It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) has been a major topic of conversation as of late. Promising significant cost and time savings, organizations from almost every industry are eager to see how they can leverage AI to improve their businesses and products and gain a competitive advantage.

However, despite 80% of enterprise organizations having already implemented some form of AI, around 91% still say they expect significant barriers to adoption. Why? Because, regardless of all the excitement around AI, there are very few people familiar, let alone comfortable, with how to effectively use it.

The truth is, depending on your use case, artificial intelligence can often be as complex or as simple as you need it to be. With an increasing number of AI-focused solutions ranging from plug-and-play to fully customized, it’s easier than ever to get started with AI.

For marketers, one of the key areas that AI can be impactful is in content marketing. Here are 4 ways you can use artificial intelligence to enhance your content marketing.

1. Optimize Your Content for SEO

Every content marketer’s fear is investing a ton of time, money and energy into a piece of content, only to see it underperforming. Improving the reach of your content is more complex than selecting key topics that may resonate with your audience. With 93% of all online experiences beginning with a search engine, it’s more important than ever to optimize your content for discoverability and readability.

Without AI, optimizing content is a lengthy, manual process that can often involve a good amount of guesswork. While over time you can start to see similarities between your highest performing content, it can be a challenge to truly identify the individual aspects that, when combined, result in a highly-successful piece of content.

How AI Can Help

Optimization tools that leverage artificial intelligence can help you create, edit and optimize content to perform better across all channels. Using machine learning algorithms, they analyze your text in real-time to determine how well it will perform with your intended target audience and offer suggestions on the fly to improve future performance. Over time, the algorithms of such tools will analyze your published content and provide you with suggestions of what time to post in order to achieve the most engagement, and what words and phrases will resonate best with your audience.

Tool to Try: Atomic Reach

2. Create Better Content Than Your Competitors

Content has become key to building trust with your customers and, ultimately, driving sales. In fact, it was found that the average B2B buyer will read at least 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. It can be a challenge to keep up with the amount of content required to stay competitive, especially when 80% of content creators are doing all the work in-house, without outsourcing any tasks. With restricted time and resources, the content that you create needs to consistently deliver value and drive traffic. To achieve this, your keywords need to be optimized for your target audience and your writing needs to be on point. You don’t want to risk losing a potential customer by not delivering what they were searching for.

Using a suite of tools, you can access the analytics you need to create a solid content strategy and optimize the content you create. The part that’s missing, however, is the ability to ensure your content is optimized to cover the topic more comprehensively than your competitors.

How AI Can Help

Artificial intelligence takes content optimization to the next level, analyzing your own content, as well as hundreds (or thousands) of other pieces of content to understand what performs well and why. It’s then able to offer topics, keywords and other suggestions to ensure your content is not only optimized for search engines but also leaves your visitors satisfied.

Tool to Try: MarketMuse

3. Get Sales Using the Best Content

More often than not, marketing teams are tasked with creating the collateral that sales teams need to spark interest with potential customers, move them along the sales funnel, and, ultimately, win deals against competitors. From eBooks and brochures to case studies and ROI calculators, this collateral takes time, effort and budget, which makes it that much more frustrating when you discover the sales team isn’t using the collateral you’ve created for them. In fact, the range of content that goes unused can be as high as 70%.

More often than not, sales content follows a similar cycle: there’s a spike in use when the piece is first released, followed by a steady decline as the sales team returns to their typical content cadences. This problem often stems from a lack of communication of what’s actually helping sales to close deals – both between departments and individual sales reps. This can be combatted by hosting content success meetings and creating feedback loops, but even that is dependent on everyone sharing honestly and applying any given advice. Even with a small local team, this can be challenging to maintain.

How AI Can Help

AI-driven tools can provide a platform for salespeople to discover the content that’s proven to close deals. Over time, these tools learn which pieces of content perform best in any given situation to help move prospects down the funnel. They can also give your team insights into which content needs improvement so you can prioritize what needs to be updated.

Tool to Try: Showpad AI

4. Improve the ROI of Your Content

In recent years, there has been a steady increase in consumer demand for personalized content across multiple channels. It’s required teams to build more and more content, more and more frequently. But the more content you create, the more challenging it becomes to manage and keep track of it, leading to issues with version control and discoverability. When your content is hosted across various systems or even worse - on isolated hard-drives - it can be near impossible to for you to scale your content creation engine effectively. A study by M-Files found that 83% of organizations have had to recreate content – at least once - because they couldn’t find it.

To better manage, distribute and track their collateral and brand assets, marketing teams often turn to digital asset management systems. However, putting a central library in place is not the final solution; you need to tag your content to make it discoverable, which can be a lengthy and resource-intensive process. While this process is manageable on a small scale when you’re uploading hundreds or thousands of files each month, the process can be daunting.

How AI Can Help

DAM systems enhanced with AI capabilities can relieve some of this burden, tagging your content with common object, facial and text recognition. Some solutions even offer custom AI solutions, that allow you to tag your content with tags specific to your business and products. While AI isn’t meant to completely replace manual tagging, it does give you a strong jumping-off point to improve the discoverability and re-use of past, current and future content.

Tool to Try: MediaValet

Getting a Head Start on AI

As you can see, implementing artificial intelligence doesn’t need to be intimidating. By starting small, using some of the plug-and-play solutions, you can begin infusing your content with AI with minimal requirements from your team.

This post is an excerpt from our eBook 8 Ways AI Can Power Your Digital Strategy. Download the full eBook today to learn more ways you can use AI in your marketing and tools that can help you get started today.