Is Content Dead? Content Strategy in the Age of AI

This week on HubHeroes, we asked the question that’s been haunting marketers across industries: Does content still matter? In a landscape where AI-generated “slop” is flooding the internet, traffic is tanking, and everyone’s convinced SEO is dead (again), it’s easy to feel like the foundation of inbound is crumbling. But is it really? Or do we just need to finally evolve how we think about content strategy?

What followed was one of the most raw and layered conversations we’ve had in a while. Yes, we talked about search engines, yes we talked about traffic. But what we really dug into was how AI is forcing us to recalibrate everything.

🔎 Go Deeper: What is the HubSpot Content Hub?

From how we measure content ROI, to how we structure our teams, to the way we think about influence, relevance, and thought leadership, this episode is less of a hot take and more of a reckoning.

We also tackled what hasn't changed: Your audience still craves clarity. Trust still matters. Structure still matters. And your content still needs to show up across multiple surfaces, including search, social, AI, and email. But it’s not about high-volume publishing anymore. It's about strategic, multi-purpose content that solves real problems and connects with real people.

If you’ve felt like you’re drowning in metrics that don’t tell the full story, trying to prove the value of content to execs who think AI is a replacement for humans, or just unsure how to show up meaningfully in a broken ecosystem, this is the episode for you.

What We Cover

• What Has and Hasn’t Changed in Content Strategy: We talk about how the rise of AI answer engines, zero-click SERPs, and shifting user behavior are forcing marketers to rethink what content is supposed to do—and what fundamental principles still apply.

• The Collapse of Traditional Metrics: Traffic and conversions are down across the board. We explore why influence, conversations, referrals, and AI citations are becoming more important indicators of content performance.

• Why Human Content Still Wins (When It’s Done Right): AI slop is everywhere—but people still recognize and seek out content created by actual humans with actual opinions. We talk about how brand voice, tone, and process help maintain trust and authority.

• New SEO Norms: Surfaceability Over Search: If you’re not optimizing content for how AI engines like ChatGPT or Gemini pull and cite information, you’re falling behind. We discuss schema, FAQs, and how to reframe content for AI visibility.

• Old Rules That Don’t Work Anymore: From defaulting to listicles to obsessing over daily blogging cadences, we break down the outdated tactics that are actively hurting your content strategy in 2025.

• The New Competitive Baseline: Max dives into what happens when AI slop becomes the norm—and how that changes your approach to differentiation, audience trust, and campaign strategy.

• AI as a Creative Partner, Not a Replacement: We share how we actually use AI in our own content workflows—from outlining and drafting to search and summarization—and how to avoid letting it dilute your message.

• Why Brand Voice Is Non-Negotiable: In a sea of generic content, a clear, consistent brand voice is what keeps you from sounding like everyone else. We revisit past episodes on brand voice and explain why this needs to be at the core of your content process.

• The Trap of Single-Use Content: George wraps with a call to action: If your content can’t be surfaced, ranked, remixed, shared, and reused—you’re doing it wrong.

And so much more ... 

Episode Transcript

Liz Moorehead: Good morning everyone.

George B. Thomas: Good morning.

Chad Hohn: up?

Liz Moorehead: You know what I love when we hop on and I just see Max with his head in his hands look like he, he looking like he's pondering the inevitable heat death of the universe. How?

Max Cohen: I'm, um, my eyes are being burned alive from all these screens that I'm looking at right now. That's what's happening.

Chad Hohn: Dark mode brother. Come on.

George B. Thomas: mode

Max Cohen: Oh, every, everything is in dark mode. Trust

George B. Thomas: don't you have those

Max Cohen: is in dark mode, and I'm just getting, oh, I do,

Chad Hohn: the the old LGS blue Light Glasses

George B. Thomas: You could be looking all cool with those

Liz Moorehead: Oh boy. He's gonna look so smart. Hold on. Let's see what we got. Let's see

George B. Thomas: everything will

Chad Hohn: You know, speaking of which, I'm supposed to wear glasses, apparently. I didn't realize that. I like, haven't had like a vision insurance in a hundred years. So I finally went to go get like my eyeballs checked

George B. Thomas: yeah.

Chad Hohn: and I got like a stigmatism.

Liz Moorehead: oh,

George B. Thomas: have that too. Which is crazy. That's

Liz Moorehead: have the strobing with lights.

Chad Hohn: Uh, yeah. Well it's like the halo around it, like especially at night.

Yeah. You get the little, you know, little stringers and all that good stuff.

Liz Moorehead: know that wasn't normal.

George B. Thomas: that's not normal. So did they give you the yellow stuff like that's in your eye? Maybe that's glaucoma. Maybe that's something

Chad Hohn: Yeah, I don't have that.

