We’re proud to announce that this year at NACCDO-PAMN, our partner, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, won first place in two award categories offered by Public Affairs and Marketing Network (PAMN); Survivorship Event and Physician-to-Physician.

Before the Project

Roswell Park was the first institution worldwide to focus exclusively on cancer research. They offer a wide range of treatments and services, from immunotherapy and clinical trials to working with the community in Buffalo, New York, for cancer screenings.

However, in the past, the depth of research conducted by scientists at Roswell Park wasn’t always made apparent by the website itself. Before this project, scientific content would be posted somewhat randomly, with no cohesive style guide or organizational framework. It was hard for grant reviewers, peers, and prospective trainees to find exactly what they were looking for.

Around 2012, the Department of Immunology wanted to give their scientists lab pages to showcase their work. At the time, the marketing team was small, and it wasn’t always easy to maintain these pages. What resulted was text-heavy and unwieldy, with no uniform style. There wasn’t a place to highlight these sites or cross-promote other content related to the lab. The whole research lab section went dormant in a matter of years.

Senior Digital Content Coordinator, Alexander Szczesny, knew there had to be a change. But first, he had to assemble a team.

Stage 1: Finding Collaborators

Stamats had experience in both healthcare and higher education content, making us a perfect fit for Roswell Park’s new project to overhaul its research content and strengthen its presence in higher ed. Stamats received the contract in early 2020 and was set to begin the project by meeting with leaders and stakeholders in Buffalo.

According to Lisa Starkey-Wood, an account executive at Stamats, “The goal of the lab website is to showcase Roswell Park’s position as a world-class research institution. Roswell is doing amazing things and having the opportunity to work on the lab websites makes us feel like we get to be just a small part of what they are doing.”

Secure in their partnership, Stamats and Roswell Park set out to create a meaningful web experience. But of course, things did not go as expected. Mere weeks before the meetings were set to take place, COVID-19 hit—and everything changed.

Stage 2: Building Remotely

In 2020, Stamats overhauled Roswell Park’s educational programs by working remotely with stakeholders, even through the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Stamats and Roswell Park’s marketing team continued work on 10 research departments, five Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG) programs, and smaller research groups and pages. Then in 2022, the focus shifted to the lab pages after the other sections launched.

After completing work on the first two labs in March/April 2022, Stamats and Roswell Park identified the first round of lab sites to focus on. Together, they identified principal investigators (PIs) who receive external funding and publish frequently, as well as researchers who’d already set up external websites. Even though these independent sites posed a legal liability to Roswell Park, it showed that the PIs were interested in creating content.

To set the stage for the lab sites, Stamats analyzed competitors and decided on a primary, secondary, and tertiary audience. Stamats chose a tone and voice that matched Roswell’s brand goals. Roswell’s web team then created visual templates for the lab’s landing pages. Stamats interviewed PIs to create content for each of the labs. Finally, it was time to publish the lab sites for the public.

Stage 3: Deploying the Lab Sites

Now, the lab sites were available on the websites for the public. Keeping the research front and center was the primary focus of each lab site. There were also impactful callouts that allowed Roswell to highlight important studies, releases, and quotes. Roswell Park also created a process for cross promotion, interlinking relevant content on each page to bolster the website as a whole. Finally, Roswell featured their latest press releases on their site to showcase cutting-edge updates and news stories. What emerged was a synchronized and organized series of lab pages that showcased the work while remaining visually appealing.

Next, it was time to expand the project. Phase 2 of the lab project involved creating content for 15 more PIs from across the research departments, while Phase 3 involved an additional 15 PIs. At the time of this writing, Stamats and Roswell have published lab pages with department heads, senior researchers, and even Roswell Park’s Deputy Director/Chair of the Department of Medicine. Each quarter content owners review their pages and make edits so that all content is up to date. Since launching the project in April 2022, the lab pages have received 34,881 total page views. Roswell’s most viewed lab sits at nearly 4,000 page views. Most labs average around 100 views/month. Together, Stamats and Roswell Park have worked hard to create and maintain these lab pages. According to Jennifer Panaro, department administrator of the Department of Cancer Genetics and Genomics and Molecular and Cellular Biology at Roswell Park, “the work that Stamats and our Roswell Park Marketing Team have accomplished will provide opportunities for new collaborations and support for future grant funding for years to come.”

Spotlight on Survivorship

In addition to winning the Physician-to-Physician award, Roswell Park won the Survivorship award for Chapter 2: A Cancer Survivor’s Workshop.

