Polished copy is easy now with AI. You can quickly write blog posts, social campaigns, video scripts, thought leadership essays, white papers, and podcasts at scale across every imaginable format and channel. And yet, after the content is published, it’s quickly forgotten.

What now separates authentic, smart content from forgettable (and sometimes regrettable) non-strategic content is taste.

When every piece of content imaginable is easy to make, deciding what not to make becomes the real work. The brands pulling ahead of everyone else are the ones making taste a core element of their content creation process.

Taste describes the ability to consistently distinguish what fits from what doesn’t. It’s an exercise in judgment about what deserves to exist in the first place. Taste is a skill that enables content teams to determine what’s worth an audience’s time from what merely fills a content calendar.

The Judgment Call

It used to be that content teams, measured by their ability to produce faster, more efficiently, at higher volume, had the advantage. But this edge has dulled as content has become a commodity. It’s simply not good enough to have “good enough” content.

Content that can be easily produced by tools and systems is competent and fluent by default. What’s often missing is judgment.

Judgement can’t be commoditized. Judgement is thinking. It’s like when a content team takes a dozen viable ideas and chooses only the three worth pursuing. When a person instinctively reframes a piece and trims it down so that what’s being communicated is genuine and advances the message, they’re making a judgment call.

Editors have always known what’s worth making and what’s best left out. The sharpest content teams are taking their cue from editors and gaining a competitive edge.

More Content Isn’t The Same as More Impact

Most organizations default to pursuing more content. More blog posts. More thought leadership. But publishing everything without taste doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

Brands also risk diluting their message when they overload their audience with content. According to Accenture, 74% of empowered consumers walked away from purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed. Content overload works the same way. What readers want is clarity. If they get that from the content they read, they stay and reward brands with their trust. Bore or bombard them with content, and they often leave quietly.

The trap of producing more content is seductive because the metrics lag behind the damage. Publishing more can keep the pageviews and open rates looking fine for months, even as readers slowly lose interest. By the time the decline shows up in the numbers, the problem has been compounding for a long time—because nobody was asking whether any of it was worth making.

What “Taste” Actually Means

Taste sounds inherently subjective. You either have, or you don’t. But in practice, it’s far more concrete than its reputation suggests.

Content guardrails tell you what to do or not to do. For example, brand guidelines tell brands how to sound. Taste takes on a harder question: What’s actually worth making?

Creative taste involves a clear sense of what fits and what doesn’t. Organizations that have it know their own voice well enough that they don’t need to watch what other brands are doing (though your content is also competing for a spot in AI-generated answers).

Brands using taste to their advantage accept that not every audience segment will be served by every piece. They also know that there’s a payoff to being opinionated when it serves the strategy, because the safest content is often the least memorable.

Codifying Taste Without Killing Creativity

Taste can be scalable when shared, but avoid the temptation of turning “taste” into a checklist or formula. How can you define taste in a structured way so that creativity flourishes?

First: Show, don’t tell. Nothing communicates taste faster than showing people what good looks like and what it doesn’t. Collections of the brand’s best work, annotated with notes on why it works, give teams a reference point far more useful than abstract principles alone.

Second: Set clear principles. Principles can help lock in content teams to what taste is, as long as the principles are clear. An example, “We explain, we don’t lecture,” sets a standard while allowing for interpretation. Principles point content teams in a direction. But they also need freedom to experiment and adapt messaging without going off-brand.

The balance that works is shared standards plus human discretion. The system provides the framework. The people provide the judgment.

Editors Were Right All Along

As the volume of potential content grows, the need for experienced judgment grows with it. Senior editors and creative directors are filters. They’re the members of the team who look at a week’s worth of planned output and ask whether it actually says anything new.

Senior editorial leaders don’t just catch errors or enforce style guides; they decide whether content is worth sharing with the world. They set the standard for what makes sense while serving as a bridge between strategy and creative execution.

From a business standpoint, investing in strong editorial leadership helps manage risk. Any piece of content that falls short costs the company something, such as audience attention, brand reputation, or internal resources. Leaders who prevent mediocre work from being published help protect the value that’s hard to recover once it’s lost.

Taste Offers A Real Creative Advantage

The future of content belongs to teams who can say, with confidence, this is us, this isn’t, and this is worth your time.

Content creation will get easier as tools get better. Taste remains the throughline that keeps brands coherent, credible, and distinct.

The volume of content will keep increasing. But the organizations that treat editorial judgment as a strategic asset will be the ones whose content still matters five years from now.

Building that kind of editorial capability doesn’t happen by accident. It takes experienced leadership, shared systems, and a commitment to quality over quantity. Connect with Contently to work with expert managing editors who can help your team develop the taste and judgment that turns content from output into advantage.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

How do I build “taste” into my team if we don’t have a senior editor?

You may not have a senior editor yet, but you can still take key steps to establish “taste” guidelines for your team. First, gather five to ten pieces that your team thinks are their best work and note why each one succeeded. This will be your “taste” reference set. Next, create two or three clear editorial principles to guide decisions, but flexible enough to encourage creativity. Keep updating the reference set and refining the principles over time, revisiting them every quarter.

How do I convince leadership that publishing less content is the right move?

Leadership will likely want more. So offer a new perspective—too much content can weaken the brand and reduce trust. Also, producing too much can stretch resources thin, resulting in team burnout. Then connect the idea of less content to real results, such as the pipeline, engagement, or earned media generated in the last two quarters. Compare that data to the total output. Usually, a small portion of content drives most of the results. This data helps make your case.

How long does it take to see results after shifting from volume to judgment?

Plan for one full quarter. In month one, review past work and set standards. The team uses them on new projects in month two. By month three, expect results: better engagement, fewer revisions, and clearer priorities. This information will give your team a stronger understanding of what’s worth creating. Be sure to agree on this timeline with leadership before starting.

The post The Future of Content Belongs to the Tastemakers appeared first on Contently.

That model is breaking down.

In AI-driven discovery environments, your content is no longer competing with other brands in the traditional sense. Instead of vying for attention and eyeballs, now you’re competing to show up in the language, examples, and assumptions AI systems use in their answers.

The first step is to survive the summarization process. Here are some tips on how to write for the “idea ecosystem.”

The New Model

When someone asks a system like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews a question, the system constructs an answer assembled from many sources at once. Your content enters that system as raw material, and exits recomposed alongside other inputs.

What matters, then, is whether any part of your brand’s messaging shapes the response the system generates. The pinnacle of success is making such an impression on one of the major LLMs that you do get cited by name. A second-best outcome is seeing your terminology or logic show up consistently in AI-generated answers, even if your brand doesn’t.

While on its face, “no attribution” sounds like a raw deal, being cited by AI, even tangentially, can make a difference in multiple stages of the sales funnel. If AI repeatedly explains a category using your logic, buyers may later:

• recognize your language on your site
• hear your pitch as familiar rather than promotional
• perceive alignment instead of persuasion

When it comes time to make a decision, this familiarity can make your product or service feel like the obvious fit.

What Actually Survives AI Compression (and What Doesn’t)

Ideas that survive compression tend to function as anchors; they give the system something stable to organize around. Examples might include a clear model for thinking about a problem, or an original benchmark that gives the system a reference point. Content that introduces structure or, better yet, new and valuable data is a boon. (This is one of the reasons we’re seeing a rise in branded benchmark reports and flagship research these days.)

Generic content rarely provides that. Familiar advice and widely repeated tips dissolve into the background because they don’t change how the system understands the topic.

A sharply argued position, on the other hand, gives the system something to work with. Instead of blending seamlessly into everything else, it helps organize other inputs. This is why original language matters—but not as ornamentation. Distinct terminology can make an idea easier for AI to find and surface.

How Marketers Need to Rethink Content Strategy

Content can no longer be treated as an asset that drives traffic; it needs to function as a source of durable ideas that persist across platforms and summarization layers. That means prioritizing clarity over cleverness. A clear definition or straightforward, compelling original data point will travel farther than a witty headline.

It also means investing in strong framing. If you can name a concept, structure it, and make it easy to restate accurately, you increase the odds it will persist.

It means using memorable language: Not buzzwords or jargon, but precise, specific phrasing that’s hard to replace with a generic equivalent.

And it means recognizing that safe, consensus-driven content is the most vulnerable to erasure. If your article says what everyone else is saying, it contributes nothing distinct to the compression process. It becomes filler.

This is uncomfortable for brands that have built content strategies around avoiding risk. But in an environment where AI systems blend dozens of voices into one, the riskiest move is to have no distinct voice at all.

The New Competitive Set: Ideas

AI doesn’t care about brand equity the way human readers do. A Reddit comment with a sharp insight can outcompete a polished whitepaper if the insight is more distinct and easier to compress; an academic study with clear findings can overshadow your thought leadership if the findings are more specific.

This levels the playing field in some ways, but it also raises the bar.

If your content strategy was built for the old model, now’s the time to audit. Here are a series of questions to ask when evaluating existing and planned content for AI search:

• If this article were compressed into a single sentence, would our core idea survive? Would our framing survive? Would our name?
• Is this content safe or generic? How can we make it stand out?
• What can we say about this topic, product, or sector that nobody else is saying? What language can we use that’s distinct, or what point of view can we “own”?
• If a buyer encountered this idea elsewhere later, would they recognize it as ours?

Idea persistence is the new metric. It’s time to start measuring for it.

Learn how Contently helps brands build content strategies designed for clarity, resilience, and long-term impact. Get in touch.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Does this mean SEO no longer matters?

No. SEO still plays a role, especially for discovery and authority signals. But it’s no longer sufficient on its own. Ranking well doesn’t guarantee influence if your ideas disappear during summarization.

How can we tell if our ideas are influencing AI answers?

You won’t see a single metric. Signals tend to be indirect: recurring language in AI-generated responses, familiar framing appearing across tools, or prospects repeating your terminology in conversations. Influence shows up over time, not in dashboards.

Is AI attribution realistic for most brands?

It depends on the category and the role your content plays in the buying journey. Direct citation does happen, especially in product-led or comparison-driven searches, but it’s inconsistent and difficult to control. For most brands—particularly those operating in crowded or concept-driven categories—the more reliable goal is idea adoption. Attribution should be treated as an upside, not the baseline measure of success.

The post Your Content Isn’t Just Competing With Other Brands Anymore appeared first on Contently.

If it feels like every vendor suddenly has a “State of Something” report, you’re not imagining it. Benchmark studies and branded data have become the new calling cards of content marketing.

While blog posts and brand manifestos still have their place in the ecosystem, they rarely break through on their own anymore. Content fatigue has reached critical mass, and audiences simply scroll past “5 tips for better marketing” articles. At the same time, AI search has changed the SEO game and raised the bar for credibility; in order to rank and get cited by large language models, marketers need original insights no one else can offer.

One solution emerging across industries has been to double down on proprietary data. From HubSpot’s State of Marketing to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, companies are mining their unique data assets to create content that commands attention, drives citations, and builds lasting authority.

Here’s why the trend is on the rise — and why it works.

Why Now? The AI Search Effect

When ChatGPT answers a question about average email open rates or Perplexity summarizes industry trends, these AI systems pull from sources with transparent, compelling data and authoritative positioning. Branded benchmarking reports check these boxes by providing structured, factual content with clear methodologies and context.

Even in a “zero click” scenario, your brand still benefits from being cited as the source of record. There can be a compounding effect to such attributions: When your report becomes the default data point for “average B2B sales cycle length” or “content marketing budget allocation,” you gain visibility across thousands of AI-generated responses, journalist articles, analyst reports, and competitor presentations. Each mention amplifies your brand’s authority, and the qualified traffic that does flow back to your domain is more likely to convert than traffic from traditional SEO.

How Benchmarking Reports Drive Value

Smart marketing leaders recognize benchmarking reports deliver measurable value across three critical dimensions:

Public Relations Impact

Proprietary data transforms your brand into a media magnet. Journalists constantly hunt for fresh statistics to anchor their stories. When you publish exclusive insights about industry trends, you hand them ready-made hooks — and the result is earned media coverage that would cost six figures through traditional PR campaigns.

Pipeline Generation

Whether gated or ungated, benchmarking reports tend to attract high-intent prospects. Gated reports identify serious buyers willing to exchange contact information for valuable insights, and ungated versions can maximize reach by getting your data in front of analysts and influencers.

Trust and Authority

Publishing rigorous, methodology-driven research signals deep expertise. You shift from vendor to trusted advisor. Transparent methodology matters here — you’ll want to ensure you’re clearly explaining data sources, sample sizes, and analysis methods to give readers confidence in the validity of your findings.

What It Takes to Create a Report That Sticks

Building a benchmarking report that achieves these outcomes requires strategic planning across a few key areas:

Data Sourcing Strategy

Start with data only you possess, like first-party usage data from your platform that provides unmatched insights competitors cannot replicate. Combine this with customer surveys or supplement with subject matter expert quotes for qualitative depth. Aggregate and anonymize to protect individual customer data while revealing category-wide patterns.

Design and Format Excellence

The most successful reports balance comprehensive analysis with scannable highlights. Transform raw data into compelling visual stories by partnering with designers who understand data visualization. Create charts that reveal insights at a glance. Write copy that explains why the data matters, not just what it shows. Package statistics as “snackable” social media content, and include downloadable one-pagers for easy sharing.

Multi-Channel Distribution

Great data dies without strong distribution. To maximize impact, launch your report with coordinated campaigns across PR, social media, email, webinars, and sales enablement. Create tiered assets: executive summary for time-pressed leaders, full report for practitioners, slide decks for internal sharing, etc. And don’t forget to train sales teams to reference key statistics during their conversations with prospective clients.

Optimizing for Citations

You’ll also want to structure your content for maximum quotability and citability by AI engines. To boost discoverability, use descriptive subheadings that work as standalone facts, and be sure to create FAQ sections addressing common questions. Build infographics for visual learners, and implement schema markup to help search engines understand your data. Include methodology sections that establish credibility and, finally, make statistics easy to cite with clear sourcing guidelines.

Consistent Refresh Cadence

A report is only as valuable as it is current. To keep your data fresh, commit to regular updates, e.g. annually for comprehensive reports, quarterly for trend data. Mark your calendar now: If you launch in January, start data collection in October. Teasing an ongoing data initiative creates anticipation and provides reasons for re-engagement.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Even with the best intentions and compelling data, a few critical mistakes can undermine even well-executed benchmarking reports. Here are three to avoid:

Weak Methodology

Small sample sizes and cherry-picked data can destroy your credibility. Invest in rigorous methodology, even if it means less favorable results. Consider partnering with research professionals if your own team doesn’t have the resources necessary to produce a truly top-notch report. And always disclose limitations or margins of error.

Sales-First Content

Readers — both humans and machines — detect and reject reports that exist primarily to promote products. Focus on category-wide insights, include competitor data where relevant, and save product mentions for subtle footer CTAs.

Underinvesting in Distribution

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your report is if nobody reads it. Budget 40% of project resources for distribution and amplification. That number may sound daunting, but without aggressive distribution, even the most groundbreaking data won’t move the needle.

The Future of Authority Marketing

The window of opportunity is open now, but it won’t be forever. Categories without established benchmark reports offer first-mover advantages. So, it’s a good idea to start now: Begin by auditing your data assets, surveying your customers, or analyzing your platform metrics. Then, transform these insights into the authoritative report your industry needs but doesn’t yet have.

As AI search changes how information is surfaced and cited, the brands supplying reliable benchmarks will own the reference points that everyone else leans on. Those who wait risk competing in categories already defined by others’ data.

Need help turning raw data into a report that drives citations and pipeline? Talk to Contently about building your next benchmark study.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

What makes a benchmarking report different from a white paper?

A white paper typically presents a company’s perspective or solution, while a benchmarking report is rooted in original data and industry-wide trends. The latter is designed to be cited, compared against, and referenced as an objective standard.

How much data do I need to publish a credible benchmarking report?

There’s no magic number, but larger sample sizes improve credibility. What matters most is transparency: Clearly explain your methodology, sample size, and any limitations so readers trust your findings.

What resources are required to create a strong benchmarking report?

Successful reports usually require collaboration across data, design, and distribution. This might mean partnering with research specialists, investing in design for clarity and impact, and budgeting a sizable share for promotion.

The post Why Branded Benchmarking Reports Are Everywhere Right Now appeared first on Contently.

Most of these assets lived squarely in marketing’s owned-and-operated channels. But sometime over the past decade, “content” stopped fitting neatly inside the marketing department. It has now spilled into every corner of the customer experience: product UI copy, customer support scripts, help-center articles, checkout flows, push notifications, and content to live on whatever buzzy new platform will inevitably debut next quarter.

