Linda Fanaras the B2B Brand180 Podcast Leveraging AI for Content Creation

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

ai, content, brand, audience, foundational documents, linkedin, target audience, persona, prompt, write, create, metadata, social media, strategy, topical, seo, page, faqs, understand, target

00:00

Hi. I'm Linda Fanaras, host of the B to B Brand 180 podcast, and CEO of Millennium agency. Today I'm excited to bring in Chuck Atkins, Founder of Tymoo and a seasoned expert in content marketing and leveraging AI. He has two decades of experience in website development, SEO and digital marketing, and he's going to bring us a wealth of experience today, particularly when it comes to content strategies and how to really use AI to elevate brand presence and connect more effectively. He has this concept called Title wave content platform. It's a suite of training, coaching and processes and also help brands create engaging content across both channel using AI. So welcome shop. God, great to have you here today. I'd love for you to share with the audience a little bit about yourself. Well, Linda,

00:53

thanks for having me a little bit about myself as it relates to what we're talking about today, I had a search so call it SEO, and the content agency for about 15 years in Denver, Colorado, sold it a few years ago, and have been out just working directly with brands still in the content marketing space, which can include social media and email. But yeah, that's a little background. It's all I've ever done. I even not to date myself, but I was even doing content is Google came along many, many years ago. So been been at this for a long time.

01:25

Yeah. So you're a true expert. That's great to hear. I think we need to talk a little bit more about the foundational work before actually leveraging the AI tools. And I think this is where a lot of businesses and marketers may go wrong. It's really how to use AI in the most effective way. Can you speak to the audience about that a little bit

01:43

when we first heard about chat GBT, or if you used a different AI tool, you go to the prompt and you start asking it to do things, to see what it can do. And you know, some people started with planning their vacation or doing a recipe or something personal, and some folks jumped right in and started applying it to their work, to their job, to their brand, and it's okay to start at the prompt and play along and see what happens. But But these foundational documents that are needed for a for a business or a brand, are things like, who's your target audience? So what kind of guidelines do you want to give AI when it's writing? What are your value props? What is your product and service? This concept of giving it some direction so that it can help you as an AI assistant is is fundamental. So there's a lot of work to be done before the prompt anytime that you're trying to do something for your business or your brand, and it's okay to start in the middle, right, get acquainted with it, but to really use AI as a marketing assistant, you have to have a strategy. You have to have intention, you have to have a target audience, and that those foundational documents are the starting point, actually the starting point that I teach and coach is your customer, is your target audience, and often the micro segmented down into multiple personas and target audience depending on exactly what you might be doing with your task. So that's a little bit about the foundational documents. And what is that? Ready? Fire aim, right. Aim first, you know before you fire off the prompts. Yeah,

03:16

exactly. And I think also it's important for our audience to realize that when you do look at tools like AI, you almost have to look at it from the perspective of okay. First of all, I need to train AI. And to your point, Chuck, okay, who is my audience? Who's my target audience? What am I trying to communicate? And are there any specific niches that you really need to cater to instead of coming back with generic copy? So I love to talk about micro segmenting the audience, because I think this also helps to really develop content that is much more in line with what the marketer or business or client is looking for. So can we speak about that a little bit? I think that's an important thing to

03:56

tackle today. Yeah. Well, one simple way for B to B to micro segment is to just to think about the different roles that might be involved in, in the the buying committee at your ideal client profile. So maybe there's the CFO, maybe there's the sales person, maybe there's a product manager, the CEO, like all of these, all of these different folks. You know that they're different roles at the ICP. So you could micro segment by role with the B to B. I often will have each one of these personas built out. Now it since I'm since I do a lot of Persona work, I will say, and we'll talk about this to you, but I have a persona building tool that, if you answer some quick questions, you can make these personas fast. And the reason that's important is, if we're talking about having maybe four or five personas into the buying committee of your target client, like it takes work, we do it faster. Maybe you micro segment by industry, so you have a persona in this vertical that you're targeting versus that one did you. Have to message our market to different folks, that becomes a persona, that becomes somebody that you can personify that way. When you go to work with AI, it knows who you're trying to talk to,

05:10

right, right? And it can be very, very targeted. As far as the communication and messaging is concerned. You know, there's a lot of different ways to use AI. You can use it to generate customer journeys, email, social media. I mean, the list goes on, but what about when it comes to actually creating metadata? How do you recommend our audience to use AI in a way that helps to identify maybe, you know, ways to improve SEO using AI?

