Not all conversations on AI and content marketing feel inspiring. This one does. Kyle Coleman, CMO at copy.ai, brings clarity and wisdom that will energize you. His perspective is positive, practical, and backed by results: over $50 million in pipeline for copy.ai with just $37,000 spent on demand generation.
Kyle articulates a vision of content's purpose that resonates: "building trust at scale." He demonstrates how AI tools can create more thoughtful content workflows and improve work-life balance (a rare combination!).
"It's not AI-generated content," Kyle says. "It's AI-synthesized content that maintains my thoughts, my thinking, my tone, my voice, my style, and then I do the last mile editing." This approach resolves the tension many content teams face between maintaining quality and scaling production.
Kyle Coleman is the CMO at copy.ai, an AI platform for go-to-market use cases, providing tools for blog drafting, social media content, and sales communications. His career began at Looker, where as the sixth employee he helped grow the company from having "friends and family as customers" to $110 million in revenue and a $2.5 billion acquisition by Google.
Kyle then spent five years at Clari, moving from demand generation to leading all marketing operations as CMO, helping scale the company 8x in revenue. His B2B SaaS growth experience informs his current work at copy.ai, where he's spent the past year applying AI workflows to marketing challenges.
Kyle has built a significant personal brand on LinkedIn. He’s recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice with over 130,000 followers by sharing actionable, experience-backed advice on sales and marketing.
Kyle balances vision with practicality, offering insights that bridge the gap between content marketers' skepticism and the undeniable potential of thoughtfully implemented AI systems.
Kyle emphasizes that while AI tools can accelerate content production, fundamental principles remain unchanged. Success in sales, marketing, or content still requires time, energy, and effort. His LinkedIn content consistently reinforces these fundamentals, even as tools evolve.
Kyle views AI as a tool for synthesizing his thinking rather than generating content from scratch. His workflow involves recording voice memos of his ideas, running the transcript through copy.ai, and then editing the output. This maintains his authentic voice while streamlining the production process.
Kyle acknowledges content marketers' resistance to AI comes from valid concerns about maintaining quality and authenticity. He explains the key is providing AI with proper context — just as you would train a new content marketer joining your team. Without this context, outputs can't be trusted.
Quoting his friend and former colleague Devin Reed, Kyle frames the ultimate purpose of content marketing as building trust with audiences. This explains why his team focuses on creating trustworthy content across multiple channels, industries, and buyer personas with thoughtfully deployed AI tools.
Kyle explains that successful AI adopters think systematically about content creation. They identify what makes content effective and build workflows to replicate those elements. This requires stepping back from "the artistry" occasionally to codify best practices.
Kyle attributes copy.ai's remarkable marketing efficiency to their AI-powered content system. Their approach has created self-reinforcing flywheels where content drives SEO interest, which creates sales conversations, which generate transcripts that become new content.
Kyle addresses a common concern among writers that AI diminishes the thinking process. He argues AI doesn't replace thinking; it removes some mechanical aspects of writing while still requiring strategy and intentional thought.
Hello... is there anybody out there creating real value with AI?
The AI conversation in content marketing has become deafening — skeptics shouting from one side, shallow tips from enthusiasts on the other. But somewhere in this noise, there must be pioneers who've actually figured something out, right?
We've gone on a search for the real pioneers — the ones who've ventured beyond the hype to succeed (or fail) spectacularly. Through their hard-won insights, we'll discover if there's actually something of value hiding in the noise, or if we're all just shouting into the void.
Check out other episodes in the season here
Clari and Looker (00:02:00): Companies where Kyle built his marketing career before joining copy.ai.
Copy.ai (00:03:00): Kyle's company, providing AI tools for content marketing and sales workflows.
Founders (00:04:00): A podcast Kyle recommends that offers summaries and analyses of founder biographies and autobiographies.
Acquired (00:04:00): Long-form podcast Kyle recommends with deep dives into how iconic companies were built. He specifically mentions episodes on Mars (candy company), IKEA, and Sony.
Outreach and Salesloft (00:07:00): Sales engagement platforms Kyle references when discussing the evolution of outbound sales tactics.
LinkedIn Top Voice recognition (00:10:00): Kyle mentions receiving this recognition in 2020 after consistently sharing sales best practices.
ChatGPT and Claude (00:19:00): General-purpose AI tools Kyle mentions while explaining the limitations of low-context content creation.
Nathan Thompson (00:28:00): Head of Content Strategy at copy.ai and former Animalz strategist who Kyle credits for their internal AI content workflows.
Devin Reed (00:32:00): Kyle's former colleague who coined the phrase "effective content builds trust at scale."
Follow Kyle Coleman on LinkedIn.
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Kyle Coleman: [00:00:00] Do your research, know your audience, be a person like this stuff is not rocket science. And yet people are always looking for the silver bullet or the shortcut or something like that. And my concept is very much about like, there is no shortcut to do this well, whether that's sales or marketing or concert, whatever it takes time, energy, effort.
