Notion

Being organised is the first step in creating great content. This is where Notion shines, it’s basically the lovechild of Evernote & Trello.

It has the flexibility to be molded into whatever you need for your business. As an agency, we use it as a lightweight Intranet to check day-to-day tasks, keep a record of our brand guidelines, store a system of procedures, and manage our content calendar. But for the purposes of this article, I’m going to show you how you can use it as a content calendar. 

This is the template that you can use directly from Notion:

It allows you to put your content ideas into a board where you can see what stage each piece of content is at, having the ability to drag cards across each card depending on its status and tag it with what kind of content it is. When you create a new card you are also able to select from different page templates which have different sections depending on the content type:

For example, say we were making a podcast episode about how much we love WeWork (honestly, we do, it’s amazing) – we could select the Podcast template and it will create a page auto-populated for that content type:

You also have the ability to change and add to these templates to best suit your needs. For example, if you run webinars, you may want to create a page template specifically for that.

They have also recently announced the Notion API which allows for a whole bunch of neat integrations like connecting it to Slack, Google Calander, with a bunch more functionality if you like using Zapier. 

Interestingly enough – Microsoft just launched its new productivity app similar to Notion called Loop, we haven’t used it ourselves but if you’re in the Microsoft ecosystem it may be a good option.

Jarvis (and other AI tools)

Now you’ve got some content ideas organised, it’s time to start creating. But if you are anything like me, when you go to write content; your mind goes blank. This is where Jarvis can help.

Jarvis is basically an AI-copyrighter, that can write long & short-form content. But before you go axing your creative team, it’s by no means a replacement for a good copywriter. Instead, use it as a tool that you can implement to assist you when writing content. A lot of these GTP-3 copywriting tools are popping up, but Jarvis & Copy.ai are the top dogs.

Simply select what kind of content you’re looking to create (i.e ideas for blog posts, LinkedIn post copy etc), give it a short line about what you want to be included, and watch Jarvis go to work writing some copy.  For example, if you are writing a blog post with different sections, you can put the headline into one of these tools and it’ll flesh out the point to help you get to a first draft faster. To demonstrate how this would work, I put in 5 tips for writing the best content for SEO, this is the points that the tool came up with:

What you can then do is take each of these points, then put it into the content expander module, which then gives you a result like this:

As you can see it’s not perfect. However, use these tools as inspiration to help give you a starting point when making content and you’ll be off to the races – because writer’s block is a real pain. 

With these AI tools helping assist people to make content, the content marketing game is going to become even more saturated than it already is. These tools are going to hinder content marketing because soon everybody will be pumping out similar content as it is based on the same AI model. Thus, it’ll be even more important to create unique content.

So use it only as a rough guide to help you get started.

Descript

Now we’ve planned, got a script, recorded our content – it’s time to edit.  Descript describes themselves as “All-in-one audio & video editing, as easy as a doc.”

We all know how important content is. But, making content is hard work. Unless you are Micheal Bay, you probably find editing a headache. Descript solves this issue. Just upload the video or audio file and Descript transcribes it; allowing you easily edit the media as if it’s a word document! I wouldn’t use this if you a producing a big-budget piece, but for social content – it’s amazing.

Just as a quick example – I’ve taken a recording from Dan’s talk about CRMs and not only can I quickly edit the video as a word document, but I am also currently using the transcript to repurpose the content into a blog post (stay tuned for that):

Scrubbing through a video to find & edit a certain section takes a lot of time, whereas here you can just delete the text and it updates the media accordingly. This is super exciting because as I just mentioned you can take a long-form piece of content convert it into a blog post, then use Descript to also make micro pieces of content for socials. It has a handy feature that lets you create an animated “audiogram” of a highlighted section. 

We also know how important having a transcript for socials is now too in case someone is on mobile with their audio-off. And, you can easily export these files into final cut or premier for further editing work if needed. Not only is this a great tool already, but it also has some other interesting features. Have you ever mispronounced something in a video? Or said the wrong thing?  If you are like me, then you’ll know this happens from time to time… 

In the premium version, you are able to use their “Overdub” feature. This is some Skynet feature – but train their AI on your voice and it will give you the ability to artificially correct any word in the edit. I haven’t used it personally, but you can watch a demo here. It looks like it works well for small blips – but don’t expect it to be able to type out your VO and for it to do it justice (Not just yet, anyway).

We really encourage our clients to use this tool as part of their content strategy.

We are delighted to have been able to share our three favorite SaaS tools for content creation with you. There are always so many great tools out there, but we hope these three will help you get started. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below or contact us anytime at hello@exemplifydigital.co.uk. We always enjoy hearing from you! (Fyi: This conclusion was written by AI)