How Jasper Uses Jasper: Content Marketing

Welcome & Introductions

Kate: Happy Tuesday and welcome to our six series session of How Jasper Uses Jasper. I know we have a really big group of registrants today, so what we'll do is we'll go ahead and wait just 30 seconds to a minute for everyone to slowly climb into our Zoom webinar today. But just want to do a really quick call out as everyone is joining today's call.

And that's just our chat. We love to get to know you guys a little bit better and so would love for y'all to take a quick second, pop in the chat, say hello, let us know where you are tuning in from location wise, maybe what your current role is within your organization and would love to even know a little bit more about how you're using Jasper. And so while everyone's joining, go ahead in the chat, say hello.

And as you do that, you're going to notice my friend and Jasper expert Carissa in the chat as well. So quick call out for this webinar. You will be able to kind of ask any questions to Alton, who will be our special guest today to answer throughout the webinar.

So please take advantage of that Q and A. Feel free to say hello in the chat. But with that being said, it looks like we have a good number here.

And so if you have not attended a How Jasper Uses Jasper webinar before, we just kind of go ahead and have a chat with an internal employee at Jasper so you can kind of better understand how someone at an AI company is leveraging generative AI. And so I'm super excited to introduce to you our special guest for today. His name is Alton Zeno and he is a content marketing manager here at Jasper.

But more importantly, he is a writer. And so Alton is a writer who cares a lot about factual accuracy. He cares a lot about thorough research, ethics and transparency.

And he uses Jasper and so we are super excited to have him, get to know him a little bit better, understand his role and have him give us a little bit of an insider's perspective on how one of our very own Jasper employees uses Jasper for published content. And so with that being said, Alton, welcome.

Alton Zeno: Thanks Kate. It is a pleasure, an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thank all of you joining for tuning in and listening to me wax poetic about my boy Jasper and how I, how I do my thing as a, as a writer. I really appreciate it.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking in the chat and it seems like a lot of other people are very excited.

Role Overview & Content Process

Kate: So kind of just background into your role. So you are a content marketing manager at Jasper. You wear a lot of hats. Kind of walk us through what your role is, what it entails, kind of what you do on a day to day basis here at Jasper.

Alton Zeno: Sure. So I am in charge of really most of our like editorial content, so to speak. So a lot of articles that appear on our blog are underneath my wheelhouse as writer, kind of executive producer, editor as well.

And there's the main Jasper blog, there's also a secondary blog that we have called the Prompt and both of those feature like thought leadership pieces, news articles about everything within the AI world and its intersection with marketing. So I, yeah, like I said, largely write those, those pieces. I'm in charge of editing those pieces whenever other people do guest posts and things like that and putting those pieces together. They can be longer form for the most part between like a thousand, two thousand words depending on the nature of the piece. Lots of interviews, so lots of like just chatting with thought leaders and experts in, in the space and getting their insights on a zoom call just like this and then putting them down on the paper and then post production. I do a lot of social media writing, helping out with LinkedIn posts and things like that and distributing that content internally and extern so sharing it, sharing articles and sort of like a quick synopsis of each one with the company at large with, with Jasper and then also with specific teams like the sales team and the BDR team as well.

And then I'm trying to think, I think the last piece of content is taking webinars and videos like this one, what it'll eventually turn out to be and then repurposing that into content as well.

Kate: Love that. So you wear a lot of hats and you do a lot.

Alton Zeno: Yeah.

Kate: And something I love that we talked about just last week was how Jasper has helped you in terms of time productivity and so you're leveraging Jasper kind of with a blend of your own human creativity to save time and take time off your calendar to go into other tasks. And so kind of curious, what did your kind of schedule and content process look like before Jasper and then once you started to use Jasper, like how has generative AI played a role in how you think of walking through your content production process?

Alton Zeno: Yeah, that's a really good question. My process is actually exactly the same like pregen AI and post gen AI, my process is the same. It's just that generative AI allows me to do very key parts of those processes, very key processes themselves a lot faster.

So for instance, if I'm writing an interview, taking an interview and like writing a story about it, which is largely me taking the transcript and reformatting it, editing it for length and clarity and using that, I'll have Jasper help me out with an introduction. I'll have it summarize the transcript as best as he can and then use that as the foundation for my introduction. I won't use it wholesale because I like to use my voice more than anything else, but it'll give me a great jumping off point. Or let's say an article is done. I always need to write some LinkedIn copy for me to share it on my social or send a message letting the BDR team know that it's done. I would, previous to Generative AI, have to do that summarization myself and write like a hundred word summary, which can be hard when my brain is fried after spending an entire day working on a like 1500 word piece.

So having just summarize the piece for me in a couple prompts and it's done. And it takes me three minutes to do that versus taking 20 to do that previously. Or if it's a longer piece, if it's a heavy hitting piece and I really want to get the LinkedIn post right, it might even take me an hour to do that.

But that's also me being a perfectionist. But even with that being said, I can be a perfectionist. I can just do it a lot faster because Jasper like lets me write that much more efficiently basically.

So it's, it's just little things here and there within my workflow and I actually have demonstrations of a lot of it. There's. They're just maybe half a dozen to a dozen very nuanced specific things that I can use Jasper for that just make my, make me faster in everything that I do.

