Hey, everyone!
As a part of my final-year dissertation module at The University of the West of England, I’m exploring the AI readiness of SMEs across the UK. Using the six-pillar framework of Strategy, Infrastructure, Data, Governance, Talent and Culture to identify the appropriate solutions for successful adoption.
If you own or work at an SME with under 250, I’d really appreciate you taking 2 minutes to share your thoughts and experiences. Feel free to share with any friends, colleagues or family.
The data gathered will be used to create an AI playbook, highlighting solutions to areas identified, enabling adoption, which I will share to everyone who participates!
https://uwe.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_74ytKWBIZ56cNBY
Why – in the name of all that is holy – does your B2B website need more than one page?!
If, like mine, your business exists to sell a single core service – to solve one problem for your clients – then you should be able to sell it on one page.
Multiple pages become necessary only when things are genuinely complex:
– Multiple audiences
– Multiple (genuine) offers, services, or products
– Blogs, or libraries of case studies
But otherwise, boiling things down to a one‑pager should be considered an upgrade, not a compromise, and here’s why 👇
I often say, as an analogy, that a one page website is like a good sales call.
How did you even get my number?
An effective salesperson will control the sequence of a conversation. They won’t start with price. They’ll start by exploring the problem, helping the prospect to understand the cost of leaving it unsolved, and then systematically ruling out some obvious alternative solutions.
A one‑page website lets you do the same thing: to guide the prospect through the stages of your argument in the correct order.
With lots of smaller pages, visitors can jump around in any order they like. They can peek at the pricing before understanding the value.
But with a one‑page site you decide what comes first, what comes next, and what someone sees before you ask them to commit.
There’s another massive advantage: simplicity. And perceived simplicity.
You must remember: your website will often be viewed in one browser tab with a bunch of your competitors’ websites open in adjacent tabs.
The viewer has a job to do: close 80% of these tabs before sending off an enquiry to the one or two which remain open – and then going to do something ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE.
If your website greets them with a complicated navigation, multiple dropdowns, and ten possible routes into the content, then browsing fatigue will kick in very fast.
And if, in the nextdoor tab, your competitor is offering a clear, focused page that immediately says “This is what we do. This is why. This is for whom. Here’s how much it costs. And here’s the proof that it works.” then their decision becomes easy.
Spoilers: the tab your site is in ain’t staying open for long.
Lots of websites seem to offer multiple services just because it’s “the done thing”.
And this, dear reader, is the worst reason to ever do anything.
Even if you do offer five services, a normal first-time buyer is only going to buy one of them. Ask yourself: Are all those pages there because they help solve a problem for your buyer – or because they make your business look more ‘proper’?
And which of these is more important?
(Do give me a shout if you’d like my thoughts on your website – I’ll send you a free Loom video with my ideas for improving it to get you more leads.)
GEO… have you heard of it?
The answer to that is probably yes. Because those three little letters have been on the lips of every marketing, PR and SEO person for the last 12 months and more.
They’ve been the subject of countless LinkedIn posts, blogs, articles, features and commentary. Everyone has something to say about Generative Engine Optimisation – we’ve even written a few ourselves.
But the big thing about GEO and all of these insights and opinions being offered up is that most of them are either misinformed or outright incorrect… and it’s creating something of a rift.
A rift in understanding, which, if you’re on the wrong side of, could end up pretty harmful. As it might lead you off-piste when it comes to your digital marketing strategies.
Which is why we’ve written this piece. To cut through the noise of all the online GEO chatter and give you a concise overview surrounding some of the most prevalent GEO misinformation you’ll come across.
This is the big one. But despite what the headlines and hot takes would have you believe, GEO is not replacing SEO.
This is one of the more potentially damaging pieces of misinformation out there. Becasue when you have reputable media outlets running articles with headlines like ‘Forget SEO, Welcome to the world of GEO, ‘ it creates an ecosystem which makes us feel we have to choose between one or the other.
That’s not how it works and it’s this narrative that’s the most harmful, because it creates a false choice dilemma. In this particular case, it’s the logical fallacy that you have to choose between either SEO or GEO.
The fallacy is then negatively reinforced by layering the argument completely in favour of GEO – but without a full understanding of what it is and how it works.
In short, people on the internet are telling you to ditch SEO for GEO – they don’t understand how the two are linked.
When the terribly clever folk were building Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity… what do you think they trained it on?
They trained it on web-scale data, which means a lot of Google-indexed content. These tools are still using web-scale data to provide responses. So all that SEO content that it’s pulling from is kind of important.
More and more people are using AI tools as search alternatives; this is true.
Where the truth gets somewhat lost is in playing up the scale of this growth. Some paint the picture of Google being a quickly sinking ship, its search dominance dropping like a stone to the bottom of the ocean.
Now Google has lost some of its dominance. Its market share dropped to below 90% for the first time in 15 years. But 89% market share is still billions and billions of searches. ChatGPT is on the rise, but 17% market share is paltry in comparison.
These patterns may continue; they may not. The most dangerous this we can do is to assume one way or another. The best thing to do is to react to the here-and-now, while keeping one eye on the future.
Don’t lose sight of the current reality, that Google still has a lot of power and search volume isn’t tanking quite as hard as sensationalist LinkedIn posts would have you believe.
