Nathan Thompson: How to make AI your creative advantage, not your competition.

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Nathan Thompson, Director of Marketing at Fullcast and one of the core team at CopyAI. Nathan, how are you?

I'm doing very well. Weirdly nervous to talk to you in this. We talk all the time, but this is—

We talk every day. It is such a pleasure to have you on the hot seat though.

That's the difference today. It's feeling warm in here. So this is— Bright and early and ready to go.

Well, it is so great to have you on our podcast today. Thank you so much. One of the things that I want to do is just help our listeners understand what an absolute rockstar talent you are at content marketing and how we are changing the game at Fulcast when it comes to marketing and sales. And so first of all, before we get started, just tell us a little bit about your background.

Yeah, background in content marketing started, I was living with my wife. We had the pleasure of living in Paris for 3 years. And so I was working abroad and studying and giving semi-legal tours of the Louvre, which was a lot of fun. We'll get into that another time. But I started writing as a way to just make money on the side. And I found that I really loved it, writing for different blog articles. I started writing for FluentU, which is a learning site for language learners. I focused on how to learn French and different ways that you could do that as an anglophone. And then I got started at a startup called Snipcart in Quebec, where my wife is from, and when we moved back home after having kids, and they had like a great team, no money. So we had to be really resourceful. Everything was organic. That's where I got my SEO chops. Long story short, after a few different places, wound up at an agency that's somewhat well known in our space called Animals, where I was writing and actually wrote the first landing pages for CopyAI as a client, which was great. I went off and started my own mini agency with a friend, and then CopyAI hired me. Zach Harris was the manager at the time, hired me as a contractor. Right as 2023 was starting. So in January back then, and I fell so much in love with the product that I was like, I can't do this agency. If they offer me full-time, I'm just going in and they did. And so mid-2023 hopped on and I think we changed the way content marketing got done. I almost don't want to call it content marketing because at this point I just think it's marketing. Like it's all content. Everything drives Pipedrive's content in some form or fashion. So agency background over to CopyAI and now part of Fullcast and can't wait to hop in. Been here for a few weeks and absolutely feel at home. This is a great crew.

Well, I'm so happy to hear that because I love linking arms with you every day and just going to battle in marketing. It's so much fun. So what an awesome background you have. You know, you've got a little bit about Paris. We wouldn't need to dive deep into that as well. And, you know, kind of a history background, and you fell into marketing and you fell into content. You found yourself to be an absolute natural at it, and then pulled in the SEO, pulled in the marketing. And I totally agree with you. You know, content marketing is marketing. If we think about it, you know, for all of you sales listeners, marketing is basically like paid, earned, and owned content. And the fundamental, you know, truism about marketing is that marketing is simply finding the right people to say the right message at the right time in the right channels. That is all marketing is, and it's incredibly difficult to execute.

It is because you also— not just the right channel, the right format within that channel. Like, you can't send a CMO a 25-page white paper and expect them to digest it. You have to send something a little bit different, quicker and faster. And Lord help me, I know that now because of the outreach messages that I get. The content is not aligned to the channel or to me at all. So it is incredibly hard.

Absolutely right. But it's, it's so exciting and there are a million ways to do marketing. So I have a question for you though, like with everything, just, you know, with AI coming in as a wrecking ball, basically, I feel like marketing is being hit harder by AI than probably any other industry, certainly any other industry in go-to-market, but I would dare say more than any other industry. You have been able to harness the power of AI through CopyAI and really, you know, have you ever seen Dune?

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Dune's so great. Right. And you know how at the end he rides the worm. I feel like AI is the worm, right? And you get destroyed by it or you ride the worm and you're riding the worm.

I love it. I'm riding the worm. Yeah. Oh, I love that analogy. Yeah. It made me think differently about marketing this morning, but yes, I am riding that worm all the way to victory.

Yes, you are. Yes, you are. So what do you think is like really today best practice in content marketing? Let me start with blogs. Let's just go channel by channel. Are blogs relevant anymore?

I think they are. I really, I really do. Maybe not so much relevant to the decision makers in the C-suite, like super up, but they are relevant to the people that you're trying to build trust with. And really, and certainly in our audience, go-to-market. I want to be helpful to the intern just starting out, as helpful as I am to the CMO or CRO at the end of their career as they're nearing retirement. I want to help that full spectrum because that intern in 3 to 5 years is not going to be an intern if, you know, if they're paying attention and they're doing what they should do. And if they learned all the best practices from Fullcast, who are they going to turn to when they are the decision maker in 3 to 5 years? So it is a long-term game with content. It always has been. But there are ways to again, reach everybody at every stage, regardless of who the decision maker is. And I think when you do that, you can really build trust. I think the problem is, and this isn't to knock other marketers, I think a lot of people are just doing it so poorly because they're expecting the tool to do the human parts and then they get annoyed when it doesn't. And I've never understood that, or at least for the past 3 years, I haven't understood why marketers are outsourcing their thinking and creativity to AI instead of outsourcing the structure of their creativity and their thoughts.

