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Content Marketing from a Blank Canvas · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Beehiiv. Finding sponsors that actually fit your audience is one of the hardest parts of running a newsletter.
• 0:15
  Historically, we've sold most Superpath sponsors by hand. It takes hours every month, and is really only possible because of years and years of brand-building work by Jimmy and Eric.
• 0:24
  But if you're building a newsletter without an expert team or if you're new to sponsorships entirely, Beehiiv helps you monetize faster.
• 0:31
  Once you pass around 1,000 subscribers, the ad network starts matching you with advertisers. No cold outreach, no media kit, no chasing invoices. I tried it a few weeks ago, and it could not be simpler.
• 0:42
  I got paid with about a minute of work just identifying the right sponsor offer. There are other ways to monetize, too.
• 0:49
  Boosts pays you for recommending newsletters you already read, and Beehiiv's digital products make it easier to sell guides, templates, coaching sessions, and more. You don't need a big list to start earning.
• 1:00
  Plus, and most importantly, Beehiiv does not take any cuts of your earnings. This month, Superpath members get 30% off with SUPERPATH30 at Beehiiv.
• 1:10
  Check the show notes for details, and thank you to Beehiiv for sponsoring this episode of Content Briefly. [upbeat music] Hey, content friends.
• 1:16
  It's Eric Doty here with Chloe Thompson, back for another episode of Content Briefly. We had a great question from the audience this week.
• 1:25
  The audience happens to be Alex Hillary, CEO of Superpath, who suggested this question to us.
• 1:32
  He said, "So much of the conversation about the future of content is from a previous idea of what, quote, content is for a B2B company.
• 1:41
  What do you think a content marketer is in 2026 if you started from a blank canvas with absolutely no baggage about what it used to be?" And then he had a bunch of sub-questions for us, which we'll get into.
• 1:52
  Might as well read them now. What should the objectives be of the role of a content marketer? Where should it sit on the team? Is it a brand function, a lead gen function, or more of an internal services role?
• 2:04
  And what mediums are the most important for content marketing? So that's an enormous question, and we've talked a lot about the future of content marketing on this sh- show, so I don't wanna rehash everything there.
• 2:16
  But Chloe and I were talking about, like, maybe if we unpack that question on if you start with a blank canvas with no baggage about what it used to be, maybe a great place for us to start is, like, Chloe, what do you think the baggage is that most of us content marketers are dealing with, other than the emotional baggage?
• 2:34
  [laughs] I know, right? The emotional, existential crisis. This was really hard for me, actually, because I am not... I can be the creative magic wand type, but I tend to just live in reality.
• 2:48
  And so the second I thought one thing, I would be like, "Well, no, but I know that doesn't work because of this."
• 2:52
  So it's like trying to take, like, 15, 16-plus years of learned experiences and create a blank canvas was hard, and I'm not sure I actually truly accomplished it. But I think my number one
• 3:06
  piece of it, and I started, you know, journalism and then went editorial and then to marketing, but I think the most obvious one, but the one I would probably agree with, is that content marketing was inherently grounded in writing.
• 3:21
  Mm-hmm. And I don't think that is untrue. I mean, I think if you've listened to me on the podcast, you know I'm, like, big proponent for the written word.
• 3:30
  But I think if I had to start all over again, I probably would've taken more advantage, actually, of the broadcast journalism classes that were available to me at URI. I took one class, and I didn't like it.
• 3:44
  I decided I didn't wanna be on TV, much to the detriment of my father, and decided I was happier, like, behind the computer in the written word. But I don't know if you have that choice now.
• 3:55
  I feel like you have to embrace all different mediums of content, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.
• 4:03
  Yeah, that actually reminds me, 'cause in my education in university, I studied cognitive science and how the brain works, and I was doing AI work at the time, like how do you replicate how infants learn language with AI, and I never really thought that work would come in that handy for content marketing.
• 4:20
  But that's fascinating. [laughs] Yeah. Let's just have an whole episode. Okay, Alex, sorry, throwing out your content topic. It's all right. I wanna hear more about Eric. [laughs] Yeah, okay. Let's end the show there.
