Custom GPTs for Marketers: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Tired of starting from scratch with every marketing task? Discover how Custom GPTs can become your most valuable team member. In this practical episode, Mike Allton breaks down exactly how marketers can create, customize, and leverage Custom GPTs to automate repetitive tasks while maintaining brand voice and creativity. From content generation to customer service, learn step-by-step how to build AI assistants that truly understand your brand and marketing goals. Whether you’re new to AI or looking to level up your automation game, this episode delivers actionable insights to transform your marketing workflow.

AI in Marketing: Unpacked host Mike Allton talked about:

✨ Build Your Perfect Assistant – Learn the step-by-step process of creating Custom GPTs tailored to your specific marketing needs.

✨ Maintain Brand Consistency – Discover how to train your Custom GPT to perfectly match your brand voice across all marketing channels.

✨ Automate With Confidence – Master the balance between AI automation and human oversight to optimize your marketing workflow.

Learn more about Mike Allton

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Custom GPTs for Marketers: Work Smarter, Not Harder with Mike Allton

[00:00:00] Mike Allton: Why should you care about custom GPTs? Well, at its core, marketing is all about communication, getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time, custom GPTs make that process easier and more scalable. They allow you to automate parts of your marketing strategy without sacrificing creativity or personal touch, unlike general purpose AI tools.

Custom GPTs aren’t just pulling random facts from the web. They’re fine tuned to match your exact needs. They can align with your brand’s voice, generate content that fits your style, and even follow specific guidelines for product descriptions, email marketing, or social media campaigns. And when done right, this feels seamless.

Not like handing over the reins to a robot, but more like having a really efficient team member who gets your business.

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, keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas, digital marketing. You get to learn to subscribe to be shown how to prepare yourself and your brand for this AI revolution and come out ahead.

Now, today we’re talking about a tool that’s going to change how you work custom GPTs. If you’ve ever thought I wish I had an AI assistant who could really understand my brand this episode is for you Today’s goal is to help you understand Exactly what custom GPTs are why they’re so useful for marketers and most importantly How you can create one yourself.

I’m going to guide you through a practical step by step process for building your custom GPT, share tips to keep it working smoothly and highlight how these models stack up against other AI tools. I’m also going to challenge you to take action. After listening to this episode, try setting up your own custom GPT and post about it.

Be sure to tag me on social media. I’d love to see what you create, give you a shout out. So grab a coffee or settle in wherever you are and let’s get started. Get into it first. Why should you care about custom GPTs at its core? Marketing is all about communication, getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.

Custom GPTs make that process easier and more scalable. They allow you to automate parts of your marketing strategy without sacrificing creativity or personal touch. Unlike general purpose AI tools, custom GPTs aren’t just pulling random facts from the web. They’re fine tuned to match your exact needs.

They can align with your brand’s voice, generate content that fits your style, and even follow specific guidelines for product descriptions, email marketing, or social media campaigns. And when done right, This feels seamless, not like handing over the reins to a robot, but more like having a really efficient team member who gets your business.

Let’s imagine you’re running a campaign to promote a new product line. You could train a custom GPT to generate multiple email drafts, Instagram captions, and ad headlines in a matter of minutes. Each version reflects the tone you want, whether it’s playful, formal, or aspirational, and follows your product messaging to the letter.

This saves you and your team hours of work, and you can still go in and tweak things if needed. Custom GPTs are also excellent for repetitive, but crucial tasks. Think about product descriptions. You sell dozens or even hundreds of items, writing detailed descriptions for each one can take forever. But with a custom GPT, it’s easy.

You could upload information about product categories, features, and tone guidelines, and the AI can crank out accurate descriptions faster than your whole team combined. The real value here isn’t just speed, though. It’s consistency. Custom GPTs ensure that every piece of content reflects the same brand voice, no matter who creates it or how often things change in the world.

Internally, whether it’s generating responses for customer inquiries or coming up with headlines for a new ad campaign, the outputs are always aligned with your overall strategy. And here’s another key advantage. You’re still in control. A lot of marketers are wary of AI because they’re afraid of losing the human element.

But the truth is. AI isn’t replacing creativity. It’s freeing up more time for it by automating the parts of your job that are repetitive or time consuming. You get to spend more time on high level strategy and creative work. In the end, custom GPTs are like having an extra pair of hands that handle the heavy lifting, letting you focus on what really matters.

Now that you understand why custom GPTs are important, let’s look at some specific ways marketers can use them. These examples will give you a feel for what’s possible and hopefully inspire you to build one that works for your business. How about a content generator GPT? This is a custom GPT that specializes in generating content at scale.

