Content Marketing and AI: Can They Work Together?

Combining content marketing and AI is fascinating. Love it, hate it, or tolerate it — AI is impacting content marketing. The AI writing tools already available to you are game-changing, and advanced uses constantly appear as developers deliver new tools and astute content marketers experiment with them.

Those using an informed, judicious approach to embracing artificial intelligence in content marketing will become much more productive. The quality of AI-produced content will continue improving as AI improves and content marketers develop new ways to apply the exciting possibilities opening up.

The Future of Content Marketing With AI

Everyone in the content marketing universe is considering how generative AI will affect their work because it’s evident that skill upgrades are imperative if humans are to remain relevant while AI continues to evolve and improve.

The trick to prospering with AI content creation seems to lie in learning how to use it for the parts it excels at and upgrading your human skills in areas where AI sucks. AI is outstanding at analyses, research, ideation, and organization, which are all time-consuming aspects of content creation.

Humans excel at creativity and can reach heights of expression that AI-generated content can’t match. Human writing can more effectively:

• Arouse feelings like compassion, curiosity, empathy, sympathy, and pain
• Use wordplay to evoke images that transport readers
• Create metaphors connecting vastly different ideas
• Share personal anecdotes drawn from lived experiences
• Inject observations from pop culture to illustrate points and increase relevancy
• Fact check AI because it believes anything it reads

Getting better at using AI to do the time-consuming aspects of content creation can boost your productivity. You can use the time gained for creatively humanizing AI-generated content to engage audiences more effectively and strengthen your brand image and voice. This is the future of content marketing with AI.

8 Ways To Power Up Your Content Strategy With AI

The new generative AI tools — and those in development — give you amazing ways to enhance your content marketing. Developers are burning the midnight oil to improve existing platforms and build new applications because the potential is obvious. Here are eight ways you can take advantage of powerful AI writing tools to up your content marketing game.

1. Sketch the Perfect Target Audience Profile

AI tools excel at gathering and analyzing data to give you deep insights for creating the perfect user persona guide that improves engagement. You can use:

• Natural language processing tools to reveal patterns in data scattered throughout emails, chats, reviews, surveys, and social media. You gain insights into customer preferences, needs, sentiments, and feedback.
• Machine learning tools that can help segment customers based on purchase history, browsing behavior, or loyalty status using data mining and statistical modeling.

2. Uncover the Right Keywords and Topic Clusters

Nailing your pillar content strategy is critical when trying to rank high in search, but researching keywords and finding ideas for topic clusters is time-intensive. However, many excellent AI tools are available that deliver both in seconds.

InLinks has a tool that enables you to follow trends in your field. Producing content clusters built around a hot trend gives you topics that will make interested audiences eager to read your content. Google Trends is a free alternative.

There are numerous excellent keyword research tools. Many of them incorporate topic cluster features and AI writing assistants. The SEMrush Keyword Manager helps you explore hot topics you’ve identified and generates ideas for related topics and topic clusters.

3. Find and Exploit Your Competitors’ Content Gaps

Analyzing your competitor’s content lets you discover what topics and content bring them the most traffic. You can use your keyword and topic tools to spot gaps in their content or gaps in your own.

Ahrefs Content Gap tool compares your site to competitors to give you a list of keywords they are ranking for but you are not. You can then create content that beats them for those keywords or do further analysis to discover associated keywords that may be easier to dominate.  

4. Take Human Creativity to New Heights

Using AI writing tools as time savers or for mental springboards and collaboration can provide sources of inspiration, data, and feedback that allow you to create better content quickly.

ChatGPT can generate text from a prompt. Tweaking your prompts to go deeper into the topic can reveal ideas you may not have considered or give you inspiration for subtopics. You can extract the best ideas from AI content to write better than ChatGPT.

Typing your keyword, topic, or title into Bing Compose and selecting the Idea feature gives you a list of suggestions drawn from the web. Be sure to check them for accuracy because the tool sometimes makes incorrect assumptions.

Google Docs is useful for collaborative editing in real-time, which can spark user creativity. It also has a useful voice-to-text feature that lets you talk instead of type. And there’s an AI writing assistant currently in beta. It’s called Google Workplace Labs.

5. Produce Content Faster Than Ever Before

Writing blog articles that engage readers and rank high in search takes time. AI blog writing tools can speed up the writing process and give you better content when a human who knows how to write uses them.

Helpful AI content marketing tools for writing include:

• Surfer SEO and Frase to help with keyword research and outlines
• Bing Chat for ideation
• InLinks to build or improve link structure
• Grammarly to highlight grammatical errors and speed up editing

AI content tools can automate and streamline production and help improve existing content.

6. Update and Improve Your Existing Content

Many content marketers have a treasure trove of existing content that’s no longer ranking because it needs updating or lacks relevancy today. AI can quickly analyze content needing improvement, saving the expense of creating new material.

If competitors’ SEO is better than yours, AI may suggest relevant keywords or sources to enhance old content. It can generate better headlines and meta descriptions and also help improve readability. Your old content takes on new life to climb the search ranks. It also becomes more engaging, attracting more traffic and conversions.

AI content marketing tools that can help you with updates and improvements are:

• MarketMuse for auditing your content to provide recommendations for improving quality and relevance
• Grammarly to check and correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and tone errors
• Lumen5 to help transform your content into engaging videos by using AI to select the best visuals, music, and voiceovers for your message
• Copy.ai to generate new content ideas, headlines, slogans, and captions

7. Access New Markets With Faster Translations

Expand your markets with an AI translation service for content marketing. Generative AI translation like ChatGPT isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement over machine learning translators similar to Google Translate.

You’ll be able to do bulk translations. Then, a professional translator can quickly use AI prompts to correct cultural or contextual errors. AI translators work in over 100 languages and can preserve your brand voice.

AI chatbots may produce different responses depending on the device used or how you phrase a prompt. Prompt engineering is critical in delivering accurate translations.

8. Find Hidden Patterns in the Data and Draw Actionable Insight

Building a digital content strategy in 2023 has become a more accurate process. AI can use machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning to analyze large, complex, or scattered datasets. Hidden patterns not visible to human analysts appear quickly.

Your targeted content marketing effort can become more rewarding when you apply the deeper insights to segmentation, targeting, personalization, optimization, and measurement.

How To Measure the ROI of Your AI-Powered Content

AI-powered content can increase the ROI of your content budget because your team can create more content with the same budget. Each additional content piece brings more traffic, which equals more conversions.

Let’s use an example from Forbes. Say you’re selling a service for $1,000 and spending $4,000 on content marketing. Your marketing strategy draws 8,000 monthly visitors with a close rate of 5%. Each lead generates $50. Break-even is 80 leads.

Using AI, your team can create the same content for $3000. Now, break-even is 60 leads.

Here’s how to do the calculations:

1. Price x close ratio = revenue per lead
2. Revenue per lead ÷ content marketing cost = leads to break even

AI can increase content marketing ROI because your team can speed up ideation and research, giving them more time to write higher-quality content. The value of content marketing increases with AI use.

Ensure E-E-A-T Content From Generative AI With Our SME Reviews

Google recently updated its Quality Rater Guidelines to combat inaccuracy, which is an area that challenges generative AI for marketing. Using content that’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) compliant will bring you higher search engine rankings and more traffic.

Google says the most critical component is experience. Having an experienced SME (subject matter expert) look over your content will ensure it’s factually accurate.

AI in content marketing is here to stay, and it will continue to deliver more value when combined with human expertise. It’s now easy to join AI and human experts. Find an SME with deep knowledge of your topic using Compose.ly’s content review service.