Ryan Sargent joins Nate Turner and Kevin King to discuss how B2B marketers can stand out now that AI has made content volume a non-factor. The conversation focuses on how better inputs, including proprietary data and first-party insights, are what separate strong AI-assisted content from generic output.

Despite predictions that websites will become obsolete, the hosts argue that they matter more than ever, and that they need to work harder to convert visitors and surface the right information for LLMs.

Other topics include hyper-specific case studies, unique audience experiences like awards and intimate events, and robust product documentation. The episode wraps with the idea that good judgment, knowing which stories to tell and where to focus effort, is the most important skill marketers can develop right now.

We’re back after a busy few months to start the year. Over the last six months, we have explored whether Ten Speed should create a Reddit marketing service. That exploration led us to the answer (no) and to this broader perspective on what Reddit means for B2B marketers.

Let us know in the comments what you think or have experienced!

Cheers,
Nate

Search Visibility

A lot has changed for B2B marketers in the last 12 months. If you have reached a point where you need outside help to improve your search visibility (SEO + AEO) to drive more pipeline for your company, we’d love to chat. Learn more about Ten Speed.

Reddit: A Red Herring for B2B Marketers

Just under a year ago, in June 2025, Profound released a study analyzing 680 million citations to identify the most-cited sources. One of the key takeaways that SEO publications and marketers latched onto was the prevalence of Reddit: the top source for AI Overview citations & Perplexity and the #2 source for ChatGPT citations.

Later, in November 2025, Profound released another analysis that was commissioned by Reddit, stating that “Reddit is the single most cited domain, proving conversational content is a non-negotiable input for modern answer engines.”

From these two studies, analyzing a massive number of citations [read: not studies focused on B2B or commercial intent] came the widespread belief that marketers need to be “doing Reddit marketing” to show up in LLMs. In every conversation we have with marketers now, they either proudly tell us they are doing Reddit marketing or ask if we can do Reddit marketing for them.

So, it felt like a good time to explain why we believe Reddit marketing is a red herring for B2B marketers.

The Data Shows Otherwise

Instead of latching onto broad-stroke statements, it is important to drill down into a few different layers of data to understand what sources are driving citations and how brands can focus their AEO efforts to be most impactful.

Sources by Vertical

In the image below, you can see that different SaaS verticals had different patterns of citation sources, with healthcare and wellness citing established medical sources like PubMed and Mayo Clinic, and DevOps and security citing developer communities like GitHub. This shows the importance of understanding what is unique about your vertical, rather than a one-size-fits-all view of top citation sources.

The data in this chart comes from a study conducted by Foundation, Inc. and AirOps. They conclude from this data that Reddit is a top citation source to focus on (Foundation offers Reddit marketing services), even though it accounts for only about 7% of citations. The argument is that it is one of the few influential sources you can optimize, but it ignores that the long tail of 3rd-party sources is indirectly influenced by having a good brand, a good product, and overall, good marketing.

All of which we feel are more important and more sustainable than hacking your way into Reddit threads.

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Sources by Competitive Set

Digging a layer deeper, you can analyze the top citation sources for your company and competitors across a large set of prompts. This is an important step that narrows the view from your vertical overall to the prompts and competitors you care about most.

In the image below, you can see the top sources for an edtech company we are tracking in Peec AI. Note that Reddit is not on the list, and YouTube is the only UGC site appearing among the top 8 domains cited.

This particular set is heavily dominated by institutional sources, so you can see how this makes a big difference in how you would go about optimizing for LLM visibility. Next, we will go even deeper into the top sources cited for one specific prompt.

Sources by Prompt

Understanding the top-cited sources for a specific prompt is the most revealing. In the image below, you can see how the domains change drastically for this specific prompt compared to the overall competitive set. It includes a broader range of types beyond institutional; YouTube is higher on the list, and Reddit is… absent.

Conversational content matters, but it's not always Reddit. In many B2B cases, the UGC sources are LinkedIn and YouTube. This, combined with the fact that these channels skew towards authenticity and brand-building, while Reddit is more anonymous and grey-hat, is why we offer LinkedIn ghostwriting and YouTube video creation services and not Reddit marketing services.

You can see how drilling down from the broad-stroke analysis of 680 million citations to verticals, to the competitive set, to specific prompts reveals markedly different lists of the most-cited domains.

What Reddit Marketing Services Entail

If you are considering hiring an agency to manage Reddit marketing for you, it is worth digging in to better understand what those services entail and the tactics being used.

Most have offshore teams that are spinning up Reddit accounts in different verticals and karma-farming with fake engagement on industry subreddits. When you hire them, they then leverage these accounts to mention your company in threads, among other tactics like creating and managing company subreddits.

This sounds great because it is an ‘easy button’ to what you’ve been made to believe is the solution to your AEO problems. But the reality is that these services regularly get accounts banned on Reddit, get sniffed out by moderators, and pose a reputational risk to your brand.

So, if you dig in as we did above and find that Reddit isn’t a top citation source for your brand, it starts to feel like a lot of downside with little (or no) upside. For me, I’ll always choose long-term brand reputation and sustainability over questionable growth hacks.

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Reddit Content Quality

The last reason that I believe Reddit is not a long-term channel for most B2B companies is that the quality of the content in the threads being cited tends to be pretty lousy. Well, they are on par with most Reddit threads, but the disconnect between how the LLM packages the information and what was actually in the threads can be quite different.

I believe that Reddit was an easy source for breadth in the early days of LLMs, but to retain users, LLMs will begin to put more and more effort into quality and intent filters, much as Google has for years with the content it indexes and surfaces. This, in turn, would further drive down the number of times LLMs cite Reddit, making your Reddit marketing efforts that much less effective.

Wrapping Up

I hope this breakdown was helpful in understanding why Reddit should not be viewed as the top citation source for prompts without careful validation for your specific circumstances.

If you find that Reddit is a channel that makes sense for your brand and you want to invest in it for the long term, we recommend making this an in-house effort, similar to any other community management channel.

Just as it has been true in SEO for decades, there is no “easy button,” and anyone telling you there is does not have your best interests in mind. AEO, building a brand, and growing a company are all hard work that takes time and iteration.

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In Session 10, Nate Turner, Kevin King, and Ryan Sargent unpack why “ICP-aligned content” has become a buzzword that few marketers can actually define or execute on.

They argue that most ICP research falls short by focusing on demographics and firmographics rather than the “jobs to be done” framework, and recommend listening to sales calls and talking to existing customers as more practical starting points.

The conversation also explores what “aligned” really means in practice — from speaking the right vocabulary to meeting audiences where they are in their journey. Ryan and the team close with actionable advice on diagnosing market maturity and building content that speaks directly to an ICP, rather than simply about one.

We’re jumping back in for 2026 with a topic that has been top of mind for us at Ten Speed for several months. Coincidentally, as this post was being edited, we came across The SoDA Report On: New strategies for the modern agency from SoDA and Webflow, which provides some great data on this exact topic.

Let us know what you think about this topic!

Cheers,
Nate

⚡️Become a Referral Partner!

Apply to join Ten Speed’s referral partner program on PartnerStack. It is free to apply, and you can earn unlimited commissions on qualified leads and 8% of all ongoing revenue from referred clients for their first 12 months.

The Marketing Agency Model is Broken. Here’s What Needs to Change.

