Micah Johnson 0:00

Welcome to today's episode of the Biggest Goal podcast. I'm your co-host, Micah Johnson.

Alane Boyd 0:05

And I'm Alane Boyd. And in today's episode, we're going to be covering our full claw-powered marketing workflow where we dive into exactly how we're getting leads, how we built this lead machine for ourselves. It's one of the biggest things that we see coming in from people how do I get more leads? So we're going to share on how we do that. And in upcoming episodes, we're going to be going and diving deeper into each one of these. So be sure to be listening over the next few weeks and you'll get a full overview and all those little nuggets and the nuance of exactly how we built this lead engine.

Micah Johnson 0:41

And before we jump into today's episode, we have a couple upcoming events that I want to share. So on Tuesday, September 29th, we have our three-hour cowork workshop. This, if you're wanting to get ahead with AI, save more time, be more efficient, implement any of the things that we're talking about in today's episode. Join us on September 29th. On the 30th, the day after, we have our AI mastermind group. This is a peer group. And one of our members is our guest speaker talking about who will make your AI adoption stick. And then on the following Wednesday, we have our AI Builders Peer Group, which is a collection of people from all different industries. Get together and we talk about how are we actually building workflows, solving problems, and getting in on the little bit more technical side of things. So go to events.biggestgoal.ai to see all of our upcoming events.

Alane Boyd 1:34

It's so cool to see the upcoming events too, Micah, with that landing page that you created. So shout out to you.

Micah Johnson 1:41

Well, it's part of our marketing system.

Alane Boyd 1:43

It is. That's why I wanted to note that. So, Micah, too, whenever we were planning this episode, I really just wanted to pull some quotes because this is what we see coming in. So a couple of them are I have no clue on effectively marketing, and I want to use AI to help me. How do I do this without a full marketing team? And I need more leads, which I think that one's mine. Yeah. Yeah.

Micah Johnson 2:12

I filled out my own lead form.

Alane Boyd 2:13

I think so too. I hear you say that on a daily basis. You're just filling out our own form. And I need to be more efficient in marketing.

Micah Johnson 2:20

Yeah, I think it's really interesting to see these quotes. We're going to talk about how we pulled these quotes before the end of the episode. Um, you know, I think spoiler alert, Alane did not spend hours and hours and hours combing through transcripts and lead form submissions. She used AI to pull this, and we'll talk about how we got that all set up.

Alane Boyd 2:42

Yeah, it was super easy too, Micah. What whenever, so this is actually yesterday that I thought would help really frame this conversation. So yesterday I was talking with another woman who has a really good-sized business. And I was telling her how we now have 52 AI employees who work for us. And she asked me how many people it would have taken humans to do the job of those 52 AI employees. And I told her, well, I I can I can think of two, but there's so much that these AI employees are doing that we never had the resources to do before. So I can't even quantify how many people it would take to do the jobs of those 52 AI employees.

Micah Johnson 3:30

I I would probably say, Alane, before we started chatting about this and even prepping for this episode, I didn't really have that put into words in my head, the thought that we're actually doing things that we would never do before. It's not about like how many jobs did we eliminate. It's that the work we're doing never had jobs to begin with.

Alane Boyd 3:53

Is ooh, yeah, that's exactly what it is because we just didn't have time capacity, resources. I mean, I think about what we used to do for a landing page, and it would take weeks and months to even just get the copy down, not much less the design of it down. Yeah. So we'd be months away from having one landing page completed. And now I'm looking at what we're doing. And over the last few months, we've, I think, Mike, I've been, I looked at the log um this week, and I think we've created over 70 landing pages.

Micah Johnson 4:27

Yeah, we actually had to make an index of our landing pages because we're able with this system, we're able to iterate and come up with things so quickly that all of a sudden it was, you know, a week or two, maybe a month into this, and we've got stuff out there. It's starting to get ranked on search engines. We're starting to come up in AI search results. We actually had to, as part of the system, create a searchable index, which was a Claude artifact dashboard, so that everybody knew what landing pages we had out there. And at first I thought, well, this is kind of dumb. But then I had to use it myself because I couldn't remember all the pages that we made. And I'm like, okay, it's not that dumb. It's kind of a good idea.