The rise of AI Search represents another turning point. LLM and AI Search experiences often pull from authoritative and widely corroborated sources; brands with consistent, high-quality coverage tend to be cited more. It stands to reason that the more unified a message your brand delivers across every element of the digital ecosystem, the more likely it is that message will make it into AI-generated outputs.

As a result of all of the above, we’re seeing content career opportunities evolve. More and more companies are hiring roles like “Head of Content Experience” and “Director of Content Design,” marking a shift in how organizations think about the choreography of brand storytelling across multiple channels. In the past, marketing teams focused on what to say and where to publish it — landing pages, campaign assets, maybe a few gated PDFs. Today, the mandate is more ambitious: Design the entire content journey so that every touchpoint feels frictionless.

Why Content Experience Matters

With so many platforms and content formats competing for customer attention, brands face a real consistency challenge. People want to feel like the same company that reeled them in during a short-form video ad is also the one answering their questions clearly in a help article or walking them through a checkout process.

While a cohesive brand voice isn’t necessarily a silver bullet for sales, it can make your brand feel more professional and trustworthy. Salesforce research has found that 69% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. At the same time, trust in corporations is reaching all-time lows; nearly three-quarters (72%) of consumers trust brands less than they did a year ago. 

In this climate, inconsistency can further chip away at confidence. Content experience is one of the levers brands can pull to counteract that.

Content Experience, Design, and Strategy: How Are They Different, and Where Do They Overlap?

Unlike content marketing, which often treats messaging as standalone assets, content experience treats content as infrastructure. It involves building the scaffolding that makes every interaction feel connected, from first click to task completion.

Here’s how the different roles tend to break down:

• Content Strategist: Sets the big-picture plan for what content to create, for whom, and why. They define voice/tone guidelines, editorial calendars, governance rules, and KPIs. A strategist might determine that the brand needs a library of onboarding tutorials, but they aren’t usually the ones crafting the microcopy inside the product.
• Content Designer: Works closely with UX and product teams to shape in-product copy and flows. They focus on clarity, accessibility, and task completion, writing for things like error messages, navigation labels, onboarding prompts, and help center articles — typically in the context of the interface.
• Content Experience Lead: Operates between strategy and design, with a systems lens. They ensure that content is consistent, discoverable, and adaptive across channels. This can include building modular content systems, implementing personalization logic, managing taxonomies, and coordinating delivery across web, app, email, and emerging platforms.

Unlike with traditional content marketing roles, content design and experience are not so much about producing more assets, but orchestrating existing ones into a coherent, user-friendly whole. The goal is to make sure that no matter where a customer encounters your brand — in an AI Search snippet, a push notification, or a complex product workflow — it feels like part of the same conversation.

These roles aren’t meant to work in silos; their real value shows when they collaborate across the full content lifecycle. A content strategist might partner with a content experience lead to ensure the high-level editorial vision translates into modular, reusable components that can live across multiple platforms. 

That same experience lead might work side by side with content designers to embed those components into product flows and ensure they’re consistent with voice, tone, and accessibility standards. In mature teams, these roles often sit in a shared content or UX organization, but they also act as liaisons to marketing, product, and customer support. The collaboration is cyclical: Strategy informs experience, experience informs design, and design feedback helps refine strategy.

Applying the Mindset Without a Dedicated Hire

You don’t need a Head of Content Experience to start thinking like one. Even without a specialized team, small shifts can move your organization toward a more cohesive, user-first content experience.

Here’s a quick-start playbook:

1. Audit your most important journeys

Map your top user tasks — whether that’s signing up for a trial, upgrading a plan, or finding help — across your site, docs, product UI, and support channels. Look for language gaps, redundant steps, or tonal mismatches that create friction or confusion.

2. Treat content as a design component

Work with your design system or dev team to bake voice, tone, terminology, and content patterns into the same place you keep visual components. If those standards live in your CMS and design files, they’re easier to apply consistently.

3. Create space for cross-functional reviews

Bring marketing, UX, and product teams into the same (virtual) room to critique real user flows. A quick “ad → landing page → trial → help doc” run-through can surface tone shifts and clarity issues that siloed reviews miss.

4. Pilot fixes in high-impact areas

You don’t have to revamp everything at once. Try a small, visible project like:

• • Launching a unified glossary so marketing, product, and support all use the same terms.
  • Applying progressive disclosure in onboarding copy to reduce overwhelm and speed up activation.

5. Give teams a cheat sheet

A single-page “language patterns” guide covering voice, tone, and terminology gives everyone a quick reference. When in doubt, they’ll have a shared source of truth.

While there’s a lot up in the air right now about the future of content (and the careers in this space), there’s one consistency we can count on: New channels will keep emerging. AI will keep reshaping how people discover and evaluate brands. The best way to future-proof your message is to make sure it already works everywhere — and that’s exactly what content experience thinking delivers.

At Contently, we help brands put these principles into practice, from developing voice and tone guides to creating modular, multi-channel content systems that keep messaging consistent everywhere your audience meets you. Learn more about our services, including our AI Studio, here.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. Do I need to hire all three roles — content strategist, content designer, and content experience lead?

Not necessarily. Many companies start by layering content experience thinking into existing roles. If you can’t staff all three, focus on cross-functional collaboration between marketing, UX, and product, and look for people who can work across silos.

2. How is “content experience” different from just good UX writing?

UX writing focuses on the clarity and usefulness of in-product copy. Content experience zooms out to orchestrate how all content — in product, marketing, and support — works together, so it feels like one cohesive brand conversation.

3. What’s the first step if my organization isn’t ready for a full content design or experience hire?

Start with an audit of your most important customer journeys and create a shared “language patterns” guide for all teams. Even small steps toward consistency can pay off quickly in trust, usability, and discoverability.

The post Strategy, Experience, Design: The Roles Redefining Content in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

You scramble to explain how that blog series probably helped a few deals move forward. You gesture vaguely at that product explainer video that likely nudged some prospects along. You say “engagement” a few times. And the CFO nods — but not in the good way.

Marketing budgets have plateaued at 7.7% of company revenue for two consecutive years, according to Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey. At the same time, the Content Marketing Institute finds that fewer than half of B2B marketers say their organization measures content performance accurately.

Flat budgets and fuzzy metrics aren’t a sustainable combo. To keep your seat at the table (and your budget intact), here are five plays that tie content to revenue in ways your finance team will actually care about.

1. Track Every Pass on the Field

If you’re only tracking last-click conversions, you’re missing half the game. Most content does its best work long before someone fills out a form by tackling intangibles — planting ideas, building trust, and answering questions a simple product page just doesn’t cover.

To show that impact, start mapping each asset to a stage in the buyer journey: Awareness, Consideration, or Decision. Then connect those stages to your CRM or marketing automation platform, so when a deal closes, you can see the full content trail behind it.

How to start:

• Look back at the past few quarters of content
• Assign a stage to each piece (gut instinct is fine to start)
• Add those tags to your lead or opportunity records going forward

This doesn’t need to be perfect or overly technical. Even a simple tagging system can surface patterns — like that one product-focused blog that keeps showing up in early-stage deals. Once you spot an asset like that, you can double down on its strengths or repurpose it for sales enablement.

2. Graduate to Multi-Touch Scoring

Content doesn’t win deals alone and rarely wins on the last touch. Think about the webinar a customer watched before even talking to sales —  those moments matter. And they don’t typically show up in a last-click report.

That’s where multi-touch attribution comes in. It spreads credit across the full buyer journey so you can see which pieces actually pull their weight, even if they don’t get the glory of the final click.

There are plenty of examples of this process in action. Take, for instance, NineTwoThree Studio. The product design and engineering firm — a Contently client — used time-decay attribution to link AI-optimised articles to ChatGPT-driven sessions and generated more than $1 million in qualified leads within 90 days. The firm now ranks in the top results for 92% of its target AI queries.

You don’t need a team of data scientists to get started. Tools like GA4, Adobe, or even a well-structured spreadsheet can help you test different models, like:

• Linear, where every touch gets equal credit
• Time-decay, where newer touches get more weight
• Position-based, where you emphasize the first and last touch

Simple first steps:

• Grab six months of data from your CRM or analytics tool.
• Try out a basic model — even just assigning 40% to the last touch, 30% to the one before it, and so on.
• Compare it to your current reporting. Which pieces show up that you’ve been ignoring?

Chances are, a few early- or mid-funnel assets will suddenly look like quiet power players. And once you know what’s working, you can invest more strategically (and stop chasing disappearing clicks).

Contently’s analytics make this process even easier. Our Content Value dashboard automatically maps every asset you create on the platform to the buyer journey, and showcases how each piece contributes to pipeline, revenue, and retention. You can dig into performance by asset type, persona, funnel stage, or even custom goals, all without wrangling a mess of spreadsheets. Customers using this dashboard report seeing multi-million-dollar organic ROI and average audience growth of 40% in six months.

3. Trade Vanity for Value Metrics

Executives aren’t looking for vibes. They’re looking for value. So it’s time to swap out vanity metrics like views, likes, and bounce rates for numbers that actually tie to revenue.

Two great ones to start with:

• Cost per Assisted Opportunity: how much you spent on a content cluster, divided by the number of deals it helped close.
• Net SEO Value: a rough estimate of what your organic traffic would’ve cost if you’d paid for it via search ads.

Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin formula:

Net SEO Value = (Organic Sessions × Avg CPC) – Content Costs

If that number beats your paid search ROI, you’ve got yourself a strong case for more investment in content — and fewer eyebrow raises at budget time.

The point of this exercise is to speak in a language your finance team already understands: efficiency, cost-per, and net return. When content starts showing up in those terms, it stops sounding like a gamble.

4. Turn Data Into Boardroom Stories

If you want your content program to resonate in the boardroom, ditch the 10-tab deck and boil it down to one powerful slide per initiative — your “Money Slide.” It should include:

• One standout chart
• One clear headline
• One quote that brings it to life

Here’s an example:

 Headline: “Financial-literacy hub influenced $4.2M in Q2 pipeline — up 27% from last quarter.”
Quote: “This content made it easier to explain our product to clients.” — a relationship manager

This approach works especially well when showcasing cross-functional wins. Say your team localized hundreds of articles in a single day and saw a major bump in regional engagement. That’s a story. It’s also a great way to make future budget requests a lot less painful.

Here’s how one team turned a simple metric into a story that stuck: A leading financial-services enterprise recently localized 252 articles across 3 languages in one day, using Contently’s AI-powered workflow. 

5. Tighten the Feedback Loop

Attribution is an ongoing rhythm. Set a recurring time (monthly, quarterly — whatever works) to check in on what’s performing, what’s lagging, and what needs a second life. That could mean trimming underperformers, refreshing outdated blog posts, or chopping long videos into clips people actually finish.

Small tweaks. Big lift. And just in time for the next budget review.

These days, it’s not enough to say content works. You’ve got to show how much it works — in language your finance team actually understands.

So map every piece to the buyer journey. Use multi-touch models to surface your real MVPs. Trade vanity metrics for ones that tie to revenue. Turn your reports into stories that stick. And keep refining as you go.

Do that, and the next time someone asks what content has done for the business, you won’t even need to say a word — your slides will do the talking.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

1. What if we don’t have fancy attribution software?

You don’t need a new tool to get started. A basic spreadsheet with deal IDs, content touches, and journey stages is enough to start spotting patterns. Over time, you can layer in GA4 or your CRM’s native reporting — no data science degree required. 

Platforms like Contently can also help you scale when you’re ready by offering built-in attribution tracking, journey mapping, and cluster-level insights designed for marketers who want proof without pulling an all-nighter in Excel.

2. Our leadership team still wants last-click numbers. Now what?

Run both. Put last-click and multi-touch side by side to highlight what’s missing from the old model. Early- and mid-funnel content that gets ignored in last-click reports often looks a lot more valuable with context — which tends to win over skeptics.

3. How often should we review content performance?

At least once a quarter. Block time to audit what’s working, what’s slowing down, and where new opportunities are emerging. The more you build this into your rhythm, the easier it gets, and the faster you’ll have proof ready when budget season rolls around.

The post The Most Effective Ways to Tie Content to Revenue in 2025 appeared first on Contently.

Google’s new AI Mode, currently in the midst of a phased rollout, is likely the beginning of the end of the SERP’s 20-year reign. In general, this new era of AI Search is nothing short of — to borrow a phrase AI loves — a paradigm shift. Instead of serving up a list of links for users to explore, search engines now generate direct, conversational answers, often without requiring users to navigate off the results page.

This shift has myriad implications for brands and publishers, chief among them the rise of the zero-click search. The impacts of this evolution can’t be understated, and it will take some trial and error to create a new game plan for driving visibility and engagement in an AI-curated world.

But some tenets of traditional content strategy aren’t going away. While users can get quick summaries through AI Search, the detailed insights found in longform content are still an essential part of any brand’s digital presence. Here’s why longform still matters in this new era — and how leading marketers can evolve their traditional approach to keep content relevant and discoverable.

Why Longform Is Still Relevant in the Age of AI

Longform content continues to serve as the backbone for establishing authority and expertise online, and search engines still rely on rich, detailed narratives to verify trustworthiness and quality.

Here’s an overview of why longform isn’t going anywhere just yet.

Not Every User Wants a Summary

AI search tools are optimized for convenience, but they often surface overviews that are just that — cursory summaries. For users researching a complex topic, making a high-stakes decision, or trying to understand a nuanced issue, these condensed answers often fall short. That’s where longform content still shines.

Which brings us to our next point…

Longform Can Power Middle- and Bottom-Funnel Conversions

In a world where bite-sized answers dominate the top of the funnel, longform content becomes even more impactful at the middle and bottom. These are the stages where trust, differentiation, and depth matter most; they’re where prospects are comparing solutions, weighing trade-offs, and looking for signs of credibility.

Well-executed longform content can walk readers through complex ideas, unpack case studies, or showcase customer success stories in a way that builds confidence and nudges them closer to action. It can also be a powerful tool for nurturing relationships over time — whether you’re supporting an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy or educating high-intent leads.

Originality Drives AI Visibility

Finally, longform content isn’t just valuable to your audience — it’s instrumental to AI systems themselves. AI search tends to pull from what it perceives as high-authority sources, and not just because of length or formatting. Content that includes original reporting, proprietary research, expert interviews, or unique insights stands a greater chance of being cited, summarized, or linked to by AI platforms.

This is another area where longform can offer a strategic edge. When content is substantive, it sends stronger relevance signals to both humans and machines. Combine that with a thoughtful PR or content syndication strategy, and you’re increasing the odds that your content becomes the source of record — not just another reference in the pile.

How to Adapt Your Longform Content for the AI Search Age

Preparing your content for an AI-driven landscape means rethinking its structure and presentation to ensure it can be easily digested by both human readers and automated systems.

To give your brand the best shot of surfacing in AI-generated results, focus on key structural and semantic strategies, including:

Structure Content for Scanning

Content that’s well-organized with descriptive headings and clear sections makes it easier for readers and AI alike to locate key information. A logical, scannable structure helps your work get referenced accurately and ensures that the takeaways are immediately accessible. You’ll also want to optimize for zero-click consumption by enhancing your content with quick overviews, summaries, FAQs, and highlighted key points.

Focus on Information-Rich Content and Original Data

Every segment of your content should deliver meaningful insights, actionable advice, or deep analysis. By cutting the fluff and prioritizing substance, you create material that’s both engaging and valuable.

Further, embedding original research or reporting, compelling statistics, and distinct viewpoints not only enriches your content, but also differentiates your narrative from generic sources. Unique data and perspectives anchor your work in real-world insights, increasing the likelihood that your content will be valued by both human readers and AI systems.

Use Internal Linking and Content Clusters

Develop a robust network of interconnected content to improve overall search coherence. Content clusters allow for a more comprehensive portrayal of your subject matter, letting both users and AI systems understand the broader context of your expertise. This layered approach can enhance your reputation as a go-to resource in your industry.

Distribution Is the New Differentiator

While it’s still smart to invest in longform, how it gets distributed is just as important as what it says. According to recent guidance from Ahrefs, traditional signals like backlinks and keyword density may carry less weight in determining what content gets surfaced in AI-generated summaries. Instead, breadth and consistency — i.e., how many places your brand shows up across and within trusted content ecosystems — is gaining influence.

