Whether it’s blog posts, product descriptions or emails, artificial intelligence can already take over a lot of our writing. Which AI writing assistants are best suited for content marketing teams? We asked Nadia Meier, Content Strategist at our agency.
Nadia, you get a lot of inquiries from clients who would like to use the support of artificial intelligence for copywriting. What kind of clients are looking for advice?
Well, essentially everyone producing content. People are surprised, amazed, and also concerned. Right now, of course, it is mostly the clients with a positive take on things who approach us. They want to seize the opportunity to scale their content output with AI or bring down the cost. Both are, of course, possible.
Why are people hesitant?
There are several reasons. Some have seen bad examples and reckon that AI cannot yet do what they are looking for. Others maybe fear for their own jobs. Or they simply do not know where to begin. At the moment, it is not easy to get a grasp on things. Development happens at lightning speed. It was only last week that I explained that ChatGPT works with data from 2021 and that that’s why you need a plugin for current topics, or that you could use Writesonic. Today I get to the office and ChatGPT Plus can access the internet.
How do you use artificial intelligence for copywriting now?
I have tried several tools over recent weeks and months, and new ones come out almost every day now. Personally, I use AI assistance in all phases of the copyediting process, so for anything from finding ideas to actual writing to editing texts for readability or tonality.
Which tool would you recommend?
There is no simple answer to that question. It depends on the task you want support for and the language you are working in, as well as on the resources available to you. Basically, you can do everything with ChatGPT, it is essentially the mother of all writing assistants. You just need time and practice to find the right prompts, that is, the instructions you feed to the text robot. The result is only ever as good as your input. So, if you have a little time on your hands at the moment to try things out, I’d start with ChatGPT.
Is the free version of ChatGPT sufficient?
For German texts, I recommend ChatGPT Plus, the paid version. As I said, this version has access to the Internet. Also, the underlying language model GPT 4.0 was trained with larger volumes of more diverse text data, as well as data in different languages. ChatGPT Plus generates better-quality results in German and has more in-depth language comprehension, so the chatbot is quicker at understanding what you want.
Can you also use ChatGPT as a team?
In that case, I would recommend sharing the prompts. Say you have developed a prompt that works well, for example, for Facebook ads for a certain target group, with a tonality that fits your brand, then everyone on the team can use this prompt as a starting point. So no one has to fiddle around on their own. Of course, someone somewhere has already identified this problem, and there are tools you can buy, such as TeamGPT, which allow you to interact with the AI as a team and save and share prompts.
If I do not have the time or expertise for ChatGPT, which tool should I use?
There are some writing assistants such as Jasper, Rytr or Writesonic that have many templates. They are very easy to use and are especially suited to content marketing if you need specific types of text such as Facebook ads, blog posts or SEO texts. You’ll have good material in more than 20 languages in a matter of seconds. The quality is really pretty decent but, of course, a human should check and revise the results before they are published. The support you get from these tools is like having 100 creative interns in an editorial department, but you are still the editor-in-chief.
How do these tools work in German?
They work well and keep improving. Neuroflash even lets you select German for Switzerland as a language. In tests, however, it still used the German “Fahrrad” instead of the Swiss German “Velo” for bicycles when I wanted to generate a headline for a bike shop in Switzerland.
Which other tools can you recommend?
What I find pretty fascinating are the various Chrome extensions such as Compose AI or Wordtune. You don’t need to keep your writing assistant open in a tab but can use it right where you’re typing, for example, in emails. The Chatsonic Chrome extension writes great answers to emails in Gmail; it refers back to the content of the email you received and can write a nice rejection, for example. Microsoft is planning to release the Copilot tool for Outlook and the whole Office suite soon.
So, soon, we won’t be doing any of our own writing anymore?
That’s what it comes down to, yes. We will do a lot less of our own writing and will be able to produce a lot more content in a shorter time. But the question is, who is going to read it all? It can’t be about squeezing the maximum volume of content out of a text robot. We need to look closely at where and when AI can support us in our content strategy. We don’t have to do everything just because we can.
What are you going to try next?
I’m eager to try out Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT. Bard is already available in 180 countries but, unfortunately, Switzerland is not one of them. Until then, I am happy to have my colleagues inspire me. Our AI working group includes design, SEO, and software development specialists.
Got any questions on content and AI or artificial intelligence in general? Give us a call.
Contact for your Digital Solution with Unic
Book an appointmentAre you keen too discuss your digital tasks with us? We would be happy to exchange ideas with you: Jörg Nölke and Gerrit Taaks (from left to right).
Contact for your Digital Solution
Book an appointmentAre you keen to talk about your next project? We will be happy exchange ideas with you: Melanie Klühe, Stefanie Berger, Stephan Handschin and Philippe Surber (clockwise).
