IT
AI CHAT NEEDS TO BE AUTHENTIC
Julaine Speight looks at what merchants need to know about using Artificial Intelligence to liaise with customers online.
T
here has been some media chatter about ChatGPT recently. It’s a new AI tool which helps create written content and has been hailed by some
as revolutionary.
If you are a merchant using e-commerce as part of your business model, you will already know the challenge of balancing your online offering with your bricks and mortar stores and as younger generations continue to search and order online, the effectiveness of your website will be even more important - DIY already makes up 14.3% of the entire UK eCommerce market* and online retail is growing fast.
It’s vital to have a good online presence; as well providing a sales operation, it can promote products, increase brand awareness and loyalty and of course, drive offline footfall. Of course, it can do none of this without good search engine optimisation (SEO). Good websites need effective SEO otherwise they will not show on search engines such as Google and this could limit brand awareness amongst new potential customers. That good SEO is achieved through a complex mix of strategies and one of these is content – media articles, blog posts, longer features, social posts and press releases. Put very simply, external (earned) content on other websites can help drive traffic to your site with links, and internal (owned) content can attract traffic to your site through the correct use of search terms.
Here is where ChatGPT comes in ChatGPT uses AI to create grammatically correct, up to the minute copy based on the brief provided. It is perfectly written and as ChatGPT is only an early version of the new tech, it is being hailed by some as a quicker way to continue getting traffic to your website. However, it would be wise to tread carefully. Digital marketing - and the content used in it - is just one part of a wider mix of strategies including PR, advertising, sales and in-store activities. They should all work together and the role of your content, whether it is on your own
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website or someone else’s, is quite complex. Content needs to be relevant to the specific audience, which of course can differ according to your product, your stores, the time of year, your wider marketing strategies and those of your suppliers or business partners. You need to take time to research the audience, know its priorities - and realise how those priorities fit into ever-changing cultures, and could be impacted by constantly fluid trends. The copy then needs to target that audience, while incorporating product or marketing messages and fitting in with your own overall brand voice. And it needs to be interesting to read. AND it needs to be approved by Google. There’s so much content already out there, that if it doesn’t do all of the above, your quickly produced, perfectly grammatical content might just not work in the long-term. 15 years ago, a lot of SEO content was clumsy and formulaic, crammed with key words and quickly shot down by Google. AI text may be more sophisticated now, but not only does it have no human nuance, it will still ultimately follow formulas that will keep
being spotted by search engines, and this will prevent it working as effectively. At First Internet, we have never had a penalty from Google for any of our clients, whether they are operating in building products or beauty salons - because, whilst there might be trends and ‘time saving’ tech appearing all the time, it remains our responsibility to think of the long-term impact of the digital content, not use shortcuts. Good content is creative, it is authentic and it must be approved and supported by search engines, so that it can talk to the audience in the right way and in the right space, at the right time.
When planning on how to market your building product, service or stores, these things all need to be considered. Creating content quickly using a robot might seem appealing, but if it’s not seen by the right people, what’s the point? BMJ
• Julaine Speight is a director at First Internet, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Manchester.
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net February 2023
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