Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Marketer's Guide to Advanced Prompt Engineering - AI Fundamentals Course Part 1
258 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the AI-Driven Marketer, Dan Sanchez dives into the vital fundamentals of AI in marketing, focusing squarely on the art of prompt engineering to elevate your AI interactions. He breaks down 'super prompts'—a method to elicit more precise and useful outputs from AI tools, essential for any marketer looking to leverage AI effectively. Whether it's enhancing personalizations in email campaigns or setting up robust automations, mastering these basics is crucial. Tune in to discover how to formulate super prompts that will transform your AI from a basic assistant into a powerhouse tool. This is your starting line for better AI execution, so don't miss out!
Resources Mentioned:
- Element451 AI Cheat Sheet: https://element451.com/blog/chatgpt-cheatsheet
Timestamps:
00:00 Repetition of fundamentals leads to higher skills.
05:40 Large language models use complex word relationships.
08:31 Utilize AI to enhance social media content.
11:02 Key strategies for achieving outstanding results outlined.
13:42 Providing specific content for LinkedIn blog post.
19:29 Instructions: Write in short, attention-grabbing style.
21:32 Experiment with prompts, learn from failures, improve.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Danchez and AI Mastery Journey
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. Friends, call me Danchez. And I am still on this journey to master AI in 2024. If you remember from the first episode, my goal was to really learn how to even put together breadcrumbs towards mastery.
00:00:21
Speaker
And now that I am over a quarter, four months into this journey, I have actually learned a lot about what I'm now calling the AI fundamentals that all marketers should learn if they're getting into artificial intelligence or how to use artificial intelligence to do better marketing.
AI Fundamentals Series Introduction
00:00:38
Speaker
So with this episode, I wanted to do a, I guess for the podcast, it's a five part series for everybody else who's not listening to this via podcast or YouTube.
00:00:47
Speaker
This is video one of a course that I'm putting on around the AI fundamentals that everybody's got to go through before you can even get to the advanced stuff that you'd want to do for marketing and setting up automations and making new personalizations and your email campaigns or any of that kind of stuff that's really fun.
The Art of Prompting in AI
00:01:05
Speaker
You have to have the fundamentals. And I wanted to start with video one here around how to prompt better. Yes.
00:01:12
Speaker
Oh my gosh, it sounds so boring and this would have sounded boring to me, but I promise, this is the foundational skill. If you don't master this one skill, you can't move on. It's like, it's the learning how to dribble with a soccer ball before you can really learn how to play soccer well, right? It's those things like learning how to dribble a basketball, right?
00:01:31
Speaker
pro basketball players practice the fundamentals over and over and over again for hours every morning even when they're become pros because we know that drilling the fundamentals is what sets up for the higher level game and the higher you go the more your fundamentals need to be solid.
00:01:48
Speaker
So I wanted to start with this because it's like the thing that I keep coming back to over and over, the more advanced that I get, the more I'm like, man, I need to go back to the fundamentals again and learn something that I haven't understood before because this is where it all starts. This is why we call it prompt engineering and not just prompting, but I wanted to come back to lesson one. We're going to spend a few lessons on prompting. You'll see how it starts to stack up and farther lessons. If you skip this lesson,
00:02:13
Speaker
Lesson two in this little five-part course is going to be even harder because it relies on the lessons from part one. So let's talk about this. When it comes to prompting, most people go to something like chat GPT and ask it a very simple command and expect greatness back.
00:02:29
Speaker
And while AI is extremely intelligent, even with what we have at the date of this recording, which is chat GPT four, four turbo or whatever, it's still limited. You still have to help it along, just like you would have to help a human along. You can't just go to a marketing manager and be like, hey, write me a marketing strategy.
00:02:49
Speaker
They'll be like, okay, and they'll probably give you a plain vanilla marketing strategy. AI would do the same thing. It'll give you a plain vanilla marketing strategy. It's kind of like, okay, it's kind of looks like something I copied and pasted off the net. Learning how to prompt better is learning how to give more specific instructions so that AI can give you a more specific result.
