 Great photo by Grok. You may know—if you don’t, here it comes—that we’ve been writing these blogs, twice a month, for more than ten years, here at Copel Communications.
How do we always have something new to talk about? More important for you and your business: How can you always have something new to talk about? And when we say “talk about,” we’re, well, talking about things like blog entries. Videos. Social posts. Stuff that keeps you out there, in the eyes of your target audience, as a thought leader. Interesting note: This becomes all the more challenging in the age of generative AI. How can you possibly stand out amid the overwhelming tsunami of auto-generated material? Fast forward We recently gave a presentation on this exact topic. We won’t dive into the details here, but AI—tools like ChatGPT—are amazing at effectively ingesting and then memorizing (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) the entire internet. Just as easily, they can spit out (first half of previous metaphor) content at will, using said input. But they have one massive limitation that you don’t. It’s why their “intelligence” is artificial, and yours is quite real. We’ll circle back to their weakness—and your strength—in just a second. But first, let’s just talk about the mundane challenge of populating your marketing editorial calendar. You do have a marketing editorial calendar, don’t you? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Lots of companies lack them. But it’s never too late to start. Think of it this way: Why break into a flop sweat every time you need to push out new material on a pre-determined cadence? If that’s an hour of stress, say, twice a month, why not eliminate it? The solution is easy: Dedicate one big chunk of time, typically around year-end, to simply jot down a list of every month of the year, and then brainstorm the topic you’ll develop content for, for each month. It’s hard, but it’s a one-shot effort, and you’ll end up with a year’s worth of topics. Yes, it’s hard. But there’s a neat trick to it, as the headline of this article has not-so-subtly implied. Back to that ChatGPT weakness. Hindsight is overrated ChatGPT seems brilliant because it can memorize the entire internet. That’s some feat. But here’s a feat you accomplish every day, which it can’t do: You look forward. The internet is a repository of stuff from the past. If you can spot trends among your clients, guess what? You’re already smarter than ChatGPT. This dovetails with our populate-the-calendar challenge rather nicely. While you may be doing this at year-end (or right now, no one cares), you’ll be using information that ChatGPT has zero access to: Your thoughts, and your files. So here—finally!—is the trick we’d teased at the outset: Looking for topics for marketing material for your business? Look no further than your recent invoices. Yep. You read right. Your invoices are magic fodder for this assignment. Look at any given one. It shows how you earned your keep, and how you delivered unique value, for any given client. And therein lies a story. Think back on what you’d billed for. There was, invariably, a challenge to solve. And you solved it. (And your client was happy to pay you for that expertise.) That’s a story. It’s a cool story. It’s a story that showcases your uniqueness and thought leadership. It’s also a story that ChatGPT couldn’t write in a million years. Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach. We build our editorial blog-post calendar, and stick to it. And we routinely open up our own billing files for cool stories that we can anonymize and share with you for handy tips and lessons learned. Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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