And if you skip those steps, you're never going to get good results.
Ty Magnin: Welcome to the animals podcast. I'm Ty Magnin, the CEO at animals. And I'm Tim Metz, Director of Marketing and Innovation. This season on The Animals Podcast, we're focused entirely on AI content use cases. We're bringing you on a search to meet the AI pioneers.
Those venturing beyond the hype to succeed or fail spectacularly. We're here today with Kyle Coleman. He's the CMO at Copy AI. If you don't know Copy AI, they are an AI platform for go to market use cases. So you can sign up for a free trial and start using them for blog post drafting, LinkedIn posts, uh, as well as [00:01:00] some common sales use cases.
Did you know animals now offers a podcast service? We're taking over your audience's earbuds, reaching them during their commutes, their workouts, or when they're doing tours around the house. From show strategy to editing and distribution, animals can handle your podcast for you. With that same originality and audience first approach that we bring to all of our content.
Every podcast episode can become fuel for your broader content program. You can mine your podcast for ideas for articles, social posts, and other kinds of content assets. Helping you create more high quality work in less time. Ready to start a podcast worth listening to? Head over to Animals. co, book a call with us, and we'll start talking about your podcasting goals.
Kyle was hoping you could do two things for us real quick. One would be your own intro, however you want to take it. And second One question we ask to all of our guests on the animals podcast is, uh, content are you consuming lately? I will give
Kyle Coleman: you the 32nd, 62nd [00:02:00] version here. Um, my name is Kyle. I started my career in B2B SaaS at a small company called Looker.
I was a sixth employee. Business intelligence company. We had friends and family as customers. I helped grow the company to 110 million in revenue over six years. And then we sold to Google for two and a half billion. I was very focused on the demand gen and outbound side of the universe and really learned what good looks like from a marketing and sales respect for demand generation.
I parlayed that experience over to Clary. I helped take the company from a series C company to, you know, about 8x revenue over the course of five years and ultimately started skating more toward marketing use cases at Clary. I took on not just demand generation and outbound, but I took on customer marketing and then product marketing and then value engineering and enablement and a handful of other marketing organizations and ultimately became the CMO.
Over a five year run at Clary, and then I started at Copy AI a year ago to lead all things marketing and CMO at Copy AI. But as you do at a small [00:03:00] company, and of course, this is no stranger to both of you, at a small company, you wear a lot of hats. So I'm getting to do all sorts of things inside and across Copy AI that are really exciting.
And for that reason, the content that I am consuming a lot of has to do with company building. I want to be an effective marketer, of course, but I think about marketing as a leadership function inside of the organization, really helping guide the product with, you know, quasi market research and insights and gut feel or whatever it is like I need to guide the product team.
I need to guide and lead and be ahead of sales team and make sure that we're equipping and enabling them. With the messaging positioning collateral that they need to tell the right story and differentiate ourselves in this very crowded AI space, it's a multifaceted leadership function inside the work.
So the concept that I'm focusing on are two podcasts. One is called founders. The guy basically gives an overview or review summary of a biography or autobiography of a founder. And it's not always tech founders. It's all across the gamut. So you just learn a lot about how do [00:04:00] great business thinkers think and operate.
The second is a company or a podcast called acquired, which is all about like these super long form stories about how great companies are built. And they started focusing on companies that were acquired, but now they're focusing on all sorts of things. And the most recent podcast, I think, was about the Mars company, the candy company.
And you start to listen to it, and you're like, what the heck is this going to have to do with what I'm doing day to day? There's always something. So hearing the story of Mars and of Ikea and of all these, like, Sony, all these, these, these companies, you're like, wow. Building an enduring business. Here's what it takes.
And it's that kind of thing that I find pretty inspirational. And I find some pretty direct applications as well.
Ty Magnin: Nice. Yeah, thanks for sharing. I hear good things about the Acquired podcast. Haven't tuned in yet, but uh, I'll add it to my Spotify playlist.
Kyle Coleman: Buckle up for four and a half hour episodes.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, yeah,
Tim Metz: I just did the six hour meta one.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, but it's cool. Yeah. They go really in depth. It's very nice. And also, I just want to say, man, you have a, you have a hand with, what's the right word? You know how to pick companies, right? It's such a cool, cool journey. [00:05:00]
Kyle Coleman: You know, it's, it's a combination of luck and skill, Tim, and I got super lucky to land.
I didn't even, I couldn't even spell SaaS when I started at Looker back in 2013. I had no idea what I was doing. But, you get the right opportunity, and if you run toward the fire, and you solve problems, and you make your own luck to a certain extent. So, got very lucky, um, at Looker, and then feel like I chose pretty well at Clary, and feel early days, but so far so good here at Copy.
ai.
