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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.

You may have written the world’s best piece of B2B content. But unless you can get eyes on it, it won’t raise anyone’s awareness or generate even the most lukewarm of leads. With millions of marketers fighting for online attention, how can you make sure your piece stands out?

To get some advice on the art of online content promotion, we spoke to Robyn Pierce, an expert in social media promotion, LinkedIn marketing, paid social strategy, and campaign management.

 

Radix: Hi Robyn, let’s start with a basic one. Where should B2B marketers be sharing their content? Is it all about LinkedIn?

Robyn: Well, it’s the one social network that absolutely positions itself as a professional network. And from a paid media point of view, there are lots of different ways you can target people based on their professional lives, whether that’s their job title or the company they work for. So it gives you the confidence that you can reach the right people to influence a buying decision.

However, there’s been a lot of talk in recent years about “humanising B2B”. We’re people – we don’t live on LinkedIn, and actually lots of us never visit it. That’s where Meta comes in. About 10 years ago, I was talking at Ignite about how you should ignore Meta at your peril. Lots of people instinctively dislike it, but everyone is on it and it has the biggest global audience. So, I think LinkedIn and Meta are good bookends of a social strategy.

Where you actually put your content will depend on various factors, including budget. Do you have the budget to diversify across multiple channels?

Radix: So that’s the ‘where’. What about the ‘how’? Is there any advice you can give to people about how to share their content?

Robyn: One thing that’s important to remember is that nobody’s on social media looking to fill in your lead-gen form and buy. That’s not what we’re doing on there. So that can be a little bit problematic if you’ve got clients who are obsessed with leads. Marketers want to use lead-gen forms on LinkedIn, and they pay through the nose. But those are still cold leads that need to be nurtured.

I think it’s also a good idea to think about social media as awareness. It’s very good for that and for engagement. It can absolutely help generate leads that you can then bring into nurture campaigns – so it’s useful for that rather than sales-ready leads. You can’t just hand those leads straight over to sales.

Radix: You mentioned awareness. How important is that as part of a marketing strategy – and is it something that can be measured?

Robyn: It’s interesting. B2B companies are some of the wealthiest, most successful businesses in the world that you’ve never heard of, because they don’t spend money on brand advertising. But I think that’s changing. I find the concept really interesting; that mental availability you have for a brand that you already trust. There’s definitely an argument that engagement isn’t the important thing all the time, and it’s about having yourself in front of people and building that familiarity with your audience.

The problem there is how do you justify that investment to your CFO? Because it’s hard to trace the results. And people don’t necessarily stick in the role long enough to say, “Look, five years down the line, here is how much we’ve grown.” There’s a lot of focus on immediate returns.

Radix: Is there a point where awareness can be a negative? If people aren’t engaging with your content, can it just feel like they’re being spammed after a while? How do you avoid that?

Robyn: Some of this comes down to experience. But you can measure something called frequency which will show you the average number of times someone has seen your ad. We often talk about seven being the sweet spot. So someone will need to see your ad around seven times before they take the desired action.

That means you need to find the right size of audience for the budget you’ve got – and make sure your campaign can run long enough for them to see your ads enough times to take action. Sometimes that means you’re better off targeting a smaller audience to reach that frequency. This is something that often gets overlooked. People will attribute a lack of engagement to creative fatigue or all sorts of things, but it’s much more likely that the right people haven’t seen it enough times.

Radix: So how can you work out why people aren’t engaging with your ads? Is there a proven method?

Robyn: Having a testing mentality is the only way you’ll ever work that out. But people can overcomplicate that, too. You need to make sure you only test one aspect at a time. It could be the headline, or the image, or whatever. But if you change more than one thing it becomes very difficult to pinpoint what made the difference. It requires a lot of patience and discipline, and you can test different elements over multiple campaigns at once. But it also requires ownership – whose responsibility is it?

The other thing to look out for is that some platforms optimise themselves, so unless you manually set them to evenly rotate your ads then the platform will automatically choose the one it thinks is performing best, so they might not all get a fair chance to be seen.

Radix: How should an organic social strategy work alongside a paid one?

Robyn: There should definitely be some sort of synergy between your organic strategy and your paid strategy, and each should complement the other. Hopefully, over time, you’ve built up a community for your organic posts, so what you want to talk to them about will be different to what you put on your paid ads. But there will be crossover, and organic posts will support your paid campaigns.

