172. Marketing & AI Part 1: The Woman Entrepreneur's Guide to Using AI with Intention

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg-Lueck, and this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. We're talking this morning about Saving time using AI without losing yourself. I'm gonna talk about how to use AI as your marketing assistant. I love talking about this and thinking about this and teaching this is first of all, to start off in our CEO brain, right? But before we do that, I want to first of all introduce myself. I'm Melissa Kellogg-Lueck and I am the proud founder of the Avanti Business Academy for Women. My whole mission on this planet is to help more women create greater financial freedom for themselves through entrepreneurship and freedom in general, right? Because entrepreneurship gives us the freedom to work where we want, work with the clients that we want, doing work that we love. And so that's what we're all about here. And I absolutely love teaching about marketing because that is my forte where I'm an expert, but I also have been an entrepreneur for 21 years. So have a lot of expertise there as well. So that's what we're all about here. And today we're talking about AI. I'm starting a 3-week series all about AI. So I wanna invite you to make sure that you are a subscriber to my Substack. I wanna invite you to be a subscriber to my Substack. This is really where all my best work is going to live and is living currently. My whole purpose is to provide all the tools, the mindset, the skillset, and the tools that you need to grow and thrive in your business. And I'm continually adding things daily. So I invite you to subscribe to the Substack. It's free. We do also have paid tiers, $7 a month or $70 for the year. If you want to go deeper and get some more personal attention, some of the more advanced tools and things that we're gonna be doing. So I'll talk more about that later. But really why we're here today is this is the kickoff to the next 3 weeks of talking about AI. And I just love having this discussion with women entrepreneurs, with CEOs around how do you want to implement AI in your business? I'm gonna share with you how I'm doing it. And some really practical things that you can walk away with. I have a prompt kit. So for all my subscribers, I'm going to send out this prompt kit to you. And so you have some prompts that you can take with you and implement right away. So what I was saying earlier is that when I was in corporate marketing, that was my whole job. My one job was marketing. I was marketing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. So for 40 hours, And then once I became an entrepreneur, I was like, okay, I have to do marketing and I have to do sales and I have to do client delivery and all the other things that we do, finance, all the things, right? And so we really need to be as efficient and simple with our marketing as we can, because we can't spend all of our time on it. And so one thing that I've really found to help me is obviously having a team is great, right? And we know that when we have a team, we can use, leverage that support to really grow our business. But we can also use AI as part of that team or make sure our team members are trained on AI, right? And real quick, I would love to hear what is your level of comfort with and skill with AI? Just give me a number, 1, 2, or 3. 1 if you're a total beginner. You maybe have tried it and used it as kind of a search engine, but you're not really using it in your business. Or number 2, you're using it, but you know that you have a lot more expertise to grow into. Or number 3, you are a power user and you should probably be the one teaching this class. But really by the end of this class, I want you to have a really great understanding of how you can begin to delegate more of your marketing to AI without losing you and your voice in the process. And I have a prompt kit there for you that I'm gonna offer. But first I wanna really want to invite us to really get into our CEO brain right now and think about and decide for ourselves how we want to use AI in our business. As a CEO, I want you to have the power and the intention to get to decide how you wanna use AI in your business. I have heard and I have experienced there's a lot of kind of what I call AI shaming going on out there where people all have different opinions of how much or how little others should be using AI in their businesses. And I wanna just invite you, and I'm gonna walk through this decision process. I wanna just invite you to make your own decision of how you wanna use AI in your business. And also have your own back in the way that you can change your mind in the future, right? The way I'm using AI now is not the way I've used it in the past, and I wouldn't use it the way I used it in the past because I have learned things and thought about things and changed my mind on some things, right? And I wanna just empower you that you get to make the decision of how you wanna use it, and then you get to have your own back about it. I'm gonna share with you today how I use it and my thinking about it, but I invite you to just take some time and think about it for yourself and make a decision as the CEO of your business. So the way I think about it is that I, I want my business to be infused with my energy, my spirit, my thinking, my values. And so I'm never gonna hand any of that over to AI. What I really love handing over to AI is all of the administrative, kind of the assistant type things that really hold me up. So a really great way to think about this is think about there's 3 zones of