AI and Content Marketing

Smart marketers understand that artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. They know that embracing it means they have a major edge over the competition. However, some consumers have feared using AI due to feeling intimidated by the technology. If marketers can pave the way, consumers should soon follow. AI is exceptionally useful for marketers because it provides them with the insights and tools they need to more effectively reach their target audience.

Many well-known companies, such as Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and Spotify, already use AI to personalize their service to customers and improve delivery times. Content marketers who want to get in on the AI craze must implement machine learning to help determine which tasks they can automate.

The Purpose of AI

In today’s rapid online business environment, instant feedback loops are essential for marketers to create campaigns based on data-driven decisions. The amount of time and effort currently required to track data, analyze results, and implement the insights is currently excessive. It’s more than any one person can manage. It’s nearly impossible to include broad assessment or competitive analysis in marketing campaigns even with someone dedicated to the effort full-time.

Areas of marketing that require vast amounts of data is where AI can be the most useful. It can find and analyze this data quickly because algorithms can spot trends that human operators might miss.

AI Eliminates Guesswork and Instinct-Based Decisions

Traditionally, marketing has not relied on numbers as much as businesses like operations, engineering, or sales. That has changed with more data becoming available through distribution channels that increasingly focuses on how a marketer’s conversion metrics affects its overall profit. This means that marketers must provide more data to describe the impacts of their efforts on company revenue or other marketing goals.

One of the greatest strengths of AI is the ability to determine which content has the greatest effect on the intended customers in real time. You no longer have to guess or spend a lot of time testing to get a response from your audience. AI platforms look at the whole picture as well as content from your competitors and overall industry to inform you of the proper content strategy going forward. This results in significantly higher rates of conversion as well as a better understanding of what drove the conversions.

Personalizing Content for Your Audience

Today’s consumer expects a personalized message before they will respond to it. It’s no longer enough for marketers to create a general buyer persona. Even so, creating and finding a range of high-quality content to deliver to a diverse audience base can be a challenge. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute reported in 2016 that only 30 percent of business to business (B2B) marketers feel that their organization is currently effective using content marketing. That is unfortunate because AI is a powerful tool for tailoring themes to a variety of audience segments.

With AI, there’s no more guesswork in curating content for different audience groups. This technology sources your content so all you need to do is review it for accuracy and schedule it for posting. It even tracks each theme independently so you can compare and optimize various audiences.

Use AI to Analyze Results and Implement New Insights

Many marketers who have used A/B testing know that it’s a necessary but tedious evil. When used with social media, A/B testing requires you to download spreadsheets from every social channel of a brand and manually figure out the numbers. That means the final analysis depends on the number cruncher not making any mistakes. Unless the person is a brilliant marketing data scientist, it’s likely he or she will miss important insights that can cause your company to fall behind the competition.

AI automates this whole process for much less than it costs manually. It also performs a more thorough analysis using a much larger amount of data. You no longer have to wait for your data team to provide you with findings before you can adjust your marketing campaign. All you need to do is open the analytics dashboard and view campaign results in real time. With the insights in place, AI then provides personalized recommendations based on its findings. That means you can say good-bye to creative briefs.

Rise to the Top of Your Industry

In the past, this level of competitive analysis has been too time-consuming and complex for marketers to use consistently. After all, analyzing a single competitor can take weeks or months without AI. This is to say nothing of your entire industry. With AI, you don’t have to give it a second thought.

After enabling an AI engine, you can run the same type of marketing analysis on a competitor or the larger industry as you run on your own campaign content. Currently, only 37 percent of marketers use AI. This already puts you in another league as an early adopter. You can outperform your competition as well as have greater insight into their content performance than even they do. As you can see, this provides you with a tremendous advantage that will only grow larger the longer your competition waits to get on board with AI. Some marketing agencies have been able to justify significantly higher fees to their clients just by using AI, which in turn leads to higher profit margins.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Content Marketing?

We can sum up the benefits of AI with a just two essential advantages. These are speed and smart content. Smart content continually self-adjusts its message, targeted audience, and method of delivery. Although this might seem unrealistic if you already feel overwhelmed running your marketing campaigns, it’s a simple reality with AI.

The way you decide to use AI in strategizing your content will give you a significant advantage over your competition as well as reach new customers and improve the experience of the customers you already have. The ability to deploy your smart content at critical times in each customer’s journey and then evaluate and act upon real-time marketing insights is a skill that the best marketers have employed for some time already. If you can’t or won’t join them, the risk of your company being left behind is very real.