This AI Replaces Your Marketing Team in 30 Minutes (Step-by-Step)

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain: "This AI Replaces Your Marketing Team in 30 Minutes (Step-by-Step)"

Host/Author: HubSpot Media
Release Date: May 13, 2025

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Introduction: Revolutionizing Marketing Teams with AI

In this groundbreaking episode of Marketing Against The Grain, HubSpot’s Chief Marketing Officer, Kipp Bodnar, and Kieran Flanagan, CMO of Zapier, delve into the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in marketing. The hosts guide listeners through the process of building a fully functional AI-driven marketing team using custom GPTs, promising to revolutionize how businesses approach marketing by integrating elite-level marketing expertise into accessible AI tools.

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Building Your AI Marketing Team

Kieran Flanagan kicks off the episode by introducing the concept of creating a marketing team composed entirely of AI personas. "We're going to build you a marketing team in AI," he states at [00:00], emphasizing the creation of custom GPTs that embody the profiles of world-class brand and paid marketers.

Key Points:

• Custom GPTs as Marketing Team Members: The idea is to develop AI personas with specialized skills in brand and paid marketing. These AI marketers can operate 24/7, providing expertise without the overhead costs of human employees.
• Profiles and Specializations: Each AI marketer is crafted with detailed profiles that include their experience, philosophies, and operational principles, mirroring top-tier professionals in the field.

Notable Quote:

• Kieran Flanagan [00:15]: "Here's a quick word from our sponsor... stick around."

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Creating Detailed Marketing Profiles

Kieran and Kipp delve into the specifics of constructing comprehensive AI profiles. Kieran elaborates on defining the characteristics of an elite paid marketer, including specialties in performance marketing for B2B SaaS companies with revenues between $10 million and $100 million.

Key Components of the Profiles:

• Experience and Philosophy: Outlining the marketer’s background, core principles, and strategic approaches.
• Campaign Management: Detailing how the AI marketer would allocate budgets, optimize campaigns across various channels (Google, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube), and implement scaling strategies.
• Mental Models and Frameworks: Incorporating methodologies from industry leaders like Brian Balfour to enhance problem-solving capabilities.

Notable Quote:

• Kieran Flanagan [05:05]: "We have a real problem. We need to get like get a life."

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Deep Dive: Enhancing AI Profiles Through Research

The discussion shifts to refining these AI profiles through deep research. Kipp explains how integrating insights from marketing thought leaders ensures that the AI marketers operate at an elite level.

Key Points:

• Incorporating Thought Leaders: Profiles are enriched with mental models and frameworks inspired by experts such as Brian Balfour, ensuring that the AI can handle complex marketing challenges.
• Work History and Real-World Impact: By simulating work histories and including case studies, the AI marketers can provide actionable solutions based on proven strategies.

Notable Quotes:

• Kieran Flanagan [06:23]: "Here's Balfour's, inspired by Balfour."
• Kieran Flanagan [08:34]: "I have the experience here, I have the philosophy, right?"

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Practical Demonstration: Solving a Real Marketing Problem

To showcase the efficacy of their AI marketing team, Kieran and Kipp present a mock problem faced by HubSpot: despite spending $30 million annually on paid marketing, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is increasing, and paid channels are experiencing diminishing returns. Leadership demands a 20% increase in qualified pipeline without increasing the budget.

AI Solution: Luke Skywalker

• Problem Resolution: The AI marketer, named Luke Skywalker, employs strategies like predictive lead scoring and dynamic creative optimization. Luke suggests refining audience segmentation, boosting creative effectiveness, and leveraging AI for real-time budget allocation ([20:42]).
• Interactive Troubleshooting: Kieran and Kipp interact with Luke, extracting both high-level strategies and actionable, step-by-step solutions to implement immediately.

Notable Quotes:

• Luke Skywalker [20:42]: "To tackle the challenge, we'll focus on three key areas: Refining audience segmentation, boosting creative effectiveness, and leveraging AI for optimization."
• Kieran Flanagan [25:40]: "We just showed you how to build your own virtual marketing team. If that's not worth your time today, I don't know what is."

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Advanced AI Capabilities and Customization

Kieran demonstrates the creation of a brand marketer AI, incorporating influences from iconic figures like Steve Jobs and David Ogilvy. This AI is programmed to handle tasks such as brand refreshes, mood boards, and ad redesigns with the precision and creativity expected from top human marketers.

