Category: Uncategorized

Producing marketing that stands out in a crowded market is perhaps the biggest challenge creative teams face. And it’s one that’s likely to get harder as homogenised, AI-generated content overwhelms the internet. It’s maybe never been more important to be adventurous and unique – but how can you teach yourself to think outside the box? Where do the sparks of inspiration that really resonate come from?

At Radix, we’re often asked to come up with creative concepts for clients. And we also spend time finding original, creative angles for our own content, so new clients can find us. We actually have our own internal guide – a sort of creativity companion – full of exercises and techniques for shaking ideas free and approaching things in different ways.

So, we thought it might be useful to share some of the key takeaways from our guide that could help you unlock new ways of creative thinking.

Here are five simple rules for doing just that. (And a free, printable poster)

1. Embrace ‘bad’ ideas

There’s a lot of truth to the old expression “perfect is the enemy of done”.

Sometimes the desire to get something just so is a hinderance to doing anything at all. And when you’re stuck in the starting blocks because your idea isn’t absolutely perfect, it can spell trouble.

The truth is that getting started is sometimes the only thing that will bring clarity. It might be producing a first draft that unlocks the insight needed to improve it. Or it might be workshopping those ideas that almost work instead of discarding them because they’re not quite right. Either way, this is about removing barriers and actually getting things done – because perfect will probably never arrive.

Remember, bad ideas can lead to good ideas, and failed attempts plant the seeds for future best practice. You don’t want the public or your clients to see the things that don’t work, but, especially during ideation, don’t be afraid to experiment with new things. You’ll learn as much from what doesn’t work as what does, so encourage free thinking and an ‘anything goes’ mindset.

2. Put a different hat on it

The way you deliver information is just as important as the information itself. If everyone is talking about the same topic, is there a way you can stand out by choosing a different medium? Could a video series drive more engagement than a white paper for a busy CEO? Would a physical mailer set your offering apart? Or is there an emerging content type that could capture the imagination of your target audience?

A good marketing campaign requires a mix of content formats. But there’s no reason a generic ebook can’t be reimagined as a something more dynamic, interactive, and interesting that generates word of mouth.

3. Adopt a new identity

When we’re trying to come up with a fresh angle on a popular topic, one thing we do to  approach things differently is adopt different personas. There are a couple of ways we deploy this idea.

With our own content, decisions are often made based on our level of expertise on a topic. For instance, if it’s something we know well, we’ll adopt the persona of an expert. On the other hand, if it’s an emerging topic, we adopt the persona of a curator or interviewer and explore the subject through the eyes of those who do know (while educating ourselves and our audience in the process).

Here are some personas to try out:

The Expert

The expert is extremely knowledgeable in their field. They’ve seen it all play out before and are in a perfect position to provide advice or explain what something really means.

The Curator

On the other end of the spectrum is the curator; a watchful, thoughtful persona that scours and compiles different opinions. By exploring and comparing different takes on topics, you can become really useful to readers who want to gain a quick but thorough understanding of the subject.

The Trend Spotter

Predictions are risky, but there’s something intrinsic to human nature about wanting to know how the future will play out. By speculating (in an educated way) about the potential impact of emerging trends, you can create content that people really engage with – especially as this kind of content leaves lots of room for differing opinions.

The Interviewer

If there’s an interesting new topic that you don’t feel you have the authority to speak about, it can be useful to find an expert in the field (or more than one) and explore the topic in an interview. This is where your SMEs will come in handy. The added benefit of this is that your interviewees are likely to share the piece through their own channels, which will result in more engagement and traffic coming your way.

Another way to find a fresh angle is something we call the adjective game. We use this to find our voice or stance on a topic, writing a variety of headlines based on different adjectives. For instance, one that’s controversial, speculative, dismissive, amusing, or philosophical. These ideas don’t have to be immediately suitable, and it’s fine to be completely over the top. A slightly softer incarnation of an extreme headline can provide a good starting point to delve into a topic. It’s also a great way to come up with different subject lines for email campaigns.

4. Open up the floor

Within your teams, you’ll have lots of personality types, each with their own ways of tackling issues or generating ideas. Only you can think like you, but that also means you can only think like you. So, use the ideation stage of a campaign to field ideas from a broad range of people. You’ll be amazed at how differently they’ll tackle a challenge or topic, and you’ll find yourself with a wider range of perspectives and possibilities.

5. Get out of your head

As a writer, I never sit and stare at a blank page, because that’s when my brain says, “Nope.” There’s nothing less inspiring than a flashing cursor on an empty Word document.  In fact, I don’t even open a Word doc until I know what my first sentence is.

Trying to force ideas isn’t something that ever works. In fact, sometimes taking time away from that thinking allows those ideas to form properly in the back of your mind. Try stepping away; get your body moving, take a shower, walk the dog. Give your brain room to breathe and see what happens.  You can also try using different tools to force your brain into new ways of thinking. For instance, a pencil and paper might seem archaic, but they change the pace you work at, and this slightly more meditative and distraction-free state of mind might be exactly what you need.

Here, have a thing we made

There’s no single solution to creative thinking. Different things work for different people – but often the key is tricking yourself into thinking differently.

If you found these tips useful, you might like the printable poster we designed as a little reminder.

 

**When looking for inspiration for our internal creativity guide, I adapted some ideas from my friend Dion’s book, Creativity Begins With You. If you’d like to explore the topic in more detail, I highly recommend it.

 

Behind every successful B2B organisation, there’s an elite marketing team dedicated to building the brand and driving revenue. And behind every elite marketing team, there’s an inspirational leader.

Andrew Soane has decades of marketing leadership experience, and he knows what it takes to lead and scale high-performing marketing teams. We sat down with him to get to the heart of what great marketing leadership looks like.

Radix: What are the hallmarks of a successful marketing team? What are they doing that other teams aren’t?

Andrew: The strongest marketing teams are commercially obsessed. They operate as true revenue partners to the sales team, not as an internal service function. And that means having shared accountability (with sales) for pipeline quality, deal progression, and growth – and a relentless focus on building a repeatable revenue engine, not just running campaigns.

High-performing teams are also cross-functional by design. And the best marketers act as connectors, bringing together sales, product, partnerships, and delivery to create alignment around customers, value propositions, and go-to-market execution.

They’re also systems-driven, not hero-driven. Exceptional individuals matter, but it’s not scalable. The most effective teams embed marketing into the organisation’s operating model through clear business processes, shared data, and repeatable programmes, so impact isn’t reliant on a handful of people

Part of this systems-driven approach is having a programmatic balance of brand and performance marketing. Clearly, you’re not going to succeed if you’re over-indexing on brand and under-investing in performance, or vice versa. It’s left- and right-brain thinking; successful teams invest in long-term brand and trust while building demand engines that convert attention into measurable revenue.

