Content Amplified

The statistical truth of an overnight success is eight to twelve years. In this episode of Content Amplified, Bill Harper, founder of BrandBossHQ and a 35-year veteran of helping businesses stand apart, breaks down why brands like Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death only look like they exploded out of nowhere. Bill's core argument: people don't buy the best products, they buy the products...

Translation is getting the words right. Localization is making the culture fit. In this episode of Content Amplified, Lina Tonk, three-time SaaS CMO and current CMO at Smartling, breaks down why "just translate the website" is the mistake almost every team makes when expanding globally. Lina shares the moment a customer presentation in EMEA lost her completely because the deck used US sp...

The election year emptied out Washington DC, so Meredith Goldberg ran the hotel's beagle for president. In this episode of Content Amplified, Meredith, Regional Director of Marketing for the East Coast at Lore Group, explains how guest experience became her marketing discipline and how she finds cultural moments that actually land. She walks through building guest personas out of booking data...

Most social media managers never build the community they run. They inherit it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Van Raynor, Director of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at Americares, walks through what to do in the first weeks after you take over a page someone else built. He starts with the snapshot: average reach, the campaigns your predecessor ran, growth rate, attrition rate, and w...

Most teams use AI to do the same work faster, which Nav compares to building a faster photocopier. In this episode of Content Amplified, Navneet Singh, Chief Marketing Officer at Eightfold AI, explains what happens when you aim AI at outcomes that were never possible in the first place. Nav walks through Mira, Eightfold's marketing intelligence and response architect: an agent that takes an I...

Your strategy document says one thing. Your budget says what you actually believe. In this episode of Content Amplified, Heidi Wurpel, Head of Marketing at Emburse, shares how she audited every marketing dollar by backing in from bookings all the way to budget, a journey she frames as "there and back again" in a nod to The Hobbit. Heidi walks through building a taxonomy that slices spend...

Being the first marketing hire at a company means the strategy, the budget, and the doing all land on you at once. In this episode of Content Amplified, Bronwyn Pope, Vice President of Marketing & Communications at St. Croix Hospice, shares what she learned doing it twice: first at Special Olympics Minnesota about 20 years ago, then at St. Croix Hospice, where she joined as the first marcomm h...

Most content gets measured by whether it was consumed. Growth content gets measured by what happens next. In this episode of Content Amplified, Erin McReynolds, Vice President of Marketing at Fremont Bank, breaks down the difference between volume content (did they download the PDF?) and growth content (what did they do after?), then walks through her four pillars for making content matter to the...

A product with nothing but perfect reviews converts at about the same rate as one averaging 3.25 stars. In this episode of Content Amplified, Todd Caponi, author of The Transparency Sale and former CRO of PowerReviews, explains the research behind that number and what it means for how you market and sell. Todd walks through the study his team ran with Northwestern University: roughly 96% of buyers...

A brochure anyone can read out loud is not a sales asset, it is a crutch. In this episode of Content Amplified, Jason Gwilliam returns to explain why the conversation closes the deal and content exists to back it up. Jason walks through the "scrub sink story," the 30 seconds outside an operating room where a rep has to land three points and then leave something behind. He explains the di...

AI can produce a thousand blog posts. It cannot tell you what you believe. In this episode of Content Amplified, Rafael Moiseev, CMO at Customertimes and principal of the fractional CMO consultancy Apex Strata, explains how his team kept scaling content after losing their content manager, and why intention matters more than volume. Rafael breaks down "institutional memory," the practice...

Bruce Springsteen played years of small clubs to small audiences before he became the superstar AI can now rip off. In this episode of Content Amplified, Wesley Quock, who leads the brand experience team at ExtraHop, traces the three disruptions that reshaped creative work across his 30-year career: the move to digital, social media plus smartphones, and now AI. He explains how each one accelerate...

Marketing teams do not fall into the execution trap because they are bad at their jobs. They fall in because they are so good at executing that every request lands on their desk. In this episode of Content Amplified, Melissa Geertz, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Gray, explains the execution trap: why most organizations only tap a fraction of marketing's expertise, and what it takes to...

