Turn AI into Your Marketing Strategy Partner – Here's How!

Give AI a strategic problem

AI is more useful for marketing strategy than writing another caption. A SWOT analysis is a good place to start because it forces you to examine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats before choosing tactics. The exercise normally takes an hour or two with colleagues, and many teams still leave with a few obvious bullet points rather than a complete view of the year.

The basic grid separates internal factors from external ones. Strengths and weaknesses are inside the company’s control. Opportunities and threats are outside it. That distinction keeps a team from treating a market change like an internal flaw or assuming a capability will solve an external risk by itself.

Use context to improve the first draft

AI can quickly produce a starting analysis, but the quality depends on what you provide. Give it the business model, audience, current goals, competitors, constraints, and relevant research. Ask it to show its assumptions and distinguish known facts from hypotheses. Then review every quadrant with people who understand the company.

The value is not that the first answer is perfect. It is that the model can surface angles the team would have skipped because the full analysis is tedious. I can ask it to expand a weakness into possible causes, connect an opportunity to a campaign, or turn a threat into a contingency plan. That gives me more options before I choose a direction.

Turn analysis into decisions

A grid alone does not improve marketing. The next prompt should ask for strategic choices and action plans. Which strengths can address the biggest opportunities? Which weaknesses make a threat more dangerous? What should happen this quarter, who owns it, and what evidence would show progress?

I still have to cherry-pick the recommendations. AI does not know which tradeoffs the business is willing to make, and it cannot replace the judgment of the people accountable for the outcome. But it can do the work teams often skip in less than five minutes: generate a fuller set of possibilities so the decision is based on more than the first tactic that came to mind.

Use the analysis as a thinking partner, not an oracle. Start with a clear strategic question, supply enough context, ask for competing options, and pressure-test the result with reality. That workflow makes planning faster while preserving the human responsibility for choosing what the company should do next.