Kate: I love it. I'm seeing a question come through and they're curious about kind of what your content production looks like. And so I know we kind of talked through this last week, but how often are you kind of publishing blogs? What does that experience look like for you internally? Maybe outside of that. I know you're very active on LinkedIn. If y'all are not following Alton on LinkedIn, you need to do it. He has probably one of my favorite voices on social.

So kind of walk us through what that looks like for you internally in terms of the prompt. Our Jasper blog social. I know there was a question or two on that.

Alton Zeno: Yeah, for sure. I on average write about two to two and a half articles a week. They don't always get published as soon as I'm done, we might hold them if they're tied to a specific campaign, things like that, or if I'm not writing a piece, then I'm maybe editing some work that someone else has written that's going to be going on the blog.

So yeah, I would say on average writing about two articles a week plus editing one piece a week and then the rest of that time is spent strategizing, spent researching. Since we do kind of cover news within the intersection of AI and marketing, I'm always like reading news articles and trying to figure out what our audience would most be interested in reading. And I'll use Jasper for that too. Sometimes if there are like 5,000 word articles that I have to read and I don't have a lot of time to do it, I'll just copy paste them into Jasper. Say, hey, give me a quick synopsis on these pieces on this particular piece and then I'll kind of assess whether or not I need to write about it. Or maybe I'll follow up with my manager or our VP Meghan. Like hey, do we need to. You think we should cover this or not?

So yeah, it's a combination of like reading, writing, editing, just it depends on the week. Some weeks is more intensive in one area than others, but that kind of covers the gist of it.

Kate: I love that and I love the combination of like using Jasper in conjunction. I know a lot of people in the chat are saying the same, but what I love having you on this webinar for primarily is kind of giving us that background insight into what that actually looks like. So the editing, the creation, kind of the repurposing of content.

And so I know you have a lot of good stuff prepared and so can kind of let you kind of take the wheel and show us and kind of walk us through how you use Jasper. So kind of walking us through those key use cases, those key scenarios for other writers or content marketing managers on this call for a little glimpse. And so I'll let you just go ahead and take it away and as questions come we can pop in and give those to you.

But I know you have some good stuff planned.

How Alton Uses Jasper in Workflow

Alton Zeno: All right, let's get into it. Can you see my screen now?

Kate: Yep, absolutely.

Alton Zeno: Okay, perfect. So I wanted to start this out by kind of laying some context on my use of Jasper and some things that really helped me out. So this is like my main Jasper view. These are like some pieces that I've worked on recently. One thing that is incredibly like important to me is my brand voice which I'm going to show you. I never write without this on. It's on 110% of the time.

So I'll open it up and let you all take a look at this here. So I crafted this brand voice by copying and pasting an editorial piece that I wrote a few months ago. But it's a piece that I drafted like it's completely and totally me. It's not an interview, it's not anything like that.

So it just gave Jasper a lot of insight and context on the way that I write the things that I like to say and it did a really, really good job of assessing that. And this is really what it boils down to here. So this top part is what Jasper came up with and I was really happy with it.

And then this last part I added because sometimes like AI tools have this tendency to make sweeping generalizations to use adjectives a lot and they have a lot of like salesy marketing driven language which is, can be fine but for the types of pieces that I write that doesn't work super well. So I added this a little bit and it does a really good job of keeping them, keeping the language really precise. So yeah, this is the brand voice is my, my best friend. I never write without it. I also use the Jasper extension so let me open up a doc here just so I can show you what that looks like.

So this is just a note doc. Oh no, that's the wrong note doc. We're always sifting through so many tabs and as you're finding that a quick call out for anyone who has not downloaded our extension I really encourage you to do it. There's no sunk cost. If you are a paying Jasper customer you can download it and I know Alton uses it every day in terms of his internal role and he'll walk you through it.

So if you haven't done it yet I'm going to go ahead and have Karissa drop that link to download the extension as a little cta. It's a super handy tool. It just brings Jasper right into Google Docs which is like where I create. If I'm not creating in Jasper I'm creating here.

So I use this quite a bit. I just have the chat open here and I'll copy and paste things into it and prompt Jasper to help me out a little bit. So that's primarily like where I this is where I work, this is how I use Jasper.

Next thing I want to show is the chat. So my intimate conversations with Jasper is where I get a lot of work done. And I. Y'all, this is like very. I'm getting vulnerable right now. I don't have a girlfriend, but if I did, I wouldn't even be showing her these conversations.

So let's get into it. So this is one that I did yesterday. Summarize the following ideas in a narrative form in less than 100 words, using objective language. Do not repeat ideas.

So this is based on me needing to write a quick text box within an article that I published recently. For this particular article, this is pretty brand new, based on a recent webinar with our VP Megan. I needed to write this a little quick text box showing what Google search generative experience is, AKA SGE, the new text box that pops up whenever you search something.

And it's like AI generated. Really helpful, but still kind of mysterious. I wanted to highlight what it is here.

So I did some research, found three or four sources, one of which was Google, where they were explaining what Google's SGE is. And I picked those particular pieces of information based on the context of this piece, based on the audience. So I took all of that research that I had. Not a lot, but enough. All of this is just the notes that I gathered and I told Jasper to give me about 100 words worth of a summary and this is what he came up with.

