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THIS HEADLINE IS AI-GENERATED (AND THAT’S GOOD)
2023 was the year that Artificial Intelligence (AI) finally entered the mainstream, and — if James Cameron’s The Terminator is any indication — we have a few more years before things get really out of hand. All joking aside, AI tools are far away from any kind of true sentience, but in the short term still offer a variety of practical applications for users across many industries. The benefits are even more evident for marketing and communications teams — particularly small teams. These tools can significantly enhance the capabilities of your teams, allowing them to tackle complex tasks with greater efficiency and effectiveness.
To start, let’s talk about the major players in the AI space. OpenAI’s GPT and Google Bard are the most powerful and well-known large language models. These tools can generate human-like written responses while understanding conversational context, making them valuable content creation, editing, and amplification assets. AI-driven tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Runway have emerged as leaders when creating visual content. All can generate images or video from textual descriptions, called “prompts,” and they can also be leveraged to analyze and optimize visual content for better engagement and impact.
While some may feel like using AI is too difficult to learn or unnecessarily complicated, these tools are designed to be highly intuitive for new users. This significant technological jump democratizes skills like Microsoft Excel opened data processing and visualization easier in the 80s and 90s. Similarly, content generation that would have been impossible for a small or single-person team can now be created simply and cost-effectively with these tools, only requiring a simple prompt.
When starting a new piece of content or a new campaign, the dreaded blank page can be intimidating, but this is one of the best places for AI tools to help. While it is important to note that these tools are imperfect and not a replacement for human-generated writing, they are a great way to start with a straightforward prompt. Whether generating topics, naming ideas, or even full-scale outlines, AI is a great first step in the brainstorming process to then improve and polish with your team. It’s as simple as typing a clear prompt like “Write 5 headlines for an article about PEOs. The titles should be no more than 10 words and have a fun, attention-grabbing tone.”
In ChatGPT, for example, that specific prompt generated the following headlines:
"PEOs Unleashed: Turbocharge Your Business with HR Wizards!"
"PEOs: Your Secret Sauce to Conquer HR Hassles!"
"PEOs 101: Your Ticket to Business Zen and Success!"
These language models can also suggest alternative phrasings, ensuring the content remains fresh, engaging, and on brand. You can give notes about the tone, style, or length of content to generate additional content or revised versions of previously shared content. For example, asking ChatGPT to rewrite the previous response in a more serious tone generated these options:
"PEOs: Empowering Businesses with Efficient HR Solutions"
"Unlocking Business Potential: The Role of PEOs"
"Streamlining HR Operations: The Power of PEOs"
"Enhancing Business Performance through PEO Partnerships"
Beyond ideas, if you have a topic or outline already written, the AI can generate a rough draft that you then edit into its final form. The language processing in these tools is sophisticated enough to transform a list of sections with bulleted outlines into a full-scale article within a specific word count. Again, editing will be a crucial part of this process because these tools are imperfect and can sometimes generate inaccurate or poorly written content, but as a starting point, they can save a lot of time.
That time-saving affords what many marketing and communications teams need: scale at speed. Scaling up operations around a big product, event, or initiative for teams with limited resources can take time and effort. Language models can generate content at an unprecedented speed, allowing teams to produce a higher volume of material. AI tools can also create content in various formats, such as blog posts, social posts, video scripts, and more. If you have one version of a piece of content, you can quickly transform it into different formats. Additionally, versions of content can be tailored to different audience segments, maximizing reach and engagement.
Not every marketing and communications team member may possess expertise in all areas of content creation. AI tools help bridge this skill set gap. Because these AI tools are trained on a vast amount of content, you can access their expertise. For example, if a team member has never written a press release, inputting the appropriate information into an AI tool generates an appropriately formatted rough draft trained on thousands or even hundreds of thousands of publicly available press releases online. AI tools can also create templates for specific content pieces like whitepapers or case studies, providing a structured foundation that team members can build upon.
The power of these AI tools is only limited by your ingenuity as a user, and the tools continue to improve. As you look to the future, there isn’t any reason to be intimidated by these tools. However, it’s also a mistake to ignore the opportunities they provide to make existing work faster, easier, and more achievable for teams of all sizes. The best teams will see these tools as a way to enhance and improve the work they already do or achieve the things they aren’t able to do currently.
Beyond marketing and communications, these tools will continue to be a significant part of how companies engage with potential and current customers before speaking directly with a human. Chatbots and virtual assistants can enhance customer interactions, improving sales and conversion rates. Other AI tools can efficiently handle customer queries, providing accurate information and timely support. AI analytics tools can also process vast amounts of data, enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions and precise forecasts. As technologies evolve, the future holds even more exciting possibilities for AI integration in various facets of marketing and business.
MIKE ALEO
Founder & Managing Partner
LGND
Washington, DC
GARET WILLIAMS
Chief Strategy OfficerLGNDWashington, DC