Why AI Continues to Suck at Original Content?

John Jantsch (00:00): I don’t believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation for like, what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I’m creating content, but here’s the way that we produce content. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and you got it. Another solo show, just me and the microphone. So I want to talk about content today. I used to stand on stages and say, content is king. Remember that? And then everybody got the message and really, content became air, really have to have it to play. Today, pretty much every single industry, obviously there are a lot of industries that realize education, building trust, building authority, those are things that go hand in hand with marketing, period.

(00:54): But pretty much every industry today, regardless, local businesses, construction businesses, plumbers need to have content today. And I actually refer to content, not as a tactic, but as the voice of strategy. Alright, with all of that set up, I want to talk about something I’m seeing a lot of right now. AI is a tool that certainly offers a lot of promise around the idea of content. Some people actually say it can produce all your content for you. However, I believe that what I see a lot of people doing is using content or using AI in some of the various new tools in the wrong way. And I think actually backwards would be how I would refer to it. I was in a presentation the other day and somebody was demonstrating some AI tools, and really it’s pretty easy. I’m kind of geek out on the coolness of some of the things that some of the AI tools can do and will increasingly be able to do.

(01:50): Kind of creepy. Cool, I suppose in some regards. But one of the things that I see a lot of people doing is there are now these tools out there that you can train to produce video with your avatar. It’ll look like you, it will talk like you sort of. And so what people are doing is they’re now just writing content or having AI create content, create scripts, feed it into this tool, and all of a sudden, voila, I’ve got video produced by ai. But then they spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to get it to sound like them, to say the things that they say, to have the tone that they have, even to be able to pronounce words in their industry the right way. And I think that while, like I said, there’s some coolness factor to it to be able to, I mean, I’ve seen people actually go and produce entire podcast with a host and a guest.

(02:44): Neither one of them actually does it. They produce a script, they produce the answers to the questions, they produce the podcast. And while it is one of those things that’s like, look what we did because we can, I’m not sure it’s, look what we did because we should. And here’s the main reason. I don’t believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation for what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I’m creating content, but here is the way that we produce content, and this is really more of a how to, not necessarily the structure of the content, but I’ll spend a minute on that. We produce what we call pillar content. So we come up with once a quarter, three core themes, and these are going to be themes that we know are ideal client or clients are looking for information on.

(03:37): And if they find it, I guess is another way of saying if they find this content and read it, it’s going to be useful in helping them understand why they might want to work with us. That’s sort of the filter, I guess. It’s not just, well, here, we should write about this trendy thing or that trendy thing. It’s what’s our core pillar content. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters, and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider.

(04:36): You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right, duct Tape Marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link. We’ll also receive 15% off an annual plan. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue, and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

(05:39): Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Now we’ll take that core pillar content and we’ll break it down into subtopics. And so for example, once we determine what that content is, some of the AI tools, the GPTs out there are really great, frankly at creating outlines. What are the subtopics that would go under this? I mean, you put in any industry and it’s pretty good at actually saying, here are the important things to know about any industry. So we actually do this same thing with clients. And if you’re out there thinking, how am I going to produce all this? Or you’re an agency that says, how can I produce all this for my clients? This is an exact approach that we teach or in some cases just do for our clients that are trying to build brand and build authority.

(06:27): So at the end of this, if you would like to know more about how we might be able to do that for you, it’s just john@ducttapemarketing.com is where I always tell people, just write to me and we’ll see what we can put together for you. But after we produce that topic list, then here is how we employ ai. I actually create videos just like if you’re watching this on YouTube, just like this one. I just stand in front of a microphone and I riff on the topic for five, 10 minutes. And when we have clients, we actually just interview them and let them riff for five or 10 minutes on the topic and we can coach them that way and get great video. But here’s what we get from that. First off, we generally speaking, get good content well, or at least it’s original content.

(07:12): It is from my thinking, it is from my point of view, it is the jargon that I use, the terminology or citing our own IP is going to show up in that video. So that’s a great starting point, but it also is an incredible way to train then an AI tool on how I speak, how I pause, how often I say there’s so many things that can be gained really just by having that original video on top of, as I said, the real starting point there is that we have good high quality original content. So I might actually just pick out one day and spend 60, 90 minutes and record 10 of these videos, which will then give my team enough ammo, frankly, to produce all the social posts, email newsletters, original videos, of course snippets. From that video. We employ all those tools to actually repurpose the content.

(08:07): And I think frankly, right now, today in what are we, almost in September of 2024, that is the best use of many of the AI tools is to produce good original content in the easiest way possible, which to me is video a lot easier than banging out a thousand words. I can talk all day long, A lot of the folks that we work with that remodeling contractor, getting them to write anything would be next to impossible, but getting them to talk for an hour about what they believe, what their process is, how to get the best out of this, new trends in appliances. I mean, they can talk for days on these. So it allows us to really capture a ton of original content and then we turn it into everything, including blog posts, of course, snippets of video I already mentioned LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, X posts, Instagram reels.

(09:03): There’s just so many things that we can produce when we start with this video first. But then we can also take some of those videos and stack them. And now we’ve got, we can actually use the AI to say, create a course, take these 10 videos and create a course out of them. Obviously we had some thought into what the titles were and the topic and the through line of the 10 videos, but it can actually produce a complete course outline, complete with questions, complete with quizzes, complete with checklists. And so we can create lead capture devices out of that. So we’ll take a checklist or two, we’ll take a tool or two, and we will actually put it into the GPT and say, here, fill this out, complete this. Give me examples, samples. So we have something we call the marketing snapshot, which is our version of a marketing plan, kind of all on one page.

(09:54): Well, I can upload that tool that we’ve created and ask the GPT to fill it in for X industry, in fact, for 10 different industries. And all of a sudden now we’ve got samples that people can relate to and really maybe more thoroughly understand. So if you start my whole point, if you start with this original content in your voice or in your client’s voice, you can then work backwards tremendously producing all kinds of iterations of that good original content that’s in your voice, in your point of view, in your tone, using your industry jargon. So instead of thinking, how can I create these avatars to talk like me, talk like you, and use the transcript of that, which pretty much every one of these tools now produces right off the bat, use the transcript of that. Then to go out and produce all kinds of other assets.

(10:49): We call this the content sprint methodology. It’s something, as I said that we do for ourself, but we also do it for pretty much all of our clients, either inside of a full engagement or as a standalone. We’d be happy to do it for you as well. So that’s it for today. Use AI the right way. Use it for good. Hopefully we’re running into you one of these days out there on the road. Don’t forget, we love those reviews as well. If you’ve got any questions, comments, feedback, john@ducttapemarketing.com. That’s DU CT A PE marketing.com. All right, take care.

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