Did AI Write It? Why I Don't Care.

Did AI write it? That’s not what matters. Instead of looking for em dashes, readers should be checking sources.  

The em dash, bullet points, emoji, italics – every reader seems to have a favorite way to determine whether AI wrote something. The truth is, when the information is helpful, reliable, and entertaining, the source becomes almost irrelevant. Also, AI is getting better faster. In just a few months I’ve seen it go from clunky writing to offering some pretty nice industry-specific insights and turns of phrase.

Did AI write it? Maybe, maybe not. The real question isn’t about revelatory em dashes and emoji. It’s about whether you find the information insightful, trustworthy, and fun to read.

Having said that, let’s talk about what “trustworthy” means. I’m talking about sources.

CHECK THE SOURCES. AI pulls some crazy citations out of its little cyber hat, but so do actual writers and bad actors. Here are three key tips from a trained journalist on checking sources:

1.       Are all sources cited? Any fact-based claim in an article like “most car owners don’t buy extended warranties at purchase” or “extreme weather events have doubled in the past 10 years” should have a clearly cited source. The fact should either be linked to the original source or provide enough information that you can easily look it up yourself.  

2.       Primary sources are more trustworthy. Quoting information from the original source means it’s less likely to be edited or mismanaged. For example, citing a report from the International Trade Commission about the impact of tariffs on rare mineral imports is better than citing an article in Supply Chain News that quotes that same research report.  

3.       Academic and government sources generally win. Although academic and government studies do sometimes have agendas, they are more impartial than business-backed analysis. A trade organization is unlikely to publish information harmful to their industry, for example, while an academic analysis seeks impartial facts.

Checking sources should be a habit to apply to any writing, especially in the current era of manipulated information and “fake news.” Personally, I don’t care anymore about whether AI wrote something. Think instead about the brain behind the AI, and how carefully that brain checked the sources supporting the premise of the article.  

When B2B Marketers Hit That Holiday Slump

Is it even worth the trouble to publish or promote any content from November 1 – January 1? I’ve mostly seen marketing teams go one of two ways. First, keep pushing out relevant content and accept that the lead flow will slow down. Or second, just phone it in with repurposed content promotions through the holidays.

But there’s a third way. I recommend a fresh approach to Q4 content that can get attention and build rapport, even with prospects who are mentally checked out until year end. Here are five options for holiday content.

1.       Show your sense of humor! Your prospects are leaning into a lighthearted holiday mindset, why not join them? One company I worked with recorded a video “greeting card” of employees singing an industry-specific version of the Twelve Days of Christmas. We sounded terrible, it was hilarious, and it was widely shared. Our community saw that we were real people, not sales robots.

2.       Recap the previous year. This works best for B2B marketers if the focus is more on your clients’ successes instead of your own. ‘Tis the season to be generous: Highlight some big wins and breakthroughs for them, with a very light nod to how proud you are to have shared in that success.  

3.       Give an industry summary. With one marketing team we got big attention for our year-end list of annual industry awards that went to a mix of companies, not just our clients. It set us up as the company that defined the industry’s annual highlights. I’d love to see someone have fun with this in a yearbook throwback type of way with “best dressed” video clips from webinars or “most likely to succeed” product announcements.  

4.       Look ahead to what’s next. Q4 is a great time to tease your product or service roadmap for the coming year. Or to make predictions for your entire industry. One company I supported had great success publishing an annual eBook predicting a handful of big trends for the coming year. It almost doesn’t matter if they materialize or not – the point is to be bold, provide some entertainment, and get people talking.

5.       Host an appreciation event. Use the holiday season as an excuse to gather clients, prospects, or industry experts for an in-person or online “thank you” experience. At one company our team hired an online party host for an annual scavenger hut experience. Or include an event with your corporate gift giving – one professional team invited me to an online cookie-decorating event with a boxed set of gingerbread cookies with decorating accessories and hot chocolate mix.

These are just a few ideas I’ve seen work, and I’d love to hear more! What is your team doing for creative holiday content? 

Content Calendars: How Far to Project Out

In building a content calendar, how far should you project out? After creating roughly a bajillion content calendars, and being in the middle of one at the moment, I have answers.

Using a Goldilocks framework, let’s look at what timeframes are too short, too long, and just right.

