Have you been looking for fresh ideas on how to amplify your content marketing strategy? Do you feel your digital marketing strategy has been stagnant for some time now?
Technology has affected all areas of our lives, including writing and content marketing.
So, how exactly is technology disrupting content marketing? Let’s see!
Technology vs Creativity
Creativity and technology have long had a love-hate relationship. Ever since we’ve become surrounded by smart gadgets that deliver us answers to any questions in a heartbeat, we’ve been wondering, “Is it a bad or a good thing for the brain?”
Our attention span is getting slower and our thirst for knowledge is getting lower (as many studies seem to confirm).
But there are many bright sides to advancing technology, including accessibility (i.e. tools making it possible for everyone to create), anonymity (and hence free idea sharing), and free access to information.
When it comes to such a creative activity as writing and content marketing, technology has come a long way. It started with “content recycling” tools: tools to “spin” content to create unique copies to re-use across multiple sites. Unsurprisingly, using “tools” to create content like that has been a long frowned upon practice.
Thankfully, the content marketing industry has matured beyond recognition since then. These days we have tools that empower writers instead of offering shortcuts.
There are lots of tools big and small brands can use to boost your content marketing strategy. For this article, I’ve been using some well-defined criteria:
- Affordable (so that it can be used by small businesses and solopreneurs)
- Easy to use (so you don’t need a separate tool or an expensive training to figure it out)
- Fostering innovation (i.e. offering something new no one else has been doing)
With that in mind, here are three tools that are disturbing (in a most positive way) the content marketing industry:
Empower Your Message with Artificial Intelligence
Simply put, AI (short for Artificial Intelligence) means “teaching” a machine to think and—more importantly—react (e.g. respond, record, etc.) like human beings would. It is a fast-growing branch in computer science affecting all areas of our lives, including – understandably – content marketing.
There are already a lot of examples of Artificial Intelligence in our everyday life:
- Facebook Messenger can be set to send automatic responses to your Facebook followers on your brand’s behalf
- LinkedIn suggests introductions based on your previous professional interactions (connections, comments and companies).
- Gmail offers a user to write entire messages based on personal typing habits and past emails.
Another widely discussed example of AI in action is chatbot technology which is able to meaningfully help and direct your customers when your team is offline.
No wonder Artificial Intelligence found lots of applications in content marketing: it can empower a writer with data, as well as improve their productivity. Evidently, AI can also help you compose an effective ad copy.
Broca is an ingenious marketing platform that uses Artificial Intelligence to help you compose Google Ad copy. You need to connect it to your Google Ads account for the tool to analyze your ad performance and based on that data the tool will generate new ad suggestions.
It’s amazing how the tool may help you find what your eye may fail to see: which words are triggering actions, which text seems to be underperforming, etc. The tool will keep on coming up with new ad copies so you never run out of tests.
Turning Text into Video with One Click of a Button
Video content creation has long been something most businesses would shy away from. Just about any brand I come across considers videos are too difficult and too expensive to create.
Yet, video content is essential for organic search presence. In some niches, you cannot really hope to become competitive without solid video content.
Videos take the best of both worlds: They present information visually (making it easier to consume) and they provide search crawlers with lots of information to crawl. According to Maxwell Hertan of Megaphone Marketing, visual content is exactly what it takes to make content easier to understand and a brand faster to remember:
When half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision, from day one it is our primary sense for understanding the world around us. With 70% of visual receptors in our eyes, it only takes 150 milliseconds to recognize and symbol and 100 milliseconds to attach a meaning to it. Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and retains 80% of what we see versus just 20% of what we read.
Supplementing text content with visual content (either images or videos or both) is a great way to amplify your content marketing efforts.
That’s where smart technology can help. InVideo offers text-to-video functionality which can save your team’s time while allowing your brand to consistently create video content.
The process is surprisingly fast and smooth:
- Copy-paste your text into the video editor
- Let the tool analyze it and select related images. InVideo will distribute your text among slides, pick background music, transitions, etc.
- Review the resulting video and tweak it so that it looks perfect. You can turn your own images into videos or keep those InVideo selected.
Composing Text Based on Semantic Analysis and Co-Occurrence
Semantic analysis is a branch of linguistics that explores connections among concepts and entities (i.e. names of places, people, brands, etc.)
Google has been actively using semantic analysis to build a good understanding of what each topic consists of and hence how relevant each web document is to each search query.
Text Optimizer is the tool that helps you identify those connections based on search snippets Google returns for a particular search query. One of its most impressive features is its ability to help you build entire sentences. Apart from being a great writing help, it also assists in coming up with content ideas. Look, I’d never think of this article angle without the help of this tool:
Conclusion
Our lives are being defined and refined by fast-evolving technology that has only been catalyzed by the global pandemic. More and more businesses are going through digital transformation, so the digital space is getting even more competitive.
The old marketing adage “Content is King” is (and will remain) true in the new marketing strategy. But the technology is changing the ways content is created and delivered.
To stay competitive, every brand should always keep on top of key technologies that are going to drive change in the content marketing industry.
The web is getting more competitive and faster, while engaging the customer is becoming more challenging. To yield results from their content marketing efforts, brands need to always be innovating, learning and testing (new software, new tactics, etc.)
