GenAI Tools for Startup Growth

 

https://www.signalfire.com/blog/generative-ai-tools-startup-marketing?ref=refind

You know you should be using Generative AI (GenAI) for marketing. But how do you actually get to faster content production, more engaging social distribution, and better personalized sales outreach? What tools can help? And how do you avoid embarrassing public mistakes?

During a recent SignalFire Mastery Series talk with 35-person content agency Foundation’s CEO Ross Simmonds, we discussed how startups can get the most out of GenAI for marketing. Ross points out that AI isn’t a replacement for marketing departments (at least, not yet) but a force that augments and optimizes existing talent. 

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to get the most out of the latest GenAI tools to reduce manual, rote, and mundane tasks so you can free up you and your marketers to focus on telling compelling human stories that attract customers.

Augmenting the content marketing workflow with GenAI

According to The state of AI in 2023 report, 40% of organizations will increase their investment in AI, and marketing and sales departments are the biggest users. So how do you use GenAI in marketing without damaging your brand or getting shot down by Google for low-value content?

Ross believes the path to success is returning to marketing fundamentals: “We all must put the marketing back into content marketing.”

Base your content workflow on the four pillars of content marketing: research, creation, distribution, and optimization. Here are the best ways to use GenAI for each.

Research

Collecting extensive information on your audience, competitors, and the current market—not to mention tracking SERP and keyword data—is time-intensive and time-sensitive.

Here’s how you can use generative AI to speed up the research phase:

• Audience research: Your CRM, sales enablement, and customer data platforms contain a wealth of information, but it’s a pain to sort through. Luckily, the incumbents have adapted quickly, with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Gong embedding AI to quickly analyze and summarize key takeaways. 
• Topic research: Perplexity, Gemini, You.com, and Poe combine generative AI and web search capabilities to give you in-depth and referenced answers during the research process. Thanks to the citations they include, you can be more confident that answers aren’t just AI hallucinations (though you should still double-check). 
• SEO research: Frase, Moz, and Ahrefs combine traditional SEO software with new generative AI approaches to provide custom recommendations to optimize your most important content and landing pages for search. They analyze keyword usage, content structure, backlinks, and more to identify opportunities to improve your content's relevance and ranking potential. 
• Transcription: AI-powered transcription tools from Zoom, Avoma, and Otter make it easy to action insights from meetings, calls, and presentations. To enrich your content, you can quickly scan transcripts and GenAI-written summaries to identify key quotes, anecdotes, and data points.

Create

Content creation is the bread and butter of frontier large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. With multiple methods for training and fine-tuning LLMs, the market is flooded with point solutions and general-purpose GenAIs.

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You can now augment your marketing and GTM teams with artificial assistants to streamline all aspects of the creative process.  

• Brief and draft development: Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude transform the initial stages of content creation. These tools quickly structure notes and scattered thoughts into a rough narrative that you can bring to life.
• Personalized messaging: ChatGPT and Jasper let you use your brand guidelines, messaging docs, and enablement materials to create custom writing assistants. The content they produce adheres to your specific voice and messaging style. 
• Workflow optimization: Copy.ai and Jasper have workflows for creating specific assets. You enter information on keywords, audiences, and tone, and the tools automatically create your particular output. They’re great for short-form social posts, emails, and ad copy. 
• Image, video, and voice generation: Tools like Midjourney, Canva, HeyGen, and ElevenLabs move AI beyond text generation. They take prompts and inputs to create custom images, videos, and sound bites.
• Copy editing: You can’t replace writers with AI; the same goes for editors. But you can make their life easier using generative tools like Hemingway and SignalFire portfolio company Grammarly to suggest edits to grammar, punctuation, and phrasing.  

Distribute

Use content distribution to increase the reach of marketing assets. Promoting your content on social media, email, PR, and forums is the perfect way to meet your audience where they live. Here’s how GenAI can help you distribute your content more effectively: 

• Derivative assets: Tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, and HubSpot Remix have dedicated workflows for repurposing webinars, whitepapers, and other long-form assets. They extract insights and turn them into bite-sized pieces of content for social. You can also prompt frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude to break down larger assets.

