Content Intelligence - Definition and How does it work?

What is Content Intelligence?

Content Intelligence is a technology built using artificial intelligence that produces valuable insights from your content to inform future content marketing strategies. It is essentially a process that helps you write and design your content to get maximum reach and engagement.

Ryan Skinner, the Principal Analyst at Forrester, very accurately defines Content Intelligence as a “technology that helps content understand itself - what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotion it calls to mind”.

This technology or process will perform a thorough analysis of the content to inform writing goals and create topic clustering models, so your domain gains authority for a topic quickly.

Content Intelligence helps save time on the initial research, structuring of your content, and the entire writing process. The focus is to create targeted and conversion-focused content that drives results quickly to your content marketing efforts.

The data-driven strategies developed using Content Intelligence will in turn help domains to build topical authority on their niche quickly. This will mean high returning visitors, increased conversion rates, and overall more visibility for your content.

Content Intelligence from a Technology perspective

Content Intelligence is a tool or software that leverages big data analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to compile data on your content, information about the target audience with the purpose to optimize content marketing decisions and processes to derive maximum output. It leverages specific technologies for a particular use case, which are mentioned below. 

1. Machine learning algorithms - This will analyze the raw data of your content, find patterns and trends to inform content marketing decisions.

2. Natural language understanding (NLU)- This is a branch of natural language processing in artificial intelligence that mainly deals with machine reading comprehension. In the context of Content Intelligence, NLU comprehends the content to create topic clusters of similar content that will help gain topical authority.

3. Natural language generation (NLG) - Similar to NLU, natural language generation is the use of artificial intelligence to produce natural language output - which is written phrases from a dataset. This, to an extent, directly contributes to the writing process helping create content in plain language for your website.

Content Intelligence from a Writer’s Perspective

Content Intelligence tools readily provide all the important data-driven insights on how to structure the content on your page, what topics to write, etc, so writers can entirely focus on writing and not the optimizations.

Content Intelligence from a Business Perspective

Content Marketing is one of the core marketing avenues for many businesses. Content Intelligence helps these businesses to ensure maximum ROI on their website content. So all the hard work on creating the content is not gone to waste.

Content Intelligence from an SEO Perspective

Content Intelligence tools provide a steady flow of keywords and topics which is a departure from the traditional keyword research. Content Intelligence is a more advanced way to create a powerful SEO strategy for your domain.  

How does it work?

Now that we understand the technologies involved and their functions, let’s dive into the main steps in the Content Intelligence process. 

1. Data Collection - collecting relevant data from the right data sources to understand trends and customer behavior patterns.
2. Data Analysis - performing the analysis on the raw data available using machine learning algorithms or even AI-powered analytics tools.
3. Deriving Insights - once the analysis is done, the next step is to derive insights and recognize all the opportunities to generate new content in different areas and platforms.

After recognizing these opportunities the final step would be to leverage all the specific insight to work on creating the content. We have explained steps in greater detail below:

1. Data Collection 

In the data collection phase, businesses will have to make use of tools or platforms that provide data on customer behavior and content trends. The goal of this first step is to get all the relevant data related to your content and your business niche, so the data can be further analyzed to derive a content strategy. 

Some of the relevant data can be:

• Data on your previously published content that did particularly well
• Overall performance of all content on your company’s website
• Competitor’s data related to their content and the specific strategies they have used
• Content and market-related trends to understand the popular topics
• Particular social media trends to understand what kind of content does well on a particular platform

2. Data Analysis

After collecting all the necessary information, the next step would be to analyze this information to match the particular parameters your business is focusing on. Asking a few pointed questions can very effectively guide your analysis.

• Which topics have higher conversion rates?
• What content are my customers interested in and are actively searching for?
• Which channel will maximize the reach of this content?
• What strategies have worked well for my competitors and how can I infuse them for my business?

Here the analysis needs to be performed on a few main areas:

• Customer analysis - You can use machine learning algorithms to perform a thorough analysis of the customer data to understand what content will attract your customers.
• Competitor analysis - You can use different SEO tools or analytics platforms to track your competitors' content. This will help you analyze the scope of your niche.
• Channel analysis - Analysing your audience on different channels will greatly inform the decisions on what kind of content to post on a particular platform.

3. Deriving Insights 

With all the above information, the next would be to derive important insights and curate a holistic content strategy. 

Some Content Intelligence tools can directly provide data-driven suggestions, cutting out all the effort from your end. These content insights can range from entirely new content areas that can be explored to improvements on your existing content. 

Finally, Content Intelligent tools powered by artificial intelligence, like natural language processing can also help you to write your content. Grammarly is one of the most commonly used tools in this domain. This will mainly inform decisions on how to structure your content and frame sentences to improve readability.

How to use Content Intelligence techniques?

The general Content Intelligence processes can very easily be incorporated into your existing content strategy. These can be small improvements that can improve the pre-existing content. 

The main scope of these changes can be performed on three different levels on your website. Each contained in the other, sort of like a babushka doll. These levels are as follows.

1. Domain Data

On this level, all the improvements will be made keeping the entire domain in mind. Keeping this in mind, here you will be analyzing the traffic and performance of all the content on your domain. So naturally, on this level, the analysis happens on a big picture and surface level. 

The goal would be to perform an audit on non-performing pages, so all the content on your domain is holistic and adds relevantly to your niche.    

2. Cluster Data

Once you have decided on your main niche, next you need to start identifying main topics to form topic clusters on your domain. For example, marketing can be the main topic and all the marketing-related content can be part of the topic cluster. 

Creating topic clusters can be a full-proof way to dominate a particular topic and gain domain authority quickly. Each individual subpage will amplify the sister pages to improve all their performance as a whole - all sort of uplifting each other. You can start getting organic traffic easily for most of the pages in the cluster in this way. 

3. Single Page Data

At this level, we have arrived at the individual pages. You can start adding pages to complete all the subtopics in your topic cluster or optimize the content on pre-existing individual pages.

The pages should be optimized such that they effectively marry all the SEO elements with the core text, making sure the structure is user-friendly. On the single page level, you want to make sure that the content on the page is relevant to your audience and is part of the overall niche of your business. 

Popular Content Intelligence tools on the Internet

1. Buzzsumo - Buzzsumo is one of the popular marketing tools that provide insights to generate useful ideas and high-performing content. You can also get data insights and monitor the performance of your domain using Buzzsumo.


2. Curata - Curata is great content curation software that helps discover, curate, and share relevant content. It is a holistic tool that easily organizes and contextualizes content to create a holistic content strategy for your website. 


3. Optimizely - Optimizely provides data-driven decisions for your website with the help of technology and continuous experimentation.


4. Contently - Contently is another tool that is focused on analytics to improve content marketing strategies. 


5. NewsCred - NewsCred is a marketing manager and software solution that helps you with the end-to-end process of your marketing lifecycle. Moreover, it also helps navigate through different avenues for content promotion. It promises to maximize visibility, increase control over your content and accelerate campaign execution.

You can also visit this AI tools directory website to check out the most popular artificial intelligence tools.