Content Strategy That Builds Pipeline: Discovery, Virality, and Relationship Loops (with Brendan Hufford)

#41 - Your team is producing more content than ever, but pipeline isn’t reflecting it. That gap between output and impact usually isn’t a volume problem — it’s a strategy problem. And it’s exactly what this conversation is built to solve.

Brendan Hufford, founder of Growth Sprints, helps B2B SaaS companies scale from $10 million to $100 million — largely through content. He’s a former high school teacher turned SEO director turned founder, and he brings a refreshingly direct take on what it actually takes to make content drive revenue. In this conversation, Brendan breaks down his four-part growth framework and gets tactical about what’s working right now across search, social, and newsletters in B2B.

What we cover:

• Why naming the problem you solve builds more trust than any product page — and how to workshop your own Content IP using the 3S strategy (sales, success, support)
• Discovery loops: how to get found in Google and LLMs, starting closest to the money with competitor and product pages
• Virality loops: why your executives need to be posting (even when they’re resistant) and how to overcome the objections
• Relationship loops: what the best B2B newsletters actually look like, with specific examples to study
• How to quantify content’s impact so your CFO stops questioning the spend
• What “checkbox marketing” looks like and how to break out of it for good
• Why smaller marketing teams with strong strategy are outperforming larger ones stuck in channel silos

About Brendan Hufford: Brendan is the founder of Growth Sprints, where he helps B2B SaaS companies scale from 10 to 100 million primarily through content. He previously served as SEO Director at a web design agency, helped scale a B2B SaaS marketing agency from 10 to 25 million, and worked in-house at ActiveCampaign. His background as a 10-year high school teacher gives him a unique perspective on communication, structure, and cutting through complexity. Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn.

Timestamps:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (02:19) Brendan’s journey from teacher to SEO director to founder
• (07:19) The 4-part growth framework: Content IP, discovery, virality, and relationship loops
• (10:10) Content IP: why naming the problem beats naming the category
• (14:00) The 3S interview method for workshopping your Content IP
• (20:09) Why AI analysis can’t replace real customer conversations
• (23:30) Discovery, virality, and relationship loops in practice
• (29:57) The best B2B newsletters to study right now
• (32:46) How to bring the loops together without silos killing your strategy
• (37:56) Quantifying content’s impact and proving ROI to the CFO

If this episode gave you a framework to rethink your content strategy, share it with a fellow marketing leader who’s tired of checkbox marketing. And if you haven’t yet, follow Growth Activated wherever you listen so you never miss an episode.

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Transcript

GROWTH ACTIVATED — Clean Verbatim Transcript
Episode: The 4-Part Content Framework That Drives B2B Pipeline with Brendan Hufford
Host: Mandy Walker | Guest: Brendan Hufford, Founder of Growth Sprints

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Mandy Walker: Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Walker, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high-performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape is evolving, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence, and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Mandy Walker: Is your team producing more content than ever, but pipeline isn't reflecting it? That gap between output and impact is usually not a volume problem. It's a strategy problem. And it's exactly what this episode is built to solve. Welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Walker. And today I'm sitting down with Brendan Hufford, founder of Growth Sprints, who helps B2B SaaS companies scale from 10 to 100 million largely through content.

Mandy Walker: Brendan built a four-part growth framework — content IP, discovery loops, virality loops, and relationship loops. And the way he breaks it down is one of the most practical takes I've heard on what it really takes to make content drive revenue. We get into why naming the problem you solve builds more trust than any product page, how to workshop your own content IP using what he calls the 3S strategy, and what's actually working right now across search, social, and newsletters in B2B.

Mandy Walker: Brendan also doesn't hold back on the hard stuff — why your executives need to be posting even when they're resistant, how to quantify content's impact so your CFO stops questioning the spend, and what it looks like to break out of checklist marketing for good. Brendan's a former teacher turned SEO director turned founder, and he brings all of that energy to this conversation. It's direct, it's actionable, and it's a lot of fun. Let's get into it.

Mandy Walker: Hey Brendan, welcome to the Growth Activated podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, Mandy, thanks for having me. I'm super excited too.

