The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Content Marketing

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Today I have a very special guest: Jeff Coyle. I’m not going to tell you what he does. I’m going to have him tell his story and we will be talking about AI and content marketing and AI-based content management tool.

Jeff is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Market Muse. He’s been in the content strategy, content marketing lead gen and search engine optimization game for about 21 years. Jeff is also one of the first people who were selling leads to B2B technology companies before people even had content, convincing large multinational B2B companies to write white papers and syndicate them.

So welcome, Jeff!

In this episode:

• Learn more about Marke Muse technology
• How can you use artificial intelligence to create better content
• What are the benefits of content marketing created by using AI technology
• The importance of having content marketing not only written but to tell a story
• How to use technology to produce content that is connecting with business goals
• Is there a way to predict how content will perform, and quantify the content ROI
• What are the innovations in content automation and technology

Quotes from the episode:

“All of our natural language processing and natural language generation is all proprietary, built by us. All the models built by us. GPT3 is one of the most amazing innovations in artificial intelligence, of all time!”

“We have teams that get thousands of content groups and they basically provide an outline or a single source of truth for the writer. So when the writer produces, they can focus on being creative. They can focus on being the expert that you’re paying them for, not doing stuff that they don’t want to do.”

 

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To keep on expanding your knowledge about AI and Content Marketing check out some of my previous podcast episodes.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Today I have a very special guest. Jeff Coyle. I’m not going to tell you why he does. I’m going to have him tell his story, and we will be talking about AI-based content management tools and let’s get started. 

So welcome, Jeff! So happy to have you on my show. Why don’t you tell everybody who you are and what you do? I know you have an awesome, awesome product. And I have seen the demo in the past, and I loved it. I can’t afford it, but I love it.

Jeff Coyle:  Well, maybe we’ll talk about that today too. I’m Jeff Coyle. I’m the co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Market Muse, and a little bit about my background.

I’ve been fortunately or unfortunately in the content strategy, content marketing lead gen and search engine optimization game for about 21 years. 

Pam Didner: All good things. I love everything you said: lead gen, content marketing, the demand gen. Yay. My favorite topics. Hard to do it well, but you have a lot to share.

Jeff Coyle:  I’m one of the first people selling leads to B2B technology companies before believing that people even had content. We were convincing large multinational B2B companies to write white papers and syndicate them cause they even have them at the time, you know.

Pam Didner: They probably focus on sales, collateral. That’s the only thing.

Jeff Coyle: A lot of white papers, and that’s it. Right? And so we kind of enhanced that space. And then we were acquired by a major publisher. I worked with them in house for many years, and during the late phase of that, I was doing editorial teams, content teams, product marketing teams, and SEO teams that don’t always work together. Pam, are you aware of that? They don’t always work together?

Pam Didner: My God. Don’t talk to me whenever you talk about those topics to create good content and the multiple teams that need to come together. Yes, I understand. I understand the pain so well.

Jeff Coyle: And so I went through that, right? And I knew that there was a better way to provide insights from research. And I found my co-founder at Market Muse had taken one of those workflows and automated it, the workflow researching topics.

So truly telling the story about what it means to be an expert on a topic.

And when you turn that and integrate that information into a research process that speaks the language of the editorial leadership, that speaks the language of the subject matter expert, because you’re not giving them a word because of some esoteric data point.  

You’re saying, “Hey, if you’re going to cover this topic comprehensively, you want to make sure that we have pages about this, sections about that, the language of the user”. Market Muse was the solution that brings those teams together by providing insights that will be awesome, exciting amplifiers for editorial leaders, writers and have the same benefits that SEO wants–traffic conversions leads engagement. So everyone’s happy, and everyone’s working together towards the same data-driven goal for the first time. 

So we’ve created an objective measure of content quality and comprehensiveness. So because, hey Pam, I can look at your site and say, “you are the expert on sales enablement, but here are a few things you haven’t covered comprehensively. And you’re like, “Oh yeah, those are obvious that I should write about, but I just shot you a spreadsheet with words in it. It’s like, “yeah, I’ll get to that next year.” That’s the difference? 

