How to build your own AI marketing assistant (Exit Five Newsletter)

Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter — read by 42,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,700 other members at exitfive.com.

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TOGETHER WITH TLDR

💰 They Drove $1M in Pipeline Through Newsletter Ads

Have you thought about running newsletter ads to drive demand for your business?

Check this out.

Delve, a compliance automation platform, needed to reach founders at the right moment when they were actually paying attention.

So instead of pouring money into noisy ad channels, they went straight to where founders choose to spend time: TLDR’s high-signal newsletters.

The result?

• The first TLDR-driven deal returned 5× the cost of the placement
• In total, the ads generated $1M in pipeline
• Overall, they saw a 52× return on investment

52× ROI isn’t something you stumble into.

It came from smart bets, tight execution, and treating newsletter ads like a real pipeline channel.

This case study shows exactly how they did it and what you can take away if newsletter ads are on your 2025 radar (hint: they should be).

🧠 Everything You Need to Know About Custom GPTs in B2B Marketing

Jake Heaps is the AI Marketing Operations Manager at Domo, a publicly traded tech company in the data experience space. He’s become a power user of Custom GPTs in his job, and in this edition of the Exit Five newsletter, we’re sharing Jake’s advice on why B2B marketers should build Custom GPTs, what even is a Custom GPT, and how you might use one.

First: What Even Is a Custom GPT?

It’s OK if you don’t know this. There’s so much buzz about AI and this is one of those things we keep hearing about over and over. So what exactly is a Custom GPT? Think of it as your personal AI assistant. It knows your brand, your voice, and your specific needs. Instead of starting every ChatGPT conversation from scratch, you're working with an agent that's pre-loaded with your context.

Why You Might Want to Build a Custom GPT

Every time you open ChatGPT, you're starting from zero. You type "Write me a marketing email," then have to explain what your company does, who your ICP is, and the tone you want to use, then give a ton of feedback until it looks like something you’d actually want to send.

But what if ChatGPT already knew your brand voice? What if it understood your audience, your tone, and your style before you even asked for help? That's exactly what Custom GPTs do. You can use them for:

• Writing copy for Google Ads that actually match your brand personality
• Email campaigns that sound like they came from your team, not a template
• Social media posts that feel authentic to your voice
• Any content where consistency and brand alignment matter (and SO much more)

The real magic happens when you stop explaining context every single time and start getting results that actually sound like you from the first draft.

Real Example: Building Your Custom Brand Voice GPT

Now that we’ve told you 1) what it is and 2) why you might use it. Now we’re going to give you a real example. This is exactly how Jake created a Domo Brand Voice GPT to help everyone across the company (not just marketers) stay on brand with their writing:

1. Start with research: Tell it to pull from your website copy to understand your tone
2. Define the purpose: Be specific about what channels you'll use it for (emails, ads, social)
3. Add examples: Upload real examples of your best copy (this is crucial)
4. Set conversation starters: Create templates like "Write me an email" or "What's our brand voice?"

Pro tip: Always keep a backup copy of your instructions. Jake learned this the hard way when the system overwrote his work.

The 4 Things You’ll Need To Build Yours

1. Model: Your foundation (ChatGPT (Jake’s go-to), Claude, etc.)

2. Instructions: Your "operating system" (what it does every time)

3. Knowledge Base: The files and data you feed it (up to 20 files)

4. Prompts: What you want it to do right now

The Knowledge Base Game-Changer

This step is make or break. You can upload up to 20 files to train your Custom GPT. Jake recommends:

• Brand guidelines document
• Collection of your best emails
• Examples of winning ads
• Any copy that represents your voice perfectly

The more information you can give, the better.

Privacy Matters

If you're uploading customer data or sensitive company info, make sure you're on a team plan ($30/month). Free versions may train on your data, but team plans explicitly don't.

Bottom Line: Custom GPTs are about giving you a consistent starting point. Whether you're a demand gen specialist who lives in ads or a marketing generalist juggling everything, having an AI that gets your voice from day one is a game-changer.

Jake's advice? Start with one focused use case (like brand voice for emails), get it working well, then expand from there.

Did this content resonate with you? Are Custom GPTs something you’re wondering about? Reply back and let us know. And if you’re already deep into using Custom GPTs, what’s the best use case you have for B2B marketing?

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

[TODAY] How To Turn Your Company Story Into Actionable Marketing Ideas That You Can Use Right Now

You do the big messaging exercise. Everyone’s aligned, the narrative is set… and then it just sits in a Google Doc.

So what’s next?

Today from 1-2 PM ET, Dave and Pranav Piyush (Founder & CEO, Paramark) will share a repeatable process for turning strategy into campaigns, ads, and content that actually get attention. You’ll see how frameworks like category entry points, jobs-to-be-done, and behavioral psychology can spark fresh, testable ideas every month.

We’ll cover:

• How to turn your story into action
• Why creative is the #1 bottleneck in marketing experiments
• Three frameworks to generate campaign hooks
• How to systemize idea generation so you’re never starting from scratch
• Real examples from Paramark campaigns, built in real time

If you’re still wondering what to do with that Google Doc, join us live and bring your questions.

Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send the recording after.

Save Your Spot

🏢 Open Roles

Who's hiring right now?

Datalily is hiring a Content Marketing Writer to craft research-driven stories, manage content projects, and set quality standards across reports, case studies, blogs, and campaigns. The ideal candidate is a sharp storyteller, highly organized, and knows how to turn B2B insights into content that performs.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Enumerate is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager
• Red Stag Fulfillment is hiring a Director of Growth Operations
• Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations is hiring a Director of Marketing
• Offsite is hiring a Field Marketing and Partnerships Lead
• BrightHire is hiring a Social and Community Marketing Manager
• Opus is hiring a Senior Manager, B2B Product Marketing
• Directive is hiring a Demand Generation Manager

See all open roles

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it? Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 42k+ marketers.

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