Should you hire an ex-FAANG marketer?

Ex-tech giant employees come with fantastic pedigree, but are they the right hire for a start-up or scale-up?

The challenges of identifying top talent

In November 2021 I gave a talk at Turing Fest in Edinburgh which explained how leaders should approach building their first marketing team from scratch.

Typically the first marketing hire for any start-up is an experienced generalist. You want someone who can get stuck into both the tactical and strategic layer (they need to be able to do the big thinking but also do the doing).

Alongside a T-shaped understanding of the marketing landscape, I also believe top marketing generalists have the following three traits:

• They need to be able to understand data, turn this into insight and connect this with action. It’s not enough to say conversions have decreased over the last month, they need to be able to diagnose (or at least present a credible theory for) why this has happened and what you need to do to turn the ship around.

• They need to be an exceptional people operator. Much of the role of the first marketing hire is focused on stakeholder management, which requires extremely good emotional intelligence and people management skills. There is also the expectation that this first marketing hire will build out a full marketing team as the company grows, for that they also require mastery of core communication skills and people leadership.

• They need to have a bias for action. It’s not enough to come up with fancy plans, presentations or roadmaps. You need them to execute quickly and ruthlessly to build traction. (This is the hardest trait to identify in the hiring process, but the most important to identify.)

The limitations of big brand marketers

Many start-ups and scale-ups consider hiring a marketing leader who comes fresh from a role within a wildly successful billion-dollar business (think large consultancy or FAANG).

While I don’t deny that many of these people a hugely talented and good at their jobs, are they the right fit for a start-up or scale-up? I’d argue in most cases, no.

Firstly, if you have worked in a large organisation you have had a LOT of resource to play with - people, budget and other teams to lean on. If you have a data problem, you can throw it over the fence to your data team. The same with a design issue, website issue etc.

Marketers from this background are not used to solving problems by themselves or with minimal input from other subject matter experts. They have not had to deal with extreme constraints or operated in an environment where throwing money at the problem is not an option.

Secondly, it is unlikely you can afford to bring in someone who has truly owned strategy development in a billion-dollar business.

There is a difference between being handed a top-level strategy to build upon and working with a founding team to develop a strategy out of a general mission and vision.

Personally, I’d bet on someone who has previously experienced and thrived in a start-up/scale-up environment.

Why marketing asks you to invest in uncertainty

Why good marketing feeds off of uncertainty

How can you predict the outcome of something you haven’t tried before?

This is the major challenge most marketers face - we often operate in the realm of the new and untested. Launching a new product to market. Trying out new creative or messaging. Developing a new brand concept.

Even with solid strategies, insight and reasoning behind us, sometimes we simply can not predict outcomes because we have no historical reference data. Or what we are trying is so different that we can’t even use competitor performance as a benchmark.

On the flip side, if we constrain ourselves to the world of the known (selling to the same audience year in year out or reusing the same messaging), we never have the opportunity to experiment. We remain locked in a recursive box which stifles the opportunity to innovate and create new competitive opportunities.

I’ve worked with businesses that have relied on the same old marketing formula for the past decade, all while the world changes around them. You can clearly see the year-on-year decrease in their marketing performance.

Their competitors are taking the risk of trying out new channels and strategies and are reaping the rewards of greater market share and improved ROI.

How to ask for clarity from your marketing team

Firstly, you need to ask the marketing team to be upfront about what they know and what they don’t know. This may be difficult for marketing teams to do in low trust environments, so you need to be clear that they will not be penalised for not having all of the answers.

It’s also important to ask for their level of confidence and certainty when assessing multiple strategies or tactical options - this way both sides can be absolutely clear on the levels of risk involved and prioritise effectively

How to balance uncertainty and risk

I’ve come across numerous methods of managing the risk when it comes to launching new ideas and campaigns. The one that will work for your business will depend on your unique environment and constraints, but the important thing is to have a way of allowing innovation.

As a bare minimum, I would urge you to:

Set experimentation budgets

This is where a pot of money is defined for use in experimentation. It is usually separate from the main marketing budget and is typically not included when calculating overall marketing ROI.

