Setting Fire to Content
This week, I’m going to keep things simple.
All I’m suggesting is that we completely set fire to the way modern B2B teams think about content creation, burn down the processes we’ve spent the last decade refining, and start again from scratch.
No big deal.
Most B2B organisations still treat content as a one-off process. You define a plan, commission a piece of content, design a landing page, get everything approved, launch it… and move on to the next one.
This process made sense when content production was slow and expensive. It forced us to think carefully about what we created. But generative AI removes those barriers and allows us to think very differently about the entire concept of content creation.
So, how about we think about how to deploy AI to really transform the business of content creation, rather than just optimise it to churn out the same old content shiz - only faster?
We all know that modern B2B buying committees do not move in straight lines. They research independently, consult peers, ask AI tools for summaries and revisit vendors months later. Their understanding evolves over time. Yet we continue to present them content with fixed narratives that were written at a single point in time.
Generative AI gives us the opportunity to reposition content creation from a collection of one off pieces of content to an ‘always on’ continuous content engine that could serve the requirements of the modern buyer way more effectively.
That engine could generate tailored micro-assets for specific companies and decision-makers. This is not just about inserting a name at the top and proclaiming it personalised. This is about a totally different story angle per asset.
A one-pager for the CFO of Company X should not read the same as a one-pager for the Head of Operations at the same organisation. A deck for a mid-market manufacturer should not look identical to one for an enterprise SaaS business. With AI, those variations do not require weeks of manual effort. They can be assembled dynamically from modular components.
The engine can also dynamically remix content based on real signals. If certain proof points are more important to one organisation, they are prioritised. If specific narratives stall, they are rewritten. If buyers consistently tell your sales team they think you are expensive, that insight feeds back into the content system and is addressed head-on.
Instead of waiting for a quarterly review, the messaging evolves continuously.
And then there is the company website.
The typical B2B website is a brochure with navigation. Everyone sees broadly the same hero message, the same product pages, the same industry sections. At best, we swap out a headline or personalise a call to action.
But what if the website were configurable? What if the core story adapted to the account visiting? A VP of Operations from a manufacturing firm could be shown operational efficiency, downtime reduction and relevant case studies. A CFO from a different sector could see margin impact, cost control and financial ROI. The product is the same, but the narrative spine shifts.
This isn’t science fiction. Netflix does this brilliantly - my Netflix home screen will look very different to yours, even though I have access to all the same films as you. It’s the same story with Amazon. So why not B2B?
Maybe content marketing teams need to behave a bit more like product development. Product teams do not ship once and then go to the beach. They iterate. They respond to feedback. They release updates.
Marketing still behaves as if it is printing brochures.
So, why haven’t we all pivoted to become our industry’s version of Amazon? Probably because it’s hard. In a world where everyone is looking for short-term wins to enable them to keep their jobs, it is much easier to automate tasks than to completely rethink something as fundamental as the structure of content marketing.
But the longer we use AI to accelerate the old model, the more obvious the gap becomes.
We do not need another AI-written ebook. We need to decide whether we are brave enough to rebuild how marketing actually functions.
Burning down the content calendar might sound dramatic, but continuing to optimise an obsolete content model that is no longer aligned to how buyers buy could be even worse.