Writing for Humans: The Real AI Workflows Behind Great B2B Content

Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Look, I hear about AI agents every single day on the internet in the Exo 5 community, but it's confusing. It's a little bit overwhelming, which platform should I be using? Which agents are actually worth building? How do I even set this up? There's a lot of noise out there. It's kind of hard to tell what's actually going to make the job easier, versus what just can be another thing to manage. Or is this just a cool little thing some guy wrote about on LinkedIn? Well, Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. You can build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. This is really smart. They also just launch virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that can learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your whole website optimized. Humans, that's us of course. We still get the final say over these robots, but this seems really useful. This is worth leaning into right now, right? Agents have so much potential and using AI in a platform like Optimizely for the stuff that eats your week. So you can get more time for the strategic thinking and actual fun parts of your job on into that. Let's make marketing about the craft of marketing. Again, I think there's something there. So go and check out Optimizely right now. See how their AI agents can help you with your B2B marketing operations. They purposely built this for B2B marketing. This is really cool. Optimizely.com/exit5. That's Optimizely.com/exit5. Go and check out their agents. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Webflow. Webflow is a website platform for the "agentic" web built for modern marketing teams to build fully custom sites that perform in AI search. No developer needed. Your website isn't just your homepage anymore. It's actually the first thing an AI agent is going to read about your company and from there, decide whether or not to recommend you to a potential customer. Before a demo, before a sales call, before anyone on your team even knows that buyer exists, which means if your site isn't structured to show up in AI search, you're not in the buying conversation. It's as simple as that. Webflow is the platform marketing teams used to fix that. You can build a fully custom site without a developer, optimize it for AI search, govern your content, and actually see how agents are reading and interpreting it all in one place. Make your website your biggest growth engine right now with Webflow. Check them out at Webflow.com/4/exit5 that's Webflow.com/FOR/exit5. You're listening to the Dave Gerard show. What is up Dave? Are we live? Is this thing on? I don't know. She said don't talk. She's lovingly lovingly looking at each other. Hey Dave. I'm live right now. Burlington, Vermont. I'm here at this space I work out of called Hula, where you are right now. I am in Ottawa, Ontario, in my lovely home office. Actually, Dave said that my backdrop does not reflect my personality well. So if you have cooler ideas for my backdrop, if you're like, oh, her backdrop should actually look like this. Please, I'm accepting tips. Just DM me on LinkedIn. I wasn't trying to match the personnel. I don't, you know, we're not going to have to go back and read your message. You're like, hey, your personality and backdrop don't line up. Well, I'm going to see you for real in two weeks and we'll hang out more in person at drive. And then you can, oh, that would be, that's actually great team bonding. Spend like a week with someone and then tell them what backdrop they should have. We did hook you up with the proper mic and do you have your headphones in today? Do you have them in? No, I couldn't figure out the headphones one thing at a time. But if you're like, whoa, she sounds amazing. Dave did hook me up with a sure mic. So I'm a legit podcast for now. All right. So anyway, we're excited to be here. I'm Dave, that's Dasha. As she said, we do these twice a month exit five live. It's become a real thing, you know, how we're hot in the streets right now, hot on LinkedIn, hot in social media. I've actually never seen so many people watch a webinar replay after this. I think we're really onto something with this format. I'm super excited to be here and doing this today another Friday back here in my little space. And we've got six B2B marketers joining us to share how they still write content for humans. But with the help of AI, this is an important topic because look, you're not going to not use AI, but it's like, what's the bar? What's the line here? How do we use this? I think we're all feeling like overfed with slop, but at the same time, smart marketers are finding ways to use AI to actually make content, but not make it suck. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And so the format is each speaker gets five minutes to walk through a specific play. This is one tactical specific example. So this is what I want you to use to judge them on. Is this play that they have? They're going to have two minutes of Q and A with us and you. So put your questions in the chat. We'll organize all them producers, Marissa and Maria backstage organizing all that stuff and making this happen. And at the end, we're going to vote on which play that you are most likely to put in action. I want you to vote today for not who the most charismatic or crazy speaker. As I want you to get, listen to the facts, listen to the examples, pick the one play that you would actually want to put in for your business. That's what we want to get into. Dash, did I miss anything before I do my little spiel here? Did I miss anything? Are we good to go here? I think we are good to go. Perfect. So, all right, perfect. So before we get into today's session, I want to give it a quick shout out to our sponsor for this episode of X of five live hottest webinar in the game right now. Shout out to markup AI. AI has made it really easy to produce a lot of content, but producing content fast and producing content that's published ready, not the same thing. And by publish ready, I mean, it actually follows your brand guidelines. It sounds like you, that's a big thing for me personally, and it's a good fit for your audience and isn't AI slop. That's the thing. Markup AI fixes that. It sits in your content creation workflow, scanning and scoring your content against your brand voice, preferred terms and messaging standards before anything goes live. Markup AI even checks for AI visibility best practices and works directly inside Google Docs. Hallelujah. So there's no extra tool or handoff. Stop publishing AI content and that's generic, off brand or unsightable. Check out markup.ai. So you're always putting your best stuff out there. Coho stasha over you, kid. All right. Let's introduce our amazing lineup. Producer Marissa, can we get the seven top please? Seven top send it. We're working with Zoom on actually branding as an actual feature. I'm willing to send Kim a message and see if we can make this a real name. All right. If you've ever wondered what is the seven top you're looking at it right now, please welcome our lineup of six amazing marketers. These are people not in STEM. They are people in M Chris, Holly, Megan, Jenny, Dan and Amanda. Chris, why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Chris Turner. I run content marketing at TechMetric. I am a team of one and using the methodologies I have put in place. I've been able to increase blog views 700% since I joined the team in March. Flex. Holly. Hey, everyone. I'm Holly and I'm thinking VP of Marketing at Market Bay. I come to you from Indianapolis. Excited to be here until a little bit more about everything we're doing outside of the prompt for our content to make it resonate. Love it, Megan. Hi, everyone. I'm Megan Crisson, a director of brand and demand marketing at Intensify and Boston based at Hardham still content marketer. I built a 23 step AI agent that automates our AEO content from topic to WordPress draft and boosted our LM visibility. Love it, Jenny. Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny Capola. I'm the senior director of branding content at Bitly. I'm out in the suburbs of Boston so we should connect later. I'm super excited to chat about turning original insights and data into a content differentiator for your brand. I feel like your backdrop represents your personality. That's my answer. I like how colorful it is. Dan, over to you. Hey, everyone. I'm head of marketing at AI Fund, Enjoying's Venture Studio. Calling to you from the side of a lake here in beautiful Polka knows PA and looking forward to chatting about how I've been using cloud to make good content faster and drive alignment with the internal stakeholders. Round us out, Amanda, over to you. Hi, friends. I'm Amanda Natividad. I am Chief Evangelist over at Spark Toro, the audience research tool. I will be talking about using AI to help you think better, research things, learn better. I'm also author of the fourth coming book, Zero Click Marketing, where there is a chapter on AI, but that's not repurposed for here. This is brand new stuff. Unfortunately, this backdrop does represent my personality. Take that for what you. Your couch looks sick. I think that's fortunate. There's Legos in the corner. By the way, if you have little kids, know that you can build up that strength to not be in pain when you step on Legos. They don't hurt me anymore. Hey, big of you. Little Tony Robbins walk on the Legos. Okay, good. All right, Dave, tell us what happens if someone wins this thing. If you are not the most charismatic but have the best play of the day, what is in it for you? Yeah, so we're actually rolling out a new prize, where if you win, I'm going to go stay your house and watch your kids for a whole week, and we're going to video it for LinkedIn. No, the winner gets, I thought we had a slide for this. I don't know where it is. You get the world famous Exit 5 live trophy. We actually engrave a trophy and send it to your house, which you can display there on one of your bookshelves, or Dan, when you get back from the Poke Nose, you can put it in your office. If that's you, Amanda, you can put it right there. Jenny's got a spot on the shelf. I see right there plus an Exit 5 swag box. And then I think the biggest one is our newsletter has really been awesome. Our newsletter has been crushing it lately. I think people really want real examples, real stories from B2B marketers. And so you'll get featured in our newsletter 63,000 people get that every single week. We'll blow up your LinkedIn by featuring you in that newsletter. All right. Let's get our first speaker up here, shall we? Yeah. Let's do it. All right, Chris. Chris Turner Tech Magic set us off. Hi, everybody. I'm Chris Turner. I lead content marketing efforts at Tech Magic. I am a team of ones. So a AI is pivotal to the work I do. And just to preface all of this, I classically trained as a newspaper reporter. So the way I think about AI workflows is very old school content production workflows from like back in the day. So as I move through this, just keep in mind these are based in the oldest of traditions. With AI, one of the best things I tell the people is input equals output. If you are really organized, have a sound strategy, have all of your research and information compiled, that makes AI enabled to create content that is on point speaks to what you're trying to do and is of interest to the customer. That is pivotal. I also say iteration is key. You're not going to have a perfect pass on anything on the first time. This isn't magic, it's technology. So iterate, iterate, iterate. Tell the AI what you want it to do and get your content there. One of the other things I am an evangelist of is setting up specific agents for designated purposes. We'll get into that a bit on the next slide, but super important. Also, loading your AI with all relevant information, again, it doesn't know your brand, your standards, the proof points you use, how you speak to customers, arming it with that will give you a better result. And again, creating specific instructions for each agent, totally important. Be specific, not general, with everything you do with AI, because again, if it doesn't know it may hallucinate, and then one thing I've done is built in actual self-reviews in all of my AI tools. So it can evaluate the content it writes. Let me know if there's anything missing or what needs to be worked on. And then I can evaluate that from an editing standpoint as opposed to a drafting content creation standpoint. What this all makes possible is creating content at scale, really amping up your efforts. Once you have your strategies laid down, you can basically build out now a digital team below you to work on the various content functions, from blogs to industry articles, to executive content, all that kind of stuff. You can also connect your AI to your CMS, so everything is easily uploaded, and enables you to move things more quickly. And then obviously one thing I've been doing with it is creating CTAs that speak to content specifically to drive more SQLs. And then for the AI agents, I've created things that I find very useful are creating a general content marketing producer trained on your brand to write a variety of content, ranging from short articles to long form pieces or research. Another thing I've created is a blog writer. It's trained on the brand, connected to HubSpot and WriteSonic, pulls in all that great LLM-backed data, so we're creating content that resonates on the internet, both where we're strong and where we're weak as a business. My another tool I've created is what's called a content prospector and outreach tool, which crawls our content that we've created as a business, through our customer results framework, and then can tee up comms for prospects and customers for our SDRs to create communications that are more on point and speak specifically to the customers we're trying to reach. And then I also have just created this week an industry article writer to write more industry related content, things that are not necessarily brand specific, but speak more to the auto repair industry. For the rest of the year, I'm looking at creating a social media producer with our social media leader, and then also looking at some type of voices, sister for repackaging content for executives. Then in a nutshell, the future is now. I always say talk to AI like it's a starship computer if you've ever watched Star Trek, how they talk to the computer and have it hone in and give it specific instructions, it's the same way with talking to AI. Give it clear parameters for what you want it to do, and it will return a better result than something that is loose to our flimsy. Hook it up with the right tools and databases, so again, it has all of that information on the backend to create content and really think about what you're doing and make data driven decisions versus decisions that you just think is a human being. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, nothing is ever perfect the first time in AI, and iterate, iterate, iterate. Always keep iterating with everything you do to get it where it needs to go, and also teach the AI when you're doing that. Say, I want you to do X, not Y next time. Remember this, you can also create style notes for the instructions on the backend. But in a nutshell, these are the rules and procedures I use to scale content. Like I said, we've been able to increase blog traffic, 700% since I started in March. So these have been really successful, and I'm super proud of everything we've been able to do here. - Amazing, with two seconds to spare, you've got your academy music, lovely. I'm going to read out a question from the chat that I want to double click on. When you say you're iterating with your agents, what processor are you talking about? Are you sending your edits back to the agent? Like, what is your process for iterating and making sure your agent is not producing slop? - So I will go through paragraph by paragraph and actually edit in the AI with the agent, viewing it in instructions, as if I had a junior writer sitting next to me and I was talking to them. That is how I talk to the AI. Treat it like it is literally a writer working on a piece, something like, hey, you're too loose here, you need to tighten this up. These facts don't necessarily align with what we're trying to say or, hey, our customer results framework needs to be featured here and you really need to tighten this up. So again, when I go through and talk to the AI, it's really giving it a strategic point of view that it may not have necessarily from what it knows, but again, I'm acting as the editor to get it on point. That makes sense. - That makes a ton of sense. Dave, you got anything or should I keep going here? - I think it's a refreshing to hear that because I think the very JV level to do this is to just have AI just like, yeah, one shot at a blog post and it's like, cool, now you have a shitty blog post, but the way that Chris is using it is like, that's the creative companion and it's like, anytime I've made a mistake in hiring agency, hiring a contractor, freelancer, whatever, it's always been on me because I didn't write a good enough brief and I like to take that mindset with how we work with these AI tools. It's like, ask a better question, you'll get a better answer. And I think if I showed you how, yes, I'm using AI to write it a bunch of copy, but if I actually showed you how much I'm putting in to the back and forth and the editing and the prompting like, there's a lot there and that's kind of the secret sauce and so I like to hear that. - Absolutely. - Like that there from Chris. - And Dave, that's like hitting it right on the head. I am a person who begins the process and I am a human being who ends the process. So AI comes in in the middle, but I am steering the process from beginning to finish so that no slop is coming out. - No slop, good job Chris. - No slop. - All right. - You'll notice all of the speakers are wearing black because death to slop, all right, Holly. I'm going to reset my timer here. - All right, I'm ready for the timer. Five, four, three, two, one. Let's go. - Let's go. - Okay, so I'm going to talk about everything that we're doing with our content. Before the prompt and after the prompt, a lot like what Chris said, what that looks like for us. So a little bit of level setting first of all here. So Marka Bay, I recently rebranded, which means our awareness is low and we've got a lot of rebuilding we need to do. We are also a startup that's selling content quality tools to content and marketers. So we have an ICP that can spot AI slop in two seconds flat. So shipping mediocre content for us is simply not an option. We also though are in this time where AI search is really changing the game and there's a certain amount of meetings to feed the machine that we feel beholden to, but at the same time that cannot let us be a reason to put something out there that we feel like we can't stand behind and doesn't actually serve our audience. So the true north that we have for the content that we're creating is that everything we publish, even if our goal is really just to be cited by an LLM, has to deliver real value to an actual person who's doing content marketing. And the ethos that I have around this is that we are too small of a team with entirely too much to do to spend even a second on content that isn't actually serving our target audience. So let me walk you through a little bit of the workflow that we have and you can see here, I've sort of mapped out where we have the human and the loop elements where we're using AI. Like a lot of teams, you know, in this draft stage, we've got a really great prompt in project and cloud that we love that we call Markup's pen that we're using to generate the content. But I specifically want to talk about the human effort that's going in at the idea stage and then the AI tools that we're using in the review stage to help us with our content. So on the idea side, what's going in, we use this, you know, pretty standard customer lifestyle framework to help us make sure that we are creating to first content across this whole funnel. It can be really easy when you're using AI to help you generate ideas and generate content to get really stuck in one of these. And then you're really missing opportunities with audiences who are falling in other parts of this funnel. So we are admittedly really focused on the first three here. But keeping this frame of reference really helps us ensure that we're meeting the needs of the audience that we're trying to reach and is a great sort of guiding light for us. And then we have, you know, our internal expertise, keyword research that we're doing. We've got a great partner on the SEO side with Provisible. And then obviously using AI to ideate as well. But having that framework for us really does a lot and just keeping us honest of, are we really meeting the needs of the audience and putting content out there that's helped answering the questions they care about? Now, I'm going to talk about the review side of things. And admittedly, I am the beauty of marketing at MarketBi. I'm about to tell you how we use MarketBi to actually help us with the review part of our content. And I'm telling you this because it has really changed the way that I review my content once it's created. I think we have all been in that vibes only sort of review of like, I'm doing the manual check. I feel like, you know, it's met the mark, the vibes feel right, but I can't necessarily like categorize what that is or feels like. MarketBi is really trying to help me prove that review process so that I can look at my content through a couple of the lenses that I really care about. And in addition to my own manual review, helping me get really guided inline edits around things like brand voice. The first one is that we're trying to. trying to talk to you are all the links that we put in the content actually working and pointing to the things that we think they're pointing to. Have I written paragraphs in a way that if they get pulled out of context, they're still going to make sense. And rather than going to clot and saying, Hey, rewrite all of this for me in my brand voice. I've already done the work of getting my content out. I've done some review like I want really specific feedback about what I'm creating and this gives me that and I can use it in my Google Docs or I can use it in clot as well and be specific about the types of feedback I want to get and what I care about for that particular output. Now, let me tell you how we know that this is working for us being able to be focused on both that human side and on the AI side. This is a quote that we had from a prospect call last week who unprompted told us that our GEO was working because he had been searching and AI found a blog post that really resonated with him went to the website, signed up for the product, got on a call with our sales team and shared this feedback, which is exactly the type of validation you would hope to get. But the data tells us a similar story as well. We've seen a 32% increase in the engagement rate on our organic traffic in the last month. And when we share our content through third parties, we see a 60% plus engagement rate on that content and people spending several minutes on our site, either on other blogs or on other parts of our pages. So that tells