• 4:29
  No, but I'll... Like, there were the, there's the AI things I learned from that, which was incredibly helpful, but also just the skills of, I did a lot of coding. I did a lot of, like, spreadsheet work.
• 4:41
  I had to do a bunch of stuff with just, like, automating a lot of files, and that's suddenly become, like, an incredibly useful skill set to have as a content marketer.
• 4:50
  So that really resonates with me on just maybe the baggage in that sense was, like, writing is the skill to have if you're a content marketer, and I do think we should unlearn that a little bit.
• 5:01
  And, like, yes, writing is still probably a core skill or the core skill, or at least the ability to clearly communicate ideas. Like, that could happen in video, too, probably.
• 5:12
  Maybe it's not as efficient as writing and sharing ideas. But I do think that, like, the tool belt of content marketers is, like, a little wider now than just writing. I'll share some of my baggage, too.
• 5:23
  Work baggage, not like any emotional family baggage.
• 5:26
  But I think I came from an SEO background, which I think a lot of content marketers did, where, like, the number one job was just write as many blog posts as you can for a company.
• 5:36
  And your job was to, like, A, be a content production factory, and B, you were, like, really a demand or let's say, like, a lead gen arm of the company, right?
• 5:47
  Like, the number one job for most content marketers was SEO blog posts that lead to conversions of some kind, and that was the job.
• 5:56
  Like, when we talked to Jimmy about what his job looked like 15 years ago, that was it, right? It was just, like, SEO and blogs.
• 6:02
  And some people, when they say content marketing, like, that's still their frame of reference. So I think, like, that's-Baggage for a lot of us. Mm.
• 6:10
  And then, like for example, I was thinking social media as like a team and a department, like it's very unclear to me now in 2026 why that would be a very different, like, team or function of the company than content marketing.
• 6:26
  Like, it's more like you have your website and you have social media and you have channels available to you.
• 6:31
  But to me, if like if the baggage was removed, the content would sort of be like one level more abstract than that, and it's more about like what do we wanna say about our company, what message do we wanna put in the world, how are we gonna build an audience?
• 6:43
  Like, all these questions sort of sit more in the abstract and are less connected to one tactic or channel, and then they sort of like umbrella out into, okay, one of the ways to distribute content is blog, one way is website, one way is YouTube.
• 6:59
  So I just think of it maybe more abstractly than we used to think of the role. Does that make sense?
• 7:03
  That's really interesting, 'cause I feel like that's how I do think of it, and that's how I always have thought about, you know, more like leading with content as the strategy versus as the tactic.
• 7:14
  And I've said before, like I didn't really grow up on the SEO side of things.
• 7:18
  Like, I worked, even with Jimmy, at a content marketing agency, but because I was more on like the editorial side of things, we were working more in magazines than website properties, it really wasn't...
• 7:29
  It was more about the stories. It was more about like the articles we wrote, and then developing like these content properties for those clients. And then that's just my evolution of content and content marketing.
• 7:41
  And I think when it comes to social, I actually have encountered that during my career where my boss has been like, "Well, do you wanna own social or should someone, should another team-" Mm-hmm. "... or what?"
• 7:52
  And I had to be like, "Well, what are the goals of our social?" Because, like if our social is gonna be more just, quote-unquote, about distribution, then I don't necessarily think, like, content needs to own it.
• 8:04
  If we wanted it to be more of like a journalist angle or if we wanted to develop more of a personality with it, then I would love for that to be under content.
• 8:14
  But it was really more of a distribution channel for our blogs and for, like, webinar and event signups and press releases.
• 8:22
  And I'm like, okay, well yeah, obviously my team creates some of that, but a lot of that sits more with like our demand gen and our brand. And so it was decided that social would sit under that. Mm-hmm.
• 8:33
  But I always think that, like, social and content should be very, very interconnected, and it should even be, you know, the content team's job to think, try to help the social person.
• 8:45
  Like, "Oh, well this could turn into a carousel. This could turn into pull quotes." Like, we should all be kind of thinking about how to help each other with our respective jobs. Hmm. Yeah. That's interesting.
• 8:56
  I wanna get more into, like, the future in a second, but because I think that's a good point about some of those delineated departments with overlap.
