B2B Content Creation Behind the Scenes: Expert Insights with Livia Hirsch

Sophie Steffen: Today, we’re going to talk about what B2B content creation actually looks like behind the scenes, so the tools, the workflows, and AI shortcuts that take an article from the blank page to publication. I have Livia with me, so thank you for joining this chat. Would you like to give us a quick intro about yourself, Livia?

Livia Hirsch: Thanks so much for having me, Sophie. I really appreciate it. So yeah, I’m Livia. I’m French and American, but based in the Netherlands, and my specialty is helping B2B scale-ups grow from local to global brands and expand into the US market using content marketing and strategy.

Sophie Steffen: Perfect. Short and sweet. So Livia, welcome to this chat. You write and strategize about B2B content in complex spaces like, for example, data privacy, so let’s skip this “content is king” talk, which has been out there for ages. The first question would be about your tech stack. So what software stack do you typically use from getting an article from the blank page to published?

Livia Hirsch: So it really varies per client, because sometimes I use my own tech stack, and at times, clients invite me to theirs. I actually use Miro a lot of the time for strategizing, for the strategy part, for brainstorming, for collaborative with my clients, and then also SEMrush, although I haven’t used the newest release with AI, so I can’t comment on that.

But I use SEMrush for keyword research, competitor research to also be part of the strategy. And then Google Drive and Google Docs are my best friends really. That’s where everything resides, organized folders, Google Docs, and then I’ll also usually create a Notion calendar. And it’s a page where we can also organize, see the workflow and whatnot, so all under one page.

So that’s my tech stack, pretty lean. But then sometimes my clients will onboard me, so of course there’s communication. I’ve used Jasper. I’ve also been embedded in their CMSes, so I’ve worked with WordPress, I’ve worked with Wix, I’ve worked with HubSpot. Think those are the three big ones. And then I’ve also worked in Asana, ClickUp, so kind of also then whatever my clients prefer.

Sophie Steffen: Okay, so you’re quite versatile, depending on what the clients are using, then you adapt to that tech stack. Okay, perfect. And you deal with subject matter experts when you write your content, because it’s technical content. So can you walk me through the actual workflow from getting an SME, subject matter expert, to review your draft without turning it into a complete chaos of Google Docs with comments where you don’t know where’s the beginning, where’s the end?

Livia Hirsch: I am guilty of the Google Docs. So the workflow, typically I find that the hardest part is actually getting the expert to get in contact and reserving time with them, because those experts are usually busy.

So that’s kind of the hardest step, but once we have, I’ll send the questions over in Google Docs, and then just so they already have a basis. Sometimes they’ll even give input of like, “Hey, I wouldn’t use this term,” or, “Actually, this is a trend that’s coming up. Maybe we should cover that as well.” And then interviews just filmed on Google Meets, and then I can take the transcript. And then I just write it up into Google Docs, and we’ll share it with them, but give them only commentator access, so it can’t – you know, “Well, I don’t like the term magenta, I prefer deep purple.” No. You can tell me, “Hey, actually I don’t agree with what was said here,” or, “You misunderstood this term,” or whatever, but high-level edits. But I am pretty guilty of the Google Docs.

But the workflow step-wise is, step one is organizing the time for the interview, and then step two is actually doing the interview. And believe it or not, step one and two are actually a lot tougher than you would imagine. And then step three is writing, step four is editing. So my workflow, in that sense, pretty lean. But I stick to Google Docs because you can see all the edits, and I find them to be easier to work with than Word.

Sophie Steffen: And that works for you? Or do you then have also feedback via Slack, email, and –

Livia Hirsch: No, typically, with the two, especially one client that right now I’m doing a lot of interviews for, it works. It’s very streamlined. There’s one folder and we put V1, and then with edits we’ll do a copy, rename it “with edits,” and then “final version.” But no, it’s very streamlined actually. And most of the time, because I’ll have one designated contact person, that does make it easier to kind of, you know, 15 people are not giving me their opinion.

It’s like, I’m partnering with Sophie. It’s Sophie’s client I’m interviewing or it’s Sophie’s friend or whatever. And so because you’re kind of the middle person, you’re like, “Cool, I get feedback from you. I get feedback from your friend,” and that is it. It’s a closed loop.

