contentcreation Archives -

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.

Continue reading “Brand Voice: The One Thing AI Can’t Clone”

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.

Continue reading “Content Calendars That Actually Work: A Practitioner’s Guide”

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.

Continue reading “The 2026 Content Marketing Imperative: Know Your Audience”

Evaluating New Entrants to the World of Gen AI

GenAI Tools You Need to Know About

ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) tool, was released by OpenAI, and that tool was soon quietly followed by other entrants to the space, including Perplexity and Claude. Then DeepSeek burst onto the scene, far from quietly, in January 2025. Almost immediately, tech companies started to worry because DeepSeek supposedly represented a low-cost option, but now experts are saying that may not be the case.

But DeepSeek isn’t the only disruptive entrant in the space. There are a continually growing number of tools and features that content creators need to know about.

Staying on top of a continually evolving GenAI landscape

Continue reading “Evaluating New Entrants to the World of Gen AI”

Content Strategy Transformation

From keyword-based optimization to conversation-ready content

The fundamental shift from keyword-based optimization to conversation-ready content represents the most significant change in SEO strategy since mobile-first indexing.

Bernardo Castro, founder of Bybrand, explains the core transformation: Continue reading “Content Strategy Transformation”

B2B Messaging That Resonates

I recently responded to a reporter’s request for input on how to make business-to-business (B2B) content more memorable. It’s a great question, especially in a generative AI (GenAI) environment where an increasing amount of content is being generated by GenAI tools, rather than humans.

That automatically makes any content that you generate generic and marginally useful. Dare to be different! Here’s how.

Continue reading “B2B Messaging That Resonates”

LinkedIn Newsletters: #9 and #10 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership

With over 1.2 billion members as of January 2025, LinkedIn has evolved beyond networking to become a critical platform for B2B content distribution and thought leadership development. LinkedIn newsletters represent one of the most significant developments in B2B content distribution because they allow users to build their own audience within LinkedIn, offering professionals a direct channel to communicate with opted-in subscribers.

Here we synthesize expert insights from digital marketing specialists, CEOs, consultants, and content strategists who have successfully leveraged LinkedIn newsletters to achieve measurable business outcomes. Their collective experience provides a roadmap for organizations seeking to establish or optimize their LinkedIn newsletter strategy and is supported through our own work and experience.

Here are our final two tips and some key recommendations.
Continue reading “LinkedIn Newsletters: #9 and #10 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership”

LinkedIn Newsletters: #7 and #8 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership

Here’s #7 and #8 of 10 recommendations. Continue reading “LinkedIn Newsletters: #7 and #8 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership”

LinkedIn Newsletters: #6 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to share a roundup of input on how to create, manage, and effectively leverage LinkedIn newsletters to achieve marketing goals.

Here’s #6 of 10 recommendations. Continue reading “LinkedIn Newsletters: #6 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership”

LinkedIn Newsletters: #5 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership

In this post we synthesize expert insights from digital marketing specialists, CEOs, consultants, and content strategists who have successfully leveraged LinkedIn newsletters to achieve measurable business outcomes. Their collective experience provides a roadmap for organizations seeking to establish or optimize their LinkedIn newsletter strategy and is supported through our own work and experience.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to share a roundup of input on how to create, manage, and effectively leverage LinkedIn newsletters to achieve marketing goals.

Here’s #5 of 10 recommendations. Continue reading “LinkedIn Newsletters: #5 of 10 Expert Best Practices for B2B Thought Leadership”