Content Marketing and AI: Match Made in Heaven, or Disaster Waiting to Happen?
I have a slightly unpopular opinion among many other content marketers: I think a lot of content marketing is no better than spam. It's keyword-stuffed nonsense written to rank and sell, not to provide value for the reader.
In my ideal world, content marketing provides:
value
amusement
honest opinions and information
and then, way down the list…..
a reason to investigate products or services further
But most content marketing nowadays? It’s blatantly promotional, written by committee, with no personality or voice.
So what would throwing AI into the mix do to that?
Many people think that AI would make it worse. After all, wouldn't an AI tool simply allow unsavory content marketers to produce that same low-quality, spammy content at scale?
Again, I'm coming at this from a slightly different perspective: I suspect generative AI has the potential to improve content marketing. Here's why I think AI marketing mixed with content marketing is a good thing for readers, marketers, and internet denizens of the world.
Good content marketers get more time
I'm boldly including myself in the category of “good content marketer” because I try to make things that are valuable and entertaining first, and marketing second. That's why I can explain this point with personal experience.
I've started using AI to help write explanatory posts for my blog. Things that don't require a lot of opinions, but do need a lot of research and facts, like “What is Contemporary Fiction?”. Google uses an algorithm to crawl, index, and rank posts anyway, so it makes sense to me to use robots to feed robots.
Now that my dreaded content cranking is out of the way, I can spend more time on thoughtful pieces like this one, written 100% by a human. I love writing, and I hate feeling like I “have” to write SEO content to stand a chance of ranking. Content generation by using an AI writer gives me the best of both worlds.
I also use an AI content generator to help me include outlines, or think of other sections to include in my posts. I hope this makes them more thoughtful, well-rounded, and interesting for my reader.
Bad content marketers stand out more
I will again be brutally honest: ever since artificial intelligence started making mass content creation possible, I have seen a lot of really crappy work go on blog posts.
This actually makes me happy: I mentally note the website as one to avoid in the future and carry on with my day. AI content marketing has actually made it easier to differentiate between a writer who had a bad day and produced a mediocre blog post, and a company who probably fired their marketers and is just spamming ChatGPT with “write an article about [keyword]” prompts.
I find it relatively easy to tell when something is pure AI content creation:
There are no hard opinions, there's just a lot of fluff and jargon.
There's no voice. it sounds like it could have been written by anyone – or any thing!
The default pronoun is the corporate “we” (e.g. “We couldn't believe our eyes when we saw those Walmart deals.” Who is “we”? Is there some kind of hive mind happening over at that company? Off-putting.)
There are very few specifics. AI technology loves producing vague statements.
There is no human experience or anecdote shared.
The blog post is full of words like “enable,” “leverage,” “utilize,” and “solutions.” Vomit emoji!
A good marketer will use AI to make her content creation better, faster, with more personality, research, and voice. A bad marketer will be lazy and just use AI generated content with no oversight. And that's made it easier to weed out the weak content creators, in my opinion.
Search engine penalties
Right now, there's no penalty on Google for using AI to generate content. We're still early days with artificial intelligence in content marketing, so it makes sense to me that Google would see how it shakes out before administering penalties.
But. Google does penalize high bounce rates. And you know what I do when I read something like the above, full of “leverage solutions” and “utilizes tools and technology?”
That's right. Your girl bounces. I have no patience for AI-written nonsense.
There will always be enough people who game the system enough to rank #1 for a search term and have complete garbled nonsense, but that was true before AI in digital marketing, and I suspect it will be true after, too. But I think the flood of nonsense content we're about to see will lower patience rates even further until the value of a good, sensible, valuable blog post is through the roof.
It's like this: imagine when you go to the market, there are occasionally noisy and crappy vendors who just shout at you to buy their goods. They're easy to ignore; you just keep shopping. Maybe once in a while one gets you.
But then imagine that same market is now flooded with vendors shouting at you, in your face, screaming that you need to buy whatever they're selling.
Suddenly, that quiet vendor with a solid reputation seems way more attractive than earlier, just by comparison to all the noise you're experiencing.
I think the same thing will happen with AI content generation. When the world is full of garbage, the value of non-garbage rises precipitously.
Automate the boring stuff
One of my favorite content marketing tools is Later. It's a social media app that allows me to schedule social media posts well in advance. Back when I used to run my cats' Instagram account, it was a godsend. I could batch my work over the course of one afternoon, then be done with social media for the week.
Marketing automation already makes my life as a content creator so much easier and happier. I can schedule emails and newsletter sequences in advance. Many of my sales funnels are designed and done long before launch.
