Gone are the days when AI was just extravagant, and marketers used to collect basic demographic information from customers to create a content marketing strategy. In the past few years, there has been a massive change in the way that businesses approach and engage with their customers.
Digital media, especially the role of AI, has spread so far and wide that it has practically taken over everyone’s daily lives and has a lasting influence on everything we do. Thus, the traditional marketing methods that were effective a few years ago do not produce the same kind of results today.
How AI is Spinning the Game of Content Marketing
The potential of AI is so enormous that it has impacted every industry, including finance, research, customer support, content marketing, telecommunications, education, and more. So, how much is AI going to impact the efforts that you put into marketing your business? Probably a lot more than you can imagine.
This insanely growing importance of ‘Big Data’ implies that marketers have to adopt sophisticated methods and undertake an in-depth analysis of customer data, that too in real-time.
From finding out the target audience to creating a content strategy, from doing SEO to sending emails – many activities done by marketers daily will be automated to a certain degree in the near future.
In fact, AI content marketing topped the list of highest-rated use cases in marketing. From the top uses of AI, a majority explicitly deals with content marketing areas. These consist of keyword analysis, content optimization, data analysis, curation of customized content, and social media management.
With the dominance of AI, the world of content marketing is bound to change, and we’re going to see exactly how it will do so.
Improving customer experience through chatbots
You have probably seen them all the time. Almost every website that you visit has a chatbot providing detailed answers to people who want solutions instantly. However, they are not just on websites anymore; they’re everywhere across the internet.
Simply put, chatbots are computer programs that utilize AI to have automated conversations with users. At a time when social media has already dominated the world, chatbots definitely seem to be the future of interactive engagement.
Through chatbots, you can ensure that marketers can smoothly interact with consumers. 57% of consumers prefer to use live chat to solve their queries. Every customer wants quick and helpful response to their questions, and chatbots are the best way to provide them with what they require.
Companies like Facebook messenger, RecurPost, and Uber are successfully using chatbots to converse with users. They mimic real-life conversations with people, thus eliminating user’s need to fill out generic forms. This assists users with their questions and purchase-related queries. People no longer feel like they are talking to a robot and not to an actual human.
Small businesses should also try to leverage chatbots to increase customer engagement. Tools like Chatfuel, Flow XO, Motion.ai, and QNA maker can help you create a basic chatbot with little to no knowledge of coding.
Identifying keyword intent
Since its outset, Google’s algorithm has been working on improving the results that people see when they initiate a search. Google is constantly paying close attention to the kind of information that people appreciate. This has resulted in smarter algorithms that focus more on user intent.
Thus, AI-powered intent analysis helps you curate content that will satisfy the user intent and help you rank in search results. Machine learning, which is a subset of Artificial intelligence, enables systems to make data-driven decisions and predictions. It can identify patterns in consumer behavior which helps marketers in identifying the right keywords.
Tools like BrightEdge, Concurred, and MarketMuse are AI-powered content curation software. They will help you discover search intent, find out topics for your content, and enable audience-specific content creation.
BrightEdge has also recently introduced Intent Signal that allows you to find out topics having high potential to generate more organic results. This will let you instantly segment keywords and create content that drives more people to your website and landing pages.
Create hyper-personalized content through AI
Being a content marketer, your topmost priority should definitely be providing personalized content to your target audience and customers. That’s because everyone wants customization in their customer journey. Customized content influences how people think of your brand and interact with you in the future.
The advancements in AI have made it easy and quick to personalize content. It helps in tracking consumer behavior, interests, and interaction with different kinds of content. OneSpot, Granify, CaliberMind, and Personyze are tools that use machine learning to provide personalized content experiences that ultimately increase engagement and conversions.
Personyze’s personalization engine takes a step ahead and produces a real-time report of visitors with the use of various data sources. It uses machine learning algorithms to further provide every customer a customized omnichannel experience.
Predictive analytics are used by AI applications such as Automizy and Mailchimp to refine subject lines for clicks, have a high degree of customization and automated content, and assess the optimum timing and duration of email campaigns.
Thus, AI is helping email marketers to provide customized content to their subscribers and target audience. This grabs their attention and prompts them to take action.
Content automation
It is becoming increasingly difficult for content marketers to stay abreast with the constant content demands. The amount of content consumed by users is increasing every single day. This is the reason why marketers are slowly turning towards AI to automate their content flow as much as possible.
Natural language generation (NGL) is an AI-based content tool that offers real-time content suggestions. It analyzes content effectiveness and provides alternate content suggestions that align with your blog or website’s tone, voice, and impact. This allows marketers to create customized and targeted content for their audience.
