In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, content creators constantly look for ways to optimize and streamline their processes to boost productivity. One emerging tool that has already impacted the creative world is artificial intelligence (AI). When used responsibly, AI can supplement and enhance the traditional content creation lifecycle in impactful ways.
Step 1: Ideation
An essential part of the content creation process is brainstorming or coming up with ideas and different angles for blog posts, videos, social media posts, and other marketing assets. The ideation process can be very time-consuming for human creators. AI platforms and tools can generate ideas and creative prompts to help kickstart the ideation phase.
For example, writing teams can use researched keywords, target audience interests, and business goals to create a brand-specific prompt to generate content. AI tools can generate outlines and general bullet points to give writers a foundation to refine and develop further. This part of the process helps expedite the start of the workflow and alleviates any roadblocks that may be obtained, such as writer’s block.
Key Takeaway: Yes, AI platforms and tools are great catalysts for jump-starting the brainstorming process. However, human comprehension is still required to fully vet generated ideas for accuracy and relevance.
Step 2: Drafting
The initial content drafting is the next phase of the content creation lifecycle, where AI tools can support a writer’s process. After refining an outline, establishing an outline, and confirming formatting and flow, writers can leverage AI platforms to create a rough draft.
The AI-generated draft serves as a starting point. It provides writers with something to build upon and refine rather than starting from scratch. This type of generation encourages writers to spend their time enhancing the content by adding tone, personality, nuance, creativity, and experience. All things that have been identified as weaknesses of AI-generated content. Manual collaboration supports originality, relevancy, and higher-quality content creation.
Key Takeaway: A first draft is only as strong as the initial outline and prompts that the writer develops. Writers still need to develop an understanding of the content’s overall goals and who it should target.
Step 3: Brand Voice and Personalization
Creating content that resonates with specific target audiences and meets their needs is key for engagement and SEO. With developed prompting skills and references, AI tools can analyze data like demographics, interests, and values of ideal customer personals. It can then generate output that suggests how content can be tailored to a client’s unique brand voice and made more helpful and targeted.
For example, when writing a piece of content, an AI-generated output may propose to include statistics related to the topic based on the target audience included in the original prompt. It may also suggest adjusting the tone, language, or examples to better align with a brand’s personality and resonate with a specific audience. By curating content to directly address the needs, concerns, and expectations of target audiences in the brand’s distinct voice, writers can increase the content’s relevance, usefulness, and chances of ranking well in search engines like Google.
Key Takeaway: While AI can provide helpful guidance on tone, data, and tailoring for audiences, the writer’s role is essential for adding personalized touches throughout the content. Writers can build on AI’s suggested output by speaking more directly to the brand’s specific products, services, and market. Writers can also inject personal experiences and examples, anecdotes, creativity, and other entertaining storytelling elements that AI still struggles with. By collaborating with AI, writers can produce highly relevant, targeted, and unique content for users.
Step 4: Optimization
After it completes the draft, AI tools can play a role in optimizing and refining content for maximum impact. While AI can analyze content metrics like word count, sentence length, grammar, and readability, these are merely suggestions. Again, human review is required to ensure content reads well, is structured properly, and meets SEO best practices. Additionally, writers and editors are ultimately responsible for accepting or rejecting AI-generated output recommendations based on the overall content goals.
Key Takeaway: While AI can provide valuable insights for creating content, writers must apply best practices and optimize content for users. This includes properly placing researched target keywords and ensuring links are relevant and helpful for users.
Conclusion
While AI tools and platforms provide a lot of value throughout the content creation process, human creativity, strategy, and review are always necessary. Writers must still upskill by developing their prompting skills to provide direction and guide AI. Additionally, writers must carefully evaluate and fact-check any AI-generated outputs. By combining AI advancements with human skillsets, experience, and strengths like emotional nuance, critical thinking, and creativity, writers can build efficient workflows while prioritizing accurate, relevant, unique, and high-quality content.
