Maximizing Business Impact with AI in 2024

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys, Darby here at Gen AI University, and welcome into 2024. Our first video of the year. Had a slower December at GIU, took some time here at our home in Austin with my fiance Rachel and our puppy Luna to kind of wind down, take a break for the holidays, enjoy some time with family, and get ready for the next year. After a lot of reflecting and review on what 2023 brought to us, extremely excited about what’s going to happen this year, especially in terms of where we’re going with our community and what to expect from us and myself here at Gen AI University over the next quarter and the rest of the year.

Starting with a few of our key events that are coming up in the next few months, one being on January 16th we’re going to be hosting a live workshop open to everyone for free to join and attend live. Recordings and all the resources from this workshop will be available to members of our community inside of our AI Growth Library. On this workshop, hope you can join us live. We’re going to be breaking down the fundamental process that we go through in any sort of content production, AI powered or not. Everything starts with a creative brief, and ultimately that creative brief has evolved into what I’m calling the buyer brief, which combines things like the buyer blueprint, which I’ve developed in collaboration with John Benson, one of the top copywriters in the world, and then the creative brief, which was a process I learned after a 12-week intensive course with Ron Lynch, the marketing mercenary.

Completed that course, went through an incredibly valuable and intense learning experience learning from Ron himself. Ron is known as the four billion dollar man and has worked with the likes of GoPro to take them to a whole new level, companies like Samsung. Just Google Ron Lynch to learn more about what Ron has been a part of over his career. And those two things combined, as well as brainstorming questions and things to spur micro content for posting on social media, staying top of mind on relevant subjects related to what we’re talking about and our audience, has been a process that we’ve been refining here for the past few years.

Initially when I was taking the marketing mercenary course, that was right around the time - coming up on two years now - that we had looked at a point in our business where we’re trying to figure out what’s next. One of the things I was working on specifically at that time was putting together a cookbook that was going to turn into a real book filled with recipes, which back in the early days of Jasper were what we were calling these longer prompt series, or just prompts that you can copy and paste to help with getting a result. Those recipes ended up evolving into this book, which you can see here today, you can find on Amazon, called Create Content with AI.

This book was an incredibly valuable resource for anyone using Jasper especially, but also what I realized is that after we put all the time and planning into this book - as you can see it’s a big book, it’s got tons of prompts and recipes and workflows and instructions for getting started with Jasper - and we wrote it and basically we were ready to publish, and just shortly after, ChatGPT hit the market. So now the contents of this book are definitely geared towards Jasper, but you can use them towards ChatGPT, Claude - I’m sure you could use them in a number of other large language models - a really sound approach to just getting started with generative AI tools as a whole.

But obviously this space moves too fast for content like this to stay completely updated all the time. It’s impossible to do that with the speed of change as things are right now. It hasn’t made sense to go back and update this book every time there’s been a new update with Jasper. Obviously Jasper’s focused more on enterprise-level accounts now and going towards that market. But one of the things that came from this book was new relationships and new learnings and discoveries throughout those in our community who have joined and found what we’re doing at Gen AI University, formerly The AI Author, to Creating Content with AI.

What we found in not only creating the creative brief that I developed for what turned into, at this point, two years ago, our Cookbook Plus membership - which initially we introduced as a monthly membership, some people signed up for a full year and continue to renew their subscriptions - this was a membership to deliver this content in advance while we’re working on it behind the scenes on these different recipes, prompts, workflows, and trainings, and has continued to evolve to us hosting and sponsoring special events such as the Women Who AI Summit and the Scale with AI Summit and a number of other events and workshops over the past few years, from writing books to developing video production workflows to taking your own frameworks and creating to turn your ideas into impact faster.

That is what we’ve come to at this point, realizing that everything is going to change, especially with AI. It’s fast, you have to be able to adapt, and you have to be able to integrate AI into your workflows and into your process, especially as a creator or an entrepreneur or somebody who is maybe strapped on resources, but you see what AI can do for you and the potential of it, and you can streamline your workflow and maybe not need to hire two or three different roles because you figured out a way to make AI work for you inside of how you’re delivering value for yourself and your clients.