Well, let's dive into this more because my thesis, and it sounds like yours is too, is that it's never been a better time to be a marketer. Yes. It's never been more exciting. Your creativity has never been more valuable, but you have to be able to automate the things that AI does well. So what do you think AI does extremely well in marketing and what do we need humans for?

I think AI does research and data analysis way better. And it's not just because I'm not a numbers person. I mean, every person I've ever met, there's only so much that they can do. And listening to sales calls is a good example. Every marketer should go into Gong and listen to sales calls and figure out not just what are the problems that are coming up. How are those problems described so that we can refine our copy on landing pages when we're reaching out to that segment? How much time do you have to listen to 45-minute phone calls to that level of granularity and still get your day-to-day job done? You just can't do that.

No way.

We can now load those calls, uh, because before we had to ask sales and that was never good. Now we can do it ourselves. We can load those calls into a huge table. I can take 100 sales calls. Get them in a table, build a workflow in 10 minutes to ask what are the common problems coming out. And now I just have to check to make sure that it's accurate. I don't have to go through every single call. I can build workflows to put guardrails up to say, hey, you need to cite the call and the timestamp so I can jump in to just make sure and build trust with the workflow before I'm just like, go for it. With that information, I now get to craft the message and I now get to choose the channel that we're going to distribute that on. I get to work with the designer to say, How are we gonna get these people's attention when there is so much to scroll through now on every channel? So it's doing that data and analysis, and then it's telling me, how can I be better at my job with my creativity? It's not me saying, go look at this, go write this, and go think for me. And if you don't do it perfectly, it's useless. I'll buy another tool. It really is figuring out. It's like if you had an intern with a photographic memory, with that show Suits, the guy Mike that was like, let's go. Yeah. He, it's like if you could have 10 of that type of person that your company can't afford to, to hand you right now anyway, but you can build that yourself to support you in your role. It's like you're building your own little team, your research team.

Mm-hmm. But you gotta be Harvey.

You gotta be Harvey. That's a great, yeah. That takes the next step. I've never thought that through. Yes. You gotta be Harvey, which is, uh, yeah, I'll pull out my boxing gloves and start a little boxing workout now. I think he does that.

Yeah. You gotta, do the, do the decision-making. That's right. So I think what you're onto is absolutely right. There are a lot of marketers and there's a lot of creative marketers. We know a few ourselves that see AI coming like a wrecking ball and are freaked out, deer in headlights, thinking I better just get out of this industry. What would you say to them?

That's your call, but I think it's the wrong call. It's a sh— it really is. I know there's a lot of marketers who are afraid of it. I, I don't want to anger our audience, but I, I gotta be honest. I think that AI really showed which marketers wanted to be paid to be part of a, a goal, a business goal and a function, which doesn't sound good. You can still be creative and, and do all those things, but it's always working toward a goal for the business. And which marketers wanted to be paid to grow their creative art. And I think you can have both, but on your own time. Look, I love music. I love playing music. I play in the basement every night. I'm not at all threatened by AI music because it's not impacting why I play music for that artistic creativity. When I'm writing marketing materials, the number of times I've written an ad or a subject line that I thought, this is so boring, it's not gonna work. And I A/B tested it against something that I thought was really creative and made me look all clever and cute and all that stuff and lost that A/B test. It just taught me clear over clever. We're working as marketers toward a unified goal with sales, with customer success. It can't be about our ego and our art. It, it really has to be our creativity supporting the team the best way the team knows how. And AI is such a great tool for that.

Oh, I love that. Okay, tell me about LLMs. How is marketing different now? So like, that's one of the big things that I get asked all the time. How do I market to— like, how do I get my information inside an LLM so they'll recommend me? Because as you know, search is— it's not— search is never going away, but search is not as important as it used to be because people are asking ChatGPT and Gemini what they should do.