Now this one is 100% true. AI and LLMs are indeed having a huge negative impact on web traffic.
In Google, thanks to the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews, zero click searches are on the rise.
A zero click search, if you don’t already know, is a search query which doesn’t result in a click to any sourced website. There are two reasons why this would happen.
One is that the search itself did yield the appropriate outcomes and was abandoned. The other is that the searcher did get the answers they needed, but from other sources.
Pre-GEO, those ‘other sources’ could have been featured snippets, knowledge panels, people also ask. All these various features, bells and whistles that Google implemented to enrich search, whether that actually happened or not is a debate for another time.
But in a GEO age, the AI overview is pulling focus. Here’s what the data shows:
These numbers are a bit of a problem for all parties.
Zero-click journeys mean people aren’t getting into the traditional search engine results, meaning they aren’t converting into visitors and leads.
So, your traditional search visibility and SEO strategies are compromised – this is where the GEO visibility conversation rightly takes root.
The second issue is one of Google’s own making. Because this also applies to paid search. By keeping attention within the overview itself, Google is compromising its own PPC income stream – an issue they’re rapidly trying to fix by deploying ads in the overview itself, though it’s very early days for this
The argument being made, over and over again, is that you should abandon keywords in favour of contextual meaning.
Logically, linguistically, literally, this is a completely flawed argument.
It’s incorrect to say GEO doesn’t use keywords at all. It would be more accurate to say that GEO is not so rigid in specific keyword matching. But they are still present, viable and useful only in a different way.
Case and point, research is showing that when using AI tools, searches and questions get longer, and when they get longer they get more complex. In response to this, a term you might hear being used is the ‘query fan out technique’
In technical terms, this means that multiple, contextualised searches across several subtopics specific to that search are being run. In Leyman’s terms, it’s answering multiple questions, across various search intents, all at once. Something like this:
Seven word search (Google Search)
What’s the best seafood restaurant in London.
20+ word search (AI)
Can you recommend five highly rated seafood restaurants in London. Lobster and mussels must feature on the menu, outdoor seating would be preferred, they must take walk-ins and have a broad wine selection.
The ani-keyword argument is grounded in the theory that keywords as a sole tactic of search visibility won’t work in GEO. That is correct.
But in trying to create nuance, it actually misses more than it answers.
A more apt description would be to say that you need MORE than just keywords.
It isn’t enough to just say ‘we are the best seafood restaurant in London’ over and over and over again, trying to game the search system.
It’s about showing, not telling.
So, this is the million-dollar question… when people are talking about GEO strategies, what do they actually mean?
There’s a lot of jargon out there, but not a whole lot of clear answers. So here they are.
The three things that you should be doing to ensure you’re featuring in AI results.
Earned Media: quality, consistent media coverage in relevant and trusted outlets earns you critical brand brownie points. Offering signals to LLMs that you are to be trusted and therefore surfaced.
EEAT-driven owned content: creating and publishing all manner of content that leverages your expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness,
Technical structures: clean site structures, good UX, readability, load times, mobile friendliness and accessibility as well as coherent AI-friendly data structures and schema markups.
Now those versed in contemporary SEO might look at these things and think, wait, that looks familiar. If you aren’t, let me give you the insight.
Earned media, EEAT and clean technical structured data – they’re fundamentals of SEO
So, in truth, SEO and GEO have a lot more in common than those on the internet would have you believe.
What works for SEO also works for GEO.
There is no SEO vs GEO debate. You don’t and shouldn’t have to decide between one or the other. As we said at the top, this is entirely a false choice dilemma.
This isn’t a divergent moment. It isn’t a question of SEO or GEO.
The two are converging. It should be SEO AND GEO, and those who would tell you anything otherwise – like how SEO doesn’t factor in things like entity association, trust signals and semantic depth – have an outmoded view of SEO and how it fits into digital PR.
This entire debate around generative AI search results fails to understand how integrated digital communications already answers many of the apparent problems that GEO causes.
So the false choice dilemmas, the LinkedIn hot takes, the countless blogs and features attempting to explain away concepts that are already very well established.
It all comes from a completely one-sided point of view. People who’ve experienced SEO as a keyword stuffing, word matching exercise, designed to game search engines and push SERP position and only that.
This one-sidedness fails to take into account that this is one aspect of a broader digital PR strategy.
We can see the numbers and the data. Reputable sources like Ahrefs are showing us, as clear as day, that earned media and EEAT content are the two biggest drivers of visibility in AI search. Which we know, because they also drive SEO performance.
SEO hasn’t been about who has the most keywords for a very long time. It’s been about quality, relevance and consistency across earned media and owned channels.
That’s the face of digital PR now. GEO is just another aspect of it.
In November 2024, Emma Rose, Centre Manager at the University of Bristol‘s Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), asked us to film the arrival of four shipping containers to a building site. This was no ordinary cargo, but the heart of the UK’s fastest AI supercomputer – the £225 million Isambard-AI.
At the mercy of snowy weather and construction logistics, we scheduled a 3 day window to get the shots we needed. Keen to add value and variety for the client, we filmed from the ground and the air. We also set up a portable edit suite in an office in the neighbouring National Composites Centre for fast turnaround edits for social media.
