How To Use AI Content Tools the Right Way

Well, right now it’s happening. Countless business owners, marketing teams, they are wasting thousands of hours, thousands of resources, thousands of dollars on AI content, creating AI content that is just getting them absolutely nowhere. They’re just churning out AI-generated slop, blog after blog, generic social post after generic social post, without seeing any engagement. And they’re sitting here wondering why. Well, it’s pretty obvious why, because they’re missing that most crucial ingredient, which is the human touch.

There is a right way to create content in 2025 with AI, and there’s definitely, definitely a wrong way as well. And today we’re going to dive into this, to the real story of AI content creation and how to do it right in 2025, and why your authentic voice matters even more so right now than ever before.

Hi, my name is Jordan McFadyen. Welcome again to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This is a podcast designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing in this AI-driven world, and challenge you to move away from random acts of marketing towards planning an intentional marketing strategy.

And this topic idea came a lot to mind over the 2024–25 Christmas break, the summer break. I just noticed, as I was doing research and reading and having a look at the landscape that we’re facing at the moment with the marketing, the massive shift and the massive increase that I started seeing in an alarming amount of articles on different sources across the web, along with LinkedIn posts, literally about how business owners and marketers are adopting AI into their content marketing workflow. And so many stories of being done so poorly. And it’s just adding to this content overload of generic, pointless content that is getting businesses absolutely nowhere.

And it actually made me think as well that it took me back to a roundtable event I went to in 2024. If you’ve listened to the podcast in the past, you would have heard me talking about this. And it was an event that I went to there, a lot of different business owners spending time kind of sharing some of the strategies that we’re using, especially around AI. They’re all discussing about how they were able to dramatically reduce their workforce, or increase their productivity and getting out pieces of content, literally by letting AI do the entire process for them. Literally giving them the ideas, writing the entire blog article, slapping it on their website and calling it done and dusted.

I’m not going to name names of who these businesses are, but I still follow them online. I still see their content every single day on my feed. And it is so blatantly obvious. And it just makes me think it is such a disservice. It’s doing a massive disservice to their brand, to all their hard work, to their business. And honestly, it’s only going to take them so far.

And I think this is going to be the year. This is the shift: 2025 is the shift where we’re going to see a lot of advancements in the AI space. And we really need to keep on top of it as marketing leaders and as marketing teams and professionals. I see that the content landscape in 2025 is going to shift dramatically. In fact, it already has shifted dramatically even in 2024. It’s become so easy to create written content over the past few years. And honestly, that is such a bad thing, that it’s become that easy. And while AI tools have become more sophisticated than ever, we’re also at the same time actually now starting to see a massive pushback against AI-generated content. And that’s a good thing.

So today’s episode really is crucial for any marketing team, any business owner that is trying to navigate this complex landscape of content creation using AI, or in an AI-driven world, and being able to do it while maintaining your authentic voice at the same time.

By the end of this episode, here’s the things I want you to think about, and the things I want you to have learned or got out of this podcast episode. The first one is around how you can strategically actually use AI tools to enhance, not replace, enhance your content creation process. I’ve got a few ideas I want to share on that. I’ve also jotted down a few things about why potentially starting, this is a big one, starting a video-first content could be crucial for you and your business in 2025, if that’s part of your content strategy. I’ll explain why shortly. And also I want to share a few practical ways to actually remain and maintain authentic while leveraging AI for efficiency. Those are the three things, the three key learning points that I want you to get out of today’s episode.

But let’s just take it all back just a little bit and just have a little think around this evolving search and discovery landscape that we’re currently going through. I’m going to use Google as an example of this, because I follow Google a lot around what they’re doing, their advancements and how they’re changing the search landscape. So this is having a look at Google search, having a look at Google Ads and all the different products that they have. I’ve always been really interested in how they operate as a business.

So if we go back first and look at Google and what their current strategy looks like, and how this could affect your content creation this year, I think you’re going to be blown away. Because Google’s whole business model focuses on retaining users on a search results page. So that’s its traditional search. There’s usually some ads, a map. There’s usually 10 kind of listings there. And then you go to page two and page three and so on. Well, I don’t think anyone goes to page two and three, but that’s a whole nother conversation. That has been Google’s business for, what, the past 20 years.

And if you followed their announcements over 2024, in Q3, I think it was, they announced a 90% reduction in cost of being able to generate what’s called an AIO. So an AI-optimised or AI-organised answer, instead of the traditional search that we see now. And this is telling us, when they announced things like that, this is telling us that it is moving much faster towards an AI-organised search result instead of the current, what we would call a solved state.

