Artificial intelligence, or AI, isn’t just the stuff of the future anymore. A 2016 survey conducted by Narrative Science revealed that 38 percent of respondents are using AI in some form or another already. About 26 percent of respondents had plans to put AI to use by 2018. One area where AI is of particular interest is content marketing. As you might know, content marketing is a marketing approach that involves creating and distributing useful and relevant content on a consistent basis in order to connect with existing audiences or customers and to engage with new ones. Take a look at how AI content marketing works, and see if it’s something worth trying for your brand.
Ways to Use AI Content Marketing
Although AI is becoming more and more common, it remains a murky subject for many content marketers. A study conducted by the Drum found that less than half of marketers understood what AI can do. More than 60 percent were concerned that integrating AI into content marketing would lead to a loss of jobs.
Understanding what AI can do in terms of content marketing is essential for marketers who wish to embrace it (and perhaps more importantly, hang on to their jobs). Here’s a few ways AI content marketing can work:
Speed up the content planning process.
Figuring out what type of content to produce can often be the biggest hurdle marketers face. Whether you are making videos, blog posts, or ebooks, you want to create something that will resonate with an audience. AI can shorten the amount of time it takes to plan content by analyzing what customers are after, and by assessing previously produced, successful content.
Make better content predictions.
Part of content planning is guessing or predicting what types of content will go over well with your intended audience, or what types of content will help you connect with a new audience. AI can help you predict the type of content that will succeed by being able to determine which forms of content are about to be trending.
Speed up sorting of images/video.
AI can mine content, searching for the best and most relevant images or video much more quickly and effectively than any human ever could.
Customize a person’s experience.
Personalization and customization is a big deal in today’s content world. AI can assess what a person has looked at previously, what he or she has purchased, and so on to create a website and content selection that is customized to that person’s specific interests and tastes.
Create content.
Yes, AI can create content. But writers and other content creators don’t need to fear for their jobs (at least not yet). AI is pretty good at producing content when there are clearly defined rules in place. You’ve probably already encountered AI produced content if you’ve ever “chatted” with a chatbot, or if you’ve looked at sports recaps or product descriptions.
Should Your Brand Use AI Content Marketing?
The human brain can only handle so much data and information. As the amount of content increases and the competition increases, there’s only so much you can do to keep up.
AI content marketing gives your brand the edge it needs to keep up in an increasingly competitive content landscape. Plus, it saves a considerable amount of time, which can in turn save your brand a fair amount of money.
Examples of AI Content Marketing
AI content marketing is already all around you. You might have come across one or more of the following examples:
Chatbots
Ever visit a website, only to be greeted by a pop-up chat window and someone who seems really excited to talk to you? Odds are, that’s not a real person, but a bot. Beauty retailer Sephora recently built a chatbot on the platform Kik, becoming the first beauty company to do so. Sephora’s bot went beyond answering simple questions posted by a customer, though. It also held contests and conducted quizzes to really discover who it was addressing.
Facial recognition
One extended use of AI’s ability to mine and sort through images and photos is its ability to recognize faces. Facial recognition is used by brands in several ways. One notable use, explained by the Guardian, is to track customers who come into brick-and-mortar locations. Nearly 60 percent of retailers are already using facial recognition in some form or another.
Personalization and content recommendations
AI can help people find more content that is interesting to or relevant for them. Early forms of personalization with AI came from Pandora, which recommended and played songs it expected someone to like based on the previous songs that person listened to. Netflix does something similar, recommending titles to viewers based on the TV and movies they have rated and watched in the past.
What Will AI Content Marketing Look Like in the Future?
Although you might hear a lot about AI content marketing nowadays, it’s worth noting that the technology is still in the relatively early stages. That means that there is a lot of room for growth and development, not only as more and more brands adopt AI, but also as the technology evolves.
Today’s AI is just the beginning. It’s likely that, in the future, AI will continue to streamline content marketing, making it not only more efficient, but also more effective.
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