Readers can smell AI writing in one line, and once they do, they never give the content a second chance. In this episode of Content Amplified, Lexi Croisdale, Director of Global Content at Varonis, maps out where content teams should sit on the spectrum between fully automated production and fully human writing. Lexi explains why the sniff test is really an authenticity test, why marketers are now...

What happens when a technical B2B SaaS company decides it doesn't need a twelve person marketing team? In this episode of Content Amplified, Jerome Stewart, a marketing leader who has spent the past decade building AI powered B2B SaaS brands in the analytics and observability space, explains how he helped shrink one marketing org from twelve people to four without breaking the work. Jerome wa...

Marketing careers rarely move in a straight line, and Sayo Martin thinks that's the whole point. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sayo, a former spoken word poet turned hyper growth marketing leader, walks through how she went from an MFA in poetry to running B2B marketing across tech, entertainment, and publishing, and why she now calls herself a cross industry marketer instead of a spe...

When Condado Tacos doubled in size in four years, guests started confusing the taco chain for a furniture company. In this episode of Content Amplified, Evan Pardue, Director of Brand and CX at Condado Tacos, breaks down the 18-month brand refresh that fixed it, and why he refuses to call it a rebrand. Evan explains why brand is a business function, not a marketing function, how the team built bra...

Storytelling has become the most overused word in marketing, and Emma Lieberman thinks that's exactly the problem. In this episode of Content Amplified, Emma, Director of Copy and Content at Impact Networking, argues that storytelling isn't a strategy to optimize, it's a craft, and treating it like a KPI is why so many brand stories fall flat. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, Em...

Turn on multi-factor authentication and you will avoid the vast majority of the attacks that quietly drain business bank accounts. That is one of the blunt, practical lessons cybersecurity veteran Jeffrey Bernstein brings to this episode of Content Amplified, recorded as marketers everywhere start building their own AI tools without a security team behind them. Jeffrey has spent 25 years in high-t...

Handing your team an AI tool and telling them to go figure it out fails for nine out of ten people. In this episode of Content Amplified, Mark Boothe, CMO at Domo, explains how he gets marketers to two, three, even five times their impact: a dedicated AI enablement hire on both the marketing and account development teams, role-specific toolkits (this is what an email marketer uses, this is what th...

Everyone in marketing has been told to do more with AI, but almost nobody is asking what that volume actually costs. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karen Cooper, Director of Marketing for the content experience team at Wolters Kluwer Health, shares what she is learning from the LinkedIn polls she is running ahead of her talk at B2B Ignite. The results surprised her: when teams are pushed to...

The most expensive thing you can make in marketing is an assumption. In this episode of Content Amplified, Vanessa Mbonu, Vice President of Marketing at the NAACP, explains what changes when a team stops treating content as output (checking the box on this week's blog post, flyer, or TikTok) and starts treating it as infrastructure: a strategic system the whole organization feeds, from progra...

Anything you say in a sales call either adds or detracts. It's signal or noise, and buyers don't want noise.  In this episode of Content to Close, Tim Schwedes, who leads enablement and training for sales engineers at Egnyte, explains how to use content to build a simple mental model in a prospect's head. He hates slides used as a crutch and prefers a few bullets or a single diagram...

Most companies are "sprinkling AI" onto old processes when the real wins come from throwing the process in the garbage and rebuilding it.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Paul Schmidt, VP of AI and Innovation at SmartBug Media, an elite HubSpot agency partner, maps the AI adoption bell curve he sees across the thousand-plus companies SmartBug has worked with: early adopters who fig...

If AI falls short in your writing, Clint Horvath says the problem is you: ChatGPT is a mirror, and it can only reflect a story you already know A to Z.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Clint, a post-production veteran turned screenwriter with three films on Amazon Prime, breaks down how he uses AI as a tool within storytelling rather than a replacement. He explains how he fed roughly 50 of h...