Day one, the snow fell, the camera people filmed, the editor edited and we had a nice 20 second piece to be published on socials on the same day that one of the four containers was craned into place. We even managed a shot of a snowman. Day two, the sun shone and the remaining containers were installed. Day three, we cancelled the final day shoot and instead, back in the office, finished the fast and furious 45 secs story of the build socials piece. Hats off to our in-house editor Nick O’Leary for a top job.
When the University of Bristol posted this film, it outperformed all other content on their social channels within the last 12 months. RESULT!
Since then, in collaboration with new BriCS Communications Manager Emily Coles, we have returned to the NCC site on numerous occasions to film key moments in the installation, typically shooting video and stills at the same time. The drone has been up for a wider view. We’ve shot stills of the key movers and shakers from Hewlett Packard Enterprises and BriCS boss Simon McIntosh-Smith and in March filmed the installation of the actual computer itself, now sitting snugly in a data centre constructed from the shipping containers.
We’ve also workshopped and scripted upcoming Hero and About Us films, which we’ll shoot once the scaffolding is down later in the summer, and attended the Isambard Day conference, with supercomputer experts from around the world, to immerse ourselves in the world of AI and its fascinating use cases, which was great for originating loads of new content ideas to suggest to the client.
All in all, it’s been a fantastic project so far and the perfect fit for us as science and tech content producers who feel personally invested in promoting our region’s innovators and pioneers. Our video production agency has grown from 3 to 7 staff over the last 18 months – meaning we have the capacity to rapidly deploy on jobs both large – like a video strategy for a suite of films, or small – such as sending out a lone videographer for a ‘quick and dirty’ social reel.
This project has also helped to push the boundaries in terms of our shooting and editing style with the high energy final build films (60 sec and 90 secs versions) complete with hyperlapses, super fast cuts and a number of more conventional edits for web headers and conference films. Shout out to Lobster Pictures Ltd. for their timelapses of the whole build from empty car park to finished supercomputer and to Oakland Construction Ltd. for accommodating our film crews.
Thanks to the Isambard-AI team of Emily Coles, Emma Rose and Simon McIntosh-Smith from BriCS and good luck for the big launch of Isambard-AI in a couple of weeks!
Web developers, digital innovators and tech professionals are gearing up for the sixth annual Umbraco Spark innovation conference, returning to Bristol this spring at We The Curious on Friday 20 March 2026. Organised by Bristol digital agency Gibe Digital, the event has become a fixture for developers from across the UK and Europe to share insights, ideas and practical knowledge around the open‑source Umbraco CMS and broader .NET ecosystem
Speaking about the conference, Steve Temple, Technical Director and Co‑founder of Gibe Digital, describes Spark as “a calendar highlight” that brings together “so many talented developers from the amazing Umbraco community.” Steve adds that the event leaves attendees “feeling inspired, armed with fresh knowledge to take your Umbraco projects to the next level.”
This year’s programme features a single main track of deep‑dive technical talks, practical demos and forward‑thinking sessions on topics such as load‑balancing for scalable apps, Umbraco Search, next‑generation back‑office features, and experimenting with AI‑driven accessibility tools.
Schedule Highlights:
Thursday, 19 March – The day before the main conference kicks off with a full-day Hackathon & Package Jam for the community, followed by a pre-party at a local game bar with ping pong, bowling, karaoke, food and drinks.
Friday, 20 March – A Harbour Run at 7 AM starts the day, followed by registration with coffee and pastries. The main track runs 9 AM–5:30PM, featuring technical talks, lightning sessions and demos. The Package Awards celebrate standout contributions, and the day wraps up with an after-party. Attendees also benefit from lunch, refreshments, a free cloakroom, and quiet/multi-faith rooms to support wellbeing.
Tickets & Pricing: Standard tickets cost £150 + VAT, available until the end of February or until sold out. Grab your ticket here.
Umbraco Spark continues to cement Bristol’s status as a hub for creative tech events — combining local community energy with the global expertise of the Umbraco ecosystem.
Google’s December 2025 core update landed just before the end of the year and for many brands, it raised familiar questions around volatility, visibility and what to do next.
Jack, Loom’s Tech SEO expert, talks us through what actually changed, why trust and experience matter more than ever and how brands should respond without overreacting.
The December 2025 core update was a broad algorithm update that began rolling out on 11th December and completed on 29th December. Google described it as a “regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.”
As with all core updates, it matters because it changes how Google evaluates content quality and relevance which can impact rankings, visibility and traffic. It’s not about penalising specific sites, but about reassessing what Google believes best serves users.
Google is constantly testing and refining its algorithm. Those smaller, often unannounced updates throughout the year can be used to fine-tune systems or correct unintended effects from previous changes.
Core updates happen less frequently, but they introduce broader shifts. That’s why Loom always advises against panicking when rankings move – you can recover from the impact of an algorithm update. Smaller updates often rebalance the bigger changes introduced during a core rollout – sometimes weeks or months later.
EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness) has become increasingly important, especially as AI-generated content becomes more widespread.
The addition of Experience is particularly telling. First-hand insight, real examples and original perspectives are now critical ways for content to stand out and add value to users. This is especially true in YMYL sectors like finance, health and news, where trust really matters.
