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AI-Powered Content Marketing: Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy

Author: Debra Marino

April 17, 2023 | 1 min read

Content marketing plays a significant role in any marketing plan, giving businesses the power to establish brand credibility, educate target buyers, and guide them along the entire buyer's journey, which predominantly occurs online. Your company has probably already implemented a content marketing strategy and is therefore aware of the time and effort involved in creating and promoting quality content that captures your audience's attention and stands out in the wealth of information overload facing us all.

This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is rapidly transforming the field of marketing, can help. The emergence of AI Marketing, specifically for content creation and content marketing, allows marketers to generate, publish, and promote content much more efficiently and effectively. By leveraging the power of AI tools, businesses can now do more with less and are better positioned to stay ahead of their competition.

This blog post will explore how marketing executives and professionals can harness the power of AI to streamline and optimize their content marketing strategies. We'll look at some benefits of utilizing AI-powered content creation tools and techniques, address some limitations and common concerns, and provide tips for how your marketing team can begin incorporating AI into their content marketing strategy.

Benefits of AI-Powered Content Marketing

Creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience can be daunting. However, with the rise of AI-powered content creation tools and techniques, marketers have access to powerful new resources that are changing the game. According to Capterra's 2022 AI Marketing Survey, 82% of marketers agree that content generated by AI or ML software is just as good or better than human-generated content. And AI can be incorporated at several different points in your content marketing process, providing numerous potential benefits, including:

Increased Efficiency and Scalability

One of the primary benefits of AI-powered content marketing is increased efficiency, allowing marketing teams to produce high-quality content at scale. Content creators can utilize AI tools to streamline keyword research, content topic brainstorming and planning, content development and refinement, and more. AI-powered design tools can even automatically generate visuals to support the content. In addition, AI can review and analyze massive amounts of data much more quickly than a human can, which streamlines any research too. The more points along the content creation process that you incorporate AI tools and techniques, the more efficiency benefit you will receive.

Reduced Costs

While improving the efficiency of content creation tasks produces indirect cost savings because your team can do more with less, utilizing AI tools for specific (and often tactical) tasks you are currently outsourcing can also provide more direct cost savings. This allows you to redirect that budget to more valuable and strategic efforts.

Improved Content Quality

AI-powered tools can help marketers create more engaging, personalized, and compelling content. For example, generative AI/natural language generation (NLG) tools, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Jasper, can automatically generate written content, including blog posts, eBooks, website content, and social media posts that adhere to your company's guidelines and tone. AI can also optimize the content for different channels and formats, such as social media, email, or blogs, increasing its relevance and appeal to the target audience. In addition, the ability of AI algorithms to analyze vast amounts of data and generate insights that humans may overlook enables more accurate and data-driven content.

Improved SEO and Content Optimization

AI can help marketers optimize their content for search engines and other channels more efficiently. For example, NLG tools can quickly and easily produce content that incorporates SEO keywords that you specify. In addition, AI-powered content analysis tools can help identify areas for improvement in your content, such as readability, relevance, and keyword density.

Concerns and Limitations

Despite the benefits, some marketers may still hesitate to utilize AI tools and techniques in their content marketing strategies due to potential drawbacks such as penalties from Google against AI-assisted content, concerns about sounding too robotic or unnatural, or even ethical concerns about bias and lack of diversity in the content.

We are still in the infancy of AI, so much is yet to be determined or constantly evolving, including Google's stance on search ranking for AI-generated content. However, Google recently clarified that its ranking system will award high-quality content regardless of how the content is created. In other words, AI-generated content will not automatically be penalized, as many once feared. Nevertheless, the solution to that concern and concerns about content sounding unnatural or being biased and lacking diversity is to use AI in conjunction with human expertise.

While AI is incredibly powerful, it is not a substitute for human judgment. Therefore, businesses should train their AI models using high-quality data and work with human editors to ensure the content sounds natural and matches the company's tone. They should also prioritize diversity and inclusivity in their data and content to avoid bias and ensure their content reflects their audience's needs and perspectives. Finally, while Google is not automatically penalizing AI-generated content today, if that changes, you can future-proof your content by running it through an AI detection tool to check which portions show up as AI content and then either run the content through a paraphrasing tool or have a human editor make appropriate changes.

In terms of the limitations of AI, there are currently some key ones that can impact content marketers. For example, the dataset that ChatGPT was trained with only goes to 2021. Therefore, if you're looking to add recent metrics or quotes for a particular topic to a piece of content, this would not be the best tool for the job. In addition, these tools can return incorrect or biased information since they are trained on real-world information and sources, which themselves may be inaccurate or biased. The important thing is to be aware of current limitations but remember that this technology is still in its infancy and will improve over time, so use it where and how it can provide value right now.

