Full Transcript for #3: What Makes Good Digital Content Now?

good content? Sinéad Walsh: I think to you know, I think absolutely Ailish's points there excuse me, Alish's points there absolutely resonate me with me. But I think from my perspective, what makes good content is when you are focusing in on your niches and that might be your customer segments, that might be your audience segments. But I love the saying if you're making content for everyone, you're making content for for no one. Niall Devitt: One arms though. Sinéad Walsh: And I think that's the risk we take with letting AI take the wheel in terms of content generation. So yeah, which I'm sure we'll get into more as we go. So I know for me personally, when I'm creating content, there's kind of four or five different categories of person that I will be focusing on when I'm doing a piece of camera or when I'm sharing a joke I've done online or whatever it might be. Now the business parallel of that is you know, what customer segments you're focusing on, right? Like is it parents, is it, you know, whatever it might be, is it, you know, remote workers, whatever it is. So I think keeping your content quite niche focused is in the long run a much better strategy than s a scatter gun generic approach. Niall Devitt: Yeah, I I w I agree with you a hundred percent. And it's like the old adage, sometimes when you ask, particularly new businesses, who are your customers, they say everyone is my customer. And my response to that is if that's your answer, you don't have a business. Sinéad Walsh: One hundred percent and you're Niall Devitt: And you can apply exactly the same rules in terms of your content. So to Ailish's point, your content needs to be valuable, but it can't be valuable to everyone. It really needs to be valuable to whoever your audience or your customer segments are. So absolutely. Dennis, Sinéad Walsh: Sure. Niall Devitt: from your point of view, what makes good content? And again, I'd ask you in terms of AI. So we we we've mentioned there that you know. Content has to offer value. It has to offer value to your specific audience or your customer segments. How can, you know, how can we create good content, but how can we also maybe use AI and for that value proposition or you know resonating with those segments that that doesn't deteriorate as a result? Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think for me, the biggest thing that I've seen is we need authenticity in our content. So with the rise of AI in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of loss of authenticity. And there's a reason why we've seen so many different influencers and things like founder led content, but kind of small startups with just a single person behind the business and they're just creating content about their journey and and how they failed building a particular thing and and how this is working. And that's what people love. People are are are all about that sort of content. So when we're talking about this this sort of content, authenticity I think

has to be at the forefront of it. So when it comes to AI, a big part of authenticity is our personal experience that we have with something. So if we're feeding AI different information about us and our business, that's all fantastic. But then there's particular stories that we can tell that no AI can can tell for us. So if we have a a combination of both of those things where we have the authentic stories, our first hand experience of things, and also the the assistance of AI and making that content interesting and coming up with a good hook, all that stuff, then you can make really, really good content. Niall Devitt: One hundred percent yeah. And it again it's one and sometimes people don't get this, but I often say to people when they're doing say digital advertising or social media advertising on the social media channels, you don't want your advertising to seem like an ad. And sometimes they don't necessarily get that, but the one thing that will make you switch off in terms of a digital news feed is if it appears like an ad. Right. So invariably, regardless of whether it's actual advertising per se, all of those same rules still apply, so to speak. Okay. Denis Jastrzebski: Exactly. Niall Devitt: The other thing I would say in terms of that, folks, and again, this is a a kind of a personal one for me. I as you know, I worked in sales for a good number of years. To my mind, the old adage that people buy people is still true. So, in other words, I think the people behind the business or involved in the business, and that includes customers and so on and so forth, right? They need to be front and center. In terms of all your content. So it amazes me sometimes that I see, you know, a a a Facebook page or an Instagram or a TikTok or whatever, and I don't really see any of the people involved with the business, be it the the employees, be it the owner, be it the the the the customers, etc. etc. But for me, you know, that's a very important and we we we buy people. So before I before I buy a service or a product or whatever it is, I buy the people behind that business. I'm interested in the people behind the business. And again, you know, that's something obviously that AI can't compete about. Okay, what we've described there, I think folks, are s are some of the foundational elements in terms of what makes good content. Now they're they're very, very important that we can can never lose sight of them, so to speak. But moving along, so if we look at digital content again, kind of in the last, you know, four or five years, Aelish, what's changed? What's different now? than when we were doing this stuff, you know, nine, ten years ago. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so I think we we we hinted at that in our first episode as well. so a couple of factors coming together in a perfect storm or you know, perfect opportunity, the way you want to look at it. so you've got fragmentation of people's sort of segmentation of audiences. So that's fragmented. You've got