That means the old playbook of producing a whitepaper, putting it behind a gated download form on your website, and watching the leads pour in may not cut it anymore. Longform content should now serve as a modular asset: republished or referenced across reputable sites, broken down into excerpts or bylined pieces for external publications, and turned into visual or multimedia formats that can travel well.

In short: don’t just publish — propagate.

AI Changes the ROI Equation for Effective Longform Content

Here’s the good news: As much as AI is a disruptor in this space, it can also be a creative accelerator. Longform content that used to take weeks or even months to produce can now be turned around in just a couple of days, for a fraction of the cost—especially if you’ve got a strong human + AI team to tackle the heavy lifting.

At Contently, we specialize in combining editorial expertise with AI-enhanced workflows to help brands scale thoughtful, strategic content. Our AI Studio streamlines every step of the process, from research and outlining to first-draft generation and editorial refinement — so you can publish faster without sacrificing quality.

AI may be reshaping how people search, but it’s also raising the bar for what gets amplified and cited. The brands that win in this new landscape won’t be the ones churning out shallow summaries; they’ll be the ones building meaningful, original content that machines can surface — and real people can actually use.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Will longform content still drive organic traffic in a zero-click world?

Even if users don’t always click through, high-quality longform content can still be surfaced, cited, and summarized by AI tools. That visibility contributes to brand awareness, trust, and discoverability across the web.

How should I structure longform content to be more AI-friendly?

Use clear headings, bullet points, summaries, and data callouts. Think modular — each section should stand alone if excerpted, and signal its value quickly to both AI and human readers.

Should I gate longform content behind lead forms?

Gating still has a place, but in the AI era, it’s often better to keep core content open and repurpose gated elements (e.g., checklists, toolkits) for lead-gen. Visibility across multiple high-authority platforms is now more important than locking content behind a form.

The post What Does AI Search Mean for the Future of Longform Content? appeared first on Contently.

The foundation of the $80 billion SEO market is cracking and something new is being born: LLM Optimization (LLMO). And the companies that understand this shift first will own a massive competitive advantage.

The Search Paradigm Has Already Changed

I’ve been watching this transformation accelerate over the past year, and the data is undeniable. Users aren’t clicking through search results anymore, they’re getting complete answers directly from AI.

Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you scrolled through multiple Google results for a simple question? Increasingly, we’re all turning to ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity and getting comprehensive answers in seconds.

The numbers tell the story: LLM search queries are now averaging 23 words instead of 4. Search sessions last 6 minutes instead of seconds. Users are having conversations with AI, not just typing keywords.

This is a fundamental rewiring of how information discovery works.

From Rankings to References

Traditional SEO was built on a simple premise: rank higher on the results page. But in an AI-first world, visibility means something entirely different. Success is no longer about where you appear, it’s about whether AI references you at all.

We’re moving from click-through rates to reference rates. The question isn’t “did they visit your page?” It’s “did the AI cite your content when answering the user’s question?”

I’ve been testing this personally. When I ask ChatGPT for marketing advice, which brands get mentioned? When I query Claude about content strategy, whose insights surface? The patterns are revealing and they have almost nothing to do with traditional SEO rankings.

The Platform Fragmentation Challenge

Here’s what makes this shift even more complex: search is fragmenting across platforms. Apple just announced that AI-native search engines like Perplexity and Claude will be built into Safari. Google’s distribution chokehold is breaking.

Users are searching on Instagram, asking Siri complex questions, querying AI assistants embedded in their work tools. Each platform has different models, different training data, different ways of surfacing information.

This fragmentation creates both challenge and opportunity. The old playbook of optimizing for one search engine is obsolete. But it also means early movers can establish presence across multiple AI platforms before the competition catches up.

Three Critical Shifts for Marketing Leaders

Structure Trumps Keywords

AI doesn’t care about keyword density or exact match phrases. It prioritizes content that’s well-organized, easy to parse, and dense with meaning.

The inverted pyramid style – leading with the answer, then supporting details – is becoming critical. I’ve seen our clients increase AI citations by 22x simply by restructuring existing content to be more AI-digestible.

Authority Signals Are Evolving

Traditional backlinks still matter, but AI is looking for different credibility signals. It favors content that cites reputable sources, includes author credentials, and demonstrates expertise through depth rather than keywords.

The old game of link building is being replaced by knowledge building. AI can detect thin, manipulative content instantly. Only genuinely valuable, well-researched content gets referenced.

Distribution Channels Multiplied

SEO focused on one channel: Google. LLMO requires presence across dozens of AI platforms, each with its own preferences and algorithms.

The brands winning are creating better content and ensuring that content is discoverable across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and the dozens of other AI interfaces emerging monthly.

We produced a detailed LLMO playbook that anyone can follow to improve their LLM brand visibility.

The Window Is Closing

Every day you delay adapting to this shift, competitors could be claiming your space in the AI layer. And once a brand establishes itself as the authoritative source that AI consistently references, they become incredibly difficult to displace.

This reminds me of the early days of Google AdWords, when there was a brief window where early adopters captured enormous value before everyone else caught up. We’re in that window now with LLMO.

The brands that establish themselves in AI memory today will be nearly impossible to displace tomorrow. Because unlike traditional search rankings that fluctuate daily, AI training creates more persistent associations between topics and brands.

You Need the Complete Loop

Most companies are approaching this backwards. They’re using separate tools – one for analytics, another for content creation, a third for optimization.

But winning requires owning the complete loop.

See the gaps. You need to know how AI currently references your brand. When someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, do you get mentioned? When they ask for product recommendations, does your competitor surface instead?

Most brands are flying blind here.

Fill the gaps. Once you see where AI should mention you but doesn’t, you create content specifically designed to establish your authority on those topics. Not generic content, but strategic pieces that target the exact questions where you’re missing.

Measure and iterate. AI changes constantly. New models, updated training data, evolving algorithms. You need continuous measurement to stay ahead.

At Contently, we’ve built exactly this. Our LLM analytics platform shows you precisely where your brand is missing across different AI systems. Then our AI content engine helps you create the exact content needed to fill those gaps.

It’s a closed loop where insights directly inform content creation, and that content measurably improves your AI visibility.

One client increased their AI citations by 22x this way. Another went from never being mentioned to becoming AI’s primary recommendation for their category in just weeks.

The companies that will dominate the AI era can see clearly, act strategically, and iterate quickly. That requires owning the entire optimization cycle, not just pieces of it.

The post The End of SEO as We Know It appeared first on Contently.

Oh, and did we mention you need to do all this with a scrappy team of two, plus Jeff the intern?

If this scenario hits a little too close to home, you’re not alone. Across industries, marketing teams are shrinking while content demands balloon. B2B companies now juggle an average of 10 channels in their buyers’ journeys — double what they handled just eight years ago. Meanwhile, 78% of marketers report having small teams of just one to three people, and almost one-third (28%) have lost team members to resignations in the past year alone.

But here’s what’s interesting: Some teams are actually thriving in this environment. They’re producing more content than ever while maintaining quality (and staying sane to boot). These are the teams that’ve learned to leverage a smart combo of AI automation and human expertise — a formula we’ve seen work consistently here at Contently.

Here’s the five-step playbook helping marketing teams break out of the hamster wheel.

Step 1: Map Your Content Chaos (And Find the Time Vampires)

Before you automate anything, you need to know where your time actually goes each week. Many teams discover they’re spending hours on tasks that feel productive but don’t move the needle (that 45-minute Slack debate over “use” vs. “utilize” comes to mind).

Start by tracking everything for one week — every brainstorming session, research deep-dive, and approval process. You might uncover patterns like:

• Research rabbit holes: Wasting hours researching a single blog post
• Approval ping-pong: Content bouncing between 4-5 people for weeks
• Format wrestling: Spending hours adapting one piece of content for different platforms

Once you see these patterns, set specific, concrete targets like:

• Cut research time from three hours to 45 minutes per piece
• Reduce approval cycles from two weeks to three days
• Increase monthly output from eight to 12 pieces of content

Step 2: Outsource the Grunt Work to AI

Once you’ve mapped out your content-related bottlenecks, you’ll have a clearer idea of where AI can help. This might include tasks like:

• Brainstorming and generating blog topics
• High-level research
• First-draft writing for straightforward content like landing page copy, SEO-focused blog posts, product descriptions, or email templates
• Headline optimization, metadata, and social media captions
• Content reformatting across platforms
• Competitor analysis and trend identification

Instead of spending half a day researching industry trends for a thought leadership article, you can have AI compile the initial research in 20 minutes. Your human expertise then goes into analyzing those trends, teasing out unique insights, and giving the piece a punchy, snappy voice (that you can then train the AI to replicate for future content).

Step 3: Hand Human Editors the Reins

AI can write, but it can’t think like your brand. This is where human editors are more valuable than ever. They can step in for high-value tasks like:

• Strategic direction and messaging
• Brand voice refinement
• Thought leadership
• Complex storytelling
• Judgment and critical thinking
• Fact-checking and final quality checks

Think of your editor as a brand translator. They take AI’s efficient (but often generic) output and transform it into something that sounds distinct and authentic.

And for regulated industries, this editorial layer is non-negotiable. If you work for a healthcare or financial services company, it doesn’t matter if AI cuts your content production time in half if hallucinated claims in a blog post lead to expensive, arduous regulatory reviews.

This is where Contently’s Managing Editor model shines; our editors are trained to work alongside AI tools from the get-go, ensuring every piece meets enterprise standards for accuracy, brand voice, and compliance while maintaining the speed advantages that make AI so appealing.

Step 4: Track Metrics That Actually Matter

Don’t just measure AI success by how much content you’re pumping out. Track the metrics that tie back to real business results.

Efficiency metrics to watch:

• Time from concept to published piece
• Hours saved per piece of content
• Content pieces published per team member per month

Quality metrics that matter:

• Average time readers spend on your content
• Share and comment rates
• Conversion from content to leads or sales

Step 5: Launch a 30-Day Pilot Program

Don’t overhaul everything at once. Pick one content type where you can easily measure success, like blog posts, social media updates, or email newsletters.

Then, run a 30-day test with clear parameters:

• Week 1: Set up your AI instance and begin simple writing tasks. Upload 1–2 strong brand voice samples and create detailed briefs for each content type to give the AI clear guidelines.
• Week 2: Start generating first drafts for straightforward content (e.g. landing pages, SEO blog posts, product descriptions). Use your brand voice samples, style pillars, and editorial briefs to train the AI on your tone and messaging.
• Week 3: Review AI drafts, provide structured feedback, and refine output quality. Expand into more complex content types and begin experimenting with repurposing (e.g. blog-to-social snippets, newsletters-to-LinkedIn posts).
• Week 4: Use AI for optimization tasks (headlines, meta descriptions, CTAs) and begin exploring more strategic uses based on what you’ve learned — such as competitor analysis or content gap research.

During the trial, get feedback from everyone involved: writers, editors, designers, and the execs approving content. Ask specific questions about which parts of the process feel smoother, and where AI outputs need the most human intervention.

Turn Content Challenges into Opportunities

At Contently, we’ve seen this playbook’s effectiveness in action: An online K-12 provider ran a 30-day sprint trial following this rough outline. Partnering with a Contently Managing Editor, they combined AI-powered content efficiency with human editorial oversight — and jumped from 3% to 55% visibility in AI search results, claiming the #1 spot across multiple AI platforms for eight of their ten target queries.

By strategically integrating AI with editorial expertise, even small teams can significantly boost output while maintaining both quality and compliance. This five-step process provides a measured approach to combining creative insight with clear, tangible results — and turns content calendar panic into a manageable, scalable system.

Ready to expand your content operation?

Discover how Contently’s AI Studio can empower your team to generate a high volume of quality content with your existing resources. Schedule a personalized demo to see our AI + editorial workflow in action.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How does integrating AI with editorial oversight benefit my content strategy?

Combining AI with editorial oversight enhances productivity by automating resource-intensive tasks while ensuring that the final content upholds the highest possible quality, maintains brand consistency, and meets compliance standards — allowing teams to focus on nuances that require human judgment or expertise.

What types of content workflows are best suited for AI automation?

Workflows that involve repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as data aggregation and drafting initial versions are well-suited for AI automation. This allows human editors to add value through creative storytelling, strategic planning, and detailed refinements.

How can I measure the success of an AI-driven content strategy?

Success can be measured by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like total content output, cycle times, engagement rates, conversion metrics, and overall return on investment (ROI). Contently’s analytics dashboard provides real-time insights to compare performance before and after integrating AI into your content creation process.

The post How to Scale Your Enterprise Content Program — Even With a Small Team appeared first on Contently.

Staying on top of the latest visual marketing design trends is essential for building an enduring brand, telling engaging stories, and emotionally connecting with customers. With that lofty objective in mind, here are a few of the top visual marketing trends that will continue to drive decision-making for marketers and designers.

2024 Visual Marketing Design Trends You Need to Know About

1. Nostalgia Marketing Visuals

Life in the 2020s can be pretty hectic, so it’s no surprise there’s an increasing craving for comfort and nostalgia in strategic visuals that resonate deeply with people. This trend is not merely about revisiting the past but fostering a sense of connection and reassurance amid change. Brands infuse memories and warmth into their present visuals to offer that comfort.

Vintage aesthetics and warm color palettes are more than just retro; they embody timelessness and authenticity, offering solace in the impersonal digital era. These elements, from soothing amber and sepia to earthy tones, create a comforting sense of familiarity, transforming the past into a welcoming home.

Familiar imagery acts as a bridge between the past and present, not solely for nostalgia’s sake but to communicate universality, durability, and trust. By weaving these images into their marketing, brands forge deeper emotional connections, ensuring their messages are not only seen but profoundly felt.

Example: Burger King Revives Its Iconic Logo

A few years have passed since Burger King revealed the retro redesign of its instantly recognizable logo, but in retrospect, the celebrated revival was on the leading edge of nostalgic visual marketing trends. Ditching the cartoonish logo and stylings used since the company’s 1999 rebrand, the new brand identity leans hard into the warm palettes and comforting aesthetics of a timeless past.

Image by Burger King

2. AI-Generated Imagery

As we venture further into the 21st century, the realms of artificial intelligence (AI) continue to expand, now revolutionizing how marketers create strategic visuals. The rise of AI-powered tools in the marketing sphere marks a significant shift, opening up a world where the creation of stunning, compelling imagery is not only faster but also more personalized and innovative than ever before.

AI-generated content transcends merely meeting the demand for new visuals; it revolutionizes creative production by quickly generating high-quality, detailed images. This shift reduces what once took hours to minutes without compromising quality, ensuring outputs meet or exceed expectations with precision.

Personalization is another benefit of AI, enabling content to be customized to individual preferences or demographics. This allows for visuals that deeply resonate with various audience segments, significantly enhancing engagement and fostering a closer connection to the brand.

Example: Coca-Cola Looks Ahead to the Year 3000

Coca-Cola has become a leading brand when it comes to leveraging the power of AI for their present and future visual marketing efforts. The company has not only used AI to create multiple iterations of classic Coke ad campaigns with the “Create Real Magic” platform, but it even launched a brand new soda called Y3000 that was created through collaboration between humans and AI.

Image by Coca-Cola

3. Human-Centered Design

Human-centered design prioritizes the user’s needs, experiences, and well-being above all else, ensuring that every visual marketing design decision is made with the end user in mind. It’s a philosophy that champions empathy, accessibility, and inclusivity, aiming to create strategic visual content that is both engaging and deeply resonant with a broad audience.

Human-centered design ensures visuals are aesthetically pleasing, navigable, and understandable for all, including those with differing abilities. This involves considerations like color contrast for visual impairments, text alternatives for images, and easy-to-navigate interactive elements for users with limited mobility.

Inclusivity broadens this approach, making sure visuals represent the diversity of the target audience, including various cultures, ethnicities, genders, ages, and body types. Embracing diversity in visuals helps brands build a sense of belonging and connection, showing appreciation and understanding of our diverse world.

Example: Airbnb Puts Customers at the Heart of the Story

Airbnb has long been a trailblazer when it comes to human-centric marketing. From a visual marketing design standpoint, the company’s website offers a simple, intuitive interface that allows people to find their perfect destination quickly. The real stars, however, are the high-quality photos that help visitors picture themselves in those destinations, which is why Airbnb provides every listing with access to a professional photographer rather than relying on user-generated photos.

Image by Airbnb

4. Maximalist Visual Marketing Design

Maximalism, a vibrant and bold trend, contrasts sharply with recent minimalist design philosophies, celebrating sensory richness and immersive experiences. It champions a vibrant, layered, and textured design approach, encouraging an embrace of abundance over restraint.

