Let’s talk about artificial intelligence—specifically as it relates to digital marketing. We are starting to see many digital marketing firms fully embrace AI technology. We get multiple emails in our inbox daily that tout the supposed benefits of using AI in marketing, and some of our clients are starting to ask if we are using AI to market their companies online.
AI has been used in digital advertising for some time now. Companies like Google and Facebook use AI to decide who should see certain ads based on a person’s profile and their history of online activity. In fact, Facebook now has AI built into their advertising in such a way that certain aspects of it can’t be turned off. In other words, we no longer have complete manual control over who to target in our Facebook advertising in some circumstances. Facebook chooses for us. So far, this hasn’t been advantageous for our clients, as our manual targeting regularly outperformed Facebook’s AI targeting, but we are adapting to this new reality.
AI-powered searches have also crept into the stock photography sites we use and seemed to have made the sites’ search functionality worse. AI-powered proofing tools are also common. You may have experienced them yourself, as you type up emails and documents. If you’ve had the same experience we’ve had with AI-powered proofing tools, the suggested corrections they make are typically not all that helpful—and are sometimes flat-out wrong!
A newer advancement in digital marketing with regard to AI is generative AI, or genAI. This involves the production of images, audio, and copy by platforms like ChapGPT. GenAI is amazing technology, to be sure, but it’s far from perfect. Despite this, many digital marketing companies are jumping on the AI bandwagon, seemingly without much thought. At Modmacro, we are taking our time to really evaluate the technology, and as of now, we have decided not to utilize genAI in our content creation.
For many years now, Modmacro has been a content-heavy marketing agency. We have taken this approach because it works! High-quality written content that incorporates high-value keywords has been a winning formula for our marketing clients in terms of search engine optimization (SEO). We have a team of writers who diligently produce copy that is engaging, informative, and relevant to our clients’ potential customers. They work hard to provide our clients with a consistent “voice” for their online content. Some of our clients want to be known as the “friendly and affordable” service provider, while others wish to present themselves as an “upscale” solution provider for more high-end clients. The content for these two types of clients can vary quite drastically.
As of now, genAI platforms have not quite figured out how to create that personalized “voice” like our writers can. AI-generated content tends to be formulaic and generic. Many have also argued (as we have) that content written by non-humans can feel soulless, which makes sense, since computers don’t have souls. Our clients appreciate that we capture their mission and vision in the content we write for them; that we mirror their values; that we provide not just informative, but also inciteful content; and that we address their reader’s concerns. These are all things that AI struggles with, but our writers do well.
We’ve also found that having AI content produced doesn’t really save all that much time—at least if you care about what it says and how well it reads. The main reason someone would use genAI to produce content would be to save time, and as a result, save money. Currently, you have to spend so much time prompting the technology and then heavily editing the content it produces that it doesn’t really yield the time savings you might be anticipating.
So, at least for now, our digital marketing company will continue to use actual humans to write the content on behalf of our clients. This is the approach that makes the most sense for our small business and nonprofit clients and works for the personalized approach to digital marketing that we’re known for.
If you have any questions or thoughts about this approach, we always welcome the conversation!
