Hey content friends,

Sponsors don’t usually end up owning the thing they’re sponsoring.

But that’s exactly what happened in this edition’s content example – a company that had been paying for ad slots for years eventually asked if they could just... own the whole show instead.

Syntax is a web development podcast that’s been running since 2017.

Sentry acquired it in 2021.

Let’s dive in.

What they did:

Syntax is a web development podcast started in 2017 by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, both established developer-educators before the show existed.

Format-wise, the show typically runs a short Monday news episode (Hasty Treat), a longer Wednesday deep dive (Tasty Treat), and a monthly listener Q&A called Potluck.

Sentry, an application monitoring software company with devs as their audience, sponsored Syntax consistently for years, alongside other sponsors. Then, in 2021, they approached Wes and Scott about acquiring the show outright.

The deal folded Syntax under the Sentry brand – giving Wes and Scott the funding to run the show, and even a small team to produce it (producer, sound engineer, marketer).

Sentry’s presence on the show today is a single sponsor read each episode…

… and a “produced by Sentry” credit on the site.

Why it works:

• The hosts were trusted experts before anyone sponsored them. Wes and Scott had built their reputations as developer-educators before Syntax existed: Wes through his own coding courses, Scott through Level Up Tutorials. The show was able to build its audience because of their expertise and credibility in the space – something that’s much, much harder for a brand-created podcast to achieve.

• Sentry bought an audience instead of building one. Usually when we think about starting a new content format – like a podcast – we instantly jump to creating that thing ourselves. Sentry took a different route entirely: find a community that already trusts two specific people, and invest in what’s already working rather than trying to replicate it in-house. Of course, they’d already tested it out with paid sponsorships too, so they presumably had strong evidence that this was worth investing in.

• The sponsorship stayed exactly as light-touch after the acquisition as before it. This is the kind of deal that could easily tip into heavy-handed brand advertising once money for ownership is involved. It didn’t. Sentry’s involvement stays mostly behind the scenes – one ad read an episode, a credit line on the site. Wes and Scott have said as much themselves in the 1000th episode special: Sentry’s always let them handle the ad reads however they want, talking about the product the way they’d actually use it rather than reading from a script.

• Three different reasons to show up. Hasty Treat is a quick Monday catch-up. Tasty Treat is Wednesday’s proper sit-down. Potluck is monthly and comes from listener questions rather than the hosts’ own agenda. Each format serves a different mood, and runs on a repeated schedule – repetition that helps to turn casual listeners into people who build the show into their week.

• Video became part of the podcast. Post-acquisition, Syntax moved into video and hired CJ Reynolds as a video creator. Rather than starting a new channel from nothing, Scott’s own YouTube channel – built up over years through Level Up Tutorials – was rebranded into the Syntax channel, again carrying an existing audience straight into the new format instead of building one from scratch a second time.

What this example made me reflect on:

• How do we build deeper relationships with the creators that we sponsor?

• Where could creators become show hosts or embedded team members?

• When is it worth investing in an audience that already trusts someone, rather than trying to build our own from nothing?

• If we owned something people already loved, what’s the first thing we’d be tempted to change – and should we?

Kudos to the Syntax and Sentry teams for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,
Your content friend,
Tabitha

Hey content friends,

The “storytelling” role is back, baby.

From Vanta’s Head of Storytelling to Clay’s Head of Narratives, to Sequel’s role simply just titled ‘Storyteller’ – the word ‘storytelling’ is popping up left, right, and centre in content roles right now.

My first instinct was to roll my eyes a bit. “Storyteller” has always been a slightly cringe word to put on a LinkedIn profile if you work in content – it reads like a dramatic synonym for spinning a corporate yarn.

But when I went and actually read what these roles are asking for, it does actually seem like there’s a shift happening in the role of content.

The scope of what’s expected has expanded – content’s job has got bigger, and I think it’s time we got the recognition we deserve for it.

How the role of content is expanding

None of these roles are actually about better writing, storytelling acumen, or even creating more content.

Instead, there are two specific themes I see coming through.

1. Content needs to determine what the company actually believes, then hold it across every touchpoint

Vanta’s Head of Storytelling asks whoever takes it to work directly with leadership – from the CEO to the CISO – to get the company’s vision and point of view straight, then carry it consistently across blog, social, and everywhere else the company shows up.

Go and find the belief this company actually holds, articulate it properly, and then make sure it’s the same belief no matter which channel someone encounters it on is a very different role to the “go and write some SEO blogs” JDs that plagued content job boards over the past decade – and to me it’s actually a lot more akin to a product marketing role in many ways (a role which is much higher regarded and much higher paid than content).

And this is a big job.

Normally a version of this core belief and POV lives somewhere in a company.

But it’s often piecemeal, mostly in the CEO’s head or in a ‘mission’ doc that only the company’s founding team remember.

And it almost never survives contact with the actual website copy, the actual sales deck, the actual LinkedIn post that went out this week – all written by different people.

Getting that story clear, and then telling it consistently is a real, senior job.

And Vanta is hiring and paying for it like one.

2. Building an in-house media publication

Some companies are going a step further than hiring one person to tell the company’s story through content. They’re building actual editorial operations, often staffed with journalists, to do this at scale.

Like State of Brand by Outlever, which hit 1.5 million monthly readers in three months, built to read like a trade publication rather than a company blog.

Or Plaid, who acquired This Week in Fintech and kept its 200,000-subscriber newsroom running as an independent subsidiary inside their own ecosystem,

Or a16z who built a full in-house media studio in 2025 and now trains “New Media” fellows to embed inside their own portfolio companies.

Or Clay, who launched their journalistic YouTube channel 2500 degrees this year, to tell the stories behind the most interesting businesses being built today.

None of this is cheap, and none of it is designed to immediately convert a bunch of leads for sales to pitch to.

It’s headcount, salary, and structure, committed to the belief that telling real stories about your industry builds more brand and audience than just talking about your product ever will.

These shifts in one person: Mishti Sharma, Head of Narratives at Clay

If you want to see both of these things happening inside one person’s job, just look at Mishti Sharma at Clay.

She joined Clay in 2023 as, in her own words, a ‘reluctant marketing hire’, not particularly excited about the prospect of mostly writing outbound email guides for a small B2B data tool.

But by 2025, the work she was doing had become the first shift I’ve just described – deciding what the company actually believes, then giving the market language specific enough to repeat it.

She wrote the pieces that gave Clay’s core beliefs a name – the classic being “The Rise of the GTM Engineer” – the essay that coined a new role and created a new category that Clay is now synonymous with, spawning thousands of GTM engineering job postings to pop up across the tech space.

And now she’s embodying the second shift towards content as journalism too.

Now Head of Narratives, she’s leading the charge on Clay’s new YouTube channel, 2500 Degrees which profiles the most interesting businesses out there, as full videos – like this one on Mixue, the Chinese fast food giant making its mark in the US currently …

… or as YT Shorts – like this one on the “kingpin” of mangoes in NYC.

I mean talk about career goals, right? Mishti, you’re my new content role model.

To me, content’s job, done well, is about finding what’s distinct about a company and building something memorable around that, so I for one love this direction of travel.

Why is this shift happening now?

I hate to say it, but: AI.

Generic content and generic positioning is cheap and easy to produce now – a company can get a serviceable go-to-market brief out of Claude in an afternoon, the same as a serviceable blog post.

Neither one differentiates anything – we’re entering an era where every tech company sounds the same, and they all sound a bit like Claude.

What’s left, the thing that still can’t be prompted into existence, is a company that has actually decided what it believes, and can prove that belief consistently, with real craft, everywhere it shows up.

That’s scarce. And it’s why these roles are appearing now.

It’s been easy to equate content with execution, output, a production like for sales team assets and SEO blogs to fill keyword gaps.

But if this is what content is now responsible for – defining what a company believes, proving it with real craft, at a level of rigour actual journalism would recognise – then there’s no denying that it’s foundational and highly strategic GTM work.

In most companies, it still isn’t recognised, or paid, that way.

The content job has got bigger, and the value placed on it needs to catch up.

What do you think on this ‘storytelling’ trend? I’d love to hear your takes in the comments.

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

Hey content friends,

I’ll be honest, the first time I saw a ClickUp Comedy skit pop up on Instagram, it made me wince a little.

Office humour skits by a B2B brand aren’t really my cup of tea, especially when I’m off-the-clock.

But, it’s clearly working for them. Their ClickUp Comedy Instagram and TikTok accounts have over 500,000 followers, with individual posts regularly hitting hundreds of thousands of views (sometimes in the millions).

For a B2B productivity software company.

So, I’m putting my personal taste aside for this one, because there are clearly lessons to be learnt here – let’s take a closer look.

What they did:

ClickUp is a productivity and project management platform – one of the more competitive spaces in B2B SaaS, and with a broad audience of teams across functions and industries.

Rather than running the classic B2B content playbook, they’ve gone all in on a dedicated comedy content operation under the ClickUp Comedy brand – a separate account on TikTok and Instagram, with the strapline “actual footage of the corporate world.”

The content is exactly what that tagline suggests: short-form comedy skits about resonant, absurd workplace scenarios.

Getting pizza as a “bonus.”

The ‘office talker’ colleague who talks at you for 45 minutes and you cannot escape.

The way people post on LinkedIn versus how they actually behave.

Crucially, ClickUp didn’t just hand a camera to a marketing intern to run the social media accounts – it’s a core part of their content strategy, and they’re treating it as such.

They hired professional actors and comedians – including people trained at The Groundlings, the LA improv group where Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig trained.

They run a weekly writers’ room with comedy writers to generate ideas, and treat it like a comedy production operation, not a social media side project.

And they run it as part of a wider ecosystem of accounts – ClickUp Comedy and ClickUp Memes each reach different audiences who’d never follow the main brand account.

When something hits (the team cites individual posts reaching 100M+ views), they joint-post it to the main account too, so the reach flows back.

Why it works:

• Entertainment is a legitimate content goal, even in B2B. A lot of B2B content exists to educate, inform, or move someone along a sales funnel. ClickUp Comedy isn’t trying to do any of that – the goal is to make you laugh, to be something you’d share, get their brand in front of as many people as possible, and build brand affinity through a feeling of “ClickUp gets what my work life is actually like”. It’s the kind of content play that’s hard to get buy-in on, because there’s no clean attribution story to lean on, but it absolutely builds the brand recognition that makes you think of them first when you’re evaluating tools.