AI can generate content at scale, but if everyone has access to the same tools using the same learning data, differentiation and value comes from genuine expertise and lived experience, not volume.
Google doesn’t always get it right the first time. SEO has always been a moving target and attempts to exploit loopholes or cut corners rarely stand the test of time.
If rankings drop, the first question should be whether that drop reflects a genuine gap in value. How does the page compare to competitors today? If the content is strong, relevant and well-optimised, sometimes the best response is patience and perspective.
Zooming out often shows that a short-term dip sits within a much stronger long-term trajectory.
Keyword rankings are no longer as clear-cut as they once were. A page ranking first organically might now appear within an AI Overview. This location/position could be bypassed entirely if the overview satisfies the user’s intent without a single click.
Since AI Overviews launched, click-through rates have dropped for many informational queries. That can feel concerning, but there’s another side to it: users who do click through are often further along in their decision-making.
At Loom, visibility now means more than link clicks. That’s why performance is tracked across search results and large language models, to understand where and how brands are being surfaced.
If in doubt, zoom out.
Looking at a single month in isolation can lead to tunnel vision. Loom always recommends waiting until a rollout is fully complete before drawing conclusions or making changes. Reacting too quickly can undo good work or introduce new problems.
Users should always come first.
There’s a balance between SEO and monetisation, but over-optimisation, whether for ads, search engines or AI systems, often reduces real value for users. Google continues to reward clarity, accessibility and genuinely helpful experiences and this should always be the focus.
Search systems will keep evolving. A consistently positive user experience, however, is always a strong foundation.
Content that’s easy to navigate, credible and genuinely useful tends to perform well regardless of algorithm changes, because it aligns with what search engines are ultimately trying to deliver.
The biggest mistake is making sweeping changes the moment rankings fluctuate. That often leads to chasing symptoms rather than addressing real issues.
Content should evolve, but changes need intention and context grounded in user needs, not short-term panic.
During a rollout, rankings can move daily. Acting before the dust settles rarely gives a clear picture of what’s actually changed.
Loom always recommends waiting until Google confirms completion, then reviewing performance calmly and systematically before deciding next steps.
The starting point is always diagnostics. Have there been recent site changes? Navigation updates? Speed or security issues? Any manual actions flagged in Search Console?
Often, performance shifts aren’t caused by the algorithm alone but by technical or structural changes that coincide with it.
Author credibility is key. Clear author bios, relevant experience and structured author schema all help reinforce trust.
Externally, citing credible sources, contributing to industry publications and building a visible expert profile all support long-term resilience.
Avoid complacency. SEO is never static. Reviewing new entrants in your space and understanding why they’re gaining visibility can offer valuable insight and opportunities to strengthen your own content.
EEAT matters more than ever.
As AI-generated content becomes more common, genuine expertise and experience are the clearest ways to stand out.
Loom has always focused on building strategies around real user needs, clear expertise and long-term value. Algorithm updates change. That principle doesn’t.
At Loom Digital, we help brands interpret search algorithm updates calmly, focusing on what genuinely matters and building search strategies that last. Our expert SEO and Content teams are on hand to help optimise your pages and create compelling content.
If you’d like to talk through what this update means for your site or how to strengthen trust and resilience in 2026, get in touch with the Loom team.
Creative technology company, Aer Studios, has appointed Jay Robinson to lead its user centred design practice as the studio continues on its growth trajectory. Taking up the role of Creative Director, Jay rounds out the leadership team while bringing additional expertise to develop the company’s creative and design capabilities.
Jay is a senior creative leader with a track record of delivering complex, high-impact work across brand, digital and experience. He has led global teams, built design capability and delivered work that operates at both cultural and commercial scale. He has worked across leading agencies (such as Taxi and Epoch Design) and direct client engagements, partnering at board, client and team level to deliver for brands including Netflix, Microsoft, Samsung, Clarks and Cube Bikes.
Amongst Jay’s recent achievements, he led the end-to-end brand and digital design for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare Curriculum, a nationally scaled education platform reaching thousands of UK schools. He also headed digital delivery on a year-long engagement with Nestlé, overseeing a UX transformation across 70 international markets and lifting global performance rankings. Bringing a wealth of expertise in creative strategy and user-centred design to Aer Studios, Jay champions purpose-driven ideas, craft and clarity to create products and services that people love to use while delivering genuine business impacts.
Jay will join the senior leadership team alongside Head of Technology, James Hobbs, Head of Marketing, Sarah Dennis, Head of People, Culture and Operations, Emily Armstrong and Head of Finance, Kate Stubbings. The cohort will work closely with CEO Tom Harber, and Director, Geoff Wells.
Aer Studios continues to grow steadily year on year with a mission to create meaningful digital experiences that have a positive impact on people and planet. The last few years have seen the agency expanding their partnerships with key clients including the BBC and Dogs Trust as well as winning multiple clients both locally and globally, including CEPI, GAVI and Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity.
Speaking on joining the company, Jay says, “From my first conversations with the team at Aer, it was clear there was something already impressive to build on. The studio’s focus on thoughtful, user-centred work for clients doing positive things aligns closely with my own values. The depth of talent across both design and technology stood out, as did the ambition to bring those disciplines closer together.
I believe the best outcomes come when design and development shape ideas together, not in sequence. At Aer that mindset is already in place – and it’s something I’m excited to help build and evolve.”
