All Marketing... With (or Without) AI

I’ve been working on an “AI Marketing” course for some time…

It’s been 90% ready for a while — the problem is — the tools just keep getting better… and better… and better…

…and I wanted to give you (and everyone else on The Path) the cutting edge…

Look, keeping up with the advances in AI is a fool’s errand.

I’m trying. And by trying, I mean — I’m in 6-8 hours a day — EVERY DAY.

Searching, discovering, and testing every tool people claim to be the best for marketing, email, copywriting, ad creatives, sales management, video editing, voice, and so much more.

I’ve even broken my lifelong pledge to never give Adobe money and I paid to try the new features in Photoshop:

Maybe not the most impressive image but I spent less than 5 minutes on this using Photoshop’s new “generative fill” feature…

…and most of that was me bitching about not only paying for Photoshop but having no clue how to use it.

And you might have no desire to create a cyberpunkish robot version of yourself but you could create ad creatives, blog images, and even reshape the images you currently have without ANY design experience whatsoever.

You literally just put whatever image you want in there, highlight the blank space and say “I want this thing here” — or — don’t tell it anything and it’ll take the context from the image and just expand it. It’s nuts.

Generative Fill In Action

Let’s say I’ve got a random picture of a bear…

I think you get the idea… but just in case, let’s find a picture of Spiderman…

…and give him a new villain!

Obviously, like most AI programs, it’s in Beta… but that will probably last a couple of weeks at most. If you’re like me — and have no clue how to use Photoshop — now you can.

So how and why does any of this stuff matter? Let’s talk about:

The Line

Marketing is split into two universes:

1. Everything people see BEFORE they click/opt-in

2. Everything people see AFTER they click/opt-in

Thank You To This Week’s Sponsor!

BusinessAnywhere.io

• No Hassle, Done For You Company Formation

• Automated Annual Renewals And State Compliance (even while you’re traveling!)

• PLUS: Virtual Mailboxes To Receive Important Documents And More!

I’ve been a “digital nomad” for 15 years now, traveling from beach to beach, city to city. That’s all good until the business starts to really succeed and you’ve got to stay organized, file properly for compliance, get important communications and more.

It makes you just want to say “screw it, I’ll go get an office.”

Then you’re paying rent, dealing with issues, you’re sort of stuck in a physical location (even if there’s not much going on there) — with Business Anywhere, it’s all taken care of for you. They register my LLCS with their registered agent, they fill out the paperwork at the end of the year to renew and stay in compliance, the mail is automatically scanned and sent to me in a safe and secure way — they just make it easy.

I’m a huge fan and if you need a new entity, want to restructure your current entity, or just need a digital “headquarters” — these are the guys to use:

Businessanywhere.io

… and there are only about 7 or 8 things on each side of that line. So maybe 16 things total you can do to market your business. 8 of which get you Opt-Ins and 8 of which get you sales.

Defining A True “Opt-In”

To get someone to properly “opt-in” to your marketing, you need two things:

1. Their contact information (name, email, and/or phone number)

2. Permission to market to them

The challenge is that it’s usually easy to get one or the other — not both. But for someone to be a true lead in your sales process — you must have both.

Most people try to shortcut this, though.

Some of the worst offenders are real estate agents. I can’t tell you how many times I went to go speak at a real estate office in Podunk, USA and half the room would take down my email and put me into their “drip campaign”…

They had my contact information but did not have permission to market to me.

When you buy, borrow, or scrape for e-mail lists, you’re spamming. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. There ARE ways to make cold outreach work — but that’s not the way.

Now you might be asking “How can someone give me permission to market to them… without their contact information?”

This is where social media comes in. If I follow you on Instagram, I’m giving you permission to show your stuff to me BUT I did NOT give you my contact information. That’s similar on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or wherever else. Even if my contact information is public on that platform — I didn’t explicitly give it to you.

So the first universe in marketing is all about collecting those two things.

