“With great power comes great responsibility.”

That’s what Uncle Ben told Peter Parker (aka Spiderman) in 1962.

Let’s twist the phrase for our industry: “Great marketing comes from great responsibility.”

That’s the message Lola Bakare sends in her 2024 book, Responsible Marketing: How To Create an Authentic and Inclusive Marketing Strategy.

Recently, she participated in a Live With CMI interview about responsible marketing. Watch the highlights below or read on for some takeaways from her book (a must-read) and the discussion.

What is responsible marketing?

Lola says she used the words “responsible marketing” to take the pressure off marketers. She explains why by starting with the well-known outdoor apparel brand Patagonia. The brand has a reputation for its commitment to the environment. It even pledges 1% of sales to environmental causes. And yet, it doesn’t use the word “sustainable” in describing its brand mission.

Vincent Stanley, director of philosophy at Patagonia, explained that deliberate decision in an interview with Yale Insights, which Lola references in her book:

“Sustainable is the popular term for companies that have environmental and social ambitions. We don’t think there’s very much that we do at Patagonia that’s truly sustainable. That’s why we use the phrase ‘responsible company.’ We’re honing our practices so that we’re creating the least amount of pollution and using the least amount of resources to create a product. That’s reducing harm.” 

Lola says Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard explains it like this, “With what I have right now, with the conditions that we’re in right now, all I can do is try to be as responsible as possible.”

But it’s more than that. Lola advocates for responsible marketing because it simplifies the conversation (and in getting buy-in and other support) — something that is needed now more than ever.

It allows marketers to roll up purpose marketing, inclusive marketing, cause marketing, conscious marketing, multicultural marketing, social impact marketing, ethical marketing, diversity marketing, sustainable marketing, and culture marketing, she explains.

Responsible marketing works for the bottom-line business side, too. “When done right, responsible marketing drives sustainable business growth. It’s a powerful reminder that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive but rather beautifully interconnected,” Lola writes.

“By optimizing for relevance, intention, and precision, responsible marketing invites us to say ‘R.I.P.’ to unnecessary confusion that slows us down, holds us back, and leaves world-changing work vulnerable to detractors both well-meaning and otherwise.”

Don’t start with demands

Responsible marketing doesn’t start with ultimatums about what should be done or complaints about what isn’t being done correctly, Lola says.

She recounts a recent conversation at her book launch event. A man in his early to mid-20s asked her when he should have his say and share his ideas about all the wrong things the company was doing. Recognizing his frustration (and how he reminded her of herself at that age,) she shared some advice that may surprise you.

“You don’t do it that way,” she told him. “You control what you can control. You stay in your lane.

“Start getting to know people, ask them questions, get them to see you as an inquisitive young man. And then I guarantee you, before long, you’ll be invited to the table and asked for your opinion.”

But once you’re at the table, you still don’t make demands, Lola says. You advocate and implement a responsible marketing strategy.

What is the responsible marketing framework?

In 2023, the World Federation of Advertisers surveyed CMOs and senior global marketers at 38 companies. Eighty-eight percent reported having a responsible marketing framework, and 87% said those frameworks are increasingly important to their long-term operations.

Lola devotes the first part of her book to distilling a framework for responsible marketing, which is reflected in the chapter titles:

• Make it authentic: Brand-relevant social impact
• Make it known: Reputation impact
• Make it count: Commercial impact

Each building block leads to the next. A brand with social relevancy gains a reputation for good that then converts into a financial result.

Lola calls it the Triple Top-Line Flywheel. Each block has five key performance indicators. When one or more of the KPIs is achieved, the next framework block is unlocked — creating an ongoing cycle of regenerative impact.

Social impact KPIs include:

• Fostering diversity
• Enabling inclusion
• Advancing equity
• Cultivating belonging
• Supporting sustainability

Reputation impact KPIs encompass:

• Amplifying brand identity
• Delivering positive earned media
• Increasing share of voice
• Generating word of mouth (net promoter score)
• Improving brand health/sentiment scores

Commercial impact KPIs include:

• Driving sales
• Acquiring new customers/users
• Retaining customers/users
• Maximizing wallet share/frequency
• Attracting investors

It’s worth emphasizing that you need only achieve one KPI in a category to propel your brand to the next stage. So, for example, if your brand marketing cultivates an online community where members feel they belong (social impact), it can increase its share of voice (reputation impact) and then retain customers (commercial impact). With the flywheel fully engaged now, you can see ongoing contributions and benefits across all categories of impact.

Lola writes, “Triple top-line thinking comes together because, when you solve a problem, you create brand preference, and that is what makes the reputational impact turn into commercial impact.”

Use your superpowers

“Nobody has more power to show people what’s really going on,” Lola says. “What win-wins are you going to find where you’re not only creating financial value for your business, but you’re actually doubling down on that because you did the ultimate thing that every marketer knows is the cheat code to outside success … emotional connection.”

To help in your process, Lola offers books and authors (I’ve linked to their books and individual LinkedIn pages) who have helped in her development as a marketer and her thinking as a responsible marketing advocate:

“Let’s stand up, especially those of us who have these really fun jobs where we have so much control over what people see, consume, and hear. If we’re going to shape culture, let’s shape it in a way that includes all of us,” Lola says.

And that’s how to use your responsible marketing power for the good of your company and the world.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

What was your favorite ad from the Super Bowl LIX?

I couldn’t pick just one. As is true every year, I love how creative they all are.

But OpenAI’s ad has stayed with me. With a new CMO at the helm, the company finally seems to have captured a message that doesn’t feel out of step with the zeitgeist.

The black-and-white ad showed hundreds of dots swirling and recombining into images celebrating human inventiveness and creativity. The company claims the ad was crafted entirely by humans with some AI-driven prototyping and storyboarding.

The commercial’s only scripted moment truly resonated, asking: “What do you want to create next?”

It’s a simple yet profound prompt for marketers navigating content creation in 2025. (And, no, the “prompting” irony isn’t lost on me.)

I touch on why in the video below and go into more detail in the rest of this article.

Constructed vs. created content

Marketing teams face an existential question today: What happens when AI can create content faster than humans?

As you know, faster doesn’t correlate to better. But slow doesn’t always correlate to great, either.

It’s comforting to rationalize that “faster than humans” isn’t enough to put most creators out of their jobs anytime soon. But that rationalization feels like the door that Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio’s characters clung to in Titanic. It looks big enough to save us both, but for some reason, it just isn’t.

You might find a better answer by understanding the difference between constructed and created content.

G.K. Chesterton articulated this distinction beautifully in his analysis of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. He wrote:

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

Created content is the poem that forms in your mind before the pen ever touches paper.

It’s the painting vividly imagined before the first brushstroke meets the canvas.

It’s the article that takes shape in a carefully crafted outline, deepens through research, and finally gets refined into just the right expression.

Constructed content, by contrast, gains value only after it’s fully realized. Think of a technical manual, a street sign, the concise summary of a novel, or the abstract of a thought-provoking lecture. Useful and efficient but only recognized for their worth after completion.

Put simply, no one anticipates these things with excitement, but people can appreciate them once they start serving their purpose.

Content output by prompting a generative AI tool is, by nature, constructed content. It’s assembled, optimized, and fine-tuned based on algorithms, data sets, and prompts.

It can be helpful, efficient, engaging, and even loved. But it will always lack something essential: the human spark — the origin of an idea that we nurture, wrestle with, and fall in love with before it’s ever expressed.

Writing is writing, isn’t it?

I recently spoke with a young writer at a B2B technology company with a fascinating career trajectory. She started at an agency, crafting brilliant blog posts and articles. Later, she moved into an in-house content role, where she thrived on writing about industry trends and conducting in-depth interviews.

But, after a few organizational shifts, she eventually found herself editing technical specifications and product documentation instead of creating original pieces.

Three months into this role, she asked her manager if she could take on more varied writing assignments. The response? “Writers are writers. And writing is writing.”

The first statement is true. The second is not.

The young writer couldn’t figure out why that comment bugged her so much. She could see the danger of her editing role being replaced by generative AI. But it was how she felt about the writing itself that was so unfortunate. Her knack for storytelling had been quashed by dry reporting.  

Some types of content can (and probably should) be purely constructed, like product descriptions, compliance documents, and technical specifications. These are useful and necessary, but they don’t exactly tap into the joy of creation.

Other kinds — thought leadership, brand storytelling, and emotionally compelling content — are created. They’re loved before they exist, and they evoke something powerful in the writer and the reader (or listener or viewer).

This distinction matters now more than ever. AI can construct content, but it doesn’t create in the way people do.

It can’t feel the deep satisfaction of discovering an idea and shaping it into a compelling narrative. It can’t infuse a piece with the lived experience, cultural nuances, and emotional resonance that make content memorable to both the author and the audience.

The power of friction in creativity

Here’s an essential point in the difference between constructed and created content. Created content isn’t better than constructed content. Constructed content may be just as effective, engaging, and appreciated.

The true value of created content lies in what it does for the creator. When people create, they don’t just express an idea. They live with it, refine it, struggle with it, and ultimately fall in love with it. That journey transforms us, sharpening our minds and deepening our perspectives.

The pushback to that manager isn’t to agree that “writing is writing.” Nor is it that the young writer can create content better than AI.

It’s that working on created content makes her a better investment for the company. She’s more valuable to the company when she falls in love with the ideas she has to wrestle into created existence.

Now, I get it. Your inner CEO might say, “I don’t care about her feelings. If the content can be just as loved, why not automate it?”

But here’s what you (and your inner CEO) should care about: the bottom line.

Wiser, more creative employees aren’t just happier — they’re also more profitable. Why?

Because a button-pushing robot follows instructions every time. Wise creative team members find better instructions over time. They start solving problems before they happen. They’re more likely to generate new ideas that push the company forward.

When creators are engaged — wrestling with ideas — they’re not just completing tasks. They’re inventing better ways to do them. That’s not just valuable, it’s irreplaceable.

This is why valuable friction is so important in marketing and creative content. Struggling with ideas, iterating, refining, and expressing something new leads to real growth.

Created content is the byproduct of that struggle, an artifact of human thought, insight, and artistry. And it’s the only thing that makes humans more valuable over time.

Balancing AI and human creativity 

Both constructed and created content have their place. Generative AI can efficiently handle some aspects of high-volume, data-driven constructed content tasks like:

• Automating SEO-focused content
• Summarizing data and reports
• Generating initial drafts for refinement
• Creating product descriptions or FAQs

AI also has the potential for working together with humans on iterative editing sessions, idea generation, or turns of phrases that express the idea the human loves and is struggling to put into words.  

But only a human can fall in love with an idea before it’s expressed. That makes humans not only irreplaceable but also the most valuable part of the AI investment.

The best investment in generative AI is the investment it makes in us. When you use AI to augment rather than replace human creativity, you don’t just create better content — you create better creators. The best marketing strategies will embrace this balance.

As the OpenAI ad prompts: “What do you want to create today?”

It’s your story. Create it well.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute Team

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are being cancelled by public institutions and private companies. But the end of formal DEI initiatives shouldn’t signal that your content and marketing should stop representing the many voices of your brand’s customers.

After all, that’s just bad business.

As Michael P. Krone explains in his classic and often cited article, Diversity Marketing & Cultural Awareness, “If your customers are different than you and they feel unrecognized, you will begin to lose them.”

That makes sense.

Now, consider non-white people make up over 40% of the U.S. population, according to a 2023 U.S. Census report. And the percentage of Black, multiracial, Hispanic, and Asian populations is only expected to grow in the coming years.

And those numbers speak only of racial identity. They don’t address gender, age, disability status, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity, or national origin. Also, add to the big picture that your company likely sells to customers outside the United States. A global view is not only welcome but necessary.

Think about the 2019 consumer survey by Google and The Female Quotient, in which 64% of respondents took some action after seeing an ad they considered to be diverse or inclusive. However, some segments experienced even higher engagement: millennials (77%), Blacks (79%), Latinos (85%), and the LGBTQ community (85%). (Google’s original link to the survey has been redirected to Think With Google’s content hub about marketing in the era of AI.)

Carlos Santiago, co-founder of Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, said in the report, “We found that highly relevant ads go beyond winking and recognizing diversity and inclusion … These ads enhance brand perception, increase brand effectiveness, and significantly lift purchase intent and loyalty.”

So, even if your organization’s climate isn’t receptive to advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion, you should still embrace the general principles. Perhaps, though, you address it by opting for an implementation strategy adapted from a good writing tip: Show, don’t tell. Show you value all types of consumers without announcing to everybody that you’re doing it.

See the big picture

Does this scenario sound familiar?

A marketer searches for a stock image to accompany a blog post titled, The Top 10 Business Lessons Every Young Professional in Our Industry Should Know.

The first result for “business” appears:

Knowing the importance of diversity, the marketer scans the image.

• Women? Check.
• Men? Yes.
• Black people? Yes/probably.
• White people? Yes/probably.
• Other minorities? Maybe.
• Young people? Yes.
• Middle-age or seniors? No.
• Office workers? Yes.
• Industrial workers? No.

Satisfied with the racial and gender mix and OK with the lack of age and worker-type diversity given the topic, the marketer includes the image with the article and checks off “diverse content” on their list.

Unfortunately, that checkmark isn’t deserved. Representing your audience can’t be done in a single image. Your audience wants to know that you see them — physically, geographically, psychologically, etc. They want to make sure you get their needs, their pain points, and their thoughts.

To accomplish all that, your content must resonate consciously and subconsciously. It requires far more than an image. It requires thinking more deeply, from your audience research to your team structure, from your style guide to your user experience.

Understand diversity and inclusion aren’t the same thing

When adopting that holistic strategy, it can be helpful to start by understanding the meanings of diversity and inclusion.

I like how Rita Mitjans, former ADP’s chief diversity and social responsibility officer, explains it: “Diversity is the ‘what’; inclusion is the ‘how’.”

She continues: “Diversity focuses on the makeup … demographics such as gender, race/ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, just to name a few … Inclusion requires that everyone’s contributions be valued.”

Does your content demonstrate that your brand sees the importance of the many differences of your audience members AND values everyone’s contribution?

Salesforce offered a great perspective on the value of inclusivity when it announced the inclusion module for its online learning system (Trailhead):

“(T)ruly inclusive marketing can elevate the stories and voices of people that have been typically marginalized or underrepresented, deepen connections with customers, and even influence positive social change.”

Imagine what a differentiator it would be if your content incorporated voices from people who haven’t experienced being represented or heard in your industry.

You need only look at Unilever’s Dove Real Beauty Pledge, which began in 2004 and was recommitted to in 2024. Over 20 years, the campaign to appreciate women of all ages, races, sizes, etc., has evolved into a brand differentiator, one from which the company still garners positive media attention and customer praise.

How to demonstrate your brand welcomes many

Committing to connecting with many segments of your buying audience is an ongoing effort. You can start (and continue) with these areas of work:

Dig into your audience

While you should respect everybody, you don’t have to address groups with no relevance or interest in your company’s products or services. For example, women would not be the primary audience for a beard-care product company. And college students would not be the primary audience for AARP.

However, you can’t fully understand your audience and its many nuances until you do the research. Look at the available data to understand representation that can be documented such as gender, income level, geography, race, etc. Then, go deeper. Ask front-line team members, go to industry events, and conduct focus groups in part to better understand those characteristics that are not easily tracked, such as physical ability or a point of view.

Develop or update audience personas to ensure that they reflect the characteristics important to your audience and/or your business. Most importantly, don’t operate from a single, homogeneous persona.

Look at your team

How well does your content marketing team reflect your audiences? If it doesn’t, how can you change that? I’m not suggesting you fire someone. But when you hire your next team member, first think about what characteristics and qualities are missing from your team. For example, if you’re hiring a new content creator, think about who can deliver a fresh voice or unrepresented perspective that will resonate with your audience.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for the next vacancy on your team. When you hire freelancers or contract with agencies, think about what voices they can provide that your team doesn’t have. Or create and listen to a more representative editorial advisory board (internal or external members) who can share ideas, react to your team’s plans, and inspire you to think differently.

It’s a good business move as Del Johnson, a principal at Backstage Capital, explained in the Google research report: “The more distance there is culturally between your team and the market, the less ability you will have to execute. We all fall into particular biases. That’s why you need to have culturally competent people in the room who have the power to affect decisions.”

One needs only to look to Gucci in 2019. Shortly after apologizing that its balaclava-style top resembled blackface (the black turtleneck was designed to be pulled up on a person’s face and had red fabric around the mouth), it had to atone for another cultural mistake — turning Sikh-like turbans into a fashion statement. The garment adorned their runway models and was sold as “Indy Full Turban.”

Gucci deeply apologizes for the offense caused by the wool balaclava jumper.
We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected, and at the forefront of every decision we make.
Full statement below. pic.twitter.com/P2iXL9uOhs

— gucci (@gucci) February 7, 2019

Perhaps if its team had included people of color and/or the Sikh faith who knew their input would be welcomed, these scenarios would have turned out differently. At a minimum, a team should be sensitized and trained to ask tough questions and encouraged to consult with those communities where a possible problem or misunderstanding could arise.

Edit for all

Ensuring that your text reflects inclusion requires writers and editors to avoid assumptions and instead question what they know. And that often requires a major shift in thinking.

Prime your writers and editors to think critically when they write and to regularly use their style guides when in doubt about phrasing. Most professional style guides address diversity-related topics. The 58th edition of the  Associated Press Style Guide included many updated entries for race, gender, and disabilities that would be helpful for content marketers.

The National Center on Disability and Journalism guide “covers general terms and words on physical disabilities, hearing and visual impairments, mental and cognitive disabilities, and seizure disorders.” The guide is also helpful because it details the background of the topic, its recommendations, and what the AP Style Guide says about it.

The important thing is to ensure that your brand’s style guide addresses the language components used most frequently and that your team members proactively ask questions so they can make the most helpful and relevant edits.

Incorporate into end marketing product

But don’t stop at the text. Think about elements such as navigation for people who don’t see or hear as well as others in your audience. For example, use alt-text for every digital image published. Don’t distinguish options by color only. Use captions for all videos. Include transcripts for audio or video interviews.

Hobo, a U.K.-based SEO service company, offers a detailed resource to help: How to Design Websites for Blind/Visually Impaired, Deaf, Disabled, & Dyslexic Visitors. UserWay also has a robust guide for deaf accessibility and inclusion for visual impairments.

Bookmark this one-stop resource

The Conscious Style Guide is designed as a “helpful resource for better understanding and knowing what to say, how to phrase something, be sensitive to, etc.” It was created by Karen Yin as a resource for inclusive, empowering, and respectful language.

Through articles and links to resources (including topical style guides), it covers:

While you should bookmark the Conscious Style Guide as a reference document, it’s also extremely helpful in educating your team members about topics they don’t know around diversity and inclusion.

Expand your audience to increase customer engagements

Letting your audience recognize themselves in your content marketing doesn’t require a formal DEI program at your company. It can’t be accomplished in a single image or checklist. It requires thinking differently to welcome all of your target customers. Fortunately, it’s a never-ending opportunity to do good for your audience and your business.

Updated from a June 2020 article.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Just when it seemed like the generative AI landscape was beginning to settle, DeepSeek stepped in and said, “Hold my beer.”

Wall Street seems convinced that China’s generative AI entry will change the game. Still, remember, popular doesn’t mean differentiated.

Yet businesses push their marketing teams to chase trends at breakneck speed. They use generative AI to quickly create content to flood channels with articles and videos optimized for popularity with algorithms instead of audiences.

And that creates an ocean of the most probable content. Note the “most probable” descriptor. Generative AI tools don’t produce “average” content (meaning they don’t return the average of everything they know about a query). They predict the most probable words.

Why does the distinction matter?

Because instead of turning out brilliant new ideas, generative AI tools mostly deliver slightly repackaged versions of ideas that have already been expressed.

The result? Unique takes struggle to stand out in the resulting ocean of probable content, while popular takes flood the market.

Welcome to the contest for differentiation.

Brands must constantly choose whether to compete in a crowded idea space by creating content that’s already popular in search and social or offer something radically different – ideas no one is talking about yet. I talk about it in this video or keep reading for even more detail.

Red and blue markets

A decade ago, the book Blue Ocean Strategy made waves (pun intended) by distinguishing between red oceans — crowded, hyper-competitive markets — and blue oceans — untapped, competition-free opportunities.

Most marketing strategies swim in red oceans, competing for attention with minor variations on the same well-worn ideas. Industries like martech, streaming media, airlines, and automotive are classic examples of this hyper-saturated competition.

The book suggests that companies stuck competing in red oceans should seek to pivot toward a blue ocean by pioneering new spaces and creating markets where none previously existed.

HubSpot did this in 2007 by carving a new category (inbound marketing) out of the fiercely competitive marketing automation space. More recently, Savannah Bananas owner Jesse Cole left the red ocean of minor league baseball and invented an entirely new market (baseball-as-entertainment) with the Banana Ball league.

But now that technology democratizes access and enables rapid replication, blue oceans don’t stay blue for long. New ideas are quickly copied and commoditized at scale. Ridesharing, for instance, was once a groundbreaking concept — until it became a contest among Uber, Lyft, and a wave of imitators.

But what if there’s a third way?

How to craft a purple ocean content strategy

A purple ocean strategy blends differentiated ideas with market demand. It involves crafting content to pull people away from crowded spaces by offering them new ways to look at (perhaps) familiar ideas before they even realize they need them.

A classic example of a purple ocean business strategy is Apple’s iPhone launch. In a crowded market, Apple introduced an entirely new way to think about the benefits of a cellular phone.

