How Justin & Team at JourneyEngine Saved 10x on Time and Scaled Content By 25x

Overview

Client: Journey Engine | Growth Marketing Agency

Results: 25X scaled their content, spending 10X less time and $300 less

Customer: Journey Engine

Journey Engine is a growth marketing agency that helps education and technology companies get more revenue from organic search. According to their website, Journey Engine ‘runs circles around other enterprise SEO agencies — for not so enterprise prices.’

The growth marketing agency’s USP is its proprietary technology that enables it to automate manual and repetitive tasks and work in short sprints. The result of that is 12 months of SEO work delivered in just 12 weeks.

About the quality of AI-generated content, at BrandWell, we can attest that the quality beats that of an average SEO writer. As Justin Thomas and his colleague, Andrew Sunil, Journey Engine’s head of activation, found out on a live training call with BrandWell’s President, Julia McCoy, the content BrandWell generates is more than decent.

Goal: Scale Content at a Manageable Cost

For a growth marketing agency that helps clients unlock more revenue from organic traffic, a big component of what Journey Engine does for its clients is content creation. The first stage of their process (Acquisition) starts with a solid library of content that they use to attract marketing qualified leads from search engines.

While Journey Engine relied on its in-house team for marketing strategy and data analysis, it had to outsource the writing function. Outsourcing content creation allowed the agency to keep a lean team and streamline its workflows. 

Unfortunately, for the money the Journey Engine team was spending on content, they were not getting a lot of it. The $1,800 per month plan they were on with their writing agency allowed them a dedicated writer but just 400 words of content a day. While this content could not meet their needs, the writer was also only available on weekdays.

The problem was that Journey Engine was spending a fair amount of money on content that could never deliver the level of organic traffic needed to drive optimal revenue for their clients. 

The goal was to scale content at a manageable cost without sacrificing quality. Journey Engine was on the writing agency’s highest tier plan but they could always work out a custom plan to unlock more content, but the cost would likely be prohibitive. The agency needed an alternative plan for content.

Solution: Automate Content Creation

One of the options that Justin Thomas, Journey Engine’s head of acquisition, looked into to scale content for their clients was to automate the writing process and scale content creation with AI.

BrandWell stood head and shoulders above the AI writing tools they considered.

This AI case study was conducted for one of Journey Engine’s clients – an edutech company that offers higher MBA programs for people working in or pursuing careers in tech. The figures quoted in this case study apply to that client and not to Journey Engine’s other clients.

Fit for Purpose

The most crucial factor for Journey Engine is that BrandWell was the best fit for the content they wanted to create – top-of-the-funnel informational content that attracts organic traffic from Google. 

BrandWell is specially designed to write long-form informational blog posts. Among the default blog post features you get with a BrandWell subscription are:

• Keyword research
• Topic reports and content briefs
• Content intelligence
• Meta title, description, and URL
• H2-H5 headers
• Table of contents
• Internal and external links
• Key takeaway boxes
• Click-to-tweet links
• Standalone FAQs section
• Generative AI

All it takes to generate a blog post with BrandWell is the keyword you want your blog post to rank for in search engines. For an agency, the additional context could be a summarized version of the client’s brief.

Value for Money (and Time)

The fear for many publishers considering going the AI route is that the quality of the content may fall. Before Google revised its position on AI-generated content, another concern was whether this content could rank.

Google has since clarified that it has no policy against AI-created content. The search giant only cares about the quality of content, not how it’s produced. 

Even if AI content was going to become an issue for search engines, you can rest easy knowing that the draft you generate with BrandWell is so well-written that it is undetectable.

Some human-written content sounds more robotic than blog articles generated by BrandWell. 🤖

The real plus for AI content is that its quality is consistent. Even if you argue that it cannot beat that of the best writers, its quality remains the same.

The machine never gets tired. The same cannot be said of a human writer whose output and quality of writing may fall, especially with the added pressure of a higher publishing schedule.

The machine does not have to worry about writer’s block either or struggle for inspiration and the other issues that human writers face. It simply writes content the moment you hit the Write Post Now button. 

Any time – night or day, weekday or weekend – that an idea for a new post hits, you can launch BrandWell from your browser, enter your keyword or URL, and you will have your draft ready to edit and optimize in under 5 minutes.

This was hugely appealing to the Journey Engine team.

SEO-Optimized Content That’s Good Enough to Rank

The Journey Engine team appreciated that the blog posts BrandWell generates are optimized for SEO fresh out of the machine. This is significant for them as they are targeting organic traffic from Google.

For a data-driven growth marketing agency, the Journey Engine team loves the keyword data the AI collates for every article it generates.

The BrandWell SEO tab shows the keywords the AI has optimized for, those that could also be targeted, and how many times it used each keyword against the average number of times the pages ranking on Google for the keyword has mentioned it.

Not only that, but BrandWell also includes a checklist with the on-page elements that must be optimized to guarantee the best chances of ranking in Google. The human writer/editor’s task is to go back in and optimize the suggested parts of the article until everything has been green-ticked.

We have tested the content BrandWell writes and found it to rank well even without optimization by a human editor. The reason it ranks and why the Journey Engine team is so excited is that our AI crawls the top of Google to learn what makes the ranking pages special in the eyes of Google and replicates that with the draft it generates for you.

We were able to walk the Journey Engine team through the process of setting up a project for their client and, importantly, how to generate an article with BrandWell. The app produced an informative, in-depth blog post that compares well with a blog post that Journey Engine has written on the same keyword for their client.

We appreciate the patience they showed in learning how BrandWell works and the eagerness they showed in putting the tool to work right away. They have pages that they have marked off for rewriting, which will be the perfect opportunity to see what the tool can do.

Minimal Human Intervention

Every good publisher knows that a draft – whether human or machine-written – has to be edited before it is published. The curious fact is that content written by BrandWell is a lot easier and takes less time to edit than human-written content.

That’s because the AI writes from an outline, has near-impeccable grammar, and isn’t prone to typos and misspellings.

The process of writing and editing AI content takes 5X-10X less time than it takes a human writer to create a blog post from scratch, let alone edit it. 

A common issue where an agency or publisher is trying to scale content creation on a budget is writers end up turning in less-than-original articles to meet their assigned targets. Journey Engine has no such worries with the articles BrandWell will generate as the software has its own Plagiarism Checker baked in.

Results

Here is an overview of the cost and time savings Journey Engine will drive with their BrandWell subscription:

• Journey Engine’s OLD cost/model with the writing agency limited them to one writer who was not available during weekends: $1800 for 10k words

vs

• Generating content with BrandWell: $1500 for 250k words

Compare the 10,000 words of content Journey Engine was getting with the writing agency and the 250,000 words they will get using BrandWell and there is no debate. 

Yep, that’s a 25x increase. You could argue that the content will be more comprehensive and better optimized for SEO, too.

Not to mention the time and energy savings – because you don’t have to headhunt a billion writers or harass a writing agency all day long.

A 25x Increase Means a Supercharged Business

Journey Engine is on course to significantly scale creation and drive even better results for its clients without sacrificing content quality or their own bottom line. What’s great about automating content creation with BrandWell is they will save both money and time. 

Journey Engine can use the time and money it saves by automating content creation in other areas of its business, like lead generation. With happy customers and a growing business, this nimble team of growth marketers can be optimistic about what the future holds for their business.

And that’s the biggest benefit of BrandWell. Massive peace of mind for agency owners and marketers.