EP107 Mastering E-commerce Marketing with ChatGPT - A Live B2B Walkthrough
===

​[00:00:00] 

[00:00:00] JOSHUA WARREN: Hi everybody, welcome to Commerce Today. I will say if you are listening to the audio podcast, this is going to be an episode where you really want to see the video. So check out the Creatuity YouTube channel or my LinkedIn profile, Joshua Warren on LinkedIn to find the video of this episode. I will also have links in the show notes to the video and to 

[00:00:25] JOSHUA WARREN: some other fun stuff that will help you follow along.

[00:00:28] JOSHUA WARREN: And that is because after talking about ChatGPT for so long and so many times, I actually am going to pretend to be a, uh, B2B marketer at a B2B brand that sells online and walk you through exactly how you can use ChatGPT. And I'm going to do this live. All of these prompts you're going to see me running for the first time.

[00:00:50] JOSHUA WARREN: So we're going to see what happens. It should be interesting, but I've realized that there's a lot of ways that I've learned to work with chat GPT and things I've learned to do that are almost muscle memory now [00:01:00] that a lot of people don't know yet. So I'm hoping by doing this, you can see how you can be using chat GPT.

[00:01:06] JOSHUA WARREN: in your job every day as an e commerce marketer. Now I'm going to try this in a brand new account that is on the free version of ChatGPT. The paid version does get you access to some more complex and smarter models, but I think we can actually accomplish a lot in the free version. I want this to be accessible to as many people as possible, so that's why I'm using the free version.

[00:01:27] JOSHUA WARREN: So I'm logged in here on ChatGPT. com and the first thing I'm actually going to do is set some custom instructions and I will have all of this linked in the show notes so that you don't have to try to read all of this but I went through and I'm going to be an employee of industrial flow systems which is a company that I completely made up but they are a 45 million revenue B2B manufacturer of industrial pumps and fluid management solutions.

[00:01:56] JOSHUA WARREN: So I'm going to basically tell ChatGPT that I'm going to [00:02:00] tell it that it's assisting an employee of this company, where our target market is, what our core offerings are, what our key differentiators are. Some target audience information. I even looked up, and these are actually real companies, I looked up the three potential competitors of this company and educated ChatGPT on that.

[00:02:21] JOSHUA WARREN: Sharing primary challenges and then a little bit of information on how to respond. I am not a professional. While typically I do fill in the how you would chat GPT to respond section, I'm not going to go into that level of detail. I've just put everything in the custom instructions field. So I'm going to save that, and it's very important if you can really work to pack that 1500 character limit of the customer instructions with as much information about you and your company as possible.

[00:02:48] JOSHUA WARREN: That really helps between that and memory and chat GPT, which we'll see in a minute that really helps chat GPT be more effective for you. So the very first thing I want to do is do [00:03:00] some competitive research. So I am going to, and just so y'all don't have to watch me type this out in real time, I am going to copy and paste these prompts in, but I have built a prompt about industrial flow systems and our competitive research that we would like to do.

[00:03:16] JOSHUA WARREN: And in this case, I'm actually going to enable the web search mode. ChatGPT can search the web, whether you enable this mode or not. But when you enable this mode, it really focuses a lot more on using content from the web. To do that, you'll see ChatGPT is searching, searching, and now it is actually giving us a competitive analysis of FlowServe Corporation.

[00:03:42] JOSHUA WARREN: And the great thing is, this must be a public company because it has actually found their financial reports, their quarterly report, and has created now six different recommendations for how our company, Industrial Flow Solutions, could better compete against FlowServe Corporation. So, it sees that FlowServe has strong [00:04:00] financial performance, a diverse product portfolio, established brand reputation.

[00:04:05] JOSHUA WARREN: But their weaknesses are challenges in converting bookings to sales and market fragmentation. So now, ChatGPT has recommended that we emphasize our custom engineering solutions, we leverage IoT and digital integration, focus on energy efficiency and sustainability, and it's given us, you can see, it's given us a detailed, or at least a one line, one sentence strategy and way to execute that strategy for each of these items.

[00:04:31] JOSHUA WARREN: Now, one thing we can do is we can actually say, please tell me much more about how to do this. We can implement your first recommended strategy and chat GPT. And again, I left search the web mode on, so it's pulling more content from the web. This may be a time where I actually turn search off and have [00:05:00] it do more thinking that way.