Sophie Steffen: Got it. So you basically have to make sure who does what from the beginning to remove any friction.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah, so that’s where the – it’s more of a process because I’ve really noticed that the hardest part is actually getting the SME to give time. And so for me, what I’ve done is I actually always say, whoever’s your contact person – like with a client we would often do partner case stories, and they always had a designated partner agent within the company.

And so I would always say, rather than me reaching out, being like, “Hey, I’m from company X. They said you okayed to do a partner story, so here I am reaching out. When would you be free?” It’s like, because I’m already an outsider from their inner circle. I’m the bottom of their to-do list. I’m the bottom of their email list. And so I have the person that they know reach out and put us in contact via email with a calendar link already. “Hey, you okayed a partner story. This is Livia. She’ll be writing the partner story. Here are three slots that we could do it. Any of these work for you?” Because they’re more likely to respond to the person they know.

Sophie Steffen: Right. Awesome. You already shared a little bit about your daily execution. Let’s talk about a little bit more about the workflows and also failures, which is always an interesting part in the day-to-day of a professional. So could you walk me through the pipeline for the last big content piece you published? From the very beginning until the end, which were the tools you touched? How did the process look?

Livia Hirsch: I’m trying to think, because I’m now thinking of various white papers I’ve written for clients. But it’s actually less about tools, because white papers, it’s a lot more about research, and really needing original research.

So for multiple clients the process is pretty the same for a white paper. First off, definitely it’s a shared, collaborative idea. Usually it’s not me coming up with a white paper on my own, because a white paper is such a key component in a content strategy. We’ve already agreed, okay, Q1 we’re focusing on this white paper of this topic, and this is obviously gonna be done in lead gen, and so blogs stem from that and whatnot.

So it’s a collaborative idea process. Then from there we set deadlines. And the deadlines are actually more for the client because the review part is often hefty, and then the design as well. But then pretty much once we’ve agreed, I will always start with an outline, just to be sure, what you think is X could be what I think is something a bit different, especially in highly technical industries. So I always send first an outline of this is what we would cover, these are the things, already with some research.

NotebookLM from Google, I love that. That is my go-to app because that’s where I’ll save everything that I’ve found useful. And then you can interact with the chat and be like, “Cool,” I saw somewhere there was a stat that said 48% of X does Y. Can you find that for me with a source? Or I see here that this source is about this specific topic, but I’m having a hard time understanding the essence of what they’re trying to get me to say, and so it really helps analyze the content. But it doesn’t add any external sources. It really keeps it to what it has.

So I think it helps with preventing hallucinations because you’ve given it these 10 sources, we’re just talking about these 10 sources. So that’s a must at this point for all heavy research. And then from there, again, Google Docs.

And writing it up once the outline has been approved, and then sharing it with the client, sitting down, going through it. But on a high level. Once again, we’re not discussing whether you prefer mustard yellow or regular yellow. We’re discussing more, okay, well, this stat is actually way more important, or we have our own research that – going through a lot of that.

But then you’ll also usually partner with a designer, and that’s where things can get a bit interesting because they’ll do the design either, mainly Figma, but I’ve also worked with InDesign. Whatever the designer prefers. But so then it’s about, okay, great, we have this fabulous 20-page thing. We also need to make it look pretty and on brand, and it needs to at least fit a bit, so then we’ll usually collaborate.

So sometimes also during the process I’ll come up with ideas also with the client for some visuals, like this statistic we should highlight, we can pull from here. So there’s already some visual ideas that come. Make comments on all of that, and also if we have already specifics, I’ll make notes in all of the Google Doc.

But then, yeah, sitting down with the designer, seeing, okay, well, here the text is a little bit too long. Just by like three words, can I somehow shorten it? And going through the nitty-gritty like that. And then it’s a finished product, and then it’s about distributing it.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, from the moment it’s published and the starting point, is there any specific bottleneck that you feel like the process always slows down at?

Livia Hirsch: Yeah, but it’s the review part. It’s the getting time. Because it’s such a hefty document, by the time it’s written, sometimes it’s 20, 30 pages. That’s not a “let me quickly read it on my lunch break.” This is, we need to sit down and make sure this makes sense for our customer, what point we’re trying to make. So the being able to sit down with a client and getting them to do the review is actually usually the bottleneck.

