3-2-1 Fridays: 3 things AI can help content marketers do better and faster

Hey friend, welcome to today’s issue of Efikó. This newsletter by Dozie Anyaegbunam helps you make smarter decisions in content marketing and life. Anyway, hello, it’s good to see you. You’re doing great 😀

Happy Friday, rockstars,

I hope things are beginning to slow down for everyone of you. It’s that time of the year when we step back, relax and reflect on the past twelve months while prepping for the one to come.

I usually do an Annual Review every last day of the year. Here are a couple of questions I swiped from Sahil Bloom’s Twitter feed for my 2022 Annual Review:

(1) What did I change my mind on?(2) What created energy?(3) What drained energy?(4) What were the boat anchors?(5) What did I not do because of fear?(6) What were my greatest hits/misses?(7) What did I learn?

You’ll should follow Sahil by the way. His content is fantastic.

On the content side of things, LinkedIn has been agog with ChatGPT takes. A couple of you have also emailed me asking how and if I use AI.

I have played around with it, no doubt.

And I don’t think it’s here to replace anyone (at least in the near future), but it will act as a capability multiplier for content marketers.

Let’s explore this in more detail.

Quick note: There will only be one more of these newsletters this year (Content Marketing Digest Ep. 41). I’ll take a break from next Friday till the 3rd of January, 2023. And I hope you’re taking some time off too.

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Three things AI can help content marketers do better and faster

i.

The obvious one is building outlines or first drafts.

I worry that the amount of work it’ll take you to clean up the piece and fact-check it once the AI is done might be more significant than writing it from scratch for complex or technical topics.

But you could argue that AI will get better at spitting relevant information over time.

But here’s where the best begin to separate themselves.

No matter how you want to put it, AI is regurgitated and paraphrased information. So this means that while it shelves the time it takes you to create an outline, what you do with it matters.

For example, here’s an outline I asked it to generate on Big Data:

Now, this outline is pretty good.

But it’s possibly what you’ll find in dozens of other pieces on the same topic.

So while it helps me get to a good outline in milliseconds. The following steps would be:

• Rejigging the outline to suit my audience or the article's goal (AI might help you do that).

• Speaking to an internal SME for insights on any sub-topics the AI might have missed.

• And we are capturing the brand’s perspective.

ii.

Next for me is content repurposing.

We have always been told to focus on one channel first, learn it, and then move to another.

But I think AI reduces the learning curve. Heck, it eliminates the learning curve.

Pop the right prompt in, and your AI tool will generate various basic angles tailor-fitted for specific channels.

You still need to copy-edit and make sure you have the right offer. But you can go from one channel to three in a blink of an eye.

iii.

The last one for me would be writing better headlines.

Take your initial headline and pop it in there.

What AI already churns out here is magical. Just look at this:

Nothing to add here.

2 Things I am Thinking About

i.

ii.

1 Book Recommendation

It’s said the best content marketing books aren’t content marketing books.

And I agree.

One such book is The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. It’s a true marketing classic, educational, practical, and a must for aspiring and practicing content marketers.

Get it if you can afford it.

Be good out there. If you can't be good, be careful

I’ll be back on 12/18.

Dozie

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