If you don’t have a digital content strategy in place for your website, your channels, and the surfaces where AI now answers your prospects’ questions, it’s time to start one. The case for thinking strategically about content was true when we first wrote this post in 2013. The importance of a strong content strategy is even more true now.
The core problem hasn’t changed — it’s intensified. People are online from waking to sleeping, and they don’t move through a tidy funnel from awareness to purchase. They drift across LinkedIn posts, podcast episodes, AI Overviews, YouTube reviews, peer Slack channels, and a half-finished newsletter from a competitor. By the time someone is ready to buy from you, they’ve already passed through dozens of moments where your content either showed up or didn’t.
A decade ago, Google’s research on the path to purchase made this visible. The pattern has only intensified since. Most B2B buying decisions now involve many content touches across multiple channels, and a meaningful share of those touches happens outside the websites and platforms you control. Your content has to be designed for that reality, not for the linear funnel diagram your sales team still has on a slide somewhere.
The channels you’re competing for have multiplied. A 2026 content strategy needs to cover, at minimum:
- Your own website and blog
- Organic search results — including AI Overviews and answer boxes
- AI-driven search surfaces like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini
- Social channels appropriate to your audience — LinkedIn for B2B, Instagram and TikTok for consumer, YouTube nearly everywhere
- Long-form audio and video — podcasts, webinars, recorded interviews
- Email newsletters and creator-style direct distribution
- Paid search, paid social, and identity-driven retargeting
- Earned coverage — press, partnerships, and customer advocacy
That’s a lot of surfaces. The point isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to choose the surfaces where your buyers actually spend their attention and to show up there saying one consistent thing.
Different channels do different jobs. Some are built to introduce you — short-form social, podcasts, organic discovery, AI summaries. Some assist mid-journey — comparison content, case studies, webinars. Some close — email sequences, retargeted ads, direct outreach. Treating them all the same is the most expensive content mistake we see clients make.
The biggest shift since the original version of this post is AI-driven search. When a prospect asks ChatGPT “who should I hire for identity-based retargeting” or types a question into Google’s AI Overview, your content either shows up in the answer or it doesn’t. Showing up there requires the same things SEO has always required — clear topical authority, depth, originality, links from credible sources — but the stakes are higher. The AI either cites you or it cites a competitor, and prospects often don’t click through to compare.
One more shift worth naming. Cookie deprecation and privacy rules have broken the old “broadcast to a lookalike and hope” paid playbook. The companies pulling ahead right now are building first-party audiences they actually own — through content, through email, through identity-based retargeting that links anonymous site visitors to known prospects. Content is what fills the top of that machine. Without it, the rest doesn’t matter.
A plug for our VisitorID product. Today, we can identify who visited our website with enough personal information to be able to reach back out to them by email and identify them to Facebook as a return visitor to the website. This enables you to retarget existing prospects, which is the most cost-effective way to secure leads and prospects.
By developing a strong, targeted content strategy — one that’s designed for how buyers actually research and decide in 2026, not how they did in 2013 — you can gain the attention of potential customers, educate them, build trust, and convince them to choose you. The principle from the original post still holds. The execution is just much more demanding now.