A Deep-Dive Into Best Practices of AI in Content Marketing

Using AI content marketing is great for scaling up production and is time and money-saving, but what about the quality? Are we sacrificing that with AI involved? This article will cover what we know about AI in content marketing – real-life use cases, AI writing prompts – and how to overcome its limitations based on expert interviews.

Use cases for AI in content marketing

For content, AI can be truly helpful. From ideation to the creation of full-fledged content, it can greatly support your content marketing tasks. While there are a lot of ways you can use AI in content marketing. Here are some use cases that you can consider:

1. Content research and ideation

The first phase of any content marketing plan is to research and ideate on topics, which can be difficult. Several AI content writing tools can help you generate ideas and research content across the web. These tools are also great to use for your content briefs and outlines. It can help set the direction of the content you are trying to develop.

2. Scaling content creation

AI tools can produce articles, ads, and other content on any given topic in minutes. You can even set the tone, be it casual, business-like, or academic. It can align well with your brand voice. Moreover, predictive analytics can help identify the tastes and preferences of your audience so you can always tweak your content to your audience's liking.

3. Proofreading

AI can be a great proofreader as it does not only check the grammar but also the intent and emotional aspect of the content, which is very important. Tools like Grammarly and Hemingway provide great assistance to not only check grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary but also helps with the emotional intent and give suggestions on improvement, making it 10x easier and faster for the writers to proofread and publish. Along with grammar and emotional aspect of the content, originality also matters. AI can help users check plagiarism to be sure about the originality of underlying content.

4. SEO strategy

AI can help you generate the best keywords and optimize the content for search engines. From assisting you in researching trending topics to discovering content gaps and even creating content, you can do these tasks faster and more efficiently with AI-powered SEO tools.

5. Content distribution and repurposing

AI can be very helpful for short-form content, especially when you want to turn your long-form content like blogs, zoom recordings, and conferences into clips or short-form content to share across social media platforms. Various AI tools help you use your content for numerous purposes and even create videos from text input.

6. Measuring content performance

With AI, you can understand what is working well and what needs improvement and optimization in real-time. Descriptive analytics helps assess business performance and identifies current trends using existing data on past events. Meanwhile, diagnostic analytics or root-cause analysis explains why events happen.

AI also uses historical information for predictive analytics, which predicts future outcomes of the customer. Finally, prescriptive analytics suggests or guides you toward a specific action based on the three other analytics.

AI writing prompts for content marketing use cases

You know all the use cases for AI in content marketing, but how do you get started with this? We have some examples of AI writing prompts that you can use for different types of use cases. Try them out yourself:

1. Content research and ideation

"I am writing an article about how recession is impacting the job market and how to stay protected in these times. Summarize the main points discussed in X article."

"I am writing an article about creating email marketing campaigns with examples. Generate some eye-catching headlines that would grab the attention of readers."

"My team is starting a new podcast for people interested in football. Generate 4-5 eye-catching, Gen-Z podcast names that are relevant to our target audience."

2. Writing content aligned with your brand voice

"Write a social media post copy about interactive emails that includes a call to action for email marketers and make it sound friendly."

"I'm an email marketer at XYZ and I need to get more people to sign up for our premium subscription. Write an eye-catching, personalized email asking customers who would be interested in our premium subscription, and if they do it now, they get a month for free. Write 3 email subject lines. Avoid generic phrases. Write in a quirky and friendly tone."

3. Proofreading and editing the content

"Imagine you're a proofreader. You are here to help me generate a proofreading text. I will provide you the text and I would like you to review it for any spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors. Once you have finished reviewing the text, provide me with any corrections or suggestions for improving the text."

4. SEO

"I am writing a product description for a laptop designed for college students. Create a list of 5 best SEO keywords related to this product."

"Research the top 5 SEO keyword strategies for a local gym that will offer yoga class as a new initiative."

"Suggest attention grabbing blog post titles related to the following SEO keywords: interactive emails, how to make emails interactive."

5. Repurposing the content

Turn the following blog post into a long-form LinkedIn post. The target audience is marketing managers, and this Linkedin post should cover the AI marketing trends that can be an asset to marketers in the future. Make it snappy, casual, and quirky in tone. Use no more than 3000 characters.

AI content marketing tools

To better utilize your time and save money, there are several AI content marketing tools that you can try:

1. Content workflow optimization

• Copy.ai for content creativity, research, and creation

• Jasper AI for branded content creation

• Writesonic for short-form copy and paraphrasing

• Phrasee copywriting and optimizing your brand voice

• ChatGPT for creating briefs,

• Grammarly for content creation

• Wordvice for proofreading

• ChatGPT for content outlines, blogs, short-form copy, etc.

2. SEO

• Frase for content creation, research, optimization, and analytics
• INK for competitive intelligence
• ChatGPT for researching keywords and creating blogs.

3. Content distribution and repurposing

• Vidyo for repurposing video content
• Lately, to repurpose long-form content in various languages
• Lumen5 to repurpose blogs into videos and long videos into clips
• Synthesia to create videos with text inputs.

4. Content analysis

• MarketMuse for finding at-risk content to optimize
• Evolv for experimentation and optimization in real-time
• Tableau to make sense of big data and generate personalized insights

Check out this guide if you want to know about more AI copywriting tools and their reviews.

How to use AI in content marketing effectively

Source: Content at Scale

• Fact check is necessary

Criticize the AI. Understand the biases and hallucinations that can cause AI to produce false results. You don't want to be a writer or strategist who creates harmful and misleading content. Also, AI can sometimes unintentionally reproduce copyrighted material that can cause problems for you. So always fact-check! Lead the AI, don't be led by it.

