Content Marketing Strategy in the Age of AI

Do you need to revamp your content marketing strategy? Wondering how AI will alter content marketing? 

In this article, we’ll explore content marketing strategy in the age of AI.

Why Is Content Marketing Strategy Important?

Content marketing has become an essential strategy for brands looking to attract and engage audiences. However, with the rise of AI, content marketing is undergoing rapid changes.

Having a solid strategy is crucial for effective content marketing. Many marketers focus only on creating content without thinking strategically about how it fits into their broader business goals. The job of a great strategic content team is not to just be good at content—it’s to understand how to make your entire business good at content.

An intentional strategy considers how content creation, distribution, governance, and technologies can work cohesively to support your business objectives—that’s the heart of a great content marketing strategy, which has nothing or little to do with the actual content that you’re creating on a day-to-day basis.

This requires you to look at the “big picture” connections between content activities rather than siloed tactics. What are the activities that you fit together in your business to create competitive advantage?

Strategy is about maximizing your value, either through differentiated activities from your competitors or executing similar activities differently. Whether you’re a team of one or a team of a thousand, content marketing is a powerful way for your brand to stand out if strategically aligned with your business goals. 

#1: Distinguish Content Marketing Strategy From Tactics 

A common mistake people make with content marketing is focusing only on tactics without an overarching strategy guiding them. Many people use the word “strategy” when they mean “tactics”.

Tactics are the specific individual tasks or actions you carry out to meet your strategy objectives. A strategy refers to how you fit specific tactics together into an overall integrated plan—you have to see the whole forest rather than just the trees.

It's easy to get excited about various tactics, like creating viral videos or optimizing for search,  at the individual team level. It’s easy to wonder what the social media team is doing or what the content and demand gen teams are doing—they all have various tactics for how they make their part of the business perform better, but are they aligning and supporting the overall business strategy?

For example, let’s say two teams are creating the same content for two separate channels. They're competing for the same audience, the same part of the buyer’s journey—the same eyeballs and attention. They’re not only not working together, they’re actually working against each other. And so that's a clear indication there's no strategy, even if the tactics themselves are pretty smart.

Strategists take a holistic view, while tacticians zoom in on details. Good strategy connects disparate activities across teams and channels to create synergy.

Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy Is a Team Sport

When deciding who should take the lead on content strategy in your company, it’s ultimately a team effort requiring collaboration. The only difference between the social groups that we think of as social groups and a business is that a business's objective is to create customers—it's a social group directed to build customers.

Ideally, there should be one or two “deciders” who provide high-level direction and vision. For larger companies, this may be the CEO, CMO, or head of marketing. But even solopreneurs can be strategic by considering how their various content efforts interrelate.

The key is having someone chart the overall objectives, plans, and tactics to ensure coordination. Again, content strategy is about fitting the pieces together, not just doing isolated tactics well.

Strategy is not the vision and it’s not the tactics—it’s the thing in between. A great content marketing strategy can give you the roadmap to your vision, it gives you a logical and effective plan for getting your business there. It’s not about whether you should write 10 blog posts or whether they should be listicles, it’s about how you fit together the operation of content as a strategic function in your business so that all those activities work together. 

#2: Rethink Your Content Marketing Strategy 

First, clearly define your content marketing objectives and charter. Even if you're a one-person team, you have to understand the purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish—what is your overarching objective and what are the activities that fit into that objective?

For example, some common goals you may include:

• Becoming an industry media expert and thought leader in your space
• Injecting high-quality content into a direct email marketing strategy
• Improving your website's technical SEO processes
• Using content as a primary business model and revenue stream

With a clear charter established, you can then develop an operating model detailing your activities, teams, workflows, and technologies. This high-level strategy will ensure your tactics ladder up to and support your overarching goals.

Take Red Bull, for example. Red Bull began sponsoring Formula One races and at these races, they would print the winners on a piece of marketing material that had their logo all over it. They found people were more interested in this than in reading a leaflet about their product. This ultimately drove tremendous value for their customer. They understood that  becoming a media and lifestyle brand was the key to their success—Red Bull Media House was born.

The publishing company is its own business within the business of Red Bull. So, they figured out the purpose or charter of the overall business first, then developed a content plan out of their overall objective and how to fit all these activities together so they can scale it consistently. Monster Energy did the same thing, putting almost no money into paid advertising, but creating a lifestyle brand out of the creation of content-driven events.

Another example is Terminus, the account-based marketing software platform. Early on, they started a content brand, FlipMyFunnel. They wrote a book, created a platform, a blog, a series of events, and webinars around the idea of this content brand. They worked as a team to bring all those content experiences together as a media operation. Using a page out of HubSpot’s playbook, Terminus made inbound marketing their overall objective. It was about educating people on account-based marketing. They became so successful that they ultimately split the company into a software division and a media division. They became profitable by making money from their customer events.

You have to start understanding what you’re doing is building and treating your content like a product and you're building an operation to manage that product. Promote and distribute your product as a core function of your business—make that your marketing.

Marketing is about reach and frequency. How many people can you reach with how much frequency? Being able to put your message in front of an audience is the benefit and frequency is the cost. How often do you have to do that for your audience to change their behavior that you want them to change? In the age of social and paid media, it's becoming increasingly hard to reach people with any frequency. And so content marketing efforts generate a level of goodwill with your audience. 

Build Addressable Audiences 

A key objective of content marketing is building addressable audiences. These are engaged subscribers you can reach anytime, such as email lists or event attendees. You have much more permission to reach your target audience organically or through paid media if you choose to promote your products. Sure you can reach those audiences, but the key is to convert them into subscribers.

