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Crafting Tomorrow: Content Marketing's Future in the AI Era
186 Plays8 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, host Mark Evans sits down with Benji Hyam, co-founder of Grow and Convert, to explore the fast-changing content marketing landsscape.
They explore the future of SEO, discussing how evolving algorithms and user behaviors shape strategies for visibility.
Benji shares his expertise on the power of brand positioning in content marketing, emphasizing its impact on engagement and conversion.
A thought-provoking segment questions the role of AI in content creation, pondering whether it could ever replace human creativity.
The conversation then shifts to crafting effective content for the bottom of the sales funnel, providing actionable insights for converting prospects. F
inally, they tackle the delicate balance between leveraging AI for content creation while maintaining the unique spark of human creativity.
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Transcript
AI's Impact on Content Marketing
00:00:09
Speaker
A lot has changed over the past 18 months if you're a content marketer, or a marketer for that matter. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGBT, and the content world has been turned upside down ever since. Today, I'm excited to talk with Benji about how AI is not just changing the game, but rewriting the rules on how content is created
00:00:29
Speaker
distributed and consumed.
Introduction to Benji Hyam
00:00:31
Speaker
Benji co-founded Grow and Convert, a fully done-for-you content marketing agency, and is the co-founder of Designs for Marketers, a digital and development agency. Welcome to Marketing Spark. I'm excited to be here.
Evolution of Content Marketing Post-ChatGBT
00:00:42
Speaker
We'll get into the impact of AI, but I'd like to start by asking you about the state of the content marketing landscape in 2024. You could argue, as I said off the top, that a lot has changed in the past 18 months since some launch of ChatGBT. For a decade, probably more,
00:00:58
Speaker
Content marketing was king and vehicles like blogs and gated guides were important marketing assets. Where's the content marketing world today? Are you still optimistic about content? And if so, why?
Founding the Agency and Addressing Content Issues
00:01:10
Speaker
I loaded a question that we can have back and certainly one that given the fact that you're a full service content marketing agency, I would say a lot has changed, but a lot hasn't changed too. When we started our agency, we started under the premise that two things were wrong with what a lot of people were doing. The first was that.
00:01:28
Speaker
Not a lot of people are measuring content all the way through conversion to see how content was producing revenue. The second was just on the content quality side. What we had noticed is that if you read most of the articles that you found over Google search, that most of it was just not good.
00:01:49
Speaker
The quality wasn't good and getting into our agency, we realized that it was a content production problem. The way that most businesses produce content was by basically giving topics to a freelance writer who knows nothing about the topic that they're writing about and then asking them to produce thought leadership content. There was a complete mismatch just in the way content was written and then the expectations from
Shift to Thought Leadership and Non-SEO Content
00:02:16
Speaker
a client. We started our agency to solve that.
00:02:18
Speaker
I preface that all because that'll make a lot more sense when we come to the AI portion. And actually why I'm not as bullish on AI, I think as most people are at this point in time. But then where things are today, I think, yes, things are changing. So there's a couple new search engines that have popped up in the last few years that are starting to gain some notoriety. Google, I think in the last month or two especially has
00:02:49
Speaker
maybe had the entire SEO community against them and people very bearish on where Google is going with search. I think because of that, people are starting to say SEO content is going away. We need more thought leadership and non SEO content. We need to distribute content in new ways. That's just my assessment of what's happening right now. And we can go into.
00:03:17
Speaker
specifics because I don't necessarily agree with the popular narrative that is going around right now. I don't know where you want to take the conversation there, but that's just me setting up my view on things.
Challenges in Measuring Content Impact
00:03:30
Speaker
So much to talk about given everything that's going on, but let's unpack your initial thoughts and really focus on, I think two topics that I think a lot of marketers think about. One is measuring the impact of content. Cause I think a lot of marketers write content.
