Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Content Marketing

The inbound marketing campaigns influence a prospect at every stage in the sales funnel by delivering valuable, relevant, and consistent content. Businesses hire professional content writers, with good domain knowledge, to create and distribute content that helps them to engage with prospective customers and influence their buying decision.
But many businesses have started using content robots and bots to create fresh, innovative, and effective content automatically. Disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) have started replacing human content writers and content marketers with content robots.
In addition to generating a variety of content for digital marketing campaigns, the content robots also produce fresh content on scale and demand. Some content marketing experts believe that robot content creators will replace human content creators gradually.

According to Joe Pulizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, “In 10 years the majority of content will be generated by the software. In 20 years, humans will wonder why we wasted so much time on content creation. I can’t see any other way around this.”

AI technologies are all set to transform content marketing in the near future. In addition to automating repetitive content marketing activities, the AI-powered robots will deliver the right content to the right prospect in the right way. Also, AI will completely change the way content marketing campaigns are planned, executed, and optimized.

7 Ways Artificial Intelligence is All Set to Transform Content Marketing

1. Creating Content at Scale

Leading news networks have been using AI to generate simple content based on breaking news, stock updates, and sports reports automatically. The content robots create simple pieces of content immediately based on specific information. Many readers fail to distinguish the content written by human writers and content robots.

The software WordSmith, backed by huge organizations such as Microsoft and Yahoo, creates over 1.5 Billion pieces of content in a year, in more than 20 languages. Can you believe it? Associated Press, one of the oldest news networks in the world, increased its output 12 times by using WordSmith to write 3700 quarterly earning stories. Competitor Washington Post uses Heliograf, its in-house automated storytelling technology, for covering high school football. Quill, which churns out a million words per day, finds the use for writing financial reports by clients such as Forbes.

The businesses will soon leverage AI-powered tools to generate personalized content at scale. In addition to identifying the most relevant information, the content robots will present the information to the readers in the most effective way. The sophisticated automated content writers also have the capability to imitate the writing style of particular journalists and content creators.

2. Personalizing Content and Communication

While planning and optimizing content marketing campaigns, marketers have to focus extensively on personalizing both content and communication. The content robots make it easier for marketers to personalize both content and communication by leveraging the real-time customer data collected from varying sources.

Unlike humans, content robots take little time to analyze customer data and make informed decisions. They also have the capability to create customer profiles on the go by collecting the relevant data points. Also, they can drive sales conversion by personalizing the brand experience, content, and offers/deals.

3. Planning and Creating the Right Type of Content

While planning content marketing campaigns, marketers have to invest both time and effort to understand the needs and expectations of the target audience precisely. They have to analyze the customer data collected from various sources to gain the insights required to create content that will increase the conversion rate.

But the AI-powered content creation tools eliminate the need to plan content marketing strategies by predicting the type of content that translates into more sales orders based on real-time customer data. The content robots will generate targeted content for both existing and prospective customers by considering both existing data and emerging trends.

4. Facilitating Real-Time Interaction through Chatbots

Unlike conventional customer communication tools, chatbots simulate both written and verbal human conversations accurately through both online chats using AI. Many websites these days start digital communication with visitors by deploying chatbots. In addition to initiating a conversion, chatbots also help businesses to answer questions, queries, and concerns in real-time.

Many customers these days interact with chatbots to resolve simple customer service issues quickly and efficiently. The content marketing strategies will leverage chatbots to influence the purchase decision of customers by offering the right content. Also, they will drive overall sales conversations by creating opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

A great case study here is the case of L’oreal, who use an AI-powered recruitment chatbot called Mya, to help screen candidates. L’oreal, which used to get 2 million job applications per year, got 13,000 applications for 80 internship positions. Mya not only saved significant time i.e. 40 minutes per applicant, but it also helped them save $250,000 in recruiter wages.

5. Delivering Content According to Voice Requests

According to ThinkwithGoogle.com, “52% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their living rooms, 25% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their bedrooms, and 22% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their kitchens.” Hence, many customers these days collect information and conduct pre-purchase research by giving voice requests and voice commands.

AI enables businesses to deliver relevant content to each customer by understanding her voice request precisely. In addition to interpreting the voice requests precisely, the AI also delivers refined and contextual voice search results by identifying the most relevant keywords. AI makes the search engines and voice assistants to deliver accurate results despite customers giving conversational commands.

6. Persuading Customers to Open and Read Emails

AI enables businesses to assign values to leads using the predictive lead scoring mechanism. The predictive lead scoring mechanism assigns values to individual leads based on their past behavior and purchase history as well as current needs and interests. The predictive lead scores help marketers to separate the sales-ready leads from dormant leads.

Also, the marketers can leverage the predictive intelligence to convert leads into customers by sending highly personalized and targeted emails at various stages in the sales funnel. They can further use AI to choose subject lines, the time of delivery, and create email content that will make the recipient open the email, read the message, and take the desired action.

7. Automating Routine Content Marketing Tasks

In addition to facilitating automated content creation, AI will help organizations to automate routine and repetitive content marketing tasks. The AI-powered marketing tools will further boost these content marketing activities by leveraging real-time data. Businesses can use next-generation marketing tools to analyze, measure, and optimize content marketing campaigns on demand.

As an inbound marketer, in charge of the content calendar, I am always searching for innovative ideas to come up with a great editorial calendar. The AI-powered marketing automation tools can come to the rescue, to automate routine tasks like keyword research, topic selection, content type evaluation, and communication channel selection. Hence, content marketers will only focus on making the content emotionally-appealing by implementing human intelligence.

Similar Read: Improve Customer Service Experience: Take the AI Way by Nishant Kadian

Conclusion:

The fifth edition of the State of Marketing (PDF) report released by Salesforce suggests that marketers’ adoption of AI has grown by 44% since 2017. More marketers are expected to adopt AI in the near future to launch and boost content marketing campaigns without investing in extra resources.

The AI-powered content robots are yet to become affordable for small and medium companies. So, I think for the near future, they will keep on finding new and innovative usage for big organizations, which need to produce content at scale. However, content robots still lack the capability to create content that appeals to customers emotionally. Hence, the businesses will still need to deploy human content writers along with content robots.