Pam Didner: I hear you. So, I have seen the demo. It is pretty impressive in terms of taking SEO, taking the initial preparation that you need to do to determine a topic and create a draft and then move your content along the production stage, if you will, not necessarily like when I say production.

It’s not video production, but like creating that draft to get to the finish line.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. So if you are the person who’s coming up with, what should we create or what should we update today that’s going to have the biggest impact on a business? or let’s say you have a business goal: I want to own this topic by the end of the year. Market Muse can tell you what articles need to be built or what articles need to be updated. And then, we follow through with the content briefs. 

So we build the content briefs at scale. We have teams that get thousands of content groups, and they provide an outline or a single source of truth for the writer. So when the writer produces, they can focus on being creative. They can focus on being the expert you’re paying them for, not doing stuff they don’t want to do. 

Pam Didner: Like SEO, like doing a lot of research and finding the title. What works whatnot.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. So then when they give you that draft, it’s highly likely, because you built the brief, you ordered the content with the brief, they’re going to give you something that’s going to have fewer feedback cycles. And it’s likely going to meet the guardrails, the guidelines that you’ve set. That’s what a brief does. It creates a point of reference.  

We automated all of those processes, so you can say, “okay, the best article I can write today, Pam, is on how do you make the best product marketing materials for events. I just made that up. Maybe that’s not a good idea, and we will build the outline, and you can write it, and you know that it will be successful. 

Pam Didner: Awesome. Love it. Love it. And one of the key product features is to use artificial intelligence, AI, to build content planning, optimized content. Like you said, such as your blog, white paper, your thought leadership pieces.

So, can you elaborate on how Market Muse uses AI and how does that help, uh, the content marketers? 

Jeff Coyle: Sure thing. So we built our natural language processing platform effectively. One of the components is in a branch of AI called topic modeling, in natural language processing. And we are a machine learning think tank.  We have our data science lab in Montreal called the M4 Lab. Those are spending nearly all of their time back in engineering on this platform that can effectively assess what it means to be an expert on a topic.

We tell the story that if you were to cover this topic comprehensively and truly be an expert, how would you do it on one page? How would you do it in one cluster of content? How would you do it across the entire site? And then we’re able to overlay that information into common workflows. So we can take that model and map it to your page and say, “Hey Pam, here’s a, here’s a page-level audit of thing you wrote. You had a few blind spots.”

Pam Didner: Okay, we’ll fix it. 

Jeff Coyle: Or we can go up to the competitive dynamic and go, “Oh, across the 20 competitors who you’re researching, here’s the stuff they did and here’s the stuff that Market Muse says is very relevant and no one’s done. And there’s your area of differentiation. So we don’t just tell you how to do everything like everybody else. We tell you how to differentiate yourself from them. That’s very special. That’s unique to Market Muse. 

At the site level or the network level, if you’ve got many sites (we work with many large publishers), we give you an on-demand content inventory and audit and all the value that goes along with that.

And it’s all personalized. So we’re the only in-market application that can tell you how hard it will be to rank for a topic. Not just how hard it is, cause that’s not valuable to me.  

Suppose I have a brand new website and write the best review of the new iPhone ever. I have no chance of getting any traffic from the market, but I’ve seen that. I go write that article and win. Market Muse answers the question of why behind that dynamic. So Pam, if you go write sales enablement tactics for first-year BDRs, it’s going to rank. 

Pam Didner: Your platform or you are tools can identify some of the gaps 

Jeff Coyle: Areas of opportunity as well. 

Pam Didner: That’s what I call a niche, but you say “areas for opportunities.” I like that term much better.

Jeff Coyle: And the gaps and the gaps, too. And the gap could be a variant. So you covered this with a great long-form thought leadership piece, but you missed a few details, or it could be vice versa. You wrote something that answered one question, and you never spoke to the big picture.

So we tell a story of what that true user intent profile is and everywhere you’ve done it everywhere you haven’t. Where are you the most important pages to lean into for links, uh, to point new pages to, what are your, um, your risk areas? So we, this is a big area for us. It’s a risk. 

You have a page out there it’s doing well. You don’t even know why, and you can need to support it.

