Or, How I used AI to help get butts in seats for a workshop (and landed a front-page news article)
Spoiler alert: I didn’t use AI to write the article.
OK, so the front page I landed was for a tiny paper called the Union Democrat in Sonora, but those newspaper readers were exactly my target audience! And I met my client’s marketing goals. Hear me out.
But first, a word on content marketing. When I tell my new clients about the virtues of content marketing and thought leadership, their eyes glaze over and they ask me if I can just write some social media posts for them. I could, but those posts might not be as effective as one well-placed thought leadership article. Let me walk you through it.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is creating content that is useful or valuable to your target audience — information and insight about something your client’s customers or donors actually want to learn about. It’s something they choose to read, as opposed to advertising copy they skip past.
Content marketing in action
In this case, my client wanted to get people to attend a workshop about forest entrepreneurship in a remote rural area of Northern California (Sonora). I wrote an article about emerging trends in the forestry industry — how the market is shifting to use smaller diameter trees for low-carbon building materials. Would-be forestry entrepreneurs learned about a new trend and a market gap that they could take advantage of. And oh by the way, the article also mentioned a FREE forest entrepreneurship workshop happening in their town that would help them launch or grow exactly this type of business.
Lead with value, not sales
I led with the educational information, not the advertisement for the workshop. I provided useful information that my target audience was interested in reading. Of course, this only works if you know your target audience really well, but that’s another blog post. In this case, I knew my target audience well enough to land an article on the front page of the newspaper they read. I also made sure the story was well written, which means I wrote the story, not my robot.
How AI can help (and not help)
AI was a helpful partner in writing the story, but not in the way you might think. Here’s how I did it:
- Human – Interview. I spoke with a successful forest entrepreneur and got his (human, lived) perspective on emerging trends in the forest industry.
- Robot – Outline. I gave ChatGPT my interview notes, some additional background, my goals and target audience for the article, and asked it to draft an outline for the article.
- Human – Writing. I filled in ChatGPT’s outline with my own writing (ignoring the parts of the outline that didn’t work ).
- Robot – Research. I asked ChatGPT to do some research on the history of forestry in California, citing resources to avoid hallucinations.
- Human – Validation and Writing: I fact-checked and summarized ChatGPT’s history and incorporated it into the article.
- Robot – Editing: I asked ChatGPT to review my article for AP style, clarity, and flow.
- Human – Validation and Final Edits: I reviewed ChatGPT’s suggestions, made my own refinements, then submitted it to the editor of the newspaper.
Partners! We worked together, I saved hours of time, and everyone was happy. Especially my client, who saw the results of this content marketing when the workshop filled with attendees in Sonora.
Content marketing can work for your organization too
Ready to learn how to use content marketing to engage donors? Let’s talk. Give me 30 minutes of your time and I’ll give you five thought leadership article ideas to help you accomplish your marketing goals.
