AI Content Marketing Trends and Insights You Need to Know About in 2023-2024

Right now, AI developers are talking a lot about how much money you can save with AI content marketing. After all, these AI writing tools appear to be faster and require less human input than traditional writing by hand.

However, there are several factors to consider as you decide the type of relationship your business should have with AI writing tools. In this article, we’ll look at how these tools work, trends, what they are capable of, and how they fall short. Then, we’ll talk about a way to leverage these tools to their best advantage – and avoid the pitfalls.

How is AI content marketing viewed by Google’s algorithm?

By far, the biggest debate surrounding AI writing tools is the extent to which their use is permitted by Google’s rules. Although 80% of marketers use some type of AI in their marketing efforts, the bulk of this usage is for analytics. However, as generative AI becomes more common, there’s a growing controversy regarding how much it can or should, be used.

In particular, Google is famous for regulating what kind of content is eligible to rank highly on the SERPs. And with over 90% of organic traffic going to that first page, you can’t take the risk of breaking the rules. Fortunately, we know quite a bit about this topic.

Google doesn’t ban content produced with generative AI

One of the biggest questions people have about using AI writing tools is whether or not AI-generated content is banned from Google. For a long time, Google’s developer advice suggested that AI content marketing materials would be subject to a manual action or algorithm-level penalty. Therefore, people were hesitant to use AI writing tools for anything other than improving human-written material or SEO planning.

It’s understandable that people thought this was true. After all, early AI-generated content was spammy. Article spinners and similar tools would take an original piece and turn it into something different, but it was usually of poor quality. However, this kind of spam was similar to thin content and other poor material that’s produced by human writers.

However, Google’s problem isn’t with AI-generated content as a whole. In fact, top-quality material can reach the top of the SERPs no matter how it was written. The difference between content that ranks well and content that doesn’t is a combination of SEO and how well it’s in compliance with the Helpful Content update.

AI is a great help for SEO

Before there were a lot of AI writing tools available, AI was a huge help for SEO planning. In fact, most SEO tools on the market right now are AI-based, even if they don’t appear to be. That’s because AI can sift through a lot more information than humans can and at a much faster pace. Then, marketers can form an SEO strategy, or fine-tune it, based on the AI program recommendations.

Here are the SEO-related AI content marketing functions you’ll see often:

• Determining user intent. It isn’t always easy for a human to know why search engine users look for a keyword. However, an AI-based SEO tool can find out by doing an analysis of existing articles.

• Finding hidden opportunities. As marketers, we sometimes fail to see the forest through the trees. As a result, we often fail to identify opportunities that are just waiting for us.

• Competitive analysis. Similar to finding opportunities, you’ll get information on what your competition does best so that you can produce even better content.

• Optimize the entire website, not just one page at a time. In other words, how does Google view the whole site? Some whole-site factors can influence the performance of one page in the SERPs.

• Provide a rough draft or outline. Various AI content marketing tools can generate text or an outline. You can use these as a starting point for a final product that’ll perform well on Google.

• Improve your writing. AI writing tools are great for improving your content. This helps with SEO in the long run, because well-written content has an advantage over inferior copy.

Careful use of AI writing tools prevents duplicate content

One of the biggest concerns about AI content marketing is that generative AI can produce robotic or duplicative content. In these situations, your content might get a manual action for plagiarism. Alternatively, your AI use might be found by an AI content detector.

Why is this important? Clearly, manual actions are a serious problem for you and your team. Google will force you to make changes, and in the meantime, your content is irrelevant and inaccessible to search engine users.

You don’t want that.

Similarly, with duplicate content, there’s a good chance Google will pass it over in favor of original content. Obviously, this isn’t good either.

However, professionally crafted AI content marketing materials will not be penalized by AI writing detectors and similar tools. That’s because following best practices will ensure that your content doesn’t have the telltale signs of AI-generated content.

Should your business use AI content marketing?

In short, it depends on what your business needs, who your audience is, and the type of content that will appeal to them. You can almost always use AI tools for secondary tasks, like improving your writing and planning SEO optimization. After all, these tasks don’t require original thought or technical knowledge. However, if you want to use AI writing tools, you need to consider the advantages and disadvantages.

While each writing tool has specific advantages and disadvantages, certain considerations are common to all of them. Let’s look at those first.

Advantages of AI writing tools

There’s little question that AI can have significant advantages depending on your business. Some of these can be more or less valuable, but they all warrant consideration.

