Will you adapt and flourish? Or deny and perish?

Someone on TV has only to say, ‘Alexa,’ and she lights up. She’s always ready for action, the perfect woman, never says, ‘Not tonight, dear.’ – Sybil Sage

As Don Tapscott calls it, we’ve just begun this new epoch in human history known as the fourth industrial revolution. Like canaries in the coal mine, companies of the future are starting to explore the power of AI in improving their content marketing strategies.

From human-like chatbots to text generators, the goal of using AI in content marketing is revolved around one singular purpose – personalising content for our readers with as little human effort as possible.

Such is the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence that it is present in every aspect of what defines modern life. Smartphone assistants, self-driving cars and even what we watch on television and how we buy products, the fingerprints of AI are there.

Against this context, today’s post is on the four reasons why artificial intelligence may potentially revolutionise content marketing.

1) Artificial intelligence knows more about us than we know ourselves

The goal of every content marketing strategist is to develop and optimise for the most effective way to target our audiences with the least amount of resources possible.

Traditionally, strategies were developed by carrying out focus groups and surveys to identify your audience.

Today, with the help of big data, we use AI assistants such as IBM’s Lucy.

Assistants like Lucy make out-of-routine, resource-intensive tasks needed to build strategies by “converting data assets into a quickly-searchable source of insights”. Long story short, what assistants like Lucy do is allow a marketer to quickly and easily identify the key metrics that they need to craft better strategies.

Using such tools allows for quick and more importantly, real-time adjustment of strategies.

With the amount of data that we generate every single day, it is too much for traditional methods to properly identify their key markets and message without having a tool that helps in parsing the vast amount of information without relying on trained data scientists.

By simplifying the analysis, tools like Lucy free up time to focus on important things like understanding our competitors or crafting impactful messages.

As such systems become cheaper and more mainstream, their impact can only increase. We can look forward to more of such software and virtual assistants for SMEs and startups in the next two to three years.

2) Artificial intelligence allows for greater intimacy through content personalisation

As content strategists, the biggest goal we want to achieve is to know our target audiences intimately. This is why we do buyer personas, emotion maps and design thinking.

We want to know you inside-out.

And as the AI software becomes more mainstream, the biggest benefit over humans is the ability to quickly analyse massive amounts of data and interpreting it.

This is because we human beings are limited in our capabilities/resources and we simply don’t know what we don’t know. With the advantage of big data, AI allows content marketers to better understand who we want to target and with the message that we want to send.

Yet, content personalisation in recent times has become a dirty word with the view that to be able to personalise content, marketers need to track and spy on us in increasingly intrusive ways. Cases such as the Cambridge Analytica incident also creates fear in the public.

Do we really not want to be tracked? Not always. Where we dislike such tracking, we are also expecting advertisements and messages to show what we want to see.

In fact, we expect advertisements we see on web pages we visit to be targeted. According to a Salesforce study, 76 per cent of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.

In the wider scheme of things, content personalisation is no different from other forms of marketing. Consumers want a personalised experience and to do that, marketers need to understand their target group.

Marketers will rely on AI because of two reasons – data analysis and market segmentation.

We want to be intimate with our target audiences! When it comes to understanding our audiences, no tool out there is better at helping a marketer understand these two things more than the power of AI.

Perhaps, let’s also learn to treat AI as an extended version to our intelligent selves, as opposed to fear or a threat.

3) Artificial intelligence speeds up predictive analytics

A famous refrain in the field of marketing is that a marketer’s job is to sell a product to consumers who do not know that they need it.

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While not entirely true, it is too late for a company when they try and convince consumers that their products are better than their competitors. It is better to have a first mover’s advantage than to try and play catch-up.

With this mantra in mind, marketers are moving towards predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics refers to using past data to predict a future outcome. Tools like Lucy and the ability to personalise content only goes so far if a marketer lacks foresight and intuiton because these tools are only able to help in understanding the now.

To understand the future, we marketers need to take the information provided by such tools (e.g through statistics, modelling and understanding our consumers) – to find ways to craft messages and target our audiences before they even know that they need our products.

When we know what our consumers want, the next step is in reinforcing our messages to reinforce the top-of-mind recall in the heads of our consumers.

4) Our next pal: the robot-journalist

With the ability to act like a human and think like one, it is not too far-fetched an idea that AI would be able to write like one too. In fact, that idea is no longer an idea. In the field of Journalism, that idea is now a reality.

In 2015, the Associated Press published an article on Apple beating analysts expectations. It’s a short article and reads as if it was written by a human. Only, towards the very end does the penny drop.

The article was written by Automated Insights. When used this way, the article was written by a robot journalist. And it is not just AP either, many respected organisations use robot journalists – Washington
Post published over 500 articles using robot journalists.

While that might sound like the end of human written articles, it isn’t all doom and gloom. As AP and Washington Post show, using human-like robot journalists — and by extension, robots to create content — is just one of the many ways that human-like AI can be used to help manage limited resources in an organisation.

When we can automate the mundane and the routine, such as writing a standard press release, we can free up our time to do higher strategic level work, or simply to focus on creating actual content.

By allowing robots to create routine content, we free up the time of our creative people to do what they do best, create content that is impactful, meaningful and that connect with our consumers.

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“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine.” – Gary Marcus

From personalising content to helping in content creation, predictive analytics to building better content marketing strategies, AI is a powerful tool in the arsenal of marketers.

For every negative headline about the ability of AI to track our every online interaction or to create fake news, there are more headlines about the positive impact that AI has had.

Like it or hate it, AI will most likely be revolutionising content marketing. We are standing right at the beginning of this revolution!

So the question is — will you adapt and flourish? Or deny and perish?

There are two types of content marketers in the world. Which are you?

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