AI and ChatGPT Can’t Replace Content Marketing Featuring Wendy Covey

Episode 7, Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly

ChatGPT is the hot topic on everyone’s mind. On today’s episode, Nicole is joined by Wendy Covey, CEO and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing to give their take on generative AI and if it’s time to worry that the robots are coming for your content marketing. Wendy also takes time to share how TREW Marketing got its start, how her non-fishing skills earned her a state record and more!

Nicole Donnelly

Welcome to Tales of Misadventure. I'm joined by Wendy Covey, the founder, and president of TREW Marketing. I am so excited to have you on the show today. Wendy.

Wendy Covey

Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be a fun time. Can't wait.

Nicole Donnelly

It is such an honor to have another female entrepreneur on the show.I have so much respect and admiration for you and what you've built at TREW. You are just a tremendous mentor and I have learned so much from you. TREW Marketing has been in business for 15 years.

Wendy Covey

Yeah, this is our 15th anniversary.

Texas Fishing Record Holder

Nicole Donnelly

Oh, my gosh. That's a big one - such a huge milestone. So you are a CEO, a technical marketing leader, author of Content Marketing: Engineered, and one of the Wall Street Journal's ten most innovative entrepreneurs in America. Amazing! You also hold a Texas fishing record.

Tell us more about that fishing record.

Wendy Covey

It's a funny story, I guess. I grew up in a family where my dad and my brother love to fish and I found it so boring. If it didn't involve boys or malls or something like that I was not into it as a teenager.

Fast forward to my adulthood, my husband is really into fishing and he was like, No, no, no, you need to try saltwater fishing. Fishing in the bay is unlike lake fishing. You catch stuff all the time and you never know what you're going to get because there are all sorts of species of fish swimming around in the ocean. So we went out and I lucked into hooking this fish.

It took all of my line and 45 minutes to reel in this fish. The guide on the boat was holding onto my shirt so I didn’t fall into the water and was talking me through the whole thing. For a moment, I thought I had caught a dolphin but it turned out to be a freakishly large redfish or the species of Red Drum. And the next thing you know, I had a state record.

Nicole Donnelly

It's like Hemingway’s Old Man in the Sea kind of battle.

Wendy Covey

It was quite a fight. At the time, I was the only woman to hold a record in the catch-and-release logs of Texas and it still might be.

So I was pretty proud of that moment.

Nicole Donnelly

So not only are you this super amazing entrepreneur, a business owner helping all these engineering companies create awesome content marketing but you also hold this fishing record

That's cool.

TREW Marketing Get It’s Start

Did you always want to be an entrepreneur or did it just kind of come to you organically? What led you to wake up one day and say, I want to start TREW Marketing.

Wendy Covey

I'm the opposite of you, Nicole. I had no aspirations to start my own business, wasn't even on my radar.

I worked at a large technology company called National Instruments, and a colleague of mine, Rebecca Geier, had become close friends. We would often jog together at lunch or have happy hour to talk about our careers. So we had some ideas percolating.

Then I married my husband and we really wanted to raise our family in a smaller environment away from the city. So I went to my leadership at National Instruments and pitched the idea of working from home either every day of the week or some days of the week.

At the time, working at this company meant starting at 7 a.m. and working until 6 p.m. - really long hours, in a leadership role. They said no and offered me a promotion because they saw a bright future for me. This was not a good option for me and Rebecca was ready to make a change.

National Instruments was a system integration company taking any products and delivering them into manufacturing. Separately, Rebecca and I noticed that the partners of national instruments didn’t have a clue about how to do good marketing. It was just so clear that they needed help.

So out of inspiration to help the company and personal motivation to work remotely so I could start and raise my family in the country, we established and launched TREW Marketing.

Nicole Donnelly

Wow, that's amazing. Do you think you would have taken the leap if you didn't have Rebecca?

Wendy Covey

There was a moment where didn’t think she could go through with the decision but I was going to do it either way. I told Rebecca that I really, really, really wanted to do this with her and she came around.

Now, would it have taken me longer to leave and start the business? I think so. I think the safety and camaraderie of and the share of risk with a partner was a huge help to us both.

