Why We Started Air Traffic Control

Air Traffic Control came out of a place of deep empathy for content marketers. We've been in those trenches, too. This is the about how we all climb out.

We were tired.

Just like everyone else, we were tired of checking all the field values. Building the segments.

"Did we tag all the content?"

"Wait, when's the last time we reviewed our tag taxonomy? Did we include the new industry tags?"

"Nothing's coming up in the dynamic content logic."

[shuts computer, sighs]

"I'll crack at this again tonight after the kids are in bed."

This is no 👏 way 👏 to 👏 live 👏.

There had to be a better way.

And it started with breaking down the problem. Like... really breaking it down.

We're not of the belief that segments are irrelevant. Sometimes you have something super valuable to share with everyone in [INDUSTRY]. Say it.

But there were things we heard from content marketers over and over that felt like they shouldn't be happening:

"I can't tell you how many times we'll get done with a campaign and realize all the content we'd written had essentially been written at some point before. So much wasted time."

Or how about this one:

"My content is collecting dust! We write it, push it, forget it."

The process that content marketers followed was pretty consistent ->

• Who are we reaching out to?
• What's the message we have for them?
• Where are we going to push that message?

The target audience tended to be fairly well understood in big places and really small places. Mid-sized orgs? Not so much. Structure would break down a bit as they evolved from their first tight ideal customer profile (ICP) to their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th addressable markets.

A problem, but not the crux of the bigger issue.

It was the messaging issue that was pervasive.

There was marketing input. Sales input. Product input. Subject Matter Expert (SME) input.

These ideas would pile up in places like Notion and Google Docs.

Then it would come time to write. Every. Single. Time. They'd write. I would write. I and my marketing teams had done this exact same thing for years.

So now we've got our audience and our content. It's time to push that out. We'd push to social. Craft some outbound marketing emails. Tee up follow on sequences for sales reps. Painstakingly wire up dynamic logic on the website to switch out a message here and a banner there based on segment logic because, hey, who gets to ever be focusing on just one segment?

Over. And over. And over again.

The Epiphany

It isn't all doom and gloom, y'all. For all the English majors still with us, here's where math has come to save your tail. 🙏

With all the hype around GPT-4, it can be easy to forget some of the pre-cursors to Natural Language Generation; namely Natural Language Processing (NLP).

In the simplest terms, NLP is able to recognize what the most important words are in a document along with all kinds of interesting insights like how positive or negative those terms are, their importance, and even their relationships to other words in the same document (and elsewhere).

When we had NLP take a look at the average archive of content a marketing team had built up over the years, it would identify thousands of unique topics that had already been covered. And, nearly every single time, they could be relevant to nearly any customer or prospect using that existing content.

And here's the kicker: even for young companies with a handful of content, they'd still have covered a lot of ground.

If there's one mantra content strategists beat their drums over its repurposing content. This is THE most significant content repurposing opportunity.

So we figured out what the content was all about in the richest way. We looked to see what people were interested in based on prior engagement and other data. And, voila, we could make recommendations for each person.

The fun thing is that to take advantage of those recommendations you just drop them into emails and web pages with merge tags. Seriously. Just merge tags.

Make use of ALL of your content. Talk to humans like humans. Wire up less complex logic. And trade your post dinner laptop sesh out for Netflix or bedtime stories with the kids or a night out. For your humanity.

We've been in those tough trenches and we're excited to be here with and for all of you towards the most exciting age in marketing. The age of personalization.

Onwards and upwards.