Alane Boyd 5:12

Yeah. I mean, uh, Micah, even like you and I have been in business together now for almost 20 years. Never in our history did we have this many.

Micah Johnson 5:20

I don't, I mean, yeah, we had to beat like two.

Alane Boyd 5:23

That was I remember creating three. One for when we were doing Monday.com clickup and Asana, um, like project management stuff. I think it took six months for us to get those three done.

Micah Johnson 5:37

It was awful. All right. So let me just high-level zip through what we're when when we say an AI marketing system, what does that contain? And there's five key elements that we have in this. First, we're understanding what people are saying in their own words and the problems that they have. The second element is we're designing landing pages. The third element, we're publishing those landing pages to a web host, creating traffic drivers. So ads and social posts and video outlines. And then the fifth element is we're taking any of the leads that we're getting and we're actually saving them into a database so that we can rinse and repeat this whole system and this process over and over again. Cause that's going to give us visibility into, hey, as our new leads are coming in, as we're running experiments, what does that look like for problems that people are having? And we all know this changes exceptionally fast, this market. So it's really important for us to always keep a pulse on it. But maybe let's dive into each of these.

Alane Boyd 6:41

Yeah. And I mean, the first one that that you mentioned, and you know, listen, like making a list of the problems. And if if you were listening to how many landing pages we had, and you're going like, oh my God, why the heck would you even create that many? It's it's because, and that's the gap that we always had. Is your your landing page has to speak to the problem that that person has and how your solution is going to help them. And so that's different ways of messaging things, figuring out what's resonates, different services. I think where Micah, you and I made the mistake before is hey, we've got this awesome home page. Let's just send traffic there.

Micah Johnson 7:22

And hope it converts.

Alane Boyd 7:24

Yeah. And and, you know, we didn't get anything.

Micah Johnson 7:28

You know, having a database, having an understanding of what the problems are as the first element in the system has made all the difference in the world. We're able to get all the details and we're able to query it. We're able to go to Claude and say, hey, Claude, what percentage of our elites are experiencing marketing problems? Is this enough to do a marketing episode on? And can you pull some of the more popular quotes that we've gotten on marketing so that Alane can share it at the opening of the episode?

Alane Boyd 8:03

I think like there's so many good things, even just with a transcript that we can do now. We talk about a lot about transcripts. And transcripts from our sales calls were super helpful because I don't want to do things on how I feel or what I think. Like I want to make judgment calls and decisions based on the data, what we're seeing. And so that's where even AI was super helpful because we already had the transcripts from sales calls. And if we had, you know, a few leads here and there come from our website, we also had that data. And so we had AI at this very first step is help analyze what are the problems so that we could start building landing pages around those problems.

Micah Johnson 8:43

The transcripts are such a good, good idea. I mean, anybody who's worked with me who's listening to this in the past, you know I think that as like the gold to give to Claude is having transcripts, being able to work with that. Um, I'm really glad you you pointed that out, Alane, because I think that falls under what we were talking about just a couple minutes ago, which is you wouldn't be able to do this without AI. This is one of those situations. Nobody is combing through hundreds of transcripts to find manually, to find the or watching the videos to find and and consolidate. And they're certainly not doing it in five minutes.

Alane Boyd 9:23

No, gosh, just love a good transcript with AI to pull out those trends. So that was the first part that we did. And then the second part is okay, well, we need to create more than one landing page, more than three landing pages. And so we using Claude Design started to create templates of what we wanted to go into these landing pages. And then changing them using skills was much easier.

Micah Johnson 9:55

Yeah. So we had we built a design system, we built templates, and the examples that we would give Claude on how we wanted to populate the temp templates came from the analysis that Claude helped us do of understanding the leads and the prospects' problems and the terms that they use and the words and all that kind of stuff, so that very quickly we could stand up a landing page.

