Issue #26: Grok for marketing, Instagram "AI friends", plus prompts

Good morning.

First up this week is an update on Elon Musk’s new AI chatbot, Grok.

It’s built by Musk’s team at xAI, trained in two months (which is insanely fast), and is taking on ChatGPT.

Grok is meant to answer questions and prompts with “a bit of wit”, “rebellious streak”, and a sense of humor.

What’s even crazier? It has real-time knowledge directly from X (formerly Twitter). 

That means you could get answers to any questions about current events (that most other AI platforms would have no clue about).

For you as a marketer, this opens up a world of possibilities. With real-time knowledge, and a brain with personality, Grok could provide you with current event marketing research in seconds.

In today’s issue I’ll show you another way of using ChatGPT for generating ideal avatars for your marketing. Plus, you’ll get a fast and simple way to create optimized subject lines and preview texts for email A/B tests.

Oh, in case you missed it:

We published a special issue on OpenAI’s Dev Day the other day.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

In today’s issue:

• 🤖 Musk's new AI with attitude, Grok.

• Instagram's new “AI Friend” (yikes!)

• ChatGPT Prompts for subject lines and Personas.

• Brave’s Privacy Based AI (good news).

• AI Investments realizing 3.5x returns in 14 months.

• AI might be gaining “Perspective”?

Let’s dive in.

BIONIC JUICE

Instagram is creating an “AI friend” that you can customize to your liking.

Talk about a new kind of “imaginary friend”.

Your “AI friend” can have different identities, spanning race, gender, age, and personality. This is an interesting use of generative AI, as your AI friend can talk and behave just the way you want him (or her).

You can assign your “friend” hobbies, name it, and you can give your friend any hair color or style you want, a big nose or a small nose, and so on.

(It’s like a cuter Frankenstein at this point?)

Snapchat released an AI tool called “My-AI” on the friends tab that everyone wants to get rid of. But this “AI friend” seems different from Snapchat’s.

Snapchat’s “My-AI” is just a bot that answers various questions for the user, and amongst college kids it’s become a homework tool— and an annoyance.

As for marketing and ads, I’m wondering whether or not this friend will have an application in driving more ad revenue, or if it will hurt it. There’s nothing stopping Instagram from slipping in paid ads in an answer from your new pal, right?

Either way, I’m sure this will change the performance of ads. And as that happens they’ll need to be tailored around what the AI tool suggests in order to keep performing and producing results.

Who knows, maybe this AI tool will turn into the new Guru method of making “10k a month with Instagram's AI friend.”

(Yes, vomit a little when I say that).

On the social media beat, TikTok is shutting down its $2 Billion creator fund on December 16th.

It seems TikTok is trying to make a push for longer content and perhaps TikTok Shop affiliate sales instead of continuous, brainless dances to be watched.

I say this because TikTok rolled out a “Creativity Program” earlier this year, which requires content creators to make videos that are longer than a minute to earn money.

Is this a smart move coming from TikTok? Probably. Even though TikTok changed content production and consumption on social media with short-form, scrollable content, this seems as if TikTokit’s is moving away from that.

On the other hand, if TikTok created the wave in the first place, maybe it’s a good idea to pay attention to what they’re doing for monetization.

My reading of the tea leaves tells me that the rise of “Faceless Youtube Channels” (which are channels with videos made entirely or mostly by AI) are making a dent. AI-made videos are becoming the norm.

When your feed is mostly AI-made images and videos, it’s hard for any business (let alone creators) to surface and gain traction.

Let’s move on to a few prompts you can use with any LLM, like ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever else you like using.

As marketers, you and I both know how important Personas (or Avatars—lots of names for the same thing) are. 

But most marketers only create a Persona (often not based on much data) and stop there.

With an LLM like ChatGPT, you can push it further by better understanding and analyzing your Personas.

As I’ve always said: Prompts are endless because language is. You can get the same or similar result with a hundred different prompts. 

The true value lies with the conversation you have and what you ask for. 

You don’t need to become a prompt specialist or use 2,000+ word prompts. 

Let me share a simple way for you to spend a few minutes today and walk away with a better, deeper understanding of your Persona.

Directions:

List out any topics or niche ideas that are related to your product or service that you’re selling.

