Content Marketing World Retrospective: 6 Concerns Marketers Told Me About in Denver

Last week, I flew to Denver to attend Content Marketing World. Brafton AI Studio had a booth on the show floor, which gave me the opportunity to have a lot of interesting conversations with marketers from all kinds of companies.

My team and I met with more than 150 professionals and heard a lot of different stories about how they’re approaching content today. And even though they came from many backgrounds, worked in disparate industries and operated within organizations with different views on the use of AI, I was surprised to hear so many commonalities in their concerns regarding the intersection of AI and marketing.

I like to think about that intersection in terms of two categories: AI for content creation, and AI for content discovery. These are both massive areas of concern for marketers, and they need to be addressed simultaneously, but in different ways.

Here are some of the top concerns we heard from marketers at CM World:

AI in Content Creation: How Do We Use This Technology the Right Way?

Many of the people we talked to were either content creators themselves or oversaw teams of content creators for their brands.

The themes brought up in our conversations related to this aspect of AI in marketing were very familiar to us. They’re reflected in our conversations with current clients, and they showed up in our research on AI adoption among marketing teams, too.

1. Quality Concerns

The big one: Content quality. When we surveyed marketers on AI for marketing, 70% of respondents’ No. 1 concern was thin or generic content, and the people we spoke with at CM World shared very similar concerns.

AI tools make it all too easy to generate an excessive amount of useless content. That’s not leveraging the technology for the benefit of your brand; that’s burying yourself alive in endless decisions about which pieces deserve to be edited and published. Any “efficiencies” the AI brought you are instantly squashed.

Creating quality content at scale requires a strong foundation. Some of the essential elements of that strong foundation include:

• Brand briefs: Your mission and values, differentiators and unique selling points.
• Target audience briefs: Who you serve, speak to and do business with.
• Writer briefs: Your tone of voice, the words and phrases you use, and those you must never use.
• Internal knowledge: All the expertise and insight that live within your organization that an AI system can’t ever find by searching the web.

Without these elements, an AI content generator simply doesn’t have the context required to produce anything valuable for your company. That might sound dramatic but it’s the truth.

But once you do have that solid foundation, you really can see the efficiencies that AI content creation can provide. Since you’re spending less time editing the output or making the decision to kill a piece of content before it’s published, you can focus more on value-add content and strategy.

2. Security & Governance Concerns

After quality, a huge concern for marketers is security. Whether it’s their IT team scrutinizing each tool they propose, or a marketer operating in a regulated industry where information needs to be handled with the utmost care, practitioners want to know that they’re not crossing any lines when producing content.

This came through in our own research as well; among marketers whose companies have an AI policy, the top specification in those policies is what information can (or can’t) be fed into a platform.

We anticipated security concerns when we built AI Studio; it’s GDPR compliant, client data is never used to train the LLM and all data is hosted entirely in the US. Not every tool can make the same promises or give you the same visibility into how it manages security, so it’s worth asking.

Security is critical when you’re using any type of technology within your brand. But another type of concern marketers in particular have is in creating content for regulated industries — the spaces in which you must never make an untrue claim, where hallucinations have the potential to cause real damage.

This is where the security conversation shifts toward governance. Human review should always be a non-negotiable component of any type of AI content creation. But of course, it’s much easier to review work that’s factually accurate from the get-go.

Companies operating within regulated industries — finance, health care, insurance, for example — need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the platforms they’re working with from this perspective in particular. By adopting a platform that’s designed to stick to approved information sources, marketers can feel confident they’re beginning their AI content creation processes from a secure place that they can trust.

3. Consistency Concerns

Giving 10 of your team members access to your company’s ChatGPT account might speed up the time it takes to create a month’s worth of blog content. And let’s forget about quality concerns with a generic tool for a moment — how do you ensure all 10 are creating a consistent body of work?

I was surprised to hear from a lot of marketers that they’re actually using several different tools for their content creation, but none of it consistently. For example, one person told me she would begin using ChatGPT for certain projects, build up a prompt library for herself and her team members to use, and when she feels the quality slipping, she’ll shift to Claude. In time, the process repeats, and she shifts back to ChatGPT when she feels Claude is no longer serving her well. But there are no real rules for her team on which tool to use, when.

Enabling your team to create content at scale can unlock a lot of potential, but if their creations don’t sound like they’re coming from the same brand, you’ve created a content library that won’t reinforce your brand voice or values. You’ve created 10 disparate content libraries, and that fragmentation will disrupt your brand’s ability to maintain a consistent digital presence.

It’s entirely possible to add consistency back into your content at the human review phase, but in a perfect world, the initial output is already on-brand, and you just need to issue a few small adjustments.

