Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
Content creation has been intertwined with digital marketing for as long as the latter has been around. Whether it was social media, search engines, or blogs and forums, creating content for consumption, which is then used as bait for the sale of products and services has been the core modus operandi, for not just digital marketing operations, but the broader global digital economy over the past two decades.
This, however, is all set to change, with the rise of novel new technologies, holding potential to fundamentally alter this landscape. Creating content to attract targeted audiences from search engines has worked wonders over the years, but what if search engines themselves start creating content? What will content on the internet look like in 5 years, and will this mean for the digital marketing industry?
It’s hard to predict the future, especially given the pace of change we’re seeing in recent years. We can only make an educated guess, often based on current trends and historical precedents during times of similar mass disruptions and upheavals. In this article, we’ve strived hard to do both, to help paint a better picture of what stakeholders of the digital economy might expect over the coming years.
1. Artificial Intelligence
The one thing that’s on all our minds, and not just digital marketers and content creators, is ChatGPT. This, however, is far from the only AI bellwether we need to concern ourselves with, as Mid Journey AI, Stable Diffusion, and a host of other innovative products are just as disruptive.
With the rise of ChatGPT, it is now possible to craft blog posts in a matter of minutes, instead of hours, helping marketers create 100s or even 1,000s of pieces of content for a small $20 monthly subscription.
While it’s nice to think of this as a new found superpower for digital marketers and content creators, there will soon come a time when search engines will no longer feel the need to aggregate content, leaving their chatbots to take care of answering user queries.
In just a few months since its launch, ChatGPT has already destroyed 1,000s of jobs for writers, and products such as MidJourney will do the same for designers, illustrators, and other creatives.
2. Interactive Content
While it’s hard to say where exactly the advances in AI will leave digital marketers and content creators, the one thing we can say for certain is that, if you want to protect your turf, do something that artificial intelligence can never quite accomplish.
This is to say, embrace your human side. If search engines start delivering answers to most queries on their own, the age-old low-value, straightforward answers will no longer cut it, and what you need is interactive content that cannot be easily replicated.
The humble webinar remains a great example of this, with the host not only presenting content, but taking questions and addressing concerns live. Even if AI can answer the same questions, it would be far from the same experience, with a human expert taking them on.
As a result, we can make an educated guess that webinars are set to make a dramatic comeback, and will likely play an outsized role in B2B content syndication and marketing going forward. This will be broadly in-line with other major formats and mediums for interactive content.
3. User Generated Content
If there is one major upside to the advances in AI over the past few years, it is the empowering of individual content creators. With generative texts, visuals, and even videos, a Pixar-style animated movie, created entirely by one person and his laptop isn’t that far off.
This has major ramifications for media, entertainment, and digital marketing, as the power irreversibly shifts to the creatives and storytellers.
What people achieve with this miraculous new found power is yet to be seen, but one thing is for sure, a significant chunk of the content that will be produced in the years ahead will be user generated. Digital marketers would do well to channelize and capitalize on this trend to the best of their ability.
Final Words
We live in undeniably exciting times, and given the pace of advances in AI and content creation in recent months, we can’t wait for the trends that lie ahead, just 1 to 2 years from now.
No matter how things change going forward, the key to most professions is being nimble and quick on your feet when it comes adapting and surviving in this AI-induced war zone.
Caroline is doing her graduation in IT from the University of South California but keens to work as a freelance blogger. She loves to write on the latest information about IoT, technology, and business. She has innovative ideas and shares her experience with her readers.