Liz Moorehead: That's called co coma tester. I have glasses too that I wear. I only wear them when I'm driving. They're pink.

George B. Thomas: Nice, nice.

Liz Moorehead: It's a lot for me emotionally. Wow. Max,

Chad Hohn: Max is

Liz Moorehead: ready to go to the shooting range. Holy, no

Chad Hohn: dude,

Max Cohen: Yeah, this is my gunners, dude.

George B. Thomas: There you go.

Max Cohen: is my

Chad Hohn: Well, gunners. Yeah, they're, they're great computer glasses. I actually kind of want some

Max Cohen: Pretty sweet.

Liz Moorehead: Oh boy. I mean, I don't have this. Well, gentlemen, we have gathered here today.

George B. Thomas: Yeah,

Liz Moorehead: To talk about

George B. Thomas: called life,

Liz Moorehead: favorite topics. Yes, life, but also content. But

George B. Thomas: that was a prince that, by the way, that was a prince

Chad Hohn: content is life.

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah, let's go crazy.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, let's go nuts. Okay, let's go nuts with content though. Go ahead, Liz. Sorry.

Liz Moorehead: We are. We nerded out with Chad last week and this week we're nerding out with Liz.

So I've brought to the table a very specific, easy topic for us to talk about, and that's content in the age of ai. We have talked around. Yeah, I know. Max, calm down.

Max Cohen: I'm just saying it's getting rough out there. It's getting rough out there. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: And for this audience in particular, I think it is critical that we talked about it. Like, so we've talked about content in the context of the new HubSpot content hub, some of the tools, but it has been a very long time, years even since we've circled back to content just as a strategic mechanism for inbound practitioners because back in the day. was the engine, right? We had blog posts and pillar pages and lead magnets and SEO, and it all used to work if you were creating helpful human content, right? If you knew the questions your buyers were asking and you were creating helpful human content, you would see that cute little hockey stick growth right now. Everyone is panicking and not necessarily for unfounded reasons. We're all seeing organic traffic, starting to tran tank. Everybody has conflicting opinions about how and when you use ai. I am literally bleeding from my eyeballs the way Max is this morning. Every time I read quote unquote human content that looks like it was written by a robot learning to love, so we're talking about. Strategy and what it should look like today because we are in an industry where one shift in the wind and people are like, blogging is dead. SEO is dead. The internet is dead. Like every, we are so quick to call things dead instead of ex. I know.

George B. Thomas: if the internet was dead?

Liz Moorehead: Well, let's just go. Let's go with something less dramatic.

Ev. Every year there's a hit piece about how SEO is dead. I'm like, okay, so you're telling me that we all collectively woke up and decided we don't wanna search for things on our little computer boxes and our phones anymore? No. We just changed how we do it. So that's what we're talking about today. Yes.

AI is forcing a lot of changes.

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

Liz Moorehead: AI is creating a lot of downward trending in a lot of our metrics, and so is content dead? I don't know, but George, I wanna start with you. Yeah, I know. Spoiler alert, but I'm curious. George, I wanna start with you and ob. Obviously Max and Chad chime in afterward in your opinion. Does content still matter with ai? Dominating search and traffic across the board is content still worth investing in?

George B. Thomas: Well, yeah, I, I think content is, uh, definitely worth investing in. Content is still the fuel. It just so happens that it's the fuel for humans or, oh, hang on, hang on. For humans.

Liz Moorehead: There we go.

George B. Thomas: right out the gate, by the way, but, but it's also the fuel for ai, because that's the thing we, we need to figure out like, yeah, this number's going down, but are you paying attention to these numbers that never existed are actually going up?

Meaning are you looking at like your HubSpot sources for Perplexity Chat, GPT, Gemini, like all of these. Things because when I say it's the fuel content, is the fuel for ai. Like large language models, they're gonna quote, they're gonna cite, they're gonna learn from these authoritative pages, these authoritative websites, hopefully your website and, and at, at the end of the day, if your brand is not publishing, it's invisible to any of those possible answers that could be happening.

Here's the other thing, like I want people to realize, I believe we're going into a world where it's less about traffic and more about impact with the content. And, and what I mean by that is like we've always had this kind of, or many, not, not we, but many have had this singularity mindset of like, I am creating content for SEO.

And for a long time I've, I've had this thing where I've talked about this narrative like. SEO and sales and social, and it was like the three-pronged approach. However, um, I just got done fish finishing, uh, creating a piece. It's not live to the world yet, but I created a piece of content that it's literally the five s content framework where I talk about sales.

