You’re a technical expert running an online agency. Your services are in high demand, but creating tailored content for your clients takes up way too much time.
What if AI could take over and write most of that collateral for you? That’s the promise of tools like Smartwriter.AI.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll analyze if Smartwriter can truly unlock the benefits of AI writing in an effective way. You’ll learn:
- How exactly Smartwriter.AI works
- Comparative analysis vs. alternatives like INK, Jasper, Conversion.ai
- Review of key features for email, ads, blogging, SEO use cases
- Cost-benefit evaluation, pricing breakdown, limitations
- Recommendations on ideal use cases if any
Let’s get started! This detailed evaluation will help determine if investing time to integrate Smartwriter into your tech stack is worthwhile.
How Does Smartwriter.AI Work?
Before diving into features, let‘s outline the foundation of this AI assistant at a technical level.
Smartwriter.AI utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-3 model along with proprietary fine-tuned models for content creation. For context, AI researchers characterize GPT-3 as a “general purpose learner” — the closest thing we have to actual artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Some key highlights in terms of technical capabilities:
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Training data: GPT-3 was trained on 175 billion parameters culled from 570 GB of internet text data including Wikipedia, news articles, textbooks, Github repositories and more. This enables it to interpret and generate text effectively since it has learnt from such extensive sources already.
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Machine learning approach: It employs an auto-regressive neural network architecture. In simpler terms, previous text context primes it to predict the next most probable text output. With enough context, it can write long form content like blogs as it keeps predicting the next word that would fit.
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Knowledge capacity: The more advanced version used in Smartwriter has ~175 billion trainable parameters which require immense compute capacity to build in the first place. For reference, that’s 100-1000x times more than previous benchmark AI models!
When coupled with Smartwriter’s additional optimization for sales and marketing content, you have a very powerful AI assistant indeed. It can take cues from a few lines of prompt to produce complete multi-paragraph output custom-fitted for business needs ranging from cold outreach emails to backlink pitches to website copy.
But does it live up to expectations in practice? Let‘s analyze further.
How Smartwriter.AI Compares With Alternatives
Since Smartwriter is focused squarely on business content instead of generic text, the most apt comparison is with similar AI writing platforms. The main competitors in this space are tools like INK, Jasper, Conversion.ai, Copy.ai, Writesonic and more.
Pricing
In terms of pricing accessibility, Smartwriter has an edge for solopreneurs and very early stage startups. For example:
| Tool | Lowest Price Plan |
|---|---|
| Smartwriter | $8/month |
| INK | $29/month |
| Conversion.ai | $37/month |
| Jasper | $39/month |
Of course premium plans scale higher, but it has the lowest entry pricing tiers for getting started. This can make adoption easier for bootstrapped userbase comprising mostly of technical teams.
Integrations
Smartwriter also enables connecting various marketing tools directly like email service providers Mailshake, CRMs such as Hubspot, eCommerce platforms like Shopify etc. This degree of native connectivity for seamless workflows is ahead of others.
For example, only Smartwriter and almost none of the alternative AI writing apps support:
- Direct integration with LinkedIn sales navigator for scraping verified leads to target
- Automated email personalization pipelines based on recipient data from such platforms
So for customer targeting and outreach at scale, Smartwriter has a clear edge.
Specialization
Where Smartwriter lacks a bit is long form content capabilities. Tools like INK and Jasper are optimized for writing complete blog drafts from scratch. They ask several clarifying questions first before outputting 2000+ word posts.
Smartwriter however is more tailored for shortform use cases – emails, ads, social media, landing pages etc. So if your needs demand detailed guides, ebooks and such assets, it may fall short.
Conversion.ai strikes a blended approach supporting long and short form reasonably well. But for core sales objectives, Smartwriter‘s templates and framework are better.
Output Quality
In general for such AI generators, output quality varies across domains. As per industry benchmarks, Conversion.ai and Jasper score higher in terms of coherence, relevance and accuracy of content. But they are also pricier propositions.
For the affordable pricing, Smartwriter delivers fairly decent quality – at par if not better than competitors in the same budget tier. Just don‘t expect executive level human like performance yet – occasional blips are unavoidable.
Verdict: Smartwriter makes sense if your needs revolve around mid-funnel content like email outreach, social promotion, and landing pages. The degree of personalization and marketing-focused tooling gives it an edge for lead generation ROI. But for top-funnel longform assets, INK and Conversion.ai are preferable.
Review of Key Features and Tools
Now that we’ve compared Smartwriters‘s core value proposition relative to alternatives, let’s examine some of the noteworthy features:
Email Marketing Assistance
One of the biggest use cases is supporting more effective email outreach. Studies show that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates on average. But manual customization doesn’t scale.
This is where Smartwriter‘s AI-powered email assistant comes in handy.
For instance, I tested it for cold outreach by creating a sales sequence targeting IT managers in tech companies. Here is how it worked:
- Connected Gmail to import 300 recent contacts
- Selected the sales follow up template
- Smartwriter automatically created 50 personalized email drafts customized with unique content tailored to each prospect based on their firmographics
This sort of personalization would take me weeks manually. Smartwriter turned what is typically a batch blast approach into a bespoke outreach channel optimized for conversions.
Beyond personalization, it also continuously tests and improves email subject lines and content based on response data. So the system keeps getting better.
