We’ve handed the high-water mark of content material advertising—a minimum of, content material advertising in its present kind.
After 13 years in content material advertising, I believe it’s honest 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 nearly totally in a world of idea and abstraction.
I depend 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 skilled in none of those matters.
This has been the completely happy actuality of content material advertising 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 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 just a few keyword-targeted H2s in the best locations.
However this doesn’t work right this moment.
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 one of the best device for the job. People can not out-copycat generative AI.
Put one other manner, the position of the content material marketer as a curator has been rendered out of date.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 method 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 overtly supported his most popular candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby targeted nearly 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 this moment must develop into their tales.
It’s a content material advertising truism that it’s unreasonable to anticipate writers to develop into consultants. There’s a superficial stage of fact to that declare—no content material marketer can purchase a decade’s value of expertise in just a few days or even weeks—however there are nice advantages awaiting any firm keen to problem that truism very, very significantly.
As Thompson proved, quick, intense durations of firsthand expertise can yield unimaginable 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 issues value writing about, as a substitute 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 corporations 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 talent secondary to a decade of hands-on search and advertising expertise). They’re costly, arduous to search 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 usually outperforms the “actual” content material. I see extra corporations keen to share subjective experiences and tales, and keep away from competing solely on the sharing of goal, factual data. I see corporations 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, however they make way more sense right this moment. This stage of effort is quick changing into the one technique to achieve 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 simple to sate; however now we have a near-limitless starvation for leisure, and private interplay, and bizarre, pattern-interrupting experiences.
Gonzo content material advertising can ship.
