Cattle vs. Pets: Not All Content is Special
Content marketing is like raising animals on a farm. You’ve got cattle in the field generating organic traffic and helping with your overall SEO strategy. And you have a few pets who live in your home, attracting the attention of very specific personas and generating leads.
With cattle, you don’t worry about any particular animal because they exist for utility or future value (mmm, dinner). Pets, on the other hand, are special. You take care of them, let them live in your house, and intentionally feed them because you have an emotional relationship with them. You might even let them sleep in your bed.
Your pet relationships are vastly different from your cattle relationships. If your dog is lost for a couple of days, you get anxious. If one of your sheep or a cow goes missing for a couple of days, no big deal. It’s probably out there somewhere in the field.
I first learned about the “cattle vs. pets” metaphor in my software development and administration days. My team sometimes treated application servers like they were pets, which made it difficult to resolve a middle-of-the-night production incident. I’d call the on-call admin only to hear, “Oh, I don’t know how to fix the server problem. That’s Sandeep’s baby, not mine.”
In the content world, it’s easy to treat every blog article like it’s a pet. But generative AI is proving that’s the wrong way of going about it.
When you need a pet
“Handmade” content isn’t a great snuggler, but it does have its perks. This is content written by a good writer who thoroughly understands your product, your market, and your purpose. It’s carefully crafted with quality and conversion in mind.
It’s also expensive.
In an ideal world, each piece of content on your site or that you put out would be a pet. Your site would be the veritable cat lady of the internet. But that’s not realistic if you’ve got budget constraints. How do you choose what should be a pet and what can go to the slaughterhouse?
We recommend expert-written content for:
Third-party articles
Thought leadership content
Website copy
Download-driven content
Important research papers or white papers
Each of these kinds of pieces should be intentional to have maximum impact. Can they be written by AI? Sure. AI can write anything. But when the stakes are higher, I suggest defaulting to human-written.
When you need cattle
Cattle content doesn’t need to be moo-ving; it just needs to exist. Cattle content is there to stake your claim to internet territory and get your brand seen and found. This is content where you can lean on generative AI to build a content foundation.
We still recommend that a human read over it, touch it up, and make sure everything is right. While a bit of robotic weirdness isn’t the end of the world, it’s the equivalent of AI-generated photos of people with three-fingered claw hands: It’s a bit off.
Here’s when you need cattle content:
High volume SEO-targeted content
Social content—sometimes
Basically, AI is there to help you get your content out to pasture, and then your pets are there to herd the cattle and get results.
Are you sick of this metaphor yet?!
How we produce cattle content for our clients
Since Ellis and I started selling content marketing services three years ago, we’ve mostly been selling pets. But recently, our clients have been twisting our arms and saying, “Hey, we love your handmade content, but we need something more affordable. We can’t treat every piece of content like it’s a pet.”
Anyone can use an AI tool to build content for cheap. But not everyone can look at what the AI generates and see what needs improvement, be it in facts, writing style, or just human-ness. Especially for companies and startups that are more in the technical realm: It’s easy to get an AI article about technical subject, but it’s going to be at least one of these three things:
Incorrect
Vague
Incorrect and vague
So for clients with pet tastes but a cattle budget, we’re starting to offer content based on generative AI that gets polished by our expert eyes. Hands? Hands and eyes.
This isn’t just for us—it enables our clients to move faster and get bigger results.
When our clients win, we win.
