173. Marketing & AI Part 2: Using AI to Organize Your Thought Leadership and Expand Your Reach

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lewicki, 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. Okay. What we're going to talk about today, I'm really excited. So today is part 2 of our Using AI as your marketing assistant. And really why I love the options and using AI this way is that we can communicate and get our message out to more people in more ways. And it really helps our reach grow without losing our voice. We're never using AI to write anything or create anything for us from scratch. But we are using it as an assistant to draft things or to synthesize things. And so I'm gonna talk more about that today. I'm so glad to see you all here. And so just as a point of introduction, I am Melissa Kellogg-Lueck. I'm so glad you're here and joining us today. I absolutely love helping women entrepreneurs to create greater freedom for themselves and their families through entrepreneurship. And I teach a lot about marketing because that's my wheelhouse. I've been working in marketing and been a marketing expert for 21 years. And now we get to, to talk about AI and the immense capabilities of this technology to really help us to increase our reach and help more people, right? And grow our business and do it simply and with more freedom. All right. Last week I talked about the 3 ways that I'm using AI as my marketing assistant. Number 1, really helping me to make sure all of my marketing projects and tasks and things that I want to prioritize during the week are on my calendar. AI really helps me with calendaring. It goes and compares my calendar, grabs any pertinent emails, and looks at my Asana project management system and makes sure that it all gels and is consistent with the goals I have given it for the week. So that's one way I use it. The second way I use it is helping me come up with ideas and synthesize a lot of the wisdom and knowledge that I'm creating at all times. And so that's what I'm gonna talk about today. And so the third way that I use AI is repurposing content. So we're gonna talk about that next week. But today I wanna talk with you about how I use AI to help me come up with ideas and also put those ideas out into the world. So what we're gonna talk about today is how you capture ideas. How you synthesize those ideas, and then how you publish them and put them out into the world to serve people, right? And to attract clients and people into your world. It's so interesting to think just a couple of years ago, before I started using AI, I had to create multiple pieces of content every week. I would create, for example, I'd write my podcast and then I would record it, and then I would have to write the show notes for that. I'd have to write the email announcement for that, and then all the social media posts. And it was all just copy. Obviously the podcast was audio, but it was all then copywriting, right? And just that process of coming up with the idea, writing the outline, recording the episode, and then sending it off. I've always had a team member help me with editing. And then, so they've gotta take some time to do that. And then I would write the, the show notes, the email announcement, and all the social media posts that would take me hours and hours of work, probably half of a day during a week, right? For one marketing deliverable, just around the podcast. Right. And now I can come up with ideas, not based on just what I'm thinking about at the moment, but based on what's going on in my industry, what I'm hearing from my clients, what I am teaching and talking about, what I'm writing about, all the notes, things that I'm journaling about. And all we have to do is have a really great system to capture them, synthesize them, and use them. For me, I've always have ideas flowing, right? But my challenge— so tell me if you guys can relate— my challenge has always been like bringing them all together and then synthesizing them in a way that I can put everything that I'm learning and thinking about and teaching back out into the world to serve more women. You have all these ideas and it's just hard to bring them all together and create something that's meaningful. Because I do believe that we have ideas around us at all times, right? And then, so that's always been a challenge for me. And then also creating the resources like freebies or tools, that's always been a stumbling block for me too. And so AI has changed all of that for me and made it so much simpler. And so I'm gonna teach you today what that process is and how we can actually bring together all of these great ideas we have and really put them in a useful format and get them back out into the world. The way I have created and designed the way I use AI based on what my biggest stumbling blocks are and the things that have really held me up. First of all, what I want you to think about is where are all the places that you capture your thoughts and ideas, your reflections, your notes, your stories. I have Notes app in my phone on my iPhone, right? I use Evernote. So the notes that I'm using to teach you today, I created in Evernote, which is an app. And I've been a subscriber to that since I think 2013. So I have, I don't know, 13 years of ideas in that one app, right? So I have notes in my phone, I've got notes in Evernote. I'm a journaler, right? So I have journal entries, I have all of the meetings, the teachings, the client sessions. I have all of that too, where my intellectual property is and my thought leadership is being created, right? And so it used to be all of those things would live siloed from one another, right? And the only way I could bring them together would be if I— I don't know, I just didn't really even bring them together. I would just see what kind of was