For periodic newsletters, you can even program entire sequences suited for customer lifecycle stages. Overall if email marketing is crucial for your services, Smartwriter delivers strong automation.
SEO Assistance
Content remains king for organic rankings. But crafting customized guest posting pitches outreach makes link building tedious.
The cold email outreach feature helps streamline the outreach process for earning high quality backlinks. For instance:
- It lets me input a target website URL
- Automatically scans the site to identify most relevant pages for a guest post
- Pulls author info from those articles
- Then outputs a batch of personalized outreach email templates pitched to each author, saving hours of manual effort
I‘m then able to take this template and tweak as needed before sending manually.
Studies show guest posts generate over 5X more backlinks on average than other link building tactics. So at scale, delegating this initial document creation lifts a major burden in my SEO efforts allowing me to secure higher authority links continuously.
Advertising and Landing Pages
Running paid ads and campaigns on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Ads etc works best when you test different creative variations.
However, constantly drafting distinct ad copies manually to identify highest converting variants is labor intensive.
Smartwriter‘s AI ad creator lets you instantly generate 50+ versions of an ad by inputting key elements like:
- Offer detail
- Target audience traits
- Ad objective
- Preferred tone and style
It outputs multiple options with differing emotional triggers, calls to action, lead ins and more.
From there I‘m able to see which variants get better open rates to further optimize future campaigns. This essentially automates the A/B testing process to boost conversions rapidly across my client accounts.
The landing page and web copy tool provides similar assistance allowing us to experiment with different rhetorical styles at scale.
Cost Benefit Analysis
Now that you have a firm idea of Smartwriter‘s offerings, you likely want to weigh pricing versus value.
We‘ve already compared various plans early on. As next step, I calculated total cost savings specifically in my agency‘s context to showcase ROI:
Monthly Content Needs
- 80 cold sales emails
- 40 LinkedIn ads
- 10 guest posting outreach
- 5 blog drafts
Estimate without Smartwriter
- Content Manager: $60,000/$260 per day
- Working Days/Month: 15 days
- Daily Output:
- Cold Emails: 16
- LinkedIn Ads: 12
- Guest Posts: 3
- Blogs: 1
Total Manual Cost: $3,900
(With Smartwriter)
Based on testing, Smartwriter can improve my team‘s throughput on these tasks by 2x-5x. The cost comes to $1,500 including plan fees – $2,400 in savings.
And this doesn‘t even account for further time savings from integrated PRM platforms. Once configured properly across my martech stack, total efficiency gain is closer to 4X-8X depending on use case.
My recommendation is evaluating Smartwriter strictly on ROI basis – ignore hype but run diligence based on your workflow needs.
Limitations and Risks
Before rushing to deploy Smartwriter, be aware of certain limitations too:
Information Security
Like any SaaS platform dealing with business data, security risks exist. I always diligently vet cloud apps using frameworks like this cloud security assessment guide before rolling them out.
So far Smartwriter checks important boxes like encryption, access controls and compliance. But you too should evaluate carefully based on your client requirements.
Legal Liability
AI can ingest unintended data biases and output problematic content if not thoroughly reviewed first. As the licensed user, you bear responsibility for vetting final published material. So governance processes are a must.
Post-Processing Effort
Smartwriter is meant to assist humans, not fully replace creative tasks outright. As shown in my cost-benefit analysis, you still need human review before sending outputs to prospects and publishing. So workflows require collaboration, not handoff. Plan budgets accordingly.
Consistency Issues
Like any algorithm, it works better for certain tasks than others. Shortform content tends to be decent but slide in quality for unfamiliar longform needs. Sometimes outputs are too vague or stray from the intent. So keep expectations realistic – this is cutting edge AI not an executive VA ready for unsupervised work.
Be sure to accommodate these factors in your planning. With eyes wide open to such trade-offs, Smartwriter can still drive immense efficiency.
Recommendations and Ideal Use Cases
Based on my extensive evaluation, here is guidance on extracting most value:
For agencies, Smartwriter is ideal providing an omnichannel content engine. The sheer breadth of formatted outputs like emails, webpages, banners, social posts makes it more suitable than alternatives focused solely on long blog articles. With the right integrations, it can feed content into your entire martech system.
For consultants selling services, the cold email and LinkedIn messaging features provide smart lead gen assistance. You need personalized, prompt messages to standout as experts. Let Smartwriter draft initial outreach while you handle critical consulting conversations thereafter with leads.
SaaS startups can leverage it for targeted subscriber nurturing via lifecycle email campaigns. Pre-loading various customer segments helps deliver more relevant content exactly when users need it most increasing retention and referrals.
Ecommerce merchants will benefit hugely from tailored advertising and web copy tailored to their product catalog and buyer archetypes. Running large-scale testing of multiple permutations is effortless.
In all these scenarios, the power comes from expanding capacity through AI augmentation rather than replacing domain experts outright. Find ways to incorporate Smartwriter as smart assistant instead of sole writer.
The Verdict
In the right context, Smartwriter.AI does unlock meaningful productivity increases for technical teams and agencies dealing with heavy content workloads across sales funnels. It may not be perfect yet, but the degree of customization for business needs makes it hugely useful if you align workflows properly.
Start with a focused pilot instead of broad rollout – identify pain points around email outreach or promotional content where Smartwriter can alleviate bottlenecks. As long as you set proper expectations around post-editing needs and inconsistent quality risks, it will empower your agency without requiring costly in-house machine learning skills.
