Beyond AI: The Real Skills Content Marketers Need to Stay Relevant

It doesn’t matter whether you're an AI skeptic or an AI enthusiast. Either way, you've undoubtedly found that good content marketing requires much more than choosing the right AI-assisted writing tool or developing a few well-crafted prompts.

To create a competitive edge and drive business impact, your content has to stand out by speaking to your audience and providing real solutions. And while AI often helps with handling repetitive tasks and speeding up production, it's far from the only tool you need to create great content.

So, what skills do you need to stay relevant as a content marketer? And how can you incorporate AI into your workflows without losing the creativity, quality, and strategy that make content meaningful?

To answer these questions, I asked in-house content leaders, agency owners, and freelance writers about their approaches to AI. Their responses are a masterclass in developing essential skills to stay indispensable and going beyond AI to establish a lasting edge in the industry.

The power and limitations of AI in B2B content creation

For many B2B content marketers, AI-powered technology offers a ton of potential. As of Q4 2024, 81% of B2B marketing teams use generative AI.

However, AI creates advantages and challenges for content teams. Here's what you should know about the power and limitations of AI.

How AI improves content creation

Increased productivity is one of the biggest perks of using AI. More than half of teams that use AI report doing fewer tedious tasks, while just under half report more efficient workflows, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

“At Surfer, we use AI every day,” shares Tom Niezgoda, co-founder & head of marketing at Surfer. AI is baked into Surfer’s SEO content optimization platform and the content team’s workflows.

Tom elaborates, “Surfer AI generates outlines for our writers, Surfy handles things like creating tables or expanding sections, Topics checks how well we’ve covered a subject, and Topical Maps help us cluster keywords into actionable ideas.”

In addition to using AI-powered content marketing tools, many B2B marketers also rely on tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to save time, improve outcomes, and scale content operations.

No matter which tools you use, "we should all be figuring out how to use AI to speed up and improve our work," recommends Lee Densmer, content strategist and owner of Globia Content Marketing. She suggests that content strategists, marketers, and writers focus on using AI for the following tasks:

• Strategists: Building buyer personas, exploring differentiation, and creating the first version of any aspect of strategy
• Marketers: Finding topics, creating an editorial calendar, and developing creative briefs and outlines
• Writers: Doing research, drafting and editing, and generating title options

How AI compromises content quality

Although AI offers plenty of perks, it also creates its fair share of challenges. By definition, AI generates new content based on libraries of existing material. That means it can't create completely original content.

As a result, pure AI content often appears generic, vague, or off-brand. To create compelling content, many content marketing specialists concentrate on improving specificity and originality.

"AI tends to blurt meaningless long-form content," observes Adelina Karpenkova, freelance writer for SaaS companies. To work around this issue, she aims for sharper, shorter copy that efficiently conveys meaning without unnecessary fluff.

B2B marketers cite accuracy and quality issues as a top concern around generative AI, according to a Salesforce study. While it's best to meet high standards and avoid errors in every industry, mistakes are particularly problematic in some sectors.

"AI tools can shave time off your research, but everything needs to be fact-checked. I've come across blatant inaccuracies," shares Charlotte Day, founder and creative director at Contentworks.

"Moving forward, we're emphasizing the services we provide that require expert knowledge and up-to-the-minute insights. In the finance sector, compliance and correctness are very important.”

How to integrate AI without sacrificing quality

Just because AI output requires careful review doesn't mean you should omit it from your workflow. The key to staying ahead of the curve in the content marketing industry is learning how to use AI without risking quality or losing the unique elements that differentiate your content.

As Tom puts it: “AI is a big help, but the human touch—reviewing, refining, and adding perspective—still makes a huge difference.” In other words, understand when to use AI to guide your analysis and production and where to incorporate your own personal touch into content.

"The best thing you can do right now as a content marketer is to cozy up to the ways these tools can unlock meaningful productivity gains in your workflows," suggests Ryan Robinson, co-founder of RightBlogger.

