The AI revolution in content marketing: How to stay ahead of the game

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Mark Evans: 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 ChatGPT and AI. It's exciting, terrifying, disruptive, and unpredictable. 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. Now an interesting angle to the ChatGPT narrative is how AI has started to impact content marketing. But truth be told, long before ChatGPT'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. 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 AI twenty one Labs, an artificial intelligence research and development company that launched Wordtune in 2020. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Ben.

Guest: Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start by having you provide background on AI twenty one and Wordtune? From what I understand, AI twenty one is kind of like OpenAI. I'm interested in learning more about the company and, you know, what its approach is strategically and tactically to launching new businesses like Virtun.

Guest: Yeah. Great. So AI twenty one Labs, it's one of the leading companies right now in the development of advanced large language models, which makes all this technology of general generative AI accessible to businesses around the world. And our product is Wordtune, And we're actually one also a 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 been amazing before, and and and now with the explosion of of the awareness to these tools, it's been even more exciting.

Mark Evans: I'm not sure how I discovered Wordtune. 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 ChatGPT, world Wordtune was already leveraging AI to help writers create better content. How do what's your perspective? I mean, it's almost like, you are way ahead of the pack, and no one really realized it.

Guest: Well, it's interesting because I discovered it. I I started working at Fortune a a bit over a a year ago, and I discovered it even before that. I actually discovered and and fell in love with the with the product myself, 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. And it sounds like I don't know. It kind of it could sound like a, I don't know, like a mission statement, marketing fluff, but it's really not because we're seeing 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 a blog post about x, which is how most, surprisingly, most tools work like this. Whereas, it's something else to develop the UI for a tool, that will assist, that will take the 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.

Mark Evans: 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. And that what I like about it, it's it's this it's this tool that works along with me and and provides me with options on how to rephrase sentences or paragraphs. And I love the UI. I love the way the the look and feel, and it just seems like a natural way to do writing. It's a seamless part of my writing process. I am interested in your take on how Wordtune has evolved or how you've positioned Wordtune over the last seven months since ChatGPT emerged on the scene. What's it been like from a marketing and sales perspective in terms of trying to differentiate Wordtune from chat ChatGPT, which has almost become this ubiquitous tool for for content marketers?

Guest: Well, I think when you have this lighthouse of understanding that the goal is basically to enhance current site like, current processes that that writers, like to to work with, then in the beginning, it was working was simply, rephrasing, paraphrasing. You you take your sentence and using AI, you offer other suggestions that you might have not not have come up with, but 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 not but still feel like you're the the author of what you did. So and we we had some interesting takes, I think, as opposed to other, products, some new things to to 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 you're explaining how let let's say you're writing about how to be persuasive, and you're in it. You're you're explaining, like, this is the key. You you to be persuasive, you have to be assertive. And then I like, let's stop what I'm thinking, and let's write a prompt. Right? Like, write me how being persuasive. It's it's like a continuation of of the flow. So here, if you're just without a prompt, you're just saying, okay. Based on what I've already written, just continue writing, which is built in into our UI, you can actually not interrupt that flow. And another way is just, okay. I can instead of writing a whole flow a whole elaborate, prompt, I can if I can just phrase the prompt with three words. So I'm I'm in the middle of a sentence, and I'm just writing expand on precision. Okay? I I didn't I I I stopped the thought process a bit, but I'm still in it. I didn't have to phrase it with this long you see these long prompts of, like, thirty, forty words. My gosh. Like, writers you expect writers to write these prompts. Just three words, and you generate a paragraph. And it's like it's the the continuation of how AI can join the the 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. And a lot of the things that as content creators, we we could use and and we need and can save us from one one of the things that it saves you is from the back and forth, Google and editor Google editor. You just stay in the in the editing, and you can get a lot of help with ideation, with finding some research, and so on so on, all on the same page.

Mark Evans: As a content creator and writer, ChatGPT I think this applies to many content marketers. ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT spits out pretty generic content. I think we all agree on that. One of the things that I've experienced firsthand in creating content for clients is that I'll use ChatGPT. I'll apply some editing to it. You know, I've been a writer for more than twenty years, so I figured I'm a pretty good editor at this point in time. 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 ChatGPT generated. But they look at the copy, and there's something not right about it. There's just something it it may not flow naturally. It may seem 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. What's your take on this whole view that chatty GPT is a tool, not a replacement for writers?

