✋ Happy Friday SuperMarketers!

“Steal like an artist." — Austin Kleon.

In his book aptly named “Steal Like An Artist”, Kleon suggests that nothing is completely original and that all creative work builds on what came before.

This applies to marketing as well….learning and taking inspiration from others is part of the creative process.

So why not use AI to your advantage, to “steal like a marketer” and deconstruct marketing that works well. This could be from competitors, or just something you see that you like—a unique social post, ad, custom image, anything.

Let's dive and see how you can do this to become a SuperMarketer!

💡 Strategy: Learn from the Best by Reverse Engineering Top Campaigns

As marketers, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are brilliant campaigns already out there that we can deconstruct to inform our own marketing strategies.

Reverse engineering involves carefully analyzing what makes the top campaigns so effective. When we break down their:

• Messaging

• Content strategy

• Funnel design

• Ad creative

We can extract the key ingredients driving their success.

Scouting the competition is a natural part of business. And it can be fun too, like this ad from Axe Body Spray (h/t to Nik Sharma with a great thread of competitors roasting each other in ads)

Even if you’re not a behemoth CPG brand, you are a SuperMarketer and you have AI as your invaluable sidekick to help you reverse engineer campaigns.

AI’s pattern recognition abilities can analyze campaigns to identify what made them effective.

AI can uncover successful ingredients like messaging, design, content formats, pricing, and much more.

By learning from past marketing wins, AI allows us to build on proven strategies instead of starting from scratch.

🔍 Use Case: If you like it, you can steal it

The list of sources from which you can find inspiration are infinite, so it’s best to start with the problem that you’re working on right in front of you. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Email campaigns - The subject lines, content formatting, calls-to-action, and personalization used in high-performing email campaigns can all

• Landing pages - The layout, copy, visuals, and calls-to-action on landing pages that successfully convert visitors. What do you like, and why?

• Social media posts - The image style, caption messaging, and engagement tactics used in content that resonates.

• SEO strategy - The keyword targeting, link building, site optimization, and content creation behind top-ranked pages.

• Case studies - The storytelling, proof points, and impact data provided in persuasive customer case studies.

• Webinars/events - The presentation techniques, audience interaction tactics, and delivery style that make virtual events engaging.

As an example, here’s a website I came across recently. Nothing crazy or fancy, but very clear with what they do. I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at Apple’s websites for inspiration.

🤖 Prompt: Analyze This Campaign

You don’t need a specific prompt to get what you want.

As long as you provide the example of what you’re trying to deconstruct, and some guidance on what type of output and analysis you want, your AI tool of choice will do the rest.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Please thoroughly analyze this [marketing campaign] to provide an in-depth understanding of why it resonates and how it could be replicated. 

Review the [copy, design, layout, positioning, psychology] to provide the following:

- An overview summarizing what the campaign is, who it targets, and what makes it effective overall.

- An analysis of the messaging and copywriting, breaking down the language, framing techniques, relevance to the target audience, and psychological triggers used to motivate desired actions.

- A visual breakdown describing how imagery, color scheme, typography, and layout contribute to the impact and flow of the campaign.

Recommendations on how someone could adapt the copy, visuals, and structure of this campaign for a similar product or service. Provide specific examples.

🔬Example: Why Is Ahref’s YouTube So Good?

Remember, ChatGPT now has Vision, which means that you can upload images and get an analysis of that — on the design, but also on the copy within that image.

As an example, I could look at Ahrefs YouTube channel, take a screenshot (sorted by most Popular videos), and upload that to ChatGPT.

I used the same prompt from above:

And in seconds, I get a complete analysis of their YouTube strategy at a high level — the types of Titles they use, their content, the thumbnail design, and much more. Here’s the first part of the output:

You could go even deeper if you want, taking transcripts of the videos (Glasp.co is a great tool for instantly pulling transcripts while on a YouTube page). You could learn about the hook in the intro, the structure of the videos, the call to actions, and much more!

Here’s another example where I asked ChatGPT how it would describe an image in text.

It then gave me a text-based description, which I added right back to DALL-E 3 and got an even better image as a result!

📖 Resources: Build Your Swipe File

So how do you easily save the content that you want to reverse engineer?

Create a swipe file!

That’s a consolidated place to store everything, and ideally you can tag it for easy reference in the future — so you have your Copywriting, Subject Lines, Video ideas, all in one place.

And to make it easier, use a free tool that has a Chrome Extension, so that it’s easy to save in just one click.

Notion,  Airtable, and Google Keep all do the same thing, for free!

So time to get out there and start swiping and getting inspiration!

Until next week,

Stay Super, Marketers!

Gen

PS:

Here’s a fun and unflattering look at an AI app that shows you how “well” you age with AI, called Extrapolate

Looks like I have Mr Bean on Speed in my distant future 😱