a plethora of content coming on stream, so there's saturation. So talking to teenmates niche idea, the way to get away from saturation is to find your niche. And then you've got the AI slot coming through and the AI fatigue. I think three years ago I said, you know, we go, AI's wonderful, there's great stuff. So five years later, right? So we go, okay, AI's great and all, but we're fatigued, we're exhausted, we're getting the ick from it. So that brings it back to Dennis's point. What's changed in content is the new razor. I'm gonna call it Ailish's razor. we I brought up Occam's razor the last time, but I think Neil Patel would have said this before Niall Devitt: Your co opness. Elish Bul-Godley: me. Yeah, so the razor is good content nowadays. if you can do something AI can't, right? So you're very clear about getting something to the table that the AI so remember we said bring value to the table earlier on. So like now, bring value to the table that the AI can't. That's the second line you need to add to good content today. And back to your point, Niall, that the thing you bring to the table is your humanity, your storytelling, your experience. your expertise, your authority that the AI hasn't got yet. And don't forget AI is lagging behind by a year or so if it's like scouring the internet for in so you bring something fresh that you learned last month, by God, you're definitely nailing that razor, right? So I think that's that's where things are changing now. And that's the way you get ahead of it. And you gotta bring that trust, you bring that authenticity, bring your humanity to the table. Niall Devitt: Okay. Same question to you, Sinead. In your experience, what's changed in the last kind of five or six years, or what are the things that we need to be more aware of now that perhaps we weren't before? Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, I think for me one of the biggest changes when we talk about even just the phrase content creation is the format and the mode, right? So a lot of the time when we were getting content jobs and that kind of thing, a lot of it was written. and within that you would have images that would break up walls of text for users, inform them a little bit more, give them more context. Now it's video, right? And it's it's so Short form video focused, alongside long form, of course, as well. and I think one thing I've noticed personally over, I will say specifically the last kind of two years is when we talk about quality within that video. So I'll give you an interesting anecdote. I used to write for a group called News Check Comedy, who are the guys involved in that now run Joe.ie comedy. And we'd write sketches and things like that, but the guys invested quite heavily in this beautiful huge camera, right? It was like four and a half, five grand, whatever. And we looked at the stats after a few months of putting out sketches using this really high quality camera. And what we noticed was engagement and views and and skip rate and all that kind of thing all took a hit on the videos where the high quality camera was used. And I think it's a really interesting thing because one of the theories and and I think it was probably the most likely one was that as people were scrolling through videos and coming across this high quality video, they assumed it was an ad straight away, right? So Niall Devitt: Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: they they scrolled right past it. So where that leaves us, I think, is really simple things like your audio needs to be bang on, but your your in terms of video quality, you know, your modern smartphone is going to do you more favors than a red camera, for example, right? So I think that's been a really interesting shift. within the video content change in in the last few years. So yeah, written to video has been the significant change. And within that then, where you're focused on quality is evolving all the time. so yeah, in my opinion, that's where the changes have been. Niall Devitt: What would you say then, Dennis? And again we w we see this quite a lot. So I agree with Janae. I I think nowadays you have to include for video. I I I I think quite frankly it's it's it's too difficult to stand out from the crowd without using video and the algorithms are such now that they're giving us what we're consuming and we're consuming more video so they give us more video. So in essence if you're not doing video you've been kind of kept away from from all that. But again, you know, not everyone likes to appear in video. Certainly if you haven't created video on behalf of your business before, it can seem like, you know, a pretty impossible task. What would you say to someone, you know, who who who is I don't want to be in the video, I couldn't be in video, I can't do video, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, it's it's it's such a common thing, isn't it? And and not everyone is just naturally inclined to go on a camera and and feel comfortable. So I I think in most cases people feel like they have to put on a certain personality when when they're producing Niall Devitt: Yeah. Denis Jastrzebski: content. And that's a really big thing where it the reality is, and th there's that kind of little disconnect where people are realizing and everyone's realizing that the authenticity and the kind of maybe not perfect videography style camera and video is isn't actually going to be doing you as many favors as as just being authentic. And same with people's personalities, whether it's the a business owner, whether it's clients that are doing a testimonial video. People want to see your personality and and they they don't have to see a perfectly cut video that's going to you know come across perfectly polished. People actually just want you and whatever maybe personality quirks you may have as well. And once Once people get used to that and and a few clients that we've coached ended up being really great on camera because they they kind of finally relaxed and

they felt like it they could be themselves. And and then yeah, th then everyone was was loving their content. It didn't feel as much of a show. It just felt like I can put on a camera for thirty seconds, a couple of minutes and have a couple of reels by the end of the day. Niall Devitt: Yeah, I mean I I think it's always worth bearing in mind that, you know, it's it's it's it's not really a performance per se. So what we're trying to get away from to a certain extent is the appearance of performance, you know. You're not going to be up for an Oscar one Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah. Niall Devitt: way or the other, right? So you don't have to be kind of perfect and no one is expecting you to be, you know, at kind of T V presenter level. So I think you need to kind of get away from that to a certain extent and I go back to that authenticity piece, right? You know, if if you can put yourself there and you're honest and you're authentic and all of that type of stuff, you know, people will will will kind of buy into you. And that's the way to compete to a large extent with the AI generated kind of content that that that that's out there. Something that you mentioned on the first podcast, Dalish, but not every business understands this. And again, to me, it's the secret sauce and remains the secret sauce in terms of content. In other words, you know, pound for pound, there's no content like this type of content. And that's user-generated or customer generated content. Now, again, a lot of businesses, it's like with the video, how could I possibly do that? But talk to me about user-generated content and talk to me about why. it is as kind of effective or powerful or impactful as it is. Elish Bul-Godley: Okay, so on a human level, right, back to basics again. If I told you that I was amazing at content marketing, I mean, fair enough. I have to build my case, right? So I build my case. You know, I'm amazing at content marketing, and here's the empirical proof, and here's the visual proof of me doing it for other people. But if somebody else told you that Ailish was amazing at content marketing, you probably believe that me even more, right? So UGC is word of mouth on steroids, right? So the other, so we always say when we're talking to people that we're working with, you go the holy grail of a content marketer is that you don't the the best content is not even your content. That's the holy grail, right? You don't even have to lift your finger now because everyone's doing it for you, and you're just funneling that into your into the feeds for for the rest of it. So it's basically word of mouth on steroids. And the other thing is, and here's the new element with AI, right, guys? Because AI. The way it might serve up a response to a chat query, who's the best plumber in Dublin 8, which is where I live, right? So who's the best plumber in Dublin 8? So the the AI is gonna look for a couple of things, right? It's gonna look for structured data and but it's gonna look