[00:05:02] JOSHUA WARREN: But it's giving us a lot of details on exactly how we could emphasize our 

[00:05:07] JOSHUA WARREN: custom engineering solutions, how we could integrate with ERP and SCADA platforms and enhance our market position. So that's a little bit of a competitor analysis. Now we are going to create a quarterly content strategy.

[00:05:25] JOSHUA WARREN: and I've, I've worked on a number of different versions of this prompt for a, um, for a content calendar. And I will probably have some updates to this that I post to LinkedIn soon. But the very first thing we're going to do is actually define our ICP. So if you already have an ICP, you may not need to do this, but I would recommend just trying it out.

[00:05:46] JOSHUA WARREN: So I'm going to ask ChatGPT to define our ICP. And that's what it's doing. And I'll go ahead and get my next prompt ready while it's writing this out.

[00:06:00] 

[00:05:58] JOSHUA WARREN: And it's interesting, you'll see it's giving you the kind of data that you really need to be able to even go in and do like a LinkedIn ad campaign, targeting it really specifically around revenue, employee count, industry, pain points. I mean, it's giving you Everything you would have in a normal ICP. What I'm going to do next is actually have it make a detailed customer persona.



[00:06:25] JOSHUA WARREN: And think about the amount of time it would take you to actually develop all of this yourself. And this may not be perfect. You may want to tweak it. Lots of times I will actually go back and forth with ChatGPT, say, change this, change that, double check this, that sort of thing. But this is probably days worth of work and research pre ChatGPT.

[00:06:46] JOSHUA WARREN: But now that it finished outputting the ICP, I'm going to ask it to create a detailed customer persona, like I mentioned. And then, as it does that, I'll get my next prompt ready. My next prompt is actually going to be [00:07:00] asking it to create a quarterly content framework. So here's our persona for Sarah, the procurement manager at our ICP.

[00:07:08] JOSHUA WARREN: It's even saying that she is 38 years old, located in the Midwest, a bachelor's in supply chain management, works at a chemical processing plant. and is really digging into what her challenges are, pressure to reduce costs, downtime risks, sustainability requirements, what her goals are in her role, all sorts of wonderful things.

[00:07:29] JOSHUA WARREN: And in this case, I'm actually primarily doing this so that ChatGPT can use it. So you can just go out there and say, ChatGPT, create my quarterly content calendar for me. without asking any of these other things. And you'd get a content calendar and you'd be okay. But by doing these steps first in this same conversation, ChatGPT is basically priming itself and um, doing the research it needs to do so that it can give you the best possible content calendar.[00:08:00] 

[00:08:00] JOSHUA WARREN: And as it finishes up here, I am just getting it, getting this next prompt ready where I'm going to ask it to come up with some key. SEO themes or key content themes, key SEO opportunities, industry trends, and five blog topics and three podcast topics.



[00:08:19] JOSHUA WARREN: And so it's actually defining for this company what sort of themes our content should have in the first quarter of 2025. So energy efficiency and sustainability, IOT and industry 4. 0 and industrial pumps, and you can read the rest there. It's created some key SEO phrases to target. And then this is where it gets really fun as it's writing these blog or blog topic ideas.

[00:08:46] JOSHUA WARREN: So this is a much longer prompt. So this is one of my prompts that I have pulled from other people and tweaked and refined over time. But I have a prompt I'm about to show and use that will actually outline a detailed article for you. [00:09:00] And this is one where we're going to take the title that ChatGPT created.

[00:09:05] JOSHUA WARREN: And I found you can just reference and say using one of the titles above, but oftentimes ChatGPT gets confused. It makes things up. So this is where you really do have to be a partner with ChatGPT. You can't just expect it to do everything for you. You have to work together with it. So I took the title of the article and put it in this prompt.

[00:09:22] JOSHUA WARREN: I'm now going to look at what makes the most sense for the keyword phrase. And I think energy. Efficient industrial pumps is probably the best one for this article. So I'm going to put that in the prompt as well. And I am going to submit that prompt. So ChatGPT, and this is the fun thing with this prompt is, it'll actually do a search for that keyword phrase, look at the top competitors, and do a basic analysis figuring out how can we write an article that will rank at least as well if not better than the current top 10.

[00:09:57] JOSHUA WARREN: So it has actually outlined this article. [00:10:00] And now the next thing I have learned, and this is important, ChatGPT can only hold so much in its mind at once. And so if you say, write the whole article for me, it's going to write like a 400 word kind of crummy article. So the prompt that I'm going to give it next actually tells it, again, I'm going to repeat the title.

