AI Makeover: How AI Took a Creator’s Brand from Manual to Magical

Welcome to a special episode of ‘The AI Hat Podcast’! Today we’re doing something a little different. Instead of our usual interview format, we’re conducting a live consulting session, an AI Makeover, with a creative entrepreneur who’s already using AI in fascinating ways.

Our guest today is Matthew Spiller, also known as Vibeproxies954 in the Magic the Gathering community. Matthew has been leveraging AI to enhance his content creation and streamline his business processes for his Magic the Gathering-related products. That’s a collectible card game that I, too, have been playing since the mid-nineties and am excited to geek out just a little bit.

In this session, we’ll explore how Matthew is currently using AI, identify areas for improvement, and brainstorm new strategies to take his business to the next level. Whether you’re a content creator, a game enthusiast, or just curious about practical AI applications in niche markets, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

So, let’s dive in and unpack the AI-powered world of Magic the Gathering content creation!

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to Matthew Spiller about:

✨ Defining a Targeted AI Strategy: Matthew learned how to create AI-powered audience and brand voice personas, allowing him to craft content that truly resonates with his Magic: The Gathering niche—an approach any business can use to sharpen their messaging.

✨ Streamlining Content Creation with AI: By using AI for social media posts, Matthew transitioned from manual, daily posting to a streamlined, batch-created schedule. Listeners will learn how AI can help them save time and ensure consistent, authentic engagement.

✨ Automating Operations for Growth: Matthew explored ways to automate inventory and customer engagement with AI, reducing manual tasks and creating a foundation for scalable growth—ideal for any small business looking to expand sustainably.

Learn more about Matthew Spiller

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

AI Makeover: How AI Took a Creator’s Brand from Manual to Magical with Matthew Spiller

[00:00:00] Matthew Spiller: Oh, wow. The things that I thought I knew, but after speaking with you, you’ve really opened my eyes to how to leverage this. And like right now on my posts, I try to at least make one or two posts per day on Instagram, Threads. But this is through manual, still doing this manually, mostly, and it’s time consuming and I don’t want to have to do that every day.

But I also recognize, you don’t, you will not get that engagement. And I want to have this succeed with of putting 100 percent of my effort into this.

[00:00:48] Mike Allton: Welcome to AI in Marketing: Unpacked, where we simplify AI for impactful marketing. I’m your host, Mike Allton here to guide you through the world of artificial intelligence and its transformative impact on marketing strategies. Each episode will break down AI concepts into manageable insights and explore practical applications that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer just starting to explore the potential of AI, this podcast will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to succeed. So tune in and let’s unlock the power of AI together.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI in Marketing: Unpacked where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn too. Subscribe to be shown to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead, but wait, welcome to a special edition of AI in Marketing: Unpacked. Today, we’re doing something a little different instead of our usual interview format, we’re conducting a live consulting session. An AI makeover with a creative entrepreneur who’s already using AI in some fascinating ways.

Our guest today is Matthew Spiller, also known as vibe proxies. In the Magic The Gathering community. Matthew has been leveraging AI to enhance his content creation and streamline his business processes for his Magic The Gathering related products. And that’s the collectible card game that I too have been playing since the mid nineties, and I’m excited to geek out just a little bit, but in this session, we’re going to explore how Matthew is currently using AI, identify areas where for improvement and brainstorm new strategies to take his business to the next level, whether you’re a content creator, a game enthusiast, or just curious about practical AI applications in niche markets.

This episode is going to be packed with insights you won’t want to miss. So let’s dive in and unpack the AI powered world of Magic The Gathering content creation. Hey, Matthew, welcome to the show.

[00:02:47] Matthew Spiller: Hi, Mike. Great to be here. And thank you once again for this opportunity to

meet with you.

[00:02:53] Mike Allton: My pleasure. I hope this is going to be beneficial to both of us, but mostly you.

So I’d love if you could start off by just kind of walking us through your current content creation process, for instance, and how specifically maybe you’re already trying to find some ways to use AI when creating magic, the gathering cards and not the cards themselves, right, but the products and everything associated with the cards.

[00:03:16] Matthew Spiller: Yes. Well, actually part of the creation process is with image generation. So I specifically deal in the field of token and proxies, which in certain circumstances is allowed by the IP holder Wizards Of The Coast for distribution. Now, tokens specifically, as long as they’re not using protected designs, your consumers of those can purchase them from content creators like myself and others.

So specifically, I have started a different lines of token designs using AI for the image generation process. So that’s the foundation now for my online store. Get my, I’ve been able to have instead of, obviously I’m trying to minimize my costs by designing my own cards. So now I have that. Gotten great feedback from the player base.

So now I’m preparing to open up a shop. Now, the area where I would love to learn more on how to leverage is actually more on the business side, processing, handling orders, marketing, not just to create generic posts, but in the different avenues like Instagram have the appropriate image based marketing message versus Threads, where I want that tool to help on a weekly basis, create engaging posts to bring up discussion.

