Sure, artificial intelligence can be fun, but you can also benefit from AI tools for much more than entertainment. There are many practical uses for it, especially for combining inbound marketing and big data.
AI enables you to take huge amounts of data (far too much for a human to ever process) and turn it into actionable insights for content intelligence. We like to call it Artificial Intelligence Marketing.
Combining AI and Content Marketing
1. Research
You can start using AI at the very beginning of the content marketing process by gathering data about customer profiles, behaviors, pain points, and watering holes.
You can then utilize this information to determine when to include particular customer segments in your campaigns, and what products and services individual users are likely to find appealing.
AI is yet more effective when you merge its ability to manage large amounts of data with a sentiment analysis of information to interpret users’ emotions. When you utilize sentiment analysis, you are able to reduce your reliance on metrics that only represent basic behavior, like clicks, bounce rate, and time on page. Instead, machine learning is able to figure out how a user may be feeling, which can enhance the impact of contextual content.
2. SEO
Keywords
With artificial intelligence marketing, you can determine the likelihood that a specific query term will be able to rank in search engines. At the same time, AI can ensure that you are bringing content to users who are searching for the terms in the right context.
One tool that helps with this is CanIRank?. It uses many of the features you find in most SEO tools, like keyword research, assessment of keyword difficulty, and competitive analysis. However, it goes a step further by combining all this with machine learning to provide you with more in-depth insights.
Instead of relying on intuition about what seems like it would work, CanIRank? analyzes more than 200,000 websites to determine what creates high rankings. Plus, it uses competitive research to diagnose problems with your website and supplies you with advice to fix the issues. This can stop you from falling into the trap of becoming too aggressive with your SEO, which can result in penalties.
Link Building
Another way you can use AI for SEO is link building. First, AI can use natural language processing to determine which sites would be appropriate for your business goals. Next, it can collect data about these websites and assesses their potential as partners. It can determine which sites have opportunities by searching for sponsored or contributor content. AI can also take into account key factors like publishing frequency and the usability of the website.
Finally, AI can use site analysis to calculate how links on the site would likely impact your ranking in the SERPs. It is even possible for AI to identify variables that impact search rankings and detect patterns that you may be unaware exist.
3. Nurturing and Engaging
Once AI has brought users to your website, it can help them continue their journey to become customers through nurturing and by facilitating engagement. There are three key tools to consider for this purpose: Phrasee, Boomtrain, and LeadSquared.
Phrasee
Phrasee is a great AI tool to step up your B2B email marketing. It works by analyzing the performance of email subject lines to determine what will increase the chance of open rates and clickthroughs for your unique audience. Phrasee creates subject lines exactly like the ones your brand writes. The difference is that these are more successful than human-created ones 98 percent of the time. Phrasee exemplifies how assumptions about what will work are often incorrect.
Boomtrain
Boomtrain allows you to engage with users on a number of channels. In addition to email, it also reaches users onsite, within apps, through SMS, and with push notifications. Boomtrain uses data collected about users to send an optimized message at the right time through whatever channel a user is most likely to respond to.
Boomtrain works by creating profiles about each user who interacts with your brand — something that is impossible for businesses with more than a few dozen customers. The data-driven marketing tool focuses on both acquiring customers and reengaging with customers after an initial purchase. In fact, Boomtrain uses nurturing to go a step further by encouraging customers to become brand advocates — to bring others to your business.
LeadSquared
Finally, we have LeadSquared. This tool combines marketing automation with sales CRM for a range of functions, such as lead tracking, lead scoring, and qualification. LeadSquared allows you to categorize leads according to how likely they are to convert and then gives you the chance to customize the nurturing approach based on what actions the lead completes.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the process is built around demographics, users’ interests, and other criteria in addition to lead behavior. Nurturing becomes more sophisticated as the lead moves closer to converting.
4. AI-Created Content
AI is still unable to create most types of content on its own, as it is more difficult to engage with users when content lacks a human touch. The one exception is fact-based content.
The most common examples of fact-based AI-powered content are sports results and stock updates. In fact, the likelihood is that you’ve come across such AI-powered content without even realizing that it is written by a machine. AI has been generating content like this for many years.
However, unless you’re in the sports or stock news business, this revelation is unlikely to be helpful to you. More practical for your marketing strategy is AI for content curation. For instance, a tool like BuzzSumo can gather information about what type of content your audience wants and what questions or concerns users have. The tool can then tell you what topics that are trending may be relevant to your audience for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
5. Content Optimization
As data keeps pouring in, using AI makes it easy to detect any shifts and adapt your strategy. You can make smarter predictions about how users will behave and react or about what customers want and need. This will result in a larger number of qualified leads, a better-designed nurturing process, and a higher Marketing ROI.
For instance, AI can detect which segments of customers are losing interest in your business and are at risk of leaving for a competitor. Whereas it is difficult (and often a waste of time) to try to retain your newest customers, AI can create models that will retain the customers who have been with your brand for some time and increase the Customer Lifetime Value. You can then test models to incentivize customers to stay with your company and optimize these for greater success as time goes on.
All of these are concrete ways that Marketing Data Science can enhance your content marketing. As well as improving the effectiveness of your strategy and reducing your workload, AI can make your life more interesting. With the above, there’s no need for you to spend time analyzing data to manually uncover trends, patterns, and insights. Instead, you’ll be free to manage tasks that Artificial Intelligence (currently) is unable to handle.
