As an business owner, you wear a lot of hats - sales, product development, hiring, raising investments, and maintaining an online presence. With tight budgets, a lack of time and resources, and limited marketing expertise, it can be difficult to manage another hat that is critical for your business growth - content marketing.
Let's share 5 content marketing tips to help you accelerate marketing with AI in 2024:
Tip 1: Create buyer personas for your customers
A buyer persona is a psychological profile of your customer, his or her needs, motivations, and success metrics. Understanding your customers is crucial for creating targeted content that resonates with them. AI can be your secret weapon in crafting accurate buyer personas. By analyzing your sales data and talking to customers, you can uncover their demographics, preferences, and pain points. Armed with this knowledge, AI content automation platforms like MarketMate AI can tailor your content to your customers' specific needs and interests.
Tip 2: Do keyword and hot topic research
Keywords and trending topics play a vital role in optimizing your content for search engines and staying relevant in your industry. Thanks to search engine optimization (SEO) platforms like Semrush, you can effortlessly analyze vast amounts of data to identify the most relevant keywords and trends that your prospective customers are search for when they need your product or service. By incorporating these insights into your content, you can boost your organic traffic and effectively engage with your target audience. These keywords can be fed into an AI content personalization software like MarketMate AI to ensure that they are used when writing your content like website landing pages or blog posts for you.
Tip 3: Map out a content calendar
A content calendar keeps your content organized and consistent, ultimately helping you reach your marketing goals whether they are generating a specific number of leads or increasing brand awareness. Start with creating a bird's eye view of who you are writing content for (e.g., your buyer personas), which channels you are using (e.g., LinkedIn, website, podcast, webinar, etc.), and what your content themes are for each month.
Content themes should be educational rather than product-focused. For example, if you sell IT services to IT managers. A good theme for a month is "5 Ways to Protect Your Enterprise From Ransomware" versus a more product-centric theme like "How [ENTER COMPANY OR PRODUCT NAME] protects your enterprise from ransomware". The reason that educational content generates more engagement with readers is that people are generally tired of being sold to and prefer to be educated on topics they are curious about. By focusing more on providing valuable educational content, more of your target customers will be drawn to your business and perceive you as an expert in the industry.
Next, you're going to want to create a specific schedule with dates when content will be published, where they will be published, and who is responsible for writing the content. Tactically, this helps you monitor content production and ensure consistency. Here is a great content calendar template that you can use from HubSpot to get started.
Tip 4: Use AI to automate content development
Now on to the fun part: creating high quality content that is relevant, engaging, and personalized for your buyer personas. Creating high-quality content takes time and resources, which are often in short supply for busy small business owners. Here's where AI comes to the rescue! AI can automate content development by generating relevant and engaging content based on your target audience and keywords.
With AI tools at your disposal, you can save valuable time and energy that can be redirected towards other essential aspects of your business. There are a few AI copywriting options that you have. I'll walk through three general categories of AI content automation tools and the advantages and disadvantages of each one:
Generic AI ChatBots: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Anthropic Claude fall into this category. These chatbots can write compelling content, but output typically sounds AI-generated and inauthentic because these AI models lack context of your buyer personas and typically require sophisticated prompts to get quality output.
Limited AI Copywriting Tools: Copywriting tools like Jasper, Anyword, and Writer can create blog posts and landing pages. They talk about speaking in "your brand voice", but they don't create buyer personas for your business or tailor content for those personas' specific needs. Without context, copy falls flat and doesn't engage your prospective customers.
Holistic AI Marketing Assistants: AI marketing platforms like MarketMate AI help you create a buyer persona, a value proposition, and personalize content for all of your channels across your website, social media, and ads with your business context. Unlike generic AI chatbots or limited AI copywriting tools, MarketMate AI doesn't require any sophisticated prompts.
For the reasons discussed, we recommend adopting a holistic virtual AI marketing assistant like MarketMate AI to scale your content development and lead generation.
Tip 5: Measure content performance with KPIs
To ensure you improve your content over time and engage with your audience more, it's critical that you track a few key metrics about how your content is performing. Here are 3 metrics you can track to get started:
Impressions: This is a measure of how many people saw or viewed your content. Generally, more views means more brand awareness for your business. When you purchase ads, you can track the CPM or cost per one thousand impressions.
Click-through-rate (CTR): This content performance indicator shows what percentage of content viewers clicked through to read or download your content. More engaging content generally has a higher click-through-rate.
Inbound Leads: I highly recommend that you include a clear and bold call to action for your audience to either schedule a demo or phone consultation at the end of your content. You should track how many leads are influenced by your content marketing. This can be done with a form on your website requesting contact information.
Once you measure your content over several months, you can benchmark the average number of impressions, click-through-rate, and inbound leads you're generated to see the measurable impact content marketing is having on your business over time.
Then you can systematically invest more in engaging content and divest from content that is not engaging. The process of building your lead generation machine takes a lot of experimentation, patience, and consistent content production.
Building a Lead Generation Machine for Your Business
Integrating AI into your content marketing strategy is essential for entrepreneurs in 2024, offering a pragmatic approach to automate marketing. Utilizing AI for creating buyer personas, doing keyword research, building a content calendar, and content performance tracking can significantly boost your lead generation from content marketing.
Tools like MarketMate AI not only streamline content marketing, but also help produce content that truly connects with your audience. Embracing AI in content marketing turns an overwhelming challenge into an exciting opportunity, transforming your content into a dynamic lead generation engine that propels your business forward and positions you as a thought leader in your industry.
Are you open to experimenting with AI to automate your content marketing activities this year? Contact us at www.marketmateai.com.
About Us
MarketMate AI's mission is to make high quality marketing content accessible to small businesses everywhere with AI. MarketMate is an intuitive content marketing platform powered by AI for target market identification, messaging, content automation, and sales enablement. Our platform generates tailored content for your buyer personas that aligns with your messaging, doesn't require sophisticated prompts, and doesn't limit you by word count.