I talk about SELI talk about surfaced. By the way, surfaced is ai. Social and then supporters because here's the other thing is while your traffic might be down, uh, look at your referrals. Is your referrals up from the trust? Is your AI up from the actual sites in the quotes? And so like, it's not as if it's gone, but is it just replaced? And do the math of the replaced combined with the traffic to see where you're at anyway. At the end of the day, Liz, does content still matter in 2025? Yes. You have to have your own assets. You have to be your own thought leader. You have to be able to get content to go to your email list, to your communities, uh, to put into your gated resources.

Like all of this is still strong when you're trying to attract. When you're trying to retain, when you're trying to like build trust and reciprocity content is still the engine and still important.

Liz Moorehead: You know, the other thing I have to chime in here with is that when we have the conversation about content, we have this habit of only focusing on one part of the flywheel or the funnel. Right? We are obsessed because it's, I think it's. It's the vast majority of the content that people create. It's also where we see the uptick in organic search traffic.

But some of the most impactful, to your point, impactful content that we create is closer to the bottom of the funnel. Now, George, I wanna take you and I back to a conversation we had at the very end of last week with one of our clients where we showed them sales emails that were going to be going to prospects, that included videos that were about.

Content topics like what is the ROI of X? What is the benefits of Y? How do you solve this particular problem? And then it also links to content we have published. Then there are case studies. Then there are any of those decision making. In sales enablement pieces are equitable revenue driving. Parts of your content strategy and the idea that just because we have to rethink how we're getting found, that we have to rethink how we measure success of content.

We are forgetting an entire part of the funnel or the flywheel that is not dependent on search

George B. Thomas: Yeah,

Liz Moorehead: in order for people to get to it.

George B. Thomas: it's funny, Liz, I'll shut up here in a minute. So like Chad and Max can

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: thoughts, but when you said the words, um, so focused on getting found. Something in the back of my cranium jumped up and was like, but they should be focused on staying relevant and there's content that keeps you relevant, like you're at least in the conversation anyway.

Liz Moorehead: Max and

Max Cohen: And I, I think, um, you know, it's not like, is, it's like when we say, does content matter anymore? Um, I, I think that was the original question or something along those lines. It's.

Liz Moorehead: Does content

Max Cohen: Gotta remember, it's like content is the only thing that matters on the internet. Content's the only thing that's on the internet, right?

Like we go to the internet to consume content through the internet. Like that is a, it is a fundamental fact. Just like lungs, breathe air, uh, humans breathe content on the internet, right? Like there's no, there's no way around that. Um, I think it's more of a question of how do we, how do we. Trust the content.

How do we appreciate the content? How are there jobs formed around creating the content? How is the of like, are we rocketing towards dead internet theory? Like we said, the internet was dead, but like dead Internet theory, I think is quickly becoming a thing where, you know, it's just a bunch of bots talking to each other, and then soon enough we're gonna be in a world where it's also botched just creating the content and we're just kind of sitting on the sides like, what's the human's like?

Point in all this.

Chad Hohn: ones are the real ones?

Max Cohen: Yeah, exactly. Like it's getting really, really freaky. Um, you know, I just, uh, just like the other night, uh, you know, I heard like Stephen Colbert show got canceled, right. And, um, this morning I, I open up TikTok and the first thing I hear is just like some audio that sounds. Just like Stephen Colbert, kind of like doing this whole, you know, uh, confirming what a, like a lot of conspiracy theorists might be thinking of, or like whatever, or like whatever side you're on.

Um, and you could just tell it was ai, but it was just good enough where someone who's not so internet brained wouldn't understand it. And it's like, this is really scary, right? Like. and again, it's just like the content's just getting created by itself, by the bots out there talking to other bots, and it's like, we're just kind of like starting to just watch it and it's like really, really, really freaky.

I don't know.

Chad Hohn: It's like the AI is, uh, prompting the AI right at this point. Right. They're like all in their own cyclical AI brain

Max Cohen: loop. Yeah,

Chad Hohn: I love it. Yeah.

Max Cohen: it is. But like, and I think I, I, and I wonder. I, I had thought for a while, I was like, you know, there's gonna be a premium placed on like human created content, right? Like, you know, uh, but I don't even know if that's gonna happen. I think AI content is gonna get so good that like, you know, people are gonna be like, oh, this content's good.

'cause it's actually just created by humans. It's like, no, it's not. And so I think you're gonna find this weird battle between human created content, AI assisted. Thoughtful, uh, human created content, and then just AI slop. Right. And I think there's just so much AI slop today that it's like, I, I would hope people can see it and, and, and, and, and be able to recognize it, but it is rapidly becoming completely unrecognizable, you know, which is freaks me out anyway.