Think blog posts, newsletters, and social media captions. If you provide it with clear guidelines, such as tone and length, it can quickly produce drafts that fit your needs. For example, You might use a content generated to write seasonal blog posts or product launch emails. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you have the AI create the first draft, and then you can refine it.

This kind of GPT is perfect for content heavy businesses like e commerce or agencies that need to churn out high quality material without burning out their team. It’s also great for experimenting with different versions of headlines or copy to see what resonates best. With your audience, if crafting really original thought leadership type content is what’s important to you, then use a GPT like this to help you come up with ideas and outlines and still leave that first draft in your capable hands.

How about a brand voice? One of the most powerful uses of custom GPTs is aligning them with your brand voice. Whether your tone is quirky and fun, sleek and professional, or warm and empathetic. This GPT can replicate that style across multiple channels. You can teach it by feeding it past ad campaigns, email templates, and even your style guides.

If this example piques your interest, stay tuned. I’ll have an entire solo episode soon dedicated to building GPTs specifically for brand voice. We’ll go step by step through the process of making sure your AI speaks just like you would. How about an audience specific GPT? This GPT is trained to communicate differently based on the audience segment you’re targeting.

For example, If you’re marketing to Gen Z, you might train the GPT to use a casual, playful tone with pop culture references. B2B campaign targeting executives, you might adjust the GPT’s output to sound more polished and authoritative. Audience segmentation is critical in marketing, and building different GPTs, or at least setting audience specific guidelines, can make a huge difference in engagement.

I’ll also dive deeper into this topic in an upcoming episode about setting up custom GPTs for target audiences. I use mine all the time to brainstorm new topics, outlines, workshop portions that I might want to cover based on that specific audience. Next, how about a customer service GPT? This GPT handles customer inquiries and support questions with empathy, And accuracy.

Instead of building a generic chatbot, you train it with your product documentation, FAQs, and brand values. The result, a virtual assistant that gives quick, helpful responses while staying on brand. This type of GPT is especially useful during peak seasons when your support team might be overwhelmed. For example, it’s an online retailer using the customer service GPT to answer shipping questions and resolve product issues in real time.

It reduces the load on human agents while ensuring customers still receive professional, high quality service. Thoughtful responses. I actually built something very similar to this for Agorapulse as an internal GPT to help our sales and customer facing teams access updated content and the most up to date information about Agorapulse’s capabilities.

Finally, let’s think about ad copy and campaigns as GPT, because if you run ads, this GPT will be your best friend. You can train it. To generate creative ad copy tailored for specific campaigns or platforms, whether you need a catchy tagline for Google ads or a playful hook for Instagram stories, the GPT can generate multiple versions for you to test.

Imagine launching a new campaign and needing a dozen variations of ad headlines to see which one resonates best. Instead of brainstorming for hours, the GPT generates a batch instantly. You get to choose the best ones and refine them further If needed. Here’s a tip. I can’t recommend enough. Use ChatGPT to help design your custom GPT.

If the idea of writing instructions from scratch feels overwhelming, don’t worry. AI can help you through it. Treat ChatGPT like a brainstorming partner. It’s an easy way to refine your goals, come up with specific instructions, and even anticipate potential challenges. Let’s say you’re thinking about building a custom GPT to write blog posts or product descriptions.

Start by opening ChatGPT and just give it a prompt like this. Help me define the tone and content guidelines for a custom GPT that writes newsletter emails, promoting our echo friendly products and services. I want the tone to feel friendly and professional, but also convey a sense of urgency. ChatGPT will come back with suggestions on how to structure your instructions.

It might offer phrases like focus on actionable language or avoid overly formal words, keep the tone conversational and approachable. That’s a huge time saver because it gives you a working template to build from. You can also use ChatGPT to test scenarios you might not think of right away. For example, ask it.

How should my custom GPT respond if a customer asks about delays due to supply chain issues? This helps you identify potential problem areas and shape your instructions to address them proactively. A good custom GPT isn’t just about writing well. It’s about being prepared for edge cases and maintaining consistency across different scenarios.

Another ChatGPT in the design phase is to create multiple versions of instructions for different use cases. Let’s say you need different tones for different marketing channels. You could ask chat GPT to help you design two sets of instructions. One for playful Instagram posts and another for professional LinkedIn content.

Having these templates ready means you can switch gears easily without having to rewrite everything from scratch. How do you actually build a custom GPT? Let’s break it down into manageable steps. This process isn’t difficult, but it does require a little planning to get the best results. Step one.

