It feels like only yesterday the thought of incorporating AI into your day-to-day operations felt futuristic. But as access to AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT or Claude continues to broaden, more opportunities arise for business owners.
If you’re focused on growth, you already understand the importance of digital marketing and may be spending lots of time, energy, and money to create and share high-quality content.
Now that AI is more prevalent than ever, some of those marketing-related tasks can potentially be offloaded, saving you valuable time and resources.
But if you’ve ever played around in an AI platform, you probably know it’s not a perfect solution. In fact, it takes quite a bit of prompting, editing, and revising to produce content that feels suitable enough to share. Once you get the hang of it, however, AI can help your firm produce a large amount of content in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes to write.
If you’re interested in using AI to create content for your firm, here are a few dos and don’ts to help get the ball rolling and find a platform that can help you create quality content that attracts your target audience quickly and efficiently.
5 Ways AI Can Support Your Writing Process
Let’s start with what AI does well when it comes to creating high-quality content for business owners.
#1: Brainstorming Ideas
Staring at a blank screen? AI can help you get past the hurdle of getting started by generating topics relevant to your target audience. While you’ll still want to refine and personalize the results, AI can help jumpstart the creative process or even expand on a broad topic or idea you already have, such as content ideas for your blog, videos, webinars, and social media posts.
#2: Researching Topics
AI is great at breaking down complex topics into more digestible summaries or bulleted lists. This can be especially useful when your audience has less technical knowledge of the topic you’re writing about. Say you’re a financial advisor trying to explain how a Roth conversion works to a first-time investor. AI can help you translate confusing jargon into plain English.
#3: Writing a First Draft
AI can draft a rough version of a blog post, web page, or social media caption in seconds. It won’t be perfect, but it gives you something to work with—which is often half the battle. To get the most out of your first draft, try providing as much specific instruction in the prompt as you can. Create a rough outline, share previous content you’ve written, and explain your services and target audience.
#4: Rewriting for Tone or Clarity
If you have content that feels too stiff, overly technical, or just doesn’t sound like you, AI can help adjust the tone and phrasing. For example, you can ask to make a section sound more conversational, cut out jargon, or rewrite in a style that more closely follows your brand’s voice.
#5: Repurposing Existing Content
From what we’ve seen so far, AI is especially effective at turning your existing content into other types of content. AI can, for instance, help you break down and repackage a blog post into new formats, such as a few LinkedIn posts, email preview, or video script.
When AI Might Fall Short of Your Content Needs
While AI can make the writing process faster and smoother, there are still a few places where it tends to miss the mark.
Providing Statistics
AI is notoriously bad at providing statistics and specific data points. Often, it will pull numbers out of context, misrepresent data, or even make up statistics to support its point. If you’re looking for specific data, stick to a reputable source from the search engine.
Writing Personal Content
AI can mimic tone, but it can’t replicate personal insight. If you have a personal story to share or a funny anecdote, why not share it in your own voice? As much time and effort as you put into training AI to sound like you, some stories are best left told straight from the source (you!).
Following Strict Compliance Standards
Certain industries, like financial services, are subject to strict regulatory oversight. If you have a compliance team, check with them first before using AI tools to create content. Depending on the subject matter, compliance may not want you to input sensitive data or information into answer engines like ChatGPT.
Addressing Niche Target Audiences
If you serve an audience with highly specific or complex needs, AI may lack the data necessary to craft compelling content that hits their pain points. Similarly, you might have a proprietary onboarding process or service that’s best explained by you, rather than generalized by AI.
Final Tips for Leveraging AI
At the end of the day, it’s important that you always sound like yourself in order to connect with readers and establish a strong brand. To help with this, always give context in your writing prompts. Share samples of your previous writing, describe your audience in detail, and be clear about the tone of voice or style you’re looking to accomplish.
A little upfront direction can go a long way toward generating more usable content, but don’t expect a perfect draft on the first try. Instead, prepare to give feedback, rephrase, experiment with prompts, and revise as needed. The more effort you put into teaching AI and providing feedback, the better your results will be moving forward.
Keep an eye out for the type of phrases or formatting that makes content sound too AI-generated. ChatGPT, for example, uses passive voice often and tends to repeat the same transition phrases like “However,” or “In order to.”
Lastly, use AI to showcase your expertise, not replace your creative thinking or thought leadership entirely. If your goal is to publish thoughtful, credible content that builds trust, you still need your voice and insights to shine through.
