How We're Leveraging the Power of AI to Supercharge Our Content Engine

When used effectively, modern AI tools have the potential to enhance your content production speed and elevate your storytelling. However, without a well-defined strategy for how and when you use them can transform your feed into a chaotic environment that pushes away your intended audience instead of supporting them.

Over the past several months, the @infiniteedge team has embarked on an exciting journey integrating AI into our content engine. Our team has always been naturally curious about technology and is always quick to embrace emerging innovations. But when it came to the AI revolution, we knew that this would be something lasting that would change our industry and our business. We understood that AI had the power to propel our company to new heights and unleash our team's capacity to make a genuine impact in the market and cater to our community. We also knew that those who embrace it, rather than try to fight it, will be the ones to lead in this new era. This journey has been exciting, fun, and eye-opening. As we continue to explore and gain insights, we're excited to continue to share and learn from others who are also exploring. 

We've been testing various tools and strategies to accelerate our efforts in crafting content that engages, informs, and sparks conversations. Recently, we've landed on a solid system for implementing AI that has propelled us to new heights.

Our Formula: Process + Tools + Humans:

Focus on the ideas that move people:

Ideas are everywhere and we need a way to harness them and bring them to life quickly before they disappear. Before we begin production on any content, our strategists map every piece to a specific audience segment, objective, channel, and a clearly defined goal. If a piece doesn't offer substantial value or align with our objectives, we don't spend the time to produce it. This helps to overcome that ephemeral nature of big ideas and empowers our thought leaders to get their ideas out. 

Humans in charge:

Our subject matter champions create the foundation of our long-form content bringing their ideas, points of view, personalities, and experience to the table. This can take many forms, like a rough outline of an idea, a video conversation with a customer or industry leader, or a recorded internal brainstorm session. 

Data-centric planning:

In today's world, your content has to feel targeted, relevant, and impactful to every one of your segment personas. To make an impact with limited resources, using the metadata is critical for getting it right the first time and continuing to evolve as your customers’ needs change. We do this by leveraging a suite of metadata insights from SEO, content performance, and behavioral insights to map and prioritize topics for production. 

Tools of the trade:

For video and audio content, we run transcripts through @Otter.ai, and then our content team uncovers valuable insights and highlights within these pieces with the help of tools like @writer and @wisecut. They will transform these into five or more content snackables like slideshows, illustrations, and video snippets, sometimes leveraging the new AI features within @canva and @adobe Photoshop. 

Things we don't rely on AI to do:

Write the content from beginning to end.

AI writing tools like Writer and @jasper are like really good collaborators that help us outline long-form content, brainstorm headlines, and pull out key highlights of the content we've produced. But the first draft of these outputs always lacks the human perspective and unique expertise of our team and cannot write about new concepts. 

Do our research.

The first time I tested a tool to write a blog, I ended up in a wild rabbit hole trying to hunt down the reports and statistics it cited in the draft. Eventually, I found that some of the stats existed but were crediting the wrong source or date. I also found that other reports and sources were completely made up. It helped guide me to some types of research for me to do, but in the end, I pulled all of my own research.

Be the final editor.

Always read every word AI produces for you. It will occasionally include incorrect facts, misspelled names, etc. Most of the time, we use the initial output as an outline. But as we edit for correctness, expertise, and the human perspective, the final draft is usually 80-90% human writing. 

Over the past few months of doing this, posting to our channels has become much more regular, and we've seen our audience, engagements, and conversations grow. We used to get stuck with a never-ending list of ideas, and our small team couldn't get through it all. 

Today, we're adept at delivering content to our audience in a way that we can foster timely and impactful discussions. 

We’ve also helped our clients implement AI within their content engines with great results as well. When we first began working with the content team at Folloze in H2 of last year, the content team consisted of 7 people along with 2 designers. Together the team produced 27 total content assets in that quarter. At the start of Q2 this year, we worked with them to make AI implementation an OKR. Five months later, with a team of 4 people and 1 designer, as well as a reduced budget, the team was able to produce 68 total assets - more than double what they had produced prior. 

The right blend of human ingenuity and AI-powered efficiency has enabled us to create a harmonious content ecosystem that resonates with our audience and drives genuine value.

How are you harnessing the power of #AI to optimize your #ContentEngine? 

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