Liz Moorehead: I think the thing we also need to keep in mind though is that there there is the kind of B2C content that's out there, Stefan, TikTok, things like that where, and to be fair, the AI slop issue is it, it's universal. No, it's, you know, it's, it's everywhere. But when I think about what I see working with some of my clients right now is actually people are starting to come to them more because they are human.

Like I have a particular

Chad Hohn: Because it's still distinguishable.

Liz Moorehead: Well, it's still distinguishable, but the other thing too is that. It reminds me of an old friend of mine named Natalie Frank, who is a, I think she's the chief evangelist at Flow Desks, which is an incredible email marketing platform. Um, but she talked about what she started out as a photographer and when iPhones came out it was, it was. Like horrible. It was a bloodbath. Everybody, every premium photographer out there was absolutely petrified that now everybody had a camera in their pocket. It would dilute the market and it, it did. A lot of people turned off. A lot of people ended up pursuing other opportunities. But she said, what we saw is the reality is the people who ended up leaving the industry as a result of iPhones in their pockets weren't actually craftsmen with photography to begin with, and the people who actually were still dedicated to the craft, who adapted to new digital strategies ended up being able to charge more of a premium.

And I'm seeing that with myself now, and I'm, I'm definitely, yeah. Do I have some AI assistance poking around in some of my parts of my process? Absolutely. But I'm still a

Chad Hohn: As you should.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Um, so we started to dig into this a little bit, but I'm gonna throw this question out to the group. So what.

Has actually changed about content strategy, right? Because I wanna pull this back to something that is native to our audience, right? Like our B2B marketers. Just, just trying to make it out there, man. We're just, we're trying, like, we're not the Coca-Colas, we're not the Duolingo, although I guess we're not really trying to be Duolingo anymore.

Um, what has actually changed in content strategy?

George B. Thomas: I don't know if I want to go first. Chad or Chad or Max, what are, what are your thoughts? I mean, I have thoughts, but I don't know if I want to go first.

Max Cohen: I mean, the, the, I, I think the way you, you, you, you evaluate, uh. How your competitors are leveraging it is a new thing that you need to do. That wasn't in the inbound handbook when I got into all of this. Right. Um, you know, because you might have some direct competitors that are absolutely shredding it with, you know, maybe some good AI content.

Maybe they are going full bore on like some AI slop and it's working like depending on mm-hmm. How, how well your audience reacts to that kind of stuff. Right? Um, but like, it, it may be a situation where you're kind of like forced into that arena, right? Um, or, you know, you, you, you take a much more careful approach to get your content to stand out from whatever it is that they're doing, right.

But it's like, it's a new thing. You have to kind of build into the calculation, right? Like, you know, is my, it's no longer like, oh. None of my competitors are making content about this stuff. So I'm the first one to the, uh, I'm the first one to the, to the show, right? It's like, it's gonna be like, no longer is your competitor isn't doing nothing.

It's the baseline is your competitor is doing AI slop, and you need to do better than that, right? Um, but like sometimes the AI slot gets, you know, it gets motion, it gets traffic. Um.

Liz Moorehead: I love

Max Cohen: it's like I think you're starting at a different baseline that you

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. The only thing I wanna say before you go on is because you brought up something there where you're talking about watching your competitors. I agree with that, but I think that's not necessarily new. I think we can all agree we kind of always had a keeping up with the Joneses peeking over the side of the fence,

Max Cohen: I'm not saying watch your competitors know, I'm just saying you are looking for them to do a different thing that you have to contend with. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: But there's always gonna be that weird thing that we need to remember, right? We can only see from the outside in. And how many times have we either looked at companies and thought, man, they had this all figured out. And the minute you get inside you're like, oh God, everything's on fire. So it's, you always have to be really careful about the surface level optics of like, you see them doing this thing, this thing, and everybody's even more scared than ever about falling behind.

But that is reactive, non-strategic motion.

George B. Thomas: yeah. 

Chad Hohn: I think kind of like, well one of those places that my brain starts to go is, is actually in like the, it's almost like a chicken in the egg scenario. Uh, 'cause we're talking about how, like what's changed, right? And. Well, if you know you got Gemini at the top of your Google search results, that's given you AI summaries to just answer questions.

Like if it's phrased in the form of a question, typically that's all you need. Um, but that Gemini is looking for pages with like authority, with search engine and authority. Right. Um, and does it, uh. Not include its own traffic in that search engine authority. Um, for example, like, you know, like, I guess where I'm getting at is like if you make content but you're like new to the game. I'm curious if you have to actually get some humans to, you know, tread over your page or if the fact that it's relevant and and useful compared to other preexisting sources will bump up your search engine authority, even though it's like Geminis scooting all over that thing. Um, or if it's, you know, Chad GPT scooting over that thing or whatever, with some of their tools these days.

