“There's always room for improvement” - you’ve likely heard that phrase more times than you can count. The reason this saying has been beaten into our brains over and over again is because it’s true. We are all human and we all make mistakes; therefore, there is always room for improvement in anything and everything that we do - including our content marketing strategy.
When it comes to content strategy, we’re really good at coming up with creative ideas to execute great content programs. You know, things like: brainstorming inspiring, valuable content ideas; creating big, juicy hooks for our articles, podcasts, interactive tools, and videos; and telling stories that resonate with other humans.
The part we’re not so great at?
Analyzing data at scale to determine exactly what type of content we should create to drive engagement and performance. Or to find the best content opportunities that will resonate with our audience and also differentiates us from our competitors.
This is where there is room for improvement.
Oftentimes, content strategy is based on gut instinct or qualitative research. (Trust me, we’re all guilty of this - lack of time, lack of tools, lack of…..you name it.) These methods can produce results. But they’re not consistently able to deliver content strategy recommendations based on qualitative data at scale that best meet the needs of our audiences.
Not to mention, many of us aren’t operating with a sophisticated and consistent content strategy as it is.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, just 38% of content marketers have a documented strategy. Another 36% say they have one, but it’s not documented. And 26% say they don’t have one at all. Yikes.
This is why brands are turning to artificial intelligence to build smart(er) content strategies.
There’s a lot of hype around AI, but behind the buzz is a very real set of technologies that have the ability to drive content marketing performance and ensure that it plays a very meaningful role in the marketing toolkit.
That’s because AI tools powered can deploy machine learning to analyze data at scale, then use that data to make predictions about content performance.
The result?
Smarter content strategies that actual produce results.
Here’s how.
1. AI helps you attract more customers
When it comes to content marketing, the content best suited to customer preferences is the content that pays the bills. Give consumers exactly what they’re looking for, and you build highly valuable trust and relationships with consumers that lead to more sales. (Yes, please!)
But to do that, you need to know what they’re looking for in the first place. And, when they’re looking for it. Good news is, artificial intelligence excels at determining what content people want.
AI-powered tools exist today that are able to assess your site data and consumer behaviors to figure out what people want to consume and in what way. These tools can also look at data from other sources online, including competitors and industry-leading outlets, and determine which topics are most popular.
In fact, AI tools can do all of the following better and faster than humans:
- Research keywords
- Select successful content topics.
- Identify content opportunities.
- Determine which content formats work best.
- Extract what works in other successful content online.
When it comes to building a content strategy, AI is actually better suited to knowing what audiences want than we do—because it’s able to look at far more data generated by content consumers than we can. And not just initial surface data, but datasets linked to datasets, linked to…...well, you get the idea.
2. AI helps you better understand your customers.
AI doesn’t just look at more data than us. It also extracts better insights from that data.
When people consume your content, they generate data that, analyzed effectively, offers more insights into what they want out of their content.
We try to do this today with the traffic and attention they’re able to attract to content. We analyze keyword data and analytics to better understand how people use our sites and consume our content, then make predictions about what additional content to create. The most analytical among us are certainly able to use data to improve content performance. But, we have a limit on how effectively we can extract insights from data.
Artificial intelligence, however, has an almost unlimited capacity to analyze data at scale, then deliver actionable insights based on that data to inform your content strategy.
Today, AI-powered tools exist that can gather insights into how your site visitors consume content, no matter how many data points these content consumers generate. The insights generated from this analysis span everything from what content works to what content your prospects are looking for to what topics are driving customer preferences.
Over time, a human might be able to collect some of these insights. But AI-powered technology does it in real-time, at scale. Which means content strategies informed by these real-time, scaled insights are able to adapt on the fly to consumer needs.
3. AI scales the execution of your strategy.
AI gives you a solid strategic foundation to attract and win more customers with content. But it also gives you the critical ability to scale your execution.
We all know that content marketers are overwhelmed. We must create more content than ever to win trust in the modern marketplace, often with limited resources. Even with an AI-powered strategy, we still need to execute. Thankfully, AI can help there, too.
AI-powered tools offer the ability to automate or augment your capabilities as a content marketer, so you can execute a content strategy more productively. AI can help with—or handle entirely—all the following content execution tasks:
- Research for individual content assets.
- Checking grammar, tone, and readability.
- Converting audio to text.
- Creating social posts from links.
- Building email newsletters.
These are just a sample of AI-powered content marketing tasks, but should give you an idea of what’s possible.
For more inspiration, check out Marketing AI Institute's Marketing AI Buyer's Guide.
Additionally, one tool to check out for your content strategy needs is Cobomba, an AI-powered tool for content planning and intelligence. Cobomba uses AI to show you what content and messaging customers want. Try it out below.
Patti Doyle
An accomplished and innovative top B2C and B2B marketing executive with profit and loss responsibility, as well as extensive experience in marketing strategy, business development, digital marketing, advertising, brand management, CRM and eCommerce.