You’re juggling multiple clients, trying to stay strategic while also knocking out messaging frameworks, content briefs, LinkedIn posts, and executive POV slides. You could use help, but you don’t have time to onboard someone who won’t nail the tone or understand the nuances of your clients’ businesses. Sound familiar?
Enter AI. Specifically: ChatGPT and custom GPTs that actually know how you think.
I recently led a session for the Fractional CMO Community focused on just that: how to use AI to create sharper brand messaging and thought leadership content—without losing your voice, your strategic edge, or your sanity. Here’s what we covered.
The Right Way to Use AI for Messaging
First: AI is not your ghostwriter. It’s your strategy intern with superpowers. ChatGPT can help fractional CMOs speed up work like:
- Summarizing documents and transcripts
- Building content outlines and messaging frameworks
- Drafting first-pass copy for web, email, or social
- Repurposing long-form content across channels
It can even mock up personas and simulate sample dialogue for video scripts. Where AI does shine is helping you move faster through the parts of your process that can be templated or systematized—so you can spend more time where your value actually lies: strategic insight, differentiation, and knowing what your audience actually needs to hear.
But it’s not magic. It won’t intuit nuance, recognize tone fatigue, or deliver a perspective that cuts through the noise. That still comes from you. That’s where our BRIDGE framework comes in.
The BRIDGE Framework, Enhanced by AI
At &Marketing, we use our BRIDGE framework to build clear, aligned messaging strategies that are both emotionally resonant and business-focused. In the session, I showed how AI can be layered into every piece of the framework—not to replace the work, but to streamline and support it:
- Brand Voice Alignment: Upload tone guides and real content examples to give AI something to learn from
- Refined Messaging: Generate value props, taglines, and positioning statements that you can actually react to
- Integrated Storytelling: Prompt AI to suggest narrative arcs or map your customer journey
- Data-Driven Insights: Use AI to synthesize call transcripts, sentiment analysis, or discovery findings
- Growth-Focused Value Props: Frame your messaging in a way that ties directly to business impact
- Enhanced by AI: Yes, the “E” is for AI, but only when it’s paired with human judgment
This structure gives AI something to plug into and gives you the foundation to make sure nothing gets lost in translation.
Creating a GPT That Thinks Like You
From there, we talked about the next evolution: custom GPTs. These are private bots you can train with your tone, voice, structure, and strategic perspective. Instead of starting from scratch every time you open a ChatGPT tab, you build a bot that already knows your client’s positioning or your own POV.
We used a fill-in-the-blank template to help participants set up their own:
- Define the GPT’s role, audience, and expertise
- Specify tone and structure (e.g., “use punchy hooks,” “avoid corporate jargon”)
- Upload sample posts, emails, and documents as training inputs
- Refine the outputs over time with specific feedback like “make this bolder” or “shorten this to one sentence per idea”
Once it’s set up, you can prompt it with instructions like:
“Write a LinkedIn post in my voice about why most founders don’t hand off marketing soon enough. Make it smart, story-driven, and direct.”
This approach turns AI from a guessing game into a repeatable workflow. And once it’s trained? You’ve got a thought leadership sidekick that works how you do.
Prompt Like a Pro (Instead of a Parrot)
Even the best GPT won’t help you if your prompts are vague or overly broad. Aka, stop treating AI like a vending machine. We dug into advanced prompting techniques that help unlock sharper, more differentiated outputs. That included asking for specific formats—like “hot take,” “list post,” or “mini story” and using perspective cues like:
- “Be a contrarian”
- “Offer a controversial but defensible opinion”
- “Write this like I’m texting another marketing leader”
The more specific you are in structure, tone, and intent, the better the outputs (and the less editing you’ll need to do later).
The Big Shift: From Content Generator to Strategic Co-Creator
The most important takeaway? AI isn’t replacing you. It’s amplifying your strengths. Marketers don’t need more content. We need better systems that let us deliver high-impact strategy and execution at scale. That’s what this session was all about: using AI not to automate our work, but to support the way we think.
The Fractional CMO community is full of smart, scrappy marketers who know how to deliver results with limited time and resources. This session showed how AI can plug into that superpower not as a shortcut, but as a creative, strategic extension of the work we’re already doing.
Best of all? This was just one of many monthly sessions available to Fractional CMO members—ranging from peer working groups to expert-led workshops like this one.
Want to learn more about the Fractional CMO Community and how to join us? Head HERE.
Have more questions about content or messaging? Use the form below to reach out. We’re always happy to help.