The marketing agency model and what companies need from an agency partner have changed dramatically in the last 12 months.

If you have worked with agencies in the last decade, you know the drill. You hire an agency for execution. They become an extension of your team for the stuff you do not have time or expertise for. You get some strategy upfront, maybe a quarterly check-in, but mostly you are paying for output.

That model works for fewer and fewer companies every year.

The Old Model Was Built for a Different Era

For a long time, agencies functioned as production houses. Places to outsource execution so in-house teams could focus on what was considered “more important.”

The logic made sense. In-house teams were small and stretched thin. Agencies had specialists and processes to crank out content, run campaigns, and manage channels at scale. Strategy stays in-house, execution gets outsourced.

But that division assumed execution was the bottleneck, that in-house teams had bandwidth for strategic work, and that the outsourced work was straightforward.

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AI Changed the Economics of Execution

AI tooling and more sophisticated tech stacks have flipped the agency dynamic on its head. Tasks that used to require hours of human effort can now be done in minutes with the right tools and workflows. This is more than a marginal efficiency gain. It’s a fundamental change in how much work a small team can produce.

Competitive content analysis that took a strategist two days now takes a few hours. Repurposing a webinar into a blog post, social clips, and email copy used to be a full day of production work. Now it’s a morning. Monthly reporting that required pulling data from five platforms and building slides can be templated and generated in a fraction of the time.

If your value proposition as an agency was “we have a lot of people who can do a lot of work,” you are in trouble. The work that used to require ten people can now be done by three people with the right systems. And in-house teams are figuring this out too. They have access to the same tools and are building internal workflows that reduce their dependency on agencies for production.

Since headcount is no longer a moat, the question we’ve been asking is: “What are we offering that a client can’t replicate with a few subscriptions and a capable generalist?”

Execution Still Matters. But the Value Proposition Has Changed.

To be clear, companies still need help with execution. Why they need it is what’s changed.

The new model is more about access to optimized workflows and expertise. This means building systems that combine AI and human judgment in ways in-house teams don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to create on their own. Figuring out where AI accelerates the work, where humans need to step in, what the human should be doing, and how to connect those dots into repeatable processes that deliver quality at speed.

An optimized workflow might use AI for initial research synthesis and outline generation, then a subject-matter expert for insight validation and unique angles, AI again for first-draft acceleration, and then a senior editor for quality control and brand voice. Each step has clear inputs, outputs, and quality gates. The result is faster turnaround without sacrificing depth, accuracy, or nuance.

In-house teams don’t have time to build these workflows, or prioritize them. They are busy running campaigns and hitting quarterly targets. They cannot spend months testing AI tools, building integrations, and optimizing handoffs between automated and human work.

This is where agencies should come in, not as a bucket of hours, but as a way for companies to leverage systems and workflows they can’t build themselves.

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But execution without strategy is still a waste of money.

Two years ago, you could make assumptions, build a strategy, and execute over the course of a few quarters or a year. Now, the environment moves faster than planning cycles can keep up with.

Take organic content as an example. A strategy built around high-volume keywords and monthly blog publishing was a reasonable approach in 2022. Today, that same company should be thinking about which queries are eaten up by AIOs, zero-click searches that reduce traffic even when rankings hold, and LLMs pulling answers from competitor content. The execution might look similar on the surface, but the strategic rationale behind what to create and why is completely different.

This is why companies need agency partners who can help them figure out what to prioritize, connect efforts to business outcomes, and adapt when things change. For us, this means senior strategists need to be deeply involved in client work. Client-to-strategist ratios need to be lower. And clients need direct access to the people actually building strategy.

The New Agency Sweet Spot

There’s a specific space that agencies need to occupy going forward.

More strategic than traditional agencies. The strategy-light, execution-heavy model doesn’t cut it. Companies need partners who can help them figure out what to do, not just how to do it. That means an agency that can look at your analytics, competitive landscape, and business goals and tell you that your content refresh program matters more than new production right now. Or that your SEO investment should shift from blog content to product page optimization because that’s where the conversion opportunity is.

More flexible than productized services. Fully productized agencies offer fixed deliverables at a fixed price. That works for some companies, but not most. The engagement model needs to flex based on where the company is and what they actually need.

A sales-led org launching a new product might need a short burst of bottom-funnel content to support outbound, not another pillar guide. A team seeing meaningful conversions from AI referral traffic might need to deprioritize traditional search in favor of LLM visibility across existing pages. Post-acquisition, technical consolidation might matter more than net-new content. These aren’t edge cases - they’re all real examples from our clients. Goals change, and agencies need to be able to re-scope work based on what’s actually happening in the business.

Built for how the work actually happens now. This means embracing a mix of full-time team members, specialized contractors, AI-powered workflows, and purpose-built tooling. The goal is deliver high-quality outcomes efficiently, instead of adding another contractor to an account.

We’re not cutting corners with AI to reduce overhead and headcount. Our goal is to be intentional about where human expertise matters the absolute most then build systems to support and amplify it.

The Bottom Line

If you’re evaluating agencies, stop asking how many people they’ll put on your account. Ask how they’re structured to deliver outcomes, how senior the people are who will actually touch your work, and how they adapt when priorities shift.

If you’re running an agency, the math has changed. You can’t win on volume anymore. The defensible position is a combination of strategic depth, operational efficiency, and flexibility that clients genuinely cannot replicate on their own.

Learn more about Ten Speed at www.tenspeed.io.

In the final episode of 2025, Nate Turner and Kevin King were joined by Ryan Sargent of Ten Speed.

Content strategy is changing quickly as AI tools reshape how teams plan and produce work. This episode looks at what 2026 will bring for content leaders who are adapting to new levels of bandwidth, velocity, and expectations.

We talk about how platforms like AirOps and specialized LLMs influence content velocity and raise the pace for companies of all sizes. We also dig into how AI search rewards freshness even more than traditional search and what that means for planning, publishing, and keeping content relevant.

The conversation explores whether teams will try to separate content created for LLMs from content created for humans and why that separation may be harder to maintain than it sounds. We also examine how AI automation interacts with human bandwidth and how teams decide the best way to divide work across writers, editors, strategists, agencies, and freelancers.

We close with a look at the content formats and approaches that actually drive conversions in a world where discoverability and performance both matter. This episode gives content leaders a grounded view of how to evolve their strategy for the year ahead.

For more, visit www.tenspeed.io.

In this Ten Speed Session, we dig into the biggest question facing B2B marketing leaders as they plan for 2026:

If you could give one piece of advice to B2B marketing leaders heading into 2026, what would it be?

We pulled together perspectives from some of the smartest operators in the industry, and a few themes surfaced again and again. Speed beats perfection. Brand measurement needs to grow up. Automation should clear the way for bold creative ideas. The modern buyer expects more than recycled tactics. Generalists are becoming the new in-house power players. And above all: stop waiting for certainty.

In this conversation, Nate Turner and Kevin King synthesize guidance from leaders across Sprout Social, Ten Speed, Clearscope, 42 Agency, MKT1, and Growth Unhinged to build a clear picture of what actually matters going into 2026.

Whether you’re navigating declining SEO traffic, figuring out how to stay visible in AI search, or trying to get your team to move faster, this episode will help you focus on what counts and ignore what doesn’t.