So I, I'm just, I don't know, I'm kind of like thinking about that chicken and the egg scenario and wondering what, because like, you know, content isn't my first, uh, skillset here on the Old Hub Heroes podcast. I'm here more as like an audience member in this particular topic. Um, yeah.

George B. Thomas: so I can give you a chicken or the egg scenario, which, uh, totally blew my mind. Um, so let me dive into that real quick and then I'll talk about where my brain goes as far as changed and unchanged to get back to like Liz's original question. But, um, Chad, I, when I launched the Superhuman Framework in, onto the, the Planet, right, uh, the Four Cornerstones, purpose, passion, persistence, love, the 10 H Pillars, I'm not gonna list them all.

When I list, when I started creating content around that, and then all of a sudden, um, it started showing up in AI results when doing like deep research, um, and asking people to actually, Hey, can you ask about this? Then all of a sudden it started showing up on their, uh, chat, GBT, their perplexity, their places.

I was like, wait, there's something to this. You can create something of value and it can be surfaced potentially quicker than it can be searched or found in search. 'cause by the way, Google is trying to take care of the entire internet. And so we all know like going into your Google search console and asking for a page to be reindexed and the amount of time that that might take and like.

All of the things that you manually have to do to like pay attention or get them to pay attention to your ever evolving and changing SEO efforts versus like you create something that's dope at a different angle, um, and all of a sudden it's being surfaced in, in ai. Hence why I used the term surfaced when I actually did the five s content, uh, framework.

But, but so, so here's the thing. I think you can create the chicken. Without the egg, which is a really weird thing to think about because now it's, it's there, it exists, it's in the world right now. You had to birth it as the human, but it, but it's there. So, so when I think about what's changed, Liz, to get back to your original question, I think AI answer engines and zero click have absolutely shrunk the top of the funnel.

We kind of talked about that at the beginning. The top of the funnel is, is just shrinking. Um, the mindset of like blog every day. Uh, you know, this idea of, uh, quantity over quality, I think has, uh, gone away This high volume blogging. Now, I think it's about depth and originality, by the way, superhuman framework.

Super original, like just it, it was a thing that was, and you can do this, by the way, the other thing I, when I did a Tron, legacy Marketing, Tron legacy or life. Latron Legacy article. The thing was like all of a sudden there because again, it was in depth, it was like a pillar page piece of content, and it was original from the mindset of like where it was coming from and, and here's what I think also has changed.

Like generative AI helps us draft real quick. It helps us be able to build strategies for clusters of content. If you think about HubSpot again for a hot second, 'cause this is literally for HubSpot users, something like Content Remix allows you to repurpose, or what I like to call content confetti real easy, right?

So like you have this thing where you should be spending more time creating something of more depth and originality, but you have the tools to get you to that depth and originality faster and remix the content after you've actually built the thing. Now here's, so that's some things that have changed, what hasn't changed.

The word trust, as much as we overuse it is still important. Humans gaining insight from the thing that they're reading or watching is still important. Google's eat is still important for, you know, the like. It's just important. Um, understanding the buyer and what drives the buyer is still important. Um, intent, structure, links. Semantic markup, it all still matters. Um, I would even throw the word out here if you're not paying attention historically to schema, schema matters. I'm gonna get real nerdy, like for ai, FAQ schema, like things like that that you're paying attention to. But strategy still matters. Tactics like content. And again, I'm not trying to be a, a, a, a homer of they ask you answer.

I'm, I'm not saying that I'll forever love Marcus Sheridan because we had this like magic moment in time. I probably will because he is just a good human. But like, it must be mapped to the buyer's pain points and their business goals like that. Those things haven't changed. I don't think they'll ever change.

If you just focus on like trust and human insights and best practices of structuring and paying attention to the humans that you're actually serving and the goals that they're trying to achieve at, then it doesn't matter if it's SEO, if it's social, if it's surfaced, if it's any of the five S's that I'd like to talk about.

Liz Moorehead: I love that. It also makes, it reminded me of something when we think about what people are running into on. They're new SERPs, right? So our search engine results pages. I was having a conversation this past weekend with some other marketers and we were talking about the fact that like. That AI preview panel is garbage.

It's usually wrong. It gives you factually inaccurate data. And somebody said to me, yeah, it feels very old school. I actually now don't trust anything on page one. I'm only taking a look at stuff that's on page two or three, like the tech companies have. Been in this arms race to IFI, everything to the point where people are like, yeah, so I'm not gonna trust any of this and I'm gonna do more due diligence to make sure that what I'm getting is accurate.

