MarTech Interview with Lisa Spira, VP of Content Intelligence at Persado

Lisa Spira, VP of Content Intelligence at Persado discusses more on how generative AI is becoming a key driver when it comes to driving online content development experiences:

 

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Lisa, tell us about yourself and what you do as a content intelligence expert at Persado…

Thank you for having me! As VP of Content Intelligence at Persado, I lead a talented team of language experts focused on creating language that speaks to consumers, motivating engagement and action. We leverage our platform’s vast data set, informed by 10 years of learning and 100 billion consumer interactions annually, to help brands determine the optimal marketing messages across channels.

Our Motivation AI technology—a specialized class of generative AI for marketing—brings proven precision to language generation, measuring the impact of emotional drivers behind every word in a message. Persado distills these insights for teams of professionals involved in content marketing across retail, financial services, travel and hospitality, and other industries. My team helps create and refine language working with many of the world’s well-known brands to drive business impact through personalized messages.

Persado’s combination of language data set, advanced AI and machine learning, and a decisioning engine, deliver the precise language that motivates an individual to engage and act. My team also serves as the “human quality assurance” element of our solution, further ensuring messages are on brand and perform well for our customers well beyond the initial design process, through continuous testing and refinement.

When it comes to using generative AI to drive content experiences today, what tips and best practices would you recommend?

Make sure your generative AI is trained on a specialized, vetted knowledge base: Over the past few months, broad awareness and availability of generative AI has skyrocketed and, while the buzzy AI models we’ve been seeing in the news provide a powerful foundation for automated content generation, not all generative AI models are created equal.

Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on the entire “Wild West” of the Internet, so their results, while delivered confidently by the model, can be riddled with inaccuracies, or even offensive content.

If you’re looking to scale your marketing content efforts while increasing conversion rates, you’ll want to explore a generative AI solution that draws from a specialized knowledge base—the more actual customer interactions the model has been trained on, the better.

Always Be Testing: The most effective marketing language targets the emotional drivers most likely to motivate your customers to act. Those emotional drivers ebb and flow with the seasons, major events, and economic conditions, so be sure that you’re regularly testing your generative AI outputs to see what’s resonating. Even simple A/B testing — determining which of two messages performs best for a segment of your customers — goes a long way in keeping your content fresh and effective as the tides change.

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Take us through your recent study on brand messaging and customer motivation with a breakdown on what type of tone/content/message is impacting the modern-day customer most?

Persado recently released its 2023 Customer Motivation Report which highlights the impact of specific narratives and language on marketing campaign performance. After analyzing consumer responses to 20.9 billion messages across more than 3,200 brand campaigns in 2022, we found themes like “stability,” “reliability,” and “consistency,” captured customer attention, across many industries, and motivated action the most last year. Considering we’ve been surrounded by mixed messages about the economy, work, health, and travel, it makes sense that consumers gravitated more toward messaging that promised some version of forever.

Drilling down to our top verticals, themes of “timelessness” increased click rates in the retail industry by as much as 27%. “Rejuvenation” yielded the greatest results for 83% of travel and leisure campaigns. And central themes of “convenience” performed better than “community” and “proactivity” in 53% of financial services campaigns.

How do you feel generative AI platforms can recreate certain marketing and content development efforts: a few examples of how you/your customers do this?

Generative AI is a powerful tool for marketers because it can create brand new content quickly— almost instantaneously. Generative AI is also fearless: it will create content that humans wouldn’t think to write, and it won’t hold back. At a glance, it appears that generative AI can take over marketing content development. But here’s the catch… will it deliver results? Not unless it’s tuned for enterprise marketing.

At Persado, we infuse generative AI with the strength of 10 years of multi-variant testing, incorporating data from real customer interactions. This is to ensure that the output from our generative AI tools is more than just content — it’s proven to drive engagement by relying on language and emotional drivers that inspire action. Generative AI tools might be capable of writing anything, but we’re able to cut through that noise, and train our generative AI to write in a way that motivates recipients to take actions: to open an email, convert on a shopping cart webpage, or stop scrolling and click on a social media ad.

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What are the basics that you feel brand marketers should keep in mind when deploying these kinds of platforms for the first time?

Measure the Impact: You can start small— with one email campaign, one audience segment, or one webpage— and see how martech tools can increase KPIs like clicks, conversions, or signups. You don’t have to overhaul your content creation efforts. Just choose one impactful starting place to get a foothold.

Be prepared to be surprised: Given how often Persado’s AI-generated language outperforms marketers’ own control copy, it’s likely that you’ll be surprised by which language drives the highest engagement. Content marketers are typically excellent writers, but even your wittiest subject lines or punniest messages may still not be motivating people to act. I’m constantly surprised by what an AI writes, but I’ve found working with it has made me a more creative, stronger writer. Likewise, my creative abilities have helped train a more impactful AI.  It may be a bit humbling, but the AI-informed insights into why certain content is performing better than others will drive results you can be proud of. Our 30 largest customers collectively achieved $1.5B in incremental revenue using Motivation AI technology.

A few common misconceptions about content marketing that you’d like to dispel?

You can ignore the AI wave: In the last few months, the world has changed and, as a marketer, you have a choice to make: You can keep doing what you’ve always done, and create content for your brand. You can experiment with the easy access generative AI models, and benefit from new efficiencies while also introducing new complexities and new risk. Or you can commit to a proven enterprise solution.

In 1996, marketers were all asking themselves if they really needed a website. That’s where we are today with generative AI. My advice is to pick a deliberate strategic direction for incorporating something new. Don’t fear it. Don’t dabble without a purpose. Understand your goals, and find a purpose-built solution to put you on a path toward attaining them.

AI is here to make us irrelevant: Across industries, leading companies are using AI as an extra team member: helping marketers become even more effective creatives, speaking to customers the way they actually want to be spoken to. It’s important to remember AI is not here to replace human marketers — it’s only here to augment our existing marketing practices to enhance CX at scale. Much like its human counterparts though, AI needs to be held accountable for its results. As we’ve seen in recent news articles, generative AI models can come up with some pretty wacky, off-putting results, so there will always be a need for humans to oversee — and continuously test — these models to ensure they’re delivering the right results for businesses. Much like transformative innovations of generations past, this new wave of AI will change how we work, opening up new doors for humans to redefine the way we do business — much like I have done along with my team at Persado.