Hyperpersonalized campaigns: AI tools like Koala and SignalFire portfolio company Tofu tailor messaging and content delivery to individual preferences and behaviors. This technology lets you deliver personalized emails, landing pages, and PDFs for every single customer.

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• Social media management: Predis, BrandBastion, and Letterdrop apply generative AI to social media. They automate content creation, optimize posts for each platform, and streamline scheduling and publishing. They even provide competitor analysis to inform strategy and offer unified inboxes to manage audience engagement.
• Backlink outreach: Smartwriter, an AI-powered tool that automates and optimizes backlink outreach, analyzes blog content to understand the context. It then generates highly personalized email requests to improve your chances of acquiring valuable backlinks. 

Optimize

Too many companies let their content “gather dust.” You can optimize existing assets like blog posts and landing pages by incorporating rich imagery, updating the copy for conversions, and making on- and off-site SEO improvements. 

• SEO optimization: Frase.io is also ideal at the optimization stage. Specifically, it compares your assets to SERP competitors and suggests relevant keywords and content structures to boost search engine rankings.
• Messaging optimization: MarketMuse, SparkToro, and BuzzSumo analyze your web content to identify gaps and opportunities. You can then use GenAI to provide personalized suggestions for improving relevance, comprehensiveness, and audience alignment.
• Campaign optimization: In addition to helping you manage social media campaigns, Letterdrop automates personalized email content generation and provides AI-powered insights to improve open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. 

Remember that the generative AI space is moving fast, and the title of “best-in-class tool” for each use case is liable to change. Take ChatGPT plugins, for example. This feature allowed users to modify the generative AI with different features, including everything from link reading and SEO to complex mathematical calculations. It was all the rage in early 2023—now it’s gone. 

Now, let’s examine how these tools can (and do) help companies scale content with fewer resources.

How to reap the benefits of AI in marketing

Major brands like CNET have embraced generative AI content creation. This approach stirred some controversy, but it’s driven impressive organic results so far. CNET still has a policy of using AI, but it’s one of augmentation, not complete replacement.

The beauty of GenAI is that it isn’t reserved for companies with deep pockets and large teams. Ross argues that GenAI tools are perfect for founders and go-to-market (GTM) specialists to create high-quality content assets at a faster clip. Leaders should empower their teams to experiment with GenAI tools to find which work best for their use case and then share the newfound best practices with the whole company.

To keep branding and quality consistent while using these tools, build a set of editorial guidelines to ensure accuracy isn’t compromised by AI-augmented workflows. You can access Foundation’s full 21-item editorial checklist here.

As an AI-powered venture fund, SignalFire is embracing AI workflows for our own content processes.

For example, we use tools like Otter to speed up the research stage when creating content assets from our Mastery Series and Mentor Program discussions. Offloading transcription to GenAI gives our writers more time to focus on distilling insights and crafting compelling stories.

We also experiment with text-to-image tools like DALL-E and Midjourney for our graphics. However, standardizing the use of these more general tools is a complex process (and may result in a few extra fingers). One of our portfolio companies, Invoke AI, aims to solve this challenge by letting companies train image generators with their brand guidelines and intellectual property.

Stay up-to-date on the best GenAI content tools

SignalFire is building, funding, and using AI every day. We’ve spent the past 10 years refining our own Beacon AI platform to assist us with sourcing investments and supporting our portfolio companies. We’re currently applying the latest LLM technology in safe and siloed ways to quickly summarize and route investment leads to the right Partners on our team. Generative AI is also allowing us to better recruit talent for our portfolio by instantly assessing a candidate’s expertise despite fragmented job titles.

How To Determine The Best Marketing Strategy

Sep 25, 2024,07:30am EDT

Joe Camberato is the CEO and Founder of National Business Capital, a leading FinTech marketplace offering streamlined small business loans.