Mandy Walker: Absolutely. I know I shared this with you, but just for my audience, you came highly recommended from some people in the community when I was doing some speaker research and outreach. And I myself have already learned so much from you just from checking you out and following you on LinkedIn. So really looking forward to the conversation today. With that, let's dive into your background. Bring us through — I know you have a little bit of a non-traditional background, but would love to hear about it.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, so I was a high school teacher for 10 years because we let 18-year-olds decide what they want to do with their lives. And at 18, I was like, I guess I want to be in high school for the rest of my life. I went to college to be a teacher, tried to climb that ladder. I got my administrative degree, was a vice principal, all these things. And I was rewarded with that decade of work with the Sunday scaries, Monday morning panic attacks, an extra 25 pounds around my midsection, a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and a myriad of other things. And I realized I had climbed this ladder, but the ladder was leaned up against the wrong wall.

Brendan Hufford: This whole time I had been building things on the side. Little projects, little websites, little email lists, just around my hobbies and things that I loved. I started an e-commerce brand, sold that. I started an affiliate website, sold that. And then I was looking for what to do next and I started working with clients.

Brendan Hufford: I was back to being a teacher again, an assistant principal for a little bit. I did what I would call an Einstein career move. I don't know if everybody's heard this — he actually worked in a patent office. He could get his work done in a couple hours a day, and then the rest of the day, just close the door and work on his own stuff. So instead of continuing to climb, which wasn't sustainable as the lowest-paid assistant principal in my state — because you can look that stuff up — I went back into the classroom.

Brendan Hufford: Everybody told me I was throwing away my career, taking a step backwards. What it gave me was time freedom. And I remember I was out in my little Nissan Versa. There's a scene from The Incredibles where Mr. Incredible is this big guy in a tiny car and he's really frustrated. That was me in my Nissan Versa — big dude, small car, just mad.

Brendan Hufford: I was on the phone with my friend and he's like, why don't you just go work somewhere? Just go work in marketing professionally, instead of trying to build all these side projects and get rich off of them. And I was like — this sounds so dumb, Andy — I'd never considered that. Because I came up in the world of not professional digital marketing. I came up in online marketing, the get-rich-quick YouTubers, that whole scene.

Brendan Hufford: And then it went so fast. I joined a web design agency, became the SEO director there. Moved to a B2B SaaS marketing agency, helped scale that from 10 to 25 million. Went in-house at a pretty big tech company called ActiveCampaign for a little bit. And then the whole time I was still building on the side. I just had this muscle to keep building on the side. And I built my own consultancy, which is called Growth Sprints, where I work primarily with SaaS companies, helping them scale from 10 to 100 million in revenue, mostly through content.

Mandy Walker: Wow. Well, that is such a fun journey to follow. And thank you for your authenticity through all of that.

Brendan Hufford: I can't be any other way. It's kind of a problem. It sounds nice on a podcast, but I'm kind of a lot in person.

Mandy Walker: Well, I would be your friend in person. But again, just PSA to any hiring leaders out there — definitely consider teachers. I've actually hired teachers that wanted to get out of teaching and brought them onto the marketing team, and they were some of my best performers. They don't have any pretense about putting up with any sort of BS from customers, clients, leadership. They've seen it all and have been broke. So if you're like, "we'll take you from making 40 grand a year to..."

Brendan Hufford: I literally went overnight — I was making I think 45 grand. And then I went to that agency and they were paying me 75, and you would have thought I hit the lottery. I didn't even know what to do with myself. And I could go to the bathroom whenever I wanted. Teachers can't do that. You're not even adults. All of a sudden you're like, whoa, what is this other world? I don't have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. This is crazy. So they're wonderful. They will be the best person on your team.

Mandy Walker: Absolutely. But hey, I'm sure that managing sales teams is sort of like managing eighth graders in some ways.

Brendan Hufford: 100%. It's not that different.

Mandy Walker: All right, Brendan. So I know one of the things you've built Growth Sprints off of is this four-part growth framework. And I know you specialize specifically in companies growing from 10 million to 100 million. Break down that framework for us and why it works for that stage, and if it applies to other stages of companies as well.

Brendan Hufford: This is a really good question. So the 10 to 100 million is my public positioning. This is a good positioning lesson for anybody. My H1 tag on my website is not long enough to say, "if you're too small and can't get work done, I don't want to work with you" or "if you're too big and you're a bureaucratic nightmare just to ship a blog, I also don't want to work with you." That's what that's a proxy for. I just figured some round numbers made sense.

