A practical guide to better marketing content
As more marketing teams turn to artificial intelligence for content creation, one thing to be aware of is the influx of low-quality, generic material—what Wired Magazine has referred to as “AI slop”—flooding online platforms.
How do you get around this and make your content shine? The answer is using GenAI in a way that enhances rather than diminishes creativity. The goal is to empower marketers to produce high-quality, standout content that resonates with audiences while preserving the human insight, authenticity, and strategic nuance that great marketing demands.
The key is to go deeper into the marketing strategy upfront: uncovering the unique qualities of your product and the motivations of your audience, and then message testing to know exactly what is working. This is the Nustory model for campaigns: Establish > Execute > Evaluate.
To bring this idea to life, we’ll use the fictional example of the launch of a new electric grill BBQ: the Electric BBQ 5000.
Let’s start with the most basic, reflexive prompt:
“Provide messaging for a campaign for a new electric BBQ grill”
Using ChatGPT, that provides us with this output which is fine, although nothing special:
“Grill smarter this Spring with the Electric BBQ 5000.”
Note we could have used any GenAI tool such as Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini, but the result in each case is similar. To get to stronger content, let’s do a little strategy work upfront.
Establish: Build Your Strategy
Understand your product, audience, and angle
The importance of a marketing strategy cannot be overstated—it serves as the foundation for all campaign decisions. By aligning on your goals, audience, and market position upfront, you ensure the content AI generates is both relevant and impactful.
A critical first step is defining your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This is the distinctive value your product or service brings to the market—what sets it apart from competitors. For example, in the Electric BBQ 5000 campaign, the USP was its smoke-free, plug-and-play convenience, ideal for modern urban living. A well-defined USP guides content direction and tone, giving AI a meaningful anchor to build from.
Equally important is identifying your key personas—the archetypes of your ideal customers. These personas give context to your content and allow for tailored messaging that resonates more deeply. Examples uncovered like Urban Entertainer Emma or Eco Dad Dave help ground your campaign in real-life scenarios.
To make this easy, we’ve created this simple business plan template document:
You can upload this to your GenAI tool of choice and use a prompt such as this:
“Using this template, provide a simple business plan for the Electric BBQ 5000.”
That provides a good level of detail, and based on the output here are some main points pulled out for this campaign:
You can see how already we’re getting a sense of what makes the product stand out, and how this same product might appeal to different audiences.
The next step is to produce unique messaging for each persona.
Execute: Run the Campaign
Craft persona-driven messaging
AI can be a powerful tool for creating highly customized content that speaks directly to the needs and preferences of your target personas. Once your personas are defined, use AI to generate messaging that is specific to their unique characteristics, motivations, and challenges. For more on personas, check out this resource. For example, Urban Entertainer Emma might respond to messaging that emphasizes design and convenience, while Eco Dad Dave may value environmental benefits and safety. Here’s an example prompt:
“For each of the personas, create ads that are really tailored to each person. Be very specific on how the USP applies to each. Make the ads as fun as possible.”
Here’s the level of detail that you can expect:
At this point, it’s important to involve your team in reviewing and refining these outputs. Use human judgment to select the most compelling pieces, adapt them where needed, and align on messaging. This step helps combine the efficiency of AI with the insight of your team, resulting in content that feels both smart and authentic.
For this example, this is where we netted out:
As I hope you agree, this is much more compelling than where we started, with ads personalized to specific audiences.
From here we can set these up as ads on a platform like Instagram, and run a quick test to see how this messaging is received by the target audience. This can also be the basis for other types of content, such as blog posts on entertaining on your balcony (for Emma) or a comparison of the environmental impact of electric vs gas grilling (for Dave).
Evaluate: Test What Works
Use data to refine and improve content
To determine which content is most effective, begin by analyzing performance metrics such as page views, time on page, click-through rates, and social engagement. These indicators provide a clear picture of what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t, helping you prioritize content that drives impact.
Beyond quantitative data, GenAI can assist in assessing the qualitative characteristics of your content by identifying tone and style. For example, if you have 100’s of blogs, you can quickly categorize content as instructional, professional, authoritative, or neutral—giving you insights into which tone best matches your audience’s expectations and preferences. An example prompt could be something along these lines:
“For each of these blog posts, analyze the style and provide output in a table. For each blog post, categorize using this model: instructional, professional, authoritative, or neutral. [provide list of URLs]”
Check out this example where we ran this exercise and categorized each company blog post to a specific content type. When we looked at the blogs that had the highest views and engagement, we noticed that “How-to” content was performing well. Based on this, we produced more how-to content which went on to perform well above benchmark.
As you can see, with this knowledge you can scale the content strategies that prove most effective. Repurpose high-performing formats, expand topics that gain traction, and continue iterating on successful tones and structures. The key is to often make data-informed decisions that continually refine and elevate your content efforts.
Wrapping up
By using the Nustory Establish > Execute > Evaluate model, you can avoid falling into the trap of producing generic ‘AI slop’, personalizing content for your audience segments, and produce content that you know resonates and builds traction for your brand.
There are other strategies you can employ if you want to take this even further. One that we recommend here at Nustory is using the Jungian archetypes to create a stronger brand relationship with your audience. You can see an example of this at play in this case study on a organic farming campaign for the Black Farmers Index.
This content was produced to support the FourSight webinar on The Future of Marketing.