AI is spreading like crazy, and I won’t take a guess, but probably most of us, even if not daily, are trying new tools to see what’s new in the market.
The importance of AI in digital marketing is not a secret anymore. Everyone is now somehow using it.
Platforms like Product Hunt are filled with tools, and we are in a so-called era of ”tool inflation”.
So, let’s be honest: We are all possibly scared of AI to some extent, but at the same time, we try to accept that no matter what we do, AI will constantly advance.
This is why we are all looking to use AI in the best possible way.
We asked 21 digital and content marketing experts to provide their insights, tips, and general advice on how you, as digital/content marketers, can benefit from AI in 2024!
1) Adam Turinas – Personalize Content to Buyer Stage
Adam has a great point on personalizing content with AI.
AI makes it simple to adapt content to where prospects are in their buyer’s journey. To personalize effectively:
– Identify what content best aligns with each buyer journey stage at your company.
– Feed sample buyer attributes to the AI mapped to their associated stage.
– Request stage-specific content tailored to their goals and blockers.
– Review output for relevance and refine prompts to improve quality over time.
Following this process leads to having the right content ready for any prospect at any given stage.
With the integration of AI into search engines, we, as digital marketing professionals, anticipate performance-oriented changes. Changes in the click-through rate (CTR) for the keywords we appear on in the search engine results page (SERP) are now inevitable, and we’ll be dealing with this data flow this year.
To give a simple example, websites that present straightforward, conventional informational content will undergo a severe traffic change, and it seems that these websites will be the most affected by this change.
On the other hand, as AI gives users access to information, we can seamlessly integrate that data into our content, enhancing its depth and quality. Using the funnel metaphor, let us examine user behavior within a search engine. Naturally, in addition to those who want the easiest way to get information, there will be users who want more in-depth exploration. In this funnel, we can think of these users who desire to learn more details as users who want to go to the next step, who will click on a site in the search results. This is where the expertise of your brand and the quality of the content set you apart.
While pages with AI-based content offer something with no difference from AI output in search results, you can stand out with content that has expertise in this area and cannot be replicated by AI.
Certainly, AI will leverage your content, but it’s crucial to remember that one of the factors influencing AI is your content on the website. Indeed, AI outputs will eventually offer your brand to users. We can view this as an entirely new ranking feature for the impression. However, there are still numerous uncertainties regarding how this measurement will be conducted.
While we stress the importance of expertise and authority, it’s important to remember that people will be clicking on your site from search results with a specific action in mind.
That’s why the on-page improvements should not be underestimated.
4) Artur Perrella Glukhovskyy – Use LLMs as Backbones!
In 2024, there’s a huge range of ways that Content Marketers can benefit from AI. Two use cases that help me massively are:
– Using an LLM to create content briefs:
I used to be a 100% BARD guy, but now I’m increasing chatGPT along with two plugins (WebPilot and SEOCoreAI).
Am I completely relying on the LLM for the last piece?
Hell, no! I just use it as a backbone to structure my blog posts.
– Use AI tools like Opus Clip to convert long-form YouTube videos into a ton of short ones.
Some results?
In 10 minutes of work, we converted 3 long videos into 20 or 25 YT shorts.
80% got less than 500 views. 15% got more than 2.5k. And 5% more than 12k!
Are these big numbers? Nope.
But if you consider that we only did 15 minutes of extra work, no editing at all, that’s not bad.
Imagine doing that for 5 accounts on IG, TikTok and YT. That’s organic reach, at scale!
Artur Perrella Glukhovskyy
SEO Consultant
5) Brendan Hufford – Pipe Insights From the 3S Teams with AI
I think generative AI can be really powerful, especially for small teams looking to move quickly.
Lots of gen AI products have sprouted up (with varying degrees of success and quality).
My friend Jay Acunzo likes to say “it has never been easier to be ignorable at scale” and I agree with him.
The marketers that look at SEO as a distribution channel (instead of a whole marketing motion), will thrive with generative AI.
But we’ve already seen that spinning up a thousand pages overnight isn’t the way to win.
The ones that are willing to become less “SEO” and more “content marketer” will see huge opportunities to create original research, talk to customers, and discover what they’re searching for that the keyword research tools don’t (and can’t) reveal.
A huge opportunity I’ve seen already is using gen AI tools to pipe insights from the 3S teams (sales, success and support) to our marketing team
AI is no doubt making an impact on SEO and content. It’s up to you how you decide to implement it into your processes.
