Marketing

A few weeks ago I ran a test on my own company. I asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions our buyers actually ask — "best AI tool for a consultant who wants to post on LinkedIn," "Hootsuite alternatives for a solo founder." Radi8 didn't come up once. That stung. But it confirmed something I've been telling founders for a while: the way buyers form trust has changed, and most of us are still optimizing for the wrong reader. Here's the trap. We spent months building positioning for humans — clever, memorable, deliberately set apart from the category. Great for a landing page. Invisible to the machine doing the recommending. An AI doesn't search your clever sentence. It breaks the question into plain category words and recommends whoever consistently shows up for them. Clever positioning wins the click. Category language wins the citation. But the real lesson isn't an AI trick. It's the thing I keep coming back to: your brand is your promise, and a visible, consistent body of work is now the evidence people — and their AI — use to decide whether to trust you, long before the first conversation. When your story isn't consistent everywhere, the machine has nothing solid to cite. I wrote up the whole thing — what we found, why it happened, and what we're changing — in public: https://www.radi8.com/blog/show-up-when-buyers-ask-ai-for-recommendations A question for the founders here: have you checked what the AI assistants say about your company when someone asks for a recommendation in your category? What did you find? …more

Today's post is 298 words, a 2-minute read. Sources: Superhuman Marketing — "Reddit's ChatGPT Citation Collapse Worries Marketers" 1 big thing: What just changed in AI visibility for B2B marketers? Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations dropped 86% in mid-August. Brands that built their AI visibility strategy around it are scrambling. Why it matters: Platform-dependent AI visibility strategies carry the same risk as platform-dependent social strategies. When the citation model shifts, everything built on top of it shifts with it. Driving the news: ChatGPT reduced how often it credits Reddit in final answers — but it is still consulting the platform behind the scenes. → Brand websites are now being credited more frequently in ChatGPT's final responses → Brands that treated Reddit as their primary AI visibility channel saw immediate exposure drops Zoom in: Experts now recommend treating social platforms as audience-insight channels rather than citation engines. → The brands gaining AI visibility are publishing authoritative, original content on their own domains — content that gets cited regardless of where the question is asked Yes, but: Most B2B marketing teams do not yet have a defined AI visibility strategy. The brands hurt most by this shift are the ones who had one built on a single platform. Be smart: Diversify where your brand authority lives. Original thought leadership on your own domain, consistent voice, and documented expertise are the assets AI models surface — not social posts optimized for one platform's algorithm. The bottom line: Platforms are channels. Brand authority is the asset. Build accordingly. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-reddit-chatgpt-citation-decline-means-for-cmos-2026-8 #AIMarketing #B2BMarketing …more

LinkedIn just added a button to flag AI slop. Then quietly nerfed two things creators have relied on for years: comment-for-lead-magnet posts and CTAs asking for reshares. I've seen it firsthand. Posts that normally hit half a million views in a week getting capped at 500. Removed the CTA and watched it climb to 20,000. My take on the lead magnet suppression: it's the wrong call. The only people commenting on those posts are people who actually want what you're offering. That's not spam — that's an engaged audience self-selecting. LinkedIn should think twice. But the broader signal? It's good for those of us who do the work. LinkedIn's own CPO called AI slop a "top priority." Over a million people clicked the new button in two weeks. Views on flagged content dropped 40%. The platform is enforcing quality now — and that means posting five times a week is only an advantage if what you're posting is worth reading. AI can help you research, find angles, and organize your thinking. But the post itself needs to come from your brain. Do epic things. Write about them. That's still the playbook — and now LinkedIn is enforcing it. https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/linkedin-seems-like-ai-slop-button-billions-automated-comments-attempts/ #LinkedIn #B2BMarketing …more

