Can AI help you write great content?

Why the future of publishing may be automated

Content marketing matters

Studies continue to show that content marketing yields the highest yield of marketing efforts and dollars. Studies say that 67% of customers say they decide to purchase a product or service after an emotional connection is made. But how do they make that connection? Well, by engaging with that company in some form. The company creates its product (soda, phones, etc), but it also creates content. So many companies are creating their own content marketing department in order to keep up with the insatiable demand that consumers have.

I’m going to reveal something that most people won’t tell you: content marketing isn’t ONLY about quality. Quantity matters as well. In fact, quantity may be more important than quality in some sense. Sure, you could create the best blog post in the world, but will it be read by anyone? You may have done the relevant SEO and blasted that post on LinkedIn, but will anyone find it? If no one finds it and engages with it, it is for all intents and purposes, worthless.

The purpose of content marketing, simply put, is to get people to view your content and provide a form of interactivity. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, right? The more content you create, the more shots you have at having it read by the people that matter: your audience.

Content marketing also serves another purpose. SEO is critical to driving traffic to your website. It is the traffic that converts into leads, which then convert into sales. However, for SEO purposes, you need to include keywords in your post. When you are writing, or having something written for you by a skilled content marketing writer, you should be including these keywords.

Content writers are key

It’s common practice to find freelance writers on platforms like Upwork or Freelancer.com. But these writers are not experts in whatever domain you’re targeting. In fact, most of them probably do this for a living. Your content needs to be focused on your business and your audience, not someone else’s audience. Your content needs to be written in your voice, your tone, and in your way. If you have a “to the point” kind of business, then you don’t need to be writing flowery, overly descriptive paragraphs to get your point across. You simply need to get to the point. Get to the point, and they’ll stick around. Content writing is not easy though. It’s easy to say “hey, just write something” or “just get something written.”

But the freelancer may not understand your brand’s tone. You may not understand what they are writing, or how your company can benefit from it. They may be skilled at writing, but not your brand’s voice. You may even need multiple freelance writers to produce content that you’re happy with — it needs sound good while addressing your target audience. Whether you’re freelancing as a writer or are a full-blown marketing agency, read on.

Social media

When people are bored and have nothing to do, they spend time on their phones reading quality content. This content is optimized for social media to attract people, convince them to click, and ultimately, read the content. Then they share it. That’s how things spread. Sharing is the number one driver of content marketing success. It’s the number one way your content gets noticed, but there is a catch. Without a solid content strategy, and without the right wording, whatever you write is simply not going to get shared. It may get a few “likes,” but is your content marketing writer really optimizing for that or are they spending their efforts on freelancing through other job boards?

The AI content writer

Researchers have done amazing work in the past 2–3 years with language models that can generate natural sounding text from a few samples. If terms like BERT, GPT, and Transformers, you’ll know how incredibly natural these models are in their content creation capabilities. The AI giants, Google, Facebook, OpenAI and others are training these models on incredibly large text datasets, like Wikipedia, books, news articles, and even tweets. They are able to mimic these texts in a way that humans struggle to tell the difference. But can AI create content as good as a human content marketing writer?

You be the judge… this post was written with the help of AI. The best artificial intelligence in the world probably can’t think like a content marketer, but it can help. It’s up to you, the human, to figure out a content marketing strategy. While AI can help you, the copywriter, it’s still up to you to make great content.

AI Assisted Copywriting

The beauty of having AI help with your digital marketing efforts is that it can fill out a lot of the boilerplate material for you. For instance, if you’re creating a landing page for a service you provide, it’s likely you will include some kind of copy. Or if you are writing white papers or a case study to speak to a more technical audience, there’s a lot of filler words and ideas that make the entire process very slow. Maybe you’re just blogging (for fun or business). Either way, there are places for AI to fill in the gaps for you. AI assisted copywriting means you can get content out faster, and you don’t have to spend as much time on it. Content creators will not be replaced by the machine overlords any time soon, but you can get a great ROI from some assistance from an AI content marketing writer.

Brand content strategy

If you’re a brand that has regular LinkedIn and other social media posts, a content strategy will help. A strategy will make sure that your team stays consistent to create better content. Your readers will understand what you’re trying to say, and how to best express it in a way that builds your brand. You’ll save money on freelance writers, and know that the quality of your content stays consistent. It’s less work for you, and will attract a better audience. Think about it, does a client come to you and want a new website design because the website sucks? No, they come to you because you have good work. If your content is good, you’ll build a better reputation for clients to come to you because you’re respected within your industry.

A proactive marketing content strategy is key, and now it’s easy. Relying on AI as a part of your strategy, you no longer have to compete with armies of bloggers or writers who are trying to steal your market share. Content has an increased ROI, and can help you get more customers. Why? Because, according to Forbes , “9 out of 10 consumers (87 percent) trust earned media (e.g. positive reviews, recommendations) over paid media.”

How do I use AI

I’m working on a product called Wordblot. It’s beta only for now (free), but that can change. The idea is that you create a document (an article, blog post, etc), and Wordblot will help you come up with good content ideas and help your writing flow. Content marketing writing is a very manual process, and by making it a lot less manual, it’s a great tool for anyone. AI will not be writing content for you and still needs human input. The general process is: Write, Predict, Edit, Repeat.

We’re still in beta and look forward to seeing what awesome content you create as subject matter experts. Please share your thoughts!