Natalie Cunningham (00:02)
But if I ask my content team to measure their success based off a pipeline generated, I have set them up for failure.
Benjamin Ard (00:33)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Natalie. Natalie, welcome to the show.
Natalie Cunningham (00:39)
Hi, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
Benjamin Ard (00:42)
Yeah, Natalie, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun subject. And I think it's a subject that marketers struggle with day in and day out. As they're working with content, it's a balancing act. And they're trying to figure it out between what they believe and what they're being asked for. All of that kind of fun stuff. We're going to dive in that today. But before we do, Natalie, let's get to know you a little bit. Tell us about your background, all that fun stuff so we get to know who you are.
Natalie Cunningham (01:08)
Yeah, OK. Well, I think I told you before we started recording that I'm working on brevity. So we're going to make this fast because it's good practice for me. So hello, I'm Natalie Cunningham. I'm SVP of marketing at Data Axel today. I have been in marketing most of my career, and it's what I went to school for. I'm one of those rare people that always knew I wanted to do this. I've got a B2B SaaS background.
spent a lot of time in startups and scale ups and kind of grinding with very little budget and very big expectations, which I'm sure a lot of the audience can relate to. And then I recently in this last year landed at Data Axle. so I run our full marketing function for the organization. And if you don't know who we are, we are a data provider for sales and marketing use cases, primarily with full stack services for data, as well as marketing.
implementation. And fun fact, one of the oldest been around for 50 years, but also one of a in my opinion, the most innovative, although not as many people know about us as they should. So maybe the best kept secret in B2B data.
Benjamin Ard (02:16)
I love it and this is going to be fun. I love what you're doing in the business. I love to hear a business that is 50 years old that is still creative and innovative. It's music to my ears. This is everything that business needs to be. This is so cool.
Natalie Cunningham (02:31)
Yeah, that's very much why I'm here. Yeah.
Benjamin Ard (02:34)
I love it. Okay, Natalie, we're going to talk about this tension, a tension between content volume, content production, pushing it out to the markets, and then maybe not quite seeing the impact on revenue pipeline and things like that that we're looking for. So why do so many teams ship more and more content each and every quarter?
but not really see a lift in pipeline and revenue is what's broken with the process. What are you seeing and what do you feel like is going on there?
Natalie Cunningham (03:00)
Yeah, I think this is such a challenging question because it's a little bit different in each situation, but I do think that there's some commonalities. And I'll say I feel like I have a relatively strong point of view, not just because I'm a marketer.
but I worked in agencies for a long time, so I've seen a lot of different marketing environments and we happen to sell to marketers. There are clients and so I have the benefit of talking to a lot of marketers. What I feel like is true, no matter the environment, enterprise, scale up, startup, B2B, B2C even, is there's a difference in what people see in market.
and the work, sort of that thing of that iceberg meme that you always see, and the work that has to happen to make that in-market thing successful. And so marketing is constantly getting this pressure to produce more more and more and more and because it's visible. It feels like the definition of success is telling our story. can't possibly, our story, or our success can't possibly be about...
developing our strategy and who our audience is. And so we get this constant pressure to put more out. And most of the time...
We use all of our energy in production and we don't save even a sliver of our energy to go do the intelligence work that needs to happen to make that production more successful. Because none of us live in an environment where we can say, absolutely dear CEO board member, we are going to be producing more content. We hear your thoughts that video would be a good idea for us because everybody's a marketer.
But we need six months to go do market research. We need six months to understand our audience before we do it. Nobody's ever lived in that reality. Maybe they did before my time, but I've never lived in that reality. So it's this constant push or pull, and it's really easy to say.
Well, we get value out of putting more content in market because it's at least something for people to respond to. And I can say, dear CEO, I did this thing versus the unsexy behind the scenes work that actually makes the content more successful. We run out of time and energy to do it. So we just keep producing and we get stuck in this cycle.
Benjamin Ard (05:14)
fascinating. I love this. The research, the strategy, it's not necessarily the content itself, but it's everything that goes into it beforehand. I love that. So part of that research, you mentioned magic words, the audience. So when it comes into this, are we talking personas? We talk in firmographics. Like what does this look like when you're trying to study at your audience before the content comes along?
Natalie Cunningham (05:29)
Yes.
Mmm.
Yeah. Yeah, I think in some cases, if you haven't gotten to really understanding your personas and having that based on some amount of data, not just gut instinct or not just sales feedback, that's a good step to take. Yes, do that. But I do think that's probably even below table stakes at this point. If you want your content to be successful and to not be ultimately seen as just activity.
