Content is cheap, but your expertise isn’t

Dave Heywood, MD & Growth Partner at OX7 Partners (00:00)
For years we’ve been trying to make content quicker, cheaper, and easier to produce. We finally did it. There’s just one problem. So can everyone else. This is Scale, on OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood

Thanks to AI, we can practically create unlimited amounts of perfectly competent content for next to nothing. And today I want to talk about what happens when content itself stops being scarce.

Now, I don’t think the answer is to produce more of it and have this endless arms race.

But I do think that one of the more interesting consequences of this is that it makes the human beings that operate inside our businesses more valuable, not less.

Because when producing content that’s just fine is now incredibly easy, having that genuine expertise and original perspective and a person people actually recognise and can connect with over time becomes comparatively difficult to replicate.

So today I’m gonna be looking at what that means for B2B marketing, why I think we need to stop creating these vast armies of content creators internally, and what a different model might look like for you and your business.

So let’s start with something we all know. The cost of producing something that looks reasonably good has absolutely gone through the floor.

Give ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever a half decent brief. Or perhaps in some cases, not even a half decent brief. And you can have some content in seconds.

You can then turn that into five LinkedIn posts an email a webinar description, a video script, a sales enablement piece, and you can do the whole thing again tomorrow, day after day after day after day.

And that content isn’t intrinsically terrible.

Some of it will look and feel and be perfectly competent. And some of it might even be better than the kind of stuff you might have been producing before.

but if everyone can produce competent content and the floor has been raised one or two levels

And what you’ve produced won’t make that much of a difference when firms to your left and to your right can do exactly the same.

All we’ve done is massively increase the supply of content into the market, but we haven’t really changed or adjusted the amount of attention available to consume it. Classic supply and demand.

So the question changes for us. It’s no longer just how do we produce more content? It becomes well what do we actually have that’s worth somebody actually paying attention to?

And I reckon that’s where things start to get a little bit more interesting for us.

and it all boils down to having something worth saying, which sounds really, really straightforward and easy, right? And there’s quite a lot of research around this.

Edelman and LinkedIn have spent years researching what they call thought leadership. And I shudder slightly when i use that term because unfortunately it’s become a phrase that we have utterly bastardised over the years.

Thought leadership is no longer what it says on the tin. It’s somehow come to mean a seven, eight hundred word article produced by someone in the business that isn’t a subject matter expert, attributed to a senior executive, containing nothing of any interest, thought, or leadership.

You’ve seen plenty of the titles, right? Five trends transforming financial services. Why customer experience matters more than ever? Three things leaders need to know about AI. You know what I’m talking about here. But this isn’t what I’m talking about when I use the term thought leadership. I’m talking about expertise, original perspective.

something that helps me understand a problem differently because the person saying it actually knows what they’re talking about. And when you look at it through that lens, some of the research becomes a little bit more interesting. So Edelman and LinkedIn’s

research into the hidden buyer found that sixty three percent or so

of buyers spend more than an hour every week consuming this sort of material.

And these people in places that you would expect, like procurement, finance, legal, and operations, people who might not be filling out your contact form but make no mistake, they can absolutely influence whether you get bought or not.

And ninety-one percent said high quality content helps them uncover challenges or needs they hadn’t previously recognised.

And also of interest here, seventy nine percent said they were more likely to advocate for proposals from companies that consistently produce high quality thinking.

So this is beyond just pumping some content out and getting a few likes on LinkedIn and and virtual pants on the back. Done properly, this expertise can find its way into and influence the buying process.

But don’t get everyone into a room just yet. Because a lot of the response to that kind of challenge.

Has been to create employee influencer strategies. Everyone gets social media training. We buy in an employee advocacy program. We load up a bunch of posts. And every Tuesday morning, a whole crop of employees simultaneously post really proud to work for a company that’s transforming, but blah blah blah blah blah.

Mm no thank you.

What happens there is we’ve just created a slightly more elaborate way of distributing the same corporate content.

And we know in our hearts of hearts that putting someone’s face next to something doesn’t automatically make it human.

And I’m not convinced everyone in a business needs a personal brand either.

Some people absolutely hate the idea. It just brings them out in hives. Some people aren’t particularly good communicators. And some incredibly valuable experts have absolutely no desire to become content creators.

And that’s cool. Because I do think we’ve got this whole model slightly backwards.

But if we slightly change our thinking to let’s not turn our experts into content creators, but turn their expertise into content, we can do a lot more with this. Because chances are in your business that expertise is already there.

There’ll be people who’ve seen the same mistake.

your customers make fifty times over.

there’s salespeople who know why opportunities that seem really, really good fit on paper suddenly fall apart.

And the objections that drive that.

there’s probably compliance specialists who can spot regulatory issues from a mile away. people in operations who understand why the thing that customers think they need isn’t actually the thing causing their problems.

And there’s probably leaders with genuinely different views about where the market is going.

Some really interesting perspectives there, but really, really difficult to draw out of something like AI. you can ask AI what the 10 biggest challenges facing CFOs are. You’ll get a perfectly reasonable answer.

But this hasn’t come from someone with fifteen years experience sitting opposite CFOs while they try to solve those problems. that experience is deep inside individuals. And the opportunity for us is to get that out of their heads.

So what might this look like in practical terms?

It challenges marketing functions to start behaving a little bit more like internal media houses.

not content factories that start with the output, saying we need X amount of posts this month, we need to fill up the LinkedIn content calendar five times a week, or we need another webinar this month.

‘Cause that’s where we start looking for stuff to fill the space.

that media house approach tends to start with the story. Who’s interesting? What do they know? What are they seeing? What have they learned? What do they disagree with? And then we figure out the best way to tell the story and distribute that. Might be an article, could be a podcast, could be a 90 second video.

Could be a sales deck.

Or one really, really good LinkedIn post.

The format stuff comes afterwards. The expertise is what comes first.

And the role isn’t to manufacture an opinion on behalf of the expert. It’s to help extract it and interrogate it, challenge it, bash it about a bit, research it, package it up, and then put it in front of the right people.

Perhaps this is where our friend AI can become more useful.

So imagine I sit down with a technical expert for half an hour.

we can record the conversation. AI can transcribe it, can pull out some of the interesting arguments, help identify where there are gaps and we need evidence. We can use it to challenge some of the assumptions that our experts have brought to bear.

It can help game out a few different narrative approaches. It can also help adapt that final idea for different formats.

So we are talking still huge, huge, huge productivity gains.

But notice what the AI hasn’t done. It hasn’t pretended to be the expert.

It helped us to scale the expert.

So what can you actually do right now? Well please, please, please don’t go away from this and launch a huge massive employee advocacy programme.

Don’t announce that everyone needs to become a creator. Find two or three people inside your organisiation that genuinely know their stuff. Book half an hour with them. ask them a few questions.

what does everyone else in the market seem to believe that you think is wrong? What’s a mistake you see customers making time and time again? And

And what two or three experiences through your career have really

shaped your views and giving you the experience that’s got you where you are today. And then just shut up and listen. Record for conversation. And if the answers aren’t particularly interesting, that’s fine. don’t try and force something out of this. Either think of some slightly different questions or find someone else.

but if they say something that makes you stop and think

There you go. That is the perfect starting point for all of this.

So don’t turn your experts into content creators, turn their expertise into content. And make use of all this incredible technology that we’ve suddenly got access to. Not to remove them from the process, but to make sure that we put the best thinking and original perspectives out into the world. Because anyone can produce content now.

But not that many still have something worth saying.

I hope you found that useful. I’m Dave Heywood This is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast, and we’ll see you next time.