Can AI write copy that you can trust for blogs, Adwords and advertising, or is it simply dog food?

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. Today, I'm delighted to have Erwin Liema, who's joining us from Holland.

Erwin, welcome.

Hi, Jim. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me.

Now you're a published author, you're a storyteller, and you're also the co-founder of a new company called StoryLab.ai.

Tell us, how do you help entrepreneurs get noticed?

What we do at StoryLab.ai is basically we use our AI tool to help you create more stories. Faster, more and better stories faster. And what that means is that we help you create all of the necessary tidbits, a story about your company, your brand, the services you provide in such a way that you can do it faster than you would normally, and that you could do better than you would normally so that you can get noticed by the right people.

Now, Owen, that's great. The question though I've got is how do you start? Because a blank piece of paper is difficult, but also If you like, a blank cursor is no easier. What do people need in order to start that? Because if you just put in one word, you can get gobbledygook from AI. Yeah.

Yeah. What, what you want is to have an idea of what you want to write about. And that's basically all you really need is an idea about what you want to write about. And the idea could be just the name of your company or a description of the service or product that you want to talk about, or the idea that you want to talk about. In, let's say, 2, 3, maybe 5 words. That's one thing you need. And the other thing you need is maybe expand on that idea, describe that idea with 1 or 2 more lines of text. If you go into the generator, you can see exactly how that works.

Okay. So can you give us an example then, maybe one you've tried? Because for most of us, the idea of putting in some text and getting something usable doesn't make any sense. So how, how have you used it?

Yeah. So that's great. I can give you an example. I was surprised by this one myself, as you mentioned, I've got a bunch of experience as a copywriter. And one thing I tried when I was trying our ad generator, I think it was the Google ad generator. We also do Facebook ad generator and a lot of blog stuff, but I was trying to work out the kinks in our platform, testing it. And what I did was I was sitting in the room where I'm sitting right now. My son was a big gamer. It's his room. Had this Trust Gamer mouse sitting on his desk. And I figured, hey, let's try and see if the generator can give me good ad copy that will help me sell this Trust mouse if I needed to. Right. So I went to the Google ad headline generator on our platform. And I said in the idea or topic box, I said, this is a Trust Gamer mouse. And then in the description box below that, I said, this is a Trust Gamer mouse that gamers need. And I kind of guessed gamers need that to be super accurate.

Okay.

And super quick. And so those are the few things that I, that I put in the intro. And then I clicked the button that says inspire me and it came back. And what was great, it literally just surprised me. It gave me, I think, 2 options that were decent, one that was pretty good and one that I really couldn't use. But then the final one that it gave me was trust your movement. And this is like, as a copywriter, that kind of gave me goosebumps that an AI would come up with that creative of a headline for a gaming mouse, trust her movement. I thought, wow, that's scary. And that's one example of how the platform might work.

Okay. So that's great. So that's one that you could actually take away and use straight away right now.

100%.

That's one you mentioned about Google and the AdWords. What other content types are you helping to create then with Storylab?

So the main, I would say the main thing that we feel that any AI copywriting tool can help you with is idea generation. It's to start off not with a blank page, but with something to go off. And so the main thing that we see people using it for right now is content idea generation. So you pop in a topic that you want to write about and you say, inspire me. And it comes up with a couple of ideas for headline generation. So same thing, only it translates to direct Write everything usable headlines. And off of that, we have this sequence that we call Blog Story Generator, where if you click that, it will ask you to put in a topic, it will give you headline ideas, and then you will be able to select one of those headline ideas. And off of that headline, it will give you a blog intro. And off of that blog intro, you can even select that and it will give you an outline for the blog. So it really helps you along the process of creating. A blog story out of nothing but knowing the topic that you wanna write about.

Okay.

So it sounds pretty extensive.

So my question to you, so Erwin from StoryLab, we're just talking then about creating sort of longer form content. Just tell me though, because often AI content can end up being gobbledygook, frankly. How does it stay on message? Because the broader, the longer it gets from an original kernel of an idea. Sometimes the content becomes further and further away from what the company wanted to say. How do you keep it being relevant?

