Should you use AI in your content marketing?
AI can help you organise ideas, repurpose existing content and review drafts. But effective content needs a clear purpose, knowledge of your customers and evidence of your expertise. I wouldn’t recommend handing your website copy over to AI and publishing it with a few tweaks. Instead, use it to support your content marketing, with someone who understands your business – and marketing - checking the thinking, facts and finished words.
Ask AI to write a blog, a LinkedIn post or a page for your website and, within seconds, you’ll have something that looks the part. Full sentences, tidy paragraphs, a beginning, middle and end. When you’re busy running a business, that’s an appealing prospect.
But how do you judge whether it’s any good?
You can check the spelling. You can decide whether you like the tone. You might even recognise a few familiar AI phrases and edit them out. But when I’m reviewing content, I’m assessing whether it says the right things to the right people and gives them a reason to choose your business, not whether it simply looks the part.
So, should you use AI in your content marketing? There are useful ways it can help. But I’d be cautious about handing over too much to the machines.
Should you use AI to write your website content?
Writing website content takes time, so it’s easy to see the appeal of getting Claude or ChatGPT to write a few pages. With a detailed brief, relevant examples and guidance on your tone of voice, AI can produce a useful draft that reflects your business.
But sounding like you is only part of the job. Your website needs to help potential customers understand what you offer, recognise whether you’re right for them and feel confident enough to take the next step.
That takes some investigation: understanding your customers, finding out what they’re searching for and deciding which parts of your experience will help them choose you.
For me, that’s where the difference between AI and human copywriting becomes more apparent.
When I’m writing website content, I’m interested in the details you might not think to mention. Things that feel routine to you can be exactly what a prospective customer needs to understand.
If you say your service is ‘bespoke’, I want to know what actually changes for each customer and why that matters. If you describe your team as experienced, what does that help them spot, solve or avoid? The answers help explain why someone should buy from you.
AI can ask questions too. My role is to follow up on what you tell me, recognise which details matter to your customers and work out how to communicate them.
So yes, AI can help you write your website content. But when deciding whether to do it yourself or work with a copywriter, account for the whole job: research, planning, writing and editing. Generating the draft is just one part of that.
Is AI copywriting good for SEO?
Whether you write the content yourself, work with a copywriter or use AI, you’ll want people to find it. So what does using AI mean for SEO?
AI copywriting isn’t automatically good or bad for SEO. What matters is whether the finished content is useful, accurate and relevant to the people searching for it.
Google’s guidance focuses on the quality and usefulness of the content rather than treating AI involvement as an automatic problem. It also warns that generating lots of pages without adding value can breach its spam policies.
You still need to understand what someone making that search wants to know, whether the page answers their question and what useful information your business can contribute.
AI can also introduce factual mistakes or make a claim sound more certain than the evidence allows. Google explicitly advises manually checking AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publication. For a specialist business, that review needs someone who understands the subject. A sentence can read beautifully and still be technically wrong.
Useful ways to use AI in your content marketing
There are plenty of tasks where AI can save time while keeping your knowledge and judgement involved.
Get your knowledge out of your head
If explaining something is easier than writing about it, record yourself answering a customer question. You can then ask AI to organise the transcript into an outline or rough draft.
This gives it something specific to work with: your explanation, your examples and your experience.
Check that the draft preserves what you meant, particularly any qualifications or exceptions. Those details may be the most valuable part.
Find the questions you haven’t answered
Give AI a draft and ask what a prospective customer might still need to know.
Perhaps you’ve explained what a service includes but haven’t covered what happens next. Perhaps you’ve used a technical term without explaining its significance.
Treat the suggestions as possibilities to assess. Your actual sales conversations and customer enquiries should help you decide which questions matter.
Repurpose existing content
You don’t need to start from scratch every time you publish something. My own articles feed into my newsletter and get used on LinkedIn, with each giving people another opportunity to find me and a different way into the subject.
AI can help pick out points worth developing and turn them into drafts. But I still choose which ideas deserve a post of their own and what needs changing for each audience. Simply making the same article shorter for every channel can lose the reason someone would read it.
Review a draft
Ask AI to flag repetition, unexplained jargon, vague claims or paragraphs that are difficult to follow.
Remember you don’t have to accept every change – or the first, second or even third version. Use the feedback to help you make your own decisions.
Organise your ideas
You may already have useful material scattered across meeting notes, sales enquiries and conversations with your team.
With confidential information removed, AI can help group those questions into themes and suggest topics to explore.
You can then prioritise them using your knowledge of customers, your business objectives and search research. The result is a starting point for your content plan, rather than a finished strategy.
So, should you use AI for your content?
You don’t have to hand over your website or entire content plan to benefit from AI. Start with a task that regularly takes up your time, whether that’s organising your notes, adapting an article for LinkedIn or tightening a draft.
See whether it makes the job easier and whether you’re happy with the result. If you spend longer correcting its suggestions than you would doing the work yourself, try a different approach or use it elsewhere.
There’s no obligation to use AI for your content marketing, despite what other people might say. Use it where it earns its place.
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