Highlights:

• Brand Refresh and Mood Boards: The AI can assess and revamp a brand’s visual and strategic elements swiftly, tasks that traditionally require significant time and financial investment.
• Ad Redesign: Demonstrates the AI’s ability to transform existing advertisements to align with specific brand guidelines, enhancing both creativity and effectiveness.

Notable Quotes:

• Kieran Flanagan [16:46]: "And then I gave it key skills and then I made it have the brand skills and experience of Steve Jobs and David Ogilvy."
• Unknown [24:50]: "So pretty great. If you're an SMB without a lot of core skills, you can have a paid marketer and you can talk to them about any set of problems you want to talk about."

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Future Directions: Expanding AI Capabilities

The hosts discuss the potential future applications of AI in marketing, such as creating entire teams of specialized GPTs, integrating AI assistants with comprehensive work histories, and enhancing community interactions through AI-driven conversations.

Key Insights:

• Scalability for SMBs: Even small to medium-sized businesses can leverage AI marketing teams to execute high-level strategies without exorbitant costs.
• Customization and Depth: The ability to deeply customize AI profiles ensures that businesses can tailor their AI marketers to fit specific needs and industry requirements.
• Community and Collaboration: Potential for AI assistants to collaborate with each other, simulating a dynamic and interactive marketing team environment.

Notable Quotes:

• Unknown [27:20]: "You can just build your own community of custom GPTs and these different chat assistants based upon Personas that you need to help you do things and conversate with them all day long."
• Kieran Flanagan [17:13]: "It's pretty cool. Very cool. It has like all these guiding principles of how it approaches paid advertising which is super cool."

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Conclusion: Embracing AI for Marketing Excellence

Kieran and Kipp wrap up the episode by reiterating the immense value of integrating AI into marketing strategies. They highlight the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and advanced capabilities that AI-driven marketing teams bring to the table.

Final Thoughts:

• Efficiency and Cost Savings: AI marketers can perform complex tasks rapidly and at a fraction of the cost of human teams.
• Enhanced Capabilities: With AI, businesses can access elite-level marketing strategies and execution without the traditional barriers.
• Continuous Innovation: The evolving nature of AI ensures that marketing strategies remain cutting-edge and adaptive to changing market dynamics.

Notable Quotes:

• Unknown [26:21]: "If you invest a little bit of work in creating a very custom Persona to do parts of your marketing that is really focused and that requires deep expertise, and then you put that into a custom GPT. It's basically like having a brand marketer or a paid marketer on your team."
• Kieran Flanagan [27:37]: "We just showed you how to build your own virtual marketing team. If that's not worth your time today, I don't know what is."

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Key Takeaways

1. AI as a Marketing Team: Custom GPTs can effectively replicate the roles of brand and paid marketers, providing expertise and scalability for businesses of all sizes.
2. Detailed AI Profiles: Creating comprehensive profiles with specialized skills, experience, and mental models ensures that AI marketers operate at an elite level.
3. Practical Application: AI marketers like Luke Skywalker can solve complex marketing problems, offering both high-level strategies and actionable steps.
4. Cost and Time Efficiency: Leveraging AI reduces the need for extensive human resources, saving time and financial resources while maintaining high-quality marketing operations.
5. Future Potential: The integration of AI in marketing is poised to evolve further, offering even more sophisticated tools and collaborative capabilities for businesses.

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By embracing AI-driven marketing teams, businesses can tap into advanced strategies, streamline operations, and achieve significant growth without the traditional constraints of budget and manpower. This episode underscores the transformative power of AI in modern marketing, setting the stage for a future where virtual experts play a pivotal role in business success.

Transcript

[Kieran Flanagan]

Hey, everyone. On today's show, we're going to build you a marketing team in AI. We're going to show you how to build a custom GPT complete with profiles and everything. You need to have a world class brand marketer and paid marketer on your marketing team.

[Unknown]

And stick around.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Kieran's going to have an amazing conversation with one of them and they're going to solve a really hard problem that we have here at HubSpot.