00:03:09
Speaker
Okay, because what I like to call AI is my genius intern. It is really good at figuring out all kinds of things, but it's like an intern. You got to hand hold it through the process. And so what I want to do is help you understand what that process looks like or kind of give you a framework on how to do what we call in the AI community a super prompt, right? How not to just ask it a simple thing, but how to give it a very beefy set of instructions so you can get a very beefy
00:03:35
Speaker
result out of it, right?
Crafting Super Prompts Framework
00:03:37
Speaker
And I want to walk you through it step by step where I level it up very simply from a lame prompt all the way up to a super prompt, right? And there's a framework that I've been using ever since I got exposed to this idea of super prompts for almost a year now. I actually discovered, let's jump to this slide, and if you're only listening to this, I'll spell it out for you.
00:03:59
Speaker
this is a screenshot of a chat gpt cheat sheet published by element 451 when i was working there as a marketing director um you can i'm gonna resource it here it's just at element 451.com slash blog blog
00:04:14
Speaker
chat GPT dash cheat sheet, you can find this full cheat sheet. This is literally a screenshot of just the bottom section of this cheat sheet. It's a great cheat sheet. This was the most valuable part of it. And it shows you how to deconstruct a super prompt. And I use this all the time as a good cheat sheet for me even crafting custom GPTs and better prompts. So I come back to this all the time. It's a really helpful tool. And it breaks down a super prompt into five different sections of role, result,
00:04:44
Speaker
context, intent, and constraint. You can see it gives some examples of how a super prompt might be crafted to craft a tweet. So your role, it gives an example of role. Act as a social media expert. Result, create a Twitter thread with no more than five tweets. Context, the post informs followers about the new university research on global warming.
00:05:05
Speaker
intent, the goal is to increase attendance on the upcoming lecture. Constraint, keep each tweet 280 characters and use relevant emojis and hashtags, right? So I'm going to show you what this looks like and a piece that I've done recently where I started with the super prompt actually reverse engineered it down to its most minimal normal prompt that most people use and show and progress it back up to show you like the difference it makes to break a prompt down into these five sections.
Artistic Prompt Engineering
00:05:32
Speaker
So but first,
00:05:33
Speaker
Let me talk a little bit about why we need to define all this stuff. I'm gonna use this little image to illustrate it. If you can't see it, it's just a, I don't know, I think this is a stock photo and it's just a cluster of nodes and they all look, it looks complicated, like they're integrated, but.
00:05:48
Speaker
At the end of the day, these large language models are essentially clusters, almost like these super sophisticated mind maps of relationships between words and the probability that they belong together so it can more accurately predict which words it needs to give you based on your prompt. It's more of an art than it is a science, but prompting and prompt engineering is more of an art.
00:06:11
Speaker
It's not like coding where you're saying, hey, insert variable here and then deal with it in this way. It's more loose than that. And I'm going to kind of explain that as we go through, because we're trying to navigate this loosey goosey maze of associations that these AIs have learned in order to get the better results out of it, which is why we engineer our prompts to be able to try to get it to be more consistent. That's why we engineer it. So let's dive into an example of,
00:06:40
Speaker
a chat that I did, and I'm just in OpenAI's chat GPT. I highly recommend paying for the chat GPT plus if you haven't already. This is where I spend most of my time and all the AI stuff. And eventually, while you can get away doing what I'm doing right now with the free version of chat GPT, if you want to get to the videos four and five, you're going to have to
Maximizing AI Learning with ChatGPT Plus
00:07:01
Speaker
pay for the plus. I'm sorry.
00:07:02
Speaker
I'm making this course free, but you're gonna have to at least pay for one month in order to experiment with building some custom GPTs. It's one of the best things on the market right now to really learn and hone your AI skills. And paying for chat GPT plus is one of the best. I'm not sponsored by them. I don't get any kickback. I'm just saying, this is the best AI tool to pay for. If you're only paying for one, it's this one.
00:07:22
Speaker
So let's break down my really simple prompt. And I'll be going back and forth between this and the image that I had out. Because remember, super prompts have five things, role, result, context, intent, and constraint. Now, in a very basic prompt, the one thing that everybody kind of does is what we start with in the super prompt is the result. What do we want?
00:07:46
Speaker
Because if you didn't give it anything and you just kind of said hi, it would just say hi back because it doesn't know what you want. So most people are pretty good at understanding. You have to ask for something. So that's what I've started with. Hey, write me a LinkedIn post about sales.