Alane Boyd 10:21

Yeah. And this, I mean, the I my mind is constantly blown at how fast these really sexy landing pages can get created with exactly what was in our head for messaging. Like it just the amount of hours that would have gone into manually building that now is just like non-existent.

Micah Johnson 10:43

I think we're starting to take it for granted too, Alane, because it works so well. We come up with an idea, we go to Cloud Design, we iterate on this landing page. And once we have a working landing page, we go into element three of this, which is how do we get it live? So once we have a working landing page, we just package that up with a prompt in itself and the actual assets and go to Claude Code and say, hey, Claude, can you publish this to our Webflow account? Now we've already connected Claude up to Webflow and we've given it MCP and command line interface access. But we're not touching, like we don't have like, I just think of like the amount of time we had to rebuild or manually build or go in with the editor. And and now it is literally pull the list of problems, articulate what we want, put that into a landing page, iterate on the landing page, get that working, go to Claude Code and ask it to publish. And it'll even stand up a development server so we can see everything before it publishes, gets our approval. And all that whole thing that I just listed, if we if we had it all dialed in and we, you know, sometimes we spend hours or days iterating because we really want to think through the concepts and the and the messaging in the landing page. But really, the the build part, we're talking minutes. We're we're pulling minutes out of getting the the data from the transcripts and our database or lead database. It's minutes to create the first version of the landing page and it's minutes to publish it. And I, you know, I think there's there's a bigger piece to this that we'll share in a second, but like the build part is really minimized.

Alane Boyd 12:32

It is. And then we had an episode on this recently, just talking about, you know, I I see where designers are hesitant to do this because it they feel like it takes away their value as a designer, but it makes you even more powerful because you can lead the vision of what you want, but not have to spend the hours custom coding things or tweaking things, pixel sizes. Like it the finished product gets to you so much faster without having to do that tedious part.

Micah Johnson 13:07

Yeah, I think this fourth element, Alane, that we're getting into, which is building the ads, the traffic drivers, like creating the social posts, the videos. Like this is another example where the the earlier elements that we were talking about, the landing pages and publishing, yeah, there was a lot of like we can be strong as founders and do stuff that we could never do as founders before. Now, building ads, posts, and videos, like again, as founders and as leaders and managers, we can do these things. But imagine if we were as skilled as current designers. And this is what gets me about all of this. I know we talked about this in the other episode. So if you take an expert marketer and you have them adopt these tools, or you take an expert designer and you have them adopt, you know, claw design, it's not replacing them, it's strengthening their knowledge. What it's done is kind of level the playing field. So as founders, we can go, hey, check out this concept. And it's 80% of the way there. But anyway, I digress. The whole point is we can do so many more things now. So our fourth element is we're building ads, posts, videos, traffic drivers. We're doing that back in cloud co-work. Maybe a little bit of cloud design, but again, we're using skills. And what we're doing is feeding it the landing page that we just published.

Alane Boyd 14:33

Yeah, and it's helping us build keywords for Google Ads. It's helping us create the ads, it's helping us analyze the ads too. And that's where we started in this process is let's just focus on launching a Google Ads campaign. And then as we've now done this for about three months and gotten better at that and feel like we've got a good handle on it. Okay, well, now we can add Meta and the other ad platforms and have copy created along with the other assets and video and stuff like that. You've been doing some amazing things with video too.

Micah Johnson 15:04

Yeah. One thing that I want to point out as we're getting into the detail of our fifth element here is that we didn't just wait to launch all of this until we've perfected it. We launched it in its crappiest version. Literally. It was the most basic version we could imagine. Will this even work? We honed our workflows over the three months. We've honed our messaging. We've honed even down to what we're at with the fifth element here, which is saving the lead data to a database. That ended up being a happy accident because we iterated through this process and this workflow. And we go, you know what? There's not a really good place for us to put a lot of the data that we're collecting. Not only are we collecting more data than we ever have before, because we have such flexibility in designing the forms in the landing pages to make them as user-friendly as possible. We don't have to like keep up with, or like, I don't know, sacrifice our usability because of existing form solutions or something like that that we embedded in there. The form can look however we want, exactly how we want. And that that I think was a big change. And I can't wait to go into that episode um to talk about how we did that and why we, how we iterate and what we thought through that. But we're we created a crappy version. We just got some quick wins, and then we've iterated and iterated and iterated. The database and saving our leads, the fifth element here is great. Is a um, you know, an outcome of that iteration, which also led to strengthening all of these because now we can go back and reanalyze as we're collecting more data, as we're trying new channels, like you're saying, Alane, as we're trying different offers and campaigns.