Defining leading and lagging indicators

When running an experiment, it’s important to have metrics that allow you to determine success or failure, ideally at speed. Leading indicators are usually indicative marketing metrics (impressions, likes) that “influence” lagging indicators (marketing outcomes - e.g. signups).

Defined leading indicators will allow your teams to report a measure of performance in the short term. However, you will need to do the work to define the leading indicators that are the clearest predictors of your lagging indicators.

Develop a shared hypothesis document

A hypothesis document is a shared list of marketing hypotheses that the team believes can be tested to see if they improve performance.

The beauty of having these hypotheses in one place is that they can be ranked by the team to produce an experimentation order that takes into account risk and impact. This document is also a very useful way of feeding risk scores directly into marketing priorities.

I typically rank experiments against the following criteria:

• Feasibility - how easy/time consuming will it be to develop and run the experiment (1-5)

• Risk - what is the risk the experiment will fail (low, medium, high)

• Potential impact - what is the potential impact on business outcomes if the experiment succeeds (low, medium, high)

Unlocking potential and growing junior digital talent

Do you remember your lucky break?

N.B. This content was originally delivered as a talk at BrightonSEO in September 2021.

Do you remember your first day at your first job and the sense of anticipation, trepidation, worry even, as you walked into a group of strangers with no idea what you were doing. 

It’s easy to forget how vulnerable people can feel early on in their careers, but everyone has to start somewhere. Even Steve Jobs had a first day on the job after all. 

I suspect most of us had colleagues who took us under their wing while we built up our skills and confidence, or mentors supported our growth and ambitions throughout our working lives. 

I certainly did and wouldn’t be doing what I did today without the support and guidance of a variety of people throughout my career.

The digital talent divide

The UK in particular is heading towards a digital skills disaster, as demand outstrips supply. Anecdotal evidence from my network seems to back this up. A number of my clients report that they are struggling to fill entry level, mid-weight and senior roles.

This skills shortage comes in sharp contrast with the employment landscape experienced by young people, who have been especially hard hit by shifting pandemic workforce patterns. 

This comes on top of entrenched systemic issues in hiring such as “needing experience to gain experience” and the unwillingness of some companies to invest in junior staff.

We have a duty as an industry to nurture the next generation of talent. Not just because we altruistically owe it to young people, but because it is the right commercial decision to make for companies chasing a limited talent pool.

In this article, I’m going to be doing a mixture of mythbusting and setting out some best practices that companies can use to maximise the potential of their junior staff and ensure their staff have the best possible start to their careers.

House of Commons Youth Unemployment statistics

 Remote Working

A selection of industry myths

We worry juniors can’t learn on their own

Companies worry that unsupervised in a remote setting, junior staff will be twiddling their thumbs, sat behind screens in their houses.

This is interesting to me because when you think about the latest cohort of higher education leavers, these are people who have spent the last 18 months learning remotely. Most of them have performed exceptionally well in their exams under extremely challenging circumstances.

We simply aren’t giving our young people enough credit. If they're not the group best equipped with the ability to learn in a remote setting, who is at this point.

We worry we will harm the start of people’s career

Over the last year, I’ve overheard conversations with hiring managers who are putting off bringing onboard junior staff until the “situation becomes more stable and we can give them what they need.”

This is erroneous again, in my opinion, because our current pandemic situation is not going to get less unstable in the short to medium term. Yes, there are signs we may be leaving the worst of the restrictions behind, but can any of us accurately predict what will happen this winter and beyond? 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that uncertainty is the certainty in life. All we can do is act as best we can with the current information we have. There’s no point waiting for a mythical day where everything will suddenly be set in stone to act.

We are damaging people’s careers by not giving them a chance to start one.

We worry about preserving our existing culture

While it is absolutely right to be concerned about whether people are actually happy at work, I do think that when companies talk about “preserving culture” they are often using it as a proxy to talk about being non-inclusive in a supposedly acceptable way.

If your culture can not handle the addition of multiple age ranges, I suggest the problem lies with your cultural expectations, not with your candidates.

