Strategies for a 1-man marketing team, How to get AI to write like you for free, and more

We got a question here. How would you strategize as a marketing team of one for a small business?

How would you strategize for a marketing team of one for a small business? Did they tell you what kind of small business?

No.

What I would do is I would just pick one marketing channel and that's it. Look to see where your competition is getting their sales from. So I would go check out paid ads on Google, paid ads on Meta's platform. I would check out if they're doing SEO and what keywords they're ranking for. I would check out if they're doing email marketing. The list goes on and on. So look at most of the channels. Look to see where they're getting most of their traffic because you can see in most of these, there's so many marketing tools out there that show you this. Then based on there, you know what channel to focus on first because if that's what your competition is doubling down on, then you know that's probably driving them a good chunk of the revenue, especially if you look at 3 or 4 competitors and they're all leveraging that same one channel as their main driver of traffic. It's probably their main driver of sales. That's where you should start focusing on first if you only have one person.

Yeah, look, if you're marketing for one business, it's marketing 101.

What is it?

people to the point of sale. And so, marketing means also, that means looking for where your attention actually is. It might be on Reddit, like it might be on YouTube, it might be on Twitter. Like you need to figure out where your audience is hanging out and the psyche of the audience and the messaging that works. This is why Reddit's really awesome for that stuff to do some customer development.

Yeah.

You can also even look at reviews too for products that are similar in your space. So, you have to do some upfront strategic work and then figure out, okay, well, Where's my audience actually hanging out? And knowing that business is a game of resource allocation, that you have to allocate your resources into the channel that you're most comfortable with, right? So you and I, like, okay, we used to start with writing. We might be comfortable with writing. We're okay with podcasting now, right? And so those might be the channels that we target first. So what is it for you? Maybe you're really entertaining. Maybe you're really good at video. Maybe you're like the Rich BFF where she's really entertaining with finance. She gets way more views than the other people. It's because she's got a take and she's got a little sass to her, right? And she like We don't necessarily have that, but, you know, we just do what we're good at. So that's what I would say. Focus on one, figure out where your audience is hanging out, where your audience is hanging out. And then once you have more resources, once you max out a channel, then you can start to expand.

Dude, it was so funny. The other day I released a Twitter prompt on ChatGPT to improve your conversion rates. And I talk about the prompt I use to talk, to find your, or to target your ideal customer. So you can actually ask ChatGPT, Who is the ideal customer for your product or service? It ends up telling you. And then it usually doesn't just give you one option, it gives you a list like 5 or 10. And then you follow up with, out of the list that you showed, which segment makes up the largest buyer group? Because then you got it. And then from there, you can ask them to show you marketing messages that appeal to that segment. But, you know, you can actually follow up with a 4th prompt that I've never done that's worth checking out. Where do most of those people hang out?

Hmm.

Right? And that'll give you—

Are you doing this in Bard or, sorry, Gemini or ChatGPT?

ChatGPT.

Okay.

And that'll probably give you ideas of what platform to target. You don't have to spend as much time. But ChatGPT isn't always accurate. And funny enough, you and I met up with venture capitalists yesterday. We were doing dinner and they were like, what the heck? We have employees doing core analysis using ChatGPT. They're like, it's off. That's like bad judgment. Yes.

Fire.

And I was just like, why aren't they using Excel? He's like, exactly. I'm like, yeah, ChatGPT's off, dude. I've had ChatGPT create a chart for me and it took him so long. My buddy Salo, who works with me, he heads up most of our marketing initiatives. He was sitting next to me here in LA. He was just like, dude, you want to create this chart for X? Let's just have ChatGPT do it. I was like, okay. I'm like, dude, this is going to take forever.

Yeah.

After Messing around for probably 15 minutes, and we both were doing it at the same time. Neither him or I could get ChatGPT to create the chart the way we wanted. The data that we fed was accurate based on all the research we did, but the chart didn't resemble the data, and we couldn't get it to actually create the chart that we wanted. And we're just like, screw this crap, we're just going to do it manually.

Yeah, I think it'll get there eventually. It's just like, again, long-term bullish, short-term it's like a little more bearish. Um, there's a lot of cool stuff happening, but did you know There's a— I don't know if I showed you this. There's— here's how you can get ChatGPT to write like you. So go to— it's— sorry, it's not even that. Here's how you can get Google Gemini to write like you. So what you do is you can take your best tweets because your tweets are actually you, right? Same thing with my tweets, right? So because it's in your voice and anything in your own voice is always going to perform better than whoever's ghostwriting for you. And so there's like a gap right now because there's people that want to ghostwrite. You want to save some time, whatever, right? So what I do is I took— what I did was I took 10 of my top-performing tweets historically that I like the most. And I just said, okay, hey, you are the world's best copywriter and I want you to suss out the nuances of how I write, any redundancies, and look at my thought patterns and all these things, right? And then here are my top 10 performing tweets over here. And then it's like, okay, got it, right? Then it's like, okay, well, I want you to write something about the latest marketing trends in 2024 using my voice. And then boom, it pumps it out. It's like 85, 90% there. It's pretty good.