Ty Magnin: Definitely. Well, uh, thrilled to have you on today. I think one thing you didn't mention about your resume is that you are a certified LinkedIn thought leader. Right? You have built up, you have built up an audience for yourself there. That's, that's pretty incredible. And the content you put out, I pay a lot of attention to.
And so I think you've got a lot to bring to the table for our audience in terms of one, how you're creating your own content as a certified LinkedIn thought leader. But two, also you have this privilege. Of seat at copy ai where you're seeing how companies all [00:06:00] kinds are implementing AI into their content production workflows.
So, curious to be able to unpack some of your perspective from those two different
Kyle Coleman: angles. 100%. Happy to explore whatever avenue you want. I think part of my success on LinkedIn is not ever thinking about or referring to myself as a thought leader. I try and avoid any sort of asshole y type vibe as possible.
And I think that's a really important part of sustainable success on the social media platforms. Rule number one of
Tim Metz: thought leadership. Yeah, don't call yourself a sociopath.
Ty Magnin: I guess how long has it been coming, you building this LinkedIn audience? Uh, since
Kyle Coleman: January of 2020. I was at Clary and I was responsible for building the outbound team and then doing a lot of demand gen type stuff.
And I saw in our internal Slack channels Our SDR team sharing bad advice that they were getting from people on LinkedIn. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, please God do not write outbound emails this way. Do it this way. Instead. Remember our training. Like we did this during our enablement, during our onboarding, like [00:07:00] stick with the plans, stick with the program.
I started thinking to myself like. This type of advice is what's popular. This is going to crater our entire industry. Like we need to focus and sure enough, that's kind of what has ended up happening. Like we need to focus on personalization. We need to focus on thought, thinking strategy for outbound type things.
And so I started sharing more of our, what our internal processes were in internal enablement, just started sharing that type of how to actionable. Uh, pretty niche content, frankly, to an audience and was just really consistent about it. Like, this is my perspective. I had built the SDR team, as I mentioned, at Looker for six, seven years.
So I had a pretty good foundation of experience. And I just basically took the internal documentation training enablement that I had done and broke it down into bite sized pieces for LinkedIn. And that was my entire, I didn't think about it at the time, but that was my entire content strategy for LinkedIn was how to Actionable validated best practices that I know are [00:08:00] sustainable and what's interesting guys is like the best practices I was talking about five years ago.
It's the same exact stuff as today. Do your research, know your audience, be a person like this stuff is not rocket science. And yet people are always looking for the silver bullet or the shortcut or something like that. And my concept is very much about like there is no shortcut to do this well, whether that sales or marketing or concert, whatever it takes.
Time, energy, effort. And if you skip those steps, you're never gonna get good results. So please, like, put in the time. And that's the drum I've been
Ty Magnin: beating for five years. Well, it's funny you say that. I mean, okay, first I want to highlight, I love that your intention, and these are my words, not yours, so feel free to redirect them.
Was to contribute to this community like on LinkedIn with best practices that you believe in that you think will work Not so much to become some thought leader right that you didn't really care about at the time or probably don't now So I find that really interesting. The second [00:09:00] thing that I'm actually gonna disagree with you on is The kind of content you're putting out sometimes to me doesn't quite feel like there are no shortcuts When I look at the use cases that you are implementing via copy AI, those feel pretty magical and like
Kyle Coleman: shortcuts to me, Kyle.
It's a fair point. We can dive into that in a moment. But you're right, my motivations were twofold. Number one, this was call it 80 percent of my motivation, was elevate the sales profession. This is back in 2020 when the reputation of SDRs was Not as bad as it is now, but it was starting to degrade it.
You know, the, the ecosystem was starting to become very crowded. The outreaches and sales lofts of the world were peaking in their popularity. And like, it was starting to getting, it's starting to get very spammy and I wanted to elevate the sales profession. And that was the, like the 80 percent of my goal was to do that.
The other 20 percent of my goal was vanity. Like frankly, guys, this is like part of this is fun. Like I like. The recognition is cool and it's nice to see and hear from people are like, wow, that really [00:10:00] helped. That framework was helpful. This was cool. Like that, that felt good. So I did. And part of it is like I didn't want to, and I never want to in anything that I pursue, just do it for the sake of doing it.
I'm goal oriented and part of the goal here is the resonance that you get in the market. And if you're creating content that doesn't resonate, that should be a signal to you that you need to change tax. So part of my goal was. To become what at the time LinkedIn called a top voice. I was like, it'd be cool to get this recognition as a top voice, because that would mean to me that there is real resonance here, that this is helpful, that I am elevating the sales profession.
I ultimately did get that in 2020, which was cool. I was like, awesome. I set a goal in January. I had a content strategy. Again, I think about it as that and the proof of this would be the resonance in the audience and then the recognition from the, you know, the outlets that care about this stuff. And so checked all those boxes like, okay, this is helpful to the audience.
