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

5 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…

Read more

a year 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.

Learn more about our case study capabilities and more.

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

One in particular that we see fairly often, is the website that grew from 100-200 URLs to 1,000+ and now has more frequent content decay to deal with.

Without the right systems, it can feel like trying to clean a house room by room with a house full of kids, and the end result is that your growth rate slows, things get hard, and you no longer love what you’re doing.

Content Decay Erodes Your Progress

The example below shows how you can be running a successful content program, adding over 320k in new traffic over the course of 24 months, yet only experiencing a net gain of ~38k.

This may seem like an extreme amount of traffic loss each month, but a site with 1k-3k URLs can easily experience 5-10% loss if decay is left unchecked.

You might be addressing content decay already by looking for the URLs with the greatest click loss and then updating them, but that doesn’t scale on its own. The more you lean into addressing decay, the more your new content plans become at risk. Before you know it, your content program starts to feel like a game of whack-a-mole.

The way to manage decay AND keep your new content production on track is to rely on a core set of systems and processes. For us, that’s the APPS Framework.

What is the APPS Framework?

The APPS Framework consists of four fundamental categories for your systems, regardless of whether you are doing it all in-house, working with contractors, or using an agency. Those categories are Analysis, Planning, Production, and Standardization.

The lessons in each of the four categories come from years of scaling content programs to over 1m visits/mo at companies like Sprout Social, as well as many other SaaS companies as clients of Ten Speed. Let’s dig into each.

Analysis

Analyzing the performance of your existing content cannot be ad hoc. You need to have a predetermined cadence established for analyzing your content to identify decay. Typically, monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually, depending on the size of your site and level of competition.

In order to do the analysis on a regular basis, you need a way to rate opportunities on a scale so that you can a) pick up where you left off on some URLs that were questionable but not in need of action last time and b) keep the process efficient. If it takes you too long each time and you’re repeating work, you are too likely to stop.

• Example: 1 = Pursue; 2 = Investigate; 3 = Defer; 4 = No Issue

Fluctuation in performance is normal. Consider establishing a threshold or benchmark (i.e. >1 standard deviation) to prevent being subjective or emotional in your analysis.

You need to establish a way to flag frequency per URL because certain topics will be more competitive than others and require more frequent updates. Having a way to flag URLs as needing to be reviewed/updated monthly or quarterly makes sure that you keep important pages on your radar and avoids duplicating work. This can be as simple as a column in a spreadsheet or even a shared doc with a short list of the most critical URLs.

Planning

Content planning to address decay cannot be done in a silo. Content decay needs to be integrated into topic roadmaps where you plan new content. If you’re always baking a full month of new content into the schedule, you’ll never have room to update content.

Remember the first point about establishing a cadence for analyzing performance? Well, your content planning needs to align with your most frequent update cadence or you will be throwing off planning or letting your analysis go stale until the next round. It sounds simple, but it is important to ensure it runs smoothly.

• If some content decays monthly, you need to plan monthly

• If most decay is semi-annually, you can plan monthly or quarterly

Most teams have a relatively fixed capacity each month. If you do, you must determine the necessary ratio of new content to content updates. This allows you to have space earmarked for updates instead of battling an over-filled content calendar of new content.

Complete your content decay research ahead of planning meetings. Even if you can see a performance decline in the data, it isn’t until you do deeper research that you understand why it decayed and what needs to be done to fix it. So, planning the right amount of time/resources to fix it is difficult if you don’t know what is needed.

Production

Use a different content brief template for updating existing content. This brief requires everything in your new content brief, plus additional instructions on keeping/modifying/deleting content.

Content updates typically require someone who understands the basic concepts of optimizing existing content and can take more of an editorial approach to the content. You need writers who understand how to do content updates.

Create a unique publishing checklist for all of the things that need to be done to publish each type of content update. You may be tempted to use your normal publishing checklist for new content, but even 3-4 different publishing tasks can throw a wrench in your process or create a bottleneck with the only person who knows how to do it the right way.

Account for new/different images that may be needed. This could be updated product images, images for new sections added, or a new featured image based on the updated title (or consolidated URLs). Do this to avoid publishing being delayed.

Standardization

You need a menu of predetermined ways to handle decay (i.e., small, medium, and large updates or consolidation of multiple URLs). In order to do this, you must understand how much effort goes into each one. If your team doesn’t have a good estimate, track time for a short period.

Make this part of your planning process. You’ve done the analysis to identify decay and researched what was needed to make the content updates, and now you can determine which of your “menu items” is the right solution. Doing this will make it easy to plan for the workload properly.

• Example: Two small updates might equal one slot for the month

• Example: One consolidation might equal two slots for one month

Do the same for design & development resources needed to make sure that you can have a shared language with those teams and that all teams can accurately plan their work.

Modify as Necessary!

No process is ever truly complete, and most frameworks don’t fit your exact situation perfectly. And that’s okay.

Please use this as a starting point and adapt it to the way your company works and other specific needs you might have.