[Unknown]

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All right, Kip, so all marketers watching this are going to be overjoyed with the sentiment behind this show. But I think what we're trying to do is show you how even if you are a paid marketer, brand marketer, product marketer, you can have an elite level colleague that is always on and can work with you.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Yeah, I think there are a few use cases here. What we're going to do is we're going to build some virtual AI marketers in ChatGPT and custom GPTs. We're going to give you all of those. So if you're listening on audio, this is a good video show. If you're watching on video, link's going to be down below or you can scan the code on the screen right now and we're going to give you the links to these custom GPTs. And I think there are a few use cases, Kieran, like me and you, like, we're not paid marketers. So if we have a GPT that's a paid marketer that like boosts our skills. If we're working on something related to paid marketing, if you're a smaller company and you don't have the budget for dedicated paid marketer, use this to go and basically act as if you had a paid marketer. Right. This is really about using AI to get a lot of scale.

[Unknown]

Yeah. And actually we're going to show you some secret things that I don't think most people are doing. So you do want to stay tuned because the way we create these, we are not giving you the average paid marketer, we are giving you Elite level status paid marketer. My usage of AI and Kip's usage of AI. I don't know how you feel about it, but I am starting to dream in prompts. So when I have dreams, my brain just goes context. I want to dream about being a world class popular. Please give me 1996.

[Kieran Flanagan]

What we were joking before we started recording today. It's like we've hit this level that we're now complaining about. We we've got too many threads in ChatGPT and Claude and we can't find them, we can't organize them. Like we have that level of problem, which means we have a real problem. We need to get like get a life.

[Unknown]

We have a real problem. Our Pitch is for OpenAI, rebuild Slack, but for people like Kip and I, where there's no humans and everyone is a chatbot and we will be pretty happy and pretty productive. That's what we need. We need thread in, we need folders, we need all of the same sort of stuff. So let's get in. Kip, me and you're going to go back forth here. So I want to start with the kind of concept here, which is we have to build the characteristics of what an elite level paid marketer would be. So you have to start with the profile. And the profile is going to allow the AI to act like you're a paid marketer, your product marketer, your brand marketer. So I'm going to bring you through what I've done and I know you're going to do one for brand marketing. So I'm going to kind of articulate some of this. If you're not watching YouTube, but you should go watching YouTube, you should subscribe because this is really a YouTube first episode. So we have an expert level SaaS, paid marketer. I have specified for SaaS, we talk about the speciality. And so what I have as a speciality is performance marketing for B2B SaaS, anywhere between 10 million and 100 million, basically. This is a CV, by the way. Yeah, I have the experience here, I have the philosophy, right? Pretty cool. Build systems that compound returns over time. Marry rigorous testing with creative breakthroughs. Spend like a CFO, which will make us all CFOs happy. Scale like a founder, optimize like a scientist. And so we break it into the core principles of what this paid marketer, how they actually approach their work, the principles of campaign management. We talk about how they allocate spend, the kind of operating model they use, we talk about their principles for operation. So they have a structured loop they go through which is called scalar. They have operation levers by channel. So how they optimize Google search, how you optimize meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, how to do retargeting these principles for scaling campaigns. So again, how they actually scale campaigns. Because if you recall, I'm trying to do it for companies of 10 to 100 million. So it's not small, but you can construct a profile for whatever your needs.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Are, whatever your business is. You put your industry, your size, everything that you need to do. Right.

[Unknown]

And we go through, so we have that creative development. So we have like a messaging stack for how they do messaging when in formats for B2B and on and on and on and on. So this is an entire profile for how a paid marketer would operate. And so the way that I got that, what I did was basically I went back and forth with AI to try to decipher if you were a top percentile of paid marketers, like you were at the top top percentile of paid marketers, what are your core principles and how do you approach your work? And so what the AI will do is return and say, are these the types of expert level practitioners that you believe are like elite? It will say things like, Kieran Flanagan, he's very, very elite. And you would say, of course he is super elite. And so he would be in your mix. Any other kind of paid marketers would be in your mix. And then you can create that profile. Yeah, so this is our profile. I'm trying to figure out if there's anything we can do to actually improve this. It's pretty like comprehensive because this is just the profile, right?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Like, yeah, this is just a profile.

[Unknown]

We're going to do a deep research to actually fill out this profile.

[Kieran Flanagan]

We have like mental models and thought process outlined here.

