Do you feel like your content marketing strategy has become stale, and you’re not seeing the results you’re used to? Or maybe despite regularly publishing content you thought was high quality and relevant, it’s not resonating with your audience, and you’re falling behind your competitors.
If you’re experiencing any of these warning signals, it’s a clear sign that it’s time to shake up your content marketing strategy and embrace the new tools and technology that use the power of AI in content marketing to help you create and deliver content that delivers results.
AI and Content Marketing – What Not to Do
You probably have at least a basic idea of what artificial intelligence is, but you may be less clear on how exactly you can apply it to your content strategy.
The first thing that springs to mind is probably machine-generated content. It’s true – AI can be used to churn out articles on any topic without involving a human writer.
This is definitely a way to produce more content very quickly without the expense of human writers, but even though algorithms have become advanced enough to write pretty decent quality articles, it’s probably not a good idea to turn all your content creation over to a computer.
While automatically generated content is acceptable for some social media posts or short news articles, it will never be as engaging as a piece of content written by a human – so don’t fire your copywriter yet!
So how instead should you make the best use of the possibilities of AI in your content strategy?
More Relevant Content
In a traditional content marketing plan, you’ll produce content designed to have a wide appeal to your general audience and send as many people to it as possible in the hopes that some of them will stick around to read it.
Artificial intelligence, however, opens up more opportunities to personalize your content to the reader, making it highly relevant and appealing, and giving you more opportunities to grow your brand relationship with each reader. 80% of consumers say they are more likely to engage with a company if it offers a personalized experience.
Data such as demographics, user behavior, time of date, engagement trends, and other factors can be used to dynamically adjust content and serve it up at exactly the right time and in the right place to resonate with a specific target group.
Up until now, content marketing has been fairly passive, but with the power of AI predictive analytics can be used to segment customers depending on certain variables and predict their future reactions with your brand. You can then target groups of customers with your highly relevant content at the exact right time when it will make the most impact.
Better Research and Improved Content Strategy
One of the most important parts of the content marketing strategy is knowing what to write about in the first place. Get your research wrong, and nobody will read your content. Or, on the other hand, people will read it, but not the ones you were looking for with a high potential of becoming future customers.
Because of this research is vital – not only to learn more about your customers and their motivations, but also to discover what types of content are performing best in your industry, upcoming news and topical subject you can leap on while they’re trending, and how you can out-perform your competitors by producing better content than them.
While humans are definitely more skilled than machines in some areas, spotting patterns in data is something that’s an ideal task for AI. This means an AI-powered content marketing tool like Concured can be highly effective at spotting search trends, identifying engaging topics, and giving you insight into what makes one piece of content better or more popular than another.
Advanced Scheduling and Automation
Marketing automation is a relatively new concept that has already transformed the way that organizations from small businesses to multinational corporations plan their marketing.
It’s a waste of your time and resources to post everything on multiple social media channels in real time, so instead, you can use the power of automation to create weeks' or months' worth of content to post in advance.
This is basic schedule and automation; however, when artificial intelligence is introduced, it opens up even more possibilities for efficiency and maximizing your ROI.
AI can be used to spot the best times for posting your content so that it receives the highest engagement levels. It can then adjust these posting times dynamically based on user interaction and other factors, rather than waiting for you to analyze your data from the previous week or month and adjust accordingly.
You can also use AI to help you identify the best platforms to connect with targeted groups and tweak your message for a better engagement rate.
Dynamic Optimization
Just as you can use the power of artificial intelligence to dynamically adjust the times and content of your posts on social media, you can also use it to improve your content in real-time.
Small factors such as the headline you use, or the image you choose to lead your content with can make a huge difference to how many people click through, read it, and take action.
Previously the only way to optimize these factors was with A/B testing – create multiple versions of one piece of content, serve these different versions up to different people, and record the results.
It works, but it’s slow and resource-intensive. Instead, AI now allows you to dynamically change different aspects of your content depending on the actions of each individual who interacts with it. Over time, the content will gradually optimize automatically in a way that’s much more efficient and easier than testing different batches of content manually.
AI Helps to Align Your Content Marketing Strategy with Your Goals
Remember – you’re not just creating content for the sake of it. The idea is to inform and engage with your audience to educate them, make them more aware of your brand, and form a relationship with them to move them through the marketing funnel.
Artificial intelligence can help you to do this, resulting in a better experience for your customers and an improved ROI, higher brand profile, and more sales or conversions for you.
We’re just starting to touch on the capabilities of AI and how it can be used in marketing, and we can only imagine what might be possible in the future. Now is the time to start experimenting with marketing AI and experience what it can do for you.
This post is syndicated from CONCURED.com, where it was originally published. CONCURED is a Marketing AI Institute benefactor.
Michael Brenner
Michael is CMO at CONCURED where he helps content marketers use AI to create content strategies that prove ROI. Brenner has been recognized as a Forbes top CMO influencer, and a Top Business Keynote Speaker by Huffington Post. He is co-author of 2 books (The Content Formula and Digital Marketing Growth Hacks), and has worked in leadership positions in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as thriving startups like NewsCred and FullTilt.