Well-strategized, high-quality content marketing is a trusted approach to engaging prospects and guiding them through the buyer journey.

And content marketers know that highly engaging content results in longer time spent on webpages, more pageviews per session, and, ultimately, swift movement to conversion and repeat purchases.

To date, this process has been highly manual and tough to scale. And ineffective, inefficient content production is costly: One study found that B2B companies’ inefficiencies cost an estimated $958 million each year. 

Artificial intelligence can help.

According to a survey by Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, more than 75% of marketers indicate content marketing is a part of their job, but only 11% feel they have an advanced understanding of AI. This marks a huge opportunity for forward-thinking marketers to make AI their content marketing competitive advantage.

AI gives marketers the power to intelligently automate content brainstorming, creation, promotion, and optimization at scale. Smarter content means a more engaged readership, which equates to contacts moving through the buyer journey at a more rapid pace than ever before.

Ready to transform your buyer journey with AI? Here are three ways to get started.

1. Use AI to Make Content Recommendations

AI learns as it goes, making it an excellent recommendation tool. It uses data to predict what contacts will like, and adjusts recommendations based on user feedback. (Think: The content and products suggested by Netflix and Amazon.) The same principles can power AI content recommendations on your website.

There are AI tools that use cookies to learn your contacts’ content preferences, then recommend the content they’re most likely to enjoy. And based on the contacts’ actions, AI-powered systems learn and improve predictions over time. 

2. Engage Users With AI-Powered Personalization

A personalized buyer experience is great in theory, but it’s simply not feasible for human marketers to accomplish at scale. 

For example, personalizing content for 100 or even 1,000 different buyers means analyzing massive data sets. This kind of work takes a highly skilled marketer and a great deal of time.

AI offers massively helpful assistance with tasks like this. AI-powered technologies can understand content consumption patterns at scale and personalize recommendations for each individual contact, a feat humans simply can’t achieve.

This means every buyer gets the content they need at the right time for them, which leads to higher engagement and an accelerated buyer journey.

3. Gain Content Intelligence Along the Way

Many content marketers rely on personal preference or gut instinct to develop content strategy. While some marketers rely on data, there’s often too much to sort through and act on in a meaningful way. And this level of data research takes time—time that many marketers simply don’t have.

But AI can provide the data-driven insights that inform a smarter content strategy.

For example, AI tools can analyze content performance data, compare it with that of competitors, and offer predictions and recommendations to improve.

And a smarter content strategy means more contacts in the funnel, moving down a faster buyer journey path. 

It’s Time to Take the Next Step With AI

The best way to harness the power of AI is to begin piloting solutions. If you’re not sure quite where to start, you’re in good company: Almost half of marketers self-identify as AI beginners, according to a survey by the Marketing AI Institute. And we are, as an industry, in the infancy of AI adoption. 

But you and your organization have the opportunity now to be proactive in advancing knowledge and capabilities before your competitors beat you to it.