Writing and content creation teams aren’t accessible to small businesses. If you’re new to the industry and don’t have a set marketing budget, you might have to do everything yourself with the tools that you have.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be an excellent middle ground. It helps you make more content without hiring an entire team with far more expensive fees.
That said, is it really suitable for your content marketing strategy? Are there problems you might run into? And finally, is it even effective?
Why Would You Use AI for Content Marketing?
Content marketing continues to yield significant ROI for a lot of websites. However, you can’t just make whatever you want and expect immediate results. To generate the most ROI, you need to consistently produce high-quality content.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an easy feat. High-quality content isn’t easy to make, after all. As a result, content marketers can’t produce as much content as they want. Hence, many marketers hire content writers and site managers to increase content production.
Big companies might have an entire team of editors, researchers, and writers to ensure they’re publishing new content multiple times a day. If you’re new to SEO or a small business, you might be unable to keep up with your competition.
AI content creation tools can make long-form blog posts from scratch. In most cases, you only need to provide a title, list some keywords, and do a few tweaks to get an instant 1000-word blog post. For small content marketing operations, this seems like a great way to compete with bigger companies.
The Potential Problems With AI Content Creation
Google is cracking down on AI-generated content. As a result, several websites that used to do well in the past couple of years stopped getting traffic altogether. Google has essentially punished AI content to clean up the SERPs.
Remember, Google prioritizes the end user. Therefore, they want searchers to find high-quality and relevant content. AI-generated content tends to be robotic, stiff, or outright plagiarism. Bot-generated content tends to be less coherent (as opposed to ones written by real content writers), so Google wants to avoid it altogether.
Even the most expensive AI content tools occasionally create nonsensical, outdated, or irrelevant text. Sometimes, the generated content isn’t even relevant to the title and keywords you input. So, if you’re not careful, you might post gibberish content that none of the end users will appreciate.
Can You Still Leverage AI for Content Marketing?
Surprisingly, yes.
Despite all the negative things I’ve mentioned, there is a way to use AI content generators to streamline your content creation. However, you still can’t rely on AI content tools to create content from scratch. You’ll still get penalties if you use a generator, copy-paste the result, and publish it without a second glance.
Instead, you can use AI content tools to help you make better content. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate them into your content creation strategy:
- Get content ideas. If you’re running out of ideas, AI content tools can suggest titles, keywords, and talking points for you to expound on.
- Use it as an outlining tool. Instead of letting the AI generator do all the work, just generate an outline with potential talking points. You can add and remove points from the outline as you see fit. This will reduce the time you need to research a topic.
- Add a “human touch” to your AI-generated content. Google can detect nonsensical, almost robotic sentences in AI-generated content. To avoid the penalties, you can use your AI tools to generate a draft and thoroughly do edits. Here, you can write more conversational phrases, use a relaxed tone, and add realistic examples.
Do note that you still need to invest significant time and effort into making AI content less spammy and robotic. In this case, your AI content tools are no longer used for instant, copy-paste content. Instead, it’s now an additional tool to improve and streamline your creation process.
Should You Purchase an AI Content Generator?
You can, but you must understand the possible risks of posting unedited AI-generated content. If you’re a small business looking to invest in content marketing tools, a good word processor, grammar tool, plagiarism, or AI checker might be a better first option.
If you already have all the basics, you can consider getting an AI content tool to boost your creation process.
That said, Google still prioritizes content that appeals to real people using the searches. So, it would be best if you were very careful about your use of AI.
You can’t let it churn out content for you. Otherwise, your site might suffer from penalties and lost traffic.