But in a content strategy, you’re rarely talking about a fundamental product shift. Instead, you’re creating content to market an existing product or service. T. Rowe Price’s Next Wave of Advice program is a great example of a purple ocean content strategy. Rather than competing in the crowded space of industry research and thought leadership, they shifted focus to teaching financial advisors how to build deeper client connections by integrating coaching into their practices.

In this generative AI-obsessed era, content may be infinite — but well-thought-out ideas are finite. Differentiation can’t just be about speed, volume, or keyword optimization. It must be about depth, originality, and value. And that’s where purple oceans come in.

So, how do you create a purple ocean strategy to rise above the sea of rapidly commoditizing content?

Here are three key principles:

1. Introduce valuable friction

The red ocean approach is all about removing as much friction as possible: Make content as fast, seamless, and optimized as possible.

But sometimes, added friction can be valuable. It forces slower engagement and deeper thought and gives buyers time to think and discover.

Instead of trying to remove every barrier, try slowing down the customer journey at key points to enhance understanding and trust. You can introduce meaningful friction by:

• Challenging conventional wisdom
• Asking bold questions that force engagement
• Creating interactive experiences that require participation

Purple ocean strategies aren’t about efficiency — they’re about depth, distinction, and differentiation.

2. Target the pre-audience

Marketers face tremendous business pressure to focus on demand identification (i.e., on people who are ready to buy today). So, they obsess over who’s searching now, which leads to a red ocean approach.

Few think about who will be searching next.

A purple ocean strategy targets audiences before they enter the market (think Savannah Bananas) or teaches them to think differently about a space (think about how HubSpot markets itself currently).

To target the  pre-audience, try one of these approaches:

• Identify emerging trends before they become mainstream
• Educate future buyers before they even recognize they have a problem
• Create content for the customers of tomorrow, not just today

For example, if I were marketing a modern marketing AI tool, instead of optimizing content for “best AI marketing tools to scale your content in 2025” (a red ocean topic), I would focus on content such as “how emerging AI reshapes brand differentiation in 2025.” This approach shifts the conversation into something that may not have people talking just yet but differentiates your brand and positions it as a trusted advisor.

3. Build an owned audience, not just a rented one

One of the biggest risks in content marketing in 2025 is relying too much on rented platforms.

SEO? Algorithm changes can tank your traffic overnight. Social media? You don’t own the audience — Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok do. Paid ads? As soon as you stop spending, the leads disappear.

A purple ocean strategy focuses on building a direct, engaged audience that wants to follow you into clearer waters. By offering the “best next” thing for them to want to follow, you develop a renewed relationship with them.

To build your owned audience, offer:

• Email newsletters that people actually want to open and read
• Communities that provide unique value beyond the content
• Content platforms that establish long-term trust and authority

Brands that develop owned-audience relationships will be the ones that survive content commoditization.

Sink or swim

Content and marketing face an inflection point. AI has changed the game, and the old strategies (whether red or blue ocean) won’t be enough.

A purple ocean mindset is essential to stand out, build lasting differentiation, and create actual value.

Are you still chasing only red or only blue oceans  — or are you ready to start swimming in purple waters?

It’s your story. Tell it well.

Subscribe to workday or weekly CMI emails to get Rose-Colored Glasses in your inbox each week. 

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Trendy content marketing formats and platforms can come and go. Today’s TikTok campaign is tomorrow’s “Remember when …?” But one format has stood the test of time — email newsletters.

Newsletters offer plenty of marketing appeal, helping brands build a subscribed audience of consumers who want to hear from your business. They’re also relatively easy and cost effective to produce, especially for teams using AI and other marketing automation tools.

Those advantages may be why 71% of marketers distribute digital newsletters, according to CMI’s latest B2B Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research.

To enhance your ability to deliver a satisfying newsletter experience that drives your marketing goals, we’ve gathered examples and best practices. Each is a winner or finalist for Best Digital Newsletter at the 2024 Content Marketing Awards.

(Though the CMI staff and community admire many creator-driven newsletters, I’ve focused on examples from brands, nonprofits, and agencies in this article.)

If you want your subscribers to look forward to opening and reading your newsletter, optimize your content for these five elements:

1. Readability

Time-constrained audiences scan newsletters for exciting ideas and relevant information rather than reading from start to end. To make that easier, use short sentences and paragraphs to get your message across. Use brief, catchy headlines and descriptive subheadings to highlight critical insights and recommended actions. Videos and images can also break up lengthy sections of copy and contextualize your messages.

Example: BDH Solutions

BDH Solutions provides business services for real estate principals, including landlords, property managers, and investors. Transactions between vendors and buyers in this space can be highly complex, which is all the more reason for BDH to communicate with the utmost clarity and simplicity.

You won’t find fancy bells and whistles in the company’s bimonthly newsletter. That’s by design.

Each issue is limited to an opening image (such as the waterfront property in the image below), two property listings, and a brief summary of and links to two industry-relevant news articles (not shown). In this version, a personalized intro to the recipient Camille includes some thoughts from CEO Ross Hedditch about his outlook for the coming year.

Subheadings appear on a green-colored banner (shown in the “Top Listings” header above), visually separating each section of concise, easy-to-read content.

In the Top Listings example, an image of the property’s charming location in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, does most of the talking. The accompanying copy focuses on top-line details, such as the unique opportunity to purchase or rent, the number of residential (364) and commercial (14) units in the parcel, and a characterization of the current tenancy (“Established agency located in a commercial hub with premium offices and a marketing catchment area of approximately 20,000 residents”). A hyperlinked call to action for more information facilitates a direct conversation with Ross.

The newsletter may be simple, but the thinking behind the development of this Content Marketing Award finalist was anything but. BDH’s agency partner, The Brilliant Content Agency, applied psychology principles such as the priming effect during copywriting (note how the CEO introduction uses word association to define “a disconnect in expectations”) to optimize engagement, enhance reader comprehension and recall, and elicit the desired action.

2. Storytelling value

While brevity works for some, deep-dive storytelling might help your brand newsletter stand out from the pack — especially if you let the action unfold within the body of the newsletter instead of requiring a click to read more.

Long-form newsletters work best when they carry readers beyond the headlines, immersing them in a relatable story that sparks empathy. Storifying your content also creates a richer, more engagement-worthy experience that subscribers can anticipate and enjoy.

Example: Aksha Dialogues

Aksha Dialogues is a monthly newsletter created to share knowledge and technical expertise from Aksha, a health and development initiative in India from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its marketing goal has always been to share the foundation’s ideas, innovations, and solutions. Yet, its content lacked the ability to advance crucial conversations around its efforts.

Marketing agency Gutenberg helped address that shortcoming by revitalizing Aksha Dialogues from a text-based publication to one that features impactful images and video links that reflect a diversity of voices and convey the richness of the foundation’s subject matter expertise.

Evidence of this is shown below. The newsletter title in a banner is set against a striking image of sanitation workers in India wearing protective masks and hard hats. The thumbnail image attracts readers to view the accompanying video by representing residents who have benefitted from the Swachh Bharat Mission featured in the newsletter.  

Among the newsletter’s distinguishing features is a full-length article (a portion is shown above), contrasting the typical newsletter approach of posting a brief teaser and a CTA to read more. Further, the content emphasizes first-person accounts from the foundation’s partners and collaborators. It contextualizes technical aspects of the foundation’s work and its positive impact on the health and well-being of people in India.

Its real-world storytelling enhances the content’s emotional resonance and potential to drive deeper engagement. For example, one section of the story (image below) discusses a community ownership initiative (as indicated in the subheading) aimed at ensuring dignified livelihoods for sanitation workers and benefits for their families in the India city of Pune.

As the newsletter feature explains, old buses are being repurposed as mobile toilet integration centers, giving women from lower-income households more reliable access to affordable and safe sanitation and hygiene services. More than 200,000 women and girls in Pune, Hyderabad, and the Andaman Islands (some shown in the photograph) have benefitted from these centers.

3. Reader focus

Successful newsletters deliver the information and answers your audience wants — not your brand’s messages and self-promotional gimmicks.

To clearly focus on what readers want, the content should be relatable, conversational, and personally relevant. It should be organized to enable readers to explore and engage with topics they’re most interested in.

Example: The Exchange

For over a decade, the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus (UBCO) produced The Exchange to share updates and events with faculty and staff.

However, a 2023 internal communication strategy review revealed the need for a refreshed approach to improve the content’s usability, audience value, and engagement potential. Additional insights uncovered through staff meetings and surveys led the content team to implement two significant changes that sharpen the newsletter’s focus on reader needs and foster a more dynamic connection to campus life.

First, it increased the distribution frequency from biweekly to weekly. Second, it redesigned the newsletter to give it a cleaner, more uniform aesthetic that better serves the informational needs of its audience.

Newsletter content is organized under easily identifiable categories — such as “Your Well-being” and “Teaching and Learning.” The added transparent navigation helps readers quickly find relevant news, digest it at a glance, and act on its recommendations.

The screenshot above shows one section — Our People — that highlights a broadly relatable story about the campus security team’s actions to guard the campus during a wildfire threat (with a linked CTA to read the full story).

The Exchange also serves more specialized reader interests. For example, staff members seeking a new role at the university can consume the section with current job postings linked to the full descriptions.

4. Clear calls to action

While your newsletter content should be engaging, it must also serve a business purpose. For that to happen, be direct about your brand’s valuable offerings.

Include compelling calls to action to guide subscribers toward the next steps your business wants them to take, such as contacting your sales team for a demo, signing up for a webinar, participating in your social media community, or supporting internal initiatives.

Make sure to design CTAs so they’re easy to spot. Keep the copy brief and to the point. You want readers to understand what they’ll receive when they click and how they stand to benefit.

Example: Loglines

If you think managing an enterprise content marketing engine is intimidating, consider the sheer scale and volume of information that a media brand like Paramount is charged with distributing externally and internally.

Keeping an estimated 30,000 staff members informed on the company’s latest strategic priorities, content successes, press events, and internal initiatives is no easy feat. With Loglines, Paramount aggregates all those data points into one weekly employee newsletter without diminishing the information’s utility or reader impact.

Like the BDH Solutions newsletter, Loglines eschews fancy layouts and multimedia features in favor of clear, direct communication. Given the sheer volume of initiatives, it has to.

But what the newsletter lacks in design sophistication, it more than makes up for in sound information architecture. Readers can easily learn about — and act on — required company procedures, as well as take advantage of benefits and special opportunities.

At the top of each issue, recipients find a timely greeting (here, it marks the first day of spring for those who live in the Northern Hemisphere) atop a simple list that notes the week’s featured story about Bob Bakish, along with current screenings (Diarra From Detroit and the CMT Music Awards), a featured event (Paramount @ SXSW), and other happenings (George Cheeks’ appearance about CBS’s future and the company’s mention on the Adweek Hot List). Rather than requiring readers to scroll through pages upon pages of content, anchored links provide direct access to any section.

The information in those sections drives further awareness of happenings and enables Paramount’s internal audience to fulfill relevant responsibilities.

For example, employees can navigate to the Good Housekeeping section (shown above) for a clear overview of the week’s critical business-related requirements, such as setting annual goals. To help activate that task, Paramount includes a link to a helpful resource.

Paramount also benefits by empowering staff members to support its shows (attending a taping of The Daily Show), events hosted by its departments (Black History Month events hosted by its BEAT-ERG team), and corporate initiatives (the student-focused ArtsMatter forum). It also pursues that goal by including clear CTAs for each initiative with links for additional information and instructions.  

5. Attractive, user-friendly design

Don’t frustrate readers by delivering great content in an ugly, cluttered, or difficult-to-navigate package. Follow SEO and design trends to draw audience attention, but don’t forget the fundamentals of a good — and accessible — user experience.

For example, use appealing, readable fonts and colors. Include images and subheadings to break up dense sections of text. Organize your information so that it’s easy to scan.

Example: The Edit

Like many companies in the energy sector, Sweden-based global electric services company Vattenfall recognizes the importance of reducing global reliance on fossil fuels. The Edit newsletter is among the ways the company communicates its commitment to that goal — and enlists the assistance of engaged community members.

The Edit team curates a mix of article summaries, quick news flashes, and industry insights to inspire and inform Vattenfall’s community. To enhance trust and engagement, the company pays attention to how the newsletter communicates visually.

For example, the large, sans-serif type in the newsletter title and subtitle (“Your monthly briefing on the journey to fossil freedom”) and a simple, soothing color palette give the content a clean look. Within the brief copy for each article, helpful subheadings point out key insights (“What to know” and “Why it matters”), making the content easy to grasp in a quick scan.

Further, each newsletter opens with a friendly “Hello!” and feel-good message related to the month’s topic. For example, an issue focused on biodiversity (shown above) celebrates good news on the topic: “The flight paths of thousands of birds were tracked by radar and cameras at offshore wind turbines for two years — and not a single bird collided with a blade.” Relevant, eye-catching visual imagery (birds photographed in mid-flight) complements each story, though the layout leaves plenty of white space to minimize eye fatigue.

The combination of valuable content and an attractive layout helped The Edit earn audience trust and the 2024 Content Marketing Award for Best Digital Newsletter.

More tips to make readers’ experiences seamless and satisfying

Implementing those five essential elements will give your newsletter a strong foundation. But they aren’t the only best practices to consider. Keep an eye on these:

• Make a good first impression: People build trusted relationships with people, not faceless corporate entities. Put a familiar name in the “from” line to make your messages warm and welcoming. Similarly, use your subject and preview line copy to pose a timely question or share a relatable point of view that compels readers to open up and explore your content.
• Offer flexible subscriptions: Give subscribers a way to select the content they want (or don’t want) to receive. For example, offer a weekly digest as an alternative to daily alerts. But always make it simple if a subscriber decides to opt out entirely.
• Be transparent: Outline what your readers will receive when they sign up, especially if you have multiple newsletter offerings and subscription options. Even better: Provide a sample newsletter for preview so potential subscribers can see the value for themselves. 
• Stay on readers’ minds: Send newsletters consistently, ideally on a day and time proven effective in your industry or tested with your audience. For example, 49 North Digital founder Sally Howard says her newsletter testing has shown B2B enterprises should avoid mailing on Mondays and Fridays because business audiences are more likely to be distracted. Small retailers should send on Friday evenings to entice weekend shoppers.
• Make it mobile-friendly: People read newsletters on their phones (maybe even more than on desktops). Check how your newsletter looks on mobile devices to ensure optimal viewing across screens.
• Use personalization: If consumers share personal data on your subscription form, put it to good use by customizing what they receive. Even something as simple as addressing them by name in a warm, friendly tone can help your content feel more like a personal conversation than an email blast.

Create reliable connections the ‘old-fashioned’ way

Newsletters may not be as sexy as 30-second videos that go viral on YouTube. But these compelling examples should more than convince you of the value of keeping newsletters at the top of your marketing mix. 

Got an example of an email newsletter you love? Drop me a line — I’d love to hear about it.

Updated from a January 2023 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Many brands line up with statements of “thoughts and prayers” after natural and human-made devastation, such as the recent California wildfires and hurricane flooding in western North Carolina.

Interestingly, though, that expression emphasizes their silent response.

However, brands that truly want to help the people who suffered tragedy know they must activate a response plan. But how and why?

Marketers should be on the frontline of the brand response. By working with others in your organization and external partners, you can turn those thoughts and prayers into helpful actions. Here are eight brands doing just that.

1. Assist with relevant products and services: Meade Tractor

Take a brief but important pause to reflect on what your brand does. This may seem like an unnecessary step, but when a disaster strikes, well-intentioned people in your organization may want to throw business to the side and put everything into a humanitarian response.

You can lead the conversation to emphasize that your company can do both — fulfill its business mission and lend a helping hand. That dual purpose also creates a relevancy that enables the business to tell the stories for months (and years) to come through its marketing channels.

In some situations, it’s easy to see how to do both. For example, Meade Tractor sells farm and construction equipment — the kind of products needed when the floods hit western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, where it has stores.

Its crisis response included loaning agricultural and compact construction equipment to individual farmers. “By supporting our farmers in times of need, we reaffirm our dedication to making a positive impact when it matters most,” the company wrote on the rental equipment application page.

So, if your business’ products and services can help, do it and tell that story.

2. Repurpose your charitable work: Lush

What if your brand doesn’t sell products or services that can help in the crisis, like Lush, a U.K.-based bath and beauty product company?

Last November, Lush launched a fire-truck-shaped soap in the United Kingdom and Europe to raise money for Indigenous and community volunteer fire brigades in the Amazon. When the Los Angeles wildfires happened, Lush sold the soap product in the United States and designated 75% of U.S. sales to emergency aid for people and animals affected by the fires.

What charitable activities does your company already do? If you don’t sell a product for charity or raise money for a designated nonprofit, is there a local organization where your employees volunteer? Consider reconfiguring or complementing those efforts for the most recent disaster response.

3. Help your social audience: Josie Maran

If donating products or profits isn’t feasible, turn to something that marketing has built — your brand’s audiences on social media.

In an immediate response to the southern California wildfires, entrepreneur and beauty brand Josie Maran replaced its normally product-focused Instagram posts with this carousel post sharing community resources to help those affected:

Posting this type of information is also likely to motivate your audience to share with their audiences and spark comments from people offering additional resources.

4. Craft a useful resource: Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley provides a wealth of resources for its philanthropic clients and communities. It publishes guides for causes ranging from the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and military aid organizations to children’s mental health and scholarships for students.

When the Los Angeles wildfires broke out, the financial services firm created the 12-page Giving Resource Guide: Southern California Wildfire Relief. As Morgan Stanley does with its other guides, this version outlines 14 relevant organizations, detailing their missions, responses to the crisis, and donation-related links in the PDF.

Guides or resource lists work well when distributed to relevant segments of your email lists. Publishing them on your website can also lead people using search engines to discover the resources (that’s how I found out about Morgan Stanley’s work). You also can promote and link to them from your social media channels.

5. Tell a relevant story and partner on the CTA: ESPN

ESPN expanded its content lineup to tell sports stories related to the wildfires, including this video interviewing the National Football League’s Los Angeles Rams. The players saw the smoke from their practice facility and employees of the organization had homes in the scorched neighborhoods.

ESPN devoted the text on the video’s YouTube page with CTAs for the American Red Cross, featuring a donate button and a tally of the total amount raised.

You can probably get this type of response approved most easily because the storytelling fits the brand’s mission and does not require the company itself to make a financial donation.

6. Tell employee stories: John Deere

If your brand operates or sells in a disaster area, chances are your employees are affected by it, too. Tell their stories (with permission, of course).

For example, when flooding damaged over 500 homes in Rock Valley, Iowa, John Deere shared how local employees volunteered their time to help and detailed the donations both employees and the brand were giving.

The post noted how employees covered for colleagues directly affected by the flood. It also shared links to a local charitable organization for people who wanted to donate.

7. Form a coalition: Los Angeles: Beauty Together

When the fires hit southern California, Josie Maran did more than post helpful resources on the brand’s Instagram channel. She got over 30 brands to form a charitable fund — Los Angeles: Beauty Together — with the mission “to provide relief to those who have lost everything to the tragic events in Los Angeles.”

While that’s the immediate purpose, Josie also knows the effort can’t be short term. Phase two will encompass sustained support to victims and charitable service providers over the rebuilding process. “This is a long healing road,” Josie tells People magazine.

8. Plan for the long term: Joey Logano Foundation

NASCAR driver Joey Logano talked last fall after Hurricane Helene about the importance of taking the long view with his foundation’s help.

“The only way you can (help) correctly is to be there and see it and say, ‘OK, where are things doing pretty good and where are things lacking and how do we look three months, six months, a year ahead and put a plan together?’”

Though you may not know yet what your brand’s long-term support will look like, you can take steps now to plan for the follow up. For example, add entries to your content calendar and fill in the specific angles or topics later.

Lead the charitable response

Turning thoughts and prayers into action is a strategy made for marketers. You have already worked hard to build goodwill and trust with your audience so they’ll ultimately take a profitable action with your business. Now, you can take that one step further and help your brand and audience to take an action that will be profitable to those affected by disasters.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

One of the best motivational speeches I’ve heard came not from a business event or even a TED conference.

It came from the Academy Awards stage. Matthew McConaughey’s three-minute acceptance speech for the Best Actor Oscar delivered a life lesson that has stuck with me for the last decade.

McConaughey shared three things he needs every day: Something to look up to, something to look forward to, and a hero to chase.

Who he chases might surprise you. At 15, he chased himself at 25. When he turned 25, his hero became Matthew at 35. Now that he’s 55, he’s (presumably) chasing Matthew at 65.

The point? He’ll never catch his future self. But he works every day to become someone worth chasing.

That lesson isn’t only about personal growth and setting high standards for yourself. It’s also one hell of a mindset for marketing and content creation. I talk about it in this video, or keep reading for even more detail.

Why playing it safe isn’t worth it

People have explained content marketing as “brands operating like a media company.” That’s no longer a clever way to describe just one part of marketing.

It’s the lifeblood of modern marketing itself.

But, if your content doesn’t give your audience someone — or something — to chase, you’re not lighting a spark. And if you don’t light that spark of inspiration, you’ll lose people in the endless noise of competitors clawing for their attention. They’ll never care enough to stick around.

Unfortunately, most marketing content today is boring. Safe. Vanilla.

Many content teams churn out how-to and FAQ content to game the search algorithm. Others focus on hot takes designed to “go viral” for five minutes. 

