Content strategy is the art of organizing content so that people find what they need to help them take action. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) make it easier to predict what content will be the most useful and effective with users, by predicting how best to deliver and leverage content, so that it is accessible, searchable, intuitive, and efficient. AI allows for adaptive content, which enables content delivery based on environmental circumstances, such as device type and operating systems, time and location, and demographics of the user. You can use AI and adaptive content to improve your content strategy. 

What is adaptive content?

Adaptive content is the practice of  “create once, publish everywhere.” At its core, adaptive content is a content strategy practice that looks at the needs and requirements for delivering personalized or targeted content through the lens of what will be required to create, deliver, and evaluate the success of those initiatives. For organizations, there is a basic need for content to be used, managed, and leveraged in order to differentiate and be distinguished from competitors. For the content strategist and content creators, managing, using, repurposing, and marketing content can become a major burden on their everyday workload. Leveraging AI to manage content allows organizations to focus on refining content strategies instead of managing the content they post.

Optimizing the content experience  

Intelligent adaptive content is content that is structured, reusable, and presentation independent and that contains meaningful metadata that delivers targeted messages based on what is known about the user. This may include information about the user’s device, the location or other contextual cues, or personal information such as life changes, gender, or  income.

AI can help with the publishing and targeting of the content, but it cannot tell the content strategists and producers what to write. It also cannot develop the strategy for what should be posted. Organizations can run the risk of overestimating the value of using AI technologies and underestimate the effort and time required from people to create and manage and evaluate the content. Adaptive content has the capacity to be a great help for content organizations, but there are factors that should be considered when determining how and when to use it. Here are some things to consider when thinking about AI for your content:

1. It’s hard to personalize everything using AI.

Predictive intelligence helps to personalize content to address user content needs and interests.  Content strategists can imagine scenarios where content is personalized and tailored for individual user needs or experiences. This type of personalization is difficult to build and create at scale. 

2. AI can make your content curation much faster and easier to manage.

Daily curation of relevant and engaging content is a tedious task. It still takes a significant amount of energy and time to sift through content, let alone curating content that is both relevant and engaging for users. AI helps content strategists curate content for users that maximizes an organization’s share of attention online.

3. AI can help you make data-driven decisions for content development.

Content strategists often rely on manually sorting through piles of data to inform creating a content strategy. AI helps analyze content performance data, compare that data with the one present on other websites, and offer related suggestions about everything right from what topics perform best and trending to help with what to write and on what platforms.

4. You can optimize how users find your content using AI. 

Using AI, content strategists can think more broadly about how various content elements, such as a title, tags, meta descriptions, intro copy, and images, work together to make it easier for users to find their content. Content strategists can work to create content that is optimized for organic search, and AI reduces this work by assessing what content will be most appealing to users based on search terms. 

The future of AI and adaptive content 

Using AI and adaptive content to improve your content strategy will likely make the jobs of content strategists more meaningful and easier; AI technology has the ability to gather data and provide the content strategist analysis that will allow content producers the freedom to harness their powers of creativity to impart a unique human experience that provides deeper meaning, value, and insight for users.

AI technology can be incredibly effective at helping create better content faster that is both on-brand and on-target. But it needs to be used in collaboration with content creators, gently nudging them with the appropriate guidance while they write and offering the governance necessary to ensure consistency. In other words, organizations would be remiss to solely rely on AI technologies blindly. To reap their benefits, AI needs to be embedded into content teams.  AI should be used with, not in replacement of, the people on your content team.