[00:10:21] JOSHUA WARREN: I'm actually basically going to repeat everything, because I've learned if you do not do that, ChatGPT will write a really interesting article about something random. So I'm giving it the title, I'm going to give it that same keyword, of Energy Efficient Industrial Pumps.

[00:10:40] JOSHUA WARREN: I'm going to make sure it actually output the keyword list. Yes, it did. I'm also going to give it this keyword list.

[00:10:50] JOSHUA WARREN: And again, I will share all of these prompts with y'all either in the show notes or in a link in the show notes. So one thing I do in this is I tell it, we're going to go section by section, [00:11:00] only write the first section. Because again, if you say write the whole thing, it's not going to write you a 2, 000 word article.

[00:11:07] JOSHUA WARREN: So here we go. It is writing the introduction. And for the sake of time, I won't go through every single section of the article. I'll do that offline and come back and share the results with y'all. I'll just do the first one, so literally now I can just say, That's great. Next section, please. 



[00:11:26] JOSHUA WARREN: And it'll write the next section.

[00:11:28] JOSHUA WARREN: And sometimes I'll go back and even verify, Okay, is the next section, it's supposed to be Understanding Energy Efficient Industrial Pumps, and that's what it's writing. Understanding Energy Efficient Industrial Pumps. So we're actually going to have a great article. I wish I had a client in this industry right now because I would love to give them this article because we're going to have a great article that is well crafted and SEO'd for this keyword.



[00:11:51] JOSHUA WARREN: Now, of course, you want to have someone that knows something about energy efficient industrial pumps read this and edit it [00:12:00] to make sure that it is accurate. Typically, I have found that these articles, especially when you focus ChatGPT in this way and do one section at a time and do the outline separate from the article writing, These articles are actually pretty accurate, but pretty accurate isn't good enough.

[00:12:14] JOSHUA WARREN: You need to go through and have a human look at it and make sure it really is accurate. So now I'm just going to tell it we will finish this article later. Let's shift gears now and do some email marketing. And I like to have fun with ChatGPT. I will actually use exclamation marks. I don't know if it actually makes a difference, but it's just more enjoyable for me, especially given that I spend a lot of time with ChatGPT.

[00:12:38] JOSHUA WARREN: If you can have a little bit of fun with it and almost treat it like you would a colleague or co worker that you're working on an exciting project with. So now we're actually going to have it write an email for us. Write a follow up email to a prospect who attended our recent webinar on sustainable fluid management in 2025.

[00:12:55] JOSHUA WARREN: Um, and then it gives them a little bit more information about what should be in [00:13:00] that email. So there you go. It's giving us the subject line, it's giving us a heading, and it's giving us the body for the email. And where this really helps me is writing an email. It could take a few hours if you're really crafting it, um, and really working to write the best possible email.

[00:13:17] JOSHUA WARREN: But I just struggle so much with blank page syndrome. With basically if I stare at a blank page or a blank screen, It's just so hard to get started and it's so hard to start getting the ideas down on paper or down into a Google Doc or into my email editor. This way, maybe it's not even that great of an email, but I have some sort of first draft that helps me just get started.

[00:13:37] JOSHUA WARREN: And I am curious, I think there's going to be some interesting research in the future of how different Neurodivergent individuals, especially with things like ADHD, are able to use chat GPT in some really unique ways and in some ways to help maybe compensate for some things. And so definitely curious to see that, but that's a whole other topic.

[00:13:57] JOSHUA WARREN: Uh, let's see. I'm actually going to ask [00:14:00] chat GPT. Does this follow best practices? Is it too long? If they. If our persona, Sarah, is busy, will she read it all? So sometimes you have to challenge that GPT. And so I actually asked it, Hey, follow best practices? Is it too long? Is a busy person actually going to read it all?

[00:14:24] JOSHUA WARREN: And it's saying, Yes, it did follow best practices. And it's actually sharing what some of those best practices are. It does say it is slightly lengthy, uh, especially for someone like Sarah juggling multiple priorities and Sarah probably won't read it all. She'll skim for immediate value and a clear next step.

