How to Place AI at the Forefront of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Avinash Nair

April 30, 2018

How to Place AI at the Forefront of Your Content Marketing Strategy

In recent years, the AI boom has taken an incredibly large role in the marketing world. A survey conducted by MemSQL, a provider of the real-time data warehousing, found that 61% of marketers claim that AI is their most significant data initiative for the coming year. Respondents were from both small and large companies.

Regarding content strategy, the insights provided by AI can do wonders to create messaging that resonates with the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Let’s talk about several ways you can use it to do so.

Accurately Align Marketing Talent with Your Goals

At its core, content marketing is all about creating human connections between brands and consumers. That being said, companies need to be very selective about the humans they place behind the scenes.

For a content marketing strategy to function properly, those involved must have compatible values, thought processes, ideologies, and both long and short-term visions. This all starts with the hiring process.

AI and B2B Recruiting

B2B companies tend to be very tight-knit. The bulk of hiring processes currently rely on word-of-mouth, especially for smaller operations. When this is the status quo, bringing new personnel onboard always comes with a certain degree of risk.

In many cases, companies never really know what they are getting until months after a person starts.

The negative ramifications of making bad hires can be

Employee turnover
Lost productivity,
Damage to the company’s reputation.

This is especially tough if the new hire is a friend, or a friend of a friend. Now, B2B companies can certainly use word-of-mouth to publicise their open positions over the grapevine. However, as AI becomes more advanced, adopting a smart solution to properly screen new candidates is an investment worth its weight in gold.

Data-driven Recruiting

With the help of data-driven recruiting, hiring managers can narrow down their choices based on some variables like keyword usage on the resume, relevant skills, and experience. From here, some of the more advanced tools can run specialized candidate assessments designed to gauge factors like:

Communication skills
Situational judgment
Problem-solving ability
Critical thinking, and more.

The insights from these tests scour a wide range of historical datasets to determine how well a candidate would fit into the open position, as well as the company culture.

With this knowledge, companies can make much more confident hiring decisions for how an applicant would mesh with their content department – or any other part of the company.

You always need to be 100% sure they will prosper in the role before bringing them aboard. This is regardless of whether you know the person applying or if they were referred to you, If you are going off a word-of-mouth approach, a bad hire can make everyone involved in the process look bad.

Success (or failure) of content marketing starts on the inside and flows outward. By using AI to better align new hires with company goals, content strategies stand of much better chance of making a positive and consistent impact.

Content Marketing Strategy

Leverage Trends and Customer Profiles

As many content creators will tell you, the key is knowing how to position your messaging in a way that plays to current interests. Producing content blindly and hoping for good traction, simply doesn’t work – at least not consistently.

This is one of the areas where AI is a content marketer’s best friend.

In regards to promoting branded content, products, and services, a smart Point-Of-Sale (POS) system can provide precise, number-backed information for how to structure marketing campaigns. For example, when customers make a purchase, your POS system will collect valuable data like

Phone numbers
Email addresses
Order history
Traffic sources
Referral sites, etc.

It will then integrate it all into a comprehensive report.

From here, content marketers can predict sales trends, determine:

Who the ideal customer segments are for targeted messaging
Where to distribute content
When to promote certain products or services
How to push upsells, and much more.

The “Age of the Customer” is here to stay. For this reason, backing a content strategy with AI is critical for producing messages that resonate and result in genuine interest.

Incorporate Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is a unique AI technology that can make the aspect of improving content much more efficient. Human language, in general, is incredibly complex. In addition to all the dialects and languages, each culture has its own set of spoken and written rules, slang terms, and syntaxes.

NLP gives computers the ability to understand, interpret, and then manipulate human discourse. It incorporates elements from computer science and computational linguistics to essentially bridge the gap between man (or woman) and machine. The algorithms are designed to “read” content and turn it into data, which the computers can then understand.

NLP can be used to analyze writing, hear speech, interpret meaning, and unbiasedly measure sentiment without fatigue. The major purpose of incorporating NLP into your content strategy is to improve targeting and proactively guide people down the sales funnel.

One of the primary areas in which NLP is used in the marketing realm is social listening. Using the right tools, content marketers can generate specialized reports based on their industry, brand name, competitors, topics, and keywords.

With such insights, content marketers can quickly understand the trending topics in their field and the way the bulk of their target audience feels about them. From here, they can produce content that plays to the current issues and answers burning questions with an expert take.

Chatbots for Marketing

As audiences engage with your content and website, NLP tools like chatbots can be used to interpret queries, recognize context, provide answers for customer service, and even nurture leads.

For brand impact, one in five people would consider purchasing through a chatbot. The overall impression of brands that adopt the technology is constructive.

Interestingly, 43% of customers surveyed in a Ubisend study thought brands that used chatbots were more innovative.

NLP is evolving like crazy and continues to be a guiding force for AI in marketing.

The sooner you jump on the bandwagon, the stronger and more targeted your content will be.

To Summarize

In the past couple of years, AI has highly influenced business and transformed into a much more efficient and powerful industry. And with each passing day, algorithms are becoming more advanced and sympathetic to human emotions, sentiment, and thought processes.

With regards to content, AI can be used from the very beginning stages of assembling your team, all the way to turning viewers into paying customers. All you need to do is understand the tools and determine how they can be used to your advantage.

Over to You

What are your thoughts on small businesses used to hiring through the grapevine, adopting some help from AI? Are you considering any other adoption of Artificial Intelligence? Or are you maybe holding out for dear life? Please share your thoughts in the comments section, below.

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You may also want to read: How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Can Be Used for Marketing

The Bond Between Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Management

4 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Impact The B2B Industry

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