AI content marketing is a major trend in 2023. While many companies have used artificial intelligence for years to collect insights into keywords, track details about the ROI of their campaigns, and analyze customers, the potential of the technology is growing.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT and generative AI algorithms, marketers have begun discovering new ways to streamline and optimize the content creation process. Studies now suggest that the market for AI in advertising and content marketing will reach a value of $107.5 billion by 2028.
This has led to quite a lot of controversy in the digital marketing world. While some content experts fear their roles will become obsolete in the age of AI content marketing, others see an opportunity.
Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the ways content experts and marketing teams can leverage the power of AI to enhance their campaign results.
Here’s your complete guide to maximizing the power of AI in content marketing.
What is Content Marketing AI?
First, let’s start with an introduction to artificial intelligence and how it impacts the content marketing world. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a term most people are familiar with today.
It’s the name for a variety of technologies that make machines capable of carrying out functions similar to human beings. There are various elements of AI in the modern world, from machine learning to natural language processing and, of course, generative AI.
In the content marketing world, AI currently acts as a complementary tool for promotional experts. It can help with everything from analyzing competitors, market trends, and customers to creating content based on directional input.
Currently, 51% of companies say AI is important to their marketing success, and 60% of teams say they use AI for some part of their marketing operations. In the past, AI in content marketing was typically used for data analysis, targeting, and insights.
However, now that generative AI has emerged, content professionals are using artificial intelligence to automate and augment more of their marketing strategies.
11 Ways to Leverage the Power of AI Content Marketing
Content remains one of the most powerful marketing tools used by brands in the modern world. Virtually every B2B and B2C business with a major following has its own content marketing strategy. This could include creating SEO-optimized blog posts, writing video scripts, producing podcasts, or simply creating social media and email marketing campaigns.
However, as the world becomes more overwhelmed with content, business leaders and marketing teams increasingly need to use every tool at their disposal to make their marketing campaigns stand out. That’s where AI content marketing comes in.
Here are just some of the best ways you can maximize the power of AI in your content.
1. Analyzing Customer Behavior and Trends
As of 2023, around 93% of businesses are using AI to personalize experiences for their customers. Consumers want to see content that’s relevant to their specific needs and goals. However, creating this kind of valuable content requires companies to access and use huge volumes of data.
Manually assessing the behaviors of customers by tracking trends on the web, pulling insights from website visits, and more would be a time-consuming and complex process. But, with AI, companies can rapidly process huge amounts of data in no time.
Tools like “poll the people” can even provide insight into customer trends and preferences, thanks to Open AI technology. With AI development, businesses can create better content by analyzing customer behavior en masse to understand what content drives the best results.
Some AI-powered marketing tools can even help organizations to determine what kind of content they should write by monitoring customer interactions and posts across the web. For instance, Pecan analyzes social media posts, online reviews, and feedback to provide companies with actionable insights to improve their content marketing strategy.
2. Analyzing Competitors
If there’s one thing artificial intelligence excels at, it’s data analysis. While customer analysis is excellent for gaining insights into how you can improve and personalize your campaigns for your target audience, it’s also worth looking at your competitors too.
Analyzing your competition is one of the best ways to develop a more successful content strategy. It can help you to determine what kinds of content you should be producing to connect with your audience. Plus, you can even use insights to find keyword gaps to boost your online presence.
AI-driven SEO tools can show you which keyword opportunities you’re missing out on. Tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Sprout Social are all great for scanning other pieces of content published by key players in your industry.
They can then gather crucial information about the marketing tactics your competitors use, with insights into traffic sources, backlinks, keywords, and more.
3. Brainstorming Content Ideas
Ideation is often the first step in the content marketing process. However, consistently developing interesting ideas for your content is easier said than done. Even the most creative professionals can struggle with inspiration blocks. Fortunately, AI can help.
HubSpot found that 33% of marketers using AI for content marketing today use it to generate inspiration and ideas for marketing content. AI can rapidly come up with ideas for your social media posts, blogs, email campaigns, and more, using huge volumes of data. Considering the extensive user base of over 4.8 billion people worldwide who engage in social media – comprising over half the global population – integrating AI in content creation ensures relevance and resonance with your diverse audience.
Solutions like Kive.ai can even help teams to create comprehensive mood boards they can use for video marketing campaigns. Some AI tools can even be fed with insights and statistics from your previous content marketing campaigns to help you build a specific strategy.
You can use AI chatbots like ChatGPT to brainstorm a list of topics and ideas by just giving the system a specific topic to work with. This can take a lot of the complexity out of the initial process of building your marketing strategies.
4. Design Content Outlines
Once you’ve developed a good selection of content ideas, AI tools can help you to determine how you’re going to structure and create that content. Some AI writing tools can create templates for landing pages or specific marketing campaigns.
