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The AI revolution in content marketing: How to stay ahead of the game
269 Plays1 year ago
In this podcast episode, Mark Evans and Ben Pines, Director of Content at Wordtune and AI 21 Labs, discuss the impact of AI on content marketing.
We discuss the evolution of Wordtune and its positioning in the market, the emergence of chat GPT as a content creation tool, and the importance of using AI as an assistant rather than a content creation machine.
We also talk about the changing landscape of content distribution and reach, the potential for AI to help content creators succeed in their businesses, and the challenges of spam and fake news.
This episode emphasizes the importance of creating high-quality content that stands out and is curated by people.
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Transcript
The Rise of AI in Content Creation
00:00:13
Speaker
If you told a content marketer a year ago that a new tool would radically change how they do their jobs, they would have been highly skeptical. If you told them this tool would make it easy and quick to create content at scale, they would have thought you were crazy. But this is the new world of content marketing with chat, GPT, and AI. It's exciting, terrifying, disruptive, and unpredictable.
00:00:42
Speaker
Many content marketers, and marketers for that matter, are starting to have questions and concerns about their jobs and what it will take to stay relevant in the future.
The Role of WordTune and AI21 Labs
00:00:51
Speaker
Now, an interesting angle to the chat GPT narrative is how AI has started to impact content marketing.
00:01:00
Speaker
But truth be told, long before chat GPT's arrival, many tools had embraced AI, but I suspect marketers probably didn't think much about it. Now, one of the highest profile tools is Grammarly, which uses machine learning and natural language processing to improve grammar and spelling. Another tool and one that I've used enthusiastically for more than a year is WordTune, a writing assistant that rephrases sentences, fixes mistakes, and changes your writing tone.
00:01:28
Speaker
As a content creator, WordTune has become an indispensable tool. It's like having a super smart assistant able and willing to provide a different take on my writing. On the podcast today, I'm excited to have Ben Pines, Director of Content at WordTune and AI21 Labs, an artificial intelligence research and development company that launched WordTune in 2020. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Ben. Hey Mark, thanks for having me.
00:01:55
Speaker
Why don't we start by having you provide background on AI 21 and WorkTune. From what I understand, AI 21 is kind of like open AI. I'm interested in learning more about the company and what its approach is strategically and tactically to launching new businesses like WorkTune.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, great. So, A821 Labs, it's one of the leading companies right now in the development of advanced large language models, which makes all this technology of generative AI accessible to businesses around the world. And our product is WordTune.
00:02:36
Speaker
And we're actually one also a unique company wherein we develop our own language models and also develop the product. And this gives us sort of a virtuous cycle of insights into improving the product and improving the models. So now we have millions of monthly active users on WordTune and hundreds of thousands of paying users. And it's
00:03:04
Speaker
been amazing before and now with the explosion of the awareness to these tools, it's been even more exciting.
00:03:15
Speaker
I'm not sure how I discovered Wertun. I do a lot of, get a lot of newsletters, do a lot of readings. Someone must have mentioned it along the way. And I do find it, I don't know if the word is ironic or interesting that before the world discovered chat GPT, Wertun was already leveraging AI to help writers create better content. What's your perspective? I mean, it's almost like you are way ahead of the pack and no one really realized it.
00:03:45
Speaker
Well it's interesting because I discovered it I started working a bit over a year ago and I discovered it even before that I actually discovered and fell in love with the product.
00:03:58
Speaker
myself. And the company is on a mission to change how people read and write and create content using AI. And the whole idea was to build a tool that will work alongside of the person using it and not replace it.
WordTune's Integration and Unique Features
00:04:19
Speaker
And it sounds like I know it kind of it could sound like, I don't know, like a mission statement, marketing fluff, but it's really not because we're seeing
00:04:27
Speaker
The difference is in the nuance and we're seeing a lot more people understand this big difference between having someone go to the tool and say, just write me a blog post about X, which is how most. It's surprising in most tools work like this.
