How Content Intelligence Boosts Relevance and Engagement

Successful content marketing hinges on your ability to continually create and share relevant content assets that resonate with your target audience.

For content marketers, this means taking your best guess at what your audience would like, creating assets, and then watching the analytics to see what worked best. In other words, it can be an arduous process of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The challenge here, as most marketers know, is that developing content isn’t cheap. It takes time and money to create high-quality content, and if your audience doesn’t bite, that’s going to impact your return on investment.

But what if there was a tool that could help you figure out the right content to produce the first time around? That’s where content intelligence comes in, and it may be the key to the future of content marketing.

What is content intelligence?

Content intelligence is the practice of using data to make informed decisions about your content strategy. Instead of guessing at what you think your audience will respond to best, you use data to make more informed decisions. For the best results, you can invest in software that analyzes your data for you.

What is content intelligence software?

Content intelligence software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze many more data points than you can on your own to understand what’s most likely to perform well with your readers. Data can include the performance of your existing content, competitive analysis, and search engine results pages (SERPs).

The insights you get from your software tools can help you choose the right topics, identify relevant related keywords, better understand search intent, and decide on an ideal word count for each article.

Content intelligence vs. artificial intelligence

Content intelligence is one example of applying AI to marketing. Artificial intelligence is a broader term that refers to any computer program designed to mimic human intelligence in a variety of applications. For example, outside of content marketing, it is used in medicine, robotics, and self-driving vehicles.

Unlike traditional computer programs, AI tools can understand natural language, analyze data, and make decisions — at least within their parameters. That’s why you can “talk” to AI-powered ChatGPT like you would message a human. You don’t need to know a programming language to use the tool.

When it comes to content intelligence, AI enables software programs to analyze the data they collect and provide you with personalized, predictive content recommendations.

The role of AI in content marketing

AI is a powerful tool that content marketers can use to work more efficiently and get more out of their content strategy.

Here are some of the ways AI can be used for content marketing:

• Brainstorming and ideation

• Performance analysis

• Content intelligence

• Keyword research

• Content creation

• Personalization

• Optimization

• Automation

• Chatbots

• Curation

It should be noted that while AI presents many potential benefits to content marketers, these tools are never a complete substitute for human insight, judgment, and experience in content creation. Instead, they’re best used to assist human writers and editors.

Benefits of content intelligence

The primary benefit of using content intelligence software is that it gives you a clear data-powered roadmap for your content. In other words, it can reduce much of the guesswork involved in creating the right content for your readers.

As a result, you can create a streamlined process, work more efficiently, and improve your return on investment.

Here are a few examples of how content intelligence tools create benefits:

• Use competitor analysis data to identify the topics already performing well.

• Analyze the current top-ranking SERP results to provide data-driven insights on the most relevant keywords.

• Measure and report key performance indicators (KPIs), including organic traffic, time on page, and social reach.

• Automate keyword research and identify related questions, relevant subtopics, ideal word count, and readability levels.

• Use AI to conduct content audits, identify underperforming pages, and provide actionable insights for re-optimizing content.

• Automate content curation and find articles to share on social media, distribute in email newsletters, or reference in a summary post.

• Generate reports that compare your performance metrics with your competitors and provide personalized recommendations to improve results.

How marketers can use content intelligence to improve results

Now that you’re more familiar with some of the features provided by content intelligence software, here’s how you can use them to get the most out of your content marketing strategy.

Generate content ideas

Content marketing is all about creating content that’s helpful, relevant, and interesting to your audience. With content intelligence tools, you can make better data-driven choices about the topics you cover because you’ll know what’s more likely to connect with your audience. By using smarter software, you take much of the guesswork out of creating your editorial calendar.

Start by leveraging competitor analysis to identify the topics that are already resonating with your readers. AI can help support your ideation process by analyzing SERP data and providing recommendations based on trending topics, different content angles, and the pain points being addressed for a given topic.

Create more relevant and engaging content

For SEO purposes, one of the key ingredients to “better quality” content that ranks higher on Google is relevance to search intent.

Relevance to search intent means that your content helps the reader achieve their search goal, whether that’s learning more about a topic, navigating to a specific page, taking an action (like booking a flight), or researching a purchase.

In other words, you need to understand what your reader ultimately wants to do with a search. Then, creating content that gets them there is up to you.

Content intelligence software looks at currently ranking articles to understand the user’s search perspective and see what content elements are working. Then, it translates that information into actionable recommendations you can follow to optimize your content for search.

Specifically, Clearscope’s SEO Editor helps you understand and satisfy search intent by providing relevant keywords, sharing the heading structure of the top-ranked posts, and compiling a list of frequently asked questions for your keyword.

Re-optimize your existing content inventory

You can also use content intelligence to improve the performance of existing posts. In particular, tools like Clearscope let you automate the content inventory process and quickly identify which pages aren’t performing as well as others.

The content inventory feature shows you the content grade for each URL, total clicks, the average position of monitored queries, and a graph showing how clicks trend over time.

Clearscope also provides data-powered recommendations for refreshing your existing content. You can re-run the text through the Clearscope report, and our software will provide updated keyword and content recommendations based on what’s currently ranking.

Automate content research

Artificial intelligence tools sift through more data in less time than humans can. When you use AI in your content marketing tools, you can include more information in your data-powered insights.