Firms that deal with repetitive production processes or structured data can take maximum benefits from NLG. For example, e-commerce firms need to create hundreds of product descriptions and catalogs. NLG can be used to automate this kind of content production, saving loads of time and resources.
While you’re creating heaps of content, you also need to think about the distribution process. Sharing and promoting every piece of content on multiple social media sites will definitely consume a lot of your time. Social media scheduling tools like RecurPost can help you automate the entire process by letting you schedule months’ worth of content ahead of time. It also lets you repurpose your content to drive traffic from the same posts again and again.
Predictive analysis
Predictive analysis is the process of data mining, modeling, and statistical analysis to predict future consequences. Platforms like Netflix and YouTube majorly use this technology to give people recommendations based on the shows they have watched in the past.
Gmail’s smart compose offers suggestions on what words you should type next to form a commonly used sentence or phrase. If a user repeatedly ignores a suggestion, Gmail will probably offer another set of recommendations in the future.
Another great example is the typing assistant software Grammarly. It not only corrects the spelling and grammar errors but also provides suggestions to improve your writing style.
Predictive analysis allows the sales and marketing division to collaborate as every lead will be approached based on the readiness to purchase. It can provide you with customer insights for dividing customers into different segments.
Using this behavioral and demographic data, you can customize lead nurturing campaigns. You can also track the preferences of consumers based on their buying behavior.
Customized news feeds
Artificial intelligence enables social networking sites like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to customize users’ feeds according to their interests. Because of AI, you see your feed and explore pages curated as per the kind of content you saw and engaged with in the past.
AI helps these social sites to find out what kind of content a user will like, share, or report spam. With this technology, you can also make sure that your users only see what they actually want to. Also, these algorithms can help you in running targeted advertisements as users will only get to see the ads they are interested in.
The information available will help marketers in understanding which type of content people are interacting with. This, in turn, will help to create more relevant content and generate more ROI.
Benefits of AI in content marketing
1. Personalized customer interactions
As said earlier, mass messaging campaigns are a thing of the past. You cannot shoot a general message to thousands of people and expect them to buy from you. Irrelevant content is a major cause why consumers don’t engage with a brand. Needless to say, they will lose interest when they don’t find content that’s not related to them.
Let’s see some interesting stats to understand this:
- 52% of consumers are likely to switch to another company when they feel that they are not getting personalized communication.
- 72% of businesses say that their top priority is to improve customer experience.
- 65% of business buyers also switch to other vendors when there is a lack of personalized communication.
- 80% of marketers claim that personalized messages work well as compared to generalized ones.
Now, personalizing messages for thousands of customers is no joke. You simply cannot achieve that through manual work. This is exactly where AI comes to your rescue! It will help in tailoring your content marketing campaigns and gives you more control.
2. Enhances marketing campaigns
We saw that content marketers can greatly enhance their marketing plans and tactics with the correct use of AI. This is because they use what they know about their clients to tailor the individual experience.
79% of content marketers think that the use of artificial intelligence has made their tasks effortless and more effective. 51% of marketing leaders are already using AI in their content strategy. 75% of marketers say that they will be actively implementing the use of AI in their content marketing strategy in the next 3 years.
3. Helps provide the right content to the right audience
AI helps marketers to predict relevant content for the right audience. 61% of businesses with innovation plans are using AI to find vital opportunities in data. And in the absence of this technology, these market opportunities are likely to be missed.
It helps marketers in realizing the true potential of audience-related data, customize and automate customer experience. You can analyze infinite amounts of data like age, income brackets, gender, location, personal interests, the device used, active time on social media, etc. This data makes marketers better equipped to make deep connections with existing as well as potential customers.
The future of content marketing
Today, the majority of content marketing campaigns involve manual work. From carrying out keyword research to deciding the blog topics, from sending emails to lead generation, every process requires some kind of human intervention.
With the advancement of AI, marketers will be able to get deeper insights and use them to precisely predict future outcomes. The implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the field of content marketing would effectively enable marketers to concentrate on higher-value activities that affect business success while leaving tedious and routine tasks to the machines.
AI-powered content can absolutely prove to be a game-changer for brands. It doesn’t matter whether you want to use the continuously increasing data, wish to offer customized content to your audience, or speed up the content curation process – AI has got it all for you.
In the coming future, the impact of Artificial intelligence will only grow more robust. Thus, to stay ahead of the curve and scale the content marketing strategy, marketers and business owners should become AI-first.
Image Credit: from the author; thank you!
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