Latest / Content, Briefly / Redpoint Content: Becky Lawlor on original research done right

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Redpoint Content: Becky Lawlor on original research done right · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  I generally like AI generated content. I don't have a problem with it. And, and that said, yeah, and I trust, you know, doesn't impact my trust of a brand when I know they've used AI generated content.
• 0:13
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm really excited to chat with Becky Lawlor. She runs Redpoint Content and has recently published a report.
• 0:29
  It's a B2B buyer's guide. So she surveyed two hundred and fifty influential B2B buyers about what types of content they want. Not surprisingly, pretty much everybody wants original research. That's what they trust most.
• 0:40
  That's what they know influences their purchasing decisions most. So there's a link to the report itself in the show notes. Go check it out.
• 0:46
  I would encourage you to do that, and then Becky kinda walks us through some of the findings. There's a few surprising things, a few not surprising things. In general, original research is kinda it right now.
• 0:55
  Like, it's having a moment that I think is actually kind of overdue. If you're having any uncertainty about what you should be doing in content right now, I would point you to this.
• 1:04
  In addition to that, we're doing an AMA with Becky. So if you're listening to this on the day it comes out or the day after, we're gonna be doing an AMA with her on Thursday, September fifth.
• 1:13
  So that'll be happening in the Slack group. There'll be details about that in our newsletter and in the announcements channel in Slack.
• 1:19
  So I would encourage you to come hang out with Becky, ask any questions you have about how to do original research well.
• 1:24
  We'll be showing some examples, talking through red flags and the mistakes she sees and all that good stuff. So anyways, I'll get out of the way. Hope you enjoy this conversation with Becky Lawlor.
• 1:34
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• 1:38
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• 3:01
  To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out manusha.com in the show notes. Hey, everybody.
• 3:10
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Very excited to be chatting with Becky Lawlor from Redpoint Content.
• 3:17
  You've recently published a report which we're gonna be talking about in a lot of detail. Link in the show notes to that.
• 3:22
  But first, Becky, would you just say hi, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are and, and what you do. Yeah. So I am Becky Lawlor, and I work in B2B content marketing.
• 3:33
  I've been in the field for over a decade producing thought leadership B2B content, and as part of that, I also help produce original research, which is a part of thought leadership content.
• 3:44
  So, and I run a small boutique marketing agency. Interesting. Okay, wait. Let's just get into this, like, right now. You just said original research, which is often part of thought leadership content.
• 3:54
  I don't know that most content marketers think of it that way.
• 3:58
  I suspect that many content marketers think of original research as, like, the PDF downloadable thing with charts and thought leadership as the essay style or LinkedIn style type of content that's mostly opinions.
• 4:12
  Maybe that's just the way I think about it. Maybe that's not generally true. How do you think about those two things where they overlap? Yeah.
• 4:18
  So I guess the way I think about thought leadership is that you need to be bringing something unique and novel to say in your thought leadership content.
• 4:26
  So how you do that, there are a bunch of different ways, and one of those ways is that sort of just either subject matter expertise.
• 4:33
  So you're on LinkedIn, you have maybe, you know, kind of some of your star subject matter experts for your brand out there kind of sharing the knowledge that they've gained over their careers.
• 4:43
  That's one way to develop thought leadership. I think interviews is another way to show, like, your brand's more-- like, your brand's thought leadership is...
• 4:52
  Interviews is another kind of unique way because, again, that's original thinking.
• 4:56
  It's coming from inside somebody's head, and you're sharing it out, and you're not just going out to the internet and gathering data that's already out there and putting it out there.
• 5:03
  And the final way is by collecting your own data, whether that is through, like, surveys, you know, your buyers, surveys of their customers, surveys of the industry, or whether that's you have internal data sets.
• 5:15
  Maybe you're some kind of analytics firm, and you can analyze your own data that you collect on your software and share out, like, benchmarking trends or something to your customers.
• 5:26
  All of that shows and positions you as having a novel point of view or novel information to share, and that's what I think as really standing up as a thought leader. Okay. That makes a ton of sense.
• 5:41
  You know, a couple months ago, I read an article for the Jasper blog. The title was something like, "The Content Marketing Playbook is Dead." You know?
• 5:48
  Like, basically this, like, SEO thing that so many folks were doing for a couple years, like, not really working anymore.
