The advent of artificial intelligence has paved the way for innovations in various sectors, with the marketing industry being no exception. A particularly interesting development is the rise of AI writing tools, tailored to accelerate content creation, enhance productivity and in some cases also provide invaluable insights. As a marketer looking to boost your work with AI, the first decision you typically need to make is whether to use a popular general-purpose AI assistant, such as ChatGPT, or opt for a more dedicated marketing tool. This blog post will dive into a comprehensive comparison between these two options aiming to provide a clear understanding of their unique features, benefits, and helping you make the optimal choice for your needs.
What General-Purpose AI Assistants Can (and Can’t) Do For You
Following the explosion in popularity of ChatGPT, additional tools such as Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Bard quickly emerged. In common to all these tools is their vast knowledge and incredible ability to interact with humans eloquently in natural language. Their knowledge comes from an expansive training set, constituting an ocean of written content from web pages, newspapers, books and more, covering countless topics. To put this knowledge to good use, they were also trained to follow user instructions, a procedure often dubbed ‘human alignment’. The underlying algorithmic engines that drive these tools are called LLMs (Large Language Models), which are advanced neural network machine learning models.
Marketers will find that these AI tools offer an array of advantages for general content creation, from drafting persuasive emails to producing captivating blog posts. These tools are also affordable and very intuitive to use. Impressive as they are however, they can still sometimes fail miserably due to a lack of knowledge, input misinterpretation or a logical failure, and it’s often hard to tell when that is going to happen. Therefore, marketers are advised to always exercise discretion before putting the AI-generated content to use. We’ll elaborate a little more about that in the next section.
General-Purpose Assistants Are Only As Good As Their Data
General-purpose AI assistants are based on incredibly powerful LLM models but it’s important to understand that these models are still limited and might sometimes respond confidently on matters they know very little about. Probably the most obvious limitation is the scope of text data that was used to train the LLM model, which is typically a huge dataset consisting of open resources. Let’s examine a few example tasks and ask ourselves whether a LLM could perform them:
- Writing in Japanese – only if the model was trained on Japanese texts
- Answering questions about recent events – if the event happened after the model was trained then it couldn’t have ingested information about it and it won’t be able to answer correctly.
- Predicting the weather – perhaps by reading enough newspaper weather forecasts, a LLM could learn to predict the weather in the coming days to some degree (e.g. that if the temperature is 80 degrees on Wednesday it’s likely to be between 70-90 on Thursday). However, to reach a good degree of accuracy, professional weather forecast models aggregate a huge amount of weather measurement data that is arguably unlikely to be available for general-purpose LLMs to ingest.
- Predicting the conversion rate of a Facebook Ad to a given target audience – similar to the weather example, a LLM could make a prediction that might sound plausible, but without ingesting actual conversion data it is unlikely that it would be able to make an accurate prediction.
The Added Value Of Marketing-Specific AI Writing Tools
Marketing-specific AI writing tools are based on a similar underlying technology to that of ChatGPT and the likes, but were designed from the ground up to cater to marketers’ needs both in terms of functionality and the data they rely on. A couple of notable market leaders in this space are Anyword and Copy.ai.
First, to avoid limiting their breadth, marketing-specific AI writing tools typically offer, in addition to other features, a generic user instructions interface that allows their users to interact with their underlying LLMs in ways similar to the general-purpose tools. Thus, even if a specific capability like say writing a funny song is not officially offered one could probably still use the tool to perform this task to the extent it is possible to do with a LLM. But, with all due respect to breadth, the bulk of the marketing copywriting work typically revolves around central repeating tasks, such as developing engaging ads, social posts, creating compelling product descriptions, and producing persuasive call-to-actions, often under specific brand guidelines and style. This is where the marketing-specific tools begin to shine. Let’s see how.
LLM Prompting
While LLM prompting (‘talking’ to the assistant to get a desired outcome) seems natural, it can still be challenging especially when you want the assistant to perform a challenging task or to take many different considerations into account at the same time (e.g. your product description, target audience, maximum character count, tone-of-voice, keywords, etc.). The marketing AI companies employ experienced professionals (often called ‘prompt engineers’) who work day and night to make sure your most important tasks will be carried out as effectively as possible with optimal, advanced prompting techniques that are often much less intuitive. They also know which LLM excels at which task and make constant adaptations when new and better LLM engines come out.
Custom Constraints
Despite the amazing progress made, some instructions are still hard for LLMs to follow reliably. Therefore, if you ask a general-purpose assistant to generate a Google Ad Description of up to 90 characters with a particular keyword, it might not get it right. Then, as a user, you have to double-check and then rinse and repeat. A marketing writing tool would typically have the mechanisms in place to verify these kinds of constraints and retry if needed under the hood so that when you get the output, you’re much more confident that it meets your needs.
Workflow Automation
A single campaign comprises several coordinated marketing assets, such as Facebook posts, tweets, and emails. Marketing assistants, like Anyword and Copy.ai, greatly accelerate the creation of these assets using multi-prompt templates.
Quantitative Marketing
As mentioned in the previous section, general-purpose AI tools cannot be expected to help marketers choose which copy to use by making accurate quantitative predictions regarding metrics like click-through-rates or conversions. Anyword is a unique marketing assistant employing customized LLMs that were trained on such quantitative data and is therefore capable of making such useful predictions.
Understanding Business Context
General-purpose AI tools don’t know your branch voice policies, business offerings, target audience, or historical campaigns. Marketing tools can learn all that, partly automatically by ingesting your data and partly through manual configuration. Once this is done, you can expect to really feel the difference between a generic AI writer and a tool that knows your business.
Costs
Pricing is a crucial factor in any marketing decision, and AI writing tools are no different. General-purpose AI writing tools such as ChatGPT are quite affordable, with rates starting at $20 per month, making them an attractive option for those with a tight budget. On the other hand, marketing-specific AI tools offer a range of pricing plans to cater to varying needs. Entry-level plans don’t significantly exceed the cost of general-purpose tools, making them accessible for businesses with limited budgets or wanting to test the waters first. However, for a more comprehensive package that includes enterprise-level features, businesses should expect to pay a higher premium. It’s vital to evaluate your specific requirements and the value that each tool brings to your business before making a final decision. Balancing cost with effectiveness will ensure the best return on investment for your chosen AI writing tool.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, both general-purpose and marketing-specific AI writing tools provide remarkable solutions to diverse content creation needs. The choice between them largely depends on your specific requirements and circumstances. General-purpose AI writing tools, like ChatGPT, are exceptional at providing broad content solutions, making them a suitable option for marketers seeking a versatile, all-around tool. However, if you’re seeking a tool tailored to deliver advanced marketing content solutions with a keen understanding of your business and the ability to accurately predict marketing metrics, a marketing-specific tool like Anyword could be a game-changer. While cost considerations are important, it’s essential to recognize the value and return on investment each tool can deliver. Embracing AI in your marketing strategies isn’t just about adopting new technology; it’s about enhancing productivity, increasing efficiency, and giving your brand a competitive edge. Whichever tool you choose, it’s clear that AI is set to play an even more significant role in shaping the future of content creation and marketing.
