Creating high-quality, engaging content consistently can be a daunting task for even the most experienced marketers. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can help. AI is changing the way we approach content creation, offering new opportunities for efficiency, creativity, and personalization.
In a recent Health Tech Marketing Show episode, host Adam Turinas, CEO of healthlaunchpad, sat down with Casey Meehan, founder of Blazing Zebra, and Lucy Railton, VP of Marketing for the Drummond Group, shared their insights and experiences on how to leverage AI throughout the content creation process effectively.
Developing a Buyer-Based Strategy with AI
The foundation of a successful content marketing strategy lies in understanding your target audience. AI can be a useful tool in developing a solid buyer-based strategy. By analyzing vast amounts of customer data, market research, and online behavior, AI algorithms can help you create detailed buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics.
Casey Meehan suggests starting by building large knowledge bases around your brand, including information about your mission, values, and unique selling propositions. Additionally, create knowledge bases for each of your target personas, encompassing their pain points, aspirations, and preferences. By feeding this information into AI tools, you can generate insights that will guide your content strategy and ensure that your messaging resonates with your intended audience.
Meehan emphasizes the importance of continuously updating and refining these knowledge bases as you gather more data and feedback from your audience. This iterative process allows the AI to learn and adapt, ultimately providing more accurate and actionable insights over time.
Ideation Using AI
One of the most significant challenges in content creation is consistently generating fresh, engaging ideas that align with your brand and audience. This is where AI can be a game-changer. By leveraging the power of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, AI tools can help you ideate novel content topics and angles.
Casey Meehan recommends a simple, three-step process for using AI in ideation:
- Prompt the AI to generate a list of 30 trending topics in your industry or area of expertise.
- Ask the AI to generate another list of 30 top-of-mind topics for your target audience.
- Instruct the AI to create novel connections between the two lists.
Using the word “novel” in your prompt encourages the AI to think outside the box and generate unconventional ideas. Meehan suggests pushing the AI to create a wide range of ideas, even if some seem unfeasible at first glance. The goal is to find one or two standout concepts to develop into compelling content pieces.
You can experiment with more advanced techniques as you become more comfortable with AI-assisted ideation. For example, you can prompt the AI to generate ideas based on the intersection of your brand knowledge base and your persona knowledge bases. This approach ensures that your content ideas are not only relevant to your audience but also aligned with your brand’s unique perspective and expertise.
Creating a Great First Draft
The next step is to create a first draft. AI can significantly streamline this process, allowing you to generate high-quality drafts in a fraction of the time it would take to write from scratch.
Lucy Railton advises providing the AI with a clear brief that outlines the key points you want to cover, the desired tone and style, and any specific examples or references you want to include. The more context and guidance you provide, the better the AI can generate a draft that meets your expectations.
To ensure that the AI captures your brand’s unique voice and style, Railton suggests giving examples of your best-performing content. This could include blog posts, whitepapers, or social media updates that exemplify the tone and approach you want to emulate. The AI can generate drafts that seamlessly align with your brand guidelines by learning from these examples.
Remember that the first draft generated by the AI is just a starting point. Railton emphasizes the need to review and refine the draft, providing feedback to the AI on areas that need improvement. This iterative process allows the AI to learn and adapt, ultimately producing better drafts over time.
Editing and Improving
Once you have a solid first draft, the real work of editing and refining begins. While AI can generate high-quality content, having a human touch is essential to ensure that the final piece is polished, accurate, and engaging.
Casey Meehan recommends breaking the editing process down into three distinct stages:
- Structural editing: Review the overall structure and flow of the piece, ensuring that the main points are presented logically and coherently. Use AI to help identify any gaps or redundancies in the content.
- Line editing: Focus on refining individual sentences and phrases, paying attention to word choice, clarity, and readability. AI can assist by suggesting alternative phrasing or highlighting areas that may be not very clear to readers.
- Proofreading: Conduct a final review to catch any grammatical errors, typos, or formatting issues. AI tools like Grammarly or Hemingway can be invaluable in this stage, identifying mistakes the human eye might miss.
Throughout the editing process, give clear and specific feedback to the AI. Meehan suggests using the term “verbatim” when providing instructions to ensure that the AI maintains the parts of the draft that you want to keep intact. This helps prevent the AI from overwriting or changing already well-written sections.
