2017 was the year of the chatbot for Internet marketing, and probably the first big customer-facing application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for business purposes. We believe that the next few years will see an increasing number of uses for AI in business, including content marketing. The sooner you can get ahead of the curve by using AI for content research and generation, the better. Here are five reasons why this should be on your radar in 2018.
Voice Searches
A traditional way of finding topics to write about is by seeing how people find your site. However, more people are starting to use voice searches rather than text searches. Incorporating voice search into your website can be a good foot in the door for using AI in your business, especially if you are targeting mobile users. From a content marketing perspective, voice queries are often far more accurate in revealing what customers want than text searches. The sooner you can get comfortable using, offering, and analyzing voice input the better prepared you’ll be.
Audience-focused Content
Today’s content marketing strategies start with an educated guess as to what the audience wants to read, then use feedback on that guess to create additional pieces. It’s hard to ask the audience as a whole what it is they want to learn or know about next. At least, it was until AI came along. Predictive analytics, like the type CONCURED has developed, will help content providers know in advance what people want to read online. Instead of focusing on what the business thinks the audience wants, we’ll be able to explore observable patterns in Internet usage to create truly audience-focused content.
Improved Efficiency of Content Creation
AI can do more than just help you choose topics the audience wants to read. It can also make the creation of new topics far faster than ever before. A major challenge for all content providers is producing enough material to keep the audience engaged. By making topics easier to find, AI cuts out a major inefficiency.
Plus, another AI benefit on the horizon is the advent of AI-produced content. This is a brand-new field that holds lots of promise for automating content marketing campaigns, and it is one that CONCURED is spending a lot of time researching.
Improved Identification of Micro-influencers
Influencer marketing is just another term for celebrity endorsements, only using people who are Internet famous for a particular audience. Getting a piece of content on an influencer’s platform or from the influencer themselves is quite powerful. So powerful that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has cracked down on some of the more extreme examples. If your content marketing involves connecting with influencers then identifying micro-influencers, those voices that aren’t celebrities but hold great weight in a community, will be crucial. Their opinions hold extra weight and can help steer your content development. By identifying the leaders of the herd, so to speak, you can pull the rest along.
Personalization Becomes Real
The current Holy Grail of all Internet marketing is the personalization of marketing messages to the individual. Big Data technologies and personalized tracking helped form the initial data set. AI techniques are now combing through this data to find patterns to exploit. Here’s a prediction. Once AI-generated content becomes realistic enough, it will become possible for businesses to offer curated blogs of their own content tailored to the individual. A stepping stone will be to do that for existing content pieces.
As you can see, the businesses that are able to pull off these technical feats will have extraordinary advantages over the competition. The sooner your business can start experimenting with AI, the further along you will be on the learning curve and the better you’ll be able to take advantage of new AI-based marketing tools.
Did you know that CONCURED can provide you with real-time information about the best performing content in your industry? Click on the link below to discover more about the valuable insights AI can provide to optimize your content marketing strategy: