In the past 6 weeks, I’ve seen so many amazing folks get laid off, it’s soul crushing, to say the least. It’s a raw, brutal reflection of how fragile our professional lives have become, particularly because of AI slop, companies playing God, and our own doomed impostor syndrome that’s been standing in the way of our potential.

This post is to share how I’ve been processing my lay off, navigating finances, and planning ahead without jumping into job portals and applying to a 1000 companies all at once and driving myself crazy.

So, I got laid off 6 weeks ago, as part of a “company restructure” on a Friday evening, 7pm, right when I thought….one last call for the week and I’m free.

Little did I know, I was about to get “free” for a weirdly long time.

My husband was out walking Joey (our dog, if you’re new here), so of course he wasn’t around for it, and there’s something almost cruel about that kind of timing, the way something soul crushing happens to you while the one person you need most is somewhere in a park with a leash in his hand with a riled up pup playing fetch, completely unaware.

I texted him three words. I got laid off. Then I put the phone face-down on my work desk and just .... sat there .... staring literally into the ceiling, thinking, okay. what just happened.

He hadn’t checked his phone once, the entire walk. Not a glance, nothing, so when he finally walked back in, Joey came in first, riled up in the way Joey gets after a good walk, tail going a mile a minute, that dumb, happy energy that has no idea anything in the world could possibly be wrong.

I just stood there and asked him, did you check your phone?

He pulled it out right there in the doorway, still holding the leash, read it, and then he just... stood there next to Joey and didn’t say anything.

Not one word. For a long minute it was just him, the dog, and the sound of absolutely nothing.

In lieu of not reliving that moment again, I’m going to spare you the details, but if there’s anything I’ve learned about layoffs is this:

It’s NEVER about you. NEVER.

If I could, I’d emblazon this across my fucking forehead.

Oh, also, stop thinking you’re layoff proofed just because you’re doing everything by the book.

Managing upwards, being visible to stakeholders, burning the “midnight oil”, being a high performer, taking on the job of 5 colleagues whose roles were never backfilled, getting your body inflammation up in flames by being in fight or flight for years.…yeah none of that crap actually protects you from getting laid off.

All it does is keep you in a “scarcity” mindset.

Now, bear with me for a minute before you think this is turning into a “motivational” post that talks about some woo woo mindset.

In the past 6 weeks, I’ve thought of every single career path I can take on from here. I’ve been a marketer in tech for 8 years, I’m in the awkward space of “too experienced for beginner roles, and too inexperienced for senior roles”, with far and few job openings that truly align with my life goals.

In an effort to walk you through the amazonian jungle thoughts in my head, think of two paths you can take after being laid off.

Path one: apply to everything, tell everyone

The first instinct, almost immediately, was to go loud. Message every person I’ve ever worked with. Post the open-to-work thing. Apply to a 100 postings in a weekend and treat every rejection like data instead of a small paper cut to the ego, one after another after another until you’re numb to it, or at least until you can perform numbness convincingly.

I know this instinct so well because it’s the one the internet insists you should have.

Hustle through it. Turn the layoff into content within 48 hours, wrap a bow on your own bad week and call it a personal brand moment. Prove, loudly and publicly, that you’re fine — better than fine, thriving, look at me gooooo.

I’m an optimist, genuinely. But I’ve also watched this job market long enough to be a realist about it.

Go back to 2008. Come forward to now. There has never been a real stretch where it tilted toward the employee. It has always been the company deciding what “we appreciate your service” means, and you and I are just rearranging our whole lives around it and calling it resilience because the other word for it is too honest.

So I looked at path one, the 100 applications, the mass messages, the performance of “Being A-okay”, and some older, more tired part of me said, NO, not this time.

Path two: sit with it, literally.

If I’m being honest with you right now, the second instinct came in almost the same night, and it scared me more than the first one, it really did, because there’s no applause waiting on the other side of it.

Nobody hearts a post that says “I did nothing today except sit with how I feel. “

I already knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to spend my life with my body stuck in fight-or-flight, jaw tight, stomach in knots, massive nerve inflammation that creeps in when you never really let yourself switch off.

I didn’t want to wreck my nervous system trying to prove something to a job title. So I just sat. Actually sat. Coffee going cold next to me, doing nothing on purpose, and somehow that nothing felt more radical than anything I’d actually done in years. (Yeah, kinda ridiculous, I know. Doing nothing shouldn’t feel like an act of rebellion or something so new and yet it did.)

I got lucky in one very specific way here. I’ve always been a saver. Not to humblebrag, just a fact, that being mindful with money for years is the only reason I had room to breathe instead of panicking into the first hundred listings I saw. That savings account bought me time, and time was the one thing door one was never going to give me.

And in that stolen time I made myself ask a question I genuinely hate.

Where do I see myself in five years?

I hate it because it’s usually asked at the scale of bank accounts and job titles, and that’s never been how I actually think. So I shrunk it down right till I could envision a day in the life of 5-year-from-now-Aarushi. I asked myself stupidly simple questions:

• what do my evenings look like, five years from now?

• what does dinner actually feel like, rushed or not?

• does my morning start with dread, or with a normal basic morning routine that’s inflammation free?

• do I still feel the Sunday evening dread before mondays even start?

• am I able to keep promises to my husband?

• if my family needed me, do i have the time and resources for it?

• can I take time off without losing sleep and constantly checking on the latest GTM campaign’s numbers like my life depended on it?

• do i have the money to support my family?

• how much money would i need for “worst case scenarios”?

• how long can i continue trading it all for a “job”?

I realize this all might sound like i’m sitting on my privileged horse disconnected from the economy of the world, but trust me, it’s important to have this conversation with yourself and your family before your company MAKES you.

Once I had all these questions, I worked backward from there. Not what I want to have, but what the good version actually feels like in the body, and then what I could start doing today to get a teensy bit closer to it.

And not just the five-year question either. I also looked, properly, at what I’m historically good at, separate from any job title I’ve ever held.

Not just writing enablement documents, not just the tasks on a job description, but the actual instincts underneath them: building a positioning and messaging strategy that makes a product make sense to a stranger, being the bridge between product and marketing, understanding a platform’s algorithm, its rhythm, its unspoken rules, and knowing how to move inside them without losing myself in the process.

Caring, genuinely, embarrassingly, about the craft itself, and being willing to advocate for that care in rooms where nobody else thought it mattered.

So if I had to hand you a formula for it, it’d look something like this, not a plan exactly, more like a set of questions to sit with before a company forces the sitting on you:

1. Ask the five-year question, small and specific, not “how much money” but “what does a Tuesday actually feel like.”

2. Audit your historical skills, not your job title. What have you always naturally been the bridge for, even in roles that never named it?

3. Look at where you’ve always shown up early, even inconsistently, even without a plan? what’s something you naturally gravitate towards?

4. Name your actual translation skill, the thing you turn into something else for other people (product into story, chaos into structure, a platform into a following).

5. Test the smallest, lowest-stakes version of it before you owe anyone an answer about what it “means.”

Answering these will be like holding up a mirror infront of yourself. For example, one answer showed up consistently for me, and it embarrassed me a little.

You see, I’ve built a LinkedIn following of 34,000 people over 6-7 years, posting sparingly, whenever the mood struck, never on any real schedule. I had a Substack back in 2023 too (1k followers in six months, before most people even knew what Substack was).

I was early. Genuinely early. And I let it go quiet….I just let it go..

If I’m being fully honest, this isn’t new. I tried my hand at fashion blogging on Instagram back in 2015 (if you can believe that) getting thousands of likes completely organically. Cringe, looking back at it now, the aesthetic alone could get me cancelled. But I was early there too.

I seem to always be early to a platform and consistently bad at staying on it. And maybe that’s its own kind of answer, that I know how to connect with people because I actually, genuinely care, that I believe in community the way some people believe in astrology, that there’s some version of me that’s a creator at heart.

I’m not promising you that’s what this becomes. I’m just noticing it for the first time and sharing it transparently.

As for my current source of income, I’ve started working with tech companies as a product marketer consultant. It’s a nice way to continue doing the work I love, without the baggage of a full-time job. I get to walk into a project, do the thing I’m good at, and walk back out before it has the chance to swallow my nights again. It’s not stable in the way a paycheck twice a month is stable, but it’s a trade off I am MUCH happier with.

Through it all, my husband continues to be my rock and I hope you’ve got people to lean on too..

My husband and I are, right now, smack in the middle of building our first house. We’re supposed to move in October. There are bills piling up the way bills do when you’re building something from the ground and paying for two lives at once, the one you’re in and the one you’re moving into.

And through all six weeks of this, he has been a rock. An actual, unmovable rock.

I wish I could say we’re new to this. We are not. He was laid off once before, in 2023, a year after we got married, a week after we came home from a month-long workation in the Himalayas with Joey, still sun-dazed and in love with our life.

That was also the exact moment AI started rising everywhere, when every brand suddenly convinced itself that a chatbot could do what a writer does, and I watched client after client disappear from my roster like chairs being pulled out mid-sentence. One week after his layoff, I lost my biggest client too.

Both of us, gutted in the same 7 days.

What we did next was not healthy, and I can say that now with some distance. We overgave. We turned ourselves inside out trying to layoff-proof our own bodies, working until 2am most nights, taking on so much responsibility for every project that I developed actual gut issues from it, real, physical, doctor-appointment gut issues, because some part of us had convinced ourselves that if we just did everything by the book, worked hard enough, cared enough, we’d be untouchable. We were not untouchable. Nobody is.

So when round two came, this time, we already had the scar tissue from round one, and I think that’s the only reason he handled it the way he did. He didn’t spiral. Not once. He was calm in a way that had nothing to do with denial… he was genuinely calm, genuinely almost happy, like some part of him knew my potential before I could realize it on my own.

He never once seemed scared about the money, even with the house, even with October bearing down on us. He just kept saying, rest. And it’s been six Fridays now, and he has not asked me once why I haven’t been applying to jobs, why I haven’t been doing outreach for new clients, why I’ve mostly just been sitting with myself in the quiet of our almost-finished house. He hasn’t expected a single thing more from me than what I’ve had to give.

All I feel from him is waves of steadiness, the whole way through.

I don’t have a clean bow to tie this up with. I’m not fully on the other side of it, not yet.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m doubling down on any of it now, consulting or being a creator, or that I’ve got a plan, a schedule, a content calendar. I don’t.

I’m writing this because I wanted to, tonight, with no goal attached to it other than getting it out of my chest and onto a page.

If it turns into more, it turns into more. If it doesn’t, I still needed to write it.

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Now let’s dive into today’s edition:

The fundamentals of marketing remain the same regardless of company size, except for few notable differences like quantity of output, impact driven by them, level of audacious OKRs, budget flexibility, and the breadth of the tech stack.

But some marketing teams clearly drive more impact than others, even when they’re significantly smaller in size.

Why and how?

When it comes to driving impact, your team size matters only so much, instead how it functions and what it prioritizes is what influences the results most.

The mindset shift from “are we using enough channels?” to “are we using our existing channels to their fullest potential?” is where it gets tricky. You could apply this to literally anything in marketing, for example,:

• instead of wondering “did we drive enough MQLs?” to “what was the ratio of MQL/SQL conversion?”,

• instead of planning “ten top of funnel blogs that drive zero MQLs”, shifting your focus on “five solid bottom funnel content pieces that drive significant MQLs.”

This is easier said than done. As a marketer, you’ll get tons of pushback from different stakeholders when you try to shift gears because you’ll always leave something at the table they “thought” was important. And that important element would change every quarter, if not faster.

Constantly having to re-iterate or “optimize” your marketing strategy is a failproof way to fail. Start with your audience at the core and work your way out to stakeholders.

1. Goals: Why does it matter?

Marketers are often guilty of doing busywork instead of impact-focused work that really moves the needle for the company goals. Typically this happens because:

• marketing is often treated more agile than it should be,

• marketing is pulled in different directions last minute,

• there’s lack of visibility and misalignment between marketing and other teams.

