Content Marketing

What Is AI In Content Marketing? What Are Its Benefits & Challenges? Explained In Detail

6 mins | Jan 27, 2024

If you work in the field of content marketing, it is crucial for you to take note of the current significant impact of AI (Artificial Intelligence) sweeping through the content marketing landscape. Businesses are consistently introducing brand-new AI products, and the blogs section of every brand is filled with articles or discussions on how AI is revolutionising the entire industry!

It doesn't matter if you're prepared or not; AI in content marketing has become a reality now, which must be accepted by all of us! At Close, we haven't overlooked this trend. Every one of us has identified the changing scenarios of the industry and has embraced the opportunity wholeheartedly. Today, it would not be wrong to say that AI serves as a valuable tool to enhance the efficiency and productivity of content marketers. Every one of us has been actively experimenting with the integration of AI tools into our marketing efforts.

So, what's the outcome of this? 54% of brands reported that AI helps in cost savings and increasing efficiencies. 54.5% of content marketers believe that AI will definitely enhance their marketing efforts. 88% of content marketers think that their business should increase the usage of automation & AI in order to fulfill customer expectations while staying competitive.

In this article, we are going to learn about AI in content marketing, what are its benefits and the challenges that come along the way. As a content marketer, you must understand how you can leverage the power of AI to elevate your own content marketing endeavours.

What Is Meant By AI In Content Marketing?

But first, what is content marketing? Of course, you might be familiar with content marketing, but let me put it in a very simple way — Content marketing involves the strategic development, creation and distribution of different forms of content, such as blog posts, articles, e-books, videos, infographics & more, via various channels.

In the digital marketing space, informative and engaging content is recognised as the pivotal force for driving marketing campaigns. Despite its significance for the success of any business, content marketing can be repetitive, time-consuming and requires a great amount of effort.

Now, talking about the concept of AI in content marketing, basically involves the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning programs into different types of content tools. All these content marketing tools tend to play a crucial role in the process of content planning, development, distribution, evaluation & reporting. The implementation of AI contributes to improving the overall aspect of content marketing.

Furthermore, it relieves people from the content marketing team from engaging in monotonous and time-consuming tasks. By integrating AI into the content marketing strategy, businesses, as well as their customers, can reap numerous benefits.

Understanding The Benefits Of AI (Artificial Intelligence) In Content Marketing

Utilising AI in your content marketing endeavours helps content marketers to do their work efficiently and smoothly. Moreover, it also allows clients to go through great experiences while engaging with your business. We have listed a few benefits of AI in content marketing below; let's check them out!

1) Content Development

Content curation is one of the most time-consuming tasks for marketers, and it requires a lot of dedication as well. Development of content involves staying informed about the latest trends/updates from numerous sources to fuel their own content creation. AI helps streamline this process by eliminating the need for manual searching and swiftly scanning through blog posts and articles using specified interests or keywords to deliver relevant resources directly to your inbox, thereby expediting the entire workflow.

Read Also: How to create high-quality content?

2) Personalization

When it comes to traditional marketing techniques, every customer is treated in the same way, and there isn't much difference! But in today's digital marketing world, a unique and engaging approach is needed to come out as a top leader in front of your customers. Here comes the role of AI, as it helps brands to know their audience and create a customer profile by collecting data. With the integration of AI, businesses can now personalise the recommendations and messaging to reach their target audience in order to provide valuable and helpful content.

3) Generation Of Content Topics

Identifying and making a list of topics that are relevant and have the potential to connect with your target audience can be a daunting task sometimes. By using AI-powered content marketing tools, businesses can now smoothly produce topics with high search rankings or achieve popularity & brand recognition among their target audience. With AI-generated content topics, your content marketing team can focus on effectively addressing each subject, dedicating their time to in-depth exploration of strategies and high-level planning.

4) Anticipating Customer Behavior

While you are planning the content that needs to be distributed among different channels, the first thing that you must pay attention to is the behaviour of your target audience. Trying to understand and acknowledge the behaviour of your clients is not easy work, and content marketers have struggled to anticipate their customers' behaviours for several years. But, with the implementation of AI, it becomes quite easy to study the past behaviours of consumers. Utilising that data to personalise the journey of every customer helps your entire team plan out the next steps.

5) Content Scoring

AI content marketing tools provide assistance to you in rating and scoring your content in order to understand how it can be improved for better and optimise your already published content pieces to stay relevant with your target audience at all times. When your content is evaluated, you can save time by not having to individually review each post. Instead, you can direct your efforts toward enhancing the areas that have been pinpointed as problematic and improve them for further achieving your goals & objectives.

