Content Worth Paying Attention To
The best marketing content doesn’t start with AI. It starts with people.
Pictured above: Phillip Atchison, bg Content Director and skilled extractor of great ideas; Charity Stevens, Xylem Marketing Manager and keeper of serious industry knowledge.
Every company has people who know things its customers would find genuinely useful. These keepers of knowledge truly understand the industry, recognize a problem before others see it, and can recommend solutions that work because they have tested them in the real world. In a market now flooded with instantly generated content, that lived human-centric, professional experience is more than a source of ideas. It is a source of differentiation – and one of the richest, most underused marketing assets your business owns.
The problem is rarely a lack of expertise. It’s access. That’s because best thinking is often buried in meetings, sales calls, project debriefs, and the minds of senior leaders and subject matter experts who are too busy to turn what they know into content. Meanwhile, the pressure to publish creates a tempting shortcut: generate first and look for something meaningful to say later. That may increase output, but it rarely builds a meaningful connection with the intended audiences.
Great Content Starts with Great Conversations
A strong interview can uncover what a generic content brief cannot: the lesson learned the hard way, the customer misconception that keeps resurfacing, the detail competitors overlook or the point of view that only years of experience can produce.
The interviewer’s job is not simply to collect answers. It is to listen for the ideas with energy in them, ask the follow-up question, and translate specialized knowledge into a story the audience can understand. Only by spending time engaging the minds of your colleagues can you uncover the specifics that really matter. That’s how you learn about the imperfect project (and what could have improved it), the unexpected result, or the judgment call no data set could make. Those details create the texture, credibility and emotional truth that polished-but-generic AI-generated content lacks. That critical human exchange between SME and interviewer is where the voice, conviction and personality of the expert enter the content.
Charity Stephens, Marketing Manager at Xylem and a longtime birdsong gregory client, sees the value of that exchange firsthand.
“The strongest content starts with people who know the market and customers firsthand. Bonus if it’s someone who really nerds out about the subject. A good conversation brings out the details, perspective and passion that make a story useful – and believable.”
Build One Strong Piece of Thinking into Ten Assets
Capturing those insights takes effort. It may require research, preparation, interviews, internal review, and careful writing. So don’t let that investment end with a single tactic.
Whether building out into a series of LinkedIn posts, an email campaign, a webinar, a sales presentation, a tip sheet, short videos, digital ads, conference content, or an executive point-of-view piece, a substantive interview or article can become the foundation for an entire campaign. You can tailor the same core thinking for different audiences, refresh it as conditions change, and return to it when a new opportunity arises.
This is not about repeating the same message everywhere. It is about finding the most valuable ideas in the original work, then expressing each one in the format best suited to the audience and channel. Done well, the content stays consistent without feeling duplicated.
Use AI to Amplify – Not Replace – Human Expertise
AI can be enormously useful in this process. It can help organize interview notes, identify recurring themes, summarize background material, suggest alternate formats, support editing, and accelerate adaptations for different channels. Used this way, it removes execution bottlenecks and gives strong human thinking more reach.
The problem is not AI itself. It is what happens when AI is allowed to own the core idea, brand voice or emotional intent. Ask it to take the first pass at the substance, and the result often sounds smooth but interchangeable with all the other AI generated content in your industry. AI tools use the same hooks, structures, claims and CTAs your audience has already seen everywhere else. More content becomes more sameness, and more sameness becomes noise.
Audiences may never stop to ask whether AI wrote a particular sentence. They simply know when something is polished but forgettable, technically correct but emotionally flat. AI can imitate language and recombine familiar patterns. It cannot contribute lived experience, personal conviction, cultural instinct, or the informed judgment to know when a story needs nuance or when it should not be turned into content at all.
The most effective model is human-led and AI-supported. People should own the core message, point of view, voice, story, context, and judgment. Then, AI can work in the background to research, organize, edit, adapt, and scale. “AI can help us work faster and get more mileage from a strong idea,” says Stephens, “but it can’t be the source of the human experience behind that idea. The human voice still has to lead – that’s what gives marketing personality and makes it connect.”
So let experienced people supply the insights, emotional color, and point of view. Let strategists and writers shape it for the audience. Then use AI where it adds speed and scale without sanding off the quirks, edges, and specificity that make the work memorable.
Make Your Best Thinking Pay You Back
Memorable content comes from people rich in experience and from a disciplined plan for putting that experience to work. Start with the right conversation. Capture something worth saying. Then build a human-led, AI-supported system that gives the idea more places to go, more audiences to reach, and more time to create value.
Your organization has already invested years in developing its expertise. In a world where content is easier than ever to produce, that distinctly human expertise is what makes content worth paying attention to. Your marketing strategy should make the most of it.