2 AI Marketing Strategies Getting Leads Basically For Free
Stop doing things that don't work, but faster.
Most marketing teams have been dipping their toes into AI, perhaps using it to save a few hours on copywriting. While that's cool, it's hardly going to create order of the order of magnitude changes in marketing performance AI leads us to believe is possible.
So what will?
That’s the question I’m chasing.
And I found 2 ideas so far, that seems to be a step in that direction. These are less step by step instructions and more strategic frameworks for you to bring into your mix, and apply to your specific situation.
I’ll break down the strategic thinking behind these approaches, and the basics of how to apply them.
Here’s a sneak peak of the strategies:
The New “Free Consultation": Imagine an AI-generated, 15-page custom growth plan landing in a prospect's inbox on your first outreach. The kind of deliverable that might take 10 hours of work, delivered for free with no strings. That would make a prospect think about you.
Scott Galloway did the analog (actual work) version of this strategy to close Yamaha and Levi’s at $500K/yr each… As his first clients out of college.
Ripple saw 100% increase in ROI of their cold email campaigns with this very strategy.
Micro-Channel Expansion: Posting more, lower quality, tweets on your profile with no followers will do nothing. But what if you can expand your distribution to 40+ channels with built in audiences of millions?
For one client we got 1M impressions on a single post in r/wallstreetbets that brought in 20+ customers
That same client had an average of 70K impressions per post using this strategy. Compared to 2K per post on their company socials.
Personally I’ve had marketing posts do 80K impressions and bring in 5 leads. No social following to speak of.
The Challenge: Cutting Through the Noise
The B2B marketing landscape is louder than ever. Cold email volume has increased by 73% this year. It feels like AI Marketing 101 has become using some copycat of AiSDR to read your prospects LinkedIn posts and think of a witty personalized message to get a conversation going.
On the content front, the situation isn't much better. Just last week a prospect sent me an essay they had “written” with a sense of accomplishment. They will publish that among many other posts on their website and wonder why the marketing results they’re after are not being met. Slowly, reports are coming in about dramatic increases in the amount of posts being posted on social media thanks to AI.
From Efficient to Effective: The AI Paradigm Shift
Focusing on efficiency, like generating posts or personalized outreach messages, might offer temporary competitive advantage. But these advantages can be replicated by competitors over night. What was originally incremental increases in ROI become status quo.
From the perspective of a marketing strategist, the real goal is to find new ways to be effective with AI. This means using AI to create value in ways that were previously impossible or prohibitively costly. It's about shifting from doing the same old things a little faster, to doing entirely new, high-impact things that truly move the needle. This approach allows you to stay ahead of the curve for much longer, building a moat around your marketing efforts.
Our core challenge became clear:
How could we use AI to deliver a 10x value jolt upfront to make cold prospects genuinely eager to engage with us?
How could we place that value where competitors weren't flooding the feed, and do it without adding to our budget?
Strategy 1: The New Free Consultation (Product + Price)
This strategy is all about delivering immense value upfront to a select group of high-value prospects. Instead of a generic cold email, you're delivering a highly personalized, high-value asset that demonstrates your expertise and understanding of their specific needs. A good pretext to this is the Dream 100 campaign by Chet Homes.
While each deliverable might initially take 15-20 minutes of human time per prospect, the perceived value and conversion rates make it incredibly worthwhile. As you refine the process, you'll find ways to optimize and save even more time.
The 6-Step Process for High-Value Deliverables:
Pick a High-Value Deliverable: Identify a deliverable that you would typically provide to a client, which is perceived as highly valuable and directly relevant to their specific situation. This could be a custom growth plan, a detailed market analysis, a personalized audit, or a strategic roadmap. The key is that it's about them and provides actionable insights.
Identify Necessary Data & Information: Determine precisely what data and information you need to assemble this offering for each prospect. This might include public company data (revenue, funding, employee count), industry trends, competitor analysis, recent news, or even specific pain points derived from their website or social media activity. Think about what you would normally ask on your discovery or onboarding call.
