Content intelligence (CI) is the shiny new toy of content marketing.

Like many new technologies, some users may try to adopt content intelligence technology before they fully understand it, and fail to fully realize its benefits.

Content intelligence software is expanding in variety and function, so it’s important to understand the pain points content intelligence addresses.

This post offers a brief overview of what content intelligence is.

It addresses some of the pain points content intelligence solves, and outlines the first step to prepare for the advent of this exciting technology.

First, let’s define content intelligence.

What Is Content Intelligence?

Content intelligence draws upon artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, but it is neither of those things.

Content intelligence is the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics.

Content intelligence gives you the full context of an individual piece of content—and the body of content it sits within, to make better decisions about anything pertaining to the content in question.

Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner defines content intelligence as “technology that helps content understand itself—what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotions it calls to mind, etc.”

What Pain Points Does Content Intelligence Address?

Every marketer alive today proclaims how “data-driven” they are.

But if you look at how content is utilized, it’s still mostly based on intuition and guesswork.

Only eight percent of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI(LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community), and only 55 percent of bloggers regularly check analytics (Orbit Media).

Here are five common content marketing pain points that content intelligence addresses.

1. You’re Not Sure What to Share or How to Distribute

When it comes to content marketing, creating a killer piece of content is only half the battle.

In addition to creating engaging content, your audience needs to be exposed to it. This means building a successful distribution strategy around your content beyond just a cursory social share or email blast.

Think about how hard it is to know what to promote, when to promote, and where to promote it.

Over four million blog posts are published on the internet every day, while 50 percent of content created gets eight shares or less according to BuzzSumo.

Content intelligence will enable highly personalized, cross-channel promotion that humans are just not wired to do.

2. Your Audience Segments Aren’t Getting the Right Content

With content intelligence, expect instead to see stories based on your previous browsing history, your position in an organization’s hierarchy, your title, what you’ve consumed in the past, what other people in your organization have consumed in the past,

And even which content—or certain pieces of content, shared in succession—has the highest conversion rate at the stage you’re currently at in the consumption cycle.

3. You Don’t Know Which Content to Update

Content marketers can use their inventory more effectively if they know when to refresh evergreen articles or update other content to help it perform better.

Say a particular article or blog post performed really well, but it hasn’t been refreshed in a year.

Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a prompt for this article to be refreshed and shared?

Beyond that, content intelligence could recommend changing a headline or adding more images if it recognizes your existing content could work more efficiently for you.

4. You Don’t Know What to Write About

Content intelligence can make recommendations about what to create based on what performs well, or what your competitors are doing, and the recommendations can vary based on your goals.

You could say, “We have a goal of a certain number of leads or page views generated for this quarter,” and you could receive recommendations to help you achieve that.

The recommendations will necessarily differ based on the goal.

5. Your Content Isn’t Working

Tennessee-based marketing strategist, speaker, and author Mark Schaefer coined the term “content shock” in 2014.

It describes the phenomenon of an ever-increasing arms race to produce more, and more compelling, content. This content is seldom personalized, and consumers’ attention spans are resolutely finite.

These two things together ultimately overwhelm people with content options, making content marketing less effective for most companies.

Content intelligence is a significant competitive advantage for organizations wanting to overcome content shock.

Content intelligence offers insights that help you produce better, more engaging content.

It also offers more intelligent means of distribution to get content to the right audience where it’s most compelling.

Content intelligence enables you to present the right content to the right person, every time.