Guest: Yeah. Certainly. Well, I think this technology has caused us to rethink what is content. Like, you you know, and I I've been having this conversation with a lot of content creators and editors. It's like, this technology came out, 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? And it made us notice, like, you know what? Some of the SEO content I've been creating, that kind of could have been created by a semi smart robot that just looks at the Internet and jumbles a few, key points. And and this is, interestingly, these are the articles I'm least proud of. These are probably not the articles I would put in my portfolio. So this could be seen as a good thing that that this technology has brought. Like, rethink what is what can't be reply replaced. And if you look at the top riders in our field, I'm talking about, you know, some of the names that I think mostly in the I I mean, every industry has their known writers, you know, for content marketing. It's, I don't know, you know, Aaron Orendorf or, you know, Ann Handley. So these writers, if you look closely at their articles, you can see they're probably cannot like, there's no way this can be, replaced by these tools. But now a lot more riders 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 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 to improve and change the algorithm. It's already doing it with some of the algorithms that take into account expertise. So, basically, that's the general change that is going to happen. We need to think how we can leverage our writing. So that's the good thing. And how AI is going to impact that is instead of just using AI to replace you, you're you're going to need to use AI because you will be much more focused on finding interesting concept, finding interesting ways to create content that that gives value, and AI is just going to be on the implementation stage. Okay. I have my angle for the article. I know the direction. I've outlined it. So if if I just go to the outline, I could create a presentation that would wow viewers. Now AI can help me formulate it into a long long form piece with examples, with citations, and so on.

Mark Evans: Two thoughts. One is that the technologist in me believes that chat GPT five, six, or seven will get a lot more will get a lot better in terms of writing content that 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 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 to answer that question. And the and then the other side of it is, 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 our readers' attention. So why don't we focus on the type of writing that people like you and I should focus on?

Guest: Okay. So first of all, I I received, heard a podcast. Sam Harris interviewed someone who's like, a who recently wrote a book about about AI, and they they were talking about the same idea. And the the guy worked on Microsoft and Google developing some of the this technology. So what he was saying was exactly what what I know, which is these models, how they're built is they're basically prediction models, these language models. So so there is a lacking of understanding. There's still no understanding, and that's why the the content is vanilla. It's it's not saying that the the GPT five and six aren't going to improve, but their way of reasoning and coming up with novel ideas and and clear ways of of creating helpful content, it's limitless. And it's not certain how much they're going going to develop 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, you know, your week, there needs to be there's lacking, there needs to be something more than generic content. So I'm not sure if there is a threat here from AI. I I really think so, and I I I I really think that there is like, I 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. So if you think about it, there's going to be people need mediation. Okay. So that it 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 twenty years, reach amazing content. However, people still follow other people on TikTok, on Instagram, and we see generation, like Gen z, using TikTok as a search engine and using, YouTube and and and and TikTok much more than, Google. Why is that? Because people prefer to to follow people. We still need the mediation of a person, and it's definitely not AI. If and 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 gonna look for the, I don't know, the blue mark that marks someone as a human because you wanna know someone actually, if you're looking for dating advice, you want to have someone who actually felt the frustration of being, you know, rejected on Tinder. You you don't want to get purely AI content, and that's not gonna change. So these are two levels where humans are going to win. And it's not to say that there's no risk 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 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 is there, the more that the medium level writers are going to turn to AI, the more need there will be for the 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, with the intention of being doing the work, doing the hard work, you're gonna manage to be on top. It's a bit like being a photographer now. If you're a mediocre photographer, you're just gonna use, I don't know, like, the the your phone camera, and that's it. But those those photographers who are diving deep into using cameras in the most sophisticated ways, those are the ones who are winning, you know, the competition and awards and are the one who are outstanding.

Mark Evans: I think that, hopefully, you're on the right track, and there is a role for creative writers like us, people who are craftsmen or craftspeople 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 gonna be huge amounts of competition for eyeballs and that we're gonna be as readers, we're gonna be overwhelmed by content. Even if you use a tool like Google and you have sophisticated way of finding that, even if you're relying on people to curate content for you. As somebody who 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? 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? Because there's gonna be an awful lot of noise, and my worry is that you'll have great content, but no one will ever see it.

