5 Levels of AI Marketing Mastery: How to Level-Up Your Use of AI

Are you ready to take your use of AI to the next level? Wondering how to integrate AI more deeply into your marketing plans?

In this article, you'll discover the steps to becoming highly proficient in AI.

Why Marketers Need to Master AI

Many marketers report feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks they need to accomplish with limited time, talent, and budget. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) solves this common challenge by allowing marketers to automate repetitive tasks, generate ideas more quickly, and predict trends before they happen. By mastering AI, marketers can keep up with the increasing demands of their roles and unlock new possibilities for creativity and innovation.

AI proficiency isn't just an optional advantage anymore; it's becoming a necessity that helps marketers scale their efforts and do more with limited resources, enhance creativity and productivity in various marketing tasks, and gain a competitive edge.

“AI can help you scale like you've never been able to before. You could do more and you can even do better with AI if you learn how to leverage it properly,” says Dan Sanchez, founder of AI Solopreneur and host of the AI-Driven Marketer podcast.

A 5-Step Framework for AI Mastery for Marketers

By following this 5-step framework, marketers can progressively integrate AI into their workflows, from basic task assistance to advanced applications like personalized content creation at scale. 

Each step builds upon the last, allowing you to gradually increase your AI proficiency and its impact on your marketing efforts. 

As you progress through the framework, you'll become more efficient and unlock new creative possibilities and strategic advantages.

#1: Use AI as a Personal Assistant

The first step in leveraging AI for marketing is to use it as a personal assistant for one-on-one tasks. This involves using AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini to help with various administrative and creative tasks.

Remember, the key is to start small and gradually incorporate AI into more aspects of your work as you build confidence and expertise.

Here are some practical ways to use these AI models as a personal assistant:

Drafting Proposals and Project Charters: Ask the AI to create a basic outline or first draft based on your key points.

Creating Meeting Agendas: Provide the AI with the meeting's purpose and participants and let it generate a structured agenda.

Repurposing Content: Feed a podcast transcript or blog post into the AI and ask it to transform it into different formats, such as social media posts or an email newsletter.

Generating Ideas for Social Media Posts: Give the AI your brand guidelines and target audience information, then ask for content ideas.

Proofreading and Editing Content: Paste your written content into the AI and ask it to check for grammar, clarity, and style consistency.

Pro Tip: Use the voice feature in AI apps to quickly dictate your ideas and have the AI transform them into written content or actionable tasks. For example, you can use the ChatGPT mobile app to record your thoughts and immediately get them transcribed and processed by the AI.

#2: Employ AI for Process Automation

Once you're comfortable using AI for individual tasks, the next step is to automate repetitive processes. This involves creating workflows incorporating AI to handle multiple steps or functions without constant human intervention.

For example, Dan Sanchez automated his podcast production process using a custom GPT called My Showrunner; visit the link to get complete instructions for setting up your own custom GPT showrunner.

He triggers the assistant by telling it he's starting a new episode, and the custom GPT assistant prompts him through a series of questions. 

First, it determines whether Dan's doing a solo show or interviewing a guest. If he's interviewing a guest, it asks for the guest's LinkedIn profile URL. It then summarizes the guest's profile, provides key information to Dan, and asks him what he wants to talk with the guest about. 

The assistant uses Dan's answer to suggest five different approaches for the interview based on the angle of his show and asks him to choose one. After Dan chooses an approach, the GPT suggests 10 titles. 

Dan chooses one (he might ask the assistant to tweak it a little), and then the assistant creates a show notes document that is about 90% perfect, including questions for him to ask the guest. Finally, the GPT writes a pre-interview email for him to send to the guest. 

After the episode is recorded, Dan feeds the transcript of the episode into the GPT so it can create the podcast description, social content, and other assets.

What used to take 60 minutes to complete is now done in 5 minutes on the front end and 10 minutes on the back end.

How to Create an AI-powered Automation (Custom GPT)

Look for repetitive tasks in your marketing workflow that can be automated using AI tools. If you're a beginner, consider Zapier, Make, and ChatGPT. For more advanced, custom integrations, consider N8N or OpenAI's API.

Automating these routine tasks will free up time to focus on higher-level strategy and creative work that genuinely requires human insight and expertise.

#3: Leverage AI as a Coach or Consultant

As AI models become more sophisticated, they can serve as valuable coaches or consultants, helping you think through complex problems and develop strategies more efficiently.