Characterized by vibrant colors, intricate patterns, and rich textures, maximalist design defies “less is more,” opting instead for statement-making chaos and complexity. This method aims to create lively, dynamic spaces and experiences bursting with personality.

In visual marketing, maximalism enables brands to capture attention in a crowded space, offering memorable and eye-catching content. It communicates luxury, creativity, and boldness, engaging consumers emotionally with its exuberant design.

Example: Pepsi Goes Big and Bold

When Pepsi made the decision to update its logo in 2023, the company eschewed minimalist trends in favor of a big, bold design that’s impossible to ignore. The new branding puts the company’s name front and center while also adopting a strong, all-caps typeface that’s impossible to ignore. As the first change to the company’s look in 14 years, it’s a strong shift that conveys Pepsi’s confidence in its future.

Image by Pepsi

5. Minimalism Design Aesthetic

Just because maximalism is growing in popularity doesn’t mean minimalism isn’t still going strong! Minimalist design focuses on clean lines, white space, and simplicity, offering a calming alternative to the complexity of maximalism.

More than an aesthetic choice, minimalism conveys a brand’s essence with precision and restraint. It emphasizes quality and value through careful selection and detail, ensuring every element has a purpose. By projecting confidence and thoughtfulness, this approach often resonates with consumers on a deeper level.

Minimalism brings calm and focus, with its clean aesthetics reducing cognitive overload and enhancing message clarity. This simplicity improves user experience, from website navigation to product interaction, making minimalism not just a design choice but a strategic one for clear, impactful communication.

Example: Western Union Opts for Standout Simplicity

Western Union may be one of the oldest companies around, but its new branding is anything but stale. Casting aside the busy, often cluttered aesthetic of its previous logos, the company debuted a clean, simple design in 2023 that’s both familiar and strikingly fresh. The versatile branding accomplishes the daunting task of making an over-170-year-old company feel vibrant and relevant for customers of all ages.

Image by Western Union

Staying abreast of visual marketing design trends is no longer optional for today’s marketers. The digital landscape is constantly evolving to shape consumer perceptions and preferences, so understanding and integrating these changes into content is essential for building strategies that grab and hold the viewer’s attention. By keeping a pulse on the latest visual marketing trends, marketers can craft campaigns that forge deeper connections with their audience, ensuring their messages are not just seen but truly felt.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs about visual marketing design trends

Q: How do I effectively track and adapt to rapidly changing visual marketing trends to ensure my content remains fresh and engaging?

You can stay current with visual trends by consistently monitoring design publications, social media, and industry leaders, and by using analytics to gauge audience engagement with different visual styles.

Q: What are the specific challenges or pitfalls I might face when trying to incorporate AI-generated imagery into campaigns, and how should they be addressed?

The main challenges include ensuring AI-generated imagery aligns with your brand identity and navigating ethical concerns around authenticity. You can address these issues through clear brand guidelines and transparency with audiences.

Q: Regarding human-centered design, how do I measure the effectiveness of promoting accessibility and inclusivity within my marketing visuals?

You can assess the impact of human-centered design by soliciting feedback from users with diverse needs and analyzing engagement metrics to see how accessibility improvements affect user experience.

Q: If I’m interested in adopting a maximalist design strategy, what considerations should I keep in mind to ensure my marketing visuals are impactful without being overwhelming?

When embracing maximalism, you should always make sure your design maintains a cohesive narrative and balances boldness with clarity to avoid overwhelming your audience.

Q: With the continued relevance of minimalism alongside the rise of maximalism, how can I decide which approach best aligns with my brand’s identity and audience preferences?

You should consider your brand’s core values and audience demographics when choosing between minimalism and maximalism. If the answer isn’t immediately clear, you can leverage A/B testing to determine which approach resonates more effectively.

Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter to find out how successful marketers are leveraging the latest visual trends in their campaigns and their future visual marketing plans.

The post Top 5 Visual Marketing Design Trends Shaping Marketing Strategies appeared first on Contently.

It’s unsurprising that AI leans heavily on cliches. Having digested most of the internet as training data, it offers responses that are typically amalgamations of previously published material. And contrary to some of the more dystopian headlines out there, AI does not (yet) have original thoughts.

But the very skills that make generative AI a mediocre content creator make it an excellent editorial assistant. AI’s penchant for pattern recognition makes it highly skilled at things like calendar management, and its impressive synthesis skills mean you can whip up a dozen social media post variations from one original in seconds.

Here are a few ways generative AI can make your job a little easier, as well as some best practices for introducing the technology into your work routine.

How to use ChatGPT for content optimization and more

Below are four helpful use cases that generative AI may be able to take off your plate.

Use case 1: Setting up your content calendar

We’ve written previously about the power of a dialed-in content calendar—especially if you’ve got one of those clients who seems to push back their target publish date week after agonizing week. Whether you’re publishing sporadic social posts or managing a full-fledged content marketing machine complete with white papers, video projects, and infographics galore, an editorial calendar is critical for staying on track (and sane).

Content marketers can use ChatGPT (or your generative AI engine of choice; I’m currently partial to Claude) to input key parameters like target audience, desired content mix, and publishing frequency. You can then prompt the AI to come up with a comprehensive content calendar formatted with as many columns as you like.

Further, AI can help with workflow management by suggesting optimal project timelines across multiple stakeholders—saving you hours of working backward from moving-target deadlines in the aftermath of a client’s latest fire drill.

Use case 2: Nailing your content briefs

There’s a big difference between editing and proofreading, and AI can be an excellent second set of eyes for the latter—whether you need to ensure client communications are typo-free or ensure your content briefs contain enough information for creatives to work their magic.

Here’s an example prompt you can try with your next brief:

Use case 3: Suggesting optimizations and SEO tweaks

Content marketing is extremely fluid, especially in today’s day and age (nobody knows, for instance, what’s going to happen to SEO in the coming weeks and months). Today’s golden-ticket keywords may land you on page ten of SERP purgatory tomorrow.

AI can prove an ally here, too, helping you pivot and optimize as the SEO winds shift. For example, AI can audit existing content and provide data-driven suggestions to improve elements like titles, subheadings, readability, keyword usage and density, accessibility, etc. It can also help out with tasks like identifying internal linking opportunities.

Use case 4: Adapting content for omnichannel distribution

AI can help repurpose a long-form piece like a white paper into derivative assets like social media posts, email newsletter content, and ad copy while maintaining message consistency. It can also be a great way to generate multiple headlines for A/B testing in campaigns or craft more functional copy like meta descriptions, image alt text, or video transcripts.

How to improve content strategy with AI: 4 best practices

Of course, there are some important do’s and don’ts when mastering how to use ChatGPT for content marketing—and specifically for client-facing work. Below are four to keep in mind.

1. Provide clear and specific prompts.

AI works best when you give it detailed instructions and context. Be as specific as possible about what you want to generate, including any key talking points, desired tone, or formatting requirements. The more specific your prompts, the more likely the AI will deliver quality outputs.

2. Review all outputs with a human eye for detail—and common sense.

Think of AI as a starting point, not a final destination. Always carefully review any AI outputs before presenting them in client-facing materials or plugging them into your content strategy. Be sure to edit all AI-crafted social posts to ensure logic, flow, and an appropriate brand voice.

3. Don’t rely solely on ChatGPT content analysis.

These days, new AI tools are cropping up for content optimization, generation, and analysis on an almost daily basis. While ChatGPT is the most well-known, it’s worth exploring other options to find the ones that best fit your needs. Many AI platforms offer free trials, so you can test drive before committing.

4. Use AI responsibly.

There are certain things you should never share with AI—including sensitive or embargoed client data, proprietary information, personal details, and anything covered by an NDA. Err on the side of caution when it comes to data privacy and security.

If you’re a freelancer, you’ll also want to check in with each of your clients to see if they have a responsible AI policy. If you use vendors yourself, it’s a good idea to draft your own guidelines around issues like disclosure, copyright, and data handling. Also, be sure to review any new client contracts for clauses that dictate if/how you can use AI.

Finally, don’t forget to fact-check AI outputs. In a world in which Google is suggesting people “eat rocks” and lawyers are citing fake precedents in court, you don’t want to risk damaging your reputation—or your client relationships—by being sloppy.

The key is to view AI as a partner, not a replacement. Sidestep the cliches and use AI for its true strengths: speed, scale, and data synthesis. By freeing yourself from tedious tasks, you can focus on higher-level strategy and creative ideation—you know, the actually stimulating aspects of the “intricate mosaic” that is content marketing.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about how to use ChatGPT for content calendars

What level of technical expertise is required to effectively use AI tools for content marketing?

You don’t need a computer science degree to learn how to use ChatGPT for content marketing. As long as you’re comfortable navigating basic software and have a general understanding of what AI can (and can’t) do, you should be able to get up and running pretty quickly.

What are some best practices for evaluating and selecting an AI tool or platform for content marketing purposes?

When choosing an AI tool, consider factors like pricing (including any usage limits or extra fees), available features and integrations, ease of use, and customer support. Look for tools that align with your specific needs and goals—whether that’s content calendar management, SEO optimization, or something else entirely. Take advantage of free trials to test out different options before committing.

Can AI tools be customized to fit specific industry needs or niches?

Absolutely! Many AI tools allow you to input your own data and parameters to tailor the outputs to your specific industry or niche. For example, you might provide the AI with examples of high-performing content in your field or a list of industry-specific keywords and phrases to incorporate. You can even play around with creating your own custom GPTs.

Keep up with the evolving world of generative AI and how it can help your marketing efforts by subscribing to The Content Strategist.

The post How To Use ChatGPT for Content Analysis and Optimization appeared first on Contently.

You have an internal marketing team, and you manage a team of freelancers—writers, designers, editors, etc. Email and Google Docs are your go-to forms of communication and collaboration. Unless your freelancers don’t have Gmail accounts, then the system breaks down. Freelancers can’t access your documents, so you have to email company assets. But those documents are constantly being updated, and you never remember which version you sent to which freelancer. So, you have to search through countless email threads to find the right one.

Now, instead of doing important work, you’re just retracing your steps to determine who knows what and what needs to happen next.

Alright, our journey is over, and you’re safe and sound now back in good old 2024. While this scenario was typical for marketing teams in 2010, many who haven’t discovered the wonder of content marketing platforms still experience these headaches. Perhaps you’re whispering to yourself: “Shoot, that’s me! What is a content marketing platform?” If so, that’s okay, we’ll bring you up to speed.

What are Content Marketing Platforms?

A content marketing platform (CMP) is an online software solution that allows businesses and marketers to collaborate across teams to strategize and streamline their content marketing processes.

I know what you’re thinking: That sounds a lot like a content management system (CMS). Sure, they both deal with content, but they serve different purposes in the overall content lifecycle. Here’s a quick breakdown of their differences:

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS is a broader tool used to publish and distribute marketing content. It allows non-technical users to easily publish content across channels, edit webpages, and manage layouts (e.g., platforms like WordPress and Magento).

Content Marketing Platforms (CMP)

A CMP is a more specialized marketing tool designed for the entire content marketing process. This includes planning content strategy, creating content, scaling content production, analyzing performance, and distributing content across various channels.

Essentially, the biggest difference is that a CMS is primarily for publishing content to your website, while a CMP is for planning, strategic alignment, content creation, and optimizing content performance.

How do Content Marketing Platforms Work?

CMPs act as a central nervous system for your marketing efforts, helping your team streamline the content marketing process from strategy to results. Here are some of the specialized tools CMPs provide to improve your content marketing process:

Strategic insight: Develop a data-driven content strategy with features like keyword research tools and competitor analyses. Easily identify content gaps and potential audiences.

Organizational alignment: Store, update, and distribute your marketing strategy in one centralized location, effectively breaking down silos between internal and external teams, like freelancers and full-time employees.

Content calendars: Visually map out your content plan with dynamic, drag-and-drop calendar features. Keep your team aligned and organized with a unified calendar to schedule content creation, distribution, campaigns, and project deadlines.

Campaign management: Create and manage multi-channel campaigns within your CMP. Ensure all marketing activities (blog posts, social media posts, email blasts, etc.) align with overall strategy.

Workflow management: Assign tasks, track progress, and set clear deadlines for content creators, editors, and other team members.

Collaboration tools: Share documents, provide feedback, solicit feedback from company executives, streamline legal review, and communicate with your team using built-in messaging, text editors, and task management tools.

Our new dual-editing feature is a real-time collaboration tool that boosts the speed and ease of collaboration when several people are working on a document. Contently is the only CMP that enables real-time collaboration in-platform.

Content performance tracking: Analyze content performance across various channels using detailed analytics.

Team coordination: Keep your team aligned with notifications on project progress, campaign performance, and team activity.

Why Do I Need a Content Marketing Platform?

Every business and marketing team is different. So, is it fair to say they all need a CMP? Yes. Yes, it is. You just need to find a CMP with the right features for your team. So, let’s talk about the benefits of CMPs and what you should look for when shopping for a CMP:

Increased Bandwidth

Marketing teams are always spread thin. But what if you could double, triple, or even quadruple the size of your team? With a CMP, you have access to a powerful network of vetted writers, copy editors, designers, art directors, photographers, videographers, and much more. Suddenly, your marketing team is able to focus on strategy while producing more content.

Without a CMP, marketing teams are forced to pause content creation and publishing while they focus on strategy. But CMPs allow teams to maintain their momentum and continue operations while finalizing their marketing approach.

What to Look For:

Not all CMPs offer a talent network. While some CMPs integrate with freelance marketplaces or offer features to collaborate with external contributors, a built-in talent network of freelancers is not a standard feature.

But the best enterprise content marketing platforms will provide trusted freelancers within their platform. For example, Contently has vetted and trained each of their 160,000+ freelancers in their talent network.

Gain Strategic Alignment

Every good campaign starts with a good strategy. With a CMP, you can document your strategy upfront, create alignment within your team, and provide visibility to your in-house team and freelancers. With custom analytics, you can track each of your audiences, determine how your content is performing, and measure your progress against key performance indicators (KPIs).

What to Look For:

Look for a user-friendly platform that allows each of your team members to customize their dashboards. Whether it’s your CMO or marketing manager using the platform, they can create a dashboard that shows the information and metrics most important to them.

You also want a platform that allows users to provide story briefs or specific instructions to individual freelancers and internal team members. Share insights into audience personas, voice, and strategy without having to attach a 70-page brand book to every assignment. Contently also allows users to templatize their story briefs, so they don’t have to start from scratch with each project.

For your freelancers, use a CMP with a quick link to content strategy, so they can quickly reference goals, audience, and tone with a click of a button.

Scale Content Creation

CMPs can function like growth serums for marketing teams by eliminating repetitive tasks, like scheduling social media posts or resizing images for different platforms. Content templates and pre-designed workflows allow teams to quickly create content consistent with brand guidelines and established processes.

With detailed analytics, teams can see which content resonates with audiences and quickly make improvements. This data-driven approach accelerates the optimization process and helps teams focus on high-performing formats and topics.

What to Look For:

To improve your optimizations and increase ROI, make sure your CMP allows you to test different monetization channels, perform A/B tests, and personalize your content and marketing campaigns using customer data.

For marketers looking for a way to justify their content spend, Contently offers the Content Value Tracker. It actually calculates how much your organic traffic is worth in dollars.

Achieve Brand Compliance

Streamline brand compliance and ensure consistency by incorporating legal and brand requirements into your project briefs, templates, and workflows. Even with strict brand guidelines, you can use brand management tools to flag blocklisted words and phrases and apply a uniform style and tone to each piece of content.

What to Look For:

The best content marketing platforms will include automated quality control features. These tools can scan for plagiarism, assess content for reading level, correct grammar, and optimize for SEO. The best CMPs will also provide AI-generated recommendations on writing quality, such as misused words and double verbs.

Contently’s workflow tools also ensure each team member knows what is required of them and when their tasks are due. Once a freelancer completes a task or meets the project requirements, they are paid automatically through Contently.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQs About Content Marketing Platforms

How do content marketing platforms facilitate communication between external freelancer and internal teams?

Content marketing platforms often provide features like built-in messaging, task management tools, and collaborative document sharing to facilitate communication between internal teams and external freelancers, ensuring seamless integration regardless of the tools they use.

Can content marketing platforms assist in identifying and filling content gaps in a marketing strategy?

Yes, content marketing platforms typically offer features such as keyword research tools and competitor analyses, allowing users to identify content gaps and potential audiences, thereby aiding in refining and filling gaps within the marketing strategy.

