Content within the ecommerce industry means a lot more today than it ever did. It has become the lifeblood of marketing strategies and an impressive way to direct traffic and engage with customers. It’s no secret that it takes time, energy, and resources to pull off effectively. From idea smithing to creating, editing, and distributing, the process can be a lot to take on, especially if you don’t have an established system in place. Don’t even think about outsourcing, that could cost more than it’s worth. However, there is a solution – Artificial Intelligence (AI).

As we’ve gotten more acquainted with the tech landscape of 2023, AI has emerged and evolved to become a powerful tool for businesses. AI has been able to transform the way merchants approach content creation, enabling businesses to expedite the processes, save time, and reduce costs. By leveraging the potential of AI, companies are able to drive content marketing efforts more efficiently and effectively.

However, there are still steps you need to take before you can properly implement these tools. This article is here to provide some insight so you can hit the ground running and get started producing the content you need. 

Define your goals 

The first step of any good strategy is to clearly define your goals. What would you like to gain from AI? Without these goals in mind, you’re just creating content for the sake of having content. This makes it worthless and doesn’t actually improve your business. Determine what you want your outcome to be. Do you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, or generate leads? Figuring out what your needs are is a great place to start. 

For instance, if you are a new brand within the fashion industry your goal for content may be to just spread awareness about your brand. This could come in the form of videos or photos showing off your products. In this case, you could use AI to assist in coming up with engaging content that would entice your audience to click through to your site. AI tools can also be used to manage your content ensuring that posts go out at the right time and monitoring who views, clicks, and shares your posts. 

While this may not be the scenario you find yourself in, it is a great way to think about how the goal directly correlates with the outcome. Often you may find that a goal your were working toward may have the consequence of improving other aspects as well. 

Develop Concepts

Now that you know what you would like to achieve you can start thinking about the concepts. Here is where you can use AI to make the process a lot faster and more efficient. Keep in mind that the more specific you are the better results you will get from the AI. 

When developing concepts you can leverage natural language processing model (NLP) AI tools, like ChatGPT, to help come up with ideas or prompts for great content. If you have an idea of your target audience you can use that information to tailor the ideas or prompts you get. 

For example, if you want a more specific idea that isn’t general or loosely applicable, you could provide information about your target audience. Like demographic information, and some factors that play into who they are or what they would be interested in. Below is an example of what that could look like.

You can do this as many times as you would like. But remember that the more information you have the better ideas and prompts you will get back, so be as narrow as possible.

Creating content 

Similar to how you can use AI for creating concepts,  it can be used to create content as well. From generating ideas, and concepts and providing topic suggestions to producing human-like written content. AI tools that use natural language processing models like ChatGPT or other tools that leverage GPT-3 can be used to generate comprehensive and, for the most part, engaging content. Additionally, if you prefer the creating over the ideation process, you can utilize AI for text-based prompts or specific instructions for creating the content.

Making it Personal

Content is only as good as it is personalized. What I mean by that is the content you create is meant to serve the audience not you. So as much as the marketing team would like it to be numbers forward, you’ve got to look at it from the perspective of your customers. When you buy something you don’t always just want to know what the item is. You may also want to know how to use it, what it’s made of, etc. Your customers don’t want to be sold to they want a story.

So, if you already have existing pieces of content that aren’t converting well, leverage AI to rewrite them in a way that keeps your target audience in mind. 

Optimizing your content

Optimization is another important aspect to keep in mind. Content won’t do you any good if no one is there to consume it. Using AI-powered tools to optimize your content for search engines improves its performance and helps it rank higher. 

AI will also save you time and energy here because you can use it to analyze keyword trends and have relevant keywords to help optimize more efficiently. Getting your content a higher organic ranking rather than artificially boosting to get it in front of more people.

Tracking performance

Lastly, and most importantly use AI to track performance metrics. This is where you get the most out of AI because it can help you make the right decisions that are based on hard data. AI tools can provide real-time analytics and insight rather than after-the-fact information. If something isn’t performing well, you can make the changes as its happening. 

Here are just a few metrics to keep an eye on:

• Engagement
• Conversions
• Click-through rates
• Social mentions 

This provides valuable insight into what is working and what isn’t. So, keeping a pulse on this information can help you refile and optimize your future content strategies. 

Content is an ever-growing part of our day-to-day lives. With AI you can tap into that connectivity without having to expend as much time and resources. By harnessing the power of AI businesses are now able to streamline the process of creating, implementing, and optimizing content that works. Content marketing efforts have never been more accessible. With AI as a valuable ally, businesses, big or small, can stay ahead in the competitive ecomerce landscape and further improve their content marketing efforts.