The 2024 Content Marketing Guide You Need To Survive AI

Okay. Everyone knows the playbook to grow your brand today. It is content and SEO. That is what we've been taught. But what have I told you? There are marketers out there building $100 million brands from a new type of playbook. It's called personality LED content. And we are going to give you the secrets to it on this very show. We're going to tell you the three things you should start to do today if you want to instrument this for your brand before anyone else. All of that and more on today's episode of Marketing against the Grain. This is the show if you want to understand how AI is going to impact your ability to grow your brand through content. Right? So content has really been a staple of how marketing strategies have evolved over time ever since the popularity of the Internet. I think some of the best marketeers have being the best because they have differentiated themselves through content. Gary Vee is a perfect example of someone who's built an unbelievable business through content. And there is many, many others like the other guy. You WhatsApp me, Alex.

I DM'd you about Alex Hormozi, friend of the pod and he had this great YouTube video about how he is about to release a book and he has like this hour long presentation with the book and he is talking about how much his time he spent iterating on it, right? He's like, I did 10 drafts of this book. I sat with this presentation for hours every day for months and months. And what's happening is like AI can do that in like 10% of the time. Like Alex is right to do what he is doing right? Where to go through those iterations and get to the perfect iteration where he feels like there's nothing left to give. The reality is though, it's really hard, I have always found to be alone doing that and then you get in your head and it slows you you down. But when you have a live editor with AI, that's completely transforms the game, right?

I. I think so. The question to ask is, will AI create thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Alexes, Right? So there's one Alex today because he's willing to grind iterate and he's great at content. He has books, he has presentations, he has a YouTube channel, he has podcast. He has all of these different things that have helped him to scale his business, but they're all fundamentally content and very much for the same of any B2B. And we've been talking about what happens. How does AI impact content? How does it affect a Marketer's ability to use content to grow their business. So let's start with a couple of things. This was from Glenn also look at Viper.

Chill, baby. This is. Glenn is like, oh, of the OG SEO folk. He's got some staying power in the SEO game and knows, knows what he's doing.

Yeah, he's his thing is really able to kind of break apart businesses who use search. He's always been really good at doing that. So one of the best search driven businesses is NerdWallet. NerdWallet, our public company, they did their earnings recently and one of the things that I thought was interesting is they mentioned organic search traffic headwinds 10 times. So we've talked a little bit to date on this show about the impact of AI on search driven content. So there's many different types of content that you use to grow your business. One of the most prominent search driven content because it actually helps you to not only scale your business, but do it in a very methodical way, a very forecastful way where you can actually figure out what the direct return on your investment is. NerdWallet are one of the best at doing this. They've created a ton of content around credit cards, business credit cards, like all of these kind of different ways to review different credit cards. And they own all those search terms. And so they, they basically mentioned organic traffic headwinds 10 times. And so when Glenn looked into this, he could see that they have decreased quarter on quarter. He used Semrush and ars by about 18 to 15%, which does not seem a lot, but for a business that's primarily a search for business, huge amount dependent. Yeah, but dependent upon traffic, that is a huge amount. And so you can see already that real businesses who are very much, you know, dependent upon search traffic have started to feel the pinch of AI and how they use content to grow their businesses. One thing I'll just say quickly about this is Tim Shen, who's the founder and CEO, he did say that they are starting to see a recovery. And the reason they're starting to see a recovery is because Google initially released AI in about 14% of all searches. It went somewhat not very good and then they decided to start to roll it back out. Now that doesn't mean that it's going to be rolled back out forever, but we still see like in businesses where I suspect if you have like 60% of all of your traffic coming from search, you are probably starting to see real impact from these changes.

Yeah. So this is, I think this is the key point, if you're watching today's show and you're like, oh my, search traffic's pretty good, then you are all the folks we've talked to, the folks that are really getting hit is where search is like the dominant channel, like where they're all in and they're really heavy into getting traffic from Google. If Google traffic is like a third of your traffic, you know you're not going to see much change. It's really on the far edge of optimization of keywords because as Google is rolling out AI search results, it's doing it through less commercial keywords and then over time to more commercial keywords because they don't want to mess up AdWords. And the folks who are really relying on those less commercial keywords, less transaction based keywords, are the folks like NerdWallet, like a lot of the media companies that are really deep into like every single keyword matters for my business, right?