hello and welcome back to the AI driven marketer I'm Dan Sanchez my friends commi danz and today we're doing another Deep dive into Ai and I today I want to show you how to use AI to think smarter because AI is so much more useful than just using it tactically to execute a lot of your daily work you can actually use it to do more with marketing strategy yes you can think smarter and do it way faster than you used to have to do when it comes to a lot of your annual and quarterly planning events that you have to do as a marketing director so today I want to show you how to use Ai and chat GPT specifically to do a SWAT analysis now if you've been to business school you know all about the SWAT it's a normal uh tool we use in our toolkit all the time and I want to tell you that AI is freaking fantastic at performing this analysis coming up with everything you need and then actually coming up with a strategic plan in order to make your business better so before we get into to it let's actually review real quick what a SWAT analysis is I'm going to jump into this little PowerPoint on my computer but don't worry if you're listening on audio just remember that I'm going to be talking through everything you're going to pick up like 95% of this without ever having to look at the visual but some people like visuals so if you want to watch it go to YouTube or go over to ad marketer.com where you can watch the video you can also pull it up on Apple podcast it's literally a video podcast pull it up uh and follow along uh SWAT analysis is just an acronym for strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats it's probably one of the most simple but honestly one of the most useful strategy tools available to marketers in order to better plan uh not just your marketing campaigns but set up an overall system for why those marketing campaigns should exist and it's a little bit more of a like a higher level business tool even than a marketing tool but it's so powerful that it actually informs a lot of my marketing campaigns I'm building out the marketing marketing plan every year the way we usually do it is by setting up this grid right with four a 2X two grid with four quadrants with strengths opportunities weaknesses and threats labeling each of the quadrants strengths and opportunities are aligned it's kind of like the good things right and then weaknesses threats and then uh strengths is is stacked on top of weaknesses for your internal uh column the things that you actually have control of in your company versus the external things that you have no control over which are the opportunities coming up and the threats and it usually takes I don't know an hour maybe two hours sometimes to get together uh with your colleagues or just to sit down by yourself to brainstorm like ah what are the things that are the strengths for my company what are the things that we have going that are advantages that we have what are the weaknesses holding us back what are the opportunities on the horizon that are coming our way that we want to take advantage of and then what are the possible threats that could happen over the next year or to that could derail us right and usually you take you take a moment it's a list building exercise where you come up with those strengths the weaknesses the opportunities and the threats then the whole goal of this the reason why we even do this is to just make it very clear to ourselves and to our team and to even our our board of directors maybe even our shareholders like what are the things we're coming up against what is going on internally and externally that we need to take advantage of um or Shore up so that's the first part of the swad analysis is just building a list of these things and it is like almost liberating and clear in and clarifying even of itself just to get past this first phase in building these lists so you can actually clearly articulate what your strength weak weaknesses opportunities and threats are um you can have chat GPT do this for you completely in fact here's the prompt that you can use to get it started I was going to build a custom GPT you really don't need it this is like the easiest prompt ever the thing that chat GPT really needs to know is context for your company so do this prompt just do tell chat GPT exactly this do a Bing search for and insert your company name to learn about the business read read through several pages to analyze its Market audience value proposition position and overall Market presence report back on what you learn the reason why you need to do this is so that it can go out out on the internet and learn for itself what your business is all about and then report back loading it from something it doesn't know about into what I call the short-term memory by it reporting back and telling you what it's learned about you what it's learned about your business you might want to add some other things like hey other helpful things to know about this business uh internally is X Y and Z or externally about the market is a b and c right so you might want to load it with some more information afterwards but generally it does a pretty dang good job of going out using Bing to scrape the internet and probably reading a lot of pages on your website to get a general understanding of what your business is who it serves what it does um and what it's its pros and cons are after that you want to actually ask it to do a SWAT analysis and before I get to the fun part the last step in a swad analysis let me show you what I got when I ran my employer through it now I work for a company College trim Healthy Mama yes uh it's a mom blog that blew up years ago with a viral book around weight loss and healthy eating for essentially like Alternative Health mamas um and they have a huge audience and sell I don't know millions and millions of dollars worth of uh goods and uh baking products online and I had I had to do a SWAT analysis and it did a fantastic job in labeling its strength strong brand identity diverse product line unique diet philosophy a very strong Community weaknesses uh it put it's now this is the far part where it really needs your help as a marketer because actually one of the things it labeled as a weakness that I noticed in this SWAT analysis was a strength so sometimes you have to be careful with AI because it'll it'll Lead You astray but you have to know when it's leading you astray and in this one particular instance everything else was correct I had actually done a swallet analysis for trim Healthy Mama before I asked AI to do it and it came up with a lot of the same stuff that I had already recognized as strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats um and it identified the same things even put out some things that I had not identified that were really strong so but but the one thing that it did was put something in the weakness category that I thought was a niche because they are niching down is one of the most powerful things you can do in marketing and they are nowhere near saturating the niche that they're in so why would you want to decrease the niche and go after more so I would actually move the niche target audience to the strengths so I made a correction later on uh it did a good job of opportunity opportunities for the brand and then some general threats that could happen uh that would impact the the brand so I went through made some corrections and gave it my assessment it went through and corrected it and I actually asked it to expand on what it had learned in the SWAT analysis so you can see it didn't at first it just ran a bullet point in a short description I actually gave it mind and asked it to expand on the SWAT analysis so not only did it give me a bullet point but it gave a whole paragraph when you're