How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Content Marketing

Artificial intelligence has improved considerably since Alan Turing first asked if machines can think. Since 1950, there have been various promising advancements in this field, some of which have started to change digital marketing. In Salesforce's State of Marketing report, 51 percent of respondents said they were already using AI in their work, and 27 percent are thinking of adopting it in the future. AI has various roles in content creation. Here are only some of the ways artificial intelligence has affected digital marketing.

Allows Marketers To Understand Customers

AI can use predictive intelligence to help companies understand their customers' needs and interests. When businesses know more about consumers, they can personalize their offerings. Aside from helping with understanding your audience, it can also affect lead scoring. When you use predictive lead scoring to regulate the buyer journey, you can speed up the sales process since you will know which customers are likely to buy which items depending on their past purchases.

When you know where users are in the buyer journey, you can deliver the content style they are most likely to consume at that stage. If you know what type of content they positively react to, you can plan your calendar or your email sequence to coincide with their preferences.

Enables Teams To Gather Data-Driven Insights

Most content strategists rely on manual sorting. They go through piles of data themselves to build their content strategy, which could take hours or even days. When you have plenty of data points, there is too much information that it can be challenging to decipher information. Fortunately, AI can analyze your content performance for you. An AI-powered system can compare your data with other websites and even offer suggestions about the topics that best perform under certain circumstances.

Allows You To Use NLP For Content

In marketing, you can use neuro-linguistic programming or NLP in various ways. Product descriptions and chatbot text, for instance, are two applications in marketing. This technology uses deep learning to understand human language. When you use NLP in marketing, you can create better scripts for your automated interactions. In time, chatbots might move beyond simple interactions and provide branded content.

Are The Robots Coming To Take (Marketing) Jobs?

Many people have sounded the alarms about allowing machine learning to take writing-related tasks. Some people fear (and rightfully so) that machines might replace human writers in newsrooms or marketing teams because they are more efficient. 

Robots seem poised to take over various jobs in different industries. After all, it has already happened in manufacturing; most factories today use machinery to automate preparation and packaging. It is indeed possible for us to develop AI that can create content. However, humans can do many things that a robot can not—especially in marketing. 

For now, AI content creation relies on algorithms. Their "writing" capacity comes from the information humans feed into them. To replace manual content creation, AI must develop human reasoning, form opinions, feel, and think critically. Even if AI evolves and becomes better at constructing sentences and detecting nuance, many vital duties would still fall on marketers. Here are some of them.‍

1. Marketers Know How To Ensure Brand Fit

A brand's culture consists of the values, the mission-vision, and the personality of the company, and machines cannot replicate character yet. Since culture is something humans live and breathe, they are the ones who can keep a brand alive. The reputation of a company depends on how the humans who run it upholds the brand.

What's more, customers can spot "uncanny" brand culture. They know if the business owners genuinely care about their company as soon as they see it. Authenticity and personality are essential, and marketers can ensure that the business's materials reflect those.

2. Marketers Can Create Strategies

Today, people like brands that stand for something. They prefer products and services that align with a higher purpose. The best marketing strategies have a clear identity, and their approach revolves around communicating that identity successfully. Companies use marketing to connect with people who identify with their values and beliefs.

A strategist needs to think of human needs and how to fulfill these. The best marketing strategies find a balance between a brand's values and their audience's. This process is something a machine cannot duplicate since algorithms wouldn't know how to identify human needs.

3. Marketers Can Interpret Results

Machine learning can gather data from thousands of different points and produce detailed graphs. A computer can process so much more data than humans can, but these results will be useless if there are no humans to interpret them. AI is excellent at processing numbers or recounting events, but it cannot tell us why these things happen or why these figures are where they are.

Humans, meanwhile, have the opposite strength. They know how to decipher context, identify nuance, and sense irony in speech and text. A human can also make connections based on cultural factors. They will know if a particular ad campaign will not work in a certain culture based on its people's beliefs or practices.

Marketing departments will always need humans, no matter how sophisticated technology becomes. AI-generated content makes work more meaningful. In the past, marketers had to sift through pages of data to figure whether or not it is useful for their team. This process takes up money, resources, and time that companies can allocate to other purposes.‍

Conclusion

‍Artificial intelligence in business is on the rise, and many people fear that this signals great economic losses for certain portions of the workforce. Although there are significant developments in AI today, it does not mean that machines will overtake humans. If you are marketing to humans, you need to know how humans think, so it's safe to say that empathy-based jobs like writing, communication, and marketing will not see a robot apocalypse. Besides, leveraging AI in your work makes you more efficient, and who does not want that?

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