And then so. sales funnel. Hey, you see, you also like magic. Do you like some tokens? So create those dynamic opportunities, obviously for a small business owner like myself. And then one concern is proper customer management. My time is limited. So if there are certain Key indicators such as, Oh, customer didn’t get anything, have the tools be able to quickly notify me, or if there’s order and inventory management, like obviously no software, there’s certain softwares that can do that, but I want to make sure everything’s integrated so that I’m always on top of, do I need to print more?

What is the trending product, do I have to get certain designs more for this? And those are some of the top three areas of concern for myself.

[00:06:05] Mike Allton: Very cool. So for those of you listening, just a little bit of a, of context, Magic the Gathering, it’s a collectible card game. It’s been around for decades. And one of the things that.

Player aficionados really appreciate is the fact that every unique card has its own unique art designs that are on it, that, that all kinds of different artists, so there’s all kinds of different designs are part of those cards and you’re creating versions of those electronically, if I’m understanding you correctly, using AI.

[00:06:35] Matthew Spiller: Yes, so currently I have a CoFi, which is allowing me to distribute the digital images of those cards for self print, but with the Etsy shop, I’m opening myself up to having a physical product and to help provide context for the viewers. I have an example of one. This is from my own designs. So as you can see here, I created the eye, the frame around it, but the central image in the TV is using AI to generate that.

And so with the frame already done, I can quickly just focus on the image itself. And. Now the business will be dealing with physical inventory. So it’s always one key concern is okay. Maintaining inventory, because if I see something good, I need these tools to be understand,

okay, every transaction for this will decrease from the inventory. Once I reach at a certain point, quickly notify me via Twitter. Text or email to say we’re running low, you’ll have X amount of time typically from their printer to shipping to now to get replacements. So at this level, make sure to have myself put an order to continue the flow of business.

[00:08:06] Mike Allton: Got it. So, you know, we’re recording this in, in mid October, 2024. And I would say that as of right now, AI agents, something we talked about briefly before we started recording, aren’t in a position yet to really help you, that’s something that you’re going to want to pay attention to over the next six to 12 months.

Today, the e commerce software that you’re, you’re using out of the box, so to speak, whether it’s Etsy. Or, you know, maybe those of you listening like myself might have a WordPress shop with a WooCommerce e commerce plugin there, those kinds of shops, they can already be configured out of the box to have specific inventory levels for specific products and to send alerts when you reach a certain threshold, not when you’re out, but when you have 10, 20, a hundred, whatever units.

Available still. So that’s the kind of thing where you can still get that notification. Now, what happens next will still be a very manual thing, right? You’d get a notification that a product is running low, which also then tell you that it’s trending and it’ll be up to you to do something about it.

Now, I. I believe really in 12 to 18 months, there will be AI agents available to help us automate those steps. Now, for those of you listening, we haven’t talked about AI agents a lot on this show, but imagine you’re talking with chat GPT or Claude or, you know, that’s your normal generative AI experience where you tell it to do something, you tell it to give it an output and it gives you the output.

And then it waits for you to do something next for you to tell it what to do next, if anything. An AI agent is kind of the next level of artificial intelligence, where it as a system will be empowered and have the capability to take actions on your behalf. So in this case, you could have an AI agent in place to automatically run a print job if a particular item gets low enough in inventory, it would automatically notify you. It could automatically check shipping statuses and that sort of thing. And, and do all those kinds of things that you’re talking about. We’re not there yet at a level, certainly that a small business would be able to employ. There may be enterprise systems available that I’m not as familiar with, but obviously they’re going to be way outside the budget for what we’re talking about.

[00:10:24] Matthew Spiller: Cause the closest I’ve seen is like Salesforce Einstein. That has certain capabilities of account management, contacts within the Salesforce environment.

[00:10:36] Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s a great example. Yeah. Salesforce is built in AI. They call it Einstein. And that has all kinds of additional AI capabilities built in.

And it’s, we hesitate to call it agents. Even though Salesforce will say it’s agents, it’s really more automation. It’s really more, really, really smart automation. If this, then that kind of sequences, but again, within the next 12 months, it will have true AI agent capabilities where it will be able to go and do things on our behalf, speak with other systems, not within the Salesforce environment, for instance.

But even to leverage that. You’d have to have a Salesforce license, which isn’t inexpensive, right? And that’s something I’m trying to be very cognizant of, right? For yourself and other small business. So the printer content creators I’m kind of including myself in that bucket, by the way, I happen to work full time for Agorapulse, but this show, my blog, the social media hat, which I’ve had for, Practically that’s always been a solopreneur exercise for me.

So I feel for you because I’ve always trying to limit my own expenditures. I can’t have too many subscriptions and too many tools and softwares and that sort of thing. So that’s the e commerce part, you know, where I would simply look into, and in your case, Etsy and look into their actual shop settings, the per product settings and look for thresholds that you can set up alerts.

You know, so whenever you set up the inventory, you should be able to mark. there. Yes, I would like to be notified when we hit 25 percent remaining, you know, whatever, whatever that threshold is. But what we can do also, though, for sure, is focus on your marketing aspects. That’s where definitely AI can help you without having to dig into a bunch of new tools.

And to give you some context, are you currently using chat GPT or cloud or a different model? All the above? What are you using today?

