How to Make Content Stand Out in the AI Age with Jillian Hoefer, Director of Content Marketing at UserEvidence | Ep. 385

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marking Millennials. Today I got Jillian Hoefer on the podcast. We recorded this last year and honestly it hits different now. Everyone out there is pumping out AI content. Jillian's doing the opposite. Original research with actual humans. I know this is a wild concept, but here's the thing. She surveyed 600 people, put in six months of work, and now that's one report that fuels 80 % of her content. In this episode, we break down the whole process, how to actually do this, where most people screw it up, and how to use AI without sounding like a robot. In my favorite part of the episode, she shows me live how fast she can pull a stat from her custom GPT.

0:50It's ridiculous. Look, this isn't easy. It's not a hack. But while everybody else out there is publishing the same recycled stuff, this is how you build something that people actually trust. So let's dive into the episode. Welcome 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.

1:32Jillian Hoefer:What is up today? I have Jillian on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining. Hey, thanks for having me, Daniel. Excited to be here. I want you to give a little background about how you got into the content space before we talk about your thoughts on content and how it's evolving with this AI trend coming. Yeah, for sure. So I stumbled into it. Like I think most millennial kids didn't grow up saying, I want to be a content marketer for a tech company when I grow up. But I studied broadcast journalism in my undergrad, totally was in deep with thinking I was going to be a reporter. I wanted to be a news anchor.

2:09I wanted to end up in one of the big markets. I went to a school, actually, Ball State University, which David Letterman went to. So we got all the David Letterman big bucks to provide us with some really great programs and equipment and state-of-the-art stuff for video and radio and multimedia. And I was in college at the time that really multimedia journalism was just starting to become a thing. Like my degree technically was a dual degree because multimedia journalism wasn't exactly a thing yet, but I was a double major in journalism and telecommunications because that was kind of the closest thing they could cobble together at the time.

2:46And I loved telling stories in a bunch of different formats. I loved specifically, I had a heart for video and audio. I just thought those were really fun and cool mediums for storytelling. And then I kind of had an aha moment when it all became real when I was looking for internships in my upperclassmen years where I was like, oh, I don't actually want to move to a little podunk sixth market town and work the 1am news shift for five years and earn my stripes. I'd rather make a little money. So I took a corporate internship that was an internal communications marketing internship and kind of just kept niching down and niching down until I realized like, oh, wow, I can use a lot of these multimedia storytelling skills in a corporate environment and get paid a lot more and work nice hours, which was a great plus to all the things I wanted to check off.

3:36So kind of ended up stumbling into it and then really, really enjoying working for startup teams just because the speed of it was kind of my style. I was used to working on deadline, used to working quickly in journalism school. So that's kind of how I ended up where I am today.

3:53Jillian Hoefer:And one thing you're really passionate about right now, and I think AI is here, it's not going away, but you talk a lot about how original research is becoming more valuable today than any other time. So could you explain what is original research? How can marketers start doing this? And why is it important? Yeah, for sure. So I kind of first came to know about the concept of original research, which is essentially like we all did it in school. It just is gathering new data and analyzing it to answer a specific research question. We all did that in all of our undergrad and graduate years. But the first way I kind of started to hear about it in the more B2B and content marketing space is through state of reports.

4:42So you see a lot of annual state of reports being put out by brands and all that's based on original research. So this job that I'm currently at User Evidence. I run content marketing here at User Evidence. This was the first job that I kind of went, okay, my team's really bought in on this. They had just released our first original research report right before I joined the team. So I kind of got to experience the fruits of the labor of what an original research report did for us. Ours was called The Evidence Gap. It was essentially kind of a state of report, but we just branded it to be a little bit more of a piece of content IP.

5:18I don't know if that term is familiar. Brendan Hufford, I think, was the first one to use it. But it really just solidified our POV in the market. Kind of helped us go, okay, we now have this language based on this research that we did. We surveyed over 600 B2B marketers, buyers, and sellers to figure out there was this evidence gap in the way that they thought about providing customer evidence for their buyers in the buying process. There's this big gap in what marketers expect, what sellers need, and what buyers are actually using to buy. So having that data and that big report to work off of has been such a huge game changer for me.

5:55And I think as a content marketer right now, it's really the biggest way that we can continue to create really impactful proprietary content that's going to stand out while a lot of lesser content marketers are going, I'm just going to crank out AI fluff pieces all day long.

