Using AI Software to Enhance Content Marketing Strategy and Production

The way tech is intruding on everything these days, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s the center of attention in digital marketing.

As productive solutions grow for small businesses, owners are feeling confused and insecure about how to use it well to achieve real results. If this is you, then finding some sort of blueprint for using AI tools could help you launch it well. Most small business marketers are using it in a piecemeal fashion so far, trying it out and using it where it can be used.

Your content creators might already be using many AI tools for digital marketing tasks. But are they using it to produce high-quality, emotionally impactful, engaging, and persuasive content? Is their development process clear and effective?

These tools can’t replace talent. Instead, they are assistive tools to help make outstanding talent even better.

The Hard Work of Discovering What’s True about AI

Some content creation tools such as Dall e, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are excellent, while others that purport to strategize SEO or improve social posts are not very helpful. The SEO tools are rudimentary stuck with only basic tactics and strategy. There’s lots of scams trying to capitalize on the AI euphoria.  The main point to make is that marketing and product experts and business owners have substantial industry-specific knowledge and strategic genius, and AI can’t reach these levels. However, it can help experts enhance and optimize their content from a big picture perspective.

In this post, our quest is to find a blueprint/model to organize your foray into marketing AI.

Powerful, Educating and Fun

AI is proving it can provide some great benefits for any content creator —  to improve creator’s AI skills, awareness, productive capacity, and maybe elevate their content quality and impact to its peak.

AI + Framework + creative talent + strategy + funding = market leader performance.

 

What Do We Call This AI Framework?

This blueprint for AI-assisted content marketing is known today by many names such as: a plan, roadmap, playbook, production pipeline, AI content strategy, AI-assisted model or AI-powered framework, depending on business owner needs. Whether it’s in travel or real estate or retail commerce, it gets everyone on the same page, and AI-enabled. We’ll explore one such blueprint below.

Big Belief in AI from Small Business Owners

A US Chamber of Commerce survey found that 98% of small businesses are already using AI-enabled tools. And 91% of small businesses believe AI will help their business grow. They didn’t say they had a plan for using them.

Travel agencies, destination marketing companies, tour companies, real estate brokerages, software companies and more need a model to help them get the maximum benefit from marketing AI.

 

“The best way to use AI for content can be summed up by this phrase: “Say it better.” There are times when what you’ve expressed, especially in the written word, isn’t what you want it to be – something is missing, confusing, or simply off. It’s in these moments that AI has incredible value.” – Marcus Sheridan, vice president, Marcus Sheridan, from CMI article.

 

How Does it Optimize Expert Level Content?

The obsession over Generative AI tools is primarily from unskilled marketers and techies who need the help. By itself, the content it generates is not fun to read.  For companies that had nothing, it’s quite a leap in content power. But for sophisticated travel companies, software companies, real estate brokerages, and financial services companies, it’s not great. In fact, it might pose legal liabilities and brand damage.

In very competitive and demanding sectors, where insider knowledge, experience, strategy, and brand awareness are needed, creative human talent and expertise are needed. It’s difficult to describe how it improves content. But envision it as a copywriting editor/coach with some good insights into your market and industry, and massive instant access to millions of relevant data sources.

As a writing coach and information fetcher, AI tools such as Jasper AI and ChatGPT can help speed up productivity and help us understand what’s wrong with our copy, as Marcus Sheridan said. In working with them, I’ve found they struggle with specific tactics and strategies I was focused on (almost getting in the way) and the advice is often mundane, academic tips which it might tell everyone else to do (your competitors).

How to Let AI Train Your Content Expert

It struggles to understand branding and human emotions, which after all is very high-level thinking that goes far beyond words, rules, and sentence structure. Still, I really enjoy it when it makes me aware of gaps and weaknesses. It’s definitely smart and a cheap writing coach.

For example, it advised me I’m sometimes too casual, using colloquialisms at times, instead of adhering to a formal, corporate left-brained approach of Challenges, Solutions, Results. It’s unaware of right-brained thinking with its clustered ideas, emotions, memories, stories, and unique flair that helps resonate with our target audience. It can appreciate your humor, flair, and tell you what it liked about that. And that’s the point — it’s something you can bounce ideas off.

AI tools are open to our input, although they often misunderstand. As I mentioned before, the real power of AI will be far beyond where it is now. That’s when we train it ourselves for our specific needs, branding, and strategy.

As I increase my skill in using prompts to converse with the systems, this will improve.  You can actually ask the AI bots to teach you how to create your instructions to them. Questions lead to great instructions. That’s an amazing helper.

AI’s Influence on your Blogging and Social Post Quality

Blogging should still be your number one traffic generator, engager and lead generator. If it’s not, then you’d be wise to take a new approach. The bar for quality, impact, and engagement has risen much higher in the last few years,. SEO traffic to websites has dropped considerably. Rand Fishkin believes companies should pull back to capture and engage their loyal audiences. I don’t agree with that. High rankings and big traffic are still present for anyone who commits to capturing them. The key to success is better content experiences, very sophisticated SEO and PR/promotion.