• 5:53
  I'm working on a follow-up to that piece about the new content playbook, and so I posted [chuckles] a thing in the Slack group asking folks, like-Show me some examples of brands that are doing content that you're really impressed with, and every response is some type of data.
• 6:10
  It's reports, it's some kind of interactive data, it's benchmark data that is updated annually.
• 6:16
  It's, like, always based in data, and it feels like data-driven content is having a moment that it probably deserved to have a long time ago, but it's happening now,
• 6:28
  maybe due to skepticism around SEO, maybe due to AI being able to do a lot of this like lower-hanging fruit style content for us.
• 6:38
  Maybe it's like we finally are realizing, like, just like understanding what people, you know, like getting an understanding of a group of people and reporting on that actually is just really valuable.
• 6:48
  Are you sort of sensing that same trend that this style of content is kind of on the way up in a way that maybe it's been overlooked over the past couple of years? Yeah, I, I do think so.
• 7:00
  I mean, obviously it's always been out there, and I think it's always been valuable, and it's always performed well when brands have done it.
• 7:07
  But I do think the trends you were talking about, I would say all of the above. I do think the AI is driving it, the changes we're seeing in SEO and even Google's EEAT formula.
• 7:17
  I mean, they're actually asking you to produce this kind of, you know, differentiated more than just SEO question and response type content that actually has real thought leadership embedded in it. So, yeah.
• 7:31
  And I think, you know, just from a human standpoint, our own curiosity, I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm always way more curious, [chuckles] you know, whether I'm reading The New York Times or something else, if there's some study I do wanna know, like, even if I know it might be slightly like, whatever, I wanna know what other, you know, people think about their health or whatever it is, you know?
• 7:52
  So. Yeah, yeah. We're just drawn- Totally. [laughs] So interesting. Can we talk a little bit about this report that you've just published? So you put together this B2B buyer guide. You collected a bunch of data.
• 8:03
  I've had a chance to look through it. Like I said, link will be in the show notes, so go check it out and kind of see this in action.
• 8:09
  But maybe can you just give us, like, in broad strokes, like, the report, you know, what you did, why you did it, and then we can talk about some of the findings. Yeah. So the report is really about...
• 8:18
  I mean, my goal with it was I really wanted to understand from a B2B buyer's perspective what type of content actually they, they want, what they prefer, but really even deeper than that, what actually makes them take action, what makes them convert in some way, whether that's to actually purchase something, whether that's to just share the content out, whether that is to, you know, hand over their personal data.
• 8:40
  And also, again, going back to this thought leadership, you know, what actually does build, what type of content do buyers see as building brand authority and expertise and increasing brand awareness?
• 8:52
  The goal is to really kind of understand what type of content was buyers preferred for those things.
• 8:59
  And then, you know, along those lines, obviously, I am a believer in original research, and so I included that as well as other types of content like case studies or educational how-to content, or even just thought leadership articles that may be like, like you talked about, like a LinkedIn one where somebody's just sharing their expertise, but they don't actually include
• 9:21
  some sort of collection of data, whether that's interviews or actual data sets or surveys. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
• 9:28
  You included a very helpful, like, takeaways section at the bottom, and the first bullet point, which I copy and pasted from my own notes, was this.
• 9:37
  It says, "Original research, including data analysis and peer interviews, has the biggest influence on buyer purchasing decisions and brand authority."
• 9:44
  And then to support that, there was a great stat in here that said, "Ninety-one percent of B2B buyers say original research reports increase brand awareness. Ninety-three percent trust brands more that invest in it."
• 9:55
  I found that to be very interesting. Like it-- real people actually, like, really notice it. I-- maybe that was what I took away from it. Yeah.
• 10:01
  You know, I had hunches, like anytime you do these kind of surveys, which is always the fun part about it, you have your own hunches, you have your hypothesis, you have myths that you wanna bust, but you don't really know until you go out and put it in the field what it's gonna come back.
• 10:14
  And I can tell you, I was actually surprised pleasantly because it supported the viewpoint that I had, but how strongly people came back and said that it mattered and how low actually, like how to-- 'cause I think a lot of times we think people want how-to and educational content, and how low that actually ranked.
