Proven Marketing Strategies To Create Explosive Growth in 2025

Today we're diving into real AI marketing strategies that are working for the fastest growing companies today. These are strategies implemented within my agency, Single Grain, for our major clients that are creating rapid growth and saving teams tons of time. We're going way beyond prompts and into how to actually automate and operationalize your growth strategy. It's a lot of information today, so if you want a written version of the strategies and tools mentioned here, check the description for a downloadable PDF. All right, let's get into it. So for the first part, we're going to talk about proven strategies that are now smarter with AI. Some of the best marketing strategies today are still the classics. You got events, you got email plus SMS, you got content, you got account-based marketing. But when you combine them with AI systems, you move faster and scale smarter. So let's start off with 1A. 1A is going to be around events and dinners. In-person dinners, meetups, and events, they still work because they build trust, they build relationships, but AI makes them operational. So for example, you can prep attendee research. So let's say you have a meeting that's happening within an hour and you have— it's a very high-stakes meeting. You could have Lindy.ai, which is an agentic flow. It can crawl all your emails, it can crawl all the conversations you've had, all the meetings you've had with this person, and it'll also scan their LinkedIn and find out more about them. And then it'll help you prepare for, hey, here's some context around this person, here's what you guys should maybe talk about. That way you're going into a meeting not necessarily blind, but it's done the 15 to 30 minutes of preparation work for you, and it doesn't really cost you much. So this in my opinion, is known as new work. This is work that you previously maybe wouldn't have paid someone to do, but now you can have AI do it for you. Okay, so the first thing I'm going to show you here is a workflow that handles meeting preparation. And you can use products like Lindy.ai, you can use Zapier, you can even use N8n for this if you want to quickly make a workflow here. And you can see in this case, it's just looking through my calendar, it's checking for an external meeting, and then it'll research the attendee of the meeting. It'll look for their LinkedIn profile URL, it'll check our email history to see what we've talked about in the past. And then I'll make a recommendation over here. So for example, this is a recording session for a podcast recording that I had to do yesterday. It sends this meeting prep information over here. And so there's a bunch of other information here that is being sent. That's all it is. And here's arrival process. Here's the parking instructions, whatever else that we might've talked about in the past. But this helps me prepare more for contacts who I'm about to meet with. So that's one example. You can also use products like Gamma and Gamma will actually help you make decks that look really nice based on your brand guidelines. You can basically do text. To deck if you wanted to do so. And you can just work with the AI, work with Gamma to figure out and just optimize the best presentation that you want to create. You can also use V0 to make customized landing pages. And what used to maybe take you weeks or days to do, you can now do it within minutes. I'm literally talking about creating a landing page within 5 minutes based on your brand guidelines and a landing page that fits what you like. And so for example, this website here, clickflow.com, which is one of our SEO products, this is built using v0. Now, does it work? Yes. Is it the most amazing website in the world? Absolutely not, right? But it works. It's functional. And you can do this within minutes. And not only that, if you want to make ads very quickly, you can use products out there like Arc Ads, create winning ads with AI actors, and you can deploy them if you want. You can set them over into, let's say, TikTok, Instagram, or whatever it is that you're looking for exactly. So there's a lot of products out there. Icon would be another one. And they're decent. And these are only going to get— they're only going to get better over time. So that's what I would say. You could also use Google's Veo. And Veo will actually allow you to make very production-grade movies and even audio as well. And you can stitch them together to make a very nice testimonial video or maybe a video previewing the event that's going to happen that you're making. And you can again do text-to-video, put them together and create a storyline that makes sense. So the next piece that's worth talking about is email and SMS. It's still one of the most powerful direct channels. Most teams are still doing it wrong even today. But with AI, you can segment based on behavior, generate hyper-personalized copy and test variations quickly. What I'm specifically talking about is using products like Clay. And what I like about Clay is it allows me to find a lot of information on the web. Let's say in this situation, I want to find websites that are using certain technologies. And so I can do that within Clay. So one thing I like to do when it comes to finding out companies to reach out to for email or SMS is using a product like clay.com. And when I use Clay, I can find companies that have a certain tech stack. And so in this case, let's say I want to find people who are using Sixth Sense. And Sixth Sense is an account-based marketing product. So I'm going to type them in and then they have a product here. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to— you can submit it or you can take a look at a preview. And in this case, I actually got some examples. So you can see this is the revenue of these companies, where they're based exactly. You might want to find them in the United States. And then what I might do afterwards is I might find people at these companies. So find people at these companies. I might look for people that have an ABM title. So I might type ABM and then I'm just going to give you an example here. And then let's say I just hit preview people and let's just see what happens. Let's see if it even gets anybody. So you can see ABM broker, SDR, ABM enablement, right? Maybe I need to refine it a little more, but it's finding people here, right? I might need to refine this, this, this preview, but that's what it is. And then if I want to find more people, I can obviously add more people to this, this list if I, if I wanted to. But, you know, Clay will help me find 100 at a time basically. Then what I can do afterwards is I use a product called SmartLead, and SmartLead allows me to set these people into an email sequence. And I can even use Clay to customize the first sentence based on what they've said on their LinkedIn recently. I typically don't do that because sometimes it might send the wrong message. So for example, someone was grieving someone recently, and then it sent them a message about them grieving that was not so tasteful. But you can basically export this into a product like SmartLead and add it to a campaign, and then boom, you're basically just off and generating there. That's what I would say about using AI to make your email and SMS just more powerful in general. This form of contacting is never going to go away, at least in the next couple years or so. So when you combine Clay with SmartLead, and you're also leveraging the power of AI, you have a very powerful combo that's going to allow you to get the response that you want at a much higher open rate and a much higher reply rate. And a common saying in marketing and sales is that the fortune is in the follow-up. So after you do these events, whether they're live events or they are webinars, nothing beats email and SMS when it comes to follow-up because open rates for SMS are still extremely high and email is still pretty good, assuming that you have a strong subject line and you have a good hook. Now, there are times where precision makes more sense over volume. This is also known as account-based marketing. There's times where it makes sense to go broad. There are times where it makes sense to hit a lot of people with your email and SMS, but it's also important to go deep on a few select accounts. And this is called account-based marketing. Now, with account-based marketing, we have a lot of different products out there, but for us, building products and then giving away certain features for free is one thing that makes sense from a distribution standpoint. So we built Carrot, which allows you to personalize LinkedIn ads for each of your target accounts. And then you can see the analytics, and you can also build these personalized landing pages too. Now this all ties in with email and SMS too, because if you're sending email and SMS, you want to make sure that you're also targeting these people if they're going to click through to a specific landing page. And also at the same time, maybe you're hitting them with ads. And so account-based marketing means that you're trying to ultimately hit your key contacts and be everywhere that they're hanging out. That's what you're trying to do. So you can use a product like Carrot or you can use something else. It doesn't really matter. But the key thing is that you're taking an omnichannel approach when you're attacking account-based marketing. And let's say I have a target list of maybe 50 enterprise companies I want to go after, maybe Salesforce, maybe HubSpot, maybe a couple other software companies that I want to go after. So what I'm doing here is I'm tailoring my messaging based on these accounts, and I might do a little more research because I'm only targeting 50 of these accounts and going very deep on their marketing strategy. And so what I might do, because I have an ad agency and because I have software products that are tied to this, I might say, hey, Salesforce, I think you should use SEO and think about using products like ClickFlow that can help you create a lot of production-grade content at scale. Or maybe you should use this product over here that will help you with internal linking. Or maybe you should use this product over here that will help you with your LinkedIn account-based marketing. Instead of it taking weeks, you can do it now in minutes. My point is, I'm crafting a specific strategy for each of these accounts. And then I might have an always-on marketing strategy that's hitting them with different strategies that are tailored towards them. And because I'm trying to have an always-on account where I'm trying to get them aware of me, and I have a custom strategy for each of them, they're much more likely to reach back out to me because I'm putting a lot more TLC, a lot more tender loving care into each of these accounts. When you do account-based marketing, it can be one-to-one. Maybe you're targeting individuals, or you can be targeting one-to-few. So multiple people working on a company or one-to-many, maybe just you're just targeting that account in general, right? And so my point of saying this is that you are going to be a lot more targeting when it comes to account-based marketing and your response rates are going to be a lot higher. And when