The plinio Story

I've spent almost 20 years with my Bureau Wehrmann working on classic B2B projects. We've worked with corporations as well as mid-sized companies – and I kept noticing the same pattern: All companies struggle with the same content problems. Not because they lack strategy. Not because the budget isn't there. But because there's a huge gap between planning and implementation.

It usually looked like this: A company has a great content strategy. They know exactly which topics are important, where they want to be found, why their target audience needs them.

Yet, the blockades are always the same. There are the marketing and PR teams – usually three to five people working on a hundred things simultaneously all day long. Campaign planning, social media, events, customer relations, market research, reporting. And at some point someone says: 'Oh yes, we also need content for SEO, blog articles, whitepapers...'

The problem is even more insidious. These marketing teams are constantly bound to an agenda – the topics that are strategically important, the products that need to be promoted. A B2B SaaS provider wants to rank for 'Business Analytics'. A fintech company for 'Digital Payment Solutions'. These keywords are central to the brand, positioning, business goals.

The reality harsh reality in the search engines: On these keywords, they're competing against hundreds of other providers with huge SEO budgets. Companies that have been investing millions in content for years. Impossible to rank – at least not with the resources a normal marketing team has.

So they produce content for these impossible keywords for months. They fulfill their internal agenda, but nothing happens in the search engine. No rankings, no traffic, no ROI. And then the question remains: How can we scale up our Content Operations?

The other problem behind this: Content creation itself is damn time-consuming. Research, writing, optimizing, coordination, revisions – this eats up hours that these people simply don't have. So content becomes a task that either doesn't get done or runs with much less quality than possible.

Or companies try it differently: They hire content specialists. But good people are hard to find and damn expensive. And even then they have the same problem again – one person can only produce so much.

Classic SEO agencies? They're the last option. Expensive terms, long contracts, the work runs as a black box, and afterwards you're dependent on one person there who has all the knowledge in their head.

I've sat in so many of meetings with marketing leaders, and it was always the same picture: They have the right strategy, the budgets fit – but they're overwhelmed by implementation. Not because they don't want to. But because they don't have time. They're constantly deployed for other important things.

There was no single 'aha moment', more of a creeping realization process. After hundreds of projects, it became clear to me: We're constantly talking to marketing teams who know exactly what they should be doing. The right strategy, the right topics – but implementation fails because these teams are torn between content production and a hundred other tasks. They're generalists under time and resource pressure. That was unsatisfying for both sides.

At some point I thought: What if we could relieve these marketing teams? Not with the traditional agency model – where everything depends on individuals. But by systematizing and automating content production so they have time again for what they're really there for – strategy, customer communication, performance, new markets?

So as an agency we started closing this gap ourselves. First by hand – very time-consuming. Then increasingly automated. We developed processes, built templates, integrated tools. Over time it became clear: Something is emerging here that's much more scalable than traditional agency work. That was the actual birth of plinio.

Exactly. This fast-growing company approached us – and the timing was perfect, because at exactly that moment AI became really usable. Before, it was still too unreliable, too unpredictable. But suddenly you could work with it.

They had an enormous problem: They wanted to expand into several new markets simultaneously. Each market needed localized, high-quality content infrastructure. SEO goals were ambitious. And the time? Zero. They couldn't wait for an agency to produce content over months.

With them, we completely rethought plinio from the ground up. What started as an internal experiment became our laboratory for enterprise content automation. We built, tested, discarded, completely rethought, optimized – and started over again. For months. Each iteration brought us closer to what plinio is today: a scalable content infrastructure that wasn't created in a whiteboard meeting, but in real projects with real requirements.

That was the difference. Plinio wasn't theoretically designed. It was built on the real problem. And you can see that in the product.

Pliny the Elder was a Roman chronicler – one of the first to systematically collect, structure, and make knowledge accessible to the world. His Naturalis Historia was the largest collection of practical knowledge at the time. The name fits: We help companies structure and organize their topics and knowledge in such a way that high-quality, scalable content emerges. Instead of knowledge disappearing into silos or being dependent on individual people.

Plinio is neither traditional software tool nor conventional agency – it's the synthesis of 20 years of B2B experience and systematized agency expertise.

An agency? Slow, expensive, people-dependent. A pure tool? Complex, time-consuming, disappointing results.

Plinio combines the best of both worlds: Decades of agency expertise meets intelligent automation. The result: Marketing teams reclaim their time and escape the agenda trap.

Specifically: Plinio finds the niche keywords that build rankings for every highly contested topic on the agenda. These are the quick wins – content that's rankable, that brings traffic, that makes a real difference. And from these quick wins, something much more valuable emerges: real domain authority. The more high-quality, ranking content pages a domain has, the stronger it becomes. And eventually even the more difficult keywords rank better.

This means: Marketing teams can focus on strategic tasks again. On the things where only people make the real difference – market understanding, creative strategies, customer relationships. Content production runs in parallel, automated, reliable – and it runs intelligently. It doesn't just produce masses of content, but strategically meaningful content assets that really generate ROI.

No more blockades. No more frustration about good ideas not being implemented because time is simply missing. And more importantly: Real, measurable rankings instead of content that remains invisible in search engines.

That's the real value: Your marketing teams no longer work on content production. They work for the company. And their content really delivers.

I'm convinced that communication is a company's most valuable asset. But only if it gets out into the world. In my career, I've seen too many great ideas slip away quietly in a presentation – not because they were bad, but because marketing teams simply didn't have the capacity to implement them.

With plinio, we give marketing teams a tool that takes time-consuming content production off their hands. They can do what they're really there for again: Strategy, creativity, building customer relationships, opening up markets. This goes far beyond a business model. It's an attitude: Marketing teams shouldn't fail due to capacity limits. They should be able to do their best work – because the boring, time-consuming work is automated.