• 9:04
  Before we get to that, I think another interesting part of this question that Alex asked us is that there are some, like, assumptions baked in about what's changed in the world. Like, okay, you know, what do...
• 9:17
  If you started from a blank canvas with no baggage, so we've talked about some of our baggage, but there's also things that are new recently. So some, like, really obvious things are AI has made production a lot easier.
• 9:28
  Like, whether it's made it better, that's another question, I think. Something that also struck me is that, like, there's a lot more AI usage in content creation across the whole company now.
• 9:39
  Like, SMEs making their own LinkedIn content, things like that. Like, that was not a thing that existed before, right? Like, it's easy to...
• 9:48
  Three years ago we had an episode of the show that was like, why you should be doing LinkedIn, and like that was something that you had to convince people of, and now that's kind of assumed to be the default, like, B2B channel where we're talking to each other.
• 10:00
  Finding your, like, evangelists within the company. Yeah, yeah. Or even just building your own personal brand.
• 10:05
  But I think, like, the sort of multi-pronged approach of content is something that's new that looks like a few different things for different companies. But that's...
• 10:15
  It used to just be like you had your company channel and that's it. So I think that's an interesting change. Mm-hmm. I mean, there's more channels and mediums. We talked about that before. Like, it's not just Google.
• 10:26
  Like, it's not just SEO or trying to rank a blog on the SERPs. There's... You could build a newsletter audience. You could build a YouTube channel. Like, there's so many choices for what you could do.
• 10:37
  That's a little different, I think. Well, and that's really messed up our lovely attribution model, right? Like, the bane of every content marketer's existence. [laughs] Totally. Yeah.
• 10:46
  There's this whole, even within Google there's the no-click- Mm-hmm... answers.
• 10:52
  There's this whole concept of, you know, zero-click marketing, and now we have the AI search as well where, like, within the LLMs people might be asking for information about your company, and they might just get served answers right in there without visiting any of your marketing channels.
• 11:07
  So I think... But it's also fallen to content marketing teams to, like, influence those answers. So- Yeah... to me, like, those are the really big obvious things I could think of.
• 11:16
  I guess an algorithm based world is the other thing compared to, let's say, 10 years ago, where everything is about winning on some algorithm. So I think that's a little bit different.
• 11:29
  Maybe before it was just about the Google algorithm, and now it's about more. Those are just... I don't know. Is there anything else you can think of that's like what's changed, why are we asking this question?
• 11:39
  I mean, I've said this before. I feel like we've come, like, full circle in a very weird way where there are schools of thought where content's role or content marketing's role has just gotten, like, bigger, right?
• 11:52
  Because now there are flavors of PR, there's flavors of brand within it, there's flavors of demand within it because you are looking for content to just influence all sorts of different parts of the business, and that takes a really strong understanding of, like, your actual go-to-market, your messaging, your company goals or, you know, the business goals.
• 12:10
  Like, I talk about this all the time, right?
• 12:12
  So, like, I just think what's exciting is thatContent marketing's role has gotten bigger, but that is also kind of the scary thing because, you know, whatever the phrase is, it's like you're good at a couple things and whatever, jack of all trades, Jill of all trades, master of none.
• 12:28
  Like, that I think is challenging because I think it's made it more difficult to figure out, like,
• 12:34
  if I were starting from a blank slate and I was like, "Wow, I wanna be the most badass content marketer I wanna be," I would have 17 trillion things to choose from.
• 12:44
  It wouldn't be like, "Oh, I wanna be like the best interviewer. I wanna be the best writer. I wanna be the best video producer."
• 12:51
  Like, now it's like you have to think of 15 different things, and I mean, I didn't go to school for marketing. Mm-hmm.
• 12:57
  So I would imagine [laughs] it to be even more challenging, you know, now to try to figure out like...
• 13:03
  I do think niching down is beneficial for your career, but there are statements to the contrary that say actually being a generalist is more beneficial to your career. I don't know if I believe that.
• 13:14
  So I think, like, if I were to start over today, I would have to force myself, I think, to experiment in a lot of different avenues to try to figure out, like, what I really, really loved, and honestly, I would probably wind up where I am still.
• 13:29
  [laughs] I don't know if I would've changed anything. You actually... Two reactions to that. One is that I think very few content marketers have an education in marketing for whatever reason.