Sophie Steffen: Okay. Well, that’s good to know. Moving into failures and maybe even tears. Do you have any story about something that completely went wrong, a content launch or any CMS update?

Livia Hirsch: Early on in my career, we were doing a website transfer from one CMS to another and updating the whole website and new branding and whatnot for this client. There were 10 people on this. It was a company-wide effort.

The CMS we used was WordPress, and I do love WordPress because it is great in certain ways, but I also think WordPress has a mind of its own. We had done a whole section, and it turned out that WordPress had put them under a whole different section and a different URL, and we’d hit publish.

It was all very soft launch. It was all published in a test ecosystem, so luckily we weren’t botching the entire live website. But there was more than once where we had duplicated everything. We’re like, “Great, that section’s done.” But because of elements and weird site map quirks and how WordPress decided to do things as you added literally thousands of pages, you’d realize, “That is not where it should be. This is all wrong. This is 25 pages that I just have to redo.”

It was lower stakes because it was a test environment, but it was a lot of work because a lot of it was manual. And yeah, you felt like you had very little control over it when you’re uploading that many pages. Sometimes, “Oh yeah, all of these blogs are now under services,” and you’re like, “Nope.”

Sophie Steffen: So there’s the reason for the test environment.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah. But because this was a massive website it would not have ever gone live unless it was 95% of the way there. But they had learned a lot. I think they were thinking it’d be super easy because once you got to duplication, the hard work was done. The components, the branding. This is just the boring easy part. Let’s just do the duplicate.

And no, the duplication was a mess. It took three times as long as it should have, and the site map sometimes didn’t fully match up. When you try and build a house, anything that can go wrong typically does. “Oh, we’ll be done in two hours.” Three days later.

Sophie Steffen: Well, it’s good that it happened early in your career.

Livia Hirsch: If you ever want to move one environment to another, if you think it’ll take you two days, budget a week. Whatever you think it is, double it.

Sophie Steffen: Usually these migrations take a lot longer than you would expect. Good learning to always book in some more time. So just to wrap up the daily execution part, you already mentioned once an article is published, the next part is distribution. So when you hit publish, what happens then? Is there a step-by-step workflow to distribute across LinkedIn, email, newsletters? And do you use any automation tools?

Livia Hirsch: Distribution is a core part of strategy, and so that’s something I do for all my clients if possible. And it all depends on what they have. I work with a lot of scale-ups, so they typically do already have something, whether it’s a LinkedIn page or an email. So we’ll work with what they have because also there’s no need to add more noise. There’s no need to add more channels just for the sake of it.

The two most typical ones at this point, especially in B2B, are LinkedIn and email. So far I’ve never done TikTok content for my B2B clients.

So distribution-wise, always share. Well, depending on the blog and depending on how many blogs we’re publishing, you don’t always share every single blog via email. For one of my enterprise clients, they publish so much they’re not gonna share every single one. They’ll share more signature pieces. But LinkedIn for sure, you can always find ways of – it just gives you fresh content, so it pretty much always goes on LinkedIn, but it fits into the established cadence that we already have.

Two times per week, three times per week, we don’t have to push it out ASAP. The next post is Thursday. That’s already been written, but we can do it next Tuesday. Definitely you can do it more than once. You don’t publish once and millions of people know it. So you can definitely recycle posts to share it again.

And then within that, any automations. I’ve worked with HubSpot for scheduling LinkedIn posts and social media posts and newsletters.

I did really like it, it was quite nice, and I know that there’s lots of automation for social media that’s quite easy. The only downside I find is that when you schedule posts, even on LinkedIn, but even through HubSpot or whatever, typically it’s harder to tag people. So if I want to be like, “Thank you so much, Sophie, for having me,” half the time that tag won’t show up. And so then you have to go and be like, “Well, I was trying to leverage each other’s audiences and tag you so you could engage with my content.”

So that would be the one thing I’ve noticed when you’re not online when you post.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, I recall that happening to me as well when I wanted to schedule and tag people. Even in the LinkedIn environment, sometimes they’re not showing up. And when you use tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, sometimes the format kind of broke.

