AI or Humans: Who Do You Want to Write Your Website Content

There’s a divergence going on in marketing. And it’s hard to know which way to jump.

On the one hand, the marketing research is showing that customers respond to personalisation and values-based messaging, and prefer companies they can easily communicate with through their DMs. They want a human connection with the companies they choose to do business with. They want storytelling and brands with authentic voices. People are intensely loyal to brands through emotion. 

Yet on the other hand, the very same marketing research is also showing us that AI is hugely helpful in creating targeted marketing content that is rich in keywords — and provides it much quicker and cheaper than getting a real human to write it. From a business owner’s financial perspective, farming out all marketing content to AI is rational. 

But is it? 

If your customer is seeking a human voice to connect with, and you’re feeding it machine-generated copy derived from the millions of words written before on a topic, there’s little chance that the resulting words will be original. There’s even less chance that your marketing copy will ever strike that emotional chord with the person reading it  — your potential customer.  

And you cannot build brand loyalty without emotion. 

AI content is generic. It is derivative by nature, and there’s therefore a real danger in letting it take the wheel of your marketing approach. It’s a robot, so asking it to write content that connects on a human level is a bridge too far. (At least for now.)

So, what’s the solution? Should you turn your back on AI altogether for marketing copy? 

No. Absolutely not. There’s enormous potential to be harnessed by strategic, cool-headed use of AI technologies. 

AI is a good jumping off point for content creation, particularly for generating any SEO-focussed blogs that you’re pretty sure no-one landing on your website is ever going to read. AI really can do some of the heavy lifting here, particularly when coming up with key points to cover, subheadings and article structure. Sure, let it write the first draft —but then we strongly recommend that you make an effort to ‘humanise’ any resulting content that you plan to post on your website. 

What about landing page copy? 

A good rule of thumb is that a human must be heavily involved in anything that you want to really resonate with your audience. 

When it comes to landing page copy, you have to get it right. Storytelling is everything. 

If you want to build a sense of rapport, brand loyalty, and start a conversation with a potential customer, then your human fingerprints should be all over your website copy. No-one will ever feel loyal to a dry, machine-generated website, or blogs that feel like they’ve been written just to tick a box. 

That means that AI should keep its little robotic fingers well clear of your landing page copy and anything that builds your authority and brand voice — or at the very least, only be given the first run at it if you’re struggling to figure out what to say. 

A professional content writer will still kick AI to the curb when it comes to impactful storytelling content. But we’d all be mad not to jump on some of the short-cuts that AI offers. 

At Clearshot, we use AI with discretion. If a client needs a bunch of blogs for SEO, we’ll get the ball rolling by putting a prompt in AI to get some content ideas, subheadings, and keywords. We’ll then humanise the resulting copy – normally so much it barely resembles the original! But this approach saves time— and if we’re billing the client hourly, that saving matters. 

But landing page content and the stuff that really matters? That’s still a conversation between people.  It’s strategy. It’s finding out where your business lies in the landscape, what you offer that’s unique, and how we can market that in a bunch of clever ways that speak to your client base. 

The resulting content isn’t generic or derivative. If you want to stand out from the crowd, it can’t afford to be.