How to Use AI to Increase Productivity

We hear a lot of discussion about how to use AI to increase productivity in marketing. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Claude are revolutionizing marketing by automating tedious tasks and generating high-quality content. Savvy marketers are integrating these tools into their workflows to do more with less and free up time for strategic thinking.

To get advice on how to do this, we enlisted the help of our AI Guru, Casey Meehan.  Casey is a  long-time content marketing expert specializing in using AI to transform how marketing teams work. He is also a member of the healthlaunchpad team.

In this post, we provide actionable instructions on how to use AI to increase productivity, covering:

• How to create an AI-enablement Plan
• Develop a Daily AI Habit Even in 5-Minute Blocks
• Creating Custom GPTs
• Integrating AI Assistants into Your Tools with Zapier
• Explore New Possibilities Beyond ChatGPT

How to create an AI-enablement Plan

While playing around with AI tools yourself is important for learning; the big win comes from showing your team how to integrate them into their day-to-day work.

Here is a framework marketing we have used successfully to skill up our team on leveraging AI via structured workshops:

1. Identify the 5-8 biggest marketing processes your team runs – e.g., Content Creation, Lead Scoring, Campaign Analysis, etc.
2. Break down and map out the step-by-step workflow for each process with lead subject matter experts from your team.
3. Analyze pain points in workflows that could be automated. Brainstorm AI tools like Claude for process improvements.
4. Run 90-minute workshops with the full marketing team, walking through the reimagined workflows using AI for each major process. Share examples and give everyone hands-on practice.
5. Encourage peer learning and tips sharing within the team around AI adoption. Foster a culture of constant optimization.

Don’t expect beginners to master AI overnight. However, structured training helps them gain confidence using these tools for clearly defined workflows relevant to their role.

Instead of one-off sessions, level up skills continuously via weekly “AI Labs,” where people collaborate to try new automation. Empower people to contribute ideas and customize AI for their strengths.

Focus oncompound productivity gains rather than unrealistic expectations of AI matching your best human marketing pros today. AI excels at making average performers achieve well above-average output.

Developing a Daily AI Habit Even in 5-Minute Blocks

Here’s the reality – most marketing leaders don’t have much free time outside of core strategy and management responsibilities. So, how do you find time to incorporate AI?

The key is turning it into a habit by using AI in short 5-10 minute blocks multiple times daily when you have low mental energy.

Here are a few ways to put this into practice:

• When you get to work, spend 5 minutes asking Claude to pull the latest industry headlines and auto-generate a social media post about an exciting story. Schedule it to post later.
• Before heading into a 2-hour strategy meeting, take 10 minutes to create a custom assistant to take notes and pull out follow-up actions so you can focus on the discussion.
• As emails pile up in the late afternoon, use ChatGPT for 5 minutes to bang out thoughtful, detailed responses to customer inquiries.
• While waiting for your morning coffee, have Claude scan for relevant new prospect companies and auto-generate a few LinkedIn connection requests.
• In a Friday evening lull, spend 10 minutes asking Anthropic to analyze campaign metrics and highlight key takeaways in a presentation.

The bite-sized approach prevents AI usage from becoming an intimidating extra task. Instead, it’s woven into natural moments of downtime that all marketers have sprinkled throughout their week.

Cultivating this daily AI habit drives tremendous compound productivity gains over time. You get more quality work done without feeling extra burnt out.

Get Started with ChatGPT and Create Custom AI Assistants

The first step is setting up ChatGPT, the popular conversational AI chatbot. While the free model allows some functionality, you’ll want to upgrade to the paid ChatGPT Plus plan ($20/month) to access more advanced features like creating custom AI assistants.

Here are step-by-step instructions to create a custom AI assistant in ChatGPT that generates YouTube video descriptions for you:

1. Sign up for a ChatGPT Plus account at chat.openai.com. This gives you access to features like custom AI assistants.
2. Navigate to the “Create Assistant” section in the left sidebar.
3. Give your assistant a name and description. For example, “Video Description Writer”.
4. In the Instructions section, describe what you want your assistant to do. For example: “Your role is to create 2 paragraph YouTube video descriptions based on video transcripts I provide. The descriptions should be engaging and use key information from the transcript.”
5. In the Examples section, provide 4 to 5 examples of ideal video descriptions using actual transcripts/descriptions from your past videos.
6. Upload any other key reference materials the assistant should use, like your channel branding guidelines.
7. Click “Train Model” and let ChatGPT process the instructions and examples to create your custom assistant.

Now when you have a new video transcript, you can send it to this Video Description Writer assistant and get an AI-generated video description draft instantly! This can save at least 30 minutes per video.

Over time, keep providing more examples to further train your custom assistant to generate better descriptions tuned to your style and audience.

Integrate AI Assistants into Your Tools with Zapier

While custom AI assistants in ChatGPT are powerful, the magic really happens when you integrate them into your existing tools using a workflow automation platform like Zapier.

For example, Casey set up a Zapier workflow to have AI automatically draft responses to common questions he gets in emails, using an FAQ he created. Here’s how:

1. Export your FAQ document into ChatGPT and create a custom assistant called “Email Response Assistant” with instructions to generate email drafts based on questions matched to FAQ answers.
2. In Zapier, set up a zap with your email provider like Gmail to trigger when new emails come in.
3. Add an action linking the new email to your Email Response Assistant on ChatGPT, feeding it the email content.
4. Set up the final zap action to take the AI-generated response draft and insert it back into Gmail as a new draft.

Now, whenever common questions come into your inbox, you’ll instantly have AI-generated draft responses ready for minor edits or sending! This helps prevent getting overwhelmed with repetitive questions.

You can use this Zapier + Custom AI Assistant framework to automate all sorts of marketing workflows:

• Generate weekly personalized sales outreach emails from your CRM
• Pull key takeaways from industry newsletters into a spreadsheet
• Transcribe podcast interviews and create summaries
• Resize and optimize batches of images

The options are truly endless. Study the tools connecting with Zapier like chat.openai.com and explore imaginative ways to eliminate drudgery from your workflows.

Explore New Possibilities Beyond ChatGPT

ChatGPT grabs headlines, but dozens of AI tools unlock marketing potential. Here are a few of Casey’s favorites to experiment with:

• Zapier: Workflows automating CRM, email, and spreadsheets. Killer for connecting marketing data points.
• Anthropic Claude: Specialized in business writing like draft copy, research, and data analysis.
• Make.com: Visual workflow builder to chain AIs. Great for non-coders.
• Relevance AI: AI business analyst for dynamic data reporting.
• Eightfold Talent AI: Optimizes talent search, skills gap analysis, and training.

Don’t get distracted endlessly trying every new AI product, though. Choose a single workflow to optimize over 3 months with tools already integrated into your stack.

Finally, brace for the AI boom to exponentially accelerate. ChatGPT 5 and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI promise to match untrained AI with average human performance across many marketing tasks by 2025.

The underprepared will get disrupted as creative synthesizers of technology and humanity thrive. Use the tips in this guide as your actionable roadmap to AI marketing mastery!

And if you need help using AI to increase productivity, check out our AI Coaching Program

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash