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Content Amplified

A Masset Podcast

446+ episodes of conversations with marketers, sales leaders, and brand builders on how to create content that actually drives results.

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Erika Robertson profile photo

How to measure enablement ROI and earn a seat at the table, with Erika Robertson

with Erika Robertson·Director of Enablement at Citrix

Erika Robertson, Director of Enablement at Citrix and a near lifelong enablement leader across Cisco, SAP, and VMware, joins Content to Close to explain how she proves enablement is worth the budget by starting with the end in mind. Before any content exists, she earns her position as a trusted advisor, uncovers the real need, confirms the desired outcomes with stakeholders, writes the learning objectives and assessments, and decides how she will measure success, because content is the last step, not the first. She is certified through the ROI Institute and uses the Phillips ROI methodology from Jack and Patty Phillips, which separates impact from ROI, rather than the Kirkpatrick model most L&D and enablement teams default to. She walks the levels, from level zero completion and level one reaction up to level three behavior change, which she calls the minimum to strive for, level four business impact, and level five ROI, noting only about 7 percent of initiatives get measured to ROI. She stresses that you can only ever claim correlation, never causation, and that baselines like average deal size and sales cycle time matter, citing a control group whose trained members closed deals twice as large, and she explains why enablement sitting inside marketing finally earned her team a seat at the table at every meal.

June 26, 202618 min
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Tell your company's story through your people, not your brand, with Scott Hild

with Scott Hild·Brand and Marketing Leader at Propeller

Scott Hild, who leads brand and marketing at the management consulting firm Propeller, joins Content Amplified to explain the visible expert strategy: telling the company's story from its people's point of view instead of from the brand. Propeller is what he calls a credence business, one that sells expertise and its people rather than a product, so it puts those experts front and center and humanizes the content around their lived experiences. Scott contrasts this with traditional thought leadership, where you list five things on a soapbox and play the professor, by wrapping each point in a real client conversation: what the client was thinking, how it went, where they started, and where they ended up. He leans on StoryBrand by Donald Miller as a rubric so the audience can see themselves as the hero and the company plays the guide, and he insists every piece have a purpose tied to an offer or asset because the goal is content that converts. To build the program, he interviews each leader for 45 to 60 minutes at the start of the year to develop content abstracts, and he advises teams to go with their hot hand by doubling down on the two or three experts with genuine passion. He closes by noting the strategy can extend to product companies if you make people the face who tell the customer's story.

June 25, 202615 min
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Why AI rank tracking is broken, and what to measure instead, with Tony Pataky

with Tony Pataky·Director of SEO at Procore

Tony Pataky, Director of SEO at Procore and a longtime SEO leader who also runs analytics and CRO, joins Content Amplified to explain why your content team can have its best quarter and your dashboard will show nothing happened. He starts with the hard truth that rankings do not really exist inside LLMs, even though vendors and agencies sell number-one ChatGPT rankings, and cites a SparkToro study by Rand Fishkin that ran roughly 3,000 prompt tests across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI with about 600 volunteers, finding that less than one in 100 times did ChatGPT return the same list of brands twice and less than one in 1,000 times the exact same order. He warns against building prompt sets from your high-converting SEO keywords, since hyper-specific prompts measure questions no real customer is typing, and argues for staying broad and high-level instead. Tony then lays out a three-layer measurement framework, AI visibility tracking, referral traffic, and post-conversion surveys, noting that analytics often shows under 1% of traffic from LLMs while surveys reveal AI was part of 30, 40, or 50 percent of buyer journeys. His closing advice is to stop trying to prove AI attribution precisely, reframe the conversation with your CMO, and build the measurement baseline now so you are ahead of the companies that start six or twelve months from now.

June 24, 202619 min
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Why getting cited by AI now matters more than ranking on Google, with Jeramy Gordon

with Jeramy Gordon·VP of Marketing at Cisive

Jeramy Gordon, VP of Marketing at Cisive, a global background screening company, and a 14-year marketer who started with 12 years in newspaper journalism, joins Content Amplified to explain why getting cited by AI now matters more than ranking on Google. He breaks down two acronyms reshaping search: AIO, the AI overview that now sits at the top of Google results, and GEO, generative engine optimization for large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. The core shift, he says, is from fighting for position in SEO to fighting for inclusion in GEO, because roughly 40% of queries are now answered inside the AI overview, which is an instant 40% drop in organic traffic, while Adobe saw a 1200% increase in AI-driven traffic once engines started citing it. To earn citations, Jeramy recommends structuring content around the questions people actually ask, writing 3000-word definitive guides that go deep instead of broad, and tightening headers, title tags, and meta descriptions. He also explains that the AI is now the reader and builds a model of who you are as an entity from your website, LinkedIn, press, podcasts, and third-party mentions like Reddit and Yelp, and he makes the case for video and podcasts as proof of human-generated content. His closing line: AI is not going to replace marketing, but AI will replace marketers who do not embrace AI.

June 23, 202617 min
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How to squeeze every dollar out of an event sponsorship, with Larry Kaiser

with Larry Kaiser·Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT

Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT and a 22-year healthcare IT veteran, joins Content Amplified to explain how he squeezes every dollar out of an event sponsorship in a niche, relationship-driven industry where the deal happens in the room, not the inbox. He puts a little over 60% of his budget into events because healthcare IT is a multi-billion dollar but extremely niche market that runs on in-person relationship building, and he works the two biggest shows of the year, Vive and HIMSS, with booths, sponsored stage presentations, and white-labeled receptions where his team is the only vendor in the room. His content engine starts before the show by repurposing older content to promote upcoming sessions, then takes the filmed event presentation and pulls a blog post, a white paper, and a podcast episode out of it, weaving one talk across every channel to get the most from a $25,000 sponsorship. On distribution, he goes LinkedIn-first with 205,000 followers and close to 60,000 newsletter subscribers, because healthcare IT CIOs told him email will never reach them, so he barely uses it. He also explains why he keeps content roughly 90% brand and 10% individuals, and why just because you can use a channel does not mean you should.

June 19, 202617 min
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Why user-generated content is the future of B2B marketing, with Nicole Gates

with Nicole Gates·VP of Global Growth at Varonis

Nicole Gates, VP of Global Growth at Varonis and a marketer with a background across content marketing, social media, and demand gen, joins Content Amplified to argue that user-generated content is the future of B2B marketing. Her early signals: LinkedIn already shows employees more than brand pages, and influencer marketing in B2C tends to reach B2B two to three years later. She says AI accelerates the shift, because when anyone can make a hundred ads in three seconds and personalize a full database, buyers grow skeptical of branded content and look for the human element. Her approach is to lean into employee advocacy and industry influencers without over-prescribing, pointing to sales reps who film videos in their cars talking about the product, and giving people tools and encouragement rather than a script. She gets practical on AEO and GEO, where LLMs increasingly pull from Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube rather than pay-to-play search, which means employees and subject matter experts have to share the same story on those channels. Her starting advice is to know your story first and build a unique point of view, because AI-generated content is flattening messaging and a clear vision is what elevates it.

June 18, 202615 min
Karisa Schroeder profile photo

Reading a brand's next move from where and how it advertises, with Karisa Schroeder

with Karisa Schroeder·GTM Strategy at MediaRadar

Karisa Schroeder, who works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar and has spent about 15 years as a marketer with a background in location intelligence, joins Content Amplified to explain how to read a brand's next move from where and how it advertises. Her central idea is that advertising is a brand's identity showing up in public, so it signals what a business is actually doing rather than just saying, and once a dollar goes behind a message there is strategy behind it. She walks through what to read in the creative, the spend, the call to action, the pricing strategy that shifts by national versus local placement, and the partnerships, celebrities, and sponsorships that act as execution signals. She expands the familiar share of voice and share of spend into share of message: for what matters most to your brand, do you own that category, and if not, where is the white space you can claim. She points to Airbnb at the Winter Olympics becoming the official sponsor of feeling at home instead of the official sponsor of lodging, frames brand building as a community and tells marketers to make it the party people want to be a part of, and says to start with your own first-party data on the channels you already run, then enrich to fill in the rest of the picture.

June 17, 202617 min
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Why AI replaces the labor in marketing, not the people, with Sarah Balli

with Sarah Balli·External Communications Specialist

Sarah Balli, an external communications specialist who also does content creation, influencer marketing, and streams on Twitch, joins Content Amplified to make the case for keeping the human element in marketing during the AI era. Her central argument is that companies are not replacing people, they are looking to replace the labor, and there is a meaningful difference between the two. She grants that AI is great at speeding up execution, writing drafts, pulling data, and generating variations, but says marketing has never really been about that kind of output, because it is also about taste, timing, and understanding people. She uses the Wendy's-style example of a marketer turning something funny that someone said on social media into a whole real-time campaign, the kind of well-timed, very human move AI cannot pull off. She likens this moment to when Microsoft Word and PowerPoint first arrived and people feared for their jobs, then turned those tools into ways to do better work, and she answers the leadership question of whether a $200-a-month Claude subscription can replace a team by pointing back to KPIs and the fact that slop in means slop out. Her throughline is a standard of excellence that does not move regardless of the tool, and tactical advice to breathe, take some beginner lessons, and at least try it.

June 16, 202614 min
Andrey Zevakhin profile photo

If you're not in sales, you're in sales enablement with Andrey Zevakhin

with Andrey Zevakhin·Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave

Andrey Zevakhin, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave and a 20-year enablement leader who has built functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, joins Content Amplified to argue that if you are not in sales, you are in sales enablement. His framing: sales sits on the frontier in front of the customer, and because deals are what fund the company, sales effectively cuts everyone's paychecks, which he says is not provocative, it is just math. He describes enablement as a funnel and a liaison that captures signals from sales (what customers ask, where deals stall, what resonates) and pulls the right partners into the conversation, because the enablement team is expert in sales execution, not product architecture or pricing strategy. He refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that can slice and dice everything but cannot do it well, and he prioritizes by one question, what directly impacts the top line, putting unique meetings, win rates, deal size, and bookings ahead of leading indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as self-inflicted, a content strategy problem rather than a content problem, and offers the Legos model: maintain one clean 200-slide master library so the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, and no two presentations ever look the same. He closes with two shifts, that enablement should own revenue culture rather than training or content, and that enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.

June 12, 202621 min
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Make one asset work harder, the Bisquick theory of content with Pat McParland

with Pat McParland·VP of Marketing at MetricStream

Pat McParland, VP of Marketing at MetricStream and a lifetime B2B marketer with more than 30 years in business information and technology, joins Content Amplified to argue that content does not need to be as hard as teams make it, and that the answer is getting back to basics and making one asset work harder. She walks through the ABCDE framework she learned at a former company (Audience, Behavior, Content, Design, Evaluation) and explains why so many teams jump straight to design, the video or the ebook, before they have settled who they are talking to and what they actually want to say. She then unveils her own Bisquick theory: messaging is the baking mix, and from one core asset like a survey or report you make the cookies, the cakes, and the muffins, meaning the infographic, the webinar, the videos, and the live event. Content is a program, not a single piece, and you are not done with the batter until everything is baked. Pat calls AI the easy bake oven that finally brings the theory to life, and she leans on Claude daily to turn one asset into many formats while keeping a human hand on the final writing. She closes with two cautions and a focus principle: the medium is not the message, AI can run a stinky process more efficiently but it is still a stinky process, and every team should be able to name its Three Rocks.

June 11, 202624 min
Jonathan Murray profile photo

Why unpolished, trust-based content is beating AI-perfect content with Jonathan Murray

with Jonathan Murray·Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing

Jonathan Murray, Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, joins Content Amplified to explain why trust-based content is winning right now and why polished, AI-perfect content is starting to repel the people it is meant to attract. His central idea is that your client or customer is the movie star and you are the supporting cast, so content should speak to what the person is feeling in the moment instead of listing your accolades. He uses the car-accident-lawyer example: a scared person Googles a lawyer, lands on a site that reads like a resume, and is already gone, while the site that names what they feel and tells them their next step converts much higher. Jonathan argues the thing holding most business owners back is ego, because they build content for colleagues who are not their clients, and the fix is as simple as a photo shoot that swaps the tie-at-the-desk shot for sleeves rolled up on the farm. He points to Gary Vee's plain talking-head videos as proof that people stick around for content that feels like a one-on-one conversation, and gives a rule to keep content unpolished 70% of the time. On AI, he says treat it like an assistant you trust but verify, or an editor-in-chief in a newsroom, and warns that letting AI become your personality makes you read as a bot, which both people and the systems start to skip.

June 10, 202618 min
Dory Ellis Garfinkle profile photo

Why simplicity is a growth strategy, not soft brand work with Dory Ellis Garfinkle

with Dory Ellis Garfinkle·Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale

Dory Ellis Garfinkle, Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale and a career-long brand-and-growth marketer who has worked at McCann, Zipcar, IDEO, and Lyft, joins Content Amplified to argue that simplicity is a growth strategy, not soft brand work. Her core frame is one question every marketer has to answer: how do you make something easy to understand and convey it in a way that is impossible to ignore? She backs it with Siegel+Gale's annual simplicity study, which surveys more than 15,000 people across nine countries and finds that 64% will pay more for simpler brand experiences, 78% are more likely to recommend, brand complexity costs companies $780 billion in unrealized annual revenue, and the simplest publicly traded brands have outperformed the global stock index by roughly 1,600% since 2009. She walks through the US Army returning to Be all you can be, which drove record Gen Z enrollment, and CVS landing on helping people on their path to better health with its heart icon, which lifted same-store sales 5.5% year over year and pharmacy services revenue 22%. Her definition anchors the whole episode: clarity is not dumbing things down, it is doing the hard work so that your audience just does not have to.

June 9, 202618 min
Hoffen Guo profile photo

Why your sales standards are really just suggestions with Hoffen Guo

with Hoffen Guo·Sales Leader at a B2B SaaS company

Hoffen Guo, a sales leader who has sold into aircraft engine giants, run enterprise learning partnerships at Udemy, and now leads 100% cold-calling teams selling to SMB restaurant owners, joins Content to Close to explain why most sales standards are quietly optional. Her central claim: if you don't enforce a standard you don't have a standard, you have a suggestion. She calls her fix the execution floor, a small set of non-negotiable behaviors that everyone runs the same way. She explains why activity metrics like 120 minutes of talk time and 150 calls a day fool leaders into rewarding busyness instead of behavior, because volume is easy to measure while call quality goes uninspected, and why most coaching (telling a rep to book more meetings or work on urgency) is really pressure in disguise rather than coaching the specific behavior. Hoffen breaks down the hidden revenue cost of letting one top performer freelance off-script: middle reps notice, the script flips from mandatory to optional, conversion becomes personality driven instead of system driven, and the forecast stops being predictable. She frames standards as social contracts that weaken the moment one person breaks them without consequence, and shows how to hold a hard line without micromanaging by separating controlling the standard (the structure is fixed) from controlling the style (how you deliver it is yours). She closes with the one standard to tighten this quarter, next-step discipline, the difference between a happy call with a happy goodbye and a real pipeline.

June 5, 202621 min
Adam Haskew profile photo

Why AI outputs don't equal a content strategy with Adam Haskew

with Adam Haskew·Associate Director of Brand Experience, Redis

Adam Haskew, Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, joins Content Amplified to make the case that AI accelerates your outputs but does nothing for your strategy, and that the gap between the two is exactly where AI slop gets made. His fix is the unglamorous, old-school stuff most teams skip when they move fast: a real kickoff call, a genuinely complete brief, and human alignment at the very start of a project, before a single word is generated. Adam explains that for planning purposes a web page is the same as an ebook, that skipping alignment creates a snowball effect where small problems amplify the further downstream they go, and that about an hour and a half of upfront communication removes most of the noise. He shares how he owns a brand voice review agent at Redis that every piece of content has to pass through before it ships, so the human stays the litmus test between the AI output and what goes out into the world. He closes on an idea he draws from musician Nick Cave: AI that has never felt hunger or fear cannot replace a human point of view, which is exactly why the human brief comes first and the AI execution comes second.

June 4, 202617 min
Adrienne Collins profile photo

Why your event should be the start of your content, not the finish line with Adrienne Collins

with Adrienne Collins·Events Leader at a B2B SaaS company

Adrienne Collins, an events leader with 13 years in the field, joins Content Amplified to explain how to turn a single event into months of pipeline-driving content instead of a one-time moment measured only by attendance. Her core shift is to treat the event as a starting point, not a finish line: build anticipation and points-of-view content before the doors open, move into capture mode not execution mode on site, then sequence the footage into short videos, sales enablement, blogs, and thought leadership over time rather than dumping it all at once. She shares the cost lesson that reshaped her program, replacing full breakout video recordings, which were expensive and barely watched, with audio plus transcripts and an on-site testimonial studio at a fourth of the cost. She walks through her capture, package, distribute, and measure framework and explains how she aligns each content piece to a stage of the buyer journey so a sales rep always has the right asset for where a prospect is. The throughline: decide your priorities and ownership in pre-planning, because content nobody uses does not help you.

June 3, 202616 min
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Why most employee advocacy programs turn your team into parrots with Matt Mullan

with Matt Mullan·Director of Social Media, NinjaOne

Matt Mullan, Director of Social Media at NinjaOne, joins Content Amplified to explain why most employee advocacy programs stall: they turn employees into parrots who repeat the same product message until no one wants to share anything. His fix is to stop trying to amplify the product and instead position employees as thought leaders, which means feeding them interesting industry content and articles they would actually want to share, not another product update. To beat the parrot problem he gives people Mad Libs style suggested copy with guardrails, a sentence they can use plus blanks they must fill in, so posts still sound human. He motivates adoption not with prizes but by shouting out every organic win across any Slack channel he can find, so employees feel supported the moment they post on their own. On measurement he is blunt: earned media value and potential impressions are made-up numbers that always fluctuate, UTM link tracking is the only honest metric, and he holds his programs to a 50% monthly usage bar where a dip below usually means the content is not good enough. He also argues LinkedIn comments now out-earn reshares because they add value to the conversation, and describes the in-house social ambassador tiger team his team built to keep those conversations going. The throughline: your audience is not your followers, it is your own employees.

June 2, 202619 min
Gus Garza profile photo

Why training alone won't make your reps revenue-ready with Gus Garza

with Gus Garza·Enablement Leader, Yext

Gus Garza, an enablement leader at Yext, joins Content to Close to explain why sales teams keep shipping more enablement material than ever while reps still freeze on live calls. His diagnosis is simple: training and revenue readiness are not the same thing, and the gap is reps, actual repetitions of practice before the conversation, not after it on a live customer. Gus walks through how he uses Gong and Clari call recordings to diagnose where individual sellers are tripping up (one rep drops into product features the second a competitor comes up, another can't tighten the close), and then builds prescriptive bite-sized learning around that specific gap instead of two-hour generic courses no one finishes. He shares the concrete tools he reaches for: a custom ChatGPT GPT in voice mode that he uses on the train to prep before a call ('I'm about to jump on with XYZ client, give me talking points, now challenge me'), Synthesia AI avatars for scenario-based learning with fake customer personas, and AI role-play platforms that can multi-thread a CFO, an economic buyer, and a champion firing questions at the rep at the same time. He closes on the cultural side effect: reps who refuse to adapt to AI tend to weed themselves out, and the ones who lean in build the muscle memory and confidence that turn training into revenue.

May 29, 202619 min
John Henkel profile photo

Why audience-first content beats cranking out specs and features with John Henkel

with John Henkel·Director of Product Marketing, AV Segment, Netgear Business

John Henkel, Director of Product Marketing for the AV segment at Netgear, joins Content Amplified with a simple opening directive every product marketer needs to hear: stop, take a second, and stop just cranking stuff out. He argues that content drifts away from the audience the moment a company, especially an engineering-led one, starts talking about specs and features instead of the problem it actually solves. John walks through the spreadsheet audit he is running right now at Netgear, where every asset is mapped to its audience and its desired action so the team can see what to keep, kill, or rebuild. He explains how he pressure-tests content with the North American AV sales team in their weekly meeting, why he sends drafts to integrators with a hard deadline ('next Friday') before anything ships, and the underrated move of picking up the phone to call an integrator so they feel invested in the feedback and tell you what is actually wrong instead of saying 'looks great.' He closes on AI: it is in his workflow, but every piece of AI-drafted content gets edited, because the model will not catch the subtle differences a real user notices, and trade-show conversations are still the best validation a marketer can get.

May 28, 202616 min
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Why your content is only as strong as the people you bring in with Leo Kosir

with Leo Kosir·Creative Director

Leo Kosir, a Chicago-based creative leader with 20-plus years across boutique design firms, full-service ad agencies, pharma, and in-house creative teams for national retail, lifestyle, and web hosting brands, joins Content Amplified to unpack what he calls 360 content. Leo's core diagnosis: most content doesn't fall apart at the idea stage, it falls apart in the handoff, because the people who shape how the work actually feels (directors, photographers, editors, stylists, music supervisors, UX, developers) get brought in after the concept is locked instead of at the brief. He explains how to corral too many cooks without losing big ideas, distill down to three diverse concepts, not three layouts of the same idea, and why decision makers belong in early brainstorms so you never hear 'let's start over' two months in. He argues testing with real customers should override and supersede even a key stakeholder's opinion, because what you produce is for the customer, not for the person who works at the company. He closes with a practical recipe for a stronger creative ecosystem: build a trusted network of collaborators, involve key partners earlier than feels comfortable, align everyone around the brand upfront, and create a real space where contributors are contributing, not just executing.

May 27, 202613 min
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Why the content mill era is over and what replaces it with Stacy Shelley

with Stacy Shelley·B2B Cybersecurity Marketing Veteran

Stacy Shelley, a 20-year B2B cybersecurity marketing veteran who has led marketing at startups that scaled into the hundreds of millions in ARR, joins Content Amplified to call time of death on the content mill era and lay out what comes next. He explains why marketers spent the last decade chasing 'lowest common denominator' search traffic, repackaging the same information everyone else was publishing to win the algorithm, and why AI overviews have finally made that playbook worthless. Stacy reframes the website's job: it is no longer the awareness engine, because by the time a buyer hits your domain they are there to learn about you, not the category, so the site should be tuned for unforgettable second and third impressions on already-qualified visitors. He argues the awareness stage has moved to Slack groups, Discords, social feeds, research reports, and the communities your audience actually trusts, and that 'showing up' there as a real participant is the new top-of-funnel work. He closes by reframing metrics: stop obsessing over raw traffic and top-10 blog posts; track pipeline influence and traffic from your ICP universe, one of his prior companies tracked associated traffic across a defined list of about 5,000 target accounts and treated everything else as noise to be filtered out.

May 26, 202618 min
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Why the AI silver bullet isn't fixing your revenue problem with Matt Zelasko

with Matt Zelasko·Founder, Radish

Matt Zelasko, founder of growth agency Radish and self-described 'Tom DeLonge of RevOps,' joins Content to Close to diagnose the AI silver bullet problem: most revenue teams are using AI to do the same broken things faster, then blaming AI for the engagement drop that was already happening. He argues the gated-ebook playbook has been a case of diminishing returns since around 2018, that content is at peak saturation, and that LLMs are not stealing search traffic so much as exposing how tired the old motion already was. The unlock, he says, is realizing an LLM is just speculating what comes next — once you understand that, you shift from prompt engineering to context engineering ('what else do you need from me?') and stop trusting confident, wrong output. Matt shares why he turned down a client who wanted an AI agent to write case studies (no captured experience to feed it) but said yes to one who wanted an agent to write RFPs (the inputs are given, the format is standardized), and why creative people still need to write 50 to 100 bad taglines by hand before reaching for any tool — a Rick Rubin 'I know it when I see it' instinct that gets dulled when AI does the ideation for you. He also warns against the talking-points pitfall where buyers read six blogs, half-diagnose their own problem, and start treating symptoms instead of root cause.

May 22, 202618 min
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Why authentic creator content sells (and brands keep killing it) with Chelsea Clark

with Chelsea Clark·Founder, Momfluence

Chelsea Clark, founder of Momfluence, joins Content Amplified to explain why the creator content that actually sells almost never survives a brand approval round, and what to do about it. Drawing on six years and over 500 brand campaigns, Chelsea names the core misalignment: brands hire influencers to make polished ads, but influencers are terrible at polished ads — their best-performing work is unrehearsed, off-the-cuff, and often doesn't even pronounce the brand name correctly, which is exactly what the C-suite rejects. She walks through how to write briefs that hold the line on authenticity (every Momfluence brief includes 'speak as if you're speaking to a friend'), why brands should expect roughly 80% of influencer-driven revenue to never show up in attribution software, and why a campaign-wide promo code beats per-creator codes because customers buy on the fifth touch, not the first. She reframes creator work as an awareness and content-library play — get 60 pieces of repurposable, diverse content to retarget across Meta, TikTok, and email, and treat sales as the bonus. She closes with a zero-to-one playbook: find three brands your customer already buys from, mine their tagged Instagram content for proven creators, then gift 50 sub-10K-follower creators and expect 10 yeses for a first campaign that lands well under $2K.

May 21, 202618 min
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How to build a B2B creator program that drives pipeline, not just reach with Justin Levy

with Justin Levy·Director of Social Media, Influencer Marketing, and Community, Nerdio

Justin Levy, Director of Social Media, Influencer Marketing, and Community at Nerdio, breaks down what an actual B2B creator partnership looks like and why so many brands leave pipeline on the table by treating influencer work like an ad buy. In this Content Amplified episode, Justin pushes back on the 'only work with nano influencers' advice — niche and nano are the bulk of any bench, but a creator with 100K–400K followers and a genuinely engaged community is still a strong fit if the math works. He explains how to stack a single partnership across LinkedIn, TikTok, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube, and even internal sales trainings for 25 of your reps or customers, and why that bundle is what separates a real partnership from beer-money sponsored posts. He walks through per-creator UTMs so revenue ties back to individual posts instead of the whole program, having sales reps reply in the comments like humans (not spammers), and treating engagements on a sponsored post as live leads to scrub and route. He closes with the real negotiation levers — timeframe, number of platforms, name image and likeness (NIL) rights, and minimum boost spend — and the pricing variance that makes this industry hard to benchmark: he has paid $80K for six months with one creator and $30K–$40K for a similar-sized audience with another, and seen 10K-follower creators charge $500 a post in one case and $2,500 a post in the next.

May 20, 202620 min
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Why personalization is dead and anticipation is the next era of marketing with Katie Carroll

with Katie Carroll·VP of Product Strategy, Businessolver

Katie Carroll, VP of Product Strategy at Businessolver, makes the case that personalization is dead because it is still fundamentally reactive — even the best variable tags and behavioral triggers wait for a user to act before responding. In this Content Amplified episode, Katie introduces anticipation as the next era of marketing and user experience: helping people before they know what to ask, the way Amazon already does on the consumer side. She walks through findings from Businessolver's eighth annual Benefits Insights Report, including the counterintuitive idea that 'quiet' (no clicks, no engagement, no support tickets) is becoming a real success metric, and how an in-house AI hit 91% instant resolution by reading the path a user is already on. Concrete examples land throughout — an HSA nudge after a pediatrician visit, an auto-enrollment in a prescription management program, and a Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) lookup that connects a parent in a childcare desert to care.com. Katie also explains why AI SDRs flopped and got replaced with humans again, why marketers in 2026 have to lean hard into data analytics, and why the easiest brand to interact with is the one that wins.

May 19, 202617 min
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How to build a sales and marketing feedback loop that actually works with Nat Norris

with Nat Norris·VP of Marketing and Customer Success, Model 1 Commercial Vehicles

Nat Norris, VP of Marketing and Customer Success at Model 1 Commercial Vehicles, explains how to get marketing out of the trophy case of unused white papers and into the rooms where deals are won and lost. In this Content to Close episode, he walks through how he embeds marketers inside the company's three sales segments — public, commercial, and retail — and forces his team into weekly quote review and deal loss meetings so they can hear exactly where marketing missed the boat. He details the data hygiene work he had to do in Power BI before any feedback loop could function, and why CRM adoption is the foundation underneath all of it. Nat carries the FAB framework — Features, Advantages, Benefits — from his catalog days, with a simple rule: push the benefit, self-serve the feature, and let the advantage flex per campaign. He closes with the two governors he uses to decide when there is enough data to act: the 80/20 rule, and the 'front page of the newspaper' worst-case test.

May 15, 202617 min
Trisha Navidzade profile photo

Why your KPIs aren't relationship material with Trisha Navidzade

with Trisha Navidzade·VP of Marketing, DZYNE Technologies

Trisha Navidzade, VP of Marketing at DZYNE Technologies, argues that most marketing KPIs are 'KPI fluff' — booth traffic, view counts, and brand-awareness numbers that look great in a leadership deck but rarely tie to revenue. In this Content Amplified episode, she explains how to flip the usual sales-and-marketing dynamic: stop asking sales what brand awareness they need, and start asking what is blocking them from closing, then build press, content, and digital campaigns around those specific blockers. Trisha walks through why press is her number-one source of qualified leads in a defense sales cycle that can run two to three years, and how to 'read the room' and bundle news so it is actually relevant to a publication's audience. She offers a simple test for any marketing program: at the end of the day, who is asking you to marry them — meaning, who is closing — not how many people walked by your booth. Her closing exercise is a weekend meditation on a single question: how do I get the customer to come to me instead of me chasing the customer?

May 14, 202613 min
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Why product marketing teams should be structured like newsrooms with Mike McGee

with Mike McGee·Director of Product Marketing, Vantaca

Mike McGee, Director of Product Marketing at Vantaca, argues that when your G2 category has 97 listings and the category average is 75, sounding like everyone else is a death sentence — so he is building his PMM team to look less like a traditional org chart and more like a digital newsroom, with product marketers assigned to specific customer roles the way reporters are assigned to beats. In this Content Amplified episode, Mike walks through where the idea came from (Nilay Patel's Decoder, specifically the Brian Chesky episode on how Airbnb blended product, PMM, and program management), the internal precedent at Vantaca (support and implementation already reorganized around customer roles instead of platform modules), and the Seth Godin 'who's it for, what's it for' lens he uses to pressure-test every messaging decision. He explains why selling at the executive buyer is the easy part, and why life-cycle marketing falls flat the moment you try to talk to every persona at once with the same voice. Mike also gets honest about when not to overhaul an org: look at what is predictable and replicable first, find the gaps, and only do a major restructure when there is no tenable way to get from where you are to where you want to go. His closing test for every team decision is whether the team is serving its customers to the utmost of its potential.

May 13, 202620 min
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Why nobody cares how the sausage is made (and what to do instead) with Orin Bliss Brecht

with Orin Bliss Brecht·Independent Creative Director

Orin Bliss Brecht, an independent creative director whose career runs from Spin Magazine through Victoria's Secret Direct, the Foundry at Time Inc., Hearst, Pace Communications, and Choreograph, argues that demystifying complex topics is the marketer's real job — and that the audience never cares how the sausage is made. In this Content Amplified episode, he explains why illustrators make the best translators of complicated subjects (they aren't subject matter experts, so if they get it, the audience will), why the B2B vs. B2C distinction is mostly noise (you're always telling a story to a human about to spend money), and why one of the biggest mistakes he's seen is letting product developers shape content aimed at C-suite buyers. Orin makes the case that storytelling has worked the same way for hundreds of years — only the format keeps shrinking — and that the modern challenge is creating snackable breadcrumbs that lead back to a master manifesto. He closes with a tactical playbook for content leaders staring at an innovative-but-confusing product: turn your elevator pitch into eight elevator pitches, write in plain English, and feed the pipeline so eyes un-glaze. If your product is hard to explain, this conversation will sharpen how you think about telling its story.

May 12, 202614 min
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How to build trust that turns prospects into partners with Tamara Asselta

with Tamara Asselta·Founder, Stratis Consulting

Tamara Asselta, founder of Stratis Consulting, argues that trust is the most crucial skill any revenue team can work on, because it is the foundation that turns prospects into partners and protects the relationship long after the contract is signed. In this Content to Close episode, she walks through her 'listening to understand' framework — listening for the real problem, the keywords the client uses, the pressure they are under, what they have already tried, and what success actually looks like — rather than waiting for your turn to talk. Tamara explains why the right discovery question is never 'what tool do you want?' but 'what is keeping you up at night?' and why a templatized intro deck should be a starting point you are willing to abandon the moment the client signals something different. She shares a real client story where she rebuilt a broken sales-to-services handoff by mapping what services could actually deliver and co-creating a tiered service model that gave sales flexibility while protecting delivery quality. Her closing argument is that every revenue org needs a 'bridge' role — sales engineer, solutions architect, whatever you call it — to carry context from the sales process into delivery for the first month, because the orgs that skip that role consistently see lower client satisfaction and worse retention.

May 8, 202615 min
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Why marketers need to know how the whole race car is built with Mike Madden

with Mike Madden·VP of Marketing, Boomi

Mike Madden, VP of Marketing at Boomi and a veteran of Marketo, Adobe, and Vista-era demand gen, argues that marketing exists to generate pipeline and create bookings, full stop, and that everything else is an art project that gets cut when the budget tightens. He uses a race car analogy with his team: you do not want a driver who has never seen the car built, because the marketer who knows how every system, definition, and process fits together can tell you exactly what kind of content the engine needs and where, even if that content is an unglamorous paid-search infographic designed only to move a lead from a score of five to eight before the score decays back to zero. Mike traces this conviction to an embarrassing moment early in his Adobe tenure when CEO Shantanu Narayen questioned the Marketo numbers and Mike, put in front of the global head of sales, could not articulate how his team's work tied to pipeline and bookings. His advice for getting unstuck is not to read more reports but to find the right mentor, the person who can tell you what they would do with a million dollars and how much it would book, and to put yourself in pressure positions where you can be embarrassed and learn the rest of the picture. On AI, Mike is direct: it will not replace your brain, it cannot learn your business for you, and the marketers entering the field today should still master Excel, Salesforce, and marketing automation, because hard skills paired with good soft skills are what actually let you influence a business.

May 7, 202615 min
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Why experience design is the only edge left when AI commoditizes content with Julio Ramirez Berroa

with Julio Ramirez Berroa·Marketing Operations Leader, B2B Architectural Lighting Manufacturer

Julio Ramirez Berroa, a marketing operations leader at a Connecticut-based B2B architectural lighting manufacturer, argues that AI is collapsing content quality into a commodity and that experience design is the only durable differentiator left for B2B marketers. He traces AI through four stages (machine learning, generative, agentic, and what he calls directive) and explains why every business is now drowning in tool sprawl, where 15 disconnected tools accumulate in two years and none of them talk to each other. Once AI can replicate the formulas that enterprise teams use to produce 'good enough' content, brand differentiation has to move from output to experience: turning prospects from spectators into participants through 3D product visualization, WebGL environments, projection mapping, and tools like Twinmotion (free under a million in revenue) and TouchDesigner (free for most small businesses). Julio warns that AI also crystallizes operational gaps, so an immersive website that outruns a real-world experience (late shipments, broken handoffs) will accelerate churn rather than prevent it. For marketers who want to break into experience design, his order of operations is start with hard close-rate data, justify spend in real dollars, then walk up the totem pole from content to customer service to revenue, designing for the hours your office is closed (when architects are at home making decisions at 11pm) so the brand still works without a human on the other end.

May 6, 202617 min
Austin Price profile photo

How to run social media like a real-time testing ground with Austin Price

with Austin Price·Director of Social Media, H&L Agency

Austin Price, Director of Social Media at H&L Agency in Oakland, frames social as the real-time nervous system of the market and runs every campaign as a portfolio of hypothesis-driven tests where creative is the question and data is the answer. He uses engagement rate as a default metric while warning that every metric eventually gets gamed, so the right measure depends on the campaign goal — impressions and engagement for awareness, lower-funnel signals for conversion. Austin gives a piece of content roughly 24 hours, not 30 days, to reveal whether to pivot or lean in, using prior content samples as his baseline so he can recognize an above-line or below-line read fast enough to redirect spend. He pushes back on raw reach as a vanity metric, pointing to a campaign that hit 100 million impressions against a 5 million addressable market as the cleanest tell that targeting is broken, and warns that giveaway-driven engagement can stall purchase intent because prospects pause buying to see if they won. He reframes quality versus quantity as a consistency problem (cell phone or full crew, the channel rewards on-message posting at a cadence you can sustain for a year) and treats the comment section as the missing context layer behind every dataset, the source that tells you why a piece of data happened rather than just what happened. His closing claim is that social is now the testing ground for every other channel: Hulu's Chad Powers began as a Manning brothers YouTube video, the Dr. Pepper jingle clip became a national TV ad, and authentic social formats are now mimicked in CTV and traditional advertising.

May 5, 202617 min
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How to use AI across sales, marketing, and customer success with Richmond Taylor

with Richmond Taylor·Founder, AI Automation and Education

Richmond Taylor, founder of an AI automation and education business and the startup promptanything.io, uses the Feynman technique to collapse the entire go-to-market motion into a frame a five-year-old could repeat: sales is how you speak, marketing is how you look, and customer success is how you get the second date. Inside that frame, AI now handles roughly 80 percent of the work in each function, from custom outbound and meeting booking on the sales side, to scripts, frames, videos, tone, voice, and brand on the marketing side, to inbound responses and tier-one customer support. The unlock is prompt engineering, which Richmond compares to landing in a small Japanese town with no shared language: without it, you cannot navigate the AI world. He breaks prompts into four categories (system, user, developer, assistant) and explains why one big detailed prompt outperforms a long thread of short follow-ups, where each new message burns tokens, bloats context, and pushes the model toward contradictions and hallucinations. His closing recommendation is to start by mastering the prompt itself, because every other AI capability (agents, automations, web apps) is downstream of how clearly you can communicate with the model.

May 1, 202614 min
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Why more AI content is not the same as more pipeline with Amanda Landsaw

with Amanda Landsaw·CMO, Endeavor B2B

Amanda Landsaw, CMO at Endeavor B2B (a marketing, media, and intelligence organization spanning 90+ brands across 16 verticals), argues that increased supply and volume of AI content does not increase relevance, differentiation, or trust, because speed is not strategy. She frames the work as 'crap input equals crap output' and explains that getting useful AI work back requires an almost intimate relationship with the model, layered prompts that peel back the onion, and a willingness to feed the system your own talks, papers, blogs, and podcasts so it can ghostwrite in your voice without losing the human review layer. Amanda also walks through how buyer behavior is shifting as people use ChatGPT and Claude as their new search, why personalization is really just relevancy in disguise (anchored in privacy-first behavioral and intent data), and how to give sales reps smarter openings so discovery starts a step or two ahead of ground zero. She makes the case that the one thing AI cannot replicate is point of view, which is why the human element, tone, and bias have to stay in the loop. The takeaway: produce less noise, sharpen the input, keep the human review, and design content so AI surfaces it on the consumer side too.

April 30, 202619 min
Antu Buck profile photo

Why customer marketing is a growth driver, not a content function with Antu Buck

with Antu Buck·Customer Marketing Leader, Gigamon

Antu Buck, who built the customer marketing pillar from scratch at Gigamon and previously led programs at McAfee and Intel, argues that most teams misdiagnose customer marketing as a content function when it should be run as a growth driver. She breaks the discipline into three pillars: customer advocacy (testimonials, case studies, reference programs), community engagement (executive briefings, advisory boards, social), and customer lifecycle management (onboarding, renewal, expansion in partnership with customer success). To keep voice-of-the-customer authentic, Antu refuses to let brand teams script customer quotes and instead asks open-ended questions like what keeps you up at night and what you would tell someone in your position six months ago. She walks through how voice-of-customer research drove Gigamon to shift its messaging from public cloud to hybrid cloud, and how a customer advisory board vote led the company to launch precryption. Her credibility loop runs on visible internal communication: an executive dashboard tied to business outcomes that shines the same light on the team that the team shines on customers. Her starter playbook for new customer marketers: align to business goals first, get a tool in place inside the first 30 days, build the case study and reference program, then layer in win-loss research and advisory boards as you go.

April 29, 202619 min
Christa Fisher profile photo

Why sales enablement stops driving revenue when it becomes a service desk with Christa Fisher

with Christa Fisher·Head of Sales Training and Development

Christa Fisher, Head of Sales Training and Development with more than two decades in sales, enablement, and L&D, argues that enablement stops driving revenue the moment it gets treated like a service desk: sales requests training, enablement delivers training, everyone feels good, and the needle never moves. She uses a race car driver analogy to separate the two functions: training teaches the driver how to drive strategically, while enablement keeps the car fueled, the track clear, and the win achievable. The diagnostic question that flips reactive into proactive is not what do sellers need but what has to change in live deals to drive more revenue, which forces enablement to align to pipeline health, conversion, and quota instead of content volume. Christa pushes hard on observable deal behaviors as the unit of measure: deeper discovery questions, value tied to business impact, multi-threading, and clean stage progression rather than completions and attendance. She explains why reps revert to old habits under pressure (the new behavior never became the practiced default), why late-stage surprises like procurement stalls are really upstream discovery failures, and why the first place to look for insight is not the dashboard but the call recording. Her closing rule: feel-good training is nice, but sticky training, embedded by sales leaders into real deals, is what changes behavior.

April 28, 202617 min
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Why sales enablement is really a revenue execution system with Robin Schweitzer

with Robin Schweitzer·Revenue and Sales Enablement Executive

Robin Schweitzer, a Revenue and Sales Enablement Executive with a background spanning sales, marketing, and enablement, argues that most teams misdiagnose enablement as training and content when it should operate as a revenue execution system. She installs three pillars when she walks into a role — rep readiness, pipeline management, and deal execution — and refuses to let content volume masquerade as impact. Robin shows how a lopsided discovery-to-proposal ratio (roughly one week of discovery against four weeks of proposal) surfaced a hidden three-part discovery problem that, once broken into sequenced conversations, lifted close-won rate by 12 percent at a prior B2B SaaS employer. She watches threading, stage duration, talk-to-listen ratio, and stall clusters as her early-warning signals, and uses a four-quadrant stakeholder mapping exercise across C-suite, sales leadership, and reps to build credibility before she recommends change. Her rule for SKO is the tell: training only sticks when it's followed by micro-trainings tied to real open deals, not a calendar event that decays inside a month. The closing frame: stop chasing the number, change the behavior, and bring product and market problems back upstream when they belong there.

April 24, 202614 min
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Finding a job in the age of AI (and what marketers should do differently) with Katie Fortunato

with Katie Fortunato·EVP Platform and Innovation, Co-Founder of Hire Innovations (Jobstream)

Katie Fortunato, EVP of Platform and Innovation and co-founder of Hire Innovations (Jobstream), explains that 70 to 80 percent of jobs never make it to a job board and over 65 percent of hires still come through networking and referrals — which means the mass-apply, 'bot on bot' activity dominating LinkedIn is a dead end for both sides of the table. For job seekers, she recommends using the Ikigai framework (passion, skill, market demand) to define a target and then running account-based marketing on your own career — building a named target list of companies and working referral paths in. For employers, she argues every company now needs a clearly articulated employer value proposition (EVP) and a recruitment marketing engine that treats candidates like a consumer audience, including creator-driven video content that is future-friendly for AI search and LLMs. Katie also makes the case for the 'chief work officer' — the convergence of HR, marketing, and operations around human capital — and shares a Pokemon case study where rejected applicants are being reframed as the brand's most loyal fan base. Her closing advice: get creative, bring humanity back into hiring, and build for the channels AI actually surfaces.

April 23, 202621 min
Justin Chappell profile photo

How to tie content to revenue, retention, and real customer outcomes with Justin Chappell

with Justin Chappell·Head of Digital Strategy, CX and Operations

Justin Chappell, Head of Digital Strategy, CX and Operations, argues that most content programs are stuck measuring vanity metrics — opens, clicks, awareness, and engagement — when they should be tied to financial outcomes like gross revenue retention, net revenue retention, renewal rates, and time to value. He outlines the three places content programs typically break down: content gets created in isolation without cross-functional ownership, it gets delivered on rigid time-bound drip campaigns instead of predictive signals, and success is measured too early on easy numbers instead of 30/60/90-day behavior. Justin contrasts the 'peanut butter' health-score approach — where one red/yellow/green model gets spread across every customer — with predictive engagement models that use product telemetry, psychographic, and firmographic data to meet each customer individually. He introduces a long form / short form / micro-learning framework that turns content into a roadmap every department can contribute to, with program managers, tech writers, and marketing each owning a role. He closes with a case for self-service as a friction-removal strategy, arguing the next evolution is AI-enabled systems that anticipate what a customer needs before they ask — so content finds them, not the other way around.

April 22, 202620 min
Kris Rudeegraap profile photo

How to turn your best digital content into physical mail that closes deals with Kris Rudeegraap

with Kris Rudeegraap·Co-CEO, Sendoso

Kris Rudeegraap, Co-CEO of Sendoso and a decade-long operator in the direct mail and gifting automation space, argues that marketers are sitting on a pile of high-performing digital content that could double as their best physical outreach — they just never think to mail it. In this Content Amplified episode, Kris walks through how to triangulate top-performing assets using three data sources (sales enablement platforms like Highspot or Seismic, web/CMS analytics, and paid-ad conversion data), then repurpose them into formats worth opening — Mad Libs books, scratch-off insight cards, workbooks, video mailers, trading cards, and quarterly printed magazines. He maps physical mailers to the full buyer's journey, from top-of-funnel SDR plays to stage-three air cover in competitive deals to post-sale onboarding kits, and explains how AI now drives personalization, print-on-demand, smart delivery to home addresses, and signal-based automated workflows. He closes with a dead-simple starter plan: pick your best asset, print 50 copies, split them across 25 in-pipeline deals and 25 target accounts, write a note, and ship.

April 21, 202617 min
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How to Operationalize Discovery So Buyers Sell Themselves with Nick Lopez

with Nick Lopez·Learning & Development Leader | Sales Enablement

Nick Lopez, a sales learning and development leader with a background spanning marketing and multifamily sales, argues that most discovery calls fall apart for the same reason: sellers ask surface-level questions, bounce between topics, and default to pitch mode the moment things get quiet. In this Content to Close episode, Nick walks through a 'pillar' framework for discovery where every question drills deeper into one topic before moving on — so sellers actually uncover pain instead of skimming past it. He explains the 80/20 listening rule (sellers talk 20%, clients talk 80%), why personal pain matters more than company pain, and the specific questions that get prospects to sell themselves on the solution. Nick also shares a practical handoff model from sales to customer success — document everything, run an internal prep meeting before involving the client, and preserve the rapport that was built in discovery so the client experience stays consistent through the full lifecycle. His closing take on content: during discovery, keep it minimal, but use diagnostic checklists and relatable collateral as leave-behinds to build trust and prepare prospects for the next meeting.

April 17, 202621 min
Kirsten Von Busch profile photo

How to Turn Data Into Narratives People Actually Remember with Kirsten Von Busch

with Kirsten Von Busch·Director of Product Marketing, Experian Automotive

Kirsten Von Busch, Director of Product Marketing at Experian Automotive, shares how her team turns one of the richest datasets in the auto industry into content that marketers, dealers, lenders, and OEMs actually use. Kirsten walks through her 'treat it like a science experiment' approach: start with a hypothesis about what you think the data will say, drill in to confirm or kill it, then build a narrative people can act on. She argues brand messaging still matters early (credibility is a prerequisite to being heard), but after that, data-driven content wins — as long as you speak in the audience's language, not yours. Kirsten explains why partner-led stories add proof that first-party data alone can't deliver, why every insight should be published in multiple formats (white paper, LinkedIn clip, video, data deep-dive) because different audiences consume differently, and why the biggest trap in data storytelling is 'burying the lead' in pivot tables. Her closing advice on metrics: vanity metrics (opens, downloads, time spent) matter, but the real signal is whether someone asked a 'so what' follow-up question — and she still treats conference hallway feedback as one of her most valuable data sources.

April 16, 202618 min
Rich Missey profile photo

How Search and Discovery Are Changing in the Age of Generative AI with Rich Missey

with Rich Missey·20-Year SEO Veteran | Hyatt, Cars.com, Groupon, Whirlpool

Rich Missey, a 20-year SEO veteran who has led search at Hyatt, Cars.com, Groupon, and Whirlpool, argues that the playbook most marketers have been running for two decades is breaking — and the fundamentals most teams skipped are exactly what matters in the new world. Rich explains 'query fan out,' where generative systems expand a user's basic question into follow-ups the user hadn't even formed yet, and guides them to the answer without ever leaving the search ecosystem. That means informational content is getting swallowed whole inside AI overviews, and the old SEO-to-conversion handoff (rank, land, pop-up, convert) no longer happens. Rich's answer: structure. He makes the case that heading hierarchy, internal linking, sentence-level clarity (he literally brings up junior-high sentence diagramming), and tables/bullets — not prose walls — are what determine whether generative systems surface your content. He also pushes marketers to rethink measurement (scroll depth, micro-interactions, and conversion funnels, not just views) and to dismantle silos between SEO, social, editorial, and press teams so the brand experience is consistent wherever the user encounters it. His closing bet: within a year or two, generative systems will create their own subtasks and agents on the fly, and the marketers who invested in clean content structure and technical infrastructure (APIs, database access) will be the ones still getting picked up.

April 15, 202617 min
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How to Be Creative in a "Boring" Industry with Logan Freedman

with Logan Freedman·Global Head of SEO, ManyChat

Logan Freedman, Global Head of SEO at ManyChat, has built a career out of standing out in industries everyone else calls boring. In this episode, Logan defines creativity as figuring out how to stand out in 'a sea of gray' — and his definition starts with fun. If you're not having fun yourself, your audience won't either. Logan explains how to spot when your team has stalled out (hint: stress, boredom, and overload are the telltale signs), and why the best ideation sessions are the ones that start with completely off-topic conversations about cults or weird hobbies and then loop back into work. He walks through his most famous campaign at LawnStarter: after getting denied a FOIA request about grass damage at Austin City Limits, he talked the CMO into walking the festival with swabs, tested six locations for fecal matter in a lab, pitched the results as an exclusive to every Texas news outlet, and got banned from ACL for life — while generating 100+ high-authority backlinks. Logan also breaks down his playbook for turning these campaigns into backlink-generating studies: build a full methodology page, use data snippets and simple graphs (not full infographics, which media outlets hate), password-protect the page, pitch it as an exclusive to one top-tier publisher, then watch lower-tier outlets pick it up for free. His closing advice for building creativity into a regular workflow: hold ideation sessions every two weeks, treat no idea as bad, and maintain a running database of crazy ideas you can pull from when a campaign slot opens up.