And lastly, these days, truly effective teams are using AI and automation to build their insights, inform their planning, and handle repeatable tasks.

Radix: How do you define ‘success’ for a marketing team – and how do you measure it?

Andrew: For me, success comes down to revenue impact, and there are three outcome areas every marketing leader should track.

The first is about marketing’s contribution to growth. If marketing is truly a revenue partner to the business, then success is measured by growth contribution. Pipeline creation, win rate, and revenue influenced. These are the metrics that matter most at board and executive level.

The second is brand strength. That’s about indicators such as share of voice, inbound lead quality, brand searches, and so on. Signals that tell you whether the market understands who you are and why you matter.

And the third is execution health. Metrics like web traffic and engagement, MQLs, event performance, and conversion rates. The specific KPIs will vary by organisation, tactics, and channels, but the underlying principle remains the same. They should be seen as performance indicators, not end goals.

The mistake I see too often is marketing teams over-indexing on execution metrics when talking to the board. The C-suite cares less about MQL volume or funnel size, and far more about how marketing is accelerating pipeline and driving revenue growth.

Strong marketing leaders translate performance into a language their CRO, CEO, and other executive leaders understand. Today’s technology has given us is the ability to do this through shared dashboards and aligned reporting across marketing and sales. Investing in that transparency is critical to building trust and credibility at the top table.

Radix: As a leader, how do you nurture motivation and engagement across the team?

Andrew: Motivation starts with clarity of mission. Teams need to understand where the business is going, what it’s trying to achieve, and how each individual contributes to that journey.

People are far more engaged when they feel part of the plan, not just recipients of it. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to share wins, celebrate successes, and ensure teams get visibility with senior leadership so their impact is recognised.

Clear career pathways and opportunities to learn and develop are also critical. But perhaps the most important leadership skill is creating a culture of honesty and openness.

Truly effective leaders build 360° feedback into their teams. If I’m doing something that frustrates or slows you down, I want to hear about it so I can change my behaviour. Ultimately, I try to treat people the way I’d want to be treated myself. If you get that right, you can’t go far wrong.

I learned this early in my leadership career – sometimes the hard way. In my first big role as Managing Director, I was responsible for multiple UK teams, and I had to oversee a significant downsizing, visiting each office to make the announcement.

At the first office, I moved too quickly through the context and focused on the outcomes. I thought they would be more interested in the impact of what I was announcing – the planned redundancies themselves.

That evening, the local manager called to tell me the team were upset because they didn’t understand the reasoning behind the decision. So that night, I prepared like crazy, so I could answer every possible question anyone could have.

The next day, I returned to the same office, apologised and explained the full context, and answered each and every question openly. While people were still understandably unhappy about the redundancies, they felt respected, informed and able to participate in the consultation process in an informed way.

I learned a big lesson that day: in any change, transparency matters more than comfort. When people understand the why, they’re far more likely to take ownership, contribute constructively, and stay engaged even in difficult moments.

Radix: What are the building blocks of an effective marketing strategy?

Andrew: There’s a famous quote from Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

I love that idea. For me, strategy starts with absolute clarity on what the business is trying to achieve. That usually means beginning with revenue goals, then layering in ICPs, buyer personas, customer journeys, competitor gaps, market dynamics, and so on.

Very often, the hard work is going back to basics, with clearly defined offerings, sharp propositions, and a coherent product or services strategy. Without that foundation, it’s almost impossible to build an effective marketing strategy; you’re simply amplifying ambiguity.

Once you have that clear, customer-centric proposition and narrative in place, building the strategy becomes a collaborative exercise. The strongest strategies are built in partnership with sales, product, and partner teams, tailored to how the organisation actually goes to market.

When marketing plays that connective role, aligning stakeholders around clear choices and priorities, marketing and GTM strategy stops being a document and becomes a shared operating model for growth.

Radix: One final question – if you could give a marketer stepping into a leadership role just one piece of advice, what would it be?

Andrew: I’d encourage leaders to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking like a CRO. The real job of marketing leadership is to build marketing systems that drive sustainable growth, not just run activities.

That mindset shift is already changing the shape of senior marketing roles. I’m seeing more CMOs step into broader roles spanning strategy, growth, and commercial execution, in some cases evolving into Chief Strategy Officer or Chief Growth Officer roles. That’s a healthy and important development, because it positions marketing where it belongs, at the centre of business decision-making, with a clear line of sight to growth

Get even more insights in our B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook

If you’d like to learn more about driving marketing success, get your copy of our handbook, featuring contributions from a dream team of B2B marketing experts.

As I enter my fourteenth year as a B2B content writer, I’ve been reflecting on the various trends I’ve seen that were supposed to completely transform the content marketing world.

First came the great SEO panic. Then the regulation-driven tracking crash. And most recently, total AI Armageddon.

Each had a significant and lasting impact on how content is produced and campaigns are structured. But in hindsight, they didn’t really bring about the kind of fundamental change in our industry that many prophesied. The world kept turning, and the fundamentals of great content writing (largely) remained unchanged.

Today, we find ourselves face-to-face with a so-called traffic apocalypse. If we’re to learn from the past, we should respond in a proactive, yet measured, way – adapting quickly, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

But this time things feel different.

What is the ‘traffic apocalypse’?

The AI-powered results you see on Google today have created ‘zero-click’ searches. You search for something, AI provides you with an answer in Google, and you move on with your life.

As the name suggests, those searches involve zero clicks. If you’ve mastered GEO, AI might pull answers from your content. But the searcher never clicks through to your website.

That means no tracking, no ongoing content journey, and no opportunity to introduce the searcher to the offering you’re trying to sell to them.

It is, in many ways, apocalyptic. Content marketing as a concept is built on the idea that good content gets found through search, and that gets people onto your website and ultimately into your sales pipeline. This threatens to fundamentally undermine that model.

How worried should B2B marketers be about zero-click search?

While there’s no doubt that millions of zero-click searches are happening today, analysts seem divided on just how big their impact is. Estimates range from a 15% to around a 55% projected decrease in overall clickthroughs from organic search this year [i].

Wherever the number actually falls, clearly it’s not great news. But the amount it impacts you will really depend on the kind of marketer you are. If ad revenue generated through web traffic is one of your main revenue sources, this shift certainly could qualify as being apocalyptic.

But, if you’re in B2B, it might not actually change that much. AI summaries provide fast answers to simple questions. In B2B, we’ve always accepted that most customers do some amount of self-driven research on a topic before they make their way to your content and website.