delegation in your business. And so this can apply if you're training AI on things or if you're training an assistant, right? So think about it in 3 zones. So number 1 is the only you zone. So what are the things that only you can do, right? So for me, I think about strategy. I can have AI help me think through things, but I'm the one that's going to choose the strategy. I have to feel aligned with the strategy. I have to feel passionate about the strategy. So I'm the final the decider of the strategy for my business and my marketing. Okay. So the only you zone. So that's like strategy, client delivery. I'm the one that's delivering the services to my clients, right? I am serving them. I show up for that and I don't delegate that to anyone but myself. Relationships, right? I'm the one that's responsible for building relationships with the other humans in my orbit, my current clients. My future clients, my referral partners, my community. I take responsibility for those relationships. And then final approval on anything that goes out from my business, any sorts of communications. I want to have final approval on those things. That's the only you zone, right? So those are the things that I am going to hold, right? But there's so many other things involved in our marketing, right? And so the second zone is the you plus support, right? So think of support could be AI or an assistant, AI and an assistant, AI and a team, right? Or just a team or just AI, right? But so it's me plus support. And so this could be, for example, drafting content. Right. So that could be drafting content. It could be a team member that executes the vision, right? You know, someone that maybe helps me with, with serving my clients or serving my community, right? I provide the thinking and then AI and/or the team provides the structure. They're the underpinning structure. Right? So that's the you plus support zone. And then third is the not you zone. So there are plenty of things in your business that you do not need to be involved in. Right? So for me, it's like podcast editing. I approve the final podcast, but I don't actually do the editing. Scheduling of social media and content going out, creating the, setting up the emails in my email system. I don't do that. Right? I don't need to do that. Actually doing the posting. I do some posting, but then I also have team members that, that post for me. So think about what are all the things that you are doing on a daily basis that maybe you don't need to be doing that are in the not you zone, right? And so what, what you can do is list out all of the things, all of the marketing activities you do. Say that the top 10 marketing activities that you do on a weekly basis, on a regular weekly basis. And just next to them, you could write, is this an only me thing, a me plus support, or a not me thing? And so I would offer for all of those not me things, that's either a team member or AI. And those would be the first lowest hanging fruit, I would say, that you could think about delegating and teaching AI on. Okay, so what I'm going to share with you are like my top 3 things, what I am delegating. Okay, so I want to talk with you about the 3 ways that I use AI the most. All right, so we have kind of that, that the bigger picture of the CEO thinking of we get to decide how we want to use AI. And so then as far as your marketing, list out those 10 ways, 10 marketing actions that you're doing on a weekly basis, and then assess, is that an only me thing? Is this a me plus support thing, or is this something that I don't need to be involved with? Right? So those are the first 2 things I want you to do. And then that gives you an idea of what you can delegate to AI. So for me, in doing this exercise, the top 3 things that I am using AI for is number 1, repurposing my content. Number 2, calendaring and helping me plan out my week and make sure I— making sure I have all the time on my calendar I need in order to create the marketing that I want to create and fulfill the plan that I have. And then number 3 is idea generation, right? And so the first one I want to talk about that I absolutely love that. If I look back to how I've been doing marketing before AI, before I started using AI heavily over the last couple of years, we had to create everything from scratch, right? And now we have so many tools to repurpose what we are creating. And the beauty of this is that you get to leverage, and this is really how we grow and scale. So if we're talking to CEOs, ladies, this is how we grow and scale. We grow and scale our businesses by leveraging our time, our money, and what we've created, right? The ideas, the thought leadership that we have. You should never be creating things over from scratch, right? And so AI makes this so easy. And so what I've been doing, I think probably for at least 2 years now, is I will create one anchor piece of content each week. I call it the anchor piece of content. So for example, this live that we're on right now, this live will be my anchor piece of content for the week. And then we will take the recording of this and edit it and turn it into a podcast episode. And then I will take the transcript of it and I will combine it with all the other teachings and things I've been doing throughout this week. And that's what will become my newsletter, or I'll turn it into articles for Substack, right? And turn it into notes. And so I never have to be creating all these different things. And so Really what I see for us as women entrepreneurs is we don't have a content problem. We have a repurposing problem, right? If we would just look at all that we are