Yes. And that was a big struggle of mine figuring that out. In 2024, and by the way, the number of people who said AI is going to ding you for AI content, it's going to, we never saw any of that. We did see a standard decrease in organic traffic, like all of our competitors, through Google answering with their AI overviews. I never understood the argument that Google would penalize you for using AI to build content. And then serve you AI answers as part of their platform. That didn't make sense. I think what they are going to punish is serving thin, poorly written AI content, just like they punished thin, poorly written human content. But when it comes to the LLMs, what I've really tried to do is figure out how can I optimize a blog post at the top of the funnel, something, you know, high level that we want to rank for, still for Google, but then create another section like an FAQ that is specifically written for LLMs, one thing I think is very important, and granted, I don't think anyone's a full-on expert yet. I think CopyAI got to be ahead of the curve. I think it's really important to build topical authority. So if you look at Semrush and you look at Ahrefs and you look at those SEO tools, they get a ton of organic traffic from non-SEO-related content. They actually get a lot of traffic from keywords related to adult websites. Because these websites get so much volume that they will rank for the keyword. And when you check, it's a review of that website's, uh, strength, SEO strength. It's nothing to do with SEO, has nothing to do with going to market, has nothing to do with content marketing, and they're getting millions of page views a month from it. It's kind of like gaming the system a little bit. I think that's over, and I think that LLMs are looking at who is an expert in what domain, and if they can look holistically at, like Fulcast, we are building not just sales content, but marketing content. Customers, I want every LLM to know that Fulcast has high quality content on everything related to go-to-market. And while all of our competitors are looking at, oh, we're going to get 10,000 views from this keyword that has nothing to do with us, but we're going to still get that volume. I, I don't think that's the right play. So I think building topical authority. Across your content system, especially on your blog or your website, building a lot of topical authority that's relevant and then structuring your answers. And we have a guide on how to rank for chat search, which applies to Perplexity as well. We have that guide. We can send that in the show notes too. How do you write it in a way that it's going to get showed up? So is it more conversational? Is it more— it is just slightly different. We load those tweaks in and we load that guide in and those best practices. And we make it part of our workflow. And then we build a little editor that says, hey, is this LLM-friendly or not? This section of our post. If it's not, it helps rewrite it. Human in the loop reviews it to make sure it's still readable and digestible. Sorry, I know I'm going on, but I will say if you've ever seen—

This is exactly what I wanted to know, and I love it.

Well, I was going to say, if you've ever seen a bad piece of AI content, that's AI with a human problem. It's not AI's fault. That's an editor who said, good enough for me. Let's publish it. It can't publish itself. So always human in the loop. But gosh, that second draft where you're just reading the book instead of writing it every day over and over and over, which burns out really talented marketers. I think that's the way forward. Optimize for Google traditionally, build that in the workflow, take a look at guides on how to start ranking in LLMs and bake that into the workflow and then bring them together.

Yeah, I love that. One of the things that I've been using AI for is my first draft. And I'm a trained editor. I got my start in academic editing and writing. And, you know, the prevailing wisdom is that when you get your article done, you're 50% of the way there.

Yes.

And then you go in and then you make it great. Like that first 50%, that'll get you to the center of the bell curve, but that's like meh, like nobody cares, nobody cares content, right? It's just, you're not embarrassing yourself by that point, but it's not good. And so that second 50% is where you write good content. And in my opinion, the AI will get you to that first draft. And then it's the human that comes in and you can say, like, I'll do it all the time. I'll write 6 or 7 drafts with the help of AI and say, all right, now lean in on this more, find me 5 more sources, do this. Oh, you know, but it's got to be yours still because, you know, it can only do what you tell it to. So I like, really like using it for content as long as it's a first draft. Now talk, talk to our audience a little bit about the EEAT principles with Google because in my opinion, This is where the magic happens. Yeah.

And I, I've really enjoyed doing this with Fulcast Podcast. We have so many resources that are based from transcripts from real experts on the Fulcast team. None of those are generated with AI, but they can really quickly be incorporated into all of our content to build our expertise and our authority and really show that we are not outsourcing our thinking to AI, we're having AI structure our thoughts. And so the Go-To-Market Podcast is a great example. We have a library of transcripts with all of your guests. All we have to do is connect that into the workflow and say, if we're writing an article, even top of the funnel, Content Marketing 101, which podcast episode is most relevant to that? Pull out real snippets from that conversation. Pull out real links to your LinkedIn profile and our guest's LinkedIn profile. And build in all of that expertise, authority, and build trust with those real human moments. It's just not taking 14 different people 8 weeks to put it together. We have it by end of day and that first draft comes in and it's awesome. Now we just have to check and make sure, is this accurate? Is it relevant? Sometimes it's not, but 99% of the time, as these LLMs are getting better, it is really easy to take your human moments and put them in. I And I joked last year, I wanna be the first marketer to never touch a keyboard again. And what I meant by that, what I said, it was all of the thought leadership that I've written or helped write has to come from a transcript. It just has to, because with a transcript, I can then sleep at night knowing we did not outsource the thinking or the insights to AI. We just asked it to structure it. And so we're having deeper level conversations and we get to spend more time thinking, who should we talk to as we're building authority across our site? Who is the real expert at these? Maybe if we're talking about cold calling, the real expert is the SDR, not the CRO, is the SDR who's actually doing it in the trenches. So maybe I'll, I'll talk to our SDR and have a conversation. What are your best practices? How is it working from the trenches? And that, I think, including that in there is really teaching Google, okay, they're not going to ChatGPT and saying, write me an article on cold calling and then spits it out and they throw it there. We're having conversations and we're taking transcripts and we're just restructuring it so that they're also friendly for algorithms to show to the right people when needed.

