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Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s already here, and it’s changing the way businesses operate. One area where AI is making a big impact is marketing. According to research from Salesforce, in 2018 only 29% of marketing leaders were using AI, but by 2020 that number reached 84%.
Marketing a business is a huge endeavor with so many different elements to take into account in our modern world; as such, there are numerous ways in which AI can help with these efforts. On one side, there is the impact of data analytics on marketing efforts, which is a huge topic in and of itself. Using AI to gather insights about consumers and then tailor marketing strategies to them has been transformative in modern marketing.
However, in this article, we want to focus on a different element of marketing – specifically, how artificial intelligence can assist us with creating content. From AI writing software to AI music composers, there are so many tools out there that can assist both large organizations, small businesses, and entrepreneurs alike in curating new and relevant ideas, generating engaging copy, and enhancing marketing efforts, all while saving us time.
Idea Generation
Sometimes, knowing where to start is half of the battle when it comes to figuring out how to position a product or business. Nowadays, instead of sitting and staring at a blank screen trying to come up with creative ideas out of one’s own mind, we can turn to artificial intelligence to do some of that brainstorming for us.
There are a number of AI algorithms out there that can assist with coming up with new marketing angles for a product, that can search for relevant keywords or topics for a brand to talk about, or can create a list of blog topics to post about based off of just a few inputs from us. One example of this is Market Muse, which is a tool that can give insights about search terms you should be targeting, as well as give topics that would be beneficial to focus on for your brand. Sometimes, these will be new angles or ideas we couldn’t have come up with ourselves, and while that is just the beginning, we do need to start somewhere.
AI Writing Tools
All sorts of AI writing software has been developed to help take care of the time-consuming task of humans writing everything themselves. There can be a tendency to see this sort of content as “robots writing for other robots.” It’s important to keep in mind that even using these tools still does require human touch, input, and mastery. One has to decide on the descriptions to feed into the software, and give it direction in terms of tone of voice, keywords, etc. These tools can generate a good amount of content and copy, but will still likely need to be looked over and edited by a human most of the time.
There are many tools out there that can write product descriptions, headlines for ads, photo captions for social media posts, engaging questions for audiences, and so much more. Jasper AI is one company whose writing software gives all sorts of templates such as these for content creation. Quillbot can paraphrase posts, expand upon them, check for grammar or plagiarism, co-write content, or give citations. Another useful tool in this category includes Grammarly, which is embedded in many other programs and help us all to catch those typos or make suggestions for ways our copy writing efforts can be clearer, stronger, and more enticing.
Blogs & SEO Optimization
One of the clearest examples of where many companies need assistance is with long form blog writing. Blogs are one of the top ways to work towards better SEO optimization for your business and website, which has become increasingly important for brands to make themselves visible in online searches and to get their name out there.
Not only can AI assist in generating topics for posts, but it can also write entire blogs for you, which can save us humans tons of time. Jasper AI has a long form assistant that allows one to input the idea for the post, and let it assist with writing a headline, intro paragraphs, body, and conclusion all in one go. Copy AI is another AI writing program that has had a lot of success and can co-write longer form content.
Then there are companies like Surfer who focus specifically on removing the guesswork out of SEO optimization practices to maximize these efforts through content, keywords, and internal links.
Other Content Creation
Outside of the realm of written content, which artificial intelligence and natural language processing are revolutionizing, there are tools that can be helpful with generating other types of content.
One such area involves video. We live in a world full of video content. Sometimes it can be hard to know where to start with these endeavors as well. Today, we can use AI tools to write scripts for videos we want to make. We can also use tools like Synthesia IO to produce videos with AI avatars and voices. Need a video of a person talking about your product that looks professional and clean? This would be a great tool to use!
In a recent blog about 11 Fun Artificial Intelligence Tools You Need to Try, we introduced Aiva AI, a tool that can compose soundtracks and original music with just a few inputs from the user. In a world where music licensing and finding good soundtracks can be difficult, we’re excited ourselves to use tools like this to produce engaging content in the future.
The ultimate goal of using these tools is not to replace the human effort that goes into these tasks. What we envision is a future where humans can utilize these tools to save time on the mundane, time-consuming tasks that take us away from the bigger picture. Getting bogged down writing social media copy means less time to actually glean insights from the work we do, to be even more creative, to make adjustments, or to think further ahead on our marketing strategies as we experiment with what works best for our companies, as well as our consumers.