Livia Hirsch: I’ve had that. I’ve used more HubSpot recently, but I do remember using Sprout Social a couple years ago and being like, this is not how it had looked when I wrote it. This is a bit weird. And I’m gonna go back in a few times and edit. But this was a while ago.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah.

Livia Hirsch: Hopefully there have been updates since. But actually, not a lot of – if when possible, it is quite easy when you’re in the mindset of the blog to then write multiple LinkedIn posts, write the email blurb, because you’ve just kind of – you’re still in that whatever topic.

And so then it’s easy to also schedule those. Same thing with a newsletter. I’ve used HubSpot and Mailchimp for various different clients.

Sophie Steffen: Moving from the daily execution part into the topic everybody’s talking about, AI. Reality versus the actual friction, so what works, what doesn’t. You mentioned AI before. Where does AI fit into your daily writing stack, workflows, and where do you think it’s completely useless?

Livia Hirsch: I feel like it’s all the hype, but for me I find that AI is a great brainstorming partner. So sometimes I’ll think of like, if I can’t think of quite the right word for a title or even a sentence, I’ll put it in, be like, “I keep thinking this or this. Can you find me like 15, 20 alternatives?” So I use it as a brainstorming partner. I have used it sometimes – for one client I had to generate a detailed brief outline that they could continuously reuse, so I used AI to help with that based on their requirements and my recommendations.

Where I think it fails is writing. I would never be, “Okay, I need to write about consent management. Write me 2,000 words about what is consent management.” Even if you were to give it the tone of voice and whatever, I’ve just noticed – I’ve tried, obviously I’ve tried – it just doesn’t meet for me the brand’s voice enough. And then a lot of my enterprise clients do often require research, and a lot of the times the research it just cannot do.

Even though I’ve tried Claude, I’ve tried ChatGPT, I’ve tried Gemini, so I was like, oh, Gemini, it’s Google, maybe it’s more connected. But I’ll be like, “Cool, I need –” it’ll be like, “Well, McKinsey says 53% of the population is happy.” Find me the McKinsey link, and it’ll not be able to get me the actual McKinsey link. It’ll link to four pages. It’ll link me to Google to have me search for that statistic.

I’m like, I need – you can’t cite McKinsey without giving me a McKinsey link. So for research and that type of thing, I find that it still is not able to directly give you source to number. And it’s not able to write.

So I use it more as a brainstorming partner. Like, they want me to write this CTA that needs to link to my conclusion. Well, this CTA is very different from my conclusion. What is the bridge between topic X to lead to topic Y CTA? Is there something I’m missing in the explanation? And then, okay, I could mention A. Smart. I will now. So, yeah, brainstorming partner.

Sophie Steffen: So let the writing still be done by humans. Unless we see any improvement.

Livia Hirsch: Pretty much. I mean, there’s a lot of – we’re seeing a lot more AI slop.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, like the top of funnel content, I feel it’s just flooded with AI content, and you can identify the emoticons and the typical stuff that AI content looks like.

Livia Hirsch: And maybe this is as a writer, but I really pay attention to words. And I really notice that with some sentences. And there was always poor writing before. It’s not like poor writing never existed. It’s not like we’ve never seen a website full of buzzwords. But you really notice that with some blogs that are more top of the funnel, super basic – what is, you know, describing something. The sentences, there’s a lot of filler words. There’s a lot of sentences where you’re like, what is that sentence? Literally says nothing. You’ve strung together a grammatically correct sentence that adds nothing in this introduction. You start to pick up on it.

Sophie Steffen: Do you use any paid version of these tools?

Livia Hirsch: No. I don’t have any subscription to any AI models. I mean, I guess I have Gemini because it’s embedded in my Google Pro suite. I don’t really know the difference between a basic and the pro one. Because Gemini can’t write, so I was hoping that it would be better at research. But like I said, it’s still not able to give me coherent stats, clear, and sourced. So I don’t really use Gemini.

