The secret to marketing success starts with a ‘G’

I finished an executive biography in 20 minutes. Yep, from start to finish—with approvals! I’ll give you a hint on how—it starts with a ‘G’.

Before I divulge my secret, here’s a little background information first. Any marketer can tell you what a hassle it can be to write executive-level content from scratch—for example, an executive biography. It goes a little something like this. Step one: Ask the exec if they have a bio. Email a follow up. Follow up again. Step two: Receive an outdated bio. Step three: Write a new bio and insert a lot of placeholders to fill in later. Ask for a review. Email a reminder. Step four: Revise and edit the bio with new inputs. Step five: Receive final approval. Time elapsed: two weeks (if you’re lucky).

Then ChatGPT arrived on the scene. OpenAI democratized generative AI (GenAI) so it was accessible and easy for any tech-savvy person to use. Quickly, the others followed: Google’s Bard (now Gemini), Microsoft CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity. Not to mention the GenAI image generators: Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Journey.

I’m sure you’ve guessed my not-so-secret weapon is GenAI. I set a speed record with that executive bio, with the help of GenAI, I was able to research and write the bio in no time flat. Here’s how it went down: I scraped the executive’s profile on LinkedIn. Asked Bard (now Gemini) to act as a marketing manager and write a 100-word executive biography for a chief data officer using the pre-existing LinkedIn profile data. Sent that bio to the executive who then had one—only one —change. Approved and done.

At Ascendion, we’re all in on GenAI. We’re keeping tabs on all the new tools and are using them in every area of our business, saving us time, money, and some hassles. From how software engineers create code, to how we provide engineering transparency for clients, to how we run our own business —we’re weaving GenAI into our work. Of all the possible use cases in the business, marketing communications was a logical place to start.

Here’s where I’m finding the most value from GenAI:

• Kickstarting creativity
  To move beyond the usual business tropes, I use GenAI to brainstorm uncommon themes and creative approaches. One example: For a brochure about cloud engineering, I was looking for art to reinforce the idea of breaking free from constraints. With the help of ChatGPT, I came up with the concept of a bird flying out of a cage. Take a look.
• Doing the drudge work
  A piece of content comes from many places. Some writers start with an outline. Others like to sketch a mind map. Some write many, many drafts. I now assign the task of organizing my thoughts to GenAI. I compile all the inputs for a story—research passages, statistics, case studies, company descriptions and differentiators, blogs, byline articles—and ask Gemini to organize the inputs. Putting the pieces together with a rationale and an outcome (in the form of a prompt) gets me to a quality first draft fast.
• Multichannel campaign components
  Take a core piece of content and turn it into a multichannel campaign. For the Ascendion and HFS research piece, Your Generative Enterprise Playbook, the full report was turned into blogs, emails, newsletter blurbs, and social media posts. We finetune the prompts for each channel (we even have our own prompt repository), so that one piece of content gets used in a myriad of ways.
• Summarizing content
  Ingesting and summarizing seems to be the hot spot for GenAI tools right now. Look at how CoPilot is being integrated more and more into the Microsoft Office suite. In fact, I used Gemini to write the closing paragraph of this post. I did a pretty good rewrite but the bot got me 60% of the way.
• Producing videos
  This is where Ascendion has really moved the needle on saving time and money. Using a GenAI video platform, we went from spending thousands of dollars, multiple weeks, and scads of people, to being able to storyboard, script, edit, and upload videos for a fraction of the cost, from one person’s remote office. Check out one of the videos we made here.

  Just as GenAI is revolutionizing enterprises, the applications for marketing and communications are mind-blowing too. Marketers can streamline workflows and offload grunt work to focus on higher value work like long-term planning and creative. For Ascendion, embracing GenAI has unlocked efficiency and innovation, allowing us to expand our marketing ecosystem with a bot that acts like a co-worker.

About the author

Jennifer Connolly is head of content and communications at Ascendion. With experience in corporate communications and B2B technology marketing, she delights in translating business issues and technical jargon into creative strategies. Jennifer holds a master’s in marketing from Northwestern University and resides in Chicago.