Cost savings

One of the big reasons that AI content marketing is becoming popular is that it’s economical. Most AI writing tools are either subscription-based or pay-per-use. Even with the latter, you’ll usually pay quite a bit less per word than you would with a human writer. This is true whether you’re using mostly in-house personnel or hiring freelancers.

Time savings

Similarly, AI content is much faster to produce than human-written content. That’s because AI tools get information from the internet in seconds, then write content from it in minutes. You can have a long-form piece of content in an hour rather than a day.

Naturally, the time savings means you can produce content at scale. This is especially advantageous if you’re writing a website from scratch or if you have a lot of keywords to cover. 

Improved accuracy

Depending on your topic, AI writing tools can increase the accuracy of your content. That’s because they don’t have a human bias on a particular issue. Instead, it draws upon information that is already on the internet. In many cases, that information presents a variety of perspectives on a topic.

Disadvantages of AI content marketing

Although producing content with AI can be advantageous, it isn’t perfect. In fact, some of the disadvantages of using AI mean that you should consider if it’s appropriate for certain topics and formats. You’ll also want to consider having human experts edit the final product for accuracy and quality.

Humans (still) required

Although AI writing tools can speed up the writing process, you’ll never eliminate the need for human intervention. For instance, all generative AI tools require people to ask it questions or give it prompts. The human operator must know how to get a decent text out of each program, or the project will take much longer than it should.

In addition, humans must still edit, fact-check, and format the finished product. For this reason, the experts say that generative AI is best for short-form content and rough drafts or outlines. These items let you save time without compromising quality.

AI doesn’t think for itself

Although AI writing tools appear to look intelligent, they’re only as good as the data. That’s because AI can’t think for itself. On a practical level, the lack of critical thinking skills means that if the program pulls up information on the internet that’s inaccurate, it’ll just parrot the false information.

Similarly, AI can’t analyze context or write original content. While AI content generally passes plagiarism checks, it’s just a rehashing of information that the program “found.” In other words, you can’t write an academic paper or other content that requires original information with it. 

You still need to worry about Google

As we mentioned above, Google no longer penalizes content just because it was written with AI. However, poor-quality content and inaccurate information can still wreck your SEO. Furthermore, it’s well known that poor-quality content doesn’t do well on Google anymore.

In other words, to do AI content marketing right, you’ll still need to do a lot of work with the text you get from even the “smartest” generative tools.

How AI writing tools work

While most people understand how SEO tools featuring AI work, it’s important to understand how writing tools operate. This information will show you why AI has its current strengths and weaknesses. In addition, most of this information is common to all of the rival generative AI tools. After that, you’ll better understand particular products and the differences between them.

AI uses neural networks

A neural network is a set of algorithms and training data that helps AI make decisions. For instance, there may be an “if, then” workflow, a “what’s common between certain items” workflow, and others. The idea is to cover every possible scenario, including some that are quite complex. As each scenario is covered and a decision is made, the right “answer” emerges.

But where does the information come from? 

There are two basic options, depending on the AI writing tools. The first is the training data itself. This approach is central to ChatGPT and similar chatbot-based products. 

The other option is the Internet. Generative AI has varying degrees of dependence on internet data, which is gathered in real-time. Once collected, this information combines with the training data to help formulate answers (or, in this case, content).

AI is logic-based and writes accordingly

The biggest weakness of AI content marketing is the dependence on logic. Certainly, human writers use logical thinking and knowledge of a topic to formulate quality content. However, with AI, there’s an inability to think outside the box. Any content produced must be a logical consequence of the information that AI writing tools have access to when answering the prompts.

This factor is the reason why AI content can so easily have factual errors. It also means that AI typically cannot handle complex or cutting-edge topics: there often isn’t enough available information. Fortunately, with the right topic and some fact-checking, you can use generative AI as a valuable tool.

Specific examples of AI content marketing tools you should know

Right now, specific AI writing tools and marketing tools are especially popular. Some of them are very common, even industry-standard. Others are much newer and require more cautious use, at least for now.

Tools that work with existing content

One of the best ways to leverage AI for content marketing is by improving existing content. You can use these with human-written content or with something you’ve made using AI writing tools. 