Yearly – Planning annually is too long of a time frame for committing to specific content because even at enterprise operations, things change by the end of the year. At one global company where I ran content, we met in person every January and spent a week in meetings to hammer out a very detailed calendar to align with annual business goals. By June it was useless, and by the third year I just ignored it after Q1.

Annual planning is, however, just right for aligning campaigns and general topics with business strategy. You’ll need to revisit those topics quarterly for realignment, but it’s helpful to define a general content direction a year in advance.

Six months – Totally useless. Planning content every six months is like running the 800 meters in track. It’s too long to sprint, but too short to run as a middle-distance race. It’s painful and pointless, forget this.

Quarterly – Now we’re getting a little more into the weeds. Quarterly planning from scratch is too short for aligning with business goals and internal stakeholders, then producing the actual content. But it’s too long a time frame for planning social media or newsletters, which need flexibility to respond to recent news or trends.

Quarterly planning is just right for scheduling content production for reports, blogs, and webinars. I have the best success when the team meets mid-quarter to review and update the next quarter’s proposed topics with detailed scheduling and production deadlines.

Two weeks – From simply a logistics perspective, two weeks is usually too short for most content planning. If you have a tight team, you can sometimes crank out a quick news or opinion blog or social post, but that’s a resource-intensive move that I only use if it’s a topic we absolutely must own.

One odd exception: Two weeks can work well for a webinar. I’ve had great success with heavy promotion for two weeks driving live registration, then promo again on-demand after broadcast.

Weekly – We’re talking newsletters here. These must feel immediate and important, and planning can make newsletter topics feel stale. Sure, plan one or two newsletter pieces ahead of time just to keep your sanity. But the best newsletter success I had (we doubled click rates and grew open rates by 60%) was due to setting aside every Monday morning to write that week’s blurbs based on the previous week’s metrics and news.

So, what’s “just right?” Rough out annual topics by quarter, then drill down quarterly to define actual content and production schedules. Crank out newsletters and social posts weekly or bi-weekly. This cadence is executable by a small team, and keeps your content calendar fresh, focused, and aligned with business strategy.

Style Guides Can Save Your Brand

Am I being hyperbolic? Bear with me. I am onboarding a new client who sent over some reading material including the most inspiring and confident style guide I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to crank out thought leadership pieces for this company.

A style guide is a boring-sounding list of content formatting rules including headline capitalization, imagery guidelines, tone of voice, banned words, and more. It’s something every content operation wants, needs, and tries to create (been there, done that), but often sits last on the priority list because, well, it’s boring and we have Big Important deadlines.

This one is not boring. It gives me a defined list of industry terms the company wants to use, and buzzwords to avoid. It tells me the content should share insights address pain points, not product details. It alerts me that we don’t bash our competitors, and we talk about ourselves as supporting traditional methods, not replacing them.

It also gets into the boring rules of capitalization, punctuation, and grammar rules.

Why does this matter? Because artistic freedom + a prescribed structure = creative but consistent branding. Consistency creates trust, and people buy from brands they trust.

As a creative, I want to focus on messaging, not punctuation. I want to create stories, not structure. A good style guide means I can put all my energy into compelling content and capitalize fully on the trust that this brand has already built.

Content Plan Pt 3: New Life for Old Content

Are you leveraging the power of your content archives, and other readily available outside content? Sure, fresh, personalized and relevant content generated in-house is the Holy Grail for smart marketing teams. But you should balance that with vintage content to improve your return-on-investment, and also extend your content’s reach. The rules for repurposed content are the same as for fresh – make it relevant and personal for readers. Here are three quick examples of how to augment your content stream via different types of repurposing.

Popular past pieces

This is the obvious first place to start – rerunning original content that your readers loved the first time around. This boosts the chance of shares (“Oh, I remember this piece, I wanted to share this with Erica.”), and also can reach an entirely new audience when shared via a different channel or at a different time or day.

For example, American Express OPENForum generates tons of fresh content weekly, packed with useful information and case studies for small business owners. But the folks at Amex monitor performance metrics carefully and they regularly republish archived content that has performed well. I know this because they keep republishing one piece that I wrote for them about creating an effective financial dashboard. I swear they rerun that post out every single month because I’m always getting tweets about it.

News events

Monitoring news events and linking content to those opens up opportunities to get new eyeballs on your archived content. Blog posts and social media are particularly suited to this strategy – a quick news-related hit can capture readers at a time when interest in the topic is high.