Brendan Hufford: Do I work with companies making less than 10 million? All the time. It's just a qualifier for me that you've got to be able to ship stuff. And do I work with companies bigger than 100 million? Sometimes, but only the ones where it's like, we don't need legal to review every single blog and email that goes out. If that's where you're at, I'm all set. There are people that are good at that. Not for me.

Brendan Hufford: Could you imagine somebody with my personality living in a bureaucracy of just approvals and meetings about meetings? I'm a nightmare. Somebody the other day was like, oh, you see this trend in job descriptions where they say, "we only hire A players, we only hire the best." And I'm like, I think they think they want A players, but A players are a total pain in the ass. We're nightmares. You actually probably don't want an A player because we're going to be messy and try to push and ship and do all these things. You might not want that, and just know that.

Brendan Hufford: So the framework that I found helps my clients the most — and I'm agnostic to stuff. I came up in the SEO world. So I was raised in the world of keywords and traffic and rankings and all of that, which I think we'd all agree is still relevant very much, but has changed dramatically.

Brendan Hufford: When I was building my own business, I was like, I can't do SEO about SEO. I was brand new. I didn't have a strong enough website. I was never going to outrank Neil Patel and HubSpot and SEMrush and Ahrefs and Google. I was never going to be able to do SEO about SEO, so I had to figure out other ways to grow my business.

Brendan Hufford: So I did a 100-day YouTube challenge where I produced — it was called 100 Days of SEO — 100 videos over the course of 20 weeks, where I did a podcast episode, a YouTube video, and a blog post every single day.

Mandy Walker: Oh my gosh.

Brendan Hufford: But it will help you grow your career. Anybody trying to grow their career, do a 100-day challenge. Just do something — do an amount of work that's hard to ignore. That line, "be so good they can't ignore you." Do that, people will take notice.

Brendan Hufford: So I'm kind of agnostic on all of this stuff. I came up in that world, but I just want to win and I love content. Originally my framework was around SEO-related stuff — technical, content, backlinks, whatever. Over time, it became SEO and some other stuff. And what I've found works best now is these four things.

Brendan Hufford: One — what I call Content IP, which is naming the problem we solve. I work primarily with tech and SaaS software companies, and a lot of them want to name their category. What they really should be doing is naming the problem they solve. Nobody wants to buy the AI copilot for customer experience automation. Nobody wakes up in the middle of the night thinking, "I really wish I had an AI copilot for my customer experience automation platform." Nobody wants that. Quit giving weird names. You do email marketing. Just be regular.

Brendan Hufford: Second — discovery loops. When somebody's searching for something in Google or in an LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity, do they find us?

Brendan Hufford: Third — a virality loop. Going viral in B2B is very different than B2C. B2C it's like, let's get a billion impressions on TikTok. In B2B, it's just, I need to see you at the top of my feed every time I open LinkedIn.

Brendan Hufford: And then the fourth is a relationship loop — a recurring marketing motion that allows you to build an ongoing relationship. A lot of times this is a newsletter. That's where a lot of my clients work, but it could also be a podcast. Could be webinars. Anything that is a recurring marketing motion builds that relationship loop.

Brendan Hufford: Those four things combined — you don't need Claude Code yet. And I say that lovingly, the head of marketing there, Casey Jenkins, is amazing. I joke about that, but people get really caught up on so many of these new products and things. You need foundations in place. And that's where I help people with this foundational content across those four pieces.

Mandy Walker: So, rapid fire — what were the four again?

Brendan Hufford: Content IP, discovery loops, virality loops, and relationship loops. So you have to be discoverable, you have to be able to go B2B viral, and you have to be able to build an ongoing relationship.

Mandy Walker: Super helpful. So let's start with Content IP. How do people figure it out? Because the great resignation, quiet quitting — such great examples. I feel like it's a lot harder to name the problem and have it stick than those examples might seem. What is your process for helping companies identify that? And where do companies get tripped up?

Brendan Hufford: It usually looks like interviews plus a workshop. If you want to practically do this, you can even steal this. You can do it for yourself. Please do. I just want people to win. If you're hungry and driven and want to just do this, please go do it. Let me know how it goes.

Brendan Hufford: First is what I call 3S interviews. I'm talking to the 3S team — sales, success, and support. A lot of marketers don't get access to them or they don't think to interview them. Spend a lot of time with them, interview them, ask them questions like: What's come up unprompted on three or more calls in the last six months? What's changing? What don't people understand after you close a deal? What causes people to churn afterwards? What's the hardest part of onboarding? Ask those hard questions and figure out those things.