05:42

Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, the most important piece of metadata you're going to have in a piece of content is going to be the page title. So what you know, like a lot of people will go to a prompt and say, write my page, or write my post or write my email, there's an entire thought process or prompting that can go into the 60 characters that make up your page title and where the keyword is placed, and, more importantly, what is the keywords you're targeting, right, right? You know, how, how competitive, or, you know, popular, is that keyword, or does anybody even type it? Maybe they don't. Maybe they don't even search it. So there's, there's concept of having using AI to help create ideas for your page title metadata that can be used as that, that leading indicator to Google about what the content of the page is about, is it is one way to for the metadata the other way. And this is a little advanced, but you know you can, you can use AI to help understand how to make the content more helpful, more comprehensive, because while the alt tags and the title tag metadata is important, it's also about all the different words that you use. Because if a piece of content has 1000 or 2000 words. What are those words that are being used? You want to cover as much as a topic as possible, and AI can help you with that. What four, five or six topics should I cover? You can ask AI that to make sure that you're creating a helpful, useful piece of content, because that that's what Google's doing, is they're going through your copy and saying, Hey, is this deserving to be in the top 10? Right? It's going to be in the top 10 in page one. It better be helping your target audience. That is what Google cares about most. Their last big algorithm update, which was in March of this year, was called the helpful content update. That is the benchmark. They don't care if you use AI. It better be helpful. It better be adding and contributing to the search experience for your target audience.

07:44

That's a great point too. So thanks for sharing that with our audience today. So if you were to take you know, I guess the question is, is trying to balance, you know, a unique voice that a brand had, the authenticity of using AI in a way that maybe is generated in a very like, what I'll call common way, that often with a very similar language. So how do you start to balance using that brand's unique voice and actually being able to leverage i into a way that can help build out effective content?

08:20

Yeah, one of my favorite techniques at the moment is to actually conduct video interviews of people that either are in the brand, they're the person that created or owns the brand, works for the brand, or somehow is associated when when you start with a video interview and you get the sound bites and the authentic language and nuances that a human brings to the table. Then as you go to use AI to build out that content, to write something, you get such a better piece of content that is authentic because it started from human perspective. Now I can do that with written word, and people can talk into their phones. There's different ways to start with authentic content. But by far, my favorite is to just jump on Zoom for 45 minutes, not to belabor, but, but. But typically, a 45 minute interview with someone who understands and is passionate about the brand, not even passionate. Just understands it can result in in multiple pages of content for the website or the blog, social media clips, video clips, just what is it that you know? What is it that you want to talk about? If I start there, the content ends up being so much more authentic and real than if you start at the prompt,

09:35

right? Well, so I would love to run through. I'm going to kind of quiz you and say, you know, how do you use AI to generate content for XYZ? And I'd love for you to give audience maybe 123, sentences. Good, solid takeaway, make sure you do this, or make sure you don't do that. So do you mind if we get what can we. Please

10:00

go for it. Quick answer then, yeah, let's walk through it. Time. You'll run

10:04

through it. So Alright, first of all, I would love you to tell us how you would use AI to craft compelling lines that really entice you to

10:15

click. Yes. So I actually would not start there at the way to get a headline usually happens after the content is written. Now I'll think about the hook. Initially. I will ask AI to say, hey, what? What is the hook that might be used on a LinkedIn post or, you know, something in social media, and that will be an opening paragraph, even if I have that hook in the beginning, once the content is written, I'm going to go back to AI and say, rewrite the hook. The hook is usually a little bit closer to the end of the process, all

10:53

right. And how would you use AI to generate maybe a helpful FAQ, oh, that's

10:58

a great so if you have your persona, and one of the things that we do with the persona immediately is figure out the pain points and the problems to be solved and and the value props with those items, I can use that data, usually with a product or service page, and create seven FAQs that I love putting on home pages because it really lifts up the SEO. But the writing of a question followed by an answer when you have your target audience, your brand promise, your value props, the things you're trying to solve is something that AI does really good at. So a real simple prompt with those inputs should give you a lot of FAQs,

11:42

perfect. So how would you approach writing product to service descriptions using informative and persuasive cut,

11:49

yeah. So, so the biggest thing I would do there is, is, as you write your prompt, you know, act like a copywriter. This just gets into general marketing and messaging, that the thing that I see most people do is write in first person, all right, just acting AI to use active voice, right in second person and use simple language will improve almost every product. Or, you know, our service page of B to B, because we're, we're always, I mean, most websites, it's all about I and what I do, not what you receive. So just, just taking your copy that you probably have and saying, Please rewrite this in second person, in simple language. Don't use long paragraphs bullets. Like making it scannable usually improves the efficacy of the product page. So

12:34

how would you help our audience uncover competitive data in a few sentences?

12:38

Yeah, so competitive data usually what you're looking for is you as a brand or your competitors should be trying to establish topical authority on something relevant in your industry. What do you stand for? What are you talking about? So what AI can do is it can crunch a lot of data really fast. So I use AI to look for trends in content and maybe even opportunities across the industry. If I were looking at four or five competitors to see what are they covering. And often it's not very targeted and succinct. Sometimes it is, but I would be using that to say, you know, if I talk about this aspect of what's going on in the industry, then I could establish topical authority, which will help in search and, you know, even in the eyes of potential clients.