[00:12:35] Matthew Spiller: Most of the time I’m actually using Gemini simply because, yeah, for me, The way I’m using it is like specifically for spelling corrections, tone changes. So what I want to do is like have it set up so that I, I know there are services, but I would like it to I’ve seen.

Demonstration and I know it’s capability to have access to accounts and distribute that to all of them at the same time, rather than through a service. I’m trying to minimize any costs and seeing if those, if like maybe a chat GPT, I think I have an account for that also to make specific content and then have that maybe definitely.

Or at least make sure it’s all preplanned for the rest of the week.

[00:13:41] Mike Allton: Yeah. So what we’re going to talk about often, I think in this conversation going forward, our Gemini gems, and I haven’t played with them a whole lot, but my understanding and I hope I’m correcting this is that the gems are very much like custom GPTs.

Or Anthropic Claude artifacts where you’ll be able to set them up in advance and they will live there as kind of a document that Gemini can refer to and you can refer to. And I say that because if you’re going to create marketing collateral for yourself, there’s some key aspects that you’re going to want to determine in advance and then make sure the AI has available to it. Folks familiar with the show know I use Magai, which is really a wrapper that allows me to use Gemini or Claude or Chat Gpt or Llama or Grok From the same chat, which is pretty awesome, and I don’t have to pay all the other tools 20 bucks a month.

I just pay Magai 20 a month. And within Magai, it has its version of all these things that we’re talking about. It’s version of the custom GPT or the Gem is called a Persona. So I’ll just talk about Gems, but those of you listening know that when I say Gems, if you’re using open AI’s Chat GPT, that would be a Custom GPT.

If you’re using Claude, it’d be an artifact and so on. So the first thing you’re going to want to do is have a conversation with Gemini about your target audience. And you’re going to want to tell it, Hey, Gemini, what we’re going to work on today is a target ICP or a persona for the business. I’m assuming you haven’t really done an exercise like that before.

Is that right, Matthew?

[00:15:19] Matthew Spiller: Not for this, I’ve done some similar projects through scholastic and work training. So I’m familiar with the concept, but not having actually applied it to myself.

[00:15:34] Mike Allton: Great. Perfect. So that’s where we’re going to start because we want to make sure that going forward, any marketing collateral we create is with that target audience in mind. And in fact, we’re also going to want to make sure that anything else that we do for the business, any product development you know, any strategy that you might want to take, it’s going to be super helpful for the AI to understand who your target audience is.

So you start off the conversation by saying, Hey, look, I want to create one or more target ICPs or personas for my audience. And then the real key there is you tell the AI, you tell Gemini, ask me questions, ask me questions about my business so that we can develop this. So you’ve told it what you want to accomplish and you’ve given it the freedom to ask you what it needs to know to help you develop a really, really great target audience for your business.

And then it’s going to give you a questionnaire. It’s going to say, all right, what’s your business name? What’s your website in, or you know, any other kind of URL that you can plug in there that’ll help give it a lot of background information. It’ll ask you about your products. It’ll start to talk to you about what we call firmographic details about your target audience.

You know, what are they struggling with? What are their pain points? What are their goals? What are their aspirations? How are you solving for all of those things? How are you helping them? And at the end, you’ll end up having a really, really crystal clear idea Of who you’re actually talking to. And it’ll be, you know, it might be, you know, male versus female.

That might be age. It might be geographic stuff, maybe, but most importantly, it’ll be a very defined segment of the entire world of the entire Magic: The Gathering community, because I think we got to be honest, not all match of the gathering card players are going to be interested in what you have to sell.

It’s a subset of that larger segment. So you had that conversation. And at the end, what you want Gemini to do for you. And this is like your last prompt is so okay. Great. Take everything that we’ve just decided and discussed and turn that into a custom prompt for me or a custom gem. So we’re going to call it where a Gemini Gem, and it will then print out for you a couple of pages of information about.

All the details that it would need to know about that audience, age, sex, gender, you know, all that kind of stuff. Sure. If it applies you know, but the other things like, how else would you describe that audience? What are their buying tendencies? What are their budget? Are they affluent? Are they looking for good deals?

I mean, these are the kinds of things we really need to know when we’re creating marketing messaging. And that last one’s a really important point, right? Let’s think about Apple. As a company, their marketing versus the dollar store’s marketing. Completely different. They’re both pretty big companies, right?

But they’re completely different. They’re talking to different audiences. Apple’s not talking to somebody that’s, you know, looking, bringing in coupon codes and that sort of thing. That’s, that’s not their audience. You know, so that will help inform everything else you’re doing. So that’s the first step is to identify that copy and paste it into a Google doc or an Evernote note or something like that, so that you can easily reference it, but then also go into Gemini settings, create a Gem for yourself, call it audience or whatever you want to call it and just paste in what Gemini created for you.

Because then going forward, anytime you want to talk to Gemini about strategy, talk to about a product development, talk to about a marketing campaign, or even something as easy as a social post. The first thing you want to do is get that audience input. So I’ve got a step two, but I’ll stop there for a second.

What questions do you have about building a custom audience for your AI?