00:03:46
Speaker
They hit the publish button. They may distribute to LinkedIn and Twitter and then maybe check Google analytics once in a while. Not good enough. The other topic is obviously other pillars, obviously a quality. There's a lot of quantity out there has been exacerbated by AI. But even before then we were marketers were trying to battle listicles and stuff that was written by Fiverr freelancers. That was essentially just generic path for the lack of a better word.
00:04:17
Speaker
Talk philosophically about how you're trying to tackle those two areas and the challenges that you face when you're trying to convince companies that this is the better approach, a smarter approach to creating content.
Focus on Pain Point SEO for Conversions
00:04:32
Speaker
On the measurement side, when I got into the agency side of things, so we started our agency in 2017, Girl Unconvert as a business started in 2015. It came off the back of me doing
00:04:46
Speaker
marketing inside startups in San Francisco. One of the issues that I noticed there was just a measurement issue. So people like the way that most people measured the impact of content marketing was saying something like we're getting 20,000 people to our site per month. And on average, a blog should convert at something like two to 3%. We're probably driving this many conversions and
00:05:16
Speaker
reporting directly to a CEO, that wasn't really good enough. They wanted to know what content was converting, what's driving revenue for the business. When we started our agency, that was a main problem that we wanted to solve for because we felt like from an agency perspective and an in-house perspective, people just didn't know the analytics well enough. When we started, what we really wanted to figure out is
00:05:39
Speaker
Can we prove the ROI of content marketing by showing businesses article by article what's converting and what's not? And we actually started our business on a completely different idea than we have now. When we first started our agency, we were
00:05:54
Speaker
Focusing more on the content quality side focusing on articles that people wanted to read and that was interesting to other people and about a year to end the business we figured out that. The stuff that people necessarily want to read isn't the things that convert when we started our agency.
00:06:13
Speaker
We did a lot more top of funnel content stories. We interviewed other marketers, depending on the business, we would go talk to industry influencers, come up with an angle for the story, interview them, write this almost like a magazine style story. And it drove a lot of traffic, but what we realized when we dug into the conversions, cause we had all the analytics set up, that stuff didn't really convert that well. We ended up discovering our now main process pain point SEO, which is just
00:06:41
Speaker
Essentially, topics that have search intent that ties into the core value of your business is what converts the best. For us as an agency, if someone's searching for top content marketing agencies, that's going to have a much higher conversion rate because of the mindset of what the customer is searching for. Then let's say if someone is searching just broadly for content marketing because content marketing as a search term is just
00:07:10
Speaker
likely someone researching the topic who doesn't really know anything about it. And so we became obsessed with figuring out what are the keywords and topics that indicate someone has buying intent for the product or the service we're selling. And that's the main thing that we ended up. It's interesting. The obvious question from someone like me who has spent many years trying to write high quality content is how
00:07:34
Speaker
content that doesn't convert fix into the overall content mix, whether there's a place for it and how a company can extract value from it, even though it may not drive conversions. Does that make sense? It's a question that a lot of people ask, but it's not to say that we won't produce top of the funnel content. We just believe that starting at the bottom of the funnel is going to yield results faster, especially if you're an agency providing a service to a company.
00:08:01
Speaker
As an agency, you're really held accountable to the ROI that you're driving. And what we realized early on is that people can like the content. When we did the story-based approach, people were like, oh, this is great content. It drove a lot of traffic, but at some point the client's going to say, okay, how much revenue is this actually driving? If you can't defend that.
00:08:21
Speaker
you're likely gone as a vendor. We just believe in starting at the bottom of the funnel and then working your way up. What are those terms, the keywords that basically have the highest likelihood of driving customers for the business? Let's start there and own the rankings for those, and then let's slowly move up the funnel. The real premise behind even that thinking
00:08:45
Speaker
is just, I think when people think of a marketing funnel, they always think people start at the very top of the funnel. So you need to have awareness of the industry first. We need to educate people on let's say, what is content marketing? And then slowly move people all the way through the funnel to let's say people who are searching for a marketing agency. Our thinking was that.
