Turing's Tofu #17

📰 This Week in AI & SaaS 📰

• Microsoft researchers have revealed a new, experimental AI model, called VASA-1 that can realistically mimic people's facial movements and expressions from a single image and audio clip. Read more. 

• Perplexity, the AI search engine start-up, is raising $250M (valuing the company at $2.5-3B) in its latest funding round, which follows two previous funding rounds this year, led by NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos. Read more. 

• Following the acquisition of DarwinAI, Apple has now acquired French start-up, Datakalab, which specializes in AI compression (anyone else getting the tv show Silicon Valley vibes) and computer vision technology and is expected to enhance Apple’s upcoming iOS features and Vision Pro projects. Read more.

Silicon Valley - Bachmanity Insanity [S03E06]

🌟Turing’s Top Picks 🌟

FEATURED TOOLS 

• Brandblast: Brandblast is an AI-powered platform that automates social media content creation, primarily for start-ups and small businesses. All you do is provide your website URL, and Brandblast will use AI to generate on-brand content. Try it. 

• Cresh.ME: Cresh.ME uses AI and community interaction to provide an in-depth evaluation of your business idea, validating it and encouraging you to refine it based on AI analysis and community feedback. Try it.  

• Feedbuck AI: Feedbuck AI integrates with your website and auto-generates a feedback widget which facilitates the rapid collection of user product feedback. Try it. 

Read of the Week: 

8 Top Takeaways from Lenny Rachitsky + Jason Lemkin on “Building a World-Class Sales Org”

If you’re starting to scale, or aspiring to scale, this is a must-read. Jason Lemkin (co-founder of SaaStr) and Lenny Rachitsky (major SaaS and software engineer influencer and educator) discuss their top tips for scaling a SaaS company. 

Read it.

💡 Marketing Moments with Mounier 💡

On my podcast "AI Unboxed," I had the pleasure of interviewing Hannah Recker, who leads Growth at Coefficient. Our conversation centered around "Scaling Content Marketing with AI." Here are some of the key learnings and insights from our discussion:

🌐 AI Integration in Marketing Hannah shared her experiences with integrating AI into Coefficient's marketing strategies. She detailed how AI tools have enhanced content creation and operational efficiencies, particularly in scriptwriting and sparking creativity for campaigns. This integration has allowed Coefficient to scale its marketing efforts without a proportional increase in resources, by streamlining processes and accelerating data-driven decisions.

🔄 Operational Efficiencies and Hands-on Learning Emphasizing the need for hands-on learning, Hannah advocates for actively engaging with AI technologies to stay ahead in the fast-evolving marketing landscape. This approach not only boosts operational efficiencies but also fosters a deeper understanding and adaptability among marketing professionals.

🚀 AI-driven Content Creation We delved into how Coefficient uses AI to generate SEO-driven content, especially around new software functionalities. This strategy leverages AI's ability to manage routine tasks, freeing up the team to tackle more complex challenges and innovate within their content strategies.

🔍 Ethical Considerations of AI The conversation also covered the ethical considerations of using AI in marketing. Hannah discussed the initial resistance within her team due to concerns about privacy and the potential misuse of AI. This led to significant reflections on the extent to which AI should be integrated into their processes, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR and maintaining a commitment to data privacy.

🤔 Further Insights on AI's Role in Marketing Looking forward, Hannah is optimistic about the potential of AI to personalize marketing at scale, akin to personalization engines used by Netflix and Spotify. This evolution in AI could revolutionize how businesses engage with customers, enhancing both satisfaction and engagement.

For those interested in exploring how AI can transform content marketing and navigate the associated challenges, I highly recommend watching the full episode. Hannah Recker’s insights provide valuable perspectives on harnessing AI's potential while thoughtfully considering its implications.

👇 Watch the full episode here 👇

👾 TOFU Quick Bytes: Blanc Labs Teardown 👾

Blanc Labs teardown

Founded in 2013, Blanc Labs develops, advises, and consults about financial and healthcare tech software and products for Horizontal companies. They embrace AI to solve the financial challenges and automation needs of the industry, enabling businesses to achieve maximum growth.  

Strategy overview: 

Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs generally focuses on large financial and healthcare enterprises and institutions across Toronto, New York, Bogota and the Buenos Aires regions.

