The insatiable demand for more content is exhausting marketing teams who may be focusing more on quantity than quality as they struggle to keep up. AI is here to get them back on track, writes Parry Malm, CEO of Phrasee.
The content beast is demanding to be fed.
Each day, marketers try their best to keep it happy. They create content for emails, social media channels, push notifications, landing pages, advertisements – the list goes on. All that content has to be on-brand, drive conversions, and make sense when translated into different languages. As soon as a marketer creates one piece and sends it out, another takes its place on the to-do list before they have even had time to take a breath.
And they are exhausted.
In a survey of over 300 senior marketers by DynataOpens a new window , 82% said they were struggling to produce enough high-quality content, and 51% said they weren’t able to do it.
Those are huge numbers that point to a dire problem within marketing.
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The Consequences of Too Much Content
What happens when your marketing team is struggling to keep up? Mistakes get made. Quick once-overs replace more in-depth reviews. Quality suffers as quantity becomes the main driver. Dull, uninspiring, error-prone copy goes out the door. Conversion rates slip, which means less revenue. Maybe something incorrect or even inappropriate goes out because oversight could not keep up. Now you have to deal with a public online flogging and send carefully-crafted apologies, which only creates more work for an already overtaxed team.
These marketing team members are probably not experiencing record-high levels of morale, which means they are more likely to seek out greener pastures, leaving the rest of the team to pick up more slack and kicking off a cycle of interviewing, hiring, and onboarding. And who could blame them? They were set up to fail.
The bottom line is, a failure to address this problem is going to lead to more problems.
“Just Hire More People, Right?â€
What do marketers need to produce high-quality content at scale? About a third of them said they were short on headcount, another third was lacking money, and the last third said they needed more time. It is the usual suspects – with enough time, money, and resources, you can do pretty much anything, right?
Unfortunately, this year has brought a general slashing of marketing budgets. So, continuing to hire a slew of content producers to keep up with demand may not be an option. And even if it was, is hiring an ever-growing content army ultimately sustainable? Besides being prohibitively expensive, can your brand voice be expressed consistently by so many different people?
As we said earlier, ignoring the problem is not an option. But there might not be money to throw at it either. So, what is a marketing leader to do?
The good news is that there is another option, and it is one many marketers might not know is available: outsourcing your content creation to AI.
Let the Robots Write
Many marketers are familiar with AI and are probably already using it in some way. In fact, 73% are planning on investing more in AI over the next 18 months, so its potential for shifting the workload from human to machine is well-known.
But of that 73%, only about 37% are planning to invest in AI that creates content. This suggests that while AI’s awareness is growing, marketing leaders may not yet have been exposed to all of the ways AI can help them.
So, let us fix that right now: AI can make content for you. It can write copy for you that is just as good – and actually, usually better – than a human. It can produce content that is in your brand’s voice and does not sound spammy. It can create multiple variants with the click of a button. It can show you very clearly what works best and what does not. It can pay for itself. It can deliver millions in extra revenue. And most importantly, it can give your team some room to breathe by taking the small stuff off their plate so they can focus on the big picture.
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The Role of Marketing Leadership
Marketing leaders want to run teams that are happy, healthy and doing their best work. They have got to remove obstacles and provide the right kind of help to keep their star players engaged. If team members do not feel like their hard work is ever going to be enough, they will give up and go elsewhere. Acknowledging their hard work and providing them with an extra pair of hands – even if those hands are bits and bytes – is the best way to keep them around.