Creating Publication-Ready Content
After several rounds of editing and refining, your content should be nearly ready for publication. However, there are a few final steps to ensure that your piece is accurate, credible, and engaging.
Lucy Railton stresses the importance of fact-checking and validating any information included in your content. AI can assist in this process by searching for relevant statistics, studies, or expert opinions to support your claims. Be sure to cite your sources and include links to original research whenever possible. This not only enhances the credibility of your content but also provides value to your readers by directing them to additional resources.
In addition to text-based content, consider using AI to generate complementary visuals, such as images, infographics, or videos. Visual content can help break up long text passages, making your piece more engaging and shareable. AI tools like Dall-E, Midjourney, or Lumen5 can create high-quality visuals based on your input, saving you time and resources.
Before publishing your content, it’s essential to review it through the lens of your target audience. Ask yourself:
- Does this piece address their pain points and provide valuable insights?
- Is the language clear, concise, and easy to understand?
- Does the content align with my brand’s voice and values?
If the answer to these questions is no, consider revisiting the piece with the AI to make necessary adjustments.
Pros and Cons of Different Tools
With the proliferation of AI tools for content creation, knowing which ones to use can be challenging. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses; the best choice will depend on your specific needs and goals.
ChatGPT, one of the most popular AI tools, excels at generating ideas and outlines. Its conversational interface makes it easy to interact with, and its outputs can be highly creative. However, ChatGPT’s content can sometimes feel formulaic or lack depth, requiring more human input to refine and polish.
Jasper, another well-known AI tool, is praised for its ability to generate highly readable and engaging content. It offers a wide range of templates and formats, making it versatile for different types of content. However, Jasper’s outputs may require more editing to ensure accuracy and brand alignment.
Claude, a newer entrant in the AI content creation space, has gained attention for its ability to handle long-form content and maintain consistency throughout a piece. Its large context window allows it to reference and build upon previous content sections. However, Claude’s interface may be less intuitive for some users than other tools.
Ultimately, the best approach is to experiment with different tools and see which ones work best for your team and workflow. It’s also important to remember that AI does not replace human creativity and expertise. Rather, it should be seen as a tool to enhance and streamline the content creation process, allowing marketers to focus on higher-level strategy and decision-making.
10 Actions You Can Take Today
- Define your target audience and create detailed buyer personas using AI-generated insights from customer data, market research, and online behavior.
- Build knowledge bases around your brand and target personas, including information about your mission, values, USPs, and audience pain points and aspirations.
- Use AI to generate lists of trending topics in your industry and top-of-mind topics for your audience, then prompt the AI to create novel connections between the two lists.
- Provide the AI with clear briefs and style examples to guide content creation, ensuring the generated drafts align with your brand voice and guidelines.
- Break the editing process into stages (structural editing, line editing, and proofreading), and provide specific, actionable feedback to the AI throughout.
- Fact-check and validate information included in your content using AI-assisted research, citing sources and linking to original research when possible.
- Enhance your text-based content with AI-generated visuals, such as images, infographics, or videos, to make your pieces more engaging and shareable.
- Review your content through the lens of your target audience, ensuring that it addresses their pain points, is easy to understand, and aligns with your brand values.
- Experiment with different AI tools to find the best fit for your team and workflow, leveraging their strengths and compensating for their weaknesses.
- Continuously refine your AI prompts, inputs, and knowledge bases based on performance data and audience feedback, allowing the AI to learn and adapt over time.
Integrating AI into your content creation process initially seems daunting, but the potential benefits are immense. By following these best practices and taking action today, you can harness the power of AI to create compelling, audience-centric content that drives engagement, builds trust, and achieves your marketing goals.
Bonus
Lucy and her team have seen a pattern with some AI tools for repeatedly using certain words or phrases. This may tip off the search engines that you have been a little too dependent in using AI t write your content.
She provided a list of “giveaway” to Google at al.
This excellent post lists these.
It’s an excellent resource
Other Resources
Here are the links to some of the things I mentioned:
Complex Blog Posts with Citations
Market Research from YouTube Comments
In case you are wondering, I used Claude and Openart.ai to create this post.