The biggest conundrum in today’s marketing world is that most companies don’t know exactly what their customers want. Customers only want to interact with companies that understand their pain points and can provide them with personalized experiences.
But here’s the good news: You can now rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to tell you about your customers’ wants and wishes (i.e., through the help of AI-powered social listening tools) and can leverage AI to build personalized content experiences.
Let’s explore AI-driven content personalization, how it works, and how to personalize content experiences using AI.
What is AI content personalization?
John Porrini, the content marketing manager at Copysmith—the parent company of AI-powered software like Frase (an AI-powered content optimization tool), Describely (an AI-led content creator for eCommerce businesses), and Rytr (an AI-writing assistant)—says:
“To me, AI content personalization is somewhat uncharted territory. I believe that as AI becomes more advanced, we’ll reach a point when every piece of content can be hyper-personalized based on your customer data, preferences, and where you are in the buying journey.
We’re talking web pages, blog posts, social posts, ads, emails, videos, etc., all dynamically personalized to the buyer based on their data. Marketers will be sitting behind the scenes managing and tweaking these personalized AI automations that are running.
We can already dynamically change content based on UTMs and other data points, so it’s not that crazy to think that AI will be doing this at a far more personalized scale. Some of this is already starting to happen; just look at what Intercom is doing with integrating AI in the support process.”
Major companies like Netflix and Spotify also use AI—albeit to provide hyper-personalized recommendations and not customer support. For example, Netflix provides content recommendations based on “match score.” This match score is assigned based on previous watch history and content preferences in a user’s watchlist.
Screenshot provided by the author
In the near future, John imagines AI might not be an accessory for powerful companies like Netflix. Still, many AI-powered tools would be available to small and medium businesses so they can personalize their content experiences as well.
Understanding how AI content personalization works
Simply put, AI is a tool that’s fed millions upon millions of data points. This user data is then processed, analyzed, and summarized based on individual queries.
For example, if we were to write a query like “How to make pesto pasta” on Bing, its AI-powered tool, Co-Pilot, will immediately produce an answer based on the information it has, with no need to scroll through multiple articles and videos to find the answer you need.
Screenshot provided by the author
Where AI works best for content personalization
The instance above is just one example. The right artificial intelligence tools will also be adaptable and account for real-time data to provide the necessary experiences for your personalization strategy.
For example, as John said, AI tools will account for user demographics and customer preferences, purchase history, and past customer interactions before providing you with an answer.
In the future, this might look like an AI chatbot that provides an omnichannel experience, has information on your past purchases and customer support interactions, and provides answers, keeping all that data in mind.
How to personalize content experiences using AI
While the way you use AI technology to personalize content preferences will differ based on the content formats you choose and your goals, here’s a few guidelines you could adapt to personalize user experiences using AI.
Understand your content marketing goals
The first step in the process is to identify how to use AI to achieve your marketing goals. For example, you could use AI for either of the possible scenarios:
- Find audience intent, individual preferences, and customer needs
- Do high-quality research on user behavior
- Provide AI-powered recommendations
- Increase efficiency in creating relevant content
- Optimize content and marketing strategies
- Find how content would perform
For example:
- AI-powered social listening tools would help you find audience intent
- AI search engine optimization tools would help optimize content
- Tools like Describely and ChatGPT will increase content efficiency
- Tools like Vision AI will provide predictive analytics
You could create a tech stack of AI tools tailored to different goals and requirements or explore nearshore software development to streamline the process. Personalize your content experiences in ways that align with these tools.
But before you move forward with anything, first look at your content marketing goals and how the adoption of AI could help you achieve them. Also, ask if you’d still be able to meet these goals without AI.
Decide when and how to use AI
Deciding when and how to use AI depends completely on your goals, requirements, current projects, and work style as a marketing professional.
For inspiration, consider the use cases John considers for AI.
He says, “At the moment, I decide where and how to use it based on where I spot operational inefficiencies and areas where AI can augment my skills.
For example, I’ll use Frase as an AI research assistant to help me quickly understand a topic before I create a brief or pass a post over to a contractor. I’m not the best editor, so I’ll use AI as a copy editor. At this point, I always have some sort of AI tool in another tab now, whether that’s Rytr, Frase, ChatGPT, or something else.
On the Copysmith side, we want to get a better understanding of what content to create for Describely. So we’re going to deploy a Frase chatbot on the Describely site to provide real-time answers to customers on the site, and this should help us not only answer questions but also identify what type of content and assets to create for prospects as they go through the buying journey, which is sort of a slight step in the direction of using AI personalization in a B2B SaaS setting to answer questions and provide insights.”
Your goals for using AI in your content creation process can be based on your personal requirements (as a content creator) or your business requirements.
For example, your requirements may be to save time while creating content, whereas your business requirements may include improving customer retention, increasing brand loyalty, and providing better customer satisfaction.
Choose the right AI tool
Once you’ve zeroed in on your goals and requirements, it’s time to select which AI tool to use.
