Joep Leussink is the Chief Growth Officer for AddEvent, a calendar marketing and event management solution. He runs sales and marketing with a focus on growth and operational efficiency. Leussink is always looking for new ways to innovate his team’s work and deliver more value to customers so when generative AI came along, he was very interested in learning how it could change how the team operates. He shared how the team is using AI today, and where they find the best value.
According to recent research from the CMO Council, content generation continues to be the biggest use of gen AI for marketing teams. Leussink said it is a good place to start and understand how it works. Every company needs to create demand, and they do this through content like articles and blog posts to engage customers and potential customers and to tell them what the company is doing. This has never been easier than by using gen AI.
But using gen AI for content development also carries risks, Leussink explains. Sure, you can create a lot of content faster, but at some point, the search and answer engines start to see that the content is similar to what others are creating. As a company, you need to figure out the right content to create that is relevant for your audience(s) and find a way to personalize it.
Before you even use AI to create content, you need to build a knowledge base of what content resonates and how to best structure it. That knowledge has always been available, but not in an easily consumable way. Leussink’s team creates GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers). For example, one GPT ingests a blog post and then provides recommendations for improving its structure and content. The recommendations are faster, and the quality continues to improve as the GPT ingests more content:
I think the industry is feeling its way around as the technology becomes available and everybody starts using it. The way we’re using it isn’t, ‘OK, let’s create 1000 articles based on what AddEvent as a company does’. We’re really trying to feed it a lot of information and data on our value prop, ICP, blog articles we’ve written, and our tone of voice, so it stays very close to AddEvent’s culture and positioning. We continue to build that out really strongly and then create quality articles.
Another point Leussink makes is that it’s much easier now to create long-tail content. Before, marketing teams had to focus on key messaging, industries, and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) when creating content because they had limited bandwidth. But the process is now easy to replicate and apply to long-tail keywords as well, so you can reach and engage a wider audience.
From one content piece to multiple with less effort
Then there’s the creation of multiple content items from a single piece. Gen AI can do more than create initial drafts of new content. Leussink says his firm is using AI and automation to expand a piece of content into other content. So a blog becomes an ad, an email, or even a YouTube video”:
The distribution of the content is something that, frankly, we previously didn’t do much because it was kind of a heavy lift, and we needed different skill sets. And it wasn’t a priority, because the content was ranking. But now we can also distribute the content across multiple places. And I think that can be very valuable for organizations.
This capability is important, particularly for small teams or teams with limited budgets, because it enables marketers to develop skills with AI tools outside their specialties. Leussink says quality needs to be high, but not necessarily perfect for some content, such as YouTube Shorts or Instagram posts. So, the blog writer can create email copy, the copywriter can create YouTube scripts and videos, and so on.
Delivering the right personalization
Personalization is another area where AI can help a company scale quickly. Leussink says that AddEvent has a wide range of customers and use cases, but until recently, everyone received the same onboarding. Using the customer’s domain, they can customize onboarding, but with AI, they can go even further by scraping the entire website:
We go two or three levels deeper. We understand what they’re doing in the product. We understand what information they’re gathering on the website and which blog articles they are reading. We know which features they use and which they don’t, and that is the information we combine and personalize with. So previously, you could personalize based on industry or company size, and that’s what a lot of folks did. But now, there are so many more signals to include. To some extent, this was available prior, but it was just really difficult to get that together, because you would need an engineer or you would need a marketing operations person. Now, it becomes much more accessible for non-technical people.
Does personalized communication perform better? This is a question I’ve been curious about for a while. Leussink says AddEvent is doing a lot of testing and are seeing strong signals from personalized email (opens and engagement), but the best way to track performance is Google and Answer engine optimization (AEO). The reporting in AEO tools is still developing – there is no shortage of vendors offering solutions -, so his team is constantly learning and adapting quickly.
The Marketing team has also built its own tracking tool that assesses traffic to AddEvent’s website. What they are seeing changes week over week, thanks in part to continually evolving algorithms, making it hard to establish a baseline. However, Leussink insists the focus isn’t solely on performance tracking, as there is a clear list of actions that can be taken today to resonate with users:
In the end, we can create content, and we can create pages that rank really well, but if users come to AddEvent and they’re clicking away, obviously, the quality of the article and the content is not there. So we really try to keep that in mind and optimize our marketing campaigns that way.
Going beyond content creation to strategic work
The AddEvent GTM team uses AI for more than content creation. They also use it to dive into customer data, previously siloed from marketing, to understand how customers use their product. Now, they can get answers quickly to questions such as, ‘How many people use this feature and how often?’ This information is then fed into GPTs to improve their performance. They also use AI for content analysis to identify gaps.
Another way the team is using AI is to assess campaigns before they go out. For example, the group created a spam-filter GPT that ensures the content is of high enough quality not to get flagged by spam filters. The GPT gives a score and recommendations for improvements.
In everything done with AI, there is a ‘human in the loop’, especially for customer-facing content or the website. Leussink predicts things may get fully-automated at some point, but as long as the firm finds room for improvements or the quality bar isn’t met, it won’t go this route.
Building the internal AI muscle
In terms of advice to Marketers, Leussink argues that the best way to think about AI is as an assistant:
Think about things that you wanted to do that you’re not able to do because you don’t have the headcount, or you don’t have the skill set. Try it with a project. I think you can read a lot of things, but until you try it, and see what the tools give you. There are also a lot of automation tools now that make it so much easier because they use AI. I think that’s critical.
Marketers have to adopt AI, and the best way to do that is to constantly test. One thing AddEvent has done that proved successful was to share AI knowledge with others in the company at an off-site event, recalls Leussink:
We had engineers doing a presentation on how they’re using it. I did a presentation on how we use it from a business perspective. And I think now people are starting to warm up to the idea of, this is actually helpful, I can actually do my job better, versus when they thought AI would take their job. I think shifting that mindset just by rolling up your sleeves and starting to use it, and, as a company, making these tools available and allocating budget for that. I think it is a huge benefit.
It also helped that management was on board with adopting AI from the start:
It was definitely top down. But then, interestingly, we saw different people in the organization, in pockets, kind of raise their hands and say, ‘Yeah, this is how I’m using it.’ Everybody quietly started sharing, ‘l wrote this with ChatGPT.’ Initially, people felt afraid of saying that because, well, that’s my job. And I was like, that’s great. The quality is great. How did you do this? So I think there’s a little bit of a shift there.
My take
There is an unlimited number of research reports indicating that many Marketers are still struggling to successfully implement AI in their workflows. I get it. It’s not about the tools; there are many good ones out there to help with marketing and other go-to-market processes. What’s hard is understanding that it’s not about the tool but about improving the process or the workflow.
Throw tools into an existing process and sure, things might get better. But to make a real difference, processes need to evolve, and team members need to be trained to think about process improvement first.
What AddEvent is doing is good. It is improving how it works without getting stuck on the tools. But the firm could be leveraging AI for a lot more, especially with a small team. I suspect when the time is right, we’ll see more strategic value from its AI efforts, just like so many other organizations.
