Does a future exist for content marketers?

Will AI-generated content put content marketers out of a job? Maybe, but not in the way many are talking about it.

Many will know the story of the Luddites, a group of textile workers in the 19th century who protested against the use of machinery in the production of goods. They believed the machines were taking their jobs, responding by destroying the machines, often violently!

We see now that those who embraced this new technology were made incredibly wealthy as it gave them leverage and lowered the cost of production, making things like clothing far more accessible. No longer today do people own just 1-2 dresses!

But will content marketers today see a similar future? Will their ability to generate more and better content lead to a similar outcome?

What saved the Luddites was a lower cost of production opening up a larger addressable market. Will that also save content marketers, and the business of content marketing broadly? It's hard to see how that happens.

If we define the market as the number of Google searches on specific keywords, or volume of content with which people are willing to engage, it's harder to see the market-expansion happening. Sure, maybe content marketers can now allocate more of their time to generating better-targeted content, or more thoughtfully weaving it into acquisition funnels. But at the end of the day, they're operating in a fundamentally limited market.

To take a positive view, you're forced to think about a reallocation of jobs to marketing efforts that were previously too costly, or maybe even entirely new forms of content marketing enabled by AI itself. Can you write content that an AI is even more likely to ingest? Can you write content that trains an AI on your specific product, better enabling customers to flow through your website?

The lack of imagination is what led the Luddites to violence, and humans often will think "faster horses" vs "cars" when asked to predict the future. We may be guilty of that lack of imagination here!

That being said, the reality of a fixed volume of "information demand" and therefore "buying demand" is threatening. If this wasn't saturated already, it will be soon. Content marketers will need to reinvent themselves, and quickly. Either to use the new tools well, or find other roles. Learn how to run the factories, or learn another skill.

Short-term implications -- evolving KPIs

Imagine a world where content marketing teams are 5-10x as productive. Adaptive and resilient content marketers are moving from the factory floor to the factory control room. Instead of spending much of their time being heads-down writing content, they can take a step back a level, thinking more about how well specific customer profiles and journeys are targeted, what emerging keywords / trends may be important to cover, and how to weave the entire strategy together.

As roles change, so should the measurements of success. Particularly in this macro where cash is king, paying for content marketing tools works, but only when there’s quantifiable ROI on the back end. And it’s not a matter of taking production-oriented KPIs and increasing them. It’s also about pushing content marketers to take ownership of the higher-level KPIs in the business (eg. influenced pipeline, MQLs influenced by marketing content). This is an opportunity for those who want elevated responsibility and ownership.

Medium-term implications -- improving the content

We’ve long lived in a world where “thin” content works fine – the world has changed somewhat, but a large portion of content remains not particularly novel or useful. Put some basic SEO content out, you hope your content matches users’ search interest, and that they’ll click through. But as we discussed above, there are a limited quantity of searches, of eyeballs, of interest.

Said differently, the speed of content production will hit “fast-forward” to eyeball saturation.

So how do you drive engagement/conversion in a world flooded with content? Improve the underlying content. People got away with writing thoughtless / repurposed content for too long. Value in the next decade will accrue to the thoughtful humans / those who have helpful and original ideas.

Long-term implications -- investing in other channels

What happens when AI beats humans in writing original content? A year ago I was skeptical we'd get here -- now it appears an inevitability. After all, what do humans really do other than synthesize ideas they’ve seen in the world, connect the dots, and repackage those linked ideas into “original” content.

This is when communities will really be critical. Human to human connection will always have a place, maybe even more so in a world inundated with advanced AI marketers on the scene. Communities though take time to build – and by the time you’re seeing ROI in content marketing drop off, it may be too late. As always, the best time to invest for the long-term is today.

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