Brendan Hufford: And then after we do those interviews, let's workshop some stuff. Let's figure out what people struggle with, what they say out loud, what's not publicly acknowledged. If I made a LinkedIn post about this, they'd all DM me, but they wouldn't comment because they don't want anybody to know. Let's talk about those things and then peel back layers. What's under that? What's under that? And sometimes we go too deep and we arrive at, "it's the patriarchy," and it's like, okay, cool. We can't solve that today. We're an email marketing platform. We can't solve the patriarchy. So let's maybe zoom back in a little. We've zoomed out too far.

Brendan Hufford: But when we're trying to workshop that, I'm really just trying to find what those struggles are. And then we're going to try a ton of names. I've tried tons of names for things all the time. People now joke in my comment section on LinkedIn — when I name something, they're like, "Oh, throwing a little Content IP at us today." And it's like, yeah, I am.

Brendan Hufford: The other day, I posted about "prove it purgatory" — how marketers get caught in this purgatory cycle of just having to prove the value of their work and sing for their supper over and over. Half the comments were like, "prove it purgatory is so good." And I'm like, well, I don't solve that. So that's not a good one for me.

Brendan Hufford: The thing I helped with that I found resonated most was "checkbox marketing." The organizations I work best in are ones that are doing a lot of content, but it's just a box-checking exercise. Weekly blog, weekly newsletter, quarterly webinar — just time plus channel. And that's their content strategy. I posted about that and people were like, "Can I get 'death to checkbox marketing' on a t-shirt?" I got DMs from brilliant people who've become really good friends that were like, "Oh my God, I'm so mad you named that first. That is exactly the problem with everything." And that's what you're looking for — some sort of resonance there.

Brendan Hufford: I worked with an HR tech company and I was talking to their founder as part of the workshop. I was like, "So, what's the big issue here?" And he said, "You know what? People are still doing HR like it's 50 years ago, where you would work one place for 40 years and then retire and they'd give you a gold watch."

Brendan Hufford: I immediately started scribbling notes down. And the IP we ended up bringing was this "Golden Watch Era" — most companies are still doing HR or expecting you to do HR like it's the Golden Watch Era. And it's just — as soon as you say "Golden Watch Era" to a person in HR, they do the snap and point. "That is the expectation and it is bullshit." And it immediately resonates. When you name someone's problem, they trust you to solve it.

Brendan Hufford: Another example — there's a company called Sendoso that I've worked with for a long time. They do gifting and direct mail. And we workshopped a bunch of stuff. The thing we ended up talking about a lot is this idea of "digital fatigue." Do they solve digital fatigue? Yeah — we're all so overwhelmed. There's new data coming out now that marketers are just as burned out by marketing emails as they are by cold emails. Your marketing email lands as well in their inbox as a cold email pitch.

Brendan Hufford: That's got to tell you something. We're all burned out by that. And that digital fatigue — I made a post about it just on their behalf to see if it would land. Absolutely crushed. Half the comments are like, "Dude, I am so exhausted by ads that follow me everywhere." We're not going to display-ad our way to a billion-dollar valuation. We're just exhausting our audience. What cuts through the noise is a really thoughtful gift. Something in our mailbox, something we can hold in our hands.

Brendan Hufford: This is one of my favorite things to show people. This isn't even a gift, but this is the DreamData benchmarks report for LinkedIn ads. It's really well done. This has sat on my desk for a year. I've shown this to hundreds of people on calls and I look at it all the time. Those sorts of things make a difference.

Brendan Hufford: All that to say — this idea of naming the problem is so powerful, and you just have to test a bunch of stuff. Your audience will let you know when it lands.

Mandy Walker: I love that. And I would imagine too, because I know back to one of your earlier points of "talk to people, talk to your customers, talk to sales, success, support" — are you finding that's even easier now today as marketing leaders where we can just use Gong recordings and do all the synthesis through AI? Or are you still saying, no, get in front of real people and talk to them to figure this out?

Brendan Hufford: Get in front of them, because I want to see your face. I like AI call analysis as a layer. That's great. Do it. Because a lot of times as marketers, we'll get asked to produce certain things, especially in content. And I like to go into Gong recordings and type that phrase in and be like, "nobody has ever said that on a call." We're not writing a blog about it.

