Would you like soup or salad with that marketing channel?
We ask because so many content teams are treated like order-takers.
Kate Pluth , former content strategy leader at Qualtrics and Dropbox, has seen this many times before:
Too often, the content team is only seen as an execution arm. She adds, “They end up in order-taking mode, whether they want to be or not.”
Kate believes the most effective content teams are part of setting cross-channel, cross-departmental strategy, not just execution. content is how a brand scales the conversations it should be having with its audience. It’s your “1:many” conversation approach.
As channels keep changing, it’s important for the content team to work as the connective tissue across multiple teams and channels. Not just an execution arm for one.
Don’t be an order taker, kids. You’re a chef.
More of Kate’s hot takes below.
Key takeaways:
When content only takes orders, the work rolls downhill. Campaign managers get stuck project managing, and product marketers end up owning measurements they don’t have time for. Only about 5% of B2B buyers are shopping at any given time, and 90%+ pick a brand they already knew on day 1. That makes audience growth a crucial goal for content. Attribution for audience-building content will never be black and white. Leadership has to commit to it without a perfect line to revenue. The reactive content domino effect Over the last few years, marketers have weathered countless channel shifts.
SEO is declining ( or not? ); chatbots are spawning at record rates; cookies are disappearing, wait, no they’re not, wait, yet they are; also, should our brand be on TikTok?
Many companies are highly reactive to these changes, letting one channel trend derail the full strategy — and not separating out a dedicated “content strategy” function.
“Many leaders treat content as a team of writers taking orders from whichever channel or campaign asks,” says Kate.
This turns into a domino effect:
The content team gets stuck in order-taking mode, and can’t think about a full strategic rollout plan or content operations The campaign managers then get stuck in doing that project management, and can’t focus on measurement and campaign strategy Further upstream, the product marketing managers have to take on the campaign direction, which takes away from their time to do larger go-to-market or sales projects. So your product marketing team is burnt out; campaign management is stuck in the weeds; and the content team is disempowered. Oof.
Overrated vs. underrated: content edition Kate has a vision for a more effective content team, and it starts with understanding today’s B2B market.
In short: Most of your market isn’t buying right now, and when they do buy, they usually pick a brand they already know. The content team’s job is to stay in front of people before they’re shopping, so you’re the first name they think of when they are.
To do that, you need to measure effectiveness as audience growth, not only leads — and leadership has to commit to that effort, even without crystal clear attribution.
(We told you the Kate Takes™️ were hot.)
Overrated: Lead gen. Underrated: Audience growth. Two timely stats that Kate thinks should live in every marketer’s head right now:
Only about 5% of B2B buyers are shopping at any given time , according to research from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and LinkedIn. 90%+ of B2B buyers choose a brand they already had in mind on day 1 , per research from Bain and Google. When 95% of folks aren’t in the market to buy today, that means audience growth is tremendously important — and leads, while valuable, are only one tiny part of the picture. Kate explains:
“Brands have a duty to be talking to that 95%, so that they are top-of-mind on that first day, even if the sales cycle is long.”
Content is a way to converse with your audience and build trust long before they’re ready to buy. It’s how you prove the value of a solution long before you send it.
Overrated: Black and white attribution. Underrated: Commitment to the brand (even if that means some ambiguity). So many marketers (and their CFOs, and their CEOs…) have pulled their hair out trying to make marketing attribution black and white.
(Raise your hand if anyone’s ever asked you, “How many SaaS subscriptions did the Instagram carousel sell?)
Kate is more comfortable with shades of gray.
“Building an audience means you’re priming the buyer so that when they’re ready to shop, they think of you, and your content accelerates the sales cycle,” Kate explains. “However, that’s near impossible to prove with some metric in the rest of the business.”
(Because that Instagram carousel didn’t directly sell SaaS subscriptions. But it got seen by X number of people who might, when they’re ready to buy, think of you later, because they’ve engaged with your social content.)
“At a certain point, a business just has to decide — we’re doing this because we believe it will work and it’s the right thing for the brand, even if we can’t ‘prove’ it retroactively,” says Kate.
Overrated: The channel of the week. Underrated: Horizontal content teams. Kate stresses that the content team is the only team that sees the entirety of a brand’s audience conversations.
“The content team acts as a horizontal function, providing this connective tissue of conversations across email, web, social, paid…across every channel.”
That view can hugely support the buyer journey — as long as the content team is allowed to operate across different channels, instead of being beholden to whatever’s trending today. Kate explains:
If your goal is to reach new markets or new ICPs , you probably want to lean into earned and paid channels. If your goal is to deepen relationships with existing clients , you probably want to lean into really great owned channels. Most businesses need both — which is why content teams work best as a horizontal function, not chasing the channel of the week.
Don’t let the channel wag the dog Marketing channels are changing faster than you can surf your CATV on a Sunday night. That means your medium won’t be constant, but your messaging can be.
Anchor your content strategy around having great audience conversations, not around individual channels you want to do major pushes on.
The channels worth investing in depend entirely on your audience — which means you have to intimately know who they are, where they hang out, and how to follow them to those places, be that YouTube, subreddits, professional associations, or live events. It also means shutting down channels that don’t work, like shuttering a blog or overhauling an event strategy.
When you go where the conversation is actually happening, you show that you can listen to B2B buyers.
And that’s how you actually start talking to them.
FAQ How do you measure content marketing when there’s no direct line to revenue? Own the engagement metrics inside each channel your content feeds. If paid is accountable to ROAS, content owns engagement on the ad creative it writes. If lifecycle is accountable to conversion to paid, content owns opens + click-throughs on the nurture copy.
How does a content team earn a seat at the strategy table? Start with reading the room. Look at the numbers executive leadership care most about. Set up virtual coffees with product marketing, paid, sales, and CX to learn their pain points. Then document the strategy and map the right content operating model on a couple of slides and walk it back through those same teams. Executive buy-in helps a lot, and early quick wins help build trust.
Should content strategists and writers be separate roles? Once a team has any real scale, yes. At Qualtrics, adding dedicated content strategy freed campaign managers to focus on measurement and took pressure off product marketing. Small teams can combine the roles, but one person doing everything from soup to nuts is often unsustainable and risks underperformance in one element of the role.