The truth is, it wasn’t working before

In an office setting, it’s often expected that junior staff will learn through osmosis. I certainly had roles early on in my career where I was expected to learn the ropes by overhearing office conversations, but I should never ask questions or interrupt the “adults” while they were working.

I was lucky to get 5 minutes for a water cooler discussion, but that was the limit of my structured training. Needless to say, this was an extremely piecemeal and demoralising way to learn.

While I’m hopeful mine is an extreme example, we have relied on this type of ambient learning for far too long as an industry. While I am a big believer in the serendipity of the office and the importance of human connections in person, I don’t believe we should go back to the old ways, which are both unstructured and inefficient.

We can do better.

Ed Zitron, Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future, The Atlantic

Remote Work Best Practices

So what does better look like? Here are some of my suggestions on how we can improve remote learning for everyone (not just juniors!)

We need to invest time into training and L&D

The fundamental thing is we need to do as an industry is invest clearly defined and designated time into training and ongoing L&D. It can’t be an afterthought.

A lot of businesses expect people to pick things up as they go, either on the job or slotted ad-hoc around client work (in-house generally is a bit better with allocating clear time to training I have found).

If you want people to dedicate time to training you have to reflect this in your team’s workloads and your overall utilisation rates.

We need to encourage everyone to take collective responsibility for training

Training is not just a manager’s responsibility, the whole team should be helping to train junior employees, including the junior employees themselves! After all, one of the best ways to verify if someone knows a topic is to have them explain it to someone else.

Not only does this spread the load, but it also helps to create a culture of shared knowledge and continuous development for everyone.

We need to treat people as individuals

A lot of companies now offer personal development plans (PDPs), but in some places, there is still a persistent tickbox attitude when it comes to training programmes, especially in larger corporates.

There are of course subjects that require universal/standardised training procedures (first aid, fire safety etc.), however, in a field like digital marketing where there are so many career paths and specialisms to follow, it’s important to tailor training programmes to your organisation’s needs, the career ambitions of your staff and your skills gaps.

We need to give regular, consistent feedback

Six month or yearly performance reviews just don’t cut it.

By the time they roll around it’s often either too late to give positive feedback or too late to resolve performance issues (nobody likes a surprise after all).

Managers should be providing feedback on a weekly basis, monthly at a minimum. This doesn’t have to be an onerous, time-intensive or formal process though.

I stole the following format from Scrum retrospectives and have been using it with my team ever since to run check-ins. I like to do these collaboratively, asking team members to reflect on each point themselves before I provide my feedback. It’s also a great framework for self-reflection and assessing your own performance and even though I now I run my business, I tend to run my own mini-retro on a Friday using the structure.

Start - what should they start doing

Stop - what could they stop doing

Continue - what is working well and should be continued

Increase - what they should increase the amount/velocity of

Decrease - what they should decrease the amount/velocity of

Building Sustainable Skills

Another selection of industry myths

We say that graduates don’t come out of education with “soft skills”

Again, much like discourse around “culture”, I believe soft skills (which will be referred to as core skills henceforth) is another example of how language is used in our sector to marginalise.

While core communication and people skills are undoubtedly important, often people are using the term as a synonym for extroversion. This is especially prevalent in client-facing roles where there is an expectation that people will adhere to a certain personality type.

As a cohort, graduates are not lacking communication skills, it’s just that the communication landscape has changed and diverse people communicate in different ways.

I’ve worked in organisations with introverts who aren’t necessarily the most vocal in meetings but will send a blinder of an email after that clearly articulates a fantastic idea provoked by the wider discussion. Their strength was in written communication, not verbal, but that didn’t make them any less valuable as a team member.

We say that higher education doesn’t teach the “right” digital skills

I’m going to push back on this one with the question of whether it’s even higher education’s responsibility to teach cutting-edge digital skills?

In an industry where technology and methodologies move at a lightning pace, can we realistically expect higher education to keep pace when we struggle to as practitioners on the front line.

I firmly believe that the role of higher education is to teach people how to learn. It’s up to us as companies to invest in the right training to ensure our people stay ahead of the curve.

