TL;DR

One of the first claims about AI written content is that it’s reached a level that’s essentially indistinguishable from human written content. If we really examine that statement, though – does it match your everyday experience? When you’re encouraged to ‘dive in’ to a content that’s ‘not just this, it’s that’, are you educated, inspired or entertained? It might sound like traditional marketing fluff, but engaging a reader emotionally is where conversion happens – whether that’s conversion into a customer or from customer to advocate, from mild interest to strong inclination or more.

The way LLMs work is essentially via predictive models based on huge amounts of training data – so when you read AI content, you’re not reading something new or unique, and with brand content already drifting into an undifferentiated and generic middle ground before generative models began mass producing content, it was already apparent to customers that many brands really didn’t care. That is the last thing you want your content to say about you – and the main reason you should be hiring humans.

• People seek novelty – LLMs, as things stand, can’t reliably provide this. 
• People enjoy feeling considered – LLMs can simulate this to an extent, but not easily.
• People crave uniqueness – LLMs by the nature of their makeup can’t provide this.

Pain points

If you’re having issues with any of the following, a fresh approach to content & copywriting may be what you need:

• Low converting content
• Trouble differentiating your brand from competitors
• Low read times or time on page for your content
• Issues with crawled vs. indexed ratios in Search Console
• Struggling to rank in YMYL verticals
• Difficulty building mentions on new search platforms (such as LLMs and AI overviews)
• Low engagement levels with content on social media or during outreach efforts

What we mean by human content

Don’t mistake us for the old people we (some of us) are – the boom in generated content has happened before. We were there for the era of the content spinner, when less sophisticated tools were pumping out masses of content. While we’ve always found the practice to exist in a moral grey area, there have been periods in which the approach has absolutely worked.

What tends to come next, however, has been clamp downs on what Google has always considered a manipulative or ‘spammy’ tactic, and the sites that made huge gains have quickly sought out agencies and experts to repair the damage that manual and algorithmic penalties have done to their brand – both in terms of visibility and perceived trustworthiness. 

So, when we make a big deal of ‘human’ content, we’re not doing it for any other reason than because we foresee (and have slowly started to actually see) an algorithmic backlash against some of the lower quality examples, and we have always seen the best commercial results from human written, human focused content.

MMC Digital’s content & copywriting service

Clients choosing MMC Digital to help them with their content and copywriting will be able to select from a broad range of human written content options (we do have ‘AI in the loop’, but the content will always be artisanally produced – we can use that term now, right?). We work with a number of talented and experienced copywriters that have been achieving results for brands of all shapes and sizes for many years. At the moment, we offer the following (but if you don’t see it mentioned, feel free to reach out):

• Brand tone of voice – we’ll audit your site, your niche and your audience analytics to provide you with a clear set of brand guidelines for your online communications that covers ads, social media, short and long-form content. One of the key levers a brand can pull in terms of differentiation is the way it talks to its customers (and how they wish to be spoken to), and this document will help to make sure you’re able to speak with one voice.
• Blogs and long-form content – rigorously researched, well referenced and always written in keeping with your brand guidelines, we can plan and produce content that helps establish your business as an authority on your topics of choice (we’re not saying your active-wear brand shouldn’t be an expert on lion-taming, but we’d probably suggest something closer to home).
• Content strategy and calendars – we can help out your inhouse teams or freelance writers by developing content strategies and calendars that will help you build trust and reputation for your brand.
• Content audits – we can review and make recommendations for improvements to your existing content, covering style, tone, consistency, messaging, SEO performance and more.

What can content & copywriting do for your business?

Information rich content has always helped to improve the performance of websites in search. It improves a site’s industry relevance and authority, but what has often been forgotten (even before the current generative boom) has been the reader. Great content can please both your customer and search engine algorithms and help you increase your share of voice on LLM platforms – and that’s what will drive results and revenue in the near and mid-term.

Unique, well researched, fun to read content gives both human and machine something it can’t get anywhere else – and that uniqueness is hugely important to both, and impossible to achieve with generative LLMs. By their nature, they can’t create anything fundamentally new in the way a human writer can, and while LLMs should absolutely be a tool in the toolkit of a good writer (just as we don’t look down on users of spellcheck), as more brands rely on generated content, human content will increasingly become a differentiator – and differentiation is a revenue driver.

So, whether you’re just starting out, or you’re planning global domination, service based or ecommerce, B2B or D2C, great content and copywriting can provide the following benefits (and more): 

• Improved visibility across the site
• Improved traffic volume from both commercial and information intent keywords
• Improved conversion rate by building brand recognition and trust
• Improved enjoyment of your online content!