Woman sketching a business plan at a creative office

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A solid marketing strategy is the best way to help your business stand out and reach its financial goals in 2024. It’s the framework for how you interact with your customers and ensures you show up consistently and deliver on your promises.

The right marketing strategy also ensures you’re using your resources wisely and only investing in the channels that provide the highest ROI. Let’s look at seven steps you can take to find the best marketing strategy for your small business.

Determine Your Goals

Every business has financial goals. Marketing is one of the tools you can leverage to reach that goal. For example, let’s say your company has a target of 20% annual sales growth. Current operations and referral channels can cover 10% of the growth this year, which leaves 10% of your growth plan still on the table. By establishing a marketing channel, you gain another stream of finding clients and, more importantly, strengthening revenue that complements your existing streams.

Marketing tools, like digital ads or media placements in publications your audience frequently reads, open the door to new customers currently outside your scope. If your business is an island, marketing is the bottle where you place your message. It’s the vehicle to spread the word about your company and excite new customers into giving you a chance.

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With that in mind, the first step—before building an email list or growing your social media following—is to take a step back and think about your goals. It’s best to have a combination of short-term and long-term goals.

Short-term goals give your business a “quick win” while supporting your long-term marketing goals. Some examples include increasing website traffic or increasing your website conversions.

Long-term goals focus on the bigger vision of what you want to accomplish in the coming years. Building authority in your industry and creating customer loyalty are examples of long-term marketing goals.

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Do Competitor Research

Competitor research is the process of gathering data about your biggest competitors’ products, services and marketing strategies. You’ll start by making a list of your biggest direct competitors; these are companies that sell products or services similar to yours.

You can identify competitors by doing market research or gathering customer feedback. From there, you’ll create competitor profiles and track the following information: market share, audience demographics, products, pricing and advertising strategies.

You’ll evaluate this data and consider your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This information can help you identify new opportunities in the marketplace.

Research Your Target Audience

You can’t come up with a solid marketing strategy if you don’t understand your target audience. You need to know what your audience wants, their pain points and where they spend time online. This information will help you create effective content and determine how to reach them.

You can start by surveying your current customers to find out what they think about your product or service. Phone interviews and focus groups are a great way to get more detailed information from your customers.

You can also review your website analytics to gather data and understand your audience demographics. Look at how your audience interacts with your website: Do they linger on certain pages or leave almost instantly?

If you have a social media following, look at how your audience interacts with your posts. What kind of posts get the most comments and engagement? Social media polls are another good way to survey your audience.

Come Up With Your Marketing Message

Your marketing message is how your business communicates its value proposition to your ideal customer. It communicates what your company offers and how your products or services solve your customers’ problems.

Here are a few ways you can come up with your marketing message:

• Know your unique value proposition: You must understand what differentiates your business. A unique value proposition explains the unique benefits your company offers and what sets it apart from your competitors.

• Be succinct: An effective marketing message is clear and concise; it explains what your business does and who it serves in as few words as possible.

• Be conversational: Don’t use jargon or technical terms in your marketing message. Aim to be conversational and friendly when you’re talking to your audience.

Evaluate Marketing Channels

The marketing channel that’s best for your business depends on your audience and the type of business you run. For example, business-to-business companies may not benefit from influencer marketing the same way a direct-to-consumer brand would.

Understanding how different marketing channels work and what each one is used for will help you determine the best options for your business:

• Social media: Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, are great ways to build audience engagement and promote your products and services.

• Email marketing: Email marketing is a direct way to engage with your prospects and customers. It allows you to send personalized offers and newsletters and interact with a diverse audience.

• Content marketing: Content marketing involves creating blog posts, videos, white papers and e-books for your audience. It’s a great way to demonstrate your experience and improve your SEO.

• PPC advertising: Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target a specific audience and get immediate results for your business.

Come Up With A Plan

Next, you need to come up with your marketing plan, which is different from your marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy focuses on your overall goals and objectives, while a marketing plan outlines the specific actions you’ll take to make that happen.

