Intelligent Content: Creation and Distribution

From a people of small tribes and farming communities, then big cities and industrialized nations, we have become a people of information. Today’s world is run on content.

The number of people whom the internet reaches genuinely boggles the mind. According to Demand Sage, “Since the year 2018, every day, approximately 900,000 people have gone online for the first time. In 2023, there will be more than 5 billion active internet users around the globe.” 

Moreover, “the average person spends around 7.8 hours a day interacting with digital content with teenagers reporting 11.1 hours a day,” reports Mordor Intelligence, adding that “there also has been a trend with users demand more personalized content.”

If you can get the right information to the right people at the right time, you can gain new users, create a loyal fanbase, and see your revenue grow.

But who can afford to personalize content to each and every prospect? No one, which is why intelligent content is so highly prized today.

The numbers bear this out: “The global content intelligence market size is estimated to expand from USD 991 million in 2022 to USD 4944 million by 2028, at a CAGR of 29.8 percent between 2023 and 2028.”

New technologies are slated to turn content creation and content marketing on their heads in the coming decade, and it’s essential to be ready for it. Those who leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning for content strategy and automation can guarantee a better customer experience for their target audience.

A better experience means happier software users, which is why content creators today focus on improving their metrics surrounding each piece of content across their marketing campaigns. If you want to do the same at your SaaS company – i.e., create high-quality content that search engines love – then it’s time to do your research.

Today’s post is all about intelligent content: what it is, which tools to use, and how to get started. Read on.

What Is Intelligent Content?

As technology advances and leaps and bounds are being made in artificial intelligence (AI), businesses are viewing content optimization strategies with an eye to the future.

With traditional solutions, the content is typically optimized for a specific user, format, or channel. On the other hand, intelligent content solutions allow businesses to centralize their content and use it for multiple users, formats, and channels.

So precisely what is intelligent content?

“Intelligent content is a content management technique in which you structure content as a modular, format-free, and semantically-rich business asset,” Contentstack says. “This practice makes it easy for the content creators and users to find and reconfigure for various occasions.”

The idea here is that companies can find the type of content they need for digital marketing optimization without creating relevant content specifically for the occasion or even searching for it manually.

Instead, the content creation process becomes much more automated using AI tools.

“Intelligent content moves away from humans needing to touch every piece of content at every instance of use,” explains the Content Marketing Institute. “Instead, intelligent content moves toward an advanced publishing process that leans on data and metadata, that coordinates content efforts across departmental silos, and that makes smart use of technology.”

Think of content intelligence as a lot of really, really dope boilerplate to which your entire organization has access at all times – complete with the tools to search for whatever you need. With the content at hand, it’s easy to choose your asset, then drop it into the appropriate format for any occasion.

That might mean turning it into a blog post, plugging it into an eBook or whitepaper template for free download, or using it as a loose guide for a video script – then using speech-to-text to make the content accessible to people who are hard of hearing. (Or simply to the people who want to watch it on mute.)

In this way, loosely curated content becomes highly structured content available at any time.

Enabling Artificial Intelligence and Search Engines With Metadata

Another way to think about intelligent content is that it’s about organizing your content in such a manner as to take advantage of new and emerging content delivery technologies. That’s where metadata comes in.

Part of the way intelligent content services work is by utilizing metadata alongside the content to enable AI and computer apps to distinguish better what the content is about.

Metadata is, in a nutshell, data about data. It’s a short content description that helps AI determine the differences between specific topics, subjects, part numbers, etc.

Metadata is how Google and other search engines crawl a piece of content and determine its relation to a searcher’s intent. But it’s also how you track your own content in a content experience platform (CXP) or digital experience platform (DXP). If you can’t find your content, then it’s not very intelligent, after all.

Not only do data tags help computers better compile information and know when to deliver it to a specific audience, but they also make it easier for users to find relevant content based on their own specific needs. That makes it easier for your prospects or users to interact with information about your product without contacting a human.

There are many benefits to highly categorized and referenceable content, from more efficient marketing to happier customers. That’s why content control is critical to your overall marketing strategy.

Make Content Control a Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Most businesses already have some structure and categorization they use to help organize their content. Too often, however, that content is siloed, kept in separate locations where it’s hard for some departments or people to access. With an intelligent solution, you create a single solution from which data is retrieved when needed to deliver the desired output.

Furthermore, the content does not have to be narrowly constructed for specific users or audiences ahead of time. Rather the “intelligent” part of the solution can be customized so access to various pieces of content can be limited and controlled.