6:14Jillian Hoefer:I mean, that is happening right now. And I get why people are doing it. But also to stand out, you have to do the harder things usually. But I want to break down how does this get started? Like, how do I like if I was running a content team right now, I want to make original content piece. Like, where do I start? How do I start doing interviews? What does that process look like? Yeah. So you've got to start with your research capture, essentially. And most of the kind of state of reports or the reports that people are putting out that are original research are based off of a survey. So that, to me, is definitely the easiest way to start with the broadest set of data.

7:00I think you're going to learn the most from a survey, a wide survey of your ICP or your audience or just an audience that you want to get the attention of. You're going to learn a lot. If you do a survey, I think supplementing that with some key interviews, maybe with people who are in the space or are experts or are, you know, just kind of the type of persona that you're trying to go after and appeal to. Having that as kind of a secondary layer is great, but I really think a survey is a great place to start. So if you are hoping to start with original research, you've got to start with a survey.

7:35There is so much that goes with that, though, Daniel, that is like, honestly, it's just hard. It's a big undertaking. When I just finished up my first start to finish original research project at User Evidence, we released a customer marketing landscape report that came out a few months ago. I came into it with rose-colored glasses being like, I can do this in three months. Like, I think this is a one-quarter project. It was like a six-plus month project. And we did have a lot of external support, a lot of internal support. It's just, it's massive. So you have to start with really great survey design.

8:11You have to make sure you're sending the survey and distributing it to the right audiences. So you've got to have partners there. You've got to make sure that your hypothesis is going to land or the data that you're gathering from the survey is going to support the hypothesis. So there's a lot that needs to even happen before you send that survey out. But that's definitely the first place I think you got to start.

8:28Jillian Hoefer:And then once you, so you get the survey, you get the partners, you get the data, like what does that look like? So now you have 600 responses. What do I do? What is the next step of that? Daniel, this and this is where I went wrong. This is where so many people go wrong. You have to have some sort of data analyst that you're working with. If you have one on your team, if you have someone who is phenomenal at digging into the numbers and the raw data and pulling out the stories, that's great. You should get them in early and often on this project. But if you don't, you've got to go out and find someone who's going to be able to do this in either a freelance or a contracted capacity.

9:09There are a lot of companies and firms out there that do it. There are a lot of individual freelancers and contractors that do it. But I think that was a huge learning for me is our CEO is a data guy. And I had to pull him in big time. I had to go, okay, I tried to dig through this data. I tried to find a story. I pride myself on being a storyteller. But there is something really different about having, you know, imagine 600 responses to a 12 question survey. I am not great at math, but that's thousands and thousands of data points that you're sorting through. Some of them are right in kind of testimonial answers.

9:48So you're pulling all this data. It is something that's so important and it's a step that a lot of people skip. But in order to make sure that you're telling the right story with the data, you've got to make sure you have someone that you can partner with to pull the right pieces so that you're telling the right stories that are going to actually impact your brand and the outcomes in the way that you want to.

10:06Jillian Hoefer:Now I'm going to go into like the content marketer side of this. So the data analyst gets you 76 % of people are doing X, Y, and Z. Like this is the most common response I see of this. As a content marketer, how are you thinking? I know, cause I know you also thinking about, okay, we're going to need to make this piece, but that's only half the battle of like a content marketer is like, you also have to market the content and make sure people see the content. So what does, after you do that, how does the creation process look like? And are you thinking about, Hey, we need to make social posts out of this, or we need to make this, are you just thinking about the piece first and then the distribution next?

10:50Yeah. So, so I'll answer this kind of in two parts, Daniel, because I do think they're kind of two different processes. One, I'm going to take us actually back to pre-survey. I talk to a lot of teams that do original research at User Evidence. One of our offerings, our service offerings, is to help people out with the surveying part of the original research and then the calling through the data. The thing that is so interesting to me is that teams can approach it two very, very different ways with very, very successful results on both sides. Number one, which is how we approach the evidence gap, we came in with a really strong hypothesis.

11:22So that's where we started before we even crafted the survey and sent it out. We said, what message do we want to get out to market? What point of view do we want to get out to market? And what data do we need to back up that point of view? And that's how we crafted the whole survey. That's how we figured out who to survey. That's how we figured out how to analyze the data and pull the points we wanted. Other teams to equal success go in completely agnostic and just say, we genuinely have a question. We don't have an answer to it. We're going to put it out there and see what the result is and be willing to be wrong on a hypothesis.

11:58So you kind of have to decide at the beginning, like, okay, what is the goal of this piece? Is the goal of this piece, the goal of this research project, is the goal to prove a point that we've already determined, or is the goal to gather new information and maybe potentially disprove a point that we thought was a truth? Again, neither of them are wrong, but it's a really, really important distinction when you're going into the project. For the evidence gap, since we kind of already had a hypothesis, Daniel, skipping ahead to after we started to analyze that data, we kind of then could work once we'd been given the points and the results, it was much easier for us to kind of map.

