Using AI for content planning and strategy: Dos and don'ts

These days, if you're not using AI to make yourself faster, more productive, and more efficient, you quickly fall behind. It truly is raising the ceiling, making good marketers great, and making great marketers absolutely unstoppable.

But there's a catch: You've got to be using AI right before you can latch onto that whole 'unstoppable' thing. Which is exactly why we've created this AI content series.

Today, we're looking at using AI for content planning and strategy—the dos, the don'ts, and some of the exceptions. Are you guilty of any of the Don'ts?

✅ Dos: How to use AI for content planning

1. Identifying content themes and pillars

   
   We've all been in the "okay, so where do we start?" kinda mood, and it can feel overwhelming. So many options, so much research, so little time.
   
   However, AI can absolutely help you kick off your content planning. By fueling your chosen AI tool up with market data, social media conversations, and specific competitor activities you've had your eyes on, it can suggest strategic content pillars and themes for your brand to go after.
   
   As always, the better the input, the better the output—if you CBA to put in the data, you can get more vague (and much less strategic) suggestions. The more data-driven your approach, the more your content will resonate with your target audience and support your business objectives.
   
   Example prompt: "Based on our brand positioning as [brand description] and target audience of [audience details], suggest 5 potential content pillars that would form a comprehensive content strategy. For each pillar, also explain its strategic value, potential subtopics, and how it supports our business objectives of [specific goals]"
   
   

2. Content calendar planning

   
   Forward planning doesn't always come super naturally to creatives (not speaking from experience or anything 🤥), so the fact AI can help will out that content calendar is a dream.
   
   Use it to optimize your publishing schedule and content mix, and beef out that cal for the quarter!
   
   Make the results even better by giving it audience engagement patterns and historical performance data to analyze and make more informed suggestions. This ensures you deliver the right content and the right time, AKA maximum impact and reach.
   
   Using AI tools for content calendar planning can also help you balance content types and topics strategically or in a way you prefer to work, whilst always maintaining that consistent messaging and brand voice.
   
   Example prompt: "Given our content pillars [list pillars], help me develop a 3-month content calendar that balances these themes. Consider our publishing capacity of [X] pieces per week, our goal to maintain a ratio of 60% educational/30% promotional/10% entertainment content, and these upcoming seasonal events and product launches [list events]. Suggest specific content pieces with strategic rationale for each"
   
   

3. Segmenting your audience and personas

   
   To make content planning a little less overwhelming, it helps to break things down into more digestible chunks—your target audiences or segments are no exception. AI can identify distinct audience segments using the data you feed it, then break down the unique characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of each segment too.
   
   With this information and in-depth understanding, you can create more nuanced content personas, tailoring your messaging effectively and making sure it HITS for engagement rates you've never seen before.
   
   Example prompt: "Analyze these customer engagement metrics, website analytics, and social media insights [paste data]. Identify 3-4 distinct audience segments that appear to have different content preferences and behaviors. For each segment, suggest: 1) Key characteristics, 2) Content preferences, 3) Platform behaviors, and 4) Strategic approaches we should take in our content planning to better serve them"
   
   

4. Aligning your content strategy with business objectives

   
   🚨 Spoiler alert: If you're struggling to convince your CMO about your new campaign or content idea, link it to business objectives. It works, every time.
   
   And guess what? AI can help you with that.
   
   Watch it map your content to specific conversion paths and identify strategic content gaps in the customer journey with ease, freeing up your time to get on with the actual content creation.
   
   This way, you can make sure your content is directly supporting your business goals, driving leads, conversions, and revenue. AI tools can also track content performance and measure its impact on key metrics.
   
   Example prompt: "Our business objectives for Q3 are [list objectives]. Analyze our current content inventory [paste inventory] and identify strategic gaps where additional content could better support these business goals. For each recommendation, explain how the content would guide audiences toward specific business outcomes and suggest metrics to track effectiveness"
   
   

5. Cross-channel coordination

   
   Cross-channel marketing is all well and good...until you realise its misaligned. (Spot the signs of marketing channel misalignment here).
   
   🦸 In swoops your favorite AI tool to help with that. Because yes, AI can indeed help with consistency across all your marketing channels, giving advice on messaging adaptations, effective content formats, and creating the most impactful customer journey.
   
   With no extra data, it can offer up best practices for each platform, sure. But for more beneficial and on-brand suggestions, input data that AI can analyze to make specific suggestions to your brand and your audience behaviors.
   
