✍️ marketing-as-media

The average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. 

So we’re guessing the average marketer makes about... a billion.

One of the most common being: Should I focus on demand or brand? 

Many B2B marketers feel trapped between optimizing for short-term demand generation and the longer-term business of brand building. 

Which is a tough spot to be in, because great companies do both.

Kyle Denhoff, Senior Director of Marketing at HubSpot, has found a unique solution to striking this balance: Treat your marketing function like a media company. And as HubSpot has navigated its transition to becoming a media company, he’s seen this strategy play out with great success. We dig in below.

Treating marketing as a media company is worth the mental shift. It’s the difference between informing readers about your product features, and connecting with them about their job, team, and goals.

Kyle breaks down this strategy across three areas: your team, your product, and the metrics you use to measure success. At the team level, this means hiring for media skills. Think beat reporters, video journalists, newsletter editors. 

There’s a reason HubSpot’s YouTube producers come from places like Business Insider, Conde Nast, and Vox (versus other B2B SaaS cos).  

At the product level, this means moving away from one-off campaigns and towards building an always-on media engine that compounds over time. 

The oft-cited 95/5 rule of marketing tells us at any given moment, 95% of your audience isn’t yet ready to buy. So why would you only make content focused on the benefits of buying your solution? 

We all love the immediate wins…until they’re in the rearview mirror, and the long-term wins are still nowhere in sight. That’s why Kyle’s team reports on both brand building and demand gen metrics. 

Do your future self a favor. Track the unsexy, slogging, long-term metrics along with the quick wins.

Learn to set up your own mini media empire in our latest and greatest strategic playbook—podcast optional. (But if you do launch one, we’ll subscribe.)

200 marketing leaders walk into a room: When everything is changing, the smartest move is to focus on what doesn’t. Last week our VP of Content, Stewart Hillhouse, joined 200 other marketing leaders at Exit Five’s Drive conference.

The big themes of our industry that stood out:

• AI adoption, but disillusionment: there has been an impressive adoption of AI at all levels since last year’s conference. But also questions floating about the fallacy of AI productivity. Is AI actually making our work better? Or just giving us the sense of accomplishing things quickly (but not always well).

• Know your NRR: your net-revenue retention is a key financial metric that will answer whether you are marketing the business, or in the business of marketing. Very important distinction if you want to have a seat at the leadership table.

• The mindset shift from roles to tasks: headcount growth is stunted across the board. This means teams are outsourcing capacity by using agencies, contractors, and now AI workflows. The job of a marketing leader today is less about building a perfect team structure and more about being a portfolio manager to execute on their vision.

Campaigns that got us talking: Instead of sending cold emails, Delve’s Co-founder sent out doormats. Obviously. It cost $6K and generated $500K.

AI hacks you pretend to already know: HubSpot just dropped their definitive guide to “loop marketing,” where marketers leverage AI to better amplify their messaging, speak to specific audiences, and iterate in real time.

Stuff that made us scroll back up: If you’ve ever looked at a company homepage and thought, “I have no idea what they do,” you’re not alone. Here’s a great mad libs framework from Fletch about how to explain your product in one sentence.

ICYMI: We shared the 30-minute interview template we use to get to the heart of what our audience really wants to know about. Content planning? The Audience-Content-Offer Match framework can help.

Your marketing team just got budget for one major initiative. Where are you putting your cash? Vote here. 

• Brand building, the long game

• Demand gen for leads ASAP

• Both—building dual flywheels

• Whatever the CEO wants this Q

A while back, we asked you an extremely important ad campaign question—and the results are in. (Also, clearly the insurance industry is doing something right.)

Bringing lessons from media brands into your marketing department is not just about production value. It’s an exercise in thinking about what entertains your audience—and what content truly builds return watchers. (And as a bonus, it’s a great excuse for billing the HBO+ subscription to your corporate card.) 

See y’all next time.

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing… A British workplace mental health platform found that 46% of Gen Z would be “severed” if they could.

And 100% of them are banking on being the outie.