Here are some deeper explanations of why most marketers fail to meet their goals often:

1. Frequent Shifts in Strategy and Direction: Marketing often takes the worst hit due to strategic changes in a company. You put months of hard work on your marketing strategy, only for it to be reworked upon the next quarter.

2. Lack of Visibility and Alignment Between Teams: Marketers are often siloed from other teams, leading to them doing unproductive busywork. For example, the way you research, create and distribute case studies varies depending on the goal — is it going to be a sales enablement asset or is it more of a proof of your product? In either scenario, you need to drill down on the goal of your case studies and work with the dedicated team to produce an output that aligns with their goals as well.

3. Overemphasis on Activity Metrics vs. Impact Metrics: Campaigns often get pulled down due to misalignment around audience preferences or the need for more fine-tuning in the strategy before the tactical part. This happens because marketers are often rushed to drive activity metrics, leaving impact-focused work on the back burner, resulting in the executive team taking down the entire campaign.

As a rule of thumb, I always set goals that directly tie up with the overall company’s goals. This helps me shift focus to impact oriented goals over activity goals where I would’ve done things to check boxes for the sake of it. Once I have my big level goals set in, I set up OKRs that break down my bigger goal into smaller metrics.

Having audacious OKRs challenges my team while remaining realistic and achievable. Think of OKRs like a compass—they should point you toward big wins while keeping your team aligned and motivated.

Example: Grow MQLs from SEO content by 40% in Q2; Achieve a 20% increase in the conversion rate from social media to product trials in Q3; Increase SQOs from x% to y%; Increase product demo request by x% and use case studies to close $ y amount of ticket size deals.

2. Audience: Who is it for?

Start with your audience at the core and work your way out to other things like channels, content assets, etc. By keeping your audience at the core of everything you do in marketing, you’ll create content and deliver it in a way your audience needs it.

Instead of saying we’ll write blogs for our “users”, narrow it down to specifics.

Example: We’ll write bottom of funnel blogs focusing on our X product for Stage 4 buyer (someone who’s considering using your tool). We’ll cover the specific pain points and objections of Stage 4 buyers to ensure our content resonates and delivers on the readers’ expectations.

When you do the opposite (work your way inward from channels to content) you tie your strategy to external factors that are limiting such as rented platforms (social media) instead of taking control over it with your content. Sure, it’s tempting to prioritize trendy platforms or the latest distribution channels. But if your audience isn't there, your efforts will most likely fall flat. By understanding your audience's preferences and habits, you can better identify what type of content resonates most with them.

Example: If your audience prefers long-form, in-depth content, a podcast or blog series might be the best approach instead of focusing on bite-sized social media posts.

3. Channels: Where will we distribute it?

Most content never sees the light of another platform. If it’s a blog, it stays right there — on the blog. You need to get the most mileage out of your content. This will extend the lifecycle of that content piece, reaching new audiences without starting from scratch every time. Plus, distributing content on various channels helps you reach new audience segments who might not interact with your primary content format.

Does this mean you need to experiment on 4-5 platforms, all at once? No.

Identify the channels your customers spend their most time on — your PMM could help conduct this research. Once you’ve jotted down the top three platforms, consider factors like message type, resources required, and budget to select the most important ones.

Then, you need to find your channel/message fit. It is the alignment between the messaging of your content and the distribution channel where it will be most effective. It's about crafting the right message for each platform and delivering it in a way that resonates best with the specific audience on that channel.

This could also influence the content format you create for that specific platform.

Example: Turn an industry trends report in a series of blogs covering sub-sections of the report and expand on them. Turn it into a LinkedIn carousel for both the company page and your team to share. Share the most interesting highlights from the report in your newsletter with a CTA to engage with the original report or specific blogs.

4. Content: What’s the look and feel of it?

Content deserves a whole another edition and I plan to send one in the upcoming weeks, but for the sake of this one, just note this: When you create content aligning with your audiences’ pain points and objections, you bridge the positioning gap and clearly establish your product in their day-to-day ops.

Right from the structure and design of your content to the copy within it — every single element works together to create a final content asset that engages with your reader.

Most marketing teams have a good mix of product, content, growth, and video folks, but the one I constantly see being hired last or perpetually being on contract is design. Till a dedicated design person is hired in-house, teams either self-design in Canva or wait for weeks/months at end to get one decent design from slow-moving and expensive agencies/contractors.

Content design matters just as much as the content quality. Strategic, on-brand, engaging creative helps create connections that fuel brand affinity and awareness. It’s what cuts the noise for buyers in a world full of blatant marketing and advertising campaigns. From the font you use to the illustrations in your reports, every single creative element helps shape the perception of your brand in a buyer’s mind.

Make sure you have catchy, engaging visuals for your content assets — be it blog banners, report templates, case study web pages, or landing pages in general. Don’t let bad visuals impact the ROI of a good content asset.

🔥 SHOUTOUT : Superside creates some of the most interesting and engaging visuals. Check them out for your visual needs (not sponsored/affiliated).

5. Growth levers: How will it drive better impact?

Growth levers are high-impact initiatives that , when prioritized, can move the needle and drive tangible results that support your overall marketing goals. These are typically based on analytics and data, and are designed to identify opps for growth and then double down on them.

Instead of viewing them as foundational strategies like your content roadmap, or email nurture campaigns, think of growth levers as mini-projects that give you the space to experiment. Use them to fill in gaps to improve funnel conversion, otpimize handoff from marketing to product/sales, increase prices for existing customers, create upsell opps, optimize prices, or find more good-fit customers.

Look for opps to iron out the gray areas such as product onboarding. If you’re a one-person or small marketing team, chances are you’ll need to support growth for onboarding too until your execs hire an onboarding specialist. Collaborate with your product teams to create a more structured onboarding process with educational pop-ups, email nudges, and a comprehensive help center, all guiding users through key features.

Example: Create upsell campaigns for highly engaged customers. Or, create more detailed documentation to help customers onboard themselves. Or, add more variables to pricing to drive up ACV for heavy-usage customers.

6. Operations: How will you manage it?

Great campaigns often fizzle due to poor management. Establish processes and use project management tools to keep everything on track. Hire marketers who can think strategically but aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty executing campaigns.

Example: Create repositories for hard-earned information that needs to be referred often (like customer quotes, internal SME insights) so they’re used multiple times and justify the time and effort invested.

Automate tasks like creating 3 Google Docs in a dedicated GDrive folder once a card is created in Asana for a new blog. Automatically tag the writer, SMEs, and final approvers in all the sub-issues once an action/trigger is complete.

7. Stakeholders: Who cares about what and who owns what?

It’s wayy easier to get approval on projects when you have buy-in from stakeholders. For this, you need to truly understand what matters to who. If your CMO cares about sales enablement, figure out how your project could possibly impact sales and write it down in your project brief. If your CEO cares about expanding to a new target audience, bridge the gap between how your project would help accelerate awareness in the new niche category.

See what I did there? Can you connect sales enablement and awareness now? Great!

Make sure you have buy-in from different stakeholders before you actually start doing the heavy work. Create a project brief that entails all the important details stakeholders need to know and can refer to in the future for context.

Have a “Captain” for every single project who are essentially the project owner and thus, responsible for ensuring it stays on track, aligns with the overall company goals, and doesn’t hit roadblocks. Assign a “Co-pilot” on every project who would assist during the project — this could be a senior stakeholder within the org who could help you get buy-in or a junior level marketer to support different areas of the project like partnering with other brands/running PR campaigns while you focus on the core project.

Example: Captain: Aarushi; Co-Pilot: James, contributors: Claire and Eddy, Reviewers: Daniel and Kylie, Design: Stephen, Distribution: Aarushi and Claire

🧠 More from The Content Playbook

• My next edition will reach your inbox NEXT WEEK. To make sure, you don’t miss out, Subscribe.

• Want to learn the difference between product-led mktg and sales-led mktg? Read my previous week’s edition here.

• Want to build a unified dashboard for your marketing content for better visibility and cross-functional team usability? Read my previous edition here.

• Want to build a repeatable process for your case studies? I laid out my entire framework here.

• Newsletter sponsorships: If you’re looking to reach 1,000+ marketers from leading companies and startups, let’s chat. Email me at aarushi@thecontentplaybook.in

Next Week: A seven-part marketing series

We’re starting a 7-part series on how to get your marketing team to drive more impact next week. Each edition will be filled with reusable templates, checklists, and docs you can use in your org.

See you next week! Until then, have a great and fulfilling week 🙏

👋 Hey, Aarushi here! Welcome to this week’s ✨free edition✨ of my newsletter. Each week I share practical frameworks, processes, mindset shifts, and anything else needed to become a better marketer. Join 800+ marketers from companies like Kalviyo, Uscreen, OpenPhone, Recart (and many more) and get a weekly in-depth essay around modern marketing topics.

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I only share marketing content — be it on LinkedIn or this newsletter. Today, I want to share something deeply personal that I believe would help you get to know me slightly better. So, if you’re new here and only signed up for marketing content, feel free to browse my previous editions, or come back the next week.

For the rest of you lot, welcome to this incredibly humbling, emotional, and exciting edition.

You see, I’ve never shared my full story anywhere — not on a podcast, on a LinkedIn post, or now that I think about it, even with a friend. I’ve always told it in bits and pieces, but I’ve left the nerdy (and most important) parts out for most of it.

I want to change that. I feel there’s a lot of noise on LinkedIn and if someone were to plan a roadmap for their career, they’d need more than a carousel. Maybe this edition will help you answer questions that you’ve had for the longest time.

With the never-ending cycle of layoffs in the name of “restructuring” or a new CEO creating a “better strategy” by laying off thousands with a crappy email, I believe this topic will resonate with a lot of you and maybe figure out the next step for you.

Transition from full-time job to freelancing

If you didn’t know already, I’m a software engineer with an Honors degree. I got a job straight out of college — packed my bags, moved to a different state, and joined a company. Got a two-month training and then joined an incredibly huge client project.

While I was figuring out “adulting” — what to eat, how to structure my day, and how to spend and save money, I quickly realized my 9-5 wouldn’t cut it. Like any 20 year old beaming with aspirations, dreams, and hope, I assumed the harder I’d work at my 9-5, the more I’d earn (young Aarushi clearly had a lot to learn).

Jobs don’t work that way — you don’t earn more simply because you work harder or longer. You earn more when you create a bigger impact. That’s why, typically, executives, senior leadership, and managers make more. They have more experience, more nuanced insights into a company’s functioning, goals, and vision. They’re able to connect the dots that 20 year old Aarushi couldn’t connect (not that I was supposed to do that either).

I was an Automation Quality Analyst who used to write scripts and create automation environments for repeated tests.

After 4 months working in my first ever full-time job, I’d figured out the knick knacks of “time management.” Suddenly, I had more time than usual — my 5-9 after office hours felt more relaxing and my weekends were completely mine.

I started making friends in office, listening to their stories about how people they knew had quit their jobs to build a tech startup or a business. And I immediately knew I wanted to build something of my own.

But I wasn’t in a position to quit my job on a whim and take my chances with a startup or a business because I had too many responsibilities and family members counting on my job.

After hundreds of conversations with people around me and the internet lords, I discovered “freelancing”.

I had met incredibly talented and skilled folks at my office who didn’t pursue freelancing because it didn’t seem safe enough to take a bet on with their entire careers.

But I was a risk taker. From investing my salary straight in equity and highly volatile funds without really knowing finance, to introspecting how I wanted to build my life, what I genuinely wanted to do after 10 years, I was willing to take a bet. A safe one.

I started freelancing in July 2018 and within two months I saved up enough to buy myself a new laptop. The first thing I did after buying a laptop? Bought a crappy domain thinking this would be my road to my first million.

I continued freelancing for the next couple months working on content writing projects from Upwork, Freelancer.com, and facebook groups. It wasn’t as easy to get good paying projects and work with solid companies as it is today (thanks to LinkedIn, Twitter, and the hundreds of Slack communities we’re all a part of now).