For example, a few years ago my hometown of Richmond, VA hosted the UCI World Road Cycling championships. One smart marketer posted content during the race about how to create annual business goals. The piece snagged reader attention with an image of professional cyclists and a headline about training goals paying off, but the story itself was pure repurposed archived material.

Social media shares

You probably see this all the time in your social media feed. Sharing other meaningful blog, story and research content via social media can build your brand, your community and number of followers. This could be as simple as waking up each morning and scrolling through your social media feed to share something like a helpful industry-focused story on LinkedIn.

Sharing outside content adds to your credibility with your target market. Readers can get annoyed if they feel like you’re always blowing your own horn or trying to sell them something. Try also sharing content from key partner brands, affinity brands and vendors – this simple content strategy can strengthen those relationships and help extend your brand image.

Content creation isn’t a “one and done” enterprise. Repurpose, but do it in a smart, personal and relevant way. Then you’ll continue to reach readers while also realizing better return on investment with your content marketing strategy.

Content Plan Pt 2: Week By Week Strategy

In Part 1 of our planning series we looked at how to create an annual content cadence that supports your overall business goals. Once that’s in place, it’s time to bang out the weekly content plan that your team can implement during the year. I’m currently teaching webinar on content strategy for MarketingProfs University, and here’s a little sneak preview of what that covers.

I use a simple Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet to set up my annual content plan, and I’ll break it down for you here. First, let’s look at the spreadsheet outline:

Let’s start with the Y axis, on the left. I like to divide my plan into eight-week chunks, with each week highlighting a piece of core content. For example, our annual cadence for this plan is divided into quarters, so this is Q2, divided by week.

For the X axis, along the top, I divide it into channels. Each channel has its own business goals, and we want to goal-set and measure that as fully as possible.

In this sample plan, our core research is focused on “millennial online shopping habits.” This could of course include any content you want to create, via any channel.

Now we fill in the details:

Here I’ve filled in the weekly plan with a mix of proposed blog topics, web content, newsletters and other publishing outlets that all tie back to the core content. So in Week 3 for example, we are featuring a client white paper - this company partnered with their own clients to create content for them.

We would upload the white paper to our web site and put it behind a pay wall to capture sales lead information. Then we would create a blog post that mentions the brand profiled in the white paper, and links to our web site for the full story; and finally we would publish the blog or maybe a chart or graph from the white paper to LinkedIn. We would also tag the brand wherever possible, while their marketing team also shares the link and tags us.

It’s a simple plan, but one that will save your team a lot of time and headache, and can be built upon during the coming year. Spend a little time up front mapping out a strategy that the entire team can support.

Creating a Matchy-Matchy Social Feed

Social media content gives everyone a headache. We know that content for each channel should be personalized and distinct, but at the same time it should all promote the same core messaging. So, how is this even doable? The key is to tell the same story in multiple different ways.

It’s important to match the message to not just audience but also channel – so don’t make the common mistake of just pushing the exact same message out via LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Just as you would personalize the message for your target audiences, you should also personalize by channel.

As long as it’s not too personalized. Here’s a classic case study for that:

DVM 360 is a website for veterinarians, and it’s full of great information for anyone running a vet practice. DVM 360 has actually won marketing awards for its content, which is shared primarily via the website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The company does a good job in each channel, in fact I would agree that it is award-worthy content, but the overall message is not working in synch to promote the brand messaging.

Let’s look at a day in the life of DVM 360’s content. This is the same day, with three different messages in three different channels.

• Instagram: A photo of a cute kitty smartphone desktop stand.

• Facebook: A post about a dangerous horse feed recall.

• Company website: Feature story sharing “our worst mistakes that you can learn from.”

None of these are bad posts. They each showcase interesting and useful information for their target audience that is tailored to each channel – the Facebook message has a link to the company website; the Instagram image is kind of fun; and the web piece is good reading.

The problem is that there’s no overall cohesive story here. So, what happens if the client only follows the company on Instagram? DVM’s messaging on that channel is fun but not very deep. The client really has to follow all channels to receive a cohesive brand message.

Let’s look at a powerful alternative.

Each social media channel should have a channel-specific message that reinforces the brand’s core content. Set a goal for each channel based on its personality, demographic and strength. For example:

• Facebook is a consistently powerful conversion channel, so Facebook messaging should always feature a link to drive readers to the website.

