The Role of AI in Upgrading Your Content Marketing Plans and Online Presence

Intro

If you’re a brand owner, you are probably aware that content is key to the success of your business - from building brand awareness down to reaching out to your audience and boosting sales. Connecting with your audience through visual and written content with the goal to attract and convert them into paying customers -- aka content marketing -- is a crucial aspect of modern marketing.

Yet, there's a difference between a brand that tosses content out there, crossing fingers for a hit, and a brand that thoughtfully crafts and shares content with clear business goals. The difference is having a solid content marketing plan.

Developing a content marketing plan involves a detailed strategy from ideation to launch, focusing on goals, tracking performance, and building a strong online presence.

At the core, your content marketing plan template should include a few key components: clear goals, target audience, types of content, optimal sharing channels, and all the tools and resources, along with everyone responsible for each step.

Whether you’re building a content marketing plan from scratch or you want to give your existing strategy a revamp, AI can help. You can even ask AI to provide some content marketing plan examples. Those can serve as a source of inspiration.

Integrating AI into every step of your plan can significantly streamline your processes. Machine learning can help you find your audience, understand what content they like, and predict trends. You can also use AI to generate aesthetic photos and posts that perfectly fit your brand’s identity. If you have tons of content already, then the AI can be used to repurpose or optimize your existing content so that it remains relevant.

Unsure of how AI can help? Here are some ideas.

Create a Unique Style by Leaning on AI Tools

When you’re creating content, make sure to implement a unique, recognizable voice, style, and tone - especially when publishing across distribution channels. This creates trust and credibility and sets clear expectations for your audience, making them more likely to engage with your content and return for more.

Source: Image by Freepik

Consider following precise content guidelines, like using specific templates and maintaining a uniform aesthetic across your posts. For example, crafting images that adhere to your brand's guidelines as part of your content marketing plan not only establishes them as a unique aspect of your style but also efficiently conveys your ideas and draws in your audience.

Fortunately, you can use AI to produce striking visuals while simplifying the content creation process. These tools let you select from presets or choose a tone, style, or theme, ensuring alignment with your brand's image and personality. Case in point, you can use an AI art generator for example, to create unique visuals that meet your brand’s palette, theme, and overall style.

How to Determine Goals and Target Audiences Using AI

Mindlessly creating content without having a purpose in mind is a waste of time, energy, and resources. Sure, you might reach some results, but without specific goals, your content marketing plan lacks direction. Setting clear goals provides a roadmap for your content creation, influencing everything from topic selection to the channels you use for distribution, even down to your post’s hashtags.

The same goes for your audience. Unless you have a clear idea of the target audience, you are talking to everyone -- which risks you not resonating with anyone. A deep understanding of your audience allows you to tailor your content marketing plan. The topics and type of content should correspond with their preferences and needs and be suitable for their stage in the purchase funnel.

AI, by using sophisticated algorithms, can develop a reliable buyer persona for your brand based on consumer data. This will allow you to focus on creating targeted campaigns and content tailored to your target audience’s behavioral patterns, needs, and interests. It also helps you choose the right mediums, reach and engage them efficiently, and even track who your competitors are targeting!

Additionally, AI analytics can help you keep track of goals and KPIs to see how your content is performing and if they’re generating the desired outcome.

Leverage AI Analytics to Improve Content Distribution

AI analytics provides a deep dive into the data behind every piece of content, allowing you to uncover valuable insights that can help you improve your content marketing plan. It dissects the data to find out which channels are most efficient in distributing content, organic and paid and informs you about emerging trends.

You have an array of AI tools at your disposal. From deciding who the right influencers for partnerships are to utilizing content calendar tools (that not only automate posting across different channels but also assist with idea generation, caption creation, performance analysis, and content optimization), AI has your back.

Putting hashtags and keywords into your content makes them more searchable. Fortunately, there are AI-based tools that provide the best keywords and hashtags for your content to help target it towards your desired audience.

Source: Image by Freepik

Repurposing and Upgrading Old Content With the Help of AI

Crafting unique content for your blog demands significant time and resources. A clever solution? Repurpose and upgrade your existing content to fill your content marketing plan’s pipeline. Using your current content for a new purpose extends its lifespan and value.

You can repurpose by sharing the content on different mediums or transforming it into a new format. Regardless, repurposing broadens your content's reach, engages diverse audiences, enhances your SEO efforts, and strengthens your online presence.

Consider turning a blog post into a slideshow, infographic, social media reel, or a sequence of engaging posts.

Conversely, you can merge several posts and blogs into an informative eBook or a detailed whitepaper. You can even turn your blog excerpts into scroll-stopping social media posts!

Similarly, you can turn to AI tools to ensure your old content stays fresh and relevant, not only for readers but even for search engines and social media algorithms. These tools can analyze your existing content to identify those that can be repurposed. Some can even automatically generate new content variations from your existing material with just a click.

If the metrics show that your content needs an update, AI tools can suggest SEO-based improvements like the best keywords to use, topics to cover, and other vital SEO elements that can help boost its visibility and engagement.

Conclusion

Integrating AI into your content marketing plan offers a transformative approach to enhancing your online presence. From designing content for your target audience and keeping up with trends to reusing old content, AI tools streamline every stage of content marketing.

By leveraging AI's capabilities in analytics, audience understanding, and content optimization, you can ensure that your target audience not only sees -- but is also impacted by -- your content, which drives engagement and bolsters your brand’s digital footprint.