Build Your Data Pipeline: Leverage tools like Clay, ChatSheet, or similar data enrichment platforms to source the identified information. Automate the process of getting this data into a structured format.
Create Prompts or Prompt Chains: Develop a series of prompts or a sophisticated prompt chain for whatever LLM. These prompts will instruct the AI to take the collected data and transform it into a draft of your high-value deliverable, following a predefined structure and tone.
Automate the Drafting Process: Integrate your data pipeline with your LLM through automation tools like Zapier (or Clay again). Effectively automating that once the necessary points of the data pipeline are filled out, it will automatically generate the draft deliverable.
Human Editing & Continuous Optimization: The AI-generated draft provides a significant head start, but human oversight is crucial. Spend time editing and refining each deliverable to ensure accuracy, polish, and a bespoke feel. As you go, continuously look for ways to optimize the entire process, to save even more time per prospect.
The fundamental principles in play with a strategy like this are pretty simple. Going back to the 4Ps of marketing, this is an attempt to give you prospect the most Product you can for free (low Price).
If you can build the process so that the end result is in fact a deliverable your client will want, it will succeed.
Strategy 2: The Micro-Channel Expansion (Promotion + Place)
This strategy is about finding untapped audiences where your competitors aren't. While using AI to bring down the cost of producing content for these smaller channels.
This takes ‘Place’ of the Ps to the extreme by essentially going to the smallest channels you can promote on, where there are virtually no large competitors to speak of, and making them profitable by also taking Promotion to the extreme using AI to diminish the cost of producing new promotional material.
I’ve run this playbook for a client and averaged 73K impressions and 2-3 customers per post. I’ve also run this for myself with an average of 11K impressions per post and a lead every other post. It works.
The 6-Step Process for a Micro-Channel Blitz:
Research Possible Channels: Identify and research niche communities that align with your business. look at platforms like Reddit, Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, X communities, and niche forum sites like IndieHackers, or whatever is relevant for your niche. For each potential channel, build a list that includes its audience size (e.g., members, followers) and an assessment of the content quality. Your goal is to find engaged communities with a clear theme that you can add value to. Probably start by picking your best 3 or 5 and build from there.
Create Your Pillar Content: Instead of starting with a blank page, I recommend filming a loom of your pillar content. This gives you a transcript you can put in your prompt and have repurposed for the channels you are targeting. If you already have some form of pillar content like newsletter posts, or podcast, great. Use that.
Find Model Content for Each Channel: For each channel you are targeting, find 3-5 really great posts that you like and that performed well on that specific platform. Analyze what makes them successful—is it the tone, the format, the use of visuals, or the way they engage with the community? Then, create a prompt that will take your pillar content transcript and transform it into a post that resembles your model post, ensuring it's tailored to the community's unique style and rules.
Edit Drafts in Canvas: Take the AI-generated output and bring it over to the Gemini Canvas. Use Gemini to help you edit the post for humanness, removing hyperbole and clichés. Often, you can highlight sections and give instructions on how to change entire parts of the text. This process significantly reduces the overall editing time and makes the final polish more enjoyable.
Post and Optimize: After editing, post your content. This is where you learn what works and what doesn't. There are a few points of failure that can happen here—your content might not be a great fit for the channel, the channels you picked might not be as great as you thought, or your prompts aren't producing decent content and the editing time is too high. All of these issues can be fixed over time as you look at your results and optimize each piece of the process, from channel selection to prompt engineering.
Automate and Scale: To scale this process, you want to automate the flow of taking your pillar content and turning it into first-draft content for all your channels. I personally use AirTable and N8n for this process, which allows me to connect my content source with my AI prompts and scheduling tools. I'll be detailing that workflow in another post, but the key is to build a system that minimizes manual work, allowing you to focus on strategy and high-touch engagement.
I recommend starting with text content. I have not move to multi-media which I know is going to be a more complicated process for carousels and videos. But that is probably where this is going.
The End
I hope you were inspired by these examples. Remember not just to look at these campaign ideas, but the process of going back to marketing first principles and stretching to figure out how the new tools available allow you to really change the playing field.
There is a lot of undiscovered opportunity beyond the tactics I laid out above.