2024 Marketing trends: balancing AI efficiency with human creativity
Discover strategies for lean content teams in 2024: blending AI precision with human creativity for impactful marketing.
The marketing sector has experienced rapid transformation, more in the past three years than in the previous five decades. This significant change is due primarily to advancements in AI and automation. The "State of Marketing 2024" report, a collaborative effort by HubSpot, Search Engine Journal, Litmus, and Rock Content, provides valuable insights into this evolution.
Drawing from a survey of over 1,400 B2B and B2C marketers globally, the report offers critical insights for lean content teams. It analyzes marketing trends from 2023, focusing on ROI, customer privacy, and lead generation, with data collected from 14 countries and various industries.
The report highlights five main categories that represent the goals of each marketing effort: Awareness, Engagement, Personalization, Efficiency, and Growth. ContentGrip has summarized the insights for content teams with lean structures to better understand and focus their strategies.
Win over AI-powered result rank by providing more human content
Content teams face challenges like finding new ideas, engaging audiences, attracting website traffic, reaching target audiences, and generating leads from the content. Furthermore, the rise of AI-powered search platforms has intensified these challenges, as users can now get answers directly from search boxes, reducing the need to visit websites.
Ben Steele from Search Engine Journal suggests that these challenges, referring to the search results from AI-generated platforms, can be addressed by producing more human-centric content for complex topics. Human content creation involves understanding situational parameters, predicting outcomes, and providing unknown yet necessary information to readers.
As he states, "Leaning into your unique knowledge allows you to curate experiences that address what users don’t know they don’t know — content that surprises, delights, and provides new insights." This approach offers an advantage over algorithmic searches and language learning models, which generally present expected information. Thought leadership content can be created by partnering with influencers or by the brands themselves.
Increasing efficiency with AI in content production
Efficiency is crucial in content marketing, and AI tools have proven effective, receiving positive feedback from 95% of surveyed marketers. AI assists in tasks like content writing, idea generation, drafting, and outlining. It saves an average of 3 hours per content piece and 2.5 hours per day, leading to more efficient, abundant, and personalized content creation. This technology is not replacing human roles but assisting in routine tasks.
However, concerns exist about AI, including potential harm to brand reputation due to bias, plagiarism, or misalignment with brand values. Solutions include integrating source and fact-checking features in AI tools, hiring legal and compliance experts, focusing on AI security, and providing AI training for specific roles.
How lean content teams can adapt in 2024
Not all trends and efforts are best to be implemented into the company, even if you’re also targeting the same goal of increasing ROI and reaching a broader audience.
The first thing to do is to evaluate your marketing efforts in 2023. When aiming to improve results, consider how other marketers in the report overcame their challenges and explored various strategies to increase their likelihood of success.
The second thing to do, in parallel, is to identify whether there is waste in your content team. Consider trialing AI tools or other automation tools to help you reduce the time needed to do manual tasks. By reducing this, your team can focus more on the creative process and increasing the quality of the content.
Atikah Amalia
For example, if you’re struggling with creating more personalized content, try ContentGrow, an AI-powered talent network for brands and publishers to work with, which has provided a list of high-quality freelance writers and journalists worldwide. This can save the time to manually reach out and search for great-fit talent for your company. Not to mention, talents included in the marketplace are invitation-only and based on their experience in the industry and topic.
For marketers, harnessing technology is vital for creating content that speaks to people. Nowadays, leading companies are focusing on selecting the right tools, processes, and frameworks to support their growth, all while keeping creativity and human connection at the forefront.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies into their approaches, these companies are increasing efficiency and enhancing the creative and human elements in their content. The fusion of technology and human insight is fundamental in creating marketing narratives that are captivating, relevant, and powerful.
ContentGrow is an AI-powered talent network for brands and publishers to work with high-quality freelance writers and journalists worldwide. Sign up to get started or book a discovery call to learn more.