In our field, we specialise in answering more complex questions. Nobody is making a million-dollar buying decision off a single AI summary to a basic question. Their journey may start there, but invariably it will still involve seeking more detailed answers to more complex questions down the line. That’s when they’ll come to you. Just as they always have.

How should B2B marketers be thinking about zero-click search?

With that said, it’s still not something we can afford to ignore. Zero-click search marks a shift in buyer behaviour and buying journeys. So, there are a few things we should keep in mind when planning and creating content:

#1) Make sure your content is included in AI summaries

Your buyers might not rely on AI summaries for answers to complex questions, but they certainly might use them to do something like gather a shortlist of vendors capable of meeting their needs. So, it’s important to take every measure possible to ensure your name and content shows up in those summaries.

My colleague George recently published a brilliant overview of how to do that.

#2) Get more specific with the questions your content answers

Space in AI summaries is limited. So, if you want to maximise your chances of showing up there, you’ll need to be very specific with the questions your content answers. Think of this in the same way you think about SEO. It’s tough to go after the most popular search terms, so refocus on answering questions that are tightly linked to your offering and likely to be asked by high-intent prospects.

#3) Provide deep content that meets B2B buyer needs

B2B buyers still need detailed answers to specific technical questions. Once they’ve found you from an AI summary, they’re still going to explore your content directly to assess whether your solutions are the right choice for them.

One mistake some brands are making today is leaning too heavily into answering basic high-level questions to help them compete for position in LLM-generated answers and summaries. It’s okay to do that, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of deeper, more detailed content that pushes prospects through that consideration stage and turns them into customers.

Maintain your commitment to creating quality content for humans

One of the good things about search LLMs like Google’s is that they look for high-quality, trusted content with a high degree of domain authority. So, in that sense, appealing to those LLMs is just business as usual for content marketers.

This isn’t the time to lean into tricks and contort your content to try to ensure you appear in as many zero-click search results as possible. Instead, stay the course, continue to focus on creating readable, authoritative, valuable, and genuinely insightful content that humans love.

Because after all, search LLMs aren’t out to undermine what you do. They just want to provide human searchers with the best information and content. Continue producing that, and you’ll be well on your way to mastering this brave new world.

I’m not saying don’t be scared. Just channel your concern into the fundamentals you already rely on. Because once again, we’re looking at a major shift that’s going to shake things up, but is unlikely to destroy everything.

[i] https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/

https://www.seo.com/blog/zero-click-searches/

https://www.jellyfish.com/en-gb/training/blog/how-zero-click-searches-are-changing-seo-in-2025

Alex Bacon is the Founder of BrightKeel.AI and an AI and marketing advisor who helps business leaders use AI and automation in targeted ways to support growth. We sat down with him to learn what it takes to use AI effectively and responsibly in B2B marketing.

Radix: What’s the biggest pitfall marketers should be aware of when they’re using AI?

Alex: The key thing to avoid is taking an extreme, all-or-nothing approach to AI.

At one end of the scale, you have marketers who dabble with AI and then abandon it. So for example. They might tell it to write a press release and then get something back in five seconds that looks great on the surface, but on closer inspection is garbage, so they just stop using AI. At the other extreme, you have people who see all the AI headlines and think they can just automate everything and get rid of the marketing team.

The reality is somewhere in the middle. It’s about understanding that the task of creating a piece of content is actually many different steps and you can map AI tools and assistants to the steps where it makes sense to use them. That could be doing the research, coming up with a suggested structure, or assessing whether the content will appeal to your ideal customer profile. But if you think you can just flip a switch and AI will do all of it, you’re probably going to fail.

Radix: So how can marketers be sure they’re making the most effective use of AI?

Alex: The first thing is to have the fundamentals in place before you start. That includes having a clear overarching strategy and value proposition, along with a messaging framework, a well-defined ICP, and persona-specific messaging. Without these fundamentals, AI usage will be directionless, and you’ll have conflicting and confusing messages out in the market. But if you’ve done this groundwork, you can feed, instruct, and use AI with the right context consistently, so you get results that are aligned to your strategy.

You also need a strategy outlining what you’re comfortable letting AI do and where human skills and expertise will still be required. You can’t just jump in and create loads of AI agents to do X, Y, and Z; it needs to be done in a deliberate, controlled way.

Whatever AI strategy you decide on, its success will be based on three pillars: education, culture, and leadership.

AI is like any other tool; people need to understand how to use it to get the most out of it. They need to feel confident in their ability to use the tool to get the right outcome, which requires education. Knowing how to prompt properly, build an assistant, train it, and so on is one element of it. But there’s also knowing your craft; even if I use AI, an experienced writer will produce something far better than I ever could, because that’s their job.

Culture is also very important. People need to feel they have permission to try new things – in a controlled, safe way – so they can find new efficiencies. There needs to be a culture of experimentation, where people accept that things aren’t going to be right first time and might even be less efficient to begin with as they’re learning.

Fostering that culture depends on strong leadership. There needs to be transparent, two-way communication between leaders and teams about fundamentals like AI strategies and responsible usage, as well as more experimental initiatives that might uncover new opportunities.

Radix: What kinds of things should marketers be looking out for to ensure they’re using AI responsibly and safely?

Alex: Historically, marketing teams didn’t create much risk in terms of data governance and compliance, but with AI potentially accessing all sorts of data sources, marketing needs to be part of that data stewardship conversation.

It’s not marketing’s call, of course, but the business needs to agree on what it’s comfortable exposing to public and in-house AI tools. You’re applying AI to amplify your capabilities and accelerate workflows. But if you don’t have the governance structures in place, you can easily amplify and accelerate the wrong things.

Once you’ve got a clear strategy and governance framework, it’s back to that education, culture, and leadership – making sure people understand what the guidelines and guardrails are and that they’re staying within them.

Radix: There’s also the potential risk of damaging the brand by publishing low-quality AI-generated content. How can marketers get value from AI while protecting their brand?

Alex: If you want to avoid putting out AI slop, it comes back to establishing in advance what you’re comfortable using AI for. You need to look at the steps in the content creation process and decide where you want a human to be in the loop. That will vary depending on your market and your risk tolerance.

For example, you might decide you want all your writing to be done by humans and AI will take care of the steps around that, like research, structure, and targeting. Or you might decide to have AI write your drafts and then you’ll review and edit them.

If you’re all-in on AI, that review and editing process is absolutely vital to avoid putting out content that’s too generalised or contains bias, inaccuracies, or fabrications. For example, I came across a blog post recently that had loads of really valuable stats in it, and I thought, “This is gold!” But I also thought, “This sounds too good to be true.” So I backtracked to try to find the sources, and the stats were completely made up – it was all just nonsense that someone had prompted AI to generate.