For me, I believe that AI + Humans = the future.
My team and I at TrioSEO are already benefiting from it in our SERP research, keyword research, outline generation, editing, and optimization processes.
We don’t rely on purely AI-written content; we believe the human touch is essential, too, but there’s SO many AI powered tools coming out in the space that can benefit your SEO efforts in other areas of the process.
We have found the most significant applications of AI in two areas:
Researching topics for articles and editing written texts.
Regarding research, AI speeds up the process by replacing the need for trying several search phrases and opening multiple tabs.
As we approach SEO articles with a journalistic mindset and use many industry examples and quotes from experts, we often ask Chat GPT to provide us with a list of experts discussing a particular topic.
For example:
We then further research those experts and look if they have given some interviews, been guests on podcasts, or published some educational videos related to our topic.
We also check their social media profiles to see if they have posted something relevant or shared some of their public appearances (because people will often brag about those).
This way, we can find their statements, quote those experts, and of course cite them in our content. This can even work as ego bait because those people might sometimes share your article on social media, which gives your content additional exposure.
On another point, when editing texts, AI helps us improve readability.
For instance, when a writer composes a lengthy sentence, AI tools quickly provide us with conceptual solutions for simplifying it or transforming it into two sentences.
AI gives us an idea, and our editorial know-how determines whether the idea is good or not.
Since readability affects how readers digest our content, it also influences SEO results. So we always strive to improve it. That’s why it’s great to have some additional help in that area.
All in all, we have found AI useful in content production, both in pre-production and post-production, where it accelerates some of our existing processes.
But for other, more complex processes, we can’t rely on it that much. So for us, it’s important to use AI where it makes sense and where it integrates nicely with our existing systems.
For those wondering the opinion of academics, Dr Oguz Acar had something to say too!
The true potential of AI is not painting or writing poems—or churning out SEO-friendly content—but it lies in pushing the creative boundaries of content creators..
Dr. Oguz Acar
Professor of Marketing & Innovation @King’s College London
10) Emilia Korczynska – AI Lacks Depth and Human Experience
The biggest upside of using AI for digital and content marketing in 2024 is that it can free up a lot of time by doing the once tedious and time-consuming tasks like data analysis or summarizing content in seconds.
I’m using chatGPT a lot to summarize and draw conclusion from data, e.g. from ICP research or monthly reports, and to summarize content I don’t have the time to read.
I don’t think AI is quite there to create actionable, helpful content for the end-users / target audience yet – it lacks the unique insight, depth and experience that human writers have.
11) Jeff Collins – Leverage AI for Additional Insights and Efficiencies
AI is often over leveraged in content. Causing low quality content, and long term losses for brands. But if you know how to leverage AI with content, it can drastically speed up processes and reduce costs, while still providing quality content to buyers.
Here are some of my favorite ways to leverage AI for content. Before I start its important to note that people should not rely solely on AI tools like ChatGPT. Rather leverage it for additional insights and efficiencies.
a) Research: leverage
Chatgpt to research potential content to create. These can be things like creating topical maps, identifying long tail keywords, etc.
b) Optimizing existing content:
Leverage Chatgpt to update existing content to formats that are easier to read and digest. A few examples might be blog intros, long sections of content.
c) Bonus efficiencies:
Write page titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, sourcing FAQ’s. Getting a foundation for a content brief.
AI presents an opportunity to enhance your content.
Many view AI-generated content as a convenience, for example: requiring fewer resources, reducing time to publish, and enabling more frequent posting. With AI, we see an increase in content volume – more people are able to post. Therefore, we can expect a significant surge in content in 2024 and beyond, thanks to the convenience of AI-generated material.
This influx means more noise than ever, making content marketing even more competitive. So, how do you stand out?
The answer lies in quality content. Use AI to improve your content. Invest more resources in researching your topics, crafting compelling headlines, and refining the text with varied prompts.
Then, extract more value from each blog post by dedicating additional time to SEO, incorporating multimedia, and promoting your content effectively.
In summary, enhance. Don’t replace.
Jesse McFarland
Principal Owner, Marketing Consultant at Spear Point
13) John Ozuysal – VS for SEO
AI is like my VA for SEO-related work. It’s making the whole process much faster for me.
My biggest benefit is that it’s helping me eliminate the grunt work and do more with less time.