AI in Content Discovery: How Will People Find Us Now That Search Has Changed?

It’s no small secret that many brands have seen their website metrics fall in a way that would have caused panic five years ago. But today, we understand that those falling impression, click and session counts are due to the new way that search operates. AI Overviews answer your questions at the very top of Google’s SERP, and people are turning to AI search engines off of Google all the time.

This leads marketers to ask some very reasonable questions:

• How do we show up in AI search?
• How should this new reality change our content priorities?
• Where else will people find us, if not through search?

The right AI tool will help you address the content discovery side of AI, too.

4. AI Visibility Concerns

I don’t need to tell you that being visible to AI search systems is a huge concern for marketers today. What professionals like us need is a platform that not only creates good content, but one that creates it in such a way that enables AI to parse and cite it.

AI visibility doesn’t come down to just one singular factor. It’s the culmination of many signals, some of which need to be intentional decisions when creating and publishing content. Those include:

• Content structure (using tables, bulleted lists, FAQ sections and other elements where appropriate).
• Technical details (like ensuring your FAQ uses FAQ schema, for example).
• Content coverage (addressing the full topic at hand, including all those spin-off questions a reader will naturally have).

Understanding the nuances of the platform you’re targeting matters, too. Aiming to be cited in an AI Overview is slightly different than targeting ChatGPT, for example. But a good AI content creation tool — one that’s made for marketers specifically — should be able to point you in the right direction for either (or both).

5. Strategic Direction Concerns

Blogging for the sake of blogging is fine if you’re just a blogger. But marketers need to blog for a defined purpose: commercial value. Whether you’re writing a top-of-funnel educational article, or a middle-of-funnel instructional guide, if you’re writing on a whim without a clear direction, you won’t get much value from the effort.

AI tools are great at helping you strategize your next move. But using generic tools has the potential to lead you astray. Ask ChatGPT what you should write about, and it’ll give you a ton of ideas and even a believable action plan. But whether those recommendations will help drive results is another story.

That was one of the gaps that we wanted to solve for with AI Studio. It can do the SEO and GEO research for you, but also give you specific, actionable recommendations for how to update or create a piece of content to give it the best potential to perform in search (traditional or AI).

Understanding when you should draft a blog post vs. a landing page vs. an in-depth pillar page helps you plan out supporting content and distribution plans, not to mention the structure of the piece itself. And when the search ecosystem is evolving in the way we’re seeing today (which is to say, notably and quickly), having certainty in your direction is immensely helpful in getting projects off the ground.

6. Audience & Platform Configuration Concerns

Finally, we heard concerns related to getting messaging across many platforms and tailored to many audiences. Most brands have multiple audiences they write for, and several channels they need to feed content into.

For example, one marketer from a health care-related company told me that, with Lung Cancer Awareness Month coming up, she needs to create content that speaks to a much less specialized audience than usual. Normally, her team is creating content for doctors and researchers, but during the month of November, she actually needs to speak to the general public.

That means taking the messaging she’s used to explain her brand to doctors, and reframing it so that the average person can relate to it. Shifting tone can be difficult, but a good AI content creation tool should be able to deconstruct the concepts in an established piece of content and reframe them with a new audience in mind.

Another way marketers need to repurpose their content is when creating for different channels. I’ve done this within our own marketing program at Brafton; one example is our webinar series.

In our September webinar, Zach Shah explained the impact AI is having on PPC and digital advertising. It was a good webinar, but I can’t allow it to exist in just one format. The information within needs to be shared on our blog, social media pages and in our email program, too.

Using AI Studio, I have the ability to give the platform Zach’s transcript and have it create spin-off blog content that dives deeper into some of the concepts he covers, social media posts to go alongside short clips of the webinar, and email content that reinforces his points or asks viewers if they need support on their own PPC programs.

What CM World Confirmed for Me

Content Marketing World gave me a view into the things marketers like myself are worried about, and what they’re excited about, too. The things they told me reflected a lot of the challenges I’ve faced as well: content quality and consistency, AI discovery and knowing what my content creation priorities should be are all questions I’ve asked myself and my team.

I’m lucky in that I’ve had early access to the AI Studio system, which has helped my team create content that we’re proud of, but also that we are confident in putting out into the world. Not just from a branding perspective, but also from a “will it perform” perspective, too.

AI technology is in constant flux, and these tools will only become more capable. As the industry evolves, it’s up to us — the real people working with the technology — to maintain our standards and to think critically about the strategy behind the content. Some of that begins with choosing the right tools for the job, but a large part of that responsibility will always come down to the choices we make.