Greg Wilkes (00:01):
The construction industry can be a tough business to crack, from cash flow problems, struggling to find skilled labour and not making enough money for your efforts, leaves many business owners feeling frustrated and burnt out. But when you get the business strategy right, it’s an industry that can be highly satisfying and financially rewarding. I’m here to give you the resources to be able to create a construction business that gives you more time, more freedom and more money. This is the Develop Your Construction Business podcast, and I’m your host, Greg Wilkes.
Greg Wilkes (00:43):
Today we are focusing on AI and I can’t believe as a former builder, I’m talking about how AI is going to revolutionise the construction industry, and it really is. When you start using it and you start seeing the power of it, it is absolutely mind blowing what AI is potentially going to do and what a disruptor it’s going to be. Particularly (not so much in how it’s going to help you build a house or whatever else) but in the way you are going to use it in the backend for your office processes and your marketing and your finance etc. It really is an absolute game changer and is going to save you hours and hours of time if you start using it. Now when I talk about AI in this podcast, what I’m specifically referring to is ChatGPT. So if you haven’t heard that before, I’m sure you have because it’s all over the internet and certainly all over my social media chat) GPT is without a doubt the market leader in AI at this time. There are others out therE, Google and others are trying to make their equivalence, but without a doubt ChatGPT is far above all the rest at the moment and we’re in April 2023. That might change in six months or a year’s time, but they certainly have got headstart on it. If you’re going to have a play around with AI, use their platform and it’s free. You can do a paid version if you want, but the free version is going to get you everything you need for now. Have a little look as it’s unbelievable. Go on to openai.com I think it is, and get your free account set up just to have a little play with it first of all.
(02:26):
What is ChatGPT ? Well I’m not intelligent enough to describe <laugh>, how it works and the the mechanics of it. But what I do know is currently when you’re searching for information, we might go on Google and we’ll type in what we want an answer to and Google will come up with the best search results. It’ll list out whatever it is, the top 10 search results on page one. Now ChatGPT, what it’s doing is it’s scouring the internet for those answers, and instead of giving you a website link that it thinks you are going to get that answer to, it’s pulling that information and putting it into text as a text answer. So you ask it a question, you write a question down via text and then it gives you an answer back via a text summary. It’s analysing multiple websites, it’s learning from itself and obviously it’s got a team working behind it to try and hone those answers. It’s pretty incredible some of the stuff it’s given you back.
(03:27):
Now what we need to bear in mind is that it’s gathering its information from the internet and there’s a lot of mistakes on the internet as well. So you do need to be careful when you’re using it because sometimes it’ll give you answers back that aren’t correct, that can be completely wrong. You don’t want to take what it’s saying as gospel, you need to check everything that is that’s given you back. But as you start playing with it, you’ll start to realise what capabilities it has and how awesome it is for your construction business. What I want to focus on (there’s so many different aspects you’re going to be able to use AI for in your business) but this specific one I just want to talk about how you can use it for marketing and how it’s going to help you understand your client, how to find your ideal client and how you really need to get on top of this because marketing has changed. It’s changing rapidly over the next few years. It is going to change. The whole face of marketing is going to change completely.
(04:25):
Now you might think back to your market in years ago, I don’t know what you were doing, but 20 years ago I was doing things like advertising in the Yellow Pages. I had an ad in the local newspaper, the free newspaper, I think it was the Gazette that used to get delivered around my way. We used to put ads in like the Thompson local or we used to do flyers, that sort of thing. Now you’ve probably done similar things over the years, but can you imagine if you were still trying to use that form of marketing right now, it wouldn’t work, would it? It would be completely outdated. You wouldn’t get the results, you’d be wasting your money. I really believe the same thing is going happen to whatever marketing strategy you’ve currently got right now. What you’ve been using over the past few years is going to become completely outdated by what AI is producing and it’s going to happen really fast. If you want to be up to date with the current trends (and we want you to be ahead in construction marketing, get ahead of your rivals) and if you are into AI and you’re into this sort of stuff, you without a doubt are going to leapfrog other companies that are still acting like dinosaurs and not getting on top of this stuff. It really is a bit of a game changer
(05:36):
What we’re going to focus on specifically today is how it helps you find your ideal client, how it helps you communicate with them and how it can help you generate social media posts and blogs etc.