So a number of ways to use AI now to grow our business, to create better content faster, and it all starts with this creative brief and combine that with a buyer’s blueprint, which you can find a similar variation of this blueprint in software form - writing software that John Benson has developed. About a year ago right now we launched our Copy Profits masterclass that I did with John Benson, an incredible deep dive into some really next-level things in terms of copywriting but also applying AI within that process. Fast forward 12 months and Benson is now helping do what we were teaching there, but I can’t even tell you how much faster it is. It’s a great tool, it helps you develop these blueprints - to a degree it’s helping you develop the initial blueprint, then you’ve got to spend time to fill it out with company information - and you want to build and solidify your blueprint inside of Benson and apply that to the different templates and workflows.

It’s a really powerful tool for that matter. We’re combining that tool with our specific prompts that we’ve developed at Gen, based off the process with Ron Lynch, as this is what you need to have created for the start of any effective marketing campaign. At the end of the day you need to know what you’re promising, you need to know the problems you’re solving, you need to understand your customers and your audience and what segments of that audience are you speaking to, how many offers do you actually have, even if you’re only selling one thing.

For example, SideHustle, the party game for entrepreneurs, we’ve run this brief dozens and dozens of times and refining it and developing the second version of this game, which was initially launched and funded on Kickstarter in 2019. The second edition of this game is going to be rolling out here in 2024, super excited about it. But I realized when I was running this buyer’s brief, which is what I’m calling the combination of these two processes and a few other special things I’ve added in, to just get the type of content that I want from any of these starting campaigns, is identifying that maybe we’re not just serving entrepreneurs with this game - maybe we’re serving people who are party game night hosts, or they’re serving educators who are looking for ways to inspire kids in their classroom and teach entrepreneurship through fun and play in a learning experience like that.

What I realized is that we’ve actually got way more than just three of those avatars, like I just said to you - a number of other customer segments that we could potentially target, such as HR managers, and Mastermind events for icebreaker games, corporate events for hosting and getting the conversation going at these networking mixers. There are so many different angles that we could take with this. That’s what I’m getting at - the message that your product or your service or whatever you’re bringing to the market is speaking directly to one person, you’re going to have a much better time articulating that message.

But if that same message - me selling this SideHustle game to an entrepreneur who’s got a company who immediately gets the connection of this game and wants to take it to play with their friends - is a different conversation than the one I’ve had with educators introducing this game into a classroom setting and developing a digital game to complement the physical game, so that you can play it even if the physical editions aren’t available in stores, which is what it is right now - our game is available online for free at PlaySideHustle.com, and it took time to obviously develop the digital version of this game.

We continue to refine and develop that idea, and why we were creating the digital version anyway, because of us going through this process of the buyer’s brief and really getting crystal clear about the core offer that we are bringing to market, but then all of the different segments of that market that we can cater our message to. So while you might have one product that serves one market great, what are the other two or three or five or ten or more potential market segments that you could be completely missing entirely - like totally not even talking to them, maybe never even considered that market might have a problem that your product is a perfect solution for.

Well, that is where AI has been a massive help, not only for myself but I’ve seen it from marketers and creators and entrepreneurs and business owners that are looking for ways they can brainstorm and ideate and gain different perspective and understand different angles they can approach - how they’re bringing their product to market, but not just bringing it to market, accelerating that idea into action, into making an impact.

Before AI, for example, if I wanted to come up with all of the names of the products inside of the SideHustle game, we would sit down and literally spend hours at a time thinking through all the different names, and ultimately we ended up with the final edition of the game, and it took a lot of time but it was worth it, we got it out there. That was one of the things people would say, like how long did it take you to come up with all these names, quite a while. Go to the second edition of the game now, we had access to Jasper and mostly Jasper when that game was getting developed, but also some ChatGPT, and now the brainstorming process for coming up with those names was accelerated a hundred times. It allowed us to just get the ideas out there, then go through, pick, choose, and think about which names are going to make the most sense for this next edition of the game, and instead of two weeks of our time it took a few hours and we figured out the naming and we got to move on to the next part of the project.

