Back in the day when I worked for Bannersnack (now known as Creatopy) I was in charge with bringing backlinks. I was a one-team person that had one single purpose: bring as many relevant backlinks as possible to the website. I had the freedom to do whatever I can with only one single condition: don’t do any black hat backlinks strategy.
And because I had a personal blog and I was very active on social media, it brought a lot of opportunities to publish guest posts, launch content marketing campaigns on different websites and juggle around with backlinks from one website to another.
How did I manage to connect with different editors from top websites to give me the chance to publish a guest post on their website? How did I manage to make all this content published for free?
There is one answer: content signals.
These days, when everything is around the topic of A.I. and the death of followers and the death of SEO, I look at content signals as the kind of strategy any brand needs to understand to get more relevant in the industry.
But before we dive deep into how to create content signals that can help your brand get recognized by A.I. and be recommended when people are searching for a directional answer in social media, let’s talk about the basis of a content signal.
What are content signals?
Content signals are the type of content you publish on the internet that make your brand stand out in a consistent way and be relevant for their industry.
Or as Marcus Sheridan said “The more known the brand, the more online signals point to it. The more signals point to it, the more AI will know to recommend it.”
It’s the content you publish on one social media platform or different ones that is relevant for one audience, that solves one problem and people are engaging with it because it’s important for them.
I recently watched this video in which Wil Reynolds shows you how to leverage Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) feature to extract questions and their answers, then running these through LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT to compare results. He also shows how the brands that appear in PAA answers on Google may differ from those appearing in LLM-generated answers. This method can help you determine if your brand’s visibility is at risk as users shift from traditional search engines to LLMs for answers.
Real life example – ExitFive
Let’s take for example ExitFive, the community for B2B marketers. It was built by Dave Gerhardt, who built his personal brand on social media while talking about B2B marketing. Then Dave wrote a book about the founder’s brand and targeted the B2B industry. In a consistent way, Dave published weekly content around B2B marketing, from organic social, to ABM strategies and talked about other solutions around the B2B industry.
The ExitFive community started building up, subscribed to his newsletter, joined the community and now this brand is the reference whenever somebody is interested to learn about B2B marketing. It’s the place where a marketer wants to go to learn about B2B marketing.
It’s the brand that is referenced by top business podcasts like My First Million when they talk about niched industry.
Just by looking at Dave’s social media profile, you will see the small but important signals that are created and delivered day by day.
His social media profile description such as – building the top community for B2B marketers at Exitfive (twitter and linkedin profiles).
And Dave continues creating daily content about B2B marketing and is sending signals to the internet that is then scrapped by A.I. tools to be the answer when somebody is asking ChatGPT about B2B marketing. Everything from weekly podcasts (audio content + short videos), to weekly newsletter and also organic content on his social media platforms. These are all small signals that are sent to be recognized in the B2B industry and then recommended.
How to create relevant content signals?
You start with the one strategy:
- one platform
- one audience
- one problem to be solved
- one CTA
It’s simple, but hard at the same time.
One is not more important than the other, that’s why you need to figure it out before you start creating and publishing content signals.
Choose one audience you want to serve. This audience can be your direct ICP (ideal client profile) or the general audience that is in your industry. I would recommend going directly to the ICP but make sure that after 3 months of publishing content and connecting with an audience, you understand their needs, their deep problems and their real value.
Choose one platform where your audience is spending time. Maybe your audience is spending time on Youtube, or maybe your audience is spending time on TikTok. But before you focus on a single platform, I recommend you try to empathize with yourself. If you were your ICP, where would you spend your time? Find that main platform, and now put one secondary platform. The important thing is to understand that you won’t get it from your first piece of content, so you need to repurpose it on different channels and see where your content gets more engagement. And after one month of publishing content on these platforms, you start to narrow down to less platforms.
What’s the one single problem you solve for them? I know that you can solve all their problems, but this is very important because they will connect with one word in their mind. If your brand (product or service) is solving a general problem, try to narrow down the solution. Make it simple to be recognizable, to be memorable and to be recommended. Think about this and put yourself in your audience’s shoes – “I’m following brand X because they solve this specific problem”.
You need to show your expertise. You need to tell them about your experiments, about your findings and let them understand how they can use your solution to solve their problem.
It’s not a clever type of game. It’s a consistent, clear game.
Create content for content
But there is one single thing many B2B creators and marketers fail to understand. You don’t create content to get to a specific purpose. You create content to create content to get to a specific purpose. Let me explain to you what I mean.
If you have a podcast, and you only publish the audio and video episode thinking that you can get hundred of thousands of downloads, you are wrong.
My solution is that if you create a podcast, you need to think about content signals that will bring people to your podcast. Think about weekly short videos, organic social media content (written or visual), threads and other small types of content that connect to your main content – the podcasts.
We are living in a world where one single type of content won’t make the consumer want to buy your product. You create one long form type of content that can be divided in different types of content that can create a signal around the topic and industry and then get recognized and recommended.
It’s an attention game you have to play if you want to win the content game and be relevant for the next few years.
Let me ask you something, why do you think that smart B2B creators and entrepreneurs are publishing daily content? Why do you think that smart companies are hiring or cultivating in-house creators that create daily content on social media?
It’s because they create content signals that are relevant for their industry, that will get recognized by their audience and then will be recommended by A.I. tools.
It’s because they play the long time strategy in building a brand.
Create content signals for your brand that
- are relevant for your audience
- get you recognized in the industry
- will recommend you to others.
That’s the simple game that is played today.
Are you in?