Using AI as a Content Analyst: How to Plan Your Next Steps

Want to improve your marketing content? Wish you could more easily extract meaningful insights from your analytics? 

Learn step-by-step how to use AI tools to analyze your marketing data and content, helping you make data-driven decisions that improve your content performance across all channels.

Why Marketing Should Use AI for Content Analysis

The key advantage of AI in marketing analysis lies in its ability to process and interpret data quickly and comprehensively. AI can analyze reports from various tools—whether analytics, social media, or email platforms—and provide insights that previously might have required specialized expertise.

This capability is particularly valuable for marketers who may be more creatively inclined and find traditional analytics tools challenging. Instead of wrestling with complex interfaces, they can now upload their data to AI platforms and engage in natural conversations to extract insights.

Andy Crestodina, cofounder and chief marketing officer at Orbit Media,  saw AI as an opportunity to enhance the methods he'd been using throughout his career, particularly in areas like SEO and analytics.

For many marketers, particularly those who are more creatively inclined, traditional analytics tools can be intimidating. The ability to simply upload data to AI platforms and have natural conversations about it represents a significant breakthrough in marketing analysis.

This capability is transformative for several reasons. First, it allows marketers to validate or challenge their assumptions with hard data. “Every idea that you've ever had in marketing is, in fact, just a hypothesis. All best practices are hypotheses,” Crestodina explains. The data is the scoreboard and validation for checking to see the efficacy of any action you take in marketing.

While Crestodina acknowledges that not everything in marketing can be measured – efforts like building brand awareness, generating referrals, or creating memorable experiences often don't show up in reports – many marketing actions do have measurable impacts. When they do, AI can provide powerful new ways to analyze and understand that data.

What makes AI analysis particularly valuable is that it goes beyond simple data interpretation. “Not only do these reports get analyzed by the AI, but the subsequent action that you might take based on that analysis is also possible within the AI,” Crestodina notes. For example, after analyzing what worked well in specific channels, the AI can recommend ways to improve traction or suggest new approaches – capabilities that traditional reporting tools don't offer.

#1: How to Perform Content Analysis with AI

According to Crestodina's annual content marketing and blogging survey, now in its 11th year, AI adoption among bloggers has doubled in the past year alone. Only 20% of bloggers reported not using AI, down from 40% the previous year.

You can use AI to help you analyze and optimize any public-facing content, such as an ad, a social post, an email subject line, an article, your homepage, etc. 

First, you need a validated customer persona.

How to Create a Valid Customer Persona to Aid in AI Analysis

These personas become the basis for all subsequent AI analyses, ensuring consistency and relevance.

Drawing from the insights of persona expert Ardith Albee, Andy says a well-crafted persona should focus on making your audience intelligence actionable. While ChatGPT or Claude can quickly generate a basic persona using specific prompts, the first iteration won't be accurate and should only be used as a starting point.

To create an effective persona using AI, provide specific details about:

• Job title
• Industry
• Company size
• Geography
• Responsibilities and goals
• Challenges

Demographic information is often less crucial in B2B marketing than many assume. Who cares whether this person is 42 years old and drives a Volvo if you're trying to sell them some enterprise software?

Please build me a persona for a coder in the app development industry at a company of 50 people in North America. This person is tasked with learning how to write code. List their hopes, dreams, fears, concerns, emotional triggers, and decision criteria.

Once the initial persona is generated, review the AI's output to identify inaccuracies or omissions. To refine the persona, have a back-and-forth conversation with the AI, instructing it to remove irrelevant details or add missing elements. For instance, you might say,

Replace [this concern] with a more relevant one.

Or,

Prioritize these [emotional triggers] over the others.

Repeat this iterative process until the persona aligns closely with your understanding of the target audience, then save and share it with your team to ensure consistency in future AI interactions.

Pro Tip: If you're using an open AI model, remove your brand name from your training data. 

How to Use AI to Analyze and Optimize Your Content

Once you have a solid persona, you can analyze your content for gaps and opportunities. This process works for various content types, including sales pages, blog posts, social media content, email campaigns, landing pages, video scripts, marketing presentations, and more.

Our example focuses on sales page analysis.

First, take a full-page screenshot of the sales page rather than just copying text. The visual allows the AI to analyze visual hierarchy and conversion elements like logos and awards. You can use tools like Go Full Page, Awesome Screenshot, or Snagit to capture these full-page screenshots.

Next, upload your persona with your screenshot and a prompt that positions the AI as a conversion optimization expert that will analyze and assess the landing page's use of your best practices for high-converting pages, including:

• The header clearly indicating the topic
• Copy answering visitor questions and addressing objections 
• Message order aligning with prioritized information needs 
• Supportive evidence backing marketing claims 
• Personal connection through human elements 
• Appropriate use of cognitive biases 
• Compelling calls to action

The goal isn't just to find deficiencies. You want the AI to find weaknesses you can correct to make a more impactful, stronger landing page.

For example, implementing cognitive biases to incorporate psychological triggers can improve conversion rates ethically. Because people tend to expend more energy avoiding losses than seeking gains, highlighting registration deadlines or limited-time opportunities should be subtly incorporated into marketing messages when appropriate.

You are an expert in content optimization. Based on this persona and the content provided, identify the most important unanswered questions and any key objections or concerns this content fails to address. Provide actionable suggestions to resolve these gaps.

One of Andy's clients wanted to improve its landing page conversion rates. By prompting the AI to evaluate the page against conversion optimization best practices, he identified key deficiencies:

• Lack of urgency and scarcity triggers, such as enrollment deadlines.
• Failure to address common objections, like the cost of the program or placement rates.
• Missing emotional appeals, such as testimonials or success stories.

