According to a recent Ahrefs analysis of nearly a million newly launched websites, 74.2% contained AI-generated content. If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely leading marketing strategy for your organization and already know what this means in practice: Content is easier to produce than ever, but it’s significantly harder to make it stand out.
Dashing off marketing content is easy—a prompt, a few edits and 10 minutes later you have a LinkedIn post ready to go—or even a series of them ready for the week. However, creating good marketing content, the kind that helps to move the dial on your customers’ decision-making, is just as challenging as it’s ever been (and maybe more so). And creating good B2B marketing content in a scalable, consistent way is nearly impossible without a solid, documented strategy and resources to support it—AI tools included.
Consider this: Your team may spend a couple of hours writing a well-researched blog post or several weeks writing and designing an eBook or whitepaper. And that’s if everything goes according to plan: The research is at your fingertips, the subject matter experts you need to interview are on board, you have a good (and available) writer and designer and your key stakeholders sign off in a timely way. If you’re like most marketers trying to establish a weekly or even daily drumbeat with your content, it’s easy to see how the math works against you.
It’s also important to keep in mind the consistency necessary to create a cohesive experience across the customer journey. What you present to prospects at the awareness stage must dovetail with their experience at consideration, intent and conversion—repeating a similar message across these touchpoints will help to reinforce your value proposition with potential customers.
To achieve the consistency, cadence and scalability you’ll need, we’re advocates of atomizing your content through a “brick and feathers” approach to your content marketing efforts, where bricks are long-form pieces of content and feathers are related short-form pieces of content
Why the Brick and Feathers Strategy Works for B2B Content Marketing
The brick and feathers strategy works because it solves many of the pain points inherent to the modern-day marketer, including:
- Scalability: You have limited time. The thought leaders you’re tapping to help build your content certainly have limited time. By breaking your brick into feathers, you get more mileage from their input and more content to share.
- Cadence: Your content engine needs fuel to run efficiently. Using feathers from your brick increases your publication speed and reduces your team’s anxiety over daily and weekly goals.
- Message discipline: What you say to a prospect today during their awareness phase should be consistent with what you say three months from now as they make their purchasing decision. Brick and feathers ensures that message discipline.
The Brick: Long-Form Content
The brick is the big piece of content you sink a lot of your time into creating. It may be an eBook or whitepaper, research report or an interactive microsite that serves as the cornerstone for one of your marketing campaigns. It likely took a lot of time to produce and required the concentrated efforts of your entire content marketing dream team.
The brick involves investment, both from you to produce and from your audience to consume. In many cases, it will help to further the conversation with prospects who are deeper in the funnel. Think of it as content targeting a prospect you’ve nurtured who needs a deeper dive on a specific trend you support or problem you solve versus someone who doesn’t know you and has just landed on your content for the first time.
The Feathers: Short-Form Content
The feathers are where your content will really start to fly. Once you have the big, heavy brick produced, you can break it up into smaller, lighter, easily consumable pieces for your audience. These feathers are the ideal way to supercharge your demand-gen efforts. You’ll be able to reach your audiences across multiple different channels and platforms (think LinkedIn, YouTube, other social media platforms, your website and third-party publications) using the same campaign concept. Getting more engagement from what you’ve already created without the heavy lifting of a brand new idea is always a win.
Examples of feathers:
- Several shorter posts posted on LinkedIn, ideally starting two to three weeks after you published the original long-form version
- A Story Stream
- A series of short videos to post on your social channels
- Single-statistic visual “chips”
- Video snippets or audio soundbites
- AI-assisted variations of feathers for different channels
A great example of this in action is a brick and feathers campaign Scribewise created for eMoney Advisor that created demand, 786 MQLs and more than $100,000 in new business (a 10x ROI). We started with an eBook as the brick, which was based on extensive primary research from eMoney on financial advisor experiences. This eBook became the downloadable asset on a Story Stream page, one of the campaign feathers. It was further supported by a series of other feathers—blog and social posts that pulled out individual stats from the eBook. Learn more about it in our eMoney Advisor case study.
Why Brick and Feathers Matters Even More in the AI Era
Answer engines and AI search tools increasingly reward the type of content a well-built brick represents: first-hand, expert-sourced and verifiably human. An interview with an SME, an original research report or a documented case study are hard for AI to create because they’re built on information nobody else has. It’s also good content that fuels generative engine optimization (GEO), helping you drive citations, quotes and recommendations in answer engines.
Feathers are where AI earns its keep. Once the brick exists, AI tools can meaningfully speed up how you atomize that material into social posts, short video scripts or visual chips. Used this way, AI isn’t replacing the strategy; it’s making the “cadence” pillar of brick and feathers faster to execute. Used the other way—asking AI to generate the brick itself, with no underlying source material—you lose the exact thing that made the content worth atomizing in the first place.
So keep producing those bricks and be sure you provide them with some feathers so they can take off.