The Future of Digital Marketing with Artificial Intelligence
In today’s world, the prospect of using artificial intelligence, or AI, for copywriting is very real. There are some fabulous tools available to make writing quicker and easier. But are these tools about to replace human copywriters and take over the world?!
Let’s find out.
Using AI for Copywriting
It’s true that AI tools have reached a more sophisticated level than ever before. Whilst this is both an exciting and frightening prospect, there’s no denying that natural language generation is here to stay.
What is AI-generated content?
Content written by AI software in its entirety is true AI-generated copywriting. But it isn’t magic. AI writing tools need a real person to continually guide the process. AI takes the last few words as its guide for the next, using a method of prediction based on what has gone before.
The output is only as good as the input.
AI content generators can also vary wildly in quality. Whilst some might think it’s just words, writing copy is complex and nuanced. Up until a few years ago, the prospect of realistically using AI for content creation was small. It was easy to spot AI content as it felt uncomfortable to read, jarring and quite simply, badly written.
But AI for content writing is entering a new era and it’s better than it’s ever been…
How It Works
Today, the more sophisticated tools on the market for writing AI copy utilise the GTP-3 Open AI API. This is a language model that uses the deep learning method of machine learning as well as natural language processing.
Essentially, this is language prediction based on learnings from a whole host of existing writing produced prior to 2020.
It has learned from writing in books, and a huge expanse of writing on the web via Common Crawl, Web Text and Wikipedia. Imagine a human reading and learning from that much text. It’s truly mind-blowing. One thing’s for sure, this technology can’t be ignored.
What AI copywriting tools are available?
There are a whole host of very good AI content writing tools on the market today. Some of the top-rated ones are:
What other tools use AI and ML?
There are other tools on the market that use AI for copywriting in a different way. Tools like Surfer SEO and Frase analyse the SERPs and use over 100 different data points to create content guidelines.
These tools don’t write the copy for you, but they do help human copywriters to focus on getting the right phrases, entities and structure in place.
It is possible to integrate AI writing tools like Jarvis with Surfer SEO or Frase to automate processes.
Using AI for SEO & Digital Marketing
At this point, some SEO and digital marketing professionals are getting excited. We’re all busy people, under more and more pressure to deliver for our companies and clients in an ever-competitive market.
Can AI technology really help to speed up some mundane tasks like writing product descriptions or social media posts?
On the flip side, many people in the copywriting profession are worried. If this new technology is so advanced, will writers be replaced by robots?
Equally, there are concerns in the SEO community. Will AI-generated spam take over the SERPs? Will it make it even harder for those of us producing genuine, valuable content to rank?
Can Google detect AI-generated content?
In short, yes. Purely AI-generated copywriting will still follow certain patterns and repeat very similar words and phrases. An AI content generator won’t check facts either. This makes it fairly easy for Google to detect.
Recently, John Mueller confirmed that AI-generated content still isn’t high enough quality to meet Google’s webmaster guidelines. In fact, he has recently expanded on this to confirm that content automatically generated by AI is against their guidelines and could result in a manual penalty.
So how can I use AI tools for SEO copywriting?
When we consider all this information, how can we use AI to write copy for SEO?
My personal experience so far is that it’s best to use it sparingly. It does have its uses though. This is how I use AI tools in my everyday life in a busy SEO agency.
- Inspiration
Anyone who writes will understand writer’s block. Staring at a blank page when you’re trying to write optimised blog posts or a page of marketing copy is soul-destroying. But let an AI tool write a few words and suddenly your page isn’t blank.
This can help a human copywriter get over a huge hurdle and give them the inspiration to write a piece. At the end of the day, they may not have taken any of the AI-generated words at all, but it gave them the ideas to get started.
- Repetitive Tasks
We all know the situation. No copywriter has the time to write hundreds of product descriptions for reams of very similar products for a busy Ecommerce site. This is a massive problem, particularly for small businesses with limited resources. AI can help a human writer to make it through these repetitive tasks, by providing yet more inspiration on how to write similar things in different ways.
- Rewriting
If you’re struggling to rewrite a sentence or paragraph to make it read better, you might turn to artificial intelligence for a hand. Once again, you should not take the output word for word, but the tools can find other words when sometimes you can’t. They’re a helping hand to make life easier.
- Understanding Copywriting Frameworks
Tools like Jasper have templates trained to give you outputs based on tried and tested frameworks like AIDA and PAS. For beginners, being able to generate real examples of sales copy using these frameworks can help them to grasp how they work, and how to employ them themselves.
- Content Guidance
Machine learning tools like Surfer SEO and Frase provide some really powerful content guidelines. These can help you to write better, and faster. It’s empowering to know that you’re focusing on the right areas for successful content rather than working hard on something that produces little or no results.
A couple more rules I live by:
- I never take AI output ‘as is’. It still requires a large element of human intervention and common sense. It doesn’t replace real copywriting skills, so take the elements you like from a sentence and adjust the rest. Yes, it’s that granular. But it still helps to get things done more efficiently.
- Always fact check. Artificial intelligence uses rules to write, but it doesn’t write factually correct information. You still need subject matter experts to substantiate any claims, and you really need to do your research to stay relevant to a topic.
How can AI help marketing?
In a wider digital marketing sense, AI software can provide many benefits. From generating different subject lines for testing, to helping with endless social media posts, improving company emails or crafting more powerful headlines, there are endless marketing applications.
The same rules apply though, it takes emotional intelligence to use these tools sensitively, and effectively, and achieve the best results.
Will copywriting be automated?
On the strength of AI-powered copywriting today, no, it won’t be fully automated for a long, long time.
So if you’re worried about whether Jarvis is going to take your job, he’s probably going to need to learn a lot more. See him as a friend rather than a foe, but remember he’s not that best friend you can trust with your life.
Or your job 😉
So, will AI replace real writers?
Right now, AI is no match for true human creativity. Writing original content is something that needs a human touch. A good content writer needs to have a varied skill set. They should be able to build an emotional connection with their audience and use their creative flair to make content ideas come to life.
What’s going to be challenging is whether businesses will see the value in really high quality copywriting services. There are sure to be plenty of people using AI to produce basic content at a low price and undercutting real content marketers.
So whilst AI is unlikely to replace content writers in the near future, it will change the game. Make sure you’re ready!
Struggling to get your head around copywriting and on page optimisation? The Boom team are always on hand to discuss your needs and how we can help you make the most of your website content. Just get in touch!
