Blog: Strategy Matters! -

Mid-Year Content Audit: 6 Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Right Now

What’s working? What’s not? A content audit can help you answer these questions.

You don’t need to review every post you’ve ever published. You just need to ask the right six questions.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

A content marketing audit is a systematic review of content to evaluate performance, relevance, and strategic alignment. An audit identifies what’s working, what needs updating, and what’s no longer serving your audience or your goals. Mid-year mark is an ideal time to conduct one: enough of the year has passed to generate meaningful performance data, and enough time remains to act on what you find.

We’re at the halfway point of 2026. If you’ve been publishing consistently, you now have a body of work worth examining. Not obsessing over, not rebuilding from scratch. Examining.

A mid-year content audit doesn’t require a team, a consultant, or a spreadsheet with a thousand rows.

It requires six honest questions and the willingness to act on the answers.

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Summer Content Strategy: Staying Visible When Audiences Check Out

School’s out for the summer, but don’t let your content strategy take a break.

The slowdown is real. What you do with it determines how you perform in the fall.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC

Summer content strategy is the practice of adapting a content marketing program to account for predictable seasonal shifts in audience attention, engagement, and buying behavior that occur between Memorial Day and Labor Day—while using the slower period strategically to build content assets that drive results in the high-engagement months that follow.

For most B2B marketers, summer presents a genuine planning challenge: audiences are distracted, decision-makers are harder to reach, and content that performs well the rest of the year often underperforms between June and August.

I’ve managed content programs through enough summer cycles to know that the worst response to the seasonal slowdown is to keep doing what you’re doing and expect different results.

The second worst response is to go quiet entirely and then scramble to rebuild momentum in September.

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Why Every Business Needs a Content Strategist (Not Just a Writer)

The work of content strategy begins before a single word is written.

Writing is a skill. Strategy is a discipline. The businesses getting the best results from content marketing understand the difference.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR, Strategic Communications, LLC

A content strategist is someone who develops, oversees, and continuously optimizes a plan for how to create, distribute, and evaluate the effectiveness of content to achieve specific business goals. Goals might include such things as audience growth, lead generation, brand authority, and search visibility. Unlike content writers, whose primary responsibility is producing individual pieces of content, content strategists plan for what gets created, why, for whom, in what format, on which channels, and how success is measured.

I’ve had my foot in both camps for a number of years—as a freelance business journalist, a corporate communication professional, and as a content marketing consultant working with B2B organizations of all sizes.

The single most consistent gap I see is this: businesses hire writers when they need strategists.

It’s an understandable mistake. Writing is visible. Strategy is not.

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The Human Touch: What Content Creators Can’t Outsource

AI-generated content is often dull, repetitive, and prone to inaccuracies.

AI is a powerful content tool. It’s not a content strategist, a storyteller, or a brand voice. Here’s the distinction that matters.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR, Strategic Communications, LLC

Human content creation is the development of original content drawing on lived experiences, domain expertise, audience empathy and understanding, and brand judgment. These are human capabilities that AI tools can approximate but not replicate.

Yes, generative AI (GenAI) has great value and application for content creators. But it’s not a replacement. As GenAI is used more and more in the content production and distribution process it’s important to understand where it’s best applied—and where humans still have an important and unique role to play.

I’ve been writing since I was a child and writing for publication since I was 18. I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. Most recently, of course, the rapid advancement of GenAI and tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude (my current favorite).

GenAI does have a place

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From Blog to Brand: The Smart Content Repurposing Playbook

Strategically repurposing your content helps drive greater exposure and optimizes your budget.

Don’t let your carefully crafted content die a slow death.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Content repurposing takes the approach of “create once, use multiple times.” It’s designed to extend the life of your copy to both leverage exposure and gain efficiency. By adapting a single, well-crafted piece of content into multiple format and channels you maximize your return on every hour invested in creating that content.

Done well, it’s one of the highest-leverage moves in a content marketer’s toolkit. Done poorly, it’s just copy-paste.

The difference is strategy.

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Brand Voice: The One Thing AI Can’t Clone

Voice is the underlying personality of your brand that shows up across every piece of content you publish, regardless of topic or format.

In a content landscape flooded with AI output, your voice is your fingerprint. Here’s how to protect it—and use it strategically.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Brand voice is the consistent, distinctive personality and perspective that an organization expresses across all of its content—regardless of topic, format, or channel. Unlike tone, which shifts situationally (warmer in a condolence message, more energetic in a product launch), brand voice is stable: it is the underlying character that makes a brand’s content recognizably its own. In 2026, with an estimated 57% of all online content now AI-generated, brand voice has become the primary differentiator available to content marketers who want to be heard.

