The buying process has evolved. Customers are becoming more empowered by information and connectivity. Marketing strategies are becoming more customer-centric, and along with it the need for personalization and one-to-one marketing. With this trend increasing, how do we cater to the expectations of our buyers?

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 us with real-time insights to how effective our strategy is. Working with Intelligent Content streamlines content creation, and allows for automation, which is key to determine content our audience demands and gather data about their responses.

In The Wheels and Cogs of Intelligent Content, we talked about the parts that go into making our content intelligent. Part of this is the application of Artificial Intelligence or AI. With content richly structured and tagged with metadata, Signagelive Content Management System (CMS) provides the infrastructure to access data, while Viana™ by meldCX interprets what's available and what we want to do with it based on our content strategy, allowing for the automation and maximization of our content.

The other ways AI contributes to Content Marketing are:

1. Learning about your audience

Research can provide us with data to plan our Content Strategy. But to help us measure how well our strategy is working, we can use our content to gather data and learn about our 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 their store, these algorithms enable machine learning to determine the patterns of our audience's interests and give us a better insight into how to reach and engage them.

Based on these patterns, we can come up with personalised content, like individualised social media news feeds, re-marketing ads, localised content, programmatic digital signage advertising, etc.

3. Distribution Channels and Automation

From automatically generating content to Search Engine Optimization, 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 visibility and encourages engagement. When content is intelligent, it is reusable, adaptive and reconfigurable. Automating this process allows you to reach them faster with content suited for each platform - from social media posts, to emails and even chat conversations.

This automation allows us to oversee and manage several accounts at the same time.  

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 we can enhance our content strategy with predictive analysis. What are the upcoming trends in our industry? What does our audience want to read about?

Knowing the facts and interpreting how these contribute to our Content Strategy allows us to stay ahead in the market and establish thought leadership.

AI can help automate many processes, allowing us 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 is our tool in automating tasks, letting us focus on improving the customer experience instead of planning and optimising strategies and creating campaigns.

This article is an instalment of our Intelligent Content series, where we take a deep dive into what makes a successful content strategy that engages and delights.