• 13:40
  I think, like, brand marketers more so, and maybe, like...
• 13:45
  I mean, in some ways I'm just guessing because I actually don't know, but in our content marketing community, like, every time I talk to somebody, they say they don't have a education background in marketing.
• 13:54
  If you listen back to all the guests we've interviewed on this show, most of them haven't. But I think, yeah, there's, like, traditional advertising, like those kinds of marketers tend to.
• 14:03
  So I think it's an interesting anecdote that it seems like most [laughs] marketers don't have an education, or most content marketers don't have an education in marketing.
• 14:12
  My other reaction is that Jimmy had a really good blog post that I actually just found the other day. It was from like four or five years ago. We'll link it in the show notes, but it was about how niching down...
• 14:23
  He was disagreeing with the niching down advice as well. Mm-hmm. And he was saying the best career arc you can take is flip-flopping between niching down and generalizing, like, in sort of a recurring pattern.
• 14:34
  It's like- Hmm...
• 14:35
  drill down, or start general, build as many skills as you can, then spend some time drilling down on one thing and getting really good at it or exploring some new avenue, then go, like, you know, work at a small company, then go back and work at a big company, be a generalist or, you know.
• 14:53
  Anyway, I'll share the link. He argued it very succinctly, and I'm trying to paraphrase it poorly, so.
• 14:59
  But I totally agree with that advice that, that like niching down is great to become an expert in one thing, but then, like, you'll expand your career more long-term if you can also generalize.
• 15:09
  And yeah, like niching down's great to like get a promotion. You're like, "I'm the best at the company at this, and now I'm gonna become the head of that."
• 15:14
  But, like, it sort of serves you better long-term to have a wider array of skills.
• 15:19
  There's a connotation with niching down, too, where it's like I'm not saying that if you niche down, it doesn't mean that you take out the adaptability of it, right? 'Cause, like,
• 15:28
  if you are unable to adapt, if you're in marketing, especially in content marketing, like, you're in the wrong field, right?
• 15:35
  Like, we wish that like, oh, okay, things could just stay the same and we'll do the same thing, but for frankly, like, that would bore us all, I think. And it is exciting that things are changing.
• 15:45
  I think the rate of change does scare me sometimes because I think that comes from just not knowing if you're doing the right thing, and I think that's where it's like I will plug like Superpath here.
• 15:58
  Like, a community like Superpath where you're sort of like, "Am I doing the right thing?" Like, "What are others doing? Where can I learn from?"
• 16:05
  It is just this community where you just feel like, "Oh, okay," like, either everyone is on the same page as me, or there are people I can learn from, or, "Wow, I'm actually ahead and I didn't realize that."
• 16:16
  You know, like, I think y- you can go to conferences and you can attend webinars and all that, and you can think to yourself, like, it can either validate what you're doing, or it can teach you something new, or it can make you feel like you're a couple steps ahead of the curve as well.
• 16:32
  So I don't know. I just think like... I, I don't know if that would be a curriculum, right? If we were to- Mm-hmm...
• 16:37
  start over in marketing and content marketing, but it's essentially you would need just like a crash course on how to be adaptable and how to like [laughs] not burn out and how to juggle all of the different requests and all of the different channels and all of this.
• 16:52
  Like, that in and of itself is a skill, and I don't know how we all learned it. We just did. But I would be really curious to be like, "Is that on a curriculum somewhere?"
• 17:02
  [laughs] Man, you, you can't ask Claude for that answer. That's just [laughs] something y- that's only earned through pain. Okay. L- let's go back to Alex's sub-questions for us.
• 17:13
  The very first question was, okay, s- blank canvas, what are the objectives of content marketing? Yeah, I mean, you said it here. It's like y- yes, you have to make the company money.
• 17:24
  [laughs] Like, at the end of the day, I always say this 'cause there's a lot of broad spectrum, like, "Oh, well, our content is sitting too close to our product. Our content is sitting too far away from our product."
• 17:34
  Like, I think you need to have a happy medium in your content where people reading it understand what you're trying to sell and what your company does. And then you have...
• 17:44
  But a lot of companies can't figure out that balance, so they have, like, an article that's like, "Five reasons why you need to buy," fill in the blank.
