Do you intend to improve your content in the next 6 months?

You want to improve your content game? Great! You'll only see a return on investment in content if you follow the rules, be yourself, and don't do what everyone else is already doing. 

Let’s start at the beginning and presume your content objective is to get your message across or to fill any part of the funnel or customer journey. By now, we know both processes are non-linear, and customer behavior is unpredictable, with ever-changing social algorithms and SEO.

And let’s presume you’re not seeing the results of content you expected, and you want to improve that.

On this page, you’ll learn the 3 things that matter, the 3 things not to do, and the 3 steps to get you started. Of course, there is much more to all these topics, I simplified and narrowed it down to keep it accessible and tangible to get you ready to start.

What you need to know

1. AI is a tool; no golden truth or magic wand
2. Authenticity becomes crucial
3. Visual first, copy second

What not to do

• Rely too heavily on AI
• Staying the same in your content strategy and approach
• Obsess on microdata and attribution modeling

And how to get started

1. Get a senior
2. Create a safe space to fail, learn and share
3. To measure is to know

Read the details below. Do you have any questions or feedback, or do you miss something? Please scroll further down and contact me. 

What you need to know to elevate your content

These are the 3 most important things to know if you want to vamp up your content game in the next 6 months. This advice is AI-cowboy proof, stripped of the buzz and fuzz, and my honest advice is based on my failures and successes in my 25 years in the digital industry working for 50+ clients.

1. AI is a tool; no golden truth or magic wand

As much as I’d love to say that you can have amazing, engaging, completely AI-generated content with a push of a button, it doesn’t work like that. AI is a tool, not a solution.

Just so you know, I focus on using AI to write copy with the help of ChatGPT or any other AI tool, not to create visuals, videos, or voices. That’s really for advanced AI users to create something awesome that they can publish without being ashamed of themselves.

AI is amazing if you want help with

• Ideation and inspiration for your storylines and content
• Speed up content production processes and easy creation of multiple variations of your content and social captions
• Rewriting, rephrasing, or proofreading your content, including writing it in your brand voice

2. Authenticity becomes crucial in AI-generated content 

With more AI comes more AI-generated content, and the more AI emerges in content creation, the more important it is that brands stay authentic and recognizable.

The biggest downside is that all that AI-generated content is based on the same predictability and probability and, therefore, is more or less the same. And let’s be honest, nobody wants more of the same mediocre content.

So you better find out who you are and to that on purpose. Let your brand personality shine, dare to stand out, and have your unique voice and point of view.

• Use AI to define your brand voice and make that part of your prompt or Custom Instructions in ChatGPT-4
• It’s human—AI—human. You do the strategic thinking, reveal insights, and have your point of view. Followed by AI to help you create the content. Then, it’s up to you again to check on validity and do the visual and formatting for mobile reading.
• You create the storyline for your content, which is customer-centric, based on a problem—solution—benefit structure. The result is that you really put yourself in your customers’ shoes and tell them how your brand and product make their lives better. A nice side effect is that Google SEO and SGE love and reward this user-intent focus as well.

3. Visual is first, copy is second

This is one of my biggest frustrations. Why are you, marketing and content people, so overly focused on copy? You tend to review the copy first, and the visual comes second, at best in a link or thumbnail in the content calendar. Your customer sees the visual first, and if that’s to their liking and engaging, they’ll check out your copy.

You can never ever review and approve your content if you haven’t seen it in exactly the same way as your customer sees it.

• Visual and copy combined, three out of four times, your customer is on a mobile phone. Keep this small mobile screen in mind; it's an absolutely totally different experience from a big screen.
• Also, adjust your writing to the mobile phone screen. The length of the text lines is generally 30% shorter, which causes 30% longer paragraphs. No one gets excited by big chunks of copy filling the mobile screen from top to bottom. Use whitespace, break lines, and subheaders to group paragraphs. If it looks empty, stupid, and dumb on a laptop, it’s probably fine on a mobile.

Please note this especially applies to your .com content; even Google SEO will display bigger visuals by the end of the year, don’t use boring corporate shitty stock images that are overly used. Same for your email marketing headers. For social content, due to its visual nature, the review and approval process is already more visual-focused.

