The benefits of leveraging GenAI can be significant, with a study undertaken by economists from Harvard and Stanford revealing that participants leveraging GenAI delivered content 40% faster while producing 18% higher quality output, as judged by expert evaluators. That robot got game! So how do you up yours?
Productivity and time savings are two of the key benefits we see emerging from use of generative AI in our work.
Business Director,
E-commerce Company
Research and guidance
One of the most powerful uses we’ve found for GenAI at Content Nation is in fundamental research and guidance for in-depth topics and client briefs. GenAI offers a fascinating and powerful insight into complex topics, and one which we generally have found to be both intuitive and illuminating. Whether you’re searching for complex insight on climate change, or fascinating competitor analysis, GenAI offers a powerful new arrow in the quiver of content research, and a major boost to productivity.
GenAI almost acts like a curated search engine for key data, and one which seems inherently more intuitive for research than a simple Google search. The right prompts can narrow down a conversation and deliver powerful results. Searching for ‘climate commitments’ would give a broad result, but prompting ‘the specific climate commitments of all countries in Asia based on net-zero goals’ for example would prompt targeted insight in line with specific research needs.
This is perhaps the most complex and fraught area of GenAI usage, however, and a key challenge which will be raised in the following chapter. GenAI can offer insight, point you to the right resources, and provide a simplified understanding that helps inform further investigation. However, you need to be very, very careful to verify that information is correct and up to date.
Quizzes and interactive content
Quizzes are an engaging, interactive form of content with real value for marketers. They can enhance conversation rates, boost web traffic, and build engagement across brand platforms. What’s more, they also offer an intriguing internal upskilling and testing tool.
GenAI is a perfect tool to generate quizzes on a broad range of topics, from the coolest Harry Potter house (obviously Slytherin…) to the top scorer in a football competition. Just plug in the parameters and get quizzical!
Inspiration and thought starters
Writer’s block is a thing guys, we all know it. But one of the best ways to get through writer’s block is just to kickstart inspiration. GenAI is a great tool to do this. Want to write a blog about the latest in Moroccan cooking? Ask GenAI for a random fact about Moroccan cuisine. Need a blog on energy policy in Europe? Prompt Gemini for the latest top news about energy policy across the European Union.
Creating interesting and/or engaging content is a key benefit of generative AI.
Researcher,
Malaysian technology industry
Tone of voice prompts that spark action
Much like the thought-starters above, tone of voice prompts can really help you get in the groove of a particular brand style or word choice. This isn’t about parroting some tired tone, but about rewiring your mindset to inspire you.
Ask GenAI to create a quirky tone that broadly aligns with what you understand about the brand. “Create a fun social media post for a health and beauty brand that likes to be cheeky.”
Check grammar and punctuation if you’re stuck
I’ll preface this by saying that a great content team shouldn’t be relying on GenAI to get grammar and punctuation right… but we don’t live in a perfect world. As a content-driven agency, Content Nation has dedicated copywriters who work to deliver outstanding content for clients around the world… but not everyone has the resources or the capability to deliver on that.
When it comes down to it, GenAI can provide a powerful tool to assist with this. Even as a copywriter with over a decade of experience, this writer has used GenAI to prompt thoughts on particularly thorny grammatical blackholes or punctuation dilemmas. We did feel dirty afterwards, however.
This is one area of particular interest in Southeast Asia, where we have an amazing creative community, but across a diverse spectrum of English proficiency.
Contextual thesaurus
Every copywriter has that nightmare moment, sitting staring at a word, realising you’ve used it three times in a sentence, but somehow unable to think of an alternative. GenAI offers a powerful solution in this case, allowing you to search for a contextual synonym that meets your needs. It’s a quick, simple, but powerful way to upgrade your copy and break past writers’ block.
Keyword research
Without oversimplifying it and angering the Internet gods… search engine optimisation (SEO) is fundamentally about matching searcher intent with answers relevant to your brand offering. That means semantics are a critical part of good keyword research. GenAI can be a powerful tool to prompt semantic-driven SEO that opens up new avenues to inspire good keyword research.
If you ask GenAI to suggest keywords it will do just that, but ultimately keyword best practice should also leverage genuine data points—search volume and term competition—to identify truly relevant keywords.
At Content Nation, we have undertaken comparison of keywords suggested by GenAI against ‘human-derived’ insight, and the performance is unconvincing.
What GenAI can do is help you dive down the path of semantics to find synonyms which you might otherwise overlook.
With its impressive cultural nuance and understanding, it can be particularly powerful to help identify localised opportunities in diverse markets. Then use your keyword research tool of choice to assess the relevant metrics to see if it’s worthwhile!
What next?
The recommendations above reflect simple, easy-access potential for GenAI to power up content creation. It’s by no means an exclusive list, and does not include the more complex opportunities presented by embedding GenAI into own-brand solutions, such as GenAI chatbot plugins or customer service platforms.