00:09:07
Speaker
Look, there's other companies that have been educating people on the industry or the category for years, likely before your business exists. So there's already some segment of the industry that is educated on what you're doing. And if we can show up when they're searching for solutions to their problems, we can shortcut a lot of that
00:09:31
Speaker
marketing funnel on the awareness side to show up when they're considering different options, basically convince someone that you're a better option than what they were already looking for. That's why we think of starting at the bottom of the funnel first and then working your way up. But again, it's not to say that top of the funnel doesn't work or there's no place for it. I think the way that we would think about it is that
00:09:51
Speaker
those bottom of the funnel terms are likely going to have the highest conversion rate from someone reading or someone finding you in the search results to actually signing up for a service or a product. But the top of the funnel, there can be other ways to basically move them through the funnel, such as if they're not ready to purchase, you can capture their email. But I think when we started the business, I think the main
00:10:17
Speaker
way that people were talking about content is almost everyone needed to capture emails and move people through nurturing campaigns for them to become a lead. And we were, we just came and said, I don't know if that's the case. Like you don't need to capture email for every single person. What we realized is the thing that dictates the conversion rate the most is just the topic of whatever you're writing about. That's how we flip that thinking
AI's Role in SEO and Content Quality
00:10:43
Speaker
a little bit.
00:10:43
Speaker
begs the question about the value and role of SEO these days. A lot of people have, if they're not, they haven't given up on, on using Google, but they're certainly using chat GPT and arc and perplexity and some of the sort of alternative AI driven search engines these days. When you look at how your approach to content marketing and how you serve clients and the value and role of SEO,
00:11:11
Speaker
How has that changed in the last 18 months? Is SEO as important a pillar or have the rules changed? Obviously you said earlier that a lot of SEO companies or players are upset with Google. How are you navigating the SEO waters these days?
00:11:30
Speaker
I think search is always going to evolve and change. I don't know in the last 18 months that anything has drastically changed other than everyone talking about how things are going to change. If that makes sense. I think people are more worried than they need to be at this point. So I remember, I think like November, it was either November 2021 or
00:11:53
Speaker
January 2022, or when was the open AI rollout? It was- November 2022. 2022. I was a year off. It's 2024 now. Got to get my ears right. I remember when it first rolled out, everyone was scared saying, this is going to take AI writing jobs. As a business, we got to go explore and see what are the capabilities of this. We did a lot of research on those. And I think in March of 2023, we came out with this video, will AI replace writers?
00:12:22
Speaker
after using chat GPT, we argued, no, at least not in the near future. And the reason was because actually there's more nuance to that. So we said it can replace bad writers, but the kind of writing that we do where we interview
00:12:38
Speaker
a point of contact inside of the company who has immense knowledge on whatever we're writing about and we're acting like journalists to produce marketing content. I don't think that's going to be replaced by some AI writing tool anytime in the near future because
00:12:55
Speaker
Not only even if we could feed an interview into chat GPT or any other AI writing tool, there's nuance in how to set up the argumentation into how to format everything, what arguments are important versus not. And I don't think AI is at the point where it can distinguish that stuff like humans. When we did the research and tested out trying to write different articles with chat GPT, even if you just think about how chat GPT works where
00:13:24
Speaker
It scrapes the web and then it kind of rehashes general talking points on whatever it is. So it tries to find the most common answer and provide that back. If we truly want to stand out in content and the content we're producing.