Others can create comprehensive briefs for content creators to follow, outlining sub-sections and headings for a blog, key topics, and ideas. Just keep in mind some solutions like ChatGPT will usually generate ideas based on other articles already present on the web.
This could mean you end up with a relatively generic blog post or article if you don’t also do your own research into which topics to cover. However, you can build out on the briefs you create, using AI analysis of your competitors and customers to help you.
You can also feed some of your own templates and ideas into certain tools, so you can ensure your content marketing efforts sound and look consistent.
5. Writing Content Drafts
AI content writing tools are becoming increasingly popular in today’s world. With your content ideas and brief in hand, you can use an AI-powered writer or AI text generators like Jasper, WriteSonic, or even ChatGPT to generate a first draft of any piece you want to produce.
Some solutions, like Shopia, can even research high-performing articles for you, follow writing templates, and create content that’s optimized for search engines. The types of content companies can produce with AI today are practically endless.
You can create everything from blog posts and listicles to emails, press releases, and social media captions. The key thing to remember here is that, at present, AI content marketing solutions are still best suited for draft purposes only.
While many solutions can help you to build amazing content, it’s still important to ensure you edit and optimize that content with a human touch. Even as AI tools continue to develop, they still lack the creativity and emotional intelligence that makes human content shine.
6. Edit and Proofread Content
Speaking of editing and proofreading, while some AI tools may struggle to proof their own content, there are solutions that are excellent for enhancing human-written pieces. AI content editing tools like Notion AI and Grammarly are valuable assistants in the editorial process.
They use natural language processing and machine learning to help creators fix incoherent phrasing, grammar mistakes, and typos. Plus, many solutions can offer suggestions to help ensure your content follows the correct brand style and tone of voice.
For instance, with Grammarly, marketers can set goals for their AI system that reflect their brand’s style guide to receive tailored editing suggestions. Jasper has its own brand voice feature, which allows users to teach it what their brand should sound like using examples.
Once again, it’s worth remembering these tools aren’t foolproof. Around 33% of marketers are now using AI tools to save time on the content production process, and editing solutions can help with this. However, they can make mistakes and suggest the wrong strategies from time to time.
7. Check Content for Plagiarism
For obvious reasons, plagiarism is a big “no-go” in the content marketing world. Not only will it damage your search engine rankings, but it can also harm your reputation. Not to mention, you might end up in legal trouble with other companies.
With so much content already available on the web, it’s easy to create pieces that are too similar to the posts already out there. This is particularly true if you’re using AI to generate content. Tools like ChatGPT create pieces based on the datasets they’ve collected from the web. They don’t create entirely fresh content from scratch.
Fortunately, you can use AI content marketing tools to check whether you’re going to flag any plagiarism issues with your posts before you publish them. Grammarly has its own in-built plagiarism checker that compares your content to billions of databases.
There are even tools out there that can help you to determine whether a piece sounds like it was created by an AI bot. This could be crucial to retaining a “human voice” in your posts.
8. Upgrade your Search Engine Optimization
Content marketing and SEO often go hand in hand. However, optimizing your content for search engines can be a complex and time-consuming process. It involves investing in extensive keyword research, considering customer intent, and mastering keyword placement.
Some tools, like ChatGPT and other AI keyword generators, can accelerate this process by creating comprehensive lists of keywords as well as keyword variations in seconds. The same solution can then categorize these keywords into topic clusters to help you develop a more comprehensive content strategy.
In 2023, a report found that keyword identification was one of the most common uses for AI in the marketing world. However, it’s worth noting that some AI SEO tools are better at identifying keywords and phrases than others. Solutions like ChatGPT (the free version) don’t have access to the search result pages, so they can’t check for keywords very accurately. That’s why many businesses turn to SaaS SEO consultants to help them navigate the complex landscape of AI-powered tools and ensure they’re using the best solutions for their specific needs.
However, Bard, Google’s AI tool, is connected to the Google Keyword planner, so it can give you more insights into keyword overlap and cannibalization. There are also tools specifically built for SEO, like SurferSEO, which comes with more granular search engine insights.
9. Rapidly Repurpose your Content
Knowing how to effectively repurpose your content is one of the best ways to increase growth and generate a higher ROI from your campaigns. Companies can spend hundreds of dollars producing a single article, so it only makes sense to find ways to use it as much as possible.
Unfortunately, repurposing content can be difficult. There are different rules, guidelines, and best practices to follow when you’re producing content for blog posts, social media, email marketing campaigns, videos, and landing pages.
Fortunately, AI can help. Solutions like Jasper can rapidly summarize blog posts and articles, so you can include snippets in your email marketing campaigns. AI transcription platforms can convert YouTube videos and podcasts into written content you can use for articles.
There are even AI video and AI voice generator available that can take pieces of content from your existing content and turn them into scripts and visual pieces.
