If Not Content, Then What?
The Smart Agency’s Guide to Using AI in PR and Marketing
As more PR platform vendors integrate AI capabilities and more AI tools become available, organizations may be tempted to use AI for all their marketing and PR activities. After all, you can input a few sentences and get a media pitch or a press release. But how far will that go to get you noticed? As we highlighted in a recent PR Vibes® article, using AI-generated content without expert human input is a good way to ensure your messages get ignored.
The good news is that AI can help amplify the effectiveness of your messaging while saving you time and money – and also help you get your message to the right people faster and more efficiently. Spoiler alert: You still need good old-fashioned human expertise here, too.
Just ask Peggy Smedley, a radio host, author, editorial director, and president of Specialty Publishing Media. Smedley has hundreds of pitches hit her desk daily, so we asked for her thoughts on how companies can strategically use AI to prevent client pitches from also hitting her trash can.
“It’s easy to spot AI-generated content, and we shouldn’t cheat ourselves by relying on it,” Smedley says. “There are, however, ways that AI can help you manage manual and time-consuming tasks and actually improve the content and delivery of your messages.”
The Potential for AI in PR
So, what are the tasks that AI can handle? With our client’s approval, we use AI in many ways at Calysto:
AI Notetaking is a great place to start. You can get a comprehensive call summary, together with follow-up actions, allowing you to remain present and interactive during a meeting instead of frantically typing notes. But be sure a human checks the final call summary for misassigned tasks or recording errors.
Media Monitoring and Research: AI-powered platforms can scan multiple news outlets, blogs, and social media channels instantly (which used to take hours to do manually). You can input search terms or ask AI to scan for sentiment to assist with:
- Crisis management and Pulse Measurement: PR teams can use AI to monitor negative chatter online, allowing a faster response that mitigates impact.
- Uncovering Opportunities: AI can also alert you to emerging themes, hot topics and breaking news, allowing you to incorporate new themes into messages or leverage breaking news to pitch a story or position executives to be quoted as thought leaders.
- Tracking Competitors: AI helps you stay up-to-date on what competitors are announcing and track similarities and differences in their messaging versus yours.
Media List Creation: There is no substitute for building human relationships, and established agencies like Calysto have spent years building longstanding relationships with tech journalists and analysts. But AI can help you efficiently build targeted influencer lists for emerging markets and new business areas or proactively update current lists. This frees up media relations teams to do what they do best: cultivate their relationships.
Testing Value Propositions with Target Personas: Calysto also uses AI to test and tweak value propositions and messaging to understand how they resonate with different audiences. We plug our clients’ carefully crafted human-generated messages into a GenAI platform, along with relevant client and buyer information. We then ask AI to create customer personas that allow us to test messages to understand how they are received, determine which channels will drive the greatest engagement, and more. This reduces trial-and-error and high costs associated with real-world tests. It also allows clients to quickly develop messages that resonate with their targeted audiences, including specific vertical markets – messages that can then be tested on a human audience.
Repurposing Existing Content: AI can help you quickly repurpose human-generated content into a format suitable for distribution in many different channels, including customer emails, blogs and social media posts. Prompts like: “Create three 500-word blog posts out of this white paper” can produce rough drafts that human professionals can then fine-tune in half the time it would take to create copy from scratch.
Trade Show Personal Assistant: At trade shows, AI allows us to rapidly get up-to-speed with the latest industry and client announcements and access easy-to-digest summaries to prepare for analyst and journalist discussions as well as competitors’ announcements.
A Marketing Tool, not a Silver Bullet
Of course, AI platforms can be used for many PR and marketing tasks to save time and money. But if you are thinking of using AI as a silver bullet for activities such as creating content, you are setting yourself up for failure.
“From our perspective, we don’t want to see half-baked AI-generated copy flooding the market. It’s only going to damage the client and the agency’s credibility in our eyes,” Smedley says. “But when you use AI to conduct research, track patterns and uncover opportunities – and then apply human expertise to craft the story and share it with an appropriate audience – the real value begins to emerge.”
Calysto: A Human-led Approach to PR
At Calysto, we use AI to delve deeper into current sentiment, to implement PR strategies faster, to reach new influencers and to test and to hone our messages using buyer personas. By applying our expertise, we can then amplify our clients’ messages, ensuring they reach the right desk at the right time to make the right impact.
We don’t cheat ourselves or our clients by taking away the human element. We continue to build relationships with analysts and journalists, using messaged content that accurately reflects our clients’ brands. But we also understand the opportunities that AI presents. The brands that work with Calysto benefit greatly from rapidly uncovered AI-driven insights that allow us to efficiently build and deliver compelling, human-crafted narratives.