AI Won't Save You (and Other Creative Tips) with Kate Mountz, Senior Content Strategist at Workweek | Ep. 360

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0:22Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast. Today I have the one and only Kate on the podcast. she is one of the best writers i know and content marketers i know so we wanted we're going to talk about how she thinks about writing her writing process her writing style but first i'd like kate introduce herself and tell her how she got into marketing so what's up kate what's up daniel thank you so much for having me um and for that generous introduction um i came to marketing um I think right out of college, I worked a bunch of random careers, you know, people graduating immediately post-financial crisis did.

1:32And I got into marketing and successfully transitioned because I was working an admin role at a startup and noticed that no one was doing anything with a social media account, but they were dumping a ton of money into paid spend. But there's just like an empty social, all their social accounts were pretty dead. And I put my hand up and offered to just start running them. And I was able to go rogue. And a couple of months in, wrote myself a job description and literally said, Hey, what if you hire a replacement for what I'm doing now and let me be your social media manager? Because I realized I was waiting for someone to tell me I could be a marketer and just jumping in and realizing I could probably figure this out was how I eventually made it official.

2:20Yeah, that's amazing. I love the initiative, but also like, I feel like there's so many gaps in businesses that could be filled with marketing and there's not enough hands on deck usually. So never enough hands on deck for sure. I want to go into the topic of the day, which is, I think really important for marketers to know but like the writing process so i wanted to start into like how you think when you get like how do you think about like okay you have to write an article or a newsletter or a post like what is your first step to making that happen and honestly it depends and i i think that people separate out marketing writing or copywriting from other writing when they probably shouldn't because it has a lot of the same principles.

3:17So coming up with ideas comes from really intimately understanding your subject and the people who you would be writing for. And so I often start with a lot of research, especially if I am not super familiar with the topic, and start jotting down things that might be threads to explore. If there's a pitching process, I'll come up with a quick, like this is what the angle is. This is what people are going to respond to. Here's why it matters. And if it is something like a blog post, you want to make sure that you're not just wasting people's time. and I think that comes back to all writing, right?

4:05But it really, for me, comes to the research and the understanding. As long as you know when to switch gears and stop researching and start creating, which can be the really hard part. But yeah, I think understanding the customer is one of those marketing cliches that's a cliche for a reason. I want to go into two parts, down two roads here. One, tell me, because I think research is one of the hardest parts that people don't know how to do and i i want to go on like how you used to do research and now like how ai and um new technology is helping you do research because like a couple years ago was you didn't have like chat gbt and perplexity and all these places to find things so let's go into like the og way off like let's find articles because i think that will help you help transition to how AI is also helping you do research these days?

4:59Totally. Good question. And spoiler alert, I think some of the OG ways are still irreplaceable. For example, reading customer reviews of your product or getting the opportunity to connect in person with your customers or at least on a one-to-one level or tagging along to a sales call even. and getting down to not what problem does our product solve, which is great to know, but what problems do our customers have and mapping in that direction. And it's also a good way to find out if your product is not really solving real problems that they care about because people have a lot of problems. So I used to start doing research by checking their social media accounts, like going through customer reviews, doing some interviews even, and then making sure I was a subject matter expert.

5:59And that would start with just like a Google and looking for recent articles on the topic from respected experts and seeing where we agreed, where we disagreed. And ultimately, like what's our specific take on it? Because the more specific you can be, the more human you are and the more kind of paradoxically universal it becomes. And yeah, so, and then now, as far as using AI for research, you definitely have to fact check it. Of course, we all know this, but using those research features like you get on a perplexity or in a deep research mode on chat GPT is a pretty easy place to start. I think when I am going through, hey, here's the problem I'm trying to solve, or here's the market I'm looking to talk to, here's the type of product we're getting into, how can we make it more valuable?

6:56And that helped me map it against problems and giving it that frame. And then really checking all the sources it gives you and going and making sure you're reading those first person sources, making sure they're current, making sure it's not a problem that doesn't really exist anymore. Because as you know, I feel like this world changes so quickly. an article from a year ago is often like completely out of date. But yeah, that's where I start with research. And, you know, last week I was lucky enough to tag along on a sales meeting with some folks you know, and I got to see how they do really similar things when they're doing it well.

