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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:00)
So one thing I've been struck by, we've released
a new AI product recently and it's a lot more aligned than anything we've done before and the end user and their ability to prompt. And so it has been a bit revealing of like the extent to which a lot of people out there still don't know how to prompt. And so we've been looking a lot at like how can we educate people on that, obviously content is huge part of that, but also how can we build into the product.
putting people on rails a little bit more. And I wonder whether that's a little bit also of the next evolution of a lot of these kinds of products, which is where actually it becomes a software engineering job and a UX engineering job to eliminate bad prompting a little bit.
Nathan Thompson (00:37)
That is really a clever way to put it. Because I've been thinking about that same coin maybe from a different side, but I really liked how you just thought of it. I kept thinking that a lot of people think that they suck at prompting. And I think that was probably true like GPT-3 or 3.5 or whatever it was in the early. Like, it's getting so good now that a lot of the times I'm finding it's just a lack of context. And so you'll have like one part of the team has
these guidelines loaded into their system and then the sales team has these assets into their chat, GPT or whatever. I've been fascinated lately with a turn. It's kind of cheesy. I apologize, but like building a brand brain and just in any system, open AI, copy AI, whatever AI you're using where it's like, okay, what is our brand voice? And what does that mean? Like what's an example of our brand voice?
What is the editorial guidelines? Meaning, do we use title case, sentence case? Do we use the Oxford comma, the dash? What are those nitpicky grammar rules? Do we know about the audience? Like who we're targeting? Do we know about our value propositions, the product, not just the features, but the benefits of the features and which segment of our audience? Once you have that, like in a Google Drive or a doc, and you pop that into any AI system, the outputs just shoot right up.
like regardless of the prompting because it just knows your brand so much better. It just gets it. So I think you're right. And I think a lot of the software engineers role in that will be what context is needed in which part of these workflows to get the best results for this department. And how do we use it in a way that the results of that are connected to the other departments so we're not just building huge silos across our team.
Tom Rudnai (02:23)
Yeah, it makes me think a little bit of like,
I think I hear a lot more, it might just be because I'm little bit new into the space, but I hear a lot of talk about content IP these days and things like that, right? And that connects a bit to the idea of a brand brain, right? It's just fleshing that out more into an actual tangible thing that you can use to educate.
Nathan Thompson (02:27)
I try.
Tom Rudnai (02:44)
humans and robots. It's another thing that struck me about your role. Like, so you changed a little bit from just kind of running the content team to moving into more content and product. I absolutely love that. It's one of my beliefs is that that's basically those two functions should be one because it allows you to create like a consistent narrative. We talked about this a bit the other day. Like, has that transition helped you a little bit with building that brain and defining like what what copy AI's brand brain is?
Nathan Thompson (03:15)
Yeah, it really has. Part of that is just as I was telling, as I was talking with a few customers about the brand brain, I was like, do we even have that? What would that look like? And so I took two days and just built a mock one inside a copy AI. Like, what would this look like? And all I'm really asking myself is what first party data would I expect a perfect intern to know? imagine an intern with a photographic memory.
Tom Rudnai (03:43)
Mike Ross.
Nathan Thompson (03:44)
What's that guy from
Suits, that kid Mike or whatever, like the main character? There you go, yes. Imagine that guy walks into your building, photographic memory, and says, I'm ready. What would we want that perfect marketer to know about our brand? And perfectly. So is our voice the same in blog verse, verse LinkedIn, verse X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it now? Are there differences? If there are, we need to have those written out. Like there's a difference between there are and we want there to be.
If there are, we need to write it out and write the rules for it, like we would want our intern Mike to have and understand. We want that person to understand our audience, like who are we solving for? And all of these different first party pieces of data that live in someone's head on the team. And then in some cases, we'll need some third party data. Like if we're writing a blog post, what are other people saying about this that we can use to help our argument with external links? So we'll add some research steps. And then it's just laying down the pipes of like, I want this blog post.
