The average adult makes in the ballpark of 35,000 decisions per day ...so we’re willing to bet the average marketer makes about a million.
One of the most common being:
Should I focus on demand or brand?
Many B2B marketers feel trapped between optimizing for short-term demand generation and the longer-term business of brand building.
Successful businesses need both.
However, the strategies you use for each can feel in competition with each other. (For example: To gate, or not to gate? Gated content can get more leads, but ungated content allows a broader audience to access your ideas.)
Kyle Denhoff, Senior Director of Marketing at HubSpot, has made a career of striking this balance. His approach: Treat your marketing function like a media business.
“Over the last 3 years, HubSpot has shifted from a traditional content marketing organization to a media organization,” says Kyle
Below, we share how to pull this off yourself.
The pitfalls of ‘one-or-the-other’ marketing
Traditional content marketing sorts content into two neat little boxes—editorial (brand building) or commercial (demand generation)—that it treats as mutually exclusive.
But it’s a shame when you force that choice. You’re missing out on an opportunity.
Just think of the loss if Reese’s had never combined peanut butter and chocolate. Great on their own, iconic together.
Take demand gen teams that live and breathe bottom-of-funnel content. Sure, you might convert the 5% that are ready to buy. But what about the other 95%, who are still figuring out if they even like you? Hit them with sales-heavy messaging too early, and they’re gone.
On the flip side, marketers who invest heavily in editorial content without building out the audience development infrastructure to support it are like gardeners who carefully plant seeds…then never water them. (Cut to a series of frustrated, “Why did we spend so much money on seeds?” conversations.)
At HubSpot, “we’ve evolved from 100% focus on demand to a more balanced mix,” says Kyle. “Today we’re at about 60% demand-focused content, 40% brand building content.”
To carry out this transition, he traded in conventional marketing strategies for the media tactics that provide always-on value.
Why ‘marketing-as-media’ drives better content than traditional campaigns
Borrowing tactics from media playbooks helps marketers create higher-quality content that their audiences will actually want to read.
Read more about Kyle's framework for marketing offers that extend content value,
instead of just interrupting it
Team: Hire for editorial-grade content
Kyle recommends hiring for a media skillset—like strong storytelling chops, multimedia production experience, and curiosity-driven interview and research skills.
When HubSpot acquired media brand The Hustle in 2021, “bringing together the editorial skillset and the B2B growth skillset was a huge unlock for us,” he explains. “Our YouTube producers now come from media companies like Business Insider, Conde Nast, and Vox, because we’re looking for a different video journalism skillset.”
Beat reporters, video journalists, and newsletter editors can make excellent content marketers, because they know how to become experts on a new topic and how to develop an audience.
Product: Building media properties, not one-and-done campaigns
Above all, Kyle insists on creating content that is genuinely useful to the consumer. This goes for marketing offers just as much as it does for content.
Don’t just seek to push out marketing fact sheets. Aim to entertain as you educate. Consider “bingeability” and “re-watchability” as you plan out your content calendars. What content will people return to?
Marketers when they publish their umpteenth product feature listicle and only get 6 likes.
Kyle’s ACOM framework—Audience-Content-Offer Match—turns offers into extensions of content experiences, rather than promotional interruptions.
Extend your reach by developing complementary media properties across different channels and formats. Over time, media content created for brand building (podcasts, newsletters, thought leadership) becomes source material for demand generation (templates, guides, case studies)—driving forward both goals.
ACOM Discovery Template
Not sure exactly what kind of content will resonate with your audience? A simple 30 minute discovery call with your ideal customer will give you all the clarity you need.
Here’s a template you can use to uncover exactly what your audience wants from you.
Reporting: Data that matters
Metrics in a vacuum are about as useful as no metrics at all.
To get the full picture, build a dual attribution model that connects brand lift to sales pipeline. Track both brand and demand metrics, and overlay them to understand if/how brand equity translates to shorter sales cycles.
Different stakeholders will be interested in different results. “Your metrics conversation with the CFO will be very different than when you talk to your YouTube producer,” says Kyle.
While marketing leaders need to keep an eye on all sides, not every team or individual needs the bird’s eye view. Executives focus on business impact, program managers aim to balance reach and conversion, and tactical teams (like video producers and newsletter editors) can optimize for channel-specific performance.
When 1 + 1 = 3
By adopting a media mindset, marketers can unlock:
- Higher conversion rates from content (by building trust and capturing attention through consistent value)
- Shorter sales cycles as you sell to more pre-educated, engaged prospects
- Organizational resilience as you structure teams for both immediate results and long-term growth
- Compounded value that comes from treating brand and demand as two vital parts of the same engine, not an either-or decision
“It is a flexible thing,” says Kyle. “You want to have both brand and demand plays built. And then you figure out, based on where your business is at and what leadership is looking for, how to adjust those investments as needed.”
Early-stage companies that need to make their first sales may ramp up their demand efforts, while incumbents may focus more on brand differentiation.
Whatever the stage, the most sophisticated dual flywheel operators adjust their brand-demand investment ratios dynamically, while still maintaining both systems.
In fact, this is the philosophy storyarb preaches (and practices) for our own clients. If you want to hear more about how it’s working, set up a time for us to chat. We could gab about B2B content flywheels all day long.
Strategic principles
Great marketers aren’t choosing between brand and demand—they’re building infrastructure to support both. A few strategic principles for to keep in mind as you do this:
- The new marketing moat is skills that can’t be automated. AI can enhance interviewing, fact checking, narrative vision, and good taste—but it won’t replace it. Invest in humans with human skills.
- Audience is infrastructure, not a byproduct. Views, followers, and subscribers aren’t just vanity metrics. By treating audience development as its own function, your audience can become a strategic audience that amplifies everything else.
- Value above all. Generic CTAs perform worse than utility offers that extend the value of the content the reader has just consumed. Offer your audience tools and content that entertain them, save them time, and help them prove their team’s worth. (Learn more about how Kyle matches offers to content to drive leads here.)
It’s time to stop choosing sides. The market rewards companies that do both.
