In today's landscape, business leaders need to establish themselves as thought leaders and build trust with their customers and prospects. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking hour creating content.
Generative AI is the new shiny toy for many organizations (both big and small). It’s a magic wand: wave it and out pops perfectly curated, perfectly optimized copy for all your content marketing channels.
If only that were true.
Don’t get me wrong. Generative AI is an amazingly powerful tool for content development. But it’s just that: a tool. Like any tool, its success is all in how you use it.
The benefits of generative AI for content creation
Generative AI changed the content marketing game. It’s made blogging and posting on social media much more accessible. And, for writers, it offers a starting point other than the blinking cursor of death.
But its real power? Generative AI provides the words leaders want to feel comfortable and confident to share their ideas with the world. Without getting dragged into the weeds.
Generative AI offers leaders two key benefits when it comes to content creation:
Leaders can focus on ideas instead of specific words
The most time-consuming aspect of content marketing campaigns is the actual writing. Generative AI removes that obstacle. You give it your ideas, expert insights, or key takeaways and it writes the content for you. In seconds, it can write whatever copy your heart desires: blog posts, articles, video scripts, social media posts, email copy, or landing pages. You have the expertise. Generative AI tools have the words to make your expertise shine.
Competing in Search Results with Embedded SEO Prompts
Generative AI tools also help that expertise get found. These tools can do basic search engine optimization (SEO) research for you—identifying keywords in existing content, highlighting the most common topics in search results, and finding the most frequently asked questions on specific topics. That information can then be used as part of a prompt to help your content rank on search engines.
The challenge of using generative AI
But generative AI isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Because it’s still a new technology, there are some kinks you have to work around. Namely, you have to train it.
Generative AI tools are machine learning products. They have to be trained on your style, target audience and expertise before it will pop out perfect little posts for you. Especially now, as it's still in its infancy stages. (Though with GPT 4, we’re seeing massive improvements).
If you don’t train your AI to talk like you to your audience about topics in your niche, you’re going to run into quality challenges.
The importance of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT)
Whether your content is developed with AI or written by humans, the search engines don’t really care. They care about quality. Which is why they’re putting more emphasis than ever on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT).
Every time you post on your website, you give off EEAT signals. The search engines use these signals to assign your content a quality score. The higher the score, the higher your content will rank on search results pages. And, despite the power of generative AI, the quality of what it gives you depends on how well you crafted your prompt.
But quality isn’t just a score search engines use. It’s also how you stand out amongst a crowd full of people yelling the same things you are.
Noise on search results pages isn’t new. Type any keyword into Google and you’ll most likely pull more than a million results. Generative AI tools read those results to write your content. Without a clear prompt or defined outline, your post is just going to parrot everything that already exists on the internet.
Not to mention, not all AI tools have learned the cardinal rule yet: you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. If the information doesn’t come back to you as a bland regurgitation of the top 10 search results, then it probably contains inaccurate information.
3 secrets to master generative AI for your content marketing initiatives
Generative AI can be the most powerful tool for your content marketing efforts. . . if you know how to wield it. With the right strategy, you can leverage generative AI tools to shorten your content production timelines and quickly share your expertise, ideas, and insights with your customers, prospects and colleagues. Here’s a step-by-step guide to the top 3 secrets for creating quality content with generative AI:
1. Learn prompt engineering
Generative AI may be powerful, but it can’t read your mind. Prompts are how you communicate with it. Every AI tools is going to give you examples when you first log in (Please note: All of these were pulled directly from Copy.ai.):
“Write a personalized email to [insert LinkedIn profile URL]”
“Summarize the latest news on generative AI”
“Write a product description for a bicycle in the style of Hemingway”
“Create a blog post about generative AI”
There are even plugins (like AIPRM for ChatGPT) you can use to help you generate prompts.
But these prompts alone won’t get you what you want. Instead, you should provide specific insights, takeaways and instructions.
