What an Actual Prompt Strategy Looks Like in a Real Business

TLDR: You don’t need 100 prompt templates. You need five solid strategies your team can use inside their own work. This post breaks down what effective prompting looks like in practice especially in marketing, eCommerce, and content-heavy roles. We show how to train your team to stop chasing prompt hacks and start designing repeatable, explainable workflows.

 Why prompt packs and libraries that you download from LinkedIn or emails you subscribe to don’t actually help your team. Shopify’s guide to prompt strategy is solid, for one reason: it’s not a dump of “Top 50 AI prompts for marketers.”
It teaches how to think, not what to paste.

In most teams we work with, prompting falls into two traps:

1. Everyone saves a bunch of random prompts… and never uses them
   
2. The team treats ChatGPT like Google, not a reasoning assistant
   

This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a workflow design problem.

What makes a good prompt strategy for marketing or ecommerce?

Prompting isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a method.
And good methods are:

• Repeatable
  
• Explainable
  

Tuned to your brand, not just general logic

At a minimum, your strategy should include:

1. Framing prompts as a dialogue, not a demand
Good outputs need clear role definition: “You’re a brand copywriter. Write in the tone of [X].”

2. Including key context upfront
The model doesn’t know your product, market, or tone unless you show it.
Include product specs, past posts, customer pain points. Build a small context block once, then reuse.

3. Iterating, not expecting perfection
Prompt once. Review. Refine. Add details. Lock what works.
This isn’t inefficient. It’s the normal process—just sped up.

4. Saving structured templates, not single-use prompts
Use input → instruction → output format consistently:

• Input: the raw product, audience segment, or campaign brief
  
• Instruction: the task and style
  
• Output format: what you want back (e.g. headline list, CTA variations)
  

5. Training the team to spot hallucinations and tone mismatches
Review is not optional. If someone blindly copies the first result, that’s not prompting, it’s outsourcing judgment.

How do we train a team to prompt well?

We build this muscle inside the AI Fundamentals Masterclass and Bootcamp.

Here’s how you can do it internally:

Start with live work. Don’t explain prompting in theory. Pick a task like writing a product description or email sequence and work through it live, on-screen. Use real prompts, not demo ones. Forget the “Act as a growth hacker” gimmicks. Use your real copy tone, product positioning, and past campaigns. Create a team prompt doc. Not a list of favourites but an actual living document of actual tested flows, including:

• What task it solves
  
• The input format
  
• The prompt
  
• The output
  
• What needed editing
  
• Review side-by-side
  
• Run a 15-min session where 2-3 people prompt for the same task.
• Compare results. Learn what worked.
  
• Do it weekly. Watch prompting confidence soar.

Why this matters more than tools

A new tool drops every week. But prompting is the glue. It’s how your team gets value out of GenAI tools.  It’s how you keep tone, structure, and accuracy consistent. It’s how you scale content without bottlenecking review or rewriting everything. And most importantly it’s how you retain control over what gets published, sent, or said.

FAQs

Q: Why aren’t prompt libraries effective?
A: Because they’re generic and rarely match your business context. Prompting only works when grounded in your own tone, tasks, and audience.

Q: How do I get my marketing team to prompt better?
A: Run live sessions with real tasks. Capture what works. Build a shared doc of successful prompt patterns. We run these sessions in our AI Bootcamp.

Q: What’s the difference between a prompt and a strategy?
A: A prompt is a line of text. A strategy is how, when, and why you prompt—and how you reuse, review, and scale it across the team.

Q: Can we just buy better tools instead of learning prompting?
A: No. Every GenAI tool is powered by prompts—visible or not. If your team can’t prompt well, they can’t get quality results from any platform.

Where to Start

• AI Fundamentals Masterclass: Teach prompting through live examples, not theory
  
• AI Bootcamp: Rebuild one of your marketing workflows with prompt-driven structure
  
• AI Strategy Roadmap: Embed prompting standards into your AI operations
  
• Readiness Assessment: Identify which teams are using GenAI poorly—and how to fix it
  

Prompting is not a skill for “the AI person.” It’s a team-wide capability that multiplies everything else. Train for it properly or keep copy-pasting half-baked content your team doesn’t trust.