Picture this scenario: You spend thousands of dollars and weeks or months of time creating high-impact content to market your company’s next big thing. Stakeholders and subject-matter experts have signed off, and the field is excited to have the asset they’ve been wanting for so long. You push it out through all your channels and…crickets.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many companies across various industries are experiencing this content crisis.
Why content doesn't convert
As a marketer, you are well aware that a large portion of marketing content you create goes unnoticed or unused. Several factors contribute to this grim reality.
For example, the noise-to-signal ratio in marketing has never been higher. You’re competing for attention in a market where countless brands are vying for viewers and where customers use more channels than ever before to gather information. In any given medium, you have literally seconds to make an impression and keep the customer reading or viewing.
Additionally, the introduction of AI in search engines and their search results can bypass SEO efforts. In fact, more and more of your customers use LLMs like Perplexity or ChatGPT for their searches in addition to—or sometimes in place of—traditional search engines. These searches can return old collateral that dilutes your current marketing campaigns and confuses customers with outdated messages.
These realities are exacerbated by at least three distinct pain points that modern marketers like you experience.
Time-consuming content creation
First, creating high-quality marketing content takes a long time. It can be a lengthy process to conduct thorough research to ensure content accuracy and relevance. Marketers often need to sift through vast amounts of information to find the most pertinent data. In addition, the process of drafting, reviewing, and approving content involves multiple stages and stakeholders. Each stage requires careful attention to detail to ensure the final product is polished and effective. All of these factors can delay time-to-market.
High costs of content creation
Second, creating high-quality marketing content is a significant investment for companies. Businesses might spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars or more per month on content marketing services, not to mention the internal costs of finding and leveraging in-house subject-matter experts.
Lack of authenticity and target accuracy
Third, an emerging overreliance on unvalidated or hallucinated content generated by AI is spurring a lack of authenticity in marketing content. Faulty content can sap your credibility with customers and cliché-laden collateral can turn off readers. Moreover, even when marketing collateral is compelling and authentic, it might still fail to resonate with your audience because it is discussing the wrong thing.
These are sticky problems, and the first two are not new. What’s changed is the urgency on the part of marketing professionals and the expectation for speed and relevance on the part of customers. They want up-to-date information that is directly relevant to their needs, not information that is merely in the ballpark, which forces them to make inferences and draw connections on their own.
What can be done?
AI and data analysis techniques can help address all of these challenges, but they can particularly shine when addressing the third pain point. A solution that can help you better and authentically target the right customers with the right topics should include the following capabilities:
- It should be able to aggregate internal, public, and competitive data, including market sentiment and messaging. Doing so would show marketers how their content measures up to the competition and how well it responds to market needs, allowing them to hone their content-production strategies.
- It should use AI and machine learning to extract patterns and quantitative relationships that are not visible to the unaided eye. AI opens the door to insights that were invisible to marketers until recently. In particular, seeing patterns in the context of collateral along with its content is a game-changer for marketing. These patterns can reveal gaps in campaigns that need to be filled or topics for collateral that would address questions and needs that customers and analysts have.
- It should leverage marketing experts and data scientists to interpret insights surfaced by analytical tools and apply them to marketing. This approach would let marketers make data-informed decisions about their marketing content, its gaps, its consistency with desired messaging, and its effectiveness in meeting consumer needs.
Such a solution would provide the basis for generating high-impact, data-backed content with fewer delays and uncertainties.
The content crisis in modern marketing is a complex challenge, but we see opportunities for innovation. By leveraging AI and data analysis, companies can streamline content creation, reduce costs, and ensure authenticity. Aggregating diverse data, uncovering hidden patterns, and involving expert interpretation can make marketing content more relevant and impactful. In our next post, we’ll propose a specific solution that does exactly that.
To learn more
To learn more about what we do at Prowess Consulting, get in touch, view our latest research, and follow us on LinkedIn.
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