Clarify your goal. Before you do anything, decide exactly what you want your GPT to accomplish. A vague goal like generate content will cut it. Instead, get specific. I want this GPT to generate email subject lines that drive clicks for our monthly promotions. The clearer your goal, the better the results.

Step two, choose your platform. If you’re working within chat, GPT customization is straightforward. You’ll open the custom instructions section and enter details about how you want the GPT to behave. But if you need advanced integrations, like connecting the GPT to your CRM or embedding it in a website, you’ll likely need to explore the open AI.

API. Just keep in mind that some of these features require a paid plan. Step three, feed it high quality inputs. Your custom GPT is only as good as the information you provide. Upload documents that reflect your brand’s voice. Think product descriptions, ad copy, email templates, or even internal style guides.

Avoid throwing in too much at once. A few high quality inputs will teach the model more effectively than a hundred random documents. Give it examples. How to create an entire brand voice and style document using chat GPT and then turning that into a customer GPT that you can call on whenever you need to is something I’ll cover in that future solo episode.

Now step four. Test, iterate, and refine. Once you’ve set up your custom GPT, it’s time to test it out. Start small, maybe generate a few subject lines, or draft some Instagram captions. Review the outputs carefully. Do they sound right? If not, go back and tweak the instructions. This isn’t a set it and forget it tool.

The more you test and refine, The better your GPT will get. Let’s talk briefly about how custom GPTs compare with other large language models. Take Claude by Anthropic, for example. Claude’s excellent at handling complex, nuanced conversations. If you’re managing a customer service team, you might find Claude’s contextual responses more useful for resolving detailed inquiries.

Gemini also has gems that you can consider, but then there’s Magai, which offers something unique. It lets you create personas across. Multiple models. So instead of locking yourself into just chat GPT, you can experiment with different LLMs like Claude or Gemini and find the one that best fits your needs for each task.

The beauty of this flexibility is that you’re not limited to one approach. The GPT 4 excels at generating creative ad capital, but Claude is better for long form content, which has been my experience. You can tailor your strategy accordingly. Keep in mind that some advanced features like cross platform persona creation may come with a price tag, so it’s worth testing the free tiers first.

Here’s more about Magai and why I always recommend it. This episode of AI in Marketing: Unpacked is brought to you by Magai, your gateway to making generative AI incredibly simple and fast. And accessible wondering how to seamlessly integrate AI into your marketing strategy without getting bogged down by complexities.

That’s exactly where Magai shines. It provides user friendly AI solutions that empower marketers just like you to innovate and elevate your campaigns without needing a degree in science. Imagine having the power to generate creative content, insightful marketing data analysis, or even personalized customer communications, all at the touch of a button, Magai isn’t just about providing tools, it’s about Magai.

Transforming your approach to marketing with AI that’s tailor made to be straightforward and effective. So whether you’re looking to boost your content creation process or want deeper insights into your marketing performance, Magai makes it all possible with a few clicks, no fuss, no hassle. Just results ready to simplify your AI journey.

Visit Magai today to learn how their solutions can revolutionize the way you engage with your audience. Don’t just market market smarter with Magai tap the link in the show notes. To wrap things up, let’s go over a few best practices first, be selective. With your inputs, focus on feeding your GPT high quality content that truly represents your brand voice.

Second, don’t over automate. AI is a powerful tool, but it’s not a replacement for human oversight. Always review the content it generates before it goes live. Third, update your instructions regularly. Your business evolves. So should your GPT. If you shift strategies, update the model to reflect the new direction.

And finally, stay ethical, be transparent about how you’re using AI, especially in customer interactions and ensure you follow data privacy regulations. For instance, almost every podcast episode that I record with guests, I tell them, and most of the time you that I’m using Claude to generate the questions and the guest introduction and that sort of thing, you can be transparent about what you’re using as well.

Alright, here’s my challenge for you. Create your first custom GPT. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Just start with something simple. Try generating a few product descriptions or draft a batch of email subject lines. See how it performs. Make tweaks where needed and get a feel for the process. You’ll quickly realize that building and refining your GPT is easier than it seems.

And when you do, I’d love to hear about it. So be sure to tag me in a social media post. Let’s celebrate your progress together. And who knows, you might even inspire someone else to try it too. I’ll be back soon with another solo episode. Like I mentioned, where we’ll go deeper into how to set up custom GPTs for specific target audiences and perfect their voice and style.

This is one of the most important aspects of creating a GPT that really connects with your audience. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with anyone you think would benefit. Your support means the world to me.

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. If 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. 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.

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