“We’re now starting to get into that day and age with AI where if you’re not utilizing AI in some capacity for your business—it doesn’t have to be just in a marketing capacity, but even for business operations, ideation, research, figuring things out—if you’re not using that to your advantage, then you’re being left behind in the dust by your competition.”—Jason Schemmel
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Jason Schemmel, owner of Get Social Done, to discuss how to use AI tools like Claude and Perplexity to improve your content marketing workflows. Jason explains specific ways to use AI to streamline your research and content creation, including pitfalls you should avoid.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below.
Integrating Generative AI into Content Marketing Workflows
Gen AI tools are powerful for content ideation and research, but you shouldn’t rely on them to create entire posts or content that you publish verbatim.
“I love using the large language models—ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity—more for ideation and research. I know a lot of people like to use it for content creation, which is fantastic when it’s done right. But I have seen way too many people just copy and paste the responses that you get back from them. And I’m like, no, you’re about halfway there, but you’re not quite there.”—Jason Schemmel
Tools and algorithms constantly change, making it hard to keep up with the latest best practices.
“Similar to social media algorithms, it’s like as soon as you have a decent handle on a tool, there’s a massive update, and it throws everything for a loop.”—Jason Schemmel
Specific GPTs provide unique benefits, like providing content marketing topic ideas.
“Custom GPTs are fantastic, because custom GPTs are primarily meant to serve one very specific need. And if you have that specific need that you’re looking for, custom GPTs are great. If you need more of a broad but more conversational AI to talk to, that’s where Claude really comes in and thrives. Whereas Perplexity, it’s just more of a ‘I’m going to give it to you straight.’ Claude you’re going to have more of a conversation; you feel like you’re actually talking to a chatbot, but a very knowledgeable chatbot, which is pretty nice.”—Jason Schemmel
“There were some [custom GPTs for content marketing] where it would help me ideate topics for my content. It’s like: give me your audience, give me your business, and your offer, and from there it’ll go, based off of the information you’ve given me these are topics that you should talk about.”—Jason Schemmel
Use each tool to its strengths and take outputs from one tool to another tool.
“You can go from there, whether that be within ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity, and say, I’m writing a blog or I’m writing a social media post on this topic. Help me write this out, or give me an outline of this, and then start breaking it down piece by piece. And you can really start building a very good, comprehensive piece of content based off of that.”—Jason Schemmel
Competitor Research and Business Optimization with AI: Strategies from a Digital Marketing Expert
Perplexity is great for competitor research.
“Perplexity is fantastic for competitor research, because it has that ability to do internet searches for you, whereas ChatGPT and Claude only have a knowledge base up to a certain date.”—Jason Schemmel
“I’m a restaurant chain down in Louisiana, serving this type of food. I could say, what are my top 10 competitors in this area? Because they had locations in Louisiana, Georgia and, I think, Florida. So I could list out those states and say, give me the top 10 competitors most comparable to this business. And then it spat it right out.”—Jason Schemmel
“Then I can start doing some menu comparisons. Let’s find out where there are similarities and differences. It’s all just part of research and figuring out what’s there and what isn’t there, and maybe finding some opportunities to enhance business operations or find new ways to increase sales or decrease costs.”—Jason Schemmel
Audience research, too.
“Same thing with audience. In these areas, give me the consensus information on the demographics of the people around here. How many are male compared to female? Ethnicity, age range, all that kind of stuff. There’s so much AI can do.”—Jason Schemmel
Always verify the accuracy of the AI outputs.
“Trust the information, but definitely verify. In some of the information it gave me, I would go and check that competitor’s active menu, and the food item that the AI listed is not there. It was going off of an older version that it picked up.”—Jason Schemmel
“The great thing about Perplexity is that I can just download the PDF of that menu. Or if a download option isn’t available, I can literally just highlight it, copy and paste it, put it into the AI and say, using this version of the menu, compare it to my client’s, and then it gives me that info.”—Jason Schemmel
Infusing Brand Voice and Personality into AI-Generated Content
Custom GPTs can help define your brand voice and enforce it across content.
“What I’ve also been hearing people talking about is using the custom GPTs and having it be embedded with their brand voice and their style guide, so that way you are ensured that people are creating things with it that actually reflect who your brand is and what you want to be known for.”—Erika Heald
“Claude and Perplexity have their own versions of it. Claude has Projects. Perplexity just came out with Spaces. And through those, you can upload past blogs that you’ve written, emails, transcripts from videos that you’ve recorded, or just upload a document. You can upload all of the stuff that is your own voice, and then tell it, hey, create a brand voice around this.”—Jason Schemmel
Use AI to simplify your content and make it more approachable, but edit its output to infuse your brand voice and expertise.