Our very first client was from the United Way which we found via Rebecca's network.

Wendy Covey

We decided to have me continue working at National Instruments and moonlight as the Operations person behind the scenes. Rebecca took a leave of absence, took care of the first few clients and I handed her half my paycheck. And that's how we funded year one at TREW Marketing.

Nicole Donnelly

That’s really amazing. To be able to take on the risk that you both did and to deal with the uncertainty I think is so cool.

Wendy Covey

I have to give a little bit of credit here to both of our husbands. We both had husbands with great jobs and they were fully on board with us which allowed us to take this leap, not making income for several years. They were able to support us and make this into a self-funded venture.

Nicole Donnelly

I had the same experience. I don't think I could have started this business without my husband. He has a nice stable job, no desire to ever go off on his own, and is just super supportive of everything that I'm doing; just a total cheerleader. But you're absolutely right, I don't think I could do this if I didn't have that kind of stability there.

Learning to Niche and Staying True to the Niche

Tell me a little bit about one of your biggest business blunders. I'm sure there are many. I have them every day.

Wendy Covey

And don't we all? Absolutely.

The biggest thing that was absolutely transformative for our business happened a the start of the Great Recession of 2009. Here we were a fledgling business, thinking things are going well, with a really eclectic mix of clients.

Then the economic stuff happening in the world started to affect everyone. It affected nonprofits, technology, you name it. Everybody was touched by this. So we had to get really smart about our growth and where we were headed.

We asked ourselves, who do we best serve? Who are the clients we will benefit from our marketing experience? Both of our careers had been spent marketing to engineers and technical audiences.

This was the audience and industry we knew. We knew the trade shows and the publications. We touched so many industries and accumulated this knowledge from wastewater to automotive tests to manufacturing process automation. It became clear that we needed to narrow our focus and so did that. We declared it.

It was really scary to say no to Dell Children's Hospital and a  teacher looking to start an educational system that has lots of money and grants.

We decided to be true to our niche and rebranded not the name of the company, but certainly what we stood for. It was because of that decision and bravery that we earned the Wall Street Journal's 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs award.

It was just saying no so we could grow and expand.

Nicole Donnelly

Every business owner has to go through that period of transformation. When you first start a business, you just want to take whatever business that you can get but I feel like there is this natural progression of once you start to grow that you really do have to make that very conscious decision.

It is a very pivotal point where it's painful to say no people.

Wendy Covey

It’s still painful.

Nicole Donnelly

Once you made that decision, how did you know it was the right choice?

Wendy Covey

The numbers. I can't quote exactly what the growth was, but it was so obvious and it built more momentum. There were people in our ecosystem that had always been there but once we declared our niche, they started sending us leads which allowed us to tap into different groups of people that needed our help.

Pivoting When Necessary

Nicole Donnelly

I think, as business owners, we have so many decisions to make but then we try to serve, learn and try to understand all these different types of businesses and different industries without having the mental capacity to do so.

If you can just niche down on one and get better at that one, you're going to gain more momentum and you're going to learn so much more quickly. That's really great advice for entrepreneurs, business owners, and manufacturers out there. But it's almost like you do kind of have to go through that period of figuring out who you are and who you're serving first before you can make that pivot. How many times have you had to pivot in your business?

Wendy Covey

Oh, several times. Many times.

Back when we were working with system integration companies of a certain size, we do everything. It was very difficult to staff all of the different functions and roles of marketing. As a growing agency, we couldn't afford to staff all of those positions.

We had to figure out the services we gravitated towards and felt we were uniquely qualified for, that our target audience needed most. We had a lot of starts and stops.

Nicole Donnelly

It's like that hedgehog concept from Jim Collins, Good to Great. Think of it as like the Venn diagram. What is it that you absolutely love to do overlapping with what is it that the market needs versus what are you the really the best at? Sounds like you guys got just really clear about that and just went for it.

Wendy Covey

Yeah.

Don’t be the Expert On Everything. Trust Your Team.

Nicole Donnelly

Owning a business requires so much. 

I started a business because I wanted to use my God-given talents to help other people, have financial freedom and independence, and I wanted to be challenged.

But it's hard. Every day is hard. How do you manage it or want hacks do you have?

