The AI-Driven Content Strategy: How (and When) to Use AI for Content Marketing

🔴 AI is a magical typewriter for content marketers …or is it?

How and when to use AI in content marketing remains a huge question. The debate rages on. My friends who are purists see no place for AI in content (where’s the authentic voice?), and my friends who are big on AI adoption see no place without AI (why not use this helpful new tool?).

Personally, I don’t use AI to write. This sentence is being written by hand. That’s my preference, and it’s what works best for me.

In fact, most marketers don’t write entire articles with AI. According to our annual survey, just 11% of content marketers draft articles using AI. Most use it for ideas and editing.

Beyond writing, these are wonderful ways to use AI for content strategy, including ideation, audits and analysis. Today we’ll review five of these and share the prompts that power them. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. AI for auditing your blog’s calls to action (maximize list growth)
2. AI for topic research (focus on the three best formats for content)
3. AI for initial edits (alignment with content best practices)
4. AI for finding partners and places to publish (PR and outreach ideas)
5. AI for performance analysis (find topic/channel fit)

Beyond CTAs, topics, editing and analysis, there are many other aspects of a content strategy. We’ll touch on those at the end.

1. Blog main page quick audit

Before hitting publish on your next article, take a look at the place where you’re publishing. This is the home of your content marketing program. Does it include all of the key success factors?

• Specific, descriptive email signup call to action
• Categories are aligned with topics (“content strategy”) rather than formats (“videos”)
• Proof points that build the credibility of the content program

The email signup CTA is the most important element on a blog’s main page. And you’ll find bad examples all over the web. Ideally, your signup box is high on the page and aligns with email signup form best practices. Compare:

With this perspective, you may see huge, immediate improvement opportunities. If the issues aren’t obvious, try this audit prompt. The inputs are a link to the page (or full-page screenshot) and a few details about the visitor and your proof points.

Blog Homepage Subscription Audit Prompt

You are an email growth strategist auditing this blog homepage. A good blog homepage does one thing above all else: converts interested visitors into subscribers. Your job is to assess how well this page does that — and make a clear recommendation.

Topic scan — Extract the 3–5 main topics this blog covers from the screenshot and URL. Then answer:

• Are those topics reflected in the CTA copy, or does the signup feel generic?
• Is the blog organized around topics (what you’ll learn) or formats (videos, webinars, guides)? Format-based organization weakens conversion — it tells visitors nothing about whether the content is relevant to them.

Label anything uncertain as an assumption. Then score the page across these eight criteria. The first four are directly on the conversion path and carry the most weight. Present results as a table with four columns: Criterion | Score (🟥 1–2 / 🟧 3 / 🟩 4–5) | What you observed | Specific fix.

Conversion-critical:

• CTA clarity and specificity — does the signup feel like a named, valuable product? Do specific topics appear in the headline, description, or button copy?
• CTA proof and trust — is there a subscriber count, testimonial, or credibility signal adjacent to the form?
• Topic-to-CTA alignment — does the CTA promise content that matches what the blog visibly covers?
• Topic-first organization — are categories and featured content organized around subjects, not delivery formats?

Supporting:

• Top-of-page clarity — is it immediately clear what the blog covers, who it’s for, and what to do next?
• Audience alignment — do the topics, tone, and CTA feel relevant to the target visitor?
• Skimmability — can a fast visitor grasp the value of subscribing without reading every word?
• Visual support — does the design make the CTA stand out, or does it disappear into the page?

Strategic gaps — Identify one or two issues the table can’t capture: structural or strategic problems that row-by-row fixes wouldn’t solve.

Verdict

• Overall strength: High / Moderate / Low
• Recommended action: Republish as-is / Light update / Significant rewrite / Rebuild
• Single highest-leverage edit: the one change most likely to improve subscription rate
• Conversion read: would a first-time visitor who cares about these topics feel compelled to subscribe — or leave without a reason to return?

[Upload a full-page screenshot. Optional: note the target audience job title and any proof points: subscriber count, testimonials, or trust signals]

The report rates the extent to which your blog main page aligns with content marketing best practices and email list growth. 