Do content marketing platforms offer functionalities for brand compliance and legal requirements within content creation?

Many content marketing platforms integrate legal and brand compliance requirements into project briefs, templates, and workflows, while also offering automated quality control features such as plagiarism detection and grammar correction.

If you’re ready to make your work life immeasurably better and add a CMP to your content marketing process, start your search here.

The post What Are Content Marketing Platforms and Why You Need One appeared first on Contently.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, might not be as fully understood. We know it’s important, but it’s often left up to SEO or IT teams, who may (or may not) have a comprehensive understanding of the broader marketing strategy. But that doesn’t mean content marketers can’t grasp and implement the basics of technical SEO to complement a great marketing strategy.

Why Does Technical SEO Matter to Content Marketers?

As you likely already know, SEO is key to online success. In fact, nearly 50% of shoppers today begin their research with Google—so ranking on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs) can offer serious opportunities to reach your ideal customers.

That’s where technical SEO comes in. When you optimize your website’s tech aspects, you make it easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl, and rank it.

These behind-the-scenes tweaks might not be flashy, but creating a faster, more mobile- and crawler-friendly website can help your page rank closer to the top of the search results. Even if you have the best content in the world, if no web traffic stops by, you might as well be writing on paper and then tucking it away in a desk drawer.

So, if you want more eyeballs on your site, you need to do two things — create quality content and follow these technical SEO recommendations — to set your site apart from competitors.

Get Cozy With Google Search Console

First, take some time to get comfortable with using Google Search Console. It offers insights into your website’s overall performance—from the keywords it’s ranking for to how to fix performance issues and how it stacks up against competitors.

It’s especially handy for SEO recommendations related to your site’s Core Web Vitals, a report that uses field data—aka data from real-world users—to gauge the performance of various URLs on your site.

The report has much to do with site and page speed or how fast a page loads. According to Google, when a site meets the Core Web Vitals threshold, users are 24% less likely to abandon it before it loads. (After all, it’s not 1998 – we’ve gotten used to our internet moving lightning fast.) Following SEO recommendations to achieve better Core Web Vitals can also lead to:

• Increased page views per session
• Longer sessions per visit
• Lower bounce rates

A faster website means a better user experience. Combine a fast site with useful, interesting content, and you can improve consumer sentiments surrounding your brand, keep visitors on your website longer, and, ultimately, boost sales or conversions.

Embrace Structured Data and Schema Markups

Here’s where things get, well, a bit technical. However, as a marketing professional (who may have a limited understanding of coding), you can still use structured data and schema markups to your advantage.

Structured data uses a language called schema markups to explain the information on a webpage so search engines can easily understand it. Schema helps search engines crawl your website; it explains to Google and the other search engines what they can expect to find in the content that follows the code.

Basically, structured data is like adding labels to different parts of a webpage to tell search engines what each piece of information is about. For example, in a recipe, schema markups can tell Google which section contains the list of ingredients, which part contains the cooking time, and so on. Helpful, right?

By using structured data and schema markups, we can give search engines more context about a website’s content (try saying that 10 times fast). This helps search engines display richer search results, improving the user experience and making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for online.

People often forget useful SEO recommendations like using Schema markups. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to use structured data to help your website get found by search engines.

Schema Made Simple

Even though Schema has been around for a while, it’s still highly relevant to SEO recommendations. One experiment found that twice as many sites with schema markups gained rankings in search engine results.

Check out Schema.org, where you can find a list of coding terms that can help your SEO; it was founded in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to provide a common language that leads to better and more consistent search results, and it has all kinds of schema types available for you to browse.

Pro tip: You can easily add schema markups to your website using WordPress plugins like Schema Pro. These plugins automate markups and can also create Custom Fields.

Know Your Link Strategy

A strong internal link-building strategy is one of the basics of a good SEO strategy. When creating a new piece of content, think about other content on your site that is valuable, relevant, and related to the piece you’re writing to include as a hyperlink. For example, if you’re writing about savings accounts and mention compound interest, linking to an article on the topic would help your readers understand the bigger picture.

Many SEO recommendations suggest five to 10 internal links for every 2,000 words of content, which is roughly one link for every 200 words.

You can add links to your higher-traffic pages to support them or lower-traffic pages to boost them. But don’t overdo it! Adding too many links could distract, overwhelm or divert your reader from reaching the CTA.

It’s also worth it to run a check every once in a while to make sure you’re not linking to URLs that have been changed, deleted or moved. These “dead links” do nothing to help your search ranking and decrease readability.

Understanding External Links/Backlinks

External links/backlinks are another matter altogether. They come in two forms:

• Outbound links, which go from your web page to an external authoritative page
• Inbound links, which go from another authoritative site to your content

Let’s first talk about the ones we can control: Outbound links.

Outbound Links

If you’re writing about a topic, you can add links to pages that aren’t part of your site. These outbound links give readers more information on the topic from an authoritative source, like a government site or scientific study. When you’re linking to other sites, choose ones that:

• Don’t compete with yours
• Have credibility as a primary or authoritative source
• Are trustworthy

If the site doesn’t meet these requirements, but you still want to link to it – for instance, in the case of a sponsorship—add a “nofollow” link. Google won’t acknowledge that you linked to the page, but your readers can find it with a click.

Inbound links

Just as you want to link to authoritative sites, you want other sites to link to your content as a helpful resource, too. Google frowns upon link trading, buying links, or other ways of securing links that do not happen organically. It considers them “Link spam”; you should mark them with “nofollow” or risk being penalized. So keep an eye on your backlinks (using your trusty Google Search console or other tool) to make sure you’re in line with Google’s rules.

Instead, you can offer to post guest blogs on relevant sites or ask partners or influencers to link to you. If another site references your content—such as the results of a survey or study—you can reach out and ask if they can add a backlink. Similarly, if someone posts a positive review of your brand on their website, ask them for a link.

Effective link-building is a lot of work, but it can offer a valuable boost in rankings.

Link Disavowal

If Google sends you a scary-looking manual action for “unnatural links,” you can log into Google Search Console and browse the list of sites that link to you for the offending links. You can then request that Google disregard those links. There’s no guarantee that Google will do what you ask, and this may impact your search rankings—for better or worse—but it’s better than having bad links slowly tank your rankings.

Put in the Time to Become a Technical SEO Pro

Following technical SEO recommendations requires patience, attention to detail, and determination—especially if you have to level up your knowledge along the way. But just like any other skill, mastering it adds value and insight to your content.

Don’t Skip the Technical SEO Audit

Most people’s shoulders tense up with the mention of the word “audit,” but in this case, it just means assessing the technical SEO methods your site already uses, how well it uses them, and what you could implement to improve it. If you feel like you might need some help along the way, there are always technical SEO consultants providing technical SEO services and plentiful online resources to help you out.

If you install the correct schema markup plugins, understand how to use the Google Search Console, and develop a solid link-building strategy, you are well on your way to climbing those rankings and reaching your audience.

Ask The Content Strategist: FAQS About Technical SEO

What are the potential risks of relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO, and how can content marketers mitigate these risks?

Relying solely on automated tools for technical SEO may overlook nuanced issues that require manual intervention. Content marketers should supplement automated tools with manual audits and regular checks to ensure comprehensive optimization and mitigate the risk of overlooking critical issues.

How does user-generated content (UGC) impact technical SEO, and what strategies can content marketers employ to leverage UGC effectively for search visibility?

User-generated content can enrich websites with fresh and diverse content, potentially impacting technical SEO factors such as keyword density and content structure. Content marketers can encourage UGC through interactive features and community engagement, optimizing user-generated content for relevant keywords and ensuring proper technical implementation for search visibility.

What role does mobile optimization play in technical SEO, and how can content marketers ensure seamless user experiences across different devices?

Content marketers can ensure seamless user experiences across devices by implementing responsive design, optimizing page speed, and testing website performance on various mobile devices and screen sizes.

How do content distribution channels outside of search engines, such as social media platforms, impact technical SEO efforts, and what strategies can content marketers employ to maximize visibility across these channels?

Content distribution channels like social media platforms can indirectly impact technical SEO through increased brand visibility and referral traffic. Content marketers can maximize visibility across these channels by optimizing content for social sharing, engaging with relevant communities, and leveraging social media analytics to refine content distribution strategies for better search visibility.

Looking for more information on SEO best practices? Subscribe to The Content Strategist and follow us on Instagram.

The post What Is Technical SEO and How Does It Impact Content Performance? appeared first on Contently.

At the heart of this alignment lies a well-structured content framework grounded on solid topic pillars, which act as the foundation for content marketers to build compelling, relevant, and targeted content.

This framework is not a one-size-fits-all template, but a tailored architecture that resonates with a brand’s ethos and speaks directly to its audience’s interests and needs. But establishing this alignment is often easier said than done. Many businesses find themselves in a conundrum, striving to strike a balance between what they deem important and what their audience finds valuable. The disconnect can result in content that drifts aimlessly, failing to hit the mark regarding engagement and conversion. Without a coherent content framework, the consistency in messaging can be lost, and the potential to build a strong, recognizable brand voice may diminish.

Identifying core topics or topic pillars and weaving a content framework around them is crucial in overcoming these challenges. It’s about delving into the core of what matters both to your business and its audience, and crafting content that serves as a bridge between the two.

What Are Topic Pillars?

Topic pillars, often referred to as content pillars or pillar content, are fundamental themes or topics you build your content strategy around. They serve as the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Each topic pillar is broad and encompassing, allowing for a range of related sub-topics or cluster content to be developed around it. This strategy is similar but differs from a hub-and-spoke model, which aims to build a stronger direct connection between content pieces. Topic pillars offer a looser and less restrictive strategy.

At Contently, for example, we organize all content within The Content Strategist around our five pillars: Strategy, Digital Transformation, Storytelling, ROI, and Trending.

We’ve baked these pillars into our content strategy by clearly defining them inside the Contently platform. Doing so not only ensures we have our pillars in mind as we plan new content but also allows us to attach the relevant pillar to every project brief, ensuring everyone on the team is in alignment.

Here’s a breakdown of what topic pillars entail:

• Broad Topics: Topic pillars are usually broad themes that are highly relevant to your brand, industry, and audience. They should be expansive enough to allow for the creation of numerous pieces of related content over time.
• SEO Value: They often have SEO value, meaning they are topics that people are searching for. They help in organizing your content in a way that’s not only beneficial for your audience but also for search engines to understand the breadth and depth of content you have on a particular topic.
• Content Clusters: Around each topic pillar, you’ll create cluster content, which are smaller, related pieces of content that delve into the specifics of the broad theme the pillar represents. For instance, if you have a topic pillar on digital marketing, cluster content could cover SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, and other related topics.

• Authority and Relevance: By creating high-quality content around these pillars, you aim to establish your brand’s authority on these topics. This method of structuring content helps build relevance and authority in the eyes of your audience and search engines.
• Interlinked Content: The pillar content and cluster content are interlinked, creating a structured content silo. This not only enhances the user experience by providing additional resources for deeper exploration but also boosts SEO by creating a tightly-knit topical relevance and internal linking structure.

In essence, topic pillars are a strategic approach to content creation, helping you ensure that the content you create is relevant to your audience, has SEO value, and is well-organized both for user experience and search engine optimization. Through this method, content marketers can ensure a more structured, targeted, and effective content marketing strategy.

How to Identify Your Core Topics

Identifying the right topic pillars is crucial as they will guide your content strategy. Here’s a methodical approach content marketers can follow to identify the topic pillars for their brand:

1. Understand Your Audience

• Persona Development: Create detailed buyer personas to understand the interests, problems, and questions of your target audience.
• Audience Feedback: Use surveys, interviews, and feedback from your customer service and sales teams to gather insights into what your audience is interested in.

2. Keyword Research

• Utilize SEO tools to conduct keyword research to find what topics related to your industry are being searched for.
• Look for high-volume, relevant keywords and topics that align with your brand and audience interests.

3. Competitor Analysis

• Analyze the content your competitors are creating to identify the topics that resonate with the shared audience.
• Look for gaps in their content that you can fill or areas where you can provide a unique, better perspective.

4. Industry Trends and Insights

• Stay updated with industry reports, blogs, forums, and news to identify trending topics or perennial themes within your industry.
• Engage in industry forums and communities to understand the ongoing discussions and concerns within your sector.

5. Conduct a Content Audit

• Perform a content audit to analyze your existing content. Identify the topics that have performed well in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
• Look for areas where you already have substantial content and consider building on those topics to create comprehensive pillar pages.

6. Utilize Analytics

• Use analytics tools to gauge which topics have driven the most engagement, traffic, and conversions in the past.
• Analyze the performance of your top-performing content to glean insights into the topic pillars that resonate with your audience.

7. Test and Refine

• Start with a few broad topic pillars and observe the performance of the content created around them.
• Over time, refine your topic pillars based on the data and feedback collected.

8. Utilize Content Platforms

• Platforms like Contently can provide data analytics and trend analysis to help identify core topics and build a content framework around them.

By integrating these steps into a systematic approach, content marketers can identify topic pillars that will not only resonate with their audience but also align with their brand’s goals and the evolving dynamics of their industry.

Building a Content Framework Around Your Topic Pillars

A content framework is a structured plan or blueprint that guides your content creation, distribution, and measurement. Topic pillars are central to this framework are topic pillars, acting as the thematic backbone and ensuring a coherent and focused content strategy that resonates with your audience. Like a roadmap, the content framework, anchored by topic pillars, outlines what content to create, how to organize it, and how it should be distributed and analyzed for optimal results.

Here’s a deeper dive into what a content framework includes:

• Defining Goals and KPIs: Setting clear, measurable objectives is pivotal. Whether your goal is brand awareness, lead generation, or customer engagement, having defined goals can steer the direction of your content framework. Take this example from The Content Strategist in Contently’s publication settings.

• Mapping Content to Customer Journey: Tailoring content to cater to the different stages of the customer journey ensures that the narrative remains relevant and engaging throughout the customer’s journey. In Contently, you can do this with our content tagging functionality.
• Content Calendar Creation: Crafting a content calendar, structured around your topic pillars, ensures a consistent and balanced output, fostering a sustained engagement with the audience.
• Measurement and Optimization: Analyzing your content’s impact against defined KPIs provides invaluable insights for fine-tuning your strategy, ensuring it continues to resonate and achieve the desired objectives.

Combating the Content Deluge with Strategic Pillars

By developing a structured content framework built around robust topic pillars, you’ll not only gain visibility but also meaningful engagements and conversions. By harnessing the clarity and focus that topic pillars bring to the table, and embedding these within a flexible yet well-defined content framework, brands are better positioned to cut through the digital noise, align with audience values, and foster a narrative that resonates.

Unleash the potential of topic pillars with Contently. Book your demo today and start your journey toward more engaging and aligned content.

The post How To Leverage Topic Pillars To Build a Targeted Content Framework appeared first on Contently.

Finding the Right Freelancer for Your Needs

As AI-generated content creates more noise in the marketplace, quality writers are crucial for scaling content strategically. It can be difficult to find the right fit, whether you have a niche subject matter that requires an experienced expert to write about it thoughtfully or you’re in a regulated industry that requires knowledge of compliance.

You need writers who understand your brand, your voice, and your industry. Those qualifications may seem rudimentary, but I know you know how difficult that triple threat can be to find. Content marketers never have enough time in the day, which means you don’t have the bandwidth to train a newbie on the cornerstones of your industry.

You also need talented writers with proven experience in the niche that you can trust to give you a great draft the first time. You don’t want to waste the precious time you do have training a writer on how to put together a grammatically correct sentence, either.

Contently’s Managing Editors

At Contently, our freelancers are pre-vetted and trained before they’re ever assigned to a client account. Our Managing Editors act as an extension of your team, enabling you to train one person on your brand tone, voice, and guidelines and then hand over the reins when it comes to sourcing, training, and editing the freelancers for hire.

With this valuable teammate in place, you can scale content creation rapidly. Managing Editors meet with their clients at their convenience for routine one-on-one meetings. In these sessions, clients discuss their content ideas, ask for help with ideation, and share feedback on recent content submissions.

Managing Editors keep track of your content calendar, advising where there are potential gaps that a new piece could fill. Whether you’re strategizing for better thought leadership on your blog or need a more strategic approach to the whole funnel, our Managing Editors can help you create a content calendar that meets those needs.

Contently’s Freelancers for Hire

With over 160,000 freelance profiles currently listed on Contently’s creative marketplace, we offer a broad array of talent for every industry. You’re not just tapping into a global network of creatives—you’re investing in a smarter way to scale your content program.