The best part was, I consistently made twice my salary each month from freelancing. But I never thought of letting go of my job’s safety net until one day.

It was 15th November, 2018 (a day after my 21st birthday) and I emailed my manager requesting for a leave because I had a throbbing headache and my muscles felt as weak as water. I couldn’t open my eyes and felt like my heart would close up on itself.

My manager denied the request stating that as it was festival season and a lot of folks on the team had pre-planned their leaves, so I wasn’t allowed to take one. Like I needed to plan ahead for my body’s sickness.

I took a shower, went to the office, and turns out, my manager was on leave because of a “personal errand” she had to run. All those who showed up did their work, took long strolls around the “chai” stall, and left early. I did too. But the entire day I felt a sense of uneasiness and discomfort, not just from being physically sick but emotionally distrubed.

I wondered, “Would I ever get any control or flexibility in my life while I work in this project at this company?”

And while the straightforward answer would be switching jobs, the fact is it isn’t as easy or quick as it seems. You don’t apply to ten jobs, get an interview, and make the move (unless you’re lucky).

After that day, I started despising my job, my manager and hit an existential crisis. I wondered about my purpose, dreams, and life every single minute. Fast forward to 28th Nov, 2018, I resigned.

I called my mum, told her how much I’d saved up from my freelancing, and said I’m giving myself an year till I figure it out. If I don’t, I’d get back to studies, get my Master’s degree, and look for a job.

On 28th Dec, 2018, I submitted my ID card, signed all documents, and walked out of that building for the last time ever. As they say, people don’t quit bad jobs, they quit bad managers. I quit mine, for the better :)

Questions to ask yourself in a full-time job:

1. Am I achieving my personal and career growth goals in this role?

2. Does my job offer me the work-life balance I need?

3. Am I satisfied with the level of job security and benefits (health insurance, retirement plans, etc.) provided?

4. Do I feel valued and recognized for my contributions?

5. Is there a clear path for advancement or promotion within my current company?

6. Am I able to make a significant impact through my work?

7. Do I have the opportunity to learn new skills and challenge myself?

8. How does my current job align with my long-term career aspirations?

9. Am I financially compensated in accordance with my contribution and industry standards?

10. Do I have a healthy work culture and supportive colleagues/managers?

Building my freelancing buisness; going global, earning $12k monthly, and being happy

I’ve been freelancing since 2018 and a LOT has changed in the past few years, especially after 2020 (when Covid hit).

I started from Upwork and Fiverr, got my “big break” with a client I found on Fiverr and realized I was undercharging my services for over 18 months (still making 2.5X of my salary).

March 2020 came with an indefinite lockdown and people started experimenting — some with TikTok dances, others with their hobbies which they successfully monetized over the next few months, and the rest doubled down on being a geek like me.

I discovered marketers who were actively sharing their learnings, experiments, and mistakes on Linkedin.

With some decent posting, I was driving 8-10 inbound leads every month from LinkedIn. The only problem or maybe my strength was, I never chased quantity. I was saying NO more than yes to inbound leads. I was mentally filtering them out based on specific criteria I had set for my buisness. I later formalized this checklist.

I truly encompassed the “Do more with less” idea. I didn’t have an agency or 15 clients that I was outsourcing to other freelancers. I had 4-5 solid retainers that consistently helped me grow my MRR without being burnt out.

My goal with freelancing has never been to earn as much as I possibly can. If that was the goal, I wouldn’t bet my entire life on a career that’s highly dependent on ad-hoc projects and the client’s budget. I would rather do my Master’s, get a good job with a great compensation package, or build my own tech product.

My goal with freelancing was to have flexibility and control over how I spent every single day of my life.

After all, if you don’t reap the benefits of your career path, what’s the point of choosing it altogether?

I wanted to live the “freelancing life”. So when I transitioned from my job to freelancing, I started traveling more, working as a digitial nomad, and developed a lot of hobbies over time (baking, cooking, gardening, and filmmaking).

I didn’t want to be bogged down with a timeline (work 8 hours every single day). Some days, I worked 4 hours, and others, I worked 12 hours. I shaped my entire life (not just profession) by truly embracing the freelance life.

Questions to ask yourself as a freelancer:

1. Am I able to maintain a steady flow of projects to ensure financial stability?

2. Do I have a clear niche or specialization that sets me apart from competitors?

3. Am I effectively managing my time between project work, client acquisition, and self-improvement?

4. Have I established a sustainable pricing model that reflects the value of my work?

5. How well am I balancing multiple client demands without compromising on quality?

6. Am I investing enough in marketing myself and networking to maintain/increase visibility?

7. Do I have a solid contract and invoicing system in place to protect my business interests?

8. What strategies do I have in place for periods of low work volume?

9. Am I continuously learning and updating my skills to stay relevant in my field?

10. How do I handle work-life balance, and am I taking enough time for personal well-being?

Consulting

As I upskilled myself, I started adding new services to my freelance proposals as add-ons.

Think email marketing — along with writing blog posts, I’d also help clients clean up their email list, segment it into different buckets based on their criteria, and create a content calendar or an email template their in-house writers could follow.

Soon, I was selling SEO, email marketing, design, research reports, and social media marketing as add-ons. I had built up frameworks, mastered tools, and driven results for my clients.

Like most things in life, you only realize what you’re doing wrong when an external source shows you that clearly. Someone close to me once asked, “Are these really add-ons or are they full-fledged jobs you’re trying to cram into your freelance proposals?”

Light bulb moment.

I took a step back, requested for some time-off for a month from all my clients, and restructured my entire business. In the meantime, I also consulted some incredible marketers for their advice and asked if I was underselling my skills?

In those 30 days, I rigorosouly trimmed down the fat of my business and kept the meaty part. That meant, scaling up from just being a freelance writer to a content strategy consultant. Eliminating distractions like research reports, design, email marketing, and social media.

And with a proven track record of actually building up content strategies and driving results from them, I continued scaling my business.

The truth is, it’s easy to change your LinkedIn bio to say whatever you want. You could add the word CEO and list your freelancing business in the Work experience section. Or you could add a Sr. content marketer when you’ve only worked as a marketer for two years.

But when you’re selling your services, you’ll run into problems when there won’t be enough validation of your skills on paper. Buyers are sharper, selective, and smarter than ever. Be it a company buying your services on ad-hoc basis, or you buying a new monitor for your work station, every single one of us has evolved professionally to a stage where we’ve become incredibly great researchers. And if someone digs deep enough about you, they should be convinced of your skills and impact.

I bought plenty of courses, listened to podcasts at least 4 hours every single day for 30 days straight, and spoke to a lot of experienced marketers to figure out the WHY and HOW of making the transition from being a writer to a marketer.

It’s been a growth-driven, balanced journey of 7 years. Every single day, I wake up loving what I do for work, looking forward to the interesting campaings my team has planned for, and feeling satisfied thinking of the impact I’m creating.

Questions to ask yourself as a consultant:

1. Do I have a deep enough understanding of my field to provide high-value advice?

2. Am I effectively communicating my expertise and the ROI of my services to potential clients?

3. Have I built a strong professional network that can lead to referrals and new opportunities?

4. Do I have a clear method for measuring the impact of my consultancy work?

5. How do I differentiate my consultancy services from competitors?

6. Am I up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations in my industry?

7. What is my strategy for long-term client relationship management and retention?

8. Do I have testimonials or case studies to prove my past success and attract new clients?

9. How am I managing the administrative and business aspects of my consultancy practice?

10. Am I setting aside time for my own professional development and learning?

Takeaways from my career as a marketer

• Value Creation Over Hard Work: In any job, earning potential increases not just with hard work but by creating a bigger impact and adding value.

• Freelancing Offers Flexibility and Growth: Freelancing can provide a significant increase in income and personal growth opportunities, alongside the flexibility to manage your own schedule.

• Building a Personal Brand: Using platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Slack communities for networking and visibility can greatly enhance freelancing opportunities.

• Prioritizing Quality Over Quantity: Focusing on a few solid clients or projects can lead to a more sustainable and less burnt-out freelancing career.

• Transition to Consulting: As skills and experience grow, transitioning from freelancing to consulting can be a natural progression, allowing for specialization and potentially higher earnings.

• Continuous Learning and Upskilling: Investing in self-improvement through courses, podcasts, and mentorship is crucial for career growth and transition.

• Authenticity and Validation are Key: In consulting or freelancing, being genuine about your skills and having a proven track record are important for attracting clients.

• Impact and Satisfaction: Finding fulfillment in your work and making a positive impact should be the ultimate goal, regardless of the career path.

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Disclaimer: This edition is a little different than my previous ones. It starts with a personal story, but if you’d like to get straight to the meaty part, scroll away to the next section :)

Have you ever hesitated to ask a question because it seemed too silly or small?

I have and sometimes I still do. And it’s okay.

If you work in marketing, you already know we coin new terms like A1. Product-led, content-led, customer-centric, product-centric, product-feature fit, customer-content fit, people-first, content-first…..the list goes on.

Half of these terms or frameworks are good ol’ marketing stuff gift-wrapped in new, shiny wrapping papers so they appear new. But really, they aren’t.

For the longest time, I had no clue what product-led and sales-led marketing meant — sure, I knew the definition and the regurgitated versions you find online. But if someone had asked 2018 Aarushi what are the core, day-to-day ops differences, I wouldn’t have been able to lay it out in its true form.

After 7 years in marketing, working with multiple companies (from early stage $1M ARR to $4B enterprises), across multiple team sizes (from one person to 120+ team members), I’ve understood not just the differences, but lived through them.

In today’s edition, I want you to understand the differences between product-led and sales-led marketing. This could help you shape your entire career, define the trajectory you want to stride on and give you a better sense of where your skillsets would bring most value for yourself and the companies you work for.

Shared goals of product-led and sales-led marketing

Both product-led and sales-led marketing share overarching goals such as driving revenue growth, enhancing customer satisfaction and retention, and maximizing profitability.

But they have significant differences as you narrow down to the individual roles, contributions, skill sets required, impact, and day-to-day ops of the marketing team.

Think of waterfall and Agile in engineering for instance. Both software methodologies work towards achieving similar results, but there’s a day and night difference in how they achieve those similar results.

Right from how the team is structured (flat or vertical), the number of departments, internal stakeholders, and review processes, every little to large detail varies.

Differences between Product-led and Sales-led Marketing

1. PLM focuses on customer-centric content first, then product knowledge

In sales-led marketing, content tends to be more company-centric, highlighting the company's awards, funding rounds, services, and brand image. The focus is on showcasing the company's offerings in the best possible light primarily via numbers.

At a creative level, sales-led marketing teams often create content that feels more transactional.

Instead of customer stories, they focus on the numbers driven by their product because it’s one of the top priorities/first objections of their champion buyers.

Instead of painting their customers as the HERO, the product itself is spotlighted as the hero.

Instead of showcasing both the hard-core and soft-serve benefits of their product(s), sales-led teams tend to focus only on hard-core benefits like how well it integrates with their customers’ existing tool stack or how can the tool drive down CAC/increase LTV/increase ROI in a specific period.

While this may bug the more creative marketers out there, you’ve got to realize it’s what their customers need in order to build affinity and trust. This by no means implies that sales-led marketing teams aren’t creative, rather they follow a specific framework that serves their customers, especially the champion buyers with the best knowledge and know-how about their product and company as a whole.

In addition, given that sales-led companies are heavily dependent on their sales executives and AOV can range up to $32K deals per enterprise customer, content is not the only growth lever SLG companies have. It’s simply a gateway to a more advanced, intricate, and detailed buying journey.

In contrast, product-led marketing focuses on the customers’ needs and takes them on a virtual learning journey where they can find answers to their most pressing pain points first-hand. Product-led content does an incredible job of objection handling; it helps customers identify their must-haves and nice-to-haves clearly, aiding their decision-making process.