00:13:42
Speaker
then wouldn't you not want to have the most generic answers and the most generic thoughts in your marketing content? You actually want to be different and have something that you're saying that's unique to the industry that makes your company stand out. And so for us, when we looked at how it was working, we just said, this doesn't even really make sense to use as a writing tool because if you're going to use AI or chat GPT or any AI writer,
00:14:10
Speaker
Just the way it works, you're going to produce just generic content that everyone else is producing because you're going to use the same arguments as everyone else. You're going to have the same opinions on the industry. And if you truly want to be differentiated in your marketing, you're supposed to do stuff differently. We just thought it didn't really make sense from a writing standpoint. So that's writing. Then there's the search engines. The search engine is probably more of what
00:14:34
Speaker
we're nervous about longer term because algorithms change the process that we've come up with to rank and all that kind of stuff can continue to change and evolve. So there's a couple of ways to look at this. There's Google versus new incumbents. I'm still of the mindset that while everyone is very negative Google right now,
00:14:57
Speaker
Google has still a majority of the market share, I would say 80 plus percent. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Like for a new search engine to gain mass adoption, I just think it's going to take years and years for that to happen. I'm not as worried about the new search engines, such as perplexity and some of the other ones at this point.
Google's Search Dominance and Competition
00:15:20
Speaker
That said, I think it's something to pay attention to long-term and see how
00:15:27
Speaker
the search results from the different search engines. What information are they giving? That's different than what Google is doing now. But also I think because people are so negative on Google and they've gotten so much backlash lately, if I was them as a company, I would just invest heavily into improving all the negative feedback that they have. So I also think that they have.
00:15:53
Speaker
way more of a wealth of knowledge than any other search engine at this point, including on the AI side. So they've been testing different AI stuff for years already. Just in terms of feeding back results that customers would want using AI, I think they're way ahead of any other competitor. And I just think that just like coming out of 2020,
00:16:19
Speaker
with the elections, how everyone was so negative on Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. And you had all those congressional testimonies and everyone's Meta's done. And now four years later, they've bounced back and no one really has that opinion anymore. I think the same thing will happen with Google. I think, okay, they might've screwed up on a couple of their last updates.
00:16:39
Speaker
This, the recent one from this March seems to have improved a lot of the negative things that have happened in the past. Uh, we like, for example, we have a client that was in the medical space that got hit really hard in the September and October updates of last year and lost, I would say 30 to 50% of their position one through three rankings. And now it corrected itself and we're nearly at all time highs in terms of rankings and those.
00:17:08
Speaker
one through three positions because they truly provided better information on the category than any other site that was talking about this. Like we're interviewing their doctors and cutting edge researchers on concussion treatment and providing way more robust answers and information than let's say a health line or a WebMD where again, you have just generic
00:17:32
Speaker
researchers or doctors talking about the space, but they don't have that level of expertise that someone who only deals in this one area does. I guess all that to say, I'm not as negative on Google in the near term. And I think people
00:17:52
Speaker
Anytime something new comes out, people over index on the side of this is going to change everything. And people forget that for real change to happen usually takes way longer than you ever expect. So you could say, I don't know if we go to a bunch of different spaces, but crypto 2017, everyone's, this is going to change everything. More people have become involved, but I've yet to see products that have hit mass adoption yet.
00:18:22
Speaker
Like any new technology, AI, same thing.
Creating Content Beyond AI's Reach
00:18:24
Speaker
Like it's been around for a long time, but I still think we're years off from where this becomes something that truly changes content. I agree with you on a lot of fronts. It's interesting as a writer, I've tried chat GPT, chat GPT four.
00:18:45
Speaker
Claude has recently come out from this perplexity. I just don't see how AI is going to replace content writers right now for a lot of content. Advertising copy, maybe email copy, maybe chat GP does a better job, but I think I'm in the skeptics camp, at least for on that sense. In a blog post recently, Rand Fiskin from Spark Toro said that content that isn't markedly better than what chat GPT generates shouldn't be created.
00:19:16
Speaker
I guess maybe it's alluding to some of the comments you made earlier. Wondering about what are your thoughts in terms of the content that breaks through the noise. We live in a tsunami of content right now. It's so easy to create content at scale using AI.
00:19:33
Speaker
But how do companies discover the most interesting topics? And what are the key elements? You mentioned talking to customers and domain experts. There's original research. There's things that you can pull out from your data. But how can companies create content that establishes a reputation as a must consume content source, the trusted resource, the place where you go to get the answers you need to some of the questions, some of the challenges that you're facing?
