5 Ready-to-Use AI Workflows for Marketers

Can you believe it’s nearly Christmas already?! Are you ready? I’m not. Nowhere near. In fact, I’m still wrapping my head around the fact it’s 2024 - which STILL sounds super futuristic to me.

This is my last newsletter of 2024, so I wanted to make it extra special. This month, I’ll be giving you 5 extremely useful, tried-and-tested (by me!) ways to use AI in your marketing next year.

1. Build, interact and stress test personas

2. Use client calls to create content ideas

3. Analyse and visualise your data 

4. Create and edit killer content: text, image, video, voice and music

5. Do market research with a synthetic audience

I’ve included my own original prompts, tool recommendations and caveats for safe use to keep a bit of balance.

Before we get stuck in, a quick heads-up:

⭐ Free Webinar: Supercharge Your Marketing in 2025 (by HubSpot)

A quick heads up: HubSpot is running something really special this Thursday 12th December from 2 to 3 pm GMT.  

It’s a totally free, live session on using AI to transform your marketing in 2025, which is useful but it’s got a ‘choose your own adventure’ style with 3 breakout sessions to choose from. 

What's included:

• A kick-off Q&A with Kieran Flanagan from "Marketing Against the Grain" about AI and marketing

• Your choice of 3 deep-dive sessions (I'm heading to the 'Convert Customers with Actionable Data' one as it sounds right up my street)

• Behind-the-scenes demos of HubSpot's newest AI tools

The session will include insights into how HubSpot is implementing AI in their own product innovations and marketing strategies, and I’m always keen to see solid results.

Right then folks, now it’s time to blow your minds with some AI wizardry. 

1. Build Personas + Interact with Them + Stress Test 

The concept of a persona is great, but let’s face it - we don’t really use them properly, do we? And what’s more, we rarely revisit them to check they’re still relevant.   They often sit static as one of the many docs we’re supposed to look at, but we don’t. 

With AI, you can now build much more useful and relevant personas. You can also ask AI to “act as” the persona and have a conversation with them!

I’ve written 3 prompts for you: 

1. Build a Persona - this is for those who don’t have one yet, or who have launched something new 

2. Interactive Persona - this prompt simulates a conversation between you and your persona.  Ask them for feedback on your ideas, see what objections they raise.

3. Stress Test Your Persona - not sure if your persona is relevant and robust enough? Run this prompt to find out how you can make it better.

2. Use real life calls to create content ideas 

Way too often, content marketers pluck content ideas from thin air. Or are inspired by competitor content, which has also been plucked from thin air. 

One of the best sources of content ideas imaginable is real life client pain.  The problems they come to you with, the questions they ask - it’s all solid gold. AI helps you analyse those topics and create content ideas that actually get results. Here’s how:

Step 1: Record your sales, discovery and onboarding calls with an AI note taker.  

AI note takers generally do 3 things: 

1. A verbatim transcript of the call, broken down by speaker 

2. An overview of what happened during the meeting 

3. Next steps deduced from the conversation

And then sometimes you have videos, clips, call analysis, etc. too. 

Which one, though? Well, I currently use Circleback, because it has intelligent notes and is quick to process calls.  (But its search facility is poor and that’s annoying).  But any of them will do: Otter, Fireflies, Sybill, etc. It’s not about fancy features, it’s about having an accurate verbatim transcript.  That’s solid gold.

Step 2: Download the transcript from your note taker, and upload it into an LLM 

By LLM I mean ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot (they’re the big 4).  Just grab the file from the note taker, and attach it to a new chat in your LLM of choice.  Claude is by far the best for this use case. 

Step 3: Use the below prompt and fill in the square brackets to analyse your call and get tons of strong content ideas.

At the bottom, you’ll see ‘bonus docs’ - i.e. extra things you can attach to get an even stronger response. 

As always with all of my prompts - don’t just blindly copy and paste.  Please pull it apart, change it, tweak it, make it your own.  The best prompts are always very personal to you. 

3: Analyse, Visualise and Enrich Data 

One of the best things about generative AI is making things that are usually static, flat things into an interactive thing you can ask questions to. 

Both ChatGPT and Claude have something called ‘data analysis mode’.  Put in some data -usually some form of spreadsheet, or zip file of spreadsheets, and you can then talk to your data: 

• Pull out key insights

• Look for trends

• Find outliers 

And it’ll even then create some visuals for you: graphs, charts, etc. 

Here’s what it looks like - using ChatGPT and some sample data:

And Claude recently got the same functionality - some are arguing even better.

A great way to have a play is to head over to Kaggle.com.  This is a great website that’s full of real, publicly available data sets in all sorts of categories.  Find something that’s relevant to your industry, download it and off you play.

A couple of caveats here: 

1. Remember, GenAI is not 100% accurate, and hallucinations (lies) do still exist, even in data analysis mode.  It definitely hallucinates less in this use case, but it still does - so always fact check. 

2. Be super careful as to what you’re uploading.  If you’re using the free versions of things, anonymise your data.  If you’re using paid tools, do your due diligence first and check their privacy is up to scratch before uploading anything sensitive.  I use ChatGPT Teams for its enterprise grade security. 

4: Create and Edit Killer Content: Text, Image, Video, Voice + Music 

Content creation is a humungous topic that I’ll break down far more in the new year, but here are my top recommendations for each content type: 

• Text: Claude

• Image: Midjourney

• Image with text: Ideogram

• Edit images: Canva Magic Studio

• Video (B roll style): Runway 

• Video (avatar style): HeyGen

• Edit video: Veed 

• Voice: Elevenlabs 

• Music: Suno

5. Market research with synthetic audiences

First things first - a synthetic audience is basically when AI simulates a bunch of people for you, complete with opinions, backgrounds, objections, motivations, etc.  It’s pretty similar to that persona simulation we built in Step 1, but it’s a group instead.

There’s a whole new category of tools that offer ‘synthetic market research’ - a goodbye to the traditional, expensive focus group and hello to affordable, accessible and quick new option.

Opinio.ai is the one I use. Firstly, it allows you ask questions to your personas, a bit like we have done manually above:

You can also create, distribute and analyse AI-built surveys to a synthetic audience. For those interested in setting this up, here’s a 9 minute video showing you exactly how:

They’re also realising ‘AI focus groups’ wherein you can chat with multiple personas at once. You can get a good idea of how it works in its free version, but to get full access to everything it’s $99/mo.  I’d like to see them introduce voice to this pretty soon.

If you prefer your traditional focus groups and still want a bit of AI help, there are options there too. Looppanel is a sort of AI note taker for focus groups, recording discussions, creating focus group-specific notes and auto tagging responses into themes, like this:

Pretty useful - and the cost-savings are potentially humungous.

So, that’s it for this week. And for this year, cor!

Thank you so very sincerely for sticking with me through tech issues and the ups and downs of business generally. I hope you all have the most fantastic, merry and warm Christmas and start the new year feeling invigorated and inspired.

Many thanks and I’ll see some of you this week in the Become an AI Trainer bootcamp,

Heather

PS I’m about to launch January’s bootcamp, Supercharge Your Sales and Lead Gen with AI. Make sure you’re on this list to hear about it first.