Strategies for AI-Driven Storytelling in Marketing

Keep the story yours

AI can help me tell better stories, but the raw material still has to be mine. The point is not to have a model invent a generic origin story. It is to use the model to shape the experience, belief, and customer insight I already carry into a clearer narrative.

That starts with capturing the story in the way I naturally think. Voice dictation is useful because I can explain what happened without stopping to polish every sentence. Once the material is out, AI can help identify the turning point, clarify the conflict, and organize the story around the customer’s journey.

Connect narrative to strategy

Storytelling is not decoration added after the strategy. A good story can carry the reason a product exists, the problem it solves, and the transformation a customer wants. Map the story to the stage of the journey. An origin story can create identification, a failure can establish credibility, and a customer transformation can make the outcome concrete.

The model is especially useful for exploring variations. I can ask for versions aimed at a beginner, a decision-maker, or someone already comparing solutions. I can test different openings and see which details support the intended emotion. I still choose what is true and what belongs.

The 01 preview model was promising for this kind of work because it could help reason through structure and nuance. But no model can supply the experience behind a unique story. If I let it fill every gap, the result may sound smooth while losing the thing that made the story worth telling.

Make the story repeatable

Create a library of real moments: the first time you saw the problem, the mistake that changed your method, the customer who revealed a need, and the decision that clarified your values. Tag each story by audience, problem, and journey stage. Then use AI to retrieve and adapt the right story for a post, email, podcast, or sales conversation.

That workflow gives marketing consistency without flattening the voice. The story remains grounded in experience, while AI reduces the time it takes to shape, reuse, and test it. The goal is not to automate personality. It is to make your unique story easier for the right people to find and understand.

