How startups grow in the age of intelligence

Rory Hope -

We’re living in strange times. The generative AI boom has had a seismic impact on the marketing landscape and startups need to rewrite their marketing playbooks for this new age of intelligence. 

Large-language model (LLM) technology has catapulted forward marketing automation capabilities, whilst at the same time creating a far more volatile channel landscape as companies like Google respond to the emerging threats and opportunities. 

Read on to understand how the landscape is changing, and my recommendations for how founders and marketers can succeed in growing their startup today.

The marketing landscape is changing, and marketers are struggling.

  • 15% of marketers feel overwhelmed keeping up with trends, 14% are struggling to understand their customers’ needs and 16% can’t create content that receives high engagement. (HubSpot, State of Marketing, 2024)
  • Google’s AI Overviews are now live across the US, UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, with information search queries returning AIOs at around 20-25% of the time
  • 58% of marketers are increasing their investment in AI and automation in 2024 due to pressures to deploy this new gen AI technology and “do more with less” in a challenging macroeconomic environment. 

Traffic is down across all industries. According to ContentSquare’s Digital Experience Report (2024) traffic has declined -3.6% across all industries, whilst some industries have observed acute drops of greater than -5%, including Services, Energy, Software, Manufacturing and Retail.

The traffic decline is being caused by a number of compounding factors:

  • Google has heavily improved the ranking of community sites like Reddit which provide people-vetted content (e.g. upvotes)
  • Google has rolled out AI Overviews, which increase the amount of ‘zero click’ searches which results in less traffic to publishers and websites 
  • More searches are now being carried out on ‘walled garden’ channels, like social media sites including LinkedIn, X and Threads
  • Users are turning to AI chatbots to get answers to their questions without having to click on a search result. 

Rewrite your marketing playbook for this new landscape. This playbook should still be based on the growth flywheel framework (HubSpot) across Attract, Engage and Delight phases, but the tactics used to create effective content loops that fuel the flywheel need to evolve.

Content loops act as the engine of your growth flywheel, specifically they:

  • Emphasise the importance of ROI on content marketing
  • Fuel, accelerate or restart your growth flywheel
  • Focus on channels, strategies, tactics or campaigns.

The notion of a content loop emphasises the importance of being able to measure the performance of your media portfolio investments. 

To deploy content loops a startup needs to set up a marketing technology (MarTech) stack. To establish a basic MarTech stack, here’s my recommendation:

These will allow you to measure the performance of your content loops. Each content loop is set up as a channel, campaign, strategy or tactic.

Put ‘The Human Element’ at the centre of your content loops in the age of intelligence. Generative AI technology means anyone can create mediocre, copycat content at scale. To make your startup stand out, you must optimise for ‘The Human Element’. 

In practice, this means using humans to create your content, and then use AI to ideate, research, repurpose and distribute your content.

I like to explain this concept by encouraging marketers to: Be the Shakespeare of your content loop, let AI be your printing press.

To grasp this concept, I’ll break down the components of ‘The Human Element’ and where AI comes in. To optimise for the ‘Human Element’, marketers need to focus on: 

  • Audience intelligence: Use audience intelligence to understand the behaviours of your target audience(s). This includes keyword, social listening and qualitative (surveys, sales calls) data.
  • Creators as your fuel: Emphasise the human element in your content loops by authoring content and media from creators or influencers. The channel landscape is evolving to prioritise this.
  • Multimedia content: Where possible combine creators with multimedia (e.g. podcasts & YouTube) to build that human connection. Make this the centre of your content loop.
  • Elicit an emotional response: Ask yourself, does my content elicit an emotional response? If so, which and why? Content rooted in human-led perspectives works well here.

AI should then be used to supercharge research and ideation, optimization and distribution. Marketers should invest in AI technology to assist with:

  • AI research: AI insights from call transcripts, statistics research and customer success. AI can analyse keyword and social trends data.
  • AI ideation: AI can help with content ideation, such as topic clusters for customer journey stages, blog post outlines or podcast topic ideas.
  • Repurposing content: Use AI to edit and improve your content, as well as repurpose content across multiple formats and channels.
  • Scale distribution and personalise: AI can be used to distribute content to prospects and customers at the right time, in the best format on a relevant channel with a personalised message.

Let’s take a look at how ‘The Human Element’ and AI could interact within a content loop that fuels, accelerates or restarts a specific phase of the growth flywheel (attract, engage, delight).

SEO is evolving as a content loop that fuels that attract phase of your growth flywheel. What worked in 2022 is no longer effective and you have to prioritise ‘The Human Element’:

  • People-first Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (EEAT) content outperforms AI-led 94.12% of the time (Neil Patel)
  • You must use qualitative research to inform your content strategy, not just quantitative keyword research
  • Backlinks from high popularity pages beat low popularity pages, according to the Google API leak
  • Reddit, and other community sites, have risen exponentially and to have visibility on search you need to be active on these forums. 

AI will play a role to support your SEO efforts:

  • AI will assist with keyword research and analysis
  • You can edit human-led content using AI 
  • Analyse call data to identify customer problems
  • Repurpose podcasts & videos into blog posts for search. 

If startup marketers only use AI to create their SEO content, and fail to incorporate ‘The Human Element’ bad things happen, as we saw with the infamous “SEO Heist”.

Email marketing as a content loop to engage and delight customers performs better with ‘The Human Element’. Marketers can improve the open rates, click rates and grow their startup’s email newsletter audiences by optimising for ‘The Human Element’:

  • Author email newsletters from company leaders
  • Human-led perspectives in newsletters
  • Personal nurturing emails from employees.

Whilst AI can improve efficiency and effectiveness of your email marketing content loops:

  • Use AI and your CRM to segment audiences based on their behaviour
  • Scale AI email automation using your customer data
  • AICRO to personalise your email messaging
  • Promote multimedia by using AI to write emails from transcripts.

SparkToro is a fantastic example of how to put ‘The Human Element’ at the centre of an email marketing content loop, as Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad use email to build a human-to-human relationship. Rand is a true modern Shakespeare of content marketing.

Social media is excellent for establishing ‘The Human Element’ and can serve as an effective content loop across all stages of the growth flywheel. Social media is an effective way for startups to build a human-to-human relationship with their prospects and customers:

  • Use it to emphasise your brand values and the people behind it
  • Create multimedia content, such as podcasts & YouTube, to build human connection
  • Prioritise human-led community management and 1-1 dialogs
  • Host live stream events from social media for lead generation. 

AI can support ‘The Human Element’ of your social content loop:

  • Use AI to analyse social listening data to uncover trends
  • Repurpose multimedia into digestible formats (e.g. YouTube Shorts) 
  • Ask AI to provide copy/creative feedback pre-trained from your customer data
  • Use AI to create images for social posts.

I would recommend that every startup has a video podcast with human thought leaders covering relevant topics to their products, services and customers. Record this on a platform like Riverside and redistribute using AI across social media. 

Startups can grow by building a growth flywheel that uses content loops to fuel, accelerate or restart it. But the age of intelligence has completely changed the marketing landscape and marketers have to optimise for ‘The Human Element’. 

Be the Shakespeare of your content loops, let AI be your printing press.