• Instagram won’t even let you add a link to photo captions, so that messaging should focus on gorgeous images that reinforce the brand identity.

• Twitter is great at creating community, so Twitter posts and chats should focus on shares or conversational topics designed to encourage engagement and participation.

Mainstream consumer magazines do this really well. Let’s look at an example from Bon Apetit. These are three different posts from the same day:

• Facebook: Link to a feature story roundup of readers’ favorite recipes, leading with the image of a gorgeous radicchio salad;

• Instagram: Same salad image, bigger and richer, with a note about summer recipes in the current issue;

• Twitter: Image of a different salad with a snarky “sorry, not sorry” note about how yummy the salad dressing is.

One core message, three different posts. You can see that if the target customer only follows one channel – say she prefers Instagram because she is a visual person – she is still going to get the same messaging as that person who follows the brand on Twitter. Likewise, if a reader follows you on all three channels, they aren’t going to see the same repetitive post three times that day. Each post is different, but all of these links send readers to the same core story. This keeps the content for each channel personalized and distinct, but gets all social media channels working together for the same overall content goal.

The Secret to Non-Sucky Keywording

Writers love to hate Search Engine Optimization – that practice of inserting Google keywords or phrases in online text so the search bots can find and rank it. Even digi-savvy writers and editors complain that working in those keywords warps their copy and puts artificial demands on the story.

But the truth is that SEO, done correctly, can be a blog post or online article’s invisible best friend. SEO is the best way to connect meaningfully with readers who care about what you’ve written. I know, because I’ve seen SEO done well (our organic search rates rise by over 20% every month) and I’ve seen it be a disaster.

Old School SEO Sucks

I’ve been doing SEO writing for about 10 years for various types of companies publishing blogs, white papers and other online articles. Here’s how it usually works:

1. Editor comes up with awkward long-tail keyword term that relates to a business product or service, like “employee long term care insurance.”

2. Editor hands keyword to writer and says to write a story about it.

3. Editor charges writer with following “SEO best practices” like including the keyword in the headline, subheds and at least 3% density in the story copy.

4. Writer hands in awkward, hard to read story that keeps repeating “employee long term care insurance.”

5. Editor runs story and hopes that companies in market for long term care insurance search on the phrase, find the story, read it, and buy this to add to their employee benefits.

6. Readers who do find the story can’t slog through it and bail quickly.

If you are being forced to follow these SEO guidelines, I don’t blame you for hating it. I actually quit a great writing job a year ago for a well-known online outlet because they handed down these old school SEO rules. Even then I knew this process was dead.

Today’s SEO Reaches Eager Readers

When I started in magazine journalism, we fought each other on the newsstands. The cover image and headlines were our key weapons in dragging readers away from our competitors. The readers took a risk on our gorgeous covers, buying the magazine and hoping to find relevant stories inside.

Fortunately, that newsstand war game is also dead. Today’s SEO is the delivery channel that helps a writer’s brilliantly crafted story reach exactly the right people who want to read it. Readers don’t have to take a chance on buying an entire magazine (unless they want to) if they only want one important story.

Here’s how SEO works as a best practice:

1. Editor uses SEMRush or Answer the Public to find out what questions and phrases readers are typing in to get information about donating household items, and comes up with a general story idea about how to keep donated clothes out of landfills.

2. Editor assigns story (without keywords) to writer.

3. Writer hands in great story with good research.

4. Editor then uses Google AdWords keyword tool to come up with a long-tail keyword, “clothes to donate,” that best matches the story.

5. Editor keywords the story, without forcing too much keyword density or artificial headlines and subheds.

6. Editor publishes story, and everyone who searches on the keyword finds it and reads it.

7. Google rewards the great user experience by showing the story to more searching readers.

In other words, we assign interesting stories our readers want to know about, and we keyword them after they come in. We don’t stuff the piece full of fake-sounding phrases. People who find the story enjoy a great read, not a mouthful of keywords. And they often click on other recommended stories afterwards.

Don’t Try to Game Google

One thing we’ve learned about modern keywording is that Google isn’t all that hung up on the exact keyword phrase. If you get most of the words of a long-tail term in the story a few times, in more or less the same order, Google will find you. 

The other reality is that while you may keyword a story intentionally with a specific phrase, Google may decide to present your story to readers based on an entirely different keyword set that it has organically decided upon (bots – there’s no controlling them). 

