Last Updated on 5 months by Christopher Jan Benitez
Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence (otherwise known as AI) is one of many things: a silver-bullet solution for the troubles and trials of the digital age, a portent of eventual human extinction, or nothing more than a trumped-up parade of smoke and mirrors. In reality, it’s probably none of these things, with an answer far more mundane (even disappointingly so).
AI as we refer to it now is a tool with significant applications for some tasks but minimal use for others. And rather than involving any actual intelligence (or even trying to approximate it), it merely involves the use of computer systems capable of adapting to the data provided to them. This process is obviously less hypeworthy, but in practice it can be tremendously valuable.
One field in which this variety of AI is having an impact is content creation. In this piece, we’re going to look at five ways in which content AI is changing how online content is made. Let’s begin:
It’s making research easier
The world of online content is both broad and deep, containing work of so many different types: everything from thin 200-word blog posts to painstakingly-researched 4000-word guides to key topics. And while pieces like the former don’t generally require research, that can’t be said of high-value tentpole content, as the target keywords must be carefully selected to maximize ROI.
AI tools can help with this.
Keyword tools abound, offering functionality such as saving time manually going through autocomplete suggestions or even analyzing the highest-ranking content for particular terms to see which commonalities can be found. You can then use such analysis tools to review your drafted content and determine how well it meets its goals.
Think about how Yoast’s SEO plugin and SEOPressor have become an industry standard for the writing and release of WordPress blog posts. It takes a topic that can be awkward to address practically and makes it as simple as following the guidelines: do that, and you’ll avoid many of the most common SEO mistakes.
Technical SEO audit is also made much easier, thanks to AI-assisted insights generated by tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tool or Screaming Frog. Use this information to guide your upcoming SEO efforts.
It’s helping with personalization
Personalizing content is an integral part of making it more appealing and engaging, particularly in a time when brands have access to so much valuable customer data. It isn’t just about names and locations now: it’s also about which products someone has bought before when they prefer to place orders, and what topics they’ve expressed interest in.
AI tools are ramping up the use of personalized elements and making the implementation hugely simpler. If you’re engaging in email marketing, you can have personal details automatically inserted. If you’re offering live chat, you can use an automated system to point people towards the content most useful for their needs. If you’re trying to refine your product pages, you can throw in an auto-populating box of dynamic recommendations.
It’s automating very basic copy
I mentioned thin blog posts earlier, the kind that people with no imagination or enthusiasm use to update their websites (usually just acknowledging industry updates but providing no insight or even commentary). They’re often essentially worthless, but not always. In some situations (client reports, for instance), dry pieces of content are entirely necessary.
Suppose you were running an SEO company and working with a client that required weekly progress updates concerning everything from the number of backlinks earned to the average session duration. While some SEO tools provide report templates, you could use AI-driven tools like Quill to automatically generate statistic-heavy summaries that read like natural language.
This frees up time to spend on the kind of content that actually demands human intervention: the kind with spirit and invention and creative freedom. It’s more valuable than any other form of content (whether short or long), and it also happens to be much more fun to write (bonus points).
It’s improving targeting options
Creating content for everyone is still viable, but being able to engage in highly-specific targeting is showing just how much value there can be in creating content for niches. If you’re trying to sell to people between 40 and 50 with jobs in the tech field and interest in the movie industry, for instance, you can do it using platforms like Facebook Ads.
There’s also the growth of programmatic advertising which sees ads automatically selected for placement through AI-driven buying and selling of ad space. This is great for marketers because it lets them spend less money to get their ads seen, giving them more resources for working on making those ads as effective as possible.
It’s damaging and protecting authenticity
Granted, the ability of AI tools to generate convincing copy is currently quite limited, but basic blog posts are entirely doable (and those limitations won’t be in place forever, as improvements are being made all the time). This has notable implications when it comes to content authorship and brand authenticity, with the latter being particularly meaningful today.
Now that people know content can be procedurally generated, it’s diluting the value of a basic blog post, as people may well assume that it wasn’t written by a person. Indeed, this doubt can shape the perception of every brand. How will people know when they’re reading work written by robots? That said, the overall effect is actually one of protection.
Here’s why: just as NLP tech can generate real-sounding language, it can detect fake language very effectively. This means that AI is the key to curbing its own threat. Soon enough there will be tools capable of gauging (with a fair amount of accuracy) whether a given writer wrote something or whether it was done artificially. This is sure to be great for legitimate businesses (and copywriters) all across the globe.
Are you ready to embrace content AI?
Content creation is a core part of a flourishing digital marketing strategy, and it needs to be handled with as much ingenuity and craft as possible to get the most value from it. In all the ways we’ve looked at here, AI is vital for that process. I strongly recommend considering how you can use it for your content marketing, and looking out for industry updates to see what comes over the horizon.