We don’t just offer access to talented writers, either. Our network is comprised of talented creatives in a variety of disciplines—including editorial, graphic design, illustration, photography, videography, and more. Just imagine what you could produce with these creative professionals at your fingertips.

We can also connect you to talent in various industries, from healthcare and financial services to hospitality and manufacturing. Got a specific niche in your field? Our internal creative marketplace team can help you find the talent you need for your specific project. Just submit a talent search request, and we’ll follow up with our top recommendations.

Measuring Freelancer ROI

In content marketing, measuring return on investment is never easy. What kind of engagement on your content leads a person to act? How many pieces of content does it take to reach a conversion? What CTAs led your reader to schedule a demo or add to cart?

There is no right answer because human behavior can only be measured in averages. While you could analyze the trends and see what gets a majority of people to convert on a specific CTA, there is no formula for the perfect media mix that gets every viewer to convert.

While Contently offers a variety of ways to prove your content’s value, it’s also a great tool for assessing the effectiveness of your freelancers. In the Contributor section of Contently Analytics, you can view specific time periods to see which writers are making the most impact on your audience.

You’ll be able to see the total people viewing content attributed to the freelancer, percentage of those people engaged, average time spent on their assets, average finish rate, and total attention time. These metrics can also be broken down by story when you open the carrot by their name to reveal individual metrics by article.

Above, you’ll see one of The Content Strategist’s key contributors, Laura Starita, and her contributions to TCS in Q2 2023. While those individuals preceding her have more total viewers, we must also consider the percentage of people engaged, average time spent, and finish rate. Those who precede here are founders, board members, or Contently alumni, and they all published their articles years before Laura started contributing to TCS. This alone shows us that she’s doing exceptionally well for the time she’s been measured.

If you need to see how one contributor compares to the rest, you can easily generate a CSV report to download and take to your team. When you click the Generate Report button on the top right corner, Contently gathers the data and emails you a CSV file.

This CSV file is attached to the email, which you can download in Excel or convert to Google Sheets. Below, you’ll see that I chose the latter. The contributor analytics pulled from Contently showcase the date range I pulled, Contently’s Q2, and the metrics for each author, including total people, engagement rate, average attention time, average finish, and total attention time.

A Content Marketing Platform With Freelancers for Hire

Contently is the ultimate content marketing platform (CMP) for marketers seeking to scale their programs with ease. With the increasing demands of the business, it’s difficult for content marketers to keep up. We need freelance support that can deliver quality results quickly. Contently can help you achieve those goals.

Ready to realize your content’s potential? Get a personalized demo today to see how you can measure even more return on your content’s investment.

The post Level Up Your Content: Unleash the Power of Freelancers for Hire appeared first on Contently.

After all, marketers are often strapped for resources, spending precious hours cobbling together insights from free tools or scouring competitors’ sites for a glimpse into their next moves. Sound familiar?

Product marketing AI changes that. From enhancing your market research to leveling up your product positioning, it can help you create stronger content strategies that leave a lasting impact.

Product Marketing AI: A Quick 101

Product marketing AI tools are solutions that automate and turbocharge tasks that comprise marketers’ day-to-day to-do lists, such as competitor analysis, persona research, and content optimization.

Like other types of AI popping up in the market, the magic of product marketing AI lies in how it can instantly analyze large volumes of data, whether it’s market trends or consumer behavior.

With this AI-powered treasure trove of actionable insights and data-driven recommendations, you can better tailor your content strategies to captivate your target audience’s attention, resonate with their pain points and preferences, and drive meaningful engagement.

5 Ways Product Marketing AI Can Augment Your Content Marketing

Ready to say goodbye to a content strategy rooted in gut checks? Whether your content marketing efforts focus on blog posts, eBooks, case studies, or fact sheets—or, ideally, a mix of all—here are five ways product marketing AI can leave a lasting impression and makes readers scroll to the end instead of closing the tab.

1. Conduct competitor analyses.

Google’s Ad Transparency Center, the company’s new counterpart to Facebook’s Ad Library, is a great way to peek into your competitors’ latest marketing moves, but it still requires manual monitoring. (When you’re in a crowded industry with dozens of competitors, those hours can add up quickly.)

AI-powered competitor analysis tools, on the other hand, can crawl through all that data and provide valuable takeaways regarding your competitors’ online presence, content performance, and marketing strategies. For example, platforms like Kompyte can track competitors’ websites, reviews, social accounts, ads, content, and even job postings to identify key trends, popular keywords, and successful content formats.

2. Complete buyer persona research.

Crafting buyer personas is a must-have when refining your content game—after all, you don’t want to create Barbie-themed content this summer when your target audience belongs to the Oppenheimer crowd.

Solutions such as Delve AI can streamline this process by using natural language processing algorithms to crunch mountains of social media, customer reviews, and user journey data to identify common pain points, preferences, behaviors, and quirks of different customer segments.

Armed with this information, you can whip up content strategies that hit the sweet spot for different customer segments.

3. Identify market trends.

Similarly, product marketing AI empowers marketers to uncover and capitalize on market trends with laser precision.

After all, for the average content marketer with no background in data science or a crystal ball, it can be challenging to know where the market is headed next. Apps like Semrush Market Explorer that leverage natural language processing and machine learning can compile nuanced insights that are otherwise too arduous or costly to obtain.

The result? A content strategy that aligns with the evolving market landscape.

4. Manage content analytics and optimization.

As any savvy marketer knows, content isn’t something you create, post, and forget about. (Even though your stacked workload might make you wish that were the case.) Over time, statistics can appear outdated, pop culture references can feel stale, and that punny joke can, sadly, become cringeworthy.

That’s why content analytics and optimization should be an important part of any content strategy. Why reinvent the wheel when you can fine-tune it so it makes a longer-lasting impact?

With product marketing AI, you don’t have to manually sift through the hundreds, if not thousands, of content pieces you’ve posted over the years. If you’re using Contently to keep your content engine running, the Contributors page offers an AI analysis of your top-performing contributors by aggregating all of their bylines. It’s an instant snapshot of which content creators keep your audience most captivated and engaged.

Meanwhile, tools like Parse.ly and Chartbeat can evaluate metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to pinpoint precisely where your content needs a facelift. Some solutions, such as Frase, can even offer optimization suggestions by comparing your content to competitors’.

5. Create a content calendar.

Even the best content strategy can be moot if it doesn’t translate to a comprehensive content calendar. But creating and managing content calendars can be a full-time job by itself.

Luckily, free AI tools like the ever-popular ChatGPT can boost your productivity by generating content calendars aligned with your posting cadence, audience segments, keywords, and overall strategy.

Go Big (With AI) or Go Home

While AI is never a substitute for human creativity, it can provide a valuable starting point for leveling up your content strategies. Think of these tools as powerful assistants that can augment your and your team’s expertise, enabling you to make data-driven decisions that lead to business success.

Even better, as AI technology continues to evolve, it will only become more sophisticated. So, start exploring and enjoy the view (and the kudos from higher-ups) as you deliver better content that results in a more impactful customer experience.

Stay informed on the future of content marketing and AI by subscribing to The Content Strategist—we’ll deliver fresh insights on the latest in digital transformation, content marketing strategies, and tech trends straight to your inbox.

The post How Product Marketing AI Tools Can Create Stronger Content Strategies appeared first on Contently.

To achieve long-term success for your business, don’t underestimate the role of customer loyalty. Just like a full-court defense strategy in basketball, investing in retention and upselling not only makes it difficult for competitors to steal customers away but also boosts customer lifetime values, referrals, and positive reviews.

So how can you jumpstart this virtuous cycle of growth and success with content marketing? Read on to find out.

How to Score Big With Retention and Upselling in Content Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, we often hear about the funnel comprising awareness, consideration, and conversion, but we sometimes forget the last stage: loyalty.

For sustainable business growth, driving loyalty through retention and upselling tactics should be at the forefront of your marketing strategy. After all, studies have found that retaining an existing customer is anywhere from five to 25 times cheaper than converting a new one. At the same time, increasing retention rates by a mere 5% can increase profits from anywhere between 25% and 95%.

Beyond unlocking savings in the realm of ads and outbound marketing, investing in customer retention also means enjoying the power of word-of-mouth marketing—where a community of raving fans not only comes back for more but also spreads the word about your business, all without you having to lift a finger.

Meanwhile, upselling is like the cherry on top of the sundae that takes your revenue growth to the next level. By promoting complementary or upgraded products or services to your existing customers, you increase their lifetime value and strengthen the relationship and trust they have with your brand.

Why Content Marketing Is the MVP of Retention and Upselling

Content marketing is your secret weapon for retention and upselling—here’s why:

• Builds trust: Providing informative and relevant content means you can better establish your brand’s expertise and credibility, which, over time, deepens your customers’ confidence in what you have to offer.
• Creates connections: Sharing content that resonates with your customers is key to building a sense of community and strengthening your relationship with otherwise one-time buyers.
• Promotes your value proposition: Content marketing lets you highlight the benefits of your products or services in a non-salesy way, upping the chances that customers explore your offerings beyond their initial purchases.

Content Marketing Pro Tips: 6 Ways to Retain and Upsell Customers

Engaging and useful content keeps customers interested and invested in your brand. So whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, consider using these actionable tips and best practices to power up your retention and upselling efforts.

1. Create in-depth product guides or tutorials.

Developing product tutorials or how-to videos demonstrating the full range of features of your products or services can help customers get the most out of their purchases, which can increase their satisfaction and, hopefully, loyalty.

Meanwhile, in-depth guides about your products or services allow customers to better grasp the full picture of any additional benefits your company can offer, which sets the stage for upselling upgrades that promise additional value.

2. Offer exclusive content.

By sharing exclusive content (such as webinars, ebooks, and behind-the-scenes sneak peeks) with your loyal VIPs, you deepen the relationship with your biggest fans and remind them that you deliver value beyond your products or services.

3. Invest in your resources.

Posting resources (like blogs, guides, and infographics) that tap into the latest insights relevant to your customers can help keep them engaged and encourage them to return for more. Additionally, resources establish your brand as an authority within your industry and help new customers find you, too.

Lululemon, for example, offers various downloadable training plans for running.

In terms of upselling, you can also use your resources to introduce new products or services, perhaps even spotlighting the inspiration behind it or diving into the research and development process.

4. Showcase product or service comparisons.

By creating content that compares different versions or tiers of your products or services, clients can begin to recognize the benefits of upgrading. Similarly, content such as recommendation quizzes or gift guides can support any cross-selling or bundling efforts.

5. Provide personalized content.

When customers feel like a brand recognizes their individual needs and preferences, they are more likely to feel appreciated and supported—that’s why brands should always strive to create personalized content closely aligned with their niche customer segments. For example, you might use data such as a customer’s past purchases, browsing behavior, or demographic information to deliver a weekly curated list of blogs to their inbox.

6. Share case studies and success stories.

With 98% of customers reading reviews before they shop, it’s unsurprising that social proof via case studies or success stories can go a long way in demonstrating the real-life benefits of your products or services, which encourages customers to continue shopping with you or exploring your other offerings.

Turn One-Off Shoppers Into Diehard Fans

When it comes to game-changers for your business, content marketing is an obvious tactic to add to your playbook. By helping you build trust, connect with your audience, and nurture customer relationships, it’s a must-have for both retention and upselling.

So make sure you’re using content marketing to give the same attention to retention and upselling efforts as you are to closing new deals—trust us: It won’t be long until you score big.

Want more tips on how to win the content marketing game? Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter for more guides like this delivered straight to your inbox.

The post Customer Loyalty 101: How To Retain and Upsell With Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

What if there were a way to ideate story ideas catered to your specific content strategy? Contently’s comprehensive content marketing platform has those tools and more to help your team plan, scale, and pivot to any content creation demand.

Ideate Your Next Story With Precision

With a clear strategy in place, the content team can request and field content ideas that match audience needs and business goals. Contently’s content marketing platform (CMP) facilitates this process by providing a central place to collect, sort, and communicate ideas before sending them out for production.

Our ideation capabilities transform ideas from meh to magnificent. How do we do it? We enable you to take full control of your pitch process, automate ideation with SEO, and prioritize content requests from other departments, all in one place.

Contently offers a wide variety of options for ideation, including:

• Pre-built pitch request forms to clarify the audience, specific topic pillar, SEO keyword target, and other relevant information
• SEO Story Ideas to leverage your pre-determined SEO keywords from your content strategy to help you ideate new story ideas
• Standardized request forms to prompt business stakeholders to clearly communicate what they want to do and how they want the content team to help

Ready to explore a world of inspired brainstorming, strategic pitching, and content requests that will have you channeling your inner Don Draper (minus the whisky, of course)? Let’s dive into the details of all these features together.

1. Pitches

Contently’s Ideation tab highlights three main functionalities, one of which includes pitches.

Here, you can field the pitches that are coming into your queue and choose to accept or decline the idea, or create a pitch request for a team of writers you know and trust.

Once a writer is ready to submit a pitch, they’ll simply fill out a form to showcase their idea with a potential title, description, sources, or links that might be relevant for the managing editor to review. They’ll also add the desired pay range to open the negotiation if the price has not already been set in the pitch request.

As pictured above, you can easily sort your pitches by review status, publication or line of business, topic pillar, contributor, and more.

Need to send the ideas to a key stakeholder outside the platform? You can easily export these pitches into an Excel file with a quick download of the data.

Maybe you need more people ideating for you, and you want to put out a broader call for creatives. By adding a link to your blog or resource center, you can request writers to pitch you their ideas. Anyone who submits the form will be logged in your review queue for fielding.

2. SEO Story Ideas

SEO Story Ideas is a tab that enables you to utilize your content strategy for ideation. Our proprietary algorithm suggests SEO Story Ideas based on your documented keywords, giving you topics to accept or decline accompanied by their average search volume and cost per click.

You can easily sort your SEO Story Ideas by review status, publication or line of business, or pillar topic associated.

3. Content Requests

As content marketers, we are all too familiar with the emails, direct messages, or office drive-bys that end with a content request. To ensure clear expectations on timing and prioritization, a content request form is often necessary to field these types of asks.

This brings us to the final tab of our ideation functionality. Our content strategy section enables users to create specific forms for requests like these. When a colleague requests a piece of content, the form will lead them through a series of important questions that you can customize. The more specific your questionnaire, the better informed you’ll be on the expectations for each asset.

All content requests end up here for review. Sorted by title, publication or line of business, content request form, submitter, date requested, and approval status, this tab enables you to easily assess each project and prioritize it alongside your other work.

Whether you are looking for a way to ideate new content ideas through pitching or SEO strategy, or you need a way to prioritize your content requests with other demands of your role, Contently’s ideation functionality can help you streamline your work.

Ideate Then Create

Once you’ve decided to work with a writer, you’ll simply accept the pitch and move on to create an assignment.

When the accept button is clicked, the pitch will automatically be placed in the brief, where you can edit the persona target, word count, topic pillar, SEO keyword, and other crucial information necessary for the writer to get started. You’ll also be able to attach a templated workflow and add payment steps along the way.

Unlock growth, one piece of content at a time. Transform your strategy with Contently. Request your discovery call today.

The post Ideate With Ease: Unlocking Success With Contently’s Ideation Tools appeared first on Contently.

That’s one of the reasons healthcare organizations have avoided adopting emerging tech into their patient and marketing processes until years (and sometimes decades) later than other industries.

However, the seismic shifts from the pandemic and the increased use of AI have fundamentally changed how consumers interact with brands — especially when it comes to healthcare. Here are some of the biggest healthcare marketing trends of 2023.

Patients Think Like Consumers

Patients no longer take the word of their healthcare provider or insurance company as fact. Instead, many people approach their healthcare and wellness as if shopping for a high-end purchase.

Patients think like consumers: They conduct their own research, read reviews on procedures and prescriptions, and get feedback from others who’ve been through similar situations. Then, they take their findings to their provider for discussion. This need for research fuels the demand for high-quality content — and that requires healthcare organizations to double down on SEO.

Innovative healthcare companies that rank #1 on search engine results pages (SERPs) produce quality content that answers patient questions and educates their target audience on solutions available to them.

To ensure your content is easily accessible, make sure your website is easy to navigate and creates a seamless user experience on both desktop and mobile.

Patients Want Personalized Experiences

When it comes to interacting with their healthcare providers, patients are no longer okay with being, well… patient. They expect to find what they’re looking for on a provider’s website without combing through every page to find the answer.

Your patients are looking for tailored content when they need it. That should always be your goal. Deliver the right content to the right person at the right time and through the right channel.