We cover:

• Why speed, agility, and imperfect execution will outperform polished plans

• The shift from vanity “brand = direct traffic” to real brand measurement

• Automation vs. alchemy: what to automate, what to pour creative energy into

• How the modern B2B buyer is changing and what that means for your playbooks

• Why generalists are becoming the in-house future (and how to hire around it)

• The importance of committing, executing, and avoiding analysis paralysis

• The GTM channels poised for real growth in 2026—including AI search

Contributors:

Marino Fresch - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinofresch/

Kamil Rextin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamilrextin/

Ryan Sargent - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-sargent-5a455511a/

Bernard Huang - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardjhuang/

Kevin King - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-king-marketer/

Emily Kramer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilykramer/

Nate Turner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nateturner1/

Kyle Poyar - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/

Growth Unhinged 2025 B2B GTM Report

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

What’s working in GTM right now

As much as we talk about AI in go-to-market, the reality is that 85% of enterprise sellers still manage their book in spreadsheets. Only 5% use CRM…

Read more

7 months ago · 100 likes · 4 comments · Kyle Poyar

We’re back for October, breaking down the nebulous idea of Human+AI in marketing and providing four real examples that you can implement for your company.

Cheers,
Nate

BOFU Content Strategy Survey

Ten Speed is seeking to learn from marketers how they are adapting their strategy for BOFU content and how LLMs have impacted their performance.

If you’re a marketer, please consider completing this short survey for us!

Take the Survey

4 Practical Examples of Human+AI Workflows

The best teams aren’t asking, “What can AI do for us?” They’re asking, “Where does human judgment matter most, and how can AI handle the rest?”

I’m certain you’ve seen things about AI assistance, Human+AI, or Human-in-the-Loop at this point. All are ways of explaining that AI is most helpful when it complements the human, who has the expertise, nuance, and context.

But what does that actually look like? Where do you draw the line on responsibilities?

At Ten Speed, we’ve been experimenting with human + AI workflows across every part of our organic growth programs since ChatGPT was released in 2022. Below are four practical examples that show how humans (and our team) and AI can complement each other in real-life scenarios.

Case Studies

Case studies are one of the hardest assets to scale. They require interviews, data validation, approvals, and storytelling finesse. All things that demand a human touch. But AI can dramatically reduce the time it takes to move from interviews and inputs to polished proof by handling summarization, structuring, and first-draft creation.

Human: Extracts customer stories, validates data accuracy, and sets narrative structure for the case study.

AI: Summarizes call transcripts, drafts 1-pagers, and creates pull quotes or comparison tables.

Example: Marketers interview customers and record calls, then add transcripts, approved data points, and other necessary context into a doc/database. AI transcribes interviews, suggests narrative arcs (“problem → proof → payoff”), and drafts alternate versions for PR pitches or LinkedIn carousels. Humans refine and edit to ensure tone and compliance, then handle publishing and promotion.

Result: Faster production of trust assets that feed into both content and PR workflows.

Organic Social & Distribution

Most B2B teams know they should repurpose content, but the reality is that creating dozens of social posts from a single long-form piece can drain capacity fast. AI helps close that gap by atomizing ideas, testing hooks, and giving strategists a starting point for every platform, while humans maintain voice, nuance, and brand consistency.

Human: Defines distribution strategy, creative pillars, and brand voice.

AI: Atomizes long-form pieces into posts, identifies trending hooks, and drafts captions or comment replies.

Example: Marketers identify long-form content (blog posts, webinars, etc.) that would be a good candidate for social content based on knowledge of ICP and could industry/market conditions, and define tone/style guidelines. AI writes first-draft versions for each platform and/or creates draft video clips; the strategist edits, refines tone, determines sequencing, and schedules them based on goals and broader marketing initiatives.

Result: Consistent cross-channel visibility without diluting expertise.

Digital PR & Outreach

Securing coverage and backlinks still depends on relationships, timing, and editorial instinct…all things that require a human touch. However, AI can handle the heavy lifting that enables those moments.

By scanning thousands of journalist profiles, clustering themes, and summarizing coverage, AI gives PR teams better context before they ever send an email.

Human: Builds relationships, sets editorial angles, and personalizes outreach.

AI: Scans media databases, summarizes journalist coverage, and drafts personalized outreach based on patterns.

Example: Marketers use AI to cluster relevant reporters and summarize their latest coverage themes. Humans then tailor personalized story pitches and proof points.

Result: AI accelerates research; human judgment drives placement success.

Thought Leadership & POV Content

Publishing thought leadership consistently is hard, especially when every post needs to sound like an executive and not a template.

An exec publishing AI-generated slop can also have the opposite effect, destroying credibility and authority, so this is definitely a tricky one!

Human: Sets the agenda/questions, interviews the exec, documents personal anecdotes, and adds company and market context.

AI: Suggests counterarguments, transcribes interview recordings, creates post outlines, and title/headline options.

Example: Marketers craft a LinkedIn series concept for the CEO based on recent industry developments. They interview the CEO, then feed the transcripts, company information, tone/style guides, and other necessary context. The AI creates an outline or rough draft, suggests supporting data and structures, and pulls direct wording from transcripts where possible. Marketers refine and edit to ensure nuance and credibility.

Result: Stronger, faster publishing cadence that scales executive visibility.

The Takeaway

These workflows work because they respect the balance between human context and data processing. AI handles the repetitive, data-heavy steps; humans focus on the parts that require interpretation, trust, and taste.

Teams that master this mix don’t just produce more content; they produce content that performs better, builds brand authority faster, and creates measurable impact across every channel.

📚 What the Ten Speed team is reading…

Third-Party Sources Drive 85% of Brand Discovery (AirOps)

Introducing Clearscope 2.0 (Clearscope)

Executive Alignment in the GEO Era (Ten Speed)

Our BrightonSEO 2025 Takeaways (Ten Speed)

Footnotes

A few other things from Ten Speed…

Free Custom Proposal

The way people find, compare, and trust brands is changing fast. From what we’ve seen, most SEO/organic growth strategies haven’t caught up. If you’re unsure whether yours has, it’s time for a second look.

At Ten Speed, we offer free custom proposals (think analysis + strategic recommendations) for all qualified companies.

Refer & Earn

Apply to join Ten Speed’s referral partner program on PartnerStack and earn commissions on both qualified leads and ongoing revenue.

We’re Hiring!

We have two full-time roles that are both US-based and fully remote.

→ Organic Growth Strategist

→ Marketing Research & Data Analyst

And we’re always looking for great freelancers across multiple disciplines to join our Freelance Network. Click here to apply.

Nate Turner and Kevin King break down what is working now in organic growth: fresh ICP-focused TOFU, AIO structuring that earns AI answers, and product content that solves real problems.

They share proof from several of their clients to show how refreshes and data-backed assets drive LLM citations, brand demand, and qualified clicks. Plus, why core pages and tight technical SEO turn that visibility into pipeline.

Register for our of our upcoming marketing happy hours!

Denver, CO (October 8) - https://luma.com/60mu0hye

Tampa, FL (October 22) - https://luma.com/753ynzip

https://www.amsive.com/insights/seo/does-llm-traffic-convert-better-than-organic-a-new-data-backed-study/

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/state-of-seo/

We’re back for September, talking about some of the interesting opportunities and challenges of vibe coding for marketers specifically. And if you’re in the Chicago or Denver areas, check out our upcoming happy hours below!