I'll get you more than 90% there.

Okay.

We do a similar approach, but we do it with blog posts. You're not giving enough data for your top 10 tweets. If you do it with blog posts, it turns out—

Yeah, because now you can do a million tokens on Gemini too, which is a lot more.

Yes.

So, so how, how's it going for, for you?

It, it, it does, it goes pretty well. So you can feed the system, um, content that you've written in the past, especially specifically if it's just you, not other people editing or team members, but just you if you want it to write like you, and you feed it in. If you have multiple blog posts, call it 10 blog posts, they're each 2,000 words or 1,000 words or whatever the number is and you're feeding it, it learns way better than if you just give it a few tweets because there's more to digest.

Yeah. I mean, with this stuff, what I'm realizing and this ties into a next good topic around— so when it comes to creating things and just testing out new stuff like this, you can't— sure, your team might volunteer some of these things but ultimately, if you want to move the fastest, you're going to have to test it yourself. Zuck, I don't know if you know this, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't believe in delegation. And so, he was doing an interview with Morning Brew and basically here's what he told the people. So, he says, probably one of my most controversial leadership or management things is I don't actually believe in delegating that much. I kind of think like the way a founder should work is you should basically make as many decisions and get involved in as many things as you can. I think that ties in with things like this. You want to move it quickly, do it, make a Loom video, send it off to people instead of saying, oh yeah, here's— here, this tweet's really— here, check out this tweet over here. And then like they read it and they don't know what to do afterwards and they don't know how to test it. And it's just like, just move a little— if you want to move a little faster, just go the extra mile.

Dude, it's the same thing that we talked about a few podcast episodes ago with Amazon and the Amazon way to grow a business. You have idea, you're the one writing a memo. You're not delegating it to someone else to put your idea on a piece of paper. And you're getting people involved and figuring out, all right, what are the things we need to accomplish? And everyone works together to just crank them out. That's what you're doing right now in your sales process.

I was walking to the gym this morning. I was just like, you know, as much as it's like, you know, it's very— it's a nice thing to want people to grow. It's like most people just aren't going to. Most people like to be told what to do and that that's okay, right? They need instruction. And instead of expecting them to figure it out, expecting them to build the business for you, you're going to have to get involved. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.

Dude, and speaking of Zuck, because he's done well and he's a billionaire, so I'm not going to question his strategy. And I know people have multiple strategies and approaches to run businesses. You have something in this topic list, the Indian billionaire way. I'm just I'm just curious what it is.

Oh yeah. So, when we were talking on the phone yesterday, so you brought up Dharmesh, right? And so, I brought up you too. It's like because people like to call you a billionaire. Who knows if you're a billionaire or not, right? Neil doesn't reveal this stuff. So—

No, I'm not rich. But okay, continue.

Point is this, right? So, when you look at how Dharmesh runs HubSpot, right? Like Dharmesh does really well for himself. But his mandate in the very beginning is I'm going to work on the things I want to work on. I'm not going to have any direct reports. So, no direct people reporting to him, right? You also don't have any direct reports as well. So I'm like, well, you know, the, the, the pattern recognition here is like, well, you're both Indian and you both don't have direct reports, right? Now, who knows if you're a billionaire or not? I just like calling it the Indian billionaire way.

I say I'm not rich, but okay, continue.

Because, because we know for a fact that Dharmesh is a billionaire, right? So feel free to elaborate on this one. That, that's where the topic idea came from.

Sure. And I, I don't know Dharmesh's net worth, and I don't want to comment on it. Yes, it's obvious he's done financially well, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't want people discussing his net worth.

It's already been discussed on other podcasts.

That's up to him to discuss it, right?

Sorry, Dharmesh.

And the way I look at direct reports is we're a small organization. We don't have that many people.

Yeah, just like 1,000.

We're not 1,000 yet. My guess is we'll hit 1,000 in like 3 months, 4 months. Close enough. But when I look at that, You know, the reason I don't have direct reports is I'm a terrible manager.

It takes a lot of humility to admit that.

I'm a really good individual contributor.

And you're fast.

And I'm fast and I just go and do shit myself.

Yeah.

You know, like even when we do M&A deals.

Yeah.

