No matter how much misinformation might be out there, this is still the information age. People still need and want information for their decisions, whether it’s for whom to vote or what the best products are.
How We Got to Here
How we get information has changed dramatically in a short time. Just a few decades ago a customer’s interactions with a brand were limited to seeing a product advertised, reading a review or seeing it on store shelves. Service businesses or B2B businesses relied on ads, trade magazines, brochures and mailings. Listings in yellow pages or the local Book of Lists were essential and getting a review or a write up in a newspaper could make or break a business. Nowadays, press coverage and advertising is much less important. Trade magazines continue to be important, but businesses increasingly rely on searches and social media to drive leads. Even B2B businesses have turned to SEO and socials for their leads.
The rise of these alternative channels has made journalism more important to marketing. People can’t find a business through search if the business doesn’t have content worth indexing and when they do find it, the content needs to build trust and provide value because there’s little external validation now. Many businesses began turning to content marketing for these goals, using journalistic techniques like objectivity and interviews to create trustworthy, valuable content. However, for many businesses, the unceasing pursuit of SEO metrics turned their content into something boring and repetitive, as it was written for the Google algorithm and not for the human readers who made up the ostensible audience and it was cheaper to have a marketing team copy the top results for a particular keyword instead of attempting something more original.
In retrospect, what happened was probably inevitable: people started turning to Reddit and its real people to get answers, recommendations and advice, while Google responded to the SEO race by allowing businesses to pay for higher rankings, ruining the entire point of SEO in the first place.
AI and Low-Quality Content Marketing
Now Google’s latest update, not to mention its absurd AI experiments, have broken things further. On the one hand, they want content with high authority, on the other hand, Gemini is sourcing its summaries from Reddit (and possibly other sites) where people love to troll. It’s easy enough for (most) humans to see that a horse landing on Mars in 1997 is a joke, but not for Gemini.
But journalism, as usual, can provide a way forward. Early this year, Bernard Huang of Clearscope introduced what he called “ranch-style SEO”. According to Huang, traditional SEO emphasizes keywords and search volume, resulting in a “skyscraper” approach that attempts to cram as much information into one piece of content as possible, while ranch-style needs to distribute the information over multiple pieces of content and include firsthand experience, subject-matter expertise, relevant search perspectives and add new information to the Knowledge Graph.
Just how can this be accomplished? Journalism, of course. While quality content marketing has already made use of interviews with customers and subject-matter experts, these tools are only becoming more important because of cheap, low quality content created by AI tools. Interviews cannot be conducted by AI, only hallucinated. In addition, according to Huang, AI tools also cannot produce new information, only regurgitate it. The “old information” problem should be familiar to content marketers — how many half-joking LinkedIn posts are there about finding the sources for statistics in 2024 articles in papers from 2008? This means that “information gain” will now be a major way to rank.
Back to the Future
As a practical matter, this means that content marketers of the future will have to not only be able to interview experts and customers, but probably others in the company in search of new information, as well as connect facts and analyze them for new insights — a lot like quality journalism. As much as AI has been a major disruption to the industry and marketers’ livelihoods, perhaps it was a necessary one. We have been creating content for robots for too long and now that robots can do that for much cheaper, it has helped us remember that our actual audience is made up of people, not AI, and it’s journalistic skills like storytelling, objectivity, interviews and analysis that is going to reach them.
To keep up with all these developments, the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association has events and webinars where marketers meet and talk about the latest developments.
