The business world is digitizing at a rapid and accelerating pace.
Digital tools are proliferating across industries, and the world of content marketing is no exception. Marketing technology (MarTech) tools tools have multiplied from around 150 in 2011 to around 8,000 today—an increase of over 5,000% in less than a decade. The content marketing landscape alone includes content-experience platforms like Brightspot and extends to tools for content distribution and recirculation, interactive tools to foster deeper audience engagement, and services to augment SEO analysis and optimization.
So many marketing activities that have been expensive, inefficient or impractical for humans to do manually will be made cheap, fast and easy with AI-powered software—but still applied at the direction of marketers.
The average enterprise now uses 120 cloud-based marketing tools, and marketing departments typically rank first among departments in the number of cloud services they use.
All this change has led to much fretting among content creators: Are machines going to take over the task of storytelling? Will content creation be done by robots, with the role of the marketer whittled down to the task of constantly feeding its engine with data?
Expert consensus is that the answer is no. But it’s worth considering how technology enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance humans' ability to automate workflows, improve content creation and drive deeper and better customer engagement.
Humans + technology = marketing power
The 2020s will be the decade of the "augmented marketer."
This is what Scott Brinker, often called the "godfather of MarTech," and Jason Baldwin, the global head of product management at creative transformation company WPP, contend in their MarTech 2030 report. By this they mean that humans will continue to play the central role in content marketing, with their efforts assisted in meaningful ways by AI-empowered tech.
"So many marketing activities that have been expensive, inefficient or impractical for humans to do manually will be made cheap, fast and easy with AI-powered software—but still applied at the direction of marketers,” the report states. "Marketers will take advantage of these capabilities to free up more time to focus on their uniquely human contributions and to render ideas that were previously out of reach due to a lack of time, skill, or budget."
In fact, Brinker believes that MarTech will not only make marketing easier and more efficient, but will free up humans to become even better at connecting with customers.
“By leveraging ever more sophisticated, AI-powered tools," he predicts, "augmented marketers will achieve new levels of creativity and productivity in crafting magical moments for customers."
There are many ways that AI-enabled tools help content creators and marketers connect better with customers and improve the likelihood of conversion. Examples include:
- Gaining insight into customer behavior from an app like Tealium or Marketo allows marketers to personalize content to engage various audience groups, promoting creative and unique approaches to content planning.
- Ad monetization apps like Doubleclick for Publishers and FreeWheel allow marketers to control the ads that specific customers see, increasing the ability to speak directly to each audience and enhance connection.
- Apps that parse metrics, such as Parse.ly and Comscore, provide content teams real-time information about how their audiences are engaging with content, allowing for strategic decision-making and planning, and enhancing creative control.
- AI translation tools like Google Translate or Lingotek can broaden content-distribution processes so that editorial teams can adapt their messaging for multiple global markets in dynamic and cost-efficient ways.
AI tools for content planning and marketing
Numerous tools can help with content planning and execution—some in the list below could become an invaluable part of your stack. These all integrate with Brightspot to seamlessly help enhance your content creation efforts.
- Acrolinx scores your content and provides suggestions for improvement
- Amazon Comprehend recommends tags for content
- Amazon Rekognition autotags images and video
- Amazon Textract extracts text from objects like PDFs and applies it as metadata
- Open Calais provides tag suggestions for content
- Amazon Transcribe transcribes audio and video content, and makes the text instantly available
- Amazon Translate translates content to multiple languages
- Google Translate translates content to multiple languages
- Lingotek manages and submits translation of content to different languages
- Optimizely allows users to do A/B tests on different locations of their site or app
- Tealium predicts customer behavior
- Marketo uses behavioral data, intelligence and journey flows to provide insight into buyers’ journeys
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows users to automatically import, segment and filter data from any source
- Hubspot is a CRM platform that helps increase leads and sales, and improve customer service
- Dynamic Yield enables personalization, recommendations, automatic optimization and one-to-one messaging
- Outbrain recommends personalized ads to end-users
- Doubleclick for Publishers allows for differentiation of ad campaigns among pages or screens
- FreeWheel allows for the control of display and video ads on various pages
- Google Analytics collates and visualizes data about your outcomes
- Google Tag Manager tracks metrics across sites or apps
- Parse.ly makes sense of analytics collected on sites or apps
- Comscore analyzes data and metrics from sites or apps
- Pendo provides usage information on various features of the CMS
Unleash your creativity with the power of AI
AI is here to stay, and in content marketing, in fact, it’s here to flourish.
The MarTech field is still growing quickly, jumping 13.6% from 2019 to 2020. Personalization and data insights are essential for marketers in this new world, and both content teams and marketing departments alike need to keep up with these trends to maintain an edge.
With the right AI tools in place, companies can create the most effective and targeted content for their audiences. Discover how Brightspot’s integrations can seamlessly enhance your marketing efforts and help you unleash your creativity.