10. Collect Insights from Marketing Campaigns
While AI solutions are excellent at providing you with the initial insights you need to create compelling marketing campaigns, their analytical capabilities go much further. Analyzing the performance and ROI of your marketing strategies is essential to success.
It’s how you can ensure you know what works for your brand and what doesn’t, so you can consistently optimize and improve your online presence. Before AI, marketers were forced to manually comb through data to create their own reports and graphs.
However, with AI tools, you can rapidly assess all kinds of data, from traffic on your website to engagement rates, to help you make the most of your future marketing efforts. Tools like Sprout Social, Surfer SEO, and more can all offer access to valuable metrics.
They can help you to figure out which of your content marketing campaigns are increasing sales and brand awareness and even offer tips on how to improve your content in the future. Some tools can even offer insights into content performance in real-time, with traffic and engagement tracking.
11. Improve Content Distribution
Finally, producing regular, engaging, and valuable content is crucial to today’s marketing teams. It’s the best way to improve brand awareness and connect with your target audience. But, to get the most out of your marketing campaigns, you need to know how to effectively promote and distribute content at the best times and on the right channels.
Figuring out when and where to post different types of content can be complex. It often requires examining large amounts of data and insights. However, with AI, you can streamline this process. AI tools built into social media management platforms like Later can even help you to determine the best time to post content based on your audience engagement. Another tool is OneUp, where you can simultaneously post across various Facebook groups, streamlining the process and saving significant time and energy.
Using machine learning, AI can analyze customer data and behavior and ensure you’re distributing content across the right channels at the most effective times. You can even use AI tools to help you create more effective content marketing calendars and schedules.
With a little insight from AI, you can ensure your posts reach as many people as possible, whether you’re sharing content via email, social media, or on your website blog. Incorporating QR codes into content distribution strategies helps connect your physical and digital promotions making it easier for people to check your content.
Will AI Content Marketing Replace Content Experts?
As AI content marketing tools grow ever more advanced, the use cases for content and marketing teams are constantly evolving. Clearly, there are a lot of different ways you can use AI to maximize the performance of your campaigns. This leads some companies to wonder whether content marketers and experts will one day be replaced by AI entirely.
However, the reality is that the best, most engaging content is still produced and managed by human beings. While AI tools can streamline and enhance your content marketing process, it’s intended as a tool to supplement and augment marketing teams.
Human professionals are still necessary to train AI algorithms, improve the quality of content, and create pieces that resonate with customers emotionally. While 77% of companies believe that AI will help them create content more efficiently, the majority also believe there’s still a need for a human element. Eliminating people from your content marketing strategy entirely could be a risky move.
After all, it’s still human beings who know best how to create unique pieces and interact with customers in an emotional, engaging format. AI content generators can really only produce content based on what’s already available online.
This means the content you create with AI solutions might sound fantastic and unique, but it could also be quite generic.
Using AI in Content Marketing
Ultimately, artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for content creation and marketing teams, and it’s growing more valuable by the day. At this point, any business that doesn’t invest in AI for its content strategies could be missing out on a huge range of benefits.
Artificial intelligence can help you streamline the content creation process, increase your ROI from each campaign, and boost your chances of higher revenue. It can even give you the tools you need to analyze and understand your audience, competitors, and the marketplace.
Investing in AI content marketing strategies is a great way to take your promotional campaigns to the next level. Just remember that AI still can’t do everything for you. It’s still important to invest in human talent to ensure your content stands out.
FAQ
How is AI used in content marketing?
AI can be used in content marketing for a range of different purposes. It can help marketers to streamline the creation process, conduct research, and optimize campaigns for different goals. Some AI tools can even create drafts of content and assist with strategies based on a proper SEO checklist.
How will AI change content marketing?
AI is likely to have a massive impact on the content marketing world as we know it. The right tools can significantly reduce the amount of work content marketers need to do to analyze their competitors and customers and create content outlines. AI can also help generate page titles, content, article ideas, and more to guide the content strategy.
What are the benefits of AI for content marketing?
AI-driven content marketing strategies can help companies to automate mundane and time-consuming tasks. It can assist with scheduling posts, tracking analytics, creating content briefs, and even writing drafts. Some tools also help companies to improve their search engine rankings. This frees up marketers to focus on the more creative aspects of building content.
Will content marketers be replaced by AI?
Artificial intelligence has started to automate various marketing tasks, such as data analysis, customer segmentation, and brief creation. However, it’s unlikely that AI will completely eliminate the need for content marketing professionals. AI still can’t fully understand customer intent or sentiment or create entirely unique content from scratch.
Should I use AI to write content?
While you can use AI to write drafts of various kinds of content, it’s worth making sure you also add your own human touch. AI can rapidly create blog posts, social media posts, video descriptions, and more, but it usually generates content based on what’s already available on the web.
