Shiny Objects, Big Promises, and the Content Engine You Actually Need

Why Great Content Strategies Fail Without Buy-In, Budget, and the Right Metrics

Everyone says they want great content. Few are willing to fund it like they mean it.
 In this episode of Chocolate Pill, we tackle the messy reality of building a content engine that actually drives growth, and why leadership plays a bigger role than most think.

Your hosts Erin, Chris, and Sandi unpack why shiny objects derail content teams, why “act like a media company” is useless advice if you don’t get a media company budget, and how to sell the value of content across your organization (hint: metrics matter, and so does product marketing).

In this episode:
 ✅ The thread of content through your entire organization
 ✅ Why content engines stall without leadership dedication
 ✅ The 7-11-4 rule and how modern metrics make content’s impact more visible
 ✅ How top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel content demand different mindsets
 ✅ The role of product marketing in helping leadership see content value
✅ Why most companies do “test and learn” but lack the patience to build content maturity

Quote of the episode:
 "Content is the connective tissue across your entire GTM motion. If leadership isn’t committed, you’ll end up with a bunch of random assets and no engine."

Meet your hosts:
 🎤 Sandi Green: Product marketing and GTM expert. Seven M&A deals, three exits, Fortune 100 + startup experience, and trusted advisor to Founders and CMOs.
 🎤 Chris: Startup veteran and first-GTM-builder. Deep experience with growth marketing, demand gen, budgeting, and headcount planning.
 🎤 Erin: Content strategy queen. Founding Content Strategist at multiple companies, Webby Award Honoree, and master of helping brands tell stronger stories.

Follow us:
👉 Miracle Max Marketing
👉 Connect on LinkedIn: Sandi, Chris, Erin

If this episode made you nod, laugh, or rethink your last campaign, subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll keep the chocolate and the marketing truth bombs coming.

#Marketing #ContentMarketing #StartupMarketing #B2BMarketing #Leadership #GTM #ProductMarketing #ContentStrategy #Podcast

