Beyond ChatGPT: How Else Are Content Marketers Using AI Today?

It’s been described as “the next big thing,” “overhyped,” the “calculator for writing,” and a “menace” to institutions of learning. But no matter what you call it, there’s no doubt it has taken the internet by storm and ushered in a new era of AI.

I’m talking, of course, about ChatGPT, the chatbot launched last November whose ability to write in a natural, realistic voice has the media proclaiming this as the year AI becomes eerily human.

Based on OpenAI’s large language model, and having devoured basically the entire internet, ChatGPT can respond to prompts on just about any topic imaginable; already it’s been used to help an 11-year-old boy create a text-based role playing game, enable students to cheat in school, and write a song in any existing musician’s style.

As you might expect, the marketing world is practically intoxicated with ChatGPT’s potential. Tons of marketers are breathlessly trumpeting the ways they have already integrated the tool into their workflows, for everything from handling customer inquiries and brainstorming new taglines to writing emails, web copy, social media content, blog posts, and much more.

Predictably, many in the industry are questioning whether ChatGPT will replace human writers altogether, causing some professionals to confront existential fears about what it means to be a writer in this day and age. But if the past is any precursor to the future, AI won’t actually take jobs away from content marketers. It is more likely to empower them to do their work faster, more effectively, and just plain better.

Despite the recent fervor about ChatGPT, the truth is that AI is already in widespread use in content marketing today. In Capterra’s 2022 AI Marketing Survey, nearly two-thirds of marketers told the software review site they use AI for email marketing, four-tenths claimed to use it for SEO optimization, and one-third for content generation. To truly understand ChatGPT’s future impact on content marketing, it is helpful to look at the ways writers, editors, and content strategists are using AI — or its subsets, machine learning, and natural language processing — today.

Planning & Strategy

AI often plays an important role in the process that sits at the very root of content marketing: idea generation. Traditionally, writers or strategists would come up with ideas for topics based on talking to customers, input from the sales team, reactions from what was being covered by the media, and their own intuition on what is most likely to engage their readers. With AI, however, marketers can now make better decisions with data-driven input.

Tools from companies such as Neuroflash, StoryLab.ai, and others use AI to help marketers come up with topics to write about based on what is trending in certain areas and what headlines are most likely to drive engagement. Meanwhile, SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Moz provide deep insight into not only what search terms people are looking for and what questions they are asking online, but what related topics those searchers are likely to be interested in.

Other tools, like BrightEdge, go so far as to use AI to help marketers understand a user’s intent behind their search queries so that marketers know what topics are relevant to someone who is most likely to buy.

Writing

Although ChatGPT might be the latest, most sensational, and most human-like AI writing tool to hit the market, it is far from the first. Intelligent writing assistants such as Jasper, Peppertype, Copy.ai, and Anyword have been around for years, helping marketers produce an array of content including ad copy, landing pages, emails, blog posts, and more.

Marketers simply give these tools some input into what they need, and the software will spit back original content that they claim is ready to be published. The tools use AI to write content approximately ten times faster than any human could, while phrasing things in ways that they know are likely to make readers take action.

For now, many view the quality of the writing as substandard. This is where ChatGPT represents a giant leap forward, though even ChatGPT’s writing seems to lack a sense of imagination and that creative spark that some believe only humans can provide. Still, many writers have found tools such as these helpful for organizing their thoughts, overcoming writer's block, and even producing outlines or first drafts that they can polish into high-quality articles.

Editing

Of all the AI-based communications tools on the market, perhaps none is as widespread nor as well-known as Grammarly, the writing assistant that helps more than 30 million people improve their spelling, grammar, and the overall quality of their writing. After receiving $200 million in funding at a $13 billion valuation in 2021, last year the company was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential companies and one of FastCompany’s most innovative companies in artificial intelligence.

Aside from real-time suggestions for clearer, more effective writing, Grammarly and other editing tools on the market, such as Phrasee and Acrolinx, can also help writers maintain consistency across their writing with their company’s style, tone of voice, and brand messaging — making their editors' job that much easier.

None of these tools replace the support and mentorship an actual editor can provide, but they allow those editors to focus less on the copyediting and grammatical fixes that these tools usually catch and more on the big-picture, insight-driven advice that truly elevates a writer’s output.

Delivery

Once the writing process is complete, AI can even step in to help marketers make sure their content gets delivered to the right person, at the right time, in the right place. Much like the advertising algorithms that target ads based on a user’s past behavior, there are several content delivery platforms on the market that serve up the right blog post, social media content or email based on their predictions about what a user is most likely to find relevant and interesting.

Platforms including Uberflip, OneSpot, and PathFactory use AI to analyze a website visitor’s profile and deliver personalized content experiences that are hyper-relevant to each person’s interests. The marketing performance management solution Allocadia, which is now part of Uptempo, used PathFactory to identify the top-performing content for each stage of its buyer’s journey, then hone in on what resonates best with each specific persona while also understanding how and when to deploy that content to best influence the sales pipeline. The result was a 17% increase in content engagement and an 11% improvement in closed-won sales rates.

While ChatGPT has marketers excited about its potential impact on their content strategies, it remains to be seen exactly what role generative AI and natural language processing will play in the coming years. Will it replace human writers altogether? Will it degrade the overall quality of writing on the internet? Will it introduce unintentional biases or spell the end of fact-checking and verification as we know it?

These questions can only be answered with time. One thing is certain, however: AI has been embraced by a large number of content marketers already, and while it might not be ready to take over their jobs, it has definitely made them better at what they do.