Don’t Forget A Process Approach When Using ChatGPT for Marketing

Finding out how to use chatgpt for marketing is all the rage. Many, many owners and CEOs of small businesses are trying to figure out the best way to use this new tool to streamline and enhance their marketing efforts – whether B2B or B2C. But before you start generating copy for your marketing assets, requesting marketing tool roundups, and brainstorming and researching content topics, ask yourself if you have done the basic foundational work that you need to do.

The goal of most ChatGPT prompts for marketing are to help with marketing tactics that involve content and copy – but the key to effective marketing is a process approach. A process approach to marketing takes the guesswork out of marketing and enables you to understand the expected results.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at the seven steps you must undertake to build a successful process approach to marketing for your business.

1. Start with a Diagnosis Before Prescription

Thinking you just need a prescription such as website, video, PPC ads, email marketing or SEO to make your marketing effective is a common mistake. Those are all elements you’ll want to tackle eventually. But first, you’ve got to start with a diagnosis, and a proper diagnosis starts with knowing:

• Who you need to be marketing to?
• What you need to be communicating?
• Where you must place your message?

If you don’t understand WHO your ideal customer is— WHAT their real problems are and WHERE to communicate your value —how can you possibly use ChatGPT marketing prompts to find a message that resonates and identify tactics that will work?

The short answer is that you can’t. Every great marketing plan and any successful ChatGPT marketing prompt is rooted in identifying your ideal customer and honing in on the ways they want to engage and interact with a business. Only once you’ve established your ideal client can you begin to connect what you offer with how you solve your customer’s problems.

2. Control the Customers You Work With

Today’s small business owners believe that getting loyal clients is about the right clients choosing you. But I have come to realize over time that creating loyal clients is mostly about you choosing the right client.

Far too many of you subject yourself to serving “anyone with money” or worse “anyone you hope will pay.” Understanding, narrowing and choosing clients that value what you bring to the table, respect your staff, pays on time and enjoys a partnership over a transaction is how to build a business that truly can thrive.

But you must understand who you are equipped to serve best and you must do everything in your power to attract, serve and choose them over all else. Smart businesses don’t sit back and let the customer choose them; they take control over the ideal clients they create and attract by how and what they communicate verbally and visually before, during and after the sale.

3. Communicate a Differentiation That is Wanted and Valued

Many experts are telling small business owners they need to be different but often ignore this part of the equation.

If your point of difference isn’t valued by your prospective clients, it won’t bring you more business. In the end, what is most important about any point of difference or unique value proposition is that in the eyes of your ideal client it’s viewed as valuable.

This will also play into your criteria for choosing ideal clients and buying process. Any differentiators that aren’t valued by a subset of prospective clients is a wasted effort.

For example, we were working with a tree service that attracted a specific type of homeowner. After interviewing their customers we spotted the following in several summaries – “They never damage my yard and always clean up when they’re done.”⠀
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Turns out that their ideal customer had beautiful front and back yards and didn't want any damage done to the monthly landscaping work they pay for.⠀
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While most of their competitor's differentiation focused on how they were award-winning, voted best, and having 60yrs experience at removing trees our client began to focus on – “We never damage your yard and always clean up when we’re done.” – getting prospective homeowners to pay a premium to solve that problem.⠀

Having a difference that is wanted and valued by a segment of your market is not only a matter of success, it is a matter of survival.

4. Create Messages Around Customer's Problems

Matching your message to your ideal client is pretty much everything when it comes to marketing these days.

Think about you – you’ve got about a couple of seconds to get and keep someone’s attention and you can’t waste that precious time with a message that doesn’t focus on what clients want more than anything - their problems understood and solved.

Experience tells me that for some of you this is going to be a challenge, because the cold, hard truth is that nobody cares about you or what you sell. While your business may be incredible, all your customers and prospects care about is what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell, and they’ll go with the business that promised them that.⠀

For example, we work with a local commercial cleaning firm that feels like what their ideal clients care about is clean common areas, counters being wiped down, toilet bowls being scrubbed, mirrors being clean, trash bins being emptied, etc.⠀
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Well, when we conducted client research through speaking with some of their commercial cleaning clients, we kept hearing over and over again that what their clients care about is the high priority our client places on "showing up when they say they will and fixing issues when they arise." ⠀
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I know that sounds kind of simple and basic, but that’s what our client's client communicated as the real problem they had.⠀

5. Get Involved At Every Step Of The Customer Journey

Mapping out the evolving relationship your prospects have with your business in a way that makes sense to service, sales and marketing is a powerful tool. Most marketers view the customer experience as the traditional funnel, with stages such as Awareness, Consideration and Purchase, but I prefer to execute a much more modern and effective approach in today’s “customer-centered” times: Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase and Refer.

The customer journey is the sum of all experiences a customer has when interacting with your business and your marketing tactics need to be involved at every step along the way. From their first Google search to their most recent purchase, every touchpoint adds up to a total customer journey. In the end, the sum of all the customer journey's parts is what your audience experiences when interacting with your brand.

These elements of the journey all shape a customer's perception of your brand.

6. Integrate Channels To Keep the Leads Flowing

When it comes to lead generation, a steady flow of leads from multiple channels is what will keep you in business for years to come. Not every lead will become a customer, but if you constantly have new opportunities coming your way, you’ll be able to continue to grow your business.

The most effective lead generation occurs through the careful blending of multiple avenues and channels not from single event lead generation promotions. Often a prospect must encounter your brand or message dozens of times before they decide to move forward or make a purchase.

It is the momentum and cumulative impact of presenting your message in each of these arenas that eventually allows you to cut through the clutter and become the provider of choice to a market.

7. Make, Live and Breath by a Action Plan

Doing marketing is always the hardest part. Successful marketing essentially boils down to everything you DO or SAY that your ideal customer sees and hears. Marketing isn’t something you can say you're going to do and forget to do. It needs to happen daily, so you should schedule it in to ensure it becomes a habit. If you have a team, stay on top of them to ensure that your priorities are moving along and you’re hitting each of those actionable steps on time.

CEOs, business owners, entrepreneurs, managers and directors all typically have remarkable technical expertise, whatever it may be. And you most likely didn’t take on that responsibility or start that business because you love marketing.

Marketing is doing, and doing leads to having – whether “having” means revenue, profits, leads or awareness.

Marketing strategies don’t fail in creation. They fail in implementation. Ensuring effective marketing implementation is one of the highest payoff activities for success.

A successful marketing plan will never produce results without a successful marketing process to activate it.

Conclusion

Great marketing is a cyclical thing; it never truly ends. Once you’ve gone through these seven steps, go right back to the beginning and refine your approach.

• Do you need to update the profile of your ideal customer?
• Is there a new online channel you should be testing?
• Have your mapping exercises highlighted a new opportunity to increase conversions?

By revisiting each of the seven steps of your process approach to marketing each quarter, it keeps your marketing plan and ChatGPT prompts fresh and identify new ways to reach customers.

Contact Your Marketing Consultant at Indispensable Marketing

If you’re a small service based business that needs help with building a marketing process for your business or your business’s online presence on Google and other search engines, at Indispensable Marketing we can help. We offer marketing strategy consulting, marketing audits, monthly marketing packages, consultations, exploratory calls or monthly local SEO services. Contact us for more information.