For example, when you run a Clearscope report, you get the following insights:

• Suggested heading keywords

• Competitor heading structure

• Frequently asked questions

• Target content score

• Common sources

• Ideal word count

• Ideal readability

• Related topics

The software can pull all of this information from the top SERP results in a couple of minutes. Without AI, it could take several hours, or even days, for one person to research all of this information and develop similar insights.

After you’ve optimized and published your posts, Clearscope continues to monitor the performance of each page and any queries you set up in their Content Inventory feature using real-time data. In this case, real-time data means that you see the content score of existing pieces based on the current SERP results rather than historical rankings.

Since search intent can evolve over time, this is crucial for shaping your work because you want to create the most relevant content for users right now.

Gain a deeper understanding of your target audience

AI efficiently collects and analyzes data from multiple sources, which means you can gain deeper insights about your potential clients.

You’ll be better able to answer questions like:

• What topics does my audience care about?

• What video elements get the most engagement?

• Does my audience prefer long or short-form articles?

• What content formats work best with my potential clients?

• Which social platforms should I use to promote my content?

• What’s the best day and time to post content for my audience?

Over time, using more powerful data analysis enables you to understand your target audience and various personas better because you have information about what content they like, where they like to access it, and when they’re most likely to engage.

What is a content intelligence platform?

A content intelligence platform uses AI, machine learning, and algorithms to analyze data and help marketers predict what content will perform best with their target audience. These platforms typically provide audience and competitor insights, and they use competitor performance to help predict the performance of your content.

You can also use content intelligence platforms to automate your data collection and better monitor the results of your published pieces.

At this point, you may wonder whether investing in content intelligence is worth it.

While it’s true that human insight is still at the core of a successful marketing strategy, it’s important to understand that technology can be a powerful asset to your team.

In the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) Industry Survey, the company asked marketers if they believed they had the right technology in place to execute their strategies. Out of all respondents, only 28% said yes.

However, when CMI looked closer and focused on the most successful content marketers, 47% of the highly effective content marketing group said that they had the right technology in place. In other words, the marketers who saw the best results were more likely to be successfully leveraging the right technology.

Marketing technology, such as content intelligence platforms, can help you get the most from your strategy, whether you need to amplify the capabilities of a lean team or find technology that can scale with a large operation.

What to look for in a content intelligence platform

Many content marketing platforms have started incorporating AI and machine learning into their tools and offering content intelligence capabilities. Here are some features and qualities to look for when finding the right solution for your team.

Content analysis

Look for a platform that can provide broad strategic guidance and apply the same data analysis to a single piece of content. Personalized actionable insights create that bridge between insight and optimization.

For example, Clearscope generates reports for individual content pieces that include data-based recommendations on related keywords, heading keywords, word count, and reading level.

You can create briefs, outlines, and drafts in Clearscope’s Editor, and it provides live updates on your word count, readability, and overall content score as you work.

Keyword discovery and insights

Keyword research is a vital part of SEO content creation, but it can also be one of the most time-consuming. Using AI to help with ideation can speed up the keyword discovery process so you’re better able to take advantage of trending and high-opportunity keywords.

Automation

You can also use AI and machine learning to automate the repetitive elements of content creation, helping you scale your efforts and generate more results. Look at your content creation process and identify some of the more time-consuming steps and then see if software can help improve your efficiency.

Here are some helpful automation features to look for:

• Competitor research

• Keyword research

• Market research

• Outline creation

• Traffic analysis

• Reporting

Clearscope reports help you automate much of your research in minutes. The platform gives you real-time access to competitive research and search engine results page (SERP) data that would normally take one person hours to complete.

Real-time data use

Digital marketing is a fast-paced field, so the most up-to-date data provides the biggest competitive advantage. The best insights, predictions, and performance analyses come from real-time data.

If SEO is part of your strategy, using the most recent keyword data and SERP results for marketing recommendations is especially vital. When you use live data, your content insights are based on current search intent. As a result, you will be able to create more relevant, useful content that performs well on search and resonates with your readers.

For example, in the Clearscope Editor, you can select a keyword and view examples. The tool will go through competitor posts and highlight sections of text that use the selected word so you can understand the context of each keyword based on what’s currently ranking.

User-friendly experience

When it comes to integrating technology into your process, you’ll get the most buy-in from team members if the platforms are easy to use (instead of adding more work).

Look for software providers that consolidate research and content insights into one dashboard. This way, your team doesn’t have to go back and forth in order to integrate the recommendations.

You can also see if there are integrations with your existing workflow.

For example, Clearscope offers a Google Docs integration, so your writers and editors don’t need to open another program to get competitive insights.

CMS integration

Your content management system (CMS) is integral to your content strategy. As such, your content intelligence tool should either provide a CMS feature or integrate with the one you use so you can maintain a seamless workflow.

A CMS integration means that you can access the insights from your content intelligence platform inside your CMS as you create and edit content. You get access to real-time recommendations that can be updated based on the work you’ve done so far.

The Clearscope WordPress plugin lets you bring content intelligence into the post editor and live updates your content score and word count.

Final thoughts: How content intelligence boosts relevance and engagement

Imagine content marketing without all of the guesswork. That’s the big promise of content intelligence. It’s the ability to use tools like AI and machine learning to bring clarity to your strategy and create data-driven content that you know will resonate with your readers without costing you a fortune in human labor for manual data crunching.

By leveraging software to automate time-consuming work like competitive analysis and content audits, you can also create much more efficiency in your content creation process too. That way, you can spend less time doing repetitive tasks and more time developing the content your audience will love.

For more information on smart content tools that help you generate more traffic, explore Clearscope today.