Creating standards, guidelines, processes, and workflows for content marketing is not the sexiest job.
But setting standards is the only way to know if you can improve anything (with AI or anything else).
Here’s the good news: All that non-sexy work frees time and resources (human and tech) you can apply to bring your brand’s strategies and plans to life.
But in many organizations, content still isn’t treated as a coordinated business function. That’s one of the big takeaways from our latest research, B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2024, conducted with MarketingProfs and sponsored by Brightspot.
A few symptoms of that reality showed up in the research:
- Marketers cite a lack of resources as a top situational challenge, the same as they did the previous year.
- Nearly three-quarters (72%) say they use generative AI, but 61% say their organization lacks guidelines for its use.
- The most frequently cited challenges include creating the right content, creating content consistently, and differentiating content.
I’ll walk you through the findings and share some advice from CMI Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose and other industry voices to shed light on what it all means for B2B marketers. There’s a lot to work through, so feel free to use the table of contents to navigate to the sections that most interest you.
Note: These numbers come from a July 2023 survey of marketers around the globe. We received 1,080 responses. This article focuses on answers from the 894 B2B respondents.
Of course, we asked respondents how they use generative AI in content and marketing. As it turns out, most experiment with it: 72% of respondents say they use generative AI tools.
But a lack of standards can get in the way.
“Generative AI is the new, disruptive capability entering the realm of content marketing in 2024,” Robert says. “It’s just another way to make our content process more efficient and effective. But it can’t do either until you establish a standard to define its value. Until then, it’s yet just another technology that may or may not make you better at what you do.”
So, how do content marketers use the tools today? About half (51%) use generative AI to brainstorm new topics. Many use the tools to research headlines and keywords (45%) and write drafts (45%). Fewer say they use AI to outline assignments (23%), proofread (20%), generate graphics (11%), and create audio (5%) and video (5%)…Read More