• The comedy works because the subject is universal. Office life is something their entire audience has in common, regardless of role, industry, or seniority. A Head of Marketing and a project coordinator are both potential ClickUp buyers, and will both recognise the “office talker” skit. That universality of office experience enables this content to reach an audience at scale – you don’t need to be a ClickUp user, or even know what ClickUp does, to find it funny. You just need to have worked in an office.

• The line between personal and professional is blurrier than B2B brands think. We all have lives outside of work, but it’s not like we’re two entirely different people in work and personal life. The classic B2B channels are the ones we think of as ‘work’ – LinkedIn, search engines, PR outlets. But VP of Sales Sarah is also a person who scrolls TikTok for a 5 minute break after a meeting. Being visible in the spaces where your buyers actually spend their time, when your competitors aren’t, is a smart play.

• Treating it like a production means the quality holds up. If you’re going to do comedy as a B2B, you have to do it well – it could so easily fall flat, and have the opposite brand impact that you’re hoping for. ClickUp went and hired professional comedians and improv-trained actors, built a writers’ room, and committed to consistent creative output. The result is content that’s clearly professionally done, and that feels like it belongs on the platform, rather than a brand awkwardly attempting to ‘do TikTok’.

• They find repeatable formats, and double down on them. The ClickUp team talk about throwing spaghetti – trying lots of ideas, seeing what hits, analysing why, and doubling down. Consistency, learnings, and iteration are a must for any content project – if you try it once, it flops, and you move onto something new, you’ll never know that you were a step away from it working.

Lessons I’m taking away for my content work:

• Know your audience beyond their job title and pain points – how they spend their time outside work and the content they consume just for fun, not for learning.

• There are probably platforms or formats we’ve dismissed as “not B2B” that our buyers are actually spending a lot of time on, just not in a work context.

• Doing something deliberately, boldly different can make a brand memorable (as long as it’s designed to resonate with our audience so we stand out in the right way).

• Creative content that doesn’t land right can do more harm than good. If we’re going to do something unexpected or entertainment-focused, it needs proper production investment behind it.

• Give content experiments enough runway to learn from before cutting them. You might be one iteration away from it working.

Kudos to Chris Cunningham and the rest of the ClickUp team involved for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Brought to you by:

Hey content friends,

Sometimes it feels like everyone has a podcast.

Especially in B2B world – there are so many samey podcasts about startup growth strategy with clean white studio backgrounds and carefully positioned guests.

Contentoo’s Permission to Rant is not one of those.

It’s two content marketers who have a lot of opinions and finally got given a microphone.

I don’t think that’s an accident – the reason it works so well is that the people hosting it are the audience it’s made for.

And that’s why it’s my content example of choice for this edition. Let’s dive in!

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Content Ideas: Contentoo’s Permission to Rant podcast

What they did:

Contentoo is a content platform – they match brands with skilled content creators and manage the process from brief to delivery. So their audience is content marketers and marketing teams.

Earlier this year, they launched Permission to Rant – a podcast hosted by their Content Lead Penny Warnock and Content Marketer Nike Pucci.

The format is exactly what the name promises: honest takes and opinionated rants about the realities of working in content, with topics like “is B2B allowed to be funny?” or “AI exposes broken marketing”.

Two content marketers talking about the stuff that actually winds them up, with occasional guests.

Each episode is posted on YouTube and Spotify…

… and then gets repurposed into LinkedIn posts using clips, carousels, and image posts of shareable moments, posted by Contentoo …

…and by the co-hosts too.

Why it works:

• The hosts are the audience. Penny and Nike aren’t presenting content to content marketers from a position of feigned authority – they’re content marketers themselves, talking through the same frustrations their audience faces daily. The podcast resonates because it comes from inside the experience.

• The groundwork was already there. Penny and Nike have both posted consistently on LinkedIn themselves, and been seen on the Contentoo LinkedIn in funny TikTok-style videos, long before the podcast was born. The voice, the opinions, the willingness to show up publicly were already established before the podcast existed, and presumably they could see that that was resonating. Permission to Rant was a natural next step, and it didn’t feel like a brand suddenly deciding to “do personal.” It felt like a natural extension of their brand voice.

• Platforming your people should be a standard part of content strategy. Penny and Nike (presumably) aren’t doing this just as a fun side project – it’s part of their content strategy to platform their internal experts to build their brand. For a content company, that comes more naturally: of course content marketers are going to get why this is a smart decision. But every company could learn from this. Identifying the people inside your company who are your audience (your Head of HR if you market to HR leaders, or your Data Scientist if you market to data people) and who are willing to show up publicly, and actively investing in them doing it – or even hiring deliberately for team members who are willing to see building a brand as part of their role.

• The brand voice and the podcast voice are the same voice. Contentoo’s brand voice – no capitals, conversational, openly human, “your content matchmaker” – is the same energy as Permission to Rant. There’s no gap between how the company presents itself and how the podcast is framed or how the hosts show up. That brand consistency signals genuine audience understanding: they know who they’re talking to, and they’ve built a company identity that reflects it.

  

• No selling, just resonance. There’s not a product mention in sight. The whole premise is “here’s a place where content marketers can feel seen – we’ll rant about the things we know you want to”. Not all content needs to move someone down a pipeline. Some content exists to build the kind of brand affinity that means when someone does need what you offer, you’re already the name they trust.

• Their audience appreciates great content and creative ideas – and this is both. For an audience who spends their days thinking about what good content looks like, a genuinely creative (and also just playful) content series is impressive to see. Permission to Rant is content that both resonates with topics their audience care about, and shows that Contentoo knows what great content looks like. Marketing to marketers is fun, but it isn’t easy, and this is a masterclass in how to do it well.

What this example made me reflect on:

• If you market to a specific function, do you have people in that function on your team who might be willing to show up publicly? And are you actually making use of them if you do? Or could you hire deliberately for that willingness if not?

• Where in our content mix are we building genuine resonance with our community versus putting out educational resources or product info? Is there space for something that exists purely to make our community feel seen?

• How much of your brand voice exists on paper versus actually showing up in how your people communicate publicly? Is there a gap between the two?

Kudos to Penny, Nike, and the rest of the Contentoo team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Hey content friends,

SEO traffic is down. Google is answering questions so people don’t have to click anywhere to get them. LinkedIn reach is more unpredictable than ever.

If your content distribution relies on rented channels, the ground is shifting pretty fast right now.

So this edition I wanted to cover an example that feels particularly relevant to that problem: State of Brand by Outlever, a B2B media publication that hit 1.5 million monthly readers in three months, and that makes a pretty compelling case for owning your audience rather than borrowing someone else’s.

Let’s dive in.

What they did:

Outlever specialises in building owned media machines for B2B brands, turning their clients into the leading voice in their industry. Melissa Rosenthal, Outlever’s co-founder, was employee 10 at BuzzFeed and led brand at ClickUp, amongst others.

She knows how editorial works, and State of Brand shows it.

State of Brand is Outlever’s own publication.

It covers brand, owned media, and GTM strategy for marketing and brand leaders – think fast, newsy articles with opinionated headlines and real reporting.

It reads like a trade publication, not a company blog, with headlines like: “Mercury Will Pay $335K to Reframe a Category. The Job Description Reads Like an Editor-in-Chief’s.”

Or: “Your Follower Count Stopped Driving Your LinkedIn Reach. The Data Proves It.”

Specific, timely, with a clear point of view.

The publication has its own identity. Outlever is present, through ads on site for their services, with wording like “if this caught your attention, that’s not accidental.”

And the meta layer is hard to miss: a company whose product is building owned media publications built its own owned media publication, and grew it to 1.5 million monthly readers in three months.

It’s the best proof a potential client could see that they know what works.

Distribution is straightforward too: Melissa posts a screenshot of the article and summary on her own LinkedIn, and the State of Brand account does too – and tag any contributors.

Why it works:

• The owned audience argument has never been more relevant. Content teams have spent years building audiences on borrowed platforms – optimising for Google, chasing LinkedIn reach, testing out YouTube’s algorithm. All of those channels are getting harder. Building a content destination that an audience value and come back to directly is the best way to combat that, and State of Brand is a live example of that working.

• It reads like a publication, not a content marketing programme. Company blogs are a mix of everything – editorial content sitting alongside product announcements, competitor comparisons, customer case studies – and they sit on your website alongside product pages and CTAs galore. State of Brand is all one thing: a news publication. Every article fits the same editorial beat. That consistency is what makes it feel like somewhere worth coming back to, rather than a company space you visit once when you need something or come to via a google search.

• “By Outlever” creates editorial distance from the product. State of Brand is a publication that happens to be built by Outlever – not Outlever’s blog with a clever name. The distance and focus gives credibility. WePresent does the same thing in a completely different context – arts journalism and platforming creatives. The content earns its place on its own terms, so the brand association is naturally positive.

• The articles are written like journalism, not content marketing. Short paragraphs, a clear position taken fast, SME interviews giving the reporting details – underpinned by Outlever working with journalists to produce the articles.

• Featuring your ICP as sources turns reporting into relationship-building. When Outlever conducts interviews for State of Brand, they’re targeting their own ICP.. Every interview is a warm touchpoint with a potential buyer – so whilst it’s predominantly a brand marketing play, the commercial benefit is clear too.

• The LinkedIn distribution is dead simple. Melissa posts a screenshot of the article on her own account, the State of Brand account does the same. They don’t reformat it – just post the article and link back to the site. The publication is the destination, and every post treats it like one.

What this example made me reflect on:

• If the channels you currently rely on for distribution disappeared tomorrow, what would you have left? An owned audience – email subscribers, direct readers, a community – is the only distribution that stays independently of platform decisions you have no control over.

• What’s the right editorial model for your audience? State of Brand is fast and newsy, but the format should fit how your audience wants to consume, not just what’s easiest to produce.

• Does your company blog have a clear editorial identity, or is it a mix of everything – thought leadership sitting alongside product announcements, SEO guides, customer stories? If the latter, do readers have enough reason to come back directly?

• Does a separate editorial destination make sense for you, or could you carve out that identity within your existing blog? A standalone site creates cleaner editorial distance from the brand, but it takes resource to build and sustain. For a lot of teams, the more realistic version is ringfencing a section of what you already have.

Kudos to the Outlever team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,
Your content friend,
Tabitha

Content people love the new and shiny.

There’s always a new topic to cover, a new format to try, a new campaign to run – the backlog of ideas is never-ending and the calendar is always filling up with what’s next.