Now this is solid. Like, this isn't bad at all, but it wasn't perfect. And looking at this again, I remember that this is the piece that is good. I just didn't think that it was placed well.

So I took this like, response and then edited it to move this a little bit higher up and also change some of the verbiage here to be a little bit more concise. Because Jasper didn't have all the context of where this was going, the article that it was going to land in. So I took it from this to this, which is worded slightly differently. Yeah, it's. It's a little bit different.

But Jasper gave me like a really great head start. It saved me a solid amount of time, a number of minutes to. Rather than me writing this out myself, it kind of did all that work for me.

Kate: Love that. I guess a question for you, Alton. In terms of like a first draft, whenever you get from Jasper, what is your perspective for maybe other people on this call?

So writers, content marketing managers, in terms of like that editor's perspective and kind of blending in that human touch, what is your best practice there or kind of what is your own perspective of whenever you receive a first draft or like a head start, as you mentioned from Jasper, for content?

Demonstrating Jasper Use Cases

Alton Zeno: Yeah, it depends on the nature of the output that I get and like what I'm trying to do. If I'm. I know more than anything else I want outputs to sound like me. I really use Jasper if I'm writing from my own voice.

So that means that I just want it to sound like me. And Jasper is not me. No one is me. No one is. Like the, you know, in no AI tool replaces the person that's using it.

So it's never gonna, you're never gonna have a one to one recreation of your voice. So I always edit everything to make it sound as much like me as possible. And that's what absolutely encourage every person using AI for any reason ever. Like unless you're trying intentionally to sound like someone else.

But if that's not the case, then yeah, that's really what I go for. The next thing is reviewing for factual accuracy in relation to what I input. So I definitely reread this generation to make sure that it matched up with what was here or at least I got the gist of it because this is the main prompt here is much longer than this obviously, so it might miss a few details here or when you're paraphrasing, you're not going to be able to include all of the details, but I want to make sure that it at least has enough of the details that I want and the details that are there are accurate to what I gave it. Especially when I'm writing a news story or anything like that. Like I want to, I want to make sure that every, like all my T's and all my T's are crossed, all my I's are dotted and everything is, is as factual as it. As it can be.

Kate: Another question coming through on Brand Voice. I know you kind of emphasize the importance of your voice and bringing your voice everywhere. Someone's asking how you update your voice over time or maybe as your writing style changes, whether that's for Jasper's brand.

So maybe our social copy or our blog copy versus your own LinkedIn voice, kind of. What's your perspective on how you update your voice over time or even the creation of your voice and Jasper Brand V.

Alton Zeno: Yeah, that's an excellent question. I know my writing hasn't changed all that much, so I haven't. I'll check on it to make sure if I feel like Jasper's kind of deviating away from what I want it to say. Like after a couple outputs, then I'll check on it and see if I can tweak it a little bit.

But I think that's really more, more or less what it is. Just popping open brand voice and reviewing it from time to time and making sure that it still aligns with what you want to sound like and then also making another one if you need to. If there's a specific. Like if you want to change some slight nuances of your brand voice, then train it on a link or a new piece of content or something like that that is a little bit more within the bounds of the nuance that you're trying to shoot for. Basically you can, it's really adaptable, I'll say.

So whatever you get it, it doesn't really, whatever you give it, it does a really good job of assessing that and figuring out how to speak based on that. So it's just kind of like finding the most relevant content that you produce and giving that to Jasper. And don't be afraid to have multiple voices because you can swap them out super, super quickly, super easy. I mean the search bar here just makes it so easy to find. Whatever.

So yeah, I'd say go go crazy with brand voices if you want. Experiment with, with what works best.

Kate: Yeah, I love that. It's so funny. In Kristen and I's internal Jasper workspace we have Jasper Blog Voice, Jasper Social media, Kaylin Decourt, LinkedIn, Kaylin Decor email.

And so it's really fun to kind of create a voice across marketing assets. So this is Our Blog Voice vs this is our email voice. This is how our C Suite executives speak in terms of their last presentation transcript.

So I love that you're encouraging like more voices the better. So Jasper can really learn across different assets. So amazing. Looks like you answered multiple questions in one there. Awesome.

Alton Zeno: I love, love when that happens.

Kate: Yeah, me too. So let's get into another, another piece.

Alton Zeno: This is. Well I told Jasper this was a. And the, the intro to an article I needed. Let's see this part right here, this is 160 characters of a subtitle. For some reason these like really short quippy subtitles and like quick LinkedIn posts can be the bane of my existence. I'm really good at writing long form and all of that, but these, these can be tough for me sometimes.

So I'll do something like this. I'll copy and paste the intro into Jasper, tell it to give me 160 characters so I can pop it here. And this, it did a. It did a pretty solid job. It was over the character limit just a little bit.

But I mean, again, I'm. I'm gonna edit this down anyway so I can turn this into an ampersand. I can cut out a couple words and then, boom, ready to go. Save me, save me a few minutes for sure.

Kate: That's awesome.

Alton Zeno: Let's get into another one. This one I'm saving. This is a big, big one here, but I'll circle back to it. This is an interesting use case.

