As a small business owner, you’ve probably heard about the power of content marketing in driving sales and fostering growth for your business. Content marketing involves creating and sharing blog posts, social media content, and videos that engage and connect with your target audience. It’s not about overtly promoting your brand, but rather to provide education, information, and subtly persuade your potential customers. There’s a subtle yet vital difference.
With the use of AI increasing in popularity, some small business owners are using these time-saving tools to create their content, with varying degrees of success. It’s important to consider that the purpose of quality content marketing is to showcase your expertise, establish trust with customers and prospects, and ultimately boost sales. Can AI achieve this?
Before you jump onto Chat GPT, there are a few crucial things you need to have in place. Let’s step back and take a “big picture” look at what we’re trying to achieve when creating content.
Content Marketing Challenges
For many of us, the challenges of content marketing include:
- Having a clear content strategy in place
- Having a clearly defined brand voice, and
- Finding the time to create quality content
Why You Need a Content Marketing Strategy
A well-crafted content strategy serves as your compass, enabling you to create purposeful, cohesive, captivating, and enduring content that truly resonates with your target audience. This is true whether you’re writing it yourself, using AI tools or working with a professional copywriter.
Similar to a business plan, a clear content strategy is essential to achieve your goals. Your content plan should encompass important elements such as knowing your audience, relevant keywords you wish to target, establishing a consistent publishing schedule, determining the topics you will cover, and assigning responsibility for content creation.
An important part of your content strategy is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – after all, your aim is to achieve search engine rankings, isn’t it? Google currently utilises EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) as a metric to assess the quality of your content. EEAT plays a crucial role in SEO, determining the visibility of your posts and website in search results. Your content should demonstrate your personal or business’ experience, your industry expertise, establish you as an authority in your field, and foster trust with your readers. It is important to note that AI-generated content copy-pasted onto a website cannot achieve these goals without a human shaping, editing and refining it.
Having a clearly defined Brand Tone of Voice is vital
The way your business communicates and the language you use plays a vital role in establishing your brand’s tone of voice. A distinctive brand voice allows consumers to differentiate your brand from others, just like your own voice sets you apart from others. The tone and style of your company’s communication reflect its unique brand personality. If you’re using AI tools, you’ll need to firstly know your TOV, then train the tools to write in your brand unique voice.
Finding the Time to Create Content
Time constraints are a common challenge faced by many business owners and managers. Content creation often takes a backseat on the never-ending “to do” list. This is why the adoption of AI writing tools like ChatGPT have skyrocketed. These innovative tools have proven to be incredibly effective in generating content with speed and ease when utilised correctly. Their capabilities are truly remarkable…. HOWEVER ….
Here are a few reasons why you must be very careful when using AI tools to create website content.
- AI writing tools are akin to any other tool – they require knowledge and a plan to be effective. Just as you wouldn’t attempt to build a house without understanding how to use a hammer and having a clear building plan, it’s crucial to learn how to properly utilise AI writing tools and have a strategy in place. Otherwise, you’ll end up bending a lot of nails and could potentially damage your brand.
- AI tools lack the human touch. They can’t create compelling stories or build relationships with customers in the same way a human can.
- The language generated by these tools can sound robotic and generic. This is not a good reflection of your brand… unless you’re selling generic robots! 🙂
- Getting any meaningful output from AI that doesn’t sound like monotonous gibberish requires genuine time, dedication, and skill. Using the raw output of these tools often leads to content and messaging that is a jumbled mix of intentions, tones, and messages. This makes the content almost worthless to your customers. Achieving results requires a competent human who knows what they’re doing.
- What is the origin of the information contained in the content? Who or what is the source? The “new” content AI generates is drawn from external websites, without you being able to verify the credibility and reliability of those sources. It lacks originality and has occasionally been proven inaccurate.
Conclusion
Before you start writing content, get clear on your content marketing strategy. Then you’ll be ready to craft your posts in line with that strategy. Know your brand’s tone of voice and train team members or AI tools to use it. Most importantly, make sure you review and edit the content yourself before publishing it. This will help you to produce content has the right tone of voice to reflect your brand’s personality and values. If you decide to use AI writing tools, do so sparingly and wisely.
At The Professional Writer, we chat with our clients about their content marketing goals, assist with brand tone of voice. Our award-winning team produces content that helps establish meaningful connections with your ideal clients through our expert copywriting solutions. We can even help with your brand Tone of Voice document. If you would like to learn more, please visit our Contact page. In the meantime, feel free to share this article with anyone who could benefit from these valuable tips. We invite you to connect with Lyndall on LinkedIn to establish a professional connection.
