Content marketing is undergoing a revolution driven by AI. To explore what’s next for content creation and distribution, I recently interviewed Ankur Pandey, CEO and co-founder of Longshot, for the Artificially Intelligent Marketing podcast.

We covered a lot of ground, from the growing need to establish brand voice to Ankur's vision for the future of marketing. Read on for key insights from our wide-ranging discussion.

Establishing Authentic Brand Voice in AI-Generated Content

As AI becomes more deeply integrated into content workflows, maintaining brand voice is crucial for authenticity. Ankur emphasised the complexity of adapting AI tools for diverse content guidelines and styles:

“Establishing a specific tonality and content guidelines for brands is complex. This involves considerations such as brand voice, avoiding abbreviations, and legal terminology, reflecting the growing importance of maintaining authenticity in AI-generated content.”

Take care to ensure your AI content resonates with your brand identity. As Ankur reminded us, details like vocabulary and formatting guidelines make a big difference.

Rising AI Literacy Among Marketing Leaders

Interest and knowledge about AI continues to grow within marketing teams. Ankur has observed more content managers proactively learning about the underlying technology:

"We discussed the increasing AI literacy among content leaders and how education about AI technologies is becoming more accessible. This speaks volumes about how AI is reshaping the content marketing domain."

As marketers get up to speed on AI, they’re more strategic about testing and implementing new tools. For long-term success, dedicate time to developing your team’s AI skills.

The Risks of Relying on a Single AI Vendor

Given the astounding pace of progress in AI, overreliance on any one vendor is risky. Ankur advised against tying yourself to a single supplier. Ankur stressed the value of not fully relying on a single AI supplier and using other elements or homegrown versions to mitigate reliance risks.

As AI continues advancing across the tech landscape, keep your options open. Maintain connections with multiple vendors so you can pivot as needed. The recent boardroom drama at OpenAI highlights how situations at vendors can change rapdily and being entirely reliant on one vendor can expose your team to risks.

Where Next for AI in Content Marketing?

As for what lies ahead, Ankur envisions more personalised, dynamically generated content. He highlighted the potential for content updates based on user signals, with content management systems potentially writing blog posts that continually refine themselves in real time based on reader data and engagement.

Additionally, Ankur predicts further specialisation as companies fine-tune AI for their specific needs:

“I would not be surprised if every medium to large companies, when they use an AI tool, either a tool or AI directly, they have fine-tuned it or adapted their use case."

The future of AI promises ever-more tailored content calibrated to react to your audience. Start planning now how to make your content resonate.

Ten Key Takeaways

Here are 10 key learnings from the interview:

1. AI is now widely accepted and used across content marketing, with all content marketers leveraging it to some degree in their workflows.

2. There was initial scepticism of AI in content marketing due to past overpromising, but the technology has now proven itself. 

3. AI content does not inherently negatively impact SEO - poor quality content would hurt SEO regardless of if it's AI-generated.

4. FactGPT is a feature in Longshot that keeps AI content factual, relevant, and focused by uploading custom context.

5. Capturing precise brand voice guidelines for AI can be complex but is becoming increasingly important.  

6. AI large language models like GPT-3 continue to evolve rapidly, requiring ongoing testing and potential model changes.

7. Building an AI SaaS product involves extensive testing, choosing suitable models per feature, and crafting sophisticated workflows.

8. Personalisation and adapting content dynamically based on reader signals may be an emerging trend in content marketing.

9. Fine-tuning models on niche data to capture industry or company specifics is increasingly essential.  

10. There are opportunities to innovate on UI/UX for human + AI collaboration in content creation.

Want More AI Insights?

My full discussion with Ankur covered lots more ground, from FactGPT’s advanced AI workflows to the transformative potential of interfaces like ChatGPT.

Get the complete analysis by listening to the full episode of Artificially Intelligent Marketing, plus access all our episodes diving deep into the nuts and bolts of AI.

What stuck out to you most from the insights above? What are you doing to leverage AI to enhance your content marketing?

Share your thoughts in the comments!