AI Copywriting: Leveraging AI for your Content Marketing Needs

In digital marketing, AI copywriting has emerged as a transformative phenomenon, especially when used for content creation.

As businesses grapple with the demands of a dynamic digital landscape, AI copywriting is a critical tool. It speeds up the process of content generation, creates outlines and drafts, and ensures that articles are well-structured and coherent.

However, it’s not perfect. Not by a long shot.

AI copywriting can include mistakes and it lacks the quirky stylistics and unique insights that human authors provide. The perfect solution is AI working alongside a human writer to generate compelling content at scale, with greater accuracy and efficiency than either party could manage alone.

Below I’ve given eight pointers to help you judiciously employ AI for content marketing. First, however, let’s summarize what AI is currently good and bad at.

What AI copywriting knocks out of the park:

• AIs like Chat-GPT are capable of flawlessly grammatical writing, with perfect vocabulary. They very rarely make linguistic mistakes.
• AIs can gather and present information with a clarity and completeness few human authors can achieve. Many can do a complete literature review of a topic in a matter of seconds.
• AIs can mimic tones and styles, to allow writers to easily slip between modes of communication.
• The best image generating AIs can produce usable, royalty-free illustrations to help save editors money and time in sourcing or clearing the work of human artists.

What AI copywriting stumbles over:

• AI writing often falls into repeating patterns of vocabulary – sentences of similar length, lists always following the “rule of three” etc.
• AI will rarely use metaphor or simile, or tell a joke, or add a personal anecdote, unless you specifically prompt it to do so.
• AI can “hallucinate,” a peculiar behaviour where it makes up data, sources, and citations. All AI-derived information must be double-checked for truth and accuracy.
• AI copywriting often uses unnecessarily complex language – it will use “leveraged” where “used” would do, or “advancements” instead of “advances” (a bugbear of this particular writer).
• There are formal limitations – you cannot currently ask Chat GPT to give you an article of a particular length, for example. Ask for 1000 words and you’ll probably get around 750. If your human writer always came up short like that, their pink slip would be imminent.

One overarching issue is that AI will only ever give you exactly what you ask for. If you fail to include something essential, it won’t do what a human might, and give you it anyway.

8 Tips for AI Copywriting:

1: Train AI to Echo Your Brand Voice

Training AI tools, like ChatGPT, to embody your brand’s unique tone and style is critical. This involves inputting quality examples of your existing content and interacting with the AI to ensure it understands your house style and tone.

SEO.ai suggest a three stage prompt format to help with this. First you select a typical passage of content written in your brand voice. Second, you ask your AI to define the characteristics of the style of your excerpt.

[Example: we input the above paragraph into Chat-GPT 4 and asked it to define it briefly and it described it thus:

Informative and Directive: The text provides clear instructions in a straightforward manner, aiming to inform the reader about a process or method.

Professional and Concise: The language used is formal and to the point, suggesting a professional context. It lacks superfluous details, focusing directly on the essential information.

… plus three other characteristics.]

Finally, you re-input the AI’s style description into your AI as a reference for the brand tone of your desired article.

2: Don’t Rely Solely on AI Copywriting Outputs

AI copywriting content should be viewed as a draft, requiring human editing to align it with your brand voice. This helps maintain authenticity and ensures your content engages effectively with your audience​​.

Editing is also necessary to add a touch of human warmth, correct errors, and do some essential fact-checking. Content agency Proofed recommend adding or amending the following aspects:

• Incorporate local elements for better personalization.
• Include relatable anecdotes and a touch of humor, where appropriate.
• Invite reader participation, with comments or questions.
• Vary sentence structure and length.
• Consider changing text to second person, directly addressing the reader.

3: Customization is Key

Personalization of AI content is vital to differentiate your brand and maintain a connection with your audience. This might involve aligning content with house formats, stylistics, and adding the unique quirks your readers enjoy.

You should also tailor AI outputs to meet specific content objectives and keep it relevant to your readers.

4: Craft Effective Prompts for Better Results

Skilled prompt engineering is essential to obtain relevant, engaging, and informative content. Prompters must provide clear, detailed instructions, context, and desired output indicators to the AI tool​​.

SEO platform Clearscope identify four elements of a well-written prompt:

• Instructions: what you are asking the AI to do.
• Context: Added detail such as the style or purpose of the content.
• Input data: any text or data sources you’d like the AI to process.
• Output data: the form and limitations of the output (i.e. exceptions, formatting)

[example prompt given to Chat-GPT4:

Prompt: Give me the top five attractions in each of Maine’s five most popular coastal cities, by researching travel websites, provided in a bulleted list, in the style of a tourist brochure.

Instructions: the top 5 attractions of Maine’s coastal cities.

Context: Style of a tourist brochure, 5 most popular cities.

Input data: travel websites

Output data: bulleted list

Result (extract):

Portland

• Commercial Street: Explore bustling restaurants, cafés, bars, and boutiques along the waterfront.
• Portland Observatory: Historic maritime tower offering spectacular harbor views.
• Portland Museum of Art: Maine’s largest public art institution with a diverse collection.
• Maine Day Ventures: Culinary tours showcasing local fare from dairy, fish, seafood, and organic produce.
• 5th Maine Museum: A museum devoted to the history of the Fifth Maine regiment and Peaks Island.]

5: Ensure SEO Optimization

AI can greatly assist in optimizing content for search engines. It can be used for keyword research, trend analysis, and incorporating SEO strategies seamlessly into your content​​​​.

This is a particularly difficult and laborious task for human writers to do alone, so here AI can make a significant time-saving contribution.

6: Regularly Update AI Learning

To keep the AI tool relevant, regularly input new information and examples. This helps the AI stay updated with current trends, language nuances, and industry changes pertinent to your brand​​.

Be aware of current limitations of “off the shelf” AIs. Chat GPT-4, for example, was trained on data sources up until April 2023 (at time of writing).

7: Balance AI and Human Oversight

While AI can efficiently generate content, human judgement is crucial for quality control and ensuring content chimes with brand values and marketing objectives​​.

You shouldn’t use an AI to write thought leadership articles, for instance, since it is incapable of original thinking, or recourse to personal experience, the way a human expert would be.

8: Monitor Performance and Adapt

Analyze the performance of AI-assisted content regularly. Use these insights to refine your approach and prompts, ensuring continued effectiveness and relevance​​.

There are a host of platforms which analyze the performance of online content, including AI-generated articles. Popular tools include Semrush, Google Analytics, and HubSpot Marketing Analytics.

AI is a tool, and tools are only as good as their users

This is the key takeaway. AI can be an immensely powerful aid to creativity, and an ally in the task of promoting your brand and staying competitive with content creation. However, it is far from perfect and requires skilled prompting and editing to perfect its creations.

Oh, in case you were wondering, I did use Chat-GPT to help write this article, but with human editing, less than 30% of what the AI offered remains.