"Spend the time to really learn which aspects of your process can best be outsourced [to AI] without losing what makes your content specially yours. Remember that it doesn't matter so much how you arrive at your end result, or which tools you use to get there, as long as the content you're publishing remains uniquely yours."

Simplify ideation

Need a hand coming up with an interesting angle for a long-form article or a social media post? How about brainstorming topics for a keyword that fits your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy?

AI tools are often helpful for ideation. They can suggest concepts or topics that fit your product or service, appeal to your target audience, and align with the business outcomes you need to achieve.

“I chat with AI to analyze ideas and assumptions behind my content at an almost philosophical level,” shares Ziemek Bućko, content manager at Hunter. “It helps me validate my thinking. It's also great at providing alternative perspectives and viewpoints.”

For instance, you might ask your conversational AI tool of choice to review a blog post draft and play devil’s advocate, sharing opinions you hadn’t yet considered.

Plus, AI tools can suggest narrative frameworks that make your arguments stronger. Here’s a prompt Ziemek recommends testing: “Try describing a user behavior you're aiming to influence and asking it for psychological frameworks that can support your goal. AI is excellent at this.”

For example, AI tools can suggest strategies for inspiring readers to feel motivated to address a problem or take the next step to find a solution.

Source data

Incorporating data into your content can be a great way to establish credibility. But if you don't have original data to work from, you'll need to find a reliable source. AI can help—but it does require fact-checking.

“I like to use Perplexity to find data and facts for each article we write," John Ozuysal, founder of House of Growth. "We don't write content with AI, but AI makes it easier to find data for us or create content upgrades for each piece we craft for our clients.”

Manual data collection and analysis can be incredibly time-consuming. But as Ziemek explains, some AI tools can complete programming and analytical tasks almost instantly.

"If I need to write a complex SQL query to produce a statistic for my article or create a simple web scraper to collect some information, AI will do in seconds what used to take me hours. AI is also incredibly powerful when you connect it to a spreadsheet using an API."

Accelerate editing

Once you've drafted content, let AI fine-tune it to deliver your message more effectively. For Ziemek, "As a non-native English speaker, I use AI to help me spot language errors, simplify my wording, or find the right phrases.”

Need your content to adhere to a style guide? AI tools can help you produce on-brand content.

With the right AI tool, you don't have to check manually for Oxford commas and other style details. Kiran Shahid, freelance writer for B2B SaaS companies, relies on Claude to check her writing against clients' style guides.

She inputs content drafts and client guidelines, asking Claude to flag major issues. Since she asks the AI assistant to suggest rewrites that maintain her voice, she can easily implement changes while following guidelines and using her own voice.

“The more I use AI writing tools, the more I notice an odd paradox," Kiran shares. "When I rely on them too heavily, my creativity muscles start to shrink. I catch myself thinking in the same repetitive patterns as the AI."

"But when I avoid them completely? I end up doing a lot of redundant work I could've automated. Like most good things in life, the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle.”

Repurpose content

Want to scale your content marketing strategy across more channels? AI helps reformat and repurpose content.

“AI has made my content production more efficient," explains Anna Burgess Yang, freelance fintech writer and owner of ABY Creative. "For example, if I share a post on LinkedIn, I use AI to reformat that post for Threads."

"The posts are still my ideas but tweaked so they're platform-specific. This is happening automatically in the background (via Zapier), though I still edit the AI-reworked posts before I publish them.”

Ryan at RightBlogger uses a similar strategy for his video-first content plan. "Over the past year, I've adopted a video-first content creation process that uses AI to convert my videos into really strong SEO blog post drafts."

The time savings can be significant. "This cuts my blogging time down to 30 to 60 minutes per long-form article, and my traffic has been growing as a direct result of this new playbook."

Plus, this cross-channel content promotion strategy increases reach substantially. By repurposing videos into blog posts, "I can attract more organic traffic on topics that used to be just a flash-in-the-pan video on my social channels. I've been getting so much out of this that I made a free video to blog tool."

6 Skills content marketers need to remain indispensable

AI offers tons of value for in-house, agency, and freelance content marketers—so much so that you might be wondering how you can offer real value and add your own unique touch.

