As a fractional CMO, I work primarily with businesses that are looking to save money where they can. I’m very budget conscious and only propose spending my clients’ money when I can show that it will bring them value or an ROI.
The recent increase in AI tools for generating content has been a huge boon for fractional marketers such as myself, because I can produce more content in less time or at a lower cost than what I could previously provide.
However, there is a limit to this ai-powered content creation.
A very reasonable question I’ve heard from startups and small businesses is why can’t we have a blog that is entirely generated by ChatGPT?
Before we answer that question, I want to discuss why a business website should even have a blog, then we can see if an AI-powered software can be its content creator.
What value does a blog add to a website?
Any content a brand produces should offer something of value to those consuming it. It could be funny, moving, inspiring, informative, or educational, depending on your content marketing goals.
Let’s focus on what it means to have useful or informative content. Entertaining content is great but less relevant for B2B companies.
A business should only have a blog on its website if it can regularly produce content that shows your business is an expert in your field.
This is important because a blog can help bring leads if it has blog posts that show you understand and know how to solve various problems and challenges in your industry.
How does a blog help convert visitors into leads?
A visitor that could be a lead generally comes to your site for 1 of 2 reasons:
- They’ve heard of you and are considering hiring you, and want to learn more about your company either before or after they’ve had an initial conversation.
- They google a question related to what you do, your site comes up on the search results, and they click through to your site to see if you are of interest to them.
Let’s look at an example of how this plays out in real life.
Situation 1:
You have had a meeting with a potential client. Things went well, they are interested in your solution, and suggest another meeting with some additional decision-makers. As the calendar invite gets sent out to the new participants, who see your company name and google it. If your marketing is working correctly, your website will appear at the top of the search results, and the decision-maker will click through to your site.
What are they looking for while on your site? Perhaps a succinct explanation of your solution. References or testimonials of similar businesses happy with your solution. A website that looks clean and professional. If they visit the blog they will likely scan the titles to see if there are any topics of interest to them, blog titles that show that they understand the intricacies of your industry and the idiosyncrasies that make solving problems so challenging.
The blog is a great way to show off that you really understand the esoteric aspects of the challenges you solve without boring the reader with too much information on the home or services pages.
Situation 2:
A business is having an issue with challenge X. Perhaps they are looking for information on how to evaluate a service provider who can solve challenge X for them. Perhaps they are looking at how to solve it themselves. Search engines read and file trillions of pages of information so that when a searcher is looking for an answer to a question, the search engine will be able to provide website pages that the search engine thinks best answer that question.
A business that is looking to generate inbound leads (that is, for potential clients to discover a business and reach out to them) can do so with a blog that offers high-quality content. With the right effort, your blog could be on the results page for searches related to solving challenge X, so that when potential customers are researching potential service providers, your site will be shown.
In order for your blog to help the visitor to your site consider hiring you, in either of the situations above, your blog needs to have high-quality content, because Google understands bad content and won’t show it.
In Situation 1 you need to mention and address industry-specific details that only someone working in the industry would know. ChatGPT is already notorious for making up information rather than pulling it from reputable sources. In Situation 2 you need to write content in a way that search engines think you have a better response than the hundreds or thousands of other pages on the internet that say similar things.
What happens if your blog posts don’t offer the highest quality content?
Well, for one, your site won’t appear on the search results page when people are searching for service providers such as yourself. I had a consultation with a business that wasn’t getting any leads from their blog. The CEO was upset because he was pouring a lot of money into via a full-time content writer and paid ads promoting it. I took a look at the blog and the number one issue that stood out to me was that it wasn’t saying anything particularly interesting. The blog titles had a lot of buzzwords that gave the impression the business understood the industry, but when I clicked through to an actual post it felt like it was a homework assignment a college student submitted after an all-nighter.
Search engines could understand the content wasn’t the highest quality and didn’t show the blog posts for relevant searches and visitors to the site who checked out the blog weren’t inspired to follow and of the call to action to reach out to the company for a demo.
This brings us back to our initial question – can ChatGPT or another AI software help you write blog posts for your site? Yes. Will those blog posts be good enough to help push leads through the conversion funnel? Probably not. AI content can be a great starting point, especially when you give the software good prompts to help get it going. But without having a human who understands your industry’s needs taking the ChatGPT text and bringing the content to the next level, you’ll be left with a blog that doesn’t offer value, bring leads, or otherwise justify having it on your website!
What do you think – does this blog post show that we understand content marketing for B2Bs? Looking for some marketing help with your B2B company? Let’s talk!
