How to use AI tools in content marketing
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How to use AI tools in content marketing
Marketing Powerup #45: Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, shares 4 AI prompt tips for content marketers.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to Marketing Powerups! 👋🏽
Today's powerups include:
A folder for storing marketing ChatGPT prompts.
Is it really Brand vs. Performance Marketing?
Ryan Law’s AI prompt tips for content marketing.
Ready? Let's go! ⭐️
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⭐️ Ryan’s 4 tips for using AI in content marketing
Since the release of ChatGPT, Ryan Law (Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs) has been experimenting with content marketers using AI to assist in content creation. He has summarized the best way to use AI in content marketing into 4 tips:
1. Be selective about what you use AI for. 🔎
AI models have limitations and are more effective in certain use cases than others. For example, any article requiring abundant concrete data usually results in outdated or outright fabricated statistics in AI’s draft.
“Because generative AI is learning from and emulating all the existing blog posts out there (the ones that are already in its data set) those same problems you will find carried through into the output it generates because that is what a B2B blog post looks like. It'll all turn out looking the same.”
Ryan thinks the best way to use AI is to transform information from one format into another. For example, he films a video of him talking about a topic, uploads it to YouTube to get a barely-readable AI-generated transcript, and then prompts ChatGPT to correct grammar mistakes.
2. Front-load the article structure. 📝
If you are going to use AI to create blog articles, it's best you provide the overall structure of the article in your AI prompt.
"The structure of an article is one of the most important determinants of its success. Basically a lot of writers obsess over line edits and the construction of individual sentences. And what happens is they forget that actually the way they've written something is probably just a reflection of their own thought process."
Ryan suggests being very discerning and deliberate about the structure and being meticulous with what to include. Provide the headings and allot word count for each section of the article to emphasize the importance of one point over another.
3. Inject "information gain." 🧠
The best articles bring something new to a topic: original data, a useful opinion, a practical experience, or an explanatory framework. Google calls this "information gain" in a patent they filed in 2020.
"Generative AI struggles to provide any information gain. It functions much like a copycat content machine: creating new writing based largely on the existing literature on a given topic."
Our job as content marketers is to seed the generated content with information gain, adding real-life examples, customer stories, accurate data, and product mentions.
4. Review everything AI produces. 🤔
The biggest issue with generative AI is that it lies. Worst yet, it doesn't tell you when it's lying to you!
"For generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), they are not created or designed to tell the truth. That is just not part of their design. That's not why they exist. They are created to sound intelligible but not truthful."
AI will generate content based on the context provided, but it does not fact-check the information it generates. Therefore, it's crucial to have a human in the loop to review the content and ensure its accuracy.
Free powerups cheatsheet 🔖
I’ve created a powerups cheatsheet exclusively for Marketing Powerups subscribers to apply Ryan Law's tips for using AI in content marketing.
→ Download and make a copy of it here (a direct link with no email required).
In the latest Marketing Powerups episode, Ryan further explains how to use AI in content marketing.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast and Spotify now, or watch it on YouTube.
✨ Mini powerups
Fun-sized tools, links, and blurbs to boost your marketing.
🗂 PromptFolder (tool): Create, save, and explore ChatGPT prompts. You can also add variables to prompts and share prompts with a colleague.
💌 Moving people from Awareness to Purchase and Referrals with email (post): Chase Diamond, the email marketing guy, breaks down how he would use email marketing to move a person through the 5 stages of the Customer’s Journey (with examples).
🔎 Find and fix 140 common SEO issues (sponsored): Ahrefs Webmaster Tool is the only free SEO tool that can go through up to 5,000 web pages to find issues that could cost you valuable traffic. I’ve installed it on the Marketing Powerups site, and I love all the insights it’s giving me (all for free).
🥊 Is it really Brand vs. Performance Marketing? (article): Barry Enderwick, a former brand marketing executive at Netflix, has always felt tension between Brand and Performance marketing. I know I have! In this article, Barry explains how Brand can reinforce Performance Marketing and vice versa.
If you enjoyed this, you’d love this Marketing Powerups issue from the archives featuring
about how to automate SEO with ChatGPT using her 6-element prompt framework.
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
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