Transcript

Unknown: 0:13

It really is the best I laugh every time, like, okay, who's gonna answer it? This time me or Sandy? Oh, I started to answer, and then I was like, Backspace, Backspace. You have not had your coffee. Chris does not need the smoke. Just tell the man what time and what the topic is. You do not need you're supposed to laugh with me, not at remember exactly? Yeah, exactly. It's our company value. We laugh with you always, even if you think we're laughing at you or laughing, yeah, yeah. So hey, Chris, what's the topic today? What are we doing right now? Selling content to your CEO. Bravo. Well done, friend. Wow. I pulled that one out. I don't know know how he did that. He's like, Oh. Gonna use the word scintillating. Podcast show, are we scintillating? We might be scintillating. You guys. What kind of podcast is this? Today's topic is one that's near and dear to my heart, and I think to all of our hearts, is the subject of content and how to sell content marketing to your CEO. Raise your hand if you've ever had a conversation about content marketing with your CEO. I think we all yes and so, yeah. So I would love to kind of go around many kind of round table here, round robin. And let's talk about an idea doesn't even have to be content related, that you've had to sell internally. I'll go first. It is content related. My idea that I actually try to sell from organization to organization is that, and you guys have heard it ad nauseam from me, is that content should be a thread throughout the organization and not a little silo in marketing. And many organizations that I work with when I get in there, that's exactly how they have it set up, like content is kind of over here, instead of content kind of having even a dotted line into kind of each area of the business, you know, content should kind of know what's going on, how people are talking about things, the messaging that they're using, the voice and tone, so that everybody's in lockstep moving forward. Rarely do I find that to be the case when I first, kind of like, embark into an organization. Sandy, do you want to share anything that you've had to sell internally? So many Oh yeah, yeah. Fun story. Fun. Fun story. Many years ago, had a CEO read an article, as they do over the weekend, come busting through the door Monday morning and say, you guys, to the marketing team, y'all should be acting like a media company. We have to act like a media company that's the future. Contents the future. And at the time, I actually owned content and product marketing, so it's music to my ears. I thought, sweet. I followed right behind him, and I said, Hey, so can I do my explainer video? And the way that man pivoted so fast, he basically said, just go get so and so and so and so. From engineering, they're really good with cameras. They can record an explainer video. And that's when my heart grew, shrank three sizes that day, because you can be a media company, but you can't be a media company when you don't have the money and you don't want to invest. I call it shiny object syndrome. And every early CEO, early founder, has it. And I think we've all experienced that, right? It's, it's what is the competitor doing that that had a couple likes on social media, and that's the piece of content that you go after, or the type of content that you create. And I think it's just really indicative of not doing the pre work, which I'm sure we'll get into in this conversation. But, and it's like, why it happens all the time? I feel like, you know, we're always on offense instead of our defense, so and so. Why always with content like and why is it so hard to kind of sell? Why do we have to sell content in the first place? And why is it so hard when talking to CEOs and those in you know, sort of like senior senior leadership, there's a few things that I've come across because I think a lot of times, at least back in the day, when you talked about content, you didn't, you talked about it in more of a creative sense and less in a financial or numeric sense. And so when you talk about content, when you do chat with those in senior executive leadership. So it's a must to tie it back to the numbers. And I think most people don't do that, at least at first. They kind of talk about this, like vision and how to align with the brand, which is great, but as we all know, CEOs senior leadership, they think in numbers. They think in in the bottom line, right? So it's all about revenue and the ROI and and also, a lot of times with content, when you're educating senior leadership, it is like content is a long game. There are some like short term wins and things you can do quickly, low hanging fruit. But primarily, content is kind of like it's a marathon, not a sprint. Do you guys agree like those are kind of the things that trip senior leadership up when, when wanting to invest in content? Yeah, I think so. I think what I found with content and actually just with marketing, just more broadly, lots of founders don't really understand marketing at its core. It's sort of the dark arts to them. So content, if marketing overall, is the dark arts. Content is like, you know, a poison, you know, it's like a it's like a secret poison, right? It's just something that they don't really get, or they only associate with one thing, I believe when you say content, still, everyone's brain thinks blog, right? And that's just not the case. And so I think that that's, that's one of the challenges, is just an overall lack of understanding is as to what it what it is, and what it can actually mean to the organization. And then I think the other thing is that, and I know, Chris, you can say a lot about this, if you think about it from a demand gen perspective, positioning it around the top middle and the bottom of the funnel, which is really just the buyer journey. A lot of times, I think that's when you can make a better connection to financial impact, to the importance of it, the strategic importance, and just the various types of content that you need in order to support your overall demand gen goals. But Chris, I'd love to hear about what you think about that. Yeah, I think you brought out a couple important things there. I think, from my experience, they do go after again, like I said, the shiny object. But the interesting part is, is that content isn't like that, like you have to be able to create some consistency before you start to see traction. Most founders are of the mindset in in today's world, it's test to learn, test to learn, iterate, iterate, iterate. But yet there's, there's often not enough patience to be able to to fully test and to totally build that, building out a good marketing or a good marketing content marketing engine takes time, and it takes broader skill sets than most marketing teams have, and so they're typically not funded, and they're not backed in a way that allows for that, that integrated, what