Specialists go deep. Generalists go wide. Both are valuable.
Continue reading “How to Write About Anything: The Generalist Content Creator’s Advantage”
The right publishing frequency is the one you can sustain indefinitely—not the most ambitious schedule you can manage for a month.
Continue reading “The Long Game: Why Consistent Content Beats Viral Every Time”
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
A case study is a detailed, evidence-based account of how a specific client or customer achieved a measurable outcome using a product, service, or approach. Case studies are told in narrative form to help prospective buyers understand what results are possible and how they might be achieved in their own context. A well-written case study is one of the most persuasive content formats available to B2B marketers because it combines social proof (‘someone like me has done this’) with specificity (‘here’s exactly what happened and what it produced’).
I’ve written a lot of case studies over the years for clients across industries, in formats ranging from one-page snapshots to 3,000-word deep dives. Over that time I’ve read even more: the ones clients show me as examples of what they want, the ones competitors publish, the ones that show up as thought leadership assets in B2B sales cycles.
Continue reading “How to Write a Case Study That Actually Converts”
Fifteen years ago I interviewed a half-dozen experts about LinkedIn Groups. Here’s how their advice has aged.Continue reading “LinkedIn Groups in 2026: What My 2011 Article Got Right — And What Changed”
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
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.
Continue reading “The Content Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter (And the Ones to Ignore)”
By Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR · Strategic Communications, LLC
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.
Continue reading “The Art of the Interview: How to Get Better Stories from Subject Matter Experts”
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.
Continue reading “The GEO Revolution: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know Right 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.
Continue reading “Back to Business: Building Your Fall Content Strategy Now”
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.
Continue reading “What Old-School Journalism Still Teaches Modern Content Marketing”
