Content Amplified

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...

In B2B, people buy from people, even when it's a corporation selling through a corporation to another corporation. In this episode of Content Amplified, Richard Hutton, Associate Vice President of Demand Generation at Sharp, explains how his team shifted from slick, highly produced product content to human-led stories, and why engagement went up when they did. Richard shares the standout exam...

Most enablement teams can tell you how many people sat through a course, but not whether any of it moved the business.  In this special Content to Close episode, Erika Robertson, Director of Enablement at Citrix, walks through how she proves enablement is worth the budget by starting with the end in mind. Erika is certified through the ROI Institute and uses the Phillips ROI methodology from Jack...

Buyers trust a peer who has been there over a brand on a soapbox.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Scott Hild, who leads brand and marketing at Propeller, a management consulting firm that helps companies through transformation, breaks down what he calls the visible expert strategy: telling the company's story from its people's point of view instead of from the brand. Scott explain...

Your content team might be having its best quarter ever, and the dashboard will tell you nothing happened.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Tony Pataky, Director of SEO at Procore, explains why measuring your brand's visibility inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI is fundamentally noisy, and what to track instead. He walks through a SparkToro study from Rand Fishkin that ran ro...

For 25 years the game was rank on Google, but no one scrolls past the AI overview anymore.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Jeramy Gordon, VP of Marketing at a global background screening company and a 14-year marketer who started in newspaper journalism, breaks down the shift from SEO to GEO and AIO. Jeramy explains the move from fighting for position to fighting for inclusion: roughly 40%...

In a relationship-driven niche like healthcare IT, the deal happens in the room, not the inbox. In this episode of Content Amplified, Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT, explains why a little over 60% of his budget goes to events and how he stretches each one across his whole content engine. Larry walks through his year at the two biggest healthcare IT shows, Vive and H...

The branded voice is losing its grip, and the people inside your company are about to replace it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Nicole Gates, VP of Global Growth at Varonis, makes the case that user-generated content is where B2B marketing is headed. She explains why what works in B2C tends to land in B2B two to three years later, and why AI is accelerating the shift by making buyers more...

A brand's advertising is its identity showing up in public, and it tells you what that brand is about to do next. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karisa Schroeder, who works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar, explains how to use ad intelligence as a window into what brands are actually doing rather than just saying. Karisa walks through reading a competitor's next move from their creat...

AI is great at writing drafts, pulling data, and generating variations, but marketing has never really been about that kind of output. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sarah Balli, an external communications specialist who also does content creation, influencer marketing, and streams on Twitch, makes the case for keeping the human element in marketing during the AI era. Sarah explains why com...

Sales sits on the frontier, and they cut all of our paychecks, which is not provocative, it is just math.  That is the line Andrey Zevakhin uses to make a bigger point: enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training, it is a company-wide responsibility and a culture. In this episode of Content Amplified, Andrey, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave, exp...

Most content teams treat a finished report as a checkbox, when it should be the starting batter.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Pat McParland, VP of Marketing at MetricStream, makes the case for getting back to basics and making every asset work harder. She walks through the ABCDE framework she learned at a former company (Audience, Behavior, Content, Design, Evaluation) and why so many te...

Someone gets in a car accident, Googles a lawyer, and lands on a site that reads like a resume. They are already gone.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Jonathan Murray, Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, explains why trust-based content is winning right now and why polished, AI-perfect content is starting to repel the people it is meant to attract. Jonathan unpacks his core idea...

Most marketers believe they have a great story that nobody is hearing, but the real problem is complexity.  In this episode of Content Amplified, Dory Ellis Garfinkle, Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, makes the case that the way to break through a world of a million messages is to get radically clear on who you are. She frames the marketer's whole job as one question: how do you make s...

If you don't enforce a standard, you don't have a standard, you have a suggestion. In this episode of Content to Close, Hoffen Guo, who has sold into aircraft engine giants, run enterprise learning partnerships at Udemy, and now leads 100% cold-calling teams selling to SMB restaurant owners, lays out her "execution floor" approach to sales leadership. Hoffen explains why activi...

Producing more content faster is not the same as producing content that matters. In this episode of Content Amplified, Adam Haskew, Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, makes the case that AI accelerates your outputs but does nothing for your strategy, and that the gap between the two is where "AI slop" gets made. Adam argues the fix is the unglamorous, old-school stuff most...

Most teams treat an event as a one-time moment, measure success by attendance, then move on to planning the next one. In this episode of Content Amplified, Adrienne Collins, who leads the events team at a SaaS company and has spent 13 years in the event space, explains how to turn a single event into months of content that actually drives pipeline. She breaks down the before, during, and after of...

Most employee advocacy programs fail because they turn employees into parrots, repeating the same product message over and over until no one wants to share anything. In this episode of Content Amplified, Matt Mullan, Director of Social Media at NinjaOne, explains how to fix that by positioning employees as thought leaders instead of megaphones. Matt walks through giving people industry content the...

Most sales teams have more enablement material than ever and reps who still freeze on live calls.  In this episode of Content to Close, Gus Garza, an enablement leader at Yext, explains why the gap between training and revenue readiness comes down to one thing: reps. Gus walks through how he uses Gong calls to diagnose where sellers are actually tripping up, why prescriptive bite-sized learning be...

Stop cranking stuff out.  That is the first move John Henkel wants every product marketer to make before they touch another asset. In this episode of Content Amplified, John, who leads product marketing for the AV segment at Netgear, shares how he keeps content tied to a real user and a real purpose instead of a list of specs. John walks through where engineering-led companies drift away from the...

Most content doesn't fall apart at the idea stage. It falls apart in the handoff. In this episode of Content Amplified, Leo Kosir, a Chicago-based creative leader with 20-plus years across boutique design firms, full-service ad agencies, pharma, and in-house teams for national retail, lifestyle, and web hosting brands, unpacks what he calls 360 content. Leo explains why directors, editors, st...

For twenty years, marketers chased lowest-common-denominator search traffic by repackaging the same information everyone else was publishing. AI just made that playbook worthless. In this episode of Content Amplified, Stacy Shelley, a 20-year B2B cybersecurity marketing veteran who has led marketing at startups that scaled to hundreds of millions in ARR, explains what marketers should be doing ins...

The old gated-ebook playbook stopped working around 2018, and slapping AI on top of it isn't going to bring it back. In this episode of Content to Close, Matt Zelasko, founder of growth agency Radish and self-described "Tom DeLonge of RevOps," makes the case that most teams are using AI to do the same broken things faster, then blaming AI for the falling engagement that was already...