us that the content we have is resonating that people are spending time with it and not just bouncing. So excited to have shared this with all of you. Thank you so much. If you want to give it a try, you can scan the QR code or you can go to markup. AI. Let me do this sound. Yeah, this sound like that. Oh, there it is. Okay, nailed it. Daesh, you go first. Yeah, I am curious. I think like in an AI world, we can generate content so quickly. I would be curious, if your time is a pie, what percent of the time is going towards updating existing content that you already spent the time writing versus net new? And the increase, like you've obviously seen that your geo is working. Is that through old that's been updated? Is that net new? How are you thinking about where your time is going? Yeah, so we are spending a lot of time on net new, but what you're point about reviewing old content is certainly relevant. As part of the rebrand, we also changed our ICP. So I had a lot of content that was speaking to a slightly different audience that we've needed to update and review over time. And our previous band had been around for 20 years. So that's a lot of content to review. So we're able to look at that at scale and go back and make updates to things. That's where our SEO partner has really been valuable to us as well, helping us focus on the content that's actually still relevant for us and not wasting time on content. That isn't going to help us at all. But where we see valuable traffic and where we see an opportunity to still leverage that content in a way that's meaningful, being able to go back and review that content over time has been super helpful. But I would say we have a pretty good balance between what we're trying to create. That's net new and meeting the moment, but also like making sure that everything we have out there is still accurate and consistent. I got one. This is a question from our chat Maria just resurfaced for us. But how do you push back on the business if they're essentially asking for check box content? We need more of this. We need more that just kind of making content for the sake of content. Yeah, I have this conversation a lot. It can feel really easy, especially for someone to come in and say, yeah, we just need to publish a whole lot of blog posts like sure that may serve certain purposes. But at the end of the day, like, we are still a business of people selling to other people and the people that we want to talk to are the people I want to read the content. So that does it like naserve one end goal, but not really all of it for me. So I write that off. Thank you, Holly. Lots of good questions for Holly and Chris are getting the chat. Get in the chat, get in the Q&A. And then there are some questions to like, share your prompt. All of that is great to do in the community because you can copy paste. It's great. Next up, we've got our speaker, Megan. Hello, Megan. Nice to be here. Dave and Dasha. Okay. I think we're ready to go. I'm Megan. I'm currently the director of brand of demand marketing at intensify. Like I said, I grew up in content marketing. So I just will always believe great content is the heart and soul of your brand and demand campaigns. And I can't be convinced otherwise. So add intensify our superpower is building content by markers for markers. We pressure test our own solutions. We try to be our own best customer. We build the how to guide the playbooks like as we go. And we're definitely using AI to help during that process. But I took a slightly different route for today's play because like one of the hardest things we do as marketers prioritize. And so whether we're in a session like this or we're scrolling links in, we might feel like we're playing ketchup or we need to be two steps ahead. And so when I think back to like our how to guys and our bread and butter, I wish those would get our brand discovered. But we do have a gap and they're a great offer for our page strategy. But they don't do much for organic visibility. So we know we can win people over once they get to us and know about us. But we also need to win in the AEO space. So my play is an automated AI agent that creates web content not for the people to browse, but for the LLM's to crawl and site and AI responses. So by automating that piece, it frees up my small screen to get back to the human content. So outsource the robot content, keep the human content. Here's what the agent looks like. So it looks like a back end. I'm going to let the screen reporting run because it's two complex capture and one screenshot. But where the human elements come in is that I can plug in the exact briefs from our product marketing team. All the details included, I can also build out a knowledge base that the agent needs more source documents and our brand guidelines are baked into. There are 23 steps in this very linear agent. It took a real lift. They're set up up front, but now it runs by itself. So the flow is it's researched and right. It gathers competitive and keyword evidence about a topic compiled into a content brief and then writes a full article from that brief, creating a WordPress draft ready to go. So although there's some of the nodes here up top, I have research notes that's pulling from four sources. We have profound citation pages for the topic, which pages LLM they're citing and why Google search results, what's actually ranking keyword ideas filtered down to the usable set and perplexity search feeding the FAQ writer. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is sponsored by Zoom webinars. Zoom webinars lets you host polished, engaging webinars that actually drive pipeline. We recently switched to Zoom webinars for exit five live. I don't know if you've seen this. It's been everywhere. I think our conversation about webinars, everyone's talking about webinars right now. Let's do great webinars. That's what we're talking about, right? I've been super happy since we moved over to Zoom. Just really the high quality, it just, something feels different. Our webinars feel professional and polished. Our media team, shout out to Marissa and Rhea. They've been putting a ton of work in behind the scenes to get this thing right and it really helps us run these exit five live sessions and put on a performance. This is not a webinar. It actually feels like our performance and the results have been there. Our attendees and our teams been really happy. The platform gives you everything you need to run a real event from branded registration built in promotional tools, live engagement features and post event follow-up that helps you convert attendees into pipeline. That's a difference between hosting a meeting and running a great event. If you're a BDB marketer with a webinar program that needs a reboot or you're thinking about building one, you should go and check out Zoom webinars, right? You know Zoom, but go and check out the webinar product and come to one of our upcoming exit five live sessions every other Friday. It's two Fridays a month. You can see it in action. Check them out, check our sessions out. I think it really gives a good example of what you can do. Go and check them out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's Dave. This episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funneled, demand-gen agency. Look, I personally hired them twice. I think I was the very first customer before I was even a thought leader just when I was a VP of marketing, a real marketer back in the day, right? CGM was one of the best agencies that I've ever hired. I think that's because they understand the job. The founder John came from this background, knows what it's like, knows the life of a marketing leader, and they help high growth, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They offer the combination of AEO, modern paid advertising strategy, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you, and this works because they were started by a former VP of marketing. Like I said, John, he really gets this space. I think that matters. By the way, for B2B tech companies, CGM has a special offer for people who listen to this podcast. You can get two free sessions focused on media planning to learn what channels are driving the best ROI, how much you should be investing in demand, capture, versus creation, and how to invest up funnel effectively. Hey, this is a really smart offer. So go check it out, compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Go check this out. Get some free help. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Bye-bye. And so if I didn't say this already, this agent is built and profound. So we've been using it since January. It's our AEO tool. I can drag and drop the nodes from a library of available sources, tweak the inputs, and then string them together with a series of LLM prompts. After the research stage, we have our synthesizing nodes. So instead of dumping all of that evidence into one giant prompt, we run separate LLM prompts that organize the findings piece by piece. So chunking it in this way, it makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot when a node fails because if anyone's built an agent like a very easy for that to happen and you're always trying to figure out what for open the process. For example, one node will find AEO opportunities. The gaps are missing. Another builds the page outline. So they're structured before the full article gets written. And then next comes the writing nodes. One LLM node put it all together and reads the brief, the outline, the FAQs, and the internal linking opportunities. And finally, perhaps the most underrated integration is that it will automatically populate this draft in WordPress for me. And often, I mean, it's just a copy paste from a doc, but you're not pulling it from cloth to put in a word doc to upload. It will be there waiting for me. It looks like this a profound draft. I had it set up that way. There are a few final formatting touches and this is where the human check comes in. I read it through. One of my favorite features is that the hyperlinks that it found those in-line linking opportunities. It will be in line. I could just go in and hyperlinks them and put the metadata in the right place and add an image, but they're almost ready to go. Finally, we have some results. So this is really new. I think a lot of you are eight years strategy is less than six months old. We started in January and we're still building the playbook on a really small team. How do we make this work for us? I went through an agent building cohort with profound to get it to speed fast. It was really helpful. It'll be a few months before I can confidently share the results of this strategy, but here's some small results since I started posting using this agent at the topic level. I'm seeing visibility increases. So for website visitor resolution specifically, I went from zero visibility to nine to 11 percent in just a couple of months. So we're going to keep monitoring that over time. But that's all I have. Epic. This is so epic. There's so many questions for you in the chat that you should go back to after. One question that comes to mind for me is like, I'm sure that the first kind of like step-by-step flow that you came up with wasn't perfect to save other marketers some time. What is something that you had to go back and fix that you were like, "Ah, I'm actually going to change this step," or whatever. Good question. And I can't remember if it was this particular agent, but when I went through this cohort session with profound, I did a lot of trial and error. And one thing that happened to me a couple times was that it was hallucinating URLs. And I couldn't tell it first because it was populating URLs that it was, and I was like, "Oh, that does look right." So I had to build into my prompts to check. So I think the benefit of building this agent in profound is that there are templates. And so I used one of their templates to start, looked at how they were written, the LLM prompts that string all the nodes together, and then kind of went in and added to them. And sometimes I would add to the prompts to saying, "If you need more information, call it out." So that it would almost like teach me when there was something broken, and it would call it, "Oh, actually, don't have the right research data to be able to populate xyz." So it's very challenging to get it to work like a puzzle, but very satisfying when it does work. I bet. Awesome. Cool. Thank you for sharing that with me. A lot of people are interested in your flow in the chat. Please go help them. All right, great job. Get in the chat. Real quick. We got a couple more people to run after this, but I just want to give you a quick PSA from the house. So one of the things that is getting a bunch of action and traction right now is our exit five podcast. And you may be listening to this. It's currently called the Dave Gerhard show, but nobody cares about me anymore. And so we're rebranding it soon to the exit five podcast, because I think we've created the number one resource for you if you work and be to be marking. But I wanted to since dashes here on the show today, she's actually co-hosting with me now. She's taking on a bunch of interviews, getting a bunch of insight, and the response has been awesome. So just real quick in the chat. Does anybody listen to our podcast? If you do, let us know. And we want to do a quick little thing. I listen on Spotify, Apple Podcast, maybe on YouTube, take a screen shot of it. I want to see that on LinkedIn. You could take a screen shot of it. Could she just post it on LinkedIn and tag dash and I look at all that. Look at all these people in the chat. We love that. Take a screen shot of that tag dash and I on LinkedIn. I would love to just spread the word about this podcast. And then like at the very least, I don't know if you know this right now. Dan came up with this amazing social campaign for our team here at exit five. And we will deploy the exit five army, the eight or nine of us that are just so active and hot on LinkedIn right now. We'll go like your stuff. We'll comment on it. And maybe dash and I will trade some DMs and we'll send someone maybe a secret gift. So do this now. Or if you already have written a post today because you know, LinkedIn only liked one post today. Do it tomorrow. Tag dash and I we'd love to just see who on LinkedIn, you know, throw a little tag. That's a little social proof, right? And I will say you can rely on the entire exit five team to descend upon your LinkedIn post. We will not leave you hanging. You were not going to put yourself out there and get no likes. We are going to be in the comments. We're going to like a repost. You're going to feel the love. It might honestly be your top performing LinkedIn post, depending on how active you are. So at a minimum, you will have some LinkedIn love. At a maximum, you will learn a lot about marketing by listening to the podcast. Come on in and push us. Keep us honest. We do this for you. We want to share what real people are doing in marketing. And that's a big value prop. So check out the pod. Dash a good job so far. We're collecting feedback. We'll see what the ratings and reviews say. One guy once left me a review and said to me, Kate, one star. How was this guy ever of VP of marketing? He asked his guest the most dumb and obvious questions. I'm like, she talks on you, buddy. That's what being a good host is all about. All right. Let's send it. Jenny's up here. Jenny from the bit Lee. She's here. Teach us. We're back. Not quite. Jenny from the block, but Jenny from the bit Lee. Yes. Yeah. You got me. Good job running with that. Okay. I'm a