How to use AI to optimise your marketing content

By Tide Member Igor Volzhanin

So you’re a small business owner with a brilliant product or service that’s going to make waves in the market. You’ve done all the work of building the business so far, now you just need customers and traction, and you’ve been using online ads to get your product out there.

Except that, when it comes to ads, you’re finding yourself a bit lost. How do you know what works and what doesn’t? 

Since your team is still small, resources and manpower are inevitably limited, so how can you create killer marketing content that competes with the big industry players? 

Traditionally, a marketing team has several ways of discovering what makes their ads successful: experimenting, extensive A/B testing, market research – to name just a few. 

As a small business, your marketing department is probably quite small. You may even have just one person working on the marketing side of things, which means all these traditional approaches take up time and money, neither of which you have. Most importantly, even after you run these tests, how do you actually learn from them?

Without a dedicated marketing team to carry out and learn from these tests, how do you figure out what works in your marketing?

This is where data and artificial intelligence (AI) can be your best friend. Let’s look at why it’s worth investing in AI tools to optimise your marketing content to help your product become a bestseller. 

AI tools read data and make predictions

AI is able to use past data to simulate human intelligence processes to perform tasks, especially repetitive tasks, much faster than a human could. AI can also identify patterns and make predictions based on the data it’s trained on, making it a powerful marketing tool. 

Most significantly, over the last decade targeting specific audiences has been made much easier with AI algorithms which digest customer data and reveal their habits. Similarly, some innovative companies are using AI to match adverts to viewers. This allows companies to dynamically predict click-through rates (CTRs) and optimise advert selection in real-time. 

AI tools tend to focus on targeting and delivery – helpful for stretching marketers’ resources  – but they fail to see the bigger picture. These tools miss the importance of content data: they can’t understand what specific features perform best in your creatives (campaign image assets for example) and engage your audience. 

An AI tool that predicts what creative will perform better is equally if not more important than a tool that focuses on delivery. Let me explain why. 

Discover what works best in your ads with  ‘semantic content analysis’ 

To understand and make use of your content data – and to discover what’s working in your marketing and what’s not – it’s a matter of breaking it down into elements and checking for patterns which relate those choices to your ad performance. This process is called semantic content analysis. 

You can conduct this analysis with all sorts of content, but let’s take a look at the images we use in ads. If you were to conduct semantic content analysis on your marketing images, you’d first have to take all of the images you’ve used previously and note down any features in those images. As a very simple example, you might find that many of the images you’ve used in ads feature the colour red. 

You can also go deeper than this to identify less obvious features that we nonetheless perceive in images. For example, we might sense an image was more ‘staged’ if the people or items in it are positioned in a way that seems unnatural. There are countless different features to look out for, from what objects are in the image to the emotions the image evokes. 

You can also use this process to identify text features. For example, you might notice your ads tend to use certain words. The language might be more formal or more friendly. Again, there are many potential different features in each element of an ad.

Once you’ve identified the different elements, you can see which types of images are receiving the most engagement and understand which features most appeal to your audience. 

Carrying out semantic content analysis improves your understanding of what content your audience prefers and allows you to create ads that have real impact. 

Use an AI tool to scale your semantic content analysis

Content analysis is easier if you have just a few campaigns on the go. Scaling semantic content analysis is more tricky. 

It isn’t practical to expect people to spend days, weeks or even months labelling pieces of content when we’re looking at hundreds of past campaigns. Here’s where AI becomes a lifesaver because it can conduct semantic content analysis of all your content data in just moments. 

With an AI tool trained on past engagement data, even just a single marketer can automate the process of semantically analysing hundreds of past campaigns. In just minutes, you can understand the exact features that are the most impactful, making the most of a modest marketing budget.

Invest in AI for marketing that works

As a small business, investing in an AI tool that tells you what features will make your campaigns more impactful is imperative. 

With access to an easy-to-use AI, you can seriously cut back on the time and money you’d spend on experimenting, A/B testing and market research, maximising ROI by getting straight to the marketing content that work.

About Igor Volzhanin

Igor founded Datasine in 2015 after moving to London to do a PhD in Psychology and Computer Science. Prior to that, he spent five years working in international development. A relentless innovator, Igor is passionate about bringing his research to life and helping companies build meaningful relationships with their customers.

About Datasine 

Datasine is an AI-powered marketing technology company, bringing together psychology and AI to empower marketers and creatives to understand what content features perform best. Founded in 2015, its first product, Datasine Connect, uses data-driven, interpretable and actionable insights to identify the most impactful features – both visual and written – for a brand’s specific customer base. Datasine work with brands across multiple industries globally, from financial institutions to hospitality, retail, real estate and travel.

Photo by Visual Tag Mx, published on Pexels