I love that. Okay, so for marketers who are looking to become more AI-enabled, what is your top piece of advice?

Don't give up too early. First of all, be open to it. Like, I— there's a lot of marketing teams that I've met in 2024 that And early this year, I thought attitudes had changed a lot more, but there are some marketers still, they don't want it to work. And I, I know it sounds like a Tony Robbins line, but it really is. If you want it to or you don't, you're probably going to be right. And so there is a certain level of patience. If it was so easy that you hit a button and it comes out perfect, then we really wouldn't have a job anymore. That's not the case. It takes Patience, and then it takes the right input with insights. And not just for marketers, for thought leaders in every industry. There's some thought leaders that have to start having some better thoughts. They just are going to have to, and they're kind of getting found out because they can't make good content with AI because they're not going a level, a level deeper. So I would say don't quit on yourself. You don't have to be a brilliant prompt engineer or PhD in AI. You just have to be patient and understand. What am I using AI for? And do I really have insights that are worth restructuring? And if it's coming out flat, it might not be AI's fault. It might just be that the insights aren't that deep.

Mm-hmm. I love that. Well, clearly, Nathan, you are at the top of your game. I knew the moment that I met you that I found a kindred spirit in marketing and life. And so what is your, what are some of your tricks that help you stay on the top of your game? And it could be anything from getting up early and getting, you know, hitting it hard to your favorite coffee.

I was going to say coffee is the—

is lots of coffee.

Both of those things. I, first of all, I know I, I love AI, use it all the time. I live most of my life on the computer now when I'm not with my kids. Handwritten notes every single day. So I have a system where on this side I have my tasks, on this side I have my meetings, and then I have random notes for whatever I need to get done. I do start very early. So I wake up at 4:15 so I can start from 4:30 to 6:00. Then I go to the gym for an hour and then I try to spend an hour with my kids in the morning. Super important to me because, but I tell you between 4:30 and 6:00, I know it sounds like an American Psycho approach to that, but it, you get 3 hours of work done in that hour and a half because the world is asleep.

Yes.

I am not going to wake up at 4:15 so I can start doom-scrolling Twitter. If I'm up at 4:15, I'm going to do something with that time. Whenever I tried to shift those hours later to when my kids went to bed, I was just too tired. And so it's, it is a, you know, a personal preference to wake up early. It's not always fun. I am sometimes tired by 2 in the afternoon and need my coffee, but I've just found that rhythm works so well. And then second thing that I do is I try to take in as much content marketing and now go-to-market and RevOps information as I can from other experts with the assumption of I got a lot to learn still. There are so many smart people out there and I just want to, I say I want to frack their brains as much as I just want all that information. So I'll go on walks with my dog and I'll listen to an audiobook. Sometimes I'll do a voice chat with ChatGPT and I'll just talk like, hey, talk to me about this so I can think through things.

Wow.

But there's not a lot of time during the day that I'm on my phone for social media. And I know that sounds kind of like a cliché, but I've been meeting people and it is such a time suck when you really look at what they're doing during the day. It's like Netflix is on in the background or Spotify's got to be on and all these things. And I just can't handle that. So when it's focus time, it's focus time. When it's time with my kids, it's time with my kids. And then hang out with my wife and go to bed.

So I love it. That's, that is a fabulous life. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Nathan. I'm excited to see you in an internal meeting in about 15 minutes.

I was gonna say, yeah, we're hopping on. You gotta be sick of me by now. I'm texting you all the time.

I love, I love, love chatting with you, and I have really enjoyed having you be able to share some of your expertise, which is quite significant. And thank you so much for joining us at Fullcast and on the podcast.

Thank you so much.

Business. Yes, that's business. Business. Yes, that's business.