00:04:45
Speaker
Whereas it's something else to develop the UI for a tool that will assist, that will take the current psychology of how professional writers or any writer create long form or short form content and see how AI can join and make it better and streamline these processes.
00:05:07
Speaker
What I find interesting as a writer is that, as you say, it's an assistant. It's a companion when I am writing blog posts or email copy.
00:05:17
Speaker
And that what I like about it, it's this tool that works along with me and provides me with options on how to rephrase sentences or paragraphs. And I love the UI, I love the way that the look and feel, and it just seems like a natural way to do writing. It's a seamless part of my writing process.
00:05:40
Speaker
I am interested in your take on how WordTune has evolved or how you've positioned WordTune over the last seven months since chatGBT emerged on the scene. What's it been like from a marketing and sales perspective in terms of trying to differentiate WordTune from chatGBT, which has almost become this ubiquitous tool for content marketers?
00:06:08
Speaker
Well, I think when you have this lighthouse of understanding that the goal is basically to enhance current processes that writers like to work with, then in the beginning, working was simply rephrasing, paraphrasing. You take your sentence and using AI, you offer other suggestions that you might not have come up with, but
00:06:35
Speaker
you can browse through, and it feels correctly. So that's a first layer we can improve. But the new layer is like content creation. So how can we think of the tool to actually create the content, but still feel like you're the author of what you did? And we had some interesting takes, I think, as opposed to other products.
00:07:05
Speaker
some new things to introduce to this industry. So for example, zero prompting. So a lot of writers I know, professional writers, don't like to think of prompts because when you're writing you're like in the flow and you're explaining, think about you're explaining how, let's say you're writing about how to be persuasive.
00:07:27
Speaker
And you're in it. You're explaining, like, this is the key. To be persuasive, you have to be assertive. And then, like, let's stop what I'm thinking, and let's write a prompt. Write me how being persuasive. It's like a continuation of the flow. So here, if you're just without a prompt, you're just saying, OK, based on what I've already written, just continue writing, which is built into our UI.
00:07:55
Speaker
you can actually not interrupt that flow. And another way is just, okay, instead of writing a whole elaborate prompt, if I can just phrase the prompt with three words, so I'm in the middle of a sentence and I'm just writing, expand on precision.
00:08:22
Speaker
Okay, I didn't, I stopped the thought process a bit, but I'm still in it. I didn't have to phrase it with these long, you see these long prompts of like 30, 40 words. My gosh, like writers, you expect writers to write these prompts. Just three words and you generate a paragraph.
00:08:41
Speaker
And it's the continuation of how AI can join the process without interrupting it. So this is a whole new category that we started and we added recently. We only added it on January. That's where the spices menu was added. And it gives you counter arguments and citations
00:09:06
Speaker
And a lot of the things that as content creators we could use and we need and can save us from, one of the things that it saves you is from the back and forth, Google and editor, Google editor.
Human Touch vs. AI in Content Creation
00:09:22
Speaker
You just stay in the editing and you can get a lot of help with ideation, with finding some research and so on, all on the same page.
00:09:36
Speaker
As a content creator and writer, chat GPT, I think this applies to many content marketers, chat GPT is very seductive. The idea that you can use it to quickly and easily create content is so compelling and so appealing. The reality is that unless you're a prompt engineer or a prompt jockey is that chat GPT spits out pretty generic content. I think we all agree on that.
00:10:03
Speaker
One of the things that I've experienced firsthand in creating content for clients is that I'll use chat GPT. I'll apply some editing to it. You know, I've been a writer for more than 20 years, so I figured I'm a pretty good editor at this point in time.
00:10:18
Speaker
And then I'll give it to the client. And my experience is that by and large they see right through it. They look at the copy and they may not know it's chat GPT generated, but they look at the copy and there's something not right about it. They're just something. It may not flow naturally. It may seem.
