Learn how to use ChatGPT and generative AI tools to enhance your content strategy, without losing the human touch behind your brand.
Sure, you could put your content generation on autopilot with AI support—but unless you want your articles to sound like a mishmash of everything on the Internet thrown into a food processor and regurgitated back into the ether, it’s a pretty good idea to keep your hands on the wheel (or keypad, in this case).
That said, I’ve been working with generative content solutions like OpenAI, Jasper, and CoPilot over the last few years to find the best ways to integrate them into my agency’s workflows. And while I’d never send a client an AI-authored piece, ChatGPT-powered technologies are ideal when it comes to optimizing your content strategy.
Here are some ways to enhance your content marketing plan with generative AI:
When approaching a topic for a long-form article, are you covering all of your bases? Asking ChatGPT to help you build a content outline can help you identify the main points that audiences may be looking for to ensure you don’t miss major areas of coverage. From there, you can build in nuance and showcase your thought leadership angle to convey a unique perspective.
Looking for the right case studies to support your argument? ChatGPT can help you find relevant examples much faster than you could on your own—just make sure to follow the source links to dig into the original research yourself, so you can bring your own perspective to the material.
Want to write a thought leadership piece that responds to a recent study or research report? While it’s important to do your own research, you can use ChatGPT to quickly summarize a longer study or report, so you can understand the primary messages and determine whether it’s relevant to your thesis. Getting quick analyses of longer reports can save you hours of working through irrelevant studies, ensuring that you can engage with material that will add depth to your article.
If you already have a blog, ask ChatGPT to review it and identify additional topics of coverage that are relevant to an audience you define (such as B2B marketing executives, or Series A startup founders). It can quickly analyze what’s happening in the cultural zeitgeist, giving you inspiration to fill up your blog with topics that hit on current industry trends. These topics are only a starting point though: You can enhance them with SEO research to make sure that they’ll show up in the search engines, and put your own spin on them by bringing in your own company’s research and insights to ensure that they provide your brand’s perspective.
Content doesn’t stay current for long, so it’s important to do periodic article refreshes to keep your content relevant and maintain high rankings in the SERPs. You can run your existing content through an AI tool to ask for insights on additional areas to cover in the piece, including new data to replace your existing citations. By swapping in new sources, and lengthening your articles with additional subtopics, you’ll be able to breathe new life into old content and keep it evergreen.
Have a competitor that always seems to be a few steps ahead when it comes to content? You can quickly analyze their output and see where your gaps are by asking ChatGPT to compare their site content with yours, and identify topic areas that they cover but you don’t. The goal here isn’t to create a carbon copy—but by hitting on similar topic areas, you’ll be able to differentiate your brand by putting a perspective on each topic, including your own subject matter expertise.
Rather than ask ChatGPT exactly what to cover, look for opportunities to get to know your audience better and then go from there. For example, if you’re writing an article on hiring a content team, you can ask the tool, “What questions would a CMO have about hiring a head of content?” The answers can guide you in shaping the content topics you’ll cover in the resulting piece.
Especially if you have multiple people producing content for your brand, it’s important to ensure a consistent voice across all of your marketing materials and educational resources. Build out a brand style guide that showcases your brand’s voice, with words such as “witty and irreverent,” or “friendly and professional,” as the case may be. You can share your brand voice requirements with ChatGPT, and ask it to do a tone check on new content inputs to ensure they’re consistent with your target voice, offering edits to maintain the correct tone throughout all of your content.
Completing and publishing a longform piece of content is a worthy accomplishment—but you’re likely to miss out on thousands of potential engagements if you don’t put in the work to repurpose the article into multiple other formats. You can use ChatGPT to suggest social media posts, headlines, emails, landing pages, and other short-form content assets that you can share to distribute and promote your longform piece across different marketing channels.
Let’s say you want to share your content for two different regional websites—one aimed at a U.S.-based audience, and the other at a U.K. audience. Once you’ve written the first piece for a U.S. audience, you can share your completed content with ChatGPT and ask it for suggestions to localize the article for the British audience, including changing word spellings (replacing z with s, etc.) and updating regional terminology and examples. You can also get suggestions for changing the tone of your content to appeal to different job titles: For instance, if you’ve written a piece aimed at marketing executives, you can ask ChatGPT for suggestions on adapting the tone to appeal to junior marketing hires.
Once your content is published, it’s important to periodically review and refresh it, to ensure that it’s still relevant to a modern audience. By asking ChatGPT to suggest revisions to outdated articles, you can tap into newer research and links that will help you keep your audience engaged, and help your content stay fresh in the search engine rankings.
Content strategy is a delicate art, but, when wielded properly, AI tools can offer the precision to help you hone your messaging and reach your intended audiences. Relying on a strategist who has experience with AI tools can ensure that you’ll be able to cover all your bases quickly and efficiently, without losing the personal touch of human-powered content marketing.
Ready to build an AI-optimized content strategy with expert support? Get in touch for a quote.
Kathryn Hawkins is principal and chief content strategist of Eucalypt Media. She has worked as a freelance journalist for media publications and managed inbound marketing and content strategy for corporate and nonprofit clients for more than 16 years.
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