(201) 305-0055
Tim Peter Thinks

Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449)

MidJourney generated image of a robot attempting to write a blog post to illustrate the idea of AI in content marketing for customer acquisition

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Youtube Music | RSS

We’re living through an evolving landscape around content marketing in the age of AI. This evolution raises the question of whether AI will kill content marketing for customer acquisition.

What do we think? Nope. No way. AI absolutely has its place. But quality content without human connection won’t work for customer acquisition. While AI can enhance content creation, it should not replace the human element that customers actively seek every single day. Personalization and community play a key role in your marketing and customer acquisition strategies. And relying on AI to “be human” almost guarantees that your content marketing won’t work.

Instead, businesses that prioritize genuine human interaction will thrive, regardless of technological advancements. Why is that so? Why does this matter? And how can you make sure that AI makes your content marketing more effective for customer acquisition? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) — Headlines and Show Notes

Show Notes and Links

Show Chapters

  • 00:00 The Role of Content in Customer Acquisition
  • 01:33 AI’s Impact on Content Marketing
  • 03:45 The Importance of Human Connection
  • 04:04 Personalization and Community in Marketing
  • 07:45 The Future of Content Marketing with AI

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

Free Downloads

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

Best of Thinks Out Loud

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com

Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks

Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 14m 02s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Transcript: Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition?

Hi everyone, welcome back to Thinks Out Loud. I’m Tim Peter.

I’ve built my career using digital channels to drive customer acquisition and in particular to lower customer acquisition costs for all kinds of businesses. I’ve long argued that quality content plays a key role in helping businesses like yours build a relationship with your customers to lower your customer acquisition costs.

Content is your 24x7x365 customer service person. It’s your 24x7x365 sales rep. As we’ve all heard plenty of times, content is king, right?

Or is it?

The availability of AI makes producing quality content relatively cheap and easy. And as I’ve talked about a bunch of times before, when a new technology makes marketing and customer acquisition easier for everyone, it ends up making marketing and customer acquisition harder for everyone. Your competitors are now able to flood the zone with cheap, decent content on social and search and making it harder for you to cut through the clutter.

That raises the question, will AI kill content marketing for customer acquisition? I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 449 of Thinks Out Loud.

Let’s dive in.

Okay, so let’s get the first question out of the way right up front. Will AI kill content marketing for customer acquisition? My answer is pretty straightforward. Only if we let it.

If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I’m not an “either/or” kind of person. I’m all about “both/and.”

AI absolutely has its place. This is about both AI and quality content. AI has a place in making that happen. That place, what it can do for us, will undoubtedly grow over time.

AI is great for helping you brainstorm new content ideas. It’s amazing for helping you research your customers and their needs. AI can do a credible job, sometimes better than credible, at first drafts and editing. You can use AI to review your content and offer valuable feedback about how well you make your points, all from the point of view of your customers, as well as using it for more tactical items like grammar and style tips. It’s also able to automate developing and delivering personalized headlines and copy and imagery at scale. These are common features in all manner of digital tools today, not just large language models like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s Gemini. They’re super helpful automating the time consuming and expensive parts of creating content at scale.

I also think that you almost certainly don’t want AI to become the face of your brand. Why? Let’s start by remembering Jeff Bezos’ advice about what won’t change. What are the things we know aren’t going to change?

One thing that’s not going to change is that your customers value companies that take care of them more than anything. They want to work with companies that make their lives easier. That’s true and it’s always true. Another truth is that people want to work with people.

My friend Mark Schaefer in his book, Belonging to the Brand, Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy, argues compellingly that customers continually seek a community that matches their values and concerns. To borrow a phrase, we all want someplace “where everybody knows your name.” That’s why personalization shows up every year on every list of the big trends shaping marketing and customer acquisition.

This is actually highly related to the point about customers wanting to work with companies that make their lives easier. It’s not that customers want personalization. It’s that they want companies that understand and address their wants, their needs, their hopes, and their fears. They want to be seen and heard as individuals, as human beings.

How many times have you heard people in marketing talking about using “surprise and delight” to drive customer acquisition and retention? The sad truth is that far too often, “understanding customers” and “meeting their needs” qualifies as surprising and delightful.

At least in theory, no one should be better at doing that than another human being, and in particular, another human being who genuinely cares. My point here is that Mark is spot on. Community matters.

And in a world where AI plays an increasingly prominent role in our lives, being human matters. It gives you a way to connect with current and potential customers in a real, live, human way.

If you tilt your head and squint, it’s actually pretty easy to see how community itself is a sort of personalization. Community demonstrates that you’re talking to individuals who share the same values and concerns as they do. It’s a fundamentally human way of demonstrating your own humanity and your company’s humanity.

I predict that the companies that do the best job of connecting with their customers as human beings, the companies who center human beings, will be the big winners over the next decade, whether they’re large businesses or small businesses. And that will be true even if they use AI under the hood or behind the scenes.

So what has all that got to do with content marketing? Actually… EVERYTHING.

No one wants to read or listen to or watch or experience machine-generated content. No one wants generic content that lacks a clear point of view or a style. They don’t want content that isn’t tailored to themselves or the communities that matter to them.

They want to know you’re talking to them, both as individuals and as members of the communities that matter to them. They want to hear your voice, both literally and figuratively. Customers want to know who they’re dealing with.

And if I could make another bold prediction, we’re going to see, I think, a very real, very serious pushback on AI-generated content. We’re already starting to see it. Your customers, the human beings that you talk to and with every day, want to hear from other human beings. They want to hear from people they trust. They want to see and hear from and connect with people, ideally a person, someone they know and trust.

Part of creating quality content that matters for your customers is putting a human face to that content.

So why not show them who’s behind it? If you’ve got a webinar or a podcast or a video, you want to be clear about who the people in these conversations are and what they share in common with your customers. There’s a reason that podcasts have the same hosts all the time. They’re all about building a personal relationship with their listeners, with their audience.

If you’ve got written content, go ahead and list who the author is, who they are, and again, what they have in common with your audience. It’s about building that human relationship. And sure, you can use AI to help with the planning, with the outlining, with the drafting, and with the editing.

You can use AI to help you repurpose the content for different audiences. Automation is absolutely part of both scaling up volume and lowering your cost of customer acquisition. You want to use the best of both worlds, both human and automation, to drive results for your business. That’s what I mean. This is about making sure we’re doing “both/and.”

If you want to acquire customers, if you want to acquire more customers, you want to be more human. Not just “seen as human,” but actually “be human.” You want your content to connect with your customers as people, as human beings, as individuals and as parts of the larger communities that they care about. You want to provide a human face that your customers can grow to trust.

And yes, you also want to use AI as a valuable tool to produce and distribute your content more quickly, more easily, and in a more personalized way. It’s not “either/or;” it’s “both/and.”

AI is not going to kill content marketing. There, I’ve said it. Let me plant a stake in the ground.

AI will not kill content marketing. Bad content will. Boring, obviously machine-generated content that lacks humanity will. Content that fails to connect with human beings as individuals and as members of the communities they care about will kill content marketing.

In short, AI will only kill content marketing if you let it. So let’s not do that, okay?

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 449.

Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.
Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

Thinks Out Loud on Social Media

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

Back To Top
Search