Building custom assistants for marketing workflows

1. Building custom assistants for marketing workflows

Welcome back! You now know about why and how custom assistants are useful. Now, it's time to build your own custom marketing assistant from scratch.

2. The three pillars of custom assistants

Before we dive into building, let's understand the key components of any custom assistant. Whether in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot, every custom assistant is built on three foundational pillars. First, instructions define what your assistant does, its objective, which guidelines to refer to, limitations, and any other context it should be aware of. Second, the knowledge base gives your assistant access to relevant data it needs to perform its tasks. These could be the guidelines we want it to stick to, best practices to abide by, or a reference document it should always check. Third, capabilities are the tools your assistant can use, like code interpretation, web search, or image generation.

3. Creating a social media assistant

Let's build a custom assistant for a marketing use-case. Imagine you're a social media marketer. Instead of each time instructing your favorite AI system to output copy and images while giving context on your brand's voice,

4. Creating a social media assistant

we'll build an assistant with that knowledge already built in. Let's do it in Copilot.

5. Creating a social media assistant

In Microsoft Copilot, we navigate to the Agents section in the left menu. We click on Create Agent to start building. Once we're in the creation interface, we go to the Configure tab. We're going to build an agent that creates on-brand, high-quality social media copy and imagery from just one idea.

6. Getting started

Before we get started, we name and provide a brief description of our assistant. This helps document the purpose of our assistant, and makes it easy for colleagues to use if we're using it in a team setting. Now we're ready to build our assistant.

7. Setting up instructions

The first pillar is Instructions. This is where we define our assistant's purpose and boundaries. Think of this as a prompt that defines the assistant's general behavior.

8. Setting up instructions: Goals

For our social media agent, we specify goals, context, and limitations: For goals, we define the assistant's objective, its expected input, and its expected output, and that if it were requested, to generate images.

9. Setting up instructions: Context and limitations

Then, we add context. In this case, it is to refer to the uploaded brand guidelines for language, tone, style, and the assets relevant for image generation. For limitations, we ask to never generate images or copy without referring to our guidelines, and to only answer questions related to social media content creation.

10. Final instructions

We end up with the following instructions.

11. Best practices providing instructions

Being detailed and exhaustive is essential when defining instructions for custom assistants. What's important is to be structured. Some tips to be mindful of when creating detailed instructions: Organize the different aspects of the instructions into sections, as we did with our goals, context, and limitations. You can use headings for example, or bullet points where it matters. Note that while the goals, context, limitations framework is very useful for clearly communicating instructions, you can also experiment. Consider adding an examples section, and whatever you think would be useful for your assistant. Keep in mind your knowledge base and ensure you provide context to your custom assistant.

12. Adding a knowledge base

Now we complete our assistant with Knowledge base and Capabilities. Here, we upload our brand guidelines in the knowledge base section of our custom assistant.

13. Knowledge base best practices

The brand guidelines contains all the necessary information to complete tasks consistently. This includes our visual identity, tone, and values, and the expected output per channel. We also add our hex codes, fonts, for image generation.

14. Adding capabilities

For capabilities, we enable image generation, this allows our agent to create visual social media posts, not just text. With these three components configured, your custom marketing agent is ready to transform a single idea into a complete, on-brand social media post in seconds.

15. Let's practice!

Now it's your turn to build a custom agent for your marketing workflows! Remember: define clear instructions, provide relevant knowledge, and enable the right capabilities.

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