Beam Content ??

Good content, consistently, means good process, consistently.

Content marketers: it's time to buck up. Creatives crave validation—and plenty of us marketers are creative people who fell into tech marketing. I know. I get it. But it’s not your CEO’s or CMO’s job to validate your creativity. They’re running a business, which means your punchy sentence or expertly woven-story needs to lead to results. The relationship between the content team and the C-suite can be tense at times. An exec glosses over your efforts. They ask for metrics that don’t tell the whole story. They might not grasp how content fits into the overall GTM strategy. It might seem easier to just power through rocky relationships with the C-suite. But, as we shared in the?Closing the Content Gap report, you can’t make an impact with content without leadership buy-in—and it’s on you to secure that support. You can lament that your boss’s boss doesn’t understand content all you want, but at the end of the day, it’s time to either: 1. Quit and find a better-fit team, or 2. Roll up your sleeves and show the value of your work. Assuming you’d pick the second option… Seven content veterans with wisdom to spare shared their insights with us: Chelsea Castle, Head of Content and Brand at?Close Ronnie Higgins ??, Founder at?Neutral Ground Labs Sam Kuehnle, VP of Marketing at?Loxo Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at?Ahrefs Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at?SparkToro Tara Robertson, CMO at?Bitly Camille Trent, Content Marketing Lead at?Auror We cover too much for me to try to recap in a single post—but I'll be sharing out some of my favorite parts this week. Here's one to start: One of the biggest gaps Tara sees is a failure to connect the dots between content initiatives and business outcomes that matter to leadership. We should listen to her; she's a CMO, after all. “It’s not just outlining what you’re working on," Tara explains. "It’s clearly explaining why these priorities align with strategic goals and backing that up with data or insights." Ronnie agrees, with concision: "Senior leaders care about outcomes, not outputs." Don’t forget: “Business outcomes” aren’t just synonymous with revenue. Maybe your leadership is looking for VC funding and needs to show off expertise in the AI conversation—content can help with that. When it’s time to hire a new team of high performers, content that highlights your people can drive excitement and goodwill with the hiring pool. Partner with other heavy hitters in your space for a co-branded research report to benefit?both?brands by association. You win the hearts and minds of the C-suite when you tie everything back to the company’s big vision. Report on the projects you’ve shipped, sure. But you should?lead?with the data to show how those projects fold into what the CEO wants to accomplish this quarter, half, or year.

Words matter, especially when you’re writing for an informed and skeptical audience.

When our calls get interrupted by air raid sirens and teams “apologize for the delay” because of the war in their front yard—we can’t say nothing. We stand with our Ukrainian clients, marketing friends, and colleagues past, present, and future. I’ve always been a little self-conscious of being an American. Today I’m outright embarrassed. Stand strong, Ukraine, as you have for the past three years.

Now that’s some good copy in the wild.

Honesty time, with two questions: 1. Which channel stresses you out the most, because you feel you understand it the least? 2. Which GTM role do you think you understand the least? They don’t have to overlap. For me: 1. Email marketing. I get its importance, I respect email marketers immensely. And it stresses me out, with all its little toggles and always-on nature. 2. Designers. I’ve found it’s difficult for me to speak their language, and recognize this is a “me” thing, not a “them” thing. I’m a words person, not a visual person, so translating what’s in my head into helpful guidance is a constant challenge. I’d like to think it’s getting better, though. (If you have recs for “email marketing 201” or “design 101” for this content marketer, I’m all ears.)

Remote panel interviews like

2025 content in 96 words: ???????? ????????????????.? No generic statements, repetition, or telling them sh*t they already know. ???? ????????????.? Call a spade a spade, not a legacy gardening implement. Just say the thing. ???? ????????????.? Cover new topics—or well-trod topics in a new way. Draw an unexpected parallel. Shine a light on new ideas via your internal and external partners. ???????? ?????? ?????????? ??????????.? Tell a great story. Be funny, personal, talk their language. Give them something to relate to. ?????????????? ??????????????????.? Share the insights only you have. Interview experts. Surface your platform data or collect survey data.

1. Is this doable for my team? 2. Does it help our team become better performers, while enjoying their?work more? 3. Are?we planning and setting our clients and our team up for success? None of what we do at Beam works if we don't place an emphasis on making the process as simple (and helpful) as possible.

Great content isn't well-written content. Great content isn't perfectly-optimized content. Great content isn't beautifully-designed content. Unfortunately, great content isn't even content that gets you a pat on the back from other content nerds. Since there's no way to accurately measure revenue influenced, here's a proxy: Great content is content the people around you will?USE. The rest is cool. Neat, awesome. But in enterprise B2B tech, none of it matters if your counterparts in sales, product marketing, demand gen, corporate comms, and customer success aren't using your content. It's time for content to kill the silo. It's time for content to be the glue. If your PR agency is spinning up themes and your demand gen team is planning out their quarterly campaigns and your Director of Product Marketing is prioritizing BoFU plans, all separately... Stop: it's time for content to kill the silo. Take a step back. Ask which focused content theme will be most impactful across your teams and channels. (Hint: it probably looks more like use case examples and original data, rather than tired case studies or high-level BS.) Create three layers of content around it: Foundation (the report, the guide, the white paper) Exploration (follow-up content with deeper tactical guidance or SME insights) Distribution (SEO, PR, social, earned media) Yes, all based on the same set of product data or CAB insights or survey results or internal interviews. That's your priority for the quarter; sprinkle in "the necessary" as it comes, but don't let it distract you. Here's a mindset shift that might help: We talk all the live-long day about "content strategy"—but, in most cases, that really means "SEO, brand, and demand gen content" strategy. Content gets created around search optimization, PR opportunities, and paid campaigns. Everything else is gap-filling. Sales doesn't get what they need, product marketing has to spin up their own stuff, and customer success wasn't even invited to the conversation. Again: stop. It's time for content to be the glue. Your aim should be to provide a foundation of impactful content for GTM and your audience, not for a set of channels. That means building one thing on top of another, not running in two dozen directions at once. The best examples I can think of: Coursera (with their annual Industry Skills Report) Writer (yes, I know) UserEvidence (drinking their own champagne, really) Cognism (some people talk about repurposing; Cognism perfected it) --- P.S. We just published an article based on our interview with ?? Matthew Sciannella at Refine Labs. I meant to recap more, but I ran up against the character limit. Here's my favorite quote: "Your content team’s mandate has to be to make the best, most interesting stuff you can based on how you’re trying to shift your market. You’re trying to move a market in a particular direction, and content underneath that is the megaphone."