How to Leverage Generative AI In Your Content Strategy

Just a few years ago, AI-generated content seemed like no more than a buzzword on LinkedIn. Today, it's in every content marketers' vocabulary – and, for some early adopters, even their content strategy.

To leverage AI content generation in the most seamless, efficient way, it needs to be built into your workflows and processes. While it's easy to turn around one-off blogs with ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM), this isn't a scalable strategy. To truly capitalize on the benefits, your content strategy should account for AI's uses throughout your content creation workflow, including large, heavy-lift initiatives and continuous maintenance through automation.

Here's exactly how you can make the most of generative AI in your content strategy.

When you're using AI for content creation, the first step stays the same as always: determine your goals. Without clearly defined objectives, even tactics leveraging the latest technology will fail to produce the results you expect. Remember to set SMART goals – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and with timelines attached. For example, you might plan to leverage generative AI with the goal to draft one blog per week that is optimized for 3 keywords each, with the aim to publish twelve blogs over the course of three months. This is specific and measurable (one blog per week, each optimized for three keywords), achievable (based on resources to review and publish), relevant to your content strategy and goals, and with a definitive timeline (three months).

Once you've determined your overall goals, you can work backwards towards determining the goals for each type of content. This is important for determining when a piece of content should be delegated to a human or to an AI content creation tool.

Truthfully, using large language models (LLMs) to create content for the sake of content is ineffective. You'll want to only consider use cases where AI makes a high impact on your goals, while only requiring low effort from humans.

Use Cases for AI Content Generation

• Biographies: This type of short, informative asset is fact-based, making it a great candidate for AI content generation, with a human reviewer.

• Event Descriptions: Short event descriptions are also great candidates for AI-created content, especially for sparking creativity. Again, these should still leverage human in the loop technology, sometimes referred to as HITL.

• FAQs: If you control the facts about your business, AI can be leveraged to answer common questions. This is especially useful for search and chat experiences. However, relying on information pulled from across the internet could result in incorrect or outdated information.

• Blog Posts: Users of Jasper.ai and ChatGPT may have already started leveraging AI to create blog posts. However, consider using AI for blog-related copy, as well. This could include meta descriptions, tags, and summaries. However, these are more difficult to scale because a human is still required to manually enter a prompt.

Primarily, you'll want to clearly define where in the workflow you should leverage AI, versus where it's necessary to look for human in the loop features.

First of all, you have to consider what happens when – not if – your AI content generation tool writes something incorrect or strange. While they are improving, LLMs are known to hallucinate, and they might sometimes create content that simply isn't fit for your organization's needs.

This is why your content strategy must account for both the AI's role and the human's role in creating types of content. One way to do this is to establish approval workflows. Be specific about who decides the topic, the role that the AI plays, and the standards that the employee should look for during the review and optimization.

Yext Content – Yext's headless content management system – can use AI to generate content and then send it to stakeholders for approval before it ever goes live. Once the content is reviewed, edited, and then approved, it can be pushed live to your website, search, or any other experience.

Leveraging generative AI tools like ChatGPT or GPT4 to write the first draft of short, fact-based blogs can be effective in some situations, but is it really the most scalable strategy for your organization?

Don't discount more impactful uses for this technology. For example, enterprise organizations often have multiple locations, each of which will need a description and landing page. As long as those organizations are in complete control of the facts about their business locations, AI content tools can pull information from the business' content management system to create relevant, correct content. This is a scalable use case because this tool could be leveraged for one location, or 500 locations – it's entirely dependent on the organization's needs.

That said, not every tool that claims to use AI to generate new content will meet the criteria for scalability. Because Yext Content organizes all of the data about your business, your team can leverage information on stored entities to generate content at scale.

Whether you've only just started using content generation in your broader content strategy, or you've been effectively using it for months, there is one thing to keep in mind: things change. Professionals exit and enter the organization, and gain new credentials and titles. Products gain new features, and the scope of services offered fluctuates. New locations open, while other locations move and close.

How will you make sure that your generative AI tool is keeping up?

As the facts about your business change, be sure to update all of your data. While some content management systems force your team to manage the data manually, this isn't scalable. Especially for large organizations where the data is publicly displayed across dozens – or even hundreds – of owned and non-owned channels, even a simple phone number change can turn into a massive effort, tying up resources and teammates.

At Yext, we solve this with Entities, a feature of Yext Content that allows you to update structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data directly in your content management system. Then, we leverage integrations and platform services like Search, Pages, and Listings to automatically update these facts everywhere that they appear, including your website, third-party listings, chat and search experiences, and more.

This saves your team time and effort by only requiring one manual update, while automation finds and replaces any outdated data with the correct information. To take this a step further, Yext Content can then automatically re-generate any descriptions, bios, blogs, and/or landing page copy. Then, thanks to human in the loop technology, your team can leverage workflows to review and approve the changes before they go live.

Generative AI is predicted to become a $110 billion industry by 2030. Organizations are already eager to tap into the potential of AI-generated content today, but most lack the in-house resources and expertise needed to adjust their tech stack — especially in a way that is compliant and secure.

Additionally, using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to create content can cause more problems than it solves – especially when, not if, the AI pulls outdated or incorrect information from the internet. Businesses will have to think very carefully about AI's place in their content strategy.

The Yext platform is a content management system that is infused with AI and large language models (LLMs), giving you the flexibility to hit the ground running with out-of-the-box generative AI in content, Yext Chat, Yext Search, and more.

Ultimately, your goal is to deliver great AI-enabled experiences for your customers without overwhelming your team. Yext Content does just that.

AI-generated content is relatively new to strategic leaders across industries and positions. Tune in to our weekly interactive virtual event series, AI and the Future of Digital Experiences to learn and experiment alongside data officers, product managers, lawyers and other C-Suite executives.