Artificial Intelligence is transforming content production for marketing, which can help deliver improved ROI and business growth

AI is putting content marketers on the verge of becoming AI-first! AI is all set to revolutionize content. Is your business AI-ready? Talk to any smart marketer today and they will tell you how artificial intelligence is being adopted across the customer lifecycle. Whether it is AI-generated content or predictive analytics, AI is being applied in some form or the other to reach, convert, and engage customers. Owing to the competitive edge and improved marketing ROI it offers, more and more content marketing organizations are investing in AI-based content solutions. This chart shows us how content marketing organizations are applying AI to improve content effectiveness. AI…

What is headless CMS and how can it benefit marketers?

It’s a question that you may have either been asked or have asked yourself in the last few months—"what exactly is headless CMS and why should marketers care?" It's unproven. It's not ready to use. It's too technical. It's only for developers. All common concerns that I have heard to date. But that's not the whole story. The CMS marketplace is moving on and it’s important to understand how.

The Stuff of Nightmares

For many marketers technical advancements are a nightmare. Having to learn new technologies, keep up with the times, and figure out how to utilise them to their full potential—it's all very scary. But headless CMS doesn't need to invoke sleepless nights thinking of the four horsemen of the apocalypse approaching. The headless CMS architecture is still developing and as it evolves, it will become a useful tool for both developers and marketers…

Content Recommendation Engines are used by over half of all top sites 

We're all familiar with those 'around the web' sections featured at the bottom of articles in many news sites. These 'advertorial' boxes can sometimes show dubious content which hasn't been short of criticism, specially among the editorial stuff of leading publications. However, the reality is that they're a significant revenue stream for some of the biggest media sites in the web. While the proliferation of content recommendation engines as a monetization tool for sites of all sizes has been remarkable, recently Slate.com and The New Yorker decided to drop them due to links that can lead to questionable websites, run by unknown entities.

SimilarTech released new insights showing the market share of content recommendation engines to understand their popularity among the biggest US & UK media publishers online. 

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Apple gets in on the rush to open up publishing on mobile optimised pages

Importance: [rating=4] (For content publishers) Recommended Source: Apple Developer blog The Internet was built for desktop computers. Then, some smart folks made the internet available on all sorts of devices small enough for us to carry about with us. After a few years of explosive growth, mobile web browsing rose to become the majority of web traffic last year. Yet we were left with an internet comprised of sites largely designed for viewing on desktop devices. Plenty of sites were quick to realise the issue and implement responsive sites so they're sites weren't impossibly hard to navigate for their legions of mobile visitors. Whilst there are still some laggards, the transition to responsive sites is now mostly complete for larger sites. Whilst responsive design removed one obstacle for mobile users, it doesn't completely solve their pain points. Another big issue…

This infographic shows why Wordpress wins "hands down"

I'm often asked this question by marketers taking their first steps into blogging as an individual or for their companies. These days I always answer without hesitation "Wordpress"! My justification is based around the experience you can create (Wordpress has great themes or is readily tailored); ease-of-use (as easy as Word or Pages); extensibility (plug-ins?); scalability (can it grow with us?); support (many agencies and freelance developers support it) and cost (it's open source, you only have hosting costs). This infographic provides a more qualitative assessment to support these arguments. The market share figures really show how Wordpress dominates. The average day sees an average 500,000 new posts on Wordpress.com, not to mention the many sites, like Smart Insights that run a bespoke hosted version for their blog or full content management system. If you're a…

Social Content Management System Tools Reviewed

Value: [rating=4] Our commentary: Since many marketers have rushed to embrace Facebook, Twitter, blogs, customer ratings and reviews, and other social media platforms"€”inviting consumers to comment on their products and services across the Web"€”they are facing an unexpected consequence: content overload. The posts, comments, tweets, videos, and other content your customers are creating about your product and services may feel like a tsunami. The lay on all the user generated content that should come as a result. So what do you do? The good news is that several social media content-management systems (CMSes) to hand that allow marketers to not only manage the distribution and placement of the online content about their brands but also analyze and leverage that content to build their businesses. Marketing Profs have created a handy reference of the best 8 that they can find. Marketing implications: Now that you've invested the time to…

In this interview which accompanies my other posts on trends and predictions for 2010, I interview Ian Truscott, Vice-President of Web Content Management at Alterian. My interview explores trends in content management and practical ideas for improving engagement - I liked Ian's reference to the concept of "Smart content" - much content on corporate sites still doesn't have the context of categories and tags commonly used in blogs. You can also read Ian's views on trends in engagement through content on the Engaging Times blog where Ian and other Alterian bloggers share their views on emerging trends on content management.

Marketing trends influencing content

Q1. Ian, what do you see as the broader trends in marketing today which affect the needs marketers have for managing content? [Ian Truscott, Alterian] In the midst of a digital revolution, we are…