AI is alluring, offering the promise of easy content generation for blogs, emails, websites, brochures and more. But it can be hard to know if it’s right for your business. Business owners like the thought of lower-cost content, while marketers appreciate the sheer volume that AI can produce, creating more content in shorter amounts of time. Those seem like good reasons.
To find out if AI is a viable business choice for content creators, the R2R Marketing team spent much of 2023 experimenting with various platforms. Here’s what we found:
AI can generate a lot of content fast. If you need a blog article on a relatively generic topic, ChatGPT and other tools can bring your prompt to life quickly. For example, the prompt “Write a blog article about writing and keeping effective New Year’s resolutions” will give you an article titled “Mastering the Art of Crafting and Sustaining Effective New Year’s Resolutions” with a seven-step process.
The content is suitable for a wide range of audiences. It’s great if you have a blog specifically for the purpose of selling digital ad space around the article. It’s not great, however, if you’re trying to engage your audience. The article is fairly lifeless and feels generic. There is no “voice” or personality.
Reading the article reminded me of a line from the character playing Sam Phillips in the Johnny Cash biographical movie Walk The Line, “We’ve already heard that song a hundred times. Just like that. Just. Like. How. You. Sing it.”
There’s nothing special about the content. No hook, no emotion, no story or example the reader can connect with and feel like the writing speaks to them personally. That’s not good enough. Real marketing content has a purpose.
Good writing moves people. Good marketing content moves people to act or at least sets the stage for the future.
When we used more specific prompts for industry information or expertise, we found the articles required a lot of fact-checking. They frequently had incorrect, outdated or misleading information. Where AI did well was in helping generate new ideas or new approaches to old ideas. This included summarizing content shared in a prompt to generate social media post ideas and themes. Still, the posts required editing, fact-checking, and familiarity with the brand, but the general ideas were helpful.
The bottom line is that for authenticity and marketing content that will connect with your target audience, today’s AI tools have limitations. If you’re a for-profit blogger who needs to generate a lot more general content to accompany ads, AI is likely a good tool for your business.
As always, if you need help with your marketing strategy, get in touch with the R2R experts.