We say that young people are “lazy” and “special snowflakes”

Firstly young people aren’t lazy, they are questioning the merits of 24/7 work culture and advocating for better work practices. This isn’t limited to younger generations either, I think the majority of us have realised during the pandemic that we don’t want to go back to cultures of overwork and presenteeism.

Secondly, the connotations special snowflake and the supposed fragility of young people is particularly galling when we think of the resilience and fortitude they have shown throughout the pandemic. It’s not that younger generations are weaker, they are simply more comfortable talking about their mental health. Which can only be a good thing.

(Just because your staff never talked about anxiety and depression in “the old days” doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by it.)

The power of mentoring

Alongside more formalised training programmes, I believe one of the most powerful ways of building skills and capabilities is through offering mentoring. Throughout my career, I have had several mentors, all of whom provided vital support in building my technical and core communication competencies. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am without them.

The best thing is that companies of any size can set up mentoring programmes, even if it initially takes the form of informal 1-2-1 catch-ups. There are also wider industry programmes which are well worth investigating. I recently took part in the WTS Mentorship Programme as a mentor and found it an extremely reciprocal experience. My mentee Jasmine was incredibly generous with her knowledge and expertise - so the mentor/mentee relationship can definitely support people both ways.

In terms of practically building a mentoring programme in your organisation, I have a few tips:

Try and find mutually good fits

Arbitrarily assigning people to a mentor can lead to poor matches. It’s important to have a process that allows both mentors and mentees to feedback on what they are hoping to get out of sessions (WTS did this really well through an online application process).

It should also be made clear that any party can choose to end the mentoring arrangement at any time if it doesn’t work for them.

Remember mentors need mentoring

There is a real difference between managing someone and mentoring them. In mentoring, the mentee drives the agenda.

It’s therefore important to ensure your mentors understand their role and how it differs from management responsibilities. Ideally, mentors should have an induction process to provide them with the right information and on-going support through their time as a mentor.

Again this was something the WTS programme did really well, as they held weekly drop-in sessions for mentors throughout the programme’s duration.

CIM: . According to Sage.com, of those with a mentor 97% say they are valuable

Providing real progression

A final selection of industry myths

We argue  some people aren’t suited to becoming managers

It’s true, management really isn’t the best or most desirable path for everyone. Some people prefer building their careers as Individual Contributors (ICs), where they focus on becoming a technical expert.

The issue comes when management is the only track for progression. If your organisation only promotes people on the basis of taking on people management responsibilities, then you’re again marginalising people who don’t conform to a narrow standard of what career progression can look like.

Engineering departments have typically been leading the way in offering IC progression routes and have a number of formats and best practices that wider digital departments can borrow from. GitLab offer some excellent details on their Engineering Career Development process and even offer people ways of trying out the people management track before they commit long term.

We argue we’re a small company and that means there’s no room to progress

This is an argument often heard at agencies, who often solve the problem by giving out inflated titles in an attempt to keep staff, usually without the corresponding pay rise….

Offering progression opportunities doesn’t have to always mean offering pay rises or better titles (though my caveat is that people should be paid fairly for their expertise and skill level and that title changes without pay increases often feel VERY hollow).

Progression can also mean giving people opportunities to work on bigger accounts, or investing in training that will boost someone’s long term skills and career opportunities. Junior employees in particular can gain a huge amount of value from being exposed to multiple areas of the business - could you offer some kind of secondment programme that allows people to spend a day or two in different departments each month?

You also need to accept that if you can’t offer people meaningful progression, at some point they are going to leave.

How to develop an inclusive promotion process

How do we ensure we engage employees in progression opportunities in a fair and transparent manner? These are my top tips on building an inclusive promotion process.

1. The process should have defined, transparent and published timescales

The promotion process can be extremely stressful and obscure for employees in organisations where decisions are made behind closed doors, with little information on how and when people can progress.

As with salary information, a lack of transparency also particularly affects minorities who may be less likely to self-advocate or be affected by the unconscious (or conscious) bias of decision-makers.

