Blog Content Marketing in a GPT World

With the proliferation of LLM-based technologies, it's clear the ways people search for and consume information are going to change. In many if not most cases it is now faster to ask ChatGPT for the answer to a question rather than querying Google.

As an early adopter of new technologies living in the middle of San Francisco, I find that I am using ChatGPT for the vast majority of my queries, and probably multiple times per hour each day. It's certainly the first place I go before resorting to Google. Adoption may not be as widespread across the rest of the world, but one can only conclude that it's an inevitability given people inherently take the path of least resistance and there's less friction using ChatGPT than a search engine.

AI is already disrupting many facets of life and business, and some categories of content marketing, specifically blog posts, appear to be sitting right in the crosshairs. Why search for and read a blog post when you can ask for an AI-generated summary in the same number of keystrokes?

As I ramp up marketing on my latest consumer product ToneScholar (https://tonescholar.com/), I've been reflecting on the ROI of generating blog content for marketing purposes and have landed upon a few insights I think are worth sharing:

1. Know how your audience consumes information

Younger and more technologically-minded people will undoubtedly be the first to embrace LLM technologies. If your product is primarily targeting these audiences, it may make more sense to meet your users where they spend most of their time. That is, search engines and blog posts are probably not where the majority of a Gen Z-er's attention is being spent... ever heard of TikTok? If your audience is older and/or less tech-savvy, there's likely still time to build marketing momentum using familiar channels like blog posts.

2. Provide value that cannot be replicated by AI

For a blog post to thrive in a GPT world, it needs to offer something that GPT does not. For a financial website, this might be a mortgage or interest rate calculator. For my product ToneScholar, all blog posts incorporate interactive audio modules (i.e. https://tonescholar.com/blog/functional-ear-training-explained). I expect we'll see an increasing number of tech-augmented blog posts dominating the top search results in the future, because why else would people read them?

3. Provide depth where depth is sought

Though rapidly improving, ChatGPT and other LLMs still have obvious limitations. For instance, nobody is asking ChatGPT "teach me Spanish." ChatGPT is where most people head for a quick answer, not in-depth knowledge, citations, interviews, etc. You shouldn't be writing blog posts that elaborately answer simple questions, you need to provide the level of depth that is now expected from this sort of content. That is to say, you better be damn sure your blog content cannot be summed up in three sentences by a grammatically perfect, obnoxiously polite, know-it-all robot in the cloud.

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The world is changing rapidly, and the phrase "Search Engine Optimization" will take on a different meaning in the next few years if it doesn't become entirely irrelevant. This transition will be painful for entrenched players while providing huge potential for early adopters ready to seize the opportunity.

How are you adapting to these changes? What are you doing to make your product and content stand out? Is blog content marketing dead? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!