Even in their little chat TBT boxes, literally yesterday I was like, what year is it? It's like 2023.

George B. Thomas: Whoopsie.

Liz Moorehead: whoopsie. You know, it's just little things like that. So what mistakes are people making right now? Because they're trying to apply old content rules to this new AI shaped ecosystem we're living in. I will just pick on somebody, Maximus.

Max Cohen: Wait, what's the, I missed the, sorry.

George B. Thomas: Mistakes

Liz Moorehead: Noah, cut this part out.

Max Cohen: are the common mistakes?

Liz Moorehead: What are the mistakes people are making right now because they're trying to apply old content rules to a new AI shaped ecosystem?

Max Cohen: Mm, well, I mean the old, again, I think the old content rules are blog, blog blog. S-E-O-S-E-O-S-E-O, right. And so like. You know, if you're, if, if, if you're, if you're the folks that you know, made the mistake of not creating the content because it was, it was too hard, and now you're like, oops, I got the easy button.

Right? And you're just literally just firing off the stuff just to check a box to say to your boss, oh Sue, we've got blog posts now. Right? I think that's, that's probably a big mistake, right? Because chances are you're generating some trash and not really paying attention to what you're putting out there.

Right. Um. I mean, and in terms of like the, I mean, it depends on like how far back we're calling like the old rules. Um,

Chad Hohn: Okay.

Max Cohen: it's, it, the, the, I think creating the stuff, like even if we think of like the old rules of like, you know, uh, what was working with the AI videos, right. Um. You know, it was a lot of these like, sort of like list video. Like I almost think the kind of equivalent today that we see with, with like short form video, um, is the, you remember how like everything when inbound really took off, everything became like a 10 things you need to know, like, uh, about x like format, right?

Listicles, right. I think the equivalent of that today is the short term video you hear with like the AI voiceover that's like so recognizable, like 10 alpha male influencers to Ba baba, right? And then they just like, it, it it, it's just. It's just clearly just like nonsense, right? Um, but I think enough people see this stuff and that's like their first sort of, um, exposure to like what AI video is.

And then there's 38 different like tools out there that build this stuff for people with like a single click. And I think it's probably pretty tempting for marketers to kind of like go down that path because they've been told by somebody that they need to embrace ai. And use AI in their marketing by their higher ups when they don't even really know what that means to do in a thoughtful, uh, creative or uh, intentional direction.

Right. Um, so I think again, like, just like we had tons of marketers go, oh, I know I gotta write blog posts and everyone's doing listicles. I gotta do that. I think that would probably be like a very similar kind of 20, 25 mistake in that all you do is just like kind of what you're seeing everyone else do, which is these.

Very weird voiced over, uh, listicle like videos, you know, don't do that. Please don't. That's the slop that we wanna avoid.

George B. Thomas: So I, so I think there's a couple things I wanna kind of jump in here and then Chad, you go with it where you want. But, um, I'm gonna put my, uh, hat on here

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah.

George B. Thomas: second. Um,

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah.

George B. Thomas: I think people are still clinging to vanity metrics, uh, traffic and conversions, and I would really want them to pay attention to influence and conversations. And how do, how do you map those? And, and again, I'm talking very much of like business to business or business to human, like type content. I'm not gonna, I'm not talking about the Stephen Colbert or the like, you know, how did X, Y, z, your tomato in your kitchen or whatever. Like, whatever. Like, I'm not talking about that kinda stuff.

Talk about relevant stuff. Um, so, so clinging to those vanity metrics and not being able to like, figure out how it's influencing the actual pipeline. And when I say that, I'm literally talking about the process of like selling the products, uh, and serving the humans. I, I think too, and I alluded to this earlier, a common mistake that's happening is people are not paying attention to the new norm or the need for structure schema, uh, FAQs to give that like AI visibility.

Some people are like head in the sand, not understanding how do, how do I actually get things surfaced? And, and that just needs to be like, I would, I would tell you spend ample time doing research on how, how to actually get the content that you may already have, um, even optimized for that ai. Because by the way, many of us, uh, or many of you listening or watching this, have been creating content for years, and maybe it's a nice little schema and some FAQs that needed added to an article that was already ranking fine for search, and now all of a sudden, boom, it's getting surfaced.

Ai. So like we've talked about historical optimization for SEO, but how about now historical optimization for ai, like that literally is a thing that you should be paying attention to. Um, and last but not least is like, and, and, and Max alluded to this, but don't hit the, uh, like, here's, here's the first draft.

