Matt Cross leads Growth Marketing, Social and Community at Knotch, a content marketing intelligence platform and consultancy.  If you’re a member of Knotch’s content marketing community, Pro’s and Content, you’ve likely seen Matt in action.  Matt has also worked in roles at tech startups, and even as a trained chef.  We sat down to discuss how testing and learning around new tools and marketing workflows can drive growth for businesses and careers.

Highlights from the discussion:

• More than ever, marketers are trying to understand how content is driving to business outcomes.  Specifically, they are looking at which assets are driving to conversations and conversions.  And which pathways are moving the fastest to actions and outcomes. 
• Knotch built Pathway IQ specifically to answer these types of content performance questions, particularly for audiences involved in longer consideration journeys.  Optimizing to faster pathways is critical for marketers today to drive efficiency and prioritize resources.
• New tools such as ChatGPT, Descript and Pathway IQ are helping marketers become more productive, get to rapid prototypes of content and syndicate across channels faster than ever before.  Staying engaged as an editor and getting strategic about training tools to be more aligned to a distinctive brand voice are key best practices to stay on top of.  
• When modern tools like ChatGPT and Descript can increase a content marketer’s productivity 10x or 100x, how should teams take full advantage of those productivity gains?  It likely is not creating 10-100x more articles.  It might be considering new approaches, such as versioning articles to different audiences or personalized segments.  And emerging best practice is to bring structure to the testing and learning process and then apply it to repeatable marketing workflows.
• While it’s critical to keep the fundamentals of marketing front and center, modern marketers cannot afford to ignore these new tools.  Give it a shot, see where they can add value, get familiar so that you don’t get left behind.
• Coming out of this discussion, there may be a dedicated #TestingAndLearning thread on the Pros & Content Slack community.  No promises(!) But we will see..

Pod and article originally published here.

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