Guest: 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. It's just going to be different. Like, twenty years ago you know, I've been in in the SEO and content marketing field for, like, fifteen years or or more or 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. Searching Google wasn't an option twenty five years ago. You needed you needed to get specific information. You needed to go to a library and rummage through, you know, microfilm and and books. And the Internet has made information so much more accessible, and marketers rode on that and created used SEO to drive reach and distribution. And this is going to change. It's going to, 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 way before ChatGPT, Google has started putting a lot more ads in. It started putting zero result, like result, like, rich snippets results on top of like, just showing their result without pointing to a website. And this was a threat. Like, it started being a threat, I think, three or four years ago, and the CEO of Witia has been talking about it for a while. And the way you battle this and in the same way you need to battle the the threat of AI in search results, is producing real followship. So if you and readership, if you produce a following with your content, if you your content is not just answering question, but it invokes, like, hey. This person has something interesting to say. I'm and this happens. And if you are able to consistently create content that drives, like, insights and and is genuinely helpful for people, 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. You're seeing things that that Seth Godin has been talking about for the past ten, twenty years, creating a following in a certain niche, and then your following is your audience. And instead of 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.

Mark Evans: Not to go off on a tangent, but it is interesting that you mentioned Google. And my experience over the last seven months with the emergence of ChatGPT is that my use of Google has gone down dramatically. I turned to ChatGPT to create lists, frameworks, tell me the best b to b SaaS 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, what's your take on AI powered 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 ChatGPT for search results? And how how do think that's gonna impact, the big search engines?

Guest: Great question. So, did let's look at this whole technology of generative AI as, the big box. But now as technology spreads, it's like a car. They're they're in the big category of a car, and then it it it it divide 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. It's going to be like the this answer engine. This is something Christopher Lockhead, who's a known marketer, is is talking about. Like, instead of search engine, there's gonna be the answer engine.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Guest: So 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 maybe something will will come up. Maybe it'll be ChatGPT will be become a certain search engine. I don't know. But or answer engine. But, yeah, I've been using Google also less frequently. They're amazing tools for, for research, and, so it's certainly a threat, for Google. And for 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 a good place. Like, how how do you rank there? How do you manage to rank there and and get your answers there? So it's going to be maybe a new methodology that's going to be competitive with SEO.

Mark Evans: Yeah. I'm I'm personally, I'm I'm excited about the whole idea of answer engines. I think that the more 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, given 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 what is Wordtune's approach from a marketing and brand awareness perspective? You guys have been in market for for almost three years. You've got a head start in terms of 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 Wordtune stand above the crowd? How does it continue to establish itself as one of the leading AI powered writing tools?

Guest: 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, because there's a certain kind of of, the technology levels off. Every product that uses the same basic technology of large language model to produce the content. So it's 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? 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, Figma is a great example. Notion is a is a good example. Like, there were tools before them that offered pretty much the same solution, but something about the UI and thinking about the the end user and developing a very handy and useful tool and, of course, adherence to a certain target audience. 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 the the product like, a lot of the success of a company like Drift is because of their superior marketing and the way they they were able to like, companies like Drift and and Buffer, they were able to really form a bond and connection with the audience. And that's a lot of what we're trying to do in terms of Wordtune's audience, like, really understanding their needs, their their challenges with using AI, what's what's keeping them from from incorporating it, where do they want to reach, you know, what are what are they their pains, and so on.

Mark Evans: Yeah. You know, it's it is interesting from a marketing perspective that pretty much every b to b 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 gonna have the same tools. Everyone's gonna be relying on the same models to power their 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 ChatGPT and generative AI, what are you most excited and optimistic about? And on the flip side, what concerns you?

Guest: What I'm most excited about is the fact that it's going to really the person 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 their either their personal business or helping other companies. So I think it's a continuation of of a trend that's already been happening. Just being able to to manage a business is is so challenging, and we talked about the overwhelm and the fact that there's 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 really helps your own business, and you only create what your customers need you to create. So so a lot of potential there just in streamlining businesses, especially small businesses where there's a lack of of of the person power. I don't know. And I think the challenge really is spam, 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 go on on very segregated routes. Like, each each 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 to come up like, every every danger produces an action from from the from the viewers and the the consumers who who want to still 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 an answer to that. So communities and and and the real real connection to the user, that's the solution.

Mark Evans: We have covered a lot of ground in the last thirty five 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 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 AI twenty one?

Guest: Yes. So I'm usually writing on LinkedIn. So Ben Pines, you can search for me. Wordtune, you can follow the working blog blog, working.com/blog, and also on all the social media, platform and YouTube.

Mark Evans: 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 b to b 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. Reach out to me via email, mark@evans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.