Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard a lot of buzz on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI). Have trouble organizing your schedule? Let AI handle that. Can’t come up with a caption for an Instagram post? AI can. Don’t feel like driving your car? Well, thanks to artificial intelligence, you may not have to anymore.
These days, it seems like AI can optimize every part of our lives, and while it feels more than a little dystopian, there’s no way to ignore how rapidly it is changing the world. The increasing reliance on AI and the further integration of AI and digital marketing have piqued the interest of many businesses, causing them to wonder if the two are enjoying a happy marriage or if the relationship is toxic.
AI and digital marketing clearly aren’t getting divorced anytime soon, and it has become increasingly clear that marketers can’t just ignore AI, but should your marketing partners be leveraging AI? Is AI-generated content good or bad? What can marketers do that AI can’t?
In our professional opinion, you should leverage AI in your digital marketing strategies — but you should not rely on it completely. It’s all about balance. But what can marketing experts actually gain from utilizing AI in marketing strategies and deliverables? Which AI tools are worth incorporating?
Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing professional, acquainting yourself with some of the do’s and don’ts for using AI in your digital marketing strategy can make sure that you capitalize on opportunity, but don’t compromise quality, when working with AI.
The do’s: How to leverage AI properly
1. Do use AI to help kickstart ideas
When you’ve been doing content marketing for as long as we have, sometimes new ideas on familiar subjects can feel hard to come by. This is where AI tools like Semrush’s topic research function and ChatGPT can assist you in your brainstorming sessions. These tools can easily analyze trends and audience preferences, suggesting relevant and engaging themes that align with an event or your industry.
We like to leverage AI to help us see what topics are trending and how we can add our clients’ unique spins to them to create more unique SEO-optimized content. Or, if we have an idea but need a little help refining the concept, AI can also help fill in the gaps. This can save you time and energy and provide more time for your creatives to focus on high-quality content creation.
2. Do use AI for content research
One of the coolest things about being a marketing writer is learning the ins and outs of multiple industries to create relevant content — it’s also one of the reasons why you always need a human to write accurate content — but this doesn’t mean that we can’t use AI to make necessary information more user-friendly, or to condense steps in the research process.
You can leverage AI for content research to gather information and create outlines for your work more quickly. AI tools can quickly scan and summarize relevant articles, studies, and data on the web, providing additional insights to round out your content.
“When writing for industries such as legal or finance, I like to use AI to summarize jargon and industry-dense articles to help me convert complex topics into layman’s terms so that an average audience can better understand the concept.
Oftentimes, our clients will deliver blocks of notes or text that can be tricky to decipher if you don’t have a law degree or speak a financial language. AI can bridge understanding to ensure that our optimized content is effective and appealing.”
Jordan Grimmer | Senior Content Specialist at Baal & Spots
Outside of our regular SEO research routine, AI can suggest relevant keywords, key themes, or talking points that search engines deem important to keep our content relevant and competitive. While we don’t use AI to author our content, it has become a helpful step in ensuring that our content has everything it needs to succeed.
3. Do utilize AI design tools
Your brand’s look and feel are crucial parts of your online identity. Maintaining and cultivating this identity is why we tailor our design work to each client’s personal brand and why human designers are so essential.
That being said, clean and custom designs take a lot of time. And while we pride ourselves on our custom creative, we leverage AI design tools to help us speed up production work for the details that need heavier lifting.
For example, if we want to create a social media graphic featuring a client’s product, AI can help us remove the product from the image’s background faster and more efficiently than if we were to do it manually. The precision and efficiency that AI can provide to our team are valuable, even if many AI design tools are still in the early stages.
“At this moment, the possibilities of AI in terms of design are a bit limited. However, looking to the future, the capabilities of these tools look very promising and could change the way we look at and deliver creative for our clients.”
Maher El Aridi | Co-Founder & Creative Lead at Baal & Spots
4. Do utilize AI to help with data analysis
Better reporting, better results
Receiving automated data and statistics on performance can’t always deliver the deep insights necessary to running a business. This is why we deliver in-depth, personalized monthly reports that help us analyze efforts and optimize our outcomes for your business and marketing goals.
Although our team dives into our reports manually to ensure that our clients are seeing the real story and performance of their digital marketing efforts, AI can quickly analyze large amounts of data from different sources, finding patterns and trends that people might miss.
These tools use machine learning to predict future trends, customer behavior, and campaign success, giving marketers useful insights. We want our reports to be as thorough as possible, and AI can help make that happen. By utilizing AI tools, we can create more accurate reports, make better decisions based on data, improve the effectiveness of our current campaigns, and figure out actionable next steps to optimize our efforts.
Keep up with the competition
We’re always looking for ways to improve our content for our clients. One method of keeping content cutting-edge is conducting competitive analysis using AI. We’ll take both our content piece and a high-ranking competitor piece, plug them into AI, and ask it to point out key differences or identify any gaps.