(05:52):
One of the first things I want to quickly touch on, is some of the problems that you might find with ChatGPT as you start using it. if you’ve been using it already or if you just start using it now, some of the things you’re going to find annoying with it is 1) It starts giving you incorrect answers (sometimes) that can be frustrating. 2) Sometimes the answers it gives you and the content it gives you, if you’re going to start using it for social media and blogs, can sound really bland and really vanilla and generic and you think, “Ah, that just doesn’t sound like me. It’s not in my voice.” That’s frustrating. And the third thing is, it can give you good content but it’s good but not good enough. For that reason, a lot of people actually get a little bit frustrated with it and they give up and think “It’s not ready yet. I’m not going to use it: But I can promise you it is ready, it is ready to use right now, but you’ve got to use it the right way. If you use it the right way is an absolute game changer.
(06:48):
There’s three things that you have to do to use it the right way. The first thing is, you have to be really specific and really clear with the prompts that you put in the text prompts. This word ‘prompts’ you might not have come across that phrase before, but this how we describe the text that you’re putting in to ChatGPT. When you ask it a question, this is the prompt. You’ve got to be clear on your prompts, because if you put rubbish in, you’re going to get rubbish out. We also wanted to talk in your voice, and there’s a way of doing that to make it talk more like you or even talk like someone you want to talk like. And the third thing you’ve got to be prepared to do, is iterate. You may have to go back and refine things and say, “Look, ChatGPT, that’s not right. Change that or change this bullet point or, or change this word” and it’ll redo it for you, and you have to be prepared to do things multiple times to get your ideal output out of it. When you do that, what it will enable you to do is (from a marketing viewpoint) is really be able to understand and connect with your ideal clients. You’ll really be able to speak to them in a way that they understand and also it’s going to save you a ton of time. If you get this right, if you can get these prompts right and you can save these prompts, you can get anyone in your company doing this and it’ll save you a ton of time.
(08:09):
What I’m going to focus on, particularly in this podcast is far as marketing goes is 1) hHw to build out a client persona or a client avatar 2) How to understand your client’s fears and frustrations 3) How to find your USP 4) how to come up with decent social media content 5) How to use it for your long form blogs. They’re the five things that that we’re going to quickly run through. Now obviously I’m not using this live, so I’ve got to explain this as we go through. So maybe as you’re listening to this podcast, you might want to be sitting there on ChatGPT and just having a little play around with it.
(08:46):
Let’s just talk about building your client avatar first of all Why is it so important to build out a client avatar? It’s really crucial that you understand who you are marketing to when you are putting your social media posts out there, when you’re building your websites, you really need to talk the same language as who you are trying to attract. You want people thinking “That’s directed to me, that this company really understands me.” To give you an example of this, there’s a company that does this so well, I think probably one of the best companies that do it is Harley Davidson. Now Harley Davidson, they’re so successful because they know their client. If you could write out what their client avatar is for Harley, it’s going to be a middle-aged man, they’re independent, they’re maybe a little bit rebellious, they want some freedom, they want some adventure, they want to belong in a community of like-minded individuals. Now that is a Harley Davidson client. But you’ll notice from that, that they’re excluding a mass of people. We straight away said middle-aged men, so that excludes women and that excludes old men and young men <laugh>. They’re really specific on who they actually want and there’s nothing wrong with doing that. You can’t be all things to all people. We see this in marketing all the time, you see it on vans sometimes “no job too big or small” . That is such wrong marketing, it’s the wrong message that’s going out there, but Harley Davidson have got it right. They’ve really focused in on their niche and that means they will attract a mass of that avatar. We want you to do the same for your company. You’ve got to get very clear about who it is you serve or who is it that you want to serve and what is their typical personality like. So there’s some specific prompts that you could try putting into ChatGPT and maybe you want to do this right now as I’m as I’m saying this.