April 14, 202617 min
Jessika Ward profile photo

Don't Be Afraid to Create Less with Jessika Ward

with Jessika Ward·Sales Enablement Leader | 13 Years in SaaS

Jessika Ward, a 13-year sales enablement veteran who has built programs from scratch at multiple SaaS startups, argues that the biggest shift enablement teams can make is redefining their function — from content and training generation to performance management. She explains why seller attention is a commodity that should be protected at all costs, and why the best enablement content feels like a shortcut, not homework — showing up when sellers are stuck rather than waiting for a calendar event. Jessika introduces an 'air traffic control' model for enablement where one curated signal per week replaces the noise of competing teams fighting for seller attention. She also challenges the industry's reliance on engagement and course-completion metrics, arguing that observable behavior change and revenue outcomes — deal velocity, pipeline generated, time to close — are the only metrics that matter. Her closing advice: start with the business problem, respect seller attention, and don't be afraid to create less.

April 8, 202615 min
Frank Pasquine profile photo

What Publishing a Book Taught a 20-Year Marketing Veteran About His Own Craft with Frank Pasquine

with Frank Pasquine·Marketing Director, Americas | DoubleVerify

Frank Pasquine, Marketing Director at DoubleVerify with nearly 20 years in the field, shares what promoting his debut novel The Prince of New York taught him about his own marketing craft. Despite spending his career advising on content strategy, platform fragmentation, and audience targeting, Frank discovered that doing it for his own product — with his own money and no approval process — was a fundamentally different experience. He explains how the fragmentation he talks about daily at DoubleVerify hit differently when he was a one-man team choosing between TikTok, Instagram, and BookTok. Frank reveals that his most successful content strategy mirrors what works in his corporate role: in-person activations (like a book signing at a St. Mark's Place bookstore) amplified digitally for FOMO and social proof. He also shares how AI video tools like Sora are enabling him to create teaser content in minutes that would have cost thousands at NYU Film School, and offers a practical playbook: start planning 100 days before launch, know your audience, identify your differentiation, and build anticipation through micro-moments and hooks.

April 9, 202625 min
Allison Myers profile photo

Find Your Superpower, Then Build a Team Around the Gaps with Allison Myers

with Allison Myers·Director of Marketing & Communications | Fives Intralogistics Corp.

Allison Myers, Director of Marketing and Communications at Fives Intralogistics Corp. with 25 years in B2B marketing, shares her framework for identifying your professional superpower and using it to build both a standout personal brand and a stronger team. She offers three diagnostic questions: What problems do people trust you with when it really matters? What type of work energizes you even on your worst day? And when do you reliably move the needle? Allison explains how to blend personal and professional branding on LinkedIn without oversharing — using a 'thin but intentional' line that reinforces trust and credibility. She addresses how to cut through AI-generated noise by leading with point of view over presence, arguing that consistency beats cleverness and that you don't need a viral moment to stand out. She closes with a powerful team-building philosophy: once you know your superpower, hire people who fill your gaps — don't hire another you. The collective output of a complementary team is always greater than any individual effort.

April 8, 202619 min
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Why More Content Isn't Working and What to Do Instead with Natalie Cunningham

with Natalie Cunningham·SVP of Marketing | Data Axle

Natalie Cunningham, SVP of Marketing at Data Axle, explains why producing more content each quarter without seeing a lift in pipeline is a symptom of a deeper problem: most marketing teams spend all their energy on production and none on the intelligence work that makes production successful. She introduces the concept of 'audience intelligence' — understanding the whole human inside the buying committee, not just their job title and firmographics — and shares how first-party research at Data Axle revealed that generational influences on buying behavior transfer directly from consumers' personal lives into their B2B purchasing decisions. Natalie also addresses AI's role as a 'marketer frenemy,' arguing that AI should be repositioned from a content production partner to a thought partner that accelerates research and insight generation. She closes with a strong take on measurement: content should never be measured against pipeline generation metrics, because doing so sets content teams up for failure.

April 7, 202618 min
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Sales Enablement Is a Revenue System, Not a Training Function with Jason Gwilliam

with Jason Gwilliam·Sales Enablement Practitioner | 25 Years in Healthcare & Med-Tech

Jason Gwilliam, a 25-year healthcare and med-tech sales enablement veteran, makes the case that enablement must be treated as a revenue system — not a training function. He explains how to shift executive perception by anchoring on measurable metrics like time-to-competency and sales cycle compression, and why enablement is best understood as an ecosystem of cross-functional stakeholders all feeding into a central hub. Jason draws on his experience at Abbott and other companies to illustrate how an aligned enablement program drives faster ramp times, shorter sales cycles, and reproducible selling behaviors. He also addresses the coaching-vs-managing distinction using sports analogies, shares why marketing alignment is critically undervalued in enablement, and explains how AI coaching tools should be introduced carefully — as development tools, not punitive grading systems. He closes with an emerging trend: fractional enablement roles on company boards.

April 3, 202619 min
Leslie Bartley profile photo

Content Is King, but Distribution Wears the Pants with Leslie Bartley

with Leslie Bartley·Lifecycle & Customer Marketing Expert | Squire

Leslie Bartley, lifecycle marketing expert at Squire, makes the case that content strategy is inseparable from distribution strategy — because the greatest content in the world still falls flat if it shows up on the wrong channel at the wrong time. She introduces a practical framework for matching message urgency to channel type: transactional messages warrant multi-channel redundancy, while discovery and education content belongs in reference-friendly formats like email and notification centers rather than high-interruption push and SMS. Leslie shares how she uses customer.io and documented workflows to keep complex multi-channel messaging organized, and makes a nuanced case for the symbiotic relationship between automation and human touch — arguing that automation should handle the 90% of routine touchpoints so human CSMs can focus their 10% on high-value conversations. She closes with her 'core four' metrics framework (reach, conversion/engagement, revenue, disinterest) and a forward-looking vision of centralized, AI-curated B2B content digests.

April 2, 202618 min
Roisin Hunt profile photo

Bringing a Broadcast Mindset to B2B Marketing with Roisin Hunt

with Roisin Hunt·Senior Director of Product Marketing at Great Place to Work

Roisin Hunt, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Great Place to Work, draws on a decade of Irish television and radio production to show how a broadcast mindset transforms B2B marketing. She explains why every piece of content should be built like a segment — with a hook, pacing, and a clear audience experience — and how the COVID era permanently raised the bar for digital events. Roisin breaks down the biggest mistakes brands make in virtual events (audio/visual quality, lack of audience energy, no pre/post personalization plan) and pushes back on the false belief that great production requires a big budget — her most successful event ran on Zoom Webinar with 2,500 attendees. She also shares how she turned her company's annual conference into a year-round content pipeline, using the conference stage to vet and produce case studies, digital event segments, and written content for the rest of the year.

April 1, 202617 min
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Why People Connect with People, Not Brands with Marisa Lather

with Marisa Lather·Content Marketer & Brand Strategist | Marketer Marisa

Marisa Lather, content marketer and brand strategist known as Marketer Marisa, explains why the rise of AI-generated polished content has paradoxically made raw, human-first content more valuable. She traces the 'anti-AI aesthetic' — messy bathroom sink product photography, unpolished social media — to a fundamental truth: people are hardwired to connect with other people, not brands. Marisa breaks down how to close the trust gap through creator partnerships (internal and external), employee advocacy, user-generated content, and radical transparency. She introduces the concept of a creator hub — a centralized enablement resource for creators — and explains why the biggest brands succeed by trusting creators to create rather than enforcing rigid messaging. She also shares practical advice for measuring creator campaigns: personality-based campaigns track sentiment, engagement, and loyalty, not just conversion, and the channel strategy should follow the audience, not the brand's preferences.

March 31, 202616 min
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How Seller Curiosity and Continuous Discovery Drive More Closed-Won Deals with Claire Scull

with Claire Scull·Founder at Ordo Consultants

Claire Scull, founder of Ordo Consultants, explains why seller curiosity is the single most underrated driver of closed-won deals. She walks through two essential sales frameworks — BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) for early qualification and SciPAB (Situation, Complication, Implication, Position, Action, Benefit) for deeper proposal-stage discovery — and shows how each maps to different stages of the sales cycle. Claire emphasizes that discovery is not a one-time event: the best sellers practice continuous revalidation throughout the opportunity lifecycle, using Customer Verifiable Outcomes (CVOs) to confirm deal health at every stage. She shares a cautionary real-world story of a committed forecast deal lost because a seller stopped asking questions after initial qualification, and discusses how content — from onboarding resources and enablement flashcards to customer references and thought leadership — plays a critical role across the entire sales process.

