How to Use AI for Content Marketing: Best Practices, Tools + Tips

AI tools can streamline the content creation process to boost productivity and efficiency. Learn the advantages of generative AI and how to effectively integrate it into your content marketing strategy.

High-quality, consistent content is the foundation of every successful marketing strategy.

It’s a powerful component that helps build brand awareness, boost SEO rankings, and generate more qualified leads and conversions.

But today, marketers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline content creation, improve workflows, and scale their content marketing efforts.

From brainstorming topics to performance analysis, AI tools and chatbots are now helping business owners deliver a wide variety of content in a way that’s less time-consuming and more cost-efficient.

However, as any artisan or skilled professional can tell you, a tool is only as effective as the individual using it.

Here, we’ll explore the benefits of AI-generated content.

With help from SEO expert Austin Lewis, we’ll also highlight some of the best ways to explore incorporating AI writing tools into your overall content marketing strategy.

Where AI content creation platforms really shine is in their ability to create ideas and topics as well as develop outlines, summaries, and rough drafts. (Image: Adobe)

What is AI-generated content?

AI-generated content is text, audio, or visual material created with generative AI tools that are powered by large language models (LLMs) and other machine learning systems.

These tools generate new content based on prompts and patterns learned from large datasets.

In content marketing, AI can help with:

Brainstorming and ideation
Creating outlines
Summarizing research
Repurposing or refreshing existing content
Drafting copy
Editing final drafts
Content distribution
Predictive analytics and data analysis

While AI can expedite content production, human-first creation and oversight are still imperative for accuracy and originality.

5 AI content marketing benefits

By automating repetitive tasks like brainstorming, outlining, editing, and repurposing, AI can help content teams focus on higher-value work such as strategy, subject matter expertise, storytelling, and the core of the creation process.

When done well, the result can be a more efficient content workflow without sacrificing quality.

Here are specific benefits of adding AI to a content strategy:

1. Saves time on repetitive tasks

AI can quickly generate topic ideas and angles — even title options, FAQs, and outlines — based on a keyword or topic cluster.

AI can also summarize research and surface relevant information, helping marketers spend less time gathering background material and more time creating original content.

Just be sure to fact-check the information provided and always confirm that sources are cited correctly.

2. Accelerates content production

AI excels at creating structured outlines and content briefs that give writers a strong starting point.

Rather than replacing the writing process, these drafts help teams overcome writer’s block, accelerate production, and spend more time refining messaging, adding expertise, and incorporating original insights.

3. Improves consistency

AI tools can help detect and correct grammar and punctuation errors, as well as offer suggestions to fix any readability issues.

Many platforms also recommend stronger headlines, meta descriptions, calls to action, and search engine optimization (SEO) improvements to help content perform better in search results.

4. Makes content easier to repurpose

With AI, repurposing existing content into multiple formats can be simple and quick.

A blog post can become a social media campaign, email campaigns, ad copy, video scripts, FAQs, or LinkedIn posts in minutes, allowing content marketers to make the most of every asset they create.

5. Helps personalize content

AI can support content personalization at scale for different audiences, industries, or stages of the customer journey.

This is done by analyzing customer behavior and engagement data to tailor messaging, offers, and content experiences — resulting in improved engagement and increased conversion rates.

Sample AI prompts for content marketing

The quality of AI-generated content depends heavily on the instructions you provide. Rather than using a broad prompt like “write an article about roof repair,” give the tool enough context to understand the audience, search intent, goal, and task.

Here are a few sample prompts you can adapt for your content marketing workflow:

For brainstorming content ideas

“Our target audience is [audience], and their primary challenge is [pain point]. Generate 10 content ideas around [topic or keyword] that address that challenge.

“Include a mix of educational, comparison, and decision-stage topics, and explain the search intent behind each.”

For creating an SEO content outline

“Create an outline for an article targeting the keyword [target keyword]. The audience is [target audience], and the primary goal is [goal]. Determine the likely search intent and structure the outline to answer it thoroughly.

“Include an H1, relevant H2s and H3s, FAQs, and opportunities to provide examples, expert insights, or original data. Avoid adding sections simply to increase length.”

For conversational or AI search

“Create an outline for the topic [topic/question] for [target audience]. Structure the content around the natural-language questions someone might ask an AI assistant about this topic.

“Provide clear, direct answers and identify places where specific facts, examples, or expert insights would make the content more useful and credible.”

For optimizing existing content

“Review the following article for the target keyword [keyword] and audience [audience]. Identify gaps in search intent, outdated or unsupported information, weak headings, unanswered questions, and opportunities to improve clarity and usefulness.

“Preserve content that already works rather than rewriting unnecessarily. Recommend changes before making them.”

For repurposing content

“Repurpose the following article into [three LinkedIn posts/an email/social posts/etc.] for [target audience].

“Preserve the article’s core message and brand voice, but adapt the format and messaging for the channel rather than simply summarizing the original.”

Pro tip: Treat prompts as a starting point, not a substitute for human expertise. Provide AI tools with relevant brand guidelines, audience information, and verified source material when appropriate, and always review the output for accuracy, originality, tone, and usefulness.

When to use AI for content

At a time when thoughtfully crafted and relevant content is more important than ever, using AI technology to help with content creation is a strategic move.

