Can AI write marketing content for your care home?

AI-powered writing tools have witnessed a surge in popularity in recent months due to the release of GPT-3. Its latest update has significantly enhanced its capabilities over the previous editions, delivering a more sophisticated and refined product — but should you use it to write your care home marketing content?

What are AI writing tools and what can they do for care home marketing?

Artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools use complex algorithms to create written content from user prompts. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, the AI is able to generate an almost infinite amount of content that can be used for website content, blogs and social media posts.

Pros of AI writing for care home marketing

If you have the highest standards of care, or the best care home regionally, you need to tell the world about it! In today’s digital-first world, this means creating regular content that boosts online visibility, engages with your community and wins the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) battle.

However, many care providers, owners and managers are hard-pressed to find time to focus on their marketing, or the resource isn’t there quite yet. This is where AI can help to create content quickly and simply to share with families and care sector jobseekers.

If you are a new care home owner — or trying to balance growth and investment — having a cost and time-efficient content creator at your fingertips can be a lifeline (especially as good SEO requires consistency and commitment).

AI can also provide a good basis for new content ideas, structures and templates, which you can later add a little flavour to by injecting your brand tone and voice.  

So far, this must sound like the golden ticket for care home owners and managers that understand the value of creating marketing content but just don’t have the time! However, it comes with a catch: copying and pasting this content can have a detrimental effect on your efforts…

Cons of using AI writing tools for your care home

Whilst AI-generated content has made huge strides in what it can provide, it does (and is likely to always) need human editing. In our own testing of the AI tools available, we saw repeated patterns, words and phrases throughout its written outputs that affected its readability and gave obvious signals it was digitally created. In many cases, rewriting even the shortest pieces of content can take as long as writing them from scratch – a point worth noting if you are looking to save time!

A consistent brand and tone of voice is a key part of marketing any business, not just care homes. Currently, AI cannot learn the ins-and-outs of your brand or replicate the specific language needed to engage with families or attract new care recruits effectively. Simply, the nuances of how you speak about your care home cannot be replicated by a machine-learning algorithm.

If that’s not enough, the way in which an AI algorithm learns and reproduces content has sparked a debate around potential plagiarism. AI gathers information from millions of different sources – and can only ever be as detailed as the information it draws from – so the chance of reproducing similar content is always a risk. The implications of plagiarism being detected by a search engine can severely affect your website’s ranking with penalties, or even blacklisted from appearing within search results.

Should you use AI in your care home marketing?

AI is an impressive tool that can provide some value to your care home’s marketing efforts, if used correctly. Using it to generate structures, templates and ideas quickly can help kickstart your content if writing is not your forte. With that said, we highly recommend avoiding using its outputs verbatim. Google’s August 2022, helpful content update – a well-established guide for content creators – clearly states that the search engine giant is looking for ‘helpful content written by people, for people’. As Google typically avoids mentioning specifics in regard to how it ranks websites, this should be taken seriously.

Creating consistent content aligned with your care home’s tone and voice should always be a priority, if you want to engage with your audience clearly and effectively. Whilst AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to new ideas and structure, having a human touch still makes all of the difference when reaching out to residents’ families, potential occupants and recruitment messaging.

If you need some help planning your SEO or content strategy in 2023, contact us to speak to our experienced team.