And I think the couple of other things here for our listeners is informational traffic is getting much hit, much harder than transactional traffic. So informational traffic is I create content to educate someone on a topic and then I get them into my website and convert them in some way. Transactional is I'm searching for a specific thing to take action, whether that's a specific product. I'm searching for like a CRM, I'm searching for a account management provider, like these kind of transactional keywords where you're seeking to take action. So NerdWallet is an informational heavy site, right? Again, that's why they are experiencing this pain because they create a ton of informational content to educate their users and then they have a bunch of transactional keywords which are all of these different reviews that they have. So one of the takeaways I would say initially is where are we in terms of AI and its impact on content to grow your business? And we just think of search to begin with. Well, there is, there is no way that AI is not going to disrupt that informational part of your traffic, right? Like we see it in our wallet. We've seen some of this in HubSpot. Even though Google are rolling this back out, there is going to be some of that content that is going to be usurped by this AI functionality where you can just get the answer all within the chat in Google or any of these other AI assistants. And so that's the first part, right? So like people like Alex, people like the, you know, all of these different types of incredible content marketers they part of what they do is they create educational content. But the other thing that I think.

Is pretty interesting is before we move on, I want to ask you about something because that's related to the kind of initial SEO content game. I would posit that the pull, like kind of basically we're having a little bit of an AI correction. We had a lot of AI hype and it's kind of correcting down and things like Google pulling back AI search results are part of that. Right. I would argue that it's giving us as marketers this unique window of time to, like, catch up and get ahead before it actually comes back and starts to dominate. And I wanted to get your take on that. Do you agree with that? And if so, what should people do in this kind of correction period of time? Hey, everyone, from one marketer to another, I want to help you out. It's tough keeping up with the content demands each year, especially across a variety of content channels. Balancing the workload while still maintaining quality can be a real challenge for everyone. We've got a free guide from HubSpot on how to use AI to make that all easier. It walks you through how to integrate AI tools into your content workflows so that you can come up with more ideas and spend less time implementing them. This is going to save you a ton of time and a ton of money. I don't know what else I have to say. I've dropped the link in the description below. You're going to want to go check it out. Now back to today's show.

We are definitely in a correction, but we're in a correction because AI has not lived up to all of the hype that we have. Kind of all of the hype that is around it, and it has not led up. It is not kind of being consistent enough and reliable enough to do a lot of the things we wanted to do yet. And part of the problem with search is it was wrong too many times. And we know that hallucination is part of the challenge with AI for something like search, where you're trying to look for a definitive answer. I believe that as a solved problem. I will say that there has been a lot of some really smart people over the last couple of weeks come out and say, well, it's not as simple as. It's not as simple as saying it's a solved problem because we are just not seeing the leaps in models that we have seen previous because we've run out of training data. We've run out of really great ways to extract more capabilities from that training data. And so we're kind of at this phase where we're seeing small improvements, but we're not seeing huge leaps. And I think that's why you start to see OpenAI really get trampled by Entropic. I think Entropic is doing a better job releasing better functionality, have better models. But I suspect there's a lot of smart people working on this. At some point you're going to start to see AI go eat, eat back up. You know, I get rolled out more extensively, eat more of our search traffic, be able to answer more questions. And so what do you do? That is kind of where we're going. Which is like, I like to, I like to think about someone like an Alex or someone like Gary Vee as marketeers who have set the standard and how to do content marketing. Because we, what they kind of do is educational. Like it's just educational content. It's like teaching you how to do something, but they inject so much personality into it. Like if you actually read anything from Alex, it's just lead gen, right? And I'm not. That's no offense to him. It's just like the ABCs of Legion, right? But he has so much personality, he injects into that. It makes it feel different, it makes it feel special, it makes it feel like you are being told a secret that you shouldn't know. And I think one of the things we would suggest to our listeners is we are going to move from like this educational led content era where you could just create the educational content, do some optimization, put the educational content out of certain channels and acquire demand to basically much more personality led content. And again, we're going back into one of our core talking points, which is we believe this is the moment for B2B creators because we are moving much more into this personality led content. And if I was a listener, I would be thinking, well, how do I do that? Because that is how I'm going to survive. And I'm not going to tell you.