But if you’re only ever looking forward, you’re publishing into a leaky bucket.

The content you wrote two years ago – the ones that were important enough to be top priority at the time – are left to go stale.

Citations and examples get dated, search rankings slip, and your ICP is still out there looking for valuable insights on that topic.

A regular content audit and refresh process is how you fix the leak

Get my free content audit template →

The case for content audits as a discipline, not a one-off process

The standard approach to a content audit is to treat it as a big project run every-so-often.

It’s top-of-the-list when you start a new role and inherit someone else’s library. Or when you introduce a new content strategy and need to see where things are at. Or when traffic declines get bad enough that you can’t ignore them anymore.

A week or two of pulling data, evaluating everything, and assigning actions. Then that’s job done until next time.

I’m guilty of this myself.

At Ravio, I’ve been building our content library for the past three years. We’ve always focused on quality over quantity, so we don’t have a vast library to maintain. But, even so, three years of work means hundreds of blogs, reports, and landing pages amass over time.

Up until now, it’s felt enough to keep on top of it via targeted refreshes for our highest priority SEO pages.

But then recently we found ourselves in an organic search pickle. Traffic and conversions down on pieces that have been performing well for us for years, seemingly overnight, for no clear reason.

I don’t think content freshness and value is the ONLY factor contributing to that, but it’s certainly been a trigger to think about how we can better keep on top of the freshness of our library over time.

So now I’m thinking about the systematic version of content audits and refreshes – how we implement a process that means we’re preventing problems proactively over time, rather than treating refreshes as a bottom-of-the-list priority.

New content is important – but it will always perform better when the library it’s joining is already in good shape.

So my answer hasn’t been about deprioritising new content production for a one-off refresh sprint. Instead, it’s been about figuring out how to build a regular audit and refresh cadence alongside new content production, so that maintenance becomes a discipline rather than a crisis response.

What my content audit process looks like now

The first time you run an audit, it is a big project. There’s no getting around that — you need to build the inventory, pull the data, and evaluate everything from scratch.

But after that first pass, it doesn’t have to be.

My approach has been to get everything into a big template once, with performance data and a clear action assigned to each piece.

From there, checks become lighter – you're maintaining something that already exists rather than starting from scratch each time.

For each piece, there are two things I’m asking when I audit: how is performance trending, and is this content still earning its place in our library (right audience, right intent, right topic, actually contains value, actually says something a competitor couldn’t copy and paste).

I’m also currently building an AI workflow to automate some of the grunt work (as I’m sure we all are) – identifying declining content and flagging suggested actions, so that the audit is constantly happening behind the scenes and that issues get surfaced before they become actual issues rather than requiring a manual data pull every time.

I’ve built a content audit template that makes all of this systematic – if building a regular cadence would be useful, it’s yours to keep.

Get my free content audit template →

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

Hey content friends,

Earlier this year, sales proposal software company Qwilr launched a game.

Not as part of their product, just a fun, 8-bit arcade game that pulls in your LinkedIn profile and turns your career history into a playable quest.

Submit your LinkedIn URL, hit play, and watch your career unfold level by level – every job a new stage, every promotion a power-up.

When I played it, I got a proper little jolt of nostalgia when the first level loaded up and announced “new job: Oxford University Press”.

It was all over LinkedIn for weeks because it’s designed to be sharable – people posting their scores, tagging colleagues, saying “you have to try this.”

And it’s our example for this edition of Content Ideas. Let’s dive in and take a closer look.

What they did:

Qwilr is a sales proposal tool, helping commercial and sales teams create visually impressive, interactive proposals rather than sending static PDFs. Their core audience is sales and marketing teams.

Earlier this year, the Qwilr team built an 8-bit arcade game about your career: Qwilr Quest.

You hand over your LinkedIn URL, and the game pulls your career history and transforms it into a retro 8-bit side-scroller arcade game.

Each job you’ve had becomes a level, and you move through your own professional history – collecting briefcases, levelling up, watching your career play out as you go.

The whole thing takes about two minutes to play.

There’s no form to fill in to get access and no CTA at the end asking you to sign up for something – as far as I can tell, no hidden agendas at all.

You just play it, feel oddly nostalgic about your first post-uni job in 2015, and then share it because you want your colleagues to experience the same thing.

Why it works:

• Entertainment is underrated as a content aim. Qwilr Quest isn’t trying to educate anyone or move them down a funnel (or at least, not as far as I can tell). It’s trying to be fun and sharable, and it succeeds. Entertainment is a content decision that requires real conviction to get signed off – but absolutely works.

• They built shareability into the mechanics. A B2B software company made a fun arcade game, which is novel enough on its own to be worth posting about. Then there’s the personal angle on top of that – seeing your own career history in pixel form makes it even more shareworthy. And then Qwilr stacked a high score competition on top, with a physical prize for winners: a branded retro game cartridge, the kind you’d recognise from a Game Boy or Nintendo. So people had a reason to keep playing, post their scores, and want to win something tangible. So it’s unsurprising that Qwilr Quest was all over LinkedIn for weeks.

• This creativity is part of a pattern, not a one-off. Qwilr Quest is one example of a company that has decided bold, creative, unexpected campaigns are just how they want to show up to their audience – one LinkedIn commenter noted that Qwilr “really doesn’t miss” and pointed to previous campaigns including a March Madness bracket for ops teams and turning people into trading cards. This creativity has become what Qwilr are known for, and that builds brand affinity in a way that product launches and white papers never will.

• There’s sharp audience knowledge underneath the fun of it. For Qwilr’s audience of largely millennial sales and marketing people, watching your career play out in the look and feel of childhood gaming taps into nostalgia. And building it around a LinkedIn profile works too, because sales and marketers live on LinkedIn for networking, prospecting, managing profiles. A game built around your LinkedIn profile was always going to land with an audience who think about their LinkedIn profile more than most.

• It reflects what Qwilr’s product actually does too. Qwilr’s product is about creating impressive, interactive experiences that stand out rather than blending in. Qwilr Quest is that, applied to their own marketing. And for an audience of sales and marketing people who care about creative quality, building something this polished and playful says more about what Qwilr is capable of than a product demo ever could.

What this example made me reflect on:

• Where could we create something our audience would share purely because it’s enjoyable?

• What do we know about how our audience actually spends their time, and are we using that creatively enough?

• Are we building anything that demonstrates what our product does just by existing, rather than having to explain it?

Kudos to the Qwilr marketing team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Most companies treat brand and content as sequential.

You define the brand first – the positioning, the values, the tone of voice guidelines – and then content executes against it.

Brand is the strategy. Content is an output.

But, in reality, brand is built through experience – through what your audience repeatedly encounters of you over time, not through what you claim about yourself in a positioning document.

In B2B, content is usually the most consistent of those repeated encounters – alongside our allies in community, events, and campaigns.

Which makes every content decision a brand-building decision, whether it’s treated as one or not.

Your content is building a brand, but it might not be the one you designed

Brand is built through accumulation. What your audience repeatedly encounters of you over months or years of interactions shapes what they think you stand for.

So if most of what you’re publishing is interchangeable with what any competitor could put out, that’s the brand taking shape in their mind: forgettable, nothing much to say.

A lot of company blogs look the same. How-to guides, industry trends roundups, concept explainers – that are all pretty thin once you click into them.

They’re reasonably written, cover the basics, might rank on Google (if you’re lucky).

But strip the logo and you couldn’t tell whose it was. There’s no perspective, nothing original in sight.

It’s what I like to call the generic company blog. You’re showing up through consistent content, technically. But building nothing.

It happens because most companies skip straight to “what should we publish this month” without spending time focused on what brand they’re building through their content.

Calendars get filled from keyword lists, stakeholder requests, topic gaps that need covering.

Brand guidelines exist somewhere – tone of voice, messaging pillars – but they don’t answer the question that actually matters: what do we believe, what do we want to be known for, and what does that mean for what we publish?

And brand strategy sits entirely separately from content strategy.

So content defaults to the generic informational pieces.

What it looks like when content builds the brand you actually want

The contrast is obvious when you look at the companies whose content actually builds brand equity.

Buffer has a blog full of great posts about social media scheduling – their product.

But there’s also content by CEO Joel Gascoigne about their approach to transparency as a company – and that’s contributed more to their brand perception than any post about LinkedIn or Instagram.

Like an 8,000-word piece walking through how their compensation system evolved over a decade, complete with the exact formulas, the mistakes they made, and what they changed.

Nobody asked for insights on pay transparency from a social media scheduler.

Buffer published it because they believe in radical transparency as a core company value – and they’ve been proving that belief through content (and action) since 2013.

You don’t need to know anything about social media scheduling to understand what Buffer stands for.

Or take WeTransfer.

Their brand guidelines probably say something about ‘supporting creativity’.

In practice, that turned into WePresent – their digital arts media platform, running since 2018 with its own editorial team, its own social channels, its own identity.

Six years of commissioning original work from artists and writers, profiling underrepresented voices, putting on exhibitions.

You’d read it if WeTransfer ceased to exist tomorrow.

Or, at Ravio, we know our audience of Reward professionals are often a team of one – isolated, under pressure, and hungry to know how peers in similar situations are navigating the same challenges – and that understanding shapes everything we publish.

Like Reward Hours – our monthly webinar series – is deliberately a real conversation between our CPO Vaso and a Reward peer, working through the challenges we hear our community wrestling with.

The brand we’re building is Ravio as the space where Reward professionals find their people and learn from one another – and that only works if the content actually feels like peer conversation rather than vendor broadcast.

Over time the chat is getting busier, conversations continue after sessions end, and Reward thought leaders now want to be guest speakers because it’s become a known space in the community.

The same thinking runs through our blog.

When we publish on lead-the-market pay strategies, compensation through M&A, or building new hire packages, it’s because these are known pain points we hear about constantly – and every piece is always grounded in Ravio’s own compensation data or in expert voices from practitioners who’ve been there.

The information alone isn’t what builds the brand.

The combination of deep audience understanding, proprietary data, and real practitioner perspective is what makes it recognisably ours and something that prospects consistently rave about.

The through-line across all of these is that there’s a clear conviction behind everything they publish – a consistent answer to “what do we believe and what do we want our audience to think of us.”

How to make your content build the brand you actually want

This comes down to two things.

First: know what brand you’re building.

What’s your distinctive point of view on your market – the perspective your competitors either don’t hold or aren’t willing to say out loud?