“Using AI for content comparison is a great way to pull something that is successful already and figure out how and why. What topics are your competitors discussing that you’re not? How is it structured? Are top-ranking sites using more images or outbound links? What practices or information could we include to improve our work? It’s a simple and cool way to identify content gaps.”
Levi Dunning | Senior Content Specialist at Baal & Spots
Content marketing, at its core, is a balance of optimization and authenticity. It can also feel like watching multiple race cars surpass each other on a track. Sometimes, in order to maintain relevancy and keep your content competitive, you have to see what makes those other cars go so fast. Although we can draw our own conclusions, AI helps us identify factors that could be utilized in our strategy to push our work forward.
The don’ts: Avoiding the pitfalls of AI-generated content
1. Don’t use AI to write SEO content
Content marketing is a large part of what we do, and when you specialize in content creation, it can be tempting to just plug a prompt into Jasper and let it write to its artificial heart’s content, especially when it seems like everyone else is doing it.
But we know that content created by AI lacks the authenticity and attention to detail that it needs to succeed — and we’re not just saying that. AI-generated content performs worse than human-generated content. There are a couple of reasons for this.
Content marketing is personal
AI tools deliver every product in a similar way. Even with complex language learning models and perfect user prompts, AI can’t help but use a one-size-fits-all approach. Sure, AI can write a blog, but it will lack your brand’s voice, authenticity, expertise, and the characteristics that make your product or service unique.
AI is not concerned with helping you stand out against the competition. In fact, AI-generated content can only blend in with the sea of similarly written content and will further obscure what makes you and your brand stand out.
“So many of our clients bring a unique perspective to their industries. As a content writer, I understand their brand and what messages are important to them to convey to their audiences. AI doesn’t know them like I do and can’t create content that paints the full picture.”
Chloe Kingston | Senior Content Specialist at Baal & Spots
Beware of Google
In March of 2024, Google released an update cracking down on AI-generated content. Why? According to Google, where success for your business is vital, AI content is often created to manipulate search algorithms to move unhelpful sites up the rankings, which is therefore a bad SEO practice.
Many websites learned very quickly that their content, and in turn, their website, was suffering due to their use of AI. Relying solely on AI for content creation is a bad idea for many reasons:
- Google will likely penalize your content and website for being “low quality”
- AI content will generate less traffic and engagement
- AI content will not be optimized to convert customers
- You run the risk of competitors outranking you
- You can potentially spread inaccurate or outdated information
- You may lose the trust of your audience
- You may infringe on copyrights, trademarks, or other important legal guidelines
AI pulls information from what already exists and spits it out in the most generic manner. AI tools get their information from content written by humans, and therefore AI-generated content would not exist without high-quality, human-made content. AI may be the future, but the human touch will always be the standard for success.
Keep reading: Is blogging still relevant?
2. Don’t skip quality control
No matter what mechanisms you use for content creation, everything you do should be proofed by a human. Period. Whether it’s a blog, a web page, or a graphic, anything you plan on putting out onto the internet should adhere to your standards.
AI tools are great for efficiency, but they are not at all capable of providing reliable or accurate information. We constantly come across AI-generated content that has outdated or just plain wrong information, publishing which could land businesses in many industries in a whole heap of trouble.
Incorrect or low-quality content can not only be harmful to your users but can also cause Google to penalize your website and bury your business. You should, at the bare minimum, always take the time to proofread and check your content for any errors or inconsistencies.
3. Don’t forget the user experience
Throughout your entire content creation process, don’t forget that you are speaking to real humans who are viewing your content (and hoping to convert). AI-generated content often lacks a human touch, which makes it come off as inauthentic and dishonest and results in decreased engagement from your target audience. Content that has been completely written by AI has a particular language and structure, and relies on patterns that make it incredibly easy to spot — especially for Google’s site crawlers.
Your content should put the user’s needs first, which means publishing work that is personable, reliable, accurate, and helpful. AI cannot achieve all of those things; only an expert can.
Need help incorporating AI and digital marketing the right way? We can help.
Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the integration of AI and digital marketing. Instead of fighting it, embrace it! Incorporating AI can be a difficult path to navigate, but with the right digital marketing partner you can make sure that you keep opportunities for your business and the quality of your content high.
The digital marketing experts at Baal & Spots (hi, that’s us!) leverage AI as a helpful tool without losing the essential human element in our content marketing. Whether we’re carrying out a brand positioning strategy using search engine marketing or writing optimized content for your website, we put the user experience first and foremost in every bespoke deliverable.
Ready to embrace the future of content marketing? Don’t worry, you don’t have to go it alone. Let’s chat about your business’s marketing goals together.
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