Well, what's interesting is I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I keep watching stuff from Alex and from Gary, but also just a lot of great YouTubers and TikTokers of all categories, even outside of business, right? And then I also am like fortunate to work with like some really great leaders, some really great CEOs. And it's like the reality is the cheat sheet to all this, you know what they do, they take remarkably simple information and they repeat it and Wrap it with very compelling stories.

Right.

And maxims. Right. The reason, you know, David Sinra, who runs the founders podcast, like that podcast is doing really well. He's literally just doing a book report every week. Yeah, that guy is making millions of dollars doing a book report every week. And the reason he's doing that is because he's able to take all this information from really smart people, simplify it, package it with the right story, and with those stories, connects it to maxims. And Maxim are those simple one or two, three line statements where you're like, oh, you know, repetition doesn't ruin the prayer. That's a maximum.

Right.

Like, that's the type of thing that is magical. And that's what all the great people we think personality is like proving how smart we are or proving how much depth of knowledge we have, when actually personality is being authentically you and packaging the stuff in a way that's both simple but authentically you. And that's what all of these folks are doing. And it's the one thing that AI can, AI can help you simplify, but it needs your guidance to package it and put the story around it and make it really authentic.

Yeah, I think that's it exactly. So I think you have to figure out what a personality means for your brand. One of the things you can start with is how do you get creative with how you set up your marketing teams? Right. So I think one of the things we're going to have to start to do is think creatively about how we even set up content teams or create content teams. So Mohawk is a awesome founder. I met him when he was raising his seed. They've gone on to do a really great things and they basically make it really easy for anyone to get a visa in any country. Make it like one click. And anyone who's had to get a visa before knows that it is not that easy. But what they're doing is hiring in house influencers to create their content. Right. They're going to travel. They're going to travel and then they're going to travel. And so what. What they're really going to do is create content around their experiences. And again, this is a really great example of how do I instrument personality led content within my business. Well, I can just hire people with personalities and give them an incredible job to create that content. And that is going to be really hard for AI to replicate. It's going to be really hard for anyone else to replicate because it's going to be unique to your brand. And so like, this is number one thing when I'm thinking through how do I, if I, if I'm listening to the pod, okay, I do a bunch of educational content. I kind of just educate my customers on tons of different things. I've never really thought about being in the personality game. I don't know how to even start. Well, one of the ways you could start is like, how do I get creative around the people that I hire into my company to do that work? And I think this is number one. I want to go over to you for reaction because I have some like, cons around doing this, but I think getting creative around how you get this talent into your company is like step one.

I'm going to put it back on you with a question because what I was hoping you would do. So we have, we have that founder who's running a company that helps people get visas. Could you maybe explain if that if he was running that company five to 10 years ago, what the content playbook would be, would have been and what it, what it is going to be more in more detail today so that people can understand the difference between the two?

Well, he's literally going through this difference. I originally talked to Moha because he was raising around and we got talking about his marketing strategy and it was primarily to do the HubSpot Content SEO engine. Right there is a total explain to.

People what that means. Like, what it means that he's hiring writers that work for him or freelance to write. He would be writing very basic stuff like how to apply for a visa, the visa requirement of every single country, all of those things, right?

In like all of the questions someone would ask about getting a visa and making sure your content appears in Google.

What paperwork do I need? What exactly how long do I, if I, if I stay for this amount of time, do I need a visa or not? All of those questions, right?

All, all of those questions disappear with AI. Like, that is like the best example of questions that will disappear because of AI. It is so much easier to ask these questions to an AI. I will say, like, my usage of AI versus Google is probably 8020 in favor of AI for like informational search, kind of traditional informational search queries. I just ask AI. It's so much easier. And so if you're like, how do I get a visa in Singapore? What, how long does it take me to get a visa in Singapore? What are the documents I need to bring? What are some gotchas that I need to think about? What is, how long is, how long is it going, I have this emergency trip. Can I get an emergency visa? None of those things you would need to ask on Google anymore, like, AI will give you a much better answer for those things in a much quicker, more concise format.

I think it'd be really helpful if we branded those types of questions for everybody. And I'm going to try this out on you, Karen. I think those are now commodity questions. They're commodity questions. Anybody could. You can get them answered for free by AI. And so you cannot get any business value from commodity questions, right?