Wendy Covey

Marketing keeps changing. If I look back to 15 years ago, holy cow, we didn't even have HubSpot or generative AI for content development. So a lot of changes with marketing.

I learned to give myself some grace. You can't be the expert at everything. You can know a little bit about a lot of things and go deep on some, but you need to surround yourself with people that are watching different balls. You will make yourself go crazy if you try to be the expert on everything.

It is not even possible.

So I take a collaborative approach to my business. I want people to feel ownership and accountability in their work. I’m hands-off in my management approach. I'm more of a coach and less of a dictator if you will.

I feel it has served me well because I can go and be like, okay, what is this GA4 thing? Like someone needs to get up to speed. Oh, you already know. Great. Can you explain this to me? Or let's record it on the podcast or whatever.

So it’s good to have collaboration partners and it doesn't have to be someone on my team. Looking to others and hearing what they have to say about things helps me manage. Listening to these podcasts of different people while you're exercising and feeling stimulated. Boy, that's a big hack for me too.

Nicole Donnelly

Yeah, I love what you said about just really trusting your team. I think that's so huge and just being really intentional about letting them have ownership. That's how you've been able to grow your business and everyone rises when you do that and it helps you too, because it's a big burden if you have to be responsible for all of that.

Wendy Covey

It was a pretty freeing thing when I got to that point where I could recognize that I needed to step back in order to have everybody grow.

Nicole Donnelly

So true. Freeing and also so humbling. I really can't be everything to everyone and do everything. And that's okay.

Building a Great Brand Culture

Wendy Covey

I want to mention another hack. Something that's really important is just taking time away from the business. I do that in two ways. First, we instituted No Meeting Fridays. We're not at the four-day workweek yet, but we're trying to avoid meetings even as a virtual workplace.

We do require that 70% of the time be during normal working hours, but the other 30% take it when you want to take it, or when you need to take it. Secondly, just take time to go fishing or whatever grounds you and brings you back to the center.

Nicole Donnelly

I've been trying No Meetings Fridays and sometimes a meeting does creeps in there but the Fridays I have no meetings are so great. I love that you give your team flexibility and have created that kind of environment for your team.

Wendy Covey

Everyone caught up with us, Nicole.

Nicole Donnelly

As an employer, what kind of benefits will improve retention and help great brand culture in the next five, or ten years?

Wendy Covey

I'd love to have this all sorted out. But, you know, high-level trends, as I look to younger generations, their value for time over money is huge. As an experiment on this, a few years ago, I said, okay, guys, if you want to work overtime, like an extra 50 hours or 60, we'll pay extra for that.

No one wanted to do that. Then I said if you want to go into sales on the side and refer people, I'll pay extra for that. No one wanted to do that.

I hear you loud and clear. So instead we invested in an annual team retreat. In fact, we just came back from Mars, in Fort Lauderdale, where we rented a giant house on the Intercoastal waterway and everybody just loved it. The feedback was so positive.

It’s time and experiences and not about money. Yes, it costs money to do the experiences but the experience was valued more than giving a company performance bonus or something like that.

Nicole Donnelly

Yeah. Oh, I love that so much. Yep. I'm dreaming of doing our first retreat. I have it in my mind and I can't wait.

Coming out of COVID, I think people are realizing just how much they really need time together, in person - people you work with, family, whatever the case may be. It's almost like people have this new appreciation for connection that maybe wasn't felt as much before. The pandemic forced them to realize how important it is that we are connected and find ways to connect.

I'm sure that your employees just absolutely love working with you. Cool!

Benefits and Drawbacks of ChatGPT and Generative AI

So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk marketing. You and I are both marketers. I am just dying to hear what your perspective is on ChatGPT. I know everybody's talking about this, but I am just really curious about your thoughts.

ChatGPT does not really have a mechanism in place to verify the information it provides. It's just basically creating content from whatever is already out there and doesn't have the self-awareness to say, Oh, this is true and this is not. How do you see this playing out in the next five, ten years?

Wendy Covey

We, at TREW Marketing, have been spending a lot of time on this and just wrapped up a research project where we piloted writing technical content onChatGPT, Jasper, and Writer.