Copy and paste the prompt below into ChatGPT and fill in the variable with that list.

Variables to fill out:

[INSERT YOUR PERSONA DESCRIPTION]: A simple description of your Persona so ChatGPT has a starting reference.

[INSERT YOUR PRODUCT DESCRIPTION]: A simple product description. You could also switch out product for a lead magnet or other offer.

[INSERT YOUR TOPICS]: List out a few topics that are relevant to your Persona and Product.

Here is the prompt to use:

You’re an expert market researcher and marketer. Your task is to help me develop my Persona and better understand their psychology, needs, desires, emotions, and a lot more. 

You’ll receive context below and your task is to use these topics to expand and develop my Persona with more details, like demographics, psychographics, and other relevant Persona details.

Here’s context: 
- Persona: [INSERT YOUR PERSONA DESCRIPTION]
- Product: [INSERT YOUR PRODUCT DESCRIPTION]

The topics related to my product:
- [INSERT YOUR TOPICS]

And to make this as clear as possible to you, here’s an example: 

You’re an expert market researcher and marketer. Your task is to help me develop my Persona and better understand their psychology, needs, desires, emotions, and a lot more. 

You’ll receive context below and your task is to use these topics to expand and develop my Persona with more details, like demographics, psychographics, and other relevant Persona details.

Here’s context: 
- Persona: Men and women between 30-45 years, with one or more children. They want to capture memories and moments of their daily lives and family, so they can remember and relive their memories. They’re often struggling with taking good photos and they don’t want to have to become experts. They value tips and tricks that help them get what they want.
- Product: an ebook called Made You Look, for people who want to take amazing and stunning photos with only their iPhone (and nothing else).

The topics related to my product:
- Practical photography skills.
- Time-saving photo editing.
- Creating photo narratives.
- Maximizing iPhone camera features.
- Organizing and keeping photos.
- Sharing and printing tips.

Here is a section of the output

ChatGPT provided a lot more details, like Technographics, Behavioral Traits, Media Consumption, and Shopping Habits.

Now remember that ChatGPT will not give you the same response every time. It also “learns” from feedback continually throughout your “Conversation”.

So, you’ll get the best output if you have that conversation and continue prompting, instead of just trying to do it all in one single prompt.

Next, I wanted to know what this person’s home life was as well to get a little more in-depth understanding as to what is really useful to them.

So, I asked ChatGPT to describe their home and work life in order to get a better understanding.

Here’s part of the output: 

The output continued in more depth and detail.

This is a simple example of expanding on your ideal persona and uncovering more insight into who they are, so you can tailor your offers and marketing better.

And this is the most important point: 

It’s not about the prompt. It’s about the conversation you have and the additional information you ask for. 

Cold prompting, which is trying to get it all in one single prompt, is a terrible way to prompt. 

You will always get better output with a prompt workflow and sequence.

Next prompt: Generate endless subject lines and preview texts for A/B split-tests.

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to generate revenue (despite people screaming that it’s “dead!” for years now).

I’ve put together a prompt to create effective subject lines and preview texts to A/B test with your email marketing campaigns.

Directions:

Copy and paste the prompt below into ChatGPT and fill in the variable with that list.

Variables to fill out:

[INSERT PRODUCT DETAILS]: A simple product description. You could also switch out product for a lead magnet or other offer.

[DESCRIBE YOUR EMAIL LIST]: Describe who’s on your email list. Usually, this is your Persona.

Here is the prompt:

You’re an expert email marketer. Your task is to generate engaging and persuasive email subject lines and preview texts that my Persona would find fascinating, intriguing and highly relevant.

Generate 8 very specific, persuasive pairs of subject lines and preview texts for an email about my Product that is going to my email list as detailed below. Use natural sounding language, like a human would speak, without jargon or bland, weak words.

- My product: [INSERT PRODUCT DETAILS]
- My Persona: [DESCRIBE YOUR EMAIL LIST, USUALLY THIS IS YOUR PERSONA]

Here’s an example: 

You’re an expert email marketer. Your task is to generate engaging and persuasive email subject lines and preview texts that my Persona would find fascinating, intriguing and highly relevant.

Follow these directions: 
- Generate 8 very specific, persuasive pairs of subject lines and preview texts for an email about my Product that is going to my email list as detailed below. Use natural sounding language, like a human would speak, without jargon or bland, weak words.

