Level Up Your Content with AI: A 20-Minute Crash Course

Hi, and thank you all for coming to this session today around leveling up your content. I'm going to give you a 20 minute crash course on ways that you should be thinking about using AI to create all of the great marketing content out there.

By way of quick background, my name is Natalie Lambert. I have been in the tech industry for many years. However, my foray into AI actually started at Google about two years ago. I was responsible for working across all of marketing to find the best use cases and technologies that would help marketers truly improve their impact. So did that, had a great time, played with about 80 to 100 different technologies, a huge number of use cases, and actually decided to start my own business where I helped marketing teams and marketers like yourselves truly learn how to use these technologies to do more. This presentation is a summary of the things that I've learned to truly elevate your content. So let's get started.

I do want to start here. It's probably my background as an analyst for many years, but you can't start any presentation without some data. I want to just start with why AI is so important to marketers right now. And it really comes down to how it can truly help us do more.

This shouldn't be surprising, but this was actually based on an HBR study that came out last year, and it looked at consultants performing marketing tasks and how they were able to complete their work compared to their non-AI using counterparts. And what this study found is that of the consultants who were using AI for marketing related activities, they found that these folks were able to complete 12% more tasks than the non-AI using folks. They were able to complete these tasks 25% faster than their non-AI using counterparts, and they were able to do it at a 40% higher quality rating. And so just the use of these technologies has truly helped marketers across the wide variety of tasks that we complete on a daily basis, do more kind of with less time, which is, you know, something we're always looking for.

Now, one of the questions I often get is, does this help everyone the same? Is it helping, you know, certain folks more? And they looked at that as well. So this same study looked at across the folks who were using AI, who was most impacted by it? And they found that the lowest performers within the group were able to see a 43% increase in their performance, where the highest performing folks were able to see a 17%. So this technology not only levels the playing field, so it makes everybody a better marketer within their organization, but it also helps both sets and gives those highest performers a boost as well. So it is great to see how these technologies can truly make us all better.

Now, finally, the last question I get beyond performance and beyond productivity is, okay, I can use these technologies and do things better and faster. But how about the things I create? Are they as good when AI helps me? And MIT did a study on just that. What they looked at was very specifically marketing content. And they looked at people's perception of the quality of the content that they were reading. And the content that these 1,008 people were told to evaluate was created in four different ways. On one end of the spectrum, AI created that marketing copy soup to nuts. On the other end of the spectrum, a human created it from beginning to end. And then in the middle, you have AI made all the final decisions, but a human helped in the brainstorming. And that third category being that a human made all the final decisions on the copy and AI helped with the brainstorming. What they found after doing the blind study is that people thought the content created by AI was of higher quality than the ones created by humans. And it wasn't until they actually told the people working on this study that a human created a certain set of content versus the others that folks actually changed their answer to give more weight to the content that had human involvement. So this is all to say is that when using these technologies, not only will you get productivity gains as we talked about, your output can be better and be more well-received by your audience if you do it well. And that's what I want to talk to you about today is how you can leverage AI to truly get to good faster than you were able to do on your own. And so there's a few ways to do this. I'm sure everyone has played around with prompting and have seen different frameworks. This one is the one that I truly stand by, and I tried to make it really easy to remember. It spells the word prompt. But these are the aspects that should be in your prompt when you are trying to create content.

So first is the peep. Who is the persona in which your AI is taking on? Are they creating a social post so that they are a social media expert? Are you creating email? Therefore, they're taking on that persona as an email marketer. You truly have to define who the person is and who the what the role the AI is taking on when starting your prompting process.

The second is the request. What do you want them to do? And this is what all of us do today, naturally when prompting. But putting it in the context of the persona really does help elevate the output that you're going to get.

The next thing to make sure is in your prompt is the outcome. What is the goal of this output? So let's go back to that social media example. Sometimes if you're creating a social media post, the outcome is to drive engagement. In other cases, the outcome is to go click on a link and register for an event. As you can imagine, the content that you want created will differ depending on those outcomes. So it's important to include that piece in your prompt.

And next is who is this targeted at? Who's the market? Who's the audience? If you're let's go back to that same social media post example, if you're creating a social media post for, you know, millennials who are buying sneakers is very different than a lawyer who is trying to accomplish a specific task. So the reason that this is the case is that, you know, both of those different audiences uses use different language in their kind of respective worlds. And so you want that language to come across in the output. So, you know, ensuring that the market and audience is included is important.