[Unknown]

You know what you can do actually if you had wave a magic wand and you were like, oh, this person would like crush paid marketing. They don't have to be paid marketing just because they have the right ways to think about problems.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Look, I think shout out to our friend Brian Balfour. Yeah, I think founder reforge, great growth marketer, super duper analytical.

[Unknown]

All right, so it's basically going to add a section in that profile which are the kind of mental models and system thinking of how Balfour solves problems. I'll be interested who you put in for brand marketing. You know, the interesting thing is I'm going to run deep research to create this profile. But actually like the research, I don't know If I even need deep research. This research here is actually pretty thorough on Brian. It's like it's got all his mental models, systems over tactics, growth equation thinking, loops, not funnels. Brian likes a loop, not a funnel. The forfeit framework, marginal unit economics, which is a big part of paid ladder of paid marketing maturity. I wonder if I should only take out the stuff for. No, I guess I would take all his mental models.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Yeah, I would say what if you have a duo rev that gives a case example for each of the mental models so that there's additional context for the LLM and how to actually use them.

[Unknown]

Okay, these are great. Can you add a sex region with a clear example of how you'd use them in a real world setting? Okay. And can you add this section to the overall paid marketing? And the thing we are going to end with where you want to stay tuned is because we are going to have a conversation with this paid marketer and they're going to solve a real HubSpot skill problem. I love that you want to see how good this conversation is going to be and then you're going to be like, this makes me rethink everything I think about life makes me rethink. Do I need an agency? Okay, let's go. So we are rebuilding the entire profile because we want to add in the thing for Brian. God, it's got some pretty sweet stuff in here. Here we go. Mental models and frameworks. Here's Balfour's, inspired by Balfour. Okay. All right. So it's got an example now for each of his mental models, which is pretty cool. So again when I think about this profile, think about this like a LinkedIn profile we're creating for the AI assistant. And so this is the AI's assistant's basically summary of work. You know what I should do? Should I do something where I give it a work profile? Like you would have worked in these types of companies over these number of years and you would have learned how to done paid market in those companies. Like basically a work cv.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I was wondering if you framed it a little bit differently to hard problems you've already solved to like tell it that it has the ability to do these things.

[Unknown]

Yeah. Okay. This paid marketer has worked in B2B SaaS scale ups for 10 years leading their paid marketing efforts. In that time they've solved an incredible number of hard complex problems to scale. Add a section for problems solved listing the real problems it solved and the companies it solved. I think this is going to be dope. I'm Actually excited by how good this is going to be.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Everybody watching. It takes a lot to get Kieran excited.

[Unknown]

Here we go. I love this.

[Kieran Flanagan]

This is so good.

[Unknown]

I have so many thoughts now. Actually, I think we should do another episode where we can actually build an array of assistants with actual work history and what the work history will do for that assistant. And that is like pretty novel. I haven't seen that done. This is the reason you tune in for this podcast. But look at this. Problem solved. Real world impact. Curious selection of. By the way, this is an O3. Actually I'm going to have O3 redo this. Sorry, I didn't know I was in 4.0. It's worked for linear rebuilt funnel with tighter UTM CRM integration. Launch Persona specific LPs and restructured campaigns. Reduce CAC by words done. Pretty good job at linear creative fatigue tank and performance and meta build creative op systems with weekly hook tested and founder led. You dude, this is so awesome.

[Kieran Flanagan]

So good. Dude. What's even the truth anymore?

[Unknown]

Oh my God. Okay, let's actually do it. This is good. I believe you can make it better. Think deeply about the prior problems it's solved and make sure they are elite level problems and give specifics on how they solved. We create the entire roof up with more detailed work history. All right, so we're going to Rebuild this with O3. Oh yeah, look at this.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Oh, it's getting good.