Cheers,
Nate

Marketing Happy Hours

In September and October, we’re hosting marketing happy hours in Chicago and Denver. If you, or someone you know, is able to attend, please register via the links below!

Chicago (Sep 18) - Register here

Denver (Oct 8) - Register here

Marketers, Vibe Coding, and SaaS

Marketers are in a strange spot right now. On one side, there’s a wave of “vibe coding” tools like Lovable or Replit that make it easier than ever to spin up scrappy, custom solutions. On the other side, there’s the established world of polished, enterprise-grade SaaS platforms that promise reliability, support, and scale.

Neither option feels quite right at the moment, and that’s what makes this such a challenging time to be in the middle.

The First 90% Problem

I’ve spent plenty of time tinkering with both Lovable and Replit to build internal tools, thinking that maybe we could even replace some of our tech stack with custom solutions.

Anyone who has gone down this road knows the same truth: the first 90% is easy, the last 10% is brutal.

Getting an MVP up and running on Replit feels fast, fun, and empowering. You can pull together a tool that solves a real pain point in a matter of hours. It feels like magic when you hit “run” and see something working that you built yourself.

But then comes the last 10%.

• The edge cases

• The unintended changes to Y while trying to fix X

• The error handling

• The polish that makes something reliable for a team, not just a playground project

That’s where vibe coding starts to hit its limits. Suddenly, what felt like momentum slows to a crawl.

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Why SaaS Still Wins (Sometimes)

This is where SaaS products pull marketers back in. Even though they might feel generic, expensive, or overly rigid, they come with one thing that vibe coding rarely does: reliability.

A SaaS tool is battle-tested. It has support, documentation, security layers, compliance certifications, and teams behind the scenes patching bugs before you even know they exist.

And you can’t beat a solid tech stack of tools that work well together with native integrations, bi-directional syncs, and libraries of templates and recipes to use as starting points for your customization.

So when the last 10% of a vibe-coded tool becomes overwhelming, it’s natural to fall back on SaaS.

The Taste of Flexibility

Here’s the tension: once you’ve experienced the flexibility of vibe coding, it’s hard to go back.

I recently spent time working in Replit to create an AI visibility tool that we could use to track how all of our clients were performing in LLMs. As noted above, the first 90% was easy and fun. The last 10% dragged on and I reach a point where I didn’t feel it was worth our time to get it—and keep it at—100%.

So, we made the decision to shelf that tool and start using an existing AI visibility tool, which I will not name. It has been very disappointing.

For $500/mo, I’m getting less data for one domain than my tool was getting for each domain across dozens of domains for a fraction of the cost in API calls. Rather than feeling satisfied with the decision, it left me feeling like I was paying more for less, even if it was still the right business decision.

Where This Leaves Marketers

Marketers are stuck in the tension between vibe coding and SaaS. Vibe coding gives us speed and flexibility to prototype, test, and create tools that feel tailored to how we work. But the last 10% exposes its limits, especially when reliability, scale, or security matter. SaaS fills those gaps, yet can feel more rigid, generic, or overpriced once you’ve experienced the freedom of building something yourself.

The reality is that both approaches have a place. Vibe coding works best for lightweight experiments and internal hacks that help you move quickly. SaaS is still necessary for operations that touch sensitive data, cross-team workflows, or anything customer-facing.

The challenge for marketers is learning when to explore and when to lean on supported products, while seeking vendors that offer more flexibility. The ones who can navigate this balance will be better positioned to grow in today’s messy middle.

📚 What the Ten Speed team is reading…

Does LLM Traffic Convert Better Than Organic? A New Data-Backed Study (Amsive)

Google’s Danny Sullivan: ‘Good SEO is good GEO’ (SEL)

Google August 2025 Spam Update Impact Felt Quickly (SE Roundtable)

SEO “Chunk Optimization” is Overrated (Ahrefs)

The Strategic Importance of Competitor Comparison Content (Ten Speed)

Marketing History

September 4, 1998 - Google incorporates; search (and soon search advertising) begins its rise to the center of digital marketing.

September 6, 2006 - Facebook launches News Feed, the algorithmic stream that rewrites distribution, organic reach, and eventually paid-social strategy.

September 20, 2021 - Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection ships with iOS 15; open rates become unreliable, pushing teams toward clicks, conversions, and modeled metrics.

In this episode, Nate Turner & Kevin King dig into five key areas of content marketing that often sit outside of the SEO/GEO conversation but are increasingly critical as B2B teams plan for 2026. From organic social and webinars to podcasts, data reports, and newsletters, these channels offer unique opportunities to drive efficiency and build authenticity in an AI-saturated landscape.

They share insights on the level of effort, ease of testing, and practical advice for each, plus where they overlap and how they can be repurposed into a broader distribution-first strategy. The goal isn’t to chase every shiny object, but to understand which channels align with your ICP, budget, and bandwidth—and to execute them well enough to actually move the needle.

Links:
Chicago marketing happy hour (9/18) - https://lu.ma/vvk26oxl
Denver marketing happy hour (10/8) - https://lu.ma/60mu0hye

https://www.demandsage.com/b2b-marketing-statistics/
https://www.getcontrast.io/learn/webinar-statistics
https://www.tenspeed.io/blog/why-research-reports-matter-in-content-strategy
https://www.hanoverresearch.com/insights-blog/corporate/what-is-market-research/
https://www.ft.com/content/19304919-9128-4c27-b5c3-4f668dd045df
https://www.cloudpresent.co/blog/7-b2b-webinar-best-practices-that-actually-drive-pipeline-growth-in-2025
https://www.fame.so/post/measuring-b2b-podcast-roi-and-pipeline

MKT1 Newsletter with Emily Kramer

How to prioritize marketing activities & avoid random acts of marketing

👋 This is a bonus free edition of MKT1 Newsletter, and the 3rd newsletter in our 3 part annual planning series. This edition is brought to you by Fiverr Pro, Caspian Studios, and 42 Agency. Become a paid subscriber to receive an additional newsletter each month, access our archives, post to…

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2 years ago · 33 likes · 3 comments

Ten Speed

Ten Speed provides a monthly newsletter for marketers with a medium dive on one topic, plus a bi-monthly(ish) podcast called Ten Speed Sessions.

They also cover which traditional SEO tactics still matter, which ones need to adapt, and why experienced SEO pros are uniquely equipped to lead this transition.

In our last newsletter, we discussed the importance of tracking impact over activity. We are following up with more details by introducing the CLEAR framework we created and why it is the best path forward for measuring marketing impact today.

Cheers!
Nate

Now Offering: Case Study Creation

Ten Speed has been expanding the ways we serve clients over the last year, and the latest addition is case studies. Whether you need help with part of the process or want us to handle it all, we have flexible options to help you showcase your success.

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B2B Marketing Needs to Rethink Performance, Fast

For the last decade, B2B marketing has operated under a narrow definition of performance. We’ve optimized for last-click conversions, paid efficiency, and platform-level reporting. However, that model is outdated, and AI is continuing render it obsolete.

Today, your buyers don’t just click Google ads or fill out lead forms. They’re getting recommendations from ChatGPT. They’re browsing roundups in newsletters, social posts, and community threads. They’re seeing which companies show up when they ask Perplexity or Claude about the best vendors in a category.

