How do you anticipate AI can be used in a content mapping exercise?

For folks who are unfamiliar, here's a short note on some key elements of the Content Playground framework:

- The traditional funnel struggles to capture the full buyer's journey, since it only starts when the marketing team recognizes that someone is on a journey. Most people are NOT in the market to buy, and they do a lot of their research before they raise their hand to show that they're buying.

- Thus, we need to stop mapping content to the traditional phases (awareness, consideration, and decision), and instead, map them to content depths (conceptual, strategic, and tactical). Conceptual is the "what" and the "why" of the idea, and helps the audience understand the problem space. Strategic is the tools, processes, and key knowledge components that must be in place to make the conceptual ideas reality; it helps the audience think about the solution space, and equips them to do their own research. The tactical depth is the prescriptive, step-by-step instructions and ongoing habits to implement the idea.

- We must also look at multiple intents, not just buy-intent (the traditional funnel assumes that all content is ultimately buy-intent). But the Playground means we recognize that there's also use-intent, help-intent, trust-intent, and learn-intent. As we think about this from a marketing and content creation perspective, we need to think about the next action and explicit CTAs. For example, if the next action is to log into the product to do something, the content is use-intent content. If the next action is to contact sales or sign up for an account, then it's buy-intent. True learn-intent content doesn't require the audience to do anything "beneficial" for the company. They might tell their team about the idea, think about it while they take a while, or share it on social media, but they're not necessarily doing something that we can "track" as part of the "funnel".

When it comes to AI, I think that the initial content mapping needs to be done by a human, because it's a mix of art and science. Figuring out which narratives to focus on, how to frame them, which depths are most important and which narratives have enough depth to fuel programs and campaigns is the strategic and creative work that humans are good at and enjoy.

However, getting audience insights can be a use case for incorporating AI into the workflow. For example, using it to summarize customer research or user interviews, helping to pull out patterns to inform the content mapping process.

It can also be good for helping you understand the language of the audience and topics the audience is most interested in hearing about. For example, it can help you identify the most-asked questions if you give it a bunch of webinar transcripts. It can also help you see most-used words in customer conversations to help you mirror the language of your audience.

Because the Playground is about seamless hand-offs and allowing your audience to choose their own path, it requires a lot of content. AI can accelerate repurposing efforts. For example, we've been experimenting with AI-assisted clip creation, using a tool to help generate short clips from a long-form video. We've also used machine-generated transcripts to make it easier to create long-form or short-form written assets from podcasts or webinars. These are basic use cases that go much faster as the tools get smarter.