[Unknown]

We've got a little tenure speciality philosophy. Here we go. Signature wins. We did all the work for Amplitude as a group marketing manager. We built first Google's meta. We built a drop blend cac. Okay, Elite problem solve. Here we go. Okay, okay, okay. So it's giving me the work history, the impact and now it's given me an elite problem solved with deep dive use cases. Let's go here. Webflow Google Ads spending 300k with 0 recorded pipeline Branded and non branded conflated CRM couldn't connect keywords revenue split brand, non brand. So it's giving me the surgical solution. So it's now giving me all of the elite level problems it has solved for these companies as its work history. We could probably finesse this, but this is pretty cool. Very cool. It has like all these guiding principles of how it approaches paid advertising which is super cool. And then it actually has mental models and frameworks from Balfour. What I am noticing actually is O3 has done less detail for some reason which I think is kind of interesting in 4.0, but I think that's still a pretty Great profile. So one of the things you can do is you can basically take that profile and then do a deep research prompt. Basically this is a version of the profile, but it's done via a deep research prompt. And so the deep research prompt is basically asking it to research principle tactics and systems and philosophy used by the best paid marketing operators. And companies like this synthesize all of their learnings and then you give it the output and you say, okay, well take all of that and create the output. And it has case studies from like thought leaders. It actually picks some people who it thinks are like thought leaders in this space to create the profile that I just showed you from. So it will take thought leaders in the space, it will actually take companies in this space and then it will create the output. So it will take all the learnings from them, do a ton of deep research on them and and then create that profile we just showed you. So you can take that profile and you can go and do a deep research query and you can say, hey, look at all of the best operators for paid marketing. Look at all the best brands that do paid marketing and create this profile. And that means it will map all of their learnings to that profile. And so that's how you end up with a pretty great work profile for your soon to be paid marketer.

[Kieran Flanagan]

We'll be right back, but I want.

[Unknown]

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[Kieran Flanagan]

Oh dude, I am deep, deep in this right now. I don't know if I've even heard what you've said for the last couple of minutes.

[Unknown]

I've noticed. I just talked to myself. This is actually getting really bad. Even on the podcast now we're just like in AI doing our AI stuff, not even listening to each other.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I was like, I'm in a dark place right now. I really need to.

[Unknown]

Okay, we have a paid marketer profile. We have our paid marketer. That paid marketer is going to help us solve problems. We're going to create a custom GPT. I'm going to create that custom GPT in the background. You're going to take us through how you're creating the brand marketer. What I'm very curious about is like have you made any enhancements and who's your inspiration for brand. Who's your brand marketer based on?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Okay, let's go. Let me pull this up here. Kieran's not going to hear anything I.

[Unknown]

Say, but I'm going because I'm creating a custom GPT now I'm creating a paid marketer. What's the name of the paid marketer? Luke Skywalker.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I don't know if I have a name for this person yet. I'm working on that. So I took the original prompt that you shared with me that you started for your paid marketer. Right. And then I have it in my prompt engineer. So everybody should have a prompt engineer in their version of ChatGPT that they can build prompts with. And so I had it basically give me a prompt to transform this into the world's best brand marketer. I then executed that prompt and got format.

[Unknown]

Also I love working in canvas.

[Kieran Flanagan]

FYI to everybody. So you'll see the chat pane here and the canvas is the full details here. So just kind of how I like to work in ChatGPT.

[Unknown]

I like that actually.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I then after I did all of this which came to the SaaS brand architect and was the first kind of evolution of what we're doing. And then I gave it key skills and then I made it have the brand skills and experience of Steve Jobs and David Ogilvy.

[Unknown]

Nice.

[Kieran Flanagan]

And so if you look here, I've got the goal of this person. I have all the outputs should return in a structured layout because I do have this structured to make a custom GPT. Like this is incredible return format.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Like everything I ask it, it's going to return. In Ogilvy and job frameworks with examples. I gave it a work history, I gave it a portfolio.

[Unknown]

You give it a credit profile. What's the best company it's worked for?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Hold on, I got to. I got to get there. Work history, rev struct it. Created fictional companies.

[Unknown]

Nice.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Created fictional companies and organic brand launch, founder led content play.

[Unknown]

Oh my God.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Tone of voice. Brand governance across teams. We are cooked.

[Unknown]

It's given itself some pretty great Jobs it is. AI doesn't want to be doing like, logo design.

[Kieran Flanagan]

I told it to list out the hard problems it solved.

[Unknown]

I love that.

[Kieran Flanagan]

And then here's this person's brand portfolio.

[Unknown]

Oh, what?

[Kieran Flanagan]

Modular homepage messaging systems, five ACT founder narrative campaigns, Brand tone and storytelling handbooks. They did that at notion, SOV and attribution dashboards. Looker plus HubSpot skills. This is a pretty good rundown. I think of everything. And what's wild. I also had to do a mood board.