Sophie Steffen: Well, if it still does the job for a brainstorm partner, then –

Livia Hirsch: Yeah, for that I honestly use Claude more. I find that Claude is a bit more, especially if you say, “Claude, I want you to act as somebody that’s in the industry, or as a content writer,” or even – I’ve sometimes used it to brainstorm ideas for my business from a more strategic level of like, “Claude, I have this idea, thinking this. Can you poke holes into it?” Try and shred it pretty much and see where it stands. And I find that it’s better versus ChatGPT, which is very much a yes man. And sometimes I’m like, “No, I need somebody to push back, in fact.”

Sophie Steffen: The people pleaser, ChatGPT.

Livia Hirsch: ChatGPT is such a people pleaser. And it takes it to extremes. Please push back a bit. Then it’s like – or please be a bit more gentle – and I’m just like, Claude’s a bit more steady.

Sophie Steffen: Well, that’s interesting. And do you use a specific prompt or shortcut that actually helps you save time in your day-to-day work?

Livia Hirsch: Not really. It’s more like, the typical sentence I would put in AI is “help me come up with X alternatives for X.” Like I said, when I get stuck on a word because I’ve said this very dumb word three times, and I don’t feel like all of the other alternatives – I’ve said “however” three times in the last three paragraphs. It feels very repetitive, and I don’t want to use “but,” and “yet” doesn’t feel – help me.

So that’s probably one of the most basic prompts I use. Don’t really use it a lot to save time. I have used it also to help me rewrite emails to sound a bit more professional or whatever. But yeah, that’s kind of it.

Sophie Steffen: And do you know if your clients have specific prompts or shortcuts they use?

Livia Hirsch: No. I’m pretty sure my two biggest clients at the moment are pretty – they’re not anti-AI, but it’s very much like, for one, they’ve created their own GPT within their ecosystem.

But the other one I think is very much like, no, we’re trying to stand out from AI and really try and create interviews, and quotes, and infographics, and have unique angles. So I don’t think they’ve really – they might use it more for prompt engineering or from a coding side or whatever. But I have no clue about that.

Sophie Steffen: All right. So wrapping up the AI part, is there a scenario where you actually used an AI tool for content and the result was just so bad that you needed more time to fix it?

Livia Hirsch: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Mainly for research. I really think I’m still sometimes so baffled that AI pulls its information from the internet, so I’m like, “You must have all the sources in the world.” If I ask you for McKinsey said – and I have sometimes probably stupidly tried to do this a dozen times thinking, “Well, no, maybe it’s me. Maybe if I change the prompt.”

Like, to me, research should be where it wins. It’s connected to everything. And ultimately it would’ve just been easier if I had probably Googled “McKinsey 54% and whatever word” in quotes and tried to see if I can find it, because it would give me a link. That’s a 404. So I’m like, “Hey, that’s a 404 page.” “Oh, you’re right. Here’s another link. It’s a blog.” That blog doesn’t link it. It just says it. I’m like, “No, I need an actual source.” And you’ll go through and I’m like, I’ve actually done this for 45 minutes and gotten no source. I should’ve just Googled it myself.

And I keep trying, and I’m now almost convinced that it doesn’t work. But I have tried a stupid amount of times to get – because I just don’t understand how this is not where it wins. But yeah.

Sophie Steffen: And maybe it’s something that will evolve at some point, because it keeps getting better. But at this point, it’s good to know that it will save you more time if you do it on your own.

Livia Hirsch: Good old-fashioned desk research is still popular.

Sophie Steffen: Moving into performance numbers. Let’s talk about the numbers behind content pieces. When you analyze how a content piece performed, do you have a specific dashboard you look at? What are the metrics you care about? And is there a specific metric you would recommend B2B marketers when they’re analyzing performance that they should obsess about, and others that are maybe complete garbage?

Livia Hirsch: There’s not one size fits all metric. It really depends on the point of your content. With one client we were trying to really boost their visibility, and the whole point of the content was to attract a certain market and really just grow their visibility. They had absolutely no blog. We were trying to really start. And that meant it was quite heavy on SEO. We were trying to down the line get inbound leads, but at first just even get visibility, being ranking for the right things.

And so for that we had created a Google Analytics dashboard with new number of new website visitors versus returning, time spent on page, scroll depth, click-through rate, location of the visitors, how they found us. So we’re really focused on are they finding us, and are they obviously then interested? If the scroll depth was three seconds and they weren’t going very far, clearly that didn’t resonate.