• 10:34
  It was typically below twenty percent that people said that that's what, you know, kind of compelled them to convert on these different metrics or drove awareness. So I found that fascinating on a number of levels. Yeah.
• 10:48
  That's so cool. You know, one thing I remember talking about this back in my agency days, we would get on sales calls and we would talk about content and SEO in particular. Customers would have...
• 11:00
  It's like they would almost sort of struggle with the silence of it. You know, it's like you could execute a really good SEO content plan, and it's like it's traffic.
• 11:08
  It does what it's supposed to do, but like there's no buzz around it. Nobody talks about it. Nobody shares it. There's like sort of nothing...
• 11:14
  It's like you almost don't know it's there unless you're checking your analytics to see if people are visiting those pages. Whereas original research has sort of the opposite effect, where it's relatively easy to
• 11:28
  make a big deal about it because there's a lot to say. It's like something new and novel that is worth putting together an announcement, sending it out to your newsletter list, posting about it on social.
• 11:38
  You know, like encouraging the rest of the content folks to kind of like pull bits and pieces of it to include in other stuff they're doing.
• 11:46
  Part of what I'm getting at is like, do you find that the customers that you work with, that they're more excited about this type of content than something else like SEO, which doesn't have that same kind of, you know, like cachet to it?
• 11:59
  Yeah. I think, I mean, both the customers that I work with that are producing it, like the in-house marketers, I mean, I think it is fun, quite frankly, to do this kind of research.
• 12:09
  You know, SEO, I think sometimes has a bit of aFor me, sometimes I feel like a slog feel to it.
• 12:13
  Like we're just checking these boxes, we're regurgitating what's already out there, but we're trying to do it in a slightly different way.
• 12:19
  There's just not a lot of creativity and kind of innovative thinking that gets to go into it in the same way when you're developing, you know, whether you're using your own data set and an-analyzing that.
• 12:31
  You know, I've worked with clients that way, and I've also worked with them on these surveys. Either way, you know, there's just another level of curiosity about, like, what does the data say? What will come back?
• 12:41
  What kind of story can we create out of this? And then obviously, it is resonating. I mean, you know, PR is, it's one of the best ways to get PR from your content. It just really resonates on so many levels.
• 12:53
  You know, webinars have a lot of success when they're featuring this kind of data-driven content in them, so that's another way you can take it from the written report to another.
• 13:02
  Sales enablement, it actually really helps in the sales field.
• 13:05
  I mean, there's just a whole bunch of ways that you can use it, so I think that creates excitement, too, that they're doing one project that really can fuel content for the whole year, content strategy- Yeah...
• 13:15
  content ideas, and fuel all these different kind of marketing KPIs that they need to hit. That's so interesting.
• 13:22
  There was another thing, um, highlighted in the report I thought was cool was that, you know, I can imagine, like, brands appreciate that this is-- they should do this, they-- you know what I mean?
• 13:31
  They should create some original research. But the how is sort of a different question.
• 13:35
  And one of the questions you asked in your survey was, if these, if this group of B2B buyers trusts in-house reports versus third-party providers, meaning like if the, that company hires a third party to just do it all for them.
• 13:49
  You found that about half trust, have equal trust in whether it's a third party or the brand, but actually about a third trusted the brand-conducted research more, which I found to be surprising because it's like you would expect that the brand would want to influence you in some way.
• 14:05
  Maybe the third party is unbiased. Did that catch your attention, or do you have any thoughts on why people responded that way? Yeah.
• 14:13
  I was actually really surprised by the finding, and, and I'll be honest that I put that in there because that was a myth that I felt was in the industry, and I personally wanted to see if I could bust it because it was my own hunch.
• 14:26
  I am a big believer that brands should own their research, and they shouldn't need to kinda label it under third party, because I've seen a lot of success.
• 14:36
  You think about Salesforce, they own their research, and I think it's one of the reasons they're a well-known brand, and people look for their annual data marketing or other kind of research content.
• 14:46
  That's just one example. So what I was really s- one, I didn't know for sure if that would be true, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that, you know, there was this equal, like, it doesn't really matter.
• 14:56
  We understand, you know, who's doing it. But I was really surprised to see that they did trust when it wasn't equal, that they actually trusted brands more, and by that much more.
• 15:07
  And I did ask an open-ended follow-up question to that if they selected that as to why, because I wanted to know if they did, why.