00:08:01
Speaker
We all know this post is probably gonna be garbage, but AI will always try to fulfill the thing, so it's gonna try here. And it wrote me a LinkedIn post about sales. And it's got rocket ships on it, unlocking sales success, the power of adaptability and learning, and it goes and outlines continuous learning, customer-centric selling and leveraging technology, lots of things.
00:08:22
Speaker
It asks a question at the bottom, and it has a bunch of hashtags, and it's just kind of a plain vanilla post, not a very good one. It looks like a chat GPG-generated post, right? If you've ever seen these, if you've ever ever seen AI come up with social content, it's like, yeah, and it honestly looks more like a small blog post than it does a social post,
Role Definition in AI Prompts
00:08:41
Speaker
but...
00:08:41
Speaker
So let's go into how do we get away from writing lame prompts like this one and how to level it up into a super prompt so that we can get something so much more specific and helpful and actually useful as a marketer, right? And I'm using this one as the illustration though, this plays across anything you'd ever want to ask GPT. So you have to think about how does this apply to what you want to get out of AI?
00:09:03
Speaker
How can you level it up into a super prompt? Maybe you start small like this one and you continue to add onto it like I did in this illustration, but just know it can do more than write social media posts. This is just an easy example and a place we've all probably have used AI before if we've played with it. We're going to show you how to get the most out of it to at least do this one action, but it applies to everything.
00:09:21
Speaker
everything. So, let's dive in. What can I do to go next? Well, if we look back at our graphic, the next one in line is the role. You'd be surprised that defining the role actually can change the post quite a bit. Let's jump into the first role I assigned to it. You are a famous LinkedIn creator and sales expert. Write a LinkedIn post about sales. Okay, so I stuck with the same result that I wanted, write a LinkedIn post about sales, but I gave it a role.
00:09:47
Speaker
And if you look at this, it says, here's the result that it generated for me. Unlocking the secrets to sales success. A blend of art and science. Okay, so it gave me kind of this similar format. It's almost more of a blog post than it is a social post. It's got the hashtags. It finishes with the question.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's hard for me to judge if the content's actually better. It seems like it's a little bit better, but this role didn't really produce that much of a difference, in my opinion, as a result as it did from the first one, right? Maybe it's a little bit better, but not that much better. But hold on, before we throw away this role thing, let's change the role again and see if that changes our result. I tried another one. You are a VP of sales at a Fortune 500 company with a passion for mentoring sales directors.
00:10:36
Speaker
Same result, write a post about LinkedIn, write a LinkedIn post about sales. Let's see what it did. Now you, the intro of this one is much different. It gave it a title with wrapped with rocket ship emojis, elevating sales, a strategic approach for a sustainable growth.
00:10:51
Speaker
As VP of Sales at a Fortune 500 company, I've had the privilege of navigating the highs and lows of the sales world, learning that success in sales is as much about strategy as it is about execution. Here are three core strategies that have consistently driven our teams to achieve outstanding results. Now, this post is still not great because it's just making up stuff, right? But can you see the difference that it's changing here?
00:11:18
Speaker
Even its outro is changing. As leaders, our role is not just. It's writing as the role of a VP of sales at a Fortune 500 with the passion for mentoring sales. And that's reflected in this post. So think about the role you want to have these things coming as. Are you having it right as you? Maybe you need to describe your role. Are you having it right as a guest? Are you wanting it to behave in a certain way? Do you want it to behave as an expert, as a layperson? What do you want it to do?
00:11:48
Speaker
right? Who do you want it to behave as? That's why defining the role is important because you see even in this generic write a post about LinkedIn post about sales, it's a generic result. You can see how the role has changed. This specific very specific role has changed the post. So it's good to define the role. Let's move on to the next one in our super prompt.
00:12:10
Speaker
pieces here. I think I'm going to move on to beefing up the results a little bit. No, I'm going to try a different role real quick. I forgot I said one more. You are a CMO of a Series B startup, and you can see this role also impacted it. Even though it's kind of a weird role to be writing about sales, a CMO of a Series B tech startup, it actually does reflect here too.