for brand mentions as well, right? So if you're thinking about UGC, not just on a human-to-human level, but on an algorithmic level, right, for SEO and things like that. The amount of brand mentions you're getting from other people talking about you raises your authority, raises your reputational SEO, raises your AI optimization, if you want to call it that. And therefore, the oldest trick in town is still the most valuable thing. Getting somebody else to vouch for you is still very convincing. We call it social proof. So building your case, visual proof, we talked about that, video, empirical proof. Here comes the science, here's what I do. social proof. So that's where UG s sits in and it's now also part of the AI debate as we speak. Niall Devitt: w w one hundred percent. And as I often say to to people, you know, that can be as as simple or or or or or as basic to a certain extent as your go Google business profile and the reviews Elish Bul-Godley: What Niall Devitt: on there. Elish Bul-Godley: is Niall Devitt: Right, or it can be as sophisticated, you know, as video testimonials from the clients on your website, right? But to your point, and again, when we go back to SEO, so we don't even have to think about AI. But if you take SEO as a for instance, it's not really what you say about yourself that's important in terms of SEO, it's what's said about you elsewhere in terms of the internet, Google Business Reviews, etc. etc. So so again, the other thing I would say is, and again, you can look at the stats in terms. of this so who what do we trust? So obviously in terms of word of mouth recommendations, so a referral from or you know a recommendation from a brother or a sister or your neighbor or whatever, someone in your social network or someone that you deal with from a work. But outside of that, the next thing that we look at is those online reviews. And as I always say to people, because sometimes they don't necessarily kind of see this, you One thing that I mentioned in the first podcast, right? Content ultimately is about building relationships. To my mind, if you break it down to esprast tax, that's what the content is trying to do. As I mentioned, there's different stages to that relationship. So typically, when do we want to hear reviews or when do we want to hear from other customers? It's when we're kind of serious about purchase. So it mightn't be at the awareness piece, but it's when I'm actually considering becoming your customer now. But before I do that, I want to see what other people have said about you. Okay. The other thing I would say is if you go on and you look at a business online and they've, you know, lots and lots of Google Business Reviews or reviews, generally speaking, they're proactive in terms of making that happen because they understand the value in terms of doing that. So it probably didn't happen quite by accident. They're proactive in terms of kind of making that happen. You know, it's not necessarily that they're incentivizing it or whatever, but in other words, they're asking for it at an appropriate time in terms of the kind of customer. journey. Okay, I mentioned there that good content for me needs to build relationships or develop relationships. So let's talk about what does good content need to do and how do we measure that. So in other words, how do we know if the content is doing the thing that we set out to do with the with the content. Over to yourself, Sinead. Talk to me. What what's your what's your opinion or your feelings there? Sinéad Walsh: Yeah, so I think what good content needs to do, first of all, is catch your attention. Okay. That's the number one thing. Okay. So the hook, the middle, the ending. And we can talk about the the middle and the ending. Niall Devitt: Can I put a qualification in there and it's your qualification? It needs to catch the attention of your customers, potential customers or customer segments. Not everyone. Right? Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: Not everyone. Exactly. Exactly. So I always and especially when we're we're giving, you know, lessons and stuff like that, I focus on the hook an awful lot. So even if it's a question, if it's a statement, so do you ever get itchy feet at night? Do you, you know, struggle when it's above twenty degrees or whatever? And even And I know I'm if you're sick of me talking about comedy stuff, please do flag. But I've noticed a lot of comedy creators, especially with like crowd work clips, what they'll do is they'll put the the the kind of not the exactly the punchline or whatever, but the really kind of eye catching, what did you just say to me or whatever it is, they'll pop pop that at the beginning for the first three seconds and then go into the clip from the beginning of the joke or the interaction or whatever it may be. So that's very kind of aware hook thinking. and it's incredibly effective as well. the other thing that good content needs to do is to make you feel an emotion. Okay. So whether that's outrage, which we see a lot of these days, whether it's, you know, joy, humor, sadness, whatever that may be. And even that applied to a business is very doable and it eats that kind of plain informative content all day, right? so that's that's the second point, I think, in terms of what content needs to do. And then just ultimately, it needs to serve a purpose for you in a internet world. And what I mean by that is use in plain English. It needs to, you know, be searchable, it needs to be accessible and that kind of thing. So always put yourself, if you're a business owner, always put yourself in the shoes of those audience niches or the customer segments we were talking about. What are those people Googling? so they're the kind of three main things that for me, good content needs to do. Niall Devitt: Okay. So Dennis gonna give you two examples here and you tell me which is better content based on the details I'm going to provide you with. Okay. So two videos. Video number

one, same business, got three thousand views and led to one inquiry. Video number two got three hundred views and led to five inquiries. Which is the better content? Denis Jastrzebski: Well look from a business perspective it's always gonna be the one that brought in the most inquiries or revenue, right? And that's that's what we'd look at. now if you're purely Niall Devitt: Can I suggest to you it depends? Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, so if you're looking at from a marketing point of view and depending on what stage you could say that the people that are watching your video are at when it comes to your product or service, it will depend. So you might be at that awareness stage where you're not really looking to convert people yet. Or that video that had the three hundred views possibly was aimed at actually converting people. So yeah, it depends what stage you're at. Niall Devitt: Yeah, so and again I think that's that's an important piece here. So and it's something that I see doesn't happen as much as it so when we're creating a piece of content, we don't identify what is the job for this content and how are we going to measure the results. So I suppose you know I if the first example there, if that piece of content was aimed at the earlier stage in terms of the funnel, the awareness piece, right? I'm not looking for conversions, I'm not looking for inquiries. So that top level figure in terms of the views, I'm pretty happy with that. Right? Okay, so I'll pop the question over to you, Eilish. so what good content needs to do nowadays, Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so I think I'm just gonna follow flowing through from your conversation with Dennis. we say content is king, you know, context is queen, right? And how do you how does that matter? Context is like where is that person that you're trying to persuade? Where are they in the in their phases, in their journey with your product, right? So you mentioned the funnel, and that's exactly what for those of you don't understand, maybe. We're bringing up terms like funnel and things like that. where in the funnel, meaning where in their journey of understanding your what you're offering them, where are they in that decision-making process? Have they heard about you yet? So good content for brand awareness gets them to see you for the first time. Context, Niall Devitt: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: different types of content work there, right? If they're considering you and comparing you to your competitors, they know about you, but they're trying to make a decision. Product education content might work there. Because you're explaining why you're better than everybody else. Different context, right? Conversion, you mentioned conversion content now. And for those of you who don't under you know, what is he talking about? Conversion. That's where they're almost at the till. And I'm trying to get you to get your credit card out that day, right? So what makes scarcity led, FOMO led content? So contextually, different