• 15:13
  And it really came back to a lot of them felt that the brand's reputation was on the line, whereas if they paid a third party to conduct this research, then the third party actually was more likely to be biased to the brand's directive than the brand doing it would need to uphold their reputation and produce credible research.
• 15:33
  So that was one of the- That is so interesting... um, responses that came out of that open-ended why question fairly often.
• 15:39
  And they just felt that the brands knew the industry or the customers they were surveying better than a third party could, which does make sense, but it was interesting to me.
• 15:49
  And I think what this tells you is, you know, I think there's this also this, you know, kind of one of the reasons brands don't invest in this kind of original research is cost, right?
• 15:57
  I think you and I have talked about this, and the idea that, you know, if you do have to go with a big name, third party, academic institution or consultancy, it's gonna cost you 100K or more probably.
• 16:09
  And that's a budget that a lot of people don't have.
• 16:12
  So when I say brand own and do it in-house, I don't necessarily s- mean you have to do it by yourself because there is a lot of expertise that goes into getting it right. Yes, yeah.
• 16:20
  But what it means is you can do it with a consultancy or a partner of some sort that has the expertise, but you brand it under your brand, you own the data, and, you know, when you send out the research, it doesn't have to have somebody else's name on it.
• 16:36
  It can if you want, but it doesn't have to. You can just own it the same way Salesforce owns, owns theirs. Yeah. That's so interesting. You know, I wonder, [chuckles] I wonder if consumers are sensitive to third-party
• 16:48
  surveys.
• 16:49
  'Cause like every now and then you hear something like, how long have people said, like, "A glass of wine every day is good for you," and then you find out like 20 years later that like, you know, actually it's not.
• 17:00
  You know what I mean? But, like, this company was paid a boatload of money by Budweiser or something [chuckles] to say that.
• 17:06
  But it's very interesting to me that the folks that you surveyed are, like, really tuned into that, and that I wouldn't have expected that they would assume that the brand's reputation is on the line, therefore they're more trustworthy.
• 17:16
  I think it's really cool. On the execution side, maybe we can talk about that for a minute. Let's say a company's like, "Okay, we've never done this before. We've never really put out original research.
• 17:25
  We've mostly been doing SEO and case studies and stuff like that." How would you steer them off in the right direction? Like, what are the things that you absolutely must know to put together quality original research?
• 17:37
  Yeah. I think the first thing is you gotta come up with a topic that is interesting and is unique. So you gotta do your research just like anything.
• 17:46
  You don't wanna, you know, there's 100 state of marketing, you know [chuckles] um, reports out there, or state of IT or whatever.
• 17:53
  You need to find something that is in your space, but that is maybe a narrower niche topic, but that would be real interest to your target audience. And you need to know what your goals are. Is it PR? Is it lead gen?
• 18:04
  Is it, you know, SEO and backlinks? Like, it can be all of the above, but you need to kinda have a primary goal. So if it's PR, then you need to be surfacing a topic that's really gonna be relevant to media.
• 18:14
  If lead gen is the primary goal, then you need to be surfacing a topic that's really relevant to your target audience that you want to download the report. So that's the first piece of it.
• 18:24
  And then the second piece is, there is a lot that goes into, like-One of the biggest kind of common errors I see is this idea that I can just whip up a survey and that that's easy to do, and actually getting a survey written in a way that's gonna produce both quality data, 'cause I would hope that all brands actually want, if you're gonna invest the time and money in this, that you actually want what you feel are real believable responses.
• 18:49
  So to get quality data, to write the survey in a way that actually makes interesting content headlines, 'cause we're talking about content production here, we're not talking about market research.
• 18:58
  So we care that we can turn it around like you don't want, you know, I've seen a lot of times where I've seen these surveys come out, and they asked all these on a scale of one to five questions.
• 19:07
  Well, how interesting is the headline that says, [chuckles] you know, 90% of people said five? [laughs] You know? Yeah, right.
• 19:15
  It just doesn't-- Like you gotta write it and, and also you lose the opportunity to dig deeper into the thoughts when you write those kind of questions. So- Yeah... there's just so many levels.
• 19:23
  So I would say the survey is critical, and if you don't have that expertise in-house, get help at least at that step, if nowhere else. Yeah, yeah.
