This Is the Future of AI-Powered Marketing...

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First, a quick backstory:

Earlier this year, I sold a SaaS product — a quiz builder for Shopify merchants, called Prehook.

In 2020, I co-founded Prehook with two friends, Az and Diederik, just as the world seemed to be closing in from the pandemic.

With my Prehook Co-Founders, Az and Diederik, enjoying the best sausages in Austin.

We decided to bootstrap the company, prioritizing our own autonomy and ownership.

It was a dream, what I always wanted to do: start a SaaS product, grow wildly, learn a lot and have fun. Sounds awesome, right?

But reality does have a way of smacking sense back in quickly.

We were a small team, and did many different roles — marketing, customer success, support, product, finance, partnerships, and so on.

Time and resources were limited.

This would be the perfect scenario to use AI. To automate and scale activities that I was doing all day, every day.

Unfortunately I didn’t leverage AI then.

Too busy working on what was immediately pressing to take a step back and learn how to use AI and automation.

Big mistake.

The crazy thing though is that AI has come so far in it’s use cases in just a few years!

We ended up selling the company in 2023.

It was a six-figure sale…but could it have been significantly more if we had more resources?

Possibly.

But that brings me to today. I am neck deep in AI — as a marketer at a leading AI content tool, Content at Scale, and using it to help with my day to day work.

And now I want to share actionable strategies on how marketers can take advantage of AI to become the best marketer possible.

Here’s how I plan to do this: every email will be focused on one specific marketing Strategy. And then include Use Cases, Prompts, Experiments and Resources so that you can try it out and see if it makes sense for your marketing life. SUPER 🦸‍♂️ 

So let’s get into it!

🎯 Strategy: Repurpose The Best Content on the Web (even if it’s not yours)

With Prehook, one of the priorities was to create thought leadership around a narrow niche: ecommerce quizzes, and zero party data (ie information that customers willingly share with brands via quizzes).

I wrote blog posts.

Hosted a podcast.

And did guest blog posts (AppSumo, MarketerHire, Speero, to name a few).

I was on a content hamster wheel.

The thing is, it took a ton of time. And I didn’t have time.

If I were to do it again, I would spend far less time on the content creation part.

Why?

Because AI would get me 80% of the way there.

Specifically, I’d use Content at Scale.

Content at Scale is an AI writing tool, built specifically for long form, SEO content.

Those blog posts that used to take me days to write….now cut down to minutes?!

Getting a high quality piece of content done instantaneously frees up so much time and resources to focus on larger strategic initiatives.

And that’s a huge unlock for all marketers.

And ultimately these days, content is the foundation of marketing that grabs attention….and customers.

📚 Use Case : Leverage Top-Ranking Content To Create Your Own Content

Even if you aren’t an expert or established thought leader in the space, Content at Scale is a tremendous shortcut to becoming an expert.

In short, with just one keyword, blog post, YouTube video, podcast, even a Google doc….you can create a 2500 word, SEO-ready blog post in a matter of minutes.

Create your blog post from a wide variety of sources.

It really is insane….and not from a biased perspective because I work there 😄 

This means that I could find the top-ranking results for my target keywords, say “ecommerce quiz”.

I could just add that keyword and use that as the basis for the post.

Or I could find the definitive video on YouTube, or a podcast and use that as the basis.

The Takeaway: Save time (and money) writing posts. Use AI to crank through a first draft, and edit and optimize from there. Reallocate the saved time to more high leverage activities.

Prompt: A General Framework for Working with AI

I described the Content at Scale tool in its simplest terms above.

In reality, you can customize a Content at Scale post to make it specific to your exact needs: customize the writing output to your brand voice, customize your call to actions, and more.

Whether you use Content at Scale, or any generative AI tool, the same principles apply: the more details and structure you add to your prompt, the better the output.

This applies to your tone of voice, writing style, ideal structure, content format, and more.

At a high level, here are some things that I include in each of my prompts.

Sticking with the Prehook example, suppose I want to come up with ideas for new keywords to write about.

I’d include:

  • Role or expertise: “You are a” or “Act as a”

  • Context: “You are a quiz builder for Shopify merchants. Your target audience are ecommerce marketing experts who want to capture more email leads”

  • Goal or Task: “Your goal is to come up with a list of 25 keywords to build awareness and Top of Funnel traffic.”

  • Examples: “Some keywords that work could be….”

  • Format: “Provide your answer in table format. Use the following headers in each column….”

Putting it all together (assume it’s to brainstorm content ideas):

“You are an expert content marketer and SEO, with the skills and experience to write in-depth content that ranks in search engines and drives organic traffic (the role).

The target audience are Shopify merchants and marketers that have brands (Context)

Your task is to create a content calendar for a Shopify app that creates quizzes. (Task)

Create a 3 month content calendar with the targeted keyword, 3 suggested blog titles, and a 2 sentence description of what to write about (Format and Details)

🔬 Experiment: Use An AI Detector

One thing that I’ve learned working in AI is that experimentation is critical. Rarely do things come out as you want in the first shot!

One way to experiment is to determine how your content is interpreted as AI content or not.

Content at Scale has one of the best AI detectors, totally free:

Run your content through the Content at Scale AI Detector to see if it is human or AI generatedhttps://contentatscale.ai/ai-content-detector/

One important side note: Google explicitly states that it rewards high-quality content, regardless of whether it’s generated by AI or humans. The most important factor is creating helpful, high-quality content. Just add your EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) as much as possible. More on Google’s AI policy here.

📖 Resource: A Content at Scale Overview

It’s much more helpful to see how it actually works.

Here’s a video with an overview of Content at Scale, and how you can use some of the features to 10x your marketing and content strategy:

And if you want to do a trial of Content at Scale, you can do so here: www.contentatscale.ai

The last resource: me! 😄

I’ve spent a ton of time learning, testing, and using these AI tools and use cases.

So if you have any questions for any specific use case, just hit reply and I’ll try to help out!

Stay Super, Marketers.

Gen

PS: I’m celebrating 11 year anniversary today 😃 …so we’ll probably just do our favorite activity, eat cake/ice cream.

2012 and 2023.