How to Use AI to Supercharge Your Content Strategy
As time goes on and the digital universe we exist in keeps growing and growing, the line between marketing and full-blown media production is becoming increasingly blurred.
You can’t run a website, blog or email newsletter without copy and pictures. You don’t get very far spreading your influence on social media without videos or photo stories. To get in anywhere in the digital world – if you want to increase brand awareness, grow an audience, convert more clicks into sales – you have to be in the business of producing and distributing content.
That makes content critically important to some pretty fundamental business objectives. Underlining that importance, 84% of businesses now say they have a formal content strategy to help them manage the considerable demands of content management and production. Yet only 29% of organisations rate their content strategy as very effective.
Why? Because creating a thorough, workable content strategy that delivers genuine results isn’t straightforward. As a content marketing agency, we see the same issue over and over again. Businesses might be working to a simple production plan and schedule. But that only answers the ‘what’ and ‘when’ of their content needs. For a content strategy to really work, you need to have clarity on some other answers, too – who you’re producing content for, where you’re publishing it, and why.
A good content strategy, therefore, is built on intelligence and insight. Clarity in the what, when, where, who and why is the difference between taking a scattergun approach that relies more on luck than judgement, and tackling an unruly yet critical task with precision and efficiency.
But that presents another challenge – where does that clarity and insight come from?
Given its data handling and analytical prowess, no one will be surprised to learn that more and more businesses and marketers are turning to AI to inform their content strategies. 56% of marketers say they are now routinely using AI tools. And the number of AI-powered marketing tools available has exploded.
But what are they, what are people using them for, and what’s the right fit for levelling up your content strategy? The sheer choice is dizzying, and it can be difficult to distinguish which tools do what. So as specialists in content strategy, we thought it would be useful to zoom in on the research and intelligence side of strategic content planning – analysing your audience, available channels and content options – and set out what in our view are the best AI tools on the market in each category.
What is Social Commerce?
Like so many digital retail trends in recent years, social commerce has gone from a fairly under-the-radar niche concept to a red-hot market in no time at all. UK retail sales through social platforms reached £7.4bn in 2024, and are forecast to more than double to £16bn by 2028.
To put that in context, although the total value of all digital retail is currently more than 10 times higher, ecommerce sales are predicted to see year-on-year growth of just 4% to the end of the decade.
At a time when total retail sales are all but flatlining, social commerce offers a rare promise of robust and sustained growth. But why?
Researching Your Audience
There’s a wide range of AI-powered tools available to help you understand the needs, expectations and preferences of existing would-be customers. This is foundational to planning content topics, tone, delivery channels and much more.
SparkToro analyses every kind of online behaviour, from what people engage with and talk about online, to what keywords they use in searches and the clues they give away about their personalities in online bios etc. Brandwatch is a dedicated consumer research platform that uses AI to analyse trends and consumer sentiment across 100 million+ online sources. It also has tools for social listening, or researching audience trends on social media.
As well as these broader insights into consumer trends and behaviours, it’s also important to get to know your existing customers. Tools like Hotjar, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics provide AI-powered behavioural analytics showing how people are interacting with your website, giving you insights into what content works best and the journeys customers are taking towards conversion. Quantilope takes things a step further by using AI to design and automate customer research queries tailored to your business needs, including rolling out customer surveys.
Researching Channels
As time goes on, the ‘where’ question becomes more and more important in content strategy, for the simple reason that there are an ever-growing number of places that you can promote your business (and actually sell your products) online. While ‘omnichannel’ is a nice idea, the practical realities of being on every channel at once have now overtaken it. Part of an effective content strategy these days is knowing which channels your audience is using, and what the best content matches are for them.
Of course, the difficult part stems from the fact that customers are using a range of channels in all sorts of different configurations. So understanding the effectiveness of channels depends on assessing these combinations, or what marketers call customer journey mapping. Amplitude uses AI to analyse marketing performance by channel, and also identify cross-channel behaviours to identify which combinations work, and where people are experiencing ‘frustration points’ and not continuing.