Hashtags are a small thing that quietly tells you something bigger: most founders are still managing their presence one post at a time, in their head, instead of turning what they've learned into a system. Here's what I mean. Every channel has its own unspoken rules. LinkedIn suppresses reach on posts that push people off-platform, so links belong in the first comment, not the body. Hashtags work differently on LinkedIn than they do on X — a handful of categorization tags at the end here, almost none there. None of that is complicated. It's just a set of preferences you have to remember and apply, every single time, forever. That's exactly the kind of repetitive judgment that never gets done consistently when it lives only in your head. So I recorded a short walk-through of how I actually run this inside Claude.ai, driving Radi8 directly. In it I check how I've been using hashtags, set hashtag preferences per channel, walk through my scheduled LinkedIn and X posts to add them, and turn "move the LinkedIn link into the first comment" into a standing preference so I never have to think about it again. The point isn't the tool. It's the shift underneath it. I'm not asking AI to decide what to say or how to sound — that's mine. I'm asking it to remember my rules and apply them the same way every time, so consistency stops depending on my memory on a busy Tuesday. AI amplifies the preferences, focus, and voice you feed it. It doesn't invent them. That's why the founders getting real leverage from it aren't the ones automating the most — they're the ones who got clear on their own rules first, then handed the execution off. I am the founder of Radi8, so this is me sharing the journey in public, not a pitch. Happy to point anyone who's curious in the right direction. For the founders here: how much of how you show up online lives as an actual repeatable system versus a decision you re-make from scratch every time you post? #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship #AIforBusiness #MarketingSystems …more

This is how you create great content for your customers - be specific, generous, and valuable. Elizabeth Greenfield runs a functional wellness practice. Her ideal clients are people dealing with exhaustion, weight gain, and feeling wired despite doing everything right. Classic signs of chronic stress. She could post generic wellness tips. Drink more water. Get more sleep. Eat better. Instead, she publishes content that connects stress to something most people don't know about: how cortisol alters DNA methylation and accelerates biological aging at the cellular level. That level of specificity does two things. First, it signals expertise. It shows she understands the root cause, not just the symptoms. Second, it attracts the right people. Someone who's tried everything and still feels terrible is going to stop scrolling when they see content that explains why nothing has worked. This is the pattern I see in content that actually converts. It's not about being everywhere or posting every day. It's about understanding your audience well enough to name the problem they're experiencing in a way that makes them feel seen. If you're struggling to figure out what to post, start here: What's the specific problem your ideal customer is dealing with right now? Not the surface-level frustration. The underlying issue they might not even have words for yet. Then create content that connects the dots. You don't need a big budget or a content team. You need clarity on what your audience is trying to solve. If you want help translating that into a repeatable content workflow, comment and I'll reach out. https://www.lizgreenfield.com/blog-1-1/h08r5dhgllb0kfyalh0zrty7ukbgic …more

Most B2B tech marketers hit a ceiling. Not from lack of effort. From optimizing the wrong variables. I've seen this across five enterprise tech companies. A team will grind for months on a content strategy that isn't working. More blog posts. More social activity. More webinars. The output increases, but the results stay flat. The problem isn't execution. It's what they're measuring. Three variables I see teams optimize that rarely move the needle: Content volume instead of resonance. Publishing 20 generic pieces won't outperform 5 that genuinely address the technical skepticism your audience brings to every vendor conversation. When you're marketing to people who evaluate infrastructure decisions or security platforms, they can smell surface-level content immediately. Optimize for depth and credibility, not frequency. Channel spread instead of concentration. I watched a marketing team stretch across seven platforms because a framework told them to be everywhere. Their audience was almost entirely on LinkedIn and in niche technical communities. When they pulled back and focused, engagement doubled in six weeks. Your audience isn't everywhere. Find where they actually pay attention and go deep there. Simplification instead of respect for intelligence. The instinct in B2B tech is to make everything simple. But your buyers are smart. They want to understand how your product works, not just what it does. The best content I've built didn't dumb things down. It made complexity clear and connected it to business outcomes they cared about. When I work with teams stuck at this ceiling, the shift isn't about doing more. It's about reframing what success looks like and aligning effort with variables that actually matter. If your content strategy feels like pushing a boulder uphill, I'm offering 30-minute strategy consultations where I'll review your current approach and give you three actionable improvements you can implement this week. DM me and we'll schedule it. https://www.contrarianthinking.co/newsletter-articles/youre-asking-the-wrong-question …more

We're halfway through the year. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what's actually worked in my marketing vs. what I thought would. Here's my honest take. What I expected to work: a polished content calendar, consistent posting across multiple channels, well-designed assets. What actually moved the needle: direct conversations that started from a single, specific LinkedIn post that named an exact pain point my audience was feeling. The post wasn't clever. It wasn't visually interesting. It was just specific and true. It got more inbound messages than anything I'd posted in the previous three months combined. The lesson I keep relearning: marketing feedback loops are much shorter than founders think. You can know within 30 days whether a message is working — if you're watching the right signal. Not follower count. Not impressions. Conversations started. That's the metric I watch now above everything else. How many people responded to something I wrote and said "this is exactly what I'm dealing with"? That's the leading indicator that content is building pipeline. The other thing that worked: teaching something specific in every post instead of sharing opinions. Opinions get likes. Teaching gets DMs. DMs become customers. My Inspiring Founders community on Skool is where I share what I'm learning as I learn it — if you want to follow along, join us. It's free: https://www.skool.com/inspiring-founders-5861/about …more

