How AI Has Changed Content Marketing
An Interview with Aki Balogh
Content marketers have long embraced cutting-edge technologies — from the printing press to the search engine.
Today, technological improvements are driving yet another revolution in the industry. Google’s search engine updates are rendering SEO gimmicks obsolete. New analytics tools are helping marketers measure the impact of their spending.
These changes are supercharging the value of first-rate content, but they also massively raise the bar for quality.
MarketMuse uses artificial intelligence to help its customers improve their content. It identifies its customers’ content gaps and guides them as they publish new material.
In this interview, MarketMuse Co-Founder and CEO Aki Balogh introduces us to the new era of content marketing.
Can you explain MarketMuse’s business?
We’re building AI tools to mechanize content planning and content creation.
We’re using machines — which are great at crunching through a lot of data — to analyze enormous amounts of web content, then build blueprints that show writers and editors exactly how to cover a topic comprehensively on their site. We provide that guidance at both a page level and a site level.
On the page level, for example, we can provide a blueprint that explains how to cover a specific topic comprehensively. We’ll tell you what related topics you should discuss, what questions you should answer, and more. On the site level, we can analyze all your content and assess how well you’ve covered a given topic. We can point out blind spots, low-quality content, and areas where your coverage is too thin.
We can use the site-level analysis to build a prioritized content plan for your business. That will show your writers the most important items to cover in the coming months. We’ll also create a page-level blueprint for each item in the plan. Depending on how many writers you have, of course, this plan can be quite long.
Between the content plans and the blueprints, we can cover the breadth and depth of your content creation.
The in-depth support that we provide is very important, because it addresses the biggest problem in content marketing — the fact that it’s hard to consistently write great articles at scale.
Everyone talks about how “10x content” is critical to driving inbound sales. That is true, but it’s extremely difficult to consistently create such high-quality pieces, because writing is a creative process.
Today, writers and editors spend an enormous amount of time and money generating content plans. It’s a slow process that requires massive upfront investment. It also involves a lot of risk, because 90% of content fails. Historically, that has made content marketing very difficult to justify versus ad words or email marketing, for which it’s easy to measure the return on your investment. There’s literally a book called Email Marketing By the Numbers!
Until now, there’s been no objective measure to score the quality of content. At MarketMuse, we’ve built that rubric. We think that one day, it will be like the Nielsen score of content marketing.
To put it another way, we tell writers how a domain expert would thoroughly cover any given topic.
This makes writers far more powerful. It helps remove biases and blind spots from their content plans. It also helps guide their research — which frees them to focus on writing.
As you pointed out, though, writing is a creative process. How can software accurately measure something as subjective as quality?
Writing is creative, which makes it one area where humans have a massive edge over machines. That’s why what we’re doing won’t replace content marketing writers — in fact, it will make their work far more valuable.
The most important way that we measure quality is by evaluating comprehensiveness.
There are other ways to measure quality — such as spelling, grammar, and technical SEO factors — and we do bake these into our system, either directly or through channel partners. The most critical issue, though, is comprehensiveness.
For example, Wikipedia does an excellent job of providing comprehensive guides across a huge breadth of topics. Because of this, search engines tend to favor it. Far more importantly, though, readers trust Wikipedia enough to seek out and engage heavily with its articles — and for good reason.
Almost every company should try to be like Wikipedia within its own niche.
A drug company might have an online resource center for certain diseases. It should cover those diseases in as much depth as possible. A bank might offer a very specific type of credit card. It should tailor its content to become the best, most comprehensive source of information on that category of card.
Writing comprehensively makes sense for large companies with huge marketing budgets. But does that mean that early-stage companies are fighting a losing battle?
No! The big secret in content marketing is that you don’t have to outspend everyone.
You do need to be really, really focused. You need to do very well in your niche. Whatever your niche is, you should focus on covering that better than anyone else — not on having a higher word count than the bigger fish.
This is one area where search engine technology has changed the landscape a lot in just the past few years.
Google’s search engine has increasingly moved beyond its old reliance on keywords. It now evaluates websites’ expertise, authority, and trust — or E.A.T. — at the level of entire topics.
Google has become excellent at sniffing out and doing away with a lot of the old SEO shortcuts. These days, it truly does favor the highest-quality sources.
MarketMuse is focused on content strategy, not SEO.
We help companies write better content to more effectively engage with their customers. Google’s updates, though, work in our favor. As search engines improve, the content marketing industry is in some ways absorbing the SEO industry. Now more than ever, better content earns you better search results.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to Aki and the rest of the MarketMuse team on Twitter at @MarketMuseCo
Originally published at launchcapital.com.
