Another chance to nerd out about AI? Don’t mind if we do.
AI has made its way into nearly every part of marketing, but when it comes to content creation, we’ve found some standout ways to make it work smarter, not take over. From brainstorming ideas to generating visuals, AI helps speed up the process, but the creativity? That’s still all us.
Here’s how we’re using AI to create better content, faster (and a few tips we’ve learned along the way).
Why We Use AI for Content Creation
Like most businesses, we use AI for the obvious reasons—efficiency and scale. AI helps us crank out blogs, social posts, videos, and more quickly. With the time we save, we’re able to produce more content than ever, benefiting both our internal marketing and, most importantly, our clients.
But AI doesn’t just help with speed—it helps boost creativity, too. Sometimes, getting started is the hardest part. Staring at a blank page, trying to find the perfect angle for a social post or the right hook for a blog? We’ve all been there. AI gives us that spark, helping generate ideas so we can run with them and make them our own.
We also use AI to analyze performance and audiences, strengthening our strategy and fine-tuning messaging to reach the right people at the right time.
How We Use AI in Content Marketing (Plus Tips & Tricks)
1. Blog Writing & Outlines
Like we mentioned earlier, AI is a great way to jumpstart the writing process, freeing up brain space for the fun part: actually writing. A lot of us on our team use AI to brainstorm blog topics or create rough outlines, giving us a solid starting point to build from.
But, Google and other search engines love authentic, human-written content. With EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) becoming a major ranking factor, it’s crucial that AI-generated content is just a starting point, not the final product. Anything AI generates needs a human touch to make sure it’s valuable, engaging, and optimized to actually rank. We’ve written two blogs about this exact topic. We encourage you to check them out to stay ahead of how search algorithms are evolving.
- Not Everything Should be AI-Generated - Here's Why
- Authenticity Vs. Algorithms: What I Learned at Inbound 2024
TIP: One of our favorite tools for blog research is Answer the Public. It pulls real search data to show what people are actively asking online. We use it to find trending questions and keywords, then plug them into ChatGPT to help shape our content strategy. This takes out any guessing and we can write about what people are already searching for.
2. Image Generation
Raise your hand if you’ve spent way too much time scouring stock photo sites, tweaking your search terms endlessly, only to come up empty-handed. No matter how creative you get, sometimes the perfect image just doesn’t exist. We’ve been there more times than we’d like to admit. That’s why we turned to AI tools like Midjourney to generate images that stock photo libraries just don’t have.
Need a photo-realistic puppy in a hard hat in your brand colors? (Yes, this was a real request.) AI makes that happen in minutes. Not only does this save us from the endless scroll of stock photo sites, but it also means we’re publishing one-of-a-kind visuals that no one else has.
3. Videos & Podcast
Over the past six months, we’ve gone all in on podcasting—including launching our own, The Spark (shameless plug, go check it out!). After recording, we end up with one long-form video that’s great for YouTube, but not for other social media platforms. We needed a way to break it down into bite-sized clips for Instagram, LinkedIn, and beyond.
At first, we did it the hard way—manually scrubbing through footage, time-stamping clips, and pulling out key moments. Yes, we know. You’re judging. But in our defense, video editing wasn’t exactly in our daily workflow, and we had to shake off some rust.
Luckily, we started using Underlord (major points for the name), an AI tool within Descript that has quite literally transformed the process for us. It takes our long-form video and chops it into smaller, shareable clips based on the prompts and parameters we set. Want six 30-second clips where Jay and Kendra break down SEO? Boom. Done. Sure, we still tweak things, but AI has shaved hours off our editing process.
Marketing Smarter, Not Harder
Bringing AI into our content creation process has helped us stay creative instead of getting stuck in the weeds—like overthinking a blog intro or spending way too long hunting down the perfect stock image. With AI handling the busy work, we can focus on producing more content that actually moves the needle.
And just to be clear, AI isn’t going to eliminate the job, but it will make it a whole lot easier. As our very own Kendra Morvillo would say, you still need a human hand on the wheel.
Want to keep up with the latest AI tools we’re testing and how we’re using them? Apply for our Marketing Rockstars program and get behind-the-scenes insights straight from our team.
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