Unlocking Efficiency Now: The Power of AI Content Marketing for Small Businesses

July 27, 2023

The media is talking about AI becoming widespread and available like it is the beginning of the end of the world, as if ChatGPT is secretly Skynet. But the truth is AI is just a new tool for us to use. In-fact AI can actually dramatically make a difference in your businesses marketing efforts. In today's competitive digital landscape, AI content tools like ChatGPT or Jasper can play a crucial role in effective digital marketing.

To really unlock a new level of efficiency, scale your marketing efforts, and save you time, it's essential to learn how to harness the power of AI content marketing for your business.

Table of Contents

Understanding AI Content Marketing

Before we really go in depth here, let's get a basic understanding of some of these tools.

These AI tools are software applications powered by artificial intelligence that help users create content (e.g., website pages or blog pages, social posts, ads, email newsletters) much more efficiently. Using AI to produce this content is referred to as generative AI. It’s primary purpose when used in a marketing context is to improve efficiency to make you more productive, enhance data analysis, and drive meaningful engagement with target audiences.

Benefits of Using AI for Your Content

Enhanced Idea Generation: AI-powered tools excel at generating fresh and creative ideas for content creation. By analyzing vast amounts of data, these tools can identify trends, consumer preferences, and relevant topics, providing marketers with a wealth of inspiration to develop engaging content.
Improved Content Quality: AI tools can analyze and optimize content to ensure its high quality. It can offer suggestions to enhance sentence structure, grammar, readability based on your audience, and coherence, helping marketers create polished and error-free content that resonates with readers (you can even tell it to not write perfect and instead with some errors, so it doesn’t sound too good)
Time Savings: Content creation often involves significant time investment. AI tools can streamline this process by automating repetitive tasks, such as generating outlines, performing research, and even drafting content. This frees up valuable time for marketers to focus on strategic aspects, creativity, and refining the final output.
Optimized SEO and Keyword Integration: AI tools can help optimize content for search engines by suggesting relevant keywords, analyzing keyword density, and providing insights on search trends. This ensures that content is discoverable and ranks higher in search engine results, driving organic traffic to websites. (but a word of caution, it’s not a replacement for correct and more thorough SEO work and analysis)
Audience Insights and Analytics: AI-powered content creation tools provide valuable insights into audience behavior and preferences. By analyzing data, marketers can gain a deeper understanding of their target audience, allowing them to create content that resonates and engages with specific demographics or segments.
Multilingual Content Creation: AI tools with language processing capabilities can assist in creating content in multiple languages. This expands the reach of businesses and enables them to engage with diverse audiences worldwide.

These AI content tools enable small to medium businesses to produce high-quality content that captivates audiences, drives organic Google traffic, and ultimately grows leads, sales, and profits.

Two Generative AI Tools You Can Use Now

ChatGPT (free): Transforming Content Creation

One of the most powerful AI tools for content creation is ChatGPT. Powered by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model (4.0 is now out but often it defaults to 3.5). ChatGPT has the ability to understand and generate human-like text. Businesses looking to enhance their marketing content can harness its capabilities to streamline their content creation process.

For example, marketers can collaborate with an AI-powered assistant to brainstorm ideas, overcome writer's block, and refine content. By simply providing prompts or questions, ChatGPT generates responses that can serve as a starting point or inspiration for engaging and relevant content.

How ChatGPT Assists in Generating Engaging and Relevant Content

Idea Generation: By feeding it relevant keywords or topics, the tool can suggest different angles, perspectives, or subtopics to explore.

Content Expansion: Sometimes, marketers need assistance in expanding on their existing content or filling in gaps. ChatGPT can provide detailed explanations, examples, supporting stories, or supporting arguments, helping marketers enrich their content and provide more value to their audience.

Writing Assistance: ChatGPT can offer suggestions to improve the flow, structure, and clarity of the content. It can provide alternative word choices, sentence restructuring, or even help with introductions and conclusions, enabling marketers to craft polished and compelling pieces.

Examples of Successful Content Created Using ChatGPT

Blog Posts: Marketers have used ChatGPT to generate engaging blog posts on various topics, from technology and fashion to finance and lifestyle. By leveraging the tool's ability to generate well-reasoned arguments and share insights, these blog posts have attracted a wider audience and generated meaningful discussions.
Social Media Content: ChatGPT has proven valuable in creating social media posts that capture attention and encourage interaction. Marketers can receive quick and catchy responses from ChatGPT, allowing them to maintain an active and engaging social media presence.
Product Descriptions: E-commerce businesses have utilized ChatGPT to generate compelling product descriptions that highlight key features and benefits. The tool's ability to understand customer preferences and language nuances ensures that the descriptions resonate with the target audience, leading to increased conversions.

