Craft Brilliance With These AI Content Marketing Strategies

  According to the Content Marketing Institute, 73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy. Spending the time to create content that resonates with your target audience can seem overwhelming. The challenge becomes even greater for marketers who manage brands with numerous business locations.    That's where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play.    Artificial intelligence can automate previously time-consuming tasks, help with various aspects of content marketing, and improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.    Within this piece, we'll focus on AI and content marketing and highlight five tactics your brand can use to create stellar content with the help of AI.   

A Look Into Content Marketing and AI 

  Before diving into the tactics, let's briefly define content marketing and the use of AI in marketing. As you'd expect, content marketing involves creating and sharing online materials such as blogs, videos, and social media posts.    Content marketing promotes a brand and provides thought leadership content around a brand, industry, or specific topic.    AI in marketing means using artificial intelligence for strategic and often real-time analysis, automation, and information delivery. Essentially, AI marketing helps you deliver more accurate and faster results.   Implementing AI into your content marketing efforts can help:

• Personalize content for specific target audiences
• Increase engagement and conversion rates
• Analyze consumer data to identify trends 
• Optimize content strategies, leading to more effective content marketing campaigns

 

Five Ways AI Can Elevate Your Content Marketing Efforts 

  Now that you have the basics of AI and content marketing, let's dive into five ways AI can level up your AI content marketing efforts.    As a marketer, finding ways to save your team time and effort while improving output is critical, and AI can help!    It's also important to note that this piece will focus primarily on generative AI. If you're unfamiliar with it, generative AI uses deep-learning models and relies on trained data to generate various types of content, such as text, imagery, videos, and other forms of data.

1. Personalized Content Recommendations 

Many marketers have been in a position where they feel like they're fresh out of ideas. We’ve been there ourselves, whether it's a blog post, growth marketing campaign, or webinar topic. AI is an excellent tool for personalized content recommendations!    Using generative AI, you can give the tool:

• A detailed description of what you need help with brainstorming
• Information about what your brand does
• Details about your target audience

  You can also share other parameters you'd like the technology to consider, such as a word count or using a specific brand voice. AI will develop several ideas from there, as seen in the example below.  

    If you're unsatisfied with AI's results, you can give it feedback, provide more detailed instructions, and try again! 

2. Automated Content Generation

Marketers can also use AI to help generate content efficiently. For instance, you've likely heard of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Jasper. As mentioned, these tools use deep-learning models trained on data to generate content.    Do you need help drafting a personalized response to a review? What about a social engagement that your brand received on social media? These tools can help!    For instance, you can feed ChatGPT a review you received and ask it to create a response. The more detail and information you give the technology, the better your chance of getting a dependable output.    For instance, you can ask it to address the person by name, keep the response to 50 words, and address the concern mentioned in the review.     

    Some marketing technology (martech) tools have incorporated AI in their tech stack for streamlined usage. More on those later!    It's also worth mentioning that marketers can also use generative AI to help with longer-form content such as blogs, guides, and e-books.    While human oversight is always needed with generative AI results, you'll find that more oversight is needed on these pieces. If there's a specific paragraph you need help with or an outline for a blog, those are areas where generative AI is most impactful! 

3. Content Optimization 

Additionally, if you're not satisfied with how AI produces longer-form content, such as whitepapers or guides, you can use AI to optimize the content. Interestingly, a survey of 700 U.S. consumers found that people preferred AI-generated content over human-generated content.   As mentioned, this doesn't mean that you need to use AI to write all of your content, but it can help improve it. For instance, take a blog post that someone on your content marketing team has written. From there, you can ask for a generative AI tool to make the blog content more straightforward, on-brand, and engaging, etc.    Content optimization doesn't stop there! AI tools can also assess content and better optimize it from an SEO standpoint, which will help boost visibility and increase organic traffic.   If you're not convinced that using AI to optimize your content is compelling, take a couple of older pieces of content, use AI to refresh them, and see how it performs. As with everything in marketing, track their performance with your set KPIs to measure their success.

4. Repurposing Content

In addition to optimizing content, use generative AI to repurpose content your brand already has.    AI can help repurpose content in several ways, including: 

• Content summarization: AI-powered tools can condense lengthy content into shorter summaries, making them more suitable for social media posts, email newsletters, or teaser content.

• Automated A/B testing: AI-powered platforms can automatically test variations of content elements such as headlines, images, and calls-to-action to identify the most effective combinations for maximizing engagement and conversions.

• Content transcription: AI can transcribe audio and video content into text, allowing marketers to repurpose it into blog posts, articles, or infographics.

• Content remixing: AI can remix existing content elements like images, videos, and text to create fresh variations suitable for different platforms or target audiences.

Testing some of the tactics mentioned above is a good starting point for brands just beginning to incorporate AI into their content marketing efforts. And as mentioned previously, it's always important to track the success of your efforts. If you're using AI for content summarization or remixing, how does it compare to someone doing it manually? Is the copy superior? And how much time did you save?

5. Predictive Analytics and Curated Content

While not directly tied to content marketing, AI can also forecast trends and audience behavior, analyzing vast amounts of data from various sources, including social media, search engines, industry reports, and historical data. This information gives brands insight into the types of content that will resonate best with their target audience.    For instance, through these predictive analytics, brands can identify patterns in audience behavior, preferences, and demographics. Marketers can utilize this data to segment audiences and then tailor content to each specific group.    Think about it: how you speak to a Gen Z customer in Seattle, Washington is likely different from how you speak to an older customer in Tampa, Florida.    This personalization increases engagement and conversion rates by delivering content that resonates with each segment's unique interests and needs.  

Get Started With SOCi 

  You have the knowledge needed to get the most out of your content marketing efforts with AI. Now is the time to get started. The task can seem daunting as a multi-location brand with 100s or 1,000s of business locations, but SOCi is here to help!    With our CoMarketing Cloud — powered by SOCi Genius, our AI engine — your brand can automate its most important workflows at scale, including your content marketing efforts.    Our CoMarketing Cloud leverages advanced data science, best-in-class generative AI, "on-brand" training models, and leading localization and automation tools to make data-driven decisions that fuel more innovative marketing strategies and increase ROI.    SOCi Genius learns your brand's style to ensure authenticity remains constant.    We recently released Genius Reviews and Genius Social. They use generative AI to respond to reviews and social engagements. And with Genius Social, you can create on-brand and localized social media content, taking some of the load off your content marketing team.    Both AI layers also rely on historical data from each location to generate the most accurate, helpful, and engaging responses or content for each location.    

    Genius Reviews and Genius Social will soon be complemented by an exciting solution from SOCi that helps to automate and optimize listing management using the power of AI.   Request a demo today for more insight into how SOCi can help your brand dominate its content marketing strategy and beyond!