Is AI the future of content marketing? It’s a question that many marketers have. With so many people using AI to create and optimize their content, it may seem like the answer is “yes.”
But what does this mean for real-life human writers? What areas can’t AI perform in yet? And where has it been most useful for content marketers today?
In this blog post, we’ll explore all of these questions. We will take a look at what AI can do for you and how it can help your business grow, as well as where it falls short.
Why use AI for content marketing?
High performing marketing teams are twice as likely to use AI in their marketing efforts.
Ninety percent of organizations use content in their marketing efforts and 70 percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. However, creating excellent content takes time. If you’re a small business, budget constraints can make it quite difficult to hire good content writers consistently.
Many affordable AI tools can help you increase the effectiveness of your content and scale your content by matching users’ intentions and requirements. They leverage user data to help you identify emerging trends and participate in real-time conversations with your users. Let’s look at some of the most popular ways AI is used in content marketing.
Content research
Content writers research several articles, understand the most important topics to be covered before writing drafts that align with their content strategy and reflect the voice of the brand they represent. It’s no surprise that over half of B2C organizations (55 percent) outsource some content marketing activities.
With all the information available on the internet today, sorting through everything manually would be nearly impossible. That is why most companies use tools like Google Alerts or Feedly to find relevant stories about their industry or competitors.
These tools have helped make researching easy because they filter through all the information and provide it to you in a neatly organized interface. They have also helped content marketers find influencers, blogs they need to read for inspiration, or other story ideas that can become great content marketing campaigns.
AI tools can help you find the best topic ideas by helping you identify trending articles. They can find content and keywords at a faster rate than humans. They allow you to find content that has resonated with audiences by collecting data on social engagement.
You can also program AI tools with specific instructions for finding data relevant to your niche or industry. They can also help you analyze relevant keywords and give you insights into the content you should focus on. With these insights, you can craft content that’s better than your competition and improve your website rankings.
Tools such as Buzzsumo can get you accurate social share data and help you find new keywords and topics. It’s quite useful when you need to renew the old content with decent SEO performance.
AI-powered SEO tools such as Twinword, Keyword Country, etc., can speed up your keyword research by offering trending keywords and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords. LSI keywords are conceptually related terms used by search engines to understand the content on a web page.
Content writing
The average blog post is about 1269 words long and takes 3 hours and 55 minutes to write. While good content can increase your conversion rates, lousy content can not only cause a dip in conversion but can damage the value of your brand. The right content presented to the right audience will increase traffic, engagement, and ultimately conversions.
A widespread use of artificial intelligence in content marketing is assisting marketers with their writing tasks. With this technology, you can create guidelines and give instructions such as the tone or type of language that should be included in your posts-allowing the AI platform to write more engaging content than ever before!
Content writing is one area where AI excels because it’s highly structured compared with creativity-heavy fields such as copywriting. It does this by using pre-written templates that have already worked well in previous situations as its base.
AI tools can do much of the content writing for you. These tools use Natural Language Processing to extract topics and measure their importance in a context automatically, which saves time. Furthermore, AI techniques can identify and recommend keywords that the competition ranks for and recommend other related keywords based on your industry or niche – saving you more precious time!
Although AI cannot replace human expression of emotion and convey subtle tones in writing that connects with the audience, it can help with initial drafts. AI can make the job of content writers easier by covering the essential topics in initial drafts. Content writers can then fine-tune their drafts to perfection.
AI tools such as Jasper, Copy AI, etc. can help you write fresh content from scratch or paraphrase your article so that it reads better. These tools offer headline suggestions and a list of outline options. Jasper has partnered with Surfer SEO, a content optimization tool with content writing and content optimization capabilities.
Content personalization
Fifty-six percent of companies using AI use it for predictive analytics to get consumer insights. Content marketers often struggle to create content that is specifically tailored to their viewers. A marketing team must have access to customer data to analyze to develop customized content and implement a plan to create tailored content. Just as Netflix and YouTube use AI to recommend movies and videos based on your watch history, AI can identify content that visitors will engage with based on their historical content consumption.
Using the data they can mine about website visitors in a CRM system, AI-driven software and machine learning systems can retrieve relevant information about customers’ interests and preferences to create tailored content for individual tastes. With parameters such as content length and content format gleaned from the metadata, sophisticated AI models can recommend the next best content to recommend to the visitor.
While most of the examples discussed concern marketing departments looking to find new ways of engaging with audiences, there are numerous other applications for AI beyond just advertising or public relations work. For example, several retailers are using chatbots on their websites to improve customer service by giving shoppers personalized help when they need it without contacting human agents through social media platforms like Facebook Messenger or Slack.