Problems like these arise when people outsource the thinking to AI, which is not really what it’s best at. That’s when you end up with the slop. Making something engaging and meaningful is really a human-to-human activity, so effective content depends on ensuring humans retain control of the critical thinking behind it.

Radix: Finally, if you could give a marketer just one piece of advice about using AI effectively, what would it be?

Alex: Identify where human input is really valued and work around that. Figure out how you can remove, improve, or automate the other parts of the process. So whether it’s defining strategy, writing content, or talking to customers, determine what you want to ringfence for human input and expertise before using AI to fill in any appropriate gaps.

Get more expert insights in our B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook

If you’re keen to learn more about how to get great content into the world – with or without an artificial helping hand – get your copy of our handbook , featuring contributions from experts across the B2B marketing landscape.

Just to be clear from the outset, I’m not here to tell you AI has no place in content creation. Every day, I work with smart marketers and technologists at companies that are expanding the boundaries of AI’s usefulness. But while they rightly evangelise about the amazing things AI can do, they’re very clear about what it can’t – or shouldn’t – do.

Generative AI, for example, is excellent at analysing large amounts of data, identifying patterns, and predicting what comes next in a sequence. That makes it great at holding natural-feeling conversations with human users, summarising unstructured data like writing, and producing credible-looking writing of its own. However, like so much in life, there’s a trade-off.

Productivity vs effectiveness

This year’s CMI B2B Content & Marketing Trends survey found that the vast majority (89%) of B2B marketers are using AI for some aspect of content creation. Of that group, 87% have seen productivity increase, which is great. But 12% say content quality has decreased as a result of using AI, which isn’t so great.

Interestingly, 40% of respondents say they still struggle with ‘Creating content that prompts desired action’. And when marketers focus on increasing outputs (making lots of content) rather than improving outcomes (making content that gets results), that challenge will remain, no matter how much AI they throw at it.

AI can be an important part of the solution to this problem, but it’s unlikely to move the content effectiveness needle on its own, for a few important reasons.

AI doesn’t laugh

AI knows the setup-punchline structure of a joke. It’s read every joke ever written, and it knows which words are most statistically likely to appear next in that structure. But it doesn’t understand why something is funny.

Humour is intrinsically tied to shared human experience and emotions. It’s the reason watching sitcoms alone is no fun, and why we can watch our favourites again and again and still laugh out loud.

Now obviously, humour isn’t especially relevant in a white paper about headless CMS integration challenges, but emotion is very relevant. Great writing, even on bland topics, creates some sort of emotional connection between the reader and the author. That requires empathy to show (even if it’s hiding in the subtext) you have a shared understanding of why the CMS integration challenge is so difficult and the emotions attached to that experience.

A statistical algorithm can’t empathise with the human experience, so it can’t form an empathetic connection with the reader. That might be fine for a run-of-the-mill SEO blog that just needs to exist to generate traffic, but it’s unlikely to be effective for thought leadership content that needs to get engagement.

AI doesn’t understand what it writes

The label ‘artificial intelligence’ is quite misleading, especially in the case of large language models (LLMs), as there’s no meaningful ‘intelligence’ at play at all. There’s a lot of data crunching and statistical modelling at orders of magnitude beyond what a human could do, but there’s no real thinking.

AI can make highly educated guesses that certain words should appear in a certain order in response to a prompt, but it doesn’t understand the words’ meaning. Because AI outputs are a string of ‘tokens’ – connected by their likelihood to appear together rather than their meaning, context or impact – LLMs tend to produce facsimiles of meaning. Facsimiles that get fainter each time they’re reproduced.

And so, there’s always a danger that AI-generated content will substitute familiar tropes, hackneyed phrasing, and superficial readability for real substance, critical analysis, and original thought. But these qualities are vital for creating credible, engaging and, most importantly, compelling content.

At a macro level, as AI-generated content proliferates, there’s also the danger of model collapse, where each generation of LLMs learns from the outputs of previous generations, so errors are amplified over time until the outputs are too unreliable to be useful.

This isn’t to say that AI can’t be a helpful writing companion for marketers. Many find it incredibly useful for proposing initial ideas or approaches and generating early drafts for more straightforward assets. It’s just worth keeping in mind that AI doesn’t understand what it’s saying, so it might not always say the things that will engage the right audience and compel them to take action.

AI has no skin in the game

If there’s nothing at stake, then there’s no incentive to produce accurate, authoritative content that generates meaningful engagement. For marketers, there’s plenty at stake: brand equity, product awareness, lead generation, ROI, personal reputation…

But AI has no horse in this race; its only ‘incentive’ is that individual users respond positively to its outputs. This is a particular issue for LLMs, which are mostly trained through reinforcement learning based on user feedback. And as researchers at Anthropic established a couple of years ago, this leads to a phenomenon called AI sycophancy, where models will produce outputs that users like, regardless of whether those outputs are factually correct or ethically sound.

With no consequences for its actions, AI doesn’t need to check its sources, or even have any sources in the first place. This was highlighted recently when Deloitte agreed to pay the Australian government a partial refund on a report that contained AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent research and a fabricated ‘quote’ from a court judgment.

As I said earlier, AI can be a very useful tool for marketers, helping accelerate various elements of the content creation process. But it’s important to use it for what it’s good at and not rely on it for things it struggles to comprehend.

Great content – the assets and campaigns that create connections and start valuable conversations – demands human empathy, critical thinking, and fresh perspectives. And the best way to get that is to fill your team with people who challenge assumptions based on their experiences and expertise.

Oh, and you should probably find a specialist copywriting partner who will do the same, and put their skin in the game alongside you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the course of 2025, there’s been an important shift in content marketing. The industry’s becoming overloaded with cookie-cutter content that’s easy to ignore, and savvy marketers are responding with bold, outside-the-box campaigns that are sure to grab their audience’s attention.

The rapid evolution of content marketing is set to continue through 2026, too. So what are the biggest challenges you’ll face? And how can you adapt to make sure your content continues to get results?

Three trends you need to watch out for in 2026

• Quality will remain king when it comes to high-performing content
• Human and AI-generated content will be a careful balancing act
• Your audience will move away from traditional search engines

Quality will remain king when it comes to high-performing content

CMI’s 2026 B2B Content and Marketing Trends Report shows that content relevance and quality was the biggest factor that improved the effectiveness of B2B marketing over the past year. In fact, 65% of respondents who rated their marketing as highly or somewhat effective in the last 12 months listed it as a key reason why. And having the right team skills and capabilities was just behind at 59%.

It’s clear that marketing effectiveness in 2025 was driven by content quality and the people that make it happen. And that’s set to continue into 2026, as marketers look for ways to help their brand stand out.

