Using AI for Your Content Marketing

Everywhere you look, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be automating aspects of our everyday lives, both business and personal. Naturally, this also includes digital marketing activities — and content strategy for businesses worldwide. AI marketing tools help digital content marketers increase their productivity while also boosting the accuracy, speed and even ideation of clients’ content goals. But how? Can AI replace or even compete with human content marketers? 

In this blog, we’ll explain the fundamentals of AI tools for content marketing:

• What AI is in the content marketing context 
• The benefits of AI for your content marketing 
• The importance of quality prompts
• The potential applications of AI in your company’s content strategy 
• The limitations of AI

[Related: Digital Marketing Trends in 2023 and Beyond]

What Is AI?

First things first: What exactly is AI when we’re referencing it in the marketing context? 

People often use it as a catchall term, but AI is basically the use of computers and machines to mimic human behavior, including making decisions and creating content. AI content tools analyze and learn from massive amounts of big data over time, otherwise known as machine learning. The more machine learning an AI tool does, the more complex its abilities can be. 

Benefits of AI Marketing Tools for Content

AI tools are beginning to change how businesses approach content marketing. They can analyze search engine data, social media trends and other algorithms to generate content and provide insights — or at least help your company with its content methods. 

Increasing Efficiency

Using AI tools for content marketing can automate mundane tasks in terms of content generation, curation, distribution and analysis. Because AI marketing tools can quickly analyze massive amounts of user data around the clock, they can radically increase efficiency when it comes to content marketing efforts. 

Saving Time

AI content tools can generate content ideas and help construct outlines in a matter of minutes. By assisting with certain aspects of research and ideation, AI content tools can save your content team invaluable time to spend elsewhere on core content marketing strategies.

Sparking Inspiration

Because AI tools use massive amounts of big data, they can generate unique and creative ideas that your team might not have otherwise found. You might think of AI content tools as fresh and exciting ways to brainstorm. 

[Related: 5 Reasons Why Content Marketing Is Important for Your Business]

The Importance of Prompting

Although AI content tools have staggering abilities, it’s important to note that they’re only as good as the person using them. A quality AI prompt is an incredibly important job to kickstart your AI content creation. 

An AI prompt is anything a person gives the tool in the form of information, questions or coding that communicates your end goal. Depending on how you phrase the prompt, an AI tool could offer a variety of responses. 

Here are a few key steps to creating an effective writing prompt for AI:

• Before creating your prompt, identify your end goal and purpose, including the next steps you want the reader to take.
• Clearly communicate the details of what you’re looking for, including specifics such as length, format, tone and style. The more detailed the prompt, the better the AI response.
• Proofread your prompt for grammar and spelling, and avoid using slang-terms and abbreviations.
• Include as much context and background for your prompt as you can.

In essence, strong, targeted prompts lead to in-depth, quality responses that can bolster your content marketing efforts. And an actual human has to create and communicate those quality prompts.

Applications of AI in Content Marketing

You can use AI tools in an array of ways, but we don’t recommend using them to create all of your blogs, articles and newsletters. 

Despite its impressive output, AI has limitations (which we’ll get into later). Here are several applications where tactfully using AI can help you reach — and even exceed — your content goals. 

Brainstorming and Ideation

One of the best ways to use AI in content marketing is for brainstorming and ideation. With the seemingly endless amount of content online, trying to get your company’s content to stand out can be overwhelming. That’s especially true when you’re fresh out of new, engaging ideas. 

Fortunately, AI-powered content tools can analyze massive amounts of data and provide unique insights based on a target customer’s behaviors and preferences. The personalized, dynamic content ideas and topics that AI tools generate can help your writers come up with exciting content — and lead your company to better customer engagement and conversion rates.

Workflow Assistance

AI content tools offer an ideal way to streamline your writers’ content creation and daily operations. The workflow assistance AI tools provide is unmatched. 

These tools can automate some manual writing processes in an instant, including tedious, time-consuming tasks like analyzing huge amounts of crucial data and performing preliminary edits and optimization before final human review.

This aid allows your team to focus on core workflow tasks, saving you all considerable time and increasing your productivity. 

Content and SEO Optimization

You can also use AI to edit and optimize marketing content. 

Through machine-learning algorithms, AI tools can perform SEO research and suggest possible  keywords for each piece. Meanwhile, they can optimize the content to include effective titles, generate apt meta descriptions and include those keywords. 

Additionally, AI content tools follow new trends and ensure your SEO tactics are up to date. And this is vital because the algorithms constantly evolve! By using AI tools, your SEO and content teams can accurately adjust their strategies to stay ahead of your competition. 

[Related: Why Everyone on Your Team Should Be Involved in Content Marketing]

Limitations of AI Marketing Tools for Content

If you know how to use it and what to use it for, AI can be an indispensable tool for your content marketing efforts. However, one thing’s for certain: You can’t completely replace people in the content creation process. 

Here are some of AI’s limitations when it comes to content marketing.

Errors in Factual Content and Citations

When you use AI tools to create content, certain facts and information can be false. Although AI tools can use natural language processing and hit the right keywords, they won’t create a dependable, factual piece of content unless you provide very specific details and in-depth prompts. 

If AI does include facts and supporting information that seem correct, it’s not easy (or time-saving) to double-check and find sources. Most AI tools don’t include citations to report where they pulled information from. This limitation can quickly become risky and lead to clients losing trust in your company — especially when they wonder where you got your stats. 

When using AI content tools, make sure you have someone fact-checking and adding citations for specific information. 

Robotic and Unnatural Writing Style

One limitation when it comes to AI content writing is that the lack of human tone may be obvious. AI writing is far from undetectable. Even with the best prompting, you might notice some of these warning signs that AI content is falling short:

• Unnatural uniformity to sentence length and structure
• Repetitive passages
• Disconnect from your company or brand’s usual writing tone and style (e.g. too professional-sounding without personality)
• Outdated statistics or old information

Limitations on Real-Time Information

When you create content using AI tools, they produce content based on data and information they previously mined. So if you’re trying to create something based on ongoing research issues or rapidly evolving statistical data, many AI tools struggle to provide real-time information. As a result, the content could mislead your customers and negatively affect your website’s SEO.

Low Understanding of Cultural Significance and Context

One of the biggest limitations of AI content tools is their low understanding of cultural nuance. Compared to AI writing, human writing can far more accurately and reliably discuss certain culturally significant factors, social references and tonal subtleties in ways that most effectively engage the audience — other humans.

[Related: Why You Should Keep Your Marketing Budget During Economic Uncertainty]

Partner With Marketeering Group To Take Your Content Strategy to the Next Level

No matter what your feelings on AI marketing tools are, it’s difficult to deny that they can really benefit your content marketing strategy — if you know how to use them. For example, they can streamline your content strategy workflow and help your company quickly produce quality content, ideation and personalized messaging based on sales forecasting, industry trends and customer insights.

At Marketeering Group, we implement cutting-edge tech — including AI content tools — to help you reach your digital marketing goals.

We offer expertise in all aspects of your marketing needs, from website development and content creation that effectively showcase your brand to SEO services and strategy that improve your rankings. Contact us today to get started!

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