13:29

And then social media, I know a lot of companies who use AI for their social media can be very generic sometimes and just regurgitate a lot of the same thing. How do you get that to be a little bit more creative and unique? What I'm

13:43

going to do most of the time, and let's just say, since this is B to B, you know, we're talking about LinkedIn, which is long, longer format than most social media platforms, really, I'm always trying to go from super long format. So let's say a video transcript or a blog post down into the smaller LinkedIn post. Again, if we've, if we've done things like video interviews and thought leadership and informative content in our content waves, all of a sudden, that is what informs the LinkedIn post. So I'm not just randomly looking for a LinkedIn post. It's because it's part of a wave of content where the LinkedIn post is just one outcome, just like, you know, an excerpt for an email might be, or, you know, a quick, a quick video clip on YouTube, if, if you have a good content strategy, ultimately, the social media content will show up as unique and compelling, right and engaged audience. If you just start at the prompt trying to make a LinkedIn post, it will not work, right? It'll it'll sound like everybody else is putting out there. You have to stop for a second and say, What do I want to be a topical authority on that's interesting to my audience, and what is my wave of content going to be about? Once you do that, it can flow so much easier, and the LinkedIn post becomes so easy to write because it's on strategy. It's on it's on target. That's

15:01

a good point. So the last quick question would be on long form content could be a blog, the article could be a white paper. What are your thoughts on how to best tackle that?

15:14

Yeah, so, so think of it as as a building process, meaning that what I teach and what I when I'm working with a brand and making a long form content, you start with an outline, and then each part of that outline, often three to five topics that make up the long format content. Those are individual writing exercises. And then once you've built out the topical things you're going to cover in a long format piece, then you can back up and write the opening. You can write the conclusion. Then you write your hook. So the the idea is to start with a topic, understand the helpful sub topics that should be covered. Write each one of those individually, which you can use AI for to create the faith copy. Then start working under your intro and your clothes to tell the whole narrative. And then go and tie it all together and enrich it with quotes and, you know, in images and things. So most of the time, people, they start and say, Ooh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sit down in one shot. I'm gonna create this, this long format content. And it's just the nature of trying to do that. No wonder we get writer's block. There's too many things going on. But when you understand how to construct it just from a copywriting or an editorial process, it becomes so much easier to produce it because you can follow a 12345, step process. It's a method and an approach that is more effective, and nai can help help with that. It can help you with an outline. It can help you identify the sub topics doesn't mean you still don't have to write, right? And you don't have to you don't have to contribute in unique ways, but, boy, it's so much easier when you when you can use a tool as an assistant to kind of get you started,

16:53

right? So I'll wrap up here with this thing called Title. We content. It's a concept that you have that really helps brands create more effective strategies. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah,

17:09

the first two steps inside of tidal wave content is one, do your foundational documents. I have three tools that I built on the website. Quick sign up. There's no pitch. There's no money to be paid. You can make your persona, brand, promise, and your voice and tone from that standpoint, the second step is to start thinking about your first strategy, whether it be informational, which is high frequency and low effort, or if it's going to be high connection and be really rich pieces that you don't do whatever the strategy is going to be that's usually done in a One hour session. And that's the starting point. And I do offer a one hour session to work with somebody, to help them start it, and then from there, who knows? They can do it themselves. We can do it together. I can do it for them. But that's the concept. The tidal wave is creating a wave of content that once you say, Hey, this is what I want to be producing. It's not as much work to be consistently producing content that's going to engage with your audience, because you understand what you're trying to do and how to do it, and then, and then, it's just like having a personal trainer or somebody to remind you to say, Okay, we're going to do this two or three times a month. Time to get out of bed and do some writing. Today, it's having the processes and the checks and balances, but first and foremost, are you doing the right thing? Is it going to work? And you know, whether it's the optimization that needs to be done or the research that goes into it to make sure you can truly be a topical authority, that starting point is what cat away is trying to figure out so

18:36

we can wrap up. I think that's a great ending, and I know you offer our custom training session. So I'd love you to close with how individual, maybe a little bit about the training, and then how individual could actually get in touch from the HR, yeah. So

18:49

you can find me on LinkedIn, at Chuck Aikens. You can go to Tidal Wave content and sign up. But, yeah, the offer is right now, a couple times a week I'm doing a 90 minute session. It's, it's typically 250 for anyone listening, we'll do it for 100 bucks, you know, throw me $100 on PayPal, just, you know, I can't do it for free, right? We're all in business. But yeah, if you'll go through and build those three foundational docs, takes about an hour. Then we get together and we start working on your on your content, wave, how you and your brand could better reach out to your audience through a strategy. And it's not super complicated, but we have to have conviction and then commitment to that strategy to see it through. Guaranteed you'll learn a few tricks about creating content with AI that'll be helpful. Perfect. Thank

19:34

you, Chuck. Well, I just want to take a moment and thank our audience today to for listening in with myself and Chuck B to be brand 180 podcast. We covered a lot of things on AI. And if you would like to connect with me directly, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn at Linda Fanaras, or you can just go to Linda finance.com and feel free to. To ask any questions that you may have, and if there's anything we could do, really, we're happy to help. So thanks for listening to the B to B brand 180 podcast today, and have a great day. You.