But basically, I'll share some benefits and drawbacks that we found. Our case study was a series of blog posts on a similar topic, and I think there was some short form content too. What we found was that the AIs were writing at an average sixth grade level and there was a lot of repetition.

So it might say a dynamometer is good for this. A dynamometer is also good for this. Sometimes it would lose itself and repeat things in weird places. But let's say it got the facts right, which is doubtful, but it will eventually.

There's something lost with your brand in your tone, in reinforcing your message. So in the quest for giving you original content ChatGPT, Writer, or Jasper, are ignoring your company's messaging. They’re purposely not trying to overlap with it to be original but you're missing this opportunity to sound like your company. It's not necessarily helping you.

In some cases, it's defining a technical term in a very arduous way to try to not use the industry standard term. Back to dynamometer, for example, a dynamometer is a dynamometer. It's not a tool that does this for this and this. It’s a noun. There’s a lot of red lining and it didn't save us time.

It wasn't all bad. It served as a good brainstorming buddy. Think blank page syndrome. Like, I need to write a white paper or a case study or whatever on this topic what are some things I could say? The AIs spit back some ideas that you could use. You could also ask it to brainstorm on headlines, like, here's my case study, it's done. What are some good headlines for this or what are some good social posts? So we see it, for now, as better for brainstorming.

Then there's this other set of tools that is SEO oriented like Market Muse. And those are great too. They're brainstorming buddies for keywords you should insert into your piece. It’s really cool but really expensive maybe in the future they'll have a lighter version for smaller companies.

I think of it as your content strategy companion to help you with topic clustering and keyword analysis and things like that.There's some overlap with what HubSpot does in that sense too but Market Muse goes deeper. Then there's SEO Rush which goes deep on the SEO side, but it doesn't generate content.

You mentioned the Venn diagram. It's kind of like you have generative, you know, we're going to write for you and then we're going to help you do content better. And there's some overlap in those two.

Nicole Donnelly

That's such a great analysis. I hadn't even thought about brand tone and voice because as you say, it makes so much sense because the whole purpose of the bot is to just conglomerate or aggregate whatever else is out there. 

Generative AI You’re Brainstorming Buddy

So do you really want your brand to be this aggregate of what’s out there? This is the opportunity for brands to really position themselves uniquely so you don’t lose your point of view.

Wendy Covey

It's just not authentic. It's a shortcut.

I see why it's tempting for small business owners to just let it write blog posts. On the surface, they look good but when you think about it’s not authentic and eventually this is a theory, but I've heard this several times now, Google is going to catch up I have a feeling punishment is coming.

Nicole Donnelly

I do too. Nothing can take down Google. Right?

Wendy Covey

They're scrambling on this, no doubt because people are going to ChatGPT for their quick answers instead of Google just for the novelty of it. So there's going to be a reckoning, Nicole.

Nicole Donnelly

I totally agree with your assessment. These AI tools should be used for research, the starting point but for the actual content creation, especially if you're dealing with really technical buyers, really niche products, there's just no way that anything can replace that subject matter expert who has expertise.

It's great to see what's already out there on the specific topic, start from there, and then you can figure out where you can what you want, your unique perspective to be on that specific topic.

Wendy Covey

Actually, my team did uncover one use case for ChatGPT - a glossary page. So if you wanted a page on your website that’s just factual like how can blah blah blah type of laser be used. So for things that aren't point of view items, don't need to be branded, and are just stating facts, you can use AI to generate that very quickly.

For everything else, say you wanted to create derivative content from a white paper and then derivative to social posts or three blog posts or whatever, the other tools, Jasper and Writer are much better at doing that, and they're best at the really short lists like headlines and social posts. They're still not there on the white paper to blog post kind of scenario, but our hope is that they'll get there and we think they will.

Nicole Donnelly

Absolutely.

Being able to create blog posts from webinar transcripts and meeting minutes all of those like kind of admin-y type of things.

Wendy Covey

I think that's coming.

Nicole Donnelly

I think there's an opportunity for business owners to be thinking about doing more live events, podcasts, webinars, where you're actually engaging in conversation, where you're sharing ideas and thought leadership. A bot can never replicate what you learn or you and I having a conversation. No way.

