AI is revolutionizing content marketing. However, the use of AI in content marketing surprisingly doesn’t involve generating content with a prompt alone.
On the contrary, AI tools for marketers are helping automate research, streamline workflows, optimize content performance, and improve quality.
Ultimately, the use of AI-powered content marketing tools is leading to a higher return on investment (ROI) for marketers and brands.
But how to use AI for automating your content marketing efforts and improving your ROI? Here’s a blog post to explain and clarify all you need to know about how AI helps with smart content creation.
The Adoption Of AI In Content Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest trend in the content marketing landscape. From small organizations to large enterprises, artificial intelligence in marketing is the driving force behind almost everything. It helps organizations with operations, content marketing, market research, and content creation.
Although a specific market segment is yet to adopt AI to their content marketing efforts, the percentage of AI-using organizations is leading the changing nature of the industry.
According to CoSchedule, 85% of content marketers and creators use AI to create content. Furthermore, nearly 75% of marketers feel that AI gives them a competitive edge over their competition.
Almost 9 out of 10 marketers would consider integrating AI into their set of marketing tools to automate most tasks.
Given the power AI brings to the table, generative AI can single-handedly help a marketer with a list of rigorous and repetitive tasks, and that doesn’t mean only prompt generating blog posts.
It’s a great tool for content ideation, research, and drafting that saves up to 5 hours of your weekly time.
The following SurveyMonkey report suggests that 50% of marketers are using AI for content creation.
How To Use AI In Content Marketing For Smart Content Creation?
Marketers are using AI to automate content marketing, and the smart use of AI content marketing techniques goes beyond simply prompt engineering.
The following are four major areas where AI is helping content marketers reduce cost and time without appearing artificial to their audience.
1. Enhanced Efficiency And Automation
Google clarifies that it promotes and ranks valuable content that helps readers and audiences regardless of its origin. But the 2024 March core updates made many marketers and creators reconsider that statement.
(i) Automated Content Creation
That said, using AI shouldn’t be completely off the table even if Google isn’t ranking AI content. It can help with many other words instead of generating generic content.
As a marketer or a creator, you can automate your content ideation, building content pillars, and first drafts. You can SEO optimize your content with the help of AI and use it to suggest relevant search terms and keywords.
(ii) Streamlined Workflows
Marketers can also use AI in a more productive way by streamlining their workflows.
- Marketers can use AI in content marketing by taking its help for creating and managing content calendars.
- AI can help distribute content across different social media channels and different media. This process can help marketers free up a lot of time for more strategic work.
- There are AI-powered tools for scheduling posts and publishing content across different channels. These tools help automate the task of publishing content.
(iii) Reduced Costs
Content creation is a resource and time-intensive effort, and marketers hardly ever get their required time and resources (marketing sarcasms intended).
But, through AI automation, it’s finally possible to make up for the resources or time that never came under your marketing budget.
When AI helps with brainstorming and content creation, it reduces resource cost and improves ROI.
2. Personalized Content Experiences
AI helps personalize content marketing and offers a more personalized experience to targeted audiences. Here’s how marketers can achieve that:
(i) Audience Segmentation And Targeting
The importance of content personalization is no news to marketers. However, it takes time to extract data from complex analytics platforms and simplify the derived data into actionable insights.
That’s where AI can help. AI can help simplify complex data in minutes. Advanced artificial intelligence and Machine Learning can go through complex sets of audience research data and turn it into useful insights. Marketers can use the insights derived to personalize their content.
Yes, it comes with a little bit of a learning curve. Marketers must learn to engineer efficient prompts for ML to help them identify segments according to different factors like demographics, behaviours, and interests.
(ii) Personalized Content Recommendations
Once the audience segmentation and profiles are ready, marketers can use AI for personalized content recommendations.
AI tools can analyze customer behaviours and preferences and deliver personalized content recommendations. Yes, it can exactly suggest which topic will go at which funnel stage. AI tools can help personalize the tone of voice for each stage of content.
All marketers are left with is content creation with the insights drawn from AI tools.
(iii) Tailored Content Formats
Let’s say that you have a content marketing strategy prepared with different types and formats decided for different funnel stages.
Now, how do you define which post should go in which type and format? That’s where AI can help to save your time. Marketers have to first train the AI model on how they consider different content formats for different funnel stages.
Next, they can use prompts to let AI do content format segmentation. It’s the most impactful and time-saving way to use AI in content marketing.
3. Optimized Content Performance
According to SurveyMonkey, nearly 51% of content marketers use AI to optimize their content for SEO. Furthermore, 41% of content marketers and brands use AI to analyze data for content performance optimization.
(i) Data-Driven Insights
But how are marketers using AI to analyze content performance? Well, AI can help collect complex data and simplify it in understandable formats.
AI tools are great for analyzing content metrics such as engagement, reach, and conversions. It helps them identify what works for someone and what doesn’t.
(ii) Performance Prediction
It feels almost forbidden to use AI for content performance optimization. Content creators and marketers can use A/B tests to compare different content formats and strategies against past content performance data.
They can use AI tools to predict which content format has the highest chance of ranking based on historical data. These insights help make more informed decisions, helping with better ROI through AI in content marketing.
(iii) Continuous Improvement
Also, with the help of AI tools for marketing, content marketers can constantly improve content performance over time. It helps creators and marketers improve content marketing ROI over time with insight-driven tactics.
4. Improved Content Quality
It’s no news to marketers that Google, as well as their audience, value high-quality and original content. It’s also correct that prompt-generated content lacks depth and can contain incorrect information.
So, how does AI help in ensuring content quality? Well, it’s an efficient tool when it comes to checking content style, optimizing content for search engines, and helping with repurposing content for different promotional channels.
While the task of creating content can be left to human efforts, these three areas are the most effective ways of using AI in content marketing.
(i) Grammar And Style Checks
Marketers and content creators can use AI to check grammar, spelling errors, and review whether the style and brand voice are consistent across different content.
(ii) Content Optimization
AI also optimizes content for search engines. It organically distributes keywords throughout the content. Such optimization work can help improve content visibility and enhance reach, leaving a positive impact on content marketing efforts.
(iii) Content Repurposing
Finally, content repurposing is another time-consuming task that AI can do. Let’s say that you’ve written a blog post with a traffic-attracting keyword. The part of content repurposing becomes the next big effort to pull in the referral traffic from social media and different forums.
That’s where AI can also help. AI can help break down long-form content into shorter and insightful posts you can share and publish on different social media channels. On top of that, it also adds an element of personalization to really engage with the right customer segment.
AI Is Here To Enhance, Not Replace, Humans
AI in content marketing helps streamline workflows and reduce a significant amount of repetitive human effort. However, it’s essential to remember that AI isn’t intended to replace humans. Content marketing and content creation are all about human interaction with brands.
AI is here to help marketers create plans and personalize content experiences so that brands sound and feel more human and related. That’s not possible without human insights, empathy, and effort.
However, it can help marketers lose some burden and focus on strategy-related critical aspects to further improve campaigns.
Would you consider the four aspects of AI content marketing discussed in this blog post? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.