00:12:29
Speaker
So let's go on to the next
Enhancing Prompts with Context and Intent
00:12:30
Speaker
one. This one, I changed the context. So that was the next one in the super prompt formula here is we have the role, we have the result, which is write the post here. I'm giving it more context, a way more context to make this post way better. Context is literally like, if you, if you could just give it one thing, give it context.
00:12:49
Speaker
And it will write way better for you. So here I gave it a ton of context You'll see how first let's go back to I get I changed the role very specifically to a very specific to a specific person You are an expert sales coach and former VP of sales Matt Brownlee now this Matt Brownlee is someone that I had the privilege of producing an episode for on the Podcast close mode, which I am the producer for that show and Brian deep Meyer was the host Bryant Matt Brownlee was the guest
00:13:19
Speaker
And now I'm giving it, so that's the role. The role I'm giving it is Matt Brownlee, who is in real life an expert sales coach and former VP of sales. The context, based on the transcript from the episode,
00:13:33
Speaker
Result, so more specific result too. Find one solid idea in the episode and turn it, and turn that idea into an actionable post for LinkedIn. That's a much beefier, and then I'm loading the whole transcript from the episode right in the prompt itself. So that is such, that is a much more specific request.
00:13:53
Speaker
I'm giving it all the content to pull from, and I'm giving it almost two steps here, right? Based on the tramp skips, find one solid idea, step one, and then turn that idea into an actionable post for LinkedIn, step two. So I'm actually giving it steps in here.
00:14:08
Speaker
and let's see what it created. Let me scroll down to the bottom of our page here, and it even gives us some feedback. Based on the rich insights shared by Matt Brownlee in the transcript, an excellent idea to transform it to an actionable LinkedIn blog post. So here's the blog post. Post title, mastering sales with the discipline of an athlete, because that's what his post about. It was like correlating focus and discipline from his triathlete and marathon running times into sales. So you can see,
00:14:38
Speaker
Let me read a little bit more. Whether you're towing the starting line at the Boston Marathon or preparing for a critical sales meeting, the same principle as a discipline and focus apply. And then he outlines four parts. Preparation is key. Coaching makes a difference. Team drives performance, results, defined success.
AI for Content Repurposing
00:14:58
Speaker
And of course, each one of those has a sentence or two expanding on it.
00:15:01
Speaker
And then the post kind of wraps it up. Again, it's still kind of long. It's still kind of like a mini blog post more than a LinkedIn post, but dang, this content is now original because I've fed it a whole freaking transcript with the original content. It's no longer plain vanilla content. It's based on what Matt Brownlee has actually said. So if you ever want to make social content using AI, it always,
00:15:29
Speaker
always works best if you feed it something to start with. If you feed it a blog post or maybe you feed it at least a tweet to inform your LinkedIn post, it's got something to go off of and it has original content. You want to think of AI for content marketing more of like a repurposing machine more than a content creation machine.
00:15:46
Speaker
and it will do much better. But I also honed in the context and the result as well. I didn't just say, hey, based on the transcript, write a LinkedIn post. I said, hey, first find one solid idea in the episode and then turn that idea into one actionable post for LinkedIn. Because that's what I would do as the producer normally is to find one good nugget
00:16:09
Speaker
This one still didn't follow through on the directions because AI sometimes has a hard time doing multiple steps in one go, but sometimes it does. In this result, I am pretty happy and it's made a huge step forward from our last post where I was just giving it a more specific role. So now I've layered on a highly specific role and highly specific instructions and tons of more context.
00:16:34
Speaker
But we can go farther. Let's go farther. Come on. Let's see. Next, we have intent. So what happens if we add intent to the post? Let's see. In this one, I did the same thing with the transcript. You are the expert sales coach and former VP of sales, Matt Brownlee, and then the same instructions. But this time I changed and added one more sentence. I said, finish with the line. And I put in quotes, you can find my full episode at closemode.media because the goal is to
00:17:01
Speaker
Oh, I left that quote open. I wonder why it screwed it up at the beginning. Because the goal is to entice readers to listen to the episode, right? I give it the intent. What are we creating this for? Just like when you delegate to humans, you need to give them the end state. What is this supposed to actually accomplish? It usually leads to better results. And that's true for AI. So let's see what AI did. It wrote the post and the post. Honestly, this is now
00:17:27
Speaker
totally a blog post more than a LinkedIn post. So this is where the engineering comes in. You have to like tweak it and tweak it in order to get better. But you can see at the end here, you can find my full interview at closemode.media. And it's hyperlinked where we delve deeper into these insights and discuss how to apply them to achieve sales excellence. Join the conversation. Let's evaluate our sales game together.
