AI's Impact on Marketers
- Content Marketing and SEO Transformation
- The Changing Job Market
- A Future-Proof Framework
- Introduction to AI Definitions and Concepts
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
AI is a game-changer for marketers. It’s time to level up.
For years, we marketers have been tasked with doing more and producing more. It’s exhausting. Even in leadership roles where we focus on marketing strategy, we’re often busy in meetings or fighting fires, including broken tracking code, budget reconciliations, and data discrepancies. We rarely get resources to help… until now.
Executives are drooling over artificial intelligence (AI). It’s so shiny, with its promise of massive cost-savings and productivity. Some executives are thinking, “AI can spit out 100 blog articles for SEO? Great. Let’s also use AI to send mass emails, create all our social media comments, design our brand campaign assets—let AI scale marketing!”
Not so fast.
AI is not a magic button. You can’t press it and forget it. It’s a tool. Yes, it’s a powerful tool for marketers that absolutely helps with content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). When properly wielded, AI drives efficiencies. However, before we explain how marketers can integrate it effectively into their work to improve productivity without damaging consequences, let’s see how the AI revolution is impacting content and SEO, and what this means for marketers.
Content Marketing and SEO Transformation
When done correctly, content marketing is effective but can be painful. The process is manual and slow and requires many resources. Think about the steps and time it takes at a corporate brand to develop and publish a piece of content, like a blog article, for example.
At LL Flooring, where we both previously worked, when a blog article was delivered by our partner agency, it then passed through five internal teams—creative, brand, content, SEO, and e-commerce—though not in a linear order. Additionally, the installation or merchandising team would review the article if their subject matter expertise was needed. An article could take weeks to move through this workstream, and occasionally it got lost or stuck within a team. Sound familiar? Although we streamlined the blog workstream across teams, the manual processes of writing, editing, optimizing, fact-checking, and publishing a blog article were still cumbersome.
AI-powered content marketing is faster, smarter, and more data-driven.
Here are a few use cases and examples of AI content marketing in action:
Faster: Repurpose one webinar into a transcript, blog articles, social media posts, and an email newsletter within minutes or hours instead of days.
Smarter: Automatically adjust website content, like the homepage banner with a relevant call to action, in real time based on the user’s previous interactions or geographic location.
Data-driven: Predict which website pages are more likely to get increased traffic and generate content briefs with SEO in mind significantly faster, so the team can prioritize optimizing those pages.
AI helps brands save time and resources while delivering better experiences to their audiences. AI empowers marketers to improve their productivity and results, not just content marketers but SEOs (search engine optimizers) too.
AI-powered SEO tools and AI features within long-standing SEO platforms are now available. Thanks to AI’s ability to analyze huge amounts of data, it can recommend keyword strategies better and predict user trends. This saves SEOs weeks of time wading through data looking for patterns and opportunities. AI is not an SEO strategist. With the insights it can provide, SEO leaders can invest more time in building effective strategies and processes. And they’ll need to spend more time on SEO strategies, because AI is changing the search experience too.
Chances are you’ve noticed something different about Google lately. When you search on a topic, you may see an AI-generated snippet of information displayed at the top of the organic search results. These snippets are meant to provide helpful information without requiring you to click through to visit a website or multiple websites. Unfortunately, these snippets aren’t always reliable. That’s challenge number one. Another challenge is that now SEOs and content marketers need to focus on optimizing their website content to increase the chances of appearing in these snippets, as these are receiving priority placement over organic search engine listings. We’ll dig into the reasons behind why AI-generated search results have varying levels of usefulness in Chapter 3, “Search, Personalization, and SEO,” as well as what you can do to address the issues.
Now that you understand the high-level impact of AI on content marketing and SEO, you may be wondering what this means for your role and your future career. We pulled together research to help content marketers and SEOs understand the job market and what next-level skills are becoming increasingly important.
