Darryl Gehly on AI-Driven Content Strategy and Brand Alignment at Skyword

1. How is your organization adapting its content marketing strategies to leverage AI-powered platforms ensuring alignment with brand voice and business objectives? 

At Skyword, we believe AI should work for your brand not the other way around. As more content starts to sound the same, standing out with a clear, authentic brand voice and a focused topic ownership strategy is more important than ever. So, when we think about using AI in content marketing, our priority is making sure it reinforces what makes our own brand and each of our clients’ brands unique its voice, tone, goals, audiences, and focus areas not just churning out generic content.

We engineered our AI-infused content marketing engine, Accelerator360™, to do this with our Configure tool. It’s designed to take in all those brand-specific inputs such as voice, tone, business goals, audience personas, and messaging themes and apply them across every AI-enabled function in the platform so that every piece of content aligns with the brand's identity and strategic objectives and the data that’s used to inform things like AI-generated assignment briefs and campaign plans is relevant and specific to the brand.

To make it easy, brands can simply input their website URL, and Accelerator360™ will automatically pre-fill their Configure fields. It analyzes how the brand is currently presenting itself, identifies inconsistencies or opportunities for improvement, and surfaces where conversations are happening around the topics the brand wants to influence. It also maps out key themes and offers strategic guidance on how the brand should show up in those conversations to lead, not just participate. All of this information is editable, but it’s another way we can use AI-powered insights to actually improve and refine brand identity and strategy rather than copy/pasting inputs from a brand book that might be dated and lack context.

We’re really focused on removing the friction that often comes with getting AI tools to stay ‘on-brand’. If your team has to spend more time fixing the output than it would’ve taken to create it themselves, the tool’s not doing its job. So our goal is to make brand alignment not just possible, but effortless. That way, marketers can spend less time rewriting or re-prompting and more time actually moving the strategy forward.

2. How are you integrating cross-channel content atomization into your marketing efforts to maximize ROI and maintain consistency across platforms? 

This is where the right AI can be a game-changer for marketing teams. It all starts with strategy. We don’t treat cross-channel content atomization as an afterthought it’s something we plan for from the beginning. We identify the high-value, “hero” content we want to lead with, knowing it’ll serve as the foundation for an entire ecosystem of supporting content.

Historically, scaling that ecosystem required a lot of manual effort from marketers and content creators. But with Accelerator360’s Atomize tool, we’ve dramatically changed that. Once we have expert-created, high-quality source material, we run it through Atomize, which instantly generates platform-native content tailored for social, email, blogs, PR, sales enablement, and more. It even adapts tone and messaging based on different audiences and use cases.

What really sets this apart is that it’s not just about automation it’s about relevance. Because we’ve baked in brand-specific inputs and understand how each channel behaves, every asset still feels true to the brand and the environment it lives in.

The impact on ROI is huge. You’re getting more like 10 to 20 times the output from a single asset, and it’s hitting the market faster without needing multiple teams to manually recreate content for each touchpoint. It’s more efficient, more consistent, and ultimately, more effective.

3. How does your organization track and analyze the performance of content assets, and how are these insights used to inform future content strategies? 

At Skyword, performance tracking is baked into everything we do, and it starts well before anything goes live. We pull from a mix of audience insights, channel data, and client-specific intelligence to shape our content strategies from the outset so we’re not guessing what will resonate, we’re informed by where there’s actual interest and intent. Some of that data comes from us and some from analyzing our clients’ existing analytics. 

Once content is in market, we track performance across all key touchpoints SEO and AIO rankings, social engagement, web traffic, email metrics, and how content is converting and influencing sales. This gives us a clear view of how the full content journey is working, from awareness to conversion. We like to track how content is driving key events in this process—so specific audience actions we set out to impact—which tends to help brands stay more focused on the big-picture than if we were to get stuck on optimizing for leading indicators. 

