Since venturing into the startup world in 2021 as a technical solo founder, I always had to pursue advice on the non-technical stuff such as marketing. When starting out as a boostrapped project, it’s commonly adviced that you should focus on direct outreach and skip any SEO/Content Marketing work.
But I’m wondering if this memo changed recently due to all the advancements in AI and text generation. What took 10 hours to write can now take 3 with the right automations setup. So if this change means that it would be good idea for founders to semi-automate their content marketing even in the very early stages.
To be clear, by early stage I mean you have a few users and maybe handful of customers not a blank zero. Also by ‘content automation’ I wouldn’t solely rely on ChatGPT to generate my blogs, but it for sure can help me with research, ideation, drafting, and reviewing.
What do you guys think?
AI will make content marketing worse - there will be too much of it and people will expect it all to be AI generated - so to be the same regurgitated content over and over. People will just learn to entirely ignore it.
I wouldn’t solely rely on ChatGPT to generate my blogs, but it for sure can help me with research, ideation, drafting, and reviewing.
I wouldn’t buy this. Sorry.
Of course, copywriters can use tools like ChatGP, but the results depend on the people who use such tools.
Can you hire great copywriters?
If you can generate content others can too… i don’t think there has been a huge shift for now… but direct outreach and paid marketing will always pay off quickly than SEO/content… even if you can generate lot of content it also takes time to refine it and make it SEO and website worthy otherwise you’re just putting content no one will read… even if content is automated or the process you mentioned, requires some strong data points, graphics, metrics, links, resources so forth for a content piece to be actually SEO optimised… in my circle the founders I’ve worked with SEO & content has always been a long term strategy… only the thought process has changed from (damn for blogs and content we will require lot of specialsied skills sets) to - (content is easy let’s hire an intern or two we can teach them what to do what not to do)… i don’t blame them.
Outreach also takes content. Great copywriting is a critical skill for every stage of a startup and for most roles.
i’m a bootstraped solo founder too, for me and what worked nothing beats cold phone calls and request meetings.
I read recently that I think it was 56% of related budget is spent on sales acquisition and 44% on content marketing. I think they’re both useful in tandem. The content space is becoming incredibly noisy, people posting like 2 or 3 times a day about everything if you’re looking at a channel like LinkedIn.
Cold outreach is changing too at the moment with companies like Google becoming hypersensitive for even well written and mail merged emails. The new thresholds were announced recently and it was something ridiculous where if you send 100 emails that are delivered to a clean verified business email address list, if 3 recipients decide to junk you, then that’s the threshold for being considered a slammer. Perhaps trying to drive revenue towards their advertising solutions.