you're using AI to do account-based marketing, you can now have AI come up with different strategies a lot faster. And then you can use different products out there, which I'll show you in a second, to allow you to rotate these different strategies a lot quicker. Okay, so the next thing that's worth talking about is content marketing. So now let's talk about the 3 Rs. You got reusing, remixing, and republishing. So the beauty is, yes, you can use AI to create content at scale, but AI creates a lot of slop right now. So you often do need a human in the loop to review the content just to make sure the content is good. Yes, you can use different products out there like NotebookLM. NotebookLM will help you summarize content from YouTube or very long PDFs, and that will give you ideas on how you might create content like this. You can use Gemini to pull YouTube videos and give you outlines from YouTube videos or YouTube Shorts, for example. You can use Manus to help you create blogs and to create decks or to create interesting looking data from the data that you have. Maybe you can upload financials or you can upload certain metrics you have from your software company and then you can repurpose your content. And so when you're using again Manus or NotebookLM or Gemini, or you can use products like Genspark, that's going to allow you to quickly figure out how you can reuse content and remix content and republish content. Now that we've covered how to take your traditional strategies further, let's talk about building AI systems that automate your work and make it easier to make greater impact faster. Let's start with SOPs or the standard operating procedures. AI agents can now manage recurring workflows such as checking daily standups, reviewing meetings, enforcing SOPs, and flagging risks. So this is where I love Lindy. We spend a lot of time creating SOPs. These are standard operating procedures. We document all these, or maybe we're making these screencasts, these Loom videos that are meant to be followed. But that historically doesn't happen. It doesn't play out how you want it to play out because humans, we're fallible humans. We make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time and I'm a human. I don't want to follow rules all the time. And neither do your employees want to follow rules all the time. But that's why the rules are there, because you want things to be done consistently, right? So the question is, how do you go about making sure that the SOPs that you've put together are mostly enforced? And sometimes your SOPs, your rules might need to be changed, and that's worth the conversation. But what you don't want to happen is create all these things and people don't comply and people end up just doing things their own way. The beauty now is when I use products like Lindy, it allows the AI to look at what people are doing for their top priority for the day. It'll also look at their top 3 priorities from yesterday, and it will straight up score them and say, hey, I think Your priorities for today are excellent. And because you said specifically that you're working on closing this deal over here with this client is tied to revenue. And so it's a great priority. But if your priority, your top priority for today is creating a report that's not specific and creating a report is so broad, it doesn't seem like a high leverage thing. The AI will actually coach you in public and score the priority that you put out there in public. And it'll also show a monthly leaderboard at the end of the month showing how consistent people have been with filling out these daily reports, which is— that's in our SOPs. Also how high leverage people are in terms of picking the highest leverage thing to work on. Because you want to make sure that people are working on the highest priority thing. That way they're getting the most done. They're getting the most efficiency out of your company. So the beauty now with these agentic workflows is that it allows you to do real work that matters, and it also allows you to create new work, work that you might have not done before because you just didn't have the manpower for it. And so we have an example here with the daily standup accountability bot where on recurring schedule every day at 2:00 PM Monday through Friday, we're going to get the message from a— the messages from a Slack channel that we have. And then we have a prompt here that basically says, hey, you're an accountability coach. help coach these people up, our people up, setting higher leverage priorities and commenting on the 3 priorities that they worked on the day before. And basically this allows us to coach at scale and how we can create feedback loops and also ultimately just help people get better at scale so the company gets better at scale. This is again another example of new work that previously wasn't possible. But now that you have AI that's checking these things constantly and it's infinitely patient, that's worth it. And then you can bonus people that are doing good work. And so you can reinforce that loop over and over. So there's levels to this. And I would say this is the first level that you can do by making these daily standup coaches. Most AI writing tools were built by engineers who've never written a blog post in their lives. ClickFlow is entirely different. It's built by my team of SEO marketers and learns your business inside out, delivering automated, scalable content that is optimized for search engines and reads like it was crafted by your own team. No more managing freelancers, no more babysitting briefs. Just press go and grow. So head to clickflow.com and get your first 