CEO Tom Harber says, “Last year we set out our vision for the next five years, and Jay’s appointment is crucial to delivering on that. Having come highly recommended from across the ecosystem, Jay brings a brilliant blend of creative firepower and design thinking capabilities needed for this next phase of growth. This is a really exciting time for Aer Studios with a number of significant projects landing and with Jay’s leadership, we’re looking forward to being able to deliver even more impact for our clients and their audiences”
A solid content marketing strategy is the foundation for meaningful results and long-term success.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for creating and sharing content that appeals to your target audience and helps you achieve your business goals.
Whether you’re a start-up trying to make your mark or an established brand wanting to stay ahead, having a clear content marketing plan can be a game-changer. At AMBITIOUS, we’ve helped many businesses turn content into business growth by integrating it within the broader PR and digital marketing landscape.
This guide will walk business owners and marketers through the essential steps to create a content marketing strategy that drives growth and keeps your brand competitive.
We’ll cover everything from defining your goals and understanding your audience, to planning content types, mapping the buyer’s journey, setting SMART goals, and measuring results.
By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap to build a strategy that delivers real business impact.
A content marketing strategy is a blueprint. It outlines the groundwork for the types of content you will produce, the topics it will cover, and the formats and channels you’ll deliver in.
You could think of it as a game plan for winning over potential customers and keeping them coming back for more… and that wouldn’t be incorrect. When viewed in isolation, a content strategy absolutely supports sales.
But, for the most successful brands, content marketing and content strategy do so much more than support sales. A content strategy keeps your brand fresh and your insights timely and valuable.
In short, it helps you remain relevant in a fast-changing market.
Now that we’ve covered what makes a strategy successful, let’s look at the key components that go into building one.
Building a content strategy involves several key components, each of which plays a crucial role in ensuring your efforts are effective and aligned with your business objectives.
To quote Simon Sinek, ‘Start with Why.’
Before you create a single piece of content, you need to understand why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Not just from a content perspective, but from an entire sales and operational perspective.
In his book,Start with Why, Sinek puts forward that the most successful brands put the why at the heart of everything they do. Taking a purpose-led approach allows you to approach subsequent strategies from a position of authenticity.
So rather than coming from a starting point of pure economics, put your mission and your vision at the heart of your content strategy.
You wouldn’t show up to a black-tie event in flip-flops… right?
Well the same principle applies to your content.
If you want to effect change and impact consumer decisions; you need to understand your audience, inside and out. Creating detailed buyer personas that go beyond basic demographics of age and geography can be incredibly valuable here.
What are their aspirations? What keeps them awake at night? What are the main pressures and challenges they’re facing?
Someone’s age, location, and job title isn’t going to give you great insight. By going beyond just demographics, you can establish what kind of content your audiences are engaging with the most.
With deeper, more detailed audience insights, you can create content that resonates with your audiences on a much more personal level.
You can then use existing audience insights and customer feedback to further refine your personas, curating your content to better address their needs.
You have your mission, your vision and your customer profiles.
Next, it’s time to understand the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey typically includes three stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision.
In this sense, every business is different, and as such, strategies and tactics must adapt. Content strategy and content creation aren’t a one-size-fits-all approach.
An FMCG brand will have a much shorter customer journey compared to a business that makes diagnostic machines.
A few blogs and some social posts aren’t going to make a quick conversion if your customer’s buying journey is traditionally 12 to 18 months or more. In cases like this, it’s about creating content strategies that are heavy on touchpoints and reinforcing your brand through much longer periods of awareness and consideration.
On the flip side; shorter journeys with bigger audiences – like FMCG – get to decision stage making much faster, so require content to match this cadence. It’s much faster, much more fluid and in the moment.
Creating content is all about matching audience and intent; you need to make sure that you’re putting the right content, in the right places, at the right time.
Your brand voice holds power, so use it wisely.
This is the real-world reflection of your mission, vision and brand values. Are you the wise mentor? The innovative disruptor? The friendly neighbour? Whatever your brand voice, consistency is key.
Also, people don’t just buy products; they buy into brands they can relate to. A strong brand identity, guided by clear brand guidelines, ensures consistency in both visual and tonal style across all content and marketing materials, strengthening brand recognition.
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across social media platforms is crucial for establishing and maintaining brand loyalty, which is key to amplifying your reach and engagement over time.
With a brand voice established and a firm understanding of your audiences, you can answer the question: what kind of content shall we produce?
There’s a lot of format options to choose from, including:
You don’t need it all to succeed. The key is to select the types of content that are most likely to resonate with your target audience. This will then inform the most appropriate channels upon which to activate those assets.
Generally speaking, having your own on-site content like blogs and articles is a universal must.
Whether you’re selling MRI machines or barefoot shoes, having on-site content that pulls through into search engine results pages and AI search platforms is going to be a major part of your content strategy.
So owned content has to be a foundational pillar of any content strategy.
Beyond your own channels, it’s about selecting the content types and channels that resonate with your target audience. If one of your prime audiences is NHS procurement teams, then you’re going to want to focus your efforts into channels like LinkedIn—with a mix of written thought leader content and video-led content marketing to catch their attention.