In this workshop, cancer survivors attended sessions focusing on physical and mental health, from acupuncture to mindfulness to patient-doctor communication. As a kick-off for the workshop, keynote speaker, author Gina Vild, spoke about ways to cultivate resiliency.

Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center was the only organization at NACCDO-PAMN to win two first-place awards this year. At Stamats, we’re so proud of our partners and grateful that we continue to have an opportunity to be part of their journey to improve cancer research and provide a haven for patients and survivors.

Shaking up your website can bring more patients, researchers, and funders to your door. Interested? Contact us for a personalized consultation on how you can transform your internet presence.

Related reading: How to Maximize Website Traffic with a Content Audit—and What to Do Next

This article was originally published by the Content Marketing Institute. It has been edited for brevity.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. As a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2024 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works simultaneously for your target audience and the media’s audiences.

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’”

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story—photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team—PR or content marketing—gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Jason Carlton, APR, Marketing Manager at Intermountain Health. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels—that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

• Page views
• Earned media mentions
• Organic search queries
• On-page actions

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Get even more insights from Mariah and these content marketing and public relations experts. Read the full article at Content Marketing Institute.

Related reading: AI, Oh My! How Content Marketers Grapple with the Robot Invasion and More Lessons from CMWorld

In my 30 years of experience in higher ed marketing (Really, can I be that old? Yes…), I’ve noticed certain words that immediately turn potential students off. These words slow the momentum of your copy and can even make you seem untrustworthy. I’ve seen the bounce rate on landing pages improve just because these words were removed. Here are the words and phrases you should never use in your higher ed content.

Buzzwords

These are corporate-speak that might feel very in vogue right now but are already outdated even as you’re writing them. Once language reaches the corporate sphere, it’s already considered cliche and overused. Not to mention, your competitors are probably using these exact same words. You don’t want to sound just like the competition. You want to sound straightforward and convincing where no one else is. Here are corporate buzzwords to avoid in 2024:

• Think outside the box
• Leverage
• Disrupter
• Drill down
• Low-hanging fruit
• Synergy
• New normal
• Circle back
• Move the needle
• Get on the same page
• Take this offline
• Lean in
• Utilize

These buzzwords from popular culture are also too stale to make fresh content:

• Hack
• Life hack
• Holistic
• Influencer
• Ducks in a row

Words that Claim Too Much

These words are trying to say a lot, and if you’re using them, there better be evidence to back them up. Otherwise, if a potential student sees “flawless,” they’re immediately going to distrust the copy. After all, there’s no way your program is actually flawless—you’re human! Potential students want to feel that you’re telling them the truth, and these words immediately make you seem dishonest.

• Revolutionary
• Unique
• Groundbreaking
• Unparalleled
• Unprecedented
• Matchless
• Unrivaled
• Beyond compare
• Flawless
• First of its kind
• World-class
• World-renowned
• Transformative

Higher Ed-Specific Words

These words mean something so specific in our industry that they are incomprehensible jargon to someone on the outside—as your website audience is. At best, these are confusing. At worst, they alienate your audience.

• Matriculate
• Outcomes
• Learning outcomes
• Prospective

When you remove these words, you start to sound less like an advertising bot and more like a human. These words can be tempting to use, but relying on them is a mistake.

Let’s look at an example of a sentence made better when the banned words were removed. I’ve bolded the problematic words we want to remove.

Before: Discover the transformative power of our HVAC program, where we utilize a comprehensive approach to training, resulting in groundbreaking outcomes that prepare you for success in the industry.

After: Explore our HVAC program. We use a hands-on approach to training that will help you develop the practical skills you need to land your first job in the industry.

The first sentence uses more words, but it doesn’t say much. What does a comprehensive approach to training mean? And is it really groundbreaking? What exactly are these outcomes? The first sentence gives the reader no reason to trust us with their time and money. In fact, it gives active reasons to distrust—why all the smoke and mirrors, a potential student could ask.

The second set of sentences is straightforward, to the point, and clarifies exactly what the goals of the program are—to help people get entry-level jobs in the HVAC program. Without all the fluff, the point gets across.

In higher education marketing, language holds immense power, shaping perceptions and influencing decisions. I’ve noticed that certain words can inadvertently hinder student engagement and trust. By removing these problematic words and phrases, higher ed marketers can boost conversions and sound human, empathetic, and convincing.