How Do We Get Opt-Ins?

There are lots of strategies for getting opt-ins but there are only so many avenues they can come in:

1. Image Ads

2. Video Ads

3. Display Ads

4. Affiliate Emails

5. Product Listings

6. Registration Pages

7. Sales Pages

Now if you think I might have missed something here, feel free to tell me, but marketing (on the front end) is simply these 7 things on repeat. To make it even simpler, it’s written, imagery, or audio.

“How does this relate to Instagram?”

It’s simply a series of image ads and video ads… you might do an “affiliate promotion” where another page does a shout-out for you… you might have a physical product for sale through the platform… a link in your bio that sends you to a registration or sales page… but that’s it.

Billboards, television commercials, podcast ads — it’s all the same stuff.

My point is most of your day-to-day marketing activities business revolves around content creation and content distribution.

And AI Does It All For You Now.

Not sometime in the future. Right this second. If you go back and read my other posts here you can see some of the tools I’m using to create these images like MidJourney or (now) Photoshop.

For the written word I get help from ChatGPT, Jasper, or Content & Copy AI.

For video and audio, I’m using Descript and Synthesia.

Just a few programs and my content creation capabilities grow by orders of magnitude.

So… How Do We Get Sales?

This is where the second universe comes in. Once you’ve got someone to cross the line (aka opt-in) — the question is — what can you show them to move them closer to a transaction?

1. Upsell Pages

2. Thank You Pages

3. Download Pages

4. Webinar Registrations

5. Sales Pages

6. Value Pages

7. Article Pages

8. Support/Help Desk

9. Email Sequences

In other words, information or sales pitches.

… or sales pitches framed as information.

In the next newsletter, I’ll share everything I’m using to create actual pages and make them look pretty but let’s bring this back down to its simplest form:

Content creation and content distribution.

Everything on this side of the line revolves around making offers, answering questions, handling objections, and supporting people along their business journey with you.

Most businesses fail simply because they stop after the first transaction. They’ve done the hardest, most expensive, and most time-consuming part which is getting you to “opt-in” and then they make one attempt at selling you something and give up.

The point of this section is to not only make a single sale but to build the relationship into a multi-year, multi-purchase journey.

You can’t do that if you only pitch… and you can’t do that if you only share value-added content… you need both.

How do you create those?

Well, your web pages, emails, blog articles, and video scripts, can all be helped along with the same tools as before. If you’re truly an expert in your field, you’ll have to do some editing but with AI you can just as easily create 10 articles (or rough drafts) as you can with one.

No longer are you constrained by man hours or the number of employees/team members/VAs.

AI can do the work of 5, 10, or even 100 people in the right circumstances.

It’s YOU. Everywhere.

Once you nail down your message and your offer. You know what you’re selling. You know what questions people ask (well, you can use ChatGPT for all of those if you don’t know) — now you just need to do the work of content distribution.

And the only thing that really slows that down is the creation of images, sliders, videos… and all of that is done with those AI programs I already shared… I feel like I’m talking in circles now — are you starting to see what I’m getting at?

Do you see the possibilities?

You know you need to post on IG, FB, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and whatever else… and in the very recent past this meant you needed to hire 1, 2, 3, or even an entire agency to run these platforms for you just to do content creation and content distribution…

Every day now people ask me “what should I do” — and I’ll give it to you right here:

1. Create copy, videos, and images about your offer and content related to your offer

2. Put it everywhere you can

   2.B. Pay attention to the platform (best practices and how it operates) & the community (how people behave on that platform/culture)

Announcements: The Path Reborn

I hope you’re enjoying the newsletter/blog so far. I enjoy writing it. Quick, witty, to-the-point.

But The Path Membership will live in a new membership area designed by our partners at GeekOut (I’ll introduce you to them next week).

If you are building a funnel, sales pages, or are desperately incompetent in tech (like me) — these are your gals.

I’ll make an introduction if you need it.

Until then, go play with some AI!