Getting Started with AI-Powered Content Marketing

The way AI is so prevalent in the news these days, and the explosion of AI tools onto the market can make determining how your marketing should begin implementing an AI content marketing strategy seem daunting. However, according to Influencer Marketing Hub's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Marketing Benchmark Report: 2023, 44.4% of marketers have already used AI for content production, and 71.2% believe AI can outperform humans. Therefore, marketing teams should be concerned about being left behind if they don't act soon, so here are a few considerations and suggestions to help get you started down the path:

Ensure you approach the topic with your team of incorporating AI into your content marketing strategy as a way to enable them to produce quality content more efficiently and reassure them it is not a strategy to replace staff. You want them to be positive about and invested in the learning process required to implement an AI-powered content strategy.
If you intend to utilize NLG tools such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, or Jasper to produce content, you should first train these tools on your company's products/services, target audiences, writing guidelines, tone, and personality. Therefore, be sure to have this information documented and available. You might also include data on your competitors, customer feedback, and industry research in the training.
It will also be helpful to have your current content marketing process and tools documented. Analyze this for the most challenging or time-consuming areas to identify potential opportunities to incorporate AI tools or techniques. For example, AI can be utilized for keyword research, brainstorming topic ideas for a content calendar, creating outlines and first drafts of potential content, refining or summarizing existing content, and much more. As you adapt your process to incorporate AI tools and techniques, update your process documentation.
Provide appropriate training to your team, including which tools to use for which tasks, tool usage, prompt engineering best practices, and changes to your overall content marketing process.
Understand that everyone will have a learning curve on the various AI tools and how to utilize them effectively. Don't be afraid to experiment, and don't expect to get everything right the first time. For example, LLM/NLG tools are subject to the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) principle, and it takes some time and training to learn how to construct prompts that produce high-quality and accurate results.
While you will need to explore the exploding landscape of standalone AI tools to identify ones that meet your unique needs, don't forget that some software tools that are already commonly used by marketing teams are now incorporating AI capabilities, such as Canva's new text-to-image and HubSpot's new content assistant tools. So be sure to audit the features of any technology already existing in-house and leverage these capabilities where they make sense since you have already invested in those products.
Continue to leverage human editors. While AI can generate content, human expertise is still needed to ensure the content is high-quality, relevant, and matches the company's tone and style. Ultimately, your marketing team is responsible for the quality and accuracy of any published content, so you should not bypass human reviews and edits.

With these general guidelines in mind, here are some specific examples of how AI can be used when producing a few different types of content marketing assets that are commonly produced by B2B companies:

Blog Posts: AI can be used to generate topic ideas, research keywords and phrases, and optimize blog posts for search engines. AI can also help summarize lengthy blog posts, create engaging headlines, and format content for readability.
eBooks: AI can help research and summarize complex topics, identify key takeaways, generate engaging introductions and conclusions, and improve grammar and readability. AI can also be used to create custom images and illustrations for eBooks.
Case Studies: AI can be used to summarize customer feedback and reviews and create compelling narratives around case studies. AI can also be used to format and present case studies in an easy-to-read and engaging format.
Webinars: AI can be used to develop and organize content, analyze attendee feedback and questions, and identify areas for improvement in future webinars. AI can also help generate follow-up content and recommendations based on attendee feedback.
Articles: AI can help generate headlines and subheadings, research and summarize topics, and create engaging introductions and conclusions. AI can also be used to optimize articles for search engines, format content for readability, and improve grammar.
Marketing Emails: AI can help generate subject lines, analyze and segment email lists, and personalize email content based on recipient engagement.

Be sure to also download our AI-Powered Content Marketing Infographic to see a real-world example content creation process incorporating AI tools and techniques.

Conclusion

AI-powered content offers many benefits for content marketing, including increased efficiency, cost savings, and higher-quality SEO. Using AI tools and techniques, businesses can streamline content creation and produce high-quality content that engages and resonates with target audiences.

While there are some concerns around the use of AI in content creation, these concerns can be addressed by selecting the right tools, correctly training the models, and still relying on a human editor to ensure that high-quality and accurate content is produced that sounds natural and matches your company's guidelines and tone.

Incorporating AI-powered content into content marketing strategies offers a significant competitive advantage. In fact, a November 2022 article published by MarTech cited a survey that found that AI helps marketers boost sales (52%), improve customer retention (51%), and introduce new products successfully (49%). Therefore, by staying up-to-date with the latest AI tools and best practices for incorporating AI, your team can achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in its content marketing program and outpace the competition.

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