AI isn’t just fucking up SEO. I believe it’s fucking up all of B2B content marketing.
Right now, 2 paths are viable.
One is a race to the bottom. The other (if I’m right) will survive AI.
First, let’s ground ourselves on where we’re at in the evolution of B2B content marketing.
A Brief History of B2B Content Marketing: From 2010 to Now
I’ve been doing content marketing for over 15 years. It’s gone through a few key phases.
Content marketing goes back even further than these phases but I’ll start with the ones that I had a front row seat to.
Phase 1: The Company Blog As the Nucleus (2010-2015ish)
When I started fresh out of college, we were all figuring out content marketing on the internet for the first time. Blogger (hah!) was still a thing. WordPress was new and innovative. The strategy was simple:
- Post a ton of content on your company blog
- Push links to that content on social
Your blog was the center of your content marketing strategy. And every other marketing channel was an extension.
At the time, these ideas were radical. We could just help people with content and then they’ll become customers? And skip all the bullshit advertising costs? Hot damn! For me, Permission Marketing epitomized this philosophy. That was published in 1999 btw.
I swear I remember a graphic from Rand Fishkin from that time that looked sorta like this:
I could be misremembering the attribution. Regardless, many of us were doing this during that era. I definitely was.
Top tier content creators would even duplicate their blogs and email list. Every email became a blog post, every blog post got sent as an email. A 1:1 copy across both channels.
At the time, I worked on the marketing team at KISSmetrics. I even ran the department for a bit. We had one of the hottest marketing blogs out there. I know because any time I told someone I worked at KISSmetrics, the first thing they’d say was “wow, I love your blog!” They never mentioned the product btw. And yes, that was an indicator of serious product/market fit issues we had at the time.
While our product had some serious flaws, we nailed the marketing piece. Our strategy was pretty simple:
- Publish a blog post every business day. We went all over the place with topics like a lot of blogs in those days. Anything under “marketing” was fair game for us.
- We never looked at SEO or worried about keywords. And yet we did 700K visitors/month without breaking a sweat. The vast majority was from SEO.
- We put a ton of effort into content quality. Basically, we treated the blog like an industry magazine. And we always shipped posts on time. Quality plus consistency was all we needed.
I was personally responsible for lead quotas during most of my tenure there and I can say with absolute certainty: the blog drove the whole damn funnel. All the direct traffic, branded traffic, free trials, all of it. Without the blog, we would not have had a business. Even during this era, attribution was a bitch and we could never turn traffic directly into free trials. Instead, we turned blog traffic into email signups and then converted those folks into webinar registrants and demo requests. It worked beautifully.
During this era, you didn’t even need to worry about how content connected to the customer funnel. Not really. Ship content on your blog, push links on social, customers showed up. Fucking wild.
Phase 2: Siloed Content Channels (2015-2022)
After a few years of promoting our blogs at the expense of everything else, some of us realized that you could go a lot further if you… specialized. Shocker!
Also, this is when the social walled gardens started locking off huge sections of the internet. Pushing links on Facebook, Twitter, or IG weren’t an option. So most content marketers picked a lane.
To me, this made perfect sense. And for that time, it still does. By specializing, you dramatically increased your ability to win:
- You focused on a single channel so you got much further up the expertise curve. You’d run circles around anyone that was trying to do SEO, email, YouTube, IG, and Twitter all at the same time.
- Smart marketers realized that every channel was a power law. The bulk of the returns went to the few at the top, everyone else fought for scraps. By focusing, you grabbed a huge chunk of the total returns. Focus could easily get you a 10X return, even a 100X return.
- You could also build an entire machine around your channel. Freelancers, SOPs, specialized FTEs, it all turned into a predictable system. Hit your inputs and out popped your quarterly KPIs.
This is exactly what I did. From 2010 to 2022, I gradually focused more and more on a single channel: SEO. The company I started, my clients, and the companies I worked for all benefited enormously from that specialization during those years.
Notable differences from the previous era when the blog was the nucleus:
- Each channel became independent. Occasionally work would overlap but many B2B marketing and content teams divided themselves up by channel.
- Company blogs became 100% SEO plays. During this era, audiences gradually moved on to other content formats (mainly social). But that was fine because SEO brought so many customers and traffic.
- Every channel was viable. I told hundreds of startup founders on consulting calls during this period that they should pick the channel that resonated with them the most. Sustainability was the most important factor in getting an organic marketing funnel going.
In my opinion, SEO was also the ideal channel for B2B. No other channel came anywhere close to matching it on volume, profitability, and consistency of client acquisition. It also required a straightforward strategy. The only downside was that it took extreme consistency over 5+ years and demanded emotional stability. It was a lot like investing in index funds. The returns are obvious, the ROI comes from winning the behavioral game. Which is still pretty hard, hence the returns for those that stuck with it.
