Content marketing strategies that leverage AI generate insane revenue for companies and can drive significant growth.
Companies that use AI and automation find they scale more easily, seeing 3X return on AI investment compared to those still in the pilot stage. Moreover, 84% of C-suite executives believe that AI must be used in order to achieve their growth goals.
Considering this, CMOs should be leveraging AI in their content marketing efforts. You may realize that AI is necessary for your content marketing strategy, but you’re still unsure of the ways it can or should be used to drive growth.
Here’s how CMOs can leverage AI for successful content marketing efforts.
AI-Powered Content Marketing Strategy Can Transform Business
AI, or artificial intelligence, is a broad sweeping term that includes all technologies under the AI umbrella. AI refers to a machine that is capable of learning, executing commands on its own, and more. It’s called artificial intelligence because it’s unlike natural intelligence (human intelligence) and is something that we created.
Cultural trends tell you that AI is the next robot butler or a computer like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. AI in science, technologies, software, and business is real, though, and is used in expert systems, natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and machine vision.
As a CMO, you likely already know all this. In fact, you understand that Google uses AI through NLP in every search query. So it may come as no surprise that we are urging CMOs to look to AI in content marketing.
With AI technologies, CMOs can do the following, and much more:
- Properly identify strategic, competitive opportunities, including keyword gaps, strategic linking campaigns, and strategic topical coverage
- Predictive analytics for understanding the customer journey
- Properly optimize content production, content editing, and content distribution to hit and even exceed target goals
- Test and retest strategic keywords, email subject lines, and headers for optimal reception and audience interest through AI-powered efforts
The bottom line is that a strong content marketing strategy is one that aptly captures the interest of that company’s target audience, successfully addresses the company’s marketing goals, and continues to evolve as markets change.
AI is the only way that companies can accurately do this. When used accurately, AI is a critical source of business value and business innovation, boosting customer conversions and growing revenue.
Common Examples of How AI is Used in Digital Marketing
Marketing automation cuts costs and brings new levels of consistency, speed, and scalability to business processes. Moreover, thanks to machine learning and deep learning, certain AI applications can read customer data, analyze it, learn from it, and adapt actually accordingly.
The ability to self-learn and self-optimize shows that AI exponentially compounds the use case advantages of AI applications in content and digital marketing.
Here are some common ways that AI is used in digital marketing:
- Deep learning for predictive analytics
- Content marketing (content curation, optimization, and recommendations)
- Generating SEO-optimized headlines
- Product recommendations in retail apps
- Speech recognition software
- Search and search optimization
- Ad targeting
- Chatbots for premium customer service
AI provides personalized content and predictive analytics. As the marketing officer, you can understand your audience from the top-down to improve the customer experience and customer journey.
12 Ways to Leverage AI in Content Marketing Efforts
Whether you are trying to connect to customers or you are a B2B marketer, AI can be applied at all stages of content marketing, including creation, deployment, and optimization, among others.
Here are 12 ways CMOs should be using AI in content marketing strategies:
Business Automation for Marketing Efficiency
As mentioned, AI-powered tools can be implemented for streamlined efficiency and business automation. AI-powered tools can actually be applied at almost every stage of your marketing efforts. Use it to assess audience insights and to target the keywords and topics that your customers want.
You can also use it to streamline the sales funnel, automate content marketing emails (like press releases) and use it as a chatbot. AI can automate basic, repetitive tasks and even glean insights along the way. With developed reports, your marketing team will be able to dive right into content strategy.
In all these ways, AI will free up critical time for your team to stay dedicated to providing the best marketing strategies.
Content Strategy Optimization
AI-powered tools offer more than just related keywords; instead, they give companies competitive direction through machine learning. Content strategy optimization includes using AI-powered tools to inform every stage of the content strategy development, including topics that are trending in your industry and niche aspects that the industry is missing.
These tools can offer critical insight into future trends as well, keeping your marketing efforts well ahead of the curve. Access key information that your competitors are already using so that you can capitalize on your marketing efforts without a lot of competition.
Searching for Competitive Topical Gaps
Much of content strategy involves finding strategic competitive gaps. This might include the topics that your company talks about on their blogs, the infographics you push out, or the video tutorials for that week.
