How to Become Your Customers’ Only Option with Content Marketing (Hint: It’s Not AI)
Content marketing is in crisis. This is not because generative AI models like ChatGPT have devalued the work of content writers, though that is reflective of the problem. It’s because most companies produce content in a way — and with people — that fails to differentiate their content from the generic information AI produces.
If you’re an executive, marketing leader, or writer, you’ve paid for or produced content via this commoditized process. Here are the three ways the commoditized approach to content marketing plays out:
You hire a content marketing or PR agency for $10-25k per month. The agency claims it will help with messaging strategy and produce top-notch writing. But when you sign up, they never produce a narrative doc, or they produce one without doing the investigative work — and involving the knowledgeable investigators — required to differentiate you from competitors. Their work isn’t wrong or devoid of value; it’s professional and passable. But your thought leadership bylines, white papers, and blog content sound like that of everyone else in your industry. If you’re being honest with yourself, you know you’re not blowing away your competitors with singular perspectives on your market. You’re not producing content that makes you the leader in your customer’s mind. So, your content marketing is decent, but it’s not worth $150-300,000 per year.
You leave content marketing to your in-house team. This, again, is fine on the surface; you hire smart people, and they know your company better than anyone. But when you speak to your content marketing and PR team, you find that they’re overwhelmed. They’re juggling requests from six different departments (plus six more marketing disciplines in addition to content). They don’t have time to step back, conduct a half dozen interviews with internal and external subject matter experts, document your competitors’ stances, and determine how to differentiate you. Heck — they hardly even have time to create high-quality content, let alone the strategy that will transform it into an engine of business differentiation. So, your team is stuck in an endless loop of reactive content creation, and they know as well as anyone that their content is not living up to its full potential.
You take the cheap route. You outsource content marketing to generative AI or inexpensive freelancers. These options are the same in that they don’t understand your business especially well. They can recite the basic talking points of your industry or write a “What is content marketing?” type of blog post, but they can’t do the original and creative intellectual labor of figuring out how to define you as a category of one — as the only option in an industry where all your competitors are either not as knowledgeable or not as capable of solving the exact problem you solve for your customers. Your content, whether via AI or cheap human labor, is just a synthesis of the blog posts your rivals are churning out. You cannot stand out with it.
As content marketers and journalists who’ve collectively been in the game for decades and have worked with hundreds of companies, we know that almost every company falls back on these commoditized approaches to content marketing. For some, that’s a question of budget; they simply can’t afford the $150-300k per year it will cost to produce content that will truly differentiate their business and pour gas on the fires of marketing and sales. But for others — especially those already paying PR and content marketing agencies $10k+/mo to produce consensus-regurgitating insights — the budget is there, and continuing to follow the commoditized approach means missing out on the opportunity to harvest content marketing’s transformative potential.
For the marketers and business leaders in camp B — for the people who know they’re not truly becoming industry thought leaders, have the money to achieve just that, and want to establish themselves as their customers’ only option by getting the best out of their content and PR resources — we wrote this white paper to lay out the three-stage process, and people, required to achieve true differentiation with content marketing.
Because, ultimately, that’s all that elite content marketing requires: a process that is superior to the commoditized approaches all your competitors are taking to content marketing as well as the talented people needed to execute that process.
The three stages of an elite content marketing process are narrative building, editorial planning, and content creation. The three personas of talent required to execute the process are industry-leading thinkers and journalists (to build narratives), veteran content strategists (to execute editorial planning), and elite writers (to create content). With the right who and how, you will transcend commoditized content marketing, become your customer’s no. 1 option, and maximize the impact of all your marketing and sales activities.
Here's how it’s done.
Narrative building
The two authors of this report have been a part of hundreds of content and PR programs. Many of those programs claim to include some form of narrative building, but almost all of them fall short of the exercise’s potential by failing to differentiate the company in question from its competitors. To transform your business, narrative building cannot simply mean sounding proficiently informed about hot industry topics or customer concerns; it cannot stop at regurgitating the typical viewpoints espoused in your industry’s trade publications or at conferences. It must mean producing insights about your customers’ most urgent needs in ways that show you are truly more prepared to meet those needs than any other company in the market.
As we are content marketing experts, the best example we can offer is our own. The report you are reading is the result of an exercise in narrative building. As a content marketing agency founded and led by veteran content marketers, Ivy League PhDs, and national journalists with subject matter expertise in our clients’ industries, we had to ask ourselves: What are the dominant processes in our industry? Who is involved in those processes? How do those processes fail to meet our customers’ needs? How are we uniquely positioned to meet those needs in the precise ways that our competitors are failing? How do we develop those singular advantages into narratives that help our customers understand that we are uniquely capable of solving their problems?
If you want to become a genuine thought leader — the recognized authority on your customers’ problems and how to solve them — you should follow a similar exercise. To do so, you will need to interview:
Your leaders to understand your greatest strengths, which your CEO, product, and marketing captains will view differently.
Outside experts to learn how they view your industry, your role in it, and your main competitors’ advantages.
Your customers to find out what they most urgently need, what they most value about your product and service, and how you can tell a story about the overlap between your capabilities and their needs.
Almost no marketing agency — be it focused on content marketing, PR, or branding, positioning, and messaging — does this level of due diligence to build the core narratives that will guide all of your content creation, if not your entire approach to marketing and sales. There’s a good reason for this. Following the best possible practices is expensive, and most agencies are designed to optimize for the budget of the average customer and the value of the average marketing agency in their niche. Conducting a thorough narrative building exercise is expensive for three reasons:
Time: It takes a month of intensive labor to conduct the interviews, analysis, and synthesis of information required to build truly differentiated narratives.
Talent: To generate the maximum amount of value with a narrative building exercise, you don’t just want a smart marketer asking questions to drive the process. You want someone who is both an expert in research and synthesizing information (such as a journalist or academic) and an expert in your industry. These people — say, a Wall Street Journal reporter who covered your industry for several years or a senior PR professional who specializes in messaging and has at least a decade of industry experience — are not just able to ask questions and synthesize information. They are, in knowledge, almost the equals of the subject matter experts they interview, enabling them to ask far deeper questions than marketing agencies typically ask, challenge your company’s assumptions, and develop the truly distinctive narratives that will transcend commodity content.
Value: The narratives that make for true thought leadership are the marketing and sales advantage almost no company has. When it comes to marketing and sales, most companies pump out the same content as competitors: talking up features that customers can hardly tell apart and reiterating perspectives that everyone in the know has read dozens of times in industry trade publications. Differentiated narratives make your customers say, “Oh, I know that company. I’ve been reading their content all over. They are my go-to resource on [insert specific problem that you solve].” Again, very few companies meet that extremely high bar. But if you can meet it, you will establish a category of one, customers will beat down your door, and sales will become far easier.
In short, narrative building is a time-intensive process that requires the participation of industry experts with outstanding research, interviewing, writing, and critical thinking credentials. If you get it right, you’ll have a roadmap to becoming the only option in your customer’s mind. At that point, you’ll be ready to determine exactly what content to create, how to distribute it, and how to create the highest-quality content.
Editorial planning
Most companies’ content production is haphazard and reactive. They have a vague understanding of the topics they want to cover and maybe a brief rundown of the messages that they think will resonate with their customers and differentiate them in the market. (They can’t be sure how effective these messages will be at building a differentiated brand that resonates with their customers because they haven’t put the necessary work, talent, and time into narrative building.) But even if they have identified those topics and messages, their approach to content ideation and execution is poorly structured. At best, they meet once a month and talk about the topics they’ll cover. At worst, they never escape reaction mode, simply covering ideas as they occur to someone on the marketing team or an internal aspiring thought leader.
The problem with this unstructured approach to editorial planning is that it is impossible to build a brand undergirded by unique narratives when those narratives are, at best, haphazardly reinforced and, at worst, entirely unreinforced. For narratives to stick, companies must propagate them thoughtfully and consistently.
For example, let’s say you’re a company that helps streamers sell ads and you want to be known as the technology vendor that helps streamers both sell the most ads and retain the highest portion of every ad dollar, something you accomplish through custom AI-driven technologies that efficiently connect over the top (OTT) ad buyers and sellers. To build that brand, you need to reinforce the narratives that underpin your positioning statement by regularly communicating them to customers, competitors, partners, and investors. But you can’t accomplish that by publishing an op-ed on the thought leadership topic of the day each month; you can’t do it either by looking at competitor blog posts and copying a couple additional posts each month. You need to:
establish your differentiating narratives.
determine the topics you’ll cover related to those narratives.
devise headlines and abstracts to align the team on your approach to those topics.
workshop the headlines and abstracts, getting input from internal stakeholders.
plan how you’ll distribute each asset.
write the content on a timeline that will facilitate consistent narrative reinforcement.
Let’s say the OTT advertising company in question develops the following narratives (which will be simplistic for the sake of example):
Streamers do not keep nearly enough of the ad revenue tied to the media they sell.
Streamers do not get enough direct advertising buyers because they rely too much on adtech intermediaries to sell their inventory.
AI is allowing tech companies for the first time to cut out many of the intermediaries in the OTT ad supply chain.
Disintermediation, or more efficiently connecting buyers and sellers, will eliminate the need for costly intermediaries, helping OTT ad sellers regain control of their inventory and maximize advertising revenue.
It’s great to devise intelligent narratives that speak to a company’s unique strengths and resonate with customers. But those narratives will have little to no business impact if the company doesn’t distribute them in content assets that regularly connect with customers. So, the next step is to create an editorial calendar — likely three months at a time — that covers the types of assets the company will create (white papers, blogs, thought leadership bylines, etc.), the topics they’ll cover, how those topics relate to the company’s narratives, and where and how they will be distributed.
Each unit, or asset, of each month of the editorial calendar might look something like this:
Byline: OTT Advertising Has a Middleman Problem
Narratives: 1 and 2
Abstract: The number of intermediaries in OTT advertising diminishes ad revenue because OTT ad sellers retain less revenue for inventory sold via programmatic intermediaries than for inventory sold directly. What’s more, relying on OTT ad middlemen creates a vicious cycle: streamers think they’re doing alright on advertising because a programmatic intermediary is selling their inventory via the spot market, but in reality, that practice is preventing them from seizing a bigger opportunity: using technology to sell more ads upfront for a premium to the world’s most reputable brands. This article will establish that OTT advertising has a middleman problem, explain why the problem persists, and illuminate what a better OTT ad supply chain would look like for ad sellers.
Distribution: Pitch to AdExchanger and other advertising trade publications. Transform into four LinkedIn posts and four tweets. Recycle two most successful LinkedIn posts and tweets once per month for three months. Rework into a blog post (month 1, item 2) that explicitly discusses how we are solving this problem with AI, something we cannot do in an earned byline because it is too promotional.
By laying out, for a quarter at a time, the topics a company will cover, what assets it will create on those topics, how those topics tie back to the company’s core narratives, and how the assets will be distributed, marketers ensure that they are widely and effectively distributing content that builds a truly differentiated brand. Again, anyone with content marketing experience can see why few companies take this approach — it requires a great deal of time, industry knowledge, creativity, and discipline to create a quarter’s worth of content ideas, ensure they are on message, and workshop them so that they can be produced in a timely fashion. But this is the bar for a content marketing program that truly builds differentiated, industry-leading brands. There are no shortcuts on the path to becoming the only option in your customer’s minds.
Content creation
When you’ve built narratives and planned an editorial calendar, you are ready to create content. There are three distinctive features of outstanding marketing content. It is:
Informed by intensive research and narrative strategy (stages 1 and 2).
Written and edited by world-class writers and editors.
Enriched by the people who best know the company producing the content.
We’ve covered point one at length, and very few companies check that box. Just as few check the second box, which is a question of who, not how. As we covered in the introduction, most companies rely on PR firms and content marketing agencies that do not have subject matter expertise, farm out work to freelance writers with limited experience and credentials, or even hand off writing, as if it were a low-value task, to generalists without writing expertise or generative AI. However, the content you produce is the means through which you establish a reputation and tell your customers, investors, prospective talent, and other stakeholders who you are, what problems you solve, and why you are the most qualified company in the world to solve them. That is not a task for bots and unproven writers.
By contrast, world-class writers have experience in your vertical, command unusually strong writing credentials, and know their way around the content marketing department. They are often journalists, academics, or longtime content marketers who have dedicated their careers to the vocation of writing, and when you tell them what you do or what you think about an industry problem, they return it to you in prose that makes you say, “I couldn’t have said it better myself.” Vet the capabilities of the writers and editors you’re hiring.
Thirdly, elite content marketing is enriched by you — the person who knows your company and brand better than any outsider, no matter their credentials. This is another common weakness of the commoditized approach to content marketing. Companies hire an agency or freelancer and then expect them to handle the entire content creation process with little to no input from company thought leaders or even the marketing team. But how is a company supposed to ascend to the status of the genuine thought leader in its sector without the participation of … its own thought leaders? While hiring the right outside help is critical, making the in-house team available to workshop the content calendar, participate in interviews to enrich the assets, and provide timely feedback is just as important to becoming your customer’s only option.
The value of becoming your customer’s only option with content marketing
It’s time for marketers to reimagine what they want out of content marketing, what its potential is, and what the value would be if they and their agencies were to meet that potential. None of us can log onto LinkedIn or Twitter without encountering a wannabe AI influencer touting the immense potential of ChatGPT to upend content marketing by … producing commodity content in record time. But this is noise, and it is small thinking.
As marketers and business leaders, we can achieve much greater things. We can transform our companies into such omnipresent, insightful, and helpful problem solvers — genuine thought leaders — that we become our customers’ only option to solve the specific problem we are focused on. We will build so much goodwill with our customers — we will have helped them so much before even having a direct conversation with them — that working with us won’t just be enticing. It’ll be a no-brainer. The perceived value of our products will skyrocket. Sales will become far easier. Our ideal customers will increasingly come to us instead of us needing to chase them or invade their inboxes with follow-up messages.
If this dream sounds familiar, it should. This is the promise of content marketing. But we cannot fulfill that promise if we maintain the status quo: creating a handful of blog posts per month and calling it a content marketing program. Content can and should be so much more than that; it is the medium through which we build connections with our customers. And we can do it in a way that is truly unique, differentiates us from competitors, overwhelmingly helps our customers and prospects, and signals to our investors that we are not just another product or service provider; we are the leaders of our industry.
In short, with the right process and people, content marketing establishes us as the ultimate authority on what we do. But churn-and-burn marketing agencies without a bespoke process or extraordinary talent can’t do that. Freelance writers can’t do that. Your in-house team, which has one hundred other things to do, probably can’t do that.
A tier-one journalist who knows your industry inside out can do that. A CMO with a track record of growing businesses like yours can do that. An editor who’s written a dozen business books and spearheaded content for a top-three consulting firm can do that. A writer with a PhD in literature can do that — if all of the above are following a time-intensive, rigorous process that allows them to transcend commodity content by combining their strengths.
With generative AI on the rise, commodity content’s hollowness has never been more apparent. But human content marketers have much greater value to offer than creating copies of competitors’ blog posts or haphazard bylines. The question is: Are you ready to be bigger and better than a commodity?