There's 2 things I would, I would say to that. One is that the AI engine that we use, which is GPT-3 or a connection to GPT-3, which is the largest AI natural language processing AI in the world, does that, what it does really well. So in general, I would say that we, we see that it comes back with copy or content that is Really good, really on topic. However, the AI does not understand, literally does not understand what it's saying and what it's about. So it may very well veer off topic a little bit, very slightly. And that's where the second part comes in, which is what we 100% advise everybody using any AI copywriting tool, and especially ours, because those are the people that we want to talk to most. We advise them to do is you use what the AI tool gives you. As something to start off with, but you always keep the human element of me, human element of your own human creativity as a check, as a balance to see, make sure that it's saying that what you're saying in the end is what you want to be saying. And that's also how we believe you get the maximum out of AI copy generators and the maximum out of yourself. And as a consequence of the combination of human and AI copywriting. You use it as something to create something, to have something to go off of. And you improve that as you go along with being what you are, a wonderful human.

Okay.

So as you say, it augments rather than replaces the human author, right?

Okay.

What about the, if you like, the evaluation of that content?

There are tools like Headline Analyzer and CoSchedule, for example, that if you put in a piece of content, it will evaluate that for style, for engagement, so on and so forth. Although I put the same headline in both of those and got entirely different results. So I have no idea which one to believe.

How do you help people to analyze what might be the performance then and to choose between, let's say, 2 different headlines?

Yeah, that's, uh, that's something that actually we're working on. So, uh, just to give you a, an idea of our background, we've been working on this for a handful of months now and just started out, uh, creating the first basic tools. And then my buddy who's way more tech savvy than me is on the backend. He's pushing buttons, turning knobs, and tweaking everything to get it to the point where we have 95% quality assurance that we feel that we can provide. Now, in the back of our heads, we have kind of a, kind of a tangential roadmap mapped out that we haven't published yet. But the things that you're talking about are things that are on there. So we, one of the kind of directions we see this going is where a tool like you mentioned, like Headline Analyzer or tools like that, that could give you instant feedback on the copy that you're creating to tell you or give you an indication of how effective that content is going to be. It was definitely something that we're planning on building up towards in the, in the middle to long, I would say middle-term future, but it's not, we're not there yet, sadly.

Okay. That's okay. So you're on the way there, Eoin. Now your background then is as a storyteller and as an author. And in your other life, you consult for people on building a brand story. Can you tell us then what would be some of the key elements that someone should think about? In our Speak PR program, we talk about storification, the need to create stories. What do you give as guidance to people?

Because before they use StoryLab, they need to be thinking about Their business as a story, don't they?

Yeah.

Yeah. Before they use StoryLab, they need to be thinking about their business as a story. I kind of like that as a question. Yes and no, I would say, but yeah, it's a good one. So what would I give to people to, to be able to pin down kind of the story of their brand? Is that your question? Is that correct? Yeah. I would say there's a story structure that a lot of storytellers reference sometimes. It's the, it's the hero's journey and it has Depending on how you look at it exactly, it has 12 steps or it has 4 phases or 3 phases. I like to layer it with 3 phases of the need-solution-result structure, which essentially, if you look at it, you can easily, very easily layer that on top of the hero's journey. And if you do that, so this is really taking it to the super most basic level that you can do. What you want to do is to say, what was the need? What is the solution and what is the result? Talking about your brand, that means you're gonna look at the need in terms of what were you as a founder or what were the founders of your company, your brand, looking at in the world that you felt needed to be changed and needed to be different, right? That's the first step. The second step is solution, is, okay, so what did you come up with? What was the solution to that thing that needed to be changed? And that could be like your value proposition or your overall promise to the world. Maybe you could even talk about a product or service that you offer there. And then result, the third stage, you talk about what does that bring to the world? How will that change the world? And here you can talk about either your vision for the future and how your brand sits in that future, or you can talk about how it changes the initial problem that you saw for the people that you're trying to help. So your customers, your audience. So this is the basic, most basic structure that you could use to talk about Your brand. So need, solution, result, and then you can dive in and create like subsections and all those where you could get into like maybe the history of the founders and, you know, their personal history. When you're talking about the solution part, you can get into the specifics of the products and services that you need. So you see that from that top-level structure in 3 tiers and the 3 steps, you can get down and you can dive into those smaller steps and you can dive deeper into those yet again. And you create content around every step like that, maybe based off something like StoryLab AI.

So Owen, we've talked then about these 3 phases. So conceivably then someone that wants to use StoryLab AI can think about putting content in that relates to these 3 different phases. What do they do from a sort of amplification and distribution perspective? Do they, because if they've got this piece of content, can they only use it the one time or?