What not to do, the common pitfalls to avoid

I’ll address these very briefly, as this deserves its own blog. This topic is too important to raffle, yet I don’t want to mention it not-not, as it’s too important.

• Rely too heavily on AI to generate your content while you fire your content team. Or use AI to scale your content’s quantity and not your quality. The first numbers indicate that fully AI-generated content performs worse in SEO and on social. The same goes for not paying attention to validation and proofreading AI-generated content to the tiniest details. Lastly, expect wonders when you don’t take the time to learn to prompt, to work with it, and to create a safe, secure environment for your team to test, fail, and learn. AI is a tool, not a replacement.
   
• Staying the same in your content strategy and approach. The world has changed, and so should you. Authenticity and values, especially on sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and doing good. By the way, the social and search algorithms changed as well, and so should your content distribution strategy.
   
• Obsess on microdata and attribution modeling. Nothing is as dangerous as a marketer who zooms in on vanity metrics, drawing conclusions and using those for future campaigns. Always zoom out on the bigger picture of how overall sales are doing over a much longer time span, preferably 3+ years. Content takes serious time before you see an impact, and still, it’s hard to measure the exact contribution and value.

Actionable steps to get started today

Again, this is based on my personal experience and what I see lacking in most organizations for successful, long-lasting, and profitable content efforts. Of course, what’s applicable to you depends on many things. These are the 3 commonly overlooked or skipped due to budget reasons.

1. Get a senior on the team

Yes, seniors are crazy expensive. But you need them to guide, manage, and train the cheaper junior team. Don’t leave that to the marketing manager. Content strategy and creation is a craft for a reason.

This senior is also the one who breaks the rules and makes a change. And looks at the data and analytics and puts them in the right context to draw conclusions. 

Stuck on a budget? Get an interim. If you’re really tight on budget, hire a temporary interim Head of Content to get things started. I know this sounds counterintuitive, as freelancers are expensive. She, or he, can train someone from the team to take over. Once the strategy is set, the ways of working and processes are in place, and the stakeholders are aligned, you don’t really need the expensive interim senior anymore.

I realize these content seniors are scarce in the industry, cost a lot of money, and are hard to keep on board. They're bored pretty quickly after a year or two maximum, which is all the more reason to use an interim to train someone on your current team and let them grow into the role. It also saves you onboarding time. 

Please don't try to get a cheaper medior to do the job. That's penny-wise, pound-foolish. I speak from experience; I'm that interim ‘head of’ and know what I'm talking about. 

2. Create a safe space to innovate, test, fail, and learn

This is so important, especially with AI. No need to tell you that you don’t want your business-critical information uploaded in a free AI tool, right? Next to that, it’s very important that your team feels safe to innovate, to fool around, to discover, to make mistakes, to fail big time, and to learn, and share those learnings with others.

And please, use the people you already have. There is no need to hire some AI prompting guru or specialized boutique agency. Train your own team and let them do the fun stuff. They know and care about your brand like no one else, and by educating them, maybe they’ll stay and continue to work with you.

3. Use OKRs for progress and KPIs for impact

To measure is to know. If you want to make progress, you need to hold yourself accountable. Personally, I love OKRs to get things done, and I use very simple KPIs to measure success, zoomed out on a larger scale and over a longer time period.

Conclusion: your roadmap to what to do and not to do

In conclusion, if you intend to improve your content game in the next 6 months, that's great and will benefit your brand.  You'll only see a return on investment in content if you follow the rules, be yourself, and don't do what everyone else is already doing. 

Do content well or not at all.

What you need to know

1. AI is a tool, no golden truth or magic wand
2. Authenticity becomes crucial
3. Visual first, copy second

What not to do

• Rely too heavily on AI
• Staying the same in your content strategy and approach
• Obsess on microdata and attribution modeling

And how to get started

1. Get a senior
2. Create a safe space to fail, learn and share
3. To measure is to know

Need help?

If you need any help with all of the above—and I’m not biased at all—I’m thoroughly experienced, have ruffled many feathers, and have learned from my mistakes, drop me an email. If I’m not the right person to help you, maybe I can recommend someone or an agency from my network.

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