Incredible Content, Incredible Experiences

Customer expectations for brand experiences are rising exponentially. With the right content management platform, you can meet and exceed those expectations. Criteria include the ability to apply data and intelligence, personalize at scale, and stream relevant content and experiences — continually and quickly. An essential element is content intelligence. Let’s take a closer look.

Every day, artificial intelligence (AI) finds brilliant new applications in unexpected places. For example, at your next doctor’s appointment, she may be using a machine to read your X-rays, personalize your regimen, or predict glitches that could keep your heart from ticking merrily along. Increasingly, doctors count on AI to enhance the accuracy, speed, and effectiveness with which they can diagnose, predict, and treat health problems, according to radiologist Paul Hsieh for Forbes and Meg Tirrell for CNBC.

As a marketer, the content and experiences you provide are generally not a life-and-death matter — although your boss may treat them that way. But success does depend on a unique treatment for each individual. If you want to keep your bottom line healthy, it’s time to ask a new digital assistant for help. AI — and in particular machine learning — is rapidly becoming the go-to tool to help marketers connect content with data and analytics, everywhere from lead scoring and retargeting to personalization and segmentation. Even with your experience, intuition, and (face it) best guesses, a dose of AI can move your content and experiences from ho-hum to off the charts. Better still, the machines will heighten your native smarts and creativity — so you can work faster, uncover hidden opportunities, and know which data insights matter and when.

“Every day your team postpones using innovative AI-powered solutions in your content marketing, you’re losing competitive edge.”

Karola Karlson
Content Marketer writing for Content Marketing Institute

Meeting customers’ healthy expectations

Today, marketers are competing with brands that lure their customers not only with products and services, but also with individual experiences. And they’re setting some healthy expectations, from recommending a movie customers will love to including a personal treat in their orders.

To meet those expectations, marketers need to develop a steady flow of compelling content. You start the content journey with ideas and concepts, then create and manage assets, deliver and personalize experiences, and finally analyze performance. And you need to do all of this fast enough for the experiences to adapt instantly to every channel and screen your customer may use. The goal is achieving what McKinsey calls marketing’s holy grail: digital personalization at scale.

Creating authentic one-to-one experiences requires extensive resources and an investment that your budget may not support. Even if you’re flush with cash, you can’t scale manually — you simply cannot hire that many people or analyze such vast data sets. The solution lies where content marketing and AI meet — content intelligence.

“Content Intelligence…is technology that helps content understand itself — what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotions it calls to mind, etc.”

Ryan Skinner
Senior Analyst, Forrester

But even large global enterprises are just getting started. According to Harvard Business Review, “AI adoption is in its infancy, with just 20 percent of our survey respondents using one or more AI technologies at scale or in a core part of their business, and only half of those using three or more.” And Harvard Business Review also notes that 41 percent of companies are experimenting or piloting AI, leading them to expect an inflection point soon, with technologies like machine learning and natural language processing maturing and proving their value.

“AI can help organize and analyze large amounts of data so it can present the right, actionable information to drive better customer experiences, much easier than you and your team could ever do on your own.”

Daniel Newman
Principal Analyst and Founding Partner, Futurum Research

Taking a turn for the better experience

Medical professionals are incorporating AI into every facet of patient care, from analyzing tests to performing surgery. Likewise, marketers can use a content and experience management platform to incorporate AI everywhere from creation and discovery to delivery and performance. Let’s look at how you can put intelligence to work across the content journey to offer exceptional experiences.

Get better answers faster

When you’re coming up with content ideas and concepts, it helps to be able to try different approaches and even reverse direction. With machine learning, software can analyze images imported into your editor to detect facial features, similar images, and even which way the subject is looking. Your designer can swap out images in real time to quickly preview as many options as you want to see. And if it doesn’t look quite right, no problem. You can go back to any point and see how a different decision — having the young couple in your mortgage ad look excitedly at each other instead of at their new home — impacts the emotional experience.

Create vital experiences — stat

You need to deliver consistent experiences across channels, without increasing cost or complexity — and you can’t always lean on IT. AI can serve as your creative assistant, rapidly assembling suggested content for audiences at every touchpoint and even optimizing it, so the burden’s not on you. If your AI application supports voice recognition, you can even tell your assistant what you want — like making the mountains disappear in a climbing shot to focus on the gear.

Manage millions of digital assets

You want one place where everyone — marketers, creatives, and outside agencies — can find approved images and video to ensure experiences will remain consistent across channels. But manually tagging images with descriptive and contextual metadata is tedious, inconsistent, and often incomplete. It’s the type of job where machines excel. AI-powered smart tags automatically provide consistent, content-based metadata in seconds — saving you hours.

“Computers will not complain about having to add metadata, they will not try to avoid it, and they will work just as hard on the hundred thousandth image as on the first one.”

Elliott Sedegah
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Adobe

Deliver experiences that make hearts leap

Marketers want to surface the right content precisely when and where customers need it. But to be efficient, you want to create once and deliver everywhere, with content automatically adjusting to fit connected experiences on any channel. Machine learning lets you do that — finding better ways to optimize layout and copy wherever they’re used. For example, smart summarization can take your product manager’s blog post about gourmet hot dogs and trim redundant content for a news clip or email.

Personalize customer treatment

You can introduce as many experience variations as you choose for your digital properties to personalize customer experiences. By evaluating all behavioral and contextual variables, machine learning can determine the best experience for each consumer — regardless of channel, device, or screen. As machine learning learns what works with each consumer, predictive analytics can tell you what each one wants to see and buy — so you’ll know whether they’ll be excited by the image of the hotel on the island beach in Phuket or the snowy slopes at Whistler.

Analyze performance with X-ray insight

To see which content is resonating and creating compelling experiences, you need insight into the moment. The combination of big data and sophisticated machine learning can help content marketers accurately measure the dollar impact of marketing activities in real time. And creators can fine-tune content based on what the market is looking for.

For example, according to Nate Smith at Adobe, an outdoor retailer running a national Thanksgiving promotion may offer shoppers a great price on a marquee item, hoping they’ll fill their baskets with higher-margin buys. Alerts and insights into anomalies can provide real-time access to performance, enabling the retailer to make immediate shifts in pricing, placement, promotions, and segments worth investing in.

Urgent care for content marketing

Even two decades into the 21st century, many marketing messages miss their target. Yes, it’s tough to get it right — reaching the right person with the right offer at the right place and moment. But leading companies do, with the help of AI.

Just as a doctor must address each patient’s issues and concerns, you must appreciate each customer’s needs and desires. But meeting their expectations also calls for new tools: You can’t win in the digital era with industrial-age technology. Integrating AI will help you deliver the truly surprising and delightful experiences that keep customers feeling on top of the world. And together, marketer and machine can tackle the tedious, the overwhelming, and the seemingly impossible — making you more agile, more powerful, and more inspired than ever.

Your next steps

https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/use-cases/campaign-orchestration.html

https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/use-cases/campaign-orchestration.html