Artificial Intelligence In Content Marketing (2020 & Beyond)
- Read original article here
Artificial intelligence and its subsets have been revolutionizing the business and marketing landscape for quite some time. Still, there’s a new frontier that this advanced technology is yet to conquer completely – content marketing.
Certain AI algorithms have become terrifyingly good at generating plausible stories, to the extent that Open AI initially decided not to release its GPT-2 publicly out of fear that it could be potentially misused. However, although these articles written by a machine are coherent and engaging thanks to massive amounts of data fed to these algorithms, lack of genuine critical thinking and creativity renders AI inferior in comparison with human writers.
But, while this means that you can’t rely on an AI tool to come up and generate entire blog posts, your content marketing can tremendously benefit from implementing this technology.
Regardless of how proficient you are in your field of expertise, finding topics that your audience will be interested in reading can be challenging.
So, even if your blog posts are well-researched and packed with useful information, you won’t get very far if the topics you picked aren’t relevant to your audience. In other words, you have to make sure that the subject you want to cover will attract your target audience.
Otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time and efforts.
Trying to check what your competitors write about by reading their blogs is a time-consuming approach. Besides, you have no way of knowing whether their strategy works or not.
AI-powered predictive analytics is capable of both performing competitive research of the topics you select and predicting your audience’s sentiments and reactions about them. Thanks to its ability to analyze massive amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data from different sources, artificial intelligence supercharges predictive analytics. Namely, AI makes sense of the data you already have and unearths immensely valuable insights from it.
What this means is that an AI-based predictive analytics tool will collect data from various sources, including competitors’ websites, search engines, social media, advertising, and many more, and allow you to better understand what your audience searches for and wants to read about.
HubSpot, for example, uses this technology in order to identify topic clusters and suggest relevant topics that your audience will be most likely to read. Besides that, this content strategy tool provides different metrics, such as the competitiveness of a particular topic as well as how well it performs.
Similarly, Crayon is another tool that you can use to analyze millions of different sources on the internet, and your competitors’ websites among them. This way, it will be much easier for you to pinpoint what your audience is interested in and select your content topics accordingly.
Moreover, it will allow you to spot content gaps in your niche and address these topics with your blog posts and other types of content. That’s a great way to offer your audience answers to questions that they can’t find elsewhere.
We’re still years or even decades away from artificial general intelligence (AGI), the machine intelligence that can match and even surpass human intellectual abilities as well as perform tasks that a human can.
As we’ve already said, this refers to writing, but it would be fair to mention some exceptional examples, such as an intelligent robot that almost won a literary award in Japan for a short novel it authored.
However, content writers and journalists don’t have to worry about robot writers stealing their jobs – at least not in the near future. As a matter of fact, these smart machines can even pick up the slack and generate content that doesn’t require superb writing chops.
Some of the biggest media companies in the world have implemented AI-reporters to churn out sports or financial reports, thus saving a lot of time and allowing journalists and human reporters to focus on more complex stories.
Bloomberg News, for example, uses Cyborg, an AI-powered robot, to speed up and scale reporting about annual company earnings. In other words, this advanced software analyzes a financial report and quickly generates a short article that contains the most important numbers and figures.
But, the word “content” doesn’t refer only to stories, reports, or blog posts – product descriptions also fall under this category. Online stores can have hundreds of products, which means that every single one of them should be described properly.
This can be a tedious task, additionally complicated by the fact that every description should be unique and optimized for search engines. With the help of AI, you can automate this process and simplify it significantly.
Any discussion about content marketing and artificial intelligence wouldn’t be complete without mentioning all the advantages of AI-powered chatbots.
Namely, these smart algorithms have evolved significantly since their early days. Instead of canned phrases and sentences, modern chatbots can be used to boost customer engagement through meaningful conversations.
If you want to establish genuine relationships with your customers, improve customer experience, and prevent churn, then conversational AI should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy. This set of technologies enables computers to understand, and process voice or text puts, as well as respond to them in a human-like manner.
What’s especially great about conversational AI is that it can be implemented on different channels, including your website, Facebook Messenger, Slack, or Alexa.
Given that many consumers turn to social media platforms for customer support, having conversational AI that’s available 24/7 across all your channels will do wonders for your customer experience. A chatbot that will answer your customers’ questions and assist them in solving product-related issues without being put on hold will speed up your sales cycle and improve your conversion rates.
Namely, sometimes an explanation about how a certain feature works can be exactly the push that a potential customer needs in order to make a purchase.
Amazon and Netflix have spoiled consumers by pampering them with highly-personalized and tailored content recommendations. These two companies have raised the bar when it comes to offering their users exactly what they want to purchase or watch.
And their proprietary AI-powered recommendation engines help them attract and keep their customers happy.
But you don’t have to be a retail or streaming giant in order to treat your customers to such a hyper-personalized experience. By leveraging artificial intelligence, you’ll be able to collect and analyze your customer information, track their behavior, and learn more about their preferences.
With all these insights, it’s possible to segment your audience and create content that will resonate with every segment. Similarly, you can produce content for different stages of the customer journey.
For example, for the awareness stage, you should opt for how-to videos, free ebooks, educational webinars, or whitepapers.
As your potential customer is trying to find a solution to their problem or find an answer to their question, it’s up to your content to educate them, and possibly collect their contact information so that you can reach out to them through email. The goal is to move these potential customers to another stage, and with the right content, you increase the chances of this happening.
Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in this entire process because it would be virtually impossible to learn all the information you need about your customers without its powerful ability to process and analyze it.
Creating quality content has never been easy, and it’s even more difficult now that customers expect nothing short of excellence. Luckily, artificial intelligence can provide you with all the tools and information you need to produce relevant, highly-personalized, and educational content that your audience will love.
