Unlocking Generative AI for Content Marketing
How to Digitally Transform your Content Marketing Process
Wednesday, Jan 24, 2024
In today's competitive market, utilizing innovative tools like Generative AI can significantly enhance the effectiveness of content marketing strategies. As an owner/operator of a digital transformation consulting firm seeking to help companies develop and execute successful digital transformation strategies, I've extensively explored how digital technologies like generative AI can effect a successful digital transformation of my own content marketing to foster the growth of my business helping me compete in this digital age.
I understand that business leaders often face the challenge of discovering and rationalizing the potential of emerging digital technologies like Generative AI to in order to develop a digital transformation strategy transform their business processes and create real business value. That's why I wanted to share the experience of my own digital transformation journey using Generative AI to accelerate content marketing for my business. By sharing my insights and lessons learned, I hope others can benefit and leverage the power of Generative AI powered digital tools within your content marketing digital transformation initiatives.
So what exactly is Generative AI?
Now, I can almost hear the collective "Huh?" emanating from some corners of this virtual room. Generative AI has been buzzing around in digital technology circles like an over-caffeinated bumblebee, and yet, it's not always clear what the buzz is all about. Let's level the playing field, and dive into what this technical jargon, Generative AI, really means.
Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of creating content that resembles human-like quality and coherence. These systems are not simply replicating or regurgitating existing materials, they're creating new content from scratch, driven by complex machine learning models.
In the context of content marketing, the relevance of Generative AI is multi-fold. Firstly, in a digital age inundated with content, Generative AI offers an efficient way to create unique, personalized content, helping your brand stand out. Secondly, it enhances productivity by automating content generation, freeing your marketing teams to focus on strategic initiatives. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, by leveraging data and machine learning, Generative AI can tailor content to resonate more effectively with your target audiences, driving engagement, conversion, and customer loyalty. Thus, Generative AI is not just a tool; it's a transformative force for content marketing.
My Journey with ChatGPT: Accelerating the Authoring Process
My journey with content marketing and Generative AI, began with OpenAI's ChatGPT and a desire to streamline and accelerate the process of creating blog posts. As a journalist by training, I always want to start with identifying the topic I want to write about, and developing my own unique perspective on the story. This step often involves brainstorming topics I am interested in, such as digital technology I've recently evaluated, challenges I have solved for clients or market trends I see emerging needs to pick a subject where I can offer a unique perspective and therefore value to my audience.
Once I've decided on a topic, I delve into research. This phase is crucial to developing my point of view and understanding the intricacies of the selected topic. I spend time reading industry reports, exploring competitor content, and analyzing key data points. The aim is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the topic, ensuring the content is accurate, insightful, and compelling.
Once I have my topic and my research in hand, the third step my process in the process is creating a simple outline of the blog post. This outline serves as a roadmap, highlighting the key points and ideas I want to cover. It provides a clear structure to the blog, ensuring the flow of ideas is logical, coherent, and engaging for the reader.
Up until this point in my process, nothing has really changed from my pre-AI workflow. Now however, I can use AI to accelerate my authoring process by using my outline as the the input prompt for ChatGPT. I present it to the AI model and ask it to draft the initial version of the blog post. For example: "Revise the following outline into a blog post: <outline here>"
Utilizing its vast language model, ChatGPT generates a comprehensive draft that aligns with the structure and key ideas highlighted in the outline.
Once I have the AI generated draft, the final step is a manual review and final editing. Here, I refine the content to ensure it accurately communicates my ideas, resonates with my target readers, and aligns with my unique writing style. This review and editing process ensures the final piece maintains a human touch, blending the efficiency and scalability of AI with the creativity and insight of a human author.
Combining the power of AI with human insight and creativity, this process has significantly accelerated my blog authoring process, allowing me to produce high-quality, engaging content at a faster pace. ChatGPT has been a game changer, not only in the creation of individual blog posts but in the overall effectiveness of my content marketing strategy.
Venturing into Bard and Claude.ai: Expanding the Creative Process
As I delved deeper into the realm of Generative AI, I decided to explore other Large Language Models -- Bard and Claude.ai -- to see if they did a better job at authoring my blog posts than ChatGPT. Bard (from Google) and Claude.ai (from Anthropic) are competing products to OpenAI's ChatGPT. All three products work in a similar manner to ChatGPT, so the question was which one gives better results.