The difference is that organic has lots of jobs to do. It’s not just about promoting your products and services, it’s also about championing the people within your business, your customers, and your values, and promoting opportunities like job roles and grad schemes. Organic social is a really content-heavy channel and it doesn’t often get the investment or resources needed to sustain it.

If you can build a community from your organic posts, it can be useful to push out messages before you turn on paid activity, so you have some initial engagement before you put marketing spend behind it. That can also be a good way to see what types of posts are resonating.

But don’t make the mistake of just using the same content on organic as you do on paid. Sometimes you can do that,  and there’s also no harm in putting money behind a particularly well-performing organic post. But for the most part they should be viewed differently.

Radix: Finally, once your campaign is over, are there any ways to keep driving traffic to your content?

Robyn: Repurposing content is really important here. If it’s something you’ve spent a lot of time on and put a lot of love into, then you want to be able to use it in as many ways as possible. For instance, if you have a piece that’s called Five Hard Truths for CMOs, then each of those truths can become a little campaign in itself. So think about ways to turn your hero asset into as many useful things as possible, like infographics and blogs that can all feed back into it.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on trends. Is a piece you wrote a year ago suddenly relevant again? Can you update a piece based on an emerging trend or new information? There are lots of options, so don’t stop until you’ve explored them all.

2024 was transformational for Radix, and not always in ways that we wanted. We entered 2025 with new clients, new services, and new momentum, but also with a significantly smaller team.

Even as we tried to roll with the punches and learn all the lessons – agency friends, please don’t underestimate how many obstacles an acquisition can put between your favourite clients and their ability to give you work – we were pushing forward with a long overdue project:

Refreshing the Radix brand.

Living both these stories at the same time has often been a jarring experience.

Workshops. Font shops. Pulling out the stops.

Taken in isolation, everything about the rebrand was a joy.

We asked the amazing Laura Stripp to shepherd us towards a new visual identity. We imagined ourselves as hummingbirds, corkscrews, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s marvel of organic architecture, Falling Water. We shopped for the perfect typeface.

Lewis Davis then developed a completely new, much more elegantly appointed website, designed by Laura to bring her vision for our brand identity to life – and to the public.

The simple need for new copy also drove us to reconsider our core proposition. We found we could voice, more clearly than ever, what the brilliant B2B marketers in the technology companies and agencies we support really value about our copywriting and content strategy services.

It was thrilling to see Radix’s future rapidly coming to life.

The dissonance creeps in

But when I stepped out of our visual identity workshops and looked at the emails in my inbox, I found myself suddenly back in that other narrative: the story of a company making incredibly difficult decisions to weather unusually challenging times.

It’s hard to explain how those of us who led the rebrand felt, and the dissonance of striving to rearticulate our business’s identity, even as we lost some of the people who had, for a long time, helped to make Radix, Radix.

While we knew we were doing genuinely vital work, devoting our energy to a project that wouldn’t bear fruit for many months sometimes felt like a luxury. There was just so much that needed our attention in the here and now.

Branding as a matter of death and life

Today, almost halfway through 2025, my feelings have changed.

For me, and I believe, for the rest of our team, the challenges we had to overcome last year have made this rebrand much more meaningful.

So often, overhauling your visual identity and web presence is about giving a fresh lick of paint to a decades-old machine. For us, it became about giving the correct shape to something genuinely exciting and new.

Radix, reincarnated, is much closer to the Radix we imagined in our branding workshops.

We’re more agile and industrious. More perfectly designed to perform our explicit function. More seamlessly and sustainably attuned to our surroundings.

We’re a hummingbird, carrying a corkscrew, through a modern woodland home.

USPs? Oh, let us tell you about our USPs…

New Radix is even more endlessly tried-and-tested than the much-loved pair of hiking boots that were mentioned in our branding workshops.

Right now, all but one of our writers have over eight years’ B2B tech writing experience. The other has almost four, and frankly, can go toe-to-toe with the industry’s best. It’s a powerhouse writing team that still offers the capacity, flexibility, and industry expertise to help our clients achieve their content ambitions.

The freedom to shape our destiny

There’s one other thing I need to mention.

We’ve been able to choose the kind of business we are – one that prioritises sustainability, provides progressive benefits, and focuses on excellence – because we’re employee-owned. I believe the fact that we all have a say in our agency’s future allows us to respond to challenging times and bounce back even stronger, like few other companies can.

If you’re reading this and want to know more about what employee ownership means, reach out. I’m always happy to evangelize.

