Remember when the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) was mostly reserved for a typical Hollywood blockbuster’s flimsy plot point?
Reality is, luckily, far from those grim, dystopian visions. Ever since the greatest tech minds of the world worked tirelessly on developing it decades prior, nowadays, AI is becoming part of a daily routine.
It’s really not a surprise; AI has become a major topic of conversation in business circles and not only the IT industry, mind you. Why is that?
AI implementation promises high cost and time savings, and organizations across industries are quite eager to discover its full potential to gain a competitive advantage.
The global AI market value is expected to surpass $267 billion by 2027. More than 37% of businesses and organizations employ some form of AI.
Most internet marketing experts agree that AI is essential for personalization, chatbots and more. But what about content?
In this article, we’re going to dive into the world of AI and how it can enhance your content creation efforts.
But first…
What is AI?
To completely remove all the preconceptions about AI (courtesy of the aforementioned Hollywood flicks), we need to define AI properly. What is it exactly?
AI is the ability of a computer to imitate and emulate human intelligence processes through machine learning and automation.
There are many misconceptions about AI, mainly the one where it somehow threatens human employees, replacing them, taking the bread out of their mouths, etc. You’ve heard them all.
It’s quite the opposite, as AI-powered tech performs a variety of tasks and assists us in almost every aspect of our lives. In fact, AI can significantly improve your job, increasing productivity and optimizing processes.
AI is capable of:
- Interpreting and analyzing visual material (images, pictures, videos)
- Recognizing emotions and sentiments (not only visually but via speech and written content)
- Understanding, analyzing and mimicking (recreate) human language and language patterns
- Analyzing and processing huge amounts of raw data
- And more
Impressive, isn’t it? But the question remains, how exactly can AI improve our content creation process?
Automate Small Content Initiatives
Let’s be real; AI isn’t quite there when it comes to writing full, long-form articles for your website’s blog page. Not yet, at least.
Hopefully, it won’t even get there any time soon since what we call the “human touch” is still an essential part of almost every writing process.
However, the best way to utilize AI is by creating small, data-specific, simple content initiatives such as:
- Reports
- Product specification pages
- Financial reports
- Real-time stock insights
- Hotel descriptions
- Profit-and-loss summaries
- News updates (that demand celerity)
For example, if you’re trying to create a simple page with some important details, you can supply these details to the AI engine.
By using natural language processing, it builds context around these details and creates the content for your page.
In fact, major media outlets use” robot reporters” to speed up their content production. This tech allows journalists to focus on more important reporting without having to worry about missing some of the daily updates.
Optimize Your Content for SEO
On the other hand, for marketing teams around the globe, one of the key areas AI undisputedly dominates is content marketing.
One of the biggest gripes of content marketing is an underperforming piece of content you invested lots of time in, energy and ultimately, money. Improving the reach of said content is more often than not more complicated than writing it.
When people go online to find a product, company, service, piece of info, or solution to their unmet needs, they start with a search. Studies show that more than 93% of online experiences start with a search engine like Google, so it’s crucial to optimize your content for SEO.
Without AI, this process can be extremely frustrating, especially if you’re just starting to do it. Not to mention that it costs a small fortune.
Optimization tools that use AI can help you create, edit and optimize existing content to perform better across various channels.
With the aid of machine learning algorithms, they analyze your content to determine how well it will perform with your target audience and give you actionable suggestions to improve future efforts.
Create Content to Edge Out Your Competition
Believe it or not, content is becoming more relevant than ever before. It is key to building trust with your (prospective) customer and ultimately increasing conversions.
On average, B2B buyer reads at least 13 pieces of content to make an informed decision before purchasing. “13” doesn’t seem that unlucky now, does it?
Judging by these stats, keeping up with the required amount of content can be extremely hard, especially nowadays, in a post-pandemic environment.
With limited time and resources, the content you create needs to constantly drive value and traffic.
Once again, enter AI!
With proper AI tools, you can analyze tons of competitor pieces of content, witness which ones perform well and why. With this data, you’ll be able to one-up your competitors, as well as find “holes” and create content for poorly covered topics.
Improve Personalization
Did you know that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a brand that offers a personalized experience?
Luckily, artificial intelligence can aid your personalization efforts and customer engagement. You can employ AI-powered software to create personalized email marketing campaigns, newsletters and more.
They manage the subject line and addressing the recipient by name or organization (or both), giving the whole email a more personal note, boosting engagement.
Personalized emails are becoming an industry standard, but presenting your website visitors to personalized landing pages? Now that is new (for now, so climb aboard).
A tool like Personyze uses visitors’ attributes like demographics, past online behavior, source and more to present dynamic landing pages to cater to visitors’ needs and morph them into customers.
Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots aren’t exactly part of the personalized experience, but they do offer an illusion of personalized communication. They navigate customers on your website and act like customer service reps, answering basic customer inquiries.
Gather User-generated Content
The concept of harnessing user content has many benefits for your brand. Generally, 84% of online consumers say that peer recommendations and testimonials are more trustworthy than any other form of advertising.
Some of the major benefits of UGC are:
- Expanding brand reach on social media
- Putting loyal customers at the front of your brand
- Communicating authenticity and trustworthiness
- Maximizing ROI
AI can help you gather brand-related content posted by your customers on various platforms.
This, in turn, allows you to use the newly acquired data not only for marketing purposes but also to get a better perspective on which marketing efforts work best for your target audience and identify pain points.
Gather Fresh Topics and Keywords
Hunting for new topics and keywords is a content marketer’s daily routine. However, thanks to AI-powered tools, time spent on data collection can be cut in half.
Many keyword research tools, for example, allow you to find keywords showing their search volume, number of results, search demand, difficulty score, organic competition and more.
Using them significantly speeds up the writing process and helps you create more customer-specific content.
When it comes to topics, it’s not that different. There are numerous blog post idea generators out there that can help you expand your future library. One of them is Answer the Public. Simply type your selected keyword and you can witness the most popular questions posed by real users.
Conclusion
As you can see, AI implementation is not only welcomed but necessary for streamlining important but tedious, manual aspects of content creation.
Why would you dig through mountains of available data if AI can mine it meticulously for you? For some, the sheer number of AI-powered tools can be a little intimidating. On the other hand, some rely too much on them.
Start out small, set the course, hold the rudder and be on your way.
Ellie is a long-time marketer, currently working as a freelancer in Miami, Florida.
She is also a passionate writer and loves to explore new, innovative and digital news.
In spare time she is an eco activist.
Editor at Digital Strategy One