Last fall I wrote a post about Pinterest’s decision to give users controls to reduce AI-generated content in their feeds. The stat that prompted it was startling: an estimated 57% of all online content is now generative AI (likely even more now…).

That number has stayed with me.

More than half of what’s published online was produced by a machine.

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Content Calendars That Actually Work: A Practitioner’s Guide

The calendar is infrastructure. The content is personality.

The goal isn’t a perfect plan. It’s a plan you can actually keep.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

A content calendar (also called an editorial calendar) is a planning tool that maps out what content an organization will publish, in what format, on which channels, and on what schedule—typically planned one to three months in advance. An effective content calendar balances evergreen and timely content, builds in flexibility for responsive publishing, and is designed around a publishing cadence the team can sustain—not around an aspirational schedule that collapses on contact with competing priorities.

Many companies and individuals these days continue to be focused on creating and distributing content in a never-ending cycle. It’s a cycle that demands new ideas, new copy, new images, new hashtags, new social media posts, new, new, new, new, new…

At the same time they need to ensure that their content is relevant and, to the extent possible, capitalizes on current events, news cycles, holidays, and emerging audience interests.

That can be a challenge.

Content calendars can help. Or hurt.

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The 2026 Content Marketing Imperative: Know Your Audience

If you can understand who your shadow buyers are and what they need, you’ll get to a place where you truly know your audience.

Copy that resonates requires knowing your audience—intimately. How are you doing with that?

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communications, LLC

Audience understanding in content marketing is the practice of developing specific, research-grounded knowledge of who your target readers or customers are—their challenges, motivations, behaviors, and preferences—and using that knowledge to create content that resonates precisely rather than broadly. It is widely considered the foundational competency of effective content strategy: content that doesn’t know who it’s for cannot connect with anyone in particular.

Every day, without fail, two very different kinds of content appears in my inbox and on the various social media channels I follow.

One kind captures my attention and gets me to start reading, sometimes dragging me down a rabbit hole that I really wish I hadn’t been dragged down…

The other kind: meh. Generic, boilerplate, trite. Copy that literally any brand could have created. It’s not personal. It’s not specific. It doesn’t speak to me.

The difference between those two experiences has nothing to do with budget, production value, or even writing skill. It comes down to one thing: how well the brand actually knows its audience.

This is not a new principle.

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Why Storytelling Still Wins in the Age of AI

The brands that are succeeding in this new AI-fueled reality aren’t succeeding because they have better AI tools. They’re succeeding because they’re telling better stories. — The story you tell—your perspective, your experience, your voice—is something no AI can replicate.

The most powerful marketing tool you have hasn’t changed. Here’s how to use it.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR – Strategic Communicaions, LLC

Storytelling in content marketing is the practice of structuring marketing content around narrative—a relatable situation, a turning point grounded in real experience, and a clear takeaway—rather than around information or promotion alone. Research consistently shows that narrative content is more memorable, more persuasive, and more likely to build the kind of audience trust that drives long-term brand authority than factual or list-based content.

Let’s address the elephant in the room right out of the gate: AI. In the age of AI content creators are feeling stressed, questioning their worth, even questioning the likelihood that they will be able to continue to practice their craft.

But here’s the thing.

The brands that are succeeding in this new AI-fueled reality aren’t succeeding because they have better AI tools.

They’re succeeding because they’re telling better stories.

Storytelling is not a soft skill. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s the engine of every piece of content that has ever actually moved an audience. And in 2026—with AI capable of producing technically competent, grammatically correct, utterly forgettable content at scale—the ability to tell a real, human story has never been more valuable.

Why stories work when information doesn’t

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LinkedIn Newsletters: Best Practices for Success

You should be using this cost effective marketing tool

LinkedIn suggests that LinkedIn Newsletters are one of the most effective features for content distribution, and they’re certainly growing in use but individuals and companies. But, do they really offer value, and in what way?

We sought input from LinkedIn experts who are using LinkedIn Newsletters—some with a great following and some just starting out—to get their insights, best practices, and actionable tips on how to make the most of this platform to grow and engage with a LinkedIn audience.

What you need to know about leveraging LinkedIn newsletters

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