• 17:52
  Or they have some thought leadership article that's like seven steps outside of what you do.
• 17:58
  I think an example I had at my old company was the CEO wrote an article about, like, SoulCycle and how that connected back to one of our topic themes.
• 18:08
  But I read the entire thing and I was like, "I don't understand why we published this or what this had to do with it." So anyway, it's got to sell-... a product.
• 18:16
  It's got to get, like, the people that are reading need to want to know more about your company and what your company does, and eventually buy from you. Like, that has to be the why. Totally. Just period.
• 18:32
  [laughs] Yeah, no, so I think that's, like, the obvious core objective, and so I think the big question of content marketing is to go, "Okay, yeah, our job here is to make money. What are the inputs needed for that?"
• 18:44
  And I think thinking blank slate here, maybe something that's different that wasn't before is, like, building an audience, I think- Mm... is also a job of content marketing these days. Like, that could be...
• 18:57
  I'm getting into tactics here, but, like, you know, it could be an email newsletter. It could be social media, like, just building some...
• 19:06
  It could even be something where there are no followers or there are no subscribers. It's just, like, these people that you've, like, a sphere of influence that you've built.
• 19:15
  I think that is a job of content marketing that I'm not sure was part of the job before, but I think it has to be now. And the main reason I say that is just 'cause, like, production is so easy.
• 19:28
  Everything is algorithm based, and so having some sort of audience built somewhere, I think, is, like, a core objective so that you can continue to market to that audience and nurture them and, you know, getting into the other roles of content.
• 19:43
  I think we've all agreed forever that content has been about, like, educating an audience, entertaining them, inspiring them, converting them to be a customer, making it easier to buy your product. I think there's...
• 19:55
  Those things have always been true and will continue to be true, but I think there's something to, like, building an audience and keeping their attention that was, that's harder now that I think is, like, more part of the job.
• 20:06
  Yeah. And I think that can be where the blur is too, because I think of, like, again, just how jobs and roles have evolved. Like, you're very rarely gonna see a job that is literally, like, write and send emails.
• 20:19
  Like, you actually might at, like, massive enterprise companies, where it's like your job is to click a button, and that is wild to me, 'cause I've heard that [laughs] from people. But
• 20:30
  it's kind of like the build an audience, the email newsletter, the distribution channels.
• 20:34
  This is where I think the blurriness between, like, what demand gen, what brand, and what content can own, and that gets into that other question, like, where does it sit?
• 20:42
  And I think that has to do with, like, how you actually define content at a company, because content can mean everything, again, going back to the bias, but, like, everything that is, like, written or everything that is produced falls under content.
• 20:56
  And then you have content that people are actually treating as, like, sales enablement.
• 21:01
  And then you have content where maybe there's not as strong of, like, a product marketing, so content is way more involved with, like, the go-to-market narrative and, like, product messaging.
• 21:11
  And, like, that's not always the case.
• 21:14
  So I would actually say, like, blank slate, if I were, like, a professor would also just be, like, exploring all of these different, like, lanes, and being like, "Where do you want to expand the most on this?"
• 21:27
  Because if you're gonna go into the, "Okay, I wanna be the doer," then your sweet spot has to be, like, automation workflows, you know, production, like, content at scale, et cetera.
• 21:37
  If it's more around, like, the narrative and the messaging, then it's like, okay, maybe you sit more with, like, executive comms and brand leadership and all that.
• 21:45
  And to me, that's really interesting, 'cause I think, like, in a blank slate today, it might be a little easier to pick a lane, and then figure out, like, how do I optimize against that lane, which makes a job sound very, very, like, robotic and tactical.
• 22:00
  But I don't know. I guess when you break it down, there are the ways to succeed. [laughs] Absolutely. And we should get into...
• 22:06
  I think the next question was about, like, where should content, like, sit in the organization, but I think you raised a good point that we haven't brought up yet, is that, like, another objective of content is just, like, making the company story very clear, both, like, internally and externally.
• 22:21
  Like, what is the story that your company wants to tell about the world and itself, and is that clear to people in, like, words in writing or video or whatever is, like, a good medium of doing that. I've read that.
