There is an overabundance of information but a shortage of attention; your content might thus be drowning in noise. Why not use artificial intelligence in your content marketing efforts to understand exactly how to write to cover a topic comprehensively, for improved reader engagement and SEO results?
With new AI tools, marketers can create better content and establish authority on topics relevant to their business, resulting in enhanced organic website traffic, improved thought leadership and improved rates of customer conversion. This is exactly what MarketMuse does.
I had a discussion on these topics with Aki Balogh, co-founder and CEO of MarketMuse. Before MarketMuse, he worked with a startup that made an analytic database for big data engagements, and prior to that, he was an associate at an investment company where he looked at investments in big data & machine learning.
Now, over to the interview with Aki Balogh!
Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO of MarketMuseWhat is Your Company’s Background?
The HOW: MarketMuse started in 2013 when Aki Balogh met Richard Mallah, an artificial intelligence technologist with a focus on semantic analysis. The first two years the team was made up of only the two of them, with Richard in an advisory role, and interns and contractors to support them. They were a couple of difficult years since Balogh was building the system by hand and didn’t seek serious funding until a few years later.
A third co-founder, Jeff Coyle, became a member of the MarketMuse team as Chief Revenue Officer in late 2015 after discovering the platform as Vice President of Search & Engagement at TechTarget, one of MarketMuse’s first major customers. The same year as Jeff joined, the company went to market and a year later MarketMuse’s revenue had quintupled. Since then, both the company and the team have been growing quickly.
The WHY: MarketMuse originated out of the need for better and more comprehensive content. With search algorithms analyzing hundreds of billions of different searches, it takes a machine to complement the creative process.
There is no way for a human to search the entire Internet. However, machines can do it. Search engines such as Google are looking to better understand the intent of its user, and the ultimate goal of content creators and marketers is now to generate high-quality content that describes their products and services, and thus better optimize their content to establish their brands as thought leaders in an area.
What Problem Does MarketMuse Solve?
MarketMuse uses AI to build content briefs that show exactly how to write to cover a topic comprehensively. By using the MarketMuse methodology, marketers can build more comprehensive content and establish authority on topics relevant to their business, resulting in enhanced organic website traffic, improved thought leadership and improved rates of customer conversion.
What Does MarketMuse do, and why is it Important to Your Customers?
MarketMuse enables the creation of comprehensive articles, increases topic coverage across a website, observes and analyzes the competitive landscape and discovers content improvement priorities
MarketMuse addresses problems encountered by three types of personas: Content Decision Makers, Content Marketers and SEO Specialists.
The first one can be classified into three different groups:
Content Decision Makers (such as Content Strategists, Director of Content, Manager of Content)
Some of their main problems consist of lacking the internal resources, tools, and time to do the proper analysis and research. Sales, for example, are often faced with the problem of having a shortage of MQL’s. Creating the right content for the right audience automatically pre-qualifies the audience as a fit.
Secondly, Content Marketers (writers, creators and editors)
They face the difficulty of knowing what to write and how to write it. There is often the misconception that quality cannot be produced at a required quantity.
Finally, the SEO Specialists are moving from a focus on keywords to a focus on writing high-quality content. While it’s not known exactly how the Google algorithm works, SEOs have conducted experiments that have identified topical comprehensiveness as a key component of Google ranking decisions (due to Google’s Hummingbird search engine update and the Google Knowledge Graph).
The platform helps marketers develop improved content strategies which will drive better results in terms of ranking keywords, SEO ranking, and organic search traffic.Ultimately, this will allow companies to be more competitive within their industry by the increased share of voice they will have with their audience.
Most competitors normally focus on keywords when it comes to creating and optimizing content. They look at the relation between the top-ranking articles and find the commonalities. MarketMuse, on the other hand, models a topic and shows how to write to cover a topic comprehensively. For example, what are the relevant concepts to mention in the content? What are the questions to answer?
What MarketMuse does is important to customers because it helps them create the highest-quality content that ranks. The quality of the content is based on writing comprehensively and targeting the user intent with AI machine learning. The platform helps connect the dots between what the content marketers want to write about and what the users want to know. This will benefit in having better engagement, winning on search, and developing thought leadership.
MarketMuse – How it works:
The way the platform works is it scours massive amounts of web content to look for the topical coverage around a focus topic. It builds a topic model that helps a marketer write like a subject matter expert about the focus topic.
MarketMuse also calculates a “Content Quality Score” which shows the quality of your content vs. competitors, i.e to the top-ranking pages in Google search. The platform also surfaces Related Topics, which represent all the related topics that should be mentioned in order to cover the focus topic. Users are able to see how well each one is covering the topic (Content Score), their Word Count, and compare their text to the top-ranking ones.
How Does MarketMuse use AI?
MarketMuse builds topic models to measure relevance in text.
In general, a topic model is a text-mining method that determines the relevance within a body of text. Topic modeling allows algorithms to analyze vast amounts of web content, assigning topical relevancy to each page and ranking it efficiently and accurately with each query.
As a concrete example: one of the more common topic models for identifying topical probability is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a statistical model in natural language processing. An LDA model views individual documents within a corpus – or, in search terms, pages within a site – and determines the relevancy of each page to a topic, assigning a percentage for topics mentioned.
LDA isn’t the only type of topic modeling, however. If you’re interested in taking a deep dive, take a look at explicit semantic analysis, latent semantic analysis, hierarchical Dirichlet process and non-negative matrix factorization.
In Your Mind, What is the Future of AI in Business and Marketing?
It became clear that there’s an overabundance of information but a shortage of attention. AI in marketing helps better target messages so that the right information reaches the right person in the right time. It’s a necessity because we’re all drowning in noise.
AI tools help marketers get better utilization of their time, minimize error, point out additional opportunities, and overall improve the quality of content being created.
Research has shown conclusively that writing higher-quality content, tightly focused on answers all of the key questions on a topic performs better and overall a better use of marketers’ and reader’s time. AI will help us track to and achieve these goals.
Do You Think Marketers Will be Replaced by AI Robots?
I think it will release massive amounts of creativity. That said, there is fear of job loss, esp. on the clerical/research level.
MarketMuse is an example of a software product that helps marketers make better content strategy decisions. It’s a decision support system. However, it does not replace humans in the process.
Simple clerical jobs such as content audits or low-level research will be replaced by more sophisticated solutions such as MarketMuse. However, the involvement of AI will not take away the human side of ideation and creation – just speed up the more low-level analytical and research work.
Do You Have Any Other Thoughts on AI in Business and Marketing?
Don’t shy away from AI. It sounds complicated, but it’s simpler than you think. Experiment with new AI solutions. Every AI solution is just another way for marketers to become more productive.
In this interview, Aki Balogh shared interesting insights into how content marketing can be improved using modern AI technologies and tools. With MarketMuse, content marketers get help in improving the quality of their content, thus improving both reader engagement and organic traffic.
I am an author, speaker and consultant in marketing automation and artificial intelligence.
Do you need help with marketing automation or AI-based solutions? Contact me and let’s discuss how I can help you!