welcome back to the AI driven marketer I'm Dan Sanchez my friends call me danz and in this episode I'm actually doing a replay of a guest appearance I had on the business of Storytelling podcast with Kristoff trap um and I talked about a number of different ways that you can use AI to do better storytelling in your business from a strategic level to practical levels and I even spent a lot of time talking about why the new chat gb01 preview is a fantastic new model available to marketers in order to make these kinds of things happen so without further Ado I'm going to now Tap Play on that episode for you to watch and listen to Hey Hey Hey business storytellers how's everyone doing episode 670 actually we had a cancellation this week or reschedule that's fine we're just rolling with the punches around here last episode in this studio next time you'll see me I think things are going to look different I might go back to these sound panels which you can get on Amazon my Amazon storefront by the way Kristoff trap on Amazon you'll find me but I got some different ones so we will see if I like them if I still sound as good as I can maybe I won't who knows but today we're going to be talking to the aid driven marketer now if that's not a title and a website you can check it out right there below Aid driven marketer.com Dan Sanchez ran across him somewhere on some podcast and I thought interesting topic I think it was about um podcasting on how to use Ai and podcasting we'll make it a littleit broader today and talk about how do you implement AI powered storytelling and we're not talking about delving haha haha into crap we're D we're talking about how do you use it to still you tell your unique story and of course align it with the customer Journey Dan welcome to the show man thanks for having me on this is awesome uh I'm excited to talk about this topic and I feel like this topic was just made even more uh like possible by chat gpt's new release that came out last week so when I saw the show coming up I'm like oh this is going to be good because what's what's available right now I think is changing the game for storytelling specifically so I'm excited to jump into it there let's jump into it but carefully I have a new hip so I'm not allowed to jump um or run anymore but I'm not going to get up anyways my friends so you know let's talk about what the update is because there's updates all the time and it's actually quite difficult in my opinion to keep up on what matters what doesn't matter how do I implement it does it work you know like what's why was this update to chat GPT so important and what what is it to this discussion so there's minor updates all the time with all the AA platforms and they're constantly like neck and neck and they're constantly showing their new test results of like oh now claud's slightly better than cat GPT and now chat GPT oh Google take a little it's like game a game of inches and every once a while one will overtake open AI is kind of been the front runner ever since they launched chat GPT right but they did just launch something new that is very exciting and the their naming Convention of it is horrible but at the end of the day when I play with it I'm seeing nothing but great results from it you have to be a paid user of chat GPT so you got to be paying the $20 a month sorry for my free user friends but this one this one's behind the Gated wall and you're only allowed to use it 50 times a week uh which for me is enough and use AI a lot but for some for power I guess superp power users it's not quite enough sometimes but this new version called 01 preview is exciting because it's the first model that has reasoning ability baked into it I think we've all had the experience with AI where it's like it just stumbles over something simple like it can't even it can do Algebra yeah it can't count what the heck it can it can do complex strategy works sometimes but yet it can't seem to understand the mechanics of some simple things um and trying to understand the the boundaries of what Ai and can and can't do made it I don't know made it easy for people like me who specialize in it in order to get the most out of it but made it hard and and sometimes unapproachable to figure out what AI is actually capable of but this new 01 preview model makes it easy because it actually reasons through what you're asking it for for a few seconds or sometimes a whole minute before it actually delivers the output so yes it's slower but slowness is actually a feature here because it's taking time to think about it before it responds to you let me give you an example even if you do something like ask it for a typical thing you might do a Google search for like I live in Nashville there's a lot of cool things to do in Nashville right it's it's a music music City but let's say I wanted to do something different I wanted to ask it like hey what are some fun things to do that are off the beaten path and child-friendly a previous model might have struggled to figure that out it would have done okay but this time it'll actually take seven 10 15 seconds to think like okay looking through the initial list vetting for what's off the beaten path checking to see if it's careful if it's free if it's a appropriate for children to participate compiling a fining final list and then delivering the results very different than how all AI models currently do it which is just jump to answering the results whether they're right or wrong it's actually checking itself now and that slowness that reasoning ability uh changes a lot of things for AI and I think especially for storytelling yeah it's very interesting I mean I go to I use claw I'm a claw user for the most part and I say things like are you sure did you make anything up how do you know that how do we know that how dides that align with the project they now have projects that's actually very nice you know like for Christof trap.com or even the podcast I say here's what the podcast is about here's kind of the tone for articles here's what we do BL BL blah um what questions should I ask Dan I don't even write questions down but if I were to right like that's what I would do on there here's what Dan does and and and whatnot but let's talk about AI powered storytelling now I my strong opinion and maybe if you disagree I mean let's we can hash that out you know virtual uh arm wrestle here if you like to but people just going to Jasper or AI writer and they just say write me an article on AI powered storytelling and then they get whatever they get I don't think that's you use AI at all and I think that's that's a waste of