• 22:33
  I think it was the GTM Now newsletter had a good piece last week about how in s- for building a software company, like, the biggest bottleneck used to be building the software, right? Like, you need a team of developers.
• 22:50
  It takes a while to ship features. You have to build, you have to build the right things.
• 22:53
  You have to build them quickly, and there's just software development is slow, so the bottleneck was, like, having enough money to do that. Mm-hmm. Now that bottleneck has kind of gone.
• 23:02
  Like, you and I can build software. It's not gonna be as good as, you know, Salesforce or whatever as, like, a CRM, but I could build my own CRM in a weekend, right?
• 23:12
  And so the real challenge they've said now about, like, building a company and growing a software company is just distribution, and then part of the distribution is differentiating yourself through the story.
• 23:23
  Because, like, we can all make pretty nice UXs now just by saying, you know, "Claude, build me a really beautiful program."
• 23:32
  Like, that used to take a lot more human skill and time and effort and money, and now that's kinda easy, so now it's about, like, how do you get people on board with your vision of your product to say that, "Okay, this product's gonna change every single day for the next five years," because code development happens so quickly now.
• 23:50
  Like, every... I guarantee you, every platform that you love and are using has changed more this year than it changed in the past 10 years.
• 23:57
  And where I'm going with this [laughs] is that content now has to keep up with, like, has to keep up with that development side of software, 'cause I mean, most of us are working at software companies, right?
• 24:08
  Yeah, that's a good point. And so, like, the story, like, it's our job to kind of, like, raise a flag in the air and say, like, "This is the type of thing we're building.
• 24:16
  You know, let me take you to this future that I can describe for you." It's not necessarily all about the features today.And I think that's- Yeah...
• 24:23
  like, a different, like, paradigm to wrap our head around in terms of what our job is. Well, it's deeper, right? Like, that's like...
• 24:30
  Well, so interestingly enough, I think that's a spin on the argument of, like, taste matters today, right? Yeah.
• 24:36
  You could argue that is everyone saying, you know, taste matters, here's why taste matters, and it's like, yeah, it's all about the story. Like, what do we actually mean by that?
• 24:46
  To me, it means that inherently your business, it'll change in some ways, but, like, the core of your business, like, your why isn't necessarily changing.
• 25:00
  It might evolve, and, like, that evolution also needs to be told, like, through content and through your marketing, you know, if you're moving to a new persona, if you're entering, like, a new category.
• 25:13
  But, like, you should still be able to, like, thread the needle of, like, why you're doing that right now, why this moment, and that moment should connect back to previous moments.
• 25:23
  And then that's how you create, like, that brand trust and that brand narrative are all of, like, these interconnected moments where all of a sudden what you're doing into the market, like, makes sense.
• 25:33
  No one's like Allbirds. Like, wait, why all of a sudden did they decide to buy a tech company? Like, no one was like, "Ah, yes, comfortable sneakers. That makes sense." Yeah. Like, now you're AI.
• 25:44
  Like, everyone was like, "What? WTF?" [laughs] Totally. Yeah. If that was their end goal for some reason, like, where was the narrative?
• 25:53
  Where was the thread that all of a sudden people were like, "Oh, okay, we understand now, and we're still gonna trust your brand"? Now everyone's like, "I don't know what you're doing."
• 26:02
  [laughs] Yeah, company building is more about, like, this story that floats in the air that everyone understands rather than just like, "Okay, we have a building, we have a thousand employees, this is what we make."
• 26:13
  And like, "Oh, now we're gonna make something else." Like, it doesn't really work that way anymore. Okay, so the next question was about where content should sit on the team, and I wanna raise a few.
• 26:24
  So we asked this question to the Superpath community, like, the big, hairy question we're addressing in this episode. So I'm gonna read what, something that Erin McGann said.
• 26:32
  Bear with me for a moment because it's on the longer side. All of us content marketers answered this question very, in very lengthy fashion.
• 26:40
  Okay, so she just said, "I would use my recent career trajectory as a bit of a hook for this.
• 26:44
  I started off very content production oriented, blog posts, white papers, but it quickly became apparent that no one had looked at the why and the who in a while," within her company, "and so I ended up spending more and more time on strategy.
• 26:57
  The production was still happening, but we did it with- in bursts or with freelancers."
