How to Create an AI-Powered Content Strategy with Cobomba

Cobomba uses AI to help marketers create more effective content strategies.

Using AI to surface relevant content topics, the tool offers recommendations on what content to create for each stage of the customer journey.

It's just a smarter way to get more ROI on every piece of content you plan and produce.

We caught up with Bart Frischknecht and Alex Davis, cofounders at Cobomba, to learn more.

In a single sentence or statement, describe Cobomba.

Cobomba’s content strategy platform uses artificial intelligence to audit a brand’s content, provide strategically relevant and brief-ready recommendations to systematically improve the relevance, discoverability, and value of that content, and track content performance over time.

How does Cobomba use artificial intelligence in its products?

Cobomba discovers audience themes using natural language processing after crawling websites and gathering thousands of search results.

Customers receive detailed content brief recommendations based on content gaps identified using machine learning, natural language processing, and graph analysis.

What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?

Businesses flounder when marketers are 1) uncertain about what content they need to create and 2) they don’t have enough time to create it.

Today, marketers are spending the majority of their time on content strategy and research, and still end up guessing about the marketing content that they need to produce. Cobomba provides intelligent content software to help thousands of marketers know exactly what marketing content to create and track content performance over time.

Using AI, Cobomba takes the guesswork out of content planning and gives marketers intelligent content recommendations that enable smart content planning and makes marketing content simple. With Cobomba, marketers are able to effortlessly identify what their audience is searching, as well as understand how well their content is performing in their industry.

The end result is a series of detailed content briefs with recommendations based on content gaps, relevance, and discoverability. In other words, the marketer will walk away with specific recommendations to highlight their best performing content, improve relevant but underperforming content, and create new content to fill topic gaps for each audience theme and each step of the customer journey.

What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?

If a marketer’s content doesn’t connect with customers, the organization won’t grow. By surfacing content topics and supporting resources that 1) are relevant to the marketer’s audience and 2) overlap with what’s important to the marketer’s business, Cobomba accelerates the research process and saves the marketer a significant amount of time researching, documenting, and communicating content briefs.

Cobomba streamlines the process of turning marketing goals and content topics into a content calendar. The resulting content calendar means the marketer is producing content that is more likely to succeed with the intended audience compared with internal brainstorming or limited research.

At the end of they day, we believe you should expect a minimum 10X return on your investment in a software solution. For even Cobomba’s smallest customers that means you should be making an additional $3,000 a month minimum through increased revenue and increased productivity. It will depend on your business whether that looks like closing a new deal, 30 hours less time spent on content, or fewer dollars spent on other tools.

Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)

No data requirements from the marketer since the AI component of Cobomba today is operating on search engine results pages (i.e., the open web). It is easier to get results when you already have an existing website with some initial marketing content (rather than starting from scratch with only the idea for a business or website).

Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?

Cobomba is designed for marketing managers, directors, and VPs that are responsible for their organization's content calendar.

It is also a great fit for organizations that have a dedicated content marketing manager or content marketing team.

Cobomba is particularly relevant for small to midsize organizations that may have digital marketers and content creators, but do not have the resources for a full content strategy team.

Cobomba's software is a great resource to marketers in industries where marketing content is having the biggest impact and industries where high consideration consumer choices are prevalent. Examples include B2C markets such as higher ed and healthcare and B2B markets such as software, tech, manufacturing, and financial services.

What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?

The biggest limit with AI-enabled tools today is that they provide partial solutions over a limited context. The ultimate goal for AI-enabled marketing tools is to help marketers make better decisions. Most marketing decisions involve a complex number of factors. However, AI tools are built to solve one prediction problems at a time.

It is taking time for platforms to develop a suite of prediction tools that can make decision recommendations more holistically and remove even more of the burden of data collection and analysis from marketers. The tools available today are a huge step forward because the alternative is going with our guts. That said, most tools still take some time investment and require some degree of marketing experience to utilize and more importantly, maximize their value.

What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?

The best AI-driven marketing tools will mature by interacting with marketers in a way that feels more human. A tool will feel more human when it can propose a limited number of solutions or alternatives rather than simply returning “insights.” It will feel more human when it automatically takes care of simple tasks so that the marketer can focus on marketing rather than wrangling a tool.

AI tools will accomplish this by maturing their platforms through additional AI prediction models that can be integrated behind the scenes to surface only the most relevant decision alternatives.

Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just getting started with AI?

Our expectations for AI in marketing are sky high. In many cases we expect AI tools to be "smarter" than us right out of the box. As more and more of our digital (and physical) world is automated, our expectations will continue to rise.

It is important to remember that great marketing is a complex combination of judgments and can't be handed off to a tool. The best way to think about AI tools in marketing is as just that—a tool—rather than a superhuman. Buying a robot vacuum cleaner or lawn mower can be liberating, but it is not as hands off as hiring a cleaning or lawn service. You need to embrace the technology and get your hands dirty with it for it to give you the best results.