Gradually and almost imperceptibly, artificial intelligence (AI) has crept into our lives and took a significant place in them. No one has realized when it turned into a familiar and commonplace phenomenon, ceasing to be a frightening and incomprehensible technology from sci-fi movies.

These days, the role of AI in marketing and business is difficult to overestimate. Many business processes have become automated thanks to various machines and software.

Thus, AI helps analyze consumer data and interests, offer targeted advertising, track sales, improve communication with customers, and predict their behavior patterns. The use of machine learning, which is useful in analyzing texts, images, and audio, is also growing.

With that said, let’s find out how you can use AI in your content marketing campaigns.

Publish Google Docs to your blog in 1-click

• ✅ Export in seconds (not hours)
• ✅ Less VAs, interns, employees
• ✅ Save 6-100+ hours/week

Check out Wordable now →

Why do you need AI in content marketing?

How much time does your team spend on various content activities? These include keyword discovery, subject line research, drafting, headline optimization, and developing your content strategy. All these are time-consuming but essential for successful content marketing campaigns.

Now imagine a scenario where you don’t need to perform most of these activities – you simply set them up. That’s how AI transforms content marketing campaigns. It helps you perform your everyday tasks, allowing you to focus on more important things that drive business growth.

How companies use AI in content marketing

Many companies have already successfully incorporated AI into their processes and products, with Oracle and Salesforce being among the first to try it. Thus, Einstein in Salesforce’s CRM can categorize images from social networks, read emails, and automatically evaluate potential customers.

Another popular example of AI implementation is chatbots. These are especially worth looking at if your business and products are geared toward mobile. Then you also have open-source software. Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have released libraries of machine learning algorithms.

Then there’s also the progressive and revolutionary SSL (Self-Supervised Learning) method, which can be used in content marketing. SSL is a means for training computers to do tasks without humans providing labeled data (i.e., a picture of a cat accompanied by the label “cat”). It’s a subset of unsupervised learning where outputs or goals are derived by machines that label, categorize, and analyze information on their own, then draw conclusions based on connections and correlations. One of the key advantages of self-supervised learning is the tremendous increase in the amount of data yielded by AI.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the AI market will reach $190.61 billion by 2025. Deloitte also found that early adopters of AI expect it to change their industries. 83% of market leaders said they have achieved significant or moderate benefits with AI.

The main benefits of AI for companies are as follows:

• Enhanced features, functions, and product/service performance;
• Automation of various processes (e.g. routine tasks) to free employees and allow them to get more creative, generate better decisions, and create new innovative solutions, etc.;
• Optimized internal business operations, and website building;
• Optimized marketing, content creation, and sales.

There are special services that allow you to do without many employees. For example, Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) allows you to create sites based on AI. Of course, you’ll still need to select content, pictures, and write the text for the site, but the AI will build the site itself, which is a great time and money saver.

AI recommends content considering human interests and needs. Take Netflix-like sites for example – AI automatically starts the next episode of the series or offers a movie that’s similar to what the user was watching or searching for.

As for content creation, AI can create media material, e.g. write product descriptions based on filled-in specs. In fact, such material is not much different from what a person could write. Of course, it may not have any complicated turns, but the text will still be quite readable.

Automation in marketing allows AI to analyze user behavior and track preferences to create relevant offers. The system creates and sends out offers to groups and individual customers, allowing you to shed some of your responsibilities and save time. The AI actively sends out offers to participants, increasing the number of customers and generating revenue for the business.

Social media connects millions of people around the world who join groups, discuss topics, or search for information on social networks. AI collects data on user activity and offers ads according to their interests. In sales, robots act as managers who send out offers to leads, peeling apart those who are not ready to cooperate.

AI could replace content marketing agencies

While it can be difficult to completely separate human involvement from technology, when robots and other AI-powered devices take over routine tasks, it’s entirely possible that some businesses, such as content marketing agencies, could suffer as it evolves.

A good example is Cosabella (an Italian lingerie brand), which replaced its agency with Albert, an AI system that manages the marketing and media buying processes, including email, search, mobile, and social media. The company has reported exponential revenue growth and cost reductions.