That visibility has little to do with ad spend or keyword ranking. It’s driven by your brand’s reputation, authority, and presence across channels, which requires a more comprehensive way to measure marketing.

At Ten Speed, we built the CLEAR framework to solve this. It stands for Conversion, Loyalty, Engagement, Awareness, and Reputation. It’s how we are helping teams shift from surface-level reporting to measuring real business impact.

The Illusion of Precision

Performance marketing made it feel like everything was trackable. But attribution has always been imperfect, and it’s only gotten worse. GA4 shook up the model. Cookie deprecation made it more difficult to track user behavior. And now with AI changing how people search, the entire journey is more opaque.

You can’t measure the impact of a LinkedIn comment that influences a buyer weeks later. You can’t track when your company is cited by name in an AI response (yet). But these things are shaping perception and driving decisions.

That’s why measurement needs to expand. The old model didn’t break overnight, but AI accelerated the collapse. CLEAR is the model to replace it.

Conversion: Move Beyond the Form Fill

Conversions still matter. But most teams only focus on easily tracked bottom-funnel actions. That gives an incomplete view of what’s working.

With CLEAR, conversion is part of the picture, but always in context. What led to the conversion? Was it high-quality? Was it influenced by other less trackable touchpoints, like reputation or thought leadership?

This isn’t about throwing out conversion metrics. It’s about understanding them in the context of quality and influence, not the whole story.

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Loyalty: Track What Happens After the Sale

Expansion and retention often drive the most revenue in B2B. Yet marketing rarely measures its role here.

Are customers engaging post-sale? Are they referring others? Are they renewing without needing to be convinced? These are loyalty signals, and they matter just as much as new logo acquisition.

Loyalty is also a visibility driver. Brands that retain customers earn more word-of-mouth and citations, human and machine.

Engagement: Measure Resonance, Not Just Reach

Engagement isn’t about vanity metrics. It’s about quality attention. Are people consuming, sharing, or responding to what you put into the world?

High engagement signals relevance. It shapes how your content is interpreted by both your audience and LLMs trained on that public data.

You don’t need a viral post. You need meaningful interaction that indicates trust and authority.

Awareness: Are You in the Right Places?

Traffic and impressions don’t tell you if your brand is top of mind. Awareness is about presence in the conversations, platforms, and sources your buyers already trust.

That includes being cited in AI answers. It includes showing up in roundups, Slack communities, and influencer content. It’s about being seen before someone searches for you directly.

Track where and how you’re showing up, not just how often.

Reputation: Your Most Valuable, Least Measured Asset

Reputation is the throughline of all the other metrics. It’s the reason your brand gets recommended. It’s what makes AI tools reference you over a competitor.

This used to be seen as a qualitative, hard-to-measure area. But now there are tools and signals—from sentiment analysis to share of voice to citations in public datasets that make it measurable.

Reputation isn’t just a PR concern anymore. It’s a core performance lever.

The Path Forward

B2B marketing leaders need to align with leadership and redefine what performance means, not just for reporting, but for resourcing, incentives, and strategic planning.

The CLEAR model gives teams a way to measure the things that actually drive durable growth, across every stage of the buyer journey and every kind of visibility: human or AI-driven.

The old way of measuring is fading fast. The question is whether your team is ready to step into what’s next.

📚 What the Ten Speed team is reading…

Google June 2025 core update rolling out now (Search Engine Land)

Does Ranking Higher on Google Mean You’ll Get Cited in AI Overviews? (Ahrefs)

Does AI Search Traffic Convert Better Than Traditional Search? (Ahrefs)

July 13, 1985 - Dual-venue Live Aid concert reaches 1.5B viewers & raises $100m+, proving that cause marketing can be both global and profitable for media partners.

July 16, 1995 - Amazon.com goes live and sells its first book, showing brands how a pure-play website plus relentless customer focus can upend entire retail categories.

July 15, 2006 - Twitter opens to the public, introducing real-time, 140-character updates and giving marketers a new, always-on conversation channel.

July 6, 2016 - Pokémon GO launches, flooding streets with players and highlighting AR’s power to drive offline foot traffic for partnered retailers.

Brain MAX by ClickUp - We have been doing more with ClickUp Brain and Brain MAX is a really interesting example of a non-AI-native company quickly pivoting to have a compelling offering that is deeply integrated into their core product. (Learn more) - not a sponsor or affiliate link; just a cool product

Plus, they break down the top challenges facing CMOs today, from proving ROI to balancing AI and creativity.

Links:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/key-hurdles-that-cmos-must-overcome/547890/

https://duaneforresterdecodes.substack.com/p/12-new-kpis-for-the-genai-era-the

It’s not a tooling problem. It’s a measurement problem.

We’re still using traffic-based metrics in a world that no longer rewards volume the way it used to. Search behavior has changed. Buyer journeys are nonlinear. AI is reshaping how information is found and consumed, often without a single click.

In the early 2010s, content strategy was straightforward. You published “The Ultimate Guide to X,” ranked on Google, generated traffic, and watched leads roll in. Traffic drove form fills, which drove sales. Simple math.

But the equation is broken now.

AI-generated summaries, featured snippets, and LLMs are answering questions before users ever reach your site. Organic click-through rates are falling. And users don’t convert the way they used to. Not directly, not immediately, and not on your timeline.

So what do we measure instead?

We need to move beyond traffic quantity and toward traffic efficiency, a model where success isn’t about how many visitors we get, but instead what those visitors represent and what they do.

Efficient traffic means content is:

• Aligned to a clear business objective

• Reaching the right people (not just more people)

• Driving real outcomes like pipeline, brand authority, and customer expansion

That means looking beyond top-line numbers and asking sharper questions:

• Is this content reaching our ICP?

• Is it helping people progress through the funnel?

• Is it referenced in sales calls, shared by execs, or showing up in AI responses?

There are three lenses we use to evaluate efficiency:

1. Purpose-driven segmentation. Not all traffic serves the same purpose, so content shouldn’t be measured by a one-size-fits-all metric. Content might be designed to build awareness, educate prospects, support decision-making, or retain existing customers. The goal defines the KPI.

2. Channel-specific objectives. Organic search is great for capturing long-tail queries and building durable authority. Social builds community and thought leadership. Email deepens engagement. Direct traffic signals brand strength. Each channel plays a different role and should be measured accordingly.

3. Outcome alignment. Content should drive measurable impact, whether that’s revenue, market expansion, improved retention, or competitive differentiation. When you link content performance to business strategy, you create alignment across teams and clearer signals for what to do next.

But here’s where most teams get stuck: they treat conversions as the only goal.

And yes, conversions matter. But when we over-prioritize them, we can miss the bigger picture.

Take this example:

• One blog post brings in 500 visits, 50 signups, and 5 demos.

• A research report brings in 2,000 visits, 20 signups, and 2 demos.

At first glance, the blog appears to be a better performer.

But that report reached nearly 850 decision-makers, drove branded search, got picked up in three industry newsletters, and influenced a six-figure deal months later. You can’t measure that kind of impact in a weekly conversion report, but it’s exactly the kind of long-term value we should be tracking.

Obviously, the ideal scenario is to do both. 😛 However, we all know that most teams can’t ‘do it all’ and are forced to prioritize, which is why this example is important.

So, how do you measure that?