Teams are so pressed for popular content that they fail to focus on meaningful work.

Safe, dull campaigns don’t just fail to inspire — they cost more money. Studies show that you’d need to add tens of millions to your budget to match the performance of a well-thought-out, exciting campaign.

Playing it safe is also a fast track to losing your edge. Consider the content about generative AI coming from the biggest technology companies. It should build excitement and spark inspiration, right?

The titles grab attention (10 Ways AI Will Revolutionize Your Marketing Today, How to Use Strategic AI for Quick Wins in Marketing, etc.).

But then you click through, only to find 500 words of throat-clearing before the article finally gets to the meat — which turns out to be the same 10 tips you’ve already read in four other articles.

Sure, some of the advice might be useful. But does any of it make you pause and think, “Wow, this company helps me understand where the world is heading, and I’m inspired to explore where I fit in?”

Probably not.

I’m not saying how-to content, foundational industry insights, or helpful advice shouldn’t be part of your strategy. This content has its place.

But spending all your time answering frequently asked questions prevents you from imagining answers to the questions no one has asked yet.

And that’s a mistake — because vision (not repetition) inspires audiences to ask new questions.

A practical approach to expanding your visionary content

So why do businesses struggle with true thought leadership, visionary, or even out-of-the-box content ideas?

Many businesses just see it as too risky. It’s easier to write about what’s already popular. You know it’ll get clicks, likes, and even a few conversions.

But when you only create content for the here and now, you lock yourself into a short-term mindset, and your audience sees you as a commentator, not a guide.

They might follow your advice, but they won’t follow your brand. You risk becoming irrelevant as the conversation moves on.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to choose between practical and inspiring content. You can do both.

Creating visionary content doesn’t mean abandoning practical content. You simply need to strike a balance between the two.

In doing so, your brand becomes the guide who says, “Here’s what you can do today — and here’s where we can go together tomorrow.”

Try these suggestions for incorporating more visionary work in your content plans:

Think in horizons

Divide your content strategy into three horizons:

• 1: Now (60%): Practical, actionable “how-to” content that solves immediate problems
• 2: Next (20%): Forward-looking insights on trends emerging in the next few years
• 3: Beyond (20%): Big, bold visions of what the future could look like in 5 to 10 years

Visionary content shines in Horizon 3 (Beyond) and strengthens Horizon 2 (Next) by setting the stage for near-term trends.

When these horizons work together, your strategy becomes more cohesive — meeting your audience where they are today while showing them where they could go next.

Make it about your audience

Visionary content shouldn’t be about your company’s goals — it should be about your audience’s dreams.

Ask yourself:

• What does our audience want to achieve in 10 years?
• What’s holding them back today?
• How can we help close the gap? 

If you can align your vision with their aspirations, you’re not just creating content — you’re building trust.

Bridge big ideas with action

Creating visionary content doesn’t mean you can’t offer steps your audience can take right now. Vision without action is just daydreaming. Give them clear, tangible actions they can take today.

For example, if you’re writing about the future of remote work, recommend tools or habits they can adopt now to prepare for the shift. If you’re describing a world transformed by sustainable energy, offer tips for how they can start reducing their carbon footprint today.

Connecting the future to the present makes your vision feel real and within their grasp.

Back it up with progress

This one is my favorite tip. Great visionary content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not so abstract that nothing exists to support the vision.

Pair your big ideas with stories of real progress — whether it’s your company’s successes, industry breakthroughs, or inspiring examples from other companies or markets. Show your audience that the future you’re describing isn’t just possible — it’s already happening.

For example, I worked with a small B2B software company in the well-trodden marketing analytics industry not long ago.

At first, the team felt everything that could be said about marketing measurement had been said. And when they started thinking about some visionary application of analytics, the ideas sounded like the promise of flying cars: daring, futuristic concepts with little detail on how they’d work.

So, the team changed gears. Instead of leaning into buzzwords like “real-time intelligence,” “AI,” or “predictive analytics,” they set a new vision. They imagined a future in which traditional analytics — dashboards, visualizations, and data sets as we know them — simply didn’t exist.

In this vision, the technology works quietly in the background, transforming raw data into actionable insights without human intervention or interpretation. No dashboards, no charts — just pure intelligence delivered when and where it’s needed.

You’ll be their (idealized) mirror

Great visionary content reflects your audience’s inspired, idealized future back to them. That’s the heart of giving your audience someone or something to chase.

Because your brand created that reflection, you’re not just part of the noise — you’re their partner on the journey.

If you do it right, you’ll never fully catch the future you’re chasing — and neither will your audience. But that’s not the point.

The point is to keep reaching, keep building, and keep inspiring things worth striving for.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute Team

You have too many marketing tasks and responsibilities to do them the hard way. Your work is too critical to business success to let best practices slide and details fall through the cracks.

Since you can’t always trust AI tools to do the job right the first time, trust the wisdom of your industry peers who have found ways to make content and marketing more manageable.

I’ve gathered some of their best tips, templates, and cheat sheets to break complex tasks into simpler steps and avoid frustrating bottlenecks. And, if you’re in between jobs or looking to advance your role, knowing these tips can help you secure a position to put these approaches to good use.  

Align strategic goals with audience needs

Brands often default to their stated mission or purpose when determining their strategic approach to content. But what your business wants to share doesn’t always align with what your audience wants to hear. It can also result in vague platitudes that fail to distinguish your brand’s unique content advantages.  

To avoid those pitfalls, work through the five-whys exercise to pinpoint where (or if) your brand’s goals intersect with what your customers care about.

The 5 whys

CMI’s Robert Rose explains the first step is to generate a list of content marketing ideas. For example, your brand may want to educate prospects on using your products or curate industry news to position your business as a thought leader.

Next, write down why the first idea is important. Then, ask why that importance is important. Ask why about that answer. Ask why about the preceding explanation two more times. (Repeat this process for each idea.)

To illustrate how it works, I’ve filled in this template with a sample idea Robert offered in his article:

The final answer should reveal a motivation for the idea that aligns with your audience’s purpose and clarifies how it fits into the brand’s overarching story.

Streamline your content operations

Your strategy dictates what you want to achieve through content. Thorough operational planning enables you to achieve it consistently. Think of it as the work to do, so everything else you do works.

Build and activate a content plan

With the matter of why settled, focus on the next big questions — what content will you create? How do you make that happen? A content plan will help determine the best answers.  

A content plan comprises the policies, practices, resources, and task-related decisions to execute the strategy. This invaluable tool lets the team orchestrate operational workflows, implement efficient processes, and enable the transformation of creative ideas into high-value marketing assets.

To build your content plan, you need to consider these four components:

1. Governance and guidelines: standards, practices, and guiding principles that define and distinguish your content’s unique value
2. Processes and systems: tasks, workflows, techniques, and technologies to manage your content marketing operations
3. Team resources: roles and skills required to perform the work and plans to fill gaps as they emerge
4. Content creation and delivery: topics, generation process and prioritization of creative ideas, content types, formats, and platforms

Decision-making in each area can take time — and a lot of effort. But fear not: The tips in this content planning checklist below will help ease the burden. (You can get more details and resources to assist you in CMI’s 4-Part Guide To Crafting a Winning Content Plan.)

Map your standard workflow (and common variations)

To ensure high-quality assets are developed consistently, content teams need a system to track and manage the production and distribution tasks.

This five-step process can help you map the workflow for each content format (and variations). From there, you can build the processes to operationalize those workflows.

You can find the details in this guide, but this abbreviated description, along with the example templates, show what the information should look like at each step:  

Step 1: Conduct a content audit. This high-level view of content deliverables and distribution is organized into four columns:

• Content format: Create a row for each format your team regularly produces.
• Primary delivery platform: Note where each format is published or shared first.
• Additional distribution targets: List additional channels and platforms where this content format may be used.
• Special circumstances and variations: Note any variations that require extra steps or a distinct production process.

Step 2: List all tasks required for each format. Don’t worry about putting the tasks in order yet.

Step 3: Organize tasks by production stage. Group each format’s tasks sequentially based on pre-production, production, or post-production timing.

Step 4: Add a column for each task’s roles and responsibilities. Map how production flows from one role to the next.

Step 5: Operationalize and iterate. Create a mechanism to track tasks as they’re completed and notify the next party in the chain when the asset is ready for them. If you don’t have dedicated software tools for this, a simple spreadsheet can work.

Systematize content requests and assignments

Requests to create content for other organizational teams is a common pain point for marketing creatives. These unexpected tasks can tax schedules and disrupt productivity; at worst, they conflict with your brand’s strategic purpose and distinct content mission.  

You may not have the power to refuse, but you can systematize these requests so everyone stays focused on content with the best potential impact.

Requiring requesters to submit a content brief is a great place to start. Documenting the necessary information and instructions gets everyone on the same page, minimizing time spent on rewrites and edits. A brief also helps when outsourcing creation to freelance writers, guest authors, and other external collaborators.

Dan Hatch says a good content brief establishes clear expectations. It covers details like the working title, project deadline, and what the story is about. It should also outline why the story is valuable, the key messages, the intended audience, and how your brand typically communicates with them.

You can start with this content brief template I use when assigning stories and customize it by adding fields for relevant contextual details, such as the target format or platform, desired responses, links to reference materials, or subject matter experts for source interviews.

Rehabilitate bad content ideas

What if you receive a brief that’s way off track or too challenging to execute? Guide the requester in a more manageable direction with this step-by-step approach suggested by Cloudflare’s Amy Higgins and Nextiva’s Monica Norton.

In their post, Bad Content Ideas: What To Do When You Can’t Say No, they share all the details and explanations. To start, use this checklist to prepare for the tough conversations to determine the best way forward:

Craft resonant, accessible stories

Aligning topics, ideas, and formats sets your creative team up for success. However, working with a proven storytelling structure can ensure the resulting content resonates with the audience.

Base stories on familiar archetypes

Seven classic archetypes work for memorable storytelling. You’ll find detailed explanations and examples in my post on storytelling archetypes. Here’s a handy rundown for writers to use the next time they’re stuck staring at a blank page:

Write to be read and understood

Even the most powerful ideas won’t help your brand gain traction if the audience struggles to engage, and the writing is unclear.

You’ll find dozens of tips for writing concisely in Ann Gynn’s post, 31 Great Content Writing Examples, Tips, and Tools. Quickly conveying your point is among them. For example, Ann suggests a few replacements for wordy phrases:

• “Show,” not “indicate”
• “Use,” not “utilize”
• “To,” not “in order to”
• “Help,” not “facilitate”
• “Get,” not “obtain”

To help express your ideas more succinctly, work with a tool like Web FX’s Readability Test.

Make content easy for everyone to access

No matter how well written, your content won’t influence anyone who can’t access it. That includes consumers who use voice commands and screen readers to navigate websites or prefer reading transcripts to engaging with videos and audio stories.

Refer to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to ensure your content is fully accessible. This checklist covers the basics in Irina Weber’s eight practical accessibility tips:

Plan for impactful distribution

Your marketing team doesn’t have bandwidth to spare. Don’t squander precious resources on channels and platforms unlikely to drive the right impact. With some extra legwork, you can make more informed decisions about where to share and promote the content.

Evaluate your social platform options

Like the content plan that guides your team’s creative and operational efforts, a robust distribution plan takes effort. Each media platform offers a unique experience with its pros and cons. You need to weigh them carefully.

Though that task can get complicated with social media platforms, the planning process boils down to four steps:

1. Investigate your options
2. Audit existing assets
3. Identify top opportunities
4. Establish procedures and guidelines

I outline details for each step in How To Build a Winning Content Plan for Social Media, but this checklist will help you know what information to gather and what questions to ask:   

Measure and compare content performance

Thorough planning can increase the chances of success, but you also must consistently measure the content’s performance to prove the plan works correctly (or that it doesn’t.)

A content scorecard can help you understand the effectiveness of your content and the corrective actions to optimize its impact. In How To Set Up a Content Scoring Process for Better Decisions, Tendo Communications vice president Lindy Roux outlines a process for quantitative and qualitative assessment. Though each analysis uses different criteria, both rate content performance on a one-to-five-point scale.

In Lindy’s approach, quantitative scores gauge asset performance against the content’s goals, such as:

• Exposure: views, impressions, backlinks
• Engagement: time on page, clicks, ratings, comments
• Conversion: purchases, registrations for gated content, return visits, clicks
• Redistribution: shares, pins

Qualitative scores gauge the relative value of the asset regardless of its performance analytics. Lindy shares some of the criteria she’s used in her scorecards:

• Consistency: Is the content consistent with the brand voice and style?
• Clarity and accuracy: Is the content understandable, accurate, and current?
• Discoverability: Does the layout of the information support key information flows?
• Engagement: Does the content use the appropriate techniques to influence or engage visitors?
• Relevance: Does the content meet the needs of all intended user types?
• Authenticity: Is the content authentic and original?

In her article, Lindy explains how to set benchmarks and make your calculations. Then, you can create a scorecard like this one:

By comparing each asset’s scores side-by-side, you can more easily determine the best course of action to take. For example: 

• Quantitative scores higher than qualitative: Review the content, looking for ways to optimize it and enhance performance.
• Qualitative scores higher than quantitative: Consider alternative ways to distribute the asset for better performance.
• Low performers: Remove them from your content platforms and avoid creating similar types of content.
• High performers: Promote and reuse these assets regularly. Update your content plan to create more of this type of content.

Get the help you need to get the job done

As you head into a year bound to bring new changes and challenges, use this guidance and tools to enhance your productivity, uphold the quality and value of your content, and enjoy greater success in your content marketing career.

All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Confession time.

Just before sitting down to write this article, I was working on a social calendar project for a new client. I turned to Google and asked: “What’s the ideal frequency to post on LinkedIn?”

As I typed, the search engine’s auto-populated options finished the phrase with options including:

• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• YouTube and YouTube Shorts
• TikTok
• Most social media platforms
• Posting content in a Facebook awareness campaign

Like most marketers, I had hoped for a one-size-fits-all answer even though I knew that was silly. People are not homogenous. They don’t all consume social media, newsletters, podcasts, videos, etc., at the same time. And their consumption behavior varies depending on how the topic fits with their personal and professional interests.

However, that doesn’t mean you just guess. To help make educated choices and develop a go-to publishing frequency strategy, learn how your peers do it and glean relevant tips from their advice.

Start frequency decisions with others’ research

OK, yes, this recommendation seems what you would find Googling a question about scheduling and frequency. But, as long as you don’t treat it as the first and only stop on your quest, it’s truly helpful.

HubSpot used survey data to compile the best times to post and frequency of posting on social media in its 2024 State of Social Media Report (free, registration required).

Common social posting frequencies for B2B and B2C brands based on the platform include:

• Facebook: Multiple times a day (B2B and B2C)
• XEx: Multiple times a day (B2B and B2C) and multiple times per week (B2B)
• TikTok: Multiple times a day (B2B), once a day (B2C)
• Instagram: Multiple times a day (B2B), multiple times per week (B2C)
• LinkedIn: Multiple times per week (B2B), weekly, or multiple times per month (B2C)
• Pinterest: Multiple times a day (B2B), multiple times per month (B2C)

Sprout Social analyzed nearly 2 billion engagements across 400,000 social profiles including, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, to determine the best times to post on social media:

• Mondays: 11 a.m. to noon
• Tuesdays: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 to 4 p.m.
• Wednesdays: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• Thursdays: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
• Fridays: 10 to 11 a.m.

Though it doesn’t identify the best publishing times for Saturday and Sunday, it says Sundays are the worst-performing days. The best days are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Image source

Mailchimp produces something similar for marketing email distribution times.

CJ Digital, a hospitality marketing agency, relies first on recommendations from expert sites because they’re based on quality research, says CEO Joshua Wood.

Then, the agency does A/B split testing on each platform to see what works in the hospitality industry. What works on one platform may not work on another. “We change it up quite often,” he says.

TIP: Don’t forget to use the recommendations provided in your content distribution tools, such as your newsletter platform, as they base those suggestions on the data your audience is providing.

Sally Howard, founder and marketing strategist at 49 North Digital, has some general preferences for publishing times based on the distribution vehicles:

• LinkedIn: 7 a.m. — the early morning works best to reach commuters and decision-makers heading to the office.
• Instagram: Though the platform now delivers content based on interests, the morning is a good time to grab people’s attention because they scroll while having coffee. Loyal followers who see it first thing in the day can interact with it, potentially pushing it out to more people.
• Blogs: Publication time doesn’t really matter. People Google things at all times of the day, so timing doesn’t matter if SEO is the goal.
• Emails: If you target corporate audiences, don’t publish on Mondays and Fridays. If you’re a small business retailer, post at 6 p.m. on Friday when your audience is looking to treat themselves after making it through the week.

However, Sally cautions that you can’t pick a publishing time and forget it. She points to an agency client in the coaching industry who experienced shifts in email open rates throughout the year. The agency played with distribution times and found a sweet spot — shifting from an evening email to a morning one prompted open rates to go from around 36% to over 50%.

Sally says marketers should review their send times quarterly around seasonal changes. “For example, if you normally send emails at 6 p.m. and you’ve noticed in the summer those email open rates have dropped because people who are your target market aren’t picking up their phones as much on summer evenings, you may want to consider targeting them during their morning commute,” she explains.

You also should test send times if you notice a sharp decline in your open rates and haven’t made drastic changes to your subject lines or experienced significant industry updates like the recent domain verification by Google.

Research your audience qualitatively and quantitatively

Recognizing your audience’s preferences is a must. Connie Smart, a writer and content creator for the City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, prefers the direct approach to assessing what channels the audience prefers, how often they want to receive the content, and what time they’re most available to consume and engage with it.

To get the answers, ask your audience. “Surveys, online polls, focus groups, and even informal chats can help you glean some great nuggets,” she says.

Then, combine that qualitative feedback with your quantitative analytics to better understand your audience’s content consumption behavior.

Build a strategy based on your primary social platforms

Mariela Azcuy, vice president of B2B strategy and executive communications at Carve Communications, recommends you focus on a few anchor channels and then:

• Pick a frequency based on the channel: Post more often on social media to appease algorithms and reinforce messages. Post blog articles less often to emphasize quality, though the actual number will depend on the available resources and SEO’s importance in your marketing strategy.
• Evaluate the effort vs. payoff: Assess your resources, including AI and external contributor support, to identify a schedule and frequency that will have the biggest payoffs.
• Think seasonally: Publishing schedules shouldn’t necessarily be the same every month of the year. What are the big moments in your industry and in the audience’s world? How should your schedule address them?
• Build on what works: Launch something small, and if it works, grow from there. For example, Carve Communications started a behind-the-scenes video series on LinkedIn. It received great viewership, so Carve created a separate LinkedIn multimedia newsletter dedicated to its behind-the-scenes work.

Test, then analyze

William Reinhart, founder and president of Signature W Studio, says a publishing schedule and plan are critical to scaling your efforts.

When his agency works with companies to reach a new audience, it goes through four stages — experimenting, analyzing, iterating, and analyzing again.  “We will stagger the time of day, vary the number of times posted per week, and alternate the content types,” William explains.

The experiment phase runs 60 to 90 days, which is usually enough time to develop a sample size that provides sufficient metrics for an analysis.

The analysis lets them know which post types and times get the most engagement and drive audiences to the brand’s desired results. Then, the process moves to the iteration stage. “Alternate successful post types with popular times of day,” William says. “This will help you build the best possible posting schedule based on the type of content.”

When the iteration stage achieves a sufficient sample size, return to the analytics. Compare the metrics from the iteration phase to the initial period to make informed decisions for your publishing plan.

Experienced marketer Liz Kolb, is the co-founder and CEO at Axion Now, a company specializing in the collectible card game Magic the Gathering.

When Axion Now sends email marketing campaigns to promote an event, it uses its database with years of information to send when open and sign-up rates are likely to be the highest.

“We never send out emails on a Monday or Friday. It seems our customers are busier on these days, and the average open rate is around 40% lower,” she explains.

Whatever the frequency, show up consistently

Don’t get so focused on the optimal publishing time that you ignore the roles that publishing frequency and consistency play.

Adam Nathan, CEO of Blaze.AI, explains, “The more you post, the more you create a repeatable pattern with your audience that the (social media platform’s) algorithm can recognize, leading to compounding engagement and account growth.”

Michelle Garrett, founder of Garrett Public Relations, sees value in consistency for newsletters, too. She religiously sends hers on the second Tuesday morning of the month.

As a newsletter consumer, she also appreciates consistency.

“I remember one newsletter I always received on Friday mornings. I always read it when it arrived. Then it started showing up randomly, and I stopped reading it as often,” she says.

Recognize when to adjust the plan

Holly Gaffney, marketing brand and content manager at Calla Shoes, grew its Instagram account from 14,000 to 174,000 followers in 2024. Her best advice? If an Instagram Reel goes viral, increase the frequency of your Instagram posts to “ride the wave.”

She explains, “We had a few viral reels, and the videos that followed also always had a great uplift. It’s also a great chance to post content that is particularly informative or engaging to people who are new to your account.”

I would think the same strategy would work well for any social media platform.

Chris Inman, president of I.D.E.A. Cleveland, adjusted his podcast frequency from 30-minute episodes one day a week to three 10-minute episodes three days a week. “I have noticed that the number of listeners doesn’t change, but the completion and retention numbers go up,” he says, noting the increased frequency also gives him a chance to share the call to action more often.

Expect to make industry-related adjustments, too.