The most underrated skill in B2B marketing isn't writing. It's listening. I've spent years marketing complex technical products across five enterprise tech companies, and the pattern holds every time: the best messaging I ever shipped didn't start in a doc. It started in a conversation I almost didn't slow down enough to have. A support engineer describing the call they dread. A customer explaining, in their own words, the moment your product stopped being "a tool" and started being "the reason I slept last night." That language is gold. And most of us walk right past it because we're in a hurry to produce. In the Army, we were taught that you never brief a mission you don't understand from the ground up. You listen first—to the terrain, to the people who've walked it, to what's actually at stake. Then you speak. The order lands because it's rooted in reality, not assumption. Marketing complex products works the same way. Curiosity isn't a soft skill here. It's the discipline that separates content people scroll past from content people feel seen by. So before you write the next campaign, try this: have one real conversation with someone who lives your customer's problem. Don't pitch. Just listen. You'll leave with a sentence better than anything a blank page could give you. The teams pulling ahead aren't the loudest. They're the most curious. Want a fresh take on your B2B content strategy? DM me and let's schedule a 30-minute consultation—I'll show you 3 things you can improve this week. #B2BMarketing #ContentStrategy https://www.generativeaipub.com/p/the-urgent-call-for-ai-slowdown-has …more

Here's a workflow you can steal. One core message → five LinkedIn posts in 30 minutes. Step 1 (5 min): Pick one thing you believe about your industry. Not a tip. A point of view. Example: "Most marketing advice for small business owners is wrong because it assumes you have a marketing team." Step 2 (5 min): Write it as a single declarative sentence. That's your core message. Step 3 (10 min): Generate five angles on it with AI. Story angle (a moment this was true). Contrarian angle (what people get wrong). Tactical angle (one thing to do differently). Mistake angle (what you used to do). Persona angle (who specifically this hurts). Step 4 (10 min): For each angle, write the first two lines yourself — that's the hook. Let AI fill in the middle. Edit the ending so the CTA sounds like you. That's it. Five posts. Same core idea, five different doors into it. Your audience won't feel repetition because each post leads with a different shape of thought. I'm walking through this workflow plus two more — competitor research in 10 minutes, and an editorial system that runs in 15 minutes a day — at my workshop on May 28th in San Jose at the MLK Library, hosted by the Silicon Valley Small Business Development Center. If you can't make it, book a free 15 to 20 minute marketing audit and I'll run this workflow with you on your business. https://www.radi8.com/free-audit?utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=free_audit&utm_content=post_id DM me if you want the workshop link. …more

Every new AI content tool promises to save time and scale content production. Yet the feed keeps filling up with the same generic posts. You know the ones—vague insights, buzzwords stacked on buzzwords, nothing that actually sounds like it came from a human with specific experience. The problem is not the AI. The problem is that most AI tools have nothing to anchor to. When you feed prompts into a blank interface, the AI does exactly what it's designed to do: generate statistically probable language. It pulls from the aggregate of everything it's been trained on. That aggregate is safe, generic, and indistinguishable from the last 50 posts in your feed. Brand context as the foundation changes this completely. When AI has actual context to work from—your positioning, your voice principles, your proof points, the specific pains your audience faces—it stops producing slop. It starts producing content that reflects how you actually think and communicate. Content that carries your credibility instead of diluting it. I've seen this across multiple enterprise tech companies. The marketers who win are not the ones using AI as a shortcut. They're the ones who build the right inputs first. They document what makes their brand distinct. They define voice principles that reflect real experience, not aspirational marketing speak. Then they use AI to scale that foundation, not replace it. If your AI-generated content feels generic, ask yourself: what context did I give it? A one-off prompt in a chat window, or a documented system that captures how your brand actually shows up? The tools matter less than the setup. Start with brand context. Everything else gets easier from there. Want a fresh take on your B2B content strategy? DM me and let's schedule a 30-minute consultation—I'll show you 3 things you can improve this week. https://www.radi8.com/blog/ai-slop-has-a-cause-its-not-the-ai …more