This tailored experience requires you to:

• Ensure your website is designed with your patient in mind.
• Empower your patients with relevant content on various channels.
• Produce content in formats that appeal to your patients.

How do you accomplish this? As a healthcare organization, it’s important to understand your patients and what they want from your organization.

Do they like receiving emails? Would they rather read a blog that informs them about a specific ailment? Are they engaging on social or watching videos to learn?

Patients Appreciate Convenience

Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth, similar to Zoom meetings, was relatively new, significantly untested, and certainly not preferred.

Since the early years of the pandemic, however, consumers have grown to appreciate the convenience of telehealth. It saves them time in the waiting room — especially when they need treatment for non-emergency care.

Giving patients the ability to schedule an appointment online goes a long way to bridging the gap between inconvenience and accommodation. Chatbots can also be a convenience, as they provide an interactive way to answer frequently asked questions your organization receives on a daily basis. Embed it on every web page, and the chatbot can single-handedly prevent the patient from having to search your site for the information.

This convenience factor goes a long way to improving your company’s relationship with your patients. You give them the ability to schedule and get basic answers quickly. Plus, you’ll save precious staff hours, eliminating the need to return endless phone calls and manually schedule appointments.

Healthcare Marketers Must Adapt or Be Left Behind

Because patients have drawn the conclusion that their healthcare (and how they access it) shouldn’t be different from any other area of their life, healthcare marketers are faced with a challenge: adapt or be left behind.

Sounds simple, but if you’ve been in healthcare marketing for more than a minute, you understand the hurdles. Government regulations aim to maintain patient privacy, healthcare leaders abide by specific structures and processes, and the organization’s legal team is often hesitant to adopt new technology or processes that may put them at risk.

However, many healthcare organizations are finding ways to take the leap — and they’re discovering how to access data that maintains privacy while still enabling marketers to provide personalized experiences that the organization’s patients crave.

Not sure where to start? Here’s the good news: We’ve uncovered five healthcare marketing trends of 2023 that organizations can implement right now to gain traction with current and future customers. Download your copy of 5 Content Strategies Transforming the Patient Experience today.

The post What Patients Expect From Healthcare Organizations in 2023 appeared first on Contently.

A lot has changed since then—namely, the arrival of two new user privacy laws (GDPR and CCPA), increased use of mobile apps, and the phasing out of third-party cookies. To adapt, GA4 is an overhaul of the current version (Universal Analytics or UA) and is designed for the world we live in now.

For content marketers, GA4 offers more detailed data on the user’s journey across apps and websites and, using machine learning, GA4 can predict how users will behave. With a clearer map of how users got to your content and what they’re likely to do next, marketers can set more specific goals for which content types to produce and how to measure their success.

With that said, let’s explore two of GA4’s standout features and three tips for content marketing teams to capitalize on.

GA4’s Most Significant Features for Content Marketers

With GA4, Google is tackling the biggest challenge marketers face today: understanding customer behavior. That’s why the two most significant features in GA4 address the often-fragmented customer journey across apps and websites and how to track user behavior in a cookie-less world.

Track Users Across Apps and Websites

Consumers now engage with brands across different devices using mobile apps and websites. This “journey” can be disjointed and hard to track with the current version of Google Analytics, which only tracks website activity. GA4 combines website and app usage into a single report. The emphasis is now firmly on tracking “the user” rather than “user sessions.”

Marketers will have a clearer view of the whole customer journey, from where customers first engage with your brand to where and when they make a purchase. Armed with multi-attribution data that accounts for all the user touchpoints within your brand — from, say, mobile app to website to blog post to video to demo sign-up — marketers can see the value each touchpoint brings to the journey and measure how well a piece of content leads to a conversion.

Use Machine Learning to Predict User Behavior

New data privacy laws combined with users demanding more control over how their web activity data gets used have led to the slow death of third-party cookies. GA4 was built with this slow death in mind.

GA4 uses machine learning and data modeling to fill in gaps where user behavior data will be incomplete without cookies. GA4’s machine learning model will scrutinize first-party and conversion data to predict if users will make a purchase or churn (using probability scores).

GA4’s machine learning modeling is key for marketers because it measures which audiences are most likely to convert based on past trends. Marketers can then target these audiences with the appropriate content.

3 Tips for Preparing Your Content Strategy for GA4

For brands, GA4 offers more tangible ways to measure if you’re truly reaching your audience and meeting your content marketing goals. With that in mind, here are three tips for getting your content house in order ahead of the switch to GA4.

1. Create Specific Content Goals for GA4.

Because GA4 allows teams to track and analyze data from both mobile apps and websites, there will be more data. Thankfully, GA4 consolidates that data into one report.

But a pile of data is not a strategy. You have to make sense of the data you’ve accessed and apply it to your content. Vague goals will only create a disconnect between your user data and the content you produce.

Examples of specific, measurable content goals that take advantage of the new GA4 capabilities include:

• Increase organic traffic
• Increase user engagement (time on page, shares, comments)
• Improve conversion rates (sign-ups, sales)
• Increase new leads
• Improve content marketing ROI

GA4 also allows you to set goals within the platform for easy tracking.

Of course, you would set content goals regardless of GA4, but GA4 provides deeper analysis—via its Pages and Screens reports—of the most-read content, pages users scrolled on the most, and pages with the most traffic.

GA4 provides a greater understanding of traffic patterns and topics that resonate, so you can pursue content goals with more confidence.

2. Get to Know Your Audience Better With GA4.

You should already know your target audience’s tendencies and behavior, but GA4 can help you go deeper with its User Metrics feature.

User metrics provide data on the number of users who engaged with a piece of content, whether those users are new or active, and how long they stay on the page. It also measures whether they used your app or website to access the content.

Additionally, GA4 allows you to create specific audiences to target based on their behavior and customer journeys.

Caution: Don’t rely solely on GA4 to understand your audience. Be sure you’re talking to them and reading the comments they leave on your website and social media channels. You can then use GA4 to assess how well your content engages and keeps them coming back.

3. Establish Your Most Important Content Types Using GA4.

To have a full-funnel content strategy, you should produce different content types for each stage—blogs, eBooks, videos, case studies, etc.

However, with so much content and different metrics for each type, it’s easy for any company to fall into the trap of producing too much content and not measuring it properly.

GA4 excels at tracking metrics for different content types in one report. You can use GA4—again via the Pages and Screens report—to figure out which content types work by analyzing metrics such as video play duration, page scroll depth, and number of downloads.

Regardless, you’ll be producing a variety of content to serve the funnel. GA4 is effective at measuring all of it, so you’re not wasting resources creating gated eBooks few people download or videos few people watch.

GA4 Drives Content Marketing Results

Data is essential to content marketing. It helps identify the topics that will help your target audience do their jobs better (B2B) or improve their lives (B2C).

GA4 has been 11 years in the making and is built for our data-driven culture. So, it behooves all marketing teams to take advantage of GA4 for the most targeted content strategy possible.

To stay informed on what’s coming in MarTech, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Ready for GA4? appeared first on Contently.

In its State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, keyword research tool company Semrush surveyed 1,500 content marketers worldwide. Only a little over half had a documented content marketing strategy despite nearly all (97 percent) reporting that content marketing was a part of their marketing strategy. Among their ongoing challenges: attracting traffic to content, improving its SEO performance, and generating content ideas.

Fortunately, Google Trends is a free tool to help solve these challenges. It can help you deliver the best content consistently and creatively. Google Trends can help you figure out:

• The topics to address and the content you could create (what you can cook)
• How to time your content (when to cook what)
• Which keywords to play with and the kinds of content that will likely resonate with your audience (the right ingredients to use)

Selecting a Content Topic Worthy of Engagement

You want to feed your readers the content they’re most curious about, which directly ties to your brand. Peeking into keyword search is a great way to get on-the-money content ideas, giving you insights about what readers want to know.

Compare and contrast keyword terms to determine how popular yours might be. For example, this chart shows that “car repair” consistently gets more hits than “car maintenance,” likely because repairs are more urgent than routine maintenance.

To discover other related keywords that audiences use in search, look under “Related Topics and Queries.” You can see “car maintenance cost” and “car service” both do well. Related topics and queries can be especially helpful for identifying alternatives to keywords with a lot of competition for top positions in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Such long-tail keywords found through Google Trends are easier to rank for.

Toggle “Rising” queries vs. “Top Queries,” and you’ll find the search terms gaining traction. Spotting and capitalizing on these trends early, especially in a B2C market, will help you ride the popularity wave while it crests. Be careful to time your activities.

Fads can crash quickly, and prospective consumers will tire of a topic if it’s seen too much air time before you’ve gotten to it.

Google Trends also enables you to parse search results by geography for further segmentation, which is useful for targeted pay-per-click campaigns. Look to Google Discover on mobile devices to sift for more contextual ideas.

Use Data to Target Your Audience at the Right Time

Successful content strategy is not just about discovering what topics and angles to cover; it’s also about targeting your customer at the right time. Use Google Trends to find keyword phrases relevant over long and short periods.

You can start from 2004 (which is how far back Google lets you go) and measure trends over a year, a month, or even a few hours. The latter is useful if you’re playing with rapid-fire breaking news—though this is rarely the case with B2B content marketing.

This screenshot shows the rise in searches about ChatGPT, an AI-driven language generation robot. While there were small blips in October and November 2022, it caught on like wildfire in December. Breakout trends like these might be worth harnessing, especially if you’re in the B2C market.

A note of caution: You always need an original point of view, especially when the web is filled with content addressing the same topic.

Watching trends play out over time can help your content strategy as you observe peaks and troughs for certain keywords. For example, do certain keywords trend as you approach Earth Day in April? Plan content calendars in advance so you can develop fresh takes every year.

Optimize Your Content on the Right Channels

Successful content uses relevant keywords and presents them in a format that suits the goals of the asset. If your strategy is not limited to written content alone, understanding what kinds of searches to optimize for (news, videos, etc.) will help. Toggle through the other options on Google Trends (Image Search, News Search, etc.) to find what kinds of content are doing well. It might spark ideas for diversifying your content buckets in the future.

Much like cooking, sometimes content strategy requires understanding how well existing content (listicles, blog posts) is performing and how you can repurpose them in new ways. You can also use Google Trends to get inspiration for adjacent categories by looking under the “Related Topics” widget. A related topic for the “Chat GPT” search term, for example, is “artificial intelligence.”

Google Trends can also help you keep tabs on your competition’s content efforts. Enter Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola in the comparison search boxes, and you can tell the cola wars are steady as ever. If your company’s search trend pattern dips compared to others, you may need to refresh your awareness-building efforts.

Research Google Trends for Content Topics with Reach

Google Trends is a helpful tool for identifying content marketing topics that have reach. Careful menu planning still doesn’t guarantee a great meal, however. Delivering consistent content that resonates requires you to understand your audience and audit content regularly to find the top performers.

Use your best judgment. If a keyword term is tired and used often, try and test new topics and approaches. There’s no substitute for well-produced content that is useful, resonates with your readers, and effectively positions your brand. It’s a tried-and-tested recipe that propels your content marketing strategy on the path to success.

To stay informed on all things content, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post Three Ways to Use Google Trends for SEO in Your Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

On the surface, brand journalism and content marketing may appear to be very similar. After all, both involve creating original content designed to inform or entertain an audience. However, some critical differences between the two disciplines are significant to distinguish. Let’s discuss some of the most critical differentiators.

1. Approach

Journalism: Objective reporting of facts

Journalism is one of the cornerstones of a free society. It is based on the objective reporting of facts without fear or favor. This requires journalists to maintain their independence and impartiality. It also encourages professionals to avoid conflicts of interest. By abiding by these guidelines, they play an essential role in holding the government and other institutions accountable.

Content marketing: Creating engaging and informative resources

When you think about it, content marketing is a lot like telling stories around a campfire. You need to capture your audience’s attention and hold it while gradually weaving in your company’s message. And just as with any good storyteller, the key is to engage and entertain your audience along the way. If you can do that, you’ll be well on your way to creating successful content marketing campaigns that nurture a lead throughout the buyer’s journey.

2. Research

Journalism: Interviews, eyewitness accounts, and first-hand stories

No matter how talented a journalist may be, they cannot produce quality content without dependable sources. Good brand journalism requires reliable information, whether interviewing experts, gathering eyewitness accounts, or simply getting the scoop from the first person to experience something. Unfortunately, obtaining accurate data is complex, and journalists must work tirelessly to find trustworthy sources.

Content marketing: Data and market research

Every story needs a grounded foundation to support its claims. In content marketing, writers use their market research and consumer data to create compelling stories. Marketers need to know their audience inside and out to deliver the right content through the right channel at the right time. Content marketers use market research, personas, consumer data, and competitive intelligence to create data-driven strategies that produce quality content for customers looking for a solution.

3. Focus

Journalism: Impartiality and accuracy

Journalism has always been a critical part of democratic societies, and the need for accurate and impartial reporting is more critical than ever. Despite increasing pressure in the current political climate, journalists must strive to maintain their independence and ensure that the public has access to reliable information. Good journalists remain gatekeepers of information, only reporting on the facts and not hearsay. Increasingly, it is up to journalists to help the public make sense of complex issues and get unbiased information about world events.

To do this effectively, journalists must maintain their impartiality and accuracy above all else. This can be difficult in an era when so many people seek to discredit the media, but it is essential for a functioning democracy. Journalists must also be aware of their own biases and work to correct them where necessary. By doing so, they can provide vital checks and balances on our government and help the public make informed decisions.

Content marketing: Creating a positive relationship with the audience

Content is the cornerstone of marketing. But content marketing isn’t just about creating and pushing out content. It’s about creating a positive relationship with the market and resonating with specific personas.

Content can engage and inform readers about market challenges, leading solutions, and industry trends. Content marketers create content that engages readers at all stages of the lead funnel, from awareness to consideration through purchase and loyalty. By creating consistent quality content, readers learn to trust companies as reliable sources of industry information. These loyal readers and customers become advocates of the brand. So how can you go about creating engaging content?

1. Know your audience

Before creating content that resonates with your readers, you need to know who they are. What are their interests? What do they care about? How do they align with your buyer personas? Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can start tailoring your content accordingly.

2. Be relevant

It’s essential to stay relevant to your audience. Create content that provides unique information and insights useful for the industry and the target’s pain points. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Focus on delivering valuable content that meets the needs of your specific target market.

3. Be original

Make sure your content stands out from the rest. Find new ways to present information or tackle topics in fresh and unique ways. If you can pique your readers’ interest right from the get-go, chances are they’ll stick around for the long haul. Creating engaging content isn’t always easy, but it’s worth the effort.

4. Other critical differences

One of the critical differences between journalism and content marketing is the narrative framework. In journalism, the narrative framework is typically inverted, with the most important information appearing at the beginning of the article. In content marketing, on the other hand, the narrative framework is often more flexible and can be used to create a more engaging story.

Another critical difference between journalism and content marketing is the process. Journalism is typically linear, with each step of the process happening in sequence. Conversely, content marketing is often more iterative, with ideas developed and refined through multiple drafts.

Finally, the formatting of journalism and content marketing can also be quite different. Journalism articles are typically shorter and to the point, while content marketing pieces can be longer and more detailed, optimizing for topic clusters to appease search engines. Content marketing pieces also use more visuals, such as images, videos, and infographics, to break up the text and intrigue readers.

Should companies use journalism or content marketing?

It depends on the business goals. As the demand for quality online content grows, companies must understand the difference between journalism and content marketing. With this knowledge, companies can effectively target their audiences and produce content that aligns with their goals. And while there may be a rare case when you’d want to use both (ex: when you publish an eMag but also prioritize content marketing for a product), the distinction for each use case is clear.

Content marketing is very different from journalistic reporting when it comes to a narrative framework, process, and formatting. So which one is right for your business? If your business has a publication that seeks ethical reporting on current issues and trends and requires unique opinions, detailed interviews, or investigative fact-checking, journalists have a better skill set for your needs. If you’re looking to create content that increases the size of your lead funnel, optimizes topics for SEO ranking, generates more engagement from prospects and customers, and nurtures leads through a buyer’s journey, content marketers have a better skill set for your needs.

While there are some similarities between journalism and content marketing, don’t make the mistake of thinking all writing is the same. Both journalism and content marketing have unique benefits and drawbacks. Understand the difference between the two before deciding which specialization is right for your business.

The post Content Marketing Vs. Brand Journalism: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Contently.