Here are the relevant details: 
- My product: an ebook called Made You Look, for people who want to take amazing and stunning photos with only their iPhone (and nothing else).
- My Persona: Men and women between 30-45 years, with one or more children. They want to capture memories and moments of their daily lives and family, so they can remember and relive their memories. They’re often struggling with taking good photos and they don’t want to have to become experts. They value tips and tricks that help them get what they want.

And here’s part of the output:

From here, you “talk” to ChatGPT and ask it to revise until you’re happy with the results, like this:

Repeat the task but this time, do NOT use exclamation marks. Instead, amplify curiosity by 150% and make them highly intriguing. It's critical that you do this, otherwise it won't work.

With this prompt sequence, you can save your marketing team hours brainstorming and testing subject lines by generating them with ChatGPT and incorporating them into an A/B test.

The key is:

You have to know what you’re looking for (what a great subject line looks like) and know how to ask for it.

You can also provide, for example, 10 great subject lines and ask ChatGPT to emulate them for your particular Persona and Product.

That’s it.

LATEST DISCOVERIES

Let’s talk about Brave’s new “Anonymous and Secure” AI chatbot, Leo.

Leo is a new AI chatbot designed to offer an anonymous and secure platform to its users.

It’s available on the Brave desktop browser and provides a range of services similar to other AI chatbots, such as translating, answering questions, summarizing web pages, and content generation.

But it has one crucial difference from other competitors: 

No conversation recording, no use in AI training, and no login credentials required.

Leo is based on Meta’s Llama 2 AI model and is free for all desktop users.

I’m sure you’re wondering why you should care about another Chatbot, but stay with me.

Having the potential to use a chatbot without having data stored could be a great use for companies to do research and work on projects without worrying about leaks.

Funding:

$2B: Google has invested $500 million upfront in Anthropic, the OpenAI rival and agreed to add $1.5 billion more over time.

3.5X Returns: A new study by IDC and Microsoft shows organizations are seeing a significant return on their AI investments, averaging a 3.5x return. The study also shows that organizations are realizing this return within 14 months.

BIONIC TOOLKIT

🤖 FocuSee turns screen recordings into Eye-catching videos without any tedious or time-consuming editing needed. Playing around with it for a few minutes with some audio and video, it could be a great platform to create ads and enhance loom videos.

🤖 Dante AI is a custom AI tool that creates AI chatbots for your business’s website without the need for coding. It can also integrate chatbots into different messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Slack.

THE LAST BYTE

I’ve said this before:

AI is going to become a lead producer in creative content, no matter how creative you think it is.

I’ve also talked about how you can beat AI-generated creative content with different forms of Perspective, as AI can test into the top 1% of creativity amongst humans, but it can’t compete with unique Perspectives (yet).

I’ll add to that and say: 

A fine-tuned LLM or a trained LLM, like Grok, can mimic Perspective as well. 

Most LLMs you interact with (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) are deliberately made to be bland and non-offensive. 

Which means that it won’t give you a unique “perspective”, so to speak. 

But Grok is supposed to have a sense of humor, and can actually learn in real-time from content on X (formerly Twitter).

Which means it can give you some sense of a perspective (in other words, an opinion).

Grok is a form of generative AI, and combining that with a sense of humor and real-time social media knowledge, Grok might be able to take on different perspectives and actually generate content that takes a side.

But, at the same time, Grok (or an LLM like it) will only reproduce and synthesize from existing opinions it may have picked up.

So, in regards to perspective and uniqueness, it’ll be fascinating to see how that plays out in the next few months and years.

Aside from generating content, Grok might have a huge potential use in creating and running marketing campaigns on X.

With real-time knowledge from the X platform, I could see this as a way to use Grok to actually create ad campaigns on X directly from real-time statistics and knowledge.

The only hiccup is how someone would employ Grok to actually manage a campaign in real-time, and adjust campaigns as necessary.

As said in the release note, Grok is going to be updated and improved weekly, which is a huge advantage over other AI’s, but comes as a disadvantage when trying to create an AI tool integrating a generative AI like Grok

The future for using Musk’s new AI tool looks bright, and I hope that it’ll help bring more marketing success in the future.

See you next week,
Sam Woods
Editor