According to Parse.ly's 2022 Content Matters report, 80% of marketers plan to produce more content next year than they did this year. While this may not be surprising for content creators, who are accustomed to rising demands and diversifying content types, it is still a staggering figure.
Despite the need to keep up with content demands, the strategies for creating new content have not changed much. Content teams have adapted to new forms of content, such as videos and podcasts, as well as longer-form LinkedIn thought leadership. However, quickly producing quality content can still be challenging, and creators often struggle with burnout and ideation.
Fortunately, generative AI has emerged as a time-saving tool to help content teams and professionals generate novel ideas more efficiently. By reducing the time it takes to execute content ideas, AI can give creative teams more time to ideate and avoid burnout. In this article, we will explore how AI improves content operations and how creative teams can use it to streamline their workflows.
What is Generative AI
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that can take human inputs and create something new, like art, writing, video, or audio. Given a prompt, it generates a new creation.
Generative AI learns by leveraging natural language learning models and consuming content. It picks up patterns in those language models and leverages them to complete thoughts or repackage ideas a human provides. Because it makes conveying ideas easier and faster, generative AI has the potential to be a transformative technology for productivity and creativity.
Here's how the process works: Large language models are given a string of text and predict the most likely next word. These models consume a huge portion of the information on the internet — about 10-20% — giving them a baseline of context on various topics in various languages.
Through exposure to this large amount of content, the models learn how humans naturally speak, write, and create things like art. They then complement that baseline with whatever prompt or context you give it. As you give the AI models more context, their outputs become better.
The two main models used in generative AI are natural language processing (NLP) and artificial neural networks (ANN). NLP models use rules to learn from existing text, while ANNs use data to create new relationships between elements.
Generative AI can be accessed directly through a large language model or an AI application like Jasper. Applications like these pull from multiple AI models with a specific use case in mind. They select the right models for the circumstances and combine them to serve the user's needs more effectively.
Over the next few years, there will likely be an emergence of a wide variety of AI models with varying strengths and specializations. Application layers will also evolve and deepen in functionality, in addition to using data to fine tune their models and create increasingly efficient outputs.
That's how the technology behind generative AI works, but it's much more intuitive in practice. As a creator, you can use AI as an assistant to help you convey your ideas simply by giving it prompts.
Using Generative AI In Marketing and Content Strategy
Generative AI can be used in a wide range of scenarios — from generating custom marketing copy and creating images for a website to creating product descriptions and writing blog posts. It can also be used to repackage your existing content into a full campaign or translate an idea into different languages. Let's spend some time on the most common uses of AI assistance for marketers.
Generate Ideas
If you're looking for new ideas, generative AI can be a great way to jump-start the ideation process. While it's not going to come up with the next big idea on its own, it can help you get over that first hurdle of getting ideas down on paper.
For example, if you're an insurance company looking to come up with blog angles you can give the AI a few prompts to inspire you. Below, you'll see the prompt in bold and the AI generated ideas in italic.
Give me ideas for blog posts on short-term disability insurance.
- How to Understand Short-Term Disability Insurance
- What You Need to Know About Short-Term Disability Coverage
- Maximizing Your Benefits with Short-term Disability Insurance
- Planning for the Unexpected: Protecting Yourself with Short-term Disability Insurance
- Understanding the Different Types of Short-term Disability Policies
You may only like one of these angles, but regardless, AI offers a head start.
Simplify Complex Ideas or Wordy Text
Maybe being a prolific writer isn't your problem, but brevity is. You can use generative AI to take
something you wrote and simplify it to a different reading level or a more streamlined format, as shown below. If you have a penchant for elaborate sentence structure, AI can help you be a little less periphrastic.
Create Accompanying Visuals
Stock photo sites are often the very definition of a wild goose chase. You spend valuable time hunting for the perfect image for your blog post or ebook and end up with results that are subpar or too expensive. Then, you finally pay for a few images only to be haunted by all the other places you see those same photos used online. If you don't have a design team or are looking for new ideas for visuals, generative AI can be a great option.
You can describe the image you want and tweak things like style and medium to help generative AI give you options that fit. Each of those options will be original, and you don't need to buy the rights to use them.
Synthesize Research
While you're not going to have an AI tool run a research study on its own, generative AI can take pages of research you've completed, like customer interviews and qualitative studies, and summarize them into key takeaways and an executive statement. If you have a lot of data, you can use generative AI to help you make sense of it all and find patterns that you may have missed. Just be sure to have your logic hat on to review the results for accuracy and ensure all your key points are there.
Lead Nurturing Sequences and Sales Outreach
Like blog posts, email sequences can be time consuming to generate. Generative AI can help you accelerate the creation of lead nurturing sequences, adapt your tone, and personalize sales outreach. You can input data about your leads and customers, and the tool will turn it into customized content for each person based on their needs, interests, and interactions. It's important to note that the AI tool will not do its own research on your leads, but it will turn your research into cohesive and tailored insights.
Does Google Penalize AI Content
In 2023, Google came out with a helpful content algorithm update that discouraged excessive use of automation for content creation. This change led many to wonder whether using AI in writing would lead to poor rankings. After some clarification and investigation, it became clear there is no stated penalty for using AI — simply a penalty for using it poorly. Google penalizes low-quality content no matter who or what wrote it. If AI-written content is low quality and doesn't help readers, it'll get dinged just like poorly written human-made content was penalized long before this advanced technology existed.
Nothing inherent about the way AI content is written leaves a fingerprint, but any reader can suss out shallow writing. So don't take a set-it and forget-it approach to writing with AI assistance. Use the time that an AI content platform gives you back to invest more in research, original ideas, and the substance behind your words; then, your content should do well.
This is Just the Beginning.
Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize how content creators develop their ideas and create new work. History has repeatedly shown us that when you remove barriers to generating and conveying ideas, periods of immense productivity follow.
There's still a lot to learn and improve about the technology. New standards will be set for AI's use cases. But Generative AI is on its way to drastically evolving how content teams operate and businesses grow.
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