I would call integrated marketing horsepower to be able to get it done right? So when you talked about top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, I know very few startups that have been able to do that right, that have been able to say, top of funnel wise, hey, our vision and our message in the marketplace is solid. That's what you have to have to do. Top good type of funnel. If you don't have that, you're dead in the water on a lot of that type of content, right? If you, if you don't have good or access to good subject matter experts and are willing to put the time in, then you're dead in the water content campaigns typically what, what happens is that they ask you to do something within a middle of funnel context, thought leadership context, but then you don't consistently get the access to to people that that have that expertise to be able to create really good content, right? And then the bottom of funnel, if you don't have a mature product launch process, oh, or you don't have a good you know, wherever it is on the bottom of the funnel, there's many different, you know, bottom of funnel, type of campaigns that you can run that rely on content. You don't have a good engine there. You don't have a good relationship internally. Those are all dead. So it's interesting that all three of those areas take a different methodology and a different approach to be able to create content consistently. Right? A lot of a lot of organizations don't see the breadth of the impact that content can make, right? And so, because I've been at places where they I've had places where it's been great, and, like, sales is actually hunting me down, you know, and hunting, you know, content down. And it's like, when is this next piece coming out, or we need a piece of this on this topic, or when is our annual, you know, report coming out, like our gated report, like, you know, that kind of stuff, right? And then I've worked with with the organizations where there's a disconnect and content might. Created, but it's just sitting there, right? And they're not taking a full advantage of it. They're not taking advantage of the nurture power it has, the demand gen power it has at all. And it's just kind of like, it's like this tool that's not being used effectively. And I think that, like some like, they just assume, okay, content is being created, just so like, when people get to our site, they look, we have some things for you to read, you know, but they're not proactively leveraging the content to to gain the traction, to get people to the to the website, to increase that, know, like and trust factor, you know, so that when people do, like, sales can be armed with the content to to nurture those conversations customer success, you know, can? I mean, I've had times when renewals are, are touch and go until, you know, they, they kind of sweeten the pot with some content with a like, okay, great. No, you guys get it, you know. You know that can happen, whether or not it's on the candidate level of someone joining a company, a prospect level from sales or kind of renewal with customer success, so many levels of the of the ladder as well. And so they're just not to and if they don't take advantage of it, and they're not going to know the power that content can have, and that can have throughout the bottom line as well. We can talk about metrics that kind of matter to a CEO. So that's tough too, because content has sort of been kind of mushy, you know. And so sometimes it's hard to tie a line between content is doing and how the business is doing, right? So it almost seems like it's it's not. It's almost like a cost center rather than actually helping, helping the business. And so it wasn't until recently that, you know, we've discovered some tools that actually tie, you know, specific pieces of content that you can actually see, okay, they were involved in these opportunities. Or, you know, the average visitor to a site has consumed X many pieces of content. So you have this data that you can actually create pretty strong and solid dashboards that content teams can now, you know, submit to their executive leadership team of like not only is can you see the volume of content that we're creating, but now you can see how it's been involved in X amount of revenue for X amount of deals and that sort of thing, which I think is pretty huge. So that's another thing. It's like tying the content to the metrics that the CEO, or whomever that the senior exec that you need to present to really cares about, what's their motivator? You know? Yeah, it used to be that that type of measurement was really tough to get at, right? I remember days at Gosh, at Cisco, and we paid outrageous sums of money to be able to track these types of things, and it just wasn't. In fact, I work with the vendors to be able to create custom attribution for this type of stuff out of money. But it's not the same anymore. I think there's tools out there, off the shelf, tools that you can use to be able to get at that accurately. You know, we found stuff at, you know, Aaron and I do work. We've worked together, I think, a lot in this area, where it's really fascinating how many touches it actually takes to get someone to engage with their company. It really is astounding, especially in the in the software world, right? Like we know Google's that I think I mentioned this last time, last podcast, but the 711, four rule, right? Which is, it's an old rule research that Google had done about, Hey, someone has to consume seven hours of content right across 11 touch points across four different platforms to be able to engage with you. The shocking thing is, in what I found in, especially in software startups, that's closer to 30 plus. So if you don't have, if you really don't have the content engine right in place to be able to enable that, then your competitors will right if they've gotten more mature in that area. And can I go back with just one second to a previous thought? Yeah, okay, so I think it was really I do think it's on the leaders. I think it's on leaders to be able to facilitate good content production and to enable your team to have a voice in the industry. So here's what, here's what I mean by that. I think middle of funnel, it's about the. In creating this space for your team to work cross functionally more effectively, and to have it prioritized, and to be able to fund it, to get the vendor help to create Polish content. That's what happens mid flow, top of funnel. It's entirely different story. I mean, it's, I believe it's on leadership, to to go out and to be able to articulate the vision and the value of what they're doing, and not just the value on a on a corporate level, right, but on a personal level, to people. So here's the shortcut that most founders take. They go throughout and they they sell directly. They through sweat and tears, and, you know, blood, sweat, tears, all of