What do you want your audience to think of when they hear your name six months from now?

What do you believe about how the problem your product solves should actually be approached?

Without clear answers, content defaults to generic because there’s nothing to draw from or aim for.

You can have a great content team, a solid editorial process, a well-resourced calendar – and produce a lot of stuff, but nothing that really builds a memorable brand, because nobody has defined what brand the content is supposed to be building.

Second: figure out which content approach brings that specific brand to life.

There’s no universal answer here.

Original data and research works if your brand is built on deep market knowledge – if being the company that knows your space better than anyone is core to who you are.

Like Ravio’s Compensation Trends report exists because we sit on a significant dataset of real compensation benchmarks, and sharing that data is how we prove our value to a community that desperately needs it.

Genuine expert voices work if peer-to-peer learning is central to your brand – if your audience trusts practitioners over vendors, and you want to position yourself as the connector. Like every Reward Hours episode, every expert-led blog post we publish at Ravio, is grounded in that understanding of our audience.

A strong POV on your topics works if you want to be known as the company that thinks differently about your space – taking a clear stance rather than just explaining the landscape. Buffer’s salary writing argues for their transparent approach.

Creative, unexpected content works if distinctiveness and boldness are part of your brand identity, if you want your audience to associate you with the kind of creativity your product enables. Like Qwilr – a sales proposal tool – built an arcade game that turns your LinkedIn career history into a retro 8-bit quest, just because it was fun and shareable.

Platforming the people inside your company works if authenticity and human connection are central to your brand. Like Contentoo’s Permission to Rant podcast – hosted by their own content marketers talking about the things that actually wind them up – works because the hosts are the audience. There’s no gap between who Contentoo says they are and who shows up in the content.

The decision comes from knowing what you’re building and choosing the approach that makes that brand real, rather than just something that exists in a brand guidelines document.

Two questions worth asking before you plan next month’s content

Question one: do you know what brand you’re building?

Can you answer, in a sentence or two: what’s your distinctive POV? What do you want to be known for? What do you believe that your competitors aren’t saying?

If the answer is no – or if different people on your team would give different answers – that’s where to start. No content approach fixes the absence of something worth saying.

Question two: look at your last five pieces of content.

For each one, ask: does this contain anything that could only have come from us?

Original data, a genuine expert voice, a clear stance on the topic, a creative angle that reflects who we are, an editorial choice that signals what we care about. Could a competitor swap their logo onto this and publish it themselves?

If you pass question one but fail question two, you have a brand conviction that isn’t making it into your content.

There’s nothing wrong with SEO content, educational how-tos, or informational posts that help your audience do their jobs. They have their place if they fit your strategy.

But the content that forms your audience’s first and most repeated impression of you – the content at the top of your funnel, the stuff they encounter long before they ever think about buying – deserves the same conviction you’d put into any other brand decision.

Because whether you’re thinking about it that way or not, it does inform your audience’s perception of your brand.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer – word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Hey content friends,

Walk through most B2B company blogs and you’ll find content about their product, their industry, their space – social media tips, scheduling best practices, analytics guides.

Buffer has all that.

But their most memorable content isn’t about social media management.

It’s about salary transparency.

Buffer publishes every employee’s salary on an ‘Open’ hub alongside company finances, revenue projections, and company handbook.

And CEO Joel Gascoigne has written several exhaustive blog posts explaining the thinking behind it all over the life of the company.

His latest is an 8,000-word deep dive on how their salary system evolved over a decade, complete with spreadsheets, formulas, market data sources, and the mistakes they made along the way.

This reads like employer branding at first – and it’s definitely true that job candidates love this level of transparency (and the generosity of the salaries).

But employer branding doesn’t stay contained – it shapes how everyone perceives the company.

When potential customers see Buffer treating their team this way, they understand the values driving the company.

That openness and fairness becomes part of the brand story, whether you’re considering working there or just choosing a social media tool.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Buffer’s salary transparency blogs

What they did:

Buffer is a social media scheduling and management tool for creators, small businesses, and marketers.

Since 2013, they’ve operated as an “open company” – sharing aspects of their business that most companies keep private.

This lives on their Open hub, where you can view:

• Every employee’s individual salary (including the CEO’s)

• Company finances and revenue projections

• Their product roadmap

• Their complete company handbook

• What the team is currently reading.

And more.

But the real content goldmine is the blog series explaining the thinking behind all of it – as part of their ‘Open blog’, where they share the behind-the-scenes on business thinking overall.

CEO Joel Gascoigne has written extensively about their approach to salaries over the past decade on the Open blog – not corporate company PR announcements, but detailed explainers written personally by him.

The latest example is an 8,000-word piece titled “Introducing our Open Salary System: Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries at Buffer.”

It walks through:

• How their salary approach evolved from formula to system over 10 years

• Why they chose specific market data sources to benchmark pay with

• The details on exact percentiles they use for different roles

• How they handle location bands and cost of living

• The mistake they made in 2022 when they broke their own formula by hiring someone at the wrong level/location band

• The systematic changes they implemented to prevent it happening again

• Links to the actual spreadsheets used to calculate salaries.

It’s vastly more detail than most companies ever give their employees on how their salary was decided – even behind closed doors, let alone in the public eye – as you can tell from a glance at this section on their overarching principles.

Other blogs in the series include pieces on why they increase salaries every year to match market rates, and their vision for location-independent salaries.

What makes it a great content marketing example to learn from:

• Strong opinions demonstrated, not claimed. Many companies say they value transparency, but just list it in their token ‘company values’ section on their careers page. Buffer proves it by publishing individual salaries and the exact formulas, and sharing the detailed thinking behind it. This is what actual thought leadership looks like – strong opinions that go against conventional actions, with clear explanations about why those opinions are held.

• They’re teaching, not just telling. Buffer could publish the salary numbers and call it a day. Instead, they write comprehensive guides on the behind-the-scenes processes that go into making those salaries public. It’s genuinely educational – you could implement your own compensation system from these blogs. That generosity transforms company news into thought leadership people actually reference and return to.

• Building in public before it was a tactic. Joel’s been writing about Buffer’s approach to openness since 2013. Now “founder-led content” and “building in public” are everywhere as marketing tactics. Buffer was just doing it because they believed in it. That authenticity – and maintaining it through market changes and company struggles for over a decade – is what makes it credible.

• Employer branding is brand building. At face value, this is employer branding: job candidates see this transparency and want to work there. But it’s more than that – because employer branding shapes how everyone perceives your company. When potential customers see how Buffer treats their team, it signals the company’s core values. That openness, that fairness, that commitment to principles – those associations follow through to overall brand perception. You understand what Buffer stands for. You respect what they’re doing. It becomes a brand you want to be associated with, whether you’re applying for a job or choosing a social media tool.

• Company operations as universal content. Compensation isn’t Buffer’s product – social media scheduling is. But everyone works. Everyone has a salary. Everyone cares about fairness in pay. Buffer found the overlap between what they do internally and what resonates universally. Not everything internal makes interesting external content, but this does.

What this example made me reflect on:

• What strong beliefs do we hold that we could prove through action rather than just claim in our content?

• Where could we share our thinking on hard problems in a way that’s genuinely educational and useful to others, not just promotional?

• What aspects of how we operate internally would resonate with our audience’s universal experiences, even if they’re not directly about our product? Are we willing to share the messy iterations and mistakes, not just the polished outcomes?

Kudos to the Buffer team for this one 👏

P.S. If you’re curious about all the details on how Buffer’s compensation approach works, I wrote about it a while back for Ravio’s Compensation Stories series.

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha.

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

You know that feeling when you look through your (very full) content calendar, and realise it’s a mish-mash of things that don’t quite ladder up to the content strategy you painstakingly put together?

Yeah, me too.

It’s easy to end up there.

Working in content means a stream of constant ideas. Some from yourself, and some from everyone else in the business – the sales team asking for something to help with a new objection, a partnership opportunity that came up and seemed too good to pass on.

All reasonable things. All now in the calendar.

But when you try and tie them back to your goals and strategy, it’s clear something isn’t quite working.

For me, that’s where a content plan comes in.

Get the content plan templates →

What your content plan should do

A content plan has one job: force prioritisation.

Your content strategy tells you what to say no to.

Your content calendar helps you execute what you’ve said yes to.

The plan is the bit in between – where you actually do the saying yes and no.

Every quarter, I sit down with my list of ideas and topics we’ve been meaning to cover, and decide what’s actually important to meet the goals we set in the strategy – and what should stay an idea for now.

It’s this decision-making layer that’s often missing when your calendar fills up with reactive requests – it’s too easy to add it to the to do list, without really reflecting on whether it’s the best next thing to work on.

So how do you build a content plan that ties strategy to output?

I split my plan into three sections: this quarter, next quarter, and an ideas log.

This quarter is what I’m committed to, the pieces that are already in flight right now – and their production details are managed via my day-to-day content calendar.

Next quarter is the pieces that are next up in terms of prioritisation – the items we know will move the needle. I populate that section as I go, but it’s not set in stone until each quarterly planning session comes around.

The ideas log is, as you might have guessed, where all those other ideas are logged. It’s where the sales request that’s reasonable but not urgent goes, along with the idea that sparked from a newsletter, the collaboration we’d love to do with a trusted thought leader. Rather than those things landing straight in the calendar and my to do list, they sit here to be properly prioritised. Then at the start of each quarter I’m working from a list I’ve already been curating rather than generating ideas from scratch – or worse, just saying yes to whatever landed most recently.

For each piece in the plan, I capture:

• What it is: working title and format

• How it connects to strategy: what goal it serves, who it’s for, what evidence of it aligning with audience pain points or business needs we have. If you can’t fill these in, it probably shouldn’t be on the plan – this is the column that does the actual work of tying ideas back to strategy.

• How it’ll reach people: content produced without a plan for distributing it won’t have the desired impact, and distribution can impact timing, so it’s worth including any ideas and dependencies.

• Who else is involved: SMEs, freelancers, partners, other internal teams – again, all dependencies that can impact timing and distribution.

• Priority: based on strategic alignment, including any notes on why.

Get my content marketing plan template

I’ve turned my content plan into a template – one for Notion, one for Google Sheets/Excel, depending on what you like to use.

Both include the three sections (this quarter, next quarter, ideas log) and all the columns I just walked through, with a how-to guide and example rows so you’re not starting from a blank page.

If it’s helpful for you, it’s all yours.