For example, if you’re looking for advancements in efficiency, you could use a generic tool like ChatGPT or a niche tool like Describely. These tools are trained for specific industries. In this instance, Describely is trained for eCommerce companies to create product descriptions.
There are also plenty of service providers in an industry for an existing use case. For example, SurferSEO, Clearscope, and Frase are all SEO content optimization tools.
To move forward in this process, consider the following questions before selecting an AI tool:
- Does it fit my budget, and can I integrate it with my existing tech stack?
- Is it easy enough to use that the least tech-savvy member of my team would be able to navigate it?
- Will I be able to use it in the long term (i.e., is it sustainable for my business)?
- Does it have the right number of features (i.e., can its feature list allow me to meet my requirements without becoming too overbearing)?
- Is it secure and stable enough to use? (To answer this question, we recommend supplementing your research by checking peer-to-peer review sites to see how the solution works beyond the free trial period, whether customers have any common complaints, and whether the company’s support is adequate for customer satisfaction.)
Build AI into your marketing workflows
The next step to deliver personalized content is to integrate AI within your existing marketing workflows. For example, you could add AI to your article writing process to ensure the content you deliver is optimized based on SERPs. Or automate your demand generation.
As an option, AI-powered call center features can help you analyze sales and support inquiries, identifying key topics and sentiments.
Or, you could leverage predictive analytics to create personalized marketing campaigns. According to John, you could also use AI personalization to run retargeting ads/ABM (account-based marketing campaigns) with hyper-personalized landing pages.
True to John’s advice, here are some brands (Swiggy and Amazon) that provide hyper-personalized landing pages after analyzing customer data and customer behavior.
Screenshot provided by the author
While doing so, try to determine whether all the tools in your marketing tech stack can support a common activity.
For example, while working on an article, many writers use multiple tools—such as Grammarly, Clearscope, Word Docs, etc.—to create a single article. If you’re providing them with Clearscope links, it might be worth considering whether the software can work with Grammarly, too, and vice versa.
The bottom line is that while it’s important to consider customer touchpoints, it’s also important to consider the touchpoints of all your stakeholders if you wish to create personalized content that can improve customer satisfaction.
Measure AI content personalization results
Last but not least, when all is said and done, now is the time to review how artificial intelligence has fared when it comes to improving customer experiences.
Give yourself 3-6 months to see how customers respond to your AI-powered personalization and whether it makes sense to continue using AI within your business.
For example, are AI-powered social media listening tools allowing you to promptly answer queries, analyze customer feedback, find common themes in customer behavior, and gain a pulse of their pain points, or is AI interference causing a blip in customer relationships by giving you inaccurate customer data and insights?
You could analyze if your personalized marketing campaigns were a hit or a miss by:
- Tracking key metrics (we’d recommend tracking customer engagement and conversion metrics like conversion rate, customer satisfaction score, return visits, page views per session, etc.)
- Using tools to run A/B tests and measure performance (e.g., Hotjar, Mixpanel, Optimizely will all help you understand how customers react to your content on different platforms and in different formats).
- Hosting interviews and surveys with customers to get their thoughts on what they think about your new marketing initiatives.
We recommend testing your content performance mainly because there have been cases where companies have used AI tools like ChatGPT to create content completely from scratch, and users have been disappointed by the lack of human touch in the words they read.
This is why it’s important to always have a human editor and review anything developed by AI.
Examples of AI personalization for content experiences
While you’ll find many instances of AI personalization in the wild, here are a few noteworthy instances where AI was used to improve content experiences for the user:
- Social platforms like Instagram and Facebook use AI and machine learning algorithms to provide customized feeds based on individual users’ preferences.
- Ecommerce businesses like Target use AI tools like Describely to scrape the web and enrich data about missing product details to provide better product recommendations and descriptions.
- BSH Group uses AI to understand customer touchpoints across various channels and find activities/topics that result in customer conversion.
- Optimove uses AI to segment audiences based on customer behavior and personalize emails/campaigns for their customers. You can also use it to generate email response templates.
- IBM’s Watson is an AI-powered chatbot that provides personalized interactions based on customer history.
- Duolingo uses artificial intelligence to customize language learning experiences based on user performance, progress, and areas of difficulty.
- Grammarly can customize its writing feedback based on the user’s preferences and writing style.
To deepen your understanding of such advancements, consider exploring an artificial intelligence course that delves into the core of these technologies and their real-world applications
Next steps
If there’s a single point worth reiterating, it’s this: Regardless of how great your AI tools are and what they can accomplish, they will never be able to replicate the human touch.
While you do need to move ahead with the times and enlist the use of AI-powered tools that’ll improve your content experiences, you also need an expert who can guide AI and act as a mediator between technology and the customer.
And if you want truly excellent results, you need to partner with a company that has made even AI tools move up the marketing and content ladder—and that’s us.
You heard that right: Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency that has gotten results for even companies with established AI software like Jasper, Adobe, Hotjar, Loom, etc., so just imagine what we could do for you and your business.
You can book a strategy call with us today to find out how we could help a company like yours and what potential we can help you achieve!