But for another client we were focusing a lot more on conversions, and they had a dashboard with Google Analytics but I think also a few other things, and they could tell, like, based on patterns. They had a whole site map in a way of, okay, Sophie entered on a blog, and then she went here, and your average person enters here, and they went there. They could see the usual browsing patterns. And they were very focused on expanding in the US, so is it the right audience but also conversions.

And they noticed, for example, that with the blogs, a website visitor was 15% more likely to convert after entering the website from a blog than they were from any other website page. But that was all, like, you have to build the right dashboard for that.

There’s not one metric that I would say, oh my gosh. It’s actually like a combination of things. As for metrics you shouldn’t look at – and I’m gonna sound cliche – basic vanity metrics, especially when it comes to LinkedIn company pages. It’s a lot harder to gain traction nowadays. Personal brands are bigger. And so just because your LinkedIn company page isn’t growing at the speed of light or isn’t generating lots of engagement, because people are less likely to engage with brands nowadays, especially ones that are less established, that doesn’t mean you should pivot and throw out your whole strategy.

So three likes on a LinkedIn post is not the end of the world. Three likes repeatedly when you have an audience of 2,000, well, maybe you should look at how to engage them, or is there a lot of bots or accounts that are not at all your audience, because there’s a mismatch if you have such a high audience and such low engagement. But vanity metrics, of course they boost your visibility, but at the end of the day they don’t pay the bills.

Sophie Steffen: So basically you don’t have one specific benchmark metric. It’s more like the combination of those you just mentioned, and then excluding the vanity metrics.

Livia Hirsch: Well, also focusing on the bigger picture instead of one. Of course there are always gonna be blogs unfortunately that tank. Not every blog, not every single blog that you write, especially if you start publishing 100 plus, is gonna be on page one of Google.

So there’s definitely looking at, okay, which ones can we optimize that are on page two, three? Is there a pattern amongst all the ones that aren’t ranking and that nobody’s browsing to? Maybe it’s a specific topic. Maybe it’s a specific format. But not panicking. Making sure you focus on the bigger picture always, rather than, “Oh my God, our blog of yesterday tanked.” Okay, I mean, give it time. All of your other ones are doing well. It’s the bigger picture rather than focusing on one thing.

Sophie Steffen: And you mentioned how your content influences lead generation. Do you also have insights on how it influences pipeline, the next step?

Livia Hirsch: I know it’s led to increased conversions, for sure. There was for one client when I first started with them, we did a lot of optimizations. And I know that it led to – just by making sure the content’s up to date, matching the new persona. Because their persona had been updated, so their content was a bit outdated to match their new persona as they grew.

So making sure the content was now a bit more relevant, a bit less jargony given their new target audience. And had their offer included easier offers – everybody has a lead pipeline, especially in B2B. You can have your end offer be 20K. You probably have a starting offer or a free thing. And so including a bit more of that free element throughout did lead to, I think, 150 to 200% increased conversion rates, just from even one or two blogs.

Yeah. You can just – the power of optimization and really targeting it right. And then at least they’re in the system. They’ve started that small free offer. They’ve started their free trial. So yeah.

Sophie Steffen: Well, thanks for sharing because I think a lot of people are wishing for that one specific metric or that one specific insight. But it’s never that easy. It’s always looking at the bigger picture and trying to understand what’s happening. So that will give you more insights, but you also need a better understanding and more experience to actually know what’s going on and evaluate that.

Livia Hirsch: Not every blog is gonna increase conversion rates by 200%. That is just not realistic either.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah. You have to manage expectations always.

Livia Hirsch: Well, because some blogs are gonna be a bit more like thought leadership and they’re gonna be a bit less – for one client, they have a magazine as well. That’s not at all about conversions. That’s about thought leadership. We’re not inputting CTAs in the middle. It’s way more about, look, we’re in the space, we’re creating a whole section within this umbrella space, each issue is about a specific subtopic. And it’s more about visibility.

So there you’re not even gonna look at conversion rates as a number.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah. Well, it’s a good piece of advice, those benchmarks you just shared. Moving into the last part of this conversation, let’s talk about industry trends and the hard lessons you’ve learned.

