Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming every aspect of business and marketing, including content strategy. What software applications should you choose to embrace this megatrend?
Despite all the recent attention given to the content creation potential of tools such as ChatGPT, the main action for marketing professionals in business and government lies in using AI-enabled tools for content strategy.
AI-powered content strategy is already generating better briefs for people like us (the humans), enabling us to monitor and optimise content campaigns more accurately and comprehensively than ever before.
What AI software can you use to facilitate this? The list includes, but is certainly not limited to:
- Acrolinx – content editing and governance
- Brand24 – media monitoring, content distribution and performance tracking
- BrightEdge – content optimisation, audits and performance tracking
- Cobomba – content research, content brief recommendations and performance tracking
- Concured – content topic research and recommendations
- Crayon – competitive intelligence and content insights
- Emplifi – social media content management
- Grammarly – content editing
- Hemingway – content editing
- HubSpot – content planning, optimisation and governance
- Influencity – monitoring and managing influencer content
- MarketMuse – content audits, planning and optimisation
- Marketo – content planning, automation, personalisation, governance and analytics
- Upland Kapost – content planning, operations and governance
Where do you begin on deciding what to use? To keep things simple, here are five AI-enabled content strategy applications we’re impressed by in 2023.
Acrolinx
Acrolinx is an advanced editing tool that enables your organisation to improve the quality of its content and speak with one voice.
At Editor Group, we use it every day to improve the work we deliver to our clients – as do many other larger businesses such as Google, Amazon and IBM.
Acrolinx provides detailed analytics reports to help you track your content production processes and quality levels. It also trains users as they work.
By using AI to analyse and score your existing content, and to recommend improvements to style, tone and grammar, Acrolinx helps you ensure your content always lives up to your brand standards, no matter who writes it.
BrightEdge
The BrightEdge platform supports a range of content strategy functions.
Its search engine optimisation (SEO) facility enables you to discover the intent behind search queries and the competitors you face for each content topic.
BrightEdge’s AI and machine learning engine crawls the web to collect first-party data and provide web-wide, real-time measurement of digital content engagement across all channels, including search, social and mobile. This means you can build your content strategy around the terms that gain the greatest engagement and increase traffic from interested customers and prospects.
The ContentIQ module also undertakes a comprehensive audit of your website and resolve errors so your content can consistently outperform competitors in search rankings.
Cobomba
Cobomba is content intelligence software that reads both search data and your content to reveal your audience’s content preferences at each stage of the buyer journey.
You can use Cobomba to identify initial audience themes, showing you the big-picture topics of greatest interest to your target market. Second, you can measure the performance of your content by audience theme and journey stage, in terms of relevance, discoverability and value. Then each month, you receive five detailed content briefs that show you how to create new content and improve existing content.
You also get performance reports, enabling you to update your content campaigns by business objective, marketing initiative, target persona and calendar, all in one place.
Concured
Concured is a content recommendation tool that helps you increase audience engagement with your content and, subsequently, conversions.
It builds a live, evolving interest profile for every visitor to your website, as they read. It then recommends the content and services most relevant to their interests.
By personalising your content to audience needs, you can increase its visibility, effectiveness and longevity. You can even customise the delivery of content to each visitor, automatically, so they will be more likely to engage and convert.
Concured also enables you to analyse the performance of your competitors’ content, helping you to tweak your strategy to stay ahead.
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a platform that can analyse all of your website content, giving you personalised, objective insights that support a more effective content strategy. We also use this one at Editor Group and can introduce you to the fantastic team at the business.
The AI automates content audits, helping you to understand which content is performing, which isn’t and what is missing. You can then prioritise the right content faster, knowing the best topics to address, their value and how hard it will be for each to rank.
And MarketMuse’s ‘cluster-first’ approach to keywords can help you prioritise the topics that have the best chance of ranking into clusters, thereby building your authority.
Comprehensive content briefs also provide other things a writer may need, including title and subheading suggestions, topics to address, questions to answer and internal links.
AI is the future of content strategy
AI can give your content strategy an advantage over competitors who continue to do things the old way. In the longer term, embracing AI will be the minimum requirement to compete in an increasingly AI-driven business environment.
The software options identified above are just five of many platforms available today. More are launching every year.
At the same time, while AI can guide decisions and may even play a part in writing, the systems should continue to be seen as a valuable complement to traditional writing and editing processes. There will always be a place for the originality, judgement and creative, nuanced thinking that comes from organisations, subject matter experts, writers and editors.
Need help? Talk to Editor Group about your content strategy needs.
By Peter-John Lewis
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