AI-powered marketing workflows for real results - Blog

Maryrose Lyons and Claire du Preez are on a mission to show how AI delivers real marketing returns.

As founder of the AI Institute, Maryrose has over two decades of experience in digital marketing. The institute helps businesses save time and augment their workflows using AI tools. Claire, a strategic marketing professional with 15+ years in digital and product marketing, specializes in helping tech startups and SMEs grow through smart, AI-powered strategies.

They took the Ben’s Bites community through a 1-hour workshop where they shared how marketers can leverage AI and no-code tools to automate workflows. It was an eye-opening session that anyone looking to elevate their marketing game will find valuable.

Here’s a sneak peek into what they showed us.

How to turn a 25-hour blog project into a 6-hour task

Maryrose kicked things off by illustrating a common scenario: creating five blog posts for a client, which traditionally could take around 25 hours. From research to writing, editing, uploading, and promoting on social media, the workload quickly adds up. But with the help of AI automation, she can slash that to just six hours.

She broke down how you could automate each step, from content ideation to drafting captions for social posts. Tools like Make automate the steps, connecting AI platforms such as Claude for content generation and Perplexity for research.

“I’m really interested in figuring out how we can see real returns from AI. The automation workflow we built for blog posts doesn’t just save time—it lets us focus on more creative tasks while still producing high-quality content. It’s about making the process efficient without sacrificing results.”

By the end of the session, the transformation from a manual process to an automated workflow became clear. I’d recommend stealing this workflow if you’re a marketer juggling multiple clients or content-heavy projects.

Using AI to automate personalized outreach emails

Next, Claire walked us through an effective email automation workflow she uses. Personalized email outreach is key for driving engagement, but doing it at scale is a challenge. Claire showed how she built automation using Make to drastically reduce the time her team spent crafting hyper-personalized emails.

The automation uses a variety of tools, some of them AI-powered, to research leads using the web.
It then uses AI to write a tailored email to the lead that feels personal and targeted.
The final draft is sent directly to Claire’s inbox for review, ready to be polished and sent.

The impact? Claire shared how this approach has led to a 20% increase in open rates and a staggering 40% boost in engagement. “We’re showing how AI can automate the repetitive parts of marketing so you can focus on the human touch—the strategy and creativity.”

This workflow wasn’t overly complicated or advanced—non-technical marketers could get the same flow set up pretty easily. But it truly highlights the value that can be gained when AI and automation work together. I highly recommend trying it!

Why APIs matter for AI marketing automation

Things took a more complex turn as Claire dove into a more technical topic: APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces). While this may sound intimidating to non-tech marketers, Claire assured us that APIs are the backbone of seamless automation. She shared a real-world example of how she needed to integrate an AI note-taker with Slack but couldn’t find the right platform—until she discovered Make which offered the necessary API integration. This capability allowed her to automatically format meeting notes and deliver them straight into Slack channels without manual intervention.

She emphasized how important it is to check the APIs available with any tool you’re using for AI automation. APIs allow platforms like Canva, Slack, Fireflies, and Perplexity to “talk” to each other and work together in a single, cohesive workflow. For marketers, this means the difference between a fully automated system and one where you still have to manually move data between apps.

Repurposing content from YouTube to blog posts using AI

Content repurposing is a key strategy for many marketers. Maryrose is no different—and she’s harnessing AI and automation to massively speed up and simplify the process.

In her demo, she took a YouTube video from her podcast and used an API to extract the transcript. From there, Claude stepped in to summarize the key points, while Make handled the formatting and delivery of the blog post directly onto her website.

This automation streamlines a process that would normally take hours of manual transcription, editing, and uploading. As Maryrose explained, “What used to take me several steps is now done in one automated flow—from video to blog in a fraction of the time.” This process also ensures SEO-optimized content, which is essential for driving traffic back to the original video.

For marketers struggling to keep up with content demands, this workflow is a perfect example of how AI can turn a heavy lift into a simple, automated task.

“As a marketer, I always have loads of ideas for how I can do things better. But I never really get time to implement them. Now, with AI and automation, I literally just schedule an hour in the morning to sit down and say, okay, I'm going to make this thing. And then it's running. Week by week by week, you're just becoming better than you've ever been. And I think that's the true purpose of bringing AI into your workflow, isn't it?”

Claire and Maryrose’s practical demos highlighted the true potential of AI for marketers. They didn’t just discuss theoretical concepts (as a lot of AI hype out there does). They showed how, when done right, AI can drive real, measurable results in marketing. They’re seeing first-hand increased efficiency, more creative freedom, and better overall marketing outcomes thanks to these automations.

Want to learn more?

Catch the full recording of Maryrose and Claire’s session now to see their AI workflows in action. The recording is available to Pro Ben’s Bites members along with the full session transcript, their presenter slides and the JSON files for Make that they shared with us.

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