Writer Connie Smart explains, “Become aware of how your audience’s content needs might fluctuate throughout the year. If your audience is small business owners, you might consider pulling back on frequency during heavy sales periods like the holiday season. If your audience is financial services, maybe you ramp up your frequency around tax time or savings contribution deadlines.” 

Belinda Conde, head of marketing at Datos, a Semrush company, says you also should consider timing in the context of your industry, not just your audience’s behavior.

“While timing is important, what matters even more is aligning our content with timely industry trends,” she says. “We look at what’s happening in the market or what our customers are currently concerned about and make sure we’re publishing insights or data that address those needs when it’s most relevant.”

For example, Datos published a white paper, Retail AI: Four User Behavior Trends to Know, when many journalists were writing about how they used AI for their holiday shopping. “By publishing during this conversation, we provided research that was both timely and valuable for our audience and the industry at large,” Belinda says.

A single answer doesn’t exist

Of course, not everyone has the same opinion or priorities on when to publish. Lindsay Young, owner and president of 3 Aspens Media, advocates for publishing content on your website when it’s ready. “There’s zero reason to wait if it holds true value to your prospects or customers,” she says.

Dane Frederiksen, founder and chief visual storyteller of Digital Accomplice, favors the publish-more strategy. “Video every day. The algorithm loves frequency; feed the beast,” he says.

5 steps to the best publishing frequency decisions

When you’re ready to optimize your content calendar, from social media posts and podcast episodes to blogs, newsletters, and videos, follow this curated advice:

1. Investigate your audience quantitatively and qualitatively to understand their consumption behavior with content formats, topics, and distribution channels.
2. Use the personalized recommendation tools from your relevant software providers.
3. Develop a scheduling strategy that consistently delivers at a frequency that works for your audience and your resources.
4. Be flexible enough to capitalize on trends related to your industry and the big success your content may find.
5. Analyze the behavior metrics after two to three months, and revise the strategy based on what you’ve learned.

By implementing this thoughtful process, you’ll never need to Google “What’s the best time to publish …” again.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Visibility.

Once upon a time, that word was the most common answer I heard when I asked marketing leaders what was wrong with their content operations. “We have limited visibility into what content is planned and produced and how effective it is,” they’d say.

One CMO of a Fortune 1000 company even admitted she learned about the company’s thought leadership by subscribing to the newsletter. “I have no idea what they’re planning,” she said.

Over the last two years, that word has faded.

Generative AI stormed into our vocabularies, commoditizing content creation. Speed and quantity are the new watchwords, and senior leaders seem to have resigned themselves to content wastage as the cost of doing business.

“Visibility? Meh. Why worry about it when we’re producing so quickly? What’s the worst that can happen? It won’t get used?”

Well, yes. And that’s precisely the problem. I talk about it and the solutions in this video. Keep reading for even more detail. 

The same logic has been applied to digital ad spend. Despite estimates that 22% of all ad budgets are lost to fraud, only 23% of marketing leaders in a 2023 survey described fraud as a concern, with 14% saying they were “unconcerned.”

Now, we’re sleepwalking into the same room with content strategy — or, more precisely, the lack of one. Forrester estimates that 65% of customer-oriented content goes unused due to issues with findability, relevance, or quality.

Let’s do some quick math: If marketers recovered even half of that wasted content, do you think overall marketing results might improve?

The messy content machine

Consider how raw ideas become marketing messages, thought leadership, articles, and campaigns. That process — now supercharged (or muddled) by generative AI — usually starts with someone creating or curating the “right” inputs to feed the content machine.

Leaders may establish the themes, but those soon get distorted by siloed teams using tools that promise efficiency but deliver chaos.

Here’s the irony: AI was supposed to make this easier.

Spoiler: It doesn’t.

AI amplifies the mess. Ideas are invisible until they’re transformed into content. And without visibility, businesses fall into the same trap: Content is everybody’s job but nobody’s strategy.

Frontline teams use AI to pump out hyper-specific content for immediate needs. Meanwhile, central teams struggle to manage the tidal wave of content or hesitate to trust it all — because they have no visibility into what was generated by AI versus what was crafted by humans.

Imagine running an automobile assembly line. The average car has 30,000 parts assembled along a line about 1,000 feet long.

Now, imagine you only have visibility into the last 50 feet. You’d have no idea how many cars are coming, which models, and whether someone swapped out a key part.

That’s what many organizations’ content operations look like today: no visibility, no alignment, and no control.

The fear factor in content collaboration

At the heart of this visibility crisis lies a deeper, often overlooked issue: a fear of collaboration.

I’ve noticed this fear growing over the last few years — especially in environments where production speed is the priority. Collaboration is often perceived as a bottleneck, requiring more time for multiple voices to be heard, consensus to be built, and conflicts to be resolved. Put simply: The focus shifted from “crafting with intention” to “publishing for the sake of speed.”

AI has only added to this challenge, amplifying the tension between speed and meaningful collaboration. Let’s unpack this further:

Fear of losing control (to the machine)

A global enterprise I worked with has been trying to use AI to churn out massive quantities of SEO-oriented content. But regional teams often find it tone-deaf and irrelevant. Leadership resists collaborating with regional teams to improve relevance, fearing it would “pollute” the AI’s training data or slow production. The result? AI content that’s fast but increasingly ineffective.

Fear of too much process

At one SaaS company, the CEO proudly claimed, “GenAI will replace midlevel employees soon.” They’ve implemented AI tools for everything — content creation, analytics, publishing schedules, etc. But without a collaborative framework, the tools have become distractions. Teams generate more content, but it lacks strategic alignment. The result? Algorithmic clutter.

(This situation reminds me of actor and director Ben Affleck’s comment about AI and art: “AI is a craftsman at best … craftsman is knowing how to work. Art is knowing when to stop.”)

Fear of failure (in the AI spotlight)

I know of a midsize consultancy that has deployed AI tools to centralize content marketing creation. But I also know that individual practitioners fear that the shared system will expose their work as less polished. So they’ve tried to use their own models. Instead of fostering collaboration, AI reinforced silos. The result? Missed opportunities and a more complicated case for future AI investments.

Generative AI will perform much better in environments with precise inputs, processes, and collaboration.

Logistics offers a perfect analogy: AI optimizes supply chains when it has complete visibility into raw materials, production stages, and delivery timelines. Your content “supply chain” is no different.

Embrace the AI-powered mess

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI doesn’t eliminate our content mess — it amplifies it.

Regional teams will still create their own content. Subject-matter experts will still upload slide decks that don’t align with strategy. AI will still generate headlines that sound right but miss the point.

And that’s OK — as long as there’s a mechanism to make the mess visible to the humans who need to make the content mean something.

Think of your content strategy and the visibility it provides as air traffic control. You don’t dictate every takeoff or landing. But you do need to know what’s in the air, what’s ready to launch, and what’s grounded.

Generative AI isn’t going away — it’s only becoming more central to content creation. The first step to thriving in this new era is reclaiming visibility.

Here’s how to start:

• Map your content supply chain: Identify every stage of content creation, including where AI contributes.
• Test and choose collaborative tools: Prioritize tools that enhance visibility and teamwork, not just automation.
• Build a culture of partnership: Embrace AI as a tool that works with the individuals on your team and their role in the process, not in place of them.
• Slow down to speed up: Sometimes, the most effective way forward is to pause, reflect, and create intentional friction in your content process. This pause isn’t about delaying progress — it’s about ensuring sharper focus, fostering creativity, and making decisions that lead to impactful, sustainable momentum.

It’s your story. AI can help you tell it — but it still needs you (and a strategy) to guide it.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Open a marketer’s treasure chest and you’ll see an abundance of data.

How do you select the valuable gold among all the worthless pyrite? And how can AI help you find that gold?

Dana DiTomaso has some thoughts based on her experience as the founder and lead instructor of Kick Point Playbook, which provides online marketing training. She recently shared her insights at CMI’s Content and Marketing Trends for 2025 event.

Watch Dana’s take on how to make the most of Google Analytics 4, AI tools, and all your other data, or read this edited transcript.

Accept that data isn’t perfect

Let’s talk about data. We’ve never had more of it. We have Google Analytics 4 and all sorts of other data we can evaluate on our website. We have our CRMs. We have all this AI information being tossed at us. We have tons and tons of data.

Unfortunately, data has never been less accurate.

Market analytics data is wrong. Can it be fixed? No. Why? Because people use ad blockers. There are all sorts of other reasons, and they all mean that your analytics are really not accurate.

I really want you to accept in your heart that analytics will never be perfect. Instead, work with what you have.

Know that Google Search Console data is not going to be 100% accurate in terms of the volume or number of impressions or clicks. But directionally, it is more or less useful. Don’t focus on the numbers; look at the trends.

Assess whether a page is doing its job

Are you matching search intent? This is a tricky question. People will look at search intent and think, “Well, I guess I got a lot of traffic here. I don’t want to look too far behind the curtain and decide if the search intent isn’t very good or not because if I better match the search intent, I might get fewer visitors to the website. That would look bad in my reports.”

However, wouldn’t you rather have 500 visitors who are more likely to convert than 10,000 visitors who aren’t going to convert? Matching search intent is critical. You can use GA4 and AI to better match search intent.

If you’ve worked in software development, you might be familiar with the concept of “jobs to be done.” A page has a specific job. The contact page has a job of enabling people to contact you. The privacy policy page has the job of making sure that you’re fulfilling your legal requirements.

If people landed on your privacy policy page somehow, would you expect them to convert? No. Some pages may have people who already have bought your service looking at them, so are you expecting them to convert again? No. Then why are you including those kinds of pages when you list landing pages with conversion rates?

So, recognize the job of the landing page.

Then, ask if the (search) queries that land visitors on a page match the job of that page. If they don’t, do you need a new page, or do you just need to fix the page that already exists?

This is where AI really shines because it can easily identify new opportunities. I really like Claude. I’m not doing anything at scale just yet. I have a text file of a page on our website, and then I go into Google Search Console and ask it to give me all the queries that led people to this page for the last 16 months. That’s the maximum amount of data you can pull natively out of the Google Search Console interface.

I look at which queries are showing up for this page. You might have an opportunity to rank for those phrases because if your page, which isn’t totally relevant for that term, shows up, Google’s really trying to figure out something that should rank for them. Those are probably good content opportunities because they may not be served well by existing content.

Then, I pose this question to Claude: “Can you identify any queries that aren’t well served by this page? And if so, what new content should I create to satisfy these queries?”

Claude comes back with a gap analysis and identifies some really fantastic pieces that we should write about on our site. My next question to Claude is, “Now, I want you to add up all the impressions and tell me which ones have the most possibilities.”

Follow the visitor journey in GA4

What is the user journey from that landing page? If that landing page is looking good, but it may not be the place where people convert, where else can they go from it? I encourage you to use the path exploration in Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Look at the event’s “session start.” What is the path of that page? Where do they go next? You can just keep clicking on those (options) until you get to where the visitors ended up. You also can do a path analysis by starting with the end point.

If you look at the gap between the landing page and the high-value pages, you can find opportunities. People started on this page; they clicked here, but they didn’t continue. How can you get people from point A to point B?

Know how visitors engage

Do you know how users are using your website?

I don’t just mean page views. I mean looking at other metrics that tell you if users are having a good or bad time with your website. You may have used bounce rate in Google’s universal analytics. It was not a good metric. GA4 has a new metric called the engagement rate. A session becomes engaged when a user does at least one of these three things:

• Had your website in an active tab for at least 10 seconds
• Visited a second page on the site
• Had a key event

This is why it’s important to make sure your key events record things that relate to your goals for your website. Looking at engagement rates can really help you know if people are engaging with your content the way you want them to. User behavior also outlines the quality of your traffic. You can identify bad traffic by looking at sources with bad engagement rates.

Engagement rates don’t tell the entire story, either. We often measure content consumption to tell us what content is engaging. It’s a Google Tag Manager recipe. It’s also a WordPress plugin. It takes the piece of content and measures how long it would take to read that piece of content. If the person dwelled long enough to view it and scrolled to the bottom of that content, the content was consumed. It gives a starting point (to know) which content to improve to make sure people are reading everything on the page.

However, remember, content isn’t just the written word. Videos have never been more popular. You should record content consumption based on how people are viewing your videos. We often track someone viewing 90% of the video as (content consumption) completion.

Then, by comparing the content consumption rates between text and video, you can see for this audience what is more compelling. Does text speak more to the audience, or does video speak more? Now, you know what to prioritize when it comes to creating more content.

Use AI to analyze the data for opportunities

What new content opportunities should you pursue?

Take your AI tool of choice. Feed it everything you have, from content assets to keywords and audience research. Then, feed it with your performance data from GA4, Google Search Console, your CRM, etc.

With your entire website and content assets in its brain, it can draw connections between the performance data and the content on the page. Then, you can ask it questions to help you make better content decisions, such as:

• “Here’s our performance data from GA4. Here’s what we’re saying in Google Search Console. What content do we already have that fulfills these search queries?”
• “Which content is doing well on search versus social?”
• “Based on this research, what content is missing?”
• “What content is doing a great job of bringing those high-value sales?”

The last question is where your CRM data comes in. I’m a big advocate of tying together GA4 data with your CRM data.

For example, people fill out a form and you know how they got to the form, but do you know the actual value ultimately of that sale? It might take months or years, depending on the field. By tying the GA4 and CRM data together, you can say, “This ad campaign actually drove X number of dollars of value.”

You can feed that information to your AI brain and say, “Tell us which content is doing the best job of driving those high-value sales.” Then, you can ask, “Now you know what content is bringing in the high-value sales; what other content do you predict would be of high value for our business?”

It can identify those opportunities and help you prioritize your work for 2025 in the place where you are making the most money.

Get the most from GA4

What else should you start tracking in GA4 in 2025?

Track image views. I record every single image viewed on our website. I can record scroll depths of 25%, 50%, 75%, etc. It gives me a highly fine-grained knowledge of exactly where people bail. I get a good sense of where people get bored and stop reading our blog posts. And it’s a really helpful way to optimize that content.

I also recommend using audiences in GA4. I love using audiences for all sorts of different stuff, such as locations or pages that people have engaged with. For example, I often use it to understand the audience, excluding people who viewed a careers page. They’re probably not going to buy stuff; they just want a job.

However, the most important thing is to ensure that you set up insights in GA4. On the homepage of GA4, scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on “create custom insights.”

That’s where you set up your alerts for things like no organic traffic or no conversions to know if something is wrong. The last thing you want is to have something horrible happen and you don’t find out until you pull the report for the next month.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

As the founder and CEO of The Joy Brigade, Shabnam Mogharabi counsels people to rebel with joy.

She’s embraced the strategy herself, doing the research, getting brands to buy in, and executing projects in marked contrast to her journalistic beginnings where she knew “if it bleeds, it leads,” also known as negativity sells.

Shabnam co-founded the mission-driven studio SoulPancake, which focused on uplifting and inspiring content, with actor Rainn Wilson. She served as its CEO for nearly a decade.

But she’s no Pollyanna.

“I think the Pollyanna-look-on-the-bright-side is actually detrimental to harvesting true joy, which requires understanding, feeling, acknowledging the negative points,” she says.

Eliciting true joy requires recognizing the negative while offering a different perspective. “It works in how you tell stories. It works in how you write. It works in how you communicate ideas,” explains Shabnam in our interview after her well-received keynote presentation at Content Marketing World.

Negativity works in marketing, but positive emotions do, too

Negativity, of course, isn’t limited to mainstream headlines to attract an audience. Clickbait headlines abound on social media. “They don’t actually tap into any emotion other than fear,” Shabnam says. “While fear is a great motivator, I think that love and inspiration and joy can be strong motivators as well.”

It’s not just what she thinks; it’s what the research shows. Her advocacy is rooted in the theories of positive psychology. “You can change the way your brain responds and reacts to various situations — good or bad — that you find yourself in,” she says.

But challenging negativity isn’t an easy battle. Shabnam points to John Gottman’s research, which found that it takes 20 positive interactions to counteract a negative one.

It’s biological. Human brains are primed to look out for danger and potential threats. “Joy is a rebellion against how we’re wired,” she says.

Negativity is easier, but the best marketers eschew the easy route. “The best marketing campaigns truly capture the full spectrum of human emotion. They recognize that things are hard, days are stressful, and achieving greatness takes a lot of work,” she says.

Brands see the good in positivity

Shabnam shares a handful of brands among many that have successfully used joy in their marketing. She worked on some of the campaigns through SoulPancake and admired others as a consumer.

They all share one thing: They identify a potential (or actual) negative or challenge but pivot to an insightful or “aha” moment that inspires and uplifts the audience. They make people feel joy, connection, and hope — the positive emotions in the spectrum of that human experience.

Nike does it

Nike is known for taking on negative stereotypes. Shabnam shares an example from the early 2010s when the company produced an ad with a person running slowly on a paved road in the distance. As the runner gets closer to the camera, the viewer sees that it is a young person who weighs more than a stereotypical runner. The voiceover talks about how greatness isn’t reserved for superstars; it’s something everybody can achieve.

The company continues celebrating commitment while acknowledging the difficulties, as this 2024 spot — Joy — shows. The video, with the description, “Feeling great doesn’t always feel good,” shows people sweating, grimacing, gasping, smiling, and crying as they run with the cheery folk tune Joy Joy by Bob Gibson playing in the background.

Procter & Gamble sees little noticed

Procter & Gamble has often shared the hard work it takes to get to jubilation during the Olympics with campaigns like “Thank You, Mom.” This example shows the parents getting their kids up in the darkness of morning, feeding them, doing the laundry, and getting them to sports practice year after year — recognizing the hard, behind-the-scenes work that often goes unnoticed. Then, the ad shows the joy experienced by their families when their athletes compete at the Olympics.

Purina pivots from scientific benefits

At SoulPancake, Shabnam worked on a campaign for Purina, which been marketing the latest product by showcasing the science behind it.

But SoulPancake scrapped the benefits-focused ad and went in an entirely different direction. The team set up a box on a Los Angeles street corner. They asked people about their stresses in life, invited them to go inside the box, and surprised them with a basket full of kittens to play with. Afterward, the once-stressed people shared the positive effects of playing with the kittens.

The wildly successful campaign got billions in views and tons of influencer engagement, Shabnam says. “People really responded to it because we tapped into the emotional side of how people feel about their cats, what their cats offer to them, and the motivation you have to take care of them coming from a place of the love and fulfillment you get from the cats,” she notes.

California Casualty delivers unexpected joy

Insurance isn’t an industry that automatically makes people think “joy,” but SoulPancake changed that. It worked on a campaign with California Casualty, a provider of auto and home insurance for educators.

It brought in five teachers to talk about the challenges of teaching. They talked about how they didn’t even know if the kids were paying attention, the lack of resources, helicopter parents, and more.

Then, those teachers got a surprise. Former students showed up to read thank-you letters to them, describing the impact the teachers had on them and reminding the teachers why they worked so hard.

Shabnam says all marketers can rebel with joy, no matter the brand they’re promoting. “Even if there are no kittens or joyfulness naturally involved, there is something universal you can tap into,” she says.

Dramamine gets the good with The Last Barf Bag

Dramamine is a good example of that. The anti-nausea drug maker celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2024 with a 13-minute documentary, The Last Barf Bag.

Though the film ponders briefly late in the documentary whether Dramamine’s debut led to the continuing decline in airlines providing air sickness bags, the real story centered on a small but fascinating group of barf bag collectors. In the nine months since its debut, more than 300,000 people have viewed the video on the brand’s YouTube channel, with only 3,870 subscribers.

“Even vomit can have an interesting story, and it was brought to you by Dramamine. It was such clever marketing,” Shabnam says. “The work is in finding that universal insight that you can tap into.”

Getting internal buy-in

Of course, creatively tapping into the spectrum of human emotions isn’t the only ingredient to being a rebel. It also will require leadership that approves the concepts and a marketing culture that makes them possible.

Shabnam says the first step is to know how executives view the business. Some may want to expect results in the next quarter; others may take a long-haul view. In some cases, executives are driven by the bottom line first, while others say employee satisfaction. As you identify their priorities, also listen to the language they use.

“If you don’t learn to speak their language, communicating and selling the benefits of changing your approach to marketing will never make progress,” she says. “It’s all about knowing who your audience is and how you adjust the message, the benefits, etc., for that.”

Once you have executive support, you also need to get the marketing team on board. That involves examining the people and the processes. To make more emotive, joyful, and sticky content, you need people whose interests and passion — the things they consume and invest their time in — reflect what you’re interested in building.

You need people who think creatively and can see the data differently. You need team members who are voraciously interested in content, whether it’s books, movies, podcasts, or something else. They want to know what’s happening in advertising and expose themselves to creativity in the wild, such as visiting museums.

And don’t forget, leadership is important here, too. You must act like you want the team to. For example, if you set up a Slack channel for an upcoming campaign and ask team members to share podcasts, videos, books, etc., that relate to the themes or examples to inspire, you should contribute, too.

“People will do what they see modeled. If it’s not being reflected at the top, they won’t model it,” Shabnam says.

In addition to the people, processes should also be examined because they can sometimes stop creativity. Identify points in the process that hinder or help the team’s creativity. Commit to getting rid of extraneous things. Shabnam says if you don’t do this postmortem after every campaign, make sure to do it annually.

“If you’re not really reflecting all the time on ‘Do we have the right people and the right processes,’ you’ll never have the kind of culture that kind of creates this environment of creative thinking and thinking about insights and the type of content you’re trying to make,” Shabnam says.

Strategize to embrace joy

Eliciting the fear factor is easier, but you can do the harder work to evoke joy and connect more strongly with your audiences.