Interested in creating relevant and engaging content? Contact us at [email protected] for a personalized consultation about how you can transform your communications.

Another content article from Joan: Our Empty Words

Both content marketing and PR center on building relationships with the media and with specific audiences. Both require smart distribution, such as placement in quality publications and media outlets, as well as gaining high-ranking search engine and social media mindshare.

These teams also have a platform in common—the institution’s blog or website press room—that makes it easy for journalists to pick up stories and general audiences to connect with your content.

Candace Gwaltney, Associate Director of Communications of Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, and I shared the stage at the NACCDO-PAMN Annual Conference to provide insights into how PR and content teams can successfully make this shift to:

• Maximize subject matter expert (SME) time with fewer, more focused interviews
• Avoid brand cannibalization or self-created SEO competition
• Create a higher volume of content with increasingly fewer staff

Content—how to do it well and at scale—was a hot topic at NACCDO-PAMN, and every other conference we’ve attended this year. Here are highlights from our presentation and insights from other institutions’ sessions.

1. Win Earned Media With Relevant Content

When pitching to reporters, Michael Perchick from ABC-11 in North Carolina says there are three factors to consider before clicking “send”:

• Is the story new? Does it offer something that hasn’t been seen before?
• Does it carry impact? Does it change how people think about something or affect multiple people in the area or nationwide?
• Can reporters get access ASAP? They’ll need interviews today, audio, and/or B-roll. Can they meet with you today, if interested?

Reporters typically work on same-day stories with tight deadlines. Providing access to timely, impactful content significantly increases the chances that they’ll pick up your story, said former journalist Taylor Lisenby who is now the Digital Communications Manager at UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

For optimal results, Michael suggests that you contact the journalist through their preferred communication channel before their morning editorial meeting and be prepared to respond quickly to any follow-up questions or requests.

2. Become an SEO Detective

“Doing SEO” well is a long game. It can take search engines a few days or weeks to crawl your site and start the SERP ranking process for new content.

Dan Cave of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center says SEO is a mix of immediacy, long-term planning, and detective work. You can’t control Google, but you CAN control your website content. Put on your SEO detective hat and check:

• Page content
• Page analytics
• Total site traffic
• Recent search engine updates

Dan also notes that search intent matters more than closely matching nonspecific keywords like “cancer” in your content. So, your site might not rank for a single, broad term. But if you do SEO well—by continually optimizing your content—you’ll rank for what really matters: The who, why, where, and how.

Look for gaps in user experience with search intent as a guidepost to optimize content and/or consider a strategic SEM campaign. For example, if people are searching “ovarian cancer treatment near me” but you haven’t created content to serve that intentional search, that’s a missed opportunity.

3. Create SEO-Rich Content at Scale

When content and PR teams collaborate, you can create a main “hub” story once and strategically share it with all your audiences—including journalists—across multiple platforms.

In our presentation, Candace and I shared best practices for collaborating between content marketing and PR teams:

• Strategic interlinking to related content helps deepen readers’ connection with your organization and subject while strengthening your SEO standing.
• Include digital brass tacks. Create a strategic meta description, URL, call-to-action, photo captions, and alt text for the stories you produce, regardless of audience.
• Find and highlight the story. What does your audience want? Shape and distribute your content to meet their wants and needs.

When you follow these basics, you can use a single story in multiple ways, reducing SME time and resulting in more strategic storytelling and media outreach across your teams. Here’s an example of how IU Simon tells effective, SEO-rich stories at scale:

• Capture video of an SME sharing their latest research
• Post that video on your site and on YouTube with a transcript
• Create a blog story from a niche topic within that research
• Publish the blog on your site and distribute it:
• • On social media
  • Via email to subscribers
  • Through your PR channels, including emails to the media and press release platforms

4. Share Department Stories on Owned Media Channels

Strategic MarComm efforts can help draw attention to service lines not currently in the spotlight for a full multimedia campaign.

Tadd Pullin, Senior Vice President of Institutional Affairs and Chief Brand and Communications Officer of UT MD Anderson Cancer Center suggested these owned media tactics to raise brand awareness, attract earned media, and show internal clients attention without overtaxing your MarComm team:

• Podcasts
• Articles and blog stories
• Website content optimization

These individual strategies are most effective where they overlap, Tad said. If you aren’t at the table, he continued, you’re on the menu. If you take a single story and run it through these channels, you’ll be more likely to reach your marcomm goals and prevent being subsumed by the competition.

