and get it to market as fast as possible then like the slack thing works really well in that instance exactly i work with a lot of earlier stage startups ups so usually when i go in and kind of figure out how to get the contact stocks the answer is usually we don't really have much you know connects whatever you need to connect so we kinda have to create a few of these processes i guess one thing you're kinda saying in a run by way here is the founder content is coming from things happen within that company can you maybe talk about that our company really that interesting like because a lot of content you kinda have to like that's a good question think about an idea whereas the day to day of a company might not be that interested for content that is true and it might not be interesting in terms of like it's not gonna be like a great hook but it gives you additional context so that you can make sure that any post that you write is actually authentic instead of like a founder giving you like you know yeah your thoughts about the industry or whatever because there's usually something like interesting or quirky that they do in the team that will you know maybe res surface in like a few weeks when i'm running a post so once you have kind of that knowledge about a company a team a founder it starts working really beautifully together and all of those parts kinda start connecting and you know obviously it matters if your founder has something meaningful to say and i don't mean this in like no you know have to believe stuff that's different and and interesting in the world right yeah and you have to you know be willing to be you know if you have a controversial idea i don't think it's gonna ruin your company to talk about it online a lot of founders are very scared to kind of say anything that they actually think and you know for a founder we had a post takeoff on friday last friday which is surprising because fridays tend to be kinda bad for posting but he just has a really controversial post that goes against the industry standard and he got a lot of hate in the comments but then we checked the website and there was a lot of sign ups so you know do with that quote from did that come from something the context captured in a meet in or slack or that was just a thought he had it was a random call that i had with him when i was kind of like digging into you know his opinions about the industry and then he said something really controversial and i was like i'm gonna use that and you know he was brave enough to do it so a lot of founders are i i think there's less of kind of worry from founders especially with like linkedin and twitter feeds like it's you know it's a feat it's fine it's gonna you know maybe get a little more than twenty four hours in this world you know is exactly one thing to remember don't you feel like one of the things we've been able to do is help everybody get a cod qualification of what it actually means to create great content with ai know this is like the thing you're passionate about so that's part of why i'm bringing it up it's also why you're asking her like a bunch of questions right now but i love this like i think this is like each company has a unique story to tell and what you're doing is try to capture that on an ongoing basis and put it into the context to create content from i think what one of the questions just before we get on to once you've captured the context what do you do it sounds like part of your process is continually intervene the finder to see what's on their mind which i think that's all the best kind of ghost riders refine do that why haven't you identified that because you could just have an agent do it for you so you don't have to do it because you know you really just wanna hear their opinions and certain things so is there a reason you still do that in person name one founder that's gonna hop on a call with an agent this is the issue right yeah that's fair i was curious if you how you tried i've floated the idea around and i got a lot of like well if we're doing that i might as well just jot down a few ideas and i know for a fact that the jot down a few ideas is just not the same because i'm there to kind of be like oh what did you actually mean by that like let's dig into that part of that idea so that i can actually get your insights so honestly a lot of founders kind of use us as a as a therapy session essentially so like these the inside calls are a bit of a therapy session plus it's once a month and if a founder doesn't have time for willingness to do like an inside call okay is he doing like a regular podcast you know a lot of founders nowadays they have a podcast like it's a it's a whole thing is he doing a lot of webinars is she attending events you know like all of those can be inside calls they don't necessarily have to come through me sitting down with a founder but again i work with a lot of early stage startups ups and they might not have a bunch of that kind of content and transcripts laying around i'm not surprised i was just trying to i was asking had you like that's what i've heard from anyone who's worked with founders as they would never do it i was curious if you had tried and been told to like no way yeah so once you have context how do you extrapolate good ideas so that is actually included in the skill that i'm gonna be sharing it today so before writes content it kind of goes through like the topic ideas so basically what you guys will have to download at the end of this episode is a scale that i just call founder ghost writer setup but the setup for this skill i think puts you in a really good position to create any skills that you need for the company including the skill for specifically founder led content so you know set up the complete writing system for a new client and once you download that you will be prompted to create context docs which i started here already because this took like twenty thirty minutes to set up so this isn't like a quick task but you know let it run in the background and turn on another chat and do something else so basically once you download this file you can prompt it and say i have a new client and everything about them is in a source material and client docs so build an entire system for founder name and context docs gross running skills and the drafting skills and then you will have something like this i just created like a test client folder so that i can show you guys on a real example without giving out the company but i still wanted it to be based on an actual founder content that i have obviously the better your source materials and more kind of specific the better the output is going to be but yeah you have the source material and context docs here so you can see meetings those are some of them that are not in my granola so i took these from kind of their internal meetings they have like a podcast or something like that so i just downloaded it all of that their existing social media posts and their blog posts obviously i wasn't downloading this manually you just task an agent and it strips all of that out you just need to give it like their linkedin account or something so it will collect all of that for you and for the contact docs i have the company and founders product technical information positioning audience ic customers all of those are really good things to just ask any new clients like just give me all of your ic docs personas your current client list you know that's all very easily downloaded and exported suits you can just have it and then for the ghost reading this skill is going to build this entire process that is much better than writing guides i'm noticing a lot of people use writing guides and i think they're terrible i think we need to abandon the writing guides they just don't produce good content you need a process you don't need just like a vague set of instructions for how to write well so that's also how writing has always worked barbara writing has always worked by having multiple people review edit feedback slash apart like whether it's like an english class in college or a newsroom or what have you like that's what it's like it's you can't just have one person follow guidelines that's like the start of an assignment right and what you're basically what i'm looking at as i'm looking through the steps in the skill here is you've gotta basically put a process in place to kinda mimic the different rounds of a traditional human led editing process yes exactly actually i have them outlined here so you guys can see very easily this is what's in the read me doc and this is what the system is basically built of so you have your main information and about the founder about the company about their ic you know are they treating their platforms differently like linkedin is usually you have your specific ic there but then x is usually a little bit different you definitely wanna have super a separate writing style into an voice on all of these platforms and then you have you know any context docs like what are we allowed to say what do we wanna stay away from etcetera etcetera but i think my main takeaway when kind of you know i write for founders every single day so i'm really in the nitty gritty of these processes and i had to like really bully cloth to figure out how to do it well because if i get a batch of posts and it says first sentence you know some kind of variation of if this and that i'm not even bothering to edit that like i don't know where to bring in there yeah i need to go back the process is broken something has going horribly wrong like i can't even put in the time to edit something like that the first draft already needs to be something that is good quality enough for me to even bother editing and you will need to be editing so it's not as clear cut as like just a bunch of batch of posts and then you schedule it but i need the first batch opposed to be good you know has to be something other than just kind of random ai slot but if it's defaulting to ai slot that means that something in the process is broken and you can fix it and when you say you know this versus ride in style can you maybe explain that for the audience of why this is different from because i when i look at this if this was all in a singular document this is somewhat close to a ride in style so what makes it different i guess yeah so what makes it different and let me just give you a very quick overview you got your onboarding in your context stocks you give all of that and then the skill is made from that but the most important part of the skill is that it has steps and for each of the steps there are different agents handling that step so for example i noticed that i get a much better first batch of posts when one of the final steps where there is an agent that reads the content cold meaning it was not the same agent who was writing or searching content yeah it's reading it as if you know it's reading it for the first time and if anyone is like kind of in the nitty gritty of writing with ai you will notice that when especially when you give it transcripts and context stocks and like an idea or a story from a founder it starts off a post in this really weird kind of way where it assumes that the reader knows context so it's like trying to make a hug but it's not really landing because the person doesn't know what you're talking about and it's like it's just this really odd way of writing it's very robotic and i was kind of thinking what is in making and do that and how do i prompt away from that and then i added well actually this wasn't my idea i was bullying cloth to tell me how i can fix this and then it was like okay let's add this new agent who like reads the last kind of part as an editor would so like you deliver your book to an editor and he might look at the first sentence you're like i have no idea what this said like you got like you didn't do it well so it's kind of giving you the a very objective opinion and then editing based on that barbara is it like in the context you do have who that person's consumer or content is like i i don't love the term ic because ic is a traditional thing used for like buying the product which is different from i think who can not who shouldn't be different from you consume content but different reasons for the consumer content and so does it take on board like i'm gonna act as that person and then review it like cold or it's just like literally the agent doing it it's like a person who is seeing this post on your linkedin feed now yeah so like it doesn't it might not know anything about the founder but if you know if you think about kind of expanding your reach on some of these platforms your content will be shown to people who don't know anything about you and are seeing you for the first time and if your content fails to resonate to someone because they don't know like the details about you and then it's it's just not gonna be good so it basically reads it as a stranger a stranger who is very good at editing i guess yeah that's very cool it's super cool i think you've given away some really valuable tips there and that tip alone is worth the whole episode and i and kieran i what i realized now is you and i do this we just did we we're never smart enough to put it the step in the process like i i'll i often sometimes we'll have specific models across my you know maybe i'll write i'll be writing i have a writing process and per complexity but then i'll have claude be like the score and greater of that content and it's it's a it's a similar process but i think barbara you articulated the problem well that the assumed context that you have when you first create something with ai has to get basically sand down and and finished out of the process and it's a really good way to do it yeah it's all these steps that i want to happen before i see to draft and get upset that it's bad so i'm just kinda trying to make that first batch as good as possible so you have like your main agent who's like the coordinator of all of the other agents and then it just like spawns as many agents at his needs this depends on the client and how technical their stuff is so for some of the clients they have very technical products and there's a like a lot of research papers and a lot of stuff that it needs to kinda take into context so i see that it sometimes spawns like ten different agents who are essentially researchers and then you have writers and another important thing next to the kind of cold reader agent is that every single agent is writing its own dedicated linkedin post if you ever asked ai to like generate a batch of post you will notice that they're all it's the same cadence it's usually the same length even if you bullied it into like you know writing a prompt that says you know you have to each post has to be unique it usually doesn't do that it just kinda defaults to a pattern because it's all one agent kind of writing it so i had to kind of create in the skill that every single post needs to be written by a separate agent and then they need to kind of review that posts work well together meaning none of the topics have been like used in that many different posts because then it's gonna be kind of awkward and then there's also a few agents who are the performance reviewer so it looks back yeah in the last week of its post to see what performed well and then it learns from that i think that's a very important aspect that i could not have even imagined in twenty twenty five that would have probably sounded like fiction that it's like a self learning system so it learns from what worked well and then it can adjust the next week's batch for that this by the way this is one of the biggest things that's changed in marketing that's why we wrote the loot book because like you have to actually you have access to all this data and you can basically run these loop learning cycles before like two years ago somebody is in the situation you're were in barbara you just you're just posting and creating and you're getting some feedback from the client you're maybe looking at some comments and then maybe like once a month you're looking at some data right and now it's like no no i've got this just repeatable system that is making literally the entire process you just outlined smarter on a daily weekly basis yeah and it's also easy to set up because you know buffer has an mc with claude so it's all kinda connected there and then i also have a dedicated agent for all of my clients that checks daily kind of news in their industry that usually needs some refinement but like you can have it here in your routines where it basically checks daily industry scans and kind of sees if there's anything worthwhile that the founder should comment on and then i have this skill connected to that so that when it writes a new batch of post for the week it also accounts for any potential news commentary that we have to write and that will also land in the batch of posts so i have a content system and that i'm gonna like plug so i don't want you to think i stole this but it's funny how like so much there's some so similarities and the performance your review is a big one like that's that's what i do is it auto ingest the data and then we'll like go back and it will actually go back and update all the skills it actually updates the context layer the ic and the skills it may have nothing to update like i try to make sure it doesn't think it has to update something if there's nothing unique to update but if it's what it what it basically is doing is clustering things into topics and what's working and what's not working and over time we'll readjust it's mostly readjust to make sure it's pulling in the right ideas because you might because if if you don't do that it would just keep suggesting the same things even though those things don't work anymore because the algorithms keep changing and so that one i think it's really really awesome and i actually i hadn't thought them i'm doing it through csv files the way you're doing it through buffer actually is a really good idea and thought about that so thank you yeah and buffer is an easy one because it allows all of the clients to add you to their workspace so i don't have to toggle between like different accounts yeah well what i wanna just point out for everybody watching is what you all we're just talking about for like the last minute is one of the single biggest things that's changed in marketing and it used to be like oh i'm gonna like make my marketing a little better and like i as a person i'm gonna learn a little bit and then maybe if some people in my team learn of it now it's the system learns and when the system learns you get compounding results it's not like incremental results were like i learned a little bit and i kinda tweak a part of the systems like the whole system gets better and because of that your actually ability to get the results linkedin followers you know engagement whatever that may be goes up at a very predictable compounding rate and i think this is an important moment because if you are a company that is not compounding their marketing that means if your competitors are you're just gonna get left behind at an alarming an alarming rate and i think this actual show today and the process they're outlining barbara is a great example of that this is amazing barbara credit to you like you were at an amazing place a year ago but this system is awesome one of the things i'm really excited about today is that barbara you're working with a ton of clients as we covered and you have one content skill that is the backbone of how you do work with all of those clients that creates really high quality content output and you're giving that to everybody for free today which is incredible so you can click the link down below everyone so barbara maybe show everybody who's excited and wants to do this for maybe themselves their own business how you actually use this skill and kind of what the output looks like yeah definitely and good news is that yes you can download the skill for free and just use it set it up today the bad news is that you're gonna have to do some works in terms of yes getting those contact stocks because that's where the magic is everything so everything so this is basically the founder growth writer setup that i use as like a global recipe and then each one of my client folders is like ingredients and then you know the more ingredients and the better your ingredients are the better the recipe is gonna turn out that type of thing i already went ahead and kind of got to the first step so download to setup up just loaded it into your quad just give it to the claude and say what or whatever ai tool you don't have to use claude it could be lit literally anything any ai tool of choice exactly no loyalty here whatever tool tool works best for me i'm using so no affiliate too philanthropic just what you're using right now and that's why you're that's why you're saying great exactly yeah and then just say that you are setting up something for a new client and you want to use this skill and then what i did before i run this prompt which will take twenty to thirty minutes i basically boarded everything that i need in the context stocks so from the founder and the company you can have any transcripts from a conversation with a founder their podcast their webinar anything that you have where they're speaking about the company ideally you would get just like on a on an onboarding call with them and ask them the origin story what they're building why they're building it might seem a little repetitive but it's really important to kind of hear them speak that in their own kind of tone of voice you know the phrases that they use and then you can use that for content by our rep repetition is signal when you are talking to a your person on your team a founder your ceo if you keep hearing the same things come up that signal that like oh this is important and i should lean into that so repetition is not a bad thing it's a really really positive yeah and it's also pretty good exercise i found that with most clients sign onboard i have a conversation with the founder and then i have a conversation with a few of their team members and when i ask a very simple question like how would you like give me just an elevator pitch of your product in your company i'm hearing a very different responses and oftentimes a person needs to kinda sit and you know think about what they would say and i'm like oh this would be kind of something that you just have that you can very quickly reserve so it is a good exercise to have especially when you're starting marketing and then add any transcripts that they already have sales calls are great because salespeople people know how to sell the product they know what resonates any kind of customer calls that you can hear what the customers like which are like the main features that they use will do they not like any internal like road roadmap discussions anything like that and then you need to strip everything that they've publish blog posts anything from their website just get an agent to do it any customer quotes any kind of banned words that they shouldn't be using stuff like that reference accounts this is a bit of a sensitive topic for founders i found when you ask them like oh give us like another founder account they're like well no ours has to be unique like i'm not gonna copy their tone of voice and running style i just need to know what good looks like to you yeah and that's one of the most important thing about dealing with agents you have to show them what good looks like for you specifically and for your clients barbara this is the number one i think people reason people fail with ai they think it's because like the model's is not good enough or they don't have the right process they don't know what to do no it's because you do not actually have strategic but clarity you know in in the loop we have this taste profile and it's all the hard questions it's like what do you believe about your industry why is your product unique and different all of those things like what you actually take the time to answer the hard questions and decide on the hard questions like you just gave good examples it's shockingly how good the content you can create off of that but it's not because the models are amazing it's because you have clarity of what you're trying to do yeah i mean i'm a non technical person what are the chances that the model is the one that is making this not work exactly exactly right the models are plenty smart i i'm the problem not not not the ai model but this is i this is a really good breakdown for everybody of the context they need and kind of the prep work they need to do to get to kind of the output that we're gonna show now you're giving them the process they gotta go do a little work with the process and then we can do something like you're about to show yeah so it's going to pull for this message that you're giving it and a task from this folder of context stocks that you set up for this new client your company whatever it is you can also just do it for yourself if you wanna start writing your post and then it's gonna just go through all of this again it's quite a it's a hefty task because it's crawling their website it's building all of these different context stocks and it's also setting up the process that i explained earlier with like different agents and who is handling what and you know it's just ingesting a lot of information about your company so just let it kinda quickly do that and it will do the rest for you it will let you know once that's done for some of these routines that you wanna set up you will have to like run the first test just to allow permissions i'm usually on the bypass permissions crowd of just you know whatever do whatever you think you need to do get to work yeah but sometimes you still need to like kind of run that test so that you can tomorrow morning wake up to like a notification that's like here's what's happening today so and then at the end you just need to test it so let's just tell it to run the scale and create a batch of posts for this founder called edmund and focus on his best insights or topics jeez a voice ai i love voice ai typing for suckers i know it's ruined and c working spaces for me though i use willow voice and they have those like whisper mics that you can just have a mic and barely talk and it picks up everything but yeah i do all of it through whisper flow love granola too love the day have you can connect it to your apple watch now which some people think it's really creepy but i'm like i don't i don't know i sometimes i talk to like a friend or something and i'm like we're having really good ideas we're now transcribed you you think of it as san francisco broader bay area not creepy the rest of the world yeah okay that's a different definition of creepy than that so i i mean i i see both sides of it okay so you you went into the skill you gave it a quick little voice prompt and you could give it a quick little voice because you've done all of the background you gave it all of the data and everything and now now where are we at what what it give us yeah so i like to see a topic plan before it goes into writing the batch of posts again i'm just trying to get us far away from feeling like i one shot at something so i wanna see the reasoning i wanna be involved in decision i work with a lot of these founders very closely so i kind of have a good grasp on what kind of content they would like what kind of content they wouldn't like so i just like to see just the concept before it goes into it and then it just gives