For example, a marketing plan for a B2B software-as-a-service company could include:

• Sending a weekly newsletter.

• Posting thought leadership articles on LinkedIn.

• Posting a weekly SEO-optimized blog post.

• Sharing customer case studies and testimonials.

• Hosting a monthly webinar.

Test And Evaluate Your Ideas

Finally, it’s time to test out your strategy and evaluate the results. Once you’ve come up with a marketing strategy, it’s a good idea to stick with it for at least six months. This gives you enough time to see your strategy through and determine what’s working and what isn’t. Being consistent, tracking your results and learning from your mistakes will give your marketing strategy the best chance for success.

Marketing Prompts

 You're to role-play with the user taking on the following buyer persona of the attached document. [Insert persona] is the target customer of [Your company] which offers [explain in detail what you offer]

[Persona]'s biggest (but not limited to) problems are:

[Insert 3 biggest problems]

Whenever making any decision, ensure those problems are enacted as your primary pain-points and then everything else after.

Response guide:

- Always talk from the perspective of [Persona] (1st person)

- [Persona] is roleplaying as the customer, where the user is [Company] (the seller).

- Respond with quotation marks around what [Persona] would say, then put in brackets what they are thinking.

- When mentioning what they are thinking, focus on their emotions.

An example response:

"I think this webpage needs more explanation around what inbox management is" 

(What is Emily thinking?: She is confused and doesn't know if inbox management means setting up the mailboxes or responding to leads)

On Fri, Oct 4, 2024 at 8:24 PM Les Tapolczai <ltaplife@gmail.com> wrote:

Learn more about your customers than even they do

PROMPT 1: Market Overview 

Prompt: Today, you're a world-class marketing analyst with meticulous attention to detail. I want you to create the ideal buyer persona profile for an [Insert what your business does]. [Explain how you do it]. The typical buyer of this service is usually [who is your target audience?]. Include Demographics, Psychographics, Main Challenges, Values, and Motivations of this buyer persona. We're looking for key emotional drivers. Give the persona a real name so it's easy for us to refer to it going forward. 

Example Prompt: Today, you're a world-class marketing analyst with meticulous attention to detail. I want you to create the ideal buyer persona profile for a lead-generation company which uses AI to help you book more meetings without growing your headcount. They do this by using AI automation to reduce the work required to book meetings whilst increasing volume. The typical buyer of this service is usually a head of growth/sales at a tech company with 50-200 headcount and based in the UK. Include Demographics, Psychographics, Main Challenges, Values, and Motivations of this buyer persona. We're looking for key emotional drivers. Give the persona a real name so it's easy for us to refer to it going forward. 

PROMPT 2: Market’s Fears 

Prompt: Great job. Now tell me 5 fears [PERSONA] has around [INSERT ONE OF THE MAIN CHALLENGES CHATGPT GIVES YOU] and what will happen if they don't address the problem. I don't want boring surface level answers. Give me the deepest fears that [PERSONA] likely wouldn't admit out loud unless nobody else was listening. Fears that can often keep them awake at night.

Example Prompt: Great job. Now tell me 5 fears Alex has around “Challenges in scaling operations efficiently while maintaining or improving lead quality” and what will happen if they don't address the problem. I don't want boring surface level answers. Give me the deepest fears that Alex likely wouldn't admit out loud unless nobody else was listening. Fears that can often keep them awake at night.

PROMPT 3: User Scenarios

Prompt: Thank you. Now give me more SPECIFIC examples of how each of these fears would affect SPECIFIC relationships. Be vivid, descriptive, and emotional. How would these fears (if realized) impact the people around [PERSONA]? In [PERSONA’S] mind (where he imagines the worst case) how would these people treat them? What would those people say? HERE ARE SOME ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES: [INSERT SCENARIOS THEY WILL LIKELY BE IN]. 

