God, even looking at the word ‘AI’ on a page bores me. It’s all anyone from every organisation in every sector has talked about for over a year. We’ve seen multiples of every conceivable take. Everything from, “I think it’s going to entirely replace every creative job in the world”, to, “I think it’s utter shite and won’t last another year” has already been said.
It’s almost impossible to contribute a fresh angle here, but as a copywriter I have a duty to clients to have a stance on this. So, I’m going to try to say something new about our new robot overlords that hopefully has some level of usable insight in it.
Let’s see…hmmm…I-I use it? I use it. There’s a good starting point. I use ChatGPT quite regularly in my work. Not for research (it hallucinates and invents things), not for writing (I’m trying to make my clients stand out in a bland sea of dull copy, not add to it), but for talking to my target audience.
AI’m whoever you want me to be
ChatGPT is really good at role play. No, not that kind. Get you head out the gutter. It’s great at embodying say, a Chief Technical Officer. I give a prompt like:
Using first hand accounts and information you can find on the internet, be the Chief Technical Officer of [insert company].
Then ask anyhting you want to know that might build a more complete picture of your target.
What are your 5 biggest challenges?
Who are your main competitors?
What do you do in your downtime?
If you could change one thing about the way your business works, what would it be?
Then you’ll get something like:
Ah jeez, I don’t know. Can all five be ‘budget’? Aha. No, no I’ve got more. Procurement, and erm, buy-in from the rest of C-suite. How many is that? Ah you’ve put me on the spot…
Wait, did I accidentally just email all of those questions to a real CTO?
Varying levels of cluelessness
I genuinely mean this in quite a good way. You see, you can ask AI to have a certain level of technical understanding, the same level that you expect your target audience to have.
A quick guide to the C-suite’s technical understanding:
- CTO – Generally pretty clued up on tech stuff
- CMO – Somehow even more clued up on tech stuff???
- CIO – Speaks in binary
- CFO – Literally doesn’t know what a website is
- CEO – Built the entire product themselves in 2010 but still can’t convert a PDF
This allows you to then tailor your content to their level by running it through your pretend C-suite bot and seeing if there are any phrases or words that they don’t understand.
Tweak the copy yourself (resist the urge to make the robot do it!) and see whether their understanding has improved. Keep tweaking until you (again, not the robot. It is not a copywriter!) feel the copy is tailored sufficiently to the audience.
It can do planning stuff?
As someone who can easily lose an hour to pondering when to use complement or compliment, planning and organisation are critical scaffolding that keep me working. But, project management software has historically been fiddly and slow and built with other teams in mind.
Letting AI help you out with planning work out, setting your own deadlines and creating realistic timelines is extremely helpful. And honestly, why wouldn’t it be?
This seems like the exact kind of thing it was invented for? Why are we forcing it to write blogs and design landing pages? AI’s inherent ability to faultlessly process information and organise it surely makes it ideal for more project management applications than creative ones?
Oops. Got carried away there. Yes, it’s really good at helping you stay on track with work!
Alright that’s enough, Ben. Let’s wrap this up.
Yes, I think that’s a good idea. To tie things up neatly, like content people like to do, AI is useful, really useful. I believe that AI’s application in SMB marketing teams now a necessity.
If you need content, fast, AI can write a perfectly serviceable blog post with careful prompts and editing from a human. Contrary to what many copywriters might say, this is fine.
I think its disingenuous to suggest that human writers always pour their heart and soul into every B2B blog they write. Because its bollocks. If your blog page is empty and you need to appear to be a thought leader in your field, you need a lot of luke warm content to show that you know what you’re on about.
You don’t need bloody East of Eden. The copywriter plays an editors role here. They can also contribute more considered, targeted and strategic posts that take a lot more effort to put together, while their little robot friend whizzes through a chunk of the content calendar.
So AI is good? No. And yes. I don’t know. Like everyone else, I’m going to continue umming and ahhhing until Alexa suffocates me in my sleep with a pillow. Until then, I’ll be using it to assist in writing, but I’ll likely never use it for the important stuff, the stuff clients pay me to write.
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Ben Greenwood - Copywriter 
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