I turn 50 this year, so I’ve been reflecting on a few things. I’ve spent over half of my life (in fact, my entire career) in marketing, which I’ve loved every minute of, but it’s incredible how technology has changed how we market nowadays, so I’ve certainly been kept on my toes.
The internet and AI have brought about the biggest changes, and now I find myself talking about the likes of ChatGPT with my clients. I’ve been overwhelmed by how many headlines this topic has dominated in the last couple of months. It’s an exciting development and I can see how useful this is in some parts of marketing, so I wanted to offer some tips around usage.
In marketing terms, AI is often used to carry out a particular task – such as identifying where to place advertising to maximise efficiency or how to personalise an email or ad campaign to increase the likelihood of getting a desired reaction or sale. In this way, AI can help build more effective marketing strategies, improve the customer journey by meeting customers’ expectations throughout their experience, and change the way businesses attract, nurture, and convert prospects to increase conversions and sales across a wide range of channels.
New AI language tools such as ChatGPT introduce a new dimension. This is where AI can be used to assist in writing content – which in marketing terms could include emails, blog posts, FAQs for websites, etc.
For instance, here’s some AI-generated content that came from typing in the question, “What are the advantages of using AI for writing content?”:
“AI-assisted writing is becoming increasingly popular in the field of content creation. By leveraging AI technology, copywriters can save time and effort while creating content that is of higher quality than ever before. AI-powered writing tools can help to automate mundane tasks such as research and data collection, enabling writers to focus on crafting compelling stories with powerful messaging. Additionally, AI technology can provide insights into the performance of content pieces, allowing copywriters to optimize their work for maximum impact. Ultimately, using AI for writing content provides numerous advantages that can help to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of any copywriting project.”
Not bad, at least to get things started – and while content still requires a human editor to tweak and improve it, AI is good at answering factual questions and providing ‘base’ information.
Why and when are AI language tools useful?
Tools like ChatGPT and Rytr are giving a helping hand to marketing content writers with things like:
- Generating content ideas for social media platforms, blogs, marketing campaigns, and even recreating existing content to increase its chances of going viral
- Creating base content for FAQ pages or product descriptions, or for summarising long content passages
- Personalising content geared to particular target markets
- Handling repetitive tasks – not just writing email responses and things like social media posts, but for scheduling meetings, creating reminders, etc.
- Research into SEO-focused blog posts or articles.
When AI language tools need some caution
Just like humans, AI language tools have their limitations, and there are numerous things to be aware of, such as:
- The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, so better directions (or questions or prompts fed into the tool) result in better-quality answers
- When you feed a question into the system, the answers you get aren’t always correct. ChatGPT is designed to provide answers that ‘feel’ right to humans, and can provide results that SEEM plausible, but are in fact wrong. Many users have discovered incorrect answers and errors as a result – so editing and proofreading are definitely still required!
- At least as of this writing, ChatGPT has only been ‘trained’ on information up to 2021, which means that it doesn’t have access to data after that time. Therefore, if you ask a question about more recent events (or software, phone models, the latest technology, etc.), you’re likely to get outdated information
- It can’t fetch real-time information or answer multiple rapid queries (like a search engine).
As we know, it’s the stories and human connections that get people to take notice and engage with our brands. So whilst not to sound biased (!), I still think that AI-generated content still needs human input, despite being a useful tool – so maybe there’s a few more years in this particular marketing consultant after all. Maybe not another 50, though … !
Curious about incorporating AI into more of your marketing efforts? Contact Breathe Marketing today.
