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There is no way you haven’t heard about generative AI (artificial intelligence) tools by now, unless you have been living under a rock for the past few years. Technological advancements have continued to change marketing at the speed of light for many years now, or so it seems. And with the developments in AI, more and more marketers are using it to make their life easier, or example for content marketing. But like any other powerful tool out there, AI must be used. with caution and handled with care. Here are our do’s and don’ts of using AI in your content marketing, all insights we gained from experience.
AI is really good at handling massive datasets and extracting valuable insights from them. Use AI-powered analytics tools to understand your audience’s preferences, behavior, and content consumption patterns. This will help you create data-driven content that resonates with your target demographic. Some CRM platforms have AI on board that helps you do this, or you can find several alternatives online.
AI can seriously streamline content creation by generating articles, blog posts, and product descriptions based on predefined parameters. You can ask AI to write anything you want, and you’ll get the result in just seconds.
CAUTION
We do want to emphasize strongly that AI does not replace human creativity entirely right now, or maybe ever. Feel free to let AI tools create drafts of your content, but proceed with caution.
If you want to use AI to support you for every aspect of your content marketing, you’ll need way more than just one AI tool. Just for text alone you may want to use different AI tools. We have seen some big differences between different tools depending on whether you need long form or short form content, a blog post or a social media post, and so on.
Then of course there’s also other types of content like images or video for example. There are several options there too. You’ll likely need some time to experiment and see which ones you like the best.
You may want to test any AI tool first before you actually publish the content it creates for you. Check what the output is. Have your colleagues read it too, maybe even people from outside your company that you trust. Then, gather their feedback and see if they react positively to whatever content you gave them. Depending on their answers, you may need to look for a different AI tool, or you may want to change the prompts you feed to the AI. Remember: garbage in equals garbage out, it just packaged a bit nicer.
Especially if you work in a bigger team with different marketers using AI, you’ll want to create a policy and set up some guidelines for everyone to follow. You need to know first of all what you are going to use AI for and what the output should be. Based on that, you can create guidelines that help you get to a certain quality in terms of the content it generates for you.
Whenever you use an AI tool and you start a new chat, you kick off a new topic. That topic will define the context in which the AI tool is going to provide you with answers. So if you continue asking your AI tool questions in the same chat, every answer and question from before in that same chat will influence the next answer. That’s great if you want to build on the same topic. However, if your intention is to start a new topic, this approach will do you no good. It’s better to start a new chat in that case.
By far the biggest mistake that people make is that they simply rely too much on AI tools. They expect AI to solve literally everything. And while AI is definitely a game changer, it can’t do everything for you. AI is no substitute for human creativity and is hardly suitable to convey emotions.
Whenever you ask AI to create content for you, you should not skip the quality control step. AI is great, but sometimes it contains mistakes. And the last thing you want is to spread wrong information. It’s detrimental to your company’s reputation. So you need to check if what is said in the content is actually correct.
In some cases, using AI for content creation is just not an option. AI tools don’t have empathy, making them entirely unsuitable for topics that are very emotional or sensitive. Topics like mental health or social issues are better left to a copywriter of flesh and blood.
We’ve noticed every single time that AI tools often make a piece of content too artificial, which prevents it from delivering it’s message. You can also not expect AI to know all the details from your brand style guide. If your company is very specific about tone voice for example, you will want to rewrite the content here and there to match your company’ s guidelines.
Just like so many other tools, AI applies the principle of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If your prompts are bad, AI’s output will be bad. Being vague is not a good thing when using AI tools. Instead, you want your prompts to be as specific as possible.
So think before you send your prompt. Choose specific words that have a very specific meaning, so AI understands exactly what you want it to do. For example, don’t ask it to rewrite something. Rewriting as a word can be interpreted in different ways: does it have to be the same length? Do you want your output a bit shorter, or longer? Instead, ask it to summarize, condense, or extrapolate. Use adjectives to describe how you want the end result to be.
Clearly there are a lot of aspects to AI that we haven’t mentioned in this blog post. AI has seemingly endless possibilities and is evolving at the speed of light. Based on our own experiences from the past few months, we’ve listed the most important findings here. But do come back later, we may be adding information later on as time goes by and we continue using AI tools for our own marketing or for clients.
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