time it's not my unique story it's never going to be my unique story now can I get some ideas that way sure but but how what does that mean AI powered storytelling and how do we do it while we're still being unique with our story I find that the key is feeding it the right information right I mean it has been and continues to be the key to getting good outputs out of AI from a marketing content especially a Content marketing stpo right you can't just be like write me an article about this thing my buyers care about it's going to give you a vanilla article it's going to suck there's not much you can do about it now I will say the 01 preview does a lot better because again it's thinking you're like huh if you're writing an article for this it will actually think to itself like hey what's the Target under like what's the target audience of this and therefore it will write a better Artic article because even without you telling it what the target audience is it's probably going to think about it in the thought process like a good writer would but even if you assign a great writer just write a generic on a generic topic it's probably not going to be that good without like some significant research to put into it hence we all go to Google and go to very not no like known websites and we find we have well-written articles written by somebody who's never done the thing right I I did a search for how to Vlog uh a couple like a few months ago and MailChimp spit out an article on vlogging 101 and I could tell as somebody who's picked up a camera and run around like Casey ni that vlogging before that that article was written by somebody who's never ever picked up a camera has never done has no probably doesn't even follow any Vlogs on YouTube that's a disaster and so AI has the same problem that humans do and that it needs original content it needs thought leadership it needs data it needs expertise it needs your experience in order to craft the stories so if you can feed at the raw material its ability to manipulate it and put out something very quickly is really good one that I was doing recently that I'd like to leave here and challenge some people with is is using it to come up with the company's strategic narrative right that's storytelling at a strategy level within the organization it's very difficult to do Andy Rasin made that very popular in the B2B space uh a few years ago and I remember sitting down when I was the the director of marketing for sweet fish media it's a large B2B podcasting agency and we wrestled for hours days even weeks over the Strategic narrative going back and forth with each other like what's the old way versus the new way in the industry how do we introduce the solution without talking about our product or service how do we adjust to it and we studied it and we looked at it now with Owen preview I was literally just just on Sunday putting in a very generic prom I said writing an Andy Rasin style strategic oh sorry write an Andy Rasin style strategic narrative for the podcast agency sweet fish media make sure it speaks to the needs of B2B marketers and incorporates a strong narrative that differentiates the company from its competitors and substitutes what it gave me back I'm like I wish I would have had this a couple years ago when we were working on this because it was good was it the perfect first draft no it like it went off on a kind of a tangent of conversational marketing but still overall what it put out was very strong for a strategic narrative that I could then use to build the website or come up with other messaging and narrative pieces of content for the for the agency now because it took 10 seconds to think it's actually taken the time to evaluate Andy Raskin style uh formulate the Strategic narrative I'm like reading down the thought process because it actually gives you a little drop down of its thinking before it writes it's very helpful to see how it's embracing it uh the strategies involve shifting market dynamics and leveraging podcast power is it like the bullet points for its thought process before it spit out a strategic narrative that looks relatively good and of course you can come back and be like that's a great start but make it a little bit more fun sweet swiish is a fun company and also the positioning is less around conversational marketing and more around uh being a personality driven brand in order to connect with Buyers emotionally and so it did that and actually came up with a great rough draft that I'm like I wish I would have had this to start from because it's so smooth and tweaking from there is the name of the game when it comes to storytelling I feel like ai's ability to come up with a good rough draft for starters especially with its ability to reason now is at an alltime it just it just puts in a different place we are no longer having to start with blank pages ever we can now just be editors curators if you will yeah you know what's interesting to me about that when you were talking about the strategic planning I was thinking about the old old old days right now I'm showing my age here like you're in a conference room or wherever or a retreat at the library or wherever you know somewhere fancy and you would put posted notes on the wall it's like let's think about it let's think about and now you can just say hey what are the different aspects of a strategic plan that I really need to discuss right like boom there's your template or whatever and then you're like okay here's what you know about me already what pieces should we incorporate boom it's not going to be close or you know but it might it's gonna be a good start right and that's I think a lot of people forget about that I actually I found somebody a high ranking person second episode in a couple weeks where I talk about the US Postal Service I was trying to reach a high ranking person I was just like okay what's the process for me to do this and they said you have to appeal it here and here and here to the district manager and whatever and so I didn't didn't get to the district manager but I got to somebody pretty close because I was following that process in actually perplexity right and then I called and she said that's not me and I said well it still got me pretty close right so like you have to keep in mind there're it's not always correct but when it comes to storytelling so now you have the strategy in place you know um I use AI for all kinds of different things including the cutting up of the episode right today we'll throw that into Opa Clips we'll get some clips that we'll use on YouTube LinkedIn blah blah blah I use otter to