Brendan Hufford: There's some things where we have to go first and be the tastemakers and name those problems. But a lot of times it's like, "oh, people are struggling with this." And I'm like, nobody's struggling with that. At least nobody we've spoken to in the past three years. So I love that as a resource.

Brendan Hufford: But I want to see when I'm talking to a salesperson — I want to see when they lean in or when they get a little bit pissed off or something else. I'm looking for their emotional reaction when they're talking about something.

Brendan Hufford: I talked to a customer success leader at a client's company, and he started going on about the dynamics that happen after marketing passes sales a lead. As marketers, we're not really privy to the closed-won to customer success pipeline and all of that. I got some insights from him where I was like, these are foundational things for our content now. We have to talk about these things because it'll increase renewals. It'll do all these things for the business. It also just makes it better for our customers.

Mandy Walker: Yeah, I love that.

Brendan Hufford: So you've got to talk to them. This era of — I think AI made it worse. I saw it a lot in SEO where people were labeled as marketers but they weren't. A lot of them were just website managers. These were devs that wanted to improve the schema and the technical stuff and Core Web Vitals, and I'm like, you guys have to talk to humans. You own the website. You have to talk to the people that use the website. And they were like, "Absolutely not. I don't want to talk to people."

Brendan Hufford: As a marketer, if you want to be great — and I think AI and tools like Clay have made it a little worse where we just want to all be spreadsheet engineers — that's fine. But if you're never surfacing insights from your actual customers or the people who talk to customers, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. You're probably not doing a bad job, and I'm not judging you. But you are leaving a ton of money on the table.

Mandy Walker: Well, hey, "spreadsheet engineers" — that could be a Content IP too. You're constantly improving. You're bringing material today.

Brendan Hufford: I love it.

Mandy Walker: So Brendan, I want to talk to you about the other three — the three loops. The discovery loop, the virality loop, and the relationship loop. Do you have specific strategies within those that you bet on and really believe right now everyone in B2B should be doing? And what is the intersection of those? Because even as you were talking about the relationship loop and how that could be a podcast, my mind goes to — okay, a YouTube podcast could be great for discoverability, but could also be great for relationship building and probably virality. So as a CMO who's tight on time, maybe that's the number one thing I should be doing because it accomplishes all three. Talk me through that. What are you seeing?

Brendan Hufford: I think there is maybe some potential for a content cascade kind of thing where it's like, this becomes this becomes this. The problem is, though, a lot of times we don't create the podcast with the other pieces in mind. So it's just not built for that. It's a meandering conversation between two people, and we're wasting all this time and half of it could probably get deleted anyway. Things even I'm thinking about as we're talking right now.

Brendan Hufford: But there is stuff like that. A lot of times when people try to take a podcast and turn it into a bunch of other things, it's not built for that and it doesn't work super well. Now, if that's all you have, if you're a solo marketer and you're like, "I have to make some bets and figure out how to do all of these things," my heart goes out to you. I have nothing but empathy for marketers. You're not dumb or bad or anything. I totally get it.

Brendan Hufford: But if you can do all of these things and do them right, the way that I think about it is primarily — discovery loops is going to be the thing you can own as website content. Any place you're mentioned on the rest of the internet is a bonus to influence that. I'm trying to get mentioned in as many pieces in the LLM's training data and on other things that are ranking in Google. That's great, but you have to cover your own bases.

Brendan Hufford: Usually I like to start closest to the money, which means — do we have platform pages? Do we have really solid product pages? Do we have competitor pages where it's like alternatives to us, us versus competitors, competitor versus competitor? Be a good guide. If somebody's trying to decide between buying two of your competitors, give them the honest truth.

Brendan Hufford: I just worked with a client on this, and they were like, "Hey, look, if you're judging between these two competitors, one of them has more support agents than the other company has employees. Just so you know the scale of these things. There's a reason one of them only costs $50 a month and the other one's thousands per month." It's very different.

Brendan Hufford: Another client — we put out a competitor versus competitor page, and it was like, "Hey, these guys just got bought by private equity and they laid off half of their staff immediately to increase valuation. You should know that. We're not making fun of them. That's just stuff that might not get surfaced, and their salesperson isn't going to tell you that they've laid off all their support and you're going to get an AI chatbot."