SEO also had a beautiful moat built in. You needed real domain authority in your topical area to rank (sidebar: Google has fucked this up tremendously in the last couple of years and the moats are now weird as fuck and not reliable).
I’m not the only one that figured this out, the SEO B2B content playbook became a checkbox budget item at many companies over this period.
And then AI blew everything up.
The False Trap of the AI Content Era: Content + AI = WINNING
Many content teams are trying to do some version of this in the age of AI:
- Take the channel specialization workflows that we all learned in the last decade.
- Replace as much of those workflows with AI as possible.
- Do more, do it faster, do it cheaper.
Don’t get me wrong, this works so fucking well right now. I know multiple top-tier B2B content teams that went all in on AI and they are kicking the shit out of everyone.
I believe this window is still open. For how much longer? Who knows. But if you go hard on this with your own content program, it will work and you’ll do really well for a while.
I also believe the window will close at some point.
Taking a standard B2B content playbook and AI-ifying it is a race to the bottom.
No matter how good your model, your AI training, or how much content you ship, someone else can train their model a bit better, run it a bit longer, or cut a few extra dollars.
That is not a game I like to compete in. Sooner or later, I’ll get outpaced. And so will you (most likely).
Instead, I’d much rather play a game where there’s tons of upside with a wide margin of error.
Influencer Nodes Are All That’s Left After AI Gobbles Up Everything Else
For my entire career, there’s always been one major content cheat code: founder-led marketing.
Build in public, bring people along for the journey, get raw and authentic. A ton of companies have been built that way.
It’s also the only thing that I think will survive the onslaught of AI content. And what does this look like when it’s not done by the founder? It’s just influencer marketing.
When we’re drowning in an endless sea of lukewarm AI slop that was trained on a brand book (now called a Brand AI Agent) that a team put way too much time into, what will we be left with?
Real stories from real fucking people.
B2C is already way ahead of the curve on this one. Everyone wants to be a creator and influencer marketing has become an established industry.
And while there’s a bit of influencer marketing in B2B, it’s nascent. A fraction of what it could be.
I believe anyone that wants to produce original, insightful content will need to distribute it via influencers. It’ll be the last distribution mechanism for real content (it sure as fuck won’t be SEO).
That means that every CMO is going to face a choice:
- Pay influencers to rep your shit
- Hire some of them, be one, hope to god your CEO is one
Lars, did you just invent influencer marketing?
… yes? Well no but yeah, this is just influencer marketing.
Lars, could this have just been a tweet?
Uhh…. also yes.
Look, none of this is new or groundbreaking.
Amanda Natividad has been pushing the zero click marketing idea for a while now. As always, her and Rand Fishkin are way ahead of the curve.
My point is that for the past decade, many B2B content teams have just been SEO machines. I am oversimplifying. There might have been a podcast, YouTube, webinar, whatever program also attached. But the core has often been SEO.
Going forward, I believe the core of B2B content marketing programs will be influencer marketing. That is a HUGE departure from the past decade. It’s not a new model. But it’s going to become THE model. At least that’s my bet.
What about the company blog?
The company blog will no longer be a primary channel for content marketing. People don’t follow blogs anymore, they haven’t for years. And with AI, information focused SEO posts will continue to see declining traffic. There are a few areas where a blog can still play a critical role (like bottom of the funnel posts), but they won’t be the centerpiece of content programs like they used to be.
What about paid marketing?
Of course, paid marketing is still alive and well. I’m looking at the organic/inbound side of things. That’s where most of my experience is and where I prefer to play.
What about so-and-so’s automated AI content?
Influencer marketing has always been a mix of real and fake content. Social media managers are not new. And before that, thought leaders (before anyone called them thought leaders) paid top-tier ghost writers fat piles of gold to write their NY Times bestselling books. Not all, but many.
And I do know of several prominent folks with major personal brands that are leaning heavy on AI. Of course they’re going to do it.
Some of them will do it well. And it may be hard to spot, at least for a while. Then influencer marketing will get overloaded with AI just like everything else.
My point is that influencer marketing is also the only strategy where you can still compete with original, high quality content. You can still stand out. If you can say shit that hasn’t been said before and engage an audience, you’ll do just fine. Even if other folks go all in on AI content.
I think my own LinkedIn profile is a good example of this. I haven’t used AI at all with any of my LinkedIn content. I haven’t even had ChatGPT give me feedback on any of my posts. It’s 100% unfiltered Lars content. I’ve tripled my LinkedIn follower count in the last year during a period where so many folks are puking AI slop all over their profiles. And yet, my content stands out just fine.
It’s still possible to win with great content as an influencer. And I believe that’s the only path forward for a B2B content program.
If you’re a CEO or CMO and are serious about setting a program like this up at your own company, we should talk.
