🙅 No second chances

How to create content that engages from the first glance

Photo by Masjid MABA on Unsplash

First impressions have never been more important.

Our audiences often aren’t willing to give second chances in the world of digital marketing.

This week, we’re talking about how to make that impact from the first look.

Today’s agenda:

✍️ Align your strategies

💻 Using AI for blog content

🖱️ How often are people clicking?

💼 Briefly: B2B lead gen & protecting your data

⏱️ Up & coming: The future of search

🚄 Streamline the user experience

Every piece of content matters—and it’s most helpful if you’re able to get things right from the start.

As Jodi Harris, director of content strategy at Content Marketing Institute, writes, if your content experience isn’t delivering what your audience wants “at someone’s first point of entry,” you might not get a second chance.

🧰 Building an ‘audience-centric’ strategy

An audience-centric strategy means that you’re creating content that addresses your audience’s challenges, based on a “deep-rooted understanding” of what they already think and feel.

Harris’s point is essentially to get all teams on the same page to create this unified experience, but if you are all teams—or if you have a small team—this strategy can be simpler to start, and easier to scale!

Here’s how:

• Start with a deep understanding of what makes your audience “tick”

• Go beyond engagement metrics and use surveys, focus groups, and user testing to gain a “3D view” of your customers

• Establish your priorities so each piece of content, including brand assets, works together seamlessly

• As you add team members over time, make sure you’re identifying the exact role they will play in the customer journey

• Set standards for your brand’s content quality, style, and voice

• Test, experiment, and redirect as needed!

👉 I dig deeper into the components involved in building a successful B2B marketing strategy in my new video, B2B Marketing Explained! (Beginners Guide 2024)

🤖 Can you write a quality blog post with AI?

Yes—click below to watch me explain my exact process:

❌ Hot topic: Is using AI-generated content plagiarism?

If you have any concerns about having AI help you generate content, we looked to the experts—namely, digital marketing expert Bruce Clay.

Clay recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land on this very topic.

His insights:

• AI generates text using a combination of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG)

• When AI generates text, it’s not a direct copy of any specific text pulled from its training data

• AI-generated content that doesn’t involve your own expertise is “bland” and “unoriginal”—figure out ways to make it your own

One way to add your own style and expertise to AI content is by creating custom GPTs—which I use in my video above to create content.

Check out this video to learn how to create your own custom GPTs.

💡 Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more!

💥 Who’s clicking?

Audience research tool SparkToro conducted a 2024 Zero-Click Search Study to determine whether Google searches are still resulting in clicks—which, of course, affects whether your organic content can generate traffic.

Key takeaways:

• In the U.S., for every 1,000 Google searches, 360 clicks go to the open web

• 58.5% of searches result in zero clicks, while 41.5% lead to a click

• Zero-click content is becoming more important for marketers

• The fear of AI Overviews and Google’s search quality decline don’t appear to check out in the data (at least not yet)

💡 Schedule a Discovery Session to see how we can accelerate your go-to-market and lead-generation strategy.

Briefly

🩹 Slack deployed a patch late last week to address a security issue where ChatGPT could potentially access users’ private conversations

🚨 Think your personal info has been compromised in yet another data breach? Read how to freeze your credit—and other ways to protect yourself

💸 Boston Federal Reserve president says there’s a “clear path” to achieving their goals without a recession—and with a healthy labor market

⚒️ Unsure about your martech stack? Check out these 7 strategies for making the most of these tools

🎢 B2B lead gen is simpler than you think—read my article on the basics

🗣️ OpenAI releases a new voice-enabled chatbot—with more capabilities than Siri and Alexa

Up & Coming

How can you prepare for a future where AI powers search?

What will happen to SEO?

Check out HubSpot’s analysis of where search is headed, how it will revolutionize SEO, and how you can prepare for it.