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Using AI To Improve Your Marketing Content

A few weeks ago, we did a social media post about how some marketers are leaning into AI, trying to find a more effective way to reach audiences. Many are using AI for audience selection, content production, setting bidding prices for ads, and more. It’s snuck into the industry quickly, but this shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, Amazon has been suggesting products based on our buying behaviors for years.  Still, AI is changing how we work, so we thought we’d share a bit about how we’re using it safely.

For this example, we’ll be using ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/), which we think is one of the better affordable options right now. Of course, this is likely to change as the competition heats up. It’s also good to point out that larger companies may be able to utilize AI that’s starting to be incorporated into their integrated marketing tools.  This will likely become more and more common in the years ahead. 

If you go to ChatGPT, you can create an account.  Then you’ll be able to submit messages to ChatGPT and it’ll try to respond with helpful content.  Here’s a sample of what we got when we said “Provide an upbeat social media post for our company named Tires For Everyone summarizing our new winter tires”.  

Everyone has their preferences in writing, but as a seasoned marketer, I’d see a few things here that I think might not be optimal:

  • The text is long by most social media standards.  Most marketers will tell you, that shorter converts better.
  • There are some claims made here about “durability” and “superior traction” that might need to be vetted.  This is especially true in highly regulated industries (pharma, financial, public media…) 
  • This has a pretty specific tone, so we might need to edit it to match our other marketing content 
  • What’s with the emojis? 

All, in all, it’s a pretty standard AI response. It’s not horrible, it might give us ideas and speed us along, but it needs some work.  So, how do you take AI responses like this and use them effectively?  I’ll share a few key recommendations below! 

 

Clarify what you want 

Each AI system does this a bit differently, but providing additional details in your content requests will get you content that’s closer to what you’re looking for. 

Consider things like specifying the desired content length and the age of the audience you’re targeting to improve your results. You can also provide content examples that you like to increase the chances you get something close to what you’re looking for.  Just don’t expect perfection. 

Below you can see what we get when we’re a bit clearer about what we want by specifying content length, saying to use a professional tone, and stating who we’re targeting.  It’s getting closer to something we can use:

Watch for Inaccurate Statements 

Early releases of AI have gotten a lot of notoriety for making inaccurate or illogical arguments.  Most current AI systems don’t fact-check, so this can be dangerous.  No doubt, this will improve in the future, but right now it could be a BIG problem. For example, in our ChatGPT session, we didn’t tell it our tires were “top-of-the-line” or that they are “crafted with precision”.  Still, AI didn’t hesitate to embellish that. In this instance, that’s maybe not a horrible overstep, but imagine if we were writing copy for a new pharmaceutical drug. Any overstatement could cost the company millions in legal fees.  Yikes!  

Write For Conversions 

Unfortunately, most AI systems don’t yet factor in what will convert best. So, if you aren’t careful, you won’t get the best results.  As you edit content provided by AI, please ask yourself if the copy will work in a digital environment. This includes looking at things like: 

  • Is there a call to action that’s easy to use? 
  • Will it resonate with the desired audience?
  • Is there any time sensitivity for the customer to act?
  • Are targeted SEO terms used?
  • Do any hashtags make sense… 

Use It for Brainstorming  

One of the places AI really shines is letting you consider approaches you might not normally take. It’s easy to run several iterations of content with different approaches. For example, we could ask Chat GPT to do a funny version, a version focusing on technical differences, or one with a serious tone, all in the span of a few minutes. Once you find one that you think will perform well, fine-tune it from there.  

Monitor the Capabilities of Tools You’re Using

There’s a constant rollout of features with AI, and platforms will continue to evolve.  Keep an eye on how your industry is leveraging AI.  We expect huge strides in content production, personalization tools (sales), and media buying.   

 

With these best practices, you’ll likely find AI to be a great tool!  We use it frequently at Visionary WebDZ, to help improve results and keep budgets low for our clients.  Feel free to reach out if you want to see it in action! 

Cheers!

-Ross Yaeger  

10/27/23