Crafting High Quality B2B Content With Help From AI with Stacey Moore

Full video transcript

Hello everyone, I am Stacy Moore, and I am here to help you learn how to craft high quality B2B content with help from AI. What is high quality content? For my purpose today, it’s based on The Cocky Writer’s ABCs of superior content, a framework that I created to help folks create better B2B content, and The Cocky Writer is one of my brands. ABC stands for audience, brand, and craft. These are, in my opinion, the three components of superior content. Audience is about understanding your audience and their needs. Brand is about having a distinct voice and personality. And craft is about being informative, persuasive, and telling stories within the context of subject matter expertise.

One of the many things I do is creating content. I write for c-suite audiences, for luxury brands, enterprise SaaS. Generally speaking, my clients require very high quality content. You can score your brand on the ABCs at cocky.scoreapp.com. This is a four-minute quiz to help folks improve their content quality. It’s free to take, and you will not get a zillion emails trying to sell you something. I send out an occasional update.

So now let’s get into how the AI works and how we can understand Jasper’s strengths and limitations. I’ve been writing for decades, and I’ve been using AI in my workflows for a couple of years, so I have a good bit of experience to share on these topics. The first thing I want to say is Jasper will save you time, but it will not do all the work for you. Think of Jasper as a junior writing assistant that’s on call 24/7/365. It will never stop giving you options when you ask for them. You can never hurt its feelings. It doesn’t ask for much in terms of pay, and it’s always there.

Now, you are the secret ingredient to creating content that does not sound generic. If you are writing for yourself, then you’re going to rely on your own expertise, your unique point of view, your creativity, and your writing skills. If you’re writing for a brand, then that would be the brand’s personality, voice and tone guidelines, and the point of view of the experts that you might interview. Mastering the basics will serve you better than overcomplicating things, and that is what I’m going to help you with today: mastering the basics. This presentation assumes that you have some familiarity with how Jasper works. You do not need to be an expert.

Jasper is a language generator, not a fact generator. This is so important to remember. It will not always give you accurate information, so you must fact check. You will rely on your own data, your own research, your own facts, and your own knowledge to fill in the gaps in what Jasper generates for you.

When we get into working with facts, let’s talk about what to do when Jasper gives you false information. Let’s take an example here. This is the personal bio template from within Jasper, and this is a template where you actually provide Jasper with a few facts to start from, so I’ve dropped a few facts in there about myself: that I’m Stacy the Polymath, I’m an expert in branding, design, and technology, nine-time founder, artist and DJ, and my friends call me the Empress of Joy.

Jasper does a great job of turning those few bullet points into prose. However, even though I provided facts, Jasper still makes things up. So if you look at the terms in here that I’ve put in bold, it says that I have over 15 years experience in the industry — not true. Featured in The New York Times, Forbes and Fast Company — not true. And it says when she’s not shaking up things in the business world, you can find her spinning tunes at your favorite nightclub. Well, although I did spin at nightclubs at one point in my life, I do not do that anymore, so that is not true.

One thing that I’ve seen is that people dismiss AI when they see things like this. They think that it’s not going to work, it writes junk. But if you want to take advantage of all the time-saving aspects of Jasper, this is just something that you have to come to understand is a part of the AI content creation experience. So you simply edit and make the text true by adding your own facts. So instead of getting frustrated, just go into edit mode and make a few changes. So you see here I’ve edited back in the technology part that was edited out. I put some more details in about the type of companies that I founded, saying that they range from fintech to fashion, and I changed the publications I was featured in to be ones that I actually was featured in, and I just deleted altogether the sentence about playing music in nightclubs.

Something that’s easy to overlook but is actually very important is the power of titles, and you might want to use an AI-friendly working title to guide Jasper’s output. You’re usually going to have a title for your piece, but that title might not always be the best one to use with Jasper. For example, the title of your piece may not align with the output that you are seeking.

This is an example from the long-form editor in Boss Mode, and notice that I have all of the other inputs turned off except for the title that’s highlighted in green there where the red arrow is. And that’s because, for the purpose of this demonstration, I’m only focusing on the title and how the title affects the content, because I want to illustrate this point. I put in the exact title of my presentation today just to have an example to use: crafting high quality B2B content with help from AI. And if you look at the output that I’ve gotten, you see that it is not really in alignment with what I would want, were I using Jasper to write some content for my presentation today. This is going into all different types of using AI for research and planning, using it for writing, and then using it for promotion and content distribution.

So what you can see is that, although my title is appropriate for my presentation today, it’s a little too broad for Jasper to give me the kind of content that I actually want. So what you can do is create a working title that nudges Jasper toward what you want. You can still keep the actual title of your piece the same. This working title is only for Jasper to see while you’re actually in Jasper writing. So I made a refinement here to see what kind of result I might get and changed it to “crafting high quality B2B content with help from AI writing tools.” That’s moving in the right direction, but here it’s giving me a bunch of different AI writing tools. It’s talking about Grammarly and Hemingway and QuillBot, and those are all tools that I use, but that’s not what we’re talking about today, so this is still a miss.