As AI evolves, agencies must rethink their approach and become more creative to stay ahead of the curve.

In web design, AI may well replace humans, as well. And it can decide what the site’s layout will look like and what colors should be used. Also, it selects fonts, button shapes, etc., based on an analysis of user behavior.

As for commercial websites, AI systems can place web page elements most rationally and also decide on the display sequence to customers.

AI systems decipher human behavior and choose relevant topics and keywords, making content more engaging. It can correct errors on site pages and analyze external and internal rankings. Unlike an optimizer, AI can process much information in the shortest time possible.

However, as long as you can still have your job, let’s find out how AI can help you improve your content marketing campaigns.

AI in content marketing campaigns

AI is changing the way brands and marketers create and distribute content. Advanced AI systems can read and write in human language, learning a little more and getting a little better every time. As a result, they can read, analyze, suggest, and write content like humans or even better. They can analyze previous information and learn fast. Thus, AI can play an integral role in repetitive tasks to help your team save time.

AI also allows you to create, brainstorm, promote, and optimize content marketing campaigns. It provides you with valuable insights from the data you collect, helping you make data-driven decisions that positively impact your content marketing campaigns. Many AI software development companies are working days and nights to develop an enhanced version of the content marketing platform to meet human intelligence.

How you can use AI to optimize your content marketing campaigns

Study Previous Campaigns

To improve your content marketing campaigns, you need information about previous campaigns. By understanding the flaws of those campaigns, you can optimize your current ones. AI extracts valuable information from data from your past campaigns and effectively separates ideas from the “noise.”

AI can also help analyze your competitors to improve your marketing efforts.

Use Right Topics

No matter how experienced you are in your field, finding topics your audience is interested in reading can be challenging. Thus, even if your blog posts are well-researched and contain helpful information, it won’t take long if your chosen topics aren’t relevant to your audience. In other words, you must ensure that the subject you want to cover appeals to your TA (target audience). Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.

Trying to check what your competitors are writing by reading their blogs takes a lot of time. In addition, you have no way of knowing whether your strategy is working. AI-based predictive analytics can conduct competitive research on your chosen topics and predict your TA’s feelings and reactions to them.

With its ability to analyze vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured data from various sources, AI extends the power of predictive analytics. AI knows precisely how to extract extremely valuable information from collected data. This means that an AI-powered predictive analytics tool will collect data from competing Websites, search engines, social media, ads, and more. This will allow you to understand better what your TA is looking for in content and wants to read about.

For example, HubSpot uses this technology to identify groups of topics and suggest relevant ones that your TA is likely to read. In addition, this content strategy tool provides various metrics, e.g. the competitiveness of a particular topic and its performance.

Similarly, Crayon is another tool you can use to analyze millions of different sources online, including your competitors’ sites. This way it will be much easier to understand your TA’s interests and choose content accordingly.

It will also allow you to identify content gaps in your niche and address those topics with blog posts and other types of content. It’s a great way to answer your audience’s questions, providing valuable information they can’t find anywhere else.

Create and Scale Great Visual Content

Your content marketing team may have access to various visual elements they use for campaigns. AI analyzes these images and determines the right content for your TA. It provides marketers with information about what consumers buy, click, and share.

Cortex, for example, uses AI to continuously help marketing teams choose the best images for their brands. The tool analyzes images, colors, hashtags, keywords, frame rate, timing, and more to help you identify the elements your TA likes best.

Adobe Sensei is another AI Script Generator that can help you identify what’s in a photo. With this tool, you can easily analyze style, context, and quality and search for images in Adobe Stock using image-related search queries.

Unfortunately, we are still years or even decades away from AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), an intelligent agent that can match or even exceed human intelligence and perform various tasks that humans can perform. As mentioned earlier, this applies to text writing, however, it would be also fair to mention an exceptional example, e.g. when a Japanese AI almost won a literary prize for a short-form novel it wrote.

Nevertheless, content writers and journalists don’t have to worry about AI writers stealing their work, at least not in the near future. In fact, these smart machines can even generate content that doesn’t require excellent writing skills.

