How Are Content Marketers Supposed To Compete With AI?

It’s fair, and perhaps a little unfortunate, to say that AI has completely revolutionized marketing in many ways. We’re not just talking about how every second service or product now includes the technology as brands are using it to renovate their service in the spirit of competition, but also that how we market itself has been altered.

For example, you may have seen “AI summaries,” which Google gleefully placed at the top of most searches, outside of the more sensitive ones. You may have seen how AI functions and search crawlers have been embedded into many different platforms, from Gemini on Android phones to CoPilot on Windows computers.

Now, the ability to effectively market content has been much reduced, even if the content is great. The worst part is that your content may even be summarised without giving you the benefit of engagement, meaning your attempts to keep your blog optimized or your content calendar effective is tougher than ever.

It’s not all bad news, though. If you know how to leverage AI, you can more easily compete with it and not against it. Of course, sometimes that also means knowing when not to use the tech, and let everyone else but you fall into the bad habits.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to effectively do both of those things:

Human Content Over All

You’ve likely seen that AI-generated content has flooded the internet, and people are getting pretty good at spotting it because it has a certain sameness to it. If you ever see phrases like “x happens, y exists, and z is the result” – you’re likely reading AI.

Human-written content, on the other hand, has personality and quirks that make it more engaging to read and you can even get away with being more irreverent now. It can be conversational, funny, opinionated, or vulnerable in ways that AI can’t really do well, and people look for that. Even if you make a joke or come across as a well-meaning person without all the perfect polish you may have honed for SEO optimized copy, that can track more easily.

This doesn’t mean AI can’t be useful in the process, as it can help with research, organizing thoughts, or drafting outlines, but the final product should still sound like it came from a real person. Editing AI-generated drafts heavily to add personality, personal anecdotes, or unique perspectives can work best. Or, better yet, write it yourself.

Brand Mentions & Listicles Help

Getting mentioned by other websites and included in listicles has become more valuable than ever. That’s because AI content is often looking for these to provide a neat little summary above all the other results. It works as a more natural outreach path too, because being featured in a “best tools for X” article or getting referenced in industry roundups puts a brand in front of audiences who are actively looking for recommendations.

For this reason, having clear information about what makes your product or service unique, providing quotes or insights when asked, and building relationships with people who create these roundups all help with getting featured more often. You can also use rejuvenated services like fatjoe’s excellent community and brand mentions service, designed to help you feature more in the top summaries of local queries.

A Rejuvenated SEO Approach

SEO hasn’t died, but it’s certainly changing in response to how the tech is being integrated into search results. The old approach of targeting specific keywords and hoping to rank on page one doesn’t work quite the same way anymore when AI summaries are sitting at the top of results pages. That doesn’t mean SEO should be abandoned or to remove it from your marketing suite but the strategy needs adjusting to account for these changes.

Some have found that focusing on long-tail keywords and more specific queries where AI summaries are less likely to completely answer the question is a better approach. If you put together detailed guides, in-depth tutorials, and resources customers can follow up with, that’s better. Moreover, targeting “how to” queries that require step-by-step instructions or detailed explanations also works well, because people want the full context.

Local SEO is another area that’s still holding up pretty well, since AI summaries can’t easily replicate the kind of location-specific information and reviews that people are looking for, especially not if you have a unique regional need.

Offer A Unique Value-Add

It’s always been said that SEO works best when you have some kind of value-add, but now interactive measures are becoming more common. For instance, if someone’s looking for tax help, featuring calculators, quizzes, customization tools, or downloadable resources are going to make someone more inclined to return to you as a resource, and click outside of the AI summary.

Another value-add is community, such as spaces where people can interact with each other around your content, which could include (but isn’t limited to) forums, comment sections that are actively moderated, or social media groups.

Alternative Platforms

Relying solely on Google for traffic is riskier now than it used to be, so branching out regarding where content is being shared and discovered makes sense. If you have social media platforms, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, and niche forums with your content, they all offer ways to reach audiences without depending on search engines. Each platform has its own audience and content style, but that variety can still be helpful for reaching different types of people.

For example, newsletters have made a comeback because they help push content directly to people who’ve already expressed interest, avoiding the AI-laden algorithms altogether. Building an email list and sending content gives you control over reaching your audience. YouTube channels have become popular for professionals too, especially if your social proof of running a business easily matches the advice you give. And hey, don’t be afraid to go on a podcast or two either.

Physical Outreach

Digital marketing is so dominant now that physical outreach can actually stand out more than it used to, weirdly enough. It’s tangible, the same way many people like eBooks but want to save their good purchase for a hardcover.

It’s memorable to receive a well-designed postcard or find a useful printed guide that sticks around on a desk as a helpful infographic. We’d also suggest you get out there in the community. If you’re seen sponsoring community events, providing printed materials that include QR codes linking to online resources, or setting up booths at trade shows, it all develops opportunities for face-to-face interaction and makes you seem more tangible.

This physical outreach approach works particularly well for local businesses or niche industries where the target audience is sometimes focused in specific areas or communities. If you’re utterly tired of AI (who can blame you?) then it might do you some good to get out there the old-fashioned way, too. Hey, we get it!

In-Person Event Coverage

A further word on going to events. Even in the year of AI, attending industry conferences, trade shows, or community events and creating content around them can be a fantastic helper. First, it showcases your brand as active and engaged within the industry rather than just existing online and pushing out generated copy. Second, event coverage tends to be time-sensitive, which means it’s less likely to be effectively summarised by AI. You can’t get better than the official coverage of your time at the local industry talks or celebration.

This also gives you a fair amount of helpful content to deliver for some time, such as recap blog posts, interviews with speakers or attendees, and photo or video documentation. After all, people who couldn’t attend the event will more easily enjoy insights from someone who was there, and those who did attend might share your coverage to extend their own reach or remember what they experienced.

Of course, this is a great chance to network too, perhaps even to develop a budding partnership. That’s one thing that AI hasn’t taken from us just yet.

Thought Leadership Within Industries

AI can summarise what’s already been said, but it can’t think up brand new solutions that come from your own experience. You have the context to fully frame your own consideration and benefit the space in that way. Even if this isn’t born out of perfect intellectualism but a frustration at a process that annoys you, that’s still human, it’s still novel, and it’s still interesting.

Do you need to be at the cutting edge? Does a small jewelry store need to have blog posts that are more reined than anything Rolex could put out? Probably not. But you can still cement your place by talking about how the trends of wedding ring stones are changing, or which pair best with certain cultural traditions, or even the alterations in ethically sourcing certain gems. As you can see, sometimes the human level is vastly superior to what even a refined LLM can provide. Make sure to adopt that and push it, because you may realize you have more to say than Mr. GPT ever could.

With this advice, we hope the exasperated content marketers among you find some hope and sense of ambition to nail your strategy once more.

Photo by Tobias Dziuba: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-sticky-notes-and-pencil-on-notebook-927576/