A fast-fashion brand would find more value in focusing on TikTok, with its in-built shopping API and fast-moving, trends-focused nature.
Important note: there’s a reason why we don’t classify social media platforms as ‘owned’. The reason being, that while the account itself is yours, you don’t own the channel itself. If TikTok or Instagram went under, then that channel is gone. Anything that is not 100% within your complete control, is classed as shared.
There are two more universal must-haves: video and direct-to-consumer content.
Whatever platform or channel you’re activating – whether it’s YouTube, LinkedIn, or TikTok – video content is the primary focus. So you need to account for video production in your content marketing strategy.
Then there’s direct-to-consumer content. Or in simple terms, email marketing.
Personalisation in sales and marketing is booming. With the sheer number of brands competing for attention across every channel and platform, the space has never been louder and more competitive. It’s incredibly easy for consumers to simply become overcome with brand fatigue and when that happens, they just start switching off.
But if you can successfully leverage a direct line of contact via email marketing, that can be a powerful thing.
Now that you have a sense of the key elements, let’s explore how to activate your content across multiple channels and formats for maximum impact.
The most effective and impactful content strategies take place across multiple channels, in multiple formats. By choosing the right mix, you can ensure your content reaches and resonates with the people who matter most.
To make this as effective as possible, combine owned elements, like on-site blogs and articles and your email channels, with the right mix of shared channels for your audience for maximum reach and effectiveness.
Look to ways you can repurpose content across different channels and formats.
Uou may want to conduct a piece of industry trends research. That piece of research becomes a designed whitepaper. That whitepaper can become a valuable sales asset, in both digital and print formats.
But it can be more.
It can then be broken apart, with news stories and releases created to generate earned media. Key elements of the whitepaper can then be created into shorter social assets, which can be activated across company and personal LinkedIn channels.
It can also be created into various blogs, summarising your findings and offering the whitepaper as a download. This gives you a lead magnet and a means of generating valuable consumer data.
You can activate these findings in your newsletters. You could even take it one step further and bring it into interactive formats like webinars, which can be especially effective for audience engagement. Those webinars could then be repurposed as further video content to be used on LinkedIn and even YouTube.
When taking this kind of integrated approach, the ultimate aim is to connect as many dots as possible.
When distributing your content, consider a broad mix of marketing channels from email marketing, social media accounts, video, digital and print design, even paid advertising like Google ads to create the greatest possible reach and impact.
With your content now planned and distributed, it’s essential to keep your strategy organised and on track.
A content strategy without a plan is like a road trip without a map. Chances are you’ll have fun, but you’ll most likely get lost.
This is where your marketing strategy and plan intersect with your content strategy. Through your marketing plans, create schedules and roadmaps, outlining campaigns, moments, and activations. Detail this with the outputs and assets you’ll need to create, with time-bound goals, to help keep you on track.
In the day-to-day, content calendars can keep everything on track and on schedule, particularly if you’re having to manage complex production schedules for video.
This will not only ensure consistency but also help you allocate resources, raise issues and delays effectively, and adapt to any required change. This helps ensure all team members and freelancers are on the same page, maintaining alignment and efficiency throughout the entire production and content creation process.
You want to stay on track and you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. To manage expectations, it’s crucial to set SMART goals. These are:
SMART goals help you to achieve a few things.
Firstly, they’re built on solid foundations of goals. For example, instead of saying, “We want more website traffic,” a SMART goal would be, “We aim to increase website traffic by 20% over the next six months by publishing two blog posts per week.”
This helps join all the dots and create content production processes with firmly established timelines and completion journeys. This clarity ensures everyone on your team knows what you’re aiming for and how to get there.
They also help you outline what’s achievable, given your organisation’s current production capacities and capabilities. For example, you may not be in a position to be able to produce your own video content, either through lack of capacity or capability.
So SMART goals can also help you identify areas where you need to bring in extra resources and skills in order to achieve these goals.
These goals act as your guiding star, helping you focus your efforts and measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that help you measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
These are ultimately showing how well your overall strategy is performing, relative to your original strategic goals and aims.
For your website, look to metrics like:
While overall impressions can give you a picture of the general reach of your site, actual on-page data is going to be much more valuable when analysing your content.
Social media platforms offer a different set of metrics. Here you’ll be looking at:
But you’ll also need to monitor sentiment on social. 1,000 comments look like a good number on a report. But if 950 of those comments are negative in sentiment, then it’s far less positive than the numbers show.
The reason why we establish KPIs isn’t to dictate any success or failure further down the line, it’s more about identifying progress, tracking what’s working, and most importantly, what isn’t.
Ongoing auditing and analysis help shape tactical, strategic, and creative decisions.
One of the biggest self-imposed flaws you can bring into your marketing strategy is to only review your activity once per year.
Ongoing auditing and analysis is a crucial step, not only in creating a content marketing strategy, but evolving it in real time.
Review your existing content to see what’s hitting the mark and what needs improvement. Determine which types of content are the most effective. Then, put plans in place to create more content which matches this.
You need to identify what isn’t working and establish why. If something doesn’t work once, try it again in a different way. But if something isn’t working over long periods of time, then continuation is likely not worth it.
By doing this, you can identify gaps in your content. Look for opportunities to repurpose content into new formats, maximise the value of your existing content, and remove anything that is low-value and surplus to requirement.
