Two weeks ago, I gave a workshop with Microconf on how to use AI your marketing foundations without flying into frustration.

And I spent this past weekend in NYC on a darling girls trip (hi Janice! 👋🏽) that reminded me of why I love to visit (and hate to smell) The Big Apple. Especially when it’s above 55*F, but that’s another story.

Working AI into your marketing can feel like trying to jump on a subway train you didn’t quite catch the name of as the “doors are closing”.

Hey, you reason, "Better to jump on the AI marketing train now - I don’t want to get left behind on the platform!”

Which gets you where you want to go in marketing about as fast as trying to get to Manhattan via Brooklyn from Queens (IYKYK).

In short, you’re not gettin’ to Times Square that way.

Which is why today to kick off the quarter, I’m going to walk you through that MicroConf workshop and teach you how to build your marketing foundations (or scale them) with some AI help.

Including guardrails, which tools we recommend for this, and where to keep things human.

Table of Contents

• Quick recap on the Marketing Foundations

• Foundation 1: Customer Research

• Foundation #2: Copy + Branding

• Foundation #3: Website

• Foundations #4: CRM + Analytics

• Foundation #5: Email

• Well that was…a lot. Here’s where you go from here …

  • If you have 0 paying customers

  • If you have 15+ paying customers

  • If you already have a strong grasp of who your cus …

ICYMI, Aelia + Midhat did a 4 week series in March on content with an entire issue on how to use AI in content. I’m going to do a quick synopsis of it at the bottom of this issue, but you should read that beauty of a post to do your content justice.

(Yes, I’m humming “New York, New Yorkkkkkkk” while I write this.) 🏙️ 

Quick recap on the Marketing Foundations

In NYC (where I was in Brooklyn, specifically), the street names are Dutch and Polish, the lingua franca is Español, and the cathedrals were built by Irish and German immigrants. I fricking love it.

Every new wave to New York builds on what was already there instead of building from scratch.

If you’re throwing AI at your marketing without first making sure your Marketing Foundations are in place, it’s gonna be like building New York from the ground up every time.

Nearly impossible to do well and unnecessarily painful.

And as the saying goes, Rome NYC wasn’t built in a day…

So here are the foundations we’ll be walking through.

And a note on those guardrails

if you apply the guardrails at each foundation and then continue adding in guardrails as you go, you will come up with far fewer problems when you're done with that first line of foundation bricks and as you keep going."

Whether you’ve already got customers and wondering “What’s next?” in your marketing or starting from scratch, here’s how to make your foundations go faster with AI.

Keeping the guardrails in place from the first foundation compounds in all the right ways - it will keep hallucinations to a minimum and make sure you didn’t quote a customer that never existed.

Think of them as making sure you don’t step in a…puddle…as you rush through the platform.

Foundation 1: Customer Research

What you need from a human

• 1:1 interviews or 1st party convos (Reddit, Slack communities, FB groups)

• Onboarding replies, sales call transcripts, and customer support back-and-forths

How to use AI to speed it up - Be organizer master flash

• Sort raw data into your Messaging Matrix

• Find throughlines between customers types

• Group your customers by common traits and phrases for deeper analysis

Guardrails

• Document, don’t summarize information

• Always verify “quotes” it finds - these are something it tends to hallucinate about 30-70% of the time in our experience unless you verify sources

Tools Set: Claude or Chat

If you need more info on how to do interviews…We have a whole issue on that with Abhishek, our customer whisperer.

Foundation #2: Copy + Branding

What you need from a human

• Your anti’s - Define who you refuse to sound or look like based on what all the competitors do sound like

• Your “So What’s?” - Turning a feature into an outcome for your customer

• Your emotional approach - how does using your product feel different than your competitors?

How to use AI to speed it up

• Headline Formulas: Feed the Messaging Matrix in and several headline formulas to get you started

• Matrix Auto-Fill: Have AI "listen" to your research for different awareness stages to fill the gaps in your messaging.

Prompts to pull out

• (Copy) "Extract every instance of a 'breaking point' or 'time-waste' and put it into Row 1 and Row 7. Use exact words—do not summarize."

• (Branding) Tweaked versions of Sarah Hart’s branding prompts. She talks about them in her newsletter here (10/10 recommend a subscribe if you’re curious about branding). These are the versions that we use.

Guardrails

• (Copy) The Evidence Check: AI will hallucinate promises. A human must ensure every claim is followed by a stat, testimonial, or screenshot.

• (Branding) Starting point only: use AI for basic branding and visualizings, trust a designer for scaling and applying it in evenly

Tools Set: Claude, Cleanshot

Foundation #3: Website

What you need from a human

• Site format - AI will flatten a site into “best practices” when what you need is a flow that follows what your customers actually want

• Homepage Copy - make sure it is using the words and phrases that are unique to your audience

How to use AI to speed it up

• Matching your branding to your

• Brainstorming design variations

Tool Set: Relume

Foundations #4: CRM + Analytics

What you need from a human

• Your actual buying cycle and sales cadence

• Documentation of the actual flow of users through your product

• What product data you need to track

How to use AI to speed it up

• Seeing connections between things

• Recommendations on how to export + import data and connect to your other tools

Guardrails

• Fact check the data points it recommends tracking

• Fact check the sales approach

Tools Set: PostHog + Bento (I cannot recommend this combo enough!!)

Foundation #5: Email

What you need from a human

• Purpose of the emails

• Writing the emails

How to use AI to speed it up

• Catching blindspots: feed it your email drafts and ask it to see if there are missing information

• Suggesting email flows: based on how people are getting stuck in the product and which features they’re not using (but are asking for)

Guardrails

• Human touch: emails work because they sound like a human Do you know what readers need from the email series?

• Trigger warning: Do the triggers make logical sense and use events and variables that you are actually tracking in your CRM/Analytics platform?

Tool Set: Claude, Bento

Here’s a prompt for that:

Well that was…a lot. Here’s where you go from here (in the next 30 days)

Take a deep breath. Pop into a bodega for a bite.

If you have 0 paying customers

Step 1: Community listening and discovery calls

Step 2: Build your GTM plan with a focus on selling and building trust

Step 3: Set up your foundations right, so you don’t clothesline your marketing

If you have 15+ paying customers

Step 1: Interview your existing customers and find the gaps in your messaging and marketing

Step 2: Layout a step-by-step plan on what to expand and experiment on

Step 3: Fill in your foundation gaps before you start heavy execution

If you already have a strong grasp of who your customers are (and you’ve done your messaging matrix) and have a plan in place for marketing, then start with tweaking that plan and fixing your foundations.

And between 0-15 paying customers, when you’ve already done your market research, you probably need to focus on sales and marketing.

If you want your marketing put together right and not duct-taped together, we can help with:

• Customer research

• Step-by-step marketing plans + execution

• Websites with copy that work and convert

And with productized pricing, you’ll never wonder where your money went!

Bring me your marketing questions! Here’s my Cal link.

We’ll see you and your inbox next week.

Cheers!

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻

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