26 February 2025 | Marketing
What content leaders in Austin are talking about
By Tracey Wallace
- It’s not just you, things are changing faster than ever: Every single person at this lunch talked about change. Change in expectations. Change in tools & technologies and algorithms. Change in processes and team structure. It is the constant, and trying to maintain sanity and clarity in it is a daily, and worthwhile, struggle. No advice here. Just a moment to feel seen.
- AI prompting is a true skill: Some companies have offered prompt training, and the content marketers from those orgs were way more confident about using AI in their processes. Here is what we learned: Prompts need to be detailed. And they need to tell the AI not just what to do, but also what NOT to do. And finally, ask the AI to ask you three clarifying questions before it begins the task.
- Also, there need to be more AI governance roles on teams so there is someone responsible for onboarding AI tools and educating teams on how to use them. Folks compared this to marketing automation. You don’t just bring on a marketing automation tool and then set your marketing team free on it. No, you train teams on how to use email and SMS and analytics. You build templates. You set up reporting. You do QA ro integrate all of your tools. We need that kind of thinking for AI.
- No one’s teams are expanding nor is anyone getting more money: Do more with the same or less is the mantra across all orgs––and drive more results while you’re at it. It requires creativity, and new ways of thinking about the tools at your disposal (i.e. AI). Also, teams are bringing on contractors and agencies, so if you are looking for a new role, don’t overlook offering your services ad hoc as a stop gap.
- Innovative ideas and the desire to stick to the proven stuff are at odds: Change as the only constant makes people more conservative in their strategy, including leaders. There is a lot of holding tight to wallets and to old-school strategies like webinars and ebooks instead of investing in more innovative projects. But, you have to do both. General recommendations at the lunch were to take roughly 10% of spend toward demand gen to use for brand content programs that are out-of-the-box and differentiated. A strong comfort here with failure, which some innovative approaches will end in, is necessary. Make it clear this is a possibility, and talk about what happens next.
- Content governance when you market to marketers, globally, is a real pain in the butt: Not only are things changing for us all the time, but things are changing for the people we are creating content for. Sometimes, the content you publish is out of date nearly the moment you publish it. Either way, the larger your library, and the more languages you translate into, the more governance you need. Governance is a full time job. And you either hire someone full-time to do it, or get really clear internally about what assets are priorities and must be 100% accurate, and which assets get a disclaimer that they haven’t been updated in a while.
- Personalized content works so well…and we need to take that to internal marketing, too (hello, sales teams!): There was a lot of talk on how to get content in the hands of sales more often. Folks talked about having an advocate on the sales team, and that seems to help. But overall, there was consensus around taking the same marketing principles and best practices that are working externally back in-house. We need to create personalized internal comms for sales folks so they feel that assets have been created specifically for them. Afterall, all of us are consumers of the modern algorithm, which serves us personalized content. How can we personalize our sales enablement to make our content even more effective down the funnel?