Rather than doing this once a year, do it with more focused regularity. More regular content audits provide valuable insights that inform your ongoing strategy.
With your strategy organised and performance measured, let’s look at how data can become your superpower.
We know that optimising your content for better visibility in search is crucial to ensure it reaches a wider audience, improves your rankings, and ensures your content stands out in search results.
But competing for keywords, intent, and eyeballs is more than just a challenge in creative writing.
It’s about leveraging the right data and insights and using tools like Google Analytics, SurferSEO, and SEMRush to give you the edge.
The same applies to social media platforms. Proprietary analytics, or third-party tools such as Hootsuite, let you see what’s working in real time.
But don’t just collect data… act on it.
You need to be prepared to adjust your strategy based on these insights. The best content strategies are the ones that adapt.
With data as your guide, you can confidently plan and adapt your strategy for ongoing success.
There’s no silver bullet for successful content. What makes a content strategy successful is two-fold.
Firstly, it’s about strategic planning, critical thinking, and creativity. You need to be able to hone in on audiences, demographics, messaging and narratives, and understand the buyer’s journey and how you can subtly influence it in your favour.
Great content strategy establishes these foundational elements, meaning you can have great creative outputs underpinned by strong data and insights. So before you’ve even drafted a word of copy, or shot a second of video content, you need to have this understanding.
But you also need to be able to react and adapt.
A framework is great. It gives you guardrails. But a dogmatic approach to your strategy could do more harm than good.
Things may not work as you predicted, attitudes change, behaviours adapt, trends come and go, and algorithms change the way content is delivered and consumed.
If all you’re doing is staying within the lines of your strategy, chances are you’re missing out.
By following these steps, you can build a content marketing strategy that is structured, effective, and adaptable.
Having a documented content marketing strategy is crucial to guide your efforts and ensure success.
Whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, improve your search ranking, surface in generative AI responses, or create personalised marketing content for your customers, a robust content marketing strategy underpins these goals and gives you the roadmap to achieving them.
But a winning content strategy isn’t just about creating more and more content. It’s about creating the right content, for the right people, and putting it in the right place at the right time.
At AMBITIOUS, we’ve seen firsthand how a content strategy can transform businesses. It’s not just about getting likes or shares; it’s about building relationships with your audience that last and deliver real results.
Get in touch to talk about how we can help you develop a strategy that’s as unique as you are.
GenAI video has been causing quite a stir recently: whether it’s backlash over the tide of AI slop, something being decried as an AI fake (whether it is or not), or an agentic AI business formula that’s made ‘millions’ overnight. Oh, and the ‘ultimate’ prompt-writing masterclass? You’ll have seen all the ads…
But look a bit harder and there’s some really interesting work out there:
One thing is undeniable: AI is going to affect digital industries – the debate around the extent and exact timeline gets far more complicated.
With all that in mind, we wanted to use our yearly Xmas video as a test bed of GenAI, to see what it could do and, importantly, what it couldn’t. And we thought we’d bring you along for the ride…
It all started in August (don’t judge). We had just ironed out our company-wide AI training roadmap and we were updating our AI usage policy. As a creative agency, it felt like we were taking real leaps forward. But it also gave our creative studio a lot to think about. We each mulled over our own questions around authenticity and the future of creative production (the part of our job many of us love most of all).
So we got our heads together and talked about how we should be doing things. What we arrived on was that creative thinking, sketching, scribbling, chatting, tinkering, and FUN should all be ring fenced and given the time they deserve. That’s why we decided to collaborate on a brief so ambitious and outlandish it simply had to work.
It should no longer come as a surprise that typing a basic prompt into AI engines only leads to AI slop.
So, before we even touched a computer, we came up with a basic concept – the ultimate tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Christmas perfume ads – and then had a mass brain-storming session where we asked the whole company for their craziest ideas. And boy did they deliver!
In a short space of time, we had suggestions ranging from a simple Xmas magic box to rivers of gravy, something about a unicorn that didn’t quite make the final edit, and the perfect name – ‘Sléj’ (pronounced as ‘slay’, obviously).
Our copywriters pulled the ideas together into a script, using a knowledge of Christmas-related puns that took a lifetime (or previous life editing rather niche magazines) to develop.
This isn’t the place to be overly reliant on AI. Allowing people free reign to throw stuff at the page works well. Importantly, don’t shut down ideas too early. The most unlikely suggestions can get workshopped into something surprising and brilliant.
This could turn into a whole blog by itself. More than any other, this stage will determine the look of your film so the more references you can include the better.
It’s crucial to find references that you have rights to both use and pass to a third party – in this case, an AI model.
For this reason, we used Generative AI to generate our reference images, feeding the output images back into the AI multiple times and asking for tweaks and refinements.
This produced a combination of a storyboard and multiple accompanying style frames (high-quality images that give a good overall feel for what the video will look like once animated).
You’re aiming to find references for each part of the shot you want to generate, for example the setting, tone, pose, character and composition etc. You want the AI to have as much information as possible and limit how much it figures out by itself.
We quickly learnt that there isn’t one AI model to rule them all, with different options performing better for different tasks. We’d highly recommend experimentation here to find which works best for your requirements.