jada kiss remix version on the locks remix version guy, but that's for driving. Another combo. Yeah. I love that. Well, I'll be at drive. So I'm excited to try to work about that. Okay. So I'm going to walk through how I use AI to turn original research and who a content differentiator. And the example that I'm going to use is the marketing visibility report, which is a pillar asset that we put together based on a survey we conducted with user evidence of more than 250 marketers. So we want to get a pulse on how marketers are approaching performance budgets and how they make decisions. And what I'm going to talk through is how we went from that raw data into a narrative that we could own and how we got there. So a few other speakers have touched from this. So I won't go too long on this area, but investing in the decision environment first, I think is he. So I am a firm believer in constraints breed creativity. And that's even grew when using AI and you're working with a robot. So setting up the project and starting with original data research, anything proprietary that you want to work from. And then layering on the constraints. So yes, think positioning and messaging, but I think arguably even more important is like, what do we not want to say? What are areas we don't want to tread into and make those be the constraints that helps you? And then my biggest takeaway for this section is really just better constraints, better outputs. It's tedious upfront, but you got to do it. Next for creating a data report. Once you have the environment built, I don't just upload the data and say, like, tell me what the story is, like, what do you think? I ask you to give me five possible narratives based on the data. And then for each one, explain like the tension that we're seeing, and then how closely that actually aligns with our positioning. So that's gives me something a lot more useful to work with than just like, here's the first draft. It's not the best draft ever. So this is where the human judgment comes in, and we ask ourselves, is this actually differentiated? Like, is this a story that we can own or that we even want to own? I think AI is great for circling the possibilities, but then again, the human judgment needs to come into actually see if that's aligned with what you're trying to convey. So going beyond just like the basic x percent of marketers say this, I think the next really important step and how you can use AI to help you get there is ask for each major finding that you have, show me what the obvious interpretation is and then go deeper. So what behavior or decision or a consequence does this create? So for example, a finding might be marketers can't clearly see what's driving her results. The obvious takeaway is maybe measurement is getting harder for them, but what actually is the impact of this. So the bigger meaning is like, markers are less confident in their data. So they rely more on instinct. And now your headline is 56% of marketers rely on gut instinct to make decisions. That's a lot more compelling than just measurement is hard. So in this heart of working on your report, be very explicit about the evidence too, as people have mentioned, AI hallucinates. So have it distinguish between the research and what it actually supports, and then have it tell you like when it is inferring things because it will make stuff up. Everyone's experienced that. This is my favorite part or the most valuable thing that I found is treating your edits as training data. So instead of just saying make it better, make it pop, like make this sound more like us, which you could do a thousand times and still end up with something sloppy. I say like hate the bad draft, write it amazingly, like write it the best way you could underwrite it, just a few sentences, then have plot or whatever your tool is, tell you like what was changed here, the tone, the structure, the pace thing, whatever. And then it will say like you removed insulated language or you shorten the setup and then you can turn that into a skill that you use moving forward for the rest of the content you create. You did find the right angles for different channels to make this content work harder for a PR angle. You might want to look at the larger market tension for SEO angle. You might want to go deeper on an answer that's in the survey or the data. This worked really well for us. It became a great source of own content for us across earned coverage. And if you want to check it out yourself, scan this bit link QR code and you can read the data report. Since you probably don't see the chat during that such a great idea. This is a great idea. Nice. Thanks Jenny. That's really good editing advice. My favorite was someone said better constraints, better output, Papa John's. I'm stealing that. I actually got some questions in the chat for Jeff. I sure do. Yeah. People love your loop suggestion. What makes something story worthy or sorry like newsworthy? Yeah. I mean, I think the easiest thing to do is to tie into something that's relevant right now like a topic that's trending and find your way to connect your data to something that's already being talked about. That's the easiest way to do it. But yeah, it's kind of having a perspective that you feel like you haven't heard a hundred times over again. And that's where using original data is a great way to stand out because inevitably you're sharing a statistic that had been been cited elsewhere, something new. So I always love leading into data surveys, like anything that can give you something you need to speak to that doesn't already exist. Love it. Sweet, cool. Go read the love in the chat. It's going to give you the warm and fuzzies. Get in the chat. Answer some questions. All right, let's bring up Dan. Thank you. Here we go. All right. You know, this whole thing is like Barney Stinson's mix capers all rise in no love. Just loving you, the editor. That's good. That's what we need these days. We're also dopamine depleted because of our stupid phones and TikTok. So this is what it takes to get people to stick around these days. So let me jump into it here. I want to talk to you about two quick things about getting using AI to go faster to content and faster to the internal buy-in. If you've forgotten my intro from the beginning, I lead marketing at Enjoying's AI Fund. It's a venture studio where we co-found and build new startups. The one man band marketing or the fund as well as advising our 40 plus portfolio companies. So let's jump right in here. First, faster to content. What does that mean? Basically, you know, there's a lot of content that is very time sensitive. Think event recaps. Knitten has a clock on it. You got to get it out quickly. I used to have a process before AI where something specific to our organization is we work with a lot of high level entrepreneurs as advisors for our companies. They're in high demand. It's still tough to get under calendars. The old process, I didn't review them. Hand off the transcript and materials to a freelancer. It takes a week, two weeks, three weeks. By that time, the VIP has moved on and it's never going to get approved because they are doing something else. New system, interview the VIP, identify the key hook while we're talking. What is the most interesting thing about them as a human, a bison entrepreneur as a successful person, provide cloud with all the materials I would have given the freelancer, the transcript, the LinkedIn profile, it's so long. And I also kind of give it this hook. The key things that I want in this finished piece like this bit of experience on their LinkedIn is nothing. This bit of experience is actually really important and we need something to the audience. I have a first draft instantly. And then depending on my schedule, the VIP gets to review the draft that same day we talked or