Define your content type and length: Different mediums have different requirements. A LinkedIn post and a landing page have drastically different goals and require drastically different copy. In your prompts, include the channel or medium for the copy (e.g. “Write a LinkedIn post for my personal account that talks about . . .”). That’s going to give your AI cues for how long you need the copy to be and the structure it should use. Where a LinkedIn post is going to use a lot of fragments and single sentence paragraphs, Twitter posts will use a lot of emojis. Where landing pages will arrange paragraphs into very short sections, blog posts will have longer paragraphs with more context.
You can also specify how long you want the post to be depending on your goals. For example: “Write a 1,200 to 2,000 word blog post for makenzieward.com about . . .” Not a fan of word counts? Generative AI tools can respond to character counts (like for SEO descriptions and social media posts) or the number of paragraphs (like for landing pages and emails).
Include your keywords: The other ways to improve your AI prompts is to include a list of keywords you want to include in the content. You can dictate that the AI uses keywords in section headers or a specific number of times throughout the piece. For example: “Write a 1,200 to 2,000 word blog post for makenzieward.com about using generative AI for content marketing and include the keywords “content marketing” and “generative AI” at least 10 times each.”
This lets you build SEO best practices into your content from the very beginning, so you don’t have your Yoast plugin telling you your SEO needs work.
2. Define your tone and audience
The advanced step to prompt engineering for content marketing is to establish your tone and identify your audience in the prompt. This means less editing work for you on the backend and a higher chance of the content resonating with your audience.
Identify your tone: Generative AI tools respond to terms like direct, confident, powerful, fun, catchy, happy, informative, persuasive, and professional in your prompts to help it hit the right note when it generates your content. Not sure what words to use? Copy.ai has a brand analyzer tool that can help you pinpoint your unique tone. Or you can use trial and error in a specific Chat window.
You can also respond to content generations with clarifying phrases like “remove the corporate jargon from that copy” or “make that copy more upbeat.” The AI will regenerate the copy based on your feedback.
Know Your Target Audience: Tone identifies the author as you. But truly successful content marketing initiatives should also clue your audience into the knowledge that this content is for them. Do they use specific phrases or acronyms? Add it to your prompt. Do they have specific concerns or needs that your content needs to address? Add it to your prompt.
For example, if I’m targeting governmental agencies, I’m going to refine my prompt to say “use the word agency instead of business or organization in the copy.”
It’s the little cues in word choice and phrasing that make your readers feel like you're talking to them instead of into the void. And you can train that into your generative AI tools.
3. Edit and Personalize AI-Generated Content
If books and movies have taught us anything, it’s that AI is eventually going to take over the world. While that might be a bit hyperbolic (at least for now), governmental agencies are coming out with regulations about when and how AI can be used, and the rights consumers have to know when they’re interacting with an AI or something made by an AI.
The most likely scenario is that any AI generated content will have to be identified as AI generated content. With Google building its own AI, the likelihood that it penalizes businesses using the technology in their own content marketing efforts is slim.
But there are a few proactive steps you can take to make sure your content stays in the good graces of governmental bodies and search engines:
Vet Your Content
While AI is still new, avoid publishing AI-generated content straight from the platform. Instead, carefully review and edit it for accuracy, alignment with your target audience, and adherence to your unique tone. And while you’re at it, make a few changes to the piece.
In August 2023, a U.S. court in Washington, D.C., ruled that any work of art created by AI without human intervention cannot be copyrighted. It won’t be long until that extends to software products and written works, too. So, make sure you own your content rights by infusing a little human element into the piece.
Add a content tag
If you want to be really proactive, you could start adding a note on your blog posts that the content was generated by AI. TikTok has already launched new rules about tagging AI-generated content. While it’s not for sure that other platforms will require these tags, it’s not outside the realm of possibility either.
Make sure generative AI is an asset to your content marketing initiatives, not an obstacle
Use these three tips to boost the quality of your AI generated content and infuse expertise and authority into your content marketing efforts. Then leverage your new prompt engineering skills to confidently establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and market.
Need help figuring out your first step? Let’s build your content marketing and thought leadership strategy together!
Comments