These next two, I would say, are more of the optional if you have it. So the first four we talked about essential in every prompt you do and the next two as as it makes sense. So for the next four, for the process part of the prompt, are there specific steps you want the AI to take when completing and when doing your output? You know, is it is it, you know, do you want them to read a doc, summarize it, tell you the key points, ask for your feedback and then create the post? Do you want them to, you know, create the output in a three column table with different things in each column? You know, this is that part in the prompt where you can provide specific examples of what you're looking for or a specific process or how you want that output to look.

And finally, is providing kind of a template or examples. You know, if you have social posts that have performed very well in the past and you want it to mirror that style, include it so that the AI can follow some of that those best practices that are in there to help replicate something that will work for your audience. So if you do this, this is that first step at creating content that will do that, that I can create that will just be a level up than what a standard, you know, just write me X, Y, Z can produce. So prompting is probably one of the most important pieces when creating content. But there's something else to consider as well, which is what type of tool are you using? The vast majority of us are using commercial chat bots. They're prompting and commercial chat bots and getting various responses. And that's great. That gets you, you know, 75 percent there. But I also want to show what custom AI models can do to elevate your content as well. So that's when you build a very personalized, very customized GPT bot gem and cater it to exactly to a very specific task. So you can create something better than what that general commercial chat bot can do.

So let me show you those examples. So to do this, I am going to use a white paper that I wrote with a colleague, and it's focused on kind of what marketers need to know about the legal landlines of AI and content creation. So this is about a 12 page white paper that I want to build a set of derivative materials on. And so when I think about building out this derivative content, I think the first step to creating a good set of content is to simply follow that prompt framework with the commercial chat bots. So if you use a good prompt, in theory, you'll get something good back out. So let's take a look. Here is an example. I am using chat GPT in this example where I include the white paper and I put in a prompt that follows general best practices. So telling the AI that your social media manager with the highest engagement rate of your peers, please read the attached white paper and create three LinkedIn posts to promote the white paper that will drive interest in reading the full paper. Each post should focus on different key points and these posts should be targeted at marketers. Take a deep breath and work on this step by step. So as you'll see in there, you'll see four likely five for four out of the six, five out of the six best practices in that prompt. And then what you'll see on the right is what I got back. And, you know, these are probably well, these are better than I would have got if I just uploaded the PDF and say, please create three LinkedIn posts. I think these get us, you know, 60, 70 percent there in terms of good content that I would be comfortable providing to, you know, on a social channel. So that's a way to get a good piece of content. We can do the same thing with writing a blog post, you know, following those same best practices and writing out what you're looking for and uploading that you can get a pretty decent blog post that isn't 100 percent generic, but that leverages your content and follows the guidelines in which you've given it. So this is how I really think about creating good content with AI. But there is a way to do this better and. There is a way to do this best. I'm kind of skipping the middle ground and skipping right to how to create great content with AI. And this is where we switch from using the general purpose commercial chatbots to custom. And so in this case, what I'm going to do is create that same type of content, but do it by creating or by using custom GPTs that I have built. So in this case, I have built GPTs that do very specific things. I've built a GPT that is trained on my voice and I've provided it probably two years of written blog posts that I have written. So it learns how I write. It learns how I want to write in the future and just my style and tone that is important for me when creating a post. I'll also create a GPT for LinkedIn posts, doing the exact same thing, taking LinkedIn posts that I've written, training it on that style so that when I get an output, it is in line with previous LinkedIn posts of mine. So it follows my voice. I've also created a GPT that takes on the persona that I want reading my post.

So as you saw in the previous examples, we said the blog post and the social post should be for marketers. I actually created a marketing leader persona so that I could get an evaluation of my content. What worked? What didn't? So that I could make edits and make it better for that target audience.

And finally, I have a GPT that does basic copywriting. So once everything is complete, I want to make sure that the post is all in active voice, uses sentence case, has no awkward words, has the Oxford comma, things like that. And then after using all of those GPTs, it's then my job to provide the human oversight to make sure that it's fantastic.

So let's take a look at how this works. So what you'll see here is the specific GPTs that I've created. I have done this in chat GPT, but you can also create these type of custom AI models using Google, the Gemini Gems, as well as pose bot feature. Pose bot feature is the only one that is free. The other ones do require you to have one of the pro or business licenses to be able to create your own personalized specialists.

