While it’s safe to say that the applications for AI technology are evolving quickly, particularly with the rise of more advanced, multimodal models, using generative AI for content creation is easily one of the most common ways to get started with Gen AI tools.
According to the American Marketing Institute, more than 90% of marketers had used generative AI in their content development process by 2024.
Using generative AI tools for marketing doesn’t just give companies a way to automate tasks like creating social media captions or scheduling blog posts. It can enhance creativity, enable hyper-personalization at scale, and help a company’s content assets stretch further.
Let’s take a closer look at the growing role of generative AI in marketing.
- Eager to learn more? Check out our guide to the top generative AI providers and the solutions they can offer. Alternatively, follow this best-practice guide for implementing Gen AI into your business workflow for marketing teams.
Ways to Use Generative AI for Content Creation
Content creation is easily one of the most popular use cases for generative AI. Ever since ChatGPT transformed the world in 2022, companies have been using bots to create blogs, articles, press releases, website copy, and more. Google even uses generative AI to deliver quick summary results to customers conducting online searches.
However, modern generative AI tools can do much more than just produce text. Creative AI tools for businesses support marketers with a range of tasks, such as:
Brainstorming and Planning Incredible Content
Coming up with fresh ideas consistently is challenging, particularly as the digital world becomes more saturated. Embracing generative AI for content creation could be the answer. Tools like ChatGPT, HubSpot’s Breeze platform, and Jasper can generate creative suggestions for all kinds of content.
Some solutions, like SEMRush’s ContentShake, can even suggest ideas based on what’s working for your competitors in the search engines, or by surfacing insights about your target audience. Generative AI tools can even help you find the data and ideas you need to enhance your content. Perplexity AI is great for surfacing valuable insights from reports and news articles, for instance.
Beyond that, using generative AI for marketing can help teams plan more effective ways of using their content. AI-driven tools can generate content strategies, showing you what type of content to create, when to publish it, and even where to distribute it for maximum impact. It does that by analyzing audience engagement patterns, and even competitor data.
Automating the Creation and Optimization of Text
Most companies using generative AI for content creation start with producing text-based content. Plenty of tools, from ChatGPT and Gemini, to Copy.AI and Jasper can easily produce text-based content at scale. All you need to do is share some data and tell your AI model what you want it to do, and it can churn out drafts of articles, blogs, social media captions, and more.
While human beings still need to edit and refine content to ensure it resonates with their target audience, AI makes it a lot easier to create crucial text-based documents fast. Plus, AI tools can help with optimizing your content too. Solutions like Microsoft Copilot built into Word can suggest ways to improve grammar or make content more engaging.
There are even tools (like Surfer SEO) that can offer insights into how to optimize your pieces to rank higher on the search engine result pages. Alternatively, some Gen AI tools can analyze customer profiles and tailor content to specific audiences, adapting to their needs and language preferences.
Creating Unique Images and Visual Assets
As mentioned above, generative AI content creation tools can do a lot more than just produce text these days. Intuitive tools like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney are fantastic for producing hyper-realistic photos, images, and visuals you can use to enhance your marketing strategy.
Imagine launching a campaign for a luxury travel service. With AI, marketers can quickly generate visuals of picturesque destinations, luxurious accommodations, or custom branding elements for your marketing strategy. Some bots can even create entire product demonstration videos or video clips.
Although there are some risks to consider (such as making sure you’re not accidentally creating deepfakes), generative AI tools can reduce your reliance on stock photography and speed up the design process. Whether you’re creating explainer videos, or social media images, generative AI makes it easy to bring new storytelling formats to life.
Generative AI Content Creation Case Studies and Examples
Countless companies are already using generative AI for content creation and marketing tasks – some more successfully than others. They’re using it for personalization, ad optimization, and even to convert existing content into different formats.
Here are some examples of how major brands use generative AI content creation tactics:
Coca-Cola: Create Real Magic
In 2023, Coca-Cola partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT and DALL·E into their marketing strategies. This collaboration led to the development of the “Create Real Magic” platform, enabling digital artists to produce original artwork using Coca-Cola’s iconic assets.