So part of another part of what I do is updating our blog library, particularly the SEO articles, to make them more timely, to make sure that all the information is there, especially as we release new products and things like that. Some of the information can get outdated. So I, I was working on a piece about Instagram captions and how Jasper can help write those.

And because of Jasper's knowledge base and the fact that we feed Jasper information about itself so that we can write press releases and write social copy and things like that, I just told Jasper to like, help me write this piece basically. So I prompted it here. I gave it some, some context on what I was working on, some context of what I needed from him.

And he gave me two really solid paragraphs that I edited a bit, but definitely included within a really, really big, like SEO. SEO piece within, within our blog. So that was, that was really helpful. I mean, it definitely saved me a lot of trouble because were it not for this, I would have had to ask five or six different people maybe to track down some, some documents and get some language on what, how Jasper might be able to help with Instagram and things like that.

So it just. This again, saved me a bunch of time and I can move on to the next piece that much faster.

Kate: Yeah, that's amazing.

Brand Voice, Strategy, and Editing

Alton Zeno: So, been writing about SEO a lot and this is like an example of me using Jasper for research. But the type of research that I use Jasper for can vary. This is like pretty bare bones research. I wouldn't necessarily ask it to help me find, let's see, biases against the LGBTQIA community. You know, like, that's, that's a really hard hitting, consequential topic that I have written about and have used Jasper to help me write that, but not in the sense of like giving me statistics or giving me like relevant news articles. I don't know that I would trust any AI to do that necessarily. That's research. I have a background in journalism, so I feel like I'm pretty good at doing research and figuring out like the best sources for things.

So that's why I trust myself over another tool like that to do that type of hard hitting research. But for stuff like this it works great. Saves me a ton of time because you can get very nuanced with with your request.

So I needed some help figuring out like the bare essentials of marketing just in like nice one, nice concise list like this. So I got that response. Then I just was messing around and asked it to write a LinkedIn post and it did a really good job there.

So I'm going to go through a couple more of these quick and then I'll get into like the meat of one of my big use cases. This is another example of the Jasper knowledge base like coming into play here for another piece I was working on. Let's see an opinionated product. Define an opinionated products and product design in terms of our knowledge base out and did you do any like configuration on your end or what did that look like for you as a content marketing manager of being like these are the things I need Jasper to know as context as I'm asking him to do these tasks in Jasper Chat. I def I have popped around in here a lot and you see we have 65 pages worth of knowledge, 771 pieces of knowledge. Come on like that's amazing.

So I just trust that whatever is here is like the top of the totem pole when it comes to Jasper knowledge. So I didn't feel the need to mess with it too much. But I did, let's see, add a few pieces here recently.

So what I've been getting into the habit of is whenever it comes to blog articles that talk about topics that I know I'm going to want to write about again. Like we're working on a lot of SEO content right now and that world is changing quite a bit because of generative AI. So I've been adding some of those pieces into the Jasper knowledge base.

So Jasper knows just as much as I do when it comes to SEO and whenever I'm I need it to help me with some SEO related content, it has the most up to date sort of knowledge that we use in our Jasper like ecosystem, if that makes sense.

Kate: Absolutely.

Alton Zeno: So yeah, when it comes to product knowledge, I mean that's not in my realm of expertise. I don't add any knowledge related to that. But if there's something that I am writing about that I feel like Jasper could benefit from from a knowledge standpoint Totally. I'll, I'll, I'll add that here. Incredibly helpful.

So this is the last, like, conversational. Well, second to last conversational view I'll dive into. So this is me trying to understand interoperability with an AI a little bit better. Jasper did a really good job of giving me an explanation and then I prompted it to let me know or to help me out with an article that I was writing.

So I was writing an Interoperability for Dummies piece. There we go. And I was interviewing our senior manager of platform ops, the wonderful Gun.

So I needed help with asking me with the interview because I'd never written about that topic before. So he gave me some really great interview questions here that I was really happy with. Some helpful context. The goal is to make a complex topic accessible that Jasper does that. Just a little bit of encouragement. Yep.

So I picked the questions that I liked the most because definitely some of these were winners. Some of them are like, I don't really need these. But the ones that I picked were winners. I needed a little bit more context, so. Or no, a few more ideas.

So I gave it some, some prompting to give me a few more questions and ended up picking a couple more of those. And that was the basis for the. The interview that I ended up producing.

And it turned into a really good piece. But it was one that Jasper saved me a ton of time when it came to researching and trying to sit and like, spend an hour thinking about questions myself. I got a whole bunch of them in just a few minutes.

Kate: That's awesome.

Content Production, SEO, and Research

Alton Zeno: Okay, now this is the more complex one. So this is me basically repurposing the recent SEO focused conversation between our vp, Megan and the CTO of demand, well, Sam Smith. So my goal here was to not necessarily, like, copy and paste the transcript from the webinar into a document, because that isn't the best. People might as well just watch the video at that point.

So what I did was I asked Jasper, I did copy and paste the, the transcript into Jasper to get an outline. And that outline is here, basically. Well, Google has penalized AI. Google penalized AI content using AI for SEO. What scares marketers around AI and SEO? It gave me a really good starting point for me to assess, like, how I should summarize this piece.