   Example prompt: "We're planning a campaign around [campaign theme] across these channels: [list channels]. For each channel, suggest how our core message should be strategically adapted while maintaining consistency. Include recommendations for channel-specific content types, timing considerations, and how these pieces should work together to create a cohesive journey toward [campaign objective]"

❌ Don'ts: Where AI falls short for content planning

1. Brand positioning

   
   No one knows your brand quite like you know your brand... not even AI. While AI tools can provide valuable insights, your core brand strategy 100% requires human vision and intuition.
   
   It's so important that AI is used to support strategic brand decisions, not replace them. Human oversight is E S S E N T I A L to make sure your brand values, brand voice, and brand messaging remain consistent and authentic.
   
   

   Solution: Make sure all your content planning processes and workflows include humans oversight (you'll regret it if you don't).

2. Quantitative data

   
   Making informed and strategic decisions comes down to having the right data, and when it comes to content planning, it needs to be data that is specific to your brand.
   
   Relying on AI to come up with a content strategy with no additional input or context into your brand is a dangerous game; you never *really* know what existing content all the information is coming from.
   
   But even beyond quantitative data, it's so important to consider other things like customer feedback, market trends, upcoming product launches, and competitive analysis.
   
   

   Solution: Go beyond the numbers; human judgment is also crucial to making informed decisions.

3. Keyword opportunities

   
   We've previously discussed using AI for SEO, and talked about its shortfalls but with content planning, it goes a little deeper than that.
   
   Asking AI for a purely SEO-driven content strategy will (most likely) lead to a series of fragmented and disjointed content.
   
   The human narrative is needed to align keyword research and keyword opportunities with your overall content pillars and themes, and make for an ultra engaging customer experience.
   
   

   Solution: Keep things consistent and keep things engaging by aligning everything (included AI-generated content strategy suggestions) to business objectives.

4. Market research and context

   
   There's a strong chance that AI can miss important competitive or cultural factors that can influence or impact content performance.
   
   Make sure you are incorporating market context from your side into your AI-assisted strategy, otherwise you could miss out on winning opportunities or your efforts could fall flat.
   
   

   Solution: Stay informed about industry trends, what your competitors are up to, and audience sentiment... and keep your prompts rich with this information too!

5. End-to-end content strategy planning

   
   Maybe this is more a long story short situation because, if you've been paying attention, it might have become *pretty* obvious that human intervention is completely, utterly, and totally necessary if you want to get ahead of your competitors and create content that your audience actually wants to see.
   
   So no, you cannot just prompt AI to give you an end-to-end content strategy—there needs to be human oversight at every step of the planning journey to make sure you're provided with the most valuable, effective content plan for you and your brand.
   
   

   Solution: Don't be lazy, and definitely do NOT get rid of your content strategists.

AI for content planning best practices: Quick-fire round

• AI is a partnership: Think of AI as your strategic thinking partner, not a replacement. The most effective content planning happens when AI's analytical capabilities and straight-up speed are combined with your industry expertise and creative vision.
• Find the right balance: Aim for that sweet spot between AI efficiency and human oversight. Use AI to handle the data analysis and get your brain into action, then it's up to you to make final strategic decisions and ensure brand alignment.
• Make sure your content strategy role is adaptable: No one can be sure what's coming next with AI and the digital landscape (did I really just use that AI stock phrase?), but content strategists have got to be adaptable; they should learn to write effective prompts, validate AI outputs, and integrate AI-generated insights into cohesive strategies to maintain brand voice.
• Preserve the human touch: Remember that emotional resonance and authentic storytelling remain unique to us humanoids; always make sure you're injecting personality and emotional intelligence.
• Use a tool that is automatically enriched with your company data and brand guidelines: AI tools like Optimizely Opal make it easy for content marketers to use AI throughout the content lifecycle, from ideation and planning through to optimization and reporting, because they learn and follow your brand information and guidelines.

Using AI for content planning: What's next?

Here are a few things to watch out for when it comes to using AI for content planning and strategy:

• Predictive content performance: AI systems are coming increasingly capable of predicting which content themes and formats will perform best with specific audience segments (which is great for resource allocation).
• Dynamic content calendars: Next-generation AI tools will help to creative more adaptive content calendar suggestions, based on real-time performance data, audience behavioral shifts, and emerging trends.
• Cross-functional collaboration (FTW!): Did someone say 'better team alignment'? Because, we love that sh*t... and AI is gonna help cross-departmental alignment by providing unified data insights and content recommendations that serve multiple objectives.
• Content opportunity forecasting: Look for AI tools that can identify emerging content gaps and opportunities months before they become obvious to your competitors. How u doing, Opal. 👀
• Ethical considerations: As AI becomes more integrated into your content planning, your brand will need to develop clear guidelines around transparency, data privacy, and disclosure of AI involvement in your content strategy process.

The overall solution for all that? Stay educated, my friends. Blink and you'll miss it.