(10:48):
One of the prompts might be, “I’m a construction company that specialises in loft conversions for homeowners in London, who is an ideal client for me?” So that could be your initial prompt. Now you can change that to suit you, or you might be a plumbing company and you might be based in Birmingham or Scotland or wherever it is you are. Now that prompt could be honed for you and that’s going to come up with (if you just type that in now) it’s going to come up with who your ideal client could potentially be. You could then ask it to go a little bit further than that. You could then ask ChatGPT to say, “based on this client, build me out a client avatar. What does this typical client look like? What’s their interests? How much money do they earn?” And it will give you a big list of who this potential client avatar is. Now it what’s really good to do is think about your ideal client. Who have you served in the past that you thought, “Oh that was such a good client, that was probably the best client I ever had.” Who was that person? What was their name? What did they do for a job? How much did they earn, do you think? What was their interests? That’s who you want. Put that client avatar into ChatGPT or let it formulate that client avatar and base your prompts around that sort of person. You really want to understand who is this person that you are talking to get really specific and name it if you need to. So that’s the first thing. Use it to build out your client avatar. You are only going to appreciate this when you actually get in and do it. So get in and do it and see what happens, what it pings back for you. You’ll be absolutely blown away by how close it gets to your ideal client. If it’s not quite correct, just refine it slightly. That’s the first thing.
(12:31):
Now once you’ve got your client avatar, we then want to understand, what are my clients’ fears, what are my client’s frustrations, what are their wants? What are their desires? We really want to connect with this client. We need to understand all of that in order to connect with them on a marketing level, because if we can connect with them and our client feels like we understand them, then they’re going to take action. They’re going to really relate to us and and feel a connection with us. Think about your client’s fears and frustrations. Now you might know some of them, but if you haven’t got an idea what they are, you can then ask ChatGPT because it’s now built out your client avatar. You could say to it in a prompt, “using this ideal client, give me five big worries or frustrations that they might have about work being carried out for them”, and what ChatGPT is going to do, is give you a massive list of five worries or frustrations that this client has. It might say, “they’re worried about the quality of the work not being right or they’re worried about the build not being finished on time, they’re worried about you running off of their deposit” etc. ChatGPT is going to come out with five potential frustrations of this client avatar that you’ve generated. Now once you’ve got that list, copy that, save that into a document. You then want to ask ChatGPT, what are the solutions that this client is looking for that’s going to resolve these five worries? It’ll give you a big list of what the solution is. So that might be (for example if they’re worried about jobs finishing on time) the solution might be they want a company that’s going to commit to time, it’s going to give them project GANT Charts, it’s going to do this and do that and it’ll give you a solution for these five worries. That’s really useful.
(14:21):
Now what we’ve generated in literally just a few minutes on it is, you are going to have your client avatar, you are going to be able to understand what their worry and their frustration is, and now you are going to be able to use that information to start marketing into this client.
(14:38):
Then you could ask, “Give me a Facebook post that will deal with worry number one and the solution that we provide and in this Facebook post, give me a call to action at the end, add some emojis to it also” You’ll put that in and ChatGPT is going to give you an awesome Facebook post. Then you can say to it, “can you suggest an image that I should use in this Facebook post that matches the description?” and it’ll give you an image that you should use too. This is pretty incredible. You’re only just scratching the surface of this. I know when I say this on a podcast, it probably doesn’t come out <laugh> as well as it does when I’m actually live demonstrating this on a screen, because you’ll be blown away at how quickly it produces. This content is absolutely crazy.
(15:26):
So you’ve got your your client’s fears, you’ve got their avatar, you’ve got some potential Facebook posts that you could use and you can change that. You can ask for a Twitter post and it’ll give you hashtags and all sorts. But then you want to go a little bit deeper and think about your USP. It’s really important that when you understand your client and you’ve got your avatar and nice and tight, you need a USP because you want to stand out to that client. When clients are online and they’re researching, we want them to get a feeling that “Yes, this is the company for me, this is what I’m looking for.” It helps you be more targeted with your messaging. We really want to think about your USP and what I would put into ChatGPT is “Using the five big worries and solutions that you’ve just come up with, give me a three point USP for my company” and it’ll give you a three point USP or a five point USP, however many you want. If it’s not detailed enough, you can then give it another prompt and say, “Go deeper on point 1 and tell me how I can demonstrate this.” Now it’ll go deeper for you and it’ll say things like (let’s just use the example of a client worried about time) One of your USP’s could be that you strive to finish on time and and do your utmost to make sure all projects finish on time for a client. It’ll go deeper and show you how you can demonstrate that for a client. How do you demonstrate that you’re going to finish on time? That’s really useful.
(17:01):
Now you’ve got a few things. You’ve understood your client, you know their needs, their frustrations, you know their ideal solutions and now you’ve got a clear USP that answers all those fears and frustrations and solutions. So now your client’s reading this online in a Facebook post thinking “This is exactly who I’m looking for, this is my ideal company.” That’s really, really useful and you’ve potentially done this in minutes, literally 10 minutes you could have done this. It’s crazy how powerful it is.
