The Complete Guide to AI for Content Strategy (2023)

Unlock the power of AI for content strategy and discover how to use AI to create engaging content and stay ahead of the competition in our guide.

Your content strategy is the guidepost that ensures you create the right content and distribute it across the right channels. And while your experience and industry knowledge play a big role in crafting your content marketing strategy, there’s still room to improve efficiency.

With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), you can improve your content strategy creation process. By using AI to start brainstorming and laying out your strategy, you can save time better spent on optimizing content, identifying opportunities, and analyzing data for insights.

Let’s look at some ways you can use AI for content strategy, its benefits, and how Jasper AI is one of the best AI tools for strategy.

What role does AI play in content strategy?

Depending on how you use it, AI can play a significant role in content strategy. AI tools help you summarize and analyze data, do SEO research, identify trends, and even brainstorm content topics. 

Specialized AI tools even provide insights into the types of content that work best for your audience, when and where you should publish that content, and how best to optimize it for engagement.

Why you should use AI in content strategy

Using AI for content strategy has a number of benefits, including:

• Improves content performance: AI helps you identify high-performing content and update your content strategy based on those insights.
• Increases engagement: AI helps you personalize your content and identify ways to make it resonate with your audience, which improves engagement.
• Saves time: You can use AI to automate parts of the content creation and distribution process so you and your marketing team can focus on other aspects of your strategy.
• Saves money: AI automation also helps your team save money on labor and potentially other expenses such as automation and content production software.

8 Ways to use AI in content strategy

Sold on using AI for content strategy? Here are 10 different ways you can add AI to your content strategy creation process.

1. Research content topics

AI analyzes search engine data and social media trends to spot relevant topics that appeal to your target audience. 

By providing AI with a description of your buyer persona and their needs, it can brainstorm dozens of topics in a matter of seconds. Pick and choose those that best match your content strategy and add them to your editorial calendar.

2. Optimize your content

You can use AI to research SEO keywords and metadata based on your content topics. Take it up a notch further by asking the AI to write meta titles, headlines, and meta descriptions for you—even if the AI doesn’t strike gold, you can riff off what it generates.

AI can also analyze content performance data. By using AI to aggregate your analytics and pull out key insights, you’ll likely save yourself hours of work digging through the numbers on your own. 

3. Create content

Use AI to write content outlines, headlines, and even articles. By using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing, AI can easily create even a full blog post in under five minutes. (Just be sure to edit and add your human touch to any AI-written content to avoid potential issues like Google flagging your content.)

Other AI, like Jasper, take this a step further by offering a full-suite content editor. Along with generating outlines and content, Jasper also adds custom AI-generated art to save you time spent searching for featured images.

4. Curate content

Some AI tools specialize in curating relevant content from sources across the internet. This is helpful if you use content curation to share relevant information and thought leadership pieces your target audience might enjoy.

5. Personalize your content

AI has access to huge amounts of online data, and that can include information about your target audience and current customers. By analyzing data like demographics, browsing preferences, needs, and interests, AI can recommend different methods and strategies for personalizing your content.

6. Distribute content

You can use AI’s analytics power to pinpoint the best days of the week and best times to distribute your content. Better yet, you can use AI to analyze engagement across all your distribution channels to spot trends and the best channels to post to for maximum reach and impact.

7. A/B test your content

A/B testing allows you to test different designs, page structure, and even copy to see what resonates best with your audience. Use AI to brainstorm and generate variations to test—or use it to analyze the results and discover insights.

8. Engage customers with chatbots

Chatbots are an easy way to engage with your customers and assist them with problems in real time. Rather than having your audience sift through forum posts or how-to guides, a chatbot can analyze a question and deliver an appropriate response.

5 More AI for content strategy tools

Looking for more AI-powered ways to boost your content strategy? Check these tools out.

1. Crayon

Source: Crayon.co

Crayon is an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool that tracks your competitors’ online content, branding and positioning, and more. By interacting with Crayon, it continues to learn more about the insights and data you value most. All this helps you create a competitive content strategy.

Crayon doesn’t publish its pricing or plans, but you can request a demo and pricing info.

2. Outranking

Source: Outranking.io

If you’re spending hours on SEO keyword research, give Outranking a look. This tool uses AI to automate your content planning based on topical keyword clusters and search engine rankings. It also analyzes your existing content to spot any content gaps or areas of the customer journey lacking supporting content.

Pricing for Outranking starts at $7 for the first month and goes up to $49 a month for your second month onward.

3. Clearscope

Source: Clearscope.io

Clearscope is an AI-powered content analysis tool that looks for ways you can boost SEO performance for every piece of content you publish. By aggregating competitor content based on keywords and pulling keywords based on popularity, Clearscope makes optimizing your content easy. Additionally, you can use its competitor analysis to find starting points for outlines and commonly asked questions.

Clearscope pricing starts at $170 a month for the Essentials plan.

4. Drift

Source: Drift.com

Need a way to help your audience and delight them 24/7? An AI chatbot like Drift can help. Drift’s chatbot uses machine learning and natural language processing to provide answers and learn from each conversation. Drift’s Visitor Intelligence helps you personalize your chatbot experience and collect data for further AI chat personalization. Additionally, Drift can send your sales team real-time notifications while new leads or existing customers engage with it.

Pricing starts at $2,500 a month for Drift’s Premium plan.

5. Acrolinx

Source: Acrolinx.com

Acrolinx takes AI-driven grammar and spelling checks to a new level by allowing you to set targets for your branded content. These targets include style, clarity, tone, and more—and Acrolinx provides guidance to help your content creators meet your quality standards. Acrolinx also includes Content Cube, a feature that spots optimization opportunities, schedules them, and recommends improvements for quick and easy updates.

Acrolinx doesn’t list pricing, so you’ll need to contact the company to get a quote.

AI for content strategy FAQs

Can AI be used for content marketing?

Yes, AI has multiple uses when it comes to content marketing. Along with writing content for multiple platforms, AI helps content marketing teams create effective content strategies, optimize content for SEO, and even curate content from relevant sources across the web. 

What are the benefits of AI for content strategy?

AI has multiple benefits when it comes to content strategy, including: 

• Boosting content performance
• Increasing engagement and personalization
• Saving time and money through automation
• Brainstorming new content topics
• Pinpointing best practices for distribution

Can I use AI for content writing?

Yes, you can use AI for writing content, and AI content creation is already influencing digital marketing worldwide. But we feel it’s best to rely on AI as a brainstorming buddy and not a full-fledged writer. 

While AI can help you write headlines, outlines, and even full articles thanks to natural language processing, using human eyes throughout the content creation process leads to better high-quality content. And you run a lower risk of potential plagiarism or red flags from Google.

P.S. Did you know Jasper has Grammarly built into its AI content editor to help you edit and avoid plagiarism?

Will AI replace content creators?

It’s unlikely AI will replace content creators. While AI is good at some aspects of content creation, it still struggles to match the creativity and storytelling abilities of human writers.

There are also plenty of nuances when it comes to content creation that AI may never be able to comprehend fully. This can include ethics, accessibility, and even context added by certain audiences, industries, or scenarios.

And at this time, AI-generated content still lacks the ability to fully mimic voice and tone like human writers, though natural language generation does help AI create a friendlier customer experience.