The Significance of AI in Content and Human Strategy

NP Digital’s Neil Patel offers commentary on the significance of AI in content and human strategy.

Thanks to AI, marketers and content teams can now work faster and more effectively than ever. Yet the role of human staff members has not been eclipsed. It has simply changed to account for human beings’ strengths and AIs’ limitations.

Here’s how the AI revolution is reshaping marketing decisions, as well as the indispensable role that human staff still play.

How AI Assists Data Analysis

Today’s sophisticated AI solutions address several of businesses’ common pain points when it comes to marketing. Previously, marketers had to slog through oceans of data from various sources, trying to identify nascent trends. It would be an understatement to say that this labor was time-consuming and difficult. Given constantly changing market conditions, it was also impossible for the analysis to ever be complete. Worse, at the end of the day, any conclusions marketers made after these manual analyses were usually based on little more than feelings and hunches.

Data collection and pattern recognition are areas in which AI excels, however. Current AI models can:

• Gather information from relevant sources in mere seconds.
• Spot suggestive consolidations that would elude human detection.
• Find correlations that help explain what’s going on.
• Identify how significant numbers of consumers react to different kinds of messaging.

AIs can also process queries along these lines in a few minutes or less, flagging interesting patterns for human team members’ attention. These results are not subjective; they are empirically based, gleaned from hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of data points. 

How AI Assists Marketing Strategy

Marketers can now generate reports at their fingertips that can confirm — or disprove — their feelings and hunches. As a result, they can now make more realistic and effective marketing decisions based on real-time data and current conditions. These trends are real, not wishful thinking, and point marketers toward the adjustments that would improve engagement rates and conversions.

But that’s not all. AI’s ability to conduct predictive analytics basically gives marketers a crystal ball. Given data from the past and present, generative AIs can extrapolate into the future to predict consumer behavior. They can even run multiple simulations to see what would likely happen if the company released one type of advertising versus another. If insufficient data exists, they can even give human staff ideas for running experiments or pilot programs that would produce the results they need to make high-quality recommendations.

In short, AI takes decisions that used to be based on subjective opinions and partial information and turns them into an empirically based science, enabling forecasting at a level never previously seen.

How AI Assists Content Production

The process of producing high-quality content is also full of pain points that today’s AI addresses effectively. Marketers have long struggled to ensure consistency throughout their brand’s presence. AI resources can conduct a scan and suggest appropriate remediation strategies in less time than it takes to brew a cup of tea.

For example, imagine how much time it would take for a human staff member to go through all of the pages of a company’s website, clicking on the links to determine whether they still work. AI’s lightning-fast sweep identifies these and presents recommendations for appropriate new URLs at the same time.

AI can also speed content production by:

• Coming up with ideas in the brainstorming stage.
• Generating sample outlines.
• Penning whole drafts of possible scripts.
• Personalizing messages to individuals, even while sending out a massive number of missives.

How AI Monitors the Competition

AI also helps marketers monitor their rivals by scanning competitors’ websites daily, looking for any changes and alerting relevant team members if something does. That way, if a competitor launches a new product, changes their prices, or features a different item, marketers can analyze these developments and respond to any ramifications if necessary. 

In addition, AI can monitor social media platforms to stay abreast of how the public is responding to other brands’ messaging, whether positively or negatively. The same goes for rivals’ advertising — marketers can use these examples when developing content for their own brands.

Moreover, AI can identify the SEO keywords competitors are trying to rank for. They can also gauge how effective this language is and if it’s driving substantial traffic to their sales funnel, which helps marketers understand the current state of battle over particular slices of the Internet, enabling them to choose their own tactics wisely.

Finally, predictive analytics can also be applied to competitors. By analyzing other companies’ past behavior, AI can identify their likely next steps. For instance, they can sense the public signals that would suggest that a business is preparing to launch a campaign in a new geographic area or push one line of products rather than another. Marketers can use this information to develop initiatives to counter these moves ahead of time. With the help of AI simulations, they can also test them to see which would be the most effective.

While AI can do a lot of the grunt work and sense patterns that would have escaped humans’ notice, however, nothing can or should replace the discretion and ultimate authority of human professionals.

AI & Human Collaboration = Business Success

Human team members not only provide valuable oversight, ensuring that the AIs’ output avoids inappropriate bias and aligns with brand goals, but also bring practical industry expertise to problem-solving that AIs frequently lack. Additionally, one of the things that makes people human is our ability to feel. Machines do not have our capacity for empathy and genuine connection. Ethics is another uniquely human trait.

Perhaps most importantly, human beings are also the ones who bring inspiration and vision to every marketing project. They write the prompts and send the directives that direct AI, and determine which tasks it should take on and when. There is no replacement for human imagination and creativity.

By working collaboratively, today’s AIs and human marketers can make decisions that propel brands to ever-higher levels of success.