Marketing is a pretty broad discipline, and it seems with each decade and technological advancement, a new specialism gets added to the roster.
There’s social media and influencer marketing, public relations, event management, digital marketing and SEO, the list goes on, so for simplicity’s sake I’m going to stay on theme and focus on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support content marketing strategy (I promise this will be the last blog dedicated to content marketing for a while!).
Rewind, what is content marketing again?
Let’s just recap what exactly it is, before deep diving into robots and super-computer brains, because if we don’t have it clear in our tiny human minds what we mean when we say, ‘content marketing’, some parts of the blog might not make a whole lotta sense.
Content marketing can be any form of content, from news to white papers, e-books, podcasts, newsletters both on and offline, how-to guides, infographics, photos, blogs, case studies, you get the picture. What makes content marketing different from just any piece of guff produced by a person is the objective of the content.
This can be specific based on the business’s objectives, but in general it will be to: raise brand awareness, reinforce the brand, nurture and convert leads, and develop a loyal community.
So how does AI factor into strategy? I’ve whittled it down to 3 phases of AI integration, to keep things nice and concise. Let’s get stuck in.
Preparation
Before any strategy can be formulated, you need to do your homework first, so at this stage think of AI as your research assistant, doing all of the boring grunt work. It can help you identify objectives/goals, by conducting market analysis on external and internal data.
For example, your business isn’t meeting sales targets on a specific product line (AI analysis on internal sales figures), however wider analysis of the market and competitors (also AI-generated) shows there is an unmet demand for this product, therefore content marketing efforts should be directed to this particular product – hurrah you have a clear goal now!
It will also help you identify and forecast any trends and insights that should influence your strategy. For example, your target audience is unaware of a particular feature of your product, therefore content should address the knowledge gaps and seek to educate the audience. AI can do this by surveying online material, like social posts and chatbot threads, as well as internal communications.
Application
This is typically where most will associate AI’s involvement in marketing, with the likes of ChatGPT generating content at the speed of light. We can all see why there’s a big benefit to being able to produce more content in a shorter amount of time, but there’s actually more to it.
More sophisticated AI can now personalise content depending on the customer journey, e.g. if they’re not yet a customer, or have been a loyal one for years. It can also enhance engagement by producing and presenting content to customers based on their unique preferences, for example when a customer fills out a call-to-action form specific to product training, they automatically receive an email with training dates, see targeted adverts of the course, and then get a pop-up message on the website’s chat box asking what they’d like to know about the product. All communication and content have been tailored to that customer’s actions and intent, and it all happened within 5 minutes thanks to AI.
Oh, and let’s not forget functions like AI being able to optimise copy for search engines at the click of a button.
Revision
Just as important as doing your homework, it’s crucial that content strategies are evaluated so you know what worked well, and of course what didn’t, so that it can be improved upon the next time you implement a content strategy (or any strategy for that matter). This was historically a laborious task for marketing executives, combing through countless reports, whether it’s Mailchimp campaign results, PR clippings or website analytics.
Now, AI can track the performance of a campaign and collate it into a pretty report ready to present to the wider team, within minutes. All you need to do is ensure you provide it with enough data and intel to make the analysis accurate. For example, if you rolled out a product training content strategy that involved email marketing campaigns, but didn’t submit all of the relevant email reports to the AI, it will only provide half the picture.
It’s also prudent to do this type of analysis halfway through a campaign strategy, to see what is and isn’t resonating with your audience, as well as some A/B testing with important copy, like headlines etc.
AI can be a minefield, especially at the rate it’s advancing, and as a business you wouldn’t be blamed for feeling guilty that you’re not using it or getting the most out of it, which is where we come in! We can help cut through the AI noise and help you utilise a tool that’s becoming invaluable, just drop us a line here.
