Digital marketing professional Janet E. Johnson provided a valuable overview on harnessing artificial intelligence to enhance online visibility and expand business growth.
When applied strategically and paired with human creativity and intelligence, AI can serve as a powerful and cost-efficient tool for accelerating success.
This was a central message during Janet E. Johnson’s session, “Leverage AI To Build Your Online Presence,” which took place on Saturday, January 4, as part of Education Day at ASI Orlando 2025.
Johnson, a digital marketing and advertising expert who leads the Janet E. Johnson Agency, frequently leverages artificial intelligence to help propel both her business and her clients’ success. She is a strong advocate for the idea that promotional product professionals can also harness AI tools to boost their sales strategies and efforts.
During her presentation, Johnson gave an overview of popular AI platforms, including text-to-image generators such as Canva AI and Midjourney. However, much of her focus was on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, highlighting how promotional professionals can utilize this widely known tool to enhance their operations.
Johnson explained that ChatGPT can be particularly useful for generating online content such as blogs, sales copy, social media posts, and digital advertisements. It can also assist in creating graphics and videos, conducting research, and brainstorming ideas for various tasks.
Despite its capabilities, Johnson emphasized that AI still requires human input to be effective. The key to achieving good results lies in crafting the right prompts — the instructions given to the AI that outline what task it should perform. The more precise and detailed the prompt, the better the outcome.
“AI is a tool,” Johnson noted. “It requires human input to produce the results you want.”
She highlighted that effective prompts are those that are clear and detailed, specifying tone, style, and context. As an example, she showed how she instructed ChatGPT to act as a social media manager and research a promotional buyer’s potential frustrations, desires, dreams, and fears. The specific instructions for this task were detailed and well-structured to guide the AI.
Within moments, ChatGPT provided a well-structured table containing 40 valuable insights. These insights, covering areas such as frustrations, desires, dreams, and fears, offer a strong foundation for a branded merchandise distributor. They can be used to develop pitches, market entry strategies, and, importantly, to craft content—including website copy, blogs, social media posts, advertisements, videos, and graphics—that resonates with the needs and goals of potential clients and promotional prospects. Here’s a glimpse of the table:
Promotional professionals can continue leveraging ChatGPT to generate content based on results tied to customers’ fears, frustrations, dreams, and desires. Johnson provided an example of this process. After receiving a table of results from ChatGPT, she added another prompt: “Please provide three social media concepts for Frustration #1.” This allowed her to gather relevant ideas. From there, each table entry could be explored to generate content that resonates with target audiences, helping promotional firms differentiate themselves in a competitive online landscape.
Throughout the session, Johnson shared additional examples, showcasing how ChatGPT can be used to create ad copy and generate ideas for graphics, videos, and video scripts to accompany the ads. She also demonstrated how these ideas could be taken to AI image generators like Canva AI or ChatGPT’s image-making feature to produce visual assets.
The key takeaway was that when effectively guided by humans, AI can significantly benefit a promotional business. “AI streamlines and enhances your social sales efforts,” Johnson stated. “I encourage you to choose one AI tool and start using it this week.”