Some of the world’s biggest media companies have deployed AI systems to create regular sports or financial reports, saving a lot of time and allowing journalists and reporters to focus on more complex stories. Thus, Bloomberg News uses Cyborg, a robot reporter that accelerates and scales the company’s annual earnings reports. In other words, this advanced software tool analyzes a financial report and quickly generates a short article containing the most important details and numbers.

However, “content” doesn’t just refer to stories, reports, or blog posts. As we have mentioned earlier, product descriptions are also included in this category. Online stores can have hundreds of products, and each of them must be adequately described. This can be a time-consuming task, complicated by the fact that each description must be unique for SEO. With AI, you can automate this process and make it much easier.

Use Predictive Analysis

Accenture once found that 91% of consumers will buy products they remember, recognize, and make appropriate recommendations. 83% of consumers will also share their data if it means they get a personalized experience.

AI can help you accurately predict customer behavior and deliver relevant content using consumer data. It uses consumer data to predict and recommend what consumers want. Create content recommendations by analyzing consumers’ content habits.

AI systems learn better from user actions and therefore are able to better predict what consumers want to hear, watch, or read next. This can help you deliver a superior consumer experience.

As mentioned earlier. collecting data about your customers allows you not only to offer personalized content but also predict their behavior in the future.

Predictive analytics can help you with the following activities:

• Find potential customers;
• Calculate customer lifetime value;
• Provide client recommendations based on their website behavior or previous purchases;
• Сalculate demand for a product/service;
• Forecast sales, customer outflows, and payment dates;
• Create sales plans for the future, etc.

More and more solutions emerge in this field, e.g. Infer, HighRadius, SAS Advanced Analytics, IBM SPSS, SAP HANA, and many others.

However, if you’re using these advanced solutions like SAP HANA for the first time, it’s highly recommended to seek SAP consulting solutions or the ones that fit the best for your needs. These experts can help you get the most out of these tools.

Use Personalization

AI tools also allow you to take advantage of personalization opportunities. You can create content that will initiate conversations and increase the profitability of your marketing campaigns.

While personalized content is clearly not the latest trend, it’s increasingly gaining traction, affecting all aspects of marketing. Even those companies that used to send mass promotion newsletters have started to understand the importance of personalized content.

Modern technology allows you to analyze virtually all user behavior – how much time a webpage spends, identify most clickable links, etc. AI can even tell where your clients’ mouse cursors stay longer! This data can be used to provide customers with valuable content when they need it most.

In addition, modern marketing systems can even “follow” users. For example, an AI will set up contextual ads when they Google something. When someone adds an item to a shopping cart but doesn’t checkout, a robot will send an invitation to complete the order.

Automatic Service Integration

Collecting client information wouldn’t be complete without a link that automatically “connects” different services together. This is how Zapier works, for example. The service delivers information about different services. Say, a new user registers on your website – the service will then send the necessary information to the newsletter service, automatically generating a welcome email. Or, when someone leaves their request to buy something, their card is immediately created in the CRM system.

Content Optimization

Content production is just one part of marketing. You also need to ensure that the content you create encourages consumers to take the right action.

AI can help you introduce your content to the right audience, discover characteristics of genuinely amazing materials, and provide information on how to improve performance.

AI tools analyze your content and compare it to that of your competitors. Then they will offer topic recommendations to help you determine which content will perform best. Thus, SEMrush allows you to conduct thematic research and find new content ideas and headlines that resonate with your TA.

The tools also determine channels you can use to engage consumers, depending on the stage they are on, on their buying journey. You can select more valuable content for your TA by analyzing keywords and patterns in real time. AI also identifies relevant topics by tracking online conversations of consumers.

AI can help you create new content and optimize existing content. The tools read and analyze your existing content and identify opportunities for improvement.

Content Created with AI

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are improving every day. Machines can already create pictures or music, compose lyrics or scripts for videos. So far, these works raise many questions and are far from what humans can do, but technology development is progressing rapidly. At the moment, AI is already able to create ads, and within a couple of years, it may be able to create perfect selling texts.