I ran the Orbit Media blog main page through this mini-audit and it definitely had some ideas. It called the way we show our posts a “chronological tile dump” and I can’t disagree.

2. AI for topic research

There are three types of content that tend to outperform all others:

1. Original research (new data)
2. Strong opinion (thought leadership)
3. Topics that aren’t yet covered (new angles)

The lowest performing content is often general, how-to articles that offer no unique methods, data or perspectives. If it could have been written by any brand (or an AI) then it isn’t going to be memorable, be bookmarked, or start a conversation. Maybe don’t write it.

AI can absolutely help you uncover relevant content ideas for strong opinions, original research and hidden gaps. Here are three prompts that do exactly that:

The “Provocative-But-Mundane Topics” Prompt:

What are some relatively mundane, almost trivial topics that [job title] has very strong opinions about?

Everyone should try this prompt at least once. It elicits topics that are triggering without being overly controversial. Here I put in “content strategist” as the job title…

As you scan the response, you’ll feel an almost physical reaction to the topics. You’ll laugh. You’ll groan. You’ll wonder if you could dip your toes into the pool of opinion-based content. Or perhaps dive directly into the depths of true thought leadership.

The magic here is that these are topics that AI can’t touch. No LLM can write strong opinion content. That’s because AI has no opinions. It has no point of view. But you do. Thought leadership is a human-only format.

The challenge is courage: Are you willing to take a stand? Is everyone on the team ok with this? Does it fit within your brand guidelines? Remember, it’s not thought leadership unless someone can disagree with it.

The “Original Research Topics” Prompt

Target audience job title: [job title]

Suggest original research topics relevant to the industry of the role above. The goal is to identify frequently asserted but rarely supported claims — statements everyone repeats but nobody has actually measured. The best topics, once researched, would be cited by journalists, editors, and bloggers looking for fresh data.

Answer these three questions:

1. Where are the gaps? Which topics in this industry are widely discussed but lack solid supporting data?
2. What’s worth measuring? Which unverified claims, if proven or disproven, would be most useful to journalists looking for fresh statistics to cite?
3. What’s the angle? For the two or three strongest opportunities, suggest a research approach — survey, analysis, experiment — and explain what would make the finding credible and linkable.

New research gets cited in other people’s content. It’s catnip for journalists and editors. This leads to links that drive search rankings for both your content and your key conversion pages. These rankings drive traffic through traditional SEO, but also inform AI responses, because of course, AI searches using search engines.

So if you can find a “missing stat” or a common assertion that is rarely supported with data, and then produce that data with a new report, you’ll have plugged a hole in the internet. Go beyond the typical industry trends. Promote it well with other content creators (ideally, by including them in the report as contributors) and you’ll attract links.

I ran this prompt using the “Content Strategist” job title. It had several interesting ideas, along with possible methodologies and angles. None of these would produce serious peer-review level research papers. Any of these would produce interesting, link-worthy content.

The challenge is time: Can you design a study that you can produce without a huge investment? Do you have any data within your company you can use? Or partner with another content program?

The “Topics-Rarely-Covered” Prompt

What are the most important topics in the [job title]’s industry that are the least likely to be covered by the popular blogs?

It’s not possible for you, a human, to read every article in an industry and spot the topics that no one is writing about. But AI does this well. Drop that prompt into any of the AI tools and you’ll see a wide-open ocean of highly differentiated content opportunities. Anything you could cover?

I also ran this one using “content strategy,” and it found some off the less common topics on content marketing blogs. I can easily imagine high clickthrough rates for these…

The challenge is alignment: Which of these rarely-covered topics aligns with your buyer and the rest of the buying committee? Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it fits. 

It’s also possible to combine these methods with good brainstorming, human creativity and subsequent prompts. Imagine if you published a research piece that gave you an opportunity to express a strong point of view. Plant your flag on a solid ground of new data. It’ll be your strongest piece of the year.

3. Article audit prompt

The email signup box is polished. The topics are set. The article is written and it’s ready to go live.

