AI can speed up content creation, but you should always maintain control of output and write and tailor copy to reflect your brand. You can also follow best-practice guidelines to help feature prominently in AI citations. While AI can be used for research and image generation, there are important considerations around accuracy and legality. Tread carefully.
One thing we’re getting asked more and more about by businesses at Coast is the advantages and disadvantages of using AI in marketing. Depending on who you speak to, AI is a totally transformative tech that’s boosting productivity in wild and unimaginable ways – or an absolute disaster for humanity.
Like most people, we’re going to have to leave the politics for another day and carry on with the day job. So, here are some of the dos and don’t for businesses. It covers content writing, visibility in search, research and some important considerations around image and video generation.
Here we go…
There are many flavours out there. Our reference points for this post are the large language models (LLMs) Claude, ChatGPT and CoPilot for Microsoft 365.
It certainly can be, but you’ll want to use discretion. In our content writing, we get it to undertake research, suggest ideas and develop structure, but rarely let it loose to create whole articles. There are good reasons why we maintain control, both from the point of view of engagement and SEO best practice. We look at these throughout the article.
However, there’s a fundamental question to ask about the quality of your content – especially when using AI: Is this copy enhancing our brand and showing our real personality, passion and values, or just filling a space? If the latter, it might be doing your brand no good at all. Use discretion. Get AI to speed up processes, write tricky sections etc. But oversee the process and write something original and useful, injecting plenty of your brand personality too.
No doubt you’ve seen the odd person shambling down the high street muttering things like ‘traffic apocalypse’ and ‘zero click searches’. They are SEO specialists and they’re having a hell of a time of it.
AI overviews are reducing website clicks by about 30%, which throws the world of SEO and SERPS (search engine results pages) upside down. But it’s not all bad news. While clicks are down, conversions are rising thanks to direct and referral traffic from AI-driven platforms, which appear to be targeting users’ needs very precisely. The key point here is that you may want to increase your visibility by making your content AI-citation ready.
AI assistants break up content into smaller, structured pieces that can be evaluated for authority and relevance, then put them together into answers from multiple sources. To increase the likelihood of your content being picked up by AI, you could choose to write in short, factual blocks of two to four sentences per paragraph, with a maximum sentence length of 20 words.
You can also say to hell with that and write the way you bloody well want to. More on that in a moment…
It’s true. Many SEO experts are pointing to Schema markup as a way to increase visibility and clickthrough rates. Schema is a standardised type of code that you add to a webpage's HTML to help search engines better understand its content and context. It enables ‘rich’ results like star ratings, FAQs and product details directly in search listings. Schema also positions your content for voice search and AI-powered answers, making it pretty essential for current SEO strategies.
Tip: If you use Yoast for SEO on your website, the paid version includes user friendly Schema features and even deploys it automatically.
Well spotted. And this is the thing. Writing with engaging personality is what we are about – it’s our USP. So, we try not to devalue content too much by slavishly following someone else’s highly proscriptive formula. We hope you agree this post doesn’t sound like it’s written by AI, and that, we believe, is a good thing.
So, yes, while we do engineer our copy frequently to appeal to search engines – for instance, if a client is targeting a specific keyword or subject area – we also allow ourselves the freedom to be human, too.
Interestingly, Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) are rewarded in AI search results and these favour named authors and original content. Other guidelines recommend a conversational tone. How you do those things by mechanically writing 20-word sentences in blocks of three or four, we’re not 100% sure. Many others we speak to in the industry aren’t either.
Our view: be aware of best-practice advice for visibility, but follow your gut and the needs of your brand too.
No.
If you’ve read endless comments from AI along the lines, ‘I’m sorry, you’re completely right – I made that up’ you’ll know it frequently isn’t. Even the Head of Google admitted as much in a BBC interview.
So, should you use it for research? We use the Claude AI paid subscription for research, because it can be a quick way to gather highly specific material about a subject. However, we also ask it to cite every fact or claim. We then go to the source to double check – a journalistic first principle in any case. This helps us weed out the minor errors and occasional incidents of staggering nonsense.
Related top tip: be very, very careful getting AI to summarise documents. It may make some bad calls and miss out things you deem crucial.
This is really, really tricky. For your mates on social, sharing a hilarious AI picture of a levelled St Michael’s Mount serving as an overflow carpark for Marazion may be permissible. But there are huge ongoing issues around claiming copyright on AI-generated images (and if you can’t copyright them, then anyone can nick them). More significantly, AI developers frequently use content without seeking permission from rights holders. This makes your AI image a potential copyright infringement. Tread very carefully.
When writing this, we asked Gemini (Android’s AI voice assistant) if we could use its woodcut-style representation of a post-apocalyptic Penzance (don’t ask) for non-commercial uses. It said go ahead. When we asked if we could use it in a commercial setting, it said definitely not.
Write content with personality, authenticity and even some idiosyncrasy. This will make people believe in your humanity and trustworthiness, and not think you’re the equivalent of a robot in a long mac selling fake branded watches.
Try to create copy only your business could write – perhaps because of your unique voice or your interview with the CEO, in a story laced with their turns of phrase and philosophy. This conforms to the EEAT principles, reads so much better than AI slop, and will shine through.
Yes, there’ll be some use of AI in the age of AI. For this article, we used it for research (which we double checked), to help write two of the answer sections above and to proof our copy. But we maintained control. And for that reason, it’s a human and, we hope, engaging piece of writing. We recommend you follow the same principles.
Martin Philp is head writer at Coast Content Marketing. His Penzance-based business helps clients manage their marketing workload and increase visibility with authentic, carefully crafted content that stands out in a world of automation. Coast specialises in cyber security marketing, IT marketing and tourism marketing, and helps businesses across all sectors, including highly regulated industries. A well-known content marketing agency in Cornwall, it has many clients in the UK and abroad. Find out more about Coast's content marketing services.