I enjoy doing it, generally speaking. And so it was a fun thing for me in 2020 and it's never felt like a chore. And if it ever feels like a chore, that means you [00:11:00] need to stop, slow down, Rethink what you're writing about and and sort of re architect your goals. I'm curious, what's the
Tim Metz: first time that that AI came into the picture in that process?
Because I think when you started it was manual
Kyle Coleman: by hand, right? Yeah, it definitely is. And so, um, so Ty is right. Like there are some shortcuts now to to the process to do effective outbound. There are some shortcuts to the process. But the parallel that I'll draw guys is, you know, 25 years ago, there's this new thing called the internet.
And we have search engines now. And if you were training an SDR team, and you're like, okay, you need to go build an account plan, but you're not allowed to use the internet, go to the library, look up the newspapers, look up the magazines, the microfiche, you know, that thing where you look at the small, tiny type, and go and do research on accounts that way.
You can't use the internet. It's illegal. It's the same paradigm now. Which is like you have this whole capability of AI to synthesize information in a faster, smarter, easier way to make it easier for you to get the information that you need to think critically [00:12:00] about how you're approaching this account.
What are we not automating? We're not automating the thinking. We're not automating the strategy. We're automating the synthesis of information. And that's what the shortcuts are that I recommend to companies. So yes, Copy AI has this account planning tool that you can use to go and automate the building, the synthesis of the research that you do on an account.
But that doesn't mean you can't. You still have to think, you still have to be the one who's strategically and thoughtfully executing against that. So that's the shortcut that Ty mentioned. Tim, what you're asking is about in the old days, pre ai, so 2023 and, and before I would sit down and literally by hand, uh, you know, by typing right out every single one of my LinkedIn posts.
So now in 2023, I have three plus years of a catalog of LinkedIn posts. I took that catalog and I threw it into Copy. ai and I said, learn who I am and how I write. And now what I do is I wake up in the morning, I have a nine month old son, I have less time than I had in the past. So I'm feeding him his [00:13:00] oatmeal, and I'm just like thinking about the topic I want to talk about.
I record a voice memo. Oh, here he is. Do you see the little, little, little, little gust in the queue? I think about the topic I want to talk about, and I record the voice memo. I take that transcript, I run it through a CopyEye workflow. CopyEye workflow has been trained against my style of authoring on LinkedIn, and it writes the first draft of the LinkedIn post for me.
So now a process that used to take me, you know, 15, 20, 30 minutes of writing on the keyboard, now it takes me three to five minutes of editing. But it's still my thoughts. And so that's the process that we, that I have now for like some content synthesis. It's not AI generated content. It's AI synthesized content that maintains my thoughts and my thinking, my tone, my voice, my style, and then I do the last mile
Ty Magnin: editing.
I like the reframe there. Of like, uh, and I'm not sure you're running with this at copy, right? But like of it being AI synthesized, uh, content creation. That's
Kyle Coleman: the right way to start, Ty. Like, so many companies are correctly wary of AI. If all you do is go to [00:14:00] ChatGPT and say, Write me a blog post about outbound sales.
It's going to be a crappy blog post and if you publish that or that type of content, you are going to get punished by the SEO gods because all that that that AI prompt is doing is regurgitating existing thinking that exists, but if instead you think about the copy or the content that you can create.
Based on your thinking or the subject matter expertise of your sales engineers or of your executive team or whomever you have all this rich content that currently exists in unstructured forms, which are transcripts, transcripts from sales calls, transcripts from podcasts like this one. And now we just need to architect the right workflows that basically performs like what animals does.
Is takes the thinking and then applies the content creation best practices to create a great first draft. And that's a lot of what AI can do, but that middle step of taking the raw input and transforming it into a useful output is still hard. It still requires domain expertise.
Tim Metz: And you're, you're essentially giving it two [00:15:00] unique inputs at least, right?
You're giving it your, your database of things that you've written before, which are unique to you. Plus you're giving it that voice memo. So those are kind of the two. And can you say something, I mean, that's more tactical or practical, but how, how much of the reference material do you need? Like to, to get, to get to your authentic voice?
Like. It's important that you had this whole library of like several years of LinkedIn writing or the kind of the volume you're looking at to find that voice.
Kyle Coleman: We normally see that if you have 10 or so examples of content, whether that's LinkedIn content or it's blog posts or it's thought leadership posts or emails, newsletters, whatever, that 5 to 10 range is typically enough for the AI to be like, Okay, I got it.
Thank you. Because part of the workflow, Tim, that we are architecting is it'll read. My voice memo, and it'll create the tone of that voice memo. So every independent voice memo that's uploaded into that workflow has a slightly different tone. Sometimes the topics I'm talking about are I'm super authoritative.
