Artificial intelligence, or AI, has become a hot topic in recent years and its numerous applications for digital marketing haven’t gone unnoticed.
When it comes to applications in content strategy, AI can take over several time-consuming tasks that go into content strategy components like buyer personas. While you still need a human touch to put those personas to use, AI can do things like examine millions of social media posts at light speed, producing workable data instantly so marketers can work with it much faster. Analyzing keywords? AI tools can tackle this task with alacrity.
Most exciting of all is that large enterprises aren’t the only ones invited to the party now.
AI Becoming More Accessible Through the SaaS Model
Technology leaders feel that AI is going to make huge strides in 2020 by becoming more accessible to smaller companies, solopreneurs, and individual users via the software-as-a-service, or SaaS, model.
Marketing tools like Salesforce and HubSpot utilize the SaaS model, as do programs like Adobe Creative Suite. While enterprise versions of these programs are available, any budding entrepreneur can just buy a subscription and get started with their projects without dropping a small fortune. The same idea is expected to come to AI, so that what used to be a significant upfront investment that only large enterprises could afford for enterprise applications could soon become as simple and economical to purchase as a Canva or HubSpot subscription.
What makes this so exciting for solopreneurs and smaller companies in particular is that several time-consuming tasks that can often hobble how much time you have to work on your business can become more easily automated. New avenues for growing your business can also be discovered through AI that basic machine learning and analytics were unable to in the past.
The Difference Between Machine Learning and AI
Machine learning relies on prior user behaviors to make more accurate predictions of outcomes over time, such as the predictive text on your phone. AI is a technology specifically designed to emulate human intelligence and behaviors.
This distinction is important to remember in content marketing applications because some aspects of your strategy will do best by machine learning, while others could use AI to find the most effective solution or use the two technologies in conjunction. For instance, as content aggregators notice which users skip over videos and which ones read fewer text, AI uses that machine learning output to better curate feeds so that those users will be shown fewer or no videos.
AI’s most salient advantage is that it can determine which channels that users prefer to communicate with so that brands can tailor content for those channels, such as email, social media, or native app. Clicks and impressions plus open rates is no longer going to cut it, and small operations will no longer have to be left in the dark once the AI applications available through SaaS start to show up in 2020.
What Still Requires a Human Touch
AI has become so intelligent that it can actually start to create content.
This is sparking fervent discussion concerning both the quality and ethics of AI-generated content creation. At the moment, AI-generated content is still resulting in poor language quality. While it has spawned Twitter memes like “I fed this content generator 15 scripts for lawyer commercials, and here’s the screenplay it wrote”, some people suspect those memes were actually written by a human. But that’s all a testament to how AI is rapidly progressing and able to decode human language, although the machine learning aspect comes in with how it digests film scripts, tweets, and other pieces of information.
While there’s concerns about content writers being replaced by AI, the main point of deploying this technology is so that the humans can focus on the tasks that more urgently require human experience and touch. If we’re not focusing on converting data into digestible stories, or analyzing spreadsheets full of keywords, then we can focus more on using our experience and skills to tell the stories that other humans want to hear (opposed to “lemons, the justice fruit that only lawyers may touch”.)
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An experienced entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and general business writer, Rachel P.’s consulting business is tailored to professional development for indie developers and other creative professionals. In addition to serving clients in need of professional development and work-life balance, Rachel also works with companies who wish to do business with game developers and professional sector workers who need assistance in acquiring and retaining game developer clients. She has helped tax offices, attorneys, and insurance brokers sell several thousand dollars worth of services through both her sales and writing skills.
