Posts
AI art attention audience B2B original research brand guides care in content collaboration content distribution content experiments Content Frameworks content ROI content SMEs content strategy content systems content teams content theories content workflows customer-led content customers in your content data data reports documenting systems effort emotion in content good content good reads how to do research surveys interviewing SMEs LLMs making content MECE original research random acts of content readers reading roundups research research reports results social media taste thought leadership video video strategy what works in content
-
Every B2B brand striking oil these days gets their content marketing right by investing in buyer research so they can speak with and for customers, not to them.
-
How many of us—especially freelancers, or in-house folks assigning the work out to freelancers—start a project by determining the word count? And what would it take to loosen ourselves from its tyranny in content planning?
-
A creative brief is only useful when it gives the team a trigger (a.k.a. something the audience already feels strongly about) and frustration is one of the richest, most reliable triggers there is, because it’s specific and it’s emotional.
-
The instinct to strip negativity out of content/copy comes from the fear that anything negative will rub off on the brand. The problem with that line of thinking is that it doesn’t factor in how our brains work. And how our brains work is the foundation of all strategic marketing.
-
We’re living in the age of the great botoxification of content—everything nipped, tucked, and pulled to give you the illusion of perfection while remaining completely devoid of emotion. And that’s a big problem.
-
In content marketing, like in journalism, getting the question right determines the fate of your final piece. That’s where the art comes in.
-
Adaptability is one of the most important survival skills in this industry, and you don’t have to suddenly become a capital-C Creator to make videos that matter.
-
Original data is one of the best, most distributable assets in your content closet. And distribution outside of that one PDF is your best shot of putting it well within reach of the right people.
-
Many marketers assume the success of a research report comes down to promotion, distribution, or budget. In reality, the reports that perform best are usually shaped by decisions made much earlier in the process.
-
Genuine research requires you to move beyond the brief, into your audience’s world. Nothing in the system rewards that move, at least for 90% of companies out there. But the 10% that prioritize this publish content that survives algorithmic changes and shapes perceptions for years to come.
-
As B2B writers, we’ve accepted as gospel that a claim isn’t credible unless there’s a third-party claim to back it up. But I believe strongly that poorly used data is more detrimental to credibility than no data.
-
If AEO content is at least partially about building for robots, and we can engineer AI to do that work, it’s time to focus on the rest of content marketing.
-
I think perhaps the “so what” piece is the big question here. Like, what does it matter if humans have taste? Or if robots do or don’t?
-
Most content calendars start with keyword research and capturing historical search volumes. Mine starts with listening to how people actually talk about their problems.
-
In animation, as with any creative discipline, your results are only as good as the system behind it. The same is true for content marketing.
-
Four things I read online this month that I’m still thinking about
-
Here’s the diagnosis hiding underneath most B2B content strategies: they default to the same two or three psychological jobs — inform me, guide me, advise me — and treat every other reason an audience might seek out content as someone else’s concern.
-
Your website is still a practical, powerful tool for talking to your entire audience – both the humans and the robots.
-
It’s the single biggest unlock that has made our AI-assisted work actually good instead of just okay.
-
Taste is a subset of judgment that’s inseparable from the person exercising it — a word for what’s at once skilled, and yet distinctly personal and human.
-
I have done time in the internal comms trenches, and I’m grateful for it because it showed me how vital it is—for both the effectiveness of your marketing and the health of your organization—that what you say externally reflects what people experience internally.
-
Nobody (external) cares about your content because nobody (internal) cares about your content. Your B2B content may be more interesting now, but still, it remains unmemorable because there is no real emotion behind it.
-
The storyteller renaissance seems like a return to thoughtful, people-centered content against the backdrop of bottomless AI slop. I think it’s a Trojan horse that could open the floodgates to more random acts of content.
-
More and more I wanted something concrete, a process for determining “when is this done?” After hours of building variations and trying to account for every corner case, I admitted that SOPs for choosing “done” on every piece of content weren’t happening. Instead, I’ve moved toward a three-part framework: purpose, limitations, value.
-
To that end, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about empathy in content. Not in terms of your audience (that’s kind of a given, right?), but in terms of the people you encounter in the process of creating content.
-
The more I think about the cognitive context modern audiences encounter content within, the more I believe content marketing is set up to fail without a narrative strategy.
-
I’ve always based my understanding of content marketing on a fairly simplistic set of assumptions. But I’ve recently noticed that I’ve been making another implicit assumption, one that doesn’t quite hold up.
-
Blogs used to be a way to connect with people. Then, at some point, they transformed into a bait that was focused more about getting people onto your site than saying something interesting once they got there.