NotebookLM for Content Marketing? Two Use Cases for Marketers

NotebookLM is powered by Google and has received positive feedback from folks like Amanda Caswell of Tom’s Guide and Android Authority’s Matt Horne, yet many have never tried it.

So, for this next post in our AI tool series, made possible by Mod Op’s AI Playground, we’re looking at NotebookLM. We’ll explore two use cases and my overall thoughts on if, when and how marketers should be using NotebookLM.

What is NotebookLM?

Google describes NotebookLM as “an AI-powered tool designed to help users better understand and work with their documents.” The tool allows users to upload documents, after which “it can analyze and summarize them, answer questions based on the content, and help you generate new content.”

Google removed NotebookLM’s “experimental” status in fall 2024 and it’s now part of Google’s general-purpose AI model, Gemini.

NotebookLM: A Content Marketing Use Case

According to HubSpot’s State of AI Report 2024, 43% of marketers using AI tools use it for content creation. With so many tools able to quickly spit out grammatically correct, typo-free content, it’s certainly a tempting use case.

I first began experimenting with Notebook LM last fall, around the time we announced the launch of Mod Op’s first book, Getting Digital Done. The book presented a content opportunity: Owned source material for blogs, ebooks and other forms of content that could be used in content marketing and other thought leadership efforts.

The tactic of repurposing existing content for other marketing efforts isn’t new – it’s a foundational aspect of content marketing that’s also used for PR and other marketing disciplines. Before NotebookLM, or other AI tools, I would spend time reading – and re-reading – the chapter as I wrote new versions in other formats.

With NotebookLM, I was able to cut down the time it took me to version the piece, by following these six steps:

1. Create a new workspace, also known as a “notebook,” in NotebookLM. I knew that I wanted to create a few pieces using this approach, so I named the notebook “Getting Digital Done.” This allowed me to easily return to the notebook to locate my content at different times during the project.
2. Add sources to the notebook. I pulled in both the full transcript of the book and the press release about the book. Knowing that I wanted to write blog posts, I pulled in past blog posts to offer a sample of formatting. I wanted to attribute content to one of the book’s authors, Len Gilbert, so I gathered past writing from Len to provide additional examples of his voice.
3. Draft a prompt. This step took some trial and error before we landed on a first draft. One aspect we has to troubleshoot was determining which elements of the book to include and which to omit. For example, Getting Digital Done relies heavily on a fictional company. While it works well in the context of the book, in the short-form blog posts, it was confusing.
4. Review the first draft and make edits. Once we settled on a draft with the right focus and format, I reviewed it for grammar, spelling, voice, tone, and SEO. I also considered how it positioned Mod Op, our experts, and the book, making manual adjustments to the piece as needed.
5. Share the draft for review and feedback. Following my review and edits, I shared the piece with Len for his review and feedback. Because NotebookLM allowed me to tweak things like tone and format easily – and because Len is a great advocate for our AI Playground – I actually shared two versions of our first blog post. That led to some really helpful feedback I could apply to our first blog post and use to refine our prompt.
6. Repeat! We used this method for a few blog posts, including “Becoming Digital: Technology Comes Last” and “The Power of an Outside-In Approach: How Understanding Your Customers Drives Digital Transformation Success.”

NotebookLM Use Case #2: Summarizing Interviews

Mod Op Chief Strategy Officer Jonathan Murray also tested NotebookLM as part of Mod Op’s AI Playground. (You can listen to Jonathan’s full overview on the Leader Generation podcast episode, “AI Playground: Microsoft Copilot & Google NotebookLM”).

In his use case, Jonathan and his team needed to review client interviews to create structured summaries and insights. As Jonathan explains, the team “had hours and hours of interviews and we had taken the transcript of those interviews. Normally we would go through the transcripts and manually extract the insights from those and, the observations from the interviews and [provide] our recommendations.”

In this case, Jonathan reports that by using NotebookLM to review the transcripts, the team was able to cut the task time by 75%. “We were able to upload the transcripts from the interviews and then have NotebookLM do all of the summarization to derive insights and to answer specific questions to provide guidance to the client.”

Should Marketers Use NotebookLM?

As a marketer, there’s a lot to consider when determining if you should use an AI tool, including data privacy, security, legal considerations, and ethical factors. It’s also important to consider problem and purpose alignment: does the AI application effectively address a specific problem relevant to your organization’s needs and goals?

From a security standpoint, NotebookLM does quite well. It’s a key factor when dealing with proprietary information and something Jonathan was quick to touch on in his review: “This model, when you upload your source material, it’s private to you. You can share your notebooks with other people, but other than that, the material stays where it is. It doesn’t get ingested by Google, and it doesn’t get reused, for the purposes of other customers. So, it’s privacy safe, and it’s very interactive.”

From a problem and purpose alignment standpoint, the answer to “should marketers use NotebookLM?” can vary.

Would I use NotebookLM to version content again? It depends. As with Jonathan’s use case, I think NotebookLM is a great tool for taking existing material – book transcripts or interview transcripts – and summarizing them. However, when you look to take it a step further by creating new marketing content, the results are mixed.

Although we produced blog posts that satisfied both me and the author using NotebookLM, some final posts still appeared as AI-generated to a trained eye (or AI tool). Even with a good deal of human oversight and editing, Copyleaks, a leading AI text analysis platform, estimated that one of the blogs we created and published was as much as 98.8% AI-generated.

In closing, NotebookML is a powerful AI tool backed by one of the world’s leading tech companies. It offers a secure AI solution for quickly reviewing and summarizing content, giving you tools to transition the content into new formats. If you’re a content marketer, it’s worth taking a look!

Interested in learning more about the apps we’re testing at Mod Op? Check out the Mod Op AI Playground and make sure to check out Mod Op’s Leader Generation podcast for special AI Playground episodes.