2023 was by far the most turbulent year for digital marketing, with generative AI having us all questioning the future of online findability and what we need to do to adapt.
2024 is going to be even more challenging and exciting. Yes, both.
Where’s change, there’s also an opportunity.
Generative AI will make buying journeys even more unpredictable but it also provides marketing opportunities we have never seen before.
Here are six AI-powered tools showing you how much more you can achieve using generative AI, as a marketer or a business owner.
1. Perplexity.AI
No 2024 tool list is complete without including at least one generative engine. I have already mentioned the most obvious one, ChatGPT, in quite a few articles of mine, including this one on fine-tuning your social media advertising strategy. So in this article, I am presenting an alternative one.
Perplexity.AI is a generative engine that is predicted to be a future Google threat because it can search, and update its knowledge base on the fly. It works similarly to ChatGPT: You can converse with the tool asking all sorts of questions and it will provide you with answers and citations.
Perplexity.AI blends AI answers with related videos, images, and follow-up questions.
Use the tool to summarize your content, find sources to refer to, and learn how to build content that has a better chance of being found by generative AI engines.
There are many more ChatGPT alternatives to check out. The more of these you are aware of, the better you are informed of the new solutions and opportunities the technology has to offer.
2. Keyword Insights: Content Optimization Strategy
Keyword Insights uses generative AI to find keyword ideas, cluster keyword lists, create content briefs, and optimize for search intent.
Once you know your target keyword cluster, use the “Content briefs” feature to create a detailed and SEO-driven content brief. A content brief is a set of requirements and an outline of what you plan to include in your article. It helps keep your team aligned with your SEO strategy, style and desired content depth.
Keyword Insights pulls a lot of data sources to help you create a better brief, including Google’s organic results, Reddit, Quora, and questions from “People Also Ask” boxes.
You can go through all the data and add subheadings to your brief.
Keyword Insights also uses a proprietary “Keyword Context” metric. When analyzing a particular keyword, the tool searches for it in Google and grabs SERP signals pointing to a particular intent.
For example, if the majority of URLs ranking in the top 20 for that keyword are articles, the “context” will be determined as informational. The presence of shopping results within the SERPs will help the tool identify the “keyword context” as transactional.
Keyword context is identified for a singular query or a keyword cluster.
Keyword context powers the tool’s AI-driven features like content briefs and keyword discovery.
3. InVideo: AI Video Creation
Invideo AI creates videos from text prompts. The generated video is narrated based on your preferences and includes a background video and subtitles. You can then edit your video using the built-in online video editor.
To create a video, select a “workflow” (available workflows are Youtube shorts, Youtube explainers, Recent events videos, or videos from a script).
You can select the length of your future video (up to 15 minutes).
I chose “Youtube explainer” and prompted it to create a video explaining why businesses need search engine optimization.
For the target audience, I selected “Business owners”, for style, I chose “Minimalist Modern” and finally I picked Youtube as my target platform:
Invideo generated a brand new script, picked media (images and videos), generated a voiceover, and took a couple of minutes to put it all together. You can provide it with follow-up prompts to add or remove sections, change the style of narration, or change background media.
In my test, both the script and the narration were of impressive quality. I wouldn’t change a thing.
I was really impressed by the quality of the script and narration. The voiceover sounded very natural and the flow of the video was logical and convincing. I think this is a great way to generate video intros, video ads, and video presentations on a topic you are working on.
4. Namify: Create Your Brand Identity
Namify is a web-based app that allows you to find your brand name from a single text prompt. Describe what you do, and the tool will pick some catchy and memorable brand names for your future site. It will also generate your brand’s visual identity making it easier for you to get started:
You can filter suggestions by style, provide a keyword that must be included in the name, and describe your target audience for it to better align suggestions.
For your chosen name, the tool will check domain and social media username availability and even check trademark availability in your target country.
5. RivalFlow: Discover Organic Search Opportunities
RivalFlow uses AI to discover your organic SERP opportunities. All you need is to type your domain name.
The tool finds your domain’s higher-ranking queries, identifies organic search competitors worth comparing with, and provides content optimization recommendations for your page to overcome that identified competition.
The key value propositions of RivalFlow are:
- It takes a second to set up: The input data is just your domain. This is perfect for small business owners who have no time to set up advanced SEO tools.
- Smart competitor’s identification. The tool will choose a page your site realistically can compete with (based on your comparable backlink profiles and organic traffic)
Once you provide your domain, RivelFlow will return suggested SERPs where it identified missing low-hanging-fruit opportunities:
Go from opportunity to opportunity and follow AI-driven recommendations to improve your content and on-page SEO.
6. Demand Schere: Search Ranking Monitoring
Google’s “10 blue links” days are long gone, and so are the days of query matching. These were the days when we could estimate the organic traffic of a page merely based on its position.
It is no longer that straightforward. These days we are dealing with visual, diverse, and interactive search engine result pages that can distract users from clicking, get them to scroll further, check alternative content formats (like images or videos), or prompt them to search for something else.
Rankings are no longer that straightforward. So evaluating your SEO strategy effectiveness based on rankings is no longer enough.
Demand Schere offers a different and innovative approach to rank tracking and competitor comparison by using a few proprietary metrics:
Visual Rank
Visual Rank takes into account everything that comes on top of organic listings (e.g. shopping results, images, ads, etc.) which forces a user to scroll to the top organic position. You can rank #1 but visually it appears where #3 would be if there were nothing on top.
Maximum Potential Rank
In many cases, top positions are simply unachievable. This is where there’s an official site, .gov page, Wikipedia (in most cases), etc. ranking for that query.
Demand Schere offers this metric for you to stop working on improving positions that are impossible and focus on achievable targets instead.
Share of Voice
Share of Voice is Demand Schere’s metric that reflects each domain’s “visibility” in search results. Share of Voice measures what percentage of the total SERP real estate or visibility is taken up by results from that domain.
Demand Schere analyzes the top 20 search engine results for a given search query. It looks at all the different SERP features that appear on those pages – things like organic listings, images, ads, images, knowledge panels, videos, etc.
The tool does this by assigning values to different SERP sections based on how prominent they are in SERPs. Organic listings may get a higher value than ads in the sidebar, for instance. But organic listings will get lower Share of Voice if they are pushed down the page by other search sections.
Google (with all its sections that don’t include external links) is included giving you a quick overview as to how much SERP visibility is even possible for the particular query.
For example, if Google’s Share of Voice for a particular SERP is more than 50, that may mean that Google dominates the visible part of SERP with its own sections (quick answers, ads, images, shopping results, etc. everything that takes a user to Google’s properties).
Conclusion
Generative AI is changing the world as we know it, and digital marketing is at the forefront of these changes because we feel them first. While it is hard to predict where it is going (or how it is going to be regulated), the key to success is early adoption. Those marketers who will embrace AI first will remain relevant and in demand. I hope the above tools will be a good start for marketers and business owners who will be inspired to test more and more emerging AI tools and use them to innovate their marketing strategies!