Using detailed prompts and the bank of reference images we had gathered for each shot, we generated our footage. Prompts were written in a similar way to how we’d add
notes on a storyboard, i.e. ‘camera push in’, ‘talent to walk across frame left to right’, ‘high-key lighting’ etc but they also included additional things that wouldn’t usually be directable without heavy VFX work, i.e. ‘swirling wind kicks up dust behind legs’.
The point here is to think like a filmmaker and art director, you need to be able to supply image references but, just as importantly, you need to be able to articulate what you want to see in the frame. Playing AI like a slot machine will lead to slop.
In the same way that you rarely edit footage together straight out of the camera, generative video will almost always benefit from some post work. Again, this is a place to add further human touches that a text box often doesn’t offer. This could be reframing, changing the colour, or in/out painting of items in the scene.
Editing and sound design is another area where, as far as we’re concerned, humans just can’t be beat (not yet). Editing – the process of deciding where to push and pull those beats and gaps – and sound design are very much a process of creating a feeling and mood.
As with traditional film making, have in mind what you want to see. Those hard-won post skills still have lots of value.
It would be remiss not to briefly discuss some of our thoughts behind the ethics of our experiment.
The ethics of AI are extremely complicated. As with most things, a simply binary choice may feel tempting, and at times compulsive, but this rarely does justice to the many nuances of a topic. There is so much for every individual and organisation to consider, and I’d argue the often-discussed environmental and job-replacement angles are just the beginning.
For further information I’d highly recommend:
For me, I think After Effect’s AI roto-brush sums up a lot of the debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXMTHe8z6Tw
So, how do I feel about the finished video? I think the team have done a great job of making a whimsical and audacious Xmas vid with just the right level of self-awareness. And with a level of production that, prior to GenAI, our budget simply wouldn’t have stretched to.
I also hope it’s as clear to you, as it is to me, that we couldn’t have come anywhere close to the result without the thought, skill, talent and humour that went into it from right across the agency.
And how do I feel about AI? It’s complicated…
At P+S, we’ve spent over 15 years delivering enterprise Drupal solutions. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the painfully slow. That’s why we created the P+S Drupal Starter Site – a modern, headless, editor-friendly solution that gets you to market faster than ever.
Drupal is one of the most powerful content management systems (CMS) available today. It’s trusted by governments, global enterprises, and mission-critical websites to manage:
Unlike many SaaS-based platforms, Drupal gives you complete control:
And thanks to its modular architecture, Drupal isn’t just for websites. It can power e-commerce, employee, customer or partner portals, learning platforms, and more – all from the same backend.
“We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It’s a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go.”
Despite its power, Drupal has long had two major drawbacks:
Many organisations end up trading control and flexibility for a quicker launch and better editorial UX elsewhere – even if it means compromising in the long term.
A traditional content management system (CMS) bundles two things together: the backend where you create and manage your content, and the frontend – the design that displays it to visitors. Everything comes as one package.
When everything is bundled together, making changes becomes difficult and expensive.Want to redesign your website? You might need to overhaul your entire system. Want to create a mobile app using your existing content? You’ll likely need to start from scratch. Need faster loading times? You’re limited by what the whole system can handle.
A headless CMS separates content management from website design. You still have a user-friendly interface to create and organise your content, but the content isn’t tied to any specific website design.
Instead, your content is made available through an API. This gives us the opportunity to match our clients with the best possible solution that delivers all the benefits of Drupal, along with design, flexibility and usability that rivals any other CMS.
We’ve gone ahead and created a custom Drupal distribution that changes EVERYTHING. It’s a production-ready Drupal backend, preconfigured in alignment with best practice. Content structures, SEO tools, and accessibility are all baked in and ready to go. This means it solves most of your needs right out of the box.
In short: an enterprise-ready, headless Drupal solution that’s as quick to launch as a WordPress site, but far more powerful.
Our starter site is designed to eliminate the two biggest historical issues:
We care as much about your editor experience as your end-user experience.
Next.js gives us everything we want in a modern frontend stack:
Next.js helps your website load incredibly fast. And that’s important; faster pages mean a better user experience and can lead to more conversions.
Next.js is built to help your content get found on Google. It gives you the tools to rank well in search engines, which is essential for attracting the right audience.
Since the CMS backend is decoupled and not publicly exposed like traditional CMS systems, it’s far less vulnerable to direct attacks.
From subtle transitions to full-screen motion graphics, Next.js handles complex animations with ease. The kind of high-impact visuals that turn heads and boost engagement.
Whether you’re launching a single marketing site or a multi-brand, multi-region platform, Next.js scales beautifully both in architecture and in performance.
By going headless, we can deliver content not just to the web, but to mobile apps, digital kiosks, voice assistants, AI agents, and more — all from a single source of truth.
For B2B marketing sites, it means fast load times, a flexible design system, and future-proof technology.
Despite the advantages list above, headless Drupal often comes at the cost of the editor experience.
We’ve created the headless Drupal CMS we all want, need and deserve:
It’s time to empower your team and future-proof your stack with complete control – and faster than ever.
To learn more about how the P+S Starter Site can transform your next digital project and explore all your CMS options, get in touch: [email protected]
You need to load content from reCAPTCHA to submit the form. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More Information