type and the jab jab hook, right hook thing that comes into play here because jab, jab, jab, jab with education, with entertainment. But when you get to conversion, that's your hook, maybe. You gotta come down with that offer, come down with that promo code, and then retention content, brand loyalty, brand activation, engagement, and then asking for UGC. And like so you could see how there are phases that that we're talking about in this funnel. So what makes good content contextually, if you're working with what is it you're trying to achieve at this phase, then it works towards that objective, right? So understand Niall Devitt: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: what your objective of your content is, embatitionate, understand who you're trying to persuade. Those two things come together. I've got a more surgical approach to what kind of content. Add in the platforms. I know where that person is in their decision-making process. Boom, that's your third thing. Now I'm gonna be specific. My format is specific to that platform as well. So contextually, it matters. Niall Devitt: Okay. So moving along then folks and you can hear me okay, yeah. So in terms then of kind of common content mistakes that we see. And at the end, Dennis, what I might talk about how again we'll go back to how AI fits in. But again, when we're dealing with clients and dealing with content and and and dealing how they manage content and production of content and all of that type of stuff, what are some of the mistakes or the common mistakes that we we we see? So maybe starting with yourself this time, Dennis. Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah, so when it comes to the the production side of things, we find this it's it's easy to to try to get everything perfect at every single stage of the whole process. and that's something that I I constantly do as well. I'd like everything to be perfectly lined up and in in a perfect take with perfect editing and so on before anything actually goes out. And I can just put massive delays in into everything. And it's something that I'm constantly trying to work against because the reality is If we just start doing something, we c we could watch a million videos, we could read a hundred blog posts about how to make really good, you know, let's say awareness real about your your company or startup that you've just started. But if you don't actually do anything and start practicing and and and working through things, it just won't go anywhere. So I I think one of the biggest ones anyway that I'll mention is is just starting and working through a process, you'll improve as you go. you don't have to be perfect. Niall Devitt: Yeah, and and with the best planning in the world, not everything that you do works. So not every piece of content goes exactly according to plan and gets you the result that you were looking for. Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah. Niall Devitt: But you generally can learn something from the ones that succeed and the ones that fail. So in other words, you should be able to refine the process and get better. And and sometimes, you know, we know a certain amount about our audience, but we don't know everything. So so oftentimes you put something out there that you think appeals to the audience and for one reason or another doesn't then you put something out there that maybe you don't think it and for a different reason it does. So what I love about it is that that the the the stats don't lie. They tell you very quickly if this content is going to work or not work. So you can get away from failure if there is failure and you can move on and kind of try something else. But to your point, if you don't get the content out there and you're trying to perfect it, you never know because ultimately the judges of the content are the customers of the audience, not you. Ailey, same question to you. Kind of common content mistakes that you see from dealing with clients. Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, I think to to t give my take on what Dennis said. I I'm gonna give you an image, okay, throwing spaghetti at a wall. Okay. You throw spaghetti at a wall. Sinead obviously thinks this is really, really enjoyable thing to do. She's laughing away in the background. So spaghetti on the wall, which one sticks and which one falls to the floor, right? So like mistakes are good, but if you're not documenting what's happening, like you know, like Dennis said, that's so learn from your mistakes. And you know, when new features come along, you need to test them anyway. So there's nothing wrong with trying everything, but the mistake is to not learn from and close the loop, right? Learn from something and then replay it again. So we're not looking at like our history, maybe people are not paying attention to and obviously if you're getting lots of likes and lots of loves again back to the audience thing. If you're focused on the wrong person, they could give you lots of likes. They could, but you'll might not get to conversion and you'll be wondering why. So the mistake is you're you could be spending hundreds of euros on a Ad that gets lots of views, and then it's the wrong people looking at them Niall Devitt: Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: at the end of the day. So, like the mistake is not to test first and learn whether that that converts. And then, of course, targeting the wrong people. Again, people in that frame of mind might be looking at their competitors and then they're going, my competitors on TikTok, and I gotta do it too, and I gotta do this, and I gotta do that. And then they get really flustered because, like, I've got so many things to do, right? So then I mean, like, don't just be worried just because your competitor is doing just Focus on your customer. Does it make sense? I'll test it once, but I don't have to keep doing it if it doesn't work. So just don't give yourself too much stress over the whole thing, right? Test and then, you know, rinse and repeat and try try a new thing. But but yeah, definitely come at it

