The Art of Humanizing AI Content: How Content Marketers Can Leverage AI for High-Impact SEO Writing

Contents

1. The AI Advantage in Content Creation

2. Setting Your Team Up for Successful AI Integration

3. Prompt Generation: the Most Critical Aspect of AI Use

4. Building Your Content Pipeline Using an AI Stack

5. The Synergy of AI and Human Creativity: Shaping the Future of Content Marketing

It's an exciting time to be a content marketer.

Now that all the hype around ChatGPT is dying down, professionals are realizing that AI-generated content is not a magic bullet that will replace writers.

Instead, artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants trained on large language models (LLMs) are valuable tools. Seasoned writers can now produce high-quality content faster.

Because time is precious, budgets are shrinking, and personalization wins, it's essential for content marketers to learn how to craft humanized AI-generated content quickly. Your competition is already doing it.

The AI Advantage in Content Creation

Unfortunately, content marketers are having to do more with less. 68% of marketers say their companies reduced advertising budgets by 5% to 10% in the second half of 2023.

Budget constraints can limit content quality, quantity, and diversity for digital marketing. Reach and impact suffer.

However, content managers can free up creator time by integrating AI throughout the content creation pipeline. Seasoned writers can then focus on building high-quality content and increasing production levels to make up for declining budgets.

The promise AI makes is enticing. WritingGPT is a Python program using Open AI’s GPT-4 to simulate an entire writing team. It quickly creates blog posts based only on a prompt and a target keyword. Users say the AI-generated content can rank first on Google for long-tail keywords.?

However, is AI content good enough to represent your brand?

While AI-generated content still needs to be improved for effective brand representation, AI writing tools do speed up production. Today's content creators need to balance AI speed with the personal touch.

The Dilemma: Achieving Balance Between AI and Authenticity

The seductive promises of advanced language models have created a dilemma in digital marketing — how do you achieve a balance between AI-generated text and authenticity to create high-quality content faster?

The AI revolution in creating human-like content offers efficiency, speed, and data-driven insights. ChatGPT can research and make an SEO outline for an article cluster faster than you can enter an effective prompt.

However, while AI-generated content can mimic a wide range of patterns and styles, it struggles to create entirely new ideas or perspectives. It lacks emotional intelligence and the ability to trigger an emotional connection or provide those light-bulb moments that hold interest.

Google’s Solution

Google’s answer to the ocean of bland AI-generated content swamping SERPS has been to roll out a series of core updates to its search engine algorithms.?

Search now prioritizes people-first content. Storytelling based on first-hand knowledge or experiences is people-first.

So, a step-by-step how-to post written in the second person might be outranked by a first-person story chronicling a real-life experience using the same how-to steps. And, if the first-person story incorporates a subject matter expert (SME), Google will see it as authentic and authoritative.

Google is also allowing people to set user preferences. Users can choose a commonly visited website, their location, or a topic for search to display results from first. The user preferences feature will increase the production of more useful, targeted content and explore topics at a deeper level.

Expect the human writing process incorporating user preferences and personal experience to become the key component of successful content. You can use it to beat out AI-only content on SERPS. You’ll also create a powerful, personal connection between your brand and your target audience.

Google's 2023 updates aim to boost informative, imaginative, emotional, and thought-provoking content. Content consumers will get the context, emotion, and critical thinking that artificial intelligence lacks.

Striking a balance between AI-generated content and human writing in the creation process is crucial. AI should inform the marketing strategy, but the execution should have a human touch that reflects your brand's unique voice.

Collaboration between AI and human writers can create a synergy that takes creation to a new level, but how should content directors approach AI integration?

Setting Your Team Up for Successful AI Integration

Integrating AI and human writers can unlock immense potential for digital marketing teams. However, overcoming integration challenges requires a combination of strategies and tools to leverage the strengths of AI and human writers while mitigating their weaknesses.

Implementing successful guiding practices at the beginning will smooth your team's AI adaptation throughout the content creation process.