Since the focus is on creating a remarkable customer experience through content, you can note viral growths across PLG companies’ lifespans. Take Notion for example.

In essence, content is the biggest growth lever PLG companies have. Right from their owned channels aka website, newsletter, or podcast to in-app content aka help docs, internal directional cues, welcome messages, etc users can read and take action merely by reading their content, without the need to speak to a support executive every time they run into an issue.

2. PLM focuses on empowering self-service customers

Sales-led marketing designs a sales-first approach for the internal team where they can provide one-on-one assistance to guide the sales-qualified lead through every stage of their journey.

Given the complex nature of most sales-led companies’ products and offerings, their customers can only do so much in a self-serve model without one-on-one guidance. Count the additional pricing of customer support, you’ll realize self-service customers in SLG models need to pay explicitly to get help around the product (at least in most cases).

Product-led marketing designs a more hands-on approach for the user by helping them experience and learn about the product themselves, while constantly supporting them throughout their journey.

Unlike sales-led companies where customer support comes at a cost, product-led companies integrate customer support across the spectrum for all their customers, bringing self-serve customers nearly equivalent to their highest-paying customers.

To do this, marketing teams work closely with other teams including product, sales, and success to ensure self-service customers have everything they need to get started and achieve their goals. From how to set up their account to perform a more complex task using specific features.

Customers get free trials or even a freemium model so they can experience the perceived value first-hand. This immediately widens the top-of-funnel acquisition and helps increase product-qualified leads who have a strong affinity towards the brand, higher chances of paid conversion, and word of mouth.

Instead of hand-holding and constant intervention, product-led marketing aims to empower users with more autonomy. This self-service paradigm not only streamlines operations but also instills a sense of empowerment within the user base, paving the way for enhanced user satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Lifecycle marketing nurtures and retains customers, not just VIP events

Sales-Led Marketing prioritizes customer retention through different tactics. This could include organizing VIP events or exclusive networking opportunities for existing customers, reinforcing their sense of belonging and appreciation within the brand community.

So, there’s intense focus on hosting/inviting VIP events in sales-led marketing. In fact, it’s counted as an individual marketing channel and calculated like you’d calculate the budget/resources/ROI for email marketing or social media marketing.

The team structure in sales-led marketing teams also reflects the strong presence of VIP events as a separate channel needing dedicated team members to support it (more on that in the next section).

The only catch; VIP events are more resource-intensive as compared to other online marketing channels. If done right, they’re incredibly valuable. But for growth-stage startups, especially with the PLG model, VIP events aren’t feasible in most scenarios.

Networking events, sure! Conferences, absolutely! But, tickets to F1 in Monaco or the Australia Open? I’m yet to see that in a PLG company.

That’s because when your product is the driving force behind your company’s success and you follow a PLG business model, you’re essentially catering to customers at en-masse. In simple words, it’s common to have 8,000+ customers in a PLG model as compared to 400+ high-value, enterprise clients in a sales-led model.

It’s an apples-to-orange comparison here.

So, when product-led marketing is at play, there’s an intense focus on nurturing and retaining customers through lifecycle marketing instead of just VIP events (if at all). Lifecycle marketing guides the customers along their journey, from activation to the stage where they’re using a product at its fullest potential.

Consider the example of a skincare brand. Through targeted email campaigns, personalized recommendations, and loyalty programs, the brand nurtures customers by providing relevant content, exclusive offers, and proactive support at each stage of their skincare journey. By focusing on building trust and delivering value over time, the brand fosters enduring relationships that transcend mere transactions.

A personal take: It’s 2024 and most companies have demand gen taking care of their existing customers, but lifecycle marketing is the next evolution and segmentation of demand gen.

4. Team structure charts are simple, but the range of skillsets is necessary

Sales-led marketing companies have a vertical team structure aka the pyramid-like, top-down management structure.

In such cases, leadership hierarchy is well-defined, with top executives overseeing middle managers who, in turn, manage regular employees. Decision-making typically flows from the top down, while approval processes move from the bottom up.

Top-level management establishes directives regarding sales, marketing, and customer service, which are then relayed to middle management. Middle managers delegate tasks to employees, ensuring alignment with established processes and objectives.

Completed work is then routed through middle and upper management for review and approval, maintaining a clear chain of command and accountability throughout the organization.

Contrarily, most product-led marketing teams have a flat aka a horizontal team structure.

A horizontal or flat team structure refers to an organizational setup where there are few or no hierarchical levels between employees, resulting in minimal layers of management. In this structure, authority and decision-making are decentralized, with teams organized around specific projects, tasks, or areas of expertise.

There is typically a greater emphasis on collaboration, autonomy, and shared responsibility among team members, promoting open communication, flexibility, and innovation within the organization.

Consider a hypothetical tech startup operating under a PLM framework. At first glance, the team structure chart may depict a basic hierarchy with roles such as product manager, UX designer, content strategist, and data analyst. However, within each of these roles lies a myriad of specialized skill sets and proficiencies necessary for executing the overarching marketing strategy.

For instance, the product manager not only oversees product development and roadmap but also requires proficiency in market research, user behavior analysis, and project management. Similarly, the UX designer must possess expertise in user interface design, usability testing, and human-computer interaction principles to create intuitive and user-friendly product experiences.

Furthermore, the content strategist must excel not only in content creation and storytelling but also in SEO optimization, content distribution strategies, and audience segmentation.

Here’s what a typical org chart for product-led versus sales-led marketing teams look like:

5. Higher flexibility and control in PLM; more room for marketers to pivot, experiment, and get buy-in

Right from making product their biggest sales asset, using content as a growth lever, to a flat team structure where marketers can experiment more, PLM teams are designed to have much higher flexibility and control than SLM teams.

This is primarily because getting buy-in in PLM teams is relatively faster, not easier. You still need to conduct extensive market research, create prototypes for new campaigns, collaborate cross-functionally to validate your ideas, and present a strong case for your strategies/tactics.

But the lack of a top down management structure makes this entire workflow significantly faster compared to sales led where every single idea needs to go through from the bottom up and approved by the top down.

In essence, while both Product-Led and Sales-Led Marketing strive for success, their paths diverge significantly, each bearing its unique set of principles and practices. By understanding these core differences, marketers can chart a course tailored to their objectives, values, and goals.

📚 More from The Content Playbook

• My next edition will reach your inbox NEXT WEEK. To make sure, you don’t miss out, Subscribe.

• Want to learn content distribution and the best AI tools to use? Read my previous week’s edition here.

• Want to build a unified dashboard for your marketing content for better visibility and cross-functional team usability? Read my previous edition here.

• Want to build a repeatable process for your case studies? I laid out my entire framework here.

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Next Week: Consulting, Freelancing, or Full-time job — Figuring out the best path for yourself

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Product-led content is great until you have:

• siloed teams that create disjointed customer experiences,

• inadequate use-case (not product) knowledge internally,

• accumulation of technical debt that interferes with content production,

Every product can be distilled into simple use cases or job(s)-to-be-done. And until your team can understand how each use case functions independently and collectively, you’re likely going to run into the issues mentioned above.

These challenges are not only an internal problem but directly translate to lower conversion and activation rates.

Having a single source of truth (SSOT), aka a use-case dashboard, that includes all of your product’s use cases along with use-case mapping, real-life examples from existing customers, potential workflows, and most importantly, how you can position your product for every single use case (and thus improve your conversion and activation rates) is important.

To help you flesh out this idea of a use-case dashboard, I put together some best practices, tools, and frameworks to get you started. You can take inspiration from the data shared below to create your marketing use-case dashboard, identify the highest-leverage lever(s) for conversion, and put more resources behind it.

1. Create your top-level messaging building blocks

Before you start creating a deck filled with your product’s different use cases, you should make sure your entire internal team gets your product’s messaging.

Even if your sales team is winning deals every quarter, you could make the time to win faster, align sales with marketing better, or align product with marketing better. This would directly impact your conversion rates across the spectrum — organic channels, paid ads, demand generation/creation, lifecycle marketing, and sales inbound & outbound calls.

The good news: There’s only one simple framework you need to adopt. Whether you’re smack dab in the middle of finding product-market fit and iterating your messaging frequently or have already nailed down your ICP and their pain points, this simple framework can be applied easily for product-led companies.

How to use this framework

Top-level messaging building blocks help align different internal teams so there’s no leaky bucket between them.

Let’s say, your marketing team drives high MQLs this quarter but the SQLs are low, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Or let’s say the following quarter, you want to double down on LinkedIn outbound via the sales team and your social selling is in full swing, but the activation rates are low, then it could be another leaky bucket in your funnel. Whatever the case may be, it’s important to have your top-level messaging building blocks in place — and update them regularly (most likely on a quarterly/half-yearly basis) — to ensure your messaging around your product is leakproof.

Note that messaging is not equal to content.

Messaging is the idea and perception of your product in your customer’s day-to-day life. It’s the foundation on which every single piece of your content is designed, written, and distributed so your customers know exactly what your product is meant for and how it can solve their challenges in a realistic way.

- I feel weird quoting this to myself so I’m just putting “Yours truly”

The easiest yet most effective way to identify your top-level messaging building blocks is to break it down into seven different (simple) steps.

Use case:

Like most product-led growth startups, chances are you solve multiple use cases for different target personas like Kajabi. Or, you might be solving a single use case for multiple target personas like DocuSign. Either way, when you’re creating your messaging building blocks, identify all the use cases you solve for your target persona(s).

• Work from outwards to inwards: Start by speaking to your prospects and existing customers to understand how they use your product in day-to-day ops and the context in which they might use the product. Then, once you’ve collated data externally dive into product demo calls/sales calls, salesforce, or other tools to identify patterns and trends in terms of “usage” and “use case”.

• Keep an eye and an ear open for social listening: Monitor social media and online forums to see how people talk about the product category and the problems they wish to solve.

• Review competitors’ offerings to identify what use cases they are addressing and where there might be gaps for new use cases.

Current way customers use:

Understand how customers are trying to solve their problems before they use your product.

• Identify what percentage of their current method is manual vs automated vs AI-powered. Then, identify if there’s a process or workflow your product could improve in the tech stack.

• Figure out the exact methods/tools they’re using at the moment: is it your competitors? is it a mature product like Google Sheets that’s intertwined extensively with the core of their workflow or day-to-day ops?

Challenges customers face:

Specify the most pressing pain points your products solve for your identified target customers.

• Start by identifying the smallest of wins your product can give your customers. Then, move on to the larger, long-term solutions your product can have.

• Think about your product’s competitive and contextual advantage. For example, “Is your product more advanced than X because it offers Y features?” OR “Does your product save Z amount of hours for sales reps every week?”

• Dive into testimonials or success stories from early adopters or beta testers.

Limitations of the current way:

Focus on the specific drawbacks of the existing methods that prevent/delay your target persona from achieving the best outcomes. For instance, existing tools might not integrate well with their core tech stack, leading to fragmented information, issues in data sync/cleanup/aggregation, and inefficient workflows.

• A good idea is to create a pie chart and based on your analysis, divide it into different limitations so you can visualize exactly how much weightage each limitation has.

Without data points to support your pie chart, you can easily overestimate or underestimate the true impact of your ICP’s current way.

For example, it might not be a huge dealbreaker for your ICP if their existing way doesn’t integrate with some tool. But if it has a poor UI, lack of user access controls, or real-time collaboration tools, those limitations could severely impact their day-to-day ops.

Product capabilities:

Think of this step as an inverse proportional to the step above aka “limitations.” At this point, you want to figure out the functionalities or capabilities of your product that can overcome the limitations of current solutions.

• Map out the relationship between your target persona’s existing way and your product capabilities. If your customer is struggling with time management, can your product improve it in any way — improve productivity, reduce manual tasks, streamline workflows, and integrate across tech stack for better ops?

Product features:

From product capabilities, reverse engineer back to the specific product features that imbibe these functionalities.

Benefits/Outcomes:

List down all the benefits and outcomes of using your product for a particular use case.