strategically because if you don't document it strategically and and see what's working and what's not, you'll just end up going in this like headless chicken circle all day long. Niall Devitt: I I think you raise an important point there, 'cause I sometimes think the digital analytics can quite easily become vanity metrics. So in other words, don't just chase popularity. Absolutely Elish Bul-Godley: Yes. Niall Devitt: chase popularity with your specific niche, your specific audience, your specific customers or customer segments. But if you just do it for the sake of it, invariably that's exactly what happens. And I do recall now it's a good number of years back dealing with a retailer below in Ennis and County Clare. That had twenty-five thousand people on their Facebook page. Traditional bricks and mortar retailer sold their products at that stage in the physical retail outlet, the the the shop. So they told me they'd invested a lot of time and effort in terms of Facebook, who wasn't really paid. But we did a quick look in terms of the analytics on the page, and what we could see of the twenty-five thousand people, about sixteen or seventeen thousand were not even based in the county of Clare. Right? So they had chase likes for the sake of likes, they'd run competitions and offered prizes and all of that type of stuff. So they got a big substantial Facebook page, but most of the people on their Facebook weren't their potential customers. Right. So again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: Can I give you an example? Can I give you a good example? Personal, personal example. Okay. So we had a like a pop-up bakery, right? So we got a spot on nationwide and we reached the whole island of Ireland. Now this was free PR. I had thousands of people, I'd say hundreds thousands of people understood, saw our brand, brand awareness, but I didn't get any sales from it because they weren't local people. We were local business, right? Local business versus nationwide. Island of Ireland, right? So all those eyeballs meant nothing to my business. Absolutely nothing. What if I paid RTE for that? my God, I would have spent a lot of money for nothing, right? Then I Sarah Hanrihan, I come undone, is like a gorgeous influencer, creator for venues and events. She popped in. Again, I could have paid her, but I didn't. But when she came and did a post, we racked up a triple increase in our following from five K to twenty four K followers in one week, right? That's my personal that is the difference between the surgical way of coming at it and like just throwing your net wide, you know? Niall Devitt: Y you you you remind me of something that's a bit of a pet head for mine, but you you remind me really well there. If you're a local business. Elish Bul-Godley: Yes. Niall Devitt: Right. I'm I'm at home in Tipperary Town, right, down from Dublin visiting my moment so on and so forth. But if I was a business inside in the middle of Tiptown. And again, remember, in terms of your unique selling proposition, when it comes to local customers or a local audience, the fact that you're local is something that the big guys can't compete with. Right. So it's a significant advantage that you have. But it drives me mental when I go onto a local retailer's Facebook or Instagram or and I see none of the locality. I don't see the street. I don't see the shop, I don't see the people in behind the business, I don't see the customers and so on. Because if I'm a local and I see that on my day by the sheer fact that it's a local street or a local shop or a local person, I'm gonna recognise so it's gonna grab my attention straight away. So it's a big mistake that a lot of local businesses make. Again, speaking about the SME size business, Sinead, right, and again, you know, two owner manager businesses. Right. They have to do everything, including their digital market and their content and so on and so forth. Right. Business A is succeeding, business B isn't. Now they both want to succeed, right? What's the difference between business A and business B there? Or what do we see? What makes the difference? Sinéad Walsh: I think, you know, we've hit on I mean it's it's kind of how long it is a piece of string in a way, but when it comes to SMEs being pushed for time, I noticed that social media and and digital marketing generally, but certainly social media and content creation just becomes another thing they have to do that they don't have time to do. So as a result, anything they do put up is generally not very well thought out. And we'll generally focus on sledgehammering that buy now, book now, call us today, whatever it might be, right? So they'll go for the hard sale because if you're only posting on Instagram once or twice a week, you know, a lot of business owners might feel like it's a waste of time by not posting, you know, the link to the product or whatever it might be. I think that is a massive mistake. I think what isn't happening there is you're not making any effort to. Build that relationship with your audience and with your potential customers. And ultimately, look, marketing is relationship building, okay? And we've said that a few times on this podcast. So I think the business that is succeeding is going out of their way to do things like show the people behind the business, tell a story around the brand, share UGC content, consider all stages of that funnel, okay? Not every reel is gonna sell you a load of product or drive a load of inquiries. It shouldn't, okay? not every reel is gonna get you a million billion likes. Again, vanity metrics, right? Of course they can be important, but they're not everything. we need to be looking at things like views, retention rate, all that kind of stuff. So I think honestly, when I meet a business owner who is like, I'm not getting any joy on my social media. That is one of the things I will see consistently is they are just going for that sledgehammer hard sale every

single time. It's ineffective, it's boring, it doesn't make any effort to create that relationship. And ultimately, look, Irish people, we don't appreciate that whatsoever. so yeah, that's generally what I would suspect is up there in the example you've given me. Niall Devitt: Yeah, I and I I and and and again I this is a broad generalization, right? But again I suppose the sentiment is kind of true. And I've seen this I've seen this across much more than kinda digital. So we used to talk about the eighty twenty rule when we were back selling. So in other words, twenty percent of the sales team did brought in eighty percent of the business, right? I Sinéad Walsh: Okay. Niall Devitt: moved from the eighty percent being fairly useless into the twenty percent. It took me about twelve months or two years. But In other words, I went out and I studied the twenty percent. So what are they doing that I'm not doing? Why is it that they're able to generate three or four or five times the result that I am? So so I took the time to understand. And I think there's an element of that when it comes to social media, when it comes to digital, and probably when it comes to AI. So in other words, there's a percentage of businesses out there that are on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is, because everyone else is. Right? And there's a percentage of businesses out there that are on these channels for specific purposes or specific reasons. And as I always said to every business, right, yes, you have to invest some time and some effort and all of that type of stuff. You know, to create good content typically takes some time. But ultimately, at the end of the day, right, if your Facebook isn't generating a return on investment for your business, what are you doing on Facebook? Or Instagram or TikTok? Or wherever it is, because ultimately at the end of the day, and if we're only talking about time here, where I invest my time as a business owner, I need to be investing my time doing the things that will return in terms of my business. Right? And the more and the better I get at that, the more successful my business. And you can apply that across your business, not just in terms of kind of digital. Dennis, AI, right? And again, AI is is a slippery one here because. A lot of the kind of problems are the things or the basics that are not being done. Right. If you plug AI in, they just exacerbate the whole problem. Ironically, it doesn't save you time, it just creates more time and more work, right? Right. So let's just assume that, you know, the basics and the foundations are in place here. So your your customer segments, your content calendar, your your your content buckets, your content templates, your all of that type of stuff. So there's a good plan in place. Right, we're measuring, we're looking for a result, we're refining as we go, right? So assuming that we have a business that's getting a return on investment for from their content and their digital