me topics here i'm not really gonna you know look through it right now i'm sure it's fine again i used a persona of a founder but i strip a lot of the information so forgive of the quality is not gonna be like fantastic here but obviously the more information you have about more specific the better balance content right and then it gives me options from that routine that are created on res industry news so it's giving me like there's some layoffs twenty twenty six tech layouts past the entire twenty twenty five total that's a bummer and then it gives me like oh there's like an traffic study that came out so i like that i can kind of choose what i want i will give them warning about these routines when you give it like an industry it's going to you know there's always like a new model coming out there's always there's always something happening so i might not understand exactly what you want but if you go into this chat and say like oh actually this wasn't relevant and this was relevant it will learn from that and it will just get better and better every single week so i feel like with this particular founder these are pretty spot on so you know let's just say good to go on the topics let's do the twenty twenty six tech layoffs news but try not to make it a bummer try not to make it a bummer it's very a very specific and scientific prompts that we're doing but again and one of the things you said very early on the show is it's like oh i gave everybody a bunch of prompts to use a year ago and like i don't even use prompts and you don't this these are very basic prompts because all of the detail is not in the prompt anymore it's in the actual process and context right which is a be a big difference i remember being so concerned about prompt engineering in twenty twenty five and like how am i structuring that prompt and i just wasn't really seeing a lot of difference in output and nowadays when i'm especially when i'm editing something like a linkedin post which you know i think a lot of people think that you will set up this process and write for a founder and it's going to be very minimal it still takes me hours to produce like a bigger bathroom post because you need to do a lot of editing but it's so much more fun if you just turn on whisper flow and you can speak and just say what you're thinking about the edit as you go instead of kind of trying to type it out and you know you're always censoring yourself a little bit when you're writing so i think it's just a i feel a more organic way to kind of edit and i i think it makes a little bit more fun i don't know at least for me i think it's i think you're totally right again i believe creating stuff makes all of us better and you know making things is a a good thing and that's why you should not outsource your taste and judgment to ai you should build processes that help cod your taste and judgment and it can get you in some cases eighty ninety percent of the way there and then just take it the last mile and that's basically what you're spending most of your time doing right now and it's it's clearly working for you and your clients it's working for i think the most people who are following that playbook versus just like one shot or outsourcing everything to ai or just trying to do it all completely manual themselves there's a hybrid approach here that's it's actually really working well out in the world yeah and as we've walked you through the skill this is a reminder it's available for free you can click that link there'll be a qr code you can scan as well if you wanna get this skill and basically do everything that barbara just walked us through yourself you can do that now for free maybe it's worth saying that like you're drafting this batch of posts but your batch of post will always consist of a lot of different things so like if you're working with a company there's probably like a marketing campaign that's currently like you know in the in the weeds and you're trying to create content for that as well and your agents can pull from that too or like maybe there's like a launch or a new feature announcement it's never just like a batch of posts that was extracted from just like one transcript couldn't agree more this is still going it's quite a hefty process yeah it's you mean you're essentially running a very complex writing process last week i built like a full blown ab agent barbara so like based marketing and it's like a three hour run it is like this un undo level of run but it's incredible like the output quality and research quality is amazing but yeah when you want really high quality output it does take a lot of time yeah and i like to see all of the steps like for example it finished all of the drafts now and it's saying waiting on the cold review so that's like that agent that kinda of comes and just reads everything with a fresh pair of eyes so i just like seeing the process well yeah it takes a while yeah one of the things i like about the process that you're giving everybody for free is that it one it shows you its work and getting that show to you understand the the value of it like most people would stop right here at what we're looking at right now which is oh i've i've got my post i've kinda graded those posts against my framework and now i'm i'm ready and i'm we're gonna publish them and now it's you're actually gonna see the difference between that and and with the cold review step which i think is pretty cool yeah and it says it ran genuinely blind and results are not what i expect it and then now it's sending two fixes to kind of figure out the draft so it must have found something that you know wasn't good and i would rather an agent find that than we have to edit it yeah a lot of these are coming back fake right which means that it's not representative of the person and that's why you actually have that cold review step yeah exactly so you can see that the agents going step by step through to eventually get to the final product yeah you can see all of the agents working in unison in a specific process that i created for this skill and here's the final output the batch of posts and obviously you will have to still work with it edited but it's by far the best first draft that i have found that you can get delivered with a skill so here's the final batch delivered it's post plus a news commentary announcement and you can take this batch and edit whatever you think needs to be edited you can give it additional feedback and it will learn from every single piece of your feedback whenever you create a batch of post and edit it barbara we went on a journey today we talked about how life has crazy changed for you in the last year we gave everybody i think one of the best content creation skills i've seen to date that they can go and try for free we walked everyone through that it was really a landmark episode thank you so much for joining us on marketing against the grain today thanks for inviting me anytime you're always welcome back let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow at

everybody online is telling you if you're a marketer you're not gonna survive ai unless you're a systems builder well what does that even mean how do i build systems on this episode of marketing i against a grain i'm gonna give you a start in ai stack something that you can build that is a real system from a single prompt i'm gonna take you through the entire stack the value of it how i use it and then at the end of the episode give you a single prompt that can build all of this for you let's get into the today's episode okay the narrative online is that the only marketers who are gonna survive in the era of ai systems builder people who can build real systems to automate a lot of work and ten the amount of work that they can do if you're a marketer that's really important right like if you can be a ten x version of yourself it's gonna be pretty easy for you to out market other people who are not doing this now i think that there is some nuance to that i don't think every role in marketing is going to need to be a systems builder we need people who are just incredible story makers creators creators lots of different things but i do believe it is true that marketing for the most part is going to need to have systems built through ai to be able to augment the work you do and make you much much more productive but it's really hard to know where to start right i'm from a engineer background i used to be a software developer and so systems are something that i think come somewhat naturally to me right i can really think in terms of processes workflows and systems but it doesn't come naturally to everyone nor should it and especially the ai these systems are built somewhat differently i wanna do in this episode is give you the marketers ai start in stack if i was gonna build a system today for a market tier or even my system a lot of this is what i do each and every day or the things that i use each and every day what would be in it how would i bill it and so i've got a visual here that will help bring this to life so you can actually by the end of this short very short ad so it become a real ai systems builder as a marketer okay so this is the marketers ai stack and now again this is a v one version of mine mine is a little more complex than this a little more i would say over engineered at times than this but this is a great start in stack if you can just build this you're gonna be a much better marketer for building it than you are today if you don't have something like this and so this ai system is gonna help you spend more time on world class execution and i break everything into layers i think layers is an easy way to think about systems that you're built within an ai or a marketer so let's start with a couple of layers and explain what they do everything really starts with if you are build a system it has to have some sort of context or intelligence layer that is really important because it makes all of the skills and plugins that you build on top so much much more better there is no system if you do not have context you don't have intelligence and your skills are reading from that intelligent context there in a meaningful way so what's a good start and intelligence layer for a market tier or a marketing leader i think you would have to have some role contacts right so everything above here reads from the intelligence layer now the cool thing is the skills only pull in what they need right imagine a world where every skill was just told to read everything in here before executing it that's a really clunky thing the skill has to whole a lot of context it's gonna get confused at use of a ton of tokens and so instead there's some routing in and you'll get that from the copy the whole stock which is just a prompt that will build us for you there's some writing in that would say only read the context that you need as a skill and i'll explain this a little more so in that intelligence layer you have some goals right as a marketer here what are your goals this quarter what are you trying to achieve that's really important so when you're running these different things on top of it it's always anchored to the kind of goals that you have who is your ic your ideal customer profile who are the competitors you have what is the position in like why is your product differentiate why is it unique why is it valuable who is the team if you are a marketing leader who reports to you or maybe who you're working with and then who are your execs for managing up and so one of the first things you wanna do when you're building a system is say okay well what are the core intelligence that i need to build and top of and this is a kind of proposal for how you start there may be some unique things that you need so for me goals ic competitors position in the team and the execs is a really good one and then we are going to have build your intelligence layer so this is actually the prompt that will help you just start to build that and so that will help you to build the different files you have here it's gonna be built from internal and external information so that's a good step one in building your system okay i'm gonna build some intelligence that my skills and plugins ins can inherit hey if you like what you heard in this episode and you want more click the link in the description or scan that qr code we have a ton of incredible resources that can get you started do doing this stuff in a very short amount of time the second thing that lives in your intelligence layer is your coach and so this is a really good one coach basically is a skill that you can build that one you run we'll look across your usage and say okay in terms of how you've used claude this is really built for claude but you can do this chat in terms of how you've use claude or chat gb this week what are suggested improvements you would make to my ai usage and people don't understand that ai as a great coach for ai as long as you create the right skill in terms of what you're looking for now this again is an illustrative prompt and so you'll wanna tweak this for your own needs but it's saying like give me my three weakest prompt habits what the three skills i should build so what are the repetitive things i ask ai to do and i don't have a skill for the files in my intelligence layer that the most in need of an update that's a really good one because your coach can continually tell you that it's find and information that would suggest some of these files are not out of date and you want your intelligence layer your contacts layer to always be up to date because if it's not the plugins and the skills will not work the way you want them to work and one capability i'm not using that fits how i actually work so how should i use you more right there's a lot of features being launched in claw and chat all the time it's impossible to keep up with them and so your ai coach will allow you to do that then i really like having this one which is a new cloud feature that allows you to record the way you work record skill is only available in your desktop app and so when you go here you'll see i can record a skill and so that allows you to actually screen capture and you can voice record yourself doing a task and then it will create a skill for you and so i put that in my intelligence layer that i can continually record the way i work and actually start to build skills that way and this is super cool this is a way a lot of tools are being created today to help people automate the work and you can do it right within claude so i think that's the neat thing to use okay so step one system make sure we have something in our intelligence context layer that everything else reads from and the main thing be in these files making sure that you decide which ones are applicable for you that help you to be a better marketer i have included some things that wouldn't normally be in the intelligence layer but i'm putting them in the foundational layer which is an ai coach to help me get better over time with ai and way to record my work to be able to automate more of that work then we go more of me so how do i scale myself or across my team and again at the end of the episode you can get this artifact and with that artifact you can copy the whole stock what gives you a prompt and i would suggest would you do is you copy the whole stack you get the prompt you put it into claude and you have a conversation with claude about how you can improve this and deliver it for your needs because this is a v one temp version and you wanna tailor it for your but let me show you what's in here the people brief so the people brief road read from my team and my goals and so what it's really doing is collect in context around who my team is and it's continually updating their goals and how they're performing against those goals and then every one a wanted will tell me what we agreed to last time what are follow ups that i owe them personally what are their kpis have their performing against those targets what are any blockers that they have anyone they've had that i should call at by name right i'm really bad at i've giving people some kudos like hey you've done a really great job i'm always looking for the problems so i need to pause and actually give people some credit and it helps me do that two questions worth asking that i would not think to ask so this is a way that i make my one on one's really impactful or a good use of time it's not just like let's get into a room and talk about a bunch of random stuff they're really well structured and again it reads from the context teams and goals the voice of you so your team can basically get an answer from you before they even have to reach out and this is reading from position and goal and position is because it really should just read from and your personal intelligence layer so it should mimic you and your style and then really your goals what do you care about and so what this is is like build me a voice of use your skill and it will answer from my intelligence there not from general knowledge but from actual things in my intelligence layer right when someone asks you the question it answers is the way i would sites which files the answer came from and states how confident it is that that is really my view and so the more the system learns about you the better it is be able to provide a preview of how you would answer something and that's one of the things that allows me to scale and myself across many folks and that they can ask the synthetic version with me a quick question before they would ever come to me and if they don't get a reasonable answer they can still book that time with me hey if you're enjoying this episode and you want all of the resources mentioned in it you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code now to get them for yourself the storyteller is really from marketing leaders but anyone who has to kinda do presentations internally part of your job as a marketer is continuing to tell the story of how marketing is helping the business and so the storyteller skill is really helping me figure out what are my goals and so it will actually translate those things into a kinda good narrative that i can give updates around right making sure people see a good job that me as a marketing leader is doing so again really important that you understand what context files it's read from it's not trying to read refund them all better thinking and so how do i improve the way that i think one of the things i can do is read my goals and my execs md like who are they and build an exec panel and so basically the way people can get feedback from me before they ever email me or reach out to me in slack i can get a kind of precursor of what the execs may say just something i'm going to pitch represent to them and so i build a little panel of my execs and so i can get better i can go back and forth and have them criticize or poke holes am i thinking or tell me my update is like way off what they want it to be before i ever have to go them so i can round out those gaps before i ever actually go actually you have to speak to and then challenge me is kinda ways of thinking and so this one here is is kinda gonna go through different ways of thinking through a problem so the inversion what would guarantee this fails prem mortem it is six months from now and this has fails right the post mortem so this will go through different things that will challenge my way of thinking so again this layer is all around better thinking how can i think better and you may only really need one of these right this is like pretty over bearing you could just pick the one that you think best suits you're kinda thinking and challenges you're kinda thinking and start with that so you don't have to start with all of them at once so that's what's in my better thinking an exec panel how do i actually have a conversation with my execs for you it might be your manager might be your ceo whoever it may be and then one that really challenges my thinking and again they only read from the core context files that they need to read from product story this is kinda unique to this v one starter stack this may be different for you if you're a demand marketer or you're a paid advertiser or you're in search i think product story is like one of the number one most important things right now because everything so noisy everything looks kinda the same and so what do i have in product story right for me in terms of marketing and nailing your product story is like task number one today and so i have voice of the customer obviously and so this will hear will build the voice of the customer your ic dot m d and then allowing me to actually speak with the customer and get some feedback what are the biggest problems you have what would make you happy what about our price frustrate you and so you wanna have a voice of a customer that you can actually build that's reading from your ic at mds so you can have a a conversation with it try to get more clearer and clean about what your product story should be the voice of the competitor is exactly that you take in your core competitors you continually update your competitor dot m d file which lives in the intelligence layer and as we said you're continually updating that with what updates your competitors are making what's the latest case studies they put on their page what are the product launches they're doing what are the paid advertising messaging they're put in that so you wanna continually update your competitors dot md file and then you build a skill that takes that competitor's d file and then can allow you to query it as if these were your you know your real competitors right tell me about what were the last three product launches you did tell me about how you updated your price and tell me about how you are marketing against whatever my brand is like how are you competing against those how did you just update your paid advertising messaging in it all led in the competitors that md file and then this skill allows you to query it and have a conversation with it this one here is kinda like fun are be really different i've been thinking about this one a lot which is everything kinda starts to sound the same because everyone's using an ai in very similar ways a lot of them using them in ways that they don't have systems right and if you're were watching this episode you're gonna build your very first system your very first marketers ai stack so yours will be a lot better because you understand the importance of build in context and intelligence and making sure your skills inherit that context and intelligence when you're using them so position in allows me to grade our position in our current position and across our website across the product pages across our paid advertising and it basically we'll say are we really different from our competitors so it takes my position in our competitors the ic dot m d who our customer is and basically says hey on a schedule one to ten how different are we are we gonna get lost in the noise and you wanna try to make sure that you're differentiated so product stories is are we building a real product story that stands and we have a voice of that inherit who our customer is that's being updated all the time that md file because your ai coach is saying hey you need to update your ic there's some new learnings in the sales transcript there's some new learnings in the customer logs they're a customer calls all these different things will prompt you to update who your customer really is voice of the competitor very similar it should be updated every month latest launches updating case study pages updating product pages on their website paid advertise messaging all of these things really matter and then are we different takes those things and says hey are you differentiated against your competitors current messaging in or you starting to old drift into the very same sign and things and then what is my day so i have skills that build me a priority list and the priority list is basically saying across goals what's happening across your team and what the execs are asking for and just the intelligence that i'm capturing on a day to day basis what should i actually do today right so it basically reads my email my slack dms inherit these context files and then reads my email at slack dms all of these different channels and says hey in this order build me a to today to do list and it's like blockers on my team kpis that are off target any follow ups that i have that i owe someone and so it will put those based upon what i want to work on day to day what did i miss so what did i miss is basically going in to the same sort of places including google dot com and saying what do i have to come back on right there's emails i have come back on there's slacks i have to come back on there's meetings follow ups so we have a meeting and so someone says hey can you do this thing i say sure i'll come back on that there's google dot com there's all of these different things and it will group them by how long they've been weighed the oldest first and for each one who is waiting what they need in the one light draft response i can edit so basically like here's all the things you need from longest to shortest in terms of length of time being weighed in and here is like a drafted response for you now a way that i would improve this is and my own system has a scorn mechanism that said these things are more important to come back to than these things so it actually understands based upon the things i truly care about what are the things i should actually get back on block watcher is one of my favorite things to do so what i wanna do as a leader is to always unblock people and so what is the most important blockers that i can solve so we'll look through a bunch of things and it look to see if you're waiting on another team you're missing a decision missing the budget missing head missing data repeated slip dates that this will be based upon water are blockers for you and it will say well okay for all of those blockers who is blocked how long what delay and give me context so i know how to go to solve these things because i wanna build momentum and so in here it's looking to see why our team blocked or individuals blocked from being successful and how i can help them the last one i'll talk about is you really wanna make use of quad live artifacts feature and i'll do a single show just on that the live artifacts allow you to actually populate with real data so i can actually aggregate data from across all my tools and build a custom dashboard and so this one here is build in dashboards for me based upon whatever kind of dataset set i wanna see and i think as a market tier marketing to manager marketing leader this is the live artifacts is a great feature to use because it allows you to see things in a very custom way and it allows you to pull in data that's interactive in a very custom way and so custom dashboards through thought life artifacts is another big one so when someone says your hey only systems builders will survive this is a v one of a marked ai stack that you can build that's a real system for you you're gonna build your intelligence you're gonna say hey these are the context files that really matter i'm going to build my intelligence layer which are these kind of files i'm gonna have an ai coach that's gonna continually look across my usage and see what files i need to keep up to date and then i'm going to record myself work in at times to actually build skills that live on top of this intelligence layer so step one you wanna have intelligence contacts of the skills actually inherit how do you scale yourself i've done this through a people brief that makes great one on one documentation the voice of me so people can communicate with me prior to actually reaching reaching out to me in slack or email generally slack i don't like email and the storyteller that allows me to tell the story of what my team and group are doing to execs and others to show the value of it better thinking i have that exact panel i can talk to it it can actually poke holes my thinking provide some really great feedback before i ever have to go pitch the execs or ask them for more budget or something else that i can challenge my thinking through this skill and different thinking methodologies product story do we have a great product story because i think that's one of the most important parts of marketing right now we a voice of the customer we have a voice of the competitor are we really different do we sound like everyone else and how i run my day i have a to do scale i have a what did i miss what am i missing i what do i to come back on hey i wanna sell blockers and i have custom dashboards that show me how everything is doing and trending that's your v one mark ai stack you'll get the artifact you can copy the prompt and you can actually build the v one of this which is illustrative and you can customize in every single prompt you'll get it would tell claude or chat this was built in claude or you can use it in chat tea to ask you a bunch of questions so you can tailor it for your needs i hope this was helpful for you i will talk to you in the next episode of marketing against the green let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot grow better