7:38Starting with the client, like pretend our solution doesn't exist. Pretend everything we're trying to sell you doesn't exist. I want to know about your problems as a business. And then we can decide if our product is like a good fit for you. And that was so rich. Getting to hear people talk about, oh, these are really our biggest concerns as a business. These are much more existential to me. Made me realize, oh, there's a big difference between a nice to have, which is great, and like a must have. And that's the old cliche about like vitamins versus painkillers. So that research, I think, is still irreplaceable because it's totally first person yeah i i think i totally agree with like the first i think also in this day and age that like first person research is is going to be more irreplaceable because so many people have access to the internet now that could find all the sources that you're probably totally agree so like so that becomes like first party data that you could separate yourself and writing but i also think the other side of it is like when you do all that research that you have now it's easier to have a tool that can help you distill all this information that you've like instead of like doing the research for you is distilling what you already found into like what are some common um ideas like common things or non-common things what article stands out what doesn't to kind of just find um holes or commonalities in the research you're doing right now that's a super important call out um because as we know the output of ai is always so much better when you give it something to work with and if you've screened these sources and said here's kind of what i'm trying to solve and you give it a really specific task like you said, find commonalities, for example, bias towards recent content, that gives you a bunch of new rabbit holes to run down.

9:40And I'll often... Everybody's brain works differently. But when I am exploring stuff like that, I will think about hooks, not pieces itself necessarily, but like bold, kind of borderline annoying or controversial statements about that sort of put your plant, plant your flag in the ground and say, this is what this is about. This is what I believe, because that's often a really rich place to start writing from. I think two things I want to ask you is one, when you're doing research, does it come from like, you have a hypothesis of like what you want to write about and you're trying to prove it true or false?

10:17Like, is there a hook in mind that you really like have, and then you're trying to like find sources to like prove that hook or prove it wrong? That's one question. I'll start with that question and have another follow-up question after that. Great, because I have trouble holding a lot of questions in my head at the same time. It all depends on my level of comfort with the topic. If it's something about marketing, for example, as you know, I will have stronger opinions. Or if it's something that I know really well, I'll have hills I want to die on or beliefs I have and biases and conversations that I've seen.

10:57And you still want to do research to make sure because everything changes so fast in marketing, it's the best and worst part about this job to me. I will want to fact check myself always, but I will have angles in mind going into the research process. If it's something I am completely new to, like I've done consulting for like creative agencies in the past. And I remember going through and researching like the first aid space and what were the pain points there. And I was completely, you know, starting from scratch. Like, what do people think about this? What are the industry standards? What are the benchmarks?

11:37What are common like pieces of positioning for like Band-Aid all the way down to like these indie kind of new wave organic first aid providers? um so there i had no idea i knew what they wanted the positioning to be i want i knew what the client believed that it was but i needed to do a lot of verification to see if that was really going to play and then i there's the the follow-up i have is when you do all this research like how are you keeping it in one place and then how are you like taking like how are you putting that research on a piece of paper like i think that's like also the next part of like how are you like piecing together the research to build a story or a narrative?

12:23Well, with the caveat that no one should take advice about how they organize their thoughts from me, what has worked for my brain is abusing my Apple Notes app. And in an actual document, if I'm working in a document, I will sort of have rough beats of the story and maybe like pace supporting evidence or even a note to self. You've seen me tear up a draft where I'll be like, oh, something about this here and not taking the time to really figure out what it is and not solve it in that moment. But if you have an idea, just get down something about this, make a point that shows that. Use this evidence here to illustrate your point and going through the entire thing to make sure the jigsaw all sort of fits together before you start really getting into wordsmithing or creating.

13:18Because if you start with, you know, wanting to get the perfect copy right out of the gate and tell the story and agonize over every sentence, which is a bad habit I sometimes have and I have to watch myself on it, you will go down so many rabbit holes, you will lose the structure of the piece and the argument And it's easy to lose sight of what purpose is this serving? Is it really serving the reader? Or am I just entertaining myself or figuring it out on the page? Because to me, I have to organize my thoughts first to start the process of figuring out how I think about something. To me, the act of writing is an act of thinking.

