We all know how important good copy is.

Well-crafted copy lends itself as an effective tool for building a brand identity and boosting search engine optimization (SEO). More importantly, it compels readers to take action, moving them through the conversion funnel.

In recent years, we've seen how artificial intelligence (AI) has taken on automating many different tasks in a business—with rather impressive results. Today, we are going to dive into how this applies to copywriting.

Whether you're an e-commerce store owner, in-house copywriter or product marketer, this article will address some of the burning questions you might have about AI copywriting.

We'll start by explaining how an AI copywriting works before going through some common use cases and best practices.

What is an AI copywriting?

An AI copywriting tool is an AI-powered tool that automatically generates copy based on a given set of information. It can generate various types of copy, including long-form blogs, product descriptions, online courses, and social media captions.

For instance, you can provide the AI with a blog post title and outline and it'll be able to come up with a couple of paragraphs you can further refine.

With an AI copywriter, you can even specify other details, such as the tone of voice or brand background, and it'll write content that aligns better with your brand identity.

How does an AI copywriting work?

An AI copywriting tool is trained on a vast dataset.

The AI draws its linguistic skills and understanding of the world from the data it has "seen". To a certain extent, it simulates how the human brain works when it comes to learning and processing information.

Think of an AI copywriter as an extremely intelligent, 12 year old child that knows a vast amount about the world from the internet. However, much like a human, an AI copywriter isn't all-knowing. It needs to be trained on data relating to a specific industry in order to have sufficient context to write effective copy.

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For example, an AI content generator designed for ecommerce would have been "exposed" to a lot more ecommerce-related content.

Just like how you might hand your copywriter a content brief, you need to provide the AI with some context about the topic you'd like to write about. That input that you give the AI sets it on the right track, else it could write just about anything.

By extension, the more high-quality information you provide the AI, the more context it has to generate your desired copy. This usually results in more accurate and effective copy.

After all, as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out".

How do I use an AI for copywriting?

The specific workflow ultimately depends on the platform you use. That said, AI copywriting usually comprises the following steps:

1. Select what type of copy you'd like to write

‍This can range from product descriptions to advertising copy.

2. Providing context for the AI

You'll need to provide the AI with more context on the task, especially factual details about the topic, brand or product.

Take the Hypotenuse AI blog article generator as an example. When you enter a few keywords on your topic of choice, this context is used to generate a list of titles that you can choose from. In this case, you can see that the topic 'Rosemary oil' was used by the AI to suggest a variety of titles:

• Get to Know Rosemary Oil: Benefits, Uses, and More
• Discover the Many Uses for Rosemary Oil
• From Aromatherapy to Skincare: The Many Benefits of Rosemary Oil
• How to Use Rosemary Oil for Healing
• The Power of Rosemary Oil: Uses and Benefits
• Make Your Own Rosemary Oil at Home

3. Setting the "knobs"

These are settings, in terms of things like the audience you want to target, the tone of voice, point of view, sentence length and readability. This goes a long way in helping to guide the AI's tone and style of writing such that it's best suited for your target audience and type of content.

In our AI article writer's case, giving some input about the brand/product, target audience, tone and point of view gives the AI information about
what perspective it should take and who to gear the information towards while incorporating your preferred tone and brand voice. Here you can see that adding some brief information generates the following suggested article outlines:

• Rosemary Oil Is an Incredible Essential Oil With a Wide Range of Benefits
• Rosemary Oil Can Improve Skin Health
• Rosemary Oil Can Help to Reduce Stress and Anxiety
• Rosemary Oil Can Improve Cognitive Function
• Rosemary Oil Can Promote Hair Growth
• How to use Rosemary Oil Safely

4. Generating, proofreading and editing your content

Using these inputs can then be used to help the AI generate even more specific, longer content. Once you've done so, running through the generated content and making any necessary changes will ensure that the text is accurate and error-free.

For instance, the keywords, title, and outline will help the AI in our blog article generator generate introductions, paragraphs and conclusions—a great first draft for you to kickstart your writing with. A built-in editor then makes it easy to make any changes on the spot.

How can an AI can help with copywriting?

Before we get there, it might help to take a look at some of the common human challenges of copywriting.

The traditional challenges of copywriting

Copywriting is like a balancing act. Here are just some of the typical issues people wrestle with when writing copy, especially when they do it extensively.

Understanding the topic

You might find yourself having to write copy for a topic, brand or product you may not be familiar with, especially if you're freelance or responsible for an extensive range of products.

It'll take a fair amount of research before you have sufficient context to write well-informed content that will appeal to your readers. You'll need to have a good understanding of the topic or product before you can highlight its value to your target audience.

More often that not, this can be a very time consuming and tedious process.‍

Writing unique content

We've all experienced the dreaded writer's block. It's not easy coming up with fresh, creative copy when you need to produce content on a regular basis.

After a while, you might start turning to the same bag of tricks, or developing some blindspots to the industry you're writing for.‍

Using the right tone and style

If you're writing for your brand or a client, you'll need to ensure that the copy aligns with the brand's identity and style guide. This might be a list of words to avoid or a series of language rules to follow.

