By Clayton Margerum, Managing Agency Director
After all, how hard can it be? Right? RIGHT?!
Sure, while we’re at it, let’s all go ahead and take out our own appendix, as well.
But before you lean back on the conference table with a sharpened knife, YouTube, and some paper towels, consider leaving surgery to the experts, those of us who have been doing the work for years and understand that it’s not just about the end result, but also about the process in getting there.
Has AI made content creation easier? Of course it has. But it’s not just about hitting 600 words for a blog and sending it out the virtual door. What’s in that content and where it leads is more powerful than the time-savings afforded by AI. And that’s where agencies are your most valuable tool. We see the larger picture and plan your marketing accordingly.
A full-service agency knows the complete network necessary to best flesh out your strategy. A push in digital banners should coincide with paid social media for maximum effectiveness, and with landing pages to measure its success. A blog post should contain shared knowledge to establish your authoritative status in the industry, with links to your own site that back up the content, something search engines love that will rank your site higher. New webpages, landing pages, and print materials should all maintain the look and feel of your existing pages, working seamlessly to produce a strong, consolidated message.
In the last few years, we’ve been using ChatGPT, Sora, Claude, Perplexity, and others to advance our research and concepting more quickly, but always with a suspicious eye. “Trust but verify” is the best method to avoid errors. Beware of the fact that, at its core, AI wants desperately to please you so that you use it more frequently. This can lead to bad responses, with partially true replies and others that have been seemingly made from whole digital cloth, with no valid source.
That’s why we use AI as an assistant, not a substitute. The choices made by a human writer will be different than a robotic one — and it’s not just varying sentence structures, but the content choices within the copy. Humans add more creativity, use less repetition, and sprinkle in a little bit of unpredictability to make copy as attention-grabbing as a weasel in a washing machine. See?
So, while the technology itself has been steadily improving for image creation (still better count those fingers, though) and with fewer em dashes in its copy — though I’ll still be using them myself, thank you very much — there are hurdles yet to jump and hills still to climb. Again, this is why it’s best to engage an agency to guide your marketing strategy, helping you avoid pitfalls and misinformation that might raise red flags for potential customers. Because ultimately, that’s what you’re doing: you’re giving potential customers confidence in your business. Mistakes will erase that confidence and cost you more than any savings AI can give you.