Categorize Your Content

Start by categorizing the types of content that can benefit from AI and those requiring a human touch. For instance, you can automate data-driven reports and real-time updates.

And AI-generated text can work well for a wide range of short-form pieces like emails and social media posts, especially when creating them to promote long-form content that AI can use as a model.

Humans should craft stories and opinion pieces. Also, long-form content like SEO blog posts, case studies, white papers, and thought leadership pieces are best created by humans because:

• AI loses focus and starts creating wonky content after a few hundred words.
• Natural language processing capabilities don't include emotional intelligence.
• Humans can think and create, which AI can't do yet. It can only copy and regurgitate.
• Humans can draw on personal experience and interview subject matter experts (SMEs).

You can use AI for tasks requiring content personalization, speed, efficiency, and data analysis. However, you need human creators to focus on content demanding empathy, creativity, and a personal touch.

Training and Familiarization

Human writers must familiarize themselves with AI tools and undergo training to incorporate them into their content creation process effectively. Training can require time and effort. Here are some challenges to consider:

• Lack of skills or familiarity with AI writing tools can hinder leveraging AI for content creation.
• Mastering many tools presents training challenges for marketing teams and creates expertise bottlenecks.
• While AI-generated content can be helpful for simple tasks, human oversight ensures quality and accuracy.
• As natural language processing algorithms evolve rapidly, your training program will require constant updates for teams to utilize AI in their marketing efforts fully.

To address the challenges, your AI training and familiarization program should focus on:

• Providing hands-on training with AI writing tools and platforms.
• Offering guidance on which areas of marketing can benefit most from AI, like SEO, analytics, outline and brief creation, and short-form content.
• Encouraging collaboration between team members to share knowledge and best practices.
• Ensuring human oversight and fact-checking for AI-generated content to maintain quality and accuracy.
• Staying up-to-date with the latest AI developments to ensure the team remains competitive in the market.

Workflow and Communication Adjustments

Integrating AI tools into a team of human writers may require changes in workflow and communication. Maintaining open communication about AI adoption is crucial for enjoying a smooth transition and addressing any concerns or challenges that may arise.

Here are some ways to maintain open communication about AI adoption:

• Explain the reasons for AI adoption: Communicate clearly the goals of AI implementation in the creative process. Understanding the benefits of cost savings, increased efficiency, improved decision-making, and having more time for creativity can be a powerful adoption motivator.
• Involve employees in the process: Encourage team members to actively participate in the AI implementation process to foster a sense of ownership and ease the transition.
• Address ethical concerns: Be transparent about the ethical implications of AI adoption. Address copyright protection, data privacy, and algorithmic transparency to ensure your team uses AI responsibly and ethically.
• Monitor progress and gather feedback: Regularly assess the effectiveness of AI implementation and gather input from employees to identify areas for improvement and address any concerns.
• Communicate success stories: Build trust and enthusiasm among team members by sharing examples of successful AI implementation, highlighting the benefits and positive outcomes.

By following these steps, organizations can maintain open communication about AI adoption, addressing any concerns or challenges that may arise and ensuring a smooth transition for creators.

Prompt Generation: the Most Critical Aspect of AI Use

Getting prompt generation down early will reduce frustration and solve many user issues before they appear. Here are ten free prompt engineering resources.

Crafting effective prompts for content marketers involves understanding prompt anatomy and each component's role. Detailed prompts to guide AI outputs are critical for coaxing AI tools to produce high-quality content.

These are six tips for effective prompt writing that Perplexity.ai generated:

1. Provide context: Introduce the topic or context in the prompt to give the AI a clear starting point for generating the desired content. Including long-tail keywords and a precise topic in your prompt helps.
2. Clarity and specificity: Clearly define your request or question specifically. A precise prompt helps the AI understand your intent and provide a focused response.
3. Describe the task: Explain the writing task in a way that encourages the AI to share its knowledge and experience or inspires its thought and creativity. Telling AI the precise content type you need — blog post, Facebook ad, email, or other output helps it formulate what you need.
4. Choose the right prompt type: Based on your topic and purpose, choose the right type of prompt — descriptive, expository/informative, narrative, opinion, persuasive, or research.
5. Include relevant examples or desired output formats: Guide the AI's understanding by providing examples or specifying the desired format of the response. This helps AI mimic your brand style and voice.
6. Experiment with different phrasings and approaches: Don't hesitate to try different prompt variations to see which ones yield the best results. You’ll gain additional insights.