00:10:36
Speaker
maybe it's just words being jammed together as opposed to the creative process happening in a very normal human-like way. And it's made me reconsider my use of ChatTP, not that I'm gonna back away from it, but I recognize that I think I need to get a lot more sophisticated about how I use the tool and how I use other tools so that it's an assistant as opposed to the content creation machine that I would rely on.
00:11:03
Speaker
What's your take on this whole view that GPT is a tool, not a replacement for writers? Yeah, certainly. Well, I think
00:11:20
Speaker
this technology has caused us to rethink what is content. I've been having this conversation with a lot of content creators and editors. This technology came out and it's like, okay, some of what I'm doing is still relevant and some is no longer relevant. And it made us think, wait, what is content creation?
00:11:44
Speaker
and it made us notice some of the SEO content I've been creating, that could have been created by a semi-smart robot that just looks at the Internet and jumbles a few key points. Interestingly, these are the articles I'm least proud of. These are probably not the articles I would put in my portfolio.
00:12:11
Speaker
So this can be seen as a good thing that this technology has brought, like rethink what is, what can't be replaced. And if you look at the top writers in our field, I'm talking about, you know, some of the names that I think mostly in the I mean, every industry has their known writers, you know, for content marketing,
00:12:37
Speaker
It's, I don't know, you know, Aaron Orendorf or, you know, and Hanley. So these writers, if you look closely at their articles, you can see
00:12:55
Speaker
there probably cannot like, there's no way this can be replaced by these tools. But now, a lot more writers need to leverage what they're writing, at least somewhat closer to those thought leaders. It's just a must. Because what is going to happen is the internet is going to get it's already happening, by the way, the internet is going to be full of
00:13:23
Speaker
SEO written articles written by either a bad human writer or AI. And that reduces the need for such articles. It reduces the price. People are willing to pay for such articles. And it makes readers a lot more skeptical when reading these articles. And Google will, of course, continue to improve and change the algorithm. It's already doing it with some of the algorithms that take into account expertise.
00:13:54
Speaker
So basically that's the general change that is going to happen. We need to think how we can leverage our writing.
00:14:04
Speaker
the good thing and how AI is going to impact that is instead of just using AI to replace you, you're going to need to use AI because you will be much more focused on finding interesting concepts, finding interesting ways to create content that gives value
00:14:26
Speaker
And AI is just going to be on the implementation stage. OK, I have my angle for the article. I know the direction. I've outlined it. So if I just go to the outline, I can create a presentation that would wow viewers. Now AI can help me formulate it into a long form piece with examples, with citations, and so on. Two thoughts. One is that
00:14:53
Speaker
the technologist in me believes that chat GPT five, six or seven will get a lot more, we'll get a lot better in terms of writing content that
00:15:04
Speaker
seems less generic, less robotic. On the flip side, and I guess I'm asking you to drill down a little bit into the kind of content that humans need to focus on, because if you look at grunt work, you know, ad copy, email copy, copy for webinar landing pages, all the things, SEO copy, all the things that take time but don't
00:15:28
Speaker
require a lot of insight or creativity, I can totally see AI tools replacing that activity and allowing writers to focus on different types of projects. But the question is a $64,000 question is, where do we shine as writers? What kind of content should we be creating? And then I want to answer that question. And then the other side of it is,
00:15:52
Speaker
sure, we can create high quality content, but how is it discovered in a world where there's so much content these days, there's a tsunami of content that is competing for readers attention? So won't we focus on the type of writing that people like you and I should focus on? Okay, so first of all, I recently heard a podcast, Sam Harris interviewed someone who's like a
00:16:18
Speaker
who recently wrote a book about AI, and they were talking about the same idea. And the guy worked on Microsoft and Google, developing some of this technology. So what he was saying was exactly what I know, which is these models, how they're built, they're basically prediction models, these language models.
