How to Use AI to Plan Your Content Strategy

Planning a content strategy can feel overwhelming. Nothing is more alarming than staring too long at a blank page of doom, waiting for your brilliant strategy to write itself.

It feels like there are a million things to balance. Managing audience needs. Optimizing for SEO. Keeping up with publishing deadlines. And aligning everything with your broader business goals. It’s easy to feel stuck or fall behind.

That’s where AI comes in—not as a replacement for your expertise, experience, and wit. But as a tool to help you move faster and think more strategically. AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Claude can support your content marketing efforts at every stage, from brainstorming ideas to repurposing content for social media or video creation.

The neat trick is knowing how to use these tools to support your process rather than replace your unique and compelling voice. And many companies are now doing this, with more than half of marketers using AI tools to optimize content or work on strategy.

In this post, we’ll walk through how to use AI to plan your content strategy more efficiently while keeping your creativity and insights front and center.

Why You’ve Got to Be Using AI

Think of AI as the ultimate cheat code or an incredible virtual assistant. It helps you get more done in less time.

AI tools can generate relevant ideas at scale, speed up research, help you draft outlines and copy, and even suggest ways to repurpose your content for other channels. Used correctly, AI allows you to focus on higher-level strategy and creativity—things only you, with your big, beautiful human brain, can do well (sorry, robots).

According to a 2024 report by The Adecco Group, generative AI saves workers an hour per day on average. That’s a lot of time that can be put to better, more productive uses.

Let’s say you’re stuck trying to develop amazing blog post ideas for next month. Instead of staring at that dreaded and cruel blank document, you can prompt an AI tool to help you.

Simply provide your generative AI tool with key details—like your audience, niche, and goals—and it will generate a list of suggestions in seconds.

The content ideas won’t be perfect out of the gate. But it’s a great starting point. That kind of time-saving is a game-changer when you’re managing a small team or wearing multiple hats.

Let’s look at more specific ways AI tools can help you build an awesome content strategy.

Using AI to Discover Killer Topics and Trends

AI is terrific at spotting patterns within a large amount of data. It can supercharge your topic research by helping you spot trends, analyze competitors, and uncover fresh angles. You might start by asking a tool like ChatGPT for blog ideas tailored to your industry and target audience.

For example, say you’re a local bakery specializing in French and Italian pastries. Here are five actual ChatGPT-generated blog post ideas you may want to try:

Our Love Affair with Pastry: The Story Behind Jim’s Euro Bakery
The Difference Between a Croissant and a Cornetto (And Why You Need Both!)
Our Favorite Italian Holiday Pastries (And When to Eat Them)
DIY Cannoli Kit: Tips for Filling Like a Pro
Perfect Coffee + Pastry Pairings for Your Morning Ritual

These are just five of the 35 total prompts ChatGPT generated in seconds. With more prompt engineering, you could multiply this by hundreds of ideas quickly!

Then, you can refine those ideas by layering in real-world data from tools like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, or Semrush.

If you want to be extra sneaky (like Gollum), you can even copy and paste recent blog headlines from your competitors into an AI prompt and ask for analysis (steal their precious!). Then see:

What content themes are emerging?
What gaps are being overlooked?
What’s been trending for them lately?

AI helps you identify patterns and opportunities faster than manual research alone.

Building a Kick-Ass Content Calendar with AI

Okay, so you have your content ideas—check. But now, you must create a realistic, well-structured, and rich content calendar.

AI tools can help here, too.

Simply let your AI tool know your publishing cadence—for example, two blog posts and one LinkedIn update per week. Then, ask for a content calendar over your chosen period—perhaps the next month, quarter, or even year.

From there, you can tweak your calendar and request variations by format, audience segment, or buyer journey stage.

A well-organized content calendar lets you plan content for multiple channels, such as your blog, social media, and video platform, without scrambling at the last minute.

It also makes it easier to ensure you’re covering the right mix of topics—from top-of-funnel awareness content to more in-depth, conversion-focused pieces.

Using AI for SEO Planning and “Optimal” Optimization

Think we forgot about SEO? Never! AI also plays a valuable role in building an SEO-friendly content strategy.

You can use keyword tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to gather a list of potential keywords. Then, plug them into an AI prompt to group them by topic cluster, theme, or search intent.

Once you’ve identified a focus keyword for a specific blog post, AI can help generate a draft outline. This may include optimized headers, suggested word count, and a logical SEO-friendly structure. AI can even recommend meta descriptions, title tags, and internal linking opportunities.

This won’t replace an experienced SEO strategist (like me!), but it’s a great way to speed up the process and quickly generate quality drafts.

Specialized tools like Frase, MarketMuse, and Su r fer SEO integrate AI directly into the content optimization workflow. These tools allow you to create and score content against SEO benchmarks in real-time.

Creating and Repurposing Brilliant Content with AI

One of the best ways to use AI is during the content creation and repurposing phase.

Need to draft a 1,500-word (or more) blog post? You can give AI a prompt with the target topic, audience, and key points and get a rough draft in minutes.

From there, you can refine the tone, add personal insights and details from your experience, and shape it to reflect your brand.

AI also makes it easy to get more mileage out of your content. A single blog post can be transformed into social media captions, email newsletter blurbs, video scripts, or even short Q&A-style posts.

Instead of reinventing the wheel for every channel, you’re simply adapting your existing assets—quickly and at scale.

What AI Can’t Do (and Why You Still Matter, You Beautiful Human)

As powerful as AI is, it has its limits. Thank God because we all still need jobs and money.

AI doesn’t know your customers the way you do. It can’t anticipate the nuance in your industry or write with your unique voice and values.

It won’t develop a sexy and bold new campaign idea or recognize when something “just doesn’t feel right.” Because it’s hard to feel when you don’t have feelings!

That’s why human insight is still essential. AI can help you work smarter and faster but can’t replace your judgment, creativity, or strategic wisdom.

The role of the AI content strategist is to guide the process, edit with intention, and ensure the content reflects your brand and connects with your audience. And be smarter than the other guys (your competitors) who are also likely using AI tools to help them.

With AI, Start Small, Stay Strategic

If you’re just starting with AI in your content planning process, don’t feel you need to dive in headfirst. Just dip a toe in the water. Start small.

Try using AI to do one of the following:

brainstorm blog topics
generate outlines
repurpose content across platforms.

Test (ABT – Always Be Testing) and see what works for you, where it saves time, and where it needs more direction.

At Reiser Digital, we help businesses develop content strategies combining human creativity and AI-powered efficiency.

If you’re ready to create a more innovative, scalable AI-driven content strategy, I’d love to help you build something that works harder for your business. Let’s chat!