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Welcome to Volume 171 👋
Happy Thursday!
In this week’s newsletter, we cover:
- 🤖 Emotion and AI: How emotionally relevant language impacts LLM
- 📢 Introducing Foundation’s AI marketing console
- 📊 The state of AI in marketing — survey results from over 350 marketers
- 👀 What’s the latest in B2B SaaS this week?
- 🧠 This week’s brain food
- ➕ The best content across the web
Let’s get into it.
📩The Ultimate Guide to Content Distribution 📩
If you’ve followed Foundation long enough, you know there’s one thing we always preach:
D.R.E.A.M. — Distribution Rules Everything Around Me
It’s easy to forget about the critical role distribution plays in connecting your target audience to your content — from sales posts on LinkedIn to community hubs like Reddit and Quora. That’s why we’re bringing back this gem from Ross.
In this comprehensive guide, you’ll learn how to do the following:
- Master the art of leveraging Owned, Earned, and Paid Channels for maximum reach.
- Discover strategies to stand out in the content overload and effectively connect with your target audience.
- Gain actionable insights on choosing the right distribution channels to boost brand awareness and drive conversions.
Check out Ross’s Ultimate Guide to Content Distribution, and transform your content to engage your audience and grow your business!
B2B SAAS NEWS
Emotion and AI: How emotionally relevant language impacts LLM
The inner workings of the human mind have always fascinated me. So you can imagine my excitement when I first stumbled across a fascinating study at the intersection of psychology and AI: Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli.
Microsofts Jindong Wang and a group of international researchers made an attempt to explore the impact that emotion has on AI performance. Well, it turns out that incorporating emotional language into prompts significantly enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. You read that right — tagging a simple “You can do this” or “I believe in you” to your prompts can improve the perceived quality and even truthfulness of responses.
All it takes is a little modification with what the researchers call EmotionPrompts (EPs).
I recently did a little breakdown of this study and its implications to explore how marketers and creatives can create emotionally charged prompts to try and improve AI outputs. Here’s what I cover in the piece:
- The heightened importance of prompt engineering skills as communicating with generative AIs becomes more and more common across platforms
- How interest in applying algorithms to create human emotion has increased over the past few decades
- The psychological theory researchers applied to test the extent that AI understands and is influenced by human emotions
- The astonishing find that EPs boost the quality, truthfulness, and responsibility of AI outputs by an average of 11%
Introducing Foundation’s AI marketing console
A few years ago, if someone said that mastering a single SaaS tool could save you 500+ work hours every year, make you a better creator, and increase your chances of landing a leadership position, you’d probably laugh them out of the room. Well, no one’s laughing now.
Generative AI is projected to add billions of dollars to the marketing industry in productivity savings alone, and the vast majority of professionals in our industry are incorporating AI this year.
Like all emerging technologies, there’s a huge advantage to moving quickly. Experimentation and research are key to building the skills you need to stay ahead. Unfortunately, these are also time-intensive processes.
That’s why we’re excited to announce the release of the AI Marketing Console.
With the AI Marketing Console, you get an arsenal of 130+ battle-tested ChatGPT prompts to help you create everything from landing pages and email drip campaigns to reports and customer research.
Plus, you’ll get exclusive access to the following:
- A visual AI toolkit with 20+ video walkthroughs
- Two keynote presentations on the state of AI in marketing
- An AI content evaluation checklist to level up your outputs
Get full access to the AI Marketing Console, and start building your AI skills now!
If you want more information on why we’ve created this offering, check out this video from Ross!
B2B SAAS INSIGHTS
The state of AI in marketing: Unveiling the survey results
In case you missed it in last week’s edition, the results from our State of AI in Marketing Survey just dropped.
We all know that the arrival of AI, epitomized by generative tools like ChatGPT, has sent ripples through the marketing industry. It’s a signal of a larger transformation that is equal parts thrilling and daunting: AI is projected to add a whopping $500 billion to global marketing, but it will undoubtedly replace human jobs.
With so much speculation and projection about these impacts, it’s time to get the real scoop. So we sent out a survey asking over 350 marketers how they use AI in the workplace, the biggest risks and benefits of AI, and how they use it in their organizations.
Here’s a sneak peek at the results.
A staggering 85% of our respondents integrate AI into their daily grind. Content creation is one of the top uses for 87% of AI use. The trend is clear — from SMEs to large corporations, the race to master AI before competitors is on.
But content creation isn’t the only use case where AI is gaining traction.