You might have a page that’s out there–I call it the arm, a hand without an arm, it’s just out there. It just gets a bunch of traffic, and you have never supported it. You never built the foundation. You’ve gotta build that foundation. 

Pam Didner: Yeah, to amplify and expand that. So it sounds like you are using artificial intelligence to do a very holistic assessment, identify the areas for improvements, identify the gaps that you need to do you look at a site level at a page level, or even at a specific level of content. Is that correct? 

Jeff Coyle:  Any level of specificity, even networks we can say like we tell our publisher if you’re writing an article about this TV show, right? And you’re going to write about the actors on the TV show. You put that over here, and if you’re going to write about ways to stream it, you know, put that over on the other side, right? So we can even get into that level of detail. We set guidelines for content and for intent. We build a topic model. The next step is obviously to start to build out drafts. 

Pam Didner: It’s a virtual editorial assistant, in a way.

Jeff Coyle: Absolutely. Inspiring you so that you know if I focus on this and put my energy towards it. I write it, great production value, high quality, a wonderful narrative that meets these guidelines, it’s going to be so successful. And now we’re building out drafts that give you inspiration form of completely original drafts. 

Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. With that being said, you kind of touched the topics I want to ask you next. The latest buzz in the field of AI is GPT3. And I read the article or a blog post you guys wrote about expose GPT in terms of what it can or can’t do.

And the GPT3 is this very powerful language model that uses machine learning to generate human-like text. Are you leveraging GPT3 at all? Or you are doing stuff on your own?

Jeff Coyle: All of our natural language processing and natural language generation is all proprietary, built by us. We built all the models. GPT3 is one of the most amazing innovations in artificial intelligence of all time!

Pam Didner: Yeah. Up to date. Yeah. There may be something that’s coming in the next year, but as of now, yes, it’s quite amazing. 

Jeff Coyle: It’s, it’s amazing. And, the amazing scale that it works at in the applications out of it is significant.

Pam Didner: I 100% agree with you. I address that a little bit at my general session at Content Marketing World 2020. And I specifically talk about content pretty much can be written for you if you use artificial intelligence. 

Jeff Coyle: And so that’s the thing. It can be written. But is it telling the story you want it to tell?

Pam Didner: Yes. Does that meet your objective? Does that resonate with your audience? You know, does that bring a hook? Yes. I hear you. 

Jeff Coyle: It’s a general-purpose language model. And so it’s not a solution. It is an API. It requires, you know, now in its current form, a lot of programming skills. At the moment it lacks structure. It degrades over time, not considering your workflows. It suffers from degradation. 

GPT2 suffered from degradation, a severe rate, right? It was “Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam” and made some kooky stuff. GPT3 is shockingly better. And there, you can begin to work with it, but it is still subject to that degradation in long-form and short-form content.

Pam Didner: I do agree with you. Having a machine generate, say, a draft, just like you said, is a draft that humans still need to take over and conduct quality checks. You still need to edit as you see fit.

You still need to make sure that you read it, aligned with your objectives and what you want to accomplish.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. And that’s where, so the solution Market Muse First Draft versus of GPT3. First of all, you know, like you were, you mentioned, I believe that you know, the Guardian post. That is an output of eight generations, and editors curate it. 

Pam Didner: They provided brief GPT3, provide specific instruction, know what they want GPT3s to write at the same time, and provided the opening paragraph. So they provide a kind of in-depth instruction for the machine. So the machine can process and determine how they want to write it. 

Jeff Coyle: I’ll tell you, though, is if you saw all eight of those generations back to back, you wouldn’t have been all that impressed. The outcome’s amazing. It’s curation, right? You had to do work on it.

So the human brain now has never experienced the outcome of generation at this level.

Washington Post–these are the problems that content marketing people need to solve, or like Washington Post solved with Helio. 

Pam Didner: Right. I was, and they did that back in 2016 and 2017. 

Jeff Coyle: Right. But the thing about the problems, right? The problem was: I can’t cover the election.

Pam Didner: On the local level, right? 

Jeff Coyle:  Right. I cover 8%, but now Heliograph lets us solve all of it.

