How small businesses can use AI for content creation | CO

Artificial intelligence continues to advance and grow in popularity, but many small business leaders are still unsure how to properly integrate it into their content creation process.

Here we discuss the benefits of leveraging AI content creation and best practices for using these tools safely and effectively for your small business.

[Read more: Ready. Set. Scale. How Small Business Can Leverage AI]

AI for content creation: Benefits and tools to consider

Many small businesses don’t have the time to create content, nor do they have the resources to hire a full-time content creator to oversee and implement it.

AI tools are a cost-effective solution for businesses with limited manpower or budgets. There are many AI options on the market, both free and paid. These tools provide businesses with an accessible solution to quickly create content with minimal effort and help scale their business. This new technology allows small businesses to boost their team’s creativity by providing new ideas and fresh perspectives.

The right AI content tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals, including:

• Content Ideas and Outlines: Well-known tools like ChatGPT can help you with the writing process by using prompts to generate content ideas and marketing strategies, and they can also generate complete written content that you can edit, such as blog posts, social media captions, and scripts.
• Transcription and editing: If you want to produce a podcast or start a YouTube channel to grow as a thought leader, a tool like Descript can help you with the process from recording to editing to sharing your content.
• Image and video generation: Use tools like Midjourney or DALL-E to generate realistic paintings, logos, renderings, and other graphics and static visual media for your business. And if you need to promote a new product, tools like Synthesia can help you create a realistic talking head video in minutes by following a simple script.

[Read more: What AI Can’t Do for Your Small Business]

Best Practices for Working with AI-Generated Content

AI content creation offers many benefits to small business owners, but it’s important to keep best practices in mind when leveraging it.

Ensure compliance with search engine guidelines and regulations

With increasing accessibility to AI comes an influx of low-quality AI-generated media. To prevent this influx and ensure compliance, search engines continue to update their AI guidelines and impose new penalties on websites that don’t follow them.

These penalties can result in lower rankings or even your website listing being removed from search results entirely. If you have international clients, it is also important to understand regulatory compliance frameworks for AI adoption, such as the Artificial Intelligence Act recently passed in the European Union.

Fact-checking to ensure accuracy and relevance

Using AI to create content can streamline the creation process, but human intervention is still required to ensure accuracy. AI may not produce accurate information, and the content may be correct but irrelevant to your overall message.

To ensure your content flows naturally and is useful to your audience, save time on drafting and verifying your content for accuracy. Instead of posting AI-generated content as is, review and refine it as needed before sharing.

Finding the balance between AI and “humanity”

View AI-generated content output as a first draft, not the final version. While AI tools can certainly help you create basic content, it’s unlikely that your first draft will immediately match your brand’s voice.

Your content represents your brand, so apply a human touch to your AI-generated content. Human intervention can help you correct unnatural language or redundancies to deliver the highest quality content for your audience, allowing them to read your content naturally and authentically.

Disclose your use of AI

Just as content creators must disclose when promoting commercial advertising, it should be common practice to disclose the use of AI to their audiences. Taking an honest approach to embracing AI will help normalize its use and ensure that AI-generated content is shared ethically.

Readers don’t want to feel duped or that you’re being dishonest by trying to mask your AI content as if it’s completely original. Disclosing this information lets readers know that you’re working with AI-generated content and helps avoid this.

[Read more: How to Encourage Your Employees to Use AI at Work]

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Published June 5, 2024