6) Data Processing

The abundance of global data becomes valuable only when they are transformed into meaningful insights. AI plays a crucial role in handling vast amounts of data gathered daily from customer activities like feedback and preferences. By employing AI to extract pertinent information from this data, you can create effective strategies and take action without personally undertaking extensive data processing tasks.

7) Enhanced User Experience

When clients experience that they are receiving the appropriate messages and derive satisfaction from engaging with your brand, their overall experience improves. This heightened satisfaction increases the likelihood of them becoming repeat customers or giving positive feedback for your products and services on social media platforms. AI plays a crucial role in maintaining a seamless balance across various customer touchpoints with your brand, ensuring that no aspect goes overlooked. Additionally, it enhances the front-end experience, allowing for effective monitoring and targeted marketing throughout their journey.

8) Helps In Cost-Cutting

Which business doesn't contemplate enough about cost cutting? Every single one out there right! So, AI can help you reduce business expenses to a great level by automating repetitive or non-creative tasks. One of the best things about AI is that it helps in executing various tasks in a short span of time unlike humans, who might take hours to complete that one task! So, that's the cherry on the cake moment you will have when using AI in content marketing.

But What Are The Drawbacks Of Utilizing AI In Content Marketing?

Well, every single thing comes with its own set of disadvantages too! So, are you ready to know about the drawbacks of AI in content marketing? Well, let's have a look!

1) Inaccurate Content Or Biased Concerns

The outcomes of AI relies heavily on the quality of the data it's trained on. If the data used for training is biased or unrepresentative, the AI's predictions can be inaccurate or biased as well. This can result in unfairly targeted advertisements, among other issues. Here's one pro tip that you can follow - try to implement an algorithmic decision making process with the accurate data in the right places. Also, audit the AI system and data to prevent any biased concerns regularly.

2) Data Privacy

To enable AI to draw insights from your campaigns, it needs to gather and scrutinize extensive volumes of lead and customer information, thereby increasing concerns regarding data privacy and security. Remember that transparency helps in fostering trust among your consumers and it's important for them to know how you collect, process and safeguard their data. After letting them know about this, allow them to decide whether they are alright about the fact of sharing their data with you or not! You must take additional measures to protect your customer data in order to prevent data breaches

3) Lack Of Originality & Creativity

Present-day AI technologies are categorized as narrow AI, which is tailored to execute particular tasks in a perfect way. They excel in data analysis and task automation. However, all these AI tools are still not able to think or learn independently. Also, they do not have feelings or emotions! Therefore, they lack originality and of course, no space for creative thinking as well.

Read Also: Top Content Marketing Tools in 2024

What Are The Challenges Of Utilizing AI in Content Marketing?

Not everyone is perfect, and so does AI! Yes, AI is neither flawless nor a cure-all solution. And you know what? Most content marketing teams are likely to encounter a learning curve. Let's have a close look at some of the prevalent challenges associated with AI in content marketing!

a) Managing Adaptation — As AI has a very dynamic nature, that's the reason why managing adaptation or any kind of modification is one of the most prominent challenges in this area. None of us are able to anticipate any changes coming in the future, specifically when it comes to complicated procedures and different variables. Hence, foreseeing results is one of the most complicated things to do when compared to conventional techniques such as surveys or A/B testing.

b) Quality Of Data — The data quality is one of the most essential factors that needs to be considered while using artificial intelligence in content marketing. If the data quality is really poor and not up to the mark, then it might result in incorrect or incomplete outcomes. Also, it will restrict the effectiveness of decisions that you will make in the future.

To make sure to achieve correct and accurate outcomes from AI-powered content marketing tools, you should maintain high-quality training data and consistently update data sets for the purpose of analysis and verification. The tools that you choose actually influence the quality of your data and the capacity to evaluate the data.

c) Training Data — Another difficulty that is associated with integrating AI-powered content marketing tools lies in making sure of an adequate amount of training data in order to enable machine learning models to acquire and produce effective results. In the absence of sufficient training data, the models may fail to accurately anticipate customer behaviour or make accurate predictions regarding customer outcomes. Consequently, it is crucial to consistently gather new data points and regularly update databases to keep the models up-to-date.

d) Generalization — Generalization in the context of AI models can be explained as their ability to effectively apply acquired knowledge from a specific dataset to different other datasets and to new situations beyond their initial surroundings. Given the dynamic nature of customer requirements and preferences, the power to generalise across diverse datasets is vital for the success of AI-driven content marketing campaigns. Addressing this challenge ensures that your campaigns remain pertinent amid evolving customer segments and changing markets.

e) Interpretability — When we talk about interpretability, it refers to the capability of the machines to understand the knowledge acquired from training datasets. While it is not mandatory for each & every AI application, it becomes crucial in some of the tasks, such as personalisation and customer segmentation. This is particularly important for content marketers, enabling them to recognise the reasons behind varying customer behaviours. Such insights can then guide the development of future campaigns and initiatives.

