A Recap of Our July MarCom Roundtable
By Karen Mauk & Nicole McCaffrey | 08 · 23 · 22
We were fortunate to have special guest Mike Kaput—chief content officer extraordinaire at the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute—lead a practical discussion at our recent OhioX MarCom Roundtable. ↓
OhioX MarCom Roundtable, July 2022
Mike made a compelling case for businesses of all sizes—from startup to enterprise—to automate their digital marketing activities, including content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and more. He walked us through several of the latest, cutting-edge technologies (some still in development) that digital marketers have at our fingertips.
These robust tools—many of them free—are plug-and-play ready to help us optimize our marketing campaigns RIGHT NOW. This is music to the ears of many of us who comprise the one- or two-person marketing department (and sometimes even the sales and operations departments too) at our early-stage companies. After all, if we can better manage our time spent on marketing tasks to increase both productivity and revenue, we can shift our energy to the activities (like fostering customer relationships) we love. And we love to do certain activities over others because, well, they make our jobs more fulfilling. So yeah. Count us in.
Mike framed the whole discussion around an a-ha moment: One helpful way to navigate all the tools and resources at our disposal as digital marketers is to break down our day into use cases. Ask yourself: What tools are particularly helpful for specific use cases? Put another way, have a content strategy in place before defining the daily tasks you need to perform in order to accomplish your marketing goals. Then, check in with yourself daily and locate where you are in the process of implementing your content strategy. When you isolate the most time-consuming steps in the process and use specific tools designed to streamline those steps, you win.
This collaborative post focuses on some of the AI-powered content marketing tools Mike touched on during our discussion. These are by no means exhaustive product reviews but just conversation starters as we put our heads together on best practices and possible solutions to our daily challenges. Please reach out if you'd like to further test these tools and help us expand these product reviews. The more perspectives and use cases to inform our understanding of various digital marketing tools, the better!
MarketMuse for Content Research and Planning
Mike introduced us to MarketMuse, a wildly powerful, AI-powered platform for researching, planning, and writing content marketing that helps build domain authority. The user interface is surprisingly simple for such a robust app. We were immediately drawn to the Research tool, which automates the topic research process for whatever content marketing piece you're working on—even if it's already published at a live URL.
This sample search gives us the related topics for a given search term ("codesign product development") as well as the associated search volumes, trends, costs per click, variants, and suggested times each topic should be mentioned in your piece for maximum optimization.
Drilling down into one of the related topics ("design thinking") reveals even more insights.
HyperWrite for Content Generation
HyperWrite is a mighty little Chrome extension that suggests relevant content as you write in various browser-based apps, including email, chat, and more. The tool just rolled out a new feature, TypeAhead Personalization, that uses AI to learn from your writing, helping to reduce repetition, increase consistency, and propose new phrasings of ideas that you've written about before.
Descript for Content Transcription and Development
Descript is an AI-native tool that offers pro-level audio and video editing for even the tightest of budgets. It's an all-in-one solution to record, transcribe, edit, mix, master, and collaborate on your audio and video projects. The Transcription tool is a personal favorite, and one that we've used together to transcribe a fireside chat and generate relevant blog content.
Check out the video ↑ for the full, fun roundtable discussion and get more of Mike's pro tips for implementing various AI-powered marketing tools in your workflow. And stop by our next OhioX MarCom Roundtable—we'd love to see you there!