Importance of Brand Positioning
00:20:04
Speaker
It starts with the company having strong positioning. So if we just go back to marketing fundamentals, I think every single company says we want to be a thought leader. We want to have thought leadership content. First, what does that even mean? I think at the end of the day, it just means that you have something different to say, some unique opinion that maybe others haven't caught on to yet.
00:20:27
Speaker
I think companies always say that they want this kind of content, but at the end of the day, there's very few companies that have those unique opinions or strong opinions. And if you don't have that, all of your content is going to fall flat, no matter what agency you work with, what writer you work with. And so I think step one is.
00:20:48
Speaker
companies needed to take more of an inward view and really surface what are those unique opinions about how we created our product, what's different about our service, how we're thinking about approaching things differently than everyone else. And it starts there because without that, nothing else really matters. I'm glad you mentioned that because I spent a lot of time, probably too much time focusing on the importance of brand positioning and helping companies differentiate themselves, being clear
00:21:18
Speaker
about what they do, who they serve and why they matter, and then establish themselves as different. And I see the pendulum swinging from data to brand strategy and the importance of brand positioning. So I'm hoping that a lot of marketers are thinking the same way that you're thinking. It's interesting that I read a post on LinkedIn today from Pete Blaja talking about his conference that he's holding called Spring and the topics that marketers want to talk about.
00:21:46
Speaker
and positioning and messaging are almost at the top of the list just behind go to market strategies. I'm very encouraged by that because it's so important and often it's not seen as a priority. It's not as top of mind for a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs. I'm glad you say that. I think we're aligned there. Like for me as a marketer, I think what's frustrating just me being on social media and things that trigger me now is more people
00:22:16
Speaker
talking too much about tactics instead of the fundamentals. And I feel like we've gone away as a marketing community from just a focus on the fundamentals. I fully agree. Positioning and messaging is probably the number one thing that you need to get from the very beginning. And then everything else falls into place once that happens. Same thing. If a company has product market fit, you can almost do anything wrong and you can still grow as a business because you have the product market fit. But I feel like
00:22:44
Speaker
So many people try to grow businesses before they have really refined positioning and messaging or product market fit. And then they talk about all these tactics that they're doing because you have to get the fundamentals right before you can do anything to scale a business. It's the same thing when it comes to content.
00:23:01
Speaker
You have to have something valuable to say, something different. So even when we're talking about producing content for our own site or content for other businesses, it's always what are you guys doing differently than other people? What are your unique opinions? How are you approaching this differently? All those things.
00:23:19
Speaker
are what's going to produce compelling content and what's going to differentiate your content versus other people's. And again, that's not going to be able to be replicated by a chat GPT, because if you're some business and you have a unique way of doing things that your competitors aren't doing, they're not going to be writing about that stuff. They're not going to be talking about it. I think it just starts there. And I don't think enough companies think about that before hiring content marketers or even hiring marketers in general. I think that's step one.
00:23:51
Speaker
What happens if you're approached by a company that wants to produce high quality content that converts? You love the product, but when you look at the website and when you talk to the client, their brand positioning is off or it's confusing or unclear or not differentiated. Do you accept them anyway or do you go back to them and say, you got a great product? We certainly can create amazing content for you, but you got a problem and you need to address it. What happens in those scenarios?
00:24:17
Speaker
We learned that the hard way. Historically, we had taken a lot of early stage startups. We've really gone away from that a lot because
00:24:25
Speaker
some of the proxies that allow us to work with the company. So you have to have over a hundred customers. Depends on the business. Obviously B2C is going to be a lot different, but essentially we want to see that the company has a lot of sales and that they have sales that are not coming from referrals or their network. So have they been able to sell through some cold channel before? Have they done cold email? Have they done outbound sales? Have they done content before? Have they done paid ads?