As a consequence, content marketers must have specific strategies that enable them to keep an eye on and respond to certain modifications immediately rather than depending entirely on automated procedures that are driven by machines. This is a great instance of how artificial intelligence can support content marketers, but it cannot be administered as an only option.

Dominate Your Content Marketing Space: 5 AI Strategies & Tools To Implement Now!

Here are 5 simple ways through which you can enrich the journey of content creation with AI tools!

1. Automating The Content Creation Process:

If you are someone who is struggling & spares no effort to crank out fresh & relevant content for your target audience on a regular basis, then say hello to your buddy, ChatGPT! This AI tool will help you to generate content outlines and even draft your content. It's a remarkable time saver tool! It also enables you to revise the outcomes according to your brand voice and unique style.

But you need to set your goals and create your prompts beforehand. Yes, list down the things you need to pay attention to! You need to be clear about the content type such as blog posts, news articles, social media posts,etc. Once you are aware of your goals, sharpen up the prompts! For getting a fine-tuned outcome, make sure your prompts are precise.

2. Strengthen Your Seo Strategy:

Get ready to beef up your SEO game in 2024 by leveraging these AI-driven tools such as MarketMuse or Clearscope. These SEO tools will help you out in creating amazing content by exploring the recommendations & outcomes to disclose high-impact keywords. You can even review your SEO analytics with these tools. But remember that AI is only there to help you with a few things and the human touch is necessary to make your content outshine everything else!

3) Turning Into Voice Search Optimization:

Voice search optimization is an essential factor of SEO which needs to be focused on! Users are increasingly utilizing voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, OkGoogle, etc. and of course, AI is the powerhouse behind this! Tools such as Semrush can be your microphone, enhancing your content in voice activated search queries.

Additionally, voice search and local SEO go hand in hand! Users seek data such as “near me” to find something present closeby at their location. Make sure to optimize your content for local SEO by integrating location-specific keywords & phrases. This is impactful in attracting local consumers because AI-powered voice assistants tend to prioritize in delivering relevant & quick solutions to search queries.

4) Revive Your Email Marketing Campaigns:

Email marketing is a great personalised way to reach out to your target audience, right! AI is here to help you craft compelling email copies. Also, do you know that AI can even be utilized to anticipate customer buying behaviour and improve segmentation? Well, now you know for sure! AI tools such as Mailchimp comes with a user-friendly environment and utilizes AI to harmonize email content and timing.

5. Make Your Content Visually Compelling:

Not a single person enjoys reading a wall of text! That's the reason why including visually appealing graphics like infographics, GIFs, images, etc., must be added to your content. This helps in boosting better engagement and conveys brand identity, emotion and purpose in an effective way. Tools like Adobe Spark & Figma can be utilized to transform the way of content creation.

Time To Incorporate AI In Content Marketing!

AI has a lot of potential, and it is here to stay, grow & conquer! As a leader in content marketing, it is important for you to take a proactive as well as realistic approach; while also maintaining optimistic behavior in regards to the capabilities and limitations of AI. When it is effectively harnessed, Artificial Intelligence will be able to enhance productivity without even coming to terms with brand consistency. AI surely serves as a valuable tool for leveraging editorial skills by identifying errors and indicating several improvements that need to be taken care of!

AI has the ability to optimise your marketing campaigns, enabling them to effectively reach your target audiences while simultaneously cutting expenses and time associated with tasks that were once manual! In addition, as campaigns outstretch, AI can play a significant role in identifying customer insights, allowing for real-time adjustments, personalised experiences, and increased engagement across various channels.

The integration of AI into content marketing is not just the future, but it is increasingly becoming the present. Now is the time for you to take the initiative to explore how an AI-powered content creation tool can empower your team to accomplish more tasks without compromising quality, setting your brand apart from your competitors!

Read Also: Top 11 AI Video Editing Tools

Key Takeaways

AI in content marketing helps to leverage advanced technologies to enhance content creation, distribution, and evaluation.

Benefits of AI in content marketing include automation, personalised content, and improved targeting, leading to increased efficiency and customer engagement.