25,000 words free. That's not a typo. $25,000. Go get them. Clickflow.com. Now I'm going to give you a bonus here. Talk about recruiting top talent when it comes to these using AI. Instead of waiting for inbound applications, you can use AI to identify, vet, and reach out to top marketers based on promotion history, company type, and behavior data. Reality is, look, top talent, they aren't filling out job applications. They're already working at companies. You just need AI to find them. And so one example here is using Lindy. And when I go into Lindy, I can say, help me find paid media managers based based in Los Angeles that have at least 2 promotions at 2 different companies, and it will find these people. Now you might say, oh, I can just do that on LinkedIn. No, you can't. You can't actually filter based on those, those search queries. But when you use Lindy, it'll find those people. It will format by first name, last name. It'll find their email address, whether it's their personal email or work email. It'll find their LinkedIn URL as well. It'll give you the justification. It'll show the location they're in, whatever columns that you want. It will fill it out for you. And then you can have Lindy handle the outreach for you. It doesn't have to be Lindy. There's a bunch of other products out there that you can use. But my point is you're going to be able able to find top talent faster, and it's going to be the talent that you want based on the exact criteria that you set. Because trust me, when I worked with recruiters, I might set criteria, but guess what? People skirt around the rules. Oh, I can't. It's not that easy to find those people. Oh, it's so hard, blah, blah, blah. Nope. No more excuses. Not with AI. So the final part of what I want to discuss is product building. Product building might sound scary to you, but it's now easier than ever to build a product. And often a product makes for the best offer for your customers. What do I mean by that? When I'm talking about offers, sometimes you see companies, they might give away these ebooks. In exchange for your email address. But over time, the bar has gotten even higher. So now you might create a tool or a calculator, and then after that you might create a product. And so if the bars continue to get higher and then you can vibe code these different tools or calculators using Cursor or using Replit, you can use a lot of these different products to do so. My point now is that product building is continuing to become a higher moat. And so what we do, for example, with ClickFlow or Carrot is that we take different features that we have that are fairly novel and then we think about how do we give those things away for free? And so it might sound scary to you, but the very least, even if you're not technical, I'm not technical, is you can start to learn how to vibe code. And when you're using Replit, you can literally be in line waiting for lunch and you can open up Replit and say, I want to build this product over here. Here's a URL of what I like. Here's some screenshots over here. And I'll start coding and you can work with it back and forth. And then eventually it can even deploy the app for you. And so maybe you can give away free apps. You could definitely create free tools or calculators, give them away on your site. And those do a good job of creating links as well. More people that are linking to your site, that means your site is going to have more authority. And that means whatever content you create, you're going to drive more SEO traffic. Traffic, right? Even in today's day and age when it comes to AI. And so this is thinking about the long term, because you want to zig where other people are zagging. If everyone's doing the ebook right now, you got to think about how can I take it 10 steps higher? And so what that means is usually when you have a really good offer, your cost per acquisition, if you're running ads or really driving any form of acquisition, is going to be a lot lower because people are willing to give up their information or maybe pay a small dollar amount for something that's clearly a really good deal. And so Can you give away a no-brainer product that might cost people thousands of dollars and just give it away for free? Well, then if you're able to do that, you're going to drive a lot of goodwill and a lot of people are willing to come onto your email list, or maybe they're even willing to be opening customers. And so product building is becoming easier than ever and is sometimes the best strategy that you can use to deploy to grow your business a lot faster, especially in this AI-driven world. All right. So look, this was a lot of information and it's a lot to take in, but you don't want to do all of this at once. I would recommend that you take what makes sense for you right now for your business and not try to do everything under the sun. And then then maybe you can come back to this video because once you start building systems with AI, they will start to compound. You're looking to build systems that compound for the long term. And if you're a company, if you have the mindset, this mindset that you can build in your company, if you can think about moving rapidly, experimenting, and then rapidly cutting things that don't work and just staying focused, you are going to grow the fastest out of everyone else. Now look, just to keep things very simple, there's a PDF linked in the description below and information about the strategies and tools mentioned here. All right. And finally, for more information on where marketing is going, check out this video on AI marketing trends You need to pay attention to.