• 27:01
  And what became a lot more important for her role was the connections internally, building relationships with the sales team, pre-sales, product, partner management, and doing that allowed content to get really specific about who we were writing for, what their needs were, what kind of voices meant something to them, et cetera.
• 27:19
  And so she summarized by saying her role shifted a lot more into, like, brand work and narrative-driven things, and it's a lot more like, how do we work with product marketing so that we, like, have similar messaging coming out of product and content?
• 27:34
  How do we share these internally? How do we tell our story to senior leadership, to the right people? And so I think that speaks to some of what we were talking about before.
• 27:44
  I totally agree with Erin that content is becoming, like, inherently more strategic and more cross-functional. Yeah. I totally agree with that. Yeah. Any other reaction to that or just stamp of approval? Go, Erin.
• 27:58
  No, I think her trajectory is kind of similar to mine, I think, where obviously I've kind of landed more on the strategic side of the coin.
• 28:06
  And inherently, I just think content, like, has to be cross-functional, and it has to break down silos.
• 28:11
  And that goes to what I said earlier around just, like, these interconnected moments and these interconnected stories, and the only way you're gonna be able to do that is if you actually have, like, that cohesive understanding across your company.
• 28:25
  It's funny, though, because I don't know Erin's background, although if I remember correctly, she might also be a former journalist.
• 28:31
  But I do think that a lot of content marketers have started as journalists or went to J school like myself, and, like, there's a whole group of us, and I think that has come from finding the story and finding the connections and really focusing on that.
• 28:48
  And then the content, like, marketing layer on top of it is like, okay, but how do I connect that to actual, like, results and actual business results? So I just, I do think that those layers are just really interesting.
• 29:03
  For sure. Okay, I really wanna quickly get to this question. We only have five minutes left, and I wanna read a couple more community takes after, but I think the one question was, like, where should marketing sit?
• 29:13
  Brand, lead gen, internal services, where should it sit? And, like, my take generally is that marketing should not report into sales because your goals are too conflicted.
• 29:26
  Like, you end up, like, too sales enablement if you end up in- Yeah. To me, you might as well be on internal services if you're gonna do that. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think, like, lead gen is, like...
• 29:35
  Or, like, I've reported into a growth team too, which I think is kind of a made-up department, but it basically just means, like, some combination of sales and marketing.
• 29:43
  I do think, like, content should report into something with marketing in the title. I think it really depends on the size of the team. I think that's another big difference is that there- Yeah...
• 29:52
  aren't as many, like, very large marketing teams anymore that necessarily have all of these teams, like, siloed apart.
• 29:58
  And to your point earlier, I think it's becoming more about, like, sort of not, like, high-performing individuals working cross-functionally, but that's kind of what I mean.
• 30:07
  Like, I do think it's less like, okay, here are these very clear departments with very clear lines between them. I think content inherently is, has to work on more cross-functional teams.
• 30:17
  And, like, I think as long as you're just reporting to a leader that's, like, aligned on the overall goals, like, I don't know. Like, I, I think it's just, like, marketing.Yeah, I would agree with that.
• 30:28
  I think content has to report to the highest function in marketing. Like, I- Mm-hmm... I think, like,
• 30:36
  no matter how you define content, whether it's brand focused or, like, executive comms, or, like, whatever it is, it needs to report to marketing leadership, for lack of a better word, because it really needs to tie into the overall, like, go-to-market and company strategy, and, like, that's where you're gonna get the closest to it.
• 30:56
  You know, demand gen, like, demand gen, lead gen, and even sales to a point, they can be more point-in-time focused, right? Like, we're only really thinking about, like, this quarter.
• 31:06
  We're only thinking about hitting the number for, like, these next six months, whereas I think it needs to be...
• 31:11
  Obviously, you want to support those and you have to support those, but it needs to be more far-reaching than that.
• 31:17
  Like, I'll always say that, like, I think part of content's job is to be thinking ahead, so it's supporting the now, but it's also trying to anticipate, like, where might our themes go, where might we be looking at for a campaign, and then how can, like, our content shape that?
• 31:34
  So I think the only way that you can do that is by reporting into, like, the top, top tier. Totally. Okay, we have... I have two more community contributions to read here.