March 27, 202622 min
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Marketing Org Design, Content Strategy, and AI's Impact on the Modern CMO with Justin Steinman

with Justin Steinman·Chief Marketing Officer at ModMed

Justin Steinman, CMO of ModMed, delivers a masterclass on marketing organizational design and how it fuels a powerful content engine. He structures his marketing team like a free market economy — product marketers aligned with product managers, specialty marketers with general managers, and demand gen managers with sales segments (with bonuses tied to sales quota achievement). Corporate marketing serves as the unifying brand voice and final filter to market, ensuring consistency across all campaigns. Justin introduces his 'steak and sizzle' framework: product marketing delivers the substance (positioning, differentiation, business benefits) while the content team in corporate marketing adds the voice and brand consistency. He also explains how AI is reshaping content demands — LLMs consume information differently than search engines, press releases are back in vogue because LLMs love them, and he positions AI as an 'intern' that accelerates his content team's output without replacing them.

March 26, 202618 min
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Using AI for Mega Trend Research and Smarter Content Strategy with Tuesday Hagiwara

with Tuesday Hagiwara·Marketing Strategist at Nonprofit (Research-focused)

Tuesday Hagiwara reveals a side of AI that most marketers overlook — using it for high-level strategic research and trend analysis rather than just content creation. She walks through her process of identifying mega trends using the PESTLE framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental), leveraging tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Miro to consume and synthesize massive amounts of research — including 160+ pieces of thought leadership and 60+ reports. By grounding LLM conversations in deep research, she produces dramatically better campaign ideas and content strategies than those relying on generic AI prompts. Tuesday emphasizes using AI for what it does best — summarizing and pattern recognition — rather than writing content directly, and validates all AI-generated insights through real-world conversations.

March 25, 202616 min
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Why Trust-Driven Content Comes from People, Not Brands with Tiffanie Reynolds

with Tiffanie Reynolds·Owner at MARCOM Consultants

Tiffanie Reynolds, owner of MARCOM Consultants, makes a compelling case for why trust-driven content must come from real people — not polished corporate messaging. She cites research showing storytelling is 20 times more memorable than corporate messaging and consumers trust subject matter experts 63% more than corporate brands. Tiffanie explains why companies are often hesitant to promote individual personalities (fear of employees leaving), but argues this approach backfires because audiences crave human-centric, personality-driven content. She highlights Tampa International Airport and Wendy's as brands doing human-centric social content right — using humor, micro-stories, and cultural relevance — while calling out the professional services industry (Big Four consulting firms) for producing excellent research content but lacking brand personality. On AI, Tiffanie praises its value as a research tool with citations but warns writers to always verify sources and never use AI to write content directly.

March 24, 202616 min
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How Can You Build a Scalable Thought Leadership Engine Using 15-Minute Employee Interviews?

with Laura Pursley·Senior Marketing Director at US Signal

Laura Pursley reveals how to turn quick 15-minute employee interviews into a scalable thought leadership content engine — blog posts, social content, and more — without burning out subject matter experts. The fuller lesson is that 15-minute structured interviews with SMEs can generate enough raw material for 4-6 pieces of content across multiple formats The key to avoiding SME burnout is making the process effortless for them — prepare questions, record everything, handle all production The page now frames the episode as a practical, transcript-backed reference for marketers who need the key idea, the reusable examples, and the next-step guidance without listening to the full recording first.

March 12, 202619 min
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How do you build a content strategy that actually supports sales?

with Katie Robinson·Chief Marketing Officer at LS3P

Katie Robinson explains why most content strategies fail sales teams and provides a practical framework for building content around the buyer journey that reps actually want to use. The fuller lesson is that Sales teams ignore most marketing content because it's built around product features rather than buyer objections and questions at each deal stage The highest-impact sales content maps to specific moments in the buyer journey — not generic 'awareness' or 'consideration' buckets The page now frames the episode as a practical, transcript-backed reference for marketers who need the key idea, the reusable examples, and the next-step guidance without listening to the full recording first.

March 11, 202616 min
347

How Does Content Create Growth and Scale?

with Billy Cripe·Global Vice President of Marketing at Solifi

Billy Cripe, Global Vice President of Marketing at Solifi, explains how does content create growth and scale. Billy Cripe joins Content Amplified to discuss how does content create growth and scale. The episode uses practical examples from Billy's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

July 9, 202516 min
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How Does Your Content Reach the 95 Percent Who Are Not Buying Yet?

with Ryan Radcliff·Product Marketing Leader at SupportLogic

Ryan Radcliff, Product Marketing Leader at SupportLogic, explains how does your content reach the 95 percent who are not buying yet. Ryan Radcliff joins Content Amplified to discuss how does your content reach the 95 percent who are not buying yet. The episode uses practical examples from Ryan's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

July 8, 202518 min
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How Is AI Changing Search Experience Optimization?

with Luke Hayes·Digital Marketing and SEO Strategist

Luke Hayes, Digital Marketing and SEO Strategist, explains how is ai changing search experience optimization. Luke Hayes joins Content Amplified to discuss how is ai changing search experience optimization. The episode uses practical examples from Luke's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

July 3, 202516 min
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How Do You Turn One Video Into a Full Content Library?

with Sherri Schwartz·Video and Content Marketing Leader

Sherri Schwartz, Video and Content Marketing Leader, explains how do you turn one video into a full content library. Sherri Schwartz joins Content Amplified to discuss how do you turn one video into a full content library. The episode uses practical examples from Sherri's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

July 2, 202516 min
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How Do You Build Expert-Led Content That Earns Trust?

with Susan Powell·Content and Marketing Leader

Susan Powell, Content and Marketing Leader, explains how do you build expert-led content that earns trust. Susan Powell joins Content Amplified to discuss how do you build expert-led content that earns trust. The episode uses practical examples from Susan's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

July 1, 202518 min
342

How Should B2B Marketers Test AI Tools Strategically?

with Jill Ransome·B2B Marketing Leader

Jill Ransome, B2B Marketing Leader, explains how should b2b marketers test ai tools strategically. Jill Ransome joins Content Amplified to discuss how should b2b marketers test ai tools strategically. The episode uses practical examples from Jill's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

June 25, 202516 min
341

How Can Podcasting Build Relationships That Drive Business?

with Jeremy Weisz·Co-Founder, Rise25

Jeremy Weisz, Co-Founder, Rise25, explains how can podcasting build relationships that drive business. Jeremy Weisz joins Content Amplified to discuss how can podcasting build relationships that drive business. The episode uses practical examples from Jeremy's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

June 24, 202519 min
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What Is Anti-Marketing Content for Technical Audiences?

with Jesus Requena·Marketing Leader at Sanity

Jesus Requena, Marketing Leader at Sanity, explains what is anti-marketing content for technical audiences. Jesus Requena joins Content Amplified to discuss what is anti-marketing content for technical audiences. The episode uses practical examples from Jesus's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

June 18, 202536 min
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How Is AI Changing Content Marketing and Search?

with Carmela Fortin·AI Coach and Consultant

Carmela Fortin, AI Coach and Consultant, explains how is ai changing content marketing and search. Carmela Fortin joins Content Amplified to discuss how is ai changing content marketing and search. The episode uses practical examples from Carmela's work to show how marketers can turn expertise, customer insight, and clear positioning into content that is easier to trust and easier to use. The richer page treatment pulls the transcript into a standalone summary, specific takeaways, real quotes, reusable resources, and FAQs so the episode can serve search visitors and sales or marketing teams even before someone listens to the full recording. The practical lesson is to make content more useful by connecting the topic to audience intent, concrete examples, and a clear next action.

June 17, 202516 min
3

What content you shouldn't be focusing on

with Madi Bullock·Content Marketing, PR, and Brand Communications Consultant

Madi Bullock makes a provocative argument: for most B2B companies, the content you probably should not be focusing on is broad social media content for channels like Instagram and TikTok. Her reasoning is that B2B content has to be relevant to the buyer's stage and intent, and those channels are usually places people go to relax, not shop for software or evaluate vendors. She does make an important exception for LinkedIn, where educational, pain-point-driven content can still play a meaningful role. She also argues that if you want to test social, influencer or creator partnerships are often a smarter first move than trying to build a branded social presence from scratch.

September 19, 202314 min
2

How to make product-led content interesting and helpful

with Megan Pratt·Fractional Product Marketing Consultant

Megan Pratt argues that product-led content becomes far more effective when marketers stop treating it as a rushed launch announcement and start treating it as a way to connect customers to the product across the full buying journey. Her three-part framework is to get closer to the product launch process so marketing has time to be creative, use that extra time to think beyond feature briefs and map content across the customer lifecycle, and stay close to real customer questions by listening to calls, scanning LinkedIn, and talking with sales. Her message is that the best product-led content sits with one foot in the product world and one foot in the customer world.

September 12, 202311 min

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