MarketingMentors is made up of a team of experienced marketeers that will guide you and help you strategise and excute the best marketing plan for your company. We run programmes that train you in all the aspects of marketing.

Claude just quietly gave small businesses something huge.

I’ve put together a guide on Claude Skills – and if you run a business, this is worth a look.

What’s the big opportunity?
You can now teach your AI how your business actually works and save it as a reusable “skill.” That means instead of re-explaining your process every time, Claude can pull in the right instructions, files, and templates and run the task the way you do it.

In practice, that means you can build your own “team” of skilled experts inside Claude:
 • a proposals skill
 • a social content skill
 • a follow-up / CS skill
 • a meeting-notes-to-actions skill
 • an onboarding skill

…all using your tone, your format, your way of working.

Why this matters: most AI so far has been “ask me anything.” This is different. This is “do it the way our business does it.” That’s why I think it’s one of the most important updates lately for founders, agencies, and small teams.

My guide walks through:
 1. what Claude Skills are (in normal language),
 2. how to scope them so Claude actually uses the right one,
 3. the kinds of business tasks that make sense to turn into skills.

If you’re already using ChatGPT Projects or custom GPTs, this will click for you – it’s the same direction: AI that remembers, reuses, and runs your processes, not just chats.

Have a read and tell me which skill you’d build first – content, onboarding, or client reports?


Follow Roisin Bennett for more Helpful AI + Marketing Content!

Roisin Bennett

CEO, MarketingMentors | AI Strategist & Trainer | Helping SME’s simplify, implement and scale AI for business growth.

Claude.AI

I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model for a few days now, and it’s the first time I’ve looked at an AI tool and thought:

“OK, this can actually sit in the middle of a real marketing engine.”
Not as a gimmick. As infrastructure.

The interesting part isn’t just the model. It’s how Gemini + the wider Google 

AI stack fit together for day-to-day marketing work:

✅ Research – Deep research across web + your own docs, turned into a single “brain” for a product or launch.

✅ Strategy – Go-to-market plans, messaging, channels, budgets and KPIs drafted in hours, not weeks.

✅ Content & Creative – One strategy becomes blogs, landing pages, emails, social posts, ad copy, plus matching visuals.

✅ Security – Built on Google’s security stack, with admin controls and sensible guardrails (important if you work with client or customer data).

✅ Data & Dashboards – Your Sheets and exports become interactive dashboards with plain-English explanations.

✅ Search & Systems – Content structured around real questions so it actually has a chance in an AI-first search world.

The big shift for me:
🟠 Models will keep changing and getting obsolete.
🟠 Workflows and methodology will not.

So instead of asking “What can Gemini do?”, I’m asking:
🟠 How do we use it as an AI marketing strategist to build grounded GTM plans?
🟠 How do we use it as an AI data analyst to answer “Are we on track?” in a way a founder can act on?
🟠 How do we use it as an AI creative director + copywriter to keep output high but on-brand?
🟠 How do we use it as an AI builder to turn these into repeatable systems the team can run without me?

Attached is a 1-page “Google Gemini Guide to Transform Your Marketing” that shows, at a glance, how these pieces fit together and where it can plug into a real business, not just a demo environment.

...........................

Follow @Roisin for more helpful AI + Marketing Content!

Build Your Custom AI Teammate (No Code, Huge Impact)

Most people still don’t realise just how far you can go with ChatGPT now.
You’re no longer limited to “asking it questions” you can actually build your own AI teammate that works the way you work, speaks in your brand voice, and slots into your day-to-day workflow.

And the best part?
Absolutely no technical skills or code needed.

The real secret is the preparation you do in advance.
Your brand assets, tone of voice, ICP, templates, FAQs, workflows… this is the fuel that makes your teammate accurate, consistent, and genuinely useful.

Once you’ve got that in place, you can create a powerful assistant in minutes and then refine it as you go.

A few things small business owners often don’t know:

⭐ You can test, tweak, and improve your teammate anytime

Your first version will never be the final one and that’s a good thing.
Ask it to improve itself. Add new examples. Tighten instructions.
It learns your way of doing things, not someone else’s.

⭐ You can use your custom GPT inside ChatGPT Projects

This is where things get really exciting.
Projects let you keep everything for a client or campaign in one workspace, notes, files, briefs, chats, research and then you can call in your custom teammate to actually do the work.

You can even build end-to-end workflows inside ChatGPT:

Start a Project with all your client notes

Run Deep Research to get market or competitor insights

Use your custom teammate to write copy in your brand tone

Then use the Canva app in ChatGPT to design the output

All without switching tools.

⭐ Saves you hours every week

Once you’ve built a teammate and a simple workflow, the time saving is huge.
Proposal writing, content creation, research, reporting, onboarding packs all of it becomes faster, cleaner, and consistent.