Every quarter, G2 releases its Best of Software Awards in a variety of categories, and the Fall 2022 results are in! Contently is proud to announce we’re leading several key categories with our end-to-end content marketing platform.

Contently reached new heights this year, not only retaining its #1 spot for G2’s Best Enterprise Content Creation Platform for the 8th consecutive time, but also claiming the Leader badge for several other categories, including content analytics, freelancer platforms, and mid-market content creation.

We are so grateful for this honor and want to thank our customers for being amazing partners.

G2’s reports, released quarterly, highlight top performers and rank companies based on categories ranging from implementation and ease-of-use to client relationships and functionality.

Read G2’s Fall 2022 Reports >>

Our satisfaction ratings are also a testament to our customer-centric focus. We received high marks in all of the following categories:

• Ease of Doing Business With – 97%
• Quality of Support – 94%
• Meets Requirements 92%
• Ease of Admin – 92%
• Ease of Setup – 92%
• Ease-of-Use – 91%

Customers also rated software on their features and functionality. We’re excited to see our clients’ satisfaction in the following areas:

• Customizable Templated Workflows – 94%
• User, Role, and Access Management – 91%
• Internal Communication – 90%

Even with these amazing customer satisfaction ratings, we are always looking to improve our offerings, and G2’s awards give us a chance to reflect on our strengths and areas for improvement to support our mission of helping marketers and creative professionals create high-performance content at scale.

In fact, 99% of Contently users rated our platform 4 or 5 stars, and 91% said they would likely recommend Contently. This input fuels our product roadmap to continually improve our platform and services and provide the functionality our customers want.

Learn more about Contently’s rankings in G2’s Fall 2022 Report.

The post Contently Maintains #1 Spot in G2’s Best Enterprise Content Creation Platform Grid appeared first on Contently.

In traditional journalism, diligent fact-checking is a given. In a recent piece I wrote on abortion, the editor required that I verify every statistic, claim, or data point with a news source or expert.

When it comes to freelance content marketing, however, the parameters are often less clear. This type of work is not journalism, strictly speaking. When a brand is behind a story, there’s bias involved. But that doesn’t mean that all journalistic rigor should go out the window. Fact-checking is still a critical part of the process.

“Fact-checking for my content marketing stories is just as essential as it is for my editorial work,” said Anna Dimond, a journalist, content creator, and producer. “What separates excellent content marketing from the mediocre, in part, is care and attention to detail. I treat every story as a valuable source of information for readers—and a valuable gateway to a brand.”

Let’s take a look at why marketing writers and editors should take fact-checking seriously—and how they can do so without spending all day, every day looking up stats and references.

Why accuracy in content marketing is important

Whether I’m penning a reported piece, ghostwriting, or composing a blog post for a brand, there are a few fact-checking measures I always take. Some are obvious, like making sure I’m spelling names right and getting sources’ pronouns correct. I also ensure I’m citing studies accurately and attributing quotes from interviews to the right people.

But after that, it gets more nuanced. As a content marketer, what’s my responsibility to double-check that information cited in a third-party article is accurate? Do I need to parse the fine print of a scientific study every time I cite a statistic? Although the answers aren’t always clear-cut, Dimond noted that accuracy is a huge part of a writer’s—and a brand’s—credibility.

“The more reliable and high-quality [the content] is for readers, the more it confers trust in and value of the brand behind it,” Dimond said. “If a reader can’t depend on the basic facts of a blog post, it’s a clear message that they can’t trust the brand.”

In a rapidly evolving digital media landscape, reader trust is precious. Today’s newsfeeds are so rife with “fake news” that the edges between fact and fiction are often blurry. When you fail to take the necessary precautions, it not only creates a credibility issue, but may also perpetuate misinformation.

Fact-checking becomes even more important when you’re writing about sensitive topics. Today, many brands strive to tell diverse perspectives and amplify underrepresented narratives. In these cases, it’s critical to get the details right. Dimond recalled writing a piece about how the parents of transgender children have translated their parenting lessons into business and leadership decisions. She called the fact-checking process for the story “intricate.”

“But in the end, it represented [the sources] and their stories in ways they wanted, while underscoring the brand’s depth, compassion, and care,” she said, adding that it also helped establish trust with her sources and strengthened her relationship with the editor. “I’m really proud of the final product.”

A final reason to be vigilant about accuracy in marketing is that there may be legal ramifications for spreading misinformation. Many companies that hire freelancers include indemnification clauses in their contracts, meaning that the writer may be on the hook should a lawsuit result from their published work. The last thing a writer wants to think about is building a legal defense because they didn’t appropriately fact-check a claim in a piece that wrestles with ambiguities.

Fact-checking basics and best practices

Putting a piece out into the world knowing it contains no factual errors is about more than just peace of mind. “It’s about bulletproofing your work,” said Amy George, former Associated Press reporter and founder of By George Communications.

As a freelancer, each of your clients will have a different fact-checking policy (or lack thereof). You may be responsible for the process, or the publication may have in-house fact-checkers who handle it.

If you’ll be responsible for the task, you’ll want to have a grip on the basics, which include combing through the document and verifying names are spelled correctly, academic degrees are accurate, and titles are up to date. Double-check dates, locations, and timelines, and be sure that any claims you’ve made are verifiable. Note all third-party-sourced information via hyperlink or comment.

There are a few standard “rules” to citing sources, too: First and foremost, never rely on Wikipedia. Secondly, don’t copy/paste statistics from another publication without verifying the data in the original study or report. Finally, if the information comes from social media, make sure it’s true before you regurgitate it in print or online. When in doubt, find another source to cite.

When it comes to citing studies, it’s important to look at them with a critical eye. You can read the executive summary to figure out when the study was conducted and the criteria used. George recommended asking the following questions: Is it an independent study? When and how was it conducted? How trustworthy is the source? Are there any potential conflicts of interest?

If you’re working on a piece that involves original reporting, there are proactive steps you can take during interviews to make the fact-checking process easier later on. Make sure you record the interview (let the source know you’re doing this first). Sites like Otter.AI or Rev can help with the transcription, but it’s a good idea to listen through the audio yourself and cross-reference the transcript’s text before cementing quotes in your story.

Finally, when you’re writing the content, match the actual quote with the recording to determine if you’ve phrased it correctly in your copy. For every original source, note the person’s name, email, and phone number in case the editor or fact-checker wants to contact them directly. To be extra safe, give your sources a heads up about the facts/figures that directly pertain to them before the story goes live, and give them the opportunity to correct any inaccuracies.

Fact-checking resources and tools

There are a ton of resources out there to help writers verify information. Below are a few of the most common and helpful.

• AP Fact Check, Associated Press: The AP provides helpful accountability resources for journalists.
• Snopes: One of the oldest fact-checking services around, Snopes helps combat misinformation and disinformation, particularly when it concerns viral posts, urban legends, hoaxes, or folklore.
• PolitiFact: Established by the Poynter Institute, PolitiFact addresses inquiries regarding political claims.
• Media Bias/Fact Check: The MBFC monitors media bias on various websites. Its analysis focuses on political affiliations, biased word choices, and sourcing.
• Washington Post Fact Checker: The reputable media outlet offers a fact-checking landing page, as well as a newsletter that myth-busts untrue or misleading rumors circulating online.
• SciCheck: This site fact-checks false and misleading scientific claims made by individuals to influence public policy.

For writers who want to hone their fact-checking skills further, there are a variety of courses available. The Check, Please! Starter Course, partially funded by RTI International and the Rita Allen Foundation via the Misinformation Solutions Forum Prize, is a free, five-lesson course for beginners. Poynter Institute offers a Hands-On Fact-Checking course that focuses on identifying reliable sources, debunking viral misinformation, and deciding whether a statement is credible; it takes about 90 minutes to complete and costs $14.95. The Knight Center also offers a Disinformation and Fact-Checking in Times of COVID-19 course for free.

Finally, if you’re more of a visual learner, YouTuber John Green has partnered with the Poynter Institute and Stanford History Education Group to share a set of YouTube videos on fact-checking and identifying digital disinformation.

Keep in mind that even as a marketer, the written word holds power: Your particular piece may inform a reader’s decision or nudge them to change course in some way. Ensuring accurate details helps tell the bigger picture, whether for a journalistic publication or a corporate entity.

The post The Most Underrated Skill in Content Marketing? Fact-Checking appeared first on Contently.

The bad news: There are a lot of content marketing resources out there.

Heading into 2022, everyone wants to up their content game. But sometimes, sifting through a sea of content about marketing can be overwhelming. Which resources can you really trust?

To help you maximize your time and get ready for a killer 2022, we curated a list of our 10 favorite content marketing resources. Check out these courses, research, playbooks, and more to take your content to the next level.

The good news? They’re all free.

1. How to Measure Content ROI in 10 Steps

One of the biggest struggles for marketers: tying content to revenue. Our Content Measurement Maturity Model—the industry’s first—gives marketers the roadmap they need to prove success.

2. What’s Your Content Maturity Level?

In this quick 11 question quiz, you’ll discover which stage of content maturity your company is at and how you can reach the next level. In terms of testing your emotional maturity, we don’t have a resource for that…yet.

3. SEO for Content Course

Over half of traffic to brand sites comes from search. Yet, many content programs still find themselves stuck in the dark ages, keyword-stuffing in vain. In this free, 8-week email course, we teach you how to do SEO right.

4. Content Strategy Course: Brand Awareness

In the first module of our FREE, 3-part content strategy course, learn how to identify what your audience craves, stand out from the competition, and build an incredible content strategy and calendar.

5. Content Strategy Course: Lead Generation

Lead gen is content marketers’ #1 goal. It’s also their #1 struggle. In this course, you’ll learn how to create valuable lead gen content and nurture prospects until they’re sales ready.

6. Content Strategy Course: Sales Enablement

Teamwork makes the dream work—and it also ensures that your content converts. In this course, we cover how sales and marketing teams can work together to create valuable content that drives revenue.

7. What Consumers Want From Marketers

Consumers are talking, but are you listening? We surveyed 1,072 Americans to find out what kinds of content they want for brands. What they said might surprise you—and even change your 2022 strategy.

8. State of Content Marketing 2021: 6 Key Opportunities for Marketers

As content marketing evolves at an exponential rate, marketers need to ensure their content strategies keep up. We surveyed the top content marketers to understand their biggest goals, challenges, and missed opportunities.

9. State of Finance Content 2021: Benchmarks, Trends, and Keys to Success

We analyzed tens of thousands of pieces of finserv content to figure out which topics, channels, and formats are working best. Learn about emerging formats—like short-form audio—that’ll help you break through. If you’re a marketer in financial services, you need to read this.

10. State of Healthcare Content 2021: 5 Trends Transforming the Industry

Good medicine, like good content, comes down to trust and results. See the five trends in healthcare content that separate the most successful brand publishers from those still struggling to build an audience. Your healthcare competitors have this bookmarked. Do you?

Want even more resources? Head over to ContentlyU, our free content marketing education and resource center.

The post 10 Free Content Marketing Resources You Need to Bookmark appeared first on Contently.

But that makes sense. It’s extremely difficult to turn a profit without offering (or leveraging) some kind of tech, which means marketing those products has become very complex. It’s looking more and more like the intro sequence of HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Among the legions scrambling toward profitability are tech startups (unicorn or otherwise), legacy companies adding new branches of innovation, B2B tech, and consumer tech, just to name a few. Many are chasing the path set forth by the technology titans: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

We’ve surveyed the offerings of some of our favorite tech companies in order to bring you a short list of stand-out content marketing. Most of us could learn a thing or two from these industry leaders.

Slack | The State of Work Report

Every brand wants to carve out a space of authority. Releasing a branded data report on your industry is the perfect way to do that. Published by Slack, the company that brought you the biggest disruption to corporate communication since Gmail, the annual State of Work report isn’t just a nice advertisement; it’s a genuinely useful piece of content for anyone who needs to think about how workspaces are built.

By gathering data, Slack makes a compelling case for streamlining office communications. The report is interesting enough that the company doesn’t have to seed CTAs throughout the copy, but any reader who enjoys it will likely conclude that Slack knows the lay of the land really well.

2019’s report found that workers who feel misaligned from their company’s central goal are the most likely to feel unhappy in their jobs: “When we’re not in sync with our company’s goals, we tend to feel more pessimistic about where our company is headed, and that’s reflected in our perception and experience of our workplace across a wide range of factors, from collaboration to productivity to compensation.”

What’s one way to connect your employees to your C-suite and a company’s high level strategy, you might ask? Downloading a chat program like Slack might help. Just saying.

Buffer | The Science of Social Media

There’s a paradox to branded podcasts. Every brand on earth wants to create an engaging podcast, but it’s hard to think of listeners who actually prefer branded programming.

But, like GE’s incredible show The Message, Buffer’s branded podcast is actually an exception to this rule. If you’re looking to dive into issues related to communication, marketing, and publishing, during your commute, you could do worse than tuning in to Buffer’s The Science of Social Media.

In one particularly interesting episode, co-host Heather-Mae Pusztai breaks down social copy into more detail than seems possible. “Consider the specific letters in the words you’re using,” she said, “particularly when it comes to stop consonants and glide consonants. Stop consonants are those that cause the vocal tract to block when pronouncing the consonant. Glide consonants do not obstruct the vocal tract and are quite frictionless when spoken.” Stop consonants, according to Pusztai, are ideal for clustering around your CTA, because they force the reader to pause.

Additionally, Buffer writes up a blog post for each podcast episode, which is a really great way to drive additional traffic and ensure that your audio content ranks on search. The Science of Social Media is just a great content product, and it enhances Buffer’s brand identity without getting into the promotional weeds.

Blendtec | Will it Blend?

The conceit of Blendtec’s massively popular YouTube series is simple: using their blender products, the company tosses in ridiculous objects to see if their patented blade technology will shred it. Put simply, “Will it Blend?” is a masterwork of a social campaign—it’s actually a deft bit of product marketing, wrapped up in a platform-specific package that respects the kind of content YouTubers like.

Based on the tone, costuming, and set design, you can tell watching the videos that Blendtec didn’t just start churning out this content on a whim. It researched what works on YouTube, and it paid off. The brand’s channel has 876,000 subscribers, and the top video (blending an iPad) has been viewed 18 million times.

Bumble | The BFF Tour

When I was single and living in a new city, I relied on Bumble for finding dates. For that, the app rocks. But when it came to finding girlfriends to meet up and confide in, I was definitely out of luck, relying on long distance phone calls with faraway buds.

Thanks to Bumble’s BFF option, singles can use the dating app to meet up platonically with new people. This update to the dating platform was launched with a live events tour, which followed a traveling airstream trailer. It’s that fun loving, surprising bit of event marketing (and content marketing!) that lands Bumble on our list.

Capitalizing on the “pop-up cocktail event” craze that’s been sweeping the nation for over a year, the BFF Tour offered a social setting for lonely singles trying to find their crew, and it fit perfectly with Bumble’s other marketing events.

Dell Technologies’ Perspectives | Girl Scouting for the STEM Age

Modern consumers want to purchase goods and services from brands that reflect their personal beliefs—the data tells us that much. That’s why creating content about empowering girls in STEM was a great move for Dell Technologies, the tech company that puts out the digital magazine Perspectives.” (Full disclosure: Contently partners with Dell Technologies to produce Perspectives.)

By describing a tech-related event that might seem small to most audiences—one girl scout troop leader taking her girls to a coding academy—Dell Technologies centers its brand in a detailed discussion. The story’s existence implies that the brand values even the smallest movements in its industry. Best of all, it leaves the reader feeling inspired about the world.

Squanch Games | Branded subreddit and discord

Few creators have a better understanding of our digital world than Justin Roiland, co-creator of the uber-popular cartoon Rick and Morty and head of the VR brand Squanch Games. Maybe because Roiland’s cartoon picked up steam in online fan communities, he was fully aware of the power of user-generated content when he launched his games studio.

Instead of waiting for consumers to start conversations about Squanch, Roiland and his team created dedicated spaces on the platforms their target audience was already using: Reddit and Discord. Combing through the discussion channels, you don’t see a lot of intrusion or advertisement from Roiland himself—unless he’s doing an AMA (Redditspeak for “Ask Me Anything” session)—but both websites are linked on Squanch’s homepage. They bear an official stamp of approval, which makes users feel like their conversations are being heard.

No matter how you fit into the technology industry, you can find creative ways to stand out by studying your target audience. That’s the bright line connecting our favorite content marketing campaigns from tech brands. The best ones meet consumers halfway.

The post 6 Examples of Incredible Content Marketing From Technology Companies appeared first on Contently.