Episode #41: The Evolution of B2B Content Marketing - Ashley Faus
Out of the funnel and into the playground
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, B2B experienced a Golden Age of Content Marketing.
Hubspot’s co-founders started blogging even before they had a product, pioneering the notion of Inbound Marketing—creating valuable content to attract your target buyers and build relationships.
Similarly, Marketo’s co-founder, Jon Miller, started blogging before there was a viable product. Like Hubspot, content was central to Marketo’s strategy. Jon Miller wrote extensive “definitive guides” that practitioners relied on to learn their craft and do their jobs.
Perhaps I’m viewing this period through rose-colored glasses, but the content from this era felt genuinely valuable.
However, somewhere along the line, things went wrong. The content marketing playbook became too mainstream. Companies adopted its forms but not its spirit.
Content became thinner and more formulaic as companies sought to feed their content engines at the lowest cost possible. Blog posts were outsourced to low-paid freelancers, and even marquee pieces of content, though nicely designed, often lacked substance.
Once upon a time, I saved ebooks on my hard drive for future reference. Now, the word “ebook” in an email subject line signals an email I can archive without reading.
We can’t blame the funnel entirely for the decline in content quality, but the funnel mindset plays a significant role.
The idea that we can mechanically move people down a path by bombarding them with ebooks and webinars, the notion that marketers can control the buyer’s journey—these ideas encourage us to view audiences more as objects than subjects. We become distant from their pains and concerns, more focused on ranking SEO content than on whether we have anything valuable to say when people arrive.
I’ve been guilty of all these sins myself.
The funnel mentality also causes companies to force prospects through experiences that don’t align with their needs.
In this week’s episode, Ashley Faus describes a software buying experience where she was already committed to selecting a solution, but the salespeople kept trying to sell her on the problem. They were trained to follow a linear program and couldn’t adapt to someone who didn’t fit their funnel.
This is why Ashley prefers the metaphor of a “playground” when thinking about content journeys.
Playgrounds are inherently non-linear. They consist of different experiences that people can choose based on interest. You can move back and forth between different stations. There’s freedom and flexibility.
Simply shifting to a playground mindset isn’t enough to fix B2B content, but it encourages a much-needed reorientation. If we focus on enabling our audience to choose content they value and enjoy, we’ll also be more focused on creating content that’s valuable and enjoyable.
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About Today's Guest
Ashley Faus is a marketer, writer, speaker by day, and a singer, actor, fitness fiend by night.
She's a leading content marketing expert who loves telling the high-level stories that resonate with an audience and connecting the dots between types of assets and distribution channels. For the past seven years, she's been the Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio, at Atlassian.
Her writing has been published on TIME, Forbes, MarketingProfs, and The Muse, and she's spoken on various marketing topics for INBOUND, Harvard Business Review, and MarketingProfs.
Key Topics
[00:00] - Introduction
[01:17] - A brief history of content marketing
[04:41] - Over-indexing on attribution
[08:55] - Different types of content intent
[15:42] - Individual vs. brand-led content
[19:12] - B2B creators
[29:24] - The content playground
[45:52] - Email as a consumption channel
[49:02] - Treating people as a whole human
[51:47] - Content formats
[54:54] - AI