Publish. Like, no, no. Like you gotta focus on your brand voice by the way. If you don't have a brand voice, you have a bland voice and a no no. Human wants to hear a bland voice, so your brand voice. By the way, if you haven't listened to our like data sources conversation and historical episodes, and you haven't gotten your brand voice set up in HubSpot, like this is a nice little juicy way to go from default draft.

Add a little humanness, put it in HubSpot, add your brand voice on top of it, like s. Anyway, process, process, process, process is what people should be thinking about to actually make this stuff go in this world of like deeper, richer, more human, but also then focused where you can use it in these multiple areas where it's optimized for these multiple areas.

Liz Moorehead: You know, I think we also did an episode, George, just on brand voice and tone

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: like a while back that people should go into the archives for, um, to throw in my 2 cents here. I think the big thing to keep in mind is that we used to rely on like really high level, not even educational, just like who are the best this, what is the top that, like those listicle things that Max is talking about.

That's not how you're gonna differentiate yourself. I regret to inform all of my beautiful CEOs and owners and marketing leaders out there. You actually have to do thought leadership. Now you have to have real opinions out loud. You have to solve real problems, not imagined ones. You have to stop clutching your secret sauce so close to your vest that nobody knows there's even a bottle of Tabasco under there, right?

Like we need. To stop hiding from content. Now the thing is though, as we've been having this conversation, there has been a nagging thing in the back of my mind where I know there are some listeners out there going, it was already hard enough to prove the ROI of content. When we had the tools, when AI wasn't stealing all of our traffic, and now you're telling us that we have to measure it and rethink how we measure the, the power of content through nebulous metrics.

Like, like influence, right? Like how do we actually measure that? And so

Chad Hohn: that's a question.

Liz Moorehead: I think, I think what gets really tricky about this conversation is that we don't have the answers to that we don't. We simply do not. But what I can tell you is that if you have a shortsighted organization that decides, you see your site traffic tanking, you can't outrun ai, so you are going to divert or.

Cut out all of your content people or any sort of content initiatives, you are screwing yourself like you are going to watch revenue go out the door. This isn't the time to get rid of content. This is the time to realize the thing that George and I have been screaming about for years. Your content actually needs to be helpful and human.

Your content needs to solve real problems, not imagined ones you can't phone it in. You can't just publish garbage. These were things that were true before. Now. They were true in vivid technicolor. It's only now that you're actually seeing the consequences of those actions and it's only gonna get harder.

It's only gonna get more Chaffee. So I know we're coming to the end of our conversation, so I have one more question I wanna ask you guys before I turn it over to you, George, to take us home. We've already started talking about this, George, and maybe you wanna kick off this convers part of the conversation for us.

How we use tools like AI in our content without losing voice or diluting our message. So you've already been talking to this a bit, right? I'd love to get some more specificity around that.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, I, I think when I, when I sit and think about this one. For me, it's been a, a big help to do things like outlines, um, data research, um, first passes, rough drafts, right? So you kind of, kind of think about AI as the, the draft in research assistant, right? Historically, this might have been like a ghost writer or some type of like, whatever, but I, I literally think that you can build a process around drafting and, and researching.

The other thing, and we kind of again alluded to this, if, if you have given the system chat, GBT, clot, perplexity, HubSpot, whatever your styles, your guides, right? Um, if you've given it examples of top performing pieces, um, and you've, you've aligned it so it can maintain your tone, um, now you're using your human brain.

For the research that you wanna gather, for the outline that you wanna create, for the draft that you're gonna build, to then be able to give it into a system that understands what historically has worked or been working, which you might have to like kind of remanufacture that as you kind of move forward.

'cause different things are gonna work over different timeframes. Um, but now you're gonna have these kind of human powered. Storytelling based. Uh, you're gonna give your opinions, you're gonna have your personality. Um, you're, by the way, you're always gonna fact check anything that you've started with an AI draft.

And then I think there's this level of after you get to that point, you can then start to personalize it or kind of refresh it, um, kind of over time. 'cause this is a problem that was happening when people were creating normal content. I think it'll still happen when they're having AI system in the content they're creating is like, it shouldn't be one and done and dead.

We create it, we publish it, we forget about it. No, like one, you should create it, you should publish it, and then you should probably re-update it over time or at least promote it more than just once. Anyway, that's, that's what I'll say there. I I, I'm sure everybody else has some other thoughts where they can say AI might help in, in the creation of it.

Max Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I'd say use it for the stuff that's like traditionally difficult when you don't have like, a lot of resources, right? So like, you know, for example, if you're making a video, uh, like you can, you can create some pretty easy B roll, right? Like, instead of having to go like, buy it from somewhere, right?

You can,

Chad Hohn: Oh man.