So let’s take it back. We think about a Google search right now. Someone’s trying to discover you or your product or your business. Let’s say you’re going to Google looking for a lasagne recipe, or even any simple type of meal recipe. Right now, you’re going to put that into Google as a keyword. You’re going to get served multiple different answers using traditional search. You’re going to put in a lasagne recipe. There’s going to be heaps of different blogs and heaps of different websites that are all going to have their different take on a lasagne recipe.

Now, how we’re seeing that shift is that’s more likely now going to be actually AI-organised results, with being giving you one recipe, from potentially pulling from lots of different sources to be able to give you that one recipe, instead of giving you a choice of 10 or 15 different websites that are all claiming to have the best lasagne recipe. Because at the end of the day, how many lasagne recipes does the world actually need?

And that example right there, that’s going to highlight redundant content is becoming less and less valuable. It’s signalling a massive decline in traffic to content designed solely to actually solve what we would call a common query. And we know this. We know that this has been coming. We know that this is where the industry is moving. We’ve been talking about this on the podcast for a long time now as well.

So if you’re currently still in the position of producing redundant or low-value informational-based content and blogs, which are easy to replicate, they don’t have any human relevance or any story to them, what you’re doing is you’re actually risking losing any relevance in this new landscape, and the new landscape that we are seeing where Google is moving and where other search engines are moving. And if you’re still producing that low-value content, you’re just going to be left behind.

Instead, what you should be doing is you should be focusing on producing content that’s actually offering a unique value, different creativity or complexity beyond an AI-generated summary. So you want to emphasise areas of personal experience, personal expertise, personal storytelling, or even just your unique perspectives on a matter. Kind of like how this podcast and this video is talking to you now. It’s offering you my unique perspective on this changing landscape that we’re seeing, and what I would suggest you should be doing, or what I’m going to be doing as we move forward. Some examples of this: experiential, cultural, emotional, resonant content that is going to remain really difficult for AI to be able to replicate authentically. That’s how you need to be thinking. And like I say, all the signs are pointing that way. So this is literally the next step with your content generation.

So this moves me on to the next bit, around what I think is going to see a big shift in 2025, which is a rise of non-text content. So currently, non-text content is harder for businesses or you or marketing teams to be able to create simply than having ChatGPT at your fingertips spit out an irrelevant blog that no one’s going to read. So, for example, Google is putting a lot of investment into different tools called Google Discover, Google Lens. These are two products that they’re investing a lot into at the moment, and it is prioritising rich media formats. For example, video. So video content is going to offer you much more engagement potential at least, and currently it is much harder for AI to mimic this authentically.

I say “currently”: there are some tools, there are some startups that are starting to replicate AI-driven videos, but they look rubbish. And there’s still some things. If we go back to what I was saying before, if you’re still being able to share your unique voice or your unique storytelling, they’re not going to be able to replicate exactly what you can do if you just use video content.

So here’s the consideration on how your marketing or your content strategy needs to shift in 2025, and that is starting with potentially a video-first content strategy. Once you have the video content, then you can create all that complementary assets: all of the blog posts if you need it, the newsletter that you’re going to send out to your database, an infographic, your social media posts, your social media snippets of that long-form content, all stemming from that piece of video content that you produce.

And that’s very similar to what we do here, what we have been doing here for a very long time, ever since we’ve been producing this podcast, is taking as much content as we can from this recording, this podcast, this video, to be able to reshare to different networks and different points, and test to see what is going to resonate best at different times. And this approach means that your content is going to remain aligned with how everything is evolving at the moment, all the evolving algorithms that we are dealing with at the moment, but also maximising audience engagement, audience authenticity, and helping to preserve your brand and your business trust at the end of the day.

And I will preface this and say that it’s not easy. Video content’s not simple, and that’s, I guess, the whole point, too. It does take time. If I think about today, this is my second recording of this particular episode. Reason being was I didn’t check my tech before I pushed record, and I wasn’t using the right microphone. The quality was horrendous. And so it does take time. It is frustrating. It takes a lot of effort to be able to put in the work to be able to produce a piece of content like this. A lot of research goes into it, being able to come up with your different perspective.

And also, I want to get it across that you don’t necessarily have to be on camera like I am here today, or like my team sometimes comes on camera as well. You need to think about some of the other resources that you have available to you at any given time, like your team, for example. Maybe let your product be the hero of your video content strategy. Maybe the customers are the hero of your content strategy. There are lots of different ways that you can start to share your authentic self, your authentic business, or your authentic product or service with your audience without having to rely on using AI. And honestly, I think that video first could be one of the keys that I really want you to think about investing in 2025.

And this naturally leads into the final part I want to cover today, which is AI is not all bad. And we can use AI to help with our content flow. Because I’m definitely not saying that AI is this terrible, terrible tool that you just don’t want to use, you want to avoid at all costs. Honestly, it’s not. It can be so helpful in this content creation workflow, especially if you’ve got a smaller team. You’ve got a small skill set. You’ve got limited resources, limited budget. AI can be extremely helpful. But how I want you to think about it is that AI and content creation process is more about enhancing your content, but not replacing your content.

