The problem with AI in content planning
This is not a rant about losing jobs to AI or anything like that.
Our clients are high-end businesses that don’t cut corners and know the value of human mind at work, so we haven’t lost any revenue due to AI content planning or writing tools.
It’s the little guys that get hit the worst. As always.
The main problem with AI in content marketing is that you, as a business, are risking your future growth by entrusting all of it to, basically, experimental products.
The irony of that is that businesses that can’t afford risking are exactly the ones relying on AI tools the most.
Small businesses, startups, side hustles all fall victims to second-hand-intelligence-born content marketing.
On the contrary, they need to approach content planning extremely smart exactly because they have limited resources and time.
- Sure, you may save money on writers and marketers using AI tools.
- Sure, getting an article or two or a whole content calendar may be fast.
- Sure, it may all look the same as your competitors’ blog.
But that’s where the problem comes from — AI tools look back at things that have been done (and overdone) already.
What they can’t do is look forward and make educated guesses.
There are dozens of AI tools for content planning, but all they do is scrape, recompile, rewrite, synonymize, and rehash.
That’s intern level, but they’re great at it and don’t take days off.
You can definitely use intern-level help in your content strategy, but don’t ask that intern to be a creative, a strategist, or a decision-maker.
You will not get thought leadership, experience, intuition for trends and directions from AI tools — not in the state that they are in now.
They lack the “why” and “what’s next” components that are vital for strategic thinking.
They also lack the risky part of every creative’s brain. AI tools don’t take risks and don’t defend their “opinions”.
AI tools have no “I feel we’ve got to try this”, and that’s exactly the brain area that takes many businesses forward.
So what do I do instead?
Craft a buyer persona
Sit down with your humans and put together a detailed description of your target market.
/Or — sit down alone if you’re the only human in your business/
If you had at least one customer, work with that info. If you’ve had zero, make one up (but you can go wrong — go do anything to talk to potential customers first).
Customer support emails, chats, forum conversations, messenger logs, and social media interactions are all amazing sources of info for this.
List your target market’s needs, challenges, and motivations.
List the features and properties of your product/service.
Find intersections between the two lists, find fun angles to approach and cover these intersections. You just came up with great topics for your blog!
Inspect competition …somewhat
See what the competitors post about, but understand why they are do it.
Do they know what they’re doing or an AI tool told them to do it?
Don’t dedicate more than 20% of your content plan to competition-sourced topics.
KISS
Don’t start shoting for complicated stuff. Thought leadership, storytelling, funnels …igonre all that at first.
Chances are, your website has tons of blind spots and gaps — your product is underdescribed, underexplained, and undermatched with your target market’s needs.
Fix that with your blog posts first.
That’s exactly the content you want to start with — help your buyer persona solve their needs by plugging your product features and selling points into your explanations.
Boom, you got your blog.
Need help with this, or want to move on to bigger and better things?