The world’s leading media are already actively using AI to generate content. For example, The Washington Post’s Heliograph is a complex award-winning technology based on the interaction between an editor and AI. So, the former can change the text prepared by the AI, add new information, images, and much more. In addition, the system is able to predict news events and send out warnings to the staff that something important is about to happen.

Chatbots

Yes, they never stop trending! Audiences enjoy the ability to instantly resolve their questions and get quality feedback from a company or salesperson 24/7. AI-based chatbots, capable of deep learning, can foster dialogue, consider past customer requests, collect data, and analyze consumer needs/requests. Moreover, high-quality chatbots are able to interact with people naturally, connecting them with the company or brand. In 2020, even the WHO (the World Health Organization) launched their chatbot for FB’s Messenger. The free service instant and accurate information about COVID-19.

AI chatbots are nothing new, but they improve their speech every year, getting more human-like and offering smarter scenarios. They provide quick support 24/7, automatically accepting and sorting out orders, offer user entertainment and other useful functions.

To integrate a bot into your company’s messenger, you can assemble it manually using a special tool (via pre-written scripts), adapt a development by a company specializing in creating chatbots, or create your own machine-learning-based assistant.

Voice Search

Voice search is no longer just entertainment – people are getting used to it and increasingly use it in their daily lives. And even if regular forecasts promising that voice search will outpace and displace text search queries have not yet come true, fans of Alice and Siri are increasing. It’s important to consider their preferences and optimize content for voice search.

According to Perficient Digital’s research, voice search comes in second place among all methods of entering a search query – 56% of users use voice search alongside other methods.

Experts believe this trend will only increase, and tools like Google Analytics will lose their relevance (unless they refine their algorithms, of course). It’s quite possible that new players will emerge in the analytics market.

In addition, Just AI predicts that 8 billion voice assistants will be in use worldwide by 2023. 71% of users surveyed have tried voice assistants, and 42% of them have used such assistants for search.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Content marketing involves evaluating and analyzing data that, if done manually, is time-consuming. AI can automate most manual and repetitive tasks, including content research. You can identify the best topics and use real-time data to identify compelling content formats. Let alone SEO optimization, scheduling, analyzing, aligning with user intent, promoting, and proofreading.

Freeing your content team from repetitive tasks gives them time to choose and create high-quality content that prompts user engagement.

Use AR & VR

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies open up new possibilities for audience interaction and consumer engagement. QR tags , AR games, unique apps, digital animations, and virtual reality glasses can be used for the purpose of digital marketing.

These technologies demonstrate that the brand can be considered advanced and can offer genuinely satisfying and memorable experiences to its clients. For example, IKEA has an AR app for selecting furniture, which allows you to virtually “place” IKEA products in your space, i.e. visualize how a table or a chair will look in a particular room.

Contextual Advertising

Automation in marketing has touched not only calls and texts but also contextual advertising. AI can advise on the click cost or even set it independently.

Albert’s previously-mentioned AI software works on such a principle – a user enters advertising campaign data (target audience, key performance indicators, necessary promotion channels, etc.) and the system creates target user profiles, decides where and when to show, and place ads.

Of course, these are just a few tools that currently exist in the automation of marketing – we also use email filtering, auto-responders, CRM-systems, etc. However, the technology described above sets the paradigm for the industry, allowing you to be more productive in terms of quality and time spent.

Conclusion

AI is indispensable, especially in this age of data. It can help you optimize content marketing campaigns by providing valuable information. Moreover, with AI, you can easily handle repetitive tasks while focusing on improving your campaign results.

You no longer need to rely on your instincts to develop content marketing strategies. Instead, you’ll have access to information based on real-time data. You can offer personalized recommendations to your TA by analyzing their behavior and actions based on this information.

The future of content marketing lies in using AI-powered tools to research, personalize, and create content. AI gives you a competitive advantage, simplifying your content team’s work and providing a compelling customer experience.

Are you using AI to enhance your content marketing efforts? Do you have any other tips or ideas? Let us know in the comments below!

Edward Bishop

Edward Bishop is a content writer for Corecommerce and content strategist of Visualmodo. He has worked in different companies and got a lot of experience. Edward is focused on making a difference with content he develops and curates.