Businesses looking into the prospect of content or copywriting can now clearly see just how much AI is changing the landscape. Indeed, it can feel difficult to find any content that doesn’t have the hand of automation somewhere inside it.
While AI tools can definitely be helpful, allowing you to work faster, they can also be a crutch, causing your brand to sound just the same as any other, with information and advice that is based purely on what data has been fed into them, rather than any of your own experiences.
As such, let’s look at what you can do to make sure that your content stands out and has some real authenticity in an increasingly automated age.
Define Your Brand’s Voice
Speaking from the heart might lend your content some degree of authenticity, but you have to remember that you’re speaking on behalf of the brand to an audience that is expecting you to represent the business.
To that end, define how your brand should sound, creating tone guidelines that can reflect your values and personality, whether you want to sound more formal and professional or if you want a brand voice that’s warmer and a little more personal.
You can also define words and terminology to use or avoid. This establishes a level of consistency that not only stands apart from the usual AI tone of voice but also makes your business’s content a little more recognizable and trustworthy.
Learn What Your Audience Wants To Hear
One of the distinct things that sets your business apart from any other is the specific audience that you’re catering to.
The demographics, needs, and challenges that face your audience can set them apart from any other, and, in turn, they might have a need or desire for unique content that speaks to that.
By authentically listening to them, gathering feedback, spending time in comment sections, and keeping an eye on their conversations in social media and online questions, you can ensure that your content speaks more directly to their needs, showing not just authenticity but empathy.
Let AI Help, Not Speak For You
If you want to use AI tools to improve your productivity and help you generate ideas for content more effectively, that doesn’t have to undermine the authenticity of your writing too much.
However, the trick is to treat AI tools as a creative partner, rather than your ghost writer. Brainstorming, summarizing, and structuring ideas through AI can save a ton of time, but then you make sure that you’re the one writing, fact-checking, and adding your own insights.
Running your content through an AI humanizer tool can ensure that nothing you’re writing sounds too robotic, which is especially important if you develop the tendency to write things in the same language suggested by AI tools.
Automation is helping writers get their work out there much more effectively and consistently. You don’t have to miss out on those benefits. Just make sure that you’re using them wisely.
Add Real Insights
When you work with AI tools, you’re likely going to be seeing a lot of the same information that others would see if they put in the same kinds of prompts.
This, in time, is going to lead to a lot of content that feels duplicated spreading over the net.
To prevent that, you need the spark of original thought.
Make sure that you’re not just repeating what AI found elsewhere. If you have any real insights or experiences that could lend either flavor or credence to the ideas that you’re sharing, put them in there.
Use Some Emotional Intelligence
AI tools are getting a lot more effective at incorporating nuance, tone, and other factors that make their text sound less and less robotic.
However, they don’t have the real emotional intelligence that we do. They can sometimes come out with content that doesn’t quite fit the spirit of the value or goals you’re trying to reach with your content.
Always keep emotional tone in mind, whether you’re writing from scratch or rewriting AI-assisted text. Using softer or bolder phrasing, adding a touch of sarcasm, or injecting a little cultural or industrial nuance, all of these can help you breathe more life into your writing in ways that AI simply can’t; not to the same degree, at least.
Go Through It With An Editor
Whether you’re using AI tools or not, you should make sure that any content has the opportunity to pass through the hands of an editor before it gets posted online. For one, the original writers might have a hard time spotting issues with it even if they look over it a second or a third time.
But secondly, editing is where the crumbs of unique tone, insights, or value can start to shine through, which can then be reinforced and hammered in with rewrites or some extra emphasis.
This is especially important if you’re using AI, which cannot hold onto larger-scale ideas and aims when it’s generating a lot of text.
Get Involved In The Conversation
The text of the content itself is not where the entirety of your content’s value is going to shine. Being able to keep up with the conversation after posting it can help you connect with its audience, expound on its ideas, and share even more insights.
Leaving the comments section open or crafting content that invites readers to share their own experiences and thoughts can make it more than just a piece of one-way communication.
It can turn it into a real conversation, which not only shows that you have an authentic interest in the subject at hand, but that you’re interested in what the audience has to say, as well, building loyalty and shared perspective with them.
AI is likely here to stay, and there’s nothing wrong with getting used to using it. However, it is authenticity that will help genuine content stand out above the sheer waves of beginning-to-end AI-generated content, so start making it a focus now.
