When you think of AI and content, what comes to mind🤔?
🥁🥁🥁
ChatGPT?
That’s no surprise.
In a survey about ChatGPT usage, a whopping 97% of business owners have adopted the generative AI tool to support their business in some form or fashion.
Entrepreneurs who were once hesitant about writing content turned into content-slinging superstars overnight.
And marketing teams by far had the highest adoption rate.
But here’s the thing:
AI is not just for content creation.
And ChatGPT is just one tool in the marketing toolbox.
You see, to increase your team’s efficiency, using AI throughout your entire content marketing lifecycle is where you’ll experience the biggest gains in your content strategy.
In this guide, we’ll identify each phase of the content marketing lifecycle and highlight cool tools content marketers are using to successfully serve and slay content.
So if you’re clear on your ideal client, let’s dive in.
Research and Planning
Now, this is your girl’s favorite part of the content marketing process–discovering the best content topics that your audience is itching to learn and sharing it in a way that positions you as the go-to queen in your industry.
It’s why I LOVE content strategy…
But let’s stay focused lol.
Research and planning consist of several components, each vitally important to cementing a solid foundation for content marketing.
- Content Ideation and Keyword Research – Finding topics your people are actively searching for and how they’re entering those inquiries in search
- Content Trends – What’s currently poppin’ in your industry that provides you an opportunity to share your expert thoughts
- Competitor Analysis – Gain inspiration and clear differentiation on what sets you apart from others in the industry
- Content Management System – The technology that houses your content editorial calendar, processes, ideas, etc.
With a solid research and planning phase, you’ll confidently produce content that sets you as an influential leader in the game.
How about that!
Here are some tools that fuse bomb AI features for this introductory phase of content marketing.
Narrato
Boasting as an all-in-one AI platform, Narrato has a powerful content planning feature to research keywords, generate content ideas, and store your content assets for easy access.
BuzzSumo
Hands down, the best tool to stay in the know and uncover trending topics. Whether you’re looking for questions people are asking, keyword ideas, or exploring active forum feeds, you’ll never run out of ideas using BuzzSumo. Oh, and they’re powerfully using AI to ensure you have the latest, most accurate conversations.
MarketMuse
If you’re using a pillar-based marketing strategy, this one’s for your team! You can build topic clusters in minutes using MarketMuse’s AI feature, saving you a ton of time while positioning your company to dominate in that subject area.
Content Creation
Ah, this is where the marvelous happens✨. You’re crafting that beautiful piece of content that will entice an emotion, inspire someone’s next power move, or give tactical know-how to get a quick result.
My friend, this is why we create.
As you know, there are tons of AI content creation tools ready to support entrepreneurs’ ambition to produce lots of content at scale….
But sis, beware.
Fresh-off-the-grill AI content is not tasty content.
It removes the human emotional piece that’s key to capturing and compelling readers.
And like you, I can smell AI copy a mile away. The repeating of a thought over and over again sprinkled with “unleash” and “unlock” and coupled with excessive emojis are often dead giveaways.
Yet, with the right prompts (or inputs) and human editing, your team can craft some amazing pieces while saving time.
Here are some of my must-haves.
Jasper
Ahh, my absolute favorite–and I’ve tried several. What makes Jasper unique is the ability to upload your brand voice (or have it create one for you) so the copy generated speaks in your tone. You can also switch to different voices to tailor your content for multiple customer segments.
As an agency that serves various clients, this is a game-changer for my team!
Grammarly
Grammarly is our content superhero🦸♀️, throwing out those red lines and saving the day before we publish or send🙏🏽. They’re taking it a step further with their AI writing assistant; designed to reword and/or finish your message to deliver clean, concise content that connects.
Writer.ai
I’ve heard great things about Writer.ai–from a friend who co-founded a leading 7-figure SEO agency to the Global Chief Brand Officer at Goldman Sachs. If you’ve published tons of long-form written content (i.e. blogs), this tool can easily repurpose them into tons of engaging short-form pieces.
Schedule and Publish
Automation, automation, automation.
The more action items we can automate, the more free time we have to focus on what we do best.
Additionally, smart automation takes on the marketing tasks that drive traffic, leads, and sales on autopilot.
That is the dream🌴.
Manually publish content as minimal as possible. Here are some tried and true tools that will enable your team to do exactly that…with some AI on the side.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been in the game for years (they were my first SMM tool back in 2010) and they never cease to amaze me. In addition to scheduling your content, their latest feature, OwlyWriter AI, is hipped to help you craft captions quickly per platform.
CoSchedule
Marketers love CoSchedule. This all-in-one content management system is an editor, planning calendar, scheduling tool, and so much more. Map out any content projects with CoSchedule while assigning your team’s tasks with its collaborative features. With Mia, its AI marketing assistant, you can build customized workflows, access prompts to increase team efficiency, and, yes, so much more.
HubSpot
HubSpot is the godmother of all things inbound marketing. They are long-time innovative leaders with a comprehensive suite of products for the scaling organization. You can leverage HubSpot AI for every phase of your content marketing.
Content Distribution and Promotion
You’ve optimized and published that well-crafted blog post, now let’s get it out to the masses!
Back in the day, content marketers followed the 80/20 rule.
In other words,
You should spend 20% of your time creating content and 80% of your time marketing it.
I’m not sure if most of my colleagues continue to follow this rule today since there’s a huge focus on creating quality content that stands out.
But the moral of the story still stands:
You must get your content in front of targeted eyeballs to drive results.
Especially your best content.
Hence, a distribution and promotion strategy!
Here are a few AI tools that will help.
Jasper
Yes, here we are again–repurpose content with Jasper! Take your top-performing blog post (check your Google Analytics) and revise it a bit for a LinkedIn article, chop it up into captions for IG content, and create a summary for your newsletter. With a few commands, you’ll have new content pieces that uniquely speak to the platforms you’re posting on.
Now use Hootsuite or CoSchedule to schedule the different pieces.
Analyze and Measure
As with any marketing strategy, it’s important to know exactly what’s working and what isn’t. Creating content and hoping it sticks is not boss moves. We must track and analyze our content to ramp up what’s performing well and improve or eliminate what’s not.
This is where it gets fun💃🏽.
It’s awesome to see the metrics climb in your favor. On the flip side, you can quickly pivot to those other amazing content ideas that are waiting to get their shot!
Check out how AI is empowering marketing teams to capture well-needed data to make powerful decisions in their content strategy.
Google Analytics 4
In addition to gleaning details such as the number of users on your site, GA4 is applying machine learning algorithms to predict future user behaviors by analyzing past interactions. Ah, talk about staying a step ahead of consumer trends!
Native Social Tools
Each social platform has its native analytics tool showing post performance, audience engagement, and what content resonates best with followers. The beauty is, these social platforms are amplifying their features using AI to improve targeting and overall ad performance (ahem, Meta Advantage Suite).
WordPress/Wix
Website-building platforms like WordPress and Wix have embraced AI to offer personalized content suggestions and SEO optimizations. Easily integrate GA4 to get the optimal data experience.
Parse.ly
Or, you could roll with Parse.ly, a robust content analytics tool that makes metrics fun! The deep insights and real-time reporting equip your team with the right data to tweak your content strategy and drive ROI. The user-friendliness will turn the creative entrepreneur into a data nerd🤓.
Conclusion
There’s more to AI than content creation and ChatGPT. AI should enrich your entire content marketing process–from content ideation to getting your brilliance out into the world! As a result, your marketing team will increase its efficiency, effectiveness, and earnings!
So, which AI content tools will you use? What are you currently exploring? I’d love to hear from you!
Rooting for you,
~Charlene