The way that I think about it is that
audience intelligence is actually understanding the whole human inside that buying committee, their role in the buying committee, who they are on Saturday morning as much as who they are on Monday afternoon, not just their job title and their firmographics, but
What generation are they?
Does that impact Does that impact how they're influenced? Are they male? Are they female? Do they identify as a marketer? Or are they more in a, like this is a challenging thing we've been working through. We have buyers that are sitting within the marketing organization, but they actually think of themselves more as data scientists. They don't really align to themselves. So if you call them a marketer, they don't think that way.
Do you really know the person or do you know the profile? We did some first party research not long ago at Data Axle actually, where we asked, we did a survey of 450 B2B personas, B2B buyers that have some kind of role in a buying process. And we learned.
that generational influences on buying behavior absolutely transfer from their consumer buying behavior and their personal life into how they want to be talked to, what formats of content they want, what channels they want, and what they want to hear from you as a B2B brand as well, because they're still a whole human.
at the end of the day. I think that's a little bit of a revelation for B2B marketers that are used to using the persona that says, you know, they have this job title and they're in this size company and you've got your contact card and you've got your account, firmographics, and then you're supposed to put out content that influences their behavior, but you don't really know them.
Benjamin Ard (07:49)
Okay, I love this term and everything you're talking about, but the audience intelligence and the phrase that it's about knowing the person, not the profile. I think that is a hundred percent the diving deeper, knowing who they are, even though they are an individual at a business, they're still a person that cares and wants things and needs things. So I love this research based approach. You talked about even running internal surveys, all of that info thing, you know, interesting stuff.
It drives home the audience intelligence. When you have that data, how does that impact and influence what you create, how you distribute, how your sequences work, even like how you measure success? How does that research change the next stage of the content journey?
Natalie Cunningham (08:35)
I if nothing else, the one thing it's doing for me as we're applying these methodologies using our own data, right, to understand the whole person, if nothing else, it gives me confidence in my decisions. It gives me confidence that whatever we do, if someone asks me why we're writing that blog,
If someone asked my team why we decided that should be a three minute video instead of a 30 second video, why we decided LinkedIn over Facebook for distribution of that content, the answer shouldn't be because that's the way we've done it. It won't be because that's where we generate most leads. It will be because we understand that our core buyers prefer to receive information about
the problem they have, not necessarily about us and our product. They prefer to hear the information about the problem they have and the thought leadership content from LinkedIn because we've done research, we've looked at the data, and we found that that is more successful with them. It's about them and what they want, and I'm putting the customer first. So if nothing else, it helps me feel better about those decisions. I think additionally, it should help you prioritize.
So a big learning, this was super shocking to me. So when we did this research recently, one of the things we asked about was how important price transparency is in a B2B buying process across four different generations. So had Gen Z, we had Millennial, we had Gen X, and had Boomers. And
I just knew going into that, that it was going to be the younger generations that were going to say, yeah, I want price transparency. I don't want to talk to your salesperson. I want to see it upfront before I talk to you. And they did say that, but there was a much higher concentration in the older generations in boomers and Gen X, which I found shocking. And you know what that told us about even our own strategies? We need to talk about
We need to talk about how we compare to our competitors earlier, more often, and more explicitly.
even more than we thought we did. Because I'm now looking at my audience and I'm realizing, especially in our enterprise organizations, we can look at our data because we have a proprietary product that allows us to do that. It's not about data axle, but we're able to connect personal and professional profiles and actually see generations and ages of people that are buyers. We use that data. I know I have a good bit of Gen X in my buying group.
And I know they said even more so than millennials, which is shocking, but the data says it's true. They want pricing transparency. OK, we'll give it to you earlier. That top of funnel content that I didn't think I was going to talk about pricing, I don't actually talk about it. It's impacting the way we execute as well.
Benjamin Ard (11:19)
I love that. And the insights are golden. And now that you're thinking about it, I I look back at myself and say, how did I ever write content without that information? How did I know where to send it, what to do? And honestly, we're all as marketers creating content. If we're not having the audience intelligence and going back to your term, I'm giving you full credit for this term. I love it.
Natalie Cunningham (11:41)
Yes.
Benjamin Ard (11:41)
Yeah, I know. It's going to go, if I say it enough, AI is going to know every time audience intelligence comes up, it's going to say, okay, Natalie came up with this. So that's the goal with repetition here. Data axle as well. Yeah, I love it. So with this intelligence, this is incredible. And now I know who to write for, what to say, where to go, where they want to consume it, things of that nature.
