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Convergence Or Collision? AI and Content Marketing, Part 10

In Part 10 of our Convergence Or Collision? AI and Content Marketing series, we’ll explore the future of artificial intelligence and content marketing.

The personalization of content

The future of AI and content seems to shine with the eyeball-grabbing glow of personalization. What do we mean by personalization, exactly?

Imagine there’s a car accident Monday morning in your neighborhood. Personalization of this information would mean:

  • you would be alerted about the crash, due to your proximity
  • you would learn about any disruptions to your commute
  • you would learn about possible neighborhood disruptions, like a downed power line

In short? It’s all about you. That’s the level of personalization that people are excited about for the future of artificial intelligence and content.

Robbie Allen, the founder of Automated Insights, noted the creation of news driven by artificial intelligence offers the possibility of being far more personalized, at-scale, than what traditional media and journalists can achieve on their own. This information may come at a premium for consumers, but paying subscription fees would allow news consumers to get highly customized news from bots.

Their product marketing manager explains this further; advances in information gathering indicate that “reach, depth and speed — can be complemented by personalization.”

Instead of having to search for updates on someone’s portfolio, for instance, that content could be systemized and delivered to you automatically, based on a trigger. They could incorporate your preferences (such as your favorite sports teams), your location (for neighborhood updates, as mentioned before) and even tailor which financial updates you receive that impact you and your household directly.

One step further

We could look at Xclaim!t as a modern-day example of this, one that goes a step further, incorporating translation services and location intelligence to customize your news alerts. As their website explains, the platform offers:

“24/7 Real-time AI news alerts, monitoring and insights. Tracking business, brands, people, events and trends…Our use of artificial intelligence, location intelligence and breaking news congregation will give you the triggers that you need, when you need them. We go behind the paywalls and provide you with contextual information from a variety of sources, ranging from forums to established publications. With over 60 languages translated, we scour the planet so that you don’t have to. We don’t bombard you with a random stream of stories. You pick the criteria, and we deliver accordingly to your own unique specification, informing you as the news pulse occurs.”

Eventually, we circle back to the age-old conundrum.  How do you make your content stand out from the competition?

One of the answers is content personalization. Any marketer worth his salt today has moved on from the ‘spray and pray’ tactics of old.

It’s all about the right content at the right time, targeting the right people, and through the right channels. Understanding your audience is what all good marketing boils down to; once you understand your target audience, you can effectively engage and convert them into customers.

Let’s take a look at some key statistics from Forbes on personalization:

  • 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging (SmarterHQ)
  • 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more a personalized experience (Accenture)
  • 89% of digital businesses are investing in personalization (Forrester)
  • Consumers are 2.1x more likely to view personalized offers as important versus unimportant (Salesforce)
  • 95% of companies that saw 3x ROI from their personalization efforts increased profitability in the year after their personalization efforts (Monetate)
  • Personalized calls to action convert 202% better than default or standard calls to action (HubSpot)
  • 70% of consumers say that a company understanding how they use products and services is very important to winning their business. – Salesforce
  • 98% of marketers say personalization advances customer relationships (Evergage)

Clearly, personalization works. And as some of those statistics highlight, it’s about more than just converting your leads.

Tailoring your content offers the customer a better journey and experience when interacting with your organization. From targeted promotions to understanding product application, both consumers and businesses expect at least a fundamental level of personalization, and this trickles down into every aspect of your content marketing strategy.

Personalization is all about tailoring content to individuals and organizations based on their specific needs and interests. With the flood of content available out there, people will only read what’s valuable and relevant to them. Understanding a customer’s particular needs and addressing them is the best way to stand out from the sea of content.

If AI can eventually create personalized content, what happens to marketers?

Would we be able to separate the role of AI and use it more for analysis and data, and then use that foundation for humans to create content?

The short answer is…yes.

In March 2017, for instance, TechCrunch laid a spotlight on Whisper, a free app available for iOS and Android that is a type of ‘anonymous social media’. Using AI, Whisper sorts and gathers related posts about various topics, such as issues at work, or in relationships. Once it organizes these, artificial intelligence adds context and generates a headline – allowing for content creation in a far larger volume than would be possible using human writers.

Whisper also has an in-house AI program called ‘Eliot,’ which takes data and identifies key topics, people and places associated with the story, then uses this for the AI engine to generate a contextually relevant story or video. It manages to create compelling content based on numerous data points that can cut through the clutter of content and appeal to its viewers.

Analyzing data and encouraging engagement

As technology develops, we’re seeing more and more instances of artificial intelligence used for data analysis, including:

  • measuring consumers’ engagement behavior with content
  • specifying what content is most popular with a certain audience
  • content distribution
  • content personalization for everyone’s benefit

All of this analysis helps marketers do their jobs better and arms them with the right tools to further their personalization efforts. It’s the perfect balance between artificial intelligence and human marketing.

Concured is a great example of this technology in action. Their product is based on NLP (natural language processing), and supports content marketers by sorting through and analyzing data that is relevant to their clients.

“Concured’s product has natural language processing (NLP) at its core. Our platform automatically detects new content published on the web (such as blog posts, news articles or thought leadership reports) relevant to our clients, then tags and categorizes these by identifying their most salient keywords, mapping these to a knowledge graph, then auto-clustering the keywords into a subset of representative topics,” Tom Salvat, CEO of Concured, explained to Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute.  “Correlating social engagements (likes, tweets, pageviews, etc.) on the original content against the topics then translates to a topic score, which ultimately allows our clients to identify the best opportunities for new content creation.”

Using AI to analyze people’s behavior in this manner helps your business understand where, when and what your content should be focused on to maximize engagement and ROI.

Social media and search engines

This extends to social media platforms and search engines too. In fact, Google is the perfect example.

Google’s semantic search algorithms extend beyond mere reading the words to interpreting the intent behind them, based on relationships between terms used in queries.

This in turn means that content marketers need to create high quality content, as using popular phrases won’t ‘fool’ Google’s algorithm.

Similarly, ad targeting is evolving as AI begins to take a larger role in it. This is not new, of course – the layers of metrics range from content interests to demographics such as professions and interests.

From Snapchat to Facebook, every platform is constantly bettering its targeting and audiences using artificial intelligence to drive better performance. Other companies are creating AI-based tools to optimize ad campaigns on these social platforms too, acting as a middleman of sorts.

The personalization of content

The future of AI and content marketing is poised to continue to converge, grow, and morph into a more symbiotic and beneficial relationship.

As we move into the future, expect AI to help content marketers:

  • analyze data
  • target customers and niche audiences
  • create more highly personalized, ultra-relevant content

Or, in the words of David Gasparyan, President of Phonexa: “No company is going to survive in the future without implementing, or at least gaining an understanding of, artificial intelligence and how it can be used to better grasp data they collect.”

Next week, in our final installment of the Convergence or Collision? AI and Content Marketing series we will explore The Changes in Store: impact on professions, communications, agency and marketer organizations.

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