[Unknown]

Oh, wow, that's so tough.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Of its style, because one of the things when you hire a brand marketer, every brand marketer has a style style. And you're trying to figure out does that person's style jive with the company and the problems you're trying to solve. Right.

[Unknown]

Dude, I want to have like, OpenAI set up as a creative director, interview your AI assistant, like, get them talking to each other. But we can do that again. But I think that's dope.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Yeah, I thought the mood board for creative style was pretty dope. And now for people who might be following along and wanting to do this, I'm now having this all packaged up as a JSON file to upload into instructions for a custom GPT. How's your custom GPT doing over there?

[Unknown]

Yeah, I can show you. So I show you what I'm doing. So now we're going to create a marketer. Usually you would have to go out, post a job and it would be like this whole thing where you have to interview. But now I can just grab a cup of coffee, not speak to a human and create a marketer. And that's what I love about AI. All right, so we're going to do a basic one here. Okay. I'm going to create a custom GPT where I want the custom GPT to solve paid marketing problems based on this profile. Can you give me instructions I should give to that custom GPT so it always adheres to solving problems using this paid marketing profile. All right. Because I'm so freaking lazy. I don't even want to put the instructions in. I just want AI to give me the instructions. Obviously you can make them probably better than AI is going to give me, but it's going to a very good first pass. And so what we're doing is we are going to get the instructions to give the custom GPT to basically solve our problems by always adhering to the doc that we give it. And so we give it a name. We're going to give it Luke the Paid marketer Skywalker, an elite level paid marketer to solve hard problems. And then we're going to say you are the SaaS paid marketing operator and elite B2B SaaS marketer who spent the last decade solving blah blah blah. Always deal with problems using the paid marketer elite level documentation I provided. Always refer to that doc to figure out how to solve the user's tough paid marketing problems. And then we are going to upload the doc and this is the profile that we created. And then we're going to create. All right, so let's do a little experiment here.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Luke, the paid marketer skypefeller.

[Unknown]

So funny to me. I have a problem here. I had it create a problem for me. So let me just go and get this problem. Yeah. Okay. We have a mock problem. So here we go. This is a mock problem for HubSpot. I want to make sure you all understand that and we are going to have a conversation with it. And so the problem is HubSpot is spending 30 million annually in paid marketing across these channels. Despite this, CAC is trending upward and paid channels are hitting diminishing returns in core markets. Gibson Core markets here leadership is demanding a 20% increase in qualified pipeline from paid media next quarter without increasing budget. Actually this is very close to home. I didn't know this. Your task. Design an advanced strategy to unlock new pipeline growth through paid media with the existing 30 minute budget by rethinking audience segmentation, creative strategies. Constraints. We give some constraints, man. And so let's go. We are going to do this and then we're going to have a conversation. Okay, here we go. Hey Luke, are you there?

[Luke Skywalker]

Hey. Let's dive into this. To tackle the challenge, we'll focus on three key. Refining audience segmentation, boosting creative effectiveness and leveraging AI for optimization.

[Unknown]

Wow, slow down. I really want to just get like really simplistic answers here so you get the problem, you understand the complex problem to solve. You obviously have a lot of experience solving these problems for B2B SaaS brands. Give us one problem you've solved previously that is very similar to what we are trying to do and the kind of solution that we should undertake.

[Luke Skywalker]

Sure thing. One similar problem I tackled involved a SaaS company that also faced rising CAC and diminishing returns in core markets. We re segmented their audiences into more granular cohorts based on thermographics and engagement signals. This allowed us to personalize ad creatives and messaging more precisely. We also introduced AI driven bid optimization to allocate budget dynamically to the highest performing segments and creatives in real time. As a result, we achieved a 25% increase in qualified leads without increasing the budget. The key takeaway was the power of hyper targeted segments and continuously optimized creatives.

[Unknown]

Okay, that sounds great, but I don't have paid marketing skills on the team. What is the most simplistic thing that we can do? And if you can give me the step by step so I can just have this conversation and go away and implement that straight away?