Increasing your content’s quality means looking at everything you do, and figuring out how to take it to the next level.

Personalisation needs to go beyond ‘Hi [Name]’ and promote an authentic and human understanding of the person you’re writing to. Thought leadership content needs to convey genuinely original, expert ideas. And organic and paid ads must be bold, provocative, and impossible to scroll past.

Human and AI-generated content will be a careful balancing act

We can’t talk about content marketing trends for 2026 without acknowledging the role of generative AI.

According to CMI’s report, of the B2B marketers whose organisations use AI-powered marketing applications, 89% are using content creation tools for generating or optimising written content. And while 87% of that group have seen an improvement in productivity, only 39% have seen an improvement in content performance.

The conflict between performance and productivity will be a major theme throughout 2026, with CMI’s report finding the two top challenges content marketers are facing are creating content that prompts a desired action (40%) and resource constraints (39%).

This highlights the biggest battle for content marketers going into 2026 – whether to focus more on human or AI-generated content.

AI content is faster and cheaper to produce, so for those with the biggest resource constraints, it can be incredibly appealing. When you can create content in a fraction of the time it would usually take, you free up more hours to strategize and develop creative ideas that will grab your audience’s attention. However, it’s unlikely your AI-generated content will stand out itself, particularly as spaces become more saturated with it, so you’ll have to be strategic about exactly when and where you use it.

Human content generates far more leads, so for people wanting to maximise engagement and conversions, it’s well worth the extra investment. While research into the exact numbers is still in its infancy, one study found human-generated content had 5.44x more traffic than AI-generated content. So, if you have a high-value campaign on the horizon that you’re banking on generating good leads, having human-written content is a must.

In reality, content marketing in 2026 is likely to involve a mix of human and AI-generated content. Your success will depend how strategic you are about when to use each method. It’s still humans who make business purchasing decisions, so human-to-human content remains the most engaging tool in your belt.

High-value assets such as case studies, thought leadership articles, gated content, personalised ABM, and organic and paid ads will benefit the most from a human touch. And you can use AI-generated content to buy you the time you need give those assets the attention they deserve.

Your audience will move away from traditional search engines

Generative AI isn’t just changing how content marketing is written; it’s changing how it’s searched for. More and more people are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines, so you need to know how to create content that AI finds and trusts.

The shift towards zero-click search means generative engine optimisation (GEO) is becoming more important for ensuring your content is understood by AI and used to inform summaries and responses to user prompts. If you collect feedback from new business leads about how they discovered your brand, you might have already noticed that people are beginning to be sent to your door after a conversation with ChatGPT. And that will become more normal as time goes on. That means you need to begin optimising your content for LLMs sooner rather than later, and get your brand into AI’s ‘consciousness’ ahead of your competitors.

It’s not just GEO you need to think about though, even people who are still using traditional search engines are changing the way they search. For years now, people have been using natural language to search with voice assistants like Siri and ‘Hey Google’. Over time, and with growing use of LLMs, it’s bled into written searches, too.

For example:

20 years ago, if you were looking to buy a new games console, you might have searched “PlayStation 2”

10 years ago, you might have searched “Xbox vs PlayStation”

5 years ago, you might have searched “Does Xbox or PlayStation have better games?”

And today you might search “Should I get an Xbox or a PlayStation if I like playing platformers?”

Search terms are getting longer and that means long-tail keywords will become even more important in your content. If you can find the right phrases to optimise for, you can reach a higher volume of the specific audience you’re targeting.

Enter 2026 with the confidence to thrive

If you’re looking to improve the quality of your content in 2026, build your understanding of where human-written content will deliver the most impact, or learn how to create content that AI finds and trusts, we can help.

Get in touch today, and we can talk about your specific needs.

 

 

Performance measurement. It’s the closing chapter in the content production process. A chance to take a beat and reflect on the impact of your newly launched asset before you start all over again on your next piece.

Well, not quite. If you want to set yourself up for good data and a meaningful look at how your content is performing, you need to start thinking about measurement much earlier in the process. To help us pinpoint the right time to start planning (and answer a few probing questions about the pitfalls of content metrics) we spoke to performance marketing expert Neil Stoneman.

Radix: Hi Neil, thanks for talking with us! Let’s start at the beginning: when’s the right time to start thinking about performance measurement for content?

Neil: Working out an ROI figure for content isn’t the easiest thing in the world. So you need to have conversations about measurement at the very start of the content production process if you want to be successful. You need clear goals if you want clear metrics.

That means collaborating more closely than many organisations generally manage. If departments or teams operate as silos, they’ll deliver as silos. Everyone in the chain needs to invest time in understanding the other components of marketing and how they’re contributing to the whole.

Radix: What happens if marketers don’t do this prep work up front?

Neil: Marketing isn’t an exact science, but in my experience, the quality of the writing and design is pretty closely correlated to the success of a piece. Skipping the prep work puts these components in jeopardy.

Say you’re creating an ebook. If your writers know what it’s for, where it’s going to be deployed, and what the marketing team want to achieve with it, they can make decisions accordingly. Same goes for the designers, the web team, and everyone else involved.

You can’t apply metrics retroactively and expect content to perform well – it just won’t be set up for it. If a piece is out in the world and there hasn’t been a conversation and a plan for what it should achieve and what success looks like, that ship has sailed.

Radix: How can content marketing teams keep their goals front and centre during the creation process?

Neil: Goals have a habit of disappearing during the process, which can create a lot of chaos as the project diverges from the original plan.

Without the ultimate goal in mind, stakeholders can get distracted by the minutiae. And then they suddenly switch from worrying about the tone of voice to asking how many leads their content produced.

Your initial goals should serve as a guide for every decision you make throughout the process. Sometimes that requires careful stakeholder management or firm pushback to manage expectations and keep a project on track. Keeping marketers, SMEs, creatives, and other stakeholders on the same page throughout means you’re more likely to produce successful content.

Radix: Some types of content are harder to monitor than others. How can you measure content performance when it’s in a difficult-to-track format?

Neil: People often ask, “Is content a channel?” And many would say it isn’t, and that it can’t be used as a channel. But there are simple additions that help even static formats act as a channel.

To go back to the ebook example, even a PDF can offer useful metrics – if you make sure you include effective calls to action. CTAs shouldn’t just float at the end of the document; they need to be contextual, especially in long pieces that cover a lot of different topics.

If you mark each CTA with its own UTM tag, you’ll be able to see exactly what convinced your reader to move on to the next stage in the process. Anecdotally, some of my clients have seen three times more conversions on demos and contact forms from content readers versus non-content readers.

Radix: In performance measurement, there’s always a lot of talk about the negatives of ‘vanity’ metrics. Do you think marketers focus on the wrong metrics?