Their target audience is clients who are actively looking to improve their operations and enhance their data management and analytics capabilities with advanced AI tech solutions like banking and regulatory compliance automation, or remote patient monitoring and patient data management systems.  

Performance Analysis:

• Their estimated annual revenue is $11.3M per year

• They grew their employee count by 53% last year

• 50% of their revenue comes from multi-billion dollar enterprises 

• They have previously, successfully raised funding over 2 rounds 

How have they achieved this? 

Critical Teardown:

What does Blanc Labs do well?

Content marketing: Blanc Labs creates insightful articles and whitepapers that address complicated topics such as business process improvement and the use of large language models in finance. 

Each piece of content they publish is easy to understand, despite the complexity of the subjects they cover. Not only does this give them credibility, showcase their experience and knowledge, and position them as thought leaders in their fields of tech, finance, and healthcare, but it also educates and adds value to their readers, who need to keep up with the latest in tech and AI. 

Strategic partnerships: Blanc Labs builds strategic partnerships with reputable and recognizable companies such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, Financial Data Exchange, and Open Banking provider, Axway. They even have ‘Partner for success’ as one of their core values. 

They do this to enhance their product and service offerings so they have a broader ecosystem that adds more value to their clients. However, partnering with reputable companies also helps them extend their marketing reach, reinforce their market position and build their brand value. 

Innovative marketing campaigns: Blanc Labs strategically hired their marketing manager–Shriya Ghate– because she had 10+ years of diverse marketing experience, spanning many different industries and has been able to come up with new, innovative marketing campaigns–including publishing interesting case studies, running free webinars, and creating insightful videos–designed to highlight their technical capabilities, drive strategic partnership opportunities, and continue to grow and develop relationships with key industry players. 

 What doesn’t Blanc Labs do well? 

Humanize/Personalization: Blanc Labs works with large enterprises in the financial and healthcare sectors. They have a dedicated space, on their website, that speaks to pain points, and have some case studies and client quotes, targeted at prospective companies. But the site feels clinical/cold. With such a heavy focus on partners they should incorporate human focused partner stories. Creating people focused customer spotlights and use cases can go a long way in building these relationships. They could also take parts of that content and incorporate it into the case studies.

Social media engagement: Blanc Labs doesn’t fully utilize its social media platforms. As you can see below, their last post on Facebook was over a year ago, and although they seem to post more on LinkedIn, it’s still been 3 weeks since they last posted: Minimal posting = minimal engagement. If they regularly posted their newest blog articles, upcoming events and webinars, product updates or success stories on channels like LinkedIn and Facebook, they could reach more people, build a community, drive more engagement, and push people across to their website. They are also missing out on the opportunity to leverage the knowledge their executive team and build more brand trust.

AI integration

Blanc Labs leverages AI to enhance its products and services, and some of its internal processes. Here’s how:

Regulatory compliance and reporting: Blanc Labs uses generative AI to help financial and healthcare institutions auto-generate complex reports and regulatory documents that need continuous updating according to ever-changing requirements and regulations. This reduces manual effort and streamlines reporting and document creation processes, making it quicker and easier to comply with regulatory standards​.

Information extraction and analysis: Blanc Labs also uses AI and ML to develop algorithms that extract, process, and analyze information from unstructured documents, enhancing data accessibility and improving decision-making processes​.

Internal day-to-day process automation: Blanc Labs uses AI to automate financial institutions' day-to-day processes, such as mortgage application processing, which improves the overall customer experience and also operational accuracy​.

Key takeaways: 

• Create easy-to-digest, insightful content around complex topics, to add value to prospective customers and position yourself as an industry leader. 

• Consider building strategic partnerships with well-respected brands to enhance your product/service offering and build your brand reputation. 

• Hire a marketing expert who has a diverse background and can, therefore, create outside-the-box campaigns that resonate with a wide variety of audiences, across multiple sectors. 

• Even when working with enterprise clients it is important to humanize your brand. Incorporating customer spotlights and use cases can go a long way in building stronger partnerships.

• Don’t neglect social media, even if you think your brand isn’t suited for it. LinkedIn is always a good idea for B2B SaaS businesses, especially. Use it to connect, drive people back to your website, and build engagement with the people that matter: your customers. 

• Use AI to automate day-to-day processes, and make regulatory reporting and information analysis quicker and easier. 

What campaign or content marketing strategy would you like to see torn apart, next? Let me know! 

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