One of the most innovative AI marketing solutions currently on the market is Brainsuite. Brainsuite is a collection of more than 100 different AI models trained using neurological and psychological data to interpret how people respond to content in context. That includes different tools for assessing the impact of content on different channels.
Content Planning
Generative AI is famous for its ability to create text, images and even video at the touch of a button. However, given the work it takes to prompt and quality control AI creations to ensure you consistently get materials good enough to put your brand’s name to, it’s not necessarily the miracle short-cut to content creation at scale it was initially billed as. That said, Gen AI tools very much do have a role to play in various areas of modern marketing. And one of them is content planning, from ideation to research to scheduling.
The choice of tools you can use to do this is huge, starting with the OG of generative AI itself, ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s big strength (and the same applies to all the similar general-purpose Gen AI engines like Gemini, CoPilot, Claude, Perplexity etc) is its ability to scrape billions of online sources not just to churn out copycat content, but to answer questions. So ask it something like ‘I want to write a series of blogs on content strategy, can you suggest 10 titles that will cover the topic in a logical and progressive way?’, ChatGPT will generate a workable skeleton content plan there and then. You can then develop individual titles by asking for suggested points to cover or full outlines with headings and suggestions for body content etc.
The likes of ChatGPT and Gemini are highly popular for content planning because they are cheap, readily available and easy to use. But you can get even more value from specialist paid-for marketing AI platforms. Again, the choice is huge. But some noteworthy examples include Jasper, best known as an AI copywriting tool, but which also has some excellent planning features. Highlights include the fact that Jasper makes it easy to integrate data feeds about your brand and customers, so you are always planning with audience and brand identity in mind. It also has shared workspaces to assist with collaborative planning across your team, and you can build workflows to automate parts of your planning.
Another leader in the field is Optimizely Opal, which is at the forefront of bringing agentic AI into marketing. Agentic AI is the use of AI specially trained AI ‘agents’ to handle tasks. You can have lots of individual specialised agents working collaboratively across workflows, which is more flexible and easier to manage than, say, having to write out long-winded prompts covering every step in a process in something like ChatGPT. Optimizely Opal has pre-built agents for ideation, planning, market research, building variations (i.e. for different markets or audience segments), industry benchmarks and more. Beyond just getting lists of topic ideas and what to cover, it brings market data, competitor analysis, personalisation and data-led scheduling into the content planning mix.
Conclusion
AI in marketing is a huge topic that is only going to get bigger. We’ve mentioned 15 different platforms and tools in this article, and we’ve only covered the formative research and planning stage of putting together a content strategy. You can multiply this number again by content creation, delivery, optimisation and governance. Like we said, there’s a lot to choose from, and knowing where to start can be tough!
The best advice is to start small and experiment. Pick an area – content planning is the obvious one – then pick a tool and see what it can do. What tasks does it help with? What’s missing? You can then trial another tool or two in the same area to compare. But eventually, you’ll want to look at additional tools that add different insights, such as audience or channel analysis.
You can also, of course, reach out to specialist content marketers like ourselves for advice on the best tools for your needs – and while you’re at it, feel free to ask anything you like about content strategy in general. To get a flavour of what we do, check out this case study explaining how we brought all marketing activity for a firm of chartered surveyors under one roof, including creating and implementing a comprehensive content strategy for web and social media.
Frequently Asked questions
Why should businesses use AI for content strategy?
AI streamlines time-consuming tasks like research, competitor analysis, and ideation. It also uncovers audience preferences, predicts channel performance, and improves efficiency, making your content strategy more targeted and effective.
Can AI generate high-quality content on its own?
AI can produce blogs, social posts, and emails, but human editing is still essential to maintain brand consistency, creativity, and trustworthiness. AI works best for drafts, brainstorming, and efficiency, not final polished pieces.
Can AI help small businesses compete with larger brands?
Absolutely. AI tools give smaller businesses access to insights and automation once reserved for companies with big budgets, helping them compete by creating smarter, more data-driven campaigns.
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James Bester