Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How to Audit Your Marketing Strategy with AI (2026-01-11)

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How to Audit Your Marketing Strategy with AI (2026-01-11) :: View in Browser

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What’s On My Mind: How to Audit Your Marketing Strategy with AI

What’s on my mind this week? How to audit your marketing strategy with AI. This week, let’s get set up for the new year. Now that we’ve done our trashy romance novel - which by the way is the second most-read book of mine on Kindle Unlimited (yeah, why did I become a marketing expert? Just use AI to write trashy romance novels) - anyway, let’s get set up for the new year with a marketing strategy review using AI agents.

You can do this with any of the agentic coding tools available on the market: Qwen Code, Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline, Kilo Code, Antigravity - doesn’t matter. Any of them that support agents internally, meaning they can run their own agents, will work fine. I’m going to be using Claude Code because it’s what I’ve got. But use whatever is in your ecosystem.

Our goal is to sanity check our marketing and make sure we’re doing the right things to achieve our goals.

Also, this week’s newsletter is going to be unusual because I’m doing a live build of it. Normally, when I make this newsletter, I write out the whole thing, record it, and then basically read it aloud. But because I don’t know the results of any of this agent work yet, I’m building the newsletter as we go along. That should be a little bit of fun.

Part 0: Mise en Place

Before we can audit our marketing strategy, we need to have one. A good strategy has five parts - Katie Robbert’s Trust Insights 5P Framework:

• Purpose: Why are we doing the thing?

• People: Who’s doing the thing and who’s being impacted by it?

• Process: How are we doing the thing?

• Platform: What are we doing the thing with?

• Performance: Did we do the thing?

Before you do anything else, you need to have the answers to these questions as a way of documenting your current strategy.

Here’s another angle - and this is why this newsletter is live. If you know what you’re doing right now isn’t working as well as you’d want, you should document what you’re doing with the 5Ps, document the outcomes you’re getting, and then document what outcomes you actually want.

This is more straightforward than it sounds. A lot of people overcomplicate this. Get out your beverage of choice (like a nice espresso or sparkling water), grab the voice memos app of your choice, and start foaming at the mouth. Answer those questions. Answer all of them. The five Ps, rant, speculate, dream, complain. Get everything out of your head where it’s not doing any good and into some kind of tangible form. Once you’ve done that, hand it to literally any AI transcription tool to transcribe into clean text.

For this week’s newsletter, I’m starting with something that has been bothering me for years: how do I more directly monetize this newsletter? I appreciate you. I do. But I’d like this newsletter to contribute more to the bottom line directly. Right now, it does help sell books and courses and occasionally helps create sales opportunities for Trust Insights. And that’s great - I love that you’ve helped support it. But with almost 300,000 subscribers, I feel like it could be working harder. If this newsletter were a US city, it would be the 73rd largest city in America, larger than Plano, Texas and North Las Vegas.

So this is a case where my current strategy isn’t working. I’ll document what I do, but I’m going to point out this is not what I want to be doing in 2026.

There’s a good chance you’re going to need lots of data along the way: screenshots and exports from your CRM, marketing automation software, web analytics, social media management software. Make sure you have all that on hand. You’re going to need those pieces as we get underway.

Part 1: Setting Up the Environment

What I’ve done already is I’ve taken my voice recorder - an old Sony solid-state recorder from about 10 years ago. I like this specifically because there are no interactions, no distractions, no notifications. Once I hit record, I can hit the lock button and just keep talking. It spits out an MP3 and I can transcribe it.

There are a gazillion AI-enabled automatic transcription systems. If that works for you, great. This is personally not what I like because I just want a dumb recorder to capture the audio, and I’ll process it myself later.

So I’ve gone ahead and done that. This is 5,000 words from a 30-minute drive - a 5,000-word, mostly complaint about my newsletter, about all the things it could be doing and all the things it’s not doing.

We now need to get this environment set up to work with AI agents. If this is unfamiliar, go back to two issues ago when I did the walkthrough of how to get started with command line and AI.

I’m going to make a series of directories - the typical directories I use are:

• data

• docs

• input

• output

• source

• tests

• temp