You use metrics like:

• Revenue per visitor

• ICP fit rate

• Cross-channel amplification

• Mentions, citations, and AI references

• Sales enablement usage

One of the best signals of efficient traffic? Branded search. When someone types your company name into Google, that’s intent. That’s influence. It’s often the downstream result of TOFU content that builds awareness and trust, even if that content didn’t convert directly.

Another? Bottom-of-funnel queries. People searching “best [category] software” or “alternatives to [competitor]” aren’t just browsing, they’re buying. These visits drive outsized pipeline value, and they’re a critical part of any efficient content strategy.

That said, TOFU content still matters.

In a zero-click, AI-heavy world, authority-building content is how you earn visibility. It’s how your brand shows up in AI overviews and drives branded search weeks later. It’s how you educate a market and shape demand long before it converts.

So no, you don’t abandon TOFU. You just stop expecting it to perform like BOFU.

What this really comes down to is building a balanced portfolio.

You need content that builds awareness, content that educates and nurtures, and content that converts. Each has a role. Each needs its own measurement model.

You also need regular feedback loops with sales. What content is used in deals? What are prospects referencing? Which assets actually help close?

That’s how you measure true efficiency by looking at how content contributes to real progress across the funnel, not just short-term spikes.

Traffic is a means to an end, not the end itself.

The best content teams aren’t chasing pageviews. They’re building trust, accelerating deals, creating unique content that builds authority, and developing long-term growth engines. That’s what we focus on at Ten Speed. Not just content that gets seen, but content that works.

📚 What the Ten Speed team is reading…

Google’s official advice on optimizing for AIOs & AI Mode (SEJ)

10 Key Hurdles That CMOs Must Overcome In 2025 And Beyond (SEJ)

12 New KPIs for the GenAI Era: The Death of the Old SEO Dashboard (Duane Forrester)

Domain-Level Link Metrics May Not Be Good Predictors of AI Search Mentions (Ahrefs)

📈 Ten Speed’s New Early-Stage GTM Program

At Ten Speed, we have worked with various B2B and SaaS companies, from pre-seed to Series D/E. As part of this, we have seen that early-stage companies not only need different things but they also need a different engagement structure altogether.

Last month, we officially launched our Early-Stage GTM Program.

Eligible startups can enjoy the benefits of a strategic partner that can help you execute across a number of channels and content types, without the stress of long-term contracts or a limited scope of work, all at discounted rates for those who meet the criteria.

June 1, 1999 - Napster launches, letting fans trade MP3s peer-to-peer. Labels lose billions, but marketers gain a crash course in viral distribution, community building, and the coming dominance of digital.

June 29, 2007 - The first iPhone goes on sale. Lines, hype, and an “always-on” pocket internet that rewrites the rules of mobile marketing, apps, and m-commerce.

June 18, 2025 - At Cannes Lions 2025, AI tools edge out rosé chatter. Holding-company chiefs pledge nine-figure AI budgets as creatives debate machine vs. muse. The festival marks AI’s coming-of-age in mainstream advertising.

Twenty - a modern, open-source CRM alternative to Salesforce that is fully customizable, affordable, and powered by the community. (Learn more) - not a sponsor or affiliate link; just a cool product

Cheers!

Nate

References: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/cms-market-share-2025/546289/

Full video version available below:

This is Nate from Ten Speed 👋. As a subscriber to many newsletters, I know how much both frequency and quality of content matter. We reviewed our newsletter data, did some research, collected feedback, and ultimately decided to bring you a totally new format for our monthly newsletter.

Rather than lengthy think-pieces or granular, tactical deep dives, we want to provide newsletters that are a quick read, but still give you a view into our unique perspective as an agency working with dozens of B2B clients.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the new format. Cheers!

AEO? Let’s goooo!

In the last few weeks, a lot of us have come to the same conclusions regarding SEO and AI.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), or Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO), or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a new paradigm that’s here to stay. Still, at the same time, it all feels very familiar 😏. We’re throwing our weight behind the AEO name.

ChatGPT has been in the hands of users for a couple of years now, but for a good chunk of that time, it was only able to reference data it had ingested through 2021. Then, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others all started integrating with search or allowing search. This led to a significant shift in the type of questions users can ask and the kind of information being surfaced.

Collectively, we experimented with what results show up for various questions and then dug in to understand why. This is the feedback loop driven by intellectual curiosity that has powered SEO and organic growth for years.

So, it only feels natural that “AEO” emerged as a concept and is gaining traction across in-house teams and agencies. A significant amount of search volume still goes to the search engines, while a growing volume is moving to answer engines, so the objective is now to guide the optimization of websites, content, and overall marketing efforts to work for both.

But, there is a twist…and I LOVE it.

What we’re seeing at Ten Speed is that the reasons why companies aren’t included in answers can be a number of things that reach far beyond keywords on a page or search intent.

In many cases, things like negative product reviews, a lack of press mentions, sentiment on social media, and missing features or integrations can be the drivers for not being included.

This means we are headed for an era of companies being rewarded for things like good marketing, good customer service, and a quality product or service, not who can spend the most or spam the system most successfully.

For the last year, we have held the conviction that the best B2B marketing approaches balance SEO (and now AEO) with digital PR, social media, email marketing, podcasts, and unique content featuring first-party/proprietary data.

Over the next 6 months, it will become quite evident which companies and agencies have shifted to this new era and which have not.

We have been expanding our capabilities so that our clients can match the shift we’ve seen. We are excited to lean into this new era to help companies continue to grow, and we’re rooting for you, too.

📚 What the Ten Speed team is reading…

Getting Executive Buy-In: How to Tie Audience Research to Business Strategy (SparkToro)

Google’s New Domain Structure: What’s Next For Hreflang? (SEJ)

The 15 biggest announcements at Google I/O 2025 (The Verge)

LLMs Don’t Reward Originality, They Flatten It (Ahrefs)

📈 Ten Speed’s New Early-Stage GTM Program

At Ten Speed, we have worked with various B2B and SaaS companies, from pre-seed to Series D/E. As part of this, we have seen that early-stage companies not only need different things but they also need a different engagement structure altogether.

This month, we officially launched our Early-Stage GTM Program.

Eligible startups can enjoy the benefits of a strategic partner that can help you execute across a number of channels and content types, without the stress of long-term contracts or a limited scope of work, all at discounted rates for those who meet the criteria.

Random Facts and Cool Finds

May 8, 1985 - Coca-Cola’s reformulated “New Coke” reached store shelves nationwide. Within weeks, consumer backlash made it the classic case study for brand equity and market research misfires. (Read)

May 5, 2003 - LinkedIn officially launched, giving B2B marketers a dedicated social channel that would later dominate professional advertising and lead-gen budgets. (Read)

May 25, 2018 - The GDPR took effect across the EU, forcing marketers everywhere to rethink consent, email lists, ad-tracking, and martech stacks overnight. (Read)

Loops - A better way to send marketing and transactional email. (Learn more) - not a sponsor or affiliate link; just a cool product

Until next time!

Nate

What's changed?

If we were to jump on the hobby horse, we’d primarily answer with 5k words on ZIRP and its perils since 2008, but we’d like to maintain our click-through rate, so we’ll mostly talk about its downstream effects on SaaS investment dynamics.

How have companies adapted?