Neil: I don’t really believe in ‘vanity’ metrics. I think all metrics, even surface-level ones like views and open rates, are useful.

These days, marketing needs to deliver a commercial outcome, but proving that delivery is notoriously difficult. There’s rarely a simple way to link marketing activities to revenue, for example. But if you’re going to start a process with creative and content, the first thing you need it to do is to generate a response. And vanity metrics are generally the best way to track that initial response.

If you publish something on LinkedIn and it gets no vanity metrics, then it’s not going to achieve the other, more important goals either. If no one likes, shares, or reposts it, it’s definitely not going to galvanize a buying committee to spend $2.5 million dollars on your offering.

Say I was working with new B2B client with high revenue targets and a long sales cycle. I couldn’t say we’d achieve a revenue uplift in two weeks. It’s not possible. But I can use vanity metrics to start to show more audience engagement in that period – they might just be the only metrics you have for the first couple of months. They’re not the be all and end all, but they show we’ve taken the right steps towards solving the conundrum.

Get more expert insights in our B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook

This is just a small excerpt of the expertise Neil shared with us – and we’ve got even more advice to share from other industry veterans. If you’d like to explore the rest of the topics, ranging from content strategy to optimisation, get your copy of our handbook or read our other Expert Q&As.

How many channels make up your marketing strategy?

While we were putting together our The B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook this year, we spoke with one expert about the most popular channels for content promotion. Unsurprisingly, their opinion was that LinkedIn and Meta make great bookends of a B2B strategy. And they’re entirely correct. This is primarily because one is where people go for work stuff and the other is where people spend their free time. It all makes perfect sense – but is there a neglected opportunity if you only pursue these channels?

We were recently exploring the archives of the Radix blog and found a post from 2016 about using Reddit as a marketing channel. If you’re raising a quizzical eyebrow right now, you’re not alone – it was news to me too. But it turns out, that post may be more relevant now than it was when it was written.

The community forum site has recently overtaken Facebook as the second most visited website in the US, and there has been increasing talk on LinkedIn about its value as part of a B2B strategy. But when we asked our team, a collection of B2B writers with an average of nine years’ experience, not one of us could recall Reddit ever being mentioned as part of a client’s strategy.

So, is Reddit B2B’s best kept secret? Are people actually using it? Or is this an example of where what makes sense in theory doesn’t quite work out in practice?

To figure this out, let’s first look at the benefits Reddit might offer for B2B marketers.

New to Reddit?

You may know Reddit as a vast online community forum, with more than 138,000 ‘Sub Reddits’ devoted to various interests, from information technology to random musings.

What you might not know, however, is its potential for marketing. Here are some quick stats:

• 51% of all online purchasing discussions take place on Reddit²
• 90% of users trust Reddit to learn about products and brands³
• 5x higher ROAS when customers come from Reddit⁴

¹ Brandwatch, Global, Oct 2023 – Mar 2024² YPulse, US, 2021³ Brandwatch, Global, Oct 2023 – Mar 2024⁴ Luth Research, 2021, US

The power of Reddit as a platform is that its users go there for information from like-minded peers. It’s essentially a vast network of little online hangouts where people hide from their emails. Which means if you find an appropriate sub, you have access to a virtual room full of your target audience.

For instance, r/artificial, a sub dedicated to AI and machine learning, attracts 263,000 weekly visitors. The people in subs like this might not always be the people making buying decisions, but if they’re not, they’re probably people who your product is designed for, and therefore the ones who can influence those decisions.

Theoretically, this makes Reddit a great place to put ads to reach your audience. And with so many buying journeys beginning or passing through there, it’s also a great place to openly (and transparently) share product information. But there is another use case that may prove just as valuable.

The importance of being a good listener

Reddit is where people go for expert advice on various subjects. (Or at least advice, you can’t always guarantee its quality because…well, it’s the internet.)

This can be anything from cloud technology to specific software solutions, with many products having their own dedicated subs. This makes it the ideal environment for learning about your customers’ or prospects’ challenges and needs.

By monitoring these conversations, you open up a world of possibilities. Some of those stretch beyond marketing and are related to things like enhancing the customer experience. For instance, by having employees in Reddit subs, you can respond to queries or even inform product updates based on frequently asked questions or requests.

You can also learn something about how competitor solutions are performing. What’s missing from the latest iteration of their product? Is there an element of yours that solves this issue that you can promote in your marketing?

As a listening platform, Reddit offers many advantages. But pursuing those advantages does require a certain amount of dedication. There are no shortcuts. You can’t just post and run; you need to spend time listening, establishing yourself as a credible voice, answering community questions, starting discussions, and providing valuable tips.

And this might be one of the reasons many B2B marketers aren’t using it. It’s something that takes time – and we could all use a little more of that.

But there is another reason…

Authenticity is key

The USP of Reddit is the authenticity of its communities. And that’s great, but also problematic. Problematic because it means people don’t want necessarily want to be marketed to there. At least not beyond the ads we’ve all become accustomed to on websites. Instead, people want genuine answers, and there’s nothing less trustworthy than a sales pitch disguised as an answer.

That poses an interesting challenge for marketers. Because although the value of having communities full of your prospects is fairly clear, as is the ROI of any ads you place there, it’s very difficult to demonstrate the value of the hours you spend listening and engaging in conversation.

Welcome to the world of GEO

Perhaps one of the reasons we’ve heard so much about Reddit as a B2B channel in recent months is because of the rise of generative engine optimisation (GEO).

If you’re not familiar with GEO yet, it’s essentially SEO for the AI age. At this nascent stage of the AI boom, most of us are still trying to figure out what the inner workings of GEO mean for our content and how to get the best out of it. Much like SEO, it’s very likely that the rules around writing for GEO will continue to change, making keeping pace a Sisyphean endeavour.

What we can say for sure, however, is that Reddit has been very good at elevating GEO results, largely due to paid partnerships to feed  AI overviews and ChatGPT responses. These overviews are designed to summarize helpful, conversational, and community-generated content. And that’s Reddit in a nutshell. However, this isn’t without its problems.

The result of Reddit’s influence on AI has been ‘GEO stuffing’; people spamming Reddit subs with mentions of their product to rank higher in results. That, and the rather huge problem that information on Reddit often can’t be verified, has caused ChatGPT to draw from the site less and less in recent months.

What this means for the future as algorithms evolve is anyone’s guess. But finding a way to get the most out of the platform may still yield significant benefits when it comes to helping people find and engage with your brand.

Are you using Reddit?

It seems there are some clear benefits to Reddit as a B2B platform. But also some drawbacks in terms of the amount of time that must be invested for anything beyond just placing ads, and the difficulty proving the return on that time investment.