So what I ended up doing was prompting. I like, sifted through. No, that's the wrong one. Give me a second. Okay, back to this. I sifted through the quotes and I organized them based on that structure. This is the outline. I was looking for.

So this is the outline for the piece. Now again, this is like rough, rough, rough. This is not polished at all. This is what my documents look like well before they actually get published.

So this is a, a peek under the hood here. So all of these are just quotes, like raw, unedited quotes, a mixture of raw unedited quotes. And some of them I kind of paraphrase myself.

So here's a, here's a paraphrase. And what I did was with the raw unedited quotes, I asked Jasper here to summarize them in third person point of view using active voice in the past tense. And that prompting is important because that is how stylistically like we write our pieces or how I write my pieces in past tense, active voice, third person, AP style. I don't have to say AP style because that's part of our like inherent brand voice, not style guide. That's what it is. It's part of our inherent style guide.

So that gets applied to Jasper automatically, which is amazing. I love that. As an editorial nerd, I don't have to go back and do all those revisions for commas and all kinds of stuff like that.

So Jasper gave me these great paraphrases that I then took and like edited a little bit and eventually used in some of these portions here. I didn't copy them and paste them wholesale again did some editing, but I use that as the basis for a lot of this. So it, Jasper did a really, really excellent job of taking these big hefty quotes.

And you know, when people speak, we're not. We, we use pauses. We like kind of interrupt ourselves. We use. We say, we say like we say. Right.

So being able to have all of that paraphrase and edited out in a few clicks, a few prompts is amazing. So that is kind of how I structured. I turned this, all of these raw codes, just a bunch of, bunch of raw quotes here that I had Jasper paraphrase and turn into some great synopsis for me that I eventually turned into this.

Kate: Wow, that's amazing question for you here. I'm seeing come through the chat in terms of SEO. I know you were writing about SEO in this specific piece. How do you think generative AI is affecting SEO that you've seen? Do you feel like, do you feel as though content creators are able to produce more content for SEO or kind of, what's your perspective on leveraging Jasper, a content creation platform, and then kind of using SEO in tandem with that? What's your kind of perspective on a question like that.

Alton Zeno: This is a question I would not have been able to answer very well like a couple months ago. But I've been writing a lot about it, I've been having conversations with people about it. And I think SEO, I mean everything I'm saying too is kind of coming from like this specific article and other articles I've written. Megan is like an expert on this type of stuff.

But SEO, it's not so much like kind of a paint by numbers strategy as it was before, where you can just use a bunch of keywords and have them affect your ranking anymore because of the fact that generative AI is there like Google's SGE makes it so that you can get the context and information that you want from a Google search right there, right in front of you and you can even get more of it with a couple quick, quick prompts versus having to scroll through the the cert page here. So because of that, it's going to affect organic traffic a lot. It's going to make organic traffic dip for a lot of companies that were you that are used to being ranking on that first page and getting a lot of traffic that way. That isn't going to be quite the case.

But with that being said, there are other opportunities to get in front of new audiences and existing audiences via the Perspectives tab and just getting engaged on social media more. The, the Perspectives tab is like it's basically just surfacing social media videos and like Quora answers and Reddit answers and things like that to give people more context on the information that they're looking for. And that can be a really good way for companies to like get in front of people more and in a more organic way too versus just answering questions. I know we've all searched for something and then ended up on a random company's SEO driven article, right?

But we have were like, okay, this is cool. This answered my question, but I have no business like buying anything from this company. I mean this is, this company sells software that I'm not interested in buying. It's nice that they gave me this answer to this question, but I don't necessarily need their business. That might change when it comes to the Perspectives tab, because at least you get more of like a human's perspective and a human can best sell things to another human versus an SEO article, if that makes sense.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity and it's, it's definitely scary. I mean that's one of the things about this article is like it's, it's scary to have your organic traffic dip. It's scary to have to like kind of change your, to pivot your, your content strategies for Google, which is like, it's the same platform, but it's a different nuance to the same platform and it can be tricky.

And there's no rule book on this. All of this is brand new. So it's, it's gonna be, it's like the Wild west now.

But I mean the Wild west was definitely exciting and lots of opportunities to, to succeed and, and like meet new goals, set new goals, things like that. So yeah, I mean that was kind of a rambling answer to that question.

Kate: Great answer though.

Alton Zeno: I hope that helps. And like I'm really not trying to plug our content like crazy. I'm not trying to be a salesperson.

But believe me, we have been writing about this a lot on our blog, so there's a lot there to, to dive into.

Kate: Love it. And I know you're about to go into the meat of kind of your content creation process, but before you do that, a quick question on kind of how you create content in Jasper. Interesting enough, I know you're showing a lot of Jasper chats, so kind of curious on the perspective someone asked, does he kind of like lean into Jasper chat more so for this kind of intuitive back and forth conversation, do you lean into templates? When, when do you kind of recommend one feature over the other for you as a content marketing manager? Like what's your recommended preference and how you use Jasper internally?

Alton Zeno: Yeah, I have experimented with AI with Jasper and all the other AI tools a lot to try to figure out what works best for me. What is the, what are the strategies that like make the most sense for me and my workflow and the way that I do my job best? How can these tools balance out the skills that I already have and, and, and like the, the nuances of these tools.