After all, the iteration is what makes all of this fun. 🙂

Explore More Ten Speed Content

How To Develop Thought Leadership Content for B2B SaaS

Episode 56 - Key Ingredients in a High-Impact Content Brief

The SaaS Content Marketing Guide: Building a Strategy that Increases Brand Awareness and Influences Revenue

On the one hand, it is true that copycat content and content created only for search engines doesn’t cut it anymore. Your content needs to be unique, creative, and give people a reason to consume your content over someone else's.

On the other hand, content marketing’s object is not simply to stand out or be the most creative. The business invested in the team and/or agency to make a return on that investment, not to impress its peers.

Moving forward, the teams that will win understand how to be creative and stand out in the right ways, while remaining focused on driving business impact. It simply cannot be one or the other. It has to be both.

Examples of business impact > preference

At Ten Speed, we have the opportunity to review GSC and GA data for a lot of B2B SaaS companies. One thing that is consistently true is that the pages you would think drive the most awareness, backlinks, leads, and/or revenue, tend to be average performers.

Nearly every company has this random page or blog post that drives unexpectedly high numbers and is highly valuable to the business. Here are a couple of examples:

A landing page that doesn’t conform to best practices

A blog post designed to be a simple resource

While at Sprout Social, Kevin King (co-founder of Ten Speed) saw in the data that there were a lot of fragmented searches for all kinds of social image sizes. Inspired to satisfy that in a robust way, he led the creation of a lengthy blog post that contained every image size for every social network, a simple corresponding Google Sheet, and a commitment to maintaining the freshness of information.

The belief was that a highly designed, creative resource would be really cool and useful, but the scrappy version of a blog post and Google Sheet would still satisfy their need and prove the business value.

This page went on to generate millions in revenue for the business, spawned variations, was the driver behind creating the free tool “Landscape,” and, to this day, is the number one thing people mention when they find out I worked at Sprout Social.

Keep your team aligned with business impact

So, how can a marketing leader with a million things going on ensure that the content team is marching down the right path?

We have assembled a list of things you can do with your in-house team or agency to give them the context and tools they need to succeed.

1. Establish clear objectives

The simplest and most obvious is to give the team a clear objective. If you tell them to create the best content in our industry, they will make different decisions than if you tell them to increase revenue by x%.

Content has a ton of value beyond direct revenue generation, and I wouldn’t recommend that being the sole objective of a content team, but make sure that what you and the CEO are expecting to happen from content is made clear.

2. Share the investment math

I’ve talked with a number of marketing leaders who don’t share the investment math and business case with the content team. Some intentionally and others, the idea of doing so didn’t cross their minds.

At some point in the budgeting and staffing process, a case was made for investing in content marketing as a way to grow the business. Sharing this case with the team is an easy way to ensure everyone is on the same page that this isn’t a creative endeavor to do stuff that makes us feel good. Company leadership has expectations tied to this work and failing to meet them will negatively impact the company.

3. Question motives

Don’t be afraid to ask “Why?” a lot with your team. Why is this part of the strategy? Why do you feel we need to create this?

Someone might say the content needs to be 10x all other content on the topic.

Okay. How do you define 10x? Does it need to be 10x better if 2x better will still accomplish our goals?

Also, keep an ear out for “I” being used. I don’t like that type of content. I want us to put everything we have into this.

4. Require reporting

You’d be surprised how many content teams are not required to report on progress, results, or business impact. 🤦🏻‍♂️

I’m an advocate of less is more with reporting, so I’m not suggesting you bog down the content team with tedious and extensive reporting. However, a simple report each month showing progress and data on 4-5 key metrics can be enough to keep a team aligned.

To make it simple, make sure the reporting covers these three areas in some way:

• Output/execution

• Awareness metrics

• Business impact metrics

It only takes one or two times of having to report sub-par numbers for someone to think, “I don’t want to have to do that again.”

5. Audit processes

At least twice per year, if not quarterly, you should sit down with the team for 30 minutes and have them walk you through every step of their process.

As a content program grows, more people will want to be involved, unnecessary steps will be added, manual tasks will creep in, etc.

Audit frequently and keep your team in check or you may end up with a few examples we’ve seen:

• a 49-point publishing checklist

• seven rounds of review/revision before publishing

• a process that takes five weeks to go from creation to publishing

Catching these issues and coaching your team to streamline things will help prevent the slowing of progress and the focus on business impact.

6. Require collaboration

As a leader, you should require your content team to collaborate with customer-facing departments on some sort of regular cadence. This will keep them aligned to what other teams need from content and ensure they are aligned with customer needs.

Sales and customer success will be blunt about what they need and the questions that prospects/customers often ask.

Customer support can have great insights into where people get stuck and detailed ways that customers are using the product.

As a bonus, your content team can also help other teams understand existing or upcoming content that fits what those teams need to educate and enable prospects and customers.

Getting started

If you’re leading a large content program that’s already in motion, we recommend getting started with #1 or #2 and building from there.

If you’re building things from the ground up, now is a great time to leverage all six to get started on the right foot.

We’re always happy to chat through this with you or answer your questions. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

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