[Luke Skywalker]

Absolutely. Let's keep it super simple. Here's a straightforward approach you can take. One, Refine your audience. Break down your target audience into smaller groups based on specific characteristics like industry, company size and job title. This way you can tailor your ads more precisely. Create a few new versions of your ads with messaging and visuals tailored to.

[Unknown]

Okay, this is too simple. We're a pretty large company scaling pretty rapidly. We have a lot of money in paid marketing. What's the most advanced thing that elite level paid marketers do that most companies don't even know about? Can you teach me something that would really unlock the ability for us to continue to grow without increasing our cac?

[Luke Skywalker]

Got it. One advanced tactic that top tier marketers use is predictive lead scoring combined with dynamic creative optimization. This involves using AI to predict which leads are most likely to convert based on historical data and then automatically adjusting your ad creative and bidding strategies in real time. By implementing this, you can ensure that your budget is funneled toward the highest propensity leads and that the most effective creative is shown to the right segment at the right time. This can significantly boost.

[Unknown]

You can pause now. You can stop talking. I'm going to talk to someone else. And if you could just listen, don't say anything. So you can basically go back and forth on any range of problems. And I think if you ask it to tell you some approaches that people you've added or companies you've added would take, it will do a pretty good job. Like if I say, okay, actually I'm talking to you now, Luke. How would Brian Balfour solved this problem?

[Luke Skywalker]

Absolutely. If you asked how someone like Brian Balfour would solve this problem, he'd likely focus on a systematic experimentation framework. He'd emphasize constant testing and iteration on audience segments, creatives and channels. He'd also integrate growth loops where learnings from one channel feed into another, creating a compounding effect that's too high level.

[Unknown]

Give me one specific actionable thing I can do.

[Luke Skywalker]

One actionable tactic is to implement micro segmentation combined with personalized retargeting. Start by splitting your existing audience into micro segments based on specific behaviors or engagement levels. Then use dynamic creative optimization tools to serve hyper.

[Unknown]

Okay, you can stop. So pretty great. If you're a SMB without a lot of core skills, you can have a paid marketer and you can talk to them about any set of problems you want to talk about.

[Kieran Flanagan]

All right, I got one minute of stuff that I want to show you before we close out here. It's pretty good. So I had my custom GPT, who's my brand marketer? I had to do a lot of things, but a couple of the interesting things is I had it assess our brand at HubSpot and give us a brand refresh. And it was able to create a brand new full mood board for the refresh with typefaces, photography, iconography and everything, which I thought was pretty awesome. So like you would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for an agency to do this and it would take weeks and months and this was minutes and free. So that's pretty awesome, right? The other thing you can do is have it redo any ad for your company. So I took this Nike ad and I was like, hey, redo it for us.

[Unknown]

And it made the HubSpot version, not your dad's here.

[Kieran Flanagan]

It's pretty awesome. So what I think we're trying to tell people on the show today is if you invest a little bit of work in creating a very custom Persona to do parts of your marketing that is really focused and that requires deep expertise, and then you put that into a custom GPT. It's basically like having a brand marketer or a paid marketer on your team. Even if you don't have one or even if you don't have enough of them. It extends the work you're able to do. And it's far, far better than asking random questions into like an empty box version of ChatGPT. Right.

[Unknown]

It also is pretty tough to see this not being very disruptive for communities. Like, I think I would join a community because I want to interact with other people. Well, I guess that's what a human would say. I wouldn't say that I'm pretty much build my own, but I think what we're saying is like you can just build your own community of custom GPTs and these different chat assistants based upon Personas that you need to help you do things and conversate with them all day long. And actually, if I really had that conversation, because I have had a more in depth conversation, you can get really into the details. What ChatGPT will do is it will start at the high level and feel like it's presenting to you. But if you keep asking the why would you do this? Why would you do this? Tell me how to do this and go deep, deep, deep. It gets really, really deep and really, really specific. You saw that when I started to try to prompt it to tell me how Bright Orion would solve that problem. And what I've found is it is really good at mimicking styles or like mimicking people, which is why there's a ton of startups that are basically just mimicking people. And you can kind of customize that to yourself and have your own kind of team do things for you.

[Kieran Flanagan]

Look, we just showed you how to build your own virtual marketing team. If that's not worth your time today, I don't know what is. It was awesome. And we're going to keep building cool AI stuff to help you grow your business and we'll see you real soon. On the mark, against the grain.