We already talked a little bit about how the internet is flooded with AI content, and specifically the B2B content industry is getting noisier and noisier. But what’s your view on what’s going to happen in the next 12 months? Where are we heading? Please give us your completely unfiltered view.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah, I think there’s dream world outcome or preferred, but I think reality – I think AI slop and AI-generated content is gonna rise in the next year. A lot of places, like, “I can just quickly do this with AI.” I think at the same time in the next year we’re gonna start finding that there’s a line.

This could be in content, but also even in general. I’ve heard that too many AI tools – there’s a study that I think Harvard did, that in fact, when you have too many AI generating tools or AI tools in your company, you’re in fact slowing down, and it decreases productivity because your employees become almost like parents having to be like, “Well, no, but this one said this,” and now you have to cooperate with this one. And so we’re also gonna start to see, I think, the limitations of AI.

So as we all start using it for everything, we’ll be like, “Oh, it’s not always better.” More is not always better. Optimizing everything and no human involved is not always better. So I think there’s gonna be that fine line that’s gonna be discovered. But I still think in general there’s gonna be lots of content that’s gonna get published and pushed.

And so with that, in order to stand out, you’re really gonna have to have and master the basics really well, which is a really good branding, positioning, point of view, tone of voice, clarity on your target audience. And I almost hope that the brands that’ll stand out are really gonna prioritize quality over quantity in such a distinct way. Cool, we know exactly who we are, we know exactly our values, and we are not gonna try and pump out 100 blogs a month in order to be seen.

And if that slows our growth, then so be it. So that’s what I would hope. But yeah, I think that the basics of target audience, positioning, branding, messaging are gonna become way more important. And I do think that more and more people are gonna see – I think already the trend of “AI is coming for our jobs,” people are seeing that’s not the case. I think that’s gonna keep growing. Oh yeah, we really do need people, definitely in certain places to check it. It’s a collaboration. It’s a tool. It’s not a replacement.

With the research part, clearly AI can’t do it. Well, we need a person to do the research. So I think we’ll get more clarity on that as well. A human is still very necessary, and in fact, where can a human do it better and work with the tool better rather than just kind of putting more tools in.

Sophie Steffen: So you’re not giving into this concern that people, especially writers, will get laid off?

Livia Hirsch: No. If I look at it now, it can’t do my job. I’ve tried. I’ve tried giving it brand guidelines. “Write me this blog with specificity.” I’ve never seen it do a good job. And it can’t do research, which is also a key part. So I’m just like, well then, what good are you?

Especially for quality content, which at this point – some companies are gonna focus a bit more on quantity. For those that are not and are gonna be focusing on quality, humans have to be involved.

Sophie Steffen: Well, it’s good for our listeners to hear that piece of reality check. Someone who’s in the field who gets her hands dirty every day and seeing, okay, this is not going to substitute us. It’s more like maybe extending our skill set.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah.

Sophie Steffen: It’s not just in marketing, right? It’s in all other sectors and jobs. In engineering, as you said at the beginning.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah.

Sophie Steffen: We’ll see what happens in the next year. It’s interesting.

Livia Hirsch: Definitely.

Sophie Steffen: What advice could you give a junior writer? A little bit of harsh advice to survive in B2B tech right now because competition is rising, and it’s not easy to stand out.

Livia Hirsch: I would almost address it more to people that work in-house. Typically we’re always asked, “What would you give other freelancers?” But just other writers, I would address more writers that are in-house: you keep practicing your craft. Keep reading different things. You don’t have to always read tech things. By exposing yourself to different forms of media, you 100% get more forms of inspiration.

But also, you kind of have to make your own opportunities in order to grow. If you’re assigned, cool, you’re a content writer and you’re writing three blogs a month and doing a few other things and working with a social team and whatever, don’t hesitate to be like, “Guys, I want to try writing Instagram captions. I would love to try – there’s this PR we’re doing. Can somebody walk me through the PR template, how we write it?” Ask questions.

When I was starting off on my internship, I had a fabulous mentor, but I asked her so many questions. And I would just, probably annoyingly so, but she gave me all the time and space in the world. I asked her so much. I’d be like, “Oh, what does this person do? Well, how does that work?” She’d say, “Well, go ask them for a demo.” And so I learned more about sales, about the design, about Figma.