12:36I think of like that meme, the like Pepe Silvia meme of like mapping the points on the big thing of like, okay, if we know this is the big hypothesis, we can pull these data points in to then tell the story. And that's where you start to build these really, really strong points of view that are data backed that then support the story that your brand is already trying to tell. Whether it's around selling your product or just trying to get a problem story out to the market, you now have data to back up those things, which is really important. Does that mean some of that data gets left on the cutting room floor a little bit strategically?

13:08Yeah, sometimes it does. But for the most part, I think you're able to kind of pull the points that you want, just like any good storyteller would do with any sort of input.

13:16Jillian Hoefer:This is why it takes six months to do. I mean, but I do think the way you thought, thinking about like the scientific process of have a hypothesis, gather data to prove or disprove the hypothesis, then tell the story of like, based on the data, what happened. I think that is, and it's good to start at the point where you just said, knowing something, because then you can go tell that data analyst, Hey, like we're trying to prove X, Y, and Z. Does this data support or not support this hypothesis that we're coming up? 100%. Yeah. I just actually spoke to, we're hosting a webinar in a few weeks here where we're featuring a couple of our customers that we worked with on original research projects and I literally just spoke to them a half an hour ago and both of them approached it in completely different ways one of them had the hypothesis going in one of them went in to kind of just say let's open this up and see where we're wrong and one of them shared the example of we got this data back from who we thought was our icp telling us hey, we don't actually think this is a problem.

14:23And then they went, wow, okay, this actually is bigger than just this piece of content that we're creating. This now is a whole go-to-market change for us. This is changing who we're targeting. This is changing who we're messaging. And then they still got great content out of it. They still created an amazing state of report, but it informed so much more than just that, which is why I think it's really cool that as a content marketer, if this is a project that you can own, this gets you a seat at the bigger table at the company. You're the owner of this incredible goldmine of data now that not only is producing a great output, which is a piece of content, and then the waterfall of all the millions of pieces of content that you can build off that data, but you also are the holder of all this really great information that typically is about your ICP.

15:08Jillian Hoefer:Yeah. I mean, so many things you could do with that. You could talk to product. You could change messaging on your website. you can inform social like this is what people care about so many different things could just come from this deep research you're doing with your customer and also it's hard for a marketer to like i'm going to talk to 25 customers you're talking to 600 people like i mean at scale which is surveys but you still 600 people are giving you information some your customers some you're not your customers and you're trying to put all this into, but there's some things that you might not use in your research that you will use for something else, which is cool as well.

15:52Yeah. And Daniel, I just did that. So I was telling you about the customer marketing tech landscape report that we just put out. There was a huge finding that we found from that survey. So we had surveyed over 200 customer marketers about how they build their tech stacks, what vendors they're currently using, what their feedback is on those vendors. But then we also had a whole separate part of the survey that was just kind of like, hey, generally, what do you hope these vendors in this space know about you and your role right now? And we learned so much about the state of the customer marketer role, which is still a fairly new and nebulous role.

16:27And they happen to be our main ICP and our buyer persona. And we learned so much about what they care about and what, where they're heading, where that role is heading, that we didn't even put that in the report. Cause we're like, this is separate. This is too big. Like we need this to go somewhere else. So we did a whole separate deep dive article on our blog with those findings and with some of the key interviews that we did with customer marketers in this space, because we were like this, this is too big of a finding to just like stick in a little subhead of a report.

16:57Jillian Hoefer:also i think one thing that is super valuable about this is when you're talking in your content you could state like based on research based on this based on 600 customers we're just so valuable than just saying something that's just in the world and i bet you're doing that all the time but like so many so many companies can't do that that's like take original research and say we talked to 600 people 56 said this 10 said this and you're actually using data which has built so much more trust with your audience instead of just saying a number and just guessing or guesstimating or coming out from old research which a lot of research is like if you go look it's like from 2022 or 2023 it's like brand new fresh information in your content that you go after.

17:53And the thing that our VP of marketing, Mark Huber, who originated the evidence gap that was originally his project before I joined the team, he reminds me all the time that he's like, the reason marketers specifically love original research is because we're nosy. We want to hear from our peers. We want to see what other people in the industry are doing. If there's a report that seems relevant to me as a content marketer or as a startup marketer or any sort of niche that I then go, oh, I just kind of want to see the baseline. I'm always going to be more compelled to download that, even if it is behind a gated form.

18:28Yeah.

