Accelerate your marketing plan by leveraging AI for content creation

This article was written by Ajay Mangilal Jain, Senior Practice Partner of AI and Automation at Wipro Limited

E-commerce has long been growing in popularity with private consumers and businesses, but the pandemic has brought an unprecedented flurry of activity, even in segments that hadn’t yet embraced online shopping. With this rapid growth and with changing customer expectations around lead times and delivery, direct-to-consumer brands increasingly need to accelerate their marketing capabilities. At the center of this trend is the need for content, which must now be adapted to different platforms and segments quickly and intelligently. However, this process is very demanding, and creating effective content for multiple platforms – including e-commerce – is nearly impossible without the proper artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) infrastructure.

When AI succeeds, so does content and content creation

To influence people, companies need to say something smart and relevant to the customer. Great content resonates, creates relevance and influences behavior. Creating this type of content requires analyzing data across multiple platforms, evaluating response rates to different materials, and diving into customer sentiment and engagement. Unfortunately, all of this takes time, a lot of time.

AI and ML have the potential to accelerate this process. AI has the ability to analyze large amounts of data and make recommendations on what content is most likely to elicit the desired response. This automated analysis helps companies generate meaningful content and develop content at scale so that it is perfectly suited to different platforms and market segments.

Historically, direct-to-consumer brands have relied on AI and ML primarily for social listening and insights. While some social platforms have introduced in-app purchases, the majority of consumers still make purchases through traditional channels, and their use of social media is focused on product research. This makes social media a great place to influence consumer behavior and capture data. AI and ML consolidate data from these platforms by analyzing context, relevance, sentiment and feedback to determine what drives the consumer and predict the best performing content for each scenario.

Using AI/ML to scale e-commerce

AI and ML can also play a key role in e-commerce content development. With more and more online shopping, new ways to meet demand have emerged. This has introduced new complexities for content marketers as direct-to-consumer companies seek to expand their presence to other platforms and commerce channels. By leveraging AI and ML, businesses can overcome these complexities while increasing visibility across platforms and gaining insights that ultimately drive growth.

Take the case of an international chocolate brand. In early 2019, the company had a business presence on both its own website and a leading e-commerce retail website, where it hosted a number of product pages to cater to various segments and test different keywords and images. The marketing team used the platform to analyze the most successful pages and determine which elements consumers found most relevant. In addition, the team needed to determine which research data was also most relevant.

The brand wanted to expand its online business presence to other retail sites and social platforms. This expansion, while promising, would essentially “trap” consumer behavior and sentiment data from each outlet inside the respective platform. The challenge then would be how to best analyze what resonated with each platform’s audience and continue to create effective “wellness” content that sets the company apart from its competitors.

By leveraging AI and ML, the chocolate brand was able to capture and combine data from its e-commerce channels, its own product site(s) and all new platforms. AI’s ability to collect and analyze content from every product, segment, and platform has allowed the company to scale quickly and create the most relevant content for every digital property. Additionally, the increased efficiency accelerated the creation of content that resonated with target consumers, while leading to increased page views and increased sales.

While AI and ML are often seen as a technology with limited applications outside of dry data analysis, they can actually be used to fuel creativity. These tools allow companies to analyze branded content from multiple systems, build bridges between platforms, improve content creation, as well as empower their marketing teams to create and scale the most relevant content across multiple platforms. Integrating AI into a marketing strategy helps direct-to-consumer brands quickly identify content that resonates, creates relevance and influences behavior. All of these features provide businesses with the ability to scale quickly and react to changing sentiment in real time.

Ajay Mangilal Jain is Senior Partner of AI and Automation Practice at Wipro Limited