00:24:52
Speaker
that's gone to the site and converted because that tells us, okay, that they have some messaging or positioning that's resonating with the audience that converts on cold leads. I think coming from my past experience, working at early stage companies, I was at two companies that I joined post series A as the first marketer. And I remember the second company specifically, the founder kept saying, no, we have product market fit, we have product market fit, we've sold
00:25:21
Speaker
I don't know, millions of dollars worth of contracts this year, but the reality was all those contracts were coming through his personal network. But it's very different when you have relationships and you're the solo salesperson talking to these people versus a marketing team that's generating cold demand, trying to pass them to a sales team and having them close. If you looked at the difference in close rate from the founder to the marketing and sales team, it was like,
00:25:48
Speaker
astronomical. It was like not even a comparison. I think we won't take on companies who don't have this figured out. And I think it's, do they have a marketing team? Have they sold through a cold channel before? Do we actually believe in what they're doing? Can they articulate what's different about the way that they're approaching their business versus anyone else? So one of the first things that we ask when we're on a sales call is, tell us the founding story. Why do you exist? That usually tells so much because
00:26:17
Speaker
Again, if they don't really have a compelling founding story, there's no real reason why they started this business.
00:26:24
Speaker
it's typically really tough to do content for a business. But oftentimes when you ask that story, they'll say, I was working in this other business. I noticed this huge problem in the industry. I set out to solve it. And a lot of that story becomes woven into the content pieces and the differentiators and all that kind of stuff. So those are typically the companies that have a really unique founding story or have some compelling reason why they exist are typically the ones that
00:26:52
Speaker
our best to do content for. I want to get your thoughts on the balancing act between human creativity and AI when it comes
Integrating AI with Human Creativity
00:27:01
Speaker
to creating content. I suspect a lot of companies follow different paths. There are companies that lean into original content. They may not be using chat GPT or AI. They're really traditional creators of content. There are companies that have
00:27:19
Speaker
leaned hard into AI thinking that it's going to replace writers and allow them to create content easily and create content at scale. And then there are companies that are trying to pull both levers at the same time using creativity, using their own writers, but also trying to enhance it or augment it with chat GBT. What is your take on
00:27:44
Speaker
trying to intermix these two worlds, trying to leverage creativity and the power of humans to do things that are amazingly thoughtful and insightful, but at the same time leveraging the power of AI because it's a tool and we should be using it in some way, shape or form. How are you approaching it? And what is the balancing act if there is like a balancing act to be had? I wrote this post a long time ago and I forget the exact title of it, but it's something like,
00:28:13
Speaker
Tools optimize processes and they're not like a replacement for like humans. And I feel like people often forget that. I think it's the same thing with AI. Look, if there's, if you have a set process for your business and there's ways that you can optimize pieces of it with AI, by all means use it. I'm not against AI as a tool because again, I think it will change a lot of things.
00:28:38
Speaker
I don't know if we know at this point necessarily what it's going to change yet. Is chat GPT going to be the winner long-term? Will even LLMs be a thing that we interact with in the way that we do today? Or will it be some other way that we interact with querying AI? I don't know yet, but I think if you
00:29:01
Speaker
have challenges coming up with content ideas. And you could use that as a way to generate more ideas or help it exercise your own creativity. If you're stuck, great way to use it. If there's certain pieces of your process that could be automated, or let's say even if I can feed an interview to an LLM and get a summary of it back, and there's certain key points that came from that interview in the summary that I forgot about, or maybe
00:29:30
Speaker
weren't as pronounced, that could be a great way to use it. So I think every company should just look at their own content creation process and figure out what pieces of their process could be more automated, whether it's brainstorming new ideas, coming up with topics, whether it's some editing portion in it. I don't know exactly what that is. I can say for us,
00:29:54
Speaker
There's not too much stuff we're using it for right now. I can say like sales meeting summaries using zoom's AI transcription. Okay. It helps us remember certain sales conversations that we've had. We use like Otter, we've used it even before a lot of the, the LLM stuff came out, just a way to transcribe interviews and get that, like there, there's certain tools that will become very helpful and save time. But for us in terms of content creation as just
00:30:24
Speaker
And overall thing that we're doing, I don't see too many ways of using it. That's going to save us a ton of time in our process, just because we have a very set process. We think it works for a very specific reason and we want to keep doing things that way. And I think it's good to stay focused on how things are changing.