Congrats! You’ve done the hard part now. It’s time for a bit more polishing up and you’ll have your use-case dashboard ready in no time. I promise.

2. Implement use-case mapping for different ICPs

You’ve probably already heard about use-case mapping as a marketer. And like anything in marketing, it’s highly subjective — the definition, the process, and the outcome of use case mapping — all of it.

The diagram below is a good place to start doing use-case mapping for your product.

3. Choose a tool to build your use-case dashboard

Creating a use-case dashboard doesn’t need a fancy tool. You could start with Google Slides, Notion, or Figma depending on your level of familiarity with the tool, its adoption across teams, and budget.

To err on the safer side, if you’ve got a small team, I’d recommend you work with Google Slides. It’s the easiest and most budget-friendly option at your disposal. As your and your team’s expertise builds out, you can venture into more complex, visually advanced tools.

4. Write a copy for each use-case using your building blocks

A use case dashboard is only successful if you get this last, critical step right. When you do this step right, it becomes much easier to figure out your messaging and value propositions that can change the trajectory of your PLG business.

Here’s how to do it:

• Deeply understand your audience before anything else

• Identify your product’s unique capabilities and tech stack integration

• Uncover and acknowledge common objections/existing challenges in the market

• Design your core narrative or the “perceptions” you want to drive.

• Use your messaging building blocks to fill out your use case dashboard. Here’s an example use-case dashboard:

📚 More from The Content Playbook

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• Want to learn content distribution and the best AI tools to use? Read my previous week’s edition here.

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• Want to build a repeatable process for your case studies? I laid out my entire framework here.

• Newsletter sponsorships: If you’re looking to reach 600+ marketers from leading companies and early-stage startups, let’s chat. Email me at aarushi@thecontentplaybook.in

Next Week: Difference between sales-led and product-led marketing

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Plug your long form content (think blog, podcast, or newsletter like this one) into an AI tool, select the different assets you want it chopped into, and press “Start.” The AI tool will then spit out your long form content asset chopped up into 10s of different smaller assets.

That’s it. You’ve got your “repurposed content” right there.

The end.

Thank you for reading this edition.

.

.

.

Well, not really.

The biggest misconception with repurposing is you simply need to “rephrase” a long form asset and chop it up for a 100 different platforms and channels. That’s what marketers have been told the definition of repurposing is.

“If you’re not repurposing your content into smaller, more digestible chunks as a marketer, you won’t get as much traction” — we’ve heard this over and over in the last few years.

And by emphasizing on “volume”, the process of repurposing itself feels like we’re on an eternal content hamster wheel that’s supposed to churn out as many “assets” as “quickly” as possible. Because of how mundane and robotic this process is, marketers generally don’t enjoy it and can often discourage them before they even get started.

Cambridge Dictionary defines repurposing as “to find a new use for an idea, product, or building.” Related idioms include “go heavy on something”, “make capital out of something”, and “mine a rich seam of something”.

Notice how each idiom, synonym, and the very core definition of repurposing emphasizes on making “better use” of something than originally intended.

But, figuring out a repeatable process that you can follow for every content asset and identifying the right tools that help reduce the workload can often feel like a full-time job. That’s because (surprise surprise) it is.

Content repurposing requires us, marketers, to think of it as individual mini-campaign launches that need a fresh angle, a new strategy, and a distribution matrix.

Good news: By talking to so many marketers in communities, on LinkedIn, one-on-one, and combining my own practices for repurposing, I’ve developed lots of ideas, opinions, and a framework on how marketers can repurpose content the right way, without sounding repetitive, while still pointing towards the same goal as originally intended in your source content piece (the one you plan to repurpose).

Let’s get right to it.

*Traction refers to the measure of a campaign’s progress and momentum in terms of gaining customer interest, user engagement, market demand, and revenue generation.

How to repurpose your content

Strategy 1: Contract or expand on the original idea

The easiest way to repurpose your content is by contracting or expanding your original idea.

As marketers, we’re obligated to particular word counts and content lengths depending on the content destination because we need to drive engagement and interest from our audience. In plain words, we end up working around limitations when we create the original piece for a specific platform.

Let’s take this newsletter as an example. I’m sharing 4 strategies to repurpose your content, but that doesn’t mean I only have *four*. I could have written at least 6 more. If I do that:

• This could end up becoming a 26 min read, one that consumes your entire lunch time or “leisure” reading time

• If you already know 3 strategies out of 10, you might not stick around to read the rest of them

• I risk diluting the value, hurting my engagement, and turning this into a mammoth of a guide versus a weekly newsletter (what you expect it to be).

But when I repurpose this newsletter for other platforms like LinkedIn, I could:

• Add more (new) strategies and turn it into a quick checklist for my audience

• Design a roadmap with all (new) strategies, write an overview of how to repurpose content the right way, and direct them to this newsletter to learn five more

• Do a super meta thing — repurpose this newsletter about repurposing so you know exactly how to do it right, tools you need to use, etcetera.

You need to build your own playbook and not follow the same ol’ frameworks that are widely regurgitated on social media platforms. Once you figure the core plan out, I’m all in for using AI tools to improve publishing velocity and reduce manual workload.

Until you do, keep experimenting and see what sticks most with your audience. Once you’ve done this process multiple times, you’ll know how your audience engages with your repurposed content, what were the biggest levers that drove the highest engagement, and what’s “feasible” resource wise to repeat.

Strategy 2: Use storytelling as a medium to resonate better

Think of your core asset as the script of a movie. Break it down into social media threads that act as teaser trailers or snippets that pull your audience closer to the original piece. Each post becomes a scene, building anticipation and curiosity. Just as a movie leaves the audience eagerly awaiting the next plot twist, your social media story posts keep followers engaged, eager to discover the unfolding story with each new piece of information.

For example, when I repurpose this newsletter, I will be adding in my personal experiences of content repurposing. This would include:

• How I drove 220K+ impressions and garnered 92K engagements for a B2B report I did for one of my previous clients

• How I got buy-in to label repurposing as a separate marketing project than a sub-project

• Examples of the best marketing repurposed content I’ve seen over the past few months

When you imbibe your personal experiences and build a narrative that sets the foundation for your core content, people resonate better. They can see themselves through your lens or vice versa. Both are exceptionally a great way to start.

Marc Thomas, Senior Growth Marketer at Podia, recently shared about repurposing in a community we’re both part of, and I couldn’t agree more.

Expanding on Marc’s ideas here, when you’re extracting a guest’s quotes and find one that clicks with you immediately, reminds you of the time you followed a similar approach or made a similar mistake and corrected it in your “own way”, bring that experience to life on social media platforms.

Share the guest’s quote, but go the extra mile by blending in your personal experiences that supplement or complement the quote and draw in the user to further listen to your show.

This approach transforms passive consumption into active exploration, much like viewers immersing themselves in the movies.

Strategy 3: Create JBTD/outcome oriented assets that function as “plug and play” solutions

Whenever Sony launches a new PlayStation, they offer an extensive range of accessories and peripherals that enhance the gaming experience. These include controllers, headsets, VR accessories, and more. From its DualSense controller providing haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to the VR headset that allows players to experience virtual reality gaming, Sony nails it every single time.

In marketing, you can create job-to-be-done assets that work as plug and play solutions for your core content, elevating your users’ experience and immediately providing them value.

If you have a report you want to distribute, you could create:

• A Notion database sharing examples or swipe files that your audience can share immediately with their internal team

• Automations that connect with your audience’s software in one-click or the very least, give inspiration to build fresh automations

• Personalized Miro or Figma boards with fillable blocks so your audience can adapt it to their use-case

Two great examples who are nailing this type of repurposing are Lashay Lewis, Founder of Authority Plug and Anthony Pierri, Co-Founder of Fletch. They have productivized their marketing agencies through JBTD assets. Their clients can now simply purchase their plug and play solutions, customize them, and use them instantly.

And in marketing, there’s no bigger win than getting your customers closer to their goals as fast as possible. And as marketers, there’s no better way to do this than creating JBTD assets, minimizing workload on yourself while still driving home value for your audience and building stronger relationships.

Strategy 4: Online whiteboard sessions

Take out one simple idea from your core content piece and illustrate it better in a whiteboard session on LinkedIn.

If you’re an early stage startup, let your founder do this. If you’re an SMB, let the captain of the core content do this.

People love learning from people. That’s why courses, masterclasses, and webinars do incredibly well (ofc when done right). Content creators don’t just create an asset, share the URL, and wait for the traction to kick in. They put in their best foot forward by turning their core idea and value proposition into more interactive sessions by creating live/on-demand courses like Jay Clouse, Founder of Creator Science, or an email series like Katelyn Bourgoin, Co-Founder of Un-ignorable.

3 ways to maximize your whiteboard sessions’ reach on social media:

1. Ask your friends and colleagues to engage

2. Send it via LinkedIn DMs to your connections

3. Share it in your newsletter (or plug it into a relevant blog)

While each of the above repurposing tactic isn’t as straightforward as plugging your content into an AI tool and immediately getting it into 100 different formats, each one of them is worth the time and energy.

Instead of using AI as your idea generator and critical thinker, use it as an assistant that knows aspect ratios for different social media platforms, automatically silences & the awkward “ums, ah, yeahhhhh”, and converts text into a tabular format. Let it do the boring (time taking) work while you focus your energy on making this next piece of repurposed content asset your most relatable one.

Best AI tools for helping you repurpose content

Before writing this newsletter, I asked in communities, on my LinkedIn, and Twitter about their go-to repurposing tool. Following are the top 6 tools that marketers are using globally:

1. Riverside: for AI generated social media friendly video clips

2. OpusPro: for AI generated video clips

3. Descript: for manually generating video clips

4. ChatGPT (paid): for converting text into different formats like checklists, tables, summaries, etcetera

5. VEED: for turning one video content into another format with AI editing tools for quick fixes

6. SummarAIze: for converting audio/video into text based formats

PS: None of these are sponsored tools. They were selected based on budget, use-cases, and popularity amongst marketers.

📚 More from The Content Playbook

• My next edition will reach your inbox NEXT WEEK. To make sure, you don’t miss out, Subscribe.

• Want to learn how to run marketing as a one-person marketing team? Here are 9 tactics to help you (straight from Eric Doty, the man himself).

• Want to build a repeatable process for your case studies? I laid out my entire framework here.

• Newsletter sponsorships: If you’re interested in reaching 600+ marketers from leading companies and early stage startups, get in touch. Email me at aarushi@thecontentplaybook.in

Next Week: How to build a use-case repository

See you next week! Until then, have a great and fulfilling week 🙏

Sincerely,

Aarushi 👋

As a one-person marketing team, you need to do the impossible. You need to build a marketing muscle from scratch at an organization that’s (most probably?) still in the product-market fit phase, while learning dozens of new skills, experimenting with multiple channels and tactics, making countless decisions, driving growth from (some) wins, and learning from mistakes as you work your way forward.

It’s like being in Harry Potter’s Hedge Maze in the Goblet of Fire. You need to overcome various obstacles like giant spiders, dementors, and an anti-gravity mist. Then, reach the Triwizard Cup at the centre of the maze. Of course, Harry didn’t have a map.

Imagine if you had a map.

I had the opportunity to chat with Eric Doty, Content Head at Dock to explore how he runs marketing as a one-person marketing team. From mindset shifts, setting north stars and KPIs, getting early wins, to leveraging personal strengths, Eric shares extensively on how he has been building an efficient (keyword being efficient here) marketing engine at Dock.

Let’s dive in.

1. Creating mind share internally

Everyone talks about the 30-60-90 day plan, but rarely people talk about the mindset you need to develop as a new marketing hire, especially at an early growth stage startup where you’re a one-person marketing team.

In my personal experience, building out a marketing function from scratch or expanding multiple channels while your company is still figuring out product-market fit is extremely challenging. You’re not just posting “content” on a channel. You’re building up the messaging and narrative from the ground up as your company/team/product scales. You’re sitting with sales and customer success (if there are indeed two different departments) and figuring out what sticks with prospects better, what are their most pressing pain points, and how can you imbibe those customer insights in marketing.