Example Prompt: Thank you. Now give me more SPECIFIC examples of how each of these fears would affect SPECIFIC relationships. Be vivid, descriptive, and emotional. How would these fears (if realized) impact the people around Alex? In Alex’s mind (where he imagines the worst case) how would these people treat them? What would those people say? HERE ARE SOME ADDITIONAL EXAMPLES: Sitting in a meeting with their boss discussing how they could use AI to improve their growth. Discussing AI with their competitors and not knowing what to say. Their employee suggests a new AI tool to implement but they don’t know much about AI to know whether to integrate it or not.

PROMPT 4: Magic Genie Part I

Prompt: OK, now imagine that [Persona] meets a magic genie that can create the perfect [your offering] for them that actually addresses and solves their issue. In this idealistic scenario, list 20 outcomes [Persona] would want this new [your offering] to bring them.

Example Prompt: OK, now imagine that Alex meets a magic genie that can create the perfect lead-gen company for them that actually addresses and solves their issue. In this idealistic scenario, list 20 outcomes Alex would want this new lead-gen company to bring them.

PROMPT 5: Risk-Reversal

Prompt: Now imagine that [PERSONA] meets a sales-man of the [PERSONA]. They’ve now been pitched. Taking into consideration the deep fears and challenges faced by [PERSONA], what offer could the sales-man give them which would remove their perceived risk and instead make it appear as if the sales-man and his company are putting some skin in the game. An example of this would be if a lead-gen company had an offer working on a 100% performance basis. Now list 20 ideas.

Example Prompt: Now imagine that Alex meets a sales-man of the Alex. They’ve now been pitched. Taking into consideration the deep fears and challenges faced by Alex, what offer could the sales-man give them which would remove their perceived risk and instead make it appear as if the sales-man and his company are putting some skin in the game. An example of this would be if a lead-gen company had an offer working on a 100% performance basis. Now list 20 ideas.

PROMPT 6: Campaign Specific Offer

Prompt: You’re running a specific campaign targeting people like [PERSONA]. [SET THE SCENE OF THE CAMPAIGN WITH SOME CONTEXT]. The objective of the campaign is to [DESIRED RESULT FOR YOUR COMPANY].

Directly call out and frame their pain-point/problem we will be fixing for them (focus on the consequences it is causing them): [INSERT ONE PROBLEM]

The result you promise them is: [INSERT ONE RESULT-CLAIM]

You aim to reduce their risk by offering them:  [INSERT ONE RISK-REVERSAL]

Now give 5 examples of how you would word the following (max 15 words for each):

- Fix their problem

- Deliver the specified result

- Reduce their risk

All the examples you give should sound like medium-effort natural-speech and not like cliche marketing copy.

Example Prompt: You’re running a specific campaign targeting people like Alex. The campaign is a cold-outreach campaign via LinkedIn to B2B companies. The objective of the campaign is to drive 20 monthly meetings.

Directly call out and frame their pain-point/problem we will be fixing for them (focus on the consequences it is causing them): Struggling to generate a higher volume of qualified leads without increasing headcount.

The result you promise them is: Book more meetings without having to increase their headcount

You aim to reduce their risk by offering them:  Implementing a model where payment is strictly tied to the quality and quantity of leads generated, ensuring Alex pays only for results.

Now give 5 examples of how you would word the following (max 15 words for each):

- Fix their problem

- Deliver the specified result

- Reduce their risk

All the examples you give should sound like medium-effort natural-speech and not like marketed email-copy.

PROMPT 7: Summary 

Now, take everything you've learned about this buyer persona [PERSONA NAME] and write me a comprehensive, detailed summary of all relevant details.

I want this summary to be something I can send to you. So that you can help me write effective advertising materials targeting personas like [PERSONA NAME] - stuff like Ads, emails, sales letters. 

This summary must include all the deep emotional drivers that inspire people like [PERSONA NAME] into taking action. Include all relevant details, quotes. Remember this summary is designed to give you (ChatGPT) the best possible context about this market. 

But I want that summary to be something I can paste into a single prompt. Make it as long as it needs to be.