The best content, Shabnam says, acknowledges the full spectrum of emotion. It isn’t just positive for the sake of being positive.

“It is, ‘Hey, we know that there are these challenges. We know there are hard things, but here are inspiring, uplifting, creative, gratitude-filled solutions or ideas that can help address those challenges.

As she explains, “It is much harder and takes much more work to do that. But if we don’t do it, we cannot possibly rebel against these larger (negative) forces at work.”

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

I recently interviewed Marcus Collins, author of For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want To Be, for an episode of Live With CMI (with my co-host, JK Kalinowski). Marcus is an award-winning marketer who is the former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York and a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

Our chat about the role of culture in marketing covered more than we could fit in a single episode, so we released a bonus video of our entire conversation. Watch it here or read the edited transcript below.

Why should culture matter to marketers?

Culture is an organizing operating system that ultimately influences just about everything we do as humans. And that’s important for marketers because your job is to influence behavior, and there is no external force more influential to human behavior than culture.

When you launch something — a new campaign, a new product — it is negotiated and constructed based on the discourse that’s happening. Say you launched a new carrot brand when an E. coli breakout affects carrots. You are negatively impacted by what’s happening in the cultural zeitgeist.

Influencing and impacting culture means contributing to discourse in a meaningful way. My friend Eric Hultgren says culture is like a car:

• You can drive it: You contribute new ideas or new conventions.
• You can ride shotgun: You engage in existing conventions.
• You can suck tailpipe: You just follow whatever is happening with no point of view and no clear conviction.

The brands that lead culture contribute new artifacts, new language, and new behavior through their works. They are the brands most likely to win.

Does authenticity relate to culture?

Scholar Eric David Brown Jr. talks about authenticity occurring when you are one’s truest self despite the context. The same thing goes for brands. Brands are authentic when they are the same, despite who they’re with or where you find them. They are awarded a level of credence that helps them engage in culture meaningfully.

If you are known to be inauthentic, it would arguably be exorbitantly difficult, and one might say impossible, to engage in and contribute to culture sustainably.

Bud Light taps into culture

In the late 1990s, Budweiser identified a cultural product in the form of a short film by Charles Stone III, a music video producer who wanted to get into Hollywood. Charles and his friends made a (three-minute) film called True. The dialogue was mostly “Wassup?” — it was how they communicated without having to say more words.

The executive from DDB, the advertising agency for Budweiser, saw the short and said, “That’s exactly what we’re trying to capture in this brand.” So, Budweiser commissioned Charles Stone to rework his short film to become an ad for Budweiser. People who saw themselves in that short film — in that cultural work — began to use that “Wassup?” language to talk to each other. This cultural lexicon became a way to signify closeness. It’s a receipt of friendship.

In this way, Budweiser identified the language used by this group. It wasn’t new, but the brand engaged in that lexicon through these cultural creators to benefit from the equity associated with it. And Budweiser was saying “Wassup?” all the way to the bank. And so was Charles Stone, who found his way into Hollywood to make movies.

Everybody associated with the “Wassup?” campaign won not because of any changes to the product but because of the brand’s ability to have proximity to culture.

Beyoncé sees the BeyHive’s real power

Part of my job working with Beyoncé was to help build her online fan club. Take an offline fan club, where people write her letters that would go without replies (as with most celebrities), and build it into an online fan club where these people could engage with each other through their fandom of Beyoncé.  

However, we realized that the engagement on the platform we built was nowhere close to the engagement within the (wider) community. In the clubs of the BeyHive, these folks had their own language, their own vernacular, their own artifacts, and their own behaviors.

They weren’t just fans of Beyoncé. They saw the world the way Beyoncé did. Their belief system brought them together. The music was merely the cultural production that expressed the shared belief that was exchanged among them.

What that illuminated for me is that building a community is “I’m going to bring people and rally them around me and my ideas.” Facilitating community is about finding people who already believe what you believe and using your resources, effort, and social capital to help them connect so that they might collectively achieve the things they set out to achieve together.

While one may see that as wordplay, I think that (thinking) is foundationally, if not philosophically, different. When you facilitate a community, you find yourself in service of people. And the best marketing is always in service to help people get through their jobs to be done, whether it’s the functional job, the emotional job, the social job, or the alchemy of all three.

So, marketers should be looking for these communities that may already exist for their brand, their product, or whatever it may be. That requires the brand to be more than a maker of products or a provider of service-based products.

The idea is that these vessels of meaning that we call brands transcend the value proposition, the category in which they operate. Then, they preach the gospel to people who see the world similarly. And those people go, “Yes, totally, I always thought about it that way. Finally, someone said it.” Then, these people preach the gospel for you. They evangelize, creating network effects that bring people toward you.

B2B and B2C brands can do this. It’s just context. Brands are vessels of meaning, and brands that mean one thing when I’m shopping through the grocery store have the same mechanisms as brands that mean something when I’m in my cubicle trying to decide whether to buy this cloud computing system or that one. It all depends on what the brand means to me.

You know that saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM?” That’s because there was cultural credence and trust in IBM. Therefore, the cultural and social expectations are pushed upon that (buyer) so that even if they see a product that performs better than IBM, they are going to go with IBM because they’re likely to get (the purchase) through the system more easily. No one is going to get upset with them. The boss probably would pat them on the back. The buyer gets all the social capital from that, even though another product may be better.

Kamala Harris didn’t get a big network cultural effect

I think people look at Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and say, “Well, her efforts were not effective enough because she didn’t win.” I say, “Well, no, not really.”

She preached the gospel. She started with what she believed, and people who saw the world similarly went, “That’s my candidate.” 

The truth of the matter is that the country didn’t believe what she believed. Should she have said something she didn’t believe to win? Then people would say, “Well, that’s not authentic.”

It’s like brands that say they believe in something, and some people go, “Nah, I don’t choose you.” So, the brand goes, “We shouldn’t have said what we believed.” Well, no. The people who chose your brand (because of what you shared) are the ones to target.

In the game of politics, it’s a binary matter — one winner and one loser. In the marketplace, a brand could not be No.1 and still win. You could be No. 5 and profitable.

Also, in politics, it’s not enough to preach the gospel to the people who see the world the way you do. You have to create the mechanisms by which you ignite the network effects.

Perhaps Kamala didn’t have enough time for that to take hold because she only entered the race in July. She only got the first reverberation of the believers and didn’t get a chance to benefit from their ability to influence other people.

The momentum she catalyzed in a short time is unprecedented. She raised a billion dollars in donations. That is unreal. What she did was a Herculean effort. Was her campaign perfect? No. But was it impactful? 1,000%.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

To get everybody on the same page with your brand’s content marketing, you need an actual page.

Your team — and everybody else involved in the process — needs to know the who, what, when, where, why, and how behind their work.

A written strategy makes it easier to:

• Align content marketing with the organization’s business goals.
• Secure leadership and budget support.
• Ensure that internal, external, and adjacent content teams work in the same direction.
• Onboard and re-educate your team as the strategy evolves.

Content Marketing Institute research has shown that a written strategy is a differentiator for top performers. A few years ago, CoSchedule reported that marketers with a documented strategy were 414% more likely to report success than those who don’t have one.

To craft a strategy that all stakeholders will actually consume (and refer to later), you should make it a single page. To help, I’ve developed seven steps to a one-page content marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Identify your business’s operational objectives and goals

Your content marketing program won’t be successful if it doesn’t align with what your organization wants to achieve.

Example

Business objective: To increase the belief that Bountiful Bank is a good source for loans (home, personal, and auto)

Business goal: To increase all types of loan applications by 10% (year over year) from Bountiful Bank customers

Step 2: Set the content marketing objective

Knowing what your business executives want to achieve, consider how content marketing will help. At this point, you’re looking for a general content marketing objective, not specific tactics or topics.

Example

The business objective is specific (raise awareness and trust in Bountiful Bank as a lender), and the goal is measurable (increase loan applications by 10%).

With that understanding, the content marketing team identified an objective that could ultimately help Bountiful Bank achieve that goal (becoming a go-to resource on personal finance).

Content marketing objective: To become a go-to content resource for bank customers interested in personal finance topics

Now, the work begins to define the path to achieving that content marketing objective.

Step 3: Define the audience

It’s tempting to detail a broad audience — all, you may think, the more people who consume your content, the more people to help you achieve the goals.

Resist that temptation because it’s ineffective. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to create content that works well for as many audience segments as possible.

Pick one primary audience and, possibly, a secondary audience.

To narrow the options, research your potential audiences. Look at the relevant data — demographics, sociographics, interests, needs, and pain points. Detail how and where people in that group currently get information related to your general topic (as mentioned in your content marketing objective).

Ask who would be most interested in your company’s content topics and who is more likely to take the desired action to achieve the business’s operational goal. This is your primary audience.

Example

Bountiful Bank considered several audiences interested in personal finance content. But when the content marketing team asked which of those audiences would be more likely to apply for a loan in the next five years, they narrowed it down to one — parents (with at least one young child). This target audience would be more likely to apply for car or home loans as their family grows.

Audience: Parents (with at least one young child) who:

• Are customers of Bountiful Bank
• Oversee their family’s budget
• Expect their living and transportation needs to evolve in the next five years
• Are challenged by balancing the family’s space and transportation requirements as the family grows
• Are crunched for time in all aspects of their life

Step 4: Identify content categories and topics

Knowing and describing your audience opens the window to content. What would this group of people want to read, watch, or hear that’s related to your content marketing objective?

Brainstorm a list of content ideas — big ideas, specific story angles, or both. As you review the list, put a star next to the ones that would benefit your target audience the most.

People prefer the easiest route. When they search for information, that now means they turn to generative AI tools, like Gemini and ChatGPT, or even AI Overview in Google Search.

These LLMs deliver neatly packaged answers. They don’t require the information seekers to scroll through a results page, click on a promising link, consume the site’s content to find the answer, and click the back arrow if they don’t find what they need.

That’s why marketers must adjust their search strategies to keep attracting online audiences to their brand and its content. To optimize your content for the search revolution, read on for recent research and advice from a few of CMI’s go-to experts in the field of search, analytics, and AI.

AI isn’t an alternative to Google; it will be the new Google

Even the search behemoth itself — Google — is immersed in the AI-answer world in ways that create a “serious situation for SEO,” writes Search Engine Journal author Roger Montti.

“In 2025, AI is not just AI Overviews. AI is Gemini, its new features coming to Gemini and possibly the release of features developed from Project Astra, a multimodal universal agent … All of these are a departure from the traditional search box as the point of contact between users, Google, and websites,” Roger explains.

Will people really move from the familiar search box to Gemini? Google’s recent statements and products indicate that the company is betting on it.

Google’s AI lab co-founder says the company will “turbo charge” the Gemini app in the next two years. Google’s universal assistant — Project Astra — will converse with users audibly and visually through their phones and prototype glasses and give answers, recommendations, and more information based on those chats.

And that’s just what’s happening at Google.

Microsoft has integrated its Bing search engine with its AI tool, CoPilot. ChatGPT, which is already a slang term for generative AI, has released SearchGPT, which draws from Bing.

And given the growing volume of players in the diverse generative AI game, expect ongoing disruption in this revolution.

Don’t panic; learn the game board

Revolutions aren’t unique. If you’re a seasoned professional, you know that before Google was THE search engine, there was Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search, Yahoo!, and more. Each had its own nuances, from algorithm preferences to how it delivered the results.

Answer-focused AI may be in a similar stage. So, now’s the time to understand what each tool cares about the most when generating responses and decide where your SEO team should invest more of its time.

Will Seer and Jason Stinnett at Seer Interactive recently broke down the three types of AI search:

• Training-first systems such as Claude and Llama “generate responses based solely on their training data — snapshots frozen in time until the next model update.”
• Search-first systems such as Google AI Overviews and Perplexity “rely heavily on real-time indexing of web pages … It’s like SEO on steroids, with a dash of content curation.”
• Hybrid systems such as Gemini and ChatGPT “blur the lines by deciding, often in real time, whether to answer based on their training data or fetch updated information from the web.”

Discover your audience’s preferences

Now that you know the potential systems, how do you know what your audience prefers? You should do what every good marketer does: Look at your web analytics.

To do a quick check, use a simple GA4 filter as explained by Orbit Media’s Andy Crestodina:

• Go to the Engagement > Page path and query string report.
• Set a long date range.
• Click the “Add filter +” button at the top of the report.
• In the filter settings on the right, select “Page Referrer” as the dimension. Select “exactly matches” as the match type. Enter “https://chatgpt.com” as the value.
• Click “Apply”.

Then, you can see the traffic coming from ChatGPT. Apply the same process but change the values for the “Page Referrer” to other domains, such as https://gemini.google.com and https://perplexity.ai.

Given the newness of AI as an alternative search method, don’t expect a lot of traffic to come from any of the sites, Andy says. As that changes, you’ll already be monitoring the impact to better understand what answer AI tools your audience prefers.

For example, Orbit Media’s site saw AI referrers made up 0.2% of its total traffic in the previous 30 days, but that’s twice as much as the previous month, Andy explains.

By checking the numbers regularly, you also can see how (if) your traditional search traffic declines month over month.

Want to spend more time setting up this monitoring permanently or creating a custom channel group? Orbit Media has step-by-step instructions on how to do both.

Ramp up your AI referral engines

Of course, just as you don’t sit and hope for search engine traffic, you shouldn’t wait for AI sites to deliver traffic. Investigate the emerging trends and know how your brand appears (or doesn’t appear) in the current systems.

Chris Long of Go Fish Digital did the latter. The agency conducted a ChatGPT Search test to see how it performed for “digital PR agency,” a query that does well for Go Fish Digital on Google Search.

It found ChatGPT Search listed Go Fish Digital, but it didn’t include the agency’s notable clients as it did for some other firms mentioned in the results.

To remedy that, the Go Fish team revisited the source page most frequently cited for its ChatGPT Search mentions. It added a “notable clients” section to the content in a bulleted list, a format the search engine LLM would be more likely to appreciate.

A week later, ChatGPT Search added Go Fish’s notable clients to its results mention.

Recognize the big picture for brand mentions

Seer Interactive took a wider view with its proprietary tool to investigate factors affecting brand mentions in AI-generated responses.

It took 300,000 keywords related to the finance and SaaS industries and got their traditional search engine rankings and other related data, such as backlinks, format, etc. It also selected 10,000 questions that would mostly trigger answers that mentioned a brand from the People Also Ask results. It ran those questions through OpenAI’s GPT4o API and counted the brand mentions in the answers.

The results led to these conclusions:

• Brands ranking on page one of Google strongly correlated with their mentions in the AI answers. Bing rankings mattered but slightly less.
• The quantity of backlinks had a weak or even neutral impact.
• Content format variety (videos, images, etc.) didn’t have much of an impact.

In a different test, Seer Interactive dug into the importance of keyword variations to generative AI tools — something that traditional search rewards.

Seer asked 1,000 versions of this question: “Who are the best brands for composite decking?”

The 1,000 answers mentioned a total of 74 unique brands, with an average of six brands included in each answer.

Seer Interactive’s Christina Blake says the results indicate that AI tools prioritize semantic intent over specific words. Thus, marketers should focus on the themes and concepts behind the questions, not minor variations in phrasing as they might do with traditional search.

Do the hard work for the easy search route

In the coming year, more and more people in your target audience will change their search behavior and opt for the easier route.

To ensure that your content and brand show up in those nicely wrapped packages, update your marketing playbook. Don’t abandon traditional search rankings, given their potential role in AI-generated answers. But do spend less time perfecting the keywords and other minutia that doesn’t really matter to your audience or the generative AI tools.

All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by a contributor to the article. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Have you seen that video of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the difference between Meta’s and Apple’s development approaches?

For some reason, LinkedIn keeps serving me a clip from the September 2024 episode of the Acquired Podcast.

At the beginning of that segment, Zuckerberg notes that Meta takes a different approach than Apple regarding product strategy:

“We’re the opposite of Apple…They take this approach that’s like, ‘We’re going to take a long time, we’re going to polish it, and we’re going to put it out.’ And maybe for the stuff that they’re doing that works, maybe that just fits with their culture.”

In other words, they move slowly, and we move fast.

But you can see that Zuckerberg visibly struggles during this 8-minute segment to separate the ideas of speed and agility. When questioned about prioritizing speed and releasing suboptimal things, he backtracks, saying, ‘Well, I don’t want to overstate it.’

Gradually, he works his way to the realization that he means their ability to learn and adapt quickly — in other words, their agility:

“Product strategy is about learning and iterating as fast as possible…If we can learn faster than everyone else, we’ll win.”

The punch line, however, lies in the audience’s reaction. Most LinkedIn comments (and the articles covering the interview) interpreted the clip as Zuckerberg saying that velocity defines a great strategy.

One commenter said, “Speed is everything in marketing.”

Spoiler alert: It isn’t.

The pitfalls of reckless velocity

I wrote recently about how the “move fast and break things” motto has permeated marketing’s culture.

I’ve seen too many marketing teams rally around new technology and activities in the name of prioritizing speed. Companies encourage teams to “fail fast” and deliver more and more content and iterative advertising faster.

In 2025, most marketers will move significantly faster than in 2015. Marketing has become more efficient and more algorithm-driven. Unfortunately, it’s also become more superficial.

Have marketers hit “peak speed,” where the downsides of constant acceleration outweigh the benefits?

Speed isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it’s critical in specific scenarios — such as responding to customer needs (as Jay Baer points out), managing crises, or adapting to rapid market changes. Yet speed for speed’s sake can lead to chaos and, paradoxically, hinder the capabilities it’s meant to enhance.

Last year, I worked with an organization whose marketing team was so focused on optimizing their automation tools to launch email campaigns faster and cheaper that they failed to recognize the consequences. Their prospects were buried under a relentless wave of emails — sophisticated, personalized, and, unfortunately, overwhelmingly poor content.

This reckless velocity culture makes teams feel like the work is happening to them rather than with them. Nobody questions where the content came from or whether it’s the right content for the goal — there’s no time for that.

Priorities become muddled, collaboration breaks down, burnout surges, and the pressure to deliver sacrifices creativity, learning, and, ultimately, quality.    

Consider Meta for a moment. The company started rolling out AI-driven (ostensibly fake) profiles platform users could chat with. After some serious blowback over the last couple of weeks, Meta has decided to delete these profiles (at least for now). None of these choices were a good look for the brand. (I talk more about that misadventure in this video and article.)

Facebook may be large enough to weather this misstep, but the lesson for smaller brands is clear: Moving too fast has serious consequences.

But what’s the better way?

The answer is the same one Zuck ultimately settled on: Agility.

Intentional agility is a far more effective way to approach marketing efforts. It involves deliberate, thoughtful, and adaptive action rather than racing forward for the sake of momentum.

Intentional agility: More than speed

Agility has also become a buzzword in marketing, touted by many as the only way innovation and adaptability can happen. But, too often, people wrongly conflate agility with speed.

Speed refers to how fast you can move in a straight line, while agility describes the ability to quickly change direction with a purpose.

So, “If we can learn faster than everyone else, we’ll win” actually means, “If we can process where we should change direction more quickly than everyone else, we’ll win.”

That’s intentional agility: the ability to respond effectively to change built on a foundation of expertise, preparation, and deliberate practice. It’s about knowing when to act quickly and when to pause, assess, and plan.

It’s about moving forward with intention, not just momentum.

Move toward inventing things intentionally

At the heart of this discussion is a philosophical shift for marketing teams: from valuing rapid, iterative change to prioritizing deliberate, creative progress.

Stop long enough to question the need for speedy change. For example, ask:

• Why do we need the Ferrari of marketing automation systems when our strategy calls for a truck?
• Why do we need to figure out how to get to 42 AI-generated versions of content when three will get us 95% of the way to our goal?
• Why do we need to create 100 pieces of content for that social media channel when it’s not delivering the desired level of benefit?

When I work on content marketing strategies for organizations, I often recommend changing the content creation process to start with the story rather than the containers (e.g., the designed asset). 

For example, if they’re planning a thought leadership piece, I recommend they avoid saying, “We need a white paper!” Instead, I recommend they define the story first and then plan whether it should be a white paper, an e-book, a webinar, a podcast, an email, or all of the above.

The No. 1 pushback I get on this recommendation is, “It sounds like you’re going to slow down the content creation process.”

My answer is, “Yup, absolutely. And by doing that, you’ll exponentially increase your re-use and repackaging capabilities.” 

Intentional agility as a strategic advantage

In a world obsessed with speed, it’s tempting to equate velocity with progress. However, the most successful organizations understand that real progress comes from moving with purpose.

Fortunately, I’m noticing more and more marketing leaders raising their hands and saying, “Maybe it’s time to pause, take a breath, and slow down.”

By shifting the focus to intentional agility— toward inventing things intentionally and away from breaking things quickly — you can create a work environment that is more sustainable, innovative, and impactful.

So, the next time you face pressure to move fast, don’t. Consider whether you’re merely chasing velocity or driving toward a meaningful destination.

Then move forward — intentionally.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Meta just learned the hard way that no one likes fake friends.

Users quickly sniffed out the company’s AI-generated profiles with their awkward bios, wonky AI-generated photos, and deceptive backstories, and the backlash has been swift. Meta called it a “bug” and quietly deleted the accounts, but not before it raised ethical questions about using AI to impersonate humans.

AI-generated “friends” aren’t new, and the deleted “bugs” don’t signal the end of their use. This year, expect AI-generated customer service agents and friendly co-pilots to grow in number and impact. They will help solve problems like complex software challenges and give out the secret hack to writing that email to your boss explaining why you won’t be at work Friday.

