2015: HubSpot hub & spoke → 2025: Video everywhere
Remember pillar content strategy circa 2015?
HubSpot's blog-centric hub and spoke model was the approach. Create one massive guide, then build 10-15 supporting blog posts linking back to it. SEO juice flows, content clusters form, Google gods smile upon you.
Fast forward to 2025, and the game has completely flipped.
The new pillar strategy isn't centered on blog posts - it's built around long-form, high-production value video. But the distribution approach makes the old hub and spoke look primitive by comparison.
Here's how it works:
Create one exceptional video asset - a customer interview, a deep product dive, or an industry roundtable. Make it substantial. Most importantly, make it something only you could create.
Then use AI to slice, adapt, and distribute that core video a million different ways:
30-second clips for social platforms
Audio segments for podcast snippets
Transcribed insights for search-friendly blog posts
Quote graphics for LinkedIn
Talking points for sales conversations
Case studies for late-stage buyers
The difference is scale and speed. What used to take weeks of coordinated content creation now happens in hours from a single source asset.
But the real magic is in the defensibility. Anyone can replicate a blog post with AI in minutes. They can't replicate your CEO and customer discussing specific implementation challenges on camera.
This shift explains why smart companies are redirecting blog budgets toward video production. The ROI equation has fundamentally changed. One high-quality video creates more distribution opportunities than twenty blog posts, with significantly more protection from AI-powered copying.
The winners in this new landscape won't be the ones with the most content. They'll be the ones who create the most valuable source material and leverage AI to distribute it everywhere.
This doesn't mean blogs are dead - they're just no longer the center of your strategy. They become one of many distribution channels for insights captured initially in video format.
Brooks
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