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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.

Continue reading “Back to Business: Building Your Fall Content Strategy Now”

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:

Continue reading “What Old-School Journalism Still Teaches Modern Content Marketing”

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

Continue reading “LinkedIn Newsletters: Best Practices for Success”

Addressing Conflicting Feedback as a Content Marketer: The Ideal Review Process

Creating marketing communications materials can be challenging. After decades in the business (yeah, I’m “seasoned”… ), I’ve had multiple experiences with review processes—some great, some good, some not so good, and some absolutely horrendous and extremely frustrating.

Over the years I’ve come to identify a number of best practices that can help to both streamline the content review process and minimize frustrations along the way—for both content creators and subject matter experts.

Continue reading “Addressing Conflicting Feedback as a Content Marketer: The Ideal Review Process”

AI for Content Creation

A Facebook headline reads, “How to Generate Blog Posts in 1 Minute Using AI.” It’s a sponsored post from Jasper (more about this later), and while the concept is certainly intriguing and tempting—especially when facing a mountain of blog posts to create for various clients—there’s a certain amount of skepticism that goes along with it. Is the hype too good to be true? Continue reading “AI for Content Creation”

10 Copywriting Tips to Get Better Results

Whether you’re writing a brochure, copy for a newspaper ad, a script for a radio announcement, or a page or blog for your web site, there are some tried and true techniques that can help you make sure that your copy gets the results you’re looking for.

Think about writing copy as making a sales pitch to a customer. Your goal is to persuade that customer to do something–most likely to purchase your product or service. Here’s how: Continue reading “10 Copywriting Tips to Get Better Results”

Blogging Best Practices

A business contact of mine asked me recently about my thoughts on the value of blogs for generating revenue and the opportunity that may exist for writers to generate content for blogs.

Personally, I think the whole field of blogging is Continue reading “Blogging Best Practices”

Go-To Online Tools for Business Owners and Freelancers

8970947 - illuminated light bulb in a row of dim ones concept for creativity, innovation and solution Strategic Communications is an entirely remote company and has been since 2008, long before the pandemic emerged. Over those years we’ve been able to leverage a number of digital tools and apps to help us do our work more efficiently. We often learn about these tools through our clients. Each new client tends to bring along at least one new tool we haven’t used before. Some of our favorites: Continue reading “Go-To Online Tools for Business Owners and Freelancers”

Creating Content: A Role for Your Contacts and Connections

Group Of Multi-Ethnic People Social Networking

As content marketing has emerged as a top go-to tactic for marketers of all kinds in all industries, the challenge that many have been faced with is how to generate the massive amounts of content often required to feed the funnel. Even large organizations with internal staff dedicated to marketing and communications often find themselves turning to others for content creation.

That’s certainly a great thing for firms like ours, and we help a number of individuals and organizations create a variety of content. But there’s another great source of content that can be leveraged in big and small ways to help feed the demand for content: Continue reading “Creating Content: A Role for Your Contacts and Connections”

Best Practices for Finding Freelancers: Top Go-To Sources of Talent

video marketing Content is king, as the saying goes, and that’s certainly true in a digital world. Consumer appetite for content is at an all-time high and continuing to grow. That’s great for organizations that have well-oiled content creation teams in place to meet the demand. For others, though, developing content on a regular basis that is high-quality and focused on issues and topics that resonate with their audiences can be a challenge. The gig economy can help. A wide range of freelancers and contract content creators are available to organizations to help produce content for any format. Continue reading “Best Practices for Finding Freelancers: Top Go-To Sources of Talent”