The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Content Marketing
Gone are the times when nearly everything was done manually. Now we are living in a time in which a lot of work is taken over by software, machines, and various automatic procedures.
In this aspect, artificial intelligence (AI) has a prominent place in all the progress made today. AI is the science of machines and computers developing intelligence like humans.
In this technology, the machines have the ability to do some of the easy to complicated things that humans need to do on a regular basis.
AI implementation in an organization
There are distinct kinds of artificial intelligence, each needing some amount of technical knowledge to completely understand. As a result, recent players in this area frequently have difficulty figuring out how to jump in.
Although cognitive technologies like robotics, natural language processing, machine learning etc, may seem difficult to deal with, getting started with them is getting easier all the time.
Many vendors have entered in this field with their offerings providing choices for any organization who want to make their products or processes smarter. You can introduce these technologies in various ways into your company.
Utilizing an existing vendor’s software with cognitive abilities is one of the ways in which these technologies can be introduced into your company. Oracle and Salesforce.com lately announced they’re adding cognitive abilities to their products.
Salesforce is adding features of Einstein to its client facing software clouds, including the capability to classify images utilized in social media, read emails from clients, and automatically score sales leads.
If you are already utilizing Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) offerings and wish to ease into more intelligent processes for services, marketing, and sales, this seems like one of the simplest ways to do it.
Chatbots are a medium-level cognitive technology that utilize natural language conversation for interacting with applications. Facebook (Messenger Platform), Microsoft (Cortana), Apple (Siri) and Google (with the recent acquisition of API.AI) have platforms for developers for deploying their chatbots.
If your business is focused particularly on mobile, where consumers seem inclined toward chatbots. You might dive into cognitive technology by picking one the APIs of those companies and connecting your applications to it.
These user interfaces will surely evolve with time. But it is a wise idea to begin working with them now in the event that you would like to take advantage of easy voice interaction.
You might even make an existing application more autonomous or smarter. Using component-based, modular architectures, it’s possible to add cognitive approaches to applications.
Another way is to build from the open source software. Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have all released open source deep learning or machine learning algorithm libraries.
For example, TensorFlow is an open source machine learning library developed by Google for the purpose of high-performance numerical computation. You can know more about this in the below video.
The development of a cognitive solution from scratch using open source tools can take longer than it usually takes for a few of the other options. Hence, this point of entry only makes sense if your organization has very critical needs. It is in favor to make a long-term commitment to developing cognitive capabilities.
Probably, it is a better approach if you plan to incorporate cognitive features into your service or product.
So, the above-mentioned examples are the more common ways for the average organization. To implement cognitive technologies into their day-to-day process.
It’s good that there exist several options. But when organizations decide to incorporate cognitive technology into their strategies, they must think hard about which one they plan to pursue.
The role of AI in content marketing
One of the areas where AI is of particular interest is content marketing. Content marketing is defined as a marketing approach. It involves development and distribution of relevant and useful content on a consistent basis. In order to communicate with existing customers or audiences and to engage with new ones.
Already, artificial intelligence plays a crucial role in the content marketing field. Helping to make the processes more effective at a time of massive content overload.
It is helping marketers perceive the content marketing universe by examining the data of users and enabling marketers to make sense of user intent.
AI might not be ready to boss every element of the marketing game just yet, but it’s a fast learner. The days in which machines market to people, monitor campaigns, analyze the data and use it to become even better at marketing to people are fast approaching.
Understanding what artificial intelligence can do to content marketing is crucial for marketers who are willing to accept it. The following are the ways in which AI in content marketing works.
Personalization
Creating content that’s specific to each viewer has been the major priority for many marketers. It’s very difficult to execute this process. To implement effective customization, teams need access to massive amounts of customer data. It must be analyzed properly and translated into actionable plans.
While personalization has been a buzzword in marketing for several years, latest advances in AI technology are now making this concept a reality.
Machine learning systems are able to collect relevant data points from customers and website visitors. They can create individual profiles from here and that may be utilized for the creation of a brand experience tailored to each individual.
Tools like OneSpot utilize AI-based algorithms and data related to web interaction to track engagement and fit content to individual tastes. Watch the below video to learn more about OneSpot.
https://youtu.be/c3WUnYoxMec
Customized offers and recommendations are in high demand among customers. 80% disclosed they’d be more inclined to buy from an organization that provides personalization.
