How Make helps Basilica nearly triple blog output without growing resources

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

• Saved 5 to 6 hours per blog
• Increased blog writing productivity by 167%
• Nearly tripled 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.