As B2B marketers, we're navigating an era of significant evolution, largely driven by the rise of generative AI. This technological shift is reshaping search behavior and, consequently, how we approach brand awareness. In this blog post, we are going to explore these shifts and provide nine strategies for optimizing content for AI.
Let's dive into the key takeaways and strategies for B2B marketing leaders looking to utilize AI.
Listen to the episode below or keep reading for key takeaways.
The shift in content strategy: quality and quantity
At Content 10x we have always emphasized focusing on platforms where your audience is most active, believing it’s not about being everywhere.
However, the advent of generative AI is challenging this approach. AI tools are constantly ingesting data, learning from the content available across various platforms. This shift suggests that to be recognized and referenced by AI, your brand needs to have a broader presence. Maybe we do need to be everywhere after all?!
When we spoke to Christopher Penn on The Content 10x Podcast he said that both quality AND quantity in content creation should be your focus. This may seem daunting – since usually there has to be a trade-off – you can’t focus on both, right?
But the reality is, we do need to up our quality and quantity game in the world of gen AI search, and content repurposing can be a powerful strategy to achieve this efficiently.
“Those who are better at content marketing will do better in the Gen AI search world – whoever has the most decent quality content out there will win – if you want to win you have to create both high quality and high quantity content”
– Christopher Penn, Trust Insights
So here are 9 strategic and tactical tips for building brand awareness and mindshare with the bots and ultimately using repurposing to help optimize content for AI.
9 strategies for optimizing content for AI
1. Create high-quality, long-form written content
Create long-form, high-quality content consistently and ensure that it exists in text format – blog posts, and articles. Plus, ensure your videos and podcasts have transcripts. This is important for repurposing too – the heart of a repurposing strategy is consistent long-form content.
So write long-form content and repurpose other formats into written content. The written word is especially important for generative AI tools.
2. Publish videos onto YouTube
Whether you’re growing a YouTube channel or not, if you create video content don’t miss the opportunity to be on YouTube because the videos all get transcribed to text and it’s a known fact that YouTube data feeds into gen AI tools.
This especially goes for video podcasts because being on YouTube won’t just help you get noticed by gen AI tools, but recent research by Cumulus Media and Signal Hill found that YouTube is the most used podcast platform for US audiences!
3. Always mention your brand
Always take the opportunity to mention your brand name – even in your own content on your site. It’s a good idea to have a standard text in your blog posts mentioning your brand, who you are, and what you do and want to be known for. Scroll to the bottom of this post to see how we do this!
It’s good to do this with all content on other sites too, for example, if you publish articles or newsletters on Medium, LinkedIn, Substack, or industry sites.
4. Mention your brand in other forms of content
The above goes for other forms of content too – mention your brand in your videos and your podcast episodes too – (following tip number 1) it all gets transcribed to text and ingested by the AI language models.
5. Collaborate!
If you have the chance to collaborate as a guest on podcasts, webinars, and video shows for example, make sure that you mention your brand and what you do – see it all as an opportunity to get more data into the world, from new sources. Practice your perfect answer to “tell me a bit more about you and what you do” and give the search engines and the AI tools the perfect answer!
Top tip: When you collaborate on other people’s content, get hold of it and see if you can share it yourself, the more content the better. Work with it and repurpose it further (if you’re allowed).
6. Say ‘yes’
Say yes to as much as you can when it comes to guesting on other people’s content. Currently, gen AI doesn’t care about domain authority. So whether it’s Forbes or a brand new podcast in your industry, if you have the time, say “yes” and get your brand in more places.
7. Don’t overlook Bing!
Many of the main gen AI tools, like ChatGPT, query Bing, so when we’re optimizing content for AI search we should pay attention to Bing as much (if not more) as Google. If you do well at traditional search you’ll do well with Gen AI search, so don’t stop focusing on SEO.
8. Focus on brand
Brand is so important – branded queries on search engines bypass AI, so keep getting your brand everywhere and ensure brand awareness plays a key role in your marketing strategy – ‘brand is everything’!
9. Have direct access to your audience
Find ways to have direct access to your audience that bypass AI, for example, an email newsletter, direct mail, text messaging, or a Discord community.
In conclusion, to stand a chance of having AI mention you in those all-important search queries on a search engine or included in a response in a gen AI tool, you need to have as much great, valuable, high-quality content as possible in as many places as possible. You need to control the narrative of who you are, what you do, and who you can help, not just for humans but for the bots as well! To do this, without burning out, focus on creating quality long-form content and repurpose. This could include repurposing content onto channels that you may previously have overlooked. The key is to make your brand and what you stand for get noticed in the places where the AI bots are drawing from.
Thanks for reading. We hope you found this helpful, let us know on LinkedIn.
Content 10x is the world’s leading authority on content repurposing. Specializing in transforming your content into multiple formats and distributing it across various platforms, Content 10x helps maximize your reach and impact. Our expert team takes your core content and creates a diverse array of high-quality, engaging assets, including videos, podcasts, social media posts, and more. Trust Content 10x to enhance your content strategy and ensure your message is seen and heard by the right audience.
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I appreciate your article on optimizing content for AI. You’ve done a fantastic job outlining actionable, strategic tips to help content creators navigate the evolving world of generative AI-driven search and content discovery while keeping quality at the center of what they do. Your emphasis on thoughtful repurposing, clear structure, and practical ways to make content AI-friendly without losing its authenticity was both insightful and inspiring. Thank you for sharing such a well-explained and forward-looking piece. It’s a valuable resource for anyone looking to adapt their content strategy in the age of AI!