Marketing and Branding Archives -

The Content Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones to Ignore)

The goal isn’t to track everything. It’s to track the right things—consistently, in a way that informs decisions.

Most content marketers are measuring the wrong things. Here’s how to tell the difference.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 28, 2026

Content marketing metrics are the quantitative and qualitative measures used to evaluate whether a content program is achieving its intended business objectives. They include audience growth, lead generation, search visibility, and revenue attribution. The distinction between meaningful metrics and vanity metrics is critical: vanity metrics (page views, social media likes, follower counts) may look impressive but reveal little about business impact, while meaningful metrics connect content activity directly to outcomes that matter to the organization.

Every content marketer I’ve worked with has felt the pull of the vanity metric. The blog post that got 2,000 views. The LinkedIn post with 150 likes. The social media following that crossed a round number.

These numbers feel like progress. They’re easy to report. But they’re often meaningless.

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The Art of the Interview: How to Get Better Stories from Subject Matter Experts

One of the most valuable things I brought from journalism to content marketing wasn’t a writing technique or a structural framework. It was the interview.

The best content doesn’t come from what you know. It comes from what you’re able to draw out of the people who do.

By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC · Published Wednesday, July 21, 2026

Interviewing subject matter experts for content marketing is the practice of conducting structured conversations with domain specialists like executives, practitioners, researchers, or clients to gather original insights, stories, and perspectives that form the foundation of high-quality written content.

Done well, the expert interview is the single most powerful tool available to content marketers for producing material that is genuinely authoritative and distinctively voiced.

And, it’s impossible for AI to replicate.

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The GEO Revolution: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know Right Now

A growing percentage of searches—particularly for informational, advisory, and how-to queries—are now answered directly by AI engines.

SEO gets you a spot on a list of links. GEO gets you cited by an AI. Here’s the difference and why it changes everything.

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

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring and presenting content so that AI-powered search engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and similar systems are more likely to surface, cite, and reference it when answering user queries. Unlike traditional SEO, which aims to rank content in a list of links, GEO aims to make content the direct source of an AI’s answer, appearing not as a link to click but as the authority being quoted.

Something has changed in how people find information online. Most content marketers haven’t caught up yet.

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Back to Business: Building Your Fall Content Strategy Now

Fall is the highest-value quarter for B2B content

September will be here faster than you think. The time to plan for it is now.

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

Fall content strategy is the practice of planning, developing, and positioning content in advance of the September–November period—typically the highest-engagement quarter of the year for B2B content marketing—so that organizations can publish with intention and consistency when audience attention and buying activity peak. Building a fall content strategy in June or July, rather than August, is what separates organizations that dominate Q4 from those that scramble to keep up.

We’re at the end of June. Back-to-school displays are appearing in stores. Conference season is ramping back up. And if you’re in B2B content marketing, you know what that means: Q3 is the sprint to Q4, and the organizations that perform best in September, October, and November are almost never the ones who started planning in late August.

They’re the ones who used the relative quiet of summer—while others were coasting—to build the infrastructure for a strong fall.

Now is exactly the right time to do that work.

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What Old-School Journalism Still Teaches Modern Content Marketing

The principles of good journalism: they were developed to solve problems that have never gone away.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. They’ve just been forgotten.

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

Journalism principles in content marketing refers to the application of foundational reporting and editorial practices—including the inverted pyramid structure, the five W’s framework, source attribution, clarity-first writing, and the commitment to factual accuracy—to the creation of marketing content. These principles, developed over more than a century of professional journalism, produce content that is more credible, more readable, and more likely to be cited by both human editors and AI search systems than content that lacks them.

My background in journalism—the discipline of it, the habits it instilled, the standards it held me to—is probably the single most valuable thing I bring to content marketing work. And it’s something I find myself returning to constantly as I watch the content landscape evolve.

Because here’s the thing about the principles of good journalism:

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The Editorial Calendar as Strategic Asset (Not Just a Planning Tool)

The editorial calendar isn’t just a scheduling tool, but a strategic instrument.

If your editorial calendar is just a schedule, you’re using it at about 20% of its potential.

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

A strategic editorial calendar is a content planning system that maps individual pieces of content to specific business objectives, audience journey stages, competitive gaps, and measurable outcomes—rather than simply scheduling what to publish and when. The distinction matters because a schedule tells you what you’re creating; a strategic calendar tells you why, for whom, and what it should accomplish.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about building a content calendar that actually holds up in real life—the practical, tactical side of the work. Today I want to go deeper: the editorial calendar not as a scheduling tool, but as a strategic instrument.

Here’s the honest truth about most editorial calendars I’ve seen, including some I’ve built myself:

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The Freedom to Be Real: Why Authenticity Is Your Best Content Strategy

Authenticity is what’s present when the content you create is genuinely yours.

Everyone says ‘be authentic.’ Almost nobody explains what that actually means—or how to do it consistently.

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

Authentic content marketing is the practice of creating content that genuinely reflects your organization’s real perspective, earned expertise, and distinctive voice—rather than content optimized to appear credible, sound authoritative, or match what competitors are publishing. It’s grounded in what you actually believe, what you’ve actually experienced, and what you genuinely understand about your audience—not in what performs well in the abstract.

Authentic, admittedly, is one of the most overused words in marketing. It’s also one of the most important and consistently misunderstood.

When most brands say they want to be ‘more authentic,’ what they usually mean is: they want to seem more relatable. More human. Less corporate.

Those are reasonable goals. But that’s not really authenticity.

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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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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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