JEWELRY BUSINESS OWNERS are not typically early technology adopters, but this past month has been unusual. With natural language processing tool ChatGPT in the news, business owners in the industry have been asking, “Could we use AI to save us time creating blogs, emails, web pages and newsletters?” It’s not a crazy question. Content creation has become a huge drain on marketing departments, and professional writers are not in retail staffing budgets.
AI writing is not new. During the past three years, dozens of affordable AI-writing software programs have hit the market, and the internet has been filling up with AI-generated content ever since. So if the software is readily available and small-business owners need help generating content, is AI the solution?
The answer is … sort of. AI writers may be beneficial to you if you know what they are suitable for … and what they are not.
Let’s answer the big question first: No, the output from AI writing tools should not be used for your blog or newsletter. Google is already crawling online content with tools that can identify AI-generated text, and we expect that Google will soon be devaluing content that is not disclosed as AI-written. No sense producing more writing just to damage your SERP (search engine results page) results.
Besides, AI may spell correctly and use good grammar (mostly), but it cannot infuse writing with an authentic voice that sounds like your brand.
So if it is inadvisable to use the outputs of AI for your marketing, how can it be helpful?
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A well-managed blog strategy involves planning content that suits your brand and promotes your products and services while increasing your SEO performance. The most challenging aspect of blogging is not the writing: It’s figuring out how to write endlessly on a limited set of topics. With software like ContextMinds and Frase, you enter a topic description and the program spits out lists of related topics, questions and answers it found online for each topic and can even create outlines for articles. These programs also display the value of search terms related to the topics and make it easy to pin or save reference articles.
In less time than most marketing writers take to produce one article, an AI software program can help you plan many weeks of writing, with confidence that the content you are planning will contain information that is popular or that is underrepresented. It’s simple to use the outlines you’ve created and the research sources you’ve pinned to write an article for each topic. In addition to saving time, every article will be in your brand voice and will improve your SEO ranking.
AI tools can significantly speed up the brainstorming, planning, research, and outlining tasks required in marketing writing. Use them for this purpose, and you will reduce the time involved in producing content while increasing overall quality. Still hate writing? No problem. Hire a writer to do the writing for you, with full confidence that when they ask the dreaded question, “So what do you want me to write?” you can hand them your AI-assisted planning output to direct them.