• 19:31
  So there is a whole process, and you gotta like program the survey, and your testing is important in that process, and the, the data analysis is important, and, and you can go deeper than just your 20 or 30 questions if you know how to do that analysis right, and get a lot of what I call hidden stories in the data.
• 19:48
  Like in this report, I pulled out, as you saw, like C-suite often had a different, like they leaned harder into certain things than- Right... other titles.
• 19:56
  So that's one way to kind of pull out some of those interesting nuggets.
• 19:58
  So what I would say is if you have the in-house expertise, great。 If you don't, like maybe even it's just your first project, you work with somebody and kinda get that handholding through it, or maybe it's something that you do outsource that piece, too.
• 20:12
  But it, like I said, you can still find smaller, less expensive kind of freelancers, consultants, agencies than having to go with a big, you know, third party
• 20:23
  consultancy because as we just found out, it doesn't matter that much. [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. I-- You know, we've done our annual salary report for five or six years now, and I remember [chuckles]
• 20:34
  the, the first year was so rinky-dink. It was very small. The next year I took it more seriously, and we had a lot of people respond, and I remember going to analyze the data and realizing how bad the survey was.
• 20:46
  You know, it's like you get to a stage and you're like, "Oh, crap." Like this question, like I have such incomplete data, or I phrased it wrong, or the, you know, I did multiple choice and I should've done something.
• 20:56
  I like-- And it was so frustrating to write it knowing that like your chance to collect the data was gone, and- Right... you had to work with what you got and then wait till next year, I guess [chuckles] to fix it.
• 21:06
  And I'm always surprised every year we do that, how hard it is to do it right, you know?
• 21:11
  It's so interesting, like I never really thought of this as the science that it actually is, but like having done this, not on like a massive scale, but we get 500 or so people responding each year.
• 21:20
  There's a lot, there's a lot that goes into making it even just okay, let alone great, which is what I hope it is, you know? Right.
• 21:28
  When people create and publish original research, do you feel strongly that it should be either gated or open? I do not have super strong opinions on that because I think that goes back to your goals.
• 21:42
  And I do think as this report actually showed that B2B buyers said they were essentially two times as likely to provide their personal data to access content that includes original research as any other kind of content.
• 21:57
  Yeah. That's interesting. And only 4% said they wouldn't share their data no matter what. So most people are willing to share their data, but what they'll share it for is different.
• 22:05
  So, and I do feel that this kind of research, it is a heavier lift in terms of the whole creation of it, the cost of it, the effort.
• 22:14
  So if lead gen and getting emails and contact information is part of your goals here, I think that it is justified to gate it.
• 22:23
  If you're more interested in just getting brand awareness and PR and those are your goals, or SEO, like original research actually performs really well in SEO in terms of generating backlinks, which then boosts your SEO ranking.
• 22:36
  So if that's your goal, then maybe you just wanna publish the whole thing in an HTML format on your blog and drive traffic that way.
• 22:43
  So it really depends on your goals, but I do think that in the right instances, it is valid to use it as a gated piece of content.
• 22:51
  I would say it's actually, in my opinion, the only [chuckles] kind of content that is worth or justifies gating. Yeah, yeah.
• 22:58
  Very interesting。 We've never-- I mean, the salary report is maybe a, a little bit different because it's kind of like a community effort, but we've never gated it, and the reason I haven't is because we get so many backlinks from it.
• 23:11
  [chuckles] You know, it's like every content writer knows they should cite data, but they probably don't have their own, so they Google it, and hopefully they find our thing and then link to that, which is great for sort of like downstream, you know, building domain authority and things like that.
• 23:25
  But again, it's sort of like a different beast doing it for the community versus if you're a SaaS company.
• 23:30
  Like, you know, you get those email addresses, they're going into your email flows, like, you know, you're pushing them closer to the product and potentially closer to becoming a customer a lot faster than waiting for your DA to rise a year later so you can get more search traffic.
• 23:44
  It's just like a much more direct path.
• 23:46
  Yeah, and I think there's also an opportunity to do kind of a little of both, like gate for a very short period of time, like right up front when the, there's kind of the most kind of excitement and energy and kind of attention on your piece, and at least grab some of that kind of- Yeah.
