3 Questions To Help You Evolve Your Content and Marketing [CMWorld Recap]

3 Questions To Help You Evolve Your Content and Marketing

The big Content Marketing World takeaway: You don’t need radical change to evolve your content marketing program (even in the age of AI). But you do need to make decisions that help you understand your mission better, find surprises in the familiar, and take a scientific approach to change. Ask these questions to get started.

As you might have guessed, many of the conversations involved artificial intelligence. Some of the brightest minds in AI shared their views on the state of AI and what it means for the future of marketers. I can’t share all the nuances and details in this recap without drowning out the rest of the week’s lessons (more to come in our ongoing coverage). But here’s a TL;DR version: AI will continue to have an extraordinary impact on our industry but so will humans.

With that understanding, I offer some provocative questions to consider based on the ideas keynote speakers shared for evolving to meet the challenges of 2023 and beyond.

1. Are you crystal clear about your content mission and purpose?

I’m sure you’re familiar with Zillow – the brand name has morphed into a verb to describe looking up home values.

You might think Zillow becoming a household term means the brand has achieved marketing rock-star status. Job done. Why would their marketing team change a thing?

But even established brands need to maintain and build on their reputation. As much as the Zillow team appreciated its funny and cool reputation, the company isn’t in the business of giving people a peak behind the curtains of houses – it’s an online real estate marketplace.

2. Have you fallen for the biggest lie in marketing?

“The truth is that the most fundamental human bias is toward familiarity,”\

Derek shared what happened when Spotify tried to push subscribers to new music by creating Discover Weekly, a playlist of 30 new songs that drops into listeners’ feeds every Monday.

A bug in the algorithm let a few familiar songs creep into the playlist. When Spotify fixed the problem, it found the number of people listening to the playlist plummeted. “A little bit of familiarity in a product designed for novelty made it more popular,” Derek said.

3. Are you running enough content experiments?

Phyllis refreshed us on the steps and provided a marketing example to illustrate:

• Ask a question: Will the AI-generated industry version of a white paper perform better than the non-AI?
• Research: Evaluate differences in knowledge requirements and preferences across industries.
• Formulate a hypothesis: AI-generated financial services and life science versions delivered in the same channels will perform 10% better.
• Make a plan: Use outbound email to test versions against industry audience members.
• Experiment: Run the test with list subsets using the same parameters/timing. Measure performance by the number of white paper downloads.
• Collect and record results: Compare results across all versions.
• Draw conclusions: Financial services met the key performance indicator (KPI). Life sciences did not. Run financial services white paper program. Evaluate input for the life sciences version. Consider testing a third industry.

The more marketing experiments you conduct, the more you can move quickly, and failure becomes a lot less painful, Phyllis said.