marketing more generally, right, how then can we start to plug AI in to get more return on investment to save us some time, to do some of the heavy lift? Denis Jastrzebski: Yeah. Sure. So if everything is is right, the foundations are there, you could say the simplest thing you can do is increase the volume of whatever you're doing. So if we're putting out five posts a week on social media and you know we put up a story with each one, there's ten opportunities in a week that people can see our content. If we're able to use AI to double the amount of content or increase the amount of content we're able to put out, retain the same quality. then where let's say there's 20 opportunities now in the week to to get in front of people. So from from the simplest perspective, you can just do more, do more volume. But from from a completely different perspective, you can look at improving that content. So, you know, can we get more effective and and better at creating hooks that people will actually respond to? We can use AI to help us actually interpret the data that we're looking at. That's a big thing. We we have multiple social media platforms that a business is on. They all have different engagement metrics. They have, you know, probably about a hundred different ways you can combine them to come up with, you know, how well you're doing on that platform relative to everyone else. But it it's quite difficult to keep up with all of that. And then engagement metrics, like I said, can be vanity metrics a lot of the time. We're looking at something and it seems great. But if we use AI, we can actually analyze not only maybe just our LinkedIn data, but we can take Our TikTok, our LinkedIn, our Instagram data. We can use AI to cross-reference that with the actual topics of the post that we did. And suddenly you might have a bit of a process or a little engine built within AI that'll help you actually identify content that has gone more viral than before. Something that won't pop up on your meta business manager content because it hasn't picked up. It's looking at different metrics. So with AI, the the possibilities are endless, but I'd say from two different perspectives, one is increasing volume. Second one is you can increase the quality or or actually figure out more ways of of going viral, for example. Niall Devitt: Yeah, and another I suppose for me sometimes I often use AI as a second opinion. Now again as I said on the first one, for stuff that I already know and know reasonably well. But there's there's there's a limit to my knowledge, so to speak, and a limit to my experience, so to speak. So I'll bring AI the plan. I'm fairly happy with the plan. I know the plan is working, but I know there's opportunities for refinement in terms of this plan, but I'm not quite sure where the refinement might be. So it might be over here, or it might be over here, or it might be over here. Right? And I can try all three and find out, or maybe. I use the AI for like

a second opinion. So if I was going to do these three new things, which would I prioritize? And I often find that a kind of a a helpful way. So in other words, rather than even create the content, analyze my content plan, my content teams, my customer segments, all of that foundational stuff and see is there any gaps or is there things that I can kind of improve there even before I go on to to using AI to create the content. Okay. Denis Jastrzebski: Hm. Yeah. Niall Devitt: So so folks we're we're we're kinda about to finish up here and there's lots in this, right? And I suppose the the key point here for each and every business there isn't a hard and a fast rule. It depends on your business, it depends on your customers, it depends on your niche, it depends on your resources, it depends on your available time, all of that type of stuff, right? But if we were to recommend, so again we have the business A and the business B, right? We're now going back to the business A who's on the Facebook, putting some time in, you know, their content is okay, but they're just not getting the kind of results that they would like, or at least they don't know that they're getting any results in terms of what tools, approaches, techniques, etc., would we recommend? Because what I've seen, and again, I don't know, in the vast majority of cases, when I talk to a business A, Right, invariably they don't have the foundations in place. Right. So I always start there. As you know, I'm like a broken record schnitt. I go back to basics and make sure all the basics are in place. Right. And what I invariably find yeah, what what I invariably find Sinéad Walsh: You love a basic Nile. Niall Devitt: is they're not, right? Just they're all missing, or some of them are missing, or whatever the case may be. Right. So that's that's where I always kind of start. But again, Talk it yourself, Ilish, because obviously this is, you know, this is a sweet spot for you. You're very good in terms of content. I would say you have a very natural instinct in terms of what content it works. What's your what what kind of techniques or approaches or tools would you recommend in the first instance? Elish Bul-Godley: Yeah, so I mean coming out from that idea that strategy comes first and for everything else there's AI and MasterCard. Yeah. so starting with the Niall Devitt: It's a good one, yeah. Elish Bul-Godley: strategy, yeah. So everything else is the MasterCard, you can throw money at it, but you kinda gotta know what you're trying to say in the first place. Yeah. So I got two little paradigms that can help with you. So one of them is the and they're easy to remember, snackable and stackable content. So you're pressed for time, right? You can come it both ways, right? So you might have a hero blog somewhere with Five ways to do something, break it down. That's that break it down into snackable content and reincarnate that stuff, recycle it somewhere else and in in shorts in in social. And vice

