In-housing, outsourcing, and AI - optimising your content production with new tech

Whether it's copywriting at scale, video editing, or generating new images for use in campaigns, AI has been the biggest trend for 2024 when it comes to content production, with its value becoming ever more recognised amongst marketers.

However, with ongoing developments in AI technology and criticism around its use – particularly on the quality of content it produces – to what extent should your business embrace AI?

In this month’s editorial, we asked our network of agency leaders to share their thoughts on the dangers of AI technology used poorly – including guidance on utilising AI efficiently for content production, the options in-house teams should consider, and how agencies can help businesses looking to implement this new technology.

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‍Take a look at our calendar of free virtual strategy workshops, designed to tackle the key challenges facing in-house marketing leaders

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Embracing AI Technology for Content Production – Common Challenges to Avoid and How to Utilise Efficiently

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“You must ALWAYS give a human touch to anything that has been created by AI.”

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AI has been a controversial subject, but I don’t think it needs to be – If used in the correct manner, it can positively support your marketing efforts. I’m not saying AI will replace creativity or jobs, but when utilised in the right way, it can boost your content.

You must ALWAYS give a human touch to anything that has been created by AI. It’s fine to use AI to spark ideas and sometimes proofread, but ultimately, the work needs to be written by a human.

If used badly, everything we see online and in print, will become the same with no actual opinions or thoughts.

It might be a scary thought to introduce AI into your marketing mix, but teams that have been trained correctly in how to use it, will quickly see its benefits to not only the quality of work, but also the proactivity of your team.

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View our Round-up: Organic Marketing – Getting the Best Out of your Channel Strategy

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“You can write quickly using AI, but it lacks the depth of real-world experiences, and this is one of the things that sets good content apart.”

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The key thing when using AI is not to overly rely on it for your content production. We’ve seen brands try and replace their content teams with AI or to produce considerably more content than before due to the speed of AI.

However, it’s these brands that have been hit the hardest by Google’s latest algorithm updates which are cracking down on bad AI content.

You can write quickly using AI, but it lacks the depth of real-world experiences, and this is one of the things that sets good content apart.

AI allows you to scale up and be more efficient at some of the tasks that can slow down copywriting, but if you want that content to perform well, it still needs a human touch.

So, make sure any content you do produce, is overseen by a human that knows what good content looks like.

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“In-house teams should leverage AI for ideation and curation, but partnering with agencies can maximise AI's potential.”‍

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AI technologies are revolutionising content creation and optimisation, becoming a necessity in modern marketing.

By thinking of AI as an assistant, you can enhance manually created content such as blog posts or LinkedIn articles, then use AI like ChatGPT-4 to polish and perfect them.

On the creative front, AI helps ideate and curate ideas, making content production more efficient.

Moreover, with reduced targeting options on platforms like Meta, creative is now the one of the most powerful targeting levers we have at our disposal.  AI can help you scale creative efforts and tailor content to specific audience groups, ensuring effective ad delivery.

In-house teams should leverage AI for ideation and curation, but partnering with agencies can maximise AI's potential. Agencies provide expertise to integrate AI tools effectively, maintaining high-quality, targeted content.

Balance AI with human creativity and agency support to produce standout content in the competitive digital landscape.

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Read: To Appoint, or Not to Appoint – How to Truly Assess the Capabilities of a Potential New Marketing Agency Partner

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“In-house team’s GenAI strategy needs to be two-fold – ensure effective value is being driven by your agency partners and upskill your internal teams.”

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In-house team’s GenAI strategy needs to be two-fold – ensure effective value is being driven by your agency partners and upskill your internal teams. Your team needs to be able to ask the right questions, for the latter to deliver on the former. My advice?

• Foster discernment – Educate your team to carefully consider which tasks can benefit most from GenAI (it’s not usually a straightforward answer).

• Encourage curiosity – Discovery needs to be ‘always on’ – things change week by week in the GenAI space.

• Build a culture of debate – GenAI is fraught with hype and failed silver bullets. Encourage your team to think critically, and ensure they keep that critical spirit when interfacing with your agencies.

• Customisation is key – Off the shelf technology will only get you so far – look for agencies that can offer customised GenAI tools for your specific business needs.

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“Think of AI tools as a junior in your business, fresh out of colleague with all the knowledge in the world, but no idea how to implement what they know.”‍

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AI is an incredibly powerful tool for optimising business processes and generating content, be it images, blogs or even video.

The key to quality AI content is humans. You still need someone who understands how to get the best out of the AI tool with the right knowledge inputs and prompts, and you still need an expert to fact check the output and ensure it’s on brief.

For in-house teams experimenting with this technology, think of AI tools as a junior in your business, fresh out of colleague with all the knowledge in the world, but no idea how to implement what they know.

This is currently our role as an agency: to shape and guide the AI tools to create valuable results for our clients. If you approach the tools this way, you should, in theory, always get quality content out.

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Download our latest industry pulse check: Marketing trends, opportunities, and challenges for 2024

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“If you’re using AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and to create efficiencies, but remaining guardians of the brand, it’s unbelievably exciting.”

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We’ve seen some huge wins using AI over the last 12 months. beginning with AI image generation for pitches and concepting, and most lately, building bots that replicate clients’ tone of voice.

Used well, with excellent prompt engineering and curating of the content, it not only stretches the boundaries of creativity, but also saves huge amounts of time and money.

As a HubSpot agency partner, we’ve implemented HubSpot’s new Content Hub for several clients over recent months, and the power of the tool is immense.  We also use AI prompts when managing digital PR for clients, with incredible results.

The key, however, lies in not mistaking AI for creativity. AI can only do what you tell it to do! If you’re using AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and to create efficiencies, but remaining guardians of the brand, it’s unbelievably exciting.

In-house teams should consider building their own bots to reduce the burden of content creation – and work with an agency like BH&P that has embraced AI, to build your own suite of AI tools.

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“We’re not going to stop using photography any time soon, but AI has given us additional flexibility in how we most cost effectively bring a campaign to life.”

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A great example of how we’ve been using AI is our development of Midjourney prompts that allow us to cost effectively execute ideas. That’s not been a quick job as getting prompts right and avoiding the weird AI look and feel we see so much of takes a lot of iteration by an experienced designer.

But now, while there’s still no replacement for skilled human beings developing the central creative concept, we can use AI to develop a wider range of campaign iterations based on that central idea than budget might have allowed in the past.

For example, if a sizeable photography budget would otherwise have been needed but unaffordable.

The upshot of this is that we can be more ambitious and wide-ranging in how creative ideas are rolled out on modest budgets because we’re not as limited by the practicalities and associated costs as we were in the past.

We’re not going to stop using photography any time soon, but AI has given us additional flexibility in how we most cost effectively bring a campaign to life.

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If you're preparing to build out your marketing strategy in 2024, make sure you're getting the most out of your resource. GO! offer cost-free advice on best-practise, provide independent agency recommendations, pitch management, and more - get in touch to get started.