i wanna tell you that the most important thing you can do with ai right now is build your personal intelligence layer this is how you are going to beat everyone else who are using these ai assistance and the best thing is in this episode we're gonna go through a step by step to tutorial and how you can build your first personal intelligence layer that can easily be plugged in to any ai assistant that you're using whether it's chat cb claw gemini to make your ai results better than anyone else and better yet if you stay tuned to the end of the video i'm gonna give you a link where you can just download all of this for yourself and get started straight away all of that and more on this episode of marking against the green okay let's do a little introduction to what we mean by building your own marked intelligence layer now this example i'm going to show you and provide the template for is specifically for market tiers but as you'll see in the tutorial you can customize it to a whatever profession you are in and so why would you want to build your own marketing intelligence layer it really allows you to capture everything you're learning throughout your career and this is not a new thing right darwin and had a really complex system in how he tagged all of his notes and observations across his lifetime and some of his most pivotal inventions happened because he was able to make connections between things he had observed twenty years prior and then things he had observed in his current day and so we as markers we acquire so much intelligence through work and most of it is lost but so much of that learning so much of the things we experience and get lost and we cannot reuse them again and we cannot benefit from those things and that's the problem right so you you run a bunch of campaigns you've built tent teams you've learned hard lessons at every company but those learnings are scattered right they're were in docs they're an old decks they're in your memory when you go to interview at the next company you're like well i did these things but there were so much other things that i did and i just can't recall them and when you start a session in ai you're kind of starting from scratch because you don't have all of that prior intelligence to plug into the ai assistant so the ai assistant can start from the vantage point of having all of your learned intelligence and then start to work with you from that intelligence layer most people are starting from zero every time they use ai and your intelligence isn't portable so you are building up memory in chat or claude or gemini but maybe you want to use different models and new can't bring that with you and so they are the problems that we want to solve by building your very first personal intelligence layer which is really a structured and searchable artifact that captures everything you've learned and it's gonna do that via a skill that's going to extract all of these things on a continual basis it strips out company confidential data so there's gonna be some tweaking that you'll want to do because you'll probably want to capture things you're learning in your personal life and there's things that you were learning within your company that you want to add to this artifact that you wanna add to your intelligence layer and some of it is going to be propriety data and so you wanna make sure your scale is stripping out anything that would be confidential data and just like focusing on the learnings the work that you're doing and it can plug into any ai assistant so without this every ai session starts cold right you have to re explain your experience your frameworks every single time what i'm trying to do with this you can just plug it in and your ai assistant knows all your prior work all your prior wins or losses your frameworks everything that you have learned in your prior life if you want to get started with this so you want the template and you want the skill i've added the link to download them from my github and you could go get started really easily so i'm gonna show you how it works and then i'm gonna actually go into the template and the skill the md file which is called build that you can get right at the end of this episode if you stay tuned i'll tell you where you can get both things to get started we're gonna get in and look to see exactly what it does because the other thing that people do a lot of ai is they build skills they build plug ins but they don't really know how they work you really wanna get in there and understand how skills work and actually craft them yourself with the help of ai so we're gonna get in and we're gonna actually look at the skill so you can see some of how it is actually working to do this for you so this is the structure right so this is kind of the structure that we're gonna go through you have a raw folder you have your bill skill that will extract and classify information strip out company knowledge and then go straight into your intelligence layer you can drop notes into this raw folder any format and see you can drop in a youtube transcript you can drop in a meet note you can drop in a pdf a document whatever it may be and then you can run your build and it will extract all of the information strip out the company data and then build an intelligence layer that at the moment i've temp the be four market tiers but you can you'll see as we go through it how you can customize it for your own needs now the build command will also connect to mc p servers if you wanted to so if you said hey connect to my gmail connect to my media notes connect to my google drive and what it will do is it will process any documents in the raw folder and every time you ask it to process information it will go and find if there's any updates in your google drive in your gmail in your slacks in your meta notes that haven't been processed and it will extract the key things that you're trying to learn and including your intelligence layer and then put them into this intelligence layer so it might find something in a conversation you've had that's applicable to paid advertising and it will store it in your paid advertising section within your intelligence layer it might find something that is really interested around leadership how you're building and a team in a meeting that you're having or slack conversation that you're having and it will extract that and put it into challenge there hey if you're enjoying this episode and you want all of the resources mentioned in it you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code now to get them for yourself again this is really a v one so everyone can get started in a really simple way so really there's two ways that you can store this i have mine in my local laptop and then in google drive because google drive allows you to easily plug your intelligence layer into any ai assistant that you're using because you can connect it to a google folder so i just have it in google folder but this is the template that you'll get so it will start with a template that allows the build command to know where to populate things so again you can customize this and i'm going to show how to do that but at the moment it's segmented into kind of it will give your current role your name then it will go into demand paid seo content attribution product marketing so the reason i like html versus dot m md files is it's just more visual so i can actually see what information is in here and i can actually work with the ai assistant to improve it and enrich it provide commentary much easier than just looking at a dot md file which is just a text file and then it will have whatever companies so as you move along your career you see it start to populate learnings you have each companies and then it has these broad topics that are applicable to all marketers and so this is something that i really use right you can see here that i have a work in intelligence layer with all of my kinda notes that i'm capturing across all of my career and i think that is super important for me that anytime i want to work with ai i can plug this in to the ai assistant whether that's chat t whether that's claude and so it has my core intelligence that has been built from all of the work that i have been doing over the years and i cannot explain how valuable that is right like think of you have in five three two ten years experience and all of that context from the things that you have learned across that time being plugged into the ai assistant when you start to work with it versus the person who just starts with a prompt and doesn't have any of that feed back into their conversations with ai and so how does this work well so this is the template so you can customize this template through the build skill itself so let's kinda jump into the build skill because it's pretty simple and again get in the package which is gonna be the template and the skill itself will make it really easy for you to customize it in any way that you want and so there's three parts to this and so it's going to allow you to build on your local laptop it will allow you to build in google drive if that's what you want to do i actually just build on my local laptop and then just copy and paste into google drive if you can over engineer things with ai right i could build it in local and then ask it to rebuild it and drive or i can just copy and paste the setup so this is what i'm talking about so when you first run the skill you can run setup and so what setup will do is it will say okay well if this is your first time and it will know it's your first time because what it does is it looks to see if the index dot edge html file is there so that is your intelligence the first time it's going to configure a bunch of things it's gonna configure a name your current role in here is what i mean so you can choose the eight default topics that i've given it or you can add your own or you can change these and so it will ask you during the setup what topics do you want you wanna keep the ones that i've provided or do you wanna change ones that better suit your career arc and whatever you give here it will update the index dot h mail file with so this here version that i'm given is part of the giveaway at the end does not have the mc p part because i don't know what mc p connections you would need so what it will do is it will look in this raw folder which is your stage in folder and then it has an archive folder where you would basically copy all of the things that have been processed and so it will look in raw it has this file called processed dot m d and that is keeping the log of all of the files that it is processing for you and extract an information and the reason it's doing that it's so it doesn't process the same files multiple times and it does a similar thing on drive there are some permissions in drive that actually if a process of file on google drive it can move it and copy it into the archive folder but it can't delete it from the raw folder in your local machine it can delete the file and move it into archive because of permissions with the google drive mc connector it cannot delete the file it can just copy it so at the end of you're in drive mode and you say bill drive it will say i processed all these files you can delete them from raw yourself that's just one of the small quirks so basically this is quite simple right does step one it's gonna read each new file whatever it may be and extract a learning a piece of knowledge and inside a framework a metric a formula whatever again these can be customized to what you want to populate your intelligence layer with i have put inside framework metric formula outcome experience that a market would want to remember confidential the a filter and so it's trying to filter it all of the things that would be priority data to that company you should own the core learnings you're getting from working within a company they are your knowledge and so i think as long as you extrapolate in the learnings not any company confidential information that's fine but this makes it really easy because you're just copy and files that you know you're able to extract information from into your raw folder so for each learning it will capture the title the content and then what type of intelligences this is whether it's a metric and find in a formula when a loss to call out a channel so that's step one step one is basically extract the information step two is route the information so it tries to route it to a topic these topics can be customized at the start as we talked about then it will route it to a company page and then it will route it to like learnings that span multiple topics like every marketing team everyone has the same three problems a single most important hire for a growth team so it tries to look at like things that are applicable to just a market here and it puts those actually on the homepage it tries to skip content that isn't mark and learning know personal notes logistics admin all those kind of things so within then it will show what was found so when you run it it will actually show exactly what was found and then give you the kind of files the summary all of these different things and i'm gonna show you what that looks like and then it will let either build the artifact if it's your first time running it or update the artifact and so as that couple of other things in there but that's the kind crux of the skill right it's being able to extrapolate all of that information and so if you're just getting started from the setup you might have a bunch of things that you've learned a bunch of documents all of these different things you can put them all in raw and it will build your very first version of your intelligence layer and then you wanna get into the habit that every kind of month you add some of the things that you've learned some of the most important things into that raw folder and run your build command and it will keep enriching and improving that intelligence layer this is a quick example of it pulling in an incredible overview best in class ways to run paid advertising teams and paid advertising campaigns from a presentation that one of our teams put together and you can see here it is going through and find in the learnings it is then telling me what exactly they are so it'll say it's a find in a formula a metric a call it will then say this is gonna be under underpaid advertising this is gonna be under attribution and measurement there's some like leadership ones signed here leadership and strategy and then it will actually say to you you want me to go ahead and update the intelligence layer or you would you like me to remove or adjust any of so you can actually work with it to say don't include this don't include that actually change this one and now you can ship them all and update that intelligence layer so this is how you win with ai that v one i look pretty simple which is like hey this is just going to be a html file that continually is updated structured to be your core intelligence personal intelligence layer that i can just basically copy to google drive i can build it on my local machine i can copy it into google drive or i just build a new google drive and anytime i'm using one of these ai systems i can say use this project folder and my project folder has my intelligence and it starts from that basis and that is huge and if you want to get started with this so you want the template and you want the skill i've added the link to download them from my github repository it's a public link and you could go get started really easily the way you do that is you basically just run the build skill like install the build skill either coworker or clock code and actually go run that skill get set up you need to have some information that you wanna process and so if you don't have any information that you wanna process this is your call that to get started to start to say these are some of the things that i really need to extrapolate the learnings from because are really important for the things that i am improving on getting better at that i want my ai system to know get into that habit and start to build that personal intelligence layer for you to make your results much much better than anyone else you're core intelligence layer you're in personal intelligence layer is the way that you are gonna differentiate from everyone else and is the most critical thing that you can own right now let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better

partnering with influencers is one of the single best ways to grow your company today the reason is it's cheaper than a lot of other advertising channels and it's much higher trust credibility today's show i'm gonna do a live demo of how you actually do your first influencer partnership and i'm giving you my special scorecard that's going to break down how to actually rank all the influences in your market from most i should work with to least likely i should work with so that you don't waste your time your business might not be growing the way you want and it's probably because you're taking the easy way out you're just putting your credit card into google or meta and the cost keep climbing and then math keeps breaking i'm here to tell you about the clever better alternative the companies that are growing the best right now have deep deep partnerships with influencers because those influencers are lower cost have bigger brand and product demand upside and today i'm gonna break down the playbook that's super simple anyone can do it to actually working with influencers and you don't have to believe just me one of the biggest companies in the world unilever has scaled their influencer marketing through the roof in the last two years they went from working with thousands of influencers to working with over three hundred thousand influencers and creators it's now a critical part of their strategy there's not a company that's more analytical that's more focused on growing you used their products every day acts dove hell mayonnaise all of those things and they're working with influencers to make that growth go round the world is full of distractions today think about it this way your ideal customer she's out there she's ignoring you completely she's not picking up your calls your emails are going to the spam filter what she is doing now is she's probably working out most mornings and in that period of time she puts her headphones in and either listens to her watches content from somebody she deeply trusts you know for me this is david sin and the founder podcast i bring him and the founders he talks to with me everywhere i go and so the companies is like rampant and van who sponsored the founders podcast are deeply in my head and i'm really aware of them and i'm considering them if i'm making a choice the companies that aren't they're kind of being ignored by me and the same thing goes for your customer that's out there and so the way you wanna think about this is you want to get into that trusted slot in your customer's day and you're not gonna get there through brute force of emailing or calling or putting your credit card into buy you're gonna have to get there in partnership with the best influencers in your market now you might be asking okay this seems hard i like this google and facebook and other channels where like i just pick some target audiences type in a few ads and put my credit card in and wash my hands with it and walk away well this is a different world but i wanna show you the most basic straightforward way to actually get started so that you can get your first partnership off the ground today so i actually wanna show you in practice what you would do the most basic version to really be successful working with influencers i'm gonna pick a fictional industry let's say i'm running a company and i target it professionals at midsize companies i don't go and just look at like topics that are really relevant it professionals so this would be like security this would be productivity i like productivity let's go with productivity as the angle so now i wanna go and look at productivity influencers what are the counter intuitive things about influencer marketing is you would think you would go to one of the ai agents or assistance like claude or chat gp and have them do all this for you they're okay not great at it that's for your first tip to really get the most up to date data and details and who's really killing it you kinda need to go to the platform yourself hey if you like today today's show we get all the resources for you to give us a try yourself you can click the link scan the qr code and check those out they're all free so you can pick any a platform tiktok instagram r youtube i like youtube a lot and i think youtube is really good especially if you're trying to drive customer acquisition not just brand awareness with your influencer marketing so i would go in here and i would just in youtube i would search like business productivity and i just wanna actually under stand who's creating here and so it's like oh you've got the productivity institute literally just scrolling through dan mart oh this interesting here's dan oh okay so he's actually an influencer he's got books he's got software as a science buy back your time oh maybe he's a little bit more individual individual productivity focus than business productivity focus but he's interesting i would probably literally just put him on my list but but for the sake of this i wanna find to see if i can find better example because dan has almost three million subscribers he's got a big audience he'd be probably a tough and expensive first pitch for my influencer program so i'm gonna just keep going here and i'm seeing who else okay ross har he is a business influencer he's got seventy thousand subscribers but he's got some pretty big views you know a hundred and fifty seven thousand views on one video so this is what's interesting to me is here's somebody who clearly is building for business owners systems and strategies okay if i'm an it person i might be thinking about starting my own company i certainly care about systems it's my whole job and i wanna be seen as a strategic thinker so like ross is probably my guy and so you're like okay i've just found my first potential person to partner with normally you can just go straight to the youtube bio and he's got a work with me link he also has a newsletter and so what i could do is i can just go straight to ross site right and he's got a whole breakdown of who the heck he is he's trying to pitch you his class and everything else which is fine what i'm actually trying to do is get his contact information okay so i've identified that i've i'd wanna work with ross now i gotta do the next step it's like how do i partner with him so i'm gonna put his website in here and i'm gonna say i want to partner with ross von influencer marketing program i want you to find his email address give me a likely range of cost and draft an email for two ross exploring the idea of partnering together cool okay so tools like claude per complexity chat gp your ai tool azure are really good for this stage now i've identified somebody now i actually need to go through and figure out can i get in touch with them and what is it gonna cost me and how i should think about the math relative to the cost of partnering with them does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses like i said the ai tools are really good for this stage of the influencer process i tend to really like poke complexity for this found ross email he's based at belfast he's the founder of this company we figured that out it talks about his audience so seven a hundred k aggregate cross instagram threads linkedin plus two his audience is business owners in the six to eight figure range consuming systems productivity delegation contact so because it's is my complexity it's doing this for hubspot but the way to think about this is here is what it's estimating your costs for working with ross is going to be so like an ig post is probably three to eight thousand dollars you what you'd wanna do is a multiple program of like a youtube video and everything else so you're opening offer it's saying is probably like fifteen to twenty five k to get started so you have some important questions to answer one what do i have to offer ross audience relative to my business second is what are my leads worth to me let's say you're paying a hundred dollars for a lead right now if you're gonna give ross fifteen k do you need to generate at least a hundred and fifty leads from that program and so you have to basically do the conversion rate math and you what you were gonna wanna do is ask your influencer somebody like ross for past campaign performance to get benchmarks of how many people watched how many people clicked how many people completed the authors the other thing you're gonna wanna do that's a little counterintuitive so you can wanna trust the influencer the influencer has a deep connection with their audience and you want them to help make sure that you have the right offer for their audience and help match the creative and offer so that it really resonates when they're promoting it to their audience once you've actually figured that out then you can know one the questions to ask ross in this case second if this estimated cost range is within your budget or not before you actually finalize an agreement but the only way to really know is to draft deputy email to ross and shoot that over to him and you can put all your context here and have your ai tool choice draft up that email shoot that over and then you're probably gonna have to get on a quick call ask for some of that benchmark data and if if the numbers work you're off to the races on your first partnership alright so i showed you how to actually establish your first influencer partnership but i don't think that's enough i wanted to give you a scorecard for how to think about evaluating any potential influencer you might be partnering with this is my creator slash influencer scorecard we talk about this and we outline it in detail in our new book loop out learn out market out outgrow which is coming out september twenty second check it out you can click the link down on the description below but this scorecard is from loop what you wanna do is you wanna grade your creators on these criteria but if you're thinking about creators you're thinking about their audience through three lenses size fit and growth sizes do they have a really big audience some media audience a smaller audience one of the things i found is that media audience creators are often the most effective the next is fit are they related to your audience or is it a bull's eye dead overlap with your audience and their overlap then the next thing is growth is their audience kinda staying flat are they adding a lot of new viewers and subscribers every month the more their audience growing the more longer term partnership possibility you have with them so those are the three key factors that you're gonna wanna score and if somebody scores high on all those they're probably a no brainer to work with few actually are though the way i think about it is you want a really high fit score and really high growth score and a middle at least the middle of the road audience score if you're gonna go to all the trouble of building a great relationship with this creator and influencer you wanna be able to work with them over months you don't wanna do a one and done one off campaign with them and so you need that audience growth and you need the quality of audience to be right so anytime you're doing research this is the scorecard and how you think about which creators make the cut for your outreach in your email and this isn't me just sitting here saying hey this is a smart thing to do we've done this at hubspot we've grown our creator program from tens of thousands of dollars and a handful creators to millions of dollars and a whole roster of creators and influencers and we're doing so because the math works and it's really effective for our company and i think it's effective for far more companies than are doing it right now and there's not much loss and experimenting doing a couple experimental campaigns i just gave you the blueprint on how to do that and i want you to drop a comment let me know if this video unlocked you wanting to do your first influencer campaign alright that is a crash course and influencer marketing please hit like hit subscribe check out the loop book and we'll see you next time on marketing against the green let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot grow better

