Is Google’s Project Magi About to Change Content Marketing Forever?

The AI race is on full throttle in 2023! Google just found itself in a soup with one of its biggest retainers, Samsung, considering dropping the search engine as its default app. The reason was Microsoft’s newly launched Bing AI. And the hype around it. While Google has not been dropped as of yet, the company is spurring toward a new project that may change search engines forever. Its name is Project Magi.

Project Magi: Google’s Cornerstone or Cul-de-Sac?

About that AI Content

By now, we all know that ChatGPT and BingAI are going to shake up the market in big ways. Marketers are already scrambling to get the jump on its content-creating capabilities but things are not all perfect quite yet. Generative AI has a lot of applications and if you are interested in it, I highly recommend reading this McKinsey blog. It talks about machine learning, artificial intelligence and the most compelling possibilities this technology holds.

In fact, as many leading content marketers like Neil Patel have stated ChatGPT is only good for creating short-form marketing content. A good example is emailer content since it can per-format personalized emails in a few seconds. Marketers can use this to optimize their email marketing campaigns but there is a caveat. They must screen for errors and language-related issues before they use these emails. This will help them avoid generative AI’s tendency to overlook scripting errors.

This also applies to all other forms of content-driven marketing including video, images and chat-based text. The AI is not sophisticated enough to handle complex questions although it might get there sometime in the future.

Will Magi be Better?

Google is planning to buck the trend of generative AI and curated search results on Bing by introducing Magi to the broad market. At present, there are around 160 engineers dedicated to this project. Google has declared they will be testing the technology on a focus group of 1 million users. The company plans to then open Magi up to as many as 50 million users. It’s a big gambit but it just might pay off and leave everyone eating Google’s dust.

With that said, jumping the gun on Google Magi will not be a good idea. Its capabilities include curated search results, enhanced paid advertising and ironclad ecommerce purchases. However, before the stock investors bank on its, all of them must prove out. The $100 billion stock value drop Google faced when the announced Bard says it in bold - the market is not ready! So, the most viable approach here is to understand how marketing in an AI world will evolve and then project forward. AI will gradually become the cornerstone of all the dominant technology on the internet. But Skynet is a long way from here - and marketing demands consistent excellence.

Here’s a quick look at how you can create stellar content marketing campaigns by combining human and AI resources:

Developing and Marketing Human(e) Content in an AI World

1Short Order for Short-Form Content

Short-form content like emailers, advertisement copies and video descriptions is easy work for ChatGPT and other AI. You can have them snap out a string of words that reads decent and may even pass for human-developed content. However, the algorithms are not, as yet, sophisticated enough to create unique content so somewhere in this content development chain, you will need a human to vet the content.

If you can do that, AI can produce short-form content at scale. This will make creating relatively unique content in a concise format much faster. Futher, it will give marketers an edge in certain forms of marketing like email. Obviously, it will require some degree of training to maintain QA standards. But it’s all for the better as long as your short-form marketing can bump up in numbers.

2Long-form Content Gets Shorter Too

Long-form content is often more complicated because it has a lot to include in its narrative thread. ChatGPT and Google Magi will not have the ability to create this kind of content. However, it can create a decent chunk of this kind of content and do a part of the work. The heavy lifting will have to be done by content developers and writers with the requisite expertise like right now.

What this will do is enable your company to get more prompt with all kinds of long-form content like blogs, guest posts and whitepapers. (Don’t bank too heavily on AI for the last one) You can also have it come up with certain code snippets and resolve coding issues. This works for issues with basic programming languages or substantiating solved code examples in a technical blog. However you use AI for your long-form content, editing, development and QA from trusted experts will remain key to all content marketing collateral.

3Adding the Human X Factor

When asked about what jobs it could potentially replace someday, ChatGPT included content and copywriters in the list. The reality, however, is that the big push with all the major companies across all industries is for personalization. For example, B2B content marketing makes heavy use of user-generated content like testimonials, product/service reviews etc. to promote brands and companies.

The key factor here is human relatability as exampled in a McKinsey report. This Hubspot blog uses the report to say about 80% of consumers are willing to make repeat purchases for personalized content. This blog also talks about omnichannel personalization and this applies to all forms of content before and after sales-qualified lead.

4AI Visuals Can Work

Generative AI is not just a way to get faster text-based content. It is also capable of generating visuals and even video. This is obviously a big improvement as far as licensing and standardization are concerned. But you cannot expect creativity on par with competent professionals from it just yet. However, it can serve as a backup or in some cases, a valid alternative. Again, the emphasis lies in getting human eyes on your visual and then refining it for unique value.

5Keeping it Fresh (And Real)

AI-generated content is a great idea as long as it can stay on point and not feel stale. Humans have the capacity to spot the difference between personalized pitches and generic ones. The biggest problem with ChatGPT and probably with Google Magi will be its non-humanness. This is even more important for long-form content which enables readers to make a personal connection. So, the key factor here is unique content creation based on more personalized info vetted and validated from the lens of experts. This is the best chance your content has of building strong goodwill in your target market and leveraging it to convert leads.

How Should Your Company Prepare for Google Magi?

GoogleMagi and BingAI are going to vie for the top spot in the months o come. Both companies and other competitors want to leverage algorithms and pattern recognition to make the user experience more curated for better returns. The winner will be decided by who impacts the customer experience better and can deliver traffic to businesses.

At present, Google holds the top spot in this category but if it cannot match its investor expectations, the company may see its fortunes take a tumble. Meanwhile, BingAI has the lead and can create a dominant market position for itself while Google jockeys up its own bid. Unless Magi can perform up to par, Google might find this position too solid to break an audience away from.

For marketers, the key bid for strong leverage lies in understanding how AI curates content and getting their marketing collateral both personalized and generative AI-friendly. Investing in pro-tier content development and QA process will also help generate more creative and quality standardized content across campaigns.

The bottom line is that marketers need to bootstrap themselves for the AI revolution and how it will change online commerce. From B2B to B2C and everything in the middle, AI will be a powerhouse for those that can capitalize on it. The time to start investing in AI-compatible marketing content is now!