Why Every Marketer Should Include AI in Their Content Marketing Strategy

Why Every Marketer Should Include AI in Their Content Marketing Strategy

AI supercharges various marketing efforts, including bringing efficiency to processes and increasing market opportunities. It also helps marketers with predictive analysis, identifying customers, and improving the quality of data.

EverString and Heinz Marketing conducted a study that found that although half of the B2B marketers are not using AI, they have high expectations from it.

Image via EverString and Heinz Marketing

But how can marketers use AI in content marketing? How can they use it to personalize engagement and improve content ROI?

AI and Content Marketing

Content marketing involves developing and distributing relevant content consistently to engage new customers and communicate with existing ones. Content marketing teams spend lots of time and effort on activities like finding keywords, planning topics, writing, personalizing content, and optimizing for search. They must also schedule social media posts, review analytics, and implement content insights.

But what if their role was to enhance content rather than all those tasks? That’s what AI offers content marketing.

Artificial Intelligence refers to machines that perform tasks requiring human intelligence. These machines learn from experience, adjust to new inputs and execute human tasks by relying heavily on deep learning and natural language processing. They accomplish specific tasks by processing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns.

In content marketing, AI helps marketers optimize their content marketing efforts. Manual content creation and curation is tedious and takes lots of time. It also requires input from different teams, keeps evolving, and the rules keep changing.

With artificial intelligence, content marketers can decipher these changes, analyze data, and curate content that meets the user intent. AI takes on time-sensitive and menial tasks so that the content creators become more efficient and realize ROI.

Why Should Marketers Include AI in their content marketing strategy?

1. Personalization

Consumer personalization and artificial intelligence are the next big thing, according to marketers. BrightEdge found that marketers considered personalization the next big trend at 28.66% and artificial intelligence at 25.69%.

Image via BrightEdge

Combine artificial intelligence and personalization, and you can engage your target audience better. AI learns what your customers want through engagements. It then adopts to provide them with what they want when they want it.

You provide your audience with authentically personalized experiences and engage directly with each consumer. From tailored landing pages to customized email, you personalize each aspect of your marketing. You also get real-time customer data on their behavior, location, demographics, values, and others.

With this data, you can identify every customer and their characteristics which helps you personalize content. SmarterHQ found that 72% of consumers only engage with messages that marketers tailor to their interests. They also found that 63% of consumers will stop buying from brands with poor personalization tactics. AI will help you personalize content and maximize results.

AI tools like OneSpot, Granify, and Personyze help you offer relevant content experiences and increase conversions. Others like Automizy and Mailchimp help you optimize subject lines, personalize emails, and determine optimal sending time and frequency.

2. Content Automation

Your content team has to deal with coming up with ideas for the content, writing the articles, publishing, and sharing on social media. AI automates the whole process. It helps you create content, curate, and distribute it while saving you effort and time.

The biggest challenge for most writers is the blank page – finding a good topic and starting to write. AI can give you the motivation to get started. Use tools like DrumUp and BuzzSumo to help you generate ideas, curate high performing relevant content, and monitor performance.

MarketMuse helps you determine what topics will be most successful and keywords related to the topic. It also gives you a target content score, minimum word count, and relevant subtopics to consider using. Ahref, on the other hand, tells you whether your competition has covered the topic and how to outrank them.

Once you have written your content, use a tool like Cortex to get a complete social media plan. Cortex helps you know whether you are creating the right content for your different social media platforms. It looks at various aspects of a successful social media post in your industry. These include colors, images, gifs, videos, texts, hashtags, and others to help you make the best possible social media post.

Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer then help you streamline your content distribution. They help you schedule your social posts on all platforms and track ROI.

3. Engage your Audience with AI Chatbots

The AI chatbots learn about your customers and help you personalize their journeys and build relationships. Think about the stages a consumer takes before they can become a customer, and then automate these steps using an intelligent and interactive chatbot.

For example, if your customer journey starts from awareness to consideration and finally, the purchase stage. The AI chatbot takes the user through the journey while gathering information and delivering relevant messaging to help them make a decision.

During the awareness stage, the bots diagnose the problem using quizzes or questionnaires. It sends valuable information in the form of videos, tutorials, and guides to confirm the problem.

During the consideration stage, it helps the consumer compare solutions and guide them towards purchase. The consumer receives information on how to solve the problem and benefits of using your product to solve their problem.

During the decision stage, the chatbot helps the consumer make the purchase. They also provide product descriptions, photos, videos, reviews, and others. If the customer abandons cart, the chatbot sends them messages to remind them to complete the purchase.

After purchase, the customer receives their receipts and shipping updates. It also sends thank you notes, asks for reviews on the purchase, and sends upsells and cross-sells.

With the AI chatbot, you increase reach, interact with customers 24/7, and send relevant information at the right time.

4. Get valuable data insights and improve customer experience

AI has given companies the ability to convert the increased volume of data they have into actionable and meaningful insights. By leveraging data, your business can improve customer experience and make data-driven decisions. High quality data helps you better understand the customers, measure satisfaction, and improve personalization.

Machine learning and natural language processing help you identify insights from all the data you collect from your CRM, social media pages, website, and other third-party sites. Using key phrases, you can analyze and visualize text to identify patterns, trends, and irregularities.

AI helps you understand the performance of your content marketing initiatives. You get feedback and insights to optimize your data creation efforts. These insights help you create better content, save time, and deliver exceptional results.

It also helps with social media efforts. The average internet user maintains a presence in around eight social media platforms. However, businesses that interact with consumers on social media have a problem with the sheer volume of information produced. Why is this?

A lot happens within a minute in the internet world.

Image via All Access

That’s a lot of data to work with! Can you imagine if you are the person responsible for monitoring every tweet or Facebook post mentioning your brand? Or the one monitoring trends? It can get hectic, especially without the right brand monitoring tools.

Machine learning in social listening tools helps you monitor your brand online, analyze sentiments, and analyze customer satisfaction. You can identify what stages of your sales funnel gives you high conversions, or what social activity led to specific sales.

AI helps you reap the full benefits of social media efforts.

Conclusion

Including AI in content marketing helps you personalize messaging, boost content performance, and improve content marketing ROI. AI powers your content strategy by helping with content research, keyword research, topic suggestions, personalization, publishing, and scheduling on social media.

You get insights that help you optimize your content marketing efforts. You know what your consumers want and can serve them content that appeals to their interest and solves their problems.

However, remember that AI does not replace the human element; it helps you optimize efforts. Your content team will still need to write the content, but now they will write content that delivers excellent results.