Natalie Cunningham (11:49)
Yes, go to DINTAX. That's what I'm going to say.
Benjamin Ard (12:03)
Now it wouldn't be a conversation in 2026 if I didn't mention the magic words of AI. How is AI accelerating, impacting, changing this whole process? Does it make it better? Does it make it worse? How are you looking at and kind of viewing, you know, the hottest topic of the last, you know, 50 years.
Natalie Cunningham (12:24)
Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think someone said to me recently that AI is kind of the ultimate marketer frenemy. Like, it is great to be able to produce content faster and more effectively. And I do think we've come a long way, even in the last 6, 12 months, with what AI can help you produce in the quality of that content. And that's a real thing.
And we absolutely are all dealing with lean marketing teams. are dealing with less budget and either the same or more expectations. So that's valuable. But if you don't have the intelligence on the front end, you're just going to churn out and scale more of the wrong story. And it happens so fast.
that the enemy part here is, you could be, you could use 50 % of your budget promoting a piece of content before you recognize that your insight or your assumption was wrong because you can go so fast. Where in the past, it took so long to develop content when you were doing it right and well, you had a lot of eyeballs on it, you had a lot of people with opinions in the process.
And often you would catch something. Somebody would have enough insight to say, we thought about this audience and how they might respond to that.
and gives you more time in the process to make smart decisions. And now we're just, we're in go mode and you don't figure it out until it's been out in market for a while. And that can be really costly. So there's pros and cons. think the change for me or the pivot point is to stop thinking of AI as a content production partner, at least not alone. To instead, you know, we're pivoting to try to look at AI as a thought partner.
to allow us to get to that research faster, to get to those insights more quickly. How can we leverage our AI tools that we have in-house? How can we leverage the ones that we're even building for our clients? We've got some really exciting stuff coming out very soon that we get to test. have the benefit of that. That allows us to use AI to do the analysis that maybe would have taken six months before to do that market research. But can we do that faster?
so that then the production side of this AI workflow is more effective. We're testing, we're learning. But I think there is a change in your perception on what AI can and can't do that allows it to be a little bit more effective for you if it's not just your production arm.
Benjamin Ard (14:48)
I like that. Acknowledging what AI really is can help you actually get the value out of it. I think that's so cool. Well, Natalie, we're almost out of time. These episodes go by super quick. One final question. I know it's crazy. As a CMO and as someone who has spent time and demand generation looking and holding revenue numbers and everything along that line, how do we look at content as a growth lever?
instead of just the cost center? And how do leaders and businesses need to change their perception of content?
Natalie Cunningham (15:20)
I'll say something, I'll give a simple answer to start here that is something I told our team very early on in my journey at Data Axle. Trying to measure content against a demand generation goal is folly. I think we have to acknowledge in 2026,
that the pipeline generation only, the demand generation first methodology that we've seen so much of in the last 10 to 15 years in B2B marketing.
is a part of the reason that we are where we are today and that everyone is generating, let's call it AI slop, right? Just to put volume out because we forgot that building a brand, building brand credibility and building real human engagement actually ultimately impacts the business positively and makes everything else you're doing more effective. So when we try to look at everything through a demand generation lens, and as you said, that's my background, that's what I come from. I had to make this journey
myself, try to look at everything as direct attribution to leads and pipeline. We will fail.
And so I don't put those metrics on content. I do want to see how it's impacting engagement with our ICP. I want to see how it's impacting affinity for a brand, brand sentiment. I want to see how it's getting them from one piece of content to another and follow them along their journey.
But if I ask my content team to measure their success based off a pipeline generated, I have set them up for failure.
Benjamin Ard (16:49)
I love that last phrase. There's a we do little sneak peeks at the beginning of every episode and I think that one's gonna have to be the one. I love that. That's super cool. Natalie, this is amazing. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Natalie Cunningham (16:57)
Nice.
gosh, LinkedIn. I am working on being there more often and putting more content out. I'm slightly inconsistent as I think many of us are, but please connect with me, follow me, send me a DM anytime on LinkedIn.
Benjamin Ard (17:17)
Love it for everyone listening. Simply scroll down to the show notes. It doesn't matter what platform you're on. We will have Natalie's LinkedIn profile right there. Click on the link, connect with Natalie. Say you came from the show, say hello. That'll be great. Great way to connect Natalie again. Thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really do appreciate it.
Natalie Cunningham (17:37)
Thanks for having me, I love this topic.