For content personalization, you can use marketing automation solutions such as Hubspot, Personyze, etc. These AI-powered tools can analyze your customers’ behavior, send them targeted messages and promotions, and increase customer loyalty. They can track interactions with the customer on multiple social media platforms and help you transition from customer segmentation to a genuinely individual content experience. Creating personalized messaging will increase customer engagement with minimal effort and maintenance.
Content optimization
AI tools can also help you optimize your content by reading top results for a search query and provide insights about the topics you should consider. These tools use Natural Language Processing to extract topics and measure their importance in a context automatically. Furthermore, AI tools can identify content gaps, identify keywords the competition ranks for, and recommend keywords to include in your content.
AI-powered tools such as Surfer SEO, Dashword, etc. can help you optimize your content by providing easy to read graphs that show how you fare against your competitors for a particular keyword in real-time. These tools are ideal if you’re looking for a data-driven as well as user-friendly experience.
Copy editing
In addition, AI software can also help you with copy editing. It helps by identifying plagiarism and other text violations that are not easily caught by the human eye because of how quickly it reads through content to determine these things. AI is a good assistant in this area as long-form content has become more prevalent over time, making manual detection difficult for humans to do independently.
AI is also better at finding patterns than humans are which means they can quickly notice things like keyword stuffing, poor formatting, duplicate content and other SEO issues that often go unnoticed.
If you want to resonate with your audience, you need to adapt their tone and use the right words. AI-powered copy editing tools help you edit your content for tone, grammar, syntax, style, spelling and punctuation. They also have plagiarism detection features. Grammarly and ProWritingAid are some AI-powered solutions you can check out.
Areas in which AI needs Improvement
AI is taking over more and more aspects of content marketing with time. It’s no surprise that content marketers feel that AI is coming for their jobs. AI has several benefits in various parts of the process, but there are also some drawbacks.
Creativity is not AI’s strong suit: The content you’re posting on your blogging platform might be great to read, but does it really have that “wow” factor? AI is still a long way away from being able to create something innovative or original. Content will always need the human touch for people to truly enjoy and share it.
Many people use AI because they don’t want the hassle and time commitment that comes with writing blog posts – but this strategy won’t yield any results. In creativity and innovation, humans are still better than machines when it comes down to producing genuinely original work. Lacking this ability will cause your business to lag behind, especially if you rely too heavily on technology-driven solutions. When writing new posts or content, we often get stuck at specific points where creativity is needed, and AI cannot provide this type of assistance just yet.
AI can’t convey tone or emotion: Content marketers need to empathize with their audience and deliver messages that resonate. AI cannot do this without being programmed by humans first. Content marketers need to know what emotions are appropriate given the topic of a blog post – if it’s about an exciting new product, then you should use words like “super,” “awesome”, and “amazing.” If your blog post is going to discuss how people will soon have more options in retirement plans, you’ll want warmer phrases like “sit back and relax.”
AI lacks accuracy: One of the critical features of any good content marketing campaign? Accuracy! Although AI can post on social media platforms, it can’t edit content or monitor inaccuracies as humans can. For example, an email marketing campaign needs to be checked by a human for the products, service, personalization, etc. If you have a research-heavy blog post to be written, it’s best to trust a human writer with this task, rather than rely on AI. AI cannot fact-check and discern between truth and fiction. It can pull up some facts, but it’s up to you, as the writer, to double check the facts before publishing the article.
AI cannot perform complex tasks: We’ve all heard about artificial intelligence becoming more advanced and doing things like driving cars. But are we ready for AI to take over our jobs? You’ll never get an accurate answer when there’s so much concern about automation replacing humans! For now, content marketers should stick with what they know best – their brain power! You can’t let AI tools create a marketing strategy, build marketing collateral or be in charge of the whole content management system. You still need to drive the strategy and execution, but can take the help of AI.
Wrap up
Artificial Intelligence tools are not perfect, and you will need to improvise the results and tweak the content to make it work for you. You need to make sure that your writing is compelling and understandable and also check if the arguments made in your writing are logical and the facts are accurate. However, these tools can make your life much easier by making the entire process of content planning, creation and distribution more effective. Content marketing is constantly in flux, but artificial intelligence is transforming it and exerting a considerable impact on the industry, creating experiences similar to, if not better than, human intelligence.
To sum up how AI helps us as content marketers:
AI is good at performing repetitive tasks, like researching and writing content. But it’s not yet able to do more complex jobs that require creativity or innovation – which means humans will always be needed for those!
The downside? With all the automation happening in marketing today, marketers are feeling overwhelmed by their efforts. Marketing can still benefit from some help with research and copy editing but should never replace a human touch altogether.
So yes, AI may have taken over content marketing in some areas—but we’ll need humans around for another few decades before it completely replaces us!
