Episode #389: AI And The Death Of Content Marketing

I started my first podcast “The Japan Leadership Series” on August 2nd, 2013. Shortly after that, I discovered Content Marketing and got better educated on the subject thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose’s podcast “This Old Marketing”, launched on November 20, 2013. The premise at the time was revolutionary. You put up your best stuff for free and don’t protect your IP. This was a radical idea and few went for it. I didn’t think of my podcast as “Content Marketing”, but I soon realised that was what I was doing. I now release six podcasts and three TV shows every week and drive my Content Marketing hard.

Content Marketing combines well with SEO as a mechanism for getting clients. I have 3300 articles each on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, 2060 podcasts on Apple Podcasts, over 2500 videos on YouTube, have published seven books, so I am all in on Content Marketing. It is coming to a shuddering halt.

AI is bypassing the content we are all putting out there and scraping our IP. Its search function homogenises what is globally and freely available on a subject and in thirty seconds provides the answers we are seeking. With Google search, you had to go to the links and my stuff would come up, with my name and my ownership of that content made quite clear. AI just bypasses all of that attribution. You get the answer, but it is not clear who it came from. We are becoming anonymous and even more invisible.

I remember a long time ago when clever people made the point that we content producers were all media companies, even though we may not have thought of ourselves in that way. I have produced a massive amount of media on three subjects – Leadership, Sales and Presentations, because that is what we mainly teach. I want people to look at what I produce and conclude they need Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training to come and help them solve their problems.

I don’t write books to sell books. The market is too niche for me. You have to be interested in Leadership and Japan, Sales and Japan, Presentations and Japan. We could hold a meeting in a largish phone booth to accommodate the denizens of these niches. We do sell copies, but we mainly hand over our books to potential clients for free and use them as textbooks for our courses.

If AI can get the answer without going through us, then how do we get to the client and get them to buy our solutions? This is the nub of the problem. What we had available to us through Content Marketing is going away rapidly, but I wonder how many people have twigged to the issue. What should we do?

At one level, we can stop shovelling coal into the Content Marketing furnace, because the client will get the answers they want without us making the effort to stoke the fires. The number of people seeing our content will diminish, so why are we doing it?

Credibility is still important though and I believe that personal branding will become the path forward. We are already doing that, but as Content Marketing drops out as a conduit from clients to us, then we need alternatives. Search will continue to work to find suppliers of specific solutions. With SEO, there are known means of enticing the spiders to find you, but what about AI? How can we spice up the AI search algorithms? That is certainly unclear at this point. Well, it is certainly unclear to me, so if you have a good idea on this point, then let me know!

Through traditional SEO, or search where you pay to place your ads, clients will find you and then what? This is where Content Marketing may still have a role. Buyers will check us out before they make contact. Ask yourself, what are you putting out there to display legendary credibility, so that they select you for follow-up rather than your rival? Our company brand is important, but our personal brand is also going to be important. Japanese clients are notoriously risk averse and want to know who they are dealing with before they go too far.

My LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads and TikTok posts are just full of content – endless and substantial and this is no accident. I want to influence the minds of the buyers, to see me as THE EXPERT in my core areas. I want them to taste what we have and know that we can solve their issues.

The end of Content Marketing may mean that clients don’t find us anymore when they are searching for an answer to their question about their problem. For example, if we ask AI “how can I get more innovation from my team?” we will get a lot of answers. What do you do with all of this theory which pops up, though? You get the answer and then have to apply the knowledge yourself. Not that many companies are capable of doing that at a high level. If they are looking for an expert to deliver the solution, they have to do a different type of search and there is a chance they will discover us. They will then want to evaluate who is the biggest, safest and best provider. This is where having a substantial body of specialist work on their area of interest will hopefully pre-select us for follow-up.

Accept that the traditional way of being found through Content Marketing is going away and prepare for a brave new world, which is changing by the second. Nevertheless, try to control what clients will find out about you, as they do their due diligence on suppliers of solutions to their problems. None of this is going to get any easier, so buckle up for the ride.