00:16:41
Speaker
there is a lacking of understanding. There's still no understanding. And that's why the content is vanilla. It's not saying that the GPT-5 and 6 aren't going to improve, but their way of reasoning and coming up with novel ideas and clear ways of creating helpful content, it's limitless. And it's not certain how much they're going to develop
00:17:10
Speaker
In that case, I'm not sure how they're going to develop because there seems to be a limit with all this technology. There seems to be a limit to the way they're understanding the real psychological issues and addressing them. And if you think about books and articles that have changed either your life or your week,
00:17:34
Speaker
There needs to be something more than generic content.
The Importance of Authenticity in AI Era
00:17:40
Speaker
So I'm not sure if there is a threat here from AI. I really think so. And I really think that I see this technology as something that's empowering humans. So that's one level, the limit of AI. The second level is the limit of humans.
00:18:01
Speaker
So if you think about it, there's going to be people need mediation. OK, so that it's like another way of saying what I previously said. So if you think about it, Google has gives you the ability to reach already for the past 20 years, reach amazing content. However, people still follow other people on TikTok, on Instagram. And we see generation like Gen Z
00:18:28
Speaker
Using tiktok as a search engine and using youtube and and and tiktok much more than google. Why is that because people prefer to follow people we still need the mediation of a person.
00:18:42
Speaker
And it's definitely not AI. Even if AI comes to the level where it can produce videos and audio and text at the same level of a human, you still want, you still are going to look for the real human. You're still going to look for the, I don't know, the blue mark and it marks someone as a human because you want to know someone actually, if you're looking for dating advice,
00:19:10
Speaker
You want to have someone who actually felt the frustration of being rejected on Tinder. You don't want to get purely AI content and that's not going to change. So these are two levels where humans are going to win. And it's not to say that there's no risk.
00:19:30
Speaker
for writers. And again, we mentioned it that those SEO writers and technical writers that have already produced these mediocre content, but for content creators who've been building their following and people go to their site or their profile directly to get their new video, that's just going to be even more important. Why? Because the more AI
00:19:56
Speaker
is there the more that the medium level writers are going to turn to AI, the more need there will be for the type of content creators who don't use AI in the same manner, who use AI as an assistant, as an enhancement to them. Those are going to be more unique. And if you go there,
00:20:18
Speaker
with the intention of doing the hard work, you're going to manage to be on top. It's a bit like being a photographer now. If you're a mediocre photographer, you're just going to use, I don't know, your phone camera and that's it. But those photographers who are diving deep into using cameras in the most sophisticated ways, those are the ones who are winning the competition and awards and are the ones who are outstanding. I think that
00:20:48
Speaker
Hopefully you're on the right track and there is a role for creative writers like us, people who are craftsmen or crafts people, um, as opposed to content produced by robots. The thing that I worry about is that there will be a awful lot of content being generated. There's going to be huge amounts of competition for eyeballs and that
00:21:13
Speaker
we're gonna be, as readers, we're gonna be overwhelmed by content. Even if you use a tool like Google and you have a sophisticated way of finding that, even if you're relying on people to curate content for you, as somebody who is a content marketer and is trying to attract the attention to the content that you create, how do you think that content breaks out?
00:21:33
Speaker
It's one thing to take a piece of content and repurpose it and have it available in multiple places, like a lot of these content gurus advocate. But the question is, how does content break through the noise? Cause it's going to be an awful lot of noise. And my worry is that you'll have great content, but no one will ever see it. I totally agree. That's the, that's the, I think that's the million dollar question because distribution and reach is going to be different.
00:21:57
Speaker
just going to be different like twenty years ago you know i've been in the seo and content marketing field for like fifteen years or more something like that for the last twenty years this whole industry has evolved and it's amazing to see how it's evolved you can search
00:22:15
Speaker
Searching Google wasn't an option 25 years ago. To get specific information, you needed to go to a library and rummage through microfilm and books, and the internet has made information so much more accessible, and marketers rode on that and used SEO to drive reach and distribution, and this is going to change.
