Anyone active in the digital world constantly comes across the topic of “artificial intelligence”. Currently hyped by ChatGPT and Composed AI. The subject itself is vast and will certainly extend into many areas of life and work in the future – including marketing. Marketing content, which is indispensable for any marketing process, is one such area that offers many starting points for the application of artificial intelligence. In some places, it has already arrived, for example in content marketing. But what role does artificial intelligence truly play in content marketing currently, and how can we best deal with this new technology? These very questions form the basis of this article.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a subfield of computer science. It deals with the automation of intelligent, human behaviour. Since there is no uniform definition of “intelligence”, AI is also difficult to delineate. In most cases, artificial intelligence describes the attempt to understand and imitate the human brain, its functions, and learning steps – usually in the form of a computer or computer program. Artificial intelligence is therefore a term that stands for applications where machines perform human-intelligent tasks such as learning, judging, and problem solving. These AI applications can be designed in many ways, from “simple”, logical calculation sequences, such as the digital chess opponent, to algorithms, and even to futuristic ideas of humanoid, autonomously acting and thinking robot humans, as seen in the film “I, Robot”.
How does Artificial Intelligence Manifest in Marketing?
Humanoid robots do not yet exist in marketing today, but if we look at the marketing materials of most Martech companies, AI-powered tools are now ubiquitous. MarTech refers to the combination of marketing and technology. The term specifically relates to important measures and tools that use technology to achieve marketing goals.
The technological possibilities in this area have developed so rapidly that, ironically, many marketers themselves struggle to holistically grasp where and how they can apply AI to their strategy, processes, and talent to get the most out of this technology. The difficulty here is not skepticism towards the tools. The sheer variety of possibilities requires a massive rethink – and that takes time. All established processes must be questioned, and resources freed up by the new application must be reallocated.
Status Quo of AI in Content Marketing
In the field of content marketing, the State of Marketing AI Report 2021 found that this is one of the most important areas where AI is already being used. Of the ten AI use cases for marketing, six related to the creation and/or evaluation and improvement of content:
- Gaining insights into top content and campaigns
- Creating data-driven content
- Predicting successful advertising assets (e.g. digital ads, landing pages) without prior A/B testing
- Delivering personalised content experiences across all channels
- Selecting keywords and topic clusters for content optimisation
- Optimising website content for search engines
How AI Supports Content Marketing in Advance
Aside from some doom and gloom predictions about AI in content marketing, which prophesied the loss of many marketers’ jobs, we want to emphasise the advantages of using AI here. No matter how good it gets, artificial intelligence will not make all marketing professionals unemployed for a long time. On the contrary, it is primarily the small-scale, time-consuming, and arduous auxiliary tasks that can be replaced by AI. This leaves much more room and time to draw qualitatively valuable conclusions from prepared information. What can AI already achieve in content marketing today?
- Artificial intelligence generally helps to perform repeatable and automated tasks more intelligently, faster, and at scale.
- It offers use cases for content research, planning, and strategy.
- Even before content production, AI can help develop a relevant and effective content calendar.
- Artificial intelligence tools can search the internet to collect data and generate topics, keywords, and content ideas based on current and historical trends.
- AI sifts through unstructured data, particularly on social media, to find brand and category mentions, based on which topic suggestions can be created that reflect the current sentiment of target audiences.
- The tools help identify the best A/B testing options to boost content performance.
- AI supports the ongoing content creation process.
Not only in advance, but also during the content creation process, AI can be a great help for marketers. Here are some promising possibilities: AI assists in developing article structures, tables of contents, and first drafts for long-form content. This saves a lot of time and massively supports implementation.
Artificial intelligence creates truly solid micro-content such as social media posts, search and display ads, email subject lines, and sales copy, as well as formulaic content like press releases and boilerplate text. In the spirit of sustainability, AI also helps with the reuse of extensive content. Converting evergreen content into case studies, infographics, product descriptions, or video scripts, as well as translating content into multiple languages, are great use cases. What AI is also very good at is technical long-form content. Financial and annual reports or technical manuals, which previously hardly thrilled any marketing heart, can now be easily delegated and automated. The large area of chatbots could also gain new and lasting momentum through the targeted use of truly good AI tools.