00:17:47
Speaker
Hey, do you think this post is now, if it wasn't a total blog post up here, but if we ended with this, you think they would be more likely to accomplish the result of getting more people to listen for their full episode?
00:17:59
Speaker
course because there was nowhere even in the previous post that was mentioning the episode. It had no idea that the reason why I wanted to write a LinkedIn post was to get more people to listen to the episode. Now that I've given it a very specific like, hey, include this at the end, here's why. It's actually included exactly what I wanted to at the end and given a persuasive little sentence to have them go join us by listening to the episode.
00:18:25
Speaker
That's why we add the intent.
Using Constraints for Specific AI Output
00:18:28
Speaker
Now, this is the fun part. This is where you can really start honing the sucker in and you'll see when we show the results of this next one, what happens when you start to add in constraints, right? Because even this last one, it kind of, ugh, it's so long and it's still better than the other ones because it's based on original content. It's based on the podcast transcript and it's still coming from Matt Brownlee's perspective. So that's good.
00:18:51
Speaker
but it could be so, so much better. Let's layer in some constraints and see what happens. So again, I have that same post going on up here, and now I still have the transcript at the bottom, but let's layer in this one more thing. I put in other instructions colon, and then I just gave it a bulleted list of things that the AI should know before writing this post.
00:19:13
Speaker
So I gave it the instructions right in the first person from the perspective of the guest. It was already doing that pretty well, but just in case, I included that because it often, because it changes sometimes. Write in short, choppy sentences with harsh line breaks. And I put the word harsh because that's kind of what LinkedIn people do. They write in that style where they have like one word sentences on a whole line or just a very short sentence.
00:19:34
Speaker
The next one is, do not use hashtags or emojis. They did it in the last one, but it often still does. I don't know why, but chatgpt thinks that emojis and hashtags have to be in every LinkedIn post often. And then last instruction, do not include a title, but do start with a short attention grabbing first line.
00:19:51
Speaker
Right? So I've layered in, these are instructions, but they're actually constraints for the post to kind of narrow down the scope of what we want. You can see how this post is a very long prompt. Of course, the transcript's really long, but just look at the almost two paragraphs of information we've given AI now to go off of. Because again, the more specific you can be and you request the AI, the more specific the result, which is why super prompts are so important. Let's look at the results. Here it is.
00:20:21
Speaker
Your network is your net worth. In sales, like marathons, the right preparation and the right team can make all the difference. Line break. Imagine starting a race already knowing the track, the pitfalls, and having trained exactly for those conditions. In sales, this translates to understanding your client's needs deeply and crafting solutions tailored just for them. Now, pair this preparation with the strong team, and he goes on. You can see, if you just take a quick look at the video, if you're an Apple podcast or on YouTube,
00:20:49
Speaker
This has all the line breaks onto it. It looks much, much closer to something you would find on LinkedIn. And it finished. You can find my full interview at closemode.media right at the end of the post. So this is actually starting to look something like I would actually post to LinkedIn. Why? Because a super prompt made it more specific.
00:21:12
Speaker
So take this lesson about super prompts, about defining the role, the result, the context, the intent, and the constraint, and go and practice it. Layer it in. Change what type of role you're speaking for and just play with it. When people say play with it, this is how you play with it. You experiment, I guess more than play is experiment to see what different roles produce, and then change the result a few different ways and open up new chat GPT windows to see if you can hone it down further.
00:21:39
Speaker
Play with the context. Play with the intent. See if you can narrow down the restraints and get it to act in a certain way. It's about experimenting your way to success, but expect a lot of failures on your way there because once you can get better and better and better at crafting these prompts, it's going to level you up, not just in your ability to get something quick out of GPTs, but to make even much larger projects.
00:22:01
Speaker
which we're going to cover in the next video. How to level up even what we're doing in super prompts with what I call the step method in order to get even more consistency out of AI. So stay tuned for that course video coming next.