Keyword research, social media management, email marketing, and even AI-assisted note-taking are all areas where marketers are using AI. Other implementations, like transcribing and summarizing video meetings with tools like Avoma, are still catching up. It’s still early days for AI in the enterprise, so it will be interesting to see how these use cases evolve over time.
Our State of AI in Marketing report is full of insights to help you inform your AI approach in 2024 and beyond. Here’s a quick look at some of the other major findings:
- ChatGPT is the undisputed leader in AI tools, but Canva, Grammarly, DALL-E, and others are on the rise as well.
- Over 60% of marketers believe AI-written content is worse than human-written content…
- … but over 90% believe AI will have a net positive impact on content creation overall.
- Only a small portion are concerned about Visual AI…
- … but nearly 80% are worried about the impact of DeepFake video AI.
- Almost 60% of marketers report that their company leadership wants to see more AI usage.
Despite concerns about the replacement of specific marketing roles or the impact of AI on misinformation spread, it seems that the marketing industry is cautiously optimistic about the future.
Get a better understanding of AI’s influence on the marketing industry by reading the full report!
👀 What’s the latest in B2B SaaS this week? 👀
- Open AI introduces new ChatGPT Team tier that lets people collaborate securely through the generative AI tool
- 77% of CEOs are concerned about AI cybersecurity risks according to the PwC Survey
- Carta’s days as the “trusted platform for startups” might be over
- OpenAI launches its new GPT Store that lets users search and share customized AIs
- Yahoo’s ID testing lets advertisers compare campaigns without cookies
🎧 Learn how to create like the greats 🎧
Looking to build your company’s content marketing and distribution engine? Interested in learning how leading brands like Loom, Toast, and Calm create winning content? Or just want to hear conversations with the likes of Tamara Dworetz, Dave Gerhardt, and Dr. Julie Gurner?
We have got the podcast for you.
In Create Like the Greats, Foundation CEO — Ross Simmonds — discusses marketing, the creative process, life, and everything in between. Here are some of the most recent episodes you can catch up on:
- How to prepare for a big keynote presentation
- Debating the value of long-form vs. short-form content
- How Ross successfully maximized his time on a 48-hour trip to New York
- Marketing frameworks, mental models, AARRR pirate metrics, and B2B buyer journeys
Kickstart your creative journey today and check out the podcast on the Foundation website or listen through Apple and Spotify!
🧠 This week’s brain food 🧠
After taking some time to explore the EmotionPrompt study, I have a renewed appreciation for emotional intelligence (EQ). Human emotion is so powerful that it can positively impact the way LLMs arrange text, and it seems like a wise move to get reacquainted with our softer side.
Why? Because EQ is a vastly underrated asset in both professional and personal settings.
In the world of work, particularly in fields steeped in logic, analytics, and numbers, EQ often takes a backseat. Yet, it’s this very human attribute that helps us navigate complex relationships, build meaningful connections, and drive empathetic decision-making.
EQ is equally important in our personal settings or situations. It helps us progress in our relationships with family, friends, and loved ones. If you’ve ever decided to show compassion to mend a bridge or give some “tough love” to drive change, it’s emotional intelligence that’s gotten you there.
Our ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions — in ourselves and others — often determines the depth and quality of our interactions. Based on the EmotionPrompt study, it looks like that dynamic is transferring to the realm of human-AI interactions as well. Do with that information what you will.
Want to sponsor our next issue? Reply to this email, and we’ll share how you can reach more SaaS founders and marketers today.
🏅Twitter/X thread of the week
Marketing is an INVESTMENT by David Gerhardt
🎖️ LinkedIn post of the week
Solo Stove, Snoop Dog, and the danger of awareness and engagement metrics by Andrew Tindal
🤳🏽 Nice finds you should binge
- OpenAI reveals how many ChatGPT for Enterprise customers it has (so far…) | VentureBeat
- The Untold Story Behind Nvidia’s Earnings: Full-Stack AI Dominance | Forbes
- Get Ready for the Great AI Disappointment | WIRED
- OpenAI-backed 1X raises another $100M for the race to humanoid robots | TechCrunch
🎧 What we’re wired into this week:
Ethiopian Jazz [Through the Years] by The Grey Area
(Thanks to Enzo Carletti for the recommendation)
This SaaS news smattering is brought to you by Ethan Crump!
If you have any feedback, suggestions, or ideas you want to see in this newsletter, feel free to email me at ethan@foundationinc.co. We always look for ways to improve and provide the best B2B SaaS marketing resources.
Have a great weekend, and see you on the other side!
