These days, it seems there’s hardly anything marketers can’t measure when it comes to our content. We track engagement trends, cover our content with metadata tags, and pour over performance data.
But there’s one question we still haven’t been able to crack. It’s a query so simple it almost seems silly to wonder about at all:
What does our content actually say?
What If We Could Measure Message?
I don’t ask the question simply in the context of your latest product flyer or eBook campaign. I mean your content as a complete entity; the entire mass of touchpoints that build the holy grail of modern marketing: customer experience, which a recent Salesforce reports ranked as more important than a company’s actual product. What if you could get a birds-eye view of the way in which your content works together to tell the story of your brand?
I know it sounds crazy, but take a minute to think seriously about the kind of doors this insight would open.
Until now, we’ve focused our energies on measuring volume and performance. But visualizing the application of our message wouldn’t just be another row on an Excel spreadsheet—it would offer us an entirely new way of looking at our content. It would move us beyond a pure measurement mentality and allow us to understand how the material we produce frames a buyer’s mental picture of who we are and what we offer.
Imagine, if you can, what it would be like to be able to answer the questions:
- Is our messaging strategy actually being implemented across our content?
- Is that strategy moving the needle?
What’s AI Got to Do With It?
Of course, answering these questions is any marketer’s dream. But it can be hard not to see it as little more than a pipe dream.
After all, even an endless supply of interns couldn’t possibly read the entirety of your content library and surface the intangible themes that bind it together (or don’t). That’s why it’s time to invite our friend artificial intelligence to come out and play.
If you have a hearty sense of skepticism at the very mention of AI, I don’t blame you. I’m bombarded by sales reps promising the miracle of machine learning so often I’m starting to wonder whether there will be any humans left in my department when they’re through with it.
But the real power of AI doesn’t come from replicating human work—it comes from doing the jobs we can’t, so that we might do our jobs a whole lot better.
If a human can empathize with customers and dream up a compelling message framework, a robot can break humans’ outputs down to their very DNA to understand how well they’re executing.
If you’re anything like me, you’re asking “but how?” and, perhaps more urgently, “when??”
I don’t have the answers, but I know people who do: Christine Bottagaro, Kapost’s CMO, and Riley Gibson, our VP of Product, are at the forefront of this growing movement. And instead of hogging their expertise to myself, I’m brought them into the webinar studio so they could share their insights with the wider marketing community.
They presented about what measuring message with AI will look like, and why it’s so important for modern marketers. Watch the on-demand webinar now.
Marketing’s Next Frontier: Measuring Message