There are a lot of things you'll have to bear in mind in order to craft highly effective copy that's tailored to a brand and its target audience.‍

Catering to the platform

Chances are, you'll be writing copy for different platforms at the same time. Besides platform-specific requirements, such as the character count, you'd also want adopt best practices that'll help you optimize your copy for that platform.

For example, different platforms afford different call-to-actions, which may influence the way you write your content.‍

Optimizing the copy

As if juggling all that wasn't enough, you'll also need to optimize your copy for search engines. This involves a variety of techniques, one of the more common ones being incorporating SEO keywords into the copy.

In order to write highly effective copy, you need to strike a balance between these factors. It's by no means an easy feat—more so if you have to craft content regularly.

This is where an AI copywriter can come in to make things a lot easier.

The benefits of an AI copywriting

The growing popularity of AI copywriters is only a testament to how they've been a useful tool for brands, copywriters and even SEO agencies. Here's how they've proven to be helpful:

Focus on more macro-level tasks

The time savings that come with using copywriting AI is perhaps one of its main draws.

With the help of an AI copywriter, you'll no longer have to spend your time on mundane, repetitive tasks like doing extensive research on products. All you'll need to do is work on refining the copy.

Instead, you can focus your time on more macro-level tasks, such as tracking your KPIs, developing your content strategy or conducting keyword research for SEO.

This affords businesses both speed and efficiency too, allowing them to respond quickly to new trends or capitalize on seasonal campaigns with the right copy.‍

Ensure greater consistency across copy

‍With sufficient context, the AI can consistently generate content that closely aligns to your stylistic choices and desired tone of voice.

This helps to ensure that you never stray from the brand guidelines and produce consistent content across different types of copy.‍

Optimize your copy

‍Not only do they generate content that's optimized for a specific platform, some AI copywriters can also write copy that helps to boost SEO.‍

Our product description generator, for one, will take in the SEO keywords you provide and make sure they're included in the generated copy—all while making it sound natural.‍

Get out of your creative rut

‍You'll no longer have to rack your brains to come up with unique content from scratch. Instead, you'll have content that you can work off and refine.

From our experience, this is particularly helpful when you've to write unique descriptions of products that share very similar features.

Additionally, AI copywriters can help you get your creative juices flowing by generating everything from blog topics to marketing ideas.

What are some use cases of AI copywriting?

So you've heard all about how AI copywriters can help, but how exactly are they applied to copywriting tasks? Here, we'll look at some of their common use cases:

Blog posts

Blogs are an effective tool for boosting SEO, but writing them can be time consuming since it often requires a great deal of research.

By providing it with information on what you want to write, along with other details like your target audience, the AI can get you started by suggesting a blog title. For example, our AI article writer generates blog titles that are relevant to your brand's background and product details. It can also give you more ideas on what to cover in the blog post with an introduction and outline.

The final step usually involves turning an outline into a long-form article, which you can use as a starting point for your article.

Product descriptions

To generate a product description, you'll need to furnish the AI with some product details, such as the product title and product features. This allows the AI to generate copy that highlights its unique features.

Using an AI copywriter for such a task is especially useful when you have to write descriptions for a large number of products, which can be very time consuming. The AI can also help to craft unique content, which can be tricky when the products share very similar features (e.g. the same type of product in different packaging).

Advertising copy

The challenge of writing advertising copy often lies in crafting something can catch people's attention amidst a noisy search engine results page or feed. The copy has to be relevant, relatable and succinct.

Exposed to plenty of creative ideas on the internet, AI copywriters can help kick-start the copywriting process with a catchy headline, along with a compelling description.

Social media copy

Give the AI some context on what your post is about and it'll generate creative, engaging captions that are optimized for the platform. For instance, with an Instagram caption generator, the AI copywriter will know to add in a couple of hashtags.

Those who run social media accounts would know how important it is to post frequently and consistently. Turning to an AI copywriter for some help with your captions can save you a significant amount of time, especially when the ideas run dry.

How can I make it work for me?

At the end of the day, an AI copywriter is simply a tool that's designed to help you generate high-quality in a fraction of the time. You'll need guide the AI along in order to generate the best output possible.

Here are some best practices when using an AI copywriter:

• Provide sufficient details. Giving the AI sufficient context about your topic, brand or product will help to make sure it doesn't get too creative that it deviates from your intended goal.
• Set the tone. Tell the AI about your brand voice and style so it can generate output that aligns with your brand identity.
• Edit the copy. While you can let the AI take care of the creative side of things, you need to bear in mind that the copy is never perfect. Make sure to edit the content for accuracy.

So... will AI replace human copywriters?

We'd like to think of it as a powerful collaboration. And just like their human counterparts, AI copywriters aren't perfect either.

No matter how skilled a writer is, it's always a good idea to run their writing past an editor. Similarly, there will still be a need for someone to review, edit and refine the copy generated by the AI.

That said, if you can use the AI copywriter to generate good output consistently, you'll minimize the amount of time and effort you need to put into editing the copy.

At the end of the day, it's important to find an AI copywriting tool that works for you—not only in terms of its output, but also its workflow.

If you're interested in trying your hand at AI copywriting, Hypotenuse AI offers a free trial here. So why not see how an AI measures up for yourself?