All chief marketing officers know that content is indeed king.
Content is the mainstay of sales and marketing, powering everything from calls to action on landing pages to product descriptions on websites. Generations of tools and capabilities have helped marketers create, edit, optimize, and refine marketing content, yet nothing comes close to how artificial intelligence – generative AI in particular – is revolutionizing the speed, depth, and breadth at which content is produced and processed for the target audience.
As a result, generative AI can help CMOs get their organization’s message across more quickly, freeing up their time and budgets to spend on other initiatives. Smart marketers realize that gen AI can be a game changer if leveraged correctly.
Gen AI harnesses large language models (LLM) trained on huge sets of data – think terabytes of them – allowing marketers to enter prompts or simple, straightforward, conversational requests. Gen AI produces the results within seconds, may they be blog posts, SEO keywords, newsletters, ebooks, social media copy, or visual assets such as images and videos.
These gen AI tools for text include popular ones such as Copy.ai and Jasper. Yet it’s ChatGPT, launched in November 2022 by San Francisco-based OpenAI, that took the world by storm, delivering anything from homework answers to recipes to marketing copy that has been claimed to generate leads, convert, and meet content marketing objectives fast and efficiently.
The use of AI in marketing isn’t without its share of criticism; the novel technology has ruffled a few feathers not only in academia but also in the corporate boardroom. But compelling evidence points out that the two aren’t strange bedfellows. According to figures from the AI Marketing Benchmark Report 2023, 61.4 percent of marketing professionals disclosed that their teams relied on AI.
The Pros of AI-Generated Marketing Content
Marketing is and has always been a deeply human business. It seeks to understand and predict human behavior, and where such behaviors lean toward when it comes to their buying and consumption habits and routines.
In integrating AI in marketing (and thus getting buy-in from the C-suite), there’s the ongoing mission to understand AI. This understanding equates to a comprehension of a collection of technologies and algorithms that seek to make machines intelligent, equipping them with the ability to hear, speak, write, communicate, and even move.
Machine learning, a key subset of AI, allows machines to excel at making predictions. While these predictions might appear too simple and common-sensical for businesses today, their true impact on the future remains to be seen.
Therefore it is worth considering what language, vision, and prediction can do for your marketing; here are some advantages that AI-generated content brings to the table.
- Scalability – AI can produce content much faster than people. These newfound efficiencies from AI can significantly increase the amount of marketing content available, as well as assist with language localization for different markets and geographies.
- Content optimization – AI content generators scan thousands of documents online, absorb the information, and in the process choose keywords to enhance search engine optimization (SEO). These tools can suggest keywords to the human writer, adding to the authoritativeness and quality of the human-generated content.
- High-value content creation – AI writing tools can be free or charge monthly subscription rates typically running about $100 for several words, usually by the tens of thousands. Leaving the task of producing simpler articles to the machines can enable human writers to focus on marketing content that demands expertise and authority, building strong thought leadership in the space.
- Content refresh – AI tools can breathe new life into older content. Upkeeping older pieces can dramatically improve your Google rankings as well as increase your overall organic click-through rate (CTR). By helping identify which articles need refreshing and suggesting SEO enhancements, these tools pair well with human creativity to tell your brand stories anew.
- Overall human assistance – The use of AI tools can help with writer’s block, particularly with high-pressure marketing campaigns and tight deadlines to meet. AI can complement CMOs’ Big Ideas and help turn the vision into reality with all the writing assistance and execution available.
AI Content: Risks and Caveats
In dealing with shiny, new things such as AI, the risks and limitations are worth considering:
- Prioritizing ‘people first’ content – Back in August 2022, Google released a helpful content update that asserts its focus on “people-first content,” where content that doesn’t meet visitors’ expectations won’t perform as well. The update effectively states that the search engines look for content from humans, thus “punishing” content created to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Plagiarism and quality issues – AI draws from data and algorithms for content production, but there are gray areas that are less black-and-white or objective. Google also implements guidelines around what’s called “stitching and combining content,” and AI tools run the risk of violating these as they piece text together from various websites, reword them, and in the process are unable to add the proper flow.
- Less personalization – If there’s one thing that AI lacks in content production, it’s the emotional intelligence that humans have always been gifted with. Thus, it’s human writers and marketers who are aware of user intent for queries, what makes customers tick, and how to go about the storytelling for a marketing campaign.
The beauty of human-machine integration is that human editing can address these risks and caveats. While tapping into the time-saving benefits of AI, CMOs should tap into human expertise in reviewing AI-generated content for factual accuracy, quality, and consistency with their branding and positioning.
Speaking of brand …
Can ChatGPT and other AI content tools write in your brand voice?
The Branding Predicament
There’s a prevailing notion that an organization’s brand voice is being endangered when you use AI-generated content.
To correct this, it’s important to be aware of tools and systems that guide the use of these AI tools toward consistency and alignment with your brand messaging.
AIPRM, for instance, is a prompt management tool and community-driven prompt library used to complete marketing, sales, operation, productivity, and customer support tasks in minutes, versus those that used to take hours with ready-to-use prompts for ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, and DALL-E. ChatGPT can also be trained to imitate your brand voice, using your brand’s tone, style, and values.
Combined with human editing and supervision, AI can steer the marketing conversation on the right path, consistent with your brand voice and position in the marketplace.
Tap Into AI, Think Like a Human
AI tools can assist with content in a wealth of ways, from research and proofreading of existing marketing material to email template creation and language translation. Integrating it into marketing workflows and processes not only means creating new efficiencies but also forming valuable connections.
When customers know that marketers genuinely get what they need and can help them quickly, it creates a bridge of trust. Trust, a superpower in the marketing world, can be created and maintained with the potent combination of technology and human intention.
The jury is still out on what AI can do in marketing – predict what people might buy, how the market might change, and how consumers’ tastes might evolve – but for now, it’s worth exploring as a helpful sidekick in the heady domain of marketing, expanding and enriching your organization’s B2B journey.
Related Readings:
10 Reasons Why Humans Still Matter in AI B2B Marketing
The AI Revolution in B2B Marketing: 10 Transforming Strategies for Results
