Over the past couple of years, I’ve become increasingly annoying vocal about the role of content in a B2B SaaS organization.
My argument is essentially this: content’s role is not support, but strategy. It’s not Marketer #4; it’s Meryl Streep. And as such, content marketers deserve a seat at the table.
Not everyone agrees with me. I’ve had feedback from people I deeply respect that have pushed back on this idea. You’re putting content on a pedestal, someone told me. What you’re describing isn’t content — it’s marketing leadership.
But… what if it’s both?
So today I want to dive a little deeper into content’s path to marketing leadership — why it’s typically untrodden, why that’s sad (but changing fast), and what might happen when you and I decide to walk it.
💪 Actionable Tip: Think About Leadership
Content marketers typically don’t pursue marketing leadership. Why? The System of incentives and expectations that have been B2B marketing for the past twenty years hasn’t often considered us as candidates. (More on that in the next section.)
But we also don’t put ourselves in the consideration set for marketing leadership, for a number of reasons.
Not much precedent. You don’t see many content leaders above Director, and you also don’t see many marketing leaders come from content backgrounds in general. The lack of role models just makes that path seem overgrown and harder to carve out for ourselves.
Perceived skills gap. When you see growth getting the lion’s share of the attention and budget from marketing and corporate leadership, you assume that’s what marketing leaders do all day. Barf, no thanks.
Content is playing the long game... but maybe that’s a disadvantage from a career standpoint. If you’re anything like me, you build relationships over time, you lay the groundwork, you understand that you can’t ever really create demand so you try to be top of mind when that demand occurs. We hardly ever go in for the ask — that’s growth or sales’s job. Could that be a factor in how we approach our own career progression?
Gender imbalance. Sure, I’ll say it. 60% of content marketing managers are women — yet men outnumber women in marketing leadership roles two to one. Even here in 2024, women are taught not to be ambitious (case study below). This isn’t necessarily a primary reason, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a contributing factor. Then you end up with fewer content marketers in leadership roles, and we’re back at bullet point #1.
So here’s the actionable tip: just think about it. What if a marketing leadership role was open to you in one, two, five years? What would have to be true for you to consider that role? What might your approach be to building a “content-first” marketing team?
Because here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s a pipe dream. The way B2B marketing is moving, there’s a strong chance that marketing leadership is going to look very different very soon. And for you and me, that’s an opportunity — but only if we’ve considered whether or not we want it.
🚫 Antipattern: The Other Pipeline
Okay, so coming back to The System. Confession: I almost immediately regretted this name as I’m pretty sure it was the name of a cult in some Netflix documentary I watched, but eh, it tracks. 😉
The System is basically the pattern of incentives, expectations, and behaviors that got B2B marketing to … here [gestures wildly].
People didn’t come to marketing with the dream of counting leads and clicks and crop dusting the internet with retargeting ads and forms. I sure didn’t, and I bet you didn’t either. At the heart of it, I don’t think that any marketer even truly believes that all of those things can replace the hard work of building a brand.
But when that behavior is what’s measured and managed and incentivized by the System, this [gestures even more wildly] is the outcome.
Brand and content are historically more difficult to measure because they are long-term engines. That doesn’t jive with the System, so we see brand taking a back seat and content marketing relegated to campaign filler. Our marketing leaders came from a growth background and hold a growth hammer, and they literally don’t know what to do with us. To them, everything looks like a nail… so we get pounded into fitting the System’s paradigm of “growth at all costs” and short-term outcomes.
And because the foundational elements of the System don’t change, we watch the other pipeline happen before our eyes: marketing leadership becomes a revolving door every 18-24 months. Someone new comes in (also with a growth background) or a poor growth marketing sap is promoted, but whoever it is, they are also incentivized by short-term tactics instead of long-term strategy.
But here’s where we get to the interesting part.
This [I never stopped gesturing] isn’t working. And amid all of these layoffs and the fact that marketing isn’t bouncing back as fast as other departments, business leaders are maybe, maybe starting to understand that it never did.
We find ourselves in, as Clark Barron and Liam Moroney say, “Late Stage Demand Gen.” Customer trust is in the gutter, people are done filling out forms to get spammed, they don’t want to be tracked all over the internet, and marketers and their leaders are finally wising up to the fact that demand can’t be created by companies after all.
What does work is what has always worked. And that’s where, dear reader, you and I come in.
💡 Big Idea: What If It’s… Us?
So if B2B marketing flew too close to the sun in all the ways that eroded our brands, crushed our spirits, incentivized the wrong behaviors, made our failures inevitable, and taught executives that marketing was glorified arts and crafts…
and if companies are maybe starting to acknowledge that (🤞) and do what needs to be done to fix it…
Is it so oddball to think that maybe a sign of rebirth would be to tap brand and content marketers in to lead marketing as it should be led?
Apparently… yes. 😂
When I first posted something about all this on LinkedIn a few months ago, a troll came out from under his bridge to say, “Oh, so it’s just power you want, then.”
My knee-jerk reaction was “NO I DON’T!” But then I thought about it some more — about the way my ambition was painted as a negative (see?), but also about how there are different kinds of power.
There is power over — the need to control, to wield authority, to dominate in order to feel important.
But there is also power to — the freedom and trust and autonomy to experiment and advocate for good practice, to have your voice heard and respected, to apply your skills in customer empathy and relationship building to craft and lead impactful go-to-market strategy.
And I realized that if it’s the second kind of power that I want and that I believe content marketers deserve? Guilty as charged. 🤷♀️
If content is the kingdom, “everything the light touches,” then content is what should lead B2B marketing into the next era.
We aren’t impactless blog factories. We’re intentional, data-driven, well-rounded, influential strategists who understand both the business and marketing’s role in helping it grow sustainably.
So if you’re seriously considering whether or not marketing leadership could be a goal for you, think about how you might prepare. Partner with your colleagues to learn how to run a paid social campaign for a content asset. See if you can add some brand flavor to an upcoming event. Put management training and business strategy on your list of PD activities this year.
You can also start here:
Bending the Spoon teaches content marketers to think like content leaders by proving the value of their work. I’ll show you how to use data to prove content’s influence on pipeline, how to communicate successfully with executives, and how to build cross-functional relationships that make you an MVP in your organization.
Yours in contention,
Lauren