5 Ways You Can Use AI To Boost Your Content Marketing Productivity
You may have noticed how AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning are permeating multiple areas of business and are currently hot topics – sadly not all positive.
On one side, we have the naysayers who see AI as the end of humanity while on the other side we have the progressive people who see how AI technology can be positively used. I’m hoping you are part of the second group and that you’re going to find this article useful as I’m going to share how AI can help with your content marketing. 😊
I’ll be covering the pros and cons, the different ways it can be used, and five simple ways you can use it effectively to boost productivity and generate more content marketing ideas.
How is AI Used in Content Marketing?
First, we need to look at how exactly AI is currently being used in content marketing, and some of the tools available. I see AI used in five key areas:
- Data analytics
- Idea generation
- Multimedia generation
- Content generation
- Research
For example, many SEO tools like SEMrush include AI enhancement for the gathering and collation of data relating to content marketing. Alternatively, AI models like ChatGPT and Jasper AI can be used for idea generation, research, and even to generate content automatically (although be careful with this).
You can also find a range of specialist tools that utilise machine learning and AI to enhance their processes. For example, SurferSEO is a content tool that helps you optimise your written content with AI suggestions and keywords.
Pros and Cons of Using AI in Your Content Marketing Strategies
While AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can be incredibly useful, they are not perfect and there are a range of pitfalls and drawbacks you need be aware of which is why I thought it was important to list the main pros and cons below.
Pros
- Improved efficiency: The first thing you will notice is that you can get more done in less time and this is the main benefit of AI Google and other tools. These AI tools can simply work faster and process more information than our brains ever could which ultimately improves your content marketing efficiency. (But be careful not to go down the ‘proverbial rabbit hole’ as it is easy to just keep asking more questions.)
- Fantastic for content scaling: AI provides an excellent way to scale-up your content marketing strategies such as generating more ideas and generating content quicker for you to very much edit, review and add your own insights and experience.
- Reduce content marketing costs: Less time spent on your content marketing with the strategic use of AI means less money spent (hopefully).
- Great content marketing variety: It can be especially difficult to continue to generate new ideas and keep your content marketing fresh. AI tools can help overcome our imaginative limitations and help supply a never-ending stream of ideas and variety. I would say that you need to be careful to ensure you don’t go too far off topic, that you are providing value to your customers and potential customers, and that you are answering the questions they have.
Cons
- Overreliance: Don’t let AI tools make you lazy. It’s easy to become over reliant on AI and let your skills and work ethic decline. Always be proactive in your content marketing and use AI as an enhancer or a starting point. AI helps but it’s the human touch, your insights and your opinions that people value. This brings me on to the next point.
- Lack of humanity: AI can do many things, but one area it lacks is the human touch. For example, it can write a superb blog article, but that article won’t have any emotion or humour. If you rely on AI solely for content marketing generation, you risk your content becoming bland and generic. You really don’t want your content to be seen a bland, boring or dare I say it simple not useful and of value.
- Incorrect tone: AI tools like ChatGPT also struggle with tonality and instead the content they generate is usually factual and to-the-point. Of course, you can use prompts to help ChatGPT learn and write ‘better’ content, but for me you simply must edit any content it generates to make it yours.
- Lack of accuracy: Remember that AI tools knowledge is based on the information that is fed into their learning model. This means that inaccuracies can happen and do happen (at least for the time being). So, I’d always double-check the information that AI tools give to you for accuracy as well as relevance. Check any statistics and any references too.
5 Ways to Use AI Effectively in Your Content Marketing
Now that you can see the benefits and potential pitfalls of AI, we can look at some simple ways of how to use it in your content marketing plans. This includes things like idea generation and audience insight.
1. Repurposing Content for Other Channels
Let’s say that you’ve created an amazing blog article for your website. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could then use that content elsewhere? I wrote an article called Conducting an Online and Offline Business Content Audit which will give you plenty of ideas of content that you already have that can be repurposed. Even back in 2020 when I wrote the article, I was amazed just how many marketers and business owners were not repurposing content. It is such a quick win and now it can be done fast. There are AI tools such as SEMrush’s AI Social Content Generator that can allow you to do this.
There are content repurposing tools and ChatGPT can certainly help as a starter. For example, you could turn that blog article into a range of other media within seconds such as social media posts, social media videos, social media images, LinkedIn articles, slide shows and more. Use your imagine and see what you can repurpose and super charge your content marketing with less time and less effort. With a little use of AI, one blog post becomes infinitely more useful and contributes more to your content marketing strategy.