That’s just one example from my own experience using AI, but also now that we’re on the second edition of bringing this idea to market, we’re going to be posting a lot of content on social media, we’re going to be using AI to help us with coming up with that content based on our buyer’s brief, so that we are speaking to the different segments of our market and able to test and refine based on the feedback we’re going to be getting here over the course of 2024.

Really excited about that, and I would encourage everybody as you’re going into 2024 and you’re looking at your goals and how you’re going to be applying AI into any aspect of your business operations - whether it’s marketing or sales or writing or education, or maybe your finances and operations from that standpoint - when you’re looking and interacting with AI, think about all the steps involved with the current process that you’re doing here, and get really clearly refined on those steps first. Once you’ve got that outline of Step A, B, C, D, E, F, G gets me this complete outcome, then you can take a step back and see, okay, great, where can AI now help me inside of this process specifically. And if you run into a roadblock, that’s cool, use something like ChatGPT-4 to ask it those questions and treat it like it is the person on the other side of the coffee table from you, who understands the problems you might be experiencing or the process you’re trying to create or the market you are looking to go after. But you’ve got to give context to get the better context back.

So providing something like ChatGPT, as you’re going in for preparing a marketing strategy and you have a buyer’s blueprint already complete, you can say: here’s the person I’m trying to target, here are all their top 10 pain points for what they might be experiencing right now in the market, here’s what their dreams are, their fears that keep them up at night, some negative statistic they don’t want to be a part of, they want to be a part of the positive statistic - all these things that are going on in the minds of your market and your buyers. Feed that to ChatGPT first, and then say, okay, great, now take this context into mind and help me solve for X. Now that you’ve got all the problems, can you help me with figuring out how I can optimize my process for this buyer in mind. If we’re creating content for that buyer, that’s how we want to optimize it, if we’re creating marketing content.

Let’s say you are getting stuck up on application forms, maybe to book a call for you, and you’re swamped with application forms and people are filling out surveys and you’re going through reading all these surveys and deciding whether or not somebody is actually a good fit for a call with you, or maybe you should put them into one of your other programs, or maybe they’re not even close to being ready to become a client with you, and so maybe a book is a better recommendation, or maybe they’re super qualified and you want to get on the phone with them right away to make sure everything is all good before potentially enrolling them into a program. There are buckets that people are going to fall into, and segments of your market are going to be at different stages in the buying experience.

Let’s just say you had an application form opening up in January for your Mastermind, and you’re selling it for three grand for the year, for your Mastermind, you’re helping people do something super specific and you’re really good at it, and you want to enroll a bunch more people in, but only the right people. So once people get into that application process, now what you have is a human that’s going through and mainly reviewing them, assessing whether or not you need to get more information and following up with the right people to enroll them into your Mastermind or your program. That is a manual process that you could certainly use AI to help you with streamlining.

How I would approach it right now is simple: take a CSV download of the application submission - the questions, the answers, that whole thing - from all of your applicants, uploading that into, let’s just say, ChatGPT-4. But I personally would be using Claude for this, because I find that Claude is right now, January 2024, my AI of choice for assessing this type of research and helping with brainstorming. Either one, they can both take files to upload right now. Ask the AI to simply help you with analyzing the content that you’ve provided, and let it know what you want it to assist with. Let’s say you want to filter through people that are meeting a certain criteria, so you want to make sure that you’re only working with people that have been established in business for three or more years, maybe they’re doing anywhere from a million to three million dollars in annual revenue and they’re wanting to grow from there, maybe they have to be a service provider and have a proven service with a boatload of testimonials so you know they’re legit and they’re not just out hawking some program.