Brendan Hufford: But be that good, trusted guide, and then you earn the right to talk about yourself. So I like all that down-funnel type of stuff. List goals, best of, whatever. Put yourself next to them, compare them side by side, do it honestly based on the best information you have. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That helps all sorts of search.

Brendan Hufford: The second piece is on the virality loop side. I'm a huge believer that people buy from people. So you need humans posting for you. If for whatever reason you don't have humans in your company posting on your behalf, there's a company called Navattic — everybody should study Natalie Marcotullio from Navattic. She's put out really great information about how she built their creators and advisor program. Study her, look at what she did, build that.

Brendan Hufford: If you're like, "we don't have the subject matter expertise and I'm selling to devs, but I'm a marketer and I don't want to build an audience of developers on LinkedIn — they're not going to trust me — and I can't get anybody from my company to post." First of all, I would disagree. You definitely can. You just need to help them understand how it connects to growing their business or serving their customers. They care about one of those if they're the CEO or the founder. But help them do more of that. That's a big piece of it.

Brendan Hufford: Sharing real authentic stories — you can use a Fathom or Granola to record all your calls. All those weekly transcripts go into Claude. Ask it, "Hey, what are the moments that are most likely to go viral because they're going to generate a ton of comments and get me more customers, ideally both?" And it'll pull all the moments out of all your transcripts from the week. Then you're like, all right, cool. You can drop that into a tool like Stanley and have it write for you, or you just write it yourself.

Brendan Hufford: There are a lot of ways to create executive content that they're happy with. Then just schedule it for them, have it go out every single day. I will tell you, it's really hard to have the virality loop succeed if your executive is resistant to posting. Or if they don't post but then all of a sudden have really strong opinions about content. They're like, "Well, I couldn't say that. That's not my brand voice." And I'm like, fam, you haven't posted in six months. You don't have a brand voice. Nobody knows what you sound like.

Brendan Hufford: Fine, just post every day for a couple of weeks. I don't care if you post a picture of your kids or your cats or the Red Rising Lego that your kid built for you on your desk. Just post something. I don't care. But that sort of thing. The overcoming executive objections for all of these things is something I think a lot about, because that's the real work of marketing, as you know.

Mandy Walker: Totally.

Brendan Hufford: And then the last piece — the relationship loops. I'm so obsessed with the play of just the simple "how I" or "how they" content. Your newsletter should be "how I do this, how I do this, how I do this" or "how they do this." "How X does Y" is really, really good.

Brendan Hufford: There's a really funny article called "Win Like Stupid" where it talks about — you have to be too stupid to be scared, too stupid to quit early, too stupid to be smart and overthink it. That's how I think about newsletters and that relationship loop — keep it as stupidly simple as possible and just keep shipping that type of stuff. At a high level, that's how I think about it from a strategic standpoint. I'm happy to get tactical or dig into any of them if it's helpful.

Mandy Walker: Well, I'd ask — you gave such great case studies for us to look at. Any that you would recommend on the newsletter front that you think do this really well?

Brendan Hufford: So I think Sendoso does this really well. They're a client, so whatever, hats off. I advise for Navattic. They do this really well. They do a thing called "Buyer First Bites," which is really good. Has a good premise.

Brendan Hufford: Jay Acunzo is like the master of premise development. His line is — your premise should be, "unlike every other newsletter, podcast, unlike everybody else who does this thing, only we do this." That's how you develop a premise according to him. So I think he's the best, and I think he has one of the best newsletters out there.

Brendan Hufford: There's a company called Boombox that I think does a really good job. They write for event planners and executive assistants running corporate events like SKOs and offsites. They also have a really good brand voice.

Brendan Hufford: One of my favorite newsletters — he's such a bro — but Alex Hormozi has one called the Mozi Minute. By the name of it, I love a literal name. It's why my consultancy is called Growth Sprints. The Mozi Minute — I know in less than 60 seconds, I'm going to learn something, and I can probably apply it today. That's a good premise. And it delivers on that premise.

Brendan Hufford: I also really like Sarah Stockdale's newsletter. She's very opinionated, very brash. Takes a lot of political stances, and I love that. She raised a really good one at Growclass. She used to have a personal one that I loved. I wish she'd bring it back.

Brendan Hufford: And then Tyler Denk, the founder of Beehiiv, has a pretty good one called Big Desk Energy. He's primarily a founder selling to other founders and media outlets they're trying to get to move to Beehiiv. But you'll learn a ton just by looking at things. I think the key for a lot of this stuff is just to consume a lot.