• Give a human touch to your content

Not only Google but soon, most audiences will probably be able to smell your AI-generated content, so it's important to give it a human touch, e.g., an infographic, stories, audio, videos, etc. Try injecting information gain-like stories so your content looks and feels human and well-thought.

• Don't write complex content with AI

AI content writing tools are great for short-form content like a copy for ads, social media, headlines, and email subject lines. Writing complex material could generate poor content as AI still needs to be developed enough to write long-form complex articles or blogs. Leave AI to generate simple and brief content rather than making it write a creative and complex informative article.

But, If you still want to write something long-form, consider this. 👇

• For long-form content, prompt in bits

So you have long-form content in mind and want to use AI for that. AI can generate long-form content in a single prompt, but fact-checking simultaneously would be extremely exhausting. It's good to start by breaking your project into bits. Start by generating an outline for your project. It will help you stay focused and break your project into bits so that you can easily fact-check research and review each material inside your project.

• Treat it like a tool, not a writer

Again, AI has limitations. It can provide false and copycat content. It's important to understand that it's a tool, not a writer. It can be useful at times and useless in some cases. It's fine if you use it to help you do things faster. Understand how you'll use it to create compelling content and not assign it the whole content strategy.

• Don't forget to incorporate your TOV

Your tone of voice matters a lot to stay connected to them emotionally. There are AI-driven tools that constantly learn your brand voice to generate content that suits your audience. So, it's essential that you keep in mind that the content needs to have a consistent tone of voice, or it loses its spark.

Future predictions for AI in content marketing space

Most of us like using AI, while others believe it isn't perfect yet to automate writing tasks. But now the question is, is AI effective for your content needs? It saves a lot of time and money, but is it worth the investment you are putting in? And is it capable of writing high-quality work? What is the future of AI in content marketing?

AI is capable of writing content that is creative and readable, although here are some things that you should consider:

1. Google acknowledges AI content

According to Google, using AI does not and will not give any special gain in SEO. As long as the content meets EEAT requirements and is helpful and useful to the community, it can do better in search results. Also, they have mentioned that they have a variety of systems, including SpamBrain, that help them identify spam content, no matter how it is produced. If your content follows Google's EEAT requirements and is useful to the users, it can rank well even if AI generates it.

Google has introduced a search experience that uses generative AI to deliver better results. This includes features like 'Help me Write' in Gmail, which helps you write an email by feeding it a prompt, and 'Immersive view for routes' in Maps, which helps you see your trip in advance by providing an incredible bird's eye view of the ride.

2. AI tools will launch watermarking in the future

Google will launch stronger AI detection systems in the future. While this is possible, Open AI is most likely to launch watermarking, and this means that light editing of your content won't remove the watermarking and stop Google from detecting it.

3. Copyright issues

Who holds the copyright for content generated by AI? Is it humans or the AI itself? Well. You don't hold ownership of AI content, and neither does AI. Although OpenAI does give you the rights to its content, in their Terms of Service, they say,

"Due to machine learning, output may not be unique across users, and the Services may generate the same or similar output for OpenAI or a third party. For example, you may provide input to a model such as "What color is the sky?" and receive output such as "The sky is blue." Other users may also ask similar questions and receive the same response. Responses requested by and generated for other users are not considered your content."

In short, you don't own the content or the others who've generated the content using the same prompt. The copyright system is pretty complicated when it comes to AI.

4. AI is not human enough yet

This could be wrong in the future, but AI still needs to be human enough. It generates robotic content at times that can be easily detected by humans and machines both. Humans are good at empathy, and when it comes to storytelling, humans do it way better than AI. AI does not experience the world like humans do. Marketing requires stories, and that being said, AI cannot do that yet.

5. AI can create biased content

AI has many biases now, and it even generates malicious and ethically wrong content at times as it is trained on the data it is fed. This becomes harmful for the coming generations. For example, many easily accessible AI content-creation tools demonstrate demographic stereotypes. According to this report, these tools are being used to generate millions of photos every day and can cause serious concerns.

Many of the biases are VERY complex and not easy to predict, let alone mitigate. For example, merely mentioning a group or nationality can influence many aspects/objects in an image, tying groups to wealth/poverty. (Look at the car, the house, the clothes, etc.) 3/8 pic.twitter.com/IKkGI69r27

— Federico Bianchi (@federicobianchy) November 8, 2022

How to identify and prevent AI content

How can you prevent AI content? By using half-human and half-AI approach. The half-human and half-AI approach is the key to overcoming low-quality, biased, and misleading AI content. This means that giving your content 50 percent AI and 50 percent human effort can do wonders for your content strategy.

Source: Animalz

While humans cannot produce huge amounts of content faster, AI can. On the other hand, AI cannot generate content while fact-checking, can ramble, and cannot support arguments. So, one can compensate for the other's weaknesses with their strengths.

There are several tools that you can use to identify AI content, such as:

1. Originality AI- This tool helps you detect plagiarism and AI in your content. It is best for marketers and web publishers.
2. ZeroGPT- This is a free-to-use, simple, and easy way to detect the use of AI in content. You only need to feed it the text you want to verify for AI inclusion.
3. Sapling AI- Sapling helps you identify and tell the probability of AI-generated content. This tool is also free and easy to use.
4. ContentDetector.AI - Similar to GPTZero, This is a free-to-use, simple, and easy way to detect AI in content with out any restrictions. It will also provide which sentences in the given text are likely be written using AI

Key takeaways

For now, our takeaway on AI in content marketing would be:

• You can use AI for content, including creation, ideation, research, and analytics.
• AI cannot fact-check, add stories and create biased content. So, human writers need to use it as a tool and do fact-checking, add information gain, and remove biases, if any, on their end when creating content with it.
• AI and writers both can together create high-quality content. Writers need to treat AI as a tool that acts as a writing assistant.