18:29Jillian Hoefer:And I think marketers are more inclined to see you as a thought leader or see you as like someone giving value information, which like most great content marketing in the B2B space is helping a marketer become better in their job, whether to make better decisions, better do something actionable, but it's making them be better. And if you have data from people who are like them, who they want to hear from, and they don't have the time to talk to 600 people, it's so valuable for you being seen as that facilitator, as the company to give that to them. It also helps our go-to-market team, specifically our sales team so much to have data points to back up the points that they're presenting to prospects and to prospective buyers.

19:22It's so much more powerful for someone like, I mean, I think SDRs have the hardest job on the face of the planet. Like if I tried to do a cold call, I would break out into a cold sweat that would never end. Like, I just don't know how they do it. But it is so much more powerful to go, hey, we surveyed 600 people like you, 75 % of them said, this is a problem. Is this a problem for you too? Like that just breaks that barrier of entry so much quicker in that conversation and gives so much credibility upfront. So this is far beyond a content play for us, especially our whole go-to-market motion is using the data that we've gotten from this survey.

20:04Jillian Hoefer:I know this is like an AI disruptor because you're competing against fluff pieces, But I want to know, like, what are you doing with AI to help you create this piece of content? Because like five years ago, you as a content marketer couldn't put something in like an AI model and say, give me 10 responses that say something like this now. So how are you using AI to help you in content marketing? AI is only as good as its inputs, especially in content. That's what I've learned as I've been like deeply, deeply experimenting over the past year. You have to have solid proprietary inputs in order for it to output anything worth posting on behalf of yourself or your brand.

20:52If you have, you know, 6 ,000 plus data points from a 600 person, 10 question survey that you then can put into an AI bot and say, hey, you are an expert on this information. now help me create this email that has this goal or help me surface a point that's going to support this blog post that I'm writing. That all of a sudden gives it an incredible proprietary input for you to use as a support mechanism. So that's literally what I have done is that I will, every time we do an original research project, I will go and I will put the raw survey data into a bot in ChatGPT or in Cloud. I've been experimenting with a couple of them, but I'll go start a project and I'll say, hey, you are now the expert.

21:37Like you're my research partner in this specific set of data. I don't want you pulling from other places. This is what you know. And then I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, hey, I'm working on a podcast episode. Our host is going to chat with this person. I would love a stat that supports this question that he can then use from the report. What do you have for me? And it serves up five things I can choose from. I said, hey, I worked at this blog post. I'm going to copy and paste the blog post in here. Tell me three places that I could insert stats or data from the report data or a quote that we got from one of the survey respondents that I could put in this article and it would make sense.

22:12And how would I cite it? So I literally have this bot that I will reference every single day when I'm creating new content that helps me feed the data from these proprietary surveys into the stuff we're doing. It's not just about making one report and repurposing that into little bite-sized pieces for social. It's about literally having an entirely new proprietary data set that no one else owns that you now can use and pull from for content for the next nine to 12 months. It's been a game changer for me.

22:43Jillian Hoefer:Yeah, I think that, I mean, original data, zero-party data is where marketers are going to win now because there's so much... ChatGPT is scraping anything that's public right now and flawed is scraping anything that's public so you win if you can have something different and that's that's what i feel deeply about like video and podcast content because you can put in uh 300 transcripts of like podcasts and say like give me the 10 best content marketing quotes from my guests and pull it up and then write a newsletter on that write a blog post on that, like talk, say in a podcast, Hey, you know, Jillian said that like, this is the best way to do content marketing.

23:33Jillian Hoefer:Do you agree or disagree? Like just what you said, like video is also a way to get hours of content without having to like write and go deep in writing as well. So I think that's another thing that I've seen as well with content marketers. 100%. And it can be a really powerful combo effort too, right? Like, for example, with this most recent report that we did, the Customer Marketing Tech Landscape Report, the two main kind of data pieces that we were working with for this original research project was that survey, 200 plus customer marketers. But then we also had these 12 interviews with who we consider just like top of the line customer marketers and customer marketing influencers right now to get more in-depth analysis on how they were building their tech stacks and how they were buying and what they were seeing in the industry.

24:24We combined the transcripts from those video interviews with the data that we were seeing. And we now have this goldmine of just like this spider web of, we have quotes from these people who are wonderful faces and voices in the industry that can also be backed up by this data now. So yeah, like you said, Daniel, I mean, Our team is a huge user and proponent of AI. It is not going anywhere. Any content marketer that is resistant to it is probably going to fail, unfortunately, right now in this space. But it's a tool. You have to use it in the right way. And I think the right way for content marketers right now is going to be investing in the ways that you can give it the best inputs possible.