⭐ Best advice

Start simple.
Build one teammate with one clear job.
Test it. Use it for a week. Improve it.
Then start connecting it to Projects and building your workflows.

Your future self (and your team) will thank you.

Happy building - this really is the next big shift for small business owners.

NotebookLM Just Got Its Biggest, 
Most Transformative Upgrade Yet! 🤯

Google's NotebookLM has moved from a simple note summariser to a powerhouse AI research and content studio, now offering a Studio UI and advanced discovery tools. These upgrades are a productivity game-changer for small businesses tackling strategy, research, teaching, and content creation.

👉 Advanced Research & Data Analysis

🔶 Deep Research Mode
Explore topics beyond simple answers, NotebookLM now autonomously analyses your sources, draws on public web data, and produces structured reports with citations, tables, and summaries. Perfect for untangling complex topics with dozens of sources.

🔶 Source Discovery & Integration
Find new sources via web search within NotebookLM and save hours. Seamlessly search and import from Google Drive—including Sheets, Word docs, PDFs, slides, and even handwritten notes or images.

🔶 Data Tables Artifacts
Automatically generate structured data tables so you can compare business metrics, valuations, or sales figures across sources—ideal for turning data into actionable insights.

👉 Visual Content Creation Studio

🔶 Mind Maps
Instantly organise ideas with interactive visual maps. A must-have for brainstorming or strategic planning.

🔶 Slide & Infographic Studio
Convert research into presentations or infographics in seconds. Choose formats optimised for LinkedIn or Instagram, tweak style or colour, and present data in an engaging way.

🔶 Video Overviews
Transform your notes or outlines into narrated slide summaries and explainer videos, pulling data and images straight from your sources.

👉 Hyper-Personalised Learning & Reporting

🔶 Adaptive AI Responses
Set your communication style and preference—brief, detailed, direct, or light-hearted. NotebookLM now adapts to deliver answers that fit your business needs.

🔶 Learning Guide Style & Custom Reports
The new mode prompts clarifying questions and lets you tailor reports for any topic, in 80+ languages, including blogs and client deliverables.

🔶 Flashcards, Quizzes & Audio Enhancements
Create flashcards and quizzes from materials in seconds. New audio overview formats now support multi-version creation for deeper analysis and learning on-the-go.

NotebookLM stays grounded, powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash, citing only your sources and eliminating AI hallucination for trusted, compliant decision-making.

I crafted the infographic below inside NotebookLM itself, proof the visual tools are already top-notch!

Ready to upgrade your workflow? Head to Studio in Google NotebookLM. It’s free to start!

Which feature will you try first - Deep Research or Infographics? 
Let’s chat in the comments! 👇

Many small businesses try AI tools. The real gains come when you turn them into a custom teammate that knows your brand, follows your workflows, and respects your guardrails.

This carousel walks through:
• What a custom assistant is (and why it’s different from another tool)
• Where you can build it: ChatGPT, @Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot
• The foundations that matter: clear goal, brand assets, ICP, voice, FAQs
• How to set simple, strong instructions and limits
• A step-by-step setup you can follow
• What success looks like: on-voice, secure, integrated, easy to update

Start small: pick one process (content, support, sales, or research), feed it the right context, and test with real scenarios. Done well, this saves hours every week and keeps your messaging consistent everywhere.

If you want a practical walkthrough, there is still time to register for our hands on workshop tomorrow. Details in the comments

..........................

Follow Roisin Bennett for more Marketing and AI content!

Custom Teammate

VOICE IS THE NEW FRONTIER IN MARKETING INTELLIGENCE 🎙️

Today’s post is about something I think is a big shift for marketers:

We’ve spent years using social listening tools that track hashtags, captions and comments. 
Useful, yes, but most of the real brand intelligence in video actually lives in what creators say on camera. 

Their wording, tone, emphasis and off-the-cuff reactions are where the real signals sit.

That’s a huge gap in how we’ve been measuring creator and UGC performance and an equally huge opportunity. 

If we can finally see which phrases, stories and delivery styles drive saves, shares and sales, we can brief better, pick better creators and stop guessing why a “winning” video worked.

I’ve been trialling a few voice intelligence tools recently, including Aggero. What I like about Aggero is that it doesn’t just transcribe the audio – it analyses the voice inside the video, frame by frame, across 100+ languages, and links specific spoken moments to how audiences actually behave. It’s the first time I’ve felt like I could see inside the content, not just around it.

If you work with influencers, UGC or video ads, this space is worth paying attention to.

Tomorrow I’ll share a deeper, practical walk-through of Aggero in my Tech Tool Tuesday post – how I’ve been using it, what it got right, and where it changes the way I brief creators.