[00:19:40] Matthew Spiller: So I guess within this process, is there, This would be focused typically then on only one demographic because what I at least try to do to help differentiate myself is I’m, I’m bilingual. So I speak both English and Spanish.

So I also try to focus efforts on the community of the Latino. Magic the Garhering community, especially in like Mexico, South America Spain collaborate with other creators there play posts. So at least should, then I have one Gem just for English and the North American diaspora, and then another agent or Gem for the Spanish community, or can it handle both?

[00:20:43] Mike Allton: The, it’s a great question. And this is something that every business needs to think about. And. Regardless of their use of AI, this is, this is almost a higher level business question, right? How many target personas do I have to define for my business? And it may be that if language is the only difference, then you don’t need a second persona.

If that is the only differentiator between that audience, if every other aspect of the definition of their persona, what they’re looking for, what they can afford, what they’re interested in, how they talk, all those other things are the same. Then all you’re talking about is translation, and between you and the AI, you can handle the translation.

But if there’s other differences, beyond language and geography, if there’s other differences in terms of what their interests are you know, what’s, how they tend to approach the game and collecting and, and, you know, their embracing of technology, because that’s an aspect, for instance to your business.

You know, traditional Magic, The Gathering players, like myself, we’re old school analog guys. I’ve got cards, as I told you before the show, right. That are 30 years old. And I keep them in this little, honestly, it’s like a treasure chest thing. And, and that’s it. That’s how I play. I don’t play online really, or doing these other kinds of things.

And if I was technology averse, which obviously I’m not, but if I was technology averse. That would be the sum in total of my involvement in Magic. I probably would not be interested in tokens and proxies and playing online and all the other things that you can do with the game. So that’s part of the process, right?

And if you notice that there’s a difference there between, you know, English speaking folks who live in the United States versus Spanish speaking folks who live in more Latino regions, then I would absolutely have just repeat that exercise. And create a second persona for the Latino community. The other thing you could do, if you’re not sure, go ahead and repeat the exercise, but the first time you do it, you’re thinking about English speaking individuals.

And the second time you’re doing it, you’re thinking about your Latino community and see if there’s a significant difference between the two, you know, at Agorapulse, like I said, where I work full time, we’ve got four different ICPs and two of them are very, very similar. They’re social media managers.

But one of them, one of the ICPs is social managers who work for retail businesses. And the other one is social managers who work for hospitality businesses. And again, in many aspects, if you were to compare their ICP side by side, they would probably be 75%. The same, but that 25%, that 25 percent is enough to make us want to have them as a different ICP where we can change the things that we’re talking about to be of real interest to one versus the other.

You know, hospitality for instance, has very little, if any online e commerce. Whereas retail increasingly has more and more online e commerce, even if they’ve got a brick and mortar company, they’re almost dead in the water. If they’re not also talking about online, which means as a social media manager, you’ve got to manage both expectations, foot traffic and online shoppers.

Whereas hospitality is almost a hundred percent foot traffic. And that’s just one difference between the two of them that might come out. Maybe, maybe not in a marketing campaign or an ad or something like that. So yeah, that was a great question. Anything else about.

[00:24:11] Matthew Spiller: I’ll have to try it out.

Definitely learn the process because this is something you. You’re, once you start looking into business marketing, you have to get into that, but this is the first time where I have to really stop and consider, okay, not just beyond these are Magic the Gathering players who will purchase. It’s like, okay, who is actually my target audience?

[00:24:38] Mike Allton: Yeah. And you know, the, again, the AI will help walk you through that. That’s why I’m phrasing this as, you know, tell the AI what we’re going to do and then tell it to ask you questions because that way we don’t have to come up with some kind of elaborate chain prompt that walks you through that it doesn’t have to be that, that complicated.

Any artificial intelligence you’re talking to, whether it’s Claude, Gemini, Chat, GPT, even, you know, Grok, it understands what a target persona is, and it understands all the frameworks that are out there for building a target persona. And it will be able to easily walk you through this, just like a paid marketing strategist sitting by your side.

And by the way, I should say, expect to spend some time on this, expect to get some questions that you don’t know the answer to right off, and you’re not going to need to go off and think about it. You know, come back on time. This isn’t something that you’re going to knock out on a Friday night. This is something that I spent, it took me over the course of two weeks.

I don’t know how many hours, but it was over the course of two weeks for me to develop this. Specific for not just my Social Media Hat audience, but that subset of marketers within that audience that’s interested in Artificial Intelligence. So I’ve got an audience just for that. So the second crucial step before you’re even creating any kind of assets is to come up with a voice.

Or, or, or custom GPT and your voice. This is how you come across as a brand, your style, your tone. And it’s important to think about, and it’s important to do the audience first, because there needs to be a blend in what you say and how you say things between. How you normally talk and how your target audience normally talks.

You’re going to want to be able to use some of the words and phrases and maybe even intonations that they use. And this is why to go back to your last question, it might actually be a great idea to have two ICPs because you know, Latino people may communicate very differently. Or at least differently enough, right, versus English speaking native English speakers in, in how you want to then change the tone, the style, and that kind of thing.