Get the content plan templates →

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

Hey content friends,

Most B2B brands create content about their product.

Lovable lets their users’ creations become the content instead.

Their Discover page isn’t a traditional resource centre or blog. It’s a curated gallery of real apps, tools, and websites that people have built using Lovable – their AI builder that lets non-coders create through conversation.

And it’s sitting right there in their main navigation, not hidden three clicks deep.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Lovable’s Discover page

What they did:

Lovable is an AI builder for founders, designers, marketers, product managers – chat to the AI and it will help you build landing pages, tools, product prototypes, without needing to know how to code.

They’ve had monumental growth over the past year, and in their recent blog on hitting $10M ARR, they cite “community and content were key to our growth.”

Their Discover page embodies both.

It’s a landing page showcasing what others are building with Lovable – “Explore apps built by talented creators with Lovable.”

Projects are organised into sections: apps for builders, most loved by the community, personal apps and entertainment, and so on.

Click into any example and you can actually interact with it – like Attendflow’s “event marketing made simple” website, for instance.

You can also click through to each creator’s profile to see what else they’ve been making – adding that human, community element.

What makes this a great content marketing example to learn from:

• Built-in shareability enables community growth. Lovable’s growth has been driven by content and community. The product itself is inherently very shareable (people want to show off what they’ve created), which fuels that community momentum. The Discover page surfaces those creations directly on their website, reinforcing what’s already happening organically. When users see their projects featured publicly, it validates the community they’re part of – and when new visitors see what others have built, they want to create their own. It’s a flywheel: builds inspire more builds, which get shared, which inspire even more.

• Content and community as a flywheel. Community members can like others’ creations, surfacing the most popular projects, and creating that ‘loved by the community’ section. That recognition validates creators and shows new visitors what’s possible – making them want to join the community themselves and get closer to the Lovable ecosystem. When they build their own projects and see them featured on Discover, they become part of that same cycle. Content feeds community engagement, community engagement surfaces the best content, and seeing that active community makes people want to be part of it. It’s a flywheel that drives growth.

• Examples spark possibility. I’m a big believer that templates and examples make for great content for software companies. I know I’m personally constantly hunting for inspirational content examples to add to my swipe file (hence this entire newsletter) – and every audience has their version of that. HR managers want to see peer employee engagement survey templates, marketers want to see how others are using AI tools to build landing pages. It’s universally effective because people want to see how their peers solve problems.

• The examples are the product in action. Instead of blog posts explaining vibe coding, Lovable surfaces real user projects you can actually interact with. And right now, with so many of us desperately trying to build AI skills to keep up, seeing someone else’s functioning event platform makes you think “I could do that too.” You’re seeing proof that someone like you already succeeded. That combination of inspiration and FOMO is what converts curiosity into an audience member signing up for a free trial.

• Radical focus over scattered resources. Lovable’s main website navigation doesn’t have a blog or resources hub. Just Discover. They’re obviously active elsewhere – YouTube tutorials, TikTok content, employee LinkedIn posts, partnership content, huge community presence. But on their website there’s just one content destination. That focus forces clarity about what actually matters to their audience and their growth journey.

What this content example made me reflect on:

• If we have a product, where’s the shareability aspect? Could we create a “built with [our tool]” showcase? Or campaigns like Spotify Wrapped that make users proud to share their usage? How do we tap into user-generated examples?

• Where could we bring more focus by reducing the number of content streams? Lovable stripped their website navigation down to Discover. What would happen if we cut half our content initiatives and doubled down on what actually drives results?

• How do we make our product the hero of our content, without having to actually talk about its features?

Kudos to the Lovable team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately?

Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha.

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Hey content friends,

I don’t usually cover product-focused content in this newsletter.

My brain gravitates towards brand campaigns and creative thinking – the content that builds authority through storytelling rather than walking people through features.

But Clay University caught my attention because of how they’ve positioned their product education.

It looks more like building a career development platform than creating help docs.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Clay University

What they did:

Most product education follows a familiar pattern: help articles explaining how to use specific features, tutorial videos walking through workflows, documentation that exists to answer “how do I do X in your product?”

Clay University takes a different approach.

They’ve built courses structured around GTM skills.

“CRM Enrichment”, for instance, teaches you how to fill missing data gaps and create workflows that keep leads updated.

“Automated Inbound” covers building systems that handle inbound lead management.

The courses teach you the skill itself, with Clay the tool needed to execute it.

So CRM enrichment becomes a capability you need to develop as a GTM professional, and Clay happens to be how you do it – and they position the certifications explicitly as “resume-worthy credentials that signal your GTM engineering skills.”

Their recent LinkedIn announcement made the scope clear: Clay University aims to become “the central hub for all GTM education.”

The language reinforces this professional development framing: it’s a university, with structured curriculum, certifications you can add to your LinkedIn profile, live cohorts for different experience levels (”aspiring GTM engineer”, “system thinker”, “semi-technical”).

And this is reflected visually too – via Clay’s recognisable clay illustrations, in the shape of an educational building.

And all of it sits behind Clay login – you need an account to access the courses.

That creates exclusivity (you’re part of the Clay community that has access to this knowledge, not just reading public docs) whilst reinforcing that the education and product are inseparable.

You can’t learn GTM engineering as an abstract concept – you learn by actually doing it within Clay itself.

What makes this a great content marketing example to learn from:

• The “University” framing legitimises the entire concept. Calling it a University with courses, certificates, and cohorts (instead of a help centre) signals their product education as something with real weight. That legitimacy rubs off on Clay itself – if mastering their platform and learning the skills needed to use it for impact requires this level of commitment, the product must be genuinely sophisticated and career-defining, not just another tool in your stack.

• They’re positioning themselves as career development for an entire (new) discipline. Aiming to be “the central hub for all GTM education” with “resume-worthy credentials” means professionals come here to learn outbound strategies, data enrichment, and automation workflows, Clay becomes synonymous with GTM mastery and career advancement. Most companies can’t credibly attempt this, but Clay pioneered the GTM engineer concept itself, so they can claim ownership of both the role and how you learn it (in Clay).

• Product complexity becomes competitive advantage. Most B2B products hide complexity behind “intuitive interface” messaging. Clay acknowledges theirs is genuinely complex to learn, and frames that difficulty as valuable – mastery takes real effort, which means the certification actually signifies something, and those in the community who achieve it are top of the pack. If you’ve invested hours progressing through Clay University, you’re less likely to start over with a competitor. They’ve turned a potential barrier into a value proposition.

• Project-based learning proves value through outcomes. Courses are structured around what you’ll achieve – “fill missing gaps of data in your CRM and create workflows that keep leads up to date” – not features you’ll learn. You’re solving real problems that exist in your actual work, and Clay is how you solve them.

• Personalised learning creates habit and investment. Progress trackers, personalised homepage, course completion status – these create reasons to keep returning rather than just visiting when you’re stuck. And the more you progress, the more you’re committed to the Clay ecosystem, because you’ve invested time building your skills within their framework.

What this example made me reflect on:

• Are we treating product education as documentation to get through, or as genuine skill development our audience will value independent?

• Could we frame our product around a broader discipline or movement or tech development, rather than just our specific features? What would need to be true for that to work credibly?

• If we positioned mastery of our product as career-defining rather than just useful, what would need to change about how we present our product and create our content?

Kudos to the Clay team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately?

Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Hey content friends,

What if your content marketing had absolutely nothing to do with your product?

Most brands would never dare.

But this edition I’m covering a content example I’ve admired for years because it’s bold, ambitious, and shows what happens when a brand commits fully to a creative vision that could easily have been dismissed as too risky or too disconnected from their core business.

It’s the inimitable WePresent by WeTransfer – a digital arts platform that operates more like an independent culture magazine than branded content.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: WePresent by WeTransfer

What they did:

WePresent launched in 2018 as WeTransfer’s digital arts and editorial platform, with the tagline “unexpected stories about creativity.”

WePresent speaks directly to what WeTransfer’s audience of creatives cares about, profiling the most interesting works of art and the most inspirational artists from across the world, spanning photography, film, music, design, writing, and more.

What makes WePresent distinctive is that it operates like genuine editorial journalism.

Every feature includes interviews with artists to delve into the thinking behind the work being featured – always complete with a ton of stunning photography or design.

Take Sam Nicklin’s colour-coded still lifes celebrating everyday objects as just one (very difficult to choose) example.

It’s the kind of profile you’d expect from a culture magazine, not a tech company – stunning doesn’t quite cut it.

And WePresent positions itself as a platform dedicated to being representative in art – showcasing a whole range of different creatives doing different work, from different cultures.

In one section you’ll see a feature on queer nightlife in Mexico, another profiling Black horse riding culture in the American South, another on the shrines of Lagos – all given equal space to share their stories.

Over time, WePresent has also expanded into collaborations and exhibitions, growing from a publishing platform into something closer to a cultural institution.

And the platform has developed recurring series outside of the regular artist interviews too, like:

“Literally” commissions written pieces from major authors like Lisa Taddeo, Olivia Laing, and Bernardine Evaristo, original creative work from some of the most respected writers working today.

“A manifesto by” features manifestos from activists and creatives in a ‘10 rules for’ format.

Like Molly Manning Walker’s 10 rules for directing, for example.

The series presents each person’s rules as beautiful visual pieces – in Molly’s case, a poster – that can be downloaded by the user.

This is also one of the few places I’ve seen within WePresent where their product is integrated into the editorial experience, and it works because there’s a perfectly natural link with the poster format of the piece.

What’s crystal clear is that this platform represents significant investment from WeTransfer.

WePresent has been running since 2018. It has its own editorial team led by Editor-in-Chief Holly Fraser, working with staff journalists and freelance contributors to run the media outlet and its associated channels, like the WePresent Instagram account.

And that investment is entirely in brand, because the editorial stories never reference WeTransfer’s product or features.

WeTransfer is there, in tie-ins like the Molly Manning Walker poster download, and in navigational references like below in the menu bar – but it’s always, always subtle.

What makes this a great example of content marketing:

• It earns attention by being genuinely worth attention. WePresent could exist as an independent publication (and it kinda does). The editorial quality, the depth of artist profiles, the commissioning of original work from established writers – the content stands on its own merit. That should be the benchmark for brand and content marketing: if someone would genuinely want to consume your content even if they never bought your product, you’ve created something valuable.