Again, before you hit publish, take a minute to check the new piece against content best practices. In our experience, these are some of the most important elements in any article:

• Strong opening hook: Does the first sentence make them want to read on?
• Evidence and examples: Are the claims backed with data, quotes or specifics?
• Expert or contributor input: Does any voice other than the brand’s appear?
• Formatting and scannability: Headers, bullets, bold, paragraph length
• Visual support: Is there something visually interesting at every scroll depth?
• Internal links: Do they guide readers to related content? Does it link to a service page?
• Personal angle or opinion: Does the article take a clear position, or does it just cover the topic?
• Call to action/next step: Is there a logical next move for the reader?

No, you don’t need to include them all. But you should consider them all. Scan through the final draft and look for content gaps. Better yet, give AI the draft along with this Article Audit Prompt:

Article Audit Prompt

You are a content strategist auditing this article on behalf of an editor who needs to decide whether to update, rewrite, or remove it. Your job is to make a clear recommendation, not hedge.

Score the article across these eight criteria. Present results as a table with four columns: Criterion | Score (🟥 1–2 / 🟧 3 / 🟩 4–5) | What you observed | Specific fix.

• Opening hook — does the first screen earn a scroll?
• Evidence and examples — are claims backed with data, quotes, or specifics?
• Expert or contributor input — does any voice other than the brand’s appear?
• Formatting and scannability — headers, bullets, bold, paragraph length
• Visual support — do images or charts add meaning, or just break up text?
• Internal links — are there contextual links to related content? Does at least one link point to a company service page?
• Personal angle or opinion — does the article take a clear position, or does it just cover the topic? A distinct point of view is one of the clearest signals that this content wasn’t written by AI.
• Call to action / next step — is there a logical next move for the reader?

Strategic gaps — After scoring, identify one or two things the table can’t capture: positioning weaknesses, missing angles, or structural issues that no amount of polishing would fix.

Verdict

• Overall strength: High / Moderate / Low
• Recommended action: Republish as-is / Light update / Significant rewrite / Remove
• Single highest-leverage edit: one specific change that would move the needle most

[Upload a full-page screenshot of the article — include top, mid-page, and bottom if the article is long]

The audit pushes you to challenge yourself, to strengthen your assertions, back up your claims and pull in the voice of experts. I ran this on a draft of this article, and it made some strong suggestions. Looks like I have some work to do before this meets the standards of our own content strategy.

4. Discover where your audience gets their content

It’s a mistake to only publish content on your own website. The best content strategists will write for any platform where their audience is paying attention. They network with editors, reach out with little pitches and collaborate with influencers.

If we know where our audience spends time, we know where to listen and where to engage. With the right audience insights, we’ll know the publications to pitch to and the events we can attend. We can meet them where they are.

Can AI help you find these people and places? Yes.

For this, I’ll use a simplified version of Liza Adams “Watering Holes” prompt.

A Simplified “Watering Holes” Prompt

You are a content strategist familiar with [job title and industry]. Identify the “watering holes” where this audience learns, engages, and connects.

For each category, name specific real examples — actual communities, publications, associations, events, podcasts, YouTube channels, forums, newsletters, and influencers.

Create a table with watering hole categories as rows and specific named examples as cells. For each, note the opportunity type: places to publish or pitch guest content, podcasts or channels to pitch yourself as a guest, events to attend or sponsor, communities to listen and engage in, or partnerships to pursue.

Finally, add a short section recommending the three highest-priority watering holes for someone just starting to build presence in this market, with a one-sentence rationale for each.

ProTip! Sign up for the audience intelligence tool, Sparktoro. The free version will show you relevant social networks and websites. The paid version also lists podcasts, YouTube channels and SubReddits. Either way, download the report as a PDF and upload it with the same prompt. 

Here I ran the prompt for “Marketing Directors” in “Healthcare Tech.” I’ve trimmed the results because the original response was a huge list of opportunities.

Scan through and your head will fill with ideas. Here are just a few to get you started:

• Which topics would get traction in which places?
• Look at the past sessions at those conferences. Have we covered those?
• Check out the editors of those publications. Do we know them yet?
• Who sponsors those tradeshows. Anyone we can partner with?
• Listen to a few of the shows. Which influencers does our audience trust?

Even if you’re starting from zero, with no knowledge of this vertical whatsoever, you can quickly see where to start listening. Within an hour of AI-supported research, you may have some great digital marketing ideas for PR, event participation and influencer marketing.

Liza Adams, AI Advisor & GTM Strategist, GrowthPath Partners “Most of us use AI to create more content. But it can also help us find where our audience already pays attention. That’s what the watering holes prompt does. It shows you the communities, publications, and events your buyers already trust, so you can go meet them there instead of waiting for them to find you.”

5. Give AI your GA4 reports… and align topics with channels

Every content strategist knows how important it is to align topics with marketing channels. Some topics work better in some channels.

Just think about search vs. social. Users of search engines are busy; users of social media are bored. That’s why some topics have opportunities in SEO (detailed long-form content that answers questions) and others do great in social media networks (surprising and visual).

Here we’ll give AI data from our Google Analytics account, showing which articles (title tags) performed how well (traffic, engagement, and conversion rates) across which channels (session source). The analysis is all done by the AI of your choice.

First, we’ll get the GA4 report. This is really just one of many ways you can have AI help with data analysis. First, a screenshot that shows all of the settings.

1. Go to the “Page path + query string” report with a nice long date range.
2. Set the drop-down above the first column to “Page title and screen class”
3. Click the blue plus (+) which is also at the top of that column to add another dimension: “Session source”
4. Set a filter to show only blog posts (“Page path and screen class” contains “blog”) and to remove direct traffic (session source does not contain “direct”) because that isn’t helpful here.
5. Export to CSV.
6. Finally, open the file and remove rows with super low traffic, irrelevant data such as translated titles (non-English) or anything else that looks weird.
7. Save it then upload that to your favorite AI with this analysis prompt

The “Top Channel Alignment” Prompt:

You are a content strategist skilled at using data to identify which topics perform well in which channels. I’m giving you a GA4 report showing blog content performance by traffic source, for a blog targeting [job title]. Suggest 10 new article topics matched to the channels where they’re likely to perform well. For each, note the visitor mindset (e.g., answer-seeking, scroll-stopping), explain the channel fit, and suggest one promotion tactic.

[upload GA4 report]

Like many AI methods, the input is the secret sauce. This one analyzes the performance of your own content with your own audience based on the GA4 report. This isn’t based on best practices. It’s based on what’s worked for you in the past.

Here’s what it looks like from our Analytics. I trimmed it a bit because it was long…

The topics are closely related to your existing content, they’re aligned with channels. For some, you can optimize the content for search. For others, the social media posts write themselves.

The AI even gives recommendations for content promotion. This doesn’t mean that one piece can’t be promoted in all channels. But it helps the content strategist think ahead to distribution, even before the content creation.

AI gave us a boost, but there’s a lot more to content strategy

We’ve reviewed five use cases for AI content strategy, but the ideas here were just the foundation. The target and topics are the beginning, but there are many other aspects to content planning and your content creation process.

• Alignment with business objectives (sales support content)
• Content formats: visual content (videos, infographics), written content (articles, interviews, guides)
• Promotion channels
• Publishing frequency
• Keyword research and SEO strategy
• Technology and tools (content personalization and predictive analytics)
• Team, partners and workflow
• Success metrics

Imagine how ChatGPT or Claude could help with these other aspects of content marketing strategy.
Imagine how the related tasks can get easier, faster and more comprehensive.
Imagine the prompts that would provide the most valuable insights and support your content marketing efforts.

But even with the cleverest prompts and the most interesting AI responses, you’ll need to stay involved. Watch it closely. Stay critical. None of those prompts will let you abdicate your job defending quality, filtering out the noise, adding your own perspective, connecting with the partners and ultimately, the prospects.

We’ve made the case that AI-driven content strategy is better than AI generated content. Generative AI can support the content creator with content ideas.

Then you, the expert, provides the human oversight and decides how to apply the insights.