Alane Boyd 16:57

Well, and at first, I didn't, I even questioned you like why would we do a separate database for this? These leads are still going into our CRM. Like it's not, these things are not exclusive of each other. They all they can go in multiple places. So we're still putting that lead in our CRM. But we also kept the separate database, which Mike was brilliant. And when we do the deeper dive into this part, we'll we'll talk about, you know, what what we which one we used and and why. But this piece of being able to analyze those leads, what they say, where like, oh God, there's so many details built around that has given us the ability to do the analysis. I know you you pretty much already said that, but I wanted to say it from like my perspective of like being able to see that in one place and get the we get an analysis every single day from AI. And it's because it has this one place to look at what the lead said, where the the ad that it clicked on, the cost of that ad. Like we get so many details in this database to then go, hey, along with the analysis, what do we want to do? And we get to make that decision. We're not letting AI look at that, analyze it, and then go off and run on its own. We are still being a human in the loop here, guiding those decisions, making the recommendations and then putting our spin on it because we want to be the strategy and the guide, but it's giving us the data to make those decisions.

Micah Johnson 18:34

Now, Alane, I I totally agree with all of that. And I want to I want to wrap this up because we're gonna go into each of these in depth in in future episodes. But in our last episode, you introduced the BO report, which is the biggest obstacle. And I wondered if I could introduce, I love this concept now that we've been kind of talking about this. I wondered if you'd let me introduce the B.O. report for you to take on.

Alane Boyd 19:01

Well, you already started, so go ahead.

Micah Johnson 19:03

All right. So this week's or this episode's BO report is about the concept of it needing way more effort and it being marketing, way more effort and how the effort shifts. So I'd love your take on this whole shift of effort, Alane.

Alane Boyd 19:23

So the I feel like effort has been a theme in my mind this year coming up a lot.

Micah Johnson 19:29

And this year.

Alane Boyd 19:31

This year. And because there's absolutely effort still there. It's not that AI has just completely removed all effort. I actually think that the effort now is heavier, but in a completely different way. The effort isn't in the nuance of building and the details of building. The effort is in what do I really want to be strategic about? And that's where I see this BO report is hey, let's let's not misunderstand where effort falls in here. The effort is in, hey, let's look at the data, let's look at what it's saying and it make improvements because there's absolutely a way to get leads from a marketing channel that's from an ad campaign to landing pages. But getting the words right and the representation correct takes a lot of work. And so as the the leader of your company or your department or whatever it might be, is that hey, where do I want my effort to be? Do I want my effort to be in the behind the scenes building where AI could alleviate a lot of that? Or hey, can I be the strategic person leading this and making those iterations?

Micah Johnson 20:44

I love that. I think the the success that we've seen in our lead program or in our marketing, our AI-powered marketing program so far over the last three months, just to put it in perspective, we're collecting about 300 leads a month from this program. And we're categorizing everything and we can analyze everything, and we can just go to Claude and ask about it. The success is not because we spent more time building. The success so far that we've seen is because we've spent a hundred times more on strategy.

Alane Boyd 21:20

Yeah, that's exactly right. So if you want to get more about how we built this process, please listen to the upcoming episodes and we're gonna dive into those things. So you're gonna be able to take away lots on how to build your marketing engine. And if you're a listener and you took a look at our reviews on Apple or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, you're gonna notice that we have less than 10 reviews for our podcast. And we would love so much if you just took a minute and went and left left us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Help share and spread the word about the biggest goal podcast. And Micah and I would appreciate it so much.