AI is changing the way marketers work in some exciting ways! But these changes aren’t without risk.
Our goal in creating this article is to help give you high level understanding of how generative AI works, how these tools have changed content marketing and the way we work for you, along with a discussion of the risks and benefits of such tools.
We’ll end by sharing our recommendations on how you can leverage these tools and discuss the key fundamentals of marketing that will never change - despite any technological advances that come our way. Let’s dive in!
ChatGPT is a chatbot built on artificial intelligence - specifically generative AI. You type your question into a chatbox similar to those you encounter on most websites today, and within seconds the chatbot will reply with a detailed text response that has been sourced from information that’s already been published across the web.
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that creates something new - text, images, or audio - from existing content sourced online.
As a generative AI model, ChatGPT is a text based platform that has been trained on billions of pieces of content online. It’s designed to leverage the data that already exists to create something new.
According to ChatGPT the bot itself “The GPT model is pre-trained on large amounts of text data, such as books, articles, and websites, using unsupervised learning techniques. This pre-training allows the model to learn the underlying patterns and structure of language, which it can then use to generate coherent and relevant responses to user queries.”
Some other AI platforms include
Jasper.ai - Content writing
Otter.ai - Audio Transcription
Copy.ai - Copywriting
Open.ai - Dedicated to free ai
AI not only helps to speed up the content creation process, but also allows us to improve the quality and reach of your content.
Content writers can now use generative ai as their writing admin and research tool. In the past writers would spend countless hours researching any given topic prior to writing. Now, in a matter of seconds,writers can gather research directly from tools like ChatGPT.
Menial tasks like re-writing existing content, turning event transcripts into blog posts, turning blog posts in social media captions, and other repurposing tasks like creating meeting minutes and meeting summaries can now be handled much more quickly with the help of AI tools.
These tools are also great at brainstorming and helping with writers block. They can be a great jumping off point for writers who just need something to start with to get their creative juices flowing.
The benefit to our customers is that these tools allow us to create more quality content in less time.
The biggest risk and limitation of AI is that there is the tools cannot verify what is true and what isn’t.
It’s likely we’ll see an increase in malicious activity from bad actors who will leverage these tools to spread misinformation. A key example of this would be governments like Russia interfering in U.S. elections. And an increase in love scams where AI is used to gather intelligence on individuals and create entirely synthetic relationships based on this data.
Trust has become more difficult for businesses to achieve over the past 10-15 years. Social media has exacerbated this issue. Everyone now has a platform to speak unsupervised, Many social media algorithms like Twitter and Facebook have created echo chambers that allow reinforcement of polarizing narratives.
This problem of building trust is unfortunately only going to become more challenging for organizations as AI content proliferates.
Synthetic data needs a human third party to verify and source accuracy of the information that’s created.
By design, AI content is derivative. It is the average of everything that already exists. It cannot replicate your unique brand voice and tone, your history, or your experience.
The opportunity for businesses today is to truly differentiate themselves by creating content that has a very unique point of view and perspective that expresses your brand voice unabashedly!
Is your brand culture playful and silly? Or are you discerning and skeptical? Your content needs to reflect this!
If you need clarity on your brand culture - invest in resources, training and education to flesh out with your team what you stand for, the topics you care about as an organization, and what your brand DNA is all about.
This serves as the foundation to creating content that not only speaks to your ideal buyer but does so from your unique perspective and experience. Something AI can never replicate.
The AI models that tools like ChatGPT are based on don’t include any data that has been created after 2021. How this will change in future is unknown.
This reinforces the need for businesses to be laser focused on creating thought leadership focused on what the future looks like in your industry and for your customers.
For example:
This is the opportunity for progressive companies to take advantage of. Focus on painting a picture of what the future looks like for your customers and how you are going to take them there.
Many content marketing experts are already predicting that there is going to be a reckoning for any AI generated content. It is possible in future that Google and other search engines will flag any AI generated content and penalize this content in search results.
Google’s own AI chatbot called “Bard” is currently under a lot of internal debate within Google on how the chatbot will integrate with search. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in the months and years ahead and how Google will further disrupt the AI space - particularly relating to SEO and search engine marketing.
There is a lack of information on the web for extremely technical topics common in manufacturing. As such, AI tools are very limited with the content they can create on these highly complex topics.
And in many cases, as we have tested the tools internally for many of our manufacturing clients, we have found many examples of situations where the information is simply inaccurate. These inaccuracies are so technical that only those with deep subject matter expertise would know they are false.
Further, experiments with ChatGPT for highly technical content have seen some issues with the quality of content. Often AI creates content that is highly repetitive and written at a 6th-grade or lower, reading level.
For sophisticated manufacturing applications that involve complex engineering processes, the ideal customers reading this content aren’t getting accurate and detailed information they need to help them make decisions and complete their jobs to be done.
The value of traditional search engines is that you as a consumer have control over which sources of information you consider to be helpful, true, valuable and trustworthy. You have control over the search process. You get to see all the content available to you. You decide what you want to click, read and research.
With an AI service like ChatGPT - you have no control over where the information is coming from. Or how AI is deciding which information is the best match for what you are looking for.
The need for search engine optimization will continue to be important for businesses in the near future. We see an increasing need for businesses to focus on content marketing - not only for SEO purposes, but as a way to build trust with customers.
Content marketing is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy and marketing campaign. This will continue to be important in the years to come because successful content marketing is what allows you to create an engaged audience of customers and followers who know you, like you and trust you.
Trew Marketing, a leading content marketing company for industrial manufacturers, recently experimented with several AI platforms to assess the accuracy, efficiency, and quality of content.
Their results emphasize that the need for exceptional content writers will only increase. Further, there is a place for generative AI but that place is purely at the admin and research level of writing.
Watch this interview we recently had with Morgan Norris, a leading brand strategist with Trew Marketing specifically about this research and what the results showed:
We want to be very clear with our customers about how we are using generative AI to support you and your content marketing efforts. Here is a quick overview of the role AI plays in our day to day work for you:
ChatGPT is our Research Buddy that we use to:
AI generated content is derivative. By design it is an amalgamation of everything that has already been created by someone else. As such we predict we are going to see an increased demand for experienced, creative writers who can craft compelling content that has been well researched and verified for accuracy. Think highly qualified journalists who practice due diligence with sourcing of truth, and who use storytelling in new and unique ways.
The need for more technical, point of view content that showcases your expertise and your unique point of view on the problems your customer is facing will increase.
If you haven’t already - consider exploring and investing in video and live event formats like podcasting, webinars and livestreaming in partnership with your customers and partners to explore topics that are important to your customers and establish social proof. This will shore up your brand reputation as trust in brands continues to degrade over time.
We encourage our customers to continue to focus on SEO optimization efforts while simultaneously creating content that reflects your thought leadership, point of view and unique brand voice.
Of utmost importance in all of this is your customer. What can you be doing now as an organization to understand their problems and challenges better than anyone else and innovate for them? The fundamentals of marketing remain unchanged. Those fundamentals include:
What questions do you have about generative AI? What are your concerns? We’d love to hear! We admit we have quite a lot of questions too! AI as we know it is very much in the infancy stage and we anticipate there will be rapid changes in the weeks, months and years ahead.
If you would like to discuss the risks and benefits of such tools and discuss how you can take advantage of new opportunities and content creation strategies, please feel free to schedule some time or drop us a note!
U.S. Air Filtration U.S. Air Filtration engineers and manufacturers air pollution control equipment and replacement parts for all industrial applications.
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