This question comes up frequently when working with clients. Understandably—we are all learning how to integrate AI into our workflows now. It’s exciting how it can boost efficiency and potentially eliminate some of those odious tasks we’d prefer to hand off. But, at the same time, I think we’re all still trying to find that balance between what we can outsource to AI and what needs a human eye.
One instance in which the question of AI comes up is content marketing. Content marketing is the strategic use of helpful, relevant content to attract and engage your target audience. In practice, this could be writing copy for a website, composing social media posts, sending email newsletters, and much more. While a critical piece of a marketing program, content marketing takes time—and let’s be honest, a lot of mental effort too.
It’s no surprise then that many of us are exploring how AI can help make this task easier. AI can be a powerful tool to speed up our work, but it comes with a few caveats. Below we offer some guidance on how to use AI to write marketing content strategically and thoughtfully.
AI in Content Marketing: How It Can Help
There are a ton of ways AI can assist in the content marketing process. Use AI to help you:
- Generate ideas: AI tools do a great job providing lists of ideas that you can springboard from.
- Create outlines: Ask AI to come up with the structure for your blog post, web page, email, etc. This can provide some organization to your ideas and allow you to fill in your thoughts from there.
- Polish your writing: AI can help you refine your message. It can clean up your grammar, smooth out your flow, and suggest structural variety, and adjust your message for different purposes.
- Overcome writer’s block: When you’re sitting there staring at a blank screen, using an AI writing tool can get the ideas flowing.
- Brainstorm titles or email subjects: If you’re looking to boost your email open rates or increase the click-through-rate (CTR) of a web page, instruct AI to come up with variations on your title that might have greater clickability.
- Repurpose content: Use AI tools to break down long-form content into social media posts, emails, ad copy, etc.
- Optimize for SEO: Provide AI your SEO focus keyword, and ask for ways to incorporate that keyword throughout your content.
The Downside to Using AI to Write Content
Tools that will do a bunch of work for us…great! Let’s use it for all our content! Not so fast. While there are many advantages to using AI to write your content, there are drawbacks as well.
To better understand the potential negatives though, we first need to step back and think about the goals we are trying to achieve:
- Build brand awareness
- Promote our business as thought leader
- Help our websites move higher in search engine rankings
- Provide helpful expertise to our audience
- Attract leads.
At first glance, one might think AI-generated content could achieve these goals. After all, it is content, isn’t it? The problem is, AI tools create their responses from existing published content. AI is not contributing anything new to the conversation. This is not good for several reasons:
Content Starts to Sound the Same
AI-generated material can sound very formulaic, lacking in personality or individual perspective. You often see the same points across dozens of articles on a topic (and often these articles start with “in this changing business landscape…” haha). When your content sounds like everyone else’s, you’re not coming across as a thought leader.
People Can Tell It is AI
Many people are savvy enough to tell what is AI-created. In fact, it’s almost becoming a game on social media for people to call out AI material. In many cases, this is not a big deal. AI created a little anthropomorphic bacon for you? Cute! You’re passing off an AI-generated article as your intellectual work? This likely won’t help build trust with your audience.
Search Engines Reward Unique Perspectives
Since the use of AI became widespread, there’s a lot of chatter in the SEO world about whether AI-generated content is a “ding” against you in search ranking criteria. The verdict seems to be that Google is okay with the use of AI content, provided that content is “original, high-quality, and people-first, demonstrating the qualities of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness).” The search engine states that, rather than penalize for poor content, the algorithms reward high quality content, whether that copy is created by a human or AI.
Tips for How to Use AI Thoughtfully
So, with all of this said, how do we use AI strategically and thoughtfully to write content? Here are a couple tips to help:
Provide Detailed Prompts
Take some time to craft the prompt you put into AI. If you’re writing marketing copy, tell AI about your target audience, the tone you are trying to capture, the goals you are trying to achieve with the piece. Give it examples of your own writing, and ask AI to write in your voice. The better the input, the better the product you will receive.
Use AI-generated Copy as the Starting Point
Rather than simply copying and pasting AI-generated text, take that copy and add your own tone, expertise, and anecdotes to create a more personalized final draft. Better yet, use that AI copy as a reference and then rewrite the sentiment in your own words. It’s like how one of my Spanish teachers in undergrad would say how translation is not a word-for-word process. The task is to understand the meaning in the original language, internalize it, and then express that meaning naturally in the second language. AI “language” should be viewed similarly.
Conclusion
If you’re curious, yes, I used AI to help me write this article. I started by freewriting a rough first draft. I then started editing, and when stuck on how to phrase a particular thought, I asked AI for help. Finally, I asked for assistance with streamlining the copy of some rough paragraphs. All of my original thoughts remained, but AI helped me make it clearer and more cohesive. The goal is to use AI as an accelerator for your work; not a complete replacement for human thought.
Essentially, I used AI in the same way I also use my mother, a retired English teacher, to proofread my writing—except AI isn’t following up its suggestions with “You’re a little too wordy, Paige.” Haha. In all honesty though, my mom still does a way better job than AI.
If you’re looking for help with your content marketing (that may, or may not, include guidance from an English teacher), let’s chat.