As a Chief Marketing Officer in the marketing and advertising industry, how has your experience with brand strategy, demand generation, and AI shaped your perspective on what makes content genuinely valuable today?
We're spoon-fed so much content daily that people are starting to pay more attention to content that's unique, informative, and genuinely engaging.
Throughout my experience, I've learned how branding, demand generation strategy, and automation can shape your content strategy.
Your brand strategy can help you define your unique value proposition, mission, and values, and use them in your content to generate leads and demand.
Of course, AI can automate some content production, but human input remains a valuable element.
Google uses the E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) framework to assess the trustworthiness of content. Therefore, you should focus on whether your content is original, addresses audience pain points, and is structured properly before publishing anything.
What career experiences led you to your current CMO role, and how did they influence the way you approach content, brand building, and audience trust?
I have over 15 years of experience in performance- and data-driven marketing across various platforms and channels. Working in tech, SaaS, blockchain, and process manufacturing has contributed to my unique perspective and skill set as a CMO.
Marketers, in general, are focused on brand, content, and messaging rather than data-driven metrics. It's important to understand that marketing is based on data; data should define how you approach campaigns and enable you to better serve your audience.
Sales cycles can last anywhere from 3 to 12 months, or even longer, so building trust with your audience takes time.
There is absolutely a place for brand, content, and messaging elements in marketing, but taking a data-driven approach can help you cater to the target audience's needs much more effectively.
Don't get me wrong: good branding and content definitely sell. But if you're investing heavily in marketing and you don't know where it's going, you're missing the point.
As AI makes it easier for brands to publish high volumes of competent content, which content characteristics are becoming most valuable in your work, and why?
AI is a big topic of conversation. I think it’s going to allow companies to create significantly more content than they are currently able to. It can also automate many mundane or manual tasks, which saves a lot of time.
However, a large volume of content doesn’t inherently make it good. Using AI as a tool is one thing, but thoroughly reviewing it and giving it the necessary human touch is the key component.
I’d say there are three main things that make content valuable:
- Original data, such as a survey, benchmark report, or industry insights, that can help you stand out in the sea of fluff and commodity content.
- A very specific point of view. AI tends to produce an average of what’s already published. If you’re opinionated and have the experience to back it up, you’re already at an advantage.
- Freshness—updating your content at least once a year to account for industry changes or new trends, and giving your take on them as you go.
If your content sounds like everything else out there, you’re not providing value to your target audience or to search engines.
You have used AI to adapt core content for audiences with different needs; what is one practical way marketers can identify where personalization will add real value rather than simply create more variations?
Think about your core message and how each audience can benefit from it. Someone who has founded a company only cares about scaling their business and how quickly they can do so. eCommerce businesses care about engagement and conversion, while SaaS brands want more qualified demo and sign-up requests.
There are only so many ways that you can say one and the same thing. You can’t recycle the same content and only briefly adapt it to different audiences, hoping it will work. It needs to have industry-specific issues, regulations, and implementation techniques for it to truly be personalized.
From your experience using natural-language processing to uncover emerging customer interests, how can marketing teams turn audience signals into original content opportunities before competitors recognize them?
The first move, as I see it, is collecting audience insights. You may want to check on-site searches, review sites, Reddit and other forums, social networks, and similar platforms, for example.
Natural-language-processing models can sift through large amounts of data and identify which topics are being discussed most.
Knowing what’s trending can help you tap into potential content gaps that your competitors haven’t explored yet. For example, you can write about which products are creating hype these days or the common problems with a new tool or feature. Treat this as an opportunity to share your insights or tips and establish yourself as the leading authority or expert in the field more easily.
What role do subject-matter experts play in making a brand’s content more valuable and defensible in an AI-saturated market, and how can marketers draw out insights that are not already available online?
We've established this as part of our content process at Digital Silk. Each piece of content we create is vetted based on insights provided by subject-matter experts.
It's far more valuable than the typical AI-generated content because it comes from people with industry experience who can share their expertise. Often, it's information you can't easily find online.
Marketers can draw these insights out by setting up interviews or asking experts for their firsthand stories. In other words, you should take an investigative, personal approach when gathering your insights.
For B2B and B2C marketers deciding where to invest limited resources, what types of content assets—such as case studies, research, tools, video, or community-driven stories—are proving most likely to earn sustained attention and trust?
If you're working with a limited budget, focus on growing trust organically. Paid channels require a minimum spend to see real success, so I wouldn't prioritize them. Instead, focus on content marketing you can create yourself—written or filmed—and share it on your channels.
Prioritize case studies, original research, and expert-led insights. Case studies help buyers assess your track record and whether you're the right fit. Original research and expert commentary build thought leadership and increase visibility.
Our client had a limited budget of around $12k a month, which shaped expectations for the overall strategy. We improved audience matching using Customer Match Lists so incoming leads connected with verified professionals. We also redid their whole YouTube channel and grew it from 650 to over 180,000 subscribers.
In our experience, the assets that earn sustained attention and trust are case studies, original research, and expert-led videos. Case studies demonstrate your track record; original research provides new, citable insights; and videos put a real expert in front of the audience.
Because you work across brand marketing, SEO, and multi-channel distribution, how do you decide whether a piece of content is sufficiently distinctive and useful to publish rather than another version of information readers can get from AI?
It’s tricky when AI can write so fluently on any topic. But it can also say a whole lot of nothing and go around in circles, even when there’s a lot of text. That’s what I think really separates the two: how unique, original, and interesting the information is, and how you package it for different purposes.
Take brand marketing, for example. It makes sense to include some information that’s specific to the brand or to have an expert from the company give their two cents on a topic. Then, for SEO, you can climb the rankings by publishing useful information that actually answers users’ questions.
As far as distribution goes, you can tweak the content a bit so it has its own angle for different channels. For LinkedIn, for example, you can go with an interesting stat; for email campaigns, you can use an expert quote.
Looking ahead, what content capability should marketing leaders begin building now to create a durable advantage as AI-generated content becomes even more common?
Creating AI agents can help smooth out the content-creation process tremendously. You can feed each model the specifics of a particular project and then test and enhance it over time so you get a useful output.
Setting this up now can help with the initial brainstorming and research phases. It can assist with some of the more time-consuming tasks, such as completing SEO checklists. Everyone can use the same models with the core data, expert input, tone of voice, and messaging guidelines.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
If you want to scale your business, don’t underestimate the role that your marketing activities play in it. You should invest about 5% to 10% of your growth revenue into marketing, especially if you’re planning on growing aggressively.
What I would also focus on from an operational standpoint is really tying up your sales and marketing functions within your business. A large portion of your budget will probably go to paid user acquisition, like Google Ads or Bing Ads. Once you’re bringing in those top-of-the-funnel leads, make sure you have an automated lead qualification model in place.
From there, once they hit a certain criterion within your marketing automation platform, your sales team can reach out and qualify those leads. You need to define the process of how your leads move from marketing into sales.
The way I’ve done it in the past for a software provider, I sent them into very specific nurture sequences based on what they showed interest in on our website. From there, when they hit a score of about 45, we had a separate lead generation team call that lead and qualify them.
Only once we defined the budget, the time frame, and the expected deliverables did we pass that on to the sales team. This increased our sales close rate dramatically, so that’s something I generally recommend. If you want more insights like this, I sometimes talk about them live on LinkedIn or the Digital Trends section of our website.
This article was first published on Featured News.