You may be feeling like AI is infiltrating many areas of your life and honestly – it is. AI is more intelligent than it has ever been – hello ChatGPT 4 that just launched this week – a larger part of our overall society than it has ever been, and it’s growing. From a marketing perspective, we have to figure out if, why, and how we should leverage it. Let’s explore using AI in the content creation process and answer this question: Should we be writing our marketing content with AI?
Creating Content With AI
If you’re in the marketing space at all or are a small business owner or startup founder, you’ve likely seen the conversation trending more and more around using AI for marketing materials, content creation, and more.
Here’s the truth: AI has the potential to transform the way we create marketing content. It really does. In fact, we started the creation of this blog post with ChatGPT. Later, we’ll show you the first draft via ChatGPT, how we transformed the content for our purposes, and how you can do the same. But first, let’s look at how you can use AI to create marketing content.
Ways You Can Create Marketing Content with ChatGPT and Other AI
Content creation: AI-powered tools like ChatGPT can automate the process of creating content by producing lists, outlines, ideas, and even starter copy. When used as a tool – not a substitute – this can allow businesses to produce large volumes of high-quality material in a fraction of the time it would take to do so 100% manually.
Personalization: When you use AI to analyze customer data, it can then create highly targeted and personalized messages that resonate with individual customers. This can help your business improve customer engagement and conversion rates by delivering content that is relevant and valuable to your audience.
Optimization: AI can analyze the performance of marketing materials and optimize them for maximum effectiveness. For example, something like ChatGPT can analyze email subject lines to determine which ones are most likely to be opened, or test different versions of a landing page to see which one performs best.
Translation: AI-powered translation tools can help your business create content in multiple languages simply and easily, making it much easier to reach audiences across different cultures and languages.
Use AI as a Tool, Not a Substitute
Just as Photoshop revolutionized the way we edit and manipulate images, the use of AI for content creation has the potential to transform the way we generate marketing materials. Here’s an example from our Chief Content Officer and Co-Founder, Savannah Abney:
“I’ve been thinking more and more about the role of AI specific to content creation, writing, and marketing material development. I personally believe it will be a tool, not a complete replacement, over the next few years. I think about it similarly to tools like Canva. Before this piece of software, you largely had to be an actual designer to be able to create quality graphics. With Canva, anyone can create beautiful graphics, however, humans still developed those templates and humans still have to understand how to manipulate them in order to get a decent result. The software alone still isn’t enough.
While we leverage this tool at Breezy Content, we still rely on our graphic designers to help us create custom templates for our clients and give us art direction. It’s a “both and.” Our team members who aren’t designers can leverage it as a tool to make quick changes and produce content faster, but we still rely on professionals in this discipline.
I believe AI tools like ChatGPT will work in a similar fashion over the next few years. A tool, not a replacement.”
This is how we should be thinking about AI in the marketing space – as a tool, not a replacement.
Let’s look at a real-life example of how AI can be used to create marketing content, long-form content specifically.
Starting Point for This Blog
In the video below, you’ll see us using ChatGPT. We brainstormed the idea for this blog post and then used it as the prompt for this blog post. You can see we got back a small blog post of generic but helpful content. We used this to begin producing the very blog post that you are reading. However, you can obviously see that this alone was not the final product. It was merely a starting point. A way to generate ideas and get the party started if you will.
We also leveraged it to create the previous section you read “Ways You Can Create Marketing Content with ChatGPT and Other AI” but edited it to feel more like our voice, created our own headline, and formatted it differently to work within the confines of our goal for this blog.
The Takeaway: It can be an awesome starting point and generate baseline content accurately and efficiently, but you still need the human element to make it feel like YOUR brand. Without professional copywriting skills and deep brand knowledge, you’ll be putting our cookie-cutter content that isn’t valuable, high-quality, engaging to your audience, or SEO-friendly.
Limitations of AI-generated Marketing Content
It Still Lacks the Human Element
As we have shared, AI can be powerful, but it still has its drawbacks. The section of content you’re reading right now was originally created in that initial ChatGPT section, but as you’ll see as you keep reading, it is different. Our team has come through and created original copy, made heavy edits to reflect our brand, and made sure it aligns with our voice and perspective. This is the limitation of AI tools like ChatGPT – they still don’t fully understand the nuances and complexities of your brand, voice, style, and perspective…at least not yet!
While AI-generated content can be highly efficient and effective, it is important for marketers to understand that humans are still essential to creating high-quality marketing content.
There are Potential Ethical Concerns
AI-generated content has and will likely continue to raise some ethical concerns around issues like privacy, bias, and transparency. It’s important for businesses to be aware of this and ensure that they are using these tools responsibly – not as a replacement for thorough research, fact-checking, and complete subject-matter expertise.
It Isn’t Providing SEO-friendly Answers/Copy
When you ask an AI tool like ChatGPT a question as we did in our previous example, it gave us some solid content to begin writing this blog with. However, what it did not provide us was content that was already SEO-friendly. It was presented like a blog should be with proper headers, keyword density, internal/external links, etc. It is still imperative that marketers and content creators rely on SEO best practices like these and ensure that the final piece of content whether it is short or long form has these key characteristics.
You will likely also need to build in more copy than an AI tool alone can provide in order to make sure that your long-form content has a solid amount of words for Google and search engines to crawl.
Lastly, you need to re-write the content that comes from an AI tool so that it isn’t generic and standard. There are many other business owners and marketers who will fall into this trap and all of the content on the topics they are writing about will be the same across the industry. Google can recognize the level of quality of content and this will hurt your search rankings if it is not unique and provides actual value to your audience.
The Question Remains: Should We Be Writing Our Marketing Content with AI?
AI tools are going to revolutionize the way we create content, there is no doubt about it. They can help us create more content, faster, provide better answers and information to our audience in a timely manner, and help us connect with customers we’re trying to reach.
However, like we’ve said before, it must be a tool, not a replacement.
If you use AI tools in this way to develop your marketing content and materials, you will be able to leverage their power while still keeping your content fresh, on brand, in your voice, and SEO-friendly.
Struggling to even find time to create content with AI? Need help launching a content marketing strategy and plan? We’re here to help!
