Every day, events are occurring that impact your audience.  This is an under-recognized opportunity for brand engagement, and the industry is starting to catch on.

✒️ Paul Rigden

Having a blog, newsletter, or information portal used to be a ton of work.  It took writers, editors, and marketers to host a full fledged content portal.  Unfortunately, that meant it was out of reach for most brands.  AI has changed a lot of industries, and if you work in content marketing, you know it’s the ground zero of AI-impacted fields.  Creating and distributing content is easier than ever before. Now, a single person can do a job that used to take a small team.  It’s hard to tell if it’s the death of the industry, or a new beginning.

All of a sudden, content marketing campaigns are making sense for a whole new generation of marketers.  Brands that had no real voice before are beginning to find one through content publishing.  As the trend continues, audiences will start to expect a brand to have a point of view on the issues they care about.  That might mean being informative, insightful, or funny, but it’s not going to work unless you're on top of what trends matter to your community.

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Social feeds full of product promotions and limited time offers will begin to seem less appealing to users with more enticing options.  Times are changing quickly, which is a huge opportunity for those nimble enough to embrace change.  But like any other major industry shift, new problems and pitfalls are emerging as well.

Generating quality content using AI still isn’t easy.  AI is great at delivering word count, but its writing is bland and watered down, and that’s a huge problem.  The cheesy marketing tone that it writes with can be fixed easily enough with basic prompt engineering, but beneath that is a deeper issue.  AI writing never gets to the point.  It’s usually a meandering string of words that promises some underlying purpose, but that promise never delivers. The reason is simple enough when you think about it.  AI generated writing never has a point because AI doesn’t have anything it wants to say.  It has no personal opinion, core values, or unique point of view.  We unpack why AI is so bad at being unique in another article, but the bottom line is it’s really hard to train a nuanced personality into an AI agent. That’s a real problem when it comes to connecting with an audience.  Audiences connect with personalities and perspectives they can relate to, which is why AI generated content so often reads as slop.

Perspective is an interesting thing.  A single event can mean completely different things to different people.  It’s pretty easy to take for granted how much lived experience impacts how we react to the world around us.  An obvious truth to one person might never have been considered by another.  One person’s highlight is another person’s turn-off.  The most successful content creators are the ones that know their audience, and how to capture their interest and imagination.  One of the biggest secrets to using AI for effective content writing isn’t ‘elite’ prompt engineering or magical phrases, it’s understanding that AI needs to be given a good subject and unique point of view to create quality content. 

Here are a few quick tips to writing with AI:

These tips all address the same core issue: AI slop is caused by a lack of perspective.  The good news is, that’s a problem you can solve all by yourself.

Nobody understands your audience like you do.  This makes you an undeniable, irreplaceable asset.  We live in a world where AI content is practically free, but it needs a human perspective to view the world through.  Every day a flood of news, videos, and social posts are unleashed across the web, and they impact different people in different ways.  What matters to your audience?  What channels and mixes of content do they find engaging?  Most importantly, how do these trending events impact them, and what perspectives will they identify with?  If you can answer those questions, then you are your own secret weapon to generating a never ending stream of engaging, high quality content.  This approach is called Reactive Marketing, and it’s a trend that’s been exploding over the past few years.

Any content marketer knows how hard it is to constantly come up with engaging content ideas that don’t feel recycled.  Using brand-relevant, trending events to engage your followers is the future of content marketing.   And by layering your perspective over those events - by reacting to them instead of just reporting them - you can make your website, newsletter, or social media channel more relevant to your followers than just another news feed.

The process of ‘Reactive Marketing’ is really just as simple as finding a trending event that’s going to engage your audience, developing a strong point of view that reflects your perspective, and writing and publishing consistently through web, social, and email channels.  That process is something that used to be out of reach for most small brands, and an undertaking even for larger ones.  The technology of today has made that process much easier, but as more and more people jump on the band wagon it’s also made the field more competitive.  It’s already easy to spot the brands which are trying, but not adapting well, to the shift.  AI Slop has become a ubiquitous term, and companies that pump out low-tier content don’t see the same results as their more savvy counterparts.

Reactive Marketing, fueled by generative AI, is a revolution that’s just beginning.  For the most part, the handbook on how to do it hasn’t fully been written, but the first few chapters are becoming pretty clear.  Post regular, quality content.  Be consistent.  Have a strong point of view and communicate it.  By following those basic principles, you’re ready to get started.  But using reactive marketing to engage audiences is just the beginning.  Once you have people’s attention, you’re going to want to use that to drive the KPIs that matter to you.  Keep reading to get into the nitty gritty of implementing your reactive marketing campaigns in a way that will convert for you.

Reactive Marketing is a fantastic strategy for creating a pipeline of engaging content, but translating that into KPIs can be a challenge of its own.  Focus the attention and engagement you get from Reactive Marketing by implementing a funnel to drive the KPIs that matter to your brand

Learn more about Reactive Marketing Funnels in the next edition of The Content Marketers Guide to AI: The 3 Pillars of the Reactive Marketing Funnel