The buying process has evolved. Customers are becoming more empowered by information and connectivity. Online marketing is becoming more customer-centric, and along with it the need for personalisation and one-to-one marketing. With this trend increasing, how do businesses cater to buyer expectations?

The digital market can be very fast-paced and demanding - everything must be available at a touch of the finger or the click of a button. Businesses continue to employ Content Marketing to attract, engage and convert the audience. This too provides real-time insights to how effective the strategy is. Working with Intelligent Content streamlines content creation, and allows for automation, which is key to determine content an audience demands and gather data about their responses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a key role in making content intelligent to work for any business. Here are 4 ways that AI contributes to effective Content Marketing:

1. Learning about your audience

‍Research can provide the data to plan our Content Strategy, but to help measure how well the strategy is working. Together, content can be used to gather data and learn about customers' behaviours and their experiences with the brand.

The success factor contributing to an insights-driven business is continually learning from their audience and interpreting those learnings to refine and enhance the customer journey, providing a superb customer experience. AI can help gather these data points and make recommendations about what's working and what's not.

2. Producing Dynamic Content

‍AI algorithms help interpret large data sets of individual customers over different demographics. Much like the shopkeepers of old, who know the preferences of each customer who enters the store, these algorithms enable machine learning to determine the patterns of audience's interests and give a better insight into how to reach and engage them.

Based on these patterns, personalised content can be created, like individualised social media news feeds, remarketing ads, localised content, etc.

3. Distribution Channels and Automation

‍From automatically generating content to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), improving ranking on search engines also involves the number of pages in a website. A web page with more pages of relevant content will organically rank higher than websites with a few pages, even if those pages have a high click-through rate.

Being able to reach audiences across multiple platforms contributes to visibility and encourages engagement. When content is intelligent, it is reusable, adaptive and reconfigurable. Automating this process allows businesses to reach their audience faster with content suited for each platform - from social media posts, to emails and even chat conversations.

4. Predictive Analysis

‍AI can compile and analyse a multitude of data and do a predictive analysis based on statistics, modelling, machine learning, and data mining. Social Listening tools are just one example of how to enhance content strategy with predictive analysis. Knowing the facts and interpreting how these contribute to the Content Strategy allows businesses to stay ahead in the market and establish thought leadership.

AI can help automate many processes, allowing businesses to understand and connect with a multitude of people on a personal level. It is a vital tool in implementing Intelligent Content.

But with all the advancement of AI in the past years, we're still a long way away from imbuing it with human creativity, ingenuity, and emotions. AI will still need a human touch to be the guiding hand in interpreting the data gathered, as well as making decisions about recommendations.

AI can play a key role in making content intelligent. With content richly structured and tagged with metadata, our Content Management System (CMS) provides the infrastructure to access data, while the AI interprets what's available and what to do with it based on the content strategy, allowing for the automation and maximisation of content.

Article original posted as AI: Enhancing Content Marketing with Bots, Machine Learning and Automation