The great thing about this strategy is it took advantage of consumer’s growing interest in generative AI tools, and enabled Coca-Cola to rapidly create tons of unique, user-generated content.
LinkedIn Collaborative Articles
If you’re active on LinkedIn, you might have seen the company’s “collaborative articles” website. Here, LinkedIn uses AI to create an article on a trending topic, like the rise of autonomous agents, for instance. Then, they ask human experts to share comments and perspectives.
This basically allows LinkedIn to take a collaborative approach to generative AI for content creation. They use AI as the initial starting point for their articles, then take advantage of their community to take the content to the next level.
Zaha Hadid Architects’ 3D Renders
Zaha Hadid Architects shows how generative AI for content creation can support more than just marketing teams. The company uses DALL-E and Midjourney to create mockup or prototype images of architectural projects to share with stakeholders.
This method allows the company to explore a wider range of creative possibilities in less time and produce more engaging client presentations – increasing sales and revenue.
Using Generative AI for Content Creation: The Benefits
With 83% of content marketers already using generative AI tools for marketing and text creation, it’s safe to say that most companies are aware of the benefits these technologies can offer. On a broad scale, the biggest benefits of generative AI for marketing include:
Faster, More Effective Content Creation
Speed is critical in content marketing – particularly if you want to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Generative AI always delivers speed. Tools like ChatGPT and Jasper can generate ideas, outlines, and drafts in minutes, enabling creators to produce high-quality content quickly. Innovative new solutions, like OpenAI’s Sora can even help companies create unique video content in a fraction of the time it takes to produce videos manually.
Beyond creating content, generative AI is helping to streamline editing processes, and ensuring creators get the most value out of their content. Intuitive tools can suggest keywords for SEO-based content, and introduce optimization strategies. They can rapidly detect grammatical errors and mistakes, and even suggest effective publishing strategies.
Enhanced Creativity and Hyper-Personalization
Generative AI can unlock creative potential in marketers and content creators by giving them fresh perspectives and ideas to consider. That’s particularly true now that new advanced reasoning models, like OpenAI’s GPT-o1, can carefully consider existing data, customer journeys and pain points, and suggest intuitive ways to create more compelling content.
With advanced AI tools, companies can even make content more relevant and personalized for their target audience. They can feed customer data and marketing stats into a model, and guide them on creating unique assets for each customer group.
Time and Cost Savings
Probably the biggest, and most obvious benefit of generative AI for content creation, is its ability to save people time. With generative AI tools for marketing, companies can streamline research processes, summarize content in seconds, and even transform content into different formats, without hiring additional researchers, writers, or designers.
Although generative AI in marketing doesn’t eliminate the need for human creativity, it does mean companies can accomplish more with less, potentially improving the return on their content investment.
Generative AI for Content Creation: Challenges and Solutions
While the potential of generative AI for content creation is massive, there are still some challenges to consider, particularly as consumers, businesses, and regulators continue to prioritize safe, secure, and ethical AI practices. For content teams, the biggest challenges include:
- Content quality: AI models don’t have true human creativity. They can commonly produce generic, or repetitive content, and even plagiarize existing content. They also frequently suffer from hallucinations which can make content inaccurate or misleading.
- Ethical concerns: Generative AI for content creation raises ethical concerns around transparency, bias, and accountability. Audiences want to know when they’re consuming AI content, and don’t like feeling mis-led by brands.
- Security and privacy: AI models require data to function effectively, but mishandling personal or proprietary information poses security and privacy risks. Organizations must tread carefully to protect sensitive data.
The easy solution to all of these issues is the right strategy for generative AI content creation. Choose trustworthy tools, feed them the right data, and keep humans in the loop to optimize, refine, and validate anything they create.
The Future of Generative AI for Content Creation
Generative AI is revolutionizing the creative process for marketers, sales teams, and individuals alike. The right tools can boost speed and creativity and unlock opportunities for hyper-personalization at scale. Although embracing generative AI for content creation requires a careful approach, the right strategy can give businesses an edge in today’s digital world.
