How to use AI for content marketing without tanking brand value (AKA: how to avoid AI content that's all fur coat and no knickers)

There’s so much hype around AI content creation it’s easy to forget the need for nuance. Yes, AI can help B2B teams do more with their content marketing budgets. But this needs to be a sensible, considered process or you risk causing long-term harm that’s slow to come back from. 

Every content marketing team wants to use AI to do more with less. Or is under pressure from the board to move that way, at least.

Sensible teams know it’s not that simple.

Now, I’m not on the bandwagon of angry writers decrying AI. I work with tech scale-ups who move fast and messy, so anything with AI’s sort of efficiency gain potential is bound to make waves.

But we need to be pragmatic. AI can give you more bang for your buck, sure. Used well, it can be a great resource. (And learning to use it well is what I’m helping my clients with at the moment. Much more valuable than bellyaching).

What it can’t do is replace human writers. At least not the good ones.

Tools like ChatGPT are just that: tools. And like any tool, they’re only as good as the people wielding them, whether that’s your in-house team or your copywriting partners. 

Let’s talk about how to make AI content marketing work – without eroding brand value and joining an unwinnable race to the bottom. So you can work out where to add AI into your own content ecosystem, where not to, and how to do it best. (Or you can just hire me and I’ll help you with all of that 😉)

“Ettie’s expertise in the HR tech space stands out. Working with her is fantastic, I would 100% recommend.” Content Strategist, Qualtrics

AI content marketing: yay, nay, or maybay?

 

What’s your content marketing philosophy?

 

Before you decide how to use AI for content, you need to be clear on why you create content in the first place. What role does content play for you?

At the left of the spectrum, you’ve got the organisations that optimise for quantity. For them, content marketing has always been a presence play. Visibility more than value. They typically invest heavily in SEO and farm content out to offshore agencies and underpaid junior copywriters.

For some, that works. Usually if they’re already market-dominant with strong brand awareness. Their main priority is staying front-of-mind, so as long as they’re not fucking up the brand by going too-far off-piste, everyone’s happy.

Then you’ve got, you know, almost everyone else.  

Except lots of the everyone else is steamrolling in the wrong direction because they’re trying to compete on quantity rather than quality – and failing. Leading to a race to the bottom where everyone’s pumping out piles of regurgitated, superficial content to compete with lots of other regurgitated, superficial content.

But let’s leave this flailing middle and move to the right side of our spectrum, where organisations prioritise quality.

Here, content marketing is an authority play. Quantity is nice but quality is non-negotiable. These teams seek efficiencies, sure. They want fairly-priced copywriters. They’re astute about where to spend. But quality is the top priority.

It’s these quality-driven organisations that need to be most cautious about AI content creation.

(And yes, there’s nuance. Most teams don’t frame their content marketing philosophy this brutally. But this underlying belief – quality versus quantity; presence versus authority – shapes every AI content decision you make.)

What makes ‘quality’ content?

Let’s assume you’re here because you’re interested in quality content. But let’s park here for a moment. What makes content ‘quality’? There are lots of reasons businesses get content marketing wrong, and misunderstanding this is a biggie.

I could reel off some adjectives for you. And I will. To my mind, quality content is*:

• Intelligent

• Thoughtful

• Interesting

• Engaging

• Educational

• Credible

• Relevant

  
  

*Non-exhaustive list

But we can narrow that down further. Quality content is valuable. Specifically, valuable to the people you’re creating it for and valuable to your organisation.

(This last bit is saying the silent bit out loud somewhat but worth flagging. There are 0000s of pieces of content that are theoretically valuable to your audience but have sod-all to do with your brand). 

So let’s launch off from this somewhat nebulous concept of value. Valuable content should demonstrably sell more of your stuff to more of your people. Or in the more familiar accoutrements: valuable content should help you move prospects along the content marketing funnel, to increase sales. Plus it should increase customer loyalty and CLV.

Within that there’s then obviously a huge amount of KPIs and indictors relevant to the content, funnel stage, platform, and so on. But the essence is there: you’re not creating content for content’s sake. You’re investing in content because you think it has bottom-line impact; it drives ROI. 