The AI's recommendations helped the client redesign the page to include these elements, improving engagement and conversions.

#2: How to Use AI to Analyze Your Content Strategy

This process highlights potential content gaps by comparing the inferred meanings of covered topics. It enables you to craft articles that strategically fill those voids in your content strategy by focusing on high-potential topics.

You can use exports from any social media platform, email service provider, or analytic platform, but you'll need to clean the data before uploading it to your AI tool.

This example uses data from GA4.

Start by viewing 12 months of your Pages Report data from Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Change the first column from “page path” to “page title” and add a secondary dimension of “source medium”—this will help you and the AI understand how content performs differently across channels. 

Now, you have a report that shows:

• Title tags in the first column
• Source and mediums in the second column (LinkedIn, social, Google search, email campaigns)
• Metrics in the following columns (engagement rate, total sessions, key conversion rates, etc.) 

Click the export button (which looks like a share button) in the top right and download the data as a CSV file.

Next, open the export and clean the data manually; Crestodina strongly advises against using AI for this step because he's had too many problems arise. You need to remove any extraneous information, such as the first rows of comments. Then, remove rows with minimal data and non-relevant language versions of your content.

Pro Tip: Consider adding topic tags to your content data before analysis. While this can be time-consuming, spending about an hour manually adding topics to your top 50-100 posts (such as “AI content strategy,” “SEO content strategy,” and “UX web design”) will significantly improve the AI's ability to identify patterns and make recommendations.

After cleaning your data, upload it to your preferred AI platform and begin the analysis process. For example, you can find out which topics work best in which channels or perform a semantic distance (gap) analysis to see which articles you should write next.

To trigger more sophisticated analysis, use specific analytical terms in your prompts, such as:

• Semantic distance analysis 
• Topic-channel correlation analysis 
• Normalized engagement metrics 
• Counter-narrative identification

How to Use AI to Analyze and Improve Your Content Strategy

If you want to perform content gap analysis, you could say:

I have given you a GA4 export of my articles and performance data. I want to identify gaps in my content strategy by combining semantic distance analysis with performance data.

1. Analyze my existing articles to extract core themes, keywords, and concepts.

2. Evaluate the performance of these articles using metrics like traffic, engagement (e.g., time on page, shares, comments), conversions, and keyword rankings.

3. Compare these themes with my niche's trending topics, emerging areas of interest, and high-demand search queries.

4. Identify underperforming areas in my existing content that may need improvement and suggest related topics that have significant semantic distance from my current portfolio but align with audience interests and trends.

For example: If articles on 'LinkedIn lead generation' perform well but have declining engagement, are there related topics like 'LinkedIn Analytics,' 'LinkedIn for B2B Outreach,' or 'LinkedIn Content Optimization' that could fill the gap? Similarly, identify high-performing clusters where deeper exploration could drive more traffic.

My ultimate goal is to prioritize content ideas that (a) address audience needs, (b) fill gaps in coverage, and (c) build on areas with proven success, driving traffic and engagement.

How to Use AI to Visualize Your Content Performance

One of the most powerful capabilities of modern AI tools is their ability to create visual representations of data analysis. These visualizations can be particularly valuable for presentations and team meetings.

I have a GA4 export of my website data, including article topics and key performance metrics such as page views, average session duration, bounce rate, conversions, and engagement rate over the past 12 months. I want to create a color-coded heat map that visualizes correlations between these metrics and my article topics to identify patterns in performance.

1. Use the exported data to group rows by article topic.

2. For each topic, calculate averages or medians for metrics like pageviews, engagement rate, conversions, etc.

3. Apply color coding to indicate performance:
Green: High-performing topics (e.g., above 75th percentile for a given metric).
Yellow: Moderate performance (e.g., between 50th and 75th percentile).
Red: Low-performing topics (e.g., below the 50th percentile).

4. Create the heat map to compare how different topics perform across metrics visually.

5. Use the heat map to suggest content opportunities, such as:
Expanding high-performing topics.
Improving underperforming topics with high potential (e.g., those with strong engagement but low conversions).

I aim to visually identify which topics resonate with my audience and prioritize content updates or new article ideas accordingly.

3 Implementation Tips for Using AI in Content Marketing Analysis

When implementing AI analysis in your marketing workflow, consider these key recommendations:

Privacy Considerations: While most marketing reports don't contain personally identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data, concerns about confidentiality are usually minimal. However, getting permission before you upload data from a client's account is wise.

Channel-Topic Alignment: Different content types perform differently across channels. Use AI to identify which topics work best in search versus social media. As Crestodina notes, “Some things are great for search, and some things are great for social, and they are often not the same. Nobody in a social stream is suddenly interested in how to make a better FAQ page,” even though such content might perform well in search.”

Iterative Analysis: Don't treat AI insights as absolute truth. Use them as a starting point for further investigation and validation.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Facebook and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

Where to subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Music | YouTube | Amazon Music | RSS

✋🏽 If you enjoyed this episode of the AI Explored podcast, please head over to Apple Podcasts, leave a rating, write a review, and subscribe.

---

Stay Up-to-Date: Get New Marketing Articles Delivered to You!

Don't miss out on upcoming social media marketing insights and strategies! Sign up to receive notifications when we publish new articles on Social Media Examiner. Our expertly crafted content will help you stay ahead of the curve and drive results for your business. Click the link below to sign up now and receive our annual report!