A Few Final Thoughts

Strategic storytelling combines elements of SEO, PR, and content marketing best practices. One cohesive story can reach journalists, donors, and prospective patients or trainees effectively.

Content has the most impact when it incorporates a mix of earned, owned, and paid media. It’s at this overlap where the magic happens. When you unite these strategies, you create a powerful blend that boosts your message, enhances your visibility, and captivates your audience.

Ready to talk strategy? Email Mariah Tang to discuss your content, SEO, and digital storytelling goals.

The truth is, AI can’t tell impactful stories—at least not yet. Storytelling is the secret sauce that makes content a truly valuable part of any robust marketing strategy. But how can tried-and-true human storytelling principles evolve to leverage data and stay relevant in a swelling sea of commodity content?

Stamats AVP of Content Marketing Mariah Obiedzinski Tang recently sat down with Martynas Fedotovas, Chief Technology Officer of Sirius Media Company, for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of content marketing. We’ve included some highlights of their discussion, and you can listen to the full interview on YouTube.

Journalism, Storytelling, and The Content Sweet Spot

Martynas Fedotovas: Can you give any advice for how to leverage journalism skills to create compelling, conversion-focused content?

Mariah Obiedzinski Tang: Absolutely. If you work in healthcare, you might have one hospital client on the West Coast and another on the East Coast. Chances are they offer very similar services. They can take care of your heart, they can treat your cancer, they can deliver a baby.

The content you create for the West Coast hospital will always look different from the content you create for that East Coast hospital. That’s because every group has different providers and workflows, different nurses and frontline staff that greet patients when they come in.

They have different patient audiences, different providers telling their unique stories, and different research projects.

While you might start by saying “we’re going to tell a story about heart disease for Heart Month, those stories will look very different based on what goes on inside the walls of that institution and how they carry that expertise out into the community.

– Mariah Obiedzinski Tang

Martynas: When you’re telling a story, what elements does it need to be compelling for customers?

Mariah: At first, companies sometimes wonder why they would need to invest in storytelling. But stories are how people learn.

From the time you’re a child through adulthood, you communicate with stories. You don’t just say “I met this guy and had a bad date.” You’re going to tell your friend about the whole ordeal: He was late, he thought you were going to pay for dinner, he brought his weird dog and it bit you. All those details make the story come alive. The AI language models can’t pull together real stories that inspire customers to act. Only you can do that.

Martynas: Is there a framework to follow to tell these types of compelling stories?

Mariah: I always coach teams to follow the Quentin Tarantino model. It’s kind of silly, but it works. You start with the end of the story in mind. Where does the audience want to end up? Help them visualize themselves as a satisfied customer. Start there and then work backward through the details about how to get there. Whether that means taking a class, getting a degree, or working with your company.

Build these blocks and put the reader in the driver’s seat. Show them what they’re going to end up with first and work back through the details. It’s a modern take on the inverted pyramid.

Martynas: What advice can you give companies that are just putting together their content creation calendar?

Mariah: It’s tempting to think “We’ve got to get our CEO on the phone” or “We’ve got to talk to the top surgeon.” Even though they only have five free minutes in their day, we think they’re the only one who can tell the story. But that’s not always true.

Instead of getting overwhelmed about how you’re going to get every subject matter expert on the phone, whittle down your calendar to the one or two important stories that really require an in-demand expert. For the others, find someone else with expertise who can give their perspective. Oftentimes if you go a couple of levels sideways or even down the chain of command, you can talk to people who are directly connected to the story and have a unique perspective.

Related reading: Creating Audience-Focused Content

Leveraging data to make content decisions

Martynas: How do you tailor content strategies to the specific needs and challenges of an industry?

Mariah: First, consider the business goals of the institution. Are they looking to attract patients, are they looking to attract trainees or researchers? Second, who are the people in the audience who would be best served by their content?

So you think about questions like:

• What is the story we are trying to tell?
• What is the information the audience needs to receive?
• What questions is the audience asking?

The answers to those questions will help you understand what content you need to produce to be an authoritative leader, one that issues the answers to those questions before they’re even asked.

Martynas: How important is gathering data to understanding the business you’re running?

Mariah: One thing we see a lot in higher education and healthcare is the massive accumulation of data. It’s just part of being an academic institution. The thing that’s sometimes missing is the next step: What happens with that data once you’ve collected it?