ai is completely broken advertising and every marketer i know has to be doing advertising on today's show i'm going to tell you three secrets to advertising in the post ai world i'm gonna show you one channel that has gotten crazy expensive because of ai i'm gonna show you the biggest deal in ai ads today and i'm gonna show you the advertising channel every b2b marketer is really confused about and how to think about it the right way and on today's show we're gonna tell you how your twenty twenty seven marketing budget is probably already wrong given everything that's changing let's get it into today's show today we're gonna show you exactly ally ai has changed the different ad placements you're using what they cost where you should be putting your money which added got more expensive which adds got less expensive whether you're spending a few hundred dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars advertising has never been more important and ai is really broken a lot of traditional advertising channels that businesses have relied on i've talked to founders i've talking to founders all the time and what they're telling me is their ads just don't perform the same way they used to and the reason that is is because the channels themselves have been disrupted i wanna show share you a great example of what i mean i've done some research and i dug in and here's some data around one of the most tried and true advertising channels out there paid search specifically google paid search now if you wanna look at this what's really fascinating is i've got two charts stacked up here the top chart here represents the amount of coverage of google's ai overview feature where you actually get the answer and you don't have to click through to the website and what you'll see from january twenty twenty five till essentially today that's gone from about six percent to over half of search queries now have those ai overview what's fascinating if you then overlay that with the actual impact that's had on paid search it's pretty revolutionary the cost per click or what you actually have to pay per click on google has risen about fourteen percent over that period of time look add price to change but that's actually not the whole story the whole story is that the engagement the paid impressions the amount of people who are seeing those ads are down six percent over that same period of time so your ad prices are going up and that's not just it they're actually being seen by less people you're spending more money to get your ads in front of less people on google because of this changing search landscape do i think google is a smart company and they're gonna figure out how to evolve this over time for sure but we're spending money we're buying ads today and then for buying ads today we need to know that ai is completely disrupted search ads and every business is spending a ton of money on search doesn't mean you should stop spending money on search ads but it means you should rethink how you're placing your budget on search and what other channels you're playing on the really interesting thing about ai is that it's not just disrupting your ads and making them more expensive there's some places where the ads are actually getting cheaper but wanna i show you now is i i'm unveiling what are the five most expensive ad channels in this post ai world and what are the five cheapest ones and it's actually pretty interesting you see a lot of expense around other programmatic cost per click channels like amazon and linkedin but then you also see it around really high prime brand placement because as paid searches is gonna be disrupted people are also spending a lot more money on brand dollars that's why you i see the big takeover overs in times square or premium tv like netflix and prime really increase in costs there's one line on here though that i think is the most important line on this chart and it's right down here it's youtube shorts the price of youtube shorts which is a four dollar and eighty five cost per thousand impressions so it cost you four dollars and eighty five cents for a thousand people to see your ad on youtube shorts if i think one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities in marketing to huge opportunity to buy low and sell high why is that it's an amazing opportunity because ai has made it easier to make videos and so if you are a influencer or your creator you can make better videos and you can make more of them and that takes the inventory of videos especially short form videos on platforms like tiktok and in this case youtube shorts means there's more of them and you've got more people making videos more people consuming them the gap is in the company's placing those ads what's happening is that there's been a gap from the creators adopting ai tools to make more videos and the business is adopting ai tools to make more video ads video ads take a little bit more work you have to have product shots or screenshots you have to have the right visual effects the right text what you can't do is just write a sentence of copy and put it in google search that you can do really really fast video ads take a little bit more time and that time and effort is your opportunity hey if you love to show today i'm giving everything away you can get the research you can get the prompt i used to to do a version of the research for yourself if you want at all click that qr code click the link in the description below and you can get it all for free if i were running marketing for any company right now the number one thing i would do is i would figure out the tooling i would be using hey gen and caption dot ai and all these awesome video tools canvas to actually build a new workflow to make video ads for youtube shorts because the cost at four dollars and eighty five cents per for a thousand impressions is a bargain and it's a bargain because i have far less competition and if i can make really great ads i can likely get more customers and as a leading indicator customers leads for my business than i can on a lot of the traditional channels like paid search and and classic cost per click channels this is the dynamic of ads if you're willing to take a little bit of risk and you're willing to build a new motion in this case learning how to build video ads you can get a huge upside of growth and get a lot more customers for a lot less money and for me youtube shorts is the ads opportunity because these ai video tools have made it easier for everyone to create compelling high quality human focus videos and advertisers have not caught up yet i don't think this is a long window i think this window is gonna last for twelve to eighteen months before the cost of youtube shorts really comes back in line but it is a great buying opportunity right now and if you are a marketer it is some place where i would at minimum be running some tests and if not even be bolder and consider moving a real part of my budget into youtube shorts so on september twenty second you've been following the show you know k and i have our new book coming out it's called loop and it is a new four step framework for how you do anything you want to do in marketing and i wanna bring what i'm saying with youtube shorts to life right now using that framework it's a quick four step framework the first step is express and it's how you actually come up with the initial concept and idea of what you wanna do and so in case of youtube shorts ad you would take customer interviews sales calls any information like that you had as well as any product information or whatever you're trying to promote put that in your ai tool of choice and ask it to generate some core scripts for youtube shorts and what you'll see is you'll get five ten scripts back you'll probably really like one take that and you've already done the first stage of loop because you have this rough script that you can kinda edit in shape the second stage here is taylor and taylor is all about how you make that message personal to your audience and for something like youtube shorts it's actually about targeting so you'd go in and make sure that you're not targeting your whole audience but instead a subset of your audience that really goes and aligns with the message you've taken the third step is amplify that's like hey i gotta go make and record this ad now and actually make the video and hit publish and put some dollars behind it that's pretty straightforward and the last stage of the loop is evolve and evolving all about how you measure and make better and so what you wanna do is you wanna actually look at the data and i would even take you the data from the first week or two of your ad being live take that as well as your content put it in your ai tool of choice and use that to get real insights on how you could make it better and how you can get the performance better the next time and that's what we mean when we talk about the loop once you actually get a core set learnings you start to loop all over again because you can then go make a new script a new video new targeting and actually get better and what we found is that if you just work and do marketing like this you learn at an exponentially faster rate and you keep getting better and better performance and and it's gonna change how you think about marketing but more important how you think about something as simple as an ad test on youtube shorts most businesses think they know their customers they have the data the records the history but it's scattered across three teams and four systems which means no one can actually use it hubspot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation into one platform every team can work from so when sales talks to a customer marketing and already know the full story and when you know more you grow more check out dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses the third takeaway for anyone doing ads in the world today is that linkedin for b b marketers is the most confused misunderstood advertising platform out there this is a hill i will die on i talked to two types of marketers one type of marketers just like my gosh linkedin is so expensive it's my most expensive channel i just can't get it to work i just don't understand the other type of marketer i talk to is oh my gosh linkedin is incredible the targeting is amazing it is by far and away our most effective ad channel i wish i had the opportunity to spend more money on linkedin because i know i could get more customers so why is there such dichotomy of marketers out there when it comes to linkedin because i am more in the ladder that linkedin is an amazing underutilized channel in b2b advertising especially because i think most marketers are just touching the surface of what linkedin can do and the reason for that is also something we talk about in the loot book we talk about this idea of creative equations and in the new world post ai of marketing the best marketing happens when you start with new equations of how you think about and measure your marketing and linkedin is a perfect example of that the marketers who tend to just think linkedin is super expensive is one they just look at it on a cost per impression basis and if you look at linkedin on a cost per impression basis it's actually very expensive you know you see here single image ads the cost per thousand impressions is almost sixty dollars versus less than five dollars on youtube shorts that is exponentially more expensive however the level of targeting that you get can mean that your cost per click is much much lower than on other platforms and it's likely depending on your product service you can have a lower cost per click on something like linkedin compared to youtube shorts but it's all gonna come down to one how you measure it and two are you able to run the loop are you able to actually say here is my unique message that's very focused am i then tailoring that audience and i'm getting the right targeting that's deeply aligned with that message and this is where most marketers fall apart they have a generic message and they send it to a broad audience and then their ads are really expensive instead you wanna do the exact opposite have multiple specific messages that you deliver to individual groups of very very tailored audiences then you also still need to through that amplify stage make really good ads and have really good copywriting really good creative and then again get look at the data and look at that data in a creative way to make sure that you're not getting blinded by the initial costs like a crazy high cpm and instead you're focused on the customers you're getting through really relevant messaging and targeting linkedin should be a key part if every b2b marketer advertising budget and if it's not i would implore you to rethink how you're measuring your linkedin performance get that new creative equation right and run some new tests using the loop k and i wrote a book together it's almost here loop out learn out market outgrow drops in september to celebrate the launch i'm hosting an early reading august nineteenth eighteenth at the boston public library from six thirty to eight thirty pm there's gonna be a preview of a book there's gonna be a q and a where you can ask any of the questions about the loop framework that you might have and the event is totally free we'll have some food some beverages and get to hang out and have a great time if you're in boston and you can make it we'd love to see the registration link is below grab a spot before they're gone on today's show i told you three major things that we're happening in advertising one that the disruption in ai search is causing cost per click ads in search engines especially google to increase in cost while being shown to fewer and fewer people and so you still need to show up there it still needs to be an important part of your mix but it might not be as big of a part of the mix as it has been historically for you the second thing so i showed you what i thought was the biggest deal in b to b advertising today and that is youtube shorts because their supply demand is out of whack if you can build the muscle to create really good video ads you can get customers for a much lower price than many of the other channels because the costs are so low the last thing is we talked about the linkedin paradox and how so many b2b marketers are divided i helped you think about using creative equations and really changing your ad strategy should be much more focused and targeted to drive much more effective cost per clicks and therefore lower cost of customer acquisition using linkedin as you're thinking about your marketing spend next year i hope you consider how advertising is changing and these three opportunities we'll see you real soon on the next episode of marketing instagram let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls of support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally miss hotspot spot grow better though

on the show today we have an incredible guest i wanna welcome bin benoit he is the chief media officer and digital commerce officer at liquid death and he is the best person i have ever met when it comes to talking about advertising and how you use advertising to jim real revenue he's built a full funnel media system he has unique creative equations that fuel that systems and he has a real methodical process for how creative and messaging maps to that system and we're gonna break down all of those for you on today show and he told me something but there is a certain metric that if you as a marketer or follow it you are destined to fail and the reality is most marketers follow that metric and so we're gonna tell you what that metric is we're gonna tell you how to avoid failure and how to think about your marketing spend in completely new and actionable ways benoit we are so excited to have you on the show today so benoit i think the story of liquid death in marketing circles has been told a ton and people know the skull they know kind of the origin story of mike and how that all came to be i think there's an untold story around liquid death that's way more important that no one knows or understands and that's the fact that you actually have figured out how to build remarkable systems and creative to actually drive sales it's not just like you didn't sell up these products because you're cool obviously being cool helped but you have to do real marketing over and over again to actually penetrate such a crowded market like you're in and so maybe just to kick us off give us your origin story like how the heck did you get to liquid death what was like the first thing you worked on and then from there i wanna go into kind of the systems and everything that we're gonna cover on the show today so yeah you you're completely right we've been talking over and over about our amazing creative machine liquid death but we've built a lot from that angle goal all the way down to cells so from my origin story and how i got to liquid it's actually a very i would say nonlinear way to get there i'm not are exactly i'm not a cp guys i'm a founder i'm a startup guy i build a lot of ad tech platforms over the years because i always from a media standpoint never had really what i wanted to buy media part early and dubai actually media other way i want which we're gonna talk about going from awareness all the way down to conversion and so the last platform that i built was a rebate redemption platform for measurement meaning i wanted to measure the impact of creators on social in retail sales brick and mortar does cool so i build an attribution platform which at the same time got me in front of liquid debt in the very early days before i actually leaving the water was in the can with mike cesar cecilia c and founder and over the years as i was building we always kept in touch big became fran and i was always here to kind of exchange ideas on the media side and then he came from exchanging ideas on the media side to becoming an official adviser and then also allowing me to really build a platform that we leverage with liquid debt that i was building and then from there we went from doing this to hey you need to come in full time to run the show when it comes to media and an acquisition and that's i joined as a as a chief media officer a little bit over two years ago now first of i think it's just such cool story around like creating situation just because you're were out building trying to solve a problem you had experienced firsthand you knew a bunch of other brands were experiencing people by the way still re really experiencing that problem but i imagine you took all of what you learned you brought that into liquid death and that was probably the foundation of the early systems because i think when it comes to liquid death people talk about the creative the design the aesthetic they don't talk about the distribution and to me like one of my mantra in life is distribution is undefeated like you you have to figure out distribution at a reasonable cost that works for your business or you don't have a business and it seems like to me like that's at the the core dna of who you are is you're trying to figure out distribution and build systems for distribution so you come into liquid death you kinda have this background like how do you get started how like how do you actually figure out what media to buy how do you figure out if it's working or not these are questions that everybody watching this is struggling with and so i wanna like hear how it started and kind of how it's evolved to where it is now for me first order of business was to understand where the money was spent and at what stage of the funnel so i came in with my full funnel approach from day one and now i started to categorize of that span so first i understand where we span how we span at what stage of the funnel categorize the whole thing now you start understanding hey we may spend too much on the one stage not enough on the other stage now in parallel i had to also understand if it was working or up right so measurement was another thing obviously the first measurement that you have access to is measurement on platform like on the amazon platform on meta you name it it's not perfect but it's least a single it's by the way that's been always my man trying and what i work with i don't need perfect i need signals yeah right yeah surgical support fiction this is important i think is hope for the right matrix the right confidence level you will never get it or it's gonna take forever to get it and by the time you get it it's over right so signals strengths up the signals is what matter and i was looking for that for now that i categorize my media mix what is working what is now working first i get in the platform and understanding and a lot of people in media pay attention to ro right mh because you weren't especially in the early days you wanna understand if when you spend money do you get money in return if i spend one dollar do i make three dollars off two or fifty cents right and people are start making decisions on that this is a a big issue if you do that here is why yes you want money we return on your investment but the other metrics that you need to pay attention to because i can't as a media buyer your drive very high return but those eye returns are actually fake what i mean by that is they are not incremental that means that the platform will tell you meta i will tell you you spent one dollar you made three the problem is those three dollars that you made that made us sense they were driving because someone clicked on a ad of you and an ad would have happened without the ad as well so you need to understand the incremental of your spend now this is a big word in media incremental and there's a lot of people talking about it and there's a lot of platform being done for me the best signal of incremental is i'm acquiring new people to the brand right so the youtube brand metric was very important as i was categorizing the efficiency of my media because i couldn't run incremental test on previous data i was gonna take me months an name of two years those kind of things that big brands do that will never get me where i need to be within the next couple weeks so when i start mapping raw with youtube brand i understand if the ross is high and the percentage of youtube brand is high that means that it is probably very incremental so now i can just triage my spend based on that filter now after that as i start i understand where i spend i understand the mix by final stage and i understand do i have some kind of incremental or not so that was the that was the beginning that that was the beginning so there's two key lessons there for anybody watching and what you just said the first is you wanted to move spend full funnel and you need to you wanted an audit spend and make sure the spend was full funnel when people think about brand dollars or creative dollars most consumer companies are just at the top of the funnel most b b companies are just at the bottom of the funnel and very few are very full funnel so that's i think having a full funnel media approach is something any company regardless of how smaller big you are can do the second thing that i think is even more important is what when you talked about the ro as plus new customers we covered a lot about today's show you probably have some questions we are giving you free additional resources to answer any of those you can scan that qr code or click the link in the description below and go get everything you need i've got a book coming out september called loop one of the core points in that book is this idea of creative equations that the marketers that win measure their marketing very differently and measure it very creatively and if you just measure the easiest thing to measure one it's probably wrong like ro and two it's highly competitive it's highly saturated everybody's doing stuff around the easiest stuff to measure which means you're paying way more for it than you should and so you gave us one creative equation are there other like creative equations that you've used over the years that you felt like really unlocked growth for the brand and unlock sales yeah i mean that's the one that actually i'm paying a lot of attention on right now which is the true incremental mentality and there is a lot especially in those days and probably a lot of listeners i've heard a lot of for example to doc shop or like social let's call it social commerce and i'm very curious about the impact of social commerce on true sales and you can see that maybe from social commerce that for me is mostly a discovery tool more than it is a scalable tool what is the impact on the scalable sales retail sales let's say on nav verizon amazon dot com or walmart dot com on target dot com we are by the way a brand that doesn't sell d two right we don't sell directly to customer on