← Marketing Against The Grain
Marketing Against The Grain
The Real Reason Your AI Content Is Average (It's Not Your Prompts)
00:24:07
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- [00:05]
A
There used to be a time where I would spend months and months building these different AI marketing skills in Claude and Claude code. Probably much like yourself, you're building hook generators, you're building skills to create content, to do paid ads, to create ad copy, to help you with your newsletter. Each skill worked. It produced a pretty good output, but the content was always kind of not that great, pretty average. And I wonder if you are experienced in the same thing. It was competent, it was clean, it could have been written by any SaaS marketer at any company in the world, but it wasn't incredible, it wasn't world class and I couldn't figure out why. I had good prompts, I had good tools, I was putting in real effort, I was putting in all of these hours every night to crunch through all of these skills and create something that I wanted to enhance my job, to create world class output. And then I found the answer. And it had nothing to do with building skills. It was actually something underneath skills that I hadn't even built yet. And once I did, everything changed about how I used AI, Claude and Claude code. I'm going to give you those secrets and better yet, I'm going to give you the exact things you need to build this for yourself.
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B
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- [02:13]
A
Now here's what most people building AI marketing systems believe. Better skills equal better output. You see it all over the place. AI marketing skills, MD files that you can download to allow your AI to do something skills. MD files are a skill in a text file that you can give your AI system something like a cloud or a cloud code. You can give it that MD file and then it can replicate that skill for you. So we obsess over skills, we refine our prompts, we test different models and we build all of these kind of elaborate workflows. We, we spend weeks and weeks iterating on these skills, trying to make them better. And the output gets marginally better, but it never gets distinctively better. It never sounds exactly like that person or is shaped exactly for that person's customer. It never stopped the scroll and it never made someone think, wow, that person really got me. They created this content just for me. I know, because this is how I worked. And here's the kind of painful truth. The skills aren't the problem. They never were. They are probably good enough for you to get the output you want. The problem is what the skills are actually building on top of now. I love to bring this to life with a really cool story.
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C
We just dropped a free guide that will turn Claude into a full blown marketing machine. It gives you four templates that will stop your AI output from sounding too generic. Each template captures a different layer of context. Your audience's vocabulary, your voice patterns, your positioning, and how your buyers actually convert. The more you update them, the better every AI skill you build will get. Get it right now. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description.
- [04:12]
A
In 1995, Pixar made toy Story, the first fully computer animated feature film. It really was a phenomenon. It was a huge, huge hit. But behind the scenes, something was really breaking. Pixar's directors, some of them the most talented storytellers alive, kept running into the same narrative problems. Story structure kind of broke at the same points. Character motivation fallen flat in the same ways, right? They kept running into the same problems. They solved a problem in one film and. And then six months later a different team would have the exact same problem. And the lesson Ed Catmull took from that, who was Pixar's president at the time, was there was no shared system across all of these directors. Every film would actually start from zero. The real problem wasn't talent. And talent in your case is your skill file. He already had the best directors. What was missing was shared intelligence, right? A way for the collective wisdom to actually flow across every project, not just inside of individual people. And so I want to kind of reiterate that point. Pixar, one of the best production houses for these kind of animated films, had the best directors on the planet who working on these stories and continually ran in to the same problems each and every time. And those problems were being solved in one film and then would reoccur on another. And so what Ed Catmull decided was they needed something called a brain trust. And so the brain trust was this kind of small group of senior creatives who would screen work in progress together. And so they would sit around and do this. And it wasn't to get notes from the top. Here's what's working, here's what's not. It wasn't to approve or reject anything. Again, these were some of the best directors on the planet. It was really to share context, to build collective understanding of what worked, what didn't and why across every film simultaneously. And the results were things like Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc. Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, all of these incredible blockbuster movies that we have probably all seen and know. And then Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 and Catmull did something that proved the point definitively. He exported the brain trust to Disney Animation. And so at this time, Disney Animation was really struggling. And so they bought Pixar and then they bought this creative brain trust. And with the same directors and same budget, they. The film that had built forgettable movies year after year did not replace a single director, did not replace any single tools. They just added their context layer. And what came out the other side was films like Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia. So same talent, the exact same directors, a new foundation that these films were being built on top of and a shared context created totally different outcomes. And that's the exact problem we are all hidden with AI. We are building the skills, we are building the movies and we may be really good at doing that, but we're not building the collective brain trust. Every single skill we build starts from zero. Just like the films that Pixar were building, they all start from zero. So what do you do about that? How do you fill in the gaps? So everyone is kind of replicating what Pixar were doing before the brain trust. They're building their skills that MD file and they're probably really good skills and they're creating okay ish content and the outcome isn't that incredible. It's because these skills are starting from zero every single time, just like the Pixar directors would with that movie. And the skills are kind of just averaging at the Internet. So the output you get in the content on the product, positioning, whatever it may be, is somewhat average because it's the average of the Internet. Because you do not have your brain trust built, you do not have your intelligence layer built. I call this for us the foundational layer. Every single system you build and when you are building skills for anything you want to do to grow your business in a post AI world, the foundation layer is much more important than the skill layer. And I'm going to tell you why. And better yet, I'm going to give you four files that you should really have in your starter foundational layer to uplevel your skills. So the output will be night and day in comparable to what you're getting today. And so I'm actually going to share my screen and get into really kind of show you these. So we'll start off with a quick look at this. So most teams are kind of building prompts. Get an output starting of. This is how skills work. They're really just prompts in text files. We what I'm arguing is that everything you build should have a foundational layer. And in that layer are core MD files that help describe who you are, how you work and who your audience is and what they react to. Now the foundational layer can be anything that helps to uplevel your skills. I'm going to suggest four starter files and better yet, I'm going to give you those four starter files so you can build your very first foundational layer and I'm going to take you through really quickly what's in that layer. And so again, this is most teams over here. Maybe this is what you're doing today. This is what the foundational layer will do, will actually help you up, level all of the skills that you build on top of. And I'm actually going to tell you how they refer to that foundational layer because that's a really important part. So the first one I'm going to talk about is an audience delight profile. Most marketers have a traditional ICP ideal customer profile and it really is like firmographics and technographics and demographics. It's fit and intent. It's who is the ideal customer that would buy our product or service. It doesn't really tell you what marketing would appeal to them, what things you could create that would elicit some sort of emotion, connect with them, get them to engage with your content, with your brand. So let me open up what this file looks like. I think this is the modern kind of file that I would create, as you can see here, not a traditional ICP firm. So basically this has some things like who they are in their own words. So how do they describe themselves? How do their peers describe them? Look at this. The person who has their shit together.
- [10:57]
B
We'll be right back to today's show. But first I want to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called Nudge. It's hosted by Phil Agnew, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals and it's the UK's fastest growing business podcast. What I love about it is that the nudge listeners love. No fluff, no bs evidence based marketing tactics they get in each episode. You're going to want to listen because this is like an MBA's worth of insight in every single podcast. And entrepreneurs, you're going to love the show because it's filled with repeatable, proven studies, not hearsay, not one off success stories. Marketers, you're going to love it because it discusses the psychology behind great marketing and what marketers are getting wrong. Listen to the Nudge wherever you get your podcast.