I love our M&A person. His name is Carlos Sesta and he came from Dentsu Aegis. He ran Americas for M&A for them. And when I deal with Carlos and stuff like that and we're trying to buy deals, Dude, like the last two deals we have, most M&A people are just like, "Oh yeah, let me handle it. We have the system and process." Carlos like encouraged me. He's like, "Neil, you want to go strike a deal? Go talk to him. He'll give me bullet points because he knows how to do this way better than me." Yeah, dude. I just call up the founders to strike up a conversation. Like, you know, I like your business. You like my business. Let's do it. And then we just negotiate on the phone. Just tell him like, "Let's get rid of the bankers." And Carlos encourages. He's like, "Dude, I love it when you go and execute on it." And it's not like I'm going around his back. I'm working with him, and I'm structuring things the way he had. Because he knows more about it. But I just like taking shit in my own hands and just getting it done.

Yeah, you're involved in your own way. And you're not necessarily micromanaging because you know, you're not gonna— you're not a good manager either, right? But it's just like you, you're adding in your own magic to it. And then once you get the deal, you're on to the next thing, right? But that's just how you've always worked. And you accept that. I think most people can accept that.

So, but the key is, is if you want to do stuff on your own, get feedback from others. Now, for example, we're about to buy a company. You pay them X dollars upfront and you're paying them X dollars in a year or 2 years or over time. One of the deals we have structured, call it roughly 12 months after we buy the business, we give them another check. And we were going back and forth on how to structure it. You know, do you end up just making it where if you hit certain revenue numbers? Well, if you do that, then they can end up signing deals that just bring in revenue and bring in no profit.

Hmm.

Do you end up making it where You're doing it on gross margins. Our CFO is like, well, our gross margins fluctuate quite a bit. It would be difficult to make it and it's not fair on the other end. I was like, okay, do you make it where they have to retain customers? And we talked to them like, well, if you retain X amount of customers, we'll give you 40% of your money guaranteed, the rest based on renewals. And we went back and forth with the team internally. The point I'm getting at is even if you're an individual contributor, like I was the one negotiating, I didn't just go to the business owners, right? Because there's 2 of them and just say, hey, this is how we're going to end up doing the deal and come out based on what I wanted to do. I talked to my team because they have more experience than I do in this, and they gave us ideas on what would work and what didn't. And once we all agreed upon what's the best solution, I then went back to the people. So the point I'm getting at is even if you're that person who likes being an individual contributor and you don't like delegating or managing a lot of people, It doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the input from other people who know more than you. There's always someone out there who's smarter, who knows more about a specific topic than you may know. And it's wise to get their opinion, whether you take it or not. There's no harm in asking.

You know, there's an exercise that we've done over the years, and it's worth doing every maybe 2, 3 years or so. It's called the Zone of Genius exercise. So I might go to you and say, hey, so, hey, Neil, I want some feedback. Basically, it's a survey, right? So, it's basically, hey, what are the things that you find that I really enjoy doing and that I'm really good at, right? That's your zone of genius. What are the things that I'm really good at but I don't appear to enjoy to be doing, right? And it's like, what are the things that I'm just like, what I'm doing right now but I just suck at, right?

Yeah.

And then, you get the feedback from a lot of different people. It could be anonymous if you want it to be. I prefer to just be like, you know, people name themselves. And then, they give you the feedback in person and it feels so liberating because it's like, yeah, that's what I actually want to do. And for the rest of it, sure, go hire people to help you there if you can afford it.

Wait, have you done this for yourself?

Yeah, I have. I have a sheet.

So, what's your zone of genius?

My zone of genius is when I'm networking, like building relationships. So, that I think I'm really good at. The other one is like creating and marketing because it feels like I'm playing a game, right? Like those are the 2 areas I'm good at. The curse for me is like I'm a pretty like okay to decent manager. And like that's the gift and the curse too, right? Because then I have to like, I'll just, no, you should do it this way. But if you're just like, I suck at it, it's like I'm just not going to touch it, right? Like that's better. So, so it is what it is.

Yeah, I typically focus most of my time on strategy over anything else. And I love it. I have fun with it. I've never done a zone of genius thing. I just tend to focus on what I love. And typically, what someone likes is usually what they're good at naturally.

I think you're probably already aware of your zone of genius. But like, I'll send you a template if you want to send it to a few people you work with. Because it's like, it's always interesting to look at too.

Yeah, actually, I would actually send it to a few people I work with.

Okay, I'll send it to you. All right, everyone. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Also, if you want more stuff like this, you want to hang out with Neil and I, I was going to say neilpatel.com, but it's not neilpatel.com. marketingschool.io/agency to go apply to the Agency Owners Association.

Dude, when are we doing it? Don't we have dates picked out?

May 8th to the 10th. So depending on the level that you're at, go ahead and apply and we'll see you inside. Bye.