That’s solving a business problem. You’ve got platforms out there that can do data-driven template content. It’s not this right. But GPT3 isn’t doing either. It’s not producing content that is meeting specifications. It’s not producing content that is connecting with your goals as a content marketer. The template might even do a better job than that, but you’re not hitting targets for tone. It’s not training it, training on your content either. So Market Muse First Draft’s value is we can train it on your blog. It can be like Pam.

Pam Didner: Yeah, understood. 

Jeff Coyle: It can write on spec.

Pam Didner: There’s another question I would like to ask you. Can you tell us what features your teams are working on in the next six to eight months that you see as additional features that you want to add? I understand that’s a product roadmap tend to be confidential and uh, but if there’s anything that you can share, that would be fantastic.

Jeff Coyle: So the big things that we will be, first of all, Marketing Muse First Draft, it’s in private alpha right now.

It launches into public beta, most likely, Q4 it’s coming out. That’s a big splash for us. Also, for the first time, Market Muse is putting new offerings at a couple of lower price points.

Pam Didner: Yay!

Jeff Coyle: I know. I know. 

Pam Didner: Jeff, I remember I was talking to you guys last year, and you will tell me like, “Oh, we focus on enterprises, and our average price is this.” And I was like, “I thank you so much. It’s very nice talking to you”, and that quiet walk away. (laughs) I love your product. I still went and did a demo for myself. I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.” 

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, it’d be, so that’s going to be a big deal. So we have those things. That’s all happening in October. So many people who, you know, we have some demand, and we didn’t have a place for a solopreneur, or a small team, even, you know, a startup or a small agency. Now easy decisions are there for you. We’re also upgrading a lot of our current clients based on that. That’s exciting. So those are huge things. 

Pam Didner: What are two pricing points? Can you say that again?

Jeff Coyle: $79 a month, $179, and $499 a month are our self-service agreements, and then we have our premium product line, which will remain at those price points.

One of the exciting things, there are some options for going annual, which makes us even more attractive. And so some of those features that I’ll mention: we’re going to have the most accurate measure for potential upside with content and topics. 

Pam Didner: So you can forecast how the content will perform?

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, we’re going to have to get where to say you are here. Here’s the estimated traffic and value that this page has. And the value is if you had to buy that traffic. We’re going to have some customization for getting even more specific into the actual return on investment, right in the application.

And you’re able to see what Market Muse thinks your potential upside is right now. And then what’s your upside is if you were the best. So we don’t think you maybe might not think you can be the best yet. But this is where you could get with an easy, quick win. So we’re trying to predict your likelihood of success because that tells the story of when you use it. You can justify the expense very easily.

Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. So you quantify that ROI? 

Jeff Coyle: Direct quantification of value. We already do it for our clients with things like QBRs–quarterly business reviews–through custom reporting.

But we need that in the self-service offering, right? It has to be automated. And so we’ve focused on that. 

You know, it’s so fun to go in and look at your content and go, “Oh, wow. Like, if I had to go buy the same traffic that this page generated, it would cost me ten grand a month.” Holy cow, right? So all of that is those are our big, our big moves. We’re stretching the market down market as well as releasing innovation for the generation side.

Pam Didner: Very, very good. Jeff is so wonderful, so wonderful to have you on my podcast and the show. You know, I hope to see you soon, hopefully at Content Marketing World or like in physical events. 

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I did my Content Marketing World presentation. I think we’re going to be one and two in the best. I’m the second-best one, you the best one. (Pam laughs) We’ll see how that goes. Yeah, Content Marketing World going to be amazing. The lineup, I’m so excited to just veg out and watch all the recordings, frankly.

Pam Didner: Very, very good. I’m going to see you at the virtual event. 

Jeff Coyle: Thank you so much, Pam. We appreciate it.

Pam Didner: I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’d appreciate that you leave a five-star review on the Apple podcast or my website, pamdidner.com. If you think this is useful, please share it with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. So join my Facebook community, Build Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

I’d answer any marketing questions you may have. I mean, any marketing questions you ask? I answer. All right? See you there. Have a great week.