Here are all the steps I would do by hand. Here are the things that I think AI could do responsibly. And then here's where I need to step in as the checker at each of these little phases for quality control. It is so tedious and it is so easy. It's both of those things. So it's hard to get done because it's just kind of a slog at the start. But once it's set up, holy crap, can you get moving?
You just get moved. We were doing like 20 top of the funnel blog posts a week at one point with our editors and consistently for months and months and months. And then I hit stop and I said, okay, we've got this year, 750 new blog posts. They're doing well. Let's do a refresh sprint and prune 25 % of those away that we can combine with other articles. And it became this like, let's start making content for our audience and not for Google anymore because the Google side of it's already baked into the equation. Like our workflow's already taken care of that.
So now let's choose things on topics that people care about in our audience. It was kind of a fun shift.
Tom Rudnai (05:40)
I'm going turn this into a bit of a therapy session now. There's something that
I experienced that I want to know whether you do as well. cause I think everything you've just described is something that comes up a lot. And I think it's the actually these days, because so much of the execution layer of what we do is being taken off our plate, or at least sped up massively. There's a lot of value and impact that comes from slowing down in order to speed up. Right. And again, putting, taking the time to put better systems in place. There's also a shitload of noise from everywhere about how fast you should be.
going and that in me creates this like I think I was just thinking of it as you as you talked I listened a little bit as well but like this like split because you're under so much pressure to do things faster you know you should slow down at times it's really hard and it leads to this like inner turmoil almost
Nathan Thompson (06:31)
You're absolutely, it's the overwhelm is huge. Also for the record, if my voice does nothing else, then kick off good ideas. I'm so happy about that. You don't have to ever listen to what I talk. Seriously. That split though is huge. And there's this idea, but look, that phrase slow down to speed up. I love it. I heard it for the first time a few weeks ago, I'm embarrassed to say, which is why it stuck out when you said that. I was trying river surfing. I don't know if you've ever tried it. It's a...
Tom Rudnai (06:34)
you
All right.
Nathan Thompson (06:58)
There's a constant wave on a river. There's one in a canal. It's really cool. It's incredibly hard to find the pocket to get in there. Like I like surfing. I tried river surfing. I suck at it. And the guy kept saying, you're trying too hard, too fast. Don't try to stand up. Just hang out on that board and catch the body wave for a little bit. just flow with it a little bit. And then once you start flowing with it, you can start to get up and move faster and do some cool stuff. But like slow down. I think just foundational.
A lot of brands aren't even aware of how unclear their current messaging is and how disparate their documentation is through Slack, through Google Drive, through Notion, all those different places. I think most people just need to like clean up their home first before they start scaling a bunch of garbage.
Tom Rudnai (07:43)
Yeah, that's really interesting.
No, no, no, no, I think it's fair and it's that flow with it point that you made, I found really interesting because some people do that with grace and I don't think I do particularly. I think I'm an angsty person who always wants to feel like I'm moving at a million miles an hour and I'm deeply uncomfortable with sitting still. Maybe I should take up surfing is what you're saying.
Nathan Thompson (07:48)
That was a mean way to put it, sorry.
Same here.
Well, okay. yeah, no, was that. look, the guy this and this was very helpful. I took a surfing lesson with my kids in Tofino. Didn't know you could do it in Canada, separate from river surfing. Sorry, this turned into surfing podcast. The instructor told me I kept falling on these bigger waves. I like really bad. I'm not a great surfer. And he kept saying it's because you're looking back at the way you keep looking back at the wave because you're scared of it. You will go where you look. So you need to look up and out.
and just trust that you can ride it. I think there's a great life lesson in that of a lot of people are looking back to 2023, 2022. What were we doing then that was working? And there's a lot of comfort in that. But there is this idea of there are changes happening. We got to look where we want to go and kind of just flow with that with that new change and figure out the best way we can have a good ride with it. And so for me, that was trial, error, experimentation.
And this belief that the technology was smarter than I in terms of that first draft, but I was going to be smarter in understanding why we're making the draft in the first place and who we're going to send it to. I think just figuring out where everything fits as we're moving forward into this new, it's a new phase of marketing. It just is. It's like never going to be the same again. Pandora's out.