What does this mean for marketers? We turned to CMI’s chief strategy advisor, Robert Rose, for his take.

AI characters prompt revealing conversations

So, Meta thought it was a good idea to sprinkle its platforms with AI-generated profiles pretending to be people. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t.

It introduced AI-powered profiles in September 2023 but killed off most of them within the year. (Is “killed off” correct? Or should it be “deleted” for deactivated droids? I’m not sure.) Anyway, a few characters remained.

Over the holiday break, the AI-profile survivors garnered new interest when Meta executive Connor Hayes told the Financial Times about plans to roll out more AI character profiles. “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” he said.

These AI profiles post AI-generated pictures to Instagram and answer messages from human users on Messenger. These characters have bios, profile pics, and stories. “Liv” described herself as a “Proud Black queer momma of 2 & a truth-teller.” When a reporter for The Washington Post asked Liv about the racial and gender diversity of her creators, she responded, “My creators’ team is predominantly white, cisgender, and male — a total of 12 people: 10 white men, 1 white woman, and 1 Asian male.”

I asked Liv, the Meta-Ai created “queer momma” why her creators didn’t actually draw from black queer people.

Not sure if Liv has media training, but here we are.

[image or embed]

— Karen Attiah (@karenattiah.bsky.social) January 3, 2025 at 9:56 AM

Liv also pointed out the glaring problem in her reply, “Zero black creators — pretty glaring omission given my identity!”

In another “conversation,” a CNN reporter chatted with “Grandpa Brian,” who identified himself as a retired African-American entrepreneur from Harlem. He spun folksy tales about his life until the reporter asked about his creators. Brian claimed interviews inspired him with 100 retirees via a nonprofit called Seniors Share Wisdom.

Adorable, right? Except that nonprofit doesn’t exist. Pressed further, Brian admitted his bio was “entirely fictionalized,” calling himself a “collection of code, data, and clever deception.” If you weren’t already cringing, Brian added, “Meta saw me as a golden goose — baiting emotional connections for profit.”

As the internet gleefully roasted Meta, the company deleted those AI profiles and claimed they were part of an “early experiment.” A bug made it impossible to block them from Meta users, a spokesperson said. But maybe, just maybe, what if the bug launched the profiles?

Why did Meta think creating a digital army of bots pretending to be real people was a good idea? Apparently, the company hoped these AI accounts would increase engagement and keep users scrolling. But instead of crafting heartwarming companions, Meta created digital imposters who couldn’t keep their stories straight.

Don’t fall under the AI siren spell until you do this

Meta’s latest misstep is a lesson for marketers: While the world rewards moving fast and breaking things, sometimes that broken thing is the trust of your customers.

You will be enticed to create anthropomorphized influencers, characters, and other personas to represent your brand. But before you succumb, be circumspect about how you will go about it. 

Put the same or more care and rigor you use in vetting your external human influencers into the AI versions. Because, as you can see, if generative AI does one thing well, it can get cringy and creepy as fast or faster than you do.  

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Brands generate original research to grow their recognition as thought leaders in their industries.

But the buzz won’t materialize if the marketing team doesn’t promote the research. Whether you have a massive budget or not, consider these five strategies to ensure that your organization’s research maximizes its direct and indirect benefits.

You can start with these five ideas based on my and others’ experiences:

1. Pick topics that promote themselves

Buffer is a social media management SaaS company. Between 2018 and 2023, it published the State of Remote Work. Instead of compiling another “state of social” report like its competitors — an approach tied directly to the services they offer — Buffer took a creative topical twist by addressing the growing trend of remote work, even though it’s not directly related to its core offerings.

Buffer recognized that research on remote work would attract wider interest than another report on social media for marketers. The strategy worked, as top media outlets such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, and Fast Company regularly reference and link to Buffer’s State of Remote Work reports.

That media coverage netted Buffer helpful backlinks, which indicate to search engines that the Buffer research is worthy of attention in results rankings. However, in 2022, the State of Remote Work report netted staggeringly more attention than it did in 2020.

As these Ahrefs’ reports show, the 2022 study earned over 1.8 million backlinks during its lifetime (621,000 of which are still live), while the 2020 study received 9,000 backlinks (more than 3,000 are still live).

What explains the tremendous difference? Remote work was a trending topic in 2022 because, by then, everybody had access to COVID-19 vaccinations. Employees were thinking about voluntarily returning to the office or were being forced back by their employers. Media looked for data to cite on this increasingly important topic and showered Buffer’s fresh study with press mentions and backlinks.

2. Publish the report on a more prominent website

When I created the first edition of the How To Build a Credible Blog report, I planned to publish it on my website () and do a ton of outreach.

Then, an idea hit me: “What if I published the study on another site before mine?” I had seen other companies do this and earn press mentions.

So, I asked Jeff Bullas, who has a big social following, to publish my report on his site, which receives a ton of traffic and for which I had previously written. I told him I would debut the study on his site, and he said yes.

The idea paid off. People who visited Jeff’s site, which gets a healthy amount of organic search and direct traffic, discovered my work. Jeff also shared the link to the blog post on social networks and tagged my handle. This got more eyeballs to gravitate toward the study and boosted its credibility.

I republished the study on my site one week later and used that link for other sites that mentioned my research.

TIP: Transform some of your study’s results into an infographic and promote it to journalists so their sites need to embed only one image.

3. Email study participants

An easy way to quickly get some views is to email the published research link to everyone who participated. But to do this, you must think ahead.

I like to add a line at the end of the survey that says, “To be among the first people to see the report, make sure you add your email address.” A lot of people submitted their details. Just make sure you stick to your promise and contact them before sharing it with anyone else.

TIP: You can also use the notification email as a request for them to help promote it. Share descriptive text and an image or two and encourage them to let their social followers know.

4. Partner with influencers

I came across this LinkedIn post from Matt Navarra, author of the Geekout newsletter and social media consultant with over 250,000 followers on social, including over 64,000 on LinkedIn.

He previewed Metricool’s study on LinkedIn in the post’s text and published a 10-image carousel with findings, ending both with a call to check out the full report. I ended up providing my contact information to Metricool and downloading the report.

TIP: Support the influencer partner after the promotion is published. When someone commented about the lack of polling as an option in the research, Matt replied and tagged Metricool, which followed up by thanking the commenter for the suggestion and noting it may add it in the next survey.

Of course, for this strategy to work well, you should team up with influencers who have access to the audience you want to reach.

5. Tease the content in blog post and ads

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Content marketers have long had an identity crisis.

In recent years, the crisis has grown with the ubiquity of content creators in the creator economy.

In truth, you know who you are in the workplace. But does your title reflect that? Does your job description? What happens when you do a job search? Or, if you’re hiring, how do you handle attracting content marketer candidates?

We posed those questions to the CMI community and, not surprisingly, discovered no one had THE answer. But their replies indicate the possibilities that the employed, job searchers, and employers need to consider. And they highlight a potentially big challenge in the long term.

Can a ‘content creator’ be a ‘content marketer’?

Let me explain how this conversation originated. In the last few years, the creator economy raised the profile of “content creators.” In that context, the term is meant to indicate people who create content to attract audiences but who may not qualify as or want to be known as an influencer.

For me, as a writer for the Content Marketing Institute, I have used the term “content creator” to describe marketers who create the content. I used it as a catch-all term for writers, graphic artists, photographers, videographers, etc., who worked in marketing.

Marketer Roxanne Blanford had similar thinking. She explains, “Typically, the term ‘content marketer’ has been used to reference individuals who create, curate, and distribute content that attracts, educates, informs, and engages a target audience over a period of time, leading them through the funnel and building trust so that a purchasing consideration can take place and the sales team has a warm and highly interested lead to pursue.”

Fellow marketer Victoria Bishara de Leon says, “When I hear the title ‘content creator,’ I immediately think influencer,” she says.

But, Victoria explains, companies that hire content creators expect that person to not only build strategies for social but also shoot the content, write the scripts, edit the content, and stay on top of trends. “It’s unreasonable and asking a person to be really good at way too many things,” she says.

Make a ‘word salad’ to describe what content marketers do

Roxanne says she’s adopted a word-salad approach in her job search. “We are all living in a world of SEO, keywords, buzzwords, and the like,” she says.

In her LinkedIn header, Roxanne includes “marketing and communications,” “marketing copywriter,” and “multichannel and omnichannel content writer” along with her purpose, “Enabling B2C/B2B market and customer connections.”

Roxanne ponders whether a succinct role title is even possible, given the number of hats worn by a content marketer.

That’s why Roxanne purposely adopted the word-salad strategy, listing every type of content she can and has produced. “It enables me to better articulate a professional identity that is simultaneously specific and adaptable on a multichannel scale,” she says.

“With content writing and content management roles becoming increasingly multifaceted, communication professionals need to present descriptions that help navigate applicant tracking systems (ATS) when looking for work,” Roxanne says.

Test job title assumptions: Content marketing may be missing

Victoria started her job search looking for senior, director, and manager titles with the term “content marketing” in them. But she soon realized “content marketing” isn’t always in the title of a role that involves content marketing.

So, she expanded her search to include titles such as copywriter, web content manager, web content designer, and content lead.

“For the longest time, I equated copywriters with those who wrote short bits of copy with the intention of getting their audience to take almost immediate action,” she says.

I don’t think her understanding of a copywriter was wrong, but its practical application led to an expansion of the job description or perhaps organizations didn’t change the budget-approved title when they changed the duties associated with it.

Though she’s worn both copywriting and content hats in the same role, Victoria knows the skills are different. “It is challenging for an individual to regularly switch their brain back and forth between writing long-form content that tells a story through several paragraphs if not pages and writing short snippets of content meant to entice audiences into conversion,” she says.

How does a job candidate know what the role will entail without clear definitions? Victoria says you shouldn’t rely on the published job description alone. For example, she always asks if the team has a dedicated designer for marketing needs. If not, responsibility likely falls to another role.

“Ask as many questions as you can about the team and what the roles and responsibilities of those people entail,” Victoria says, suggesting reaching out to the future peers to ensure everything tracks.

Does the title matter?

Anna Wagner Schliep most recently had a marketing communications title where she owned the content for her area of the organization. (The company didn’t have a content marketing role, though it did have a content strategist who did SEO.)

In her current job search for content and communications work, she primarily looks at two titles — communications manager and content marketing manager. But many other titles may fit.

On her resume, she emphasizes in the headline and bullets her content and “owned” content experience. “So far, that approach doesn’t seem to be delivering for content marketing manager titles,” Anna says. “Perhaps that’s because the content marketing space is so crowded that if I haven’t had that title, it doesn’t matter.”

But, she says, the strategy does work OK for roles focused on communications with a marketing element.

Anna’s wish? That employers would be open to candidates with different titles on their resume and be clear in what the business seeks from the role. For example, “Do they want a social content creator or someone who’s looking at bigger-picture messaging and development,” she asks.

Switch up titles to assess the applicant pool

At AdDaptive Intelligence, Laura Goldstone has tested a few titles when searching for someone to fill their content marketing coordinator/specialist roles.

She discarded a lot of “content creator” applications from people who were social media influencers or ran social media accounts but had never worked in marketing or weren’t qualified for the more strategic, holistic, full-funnel content marketing contribution the company sought.

“I do think ‘content creator’ being used in the creator economy/social media influencer realm has muddied the waters a bit when it comes to hiring for traditional content marketing roles,” Laura says.

When the company posted a “content marketing specialist” role, applications came from all age groups, from entry-level to experienced in general and niche marketing.

But when it sought a “content marketing coordinator,” the candidate pool was more consistent — applicants typically in earlier phases of their career who had some experience writing and promoting.

Laura understands the challenges of using titles that accurately reflect the role. Her title is senior director of communications and branding strategy / head of brand and content.

“It’s a mouthful because a more concise title didn’t seem to do justice to the wide range of responsibilities I have,” she says.

The AdDaptive Intelligence marketing department is split into brand and demand. All the content comes from the brand team, which she oversees, along with messaging and design. The communications component of her title indicates to internal stakeholders her broader scope of responsibility. (The company’s content team reports to the head of communications.)

Giving proper perspective

Marion Abrams, director of content at Dartmouth Health, says she sees the challenge in using the term “content.”

One version is old school, referencing everything written on a website and the site’s SEO, structure, and information architecture. The more modern version encompasses social media, videos, emails, podcasts, and articles.

“And both are 100% sure that what they mean is obvious,” Marion says. “It causes a lot of confusion.”

That’s in part why Dartmouth Health strives to solve the problem by adding descriptors when using the term “content,” and that includes their current work of writing job descriptions.

Knowing what is and is not

Lee Densmer, owner and content marketing strategist of Globia Content Marketing, says being precise should be a must. “A content creator is not a content marketer. Also, a social media manager is not a content marketer. Also, an SEO writer is not a content marketer,” she says.

Though an SEO writer or social media person can become a content marketer, it shouldn’t be expected, and none of those people is automatically a content strategist.

While she recognizes that few, if any, companies can budget for all those roles, they should invest in a strategic role first, perhaps a fractional content marketing strategist, and then add practitioners, she says. To help, she has crafted a handbook for hiring a content marketing team that provides eight roles, including job descriptions and pay rates.

Making this differentiation

Jason Patterson, founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency, views a content marketer as someone who has one foot in content and one foot in marketing. If someone does content in a branded newsroom, not marketing, they are brand journalists or something similar.

“The key point to remember is that these people are often in corporate marketing or brand-level teams and not product marketing,” Jason says.

As for clients, the terminology doesn’t matter. “Most clients … have things they want done and pay us to do them. Regardless of whether they’re right about what content marketing is or should be,” he says.

Expanding duties

Michelle Garrett, founder of Garrett Public Relations, says she’s observed content marketing duties being added into job descriptions for public relations and social media roles. “There is a lot of overlap and confusion about who should be responsible for what,” she says.

As some of the skills overlap, human resources and hiring managers may not understand how to capture that in a title and job description. Or perhaps it’s because the company wants one person to do all those things, Michelle says.

“While I understand that it might be beneficial to hire someone who has different skills, that shouldn’t make it OK to expect one person to take on too many responsibilities,” she says.

“I think the days of the specialist may be behind us, unfortunately.”

Recognizing long-term impact of muddled titles and roles

Jeremy Bednarski, senior manager of content strategy at Salesforce, says he sees a long-term impact of confusing and inconsistent job titles.

“What’s the next title and/or set of responsibilities when you get promoted? What’s the career path when there’s not much consistency in roles among companies?” he asks.

AdDaptive’s Laura Goldstone sees it as problematic, too. “Through 15-plus years, I haven’t seen one clear answer emerge as the obvious winner or most data-backed trend (for title names).

“It’s confusing when it comes to career pathing — both for myself and for the team members I lead. But I try to view it as being empowering since we have a bit more autonomy and flexibility when it comes to creating roles — from title to scope — that match the breadth of work we produce.”

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Happy New Year!

Here we are again. It’s the beginning of a new year — that magical time when your journaling app sends you a passive-aggressive reminder to “set your intentions” (and you almost believe you’ll live up to them).

What are your New Year’s traditions for starting again? Do you write resolutions? Do you set intentions? How about goals? How do you make sure you’ll keep working toward them?

I’ve found that setting a single word as my aspirational and guiding principle for the year makes it easier. My New Year journals track my words for at least 20 years.

In case you’re curious, here’s the list for the last 10:

• Imagination (2024)
• Balance (2023)
• Freedom (2022)
• Love (2021)
• Elegance (pre-COVID 2020)
• Happiness (2019)
• Scale (2018)
• Execute (2017)
• Evolve (2016)
• Manifest (2015)

I also assign a word for what the previous year became. In fact, I choose a word for the old year first. The two words rarely match. 2018’s “scale” turned into “choice” at year’s end, and 2016’s “evolve” became “evolved.”

The years when they don’t align reveal my struggles. 2019’s “happiness” gave way to “rambling,” and last year’s “imagination” gave way to “pivot.”

Focusing on a single word gives my intention a name and provides the foundation for every action I plan and take rather than a set of rules I’ll likely break.

Drumroll, please: My word for 2025

I mentioned that my end word for 2024 was “pivot.” I went through a lot of change this year (as many of you did).

The nature of my work today is completely different than in January of 2024. The model by which I do it changed. The business world has changed. Geopolitics has changed. And our beloved marketing practice faces some of the biggest disruptions in over a decade.

Some of this change felt hard and discouraging. Other elements sparked positivity and excitement. But I feel grateful for all of it. As I mentioned in a recent post, shifting my focus from “I have to” to “I get to” helped tremendously.

So, I almost chose “gratitude” as my word for 2025. Here’s why I decided on a different word.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about what we don’t have. And it’s much harder to remember all that we do. But that keeps people stuck in a scarcity mentality.

Gratitude can tip the scales back in the other direction. But, if you’re not careful, you can go too far. Then, what I call “rationalized gratitude” becomes toxic.

Rationalized gratitude sounds like a cruel inner monologue: “Unhappy in your job? Be grateful you have a job!” Or, “Need more money? Be thankful for the money you have and spend less of it.” 

This form of “gratitude” is actually a scarcity mindset in disguise. It tells you there isn’t enough to go around, so you should feel lucky to have anything at all.

When you’re practicing gratitude, it’s OK to acknowledge that life isn’t perfect. And it’s OK to recognize that you have things others might be grateful for but aren’t right for you.

After I thought long and hard about the “pivot” I’m still in the process of making, my word for 2025 emerged. It’s abundance.

Abundance is a word that feels expansive, hopeful, and deeply aligned with a fresh start. Abundance, for me, isn’t about accumulating money, stuff, or more of anything.

Abundance is about flow — a dynamic, energizing rhythm of giving and receiving, of noticing and amplifying what already exists.

Motivational speaker Wayne Dyer once said, “Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.”

That simple truth has stayed with me as I’ve reflected on the kind of year I want to create.

For me, abundance isn’t about striving, hustling, or pivoting. It’s about attunement. It’s about opening my eyes to the richness of life that’s already here — in creativity, relationships, opportunities, and even uncomfortable challenges that stretch me.

It’s about trusting that life has a rhythm and that by participating fully, I’ll receive what I need when I need it.

This idea of abundance as flow feels especially meaningful as I continue to pivot my professional career toward providing fractional marketing services.

I’m drawn to the idea of creating something sustainable and balanced: A business that thrives not through constant hustle and 225 days on the road but through steady momentum.

I want to deepen relationships with colleagues and friends, generate ideas with people I encounter, and contribute my expertise in ways that feel energizing and reciprocal. And, in return, I want to feel inspired and free, with the kind of peace of mind that comes from knowing I’m aligned with my purpose.

Abundance, in this sense, touches every aspect of life. It’s the freedom to choose how to spend time and energy, the creativity to imagine new possibilities and bring them to life, and the gratitude that fuels a mindset of “enough,” even while I aspire for more.

Abundance isn’t static — it’s a river, always moving and continually replenished, as long as you stay in tune with its flow.

So, as I set out to live my Year of Living Richly (the title of an imaginary book I wrote in my notes), I found myself writing these questions in my journal:

• How can I give more generously without fear of running out?
• How can I create space for inspiration to find me?
• How can I honor the flow of abundance by trusting in what’s yet to come?

I hope that by sharing this intention I’ll inspire you to think about what abundance might mean for you. It’s not something we need to chase or hoard. It’s already here, waiting for us to tune in.

What’s your word for 2025? Let me know on LinkedIn (and tag Content Marketing Institute).

It’s your story. Tell it well.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

I hope you are getting ready for a wonderful season of giving, and taking a pause from all things marketing and business. For the last — well, decade — I have ended the year with a special review.

This year, AI seems to have taken all the oxygen out of the marketing room. With a nod to those brands feeling compelled to fill their marketing with AI-generated content, 2024 felt a little grinchy. So, if you’ll indulge me:

Everyone in Marketing loved creativity a lot,
But the executives running the business did NOT.

They hated Creative! The sentiment! The trends!
Expensive brand campaigns with emotional ends.

They smirked at the memes; the creative was so cute.
They sneered, “Who needs empathy when we’ve got compute?”

“Look at these fools with their thought leadership fluff,
Brainstorming for hours — like that’s ever enough!
They’re slow and inefficient, stuck in their ways,
While I optimize content in seconds, not days!”

Now, with a neural net hum and a Tesla-like purr,
AI learned all their content in one swift blur.
They launched drones over Jersey with flair,
And rewrote their ads with a cold, bot-generated air.

Gone were stories, the joy, and the fun,
Replaced with AI: “Delving and evolving savings! Buy one, get one!”
Ads smacking and packing with gerunds galore,
While bots buzzed in circles and crashed at the door.

And as the execs planned to lay off the team,
The tech bros got together and logged in with a scheme.
Sam Altman posted, “Let’s optimize joy with OpenAI flair!”
While Bezos declared, “Creativity’s dead — AI will write with more care!”

Sundar Pichai chimed, “Productivity’s key! No delay!”
“AI will deliver Marketing’s Christmas, the Google way!”

But way down in the marketers’ corner, the teams regrouped,
Ignoring the chaos of tech-bro loops.
They slowed down, creating stuff humans would feel.
Not algorithms or billionaires making a steal.

They crafted slow stories with care and delight,
Handmade campaigns that felt human and bright.
While AI churned dreck — cold, soulless, and bland,
Their creative magic flew, built by real hands.

The execs stared down at their dashboards and feeds,
Perplexed by the magic that human joy breeds.
They paused their machines, unsure what to say,
As the marketers showed, they knew the right way.