My advice? Don’t try to game the bots, and don’t overthink SEO. Google’s algorithm keeps changing to reward the user experience, and it will outsmart anyone who tries to play only to the numbers. Instead, search engines want us to create strong writing that engages readers. 

As an editor, I use SEO combined with digital tracking to see who is reading what, how much time they spent on the page, where they come from and where else they go. Armed with that information, I can build a better reader experience and forge a stronger connection. SEO gets me to a lot more readers, who are a lot more interested, than the newsstand ever did. That’s something that even old-school non-digital journalists strive for. 

Just Do It: Don't Overthink Your Content Strategy

There is a reason that Nike's “Just Do It” slogan has lasted over 26 years. The phrase brilliantly encapsulates both the encouragement and also the impatience of someone talking to an armchair athlete. Just get off your butt and get out there, the voice says. It doesn’t matter what activity you try, or what level your ability. Get off the couch and move toward the goal.

The same sentiment applies to so many other activities in life. Lately I’ve been using it for content strategy to push hesitant marketers up off the couch and into the game of content planning and curation. I’m not talking about creating the content, I’m talking about all the tracking, storage and measurement that comes afterwards.

There is a typical approach to content strategy that I see over and over. Let’s call the company Evergreen Industries. The marketing team at Evergreen is full of smart people. They want to put together a comprehensive marketing, measurement and curation strategy, and they’ve done their homework by reading about the different options and platforms available. And then, they freeze.

The team at Evergreen gets overwhelmed by the options and simply can’t pull together a plan that satisfies all stakeholders. Part of the problem is that content strategy is a moving target, always changing, always offering new, better options that people want to incorporate.

I worked alongside one team that tried for over a year to create a content strategy but never pulled it off. They were crippled by the fear that they would leave out a critical measurement metric, or overlook some flashy engagement tool that everyone else had. They didn’t have the courage to “Just Do It.”

Let me give you a little coaching advice: If you dither on the sidelines you are missing valuable learning opportunities. Know that you will certainly make mistakes, you will fall down and get bruises, and you will overlook or skip key parts of your training plan. But the sooner you can jump into the game, the faster you will ramp up the learning curve.

A few weeks ago I met with the CMO of a large B2B company, and she had her eye fixed firmly on the ball. As we talked, she sketched a rough “game plan” on the back of a scrap piece of paper.

She quickly jotted down the key elements the strategy should include, like channel options, key measurement metrics, alignment with the sales funnel and identifying gaps there, key SME bylines and a curation plan for repurposing archived content. We both looked down at the complex scribbles and long list of required elements.

“Of course, we wouldn’t do this all at once,” she said. “We’d pick two or three things to test and learn, and grow from there.”

In other words, Just Do It. I will be looking for this company to win the content marketing Olympics in a year or so because they have the confidence to jump in and get started, and the dedication to test and learn from new initiatives.

If your team is ready to get off the couch and start moving, here is a game plan for building an early-stage strategy. From this initial plan you can tweak and iterate to your heart’s content, adding an element here or there to personalize your plan based on the feedback it creates.

1.  Measurement metrics: Experts advise starting with only 2-3 measurement metrics and building from there. This can be as simple as setting up your Google Analytics tracking to focus on the metrics that seem the most important to your business today – for example, email opens, response to Calls to Action (like downloads or comments), and social media shares. Once you have identified the content engagement process that leads to conversion, then you can tweak your metrics to track that process.
2. Alignment with sales funnel: I have worked with teams that attack this problem from the content end of things, labeling content that seems to fit with different stages of the sales process. Instead, I recommend working backwards and identifying the actual content that prospects engage with before converting – for example, are they primarily downloading white papers or clicking on case studies? And which comes first? Once you’ve built that grid, you can identify gaps in content and also adjust your tracking metrics.
3. Curation: Tagging is the best way to track archived content so that it can easily be used by key stakeholders including your sales force. I advise tags by type of content, industry, and key business solution featured. In addition, your Content Director should be familiar enough with the archives to pounce on any news-related opportunities to push existing content through social media channels.

Maybe you have your own ideas about an effective game plan, and you’ve been trying to pull together a workable strategy. My recommendation is to ignore words like “comprehensive,” or “inclusive” or “wide-ranging.” Sure, that’s the end game but everybody starts small. Just pick a few elements to focus on and get off the sidelines and into the game. Ditch the excuses and the fear, and Just Do It.