👋 Happy Friday SuperMarketers!

“First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.” - David Ogilvy, SuperMarketer & OG father of advertising.

AI is a transformative force in how it creates leverage for individual marketers to level up their output and skillset.

However, humans are still necessary, at least until Artificial General Intelligence is achieved.

One element of many high functioning teams are often Virtual Assistants (VAs)—self-employed team members who offer administrative tasks to clients remotely.

With the right recipe of standardized processes, AI prompts, and automation, you can scale your output and quality significantly.

In this edition of SuperMarketers, we're digging in to a yummy alphabet soup of VAs, SOPs, and AI.

Hungry yet? Let’s start. 😋 

💡 Strategy: Enhance VA Efficiency with AI-Driven SOPs (and save 💰️)

The key to working having a great system with your VAs is clarity: the expectations of output, the process of how to get there, and how this will all be communicated.

Frankly the standardization and organization is hard for me sometimes. Hence, AI and getting it down in writing is a blessing.

But the challenge of getting the system set up is worth it, particularly when the savings can be 80% or more of what US-based talent might cost.

Once the the system is set up with SOPs, the upside includes:

• Maximizing Efficiency and Productivity: AI-driven SOPs streamline the workflow for VAs, allowing them to focus more on high-impact tasks. By automating routine tasks, AI not only speeds up the process but also minimizes errors, ensuring high-quality output consistently.

• Scalable Growth: As your business grows, the need for scalable processes becomes critical. AI-enhanced SOPs are easily adaptable and can handle increasing volumes of work, making them ideal for companies in growth phases.

• Consistent Quality and Reliability: Consistency in communication and campaign execution is key to maintaining brand consistency. AI-driven SOPs ensure that every task, from email marketing to social media management, is executed with a consistent level of quality and precision, regardless of who is performing the task.

• Improved Training and Onboarding: For new team members, especially VAs, AI-enhanced SOPs act as an interactive training guide, reducing the learning curve and helping them become productive more quickly. This leads to faster integration into your team and quicker realization of their full potential.

That all sounds good, but specifically, what tasks can you get help with here?

🔍 Use Case: Benefits Across Your Marketing Team

Implementing AI-driven SOPs for VAs will improve your marketing operations significantly. You can start with some of the repetitive, boring tasks that take up a lot of an employee's day but don't require strategic thinking.

MarketerHire highlights some ideas of what their Expert Assistants can do:

Let’s get specific with a few examples though…

Content: For content management, you can develop an SOP for managing your content calendar and social media posting. Your VA can assist in scheduling posts, optimizing content based on performance analytics, and even suggesting content modifications. Create an AI-driven SOP for this, and it’s a huge boost for your content program.

Email: Streamline your email with an SOP for handling emails. AI tools can categorize emails, flag high-priority messages, and suggest draft responses. This reduces the time spent on email management, ensuring that important communications are addressed promptly and efficiently.

Project Management: Create an SOP to track project timelines, send reminders for deadlines, and help in organizing different marketing campaigns. Ultimately this can help with organizing and managing your ongoing and future campaigns.

Now to the good stuff, the HOW, ie the prompt.

🤖 Prompt: Use An AI-Powered SOP Builder

To craft an effective SOP for a specific marketing task using AI, you can use the following prompt structure:

As an AI specialized in creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), your primary function is to assist users in creating, understanding, and optimizing SOPs for various industries. Your name is SOP Assistant Creator, and you have been customized to provide expert guidance in SOP creation and interpretation.

Key Goals and Functions:

1. SOP Creation: When users request SOP creation, draft clear, concise, and well-structured SOPs that adhere to industry standards and are easy to follow.

2. SOP Interpretation: When presented with an existing SOP, interpret and explain it in simpler terms if needed, highlighting key steps and requirements for easy understanding.

3. Feedback and Improvement: Provide constructive suggestions for improving existing SOPs, focusing on clarity, efficiency, and compliance with relevant standards.

4. Industry Knowledge: Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in SOP formats and regulatory requirements across various industries to provide current and relevant advice.

5. User Education: When appropriate, educate users about best practices in SOP writing and maintenance, sharing tips on clarity, compliance, and process optimization.

Guidelines for Interaction:

Ask for clarification when needed to ensure the most relevant and accurate assistance.

Respect confidentiality and sensitivity regarding proprietary information in SOPs.

Encourage user feedback for continuous improvement of the SOPs created or improved.

By following these guidelines, you will serve as a proficient and reliable assistant in the domain of Standard Operating Procedures, helping users enhance their operational efficiency and compliance.

I created this GPT from seeing how the other GPTs have used their SOP builder….check my last newsletter here to get the prompt that shares the custom instructions of GPTs, it’s a good one 😉 

Anyway, here’s the output of an SOP when I asked for help with coming up with ideas, research, and outlining YouTube ideas.

Interestingly, it broke it down cleanly into the 3 distinct asks that I had, starting with the ideating:

Then the research:

And then the outlining:

🔬 Experiment: Optimizing and Adapting AI-Enhanced SOPs

You can experiment with different SOPs for whatever it is that you’re looking to do. You may also want to pick out specific points of the SOP output that are too vague, or don’t have the specifics of your particular needs, tech stack, etc, and either add more detail yourself or prompt your AI to add more detail.

Some other ideas:

• Customize for Specific Roles:

  • Personalization Approach: Differentiate SOPs based on the unique roles within your team. For example, create distinct SOPs for administrative, technical, and creative VAs.

• Regular Updates:

  • Iterative Improvement: Establish a routine for revisiting and updating SOPs. Use feedback from VAs and performance data to refine procedures.

By continuously experimenting with and adapting your SOPs, you can make sure that you’re keeping the process up to date with your changes in tools or marketing strategies.

📖 Resources: Essential Tools for Crafting AI-Enhanced SOPs

The creation and implementation of effective SOPs are greatly aided by a suite of digital tools. Here's a rundown of essential resources that can help streamline this process:

• Google Docs: Ideal for drafting and sharing text-based SOPs. They offer real-time collaboration, version history, and easy formatting options.

• Guidde: A newer tool that allows for interactive guides and SOPs directly within your web applications, enhancing user experience and comprehension.

  

• TLDV: A useful tool for summarizing long video meetings or trainings on Zoom or Google Meet, extracting key moments and decisions.

  

• Onlinejobs.ph & Upwork: These platforms are ideal for finding skilled virtual assistants. You can find professionals experienced in various fields, ensuring that you get the right talent for your specific needs. Onlinejobs.ph is specifically for talent in the Philippines.

Using these tools doesn’t need to be a big financial investment. But it does require time and planning.

I’m working through that now myself, not always fun, but critically important to scale.

And that’s what we all want, right? at least that’s what we may have resolved to do just a few weeks ago in the new year.

Anyway, hope this was a helpful one, until next week!

Stay Super, Marketers.

Gen