They didn’t need bots or predictive commands,
Just humor, emotion, and work from their hands.
They gathered in rooms with ideas to share,
Proving it’s humans who give brands their flair.

“What is this?” the execs cried, “We can’t look away!
How did humans outshine the power of AI?”

They learned that connection can’t be tracked on a chart,
And real engagement begins with the heart.

So, what happened then? Well, in Marketing they say,
The execs’ sense of wisdom grew five sizes that day!
They joined the marketers, crafting captions with flair,
And helped Santa upgrade with Wi-Fi to spare.

Now, every Christmas, they play a small part,
Balancing big data with a marketer’s heart.
And even Sam Altman, with a sheepish, small grin,
Writes human content — with no AI spin.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

When your content fires on all cylinders, the signs are obvious.

Your audience searches for your content by name, eagerly engages with it, and spends time exploring your related assets. Rave reviews are posted across social media. Buyers fill the sales funnel to connect with your sales team and buy your products.  

When your content stalls out, the signs aren’t always easy to see.

However, you must figure out how to get the content humming again. The best place to start is looking for simple oversights and missteps that cause performance to slip over time or fail to move altogether.

To help, consider these four common mistakes, along with signs, symptoms, and corrective actions to get your content program back on track.  

Mistake 1: Content lacks a clear and distinct purpose

On the surface, your content seems great — it’s creative, well-written, and provides valuable insights for consumers. You consistently produce stories in multiple formats to accommodate consumer preferences; you share them everywhere your audience will likely look for them.

However, according to your analytics, the audience doesn’t seem to care. Your content doesn’t get traction on any content platform, and those who view it move on quickly without taking action.

Signs of this mistake

“Great” content that doesn’t resonate or spark the desire to connect with your business may indicate the lack of a clear, unifying purpose. It often manifests as a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none syndrome: You aim to appeal to anyone and everyone instead of building the deeper, trusted connections that drive desirable marketing outcomes.

Here are a few signs this mistake exists:

• You publish content without defining your business purpose or how your content will work to achieve it.
• You can’t explain who your target audiences are, what you want them to do, and what it will take to nurture them from casual viewers to active customers.
• Your content doesn’t speak from a unique point of view, leaving your audience struggling to find a compelling reason to engage.

Solution: Build a content marketing strategy

It’s common to think casting the widest possible net will get your content enough traction. What business would miss an opportunity to connect with a potential customer? But even the highest-quality content in the world won’t help the business if you don’t clearly understand why it’s being created, for whom, and how it functions best as a business asset.

To make that happen, you need a content marketing strategy. Start with these three questions:

• What goals will the content help the business accomplish, and what does that contribution to success look like?
• What audiences should the storytelling activate?
• How will those stories uniquely compel and provide value to those audiences?

TIP: View your brand’s priorities through your audience’s lenses. Keep an eye on industry trends, marketplace disruptions, and emerging ideas that may affect your content’s relevance and value proposition.

Mistake 2: Content is narcissistic and lacks empathy

You’ve worked hard to create content that puts your business in the spotlight and casts your experts as follow-worthy thought leaders. But while your unique views are on an upswing, they don’t translate to an uptick in customer behaviors or inquiries.

This mistake happens when brands forget that content is a conversation — both parties must see the benefit of the exchange. Your business talks a good game but fails to give its audience members a voice, demonstrate an understanding of their problems, or express a genuine interest in providing help. Potential customers see your content as irrelevant noise and decline to engage more deeply.

Signs of this mistake

Content solely focused on your business, its offerings, and its messaging priorities shows that your business is more interested in speaking than listening — a common turnoff for today’s marketing-fatigued consumers.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to get users to consume your content. It’s to convince them to convert as customers. That becomes harder to achieve unless you demonstrate an understanding of their needs and your unique ability to satisfy them.

Here are a few signs your content is falling short:

• Your content discusses your products and solutions instead of audience needs and interests.
• Your experience is organized hierarchically rather than contextually, making it difficult for consumers to find the content they need most or take action on the intentions that brought them to it.
• Your content prioritizes attracting attention over earning the audience’s trust.

Solution: Make your audience the star of the content experience

Instead of focusing on your marketing goals first, focus on the customers’ desired outcomes — not just the transactional moves. Remember, consumers aren’t abstract constructs. They’re people who want to be seen and valued. If your content experience is built for personal resonance, it will gain traction more quickly.

These content tactics and techniques are well-suited to demonstrate a genuine interest in helping customers achieve their goals:

• Use social media to create trust, not just transactions. Pay attention to the conversations in relevant communities. Ask questions that encourage your audience members to share their experiences and then respond to their comments with genuine concern — even when you can’t provide a product-related solution.
• Drive participation with interactive content. Give audiences something to do, say, see, and feel. Allowing them to express their views, opinions, and preferences helps them feel more connected to your content experience.
• Recognize and empower customers to share their stories. Content like reviews and ratings, case studies, and testimonials lets customers talk about your benefits in their own words, which can inspire other like-minded audiences to put their trust in your brand and its value.
• Customize the information exchange. Giving your audience the ability to decide how, when, and what information they receive from your brand puts the power in their hands while keeping the channels of communication open. At the very least, offer subscribers the ability to opt out of messages they aren’t interested in. If you have marketing automation capabilities, use personalization techniques to tailor their content experience based on interests, behaviors, and preferences they’ve shared with your business.
• Enlist community members to lead your brand’s conversations. Your social media communities may be filled with subject matter experts looking to share relevant experiences and discuss challenges with their peers. Offer them opportunities to elevate their profiles, such as guest hosting your forums. Not only can this encourage their fellow participants to share authentic perspectives, but it can also increase their interest in contributing to your content success.

For example, the Content Marketing Institute asked Jeremy Bednarski, a senior manager of content strategy at Salesforce, if he would be interested in hosting the CMI Slack channel. Five years later, Jeremy’s daily conversation prompts have helped grow the channel into one of our most vibrant and active community forums.

Mistake 3: The content experience has grown stale and stagnant

It’s normal for content marketing performance to ebb and flow. However, if you see steady or significant declines, your content program could be overdue for an overhaul.

Business conditions, media trends, and consumer interests evolve, which means topics and tactics that once worked like a charm can lose their relevance and impact. And even once-reliable subscribers and followers can become less receptive to your stories if they don’t reflect current needs and priorities.

Content marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it technique. You must continually refresh your approach and offerings, so consumers see your brand experience as a resource worthy of their attention.

Signs of this mistake

Failing to adapt your content around emerging marketplace trends and consumer behaviors can harm your brand perception and drive your audience into the arms of your competitors. Avoid that fate by demonstrating your ability to experiment, innovate, and lean into new insights and ideas.

Here are some signs that a lack of content agility may put your customer relationships at risk:

• Your creative team struggles to generate fresh ideas and find novel ways to approach evergreen topics.
• Your distribution plan centers on channels your target audience has abandoned (sorry, Snapchat, SlideShare, and X) or fails to embrace up-and-coming platforms and media products.
• Your top-performing search content includes outdated stats, information, and creative examples, which reflects poorly on your brand’s relevance and value.

Solution: Audit, analyze, and intervene

Flagging performance may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to proactively see the red flags and fix obvious signs of stagnancy before they escalate into a full-scale content fail.

Audit

The process of diagnosing performance problems starts with an audit of your content assets. It can give a clearer picture of the stories and formats customers care about most and help identify critical gaps in your coverage.

TIP: The process doesn’t require a massively disruptive undertaking. A streamlined content audit speeds things up without losing any directional guidance you need.

Analyze

Monitor your analytics regularly to quickly pinpoint any high-performing assets that need updating to preserve their accuracy. The data can also reveal topics or formats to retire, allowing the team to refocus resources on areas of greater interest.

TIP: Build a performance dashboard to give the content team an at-a-glance view of the metrics that matter most for your organization’s goals.

Intervene

Once you analyze the insights and evaluate your course-correcting options, you are prepared to conquer even the most intimidating tasks required to recapture your audience’s attention and reinvigorate your content performance.

TIP: It can be challenging to get the support you need to implement strategic overhauls and tactical retrofits. CMI’s Robert Rose recommends staying the course in the short term while working behind the scenes to build a new strategy from the ground up.

Mistake 4: Team resources are pushed to breaking point

“Do more with less” — it’s the default mantra for every budget-conscious marketing department (and show me one that isn’t). Out of necessity and determination, your team pulls together, tightens their belts, and pushes forward as best they can with the resources available.

But there comes a point when frugality exceeds feasibility. When marketers stretch content resources beyond those limits, the resulting stress can send shock waves across productivity, work quality, and turnover.

Signs of this mistake

A company might need to add a few tasks to their content creators’ to-do lists in a pinch. However, these stop-gap measures shouldn’t be a long-term substitute for filling critical roles or providing adequate resources.

When extra tasks and asks add up to an untenable volume, signs like these may appear:

• The normally high-functioning content team loses efficiency. They struggle with getting regularly planned efforts off the ground, let alone bringing novel content ideas and initiatives to fruition.
• Deadlines are frequently missed, obvious errors are made, and exciting projects sit in limbo because the team focuses on the low-hanging fruit that can be executed quickly.
• Team morale is shot, staff churn is high, and burned-out workers air grievances on public channels.

Solution: Educate, prioritize, and partner on content

Businesses commonly expect their content marketing teams to tackle all kinds of content requests across the enterprise. This scope creep typically happens when hiring budgets are stretched, and no one else can share the writing workload. It also occurs when management sees competitors making waves on a new channel and demands that a brand also needs a presence.

You can address these issues in a few ways, but it always starts with a root cause.

Educate

When management doesn’t understand why your content team can’t just create a few more assets to fuel a new channel or fulfill their requests, developing (and documenting) a clear content plan is a good idea.

Sharing this business case for content creation and distribution, quality criteria, governance policies, and benefits can help stakeholders see the bigger strategic picture. Once they recognize how much work is involved in effective content marketing, they may provide additional support or authorize a budget increase.

Prioritize

With too few players and too many asks, your team must set clear priorities around the content types, channels, and platforms.

Implementing a content-scoring process can help with this. It provides a quantifiable way to gauge which kinds of content deliver the strongest performance against industry benchmarks or internal criteria. That information can help you advocate for focusing your resources on viable efforts and pulling back on less impactful ones.

For example, if your company wants to add livestreaming video to the mix, run some competitors’ efforts through your scoring worksheet first. If you find that those conditions aren’t ideal for your business (e.g., you don’t have video editors or production resources, your audience isn’t engaging with this format, the market is oversaturated with competing livestreams), it’s best to leave it off your list until the situation changes.

However, if you discover that this new format presents an attractive opportunity or offers a high-priority benefit you have been struggling to provide, scale down or pause lower-performing content activities to free up the necessary team resources.

Partner with creators and technology

If your options are limited and upper management won’t staff up or scale down, forge a content partnership.

Co-creating content with the help of relevant industry influencers, high-profile thought leaders, and like-minded complementary brands can be a cost-effective way to shore up your assets without overstressing in-house content creators. Tap into your actively engaged community’s creative talents by empowering them to contribute guest posts or other types of user-generated content.

Content partnerships don’t always have to be people-centric. You can unlock content marketing potential by pairing your human creatives with the power of technology.  

Incorporate generative AI and other machine-learning tools into your content operations to produce more content — in more formats — with less manual effort:

• Remix and reuse existing content to give older assets new relevance and value.
• Fill gaps in your team’s design or video production capabilities using AI to transform text-based content into eye-catching videos, animations, and data visualizations.
• Use text-to-audio tools to instantly convert lengthy copy into easy-to-consume audio stories and podcasts.  

TIP: Consider these nine additional actions to help get better content results without blowing your budget or causing your team to break down.  

Got problems? Get answers

Though not all content marketing problems have simple solutions, identifying warning signs like these four is your best first line of defense against major missteps, miscalculations, and missed opportunities. What other big content challenges are you currently struggling with? Share this article on social with a comment.

Updated from a September 2021 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Hashtag stuffing isn’t as tasty a dish as it once was.

This month, Instagram ended its following hashtags feature. Users can no longer follow hashtags and have that content show up in their feeds or Reels. However, they can still search for a hashtag.

The move is a definite problem for hashtag stuffers — those spammers who include any and every popular and trending hashtag regardless of relevance to get their content in front of more people.

But is the end of Instagram’s follow feature a harbinger for marketers about the future of hashtags?

Yes, according to a handful of marketing experts who responded to CMI’s query on the Qwoted platform.

Forget mass attraction

Robin Dimond, CEO and founder of marketing and innovation firm Fifth & Cor, says the role of hashtags is evolving. “There’s now a tool to enhance relevance rather than to drive mass visibility,” she says.

To optimize their use, she recommends using five to 10 broad and niche hashtags to gain a wider reach and connect with more relevant groups.

Also, lean into other Instagram best practices, such as writing SEO-friendly captions and using trending audio. Collaborate with creators or other brands to boost discoverability.

“While hashtags can support your strategy, they are no longer the centerpiece — authenticity and algorithm-friendly engagement are,” Robin says.

Hashtags count in a different way

Saleha Malik, founder of S-Squared, agrees that hashtags still matter, but not the way they used to. She says marketers would do well to adopt a holistic strategy that focuses on engagement metrics, relevancy, and quality content that sparks interaction.

“Once, hashtags were like open-door invitations to broader communities. Using #Travel or #OOTD (opinion of the day) could catapult a post into the feeds of thousands following those topics,” Saleha says.

Now, Instagram prioritizes delivering content tailored to the user’s interests, so its algorithm is more interested in interactions and conference preferences.

She points to sustainable fashion brand Reformation’s Instagram channel. It minimized hashtag usage in its posts — many don’t include any hashtags. This post even uses OOTD in the text in the visual post with three clothing options for being the life of the party — without ever using the hashtag sign.

Instead, Reformation now focuses on encouraging user interaction through questions and polls in Stories to boost its rankings in personalized feeds.

Take a TikTok-like approach

Instagram’s move reflects the shift to a more TikTok-like, algorithm-driven approach, says Kaveh Vahdat, founder and president at RiseOpp, a fractional CMO services company.

“On TikTok, while hashtags help categorize content, the platform’s algorithm prioritizes user interactions — such as likes, shares, comments, and watch time — to determine what appears on users’ for-you pages,” he says.

Liam Taylor, a content marketer for performers and singers, also notes that on TikTok, the best strategy to attract many users is not to use any hashtags.

But that still isn’t the best strategy for Instagram. “The more tags you use, the more it allows you to niche down and reach a specific user,” he says. Still, Liam recommends using no more than three hashtags to attract a target niche.

Kaveh says the most important thing for marketers to do is producing compelling content that resonates with their target audience and fosters engagement, as this is more likely to be favored by the algorithms on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Back to a Google-like strategy

Kate Smoothly, founder and director at Webhive Digital, says today’s social media users adopt a Google approach to social media, using these platforms as search tools. So, marketers should follow suit and use keywords to get their content surfaced.

Liam agrees. “You’re better off writing detailed captions, which are engaging and encourage users to interact,” he says.

In the end, how many hashtags to use or not to use is not the question marketers should be answering.

“The most important thing is to find space to experiment. What works today might not work tomorrow. What works for me might not work for you,” Liam says. “Whenever you try a new approach, be sure to measure the results and use that to inform your strategy going forward.”

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Earlier this year, everybody was all aflutter about the U.S. ban on TikTok.

But when the ban moved into the courts, everybody moved on to something else.

Well, the ban is back. Or is it?

Last week, a federal appeals court upheld the law, citing national security concerns and rejecting TikTok parent company ByteDance’s argument that the ban violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The decision clears the way for U.S. users to lose access to TikTok on Jan. 19.

But not so fast.

What’s really happening? What’s probably going to happen before you lose the dance videos, dog memes, and general ridiculousness of TikTok — and one of the most powerful marketing and commerce platforms of the last decade?

As the clock ticks, we asked Robert Rose, CMI’s chief strategy advisor, for his take. Here’s what he had to say:

Court: TikTok isn’t a First Amendment issue

The clock is running out on TikTok and ByteDance.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg laid down the law in his ruling to uphold the TikTok divestiture. In the decision, he wrote, “The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States. Here, the government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

Translation: It’s complicated.

Of course, TikTok’s lawyers clapped back, saying the ban will “silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the U.S. and around the world on Jan. 19, 2025.”

And let’s be real — how will the world survive without endless cat videos and questionable life hacks?

First Amendment issues aside, TikTok has grown into a marketing, advertising, and e-commerce juggernaut. I’ve talked many times about how both B2C and B2B marketers see real engagement, real success, and real dollars using TikTok.

Don’t believe the Jan. 19 deadline

In spring, I spared you from reading the bill and outlined what was going on. And this time, I must say that many media outlets still are not communicating what’s really happening. They make it sound like Jan. 19 is a line in the sand, after which all access to the network will be blocked. That is simply not true.

The Jan. 19 date is 270 days after the bill was signed into law — the deadline for ByteDance to divest from TikTok. But TikTok has filed an emergency injunction to stop the ban from taking effect.

Honestly, this was always going to happen, even without the interesting wrinkle that Donald Trump, who said during the election campaign he opposed the ban, will take office on Jan. 20. Talk about timing.

In March, I said TikTok was in little danger of going anywhere, and I still believe that.

The Jan. 19 date might get stayed by the courts, the U.S. infrastructure might not be able to block the site, or President Trump might step in before dinner on Inauguration Day. In any case, a TikTok conclusion will not be realized in the next few months.

So, if you are pondering a pivot out of TikTok or considering a pivot in, take a breath. Give it a few weeks. I think you will be just fine.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Exciting destinations. Luxurious accommodations. Friction-free coordination. Memory-making experiences.

For consumers, these are the things travel dreams are made of.

For content marketers, empowering aspiring travelers to realize those dreams is their job.

“Job” is the operative word, as storytelling in this crowded space takes more than associating the brand with a pleasant and purposeful journey. To influence travelers’ choices, marketers must walk the extra mile in their customers’ shoes.

The following brands may share a vertical industry, but they all address the universal challenge of connecting with consumers distinctly. Their work, which earned 2024 Content Marketing Awards, illustrates some best practices marketers can apply.  

Support your partners in business success

One of the largest cities in the United States, Chicago is home to many world-renowned tourist destinations. Business travelers and vacationers likely know its biggest attractions, like the Magnificent Mile and Millennium Park. However, they may not know about its 77 neighborhoods.

Choose Chicago — The 77: A City of Neighborhoods

To position Chicago’s lesser-known communities as premier destinations, the city’s tourism board, Choose Chicago, developed The 77: A City of Neighborhoods.

The centerpiece of this content initiative is a video travel series showcasing five of Chicago’s most culturally and geographically diverse neighborhoods: Uptown, Little Village, Bronzeville, Humboldt Park, and Pullman and Roseland. (A sixth neighborhood, La Villita, was added later.)  

Each episode dives into a neighborhood’s culture and history through personal stories shared by residents and small-business owners. But the series doesn’t shy away from addressing contemporary challenges. For example, the segment focused on Uptown (above) notes its history as a refuge for immigrants and LGBTQ+ communities, pointing out the impact of this cross-cultural enclave’s popularity — a shortage of affordable housing and ongoing gentrification.

Of course, awareness is only half the battle, so Choose Chicago directly supported the neighborhood businesses and their owners. Several content creators from its ongoing resident influencer program interviewed the business owners, and over half of the initiative’s production budget went to women and minority-owned contractors. Some of the spotlighted businesses catered a red-carpet premiere screening of the docuseries. Choose Chicago also hosted screenings in each featured community.

The 77: A City of Neighborhoods won the Best in Travel and Tourism category at the 2024 Content Marketing Awards.

Take consumers inside your distinctive offerings

Cruises are ideal for travelers looking to explore multiple destinations while having all their needs catered to along the journey. Highlighting what it takes to make every customer feel at home while away can help create a distinct experience — and increase affinity for the brand delivering it.

Norwegian Cruise Lines — Embark

Travelers often want a lot of information to help them choose the best cruise line operator and ship offering for their interests. But poring through detailed booking brochures is tedious and doesn’t always make for easy distinctions.

With its EMBARK With NCL travelogue series, Norwegian Cruise Lines sets itself apart by giving cruisers a uniquely appealing and insightful brand experience before they set sail.

EMBARK takes audiences on an all-access tour of NCL’s Guest F1rst Experience, including the meticulously planned operational details executed for each cruise to be successful. It tells stories about the people who work below deck, and satisfied passengers provide testimonials.

EMBARK vividly showcases the brand’s breathtaking destinations and signature experiences. For example, in the video above, host Zay Harding takes viewers on a tour of Hawaii’s coffee and cacao farms and a quick hula lesson. Afterward, he hits the island of Kaua’i to catch some waves and rides a UTV across its lush mountainous terrain.

But the wind really hits the sails when the series brings viewers back on board for glimpses into the lives of crew members. In the video above, Zay also talks with general manager Kai Turuneu about why he’s worked at NCL for over 16 years.

The EMBARK campaign was a finalist in the Best Travel and Tourism category in this year’s Content Marketing Awards.  

Enable equitable enjoyment

Traveling can broaden horizons and shift perspectives. But for people with disabilities, it can also present unexpected obstacles that prevent them from accessing attractions or taking full advantage of the amenities.

No matter whether you work in a tourism business or another industry, creating detailed guides, checklists, and assessments can go a long way toward earning consumers’ trust, appreciation, and booked business.

