It's all about the summer break

Okay, fine, it's a little about AI.

Coming up with an idea is something most of us can do.

Coming up with several ideas takes some mental effort, but it’s a hurdle most knowledge workers can clear. Coming up with a constant flow of stuff to say that your audience would also want to hear is a very hard problem.

There is an inherent conflict between creative output and the demands to manufacture it on a regular basis.

Earlier this year I met a former journalist now working for a boutique investment house. Part of her job was to come up with at least ten different LinkedIn posts a week: for the company page, for the CEO, and for some key employees. Ten new ideas, every week!

Thought leadership – offering valuable information to clients – has become the main delivery mechanism for product promotion. Blogs, newsletters, webinars, podcasts, videos…it really doesn’t matter how the information is served. What matters is that it takes enormous effort to create, but  the expectation is that industrial amounts of it should be created, because the shelf life of each individual piece is so short.

So I took last summer off to solve this problem. Though, for a second, it seemed as if my help would not be needed after all.

ChatGPT came out, companies started using it, and large language models were going to solve this problem by making creation automatic. The shift to generated writing has been measurable:

An annual report tracking LinkedIn performance shows about 15% of existing creators have increased their posting frequency. Also, posts have become on average 28% longer. No doubt, words have become cheaper. But junk is junk:

The report claims AI-generated content experiences a 30% drop in reach, 55% decrease in engagement, and 60% less clickthrough rate compared to original content. There are more stats along these lines. The message overall is, AI hasn’t solved the problem of delivering valuable information.

One way of solving the problem of industrial production of creative output was to first home in on one specific way where information delivers value to a target audience, and then find a way to make it easy to produce that kind of information over and over again.

We can talk about concepts until we’re blue in the face, but seeing is believing.

So I used last year’s break to build a software tool, called Stedili. And then I launched a newsletter called Fund Marketer  – this newsletter! – to see it works. By ‘works’ I mean demonstrably show it creates value for a business audience without costing the world in time or money.

There’s a full case study with charts, but the essence of it is this:

• Each edition takes about two hours to put together, and this is a pretty dense newsletter. (It tends to cover 12-14 source articles.)

• With minimal promotion the newsletter’s subscriber growth has been consistent, while attrition has been next to nil.

• The newsletter has consistently maintained a high open rate, typically over 43%.

Personally, I write about fund marketing because I like it, and it’s a niche I’ve worked in for the last eight years.

But this specific domain is also emblematic of most B2B domains: target buyers are specific, and they are also domain experts. Generic guff simply won’t do.

This newsletter is not “generated”. There is no button that, once clicked, spits out the weekly edition. Instead, Stedili mimics how professional writers create, but makes it radically easier. Yes, there is “AI”. But more importantly, there is underlying process that gets you from none to done.

Removing the grunt work has allowed me to spend more of those two hours on what marketers like to call “tone of voice” or normal people call humour and personality. Of course you are not going to relegate those parts to a machine!

In a way, that marketer I mentioned above is one of the lucky ones.

Consider: the UK financial sector is 8% of the GDP and consists of nearly 20,000 companies. Frankly, I was surprised to learn 94% of these companies have fewer than ten employees. Their issue isn’t them struggling to create more, it’s that they struggle to create at all.

How many of these companies would be able to grow simply by being able to be interesting to their audiences about the value they offer?

And so, all things considered, I’m glad I took a summer break last year. So much so, I am taking another one.

Professional writers always have a process. It’s how they reconcile this inherent conflict between delivering a creative output, and having to do so over and over again. Last summer, it was about taking the process apart to such small chunks it can be explained to a machine.

This summer, it’s putting it into a step-by-step manual. Along with the tool that makes it a breeze, thought leadership becomes much more of a solved problem.

See you again in the autumn!