Thread by @alanjboyd

ChatGPT vs Marketing Strategist - How Effective Is It?

Recently, I took a memorable consulting win from last year and entered the challenges faced into ChatGPT to see how effective it really is at creating business growth strategies.

The results were remarkable.

First a little backstory:

The Blue Heron, a client of my consulting practice, is an iconic family-friendly fishing charter fleet out of Palm Beach County, Florida that's been in business since 1955.

When corona hit, the boats weren't running and instead of just sitting there, we decided this would be the perfect time to upgrade the vessels.

Here's one of them in the dockyard:

They made top-to-bottom upgrades and when they were completed, they were spectacular party boats with a capacity of 135 (!) people.

Here's a pic of the friends and family party celebrating their first time back in the water after spending close to a year in the dockyard.

The challenge we faced was that the boats had a such strong reputation for being family-friendly fishing boats that when we started advertising the new waterfront party venue as a service there was cognitive dissonance in the marketplace.

"Host a party on a fishing boat??"

Even though they invested in upgrading the fleet to cater to events - the market had spoken and they weren't buying it.

So I proposed that we rebrand that arm of the company calling it 'Blue Heron Events' and designed all the collateral.

Here's a slide from the press kit:

Once we had all the collateral in place, I organized a boat party and invited 44 local business owners comprised of clients from my consulting practice.

Here's a flyer we made for the event:

I knew that the best way to update the perception in the market was to demonstrate the capabilities of the boat in person.

We also wanted to get a ton of local publicity surrounding the event and brought in multiple press photographers, and a drone video company to cover it.

Here's a cool drone video we produced of the event:

We received great feedback from over forty of the sharpest business minds in the area on how to make the experience even better which probably sped up our learning curve by months if not years...

And we also got featured in @JupiterMagazine a local society magazine 🙌

All the business owners shared their experiences on their social media which exponentially increased the reach of the event in the local market.

Seemingly overnight we had updated the perception of the marketplace and had the boat booking out.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED 🍾

Knowing that this strategy had worked perfectly in real life, I entered the challenge into ChatGPT to see the strategy it created for that situation.

The advisory from ChatGPT was impressive.

The strategy might seem somewhat boilerplate to savvy marketers but I'd give Chat-GPT an 8 or 9 out of ten as far as the recommendations it made and even spun up a quick YT video walking through some more examples it nailed:

As far as marketing strategy prompts go, you can enter the:

- Industry
- Goals
- Budget
- Challenges
- Project Timeline

And ChatGPT will generate solid results that you can triage yourself to determine tactics for growing any(?) kind of business.

That's when I saw this post by @TrungTPhan forecasting that ChatGPT is:

"Essentially a consultant that works for pennies per hour".

This confirmed my thoughts and I knew this technology would change my consulting business forever.

I took this challenge to ChatGPT and it recommended that I start a newsletter on how AI will impact small businesses to both keep my finger on the pulse of the emerging technology and share insights that help other SMBs adapt to the new tech.

I've been immersed in AI since Nov '22 and one of my strengths is distilling down complex topics and making them approachable for people and business leaders even if they're not super tech-savvy.

So I pulled the trigger on ChatGPTs suggestion and 'The Bottom Line' was born.

The next day, @jacksonfall's #HustleGPT challenge we viral.

I thought this was a great prompt and joined the #HustleGPT movement by teaming up with ChatGPT for ideas on how to get my newsletter going.

Within days we launched The Bottom Line newsletter on the beehiiv platform and - even though it's brand new - so far the response and engagement have been awesome.

In addition to several encouraging replies, one of our readers, @1MartinMatthews sent us this cool teaser video he made to help bring awareness to The Bottom Line newsletter:

👏

The first newsletter laid the groundwork for future issues by encouraging readers to reframe their perspective of AI by highlighting the concept of 'A Second Opinion Machine' and how

"Awareness gives you an edge".

A Second Opinion Machine (generated by @runwayml)

This upcoming Friday's issue will take a positive and contrarian view (that I believe is accurate and likely) on a widely popular and not-so-optimistic topic surrounding #AI and the effect it will have on businesses and employees that you won't want to miss:

Job Security.

Be sure to subscribe, I would be honored to have you as a reader and look forward to connecting with you.

- Alan

thebottomline.ai/subscribe