AI is undoubtedly the fastest-growing aspect of business marketing in 2023. In this four-part series, we’re going to look at some essential factors in your AI marketing strategy, along with potential pitfalls to avoid. The COGO blog was recently selected as one of FeedSpot’s 100 Best Small Business Marketing Blogs, so today we’re going to stick with that theme and start this series with the most important things to remember when harnessing the power of AI for creating written content, especially for your blog.
Understand your tools. Certainly you’ve already heard about ChatGPT, and perhaps you’ve even used it (or another AI-based text generator) to create some content. This can be eye-opening because many times the results are either not as good as you had hoped, or are suspiciously good to the point where you don’t trust them. This is where it’s important to follow your intuition and inform yourself about what AI can and cannot do. For example, ChatGPT will often state something as a fact but will not provide any sources or evidence for what it’s claiming, so you still have to do your own fact-checking and make sure that it hasn’t misrepresented something or made a false statement. Likewise, its knowledge base doesn’t extend past 2021, so it will be limited in helping you write about current events or recent news items. Before you use any generative text tool, it’s essential to read up on its limitations so that you don’t publish anything that will make you or your business look foolish.
Keep yourself in the driver’s seat. Though it might be tempting to let AI write all your content on the basis that it might not be perfect but it’s “good enough”, doing this will only hurt your business and create more work for you in the long run. Google is perpetually updating its algorithms to reward quality content and suppress misinformation, and there are already systems in place to detect and assess the quality of AI-generated content. Remember that ChatGPT does not have opinions or real-world expertise on any topic, so you and your personal knowledge are still the most important elements in creating written content that will be useful to your target audience.
Think of AI as a new team member. AI is very good at what it does, and as with any new member of your team, it will get better with training, and over time it’ll become more obvious where it fits into your overall marketing picture. Of course you wouldn’t immediately hand your company over to a trainee; instead you’d give them certain basic tasks and then add onto that over time, based on performance and proven consistency. The same should be true with generative AI tools for your content. Keep testing and checking your key metrics to monitor for any positive or negative changes, and you start to see where AI is helping or hurting your strategy, you can make adjustments accordingly and integrate your AI tools more fully.
In order to succeed in 2023, your business needs to understand how to use AI in the context of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Contact us for a free consultation — we’ll look at your current strategy and help you fine-tune your trajectory to incorporate the latest tools and techniques used by successful businesses.
COGO Interactive is an award-winning digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing strategy, web design, SEO and social media marketing. We work with clients in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, DC and across the nation.
