How AI can support your content strategy

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Transcript

We use AI to support our content creation process, but never as a replacement for humans, for a few reasons I’ll get into.

The ideas, the creativity, the insight, and how that all ties into the broader digital marketing strategy – that all come from us. 

There’s a great rule of thumb in the Copywriters Code of Conduct that ProCopywriters put together that says, basically, that the use of AI in content creation is inevitable – which I agree with, it’s like work from home, the cat’s out of the bag – but we should always make sure that humans are there at the start and the end of the content creation process. 

So for example let’s say you’re working on a research-heavy piece, maybe you’re writing a downloadable guide for a client’s customers. AI can really help speed up the initial research and planning stage. 

You can gather research from various sources – Reddit threads, blog posts, user recommendations, and so on. Then, you can use AI to organise that messy information into more meaningful categories, which can make it easier for you to start planning your headers, subheaders, etc. 

Once you have that basic structured research, it’s much easier to build your content. Then, we can put all our time into making that content piece read as well as possible, meet the right tone of voice, fact checking, and ensuring ultimately that it’s going to help our clients meet their goals.  

From an SEO perspective, there’s also a real missed opportunity when it comes to updating your old site content.

AI is really great at spotting these opportunities – even if it doesn’t always know the best action to take next.

Abby, our Head of Search & Content, has done a lot of work to ingrain AI into these processes. So for example, we’ll use Apps Script to automatically review the articles on our clients’ websites every 12 months, to highlight how many keywords that article ranks for a year later, how many views it had in the last month, and to prompt us to update the keywords or any factual information that might have changed since that piece was published. 

This is a great use of AI for our clients because it can be used to make us aware of potential opportunities to improve their content and to prompt action on our part – even though what that action is, is ultimately determined by our team. The outcome is a website that remains factually up to date, relevant in search, and under consistent human review, prompted by AI flagging.

When it comes to how we use AI in content creation, the key point I want to get to is this:

AI isn’t writing the final content. It’s not doing the creative heavy-lifting. In fact, if you use AI to handle your content creation start to finish, you’re not going to get the results you want to see.

We’ve already seen Google come out with updated standards that explicitly state that they’re trying to engineer their algorithm to avoid content that was created by generative AI – and that the key thing they use to differentiate between AI and non-AI content is evidence of real human Experience.

So in order for your content to reach your audience, it needs to be grounded in real-world insights and expert knowledge that can’t be found elsewhere.

AI helps us get organised in the research stage – and it can help us do a quick grammar or style check at the end – but it’s human input, both from us and our client, that ensures that their content is original, valuable, and aligned with a strong digital marketing strategy.

Looking for help building your AI strategy?

Email me at [email protected].