If you can convert 1–5% of your market into loyal subscribers, you win every time. You can engage them ongoingly, earning their trust and business. This is similar to how media companies monetize audiences across events, communities, subscriptions, and more. Content builds loyalty so people want to hear from you and buy from you. They may not be buyers today or tomorrow, but if you keep them engaged, if you're always delivering value, you're always on top of their minds.

Think of Marvel as a media company. Their goal is to have as big of an audience as they possibly can. Through their content, they are creating loyalty to their audience every time they release something new and their audience is going to spend money on it.

Or take the Barbie movie, for example. It’s the perfect way to think about content marketing—Mattel has completely rebooted the brand of Barbie with one movie.

You can build a spider web of all of the different ways that a singular asset—your audience—can provide monetization to your company. If you're a media company, you have attendees who spend money to come to your events, you have sponsors who also spend money to access those audiences. If you're a smaller company, maybe you have a smaller audience through your email list and through clients you serve, or books and subscriptions you sell. Your audience is trusting in the value you are providing, and you’re making it easier for yourself to monetize your business—that’s the heart of content marketing. it’s like butter—by itself, it's okay, but on top of things, it’s amazing!

Another way to think about addressable audiences is to ask yourself if you can reach them on your terms, independent of platform. A podcast, for example, can be an owned media experience if people have to go to your website and subscribe to listen to it. Whereas a subscriber or follower to your podcast on Apple iTunes or Spotify, that's Apple’s and Spotify’s audience. And ultimately you're a slave to those platform’s algorithms. If Spotify decides to kick you off or shuts down, you’re out of luck. It’s the same with LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

What you hope in building those audiences on social media platforms is that you are treating them like a river where they flow into becoming addressable. The key is knowing your audience—have they shared their information with you to allow you to address them when you want to address them? Event attendees, for example, most likely have given you access to their info via registration. So you have their email address and phone number and can continue to address them. It’s up to you to keep the relationship alive and well. 

#3: How AI Could Alter Your Content Strategy 

Since ChatGPT’s launch, there have been significant drops in search traffic as people increasingly get direct answers from AI rather than clicking web search results. AI is permanently changing search behavior and content consumption.

Google is currently beta-testing AI in its search results. Every time you search, the AI answer will appear at the top of the page, and under that, classic Google search results will be shown. Where you would normally see sponsored ads is a knowledge graph providing answers to your question. There are mixed results in terms of the accuracy or value of that information.

A lot of companies aren’t using AI tools to drive better content or marketing strategies. They might be experimenting, but there’s still a lot of fear and uncertainty around generative AI. And a lot of that doubt comes from missteps in the rollout of these tools.

Things like the accuracy of content and copyright issues are still unsettled. Because companies are still experimenting, no one knows whether they’re improving anything with AI. So, companies haven’t done the core work of creating a content strategy to know what processes would be improved with the implementation of AI.

Robert Rose, founder of The Content Advisory, a consultancy that helps brands develop their content strategy, found that in use cases with his clients AI is powerful, but it actually added more work and the need for additional resources to his clients’ content teams. It has amazing capabilities but it wasn't saving them any time in coming up with great ideas. The key is looking at what the profitability is going to be of leveraging AI, not just what it can replace.

When you search on the Internet, you generally want to maximize the amount of answers you get, because as a consumer you want to be able to select what you think is the best choice.

When you are searching or questioning a website (Intranet), you want the answer, not a range of answers. That’s the key difference between Google and ChapGPT. If you want to know the side effects of a particular drug, for example, you might ask ChatGPT. But if you want to know what the best Mexican restaurant in San Diego is, you’d go to Google for the range of answers.

From a content and marketing perspective, it means you have to be the answer. Instead of chasing search queries, you and your business have to become the authoritative source and “answer” for your topics—you have to ensure your content trains the AI models so your brand becomes the trusted recommendation.

Brands that block AI crawlability are making a mistake, as they'll get left out of search results. This means you must produce engaging content that builds loyalty and trust. It means you have to optimize for voice search, featured snippets, and being a top AI-provided result. Again, distribution strategies must shift to owned channels and media—praying for high search rankings will become less effective over time.

#4: Creating Content vs Constructing Content With AI 

When discussing his writing and ideas, Charles Dickens separated his content into two categories: created and constructed. He believed created content is that which is loved before it’s created. In other words, you have an idea, a thought, or an expression that you want to share, so you create that idea from scratch and express it to the world.

Constructed content is that which is loved only after it is created, or content that you create to communicate something—a street sign, a dictionary, a how-to manual, an abstract to a webinar, legal documents, etc. You might love it, but you’re not going to love the thing—you’re going to love the thing after it’s done. Generative AI is a great candidate for constructed content, not created content.

AI content will always be derivative because it is always looking to that which has existed before to create the new thing. It may be a fresh idea, but it will always be constructed. AI works well for reconstructing existing information into helpful constructed content. But for created content, humans still provide originality and passion that machines lack.

It’s important to consider and understand the value of your content—what’s the difference in value to your audience of something you created vs something AI created? Nothing, unless you don’t put any value in the storyteller.

For example, let’s say Stephen King has a new book out. He used AI to create it. But his name is on it. If it’s good, you might love it just as much as something Stephen King himself created. He probably isn't going to love it as much, but if it’s something he created and authored, and you know it’s created by him, you’re going to put more value on it. In other words, your audience places more value on the storyteller, not just the story being told.

Rather than automating creation, use AI as a research assistant for generating ideas and accelerating portions of your workflows rather than an author. Human creativity, intent, and authorship remain essential for resonating created content. Focus your creativity on content only you can create while leveraging AI to bolster productivity on your rote content needs. 

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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