The New Content Funnel

A power shift is underway in media and marketing, and it should fundamentally change how we all do our jobs.

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Over the past two weeks, one big story has dominated my LinkedIn feed.?

No, it’s not a sociopathic billionaire casually breaking out a nazi salute like he’s dabbing at a white power wedding. It’s this graph showing that Hubspot’s search traffic has fallen off a cliff — first posted by Ryan Law of Ahrefs.

Everyone in my weird network of content geeks had something to say about this post, which amassed millions of views before mysteriously disappearing. That may seem bizarre, but Hubspot is to B2B content marketers what Leo Dicaprio is to elder millennials. They’re the OG darling that people love to see slapped down. In Leo’s case, it was screwing one too many 20-year-olds on his yacht. In Hubspot’s case, their traffic plummeted after SEO-bait posts like “Famous Quotes for Sales” got eaten by AI Overviews.

The real story, though, is that Hubspot’s traffic collapse is part of a larger trend —?the content game has fundamentally changed, with a new funnel emerging. And whether you’re a CMO, Substack solopreneur, or an ex-journalist trying to pay the bills telling great stories inside the corporate machine, it should change how you think about your job.

The 4 forces of change

As I touched on in The New Rules of Content Marketing earlier this month, we’re in the midst of a big power shift, driven by four key forces:

1) The organic SEO apocalypse and the rise of zero-click SEO: For two decades, marketers have been obsessed with creating generic blog posts like “What is Content Marketing?” in hopes of generating cheap traffic that looks good on a Google Analytics chart but rarely converts. But now, 99.2% of informational searches return an AI Overview, meaning creating informational content is pointless; it won’t drive clicks. This is why Hubspot’s traffic fell off a cliff. “Zero click SEO” — in which someone sees information about your brand but doesn’t click on anything — does have an impact, but it’s hard to measure and requires a different strategy (more on that shortly).

2) The Substackification of Media and the Creator Economy: People want to follow people, not brands. This is true of both corporate brands and publications — our allegiance is to individuals we trust. It’s why we’re seeing everything from a video game writer leaving Axios and making $100K on his Substack within his first year to Paul Krugman leaving the Times and racking up 150,000 subs by breakfast. The social algorithms know this, which is why company page posts only reach 1-2% of followers. If brands want to reach people efficiently, they need to go through creators their audience trusts, which is why influencer marketing has grown 14x since 2016 to $24 billion, slowly tipping the media power structure in favor of creators. (For the record, Hubspot was ahead of the curve here. They saw the SEO apocalypse coming and built a popular podcast network of marketing influencers. Their stock price just reached an all-time high.)

3) Skyrocketing digital ad costs: Hyper-targeted digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Google used to be easy money for brands. But as marketers saturated the market, the cost to acquire each customer skyrocketed 222% between 2013 and 2022. Based on conversations I’ve had with several agencies, customer acquisition costs through digital ads have roughly grown another 50-100% since 2022 in many industries, as market saturation deepened and the cookie apocalypse made stalking people harder.?

4) AI slop vertigo: When used correctly, GenAI can drive down the cost of creating great content — boosting brainstorming and creativity and automating time-consuming work (data visualization, research, interview transcription, social video editing, etc.). But it also allows people to make bad or mediocre content with zero effort, and already, there’s a backlash as a flood of AI slop floods the internet. As a result, the mediocre content most brands mindlessly pump out has minimal or negative value — it doesn’t help your SEO, and sophisticated consumers will suspect you outsourced it to ChatGPT.?

As I illustrate in this ratchet chart below:

• The value of mediocre content is approaching zero.
• The quality bar that people demand to capture their attention is rising.
• The value of high-quality, distinctly human content is rising.

All of this is shifting the power structure of media and marketing away from performance marketing and “the brand” to creators — both inside and outside of the company.

And it’s creating a new content funnel.?CUE THE GRAPHIC.

I know. I’m sick of the funnel too. I can’t believe I’m still writing about it voluntarily. But it’s the most straightforward framework for understanding how you get someone’s attention and eventually get them to buy something. (And we’re all selling something — even if you’re an independent writer on Substack, you’re likely selling paid subs or books or some freelance offering.)

And in this new environment, it falls into three stages:

Let’s break it down:

Create Demand

The traditional marketing funnel starts with “awareness,” but the game isn’t awareness. It’s creating demand for whatever you’re selling — software, consulting, sex toys, or a paid newsletter subscription. It’s about grabbing your target audience’s attention — the most valuable and fleeting resource today — and getting them to give a crap about you. The only real way to do this effectively is to reach them within the walled-garden social media ecosystems where they spend their time, through the accounts of people they find interesting.?

Ryan Law’s LinkedIn post about Hubspot’s traffic collapse was a brilliant example of this; he’s a content marketing geek selling to other content marketing geeks, and with a one-sentence post (which was mysteriously deleted!), he got millions of people looking at the above screenshot of Ahrefs product for free. Sparktoro’s Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad also do this very well, using their own product to create entertaining content that answers their target audience’s biggest questions.

