AI can do more than write copy… (Exit Five Newsletter)

Hello and welcome to the Exit Five Weekly Newsletter — read by 42,000 B2B marketing professionals around the world. Exit Five is a membership site designed to help you build a successful career in B2B marketing. Join 5,700 other members at exitfive.com.

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TOGETHER WITH AIROPS

🔍AI & Search: How to be visible in the new battleground between Google & ChatGPT

All marketers are talking about how AI is changing search right now. You’ve seen it yourself—buyers don’t just “Google it” anymore. They ask ChatGPT.

And with 6.8 billion visits in the US alone, ChatGPT is now a major player in search.

That shift has serious implications for your SEO strategy, your content, and your pipeline.

So what should you actually be doing about it?

Kevin Indig (ex-Shopify, G2, Atlassian) is teaming up with the AirOps team to break it down for you in a live session on:

• Why ChatGPT isn’t cannibalizing Google (but expanding the search frontier)
• How user behavior and conversion rates differ between platforms
• The new KPIs that matter in AI-driven search
• How to structure your content to show up in both Google and ChatGPT
• Tactics to win high-intent traffic

It’s happening live on Thursday, Sept 18 at 2 PM ET but the recording will be sent to all who register. Grab your spot now.

Bonus for Exit Five readers

AirOps is also giving access to their Visibility → Actions Dashboard to 10 companies reading this newsletter. This tool shows not just how you rank, but the prioritized actions you can take to fix it. If you want in, apply here and mention Exit Five.

✍️ Here’s How You Can Use AI To Build An Actual Content Engine

There's so much buzz around using AI for content right now. But it goes way beyond just using AI to write your content. There's a smarter play: building actual systems for research, distribution, lead qualification, and revenue attribution.

While most teams are stuck using AI as a bad copywriter, the smart ones are automating entire workflows — from analyzing customer interviews to tracking which LinkedIn engagers are ready to buy.

Ugi Djuric, founder of ContentMonk, has built these exact workflows that took his agency from manual grunt work to serving 40+ B2B software companies. And he walked us through the complete system: the tools, the workflows, everything you need to build them yourself.

Here's what we learned…

The Ultimate AI Content System

Here's the high-level view of what a proper AI content system looks like:

Phase 1: Research and Strategy

• AI-powered ICP analysis from customer interviews
• Competitive content gap analysis
• Positioning and narrative development

Phase 2: Content Creation

• Automated brief generation
• AI-assisted writing with style guides
• Quality control checkpoints

Phase 3: Distribution and Repurposing

• Multi-channel content adaptation
• Social media automation
• Lead capture and nurturing

Phase 4: Revenue Attribution

• Engagement signal tracking
• Lead qualification workflows
• Sales handoff systems

Let's break down each phase with the actual tools and workflows.

Phase 1: AI-Powered ICP Research

Most teams skip this step or do it manually. Big mistake. When you do it right, this will replace 40–50 hours of manual analysis:

The System:

1. Paste customer interview transcripts into a Google Sheet
2. AI analyzes transcripts for common patterns, triggers, problems, and desired solutions
3. Automatically populates an ICP research matrix
4. Generates a unified customer persona document

The Tools:

• n8n for workflow automation
• Google Sheets for data input
• OpenAI API for analysis
• Custom prompts for pattern recognition

The Result: Instead of spending weeks manually highlighting transcripts and finding patterns, you get a comprehensive ICP analysis in under an hour.

Phase 2: The Content Creation Engine

This is where things get interesting. Here's the complete workflow from idea to published article:

Step 1: Content Brief Generation

• Add your article idea with unique insights to Notion
• AI researches top-ranking competitive articles
• System identifies content gaps and opportunities
• Generates comprehensive brief consulting your style guides and knowledge base

Step 2: Automated Writing Process

• AI writes article following your brand guidelines
• Consults SEO optimization rules
• Creates Google Doc with formatted content
• Flags for human review and editing

Step 3: Quality Control

The system requires two manual touchpoints:

• Initial brief review and approval (15 minutes)
• Final editing and personalization (30–60 minutes)

That's it. Everything else is automated.

The Tools in Action:

Using n8n, the workflow looks like this:

• Notion trigger detects new content requests
• Google search API finds competitive articles
• AI analyzes gaps and opportunities
• Content generation following your style guides
• Google Docs creation for review
• Notion dashboard updates with status

Phase 3: Distribution and Repurposing

Here's where most teams drop the ball. They create one piece of content and call it done.

The Smart Approach:

Every long-form article becomes:

• 5–8 LinkedIn posts adapted for specific team members
• Twitter threads
• Email newsletter content
• Sales enablement materials

The AI Repurposing System:

• Custom AI assistants trained on each team member's writing style
• Automated social media content generation
• Style-specific adaptation (what works on LinkedIn vs Twitter)
• Direct integration with content calendar

Pro Tip: Create separate AI assistants for each person in your company who publishes content. Train them on that person's best posts, speaking transcripts, and writing style. The output quality is significantly better than generic AI writing.

Phase 4: The Revenue Connection

This is the part that separates amateur content operations from professional ones.

