Should You Use AI in Your Marketing? Part One: Copywriting

AI is the buzzword of the moment. It’s hard to miss the headlines about how AI is supposedly transforming industries, promising efficiency gains, and even threatening to replace jobs.

So, should Engineering and B2B Manufacturers use AI in their marketing? The short answer is yes, but it’s not as simple as letting AI do the work for you and replace your marketing team or agency. AI is a tool, a powerful one, but one that you must be careful with. Like any tool, AI can damage your business as much as it can enhance it.

In this blog, I look at the pros and cons of using AI for marketing copywriting. From social media posts to blogs, white papers, and brochures, AI has the potential to streamline processes, spark ideas, and save valuable time. However, it’s not without its dangers. Let’s look at how you can use AI effectively while avoiding common pitfalls.

The Dangers of Using AI in copywriting

Before embracing AI, it’s important to understand its limitations. These challenges can impact your brand’s ability to stand out and deliver accurate, engaging content.

1. Generic Output

AI tools like ChatGPT and similar large language models (LLMs) generate responses based on patterns from vast datasets. While this can produce coherent and structured content, it often lacks originality. Using them without editing can result in content that is bland or formulaic. This is a huge problem for brands: you need to stand out, not blend in. This is already something that Engineering and B2B Manufacturers struggle with – this can be multiplied by relying too heavily on AI.

2. No longer sounding like “you” – Tone of Voice

Your brand’s tone of voice is a critical part of its brand identity. AI models don’t inherently understand this. While LLMs can mimic certain styles if trained effectively, achieving brand consistency requires human oversight. Any content generated by AI will need to be edited and rewritten to align with your brand’s unique voice, otherwise your customers will no longer recognise you and it will be harder to gain recognition with potential customers. It is the same concept as consistency in brand colours, fonts and logos etc (see our blog on “Brand”)

3. Inaccuracies

LLMs don’t “understand” the content they produce; they predict the next word in a sequence. This means they can fabricate facts or misinterpret context. Without fact-checking, these inaccuracies could damage your brand’s credibility. This is a particular risk in Engineering and B2B manufacturing where technical credibility is crucial.

Speech to text AIs can also introduce inaccuracies. While tools such as Otter AI are much more accurate that these types of tools were 10 years ago, they aren’t perfect, so you need to check outputs before publishing.

Why Use AI in Marketing?

Given these dangers, why bother with AI at all? The answer lies in the potential to time savings, sparking ideas, and improving efficiency. Here are some of the key benefits:

1. Time Savings

Starting from a blank page can be daunting. LLMs like Chat GPT can provide a starting point, such as a structure or draft that can be refined. For example, feeding an academic article or a technical report into a tool like ChatGPT can yield a simplified, readable version in minutes. While you’ll need to review and revise, this approach can cut writing time significantly.

Speech to text tools such as Otter AI can save a lot of time too. Whether that is using it to transcribe your ideas or to create subtitles for your videos, purpose build AI tools are far more accurate than inbuilt tools (for example the transcription tool in Microsoft Teams). They still require editing, but you can speak far quicker than you can write.

2. Organising and Simplifying Information

AI excels at processing complex inputs and breaking them down into manageable pieces. Whether you’re condensing a lengthy white paper into a concise blog post or simplifying technical jargon for a non-technical (or just very busy) audience, AI can streamline the process.

3. Idea Generation

Struggling with writer’s block? AI can generate ideas for social media posts, blog topics etc. You will get both good and bad suggestions, but they provide a starting point.

How to Use AI Effectively

To harness AI’s potential while mitigating its risks, follow these best practices:

1. Input Matters

AI tools are only as good as the data they’re fed. For the best results, provide high-quality inputs that you own, such as brochures, case studies, or website content. The more specific your prompts, the better the output. If you are controlling the input, you are also minimising the risk of errors and inaccuracies creeping in.

2. Always Edit

Large Language Models should never be used to just copy and paste. Treat its output as a draft. Refine, rewrite, and fact-check to ensure the final product aligns with your brand’s tone, style, and standards.

3. Combine Tools

Speech-to-text tools like Otter AI pair well with LLMs. For instance, you can use Otter AI to transcribe a brainstorming session or spoken content. Then, feed the transcription into ChatGPT to generate a polished blog post or article. This approach saves time while retaining the authenticity of your voice.

Some Practical Applications of AI in Writing

Here are some specific ways you can integrate AI into your marketing workflow:

Social Media Posts

AI can help you craft engaging posts quickly. For example, if you have a product page you want to promote on LinkedIn, an AI tool can generate a draft. While you’ll still need to tweak the language, add hashtags, and ensure the post resonates with your audience, this is often quicker than starting from scratch – particularly if you are not a copywriter or trained social media manager.

Blog Writing

Large Language models can cut blog writing time in half, even for experience copywriters. Editing and rewriting is much quicker than writing from scratch. However, make sure to rewrite extensively. Repetition and generic phrasing are common in AI outputs, so thorough editing is essential. Also, remember that you will get better outputs from information fed in, whether 6that is existing articles or blog outlines you have written or existing pages on your website.

Subtitles and Transcripts

For video content, speech to text tools like Otter AI can create subtitles and transcripts quickly. For short videos, the editing process is minimal, making this a particularly time-efficient use case. For longer videos this can still be time consuming, but you are still saving time compared to typing everything out.

Combining AI Tools for this very blog

I wrote this blog using a combination of AI tools. First, Otter AI was used to transcribe everything I wanted to cover in this blog. Then I used ChatGPT to turn the transcription into a coherent draft by feeding it the Otter AI output and a blog outline. Finally, the content was edited to ensure accuracy, polish, and correcting tone of voice.

This saved me hours compared to traditional writing processes, demonstrating AI’s potential to enhance productivity when used responsibly. I even had to do far less editing compared to using Chat GPT alone because it my own words throughout and stuck to my original blog outline to organise what I said.

Conclusion

AI is changing how we do marketing, offering tools that can save time, generate ideas, and increase efficiency. However, it’s not a magic bullet. To truly benefit from AI, marketers and anyone else responsible for marketing in your organisation must use it responsibly editing outputs, maintaining a consistent tone of voice, and ensuring accuracy.

When used correctly, AI doesn’t replace copywriters or marketers. Instead, it empowers them to focus on high-value tasks like strategy and creativity and to help you increase you brand awareness by doing more. By combining tools like ChatGPT and Otter AI, you can streamline your workflow and elevate your marketing efforts.

Author: Samantha Tonge, Co-Founder.