You know that more organizations are using AI for marketing, but how do you integrate it into your own planning without losing your authenticity?
The key to using AI well is to use it to automate, enhance or accelerate some of your existing work, while leaving the genuine communication work to your team. Good judgement, fresh ideas, and an understanding of what will connect with your audiences: those aren’t skills you can replace with bots. That kind of communication takes an expert.
In fact, that’s the good news/bad news we have to share: ultimately, everything you do with AI needs a human to act as the fact-checker and quality control. But when you use AI tools the right way, they can be a huge help for SEO, non-profit writing, social media planning, metrics, and even certain kinds of image/video/song generation! Read on:
1) AI can automate SEO: AI is great at altering copy to improve SEO, or at drafting keywords for metadata. Try Claude or ChatGPT for keyword and search optimization. If you already have a post drafted, AI can help with a first pass for identifying hashtags, snippets and tags. But remember: while AI can suggest all sorts of optimizations, only humans can look past the word clouds to understand what’s motivating your audiences. And when it comes to SEO-optimized copy, ultimately you’ll want your personal writing to take the lead to ensure that it’s aligned with your brand voice and values.
2) AI’s can enhance non-profit comms: Non profit communicators use a certain style of writing to connect with donors. If you’re creating content as a non-profit, AI’s can help check specific boxes like which reading level you’re writing to, as well as help you improve your donor-driven writing. Try Hemingway or the Ahern Audit from Bloomerang. Both of these AI’s are designed to help you understand where your writing is over-complicated or hard to understand, without doing the rewrites for you. Let these AI’s spot multiple clauses, while you concentrate on understanding what kinds of stories donors want to hear.
3) AI’s can help you create content – although this tip comes with a content warning. We’ve all seen bad or just plain weird AI images, so exercising caution is key here – letting AI create all of your images without oversight is a quick way to destroy trust with your audience. But one area where AI can shine is by helping you to create illustrations for longer articles, blog posts and certain kinds of events. To ensure an outcome that’s friendly, not surreal, give an AI like Gemini your brand colours in your prompt (hex numbers will do) and specify what style you mean when you ask for an illustration. Be sure to acknowledge that you’ve used AI to create the illustration!
4) AI’s can help slice and dice content for repurposing. You should always have an experienced professional write your original copy! But AI can help you generate a week’s worth of social posts from a longer article, and suggest keywords that fit social search on each platform. When you use AI as a first look at reorganizing and reframing your content, it can help speed up and improve your approach to socials.
5) AI can help you with insight into your social metrics: AI can help with understanding your metrics by summarizing what’s performing well, identifying themes across high-engagement posts, and suggesting experiments to try next. What it can’t do? Interpret why something did well, or make good decisions about what to do next. AI can spot patterns, but it doesn’t understand why something resonates with your audiences the way that your team can.
Bonus use: troubleshooting. If you’re a smaller organization that’s using a new-to-you platform, or working a little outside your comfort zone on website coding, an AI like ChatGPT can help diagnose any problems you encounter with just a screenshot and a prompt. Case in point: we used AI to get our wireless printer talking to our router again after a power outage. If it could work out the problems between those two, it can probably help with your website – no coffee needed! AI can almost always help you figure out whatever technical glitch is getting in the way of connecting to your audience.
The most effective digital marketing still depends on human skills. But when you let AI’s handle the repetitive, mechanical, or time-consuming parts of the work, you’ll free your team to do what they do best: tell meaningful stories, make smart decisions, and build genuine connections.
