Content Marketing & AI: What You Need To Consider

Artificial intelligence (AI) has always been a topic that’s fascinated me. From gaming, finance and the military through to data security, healthcare and transport, nearly every industry around has been experimenting with AI capabilities, and the impact this can have on their future endeavours. I’m truly astounded by how far we’ve come since Alan Turing first posed the question, “Can machines think?” in 1950, because it’s this thinking that has led to better diagnoses in hospitals, fraud detection in finance and responsive and adaptive video game experiences. Recently, AI has shown great promise in terms of marketing too. According to Salesforce’s 2017 ‘State of Marketing’ report, 51% of marketers are already using artificial intelligence, and 27% are planning to use it in the near future. So how could this shape up, and what should content marketers consider when it comes to their AI strategies? This blog intends to find out…

AI in Content Marketing

AI in content marketing has many uses. For starters, it can help marketers make sense of piles of data related to market research, as well as aid content creation through search intent and topic research. Supporting content strategies too, AI has further uses in what is known as ‘Business Intelligence’ (BI). BI helps marketers perceive the content marketing universe by examining the data of users, helping marketers better understand their intent.

Artificial intelligence is changing content marketing in various ways, including:

Delivering Unique Experiences With Predictive Intelligence

Predictive intelligence helps businesses understand the demands of individual customers and personalise content to address their needs and interests. It enables marketers to observe customer behaviour, and with every action taken, build a profile of customer preferences. That information is then used to deliver content tailored to each customer in real time, and across any web-based channel like the web, email, mobile or social media.

More than just personalisation, Predictive Intelligence uses algorithms to deliver content based on estimates of what the customer wants or needs. It actually anticipates the intent of the customer, and then provides a unique recommendation based on what has been observed.

Predictive intelligence also provides marketers insight into which content to target for which group of customers. Once you understand where a user is in the buyer journey, you can leverage that information to target the particular content style they are most likely to engage with. Sounds pretty fantastic right?

AI & Content Creation

Content creation is all about searching, finding, organising, and creating the most relevant content on a topic regularly, regardless of whether that’s insurance, mortgages, technology or pet care. It isn’t always so easy to do this, but there are great tools out there to help – such as Ahrefs and BuzzSumo. Allowing you to see trending topics, keywords and related articles, you can build up a picture of what your clients are looking for, and the type of content that you should be creating to meet their needs. This also allows marketers to guide potential customers through various stages of awareness right the way through to making a purchase.

I couldn’t mention content without the importance of quality. Grammatical errors and poorly constructed sentences will not bode well for your content and company, and can even negatively impact trust. With this in mind, services such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid can help to avoid typos and significantly increase the quality of your content, and the likelihood of customers liking what they see.

Customer Support & AI

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of AI that makes human language intelligible to machines. AI technologies allow them to recognise and interpret human speech independently, reacting to it accordingly. A good example of this in marketing are chatbots. For example, if a website visitor is interested in a certain promotion, or they can’t find a section of the site, they can use a chatbot to find this. Guiding their path to purchase, chatbots can be a great addition to customer support.

What To Consider For Your AI Strategies?

What follows are a list of further AI tools that can help enhance your content marketing strategies no end:

Frase.io: Frase.io is an AI-powered writing, SEO, and research assistant.

HubSpot: HubSpot develops cloud-based, inbound marketing software that allows businesses to transform the way that they market online.

Acrolinx — Acrolinx is an AI-powered platform for enterprise content governance that uses a unique linguistic analytics engine to “read” all your content and provide immediate guidance to improve it.

As an AI-enthusiast, I can’t wait to see how else this technology impacts the world, and marketing in general. If you’ve been considering a new content strategy, then I’m also pretty enthusiastic about our content team, and recommend you get in touch with them today on 0161 327 2635 to learn more about what they can do for you.