Between juggling content creation, distribution plans, and keeping tabs on your customers’ metrics, you also need to stay up to date on the latest in content marketing. Easy peasy, right? (Read: not.) SEO, strategy, AI, product-led X–Y–Z, brand-driven location-based omnichannel personalization marketing — okay, that last one might be a stretch. But you get the point. It’s A LOT. Now, you could subscribe to every SEO newsletter on the planet, as our former blog host Ryan Law did at Ahrefs. But do you really want to add an even more overwhelming inbox to your list of headaches? I think not. Ins ..read more

A few years back, I mentioned to John Collins, then content director at Intercom, how much Animalz customers admired their blog. “We’d love to help our clients create something similar,” I told him. John’s response? “They may feel differently if they saw the costs.” Editor’s note: This post was updated in 2024 by the Animalz team, based on a recent Q&A with Jimmy Daly to reflect the evolution in his thinking about the Library vs. Publication Framework. All brilliance is his, any errors and oversights our own. (You can still read the original 2018 version here.) John’s quip summed up what s ..read more

Google’s massive March 2024 search update takes aim at AI-generated “copycat content.” The search giant expects this update to reduce unhelpful, low-quality content by 40%. This update is part of a broader effort to combat content spam, as Search Engine Land reports. Three Practices Google Now Considers Spam Google’s update targets three practices the search giant now classifies as spam. 1. Scaled Content Abuse Scaled content abuse refers to mass-produced content created to game rankings, whether AI-generated or human-written. Google is cracking down on content that provides little to no value ..read more

“If you build it, they will come” is a classic startup mistake. It’s the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often, they don’t. Content marketers fall for this same trap all the time. We pour ourselves into crafting a perfect piece, hit publish, and hope for the best. Sometimes, readers show up. Often, they don’t. A distribution-first strategy starts with the “they will come” part. You analyze all your channels — including the unsexy ones — to find the biggest opportunities and only then double down with great content. Most con ..read more

There’s a hidden epidemic in the Product-Led Growth (PLG) movement, and it’s happening right under our noses: the waste of valuable by-products. Every day, teams create artifacts as part of their work — presentations, demos, interview transcripts — that could make for great content. Instead, these resources go to rot in digital archives. This waste contradicts a core feature of Product-Led Growth (PLG): efficiency. PLG makes the product itself the main driver of customer acquisition, essentially giving you a “two for one” deal: an exceptional user experience that also attracts new customers. B ..read more

Our in-house innovation lead, Tim Metz, explores new ideas and technologies for our customers and content. In this article, he shows how content teams can use AI tools in their research process. Your first experiences with ChatGPT are likely similar to mine: excitement, wonder, and fear, quickly followed by disappointment — and some relief — about its hallucinations. Those incorrect facts, figures, and fantasies have branded AI as untrustworthy. Much has changed since ChatGPT’s release. Its Plus version browses the web and reads files. The GPT-4 engine on which it runs is much better than its ..read more

The first half of 2022 was an exciting period for SupportLogic, a support experience (SX) management platform. A new website, domain, and positioning set the stage for a strong, content-driven marketing push.  Then ChatGPT happened, followed by Google announcing the Search Generative Experience (SGE) initiative — AI-generated summaries integrated into Google’s search results. Now, in addition to driving organic growth, SupportLogic faced a new challenge: protecting against ‘click-stealing’ AI that diverts traffic away from their site to these AI-generated summaries instead. Together, Supp ..read more

Gareth Davies is the content lead at Parabol, an online Agile meeting tool. He explains how they’ve pioneered a unique approach to product development called “content-led product.” As a content marketer, you might think your job is crafting stories to attract customers to your product. But your skills, insights, and strategic perspective could shape the very core of your business by influencing what your product team builds next. Traditionally, product teams build first and then bring in marketers. With “content-led product,” you reverse this process by starting with content and then using it ..read more

Manual link-building isn’t for the faint of heart. You knock on many doors, endure countless rejections, and occasionally score a few backlinks — campaign after campaign after campaign. It’s a disheartening process many content marketers have to endure. But there’s another way.  Create linkable content you know people want to reference on topics that naturally attract high-quality backlinks. We’re going to walk you through that process and teach you how to find linkable content ideas that generate backlinks on autopilot. 7 Steps to Identify Topics With Organic Link-Building Potential Attr ..read more

Take an ounce of business analysis. Add a dash of narrative, a sprinkling of journalism, and a pinch of content marketing. Stir until it simmers with insight, then serve to critical startup investors who feast on this research. Sounds like alchemy, or perhaps a fairy tale? Lead turning into gold, princes into frogs and all that. Sacra, a private markets research company, performs this magic daily. Cofounder Jan-Erik Asplund explains how this approach built their research platform, counting 344 private startups and 13,000 email subscribers. The quest: A Bloomberg for private markets In 2020, th ..read more