by Jim August 16, 2023
Welcome back everyone! Today I’m exploring the evolving landscape of AI content creation, particularly its impact on digital marketing and eCommerce. I’ll highlight the potential pitfalls of creating content solely for search engines and emphasise the importance of aligning content with buyer personas for improved engagement and conversions. I’ll also discuss the significance of quality over quantity in AI-generated content and tease upcoming insights into using AI tools for competitor analysis.
What I learned
- AI is great at quantity, but not necessarily quality!
- Remember prompt quality counts.
- Garbage in, garbage out.
- Why blogs aren’t great for eCommerce.
- The importance of buyer personas.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers! How are you doing? ChatGPT and the other LLMs out there are really great at creating content, we know that, right? I’ve got a smart assistant I talk to every day. I built it myself, and I talk to it, and it creates emails for me. It will give me motivation, leadership advice, all these things. This is just something I’ve built myself, but it creates that content really, really well.
AI Content at Scale
This has led to a move, I guess, in the digital marketing space, where I’m starting to see people saying we can do content at scale using AI. And I think the thinking behind it is, what I assume this is, is to have lots and lots of articles out there on lots and lots of different sites so we get lots and lots of backlinks. Maybe we’re not a fan of that. As you know, we’ve moved away from that sort of model years and years ago when we used to write blog posts literally for car parks and toilet roll. And there was that point we realized we’d jumped the shark.
And with Google’s announcement recently of the helpful content update and all these other content things that are coming out, I think it’s a good time to just pause and understand what you want the content to do? Because as we’ve demonstrated before, if you’re bringing in a lot of organic traffic from blog posts, chances are if you’re an e-commerce store, those blog posts aren’t going to convert anywhere near as well as, say, someone landing on a product page or a category page. Makes sense, right? If I’m landing on those pages, I’m there to buy. If I’m landing on a blog, I’m there to read. And that’s what helpful content is. It can be helpful, and it might get you traffic, but it just might not get you sales because it’s the wrong sort of person that’s hit your site. That’s why if we’re writing content or anything like that for a blog, it’s going to tie into an EDM, to a Klaviyo email campaign or something like that. So, it supports that rather than just being the standalone thing out there where we’re trying to talk to Google essentially and not the shopper to get the traffic. And that’s what a lot of this content is.
And I had that experience last *****. I was working on my 3D printer and had a broken part, and I wanted to get basically a troubleshooting checklist for this part. So, I just simply went into ChatGPT, asked the question, and within seconds, it gave me the checklist. Now, interestingly, it used browse with Bing, and it’s found an article, and then it extracted the checklist from that article. So I don’t have to wade through all the Google content crap that starts at the top.
You see so many articles like this on publishing sites where they have these long articles, and then finally, you get to the meat of the article right down the bottom. And it’s just a horrible experience for the shopper or the user. So, what we do with all our content, we don’t write it for Google. And this has stemmed out of seeing one particular client who thought, “I know how to do SEO content,” and so they didn’t, as it turned out. But they went to ChatGPT, and they asked, “Can you write a piece of SEO copy and include these keywords for my tabletops?” And the article started off with something like, “Tabletops are not only good for putting your food and drink on; tabletops also make any café…” We know what tabletops are. It was just junk content, and obviously, it didn’t rank.
The Importance of Buyer Personas
Now, what we do with the content is we filter it all through a buyer persona. So, if you want to know about buyer personas, go and read David Meerman Scott’s book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” He introduced me to the concept years ago, and it makes a lot of sense. So we’ve built our own buyer personas. And what we do is we look at a client’s site, we get the information from that site, and then we generate a buyer persona based on that.
Now, if the buyer persona that comes out from that is not what the client was expecting, then chances are there’s a lot more work to be done on the site with the content that you’ve got because the content can’t be right if we’re taking that content that’s creating this buyer persona. So those buyer personas are so valuable for writing EDMs, blog posts, ads, everything, and how they then would tailor into the brand voice. It also helps you understand what product selection you should be doing. So for us, for our buyer personas, we can say, “Who would buy this?” And we might have Tech Terry, which is one of our buyer personas, and we’d say, “Would Tech Terry buy this? Is this something Tech Terry would want?” And it’s all those sorts of things that you can do with buyer personas.
So, I would encourage you, yes, create content if you’ve got time and you want to have a go at doing that, but understand who you’re writing for, like any writer. And as I said at the beginning of the year, if you’re already really good at something, this is going to amplify that. If you were never good at writing great content, probably don’t start now and try to get it done with ChatGPT because you will get something, but it’s always going to be garbage in, garbage out. The quality of the prompt and the input is going to dictate the output. And that’s why we have these templates, so we know how to create the content properly. So, it’s not just noise and it’s not just volumes; it’s quality that we want. We don’t want quantity.
So just remember, sorry, this video is so long; I didn’t have time to write you a short one. Just keep it short and succinct. Even my smart assistant, I will sometimes take the emails it writes for me and then shorten them down, bullet point them even further. Hopefully, that’s helpful. And next week, I’m going to be telling you a little bit about how we’re using these AI tools that we’ve built to really dive in and understand competitor analysis at a smart assistant level, which is going to be interesting. If you need some AI advice for your business or just fancy dropping me a line, let me know at [email protected]. See you next week. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