maybe the next day. They're still thinking about it. The whole thing moves quickly and they give it the stamp of approval and we can move on. The result for this is it ended up working so well. I actually allocated my marketing budget better. I eliminated the line for freelance copywriting and redirected it toward advancing tools which drives a lot more value for us. What makes this process work, first is giving AI what I want up front, the hook, the human color. It doesn't do a very good job of figuring that out from a mass of transcripts and so on and editing what comes out. As everyone's already said here, you know, AI is an okay writer, but it's not great as one shot. So it gets it close to good enough and I can polish it. I haven't said this works really well. If you want to implement it for simple deadline driven content, it's not great for scroll stopping copy. That means the unit touch. Regarding the cloud watermark everyone keeps asking about. I did run a few of these projects through pangram. My scores ranged from 51% AI to 0% AI. I really don't think the cloud watermark is an issue. Just make sure your content doesn't sound like slop. Close jump into the other thing. That's getting content out. Now, before you get anything out, there's usually all kinds of alignment you need to get internally. Getting your executive team aligned on your strategy, your budget, timelines, all that kind of stuff. And how many times have you walked into a presentation to share your idea and it gets derailed because the executive wants to focus on one. Little aspect that maybe is not the core of your thing, or they ask you a really good question that you forgot to anticipate. So I built a cloud skill for my key stakeholders that I work with, that I report to an olem meeting notes, Slack messages, Google Doc feedback, that kind of thing. First, got a really great analysis of what do these people really care about? So how can I orient my document around that? Then I turned it into a skill for future work. So now whenever I write something, it runs through the stakeholder skill and they get a document that is already looks like what they want. Now, fun fact here is how this works. I used this skill to negotiate approval for my drive ticket. So I'll see you all in a week or two for that. Lastly, I want you to have all these skills. So if you are a code, there's a link. I'd use Bitly because they're here today. I'll drop that in the chat for you too. But basically, it's a set of MDs, walk down documents, which if that sounds like Greek to you, give it the cloud. It will literally walk you through step-by-step everything you need so that you can build this your own. You'll get the content skill, you'll get the anti-AI writing skill, and you'll get the stakeholder skill. So you can have more productive meetings with your stakeholders. Perfect time management. That is amazing. Dave, you got anything or should I fire away with a question here? I know the answer to that question. I'm going to let you lead. Alphabet, would you cure us to you? Yeah, you would go for yourself. I would go for yourself. Okay. Perfect. All right. Dan, how are you connecting increases in organic traffic to your content and AI workflows, especially when AI overviews are reducing clicks? And for a small team, like anything that you've picked up on that works especially well for a small team that has limited resources, what's actually helping you grow your traffic? I would say traffic is not our main focus based on the people we're working with. So I'm not the best person to ask for that. And then any tools in particular that you're using and being able to get your team bought in on you using as a team of one? Cloud is probably the one we go deepest on and I have a ton of other skills like this. One of the best things you can do in general as a marketer is give your boss a quick report every week what you did that is moving the needle for the business, what you need help with. And it's hard to pull out information together and having to go the thought of digging through my calendar and my Slack. So what did I do this week? That was important. That's a blocker that makes me not want to do it at all. So to get past that on Friday afternoon, I just have all these things connected to cloud via MCP and I just tell cloud what did I do this week and it gives me a little report. I can fix it as needed and it goes to the executive team and it makes these decisions so much easier when it's budget time because I see I'm doing stuff and that's probably one of the biggest hacks I can give you as a small marketing teams get to your executive team on your side and then everything else goes easier. I love it. I think that's something that as marketers, we always knew like, okay, you should be managing up. You should be reporting on the things that you're doing that are moving the needle. But it's like, okay, it's Friday afternoon I'm trying to like go spend time with my family. Am I going to sit down and write a report with cloud and all my tools hooked up like, yeah, because it's going to take me like 30 minutes and it's going to be the thing that gets something approved very quickly. So I think that's where it breaks though, like one of my biggest pet peeves about people, everyone, you know, with internal communication is like, I think being a marketer is understanding your audience and knowing that sure, if you just rush to send your boss something at four o'clock on a Friday, like that's actually like the worst time probably to send it. I love that advice. Also, just want to wrap our teams going nuts and nobody else can see it. But our team is going nuts in the chat because we're like, who's the dad? Like, did we plant them? He built a business case checker. Like, who is this guy? Like, this is amazing. Did we plant them? So I love that. All right. Not a plan job. Let's shake it over to plant water. The infant hatchet. The lady who just invented the in there was the typo of Freudian slip in the chat earlier. She said, don't just look on Amazon for the infant hatchet. Awesome. All right, guys, let me know the AI visibility for infant hatchets and that would love to rank for that. That'd be really important to me. No, but shout out to BlueBottle for their instant satchits of New Orleans ice coffee. Delicious. I have it. I also mixed in my college and peptides. Let's go. Okay. So today, we are going to talk about using AI to help you instead of having it just your job. So all of the speakers today had some really good advice on how they're using like agentic workflows, how they're using it to do things better. I wanted to do something a little bit different with I try to do something different, right? On how I'm using it to think better, to learn faster, do my work more efficiently. And I know that like everyone who presented at least right would agree with like, don't just have AI do your job. It's like, have it do things to make your job easier so that you can be better at it, right? So, all right. So if other thing is I want to caveat this with, to be clear, I'm not anti AI, I'm really just anti outsourcing or thinking and anti outsourcing your reps. Because at the end of the day, like, yeah, you can use these tools to work faster, to work better, but you still got to do the reps, right? You still got to put in the work because at the end of the day, you were the one accountable to what you're posting. I do want to talk about a little bit about taste because you only developed that sense of taste through putting in the reps, right? So having chat GPT do your job for you, but using it to learn faster and move past your own shitty ideas. Yeah, let's do that. I started thinking about like, truly like how am I using AI in my day to day to be better? You know, and so one thing that came up, I'm going to have all my personal stuff, but