How to Prevent Low-Quality, AI-Generated Content From Killing Your Brand Reputation

Jun 13

Content has long been a pillar of a strong marketing strategy. It attracts ideal audiences, nurtures interested customers, and converts prospects into buyers.

It effectively builds brand authority, elevates company leaders, and establishes trust and affinity.

However, content can also quickly unravel all of these brand-boosting benefits.

If you publish low-quality content that relies solely on surface AI prompts without proper training and human proofreading, it can pull your brand down instead of raising it up. Let’s look at how taking content shortcuts can undo the benefits of your previous work and quickly kill your brand reputation.

How Low-Quality Content Can Kill Brand Reputation

The mass adoption of generative AI tools has flooded social media feeds and marketing channels with low-quality, unreliable, and uninspired content. Many brands are creating more content in less time without realizing that the shortcuts come with repercussions.

Sharing low-quality, and in some cases inaccurate, content can:

Break trust
Lower brand affinity
Decrease engagement
Waste resources
Damage your reputation

While producing more content in less time may seem like a win, taking shortcuts with your content can actually hurt your brand rather than boost it.

Inaccurate Information

AI is not perfect and can produce content that includes inaccurate stats, misquoted sources, and unsupported claims. All it takes is one error in your content for audiences to decide they can no longer rely on your insights and information.

Inauthentic Communication

Audiences are becoming more aware of AI-generated content and more savvy at identifying it. If you use AI to generate 100% of your content, audiences will notice and become more dismissive of your posts. Are you familiar with basic AI tells? Overuse of emojis, a theme of punctuation with dashes and sentence structure, overuse of specific words.

Generic Insights

If your content could be written by any brand, it’s not building your brand. Recycling the same insights doesn’t add value. In a sea of more of the same, audiences are looking for brands who can share something new.

The goal of your content is to help you stand out, engage audiences, and highlight your expertise and differentiation. It can’t do that if it is generic, inauthentic, and filled with errors.

How to Elevate Your Content to Enhance Your Reputation

If you want to use content to boost your brand reputation rather than tear it down, remember why you’re creating content. The value of content is in the insights you share, the problems you solve, and the connections you make with your audience and customers.

Here are a few ways to keep your content quality up, while also using AI to support your efforts.

See AI as a tool, not as a replacement.

Let’s be clear. AI is amazing. AI is a powerful tool to help you work smarter, save time, and produce better work. The challenge is how people use it. Don’t replace your work with AI. Use AI as a tool to support your work.

We recommend approaching it like an “AI sandwich.” A human starts the process. They begin with a vision, strategy, and thoughtful AI brand training and precise prompts. AI then produces the initial insights, ideas, and copy. Finally, a human jumps back in to verify, update, and elevate the content before it is published.

Focus on your unique brand.

Your unique brand is more important than ever in the age of AI-generated content. Focus on what makes you different to stand out in a sea of sameness.

Build a brand guide. Set your brand apart by defining your unique voice, tone, and style.
Identify your differentiators. Get clear about what makes your brand, products, and services different from competitors.
Train AI on your brand. Build custom GPTs trained on your brand guide and differentiators to produce more authentic, unique content.

Check your facts and stats.

AI is not perfect. It can confidently generate false or misleading information called “hallucinations.” Even when you ask it multiple times to verify the source or content. Human verification of any facts or stats produced by AI is needed and always look for the original source before including any AI-generated research in your content.

Share original insights.

As more and more brands create content based on the same source material, it’s creating an opportunity for you to stand out by sharing original insights. To differentiate your brand and attract audiences, don’t publish what everyone else is. Share thought leadership rooted in real data and experience. Become a real life scenario storyteller. Develop original content that includes:

Proprietary data
Case studies
Testimonials
Insights from experienced subject matter experts

Train your team.

Your team is a reflection of your brand. Ensure that they also meet the same high standards in using AI-generated content. Train your team on the best practices for using AI to create employee-generated content that appears in public marketing channels as well as in private sales materials and correspondence.

It’s not just in marketing where audiences can see through inauthentic AI-generated content. Make sure communication coming from all departments is authentic, genuine, and factual. For instance, more and more sales teams are using AI to generate email content. If this is done incorrectly, it’s the fastest route to losing trust and a deal. Get marketing and sales aligned in messaging.

Share your AI policy.

To add an extra layer of transparency, you may even consider authoring and publishing an AI policy. An AI policy can share how and when you use AI, your process for verification and fact-checking, and your ethical standards for avoiding plagiarism. You may publish this on your website, employee handbooks, and client contracts.

Use Authentic, Original Content to Build a Stronger Brand Reputation

Falling into the trap of producing low-quality, generic AI-generated posts will not only prevent your brand from standing out, it can actually cause your brand to falter in the eyes of your audience.

Don’t buy into shortcuts and lose the respect of your prospects and customers in the process. Focus on publishing high-quality, valuable content to stand out, differentiate your brand, and build and maintain trust and affinity. And with the proper training and use of AI, it can be magical.

Need help creating high-quality content? Talk to SpotOn Digital about how our content strategists can develop a plan to use content to build a stronger reputation for your brand. Contact us today.

Raubi Perilli