AI has been good for so many things - most things. But in the case of content marketing, we believe it takes the magic and creativity out of it. Artificial Intelligence is not Emotional Intelligence, and AI storytelling will never compare to that of humans.
We’re not saying that there is no place for AI in content marketing. Rather, we’re saying stop using it to write content and use it to inform your content instead. Stop creating garbage, ChatGPT articles, and use AI to create pieces that make people want to become a customer because they’ve been inspired by it, or made to think differently because of it.
As a media agency, yes it's important to embrace technology, especially AI, but be known for using it in the right way. Use AI to surface rich audience insights (on your clients audience), find out what types of content they’re most drawn to, and play into that.
Use AI to create winning content strategies, not more mess on the web.
AI should be used to inspire the content you create, instead of creating it for you. AI can help you find out things like what your client’s audience loves most, so you can write about it. It's sort of like this, if you use AI to actually write the content it won’t resonate, but if you don’t use AI to tell you what an audience likes, it probably also won’t resonate.
If you’re going in blind, you might just assume what the interests of your client’s audience are. It is far too easy to stereotype audiences and then write what you think they want to read. But your job isn’t to be a mind reader, or a “guesser”, you need the help of AI tools to tell you what they want to read.
Another key part of this is that people’s interests are forever changing, so content that they liked months ago might not be the content they are interested in reading today. But you won’t know unless you use AI.
Take a look at this example below. Here we have analyzed an audience of female “Fitbit” users. One might stereotype this group and assume they only want to read articles on workouts, but the data tells a more detailed story.
By analyzing this audience using our tool SOPRISM, we’ve come to find out that they want content specifically related to CrossFit and obstacle training. Additionally, they would be interested in content that includes the subject of weight loss, and sparkling water. You could then use this insight to write content like: “5 Tasty Sparkling Water Flavour Drops that help you curb those cravings” OR “How to know if you are burning enough calories during your CrossFit workout?” (content that combines their interest of Weightloss + Sparkling water, and Weightloss + CrossFit).
Similar to the last point, AI can really help direct your content strategy. By surfacing the top articles your audience is liking and sharing on social you can get a sense for things like:
These might seem like small details but they are ones that help you create content that your client’s audience wants to open, and then keeps them on the page. Maybe you’ll find out that they gravitate towards blog posts that are 800 words or less, so you can stop wasting your time producing long-form blogs that they’ll pass over.
This doesn’t just go for blog posts. AI can also help surface the top social posts and videos they gravitate towards, helping to inform your entire content strategy.
Below is an image of an Audiense report on the Shopify audience segment of “E-commerce Solutions”. The report highlights what this audience is reading, liking and sharing on social:
Based on these insights surfaced through the use of AI (The Audiense Platform), we can gather that this audience …
By now, you should be starting to see how AI-driven insights can really help to formulate ideas for articles that you wouldn’t have been able to “guess up” even if you wanted to - because they’re niche.
AI can help you identify what is trending and topical for your client’s audience right now.
Sure, it’s not hard to uncover what is trending in the news right currently. But what is hard to uncover, is what is trending that is of interest to that audience.
Analyzing the same Shopify audience below, we can surface insights like top social posts, and keywords.
Things like CES (largest tech event in the world), Zeta Block Chain, the MasculineSaturday hashtag and the new game Palworld, were all trending topics amongst this audience some months ago.
You don’t have to hop on every trend that emerges for this group, but it’s good to keep your finger on the pulse because it can still inspire the blog content, social posts, and even hashtags you choose to use.
We don’t think AI is going to come in and take the place of graphic designers. We do think AI can remove some bottlenecks though.
When your graphic designer is finished with the Hero image for a blog post, for example, maybe there are a few tweaks you’d like to make, but you aren’t proficient in Adobe. If you have to keep going back and forth with your designer to make these smaller edits, it can hold up the time it takes to get your post live.
Luckily, tools like Adobe Photoshop have implemented AI within their platform, allowing users to type in the thing they want changed, edited, or removed.
Now you don’t need the skills of your graphic designer to make the little changes that might be holding up the publication of your content, thanks to AI.
After you’ve created your content, you can use AI to tell you when it’s the best time to post that content, based on when the majority of your audience will be online to see it.
This might seem like a small detail, but if it can increase traffic by even 1%, it’s worth implementing this practice.
For example, this audience of Vegans below is most active on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2 pm. So, your agency should advise your client to post on those days at those times.
You’d be surprised how many content calendars are created based on “how things have always been done” - ie. “We’ve always posted blog posts on Mondays and Thursdays, first thing in the morning”.
Like everything you do in marketing, the decision on when to post your content should be backed by data. Tools like Affinio make it easy to do so.
So I know we said don’t use ChatGPT to write your content for you, but using it to write Meta descriptions is okay (as a starting point)! Usually, you are confined to a character count and it can be hard to summarize a blog post in two sentences, while keeping it catchy. ChatGPT is great for creating Meta descriptions because, when you upload your article, it summarizes everything you wrote in 2 seconds. If you do use ChatGPT to create your Meta Descriptions, we suggest putting your own twist on it, so that you are never copying word for word.
This can also be helpful to create social posts, to promote your article. By pasting the article into Open AI and then asking it to create a social post for X, for example, is helpful again because there is a character count you have to stay within. We posted this blog in ChatGPT and asked it to create a X post promoting this article, directed at our audience of marketers. Here’s what it came back with:
Now this gives us a helpful starting point. Using this as a base, we can then put our own twist on it, and post something like this:
“Stop creating garbage content with ChatGPT. Learn how to use AI the right way, and turn data-driven insights into compelling man-made content.”
So there is a use for ChatGPT and AI in some content creation, but only in the context of a Meta description or social post, and only if you then put your own twist on it. Only use it as a s
That’s the theme here for most of this post, that AI makes a nice starting point, and can direct us in the right way to take things. It’s up to the marketer to take it from there, and to express their own ideas and “takes” on things. That's how we end up with really valuable, interesting, and resonating content on the web, instead of a bunch of robotic articles that no one reads, courtesy of ChatGPT.
Be an agency that uses AI in the right way, and sign up for Audiense today.