One response we've seen across our own clients and the broader B2B market is an expansion upmarket to provide value for the enterprise. Longer contracts with higher dollar values, alongside lower relative acquisition costs, both make enterprise solutions valuable.

As a company shifts and expands upmarket, what role should content marketing play?

Can your content strategy complement an enterprise product and generate revenue like it does for a freemium, SMB, or D2C solutions?

If you trust a subset of the collective hive brain on LinkedIn, you’ll often hear refrains of “SEO is dead!”, “You need to go programmatic!”, “Organic just doesn’t work for enterprise!”.

Instead, they’ll say companies need to slash and shuffle budgets to accommodate an army of AI SDRs and Account Executives. Otherwise, pipeline will disappear.

We disagree.

Yes, your sales motion should evolve to accommodate longer deal cycles, multiple decision-makers, higher contract values, and complex deals.

But, as you move upmarket, your content program can also adapt to connect with those stakeholders, across different distribution channels, and in unique formats before (and after) the first form fill.

ZIRP - no free lunch

First, a quick jump onto the hobby horse to talk monetary policy and how it’s affected SaaS markets, and well, pretty much everything else over the last two decades (sorry, we’ll keep it short).

From 2008 until 2022, federal short-term interest rates held at, or near, zero, otherwise known as ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). Primarily a response to the financial crisis, for tech companies and investors, this meant borrowing and investing money was effectively risk-free.

From post-COVID to today, as lending rates and subsequently the cost of capital increase, high-burn, low-margin customer acquisition strategies no longer make sense.

Snap to 2025, investors are increasingly prioritizing efficient growth models and profitability. As a result, companies have had to find different ways to generate cash efficiently and predictably to secure funding.

Enterprise Advantages

What specifically is so efficient and predictable about enterprise software relative to SMB or D2C?

When a company moves upmarket, product features naturally adapt to solve more narrow and/or specific business use cases.

The more use cases the product solves in a specific business environment, the more leverage that company has to keep that customer around. After all, they may have the only product uniquely solving the specific problem for that industry, segment, or business.

This kind of specialization leads to less competition. Barriers to entry are higher (SOC2 cert anyone?), and similar products often don’t have direct parity. There may be overlap in specific features between competing products, but there are often different focuses on varying verticals and customers.

The end result is a SaaS product with more pricing power, a deeper moat, stickier customers, and, if it continues to be differentiated, more reliable revenue.

Take Zoom. Starting out as a mostly out-of-the-box PLG offering for SMBs, during COVID, they quickly expanded their feature set and acquired multiple companies to accommodate larger businesses across more verticals operating remotely.

Building in enhanced security, higher meeting capacities, and specific features for healthcare (HIPAA compliant conferencing) and even entirely new products (Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Events), all enabled Zoom to become stickier than its competitors, or, more often, they were the only solution for these customers.

Enterprise Adaptations

Beyond the forcing functions and benefits behind the upmarket shift, there are still barriers to successfully transitioning. Enterprise companies have a different approach to choosing new solutions compared to SMB:

• Complex buying committees span manager to C-suite levels, including legal, procurement, and compliance stakeholders — purchases often require 14+ people across multiple departments to sign off

• Extended sales cycles feature more decision points, higher contract values with longer terms, and varied evaluation processes — 6-9 months is normal for an enterprise sales cycle compared to 30-90 days for SMB deals

• Risk-averse buyers are common and are resistant to changing current infrastructure, require budget approval, and demand proven ROI before making a purchase

How can companies respond to these challenges via content? Better yet, how can you support the sales team further down the funnel?

Leveraging Existing Inbound Value as You Move Upmarket

We’ll often partner with companies as they’re gaining an initial foothold with their enterprise offering, but before they have a reliable pipeline of leads for the sales team to engage with.

To help them bridge that gap, we don’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, we’ll leverage the existing inbound motion that’s already working by refining and repositioning existing content.

Take this pillar piece from Workvivo. It’s at the top of the SERP, has strong conversion elements, is a high authority piece with time and attention put into it, and includes real interviews with multiple CEOs.

However, the content (at the time) didn’t speak to the specific HR manager audience Workvivo identified as a primary decision maker as they shifted up the market.

Instead of creating a net-new piece of content and waiting for it to be indexed, we applied a comprehensive update to the existing piece to better reflect the HR audience and provide information they want to be educated on.

We then scaled this approach across their content library - updating, consolidating, and connecting different URLs to weave in changes to the Workvivo product and how it can help their enterprise customers.

Existing long-form blog content isn’t the only lever to pull, either.

Improving product documentation can serve a similar purpose for technical enterprise SaaS products—those with a CIO or IT manager on the buying committee.

Improving on-page elements and indexing a documentation portal serves as a lower funnel conversion layer. Technical buyers want to know how the software works and how to implement it before engaging with sales.

Adjacent to documentation, enterprise solutions often have multiple integration pages that can be updated to focus on non-brand queries.

Often, we work with clients across all three parts of their marketing site to connect existing content with new buyers.

Content Diversification

When building initial strategies for three or four months of content, think hard about what kinds of content are created, where that content can be found, and who should find it.

Most companies coming from PLG or SMB motions are usually stuck in one or two content formats.

Building another SERP-crushing pillar post on “What is X” or “The Definitive Guide to X, 2025” is enticing, but may not influence enterprise buyers to take action.

Instead, allocate resources to crafting a vertical-specific case study, thought leadership, or a quarterly research report. This expands the surface area of your content program and provides multiple touchpoints for your audience to engage with:

• Case studies prove that you are who you say you are as a company. Incorporating a customer interview, a cohesive narrative, and concrete business impacts builds real trust in enterprise buyers' minds.

• Research reports support building authority up-funnel, provide useful data that can be used across multiple other pieces of content, and can also become email collectors for retargeting.

• Thought leadership can take many forms. CEO influencers on X and LinkedIn, company podcasts, and newsletters are all viable

Ten Speed builds Authority Content across multiple enterprise clients. We’ll interview the VP of Product to extract their unique POV on an important industry topic, create long-form written content, and then redistribute it across various channels.

Thought leadership should increase authority and communicate the expertise and opinions of the company and the people behind it. It creates trust with enterprise buyers by providing a nuanced POV on a subject they think about often and/or care about deeply.

SEO for Enterprise

Content teams often play the same game: create upper funnel blogs to mostly drive traffic volume and pray that visitors click “book now” on the floating header.

This approach can work for low-friction SMB and PLG offerings, but it seldom converts enterprise prospects because it fails to trigger the crucial "This solution addresses my specific business challenges".

Instead, understand who you’re trying to reach across the buying committee, then research those topics and scale them across multiple stakeholders.

A few examples of this approach from an enterprise product targeting dev and finance audiences:

• https://www.prosperops.com/blog/finops-automation/

• https://www.prosperops.com/blog/devops-automation-tools/

• https://www.prosperops.com/blog/finops-lifecycle/

Lower-funnel brand comparisons are also still effective. Dedicated “X vs. Y pages” or “Y Alternatives” pages leverage common SERP queries to help buyers directly compare features between competitors. It puts your brand in the conversation, and the content should find buyers after they’ve already interacted with your company.

Beyond optimized blog content, specific solutions and industry pages can latch onto core non-brand search terms and become conversion areas for the audience.