Jasper: Enhancing Content Quality (paid tool)

Jasper is another effective generative AI tool that can help you scale your content production. It’s more robust and offers marketers more features. But Jasper is paid too, and for good reason.

While Jasper has AI chat similar to ChatGPT, it offers pre-made AI prompts to help. Here’s an example of some of the other features it has that ChatGPT doesn’t (remember, ChatGPT is on only chat).

Jasper Templates

AI Content Marketing Template

AI Content Marketing Workflow

Another feature of Jasper is that it can be taught your company's brand voice, making all the content you make with it stick to your company's voice and style. This can shave time off of your editing, after all these tools are great but the human element is still always necessary.

Prompt Engineering -

It’s a Thing

AI prompt engineering is the process of crafting precise and well-structured instructions or queries given to AI models to generate specific outputs. Just like asking the right questions to get the right answers, prompt engineering ensures that AI tools understand the intended purpose and context of the task. By providing clear guidance and context, businesses can customize AI outputs to align with their marketing objectives and brand identity.

While AI marketing tools offer numerous benefits, one of their greatest strengths lies in their high customizability, especially when it comes to prompt engineering. Think of it as being a college professor – you ask the right questions to get the right answers.

Prompt engineering empowers marketers to tailor AI models to their specific needs and objectives. But most importantly, squeeze out of AI exactly what the user needs.

By crafting precise and well-structured prompts, businesses can guide AI tools to generate content that aligns perfectly with their brand identity and marketing strategy. This customization ensures that AI-generated outputs are not only accurate but also highly relevant to the intended audience.

Here is an example:

Let's say you are a Massage and Spa company, and you need to make new Facebook posts on a new special. If you put in something like "make me 3 social media posts, I’ma massage and spa company" you're going to get content like this:

AI Content Marketing Bad Prompt

Not too bad but it is pretty basic huh?

If you put in a basic prompt, you are going to get basic content. But the more effort you put into the content the better it will be. Thankfully learning how to create better prompts is not too hard, just try to follow these steps:

Start with a Clear Understanding of The Contents Objectives: Before diving into the content, clearly define your business objectives and desired outcomes. Identify the specific areas of your marketing strategy that could benefit from AI automation or optimization. This will provide a focused direction and help you choose the most suitable AI tools.
Make Sure to Tell the AI Who it Needs to Create Content for: Telling the program who it should write for and telling it the name of your company is always a good idea. Usually for marketing purposes it's okay to just tell it “Act as a digital marketer” but you might want to get more specific if you're doing social media or blog posts.
Give the AI Important Details About the Content: The more details you can give the program, the better the content you will get. For example, if you are trying to advertise that you are doing a sale, make sure you tell it “The deal is 50% off” or whatever the sale is. And tell it who the user is and what actions you want it to take (learn more, buy, call, etc).
Make Sure You Tell the AI What the Goal of The Content Is: Telling the program exactly what you are trying to do with the content can give it insight into what your goals are. This can vastly improve the intent of the content the AI produces.

So, using the example from before and using these steps lets improve on the basic prompt:

AI Content Marketing Better Prompt

See how much better and professional that prompt is?

Here’s three examples that demonstrate how better AI prompts generates more effective outputs:

Example 1:

AI Content Marketing Post 1

Example 2:

AI Content Marketing Post 2

Example 3:

AI Content Marketing Post 3

Notice the difference in Chat’s output using that more detailed prompt? You can get extraordinarily better content out of these programs with a very small amount of effort!

Bottom line, being able to give the programs adequate prompts is pivotal for high-quality AI content that sounds natural and spot-on for your audience. You still need a good marketing mind though to start the process. All of this content creation is no good if you don't have quality research and intent behind it.

AI Content Workflow for Blog Posts

So, you're ready to dive into the world of AI-generated marketing content. Let's walk through the content workflow that'll help you seamlessly integrate AI tools into your content creation strategy. For the first workflow example let's assume you're using AI to help you write Blog content for an Italian Restaurant.

It's all about working smart and efficiently.

Here's how it goes:

Step 1: Planning and Strategy

First things first, let's set clear objectives and define who we're targeting. Know your audience inside out and identify the topics and messaging that'll resonate with them. Once that's done, it's time to pick the perfect AI tools that'll support your content creation process like a true partner.