that's not what we're here for today. It's for work stuff. And the last time I remember, I just viscerally being like, I need help is I was reading this research. This is a research from AirOps and my buddy, Kevin Indig. This is about the fan out effect. What happens between a query and a citation. Stay studied all these AI prompts. and the way queries are conducted fan out queries. Could you put in a prompt? It fans out, runs a bunch of queries. That's all I know on that. But I was reading this, because I was in any of this was important, and I was, I don't really understand it. So I was reading it, and I was like, hey, primary similarities, schema markup. I kind of know what schema markup is. A Jason LD don't really know this, right? This is directly from their report. I don't know, maybe you all know this. You're probably all smarter than me. But I wasn't, who's Jason? I don't know. Why is the thing spelled that way? Then I was like, well, I'm going to use chat GPT to learn this better. And that helped me just think through, OK, what are my rules for learning with AI, right? Because I don't want to just give AI this report and be like, I don't know, like just learn it for me, right? I still want to know it, right? I still want to understand what there is to learn there. I want to think about what are the things I need to know as a marketer and creator. So these are the rules I came up with. Maybe you will have your own as well. One is, I always read the original source. I never just put the report into chat GPT, cloud, whatever, and say, hey, do this for me. I always read it first. Next, sure I might ask for a summary, but it's always better to ask specific questions. Like, maybe it's, hey, can you explain the implications of the schema markup? Like, why should I know that? Why is this different from SEO? I don't know, whatever that question might be. Third, when you are faced with what feels very abstract, ask for plausible examples to make the abstract concrete. Like, if you don't understand who is Jason, right? Ask it, like, oh, does that mean, like, or maybe ask, like, well, let's say I own an e-commerce company. How would I run this? What is the implication for me? Fourth, assume that the LLM will likely hallucinate. You know, we know these models are a lot better now, but they might still hallucinate. And then finally, if it's really dense, ask it to write in the format of your choice. Like, I like axiosis newsletters, and I use that. So I'll read the research. I'll have my opinion. I'll rant unfilteredly through Whisper Flow, which is a great tool. I'll dictate to chat GPT8, and I'll ask chat GPT8, like, what's interesting about what I said? What's notable? What's raw? And then I will go old school here, refine that edit in Google Docs. I will record my podcast, my zero click marketing podcast, record an edit in Riverside. It takes about 45 minutes to do all of this. And then got the downloads. So you have your podcast, right? Everyone knows that this is not brilliant, but everyone knows that it's a long game. You're tracking this stuff like day to day. It looks like this. But what you really want is, you know, up and to the right. So this is working for me. People are actually listening to my podcast. They are downloading it. It's growing. It's lovely. If you want to learn more from me, zero click marketing is my book. You can pre-order it as zero click marketing.co/book. And that is that. And I talked too long. - Now you're good. - More hatchets. - You did great. - I'm a whisper flow. I'm a whisper flow guy, but it's not been working for me as good as it used to. I don't know what's happening there. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you. We got Mercer's favorite seven top real quick, wherever you are at home right now, round of applause. But it is that time. Somehow we're 53 minutes into this thing. We've had almost 400 people here the entire freaking time, which is incredible. The roller coasters on the way up. But now we're gonna send the roller coasters back down because right now we need you to pick one winner. I don't want the most charismatic speaker. I don't want the funniest, you know, just because you said infant hatchets doesn't mean you're necessarily gonna win. Just because you know, you plug drive, our thing, we love you, doesn't mean you're gonna win. But I want to know, what's the one play? Who did you learn from today that gave you one play that you were gonna take out of this? The voting should be up on the screen right now. That's it. This is it. This is the moment who will have their name engraved on the next world famous exit five trophy. That's actually hand engraved by a man in Minnesota. It's not AI generated slop. We're still tallying right now. The thing is, it looks like ladies and gentlemen, congratulations to Jenny. Turning original insights and raw data into your content differentiator. I love this play, big fan way to go, Jenny. We love this because I love the idea of like original research being your own publishing company today. That's one of the ways to stand out create awesome stuff with AI. Okay, last question, I think that's it. We're on the way down here. Last question. Can you rate this session? We're data driven folks. We're marketers here too. You know, our team here, how was this? Was it helpful? Don't just rate this. Compare it to the other webinars you go to from other companies and other people that put these on, all right? Whoever just threw out the one, thank you for that. I know we see all these. That's okay. I appreciate it anyway. You're just being a hater for no reason. The five's in force is obviously where this is gonna be at. Thank you for all your feedback. We sweat this every single week. We treat eggs to five like a media company. We put a ton of effort into these. The quality of these continue to go up. So we appreciate, appreciate all your rating and your feedback and the basically 450 people who are here the whole time today. Marissa's just sending me all caps stuff and slack right now. I feel like we're getting kicked off the stage. But that's it. PSA from us. We're back here two weeks from today. We'll be back here. Let's roll the announcement slide if we got it. We're also gonna do a play where I think a bunch of people want to get more and hear more from these experts inside of our community. You can certainly do that. We also have something called our experts network where if you want to be participated, if you have something you want to share, you're like, man, I could have been on that session. I could have been talking about X. Well, great. We have that opportunity. You can apply to join our network of vetted experts. If you can't find that information, go to exit5.com or just email us high at exit5.com or find Maria on LinkedIn. We're back here Friday, September 4th, exit 5 live. We're gonna demo a bunch of agents. That should great to see you. Great effort out there. It's good to see you. Wait, can I do some ASMR with my cool mic? Yes, you can. Let's talk about agents. What's it like to ask? If you had these headphones, if you had the in here, wait till you see how these feel. Okay, next time you're by this channel. I got this one. I got goosebumps. All right, someone removed the number one. We're out of here. Thank you, everybody. Shout out to our team, exit5 team. Awesome job behind the scenes. Appreciate you all making this happen. We'll be back to see you back here in two weeks. Peace. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com. Our mission at exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Then there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk-free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you wanna become a member for the year. Go check it out learnmore exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. (upbeat music)