It should come as no surprise creating content is one of the most time-intensive components of marketing. But did you know that effective content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads? Salespeople only spend a third of their day talking to potential customers, but content never stops talking. It boosts sales, brand awareness, and helps foster deeper relationships with customers.
Despite the benefits, developing engaging content for customers isn’t easy. And in the future, it’s not going to get any easier. Brands and B2B marketers will need to create even more content to engage consumers in the connected, AI, and IOT-driven world that lies ahead.
Engaging content takes time
Creating enough content to engage with future customers would require dozens of content creators working 24/7. The average whitepaper – from creation to review to design to delivery – takes up to eight weeks, a brochure three, a web page two, and press releases and blogs a few days. One piece of content alone – promoted across five channels and in eight languages – could quickly involve creating, managing and delivering up to 280 different pieces of different content.
No team in the world can turn that level of content around overnight. It’s just not a realistic option when marketers already identify both a lack of bandwidth to create content (51%), and producing enough content (50%), among the top challenges they face, according to the LinkedIn Technology Marketing Group. It’s clear that time-strapped content marketers need help. And it’s here where exciting, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can assist brands in 2018 and beyond.
Creating content from nothing
Imagine if content could create itself from nothing, and help you reach any customer, in any language, with the right piece of content? We’re not talking about machines recreating, or trying to replace, the human mind. We’re talking about machines helping to create large volumes of content out of nothing but information, and helping content teams by suggesting words, phrases, brand messages and communications you know will hit the right note. Simply put, imagine a more productive world with tools that can distill information to generate and deliver that content so you quickly engage customers.
We see a future where marketers are provided insights on customer trends, given suggestions for campaigns and even provided with the content itself to refine and deliver. Imagine if it could even take a first draft of the content for you? Now wouldn’t that help you launch more campaigns faster – with more impact?
A new course for content
By combining AI, machine translation and natural language processing (NLP), it’s now possible to create, translate and deliver content in a variety of ways. It works by suggesting words and translations to content teams (and translators) based on what has already been translated in the past. In the future such a tool may be able to provide assistance in creating copy based on source data and other relevant material, while tagging and structuring content for delivery across different channels.
In an era with excess information, where customers are bombarded daily with irrelevant messages and ads, relevancy quickly determines the success of your brand. AI presents the promise of enabling customers to follow every stage of the purchase journey without distraction, while making it easier for your content teams to create even more powerful, highly-tuned and relevant communications.
