The Future of Content Marketing: Why Connection Beats Volume

For a long time, I bought into the idea that content marketing required volume over all else. More blogs. More campaigns. More everything. Quality was important, but quantity was more important.

However, especially since ChatGPT came out, I've realized that publishing lots of content is no longer a differentiator. Everyone can do it. Some companies are publishing five blog posts a day. Is it working? From an SEO perspective, it seems to be working. But what about from a lead gen perspective? I'm not so sure about that (but I can't validate it either way).

On the other hand, I see companies publishing medium quantities of content, but getting far more branding, name recognition, and dark social coverage. Companies like Hubspot, AirOps, and 6sense are talked about frequently in marketing circles. They are no doubt doing all the SEO things, but they are also building a reputation. They have relationships with their customers, they make a notable difference in their customers' lives.

What are they doing? Why do some brands—even with fewer resources or smaller teams—consistently punch above their weight? Why do some campaigns spark conversations while others land with a dull thud? And why does so much "best practice" content just... feel bad?

I'm of the opinion that the companies who are getting ahead are doing more than just publishing content—they're spurring conversations. They're making themselves approachable, interesting and interested, being the friend customers feel they can talk to, and saying things that only they have the expertise and experience to say. This is where I think the future of content marketing is headed. It belongs to brands that master three interconnected capabilities:

1. Capturing expert insights

2. Exploring ideas deeply

3. Designing campaigns for conversation rather than conversion.

And now more than ever, companies have an incredible opportunity to create a quiet but powerful orchestration system underneath these content pillars that balances human judgment with AI efficiency.

That's what I want to share with you today: My thoughts on what this system looks like, why it works, and how to use AI to scale it.

The Core Shift: From Volume to Connection

As AI lowers the cost of producing average content to near-zero, human judgment, lived experience, and authentic voice will become the scarce signals that audiences crave. This means rethinking everything, including your core beliefs: We tend to believe leads are the byproduct of broadcasting benefits and results at the right place at the right time. But what if leads are more a byproduct of trust and conversation?

Short bursts of attention rise and fade, but relationships compound over time. Personalization is all the rage right now, but it has to feel real. Throwing a comment in a cold email about someone's college mascot isn't going to open doors anymore. But giving them a short, helpful how-to in response (without the sales pitch) to a question they've asked? That's where relationships begin.

And this can be done and scaled with the following three pillar engines constantly running in the background.

Expert Insights: Building Your Proprietary Knowledge Engine

Everyone has access to every piece of information published on the web now. What no one else has are the lived experiences of your subject matter experts, customers, and partners. That's where your differentiation lies.

This means it's time to treat insight capture like a discipline, not an afterthought or an ad-hoc activity for a specific campaign. All of your content should be driven by insights from your people.

But scheduling endless Zoom calls with SMEs or running traditional customer advocacy programs is exhausting for everyone involved. The smarter approach is building systems that gather input quickly, easily, and on everyone else's schedule. Here's how I would do this to create a living library that is accessible to my team 24/7.

Use remote capture technology. SMEs, customers, and partners can share their thoughts on their own schedule through voice, video, or text. They get a prompt with 3-5 focused questions and respond when it's convenient. This protects their energy while ensuring you get consistent input.

Set up automatic transcription and storage from calls and meetings to create an ever-growing, searchable database. Security controls matter, of course: consent flags, data loss prevention checks, auto-redaction for sensitive information, and clear opt-in protocols for recording should be worked into your process. Or, at the very least, an option to turn the automation "on" or "off" for a particular call.

Prioritize the human editorial layer to provide context and prioritization that AI can't. Someone needs to skim entries, extract key takeaways, and maintain a taxonomy with tags for role, industry, pain points, journey stage, and confidence levels so you know how, when, and why to use your varying assets.

Build a system that can construct this library of intelligence and you'll have a consistent, real-time source of information about the everyday struggles, wins, and nuances that make your audience feel seen. You'll have credible, unique, actionable content that stands out against the rinse-and-repeat how-to's from the SEO-focused companies.

Deep Topic Exploration

Too many teams treat AI as a vending machine for copy—input a prompt, get generic output. The future belongs to those who treat AI as a thinking partner for exploration. Conversations are far more valuable and far more sticky than a single information dump.

