How Content Roles Very Quietly Became Very Important
Did you hear the one about ChatGPT replacing all content writers?
Apart from the one they’re hiring for $250k to write content for the CEO.
Ah yes, all content roles apart from that one - and the ones we’ve been working on, too. ChatGPT hasn’t replaced them, either.
Very quietly, content roles have shifted from single-skill content production to something more wide-ranging, something more far-reaching and more impactful. And yet, they’re not for everyone, even with a bit of repositioning.
It’s safe to say that content has always been at the heart of good B2B marketing. Not all of it has been good content in the past, but at least the idea that content is important has always been around. Thankfully, we’ve moved on from the ‘white paper repository’ era.
One of my first marketing roles was as a content producer. For a few months, I produced a tonne of content until together, we realised that it’s not just about producing stuff, it’s about making stuff work. And so, this being the noughties, I got better at search (organic and paid), and I got better at lifecycle marketing, and started pitching in for sales enablement. I became the one who’d build the dashboards and explain why those white papers were important.
My title changed regularly as I got promoted, and I moved away from content and into the channels and eventually, more strategic roles. The content was often hived off to copywriters.
Today’s content roles have mutated, though. And this is where many individual copywriters and content producers are falling behind - what companies want is a content strategist who acts as the pivot within the marketing team. Someone who can:
Tell great stories
Demonstrate the value of content
Prove the ROI of content
Design content
Build sales enablement content
Work cross-functionally
And that requires a rather fundamental change in how we look for people. Increasingly, we’re being asked for the following:
Former journalists
People from a comms / PR background
People with hands-on experience of Agentic AI
Coders & Designers
Product marketers who can write
People who have built analytics dashboards
Indeed, a combination of the above. The proof of content is the very entry point, the pay-to-play that we expect to see before we talk revenue, achievements, behaviours.
We’ve heard the arguments before that you shouldn’t expect marketers to fulfil every role, that you shouldn’t expect them to wear every hat. Those days have long gone. Single-skill marketers are not what the market wants. The market wants people who can not just tell a story, but who can analyse the impact of a story, report it to board level and scale the stories you tell.
AI hasn’t replaced people, it has changed the way we think about these roles and the way we view the opportunity.
The result is that content roles have mutated in a very decisive way, and we’re only just seeing the impact now.
