Jessica Mehring, M.A.'s Linkedin Analytics

YES. This. 👇🏼 Want marketing to work again? mallory contois and Emily Kramer have created the only playbook you need -- full of practical advice, and most importantly, the hope we all need in business right now.

Marketers (and those who support marketers) are scrappy. We are the kings and queens of reinvention. Lately I've been seeing some really interesting new models coming from freelancers, consultants and agency owners as we all adapt to new technologies and ways of doing business. "Fractional" has become the new model for short-term, part-time and contract expertise. "Unlimited requests" is becoming a thing for some design agencies. The royalties model is reemerging in the direct mail and advertising spaces. For my firm, Horizon Peak Consulting, I've built a new copywriting retainer model from the ground up. It is radically simplifying things for our clients in demand generation, integrated campaigns, and content marketing. ❓What new or reemerging models are YOU seeing in the marketing industry?

Hey demand gen and growth marketing friends: Are there any good industry events (especially smaller, niche ones) coming up this year? I feel like some of the bigger ones have gotten overly ... sponsored.

Nonprofit friends! Check this out. Alexson is AMAZING, and YOU SHOULD DO THIS. Thanks to Alexson coaching me on my media message before my last TV interview, I was able to stay on-topic even with my 5-year-old being a gremlin in the background. 😅

Enterprise-focused content often excels at explaining what solutions do, but misses the most important conversion trigger: "Why now?" Your prospects read case studies. They review white papers. They understand your value proposition perfectly. Yet they still hesitate to move forward. Because your content answers "what" and "why" without addressing "when." Every day your prospects wait costs them money. Every month they delay means lost opportunities. Every quarter without implementation equals diminished competitive advantage. Strong content creates urgency through: ✔️ Quantified cost of delay: Show how much your prospects lose each month without your solution. ✔️ Market timing factors: Connect your solution to current industry shifts that make action essential now. ✔️ Competitive pressure points: Demonstrate how early adopters gain advantages that late movers cannot replicate. ✔️ Implementation reality checks: Address the misconception that waiting makes adoption easier (it rarely does). Remember: Your prospects already know they need solutions like yours. What they question is whether they need them *right now*. Content that converts enterprise audiences answers that question decisively. How does your content answer “Why now?”

I hate to break it to you, but AI chatbots don't care about your SEO. New research shows they prefer deep, comprehensive content with high readability scores. AI drives more traffic to websites that provide genuine value. Want to get your content cited by AI? *Focus on comprehension over keywords.* Full article 👇🏼.

How we are responding to the global economy being "thrown in a blender," as Sonia Simone so aptly put it in her newsletter this morning ... More support. More ease. More "what you need, when you need it" and less "another negotiation every time the marketing wind shifts." Internally here at Horizon Peak Consulting, the mechanism for that is a new copywriting retainer model that is so dead simple and streamlined, clients are telling us, "I've never seen anything like this before, and it's such a no-brainer!" Look, it's been a rough last few years for everyone. And the economic volatility of 2025 has upended the tech market AGAIN. What I'm seeing in my audience is *exhaustion*. So I am fighting the natural entrepreneurial instinct to create more offerings and more options -- and leaning into my human instinct to make people's lives better. Because if I can't fix this economy for you, I can at least take some stress off you.

I have had a change of heart. In my writing and in conversation lately, I have been talking about the schism of written content. Over the last several years, written content has split into two buckets: 1️⃣ Informational content, meant to simply exist, to make a person or company look valid, or fulfill an algorithmic purpose. 2️⃣ Purposeful, meaningful content, meant to connect with the reader and/or do a measurable job. And I’ve been saying that Bucket 1 content is fine to do quickly and cheaply. Use AI to write it if you want to. *It doesn’t matter anyway.* But … that was my cynicism talking. Look, it’s hard to be a writer in 2025. What breaks me of my cynicism is the hope I still have in humanity. Yes, even with everything happening right now, I still believe that we have the capacity to rethink, change course and make better choices. So I’m forming a new opinion, and I’m open to it evolving again as we move forward with ALL our new normals: ☀️ Writing is fundamental to human communication. We write to connect with one another. SO ALL WRITING MATTERS. ☀️ You wouldn’t write a letter to your grandma, or an email to your boss, or an essay for an application without thinking through what you want to communicate, what the recipient needs to get out of the exchange, and how to get your message across clearly. Why should a tweet, a blog post or an FAQ page be any different? *If it doesn’t matter, why are you even writing it?* 👉🏼 And if it matters, write it well.