And in social media, a very different medium, it’s still about reaching people to get them to support your brand.

The SEO flywheel model is all about bringing in prospects from Google and then engaging them with whatever content or other channel they’d like. An AI marketing flywheel moves all inbound traffic flow to generate continuous growth.  Without SEO, a flywheel might not be that fruitful.

One of the issues is in how difficult promotional outreach is today. Without strong promotion and working with PR, journalists and experts in the industry, content can’t garner the support needed from customers, influencers, and movers and shakers. This is the number one problem for bloggers and companies — a low domain rating due to low reach to authoritative industry people.

If your reach and DA are low, your content will struggle to be viewed, respected, and linked to. Gotta get those backlinks.  It’s the same on YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram and Twitter. But AI is really about content development and production.  SEO is achieved by talented humans. And you must use advanced SEO now.

A recent survey by Orbit Media (yearly) called the 2024 Blogging Survey: Trends and Insights from 12,000 bloggers over 11 Years,  showed content creators are using AI in big numbers. Yet, respondents said it hasn’t really changed their results. Exactly, users aren’t using it the right way.

The authors of the report found creators aren’t producing long-form content as much this year, even though long-form content was the highest-performing type.

It’s not hard to see how creators might be getting lazy and then use ChatGPT to avoid doing lengthy, hard work in research, writing, and content production. And when used without a blueprint to create compelling high-quality content, it becomes spammy and thus erodes brands and fails to achieve important goals.

To counter that, we can build an amazing AI plan, roadmap, blueprint, or playbook.

A Model for AI-Enhanced Content Development

Objective: To understand how AI can assist us with our marketing, and find ways to utilize it.
Action: To leverage AI tools like ChatGPT to streamline and improve your content marketing process, from strategy development to content creation, optimization, and analysis. Our goal is to save time, enhance creativity, and produce impactful, brand-powered, high-quality content tailored to your target audience.

Key Areas of AI Software Utilization

Audience Research & Insights

• Use AI to identify key audience demographics, pain points, and interests.
• Generate buyer personas by analyzing audience behavior and preferences.
• Discover trending topics, questions, and keywords related to your industry.

Content Ideation & Planning

• Use generative AI tools to find creative and data-driven ideas for blog posts, ppc keywords and landing pages, YouTube videos, social media posts, and marketing campaigns.
• Develop detailed content calendars and strategy outlines, prioritizing high-impact content clusters.
• Brainstorm engaging headlines, hooks, images, and calls-to-action (CTAs),.

Content Creation

• Draft initial versions of blogs, social media captions, email campaigns, and ad copy.
• Use AI for storytelling techniques or personalized content tailored to specific audience segments.
• Create SEO-optimized content by integrating relevant keywords and metadata recommendations.

Copy Editing & Optimization

• Refine grammar, tone, and structure to align with your brand voice and audience expectations.
• Perform readability checks and adjust content for better engagement.
• Use AI-powered SEO tools to improve ranking potential through targeted keyword density and linking strategies.

Visual Content Support

• Collaborate with AI tools for ideas and captions for visual elements, such as images and videos.
• Generate image prompts for visuals using AI art tools like DALL-E to complement written content.

Performance Tracking & Iteration

• Analyze campaign performance using AI analytics tools (e.g., asking Usermaven to create reports for you via asking it).
• Identify gaps and opportunities for improvement based on engagement metrics.
• Develop A/B testing frameworks for continuous optimization of content.

Scaling Content Production

• Automate repetitive tasks like generating summaries, translations, or FAQs.
• Repurpose long-form content into smaller, platform-specific pieces.
• Use AI tools to batch-produce variations of content for testing and distribution.

AI-Assisted Content Strategy Action Plan

Onboard AI Tools

• Identify and subscribe and learn relevant AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Jasper, Grammarly, SEMrush).
• Familiarize yourself with features, then learn and experiment with prompts for maximum output.

Integrate AI in Workflow

• Define which stages of your content creation and publishing process AI will support.
• Establish clear input-output guidelines for AI-generated content to ensure quality.

Refine AI Output

• review, fact-check, and enhance AI-generated content to align with your brand values and expertise.

Measure & Adapt

• Regularly assess the impact of AI-assisted content against the KPIs we choose (e.g., engagement, conversion rates).
• Iterate your processes based on results and feedback.

AI Tools & Resources

• Content Creation: ChatGPT, Jasper
• SEO Optimization: SEMrush, Ahrefs
• Social Media: Ocoya, Feedhive, Flick
• Analytics: Google Analytics, HubSpot, Maven AI
• Visual Content: Canva, DALL-E, Pictory, Deep AI Image Generator

Implementing AI Content Creation Software

Your approach won’t be the same as big corporations. SMB content creators and marketers can use the above template to get oriented, work with them to test them, and discover which creates the best quality and outcomes (analytics).

AI plus creative talent plus promotion can be a game changer for your travel agency, software company or real estate brokerage.

Interested in an AI-enhanced content developer? Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 to explore.