AI in Content Marketing: Automating Creativity and Driving Engagement

Gone are the days when artificial intelligence was just seen in science fiction movies or novels alone. In today’s digital landscape, businesses are using AI in just about every sphere, be it creating art or analyzing the market. As per one of the reports by Statista, the global market revenue for AI in marketing is expected to be more than $107 Billion for the year 2028. AI has completely transformed the entire creative process in the content marketing sphere by automating mundane tasks that need a lesser human touch and a more mechanical approach.

In this article, we will see how AI has revolutionized the way businesses create content and shape their engagement strategies. We’ll also discuss how you can harness the power of AI to your advantage and drive better engagement and ROI. So let’s dive straight to it –

The Emergence of AI in Content Marketing

In one of the reports published by Hubspot, about 68% of marketing experts of director level and above strongly believe that AI and automation could aid in bringing exponential growth to organizations.

As businesses strive to make it big in the digital scape, the demand for high-quality and relevant content keeps rising. That’s where artificial intelligence comes into play with all its machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, easing out the entire process. AI has redefined the process by streamlining mundane tasks and enabling businesses to have their content creators focus on innovation and creativity.

You can never fall short of defining the ways in which AI has empowered businesses to improve their content marketing efforts. From writing fresh content, editing or rephrasing the existing one to keyword research and analyzing data, businesses use AI for just about every task. However, while AI is definitely a valuable ally, it can not be the foreman in content creation as it cannot produce humanized content that is conversational or personal.

Impact of AI on Digital Content Marketing

Content marketing is a time consuming process involving repetitive activities which often impact the quality of the written content. AI has efficiently taken those tasks off of the plate of the writers, giving them the freedom to delve deeper into the creative process and generate high quality content. Let’s look at some examples of how AI has aided in better content marketing:

Marketing Automation

Automation has been a boon to the content marketing industry. Thanks to AI powered automation a lot of tasks like generating outlines, topic research or creating a rough draft can be done within minutes. This has given the writers the ability to focus on creating compelling narratives and content that is personal and connects well with the target audience.

Natural Language Processing

AI has also obliterated global language barriers with powerful translation tools and language processing capabilities, allowing businesses to target audiences at a global level. Its ability to learn and process human languages allows it to create, edit, or translate human-like content in just about any language, increasing the business’s reach and user base.

In short, AI has evolved a lot from being just a tool to becoming a collaborative partner, helping content marketers generate new ideas and content strategies, helping them analyze the market and writing fresh content in seconds.

One of the key terms that often pops up in this context is generative AI.

As per one of the surveys conducted by Hubspot, here are some of the ways marketers use generative AI in content marketing:

(Image Source – Hubspot.com)

Multifarious Benefits of AI in Content Marketing

While using AI can help businesses expand their reach, get data-driven insights on market trends, and generate highly optimized content, it also adds new levels of efficiency, personalization and accuracy to the process.

Writing engaging content that resonates with your target audience has never been easier. Let’s take a quick peek at how generative AI has aided in making content marketing strategies more impactful:

Enhanced Content Quality

While AI content is definitely not as conversational and surely lacks human touch and nuances, it can be used by content creators to enhance their existing write-ups. You can easily use the content generated by AI tools like Gemini or ChatGPT to refine your writing and ensure informational accuracy.

AI suggestions help in analyzing the impact of your content on the target audience, providing better insights and guiding you to produce relevant and compelling content.

Increased Efficiency

AI has empowered businesses to bring innovation and efficiency to the forefront of their content marketing efforts. With great AI-powered tools that enable marketing automation and streamline repetitive tasks, businesses can have their content marketers focus on generating high-quality and personalized content efficiently.

Content marketing experts can generate content, rewrite, rephrase, edit existing content, and even automate the distribution of content across channels.

Improved Content Quality

A lot of AI tools are designed to analyze large data-sets to refine the quality of content. Tools equipped with AI capabilities can be used to streamline multiple tasks which would otherwise require a lot of time and resources, like finding out the trending topic, checking out the best performing headlines, etc.

One of the great examples of this is Grammarly, which can be used to check grammatical correctness along with suggesting better sentence structure to make the content more compelling, readable and relevant. It can also be used to make your content plagiarism free, all of which if done individually would take double the effort.

Better Marketing ROI

Ever since the influx of AI in content marketing, analyzing market needs and trends has become a cakewalk. If you know what you need and can give the right prompts, you could have AI generate advanced analytical data within seconds. This helps you in running superior quality campaigns that boost your ROI.

AI helps content marketers understand which strategies work the best for a certain demography and target audience, enabling better use of resources for best results.

Time and Cost Efficiency

Time and money are two of the most important driving factors for any business. If one can not deliver results in time and within budget, the repercussions could be long-term. With the emergence of AI in content marketing, businesses have been able to significantly improve their TAT by redistributing mundane tasks like keyword research, performance monitoring, and scheduling content to AI. Helping them utilize maximum resources for generating out-of-the-box ideas that leave a mark.

AI-driven content marketing strategies require less human intervention and help businesses reduce their operational costs significantly.

Challenges Posed by AI

If you have made up your mind to utilize AI to enhance your content marketing strategies after reading the above, hold up for a second. Introducing AI-powered marketing strategies comes with its own set of challenges which you need to be aware of in order to harness AI’s full potential. Here’s what you need to know –

• AI generated content at times lacks originality, as it essentially generates data by compiling similar content from multiple sources. This could mean that the content you use is repetitive, generic and lacks uniqueness.
• Using AI for your business is beneficial on a lot of levels, however it could raise some concerns regarding the authenticity of the information presented. You could definitely use AI for content creation but be sure to not mislead your audience with exaggerated and biased information.
• AI algorithms learn from the regular influx of data that they receive or are trained on. As a content marketing business you must ensure that your content is inclusive and does not promote discrimination.
• Generating well optimized content using AI often requires large data sets that could significantly raise questions about data privacy. Be sure not to include any personal or sensitive data which you would not want to get out.
• While AI can be a boon to your content marketing efforts, content generated by ChatGPT or Gemini or any other tool could at times feel mechanical and out of touch. You need to strike the right balance between automation and humanization so that your content remains unique with original perspectives and personal experiences.

Wrapping it Up!

Contrary to popular belief that the introduction of AI in content marketing would hamper creativity, it is proving to be a boon in helping writers enhance their content.

A decade or so ago none of us would have thought of using bots for running our content marketing campaigns, but neither did our ancestors about going to the moon.

As the technology grows and artificial intelligence becomes more widely adopted, the content it creates would become more human-like. But this doesn’t mean that the invaluable contributions humans bring to writing, editing and proofreading, would go obsolete.

A perfect marketing campaign is always the one that strikes the right balance between human written and AI generated content. Together, they form an infallible team that can maximize ROI, drive better engagement and boost sales for any brand.