With the rise of Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT, which is still the most commonly used AI tool around, content marketers have been experimenting and trying to find cool and unique ways to use AI to improve their content and results.
While AI isn’t replacing content writers, and especially content strategists, anytime soon (because it is a tool that needs a human to operate it, at least until it becomes sentient), AI tools are proving themselves to be very useful for a lot of use cases.
There are a plethora of AI content tools out there, from the more commonly known SEO AI tools like Frase or Surfer, to more niche AI writing tools like Quillbee, and content tools like Content Harmony with AI features, all of which can be useful. We recommend that content marketers try as many as they can (many offer free trials) and find the one(s) that integrate into their workflow.
To do that, you need “jobs” to assign the tools. If you’re using an AI tool instead of a human, it makes sense that you should have specific things you’re using AI for.
Here are 11 “jobs” to use AI to accomplish in your content marketing.
Generate content ideas
This first one is pretty incredible. A lot of content people struggle to come up with content ideas, which is why there are also a ton of blog posts written about this specific topic (and 3.68 billion results in Google for the query):
The old way of generating content ideas involved either sitting in front of a computer pounding out ideas or, if you were a bit more sophisticated, doing competitor research to get keyword ideas and therefore blog post ideas.
With AI, it’s a lot simpler. They’re not the final topics, but it’s a great shortcut to starting your brainstorming:
Writing prompts to unblock your creativity
Sometimes marketers and writers hit a wall with their creativity. Whether it’s true writer’s block or just stumped on how to start the next paragraph, it happens to the best of us.
Try this.
While they gave me an introduction and not just a prompt, I can take inspiration from this to craft my own, like:
When you come across writer’s block, leveraging AI can unblock your creative process by giving you examples of what it would write. You can then edit and beg and borrow and steal to write something that follows your desired tone.
Create original images
AI is great for writing, but it’s also great for imagery. The most widely used tools are Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E, which I prefer to access via Bing Create.
By starting with one of their templates and writing my own prompt, I end up with this:
And there’s the one that I could use, because it’s closer to our style guide. OpenAI also recently plugged ChatGPT into Canva to make this all easier:
Format text with HTML
This one is pretty nifty and has saved me a lot of time. Sometimes, you need to format a lot of content in HTML, but that’s a lot of work.
With ChatGPT, you can give it your text and some basic instructions on formatting, and you’ll get your text formatted quickly:
Outline 30 days of content
We talked about using ChatGPT/AI to generate content ideas above, but now we can take it even a step further and have AI outline our content calendar for us.
Once again, this is just a draft, but it’s a quick starting point that can save us a lot of time.
Draft SEO titles and meta descriptions
Here’s another fun one. Take a list of blog posts and ask AI to generate SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions.
Categorize keywords by topic
Categorizing SEO keywords used to be very manual. I remember spending hours doing it in my first SEO job back in 2010.
Now, you can feed AI a list of keywords and search volumes, and it will take the first cut at categorizing them for your review. You can take it a step further with intent as well, categorizing into buying-related keywords and informational keywords. So powerful.
Shorten page copy to remove filler words
I tend to be a wordy writer, including too many filler words and internal arguments that make copy unclear. So, I use AI to make my copy more succinct. It needs a bit of editing after the fact to keep it in our tone and style, but check out the difference:
Ideate email subject lines
Let’s say I was writing a blog post about 11 uses for AI in content marketing, and was also speaking next week at DudaCon on AI and Content Marketing. After publishing the post, I plan to send an email promoting both the new post and the conference session.
But I’m tired from a long week of sales calls and writing content, so I need a bit of help.
AI to the rescue. Here are some email subject lines I could use (number 5 is pretty close to what I want to send!)
Summarize blog post sections into SEO-friendly content snippets
A large part of marketing content today is optimizing that content for search engines to use as Featured Snippets at the top of search results. If you have the snippet, you can get a lot of the traffic for that query.
Here I asked ChatGPT to give a succinct answer that exactly answers the query “What is the difference between copy editing and proofreading?”
Create blog post intros based on the body content
You’ve written a blog, maybe on “copy editing vs proofreading.” Now you need an introductory paragraph for it, because you don’t write introductions until the body of the post has been fully written.
AI can do this too:
A quick note here – after I asked ChatGPT to summarize the post, I wasn’t happy with the output. The language was too flowery and advanced for the audience I write for. So, I asked ChatGPT to regenerate it but to remove complicated words. I gave a few examples, and the above came back. I’d still edit it down a bit, but this is pretty good!
Create social media post drafts from body content
Now that the post is written and has an introduction, I need social copy for both the short and long form social media sites. AI can take care of those drafts too:
Bonus: Need Editing for AI (or Human!) Generated Content?
EditorNinja is your modern copy editing and proofreading service. We’ve edited hundreds of thousands of words generated with AI, and millions more that were written by humans.
If you’re discovering an editing bottleneck because of an increasing volume of content, let’s chat. We can solve that bottleneck for you.