that. They go and they sell to people. They call, they call, they call, they understand intrinsically what the value is and what the pain is. But what happens is, further down the line, about a year down line, once you hit about a million in revenue, you're trying to hand off that sales motion to a sales team, is you've forgotten all that. And so what happens is, it comes across as feature functionality, and then when the marketing team tries to replicate that message of feature functionality, it doesn't work because they don't have the relationships in place. You shortcut all that. You basically said, Okay, marketing team, go out and create content that talks about our wonderful, wonderful features, and that's going to connect with people. Well, you've forgotten that you haven't already been in a conversation with people. You haven't talked to them yet. You haven't figured out their pain yet. You haven't even figured out what the team's pain is yet. And you definitely don't, don't know what a personal you know, our person is going through in terms of their pain. So you've short coded all that, and you just put your marketing team in a really, really bad spot. So there are frameworks and stuff that you should be using, I think, as a leader, to enable your marketing team, whatever part to Sandy Point, I think whatever part of the funnel that you're in, yeah, going, going from chasing down your audience and spending a lot of time doing things like expert, you know, interviews and user interviews, and all of the all of that works product marketing work. So you just hit me in my heart when you said, you know, the shortcut comes when, when you when you just cut to features and benefits. Because a lot of times founders sort of forget that, in the in the handoff, in the in the transition. I think one of the great opportunities that content has to partner with product marketing. Is the way that product marketing thinks about the person, or should think about the person is we think about the whole person, right? This whole persona, and they're the jobs that they have to do over the course of the day. While your solutions may only address a very small fraction of them, they do have other other problems, like we have that research so we know who your who your audience is, right? It's done well, you know who your audience is. You know what their challenges are. And if you're thinking about top of funnel content, specifically, just trying to get their attention and just trying to introduce your audience, to your brand, to your to your point of view. What better way than to approach them based on their challenges, based on their on their you know, on their business challenges, on their state, in the company, in terms of their own stature, like there's just lots of things that creative, things that you can do from a content perspective that really helps your audience say, you get me, I should keep an eye on you guys. Those, to me, are some of the best opportunities that you have top of funnel, where it's not even about the product. It's about just saying, Hey, I see you. Because the thing that I think more companies are going to run up against, you know, start in 2025 and beyond, is it's not just a competition for market share. It's not really a competition for dollars. It's really not even a competition for, you know, for for for mindshare. It's, it's a competition for attention. And so what you need to do at the very top of the funnel is make yourself stand out, and you've got myriad ways to do that when you're creative, when it comes to content. So it's not just about, you know, writing a couple of vlogs or doing a few social posts and calling it good. That's just not going to cut it. What it's really about is trying to relate to your audience on a more personal level, build that relationship. And then, to Chris's point, across the 711, four, they will remember you. They will come back to you. So I think, from contents perspective. If, if, if you're, if you're out there and you're a content person, and you feel like you're an island of one, and you happen to have a product marketing person on your team, please go link arms and figure out what are their stories you can put in into market. They should your PMM, if they're good, they should understand the importance of that and the value of that, because it's, it's research that they have already done. Same with your product managers, I think, to Chris's point, when you were talking about the middle of funnel content and just getting access to those, those resources you know, in in house, in order to create good content in house product managers, if you are sick and tired of doing one off. Calls and one off enablement, one off pieces and one off, you know, comparisons, when your content marketer knocks on your door, please, please answer like that's what they want to do. They want to create content so that you can, you can do a random of sorts once, and then they can take that content and and and use it throughout the journey, so that the story that you're trying to get there, get out there, reaches right audience at the right time, and hopefully what's a creative content being a thread. So I would say to all the all the content people out there, whether you're a team of one or more, please do start to shift your thinking. If you haven't already that content is an ecosystem that you're building out, right? So, and it is, I think, contents responsibility to get out there and and link arms with the product managers, with the product marketing managers, with your events manager, you know, reach out to sales, right? And it's like, you can be the change, right? You can be the one that, like, Okay, guys, we're all going to, you know, weekly, bi weekly, or whatever, you know, meet up and like, Okay, what is everybody seeing? What in the and also, like, what, what is coming up on the roadmap for product? What event are we having? And have those all be in lockstep too many times I see it's this disparate, you know, crazy calendar, if there is a calendar, so you're lucky actually there if you even have a calendar, but if you do a calendar that it's kind of all over the place, like the topic of a webinar has nothing to do with the product launch that's about to happen, that has nothing to do with what sales is hearing in the field, that's really resonating with prospects, right? And so it's like tying those all together. And I feel like content is the person to do that, and the content should always have the 30,000 foot view of what is going on in the organization, who is saying what? And then, you know the holes, right? So, you know, if the CEO comes to you and he's he or she is like, hey, you know, what do we have under X? Like we need to support X effort. You should know we're good. We have this, this and this. We have this event coming up, we have this blog post, we have this whatever, and then, and then, if