Gartner research indicates the number of enterprises implementing AI solutions grew 270% from 2015 to 2019, and that number has only continued to skyrocket.
(What motivates this growth? —and what should that teach us?)
Gartner also predicts that by 2028, AI-driven machines will account for 20% of the global workforce and 40% of all economic productivity.
(How can you set up now for the future of your content marketing efforts?)
The truth is: AI can help create personalized content, optimize campaigns, and measure results. However, it is important to use AI wisely and follow best practices to ensure success.
In this blog post, we'll look at five powerful ways to scale your AI content marketing best practices.
Design an AI content marketing strategy
The first step to maximizing the power of AI is to design an AI content marketing strategy.
If you don’t have a strategy, it will be challenging to use this technology to drive results and serve your objectives.
In our recent an article on impact of AI in SaaS we highlighted the following:
‘Although B2B companies historically have expected a longer sales cycle, recent research shows that customers in 2023 are becoming more accustomed, due to advances in technology, to quicker processes.’
If you want to stay competitive, you can’t neglect the potential of AI for scalability.
The first step is to map out why you are using AI for content marketing—some B2B marketing teams use AI to support their content efforts for faster execution, and others use it as a last resort.
So write down the “why" behind your decision to use AI for content marketing and design a system to help you achieve your goal. Whether you're building a community for your SaaS or attracting buyers for your products, you have to define a goal and stick to it.
The next step is to create a use case—AI tool fit system.
Chuks Wesley
Here’s what I mean; If you publish text-based content often, do you have a system to utilize AI’s potency for blog posts and social media text-only posts?
For example, if you want to use ChatGPT to foster your content execution, you can use ChatGPT to create tons of headlines that fit your post—this is a process.
Remember, some AI tools help you generate content fully while others serve as support, tools like Lex AJ help you ideate faster and fill in your blank docs.
So, you should have a specific task for each tool to avoid complexity.
For example, the key difference between ChatGPT and Wordtune is the purpose.
ChatGPT is designed to generate natural language responses, whereas Wordtune Spices assists writers by providing analogies, facts, and data to support existing ideas.
So, it would help if you choose each tool for a specific task at a specific stage of your content process. If you want to publish visual content and carousels, you should create a process and AI tool that fits your approach.
For example, the content team at Wordtune use their tool to augment their content writing process and they have a specific compatible task.
At the end of their articles, they add the post script above. What does this imply: They've found a way to create a use case—AI tool fit process.
Put the human in control
When we hear a technology leverages 175 billion parameters, it’s easy to assume it must have the perfect answer.
The opposite is usually the case. AI is best used to assist, not replace, the modern marketer.
Ryan Law, the VP of Content at Animalz, laid so much emphasis on this in an article titled Content Cyborg co-written with Angela Rollins.
They said;
“The goal isn't to write everything with AI — the goal is to get great results from our content."
“It's a human writer’s job to seed the generated content with information gain, to add real-life examples; customer stories; accurate, trusted, and relevant data; product mentions; CTAs.”
They are not the only professionals with this principle.
Karthik Manoharan, Co-founder of WeCodee explained that: “His biggest lesson from using AI in marketing is that you can't blindly rely on recommendations from AI tools.”
Anthony Witherspoon
He also said:
“We spent around $10,000 on ad-spend over a period of three months, with $300 for the tool. The result – crickets. Why? Because the channel was inappropriate. Our target customers were C-level executives who won't trust an ad.”
So, never be tempted to take everything AI-generated, hook, line, and sinker.
Here are some strategies marketers use to stay in control
- Follow a strict content guideline: Unless you use to find a way to use a magic prompt, it's difficult for AI to satisfy your content guideline intent
- Check for tone: When AI writes your headline, you don’t want it to sound like a Buzzfeed type of headline.
- Get buy-ins from executive members: This is not permission to descend into a content-by-committee approach. Rather, an encouragement to agree to a specific outcome with executive members and stick to the process that helps you achieve such a result.
Train writers to use the tool
“AI in the hands of skilled practitioners—whether writers, photographers, or social media managers—is far more powerful than AI alone," said May Habib, the Founder, and CEO of Writer.
While some writers feel the upsurge of AI tools is a downfall for their career, other intentional writers see these tools as an ally that will boost their performance at their workplaces.
Here's what Dan Shipper, the CEO of Every, had to say about using AI creatively:
One lesson from Dan: Go creative with AI or go bland.
The key is to encourage your content team to go the extra mile to learn how to use these tools effectively and efficiently.
But this is what you must know:
The machine is only as good as your input. If you want the best results from AI, train your writers to use it. This way, the AI is trained to generate better results from prompts.
To stay ahead, CIOs need to be creative. If there is no AI talent available, another possibility is to invest in training programs for employees with backgrounds in statistics and data management. Some organizations also create job shares with ecosystem and business partners.
Use AI to automate the process
Picture these two scenarios:
You use an AI content brief builder to churn out briefs for your writers, then you fact check the brief and prune out excesses vs. taking many hours to create a solid content brief—more time is taken, content execution is slower.
However, many content professionals might opt for the latter; while that’s great — I'm not surprised — it’s time-consuming because you have a lot of work to do in other steps of the content publishing process.
So, It's better to automate specific minute content processes to scale execution.
But this doesn't mean over-relying on AI to automate all processes; you must fact-check and edit every automated process to ensure that it is void of error and specific.
I spoke to Teemu Raitaluoto, the founder of AIContentfy; he told me how he scaled his site to 15k in traffic using AIcontentfy — an AI content generator tool.
However, he used this tool to create top of funnel content — this further buttresses the fact that this technology will not wholly replace thought leadership content.
So what should you do? Use AI to automate minute content processes and publish top of funnel content.
I'm not the only one that thinks so… Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa, and MECLABS Institute, said:
“For more complex, emotional topics, it is much harder for AI to create quality content that will attract backlinks from truly authoritative websites."
You should seek an adept, advanced writer who either knows your industry well or has a track record of learning about an industry quickly and creating value.
Draw out a compliance routine and be ethical
The recent U.S. blueprint aims to protect society from harmful AI, reminding all developers and users of AI models that they need to build safeguards into their AI models and strategies.
Organizations that don’t manage AI risk are much more likely to experience negative AI outcomes. Models won’t perform as intended, and there will be security and privacy failures, financial and reputational loss, and individual harm. AI that is carried out wrongly can also cause organizations to make poor business decisions.
But that's not all. You must be ethical about the use of AI.
Imagine this; you are the head of content or content manager. How would you feel when you find out that some of your team’s content has been scrapped and plagiarized on other websites?
Daniel Burstein, Senior Director, Content & Marketing, MarketingSherpa, explained that:
“While ripping off others is certainly nothing new, technology can magnify the problem. As a writer myself, I’ve often seen my articles stolen. While content scraping is frustrating enough, black-hat AI-written content is even more infuriating because they mangle your writing. I’ve stumbled across my writing butchered on LinkedIn by AI mixing it with other articles. I’ve even had poorly AI-spun descriptions of the How I Made It In Marketing podcast emailed back to me in pitches.”
“AI is a robot perched on your shoulder….”
“AI is a robot perched on your shoulder. AI is not the creator at the keyboard", said Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes.
“Will AI improve my content marketing practices?"
Yes, it will, but you must intentionally execute the points in this post.
You can stand out in your industry and create content that accomplishes a goal without cutting corners—copying and pasting or scrapping other content. It's possible.
Remember, you are the boss! Control AI and maximize to the fullest.
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