Voice is the New Frontier in Marketing Intelligence

I’ve been trialling Aggero over the past week, and today’s carousel is a breakdown of what I actually found when I put it into my own workflow.

For these Tech Tool Tuesday reviews, I try to shine a light on tools that genuinely stand out, not because they say they’re different, but because they feel different when you use them. Aggero was one of those.

I work with a lot of creator content, UGC and ad creative, and there’s always been this gap: I could see the results, but not the reason behind them. I knew the performance was inside the video, not around it, but I didn’t have a way to see what was happening at the moment-by-moment level.

That’s what Aggero actually gives you.
It listens inside the videothe, words, the tone, the shifts in delivery and connects those moments with how audiences respond. It’s not transcription, and it’s not sentiment on comments. It’s voice intelligence.

When I analysed my test videos, it showed me patterns I simply wouldn’t have spotted on my own:
– certain phrases that lifted engagement
– tiny vocal cues that signalled authenticity
– openings that consistently dragged performance down
– differences in tone between videos that converted and those that didn’t.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It explains the “this one just worked” moments that marketers usually put down to luck or creator chemistry.

Marketing went video-first, but analytics didn’t. We’ve been measuring video through metrics built for a text era. Tools like Aggero close that gap.

They make video performance:
Predictable.
Optimisable.
Replicable.

Influencer and UGC work stops being guesswork and becomes something you can actually engineer.

If you manage creators, UGC or ad creative, it’s worth testing:
→ Upload your best and worst performers
→ Look at the Drivers/Drainers
→ Apply the insights to your next brief

I had that “oh… that’s what I’ve been missing” moment.
You may have the same.
Try Aggero's 7-day free trial here https://lnkd.in/eEY-bPpv

Aggero.io Tech Tool Tuesday

Happy Friday and a little favour to ask! 

Next week, I’m running a hands-on workshop all about creating your very own AI Marketing Assistant with ChatGPT. It’s designed especially for small businesses, solopreneurs, and creative folks juggling a lot of hats!

We’ll cover how to set up a custom assistant that really “gets” your brand, from nailing your tone to understanding your ideal customers and how to turn ChatGPT into a proper time-saver!. 

I'm trying to do this a little differently so that it is not just another sit-and-listen kind of workshop.  There’s a bit of pre-work involved for participants and they need to come prepared to get the most out of the session and have their own Custom Assistant at the end of the workshop. It will be interactive, tangible and we're there to guide you through the process. 

I’d love if you could share this with anyone in your network who might find it useful. (I know I received most DM's when I posted about How to Build Your Custom GPT recently) 

Thanks so much for your support and I can’t wait to see who joins us. Booking details in the comments 👇

Have a great weekend All 🙌

Is Gemini 3 really a big deal for business, or just another AI upgrade?

A lot of tools get launched with big promises and not a lot of follow-through.

So when Google announced Gemini 3, with people calling it “the best LLM in the world”, I wanted to know one thing:


 Is this actually different – and does it matter for small and mid-sized businesses?

Short answer: yes, it’s different.
And yes, it matters.

Gemini 3 is not “slightly better chat”

Most people will first meet Gemini 3 in the Gemini app or in Google Search and think:

“Oh, the answers sound a bit smarter.”

That’s the least interesting part.

The real shift is this:

✅ It can break problems into steps, plan, and stick to a process.
✅ It works across text, images, video, PDFs and code in one go.
✅ It’s being plugged directly into Search and Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet).

In other words, it’s moving from “clever autocomplete” to an assistant that can actually help run parts of your business.

What can it actually do in a small business?

Here’s what this looks like in day-to-day work.

1. Operations & admin
2. Sales & marketing
3. Customer service
4. Finance & planning

👉 Why this is a real shift, not just a shinier model

The important bit is where Gemini 3 lives:

Inside tools you already use every day: Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Search.
Close to your real work – emails, documents, calls, spreadsheets – not just in a separate chat window.

That means you don’t have to “remember to use AI”.
It’s sitting in the sidebar, inside the search box, and behind the tools, quietly taking work off your plate.

👉 Where to start

If you’re a small business owner, I’d treat Gemini 3 like this:

1) Pick one painful process
2) Lead follow-up, proposals, support emails, or weekly reports.
3) Let it draft, you approve
4) Start with: “You draft, I review and send.”
5) Only automate further once you trust the output.
6) Measure hours saved

If it doesn’t save time or improve quality, change the workflow or turn it off.
Is Gemini 3 “the best LLM in the world”?

Maybe.
What matters more is this:

Used well, it becomes a quiet extra team member, 
helping you communicate faster, stay organised,
and run a calmer, more efficient business.

Gemini 3 the best LLM

What’s actually working with AI right now (and what’s not)

I’ve been speaking to founders, testing workflows, and working inside businesses trying to make AI actually useful.

