Have you ever thought about how common artificial intelligence is? Or how close are we to all-powerful AI “supercomputers”? Gartner reports that 37% of companies implemented AI in some form in 2019. So, there is a pretty good chance you’re already using AI without even knowing it. AI can be as simple as Gmail filters sorting your emails into different categories, or Amazon’s predictive recommendations popping up as you search. But what exactly is AI, and how can you use it to help improve your content creation?
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of AI and how it can improve content creation. If you’re interested in diving deeper into AI, check out Cloud Academy’s course, Building a Chatbot on Azure. You’ll learn how to automate content creation tasks by using chatbots to answer typical questions about specific products and services.
What exactly is AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as the ability of a computer to emulate human intelligence processes through learning and automation. Modern AI-powered computers perform various tasks and assist us in almost every area of our lives.
While there are still many misconceptions about AI, it’s important to understand that it’s not a threat to human employees. Oppositely, AI-powered technology can significantly improve your job as it proves to increase productivity and optimize processes.
As AI advances, computers are now able to perform many tasks, including the ability to:
- Recognize emotions in human faces and speech
- Interpret and analyze images
- Understand, analyze, and recreate human languages
- Analyze and process complex patterns in a large amount of data
- Beat 75% of Americans in the visual intelligence test
Impressive, right? Now that computers can talk to us and score higher than us in tests, there are also ways they can help us optimize business activities and improve content efforts.
There are many ways you can use artificial intelligence to automate the content creation process. Major media and news outlets, like The Washington Post, Forbes, The Guardian, and Reuters, use the help of “the robot reporters” to speed up and automate content creation.
In fact, it’s possible that some of the tools you’re using for your business, like a chatbot or a logo maker, are AI-powered. In this article, we’ll discover different ways you can incorporate AI to help your content creation.
How to use AI to improve content creation
1. Automate small content initiatives with natural language generation
Artificial intelligence isn’t quite in a place where robots can write entire articles for your company’s blog. At least not yet. In the meantime, one way to use AI is by creating small data-specific content pieces, like tweets, news updates, and reports with the help of the natural language generation technology.
Not really sure what natural language generation (NLG) is? Simply put, it’s when an algorithm translates complex data into human language. In its essence, NGL software automatically generates narratives to describe structured data in a matter of milliseconds. You can use NGL software to write product descriptions and tailor customer satisfaction reports.
The Washington Post’s “robot reporter,” called Heliograf, is a great example. Heliograf is an automated storytelling technology that covers D.C.-area high school football games based on the data submitted by football coaches. This technology allows in-house journalists to focus on in-depth reporting of the “bigger” games while keeping the local community informed.
2. Improve personalization efforts
Did you know that 74% of marketers report an increase in customer engagement due to targeted personalization? The good news is that artificial intelligence can help your personalization and customer engagement, too. For example, you can employ AI-powered software to create personalized email marketing campaigns. They’ll manage subject line and email body personalization addressing recipients by their name or organization. AI can help your widely-distributed general email feel more personal, boosting customer engagement.
Also, you can use AI to create highly-personalized apps. Under Armor’s health tracking app, called “Record,” is a wonderful example. The app uses the AI-powered algorithm to create workout and nutrition recommendations based on your personal data.
3. Evaluate social media content
Also, you can use AI to track the performance of your social media content. Many marketers develop their content distribution strategies based solely on customer demographics. You can take this approach to the next level using the AI-powered software. Instead of tracking demographics only, collect and analyze customer locations, behaviors, and values. That’ll help you create super-personalized and targeted content to improve your social media campaign.
4. Get fresh topics and keywords
Thanks to artificial intelligence, there are now tools that can help your keyword research and topic generation. AI can give you precious insight into what your customers are really interested in.
Many keyword research tools allow you to find keywords showing their search volume, number of results, organic competition, difficulty score, search demand, and other metrics. Using keyword research tools will speed up your writing process and help you create more customer-specific content.
There are many blog post idea generators out there to help you develop and expand your topics. Answer the Public is one of such tools. When you enter your keyword, let’s say “artificial intelligence,” you can see the most popular questions asked by real users. As simple as a few clicks, you get data and ideas to help you expand and develop your topic.
5. Gather user-generated content
A new study shows that 90% of consumers report that user-generated content holds more influence over their buying decisions than other forms of marketing. AI can help you gather brand-related content posted by your customers on social media. This became possible due to the visual recognition technology that can analyze images and identify your products. You can use this data not only for marketing but also to get a better perspective on what works for your audience and community. Additionally, it increases your brand visibility and online presence.
6. Use chatbots to help your customers
AI-powered chatbots can help you communicate with your customers better and enable them to self-create branded content. The first part is pretty obvious. We all know how to use chatbots for navigating customers and acting as customer service reps.
When it comes to user-generated content, chatbots can facilitate your customers to create more of it. For example, Whole Foods launched an innovative chatbot for Facebook’s Messenger. Besides helping to navigate Whole Foods locations, the chatbot offers healthy and wholesome recipes. All you need to do is answer a series of questions (you can even use emojis to describe products) and let the chatbot do the rest.
Alternatively, you can use chatbots to promote content sharing within your clients. Spotify’s chatbot is a great example of this strategy in real life. Subscribers can not only ask about their accounts and discover newly released music, but they can also choose songs their friends might be interested in. Then, they can easily share these recommendations with their friends within the platform.
Final thoughts
The rapid growth of AI-powered software is predicted to change content creation as it exists now. According to experts, AI will be able to complete any intellectual task humans can perform by the year of 2050.
But what can AI do now? AI-powered computes have learned to provide organizations with data, story templates, fresh blog ideas, and user-generated content. A combination of machine learning and customer data has the impact you need to take your content creation efforts to the next level. That’s why it is so important to analyze data at the first stages of your content creation process. Also, your content efforts can massively benefit from AI as it helps you create more personalized and targeted content.
