We’ve handed the high-water mark of content material advertising and marketing—at the least, content material advertising and marketing in its present type.
After 13 years in content material advertising and marketing, I believe it’s truthful to say that many of the content material on firm blogs was created by folks with zero firsthand expertise of their material. We’ve got constructed a career of armchair commentators, a category of entrepreneurs who exist virtually totally in a world of principle and abstraction.
I rely myself amongst their quantity. I’ve a whole lot of bylines about subfloor moisture administration, data safety, SaaS pricing fashions, company useful resource administration. I’m an knowledgeable in none of those subjects.
This has been the completely happy actuality of content material advertising and marketing for over a decade, a pure consequence of the incentives created by early Google Search. Traditionally, being a fantastic content material marketer required exactly no material experience. It was sufficient to learn extensively and write rapidly.
Mountains of natural visitors have been constructed on the backs of armchair commentators like myself. Time spent doing deep, detailed analysis was, usually talking, wasted, as a result of 80% of the returns got here from merely shuffling different folks’s concepts round and slapping a couple of keyword-targeted H2s in the best locations.
However this doesn’t work right now.
For all of its flaws, generative AI is a wonderful, really world-class armchair commentator. If the job-to-be-done is studying a dozen articles and how-to’s and turning them into one thing semi-original and pretty coherent, AI actually is the most effective software for the job. People can’t out-copycat generative AI.
Put one other approach, the function of the content material marketer as a curator has been rendered out of date. So the place will we go from right here?
Hunter S. Thompson popularised the concept of gonzo journalism, “a mode of journalism that’s written with out claims of objectivity, typically together with the reporter as a part of the story utilizing a first-person narrative.”
In different phrases, Hunter was the story.
When requested to cowl the rising phenomenon of the Hell’s Angels, he grew to become a Hell’s Angel. Throughout his protection of the ‘72 presidential marketing campaign, he overtly supported his most well-liked candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby targeted virtually totally on his personal debauchery and chaos-making—a narrative that has outlasted any factual account of the race itself.
In the identical vein, content material entrepreneurs right now have to turn into their tales.
It’s a content material advertising and marketing truism that it’s unreasonable to count on writers to turn into consultants. There’s a superficial degree of fact to that declare—no content material marketer can purchase a decade’s price of expertise in a couple of days or perhaps weeks—however there are nice advantages awaiting any firm keen to problem that truism very, very critically.
As Thompson proved, quick, intense durations of firsthand expertise can yield unbelievable insights and tales. So what would occur in case you radically lowered your content material output and devoted half of your content material workforce’s time to analysis and experimentation? If their job was doing issues price writing about, as an alternative of simply writing? If skin-in-the-game, regardless of how small, was a prerequisite of the function?
We’re already seeing this shift.
Each week, I see extra firms hiring entrepreneurs who’re true, bonafide material consultants (I embody the Ahrefs content material workforce right here—for almost all of our workforce, “writing” is a ability secondary to a decade of hands-on search and advertising and marketing expertise). They’re costly, arduous to search out, and within the period of AI, price each cent.
I see a rising expectation that entrepreneurs will doc their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that usually outperforms the “actual” content material. I see extra firms keen to share subjective experiences and tales, and keep away from competing solely on the sharing of goal, factual data. I see firms spending cash to advertise the non-public manufacturers of in-house creators, actively encouraging parasocial relationships as their company model accounts lay dormant.
These are concepts that made no sense within the outdated mannequin of content material advertising and marketing, however they make rather more sense right now. This degree of effort is quick turning into the one option to acquire any sort of moat, creating materials that doesn’t exist already on a dozen different firm blogs.
Within the period of data abundance, our want for data is comparatively straightforward to sate; however we now have a near-limitless starvation for leisure, and private interplay, and peculiar, pattern-interrupting experiences.
Gonzo content material advertising and marketing can ship.