To maintain a competitive edge as an expert content marketer, it's critical to think beyond excellent writing and editing skills. After all, AI tools can also write and edit, and it’s safe to assume they’ll continue to generate increasingly high-quality output over time. Instead, identify skills that make your content more distinct—which AI can enhance but not replace.

1. Research skills

It's true that AI can assist with research. But what if you don't know where to begin looking for data? Or if you aren't sure what kinds of questions would lead to data that supports your narrative?

Instead of leaving research to AI tools, “I’m focusing more on honing my research skills to differentiate my work," explains Femi Oyelola, content marketer for B2B tech companies. "This means taking a research-first approach when working on a project."

"I’m also taking some courses on OSINT (open source intelligence), which teaches how to gather and analyze information from public domains to answer particular questions. I’m taking this course to widen my understanding of cybersecurity, but my marketer brain is looking for ways to leverage this when writing content.”

2. Content strategy

Similar to the research process, AI can help with some aspects of content strategy. But it's less adept at truly understanding your customer base and using that knowledge to develop a winning strategy.

“AI can't take over my strategic and planning skills," Lee states. "Or my ability to guide the work of other people. Nor can AI pivot with the needs of the business in mind when things change."

For Todd Raphael, strategy is a key area of concentration. “I'm focusing less on productizing (i.e., I'll deliver XYZ for this amount of money) and more on deeply understanding the customer and their needs."

"What is it they truly need, besides just a bunch of work done (which is of course also important)? Do they need to distinguish themselves? Do they need to better communicate the strength of their product to influencers and the target market?"

Todd elaborates, "Are they trying to make their brand stand for too many things and overcome long-held beliefs about their brand, when they should be spinning off something new? Is their storytelling too cold and lacking humans? Does their design lack the sophistication of the product? And so on.”

For freelance and fractional content specialists, this kind of framework is particularly helpful. Instead of positioning your work as a commodity, you can use your deep strategic knowledge to become a true partner for your clients.

3. Creativity

Since AI is limited to building on existing content, nothing it creates is truly new. This can make your content sound a lot like your competitors or any other site with content on the same topic.

To differentiate their work, many content marketers are doubling down on creativity. Using a creative approach can mean a lot of things, such as incorporating new perspectives or testing various content formats.

Tom suggests adding “your real-life experiences, unique stories, and, most importantly, your ‘soul.’ It’s the personal perspective that makes content stand out. It turns something generic into something people actually connect with.”

You can also take creativity a step further by opting out of the same playbook or approach everyone else is using.

Before she begins creating outlines for new pieces of content, Adelina avoids looking at content that already ranks for the same keyword on the first page of search results. "AI 'gets inspired' by what’s already been published, so that means I have to create something that’s not there yet.”

4. Subject matter expertise

If you've read this far, you're likely an experienced content marketer. But are you a subject matter expert (SME) in the topics you write about?

In some cases, you might partner with SMEs to write authoritative content. But it may be worth cultivating first-hand experience in a specific niche so you can create content that speaks more deeply to decision makers.

“Having a deep understanding of a specific market segment (best developed by direct experience rather than just reading about it) helps create content that actually solves user problems," Ziemek explains.

"The level of thought leadership that readers expect in most industries has grown, and interviewing a couple of SMEs is rarely enough to create content that's actually helpful. You need to become the SME, or at least aim for it.”

By prioritizing subject matter expertise, John's consultancy is able to produce superior content. “At House of Growth, we like to write about topics where we have subject matter expertise so it's easy for us to understand what's missing from the articles from the perspective of a reader.”

When writing content for software companies, freelance writer Dianna Gunn takes a similar approach. “I'm leaning harder than ever into review-focused content formats, as reviews are all about the human experience."

"The number of high-paying markets for software reviews may be small, but they're out there and I'm really good at what I do. I don't foresee myself being forced out of freelance writing by AI any time soon.”

5. Thought leadership

When you want your content to change how customers and colleagues think, take your first-hand experience and subject matter expertise a step further. Focus on creating thought leadership that's packed with personal insights and an innovative view of the industry.