And here's the problem. Here's actually the problem. Google is not even giving. Like, the problem is Google doesn't even do a good job of this stuff anyway, right? Like, the challenge that, you know, you have with Google is it doesn't really give you. People are like, well, AI won't give you an accurate answer every time, but it does give you a clear, concise answer. Look at this from Google, right? Best reward credit cards. It basically just directs you to a bunch of other sites who do lists, correct? So it doesn't give you a clear and concise answer anyway. It just gives you a bunch of work to go and do yourself. And that's why people are starting to gravitate towards AIs, because Google has really just become an engine where it shows you, like, well, here's a bunch of places you can go do your own research, but AI can actually do all the research for you and actually give you. I can say, I want three credit cards that have these characteristics. Give me these, right? I don't have to do any of this work. Additional work. So these are all, all this kind of search is going to get commoditized and cannibalized by AI. And so if I'm Mohawk and I'm a great founder trying to build a brand, what do I do when I'm like, hey, where? Where do people actually spend their time learning about travel these days? They're on TikTok, they're on Instagram, they're on YouTube, they're on whatever other channels they may be. None of those channels are great for me as a brand to show up and teach you something. They are really great places for me to have a bunch of personalities creating content around their experiences and be able to teach you through those things. Right? And so I gravitate towards the old model of hire writers, look for these different key phrases, create content to actually hire influencers who have real personalities and are really great at these kind of personality LED channels and arm them with everything they need to be successful in those channels and have all of those people associated with my brand.

Yeah. I think what we're trying to say though is that this new playbook is a very different type of person. Right. And Karen, I would go so far as it's actually two type of people. It's that personally allowed personality led influencer and then it's also somebody we are hiring at HubSpot. One of the things we're doing for longer form content, like for more offer based content where you might put behind a lead magnet and those type of thing. We're hiring somebody who's going to basically create with AI to create, you know, web apps, dashboards, highly personalized offers that are not just stagnant PDFs.

Right.

The, the more kind of discovery based the content is, the more personality you need and I'd argue the more in depth the content is, the more like technical AI skills that creator needs to have to really make it like deep and personal to the audience. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I think there's two ends of the spectrum. There's one where you have these personality channels and you have to have personality be able to create engaging content. Because if you're discover in any of those challenges or channels, it's all about the discovery and making sure that they stop and click on your content. And there's still some education in there but you lead with the personality, you lead with the attention grabbing first two seconds. Right. On the other end of the spectrum, the thing that you're discussing is there's still a need for the, there's still a need for knowledge. Right. But you actually have to have really deep expertise and to be able to differentiate your stuff from everyone else's to make sure that you're your one stands the test of time. And I think AI can actually help you go much deeper create a much better version of that if you, if you use AI properly because it can probably do like 60% of the work, 70% of the work. So you can spend 30% of your time on the stuff that is really going to make that different better than anything else anyone else can do. But you really have to be a practitioner, craftsperson in the thing you're writing about for it to really stand the test of, of time. And I think they're the two places that you could still win in content. Is, is how do I figure out how to have the deep expertise, the practitioner, the craftsperson really create this great content around this, these subjects and how do I have the Personality led content on these other channels where I can grab your attention and I can actually get you to consume my. Consume my content. Yeah.

And I. And we've tried to really give people the blueprint for that personality led growth on the show that you should go back and check out the episode episode with Jenny Hoyos, who was the Masterclass on like YouTube and YouTube shorts and how you bring personality and process together to really create in a remarkable way. We had Gary V. On. He obviously shared a bunch of content around how you do this. But if you were going to give folks the cheat sheet, the like, three things. Like if you were talking to Mohawk, right, And you were like, hey, the person, the people you hire to be these travel influencers, they have to do these three to four things, what would they be?

I think actually number one is set up the incentives. The hardest thing around influencers is they want to do their own thing. I think it's a hard thing to get influencers to really commit to work for a brand. And, you know, why not just grow your own channels? If you're really good at what you do, you would probably grow your own channels. You could argue that if you're going to work for a company, you're either quite junior and you're trying to become an influencer or you are basically not a very good one. Now, I do think there's two things you can do in incentives, right? You can actually do. What Mohawk's doing, which I think he's doing, is like, find people to create to turn into influencers. So I give them, I find the personality. It's like a, you know, audition in four. A boy band, right? Like you're. Or a girl band, right? You show up, you're trying to see if they have the right personalities, and you're going to give them everything they need to have to be successful. So that's number one, is like, am I going to hire the want to be influencers and make a commitment to set them up for success, or am I going to figure out how to hire the actual influencers and have incentives that make them want to work for my brand? So the incentives really matter if you're going to hire the, you know, established influencers or the. Or the actual junior influencers. The second thing is like, where you can win, right? Because everywhere is saturated, right? You are now competing with other brands. You are competing with other influencers. So you have to really figure out, where am I different, right? Like, where's the differentiation? Where can I actually show up and figure out how my stuff is going to stand up and obsess over a couple of things, not all the things like maybe obsess over one platform, not all the platforms, and figure out how you can win in one place versus all the places. And then on the third one, I think on the deep expertise, I think what we're doing in HubSpot is like looking at all the informational content we have, categorizing it into different buckets and looking at the most defensible stuff and going deeper on those, adding more, adding more value. In all those posts that we think we can still differentiate enough where AI cannot replicate that really easily now you have to. So you basically, you're like, okay, I've got 100% of my traffic, 25%. I'm okay losing because I just don't think there's enough there for me to be able to invest in, differentiate from AI all of the other stuff. I can add video, I can add imagery, I can add customer data, I can add quotes, I can add expert insights, I can add whatever it may be and it's still going to stand the test of time because AI is not going to be able to replicate that. It's going to be much more depth of expertise, much more differentiated. So I think there are three things you can actually start with.

I think those are great tips. Do you think, like, let's, let's be really perspective, like prescriptive here. Do you think the catching influencers, early hiring influencers, helping them hone their craft and then understanding that once they get to a certain scale, they're probably going to leave and go independent. Is that the right path for this personality LED model?

I think that's a good path. And then you just have the incentives where you can offboard the influencer, but they're still connected to your brand. So you pay them a flat fee, plus you pay them some sort of money for distribution exclusively through their channels. I think the thing you're going to argue with influencers about is like you're going to. If they're kind of building their brand in your company, you own the channel, right? So it's still going to be a brand channel. That's the thing I would hold fast on is like I would not have them have their own channels. What's the point in investing a ton of money into influencers and they actually own the brand and you don't want to do that, right? You want to own the asset and then just want to swap in other influencers into that channel. So as long as you're growing your channels through the influencers and the influencers are like, you know, a TV series, characters change all the time.

This is the point I'm going to make. What you're actually saying is that modern B2B creator marketing is like the Marvel universe. It's like that company need to own the ip, the infrastructure, the characters, the story. In this case, that's the social accounts, the YouTube accounts, the TikTok accounts, the playbooks, all of those things. And the actual creators, the talent, they may swap and change. Right. You can have different actors play Wolverine depending on the type of story it is. And that is what is, is important in today's world is that getting that infrastructure right, owning the most valuable parts of the infrastructure and then incentivizing creators in the right way. Which is your point.

Exactly, Exactly.

Okay, so we kind of broke down for everybody, the playbook, to transition from this old content playbook to a personality led creator playbook. And that is going to help us basically protect from the changing landscape of Google search. It's going to allow us to get more traffic from essentially the algorithms, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Right. Instagram Reels, whatever the platform of choice may be. Anything else that companies should be doing to protect themselves through this, like coming AI like dip and resurgence.

No, I think the best thing is to stay aware. Right. You can't continually look at your traffic and to start to see where AI is impacting it. Stay, stay abreast of like Google's rollout of AI into their search engine pages, what percentage of queries it's, it's over. Are they planning to roll it out even more? I think the thing is just that you stay hyper vigilant, but actually building these capabilities today, you are already behind the curve if you're only just starting to think about this. So the sooner you get started, I think the better you can be prepared for when you start to lose more and more of that informational search to Google.

Yeah, and I think in these transitions, the companies that lose are the companies that are unhonest and dishonest with themselves. Where they're like you should really just make in this new era. Here are the skills, here's the list of the skills we need. We just gave it to you, you just gave it to people. So you can go back and transcribe this show and get those list of skills. And what of those skills do we have in our company today versus where do we need to go and hire people in different people who have those skills. Most companies fail because they're like, oh, the skills aren't that important. We can do them. We have people with them. And then you wake up 12 months and you've made no progress because people don't actually have the skills or know how to make that progress.

Exactly. Talent is everything.

Talent is everything. Stay away from commodity questions. You want to move to a personality led model. We gave you some great lessons today on how to do that. This has been another episode of Marketing against the Grain. We'll see you again real soon.

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