18 Feb AI in Digital Marketing
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since my last blog post in December, it has been nonstop. With the festive period being such an important time of year for many of my clients, especially those in the e-commerce/D2C space, it was a hectic time for me while I helped them maximise their festive traffic. With that being said, we have now come to the end of January, which for some felt like the longest month, but for me, it went by in the blink of an eye. Despite the chaos of the January sales that follow Christmas, I still managed to find some time to renew my Google Partners certification as well as recover from a pretty nasty cold. With that being said, I can only apologise for the gap in regular posting. I’m always working on client content calendars and making sure that they are regularly working on content for their websites. But I’ll admit, I’ve been failing to take my advice and do my own! Isn’t that always the way, the builder’s house is never built!
What I wanted to talk about in this blog is a topic that is becoming more and more prevalent in day-to-day life. ChatGPT and Bard, now Gemini! have been quite the talking point in the last 18 months to 2 years and with good reason. They are an example of how far technology has come and given us a glimpse into what the future could look like. However, I am seeing them burst into the digital marketing world more often, which has prompted me to pen my thoughts to this blog.
What is AI and How Can a Small Business Utilise it?
In its simplest form, technology like ChatGPT is a form of generative AI that allows users to input prompts and receive humanlike responses, whether that is text, images, or videos. It is especially useful for getting answers to questions that may take some trawling of the SERPs to find. ChatGPT and Gemini also pose as incredibly helpful tools for small businesses, helping those within the business save time with processes that the AI can generate in a matter of seconds.
Where I’m seeing most small businesses take advantage of AI is with their content creation. In a matter of seconds, ChatGPT can spew out 500 words on your chosen topic. To some, this makes posting regular content to their site easier than ever before. There are also other AI tools (albeit behind a paywall!) out there that can help generate images for social media or even your product pages. The possibilities with AI in digital marketing are endless. Whether you use it for brainstorming ideas, writing web copy, ad copy, writing scripts for ads, or creating any image your imagination can think of. Then there’s research, competitor analysis, keyword research, writing code, writing scripts the list goes on, and on, but should we be rushing to replace humans with AI technology straight away?
The Dangers of Relying on AI
It’s easy to be mesmerised by the capabilities of ChatGPT and Gemini, but they do come with their reasons to use them with caution. If you ask anyone in the digital marketing industry if they could identify an unedited AI-written article, they would be able to spot it a mile away. The current issue is that most of the content is generic and fails to inspire with how it’s written. These are typically not things you want associated with your digital marketing efforts.
What Google Makes of AI-Generated Content
Google’s initial stance on AI-generated content, from a search perspective, was that it was potentially going to lead to spam filling the internet and therefore would generally be penalised by the algorithm. However, it is worth noting that this was their stance before they released Gemini, their own generative AI tool. So as you can imagine, they’ve changed their tune a bit. In their own words, their most recent search guidelines concerning AI content state “Our focus is on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced. So put another way, their stance has gone from content should be written by the user, to content should be written for the user, how it comes about doesn’t matter (in theory).
What has happened as a result is that largely low-quality content is finding its way to the top of the SERPs. Generic content is being produced by the boatload, with nearly all of them lacking the zest that matches a brand’s tone of voice as well as doing what’s needed to convert customers.
What I Would Recommend?
I’m not here to denounce the use of tools like ChatGPT. I am saying quite the opposite. At present, there are a few drawbacks that stop these tools from being your all-in-one marketing tool. When it comes to saving some time as a small business, these tools come into their own. For example, say you need some blog ideas for your website, just put in your chosen topic area or industry and ask for blog title ideas. While most of them might be a little obvious, you are likely to get a couple of ideas that work for your business and will be a very quick starting point to generate some good topics to explore.
It would be very easy from this point to just ask AI to write the blog for you. But I believe you will get more value out of writing it yourself. You will be able to capture the user’s intent better than AI would be able to, whilst including nuances and tone of voice of your business that ChatGPT simply isn’t advanced enough to think about including…… yet. This is where humans provide extra value to your customers. When using AI, if you put good-quality prompts in, you will get good-quality responses out. Knowing enough about the topic to craft strong prompts means AI tools can be hugely time-saving and should be used to speed up some areas. But if you use vague basic prompts you will get vague responses out, which aren’t necessarily all that useful. Having human understanding and overview is the only safe way to lean on AI technology. It’s of course possible for you to ask the technology to create a script or formula, but if you don’t have the basic understanding to check what is being created, it causes endless problems which you wouldn’t want to associate with your business.
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