Here’s something too many marketers learn the hard way:
Great content gets you halfway there.
You can nail your content strategy, hit every editorial beat, and build real audience loyalty. But if your demand gen strategy is to slap generic promos on otherwise thoughtful content, you’re basically building a beautiful storefront with a broken cash register.
Kyle Denhoff, Senior Director of Marketing at HubSpot, has seen the brand vs. demand disconnect play out firsthand. Below, he shares his framework for connecting content to conversions.
ACOM Discovery Interview
Learn how to identify content that actually converts, not just content that gets consumed
The brand–demand disconnect
All dressed up and nowhere to go.
That’s how it can feel when your beautiful, tailored, high-quality content gets paired with a not-so-tailored lead gen strategy. Like showing up to a black tie event in flip-flops.
One misstep brands make is assuming they can put a promotion into their content, and it’ll work just because there’s an audience there, says Kyle.
But audience eyeballs don’t translate to audience engagement. When generic offers interrupt rather than enhance your content (when was the last time you were excited to watch a TV ad selling you health insurance while watching a football game?), you end up with low conversion rates, no matter how high content engagement soars.
Without a system for matching offers to content, your brand marketing becomes…bland marketing. (Sorry, had to.)
Relevant offers extend the value of your content
To better tie lead gen to content, Kyle developed the ACOM framework: Audience-Content-Offer Match.
This means asking:
- Who’s the audience for this content?
- What does the content actually say?
- What offer matches that message?
- What’s the right format and context for that offer?
Rather than promotional interruptions, Kyle’s team positions their offerings as extensions of a unique content experience.
It’s not just about getting you to watch a video. I want there to be a relevant offer that creates additional value to motivate you to take an action.
ACOM alignment in action
Step 1: Audience behavior
The first step to better content-offer pairings is understanding your audience.
Yes, the usual demographics—job titles, company size, industry—help. But deeper insights come from figuring out where your audience actually spends their time online.
Content and its role in the buying journey have drastically changed since HubSpot first wrote the book on inbound SEO.
YouTube has become the second-largest search engine; Substack has hit tens of millions of subscribers; and TikTok-ification has come to nearly every social media platform. People are also increasingly consuming content on mobile (yes, even B2B buyers), app-hopping across 3–5 content apps on any given day.
Kyle’s team realized that traditional SEO blog posts—the workhorse of HubSpot’s inbound marketing engine—were simply no longer the format du jour.
In response, they conducted customer interviews that revealed a growing interest in podcasts. “And so, the first investment that we made was into podcasts, and My First Million came over with our acquisition of The Hustle,” he says.
How to do it:
- Audit your content analytics to identify the formats where engagement is declining.
- Conduct customer interviews asking not just what content they consume, but also where, when, and how they prefer to consume it. (This is the exact process we follow at the ‘arb to choose what topics we cover. Including this one, to get a little meta.) Tools like Sparktoro or Ahrefs can give you additional data points that pair with this qualitative work.
- Run brief, focused tests on 1–2 new platforms or formats your audience mentions. (HubSpot holds an annual planning season each August through November, where employees can pitch short-term experiments to run—a great format for testing your audience behavior hypotheses.)
ACOM Discovery Interview
Learn how to identify content that actually converts, not just content that gets consumed
Step 2: Content purpose
There’s a gap between what your audience is searching for now and what they need next—and it’s your job to bridge it.
This step is all about audience intent: Why are they consuming this content, and what are they looking to accomplish?
For example:
After consuming your content, your audience’s next question is, “Now what?” Your offers should answer that question.
For example, Kyle notes that templates remain a top-converting format for HubSpot’s readers, despite how long they’ve been around. While they may not be flashy, they convert because they provide immediate value. They offer a clear path from learning about a concept to applying it—right away.
He also notes that for many marketers, the offer comes as an afterthought. People think, ‘Oh, I have this great media product, now what can I plug in to monetize it?’ But you have to flip the script, he says.
Instead, he recommends designing the offer first and editorial packaging second.
The better question is: ‘I have this great library of assets I can monetize. How do I package those through my different distribution channels?’
How to do it:
- Map what you know about your audience’s search behavior (keywords you rank for, top-performing pieces of content) to what they actually need.
- Test the “offer first” framework by choosing a valuable asset you already have, then create 2–3 content pieces that naturally bridge to it.
Step 3: Valuable offer matching
Kyle’s nonnegotiable: Offers have to be genuinely useful.
That means bringing the reader practical, immediate value relevant to the content they’re consuming.
The offer has to be so valuable that people want to take an extra step to get it.
High-quality offers bring the opportunity to recycle and upcycle. Kyle’s team creates “anchor offers” that they place across different channels and periodically refresh. To make the most of these offers, he recommends creating placement guidelines for different content formats, with specific language patterns and positioning strategies.
For example, instead of slotting in a vaguely connected ad like “Check out our AI tool,” the HubSpot team includes a relevant marketing planning template within a blog post that helps marketers prepare for seasonality in their business.
How to do it:
- Audit your current offers. Can you succinctly say what value each one gives your reader?
- Test the “immediate utility” standard. Can someone download your offer and use it within 30 minutes, or does it require additional research to be valuable?
- Collaborate with subject matter experts (like a prompt engineer) to verify your offers deliver genuine expertise, not just repackaged marketing content.
A path to better leads
By giving audiences what they really need, the ACOM framework helps marketers get what they really need: higher quality leads.
When offers connect with and expand on content, they spur higher engagement and conversion rates further down the funnel. Kyle has observed that channels that follow the ACOM framework have a higher Lead-to-QL ratio than those that don’t.
To measure success, he recommends looking at reach, demand, and conversion rate to evaluate what channels are efficient funnels for you, as well as comparing lead quality metrics between ACOM-generated leads and other sources. You’ll end up with a heatmap about what’s working across channels, offers, and audience segments—and a roadmap for future campaigns.
But for this framework to work, marketers ultimately have to understand what “value” really looks like.
At the end of the day, you have to have taste, Kyle explains. To be candid, I think this generative AI era means we’re going to have to learn how to create great content again. We have to know what ‘good’ looks like. We have to make something the audience will actually like. It needs to be editorial grade.
Bottom line? The best marketers today are tastemakers, not trend-hawkers—because they know what audiences really value, and they can deliver it. Across both content and offers.