And here’s what’s clear:

It’s not about which tool you’re using.

It’s about whether your systems are set up to use AI properly.

The companies doing well with AI in 2025 are all doing a version of the following 5 things:

1. Integrated Systems
They’ve joined up their stack – CRM, email, website, calendar, billing, analytics so things flow automatically.
No more broken handoffs or “who owns this?” moments.
→ Tools like Make.com, n8n, Zapier and Data Cloud are enabling this, even for small teams.

2. Proprietary Data
They’re not relying on generic data.
They’re organising their own – meeting notes, emails, docs, chat threads into structured libraries that AI can actually use.
→ This is what makes outputs more useful, relevant, and consistent.

3. Automated Service Workflows
They’re systemising delivery – onboarding, content drafts, client check-ins, follow-ups.
→ AI does the heavy lifting, humans step in for strategy and quality control.

4. Orchestrated Agents
Instead of one bot doing everything badly, they’re building networks of small, specific agents that handle tasks like research, approvals, or reporting.
→ Think of it like building a team of AI interns with clear roles.

5. Frameworks & Templates
They’re not reinventing the wheel.
When something works, they turn it into a reusable system  - a playbook, a prompt library, a custom GPT, or even a Notion template.
→ This is how you scale AI inside a team without needing to train everyone from scratch.

The common thread?

These businesses aren’t starting with tools.

They’re starting with structure and then layering AI in where it makes sense.

Most businesses don’t need more AI tools, they need AI workflows.

I’ve put together a simple carousel that shows how to build an “AI team” using the tools you probably already have: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude,
Perplexity, NotebookLM and Notion to hold it all together.

Here’s the core idea 👇
If you set up a few repeatable workflows, you can go from research → visuals → assets → team handover without starting from scratch every time.

What’s inside the carousel:
 • Research & analysis – use Perplexity + NotebookLM to get reliable, up-to-date insights.
 • Strategic visuals – send that research to Gemini or Claude to turn it into something people can actually see.
 • Asset creation – build decks, social posts, landing pages straight from the research.
 • Enablement & reuse – document it in ChatGPT, store it in Notion, so anyone on your team can run it.

The message for business owners:
⚠️ Don’t chase every new AI tool.
✅ Build 4–5 solid workflows your team can use every week.

That’s how you get real time back, keep your content current, and make AI part of how you work, not a side project.

Profitable AI Workflows

It’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed by AI right now. 

Every week, there's a new tool promising to solve all your marketing or operations problems, and for SMEs, that usually leads to more fragmentation and stress.

The fundamental mistake most businesses make is constantly asking the wrong question: "What is the best tool for X?". This focus on individual gadgets is why so many teams end up stuck in "Tool Chaos". 

We’re drowning in channels, fighting rising ad costs, and struggling because tools are everywhere but data is scattered and siloed. This leads directly to wasted time and burnout.

Last week, I presented our AI Implementation Strategy to a business group, using the deck "Beyond the Hype: Building Your AI Co-pilot". The core lesson is simple and critical: Random tools create random results, but a system creates growth.

The goal is to move from tool chaos to an AI Co-pilot. This means adopting a systemic approach. AI works best when it runs inside a clear process, not on top of chaos. This approach helps you reduce manual work, connect the dots between your tools, and make faster, better decisions.

We walked through how to define your processes and implement key components, differentiating between:

1. Custom Assistants: Smart chatbots trained on your content (PDFs, SOPs) that help you answer questions and draft content.
2. AI Agents: Workflows that go beyond answering to take action, like writing a reply, sending it, logging it in your CRM, and updating a pipeline.

The journey from random acts of AI to a cohesive system is the single most important investment you can make in your business’s future. We need to map the customer journey and decide precisely where AI drafts, where AI automates, and where human review is necessary.

P.S. I created this slide deck, along with the infographic and video overview (linked in the comments), in the new update in Google's NotebookLM. So impressed with the quality and speed of generation for structuring complex material!!

taplio

MarketingMentors 's Linkedin Analytics

marketingmentors

Performance Scoremarketingmentors's LinkedIn Performance

marketingmentors's Best Posts (last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

.css-6ytdur{background-image:linear-gradient(284deg, rgba(39, 43, 72, 1) 0%, rgba(33, 47, 183, 1) 100%);color:transparent;-webkit-background-clip:text;background-clip:text;}MarketingMentors 's Linkedin Analytics

marketingmentors

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}marketingmentors's LinkedIn Performance

marketingmentors's Best Posts .css-1emoo84{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:400;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);}(last 30 days)

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

MarketingMentors 's Linkedin Analytics

Performance Scoremarketingmentors's LinkedIn Performance

marketingmentors's Best Posts (last 30 days)