Currently, one of the biggest trends in content strategy is using artificial intelligence (AI). After all, tools like ChatGPT have taken technology news by storm and have become part of people’s daily lives. So, it’s no surprise that professionals across industries, including marketing, have been testing to see how AI tools can streamline workflows.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Just five months later, in March 2023, Botco conducted a survey including 1,000 marketing professionals from multiple industries. The results show that 73 percent of respondents reported using AI to create content — and just 17 percent of marketers said they weren’t.
However, having access to AI isn’t enough. To get the most out of AI tools and ensure your content is fresh, compelling, and accurate, you need to use AI effectively. In this article, we’ll explore why AI is transforming content strategy and the several ways it can improve yours.
Understanding AI in Content Creation
To use AI effectively in your content strategy, you must first understand AI’s strengths and limitations. It’s important to temper expectations: AI isn’t infallible. We must recognize what it can and can’t do.
AI excels in many areas, like crunching data, generating content outlines, and predicting audience trends. Those capabilities free up human strategists to focus on high-level creative thinking.
But AI can sometimes be dry, repetitive, and fluffy. It sounds like a robot. Additionally, it often fails to grasp complex topics, cultural references, and other nuances in language that make us human. Another limitation is that AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. And it may eventually display bias if not human-supervised — something we’ll discuss later.
So, while AI can help with generating content and planning out content, it’s no replacement for human strategy and creativity.
The Role of AI in Streamlining Content Production
AI boosts efficiency in content creation by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up content creators to shift their focus to more innovative work. Introducing AI in your content strategy provides several benefits, including:
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Simplified data analysis — In data analysis, AI algorithms rapidly process vast amounts of information. You can use AI tools to extract valuable insights quickly and incorporate this information into your content strategies.
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Trend prediction — Because AI analyzes patterns, it’s a useful trend prediction tool. You can leverage AI to align your content with the trends and interests the model identifies.
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Rewriting and editing — Rewriting and copy editing are streamlined with AI tools that enhance language quality and coherence.
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Technical review — Technical review benefits from AI’s ability to identify errors and inconsistencies, ensuring your content meets industry standards.
Maintaining a “Person in the Loop” Approach
Human judgment and creativity are essential for preserving the unique voice, tone, and creativity that distinguishes authentic content. Integrating technology must be done thoughtfully to ensure accuracy in AI-generated content — in other words, it requires human oversight.
Maintaining this “person in the loop” approach is vital in AI-driven marketing content. Human intuition is irreplaceable in discerning nuances, cultural sensitivities, and emotional intelligence — crucial elements often overlooked by AI. So, marketers should actively review and curate AI-generated content, correcting any errors or misinterpretations.
Additionally, involving human creators helps align AI-generated content with the brand’s voice and values. Striking this balance ensures that AI enhances creativity while upholding the authenticity and resonance of marketing messages.
The Need for Prompt Engineering
Clear instructions — called “prompts” — are crucial to ensure that AI generates accurate and helpful outputs. They help the AI understand precisely what kind of content is needed and in what context.
Crafting effective prompts for AI is a nuanced task requiring attention to detail, ensuring relevance and accuracy. It’s crucial to be clear and specific in the prompt, outlining the desired outcome in detail. For example, when instructing AI to generate tech-related content, specify your key industry terms, preferred writing style, and target audience to streamline the process.
Balancing AI and Human Creativity
Finding the right balance between AI and human creativity is essential to creating good content. AI is excellent at doing repetitive tasks quickly and handling large amounts of information. Still, it can’t be creative or understand emotions like humans. Human creativity brings unique perspectives, storytelling skills, and the ability to communicate in a natural and authentic way.
You can incorporate AI tools while maintaining human qualities to make your content stand out. Here are some ways to do so:
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Use AI to understand your audience — AI can help you study customer behavior, social media trends, and competitor content to create engaging and converting content.
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Keep up with trends — AI can help you track trends in your field. This will help you stay relevant and establish thought leadership.
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Add personalization — AI can help you personalize your content and messaging by analyzing user behavior. This creates a unique and engaging experience that builds brand loyalty.
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Improve search engine optimization (SEO) — AI can suggest improvements for SEO, like better keyword placement, sentence structure, and readability.
Ultimately, you want to encourage collaboration between AI systems and human creators. Foster a content creation process that leverages the strengths of both. Doing so promotes efficiency without compromising the distinct and irreplaceable qualities that human creativity brings to the table.
Advanced AI Use Techniques
Maintaining brand consistency is crucial in marketing, but it takes effort. Thankfully, emerging advanced AI techniques can help.
For a content marketing agency that works with diverse clients across different industries, a large language model (LLM) can streamline the content creation process. The LLM, pre-trained on a broad spectrum of language patterns and styles, can generate initial drafts for various content pieces. This allows content creators to efficiently produce high-quality content that aligns with each client’s unique voice and tone without requiring extensive manual input.
You can fine-tune AI, where you adapt a pre-trained model for a specific task or domain. You might implement AI fine-tuning to optimize social media scheduling tools. The AI can tailor captions, hashtags, and messages by training a pre-existing model with a brand’s past social media content. This ensures a consistent and personalized brand voice across platforms.
Ethical Considerations in AI Usage
Ethical considerations are paramount in leveraging AI for content creation, particularly in marketing.
Responsible use involves setting clear guidelines for AI systems to prevent the dissemination of biased or inappropriate content. Regular audits and reviews are essential to identify and rectify any unintended consequences, upholding ethical standards.
Furthermore, ensuring the AI models are trained on diverse and inclusive datasets helps minimize biases in content creation. Striking a balance between automation and human oversight plays an important role in maintaining the integrity of content generated — or partially generated — by AI.
Next Steps
AI technology is revolutionizing the way tech companies create and distribute content. With AI tools, companies can quickly analyze huge amounts of data to identify trends and create personalized content for different audiences.
Automating routine tasks like data analysis and copy editing helps speed up content production. And AI’s ability to predict user behavior and provide insights, coupled with human ingenuity and creativity, helps companies create engaging content that resonates with their audience.
Looking for high-quality technical content to grow your business? Contact ContentLab. We combine AI innovation with a human touch to craft a content strategy that adapts to your audience’s needs and drives your business forward. Reach out to stay ahead in this evolving field.