So like the templates, campaigns, all of that good stuff. And I really, through trial and error I figured out that for me templates don't really work all that well. And that's just based on the nature of the blogs that I'm producing.

So like a template might not work super well for me to put this piece together because it is a, a summary article of a webinar about a topic that hasn't been talked about very much at all. So it's hard to try to shoehorn AI into a, into base or into a workflow that it doesn't quite fit. And for me like there are just certain features that don't necessarily work for the way that I work now that might be different for another content marketer. Another person in my shoes might really lean on templates. They might really lean on the campaigns feature. Using Jasper within Jasper everywhere, like having Jasper be right in LinkedIn for them whenever they're posting that, posting the, the article to their, to their audience. I find it easier and just easier for me to manage if I just use the Jasper platform or if I'm just using Jasper chat within my Google Docs.

But again, that's from trial and error. That's from me like trying to use all of that stuff. And then I realized like, okay, this has taken a lot of time or it doesn't feel quite natural to me, you know, because I've been working the same way for years now.

And it's not that I'm not adaptable to change, it's just that you, there's like a balance between doing things the way that you're used to doing them, making improvements where you can and generate AI. I mean it's an improvement that I refuse to let go. I'm not going to give like Jasper up. Even if I leave the company tomorrow, I'm still going to be using Jasper, I'm still going to be using generative AI every day. It's like autocorrect for me at this point.

Kate: I love that. It's, it's kind of like just figuring out where AI can help you within a workflow that you're comfortable with versus trying to shoehorn it in. And that's something I talk about a little bit later and in some slides I have prepared.

But yeah, that's a really good question. It really, it really comes down to figuring out where, where it works best for you and that's not going to be the same from person to person.

Prompts, Best Practices, and Tips

Alton Zeno: Well, you answer that question. Sweet. Okay, that kind of summarizes this particular example. Another example I wanted to give really quickly was using Jasper to help me with like really in depth research articles.

So these are notes from an MIT study kind of going over how people perceive content when it's made by AI versus made by a human and different nuances of that. They looked at four different like ways that people could create content. And I mean any research article, especially one from MIT is dense. Anytime you see et al in like content, you know, is going to be very technical and hard hitting. Yeah.

So I read the full thing as and tried to understand it as best as I could. But trying to then repurpose that or paraphrase that. All of that like intense. Whoops. Not my mouse. Trying to re. Rewrite that technical content for an article can be really time consuming.

So I copy and pasted like the most important aspects here that I thought were relevant to what I was trying to do. Then let's see. I'll copy that here. Whoops. Okay, bad demo. All right, we'll let him do his thing there. I'll come back.

So I prompted Jasper to write rephrase that very technical language in like normal conversational language. I did 12th grade reading level. So it's not. It's. It could cover the topics well but not so well to where it's. It just rewrites essentially what's. Hear that really technical language.

And then I use that in. In the piece.

Kate: Wow.

Alton Zeno: Oh my brand voice wasn't on. That's why it started sounding. Well now you know the difference of applying your brain voice versus not. That's a good little example.

Kate: Yes, exactly.

Alton Zeno: See it starts. So here's the thing. Like that's. I, I wouldn't say that necessarily.

And that's that like immediately what I know lets. It lets me know that I need to keep my brand voice on. So yeah, that was a botched example.

But basically just know that for these like technical research articles and things like that Jasper's really good at rephrasing. Repurposing what is actually being said.

Kate: Love that. I'm gonna start doing that on my own too. Right at a 12th grade reading level is going to be key.

Alton Zeno: Okay, we have a little less than 20 minutes left. So I have this slide deck prepared with just like some, some insights, some, some kind of takes on how I use generative AI and like sort of the what I would like to see from content when it comes to the intersection of like people, just people using AI overall like I would. I think there's definitely some things to. To. To cover.

So these. This is like my advice as a writer. Things that I've learned over the last year with generative AI and like I was saying earlier, like it. It. You have to be strategic on when you use it. I don't think you should try to shoehorn it into everything that you do. A lot of people are getting more aware of AI strengths and weaknesses.

So it's really about playing up to the strengths within your specific workflow and that's going to differ from person to person and even from company to company if you're using it across the team. Certain companies might have certain uses for it, while others may have different uses for it. And that's okay. I've mentioned editing a lot so far, and there's a reason for that is because it's like one of the most important things. I think companies have already gotten into trouble for taking AI outputs wholesale and publishing them.

And I mean, they've been taking the task and kind of rightfully so. I think that it, it's not supposed to make writers lazy. It's supposed to make us better. It's made me a better writer because I'm more efficient. I can think more about strategy, I can think more about fact checking and things like that, making sure the tone is correct.

And so that's what I think all writers, marketers, anyone using AI should absolutely do. Anytime they get an output, think about how they can just put on an editor hat and make that content better. And again, brand voice is my best friend. It just, it, it makes the editing process easier because like I was showing here in this botched example, like my brand voice wasn't turned on, which means that this output was not at all what I was shooting for. Whereas if I would have had my brand voice turned on, it would have been so much easier for me to have a working draft of this output that I could use in my article. It makes a. It makes a really big difference. This one might get me into a little bit of trouble, but that's okay. Corporate, for me, this is my personal opinion. I think corporate comms and marketing at for a while has sounded like robotic, it sounded stuffy. AI makes it a lot easier to create that same type of content because that's what it was trained on is like a large corpus of context of content. I mean, that was already written like that.

