The fact of the matter is AI is here and a part of our everyday lives. While it may be a little natural to worry that AI will continue to increase in popularity, making your role as content marketer obsolete, that’s not the case.
Instead, when used strategically, AI can improve your content marketing while making your job a little easier in the process. Don’t believe us? Here are some examples of how you can blend AI and content marketing in 2021 and beyond.
Have you ever written a great blog but forgot to share it on social media? What about a press release? Did you spend time and energy only to slip up and not blast it to your network? With AI, you won’t have to worry about that ever again. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and others streamline the distribution of your content by automatically scheduling all your posts. If you need to schedule it across different platforms, you can. You can also dig into analytics to measure individual pieces of content. For press releases, Cision and similar software can help.
Influencer marketing, or user-generated content, can improve your brand’s authority and public trust. AI tools such as social listening and keyword collectors can help you find the brand-related content posted by your customers. Then, you can ask for their permission to post it on your blog or use it to create a larger piece of material.
For specific industries, AI can offload the work of writing basic articles or blogs. For instance, different kinds of sports teams can use AI-powered tools to upload scores and game reports. The financial industry can use these algorithms to write updates on stocks, the Dow, and the like. It’s all made possible through Natural Language Generation, a specific discipline of machine learning. The Washington Post already uses it for simpler stories, allowing their staff to focus on deep, feature pieces that require an empathic, human touch.
No doubt, you’ve received an email that included your first name. If you’re a marketer, you know someone didn’t do this by hand for every single person on a list. AI did! From customized emails, tailored landing pages, salutations in chatbots or SMS, AI can help contextualize your content. This allows your brand to have one-on-one engagement with every customer and lead – without adding extra work to your day.
By now, you should know chatbots are AI-powered (bot, anyone)? Their machine learning and AI tools can help with customer support, resolving support tickets, and more. You can also use this AI platform to promote content sharing or facilitate even more self-created, branded content. Others, like Whole Foods, provide recipes and encourage users to share them without someone having to type it all up in the backend every time.
Every major social network uses AI and algorithms to customize the news feeds of your users. Typically, they show their visitors only the posts or tweets related to their interests. You can do that too for any platform – external or internal – that delivers news or other similar updates to online visitors.
Several AI tools on the market automatically track, measure, and provide reports on your various content efforts and audiences. They can include anything from social media reports to website analytics. With that information, you can better target your personas and serve them the content they want when they need it.
Still a little hesitant about utilizing certain AI features in your content marketing landscape? You shouldn’t be. AI helps you better understand your audiences and gives you insights into what they want to see. In turn, you can create that content and engage with them. Personalization tools make that content experience even better. Not only that, but you can also let AI take over some of the more mundane tasks that hinder you from working on more significant marketing initiatives.
However, deploying AI by itself without a strategy may not pan out quite the way you envision. To avoid that, you need an in-depth content marketing strategy, pinpointing the places where AI will and won’t work. For help coming up with and executing your plan, reach out to the Lynton team today. We’d be happy to assist!