The virtually limitless data brought by the digital revolution used to contrast with the limitations of its manual processability. However, technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine-Learning (ML) and their self-learning algorithms are starting to empower businesses with ways to overcoming these boundaries.
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When it comes to AI’s capabilities, they go far beyond statistical algorithms for detecting maximum or average values. Man-made, technically highly specialized algorithms are always the starting point. Based on this, AI is able to derive enhanced algorithms to optimize results from the large database. An example of this are algorithms for automated image recognition and tagging. Humans use algorithms to describe the appearance of visual elements, e.g. sky, forest, water and human portraits, and then AI learns from these databases and derives new rules to refine and fine-tune the initial algorithm capabilities.
Although this defines AI as a “non-autonomous intelligence”, in combination with big data, it can create revolutionary living and breathing data environments that deliver intelligence back to business applications. So when it comes to marketing technologies, where can AI play a role and help marketers to analyze, predict and act?
Understanding what influences customer behaviors and decisions is one of the most important aspects of a content marketing strategy. However, marketers are drowning in data from various analytics systems and one their top challenges is turning all this information into action. This is where AI comes in. By processing natural language and interpreting complex statistics, AI generates intelligence over content (and also your competitors’!) for truly data-driven marketing strategies that generate more leads and convert these leads into loyal customers.
AI analyzes your customer base and every single interaction they had with your brand to develop robust buyer personas that include recognizable characteristics such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals.
AI scans all your content and identifies keywords to automatically tag content or summarize texts, assigning each piece to the target audience, language and topic.
AI evaluates your new, untested content with minimal risk for the sales pipeline, making predictive editorial recommendations for new content or optimizing existing pieces. With AI, marketers can know exactly what their prospects are thinking in real-time, and put it to their advantage to quickly modify messaging.
AI monitors both yours and your competitors’ content performance across digital channels and taps into the abundance of data hidden in keyword searches, social profiles and other online channels to identify opportunities for improvement. The results are human-level insights on website user experience, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media engagement without the manual analysis.
When you put all these tools together, the ultimate goal is to enable marketers to deliver the right content, at the right time, to the right audiences, guiding prospects’ journey into clients.
Many brands are already heavily relying on information technology to deliver more engaging content, improve brand image and increase conversions, and this is particularly evident with the popularity rise of augmented reality (AR) during 2018. Recent research by Forrester also comes to prove the importance of content for companies’ success, with 82% of companies agreeing on its critical role to achieve top business objectives like growing revenue, leveraging analytics in business decision making and improving customer experience.
It is worth mentioning that the insights gained out of content intelligence are always only as good as the amount and quality of the data provided. In order to effectively use this technology for competitive advantages, a sufficiently long history of well-maintained, structured and qualitatively trustworthy content is required.
As the integration of smart content management technologies and marketing begins to grow, leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and smarter content to build more personal connections between brands and their target audiences is an opportunity that just cannot be missed by digital marketers!