That’s a more meaty concept than it first appears (and it’s one content teams so often lose sight of, with planning/strategy/execution spread across siloes and hard to track metrics).

To meet these goals, content needs to communicate about your product and brand in a consistent, funnel-, persona-, and channel-, and brand-aligned way. (Louder for those in the back…)

All your content, if it aspires to this concept of value, must be embedded with this deep existential awareness: Why do I exist?

In this way of thinking, even the most educational, top-funnel content must understand the audience, the product, the positioning, the messaging, and the strategy inside-out. And it must wrap those things into content creation in an intelligent, nuanced way.

Which brings us back to AI content creation.

My personal bar is this: Would I give this piece of content to the busiest senior leader I know with a straight face? (Busy senior leaders are who I almost exclusively write for, hence the Q).

Would I expect the Head of Talent for BP, say, to find my words valuable? The HRBP of BT Group? The CEO of Sainsbury’s?

For me, however you integrate AI into content marketing, this should remain the top question.

How does AI content creation work – and not work?

If your organisation veers more towards the left side of the spectrum, it’s a lot easier to integrate AI into content marketing. You’re already using writers mechanically anyway, so you might as well mechanise the process to the max and use humans for quality assurance. (Such as it is.)

But if one of your guiding principles is quality, you’ll need to think more carefully about AI content. It’s not as simple as briefing into AI, “write a 750-word blog about ‘what is workforce management’ optimised for these KWs”, or whatever.

You can’t input one prompt – however much you’ve worked on your prompt engineering ;) – and take the output and off you go.

To make AI content work for you, you’ll need clear strategy and process guardrails to keep your content marketing ecosystem on track. Humans will be instrumental to that process, at every stage:

• To set content strategy

• To define and hone brand voice

• To create briefs

• To develop perspectives and angles

• To create and choose personas

• To build and challenge arguments

• To craft memorable angles

• To refine language

• To review content

  
  

AI can make the slow, fairly mechanical bits faster. It’s a great research tool (provided you check everything; AI lies constantly and compellingly). It can be great for repurposing your existing content, to get more for your money. It can help with the promotion wraparound. It can help you scale.

But it’s not “good writing” – even if it looks like it, at first glance. And that’s really the issue. Because the people evaluating if this AI malarky is any good aren’t writers or, usually, subject matter experts. They’re normally marketers with steam coming out of their ears and the CEO breathing down their neck about efficiency.

So often, AI content does look fine. Because AI is increasingly able to generate content that masquerades as good writing. But it’s all fur coat and no knickers. All icing and no cake.

Good writing has never been, really, about writing. It’s always been about thinking. When content is taken, “consumed” (eurgh), engaged with, maybe even shared – when content persuades; engages; wins hearts and minds – it’s this underbelly of thinking that’s driving value.

Now, let’s be clear. I’m not saying content marketing teams shouldn’t be using AI. That would be like saying content marketing teams shouldn’t be using Google, or Canva, or whatever else they use.

But I’m saying there’s a danger we over-focus on efficiency as a vanity metric. Because, yes, AI content production might look good now. But doing bad stuff faster is still doing bad stuff. And it risks damaging the more substantial, longer-term metrics that matter more, like brand awareness, consideration, preference, loyalty. Sales. Value.

Let’s keep AI right-sized, in conclusion.

AI is not a replacement for human writers; it’s a tool that can help accelerate and enhance aspects of the content marketing process.

The key thing for content marketing teams is to decide what those aspects are, decide what they’re not, and then to match resources so the bits that need skilled experts get skilled experts.

In other words, it’s business-as-usual. The outcome might be different – maybe you don’t need seven in-house typing monkeys churning out SEO content anymore (and there's an argument you never did, but I'll leave that for another day) – but the calculation is the same.

And personally, I think when teams have made it, they’ll still be knocking on the door of specialist external writers. (… like me 😎).

"Ettie smashes it out of the park – working with her has been one of the best decisions I've made in my role." Content Marketing Manager, Enboarder

I’m Ettie – an HR tech and rec-tech copywriter and strategist with 10+ years’ experience helping global scale-ups in this space accelerate growth, including lots of names you’ll know. Love to chat.