there is a hole, you also know that too, and you know exactly how to fill it and who to work with. So it's kind of like seeing, I think it's, it's, it's a couple of things that we've gone over in this conversation, it's like knowing what resonates, what motivates the leader that you need the approval from, most likely it's going to be metrics, performance and how impacts revenue, and then also getting buy in and kind of like stakeholders from around the company, so that content is seen as more of a has more of a seat at the table, and kind of bringing all these efforts together so they're all aligned and moving forward in lockstep. Is there anything on this that you guys want to share before we wrap it up? I I'm scared for people that are hearing this, just because you hit on something, I think, which is really interesting, getting approval that just like was like a trigger to me. I don't know why. Yeah, it's very triggering, as my kids say. I think the reason is, is because she never, I don't, I don't know if you should ever be ideally in that position, right? Like there should already, and you've hit on this a little bit, is that organizations that they grow become more siloed, right? And so you find yourself in a bureaucracy where you're actually having to get that approval and things like that. And things like that, where is, if it not as if, if you were back, what's happening with our product, what's happening with the industry? How do we want to position ourselves, thought, leadership wise, if you knew all of those things, and you had a story arc, or you had a progression of what you thought those should be over time, you should be creating themes right within your within your marketing team and within your executive team and your sales team cross functionally to be able to say, Yeah, this is what we're going to talk about now. And then those approvals go away, and you start to stop, you stop taking one off requests, and you start focusing around what matters right now. And I think I would say 90% plus of teams cannot get there. They just, they just can't. So again, I think it has to do with with leadership. I think you have to enable your marketing team, and your sales team, your CS team, all your go to market team, to really talk, right? And to really get together and have a very clear vision and a direction. If you do, if all of those things come together, then, then guess what? Then you're all on the same page, and it's only going to get harder as you grow. It doesn't. Get easier. It gets harder. Yeah, and sadly, I know we've been talking a lot about startups, right early stage companies, when there's a loan market or a loan content marketer, but this, this problem doesn't go away to Christmas point as you, as you grow, if, if nothing else, it actually grows. The problem actually gets, gets bigger. It sort of mushrooms. So I think the challenge I would I would leave with, with content marketers out there, is, think about what stories you want to tell this year. Take that question to your product marketing person, to your product manager, what stories are we telling this year? So rather than saying what campaigns, what stories are we telling this year? Who do we need to really get to, and if it's a, if it's a, if it's a persona, or, you know, just a different kind of segment or audience that you're maybe not familiar with, that's your opportunity to really understand them. Because what you can do with that is say, okay, so if I know what stories we want to tell, I can also come back and think about who the message on, who this message needs to reach, and what's the best avenue to reach them. So may not just be ads or email or social posts, maybe it's video, maybe it's some other kind of creative series. Maybe it's a maybe it's a linking of a few things to Aaron's point that that are already happening. But if you can sort of change the language around it and really think about what stories we want to tell this year, I think what, what, what should happen is it should get you to sort of think, go further up the funnel mentally and start at the top. And I think, I think the more that you can do that, sort of the easier it gets to not only make the case, but also be the person on the team that knits together all these disparate campaigns that are happening. Because there's always campaigns running, whether you're small or large, there's always a bunch of stuff happening. Is it cohesive? Is it measurable? Does it tell a story? Does it help with the buyer journey? Does it enable the teams that you need it to make? Does it make a difference to your audience? All those questions are really, really hard questions, but there are things that you need to think about and challenge your challenge routine to do better with as you're planning the year. And I would just say, just to clarify, the way that leaders, I think I said this a couple times, the way that leadership gives gets to that vision, that story, is through product marketing, right? Like, if you have strong product marketing, they help you get there. You don't have the strong product marketing, look for something, yep, get some help. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a problem. And I know it's, it's, it's actually a widespread, a widespread one, and that's big on product marketers. But since I am a product marketer, I kind of will if you're in an organization where product marketing is only focused on sales enablement, or they're only focused on product launches, or they're only focused on competitive Intel, your chat, my challenge to you is kick their chairs and tell them that there's, there's more on their plate. There's more things that they need to do. Hopefully they'll see it as a relief from whatever it is they're doing. But yeah, they're, they are the, they are the the team that should be the key to success in terms of selling the story, getting to the right, getting to the right buyer, and just making sort of the whole customer so well we you guys, we love talking about this stuff. So we could talk all day about it honestly. But the easiest, probably way to kind of chat with us about it is to, like, find us on LinkedIn, send us, you know, some some messages, if you're like, we would love, actually, to hear from you as well. Like your stories of what you know you've gone through, your experiences, and also any questions around you know what we've spoken about, or like, Okay, well, that's great, but I have this issue. So how do I put that into practice? Or I try that, and this is my experience. You know what? What next step should I take? We're so happy to help and support as you go go along, because, as Sandy said, it doesn't go away. Whether or not you're a smaller startup or your scale you're scaling up, or even enterprise. So So we're here to help. So thanks for tuning in, and we're excited to share some insights in our next episode coming up. I'm.