By following these guidelines and iterating through different prompts, you can better understand how to communicate with AI and achieve improved performance effectively. You’ll gain more desirable outcomes from generative AI tools.

Building Your Content Pipeline Using an AI Stack

When you look at content production as being a pipeline, it's easy to get an overall view of the workflow your digital marketing strategy requires. AI tools based on an LLM like ChatGPT can help with many of your tasks.?

However, many other AI tools are extremely valuable time savers and should be included in your AI stack. Some of the apps are working hard to incorporate an LLM and move into an AI future.

Most pipelines will need a variety of tools to assist with producing the types of content required at each funnel stage:

• Blog posts, thought leadership pieces, videos, and social media posts gather prospects into your funnel.
• Case studies and white papers keep prospects engaged and moving through the funnel.
• High-converting landing pages get the sale at the bottom of the funnel.

AI writing assistants are the most helpful in creating material for the beginning stage of sales funnels and analyzing performance. Humans do better at creating highly nuanced content for the middle and advanced stages.

Each content piece for your funnel moves through distinct production phases, like identifying content opportunities, brief creation, production, editing, publication, and evaluation. AI content tools can speed up many of the processes.

These seven steps will help you find the most rewarding opportunities to focus your team’s efforts on.

1. Build Detailed Buyer Personas

AI can jump-start creating buyer personas. Live Persona by Delve.ai and MakeMyPersona by HubSpot will help you develop a primary persona. Then, you can use intuition and deeper research to drill down and uncover more specific behaviors and pain points.

Perplexity.ai also gives good general information when prompted to create a buyer persona for your product.

2. Identify Trending Topics and Keywords

AI algorithms can identify popular trends, topics, and formats. You can then determine popular or under-utilized keywords to tailor your content around to maximize engagement.

Sophisticated AI tools specialize in trend analysis and keyword research. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence, SEMrush, and MonkeyLearn are examples. These tools use machine learning algorithms to analyze data, extract relevant keywords, or identify trending topics.

Or you can leverage ChatGPT for research.

3. Perform Competitor Analysis

Discover competitors' keywords and approaches for trending topics and high-ranking content. You can then create better content to take their search engine spot.?

You can also target related keywords that they may not be using.

AI content analytics tools can extract keywords, entities, and patterns from existing data, including text, images, videos, and diagrams.

4. AI Discovers Content Gaps

Use AI to explore content gaps for the topics and keywords you identified. Content writing platforms like Surfer SEO , Frase , or MarketMuse make this process quicker. AIPRM and ChatGPT can compare your website to competitors, pinpoint content gaps, and suggest improvements.

You can also use keyword tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMRush to study top competitors in your niche, their content, and their market presence.

5. Develop a Content Strategy

Based on your buyer profiles, identified gaps, and AI-generated insights, create a content strategy that addresses missing information and provides unique value to your audience.

Your content strategy should identify the content types and platforms that resonate with your target audience.

6. Include Repurposing

Including content repurposing in your strategy can enable your content to reach a wider yet more targeted audience on various platforms. You can also address budgetary concerns by reusing existing content instead of constantly creating new content.

Content repurposing means transforming existing content into other formats for broader distribution on various platforms. You can expand reach, save time, create compelling content, and potentially boost SEO.?

Sophisticated AI tools that can assist with content repurposing include:

• VEED.IO and Lumen5 transform written blogs into videos.
• Munch distills your long-form content, uses marketing data to set your content for success, and generates instant social posts based on your video content.
• Opus Clip repurposes long talking videos into shorts with one click. ChatGPT powers it. Opus Clip has become one of the most popular AI video clipping tools on the market.
• Vidyo.ai is an AI-powered video editing platform that repurposes long-form podcasts and videos into short viral clips for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
• AI Social Content Generator can repurpose your blog content into unlimited social media posts. It can also generate captions and hashtags for your posts.