transcribe it right in a couple of seconds I you know I think those are probably the main things I use claw to get some other ideas okay what are some things Dan and Kristoff talked about that I that I didn't even think about early on that I could now write about in addition to the actual topic that we declared initially um but what are some other ways that you would recommend people use AI in their their storytelling absolutely so I think some easy ways are looking at what are the stories going on in your business all the time think of case studies customer testimonials uh maybe even your founder story sometimes it's hard to get them drafted unless you're working with a professional writer that knows that specializes in storytelling you're like like it's it's hard to get them down you write it doesn't feel right now if you could literally just throw the meat of it down like the case study if you have someone rattle off like well they came in like maybe you get the sales rep in you record a little session with him and you get the little transcript of like what was the problem they were coming in for what and what were the solution how did we how do we arrive at that topic like you could probably even take the sales calls and be like hey come up with a case study based on this and then talk to customer service later who maybe got some data points on how well they're doing now and then give AI that starting point in order to come up with a case study now if you're G to do case studies really well you might go and talk to that that customer with questions and kind of do a quick interview in order to unpack it but then you can unpack that interview pop it into Ai and be like hey using this template it's always good to give an example exle come up with a case study based on the transcript of this story this template come up with a case study that looks like this and it will execute it and put together a pretty dang good starting point for that story whether it's a case study again stories from customers you can take reviews and pop it into Ai and ask for stories or ask it to come up with illustrations that you could pop into your website little simple stories right because we're all trying to figure out how to sell the often a SAS tool needs little stories so people can visualize what it's like to use the tool you're talking about the feature but if you take some of your feedback from reviews you can then have ai going based on those reviews write PL the little stories you need throughout your website in order to tell a more engaging overarching story about how this tool can be used by the team and it can even do creative things but before I get into some of the more creative things that I've done with marketing and AI now uh I see if you have any questions about those little turning case studes into stories yeah yeah you know what's interesting to me too is when you're when you're talking about those things is what happens to the writers right I mean you you need to be you still need to be an editor you still need to know the the topic when you were mentioning the the the example of I'm not a Casey NAD or whoever the person that was doing it but they never even followed anybody who does that kind of thing and then they wrote about it I'm in the market research industry right I'm not a market researcher but I write about it all the time I work with market research companies so I know the indry better than somebody who wouldn't be in it but how how do people adjust their skills i p personally think it's great right like you I get the content and then I like you know get it into submission basically one way or another but what are the skills that people have to have to actually make this work and how do you know and and how dependent can you be on one tool what if Claud AI goes out of business or chat GPT shuts down I know I know they're not owned by Google but you know like we've seen that happen I think these models are pretty they're pretty close to each other and if I had if chat GPT stopped existing I'd be like okay I'd go set up a Claud account take my same payment go pay it to Claude and instead of having custom gpts I think you called it artifacts right it's their custom gpts where you can load it in with custom instructions and stuff I could do the same thing with Google like these not all the all the companies won't die and they all work generally the same there are nuances between them but like like generally it's like learning I don't know it's not even like learning instruments it'd be like jumping from the like M I don't know maybe this isn't a fair comparison I don't play these instruments but jumping from like a violin to a viola like they're pretty similar and a lot of the a lot of the skill sets will carry over I think what professionals need to focus on now especially writers is learning how to Leverage The Tool because you're going to know better how to leverage it kind of like we did even in graphic designers are facing the same problem because it's getting easier and easier with things like AI power tools and canva and and like mid journey to come up with illustrations and design faster um for non-designers um the cool thing is designers and writers have a better vocabulary in order to prompt AI to get better results out of it faster so the a the ones who embrace the tool sooner will be able to get ahead because they'll be able to do more work better and faster than a than normal people will because they'll know how they'll know the words for the style that they want a client will have a specific need but they won't know how to say it and a client's like oh you're looking for this which in design happens all the time they're like I want it to pop more you know you're like okay as a designer I'd have to now unpack that what do you mean pop more oh they want to be bright brighter colors why oh so that when they're in the wall of all their competitors which are generally blue like navy blue and banking they want to stand out so it doesn't necessarily need to be bright pink but we need to stand out from navy blue writers have the same ability to understand what's actually needed versus what they think is needed I will say the AI is getting better at interpreting what people actually want and that's what we're starting to see with the 01 preview is that I no longer before to turn a podcast transcript into five LinkedIn posts it would take a heck of a prompt like a mega prompt with instructions and examples and templates and formatting instructions on what to do and it was loading it with too many emojis and it it was like what it thought