Once you input that prompt, that you’re giving the prompt of what you want it to do, the AI is going to go and analyze the contents that you’ve uploaded and help with executing each step of that prompt. Let’s say you had 100 applicants and it filtered through and identified maybe the top 10 based on the criteria that you gave it that you’re looking for, said okay, out of these 100 applicants these 10 show the most attributes or the most characteristics or the most responses that are likely to fit your criteria. Now maybe that process would have taken a real human 30 minutes, an hour, three hours, five hours or more to go through and review everyone and analyze and assess and update each one, well now we’re talking about a matter of minutes that you can take that information and see what they inputted and see who’s the most qualified to work with you inside of this program or this Mastermind, and then you can use their intake to take it further - okay great, these are the top 10, let’s go ahead and take this onto the next step of the conversation, maybe that’s an email, maybe that’s another thing you’re doing in the vetting process.

Whatever that is, just think of AI as something to help speed up a very specific aspect of an already operational workflow. Where are you already spending the time, now that AI is going to help you with saving time in that specific workflow, or if you’re doing a workflow that you could do faster - that’s not only going to save you time, is that workflow also part of your sales process or your marketing process or delivering educational content or writing a book or creating a course that is going to lead to more value for your audience, maybe more sales revenue for your business - and focusing on those things first, the things that are most important, just jotting down maybe two or three right now that come to mind, that you’re spending a lot of time on, the 80% of your time on that’s getting you the 20% of the kind of results you’re getting, is coming from this sort of process. Analyze it and outline it, get really clear on what that process looks like, and then starting with the end in mind, we can reverse engineer that workflow that will have AI help you with optimizing that process, and you can use AI to help you with brainstorming this as well.

All of this coming down to how are we creating better content faster, and how are we using that content to turn our ideas into greater impact in the market. All of this really boils back down to who are you speaking to and who are you serving in your business, and do you have a blueprint for speaking to that person, that segment of your market specifically. Do you have a workflow, do you have a brief that you and your team and your organization and any agency you’re working with can have on hand to get a quick read through and know exactly who you’re speaking to, know the language that’s going to resonate with them and create content and inform your strategy around what the market is saying and where things are trending towards right now. AI can help with giving you those actionable insights into your marketing game, and it can help you with taking those insights and making you more efficient and more productive inside of your workflows and your process.

Again, what we do with that efficiency and those gains that we’re seeing from AI, well, we can reinvest the time, energy, and resources back into other areas of our business and our lives that we want to work on improving, and continue to adapt and continue to integrate and continue to grow. Because as new innovations and new creations come in the world of AI, we’re only going to have new opportunities to take what we’re talking about right now in this video and improve upon that and get better and do that every day with practice, access, and consistency, and a little bit of creativity and commitment to sticking with this technology, to build a better world and do great things and sell our services and products to the market in an ethical way, so that we can again do better in the world and help more people get what they look to achieve.

Of course, if we can help more people get what they are looking to achieve, what the market is looking for that we can serve as a business or an entrepreneur, then obviously that’s going to come back to us and help us achieve what we’re looking to achieve and grow as a business. I’m looking forward to an exciting 2024 with you and all the cool exciting things that are going to be coming our way. Expect more content around these buyer’s briefs, around psychographic segmentation, about understanding the minds of your market, and mastering not only this process in your marketing material but how do we fit this in the entire production cycle of creating really great outstanding content and leveraging this technology to make our marketing stand out through storytelling, through innovation, and through things that are going to put us that step ahead and keep the humans as the creators behind these machines, to create really great and impactful things and to do good with this technology.

Make sure that you are subscribed to us on our YouTube channel and have the notifications on so you know when we drop new videos, and make sure you subscribe to our newsletter, the Creator newsletter, at genuniversity.com/subscribe. There you’ll get updates for new deals, new programs, new workflows, and new discoveries that we are unearthing as we continue to research and develop new content and innovations here at Gen AI University. Until the other side, make sure you subscribe and I’ll see you inside GenU. Keep coming back, and Darby, cheers.