Content strategies are evolving so rapidly that it can be difficult to keep up. AI is now hugely influential, and there are sound business reasons to incorporate it into your content strategy. There are also important caveats, such as content creation being just that – a creative art – and AI can’t replace human creativity. Read on for our review of using AI in your content strategy.
What Is a Content Strategy?
A content strategy covers everything from your business that reaches your customers (existing and potential), your employees, followers on social media, and anyone interested in what you do. It’s one of the most important aspects of business strategy.
If you’d like to know more about putting together a content strategy, we have a great guide that will help you.
What Can AI Do for Your Content Strategy?
AI can produce, summarize, and improve content at high speed. And it can do all of that over and over again (without getting tired!), allowing you to update your content continuously.
Improve Efficiency
Because AI works at pace, it can speed up repetitive tasks (e.g., writing emails), rapidly summarize lengthy documents, and carry out research.
Consider the number of emails your business sends externally and internally that could be automated. Your customer mailing list might be accessed weekly for certain topics, monthly for some, and sporadically for others. AI can generate all of those emails using a primary source produced by your team (or without human intervention) before reaching the proofreading stage. Perhaps you send weekly messages to your staff updating them on the previous week’s activity – those can be incorporated into an AI schedule, too, and easily linked to report production for activities you want your teams to engage with.
Research
AI can analyze social media trends and search engine activity rapidly to find topics that will engage your audience. If your content team provides customer profiles, AI will produce recommendations targeted to their needs and interests. Your team can then decide on what best fits your content strategy – a much less human resource-intensive means of populating your editorial calendar.
Generate Ideas and Content
AI can function as a brainstorming session. Its ability to process vast quantities of data in a matter of seconds allows it to brainstorm ideas and produce lists of keywords and phrases that will drive ideas and content production. Writer’s block doesn’t exist with AI (as long as you have a good writing prompt!) – and which content creator hasn’t occasionally had that sinking feeling when faced with a blank page?
Website copy, formal corporate reporting, press releases, outlines of talks for speaking engagements, photo montages, and video content can all be generated by AI. Just make sure you always have real people editing AI-produced content to prevent having your content flagged by Google. We can train your content team to tackle this or undertake the editing for you.
The ability of AI to summarize can be very effective at producing content for your social media feeds from other pre-existing marketing copy that’s perhaps already on your website or generated from messages received by happy customers. Video and photo content can be generated just as readily as written copy.
Personalize Consumer Experience
Clever marketing has long used some degree of personalization. At a basic level, that has meant taking a knowledge of broad-based demographics, such as age and geographical location, and using them to target specific groups with relevant information.
Anyone who’s reached the age of 50 will have seen the dramatic increase in hard copy and social media advertising for bifocal spectacles, garden tools, family history research services, retirement homes, cheaper car insurance, will writing, and yes, even funeral plan insurance! So, targeted advertising has been with us for quite a time already. But what AI can bring to the table is a degree of personalization not previously seen: hyper-personalization.
AI can rapidly access massive amounts of online data to gather information on various aspects of customers’ lives, including shopping preferences, browsing habits, professional interests, and credit scores. This data can then be used to tailor content very specifically, whether it’s product advertising to retail consumers or thought leadership pieces of interest to entrepreneurs. The ability to send communications that are contextualized to individuals – in their preferred format, on their favorite platform, at the time of day they’re most likely to read it – would be practically impossible without AI.
The ability to generate differentiated content, relevant offers with individualized discount structures, personalized loyalty programs, and tailored recommendations for products, job vacancies, or educational materials should lead to more meaningful connections with existing and potential customers. This is critical to successful content production and relationship building in the increasingly competitive marketplace.
Improve Content Performance and Reach
By identifying the highest-performing content, AI can help you keep your content strategy relevant and tell you which market sectors you should focus your efforts on.
Content Optimization
In addition to using AI to produce and analyze content, it can also generate meta titles and headlines. No one quite knows the secrets of how the Google gods operate search engine optimization (SEO) and set criteria for sending your content snippet to that top spot on the search results page, but by using AI, you might stand a greater chance of snippet success because AI can generate high volumes of keywords and topic suggestions that you can use in your content. There has been considerable debate about Google’s views on AI generated content and SEO.
SEO is a major aspect of successful content placement. Search results rankings do matter, but don’t let that desire for rankings override the utility of your content. You write content primarily to engage with people, so as long as your content provides value to your audience, your content should work its way up the rankings, even if it draws heavily on AI generation (as this piece from Forbes explains).
What Are the Caveats?
Knowledge of Your Audience and Your Market
You know which communication style and tone give you the greatest positive engagement because you know your audience and market better than anyone. Experience brings that hard-to-define instinct that tells you what your audience wants. AI knows data, but you know people. AI can work out what people think, but it doesn’t know how people think. You do, so make sure you edit your AI-generated content and give it the human touch.
Brand Voice and Personality
Every word and image used in your content can build or damage your business’ brand and reputation. Your content tells the world who you are as a business, what you care about, and how much you value your customers. It’s your business’ personality that needs to shine in your content, not a robotic voice. AI’s use of natural language processing has undoubtedly given its recent content a more natural tone, but it’s still quite easy to spot content that’s had no human input.
Creativity
Your content strategy should be unique to your business. Over-reliance on AI-generated content will reduce the recognizability of your business’ voice and brand. Creativity and originality make us human, and AI can’t match real people when it comes to that. So again, ensuring that your editing team is involved with your content strategy and the content you produce will help maintain your edge and unique brand personality.
Focusing your team’s efforts on what AI cannot do will ensure you retain what distinguishes your brand from your competitors.
Conclusion
The best AI content strategy in 2023 is this: Utilize AI as a great addition to your content toolkit, but as with any business tool, take the best of what it can do, adapt it to your business’ circumstances, and disregard the aspects that don’t work for you. Integrate AI into your content strategy but temper and enhance it with those aspects of content creation that only real people can provide. Think about consumer empathy, brand voice, and creativity, and consider which aspects of your content can be generated by AI but edited by real people.
We understand the need to ensure your content reflects positively on your business. Proofed has worked with thousands of business teams from all around the world. If you’d like to find out how we can help your team, get in touch today!