Radix is dead. Long live Radix.

Thanks for reading. If you want to see what a lovely job Laura and Lewis have done, have a look around. And if you want to create amazing B2B tech marketing content – just get in touch.

The most valuable B2B content is closely aligned with the strategy of your business. Your marketing strategy helps bridge the gap between the two. But there’s a subtle art to translating a marketing strategy into a strong content plan.

To get some expert advice on how to do that, we recently sat down with Irene Triendl, one of the smartest marketing and content strategists we know. In Irene’s own words, she helps B2B companies figure out what to say, to whom, and in what order.

Here’s a quick look at our conversation.

Radix: Hi Irene, great to speak to you again! If marketers are creating content plans from scratch, where should they begin?

Irene: It might seem a bit obvious, but the first thing you’ll need if you want to deliver great B2B marketing content is a clearly defined marketing strategy.

You’d think that’s a given, but in a lot of technology businesses, there’s little trust placed in marketing teams. Technical decision-makers may want to sign everything off themselves, and, while they might have an idea of the kind of marketing strategy they should pursue, this is often only in their minds – not shared with the marketing team. Naturally, that’s a major hindrance to marketers’ effectiveness and ability to deliver great results.

With no strategy, everything you do will be ad hoc and in response to short-term needs. That pushes you into a loop of continuous firefighting, so major overarching goals like creating awareness or driving demand for specific solutions go unaccomplished.

Radix: So, if a marketing strategy is incomplete or non-existent, what should marketers make sure they clarify before they build a content plan?

Irene: Frustratingly, it’s often the most important elements of a marketing strategy that go overlooked or under-defined. It’s all too common to find that strategies don’t clearly define marketing goals, target audiences, or common objections and blockers, for example. Why people don’t buy is at least as important as why they do.

Value propositions are another area with a lot of room for improvement. Leaders often define them from a product perspective, but don’t explain why a customer should care. If your value propositions talk about you or your products more than what you do for customers, something has gone wrong.

If any of those things aren’t immediately obvious and available to you as a marketer, you’ll need to ask the right questions to establish them before you jump into building a content plan.

Radix: Once a marketer has finally got all of that defined, what comes next? How does their content plan start to take shape?

Irene: Your marketing strategy lays out what you want to achieve. So, the first thing you need to do is work out exactly how content can help you achieve that. For example, if your goal is for decision-makers in your target industry to recognise your name, your content might be a highly visual, targeted brand campaign; if the goal is to build authority, it might be a series of in-depth blog posts co-authored with subject-matter experts from your business.

Next, you’ll need to do some prioritising. If you’re starting from scratch, it’s worth focusing your efforts and budget on content that tells your core story in a clear and consistent way before you move onto more trend-based content, or content that speaks to just one of your audiences. Get your foundation in place and then build around that.

With a clear view of how content can help you achieve your marketing goals, and a prioritised list of the initial content you need to tell your core story, you’ve already got the makings of an effective and actionable content plan.

Radix: Content plans must vary a lot between teams and organisations. How can a marketer tell whether theirs is ‘correct’?

Irene: As you say, what’s right for one organisation won’t necessarily be right for another. But invariably, the best and most effective content plans are clearly mapped to marketing and business strategies, make it clear how they’ll deliver value, and are realistically deliverable with your budget and resources.

Radix: Obviously you’ve got a lot of experience creating content plans that meet those criteria. Do you have any top tips to share with our readers to help them do the same?

Irene: Sure, I think I’ve probably got a few to share.

Number one, if things feel overwhelming, break them down into manageable chunks. Starting from scratch is a daunting prospect, but you really can start very small. Just focus on telling your most important stories – things like who you’re for, the problems you solve, and how your approach is different – in ways that support your biggest goals and take things step by step.

Number two, make the most of the expertise in your business to make sure you’re going to the right people with the right messages in the right way. Build relationships with key SMEs early, and use content to build their profile in your industry. If you do that well, you can turn them into valuable advocates for your content and wider marketing plans.

And finally, it’s also important to connect your work to business results and think about how you’ll define and measure success. And don’t forget to celebrate your successes loudly to make sure people understand the value you’re delivering, so you can maintain buy-in for your content efforts.

 

Also in the series

We spoke to Stephanie Wisdom about how to keep your B2B content fresh, agile and focused on what really matters – your customers. Read the Expert Q and A with Stephanie.