(17:33):
Let’s go a bit further. We’ve done that (the above steps). Now, how do we use it for generating blog content? Well, what I would then do is, I would put a prompt into ChatGPT and say, “Write me a 500 word blog based on client frustration number one, and show how I solve that frustration and give me a call to action at the end.” It’s going to generate a massive blog for you that you can then read and check and it’ll be pretty impressive. You’ve now got a blog generated in minutes, seconds even, and you can go further than that. Most people write blogs to enhance their keyword and SEO online. So you could say, “Give me some ideal keywords that I should be included to improve my SEO”, or you might want to put into it, “My keywords are this.” Let’s use our previous example. Your keywords are “loft conversions in London” and “families” or wherever it is that your keywords are. It’ll put all those keywords into the blog for you and regenerate it completely for you. You can even go further and say, “Give me some research on keywords I should be using for my company.” It will come up with a list of keywords for you if you don’t even know what they are! That’s crazy too. It is doing all that that you would pay a lot of money for to SEO companies, and this is gonna do it for you. It’s awesome.
(19:07):
One of the problems we said earlier is that sometimes it doesn’t speak in your voice and that could be frustrating because it sounds a little bit bland and a little bit vanilla. One thing I did (this might be a little bit more difficult for you) but obviously I’ve written a book, so I copied and pasted my entire contents page and my entire introduction page in my book, and I pasted it into ChatGPT. I said, “I want you to analyse this writing style and give me a complete and detailed summary of what this writing style is.” It gave me a summary of my specific writing style. It said “your persuasive, you’re honest, you use illustrations and examples etc and stories.” I would then save that paragraph of how it analysed m|y writing style. Then I would paste that into ChatGPT and say, “Now rewrite this blog using this writing style and it rewrite it in my voice.” I can tell you I was blown away with how much it sounded like the way I write. It really was incredible. Now, you might not have a book or an introduction that you can put into that, but you may have written a blog before. That could be good. If you’ve got anything you’ve written before, you can put that in. Or Facebook post or if you’ve got any sort of long form content that you’ve ever written, you can put that in. Or, if you don’t want to do that and you just want it to sound like someone else that you admire, put in your favourite author. Say, “I want this to sound like Gary V or Tony Robbins. I want this to sound like Oprah.” You just watch how it changes it! It’ll actually change it and you’ll end up talking like them in your blog content.
(20:50):
It really is powerful. Now, one of the concerns a lot of people have is it’s scouring the internet. What if it’s just producing plagiarism content? It’s just copying and pasting content from someone else’s website. You clearly don’t want that, especially if you’re writing blogs. You don’t want to be just plagiarising because Google’s going to pick up on that and you’ll end up going down in the rankings if it thinks you’re just copying other people’s content. You could then take your blog that AI’s generated and I would put it into a plagiarism detector. Just type that in online. I think there’s one called plagiarismdetector.net. It’s free and just past your blog into there and it’ll tell you if it’s unique or if it has been plagiarised. Now, every time I’ve done it, I’ve always found it’s been pretty unique actually, especially because I’m changing to my own voice and I’m iterating all the time and changing certain paragraphs that I don’t like. But you need to do that too, just to make sure that it is completely unique to you and you’ve not just copied it off someone else’s website.
(21:56):
We’ve covered a few things there. I know that doing this over a podcast isn’t as powerful as as doing it online. If you’ve been on any of my AI workshops, you would’ve really seen the power of it. All I want this podcast to do for you is if you’re just listening to this and you’re driving and you can’t actually get on a computer and do it, I want you to go home at some point and have a play around with it, you will be mind blown. If you listen back to this and you can type some of those prompts in, you’ll just start to see the power of it. Once you go down that rabbit hole, you are off and you’ll never turn back. It’s crazy how useful it is. We really are just scratching the surface of what this can do for your construction company. We go in really deep on this in my mastermind, we’re using it for all sorts of things on the backend office tasks. But finding your ideal client and marketing and getting your ideal jobs is a passion of mine. I think I wanted to really share that with you today so hopefully it can help you with your marketing in some way. I’d love to hear about how that works for you. Feel free to drop me an email or drop a comment in on how AI is transforming your business. I hope that’s useful.
Greg Wilkes (23:21):
If you’d like to work with me to fast track your construction business growth, then reach out on www.developcoaching.co.uk.