It’s therefore vital that organisations have a standardised promotion process that includes clear policies, procedures and milestones which are transparently communicated throughout the entire workforce.

Typically this takes the form of an internal document that can live on your internal wiki or knowledge base. Some companies, like GitLab again, have made their promotions documentation public-facing, which can be a great tool for recruitment (and very informative for anyone looking to develop their own documentation!)

1. The process should include diverse decision-makers

This is really about removing single gatekeepers and lessening the opportunity for biases to influence the process. Developing a promotions panel is also a great opportunity to bring in the viewpoints of multiple departments into the promotions processes and ensures that decisions are made with an appropriate level of scrutiny.

1. Candidates should be assessed against consistent and relevant criteria

This is again about standardising things and ensuring a fair process.

(Also if it’s not in their job description, why are you assessing them on it?)

1. People should be able to self nominate for a progression opportunity

All employees should feel empowered to put themselves forward for internal opportunities (this should be made explicit when new job roles are posted).

However, it’s important to note that some groups are again less likely to self-advocate and put themselves forward. This is why it’s important that every employee is regularly reviewed and assessed so that amazing people aren’t overlooked simply because they don’t shout the loudest.

Microsoft Work Trend Index Report 2021

See the full slides

Unlocking potential and growing junior staff sustainably | Bethan Vincent | Brighton SEO Sep 2021 from Bethan Vincent

Marketing Plan vs. Marketing Strategy

Strategy is not planning

It’s about the principles that guide your decisions, not the decisions themselves.

There is a lot of confusion in the marketing world about what it means to have a marketing strategy.

You can read article after article about how important it is to have a strategy, but very few marketers talk about what strategy is, how to develop it and how to use it to win.

Having a marketing plan does not mean you have a strategy.  

Coordinating your marketing activities is not the same as developing a strategy.  

Assigning tasks is not “doing strategy”.

Strategy is the step before decision making and tactical plans and it should outline the framework and principles that will guide your decision making process as an organisation.

This should be based on a thorough understanding of:

• Where you’re going (what does success look like)

• How you’re going to get these (how you will win within your constraints and against the competition)

• Why are you setting off in the first place (why bother going to all of this effort - what’s the point?)

“Imagine you decide you want to go for a run. You head out the front door, find a good rhythm and before you know it, put several miles between your feet and the house. 

Only thing is you didn’t really have a destination in mind, so you have no idea where you are. It’s also dark and you left the torch at home. And you forgot to put shoes on, so now your feet are blistered. 

That’s how you should think about strategy. You need to know where it is you want to go, create the guiding policy that will help you get there, and equip your company with the tools to execute."

Jason Bradwell

What is a marketing strategy

Your marketing strategy has to fit with your overarching business strategy. In fact, before you even get to the point of “doing” marketing strategy work, you need to ensure that you have a solid business strategy in place.

After all, if you build a marketing strategy around a product or service that customers don’t want, or at a price point that doesn’t generate sufficient profile, you won’t have a business for very long.

Your business strategy should provide direction on the following points, at a minimum:

(Remember strategy is about developing a decision making framework and a guiding set of principles.)

• Your mission and vision - what does an ideal present future look like? Will you be global or local, mass market or niche? Where is the destination?

• Your goals and objectives - what metrics are you pursuing at the expense of other avenues? Are you focused on EBITDA over net profit, utilisation over headcount?

• Your values - what are your dealbreakers? What won’t you do in pursuit of your company objectives?

• The products/services you plan to sell - strip it back to your core offerings, not “we might do this in the future”. It has to be realistic, achievable and capable of supporting your objectives.

• Your competitive advantages - what attributes and capabilities will you nurture across your organisation to ensure you win. E.g. better customer service, ability to reach to market changes, willingness to invest in talent.

Building on the above, your marketing strategy should outline the following

• Customer segmentation and targeting - our of every type of customer you could market to, who should you focus on?

• Pricing - are you going to be premium or budget? Will you discount for volume or longer contracts?