creating, because anytime we have a conversation, anytime we write a post or we send a voice text or we answer someone's question, that is all intellectual property and thought leadership that you have. That can be reused in a bunch of different ways. And so what I like to do, and I'm doing this more and more, is really thinking about each week how I can capture all of that thought leadership. And then I use AI to help me repurpose it. I've built a content flywheel. And so for those of you that become paid subscribers, I'm gonna take you through this, how to create your own content flywheel on August 5th, I'm going to have a masterclass just for my Substack paid subscribers. And if you subscribe today, between now and August 5th, you will be part of that. And actually, even after August 5th, you'll have the replay. But I've created a content flywheel that basically I can take the transcript from this class, I'll take the transcripts from other conversations and places that I have taught, talks that I have developed, things that I have written, I'll take all of that and put it into AI and ask it to create all these different pieces of content that I want to put out into the world. And so those are all my ideas, my frameworks, my teachings, my words, but it's helping me to reuse it in— my goal is always 3 to 10 ways of repurposing. So that it can help more people in more ways. So you all here are people that watch videos, right? Or come to live masterclasses. But we could probably imagine that there are a lot of other people that either couldn't be here or they don't really like watching lives. They would much rather read an article. So when I repurpose this content and put it into an article, it's going to serve them. Right? Or when I cut it up into short-form video and post it on Instagram as reels, it's gonna reach the people that are there. And so it really helps us to expand our impact, right? And what I wanna say with AI is it is a myth that you have to have the perfect prompt or that you have to know how to create this or that before you do it. You can just go into AI and say, I wanna turn this one piece of content into 10 pieces of repurposed content. Can you help me? How do you help me do that? And you can ask it questions and it will tell you how to do the things. So I have been building skills on Claude, which basically are prompts that, that it will remember and it will run them anytime you ask it to. So for example, my content flywheel is a set of prompts about how to repurpose my content, but I don't have to tell it who I am and tell it what role to play and tell it what to do every time. It remembers all of that. And all I have to do is go into that skill, it's called in Claude, and put in my latest content. I just, Attach it in there and tell it to run the content flywheel and it runs it. It does all the things because I have it do the same thing every week, right? So this skills are really great for repurposing and having AI do the same task over and over. And I love it because then I don't have to do it over and over. So that's one way that I'm using it. We hear all these fancy terms, these fancy, like, tech terms or computer programmer, software engineer terms, right? And agents and all of this. And really all of it is, all it is a skill or a, it's like a workflow that AI knows how to run over and over. You just prompt it to run the flywheel and it knows all the tasks and how to do it. And so it's great because it challenges us as a CEO to create that workflow. And it's the same if you had a, a human working for you, you would have a workflow for them, right? And you would give them all the steps. And so you're doing the same with AI. You're giving it all the steps. And the way Claude is now, it can hook into your calendar, your email, your Asana project management, and it also hooks into my Descript, which is what I use for editing my podcast and video editing and audio editing. And it can go into those programs and do things for me. So it's wonderful. But that leads me perfectly into the second way that I am using AI in my marketing. And it's around calendaring and scheduling. So we all have a list of thing— marketing actions that we do every week, whether it's I send out an email weekly to my list. I post on social media 5 times. I reach out to the people that I met when I'm out networking. Whatever those things are, you need to have time on your calendar for those projects. And these are the projects that you've decided are yours to own, right? If we go back to where we started, there are things that you want to own, right? And so those activities that you want to own, that you believe are only you can do, they need to be on your calendar. You've got to have time set aside for those, because what I have experienced over and over again, and with many of the women I work with, is that we have this list of all these marketing things we want to do, and they never get done because they're not on the calendar. They get pushed off the plate because A client messaged us, or I have a kid today with strep throat. I've gotta take her to the doctor. And so it's like there's always something. And then so it's our marketing that gets pushed off the plate. And then when that happens, we aren't bringing in sales opportunities. We're not making offers. We're not bringing in business. Right. And so I have started to use AI to really help me with my calendaring and planning out my week. And so I use Claude, like I said before. And I created the skill, right? So she knows when I ask her to plan out my week, she knows exactly what I'm talking about. And so all I do is I'll put