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Digital marketer Rebecca Barnatt-Smith explains how to leverage artificial intelligence tools to create and automate personalised marketing content.
The chatbot market is exploding. With it expected to be worth more than $1.25bn by 2025 alone, Gartner predicts that over a quarter of brands will be using language models to their advantage within the next few years.
The question is, just how much of an impact will these language models have on the future of marketing?
We know that chatbots have become the number one customer service aid in the ecommerce sector, a productivity booster for business leaders and a research tool that is redefining education, but what about their impact on content creation?
“AI has to have its place in your business if you’re going to keep up with the competition,” says the CEO of Grow, Isabelle Shee.
“There’s fear that when you have AI write your content entirely or replace interactions with your customers, you risk replacing the heart of your business. But you also open the door to creating a better product, which is what your customers ultimately want. Even the Tin Man found his heart eventually, right?”
With this in mind, let’s have a closer look at how you can use modern language models for content creation.
Personalising email campaigns
Did you know that 40pc of online consumers are more likely to chat with an AI-powered bot rather than an agent? If you want to improve your email marketing success, introducing an automated content tool to the mix could be your key to boosting engagement.
Not only do automated email campaigns improve marketing productivity, but they are also responsible for boosting campaign performance, too, according to Antonio Gabrić, outreach manager at Hunter.
“Chatbots can ask for demographic data besides names and designations. These are potent weapons to personalise email campaigns and stay ahead of competitors.
“Both B2B and B2C prospects love to see brands that put in extra effort, and you can get the required data from chatbots to pull off hyper-personalisation,” he states.
Language bots can generate email campaigns in seconds while still tailoring content towards each and every target consumer in an effort to ensure the campaign is both engaging and relevant to each recipient’s life experiences.
Duolingo is a great example of a brand using AI-powered language models in its email marketing strategy.
Incorporating a chatbot into its outreach process, the bot sends each email subscriber interactive language exercises based on the language they are learning and their own personalised difficulty level. From sentence quizzes to on-the-spot tests, this approach to email targeting enhances interactivity and engagement with little interference from marketers themselves.
Enhancing social success
Social selling is also on the rise. If a brand wants to make it big in 2023, its social media strategy must be up to scratch.
In 2022 alone, social media sales surpassed $992bn. With over 4bn users across a range of social platforms, it’s no wonder that marketers are looking for automated aids to improve their targeting efforts.
Language bots can improve social media content creation in a number of ways. From automating a consistent posting stream to targeting users with personalised announcements, offers and tips, language bots can create content for all social platforms, following the target structure of viral posting.
Take The New York Times as an example. Using content bots, the news outlet delivers personalised content straight into the Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM or Slack inboxes of their followers. Accompanied by customised summaries and news alerts, this has become a great way for the brand to increase individual article engagement.
Powering automated content
AI-powered chatbots are transforming content creation. With the ability to leverage data from a brand’s historical content, target audiences and niche trends, language models can automatically curate a variety of content types at the push of a button.
The key here is to provide your chosen language bot with specific keywords, guidelines and topics to help shape its craft. In return, marketers can enjoy AI-generated blog posts, product descriptions, social content and much more in return.
In fact, business leaders can even create their own websites using AI. Using an AI website builder, the brand simply inputs its basic information and chooses a website type before letting AI take care of the rest.
Better still, content-driven chatbots can also be used as a summarisation tool, especially when trying to optimise your guest blogging efforts. Whether you are embarking on your own guest posting campaign or employing a guest-posting service, automated content bots can help you find inspiration and trending discussion topics and even aid meta-title writing for a guest post that drives engagement.
Language bots are the perfect partners when it comes to shortening content for simplified product descriptions, social captions or email campaigns. AI-powered chatbots can extract key points, stats and click-worthy insights from long reams of text for maximum readability and engagement potential.
Walmart demonstrates a great example of this. Using AI to optimise its site content generation, the commerce giant uses language models to automate product descriptions.
Leveraging data from previous product content, consumer reviews and competitor results, Walmart quickly receives a hyper-personalised product description that is generated to catch the eye of both their target leads and Google’s search algorithm.
A challenging future for marketers
For marketers looking to improve their content generation, language models have become a go-to tool for success. However, automation comes with its own challenges.
“I think AI tools will redefine content creation. So, it goes without saying that I view these tools positively. However, there’s a flip side to everything.,” says the co-founder of WPForms, Jared Atchison.
“The core benefit of using AI tools is that they make content creation less time-consuming. But the tools lack emotional intelligence and empathy for the audience. So, using them to create content is fine, but the end product requires a human touch.”
Language models may be a powerful tool, but human oversight is still essential. Before embarking on an AI-powered content journey, it is important to remember to review and edit content generated by a chatbot, and train your bot with content that follows your desired style and tone.
A good tip is to prioritise using AI bots for inspiration. They should be leveraged for inspiration and then built upon with human input. This is what will set your content aside from competitors only using AI.
“AI language tools are neither intelligent nor dumb. They’re just tools. If you train these tools intensely, they can produce the intended content faster. But they can’t produce the creativity that needs to go into the content. You always need a human to inject the necessary brilliance into AI-generated content pieces. So, the motto is ‘AI-assisted, not AI-generated’, claims Kelly Richardson, co-founder and design head of Infobrandz.
As we move towards a hybrid future for automated marketing, the question is not when will you invest in a language model, but rather, how will you use it to your advantage?
Rebecca Barnatt-Smith is a freelance content writer and multimedia marketing executive at Solvid Digital, specialising in social media trends and widespread digitalisation in the marketing sector.
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