In other words, you might have a social post that you want to share in both languages, which you can do pretty easily, right? And the Spanish one might not be a word for word translation of the English one, because, you know, It might come across differently.

[00:27:10] Matthew Spiller: One example is whenever I use translation software, one thing I can know, or at least easily see when someone uses the translation is Tarjeta and Carta.

Carta, they’re both technically reference similar words, depending on the use, but Tarjeta would be referring to card as in playing card. But whenever I use translation or see posts in the Magic the Gathering community, using carta, I knew it refers typically to letter. So the translation is saying, I want to say, you’re seeing this letter when they really should be saying, you should really see this card.

It’s those types of errors I don’t want to have. That’s what I usually may use that for translation software for certain things, but it always a once over to make sure, like you said, my voice is coming through the message,

[00:28:20] Mike Allton: right? So all of the large language models. Let’s say adequate at translating text They’re really great if it’s not being translated for public consumption, right?

If you just need to translate it for yourself an email, you know, somebody else’s social copy something like that That’s that’s fine. But yeah, if it’s being translated for Public consumption as in like marketing copy. Yeah, that’s where we have to be careful. Deep L. com is I think considered one of the best translation services.

But like everything else that means there’s an expense involved. It’s probably better if you play around with Chat GPT versus Claude versus Gemini, and you can just do some simple tests, right? You can give each of them the exact same script and ask them to translate them using a lot of the jargon and the names and the, and you know, the, the words right, that you’re going to be using, like.

And, you know, see if there’s any difference between them. I imagine one of them is probably going to end up coming out ahead and a little bit better for you. The other thing you’ll be able to do is as you’re building some of these gems, when you’re going to use them for creating translated or translations of your copy, you can tell it always use these translations for these words.

Do not use Carta. For card. I mean, I know that comes from the Latin, like the Magna Carta. So that, you know, so I understand where it’s coming from and that, and it doesn’t understand all the context around it, but you can tell it and you can train at that. And that’s the beauty of a Gem. Instead of having to say things like that, every time you’re starting a new prompt, you pull in the Gem to the conversation and the AI already knows all the instructions that you put in there.

Right. So when you’re creating a new marketing campaign, you start with the audience, Gem, say, Hey, I’ve got a new product. I want to build on a marketing campaign. I want to do email. I want to do social media. I want to do paid ads. I want to do a live stream. Here’s the new product. Help me map out a campaign and just with the audience, Gem, Gemini will do a great job of mapping out cool.

And you can tell it to ask you questions. Remember that’s always part of my basic prompt, right? Ask me what else you want to know before giving me the output. Cause like one thing I forgot to just spit out in this example was a campaign start date and an end date, which Gemini would know to ask if you give it the freedom to ask that, but we have to tell it that it’s okay to ask questions.

It also helps to tell it take your time. Okay. I don’t know why exactly, but if you tell AI in any one of these large language models, take your time, that helps, even though it may not be a discernible difference in the output time, it’s that freedom to think about it, which is where we’re going with our AI.

And I don’t want to get too much into the large language models, but the early ones did not have that freedom to think about and evaluate the output. Whereas check GPT four, Oh, that was a big part of the difference. With that large language model, it was designed to think about and evaluate the response before it output it, which is why it could tell you how many r’s are in the word strawberry versus ChatGPT 3.

5 could not answer that question correctly. So, so those are a couple of tips. So yeah, so then the next thing is like I was saying, we want to go through that same kind of audience process, but now we want to talk about voice. Tone style. And so you tell Gemini in a new chat, all right, we’re going to create a style guide and a voice guide or a brand voice for myself and for my organization, ask me questions, ask me what you want to know, and it will again, deliver for you a questionnaire.

Now, the one difference here with this exercise is you’re also going to want to feed it examples. You’re going to want to look back through things that you’ve written blog posts, emails, eBooks, PDFs, social copy is okay. But generally speaking, social copy is not long enough. So you’d have to feed it. If you, if we were doing strictly like Threads posts, you’d have to feed it like 50 cause you want to give it a lot of examples of your writing.

This is an area where I’m fortunate because I like to write. I write a lot. I’ll put it’s no problem for me to put 2500 words into a single blog post. So I was able to give Chat GPT. I think maybe three blog posts before it was like, Oh, yeah. Okay, Mike, I get it. I understand. You’re a sci fi nerd. You love historical references.

You love taking really complicated topics and simplifying them for your audience in a very conversational, approachable, authentic, trustworthy way. I’m like, yeah, you nailed it. You got me. You, I mean, and there was more to the analysis there, but it totally understood it and that’s what you want to get to.

You want to get to the point where Gemini has now defined for you, Matthew, this is your style. This is how you approach your writing. This is how you approach your communication. And then you blend that with your audience. Say, okay, cool. That’s me. Here’s my audience. You bring in the Gem that you already created for your audience.

And you say, do I need to adjust this to resonate more with my audience? Are there key words, phrases you know, other communication styles that my audience Prefers that I need to think about, and I’ll give you a really silly example. You might be the kind of guy that no matter the situation, even if it’s a live stream or a consulting call like this, you’re not afraid to swear.