• Positioning - this is tied into everything above, but is also about perception and messaging. As positioning expert April Dunford puts it - “Positioning defines how our product is different and better than alternatives for a particular set of customers”

• Opportunities and threats - this is systematic identification of existing and emerging opportunities and threats that may influence your market and organisation over the next few years. You then need to decide how you’ll hedge against them and what ground you are willing to give up in pursuit of your objectives (most organisations skip the threats part and ignore them until it’s too late)

As a marketing consultant working with companies to develop their marketing strategies, I typically like to run a comprehensive exercise that explores all of the areas above. 

From this exploration, I then help organisations define a broad list of strategic principles. Short and sweet, these points distill the marketing strategy into clearly defined principles that can broadly guide decision making.

For example, one of my own strategic marketing principles for my marketing consultancy is:

• Aligning myself with the industries, companies and people who challenging the status quo to be be the go-to consultant for high-tech companies building a better future

In terms of how this guides decision making, I ask myself “does this activity/tactic/channel align with this strategic principle?”

If yes, I go ahead. If no, I should reconsider.

What is a marketing plan

Have you noticed we haven’t talked about channels, tactics, metrics or content calendars yet? 

That’s because all of these elements should all go into your marketing plan, not your marketing strategy. 

A marketing plan is a tactical or operational plan that covers in detail the actions to be taken within a short term planning period, how these actions will be measured for effectiveness and who will be responsible for ensuring that they take place.

What’s the difference between a marketing plan and marketing strategy?

Your marketing strategy defines the “why”, “what” and “who” behind your marketing. 

• What winning looks like

• Why you’re going to win

• Who are you winning for and with

Your marketing plan should outline the “how,” “when,” “where,” and “who”

• How you will measure subset indicators of success (marketing KPIs) that lead to macro indicators of success (business KPIs = winning) - e.g. we need 112 MQLs in Q1 to reach our £20m turnover target

• How you will convey your winning proposition to customers (messaging)

• Where you plan to reach your best fit customers (channels & positioning)

• How you plan organise your marketing activities (campaigns & themes)

• When plan to run marketing campaigns, tactics and activities (time boundaries, cadence & calendar)

• Who will be responsible for each activity and who (the resources - an awful name for people) will be required to ensure the marketing plan is implemented.

• How, where and when budget will be allocated across your chosen channels, tactics and activities

Why you need both a marketing strategy and a marketing plan

Your marketing strategy is focused on being effective - it’s about identifying where you need to focus your efforts and deciding what’s out of scope based on your organisational goals.

Your marketing plan is at its heart a resource allocation plan - it’s focused on conveying your strategy into action in the most efficient way possible.

Companies with an effective strategy but inefficient tactics may not do astoundingly well, but they will survive. 

Those with an ineffective strategy will eventually fail, the question of how quickly will be determined by how efficient their tactics are. 

(Counterintuitively, efficient tactics will often drive faster failure in companies barking up the wrong strategic tree.)

Using Your Marketing Strategy and Plan

Both your marketing strategy and marketing plan should exist as living written documents. 

The living aspect is important, as we must recognise marketing strategies and plans are constantly changing along with the wider market and business contexts.

We shouldn’t be afraid to change our strategy or plan if new information becomes available, or if our assumptions (strategy is after all a well reasoned set of assumptions about the reality in which an organisation operates) are proven incorrect.

As to exactly how often you should be reviewing your strategy and plan, to use a well worn cliche, it really does depend. 

However at a minimum I would advise you review your marketing strategy on a yearly basis and your marketing plan every three months. Typically with clients I work on a quarterly basis when it comes to planning, as this keeps things nimble and adaptive. However we are still grounded by the longer term strategy, so that future focus is not lost.

Using a regularly reviewed and updated marketing strategy and plan, your organisation should:

• Achieve better coordination of marketing activities

• Identify expected developments or changes to the cadence, timing or purpose of your marketing activities

• Increase your organisation’s ability to change with a process that anticipates it

• Reduce conflicts about “where the company is going” and which department is responsible for what 

• Improve wider organisational communication about what marketing is working on and why

• Ensure available resources can be better matched to growth opportunities

• Develop a framework for continuous improvement and review of marketing operations and efficiency

• Take a systematic approach to developing strategy that does not rely on best guesses or the highest paid person’s opinion

Looking for external support to develop or scale your marketing strategy and plan?

