5 best uses for AI content creation

If this question has begun to come up repeatedly in your organization, you’re not alone. Although there are some caveats, in many cases, the answer is likely to be a resounding “yes!”

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology now powers SEO tools, like GrowthBar, advertising copy generators, like Copysmith, and ChatGPT, the general language model that’s taken the world by storm. Although in its early days, this emerging category already delivers significant gains in efficiency and quality to the marketers who are experimenting with it.  

Dive into how content writers can lean on these tools to overcome writer’s block, personalize content, generate high-quality content, automate and streamline the content creation process, and optimize content for search performance. Plus, explore how today’s AI content generators can help you start the creative process or improve the performance of existing content.

The benefits of leveraging AI-generated content can be advantageous for creating an increasingly long list of content types: e-commerce copy, compelling headlines, engaging social media posts, product descriptions, ad copy that converts, and video content – to name just a few.

1. Using AI to generate content ideas

We tend to think of AI as potentially replacing the act of content writing, but in many ways, these tools, using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyze data and generate relevant and engaging content, are the ultimate brainstorming partners.

Give the tools a list of keywords to consider, ask them to analyze all your existing content, or prompt them to find everything known about a topic, and you are sure to get a response that surfaces fresh, original content to explore for your next blog piece or an upcoming marketing campaign.

For example, a content marketer for a wellness blog might prompt ChatGPT or Copy.ai for a list of interesting article ideas. In a matter of seconds, it will return a list of a dozen or more topics, such as “The Power of Mindfulness” or “The Role of Sleep in Wellness”. The prompt could be further refined to focus on topics around a particular aspect of health, such as nutrition. Or you could ask it to generate sub-topics for any one of the story ideas.

When you have a list of ideas to consider for your content marketing strategy, you can launch into the all-important work of evolving the concept and fine-tuning it to match your company’s message and purpose.

2. How AI can create content outlines

The right logical structure can make or break any piece of content. But copywriting topics often lend themselves to a variety of organizing principles. Which one you choose determines how the writing goes from there.

AI content creation tools are remarkably capable of creating blog content outlines. As such, these smart assistants help writers avoid the painstaking experience of meandering through a topic or beginning content development only to conclude — well into the content creation process — that a different flow would work better.

With a strong outline in hand, you can begin the first draft — whether short-form content or long-form content — confident in the direction of the piece. From there, you can even ask your AI sidekick to create a rough first draft.

But keep in mind that you will have to apply the finishing touches, such as a strong opening and closing, your company’s tone of voice, and the emotional qualities you want to convey to be sure the resulting content is unique to your brand and supports your content strategy.

3. AI can speed up content research

Say you have an article underway, and you’d like to find a few key facts to support the thesis. Ask OpenAI, Writesonic, Jasper, or any other AI tool to collect and analyze all the available data that illustrates your point, in real-time. With the right prompting strategy, a research task that used to take many hours — if it could be accomplished at all — is compressed into a minute or less.

It’s important to fact-check the AI’s work to prevent cases of hallucination — where the software essentially fills in the gaps in its logic with incorrect information or conclusions.

But even with this added step, AI content creation tools, especially if you’re building lots of content briefs every month, can help you generate a few ideas to get the ball rolling on each. They are a massive time-saver compared to the old-fashioned writing process and can streamline your creative workflow enormously.

4. Using AI for keyword research and semantic grouping

How long would it take to list out every possible combination of relevant search terms for your product or business? ChatGPT and other tools can take on the tedious task of keyword identification and SEO optimization. You provide the direction and let the SEO AI take it from there.

Continuing with the wellness example from above, you might ask your AI writing assistant to suggest keywords for each of the article topics it suggested in the brainstorming phase. It will come up with several SEO content options per topic. For a blog post about sleep, the top-ranking keyword phrases, according to AI-powered content, include: improve sleep quality, healthy sleep habits, sleep disorders, insomnia remedies, sleep, and wellness.

Next, you can drill further into sub-topics and groupings that make the most sense for your search optimization efforts and future content planning.

5. Checking for plagiarism with AI

Every high school student today knows about the importance of avoiding plagiarism in writing. Marketers also need to make sure their finished content is original, but since AI content generators pull from all the existing digital content on the internet, it’s possible they will include text from another source without directly quoting it or providing an attribution for you to cite.

Tools with the functionality of AI plagiarism like Grammarly, which can review your near-finished content for passages that may exist elsewhere, word for word. Plagiarism checkers provide a safeguard against accidental plagiarism and encourage you to convey a unique human touch instead.

Sitecore has woven AI technology into the core of our content, engagement, and commerce products, and we believe these five use cases are just the beginning of how AI-powered engines will augment the capabilities of writers and digital marketers in the future.

From efficiency gains to enhanced creativity, and higher conversions and target audience engagement, human writers are counting on AI to generate results for all types of content and shape marketing strategies for years to come.