• Brand elevation happens through association with excellence. WeTransfer positions themselves as patrons of the arts through their association with the WePresent project, demonstrating clear commitment to the creative community they serve. That builds brand authority in a way product content never could – you’re not claiming expertise, you’re proving your values through sustained investment in the work that matters to your audience.

• Focus amplifies impact. WePresent represents where WeTransfer invests their top-of-funnel content efforts. Yes, they maintain social channels and have product blogs for updates and announcements, but WePresent is the flagship. That focus means they can keep improving it, keep building momentum, keep creating something that becomes more valuable and recognisable over time rather than diluting resources across every possible content format.

• Sustained investment signals genuine commitment. WePresent has been running since 2018 with consistent output and building momentum over time. That longevity and quality require serious budget and organisational commitment. Most brands would have pulled back or pivoted by now, wanting to focus on the content that has a clearer attribution to pipeline. That commitment is visible to their audience and reinforces that this isn’t a marketing campaign with an end date – it’s an ongoing cultural project.

What this example made me reflect on:

• If we completely forgot about product connection and focused on the realm we work in and the interests of our audience, what content would we create purely to entertain, educate, or engage?

• How can we go bolder with our content investments? What would it look like to commit to one major content project the way WeTransfer committed to WePresent?

• Are we building content that could stand on its own merit, or content that only exists to serve our immediate marketing goals?

• Does creating something genuinely valuable for your audience matter more than being able to draw a direct line to pipeline?

Kudos to the WePresent team for this one – honestly the standout content marketing example that I’ve kept coming back to throughout my career 👏

What content examples do you keep coming back to as standout pieces of work? I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover, and I’d love to know the examples that have stuck with you.

Speak soon,
Your content friend, Tabitha.

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

In content, there’s always another idea to try.

“I have a great concept for a podcast.” “I think we should be testing out this new social media platform.” “What if we did a quarterly survey report?” “Here’s another topic to put on the backlog.”

It’s a constant stream of topics, channels, formats, creative ideas.

And that’s part of the joy of working in content.

But it can also be part of the pain.

The content calendar fills up with ad hoc ideas, the backlog is never ending, you’re constantly producing more and more, and context-switching between ideas and formats.

And it never quite feels like it’s building into anything – lots of output, but no real momentum.

One thing that I’ve found changes that is focusing first on a great recurring content series – one format that deeply reflects your audience, your expertise, your strategy, committed to consistently, that your audience comes to expect and your brand becomes known for.

A full content calendar doesn’t mean you’re building recognition

When you’re planning content month to month – filling slots from the backlog for each of your channels – you end up optimising for output.

Each piece exists in isolation. A blog gets published, then it’s on to the next one. A campaign runs, gets some traction, and is never to be heard of again.

You reach people in that window, but you’re not really building any rapport with them. Next month you start from scratch again.

The reason a stream of one-off content struggles to build recognition is simple.

Familiarity requires repetition, and repetition requires consistency.

If every piece you publish is on a different topic in a different format, there’s no consistent signal for your audience to latch onto.

You’re reaching people, but you’re not giving them anything to remember you by.

And on a personal level, it’s exhausting – especially for content teams-of-one.

When nothing feels like it’s building, the instinct is to create more – more pieces, more channels, more ideas from the backlog.

Volume becomes the only lever you can see. So you run faster, or you add capacity, and it just feels like the to-do list never ends.

Recurring series turn audiences from passers-by into regulars

When you show up consistently in the same format, your audience stops stumbling across your content and starts seeking it out.

It becomes something people expect to see each week or each month, that they’d notice if it suddenly stopped appearing – and that they’re way more likely to recommend to a peer in passing conversation.

That’s a different relationship entirely to someone reading a blog post once and moving on.

And it builds over time.

The audience grows around the format, your team gets better at making it, and your brand becomes genuinely associated with something specific and valuable – which is what recognition and trust actually looks like.

The caveat is that the content series has to be worth showing up for. Not just a recurring slot to fill, but a series with a clear reason to exist.

As with all great content, that means starting with a genuine understanding of what your audience actually needs – the problems they’re wrestling with, the questions they can’t easily find answers to – and then building a series around the intersection of that need and what you can uniquely offer.

What this actually looks like in practice

It’s all very well making the case for content series, but it’s hard to buy into it without seeing what this can actually look like in practice.

So let’s take a look at an example.

Reward Hours is a monthly webinar series we run at Ravio – it’s a one-hour conversation between our Chief People Officer, Vaso, and a rewards professionals on the topic we hear our community struggling with. No slides, no polished takes, a real peer conversation working through a topic together.

It fits our content strategy perfectly, because we know our audience of Rewards professionals at high-growth tech companies are often a team of one, or a people leader doing comp on the side.

It’s an isolating role and one that comes with a lot of pressure, because employee salaries are the biggest item on payroll, and make or break for whether you can hire and keep the team you need to grow.

What we hear consistently is that what they want more than anything is to understand how peers in similar situations are navigating the same challenges.

We launched in January 2025 with 168 attendees. Last month we had 405. Relatively slow growth, but it’s building – and, more importantly, we’re getting the right people are in the room. The chat is getting busier, the questions more engaged, the conversations continuing after the session ends.

Ravio promotes it, Vaso promotes it to her own network, and the guest speaker promotes it to theirs. Each episode brings a fresh distribution opportunity, because each guest has their own audience who trust their recommendation.

In the early days, finding speakers for a series was, admittedly, a struggle.

We had to book guests well in advance to protect the cadence and make sure we could have that repeatability.

Now it’s easy. Our community and wider thought leaders want to be invited to be a guest speaker now – it’s become a known opportunity to build their own profile in front of a relevant audience.

And, finally, each episode of Reward Hours also feeds our wider content calendar – the webinar as an on-demand video, short clips for YouTube and LinkedIn, an expert insights blog on the topic, all distributed by Ravio, by Vaso, and by the guest speaker.

Even if we never published any of it, Reward Hours would still be worth running. Every episode deepens our team’s understanding of what our audience is actually grappling with – the nuance behind the challenges, the language they use, the questions that don’t have easy answers.

That understanding feeds everything else we create, and it’s the kind of audience insight you simply can’t get from a survey.

It’s one simple conversation a month, and it keeps on giving.

Webinars and podcasts do work particularly well as content series because of how every conversation deepens your understanding of your audience – Sequel’s Game Changers series is another great example.

But it doesn’t have to be that format. Storyarb’s weekly newsletter The Standard shows the same principle working in a completely different medium – a consistent format, a clear reason to exist, showing up reliably enough that readers know exactly what they’re getting.

Different formats, same principle: show up consistently in something worth showing up for, and recognition follows.

Hey content friends,

Original research reports are a known and loved format in B2B content.

The typical playbook: survey your audience or analyse your product data, create a comprehensive report, gate it behind a form, promote it heavily for a few weeks, then start planning next year’s version.

Agorapulse does something different.

Their Social Trends landing page is an always-on dashboard that updates monthly with fresh social media performance data.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Agorapulse’s Social Trends landing page

What they did:

Agorapulse is a social media management tool for marketers and social media managers.

They created Social Trends powered by Agorapulse – a landing page with social media performance metrics updated monthly.

The data covers Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, showing:

• Average engagement rate per day

• Average impressions per day

• Type of content most shared

• Type of content most engaged with

• Top hashtags

You can view data from the last 4 weeks or look back further to see trends from any month in the past year, and you can filter by region (country) and industry to see benchmarks for how different sectors perform.

They also create social content off the back of it – like this LinkedIn carousel on the best day to post on LinkedIn for maximum engagement, using fresh data from the Social Trends dashboard.

What makes it a great example of B2B content marketing:

• Original research that solves a real audience need. Social media managers constantly ask “what’s typical performance?” or “are my engagement rates normal for my industry?” Agorapulse answers that question with real benchmarks. It’s genuinely useful as a snapshot, which means people will bookmark it and return to it.

• The format mirrors the product. Most original research becomes a static PDF report. But Agorapulse is a social media management platform – their product is a dashboard with real-time insights. So their content is a dashboard too. That consistency reinforces what their product offers whilst matching how their audience actually wants to consume data (interactive and filterable, not a 40-page annual PDF they’ll never read).

• Always-on not annual snapshot. Agorapulse updates the same landing page monthly instead of delivering an annual “The State of Social Media in 2026” report. That means it’s always relevant. Someone searching for social media benchmarks in March gets March data, not insights from last year that might no longer apply. It also means they’re not starting from scratch every year with a huge, resource-heavy campaign – they’re iterating on the same resource, making it stronger over time.

• Monthly updates create recurring content opportunities. Every month when they update the dashboard, they can create new social posts pulling the latest findings. “Best day to post on LinkedIn this month” feels timely because it is. It’s not repurposing the same report over and over – it’s genuinely timely insights each time, which gives them ongoing reasons to promote it without it feeling stale.

• It gives a glimpse of product value. The page is clearly “powered by Agorapulse” – this data comes from their platform. It’s a subtle but effective way to demonstrate the depth of insights their product can provide. If this free dashboard shows this much, imagine what you’d get as an actual user with full access.

• Fresh data drives SEO performance. The page ranks second for “social trends” (after sponsored results and AI overview). Google rewards content that stays current, and Agorapulse’s monthly data updates signal that this page has the latest information. That drives consistent organic traffic from people actively searching for data that they can offer.

What this example made me reflect on:

• If we have original data in our product, how could we use it for an always-on campaign instead of an annual report? Could we create a dashboard that updates quarterly or monthly, providing ongoing value instead of a one-time download?

• Does our content format mirror our product and our audience’s needs and how our audience wants to consume insights throughout the year?

• What are the trade-offs between always-on content vs one-off campaigns throughout the years?

Kudos to the Agorapulse team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha.

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Hey content friends,

Most B2B brands struggle to maintain one podcast consistently.

So when I saw Greenly running two separate climate podcasts under the same brand, I was sceptical – I’m a big believer in focus, doing less, doing it well.

But in this case, the separation actually serves their audience better.

Both live under Leaf Media by Greenly, a mini-brand with its own microsite, social channels, and editorial identity distinct from their core product.

It’s a masterclass in understanding that different content serves different purposes, and sometimes keeping things separate makes them more valuable.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Greenly’s Leaf Media podcast strategy

What they did:

Greenly is sustainability software for businesses – GHG disclosure, product carbon footprint, compliance, a “climate copilot” for companies.