[00:14:40] JOSHUA WARREN: So it's recommending that we focus, we highlight ROI more explicitly, make the call to action unmissable. And now it's revising the email. And so this is another thing that I think a lot of people don't know to do with chat GPT yet. I didn't just say, thank you. I don't like the email make it better. I actually cause [00:15:00] ChatGPT to think about best practices and to think about the email and to think about how to improve it and then to apply those improvements.

[00:15:09] JOSHUA WARREN: And there we go. Now we have a shorter email that I think is going to work a lot better. 

[00:15:14] JOSHUA WARREN: This is one thing to note is that when you're on the free plan, we just hit our free limit for the 4. 0 model, which is the more powerful model. We're going to be on a less powerful full model for a number of hours now.

[00:15:27] JOSHUA WARREN: Now you can pay 20 a month. You won't have that limit anymore, but I think you'll see, as we go through that even the less powerful model is going to be enough for what we need. So even if you can't get budget approved for a chat GPT account. Use the free account. It is actually more powerful than you think.

[00:15:44] JOSHUA WARREN: So now we are going to write, I'm going to tell it, that's much better. And now we're going to have it write a cold outreach email.

[00:15:54] JOSHUA WARREN: And you'll see that this less powerful model is also faster. So depending on what you're [00:16:00] working on, um, sometimes it actually makes more sense, especially if you're trying to get a lot done in a short period of time to switch to one of those less powerful models. If you are on the paid version of ChatGPT, you can actually, um, use this drop down up here to select your model.

[00:16:14] JOSHUA WARREN: This email is too long. Can you make it shorter and more impactful? And then we'll do two more prompts and we'll wrap up this episode. So you'll see it made it a shorter email. Now I'm going to ask it, and this is one where maybe the model that we no longer have access to for the next few hours might actually do better, but here is a prompt that will help it brainstorm three unique strategies to position us as thought leaders.

[00:16:47] JOSHUA WARREN: So I've shown a lot that it's more of the nuts and bolts like day to day operational work in a marketing role, but ChatGPT can be a great thinking partner for strategic work as well. So here it is coming up with [00:17:00] plans for interactive webinars and workshops, for a comprehensive IoT fluids management resource hub.

[00:17:07] JOSHUA WARREN: This is a whole interesting web project that I've would love to actually dive in and show how you could do this whole project with chat GPT. So if someone's interested in that, let me know. And then a sustainability and IOT case study challenge. Launch a company wide or industry wide sustainability with IOT challenge.

[00:17:26] JOSHUA WARREN: That's actually something I probably wouldn't have thought of and is a really interesting way to position this company as a thought leader and a leader in their industry. Finally, Getting into, uh, something I love to talk about in addition to AI, I'm just going to ask it about, Composable Commerce and just say, Hey, we're currently using a monolithic e commerce platform.

[00:17:46] JOSHUA WARREN: We'd like to move to a Composable Commerce approach. How should we begin this process? And it's actually going to walk through how we could do that and what we need to look at. So front end layer, a headless [00:18:00] CMS. e commerce platform. Look at something like Shopify plus big commerce or Magento commerce.

[00:18:06] JOSHUA WARREN: How to look at the API, what your integration strategy is, and even what your phases should be for this project. So again, if you're in a role and this works great for people that are e commerce team of one, if you're not really sure what to do next and you don't have someone to bounce ideas off of, maybe this isn't the best plan.

[00:18:25] JOSHUA WARREN: But again, this avoids that blank page syndrome. This is the start of a plan that you can then think through, talk about, and really just dive into. I am going to share links to all of these prompts, and I'll actually share links to these ChatGPT conversations, so you can go back and read the whole conversation yourself if you're interested.

[00:18:43] JOSHUA WARREN: But hopefully this gets you interested in using and trying ChatGPT, even if it's just the free version. I would recommend, definitely recommend that all of you, if you haven't yet, right now, unless you're driving, but right now, go to chatgpt. com, uh, login. It's a super simple process. You can actually create an account using your [00:19:00] Google login or other similar logins, so it's super fast, and just go try it out.

[00:19:04] JOSHUA WARREN: And again, as I've shown, Probably the most important thing to know is to just talk back, work with it, to not just take the first, like the first email that outputs for you, ask it, does this follow best practices? Basically, is this the best you can do? And lots of times it can actually produce even better content that way.

[00:19:21] JOSHUA WARREN: Hope you found this useful. Please find me on LinkedIn as Joshua Warren with a gold background behind my head and let me know what you think. I would love to hear how you're using chat GPT in your e commerce role today. 

​