AI in marketing part 3 of 6: Content and top of funnel

In prior posts, I shared some ideas where AI could impact marketing strategy and planning, and product marketing and product management. In this post, I share where I think AI will impact content marketing and top-of-funnel tactics.

Rapid text and image creation. We’ve already seen generative AI used for blog posts and digital ad images. There’s still a VERY long way to go before the quality is high enough for immediate use, and much of that AI-generated content is dull, derivative, often wrong, and often weird. Right now AI is great for early drafts or ideation. But a strong near-future use case for AI is rapid generation of content variants — emails, display ads, social posts — that can be used for A/B/n testing in the real world. I understand that some AdTech firms may already doing this today.

Content personalization at scale. The biggest barrier in my experience to personalization today have been the inability to generate enough content, quickly enough, to support personalized digital experiences. The above bullet shows how AI can solve the rapidity problem. It can also solve the other side of the personalization challenge, scale. With inputs from multiple sources (especially first-party data), instead of random variants, AI could also personalize each variant for the particular audience. The computing power to handle that would probably make GroupM, AWS and WordPress shudder, but it's not inconceivable.

Editorial topic alignment. AI will be able to improve content marketer’s ability to identify conversation trends that can help drive more dynamic editorial calendars and strategy, capturing (predicting) discussion trends much earlier, so that content that can connect more quickly and effectively to customers’ current thinking.

This is I'm sure a very short list of possibilities for AI to impact top-of-funnel and content marketing efforts. How do you see AI impacting content marketing and top-of-funnel activities?

Next up in my series, 4 of 6: AI for Demand Generation.