You know the old saying about how if you put enough monkeys on enough typewriters you’ll eventually get Shakespeare? It might take several million years and several million monkeys, but eventually they’ll accidentally hammer out a relevant page.
Content writing involves a lot more than hitting random keys on the keyboard and hoping for a good story. Even so, the biggest challenge we face is creating content truly relevant to the audience.
If it’s not relevant, then it’s not much more valuable than what those monkeys on their typewriters are doing.
OK, that’s a strong statement. But it’s hard to overstate just how important it is to produce relevant content, content people will read, share and value.
Making content relevant begins with knowing your audience, and artificial intelligence has given marketers new opportunities to know and understand their audiences like never before.
The value of AI marketing
Simply put, artificial intelligence provides powerful insights into consumer behavior and preferences that give marketers an in-depth look at multiple audience segments.
That’s the view from 50,000 feet.
When you get down to it, the reason is that AI allows for in-depth personalization. In a recent blog on marketing and personalization, Scott Litman wrote that, “Modern marketing is a journey towards personalization.” Broad campaigns, large announcements, all these need to be scaled down to cater to individual consumers.
Personalized marketing: It’s every marketer’s dream. The problem is resources.
Marketing with AI gets us closer. By crunching user information like location, device, website interaction, demographics and more, AI can offer content that caters to the individual user. Based on the AI analysis, it can then push the right content in front of the right people.
With the right AI system in place, marketers can dive even deeper. You might be targeting two men in their late 40s who like to fish, but that doesn’t mean they’ll respond to the same piece of content.
In the same blog, Litman talks about cognitive computing that allows marketers to go deeper than demographics, geography and items previously clicked on to get close to that elusive goal: a truly personalized marketing campaign where the right content goes to the right people.
What kind of data can AI provide for writers?
Unless you’ve been living off the grid, you’ve heard once or twice that we’re living in the age of big data.
With so many things that we do, data is in the driver’s seat.
For content writers, some of the most salient data points include: web page interactions, referral source, psychographic indicators, communication history, purchasing patterns, events in their area and more.
Such data is incredibly useful when crafting a piece of content, but big data is just that: Big.
To effectively utilize the massive amount of data available, you need the right tools.
What marketing AI tools are popular?
As the use of AI spreads, so will AI marketing tools. There are a lot out there, but these are two AI tools content marketers seem to love.
Lucy. What if you could take all the market research on a particular (and narrow) demographic — the reports, the models and all the data — and come up with a customer prototype? We’re not talking about a caricature, but a complicated, multidimensional “person.”
This is the marketer’s dream and pretty much what the impressive and slick AI tool Lucy does. With a few key customer data points, it draws from a number of resources and databases to create a detailed audience profile. This includes things like personality, needs, goals and values.
Going even further, it breaks this persona into archetype groups, which gives marketers a deep understanding that allows them to tailor their message. All of this can be done with little manpower and hours staring at the screen.The strategists at Brandpoint have just begun to unleash the power of Lucy for clients and help them better understand who they’re creating content for and how/what they should create.
Chatbots. Consumers know chatbots in the form of Google Home or Amazon Alexa, but chatbots do so much more than just take directions or play the song you want to hear. Recently, the world saw this when Google showed audio examples of its Duplex making appointments like it was a real person, navigating schedules, objections and even language barriers.
This demonstrated just how lifelike chatbot interactions can be. What allows chatbots to learn as they go and get to know the customer to develop a robust, immersive experience is the technology that marketers use to determine what content works best for individual consumers. In a very real way, chatbots can be used to create content that directly speaks to an individual in a highly personalized way.
The modern marketer
Personalization, data points and predictive AI: These words and the advanced systems they represent may get the majority of the marketing spotlight (and why not, they’re incredible!) but they need to be backed up by good, old-fashioned content.
Likewise, modern content writers need these tools to hone their writing and message to deliver relevant, personalized content to consumers.
It’ll make us way better than those monkeys hitting their rickety old typewriters!
