Posts
AEO AI art attention audience B2B original research blogging brand guides care in content collaboration content distribution content for humans content formats Content Frameworks content strategy content teams content theories content workflows conversations data data-driven conent data reports documenting systems effort email content emotion in content good content good reads how to do research surveys JTBD LLMs making content narrative strategy original research quality content random acts of content reading roundups research research reports scaling content SEO SME interviews social media taste thought leadership
-
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.