In today‘s oversaturated digital landscape, marketers face immense pressure to create content that resonates with their target audiences and drives measurable results. The challenge lies in determining what content will actually engage customers and propel them down the marketing funnel.
This is where content intelligence comes in. Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, content intelligence analyzes data to provide actionable recommendations on optimizing content for higher performance. It is revolutionizing content creation and enabling more personalized, relevant and impactful marketing.
According to Insider Intelligence, content intelligence adoption will grow by 300% in 2023 as more companies realize its benefits. This guide explores what content intelligence is, how it works, its key benefits for marketers, top solutions and challenges to consider.
What is Content Intelligence and How Does it Work?
Content intelligence refers to the automated analysis of content performance data using AI and machine learning algorithms. It enables you to:
- Collect and connect data on content engagement across channels
- Analyze metrics like views, clicks, shares, conversions etc.
- Uncover insights about customer content preferences and behaviors
- Receive data-backed recommendations to optimize content
Content intelligence platforms leverage natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation to evaluate content and suggest improvements.
Key capabilities include:
- Competitor benchmarking: Analyze competitors‘ top-performing content by engagement metrics
- Market research: Identify trending topics and questions your audience is interested in
- Performance prediction: Forecast how well a piece of content could potentially perform
- Optimization: Provide specific recommendations to improve content based on data and best practices
As more customer data is aggregated and analyzed over time, the recommendations become increasingly tailored for your brand.
Benefits of Content Intelligence for Marketers
Here are 5 ways content intelligence can elevate your marketing:
1. Creates Higher-Performing Content
Content intelligence tools analyze historical performance data to determine what content resonates most with your audiences. These insights allow you to produce content designed to drive more clicks, shares, leads and sales.
For example, the platform may identify that blogs between 1,200 – 1,500 words in length with 5-7 subheadings generate 20% more traffic for your business. Armed with recommendations like these, you can consistently create better-performing content.
2. Enables Personalization at Scale
Today‘s customers expect personalized interactions across every touchpoint. Content intelligence makes it feasible to deliver tailored content to each visitor by leveraging customer data and segmentation.
You can automatically customize content like emails, landing pages and product recommendations for various audience groups. This leads to higher engagement and conversion rates.
3. Uncovers New Opportunity Gaps
It‘s difficult for marketers to manually track every content trend across the web. Content intelligence analytics continuously crawl sites to uncover the latest topics and questions gaining traction with your target buyers.
These opportunity gaps – where demand exists but content doesn‘t yet – represent a chance to get ahead of competitors by creating original, helpful content first.
4. Optimizes for Organic Reach & Rankings
Ranking high organically is pivotal for companies wanting to expand reach and gain qualified visitors. Content intelligence can analyze top-ranking competitor pages and identify optimization opportunities.
It also provides keyword recommendations based on search volume data so you can create SEO-friendly content engineered to rank. This leads to lower paid acquisition costs over time.
5. Improves Content Team Productivity
Creating strategic, high-performing content at scale is extremely difficult without the right technology. Content intelligence alleviates much of the manual effort for teams by automatically surfacing insights and producing content briefs.
Marketers can focus less on discovery and analysis, and more on creative direction. Collectively, this results in greater output and ROI from the content team.
Top 4 Content Intelligence Platforms
Here is a brief overview of leading content intelligence platforms for marketers:
1. Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI-powered content intelligence platform used by companies like UPS, Glassdoor and Mastercard. Key features include:
- SEO Content Strategy Planner for mapping topics to rank for
- Competitor content analysis
- Content Ideation with machine learning
- Performance prediction scoring
2. Uberflip
Uberflip centralizes content performance analytics and provides optimization recommendations. It also includes modules for building personalized content experiences.
3. ScribbleLive
Scribblelive is focused on helping marketers spot trends and opportunities early to guide strategic content creation. It leverages AI and NLP to recommend topics.
4. Percolate
Percolate is a marketing platform aimed at enterprise brands managing large content volumes. It uses AI to optimize publishing workflows across teams.
Key Challenges With Content Intelligence
While content intelligence adoption is accelerating, marketers should be aware of few common challenges:
Weeding Out Bad Data
With so much data getting aggregated from multiple sources, low quality or irrelevant data can skew insights. Marketers should be vigilant about filtering out any inaccurate or misleading data inputs.
Building Trust in AI
Since content intelligence relies heavily on emerging technologies like AI and ML, it takes time to trust recommendations. Marketers should validate suggested optimizations through ongoing small-scale testing.
Avoiding Content Homogenization
While leveraging common high-performing content attributes is useful, too much uniformity in content style loses the human creative touch. Brands must still nurture their distinctive voice and personalities.
The Future of Content Intelligence
As AI capabilities accelerate, so will the sophistication of content intelligence. Soon content strategy may become almost entirely automated, with platforms not just recommending topics but also generating complete articles and digital experiences tailored to each customer.
The technology still requires human guidance, but it is making great strides. According to Statista, 75% of content is expected to be written by machines by 2025. While outcomes may not replace the creativity of human minds just yet, the efficiency gains are undeniable.
Early adopters of content intelligence are building a decisive competitive advantage in their ability to engage, convert and delight customers through content. With more intelligent tools at their disposal, modern marketing teams can focus on what matters most – building brands people relate to and love.