AI in Quality Control and Post-Processing
As might be expected, AI can also make a valuable contribution to quality control and post-processing. In many places, this is already happening without us actually being aware of it. Here are some concrete examples:
- AI provides us with suitable recommendations for personalising content and products.
- AI tools are unbeatable when it comes to saving time: from research to content creation, distribution, and measurement. This leaves more time for other tasks.
- Across the entire SEO landscape, artificial intelligence can boost performance. It allows for the integration of the best keywords and the design of high-performing SEO strategies.
- Artificial intelligence supports increasing content effectiveness with recommendations. What is truly clicked, liked, and read can be derived simply and quickly.
- Content and workflow standardisation: Intelligent content management platforms can help streamline the process from planning to creation and distribution, especially for larger, geographically dispersed teams.
AI in Content Marketing: Big Change and Big Opportunity
AI is becoming exponentially better at understanding, writing, and speaking human-like language. For this, it needs local languages, grammar, punctuation, brand style guides, and other parameters. Feeding AI with this input and setting guidelines for its development will certainly be the future task of marketing. The fact is, AI lends a traditionally rather time and labour intensive human activity, such as writing, a speed and scalability that is unattainable by humans. Instead of viewing this fact as a threat, we should recognise the opportunities it presents.
Accuracy, context, and nuance, however, are still areas requiring human intervention. Even as AI continuously learns, well-trained editorial teams and strategic quality control remain important and will need to contribute even more significantly in the future. The use of AI in content marketing will no longer be about doing a lot, but about doing the right thing. Although many marketers have adhered to this principle before, this emphasis was not always evident in some implementations.
Practically speaking, AI can help conserve resources: writing resources, for example, are expensive and should be deployed where they are truly needed. If processes are organised such that a large part of routine and quantitatively demanding work is shifted to AI tools, the people behind the content can perform more value-adding tasks. It is important that we learn how to work with AI and how to increasingly use the newly gained time for content context and relevance, enhanced quality control, strategic alignment, and fact-checking. Keyword “process optimisation”: The integration of AI-powered content marketing tools into the entire Martech stack is crucial for efficient and seamless workflows, but equally important is the question of integrating expert, management, and legal approval workflows into AI-generated content. Here too, more workforce will be needed that cannot be replaced by AI. We must also ensure we build internal expertise for optimal use of the technology and engage employees in training AI to generate more relevant industry and brand-oriented content. Considerations before investing in AI tools for content marketing: Where should marketers ideally start on their journey to using AI tools for marketing processes? The starting point here, too, is always the content strategy and an overview of the use cases.
As with any other technology, clarity about what needs to be achieved and why is paramount. The tools applied are the how in implementation. So, once it is clear where to go, the next step is to clarify which tools can help to work faster and smarter to achieve strategic goals. Identifying the right use cases is a natural outcome of this process. Important selection criteria for AI tools, based on this, are:
- the quality of the generated content
- user-friendliness
- the research capability of the tool. Here, we usually have no choice but to try, test, compare, and exchange ideas with others.
Conclusion: AI in Content Marketing
AI content tools will change how the performance of marketers, writers, and content itself is measured – that much is clear. As mentioned, it is not about more, but about creating better content. Content creators with AI tools, capable of researching and creating content more efficiently, gain additional prestige because they deliver significantly more productive, higher quality content and improved conversions.
It is true that marketers still have much to learn, but it is within an exciting and opportunity-rich field of development. The potential of AI-powered technologies is evident when it comes to reducing costs, increasing revenue, and even providing differentiated content experiences. AI also provides valuable services in consolidating data into a golden record. What sometimes makes us hesitate is not the fear of AI itself, but our need for greater understanding and knowledge of how this potential can be best used and integrated sustainably.
When applied correctly, AI could be the perfect solution for our digital world to tame the content and data tsunamis, while simultaneously sustainably improving what humans are truly good at – namely creating context.
Fancy trying something out yourself? Here are two links: Rytr – text generation with AI [Craiyon] (https://www.craiyon.com/) – image generation with AI