I have a strong point of view on this. And so the AI picks up on on that [00:16:00] from the transcript and applies that tone. against my style
Ty Magnin: of writing. Kyle, I've dabbled quite a bit in copy AI, playing with different templates that are already like easily available for anyone who starts a trial. One of those is focused on writing LinkedIn posts and it contains basically you give it an input such as a transcript from a voice memo.
And it will give you like seven different versions of a post based on some like LinkedIn templates or post archetypes. They all have an acronym, which sort of fascinated me. One is SLAP. That's the one I'm always like, I want one that slaps, you know, cause that's what the young kids are saying. Do you use any of that in your LinkedIn post
Kyle Coleman: workflow?
I personally do not. Um, I know some people who do that workflow template that you're talking about, Ty, is in our workflow library. That's more about, hey, here's the art of the possible using copy AI or using AI for content creation. So like out of the box, you can get some [00:17:00] value. You want the AI, DA, format, action, interest, desire, like what?
Cool. Like here it is. Um, but no, when we're doing production level stuff and anytime we do a customer deployment, we're like. The purpose of AI is not general best practices from our point of view, the purpose of AI is your nuanced bespoke best practices, and we need to codify those in the workflow builder, so we'll take that out of the box workflow, and then we'll customize it to make sure that it's fitting exactly you and your style, and so it's a combination of things.
I would say those those workflow libraries The, the templates there, they'll get you like 60, 70, 80 percent of the way there, but the secret sauce and the magic of AI is in that last mile type, you know, the 20, 30, 40 percent that's unique to you.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, so quick way to see the art of the possible. I mean, I even think back to the holidays of 2023, or 20, yeah, holidays of 2023 when, uh, Cat GBT first came out.
Kyle Coleman: 22.
Ty Magnin: 22. I think it's 22. Going into 23, right? Like, I remember sitting at [00:18:00] like, at the dinner table with my family New Year's Eve. Playing with the tool, right? To like, make these, you know, ridiculous songs or blog posts for x topic and it seems like the trajectory since then has been like, okay, that was such a wow experience.
We all like jumped up the hype cycle and we're like, this is the future, right? And then it's like the last mile problem became very apparent, right? In that, you know, you start to use those same prompts and the output's like only so good. Yeah. Um, but now it sounds like we are really starting to climb back up the, you know, I'm thinking about the Gardner hype cycle.
So there was the trough of disillusionment and now it's like, whatever the actual value part of the curve, where do you see the general content marketing audience in its journey?
Kyle Coleman: Yeah. The general content marketing audience is extremely skeptical. of AI. And the reason for it is because they correctly like content marketers and us, the three of us as authors of our own content.
We [00:19:00] think about the artistry of the words, and we take a lot of pride in every single word that gets authored. And the experience that many content marketers have had with the chat GPTs of the world or Claude or whatever it is, has been a low context content creation exercise where they had don't have faith in the outputs.
Because they haven't been trained on how to put in the context that they need to trust those outputs. But if you can be more thoughtful about how would you train a new content marketer who's onboarding on your team? How would you train them to take a transcript and turn it into a piece? Well, now instead of training that human to do that, let's train the A.
I. To do that. It's gonna take some elbow grease. It's gonna take some time. We need to pull in the business context means to pull in the understanding of your personas and your product lines and your value props. And we had to pull all of that information in. This is context that exists in your brain. We need to get it out of your brain and into the AI workflow so that you trust the output.
[00:20:00] And when content marketers start thinking a bit more systematically about things, and they understand that we're going to maintain as much artistry as possible, but we do need to systematize this. Because there are, there's pieces of content that no content marketer likes creating, and they have to do it anyway.
You know, the promo emails for all the campaigns that you're running. Does anybody want to spend 9 to 10 p. m. writing those promo emails? No! Let's train the AI to take the thinking you've done for this content, this campaign brief, and turn it into emails where you've already approved the format. And that type of thing that's like, a little bit of productivity gain here, a little bit here, and it starts to compound and compound.
So the content marketers who are thinking a bit more systematically, Who are understanding that this AI thing is not going away. Like, I gotta use it, or I'm gonna get run over by it. I need to put it to work. I need to put in the effort to learn how to train it, how to wrangle it, how to get trustworthy outputs.
Those are the, I would say it's like, no more than 5 percent of content marketers right now. And maybe you guys are experiencing something different. But [00:21:00] those are the folks who are really ahead of the curve and are starting to see a lot of productivity gains within and across their team. And then the business results that follow like this, this content engine that they're able to build the SEO performances off the charts, their organic social performances off the charts, the sales assets they can create for their team.
It was hyper responsive to any use case that the sales team needs, like the trust they have internally as a leadership function inside their organization. Like there's so much. Um, that ends up accruing to the marketing team as a result of this high velocity content engine. It just requires you putting in the time and energy to get things right by wrangling
Ty Magnin: AI the right way.