If you’re gathering all this data, it doesn’t serve your audience until you’ve taken that next step to implement it. If you don’t have a person on your team who’s well-versed in analyzing data and spotting trends, you might consider working with a partner organization that can help you leverage that data into something you can use.

That teammate or partner could help you identify what people are looking for on your website, for instance. If it’s not there, then you’ve found some missing content you can create to engage with your audience. That’s an opportunity to answer questions they’re asking.

Martynas: How can small and medium-sized businesses use the data they have to make better quality decisions?

Mariah: One thing I recommend is a competitor analysis. Obviously, you don’t want to copy what your competitors are doing. What you can do is take that layer of data and overlay it to compare against what you’re offering. That’s a great way to identify potential gaps in your content.

Another way is to look at your social media to see what’s resonating with people in real-time. Look at the comments they leave and the engagements they offer. If they’re not interacting, it could be that your content isn’t getting seen, or maybe it’s just not resonating with your audience. If they’re leaving comments, sharing, and interacting with your posts, you can get a lot of information just by listening organically on social media.

Related reading: How to Maximize Website Traffic with a Content Audit—and What to Do Next

Building content efficiency and earning executive buy-in

Martynas: How can marketing and public relations teams take proactive steps to streamline the process and enhance collaboration?

Mariah: Shared calendars are important. Often in a big institution, it can be complicated (to say the least) to combine all your ideas. In small organizations, when you have a one- or two-person marketing team, you don’t always have much opportunity to bounce ideas around.

However, if you make an effort to have a 10- or 15-minute touch-base meeting, it can make a big difference. What are the top stories you need to cover for your department this week? Discuss your ideas and identify where projects overlap. It’s those overlaps where you can find some powerful additional content that you can spread out all month.

You can save your teams and subject matter experts a lot of time and effort when you’re creating one robust piece of strategic content instead of three or four less impactful pieces.

Martynas: How do you communicate the long-term value of storytelling and content marketing to stakeholders inside the company who may be looking for short-term results?

Mariah: The beauty of content marketing is sometimes you know a piece is going to take off and be impactful, and sometimes you don’t know. If you can show off incremental wins and demonstrate the strategy of leveling up week after week, month after month, it shows you have thought behind your process.

Bringing data is always important, especially when you’re working with executives. They like to see those numbers, and they like to know what you’re doing with those numbers and how you’re going to continue to grow. Show them the quick wins and show them the long-term strategy. Show them where you are now and demonstrate how that strategy will get the company to where it wants to go.

AI and the future of content marketing

Martynas: How do you think the algorithms are shaping the way companies are communicating with audiences?

Mariah: Over the years, we’ve seen people’s opinions, tactics, and content change. One thing that’s stayed true is that anything created for humans is always going to resonate better in the long term, and it’s going to serve you better than anything you’ve designed to appeal to an algorithm.

Five or 10 years ago, writing for SEO was the big thing. People were plugging in keywords every other sentence, and the content became unreadable. That worked for a while. Your page might rank first or second on Google, but it would plummet right away when people found it unusable. According to Google, the more you write for human beings the more your content will be viewed as relevant, and the more it will get picked up—in search and by these generative AI products. It’s all about relevance and usefulness. In a world of commodity content that anybody can create, that’s what’s going to help you stand out.

Martynas: There are so many changes happening in the marketing industry these days, and Stamats has been around for 100 years now. How do you see the future evolving, and where are the opportunities for companies?

Mariah: As marketers, writers, and designers, it’s tempting to feel threatened by some of these new technological tools like ChatGPT and even Canva. It’s important to remember there’s always a burst of Shiny Object Syndrome.

New things come out, and we have this collective freakout moment. Then over the next couple of months, people start to realize these things can be used to enhance our work, make us more efficient, and serve our clients and their budgets well.

We have to be willing to be flexible, to try new things, and not put our eggs all in the same basket. I guarantee that in six months it’s going to look wildly different from what it is now, so the best thing we can do is buckle up, work AI into our processes, and go from there.

About Mariah Obiedzinski

Mariah brings training in journalism and decades of experience leading content marketing teams in content strategy, writing, subject matter expert and stakeholder interviews, and content marketing initiatives.

Catch her at an upcoming speaking engagement: 

• NACCDO-PAMN Annual Conference, May 20-23, 2024 in Salt Lake City, UT 
• Sirius Marketing Event 2024, June 18-20, 2020, online via Zoom 

Stamats works with clients to maximize the impact of their content marketing strategy. Schedule a time to talk with an expert about your content.