“I’m leaning into a strategy focused on high-value, real-life interactions," shares Janet Celosia, vice president of marketing strategy at BackPocket Agency. "I’ve been prioritizing participating in mentorship programs and events as much as possible and drawing from experiences to inspire fresh content."

"In B2B, especially, there’s a growing importance in thought leadership and unique perspectives and stories. With AI-generated content handling the basic search results, there’s an opportunity for branded content to address the deeper 'why' and 'how' questions.”

6. Adjacent business skills

In many cases, it's also worth developing skills that go beyond content. “I strongly believe that content marketers need to niche down and develop adjacent business skills to stay competitive," Ziemek explains. "This was true before ChatGPT and is much truer now."

Ziemek recommends mastering skills like:

• Automation
• Prompting
• User research
• Data analysis
• Design

To zero in on the optimal skills, think about where your current content marketing workflow is most lacking. Where could you create more depth and add the most value?

Why content marketing roles are here to stay

The countless headlines projecting job losses to AI can certainly be alarming. But it's important to take them with a grain of salt. All signs indicate that content marketing positions are here to stay—as long as you know how to prepare for them and navigate them effectively.

Marketing teams lack trust in AI output

Given the amount of buzz AI has created, it would be easy to assume that the average content marketing manager has shifted to a completely AI-driven workflow. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

Only 4% of B2B marketers claim a high level of trust in generative AI output, according to the Content Marketing Institute. An additional 28% have a low level of trust, and 67% have a medium level of trust.

Plus, many content teams consider the quality of AI content relatively low. While 44% consider the quality good, 35% consider it fair, and 4% consider it poor. Only 14% view the quality as very good.

If you can develop a way to create trustworthy, high-quality content, you'll have a significant advantage over AI.

Content teams need deeper strategic and creative skills

Many content teams may opt to outsource repetitive tasks to AI. For example, Surfer's content team uses AI to scale content and improve efficiency.

“AI has impacted our hiring plans," Tom explains. "Without it, we’d need a team twice the size, which isn’t ideal for a small organization like ours.”

However, AI can't handle everything. B2B content teams still need deep strategic and creative skills.

“I'm not concerned about AI's impact on me as a content marketer," Anna shares. "The demand for my work has been higher this year than last year."

"I think it's because the clients I serve want to stand out from the 'noise' that's been created by AI, so they're turning even more to human-generated content that's compelling and speaks to their audience. I deliver that.“

AI content is fundamentally different from human content

No matter how your organization opts to incorporate AI tools, it's important to know that generative AI content simply isn't the same as content that maintains human involvement throughout the strategy, writing, editing, and distribution phases.

"It only takes a few minutes of playing around with AI to understand that this technology will never truly replace us in a really meaningful sense," Ryan explains. "Help articles? Straightforward Q&A? Simple walkthroughs? Sure, AI is already pretty good at this kind of content."

"But the most crucial thing AI lacks (and always will) is direct human experience. As Certified Humans™️, we write from our own lived body of experiences. These real-life examples and things we've gone through create unique human emotional responses and stimulate thought processes that can't be mimicked in the exact same way by technology."

As Ryan puts it: "Artificial Intelligence is derivative, based on trying to imitate human outputs. This means AI writing will forever be something different than human writing. It'll continue to get 'better' over time, for sure, but ultimately this unlocks more freedom for us to express ourselves creatively through our writing in ways that robots simply can't."

Content marketers should embrace AI as a content ally

AI can handle many of the most basic aspects of content marketing, from guiding ideation to speeding up the editing process. Learning how to use AI for these tasks can help you work more efficiently and free up valuable time to channel your efforts elsewhere.

However, AI can't take over the strategic and creative elements of content marketing or add first-hand experience and subject matter expertise. By upskilling in these areas, you can focus on creating more impactful content and making yourself an indispensable content marketer.

Ready to invest in a tool that supports both efficiency and creativity in content production? Get started with a free trial of Relato!