If your LinkedIn feed felt a little smarter this week, that’s because our CommaCon: Social Season just wrapped, and our speakers did not hold back.

Four days. Four of the sharpest minds in executive social. And more “wait, write that down” moments than we could count. 

If you registered, you got the live sessions, the sparknotes, and the recordings each and every day. If you didn’t, never fear, because it’s all going live on site.

And if you want even more social brilliance…next week we’re hosting a big ol’ launch for anyone who’s ever asked, “Does thought leadership actually work?” Let’s just say… It’s gonna be a party. 🎉 

But more on that later.

Massive thanks to brains from LinkedIn, UTA, and more (Ty Heath, Alex Lieberman, Jenny Stojkovic, and Michael Burke) for bringing the heat. Toss them a follow and watch them practice what they preach. 

Now on to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Guys, you might not have noticed this, but…

B2B marketing is hella reactive. 😱

Okay, we know this is painfully obvious. Who among us hasn’t had a job where we had to learn a new channel overnight, scramble on a short timeline requested by another department, or ship a weird piece of content because the CEO had a dream about it?

Being an order-taker sometimes feels like part of the gig.  

But our friend Kate Pluth — a content strategy mastermind at brands like Dropbox and Qualtrics — has a more enlightened vision of what a content team can be. 

Let’s get into it. 

Here are two stats Kate can fire off at the drop of a hat: 

• Only about 5% of B2B buyers are shopping at any given time

• When they’re ready to buy, 80%+ of B2B buyers choose a brand they consider on day one of their shopping 

In other words, 95% of your TAM isn’t actively looking to buy — but when they’re ready, they’ll need to already know your name.

In theory, this means that audience development and TOFU growth should be a huge focus for your local content team.

In reality, many business get so myopically focused on: 

1. The 5%, and 

2. The “channel of the week” 

…that the content team gets turned into order-takers, executing as fast as they can on strategy they didn’t shape, to get leads they aren’t primed to win. 

And the whole marketing house comes crumbling down: 

• The content team gets stuck in execution 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 measurement work, 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.

Cool. 

Fortunately, Kate has a solution. She recently sat down with us to share some of her overrateds/underrateds of content marketing — read all about it. 

*jk beehiiv, we love you, and all your shiny newsletter, site builder, and monetization functions. Our readers can love beehiiv too — use our code STORYARB30 to get 30% off your first 3 months of beehiiv.

Ok, it’s later. 

storyarb launches our big fat Thought Leadership Report next week, and she’s a beauty. 

In it, we’ll dive into: 

• How the LinkedIn algorithm has changed, and what to do about it 

• Why CEO-led content isn’t enough

• How to sound like a person

• Data points to make you sound smart in your next team meeting 

And much more. Including some quizzes, games, and pretty colors. (The attention economy is tough.) 

Told ya it was gonna be a party. 😉

Airing our content grievances. 

We’ve heard the LinkedIn algorithm is penalizing impressions.

In fact, we’ve heard it 146 times since breakfast.

We feel you in those impression-plummeting trenches, but guys, it’s gonna be okay. We’re on it.

Our Thought Leadership Report launches next week — and in the meantime, you can read our deep dive on LinkedIn’s algo here.

So we can stop posting about impressions tanking, and go back to posting about what really matters: what getting left at the altar taught me about B2B SaaS.

Channels are going to keep reshuffling. SEO will probably die and come back to life 3 more times before Q2, and someone in your next leadership meeting will absolutely ask about TikTok again. 

Your conversation with your audience is the one thing that doesn’t have to change every time the channels do. 

And the content team is the only group in the building that sees that whole conversation at once.

So pull up a chair at the strategy table. When that other 95% starts shopping, you’ll want to be the name they already know.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… On August 18, 2013, 52-year-old Englishman Matt McKeown broke a world record when he drove a motorized shopping cart down an airfield at a whopping 70.4 mph. McKeown used a secondhand Chinook helicopter starter engine to power the superspeedy cart, breaking his previous record of 45.7 mph. 

Now if only we could get customers to convert their shopping carts that quickly…

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