Content marketing strategy for small teams in 2026

The state of content marketing

The numbers behind the industry and what they mean for your plan.

• The state of content marketing 2026: every stat that actually matters (in one place)

  Every major 2026 content marketing report, distilled and editorialized. The numbers without the noise - and what each one means for how you work.

  5 min read

• Content marketing statistics 2026: what the numbers actually mean

  Anyone can list 180 content marketing statistics. This post does something more useful - takes five genuinely telling data points from 2025-2026 research and draws a single clear argument about where content investment is heading.

  5 min read

• Content marketing in the age of AI: how to actually structure for it

  AI didn't just change how content gets made - it changed what a content team needs to look like. Here's how to restructure for it without burning everything down.

  5 min read

Strategy for founders

Content plans built around a founder's time and voice.

• Content strategy for founders: how to build a system that runs without you

  A solo founder does not need a content team to ship content that looks like they have one. They need a system, and this is how to build it.

  6 min read

• 5 reasons to get your CEO posting on LinkedIn

  A CEO who posts on LinkedIn consistently does something no company page can do - they make the business feel human. Here's why that matters commercially.

  5 min read

• LinkedIn pulse is broken for SEO and posts are winning instead

  LinkedIn Pulse articles peaked at 33 million monthly Google visits in March 2024 and collapsed to 3.6 million by March 2026. If your LinkedIn content strategy still centres on long-form articles for SEO, the ground shifted under you months ago.

  6 min read

• The Google update that made LinkedIn articles worth taking seriously

  Google likes ranking LinkedIn articles. That's been true for a while, but the received wisdom held that backlink quality from Pulse didn't do much for your actual brand or website. So the collective shrug was understandable. The collective response was to file it under "nice to have" distribution an

  3 min read

Teams and roles

How content teams are set up now, and the roles that are growing.

• How to set up a content marketing team that actually produces (not just exists)

  Most content marketing teams are structured around org charts rather than output. This guide argues the opposite - define what you need to ship first, then build the team around that.

  5 min read

• What my content team looks like in 2026

  We had ClaudeCode running, the repo was set up, and we genuinely believed that once the team saw how powerful this was, they'd be in. Some of them were. Plenty weren't - because plenty of the team didn't want to build in a terminal environment, and that reality changed how I think about content engi

  5 min read

• What running a content team looked like 10 years ago - and what it looks like now

  About 12 years ago, I ran a content operation that looked like most content operations at the time. A room of writers. An SEO lead feeding them keyword briefs. Templates, workflows, a publishing policy, someone to handle distribution. If you wanted ten blogs a week, you hired ten writers. If you wan

  3 min read

• The job of the modern content marketer is changing

  My job looks pretty different to what it did two years ago. Same title, same team, same broad remit - strategy, narrative, CEO and CMO alignment, PR, social, ABM support, quality bar, team performance. But at least 60% of my time goes toward building agentic workflows. Content engineering is what we

  3 min read

• What is an AI-native content marketer (and are you one)?

  An AI-native content marketer designs and operates content workflows built on agentic AI - owning the system end-to-end, from strategy to distribution. This is what separates them from someone who just uses AI to write faster.

  5 min read

• What is a marketing generalist, and why the role is having its moment

  A marketing generalist works across the full spread of marketing rather than specialising in one channel. AI has quietly made that breadth more valuable, not less, which is why the role is back in demand.

  6 min read

Lessons from the field

Opinions earned the slow way.

• 10 lessons from 10 years of leading content

  Ten years running content functions, not just creating content. Here's what a decade in the trenches actually teaches you - the stuff that doesn't make it into the frameworks.

  5 min read

FAQ

Common questions