in the next 10 years, the value of « educational blog content » as a marketing strategy will go to zero. almost all informational queries will be resolved by LLMs in the places we already spend time: in our messaging and note-taking apps, in our email clients, in our social media feeds.
there will be no reason to tolerate visiting a random SaaS company’s resource center just to find utilitarian information. there will be hundreds of vastly better ways to access information, each personalised to the specific needs and preferences of every user. we will be able to access information in precisely the format we want it: in the language and tone we like, in the context of our previous conversations, in the places we want it to appear. there will be no place for regurgitated Wiki content shared on one of a hundred lookalike static HTML pages.
nobody will put up with the friction imposed by content marketing. searchers will no longer suffer the inconvenience of trawling through the corporate backwaters of the internet just to learn how to install software or cook a common recipe. companies will no longer see economic rewards from simple information arbitrage. the uneasy truce we’ve tolerated for the past decade will end. we will finally draw a line under the era of information arbitrage as a dominant marketing strategy.
but here’s the crux: marketing existed before this strange little loophole appeared, and marketing will exist after.
the marketing strategies in ascendance today are not new or novel: events, branding, advertising, social. we are not abandoning the marketing playbook so much as cycling through it. every marketing tactic is part of a cycle of adoption, saturation, and abandonment. technology has accelerated this process, but the process has always existed.
it’s scary to see the dominant marketing strategy of the past decade shrivel and wither at such an alarming rate, but it shouldn’t be unexpected. the law of shitty click-throughs always wins: when any tactic gets too popular, its returns start to diminish. LLMs have vastly accelerated this process, but in my opinion, we’ve been on the downslope of « educational blog content » for a while.
dealing with this kind of change is part of our job description. marketing is a continued exercise in novelty: how can we be noteworthy and different, relative to other companies? the best marketers are flexible, questioning and risk-tolerant enough to try new, weird, pattern-interrupting strategies without any guarantee of pay-off.
i think the people who are most wedded to the « content » part of « content marketing » might struggle over the next few years, but the people who embrace the « marketing » part of their job are in for a fantastic decade.
~fin