The Engagement Signal System:

Using tools like Phantom Buster and n8n:

• Monitor LinkedIn posts for engagement
• Scrape profiles of people who engage 3+ times
• Run AI-powered ICP filtering
• Automatically add qualified leads to sales pipeline

The Logic: If someone is engaging with your content multiple times and fits your ICP, they're showing buying intent. Don't wait months for them to convert organically. Reach out now.

The Follow-up Automation: For highly qualified leads, you can automate:

• Company research
• Personal LinkedIn analysis
• Problem identification
• Personalized email sequences

Important: Some people prefer to do manual outreach. The system can simply flag qualified leads for human follow-up instead of full automation.

The Content Management Dashboard

Everything lives in one central Notion dashboard with:

• Content calendar with clear CTAs for each piece
• Social media calendar for all team members
• Keyword research and tracking
• Lead pipeline from content engagement
• Performance analytics

The Key Insight: Every piece of content should have a specific goal. Not “brand awareness” – but “download this lead magnet” or “book a demo.” Plan the conversion strategy before you write the content.

The Technical Setup

Primary Tools:

• n8n for workflow automation (free up to 2,500 executions/month)
• OpenAI API for AI processing ($20–50/month for most teams)
• Notion for content management
• Google Workspace for collaboration

Cost Reality: The tools are cheap. A typical setup costs under $100/month. The real investment is in setup time and prompt engineering.

Getting Started

Don’t try to build everything at once. Start with the most time-consuming manual tasks:

1. ICP research automation
2. Content brief generation
3. Basic repurposing workflows

What You Need To Get Started

Here are all the docs you need before building any automation:

• ICP research matrix template
• Content brief writing guidelines
• Style guides for each team member
• Brand narrative and positioning docs
• Content calendar with CTA strategy

What Not to Automate

Some things should stay human:

• Strategic content direction and unique insights
• Final quality control and editing
• Relationship building and sales conversations
• Creative strategy and brand voice development

The AI handles the grunt work. Humans handle the strategy and relationships.

The Reality Check

This isn't a "set it and forget it" solution. These systems require:

• Initial setup time (weeks, not hours)
• Ongoing prompt refinement
• Regular quality monitoring
• Process optimization

But the payoff is significant: content operations that scale without adding headcount, better quality output, and direct revenue attribution.

Your Next Steps

1. Audit your current process: Where are you spending the most manual time?
2. Start with foundations: Get your ICP research and brand positioning locked down
3. Pick one workflow: Choose the biggest time-waster and automate that first
4. Test and refine: Expect to spend time tweaking prompts and processes
5. Scale gradually: Add more automation as you prove what works

The bottom line? While your competitors are still manually creating content and hoping for results, you can build a system that consistently produces better content, distributes it strategically, and directly tracks revenue impact.

The tools exist. The frameworks work. The question is: will you build the system, or keep doing things the hard way?

- Dave

PS. We just wrapped up our annual event, Drive, last week. And I’m still buzzing. I put up some early pictures on LinkedIn if you want to see; still trying to get my voice back. Hope you can join us for our next in-person event – we’re coming to NYC in October if you’re in town...

📺 UPCOMING EVENTS

[SEPTEMBER 23RD] Marketing in the Age of AI: CMOs Separating the Hype from What’s Real (Live Discussion)

AI is everywhere in marketing right now. Every tool, every vendor, every headline promises to change the game. But what’s actually working—and what’s just noise?

We wanted to do something different and tapped a group of CMOs to sit down and share what’s actually going on inside of their marketing teams with AI. Have they fired the whole team yet and just used AI agents? Is ChatGPT writing all of their content? Are things running autonomously 24/7? What are some real examples and ways they are using AI as a B2B marketing team?

Dave is hosting Jennifer Delevante-Moulen (CMO, Knak) and Tara Robertson (CMO, Bitly) to have an honest discussion about how to survive the AI hype cycle in marketing (and hopefully leave you with a few real examples of what their orgs are actually doing right now)

They’ll cover:

• Where AI actually accelerates campaign execution
• The creative work that still needs a human touch
• How CMOs should prepare their marketing playbooks for AI
• Plus they’ll be live to take all of your questions so we can do a bit of “marketing therapy” if you want to talk about your challenges right now too

Think of it as a practical guide to navigating AI in marketing without losing sight of what really matters.

Save Your Spot

🏢 Open Roles

Who's hiring right now?

Enumerate is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager to own positioning, messaging, and GTM strategy for their software and payments solutions. The ideal candidate is a strategic B2B SaaS marketer with a track record of shaping roadmaps, leading launches, and turning customer insights into revenue growth.

Other open roles on the Exit Five job board this week:

• Paramark is hiring a Marketing Manager
• Doist is hiring a Lifecycle Market
• Tatari, Inc. is hiring a Digital Marketing manager
• Red Stag Fulfillment is hiring a Director of Growth Operations
• Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations is hiring a Director of Marketing
• Offsite is hiring a Field Marketing and Partnerships Lead
• BrightHire is hiring a Social and Community Marketing Manager
• Opus is hiring a Senior Manager, B2B Product Marketing

See all open roles

Have an open role and want to make sure the best B2B marketing talent sees it? Just reply to this email and we'll send over more info on how you can post it on our job board + get it in front of 42k+ marketers.

🪪 NEW INSIDE THE EXIT FIVE COMMUNITY

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