Daniel Ceniceros, Founder and CEO of Connect Commercial Real Estate.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the media industry. From content creation and distribution to marketing and advertising, AI is changing the way media and digital marketing businesses operate.
As a media and digital marketing consultant, my own company has seen the benefits of leveraging AI to help our customers build websites. In this article, I will explore the potential future applications of generative AI for media and marketing. While it is important to understand that there are gaps that still exist, there is potential for AI to create more engaging and personalized content, automate tasks, improve efficiency and productivity, and guide better decisions.
1. Generating More Engaging And Personalized Content
AI can be used to analyze user data to determine what content is most likely to appeal to them, which can help keep users coming back. For example, AI can be used to recommend articles to users based on their past reading history or to create personalized news feeds that are tailored to each user’s interests. For media companies, this can mean more users and increased engagement, which impacts both website impressions and SEO—two items that drive ad sales and generate revenue.
However, AI can pose some challenges when it comes to producing personalized content; the technology is just so new, and it is still learning every day. While AI generators can create books’ worth of information in seconds, the information still needs to be validated. There is room for error, so it’s imperative that you edit any AI-generated content for grammar and accuracy.
Many people resist adopting new technology such as AI. My daughter entered the eighth grade this year, and her school requested that parents edit the settings on their children’s laptops so that AI cannot be used for school assignments. While I agree with the importance of doing the work on your own, I feel that the school is not considering the increased role that this technology can play going forward. AI is not going anywhere, and we all can learn how to utilize this valuable tool and grow with it as the technology progresses. The same goes for businesses. I believe it is imperative that leadership within organizations have open minds and utilize all of the tools at our disposal to provide the best possible products and user experiences.
2. Improving Efficiency And Productivity With Automation
AI can also automate many basic tasks that are currently performed by human employees, such as content curation and scheduling. This can free up employees to focus on more creative and strategic tasks. AI can even be used to generate summaries of articles or create transcripts of videos.
Integrating AI technology can seem like a daunting task, but odds are, you and your employees are already using it in some capacity. For instance, your email service may try to predict wording to end your sentences or suggest word substitutions for clarity. This is AI technology, and it can help improve the quality of your emails to colleagues and clients with little to no work on your end.
Additionally, software such as Grammarly can be added to your web browser to help edit text messages, blog posts or even verbiage for a marketing campaign. Little things like this can make your life easier and more efficient, and they are great places to start if you are interested in implementing AI.
3. Predictive Analytics Driving Website Design
In my previous article, I examined steps to mapping an effective business website. I advised that a website’s interactivity and functionality reflect its brand, company culture and offerings. AI allows you to take this to a more intense level of intelligence and customization using predictive analytics.
Businesses used to only need a simple, stand-alone website. But today, a website is expected to deliver rich multimedia, a customized sales funnel with fresh content, and intuitive responsiveness. Its user interface (UI) should be built to provide a fluid user experience. The end user does not want to expend the effort to advance through pages to search for information.
For example, consider the benefits of including infinite scroll, a design plug-in allowing users to continually advance through a page, eliminating the need to hit “refresh” or “next page.” Based on the users’ previously read articles, AI can be designed to show the readers similar stories to try to keep them on the page and reading more stories. This type of program uses variable-ratio reinforcement to influence choice behavior and helps keep users engaged, removing barriers.
There are multiple other applications for AI in improving your website design, including:
• QA testing to ensure the site is free of bugs and errors before it is set to live.
• Deploying code to production, automating the deployment process and reducing the risk of errors.
• Creating distinct user journeys so that websites provide a sales funnel; this can be through the production of multiple landing pages paired with digital marketing strategies or on a main website.
4. Making Better Decisions
AI can help media companies analyze data to identify trends and patterns. This valuable tool can be fed data from lengthy reports and pull out the most important statistics, distilling the information down and cutting the time it takes the user to find the information they need. Additionally, this technology can be used to pull out performance metrics from your company’s blog posts or marketing campaigns, illustrating reading and viewing habits of site visitors. You could then use this information to improve your website and content, which can improve site traffic.
Overall, generative AI has the potential to revolutionize the media and digital marketing industries, if applied well. Through automating tasks, improving efficiency and productivity, and assisting with making better decisions, I believe that AI can help our industry create more engaging and personalized content that will keep users coming back for more.
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