Mandy Walker: Super helpful. Thank you. I can't wait to go check out some of those people. Some I follow, some I don't. So I'll go learn from them. But I'd be curious — if you zoomed out a little bit across those three loops, how do you bring it all together as one strategy? And do you view — not to get too tactical — but in marketing organizations, does one person own each of those loops or one team own each, or are you against that? How do we tactically excel within these loops?

Brendan Hufford: So each of them has a goal, right? Discovery loops — the goal is to get found when they're searching. Virality loops — the goal is to be at the top of the feed as much as possible for our ICP. Relationship loops — to build a relationship with them over time.

Brendan Hufford: So we always come back to that. Is this helping us get discovered? Is this helping us be at the top of the feed related to what we do — not just going viral? You can post all sorts of sensational stuff on LinkedIn. The trend I hate is "engagement ransomware" — like, "comment to get my playbook of this insane thing that I definitely just made up yesterday."

Brendan Hufford: Or even the emails where people are like, "but we have a new product release. We have to tell them about the product release." And it's like, no, that doesn't build a relationship. Stop it. Put it in the PS or something. Maybe their favorite newsletter, and then at the end in the PS, be like, "Hey, we also launched this thing that's super helpful for you. We made a little video if you want to check it out." That's not a newsletter. You can still send them marketing emails. It's just not a newsletter.

Brendan Hufford: Jenny Koop was my VP at ActiveCampaign when I worked there, and she always said, "We have to be singing from the same sheet of music." And I think about that a ton. You need a conductor. You need to make sure everybody's playing from the same sheet of music. Otherwise, everybody gets very specific on their channel metrics. "I have to hit this and I'm not going to work with you because it could hurt my channel metrics."

Brendan Hufford: I remember when I was in-house, I asked the person running Google Ads to see the Google Ads that were working. And I was like, well, if they're working in paid, we should have organic pages for these. First of all, they were a little reluctant to show me. And I later found out when I finally saw them is because we were wasting a ton of money on branded search. I'm like, wait — we're paying a person to run ads to pay for traffic we would already get anyway? What are we doing?

Brendan Hufford: And it was also counter — that's harming my work. We're spending that budget, which gets way more budget than organic, to take my organic traffic. And it's not even my organic traffic because it's branded. I didn't even do that. That's everything else we were doing in the world that makes somebody Google the brand.

Brendan Hufford: So when you get people locked into their channel — and I understand at big companies that it makes sense to have an SEO person, a social person, whatever — you need somebody making sure they're all singing from the same sheet of music. And you can't just smush them together. You can't be like, "Right, you all have a meeting and you have a meeting." That's not how that works. You have to make sure they're all singing from the same sheet of music.

Brendan Hufford: I also work in a lot of companies where the marketing team is less than 10 people. And I think that's kind of the way marketing teams are going for better or worse, where it's less people, more tooling. I'm a one-person team, and I'm running content strategy and producing content for organic SEO, AEO, newsletter, and social. And I can do that because I'm really good with the tooling available. It's good — it's a quality debate, not a tactics debate. If it's good, it's good. And you don't need to have a million people on the team anymore to do that. If I can run that for four to five clients at a time, you can probably have one person on the team run some of this stuff.

Brendan Hufford: Where you get into trouble is where your content team becomes a service org within the company. "Hey, we need a blog about this. Hey, we need a blog about that. We got to send out an email about this." Just other people giving orders and you're taking them and making stuff. And that's a recipe for disaster because now you're not singing from the same sheet of music anymore.

Brendan Hufford: So from an organizational standpoint, it can be all over the place. It just depends on whether we're staying focused on our Content IP and then accomplishing the goals of those three different loops. When you stray from your IP and when you stray from those loops — the actual goal of the loops of being discovered, showing up in the feed regularly, and building relationship — that's where you get into trouble. It's not even trouble. It's just a quiet death spiral, because nobody's going to tell you it's not resonating. They just stop reading your emails. They just stop commenting on your social.

Brendan Hufford: And you don't know, because maybe new people come. Maybe impressions look like they're going up and engagement looks like it's going up. But you're accidentally building an audience of — I'll use myself as an example. I could do a ton of building in public, tell you all about my business, how much money I'm making, how many clients I have, how I'm running all my stuff behind the scenes. Sometimes that's valuable. It really just builds an audience of other solo people like me. But I don't sell to them. So it's not a good idea. It's really important you're sharing stuff in service of your audience. And most of us are not marketers selling to other marketers.

