Build your marketing brain

Read time: 5 minutes 48 seconds

Hey Intelligent Marketer,

I want to help you turn your AI tools into a valuable team member, so you can stop redoing the same work over and over. And start building assets and systems that make you better at your job.

That’s what the last newsletter was about. Like anyone you’ve just hired, AI has a load of potential but is clueless without onboarding. The right context can make all the difference.

That still holds. A good prompt is like good onboarding. You give it a clear goal, context, good examples, and a way to think through the task. And that's how it can start to give you back something closer to what you're looking for.

But that only gets you so far.

If you want AI to be useful across all your marketing work, it's never just about one task anymore. It needs a place to understand your business and your market from. That's your marketing brain.

Everyone can write a landing page or some ad copy with ChatGPT or Claude now, and that's the problem. If everyone's prompting from the same blank chat, everyone gets the same stuff, because the model only knows what it was trained on and nothing about your business.

Most people are still working in this blank chat mode most of the time. Maybe they've set up a Claude Project with a bit of info in it, or they're leaning on whatever ChatGPT has picked up about them over time in its memory. But none of that is enough to understand what you sell, how your market talks, or what matters to you this quarter. So what comes back might look good enough, but it feels generic or just a bit off. You either spend ages editing it, or you share as is and your audience scrolls past thinking "here we go, more AI slop".

We've now become a context cannon for our tools. Constantly copy and pasting, telling AI what it gave us is wrong and desperately trying to nudge it in the right direction. So much so it's taking us longer than it did before.

It hurts my brain just thinking about how I used to manage it like this.

There's an easier way, and it comes down to: treating your context as infrastructure, not a conversation.

A marketing brain is a context layer your AI reads before it does any work. It's a folder on your computer, a handful of text files it goes through any time it writes, researches, plans, or builds something for you. It replaces the prompt library and the dozen docs scattered across Notion and Google Drive that you dig up and paste in every time. If you can write a doc and drop it in a folder, you can build one.

If the last issue was about how to brief the new hire, this one's about the knowledge base they work from.

There's lots of ways to build one, but it comes down to two halves. Call them the inside and the outside.

The inside is your business. What you sell and who it's for, how you position it, how you sound, and the numbers and facts you can quote.

The outside is your market. Your sales calls and reviews, the pain points and objections buyers raise, what your competitors are saying, and the exact words buyers use to describe the problem.

Most people nail the first and skip the second. That's why so much content doesn't resonate anymore or sounds cliche, it's all pulled from the same training data everyone else is using.

Without one, every chat starts from zero. You repeat yourself, paste the same context in again, and hope it guesses well enough this time.

With a marketing brain, the context is always there, ready to go. Ask for anything and it pulls your positioning, the line a customer used on a call last week, the way your brand really writes, without you feeding it a thing.

Here's mine, so this isn't abstract. It's a folder with a few plain files: how I position what I do, a running list of the exact lines customers use on calls, a note on how I write, and the numbers I'm allowed to quote. Last week I asked for a landing page and the draft came back using a phrase a customer had said to me a month earlier, one I'd forgotten I had. I never pasted it in. It was already in the folder, so it was already in the work.

It also becomes one source of truth. Update your customer profile once and every tool you use, and everyone on your team, is working from the right version, not five stale copies floating around different docs.

And it's yours. It's a folder you own, so any tool can read it, Claude, ChatGPT, whatever comes next, and you can build anything on top of it. You're never locked into one app's memory.

And it compounds. The brain you'll have in six months is far more powerful than the one you start today, so the move is to start now and get in the habit of adding to it.

You don't need the perfect system this weekend, but here's how to get started.

That's it. Once it's set up, it's just the habit of keeping the context that would otherwise get lost or forgotten.

A few things make the difference between a brain that helps and one that slows you down.

Give it some structure. Dump everything in with no order and you hit the opposite problem, context bloat. Your tools waste tokens, slow down, and pull the wrong things. A little structure keeps it sharp.

Tell it how you work. AI is good at following patterns, not finding them, so it won't guess your judgment. Write down the rules you follow and the calls you'd make, and the output goes from informed to genuinely good.

Prune as you go. Archive what's gone stale so it's always working from the truth, not the plan your CEO flipped on a month ago.

Getting started is easy. Getting it genuinely good is the part that takes a bit of craft, and I've spent the last 3 years on mine working out the shortcuts, so yours keeps paying off.

Make sure you hit reply and tell me what the first thing in your marketing brain would be. I read every one.

Next week: your first build. How to turn one job you redo every week into something the brain just does for you.

- Will