Oh no, they can, they can, for now, you can use and reuse every bit of content that you get from Storylab AI because literally what you want to do now is just copy it out of the editor and paste it onto whatever platform you're using it for. In the future, If you go into the interface right now, you will see that after you've put in your topic and you put in a small description and click Inspire Me, and it gives you back these options, it takes you to an editor. And in the editor, you can edit, obviously. You can write more. What you'll see is there are 2 buttons at the bottom of the editor. The left one says Save, where you can save whatever you've been working on. The other button doesn't save anything yet. And this is something that's also for the future. The plan is to have that be a connector to at first one or two, or in the near and farther future, as many as you can imagine, platforms where you can automatically publish from our platform out to as many as you like. So we're not going to be putting any restrictions on the use of the content you get at all.

Okay.

Yeah. So it'll become a platform a bit like a Zoho or a Hootsuite or an amplification platform directly from the content generator.

What about graphics, because increasingly view is that just the text itself isn't generating enough engagement.

How do you think people can use what they generate using StoryLab AI within multimedia, if you like, pictures and video?

Yeah. Yeah. That's also something that's, that's, that we're thinking about. Not something that we're seeing, that we're seeing ourselves integrate into our platform very soon, but definitely something that we think about towards the Slightly longer future is integration of the creation, the easy creation of graphics off of the copy, the copy that we've created in StoryLab. But for now, yeah, we're the way we think about it right now is you create your— StoryLab is focused solely on copy, story, text, words. So you create your story there and you use that and you go on another platform for now to add visuals to it. Yeah. I totally agree with what you're saying, Tim. It's absolutely 100% very important. We're getting ever more important to add visuals to your story.

What one could do is just cut and paste it into Canva, for example, to make a graphic. Or Visme is the other big platform, isn't it? Now, what about pricing? Is this an expensive platform for entrepreneurs to try and use?

It's a, I would say, premium model. I would also venture to say, I think it's not, it's not very expensive if you go beyond the free subscription. So our free subscription right now offers you 25 AI runs each month. So that I feel, we feel, gets you more than enough of a chance to get a feel for does this platform work for you? Does the workflow of this platform work for you? Is the copy that the AI is giving you valuable at all? Although we'd love to hear from you and then anybody yet trying out the platform, obviously, is that working? And then if you're maxing out those 25 runs a month, this month, maybe next month as well, then you can upgrade and get way more than that. 250 AI words at $7 a month. So I think to most entrepreneurs, that would be something worth considering.

That's more than most people would be creating.

That would really play into what I talk about with the Active Communications Index, that it's content times channels times consistency.

So that's fantastic, Owen.

Yeah.

And Owen, if people want to connect with you either for your story and brand story expertise, but also for StoryLab, In whatever way they're interested, how can they get ahold of you?

Yeah. So I'd say the easiest way to connect with me is through LinkedIn or Twitter, where if you search for Erwin Lima on LinkedIn, you will most likely find me. And if you look for Erwin Lima or LimaWrites on Twitter, you will also find me. Next to that, you can find me at storylab.ai. Obviously you can network with me there. Okay.

That's wonderful. And one last question for you. How are you going to get StoryLab noticed? What's working for you?

Great question. What's working for us right now is eating our own dog food. So I'm creating a bunch of content, but my buddy who is our kind of chief marketing officer and who knows way more about marketing than I do is also creating a ton of content literally by using our content generating tool and editing the stuff, using the guidelines and tools that we provide to make that copy better. And then what he does is he does his marketing and SEO magic, makes it so that as many people as possible get to see that content. We try to be active on social media at least a couple of times a week. We're, we're on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all these places. All thanks to my, my buddy, the CMO of StoryLab.ai. And, and that's really starting to pay off as it does in the middle to long range. It starts to pay off. You see more and more people flock to the website. You see more and more subscriptions, people trying it out. So that's great. And we're slowly, steadily building this thing.

Erwin, congratulations as an entrepreneur.

I salute you. And as someone who has to write copy continuously, I thank you for creating what you're creating and joining me on the show to share it with other entrepreneurs.

Thank you so much today.

Much obliged, Jim. And thank you so much for having me on. And also, if you would, after you've tried out the tool, please let me know how it feels, how it's working for you. That would be awesome because all feedback, like I said, is super valuable to us at this time.

Wonderful. Thank you, Erwin Liemer, for joining me today on the Unnoticed Show all the way from Holland.

Thank you.