Step 2: Use AI to Help You Brainstorm Headlines

AI Content Marketing Brainstorm

Let's fire up that AI tool and get those brainstorming gears turning! AI is great when it comes to generating headlines that capture a reader’s attention and sell more of what you have to offer. Just feed it some keywords or topic ideas, and bam! You'll have a list of headline gems ready to grab your readers' attention. It's like having a brainstorming buddy that never runs out of awesome ideas. Once you’ve picked one, you’re comfortable with, move to the next step.

Step 3: Use Those Headlines for an Outline

AI Content Marketing Headline Outline

Now that we've got those headlines, let's use them as the backbone of our content. Let the AI take those amazing headlines and create a rock-solid outline. It's like having a content architect that knows exactly how to structure your masterpiece. With the AI's guidance, we'll have a roadmap to guide us through the content creation process.

Step 4: Have the AI Write Content Based Off the Outline

AI Content Marketing AI Writing Content

It's the moment we've all been waiting for.

We'll hand over that outline to our AI and let it start weaving its magic into content. We have noticed the absolute best way to do this with Chat AI is to give the program each section of the outline one at a time. Start with the introduction, then to the second point, ect, ect.

Step 5: Human Review and Editing

Once you have the entire Blog, its time to review and edit it. Remember, AI is amazing, but it's always a good idea to edit the work it produces. Put your personal touch on it, add any missing context, and ensure it reflects your brand voice. This step ensures that your content is top-notch and resonates with your audience.

Step 6: Optimization

You're almost there! Give your content one last polish.

Fine-tune it, optimize it for SEO, and add photos. Check for any final tweaks, adjust where needed, and make sure it's primed and ready for the world to see.

With this content workflow, you'll be generating marketing content like a pro.

But what if you're not just doing Blog posts?

AI Content Workflow for Email Campaign

There are paid AI services out there that will actually fully automate email campaigns for you but for this example let's stick with the restaurant and again just go over the workflow for having ChatGPT help with content. You will want to use a lot of the same concepts for the blog workflow, don’t just try to do it all in one prompt break it up:

Step 1: Personalized Subject Lines

AI Content Marketing Subject Lines

Start by feeding ChatGPT some key information about your audience and campaign goals. Let the AI work its magic to generate a variety of attention-grabbing subject line ideas. Choose the one that aligns best with your campaign objectives and resonates with your target audience.

Step 2: Compelling Email Introductions

AI Content Marketing Email Introductions

Crafting captivating email introductions is essential to hook your readers from the start. Share the essence of your message with ChatGPT, and it will help you compose compelling and personalized introductions that captivate your audience's interest, encouraging them to read further.

Step 3: Engaging Body Content

AI Content Marketing Engaging Body Content

With your email introduction set, leverage ChatGPT to expand on your ideas and provide valuable information to your readers. Whether it's product updates, promotional offers, or informative content, the AI can assist in generating engaging email content that keeps your audience hooked.

Step 4: Call-to-Action (CTA) Optimization

AI Content Marketing CTA

A strong CTA can significantly impact your email's conversion rates. Provide ChatGPT with the necessary details, and it will help you experiment with different CTAs. Fine-tune the wording, tone, and placement to create a compelling CTA that encourages your readers to take action.

Step 5 and 6 is the same as the blog workflow. Always remember, AI is your ally, but your creativity and human touch are what make your content truly exceptional.

A True Improvement in Efficiency and Time Management

By leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper, small businesses can revolutionize their content creation by shaving tons of time while still enhancing the content’s quality. You still need the human element, and it is not yet advanced enough to do quality research. It is just a fact that it will never know all the ins and outs of the industry like a good agency like us do. With that being said, it is becoming more and more clear that these tools are becoming essential for saving businesses time and money.

About the author

Drew Dischner

Drew, a Southern California native, is an employee at 39 Celsius. At Grand Canyon University, located in the Phoenix area, he pursued a digital marketing track and honed his skills as an Assistant Copywriter at the GCU Ad Agency. Graduating with a BA in Professional Writing, Drew then gained valuable experience as a social media manager before happily returning home to thrive as a valued member of the team at 39 Celsius.

This is awesome! So helpful and so descriptive. Plus gives a positive outlook on how this can help me plan social media posts without feeling guilty for using AI. I will be bookmarking this for social planning next week!