The Iterative Approach

To do this, feed AI your curated insight packs from the expert library, then engage in rigorous questioning: Why does this matter to the target audience? What breaks if we ignore it? What would a skeptic say? Where's the edge case? Even better, build your content pipeline so your AI asks your content team these questions and queues up a discussion along the way. AI does a great job answering questions, but it also is excellent at asking good, probing questions.

Map anecdotes to outcomes. Ask AI to identify gaps and contradictions in your data. Use it to cluster themes, rank novelty, and suggest angles with clear proof paths. Take walk in your target audience's shoes. What might a typical day look like? What additional stresses and pressures are they dealing with that might be unintentionally affecting the problem they're trying to solve? The goal isn't to automate thinking—it's to expand your thinking by seeing connections you might miss.

Maintaining Human Judgment

But here's what's crucial: AI is an excellent assistant with synthesis, but humans must review the claims and frame the perspective. Without human oversight, even the best AI exploration can drift into hallucination or miss critical context.

The solution is building in explicit checkpoints: after the initial idea, after the outline, after the research pack, and after the first draft. At each point, ask and discuss three focused questions and make a green/yellow/red decisions. This creates a rhythm where AI expands possibilities and humans provide feedback and judgment.

This iterative exploration could reveal patterns you'd never notice manually. You might discover that customer frustrations stem not from product complexity, but from a lack of clear examples—insights that could shift your entire content strategy and dramatically improve engagement.

Conversational Campaigns: From Monologues to Dialogues

Most marketing is still stuck in broadcast mode—shouting to get attention but leaving no room for reply. Do we really think our prospects want a lecture from us? I don't think so. Here's how to think about this: If you're doing all the talking, you're lecturing your audience. If you're doing all the questioning, you're interrogating your audience. Neither one goes down well, especially when it includes a pitch.

Conversation is the happy medium, the comfort zone. As I like to say, "conversations before campaigns". Think about how you are going communicate and share your content to get people to interact with you.

Designing for Dialogue

Replace monologues with prompts and questions. Your campaigns should invite dialogue through thoughtful comments, open-ended posts, and spaces where your audience can share their perspectives. Try writing in a more conversational manner rather than an authoritative one. Ask questions that will intrigue your audience. Skip the pitch and just share some interesting thoughts and questions you've been tossing around. This isn't just a tone shift—it's a strategy shift that prioritizes relationship building over immediate conversion.

Track conversations started, not just impressions. Focus on tough or nuanced topics that reward curiosity rather than simple, shareable soundbites. Prioritize next questions over next clicks.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I'm a big fan of a company motto that states that "everyone is marketing". Your engineers, executives, customer service team members, and operations folks can all participate in conversations across the web without feeling the pressure to pitch anything. Here are some practical ways you can implement this.

• Engineers helping engineers in forums without pitching

• Sales teams sharing useful resources with zero strings attached

• Social posts that explore industry pain points and invite discussion

• Blog posts that end with genuine questions rather than hard CTAs

• "Office hours" threads where experts answer questions with short video clips

• Reply hours where leaders dedicate time weekly to responding to comments and DMs

The irony? These campaigns are often simpler and less polished—and that's exactly why they work. The more your audience feels like they're talking to humans rather than a brand, the more likely they are to engage.

Human + AI Orchestration: The System That Scales

All of this can be optimized and sped up when you build your system to maximize the best skills of humans and AI. Too many teams either hand everything to AI or resist automation entirely. The sweet spot is treating AI as your operational engine while keeping humans in charge of the decisions that affect trust and brand perception.

Where AI Excels

AI should handle the heavy operational lifting: organizing incoming insights, transcribing and tagging content, routing materials to the right channels, creating first-pass drafts, pausing the process to gather the right insights from humans, and managing distribution queues.

Think of AI as running the pipes—the behind-the-scenes systems that keep everything flowing smoothly. It's excellent at pattern recognition, categorization, and maintaining consistency across large volumes of work.

Where Humans Add Irreplaceable Value

Humans set the standards, make judgment calls, and handle anything that affects your brand's voice or credibility. This includes framing perspectives, determining which insights matter most, deciding when vulnerability builds trust versus when it creates risk, and making the editorial choices that give your content its distinctive voice.

