We’re in a weird moment in content marketing in which it seems like all predictions about the discipline have come true.
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Your content team needs to be running a media model: Some of the most successful content marketing teams out there run their organizations like media companies, producing podcasts and videos and thought pieces on relevant news to their audience.
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AEO has spawned a resurgence in old-school SEO tactics, like “best of” listicles, comparison content, and “limitations” content (which directly addresses smaller scale prospect concerns about your product that the LLMs seem to surface deep into an on-going conversation).
While visibility is becoming less of a vanity metric, conversion is still the #1 goal, meaning it is critical that your content look good and stand out, while simultaneously getting folks to take the next step.
This means we can’t go after a pure play media model (which is supported by ads not software sales). Neither can we, though, go after only the AEO and traditional SEO tactics, which drive visibility and traffic (though less traffic is attributed to organic as Google and LLMs follow a more zero-click model to keep users within the tool).
Per usual, you need all of it. So, how do you build a content program that does just that?
Well, for my team, we bucket content into three categories:
- Thought leadership
- Performance (SEO & AEO)
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Lead generation
And, we’ve built a waterfall method in which thought leadership is refined through customer events, partner feedback, community engagement, media pick-up, and organic performance, and later turned into lead gen activities.
This means that 1+1 can equal 3 for us. Our thought leadership plays feed into our customer and event marketing, our PR, and our organic search tactics. When they work, we then turn those assets into lead gen plays to get even more bang for our buck. And all of this happens at a global scale.
We also map our tactics back to quarterly themes. Now, not everything we produce aligns 100% to a theme––but our biggest and more distributed assets always do.
Here is how it works:
- Themes are determined by product roadmap
- They are aligned on across content, product marketing, and PR
- Each quarter’s assets follow the same cadence: a product release, some research, a webinar, a playbook, supporting enablement, etc.
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All of this is backed into a bill of materials so the larger team can see how each activity impacts and supports the rest––and so that everyone can get comfortable with the recurring cadence.
We do new things every quarter, but they rhyme. And that rhythm helps our teams move fast because they know what to expect, and can build both professional muscle memory as well as templates.
While many predictions about content marketing have come true, the principle of the discipline is the same. Your content needs to support the business by driving awareness, traffic, and conversion throughout the funnel.
To do that with a small team across all the required channels, every asset has to work a little bit extra. Each one needs to further the narrative of the one before it, building trust, building credibility, and solidifying the brand story for your audience.
Thought leadership, as I’ve said before, isn’t built overnight. It is the outcome of consistently fantastic content marketing (and great alignment with product marketing). 2026 is the year you can make that happen for your brand.