I don’t think that it’s there to create engaging and highly converting content, but it’s still a big help for me to do optimization; I am using it a lot for entity optimization. and also scoring my content based on Google’s guidelines.
As a Content Writer for niche B2B companies, I think AI greatly helps speed up my research process.
Using perplexity, I can ask extremely detailed questions, such as “What are tax laws in California related to equipment rental,” and it will give me a bullet list of answers with cited research.
This saves me a lot of time reading through both relevant and irrelevant links. Instead, I get a direct answer with links that I can check out to learn more.
I think using AI to speed up the research process will enable writers to ensure they have the correct facts while speeding up the research phase.
Livia Hirsch
Content Writer & Content Strategist
15) Mariano Martene – Get AI to Automate Things
AI is here to make your life easier. You can make the most of what it’s already good at:
⟶ Transcription
⟶ Grammar Check
⟶ Classification
⟶ Summaries
You’re better at thinking of AI as your helper and assistant. See how it can help you run your content ops and automate your daily tasks
An example:
Example Mariano shared on his newsletter SaaS-HQ from Filipa Canelas using Zapier+ChatGPT to automate her content ops.
16) Nick Colthorpe – AI is Your Assistant, Not Your Replacement.
I’ve been a marketing generalist for several years and for some clients, a one-person marketing team.
Mostly, I’m hired for copywriting—emails, articles, social posts, landing pages, etc.
And the biggest pain point for me was time.
Until ChatGPT popped into my life.
With a tight window to complete a project, AI speeds up the content process and allows me to spend more time on the details.
However, relying solely on AI isn’t the best move.
Even with the best prompts, it tends to produce similar results. To truly stand out, you still need to add that unique personal touch.
By using a few AI tools, some of which are free, I’ve slashed my content creation time by a whopping 75%.
And in the case of articles, this allows me more time to make sure it:
-Is SEO-optimised -Uses engaging imagery -Utilises best practice formatting -Includes internal and external links -Has the most compelling references
For example, when creating an article on a topic I’m not familiar with, I use Perplexity AI for research.
It’s free and a breeze to use, either directly on their site or as a Chrome extension. Need stats, surveys, or some juicy quotes? Perplexity is your go-to.
I also use Perplexity for keyword research and gathering semantic keywords and entities.
Another tool handy for keywords is Harpa AI, another free Chrome extension.
Simply go to the Google SERPs for your keyword and prompt Harpa for LSI keywords that would be relevant to that topic.
It is also great for listing unique article titles that would rank highly for that search term. Or extracting any other relevant information, such as, ‘people also ask’ questions and related searches.
Pop all this info into ChatGPT and watch it whip up an outline that’s not just engaging but also SEO-savvy.
Pro tip: Prompt it to include relevant keywords from your list to each talking point to alleviate keyword stuffing.
My advice for AI-assisted copywriting? Assign roles.
Tell ChatGPT, “You’re an expert copywriter who creates engaging, compelling and conversational articles.”
And check in with a “do you understand?” at the end of the prompt to keep it on track.
In many cases, it can be beneficial to press the regenerate button. This will give you a rewritten version to compare it with.
The trick to getting the best out of AI in marketing? Don’t just fire and forget.
Engage with it, nurture its responses, guide its direction, and mould its output.
For any marketer looking to stay ahead of the curve, embracing AI isn’t just a smart move—it’s essential.
Just remember, the AI is your assistant, not your replacement.
I am not a big fan of full-fledged AI content (at least a this point since it’s not there yet) however I think it’s a great tool for assisting content creation down the line.
For me has been to summarize large pieces of text to drive meaningful insights out of them. For example, a big one is distilling the user reviews from software aggregator websites like G2 and Capterra for your product to find the most repeated features, the most powerful use cases highlighted, and the sentiment of multiple personas over a spectrum when it comes to the problem-solving abilities of the tool.
Then you can use this information in building your product-led content marketing strategy and the resonance of the content with the reader would be touching new heights.
Another big use-case for me is to create automated spreadsheets with complex custom formulas.
As content strategists we not only help create but also analyze content’s performance and that requires playing a ton with data.
Whenever I perform some analysis in a spreadsheet, my first thought is always:
Can I automate this with some formulas?
And using a tool like ChatGPT (provided that you know what you want to build) you can build almost anything.
For example, using this exact method I’ve turned multiple processes that used to take about 4-5 hours to complete into a 30-minute task, saving a lot of $ for my past company.
