Getting into marketing now AI is in the team.
Most advice tells you to get comfortable using AI. That's right, but it's half of it. The skill employers are short of is knowing when the AI is wrong, and saying so politely. If you've ever checked letters, records or rotas for mistakes, you've been practising it already.
AI writes a lot of first drafts. People decide which ones are right, fix the rest, and put their name to what goes out. Teams need people who can do both: use the tools quickly, and spot the confident mistake.
Words you'll hear in your first month.
- Funnel
- The path from someone first hearing about a business to buying from it. Lots of people at the top, fewer at the bottom.
- Lead, and qualified lead
- A lead is someone who has shown interest, such as filling in a form. A qualified lead is one who looks likely to buy.
- CRM
- The system that holds customer and enquiry records, so the business remembers who said what.
- Brief
- The instructions for a piece of work: who it's for, what it should do, and by when. A good brief is the best way to get good work from people and from AI.
- Brand guidelines
- The rules for how a business looks and sounds: colours, words to use, words never to use.
- The judgement layer
- Our term for the checking, correcting and approving that happens after AI has done the first draft. Most of the time, nobody outside the team sees it.
What to say about AI.
Say how you use it, then say how you check it. "I use AI for first drafts and research. I always check facts, names and figures before anything goes out, because it sounds just as confident when it's wrong." That second sentence is the one that gets remembered.
You may have more of it than you think.
Writing clear emails is copywriting. Dealing calmly with upset people is customer experience. Spotting the error in a letter before it goes out is quality control, which is exactly what AI-assisted teams are short of.
How marketing teams really work.
The Charlie Jacks Substack is about what happens inside marketing teams, the patterns nobody writes down. Free, most weeks.