For this content to succeed, it needs to be voicey, opinionated, entertaining, and feel like it comes from a real human.

For instance, this is Sam Altman’s entire job. OpenAI’s $157 billion valuation and market position are mostly driven by his constant presence as the top story on social and traditional media channels. (As DeepSeek showed this week, they don’t have much of a competitive MOAT). He’s their Chief Influencer Officer, even if that now also includes licking Trump’s boots. The most successful founders today aren’t coders; they’re storytellers.

Of course, these influencers don’t all have to be internal. B2B brands are now following their B2C counterparts in plowing money into influencer marketing. We’ll see more B2B brands partner with business creators with large LinkedIn and newsletter followings this year.

Capture Demand

Since informational SEO is dead (see above), you’re no longer getting website traffic from people searching for long-tail, informational searches. Instead, most of your website traffic will now come from people who have already heard about you; your website's job is to capture that demand. That means refocusing your website’s content on product-led SEO. As Eli Schwartz — an SEO expert who literally wrote the book on this — explains:

Product-led SEO is the concept of building a valuable product specifically for users. It’s not creating content because a keyword research tool tells you to; you're telling a story about a product users want.

The difference is you're creating content people want to read because you know they want it, not because you want rankings. The idea is to create something that helps users learn after clicking on your website. Beyond driving keywords, you're building something of value.

That means no more writing insufferable, keyword-stuffed copy in hopes of tricking the Google bots. Instead, tell a story that makes it clear how you help people in easy-to-understand terms, not a river of jargon about how you unleash paradigm-shifting capabilities to help navigate a fast-evolving landscape.

If you’re a software company, that’s a story about your tech and the problems it solves. If you’re a consultant, it’s a story about you and the problems you solve. If you’re a writer, it’s all about driving people to your best stories — the ones that show you at your best and convert subscribers at an unusually high rate.

Build Trust & Convert

2010s-era business books like Predictable Revenue promised that if you just had the right team structure and sent pithy, well-researched emails to “decision-makers,” you’d print money. The majority of sales leaders I’ve interviewed over the past few years still worship at the altar of this crap, even though it hasn’t worked since 2015.?

The successful salespeople I know have a few things in common: They’re great storytellers and “story listeners,” experts at getting other people to open up to share their stories. They genuinely geek out about their industry. And increasingly, they’re creating high-quality content on LinkedIn and Instagram to stay top-of-mind with prospects and customers. It’s a trope that the best salespeople are more like consultants — increasingly, they’ll look like creators.?

But really, this is a shift that changes everyone’s job.?Time for a rundown!

What this all means for …

Marketing Execs

You need to quit banging your head against the wall with the same expensive performance ads that don’t convert and e-books that no one downloads. And for the love of the internet, stop creating SEO slop this instant. It’s going to be a lot of work cultivating internal influencers, partnering with outside ones, and convincing your skeptical leadership team that this is a good idea. But the alternative is getting thrown under the bus during every exec meeting and slowly dying inside. You choose.

Salespeople

As covered above — creators crush quota, fam. GET THAT BREAD.?

Content Marketers

Your job used to be developing a roster of writers and video editors; now, your job is to build a roster of creators your audience trusts. And one of those creators should be you.

Want real economic leverage and freedom? Build a loyal audience of people in your industry. Create great content, rack up followers on Instagram and LinkedIn, and then convert those people to your newsletter. Walk into every job interview and slap that audience on the table like BAM! You’ll have the freedom to do the work you want, and you’ll make more money. This is how you survive in marketing without losing your mind.

Writers/Creators

This funnel applies to you, too. Reach your audience on the platforms where they spend their time and then convert them into your owned audience on a platform like Substack. I’ve been converting hundreds of people a week off LinkedIn to my Substack newsletter, where I own my audience, even though I’m not doing 5% of the things I should be doing to market this newsletter. Know that your value is set to skyrocket, especially if you create business and tech-focused content.

B2B marketers are painfully slow to follow B2C trends, but we’re reaching a tipping point this year. According to Creator Authority, sixty-one percent of B2B companies plan to increase their influencer marketing budget this year. If you’re open to taking sponsorships, it’s time to make that very clear to your audience.?

(Speaking of which: B2B marketing/tech companies, I will totally take your money for ads and influencering, so long as I’m actually into whatever you’re selling. My DMs are open!)

The upshot of all this: People who can create great content that vibrates with the unmistakable quality of being crafted by a human have never been more valuable. If you’re a strong storyteller, this is your time. And if you’re a marketing leader, it’s time to get with the times. Adapt or die!

If you made it to the end, you may also like:

• How AI Nearly Tricked Me Into a Career-Ending Mistake
• The New Rules of Content Marketing
• The 4 Elements of Great Storytelling, According to Neuroscience

I’m the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and a content nerd. If you enjoyed this post, then subscribe for free to my weekly newsletter to get new storytelling and audience-building strategies each week.