That is, as long as you know how and when to use it to your best advantage.

While AI can be a useful tool for content creation, it is best suited for particular tasks — and shouldn’t replace essential human roles.

Some tasks that AI is useful for include:

Brainstorming topics
Keyword research
Sentiment analysis
Drafting outlines
Summarizing information
Repurposing content
Creating ad copy
Meta descriptions
Email subject lines
Social media marketing posts
Data analysis and predictive analysis

However, AI should never replace original thought leadership, brand storytelling and core content creation, deep research, or final edits.

Lewis finds that the top advantages of leveraging AI in content are using LLMs and SERP data points to reverse engineer content set up to succeed, and the ability to scale.

The most important thing to remember is that AI writing tools, when prompted to generate content, will draw upon content that already exists.

How to use AI for content marketing

AI is most effective when it supports your existing workflows rather than replacing them.

To find out the best and most efficient ways to leverage LLMs in content marketing, we turned to Lewis, who has extensive experience in using these tools and platforms thoughtfully, strategically, and ethically.

1. Invest time into building custom GPTs

“I’ve helped pioneer a custom GPT process that significantly enhances the efficiency of production teams across all marketing channels,” says Lewis.

“Using traditional GPTs will almost always produce content that looks like it was created by LLMs. You must invest in the process of building custom GPTs that are 100% on-brand and excel at routine digital marketing tasks.”

Pro tip: If you work with Hawk, our team will build a custom GPT for your team to use throughout the life of our engagement.

2. Keep a spreadsheet

Lewis also recommends creating a spreadsheet to track the tools you have tried, the hypothesis, the test or application, and their efficacy.

“There is an ocean of options,” he explains, “so you have to treat them all as independent experiments and have a means for tracking the scientific process in a concise format.”

3. Don’t get left behind

The adoption of new tools can be scary or intimidating, especially when they can create what feels like a seismic shift in the industry.

However, Lewis says ignoring or opting out of these emerging technologies could be detrimental to your brand.

“AI is not here to totally replace marketers; it’s here to augment us,” he says.

“The marketers who will thrive are the ones who learn how to train, prompt, and collaborate with AI tools in ways that are consistent with their brand, their values, and their goals. Your voice still matters; AI just gives you a louder microphone.”

Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Expertise Intelligence Learn

Using AI tools early in the content creation process can help you brainstorm ideas about what to write and jumpstart the creative process. (Image: Adobe)

Challenges of using AI for content marketing

While generative AI can support content marketing efforts, it doesn’t come without drawbacks. Below are some of the challenges of working with these platforms.

1. Lacks original expertise and brand perspective

This is especially important in digital marketing, as both context and tone play an important role in cultivating brand identity.

Human content writers create copy with emotion and often draw upon their past experiences to craft engaging copy that resonates with the unique needs of an audience.

The machine learning algorithms behind AI tools lack the emotional intelligence needed to pull this off convincingly.

Natural language processing (NLP) — which aims to remedy this problem and allow computers to think and speak in a manner more similar to humans — is built into many AI content generators.

However, the technology still has a long way to go.

2. Can produce inaccurate or outdated information

Even the most advanced AI models can make factual mistakes, cite outdated information, or confidently present incorrect answers (sometimes called AI “hallucinations”).

Just as you would any other piece of written content for your website, landing pages, and other marketing channels, AI-generated content should still be reviewed by human eyes.

3. Overreliance can hurt credibility

Lewis puts it plainly: “If you don’t customize your output, it can come across as AI/lazy.”

And he’s right — people have begun calling out content they deem as blatantly AI-generated with no thought put into editing or modifying the content to make it more professional, accurate, and authentic.

Even if you ask these LLMs to use your brand voice, you’ll still need someone to edit the content for clarity and tone, as mentioned above.

The last thing you want is for your brand to go viral for the wrong reasons, such as publishing unedited AI content.

“It’s content assistance,” says Lewis, “not content replacement.”

4. Data privacy concerns

Many AI tools process prompts and uploaded files on external servers, which means sensitive information could be exposed if proper safeguards aren’t in place.

Before entering proprietary business information, customer data, financial details, or confidential documents into an AI platform, understand how that provider stores, uses, and retains your data.

When in doubt, avoid uploading confidential information or use enterprise AI solutions with stronger privacy and security controls.

Does Google penalize AI-generated content?

No, Google doesn’t penalize content if it was created with AI.

Instead, its focus is on helpful, original, people-first content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

Low-quality or spammy content can perform poorly regardless of whether it was written by AI or humans. High-quality content will perform better, even if it was created with the assistance of generative AI.

The takeaway

Leveraging generative AI to streamline your workflow and marketing processes has its benefits — but it works best as a collaborator rather than a replacement.

The most successful content marketing teams use AI to accelerate research, brainstorming, optimization, and repurposing while relying on human expertise for strategy, originality, fact-checking, and storytelling.

As a full-service digital marketing agency, HawkSEM uses a multitude of AI marketing tools and marketing automation platforms to enhance, not replace, the human touch that comes from our team of experienced industry pros.

These allow us to help you tell the story of your brand and create a unique customer experience along the way. Discover how.

This article has been updated and was originally published in November 2023.