We’ve handed the high-water mark of content material advertising and marketing—no less than, content material advertising and marketing in its present kind.
After 13 years in content material advertising and marketing, I feel it’s honest to say that a lot of the content material on firm blogs was created by individuals with zero firsthand expertise of their material. Now we have constructed a occupation of armchair commentators, a category of entrepreneurs who exist nearly completely in a world of principle and abstraction.
I depend myself amongst their quantity. I’ve a whole bunch of bylines about subfloor moisture administration, info safety, SaaS pricing fashions, company useful resource administration. I’m an professional 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 an important content material marketer required exactly no material experience. It was sufficient to learn broadly and write rapidly.
Mountains of natural site visitors have been constructed on the backs of armchair commentators like myself. Time spent doing deep, detailed analysis was, typically talking, wasted, as a result of 80% of the returns got here from simply shuffling other people’s ideas around and slapping a number of keyword-targeted H2s in the precise locations.
However this doesn’t work as we speak.
For all of its flaws, generative AI is a superb, actually 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 very best device for the job. People can’t out-copycat generative AI.
Put one other approach, the position of the content material marketer as a curator has been rendered out of date. So the place can 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, usually 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 brazenly supported his most well-liked candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby targeted nearly completely 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 as we speak must grow to be their tales.
It’s a content material advertising and marketing truism that it’s unreasonable to count on writers to grow to be consultants. There’s a superficial stage of reality to that declare—no content material marketer can purchase a decade’s value of expertise in a number of days or perhaps weeks—however there are nice advantages awaiting any firm keen to problem that truism very, very severely.
As Thompson proved, quick, intense intervals of firsthand expertise can yield unbelievable insights and tales. So what would occur if you happen to 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 things worth writing about, as an alternative of simply writing? If skin-in-the-game, irrespective of how small, was a prerequisite of the position?
We’re already seeing this shift.
Each week, I see extra firms hiring entrepreneurs who’re true, bonafide material consultants (I embrace 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, onerous to seek out, and within the period of AI, value each cent.
I see a rising expectation that entrepreneurs will doc their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that always 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 info. 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 previous mannequin of content material advertising and marketing, however they make way more sense as we speak. This stage of effort is quick changing into the one approach to achieve any form of moat, creating materials that doesn’t already exist on a dozen different firm blogs.
Within the period of information abundance, our want for info is comparatively simple to sate; however we now have a near-limitless starvation for leisure, and private interplay, and bizarre, pattern-interrupting experiences.
Gonzo content material advertising and marketing can ship.