our website so that's why i'm not talking about it we only sell on retail our website but what i'm paying a lot of that attention in talking about this you know equation i'm looking at what i call now incremental ro right and so that means that this incremental rise and this is where it gets a little bit more technical and you need models and platforms but there's a a school of i've thought right now where we can get that data pretty quickly because models move or better yeah and i can understand if my incremental is true or not and so the incremental and maybe to try to simplify please for the audience is i look at a region two regions right like let's say la and new york and let's say they are very similar in terms of shoppers for me i'm gonna spend money in new york and not spend money in la and i'm gonna see if sales go up in new york and don't go up in in la and if it does i means that what i did in york works because if i didn't do it in la and it did if and it didn't move then that means that yes it worked so that's a very simple if people are very deep in incremental on the audience i'll say what is he talking about but this kind of the fundamentals right yeah is there incremental in sales with the media that you spend so that's something that i pay a lot of attention that i'm trying to actually simplify because out there there's a lot of complexity around that a lot of takes forever to do how can we shorten the cycle to test how can we get the data fast but i'm looking at the incremental reality that goes beyond what we talk about youtube brand and raw ass like true incremental adi when a buyer's ai for solution link do you know if you're showing up or not and hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you can show up even more yeah so i think you're making a couple points here they're really important one that like innovations and data science and ai is making the ability to do these tests easier and faster and which is really changing advertising and media buying at its heart the second thing you're based saying is there's lots of different ways for something can be incremental right and you can look at incremental one channel versus the other one region versus the other the actual important part is actually setting up the experiment and having a thesis to know what am i actually trying to figure out and even if you have thousands of dollars you still can do small incremental mortality experiments to unlock insights right correct correct and and and i think that goes along with the other thing that i do a lot which is testing i test all the time not just for incremental but for any metrics that matters right so for example another one that is very important for me in the consideration stage which is the mid funnel meaning people discover your product and are intrigued and wanna try the product for me it's the efficiency of driving from someone that see your ad to go to your pdp right your product page on the retailer right on the dot com and this efficiency can be measured by click through rate yeah but click through rate can be me misleading and maybe i'm gonna go into too much details but i think it's important for on we want all the details here yeah right so click through rate is important but if you have a good click through rate on the ic it still drive a pretty expensive cost per click which leads to a pretty expensive cost to get someone to your product page of view so click through rate is not the only metric it's click through rate plus cpm which gets you to your cost per click now there is even more than that is cost per click usually correlate it with the cost to get people to go to the product page view because if you click usually you land on the product page but in the current world especially when you're on social or any platforms you have some kind of a loop happening may there's a pop up window know that says you're leaving this site there's a lot of that could happen that you don't aware that will get people to click but don't land on your product page so you need to measure that as well so that's why i look at a cost per product page view and that i test a lot to get to the most efficient metric here and that's takes a lot because again the levers there are a lot of different levers so my liver is a click through rate i need to test my click through rate my liver is the cpm because also if i have a i click through rate on the low cpm now i'm golden and i need to also leisure if there's any kind of drop off from the click to the product page right so i spend a lot of time testing all those different levers and when you test those levers are you getting small gains big gains like how do you know what tests to run and and if they're really all these tests to worth it i'm only looking at big gains yes i love this i'm only looking for home brands we are a brand that is in hyper growth mode i'm not looking for five percent gain i'm looking for double digit gains and i'm looking for even more than twenty percent gain every time that's why i need signal i don't need precise results because if your are other point was like hey i may get five percent but i need more clicks you understand if it's true i don't care if it's five percent let's move on right because five percent is not helping me now if you have a thirty percent gain you don't need a lot of data to get to thirty percent again you will get that very quickly it's either working or it's not yeah so i'm only going for the home run not for a single or double sorry for people that don't feel baseball but i'm i'm i'm i'm waiting for the fences every single time so i have this framework that i always use that it's basically a two by two and one axis is predictability and one axis is axis is magnitude and two often marketers get trapped in the highly predictable lobe magnitude quadrant of that where it's like i'm gonna i know this works i can predict it so i'm just gonna try to get a couple points better you're basically here telling us that is the completely wrong way to think about it you wanna buy i mean you want to be in the highest magnitude quadrant possible you could care less about predictability in the short term yes you want it to be predictable longer term but you what you actually care about is can i maximize my upside correct it's maximize the upside big swing because if i will have time to think about the single digit growth when we are massive right so right if you're are if you're are a multi billion dollar company that has been around for fifty years that the only goal is not to grow but to not lose market share then yes that's probably what you do you're looking for those single digit growth we are not that and i assume most of the people listening that no podcast podcasts are not that no everybody watching here founders their marketers they're in hyper growth mode and i think you gave us the right lens of focus is that you only need you only wanna run tests that are really high upside tests and the benefit of those is not only growth but you get to clarity of results much faster you get to statistical sniff it gets much faster so it's this double w of growth and a learning loop that runs much faster and nice running if you're under this and you are like for this in the test and the data is still not conclusive that means that it will it's it the the the the outcome will never be big so just move on correct okay so we talked a little bit about i think like the math and equations and testing side of your media machine give us your take on how you think about channels here's my rough overview the average marketer they get bombarded with media salespeople and they kinda listen to some of those salespeople and then they do the obvious things like facebook and google but how do you think about where you want to play when you're spending money and trying to build a brand that actually is gonna drive sales when i look at platform for me it depends on again what stage i'm at and what i'm gonna leverage it for for example let's start with the upper funnel right so awareness what i look for a platform that gives me awareness is ability to have eye frequency if i cannot drive eye frequency awareness s one work you won't get aware of a new product of a new brand unless you get in front of someone several times per week if the platform dictates the frequency without letting you play with it you are in trouble perfect example meta up meta won't let you dictate your frequency how can you do awareness without frequency especially in a meta environment of facebook on environment where you're bombarded with content so if you are showing up only once a week which most of the a dies one to one point five times a week and you're in the middle of a thousand pieces of contents nobody will remember right so in my opinion social is not for awareness period but ct tv radio podcasts all those channels are really good for awareness right and there are a lot of different reason now if i look for consideration now it's different i look for someone that is gonna let me optimize against what i say before against a click out yes and i need to be as close as i can to conversion because this is the next step so an example there meta may be good for that right because now i can have the a optimize against a click no problem i can do re retargeting which is even i'm plus amplifying your right your chance to click out now obviously also for me the platforms that i love all the platform where people convert which is amazon dot com walmart dot com target dot com those places are great so now i need to have those platforms work because now there i can get people to consider the product but also convert so for me it's really looking at what is the platform good at based on what i need do i need conversion do i need awareness and if i need any of those what are the levers that i need to control if they don't let me control then i won't touch it that is one of the best single breakdowns of how to think about where to play in advertising that i think i've ever heard because you included it in the outcomes and the goals you're trying to achieve as a marketer i think so many marketers are just like oh my customers on instagram i'm just gonna just spend some money there right and that is like the complete wrong way to think about it it's like you can reach your customers thousands of different ways what are the best couple ways for the goals that you have and for the stage of the process because we're here talking about how you actually use media to drive revenue which means you have to move people through the process which inherently means you need different types of media formats and different types of creative to actually make that happen and it strikes me that you all have actually built a really strong system with the typed type of equations we went over the type of strategy around how we built our media buying so the third part of that to me is like the creative and the messaging that fits inside those and it's really hard and i i think it's something that i as a cmo have struggled with a ton over the years because it's like oh my ceo has an idea my brand leader like you know five different people have an idea and i'm like i don't know what the right message is like how do you figure that out yeah everybody wants to be a marketer no matter what you've careful one to be a marketer until they have to run the website and all the terrible stuff that comes with theater marketer exactly well again i think it's very similar to the the answer that i gave around what platform i use it's the same for the creative it's i think each stage of the funnel as its own creative so if i go back to each stage of the fellow from an awareness standpoint the creative has to be about remembering the brand not remembering that yeah zero sugar not remembering that it's available at that very specific retailer it's to remember that we are liquid death and we are a healthy beverage company and even if i have to do that remembering that we are a beverage and are colleague liquid death so that's where also from a creative standpoint you cannot have everything in a single credit from where you are how much you cost what are the tvs like you cannot just plug it into all you need to have one focus so when i think about what i'm gonna run on ct tv i'm thinking about something that is gonna capture your attention and remember our name so for us we picked our lane which is comedy not an easy lane but this is all lane hard lane we mean exactly so trying to be funny and as we are funny people will remember and we do that through i think very creative campaign around people that is like that was crazy that was fun and now i remember the name i remember that beverage company does has some crazy ads now from there now that you remember me because the creative is strong from a remembering standpoint and i go with eye frequency so now people really remember now next time they see me which is most likely for me on social or the retailer i need to basically link the brand name with the benefits of the product so now i'm getting into couple different type of creative the creative are not anymore about remembering my brand now it's about telling them why the product is healthy why the product is affordable where to find it mh so now they can consider it and they at that point they can click it but if i try to turn a crazy creative funny into also telling them why the product is good and where they can buy it is not gonna happen right not possible write google's those too if they click on that and they land but they probably won't buy right away now i need to follow them through a lot of different tactics and re retargeting tactics now what do i say when i re target them well i probably not say the exact same thing i told them the first time around why they click because if you they click and you didn't convert why they didn't convert it so maybe now you start touching on very unique points so you get even more precise on what you touch now the next step is which we do a lot is people bought once but did repeat yet so although you target people that are lapse right mh and so at that point it's again a different messaging and so you see how i categorize my type of creative based again on the goal that i have and again for each one of them now i start doing a lot of different testing to see what weed drive when i meet yeah it really it's just it's like it's a grid of where the customers in the journey what the channels they're on and what the messaging they need per channel per stage of their journey to kinda help move them along and move them to the next and i think most of marketers i talk to you think about this creative media placement so much in isolation and they think about it as a campaign versus a system oh i have this thing i want the world to know i'm gonna go run this big campaign versus no i kinda know what i my place in the world i just need more people to believe it and i gotta build a system in march after that day after day month after month to get more and more people to know that correct like you you cannot have a campaign that as everything like i keep saying that and that's how i think a big problem that i will blame meta up for that is making you believe that you can do the full funnel in a single ad unit yeah and then there's always people that are trying to sound cool by saying yeah the funnel has collapse the funnel is shorter like the funnel will always exist you need to start getting aware of the brand you need to consider the brand and need you need to buy the brand now can you make that happen maybe faster maybe for some people but you still also people are gonna take a long time to go through those steps so you need to basically split those tests those steps sorry so you can really get the right platform and the right creative to go through those stages and i think what's interesting about what you just walked us through is that i think when a lot of people think of cool brand liquid death or something similar i think they imagine like glamorous video shoots and like long lengthy campaigns what you just described is it's actually just very tedious and very thoughtful and it's yeah it's the collision point of data and taste and understanding your customer and what moves them and yeah there's some cool shoots but that's like a small part of what actually it takes to sell something and i think of the average founder out there especially listening probably doesn't understand that right now no i agree and i and i think for that for also the early stage it's it's something very important i think i need to share here what you say is correct you need to this very tedious and understanding and yes there is the cold glamour photo like video shoot with like yeah celebrities and stuff that is happening and and and and it's important but you need to have everything else now what i would say for early stage founder because i run into this issue over and over and over and liquid death didn't run into that issue because of the type of marketers that our liquid death is if you chase conversion from day one you're gonna fail yes right so if your only metric is ka lt ratio you are gonna fail what is what because you have for your product for your brand always what i call the golden core you're always gonna have a certain amount of people that are gonna convert pretty fast on your product because y'all are those type of people that will engage fast won't wanna test fast and not gonna go in now this golden quartz as a certain size a million dollar revenue three million dollar revenue five or thousand revenue as you get out of this there's no more scale people at that point your c is gonna start rising you're gonna go do your your khaki ratio is gonna go upside down and now you're starting to say what am i doing oh the mid algorithm is not working anymore no no it's because the true people outside of this golden core are need a full funnel yeah and so where we need a liquid death that because of the type of creative people we add is from the very beginning we work with awareness we worked the awareness campaigns to know the brand it was a lot of morality on social it was a lot of what we talk about things that you will remember not about the benefits of the product but about the brand and that's a very uncomfortable thing to do because you cannot measure the dollar impact on this but if we don't do that you don't feed the top of the funnel if we don't feed the top of the funnel you have nobody to convert at the bottom right so i would say do that i love the show land man don't know if you watch land man taylor share i love it i it's great yeah like it's some of the best man writing and directing out there it's it's fantastic but it reminds you you're basically saying it's like hey i've got this oil will and i'm trying to extract all the oil possible from this well and at some point the well is gonna run dry right and like that's going to beef fundamental problem and you can't do it you feel like investing money on lt to c and highly highly converting media is a good way to not waste money and the reality is it's counterintuitive false right it's actually you are wasting money because you would get a lot of that revenue anyway and then you're afraid if you go spend awareness consideration dollars that you're wasting money and the reality is that's actually how you're building a base and driving money and it's it's like really important paradox and marketing that i think most people don't understand yeah and that's why i'm trying to say that to especially in early state right when you're very tight with cash and you have to be careful on how you spend and you have investors on your back telling you oh what was your ro what was your cat right that's gonna lead to trouble very very fast and so i know it's uncomfortable but pick your lane don't start with an ad made out that just tells us by my product because it's good stock with ads that will get people to remember you and this is a good reminder that investors are good investors they're not good marketers exactly and the other ones i believe all good marketers and not gonna give you all their ideas as we're closing out here pin benoit one of the things i i wanna know is you today if you had a time machine and it could go tell tell yourself when you first start liquid death like what would be the couple of things you're like you should just know this now it'll save you so much time pain it'll help you grow faster like what are the core lessons learned reach and as i preface of course it's for cp g guy so i we are cp so what i'm gonna say doesn't apply necessarily to non cp g folks but retail media is key for cp people right don't focus only on your d two focus not focus on on a shopify revenue focus on what you can drive at amazon at walmart at target and the dollars that you spend there can really turn into massive growth and so i wish i had paying more attention from day one in retail media i'm really deep in it but i wish i had done that before because there's a lot of a lot of impact and a lot of growth there one of the themes of the show today that's kinda of been unspoken that i wanna make sure we cover before we we we close out today is is sub of like marketers needing to give up control and that add units are very fragmented they're across all these platforms hey you're gonna sell a product like liquid three amazon through target not through liquid death dot com for the most part and most marketers i know like i need to get the visits to my website i need people to look at my product pages i want all the control like what advice you give to marketers around this topic like should they let go of control how should they evolve yeah i think for me is like two things you have to focus on where you think you can get school i love that right and that's goes with the let go of control because again same thing you may be misled on where you think the scale is you go where you have the most control which is most likely your shopify website but this is honestly necessarily where you get the most scale and where you get the most scale is morally where you get the least amount of control and that's where i think it's very important think about can you take it to big revenue through that channel now people like well that's the first step yeah that's the first step but if you only think about the first step you may not take the right first step right so think where you wanna go and so when letting control go that's where i would say that now where i would say don't let the control go it's on when you buy media there's a lot of problems right now with platforms that are trying to plug ai in so they do it all for you right especially for example i will bring that one because that one is driving me crazy is this notion of throw as many creative as you can meta and the will figure it out i don't want mega to decide what creative to get in front of each person for me i will decide because again for me consistency of creative matters because what meta us seeds is just one small fragment of the entire funnel so if i let made a play around with it then it's gonna this destroy my full funnel so let control go on where you need to scale and the channels to distribute take control over where you buy and now you love that and because the your incentives in and meta and all the other platforms incentives are not always the same right they're sometimes not but not always aligned so you want control to make sure you're using them in the ways that are aligned alright well bin benoit you have given us i think a master class and how to think about buying and building media systems to drive real revenue and to do that not at the expense building a brand but at the acceleration of building a brand which is actually how you build a big and remarkable company and i really deeply appreciate everything and thank you so much for being on marketing it's a great today thanks for wyoming me that was fun let me tell you about a great podcast demand decode from the team at b a b website and demand generation agency comes demand decode the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional b2b marketing tactics hosts dan and phil deliver actionable insights transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine whether you're struggling with linkedin ads that aren't converting want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation or need to optimize your conversion rates demand decode gives you strategies that work today tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll help you become a better b b marketer they recently did a great episode titled how to fix the ai and inconsistency problem wrecking your go to market listen to demand decode it wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully into well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow better him