00:22:40
Speaker
like it's going to morph into something different like how it's going to morph i don't exactly know because it's it's hard to know but people have been talking about the threat of google you know google has been way before chat gpt google has started putting a lot more ads in it started putting zero uh result like result uh like rich snippets results on top of like just showing their result without
00:23:07
Speaker
pointing to a website. And this was a threat. It started being a threat, I think, three or four years ago. And the CEO of Withia has been talking about it for a while. And the way you battle this, and in the same way you need to battle the threat of AI in search results, is producing real followship.
AI's Impact on Search Engines and Marketing Opportunities
00:23:32
Speaker
And readership, if you produce a following,
00:23:35
Speaker
with your content if your content is not just answering question but it invokes like hey this person has something interesting to say i'm and this happens if you are able to consistently create content that drives like insights and is genuinely helpful for people.
00:23:53
Speaker
those people will follow you and will register for your email list and then you're serving a specific niche, you're serving a specific audience. It's like the basics of marketing all over again, seeing things that Seth Goding has been talking about for the past 10, 20 years, creating a following in a certain niche and then your following is your audience and instead of
00:24:19
Speaker
reaching like a million people you're maybe reaching a thousand people but they are paying you and this is stuff that SaaS companies can implement it's also something that you know the one person business content creator can implement for their own business. Not to go off on a tangent but it
00:24:40
Speaker
It's interesting that you mentioned Google and my experience over the last seven months with the emergence of chat GBT is that my use of Google has gone down dramatically. I turn to chat GBT to create lists frameworks, tell me the best B2B SAS company pricing pages, because that information is right there as opposed to having to scroll through search results as someone who started your career in SEO.
00:25:08
Speaker
What's your take on AI power tools versus search engines? So I know that Bing and Google are now quickly scrambling to bring generative AI into their platforms. How do you view the world now that people are just relying on chat GPT for search results? And how do you think that's going to impact the big search engines?
00:25:31
Speaker
Great question. So let's look at this whole technology of generative AI as like the big box. But now as technology spreads, it's like a car. There's the big category of a car. And then it divides into different categories, like you have the Jeeps and you have the minivans and all those. And this is what's going to happen with generative AI. So you have one of the bigger chunks is going to be like this answer engine.
00:26:00
Speaker
This is something Christopher Lockhead, who's a known marketer, is talking about. Instead of search engine, there's going to be the answer engine. And this is definitely now is a chance for competitors all over the world to create tools that are those answer engines that maybe will compete with Google. I don't know. Maybe something will come up. Maybe it'll be chat GPT will become a certain search engine. I don't know. Or answer engine.
00:26:30
Speaker
But yeah, I've been using Google also less frequently. There are amazing tools for research. And so it's certainly a threat for Google. And for marketers, it could be an opportunity. So for example, if you notice the Bing results that now gives you the answer but also gives you the citation, the sources, this is a good place. How do you rank there?
Success Factors for AI Tools Like WordTune
00:27:00
Speaker
How do you manage to rank there and get your answers there? Um, so it's going to be a, maybe a new methodology. That's going to be competitive with, uh, SEO. Yeah. I'm personally, I'm excited about the whole idea of answer engines. I think that the more.
00:27:17
Speaker
competitive options you have to Google and Bing, the better it will be for everybody overall because competition is always a good thing. Turning our sites back to WordTune, giving the number of tools being launched and it seems like daily there are new and exciting tools that appear on the marketplace. Two questions, what's your take on the AI powered writing landscape and
00:27:43
Speaker
What is work tunes approach from a marketing and brand awareness perspective? You guys have been in market for almost three years. You've got a head start in terms of a large installed base. Millions of people are using the application. Do you see it as noisy, crowded, overly competitive? And given that reality, how does work tune
00:28:07
Speaker
stand above the crowd? How does it continue to establish itself as one of the leading AI powered writing tools? Okay, so basically, once this technology came out, it's like all about the technology. Everyone is excited about this new engine. But basically, the engine is less interesting, I have to say.
00:28:30
Speaker
Because there's a certain kind of, the technology levels off. Every product uses the same basic technology of large language model to produce the content. So it's the competition, I think, veers from the excitement from this new technology, because it's not novel anymore, to, okay, I understand that all the products use basically the same technology. How is the interface?
