AI for Content Development & Optimization

Artificial Intelligence has dominated the news in the last couple of years, and this year more than ever. With ChatGPT’s 4o release, to Google’s Gemini extravaganza and Google I/O, AI is being shoehorned into every tool and platform.

The pace at which AI is developing is reshaping most industries, and marketing is no exception. Marketing is seeing the most changes, from AI search to AI-generated and targeted ads and massively scaled-up content creation.

Staying ahead of the curve with all these tools can really empower some in the industry and help improve processes and strategies if used well, consciously, and with intent.

Automating Repetitive Tasks

Marketing involves a lot of repetitive and menial tasks, which for the longest time, people outsourced or handed over to an intern or junior. These are jobs that no one wants to do, but they have to get done.

AI tools can handle tasks such as research, data analysis, and content curation, allowing human marketers to focus on more creative and strategic aspects of content development.

One of my favourite research tools, Perplexity.AI, is an AI-based search tool that digests search results, provides analysis, and includes sources and citations for fact-checking. Perplexity can save hours of hunting through Google search results (which, let’s face it, are frustratingly mostly ads) by digesting content from relevant sources, providing a summary with citations, and running contextual follow-up queries.

Generating Content Ideas and Outlines

Brainstorming and ideating can be fun using ChatGPT and Gemini, using them as sounding boards and exploration tools. They can bring up different ideas and dimensions you might not have thought of, which is great to add depth to your process. Be careful to always fact-check their responses while researching.

From a creative perspective, AI is a great tool to create outlines, draft content, paraphrase sentences, and quickly find synonyms.

It’s very handy at generating alternatives and variations in seconds. For example, you can quickly create 20 article title variations or ad copy alternatives to A/B test, ensuring you choose the most effective options for your campaigns.

Enhancing Content Quality and Optimization

AI-powered writing assistants have come a long way with the likes of Jasper, Copy.ai, and Writesonic, which can generate a variety of content formats including blog posts, social media updates, and email campaigns.

These tools have the ability to be trained in your brand voice and tone, and you can give them instructions on how to sound, the target audience, and more to refine the output.

AI tools are also a great way to check your content for spelling and grammar, which sometimes even a human editor can let slip, especially in large documents.

Regardless of how sophisticated these tools get, it’s always recommended to run it by an editor for review. AI writing tools tend to sound the same, using specific writing tropes and words most of us don’t use. It’s important to make sure that your content is relatable to your audience.

Creating Personalized and Engaging Content

We love it when we read or engage with content that feels like it is catering personally to us. For marketers, the larger the audience, the harder it is to scale up.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Email Marketing Systems (EMS) have been integrating AI into their suites, which can help personalize content from collected data and past behavior.

Marketers can use AI to create super personalized email and social media campaigns and ads using the data in their systems and test messaging at scale. This helps them really connect with their audience and make customer experiences very personal.

Some tools claim they can create images and videos for content personalization, but results can be inconsistent in my experience. However, advancements, including those in AI video, can significantly improve this in the coming months.

Leveraging AI in Marketing and CRM Tools

CRMs like HubSpot are really shifting their platform focus, integrating AI to scale content creation and optimization significantly.

HubSpot’s recently released Content Hub suite, for example, adds AI content generation anywhere it can, with a major feature set called Remix that can repurpose content for different channels.

Content Generation and Optimization

HubSpot’s AI Content Assistant uses an OpenAI GPT model to generate blog ideas, create outlines, write paragraphs, and draft emails. This is great as a starting point for marketers to produce initial drafts quickly, which can then be refined to match the brand’s voice and audience preferences.

With SEMRush as an SEO backend mixed with AI, HubSpot provides SEO recommendations, suggests content topics based on relevance, competition, and popularity, and offers related content suggestions.

Content Repurposing and Distribution

These days it’s tough to get by with publishing a single piece of content in one channel. A blog post needs to be promoted on social media, included in email newsletters, or even repurposed as a downloadable eBook.

HubSpot’s Content Remix feature uses AI to transform existing content into various formats suitable for different channels, to really push the value and longevity of all the hard work spent creating the original piece.

Creative Assistance

Having a creative assistant to help with specific brainstorming tasks in the context of what you are doing is great. HubSpot can help create social media captions, and EMSs like MailChimp’s Email Subject Line Helper use their vast experience in email marketing to help marketers create compelling email subject lines.

Considerations

While AI offers powerful capabilities, marketers need to find the right balance between automation and a human-centered perspective. AI-generated content can be used as a starting point, with human marketers adding their expertise, creativity, and brand voice to create content that aligns with the company’s core principles for that personalized and bespoke brand experience.

Marketers should also be aware of and comply with legal and ethical considerations, such as respecting copyright laws, obtaining consent for data usage, and being transparent with their audience about the use of AI in content development.

Final Thoughts

Using AI tools for the last couple of years since the public launch of ChatGPT has been an interesting ride. Learning how to use AI creatively and responsibly has been a challenge, and it will be the norm going forward. If you are not leveraging its capabilities, you are going to be left behind.

With that said, we need to make sure to know when to use it, how to use it, and ensure that we are always including a human element in its output.

We also need to make sure that our responsible use of AI includes considerations of copyright, trademarks, and local laws to avoid infringing on our fellow creators and artists’ work.

AI can be very empowering and has helped a lot of people break into spaces they thought were gated from them. We are still in the early phases of its use and understanding where it will go. It’s already clear it has immense promise for helping us be more creative and innovative.

Exploring the Benefits of AI in Content Development and Optimization

Automating Repetitive Tasks

Generating Content Ideas and Outlines

Enhancing Content Quality and Optimization

Creating Personalized and Engaging Content

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Leveraging AI in Marketing and CRM Tools

Content Generation and Optimization

Content Repurposing and Distribution

Creative Assistance

Considerations

Final Thoughts

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