Humans also provide the context that AI lacks. They understand company politics, competitive positioning, customer relationships, and the subtle nuances that can make or break a piece of content.

Building in Checkpoints

The real power of this process comes into play when humans are integrated at key points when intelligence is needed most. Not to provide some basic information at the beginning and editing at the end, but to guide the thinking and the narrative all along the way.

Key checkpoint moments include after initial topic selection, after outline development, and after first drafts. At each stage, deep questions should be addressed: "Why does this matter in the first place?" "What context or angle is everyone else missing that we can provide?" "What feels generic?" Make a simple go/revise/kill decision and move forward.

This workflow flips the traditional model. Instead of humans providing superficial inputs and letting AI run wild, AI prompts humans for deeper thinking, surfacing gaps and opportunities that make the final output sharper. The result is faster production, more relevant content, and a sustainable system that balances automation with authentic human insight.

The Principles of the Whole Thang

Let's tie this whole thing together, shall we? Here are some basic principles that I think are the driving force behind this ideal approach to content.

Authenticity Through Simplicity

As AI-generated content floods every corner of the internet, human-made content becomes the outlier—and its value soars. Authenticity beats polish every time.

Favor real human tone over perfect production. "Good enough" quality beats no post at all. Quick clips and candid notes win attention because they feel true. Your audience doesn't need perfect; they need real. That doesn't mean you should overcorrect and leave intentional typos (yes, some people are doing this, and it's silly), but it might mean more stream-of-thought communication than buttoned-up, well-formatted articles. Overall, it means infusing humans into the entire process so the output is actually what exists in their brains. Humans don't have to do the writing to craft the shape of the content.

Use simple formats that feel human: Think micro-posts that follow a clear pattern: observation → example → question. Blog posts that end with genuine curiosity rather than hard CTAs. Comments that add value to ongoing discussions without pitching. Video content, keep it simple—15-230 second clips with one idea, one example, and one question. Phone-camera quality with clear audio instead of highly-produced intros and outros.

Leadership Voices and Community Presence

High-credibility, senior voices need to show up consistently across your brands communications. Honesty and vulnerability build trust—share lessons and missteps where appropriate. Set lightweight routines where cadence beats perfection.

Support, don't pitch. Join forums and communities with a service mindset. Build niche micro-communities when public forums don't exist for your specific audience needs.

Enable everyone to be a marketer with simple playbooks: where to show up, how to add value, when to ask for help. Provide approved snippets and examples without scripting individual voices.

Measuring BEYOND Clicks and mqls

Traditional metrics miss the point, and only track your short-term gains. Instead, track:

• Conversation metrics: Count interactions outside brand-owned spaces. Measure depth through back-and-forth exchanges, recency, and role seniority of participants.

• Leader visibility: Weekly posts per leader, meaningful replies sent and received, saves and shares that indicate genuine value.

• Expert library health: New insight entries per week, percentage tagged within service level agreements, usage by content and sales teams.

• Business connections: Assisted pipeline from conversation-sourced contacts, win stories tied to community engagement, time-to-first-meaningful-reply metrics.

The crux of all of this is that, when you gain customers through genuine relationships and conversations, you actually have a much better customer acquisition story to tell later. Case studies that start with "I was on a forum looking for help automating my content dev process and this guy Greg kept popping up with really good advice. We tossed around some homegrown ideas and joked about the struggles of having kids in college..."

That's fodder for a customer story, not just a list of outcomes.

The Long Game Strategy

The point is, this approach isn't about quick wins. It's about building something durable: trust, reputation, and community. The companies that commit to this—and give it the time and consistency it requires—will find they have champions that give back as much as they get. And whether or not they actually buy the product, they'll be talking about the company and it's incredibly helpful, smart employees.

Trust accumulates over months and years. One strong relationship beats a hundred empty clicks. As algorithm-chasing becomes less effective and audiences grow more sophisticated, the brands with genuine human connections will have a pipeline to last a lifetime, rather than a list of leads that don't really want another nurture email.

The choice is simple: keep playing the volume game while your content gets lost in the AI-generated noise, or start building the human connections that will define your brand for the next decade. The companies making this shift today are already seeing the results. The question isn't whether this approach works—it's whether you'll adopt it before your competitors do.