By using AI-enabled software to track preferences and the behavior of customers, brands can use this information to guide their content strategies. Via multiple approaches, including customized content that is specific to each customer, and sending personalized offers for higher conversions.
Content creation
You can use AI to create content for simple stories like sports reports and stock updates.
This practice isn’t a new one. Using machines to automatically generate content has been common for years, and companies like Fox and The Associated Press take full advantage.
It could be that you’ve come across content that was created by an algorithm even without noticing it.
Artificial intelligence already creates content. Hundreds of Washington Post articles have been authored by a robot. Heliograf, the paper’s own AI technology, has written short articles about the Olympics, political races and high school sports. The video below explains more about this AI technology.
https://youtu.be/1nJhe0XKfhc
Content planning
Determining what kind of content to create can often be a major hurdle marketers face. You want to create something that resonates well with your audience, be it an ebook, a blog post, or a video.
Artificial Intelligence can reduce the amount of time it takes to plan content by examining what customers are after, and by evaluating successful, previously produced content.
One component of planning content is predicting or guessing what content type will resonate well with your target audience. Or what kinds of content will enable you to connect with a new audience.
Artificial Intelligence can enable you to predict the content type that will flourish by being able to understand which content forms are about to be trending.
Engagement (with the help of Chatbots)
Chatbots are termed as computer programs that utilize AI to mimic conversation with users. Facebook Messenger is one such example, which utilizes chatbots to answer real-time concerns and queries, and perform quasi-conversations with users.
Organizations like 1-800 Flowers and Uber utilize Facebook Messenger chatbots to select their flower arrangements or to enable users to request a ride without the need to open the application. Check out the below video to see how the 1-800-Flowers chatbot enables you to browse and order flowers from Facebook Messenger without navigating anywhere else.
Facebook Messenger chatbots can also be utilized to send promotional content if a user initiates the interaction. Chatbots are useful for streamlining the process of customer support. In this process, chatbots help you get a real-time answer if you just type in your query instead of filling out the form.
Chatbots utilize machine learning to track and examine every conversation and make enhancements with each interaction.
Because of their capability to gain knowledge and adjust to meet the needs of every customer around the clock. Higher engagement levels are received by chatbots when compared with any other tactic. However, you must know how to choose a chatbot that perfectly suits your business.
Automating repetitive tasks
To stay on top of search and marketing trends, you need to constantly evaluate and analyze a lot of data.
Most of these manual and repetitive tasks can be automated with the help of marketing tools powered by artificial intelligence so you can analyze, measure, promote, personalize, optimize, and plan content and its performance.
You can begin by assessing your present content marketing process and determining tasks that can be automated with artificial intelligence technologies to save money and time.
For instance, freeing your resources from repetitive tasks like identifying the best topics and content format based on real-time data will allow you to invest more time and budget on in-depth analysis, reports, research, and the content where human intelligence will be needed more.
What AI skills do content marketers need?
AI can make a huge difference, and we are only getting started. AI usage is not going to slow down anytime soon.
The Artificial Intelligence market revenues around the world in 2018 are $7.35 billion U.S. It is expected to reach about $17 billion in 2020 and $89.8 billion in 2025.
According to Salesforce’s 2017 State of Marketing report, 51% of marketers are already using artificial intelligence and 27% are planning to use it in the next 2 years.
Conclusion
When it comes to the content marketing field, AI is here to stay and help content marketers in improving their content marketing activities.
You can achieve fantastic results when you combine human skills and artificial intelligence.
The vital part is building a team consisting of experts in artificial intelligence who can form an idea of the use cases of artificial intelligence, code, and put them into practice.
Similarly, the availability of data to train and test AI systems is critically important. Irrelevant or insufficient data jeopardizes the AI applications’ accuracy, rendering them unusable and unreliable.
So, companies with a proper combination of skills and data derive greater benefits from artificial intelligence when compared with those who have yet to develop them.
As a marketer, it is time to accept artificial intelligence with open arms if you want to make your audience engaged in a meaningful and profitable way, remain relevant, and stay at the top of the curve.