Integrating Enterprise Content Motions

Calling back to increasing the surface area of the content program, each of the content types above - case studies, newsletters, thought leadership, alongside a more focused organic strategy - shouldn’t stay siloed. They all can and should be consistently repurposed across other channels, inside and outside the marketing motion:

Inside the marketing motion:

• Organic blog content can be repurposed to LinkedIn and can bring audiences to the site beyond search.

• Authority Content can be distributed via PR, and repurposed to X or LinkedIn from the CEO/CPO’s POV.

• Newsletters can redistribute blog content, case studies, thought leadership, or serve as roundups on product features, etc.

• Paid search can also overlap with organic content through landing pages and mixed intent keywords.

Outside the marketing motion:

• Case studies, research reports, and blog content can be used as sales enablement.

• Documentation and research reports can augment customer success and customer marketing.

Sales can also leverage content libraries during an active deal. As a sale progresses, more of the buying committee is involved, and the salesperson has a captive and engaged audience to redistribute relevant content to directly.

Landing the plane

Hopefully, we’ve convinced you that turning off content isn’t a real solution when moving upmarket.

However, what works for mid-market won’t necessarily work for enterprise.

Adapting your content strategy to serve the enterprise buyers you’re trying to reach, through format, messaging, or channel, will help fuel your sales team while also expanding the surface area of your marketing program before (and after!) that first form fill.

When done right, audits can be extremely valuable to in-house marketing teams, but this is a part of the marketing world where, sadly, the bad experiences outweigh the good ones.

A big part of the problem is that it is difficult to look at two audit offerings from consultants or agencies and understand which one will be good.

My goal with this post is to help you better understand when it makes sense for you to get an audit, how to identify a good one from a bad one (before you buy!), and how to get the most value from an audit.

Let’s dig in.

When to consider getting an audit

Despite some of the fuss over audits, they are still valuable tools, and many smart, motivated marketers use them to grow and improve. Here are three main reasons you should consider getting an audit.

You can’t solve the problem in-house

Site speed, technical SEO, and marketing automation configuration are a few areas where marketing teams often find that they don’t have the right skillsets/experience in-house to figure out the problems themselves. You might be able to narrow the issues down to a more specific area, but ultimately, you need help diagnosing the issue and developing a solution.

You don’t have the bandwidth

I once used an analytics agency to audit our tracking scripts and custom JS and give clear direction on what to change because our in-house devs were too busy to take on the task. They totally could have figured it out, but getting the audit allowed our devs to keep making progress on their work, and I solved the problems.

Sometimes, it makes sense to get the extra bandwidth to go faster.

You need third-party validation

I was once hired by a CEO to audit an entire marketing program (tools, tactics, and team) for the purpose of validating where the issues and opportunities existed. To them, this validation was valuable in handling immediate issues and also figuring out the right marketing leader to bring in next.

In some ways, this is a combination of points 1 & 2, but overall, it can be useful to confirm or challenge your current understanding via an unbiased external partner.

When NOT to get an audit

Sometimes, the audit you paid for is done well, but you may be disappointed with the outcome because you shouldn’t have sought out an audit in the first place. Here are two reasons not to pursue an audit.

You don’t have a clear objective

Can you imagine calling a plumber to your home and telling them to look around and see what they can find?

When an audit doesn’t begin with a clear objective, it sets up the entire thing to feel aimless, generic, and pointless.

Good consultants and agencies will definitely find things to highlight in the audit, but none of it will answer the question, “so what?”

You’re hoping for a silver bullet

If you’re behind on your goals for the quarter, an audit isn’t likely to save the quarter.

If you don’t have product-market fit, an audit isn’t likely to change that.

Getting an audit (or doing anything in marketing) out of desperation isn’t likely to end well. Maybe somewhere, there is a marketer who threw a Hail Mary with an audit, found out something that turned things around, and went on to great success, but I’ve never heard a story like that, and it certainly isn’t the norm.

The audit will not hand you a silver bullet.

What makes an audit good or bad?

If you now feel that there is a clear and valid reason to get an audit, how do you determine if an audit will be good? How do you avoid being one of those people heading to X to rant about the useless audit you just got back?

Below are six elements you should look for when evaluating (and ideally you can see some examples before buying).

1. Data presentation

How the results of the audit are presented to you matter. You need to understand the content and be able to hand it off to others without requiring a lot of work. The most hated SEO audits simply export data from a tool and call it an audit.

Look for an audit that will take the time to curate the data and put it together in a way that is easy to understand, reference, and share.

Bad: Generic, raw data export
Good: Styled, curated data

2. Prioritization

One of the most important aspects of an audit is prioritization. Without it, you might assume that everything needs to be addressed ASAP.

Look for an audit that will include realistic prioritization.

Bad: All items shown as critical
Good: Items prioritized by impact

3. Full picture

Along the same lines as prioritization, you don’t want to get a readout that is all bad. It can make everything feel more dire than it is, leading to misapplied focus or resources.

Look for an audit that will find the issues, but also shows you everything that is in good shape or being done well.

Bad: Only shows the issues
Good: Shows the bad and the good

4. Context

If your audit tells you that you have synchronous JS blocking the loading of critical assets, that’s helpful. If your audit tells you that it matters because it appears to be causing the lead form on your site to not load for 4 seconds, which is likely having a negative impact on conversion rates, that’s very helpful.

Look for an audit that is going to tell you not only what but also why it matters.

Bad: Only tells you the what
Good: Also tells you why it matters

5. Meetings

Imagine getting an email with a bunch of attachments or a link to a Google Drive folder with 7-10 spreadsheets and slide decks and a simple “let us know if you have any questions!” What the heck do you do with all of that?

Look for an audit that includes meetings to gain context before starting, a meeting to walk through all of the findings, and some sort of guidance or support to help beyond the presentation meeting.

Bad: Hands over a data dump
Good: Includes guidance & meetings

6. Broader Impact

If you hire someone to audit your paid social campaigns, they will do that. If there are things adjacent to the paid social campaigns that could be better, like landing pages, offers, or how you handle organic social, you would want to know those things too.

Look for an audit that will go beyond the core thing to evaluate and speak to adjacent or related things that may be impacting the core thing or are being impacted by the core thing.

Bad: Is myopic in one area
Good: Understands broader impact

How to get the most value from an audit

Now, let’s assume you pursued an audit for the right reasons and were able to find someone to give you a good one that aligns with the details above. How do you ensure that you turn the learnings from the audit into added value for your company?

Have a plan for how to implement/execute.

The worst thing you can do is get a good audit that lays things out for your company, but all it does is collect dust.

Granted, you won’t know exactly what will need to be done until you get the audit back. However, you should have a pretty good idea of the type of work involved and the resources you’ll need.

Assume there will be a lot to do and prepare accordingly, so that you can take action and implement the changes/learnings from the audit.

Does Ten Speed offer any audits?

Yes, we do. It’s probably not a surprise, but they contain the 6 elements of a good audit outlined above. 🙂

We currently offer the following audits, if any of them might be useful to you.

• Comprehensive Strategy Audit

• Content Decay Audit

• On-Site & Technical SEO Audit

• Site Migration Audit

Fill out this form and we’ll provide you with more info.

Additional Resources:

Understanding Search Intent: Examples for B2B SaaS SEO

How To Develop Thought Leadership Content for B2B SaaS

7 Product-Led Growth Examples From Companies Worth Studying