Max Cohen: you know, the same, the same way.

Chad Hohn: all them.

Max Cohen: Yeah, right. Yeah. Th those guys are screwed. Like, I, I don't know what

Chad Hohn: so

Max Cohen: I don't know what, like they're toast. Like, I don't know how their business is going to, you know, continue to stay. I mean, they're probably gonna create their content through AI and hopefully just prey on people that don't know how to go to chat GBT and do it own.

Um, yeah, I mean, uh, but I'd say also like. Use it for the stuff that's like uniquely hard to you, like to you, right? Like maybe it's, it's again, if you're a bad writer, kinda like George said, you know. No harm in throwing together an outline using ai, so you at least have a starting point, right? Um, or, you know, if you're, it's difficult for you to articulate things in certain ways, right?

Like it's, it's really easy to kind of give it a first pass and then, you know, have AI say, oh, this is a better way you could rewrite it, or something along those lines, right? And have it, have it assist your original thoughts, right? I think is the, one of the best ways you could use it. Um. But you know, the other thing too is like sometimes inspiration is really difficult to come by, right?

And I think it's totally okay to like go to AI and be like, really know what I should make a video about or write an article about or do x, y, z about. Can you give me some ideas? And maybe it doesn't give you the ideas. But it mixes up your brain enough to have that original idea, right? Once you kind of started thinking about some of these other things.

Right? Like oftentimes when I've done that with ai, I end up thinking of something that is not what it suggested, but if my brain hadn't like started going, oh yeah, think of that. Oh, think of that. Oh, think of that, or you know, it, it was able to kind of like look at a suggestion and then kind of come up with a totally different one on my own.

And it was just the. The right amount of brain massaging. I needed to have that, you know, next, sort of like unique idea. It was worth it, right? So, you know, um, don't, don't let it take you and your creativity and your originality out of the process and just do it for you. 'cause then why are you even doing it in the first place,

Chad Hohn: Yeah. It's like the ultimate, the ultimate writer's un blocker, you know, in a way, I mean, I really, for me, a lot of ways, especially when I'm having a hard time coming up with like exactly what to do or where to go with certain things, but, uh, yeah.

George B. Thomas: I mean, many times I'll be watching like a sermon or a TV show and somebody will say something and I'll pull up my chat BT or my Claude, and be like, Hey, if I was to write an article about this, but from the direction of that, the thing that I just heard, by the way. What would that look like? And then you go on a whole dope fricking journey where you're unlocking the thoughts of your brain to get to a point where you eventually create something that is so different and unique because it came from different vectors or verticals.

Liz Moorehead: I've gone into some of my tips and tricks and other podcasts that we've done on this topic, but I'm gonna keep mine super short, and this is for my content creator's out there. The content creators who are still feeling friction around bringing AI into your process because you feel like it is corrupting what it is that you're doing.

At some point, you are either an artist who understands that it's okay to embrace new tools and do things like George and Max are talking about, where you take a look at really cumbersome parts of your process. For example, I do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviewing,

Chad Hohn: How many.

Liz Moorehead: sometimes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

Sometimes I need my little pal chat, JBT, to be like, it's on page seven where Rob said to do this thing. You beautiful dingdong, right? Like, or pulling out big themes. I'm still the writer. I'm still the thing doing the thing. But at some point you're either an artist who is willing to pick up new tools, new paint, es, or you're a masochist, clinging to your craft and you're gonna drown.

George B. Thomas: Hmm.

Liz Moorehead: That's fundamentally

Chad Hohn: do you have a customization in your chat, GPT to call you the beautiful ding don

Liz Moorehead: Yes. It's actually, I'm not even kidding. I'll share, it's called Ding-Dong Bot, where it's like I ask it to do dumb things where I can't, it's programmed to find stuff I can't find because I have so much dense conversations with so many people that I get like a little lost. So George, help us land this beautiful content plane. What is the between one and 75 things you would like folks to leave today's conversation with?

George B. Thomas: One thing. Um, stop creating single use content. By the way, Liz, I'm proud of you. 'cause I remember back in the backpack days where I was bringing up using AI and the, to see

Liz Moorehead: I was very angry,

George B. Thomas: Yeah. To see where you're at with it now, um, brings my heart great joy. But my one takeaway is stop creating single use content.

You, you have to build an ecosystem where every piece that you're creating sells. Ranks surfaces in AI, gets spread on social and turns customers into supporters. Like that's just the world that we're living in now. So think about those things. It, listen, we live in an AI noisy world. It's just a true fact.

Uh, you know, we've called it a couple different names during this episode, but ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to tell you that purpose driven multitasking content is the edge. That will compound the results that your organization needs.