In a sea of digital marketing acronyms, there’s one on everyone’s mind right now: AI. Once seeming like a far-off, futuristic tech solution, artificial intelligence has become more prominent and accessible over the past few years. Recently, AI has been on a rapid ascent, becoming a core part of everyday life online — from Google answering search queries with AI-generated responses to influencers using AI to follow social media photo trends.
For every startup and entrepreneur, AI helps their stretched-thin marketing teams work more efficiently. Digital marketers can incorporate AI into their strategies to inspire new ideas, quickly gather information, refresh and repurpose existing content, make their pieces accessible to more people, and do so much more. Find out how AI can benefit your marketing team, the obstacles you should look out for, and where the future is headed.
Benefits of AI in Your Content Strategy
AI can boost your content strategy through:
- Efficiency: Writing copy, designing images, and creating other types of content can take up a lot of time and resources. AI can write outlines, generate images, and transform written content into audio much faster than its human counterparts.
- Personalization: Struggling to make content that doesn’t feel salesy and contrived? AI can suggest personalizations for your existing content so you can speak more directly to the unique individuals who make up your online audience.
- Data-driven insights: Sifting through every metric to try to translate info into action is a huge time suck — and at the end of it, your interpretation could still be wrong. AI-powered insights automatically process your metric ton of data to point out patterns you might otherwise miss and advise you on how to best use them.
- Enhanced creativity: Fulfilling your content calendar every month doesn’t leave a lot of time for coming up with new ideas. AI can spark inspiration, suggest edits like a coach or peer, and propose ways to update older content to juice more value out of it and improve your ROI.
Current AI Tools and Technologies
Current AI tech boasts a bunch of functional benefits. Prominent AI tools used to generate and improve content include the following.
Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs): Use Machine Learning to Understand and Create Human Language
- How they work: You enter a prompt, and the GPT writes content based on what it can find on the internet about the subject you provided.
- What you can use them for: Use them for AI-powered blogs, social media posts based on specific pieces of content, outlines, marketing emails, and web copy, all based on your specific brand voice.
AI Image Generators: Fuse Multiple Styles, Concepts, and Attributes Together to Create Images From Scratch
- How they work: You specify the subjects, the colors, the art styles, and any other details you want in the image, and then the generator returns options based on the information you supplied.
- What you can use them for: Create unique images for your webpages, blogs, social media posts, advertising graphics, and more.
AI Content Repurposing: Take Existing Content and Automatically Transform It Into Other Mediums, Similar Pieces, Updated Versions, and More
- How it works: You upload the content you’re looking to change and describe your goal for the new piece, and then the system generates new content based on what you gave it.
- What you can use it for: Use it for adding narration to your blog posts, updating your outdated assets with current information, remixing your existing content into social media posts and other formats, and anything else you can come up with.
Challenges and Limitations
Like any technology, artificial intelligence isn’t without its issues. For one, generative AI learns from existing information, written works, art, and more on the internet to create new pieces. It can steal from other people’s previous work and replace jobs, posing a valid ethical concern.
Marketers who rush through the AI content creation process without checking through their work may also encounter quality-control issues. AI isn’t a perfect solution, and as much as it's meant to create natural-sounding text and accurate-looking photos, it makes mistakes. You’ll need a stringent review process to avoid posting a photo of a person with too many fingers or a blog post that makes your business sound out of touch.
Future Trends
As AI tech continues to evolve, it should be able to deliver a higher-quality output more consistently. For example, as machine learning solutions process writing in different languages — and understand the subtle differences between each — automated translation tools should become more reliable. As it stands, current translation tech can help you get started on creating content across languages, but the result will probably sound somewhat stilted and awkward in the second language without a thorough review from a fluent speaker.
With the use of AI in marketing on the rise, teams stand to deliver more high-quality content to their target audience. Those who don’t use AI to its full potential may find themselves falling behind their competitors with a content plan that just can’t keep up.
AI Adds Heat to Fire Up Your Content Oven
Ultimately, embracing AI in your content strategy will help you create higher-quality content faster — giving you more chances to be seen and remembered online. But it isn’t a cure-all, and it doesn’t replace a human’s personal touch. The AI content creation process should start with great source material from your marketing team, work with human oversight, and end with a manual review before distribution.
If you want to find the right balance between people and AI in your digital marketing strategy, Pyromaniac Digital can help. As a HubSpot-certified agency, we implement the tool from scratch, add the new AI-powered Content Hub to companies’ current plans, or improve brands’ existing use of the system, depending on each client's specific needs. Whether you’re just starting out on HubSpot or wondering how to get more out of your subscription, we’ll create a custom plan to launch you toward your goals.
Interested in strengthening your content strategy? Find out more by talking to one of our HubSpot experts.