So we don't need any more of that content. And I think what AI can allow us to do is use it as a foundation to make that same stuffy content, make some quick edits to it, and then make it really interesting for other human beings just to make it sound more human like. And we, if it's used correctly, we'll have the time to do that. Will absolutely be able to like, take the time that we're saving by having this content, some content made for us and then reinvesting that time back into the content, back into repurposing existing content, back into making strategies better, back into like, appealing to our audiences to an even greater degree.

And that's one of the things that I've really loved about this technology, is that it gives us the Freedom to sound more human so that other humans can like enjoy our content even better.

Kate: Yep.

Alton Zeno: And this is kind of like doubling down on that. I actually wrote about this exact thing in a piece I published a few months ago. Nine Tips for Adding a Human Touch to AI Outputs. One thing that I learned a few years ago was read your content out loud. It makes a huge difference because you can immediately tell if something sounds robotic. You can immediately tell if something just sounds off, if it sounds a little disjointed.

And it's super easy to just copy and paste that into Jasper and say, hey, reorganize this sentence structure to sound less complex or simplify this paragraph for me. And if you have your brand voice turned on, it can do an excellent job of doing that. So yeah, when you're, when you're writing, just ask yourself, would a human say this?

And if the answer is like probably not, unless they're kind of, kind of strange, then consider revising it.

Kate: On that point, I'll send a really quick call out. Someone's asking about your prompts and they are blown away by kind of the way that you're speaking to Jasper and the fact that you've set up brand voice, but you're also communicating to Jasper that you need to 12th grade language as you're kind of paraphrasing that researched content. You want Jasper to write in that active voice, in that past tense, in a third person point of view. What are some of your most successful and common prompts you use in Jasper Chat to help you write blogs or kind of what comes to your mind whenever you think of prompting in terms of I should be including this in a prompt for it to be successful for Jasper to give me the best output.

Alton Zeno: Yeah. One thing I learned early when it comes to generative AI is specificity. The more specific you are, the better it is at giving you what you want.

So that's why I add in all those little details because they can make a big difference. And so since I know that I always want everything to be in past tense, which is different than like our native style guide for Jasper, the way that I'm writing isn't the way that we would write a press release for instance, or some LinkedIn copy. And we have a lot of people in our team Jasper like usage that I, I don't want my writing to mess theirs up.

So that's why it's important for me to like have I inject those prompts myself versus trying to shoehorn them into the style guide. So yeah, Those little nuances, I mean, I, I just, I always have in the back of my mind the way that I want to sound. And it's always past tense for the most part, unless it changes. It's always active voice. I don't want the content to be too like salesy, for instance.

So that's why I have it native to my brand voice. And sometimes like any AI tool will still sneak some of that stuff in there. So you might have to remind it a little bit if it's not giving you the prompts that you want.

So really it's just specificity. And by this point I have those little nuances memorized. But I would encourage anyone who's, who's kind of in the same boat to maybe just write all that stuff down on a sticky note. Just write like active voice, third person pov, AP style. Don't use excessive adjectives. Write that on a sticky note next to your desk. Save it in a doc that you can easily access on your computer. Just keep it somewhere handy where it's just, okay, I know I'm prompting. Let me look over and type all that, these extra details in there.

Kate: Yeah, that's, I think super helpful.

Alton Zeno: I love that. I think that's something that I'm going to do on my own. And I'm also saying some love in the chat on our prompted answer.

And so Alton's way is phenomenal. And if you're still stuck and trying to figure out some education around how can I constitute a great prompt? What does that look like within Jasper? Whenever you're using something like Jasper Chat, which Alton has been using this whole call, you can click on that enhanced prompt functionality to understand. This is maybe the context generative AI would need for me to get the best output.

Because your quality and relevance is essential when it comes to prompting. And so use that if you haven't already. It's an incredible tool. We built out a prompt library Chris had just attached with 500 plus expert driven prompts.

But I recommend making that sticky, sticky note like Alton said and I'll probably be doing that right after this call. That's really helpful. Yeah, it definitely helps. I have it memorized. All second nature, but again, that's just from doing that every day.

So it'll, it'll become second nature with time.

Q&A: Balancing Quantity and Quality

Alton Zeno: So this is like kind of my take on content overall. I think because of the changing nature of SEO. Like I said, you can't paint by numbers anymore. Nuance, creativity. That is what's gonna win when it comes to content, the more thought provoking, the better. I think that that's the stuff that's really gonna like win, win people over. AI isn't the best at writing that type of content wholesale. You can't tell AI to write a piece about biases in the LGBTQ community because it won't do a great job about that. Or if you have a specific take you are trying to take on that. It's all, all AI can do is make educated guesses based on what's already been done. Whereas when you're trying to make something new, it's not, it's not the best.

