Want to empower your teams to create content at scale?
AI from a company called Writer helps you do just that. Writer uses AI to do everything content-related faster, including ideation, drafting, editing, and distribution.
We spoke to Katherine Duh, Director of Product Marketing at Writer, to learn more about how this AI-powered marketing solution works.
In a single sentence or statement, describe Writer.
Writer is the AI writing platform for teams: we empower GTM leaders to accelerate content, align brand, and empower more writers.
How does Writer use artificial intelligence in its products?
Writer supports marketers and content teams throughout the entire writing process: from ideation and drafting to editing and distribution.
In the early stages of content creation, CoWrite generates on-brand first drafts trained on a team's best copy and content. Teams can use CoWrite's dozens of out-of-the-box templates, for blog posts, email subject lines, product descriptions, and more—or they can create their own custom, hyper-specific CoWrite templates for their team's unique use cases.
When editing, teams can instantly rephrase sentences or paragraphs with the ReWrite feature. By default, there are four different options for rephrasing—Simplify, Polish, Shorten, and Enrich. Teams can also create their own custom ReWrite options by training the model on their own content.
Once a piece of longform content like a blog post is done and ready to be distributed, teams can instantly generate descriptive or promotional short copy for that piece of content by using the Highlights feature. Out-of-the-box, Highlights generates meta descriptions, bulleted summaries, Twitter posts, and LinkedIn posts, but teams can also train Highlights to generate custom formats.
What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?
As an AI writing platform, we can be used anywhere that writing is being done. That being said, content marketers, who are expected to produce large quantities of on-brand content on a regular cadence, will see the most immediate impact from incorporating Writer into their workflows.
What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?
Content teams are being increasingly asked to produce more with less budget and headcount—all the while ensuring that all their content stays perfectly on-brand over an ever-growing number of platforms and potential customer touch points.
The truth is that a lot of the work required to support a content marketing team isn’t especially satisfying or creative: iterating on hundreds of ad copy variants; rephrasing the same points in different ways for social media; summarizing longer pieces of content; creating basic SEO blog posts. With Writer, accelerating these previously time-consuming tasks, customers can unlock improvements in the writing process: they can produce content in less time, and use those time savings to be more deliberate and strategic with the content they produce.
Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)
While there are no minimum requirements for getting value out of Writer, the scale benefits of Writer mean it is especially useful for larger teams that need to align brand language across a wide range of platforms and customer touch points.
Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?
Our ideal customers are mid-market to enterprise, and typically in software or consumer technology. We also have customers in finance, healthcare, insurance, retail, and professional services.
What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?
AI currently can't make high-level strategic decisions about how to run an effective content operation. Additionally, AI isn't currently capable of discerning what makes for an emotionally affecting narrative. For these reasons, we believe that successful AI writing needs to be guided by great writers—to decide what makes for a good story, and to determine if the story that's been told has been told effectively.
What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?
We believe AI represents an opportunity to fundamentally change the nature of work for the better, by replacing the routine and repetitive with more fulfilling strategic and creative work. Rather than replacing writers, we believe that AI writing platforms will lead to more content marketing jobs, because people are going to get leverage faster—which means content marketing will meet their goals faster, which means marketers will get more budget to do more content marketing.
Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just getting started with AI?
There is a lot of fear and misinformation about AI, and the fastest way to understand what's truth and what's fiction is to try AI tools out for yourself. Test them in many different ways, and challenge them to their limits—learn what their strengths and limitations are. With a more grounded and realistic understanding of AI's capabilities, you'll be much better equipped to use AI effectively.