2023, wow, what a year! From Hollywood strikes to a new king of England, 2023 brought a treasure trove of pop culture moments and social movements that captured the world’s attention. But even amidst billion-dollar Taylor Swift tours and the cult of Pedro Pascal, one topic of discussion has dominated nearly every narrative. AI.
Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the past year, you’ve probably used or at least heard of generative AI tools. Actually, even the boulder dwellers among us have probably had ChatGPT write an email reply by now.
AI is everywhere, and that goes doubly so for the marketing world, with digital content marketing being the area with the most pronounced impact. So, get your reply prompts ready as we discuss how AI transformed the content marketing landscape in 2023.
Can AI Tools Keep Pace With the Trade?
2023 saw an explosive expansion of tools for writing blogs, drafting social media posts, designing graphics, and more, all through the power of AI. What usually takes content marketers hours to accomplish can seemingly be condensed into a matter of minutes. But, this raises the question of whether AI-generated content can provide the same value to marketers as work created by human writers and designers. The answer, as it turns out, isn’t so clear.
Finding the Art in Artificial Intelligence
Proponents of marketing AI tools are quick to cite their ability to increase productivity, support more consistent content schedules, and reduce creative resource use. It’s hard to argue that having content ready at the push of a button won’t improve your productivity and bring more potential strategies within reach.
On the other hand, AI skeptics focus heavily on the middling quality of work AI tools can produce. Many writers complain about a lack of creativity and personality in AI writing, which lessens reader engagement and leads to higher bounce rates from blogs and social pages.
Search Algorithms Side with Quality Over Quantity
While it remains to be seen whether AI generators can close the gap between man-made content and their own, it’s important to note that quality is already a major consideration for SEO purposes.
Google and large social media sites like TikTok emphasized their algorithms will prioritize high-quality content, AI-generated or not, over all else. So before you try gaming the system with a flood of keyword-littered AI essays, consider if your best bet actually to be seen is taking time to perfect one post.
Leading Brands Leverage AI Across the Enterprise, Will Yours?
Whether your business works with AI or not, it’s undoubtedly the hot new capability every marketing company wants to tout for themselves. 2023 saw marketing industry behemoths like HubSpot and Salesforce go all in on AI with new features and products featuring the technology added to their user platforms. Even advertising platforms like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have integrated generative AI tools to assist marketers in leveraging the technology for targeted content creation.
As AI continues to evolve and expand in 2024, so will the possibilities for more curated content creation and deeper customer engagement. Whether its role will be augmenting content marketing or transforming media creation as a whole remains to be seen.
One trend we are confident will remain steady, and even grow in significance, is the focus on content development within B2B marketing roadmaps. Especially in a new era where previous boundaries around writing resources and bandwidth have been leveled by technology, companies are enabled to efficiently produce content at scale. Whether or not that content is right theme or voice for their audience, that’s a different story. That’s where an agency partner can come in handy to ensure any AI tools and new technology are working for you, not against you.
Curious where a stronger content strategy could take your business in the new year? Contact Bluetext to learn more about messaging, positioning, content marketing and more.
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