On some days, there might be a lot of back-end strategy and positioning work. On others, you’ll execute those strategies. But, how do you get your company to see what you bring to the table OR communicate early wins?

“When you're a one-person team, you're essentially fighting two battles: the production battle, where you're working solo to create enough content for company success, and an internal battle that often goes unnoticed. As a lone team member, you don't command much mind share or real estate within the company, especially in a startup environment focused on finding product-market fit.

So, before you even get to the tactics or strategies, when you join a startup as the sole marketer (not just content) handling product marketing, newsletter, logistical ops things and a bunch of other things, it’s important to take the time to ensure you’re creating that mind share internally. This involves practical steps like creating a Slack channel, openly sharing ongoing work, and actively engaging with other team members in the company to build advocates and ensure awareness of your contributions. The key advice is to prioritize creating an impression and getting people's attention as soon as you join a new organization.

In terms of a 30, 60, 90-day plan, I take a three-pronged approach. First off, focus on creating mind share for yourself. Second, get your systems going — be incredibly good with tools. When you’re just a small team, or a one-person marketing function, you have to be incredibly efficient, find ways to scale yourself that you wouldn’t have to necessarily do if you’re like a five-person marketing team.

In my case, at Dock, we manage various channels such as blogs, podcasts, and social media. One person can’t do all these things on their own by just sort of brute force. To cope, I set up super elaborate Airtable with lots of automations to enhance scalability within my systems.

The second part of the approach is simply spinning up one channel initially, focusing on mastery before expanding to other areas. For us, starting with the blog was a strategic choice. I knew I could get the blog up and running quickly, figure out the strategy, hire freelancers, and run it efficiently. After 3-6 months, the blog started taking less of my energy and the system works with minimal intervention. That’s when we started our podcast, social media, and other components. The key is to avoid spreading oneself thin by tackling too many channels simultaneously.

It's better to start with one thing, do really well, move to get some quick wins on that channel, and then move on to another channel. It could be as simple as looking at your website and saying “Hey, this is clearly missing a lot of information”, and then proceeding to add it.”

2. Reverse engineer your goal to identify north stars for your marketing campaigns

Blogs, email, social media, newsletter, podcast, paid ads, PR, partner marketing, influencer marketing — there are 100 different marketing channels and 1000 different strategies & tactics for each one of them. It’s near impossible for one person to successfully drive growth across the spectrum in marketing. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

The question is: where?

How do you decide the north star when you’re running marketing as a one-person team and what takes priority when there’s so much noise?

“We’ve had a few motivating factors: our pricing structure, our product structure, and what is success going to look like. Our product right now is $50 a user and our typical accounts are going to be three to five users on an account anyday. We'd love that to be 100. But right now we're going after small mid market companies because that's sort of who we satisfy right now. And so when you do the math on how do you become a billion dollar company with $250 a month accounts or something like that, you're going to need a lot of accounts. That means that right away SEO has to be a strategy for us. We need to get into the tens of thousands of users and we're not going to do that purely through thought leadership, for example, or a podcast, right? So SEO is one channel that has to be there that has to be done right away.

But at the same time, through our sales cycle or sales motion, we learned that ideally right now, every company wants to be fully product led, right? Like Loom. You send a loom video to somebody, someone sees it and goes, “Wow, I also want to use Loom.” They just try it for themselves, they sign it for free and then eventually their organization adopts it because so many people in the organization are using Loom.

There's virality in that. So, when some of our customers send Dock Workspaces out and someone else sees that, they do say, “Well, our company should use this too. This is a way better experience. I'm going to use Dock now” — there is some of that virality element right there.

And to capitalize on this virality, we’ve got to focus on our champion buyers which typically includes folks like revenue leaders, heads of sales, and heads of customer success. From a content perspective, we need to be highly focused at this ICP with thought leadership. So, think of how-to type content like how to get 100 sales reps to follow the same sales proposal steps? Or how do you stop sales reps from sending out sales proposals that don't follow the pricing model you want to follow, right?

Even when we talk about a pretty top of funnel topic, we'll always talk about it through the lens of “would this appeal to a sales leader versus a sales rep?” Everything we do should has thought leadership. And like you said, it's not like a tactic or a channel. It's like we're going to put thought leadership into our SEO. SEO thought leadership has been our one big play so far.”

Eric further shares that they’re also using their podcast to support their thought leadership goals. While there’s plenty opportunity for repurposing and distribution that comes from a podcast, he shares the channel is a great way to speak directly to the type of people who fit their ICP. This also legitimizes Dock in their (podcast guests’) broader network. So, it becomes both a sales play as it is a marketing play.

“And so the podcast, for example, was just they check lots of boxes of it can be used for so many things, so many purposes. Even our sales team can then also say, “hey, did you see the latest episode with so and so?” I think that would be really interesting. And that can be like a cold outbound tactic, right? So there's so many different ways we can use that.”

3. Build a tech stack that supports and delivers on your expected ROI

Marketers suffer from shiny object syndrome big time. “Shiny object syndrome is when someone focuses all their attention on something new and current. Usually, this is at the expense of whatever they have or currently doing. In a business setting, shiny object syndrome takes the form of chasing the latest strategy, tactic, or advice making the rounds within the industry”, shares Everhour.

It’s the same with tools.

“Do I go with the one that has a lot of noise on LinkedIn? Do I adopt the one I personally use or like or am used to? Do I ask for the best recommended ones in communities and then explore?”

Eric’s approach for choosing the right tools is great advice for anyone struggling to justify costs to higher management and getting buy-in from C-level folks.

“We take a very ROI centric approach. For example, if a tool is $100 a month, it’s a bit expensive. The question then becomes “Is it adding $200 of value?” Yes. Let's just do it. Because when you're at an early growth stage startup, you need to consistently grow, like 20% to 30% MOM (month-on-month) to meet our goals.

So, naturally, at Dock, we’re more than willing to invest in tools if they help us grow faster. The only catch is, you need to make sure you don’t suddenly have 20 tools and you’re using only a third of them. As long as your tools support and deliver on the ROI that you're expecting, that makes sense.”

4. Be loud about what you’re working on

Saying NO to internal content requests can be a wee bit hard for some marketers.

You want to support sales, customer success, and product — all while running marketing campaigns you decided on. But, there’s only so much one person (or a small team) can successfully do.

Here’s Eric’s advice on taking in content requests:

“Be really loud about what you're working on and your personal capacity. Remember though, you don't want to create a culture where people don't ask for things because you say you're too busy all the time. But if you are proactive on sharing what it is you're working on and what you're delivering, people can get a better sense of that.

You're not just the department the post memes on LinkedIn. You're actually doing something. So, that might look different at different companies, but for example, at our town halls, I'll share the plan for the quarter on what it is we're going to be, or maybe the month is probably more realistic. Here's results, here's some things we did last month. Here's what we're going to do next month. And you deliver on that and then that gives people a chance to see the types of things you're working on and throw ideas out there or say, it would be really nice to have this. Because you're showing you have a plan and you're vocal about it, you don't just become the department that just takes requests and spits things out, because that's a really crappy situation to be in.”

5. Spin up only one channel at a time

The B2B marketing industry flipped on its back in 2023 when AI came out, a half-baked recession hit, and B2B buying journey got more intricate and complicated.

That’s when modern marketing was born. In chaos. And that’s when everyone started doing everything all at once. Social selling on LinkedIn, running a podcast on Spotify, building a community on Slack, and publishing 1000 blogs in a year.

But, if you’re a marketer in an early stage startup, you don’t need to focus on everything. Eric shares more in-depth around how he sets realistic intentions and prioritizes the right channels at Dock.

“It's definitely a feeling out process and that's why I advocate spinning up one channel at a time, getting really efficient at it before you start adding things. Otherwise, you're doing product announcements, blog, podcast, sales, has requests for sales enablement resources, and then you're just spread super thin. At Dock, we worked out like, okay, let's set a target of eight blogs a month and let's see pretty much the fastest we can do that.

We chose the number eight just because the budget made sense. Personal capacity, that's how much time we want to allocate, and then we just got that down to as little time as possible. And then I can go to my founder or leader or teammates and then say, “okay, now I have capacity to add these other things.” And then obviously when things take priority, you can slow that down or speed it up. We say eight blogs a month, but I think some months I did six, and then the next one I do like 15 because I had time and I threw lots of things out there and now I can slow down the next month and take on a new project. So it's a bit about flexibility in that way, but I think just being really communicative about it is never going to hurt you.”

6. Pay attention to social selling

Social selling is a huge lever in the modern marketing engine — it’s becoming bigger each day in B2B.

First off, there’s the key reason that algorithms favor people more than product pages. But this idea in itself gets a lot of pushback, especially from early stage startups and founders who are excited to go big on the company page with memes, dashboard, congratulatory posts, and new employee highlights.

You see, when you’re social selling, your first priority is to build resonance with your audience. It’s to share things that ring true to their experiences. When you do that as a person on behalf of a company versus as a company page, the impact, reach, and perspective it builds is far stronger.

Some marketers go as far as to claim that LinkedIn wants companies to pay for advertising and not just get free exposure, which is why company pages have lesser reach. While I have no solid data to back this statement, I do believe people simply trust people, not brands. “This isn’t revolutionary and social selling comes with a huge marketing value for early stage startups as well for marketers to draw some quick wins,” Eric says.

Even if your audience is completely different from your company’s ICP, over time, you can bridge that gap and shift your focus to your ICP. Here’s how (in Eric’s words),

“My audience is primarily built up of marketers and while Dock isn’t exactly for my audience, it doesn’t hurt for them to know about it. Like I said, some products are built on virality and Dock is one of them. Founder-led marketing and social selling is the new way — it’s refreshing and interesting to see how you can impact prospects. It also gives off the illusion that your team and company are bigger than they actually are. That’s because at Dock, each one of our employees will sort of resort to their own superpower.

I'll talk about marketing, our designer will share designs he's working on and he just has like a designer audience. But that's fine, we all use our own sort of audience to just move the needle a little bit and you never know what backlinks that's going to get you what person's attention you're going to get. So even though it's not like a direct one-to-one between Dock’s prospects and us (as creators), it's at least building that mind share and legitimacy.

The traditional sort of barrier between employee and company is blending a lot. And there's so many benefits to letting your people just sort of loose out there.

Have your sales team, even if it's just, like, once a week, just post, like, anecdotes or your designers post examples of things they're working on, because it's not in everybody's wheelhouse to do that, or the build in public thing isn't for everybody. But I think encouraging your company to do that is like a no brainer free marketing play. Don't chase an algorithm or don't chase whatever best practices you've read build out from the problem you're trying to solve and build a solution that solves that instead. Right?”

7. Be a company leader, a brand advocate

Marketers have been pigeonholed for the longest time. Content teams struggle to get a seat at the table. Lifecycle marketing is only being born in B2B and B2C while it’s been thriving in D2C for years. SEO folks are boxed in the “keyword research” team. This needs to change.

For that, marketers should take more strategic ownership on a company-level. When I asked Eric about this, he shared,

“I got an incredible advice recently - to become a really good leader of any department, you have to become invested in the entire company, in every other department as well.

You have to be like a company leader, not just a marketing leader. So you have to understand how does the product team work, what is the sales process, all these things. The more you can learn about all that, then it informs your marketing strategy way better. So I actually think more marketers need to spend time learning things outside of marketing.

Go listen to a sales podcast. That's when you really start to take your knowledge from you're good at marketing tactics versus you can build a strategy out from a new company or a new startup, especially as a one person team, you need to become more knowledgeable about how all the other departments work.”

