My first AI marketing agent

Last year, I lost one of my biggest clients because I refused to accept AI.

We had been working for over a year at this point, and things were going great. Traffic up, conversions up.

But…

They wanted more.

“We are trying to set ourselves up for an IPO. Can we use AI to 10X our content output this month?”

I refused.

It was a time when everyone on LinkedIn and X was showing hockey stick traffic graphs from all the AI content they were posting at scale.

The advice all over social media was: “Have AI generate content for you, then use a human editor to give it a personal touch.”

So you’re telling me, have a soulless machine write marketing copy you expect potential buyers to fall for and then add a human to remove a few em dashes, delete the word “delve,” and spice it up with a few personal anecdotes?

It all seemed backwards.

So, I refused to scale my writing efforts with AI. And, I lost the client.

Funny enough, many of those brands eventually saw a reverse hockey stick graph during Google’s 2024 August Core Update.

And it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien: “Shortcuts create long delays.”

Anyways, fast forward to January of this year, I started to realize that maybe my approach to AI has been completely wrong.

Maybe AI isn’t a tool to generate creative ideas or content.

Maybe its true (marketing) power lies in automation and helping you get your own ideas out, faster.

I came to the realization that I have been the bottleneck.

My stubbornness around using AI in my workflows took time away from the creative, human stuff I loved doing.

So, I made (and still am making) an effort to find ways to use AI in my workflows as a marketer.

In theory, if I could leverage AI agent platforms to automate all of my tasks (besides anything that requires me to write or speak) I could scale all of my marketing efforts.

So that’s what I’m doing this year. And as I start to automate different parts of my workflow, I’m going to tell you about it so you can do it too.

The first one?

Scaling blog writing, while still having everything come from my voice and experience.

Yesterday, I wrote a blog post on the APTK Framework (a content marketing strategy I use to create content for my clients). It’s an acronym I made up.

It took me 10 minutes to publish, and within 2 hours it was ranking on Google:

And, it was ranking on Bing:

Here’s how I got this article out in just 10 minutes.

I opened a Google Doc, as I do with every blog post I write.

Plugged in my Apple wired headphones (the ones with the mic).

I pressed “Command + Shift + S” (on Mac) and just talked out the entire blog post in 5 minutes.

You can also access this feature in the “Tools” section in the top bar and then click on “Voice typing.”

I then had a whole doc of just a stream of consciousness.

I then went to ChatGPT and gave it this prompt:

I wrote a blog post using speech to text. I want you to fix up any grammar mistakes and improve the readability by splitting up the content into different paragraphs where it makes sense. Please do not change the voice and tone or general structure and do not add or remove too many words.

And then I pasted the raw content from the Google Doc. And within seconds, I had a clean blog post, in my own voice.

Just to be safe, I passed it through Originality AI (a content detector), and it passed as 100% human. I also reread the entire thing and it read 100% like my voice.

Incredible.

My own little AI copy editor agent.

AI for writing? Big no!

AI for editing my writing/speech? Big yes!

Now I’m optimizing this workflow even further. And I’m finding ways to do more stuff like this across all marketing disciplines. Can’t wait to show you more.

2025 is the year of the smart marketer. And we are all going to get there.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• Using AI agents for product-led growth

• How to win back dead leads

• UX study of Google’s AI Overviews

• How to validate your brand positioning

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Apple is trying to get ‘LLM Siri’ back on track

• Meta shares usage insights in FTC trial

• After a year of Google’s AI Overviews, marketers consider tweaking their paid search strategies

• Pinterest confirms erroneous removals of many accounts

• Google launches stand-alone NotebookLM apps for Android and iOS

🚀 All things growth & product

💌 Email marketing & copywriting

✍️ SEO & content marketing

🤳 Social media, branding, & creativity

📈 What’s trending

📣 Ad in the wild

Spotted an ad in the wild that caught your eye? Reply to this email with the ad and your @ for credit to get it featured!

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Senior Customer Marketing Manager @ Webflow

• Product Marketing Manager @ Athelas

• GTM Operations Lead @ Substack

• Head of Product Marketing @ n8n

• Head of Marketing @ Shef

Seeing an uptick in product marketing related roles 👀

Okay, that's it for now 💙. See you in the next edition!

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” — T.S. Eliot

Riddle answer: The word “short.”