Wendy Covey

Good luck, Synthetic Intelligence.

TREW Marketing’s Playbook

Nicole Donnelly

Switching gears again.

How are you marketing your business now, knowing what you know now for TREW Marketing? What's worked for you and what hasn't worked?

Wendy Covey

What we did at the beginning that worked is speaking engagements - getting in front of other people's communities, whether that be virtually or in person. It hands down has always worked and will continue to work because when it's somebody else's community but you're given the forum to speak and prove out your expertise. There's something special about speaking engagements and when you can be there in person even better.

Next, content marketing playbook and inbound marketing. So the idea of publishing content on a consistent basis and attracting people to your website, building trust, nurturing them, the typical playbook for inbound has absolutely worked for us to the degree that I haven't had to do a cold sales outreach type of thing in probably six years.

Part of that is branding as well but I put most of it on content marketing. I believe in it. It works.

I will say when Google changed its algorithm last year. We were horrified and they punished us. We had been blogging twice a week for over a decade and over time, we would blog on similar subjects with a new author or whatever. However, the blogs were similar enough that we were punished for it. Some of our topics are very general and some are very niche.

So when they changed their algorithm, I think that strategy actually hurt us and we had to get rid of a lot of content, which sounds really counterintuitive to the me of three years ago looking at content marketing.

Nicole Donnelly

So interesting. I was just reading something about that specifically that Google is rewarding not less content, but more in-depth pieces of the trade. I think that's interesting, but maybe a little less overwhelming for someone just getting started because it's not like they have to write and pillar pieces, then create like 12 sub-articles all around the same thing. 

The Importance of Measuring Your Metrics

I think that's all shifting. I mean, I'm curious about your perspective on the whole topical cluster.

Wendy Covey

The pillar pages, those long scrolling pages, work incredibly well and long blogs get great engagement to old blogs.

Nicole Donnelly

Position is key. Making sure you're updating what you got out there on a regular basis.

Wendy Covey

Let's add another element. We leaned into video a couple of years ago. We had videos on our website and they were hosted through YouTube and some embedded. I guess we were pulling them in from YouTube and the load time was just slow enough that Google was punishing us, even though YouTube is their engine. So there are many technical aspects we need to know.

SEO has been our biggest learning lesson of the past couple of years. As SEO rapidly changes and Google has the power to change its algorithm and completely reshuffle how businesses grow or don't grow that are reliant upon Search. As a small business owner, I had the responsibility of staying on top of that and acting quickly.

Nicole Donnelly

Yeah, and maybe even like trying to make sure that you don't have all your eggs in one basket, if you will, right? Try to make sure you have different ways to bring in new business.

Wendy Covey

I will say, inbound was working so well for us that I had a lot of eggs in that SEO basket. When I lost all those eggs, it left me asking where all my leads went? What just happen? Where are the visits?

I'm almost over it. I'm still a little angry at Google.

Nicole Donnelly

You're so insightful, Wendy. I could just talk to you all day.

Wendy Covey

Oh, well, you need to credit my team. They uncovered a lot of that. I'm just soaking it in and, you know, making business decisions based on the information. It's shows how important it is to measure, right? Imagine if we weren’t measuring those metrics! For those businesses that weren’t measuring, they had no idea that their website traffic just tanked and all of a sudden they're not getting forms but they don't know why.

Nicole Donnelly

You know. That is so true. Yeah, that's why marketing is so important. So everyone who's listening, you need to measure. You need to be able to know what's going on with your business.

Wendy Covey

Absolutely.

Nicole Donnelly

This has been such an honor having you on the show. I've learned so much from you. I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing all about your business experience and your marketing acumen and everything. It's been amazing.

Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendycovey/. Learn more about TREW Marketing at https://www.trewmarketing.com/. Get your copy of Content Marketing, Engineered: Build Trust and Convert Buyers with Technical Content on Amazon.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel or wherever you prefer to stream podcasts and never miss an episode of Tales of Misadventure with Nicole Donnelly.

Looking for marketing insights and resources? Subscribe to our newsletter https://info.dmgdigital.io/welcome-to-dmg-digital.