The rise of the robots: AI and content marketing

Let’s start with some audience participation: when you think of artificial intelligence (AI), what’s the first thing that springs to mind? Bet it’s not creative content marketing. Unless you’ve been hiding from the news, the internet and just about any form of media in the past few years, you’ll know that AI is kind of a big deal. Robotics pros have been hard at work creating machines that can “think” just like humans. Basically, the robot apocalypse is coming.

That’s how content marketers have been feeling, anyway. As scientists get smarter and smarter with their programming, their robots are also becoming more human than ever. And with that comes the random, haphazard and often irrational “thoughts” that tend to grace the minds of creative individuals. Thankfully, they’re not quite there yet and machines still aren’t quite the wordsmiths scientists might like them to be – you need look no further than this sci-fi film, created by a robot, for concrete proof.

Robot rant aside, artificial intelligence could be changing the content marketing world for the better. Here’s why:

It’s tackling content overload

Now more than ever, our audiences are being bombarded with content, good, bad and ugly. AI is already playing a significant role in cutting through that noise, helping quality relevant content to be seen and heard by people who are looking for it. And all content marketers know, that’s no bad thing! This clever machine learning functionality is also helping us to decipher just what it is the users are reading so that we can create even more of it. Thanks Google (and other search engines).

It’s getting chatty

Chatbots are somewhat of a controversial tool in the content world. However, for content marketers with large social communities to manage, chatbots can be a godsend. The particularly clever ones can mimic conversations and answer users’ questions in real time, freeing up time for creative thinking elsewhere.

It’s streamlining the user experience

IBM’s Watson computer is a prime example. A step up from Siri, Watson not only makes suggestions based on certain verbal cues, it’s also smart enough to understand, reason, learn and interact. This problem-solving ability means that Watson and similar AIs can direct users to what they’re looking for, as well as any relevant marketing materials they might find useful.

So, content marketers rest assured. The robots aren’t out for our jobs. After all, a machine can’t mimic the imaginative musings of a content pros mind. What the robots are doing, though, is making it easier than ever for us to figure out what our audiences want to read/ watch/ see so that we can get to the nitty-gritty creative stuff.  Or maybe they’re just biding their time…

At Cobb Digital we’re all about developing creative ideas that make your brand stand out from the crowd. To find out more about our data-driven approach to creative thinking, don’t hesitate to get in touch or pop in for a coffee.