Leverage AI for B2B Content Creation
Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes
Intended Audience: Microsoft Partners
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a buzzword but a practical tool for growth, as evidenced by the recent adoption rates among organizations. With 80% of small businesses already embracing AI, it’s clear that the technology is not just for industry giants but is accessible and beneficial to businesses of all sizes, signaling a transformative shift in the modern business ecosystem.
Building on the trend of small businesses adopting AI, the realm of marketing is witnessing a similar transformation. AI is enhancing SEO strategies, streamlining content creation, and ensuring marketers stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape. It acts as a safeguard against writer’s block and accelerates the drafting process, proving indispensable for maintaining a constant flow of engaging content.,
How to Use AI for B2B Marketing
AI can be employed in a variety of ways to improve B2B marketing, including but not limited to:
- Social Media Posts: AI tools can analyze trends and user engagement to generate social media content that is likely to perform well, tailoring posts to different platforms and audiences.
- Blog Drafts: By leveraging natural language processing, AI can assist in creating well-structured blog drafts, suggesting topics, and optimizing content for SEO.
- Emails/Webinar Invites: AI can personalize bulk email campaigns and webinar invites, improving open rates and engagement by analyzing past user behaviors.
- Brand Personas: AI enables marketers to develop detailed brand personas by sifting through data to identify the most common characteristics of their target audience.
- Edit Existing Copy: AI can refine and improve existing marketing copy, ensuring clarity and engagement, and aligning the content with the latest SEO guidelines.
- Competitor Analysis: AI-driven tools can provide real-time insights into competitors’ strategies, helping businesses to stay ahead by adjusting their tactics accordingly.
Let’s delve into the ways AI can assist you in generating short and long-form content, from concise social media snippets to comprehensive blog articles
Effectively Prompting AI for B2B Content Generation
- Explicit specification: This is about being clear and detailed with your instructions to AI from the outset. It means making sure your expectations are understood in one attempt by providing detailed information on the tone, style, and format you want. This approach helps guide the AI to produce the precise output you’re looking for, eliminating guesswork and reducing the need for multiple iterations. With this method, you might tell AI to write a blog, with the topic, style, tone of voice, and audience all in one prompt.
- Prompt chaining: In this method, each new prompt to the AI builds off the last one, effectively guiding the AI along a desired narrative or thought path. This technique ensures that each subsequent response from the AI is focused and on-topic, moving steadily towards the final goal. For example, you could first ask the AI to craft a blog post, then ask it to fine-tune the tone or pepper in keywords, and then create meta titles and headings. It’s about shaping the AI’s output step by step to get exactly what you’re looking for.
- Reverse engineering: In the context of AI, reverse engineering involves feeding the AI existing content, then using it to generate prompts that reflect the core elements of that content. These prompts can then be used as a foundation to generate new content, maintaining the essence of the original while potentially adding new perspectives or ideas. This process allows for the expansion of initial ideas and the creation of fresh content that aligns with the original material’s themes and style, and might be a good way to get prompt ideas if you’re feeling stuck.
Regardless of the prompting technique you choose, the secret to harnessing AI effectively lies in the details. Give it a clear picture — the topic at hand, the writing style you’re aiming for, the tone that speaks to your audience, and the purpose behind your words. This groundwork sets the stage for AI to deliver a solid starting block of content.
Think of the initial output as a lump of clay from which you can sculpt your masterpiece. The richer the context, the closer that first version is to something special. And it doesn’t end there — keep the conversation going with follow-up prompts, and watch the draft evolve. Remember, though, that this is just the beginning. AI lays the foundation, but it’s your human touch that will breathe life into the final creation.
AI for Different Types of B2B Content
We wanted to see how various AI tools perform at generating short-form content like social media posts, and long-form content like blogs:
AI for Short-Form Content
AI for Long-Form Content
When it came to long-form content, such as our Maven blogs, our exploration included tools such as ChatGPT, Grammarly, Quillbot, Writesonic, Bing AI, and Copy.ai. In the realm of creating comprehensive, detailed, and nuanced long-form content, ChatGPT remained in the lead. We found that ChatGPT was the most intuitive to use, and its output, while not perfect, typically tended to be closest to what we were looking for with the fewest iterations and modifications required. However, Bing AI and Copy.ai also impressed us with their outputs, generating long-form content that followed the style and tone of voice we wanted, but usually requiring more guidance.
Overall, each AI tool we tested was quite impressive with its capabilities, and improvements are constantly being made (even as we’re writing this!) Using a combination of AI tools can help not only create fresh content, but also enhance the quality of written content across various platforms and formats.
Leveraging AI for B2B Content Marketing
To sum up, AI for B2B content marketing is a powerful tool, offering quick output on any topic you provide. However, it’s not a standalone solution. Even though we have found AI useful for creating long and short-form content given the right prompts, the output generated still requires a human touch and sometimes a few iterations of edits before it is ready for publishing. AI has its limitations, particularly in understanding the full context and emotional subtleties that human marketers grasp intuitively.
The key is to use AI as an assistant that works in harmony with the human touch. By blending AI’s capabilities with our own strategic and creative strengths, marketers can develop more nuanced and effective campaigns. This balanced approach ensures that marketing efforts are not only smart and analytical but also resonate on a human level, striking the right chord with business clients.
If you have any questions about how to best leverage AI in your marketing efforts, feel free to get in touch with the Mavens!