A content calendar is essential for keeping track of all the moving parts, AI tools, and team members to keep your content pipeline flowing smoothly.

7. Your Content Calendar Is Critical

The dynamic pump driving your content pipeline is your content calendar. Creating a content brief for each piece enables you to monitor it as it moves through the content production pipeline.

AI-driven calendars make it easy to schedule and track briefs and organize your team to maximize productivity and efficiency. Streamline your pipeline with AI’s data-driven insights. AI can categorize resources such as images, videos, and articles for easy access.

Make it easier for your team to collaborate and stay on the same page with these AI content calendar tools:

• Hootsuite is a comprehensive tool known for its robust platform, which includes social publishing and analytics.
• CoSchedule features the ability to help organize and schedule content effectively.
• Sprout Social has strong publishing and scheduling functionality.

You can build a content pipeline that will help your business thrive by combining AI tools and seasoned human creators. AI tools for analysis are becoming so good that even newbies can succeed with content marketing.

The Synergy of AI and Human Creativity: Shaping the Future of Content Marketing

The fusion of AI and human creativity has emerged as a potent and transformative force in content creation. This synergistic collaboration is reshaping the marketing landscape fast.

You can achieve a harmonious blend of innovation and expression by leveraging AI's strengths and addressing its weaknesses. You may unlock new dimensions in content creation, hyper-personalization, SEO optimization, and user experience.?

Here are eight takeaways to guide you.

1. Improve AI Content

Use AI-generated content as a foundation, then infuse it with your unique style, emotions, and personal narrative. Google's sophisticated algorithms seek compelling content, human writing styles, and conversational language.?

Don't hesitate to experiment with multiple iterations of AI-generated content and integrate feedback from user experiences, peers, editors, or mentors.

2. Include Personalized Experiences

Google's latest attempt to sort out helpful, original, human-created content from the sea of AI-generated text prioritizes personal experience. Content creators can get ahead in search by including valuable insights in first-hand accounts of how-to-do processes.?

You can also use SMEs to provide even more valuable insights and build E-E-A-T. Using conversational language and human language helps.

3. One Chunk at a Time:

AI content writers can go off-topic after a few hundred words. Generating first drafts using a specific prompt for each H2 or H3 is best. Then, human writers can touch content up with quotes, statistics, and valuable personal insights.

4. Embrace the Iterative Process

Use AI to generate initial drafts, then refine and improve the content with the human element and new information like original statistics and quotes. Many AI tools offer suggestions for deeper exploration. The best tools can remember and build on previous prompts and answers in a thread.

5. Maintain a Human Touch

Infuse personalization, emotions, brand voice, and storytelling elements to create human-crafted content. A lack of human rewriting may result in content that comes across as robotic or impersonal.

6. Use Related Keywords

AI can help identify relevant keywords to incorporate throughout a content piece. This can improve SEO and make authentic content more discoverable.

7. Edit and Review Content

Thoroughly review and edit human and AI content. AI-generated content may contain inaccuracies or misrepresentations that can impact credibility and accuracy. Using subject matter experts to identify and address potential issues and provide insights will help meet E-E-A-T.

8. Continually Improve and Adapt

Researchers update artificial intelligence algorithms frequently as they gain an improved understanding of natural language processing. Therefore, it's vital for content creators to keep up with the latest advancements.

Experiment with different writing techniques, keywords, and formats to optimize results. Paying attention to analytics and user feedback will help you understand what works and what doesn't as you create AI/human synergy.

Using artificial intelligence to create a foundation speeds up content creation. To build memorable content that improves your metrics, infuse AI beginnings with unique style, emotions, and personal narrative to maintain the human touch that drives engagement.

Contact a seasoned human writer who ‘gets' AI.