So here’s what I mean. Let’s go back to the start, where I was talking about that roundtable event that I visited in 2024. A lot of business owners are all talking about solely relying on ChatGPT to come up with the idea, write the blog, copy and paste it onto their blog, and the job’s done. So those relying entirely on generative AI models like ChatGPT or Claude or any other LLM to churn out content, they will likely underperform. We’ve got that. And there is going to be a massive change. They need to change quick. Because in this year, I honestly think it’s going to get far, far worse.

But what I would say to those people is using AI to support their original creations, that’s going to be the key. So using AI to support the creation of your transcriptions, helping with your editing process or your research process, can be really helpful. ChatGPT now searches the web. It searches Bing as part of its research. And that can be incredibly powerful for you to be able to find articles that relate to the topic that you’re wanting to talk about. So that is where AI is providing that competitive advantage to your workflow, to being able to do things like what I’m doing here faster, and being able to produce more content, more valuable, authentic content, faster and better.

So using AI to support the original creatives that you’re putting together. So some ideas about how you can do that: turning video or audio into a text, search-friendly article that you could post on your website, or that you could post as a LinkedIn newsletter or your social post. Being able to convert it into a social post that you can put on your Facebook page, wherever your audience is. Or maybe you’ve got a great newsletter database. You could use that content to then be able to write that newsletter that you want to send to your audience.

Extract key takeaways from, let’s say you did a long webinar or a long-form video, similar to what we’re doing here. And you can create and extract those key takeaways. Ask AI to go through and say, these are the key learnings that I want to find out and that I want to share with my audience. What would you say would be the chunks that I need to take out and reshare to my audience as a smaller bite-sized chunk? That’s going to help you build brand authenticity and brand trust. But again, it’s you driving that content. You’re just using AI to help kind of pinpoint which pieces you want to share.

And then let AI even become that research assistant. As I said before, ChatGPT is now connected with search. It’s able to search the web for recent articles to help with that research process. AI can help you generate different ideas. It can help start drafting image assets or different templates that you have. And being able to support human creativity without having to actually overshadow it at the end of the day as well.

So I want to wrap up with a couple of key points that I really want you to take away from today. First, start with producing high-quality content. Human-driven content. And if you can, in 2025, it’s got to be video-driven content. I honestly think that’s going to be a key. It’s where we’re seeing Google invest a lot of resource. Obviously, TikTok and Facebook, all these big tech companies putting a lot of resource into video. If you can start there, that’s going to give you the head start. And this isn’t just about trends or anything like that. This is about trying to think about creating content that AI is not able to replicate right now. And it’s content that is going to resonate with your audience on a more human level.

Second, I want you to try to think about how you can be more unique. Focus on sharing things like your experiences, your creativity, your emotional connections with your audience. Those are, again, things that AI simply cannot replicate. And they can’t replicate it authentically.

And finally, if you’re going to use AI tools, do it. They’re incredible. But use AI tools wisely. They’re excellent for enhancing your workflow, being able to do this quicker, do this better. Remove any blocks that you may have in your head. Streamline your process. And support your content creation. But, again, they should never, ever replace your authentic voice, or your brand, or your business’s authentic.

Remember, success in 2025 isn’t going to be about choosing between AI and human creativity. I believe that it’s more going to be about how can we find that sweet spot where both AI and human creativity can work together to be able to create content that truly will connect with your audience and, of course, grow your business steadily as well. Because that’s why we’re all here. That’s why we’re doing this. Just remember to think about how we can grow our business, how we can still be discoverable, how people can still find us and connect with our brands, and ultimately buy from us at the end of the day as well.

And thank you again for listening to the Marketing Mindset podcast. If you have found it valuable, please subscribe. It does help a lot. And also, if you could share this with someone who you think needs to hear this content, someone who you think is using AI in the wrong way right now, please share it with them. The more people that I can encourage to use AI in a more authentic way, the better it is for me, and the better it is for what I’m trying to do to help you be able to market your business in this AI-driven world more effectively.

And look, if you need some advice, or you need some consultation from myself or a member of my team, building marketing strategies in an AI-driven world, or just marketing strategies, being able to blend traditional marketing with AI, that’s just what we do. That’s our bread and butter. We want to build marketing strategies to be able to allow you to grow through many different industry evolutions.

Please get in contact with me or the rest of the team. You can go to our website, donebynine.com, go to the Contact Us page. While you’re there as well, click on Podcasts at the top. There’s all our other articles and different podcasts that we’ve shared with our audience over the years as well. We’d love for you to go and learn as much as you can, and we’ll keep sharing as much as we can as well. And thank you so much for listening once again to the Marketing Mindset podcast.