For most B2B brands, it’s hard to look past the mainstays of LinkedIn and Meta for marketing activities. After all, budgets aren’t infinite and change can be scary. However, there may be some value in experimenting on a small scale with something new.

What do you think? Are you using Reddit for your B2B marketing? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

First, marketers had to optimise their messages for print. Then there was SEO and mobile-first optimisation. And now, in the era of AI and large language models (LLMs), we have generative engine optimisation (GEO), a new opportunity for brands to stand out.

GEO is about optimising content to ensure it’s being read and understood by AI. And in turn, that means it’s more likely to appear in AI-generated search summaries or responses to user prompts.

So, why does GEO matter? And what can marketers do to make sure their content gets noticed by AI?

What is GEO?

For years, search engines have been trying to get people answers to their questions as quickly as possible. That used to mean rapidly providing a list of relevant web pages. Now, it often means bypassing web pages completely, with LLMs delivering answers and summaries to people directly.

The key for marketers is that if someone searches for a product or service, these answers and search summaries can (and often will) include relevant brands. GEO is about optimising your content and online presence to make sure your brand is the one that AI notices and puts front and centre.

Why is GEO important?

GEO represents how easy it is for LLMs to understand and summarise your brand and its content. That pulls double duty, as it makes your brand more likely to appear in responses to user questions, but it also means your brand has a better chance of appearing in the summaries displayed at the top of AI-powered search engines.

Being mentioned in a small summary that’s only displayed for a subset of users might not seem like a grand prize. But this could easily become a key battleground for prospect and customer attention. As AI overviews become increasingly common, research suggests users will rely on these overviews over clicking through to web pages.

An Authoritas study found that when a query triggers an AI overview, clickthrough rates drop by 47.55% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile compared to queries with no overview.[i] Worse yet, when someone expands the AI overview, the additional pixels on the screen drop the first traditional web page result down by up to 1,585 pixels, depending on the size of the summary. That’s almost 1.5x the viewport height on a standard desktop – so your page will likely get pushed below the fold.

And just as conventional web pages shortened sales cycles and empowered buyers to compare products on their own – without talking to salespeople – AI summaries will likely shorten the sales cycle further. That means getting into AI summaries and answers isn’t just a marketing issue; it’s potentially a direct way to boost sales.

While traditional SEO will still be vital in mitigating the damage, optimising your content to appear in these AI overviews can be another way to keep your brand in front of your audience.

As David McGuire, Radix alumnus and consultant Windhover B2B, puts it: “What AI-powered search takes away in clickthroughs, it can make up for in recommendations. I recently met someone who’d had eight consecutive new business calls from ChatGPT shortlists. As traditional search gets phased out, this is going to be increasingly normal.”

It’s worth noting that GEO is an emerging area. Plenty is changing about how AI summaries work, and there’s even debate about whether GEO is worth pursuing at all. But the reality is that the strategies you might use to improve GEO will also pay dividends for SEO objectives and engaging human readers. Even if you’re sceptical about GEO, it’s worth following best practices and guidance, as they can potentially improve many aspects of your content.

How different is GEO to SEO?

I know what you’re thinking: “I already optimised my web content for search. Is this just a case of doing the same thing again for AI?”

The answer isn’t a straight yes or no. Many SEO efforts support GEO as well. For example, good SEO principles are more likely to get your brand and content into Google’s Featured Snippets – those summaries that used to appear for common searches a few years before LLMs came on the scene.

Authoritas’ research found that brands in Featured Snippets were sourced in AI overviews 63.3% of the time. Other experiments found that many outputs from LLMs connected to the web draw from sources in the first two pages of major search engines. So, if you’re topping the search rankings already, there’s a good chance you’ll get LLMs’ attention.

However, LLMs and search engine web crawlers analyse pages differently, so good SEO doesn’t guarantee GEO.

SEO is largely about individual words and links

SEO is complex, but if you boil it down to its base elements, SEO rankings are mostly decided by keywords in written content and backlinks that demonstrate a page has authority on a particular topic.

The same techniques that lead to good SEO will also contribute to GEO. On the other side of the coin, bad SEO is also detrimental to GEO efforts, with one study finding that using too many keywords significantly reduced the likelihood of appearing in AI summaries.[ii]

GEO is about how things are written

LLMs look at large volumes of text to understand overall intent and meaning. That means individual keywords and links aren’t as important as overall trends in writing and repeated exposure to certain words and ideas.

A key consideration is how a particular LLM accesses web content. If an LLM:

• Has access to live search: then it has access to web content in real time
• Doesn’t have live search: then it only works with training data, so will only consider terms from pre-existing web content

The main difference is when an LLM without live search was trained. For example, the initial ChatGPT launch model was only trained on data up to 2019, so anything more recent than that would have had no chance of showing up in its answers.

How do we optimise for generative AI?

Just like SEO, GEO is all about writing in a way that simultaneously appeals to human readers and to LLMs that scan your web content.

David spent some time surveying how the current crop of LLMs and AI-powered search engines analyse text and surface answers. He found several common themes in how LLMs engage with the written word. While LLMs are rapidly changing, these themes give us a sense of early best practices for GEO.

Before we get started, if you’d like a really helpful summary of GEO tips, check out this GEO writing checklist from Windhover B2B:

Focus on fluid, readable writing

One of the biggest differences between SEO and GEO is that writing style can have a huge  impact on GEO success. Early reports suggest the fluidity and readability of a written piece have a major influence on whether AI will pay attention to it.

So, avoid overly formal, stuffy writing; it’s very easy for AI and humans to ignore. LLMs are looking for high-quality, engaging writing that indicates human authority and expertise. The kind of writing you might get from, say, a really experienced copywriter who’s just interviewed one of your most knowledgeable and passionate SMEs.

Use content structures that signpost readers

Few readers will complain about a blog or ebook being too easy to follow. But clear signposting is even more important to ensure LLMs can quickly scan your content and identify it as an authoritative answer to people’s questions.

That means things like Q&A blogs, step-by-step guides, listicles, and other highly structured content are important for GEO, as they’re easy to read for humans and AI.

In other types of content, bulleted lists, tables, and small paragraphs all scan better for LLMs. Keeping paragraphs short (below 100 words, ideally) makes your content more likely to be favoured by LLMs.

For bonus points, include a contents section and author bio to show LLMs what to expect in your content and the credentials of the person who wrote it.

Hyperfocus on headers

Even if you don’t want to commit to endless Q&A posts, more conventionally structured pieces can still be optimised for LLMs by writing clear, descriptive headers that set up each section.