8. Leverage your personal strengths to drive your campaigns

There could be a million different channels, platforms, strategies, and tactics you could be focusing on as an early stage marketer. But you shouldn’t. Here’s a great take on using your personal strengths to drive campaigns early on in your role from Eric:

“If you are one person team, if you're very good at blogs, make blogs. If you're very good at video, make video. Because just being a one person team is all about maximizing your time, your personal time. And so what can you get the best quality out of? Best quality and quantity combo that's going to be focused on your strengths, which is why I focused on blog. You should be hired as a match to your company. Match the channel and make sure it's appropriate for the company. In fact, when you’re interviewing for the role, highlight your wins around your strengths. Tell them we should do blogs or emails or whatever it is.”

9. Focus on getting things done, not perfect

Every marketer struggles with perfection, on some level. But great marketers know when to ship fast, fail fast, and when to take it one step at a time. When you’re a one-person marketing team, your focus should be on the former — do more, faster.

“Go get things published. Get them published quickly. Focus on becoming efficient at publishing if you're a one person team and getting projects over the line, rather than just focus, like living in a quality world all day, because then that's where pressure builds diamonds, as they say, that's where you start to really get your cadence by putting those guidelines on yourself,” says Eric.

Next week: 🌐 Distributing your content the right way (best tools to use)

Final words of wisdom:

“There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.” 

– George Shinn

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” 

– Phil Jackson

A big thank-you to Eric Doty (Dock) for sharing his insights and experience. You can watch the complete podcast here, connect with Eric on Linkedin, and follow Dock.

Premise

In my experience of working with early/growth stage startups and B2B MarTech enterprises, there’s one thing that almost always comes across about case studies: “we want them to act as our social proof and stand as strong testimonials on our owned channels (think: website).” There’s nothing wrong with the goal here. I’d go as far as to say, it’s the perfect S.M.A.R.T goal for case studies, regardless of your company’s growth stage, niche, and audience.

The problem is, there’s not much thought given into how to actually use these case studies as bottom-funnel assets (which most agencies and fractional marketing managers claim it is).

Just because you’re interviewing your customer and sharing their story on your owned channel (and possibly a URL on LinkedIn too), it doesn’t “automatically” qualify as a bottom-funnel content asset. Neither does it work as intended — drive qualified prospects closer to the funnel.

Customer case studies should be designed for three things:

1/ Your brand’s messaging

2/ Your brand’s differentiator

2/ Your buying teams’ objections

Sure, customer case studies are great for strengthening relationships with your existing customers. But they’re a time-intensive, resource-consuming, and expensive asset to build. You need them to work across channels, teams, and goals to make them worth their while.

And remember, if your product sucks for a customer, they’re going to figure it out sooner or later and your case study wouldn’t be the hanging thread in your relationship anymore. It’s a nice add-on, but it won’t save a churning customer if there’s no product-need fit anymore.

Here’s what’s covered in this edition of the The Content Playbook Newsletter:

• 👩🏻 How to create a case study for your champion buyers and communicate your product’s value

• 🪜How to build a case study process that doesn’t suck

• 🕒 How to shorten case study approval timelines, what questions to ask your customers, and stakeholder management for complex case studies

How to create a case study for your champion buyers

3 things to focus on when creating a case study for your champion buyer

Before we dive in to the good part, I want to define champion buyers — who are they, what they do, and why they are important target readers for case studies.

Champion buyer is the person who spearheads the decision-making process by actively researching solutions for their needs, booking demos, taking notes, comparing different solutions, and ultimately, communicating the value of the chosen solution to the broader decision-making team.

When you create case studies, it’s important to write for your champion buyer. This means, you’re writing for someone who already has the intent to purchase, affinity towards your brand (maybe your solution came up in G2’s or Gartner’s recommendations), and is considering moving a step closer to the purchasing decision.

Things are looking great till this stage. Now, you can use customer case studies to further propel your champion buyer to 1) move closer to booking a demo request or 2) understand your product’s value during a sales call.

Without further ado, let’s head into the three core things you should focus on when creating a customer case study for your champion buyer:

1. Forklift your messaging by focusing on product-prospect fit, not product-market fit

Heads up: If you have an incredibly narrow ICP (ideal customer profile), feel free to skip this part. But if you cater to more than one verticals/audiences/challenges, this part is important.

When I joined a B2B MarTech enterprise org as their Content Head of APAC & SEA, they had minimal (read zero) content functions in the region. Sure, they had a U.S. marketing team that used to create great content (including customer case studies).

The problem was these customer case studies didn’t resonate with our specific region’s prospects even though they had amazing product-market fit because 1) they were designed with a one-size-fits-all approach 2) substantially lacked in communicating the value & differentiator that was critical for APAC & SEA brands.

This org was catering to at least 7-8 different verticals. So, building a content positioning strategy from the ground up for such a diverse and broad ICP was….tough (freaking tough). And then nailing it down to how individual content assets would be designed to align with our key content positioning strategy was even tougher.

But things got easier once I got the product, customer, sales, and marketing team together. Once I had a solid idea of who the champion buyers are and what are their most pressing challenges/objections, I created a case study process that would help me execute ideas faster, generate interest from our champion buyers, and

Let’s flip this on you for a hot second so you know exactly what I mean.

Imagine you’re a mobile linking and attribution tool catering to two different verticals: retail and quick-service restaurants (QSRs).

Here’s what a quick brief on your champion buyer would look like:

Champion buyer: performance marketers

Goals(s):

Retail - reliable attribution to understand what offline and online channels drive most growth and double down on them

QSRs- drive growth to its own mobile app, while minimizing dependency on super apps (UberEats if you’re from U.S./ Zomato if you’re from APAC)

Great, you’ve got all the context now. Let’s take a look at how you would go on to create customer case studies for product-prospect fit that appeal to your champion buyer.

When you set out to create customer case studies, imbibe your champion buyers’ goals throughout to establish a product-prospect fit.

For example, if your customer is KFC and they adopted your solution to drive growth for their own app, set a strong narrative about how and why KFC adopted your product. From its discovery to implementation, before and after, technical objections — integrate all of this information in your case study via text and visuals. This would then go on to be a perfect bottom-funnel asset for moving the champion buyer of Pizza Hut a step closer to the final conversion.

If you’re creating a case study about Target U.S., create compelling graphs that show how they were able to track attribution across their offline and online channels. Add as much context as you possibly can to educate the champion buyer of a prospect like Walmart. Talk about any seasonal sales (black friday, new years, back to school) where they used your product to identify their winning channels and doubled down on it.

Once you understand the art of messaging and designing content for product-prospect fit, you’ll be able to create resonance with your prospects better and faster. They’ll be able to see themselves in your customers’ shoes and go “Oh yes! We have struggled with this same challenge last year and we just couldn’t figure out a good solution.”

So your champion buyer knows they have a pain point and probably goes a lot deeper and impacts the bottom line more than they knew. But, there are other solutions (your competitors) out there, so WHY YOU?

2. Differentiator that showcases your product’s value

Establishing differentiators throughout a customer case study is crucial. They help you communicate your product’s value to your champion buyer, clearly highlight where your product sits in the market, and what gaps do you fill in.

This also means, sometimes (most of the times), you’ll have to paint a clear before and after picture on how your customer tried using another solution but couldn’t solve their challenges or drive enough ROI for it to be sustainable.

And before you go all “But we want to be the bigger person and not name our competitors, and we don’t want to look down on our competition, yada yada yada.” hear me out.

Differentiators help build an alignment between your champion buyers’ needs and your product. It’s not simply mentioning your competitors’ names in customer case studies and saying “WE ARE THE BEST”. It’s about educating your champion buyers with testimonials, social proof, and strong metrics on how your product is more ideal for their needs and goals.

So let’s say if you’re competing against Salesforce and you know it’s the best option for your champion buyer, reeling them in with your product that doesn’t align completely with their needs will lead them to churn sooner or later. You don’t want that.

What you want is for your customer case study to serve as an evergreen content asset that clearly highlights your differentiator and influences champion buyers that are an ideal fit.

3. Handling objections for the broader decision-making team

Matthew Dixon conducted a large-scale study of more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations — spanning both transactional and complex sales — and found that anywhere between 40% and 60% of deals today end up lost to customers who express their intent to purchase, but ultimately fail to act.

These customers will often go through the entire sales process — consuming valuable seller time and organizational resources, perhaps even engaging in extended pilots or proof-of-concept trials — only to end up not crossing the finish line.

So many deals are lost because of customer indecision. Customer indecision is driven by a separate and distinct psychological effect called the omission bias, which, in this context, is the customer’s desire to avoid taking action that might lead to a loss (ref).

So, how can you use customer case studies to sell in such an incredibly tough market? How do you help your champion buyer transform from a state of indecisiveness to committed to your product?

By handling objections for the broader team.

Look, if you nail the first two steps — forklift your messaging and establish your differentiator — you’ll have successfully communicated your product’s value to your champion buyer. But, there’s a much larger buying committee involved behind-the-scenes that could ruin your deal in an instant and your champion buyer would then be left alone to vote for your product (failed deal!).

Let your customer case studies be an opportunity to handle objections. For instance, you already know the C-level exec is primarily concerned about the numbers (ROI). And the tech team wants the new tool to integrate with everything they’re already using. And there’s also an expectation of onboarding and training.

Answer as much as you possibly can in your customer case studies. To go a level deeper, when you’re interviewing your customers, ask the objections their team had. This would give you visibility into not just the broader objections prospects have, but more specific, nuanced questions they have around your product.

How to build a sustainable and repeatable case study process

For this part, I did a quick interview with Joel Klettke, Founder of Case Study Buddy. He helps mid-size to enterprise companies scale their case study and video testimonial production and transform every customer story into a full campaign’s worth of content (written, video, social, etc).

Safe to say, Joel knows a lot about creating case studies (he has delivered thousands of them, worked with multiple companies, interviewed customers across verticals).

When asked about what’s the single biggest challenge brands face when creating case studies, Joel said, “There’s a complete and total lack of internal processes and clear accountabilities for the stories. They don’t have an SOP or any clarity on who should be involved or what they should handle.”

And I strongly agree. In my experience of working with early/growth stage startups and enterprises, I’ve seen case studies being tossed around like they’re another “blog.” Since there’s no SEO research involved in case studies, writers are simply given the transcript of the customer interview and asked to fill in a template of “challenge, solution, result.”

With this part of the edition, I aim to share the framework that helps brands create a better case study process — right from qualifying the right customers to interview to helping writers ask better questions and establishing clear POCs for easier communication.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Create a qualification criteria

Context: Your CMO wants you to focus on the high ticket-size logos that give you market pull. Your product team wants you to promote your latest product update/new feature. Your head (or director) of marketing wants you to interview all the event attendees and create case studies.

Every team has a different goal they’re trying to achieve within an org and when this happens, there’s a lot of confusion (chaos) around what to prioritize. And when it comes to content assets, especially case studies, there’s no playbook. But when you have a qualification criteria that’s tried and tested in terms of conversion, market pull, organic growth, and pipeline, that’s it! You hit jackpot.

Joel also suggests to look at the potential impact of the stories based on the most urgent needs of the overall business and the most significant overlap across goals between teams. Asking questions like “What stories will be most instrumental in achieving or closing the gap on those goals?” is the starting point, says Joel.

Strategy: Analyze which case studies worked best and the common themes across them — were they around specific products, did they come from big, global brands everyone recognizes leading to a natural brand affinity towards you, or were they just promoted better? Do this on a quarterly basis and create a list of customers you want to interview.

Make sure you involve success reps early on in this process to double-check you’re chasing the right customers.

Tactics:

• Speak with your director of marketing/CMO to figure out what are the factors you need to take in account for when selecting customers for case studies.

• Case studies are a time sink, only when chased at the wrong time though. Plan your case studies around quarterly/yearly renewals — this gives an added boost to your customers’ media presence while building a better relationship.

• If your org hosts annual/industry awards, that’s a great time to reach out to customers. Invite them on your podcast, plan co-marketing activities, or co-write a thought leadership piece. Imbibe your case study as an add-on or a standalone activity then.