in there my big 3 things that I want to accomplish this week, because those come from my brain, right? So I know what my big 3 goals are for the week. And then she knows all the things that I have assigned to me in Asana. She can look at my calendar. She goes through my email to look and see if there's anything in there. And then she'll come back to me and say, okay, this is how the calendar is gonna look this week. What do you think? And she asks questions. And that's been really helpful for me because now I have specific time on my calendar for all the things that I want to accomplish. And so that's me honoring me and setting me up for success. Right. And so I think that's one of the things that's so important is that we've gotta make sure we're setting ourselves up for success with our marketing. And that comes with setting up your goals and your plan. And that's something I work with my clients on. So I'm always happy to talk with you about that. That's not what we're talking about today, but if you want to be able to accomplish your goals and your plans, you've got to set yourself up for success on a daily basis. And so you're not gonna— time for marketing and doing those things that we want is not gonna just appear. You and I, we all know we've got full calendars, so we've gotta set that time aside and prioritize it because bringing in new people into our world and nurturing relationships and making offers is the lifeblood of our business. We have to make time for that on our calendar. And so I've used AI to help me with that. And that is a process that used to take me at least an hour. It really, if I was very focused with no distractions on a Sunday or something, I could get it done in an hour where I would go through my calendar, go through my project management, go through my email and just see all the things that people needed from me, all the places I needed to be going and match it all. That would take me at least an hour. And now AI does it in 15 minutes. And usually I'll do it on Monday during my lunch hour or on Sunday. I'll just have her plan out my week and here's my 3 goals for the week. And it really has helped me to stay organized. And then all I have to do is follow the calendar, follow the plan, right? Not be thinking about what should I be doing and what's important today? No, I already decided on Sunday or Monday, what are the top 3 things? What's the most important? I've got time set aside for those so I can accomplish them. And then so all I have to do is follow the plan. So that's been really helpful. And then the third part is idea generation. The third strategy in how I'm using AI is around generating ideas and not that I use AI to generate my ideas, but I can use it for research. I can use it for looking at trends. I just created a whole trend document, or I had it do a whole bunch of trend research on Substack. Since I'm new to Substack and new to publishing on Substack, I had it do a whole trend analysis around this, the area of entrepreneurship and marketing that I work in. And that was really helpful. For those of you that are, you human, into human design. I am a generator 6/3, like I'm not a specialist, but I really think that knowing my human design has really helped. And I actually gave my Claude my human design profile. And so it will ask me questions and communicate with me based on my human design. But what I know about myself is that I am a responder. So in terms of creating ideas and generating new content, it really helps me as a responder to be able to see ideas. And then I can use my sacral authority, my gut, to really respond to those ideas. And then I'll know if those ideas are for me or they're not for me, whether I'm aligned with them or not. I'm a sacral authority. So Claude was always asking me to check my gut. And so I think So fun. But because I know that about myself and now Claude knows that about me, if you click on your name in the bottom left corner and you go to settings and there's a main section there, instructions for Claude, and you put in there, I put in my professional background, some, some context about me. And so that's where I put it in there. So that is consistent throughout all the projects, all the everything. It's kind of the main brain. If you put it in there, then Claude knows that about you for everything that you do with it. Yeah. So Claude can really help me with idea generation because I can say, uh, this is what I wanna talk about. This is how I wanna teach it. Claude knows how I teach, cuz I put a lot of my teachings in there so that it already knows. And so then like for the, this series of 3 AI masterclasses that I'm gonna have over the next 3 weeks, Claude helps me to develop that. Like I said, this is what I have been teaching. This is what I love teaching. This is my perspective. Let's come up with some great masterclasses. And so we have that back and forth. And it really helps me with idea generation. And I have a prompt in this prompt kit for you that it just will help you to get unstuck and give you something to respond to. Because for most of us, and I know the studies show this, that for most of us, I think it's 80-something percent of us sitting in front of a blank screen with a blinking cursor is not inspirational. It doesn't inspire. Fire ideas. Is that true for anybody else? We just, I just freeze like at that. But if I can start having a conversation. So if you think of Claude, like if you had a marketing assistant sitting in your office with you and you wanted to just have a conversation with her about what's going on with the clients, what's going on with the business, what's