14:05It's figuring out how you feel about something sometimes requires writing about it. For me, personally and professionally, it's like how I'm constructing this argument. Am I convinced? Is the audience going to be convinced? And sometimes you have to just write it and organize all your thoughts on a bird's eye view before you decide if you believe what you're saying or not. the next piece because i i know we talked about like if you have an opinion it's easier to like write about and find things to disapprove but there's the other side of it but and i know you've worked with a lot of like ghost written for a lot of like founders and brands and um all that so and i know a lot of like content marketers had to put themselves in the shoes of like different audiences and also that they co they helping write for their founders on social and stuff like that they have to get in the voice of it so how best do you get into the perspective of the person or the brand or the person you're writing for and the tone um and make sure like the like the it also the audience doesn't like see that this is coming off as inauthentic and not real and not like what the brand says.

15:22Right. Um, I think it's a similar approach, different execution if you're writing for a brand versus a human being. And I, I really, I honestly prefer writing for others and putting on these different costumes and hats. Uh, and I think it's not just the language, right? It's deceptively tricky because you also have to understand on a more fundamental level the way this person or this brand sees the world, how they're oriented towards things and what they believe. And then you want to be as specific as possible, which is really difficult when you're writing for someone else. If I am writing for someone that's super different from me, for example, I have to make sure I am not projecting my worldviews into their writing unless I know it's accurate.

16:14And so much of what makes writing great is being able to be specific about your experiences. It's why no one writes an intro about their day like you do because you were living it and you were at the center of that experience. And that's the challenge and thing you wrestle with every day. It requires a lot of buy-in from the client. It requires a certain generosity of feedback. And it sometimes just requires time where you get to be with someone and realize they use these little turns of phrases, or they have these funny stylistic quirks that are, you know, little shibboleths to the audience about, oh, Daniel doesn't usually sound like that, for example.

17:01Or, you know, that person would never say that or what did they change their mind? It's an in-group, out-group signifier. And sometimes if you get something like that wrong, I've heard a different creator we've worked with say, there's like outside the fintech industry, people don't see a difference between payers or like a payment or payments. But inside fintech, that's a total tiny, one single letter indicates whether or not you're in this world or not. And so the details are so important, especially at the beginning of that stage. For example, I know you and Ari always, you don't spell out your numerals.

17:45And that's a tiny thing that would stick out to someone who was like a real fan, that this wasn't something he wrote. But yeah, it's honestly my preference. I think it's easier to construct an argument when you have a little bit more distance from the brand. I don't know if I could do what you do as far as really just putting your face on something sticking your flag in the ground and going for it but I love the challenge of doing it for others campaigns get stuck 17 strategy drafts feedback and multiple channels approvals and email thread limbo enter loom the ai-powered video tool to get your team aligned and your campaign unstuck loom records your screen camera and voice to share video messages async so you can get the clarity to move forward fewer bottlenecks faster launches smarter campaigns go to loom.com that's l-o-o-m.com i also think like sometimes the stylistic quirks you do like sometimes i do for me I do things on purpose just so people know that hey yeah it's me like I think I think I think it's important like to have a unique personality in your writing especially now with AI like that I was about to say yeah you know like okay if I'm gonna like use emojis for numbers or I'm going to like um cap something and not cap this or bold this and not bold this like that's like my quirks I do.

19:19Yes. And that will help you stand out to know that you're writing from an authentic place as well. And that's a great example of that brand voice expressed via style, like literal execution in the craft. And I completely agree about how it's way more important with AI. And it's sort of frustrating to someone who's like an old school writing nerd like me, I think it can be hard to accept. You spend a lot of time getting your grammar right and expressing things in a certain way. And then AI is sort of amalgamating all of that, and it can pull that off effortlessly. And so what makes you you? What is like a malapropism or what is a little quirk that you have that AI would never do that becomes like a signifier of authenticity.

20:11Even typos almost are refreshing. I've heard, I have a lot of teacher friends and they talk about the joy of reading someone's work that has a lot of mistakes, but they clearly wrestled with the topic and worked through it themselves. And how sad it is that people will farm that stuff out to AI when you're trying to learn the thing. I think you've spoken about that before. You shouldn't bring AI into it until you really understand the topic. Yeah, I actually don't like like AI, like grammar, copywriting me. Like, I feel like I like it as like a way to like bounce, like, is the idea strong enough or will marketers care about this?

20:54But I don't. I think like the little quirks you have as a writer that might come off as like, oh, you're supposed to have like an M dash here or a colon here. Or like sometimes it's just like shows that you're talking to a friend and you're writing to a friend and not writing for. And it depends on the median, too. Like if you're like your audience is scholars, you might need to be perfect on grammar. And sure. So it depends who your audience is. Right. It does completely. But I think for a lot of the kind of writing that you do and that I do, that really matters. And as you know, I was like the most diehard MDash user.