 

Planning is a huge part of B2B content marketers’ lives. So, when we began creating the planning section of our B2B content marketing handbook, we reached out to one of the best to help us gather some expert insight.

Shikha Saxena is Head of Marketing and Communications at Globant UK. During her career, she’s planned and executed countless high-impact content projects on time and under budget – some of them in partnership with Radix.

To find out how other B2B content marketers can follow in her footsteps and gather a few best practices for our checklist, we sat down for a quick chat.

Radix: Hi Shikha! First things first, how far ahead do you typically plan your content?

Shikha: One of the biggest challenges of creating great content in the B2B technology world is that things are constantly evolving. What’s relevant for your audience one week could feel stale and dated the next. So, it really doesn’t pay to make detailed plans looking too far into the future.

The pace of B2B marketing changed a lot during the pandemic. Now, with technologies like AI evolving at speed, there’s a significant shift in the market every few weeks. So, we don’t plan our content much further than one quarter in advance. If we looked any further ahead than that, we’d run a real risk of our ideas being irrelevant once they’re published.

But even with a relatively short period of time between planning and execution, you still can’t afford to step away from your content plan. At the very least, you need to revisit it every 4-6 weeks and make sure things still sit right, and adapt things as you go to optimise them.

Radix: So, what makes a great content concept for you? Is it just a matter of being timely and audience relevant?

Shikha: When we talk about making sure the content you plan and publish is relevant, we don’t just mean relevant to your audience’s interests. It also needs to be relevant to your business and aligned with your current objectives.

Content was a soft asset five years ago. But now, all of your decisions need to be justified in terms of ROI. Budgets are tight, and budget holders want continuous reassurance that what you create is having a tangible impact on the business and driving the right outcomes.

So, the key to planning concepts that work is tracking and understanding what delivers the right results. You might not get everything spot-on first time, but as long as you’re tracking the right performance metrics, you can identify what resonates with your audience, demonstrate how that translates into ROI, and continuously improve your content.

Radix: How can B2B marketers gain a better understanding of what their customers want from them, and translate that insight into their content plans?

Shikha: B2B marketers don’t operate on the frontlines. It’s all too easy to keep planning content based on assumptions about your audience, without having any real connection to them or confidence that you understand what they really need from you today.

Marketers need to make the most of the data available to them to stay close to customers. If you can see which pages they’re visiting and which content they’re engaging with, you can draw meaningful conclusions about what they’re currently interested in.

Keeping your content aligned with what your audience truly cares about is essential. It’s easy to get dazed by new trends and technologies, so you end up writing about them at length. But there’s no guarantee that your audience really cares about those trends until they show you they do.

Radix: Let’s say you’ve planned and launched a great piece of content. What comes next? Is it just on to the next planning phase?

Shikha: The constant cycle of B2B content planning and delivery often means that teams quickly move from one project to the next. By the time something’s published, chances are your head is already well into the next batch of projects. But if you move on too quickly, you could be missing some very valuable opportunities.

Once a good piece of content is launched and starts generating great results, it can’t be forgotten. Instead, you must amplify it and maximise its value.

That’s the perfect opportunity to revisit your content plan. Instead of jumping into the next thing, rework your plan around amplifying and promoting your high-performing content. Get as many eyes on it as possible, boost its impact, and use its results to secure buy-in for your next big content idea.

You’ve got to keep things mapped to your business objectives and sales goals. When a piece of content demonstrably contributes to them, amplify it to boost your results. Then work out why that piece worked and plan more of it.

Radix: Do you have any advice for marketers just getting started in B2B content planning?

Shikha: First, don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. Things have been done a certain way for a long time in B2B, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way. Your fresh perspective has value.

However, you should always back your thinking with data. Data helps you understand what’s working and what you should plan more of, and prove the efficacy of your plans to budget holders. If you don’t have access to performance data, do some testing to establish what works.

So try new things, and if they don’t work, just take that as valuable data to inform your future plans.

It’s also important to build strong social capital within your company. The best content will often come from ideas held by SMEs. Connect with those people, build strong relationships, and ensure that when they have good ideas, you’re there to translate them into your content plan.

There’s a lot more where that came from

We hope you find Shikha’s insights as valuable as we did, and that they help you start building stronger B2B content plans today. But remember, solid content plans start with a clear and complete marketing strategy. You can learn more about that, and how to translate marketing strategies into content plans in our expert Q+A article with Irene Triendl.