Authentic Marketing

Before OpenAI, it was people who created content; and the process of planning, writing, and authenticating content using one’s own ingenuity is what made someone an author.

Authenticity comes from the root word author, as does the word authority. Interestingly enough, the thing that helps determine successful SEO—a marketing method with an average ROI of 826%—is Authoritativeness.

“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information that’s created to benefit people… what we call E-E-A-T.”

Google — Search Quality Rater Guidelines

What E-E-A-T Stands For

E Experience

E Expertise

A Authoritativeness

T Trustworthiness

There is a relationship between authorship and building authority—which ultimately leads to successful marketing. Authority means credibility, trust, and above all else, responsibility. If you run a business, then you know that you have a responsibility to your customers, and fulfilling it can lead to even more customers and better online visibility.

But what does it mean for your marketing campaign when authors are replaced by robots? When anyone can now create content from unverified experience, and where it has become easier to spread unreliable information from second-hand sources, than to provide reliable content from first-hand experience.

Well, consumers become cautious.

Here’s what happens when you—or someone you hire—settle for convenience over quality marketing.

Just because everyone is using AI haphazardly, doesn’t mean you should. It’s inauthentic. The more common inauthenticity is, the more valued authenticity will become. And the more everyone begins to do things the same way, the more you’ll stand out when you begin to do things different.

Your consumers are changing. You can’t afford to settle for just marketing when the world clearly needs…

The Importance of Authentic Marketing

We live in a peculiar time. Everything is happening fast, so it’s hard to make sense of things until after they happen. Nobody can predict the future, but some can make sense of what happens when the future arrives (and where it soon becomes the past).

In 2018, people heard of Artificial Intelligence but had no idea what it would actually be. At seventeen years old—the year was 2011—I would take open-source MIT courses on the theory of finance—sort of like a self-teaching regimen—and I remember thinking what the next big investment would be. I came to a conclusion: AI was the next big thing and Google would be a pioneer.

I wasn’t wrong, but my conclusion didn’t do me much good, because Google’s stock was already selling at around $300 per share, and I couldn’t even afford to take a real MIT class. I realized that if I wasn’t already rich, then I couldn’t plan on getting any richer by investing in Google. And I now know that even if I could, I still wouldn’t be able to predict ChatGPT or OpenAI. Nobody would…

Who could have predicted that Artificial Intelligence would become a platform that anyone can use, and that people would use it to create content that would lead to unprecedented spam on the Internet — causing Google to release scaled content abuse policies, and even update their quality guidelines to include Experience.

Since 2013, Google’s automated systems have helped determine ranking by using E-A-T — Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Then in 2022, they went out of their way to add an extra E to the equation: Experience.

E-A-T became E-E-A-T just one month after the release of ChatGPT. Why?

Because if someone sounds good enough, they can fake expertise, trustworthiness, and authority, and get away with it. However, it is impossible to fake Experience, even if AI sounds professional. This is because Experience is the only thing that verifies the other three (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

Marketing is all about information, and information is given to people through content; therefore, it makes sense for Google to include Experience in their content quality guideline; otherwise, you would get misinformed, unhelpful pages created by people who don’t care in search results.

Authentic marketing uses Experienced writers, managers, and specialists to create campaigns that establish your Expertise (your business), helping you gain Trustworthiness. This means earning trust from search engines so they can rank you better, and trust from people so that they will want to transact with you; thereby helping your business acquire more clients or customers.

When enough transactions come from trust, your business then attains genuine Authority. To get the best marketing results, you need to start with experience — you need to hire real authors to work on your marketing.

How AI Helps Marketing Campaigns

There is good news for marketing in the age of AI. Artificial Intelligence does have its place, and it will make the creative people even more creative. It will give authors the ability to go beyond what they would have otherwise been able to achieve. For marketing campaigns, this means that truly experienced people will use AI to produce content that is more in-depth and user-friendly, leading to higher marketing success.

Even writers who use AI will be able to produce better writing for marketing, because writing is not so different from thinking, and when Artificial Intelligence is used properly, it can help professionals who are already experienced flesh out ideas.

In school, most millennials were taught to plan before writing. Essentially, you write down what you’re going to write about—the beginning, middle, and end—before you even start writing the actual draft. But this doesn’t make writing easier; it doesn’t even make it effective.

Just as you can’t plan a thought before you think it, you can’t plan—in writing—what you want to write about and expect to get the same results as your plan. The expectation will kill the creativity in the first place because if you can expect something, then how can it be new, original, or authentic?iThis doesn’t mean marketing involves no planning. Planning is a huge part of marketing. But the process of creating the best possible content involves revisions, and the best ideas are often revealed as the work is being done..

An author—another word for a creator—understands that creativity is revealed through the work, not planned through imagination. Many people have a misconception that AI will make writers obsolete, but this is far from the truth. Artificial Intelligence will make the authentic authors and writers even more valuable because:

Why You Should Hire Real Writers For Marketing

Artificial Intelligence will not replace writers; in fact, writers with some marketing skills will be able to use AI tools to produce better content than most marketers with some writing skills. This is because writing is an intrinsic part of the prompt, and the quality of the prompt determines the quality of the production; moreover, AI learns through conversation, and the soft skills that writers possess will allow them to train the AI to produce better results.

Conversation is the best way to provide context, and context is crucial for AI to produce a desired outcome. Since conversations with the AI must be written, writers will have the natural propensity to get better results from AI. This means more effective copy for your sales page, and higher-ranking blogs for your knowledge pages.