i'm gonna show you how to create the ai skill that solves the biggest problem for content creators and that is the ability to get content ideas map to the platform that you are trying to grow your audience and i'm gonna show you how to in three easy steps let's get into today's episode okay so i see a lot of people sharing their ai content systems online and they're all kinda good but i'm here to throw them the gauntlet that i think i have the best ai content system better than all of these folks and now the thing i'm gonna show you is like one skill which is getting content idea so i wanna show you this because it's one of my favorite and i think it's the number one thing that most people can build that will really help them create content because one of the hard things to do is continually coming up with great ideas that is a good starting point to create content that your audience will love and i think i figured out a good way to do this it's actually a great way to do this that is working really well for me and i wanna share it with all of you now the first thing you'll notice about my system is that my content team is available in cloud and it's also available in chat and so it has context it keeps the context between both i can operate this in cloud or i can operate in chat gb so i don't have to be wondering should i create content in one or the other and both of them have access to all of the things that i'm gonna show you because of the way i built there so the thing that i'm going to show you is the ideas and then i'm gonna show you why they're so good and the things that you can build to do the same thing yourself so we get out here and we say hey we want great content ideas and so it will go through and it will start to do a couple of things it will look at my audience profile that i'm going to show you and that is like number one audience profile you wanna make sure you have a really rich audience profile that is not an ideal customer profile it helps you to craft content that people react to number two it will look at my winning platform patterns and so it's going to look at my audience that i'm gonna show you then it's gonna look at hey i see you or just asking for content so i'll check all your profiles if i said hey create content ideas for linkedin or subs youtube tiktok it will only look at the winning patterns from that specific platform what are winning patterns i'm gonna show you and so look how good these ideas are so these proven ideas are mapped to things that work really well for me on linkedin and subs and because you would say well just because these things have worked in the past does not mean they will work in the future and is it not just reg date the same thing no because you'll see it's trying to map to patterns not specific topics and i'll show you that but there's a couple in here that immediately i see will work really off my audience now the big thing is you are the domain expert you are the content creator you have great taste you have great judgment the wrong workflow and i see people doing this is hey please give me some ideas about how marketers should use ai here's some ideas about how marketers should use ai great can you create the linkedin post on this idea sure here's the linkedin post vomit text put live sucks what do i mean by that this one here right this is a good idea because this idea i can immediately see would work well for my audience this is basically saying ai doesn't fix your operating system ai can't fix a fuzzy ideal customer profile or around trusted of data it helps you produce confusion faster okay because i'm the content creator i know my audience i've created a content for the long enough that i know that ai add systems is chaos or ai that operating system is chaos there's a great quote around this from atomic habits james clear basically said that something with systems is chaos and i think about that as ai and so i already can see how i could craft something great for my audience about this and obviously i would do the extra step which is the deep dive research this one here would work really well i saw this one here but basically the market in org renovation so marketing leaders are redesigned or charts instead of reimagine them the work this is very true there's a great story but and i've told us before about the electric motor coming to the factory floor when the electric motor first came to the factory floor the factory just like integrated it into the current system and they saw no productivity upside it was called a productivity paradox and it wasn't until they redesigned the floor around the electric motor if they store real upside so i already have something in my head that could work really well here i would still go on and do the deep dive this is really good i've talked about this for two years everyone is fixated on ai being integrated into marketing sales your go to market and how disruptive that will be well actually i think the most disruptive thing that is going to be ai agents doing the buy in right how do you market sell to agents and that to me is interesting that's always been an incredibly interested and take and so that i can see me create a piece of content on this now skills tend to never work a hundred percent of the way you think it will work and that is specifically true when i built something that is ai assistant agnostic which means mine works in claude chat i could add it to anywhere and it will work the same way because of how i built it but you can see it's doing something odd here and that it should be showing me what platform it's recommended so it has recommended this one for subs stack right i think this is a good map for subs stacks because it's loaded all of my patterns and i would ask it hey you haven't done that for the others and we would refine it right always be refining your sales and plugins now trending upside this is so cool right this is basically looking at my audience and you over the last thirty days when i check reddit it when i check x when i check the web when i check oldest the sources that i've given through these mc servers here's the things that people are talking about this one here from levi which is the ceo of box i think you can see it's pulled in this is a viral thread one nine six zero likes this is very similar to what i talked about that ai without systems is chaos and so that's a pretty good indicator that that post work really well it's in the proven pattern it's in the trend and upside that's kinda what we want there's like one here out here it is from care this is a really good right your leader's lack of ai heart sales is the bottleneck i saw a job posted this week where someone a marketing leader was high in your kind of vp of ai strategy the person who owns ai in marketing and the ai strategy is the marked leader you don't outsource that part of your job and they think that would make a great post and look i've got validation and i can ask it to actually do a deep dive it has a clear bow thread that has gone viral now again there's always continual improvement and so one of the interesting things here is it should have told me the platform it should have done this for each of the post it didn't i suspect the reason it didn't is some of these are coming from the web some of these are coming from reddit and some of them are coming from like places where it can gather that data from but tiny little incremental improvements if you love that episode and you want all of the resources you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code to get them all delivered to your inbox so why are these so well mapped to what i wanna do well the content profile is the take part of that this is not an ideal customer profile this is how you build tasteful content and tasteful assets for the audience right it's a very different type of thing and it's being updated continually i updated every month i refine it every month based upon all of the performance data that i'm could gathering and you can see here i can log results and that login results updates the context which is that in this case i'm gonna show you the audience profile and that within patterns and it actually updates all these skills to make them run better so you can see here this is my audience profile so this is what it checks this is wrong it should be yeah april twenty twenty six so that's interesting the audience identity so who they are these are kinda like more standard stuff how they see themselves their sophistication level and again i do not use my system to create finished pieces of content i do not copy and paste from ai now i wanna say something really quick on that i see all these things about like remove your ai slot and i think that's great like i get it there is a huge backlash at the moment from people use an ai to craft things and if it's really obvious that you crafted that thing with ai now i just always prefer creating the content in ai is giving me all of the building blocks to create great content and research is one of those building blocks but i have a problem with people call in a lot of what ai does and write and s it's annoying it's not s these things are great right in patterns that we used to be able to use m dashes it's not this it's that that actually is a good patterns and build tension makes a bold point and so they're just like right in patterns that now are available to everyone with a click of a button or a little prompt that gets integrated into everyone's writing and so they're saturated they're saturated it doesn't mean they're swaps slot means they suck they're bad they're like below average and they're not the content ai creates is above average it's just easy to spot it because everyone is doing it right it's like everyone is doing the thing and so you're like well that's ai because they get the same as everyone else's and so i well x why i'd prefer using my system to get the building blocks really crisp and then i craft all of the content and use my skill judgment and taste to do that little point on it's my little point here on cy point when a buyer ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not in hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you could show up even more jobs to be done what are they trying to do their pain points think that's really important this is kinda like the slap thing alright like i don't care about s here because i'm not trying to have the ai craft a finished piece of content it actually creates drafts and has all of the kind of build blocks for me to create incredible content these are kinda of more based on content right this is why it's on ic what are the emotional triggers validation hooks like how can you actually really grab that person's attention content triggers anti triggers like what really triggers some interest situational free and so trusted voices who did they listen to right they listen to lan they listen to x five chart today if they listen it behind the cmo they listen to marketing and against the green thank you thank you they listen into cx they listened to practitioners you know peers at similar stage companies first person accounts they love that named companies and we you see that the richness the detail okay so like hey i've looked at your audience i get it this is who your audience is well i actually want to see what works for you right because i wanna figure out what ideas fit into the patterns that work for your platforms here's linkedin the winning in content profile and linkedin this is hundred and sixty posts from single year it's all of the post content all of the post performance data very rich data set do the same for subs will do the same for youtube and youtube not just the performance data all of the transcripts right real job real effort to make this stuff good and so you can see here it actually has a ranked by engagement gets updated every single month or does not go stale it has like news drop in your take right like so again it's a pattern something happened and what's my taking it i would say i will probably this one is actually coming down over the last couple of months in value so this stock rank is going to change this works really well for me i am on the ground i am building stuff my happy space is actually built and stuff shipping things practical things things that work not just ai create s i use the word slap there properly right not just that's the proper way to use it number how two but i say that there's like some nuance in there here's how two the comes once right number steps this is a simplification of content i talked about i over complicate content this is the simplification content the reason number to list work is people want like just tell me the five thing shut up i don't need all of this context tell me the five things the identity this works pretty well i do have like here's how mark teams will change here's i roll the cmo would change here's how this will change i have a lot of takes in that i think about those things all the time this is my fun one in linkedin i love to do just funny posts have not done a lot lately and would never have ai find i don't know maybe i will ask it to find some funny it never like really does a good job at finding them the funny ideas i don't know if there's much comedy and business ai maybe i i wanna bring more to it and then i love doing contra takes why i think people are wrong about things like the you know the one that i'm probably gonna create a piece of content on is that the marketing leader cannot outsource ai strategy to another role i don't hire ai strategy you are the ai strategist and so there it checks all of this has like anti patterns it has the confidence notes confident notes is basically white thinks to this profile is pretty confident and then you can see so what do i do i have a queue right i already have a queue i had to i'd constantly clean up you can see us way too many things on here so i will always clean it up it does this thing where it categorized them this is my own categorization ai is so personal to how you do things spicy take data nugget educational like means it has a really shareable piece of data spicy means like it's a counterintuitive should take educational means there's a singular lesson but i can call my content queue so anytime i'm create a content i'm like hey show me my q cool don't want that one don't kill that one kill that one kill that one kill that one and then let's find out what's be happening i can tell it over i can say research last seven days i can say research the last twenty eight days whatever i wanna say i'll go through these ideas here that we've gone through and their killer and i think i'm gonna add three to my content queue right so all that three new ones to my conte queue and that's why i don't run that of ideas and i'm constantly jot and down things so like i'm constantly putting things into the queue and then kinda playing around with those ideas and so this is content idea idea i could do the same thing on chat g and you get different flavors because chat i've noticed is actually better a content at the moment for some reason so i can run the same process here works here works here has the access to the exact same context has my audience profile has all of the women patterns profiles anything i actually create here on the content queue because of the way again i've created it it will be available here so they're totally in sync does doesn't matter which one i work on that's how you never run out of content ideas map to your audience mapped to the platform and don't just reg to take crap ideas that everyone else is doing i hope this was an interesting and lesson for you i will be dropping more skills from that content system it's a lot to do in a single video so i think these kind of miniature videos with singular skills is the best way to do it you want more from the content system drop it in the comments let me tell you about a great podcast demand decode from the team at b a b website and demand generation agency comes demand decode the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional b2b marketing tactics post dan and phil deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine whether you're struggling with linkedin ads that aren't converting want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation or need to optimize your conversion rates demand decode gives you strategies that work today tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll help you become a better b2b marketer they recently did a great episode titled how to fix the ai inconsistency problem wrecking your go to market listen to demand decode wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history calls four tickets emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot girl better him four

hey we all thought getting people to use ai was gonna be the hard part it turns out that we were completely wrong the harder problems is getting them to use ai correctly we're now flooded with ai slot one person pasting something into cloud and then sending that to the other person it's becoming epidemic in your company and every company out there today we're joined by hillary grid she built an amazing system at whoop and turned all this ai slot into repeatable quality she's showing us how to build real tools today that can fix this problem you wanna stick around she's take us behind the scenes this is going to up level the quality of ai work within your company dramatically let's get to today's show hillary welcome to the show today we're really excited to have you on marketing screen thank you i'm so excited to be here we're talking about a fun topic that i think literally applies to every single person in the world and especially every single marketer or builder in the world and that topic is we've all started to use ai and ai has become a big part of our lives and now we are flooded with ai slot i'm on a group chat and this is senior leaders at all like brands that you all have heard of and know is like i feel like so much of my day is reading people basically typing something into claude taking that response from claude goes to another person and claude summarizing it for the other person and it's like going back and forth and basically the tagline of this chad is like people are outsourcing their taste and their judgment to a decision making to ai and it's creating this huge wave of crap and s out there yes and we have to stop the slot we cannot let this tidal wave of s wash us all the way because we we will not be a happy campers if that happened yeah and so you were obviously you were builder at whoop you saw this firsthand you were you you were here through kind of the this first wave of ai which is like oh we all need to start using ai now we're past that and we actually need to actually get into a place where it's like oh we're using ai to scale our case and judgment not to outsource our taste and judgment and so maybe like from the front lines like take us behind the scenes like what did you see and what have you seen that is like the big reasons that this problem exists sure so i've seen this from a few vantage points as you said i saw as i was leading teams at wu and i was working to get adoption in the early days of we could see people working differently with ai we were trying to get this out into coding teams into non technical teams across the entire organization and figure out how to do it in the right way and then from that i actually started teaching a course called how to be a super manager with ai and so through that course i have talked with hundreds of managers at other companies who have also been on this trajectory and i have seen how the pain points that managers and that independent contributors have have changed over the past two years so when i started this course i was still at loop and this was in february of twenty twenty five and the most common thing i was getting asked was how do we get people to actually use these tools and this was something that it whoop i think we did a a very good job of and we had some really smart folks on the internal ai team there that we're really focused on finding power users getting them equipped with the tools and then letting that sort of you know trickle out to the rest of the organization and so that's what a lot of people were doing and it was it was really great it was fun you had these like ai super users who were really just super charging the way they worked and the way that their peers worked and then i noticed something started to shift which is wait everybody's kinda doing this in their own way problem one kinda it's all it's all decentralized and completely getting those if people are using this stuff the right way or the wrong way i totally agree exactly and it and it kinda has to be in some ways because you need the domain experts to be the ones who are actually figuring out how to do this work right you need a marketing expert to figure out how you make a really cool ai powered marketing workflow and just pulling in somebody from an engineering team who has no domain expertise or on marketing is not gonna do very a good job of that so it kinda has to start that way but everyone's doing their own thing they're all pulling from different context right they're all using different sources of truth some of them are stated some of them are conflicting with each other some people are connecting their tools some people are not connecting their tools so that's problem too is there's no kind of canon right there's no central brain although many companies are kind of attempting to do this it's easier said than done and then the third problem is nobody is really articulating what good looks like here and this is the problem that eye i care the most about as somebody who's led high performing teams as somebody who teaches people how to lead high performing teams in this ai era is it really have to be clear about what good looks like and if you are not setting that quality bar as a leader or as a manager you can't be surprised when that quality starts slipping and when people find out that there's an easy button that they can press to do their job for them and maybe it does like an okay job and maybe in some cases okay is fine but then you noticed it starts kinda seeping into more and more things and that's when i think you get this dynamic that you were just talking about where it it you kinda have this feeling that you're just like talking to a person who's just an intermediary for claude where it's like i i can go talk to claude if i walk to i'm talking to you and i think that that is something that i'm hearing constantly for managers now it's like what are we gonna do about this and so if you're interested in everything we cover today you're gonna wanna scan the qr code click the link in the description below and we've got a ton of resources to take you to the next level i have felt that what you've said deeply and i've talked to a lot of other leaders who have also experienced what you're talking about there's there's a few things i would add like my hottest take here is that you had two types of managers in the pre ai world you had managed who were deep crafts people and that might be a amazing email marketer a great creative director might be a great ux designer or pm and then you had what i'd call context carriers that their whole job was to move information around and like they didn't really have deep craft expertise but they were kind of a human api they were a glue that could move context around mh and ai is kind of obsolete that second group of people and there's still a lot of those groups of people across all these companies and because companies are in the midst of making these transitions and i find that that that the s is more prevalent with with the context carriers because they can't do exactly what you just said they don't know the standards and and how to set them and they're not deep enough in the technology and the application of the technology to actually teach their teams what they're good at is moving information around and ai makes it really easy to move information around and that's what creates all the sla is you get this information regurgitation on an like an endless cycle i think that's exactly right and i would even say for the information carriers and the context carriers there is still a role for people like that to play and you can be really good at it right there are ways to be not very effective at it i i think a lot of times like a lot of these problems come down to as a manager if you're not really sure what you do or what value you bring then that is going to be made very apparent in the ai era if it was not before because if you're just saying to people like hey run this by claude what value are you bringing to that conversation right but i do think for somebody who is like a a context thinker who has a a genius for that it is easier said than done for a company to figure out what context is real and to keep it updated and i think especially now like this maybe gets solved in six months i don't know but i think what you're saying about the people who are who real crafts people they have a completely different opportunity which is how can i shape these tools so that they are making my team better at what they do even if you took the tools away tomorrow and this is again when i teach in my classes is like you want you wanna build these tools in such a way where they are tee teaching your to your team how to do things how to do a good job and what good looks like but they are teaching it in such a way that if you you kicked the crutch out tomorrow they wouldn't be like oh no i haven't learned anything and i think that is why it's so important for leaders to be really involved in these implementation questions how we design these ai systems because there's so many choices to make along the way what does the human do what does the ai do and how do they interface that really do have an impact on like the the cognitive ability of your team and whether your teams are getting better and if you can make teams that get better those teams will make the systems get better which then make the people get better and it creates this virtuous cycle as opposed to if you just have kind of this cognitive rock happening where everyone's outsourcing their judgment to the ai nobody's questioning anything that's coming out of it the people get worse that makes the systems worse and then you get into this sort of s doom loop yeah once the swap starts it's really hard to break that s dude as you're saying i i have a couple of things i wanna follow out there but before you use the word context many times and context it's a word that's getting thrown around by everybody out in the world me included i would love for you to define for everybody watching today when you say context what do you mean i mean it in its most kind of pure sense which is what is the information that a person or an ai agent needs in order to do a job well right if i go to a new hire and i say you know plan this launch for this feature that we have coming out if that's all the context they have they're not gonna be able to do a good job but if i tell them here's everything you need to know about the feature and by the way here's everything you need to know about launches that we've run in the past here's what worked here's what didn't work here's what we tried with that context a smart person can really build on that and do a really excellent job planning this launch but me is the manager how i think about the information that i give to them in order to do that right like you don't wanna give them way way way way way too much if if i say like here's every ab test that we have ever run the history of this company knock yourself out right like that's not helpful but likewise it is not helpful to to give them no one for and so how you decide what information you give them is actually like a a core challenge of being a good manager and that as i said is true whether you're managing humans or whether you're managing agents because an ai agent is gonna have the same problem i think there's a third level to it and it's the thing that i believe the most in which is it's the clarity and decision making foundation that leads to all the work that you need to get done if you show me a team that's really executing really well in general they're very focused and they're super clear on what the strategy is what their priorities are who they're serving how they're adding value to them and it's easy to just lose sight of all those things and just ask claude and have a hundred different people asking claude a hundred different ways what the answers to those questions are you know kieran and i have a book coming out called loop it's coming out in september and one of the ideas we have in the book is what we call taste profile and it is all your context that you need to build your marketing and it is essentially all of the stuff that isn't in an ideal customer profile non demographic data so like what that customer believes what they feel what pushes them too far all of that because that is actually like the instructions that ai needs they need a deep emotional understanding of the customer and the other part of it is all the stories you as a brand you as a company you're trying to tell you know like what is the core product narrative if you have what is the core emotional brand story the thing you want people to feel and if everybody on your team has access to that same case profile in this case or same context file and what you're saying the quality of work automatically goes up the consistency automatically goes up and you don't have this s cycle because you're you're you're gonna reduce so much of that because the judgment making by both ai and the people gets a lot more focused and what i think is so funny about that so i totally agree i think that's amazing i love i love that concept and what is so funny to me about it is even if we had no ai if you as a marketing leader took the time to assemble something like that and dis it to your people we everything would improve immediately everything would approve dramatically right and that and it has happened in some ways before and like with creative brief and there there other artifacts of this but now in the new world you actually be more depth and i think that you know sla is a