The Revolution of AI in Shaping the Content Marketing Landscape
Has the ‘Terminator’ arrived in the world of content marketing? Are we looking at the beginning of the end of content marketing, or is AI just a trend we can all wait out?
The answer to all these frantic questions is none of the above!
Now that we have experienced the beguiling power of ChatGPT for a few months and the initial hullabaloo around the topic has subsided, we have studied a multitude of AI experiences to arrive at a more realistic impact of AI in content marketing.
Before we unpack these observations, let us quickly recap the various ways in which the domains of AI and content marketing interact and overlap with each other.
The Rising Influence of AI in Content Marketing
Content Marketing is all about strategically using diverse content formats to engage, attract, and convert an audience to a business’s purpose. In the digital marketplace, content marketing is the lifeblood of all marketers, and AI makes it smarter, faster, smoother, and cheaper.
While the conversation around AI has boomed recently due to Generative AI hitting the market, companies have been consuming and using AI for a long time. Everyday examples include AI algorithms in Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify; all three of them use artificial intelligence to recommend tailored content and products based on your activity on their platforms.
What is AI in Content Marketing?
AI is often used as a catch-all term and is usually used to describe a computer system’s ability to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence, but that is a fairly narrow definition. In the context of content marketing, where AI is extensively used to create, curate, and improve content, other important AI-related terms are:
- Machine learning: refers to when a computer uses an algorithm to learn by absorbing vast amounts of data without being explicitly programmed to do so. It is a self-adjusting algorithm that improves as it ingests more information.
- Natural Language Processing: NLP helps AI understand and generate answers or content using human language rather than a string of code. It communicates or presents information in the form of a human conversation. ChatGPT is the most widely used example of NLP.
- Predictive Analytics: Predictive analytics describes the enormous data-crunching ability of AI. AI uses vast amounts of contextual, historical data to forecast future trends; it is like having a crystal ball for marketing.
How Are Marketers Using AI in Content Marketing?
In a very short period of time, AI has become a pervasive and, undeniably, critical tool for all marketers. As it evolves and matures into a perpetual part of the marketing arsenal, let us look at the current form of AI in content marketing.
Idea Generation
While most people would point to text-based and visual content creation as a premium use case of AI, we would instead like to point out an earlier starting point for integrating AI in content creation – the ideation phase.
Generative AI models such as ChatGPT can offer an intuitive tool for generating fresh perspectives and ideas. Asking questions on certain themes can throw up trends and ideas that can become the starting point for innovative campaigns. For example, a prompt asking “three things that most people don’t know about x’ or ‘Why do people buy black shoes?’ can throw up interesting perspectives that might otherwise not surface in usual brainstorming meetings.
Streamlining Content Creation
Anyone who has used ChatGPT or Bard knows how shockingly fast and good they are. Hours of research and writing are condensed into a matter of minutes. No matter what the topic is, if you ask AI properly, you will get excellent blog posts, product descriptions, and social media updates at scale in seconds!
AI tools are also widely used to improve existing content, whether it is automated proofreading, optimizing for certain keywords, or improving or changing writing styles.
Read our blog, Pros and Cons of ChatGPT and AI in Marketing, to learn more.
Content Curation
What is the first thing we do when we want to find out some new information? Google it, of course. And then we spend an hour or so sifting, reading, understanding, and bookmarking the information we need.
AI models do all this in seconds AND present the information in your desired format!
Curating information is a key support function that more and more content creators are depending on AI to automate.
Data Analysis
AI models are being used for large-scale data crunching, where they can process massive data dumps in real time, easily uncovering insights that would be impossible for human eyes and understanding to find. Marketers can use AI data tools to understand audience behaviour, content performance, and predict trends.
SEO Optimization
AI-based SEO tools are already the mainstay of SEO professionals and are used to analyze search trends, keyword performance, and competitor strategies – all of this is used to improve content strategies.
Benefits of Using AI in Content Marketing
AI has become almost indispensable for marketers. Here’s why:
Increased Efficiency and Productivity
All those hours saved researching, curating, optimizing, and creating content bring a lot of efficiency and speed to marketing departments. What took more people, and more time is now possible to complete faster and without tying up precious resources. The time saved can be used more productively to explore more creative ventures.
Hyper-personalization
By analyzing vast amounts of consumer data and online activity, AI can offer hyper-personalization right down to a single individual. Breaking away from the traditional, one-size-fits-all marketing method, a tailored approach makes the customer feel more valued and connected with the brand.
Using AI, marketers can create thin audience segments and provide customized recommendations and content to enhance customer experiences.
Challenges and Considerations in Implementing AI
There is no doubt that AI adds immense value to marketing endeavours, and most of us can probably agree that it is now an intrinsic part of all online sales and marketing efforts. However, the technology comes with its own set of challenges, and its many pros should not cloud the cons.
Navigating Ethical Concerns
Do your users deserve to know that they are reading AI-generated content? How about art? Should AI-created work be labelled as such?
These questions of attribution and transparency are a constant debate and might change the content marketing landscape in the future.
The other angle in the ethics debate is regarding the data – AI models are trained on vast amounts of data, and a lot more is fed in by users. How is this information stored and safeguarded, and who owns it? This question certainly deserves some thought.
For some time now, the unconscious data-generated bias in AI has been a topic of ethical discussion; marketers must be vigilant and ensure a diverse set of data points are used to train their AI models.
Cost and Complexity
AI comes in many forms, and not all of them are easy or affordable to implement, especially for small businesses. Along with the cost of the tools, one must also factor in the expense of hiring or upskilling current marketing team members to collaborate effectively with AI tools.
Misinformation
Despite its proven successes, AI is not infallible. It is as good as the data it uses, and if the data pipeline is incorrect, biased, or out of date, then the results will be too. A layer of human verification and guidance is essential to ensuring 100% alignment between ideas and their execution.
The Future of AI in Content Marketing
AI is just coming into its own, and we are witnessing the next big wave of disruption as it builds momentum right in front of us. While predicting the future seems like a very long shot, in the coming few years, we will certainly witness AI maturing and becoming more ubiquitous. Naturally, as the technology expands, so will laws and regulations to limit misuse.
It will also be exciting to see various technologies merge to provide new marketing products and trends, such as augmented and virtual reality or IoT with AI.
We live in exciting times, and we look forward to seeing what new worlds AI can create for content marketing and what boundaries it can dissolve. As we continue our journey into the world of AI, join us to guide your business safely into the future of content marketing.
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