A 15-Step Framework to Create a Better Content Strategy Using AI

Attention is at an all-time premium.

It's not enough to publish content and share it. 

To capture real results, you need to create extraordinary value propositions with your content marketing—and treat your content program like an audience-building business.

Intelligent automation tools and AI technologies make this possible, even for smaller, resource-strapped teams.

In fact, you can use AI in content marketing, along with smarter technology and better strategy to build a more sophisticated, personalized, and dynamic content marketing program.

We've developed a proprietary strategic framework based on this idea, called a Cognitive Content Hub^TM.

The Cognitive Content Hub^TM is a content engine powered by artificial intelligence. It marries artificial intelligence and human strategists to create content proven to engage audiences and grow businesses 24/7.

The framework follows 15 steps, which come from our AI Academy for Marketers course The Cognitive Content Hub: How to Build a More (Artificially) Intelligent Content Engine. The course is taught by Marketing AI Institute founder/CEO Paul Roetzer, who created and implemented the framework to create this website.

15 Steps to a More Intelligent Content Strategy

1. Conduct a market analysis. Quickly validate your content ideas and the size of the market for your content using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Facebook Insights, and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes.
2. Connect content to business goals. While a large number of pageviews is exciting, it’s better to be able to connect your results to business goals. Once you do, you can measure and monetize your content appropriately.
3. Evaluate AI-powered content tools. There are hundreds of AI powered tools that can help you build smarter content once you know what you’re looking for. The course mentioned above walks you through a number of ways to find, evaluate, and test these tools. Today, AI tools exist that can do keyword research, automate social shares, and even write content for you.
4. Identify your personas and buyer journey stages: AI will enable highly granular targeting of micro-personas, so you don’t need highly detailed personas/stages. You just need a broad definition of your target audience, and intelligent market research tools will help you do that in this stage.
5. Create a content mission statement. Why are you creating what you are creating? Ask yourself who, what, and why. This may seem basic, but it is commonly overlooked. A concise content mission statement will help you guide all your efforts moving forward. 
6. Determine what questions matter to your audience. In this step, you'll use natural language processing to determine the topics and questions that matter most to your markets and audiences.
7. Conduct a content audit. Examine and document the content assets you already have. These assets can be repurposed, remixed, and republished within your new content strategy.
8. Gather competitive intelligence and market inspiration. With AI tools, you can easily collect data about your competitors to use in your own strategy. That includes what content they create, the ads they run, which CTAs they use, and more.
9. Conduct keyword research. Now, you're ready to translate your core topics and questions into actionable keyword research, including keyword phrases, topic clusters, difficulty levels, and search volumes.
10. Determine your editorial focused formats and budget. AI can contribute to your editorial focus by clustering or topic modeling your data. What are the three to five core themes that will drive your content strategy? Commit to a core group of formats (long-form, list posts, original research, republished, curated, interviews, etc.). Pick five to seven formats, then allocate budget to production.
11. Select your hook(s): Every content hub needs at least one compelling hook asset to collect email addresses. The hook should solve your audiences' biggest pain points in a highly valuable way. As an example, Marketing AI Institute built the Ultimate Beginner's Guide to AI in Marketing, which helped marketers solve their biggest early challenge with AI: Getting up to speed quickly.
12. Choose your domain. You may choose to incorporate your content hub into your existing company domain or blog. Or, depending on your audience, it may make more sense to establish a separate domain to build a dedicated community and movement around your content property.
13. Build the editorial calendar. Translate your core topics, formats, and hooks into a documented editorial calendar, preferably one that can also be built in a team project management system.
14. Automate content reporting. You can use natural language generation to assist in writing reports by automating some or all of your regular content marketing reporting.
15. Create the newsletter plan. A newsletter can help you build deeper relationships on an ongoing basis with your audience, even when they're not visiting your website. As the final step in the framework, you'll build a strategy for an AI-powered newsletter.

How to Execute This Framework

The proprietary Cognitive Content Hub^TM framework is flexible. It can be executed by any team of any size.

Our AI Academy for Marketers course—The Cognitive Content Hub: How to Build a More (Artificially) Intelligent Content Engine—shows you exactly how.

AI Academy for Marketers is our members-only online education platform and community. The Academy features dozens of on-demand courses and certifications taught by leading AI and marketing experts.

The 25+ courses available in AI Academy are complemented by additional exclusive content, including:

• Live monthly Ask Me Anything sessions with instructors. 
• The Answering AI series of quick-take videos that provides simple answers to common AI questions.
• Keynote presentations from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON).
• AI Tech Showcase product demos from leading AI-powered vendors.

Individual and team licenses are available. Discounts are offered for students, educators and nonprofits.