To me, content creation is fun, but it's surrounded by a lot of non-fun stuff like copy-pasting content from one platform to another, or compiling lists of keywords. I suspect the same is true for digital marketing and other kinds of marketers.
I see AI content marketing tools following a similar pattern as with social media, digital marketing, email marketing, and more. I use artificial intelligence to help me ideate keywords already; I use AI to outline articles and do other various boring content marketing bits.
In my perfect world, content creation is purely that: I create content with no further thought or optimization than making stuff I think readers will like. We're a long way from that yet, but artificial intelligence lets me automation the boring stuff.
Do more stuff
Finally, I'll end with my final point in favor of AI and content marketing: it lets me do more than I could before with my content creation, things I couldn't do before.
For example, I regularly search on the Midjourney discord channel for AI generated art that fits my blog post. I'd never pay for stock footage, but I get tired of the same images over and over. Midjourney creates fresh, unique pictures.
Or I use it to create HTML tables. Again, I never would have hired a web dev to do this – my old hacky workaround was making a table in Google sheets, then taking a screenshot and adding it as an image in my blog post. Now, I just ask ChatGPT to generate the table containing the info I want, in the format I want.
I can also just do more, full stop. I used to be able to publish one blog post per week. Now I've got the time to do two per week. This means my content marketing earnings are going up – which means I have more disposable income to pay my YouTube thumbnail designer, or a video editor, or a web designer to overhaul my website.
These let me add more value to my blog posts, both in the immediate sense of helping me make better blog posts, but also in the long-term sense of helping me be a better marketer, full stop. AI helps me do content creation better, there's no two ways about it.
FAQs
Hopefully you're persuaded as to why I think AI is great for content marketing. Now let's get into some frequently asked questions about the topic.
What content creation AI tools do you recommend?
I have tested a lot of AI tools. My number one recommendation is SEOWriting.AI. Here's an example of a blog post I created with it:
All other ones… I honestly think ChatGPT is as good as, or better, with the added benefit of being free. Here's a list of my reviews so far if you'd like my take:
Scalenut Review (this is the only other one I'd recommend, and for professional marketers, not beginners)
How does AI improve content creation?
In short, it lets you create more content faster (and ideally better) and it lets you do things you couldn't, like get unique imagery or generate HTML code.
It also helps me come up with specifics in areas I don't know much about. For example, when I'm doing client work in fields like MedTech or IT, I'll often ask ChatGPT to give me an example relevant to the industry.
Does using AI in content marketing affect search engine rankings?
Look, right now there are no explicit penalties from search engines for using AI-generated content. (Though I expect this will change in the future.)
However, search engines do penalize high bounce rates. Because low-value AI-generated content fails to provide value or engage readers, this leads to high bounce rates. That means in the long term, those blog posts will go down in the rankings.
Will AI replace humans in content creation?
In the short term? Probably. There are tons of fantastic marketers who have lost jobs due to unscrupulous bosses choosing to go the cheap, low-value AI generation route. I have also heard of websites losing 90% of their traffic overnight, outcompeted by AI garbage, and having to lay off writers for that reason.
But in the long term? Absolutely not. I don't want to live in a world full of nothing but AI generated word salad, each progressive iteration of AI model trained on previous AI-generated content, and neither do you (or Google, or Microsoft, or any of the other big companies currently investing in AI).
But isn't AI content creation getting “better”?
Common misconception. I will ask you this: what makes content creation good? Is it sounding more human? Yes, and AI content models are getting better at that.
But to me, a large part of "quality" means experienced, knowledgeable, fun, and opinionated.
Due to the way AI models work, they will never get those parameters. They will never be able to emulate my tone, no matter how much training text they are given. They will never be able to have the life experience that informs articles, because they are simply an advanced version of your iPhone's predictive text.
And, because of corporate interests, they will never be opinionated like humans are. Current models are bland and vague because all corporate text is bland and vague. Nobody at Microsoft wants to accidentally offend someone by having their Microsoft-branded AI chatbot say Coca Cola sucks. Marketers also want to avoid overt negativity, but we can and will say if something is really bad.
Come on, ChatGPT. Nobody is paying you to shill for Coke.
(My honest opinion is that flavor of coca cola is not good! It’s way too sweet! ChatGPT will fight me on this, even when I explicitly tell it to tell me what’s bad about Coke!)
Is this what the kids call “simping”?
Final thoughts on content marketing and AI
Long story short: I think the ability to vomit mass quantities of AI-generated spam at scale is actually going to separate the chaff from the wheat, resulting in a net positive for marketers.