Get in touch today for a high level chat about how I could support your organisation in finding its winning formula.

Should you let AI write your content?

“This advert was written by AI”

If you work in the content marketing space, it’s extremely likely you have been bombarded with adverts for AI copywriting tools over the past few months. These tools promise the creation of high-performing marketing copy in seconds and the instant generation of blog posts, social media content and even entire websites.

How does AI copywriting work?

AI copywriting is essentially computer-generated writing created by natural language processing tools. The majority of AI copywriting platforms utilise the OpenAI API which runs models with weights from the GPT-3 family.

Given a text prompt, the AI copywriting tool will generate content by analysing similar preexisting content from around the web, taking these parameters to generate something new and supposedly plagiarism free. (It’s always worth checking their outputs against existing content as they have been known to copy and paste).

Is AI actually any good at writing content real humans want to read?

To put the machines through their paces I let an AI copywriting tool write the following article. I provided the tool with the headings as inputs and asked the tool to give me a paragraph of copy for each.

Should you let AI write your content for you?

To write or not to write? That is the question. For years, people have been writing content for blogs, websites, and businesses. Now, there’s a multitude of artificial intelligence platforms that will do all the writing for you! So should you outsource your content generation to AI content genera- er...creators?

Can AI Replace Human Writers?

As long as there have been humans writing, there have been people who seek to criticize them. The goal of a critic is to find fault with a piece of writing and explain why it's wrong. This is a natural role for a human writer but today, humans are being replaced by computers because it’s cheaper and easier to let machines handle parts of writing tasks such as proofreading. Let’s take a look at why letting AI write your content might be a good idea....

Why Should You Use an AI Copywriting Tool?

Writing content is hard. There’s the writing, the thinking, the researching and the editing and reading all along the way. Most of the work is spent building and improving your skills in each area. That's why we at CopyAI decided it was time to open up our platform to help writers put their best work into the world. Our goal is to help writers get more shares, more traffic, and more sales from the places they already get 40% of their sales from.

What Is AI Copywriting and How Does It Work?

Writing is a skill that can be learned, practiced and practiced. In today’s world of quick-thinking copywriters with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, there’s never been a need to let an AI expert rewrite your content for you — unless you know exactly what you want and need. For this post, we’re going to look at how AI copywriting can help you create content that sells more, attracts more leads, generates more revenue and inspires your readers.

Can AI write meaningful stories?

Some people believe that the answer to the above is yes, that AI can and will write your content for you. Full stop. If you want the best writing possible, if you want to maximize ad spend and minimize efforts, then the answer is yes. This is not something that should be surprising to anyone who has tried doing something online. The truth is that most humans are terrible at

Back to the human wordsmith…

Will the machines replace writers?

Looking at the results above, I think it’s safe to say that AI copywriting tools are not set to replace human writers any time soon.

For a start, the term AI is misplaced. The tools can’t think for themselves and are only as good as the text inputs you give them. A lot of the content they spit out is reductive and often pretty nonsensical, possibly reflecting the wider data set they were trained on.

Human judgement is required to both select the right inputs and judge the outputs.

Very occasionally you do get a nugget that’s worth using, but this more to do with the automation of infinite monkeys than a reliable machine that can spew out Shakespeare on-demand.

What is the use case for automated copywriting then?

As someone who suffers from writer’s block practically every time I sit down at a keyboard, I do think there is a use case for copywriting tools when it comes to generating ideas and refining tricky paragraphs and phrasing.

The tools are actually quite good at reforming and regurgitating sentences, which means they can be used for finding synonyms and alternate phrasing at scale.

Good writing is the result of refining a bad first draft and these tools definitely aid in this, but they can not be relied upon to develop new ideas. The machines can not be decoupled from the human inputs and can not be relied upon to deliver groundbreaking prose or original arguments.

Like with most technology, these tools are still only as good as the user…