“Say rewrite it at a third to fourth-grade reading level, not to offend or insult intellect or anything like that, but make it very easy to understand. Watch the content that it spits out, and you’re like, that’s actually a really good way to do it, because at any level, it’s super easy to understand.”—Jason Schemmel
Navigating the Strengths and Limitations of ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity
All AI tools require context for an effective output. We chatted about this more in our conversation with Pam Didner about writing great AI prompts for content marketing.
“This goes with any prompt, any question that you ask AI; the responses that you get, the quality of it and the depth of it, is going to greatly depend on the amount of detail and context that you give it.”—Jason Schemmel
“So many people think a good prompt is ‘write a blog post on X topic,’ and that is absolutely the worst kind of a prompt.”—Erika Heald
Jason provides a framework to write an effective prompt:
“Think of AI like this very knowledgeable, super smart kid in a sandbox. It has this vivid, vast imagination, and you’re trying to get it to build a very specific sand castle, which is your piece of content that you’re looking for it to build.”—Jason Schemmel
“First thing is, you’ve got to tell it what role it’s meant to play. So usually, in this instance, you’re like, you are an expert content marketer, you’re an expert blog writer, you’re an English major, something to that effect, something that’s relevant to the task at hand that you’re going to ask it to do.”—Jason Schemmel
“Then you explain the context. You start setting the parameters of this imagination, world, vision. My company is this. This is our target market. We need to create content that’s relevant and useful and valuable to these types of people who need to solve this type of problem. I need you to write me a blog about this topic.”—Jason Schemmel
“You always end it with: ask me any clarifying questions you need before proceeding. This works in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Now you’ve given the AI permission to ask you further clarifying contextual questions so that it has enough detail to give you the response back that you’re looking for. Usually, this will come back with about five to 10 extra questions for you, and you don’t have to know the answers to all of them. You don’t have to know the answers to any of them, really.”—Jason Schemmel
“There’s a fifth step. You literally give it these three words: critique the above. Three simple words. You’ve now given the AI permission to critique its own work and tell you, this is where the information I gave you is strong, this is where it’s impactful, and then here’s a list of other things that we can do to optimize it or enhance it, or where there are opportunities to make this piece of content stronger.”—Jason Schemmel
Use AI to identify gaps in your strategy or audience needs you may be overlooking.
“Especially if it’s a piece of content where you haven’t gone in that direction before, or it’s going really deep into something, you don’t necessarily even know what your reader wouldn’t know. But because you’ve given that information to the AI and explained who your audience is and the objective of the piece that you’re doing, it can help flag that kind of stuff to you that you shouldn’t take for granted. And [conversely] the more experience you have with the topic, the longer you’re in an industry, the harder it is to remember that people don’t know what some of these acronyms mean, or what some of these very particular, specific words.”—Erika Heald
Experiment with repurposing content using AI.
“One of my other favorite AI use cases is around creating derivative content. So taking a blog post or an e-book or a video transcript and creating other content”—Erika Heald
AI can suggest content topics.
“My favorite thing to use AI for is for ideation. Even if it’s taking existing content topics that are out there and then plugging it into AI; this is a hot topic, a lot of people are talking about this, what are other similar yet relevant topics I could be talking about to take advantage of?”—Jason Schemmel
“If you find competitor [content] or an ad that’s really going off, you can take advantage of that by literally copying and pasting that content, or downloading it and uploading it into the AI, and then say based off of this, this is high converting, high engaging content, what other topics should I consider creating, writing, talking about that are similar to this, that this type of audience would eat up? And you can easily get 10 to 15 topics.”—Jason Schemmel
Consider using AI to create images. Jason recommends Ideogram.
“I know Midjourney is probably still the household AI image creator, but my favorite image creation AI tool is Ideogram.”—Jason Schemmel
“Ideogram is perfect for someone like me. I can take something very generic, where I’m not quite sure where I’m going with it yet, give it the prompt, have it create four images, and then show me that more detailed prompt that it used to create all of that, and then I can start tinkering with it until I get to an image that I’m very satisfied with.”—Jason Schemmel
Jason explains his favorite AI tools and the shortcomings of options like Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity starting at 36:56 in the recording.
Unlocking Data-Driven Insights for Business Growth: AI-Powered Recommendations
Listen to the recording starting at 29:05 to hear how Jason used AI to help a restaurant optimize its business operations by analyzing its quarterly sales and labor costs.
“I’m noticing that the a.m. shifts have the most discrepancies compared to sales. And then I said, give me five more ideas on how we can optimize this and help this so that we can balance out the discrepancies, which would lead to increased sales while decreasing costs, while not sacrificing efficiency. And then right away, it gave me five more. And I’m like, holy smokes, this is great. And then I showed the executive group of this, and they went, holy smokes, we never even thought of that.”—Jason Schemmel
If you could use some support to identify how to get started with AI in your content marketing program, get in touch.