2. Image Generation for Content Marketing Media
AI image generation tools are getting better and better! Just give them a try and see what ridiculous creations you can make – have some fun with them and learn how to use them to boost your marketing efforts. Tools like Adobe Firefly, Pixlr, and Canva’s AI image generator are highly advanced and can make your content media generation that much easier. I’ve been using Canva for all sorts of graphics and videos, and it’s great.
Consider using these tools to produce custom media such as images that are more relevant to your content marketing. And these tools often combine free stock images with AI-generated inclusions so you get creative content, images and videos, that are more interesting and unique compared to just using stock images for your blogs.
When using tools like these, just make sure you check copyright information, and that what has been generated is accurate. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of weird AI images on Google and Facebook such as people with two heads – so be thoughtful in what you generate as you don’t want to be the business that becomes known for AI image failures.
3. To Gain Insights for Your Content Marketing and Target Audience
Hopefully, when creating your content marketing you already have a decent idea of your target audience and what makes them tick. However, AI tools can help you take this one step further and tailor your content for their specific needs, interests and habits – things that you may not have necessarily thought of.
For example, perhaps you’re writing a blog about lawn care for your gardening supplies website. You want to aim this at newbies who have never done it before, so you could ask ChatGPT, “I’m writing a blog about lawn care for people who haven’t done it before. What are their challenges, needs, interests, and common questions?”
From this simple question, you will get a heap of useful information that you can then work into your content and make it more relevant for your target audience. Giving ChatGPT context with longer prompts is also worthwhile – what’s then generated is often ‘better’.
4. To Generate New Content Marketing Ideas
An important aspect of content marketing is consistency. If you want to stay relevant and show Google that you are an authority within your industry you need to be producing content regularly and it needs to be good quality content. This can be incredibly taxing.
For example, I’m sure you know how difficult it is to keep generating new blog ideas when you’ve already got a backlog of maybe 25 articles. Hopefully that’s not actually you!
This is where AI tools can take up the slack. Where your brain and imagination has a limited capacity, tools like ChatGPT can draw from millions of sources across the internet. So, why not make use of that vast database and ask these tools for content marketing ideas?
For example, you could ask ChatGPT, “Hi ChatGPT, please can you provide me with a list of blog ideas for small business accounting” (always make sure you are polite!). In a flash it will give you an epic list of ideas that you can then turn into your next 25 articles. You could of course increase the length of the prompt to include the type of person who you would like to read the blogs so that ChatGPT has that all important context.
5. For Help with Article Drafts and Writing
So, you’ve got a primary keyword that you want to base a blog article on, but you are stumped for titles and ideas. In a scenario like this, a tool like ChatGPT can be invaluable. You can literally ask ChatGPT to recommend articles titles for that specific keyword and it will reel off a list of ideas in a few seconds.
You can then go one step further and ask ChatGPT to suggest a potential article outline with headings and subheading to include. In a minute or so, you can have your article title and structure drafted where this process could manually take much longer.
Remember though, if your article has dual purposes of answering a question your ideal target audience has as well as helping with search engine optimisation, you may want to refine the title to ensure the target keywords are prominent. 😉
Now, some people then go even further and just ask ChatGPT to write the article for them. I strongly advise against this. While these AI tools can write great content, I find that the human touch is non-existent, and this is often what makes content standout. AI content is by its nature bland, boring and often lacks authenticity. This may change over time but I’d really recommend using any information as a basis but not a final version.
ChatGPT can’t be emotive. Nor can it speak from a first-person perspective. These tools are also incapable of expressing opinions and even if they were – the reader once your opinions and insights. These are all elements of writing that make things like blogs and news articles relatable and much easier to digest.
Therefore, I recommend only using AI tools for ideas, drafting article outlines, and suggesting content to include – write the actual text yourself and let your personality and humanity shine. 😊
When Used Strategically, AI Can be Incredibly Useful for Your Content Marketing
The main takeaway I want you to have from this article is that AI can be especially helpful for content marketing and with an open mind it can boost your efficiency and idea generation exponentially.
Forget about horror stories of AI replacing humans and making us redundant. That’s simply not the case. Instead, think of AI technologies and platforms like ChatGPT and AI Google as virtual marketing assistants that can enhance your work and make things easier for you.
As you can see from the above, for content marketing, AI can help with idea generation, audience insight, article creation, media generation, and the repurposing of content. If this is something you think you would benefit from but are unsure where to start, please feel free to get in touch to see how we can help.