It's a pretty good picture you just painted for a content marketer that is promising of like, uh, being a leader within the organization because you figured this thing out because you can deliver value to your stakeholders faster or more meaningfully with less, right? That is a much better place to be in than Being at odds with your leadership team saying this stuff isn't going to help you when they're really [00:22:00] incentivized and they are believers, you know, educating them on the how, like, how can you use AI responsibly to still have, you know, quality standards met, don't get in trouble with the SEO gods and like that kind of thing, uh, that is still your job, but you don't want to put yourself too much at odds with That's right.
Tim Metz: What, what are the characteristics of the kind of customers or teams that you have seen implement and run with it versus those that, that don't are the specific things that they're doing well or trades in their organization that, that operate in the way that you're just
Kyle Coleman: describing? Uh, that's a really good question, Tim.
I would say the, the folks who are. Implementing AI. Well, are the people who are able to think about their high quality content outputs and break them down into the component parts of what makes this content right? And not every content marketer thinks this way, and not every, you know, marketer or salesperson thinks this way.
It's kind of the same paradigm on the sales side. Like, why did you win that deal? And the [00:23:00] sales rep is like, I don't know. It just kind of happens like, well, no, like you did everything right in some certain sequence. That we need to go and train the rest of the sales team on. So like, work with me here. And it's the same sort of thing for content marketers.
It's not just about this, uh, marquee, awesome piece of content you created. How did you do it? Started with some content brief and you thought really critically about the audience you were trying to engage and the main messaging. You thought really, uh, critically about the language that you were going to use and how it was different or engaging or something like, like you built a really comprehensive brief and then you brought it to life in some unique way.
You connected the dots. Between this persona and that persona, how they have the shared need for this specific product that you have, like you did something that was systematic and maybe you don't think about it that way, but you have to start thinking about it that way so that you can codify that system so that you can codify that process so that you can have, you know, the sales call transcripts with your solution engineer presenting the product, workflow, get an awesome piece of content that you could [00:24:00] have never written because you're not the subject matter expert.
But it requires you as a content marketer to break down how and why great content comes to life in your experience, in your career, in your best practices, and then architect that using AI.
Ty Magnin: Are there certain kinds of companies that are adopting it faster than others? Like who are you seeing as your power users?
I copy. Are they small teams, big teams? Are they marketers? I assume so. Like,
Kyle Coleman: um, there's, it kind of takes two forms tie. One is companies who are early adopters of AI and these companies have created an AI council and they have a man, top sound mandate to start thinking about and using AI across the go to market engine.
And so again, that is. You know, 5 percent of companies. It's, it's by no means early, early adopters.
Ty Magnin: It sounds like a large client too. Like to have an AI council, you're probably a hundred, couple hundred people. Yeah,
Kyle Coleman: minimum. Yeah. So you're right. As I think about kind of how we've sold into those AI [00:25:00] councils, they normally are at larger companies.
So that, that's one profile. The other profile of companies are, are, are content teams that are totally strapped and they're like, I'm a team of one and my CEO expects us to have this organic social organic content strategy that's generating 40, 50, 60 percent of our demand. How the hell? Am I going to do this?
I look across the six products that we sell and the ten members of the buying group and the four different verticals that we're across and I need to create content for every cell in that matrix. It's not possible. And they come to us and they're like, Can you help? And we're like, Yes. That's exactly what we can do.
But you need to have your best practices for what good looks like for all these different content types. And they're like, Great. So I would say that the folks that have the mandate to do more with less, And believe that A. I. is a viable solution to this. And probably they haven't been burned as badly by their experience with A.
I. They've put in a little more elbow grease to try and make the chat GPTs of the world work for them. But they know that [00:26:00] there's a more scalable, integrable solution. And they come to us for that reason. It's interesting to think about how the constraints can lead to It has to. Inventiveness. It has to.
It has to. I mean, the alternative is content marketers that are working nights and weekends. Because they, they know that they have to deliver against all these things or their neck is on the line and that's no way to live life. So, and I'm sure Ty, Tim, you have experienced this yourself personally with the clients you work with.
It's the repetitive, below the line, low leverage work that has to get done that people hate doing. And if you think about that kind of stuff, like taking the transcript from the podcast and turning it into a blog post, like, that's not the most fun or rewarding exercise in the world to do. It takes a long time.
And if you can short circuit that time and get time back to focus on the higher leverage marquee assets that are really going to move the needle, that's what content marketers love doing. And that's the exciting thing to me is that if we can help [00:27:00] AIFI more the run rate content marketing and give people time back for the more the deeper thought leadership type stuff.
That's the right balance, I think, of human plus AI.
Ty Magnin: Totally. And that leads to a, yeah, a, uh, maybe a better lifestyle, right? Or a better work day, potentially. I mean, people like writing, I get that, but you're still, I mean, I've, I've been using some of the tools and dabbling a bunch. It still feels like writing, you know, you're still creating something.
