Much of today’s marketing is based on this idea: educate That’s enough. By providing searchers with practical, half-decent information, we’re already halfway toward winning hearts and minds.
In a world before artificial intelligence, this was true. Accurate information is scarce. Organizing web content into a more accessible format is a real value-add. Education is the engine that drives growth.
But today, information has become extremely cheap. Any brand can become a generalist publisher and produce thousands of search optimization products how A guide to almost any topic. It’s getting easier to find customized, personalized answers to even the weirdest long-tail queries.
The Internet has transformed from a place to Information is scarce to one of them Informativethen the value of “education” as a marketing strategy plummeted.
In my early career (about thirteen years ago), many of the articles I published were solely “educational” SEO content written on a specific topic.
This may sound attractive today, but at the time, it was a problem. Many SERPs are a hodgepodge of different content types and search intent. It is the responsibility of the searcher to piece together their answers from a collection of partially useful sources.
as i have Wrote before:
There was a time when a Google search would yield only a page of vaguely relevant search results; finding an article that addressed your specific problem was rare and extremely popular.
The information searchers want often exists, but is locked away in inaccessible places: obscure forum posts, esoteric PDFs, hard-to-find personal blogs.
My value-add is simply finding this information and repurposing it into a more accessible format—the format that will appear when people search for it. (This is a huge benefit of the skyscraper approach: bringing disparate information into one place.)
This is arbitrage: Take advantage of temporary information asymmetry to profit. The information I share is already on the web but hard to find – I make it simple, make it more specific, and customize it to whatever language the searcher is speaking. My content was rewarded with traffic growth.
Looking back, we can call this era the Google era Information is scarce:
- It’s hard to find specific, highly relevant information.
- Content is expensive to create.
- Simple message arbitrage is useful and appreciated.
- There is little competition; companies in every industry can be first movers.
- The source of the information doesn’t matter; You will get information from wherever you can get it.
- It’s easy to differentiate between good content and bad content.
The era of information scarcity is characterized by finding signals in noise. You have a specific question; the search engine helps you search for semi-relevant information in hopes of getting an answer.
But today’s Internet is different.
SEO is a bet strategy used by everyone from individual entrepreneurs to multinational corporations. it’s too late First-mover advantage application: Simple arbitrage won’t have the same impact, as another brand (or a dozen brands) may well have beaten you to it.
It’s also the easiest and cheapest way to create content ever. The marginal cost of content creation drops to almost zero; a brand can publish fifty articles a day and have a hundred dollar bill left over. As more brands become generalist publishers, the amount of “educational” SEO content is growing exponentially.
Even the most niche, long-tail, hyper-specific queries can benefit from extremely relevant answers because LLM can generate them on the fly, pulling from different sources and changing the context to fit the query. With AI Overviews, Google can even do this for you.
This AI content is at least as good as regular human content (i.e., not great – but that’s SEO content is always). Most questions on most topics can be answered satisfactorily.
…or something like that. The hallucinatory nature of LLM means that the generated content can have a polished and professional look and feel while containing garbled meaningless messages. Bad content looks more and more like good content. Without closer inspection, it’s hard to tell the difference.
We have entered the age of Google Informative:
- For most queries, specific, relevant information is almost guaranteed.
- Content is cheap to create; there are no barriers to entry.
- Simple message arbitrage becomes almost worthless.
- Competition is fierce; companies from all industries are highly likely to latecomer.
- The source of information is everything. Searchers look for trusted brands and people to get information from.
- It’s much harder to differentiate between good content and bad content.
The information-rich age is characterized by the search for signals within signals. There are even dozens hundreds Competing sources (including Google itself) claiming the correct answer. Most of this is AI overflow, where LLM output regurgitates LLM output, and the resolution keeps getting worse.
This single change—information becoming incredibly cheap and plentiful—has transformed the way marketing works.
In the past, the simple act of sharing simple educational content was enough to win the hearts of your audience. In the age of artificial intelligence, where educational content becomes incredibly cheap and ubiquitous, we need to do more.
But how?
Provide new information style
Assume that you can only publish the same information as your competitors. Can you find ways to differentiate?
Yes: by providing a unique “flavor” of that information.
For example: There are a hundred different ways to consume news. There is news that positive person. News for people with obvious political leanings. News for financiers and economists. Nerd News. News for your local community.
The core body of information—what’s happening around the world—is essentially the same, but the management, presentation, and experience of that information are very different.
We can do the same with the information we share. This “Ultimate Guide to Link Building” could become “The SaaS Founder’s Guide to Link Building,” or “How to Build Your Top 10 High-Quality Links,” or follow your content series actually Create a link.
Each “flavor” of the link building guide will contain roughly the same core message, but the experience of using it will be completely different.
There’s a trade-off here: the more specific your focus, the smaller your overall target market. But the search is becoming increasingly zero-sum. For many brands, it’s better to have a low-sales topic than try to compete for a high-sales topic with heavy competition.
Create new information
Thankfully, we don’t have to post the same message as everyone else. we can create new messages and expand the available data pool.
Few topics have a completely fixed body of knowledge. By performing simple experiments, trying to solve hard problems, or exploring strange edge cases, you may find a way to inject new, useful information—information that isn’t immediately found on your competitors’ websites or in your LL.M.’s output .
This is usually more difficult and expensive, but it provides longer-lasting benefits. I’ve written more about the practicality of doing this here: How to stand out in a sea of AI content.
Skip rote messages
Finally: Assuming education is the table stakes, each brand offers an exhaustive resource center and certification program covering topics core to their industry. How will you attract attention?
Entertainment is the obvious answer. Much of the media most people consume every day is not overtly educational, but rather entertaining. Big brands such as paddle and pivot point and smaller brands like Wisteria and Audience plus Recognize this reality and be willing to make big bets on entertainment strategies, but the rewards cannot be easily calculated.
Entertainment is extremely hard work, but it brings many benefits:
- Larger TAM. The above strategies work because they focus on a specific audience, creating hyper-specific content that resonates with a small audience. Media, on the other hand, expands your total addressable market to the largest possible size.
- Moat entry. There’s a reason most companies haven’t built media brands yet: Entertainment is hard. It requires a deeper understanding of the target audience than simple educational content; this is subjective, unfamiliar, and risky. This makes it more difficult to execute well, but if successful, its value increases infinitely.
- Get to value faster. as i have shared before, “Content marketing allows companies to provide consumers with more valuable value earlier in the buying process than they would otherwise; but as content marketing becomes more common, media enables this to happen at an earlier stage.
source: Media strategy isn’t as crazy as it seems
As HubSpot’s Kieran Flanigan says, “The challenge with education is that it only makes sense when you need it.” Entertainment-as-marketing strategies allow you to reach your audience early, before they realize it Problem awareness. There are few competitors at this stage of the buying cycle.
final thoughts
Today, most digital marketing is driven by “educational” content: simple, practical messages created by talented generalists and signed by unknown brand accounts.
We have at least reached a level of maturity where most brands publish fairly accurate and useful information; but few brands have made significant progress beyond the simple information arbitrage stage. Most marketing content is a carbon copy of someone else’s work.
In an age of abundant information, such arbitrage is worthless. Large, well-known brands will benefit from these strategies for many more years, leveraging their brand recognition and domain authority; but smaller brands looking to carve out market share will need to do something completely different.