They’ve made podcasts a core content format over the past year, running two distinct video podcasts:

CSO Connect: Interviews with Chief Sustainability Officers about strategy, challenges, career paths. It’s the tactical, career-focused podcast targeting sustainability leaders and practitioners working in the field.

Eco Echoes: Conversations with leading voices in the climate space – activists, environmentalists, visionaries sharing their vision for global change. Guests include people like Clover Hogan and Mike Berners-Lee. It’s the inspirational, personal podcast for a broader climate-conscious audience.

Both are (of course) repurposed into clips for other platforms too.

And critically, both podcasts sit under Leaf Media by Greenly – a separate mini-brand that includes podcasts, data stories, articles, and a newsletter, all hosted on a microsite that keeps the media content separate from the main Greenly brand.

Leaf Media has its own social channels too (YouTube, LinkedIn, etc) where the content is distributed.

Why it works:

• The separation serves different audience needs and listening moments. They could’ve lumped everything together as “Greenly’s Climate Podcast” – all climate interviews under one umbrella. But a CSO discussing compliance deadlines and stakeholder buy-in serves a completely different need than an activist sharing their vision for systemic change. One is a career podcast you listen to for tactical insights during work hours. The other is for inspiration during your commute or downtime. Different purposes, different emotional spaces, different value propositions. Keeping them separate means each can serve its specific audience moment better.

• Separated mini-brand creates editorial distance. This won’t always be the right choice, but for Greenly it works. Leaf Media by Greenly positions the content as educational media first, company marketing second. It’s “podcast by/supported by Greenly,” not just another B2B podcast pushing product. That framing gives them freedom to focus purely on education and insights without every episode needing to tie back to their software. The separation builds trust – you’re here for the content, not the sales pitch.

• Serialised formats create recognition and habit. Both podcasts run regularly with consistent formats – the audience knows what to expect, when to expect it, and what they’ll get from each show. That consistency builds engaged audiences who actually show up, rather than needing to convince people from scratch every time. Then they repurpose each episode into short clips and social posts, maximising the value of each conversation.

• Guest strategy builds value and distribution. Every episode features real expert voices sharing genuine insights. That makes the content inherently valuable even if you never consider Greenly as a vendor. But it also creates built-in distribution – when a Chief Sustainability Officer or climate activist appears on the podcast, they’re likely to share it with their network, expanding the audience the content reaches.

What this content example made me reflect on:

• If we run multiple content series, are we clear about the distinct purpose of each?

• On the other hand, are we keeping things separate just because they seem different, or because our audience actually consumes them differently?

• When does separating content from the core brand via a media property that exists on its own merit make sense?

Kudos to the Greenly team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Your content friend, Tabitha.

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Let’s dive in.

I see it everywhere – white papers labelled “industry insights,” CEO LinkedIn posts positioned as “provocative takes,” research reports that promise to “challenge conventional thinking.”

But most of it doesn’t have an actual opinion behind it.

Just repackaged conventional wisdom with a few stats sprinkled in, or safe observations that could’ve been written by anyone.

So what does it mean to create content that actually leads thoughts, influencing and shifting how an audience thinks?

Real thought leadership needs two things: somewhere to lead, and a way to lead people there – direction, plus persuasion.

Somewhere to lead – having a clear perspective matters

If you want to do thought leadership content, you need an actual perspective – you can’t lead thoughts if you’re not really saying anything.

That’s the “leadership” part. You’re taking a position and saying “this is how we see it, follow me.” A clear story, a point of view on your market, opinions about what works and what doesn’t.

That conviction is what builds authority. It signals you’ve thought deeply enough about your space to have a stance.

And it compounds. When every piece reinforces the same perspective, your message gets clearer and stronger – it’s what makes you recognisable, as “the brand that is advocating for X in our industry.”

Take a piece I was working on recently about controlled environment agriculture.

Most people in the space assume the industry’s future is replacing low-tech polytunnels with expensive greenhouse systems – that’s where investment money flows, where industry chat focuses.

But in reality 91% of protected agriculture happens in polytunnels, and so there’s a huge market opportunity in optimising climate control in those existing structures. So the piece argues that the industry is solving for the exception whilst ignoring the rule.

It’s contrarian – it goes against where attention currently flows. It shows a willingness to take a clear position, and not just blindly follow where the rest of the industry is headed. That naturally builds authority and memorability, through demonstrating a deep understanding of the market you’re in and through having the conviction to share that perspective.

And if Ostara now consistently argues from and builds on this foundational perspective it will become their recognisable position, causing that compounding effect.

But most companies haven’t articulated their brand POV.

Which means their ‘thought leadership’ is actually just content that could’ve been written by anyone. Safe, neutral observations that everyone already agrees with, or repackaged conventional wisdom with their logo on it.

Your brain recognises these messages and files them away without engaging. It might provide more evidence for something you already believe, but it won’t shift how you think.

A way to lead people there – helping them see what you see

But having a perspective also isn’t enough. You need to help people see what you see.

Most ‘thought leadership’ content presents an opinion that you believe your audience should have and expect them to accept it. “Here’s what we believe. And you should too because … we said so.”

People naturally resist being told what to think. Research on confirmation bias, for instance, shows we reject information that contradicts our existing beliefs rather than engaging with it.

Research also shows that people become more receptive to new perspectives when their existing experience is validated first.

Studies on cognitive dissonance have shown that validation reduces the psychological discomfort of considering contradictory information. When you start with “you’re right to feel frustrated” or “you aren’t the only one frustrated about this” before explaining why the conventional approach creates that frustration, you reduce defensive resistance.

Then, once the audience is open to the message, you also need to do the work to prove why your perspective is right or interesting – backed by evidence and expertise, and with practical application.

In practice, that means strong thought leadership pieces should:

1. Validate the audience’s pain first to open them up to hearing more, acknowledging the problem they’re experiencing and where they are on it today – this works especially well when the author of the content is a peer in the space who is on the audience’s level, which is why I’d always recommend thought leadership content be delivered by an individual, not a company.

2. Reframe that problem with the patterns they haven’t seen, surfacing the new idea or perspective that helps them see the problem in a new light.

3. Provide the proof, with evidence via original data, research, lived examples (not recycled ones)

4. Make it actionable, not just interesting theory, but something practical they can actually apply to the problem at hand.

Together, these four elements create a journey that leads people to see your perspective.

Take Float CEO Glenn Rogers’ piece on async work culture.

His perspective is that real remote work requires async-first communication and trust, not replicating office habits in Zoom. And the article:

• Validates pain: Glenn starts by acknowledging the frustrations that many remote teams experience: “Regardless of our best efforts to coordinate calendars, it felt like someone constantly lost out.”

• Reframes with the underlying patterns: Then he reveals the pattern his audience hasn’t yet acknowledged: that the problem wasn’t calendar coordination, but the approach to “replicating all the unhealthy habits that we’d learned at previous office jobs”. The reframe becomes: trying to replicate the office via Zoom creates the problem, to do remote well means async-first communication and trust.

• Provides proof: The evidence comes from Float’s 10-year journey of lived examples. Removing status meetings. Creating The Float Weekly newsletter to share big decisions. Building a detailed wiki in Notion so “a team member never needs to wait until someone is available to answer a question about how we work.”

• Makes it actionable: Glenn shares concrete examples that readers can implement: the manager README that sets expectations upfront, the wiki structure for evergreen information, the approach to hiring for async-first fit.

The combination of these things – Glenn as CEO validating the frustration from experience, showing the pattern others miss, backing it with 10 years of specific examples, offering practical frameworks – leads people to see async work differently. It starts where they are (struggling with remote coordination) and takes them to his perspective (async-first is the answer) without triggering resistance.

If Float consistently shares this perspective across their content, they build authority as the company that truly understands remote work. Which then compounds to make their positioning as a resource planning tool for distributed teams feel earned – they’re not just selling software, they’re the team that’s actually figured out how async-first remote work operates.

To lead thoughts, you need a thought and you need to lead your people to it

So if we look at thought leadership that actually shifts thinking, it comes down to two things:

• Somewhere to lead: that clear perspective that surfaces patterns others miss, challenges conventional wisdom, and shows conviction. Not safe observations everyone agrees with, but a specific position you’re willing to take even if it alienates some people.

• A way to lead people there: validating your audience’s experience first, reframing the problem with patterns they haven’t seen, backing it with original evidence delivered by an expert voice, and making it actionable – a journey that starts where your audience is and takes them to your perspective.

All of which requires genuine conviction about your market, evidence to back up your position, and the ability to meet your audience where they are whilst showing them what they couldn’t see before.

Which means that the real question isn’t “how do we do thought leadership?”

It’s “do we have something worth saying?”

Most companies don’t. Or they haven’t articulated their position quite yet. And that’s fine – there’s plenty of valuable content that isn’t thought leadership.

But if you do want thought leadership to be part of your mix, it has to start with defining those perspectives and brand POVs first.

So if you’re going to claim you’re doing thought leadership, make sure you’re actually leading thoughts – with a thought worth following, and content that leads people there.

Hey content friends,

It’s so easy to fall into the content hamster wheel of always needing to create more.

More channels, more formats, more ideas, more pressure to be everywhere at once.

But what if the answer to impactful B2B content isn’t more – it’s focus?

Sequel’s Game Changers CMO webinar series has been running since September 2022.

And where most content teams would treat a conversational webinar series as one format of many, Sequel made it their whole strategy.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: Sequel’s Game Changers

What they did:

Game Changers started in September 2022 as a weekly webinar series.

Sequel’s CEO Oana Manolache (or guest hosts) interviews CMOs and heads of marketing for 30 minutes, digging into timely marketing challenges (like Jamie Bell, CMO of Workshop, recently covering ‘intelligent’ websites) or specific campaign deep-dives (like Allison Gillespie, VP Marketing at O’Reilly, sharing recently how their team on reinvented for AI).

Most companies would run this as one content format among many – or they’d do webinars ad hoc when there’s something to promote or a partner suggests collaborating.

Sequel doubled down on it instead.

The CMO Series has stayed running regularly since 2022, as the sole top-of-funnel educational content series they run – consistent, valuable conversations with marketing leaders.

Each live webinar becomes on-demand replay content (still gated), a written summary, LinkedIn posts (both by internal accounts and via guest speakers too), video clips.

One conversation, multiple formats.

For a webinar software company, it also does double duty: genuinely educating their marketing audience, whilst showcasing their product in action every single week too.

Then they expanded by adding the Masterclass series underneath the same Game Changers brand.