Spelling and grammar checkers

Most of us are used to spelling and grammar checkers in our word processing programs. However, they’ve gotten smarter over the years. Some companies have even developed powerful AI tools that take editing to the next level. Not only do they check for basic errors, but you can even edit for tone, delivery, and more.

These are close to becoming industry standard and are great with both AI and human-written rough drafts.

Article spinners

An article spinner takes the existing text and turns it into a new text. The idea is to reword content so you can use it for other purposes or use similar content for a related keyword. It’s an old-fashioned shortcut for businesses that need a lot of content.

Sadly, article spinners are easy to abuse, and they often produce poor-quality results. They’re a great way to evade AI detectors, but the copy is often of lower quality than the original. You’ll usually need to do heavy editing to make the text good enough for your website.

The other thing to consider with spinners is that they usually don’t produce content that ranks well unless you do the work to edit. In many cases, spun content is what gets Google manual actions and other undesirable results.

Generative AI writing tools

The other major tool type to know about is generative AI. These are the tools that are taking the writing industry by storm and causing much controversy. While article spinners were controversial in their heyday, the difference is that spinners were rarely used for cheating on exams or composing research papers. On the other hand, generative AI can craft copy with little more than a prompt.

By far, the most popular examples are Jasper AI and ChatGPT.

Jasper AI

Jasper has been around for a few years, though it’s gained popularity recently. You can use this tool for short and long-form content, though it’s generally better for longer pieces than its competitors.

Jasper has a number of advantages:

• It’s easy to use
• You can write long-form content
• Lots of template choices

However, Jasper has the same drawbacks as most other AI writing tools, including issues with accuracy and the need for human input. So, you’ll need to heavily edit your Jasper content before it’s website-ready.

Worse, Jasper is relatively poor at SEO writing. Its algorithm might decide that the awkward or precise phrasing to insert keywords are illogical. And the neural network lacks the sophistication to override this type of judgment. 

ChatGPT

By far the most hyped AI tool right now, ChatGPT is better for short-form content and outlines. You can also use it as a way to break through writer’s block.

Once again, there are advantages to using ChatGPT. In particular, this tool is great for short-form content, like social media posts and product descriptions. You’ll also love certain other features, like requesting a particular writing style or producing content that’s geared toward a particular age group.

However, ChatGPT has some unique challenges. For instance, because it’s a chatbot, you’ll have difficulty getting detailed answers to your prompts. In addition, it doesn’t consult the internet during the writing process. That means it’s limited to whatever information it had in training data (original and new) before you asked the question.

And if the information ChatGPT has on hand is obsolete or inaccurate, so will your text. In other words, ChatGPT has a long way to go before it’s a reliable way to produce publishable text.

WriterArmy offers the best of both worlds

Although AI content marketing has significant weaknesses, there’s a lot of value to leveraging AI. As we’ve mentioned before, outlines and rough drafts written with AI can save you a lot of time and help you stay organized.

The trouble is that learning to use these AI writing tools can be complicated, and editing takes a lot of time.

Fortunately, at WriterArmy, we know how to leverage the power of AI while still producing human-like content. We use two generative AI algorithms to produce a rough draft, then have our human writers edit the content to perfection. This saves you a lot of time and money because AI works quickly, and editing is more economical to purchase from humans.

Here are some reasons why you should consider using our service.

We do everything

When you hire us, we do everything. You simply tell us what you need, answer some basic questions, and we take care of the rest. For our AI writing tools, that means feeding pertinent information into the algorithms. Then, we pay our team of freelancers to make it perfect.

Here are the things we handle for you:

• Ensure that your keyword is inserted with sufficient frequency
• Edit the content to match your brand voice, message, and target audience
• Add pictures or graphics according to requirements
• Include meta tags, descriptions, and links
• Optimize for SEO
• Fact-checking and correction as appropriate.

We’ll even post each article on your website for a small upcharge per article.

In other words, our service provides turnkey content that you can trust was done right. And, because we take care of everything, you don’t have to worry about using a lot of staff time. The best part of it is that our service is worry-free. 

Final thoughts

Right now, the field of AI content marketing is evolving quickly. Companies are putting out new tools on a regular basis, and they have gotten better over time. Still, these tools are far from perfect. You’ll need to do a lot of work to ensure that your content produced by AI writing tools is suitable for publication.

Or, you can call us for a free consultation. We’ll assess your needs as necessary, help develop keywords, and produce the right content for your business. All you need to do is consult with us. It’s that easy.