That’s just part of who you are. You cuss all the time and you’re cool with that. And you don’t care what anybody else thinks, because that’s just part of your, your, your approach to communication and there’s nothing wrong with that. But what if your target audience, the people you really want to sell to, they’re turned off by swearing.

That’s the kind of revelation we want to have out of this process. We want Gemini to come to you and say, and it’s probably not going to come with that kind of a revelation, but it might tell you something like your audience is not interested in science fiction. That might be something that tells me and I’m like, Oh, okay.

So enough with the Star Wars references, I gotta leave that alone and not use that in every other blog post or social post switch to Silo. That’s very informative. Yeah. Which is absolutely you know, or, or spycraft who knows, but those are the kinds of insights we want to get out of this and then at the end, just like with audience, we’re going to tell Gemini cool, create for me a complete instruction set.

For a Gem or for those of you listening for a Custom GPT or an Artifact or a Persona, depending on what model you’re using, create for me a complete instruction set so that you understand the next time I ask you exactly what my voice and style should be. And it’ll print that out on the screen. Then you copy and paste that.

Two places into a document that you can reference if you need to, and then into a new Gem, and then you test them, right? You, you, you start a new chat, you reference the audience or the the voice, whatever you call it, and you say, okay, great. I want to create a social media post talking about Magic, the Gatherings, the latest release.

I mean, just, just pick something right. And you give it the details, the facts, and you let it craft the social post. And then you read it and you’re like, okay. Yeah, that kind of sounds like me. That sounds like something I would write if I knew what to write for a social post, right? Cause that’s what it’s relieving us as the business owner, who isn’t a marketer of having to know how to create copy for marketing.

This is where the real shortcut happens because like I said, it will take you time to get here. So this is an investment of time. But then from that moment forward, everything else, just like the pharmaceutical companies who invest billions in the first pill, and then everything after that, it’s super cheap to make, it’s gonna be the same thing now with your marketing, right?

So you decide, okay, cool. Now I need to come up with a marketing strategy. For the business and you start a new chat. And the first thing you do is bring in your audience. You said, cool, here’s who I am. We’re going to build out a marketing strategy. There’s all these social channels that I could be active on.

I don’t have time to be active in all of them. Help me prioritize my social media. Help me prioritize email or paid ads or what other channels. You think I should be active on and ask me questions so that we can develop this together. And now you’re having a conversation with an artificial intelligence who knows exactly who you are and who you’re trying to talk to.

[00:37:36] Matthew Spiller: And this is where I think the tools, especially are useful for small business owners like myself. I just want to prioritize my time between like, you know, Like I said prior to the recording studying for my certification or content creation itself, rather than, you know, the other aspects you’re into marketing, I’m into creation, but we both don’t understand.

Time is very valuable,

[00:38:10] Mike Allton: right? So, and that’s why this is almost a step three, right? Where you’re going to use these newfound Gems and these newfound you know, just documentation of who you’re talking to and how you’re going to talk to them to do the next thing, which is to create that marketing strategy, because Gemini is familiar with all of today’s social channels and all of today’s marketing channels and mediums.

And once you. Show it who your target audience is. It might tell you, you know what, ignore LinkedIn, ignore Facebook, focus on Threads and Instagram and YouTube. And already now you’re going to be saving yourself time by not trying to be on every social platform all the time. You’re going to focus your efforts on those three channels and then you can drill down.

Okay. Well, let’s, let’s talk about those three channels. What are we going to do specifically on those three channels? Let’s come up with a high level strategy and then outline the specific tactics. And again, At any step in the way, if you’re not really familiar with what the next step is, all you have to do is ask Gemini.

I want a marketing strategy. Help me understand how to go from here. What questions should I ask you ask me questions and have that conversation back and forth with the strategist. And at the end of the day, it’ll come up with something like you’re going to spend time on Threads, having conversations like I know you’re doing.

You’re going to post twice a week. Instagram, these kinds of posts, and it’ll walk you through what those might look like. And you’re going to start you’re, I think you’re already doing live streaming, right? So you’re already leveraging live stream. We’re going to make sure that’s going to YouTube and Twitch or wherever, and it’ll help you map out how to repurpose all those things and make sure that you’re doing as a, as a solopreneur, as a small business owner, I typically recommend doing one major marketing motion, and then getting as much mileage out of that motion as you can So as an example, we are right now doing my major marketing motion me personally I do a podcast. I do interviews on the podcast and then I publish those interviews once maybe twice a week depending on how far ahead I am and then I take snippets and, you know, small video clips, 60 second clips, and those get to TikTok and Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts and Pinterest and everywhere.

And I’m using that to power my email marketing, everything else. It all stems from that one single marketing motion of the podcast. And so, you know, for you, it might be your live stream, or again, in this kind of a brainstorming strategy session that you have with AI. You might talk about that and it might say, you know what, based on what you’ve told me so far, you might want to do more audio content or you might want to do more written plus visual content.

That’s, that, that’s, that, that’ll be part of the details, right? That, that come from that conversation. But then once you’ve got that in place, then it’s just a matter of coming up with the schedule and executing the schedule for the marketing assets. And again, that’s where the tool is going to come in so handy.

