Should You Replace Your Content Marketer with AI? Maybe…

Fire your content writers!

Okay, wait a minute…

Let me rephrase that.

Fire your content writers if they are still sitting there typing out every single word from scratch and charging you an arm and a leg for a mediocre, or worse—a subpar, regurgitation of what your competitors have already flooded the SERPs with.

If all you want is copycat content that will make your brand blend into the sea of sameness, then get a free ChatGPT account instead and save thousands!

Except you probably don’t want that, do you?

Here, I talk about what makes a content marketer great and worth every dime you spend on them in the age of generative AI.

Where the Aforementioned Question Came From 

In 2023, AI flipped the role of content marketers on its head. Putting generic words to a page is no longer a specialized skill. Anyone and their uncle can prompt ChatGPT to write a generic article, for example.

But, unfortunately for all those penny-pinching CFOs out there, AI isn’t a perfect solution that will allow you to nix your content marketing budget and fire your content marketers. 

…at least not the good ones.

Why Ai Can’t Replace *Some* Content Marketers

Firstly, AI lacks original thought. Sure it can string words together in an original way but the idea behind those strings of words is never unique. It’s always been said before.

Also, AI produces similar outputs from similar inputs. So, for example, let’s say there’s a trending keyword in your industry. You and everyone else in your industry head to ChatGPT and ask it to produce an article that targets said keyword. The articles produced might not have the exact same words in the exact same order but the ideas covered are all essentially the same. You all publish the articles and now Google doesn’t know which one to rank because no article is better than the other. 

Voila—the dreaded sea of sameness ensues.  

What Your Business Needs in a Content Marketer Going Forward

You need great content marketers who help your brand push out unique insights and make you stand out as the thought leader amongst the regurgitating copycats. 

So what does it mean to be a great B2B content marketer in 2024 and beyond? 

First of all, content marketers need to be great interviewers. They need to know how to work with the SMEs at your organization to draw out interesting insights and find the compelling stories that your brand should tell. 

Secondly, they need to know how to compose a great content piece. That doesn’t necessarily mean writing the entire thing from scratch. In fact, I would argue that they shouldn’t do that. Knowing when and how to leverage AI to do some of the writing gruntwork is a necessary skill to cut down the amount of time it takes to produce content. 

Thirdly, they need to know how to edit and revise AI content outputs to ensure that the content aligns with a brand’s expertise and that the messaging resonates with a brand’s ICP. 

Then, they need to strategize ways to maximize the ROI of the piece of content that they produced by leveraging AI to repurpose the content for different means. So, for example, if the initial content was a blog post, AI could be used to turn that content into a podcast that can in turn help you generate backlinks to the article. 

Fire Your Content Marketer if…

So, from this point forward, content marketers need to be much more than content writers. They need to be great producers, strategists, and storytellers. And if they’re not, well you probably shouldn’t be paying them. ChatGPT can do their job for free!