Both Maddy and I are not full-blown “AI is evil” people. We both deeply believe that you need to lean into the change and lean into how technology is evolving. Things are always changing and it's not necessarily bad, but we need to know the facts. So that's why we wanted to come together, do our research, and as a social media manager and a copywriter give you our best tips and thoughts on using Ai in your marketing.

How can you use AI in your business?

AI really levels the playing field as far as who has access to quickly done marketing content.  We definitely think that AI can make content creation more accessible when you can't hire those services out, but it can't fully replace a service provider. but, it can be a great starting point!

Both Maddy and I use AI as a starting point for some of our projects!  Maddy uses AI to help her come up with blog titles, and I use AI to help me create the outlines for my blogs. We'd never straight copy and paste what AI gives us, but it can be a great place to start to get ideas, see what's already on the internet, or just have something to go off of.

CopyAI seems to be the main thing for blog posts, where ChatGBT is largely for social media. We both agree that we would never use AI for captions- it just doesn't convert well and it doesn't really connect to your audience. 

A big thing about using AI in your business is that you need to fact check it. Most of the main AIs right now explicitly tell you that they only pull data from before 2021, and that's a huge oversight. There's so much that's changed in so many industries just in the last two years, so you need to double check if what the AI gives you is actually accurate and actually the tone of voice, energy, and words that you want to use. 

Don't trust AI to get things perfect! But AI can be a really great way to generate some ideas and give yourself a starting point. especially if you can't afford a service provider like a copywriter or social media manager, and you just need some ideas to get you started.

Will AI replace a service provider?

Put simply, no. And the biggest reason is that AI cannot give you a strategy. A copywriter, social media manager, or a web designer can actually give you a strategy to your content and help you figure out not only what to post but why and how to create it. And an AI can't do that. 

An AI can't have a monthly meeting with you, or take revisions, or come up with a new idea based on your feedback. Even if you can tweak ai, it can't give you a strategy behind the content that it's giving you.

And strategy is everything. 

Strategy is what makes you stand out, connect with your audience, and actually create content that you really love and reflects you. If you're just going to use AI, it's really likely that you might just be saying something that several other people in your industry already are, and that's not going to help you stand out or connect with your audience. And it's not going to be personalized to you. 

AI can be great for ideas, but it's not great for personalized strategy that connects with your specific audience.

Plus, if you're seeing AI as a big time saver, that might not really be true if you already have a service provider. because like we've said you need to double check AI, whereas a service provider will already be using their biggest creativity and their expertise to make sure that your content is top quality. 

You're always going to have to quality check, fact check and vibe check anything that comes out of an AI generator. 

If you currently can't afford a service provider and just want to have something to help you get started, AI can be a great resource for you. But it isn't going to fully replace the service provider and we both recommend finding a social media manager, a copywriter and other content creators to help you as your business grows.

What are the issues with using AI in your marketing?

But we both think AI can be great for marketing ideas, AI is not fully to be trusted. First off, it can give you really repetitive messaging, which just ain't it.  It also can't hope to fully replicate your style and your voice. So if you're trying to have a really set brand voice, AI cannot replicate that and isn't going to give you that voice that really connects with your audience.

But getting into the ethical stuff, AI can dive into the murky waters of plagiarism so quickly. Since it's just pulling from the internet, you really don't know if what you're getting is factually accurate, fully relevant to 2023, and beyond that, you don't know if you're just straight up stealing somebody else's content. And that's not okay. 

Neither Maddy or I would feel comfortable at all turning over a piece of fully AI-written content to our clients, because we can't ethically say that we created it, and we also have no idea if it's not just straight-up plagiarism. Which is something that we are both deeply against and know is extremely wrong, especially in the marketing and content creation space.

Yours and other people's intellectual property is extremely important to respect. And AI doesn't promise to do that. AI can't promise that it didn't just steal all of its content from somebody else's blog post, and that's not something that we can ethically stand by.

How does AI impact my SEO?

 So Maddy did some deep diving into this, and she found that how Google ranks your content is partly off of keywords, but is largely based on the quality and expertise of your content. It's looking for the relevance, quality, expertise, and trustworthiness of your content. These are all things that AI can kind of mess up for you. In fact, Google can know and see that you're using AI to create content, which encourages it to rank your content lower and not see it as high quality.

 If you're looking to use AI to increase your SEO with blog posts and your copy, it might not really be the best choice for you. AI might actually be holding you back from ranking better than just investing in a quality service provider, or spending the time and energy yourself to come up with personalized, quality content that represents your true brand voice and actually connects with your audience. 

Both Maddy and I aren’t anti-technology. Not in the slightest. We know that you need to pivot, need to grow, and need to lean into the change. 

I am so excited for how AI is going to maybe increase our conversation about quality content, how ethical content is, and encourage us to pour more into our content and our words so they truly connect to people and actually stand out. 

This is a really important time in marketing to stand out and be fully yourself. We can't afford to blend in or sound like anyone else, there's just too many people. And our bullshit radars are so high right now. Everyone’s is. So don't give your audience bullshit. You need to be giving them quality content that really reflects you and shows your personality, trustworthiness and expertise. 

You can totally use AI to give you ideas, help you get a starting off point, or just get something rolling when you feel like you're hitting a wall. There's nothing wrong with using it to come up with ideas for a blog title, give you a blog outline, or just give you some ideas of where you want to start. But the key word is start. We do not recommend copy and pasting and just sending out whatever AI gives you. Instead, we highly recommend using AI as a jumping off point, and actively checking and adding quality to any AI-generated content so that it actually ranks, connects, and, honestly, matters to your audience.

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