Buyer's Brief Mini-Series | Episode 6 | Implementation Guide

Full video transcript

All right, we’ve made it here to the implementation guide, and that means that you’ve got your buyer blueprint rocking and rolling, you’ve got your strategic and creative brief completed, targeting multiple different segments of your audience, understanding the frameworks and the messaging that can reach them, and then creating micro content and brainstorming who, what, where, when, why, and how questions to create content that builds thought leadership at top of any product, market, or niche that we want to be creating content around. So, all that said and done, what are we going to do with this information? The answer is quite a bit, and that depends on what your goals are as an entrepreneur, a marketing leader, a founder of an idea, someone looking to start a business, or a corporate executive looking to integrate better marketing research and AI usage across the teams in your organization.

The first step is understanding what your goals are in the first place, and then, based on the brief you’ve created, what the next steps are for putting those ideas into action. For the buyer blueprint, it’s a great idea to survey your audience and use those surveys as a positive feedback loop to create new and updated buyer blueprints over time. Survey your customers — your best customers and your worst customers — and figure out who the people are that you really want to be targeting and speaking to directly. Is there an 80/20 of your customer base that, if you had more of, would move the needle, and do you know how to get more of those customers with your marketing? If you can identify that going into this exercise, it will help make your content more cohesive and consistent across the board.

You want your buyer blueprint ready, and then you want to take it and implement it across your team. If you know you’re going to need a lot of these, you might consider integrating this entire workflow into your agency by licensing it from us — reach out if that’s something you’re considering — or simply run the process yourself and train your teammates on what you’ve learned in the book. We’re constantly innovating and developing this process, so stay tuned for what we’re building at Gen AI University and with Market Sauce, because there will be more advanced uses for this. Fundamentally, though, you’ve got to have that foundation of who you’re speaking to, and that’s what this section is all about.

Make sure you’re testing, validating, and seeing what questions work out of the ten pain points you develop. Which one, two, or three of them tend to be the real hot buttons? How do you want to cater your messaging to those pain points, identify the symptoms of those pain points, market to the symptoms, and then position your product as the solution to the problem? Continue to refine, test, and iterate as you go, and as you get data back, run this workflow again to upgrade and enhance the insights you’re developing by leveraging AI in the process. That’s step one, and those are general recommendations for validating the content you’re developing — because if you’re using AI, you want to make sure a real expert confirms or denies certain things, and that you’re fact-checking the research you’re pulling in, including any links. You can use AI to help source links that back up your arguments, whether inside a workflow like this or even in ChatGPT, pulling and answering different questions across different topics of conversation.

The second section to implement, with some general guidelines, is the strategic and creative brief. This is foundational for your go-to-market strategy — you want to create the videos, cast the actors or get user-generated content, film podcast episodes, or work with podcast guests to create content on the topics you’ve outlined in the brief. Again, test and validate the ideas in there: if you’ve got ten different market segments and never tried marketing to five of them, determine whether it actually makes sense to focus in on them, or whether it’s a nice idea that doesn’t deserve a ton of focus right now. This is the validation step — here are all the ideas in one place, do we want to cut anything that’s not going to serve us right now, and what can we put out there and pass along, along with our strategic brand voice and style guide, so our team is on the same page and our message is consistent across platforms.

You might not need to create a new brand style guide every time you run a brief, but it’s certainly helpful to have on hand, and going through that process once will save a lot of time down the road. If you don’t have it, this is a good place to build it; if you do have it, include it in this section. Then move on to the micro content — a popular use of this section is going into a tool like Canva or another creative design tool like Figma, adding the quotes you create, editing them, and getting them ready to post on your X account, start a conversation on LinkedIn, or put on your Instagram feed, or shooting actual short-form content by taking a bullet-point idea as a script. Then you go shoot the shorts, post them, and schedule that content out on your social media scheduler. The point is you’re getting about 80% of the way there, and you do the rest of the work to put it into action and schedule it out.

Moving on to the brainstorming questions: if you want to build a lot of conversation and thought leadership around a specific topic, use this section to brainstorm the questions you’ll want to consider to answer everything that could be top of mind for your audience in a market experiencing different problems, pains, hopes, dreams, and desires. You’re using this in line with the blueprint, the strategic creative brief, and the micro content you’ve already created, tying it all together into what can end up being anywhere from ten to forty-plus pages of an actionable go-to-market strategy — giving you insight into what’s driving your best customers to buy and what makes them decide in a matter of seconds. Once you’ve got one of these briefs, you can create content, use it to inform what you’re creating, distribute it, optimize and review the results, and feed that back into updating the brief.

I recommend updating one of these briefs at least once a quarter once you’re putting it into action, but ideally you’re updating a brief for every campaign you run, whether on a monthly cadence or otherwise. Something to consider is how you’re implementing these briefs in your business — whether it’s just for yourself, taking your own ideas to market and validating and testing them to accelerate an idea into impact, or using this across your team or agency to make your marketing workflows more effective and streamlined, especially on the customer research side. Traditionally, this has meant pushing product launches off to gather feedback from people, or paying a big-ticket consulting firm hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, with AI, you can do this much faster and far more cost-effectively once you understand how to implement this methodology — which, because AI advances so quickly, will continue to innovate and evolve over time.

Right now, what’s working is in this book, and as you can see with the case studies found in the appendices — which I’m sure we’ll do separate episodes about, interviewing each of these case study members, though nothing is confirmed yet — you can see the different markets, industries, and applications of a tool like this, and get insights from the people who participated in this case study and submitted their information as we were developing this book and framework. It’s all actionable information that will help you make better decisions in your marketing, product development, and customer experience. At the end of the day, the responsibility is on you, your team, or your brand to articulate your message in a way that connects with more people. If you’re selling a product that’s ethical and doing good in the world, my ultimate goal with this book is to help you sell more of it, because you’re refining your messaging, getting more clarity on your positioning, and getting more of the right customers into your business — using this process in an ethical manner so you’re doing more good in the world, connecting and resonating with people, and helping them solve problems in their life.

My name is Darby Rollins, and this concludes the core content of our mini-series for the Buyer’s Blueprint book, which you can get online on Amazon and our website, and potentially more places as we continue to expand our distribution. Make sure you’re subscribed if you found this content useful, and share with me — send a message on social media or an email, which you can find through the contact form on our site. Let us know how you’ve implemented the book — that’s GenAIUniversity.com to learn more about our products, programs, and services. In the next episode, I’ll wrap things up with a few recommended resources so you have that all in one place. I’ll see you on the other side.