Many of us aren't great at content creation or content strategy...
Don't worry. That's not an insult. We're only human. And content marketing is both art and science.
Humans are really good at the art part.
We excel at the creative side of the content marketing process, like compelling content creation and telling stories that resonate with customers.
But the science side of content marketing?
Eh, not so much.
We human marketers tend to use gut feeling to determine what to publish next.
Even when we do get strategic, we spend tons of time on keyword research, topic selection, and performance tracking.
Turns out, AI in content marketing can give you a huge competitive advantage on the science side of your content marketing.
In fact, AI powered content creation and strategy can help you create content faster and at scale, following a strategy backed by data—not gut instinct.
In this post, we show you how, based on years of experience researching and using AI for content marketing.
What Is AI Powered Content Creation and Strategy?
AI content creation means that a machine creates content for you.
Today, AI content creation often refers to written content like blog posts, articles, and marketing copy.
But AI is starting to show promise in creating audio and video, too.
Humans give AI a prompt, description, or parameters. The machine generates the content, often in seconds or minutes.
As a result, you can often create many pieces of content far faster than you would with human writers or content producers alone.
When we talk about AI for content generation we're simply referring to the AI tool you use to actually do AI-powered content creation.
These tools have all sorts of capabilities. Some write blog posts for you. Others generate email subject lines or ad copy.
There are even content generation AI platforms that will write anything for you on any topic. Most of the top content generation tools today focus on written content.
These tools write content for you by using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) models.
These models allow machines to understand human language and create their own language that sounds human.
This makes it possible for you to type a prompt and the machine to understand it. Then, the machine uses all the data available to it (often, billions of online articles) to generate content on your preferred topic.
And don't worry...
This is original content that a machine creates using what it's learned from online articles. The machine is not scraping pieces of existing content.
AI doesn't just create content. It also gives you insights that make your content strategy more effective.
Today, AI tools can tell you exactly what to write about and how to write it, so you cover topics comprehensively and your content gets better results.
AI does that by using the NLP capabilities we mentioned above to understand how others cover certain topics online, then surface those insights for you. They can then be deployed to create content that outmaneuvers your competitors and attracts your target audiences.
Can Google Detect AI Content Generation?
This is one of the top questions businesses and creators ask about AI content creation.
In some ways, however, it's the wrong question.
When you generate content with AI, you are using a tool to create content for you. That content may still require human editing. Humans still upload, format, optimize, and publish it.
In fact, the content usually requires human writing to make it interesting, relevant, and engaging for readers.
The better question is:
Is your content high-quality, authoritative, and relevant to what searchers are looking for?
Google will penalize low-quality content, whether it's written by a human or a machine.
Google will reward high-quality content that provides the best result for searchers. Period.
Now, keep in mind:
Search engines change their rules all the time, so it's always possible Google will crack down on AI-generated content.
But, we don't think it's likely...
Google will always crack down on spammy content written by AI or humans.
If people use AI-generated content to spam or game search results, they will surely pay the price.
But if they use AI-generated content to create more and better search results, they're going to win.
The Best AI Powered Content Generation and Strategy Tools
So, which AI tools should you actually use to create content and build smarter content strategy?
Here at Marketing AI Institute, we track thousands of AI-powered marketing and sales tools. And there are a handful we think are some of the best to investigate.
1. HubSpot - AI-Powered Content Strategy
HubSpot's Content Strategy tool uses machine learning to help marketers discover quality content ideas that perform well and validate those content ideas in the most efficient way possible.
The tool offers suggestions about which topic clusters to pursue based on competition and relevance. It also automatically performs competitive research on those topics to make sure they're worth spending time on.
The result is machine-assisted content strategy that takes a lot of guesswork-and elbow grease-out of building successful content marketing campaigns.
2. Concured - AI Content Personalization
Concured uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to show marketers exactly what topics drive engagement and what to write about next.
The result is an AI-powered Content Strategy Platform that automates content audits, topic research, the creation of data-driven content briefs, content promotion, and tracking content marketing performance. Overall, it's just a smarter way to do content creation and content strategy.