bubbling up and develop content around that. But now what I do is so much more organized and valuable because I use all of those different places. I have AI collect all of those notes and things in those different places and then bring it all together. So now I'm using the notes that I've compiled in my phone, my journal entries, call transcripts, frameworks I've already created because obviously AI has memory, right? So I have one project in my Claude that is a copywriting project and it knows my brand voice, like I taught last week how to create your brand voice. And then it has memory of all the things that I've already put in there, and it brings it all together. And so using AI this way has really helped me to create much better, juicier, more useful, more valuable teaching and content. And being a woman of middle age, I forget a lot of things. I forget about frameworks that I've created. And it doesn't forget, right? So it can bring those back to my awareness. And so the framework I'm going to teach you today is a 3-step framework. So number 1, we're going to capture ideas. Number 2, we're going to synthesize them. And number 3, we're going to publish them. Okay, so if we're thinking about capturing your ideas, I want you to consider creating a process for yourself that makes it easy and simple to capture your ideas. First of all, I want you to remember that most ideas will come to you when you're not sitting at your computer or at your desk in front of that blank screen with the blinking cursor, right? That's not, at least for me, And for, I think, the vast majority, two-thirds of people, studies have shown, I think it's either 60 or 80% of people sitting in front of a computer, the blank screen and a blinking cursor is not where they get their best ideas. For most of us, our best ideas come to us in other places. For me, it's while I'm taking a walk or when I'm driving in the car, right? Or when I'm in the shower or sitting outside on the patio in the morning, having my first cup of coffee. Watching the sunrise. Those are when my best ideas come. So what you want to do is think about when do my best ideas come, and then I want to have a way to capture them. So for example, if you love speaking out your ideas, you want to have a way that you can capture those ideas, right? So for example, if you're driving in your car— this works in the shower too— is have your voice recorder easily reachable on your phone, right? And so then you can just speak those ideas. You can speak those ideas into your voice recorder. And on iPhone, at least, I'm not sure about the Android platform, which I imagine it does the same thing, but your voice recorder will transcribe your voice notes. And so then you have the voice and then you also have the audio and now you also have the transcript, right? So I will have a voice recorder that I use. And so I can use my Evernote also. They have a voice recorder. I also use my Notes app a lot. If I don't have my journal with me and I have ideas, I will just put them in my Notes app. And I know Taylor Swift does the same thing. I heard an interview with her. I don't know if it was on her documentary or whatever, but her Notes app is just forever long because she puts ideas for songs in there. So anytime she wants to write a new song, she just goes into her Notes app and has it there. So just think about for you, my ideas come in the shower or driving or on a walk. How am I going to capture that? Because I don't know about you, and especially for me, if I wake up in the middle of the night and I have an idea, some brilliant thing comes to me, I'm always like, oh, I'll remember it. I'm sure I'll remember it. And sure enough, in the morning I don't remember it, right? So make sure you have a way that's super simple for you. And our phones are always with us, so it's always easy to grab that phone and do the voice note or whatever. If you really value your ideas and your brilliance, which I encourage you to highly value that, then you will have a way to capture those because I believe that we are basically a conduit of ideas and value, right? So those ideas that come to us, those pearls of wisdom are meant for us to receive and then for us to put out into the world. And so I'm trying really hard to have that system so that I'm not quote unquote wasting those ideas, right? And so that's number one is to capture those ideas and have a place where you capture those. So I capture them in my Notes app, in my journal, in my Evernote app. So that's one place I capture them. And then if you're meeting with people, talking with people, serving people throughout the week, which I know you all are, then there's a lot of value that is included in all of that as well. So make sure you're capturing all of those conversations, whether recording and transcribing those. So I'll use call transcripts. I will also take notes. Maybe I'm speaking to someone in person and we have a really juicy conversation. I go to my car, I'll just take what we talked about that I want to remember that was so juicy. So really intentionally capturing those ideas. So then once you've captured those, number 2 is synthesizing. So the second step here is we want to synthesize, which means bringing them all together. And I think about it's like alchemizing, like all the things we're learning and reading and watching and talking about, bringing them all together and then putting them into this beautiful mixture that only you can create and putting them back out into the world. I think it's just such a beautiful process and AI is so helpful for this. So once you are capturing your ideas and knowing where they are, because that's also important. I lose things. I create brilliant files and then I've saved it somewhere and I can't remember. I don't know if that ever happens to you, which is why I love