writing a strategic plan this is often the part that just takes so freaking long actually write like not only coming up with the bulleted list but actually expanding on what you mean by the bullet because it's possible that a team member could be reading it and not have Clarity not trly what you mean when you say you have a engaged Community well what is an Engaged Community exactly uh does that mean you have a lot of people locally that rally around you in an event does that mean you have a lot of Facebook followers that that engage with your posts does that mean you have a strong sense of identity within your customers and they rally together they have support groups they have uh fan groups you know like what what is it what is engaged Community well you have to expand on that and actually write out a few sentences about what that means in short little paragraphs and this is the part that's timec consuming when coming up with a SWAT analysis and putting it down on paper so that not only you benefit from it from your but your team and other departments who are interested in what marketing is doing can actually read and follow up with chat GPT can do it in an instant so that's the one of the things I love because this usually took me a long time to actually write out for the marketing plan and now chat GPT can just get it through in just a few seconds so again you have to read it and make sure that it actually lines up with what you're doing but I find that it's almost always like 90 95% on par with what I was going to do manually anyway saving you time and even helping you think better as it comes up with more clear a clearer articulation than I would have otherwise to as it comes up with it itself so and the last step for coming up with the SWAT analysis is actually asking it and giving it one more prompt because you don't want to just end with the analysis great it's identified what we kind of already knew but maybe made it clear that's helpful but the next step is the most important part you actually go in and prompt it now create a strategic plan that maximizes strengths makes the most of opportunities decreases weaknesses and minimizes threats and this is where AI becomes the most powerful because you've already done some pre-work it's already been trained on who you are and what you do it's already done the analysis of the strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and then spelled them out in Greater detail it has everything it needs to needs in order to create a fairly strong strategic plan for your business so when I did this for trim Healthy Mama I was blown away by the results that it gave me back now these are just things that then become fodder for you to look through and then plug back into your actual marketing plan so it gave me all kinds of ideas to run with some of which I love some of which I was like eh it's okay some of which I were I was already planning on doing these are things that I already had in mind I'm like oh we need to start doing next because this is the thing this is the we strength this is the opportunity this is the threat this is the weakness like things that I already been doing um it brought to light and some things were new so why wouldn't you take the time to do this when it's so easy to do it takes literally two minutes and you have a fully baked SWAT analysis with fantastic and creative ideas on how to actually address it so let's walk through some of the things that recommend for trim Healthy Mama so one of the strengths of course was trim healthy Mama's Community they have a huge fan base and a very loyal crowd of women that love to buy from this brand so but it's not the same it's not as big as it was before and that was one of the the threat I believe one of the threats or weaknesses so one one of the objectives were to reignite uh with the Brand's fervent audience on rented and owned media and then it gave actions and this is where it really comes up with some really interesting ideas Community campaign launch a mama success stories and family on plan is kind of around his branding campaigns encouraging followers to share their progress using trim Healthy Mama I'm just going to kind of skip around through what it's written as a strategic plan here uh come up with exclusive offers and engagements and it gave a great idea there uh Facebook group revitalization encourage engagement in the Facebook groups by creating regular challenges such as meal planning weeks or health goals future success stories that showcase tangible results and maintain excitement because this brand has done a great job with its Facebook group there's like literally like a half million mamas in that group um but probably only tens of thousand's actually engaging regularly after it's cooled down over the last five years or so so by coming up having the idea of like coming up with mini challenges to re-engage the base was a fantastic and strategic uh priority that I I'm actually moving like I'm moving forward with this idea for the company and it gave a number it took multiple objectives oh and then it broke down so it actually broke it down by like coming up with an objective coming up with multiple actions and then an expected outcome by leveraging or taking action on these ideas and it did that per every single strength weakness opportunity and threat in order to do what I told it to do right which was create a strategic plan that maximizes strengths makes the most of opportunities decreases we weaknesses and minimizes threats it created a very very robust plan in order to make the most of what is currently going on internally and externally from this brand I promise if you just take a few minutes to do this you will come up with some very creative um outof the-box ideas that are very uh contextual for what's going on in your company right now again it can only take action and come up with strategic insights for the things that it knows about you so what it whatever it doesn't get from the online search feed it back to it so that it knows and incorporates those into the SWAT analysis so that it can actually create action items for you based on what you know or current uh uh strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats but it will take very little time because you just filling in a few gaps that it already missed I find its ability even just doing on a web search uh an under basic understanding of the company It's ability to assess what those things were was very very strong so this is a good example of how AI can help you think strategically so that you can actually perform better marketing faster these are the kinds of things we often don't do and if we do them we we don't do them very well or to the fullest extent because it takes so much time to Rite it out it takes so much time to actually create the full swad analysis that then create the Strategic plan to address um we generally only come up with the few bullet points of action items because we already have in our mind kind of what we want to do but don't actually take the time to flesh out all the possibilities and angles we could take to address all the objectives that we want to accomplish within a year this way we can get more done and have a more fully fleshed out plan that we can then cherry-pick to find the best ones available but we all know that having more ideas on the table is usually better but it's too painful to get there so we just start with the preconceived ideas and tactics that we already think will move the needle before we actually do the full analysis and assessment of what's possible and that's the thing that makes AI truly remarkable is it can help you do the work that you were skipping in less than 5 minutes so take a moment do this for your brand you won't regret it