So I’m going to try again. You may have to try a few times. This time I’m just asking Jasper to give me something about help from Jasper AI. We run again into our fact-checking problem, where it’s generating words but they aren’t necessarily true. So what I’m going to do is give it a little more detail: “writing high quality B2B content with help from Jasper, an AI writer.” And now I’m getting something that is in line with what I actually want.

The reason why I refine this before I even put in the brief is because all of these components — the title, the content brief, tone of voice, and keywords — are all going to be affecting what I’m getting in terms of output in Boss Mode. If I take a few seconds to refine the title before I even create the brief, I’m just purely testing the title to see how close it is to giving me what I want, and it’s going to give me an overall much better quality of output if I take the few seconds to do that.

So now that we’ve gotten the title dialed in, let’s start looking at how to create effective briefs, how to tell Jasper exactly what you want. Always begin with the end in mind. I know that sounds simple, but really you have to think about what you want in terms of output, what the goals of your content are, all these kinds of things. Think about it beforehand. This goes back to those ABCs, about having your audience in mind and having your brand’s personality in mind, and knowing all these things before you even start writing a single word.

I always start a brief with a simple one-sentence template: write a [format] for [audience] about [topic]. What that looks like in a completed version is “write a presentation for B2B content creators about crafting high quality B2B content with help from Jasper, an AI writer.” I’ve taken that same text that I refined in the title and now I’m using that in my content brief, and for the format I’m saying I want to write a presentation, for the audience I’m saying I want to write for B2B content creators. This is the first place that we’re really getting into the audience aspect of the ABCs by telling Jasper to write for a specific audience.

Take that, paste it into the content brief field, and switch it on. This small brief made a big difference in our output. You see now that it’s speaking directly to B2B content creators: “B2B content creators have a lot on their plate, they need to produce high quality, engaging content,” and it’s actually giving me things about keeping it simple, being compelling, and driving results that are relevant to the audience. So we now have something specifically addressing our audience needs.

What you want to do now is continue adding details to that brief about what you want. I’m going to add: write in first person active voice at the fifth grade level, speak directly to the reader using you and your, use contractions to be less formal. What you put in your brief is going to vary depending on your audience, your brand’s voice and personality, and the type of content you’re creating. I’m giving you these sentences for the sake of example, but what you may use could be completely different than what I’m using here. Feel free to use these if they apply to your particular situation.

I’ve pasted this in, and if you’ll notice here, the brief can have a huge impact on the tone of your content. You’re not just limited to the tone of voice field. In fact, I craft my tone of voice by giving these types of technical instructions in the brief, because I have much more fine-tuned control over the writing than I do by just putting a word or two in the tone of voice field. You see here that this has given me a very specific tone, it’s creating headlines, and you just have a lot of control with what you can do in the brief. And if you look here, I haven’t even used half of the space that’s available in the brief. I could go ahead and drop an outline in there. There are many, many more things that I could do, so really take advantage of that content brief, because it really plays a big role in the type of output that you get.

You can also craft your tone of voice using the actual tone of voice input to make Jasper’s output sound the way that you want. Here’s an example where I’ve put the tone of voice as formal, academic, and detailed. If you notice, I’ve switched off my brief for this demo, because there would be a tone conflict in that brief. I put specifications in there that were a more conversational, simple, plain language tone versus a formal, academic, and detailed tone, so I turned it off to be able to show you how the tone field makes a difference. Another thing that you can use in the tone field that I think is really handy, and I sometimes use, is try using your customer avatar as the tone of voice. That way you create content that sounds like who you’re speaking to.

Another critical component of any piece of content is a strong outline, so I’m going to talk about how to get topic coverage that is relevant to your audience, back to that A of the ABCs, the audience. There are several different ways that you can get outlines in Jasper. The common one is to use a Jasper command in the long-form editor. You can see what I’ve done here is just put the command “write an outline for the presentation,” and so I’ve gotten a kind of generic five-point outline back that I’m not really crazy about.

Another option is to use the blog post outline template. What I’ve done in here is I’ve had to edit my title a little bit because this template only gives you 80 characters, and I put in the title “a presentation about crafting high quality B2B content with help from AI.” This gives me something that’s a little bit more rich and still not exactly what I’m looking for. One thing that you can do in this blog post template is to add a prefix to get thesis sentences instead of an outline: at the beginning of the title I add “10 concise statements about.” You may need to shorten your topic to get it to fit, since this only allows 80 characters, but what this does, it gives you back a rich set of sentences that you can either feed those thesis sentences into the paragraph generator or use them to begin the paragraphs in the long-form editor.

Another trick, and this is my favorite way of generating outlines, is to generate a topic list in the long-form. All you need to do is start a list by writing the prefix and then add the number one and a period. What I’ve done here is list “the top 10 topics of importance to the audience,” again focusing on that relevance to the audience, and I get back a much, much better outline than I did with any of the other methods. I usually write my own outlines and then I generate a topic list like this a few times to see if there are any gaps I need to fill in from what I wrote myself.

That is it for today. I hope you have fun creating great B2B content with Jasper. Please visit my website at stacy.wtf, or follow me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com the Stacy Moore. Have an awesome day.