the Google platform because their search is so powerful, right? So I will grab all of those source documents, materials, files, and dump them into my AI. And I think, as I mentioned last time, I primarily use Claude now. I will dump all of those things into— into one project, my copywriting project, and then I will ask it to look for threads throughlines that I can develop further. I will ask it to pull out stories that I've told or frameworks maybe that I created just in a conversation or in a coaching session. And then I will also ask it to pull out common questions that people ask me, common challenges that my clients have, because that really helps me to synthesize and to bring this all together and create very valuable content with all of those ideas, notes, transcripts, right? So I've personally built a content flywheel, what I call a content flywheel, that I run each week, and it just runs on its own. And I have it so that Claude will draft a few ideas, and then it presents them back to me and says, this is all the things I'm noticing. These are some ideas that you could build out. And then I decide which ideas I want to develop further. And then based on my words, my ideas, my frameworks, my teachings, I ask it to draft an article. So my primary publishing platform right now is on Substack, right? And so I ask it to draft an article that I can use here on Substack. Which I then edit and put my flavor, my own seasoning into, right? My personality. And then I'll put that back into Claude and then she will create social media posts, notes, et cetera. And I'm actually hosting a live workshop for all paid subscribers to my Substack channel. And so together we're gonna live on Zoom, we're going to create a content flywheel in Claude for you. And I'm gonna show you how I did that. So that's on Wednesday, August 5th at 1:00 PM Mountain Time, 3:00 PM Eastern Time for all of our paid subscribers. So if you're not yet a paid subscriber, make sure to click that subscribe button and subscribe to our Substack. And once you have all of those synthesized notes and so forth, in that one project in your AI tool, you always have it there. And AI is now learning more about you and your teachings and your frameworks. And I love that because it really helps me to remember all that I've created, right? Okay, so that's our number 2 step, the synthesize, bringing all those things together and putting them in, into AI so that it can pull out common themes, frameworks, stories, all of that. And I'm gonna send out to all the subscribers the special resource from today with some prompts and the notes, the recap like I did last week. Okay. So then our third step is to publish. And so you get to decide based on how you like to serve your community. Now that you've synthesized all of your things and you've got all your raw materials in your AI tool, then you can ask it to draft posts. And I like to always tell it to use my words, my ideas, don't make anything up. You can have it draft blog posts or Substack articles, podcast episode ideas, videos. You can use those for ideas for live videos or video trainings. Maybe you create workshops, in-person or online workshops. And so you can decide how you wanna use all this raw material. How you want AI to synthesize it for you and to help you publish it and put it back out into the world. All right. So then I always ask AI to draft the output, whether it's a post or an article, whatever. And then I, I am the chief editor, right? So I edit it. I go back through it. I put in my own stories if they're not already in there.. And you can also use AI to help you create quote cards is a really great use of AI or graphics. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're not. I've gone both ways on the graphics, but it's really great for quote cards. And so what once took me probably half of a day in terms of quantity of content, I can now create in an hour. Because what I'm doing is, rather than sitting down in front of a blank screen, I'm taking all of the ideas, notes, thoughts, all of that that I have amassed during the course of a week, and I am having AI help me synthesize it and then help me create ideas that I can publish and put out into the world, right? And so that has drastically helped me increase my reach and also serve more people. So thank you for being here. And like I said, on August 5th, I'm going to be hosting a live Zoom session with me to work with you as a group of subscribers on your content flywheel and help you build that out so that it works for you and your business and how you create content, how how you create ideas. And so you can put things into different formats and serve more people, increase your reach. And so just make sure you're a paid subscriber and you will get an invitation to that. And so just to wrap up for today, please let me know if you have any questions, but the main idea is that AI can really be a great way to help us create ideas and, and synthesize the work, the thought leadership, the intellectual property that we're creating every day in our businesses. And I think sometimes we don't really understand how much great stuff we're actually creating all throughout the week, right? That it doesn't require just sitting down in front of a blank screen and starting from scratch. You have so much of value already in motion, in process, out in the world. Let's help you to use that in a way that it can help more people and help you build your business simpler, easier with your own ideas using this great technology. So I hope this has been helpful for you. I hope you have a fabulous rest of your week. Thank you all for being here and I will see you right back here next week. Bye. Hey, if you like this podcast, I wanna invite you to become part of my community. 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