- [11:43]
A
This is for a profile that I had created for Notion to illustrate this point. So who do notion sell to the company Notion what makes them light up so topics they can't stop talking about. You can see here. It gives you like very granular details. Templates that save them real time. They love their notion setup. People who are into Notion really kind of where they're set up as a badge of pride. They're kind of first movers, love new features. They love the feeling of replacing different tools. They finally said different things like around productivity they have like finally someone said it moment. So these are the things that really capture their attention because they think these things but no one really says it. This is pretty spicy. Confluence is where documentation goes to die. Content they forward to colleagues. This is really important. This means that it's shareable. What makes them reach out, what frustrates them. Right. You get into like the real granular details of what Frustration, objections and misconceptions. What is their vocabulary? I love this one. So what are things they say? What are things they don't say? They say second brain. They say single source of truth. They say wiki. They don't say knowledge management system. They don't say documentation repository. What pulls them in versus pushes them away. Real workspace screenshots. Here's my actual setup. Generic productivity advice. Plan your week on a Sunday without showing how so you can see this audience delight profile is how I create things that will actually delight my audience. Okay, so the next one is a creator style. The creator style is what style do you need to actually bring this to life across all of the different things you create to delight that audience. And so the creator style grounds the things that your skills create in this style for that audience. So again we are updating all of the marketing traditional docs that we used to have with these foundational files. We used to have brand guidelines. That's boring. Now we actually have creator style much more interesting. So this really tells us how to create content voice in one sentence. It kind of talks a lot about what your voice should be. The atomic unit, again, this is all built for theoretically, if we were trying to market for notion, tone characteristics, the five defining traits. So conversational, not corporate, empowering, not patronizing, playful. This is really good, right? Not silly. We have a personality, wit, warmth, occasional humor. But we never sacrifice clarity for joke. We're direct, not verbose. We have write in patterns, we have our sentence structure, we have our format in happens. We have our open end pattern, we have our closing pattern. This is my most favorite actually, which is we always do these things, we never do these things. And then you can add a lot of the kind of AI stuff in here, whether it's the EM dashes or whatever you may be. What sounds like notion, what doesn't sound like notion. And we try to keep these files really short and powerful. AI has a habit of getting kind of confused if you give it a lot of different context. So the incredible thing about these four files I'm showing you is they all complement each other. They do not overlap with each other. I spent a lot of time refining them. So they do not overlap with each other. They all have a very clear purpose. So if the skill loads two of them, the two of them are complementary, they don't overlap and give the skill mixed instructions. So we have our audience delight profile. This is what really is going to elicit emotions from your audience, get them to react to the things that you put out. This is the style we need to really be us, to really market like us, to really sound like us. And that could be you as the individual, that could be you as a brand, that could be you who is not even really creating content yet and wants to get started on this path and can take a lot of content that you're inspired by. So remember this. You can say, I'm inspired by a bunch of different creators. You can, you can create a single document of all of their content. You can get this template that I'm giving you and then you can say, Claude, can you recreate this template based upon this content? That's how powerful this is. And then you can create your own style market position in map. So let me show you this one because this is super cool. Okay? We're not doing a stuffy positioning slide deck from last quarter that gets stuck in a Google folder and never gets used to this gets updated. Your foundational layer will get updated all of the time. We have position and we have our strategic claim. We have our competitive landscape. You need to know this what they claim where they win, where they're weak. Because if you're creating product marketing material or brand material, you'd want the skill to be able to know that. So again, it would only use the parts of the foundational layer that it needs. And again, I'm going to show you at the end of this video how to make sure your skill understands what what MD file from your foundational layer to load automatically. Make this all really easy for you so you don't even really have to think about it. The cool thing is you can just get these templates and tell cloud to create them for you. So you're not even going to have to do much work once you actually have the template. What we own versus what's contested. So where do we win and where's contested territory for notion? They're contesting like AI powered workspace. Every competitor has a shipped AI feature. That's very true. The claim is no longer differentiated on its own. Very, very true. All in one. A very kind of contested area. Where is their white space for notion? So cross functional workspace, that's a really good one for them. They should really lean into that. Cross functional is a bigger and bigger thing as AI collapses functions into each other. The anti sass brawl is a pretty good one. What's changing? You would want to know what the market shifts are and you would want to update this every single quarter. Again, short and powerful. So now we have our audience delight which what elicits emotions. We have our own style now we have where we sit in the market and the last one we're going to do is a customer journey intelligence foundational file. And this is one of my favorites which is how you market across the journey because you would want your skills to produce different output dependent upon where the journey someone is. So let me download this one. This is not a funnel diagram. They're old and stuffy. This is not a lifestyle cycle stage pressure, right? This is a real