How AI Is Revolutionizing Content Marketing
If you have been involved in content marketing for a while then you will be well aware of the amount of work involved not just in creating quality content but in ensuring that the content gets seen by the right people.
You might write the best ever blog post on a particular subject but unless that blog post is seen by the right audience then you are simply wasting your time.
Few of us have sufficient hours in the day to write and promote our content while still engaging meaningfully with all the other business tasks that we need to get done every day.
The solution for an increasing number of digital marketers has been to adapt AI tools.
Artificial Intelligence may once have been the realm of science fiction but today it has countless real-world applications.
It allows marketers to produce content more quickly and then to promote that content to the most interested audience more effectively than could ever be done by human skill alone.
A recent survey by Salesforce reported that 51% of marketers are already using AI tools regularly. An additional 27% are planning to adopt AI tools before the end of 2019.
Why use AI tools?
In the past, many digital marketers have been wary of embracing AI believing that the results of using technology were uncertain, or that a computer could never be as good as a human.
It does remain true that there are still plenty of creative areas where human expertise is required what can now be conclusively shown is that computers are more effective than humans at a range of mundane marketing tasks.
The answers are in the data
How long do you spend studying your analytics trying to make sense of your visitors intent?
If you are going to improve your conversion rate you need to know what your visitors are seeking and how you can provide it for them.
Analytics is one of many digital marketing tasks require sifting through large amounts of data before you can see results.
The processing power of computers combined with the latest machine learning algorithms make them ideal for these tasks.
Whether it is identifying keywords, planning blog post topics, optimizing or personalizing marketing content or even personalized advertising AI can complete these tasks in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
Identify keyword intent
Let’s look at some practical examples of how AI is being used to make content marketing faster and more effective.
Identifying the right keywords for your business and grouping them properly can be tough if you have to do it manually.
Using natural language processing and machine learning to get the task done is a lot more efficient.
Keyword filtering with AI tools can quickly locate the keywords that most closely reflect your PPC or SEO goals.
AI can be used to spot patterns, topics, and user-intent which might easily be missed during a manual search.
Identify blog topics
If you are like many business owners you will have started a blog for your company website but quickly struggled to find sufficient topics to write about.
For a lot of bloggers coming up with topics to cover is the hardest part of blogging, they frequently spend hours staring at a blank screen desperately searching for inspiration.
Locating topics for new blog posts is another area where AI can excel.
Tools such as Crayon can track your competitors’ websites and identify changes in real time.
By seeing what your competitors are publishing and the messages they are sending you can identify gaps in your own blogging strategy and even try to improve upon their work.
In a similar vein, there is the Hubspot Content Strategy tool which employs AI to help you find topics that are relevant to your market which you can then write-up for your blog.
The creative writing work is left to you, but the difficult task of identifying missed topics and finding topics is left to the AI.
Improved personalization
If you have a list or ever use email marketing you will understand the importance of personalization.
The days when you could send out identical emails to everyone on your list and expect a reasonable response rate are long past.
Today most of us must deal with so much content that unless something is of direct interest it is not going to hold our attention or elicit a response.
The problem for content marketers is that creating highly personalized content is a time-consuming business.
Carefully A/B testing email sending times and web content can quickly take up most of your day and still not be fully effective. You can A/B test ever smaller and more focused groups but you can never get down to the individual customer level.
The contrast with AI is obvious since AI tools are able to monitor the actions of individual recipients, allowing you to create the perfect email for them, or to direct them to the web page that is tailored to produce the best response from them.
Measure individual responses
In the email marketing world, AI can identify the open and click time of every email recipient allowing marketers to adjust their email sending time down to the minute.
AI can be used to measure the response to each individual promotion.
These past customer interactions can be used to ensure that customers only receive future email promotions in which they are likely to be interested, in this way can marketers can avoid driving away customers through email fatigue.
A similar technique can be used with a customer’s browsing or purchase history to suggest products or web pages which may be of interest to them.
To really improve your email response rate it’s not just the timing and the type of emails that you need to optimize but the content as well.
There are AI tools that can help here as well, Adobe Sensei will scan your draft email and provide suggestions on how the design can be improved to generate a better response.
Finally, any email marketer will want to work on the subject line for their emails.
While A/B testing can provide you with some feedback on the most effective subject lines it is AI that can really drill down and personalize the subject line down to the individual level.
One AI start-up Phrasee reports that 95% of the time its AI written subject lines perform better than human-written subject lines.
Employing AI enables digital marketers to personalize their content and provide their readers with the content that is of the greatest interest to them.
Instead of struggling to analyze your data manually why not see how AI tools can do the hard work leaving you free to do the more rewarding creative work.
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