🗃 2026 content bets

Where top AI companies are putting their content budget

Tommy Clark
July 13, 2026

Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

I spent my weekend…per usual…reading, sleeping, and watching the World Cup. We were spoiled with some A+ matches. There’s no way that should have been a second yellow card for Embolo…Switzerland was robbed. But I digress.

You’re here for content strategy advice.

A single-founder organic LinkedIn strategy is table stakes, but it’s no longer enough to break through the noise on social in 2026. You must adapt, and today I have two ways for you to do so.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Where top AI companies are putting their content budget.

My job is pretty cool. I run Compound: a content-led growth agency for B2B tech cos. So, I get to spend my days on a flurry of Google Meets speaking to founders, marketing folks, and growth leaders at some of Silicon Valley’s top AI companies.

All of them trying to figure out how to crack distribution in 2026.

2024-2025 were the years of founder-led content. If you could activate your CEO on LinkedIn, you could print demos. As I wrote last week, this has changed.

So, let’s assume a company’s just raised a fresh round of funding. Of that % of the $$$ allotted for Growth, where’s it going?

A few notes:

(1) Executive content on LinkedIn is still the primary distribution channel for B2B tech. Except now, companies are moving beyond the CEO to scale a Content Ecosystem. Companies like beehiiv, Clay, and ColdIQ were early to this.

Some Heads of Marketing are trying (unsuccessfully) to scale AI-generated content across GTM orgs. Savvy Heads of Marketing are picking up people in their company with latent interest in personal branding, and empowering them to action it.

I wrote this piece way back in 2024 about how to execute this playbook. A lot of it still holds up.

(2) More companies want to launch founder-led newsletters. Aside from scaling multiple voices on LinkedIn, there is also appetite for content that lives off of social platforms.

We had a longtime client expand into newsletter content as of July, and I’ve had 2 other sales calls this month alone where the prospect expressed interest in long-form writing for their CEO.

My POV: written social content + newsletter content have a symbiotic relationship. I wouldn’t think about them as separate things.

Long-form pieces can be adapted into platform-specific, shareable formats. I think Rachel Karten at Link In Bio crushes this.

You can also use social insights (post performance, inbound comments and DMs, etc) to inform future topics for newsletters.

And—getting really really tactical here—you can use newsletters as one of those LinkedIn comment-prompted giveaway posts that drive wild engagement numbers. Of course, this depends on your ICP (some people are repulsed by that format), but you get my point.

Long-form written content is the bedrock from which all other content formats are built.

(3) Everyone’s obsessed with launch videos. If you’ve raised a new round, it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll invest tens of thousands of dollars into a highly produced launch video.

You’ll then put even more budget into paid amplification using influencers, theme pages, etc.

Apparently, the ROI on this approach is there, so much so that this format has become the default.

(4) Growth-stage tech companies are trying to bring Executive Content in-house.

Given the popularity of the growth channel over the last few years, this is unsurprising. Some are successful (i.e., Clay has a phenomenal Narrative and Exec Branding team). Most struggle to find talent that really ‘gets’ it.

I, of course, am a bit biased. But I think my take will surprise you. If—BIG ‘if’—you're able to find a content savant who can write well + has taste + has the endurance to keep up on social, hire them. Immediately.

I like Taylor Holiday’s approach here. He’s the CEO at Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce agency. I’m paraphrasing here, but I believe he said something along the lines of: hire the best talent for the best price. Whether it’s agency-side or in-house is irrelevant. Find the best.

This trend is going to wreck low-tier ghostwriting firms whose only deliverable is ‘we write you 5 LinkedIn posts per week.’

If I had to sum up what I’m seeing across clients, prospects, and the broader timeline in one sentence, it would be:

2026 is the year to scale beyond founder-led content to content-led growth across multiple personalities and multiple channels, like LinkedIn, newsletter, X, and Instagram.

Of course, there’s a whole other world to discuss re: AEO and AI Search. I don’t have as much exposure there, as that isn’t Compound’s domain, so of course most of my observations are editorial content-related.

That’s all for this week. I’ll continue to share notes as we see them in our data at Compound.

TOMMY’S BOOKSHELF 📚

Current read: The Wager by David Grann. I switched it up a bit this week, jumping from my usual fantasy reads to narrative non-fiction. Grann’s book tells the tale of the Wager shipwreck off the coast of Cape Horn during the eighteenth century. I blew through this book in less than a week, which was a welcome change of pace after the month-long slog that was The Way of Kings.

Evergreen reminder: if you haven’t yet, do yourself a favor and read Red Rising. This is the gateway drug to fiction reading as an adult.

If you want more book content, I’ve built a little audience on Instagram where I post about fiction and writing.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.