00:30:48
Speaker
But again, things don't change all that quickly. And I think there's so many people even pontificating on how Google will change with the rollout of SG. The reality is we just don't know until it rolls out and we actually get to test things. And I think trying to get too far ahead of things instead of just focusing on what works now.
00:31:08
Speaker
can be a recipe for disaster. Because again, you're trying to, you're spending all this time thinking about how search could change in a year or two, or even longer than that, instead of just doing what works now. I think if more companies just focused on how to be the best at doing what works now, I think they'd have a lot more success than trying to think too deeply into what are all the possible things that could go wrong with my approach in the future.
00:31:33
Speaker
That's great advice. I agree with your approach and use of AI in my world. I use chat GPT for frameworks and generating content ideas. And sometimes I'll feed content that I wrote into chat GPT and say, can you fix any grammatical and spelling errors? Cause the last thing you want to do as a writer is have mistakes in your copy. And then the only other tools that I really use on a regular basis would be a little plugin called word tune.
00:31:58
Speaker
that you can, you write an article and then you can highlight a sentence or a paragraph and it gives you alternatives. It's AI generated, but it just gives you some creative alternatives that, Oh, that sentence better than the one I wrote. And I'm the only one that would be descript, which is a video editing, which is awesome. That's a great tool for transcription and captions and video editing, but that's about it for now. I think that's the thing is I think there's,
00:32:25
Speaker
very specific use cases for AI. Again, I think it helps optimize certain processes. Descripts the perfect example. It's a product that can take your video, transcribe it, and then it helps just with the editing process, and you can edit much easier. Again, it optimizes a very specific process. It's not a replacement for
00:32:46
Speaker
editors completely, someone who's not an editor can edit stuff more easily, but it also helps just an editor save time in their job. And I think if I view how AI is going to change in the next, I don't know, two to five years, I think
00:33:04
Speaker
AI is going to be included in a lot more existing products. AI, I don't know if it is the product. I think that's, I think that's like the last year how the narrative has changed. And I think people are coming from being scared of AI eating jobs as AI is this thing that is going to take over. It's going to replace humans too.
00:33:27
Speaker
Oh, it's a technology that's going to improve a lot of the way that we do things and AI is going to be integrated into a lot of the tools that we already use and help improve specific processes inside of the product.
Addressing Content Gaps in a Social Media Age
00:33:41
Speaker
I think we've done a good job over the last 40 minutes of convincing marketers that AI is not going to steal their jobs. In fact, it could be a way of enhancing their jobs and making their jobs easier.
00:33:51
Speaker
And I did want to end the podcast on a bit of a positive note and ask you amid all these changes and all these new developments, what are you most excited about when you look at the content marketing landscape into in 2024 and beyond? What are the things, the trends, the concepts, the approaches that get you excited about waking up every morning and going to work? What I think about a lot is just.
00:34:17
Speaker
What are the gaps in content right now? What are the gaps in other people's marketing? I feel like recently it's become so easy to just do what everyone else is doing. Find the next big trend and just follow it. So like the big thing has been like LinkedIn over the last two years. LinkedIn's the main distribution channel. Everyone's on it. But when everyone's on something, it becomes way less effective. I always get excited about thinking,
00:34:44
Speaker
Like, Davis and I were thinking about this yesterday. Davis is my business partner. We were thinking, what is like the main marketing publication right now? If we wanted to go read stuff on marketing, where would we go? To be honest, I couldn't even think of one resource that I'm like this blog or this group of people are just so good. And I find so much value in reading their stuff to me. That's an opportunity. I feel like things have shifted so much towards.