a LinkedIn post needed was wrong so I'd have to UNC I'd have to correct it with all these things and even turn it into a chain prompt with like okay first do this find the main ideas after you find the main ideas let's talk about what a good LinkedIn post looks like okay let's start with post one post two now with 01 preview I can just give it the transcript and a two sentence prompt and maybe it help to have a little bit of my writing style and its ability to hit it right the first time much higher and so if we continue on this trend it is concerning my and so personally I'm looking at it thinking like well if Sam alman's right and 95% of marketing is completely done by AI five years from now then that's a problem that still leaves 5 per probably running the AI machines and I'm like maybe I'll be one of those or I've always considered marketing to be a bit of a black hole if you ever noticed that you can can never really spend enough in marketing put enough people or Talent OR time into marketing it always it can always take more you can always put more money into marketing and I'm like maybe that black hole continues to exist and even AI can't fill all the things that marketing could ever do and we'll just have a different age of how we do things in marketing it'll be very AI driven I'm hoping for that future not the one where a lot of us lose jobs but you know I'm trying to be prepared for both by plowing head first into Ai and trying to get more out of it as I can yeah I don't think we're all going to lose jobs but it's I think it's going to change quite a bit right how do we do it and it's what's interesting to me too is some people have that discussion about do you have to disclose when you use AI right and like is it only when you write from scratch is it when you do this and this and this and I'm thinking I don't disclose what kind of keyboard I use I don't disclose that I voice dictated My article I don't disclose that I wrote it by hand and then typed it in after I edited it you know what I mean like at what point does it become just like that and then when does it matter I think it matters when it's completely wrong or when you're just kind of making up stuff you know like I mean I've had an article one time I but humans are wrong you know what I'm saying so it's like how do you draw the line in that either well I think the diff I think the line is when it just makes up stuff so like I was testing something the other day and I said I need some quotes in this or something and and there was these random people in this article I said Who are the these people and it said they're completely fictional I'm like where did they come from just made them up right so very very interesting but what's the next step so AI powered storytelling companies want to do it how do they use it to uh align with the customer journey I mean so you get like the production the creation you get the maybe analysis but how do you align it uh right time right place you know those buzzwords you know that's a really good question I think how do you align it to the customer Journey it's such a broad question you're like well which part of the customer Journey every part of the customer Journey needs something different and how you can use AI to solve it depends so generally I where I find AI can be the most useful is looking at the bottleneck what part of the customer journey is broken for your business which part is not resolved yet you could probably start using AI to fix that bottleneck but let's keep it on storytelling something that I'm experimenting with this makes a lot of people really uncomfortable but it's something that I'm pushing into harder more and more often because I think this is one of the most powerful parts of AI is using AI to write custom content for hyper-personalized content if you want an example it's on Aid driven marketer.com it's a free course and it will ask you three questions before you sign up for the course with your email It'll ask you what your job title is what Market you're in and who your buyer is with those three pieces of information I actually take the transcript video because there's a video five video lessons you'll get in a row on how to become a better better at AI but it'll actually customize the lesson with action points specific to who you are who you sell to and what you're selling so that a CMO selling beauty products to twins is going to get a very different lesson than email marketing specialist on the ground level of the B2B SAS startup you're going selling to selling to maybe I don't know veterinarians they're going to get a very different customized lesson because it's hyper personalized now you could use that same mechanic for storytelling right if you knew just a few pieces of information the ai's ability to at scale customize the emails the text messages or other owned media is is is now possible it wasn't you couldn't do it before you could only mad Li your way through automation so much but AI is creative and it can fill in those stories especially if you give it very tight parameters and you test it with all kinds of different things I'm not saying you just let it go and put it out there because it's again this is scary but this is where we're going is the ability to create hyper-personalized stories imagine if an email sequence has a story and it's actually highlighting the case study in such a way that it's going to be tuned to a CMO versus a director of marketing who depending on who's in the sequence right that's that's a whole new level in order to actually engage people with um a way that only AI can do very interesting of course you can level that up and scale it up much quicker than me thinking about it Hey would this audience care about that at that point much much easier Aid driven Market connect with Dan there you can sign up for his email list Dan nice to see you thanks for coming on and we're out wh thank you so much for listening to the AI driven marketer if this show was any good please give it a festar or whatever star rating you think it deserves on the podcast app that you're listening to and tap that thumbs up button on YouTube and if you want to dive deeper into Ai and you're still not sure if you've mastered the fundamentals go to my free AI course at Aid driven marketer.com and take a look learn the fundamentals and you will never have to look for a promt cheat sheet again five video series and you'll even find that I've customized the course so it's hyper personalized for you your role and the people you're marketing to take a look at it and let's get started so we can do more with AI today