It's still thinking. It's
Kyle Coleman: still thinking. The people who like writing are the people who like thinking. And they're worried that if I outsource this all to AI, then I'm eliminating my thinking. It's like, no, you're not. Like, it still requires thought. It still requires strategy. It still requires your bespoke way of doing something.
And so I totally agree.
Tim Metz: But I would say you have to be vigilant about not getting lazy because like you need to be more intentional like the writing will force you to think right where so if you take that requirement out, then you need to be intentional about saying when and where in the process am I going to think right?
Because it's kind of easy to kind of surrender to the process and then. Not think. So [00:28:00] you have to, you have to have a mechanism that then pushes you to think. So for you, that's the voice memos, I guess.
Kyle Coleman: Yeah, exactly. And what we recommend, so like, um, our internal head of content strategy, his name is Nathan.
You all know him. He used to be an animal himself. Hi, Nathan. Nathan Thompson, follow him on LinkedIn. He is just a magician. What he does internally is every couple of weeks, he has standing meetings with me and then with our CEO, our CTO, our head of sales. And he comes prepared with topics that he wants their thoughts on.
So when he meets with our CTO, it's all about product vision and future and how we think about the topics that he wants their perspective on. He interviews them, that creates the transcripts. Nathan then runs those through the AI workflows that translates their thinking into LinkedIn posts for each of them.
And now he has the next two weeks of their presence on LinkedIn already done. It's their thoughts, and it's our AI workflows that are creating the outputs. And you can do that kind of thing for basically any content type to make for really exciting, engaging, authentic. [00:29:00]
Ty Magnin: Kyle, at some point, I believe you've made mention of a real world copy AI use case of some AI powered workflow that generated 30 million in pipeline.
And it costs 25, 000 to do this thing. So again, 25, 000 in, 30, 000 in pipeline out. 30 million, sorry, in pipeline out. What is this story
Kyle Coleman: about? Yeah, so it's not a single workflow. It is the story of my 2024 at Copy. ai. I've been here for a year, and we have some updated figures for y'all. So I've been here for a year.
We, as a marketing team, have generated over 50 million in pipeline. And I, as a leader of, uh, marketing, have spent 37K total on demand gen. And so where, how the heck are we generating all this pipeline? Doesn't add up. And the answer is, all of the AI workflows that we have, guiding our content strategy, guiding our LinkedIn strategy, 70 plus percent of our demand is coming from those channels.
Our SEO performance is off the [00:30:00] charts. Our performance on LinkedIn is out of control. And the reason for it is because we're super consistent, we're super high quality, and we're hyper engaged across our entire business. I think something like 40 percent or 50 percent of our go to market team posts multiple times a week on LinkedIn because they have all the tools at their disposal to do that.
And so, like, it's having this system of demand generation and these flywheels that end up getting created. What do I mean by that? So we create all this content on a certain topic that generates SEO interest. People come to us, they request a demo. That demo meeting happens, that creates a transcript. Our solutions engineer team presents the product, talks about the use case, handles objections, all the rest.
That creates the content that gets published, that starts ranking for SEO, and the flywheel continues to spin. So this is how we have started to build a system. It did not happen overnight. But we have started to create workflows for basically any sort of content type you can imagine and make sure that everything is interwoven so the content that we create.
ends [00:31:00] up informing the outbound sequences that we're writing. There's no point, or there's less of a point in a high velocity content engine if you're not distributing that content well. So how are we distributing the content? AI powered campaigns, AI powered outbound, everything in between. So, Copy AI, that's really, uh, to, to, to thank for that unbelievably efficient cack.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, what is that, 100x? I think I'm trying to do the math and I had a thousand. Yeah, it's a lot of zeros. You know, there are some SAS companies that are a content culture in a way, right? I think about intercom, right? And the way people know them HubSpot to some extent, right? Like they are a, they have a content culture and it sounds like copy has that too.
Right now you can kind of be like, Oh, well, of course they do. They kind of have to, they're going to dog food, the tool, et cetera, but the tool itself. Can help create these content cultures with a lot more ease than in the past. That to me is like a big, huge takeaway.
Kyle Coleman: My, my friend and former colleague, uh, [00:32:00] Devin Reed, who led content with and for me at, at Clary.
He, he says something that I think is spot on, which is effective content builds trust at scale. That's the prism that I view our content marketing strategy through. We want to build trust at scale. That's the purpose of our content strategy. And so we have, in order to do that, it can't just be us creating the one blog post a week and crossing our fingers that that's what's top of mind for people.
We need, we have a horizontal platform that solves use cases across the whole GTM engine. We have probably no fewer than 12 to 15 members of the buying group that we need to engage. We are industry agnostic, and we sell to all sorts of different industries. We need to be able to create trust at scale with a huge number of people across a huge number of industries.