00:28:57
Speaker
Think of all the SaaS companies that have won. A lot of it was because of a superior interface. I like to think of like Sigma is a great example.
00:29:08
Speaker
Notion is a good example. There were tools before them that offered pretty much the same solution, but something about the UI and thinking about the end user and developing a very handy and useful tool and, of course, adherence to a certain target audience.
00:29:30
Speaker
I think that that is and of course, you know, marketing also plays a great part of it, like understanding the audience and serving them and helping them. Sometimes it's outside even the product. If you think about a product like drift, I don't think that the product like a lot of the success of a company like drift is because of their superior marketing and the way they were able to like companies like drift and buffer, they were able to really form a bond and connection with the audience. And that's a lot of what
00:29:59
Speaker
we're trying to do in terms of WordTunes audience, really understanding their needs, their challenges with using AI, what's keeping them from incorporating it, where do they want to reach, what are their pains, and so on.
Opportunities and Risks of AI in Content Creation
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah, it is interesting from a marketing perspective that pretty much every B2B SaaS company, if you go to their homepage, it increasingly says AI powered. Because if you're not on the bandwagon, you risk being seen as being left behind. But you make a great point in terms of technology for the sake of technology is great. Everyone's going to have the same tools.
00:30:41
Speaker
Everyone's going to be relying on the same models to power the technology. But when it comes down to it, it's can you meet a need and can you delight someone in terms of how the service works, how they use it, whether it's user friendly, whether it creates the outcomes that they want. And at the end of the day, I think that's what matters most. When you look at the AI and chat GPT and generative AI,
00:31:07
Speaker
What are you most excited and optimistic about? And on the flip side, what concerns you? What I'm most excited about is the fact that the person who is going to be leveraged the most is the content creator. So I'm excited about the possibilities of content creators to really succeed in either their personal business or helping other companies. So I think
00:31:35
Speaker
It's a continuation of a trend that's already been happening. Just being able to manage a business is so challenging. And we talked about the overwhelm and the fact that there is so much to follow and so many changes. And I think AI is going to mitigate some of these challenges. So you only read what
00:31:57
Speaker
really helps your own business and you only create what your customers need you to create. So a lot of potential there just in streamlining businesses, especially small businesses where there's a lack of person power, I don't know. And I think the challenge really is spam.
00:32:20
Speaker
just filling the internet with so much content that it's going to be very hard to understand what is real and what is not, what is fake news and what is not. We're already seeing this. Also silos in social media. Think about Cambridge Analytica and all those challenges in terms of politics, in terms of having groups
00:32:43
Speaker
go on very segregated routes like each group is very offensive to one another. So with the power of AI, this can potentially become more of a problem just because you can create a lot more content that's a lot more personalized. And I think the remedy for this is really to
00:33:05
Speaker
to come up like every every danger produces an action from from the from the viewers and the consumers who want to steal consume content. So I think a way of thinking how to reform this connection, this personal connection that's not generated by AI with the audience is sort of the answer to that.
00:33:30
Speaker
So communities and real connection to the user, that's the solution. We have covered a lot of ground in the last 35 minutes. I have put you on the spot in many ways because what's over the horizon is a mystery to many of us as much as we can predict what may happen or
00:33:52
Speaker
want to envision what we would like to see happen. AI is such a volatile and evolving landscape that we're all trying to figure out as we go. One final question is, where can people learn more about you and WordTune and AI21? Yes. So I'm usually writing on LinkedIn. So Ben Pines, you can search for me. WordTune, you can follow the WordTune blog, wordtune.com slash blog.
00:34:20
Speaker
and also on all the social media platforms and YouTube.
00:34:26
Speaker
Well, thanks, Ben, for great insight. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. I use a three-part methodology to diagnose, improve, and optimize your marketing strategically and tactically.
00:34:52
Speaker
reach out to me via email, mark at mark Evans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.