Make helped Basilica nearly triple blog output without increasing resources
Learn how Basilica uses AI automation to re-imagine the possibilities of content creation, rapidly accelerating writing processes and boosting productivity by 167%.
Industry: Marketing
Use cases: AI, business efficiency, customer experience
Location: Atlanta, US
Basilica, a strategic marketing firm specializing in brand-based thinking, helps SMBs and startups accelerate revenue. The company’s founder, Toshi Jones, explains how they used Make to generate high-quality, technical content nearly three times faster with AI.
“We’ve used automation before, but Make gives us a new level of flexibility. Having an all-in-one software where you can stitch things together, drag-and-drop them wherever you want, and export the final product is a game changer.”
The challenges
In Q1 of 2024, Toshi and her team found themselves on a tight schedule, with several bottlenecks to solve:
No time to spare: In only a few days, Basilica had to write a series of highly technical blogs while simultaneously working on projects for other clients. Creating the content would take at least 16 hours from their capacity.
Restrictive tools: Until then, the Basilica team had been automating tasks solely in task-specific programs, which had limitations. For example, other solutions they used had internal workflow builders but didn’t let you build a workflow that automated the entire content creation process.
“We found these workflow builders restrictive. They won’t let you house a spreadsheet on your Google Drive. You have to upload the spreadsheet and tell the software exactly which information in which cells it should use, which is incredibly hard to manage at scale.”
Limited content quality: Writing in-depth ChatGPT prompts manually for each blog and getting truly quality content out of it is no way to save time. This process would be too time-consuming and require many follow-ups.
The solutions
With only four working days left until the deadline, Toshi turned to her friend Sarah Woodward, a founder of AI Growth Ops. Sarah helps companies scale marketing, sales, and products using AI and automation. In only one day, she presented Toshi with a sophisticated solution in Make that fully automates blog content creation.
“I asked Sarah to help us on Wednesday and on Thursday, she delivered this really complex scenario. First, I was skeptical. I asked her if it would work because we had no time to spare. She told me not to worry. She said that it would only take one or two hours per blog to make the final tweaks before it could go to the client. And she was right!”
Sarah Woodward (left), Toshi Jones (right)
Creating the first scenario
Basilica’s initial scenario was a sequence of Google Sheets and Google Docs with precise instructions. These apps then fed information into an Anthropic Claude AI tool, telling it how to execute each step of the content creation. Toshi and Sarah trained the AI on brand messaging, voice, and keyword targets. The final article was then sent via Slack.
“We were all excited that the entire automation could happen with very little involvement. Simply by pressing the run button, we had the finished documents sent to Slack in minutes.”
Polishing rough edges
When Toshi realized that the scenario reduced 16 hours' worth of work down to 6, she decided to apply it universally. However, automatically generating AI content had its issues. Especially repetition, cliché language, and content length limitations.
“We started adding more instructions to our prompts. Soon, we had a long list of things that the AI couldn’t use. For example, we told it to avoid certain phrases or reduce adjectives by 40% for more quality, concise content. It made the articles much better.”
From blogs to the entire content
After fully automating the content writing process, Toshi and Sarah created a workflow that changes blogs into social media posts. It automatically compresses a 1,200-word-long blog into a 1,000-characters-long LinkedIn post and, finally, 250-characters-long X status. Besides blogs and social media posts, Basilica is now automating PPC posts, email drip campaigns, and press releases for their clients.
The results
As an outcome of their partnership with Make, Basilica could:
Save 5 to 6 hours per blog
Increase blog writing productivity by 167%
Nearly tripling their blog output without increasing resources
Why are Basilica and Make a perfect match?
From all the solutions Sarah suggested, Toshi and her team found Make’s visual drag-and-drop interface the most intuitive. But the single best aspect Toshi outlined is the speed. Thanks to the partnership with Make, Basilica rapidly improved its content creation workflow, doing more for its clients while keeping up the stellar quality. Their writers upskilled their processes in no time by working with AI daily, automating research, topic creation, drafting, and iteration.
“With Make, we don’t have to compromise. It accelerates our ability to write all the content our clients need and still deliver accurate, in-depth blogs.”
Ready to automate your workflows like Basilica? Get started with Make for free.
