The Future of Content Marketing Involves AI

The future of content marketing involves machines… at a greater scale than you could imagine.

Though self-driving cars aren’t yet a common sight on our roads, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are nonetheless driving business outcomes. Whether you’re a finance leader at a Fortune 500 bank or a marketing manager at a mid-sized retailer, AI can level up your team. 

In the same way that the internet reshaped the way we work nearly 40 years ago, AI is reinventing the way we think about our work today and how we leverage technology to supplement and even augment human activity. With AI, teams can generate more quality work, faster. As for the future of marketing and of content? Consider the following insights.

AI won’t replace human creativity

As content marketers, we’ve all slogged through the effort of drafting different variations of website copy, subject lines, CTA’s etc. The goal is to try different approaches and see which gets more clicks. Clicks mean leads, leads mean conversions, and conversions mean sales. We all know the basic lead funnel.

But most of the time, we’re guessing. Personas help, but they’re more like a silhouette than a fully-drawn human being. If personas captured everything relevant there was to know about a customer, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg would have already designed the algorithm that could drive a 99.9% conversion rate.

No machine or human can fully predict what will drive impact across a large audience, though AI is helping content marketing analyze more customer data and test more of those content variations to narrow in on the human aspects that matter for business impact. AI doesn’t do this alone, but rather works alongside marketing teams to generate better results. It is especially helpful for repetitive and mundane tasks, like writing A/B test copy variations and surfacing timely results back to leaders to drive action.

With AI on the content marketing team, humans can focus more on strategy, which elevates their role in the business.

Innovation will be key for the next wave of success

And speaking of automating mundane tasks…we need to broadly embrace machines as automation team members. We need to do so not only because repetitive tasks produce less value—but because the future will require businesses to execute them at a scale and speed that simply isn’t possible for humans to complete.

The billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban has said that, in the future, the most valuable job skill will be the ability to think deeply and problem solve. What greater value of work can we bestow on our team than to automate tasks that a machine can do faster or more accurately, and leverage human ingenuity for tasks that require a uniquely human skill set.

Fortune 500 brands are already using machine learning and AI to automate certain business processes. As businesses look beyond the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic and toward the future, marketing professionals must be ready to innovate with technology that empowers data-driven decision making.

As a content marketer, I am thrilled to showcase the value of content. Language is the most powerful tool we have in marketing. Communication is core to everything we do, and the words we use matter. So, why not let AI help us find the right words for every person we’re reaching out to?

Welcome AI to the team

No machine can replicate the human combination of ideation and strategic thinking that goes into crafting marketing plans, let alone capture how analytics correlate with strategic business goals. But no human can crunch data or generate content with the speed of an AI. Marketers need both.

Chief Marketing Officers everywhere must assess the strengths of their teams and reorganize to enable every contributor to create higher value. Technology advances with AI are just the next step in how your organization will change.

AI is powered by data. With third-party cookies disappearing in 2022, marketers must embrace a first-party data strategy. Large organizations often sit on large volumes of customer data with the potential to generate millions in incremental revenue. If the business is prepared to unlock its potential with AI. 

Because AI is the only way to generate personalized experiences for every customer segment, at every touchpoint. It’s the only way to test many language variables and uncover insights to drive back to the business in real time. 

Persado’s language-generation AI enables enterprise companies to generate personalized messages at scale with an average conversion lift of 41%. In fact, our data shows that AI can generate better performing language than the control content 96% of the time. 

Are you ready for the content revolution? Our work is about to get better and more exciting, with more emphasis on data and insights for strategic decision making. AI is the team member you need to meet this moment and produce outcomes you need to transform your business.