21:41And now I only use it really in my personal communications because I know how people react, how I react. If I see something that I suspect was written by AI and not, you know, or at least not effectively edited, and I lose interest because you get a sense that it's not another human being talking to one another. And you, I think even subconsciously want to speak to other people. People follow people, as they say. And if you don't believe someone really put thought into something, you don't want to put any thought into understanding it or engaging with it. And so that editing process, that brand consistency is like an act of care that shows authenticity and shows people that you are not just like pumping out the maximum amount of written content that doesn't really serve people but is quote-unquote good enough yeah i think also would we just this topic we're talking about right now is why it's so important if you are writing for a brand to make sure like these stylistic quirks um these the personality this is what we say and this is what we don't say um it's so important to do up front so anybody who comes in to write for your brand or write for a article for your brand or something like knows that like, I don't write like this.

23:10So I think it's super important to create a brand writing playbook for each medium that people understand. I completely agree because otherwise it's not, well, here comes the word. It's not scalable otherwise. Because then it's only a single person who has all this esoteric knowledge about what the brand sounds like can create this stuff. And that's no way to run a railroad, as they say. And I think all that upfront work is really hard. You often are like, oh, that's a new brand quirk, or we've uncovered a different way of speaking to people or if we reposition and you say, oh, I know it and I'm doing the work.

23:50So I'll write it down later. I'll document these standards later. And maybe you never get around to it or you don't do it while it's fresh. And then no one else gets the opportunity to learn it and be in lockstep with you. That's a great point. Especially, I mean, the scalable thing is a true thing. I mean, at the beginning, any writer is writing for themselves and writing and then when you get totally when you get to a point where you you pumping out 15 20 pieces of um content a week you're gonna need other writers and i think that's important why you why at least like especially um at work week We do writers rooms and idea rooms and places where we can coach each other and also come up with ideas that we're passionate about to be able to put onto paper.

24:51Because I think that is important to have different views, but also make the brand voice stronger and stronger and stronger. Yeah. And to me, that's not just about that brand consistency and unified tone. It's also like about holding on to the fun is I think, yeah, I think every writer who starts out writing is doing it for like pleasure. Like if you did it as a kid, if you were a massive nerd, like I was, like you were really into it as this source of joy or self-discovery or rebellion, figuring out again, like how you feel about stuff. but I once you transition into that place where you're writing for others which any like professional writer is doing um like I went to a craft talk my very first year of college uh by Michael Cunningham um and he was talking about like listen yes I do get joy in my writing but I don't go home every night and bake this beautiful cake and arduously decorate it and then eat it all myself.

25:57I'm doing this for other people and you have to maintain that, but not lose that joy and fun. Because when you're cranking out all of this content, even if you're using AI, if you lose that joy or the fun, and it feels like it was a total drudgery to write it, everybody's going to feel that way reading it and being able to find the little entertaining thing, the curiosity of how something is going to turn out instead of falling into that line cook mode where you're just trying to get orders out as fast as you possibly can and you don't get to do any menu planning or thoughtfulness. I think that's why the writer's room style approach works so well is you get to play a little bit and you think about the brand standards as your creative constraints, which makes things more interesting and then be like what's actually fun like where did the fun go and how do we how do we bring it to the front of the writing so everyone else can feel it what's really sad to me though to for me is i used to love doing when i was a kid writing little creative stories yes and then but then when i got later into my school career i felt i had less room to be creative because i had to be so perfect with grammar that it made me the whole writing process was me thinking did i put did i make this colon right did i make this period right is the sentence structure perfect it's not a run-on sentence where that's why i love marketing writing because you can make those mistakes and still put your point in and sometimes if your point's good enough it overlooks those mistakes but when you're in school you can have such a good point but your whole paper could have marks because you had a run-on sentence here you didn't put a colon here you didn't put an m dash here you did you you didn't break the paragraph correctly you didn't do ap styling you didn't source perfectly here and that's where i got bad grades in writing is not the idea of my writing it was came from oh i didn't do perfect ab style i didn't i may have done a run-on sentence here or there and i wasn't perfect on the grammar side but i had the idea side down so yeah i mean i was a grammar nerd but i mean does anybody really figure out who versus whom yes they do but it's it's like how important is it to fully expressing your idea?