This step involves using AI tools such as ChatGPT (especially the GPT-4 model and the o1-mini model), Claude, Google Gemini, Grok (for real time social media insights), and Custom GPTs tailored to your specific marketing niche.

You can use AI to enhance your decision-making process and gain new perspectives on marketing challenges by:

• Asking for feedback on your marketing plans
• Seeking alternative perspectives on a problem
• Analyzing competitor strategies
• Brainstorming new campaign ideas
• Evaluating the potential impact of different marketing approaches

To use AI as a marketing coach or consultant, clearly define the challenge or decision you're facing. Once you've articulated your problem, provide the AI with relevant background information about your business, industry, and target audience. This context is crucial for generating meaningful insights. 

Next, request that the AI analyze the situation and provide recommendations based on the information you've given it. Ask the AI to consider alternative viewpoints or play devil's advocate to ensure a well-rounded perspective. This can help uncover potential blind spots in your thinking.

After receiving the AI's analysis, ask for specific, actionable steps you can take based on its recommendations. 

Finally, always critically evaluate the AI's suggestions using your own expertise and industry knowledge. Remember that while AI can provide valuable insights, it's ultimately your decision on which recommendations to implement and how to adapt them to your unique situation.

Here are three use cases to get you started.

Marketing Strategy

Imagine facing a challenging marketing directive from your boss: increase sales through social media in the next couple of months, even though you believe email marketing might be more effective. 

Here's how you could use AI as a consultant to help navigate this situation:

1. Explain the problem: Describe the situation to the AI, including your boss's requirements and your perspective on email marketing.
2. Ask for missing considerations: Request the AI to point out any factors you might have overlooked in this scenario.
3. Explore possible angles: Ask the AI to suggest different approaches to tackling the challenge of increasing sales through social media.
4. Seek new opportunities: Have the AI brainstorm potential opportunities within social media marketing that you may not have considered.
5. Request synthesis: Ask the AI to propose ways to potentially merge social media and email marketing strategies for better results.
6. Gather insights: Use the AI to gain new perspectives on the problem, similar to how you might bounce ideas off a co-worker.

By leveraging AI in this way, you can expand your thinking, discover new approaches, and develop a more comprehensive strategy to address the challenge at hand.

Target Audience Research

Imagine you want to understand current trends and pain points your target audience is thinking about.

Here is how Grok, an AI tool integrated with X (formerly Twitter), quickly gathers insights that traditionally require extensive manual or expensive market research tools. 

1. Ask Grok, “What is my target audience thinking about our product?”
2. Follow-up with, “What's trending with my target audience right now?”
3. Next, ask, “What are my target audience's main complaints about products like ours?”

Grok analyzes real-time data from X and summarizes current trends, thoughts, and complaints. It then presents examples, showing 5-7 tweets from the target audience that illustrate these trends and complaints.

You can use this real time market research to inform your strategy, address customer pain points, and capitalize on current trends.

Customer Satisfaction Analysis

Imagine you've collected numerous customer reviews and testimonials over the years. These are stored in a spreadsheet but haven't been organized or analyzed in depth.

You can use AI to quickly gain structured, data-driven insights from their testimonials without manually reading through each one or creating complex spreadsheet formulas. 

1. Export the testimonials as a CSV file and upload the file to your preferred AI tool.



2. Ask the AI to categorize the testimonials into relevant buckets. For instance: Speakers, Networking opportunities, Event organization, Content quality, Overall experience
3. Ask the AI to perform a quantitative analysis of the categorized data and present it in a chart format.
4. Next, ask the AI to provide qualitative insights based on the analysis, highlighting trends, common praises, and areas for improvement.



5. Finally, ask the AI to give you “the good, the bad, and the ugly” – a summary of the most positive feedback, critical comments, and surprising or outlier responses.

#4: Utilize AI for Market Forecasting and Customer Trend Prediction

While still in its early stages, AI is increasingly capable of analyzing data to predict trends and forecast outcomes. 

By incorporating AI forecasting into your marketing strategy, you can stay ahead of trends, anticipate market changes, and make more informed decisions about resource allocation and campaign timing.

For example, KnownWell is using AI to monitor customer sentiment across various platforms, which allows it to improve customer retention and capitalize on market trends. 

They implement an AI-powered system that integrates with their communication channels (Slack, email, and social media) and analyzes customer interactions. 

