The job of the modern content marketer is changing
My job looks pretty different to what it did two years ago. Same title, same team, same broad remit - strategy, narrative, CEO and CMO alignment, PR, social, ABM support, quality bar, team performance. But at least 60% of my time goes toward building agentic workflows.
Content engineering is what we call it.
The way I think about it - my job has moved from writing the playbook to building the system that runs it. I'm identifying every process in my team where someone is burning time on grunt work, the kind of work that used to be unavoidable, but isn't anymore. Copy-pasting between documents. Reformatting. Following a twelve-step SOP that someone wrote when we had no other option. All of that is now something I can systematise, automate, and hand over to an agent.
Take PR writing. Someone on my team brings a brief to the system, puts it in, and the agent writes the PR. It goes through the right guardrails, it comes out on-brand, and the person responsible for that piece now spends their time reviewing and refining. Working day sorted.
Same story with SEO. I've built a workflow that surfaces ranking opportunities from our Google Search Console data and queues up briefs for blogs to capture them, on autopilot. The person responsible gets an email, follows a defined process, and moves it through to publication. Your team gets to do quality work because the system handles the heavy thinking first.
Building a well-governed agentic workflow almost replaces the need for traditional SOPs. You set up the agent correctly in a controlled internal application with clear inputs and outputs, and it becomes the standard operating procedure. Training someone new means onboarding them into the app, making sure they understand why they're doing what they're doing, and then they press buttons and things happen for them. The SOP is the system - lighter, faster to learn, and significantly harder to ignore.
The modern content leader has to be honest with themselves about whether they're building this or not. Because the teams that are - their output looks faster, more consistent, and polished well beyond what the headcount would suggest. Quietly, then all at once.
The real gift to your team, if you get this right, is that they stop spending their best hours on the stuff no one ever wanted to do in the first place. They get to their drafts faster, from a solid knowledge base, on-brand. And then they have actual time to think - why are we creating this, who is it for, what does it need to do, and how do we make it as good as it possibly can be.
That's where creative energy belongs. Getting it their is the job.