You’re going to decide. How often you’re going to post, what you’re going to post about, where you’re going to post it. And every time it’s time to create the next post, and you can do this in batch you’re going to work with the AI to come up with ideas of topics, themes, questions. You know, what, what would your audience be interested in, and having you post about aside from new products, right?

And then, and that’s what the audience, Gem, will help you do. That’s kind of your strategy guy, right? Then your voice guy is your actual copywriter. So anytime you actually want to create the copy, turn to voice. So in my case, what I’m doing is like, I’m using Magai and I will start a new chat with my Audience Persona selected and usually for the, I might, I might use Chat GPT at this stage and say, I want to leverage this podcast interview that I was on with somebody else, right? They were interviewing me. So I was doing most of the talking in that interview and I’m going to feed it the transcript and I’m going to ask it to identify five or 10 themes or topics are really great points that I made, and it’ll do that for me, and then I will switch gears to use Claude and my Voice Persona and say, cool, let’s talk about that first theme where I talked about, you know, how I got started in AI and how it’s very recent. That sort of thing. I want you to pull from the transcript and turn that into a social media post.

And now it’s doing that with my voice. It’s pulling from transcript information. So it’s already pretty much my voice anyways. But it already knew the audience before, you know, when it defined the strategy and then when we get down into the actual copywriting, we use my voice. Does that make sense?

[00:43:13] Matthew Spiller: Yes.

And I can understand it now. To have the focal point to provide the initial push, like I said, start with a podcast or in my case popping into a stream for matches where It doesn’t provide too much contextual information, but it’s a focal point for access to a community. You’re also being able to see, you know, with streams, you see the cards, you’d be able to see myself playing with it.

And then from that post, I’ll have typically the host post host. player will stream, post information about that stream. So there’s access points for the Gems. Hey, I’ll be posting here. How can I help extend that? Not just on my posting, but Any other things that I can’t see in connection with that I can use to help spread that influence,

[00:44:25] Mike Allton: right?

So that’s something that I would actually describe in that chat to Gemini. These are the streams that I’m doing right now. This is the engagement that I’m getting or the reactions that I’m getting, you know, help me. Analyze and think about is, is this the best marketing motion for me? Is there something I should be doing differently or instead of, or amplifying this and how do we leverage this?

If this is the thing that we’re going to keep doing most of the time, how can we best leverage this, knowing what you do about my audience and whatever else you’re able to tell it, because it’s going to ask you all kinds of questions. Once you open up that floodgate, right. That’s going to ask you what social channels you’re active on.

What are the marketing mediums you have? Like, do you have an email list? Do you have a website? Do you have a paid strategy? Do you have a paid budget? And whatever the answer is to any of those questions is the right answer. That just helps Gemini understand. Okay. These are the things that we have. To work with this is your time.

That’s going to be a really important thing, right? Just how much time do you have? Available to invest in that because if again if i’m just putting my own hat on for a moment I don’t have a lot of time because i’ve got a full time job. This is my side gig right? I I work on the social media hat You know, a couple hours in the evenings during the week because I’ve got a family, but my girls are busy doing dance and horseback riding, all that kind of stuff.

And then pretty much Saturdays I have almost the entire day most of the time and that’s it. So like I publish on Saturday mornings because that’s when I have like three hours to just sit down with my latest podcast episode and work through the editing, the publishing, the promotion. There’s a whole process there, but that’s me.

Not everybody has even that much time, particularly if it’s from a market perspective. But if we’re talking about promoting your business and you want to approach it from an eight to five perspective, meaning your evenings and your weekends are your own, and that’s cool. So then how much time out of your week, out of your 40 hours, can you devote to marketing?

That should be one of the things that we talk about with AI so that it understands, okay, Matthew has said he’s got four hours a week that he can put to marketing the business. I’m obviously just making that up, you know, whatever that time is. And. It will have a fairly good understanding of how much time it takes to do a lot of the things you could be doing with marketing, and it will then help you prioritize.

All those different tasks.

[00:46:54] Matthew Spiller: Oh, wow. The things that I thought I knew, but after speaking with you, you’ve really opened my eyes to how to leverage this and to not see like right now, on my posts, I try to at least make one or two posts per day on Instagram, Threads, but this is through manual. Still doing this manually, mostly.

And it’s time consuming, and I don’t want to have to do that every day, but I also recognize you don’t, you will not get that engagement. And I want to have this succeed with putting 100 percent of my effort into this.

[00:47:48] Mike Allton: Yeah. And so one of the things that this going through this exercise will help you, you’ll identify the channels that you want to leverage.

And from there. You’ll be able to look at very specific tools that you can use to manage those channels. The one thing that I’m pretty sure Gemini cannot do yet, cause I’m pretty sure most of the other language models cannot do it yet, is take an action on our behalf. You can’t ask Gemini to craft an Instagram post for you, give you a prompt for an image, create the image, and then say, go post that to Instagram for me.

