No-one wants to read another generic, clichéd, blog post full of capitalised sentences and buzzwords like ‘supercharge’, ‘unparalleled’, ‘game-changing’, and how ‘delighted or excited you are to announce’.
Sorry, but we can all now spot the AI traits, ticks and giveaways…
And that’s the main problem with artificial intelligence for content creation. Unless you’re skilled in how to use it, it just sounds so, well, artificial.
But put it to work in the right way, as a partner rather than a replacement, and it can indeed ‘supercharge’ your output 😉.
AI solutions for small businesses
At EBY, we’re now implementing AI solutions for businesses in a variety of areas, all designed to maximise the efficiency of your team and your operations.
We explored this in a previous article which focused on the practical tasks AI can support with to boost productivity.
While AI is definitely changing the way we all do things in the marketing world, some fundamentals remain. You still need a foundation of creative, engaging and human-driven content – backed by a well-thought out strategy – upon which to build your marketing activities.
The golden rule of AI content creation
The first thing to note is we’d never recommend just asking your large language model (LLM) of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Sonnet etc) to perform some random task without any context, such as asking it to write a blog on x, y or z. As that will only get you those generic, cliched articles I mentioned earlier.
Just as you would train a new member of staff, you have to train your LLM. That means giving it as much context as possible about what you do, who your customers are, examples of your tone of voice and writing style and your objectives for the task at hand.
What you get out is only as good as what you put in
Another topic we recently wrote about is how SEO is changing. You’ll likely have noticed how zero-click AI-generated snippets now appear at the top of the search engine results page, which is making it harder for businesses to get click-throughs in the way we had become used to.
This doesn’t mean good content is no longer relevant – on the contrary, useful and engaging content is more important than ever, it just has to be presented in the right way.
We’d always start with original content that relates directly to your business, your knowledge and your experiences, then use AI to enable you to be more creative, strategic and productive.
Examples of when to use AI in content creation
Here are some of the ways you might use AI in your content creation.
- Market research: Good content starts with a proper marketing strategy. You know all those hours of research that goes into it? You can get AI to help by building specific prompts to analyse a wide variety of data and create reports that look at your competitors, buyer sentiment, gaps in the market and so on.
- Generating ideas: When you’re staring at a blank page, not sure what to write about, or what name to give a campaign, AI can help you get started. 99% of the ideas will be cheesy or awful, 1% might spark an idea that leads you on to something else that becomes the thing you want to do.
- Content repurposing: I recently wrote about how you can repurpose content to squeeze every last drop of value out of it. This is an excellent way to put AI to work. Give it your original piece and ask it to turn that into whatever else you want.
- It could be creating a series of blogs from a whitepaper, social media posts from a blog, short video snippets from a long video – the possibilities are endless. Because you’re inputting all the initial content, you’re reducing the risk of AI fabrications and that generic output no-one wants.
- Data analysis: When you get your various reports back about your website traffic, social media engagement metrics, media monitoring etc, you can ask AI to analyse all the data and generate insights about the topics and formats that are creating the most productive leads.
- Time-consuming tasks: In addition to the above, there are many time-consuming, manual tasks that can be taken on by AI, giving you more space for creativity and additional work.
- These could include:
- Transcribing videos and podcasts
- Reading and summarising lengthy reports and data sets
- Writing meta descriptions and SEO optimisations for your content
- Writing a brief to give to your agency
Making the most of AI in your business
When deployed in the right way, AI can be a useful asset in your business. The key is to see it as a partner, rather than a replacement – maintaining the human touch is essential.
If you need help implementing AI, including how to use it safely and securely, engineering prompts, or creating AI agents, let’s have a chat.