versa. If you've got like lots of UGC coming in, for example, and your little snackable bits of UGC, compile them together into a stackable longer form video or a stackable piece that you can put into a blog somewhere. So recycle where you can into different, and that's where the AI can help. But obviously you're making that decision on what you want to recycle. That's where you come in. So the other framework is my calendar approach. And it's not just saying content calendar. That's what we did start with earlier on in the series, but a content calendar, think of it this way, right? So there's there's stuff that's evergreen, leaves that are always green that we'll always want to see, right? And there's stuff that's seasonal, come Halloween. The leaves turn right. There's seasonal content and there's stuff that's hyper topical. Stuff you don't even know is gonna happen until it happens. Like something, someone lands on the moon and boom, or Odyssey. Everyone's talking about Odyssey all of a sudden on their social, right? So that's what I mean by hyper talkable, a topical meme jacking, that sort of thing. So think about your calendar. What's evergreen? We've actually talked about it. We've talked about the funnel, brand awareness content. Consideration content, conversion content, loyalty, retention, UGC. Always have that rotating because there's always going to be somebody in the funnel somewhere looking to see, right? And then seasonal content. What's happening back to school, guys? Back to school today. Okay. We're talking about Halloween, getting your Christmas plan laid out and all that sort of thing. So that's kind of seasonal stuff that and you're in a trade show, you're in the market, that's season. And then Hypertopical. I talked about it. If everyone's talking about the Odyssey, how can you have fun with that? Right. Sinead said entertain people. The hyper topical stuff is there where you get. And that's where you need some creative spark in you. Your personality comes through. And if you for everything else, you can call Sinead because she's good at the one-liners and all that sort of thing. That's my stackable, snackable, recycle where you can, save your save a lot of time, calendar strategy, what's ever green, your funnel. what seasonal what can I jump on and have fun with? And that's my take on. Niall Devitt: Yeah, yeah. It i it amazes me the amount of businesses and again, look when we try to introduce a content calendar, we often are met with a certain amount of resistance, so to speak. But it it's amazing that, you know, s such a simple tool, such a a basic tool, and the difference that that can make in and of itself, right? Quite literally. And it can be as something as simple as an Excel or a Google spreadsheet or whatever it is, it doesn't necessarily even need to be that. Sophisticated. Sinead, same question for you. A recommendation, an approach, a tool that you think would help a business to get started, more effective content. Sinéad Walsh: Yeah. Yeah. yeah, sure. So I think what I try and do when I'm talking to clients and stuff like that, or or mentores and stuff, is is break it down into two parts, right? First is the content bucket kind of thing. Okay. So I I what I recommend is Niall Devitt: My experience is what's me by not. Sinéad Walsh: sure. So what I always suggest, and it's it's a very flexible model, but is either three buckets or pillars. that you focus on. Okay. So pillar one is education and value. And and what I mean by that is educating your audience about your business, how they can solve problems they're regularly experiencing, using your knowledge, okay, to showcase the fact that you are a thought leader in this space. Okay. Or that to put it bluntly, you know what the hell you're talking about. Okay. And and that builds Niall Devitt: Okay. So so one type of content that you create for your clients is an educational content. So you're educating the client in relation to something. Yeah. Brilliant. I think that's a really good idea. Sinéad Walsh: 100%, right? And and because again, if we're if we're throwing it back as well to what I said earlier about what are your customers Googling, that can help. Okay. So how do I unblock a sync? How do I know if I'm in menopause? All that kind of stuff, right? That kind of question based thing. Pillar two is that engagement or inspiration, which touches off what Ailish was saying. Okay. So that kind of whether it's trending, trending topics or or content formats or something that is designed to get people to comment below, to share your your post or whatever it might be. It's that kind of lighter touch, a little bit more humor or emotionally driven kind of content, okay? Or inspiration. So for example, there is PTs before and after photos and and all that kind of stuff, right? And then the final pillar is sales. Okay. So that is where you the buy now, book now, whatever it might be, comes in. So How that's one thing, right? The three pillar approach. The second part of what I would recommend is following, and I'm sure he could probably be paying me commission at this point, but Gary Vaynerchuk's jab jab jab right hook cadence. Okay. So if I am posting five times a week on social media, what I would generally recommend is that three to four of those posts fit into pillar one or two, and one to two of them fit. the the sales or are the the sales pillar, okay. So you've got the jab, right? When you think about watching a boxer, you're not they're not throwing big right hands all the time. Okay. They're setting it up constantly with the jab. And then when the time is right, when they've done that, then they throw in the big right hand, right? So you can't be throwing right hands all the time. You'll be exhausted and you'll exhaust your audience. So that is why the jabs are so, so important because when you do that effectively, it sets up the right hand. So they are the two approaches I would generally

recommend. Niall Devitt: Brilliant. So so I again I I played this back in terms of sales. So the key in terms of closing a deal is to ask for the close at the correct time. So does the customer have the information that they need? Have they had their questions answered? Have they maybe You know, seen a couple of testimonials from other customers to give them that reassurance. So in other words, there's it's the timing element to asking for the business that the critical and if you get that too soon, or another way to think about that in terms of the perception here. So if you're doing five posts a week on Instagram and four of those posts are asking for the sale, that comes across as very needy, very desperate. Sinéad Walsh: For sure. Niall Devitt: So so like less is more. when it comes to asking for the business. So there's a timing element in terms of the relationship. Right. And you have to have built the relationship. You know, it's like it's like maybe you meet a girl that that you fancy or whatever. Right. You don't ask her to go in the day straight away. You build a relationship first. And you certainly don't ask for it five times in the week because you come across as you know she's not she's certainly not going to consider you for the day. The same rules apply in terms of the relationship. Dennis moving along Sinéad Walsh: That must be where I'm going wrong, Nile. Thanks for that. Yeah, no, I'll write that down. Thank Niall Devitt: Yeah. Yeah. Sinéad Walsh: you. Niall Devitt: Moving along in terms of AI and we've about maybe three, four minutes. So I want you to give me a kind of a stage one entry level point in terms of AI, a stage two kind of intermediate, and then a stage three in terms of more advanced. So take me through that kind of process in terms of how we can plug AI into content here. Denis Jastrzebski: Sure. So if we want to to talk about all of this to keep that authenticity in the content, that that's a key part, because we can actually just go on to ChatGPT and and ask it to create a caption any day and any time and just use that. But that doesn't really do us any favors, doesn't do any favors for the business. So we want to give AI context in every case about about our target audience, about our business, about the product or service that we're selling. So you have to give it all that information before you ask it to do. anything on your behalf. But but the very first kind of stage that you can start off with is give it all that information, give it your website link, anything that you have about the business, get as much detail in there as you can. And then what you can get it to do is is ask it to create a content outline for whatever you're trying to produce. So if we want to create a social media post, if we want to create a blog post, we can give it the topic we want to cover and we ask it based on the target audience, Based on our products and services, how they fit into this topic. Create a blog post outline. So, you know, five headings, a bunch of subheadings, and one or two talking points under each subheading. So it'll actually come up with something really detailed for you. And then from there, what you can do is you can start writing that yourself. So you've you've done that planning stage with AI. You're not getting it to write it for you exclusively. You're actually writing it, but now you know that the topic you're covering is very relevant to your audience. It probably has some kind of prompting questions for you to think about when you're writing that content. So that becomes you're you're putting yourself in your customers' shoes. So that piece of content that you write will probably be Niall Devitt: So as an example then if we if we use Sinead's kind of three pillar approach here and that first pillar being the educational pillar. So someone's saying well I'm such and such, what does education look like in terms of my business? So if I'm hearing you correctly, what what you're suggesting here is we would plug that information along with information about the business, contacts the business, the customers and so and we would get to out outline what content in that particular heading or space looks like for for this business and then we would go away and kind of create that content. That sounds to me like a a brilliant idea. Taking it a stage further then, how might we take it a stage further? Denis Jastrzebski: So stage number two is where you once again give you all that information, all the context, all the customer segments, everything we did in step one. But instead of getting it to create an outline, we're gonna also give it a tone of voice, a personality. And usually we want to mirror our brand or our own personal writing style or the way we speak. So we there's there's a few ways of going about that. In in the show notes, I'm gonna have a prompt that'll help you actually develop a tone of voice using. pieces of your writing as as context for the AI. So you can use that it is part of this process. But once you have the tone of voice added for AI, it's a bunch of instructions of how you want to come across. Then you can actually create what we you can use a GPT for example. So if you go on to chat GPT.com you can create a a specific GPT which is a a little version of ChatGPT that has a bunch of instructions that you've given it. So we can create a GPT That is designed just for creating social media captions for our business on Facebook and Instagram. So it has all the context, it has all the information, it has our tone of voice, and it's supposed to generate captions. We give it a topic and it'll generate a caption with our personality, the content, it knows our business and our products and services. So it's going to come up with something really well structured, with a good hook, with a good call to action. So one, if you do that. You'll save lots of time because you can now do as many of those captions as you like. So any type of