I’m fairly certain they don’t do that. And honestly, I’m not even sure if they ever will will, because in order to post to social platforms, you have to have access to their API APIs, and that’s a, that’s a bigger deal on a bigger question. Some of them like X charge for that API access. And I guarantee you, Google does not want to pay X a dime.

So you’d never be able to post to X or Twitter from Gemini and probably most of the others. But what you can do is use the large language models to come up with a promotional calendar, a schedule, how many times you can post and when help you create the content and then subscribe to an inexpensive tool that’ll help you manage that. And that’s why I say determining the channels is first, because you want to make sure that if you subscribe to a tool, it supports the channels you want to support. And I say inexpensive because for most small business owners like yourself, you’re only going to be talking about two or three channels that you’re going to want to post to regularly. So let’s say it’s Instagram, Threads and YouTube, you know, something like that you could use Agorapulse or a Buffer or something like that at a free or inexpensive plan level, because it’s only you. So it’s one seat and it’s only two or three profiles.

Most of the tools, like Agorapulse has a free plan that you can do one seat and three profiles. You know, Buffer has a free or 10 a month plan. I think it’s been a long time since I looked at their pricing, but it’s, it’s probably not far off. That’ll do a few, a few profiles. So then you use the AI to create, help you create the content and you could do all that, you know, in batch and then push all that to the tool, like Agorapulse is A G O R A P U L S E and let the tool then post for you on that schedule.

In fact, I work for Agorapulse, so obviously I’m un bias, but one of the things I I like about Agorapulse is they have a content queue. So if you decide you’re gonna post two times a day to Instagram, which which might be a lot, I’m, I’m getting the betting, the AI will tell you, you don’t need to post that off into Instagram, but let’s say it does.

You could set up a time schedule and say, I’m gonna post at 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM every day. Or maybe Monday through Friday, and it’s going to create a bucket, a queue where then you can just batch, create the image in the captions and add them to the queue. And it will automatically post the next scheduled one for you.

So you could knock out a month’s worth of content in a weekend. And

[00:51:09] Matthew Spiller: because I’ve yet to do it, I know I have to switch my Instagram to a business one because I was looking until. I think it’s similar to Agoraplus or Buffer to just batch out what I was thinking it was before really looking into AI was like what you’re saying a batch posting so that at least stuff that I’m going to be promoting will always be promoted.

And if I want to comment or have, there’s some immediate news I can always post on my own, but. At least the daily post to get the appropriate engagement and keep into the community is achieved.

[00:51:59] Mike Allton: Yeah. And then, you know, with a tool like that, you’ll be able to monitor and make sure you see and respond to any comments or questions or direct messages.

And the beauty there is you’re in one dashboard, handling all of your scheduling, all of your monitoring. Instead of having to go to each individual platform and then you’d get reports too, which is a real benefit. You know, we don’t have really good reports with Threads. We don’t have great reports with Instagram.

Or I mean, YouTube is great. YouTube has a dedicated app just for reporting. But when you can bring all that into a single dashboard and see which channels are performing, how that’s going to help you make really smart data driven decisions down the road. And then you could even think about adding something like Chatbot Builder AI to your Instagram play so you can have posts going out via Agorapulse to Instagram that tell people hey, you know comment Shivan and I’ll send you a discount code or something like that, right and the Chatbot Builder AI will be able to you know Monitor those and have real time conversations with your audience.

So that again, you don’t have to be there in the trenches, having those kinds of conversations, driving the engagement, the AI chat bot, we’ll be able to do that. I did a whole episode with Kelly Mirabella about Chat Bot Builder AI. That was just mind blowing. So you have to go back and look into that. And for those of you listening, I’ll put that in the show notes, but I hope that’s been really helpful.

I’m sure that was a lot. We’ve been talking for almost an hour. So like I would tell any consulting client. By all means, if you’ve got questions, if you’re thinking about this, you’re trying to do one of these custom Gems that we talked about and you’re like, where do I start or what do I do next? By all means, email me, reach out to me on any one of the channels.

But Matthew, you’ve been amazing. And, and this has been, I think, such an interesting episode for folks who might want to know more about you and connect with you, where can they go and, and learn about you?

[00:54:03] Matthew Spiller: Sure. Thank you for anyone who visits my, I think I’ll put my linktree below this the linktree.

ee slash viproxys95 has all my social media, it has my deck profiles on moxfield, and as soon as the Etsy is up, it will have that link also.

[00:54:30] Mike Allton: Terrific. I’ll have all of Matthew’s links in the show notes below. And if you joined this episode, if you enjoyed it and you want to learn more, you want to hear more AI Makeovers, just like this, definitely let me know.

And if you’re facing some unique challenges in implementing AI and marketing and want to be considered for a future AI Makeover, let me know. Please reach out until next time. Welcome to the grid. Thanks for joining us on AI in marketing unpacked. I hope today’s episode has inspired you and given you actionable insights to integrate AI into your marketing strategies.

You enjoyed the show, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider leaving a review. We’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you might have. Don’t forget to join us next time as we continue to simplify AI and help you make a real impact in your marketing efforts until then keep innovating and see just how far AI can take your marketing.

Thank you for listening and have a fantastic day.

Related