Mandy Walker: As you were talking, I was thinking — oh, "they're quitting your content quietly." Dropping out.

Mandy Walker: Well Brendan, I could talk to you for hours. This has been so much fun. I know we have a few minutes left. Give us some of your best pieces of advice for CMOs out there that are in the slog right now. What are you seeing, and what do you think we should be doing?

Brendan Hufford: I think one of the most important things is being able to quantify how much content is helping you. We all know content matters. I could survey a thousand CMOs and a thousand of them would be like, "Yes, content is important. Yes, brand is important." But then you meet with the CFO and they're like, "How much money did we make from the newsletter?" And you're like, "I don't know."

Brendan Hufford: We have self-reported attribution, and I can put that in there. But self-reported attribution is just as imperfect as software-based. It's a good additional data point. If you're only using first-click, last-click, whatever software-based attribution — please stop that. Add a form field that says, "How'd you hear about us?" But we all know from human psychology that we have primacy and recency bias. It's just first and last click. What happened most recently and what happened first?

Brendan Hufford: And if you have a famous founder, people love putting that in there. "Oh, I've been following Mandy for years." And it's like, you're just saying that to be kind of a kiss-ass. It's not — I've worked with a couple of companies and they're like, "Our form field only says our founder's name over and over." And I'm like, well, that can't be it. Because if they've been following them for years, why today? Why not six months ago or two years ago? That's weird. There's an inciting event that is not that.

Brendan Hufford: So start there. Then use a tool — I showed you DreamData earlier. A lot of my clients use them. I'm a huge fan because you can see all the marketing touchpoints. When did they open emails? When did they subscribe to the newsletter? You can see it in one customer journey. When did they receive a Sendoso gift? All these things. And all of a sudden we're like, oh, this buyer journey that we've always known is a squiggly mess line — we can finally see what it actually looks like. It wasn't the BDR that scanned their badge three years ago at the conference. And it wasn't the one gift we sent. And it wasn't the one blog they read. But now we have correlation.

Brendan Hufford: "Hey, you know what? We noticed, we looked in our DreamData — and this is real — we found that newsletter subscribers not only become customers at a higher rate than non-newsletter subscribers, we also found that those deals closed 60% faster. We probably need to get more people reading our newsletter because we know it prints money for us." Even though we don't have any direct correlation to people saying the newsletter is why they bought our health tech software or something.

Brendan Hufford: I think that's the biggest place to start — just being able to quantify. We all know and believe in content. But the hardest piece is convincing everybody else in the org. Your CEO, your CFO — especially somebody that controls the purse strings. They're like, "Well, the Google Ads are really crushing this quarter. Let's just keep running those competitive Google Ads." And I'm like, yeah, people are clicking that. But why are they searching us versus our competitors?

Brendan Hufford: We did so much work upfront, and you're going to be like, "It's the branded search that we should pour more money into." And then next year, "Hey guys, why aren't the Google Ads doing good?" Well, half as many people this year are Googling us compared to last year because we stopped everything else.

Brendan Hufford: That's a hard spot. A lot of that's why everybody talks about CMO tenure. I don't think CMOs get fired — I do think that happens — because you've got people running other things that make poor decisions. But I think the other piece of it is CMOs quit. They quit organizations where they're in that "prove it purgatory."

Brendan Hufford: Let's say you have a seasonal business. Some of my clients — they're like, "Well, I expect this linear line of leads throughout the year." And they're like, "Here's the last five years. It's all lumpy in a certain season because our buyer is in education or gifting." The gifting season is a time of the year when people buy and use software for that.

Brendan Hufford: Anyway, all that to say — if you are a CMO, send me a DM on LinkedIn. I will absolutely help you for free. I'm happy to be helpful. I'm happy to expand on any of this stuff. I'm so competitive, I just want people that care about this and are listening to podcasts about it and are in your community — I just want them to win. So whatever I can do to help, I will.

Mandy Walker: I love that. Well, thank you so much, Brendan. It's been so fun talking to you today. And I really hope that our audience takes advantage of your knowledge and reaches out. I appreciate your time today.

Brendan Hufford: Thanks, Mandy.

Mandy Walker: All right. Talk soon.

Mandy Walker: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.