Generative AI has the potential to dramatically transform the way marketing departments create content. But without a content strategy, different or more marketing content might not budge the sales needle – it might have the opposite effect. A glut of unfocused content could alienate customers by overwhelming them with too much content or bore them with poorly written content that doesn’t match the brand. A good content strategy is a critical tool for organizations to make the best use of generative AI to delight customers and meet business goals. Using generative AI-based content strategy tools can speed up the content strategy process.

Content strategy for content creation

A content strategy is a plan for the creation, delivery and management of content. It means thinking strategically about what content supports both business goals and customer needs, then planning to produce the right content and put it in the right place at the right time.

A handful of tools in the content strategy toolkit address different needs at each point in the process of planning, creating and managing content. For instance, a set of content guidelines for tone and language ensures all language that represents an organization is consistent, ethical (avoids bias) and in the brand voice. These guidelines support the creation of content that resonates with the target audience and builds trust in the brand. Content guidelines can also reduce editing time as well as the learning curve for content creators who are new to the company – including artificial content generators.

Other content strategy tools make it easy to determine what content needs to be created. A content inventory or content audit shows what content already exists on a website, and a content matrix with a gap analysis shows where content is needed in a new information architecture or to meet the needs of a new marketing campaign or plan. A customer journey map shows all the places where customers interact with an organization and can be especially helpful in identifying where content gaps exist.

There are many AI-based tools on the market right now that can generate a content gap analysis. In fact, generative AI can greatly reduce the time needed to create outputs for all the previously mentioned content strategy tools. MarketMuse is an AI-powered tool that can analyze existing website content and create a content inventory that shows how well content ranks for SEO along with recommendations on how to improve. Given the right prompts, ChatGPT can create a content matrix that takes all of an organization’s marketing channels into consideration and maps to the customer journey. For a more comprehensive overview of the customer journey complete with insights into potential improvements, Woopra uses AI to track, analyze and suggest optimizations for every customer touchpoint.

Content strategy + AI = high-quality content

After identifying which content is important and necessary, it’s time to create. While it may be tempting to greatly expand the number of blog posts or web pages with the help of generative AI, a comprehensive content strategy that reflects how marketing content supports business goals makes it more likely that all the content produced will be high quality – meaningful, useful and aligned to drive the right business priorities.

A content strategy should include the target audience, the tone that might resonate with customers and what kind of content is important to them. Content generators can use this information to inform generative AI prompts in free AI tools like ChatGPT to produce more relevant, effective results. More robust AI-based tools like Writer.com allow marketing leaders to apply content guidelines to AI-generated content to ensure the content that is generated is unbiased and in compliance with the corporate content strategy. Writer.com also provides an easy-to-use template that guides users down a step-by-step path to building brand-specific content guidelines.

Content strategy for governance

After creating content that maps to a strategic plan, it’s time to get it in the right place at the right time. The content matrix created in the planning stage can be used to identify appropriate places for content to be re-used in a content management system or other marketing channels. It can include content attributes like the content life span, status in the review cycle, key messages and objectives, metrics and where the content should appear in the site architecture.

The content strategy determines how content needs to change in different locations to meet requirements such as language, tone or length. Using generative AI to adapt the content to the requirements of different environments is a huge time saver. For example, generative AI makes it easy to generate social media blurbs to tease blog posts or summaries to introduce whitepapers. It can also be used to translate content into different languages for a personalized digital experience.

Generative AI has the potential to save marketing departments a lot of time and money in creating both a content strategy and written content. Having a content strategy in place ensures that marketing dollars are being spent on content that is part of a bigger plan, and all the content an AI tool generates is valuable and effective.