How AI can be Used in Digital PR

If you’re anything like me, then the chances are you might have been sceptical about using AI within your digital PR work. After all, it’s easy to be uneasy about it, whether it’s the fear that the machine will make a mistake or – shock horror – it might be better than you!

Well, speaking from experience, I’ve found the best way to approach AI in this particular area of digital marketing is to see how you can use it in a collaborative way to improve the work you’re already doing. Ultimately, with a little research and experimentation, you’ll find there are in fact lots of different ways you can utilise AI tools to support your campaigns and work.

Below I’ve taken a look at a number of examples:

What do you Mean by AI?

For the uninitiated, AI means ‘artificial intelligence’, but rather than what we see in the realms of science fiction, in a modern ‘IRL’ context it tends to refer to human-built programs that can quickly analyse huge data sets to replicate human thoughts and make predictions and decisions.

However, right now it is not ‘self-aware’, it doesn’t have ‘feelings’, nor can it make emotional choices as it doesn’t understand empathy. Although, there is some belief that this might change one day.

As such, the AI tools that are being made typically are a means of creating lots of text or graphics and images based on prompts given to them by humans. There are new tools being brought out all the time too, often for specific content creation needs, but some of the more famous ones are:

• ChatGPT – a popular platform developed by OpenAI that’s used to create vast amounts of text from queries it’s given.
• Google Bard – basically Google’s version of ChatGPT, although it’s more ‘conversational’ in nature.
• DALL-E – another tool from OpenAI that can generate images based on prompts.

Using AI for Your Ideation

So while you can’t just ask the text-based AI to make a digital PR campaign for you, it can be used as a jumping off point of sorts. For example, if you had a brief from a client in a specific niche, you could use something like ChatGPT to come up with some campaign ideas that fit within these requirements.

They might not all be winners and some might need some extra work and checks for originality, but it’s a quick way to get some fresh takes on a subject.

Using AI for Campaign Refinement

If you’re struggling to get an idea off the ground, AI tools can really help give a campaign a bit of a lift. One way is to ask a tool to give you some advice on what other subjects could be tangentially linked to your main campaign to give you more ideas to play with. Equally, if you need to do a survey, you could get some draft questions created that might give you more angles to look at. Lastly, getting some AI-produced images to represent your ideas can really help bring it to life – this is especially useful for making pitches to clients more engaging.

Using AI to Support Outreach

AI tools can be helpful when creating media lists. All you need to do is ask it to name a selection of journalists who cover particular topics and it should be able to pull in and reference some relevant examples.

On top of this, I recently used a handy AI tool called ortto, which describes itself as a free ‘Subject Line Tester Tool’. As you might be able to work out, this uses AI to give you more outreach email subject line suggestions. You can then use these to help boost open rates and more effectively pique the interest of recipients.

A Few Other AI Considerations

If all the above sounds appealing to you, then please be aware that there are a couple of considerations that you need to bear in mind before you dive straight in to AI:

• Some tools only pull in information up to a certain timeframe, so some ‘facts’ might be out of date.
• Some ‘new’ ideas AI gathers might also be rehashes of other recent, relevant things, so do your research on these to check just how recent they were.
• The copy can be quite ‘robotic’ and obviously not written by a human at times, so don’t rely on it for swathes of original content.

Final – Hopefully Reassuring – Points

To end with a key point, AI won’t replace your job. But, it can be something you use to make your digital PR even better. Like I’ve alluded to earlier, AI can and does make mistakes and there’s still an essential human element required here to – in the very least – be creative, but also to steer the AI tools and check what they’ve produced is actually useful.

That said, if you’re new to digital PR and/or you’re looking for support with business’s your current setup, get in touch with us today to find out more about what the Another Concept team can do for you.