And our approach to content, whether that's on our blog, or whether that's on social, or the events we do, or the whenever, wherever people see us. Like, we need to check all the boxes. And we do that, we fulfill that big content matrix. Using copy AI and that's been the [00:33:00] secret of our success to date and it's a really effective and really efficient way of generating demand.
We've spent 0 on Google ads since I've been here. Zero because why like why we rank well for every single thing that we could possibly care about or pay for.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, that's awesome. Kyle, we should let you get out of here at least close to on time. This was fun. I learned a ton. You know, I really am inspired by, I think the tone and the baton that you're carrying forward for content marketers.
You know, I think that you have a level headed approach here. You're not selling snake oil. I'll continue to be inspired and to follow along with, and I encourage folks here listening to the same, right? Give Kyle a follow, uh, give him a shot. Uh, I really think that like. This is what the future is going to look like.
It's a tool, and it's how you use it.
Kyle Coleman: I appreciate that, Ty. And the feeling's mutual. And it's so much fun working with you and the team at Animals because you all are the strategic thinkers who know how to get from A to [00:34:00] Z in all of the hard work that has to go into architecting that content system in order to do that.
Tim Metz: Thanks, Kyle. What are you thinking?
Ty Magnin: I love Kyle. I think, you know, I think he just has like a good, balanced approach. I think he's, he's, he's like humble about what he's selling, but, you know, enthusiastic about it too. There's something really valuable about having an AI platform, right, that the copy provides.
Um, and I think the numbers that he shares are real, like they are growing at a rapid rate by using AI in their content and having an inbound marketing motion that's really working. Uh, it obviously helps. They have a tailwind of like, they already have a good brand and they have a good product and also people are interested in AI right now.
So you know hot market creates a good talent what did you take away from today's call
Tim Metz: well that that's first of all as well like he has a very clear way of thinking he can explain things clearly he's clearly structured thinker but also yet kind of humble has a nice person i mean it's first time i met him right so so i like that a lot.
I think he also touched [00:35:00] on what I think is the tension for a lot of content marketers. I mean, he didn't describe it as such, but that's what I take out of it. It's like, cause you call it content culture. I would almost describe it as a workflow culture that they are building. You can like everything they're doing.
It's like workflows, workflows, like we've talked about it. Like workflows are the new work or something. That's what I was throwing around or something like that. Right. And I think that's where the tension is for some people because they are actually more creative, right? So they don't think in workflows and they're just, it's exactly what he said.
It's like. Oh yeah, I put out a great piece and it did well. And if you would ask again, but how exactly did you do it? It's like, well, I spent a lot of time on it. I interviewed a few, but there's no process. Right. And so I think that's where for some content marketers is the tension with AI. Cause it's becoming much more about the process than about the creative act.
I think that that's what I took away from him. It's like the mindset of this process workflows and. Um, it's a different mindset than
Ty Magnin: what a lot of people have. Sometimes you just have this strike of creative genius, it seems, and you don't know where the idea came from, but like, boom, all of a sudden you have the outline for something clear in your head, you know, and then you [00:36:00] go write the thing and it is hard.
Like it is like a bit of a divine thing when you get struck with that creative inspiration.
Tim Metz: You know, I was reading some of his stuff and then, and I was like, ah, I recognize this is AI generated because I know this word is always comes out of these AI models, right? And then I started thinking like, yeah, but maybe is that just like me?
And, and like, cause I'm spending so much time with it and I'm hypersensitive to these words because I know they're AI generated, but it's working for him. Right. And so like, are we overthinking as people being in the craft, being in the, in the, in this, in this field that, yeah, we recognize that it's AI generated because it uses, you know, I dunno, title cases, the H2s or whatever, right.
But like, maybe the audience doesn't notice or care about that. And so it works. Right. And so maybe we're also too sensitive for that kind of stuff, especially when it comes to our client. We're like, maybe that, that is less important than we think it's about whether it's effective or not.
Ty Magnin: Yeah, so much is about our relationship as creators to the tool, right?
I [00:37:00] think at some point, that all goes away. I do think though, with video and graphics, it'll take longer for that question to go away. One, I don't think we're asking it as loudly yet, because we don't see as many, one, I'm not in the field so much of creating videos today, you know? Uh, but two, like, we don't see as high volume of that stuff.
But the impact of like an AI generated image, which we really perceive as like real and there's some consequences towards versus copy, like, I just think the stakes are higher for, for, for images and videos. So I think we ask that question longer. It is hard to listen to Kyle and like hear the results and see what he puts out on LinkedIn and know that there's some AI involved and not get inspired to do something similar, right?
It just feels like this is where it's heading. It's obviously working for them. They have a customer list that it's working for to, you know, you can go read the case studies, that kind of thing. That's the way to do it. Yeah. That's the way to do [00:38:00] it.