• 24:01
  I love that... gated traffic. But then, you know, pretty quickly, maybe just a couple months out, put it on your blog post, open it up, ungate it, and start driving that SEO traffic. Yeah, I love that.
• 24:13
  How about product data? I mean, I'm just sort of thinking about there's a few ways to get good original data to work with. One would be run the survey. Another's like interviews.
• 24:23
  Another I, I think would be product data, like Wistia comes to mind. Like they recently-- we had their head of content, Sam Balter, onA month or two ago to talk about their state of video report.
• 24:32
  It's pretty cool because, you know, they have like millions and millions of video plays to analyze, and they can tell you exactly when people drop off.
• 24:41
  You know, the video should be X minutes long based on million views or whatever, you know? Is that a totally different beast? Or do you think there's room for both?
• 24:50
  There's definitely room for both, and I definitely encourage you, if you're a brand that has kind of an internal data set that you can share like that, and I have clients that I work with on this, the biggest issue I've seen when we go to, to do this, and I have a data analyst on staff that, you know, kind of helps [chuckles]
• 25:06
  is a lot of times brands exporting that data out of their tool, and then one, sometimes it's hard to know if there's really a story there with the data. You just don't know. Right.
• 25:17
  But you do have to spend the time and investment to first export it, analyze it, and see what's there. And then if there's a good story, then you can move forward.
• 25:26
  But there's been a couple of times where we've exported the data, and either it's just been too hard to, like, really get it in a format. Like there's just too many inconsistencies in the way they collect their data.
• 25:36
  Or you analyze and you're like, "Ah, there's not really, you know, a big story here. Like, we do have these analytics, but there's not like big pattern changes that we can really call out. We're not seeing..." You know.
• 25:49
  So that can happen, but I definitely think it's at least worth considering if you have that. And the other opportunity is you can take third-party data and create original research out of that.
• 26:00
  Like Andy Crestodina has done this.
• 26:03
  Like he's done things where he like analyzes 100 websites or, you know, out there and looks at kind of like where the CTAs are, where certain things are on it, and then like how do those drive traffic, you know?
• 26:15
  That's cool. So there are ways you can also take other people's kind of data.
• 26:19
  I put that in quotes 'cause it's not quite data what you're going to look at, but you're still presenting your own unique analysis of something happening out in the world, and you've spotted trends or patterns based on doing that analysis of looking at something, you know, 100 times or 500 times and seeing where there's differences or not.
• 26:38
  Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, shoot, one of our customers a year ago or so did a article about how to become a chief product officer, and they scraped a bunch of LinkedIn profiles and then found things.
• 26:49
  I mean, it was like relatively simple to like- Right... how, like what percentage have an MBA? How many years between their first product job and when they became a CPO and stuff like that.
• 26:58
  So relatively low lift compared to like running a survey or something, but- Yeah, but if you think about it from context- I feel like there's like a spirit to it...
• 27:04
  it's still, it's still more interesting to kind of know, like instead of just reading an article that tells you, "Oh, you should, you know, have this many years of experience." Or do this. Yeah.
• 27:11
  Do you feel better if you say like, "And we looked at 100 LinkedIn profiles for this job, and they, you know, 87% had at least five or more years experience."
• 27:19
  That tells me something different than somebody just writing, "You should have five or more years experience." Yeah. Yeah. You know, before I forget, there was one other thing that I flagged.
• 27:26
  Well, there was a lot of interesting stuff in this report, but one other thing that I flagged that I thought was very interesting was you asked some questions about AI and how this group of buyers felt about it, and they were surprisingly open to it, from my perspective.
• 27:38
  I just sort of thought it was interesting that the-- basically the question you asked was like, "Do you like AI content?" And they mostly said, "Yeah." [chuckles] I mean, what did you think about that? Yeah.
• 27:49
  I was really [chuckles] so this is one where it wasn't like, you know, you have a hypothesis. I thought they would say no, and I thought, "You know, I can go out and say like, 'Yeah, you need to...
• 27:58
  You know, this is why you need to still use real humans.'" But it was over 60% that said, "Yeah, you know, I generally like AI-generated content. I don't have a problem with it."
• 28:08
  And that said, you know, doesn't impact my trust of a brand when I know they've used AI-generated content.