00:35:15
Speaker
sound bites on social, whether it's like these Twitter posts or everyone trying to be an expert on LinkedIn that we've lost a lot of the nuance and we've lost a lot of the depth that used to happen in blog posts. To me, I think of that as an opportunity. I'm like, okay, if everyone else is just trying to be
00:35:36
Speaker
an expert on LinkedIn and just not even going into the detail. Can we write content that does go into the detail and move the conversation back towards this kind of stuff? And I think that applies to every single industry. If you look at any industry, what are the publications that you go read? What are the YouTube channels that you subscribe to? What are those people doing differently?
00:36:01
Speaker
than just all the other people. Like there's thousands, I don't know, there's hundreds of thousands of marketers. And the fact that I can't name like five different blogs that I am like, yes, I would subscribe to this email newsletter, read their articles every day is an issue. I think again, we've moved from the direction of
00:36:25
Speaker
content, like people producing content to truly help people share their learnings and all that kind of stuff to just very, it's very much transactional right now. It seems like LinkedIn is so much just about everyone growing their own following that people are willing to say whatever they want just to get that rise or get that engagement. And it's become a frustrating place. Like for me, I've realized I'm trying to spend way less time on social media because I've realized that
00:36:55
Speaker
the incentives have become skewed. It's become less about providing really interesting information to your audience that used to be done in let's say traditional blogging. Like you'd lay out an argument and share examples and argue everything. To now it's just come up with a really pithy headline that drives a reaction and then like some story that backs it. And it's just, I don't know, I feel like we've lost
00:37:20
Speaker
a lot of the interesting content for every single industry. I think what excites me going forward is trying to figure out what are going to be the next big distribution channels.
00:37:31
Speaker
The reason, and by the way, the reason why we focus on SEO is because we had started our business with a completely different premise that we were, we had something called community content promotion, which is find communities where you know, your target audience hangs out and share your content in those places as a way to drive traffic back to your site. A lot of the communities have changed where I think social has become largely where those communities are now, but the idea behind it still stays the same. So like where are people congregating right now?
00:38:01
Speaker
What content can I produce that's truly unique and compelling? And I think just constantly thinking about that is what excites me going forward. I think what should excite most people. I think, again, if everyone's doing the same thing,
00:38:17
Speaker
If everyone's writing content the same way, if everyone's producing content with chat GPT, if everyone's using freelance writers who are just Googling around and trying to rehash everything that's already said, nothing is interesting. If that's the way that everyone does things, I think content will end up in a very bad place. And I think to be fair, that's, I empathize with the feeling around content right now, because I think that's largely what's happened in the last few years is we've.
00:38:43
Speaker
try to take so many shortcuts to produce content that most of the content is just not interesting. But I think for things that people should think about, if you can truly provide different information, you can distribute it in different places, I think that's where the opportunity is going forward.
00:39:07
Speaker
Interesting thoughts.
Resources from Grow and Convert Website
00:39:09
Speaker
I must admit or confess that I have been on the LinkedIn bandwagon for the last three years, even though I feel like the bandwagon has got increasingly noisy and LinkedIn seems to be, spends more time trying to twist the algorithm than serve creators. So I think I may have to go back to my blog, which was my original love when I got into content marketing.
00:39:29
Speaker
originally. And I guess you've given me some motivation and inspiration to seek stop, stop posting less on LinkedIn and maybe more of my blog and see if I can come up with some more helpful content. One last question is if people are interested in learning more about you and what you do, where should they go?
00:39:43
Speaker
Our website, growandconvert.com, tons of articles, just outlining our whole content marketing process, sharing different thoughts on marketing. I'm fairly active on Twitter, not so much on LinkedIn.
00:40:03
Speaker
or your favorite podcast app, and of course share via social media. If you're a B2B or a SaaS company looking for more demand, pipeline and revenue, but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk about my fractional CMO and strategic advisory services and my 90-day marketing sprint package. You can reach out to me via email, mark at markevans.ca, connect with me on LinkedIn, of course, or visit marketingspark.co. We'll talk to you next time.