going on with the economy or whatever, what's that conversation that you would have with her? And you can have that with Claude. Claude. And so it's gonna give you some ideas and you can kind of bounce those back and forth and, oh, that one kind of fits, but it sounds too this, or I like that one, but the hook isn't that great. And go back and forth. And so that's how I use it for idea generation. So I do have some prompts in this pack for you, like 10 different angles on a specific topic or hooks and headlines. And not that you have to use any of them. Remember, you are always the final authority. You are always the chief editor. But I think the ideas that it can give you can be really helpful. So those are the main 3 ways that I am currently using AI in my marketing. And so for all of you that are subscribers here on Substack, I'm gonna send you the AI marketing prompt kit. And this has prompts. Like I said, I'm primarily using Claude now and creating skills. And so for those of you that use other AI tools, you can just take these prompts and put 'em in there. But if you're interested in creating some, some Claude skills or specifically this content flywheel, I wanna invite you to join me on August 5th. All of my paid subscribers will be invited to join me on August 5th to, to build their own content flywheel and we'll build it together. We'll be on Zoom, we'll be interacting. So I invite you to do that and So subscribing to Substack is $7 a month or $70 for an entire year. And as an annual subscriber, you get access to all of my experiences and challenges that I host throughout the year. It's all included in that $70. So it's a no-brainer, but if you wanna just dip your toe in, you can be a monthly subscriber for $7 and you will get this Content Flywheel Build Day workshop together and any of the other fun things that we do together in the future and any other masterclasses or things that I'm offering. So you will get to take advantage of those. And I'm always teaching around marketing and simplicity. And AI just fits perfectly into that. So just as a recap, I wanna remind you to First of all, start with your CEO brain, right? And think about how do I want to use AI in my marketing? What are the marketing pieces, things you're doing in marketing that are fully you, that only you can do? You wanna own those. What are the things that you and AI could do together, right? Like idea generation, right? And then what are the things that you wanna fully delegate that don't need to be you? Research, admin, posting, Scheduling, those types of things. So AI can do a lot of that for you. A lot of the administrative work, even collecting some of these pieces of content. I created an excavator, a thought leadership excavator, which I'll teach on that too. I should give you guys that too. It basically collects all of the brilliance that you have created. And for me, it's been 21 years of being an entrepreneur and really shows you all of your common themes and your common quotes and your stories that you tell. And all those things that I've been forgetting that I've created over the last 20 years. So that's really powerful too for idea generation. So anyway, so you gotta decide first how you wanna use AI in your marketing and then have your own back about it, right? And you get to change your mind in the future, but just have your own back about it and allow it to be helpful. Then I talked about the 3 ways that I'm using it with repurposing, with calendaring and planning out, making sure I have time set aside for the projects that are most important to me. And then 3 for idea generation. So often I think we are actually, and I find myself doing this, we're doing so many administrative things that we have no business doing that we don't even notice. We're just doing them. I had this thought the other day when I was gathering all the things for my repurposing. I'm like, I don't need to be going out to Descript to get that transcript or going to Zoom to get that transcript or going and trying to find that file. I don't have to do that. Claude could do all of that for me. But we just get so ingrained in our habits that, that we just continually do things over and over the same way. So just have some awareness this week and think about, I wonder if I could apply AI to this. And if you have that question, you're always welcome to reach out to me and ask me, but also you can just ask your AI tool, right? I do that all the time and I learn new things because, for example, I didn't know that Claude could connect to Descript and it can, but I was saying I needed to get some transcripts and for some reason I just asked Claude, can you get transcripts? And it's like, listen, it's Descript. We have a connection to Descript. I was like, yes, it is. So things are changing and improving every day. So you can always just ask your AI tool, I need to do XYZ, can you help me with that? And if it can, it will tell you. If it can't, it will tell you. So, all right, thank you so much for being here, and I hope to see you next week. But for now, have a fabulous rest of your day and your week. And make sure you get subscribed and so you get all the goodies. All right. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I wanna invite you to become part of my community. Each Friday, I'm gonna deliver to your inbox my weekly celebration, as well as my thoughts on the latest in business and marketing. I wanna keep you in the know about my upcoming events, free trainings, book clubs. All the fun things, even some free gifts. And of course, I'm gonna let you know about these new podcast episodes. I'll see you there.