Transforming Customer Experience: The Superpowers of AI ML in Content Marketing

Content marketing is rapidly evolving, and is among the most potent techniques to implement in the business. And so, it’s increasingly essential for brands, marketers, and leaders to stay updated with the new trends and keep going strong. A report by the Content Marketing Institute stated that content marketing generates around 3 times the leads as any outbound marketing. And not just that, it is also 62% cheaper than outbound marketing.

But the question remains, can an individual or a team of more-than-capable marketers do the magic with content without any technological assistants?

Can marketing professionals manage to pull off the volley of tasks like observing analytics and trends, performing search engine optimization searches, keyword searches, personalizing content, etc before any content copy goes live?

The answer is obviously a big “NO”. It is humanly impossible or productivity-wise doable to spend endless hours searching, writing, optimizing as well as researching and still hit the bull’s eye to achieve customer satisfaction. The fact is, most marketers today, are constantly on their toes, trying to establish a better channel of communication, connect with their audience in a more personalized way and offer the finest customer experience.

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There’s no iota of doubt in acknowledging that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques have been the prime drivers that are transforming the content marketing landscape. In this post, we are focussing on how AI and ML are supporting numerous organizations and reshaping content marketing forever.

AI in Content Marketing

From transcribing content in different formats and writing articles to personalize a customer’s experience and maintaining a loyal relationship, AI is helping businesses stay vigilant about customer behavior and act responsibly in the content-driven world. Let’s take a look at how companies and marketing leaders adopt AI in their strategy to stay ahead of their game.

Salesforce’s report indicated that efficient marketing teams are more prone to imbibing AI at least two times in their marketing campaigns than teams that do not perform well.

Bots for Quick Content Creation

Bots are the underdog heroes of the AI fraternity who are creating content and grabbing a user’s attention immediately.  Big organizations like Fox and Yahoo are covering the latest news updates with lightning speed, all thanks to AI’s army of bots.

Chatbots for Enhanced Customer Engagement   

AI-empowered chatbots are conversational tools that have become the perfect customer service solutions. They are also responsible for enhanced customer engagement. Based on natural language processing, chatbots can mimic how a human interacts and add the friendliness that customers require while reaching out to brands for assistance. Besides being a one-time investment and offering instant replies to customers, chatbots are also capable of collating data about customers which can be later used to devise a marketing strategy based on information. Another advantage of chatbots is that they are available 24*7. Chatbots enable marketers to automate day-to-day repetitive tasks,  that are time-consuming,

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Userlike reported that around 68% of users prefer chatbots as a better communication channel than humans as they provide instant, hassle-free responses. In 2019, Gartner forecasted that AI, including chatbots, will handle 15% of global interactions and by 2022, chatbot usage will increase further to 70% in industries catering to millennials.

Data-driven Insights for Prediction

Content and data consumption go hand in hand. Did you know that in the current scenario, every day we create a whopping 2.5 quintillion bytes of data? This sounds insane, but the mind-boggling truth is, in the last 2 years, almost 90% of it was created! Now with such a colossal data stockpile, there’s absolutely no way a human can skim through it to extract insights about a customer’s next move. Here’s when AI comes into the content marketing picture. AI uses this data to create personalized content tailor-made for its users. Today, customers want quick information and consume content smartly. And honestly, no customer has the time to scroll down till the last word of a 2 pager article. AI uses predictive intelligence to understand each customer’s behavior and intent and accordingly generates customized content that the customer feels happy about.

Generating topics and keywords enhanced SEO

AI is bestowed with the power of collecting customer data and extracting valuable insights from it. You can understand different aspects of your customer’s behavior like their personal interests, preferences, likes, and dislikes. With this information, brands can identify relevant content topics that will resonate better with the customer. Not just that. AI can also generate more SEO-friendly results. For example, the use of advanced keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can help to point out the organic competition and measure keyword search volume to enable marketing professionals to figure out the correct keywords to make your content SEO-friendly.

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ML in Content Marketing

Machine learning is a subtype of artificial intelligence that enables computers or machines to learn and improve their performance in a particular set of tasks over a period of time. In the world of content marketing, machine learning is helping brands decipher what customers like/dislike. This will help marketers to create content that is more likely to turn into conversions. Let’s take a look at how marketers are using machine learning tools to improve their businesses.

Content Automation

Automatically Generated Content refers to the content created automatically by bots with very little human involvement. Based on Natural Language Generation (NLG) technologies, the main function of bots is to convert the data into authentic, well-written content formats.  A common feature of NLG is Gmail’s Smart Compose where users are prompted what to type next.

Personalized Content

Customers are smart and they have moved over the ‘in-your-face’ advertising and they’d rather prefer an article specifically giving them information about what they like. Customers know what they want, how they want, and when they want, they no longer care about any brand’s guesswork. Backed with a self-learning model, machine learning helps markets to analyze a customer’s behavior and then curtain content just based on those likes.  Today, Netflix will not give you a list of the 10 best romcoms, instead, it will first identify the genre you like and then customize the list according to the same data.  Brands like Spotify and Amazon are making judicial use of machine learning to serve personalized content to each individual. Spotify takes into account your learning history and based on that makes a song, album, and artist recommendations.

Today, 90% of marketers admit to leveraging analytics to deliver and enhance a customer’s experience.  According to a survey by Forbes, around 80% of customers are more than willing to do business with a brand if it offers personalized experiences.

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Short Videos and Podcasts

In the current content-driven scenario, short videos on social media and podcasts are the most exciting technological miracles and are gaining immense popularity.  The thing with video marketing as well as podcasts is that they are easy to watch, listen and share in the digital space. Podcasts on the other hand are a powerful yet refreshing marketing trend that has seen massive growth in the last few years. Customers and audience are constantly looking for something new and out-of-the-box in their feeds and podcasts pretty much suffices that request. Podcasts are cheaper and a very subtle way of building a loyal customer base over time. All you need is good content, a good microphone, and recording software to do the magic. Did you know that in 2021, there were about 115 million podcast listeners in the US alone, needless to say, this number is set to grow further. A survey by HubSpot stated that marketers were quite comfortable and eager to increase their investment in the audio medium.

Conclusion

Addressing the elephant in the room- AI and ML will undoubtedly and rightfully transform the way content marketing happens in the digital space and this will happen even sooner than we might think. With the right mix of tools, software, and technology, and a gamut of platforms to support it, marketers can now understand the customer better by creating accurate, quality content which will hit the bull’s eye.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com].