To illustrate, let’s say your customer wants a copy of their owner’s manual for one of your products. Using a traditional solution, you may already have owner’s manuals in a searchable database repository customers can access. Let’s assume your sales department also needs access to the owner’s manuals and product data specs.

Instead of replicating the data into different repositories with different access permissions, you could have a single repository housing all relevant product information: owner’s manuals, spec sheets, etc. When users connect through your intelligent content service, they can access all the content they have permission to retrieve.

The Right Content Management System Uses Automation to Distribute Content

No matter how well you design a centralized content hub, you're doing something wrong if you need humans to run it.

The goal is to create a repository for

Once it’s there, people can search for what they need using applicable terms. They can download what they need, format it, and push it out into the world if they have access. With automated campaigns, you can use tools that pull and format the content for you, then pass it on to the end user.

For instance, you might have a “smart” graphic user interface where users click on or tap the types of content they need rather than entering text into a search box. Essentially, there is no limit to the kinds of content you could incorporate into an intelligent solution such as this one.

The critical thing to remember, though, is that the data does need to be structured so the “intelligent” features of the solution can function correctly. You need to use the right metadata to return the right results when an internal or external user seeks information.

In addition, you will need to address concerns about data security issues. Luckily, intelligent services make it easy to house data securely in the Cloud. As such, you can keep your proprietary data separate without worrying about providing external access to internal data systems.

Content Creation Process for an Intelligent Content Strategy

You understand the goal: to put all your information in one place, from whence it can be retrieved by anyone who needs it. And you know that automation is critical to the process, saving you expensive human hours that will erode your bottom line.

But what exactly does the content creation process look like, from start to finish?

Leverage AI for Research

First, you must know what type of content will work best for you. When it comes to internal teams, that’s a little simpler. Whatever you need to educate your people, that’s the content you should create.

Externally, however, it’s a different question. What type of content will work best for you when it comes to serving your leads, prospects, and customers? That’s where research comes in. Using AI tools, you can pull up information about your prospects’ needs, cater to it in marketing, and file it in your central hub.

Create Quality Content Faster

You can grab and go once you have your information in the hub. Whether promoting an e-commerce tool or designing a content marketing strategy around a new device, you’ll get much farther if you can easily reuse quality content.

Once you have it, you can turn it into a post for LinkedIn or other social media sites, record it as a podcast, or publish case studies that impress your prospects.

Generate Text More Easily

Although there have recently been concerns about AI-generated content ranking lower in Google search results, and there is some truth to these concerns, it’s not as cut-and-dried as you might think. AI content can prove quite helpful, provided you understand Google’s rules:

“Automation has long been used to generate helpful content, such as sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts,” says the search giant. "Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high-quality results to users for years.”

All of which is to say, AI is a great way to generate content, but you’ll need humans to look it over, edit, contextualize, and make it fit for consumption by other humans.

Utilize Speech-to-Text Technology

Another brilliant tool today is natural language processing (NLP). Speech-to-text technology helps you turn the spoken word into captions, making your videos and audio files accessible to people who are hard of hearing.

Get the Content to the People

Once you’ve got the content you need, it’s time to put it out there. Several tools exist to help you optimize your SEO so it snags the attention of search algorithms, which is the first step in getting your content to real people.

The good news is that many of the same metadata you’ll use to organize your content in a central hub can also be used to optimize content for search engines.

Personalize and Analyze the Content Experience

People want their user experience to feel like it’s all about

You can achieve this using localization tools, employing chatbots to improve their workflow or real-time information searches (think pricing), and augmenting their time within a learning academy for customer onboarding or employee training.

Whatever you use your content for, you’ll need to see if it’s getting the job done. When people are served this content, does it convert? Does it answer questions? Does it reduce customer service tickets? And so forth.

Integrate Your Content Assets Into Your Learning Academy

Last but not least, ensure that your content assets are readily available to your internal team and your users. They’re the entire reason your company exists, after all. If they can’t find the information they’re looking for during onboarding and after, they will churn right on over to a competitor with a more

Don’t let that happen. Instead, ensure that your centralized content location has rules and permission that allow SaaS users to get the info they need when needed. That way, they have no trouble learning about your product, understanding how to use new features, upgrading when necessary, and telling others how great you are.

If you’d like to know more about how an intelligently integrated learning academy can win customers and keep them returning over the long haul, feel free to reach out today. Raven360 would love to answer your questions or provide a demo, so don’t hesitate to get in touch!