Here's how they use it:

1. Early Warning System: The AI monitors customer communications across all channels. It flags a conversation in Slack where a customer expresses frustration with a recent software update. This allows the customer success team to address the issue proactively before it escalates.
2. Churn Prediction: By analyzing patterns in customer behavior across platforms, the AI predicts which clients are at risk of churning. It alerts the team to a customer posting negative comments on social media, enabling them to intervene before receiving a cancellation email.
3. Trend Identification: The AI system monitors social media platforms like TikTok for trending topics relevant to the software industry. It identifies a new trend in productivity hacks that aligns perfectly with one of the company's features. The marketing team is alerted early, allowing them to create content and campaigns around this trend before it peaks.
4. Product-Trend Fit Analysis: When a new trend emerges, the AI analyzes whether the company's products or services would be a good fit. For a B2C feature the company is developing, the AI identifies a trending challenge on TikTok where their tool could be showcased, providing a timely marketing opportunity.

By leveraging AI, the company can anticipate customer needs, prevent churn, and capitalize on market trends more effectively than traditional manual monitoring methods.

Tools such as Grok (for X/Twitter trends), Meta AI (for Facebook and Instagram insights), Google Trends with AI integration, Crayon (for competitive intelligence), and Marketmuse (for content strategy predictions) can help you implement a similar system.

To use AI for forecasting and trend prediction in your marketing efforts, identify the key metrics that align with your marketing goals. Once you've determined these crucial indicators, gather relevant historical data on these metrics to provide a solid foundation for the AI's analysis. 

Next, select an AI forecasting tool that can handle your data volume and type. After choosing your tool, feed your historical data into the AI system, ensuring you provide any relevant contextual information that might influence the predictions. 

Then, set specific parameters for your forecast, including the desired time frame and confidence level for the predictions. Once the AI generates its forecast, carefully review the results and look for actionable insights to inform your marketing strategy. 

Finally, regularly monitor and adjust your approach by comparing the AI's predictions against actual results. This ongoing refinement will help improve the accuracy of future forecasts and ensure your AI-driven predictions remain a valuable asset in your marketing toolkit.

#5: Explore AI for Original Value Creation

The final and most advanced step in using AI for marketing is leveraging it to create entirely new value that wasn't possible before.

This involves using AI tools such as GPT-4 and future large language models, DALL-E or Midjourney for image generation, RunwayML for video creation, and custom-built AI solutions using TensorFlow or PyTorch to generate unique, personalized content or experiences at scale, pushing the boundaries of what's possible in marketing.

Examples of original value creation with AI include:

• Personalized video advertisements generated in real time based on user data
• AI-powered interactive storytelling experiences for brand engagement
• Customized product recommendations that adapt in real time to user behavior
• AI-generated, personalized content series tailored to individual customer journeys

Remember, the goal is to create something truly novel that enhances the customer experience in ways that weren't previously feasible. This is where AI can help marketers push the boundaries of creativity and personalization.

Dan uses AI to create hyper-personalized course content. No email is the same because he asks for unique details from everyone who registers. 

• What's your job title? 
• What industry are you in? What do you sell? 
• Who are you selling to? 

Based on those three pieces of information, every lesson transcript is sent to AI, and the lesson is customized for each person.

To explore AI for original value creation, identify unique opportunities where personalization or scale could significantly benefit your audience. Once you've pinpointed these areas, conceptualize your idea by developing a clear vision of what you want to create. 

Next, choose appropriate AI tools that can bring your idea to life. With your tools selected, design an AI workflow that combines AI generation with human oversight to ensure quality and relevance. Begin by developing a prototype or proof of concept to test your idea's feasibility. 

As you gather feedback on your prototype, continually test and iterate, refining your AI-driven creation based on user responses and performance data. 

Finally, once you've perfected your process and are confident in its value, look for ways to thoughtfully scale your creation, expanding its impact while maintaining its quality and effectiveness. This step-by-step approach allows you to harness AI's potential for innovation while ensuring that your creation truly meets your audience's needs and expectations.

Pro Tip: Think beyond automation and enhancement. Ask yourself, “What new things are now possible with AI that were impossible before?” This mindset can lead to innovative marketing approaches that differentiate you from competitors.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Facebook and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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✋🏽 If you enjoyed this episode of the AI Explored podcast, please head over to Apple Podcasts, leave a rating, write a review, and subscribe.

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