• 28:15
  You know, this is one of the things with any survey where afterwards you get the data and you're like, "Wow, this is so interesting. I wish I had like five follow-up questions- Yeah. Yeah...
• 28:22
  so I could understand better 'cause I'm really surprised here." So then you're like, for the next survey, [chuckles] I'll be asking- Yeah... all these questions.
• 28:29
  But I think, you know, what it-- like if I were to hypothesize, obviously I don't know 'cause I didn't ask the follow-up why they felt that way, I think that it just comes down to, you know, they do want quality.
• 28:41
  I don't think they're saying they want to read crappy AI-generated content. What I think they're saying is they don't care about the process. What they care about is the outcome.
• 28:48
  I mean, they said over and over they want interesting, kind of original, unique content, content that stood out to them.
• 28:54
  A lot of times they said, you know, "It solved a problem that I had that I had with a unique solution that I hadn't thought of, or it had really interesting data about my peers.
• 29:03
  I asked a question around that, and I asked an open-ended question of like, you know, first, what, have you had content that stood out, and then why?"
• 29:09
  And so those were kind of the responses, and it was still based around, you know, getting some kind of insight that really was valuable and interesting to them. Yeah.
• 29:19
  And so I think what they're saying in this question is just that the process doesn't matter, the outcome matters. Yeah.
• 29:28
  I find that to be really interesting, you know, and, and very specifically in the context of original research. You know, you can imagine like you run the survey, you have this original data to work with.
• 29:37
  Like if AI is helping you, like turn it into content that you publish, that's great. You know what I mean?
• 29:42
  I feel like the fear people have of AI content is that it's just fabricating junk that looks like content, but if it's based on something that you know and trust, then it's for efficiency more than anything else.
• 29:54
  You don't have to answer this if you don't want to. Did you use AI editing this part? [chuckles] I use AI- Creation of this report...
• 30:00
  I mean, as a, as a content creator, AI is here to stay, and it's a tool just like any other tool, and if you're using it appropriately, it can help you. It can speed processes. It can, you know...
• 30:10
  So I did use it even in writing this report. Like, you know, oh, give me, you know, 10 headlines that create, and then I can pick through those and I'd be like, "Oh, I really like this adjective that- Yeah...
• 30:21
  I hadn't thought of this adjective. I'm gonna take this and this piece and I'm gonna piece it together."
• 30:25
  So there's always a human element going into it, but I have started really using AI a lot of times, and especially even if I'm just kind of stuck on that blank page, like get me going and then I will, you know.
• 30:37
  But I think you have to come at it with, I have the expertise to know what quality content looks like, so I'm not gonna just take it and paste it and move on without evaluating whether or not what it produced was quality.
• 30:48
  Yeah, totally. Totally. Last summer I was a officiant at a wedding, and, uh, I'm not gonna tell my friends this, but I used ChatGPT to, to get me started 'cause like you have to write an entire wedding ceremony.
• 31:00
  You gotta make sure everything's included, the structure has to be right. That was hard, and ChatGPT did that for me in like five seconds, [chuckles] uh, which was awesome. Okay, cool.
• 31:08
  I would really encourage people to go look at the report. I mean, these are like, these are B2B buyers telling you that they want original research, so you should give it to them.
• 31:17
  Uh, also, Becky, you can help provide that, right? Like that's what you do through Redpoint. Yes. Yes. I do. So- And, um, love to help anybody who is interested and wants to get started in that realm. Okay, amazing.
• 31:30
  We'll have the links in the show notes to the report itself, so go check that out, to your website, Redpoint Content. To LinkedIn, is that the best place to send folks- Mm-hmm... to connect with you personally? Cool.
• 31:40
  Amazing. Seriously, thank you so much. Like, I really, as I said at the beginning, like original research is having a moment. It's overdue.
• 31:46
  This to me is like if you have skepticism or uncertainty about what you should be doing with content, this is just like the most obvious path, right?
• 31:54
  Get the original research and then let it fuel the rest of your content. So anyways, thank you so much for the time. It's great to chat.
• 32:02
  And if you're listening to this the day or after, the day after it comes out, we're doing an AMA with you in the Slack group. So look for the email and the announcement about that in the Slack group too. So- Thanks, Jim.
• 32:13
  It was great to talk... it was long after. Yeah. [chuckles] Great to talk, Becky. Take care. [outro music]