When most people think about AI in marketing, they imagine using LLMs to generate a post and write social media copy. Indeed, these were the first SaaS use cases for LLMs that took off as early as 2021, with companies like Jasper and Copy launching content marketing tools powered by GPT-3. The limitations became obvious fairly quickly. One-off generated copy might be a personal time saver but is not engaging or differentiated.
Fast forward a couple years to the end of 2023 and most CMOs were concerned about battling an onslaught of mediocre content flooding the internet. LLMs were for content no one wanted to write, targeting an audience that didn’t want to read it. Is this really the AI revolution in marketing we were expecting?
When I met Alex Halliday, the CEO and co-founder of AirOps earlier this year, it was immediately clear that they had discovered something unique. Some of their customers had just started using AirOps’s no-code custom LLM application builder to ship ambitious content projects that had historically been too intimidating and costly to attempt. AirOps had built a tool for moonshot marketing.
Moonshot marketing projects have a long history in software and ecommerce as being the secret sauce behind scaling organic traffic. My favorite case study on this is Hubspot’s website grader. Launched in 2006, it generated over 4 million inbound leads for the company over five years. Unlike PR, paid media, and live events, a good SEO-optimized content project gives a business leverage, generating increasing amounts of traffic over time. The reason most marketers didn’t attempt these moonshot projects regularly — from launching programmatic SEO to upgrading product page libraries — is that they were high-risk, high return. Before AirOps, they required a large team with a clear vision behind shipping and maintaining them as well as a long time horizon of investment for success.
AirOps completely changes the daunting risk-return profile of a moonshot marketing project by reducing the upfront investment needed and putting ongoing maintenance on autopilot. You can leverage the awesome scale and expertise of LLMs to launch a moonshot project faster with a small team. You can then iterate on it till you start hitting your metrics. Combined with a good idea, you can see moonshot impact from AirOps like 20X traffic growth within months.
None of this would have been possible without the exploratory journey across LLM applications that Alex, Matt and Berna led over the past two years. Their curiosity, vision, and now obsession for making a difference in the lives of creative marketers and agencies is inspiring. As LLMs continue to improve in their language and reasoning capabilities, we believe that AirOps is the way most content marketers will leverage them.
We are thrilled to be leading the AirOps’ Series A round along with Wing, Xfund, Founders Collective and growth leaders like Lauryn Motamedi. If you are curious about how AI can help with your company’s organic growth strategy, check out AirOps.
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