Previously, content marketing was an arena dominated by well-resourced organizations. Large corporations have editorial teams, content strategists, SEO experts, and unlimited budgets. If you owned a start-up or small business, you probably did not have enough manpower or the money to create the level of content needed to succeed online. However, things are different today […]
Previously, content marketing was an arena dominated by well-resourced organizations. Large corporations have editorial teams, content strategists, SEO experts, and unlimited budgets.
If you owned a start-up or small business, you probably did not have enough manpower or the money to create the level of content needed to succeed online.
However, things are different today thanks to artificial intelligence. It is now possible for a two-person team to achieve what used to require an entire department. However, having a strategy is key. Whether creating blog posts or turning videos into emails, AI has enabled small firms to become competent in content marketing.
Although accessing these AI-powered services is relatively simple, knowing how to leverage their capability can be tricky.
Using AI in content marketing without a strategy results in chaos. In this article, we will explore strategies for using AI in content marketing. These tips will help you grow despite having a small team.
Prior to introducing AI technology to your content marketing initiatives, you should understand what you currently own and how effective those elements are.
Content audits will provide you with an inventory of the materials you possess – from blog posts and landing pages to social media content and email marketing campaigns – while showcasing successful items, outdated elements, and gaps within the system.
Begin by identifying your top-performing pages, based on metrics such as organic clicks, impressions, average position, and time spent on page.
Next, sort all material into three categories: keep and optimize, revise and republish, and remove or merge. Just this process may uncover some low-hanging fruit, where you can take a decently ranked article and fine-tune its performance to place it in the top five results.
This is where AI really shines right from the start: once you have established what requires a refresh, the next step would be to run the existing content through an AI content detector to determine which sections need updating due to being outdated, completely AI-generated, or failing to meet your current criteria.
This way, you get to direct your efforts on the right sections without having to do all the work upfront. With your evaluation complete, you will now have a better outline for your AI content generator.
A common mistake that small businesses usually commit when using AI content creation software is skipping the brand voice stage. What happens here is that companies jump right into content creation, get generic outputs, and ask themselves why everything does not work.
But brand voice is not only about tone – it includes the words you use, the structure of your sentences, writing style, etc. Write down the document about your brand voice before moving on with mass content creation.
Be sure to make it clear to everyone who will be using it – one page will be more than enough, along with the detailed description of up to three to five features, including “We say this, not that” examples, and a few paragraphs.
Once you are done with it, just copy-paste it into your AI software prompt to see how great the outputs become. It will also help you build your own custom personas for your AI tool – you will spend just a little bit of time and never again worry about inconsistency.
Content marketing has been relying on keyword analysis from its inception, but AI has made this job easier and much more effective.
Instead of traditional keyword research based on the idea of choosing one particular keyword and then creating content around it, keyword clustering has emerged as a new methodology for keyword research.
First, you should identify a seed keyword related to your core product or service. Conduct keyword analysis using a specific AI-driven keyword analysis tool to identify keywords connected to the seed keyword. Cluster these keywords based on semantic similarities using AI technology. If you have chosen “project management for small teams” as the seed keyword, you may have the following clusters: software reviews, efficiency tips, remote team management, and so forth.
Once the keyword clusters have been identified, you should associate the keyword clusters with the appropriate type of content. The informational keyword clusters may turn into blog posts or videos with “how-to” instructions.
On the other hand, comparative keywords would turn into comparative posts while commercial keywords would transform into landing pages or buyer’s guides. The process of content creation will revolve around clusters instead of keywords alone.
One of the main benefits of using AI in small businesses is rapid content repurposing. You can now transform a lengthy blog article into a carousel, a thread, a newsletter section, a script for a short video, and an outline for a podcast show in an hour or less by using appropriate workflows.
The trick here is to treat your lengthy content as raw material and use AI to convert formats. Write or record your cornerstone content — a blog post or a podcast episode, depending on your strategy.
After that, you just need to use the repurposing prompt when working with your preferred AI service: “Identify five counterintuitive pieces of insight from the article and create 5 separate posts with them, each with no more than 280 characters.”
AI tools customized for specific needs will help you to automatically transcribe podcasts and videos, create summaries, and make social media clips out of the most engaging parts of your content.
With the right combination of AI services, one piece of long-form content will become the foundation of a week-long content distribution campaign on multiple channels at once.
The ROI in email marketing for small and medium-sized businesses is a strong $36 per dollar of investment, according to the industry metrics.
Yet, mass emailing without any personalization and addressing each recipient in his/her own way does not work anymore.
Personalization is the keyword here, and, fortunately, AI solutions can help you to personalize your emails to the point where this task would have required you to hire a full-fledged CRM department in the past.
In the first place, segment your list of recipients by behavior patterns: customers, non-buying subscribers, and those who followed a specific link on your last newsletter.
This segmentation feature should be available in your email service, and, ideally, it might offer even some AI-powered features in segmentation creation.
Finally, prepare the email content, including its subject lines for each separate segment of customers, with the help of AI technology. Your regular clients get an email saying about the high value of their support and your future innovations.
The inactive subscribers, on the contrary, get a newsletter reminding them of their lack of activity and offering something for them right away. AI-driven subject line generation and predictive delivery dates will ensure your perfect results!
What you can not measure, you can not optimize, and too often, startups think about their content analytics far too late. Monthly checks for pageviews, a shrug, and no action taken – because they simply do not know what is driving the numbers or how to use their content effectively. Fortunately, AI tools now enable deep dives without needing a data analyst on your payroll.
Want AI-enabled insights? Market research tools are able to examine your content’s topical coverage, compare it with top-ranking competitors, and provide precise feedback on improvements you can make – not general guidelines, but concrete recommendations of which subtopics, questions, and internal links you should include.
Create a monthly content performance meeting where you will look at three data points in relation to each article you published in the last three months: organic traffic growth, engagement level per article, and conversion rate.
Let AI tools cluster your results into patterns, like the tendency to perform better on certain types of posts. For instance, you might notice how your how-to articles beat your opinion pieces hands down, or how one specific topic gets you triple conversions compared to others. That becomes the prompt for your next content creation session.
Content marketing strategies should not be created in isolation. Instead, they should be designed based on the challenges that customers face and the information they need.
Luckily, AI technologies make it significantly easier to identify those trends, regardless of whether your business is managed by a single person or a team of hundreds.
To begin with, combine the data gathered from your customer support efforts with your content marketing strategy.
Export the last 200 support tickets or chat messages and copy them to an AI tool, specifying the following command: “Provide a list of ten most commonly asked questions/pain points in this dataset and suggest topics/content pieces to cover them.” You will receive a detailed content brief, which is completely based on real customer issues and language.
Similarly, process the audio records of your sales calls with the help of AI software that will identify recurring objections, concerns, and questions among your salespeople.
They will become your high-priority content topics as they target the main challenges faced by potential buyers right before making their purchase decisions. Moreover, content created based on real buyer language will consistently perform better than content driven exclusively by keyword data.
The reality of AI has made a tremendous difference to the landscape of possibilities for startup and small business content creation. There is a new game, and the game can now be played by smaller and leaner teams in a way that was once only possible through agencies.
But the winners among these businesses will not be those who make the most content possible using their new technology, but those who use it to see more clearly, act quicker, and keep the laser focus on exactly what their market needs.
Take this roadmap as your foundation, and build outward from there, one layer at a time. The tech is better than ever — the strategy is yours to craft.
