Content is something you do. A box to check off the list of marketing tactics. That’s why it’s so easy for businesses to see the shiny new toy that is AI and immediately think that content can be automated.

The incremental, tactical approach to marketing doesn't account for the nonlinear impact of a relatively expensive step in the marketing process: strategy.

Many marketing agencies aspire to provide and even claim to offer a world-class service. But taking that term seriously points us in a different direction.

There is no reason B2B brands can’t aspire to what Rev represents: narrative differentiation, proactive and inventive editorial planning, and world-class content (you know, the kind that involves hiring Grey Lady journalists). But so few do. Instead, B2B brands stay small in their thinking — and the results speak for themselves.

The value of marketing services does not directly correlate to the calculable ROI on those services. And this is true for content marketing as well.

The good news is that creating a content marketing strategy doesn’t need to be a baroque affair with 10 MBA-caliber slide decks and a 10,000-word strategy doc that no one on your team will read. It can be done in a month of interviews and crystallized in a document as short as 2,000 words.

If you’re thinking about launching a content marketing strategy from scratch or transforming your haphazard approach to content into a more strategic one, you’ll need to think through four principles: who your customers are, where the intersection lies between your expertise and your customers’ needs, how you can reach them, and why you’re creating content in the first place.

Since ChatGPT exploded in popularity, my conversations with non-content marketing colleagues focus on one topic: generative AI. My clients, adtech and martech leaders and marketers, are also wondering how they should be using this technology and what it spells for the future of content marketing.

As an editor and then a content marketing agency owner, I’ve been in adtech and martech for seven years. And our space has the same problems that plague so much of B2B content marketing.

Why is churn so frequent? The number-one factor is that agencies aren’t optimally positioned, and they do not follow through on that positioning.

Customer research is essential to growing a business. But it’s also essential to content strategy whether you’re figuring it out in-house or trying to help a client figure it out as an agency or freelancer.

Is content marketing right for you? And more importantly, even if you do try it, how do you decide which channels and tactics to deploy to reach those results others are raving about?

Over the past two years, I’ve worked with well over a dozen freelance writers. Here are the four qualities I look for when hiring and evaluating talent.

Showing up everyday to help your prospects do their jobs better by teaching them about your craft is a textbook use of content marketing to foster relationships, drive inbound leads, and create sales opportunities.

There are concrete lessons from my own experience that I can pass along to help freelancers grow their businesses and possibly start agencies.

The three lessons I’ll take away from this year concern content strategy, talent, and agency growth. Here’s what I learned about how to set up successful content programs, foster a content talent pipeline, and foster predictable and sustainable agency growth.

The ultimate purpose of LinkedIn content is to surface new business opportunities by connecting a company’s executives or business development team (whoever’s posting the content) with prospects in the company’s target audience.

The story of our own positioning’s evolution is just an example. The broader lesson is that every content marketing agency or content studio has its strengths, and every buyer of content services requires different solutions. Buyers need to understand the nuances across those solutions — and sellers need to understand the granularities of what they’re selling — to foster ideal partnerships.

For marketing to work at maximum efficiency and effectiveness, the content marketing or PR workflow needs to be set up with trust in mind. Everyone who touches the Google doc needs to believe that the people who wrote and edited the byline, blog post, or social content before them are expert writers who are not only probably better writers than they but also better acquainted with industry best practices, journalistic norms, and content marketing strategy.

There are no magic bullets or mathematical formulas that single-handedly transform a content marketing strategy into a steady stream of new business. But there are a few best practices to bear in mind if you want to drive conversations and relationships with content.