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Turn AI into Your Marketing Strategy Partner – Here’s How!
503 Plays26 days ago
In this AI marketing podcast episode, Dan Sanchez takes a deep dive into using AI as a tool for strategic marketing thinking, specifically focusing on executing a SWOT analysis. Rather than just tactical work, Dan explains how AI can elevate your marketing strategy by helping you "think smarter" and do more with annual and quarterly planning. By leveraging ChatGPT for SWOT, Dan demonstrates how AI can list and assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your business, helping marketing teams streamline strategic planning. Tune in to learn actionable prompts, strategic insights, and ways to turn SWOT analysis into a robust plan for the coming year.
Timestamps:
- 00:00 – Welcome and Episode Introduction
- 01:05 – The Power of Using AI for Strategic Thinking, Not Just Tactics
- 02:30 – Overview of SWOT Analysis in Business
- 04:20 – How ChatGPT Can Perform SWOT Analysis and Strategic Planning
- 06:15 – Steps to Prepare ChatGPT with Context for SWOT
- 08:05 – Practical Prompt Example to Train ChatGPT on Your Business Needs
- 09:50 – Customizing AI Insights for Trim Healthy Mama’s SWOT Analysis
- 11:35 – Adjusting AI Results for Real-World Applicability in Marketing
- 13:00 – Transforming SWOT Insights into a Strategic Action Plan
- 14:20 – Final Thoughts: Embracing AI to Think Smarter in Marketing
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends, Kami Danches. And today we're doing another deep dive into AI. And today I want to show you how to use AI to think smarter because AI is so much more useful than just using it tactically to execute a lot of your daily work. You can actually use it to do more with marketing strategy. Yes, you can think smarter and do it way faster than you used to have to do when it comes to a lot of your annual and quarterly planning events that you have to do as a marketing director. So today I want to show you how to use AI and chat GPT specifically to do a s SWOT analysis.
00:00:38
Speaker
Now, if you've been to business school, you know all about the SWOT. It's a normal us tool that we use in our toolkit all the time. And I want to tell you that AI is freaking fantastic at performing this analysis, coming up with everything you need, and then actually coming up with a strategic plan in order to make your business better So, before we get into it, let's actually review real quick what a SWOT analysis is. I'm going to jump into this little PowerPoint on my computer, but don't worry. If you're listening on audio, just remember that I'm going to be talking through everything. You're going to pick up like 95% of this without ever having to look at the visual. But some people like visuals, so if you want to watch it, go to YouTube, or go over to adrivedmarketer.com where you can watch the video. You can also pull it up on Apple Podcasts. It's literally a video podcast. Pull it up and follow along.
00:01:26
Speaker
ah s SWOT analysis is just an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It's probably one of the most simple, but honestly, one of the most useful strategy tools available to marketers in order to better plan, ah not just your marketing campaigns, but set up an overall system for why those marketing campaigns should exist. And it's a little bit more of a like a higher level business tool, even than a marketing tool,
00:01:52
Speaker
but it's so powerful that it actually informs a lot of my marketing campaigns. I'm building out the marketing marketing plan every year. The way we usually do it is by setting up this grid right with ah for a two by two grid with four quadrants with strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, and threats labeling each of the quadrants. Strengths and opportunities are aligned. It's kind of like the good things, right? And then weaknesses, threats, and then strengths is to ah stacked on top of weaknesses for your internal ah column, the things that you actually have control of in your company versus the external things that you have no control over, which are the opportunities coming up and the threats. And it usually takes, I don't know, an hour, maybe two hours sometimes to get together ah with your colleagues or just to sit down by yourself to brainstorm like, ah, what are the things that are the strengths for my company?
00:02:46
Speaker
What are the things that we have going that are advantages that we have? What are the weaknesses holding us back? What are the opportunities on the horizon that are coming our way that we want to take advantage of? And then what are the possible threats that could happen over the next year or two that could derail us, right?
00:03:02
Speaker
And usually you take you take a moment, it's a list building exercise where you come up with those strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and the threats. Then the whole goal of this, the reason why we even do this is to just make it very clear to ourselves and to our team and to even our our board of directors, maybe even our shareholders, like what are the things we're coming up against? What is going on internally and externally that we need to take advantage of um or shore up? So that's the first part of the SWOT analysis is just building a list of these things. And it is like almost liberating and clear and clarifying even of itself just to get past this first
00:03:42
Speaker
in building these lists so you can actually clearly articulate what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are. You can have chat GPT do this for you completely. In fact, here's the prompt that you can use to get it started. I was gonna build a custom GPT, you really don't need it. This is like the easiest prompt ever. The thing that chat GPT really needs to know is context for your company. So do this prompt. Just do tell chat GPT exactly this.
00:04:09
Speaker
Do a Bing search for, and insert your company name, to learn about the business. read Read through several pages to analyze its market audience, value proposition, position, and overall market presence. Report back on what you learn.
00:04:25
Speaker
The reason why you need to do this is so that it can go out out on the internet and learn for itself what your business is all about and then report back, loading it from something it doesn't know about into what I call the short-term memory by reporting back and telling you what it's learned about you.
00:04:41
Speaker
what it's learned about your business. You might wanna add some other things like, hey, other helpful things to know about this business ah internally is X, Y, and Z, or externally about the market is A, B, and C, right? So you might wanna load it with some more information afterwards, but generally it does a pretty dang good job of going out and using Bing to scrape the internet and probably reading a lot of pages on your website to get a general understanding of what your business is, who it serves, what it does, um and what its its pros and cons are.
00:05:09
Speaker
After that, you want to actually ask it to do a SWOT analysis. And before I get to the fun part, the last step in a SWOT analysis, let me show you what I got when I ran my employer through it. Now I work for a company called Trim Healthy Mama. Yes, it's a mom blog that blew up years ago with a viral book around weight loss and healthy eating for essentially like but alternative health mamas.
00:05:38
Speaker
um And they have a huge audience and sell, I don't know, millions and millions of dollars worth of goods and ah baking products online. And i had I had to do a SWOT analysis and it did a fantastic job in labeling its strengths, strong brand identity, diverse product line, unique diet philosophy, a very strong community, weaknesses.
00:06:00
Speaker
ah Now this is the far part where it really needs your help as a marketer because actually one of the things it labeled as a weakness that I noticed in this SWOT analysis was a strength. So sometimes you have to be careful with AI because it'll it'll lead you astray, but you have to know when it's leading you astray. And in this one particular instance, everything else was correct.
00:06:22
Speaker
I'd actually done a SWOT analysis for Trim Healthy Mama before I asked AI to do it, and it came up with a lot of the same stuff that I had already recognized as strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats. um And it identified the same things, even put out some things that I had not identified that were really strong. So, but, but.
00:06:43
Speaker
The one thing that it did was put something in the weakness category that I thought was a niche because they are, niching down is one of the most powerful things you can do in marketing. And they are nowhere near saturating the niche that they're in. So why would you want to decrease the niche and go after more? So I would actually move the niche target audience to the strengths. So I made a correction later on.
00:07:10
Speaker
It did a good job of opportunities opportunities for the brand and then some general threats that could happen ah that would impact the the brand. So I went through, made some corrections and gave it my assessment. It went through and corrected it and I actually asked it to expand on what it had learned but in the SWOT analysis.
00:07:29
Speaker
So you can see it didn't at first it just ran a bullet point or in a short description actually gave it mind and asked it to expand on the SWOT analysis. So not only did it give me a bullet point but it gave a whole paragraph. When you're writing a strategic plan this is often the part that just takes so freaking long. Actually right like not only coming up with the bulleted list but actually expanding on what you mean by the bullet because it's possible that a team member could be reading it and not have clarity. Not really what you mean when you say you have an engaged community. Well, what is an engaged community exactly? ah Does that mean you have a lot of people locally that rally around you in an event? Does that mean you have a lot of Facebook followers that that engage with your posts? Does that mean you have a strong sense of identity within your customers and they rally together? They have support groups, they have ah fan groups, you know? like
00:08:24
Speaker
what what is it What is engaged community? Well, you have to expand on that and actually write out a few sentences about what that means in short little paragraphs. And this is the part that's time consuming when coming up with a SWAT analysis and putting it down on paper so that not only you benefit from it, from your but your team and other departments who are interested in what marketing is doing can actually read and follow up with.
00:08:44
Speaker
chat GPT can do it in an instant. So that's the, one of the, one of the things I love cause this usually took me a long time to actually write out for the marketing plan. And now chat GPT can just get it through in just a few seconds. So again, you have to read it and make sure that it actually lines up with what you're doing. But I find that it's almost always like 90, 95% on par with what I was going to do manually anyway, saving you time.
00:09:08
Speaker
and even helping you think better as it comes up with a more clear um a clearer articulation than I would have otherwise to as it comes up with it by itself. so in The last step for coming up with the SWOT analysis is actually asking it and giving it one more prompt because you don't want to just end with the analysis, great. It's identified what we kind of already knew, but maybe made it clear. That's helpful, but the next step is the most important part. You actually go in and prompt it. Now create a strategic plan that maximizes strengths, makes the most of opportunities, decreases weaknesses, and minimizes threats.