To do this I followed the exact same process as I described above but instead of just prompting ChatGPT for my draft, I gave the same prompt was then fed to all three models.
Next came the task of comparing these drafts. I critically reviewed each version, analyzing which parts resonated with my ideas, and carefully considering the unique insights each model offered. In general I found all three models did a pretty good job but I did find myself choosing the answers from Google's Bard moreso than the other models as it just seemed to write better marketing focused content.
Teaming Up with Jasper.ai: Streamlining the Content Creation Process
In my pursuit of further streamlining the content creation process, I was introduced to Jasper.ai by my friend Aby Varma from Spark Novus (sparknovus.com). Jasper.ai, another formidable player in the realm of AI-powered writing, was touted as a tool that could potentially elevate my content marketing strategy to the next level.
For those not familiar with it, Jasper.ai is an AI writing assistant explicitly designed for content marketers. Unlike ChatGPT, which necessitates a certain level of manual input and subsequent editing, Jasper.ai's user interface is purpose-built for content marketing, simplifying the process of content generation. It turns your content briefs into well-articulated, SEO-optimized drafts, ready for publishing with minimal edits.
Another key differentiator for Jasper.ai is its vast suite of content marketing templates. From blog posts to sales emails to social media updates, Jasper.ai has a pre-built template for every content need. These templates significantly reduce the time spent structuring content, allowing me to focus more on refining the narrative and adding the unique touch that my readers appreciate.
One of the game-changing features of Jasper.ai is its integration with Surfer SEO, enhancing its SEO optimization capabilities. We all know that great content isn't just about engaging readersโit's about being discovered by them in the first place. With Surfer SEO integration, Jasper.ai incorporates SEO best practices into the content generation process, ensuring that your content is not only reader-friendly but also primed to rank high on search engine results.
EnterAnother key differentiator I've uncovered is Jasper.ai's remarkable capacity to be primed with an abundance of context regarding your company, products, and services, as well as your specific tone of voice. This feature ensures that every piece of content it generates stays true to your unique brand voice and aligns with your business goals. While this level of customization can be achieved with ChatGPT and other models, it requires manually entering these details with every prompt. With Jasper.ai, this info is pre-configured, saving a significant amount of time and ensuring consistency across all content. This, combined with its other features, marks Jasper.ai as a powerful tool in content marketing, harnessing AI's efficiency while retaining your brand's unique human touch.
So with the power of Jasper.ai, my process changed a bit in that I was able to use Jasper to capture my outline and then have Jasper help me write the content for each section the outline in real time. Once I got it's initial pass at a section I would review and copy edit the content inline, either by manually rewriting content or just hi-lighting it and prompting Jasper to rewrite it in a specific manner. This unified authoring experience is definitely an improvement over the patchwork copy and paste process I was using with ChatGPT.
The Reality Check: AI Tools are Assistants, not Replacements
Based on my experiments, I firmly believe GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai will become table stakes in content creation process, however it's pivotal to remember that these tools serve to assist and not replace human creativity. Yes, these AI models can generate vast amounts of content rapidly, efficiently, and accurately. However, the spark of originality and the allure of an engaging narrative still lie within the realms of human ingenuity.
AI, no matter how advanced, operates within a framework of learned patterns and algorithmsโit lacks the spontaneous creativity and emotional intelligence that human authors bring to content creation. Succumbing to the comfort zone of letting AI do all the work can lead to a sea of sameness, where your content gets lost amidst the AI-generated masses.
In this evolving landscape, the key to standing out is maintaining the balance between efficiency and creativity. Leverage AI to streamline and speed up the content creation process, but ensure you and your team are the driving force behind the ideas, the strategy, and the final creative touch. This 'last mile of creativity' adds the unique flavor to your content that sets it apart, helping your brand to resonate with your audience on a deeper level.
As content creators, we need to embrace AI as a powerful tool that enhances our capabilities, not as a crutch that diminishes our role. Staying actively involved in the content creation process and infusing our unique insights and creativity into the content ensures our brand's voice remains distinct and our content stays engaging, relevant and memorable.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, AI powered digital tools like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai are revolutionizing the world of content marketing. They are powering digital transformations supercharging how businesses connect with their audience and create impactful content. If you find yourself struggling to develop your digital transformation strategy, don't hesitate to reach out to me for assistance. Together, we can develop a successful digital transformation strategy to harness the power of AI to elevate your content marketing strategy and pave the way for your business's success. Let's embark on this digital transformation journey together.
