Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Every day a new AI content-generation tool emerges from the primordial LLM pool, raring to disrupt the industry and let you do 10x the work in a tenth of the time.
By now though a lot of us have realized that while AI can be a fantastic mental sparring partner when prompted correctly, few of us are comfortable giving it free rein over our content, and so that 100x impact, is actually more like a 2-5x improvement, good, but nobody is firing the content marketing team yet (and if they did, they’d probably regret it…)
While even OpenAI themselves have said that it is almost impossible to accurately determine AI written content, the content it produces is often largely unoriginal and uninspired (a result of lackluster prompting as much as the derivative nature of AI).
But, content creation isn’t the only way AI could have an impact on Content Marketing, enter:
The Great Transfiguration of Chatbots.
Not that long ago (or a very long time ago if you are counting in “AI years”), chatbots were the scourge of the internet, asking inane questions that quickly resulted in dead-ends, due to their inherent, deterministic flows.
But with AI that all changed.
First with ChatGPT and now with new products built on top of ChatGPT (but trained not to hallucinate, while having perfect recall of only your business’ content), chatbots are fast becoming a new tool in the early AI-adopting Content Marketers’ toolbox.
Let’s take a look at 3 ways you can use them to get more content engagement, find out what your visitors want to read about, and how you can use your chatbot to better personalize your outreach:
Increasing dwell time by engaging with visitors
It used to be that chatbots were only used by visitors to rant at customer support, but now you can train them with all of your site’s resources: your blog posts, newsletters, playbooks, and reports, along with anything off your site (hidden deep within your Google Drive), and then have them act as a concierge to your content, answering your visitors’ questions and showing them to your best work, however they are asked, and in whatever language they are asked in.
The best chatbots will also share the links they have used to answer your visitors’ questions, giving them a way to read more and discover that highly-researched post you wrote 18 months ago that needs (and deserves) a little more love.
As they fall deeper into a conversation, they are learning more and more about your business through your content, asking the questions that they are often too lazy or embarrassed to ask a person, all the while getting direct, personalized answers.
Learning from your visitors, what they really want to find out
Searches on search engines are an excellent starting point for discovering visitor intent, but when they land on your site, the line goes cold.
When they get there, what do they want?
Tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics allow you to capture clicks and some behaviors but they won’t tell you what a user wants to ask you.
But a good AI chatbot will reveal all.
All questions asked to your chatbot are logged, along with the responses given so you can observe the conversations and find out what your visitors really want your content to tell them (along with what it is unable to, giving you a big headstart on next month’s content calendar).
Some tools will also enable you to extract insights from these questions, summarizing the most common queries that were and weren’t answered by your content (telling you what you might want to double down on or what you might be missing).
Goodbye to contact forms
There is no sadder sight than a contact form on a website in 2023. The lack of feedback, the uncertainty of knowing whether someone will ever read it, the one-size-fits-all empty box. Well, now you can double up by using your chatbot as a more “personal” contact form or lead generation tool.
The chatbot’s knowledge can even act as an incentive to be unlocked by the visitor in exchange for the provision of their contact details.
Now, combine this with the analytics you get from their conversational history and you have all the details you need to triage and truly personalize your outreach to visitors based on what they really want from your product.
AI chatbots could then become the way to ensure your content is:
- Always discoverable (much more so than when you use the basic keyword site search),
- Repurposed on the fly (to match your visitors’ intent) and;
- Squeezed to extract the maximum possible value for the most people
These benefits may underline a shift.
Instead of just focusing on content generation, we can recognize the value chatbots can bring to user interaction and content research. Their capacity to bridge the information gap, engage users, and personalize content could change how content is consumed in the future.
While content generation may have been the hare in the race to “add AI” to businesses, maybe in the end it will be the tortoise of chat that will have the biggest impact and take the spoils in the long term for content marketing.