Just make sure to deliver whatever your headers and subheads promise. As LLMs assess entire pieces for overall meaning and impact, they’ll likely disregard pieces they see as disjointed or unable to answer user questions.

Write the way LLM users do

LLMs are built to respond to questions. By and large, that means they’ll also be looking for question and answer pairings they can feed to users.

Using questions in your content as a rhetorical device can lead to quick GEO wins. For example, in a blog about the best SaaS CRM platforms, you might directly ask the reader, “What are the best SaaS CRM platforms on the market today?” Or, you might want to structure subheads as questions, with each section providing the answer.

Broaden the topics you focus on

Unlike the web crawlers that contribute to search results, LLMs aren’t just looking for relevant keywords for a single query. LLMs look for entire answers to a user’s intent, and that often involves going beyond the answer to one question and offering additional context and information.

For content marketers, this means that answering a single specific question in your content might put it at risk of being overlooked by AI. Instead, try covering broader topics and offering complementary insights to capture the interest of your human and AI readers.

Get your content (and your brand) in multiple places

Web-enabled LLMs will look at multiple sources while answering a question. So, if you can get your brand and content in multiple locations, you stand a better chance of hitting AI overviews and Featured Snippets.

Collaborate with third parties, syndicate your content, and try guest blogging on other sites to expand your reach and your chances of being noticed by LLMs.

Just remember, the sites LLMs lean on could shift over time. Just as Reddit and OpenAI forged a partnership, there’s a chance specific sites will pair with LLMs, impacting which places savvy marketers should target in their GEO efforts.

Establish authority with credible stats and sources

While trying to answer user queries, LLMs depend on sources they see as authoritative. By incorporating statistics and quotes from established, credible sources, you can show LLMs your content is the right place to pull answers from.

GEO and AI optimisation is a nudge, not a revolution

It’s a lot to think about, but the eagle-eyed reader (or LLM that may be attempting to summarise this blog for a Featured Snippet, he says hopefully) will notice that none of these steps are drastic changes to the usual formula.

Write well, clearly, in a snappy structure with decent variety, and you’re already halfway there. Add in a few tweaks to where you place your content and how regularly, and you’ll be well on your way to GEO success.

And wouldn’t you know it, we recently published The B2B Content Marketer’s Handbook: a selection of tips from industry experts to help improve all aspects of your content delivery. While it’s not about GEO specifically, much of the advice in it will set you up for success with AI results and human readers. Download it now.

 

[i] https://www.authoritas.com/seo-ai-research-whitepapers/the-state-of-aios-user-intent-research-dec-2024

[ii] https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/geo-generative-engine-optimization

 

 

 

Great B2B technology marketing content showcases your unique expertise, perspectives, and insight. The trouble is, in most organisations those things tend to be trapped in the minds of busy Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

Over the years, we’ve worked with a lot of amazing marketers. But when it comes to effectively engaging a diverse team of SMEs, one of the most adept is Senior Communications Manager, Rebecca Kalra.

Rebecca manages a global team of SMEs and uses their insights to create consistently great marketing content. Recently, she kindly agreed to sit down with us and share some advice to help you do the same.

Radix: Hi Rebecca! First things first, from a marketer’s perspective, what makes a great SME?

Rebecca: It’s hard to say exactly what makes an SME ‘great’, as the ideal person to provide input for your content will depend on what you’re trying to create. However, there are a few general traits that I try to look out for when engaging new SMEs.

The perfect SME will be a leading authority on the topic within your organisation, a good communicator, value the role marketing plays in your organisation’s success, and understand your target audience and the challenges they face. It’s also important that they’re comfortable being interviewed, and it helps if they’re keen to build their own professional profile.

Invariably, the best SMEs have a unique balance between expertise and storytelling skill. They offer their insights without getting lost in jargon. In a perfect world you’re looking for someone who can communicate with passion, credibility, and clarity.

Radix: That’s great. And what comes next then? Once you’ve chosen a SME to provide input for your content project, how do you get that input from them?

Rebecca: Typically, SME input is gathered by me and the copywriter. We do this on an interview call, and the value of that call really rests on how well you prepare yourself and your SME for it.

Before jumping into an interview, your SMEs should know exactly what to expect. People don’t like being blindsided, so get the basics down into a briefing document for them, clearly set your expectations, and enable them to prepare answers to questions beforehand so they come into the meeting feeling confident.

Radix: Once you’re in that meeting is there anything you do to make sure everyone gets what they need from it?

Rebecca: If you’ve prepared well and everyone knows what to expect – and what’s expected of them – you should be well on your way to having an extremely productive and valuable input session. But, even then, it can be pretty easy for things to go off track.

This is where the relationship between the marketer and copywriter is so important. Great interviews are co-managed by marketers and copywriters. If one of you goes off on a tangent, for example, the other should be able to bring things back onto the core topic. It’s a mutually supportive relationship.

The marketer and writer should work in tandem to keep the SME on topic, put them at ease, and ensure you get through everything on your agenda within the allotted time. It sounds simple, but it can be incredibly tough to do consistently.

Radix: And after you’ve got your input from the SME, how do you keep things moving and keep them engaged with the content development process?

Rebecca: When you’re choosing SMEs, you’re also looking for someone who respects timelines and is open to feedback. You don’t just need buy-in at the start of your project – you’ll need their feedback until the process is complete.

If you’ve kept them in the loop and communicated your needs and expectations well, your SME shouldn’t be surprised when you send them the copy. In fact, they should be excited to see the wonders your writer has spun from the raw insight they provided.

Providing feedback can be quite an uncomfortable process for people the first few times. So, make sure they know that their feedback will be required, and that you really need them to be honest and direct about anything the writer has misinterpreted. You don’t want to get into a situation where they wave something through that’s almost right just to avoid a perceived conflict— or to just get the task off their desk.

Radix: So, with that all said and done, the process is over, right? Mission complete?

Rebecca: Not exactly! If the SME proved to be a valuable source of insight, you’re going to want to repeat that process again the future. So, my final tip is that you should always celebrate the success of your content with the SMEs involved.

Share the final version with them so they can appreciate what they helped shape. Tell them what it’s helped you achieve, and make sure they feel valued. If possible, share it in ways that help boost the SME’s profile, so they get something out of the deal too.

The real key to building great relationships with SMEs is working out how to make them mutually beneficial. If you do a little bit of digging, you may find your SMEs have ambitions you could support, like being featured in a specific publication. They help you achieve your marketing goals, so find something you can help them achieve in return.

Get more tips in our B2B content marketer’s handbook

Rebecca was one of many experts who contributed to the creation of our B2B content marketer’s handbook. For more practical tips from her, and a range of experts from across the B2B content marketing industry, download your copy now.