00:09:45
Speaker
And this is where AI becomes the most powerful because you've already done some pre-work. It's already been trained on who you are and what you do. It's already done the analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then spelled them out in greater detail. It has everything it needs to needs in order to create a fairly strong strategic plan for your business. So when I did this for Trim Healthy Mama, I was blown away by the results that it gave me back.
00:10:14
Speaker
Now, these are just things that then become fodder for you to look through and then plug back into your actual marketing plan. So it gave me all kinds of ideas to run with, some of which I loved, some of which I was like, eh.
00:10:30
Speaker
It's OK. Some of which i were I was already planning on doing. These are things that I already had in mind. I'm like, oh, we need to start doing next because this is the thing. This is the strength. This is the not opportunity. This is the right. This is the weakness. Like things that I've already been doing, um it brought to light and some things were new.
00:10:45
Speaker
So why wouldn't you take the time to do this when it's so easy to do? It takes literally two minutes and you have a fully baked SWOT analysis with fantastic and creative ideas on how to actually address it. So let's walk through some of the things that recommended for Trim Healthy Mama. So one of the strengths of course was Trim Healthy Mama's community. They have a huge fan base and a very loyal crowd of women that love to buy from this brand.
00:11:11
Speaker
So, but it's not the same, it's not as big as it was before. And that was one of the the threats, I believe one of the threats or weaknesses. So, one one of the objectives were to reignite ah it with the brand's fervent audience on rented and owned media. And then it gave actions. And this is where it really comes up with some really interesting ideas. Community campaign, launch of Mama's success stories, and family on plan, just kind of and around his branding.
00:11:37
Speaker
campaigns encouraging followers to share their progress using Trim Healthy Mama. I'm just going to kind of skip around through what it's written at as a strategic plan here. ah Come up with exclusive offers and engagements and it gave a great idea there. ah Facebook group revitalization. Encourage engagement in the Facebook groups by creating regular challenges such as meal planning weeks or health goals. Feature success stories to showcase tangible results and maintain excitement.
00:12:01
Speaker
because this brand has done a great job with its Facebook group. There's like literally like a half million mamas in that group, um but probably only tens of thousands actually engaging regularly after it's cooled down over the last five years or so. So by coming up, having the idea of like coming up with mini challenges to re-engage the base was a fantastic and strategic ah priority that I'm i'm actually moving like i'm moving forward with this idea for the company.
00:12:27
Speaker
And it gave a number. It actually took multiple objectives. Oh, and then it broke down. So it actually broke it down by like coming up with an objective, coming up with multiple actions, and then an expected outcome by leveraging or taking action on these ideas. And it did that per every single strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat in order to do what I told it to do, right? Which was created a strategic plan that maximizes strengths, makes the most of opportunities, decreases weaknesses, and minimizes threats. It created a very, very robust plan in order to make the most of what is currently going on internally and externally from this brand.
00:13:07
Speaker
I promise if you just take a few minutes to do this, you will come up with some very creative, um out-of-the-box ideas that are very contextual for what's going on in your company right now. Again, it can only take action and come up with strategic insights for the things that it knows about you. so whatever it Whatever it doesn't get from the online search, feed it back to it so that it knows and incorporates those into the s SWOT analysis so that it can actually create action items for you based on what you know are current ah ah strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. But it will take very little time because you're just filling in a few gaps that we're already missed. I find its ability, even just doing on a web search and under basic understanding of the company, its ability to assess what those things were was very, very strong.
00:13:57
Speaker
So, this is a good example of how AI can help you think strategically so that you can actually perform better marketing faster. These are the kinds of things we often don't do, and if we do them, we we don't do them very well or to the fullest extent because it takes so much time to ride it out. It takes so much time to actually create the full s SWOT analysis.
00:14:19
Speaker
to then create the strategic plan to address. um We generally only come up with a few bullet points of action items because we already have in our mind kind of what we want to do, but we don't actually take the time to flesh out all the possibilities and angles we could take to address all the objectives that we want to accomplish within a year. This way, we can get more done and have a more fully fleshed out plan that we can then cherry pick to find the best ones available.
00:14:45
Speaker
But we all know that having more ideas on the table is usually better, but it's too painful to get there. So we just start with the preconceived ideas and tactics that we already think will move the needle before we actually do the full analysis and assessment of what's possible. And that's the thing that makes AI truly remarkable, is it can help you do the work that you were skipping in less than five minutes. So take a moment, do this for your brand, you won't regret it.