Why AI Makes "Good" Content Matter More than Ever

In what feels like a blink of an eye, AI has upended much of the marketing ecosystem.

SEO is now a completely different beast.

Media sites are losing clicks and, subsequently, subscribers due to AI-powered search tools.

Agencies are adapting business models as brands look to do more content creation in house.

Given the still-evolving transformation of external channels used by businesses to reach prospects, businesses are gradually shifting the focus of their content distribution efforts to brand-owned channels, including web sites, blogs, events and social media.

And they are creating more and more of that content in house, aided by generative AI, recognizing that the most effective path for persuading prospects that their products and services are best-in-class is an organic one.

They also recognize that advances in AI have likewise empowered prospective customers with the ability to conduct extensive, thorough and largely self-guided investigations into potential business solutions. Today’s reality is that most business buyers, relying on vendor-supplied content, progress as far as 60% to 70% down the purchasing path before they even speak to a salesperson, according to multiple surveys and studies of B2B buying habits.

So, where does that leave brands in today’s marketing landscape?

For starters, they need more content — both to supply all those channels and to ensure that when potential buyers initiate their self-guided awareness and comparison journeys they don’t come up empty or short (in comparison to competitors).

That’s where generative AI is upending the marketing status quo in a positive way. Call it an assistant, a colleague or something in between, as I have in a previous article, but AI is rapidly developing into a powerful tool for boosting productivity and efficiency of content creation and distribution.

Can it also assist with research and brainstorming content topics? Absolutely. But its real power is in offloading the most repetitive tasks from carbon-based marketers, freeing them up to focus on the stuff that humans are still pretty good at, like taking thought-leadership to new levels.

• Back in the good old pre-AI days, circa 2023 and earlier, repurposing quality content, like a webinar, went something like this:

• Generate a transcript (once by hand, later through mostly clunky software or services)

• Turn it into a white paper or ebook, again largely a manual process

• Pump out a couple blogs, an email or two and a handful of social posts, again, essentially from scratch

• Finetune each piece of content by submitting it to multiple and mostly manual reviews and revisions

With AI, the same process, which may have taken weeks, can be accomplished in hours, if not minutes (not including still-human-supervised editing, verification, etc.). On top of that, generating additional, personalized versions of all these different content formats for multiple personas is now just a prompt or two away.

So, you’re now producing more content, in more formats, to more channels than ever before.

You must be raking in sales and new prospects, right?

No? Then the problem may not be the width of your content pipeline, but the quality of the content that’s flowing through it.

The not-so-convenient flip side of leveraging AI to up your content velocity and volume is that your competitors are likely doing the same thing. That means the eyeballs of the potential clients you’re competing for are being inundated with information like never before, making it more difficult for your product or brand to stand out from the crowd.

In this New World Order (as in the Old World Order), bland, me-too or vanilla content just isn’t going to get the job done.

Avoiding this situation could be as simple as embracing this two-item Dos and Don’ts list of generative AI adoption:

Do use AI to augment your current content marketing operations, utilizing its ability to shorten multistep or repetitive tasks, such as topic brainstorming and content repurposing.

Don’t use AI as a substitute for industry expertise or for executing truly disruptive thought leadership initiatives, two critical skills that LLM engines currently lack.

What the advent of AI hasn’t changed is that effective marketing requires the creation of intimacy with consumers of content, who could be spending their time doing so many other things instead of reading your prose or watching your video.

Gaining the attention, for even a few minutes, of busy humans who might be scanning someone else’s content — or doom scrolling or playing Candy Crush or keeping an electronic eye on their pet, house, stock portfolio, etc. — is no simple feat. It will take more than quantity or frequency.

It will take compelling and quality content that can only be produced by humans (in conjunction with generative AI tools) with deep industry expertise, insider knowledge and empathy.

No matter how precise or productive AI grows, it will always fall a little short of replicating the nuance and inventiveness native to humans that produces content that resonates with other humans.