Even though I’m not a designer and might never be, I still learned about, oh, what do they think about when they create an outline, a template? It further enriches my experience and knowledge going forward because it’s never just about writing.

Sophie Steffen: So –

Livia Hirsch: Yeah, ask questions, be annoying, and create those opportunities. “Oh, how is that done?” Well, you can go over there and ask them. “Can I get a 30-minute demo as to how that works?” Make your own opportunities happen, because that is really how you then also enrich your experience and see the amount that writing touches, because it touches everything.

Sophie Steffen: Love that, because there’s so much cliche advice out there. Did you ever hear any advice that was given that you think was completely BS?

Livia Hirsch: I’ve been seven, eight years in the field now. I just think that a lot of advice is very surface level. I’m trying to think – a lot of the advice that came to mind was business owner advice where I’m like, yes, I have heard advice for business owners that is complete BS.

But in terms of writing advice, I think it’s just that some of the whole “read and write more” seems very basic, and it’s not enough to then get you to the next level. So that’s why I said, of course I’m gonna say this, because yes, if you read different forms of media, you do get exposed to different words, different ways of writing. But practicing writing is not enough. You need to forge your own opportunities.

Sophie Steffen: Yeah, you need to do that extra step, and that only comes when you expand beyond your knowledge zone, your comfort zone.

Livia Hirsch: And beyond your scope. We’re writers. Great, I wrote my blog, I wrote my LinkedIn post, I’m done for the day. It’s like, go ask the sales team what they’re doing. How do paid campaigns work? Maybe you discover you love Google Ads.

Sophie Steffen: I think that’s a lesson for every professional. If you just stay within your niche and your skill set and your scope, then you’re not going to understand the impact that your content might have or how the skills from others might feed back to you. That’s true.

Livia Hirsch: Yeah.

Sophie Steffen: Awesome. Coming into the very last question. Looking back into your whole career so far, is there a single most important lesson that you’ve learned about doing content right?

Livia Hirsch: It’s not a one moment, but more the realization over the years that writing is way more than writing. And so I’ve had clients who are just startups figuring it out and didn’t have a lot. And we’re trying to make, “Hey, you have an audience, but you don’t have branding.”

But when a client has a very clear branding, a very clear tone of voice, and a very clear audience, and a very distinct personality, it’s so much easier to write. And so it just shows the importance of the basics. You’re never just writing. The writing is for someone to do something, and if you don’t know what that information is, how are you supposed to write well?

It shows the power of the foundations that we all preach about. Have a target audience. Define how you want to sound. We’ve all heard it, but it’s true because it makes then also, if I give that information to a writer, a junior writer, if I can give it clearly and succinctly, it’s gonna be a lot easier for them to write.

So the power of the background, because you’re never just a writer. You’re trying to get the reader to think differently and convince them to take a next step, especially in content marketing. At the end of the day, we’re selling something. Let’s not pretend. I’m not writing about what is a green plant out of the joyfulness of my heart. I’m also trying to sell you a green plant.

So yeah, it’s the power of the basics. It’s so important for writing.

Sophie Steffen: Get your basics right.

Livia Hirsch: Pretty much. There’s so much that goes under powerful writing – it’s almost just the end result. I’ve made a LinkedIn post about this saying, “I’m not just a writer. I’m somebody that asks questions. I’m a researcher. I’m somebody that’s going to dig into things.” The writing is almost just the deliverable you get.

But before that, there’s a whole onboarding where I ask you all of these questions, because that’s gonna make the writing 100 times better.

Sophie Steffen: I love that. To finalize the chat, is there anything you would like to share at the end? Or is there a place where people can learn more about you and your work?

Livia Hirsch: Always happy to connect with anybody on LinkedIn. My name, Livia Hirsch, you can find me on LinkedIn. And then I also have a website, liviahirsch.com. So those are the best places. But for more direct messaging and keeping in touch, LinkedIn is the best way. If anybody wants to connect, always happy to chat. Very chatty person.

Sophie Steffen: All right. Thank you, Livia, for this very chatty chat and full of insights. And to our listeners, if you found this useful, please follow us, tag us, and yeah, see you next time.

Livia Hirsch: Thanks so much for having me.