One of the biggest challenges to achieving content impact is a lack of people. That’s the word from the senior content marketers who answered the Contently 2023 State of Content Marketing survey. The Great Resignation that began in 2021 continued through all of last year, and Quiet Quitting added more pressure, stretching content teams thin and leading many to seek more content marketers for hire.

How are marketers planning to address those talent challenges? By hiring, developing, and augmenting. Read on to find out what that looks like.

Content Needs to Hire More People

Despite significant employee turnover, the unemployment rate across the U.S. remained at or below 4 percent throughout 2022. That made it a seller’s market for content, including for knowledge workers with digital marketing skills.

We saw that come through in the survey responses. When asked about the challenges of creating great content, 65 percent of respondents included a lack of people resources among the answers. When asked to name the biggest challenge, the largest share, 33 percent, also said a lack of people.

For comparison, a lack of financial resources came in as the biggest challenge for the second-largest share of respondents. That is 15 percent—less than half of those that emphasized a shortage of people.

The obvious consequence is that businesses need to start posting that they want a content marketer for hire if they hope to improve impact. Fortunately, that is exactly what they are doing.

Content Is Developing Skills in the People It Has

Eighty percent of respondents plan to invest in 2023 to grow the impact of their content. Those investments come in two forms, summed up as “do more by hiring more” and “do more with what we have.”

Accessing more people involves hiring more staff or hiring more contractors and agencies. Hiring more full-time staff is in the plan for 23 percent of respondents, and expanding agency usage is on deck for more than 30 percent.*

The second approach of doing more with the people already on the team comes through investments in skill development—which more than 50 percent intend to do in 2023. Skill development can come in the form of online learning platforms, trainings, conference attendance, and so on.

Growing project management skills, named by 38 percent of respondents, caught our eye, in particular for the way it can make teams more productive and therefore increase the outputs of the people you have. With clear processes, expectations, and information, content teams spend more time creating and less time tracking down information or revising copy because the audience or goals were poorly defined.

Finally, it’s worth noting that 29 percent of respondents said their approach to driving impact in 2023 included investments in technology to measure content ROI—key for identifying what works and what doesn’t so content teams can focus on the projects that will drive strategic results.

*Note: Respondents could give more than one answer to the question about what capabilities their organization plans to invest in to grow content marketing impact. As a result, the percentages are non-mutually exclusive.

Content Hope to Augment Humans With AI

Content marketers are leveraging AI content generators for text—like Jasper.ai, Copy.ai, and ChatGPT—and for static images—like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Jasper Art.

In fact, fourteen percent of respondents say they used generative AI in 2022 and an additional 23 percent plan to deploy it in 2023. That’s a 160 percent growth rate!

New solutions are launching every day, including for video generation, which only saw inklings of activity in 2022 but is fast following. With AI, enterprises can produce far more content than they could hope to generate with human creators.

What’s Next?

Investing in the people and the skills to produce great content sets marketing leaders up for a successful year. In particular, your people will be at the forefront of your ability to take advantage of the key marketing trends of AI, ROI, and personalization.

To learn more, download the full State of Content Marketing 2023 report.