3. BrightEdge - AI-Powered Enterprise SEO
BrightEdge is a global leader in SEO and content performance marketing that blends search intent discovery, optimized content creation, and performance measurement into one integrated solution.
The solution uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover what people are searching for, align your content creation around those terms, and build a content strategy to capture more traffic and consumer interest.
4. Crayon - AI-Powered Competitive Intelligence Software
When creating content marketing strategies, lack of fresh ideas can be a major time waster, as anyone who has hit a creative wall can attest.
Crayon uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to give you competitive intelligence on exactly what your competitors are doing online.
You'll be able to see how the main pages of a company's website change over time, which in turn reveals insights about their content marketing strategy, targeting, and messaging.
This kind of information can be a goldmine of ideas for your content marketing efforts. Just search your top competitors or brands you admire using Crayon, and get ready for a torrent of inspiration.
5. MarketMuse - AI Content Planning and Optimization
MarketMuse uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help you build content marketing strategies. The tool will show you exactly what terms you need to target to compete in certain topic categories. It'll also surface topics you may need to target if you want to own certain topics.
The result? AI-powered SEO recommendations and insights that can guide your entire content creation team and your entire content creation process.
6. Acrolinx - AI-Powered Content Governance
Acrolinx is a content strategy alignment platform that helps major enterprise brands improve the quality of their content creation at scale. The tool uses sophisticated artificial intelligence, developed in one of Germany's top artificial intelligence research centers, to "read" your content and make sure it meets your brand standards, no matter who's writing it.
That includes analyzing and improving across thousands of factors, from tone of voice to approved language and style to how on-brand your content is. The result is consistent, impactful content creation across teams, no matter how big you are or what language you communicate in. 
7. Cobomba - AI-Powered Content Intelligence
Cobomba is a content intelligence platform that helps marketers be more relevant to customers in messaging, content strategy and marketing communications.
Cobomba gives you to the power to measure your content metrics over time, so you can track performance at scale. And it offers smart recommendations on how to improve content effectiveness.
8. Frase - AI-Powered Answer Bot
Frase uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to build outline briefs on different search terms.
It also features an AI-powered answer chatbot that uses content on your site to answer user questions. The chatbot uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand user queries, then serve up posts on your site that provide appropriate answers to questions.
Both features make it possible to do more intelligent content creation and strategy.
You can use the outlines to speed up content creation, automatically summarizing articles and pulling relevant statistics. You can also use the user questions collected by the answer bot to inform what you write about next.
With artificial intelligence and machine learning from Frase, any content marketer or content creator can produce smarter content.
9. Automated Insights - Content Automation
Automated Insights is an AI content creation tool that uses natural language generation (NLG) to write narratives.
The tool allows you to build templates to turn data into content. Once the template is created, you can run a spreadsheet through the AI tool and it will produce a written narrative.
You can use Automated Insights for automated content creation across use cases like: reports, press releases, and data-driven narratives that content writers can then add their own polish to. 
10. HyperWrite - AI Writer
HyperWrite uses NLG to write entire sentences and paragraphs for you. You can use the tool to write entire articles or just get a head start on your next piece of content.
We've used the tool in our own experiments and find it to be largely factually accurate and completely original.
11. Jasper - AI Writer
Jasper uses AI to generate short-form blog, email, landing page, and social media content. Give Jasper a prompt, and it'll spit out dozens of pieces of short-form content to get you started on your next piece.
12. Writesonic - AI Writer
Writesonic is an AI copywriting tool that writes content, focusing on website copy and long-form content, and its system has been trained on high-performing copy from top brands. 
13. Grammarly - AI Writing Assistant
Grammarly's AI reads and evaluates your writing, automatically flagging typos and recommending tone and language changes to make your writing more compelling and clear.
14. Descript - AI Audio and Video Editor
If you work with audio or video content, you need to check out Descript. Descript's AI makes it easy for anyone, even those without a production background, to edit audio and video as easily as you'd edit a text document.
15. Synthesia - AI Video Generation Platform
Using sophisticated AI, Synthesia creates lifelike digital avatars that read any script you give them, making creating professional looking videos a breeze, no matter what your budget.