This is mid-funnel content showing how other companies use webinars in their marketing – essentially case studies for Sequel’s product, but formatted as educational webinar content rather than sales collateral. These webinars then also get repurposed into written articles, walking through real strategies and showcasing real impact.

The CMO series remains the flagship, but Game Changers became its own mini-brand under the Sequel brand, with its own logo and its own spot in the main website navigation.

They’ve also published multiple guides explaining how they built Game Changers itself – behind-the-scenes breakdowns of their strategy, promotion tactics, repurposing workflows, what worked and what didn’t.

For a webinar tool marketing to marketers, this meta content does two things: it provides genuine value to their audience who want to learn how to run better webinar programmes, and it naturally showcases their expertise and product capabilities without being sales-y.

What makes it a great content marketing example:

1. They picked one thing and committed. Instead of spreading themselves thin trying to be present on every platform with every content format, they focused on building one recognisable, valuable series and making it excellent. That focus means they can keep improving it, keep showing up consistently, and keep building momentum rather than constantly starting from scratch with new formats.

2. Serialisation creates recognition and habit. Game Changers has run since 2022. That consistency means their audience knows what to expect, when to expect it, and what they’ll get from it – not random webinars scattered throughout the year. That’s powerful for building an engaged audience who actually show up, rather than needing to convince people to register from scratch every time.

3. The mini-brand approach gives them room to expand. By establishing Game Changers as its own brand identity rather than just “Sequel webinars,” they created space to add more series underneath that umbrella. The CMO Series and Masterclass Series feel connected but serve different purposes – top-of-funnel thought leadership and mid-funnel demand generation. It’s focused expansion rather than scattered diversification.

4. Platforming experts builds value and distribution at once. Every episode features a marketing leader sharing their expertise and real experiences. That automatically makes it valuable, even if you never consider their product. But it also creates built-in distribution – when a CMO appears on Game Changers, they’re likely to share it with their network because it showcases their expertise, so the guests become the amplifiers.

5. Embedded on their website means seamless experience and product showcase. Most webinars happen on third-party platforms. You register on the company’s site, then get kicked over to Zoom for the actual event. Sequel’s different – their webinar tool lets you embed everything directly on your own website. So they practise what they preach. Registration, live session, replay – it all happens on sequel.io. Users never leave their site, which means a seamless experience for them, and an opportunity to demonstrate a seamless product experience for Sequel.

6. Meta content shows expertise through transparency. Publishing guides on how they built Game Changers is clever for their audience of marketers. It positions them as practitioners sharing real playbooks and lessons learnt from their own experience, not just a vendor pitching features. This transparency builds trust – they’re showing you exactly how they do it, what works for them, what doesn’t. You’re learning from their process whilst seeing their tool in action.

What this example made me reflect on for my own work:

• What would happen if we stopped trying to be everywhere and just focused on doing one content series exceptionally well?

• Are we building content that people follow, or just content that people consume once and forget?

• What expertise or processes do we have internally that our audience would actually find valuable to learn about? (For Sequel’s marketing audience, it’s how they run their webinar series. If your audience is engineers, maybe it’s how you build and ship features. If your audience is HR leaders, maybe it’s how you structure your own team or run compensation reviews.)

Kudos to the Sequel team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶

Most content calendars try to do too much. Production schedule, performance dashboard, stakeholder reporting tool, strategic roadmap – all in one document.

But you also have a separate reporting doc for your CMO. A campaign calendar for the wider marketing team. Notes scattered across Notion pages because the calendar doesn’t have space for everything you actually need to track.

So you’re duplicating the same information across multiple places. Updating the content calendar, then updating the campaign tracker, then copying metrics into the reporting doc. It takes longer than creating the actual content.

The calendar was supposed to make your life easier.

Instead it’s just another thing to maintain, so it stops getting used.

Cells left un-updated. Status columns that still say “in progress” for content that went live a month ago. Performance results never filled in and long-forgotten.

I’ve been there. Most content marketers have.

The problem isn’t our planning ability, it’s that the calendars become way too complicated.

What a content calendar should actually do

Your content strategy tells you what to say no to.

Then, your content calendar helps you execute what you’ve said yes to.

Which means it needs to tell you what you’re creating, when it’s being published, who’s responsible, and which strategic pillar(s) it supports.

That’s it.

Why your calendar became impossible to maintain

Most content calendars try to do too much.

Production schedule, performance dashboard, stakeholder reporting tool, strategic roadmap – all in one document.

But you also have a separate reporting doc for your CMO. A campaign calendar for the wider marketing team. Notes scattered across Notion pages because the calendar doesn’t have space for everything you actually need to track.

So you’re duplicating the same information across multiple places. Updating the content calendar, then updating the campaign tracker, then copying metrics into the reporting doc. It takes longer than creating the actual content.

The calendar was supposed to make your life easier. Instead it’s just another thing to maintain.

What actually belongs in your calendar

If your calendar’s job is helping you execute, it needs surprisingly little.

What every content calendar should contain:

Title, status, owner, publication date, description. That covers the basics of what you’re creating and when it’s happening.

Target audience, content pillar, goal alignment. These connect back to your strategy – they’re the filter that tells you if this content fits what you’ve decided to focus on.

Format and channel. Blog, LinkedIn post, webinar, whatever.

That’s the core.

What to add if it genuinely helps you execute:

Target keyword for SEO content – if you’re optimising for search, you need to know what you’re targeting.

Associated pain point – keeps you focused on what matters to your audience, not just what you want to say.

Links to drafts and live content – means everything’s accessible in one place when you need it.

If tracking a couple of key metrics in your calendar genuinely saves you time (because you’re not maintaining a separate doc), add them. Views and engagement for blogs, impressions and clicks for social posts. But if you already have a reporting doc that works, don’t duplicate it here – your calendar’s job is execution, not reporting.

If you’re a team of one constantly fielding “what’s coming up?” questions, a simplified roadmap view can help. Just title, format, date, status. Nothing else.

What to skip entirely:

Detailed channel performance like follower growth or overall engagement rates. That should live in your reporting, not your production schedule.

Anything that requires manual updates in multiple places.

Columns you added because you thought you should track them, not because you actually use them.

If you haven’t looked at a column in a month, delete it.

My actual content calendar template (it’s yours to use if it helps)

I’ve turned my own content calendars into templates – one for Notion, one for Google Sheets/Excel.

Both include the core fields I just walked through, plus optional sections for performance tracking and stakeholder roadmap views.

Use what’s helpful, delete what isn’t.

There are templates for both Notion and for Excel / Google Sheets (same link).

I switched from spreadsheets a few years back, mostly because Notion was already where I did everything else – strategy docs, campaign plans, meeting notes. The database views help. Table view when I’m planning, calendar view when I need to see what’s coming this month, filters when I’m checking what’s in progress.

But plenty of people still love Google Sheets or Excel. Simpler, no learning curve, does everything you need.

Pick something that fits how you already work.

If your team lives in Asana or Trello or Monday, build your calendar there. If you hate learning new tools, stick with a spreadsheet.

They’re not super fancy. They’re just functional, and they’re based on years of figuring out what I actually need versus what sounds good in theory – and there are examples in there too, because I always fine blank templates a little bit useless.

Get the template →

Your content calendar should be the document you open every day to stay on track. Not the document you avoid because it’s become a burden.

Strategy tells you what to say no to. Your calendar helps you execute what you’ve said yes to.

Keep it that simple.

What content calendar struggles are you dealing with? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always curious what’s working (or spectacularly not working) for other content people.

Speak soon,

Your content friend,

Tabitha

Hey content friends,

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most company newsletters end up feeling like thinly veiled promotion. They exist to nudge readers towards services or products, and the readers can smell it from the subject line.

So when a branded newsletter actually feels worth subscribing to for its own merit, it’s getting added straight to my ideas log.

This month, that’s The Standard by Storyarb.

Let’s dive in.

Content Ideas: The Standard by Storyarb

What they did:

Storyarb is a B2B content agency – they’re all about world-class copywriting and editorial strategy for modern brands.

Instead of a typical company newsletter pushing their services, they created The Standard – a weekly newsletter that sounds and reads like an old-school news publication.

The branding leans into that newspaper aesthetic, and each edition follows a consistent format: a headline piece from a marketing leader weighing in on trending topics or hard-won lessons, followed by repeatable sections like “From our marketing-inspo file to yours.”

Some editions feature Storyarb’s own team – like CEO Alex Lieberman discussing AI implementation – but (IMO) the strongest ones bring in external marketing leaders to share career-defining projects and the lessons learnt along the way.

Take their edition featuring Morgan Selzer, sharing the inside story of the Headspace x Sesame Street collaboration from her time as Chief Content Officer at Headspace.

It’s the kind of practitioner insight you might expect from an industry publication, not a vendor newsletter.

What makes this a great content marketing example:

1. The newspaper aesthetic screams “I know my audience”. Naming it “The Standard” and designing it like a newspaper immediately signals what this is: editorial content, not marketing collateral. For a content agency whose business is editorial newsletters and thought leadership, this alignment is perfect. But it also taps into something deeper – plenty of content marketers have journalism backgrounds or grew up dreaming of working on publications like that. The format speaks to who the audience is, not just what they do. Your content strategy should reflect your business strategy and serve your audience – and Storyarb’s does exactly that.

2. “By Storyarb” creates crucial editorial distance. It’s not “The Storyarb Newsletter” – it’s The Standard, brought to you by Storyarb. That framing matters. The content stands on its own as valuable even if you never engage with Storyarb as a vendor. (Similar to how Vector’s Proven Playbooks teach you growth tactics whether you bought their product or not – educational first, brand second.)

3. External voices build credibility. The editions that bring in marketing leaders from companies like Headspace feel like gaining access to insider knowledge. Storyarb becomes the curator and connector, not the brand demanding attention.

4. Repeatable format removes friction. Readers know what they’re getting each week through the standardised format and regular cadence. There’s comfort in consistency – you’re not wondering if this edition will be worth opening, because the format proves its value over time.

What this example made me reflect on:

• Does our content format and branding reflect what our business does and who our audience is?

• How much editorial distance does our content have from our brand? Does it exist to serve our audience first, or promote our company?

• Are we positioning ourselves as the expert, or creating space for practitioners to share their experiences?

Kudos to the Storyarb team for this one 👏

What content examples have caught your attention lately? Hit reply and let me know – I’m always on the lookout for the most creative, unique, inspirational examples to cover.

Speak soon,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