28:38Like I had a professor who was like in college where everybody's first question because they were trained from like childhood that, oh, how long does that have to be? You have to turn in a 10 page paper, whatever it is. And it was mind blowing to me to hear this person hear from another freshman say, how long does it have to be? We got this assignment, but like, how long is it supposed to be? and he said, as long as it needs to be. And everybody goes, come on, like there's a record, like tell us how long it has to be. And he said, no, I'm serious. If you could write a well-reasoned argument that about King Lear, that is a page, single page long and is fully fleshed out and has the information I need, I would love to read and grade that.

29:23I've never seen it yet. I've never seen anybody need just one page, but if you could pull it off, I would be floored. And so as long as it needs to be like, what is your requirement? What kind of space does your argument require? I think we're trained in school, like you said, sometimes out of that joy by being like, okay, what are the non-fun creative, like creative restrictions of like, okay, I just have to put in a bunch of filler. I'm going to make the font size 12.5 and the margins like 1.6 inches to get to where I need to be. And it becomes more about just fulfilling the assignment line cook style and not about what am I trying to say for real like what's my point yeah and that's where I think like my wife Ari you know her well but um she's a really good writer she was really good at writing growing up her family is grammar nerds um I knew she was a lawyer I just knew it her dad's a lawyer and he corrects my grammar all the time but it I come of a family that is not grammar nerds um so it's and more creative um so it depends also and i wish sometimes not everybody is good at writing so the people who not good at writing perfect grammar um so i agree you have to learn how to do it but also if it if there's restrictions on you need to be a thousand words you need to have this that is hindering someone creating a great article or a great essay or great i think it's that's why briefs are so important and they shouldn't be so rigid and so yes they need to have some idea like let let the writer have creative freedom but also have some some some guardrails that so they don't go crazy in the writing yeah they're like you have to learn the rules so that you can hopefully eventually break them in smart and effective ways and throw the rule book out the window when it needs to be thrown out the window.

31:34Because great writing is really just like really good communicating. And you could have something that's aesthetically gorgeous, but if it's not really communicating anything, you've failed ultimately. And this applies to all writing because we aren't writing it for ourselves really. Even fiction. It's what are we trying to communicate? What are we trying to illuminate? What kinds of empathy are we generating? These are much more important questions than like, oh yeah, it has to be in this certain format. And I think a lot of people do have like this educational trauma around, God, I'm not a good writer or I hate writing because of all of these like restrictive rules that take the fun away.

32:18I think that's where we started on this. the fun, losing the fun. Lastly, since we're coming up with time, is I want to ask you a question I ask everybody in this podcast is, what is a marketing hill you would die on? I know you always ask this and I still didn't come prepared, but I think in this, I think that my marketing hill I would die on and we'll make it AI specific in this age of generative AI. I think we can't lose sight of the, value of doing it the hard way sometimes, of really turning our brain on because the act of writing is figuring out how you think about something so that you can communicate it effectively, like being legible to other people, being entertaining, being novel.

33:06And if you can just kind of hit a button and be like, this is kind of what I'm looking for. It's good enough. you're or you're not editing the output or you're however you're leveraging AI and obviously we're all doing more with less everybody is leveraging AI but I think we have to make sure we're not opting out of that crucial part because that's that high value part that only human beings can do even the dumbest joke or the most grammatically like incorrect dashed off tweet you can imagine if it has that hard part where you have a clear thought being expressed effectively, that automatically makes people more interested in engaging with it.

33:50So yeah, I think your writing has the, like that hard part is sometimes the key part, which I know is super old school, but I think that's the hill I will die on. Yeah, I love that hill. I think it's super important. And lastly, where can we find you, Kate? I know you don't like being public, but where can we find you? Yeah, I'm the ghost. I'm the ghost in the machine. If people want to find you, where can they find you? Well, they can certainly find me on LinkedIn. And I'm a Twitter lurker under Kate Mounts, my name. So you can certainly always find me there. And yeah, I think I'm very happy being behind the scenes.

34:32But yeah, I also will chop it up with you about pop culture anytime. I love it. Thank you for coming on. I think it's very valuable for people to just understand that the depth of writing, researching, marketers, it's so important to set up your research, set up your writing to create a great argument. Thank you for such a good conversation. I don't know the last time I was able to talk about writing this much, which is wonderful. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

35:15And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five-star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.

35:30Thank you.