Competitive topical gaps alleviate the stress of having to research and produce extremely targeted content because you have advanced insight into the topics that your customers want but aren’t getting from competitors.
Machine learning can identify these gaps, and from there you can then develop content clusters around these topics to deliver comprehensive knowledge. With this AI tool, you can come out as a topical authority on that content gap before any of your competitors do and become a marketing leader.
Targeting Strategic Keywords Gaps
Similar to identifying topical gaps, AI tools in SEO and content strategy help your content managers identify keywords gaps. This is an important tool that can allow your content to get the foot in the door more and more, rather than competing for top bids on extremely competitive pages all the time.
With strategic long-tail keywords, your page will begin to rank for more authority in general and begin to rank on more competitive short-tail keywords too. These keyword gaps give your team some breathing room and a chance to create a comprehensive keyword list.
Content Creation
Content creation is an obvious use case for AI in content marketing, but it’s actually not the strongest. When fed with some starting data, AI tools can actually generate a working draft that your content editors can fix up and polish. Content creation is extremely useful for companies who have to put out a lot of content but can’t find reliable content writers.
However, note that the content that these AI tools spit out is not always the best. While the technology is getting to the point where it could write coherent and human-like paragraphs, that technology will be extremely expensive or unavailable to the public. We are therefore left with mediocre tools that are usually glitchy and require extensive editing and rewriting.
Optimization During the Content Creation Process
Your content writers work hard to produce high-quality content all the time. With AI-powered tools, they can use optimization methods to ensure that the blog is hitting all the right points from the start.
Writers can use optimization in the content creation process to find better research and to quickly identify niche topical gaps within the content itself, allowing the content to be better quality and to more accurately hit the necessary key points that customers want to be addressed. It will also save a lot of time in the editing process.
Optimizing Old Content for New, Competitive Keywords and Competitors
AI tools can be used in the optimization process too. If you have old content that needs to be refreshed, you can use AI to better understand competitive keywords, topics your competitors are or are not addressing, and ways you can capitalize on that.
By using AI-powered tools in optimization, you will not only be updating the content but ensuring that it hits marketing trends too. This saves you tons of time in researching and manually going through each competitor site.
Strategic, SEO-optimized, and Direction-Oriented Headers
AI tools can provide SEO-optimized headers too, allowing your content to be SEO optimized and indexed properly. With SEO-optimized headers, your content will speak louder and clearer and reach your target audience.
On top of that, with these headers, your writers will better understand the direction the piece should go. This eliminates wordy language, confusing and out-of-place sections, and tangents, allowing your piece to stay streamlined and focused.
Identify Key Customer Pain Points and Questions
AI marketing tools will help you to strategically identify and answer customer questions and pain points. With this data, you’ll have an optimized strategy through and through. You can develop trends from this information, like identifying that customers are frustrated with billing and payment in the rideshare industry, to provide welcome solutions.
By better understanding these pain points, your company can also get ahead on competitive technology and product solutions.
Providing Strategic Linking Opportunities and Ensuring Relevancy
Your content will need to be optimized in every way, including determining accuracy and linking opportunities. AI can help here as well. With strategic linking opportunities, your content will always be respected based on SEO best practices and links to reliable sources.
While ensuring this in your strategy is not necessarily difficult, it can be time-consuming. Eliminate these mundane tasks with AI software on your side.
Strategic Content Deployment
Marketers should use content intelligence for content distribution and to reach their target audience. If you release content at the wrong time, then you risk burying that content in your customers’ email inbox or news feed.
AI can help inform you when your customers are on social media the most to accurately determine the best time to send content.
Content Marketing Strategy Assessment/Reassessment
Once you’ve used your marketing strategy, content marketers can use AI to assess how effective it was and then optimize it for the next month or quarter. You should never go into your content marketing efforts blind. While you might have access to analytics, AI can actually read your analytics data for you and provide better, more direct insights.
Use AI in Your Content Marketing Strategy Today
AI tools are becoming increasingly effective. While AI won’t take away all of the labor, it will eliminate much of the repetitive and mundane tasks, and allow your content to stay competitive and excel with greater ease.
See today how AI can support your content marketing strategy.