• 31:44
  So one was from Katie Wakich, who mentioned that she's found that, like, her role has shifted a lot more into positioning and messaging for the company and the product, which I think is true.
• 31:56
  Like, we've talked about product marketing a lot recently on this show. I think that's absolutely true, though, like reinvented.
• 32:01
  I think content marketing and product marketing have a lot more overlap than they used to, so I think that's a great point. And then a friend of the show, Ronnie Higgins, he, of course, had a great answer about he...
• 32:15
  if he reinvented content from scratch, it would l- look way more like a broadcaster.
• 32:20
  So he said, "Someone whose job is to build and serve an audience over time with deliberate choices about format, cadence, and sequence, someone who thinks less like an editor at a magazine and more like a cable TV executive.
• 32:32
  The goal is the audience relationship. So while a publisher asks did the piece perform, but a broadcaster asks did the audience come back?" And so he has this, like, broadcaster-based theory. Mm.
• 32:45
  And so he thinks, like, it's more of an audience trust builder, and, like, the revenue follows from growing an audience and building trust with that audience rather than publishing things at them and getting them to convert.
• 32:58
  So I think that's a very interesting...
• 33:00
  Like, that's a big change, you know, so I think that's a great example of, like, me and you have baggage of what we think of as content marketing, and I think, yeah, you could throw it out, out the window and you're like, "I'm gonna have more of a broadcaster model."
• 33:12
  I've seen... Sorry, I'm rambling, but we're having Melissa Rosenthal do an AMA in, in, I think it's June 18th. Oh, gosh.
• 33:21
  Okay, I'll, I'll post the correct date, but she's doing an AMA in our Slack community, and she has this company called Outlever, and the thing that they're doing is they're helping companies build their own, like, news website basically, where rather than doing, like, a traditional content marketing play, it's like we're gonna be the news site for our industry, whatever that industry is.
• 33:40
  And she's doing the state of the brand stuff, right? Fascinating. I've totally been following along on that.
• 33:46
  Exactly, and it gets, like, 1,000 likes on every LinkedIn post, so I think it's a really good example of instead of treating content as, like... I mean, Ronnie said it's not like a publisher.
• 33:56
  I think this is more like thinking of it as, like, a news publisher or... Yeah, it's just, like, a different way around the problem. Yeah. Well, and for a while, companies were doing that. Like, they had- Yeah...
• 34:04
  like, these, like, mini newsrooms, and I think that's just a question mark of, like, where you want to invest your dollars, what does your team actually look like?
• 34:11
  Like, I think Jimmy mentioned as well, like Ramp, they have an economist, like, on staff. It's just... It's a question of just, like, what are you trying to do? What are the resources you actually have?
• 34:21
  And, like, where are you gonna get the biggest bang for your buck?
• 34:23
  Because in an ideal world, you could have people that are doing all of these different roles, but, like, we're seeing content teams shrink rather than grow, right?
• 34:33
  And we're seeing more content marketers that are, like, having responsibilities of 10 people versus of three.
• 34:40
  So it'll be really interesting just to see where that goes, because I think the dial has spun back to try to be like, "Okay, no, we care about quality, and we care about taste, and we care about this," and it's one thing to say it, but it's another thing to act on it, and it'll be really interesting to see the companies that act on it and how they succeed.
• 34:59
  Sounds like a great place to end. Chloe, thanks so much for prognosticating about the future of content once again. Like, [laughs] we do a lot of trying to guess what the future's gonna look like now. That's...
• 35:10
  Maybe that's another role for c- uh, job line item for content marketers that we didn't have before, is trying to fortune tell about the future. I feel like that happened with journalism too, though. [laughs] Mm. Yeah.
• 35:21
  It's so big. [laughs] Fair. Well, I didn't know that we were having our $5 dictionary and calendars on our desk, but appreciate you as always, Eric. [laughs] Yeah. Thanks so much, Chloe.
• 35:33
  All right, uh, thanks everyone for listening. Don't forget, join Superpath Community, superpath.co. How's that for marketing, Chloe? We love that. Thanks, folks. See? Consistency. [laughs] Thanks, everyone.
• 35:47
  [outro music]