Harnessing the Power of AI for Digital Marketing Content

The future of digital marketing will always be influenced by advances in technology, along with societal changes and norms. News on the abilities of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is virtually buzzing, but we still need to accept that while AI can improve accuracy, save time and streamline service delivery, it cannot replace a living, breathing writer. Not yet anyway.

At its core, AI is a computer program with the ability to imitate human traits like the recognition of images or outlining patterns in data sets. This coupled with Machine Learning, a subset of AI, means all data available is continually compared and analysed at speeds humans cannot match. In the simplest terms – both Machine Learning and AI are algorithms but differ on whether the data they process is structured or unstructured.

AI has posed many questions to both its users and outside observers. Will AI take our jobs? Are designers, copywriters and other digital marketers out of a job?

In short, AI is not at a level where it could be a viable replacement for a skilled human being’s ability to create nuanced content and adapt or grasp complex ideas, especially when it comes to language and its use. However, ignoring the potential of AI would be a grave mistake.

Using AI for Content Creation

While AI has reached a point of impressive writing capabilities, it still sounds like a robot at the end of the day. However, there are plenty of AI tools a writer can make use of as a means of improving their work. We will explore a few of these tools below.

AI Proofreading Tools

People may not realise they are making use of AI when they write but anyone who uses proofreading tools like Grammarly is producing AI-influenced content. The tool crawls the words and points out any mistakes with suggestions on how to correct them.

Any student who handed in a dissertation before the age of Grammarly is sure to tell you it would have made a huge difference to both their writing experience and the resulting paper.

Professional copywriters should make use of proofreading tools. However, these proofing tools should not replace a fellow skilled writer editing the content.

AI Research Tools

Google is a rat race to the #1 ranked spot. The whole role of SEO is to give users the best experience while answering their posed question or buyer intention as matched with Google’s algorithms.

Google Ads is companies throwing money at the top spot in hopes of converting more leads. These methods are perfectly valid when looking for quick chunks of information or to make a purchase. However, they may fall short for writers looking to do more in-depth research.

While conducting research, a search engine alone may not be as effective at retrieving the information required without some expertise on how to talk to Google, something professional SEOs are fluent in.

Google has filled this gap in the market with its own AI tool called “Talk to Books.” It allows the searcher to enter their statement, subject or query in the search bar. Talk to Books then gives you a list of books that cover or are related to the subject matter entered in the initial search. This clearly outweighs the efficiency presented by the alternative of sifting through your local libraries’ catalogues.

AI Writing Tools

There are a huge number of AI Writing Tools out there, though they are not all created equal. While we can understand tools like Rytr that act as a writing assistant, rather than a replacement for the writer, those that aim to replace a person tend to fall short.

This does not mean these tools are not useful. While AI writing tools are not yet at a level to create content without human reasoning and intervention before publishing. At this point, AI writing tools can be seen as productivity tools Digital Marketers can benefit from.

Below we discuss some of the fundamental ways in which AI writing tools can’t stack up to an experienced writer.

Tone 

The most obvious flaw with AI writing tools is that they cannot replicate tone. This is essential to all writing, especially writing for marketing purposes.

The tone in writing is born from understanding the emotion you will evoke in your audience. AI doesn’t understand emotions and so cannot successfully recreate the particular tone of writing by a single person or for a business with a curated brand voice.

The tone of a piece of work can be outraged and critical or sarcastic and ironic. AI cannot understand these kinds of nuances AI nor successfully recreate.

Some may argue that while AI can’t master certain aspects of writing, a person could always step in at this point, which is true!

Style

There are multiple different writing styles that are employed for different reasons. The style is based on the audience, especially in the world of digital writing. The style of a written piece is based on (but not limited to) the following:

• Level of formality
• The complexity of the language used
• Tone
• Mood
• Syntax

Original Thought

While we cannot deny that AI writing is impressive and the speed at which it can regurgitate information is unmatched, it is still unoriginal.

All writers strive to be original. AI is incapable of creating original. It can only pull up the information it has found in its data source. This means that in situations where the writer or student is tasked with comparing ideas and forming an opinion, AI won’t be able to do your homework for you.

Plagiarism 

With the regurgitation of unoriginal information continuously being done by AI, plagiarism is almost always guaranteed because the only information it can give is the information it already has. When plagiarism is committed by an individual, it is usually done knowingly. AI is not knowingly plagiarising, but that does not negate the fact that it is not from the mind of a writer.

Ask yourself this, if a student is tasked with writing a paper on Ancient Greece and gives in a completely AI-generated paper, has the student committed plagiarism? This is sure to be a hot debate amongst teachers, students and educational practitioners in the near future.

Some AI tools have even jumped ahead of the game as this was the perfect starting point for AI. Grammarly has a plagiarism checker as AI is perfectly adept at crawling huge amounts of text to find a match. Loved by teachers, hated by sneaky students.

It would be foolish to trust AI-generated content as original or even true. It will need to be fact-checked and checked for plagiarism before publishing.

SEO – Matching Google’s Requirements

“Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller says content automatically generated with AI writing tools is considered spam, according to the search engine’s webmaster guidelines.”- Search Engine Journal

In Google’s eyes, content created by AI is considered automatically generated. Automatically generated content is still considered spam by Google. It’s not worth losing work done by SEOs to save some money using AI-generated content. It is more than likely to trigger Google’s webspam team to take action with potentially irreparable damage done to a website’s SEO and overall reputation.

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is that AI will continue to grow and essentially become “smarter” as it continues to consume and crawl data. The beauty of “Machine Learning” is that the more information it receives, the more data it will process and “learn from”.

The speed at which AI can deliver accurate results is astonishing and not making use of this technological advancement may leave you in your competitors’ dust.

Making use of Content Marketing teams that know how to use these tools effectively is essential to avoid sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb amongst those who don’t place blind faith in the effectiveness of AI-generated content.