Those insights directly inform the next wave of strategy. We look at what topics and formats are landing, which channels are converting, how seasonality impacts engagement, and where we can fine-tune the message to better speak to the audience’s needs. All of that data gets fed into our system, so that the system and the strategy keeps getting smarter and more effective over time.

4. In what ways are you leveraging AI-generated briefs and performance-enhancing recommendations to improve content quality and efficiency? 

At Skyword, we’re using AI not just to create content faster—but to make it smarter from the start. And we do that with AI-generated briefs and recommendations in a few ways beyond initial content planning and ideation: 

With Accelerator360™, every AI-generated brief is fueled by a mix of the brand-specific intelligence I mentioned earlier and real-time competitive analysis. As the brief is being built, the AI scans the top-performing content for the topic, then crafts a brief designed to outperform it—while automatically adjusting the angle and tone to match the brand’s voice, audience, and strategy. It’s not just about ranking; it’s about standing out and being more helpful than what’s already out there.

Marketers can also access AI-powered suggestions in the content editing and review process—whether it’s for improving quality, adjusting tone, or fine-tuning formatting. And when it’s time for a final polish, our AI Copyedit option is available to give the content that last layer of refinement.

We’re just as focused on helping teams get more from the content they already have. In real-time, Accelerator360’s Audit & Optimize tool can scan all the content across a domain, subdomain, or specific URL, analyze its performance, and make both technical and qualitative optimization recommendations, based on the latest SEO best practices and what’s currently top-ranking on the topic. Our AI can then optimize the content for you automatically or you can choose to implement changes manually. So, even content refreshes are data-informed to ensure content is more competitive and aligned to what audiences are searching for at the moment. 

5. How is your organization preparing for emerging trends in content marketing, such as the integration of interactive and video content formats? 

At Skyword, we’re keeping a close eye on how AI can further enable and improve the creation of content formats like interactive media and video, but we’re doing it with a disciplined, client-first approach. While AI has made incredible strides, there are still some quality and governance hurdles when it comes to fully generating interactive and video content. We govern our adoption of this technology based on the quality of output, governance protecting our clients’ data, and ensuring what’s produced is authentic and ownable.

Right now, we use AI to support the content creation process for interactive designs and video where it makes the most sense. For example, we leverage AI and data to develop video scripts and design guidelines, which are then handed off to our global talent network of expert human creatives to bring to life. This hybrid approach ensures the final product meets the high standards our clients expect.

Looking ahead, we're preparing to accelerate this process even further. Soon, we’ll be able to atomize human-crafted source content into short-form visual stories instantly—giving brands even faster ways to amplify campaigns across multiple channels, without sacrificing quality or originality.

In short, we’re ready to adopt emerging formats as soon as the technology meets our standards and in the meantime, we’re making sure our clients have the best of both worlds: the efficiency of AI plus the creativity and craft of top human talent.

6. How are you ensuring that your content marketing approaches remain adaptable to changes in consumer behavior and technological advancements?

Adaptability is at the core of our content marketing approach. When we built Accelerator360™, we didn’t just design it to work with a single AI model or a fixed creative workflow—and we certainly didn’t leave out the human element. We intentionally built in the flexibility to tap into our global network of expert creative talent wherever it's needed. Having both AI and human-driven options isn’t just nice to have—it’s critical to staying adaptable in today’s environment.

On the AI side, Accelerator360™ leverages a dynamic mix of large language models currently more than nine each selected for their strengths in specific applications. This "plug-and-play" approach allows us to constantly match the right technology and talent to the task, whether it’s boosting creativity, ensuring brand consistency, speeding up production, or responding quickly to shifts in consumer behavior. As models improve or new ones become available, we are ready to make them available to our clients.

We understand that modern content marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s about balancing creativity, differentiation, quality, speed, modularity, audience insights, and brand authenticity while also managing time and budget realities. We are committed to giving our clients access to the best and latest technologies, but we always keep creativity and brand integrity at the center of everything we do.