So kind of coming back to this, here is where I am going to take the different GPTs that I've created, the different specialists to recreate all the content that we just talked about. So moving quickly to this tab here, you'll see me doing and following the same process that you saw before. So I upload that PDF and I ask it to write three posts. And by that, I mean social posts, each addressing a key takeaway of this white paper.

Now, what you'll see is I'm not following prompting best practices because each of these GPTs have been trained and and trained on and with prompting best practices to do their specific task. So what you'll see here is see this little designation that is saying that I have called my social media, specifically my LinkedIn GPT. So when I ask it to write three posts, each addressing a key takeaway, it is calling a GPT that has been given all of my instructions around what it means to create a great LinkedIn post. And so what you'll see here is this now starts to follow my style. And as you can see, there are no emojis in it because in my prompting of what I want from LinkedIn, I don't have emojis. I do like to have short bullets. This is in line with my style. So now you see all three of these posts created very quickly that just follow a different style. And it's much more personalized than what you saw in the simply doing the prompting best practices. So then it kind of gives an assessment. And then I can say, OK, I now have these posts. Can you craft a blog based on the above white paper? And I want the post to stand alone. So don't mention the white paper. And you'll see in this case, the icon has changed because now I've called a different specialist, I've called a different GPT. And this is the one that has been trained on my writing style.

So you'll see this creates a blog post that, again, is much more personalized to how I write. It's less generic in terms of just lots of paragraphs and things like that. Instead, this kind of follows my guidelines around having folds and bullets. And, you know, you'll see odd numbers of bullets. I kid you not. That's actually in my GPT requirements. So it's great to see that come out in a way that is much more reflective of my style. So it's going to make it easier for me to edit in the end.

Now, what I want to do is now that I have this blog, because I told you I have a GPT created on a persona, I can ask this persona to evaluate the blog and tell me if there are sections that they don't understand or you don't agree with, and what additional questions you might have after reading it. So now this persona is able to go through this blog, tell me what works well, tell me some areas that might need clarification or revision. I do like this because I do include in a post that copyright can be polluted with other things. And it's saying we don't know what that means. You know, super helpful for me when creating this content to bring out language that will resonate with my audience. You'll see, you know, just providing more and more updates. It tells me areas that it doesn't agree with. And so for me, this is my ability or my decision as an author to decide if I'm going to change anything, keep it, make edits. You know, this really puts this onus back on you to decide what parts of this are things you want to take to make your content truly fantastic.

And then, you know, at this point, you'll have made the edits that you want to make based on the feedback above. And I can now ask it to do that final copywriting of the blog. So here I asked it to copyright the blog and I pasted the kind of now the most final version based on my edits. And in this case, it's calling that copywriter GPT. And you'll see it can do that final pass to truly make my content, you know, great, read well and be something that I am proud of. And it tells me the various edits that it made at the end. So hopefully this shows how, you know, prompting can get you good content. But when you take the time to train different custom models on exactly what you're looking for, you can elevate your content in ways you likely never imagined.

And so to kind of find to end this, I want to just highlight all of the places where AI can play a role in helping you create content. Depending on what you're building, you can create AI specialists to help with blogs, longer types of content like eBooks or white paper, social posts. There are AI tools that can help you build infographics based on a summary of your content. Songs, nurture email call strips, the list goes on and on. There are so many incredible AI tools that can help elevate your work.

They are absolutely worth looking into. And kind of work looking into them is something that's important for all of us marketers. Because at the end of the day, these tools are truly changing our job. And a recent study done by Microsoft looks at how people are, how leaders are thinking of hiring. And what that study found is that 66% of leaders said that they're not hiring people without AI skills, because they see how these technologies are truly moving forward. All of our different respective jobs and industries. And it is those who know how to use them that are going to be the most helpful, have the most impact within their organization.

The study also found that leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than one who has much more experience but doesn't know these tools. So I highly recommend truly taking the time to sit and play with all of these different technologies so that you just have a level of comfort to truly, you know, improve the impact you have to your organization.

So in closing, I just want to let you know that I have an upcoming training. It's about eight hours of training where I will sit here and work with you to build GPTs based on your voice. So please feel free to sign up for my next cohort, which you can access in that QR code. And thank you very much. I hope this was helpful and gives you a quick look into how you can truly leverage AI to up-level the marketing content that you create.