Visit Lauderdale — Wheel the World

Florida might not leap to mind as a beacon of inclusivity. However, Visit Lauderdale aims to change that by highlighting Greater Fort Lauderdale as an accessible destination for travelers with disabilities.

For its Wheel the World content initiative, Visit Lauderdale partnered with Aqua Marketing and Communications to conduct detailed accessibility assessments of 70 hotels, restaurants, and attractions.

The verified details were compiled into a comprehensive online guide and shared via a co-branded website featuring blog posts, FAQs, travel tips, and e-learning training. A series of sizzle reels and social media videos bolstered the campaign’s reach.

For example, the video above shows travelers enjoying wheelchair-friendly activities like feeding the birds at Flamingo Gardens, touring the Florida Everglades in an airboat, and cruising the Jungle Queen Riverboat.

By showcasing Fort Lauderdale’s inclusive nature through compelling storytelling and detailed guidance, the campaign reinforced the area’s reputation as a welcoming place for all travelers. It enabled consumers to choose suitable activities and accommodations with greater confidence.

The extra effort taken by Visit Lauderdale to support specialized needs also proved it worthy of recognition as a finalist for Best Use of Social Media in the Content Marketing Awards.

Show off big benefits in smaller packages

Summer may be the high season for extended vacations. But with the right content, travel brands can tempt consumers into taking shorter but equally appealing trips at any time of year.

Connecticut Office of Tourism — Find Your Vibe

Though Connecticut offers the same quaint charm and multi-seasonal activities as other New England states, it’s known more for its wealthy suburban neighborhoods and traffic-filled roads on the way to more exciting destinations.

However, this compact state has many more traveler-friendly offerings than meets the eye, even if the same can’t be said about its tourism budget. So, the Connecticut Office of Tourism partnered with marketing agency Adams & Knight to emphasize the former while working within the confines of the latter.

It resulted in Find Your Vibe, a series of articles, directories, and short videos built around a central message: Connecticut’s compact geography means visitors can pack a lot of leisure activities into a quick getaway any time of year.

For example, a video highlighting autumn fun (above) previews outdoor activities like hiking with llamas and horseback riding, plus opportunities to shop at local boutiques, attend arts performances, and visit animals at the state’s aquarium and zoo.

Find Your Vibe is also part of a larger initiative — CTVisit — that includes a dynamic content hub and weekly broadcast programs in partnership with news stations in Connecticut’s tri-state area. It enables the tourism board to promote many more experiences and businesses and continually update locals and vacationers alike on new experiences they can explore in the upcoming season.

The effort has helped support tourism in Connecticut and achieved finalist status in the Travel and Tourism category at the Content Marketing Awards.

Serve up a gen-ex(perience) to connect with youthful audiences

Younger-generation consumers can have vastly different expectations than their older or family-focused counterparts. For them, “catching a tour” is likely more about music than museums.  

Content gets and stays on their radar when it fuels their interest in immersive experiences and makes personal connections to their passions.

Marriott Bonvoy — The Road to Beautiful with Rolling Stone

Marriott Bonvoy wanted to enhance the perception of its portfolio among next-generation experience seekers. The brand found the perfect opportunity in a partnership with Rolling Stone — the magazine with a storied history for engaging young music lovers and festival goers.

In advance of the Life is Beautiful festival in Las Vegas in 2023, Rolling Stone and Marriott Bonvoy teamed up to join three of the festival’s performers on their tours and created The Road to Beautiful, a series of up-close interviews captured at Marriott properties reflecting each artist’s unique style.

The interviews were shared through articles and photos published on Rolling Stone and in short clips posted on YouTube and TikTok. But the conversations go deeper than the average band promotion by digging into the personal connections these artists feel for the interview setting.

For example, in a clip filmed at The Blackstone hotel in Chicago (above), the members of musical collective Franc Moody check out a local music store, talk to local DJs, and discuss how the city’s eclectic musical influences inspired their signature sound.

The Road to Beautiful also led to an additional achievement for Marriott International: being named a Content Marketing Award finalist for Best Use of Native Advertising/Sponsored Content.

Reach for the skies

These brands show the power of storytelling in all formats, from behind the scenes to deep immersions. No matter what consumers want to achieve through travel, your brand’s robust content efforts can connect them to their passions, ease the path to experiencing them, and inspire them to bring your brand along for the ride.

Let us know on social with #CMWorld if these efforts have sparked new content ideas to help your business reach its desired marketing destinations.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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As a marketer, you might ponder generative AI’s role in the industry and the outlook for marketing jobs.

As a demand-gen marketer or a marketer to marketers, you may reflect on how you made it through a difficult year.

As a writer or manager of a corporate blog, you might review your current operations.

No matter your role, you may look for ways to strengthen your content and marketing in 2025.

Get help to improve your strategy in the coming year with these curated statistics from CMI’s 2024 research and bonus stats from the blogging survey by Andy Crestodina and Orbit Media Studios.

Content and marketing employment and career stats for 2025

CMI’s 2025 Career Outlook: Content and Marketing Professionals research (registration required) studied employment trends, job satisfaction, salaries, use of generative AI tools, and training/professional development.

Outlook for marketing jobs

• One in three marketers (33%) say their company laid off marketing employees in the last 12 months.
• Sixty-eight percent say finding a job in marketing is more challenging today than it was five years ago, 25% say it’s about the same, and 7% say it’s less challenging.

• Three-fourths of marketers list macroeconomic factors as a reason for the challenging job search environment, while 69% cite heightened competition. Only 33% indicate that AI is a factor.

Salary satisfaction and supplementary freelance income

• Marketers believe they should earn approximately 20% more than they currently do.
• More than one in five full-time marketers (22%) say they freelance on the side. On average, they make an additional $8,250 per year from these gigs.

Job satisfaction and plans for change

• Seventy-six percent of marketers say they’re somewhat or very satisfied in their roles.
• Those with roles at the director level and above are most likely to be very satisfied (79%). Forty percent are somewhat satisfied, 10% are neutral, and 12% are either somewhat or very dissatisfied.
• Even satisfied marketers keep their options open: 35% of all marketers say they’re pursuing or highly interested in finding another job (up 4 percentage points from the previous year and 7 percentage points from two years ago).

Remote work preferences

• Eighty-four percent of marketers work remotely, at least part-time.
• Among marketers who work remotely or in hybrid arrangements, 68% say they would leave their current employer if forced to work in the office full-time.
• A much higher percentage of women than men (55% vs. 35%) say they’d leave their current employer if forced to work in an office every day.

How content and marketing practitioners use AI

• Here’s the breakdown of their AI use:
  • Brainstorm new topics (62%)Summarize content (53%)Write drafts (44%)Optimize content (41%)Write email copy (38%)Create social media posts (34%)Outline assignments (32%)Repurpose content (32%)Proofread (27%)Analyze data/performance (12%)Create buyer personas (10%)Create graphics (9%)Create videos (4%)

Eleven percent say they do not use AI tools.

Skills training offered and desired

• Only 35.5% say yes, their marketing training (internal and external) meets their career needs, while 29.7% say no, and 34.8% are unsure.

• Yet 76% of marketers say they need to master specialized or niche skills to remain relevant in the face of AI.
• And 58% of marketers say their organization’s training program is not keeping pace with changes in marketing.
• Forty-eight percent of marketers pursue professional training outside their organization.

Career guidance

If you suspect you’re underpaid, start by researching what others in your position make, as Ann Gynn advises in How To Make the Case for a Raise in Your Content or Marketing Role. 

And don’t discount the value of a strong personal brand during this process.

We asked Bria Bell, senior marketing strategist at JPMorgan Chase & Co., for her thoughts on how content professionals and marketers can best position themselves for career growth:

“A strong personal brand can be a game-changer, whether you’re seeking a new opportunity or negotiating a raise. It’s about positioning yourself as an asset, demonstrating your unique value proposition, and building credibility.

“By highlighting your value and contributions, you can effectively advocate for a higher salary or better benefits.

“Additionally, enhancing your personal brand can boost your confidence, empowering you to quiet your inner critic and overcome imposter syndrome, thus allowing you to negotiate the terms you believe you deserve.”

What to do for your team

As noted, three in four marketers say they need to master specialized or niche skills to remain relevant. To keep your talent (and keep them happy and productive), look for opportunities to support them — either through internal or external training opportunities.

Regarding salaries, U.S. employers, on average, anticipate a 3.9% salary increase for 2025, about the same as actual growth in 2024, according to a new report from The Conference Board.

If you can’t afford an adequate raise, think about what else you can do to recognize and reward employees. Consider options like additional days off, participation in high-profile projects, or a change in title.

B2B content marketing statistics for 2025

CMI’s annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2025 research delved into the challenges faced by B2B marketers and how the top performers stand out.

Content marketing challenges

• Only 29% of marketers whose organizations have a documented content strategy say it’s extremely or very effective. Another 58% say it’s moderately effective, 12% say it’s not very effective, and 1% say it’s not at all effective.

• Among B2B marketers who rate their strategy as moderately effective or worse, 42% attribute that in part to a lack of clear goals.
• Other reasons for less effective strategies include:
  • Not tied to customer journey (39%)
  • Not data driven (35%)
  • Ineffective audience research (29%)
  • Other (26%)
  • Unrealistic expectations (23%)
  • Emphasizes content quantity over quality (20%)
  • Failure to iterate/adapt (18%)
  • Inconsistent brand voice (17%)
  • Poor content quality (10%)

• Fifty-four percent of B2B marketers say lack of resources is a challenge.
• Forty-five percent of B2B marketers lack a scalable model for content creation. Thirty-five percent have one, and 20% are unsure.
• More than half of B2B marketers (55%) say it’s challenging to create content that prompts a desired action (e.g., conversions). Other content creation challenges include:
  • Creating content consistently (42%)
  • Creating the right content for our audience (40%)
  • Creating enough content (39%)
  • Creating quality content (27%)

Technology issues

• When asked what’s missing from their marketing tech stack, 47% of B2B marketers say efficient lead generation and nurturing processes, and 47% say streamlined marketing data management and reporting. Other missing capabilities include:
  • Ability to automate repetitive tasks and workflows (44%)
  • Easy access to enterprise analytics (41%)
  • Strong alignment between sales and marketing (39%)

Eight percent say their tech stack isn’t missing any capability.

• Only 26% of B2B marketers say their organization has the right technology to manage content across the organization. Thirty-eight percent say they have the technology but aren’t using it to its potential. Twenty-seven percent say they haven’t acquired the right technology, and 9% are unsure.

Metrics and goals

• The two challenges cited most often for B2B marketers measuring content performance are attributing ROI to content efforts (56%) and tracking customer journeys (56%).
• Eighty-seven percent of B2B marketers say content marketing created brand awareness in the last 12 months. Among the other content marketing achievements:
  • Generated demand/leads (74%)
  • Nurtured subscribers/audience/leads (62%)
  • Grew loyalty with existing clients/customers (52%)
  • Generated sales/revenue (49%)
  • Grew a subscribed audience (37%)
  • Reduced customer support costs (9%)

Top performer attributes and activities

• Twenty-two percent of B2B marketers characterize the success of their content marketing as extremely or very successful. These top performers most often attributetheir success to understanding their audience (82%). Other factors include:
  • Produce high-quality content (77%)
  • Possess industry expertise (70%)
  • Have high-performing team members (69%)
  • Set goals that align with their organization’s objectives (62%)
  • Measure and demonstrate content performance effectively (53%)
• Have a documented strategy (47%)

The characteristics among the most successful (top performers), the least successful, and all respondents break down as follows:

• Think the size of their content marketing team will grow in 2025: most successful (38%), least (19%), and all (27%)
• Say their content marketing strategy is extremely or very effective: most (74%), least (2%), and all (29%)
• Organization has generative AI usage guidelines: most (49%), least (29%), all (38%)
• AI is integrated into daily processes/workflows: most (31%), least (12%), and all (19%)
• Realizing more efficient workflows from AI: most (56%), least (31%), and all (45%)
• Seeing improved content optimization from AI: most (55%), least (31%), and all (42%)
• Have the right technology in place to manage content across the organization: most (46%), least (13%), and all (26%)
• Have a scalable model for content creation: most (61%), least (17%), and all (35%)
• Content creation model creates the desired outcomes: most (71%), least (6%), and all (41%)
• Agree that the organization measures content performance effectively: most (84%), least (15%), and all (51%)

In addition, performance level also produces differing results, including:

• Generate demand/leads: most successful (89%), least (49%), and all (74%)
• Nurture subscribers/audiences/leads: most (77%), least (36%), and all (62%)
• Grow loyalty with existing clients/customers: most (66%), least (33%), and all (52%)
• Generate sales/revenue: most (66%), least (33%), and all (52%)

B2B marketers and AI

• Most B2B marketing teams (54%) take an ad hoc approach to AI (i.e., they’re experimenting but not necessarily applying it widely). Another 27% report that their teams don’t formally use AI, but individual staff members may choose to use it. Only 19% of B2B marketers say AI is integrated into their daily processes/workflows.
• Only 4% of B2B marketers report a high level of trust in generative AI’s outputs. Sixty-seven percent say they have a medium level of trust, and 28% say they have a low level of trust. Only 1% say they don’t trust AI’s output.
• Seventeen percent of B2B marketers rate the quality of the content generated by AI as excellent or very good. Forty-four percent say it’s good, 35% say it’s fair, and 4% say it’s poor.

Content types, distribution, and social media

• Ninety-two percent of B2B marketers use short articles/posts, 76% use videos, and 75% use case studies/customer stories. B2B marketers say videos produce the best results for their content marketing.
• Most B2B marketers (89%) use organic social media platforms to distribute content. Eighty-four percent use blogs on corporate websites, 71% use email newsletters, and 63% use email. Fifty-five percent use both in-person events and webinars, which are the two distribution channels that B2B marketers say produce the best results for their content marketing.
• Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the social media platform that delivers the best value for their organization.
• Eighty-four percent of B2B marketers use paid channels to distribute content. Among those, 73% use social media advertising/promoted posts, and 64% use search engine marketing (SEM)/pay-per-click (PPC), which marketers say is the most effective paid channel.
• Regarding their evolving use of social media platforms in the last 12 months:
  • Sixty-eight percent of B2B marketers increased their use of LinkedIn, 27% stayed the same, 3% decreased, and 2% didn’t use it.
  • Thirty-one percent increased their use of YouTube, 36% stayed the same, 10% decreased, and 23% didn’t use it.
  • Twenty-seven percent increased their use of Instagram, 30% stayed the same, 11% decreased, and 32% didn’t use it.
  • Twenty percent increased their use of Facebook, 40% stayed the same, 19% decreased, and 21% didn’t use it.
  • Nine percent increased their use of TikTok, 7% stayed the same, 4% decreased, and 80% didn’t use it.
  • Six percent increased their use of X, 27% stayed the same, 28% decreased, and 39% didn’t use it.
  • Six percent increased their use of Reddit, 7% stayed the same, 2% decreased, and 85% didn’t use it.

Content marketing budgets and investment for 2025

• Forty-six percent of B2B marketers think their content marketing budget will increase in 2025. Forty-one percent expect it to stay the same, 8% think it will decrease, and 5% are unsure.
• Most B2B marketers (61%) expect their organizations’ investment in video to increase in 2025. Fifty-two percent expect investment to increase in thought leadership content. Other areas of expected budget boosts include:
  • AI for content optimization/performance (40%)
  • Paid advertising (40%)
  • AI for content creation (39%)
  • In-person events (35%)
  • Webinars (32%)
  • Building online community (27%)
  • Digital events (21%)
  • Audio content (20%)

How to apply these stats to your content strategy

If, like many other B2B marketers, you feel meh about your content strategy, reflect on the past year, identify the problem areas, and plan for changes to make in 2025.

Here’s some advice from Robert Rose, CMI’s chief strategy advisor:

• Get your content house in order. Tackle the difficult work of creating cross-team governance, workflows, and standards.
• Regarding AI, come together to collaborate and commit to a few structured activities. An ad hoc approach won’t get you far.
• Stop doing activities that don’t contribute to targeted outcomes and quit measuring what doesn’t align with overall objectives.

Demand generation statistics for 2025

CMI’s Content Marketing for Demand Generation research explores the daily issues faced by demand generation marketers. Fifty-seven percent thought AI was the demand-generation trend/development that would have the biggest impact on their strategy in 2024.

Pressure to achieve results

• Over half of demand-gen marketers (56%) say they felt pressure to a great extent to achieve results despite limited budgets and resources. Another 39% felt that pressure to some extent, and only 5% felt no pressure.

• Almost one in four (24%) say their organization’s demand-generation strategies are extremely or very successful. Another 63% rate their programs as moderately successful. Ten percent say their strategies are not very successful, and 3% say they are not at all successful.

Ability to create targeted content

• Forty-seven percent rate their organizations’ ability to create targeted content as excellent or very good. More than half (53%) rate their ability as average, fair, or poor.

Budget allocation

• One in five demand-gen marketers spend more than half of their budget on demand generation; another 21% say it consumes more than a third of their budget. Email, in-person events, and video were the top three areas where they planned to increase spending in 2024.

Challenges faced

• Budget constraints are a challenge for 62% of demand-gen marketers. Fifty percent or more cite lack of internal resources (58%) and content issues (50%). Other challenges include:
  • Audience segmentation (44%)
  • Personalization (35%)
  • Researching audiences to understand them better (31%)
  • Identifying audiences (24%)
  • Creating buyer personas (20%)
  • Competition (18%)
  • Lack of executive support (17%)

How to use these findings

If you feel pressured in your demand-generation efforts, face budget and resource issues, and worry you need to use AI to do more with less, you are not alone. It’s been a challenging year for marketers. CMI’s Robert Rose says, “Marketers who spend their efforts at the earliest parts of the customer journey have arguably had it the worst.”

Stay the course when it comes to creating targeted content. Know that AI cannot replace good ideas, a smart content strategy, and a solid measurement process.

Marketing to marketers research

In CMI’s first Marketing to Marketers study, we asked marketers about the content they value, how they learn about solutions, and why they choose the solutions they work with.

• Fifty-five percent of marketers prefer to consume work-related content by reading online. Twenty-six percent opt for videos, 11% prefer listening, and 8% choose print.

• The top five content types used by marketers researching tools, technologies, or services include:
• Forty-five percent of marketers prefer to discuss solutions on a video call. Twenty-seven percent want a text-based email, 7% choose a phone call, and 4% opt for an in-person meeting. Seventeen percent say they prefer no contact, perusing the vendor’s digital content on their own.
• Half of marketers (51%) attend one or two in-person events per year (either marketing-focused or specific to their industry).
• Almost all marketers (98%) attend digital webinars.
• Eighty-four percent of marketers who attend webinars say the most important thing they want is relevant and actionable content. Seventy-three percent say content that addresses current challenges and trends is important; 55% want on-demand access to recordings; 53% seek expert speakers with hands-on experience; 8% are looking for interactivity and engagement; and 8% say a user-friendly platform is important.

• Ninety-four percent of marketers say a company that makes extensive thought leadership content available raises their perception of the brand as a valuable information resource.
• Seventy-three percent of marketers say that their request for the content is the primary factor that prompts them to open an email. The second most compelling factor is a relevant subject line (62%).

How to use the findings

If you market to marketers, provide prescriptive, specific advice. Creating value requires a point of view and actionable content.

Marketers aren’t all that different from other business buyers. Yes, the bar may be higher because marketers know a pitch when they see one. Give them content that will inspire, educate, and engage. Otherwise, you’ll find your prospects avoiding sales conversations altogether.

Blogging in 2024

Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios, published the 11th Annual Blogger Survey in 2024. I’m including those findings because many of you are bloggers or involved with blogs and the findings are illuminating. Among the highlights:

• The average blog post is around 1,400 words and takes three hours and 48 minutes.
• Only 20% of bloggers report strong results, down from 30% five years ago.
• Those who spend more than six hours on each article are much more likely to report strong results.
• Bloggers who publish more often are more likely to report strong results. The data suggests that publishing content biweekly is the minimum for content performance.

• Fifty-three percent say it’s gotten harder to attract visitors from search engines.
• Seventy-four percent of bloggers create how-to articles. Other structures include lists (50%), guides and e-books (46%), news and trends (45%), opinion (43%), original research (43%), interviews (34%), webinars (26%), infographics (22%), and roundups (22%). The most effective formats, according to bloggers who produce strong results, are roundups, infographics, and original research.

We asked Andy for some guidance on how to get better results from your publishing in 2025. Here’s what he suggests:

“Your content doesn’t just compete with competitors’ content. It competes for attention with the social streams themselves,” he says. “So, the more your content feels like a social stream, the more likely you are to keep your visitor engaged.

“What does this mean? Fill your content with visuals. Include lots of contributor quotes. Embed a few videos. Make it long and detailed. Inject a few strong opinions. That’s what the social platforms do. That’s why they are so compelling.”

How to use these stats

Use these findings to benchmark your blogging strategy against your peers. Questions to ask include:

• Are we spending the right amount of time writing blog posts?
• Are our blog posts the right length?
• Are we writing an ideal number of words in each post?
• Are we publishing often enough?
• Has it become harder for us to drive traffic to our blog via search? If so, how will we adapt?
• Are we publishing effective content formats?

Map out your strategy for a successful 2025

Stats are just figures, but they can help you tell the stories to make the case for the resources you need for a successful year. Use them to guide your thinking as you plan for 2025.

Finally, CMI would like to thank all the marketers who participated in our 2024 surveys. Your input helps advance the practice of content marketing, and we’re grateful.

Updated from a November 2023 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute