Interview with entrepreneur and digitization expert Dr. Peter Gentsch
As part of a presentation at the BVDW (German Association of Digital Marketing), Dr. Peter Gentsch talked about how AI-assisted writing is revolutionizing the creation of relevant content. I had the pleasure of speaking with him afterwards about this exciting topic.
To kick off the talk, he used a matrix to illustrate which marketing, sales and services solutions can best be supported with artificial intelligence (AI). As shown in the figure below, the success factors for business success also differ in how much the respective processes can be automated.
“It is important for me to make clear that a critical success factor for any company is where to start implementing AI in its processes. Not all sub-areas are currently equally well suited for application of AI solutions,” Gentsch explains. On the left-hand side of the first chart, you can see many areas that have already reached a high level of maturity and are therefore automated in many companies. On the right-hand side, however, it is clear to see that the points are far less mature and are also used less in the companies.
Gentsch explains: “Nowadays, we are already very good at automating simple processes and evaluating large amounts of data, as the left-hand side shows. However, the development of machine learning with the involvement of employees is not yet as far along. Complex tasks such as strategy planning, storytelling or brand management are mostly still done exclusively by employees without intelligent support from software. The development of such AI-based solutions that involve the employee and solve complex problems is also significantly more complicated. There is still a lot of untapped potential there at the moment.”
The aforementioned task areas on the right side of the figure have one thing in common: They require a high degree of creativity. AI-assisted writing solutions will increasingly support this creativity process. Gentsch makes this point with the following example: “By 2022, according to Gartner, content marketers will produce more than 30% of their digital content using AI-generation techniques, which will increase productivity and advertising effectiveness, but also reorder the creative process.”
AI-Assisted Writing: Relevant Content
These intelligent solutions will also be able to better understand search engines like Google and respond quickly to their updates. 90.6% of content marketing worldwide creates zero traffic from Google! This is due to Google Search Updates, which change the search engine algorithm several times a year. In order to still be relevant to search engines in the long term and sustainably, companies are dependent on practicing modern online marketing. Systems and platforms that optimize the performance of your content with machine learning, NLP, and more are critical to this.
Does this mean you should only optimize your content for search engines and no longer pay attention to the readability? Dr. Peter Gentsch has a clear answer to this: “I hope I have been able to explain well up to this point why AI-based solutions are essential in modern digital marketing. In addition, I would like to clarify at this point that this does not mean that content should be written purely for search engines. Quite the contrary!
Google has been striving for decades to show its users the most relevant content for their search query. Thus, the goal should be to provide content that is actually relevant, rather than just giving the impression that the content is relevant to the search query. This actual relevance is increasingly recognized by search engines, which are also becoming more intelligent. Thus, the goal is to create content that is actually relevant to the search queries with the support of AI-assisted writing, which will then organically and sustainably guarantee a high ranking in search engines like Google.”
How is search behavior changing?
With the increase in mobile searches and voice searches, the nature of search queries is changing dramatically. “Today, 59% of search queries are made on mobile devices and already half of consumers use voice search. Brands will therefore need more than rule-based algorithms to be visible in the future. This is also confirmed by the fact that recent Google updates mean that search is now based entirely on NLP,” Gentsch explains.
The following Sistrix statistics from 2020 show that about 95% of users only click on Google search results on page 1. Only 6.8% of them click on ads. The remaining 88% are distributed among the organic results on the first page as shown below. “If you don’t show up there, you don’t exist digitally as a brand,” Peter Gentsch sums up.
More than half of the users click on the first three results.
Thus, the great challenge is to link the needs of the users and the circumstances of the search engines with each other, and to create relevant content tailored to them. Dr. Peter Gentsch draws the following conclusion: “Both NLP and NLU as well as Deep Learning based on Big Data must be taken into account. The key point, however, is that this is no longer sufficient these days. It is essential that humans are integrated into this data-driven process. This is the only way to create Intelligence Augmentation that can meet the demands of today’s search engines.”
These are the challenges that rellify is addressing. The startup recognizes the technical imperatives and offers the solutions to meet them.
If you are interested in other interviews, watch this video with our CEO Peter Kraus. He talks about his career, his goals and the future of content performance in connection with artificial intelligence (AI).