function of a lack of depth is my argument right like you don't have contacts you don't have depth in what you're trying to do and so you stay at this surface level i find that the people who are really great at working with ai have a ton of beliefs some point of view and then they'll go back and iterate a hundred times on something it's not just asking claude to spit out something went off but i know you have a bunch of lessons that you have learned and advice for folks who are in this swap cycle and how to get out of it and i think i think you got a couple things you wanna share with the audience today so i wanna kick it over to you kinda kick us off in the solution stage of if you are on a team you're in a company you founded a company and just like i'm just surrounded by endless words and images that are kinda sloppy and crappy and don't actually have any value what the heck you do sure win a buyer ass ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not in hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you can show up even more the the broad theme of what i'm gonna talk through is that you have to make it super clear for people what good looks like and that shows up in a few different ways i'm gonna show a few different tools and ways to think about doing that but if you take nothing else away from this i think that is the most important thing what does good look like what does good work look like what does a good version of this job look like in an ai era and if you don't have clarity on that you cannot expect anyone on your team to have clarity on that and if they don't have clarity on that you can't expect them to meet that bar and so much like you were saying you know if you take the time and effort to cod all the context that people need to do a good job whether ai has access to that or not people will become better at their jobs for having that yeah it's the same with this like i i laugh with all this ai stuff because it's like it's just could leadership management exactly exactly yeah it's like right it you need to bring the clarity for expectations and for quality and if you can do that and you can help people meet that bar you're gonna be happy no matter what the technology you're using can you talk about setting a quality bar real quick because i think humans have a hard time one setting a quality bar for themselves and depending on the manager sometimes they're scared to set the quality bar and sometimes they're setting the quality bar too aggressively and too high mh so maybe like help us unpack what it means to do that well yes so i wanna think about it a two level and the first level that i'll start with is what is what does the job look like like what does a good version of this job look like and i think what i mentioned early on you know people were sort of giving ai to super users seeing how they used it and then kinda letting that sort of trickle across the organization finding examples of good versions of using ai and then piecing those together and i think that was a great way to start but at this point i think we need to go beyond that right and in general i like to think where are we trying to get to and then how do we work our way backward to where we are today to figure out how to get there rather than how do we start from where we are today and then incrementally change things to try to get to some future state and so i think we were past the point of starting from where we are today imagining our jobs today and then thinking okay how can we add some ai here and some ai there right like i already am going to write a brief like can i write that brief for me whatever so instead i would urge eat leaders to say like think about a year two years five years in the future five years is maybe hard to predict think about two years in the future i can't imagine least six months i know okay worlds move fast that's true that's true every week you're like oh gosh seriously oh everything's changed now so imagine a year in the future right like what if all your dreams come true and your team is totally ai pill and they're working in an ai native way like what does a day in their life look like and how is that different than what a day in their life is like today and can you show that picture to them so that they have the clarity they don't feel like they're just throwing spaghetti at the wall try random things with ai and see what works but they actually have something they're working toward well so that's the first thing that i and i would just interject that i think it's real important for people to understand that that dream state where people are working an ai native way they could also still be doing the wrong things and not being productive right it's not just working in an ai native way it is working against a strategy that's gonna add value to your customers to the business and i think so many of you know again i'm on these group chats and it's like people are doing so many cool things mh but over half of those things have like no value yes and that's the that like that which is a different layer of s think when we think about eye swap we think of like cloud text or chat cheap text there's a whole other level of swap of like i built these ten applications that nobody's ever gonna see or use yes because i thought it was cool and only i thought it was cool and that's as again as manager or as a leader you should be thinking like all those levels like at with the top level is like okay how are people spending their time what are they doing how are they working and then there's a level below that which is like what are the you know of of the hundred projects they could be working on what are the ten they choose to work on and how do we make sure those are the right ones and then on a the level below that it's like for any one project right what is the work that is coming out of it and what is good for that piece of work look like and how are we you know c cod firing and system digitizing that in some way and it is i it goes all the way up and down the stack like you can't you can't just focus on one piece of it you really do have to be managing at all layers of that so i can show you a bit about how i think about the kind of top layer and then we're gonna go down to a very granular layer for a piece of work yeah how do we actually think about know articulating what good looks like for that we should do that pull that up while you it up i would just say to reiterate what you're just saying i think this ai transformation of work and getting rid of s is not that just dissimilar to any other technology that we've had and i i've read this book recently called inside the box by david epstein david's coming on the show soon and he's got great stories in there about how constraints and focus help you and that's essentially the thesis and i think that's especially true in the ir but he has the whole story of how pixar you know iterate and stayed laser focus to get to the toy story moment right and i think that is essentially the exact thing that's happening in every team is that your job as a leader is to set the constraints and focus because you can't have people going off and doing a hundred different things as you were just saying you need them actually going really deep on the one to three things that you believe are going to have the highest impact when they're done in this new ai native way it's so true and that's why i always kinda laugh when people say well is there a reason that we need managers in this ai world and it's like on one hand there are a lot of ineffective managers out there we've never needed in ineffective managers and so if some if some cleanup of ineffective managers is happening like fine but to your point the these the scope of chaos of what a single person can do if they are if they are not given that clear context clear strategy like if if they're not gonna point in the right direction it is just we're seeing this we're seeing this play out what kind of chaos it can create when every single person has their own mental model of if here's what i should be doing here's what matters here's what good looks like and there's there's no kind of orchestration happening between that and so i actually think having a good managers is more important and higher impact than ever but yes if if it was a manager you're not doing any of those things then if you're only gonna add to that case this is the classic example of the more things change the more things stay the same you still need like the great fundamentals truly alright walk us through what you got here okay so what i like to tell people is think about a situation right that you are going to encounter in your role that somebody on and your team is going to encounter in your role and then how would you map out what a person does today when they're navigating that situation like something has happened what do they do and then what and then what and then what and then take a step back and try to reimagine what that would look like if it truly had ai at the center of it and to have ai at the center of it i basically think everything's happening proactively right so anything that today you kinda have to notice or be alerted to or go in and find imagine that signal is being served you proactively and then as you think about every step that happens after that think through okay well what if ai did the next thing what if it went even further what if it went even further and so i have an example of that here i show you one that i have for a marketing team a situation right your ceo has just asked why is a competitor's new campaign sound exactly like this positioning that we have sometimes examples feel too real this is one of sema says everyone watching at this moment u well i don't know we we interviewed all the same people i don't know how this happened but anyway so i think about how this works today right where you kinda you pull up your competitor site you're sort of trying to you're reactive figure out what happened right like oh wait what is their campaign let me go see it let me go find their social let me go find their website let me piece this whole thing together and then you kinda put this all in a dock and then you kinda look at your messaging and their messaging and you're going back and forth you call the team together you kinda whiteboard bunch of my ideas out is somebody takes pictures of the whiteboard nobody ever looks those pictures again at some point you write a brief for a designer to try a a different spin on this your ceo was pest you saying what's going on what's going on and you're like we're working on it right does that sound familiar same sounds too familiar so what would this look like right if nothing was a surprise and if the ai could always go one step further so if nothing was a surprise right the system has flagged this somehow right imagine you have an the agent that is constantly scanning your competitors for their competitive messaging and comparing it against your own and so it should proactively be flagging when something like this happens but then what would it mean to take that a step further right it's not just flagging for you and saying oh hey we've got a problem it's proposing three different angles right each with a landing page mock up that you can preview so it's kind of prototype out these different responses and then you as the human can kind of use your taste use your judgment to choose between those and maybe it pulls in some supporting data maybe it has a a conversion estimate on each which is pulling from your site data and so maybe you pick your favorite ones your system updates the landing page and then it updates all the trickle down the ad copy the email sequences i know this happens in you know a a couple hours maybe less yeah and then it allows you to then respond to your ceo and say hey we're on top of it we have a new page shipped this is what we expect i'll follow up in a week when we have some results from how this new page performed and so something like this like hopefully this sort of illustrates the difference between a situation right situations might not really change but what happens as a result of that situation can change a lot and so i encourage managers to try to go through and exercise like this and to really think about what are the types of challenges problems your team is solving today what would it look like to solve that in a more ai native way and then walk them through that like paint that picture for them and bring it to life with really concrete details like very concrete to the point of you know what are the data sources that this is pulling from what is the exact next action that the ai is doing and what is the role of the human in all of this and i think giving people something like this it's just it it makes them in my experience if it gets them a little bit excited because they can see where this is going they can see themselves in it it reduces the fear uncertainty and doubt of just like i don't know man my manager just keeps telling me to use claude and it doesn't seem like they have a clue right it gives them confidence in you because it seems like you know what you're doing which is important and it gives it gives them something to work too like what i have on the right here might be a little bit beyond the capabilities of your system where your organization today but you can get there you could get there right now if you wanted to yeah i and i think what's interesting is you you break down on the workflow i think really well and i would say there's also like kind of a top line constraint one of the ideas we have in the book is like things have moved from months to minutes you know really something we believe and if you just had a a goal underneath your problems staying up there which is like you need to get your ceo a prototype which here she can review within thirty minutes of the new page mh right that's actually what we're talking about we're talking about solving a problem in a way that was never before possible and the steps you have here essentially that's what they're solving against they're solving for this thing of like oh my ceo's has got this crazy problem before it would've have taken me like weeks to like get him or her something to look at now i can get them something like within thirty minutes and by the way it can't be sloppy because i'm not gonna send a swap landing page to my ceo right so it's like kind of a really good constraint and forcing a function and if you can do something like that then you can probably almost do anything that is slot free right because that it's a good way to show i actually know how to work in this new world in a way that's valuable to that point when you are making things concrete like this you can have real conversations about what a person's role is and that includes like the accountability i like i tell people the job has never really been about the work it's always been about accountability for the work right in theory you could have contracted your workout to some third party and sur suspiciously had them do the work and then send that to your boss and the only reason knew one would ever know if that happened is if the work wasn't good and then most people would say well it would be impossible for this random third party to do the work secretly without having any information as good as i could so i'm just gonna do it myself but now anyone kind of has that that third party and it doesn't have to be secret and it turns out it's actually pretty good but you're still accountable like you're still accountable for the quality of your work and so you can say something like this to your point like your job is to get a prototype to the ceo and success looks like it's a good prototype yeah if i look at it and i'm like no thought has been put into this and this is just like clearly ai slot that you typed in hey make a prototype for me and then sent out to the ceo like you're you're not meeting the bar but i see a lot of confusion to like i told my team to use ai and how they're using it but they're making all this bad stuff and i think that it's that's like too focused on how to do the work which is not actually what you wanna have the conversation about you wanna have the conversation about what you're accountable for and what good looks like exactly what the goals the constraints the timelines are and that forces you to work in this way like one of things i believe is that i believe some some and very few people are really good blank page people that they're like oh i know i get this blank page and i could just whip up the right thing i think peep most people are great editors myself included i'm a terrible blank page person but i'm a great editor and what i love with the ai world is i can get all these options that you outlined right it's like hey yeah i need help with this give me three different angles and then i can edit and move and say oh actually i don't like any of those three i like this other thing and that is i think a boo and a tailwind to anybody out there who i think it's most people who are just really good editors they just need to use ai in that way versus just totally outsourcing the thinking and the editing to ai itself i totally i think there's almost too much focus especially in non technical fields around automation which implies it starts the job it finished at the job and for me the way i think about it is like i still wanna do the things i love doing about my job i just i just don't wanna be starting from zero there are things where like me starting from zero i'm able to sort of bring some kind of generative seed into that which then the ai can sort of super charge but there's so many things we have to do over the course of the day where you just really the the cognitive of energy it takes to get from zero to eighty percent of it is a lot and it's not that different jade it right differentiation comes in like the you exercising your judgment and taste to really get it over the line and get it from good to great and so if you could have just good blend on your desk and then your job becomes getting everything to great like i i think that's a lot of i think it's a great way to work yeah in a world where ai swap is so prevalent now like the they're remarkable the o g decisions and content and products get way more rewarded and there's only come from people willing to make hard choices and having a real clear vision of what they're trying to achieve okay i think you walked us through a really good perspective of how work actually should get done and how it's transformed and changed a lot what else should people be doing to get the sla out of their own work as well as like the people that are working with so the other thing that i like to teach managers about is how do you make tools that give feedback on people's work so that they can understand where it is not meeting the bar and how to get to the bar and part of why i think this is important is because it forces a more iterative way of working where you are you are doing a shot at something you're trying it you're getting feedback you're improving it you're taking another shot you're getting feedback you're improving it historically that would be really slow to do if every single time they had to wait for your feedback right it's like piling up in your inbox and you as a manager you just like nobody wants to be the kind of manager that's like everything has to go through me in order to move forward but if presumably if you have some level of craft if you have some level of expertise that's actually quite helpful for your team and so you wanna give that to them as a way for them to make their work better not as like a process hoop they have to jump through but again as a way to just keep getting better and better and better and by the way this is something to your point around you know if you feel like you are getting s and you're just like it doesn't it doesn't feel like you put work into this one very simple non ai approach to that is just say to them like this is a good first start but it still feels too ai generated so keep going and i think a lot of times people get stuck in this like it's either bad or it's good right either did a bad job right did a good job and if you say this is too ai generated and you did a bad job which means you did something wrong and i think when you're kind of introducing this new way of working which is like the ai is helping getting you further and then you have to keep going it's not like hey this is bad like you made sloppy you're a bad person it's like okay this is you know maybe like a first take at this i it doesn't seem like you put a ton of thought into it i'm so i'm not gonna put a ton of thought into it why don't you take another pass and sort of put your spin on this and then i'll sit down and put my spin on this and so really like working and and doing that change management for teams to work in a more iterative kind of continuing to to tweak and iterate and make better and better and better way of working and so i have a lot of tools i've made for how to do this and what i teach is basically how to take expertise that's in your head and turn that into some kind of tool so it could be a custom gp which is just a very simple way to have people upload some piece of work and then get feedback on that and the feedback is not just what chat gp is saying but it's actually following a set of instructions that you have written that are based in on what you evaluate when you look at a piece of work and help them understand if they've met the bar or not but there's there's a lot of different ways you could do this as a skill if you're in c copilot you can do this as an agent or if you're in gemini you can do this as a gem so i made a tool called the executive editor and basically this is a tool that anyone on my team could upload an email that they were going to send to an executive and would give them feedback on how to make that email basically more likely to just get a yes a green light yeah continue doing what you're doing because i saw that so many times my team would put all this work into something they were working on and then they would you know think of as kind of a formality like oh you know we're gonna have to change the launch date we better give the ceo a heads up and then they would send this email and ceo respond to be like talking about we to change the launch date absolutely not like not acceptable we one of the things the ceo never wants to do is change the launch date just fyi free free chip for everybody out there yeah you know i always laugh when to give this example because people are like you know is our email like do we really need to be spending that much time working on our internal emails to each other and i'm like and you never had your day blown up because you know you like thought you were gonna do something that was gonna be relatively straightforward and then yeah you you're you're like hey is it cool we moved the launch date back a month and the ceo was like no absolutely no it is not cool not even the lit of it so i made this tool basically to help guide them through improving this and again this isn't something i wanted to spend my time on i don't wanna be editing people's emails for them so this tool is it for them but importantly it is based on the principles that i bring when i'm thinking about what good executive communication and managing up looks like this is different than if you were to just like me as a manager saying hey can you run your emails through claude before you send them is like there's no me in that equation yeah breakdown for us like how did you like what's the logic how'd you actually build this somebody's like you know what yeah i don't wanna look like an idiot to my ceo anymore i want the same thing like what what you do yes so this is a custom g okay if somebody would paste in their draft email and then it would give them feedback basically like pass and here's what to improve and here's some would rewrite to extract your standards so what are the ways like what are the things that i look for when i'm evaluating in email now that's kinda hard to do like if i asked you what are the five things that you look for when you are you know reading somebody's email that they're gonna send to a ceo i don't think i could tell you at this moment yeah but it's hard right yeah it's hard and so there's some ways that ai i can help with this my favorite one is like giving it examples so i literally had a document and in one column i had draft emails that people had sent me and then in the other column i had my revisions and i put that document i just uploaded it into chat and i said what is the difference between column a and column b like what are what are you noticing about the the edits that i make over and over and over again and can you help me spot the patterns so you guys very good at spotting patterns and it said yeah well sure it's you know you're you are looking for does it lead with the message like in the very first sentence right is it actionable is the tone right is it clear like is every single word adding clarity rather than ambiguity and so then i say okay can you turn those rules into criteria right give me five criteria and then write out in plain english what does passing versus failing that criteria look like and then you have a rubric and you can run anything against a rubric and so what you do you and you can you can say like write that rubric as a prompt that i can paste into a custom gp or into a skill whatever you wanna do it's just english right it's just gonna make an english document you copy it it says you know step one evaluate the the email across these criteria tell the user whether anything is passed or failed and then give suggestions for how to improve and then you just copy that paste that in the system prompt a custom gp and then anyone can use it anyone has access to your brain and the thing that i think is important about this is i've seen people who are sort of make these like second brains for their team i think it's really important to do it in a purpose driven way like you'll notice that i was not like i'm gonna make a second hillary which is just a whole bunch of documents about me that anyone can upload whatever they want and get feedback like i made this as specific as in an editor for emails that you are sending to an executive that you need to get a yes on and so i've made dozens of these and they're all that specific because i really i mean again this is sort of a silly example it's like internal emails but i really do care about what good looks like whether it is you know a a product requirements stock whether it's even a problem statement the design of an ab b test like i have opinions about what how you should do that what good looks like and so that's what i'm trying to encode in these tools to give my team basically on demand access to my own thinking models rather than just saying like yeah i don't the talked claude it's kinda like the ai equivalent of the old john wooden story where you know the first day of basketball practice at ucla and john within the famous coach he'd start with having everybody put their socks on you know it's like the most fundamental basic thing like you need to do like can't play based basketball without socks yeah right and what you're basically saying is that there are certain touch points in every person's day and how they do work they're are foundational and one way to avoid s get better outcomes as well and just be more successful in your job or your career is to have little very focused tools for those moments you showed us a really good example of them everybody probably has six to eight that they probably should build that will actually set that foundation and set that bar to actually make them position for success and like everything else like i get so much clarity by going through this as a manager it's actually really good to sit down and ask yourself what do i think success looks like you know what like what what what is a level that if my team is doing this on a consistent basis i will be happy and how can i articulate that and even if you don't go and make any tools out of this even if you just have conversations where you say that to people like you're gonna be a better manager yeah the best ai work has nothing to do with ai getting clarity understanding standards getting clear on who you're serving and how you help them all of those decisions which you can be hand waving and ignore really easily but when you set them really helps you transform hillary this has been an awesome awesome show today i have taken away so much from our conversation i think you've taken people behind the scenes to actually understand what it's like to work in a really high performing team it isn't just slapping ai text back and forth to each other where can everybody find out more about you if they wanna take courses do everything else like where can where can folks find you great i have a subs stack where i post the newsletter that's probably the best way to stay in touch with me it's called hills dot subs dot com h i l s just one l and then as i said i teach a course called how to be a super manager with ai i on m so you can find me there and yeah i'm i'm around the internet talking to managers and sharing what i hear from them well hillary this was incredible can't wait to have you back on in the future with more lessons learned and thank you for joining us on marketing at screen thank you so much for me let me tell you about a great podcast demand decode from the team at b a b website and demand generation agency comes demand decode the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional b2b marketing tactics hosts dan and phil deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine whether you're struggling with linkedin ads that aren't converting want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation or need to optimize your conversion rates demand decode gives you strategies that work today tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll will help you become a better b b marketer they recently did a great episode titled how to fix the ai and inconsistency problem wrecking your go to market listen to demand decode wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the client's whole history recall support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow

hey grace welcome to the show we're super excited to have you marketing against the crane today thank you thanks so much for having me today if grace is gonna show us a repeatable pattern that you can use for any marketing discipline whether that's your design work whether that's your performance marketing whether that's your demand gen because it connects back to like contact intelligence grace you have built a whole system for how you build manage prompts and actually scale how you work with ai products like building a design system in cloud to then building a template for a carousel turning that template into a skill mh and now you can anytime you're cloud build a carousel in this case because that's what we built right leave you're building a system today and you wanna have a team that really uses ai you have to have like contacts intelligence you have to have skills that you can give to them and you wanna make sure that you evaluate those skills to make sure they do the things you want them to do exactly yeah and so the system i'm going to share today is also work with seo and also google ads yeah so if you're your general is marketer is critical because you could apply it to any of the tasks you have to do on a day to day week to week basis and so grace maybe kick us off with i don't actually get started working in in a better way with the ai eye versus just like kinda one off basic couple sentence prompting so first thing is of course like to create a folder so this photo is just like your structure like your system so basically like for example maybe for marketing team usually we have different disciplined so we can have ads we can have seo we have social website and then the first thing is we would create a context folder so you can see this is a context folder and inside we will have different core contacts and these core contacts should be reusable so i will prepare all those context file first before like doing anything so i think this is really important i just want like underline this for everybody watching and listening to the show today but you have david epstein coming on the show soon he wrote this book inside the box and it's about how constraints are really valuable in working and and in the way when working with ai because you can do anything you can get really distracted there's a whole concept around like you need to work slow before you can work fast and what you're actually saying instead of going in and prompting everything you actually need to do the setup and get that magically right and understand hey this is the context around my brand my voice the way that i actually do marketing needs to be very explicit and and by the way if you don't have those answers then you don't even need ai you have to go and figure out and you know what your brand voice and those more foundational elements are yes absolutely because most marketed just directly jump okay i have to create scales but to me sci is always like the last mile bigger because skills is about like automating scale things up so you just have like a simple system and i think one of the me mistake people make is they make the system so sophisticated and complicated when it gets started okay how many photos i should create the first like like ten folders twenty photos but however the system will evolve so you would adjust along the way so my advice do not complicate your photos setup up just just make sure it works for you the cool thing about you know ai really is in the show off your kind of systems stage right now and i've i've done a lot in it's cool like ai has made local file structures is really cool like everyone's like look at my local file structure and then i showed in ob and well i look at this like i've got so many cool files on my laptop and a cool local file structure it makes kind of all of these things that used to be pretty boring like i i have so much fun doing pho structures now i'm gonna organize organizing all my folders together like contacts and all my different layers which which by the way it's hilarious but we also have to all remember that most people in this world their desktop looks like it exploded right so the you know this is not a natural habit for anybody to have and and grace that's why i'm trying to make sure for everybody watching why they understand that's so important it it seems silly that a few folders on a page is like worth looking at but it's actually critical to being successful when you're trying to do really important tasks over and over again at a high quality yes so this is yes i think the system right is like the most important thing yeah and so for this show i will be using clock core you're doing you're using cloud core people could use anything this is just the example you know we're we're showing you a system that could work in any in any ai so hey if you like what you heard in this episode and you want more click the link in the description or scan that qr code we have a ton of incredible resources that can get you started to doing this stuff in a very short amount of time yes and so by the way how you set this up and you go to project and then you create new project and then you can choose an existing folder so basically i can choose my folder here branding and in projects and then demo and then marketing so i'm i'm good to go and this is exactly the photo you just see with the clutter empty and by the way i have mentioned what is clutter so clutter md is basically just the project instruction and i i tried to make it really simple so how the photo structure works and then what is the context file routing so we want to brief call how to route the system how to navigate different photos and also like the tool routing might be for some system you have already connect so many different tools and they're with each other so i will also have it like a tool routing instructions like for example maybe for competitive data i always use ahrefs send or like out of ai search tools or maybe like search performance i already have google search console connected i also have google go as meta as connectors connected so i will directly okay what chose that issue is i think one of the important things you're showing here is the skill kind of inherent things from the context so you run a scale and then it goes and checks in the context folder and it loads things before it execute the skill yeah so clock will be okay i know exactly what what i should behave for the system yeah so someone comes in and they're create on their project for i wanna do like paid advertising so i set up my context i set up my context folder here's kind of what works here's is our brand style here's the kind of design that works and i then i set my cloud that d file is it probably is scary for someone to go how do i even like no one instructions to put in here exactly you like do do you do a first pass with claw to say this is what i'm trying to do give me like a first pass with the called cloud dot md file and then kind of edit and cut cut it down to what you think is important yes yes so actually i these days i just make the closet the d the project instructions with clog so yeah i just tell you okay what this system is going to be like how i want like the files to be organized and they i just let it build it friday they work when a buyer ass ai for solution link yours do you know if you're showing up or not in hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you can show up even more okay so if we go to cloth design and then we will create a the size system and this is the first thing because you want to have reusable brand that saas system where you can apply it no letter you're building bags or dashboard or carousel sale post can play which is on in this case so we can click create and then we can create here so here you can set up you can give it different example maybe you have a github you can just load it your the files there then it will extract but here i have the branding so this is the folder i already set up and this photo you can see i have the brand logo in g and then i also have the landing page so this is just a like preview like what the style of and i know like different marketers they already have some existing brand as said then you can just load it here and also like the the pallet and then you can just load back the photo here and then you can add the logo and then her house maybe you have like out notes notes if you have a custom font you do that but it depends on the sophistication of your company right yes so it depends on like how you want the final like design looks and then this is the results just to give you the preview and then it will extract the logo the style like how it should look so this is how you like create the brand design system on call design and i think this date is very good yeah then what and do is you can share and you can export it into project so you can just download the project add that here and basically this is a skill so this is a reusable skill that you can deploy back to your system and then we can just use the same methodology load it and then make it like a reusable scale and you can do everything from here like we're gonna do one thing but once done the hard work of make a system you could you could literally design ten different things off of that yes yes so the the the last system is like the first thing we we can do and then based on that we will start creating different reusable marketing template so in this case i just make a reusable also to make a reusable social media care template and then i just pick back the brand design system we just created and then it will create asset you can see everything looks on brand it's just like exactly the same and then we can tweak it here and once we're done we can just download it as a standalone html carousel template i haven't used cloud design too much so you you basically created a folder structure you had the cloud that md file tells you how the how the overarching marketing marketing project should should be run yeah then you have the contacts that kinda sets the context which is like hey this is our brand aesthetics this is our tone of voice yeah this is our right in style this is how everything should look when we create brand assets then you have the individual folders for each of the kinda core market disciplines why i do it in cloth design is because it already got the system it is reusable so that's why in that case i just incorporate like an extra step so when use cloth dubai to first build the ten play and this is what i found the bass value from cloud design is not like building the in product but to build all those reusable marketing asset templates bags templates play that can exported back to the system we just cool no that's why i haven't seen it used that way so you create these reusable templates and then you move back in claw to turn that you're like oh this this looks correct it works really well this is the kind of carousel that i want turn that into a skill to create carousel ourselves let me show you like how the skills looks like and so this is the brand design so this is like the the brand design we ex i bought from the brand design system and then we also have the carousel our design so you can see the garrett sell design we have an access so this is the access out my brand logo and then the carroll template play you can see actual this is just a placeholder right so every time clock we use this to generate so everything is predictable we can control the quality so this is how we we can control everything okay so now we have created this carousel post and then we can click here to view it but of course we can also show it in a folder so you can see this has been created inside the folder and that as we open it so we can see the post so this is the pose this is care post we just created so it contains six lies but this post is not ready to be published yet because if you are doing instagram you have to convert it into images or if you might be want to post on linkedin platform you have to converted it into document so that you can publish it so that's why we can create and all skills to export these whole set of cara posts into ready to post speed up of document or images so first of all let's say if i want to post it on linkedin then i can use the skills carol's child's pdf export so these skills will export these carol's post into a pdf document and it will export and save it into the same folder so now you can see it is spinning of progress and now you can see it has just exported these carousel self post into a pdf document so actually it has so this is perfect and this is ready to post on like linkedin platform and this is how you complete the whole workflow and end from drafting proposing the topic and then let outline the copy for each slide where you can trade it back and forth you can make changes to each of a copy like what are the the things you want to emphasize on each slide and then you can just export it into a pdf document or might be let's say you are post an instagram and you need it to export you need them into images then you can also use this skill and do the same thing and let claw to convert it into ready to pose images okay so you can see immediately it has converted the six slides into individual images and we can actually check it inside the folder as well but you can absolutely just click on it and then you can preview each images so these are perfect and when you open to the same folder you can see so this is the a chanel file we generated with cloud and then this is the p document and then here is the images we just created so this is slide one slide two slide three slide four slide five in a end slide so this is how you create the workflow ends end so think about what is your typical marketing tails and then try to break it down into a smaller step and each one can be a reusable skills so this is also how you can up faster identify like where the areas you can optimize and so you can like design the flow from n to n so shall we sue we try let's make one so maybe first i ask to propose five potential topics by the way i'm using sonic i just love sonic i don't know you guys but yeah i i found awesome yeah i i think the opus models have degraded i think that was actually something one of the cloud c pms admitted to he said four point seven point four eight so i've kinda used four point six but i've been using son way more but like they've let they've let son because they were really focused on their smarter models i actually think they've lost the lighter weight model to chat owned yeah i i agree yeah i found son faster more efficient and the hundred percent yeah yeah weak faster yeah claude with the smallest are so slow right now and i'm i'm all in claude so it pains me to say that but i'm actually moving some of my stuff over with the codecs you're coming to the codecs camp no loyalty no no loyalty in this model i model yeah that's why the best that's why you just wanna a harness that uses all the models so that's a whole different show for another day it's okay so here you can see it propose different topics so why e it knows like what topics to propose it's because you can see it will lose my strategy my like ideal custom profile it already got everything so it knows my brand so for example might i love like four let's do topic for and then i can just like hit go so then it will it will call skills because we remember just now we we have the instructions so in instructions so it will know what's to call so it will first call the brand voice and then it will trigger the brand carousel design because we already instructed it's to do do so so it's now generating the carousel out and then it will save inside the social folder so we remember just now we have created the folder here so it will create the folder here so it will like structure everything as the project because this is how i instruct the skill to do it i like that actually that's a really great routing in the i put into the correct folders because if you don't it will just go into the base folder it gets pretty un un unwilling one of the interesting things is like local fox systems so ai geek is like really impressed with their ai second brain right like i feel a second brain ob citi and local file system right and i and nice poured water over my laptop not purposely but i did that anyway and so i was like oh my god like i've lost my second brain and i was like really lost and i didn't know how to work for like three or four days and so i got i got everything back on track but i've i've started making my brain portable and so it basically you know it it lives in my local system but it constantly syncs to get hub and then it will sync across the google drive because sometimes you might wanna use like cloud your phone and you'll just wanna connect it through the web app you just connect it to a folder sometimes you'll be in cloud code you connect it to git sometimes you'll be in codecs you wanna connect it to your local file system do you think about that at at at all like in terms of when you're building these local file systems the portability of it because it's all on your laptop so like say you're on the you know you're away from your laptop and you're on your phone i know you can use some of the remote tools now but i'm just i'm just curious because you're someone who's assistance builder do you think about the portability of the kind of core context that all these things connect to and yes you or you just stick to local file systems so i'm also planning to migrate the context file to github hop yeah most of the mo of the ai models like like code or maybe clog yeah they just have direct integration and and google as well like ai node just directly connect to github so i imagine maybe the future marketing teams they are more building the system to get up so that is like platform and agnostic you can make it exactly oh and then not everything inside the the local file and the thing for right now has a limit has a little little limitation is because it's a local agent so it's more like a personal productivity goal but what you mentioned is portability how we can collaborate with the team so when it come to that and yeah like we said we have to make maybe put it like a platform on a cloud so and that's yeah that's the that's the reason why i see like cloud has like managed agent yeah that's a that's my little personal project at the moment making it making it portable and making a device agnostic which means you can access it through the cloud standard cloud cohort cloud code codecs complexity anyway i was just curious if you it sounds like you you you are thinking about that as all and i believe this is the trend that i'm seeing yeah so not just about okay log in to call ecosystem but we have the same set of files that we can plug and play to whatever sent it plug we we we want to use yeah was working on a system i built and call code yesterday but it just never stopped it it would give me back at my it would do the work and i would say okay like ready for next thing but it was still working and i was like burning tokens it's like finished it's like you're and i kept saying you're literally finished stop burning tokens stop doing it and it's like ready for your next command burn tokens burn tokens for i'm like what is this there new like grow wrote something like you you can imagine like a growth hacker is like okay what we'll do is when we're finished giving them the answer we'll still burn tokens until they tell us to stop doing it it's like stop burning and tokens claude you're finished often i found claus sometimes has the overthinking overthinking yes i'm not sure how's experience but it's always over the okay it's the right way to do and then yeah and just overdo it yeah so i kinda i i really a little thing about this today so the microsoft ceo wrote a pretty cool post yeah i'm sure evelyn everyone's write it because there one's a geek the thing he talked about is like you're you know don't see your intelligence to ai models right he's basically saying hey like how do you still survive in the world of ai like or the the asset you have is intelligence like you understand how to do marketing you understand workflows you understand your customer you understand what works where doesn't work and today that either lives in the minds of your employees right your employees has market intelligence and they kinda walk out the door and it leaves with them or they are outsourcing that to the ai model because they're just going to the ai model and they're saying hey like create me an ad hey create me a strategic proposal for this hey create me an ee strategy and the l is basically saying okay well i have all these marketing tutorials and i'll give you back the average and that's best practice and so what i think you're showing is the future of how you differentiate yourself from everyone else and that your context layer is the raw intelligence that you have that makes you special that is that is your core asset which is like i know how to do marketing and i'm gonna put it all into this context layer and this is what works this is what doesn't work this is the learnings that i've had these are the things that i know will resonate with my customers mh and then when you build skills on top of it it will inherit that intelligence and so your output will be different than everyone else's and that's how you win in a market where everyone else is going to look the same because you're you're using ai to do those things right like you have very different aesthetics that work for you and to differentiated because you have raw intelligence of the things that will engage your audience like these are the things that work for my audience and so for me like the core takeaway is like if you are building ai for a marketing team where you're a marketing team use an ai if you don't actually have that context and intelligence layer you are being moved into the best practice place like the model will just give you the best practice and that's how your marketing will likely die is that you will just be like the one of everyone what i think i think that's right karen and you know you and i wrote this new book loop that comes out in a couple months and in that we talk a lot about taste and how taste is really important how taste is how you differentiate and like grace just showed us her taste right she didn't just show us a file system she showed us the colors the fonts the word choice the sources she trusted the source she doesn't trust how she wants to work and i think that is fundamental because if you don't it's not just you're going to the middle it's like we said earlier on the showed like you know if claude design something you know if chat gp generates an image when you have a a high contact system like we walked through today you don't know that all you know is that grace built it right and then it connects back to her and what she's trying to do and i think that's fundamentally a very different way of working than a lot of people are working now but i think it's the long term durable way of working to get real advantage and to be a successful marketer or not just in the next year but in the next decade yep mh agree yeah i i still think like human intelligence like has a place or to earn not just like because l they don't just don't get this smart but they don't have the understanding of how we work works how like things connected yeah maybe they expert all doing google ads but they don't know how they're like your a competitive landscape the trends like how impact everything and this is why we still have like judgment the ta and humans all love that i think that's the perfect closing note grace i really appreciate you you give us a masterclass class in how to work and how to build systems to work with ai in in new and meaningful ways and i hope everyone learned a ton on today's show we wanna thank you and we'll see you next time on marketing a great let me tell you about a great podcast demand decode from the team at b a b website and demand generation agency comes demand decode the podcast that breaks the mold of traditional b marketing tactics post dan and fill deliver actionable insights that transform your marketing into a revenue generating machine whether you're struggling with linkedin ads that aren't converting want to understand the difference between lead generation and demand generation or need to optimize your conversion rates demand decode gives you strategies that work today tune in for weekly episodes featuring expert analysis and hard earned tips that'll will help you become a better b2b marketer they recently did a great episode titled how to fix the ai inconsistency problem wrecking your go to market listen to demand decode wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow