Is 2024 the year content marketing breathes its last?

Up until late November 2022, content marketing was at its peak. Content was king. Its reign marked an era of great success for those that abided with its laws.

Then ChatGPT and a slew of similar generative AI tools happened.

Now, everyone is pumping out content left and right in a race to appease the algorithm.

And people are getting tired of it.

Content marketers are running into new and extensive industry challenges.

The competition has never been higher, and the market has never been so resistant to promotional material. It's harder to rank today because too much content is flooding the SERPS. And don't get me started on generative search; Google's SGE and Bing's Copilot are, quite frankly, stealing potential traffic from long-time favorite blogs and websites.

How we got here

Looking back at recent developments, it's remarkable how far we've come. Historically, the content-driven sales funnel involved creating and publishing tons of content.

In doing so, marketers hoped to attract mass audiences and turn some of that traffic into hot, steaming leads and, later, customers.

While diabolically easy at first, this process was met with a new threat. The intense competition rendered it more difficult to compete for customer attention. Those that tried too hard got burned.

When every trader in the market is screaming out for attention, it becomes difficult to make your voice heard by your ideal customer.

Unsurprisingly, this has given the impression that content marketing is no longer relevant. For traffic-hunting website managers, content that doesn't drive traffic isn't meeting its goals, hence irrelevant and unwise to invest in.

What the numbers say about content marketing

• 90% of all organizations market with content. The reasons for clinging on vary. Content in marketing maintains reader attention, generates leads, and improves brand loyalty.
• 53 percent of businesses spend money and time on content marketing. Of these, 51 percent publish their content daily.
• 49 percent of bloggers are struggling to get their readers to engage with content.
• Over 70 percent of consumers barely skim blog posts, infographics, and long-form content. On the contrary, more than 60 percent of respondents thoroughly consume video and news articles.
• 49 percent of consumers are drawn to promotional content. However, too much of promotional material could pose additional challenges to your marketing strategy.
• How-to articles and blog posts top the list of the most popular (written) content formats.

These statistics highlight a crucial underlying fact:

Content marketing is not dead, nor is it about to die any time soon. However, it's changing in response to how we consume information and how we transact via the internet.

These numbers also go on to show that creating content for the sake of traffic will soon become an outdated practice. Companies that get stuck in the past are likely to get left behind by their peers.

Currently, business leaders are urged to invest in a structured content marketing strategy. One that addresses the needs of their target market with special focus on the bottom-of-the-funnel leads.

So, now the question turns back to how to get the most out of your content marketing efforts. Here are a few recommendations:

1. Relegate automated content marketing solutions to a subordinate role in your content process

73% of B2B and B2C marketing executives already use artificial intelligence. Out of these, 33% use artificial intelligence for generating ideas for content marketing.

True, automated tools can make anyone better at marketing. But let’s look at the reality for a moment. Of the businesses that use automated tools to generate content, a significant number of them push human experiences to the side.

Their content strategy has become proliferated with automation as they kick their in-house writers to the curb. Just like there exists a "superhero fatigue", an AI fatigue isn't far.

One Reddit user said:

It's affecting all creative areas at this point. Book publishers are being overwhelmed by AI generated submissions. Social media accounts posing as artists, selling AI generated art. It's ridiculous.

In light of these sentiments, content marketers are urged to relegate automated tools to a subordinate role and leave human-centric activities to, well, humans. Some subordinate tasks that can be performed with automation include:

• Basic research – Automated content tools have access to billions of web pages and research material. Valuable ideas can be scraped from all corners of the internet with ease.
• Creating initial outlines for clients – AI-powered writing assistants such as Frase have an AI draft generator that can produce optimized first drafts. Often, these drafts are good enough to get things going. By the way, Frase is offering a 5-day trial for only $1.
• Suggest keywords for SEO – Artificial intelligence can suggest relevant keywords for your SEO. However, these should be taken with a grain of salt. There's a reason why only 14% of marketers trust keyword data from AI.

Therefore, learn how to integrate automation sparingly into your content strategy. Merging human effort with automation sets you in a better path to success unlike marketers who overuse the technology and lose sight of the people they're creating content for.

2. Write for Humans with Empathy

Empathy, joy, sadness, or any other kind of emotion is yet to filter its way into the emotionless content marketing practices we see today. Most content marketers are fixated on results. ROI, traffic, clicks, and other flashy metrics are considered key indicators of performance, but the human experience is rarely factored into these indicators.

Content marketers often go straight for the reward, bypassing their readers' pain points. This was not the case just a few short years ago.

No value meant no traffic. No traffic meant no sales.

And that there is an opportunity.

Here’s how to connect with your target audience in a human and authentic way:

• Start with understanding what your loyal audience is going through. Show some empathy, promise a solution, and deliver on that promise however you can.
• Fact-check your product and its branding. If you outsource content creation and marketing, don't just "trust" that your outsourced partner got the message right the first time. Get involved in the branding process.
• Share additional high-value material where possible. You might not know this yet but sharing more useful material in a genuine attempt to help your audience resolve their challenges is a good way to build inbound leads.

By adorning your content with high-quality, relevant source material, you signal to the search engine community that your digital assets are all about helping people find solutions to their challenges. And that’s what they want to see.

3. Strike perfect balance between quality and quantity

When you’re launching your new site, it’s difficult to get into the top spot. That’s because your site probably has very little content to amass an audience. That goes on to tell you that quantity matters just as much as quality.

Hundreds of low-value blog posts, on the other hand, may lose traffic in the long run, thanks to Google’s chain of algorithm updates.

Two of the most recent updates: the Helpful Content Update and the March update have already scrapped off hundreds of websites and deindexed others for violation of spam policies.

>>> Read more about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update

Google also warns against taking a search engine-first approach, i.e. writing content for search engines first. This happens often when people churn out large volumes of content with the hope of driving large volumes of traffic to their websites.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that creating large volumes of content is a bad thing. The more high-quality content you have, the better.

High-quality in this context means web content that fully answers the user’s questions, guides them to valuable sources of information, and helps them solve their problems.

The Bottomline

Content marketing is not dead. It's simply evolving in response to the new market conditions. Remember, these conditions will remain with us for years to come. As a content marketer, business owner, or writer, it's in your best interests to focus more on your audience, their needs, and concerns.

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