Behind the Scenes of Anrok's AI-Powered Marketing Team

Ever wonder how marketing leaders are actually using AI in the real world? ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, capturing the imagination of millions. Sure, we've all dabbled in AI for our daily fix of productivity, but it's hard to know how the best marketing leaders are actually implementing it.

Enter Toolflow Connect and our AMA series with AI founders & operators. Today, we have Devon Watts in the hot seat, Head of Marketing at Anrok. Devon shared insights into how her team utilizes different AI tools and platforms for content creation, including chatbots, programmatic SEO, and generative AI for image and video creation. Let's dive in!

Anrok’s Marketing Team

Anrok is a Series A B2B SaaS company that specializes in automating sales tax compliance, servicing finance teams across the tech industry. They help businesses navigate the complex world of sales tax regulations. Devon leads a team of four marketers at Anrok, responsible for generating qualified pipeline for their sales team. 

1. Content and Creative: Responsible for all things related to words, pictures, and design. They create content including guides, interactive tools, ad creative, and videos.

2. Growth and Demand Gen: Focuses on numbers and manages email campaigns, paid campaigns (such as LinkedIn and Google ads), lead qualification, and hand-off to the sales team.

3. Product Marketing: Responsible for competitive messaging and differentiation. They focus on creating content for sales enablement, partner enablement, and go-to-market strategies.

4. Community and Events: Responsible for building relationships within online communities, organizing events, and coordinating third-party event sponsorships. They also work on executive relationships and nurture bigger customers.

Their marketing motion is primarily inbound-driven, with a strong emphasis on content promotion and paid search.They’ve begun to adopt AI across all four roles. 

Chatbots and AI Assistants

Devon’s team have played around with both ChatGPT and Claude. They both have their own pros and cons, but the main use-cases here are as a “brainstorm buddy”. Getting over the blank page problem and getting a zero to one. For example, they just launched a substack and brainstormed something witty that appeals to finance teams, Journal Entries was born. 

Devon sees chatbots as the king of first drafts. They may not nail your copy or brand voice, but they’re a pretty quick way to get something started. 

“It’s much easier to edit things and make them better than start from scratch."

Differences between Claude and ChatGPT

Out of the box, ChatGPT has a somewhat pompous and loquacious writing style. You can tone it down by giving clearer instructions like “write in a style that appeals to a reading age of 7”. For context, the IRS website is written for a reading age of 4 years old. If young reading ages help the IRS get people to pay taxes, then it’s a good start to help your audience read your content too! 

Downsides to Chatbots: Research and facts

ChatGPT, and other models like Claude, work by predicting what words should appear next. They are “probabilistic” models, not “deterministic’. Which means they’re guessing what their responses should be, and not actually scraping the web pulling factual information. 

This can be tricky when you’re trying to write content with factual references. It may hallucinate and write things that aren’t true. The inability to live crawl the web and pull resources makes research hard. 

Devon turns to Perplexity.ai which is a new-age search engine that answers questions by pulling real resources and summarizing content from them. For example, Devon would give thema  list of companies and summarize who funded them. You could perform similar searches for competitive research and it will pull positive and negative reviews from G2 crowd. 

Programmatic SEO: Creating Pages for Sales Tax Regulations

Programmatic SEO plays a crucial role in Anrok's marketing strategy. In essence, it’s where you create content for a large batch of long-tail keywords. Each keyword may not have significant search volume, but they tend to be easier to rank for and there are much more of them. By programmatically producing content for these keywords through blogs or landing pages you can start to scalp volume. In aggregate, it can be an impactful way to generate leads. 

“Zapier is an example of programmatic SEO. They wanted a landing page for each tool integration that you could have on Zapier, which is thousands”. 

In Anrok’s case, their audience needs to be kept up to date about the local and international sales tax rates, which can change yearly in a variety of locations. There are potentially hundreds of different geographies with different rates. Each geography could be a search term e.g. “France VAT rate”. By doing programmatic SEO Anrok could capture a lot of this traffic. 

However, the challenge is Google can penalize sites for duplicate content. If each page is effectively the same information with only a VAT rate changing from 5% to 6% then Google migh punish them in the rankings. Their goal was to create duplicate pages with slight variations in text to ensure the content was fresh and engaging. 

Anrok do this with a database of tax rates in Airtable, Whalesync to upload into Webflow CMS and AI tools like Copy.ai and Byword.ai to create distinct prose for each page. 

AI For Video Editing &  Image Generation

Anrok’s content goes beyond text-based formats. They also do video interviews, webinars, customer testimonials all leveraging audio or video recordings. 

They use AI tools like Descript to power video editing, creating transcripts, and even AI-powered voice dubbing. With a team of four people, design and editing is hard to do in house without these kinds of tools. 

Limitations for image generation

Devon’s team does all their design in-house, without a dedicated designer. They’ve got to grips with Figma, Adobe, and some other tools that do 80% of what they need to do. But they’ve yet to unlock AI’s power for image creation.

While there are some use-cases like creating images for blog posts, image generation models today aren’t super flexible. They’re hard to edit or iterate without generating a complete new image. Let’s say you want to change the color of a model's hair, but the rest of the image should stay the same. The models just can’t do that today. Unfortunately, this makes them hard to lean on for B2B marketing since you need much more control over your brand image. 

There is some promise on the horizon however. Sora is a new video generation model released by OpenAI. Videos are effectively multiple still images stitched together. If they can create a video while maintaining consistency in the imagery across states then it’s feasible to assume we’re close to having much greater control over image editing with AI. Once we cross this gap, it’s much more likely we’ll see image generation filter down to B2B marketing teams. 

Promising Use-Cases: Hyper-personalized marketing

Text-to-Voice, image, and video generation are far behind text only generation in terms of capabilities. But they’re improving rapidly. With images, voice, and video that can be created on the fly using variable inputs like “first name” or “company name” it’s going to be possible to create highly personalized marketing campaigns. 

In sales for example, people take a selfie holding a whiteboard with the name of the prospect they’re reaching out to. It’s an attention grabber and shows the prospect the salesperson has made an effort to personalize the outreach. This kind of tactic is hard to scale. But with AI and the increase in data we capture on prospects, it’s going to get easier and easier to produce hyper-personalized marketing campaigns that convert. 

Conclusion

AI has become an indispensable tool in the marketing industry, offering numerous benefits for content creation and other marketing workflows. By leveraging AI tools and platforms, marketers can streamline their processes, generate ideas, and create high-quality content more efficiently. However, it is important to strike a balance between AI-generated content and human creativity. AI should be used as a tool to aid and enhance human efforts, rather than replace them entirely.

As AI continues to evolve, marketers should stay informed about the latest advancements and explore how they can leverage AI in their own workflows. By embracing the power of AI, marketers can unlock new possibilities and drive marketing success in an increasingly digital world.

To learn more about Anrok and their innovative approach to sales tax compliance, visit their website at Anrok.com. You can also check out their new substack newsletter, "Journal Entries,"