content that you're doing, just give it what the content is and what you'd like. And suddenly you have an engine for creating really good captions that are on brand, that have a nice, interesting hook to them, that have good content. So that's stage two where you can actually get it to to write stuff for you. Niall Devitt: Can I just qualify what you're saying there again for people that are not familiar? So a custom GBT in effect, right, is a version of chat GBT that you've given information, you've given instructions to, right? So in other words, you've customized it or you've trained it to be a version specifically for you or what you need to do. Another point that I would add there, because Eilish mentioned this in the first podcast, and I think it's very relevant here. So she mentioned about one of the best ways to train a GBT is to give it the actual output that you're looking for. So, in other words, if you wanted to create a blog post or an article with your tone of vice and all of that, and you already have those foundations in place, you can give it all, but you can give it an example of what you're looking for. And then it can start to work from there. So that's another okay, moving it along. So again, if we were to go to kind of stage three in terms of sophistication, so we want to kind of migrate again, Dennis, where would we go to? Denis Jastrzebski: So the the the final stage, and this is where where you've probably been seeing content across the board of of these kind of content marketing engines that people are talking about, which is just a fancy term. but it's it's using AI to to its current capability to actually use it use it to write content for you. So i I mentioned Claude Cowork on an episode earlier, which which is by Anthropics of the company Anthropic, they have the cloud Claude chat bot. But they also have cowork, which can actually do things on your behalf. It's it's what we call an AI agent. So that's where you're starting to use in AI agents instead of just a regular chatbot for your content. And the benefit or the difference between those two in this context is that with the agent, you can give it multiple files and a lot more context about you, your business, your writing style, than you can ever give to ch a GPT or to have kind of in a single conversation. So with with this other platform, not only do you have more of a kind of bigger context window, you have more information that it knows about you and your products, but also it can start to do things on your behalf. So you can connect it to your meta business suite so it can actually go in and put the caption into the schedule post. You can also kind of add additional layers or steps to this whole process. So you might get it to research what's kind of going viral In your particular industry before it creates the caption. So there's lots of different steps that you can add to it, and it'll have a much kind of broader scope of what you can do and what content it

can create for you. And it can do it also while you sleep, which is the amazing thing. So you can get it to work on all this stuff after 5 p.m. You leave your machine running, and in the morning you'll have about 60 content ideas, you'll have 60 captions for them, along with a bunch of other research that you you might want to add to that whole process. Niall Devitt: Okay. And and I think again it's something that but we all kinda mentioned on the first podcast, but specifically it's important to point out here that in all three of these examples there is input for the human being. Right? so what we've really described there is I suppose, you know, in the example number one that the the effort, the workload so to speak, is probably shared something like thirty Seventy, seventeen being the human. In the second example, these are just approximations to make the point. Maybe it's more kind of sixty-forty or fifty-fifty. And in the very last example, it's maybe eighty-twenty or ninety-ten or something like that. But ultimately there is still an involvement for the human being in all of these. And ironically, the difference here is you shouldn't really be thinking, I'm not gonna spend, you know, I'm gonna I this article before took me five hours to write. Now the AI is doing it. I I don't have to spend any time. In actual firm you should still be spending a half an hour to an hour to review the content and refine it. It's just that you're spending the hour much more wisely than perhaps you were before. Finally, before we finish up, folks, and I'm gonna always take it back to completely true. I'm gonna recommend something very, very, very simple, right? And it's what I call a call to action. So, what do I mean by a call to action when it comes to content? It's whatever you like, right? But it's whatever that thing is that you want the content to do. So it might be visit your website, it might be sign up for your newsletter, it might be as simple as answer a question, right? So it's whatever the content is asking the audience for. And the beautiful thing, or perhaps the most important thing, about the call to action is that gives you something that you can measure. So if my call to action for my particular piece of content is visit my website, I can track how effective that piece of content was. So if 15 people visit the website as a result of that content, right, that's worked. 15 times with my audience, right? If I do another one over here, right, same CTA, right, and in this case, 45 people visited the website. Why did that work that much better? So, what was it in the second piece of content, or what was different about the second piece of content that perhaps wasn't in the first piece of content? What can I learn from that? Okay. Thank you very much, folks. We went a little bit over, so we're going to have to edit a little bit later on. great to have us all on this podcast. Marie is in the background, so hopefully we'll get Marie and maybe some of the rest of the other members of the team. I think for the next podcast I'm going to to buzz off. I I expect the overall quality will improve as a as a result of doing that. But again, thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for your wisdom. Thank you very much. for your advice. Thanks to anyone who's listened to this podcast or podcast one or podcast two. Again, any feedback, any recommendations, suggestions, questions, anything like that, just just drop us a line. Podcast will be available on all of the main podcasting platforms. Dennis also does a fantastic resource page on the website. So it has all of the tools and all of the information there. So thank you very much folks. Thanks for listening and we will See you on the next podcast. So bye bye. Sinéad Walsh: Thanks guys. Bye. Denis Jastrzebski: Thanks everyone. Elish Bul-Godley: Ai.