living file that will continually be updated to uplevel our skills. So our skills are always producing great feedback. So how do they find us? So first of all, if we were using skills to create marketing assets, we would want it to understand where our audience find us. For notion, that's YouTube. They get peer recommendations, they get TikTok, Reddit product Hunk, they get Google search. What triggers first awareness. How do you actually create first awareness? Look at this. The emotional driver behind these moments live in audience MD file so you can see I have cross referenced the the different foundational files with each Other so they really are a live and breathe in context layer. We have evaluation what they ask, compare and object to. Again, you'd want to know all of these things because when they get into the buying decision, they're kind of making decisions between you and someone else. These objections are going to be really good for when you're creating sales enablement materials. When you're creating product positioning work, these conversion triggers what closes a deal. The aha workspace moment. They build their first workspace and see databases, link views. So this is how notion really sells. A colleague's already using it, a template that matches their use case, a storage or a guest limit. So this is very PLG driven proof points. They want to see the temperate library breadth, community size, name, company usage. Why do they stall and churn? This is actually really good by the way. Why would they actually churn out of notion? Why they leave team didn't adopt it. They found a specialized tool, performance of scale, context change and then how you can actually expand. So you can see this customer journey is really how you acquire to actually expand to actually keep people using your product and how you actually sell in the moment when someone's considering your brand versus someone else. Again, the context of the foundational layer is the core point of this episode. And these files illustrate how you would bring this to life. We'll give you these as templates that you can replicate or you might decide that there's things that you want to in your foundational layer that is different from what I'm suggesting here. Now, my foundational layer is different per team. I have a content team. I have like different AI teams and they have different foundational layers that they will reference. But here's the killer part. Okay, so let's say you end up with 20 foundational files. That's your context layer. I built like all of these different things I need my skills to refer to. But your skills don't need to refer to every single file in that foundational layer before it runs. They only need to grab the ones that are relevant for the thing that skill does. So it has the context it needs. It is not overloaded with context and gets confused. So every foundational file has a header that declares what the skill should use it for. And then the skill will load this when it's trying to do some of these things. So it will say load this file when the skill writes any content, blog post, social copy and emails, landing pages. Do not load this file when the skill only needs audience data, only needs competitive position. So for Every skill, they have this block that you run right at the start. And what it's doing here is it's scanning the foundational file and looking to see if that is one that it needs to run or not, or include or not. And then if it doesn't, it does not include that one. And so that's how you start to build a foundational file that really only gets used in the way it's meant to be used. So to reiterate that, the foundational file has a piece of text that basically tells a skill. Here's how you use me and here's when you don't need to use me. And then every skill that is referencing that foundational file. So in every skill, the first thing it does, it's going to scan your foundational folder, it's going to look across all of your MD files and it's going to pull in the ones that are applicable for the task that it is trying to do. And in that way, every update you do to your foundational layer improves your skills. And that's the important part. So now you have a context layer that these skills are built on top of a folder that says foundational. It has all of these different MD files and you update those MD files every quarter. You just tell Claude and hey, let's update these and refresh them. Make sure that they're the most up to date, the best that they can be. And every skill that is referencing that foundational folder and the MD files that live in that folder will get better and better and better. And the real upside here is if you are able to layer in performance data so you can tell Claude, here's the things that I produced this quarter here, here was the performance based upon this, how can I improve all of the files on my foundational layer to get better performance? These ones perform great. This stuff didn't perform great. I need more of the great stuff. Update my foundational layer with the patterns, that would get more of the great stuff. And I will do another episode just on how to improve the foundational layer with performance layer. If that is something you really want me to go through, tell me in the comments. But that is the Pixar brain trust approach to building skills. Don't obsess so much over the skills. Obsess over the context the skill is pulling in and make sure it pulls in the right context for the right task. And that context is updated frequently based upon your performance. What is the performance of the output you're producing? Hopefully that was of interest to you get your foundational files, the starter pack in the comments, and until next time, this is Marketing against the Grain.
- [23:31]
B
Hey everyone. You know Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with Marketing against the Grain. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about. We're going to launch the Marketing against the Grain newsletter. And Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader, practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from the guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got a hundred thousand marketers who are on this newsletter. Please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community. And it's easy. You can click the link in the description below or you can head to marketingagainsthegrain.com subscribe this data is wrong.
- [24:46]
D
Every freaking time.
- [24:48]
B
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
- [24:53]
D
Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.
- [25:03]
A
Grow better.