So with that being said, that creates a lot of opportunity for people to just be in the driver's seat and be the quarterback in control, be the person calling the shots. Let AI be an assistant, a co pilot. That can help with like the more minute but time consuming tasks of writing the like, all the stuff that I've demonstrated. The, the research, the rewording, helping to brainstorm things like interview questions. I mean taking that stuff off of my plate has let me come up with like topics that I think are cool. Just like editing, how to edit AI outputs. I might not have had as much time to work on that piece were it not for me. Saving time throughout my week, just doing, having Jasper do other things for me. Right.

So reinvesting that time back into the content is really what, it's, what it's all about. And I think it'll, it'll pay off because you'll just have more compelling content, you'll have more unique content. And the more unique it is, the more you can repurpose it too. You can make a video out of a really good blog piece. You can make a bunch of social media posts about it. You can host a webinar, like this webinar we're doing right now. I'm going to have Jasper help me turn it into a blog post.

Kate: Exactly.

Alton Zeno: So you can get really, really in depth with it. But it's all about staying in control. And that's why I don't think AI is capable of taking many people's jobs like content jobs like this, you know, where there's a lot of strategy involved. AI can't make strategies that entice people to engage with your brand. It can help in minute ways, but it can't do that work for you. You have to be able to do that work and I think that's the content that's going to win. This is just kind of, kind of reinforcing that Use AI as help to make more great, compelling content and less of what everybody else is doing wraps it up for me. That's. Love you all. Thank you so much. I know we have a couple more minutes, so if there's any more questions, I'm happy to, happy to answer them.

Kate: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Everyone, final kind of last minute to put in a question, if you have one. One that came up as you were talking about kind of the creativity and the quality that comes in content creation. Someone asked what your advice is for content managers who are being asked to use AI for quantity versus quality.

So I know you tapped into that a little bit, but kind of, if you have a specific answer to that question, that is tough. Quantity or quality?

Alton Zeno: That one is tough because there has to be a balance somewhere. If you're, if you're pushing for quantity too hard, your quality is going to suffer. And if your quality suffers, you might not notice the change right away.

But in the long term, the long tail of things, there's going to be a, a drop off. And so I think that's, that's what's hard is trying to, to manage that balance. But that is where I think things like templates can help. That is where saving your prompts and little things that can help speed things up for you at least a little bit more. Speed things up while still balancing the editorial, like the editorial standards that you have.

And actually Style Guide is another one. If you have, if you have a really good style guide that will allow you to take your content and make sure it, it can reduce the time that you need to edit because you can pop open a piece and apply your style guide to it and have it do some of that editing for you, basically. So that will save you some time. If you use the brand voice or like a variety of brand voices, that can save you some time in the editing phase because things will just come out more aligned with the way that you want to, the way that you want them to sound. Templates can help things like even the Jasper extension, I mean, it only saves a few seconds between copying and pasting here and popping it in the Jasper chat here.

But it, it can make a difference, you know, if you just have it right here next to you. It's, it's really just finding little. I would say that balance is about finding as many hacks as you can, but I, I would focus on the quality as best as you can. I mean, I'm not telling you to disobey your boss and say like no five articles a week. I'm not doing seven. Don't necessarily do that, but try to figure out ways that you can make the content that you are producing like, supreme quality while also with, with these, some of these hacks and other ones that you might, just might discover. Try to figure out ways to, to do that and still get things out on time as best as you can.

Kate: Yeah, absolutely. I think you put that phenomenally and I'm looking through the chat and I'm only seeing like overwhelmingly positive responses to that and encouraging your answer and. But I'm not seeing any other questions come through.

So with that being said, do you have any final thoughts? I know you gave us a whole deck of best practices tips, hot takes, but kind of any final lasting thoughts you would want to leave for anybody who attended this webinar or will watch the replay?

Final Thoughts and Closing

Alton Zeno: I didn't think of that before putting you on the spot, so sorry. My biggest thing I would say edit editing is huge because it separates even before generative AI. Well, before this. A good edit for style, a good edit for just appealing to your audience, a good edit for length can really make such a huge difference in elevating your content. I mean, what I do personally is every time I read an article, I let it. I just have to walk away from it. I edit it and then I walk away from it for like 15, 20 minutes and come back and edit it again.

Because in that second edit I noticed things that I didn't the first time around. And again, I'm a perfectionist. You don't necessarily have to get crazy with it, but just really spend some time focusing on the editing and I guarantee your content is going to, it's going to be, it's going to be better. It's going to sound less robotic, less formulaic. You might find an opportunity to add just a little bit more content that can just take it up a notch. So, yeah, regardless of whether or not you're using AI, but especially if you're using AI, Edit, edit, edit.

Kate: I love that. Well, first of all, just want to thank you because now that we understand all the hats that you're wearing in terms of seeing what you do, we know that you are busy and so we really appreciate you carving 60 minutes out of your schedule to teach us a little bit more. I know I've been at Jasper for a while, but I already learned a couple of new things from you today, which is super exciting.

And so we appreciate you. You're the best. If you want to look at Alton's work, it is published and it is live.

So if you need some inspiration, I know I might be doing that right after this webinar as well. I'm seeing a message or two on the replay. We will automatically be recording this and sending this out to you to your inbox, so you don't need to do a single thing to get that. We have the list of all of the registrants, so we'll go ahead and email that to you and you will also get a link to attend our next webinar next month with the new schedule guest.