• If your org hosts VIP events, network with customers, ask them to participate in surveys/reviews (keep it as simple as possible — could be a “hey, how is X working for you? Would you like me to communicate any feedback to the team so we can make this better?” If they’re happy and willing, ask them if you could publish a case study with them as the HERO in it.

• Again, you could always go to Salesforce and segment customers vertical-wise/category-wise/product-wise/ticket-size to figure out who you want to reach out to.

• Maintain an active spreadsheet with details around your qualification criteria, who you’re planning to interview in the upcoming quarter, and other relevant info. Share it with key internal stakeholders.

Step 2: Automate case study admin tasks

Context: You schedule a call, record it, ask your writing team to manually take down important notes, create multiple docs (a client version and an internal version), collect data and screenshots, follow up on emails, get internal reviews, more reviews, and finally wait for a sign off from the customer.

The process of creating a case study is freaking long and I’m surprised how many people don’t talk about it. There are so many steps you could automate in between of these stages (interview to publishing) to reduce burden on your team and improve publishing velocity.

Strategy: Focus on automating the admin tasks most — kicking off new projects once the recording is done, automatically sending emails for first review/data collection from customer success, or dynamic document creation.

The idea is to reduce as many manual (and irrelevant but time consuming) tasks you possibly can so your writers can focus on crafting a better narrative, your review committee is kept in the loop, and the overall time to publish is shortened.

Tactics:

• Build a lean and mean tech stack: Zoom/Google Meet,Otter.ai, Asana/Notion, Zapier (to create subtasks automatically like create a google doc, assign a writer/strategist to extract important information etc)

• Add your marketing pod in case studies after it reaches a certain stage. So, if you have a graphic designer, let Asana automatically assign them a task to create case study assets after it has marked as “ready for design”. Note: Set timelines mindfully - you don’t want to have a full-fledged design kit fleshed out before you get the actual sign-off from your customer.

• Assign important stakeholders based on teams and product usage: dedicated AE or customer success, product head/product marketers, lifecycle marketers.

Step 3: Build a centralized use-case repository

Context: Imagine if you could have a deck with all of your customers’ screenshots of product flows in action. It would be such a time-saver. Not just for case studies, but for other content assets too — think blogs, newsletters, social media posts, pillar posts, webinars, trainings and workshops.

When you create case studies, you’re actively collecting data first-hand from your customer and your internal teams. Store it. Secure it. Share it.

Strategy: Create a centralized use-case repository or an SSOT (single source of truth) that internal team members can refer to. Use this for inspiration, content ideas, and distribution.

Tactics:

• Create a simple Canva or Google Slides deck to collect all the use-cases of your product. Learn and explore what your “product in the wild™” looks like.

• Structure your repository with organized categories and industry segments. This ensures that use cases are easily navigable, and teams can quickly find relevant content based on their needs.

• Integrate version control features to track updates and changes. This ensures that teams are working with the latest and most accurate information, reducing the risk of using outdated content.

• Define user permissions to control access levels. Different teams and individuals may have varied needs for the information, so tailor access rights accordingly to maintain data security.

• Make sure you include a bold visual element that states whether an asset is permitted to be used or not. Sometimes, you’ll have approved assets from customers, other times you might be collecting “product in the wild” visuals from your company’s Slack channels.

• Develop user guides or documentation that outlines how teams can effectively utilize the use-case repository. This ensures that everyone understands the structure, purpose, and functionalities of the repository.

• Foster a culture of contribution, encouraging teams to add valuable insights, customer interactions, and new use cases to the repository. This ensures the repository remains dynamic and grows over time.

How to shorten case study approval timelines

“An ounce of planning is worth a pound of begging. Shorten timelines by properly priming the customer with the story you want to tell, the metrics you’d like to cover, and a potential launch date - before they ever get on the call. This gives them a chance to come prepared and run potential issues past their stakeholders. Stay consistent in follow-up, and make sure whoever is creating the story is deeply immersed in the context of the relationship: they need more than a transcript, they need a brief”, says Joel and I couldn’t agree more.

More marketers get caught up in case study approvals & reviews than you could imagine. From your customers’ legal to ops, HR, director of product/marketing, and sometimes even CEO, reviews and approvals can be painfully long…

Joel further adds “Brands need to have some structured conversations internally between sales/CSMs and marketing to get on the same page in terms of story strategy, accountabilities/ownership through the process, and the final formats to produce, and then translate those conversations into SOPs and ongoing connection points to keep aligned and keep their programs humming.”

Combining the advice from Joel and my own marketing experience, here are some of the best practices I recommend to keep approval timelines short and sweet:

• If you have an internal content review team, make sure you mark your case study as “important” so they know it is indeed important. Such committees are usually pulled in different directions and it’s easy for your email to get lost in a sea of other blog, newsletter, podcast script, event invitation, or whitepaper draft approvals — make sure yours is marked as time-sensitive.

• Encourage parallel reviews: this is a mistake I did for the longest time. I used to keep waiting for one person to review and then move on to the next. After a couple of months I knew i could no longer sustain this and started parallel review requests. Surprisingly, reviews went faster, edits went crazy down, and customers got the draft at least a week before the deadline..

• Create an escalation plan in case if it’s a big client that has a big ass team (more so, if they’ve got a Harvey Spectre legal team).

• Create a conditional approval system for your internal team review committee: when i was working as the Content Head at my previous org, there were times I got notes saying, “Signing off - this looks good. but if we could get this one extra metric/detail, that would make it GREAT.” If I could get my hands on the requested addition, great! If not, I still knew it could go to publishing without further approvals or updates to the commentator.

• If there’s PR involved, get your company’s PR team to create a press release asap and share it with the customer. More often than not, you’ll notice the customer’s PR team lagging behind or asking for multiple revisions, which leads to unexpected delays. A lot of marketers send PR as an add-on doc at the end, right before publishing - don’t do this.

• Have simple design templates you can plug and play in different case studies

• Make sure you clearly communicate timelines and there’s a mutual understanding on the target final publishing date.

• Work with the AE or whoever is closest to the customer to be actively chasing the client in case your follow ups go unresponsive.

Here’s what questions you should ask for creating case studies

And how to tweak them based on different verticals

Part 1: Flashbacks and flashforwards

Get more context on what’s the backstory of a customer, what led them to make a decision to buy your product/service, and follow along their journey AFTER they’ve implemented your product/service...

Use flashcards

Use these flashcards to craft an authentic dialogue that reveals your customer’s story — the hardships, objections, assumptions, hypothesis, dicovery, activation, ROI, gaining momentum — all of it..

The objective is to break down every single touchpoint/action they took in the process of becoming a paid customer. Whether they were a freemium customer or discovered your product on LinkedIn, these flashback cards make it easier to map out their entire journey from scratch so you can craft a stronger narrative for your case study..

some more context on why we’re using flashcards....

The goal is to go beyond attribution tools and UTM tags to get more context on why exactly your customer chose to become your customer.

• were they a consumer of your freemium model?

• if yes, what was the series of campaigns that led them to move to a paying model?

• if no, how did they go from discovery to final activation?

These questions will help your team understand:

• how your product is positioned in a customer’s tech stack?

• how do you fare against your competitors apart from your own SEO research?

• what features are your customers’ top favorites?

(psst...if you cater to various verticals [think retail, RMG, travel, ecommerce, QSRs] you can identify industry-specific top features and share that data w/d lifecycle marketing teams)

Part 2: Adaption and implementation fit

Adaptation and implementation fit isn’t just limited to figuring out the placement of your product within your customer’s existing tech stack.

It’s also about:

• how does the product integrate with other tools in the customer’s tech stack?

• is the product compatible with commonly used platforms and technologies?

• in what ways does the product enhance or complement the functionality of existing systems?

• how does data flow between the product and other components of the tech stack?

• are there any challenges or complexities in the integration process?

Tech stack positioning template

This is more of a one-off exercise for each vertical. So, if you’re writing a case study for a retail customer (eg: Target), conducting this (thorough) research just once should help you understand how exactly your tool fits in a niche ecosystem. More often than not, other retail customers would also be using your tool in a similar fashion. What would differ is “HOW” they use your tool (more on this in the next section).

Part 3: Narrative and context setting

No two stories are the exact same, and this holds even more true for case studies. Regardless of your customers being in the same vertical/niche, ticket size, products usage category, how they actually use your product is almost always unique.

Position your customer as the protagonist, not your brand.

Your protagonist — their choices, goals, objections, struggles, and transformations — create the crux of your story. Bring them at the dead center of your story and branch out your arguments from there.

Here are some interesting storytelling techniques you can use to craft a better, stronger narrative..

Storytelling techniques

There are tons of storytelling techniques out there, but these are my favorite ones for crafting case study narratives.

I could give you 100 questions on narrative and context setting and it still wouldn’t be “one-size-fits-all”. Instead, I’ll leave you with 5 core questions you could ask any customer, regardless of their niche/products purchased, to help you develop a unique premise and stronger narrative.

• What challenges were you facing before our product and how was it impacting the day-to-day ops of your team?

• Could you walk me through the journey of discovery to implementation?

• What are your favorite features and how do they bring value to you in both qualitative and quantitative sense?

• Could you specify 1-2 instances where our product helped you drive great results?

• Looking ahead, what are your organization's future plans in terms of leveraging our product? Are there upcoming projects or expansions where our solution will play a key role?

Part 4: Measurable impact and ROI

Companies are always reluctant giving out metrics and data. They need approvals from higher-ups and there’s always a “but there were other tools that helped us achieve this growth and we can’t attribute it to you completely..”

Things can get tricky if you don’t have the right metrics. Your internal team will be pushing you to get numbers that position your product as a growth driver. On the other hand, your customer might be handing off slightly vague metrics because of internal pushback.

At this moment, you need to be careful around how you intertwine your story and data. Your narrative will heavily influence whether your draft gets external stakeholder approvals or not. More importantly, it’ll affect what and how you can include metrics in your case study.

Make sure before you hit send, you get it reviewed internally from the committee or a single POC who knows the entire background of your customer. If your customer is reluctant in sharing exact numbers publicly, chat with them to figure out an alternative metric (you’ll be surprised how easily this can be solved if both parties work together).

But in case you need some reference questions around measurable impact and ROI, here are some starters for you:

• What specific metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) were you tracking before implementing our solution, and how have they changed since?

• Can you quantify the financial impact our product has had on your organization? This could include cost savings, revenue increase, or any other measurable financial outcomes.

• How has the adoption of our product influenced time efficiency within your team or organization? Are there specific processes that have become more streamlined or accelerated?

• Have you observed any changes in user productivity since implementing our solution? This could include faster task completion, reduced manual effort, or increased output.

• In what ways has our product facilitated scalability for your organization? Have you been able to easily expand operations without significant disruptions?

• How has the implementation of our solution influenced your customer acquisition cost? Have you seen any improvements in cost-effectiveness in acquiring new customers?

Stakeholder management for complex case studies

Depending on your customer’s profile, popularity, and product implementation, a case study could be simple or complex.

For example, if I were to interview an early/growth stage startup where founders are actively doing sales outreach (still) and sales is also serving as success & support, I could be looking at shorter review/approval times. They’d also most probably remember me and my time since there’s less internal hand-off.

Contrarily, if I were to interview a Series E funded enterprise org where there are 7 stages of approvals and 4 different teams involved, I could be looking at strangers emailing me or other folks in my team, unaware of who’s responsible for what, when’s something due, and more.

To overcome this, follow this simple tactic: share point of contacts (POCs) in the first email as soon as you start communication over email (pre- or post- interview call). Having proper POCs your customer can reach out to for specific questions will make collaboration easier and faster.

• Primary POCs: Head of marketing/content and the writer

• Secondary POCs: Customer success or account executive

Creating case studies is tough, and while this process may seem a bit extraa, it’ll help you build a repeatable process that your entire writing team can replicate with minimal to zero hand-holding — all while crafting a unique narrative that directly speaks to your champion buyers and drives measurable pipeline.

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