Brooklin Nash 💡

Let’s be honest: most B2B content is boring AF. 

It’s often general statements and regurgitated info and basic definitions, wrapped in faux authoritative lingo. 

Before you pull out your pitchfork, let me clarify: this isn’t entirely, or even mostly, the fault of content marketers. Content teams face high publishing cadences and lead gen expectations, low bandwidth and budgets, with little leeway to lean on leadership, partners, and customers. (Not to mention peanut gallery questions like “can we optimize this?” and “can we make this go viral?”) 

All of that, if you’re not careful, can lead to an “it’s good enough” mindset.  

This mindset affects the reader—and in turn your pipeline. But it also diminishes the role of content marketing within a company. 

Content marketers can be storytellers and interpreters. They’re not just here to serve lead gen. They’re here to make their customers and audience the stars of the show. To do that, they can’t be relegated to keyword research and ill-conceived gated assets. 

That’s an issue worth fixing.

That’s why I started Beam Content with two co-founders who know their sh*t. 

With nearly a decade of experience in B2B marketing, the #BeamTeam focuses on long-form content and social assets that resonate with your audience. 

We work with clients like:

Outreach
Typeform
DocuSign
Coursera 
Metadata
Bird 
Mixpanel
Dooly

Are you looking to elevate your content? 

Shoot me an email! brooklin@beamcontent.co

Co-Founder

Beam helps B2B SaaS companies create expert-driven content based on interviews and original data so that they can build trust with their buyers.

Working with: Outreach, ThoughtSpot, Freshworks, Metadata, Dooly and more.

Brooklin Nash

This one is for all the content and product marketers serving a skeptical, technical audience: 

What's stopping you from doing more original research in 2026? 

This isn't even a "poke the bear" type question. It's a genuinely curious question.

Is it a focus on more tactical, product-led content?
Is it the thought that "thought leadership" can't lead to direct wins?
Is it the budget constraints and the six-figure line items of big analyst firms?

I'd love to hear from you, either in the comments or DMs.

Talk to me about content backed by original research.

PSA: Quality research reports take ~12 weeks to produce. 

Our process breaks things down into ~2 week sprints:

1. Ideation, goals and survey creation
2. Survey collection
3. Insights, narrative, and brief
4. Writing
5. Design
6. Finalization to be launch-ready

If you're looking at that big June launch, it's time to get started.

I help adtech companies including Scope3, Viant, LiveRamp, tvScientific, Transmit, Firsthand, and many others with marketing strategy, content, and PR. 

If you want to talk about ad/martech marketing, send me a message at joe@sharppenmedia.com or DM me on LinkedIn.

If you're here because you like my content, sign up for my weekly newsletter, where I talk about ad/martech GTM strategy and best practices: https://shorturl.at/celmR

Joe Zappa

Adtech founders, especially early-stage, ask me all the time about events: Which ones are legit? Do I sponsor? How do we approach them?

So Eric Franchi and I recorded a "guide to advertising events" Open Market podcast. 

We identified 6 core events:
+ CES
+ IAB ALM
+ Marketecture (#biased)
+ POSSIBLE
+ Cannes
+ Advertising Week

Check it out today on Spotify, Apple, etc. And please yell at us about the events we missed in the comments.

Helping adtech companies with marketing, content, PR

I remember sending a bunch of cold DMs when I started my agency. It sucked — for me and the people I was DM'ing.

It's not that I didn't have value to offer. It's just that their inboxes were inundated, and they and I both knew what I ultimately wanted (their money). It's  not a great way to begin relationships. Even if I offered to help them for free, it still felt either salesy or desperate.

Fast-forward three years. Half my clients come from CEOs and marketers consuming my content (across social, email, and podcasts). The other half come from referrals, and every single one of those was touched by content, too.

The lesson: Share your learnings. Your outbound becomes warm, and you'll grow inbound, too.

Plus, the impact keeps growing as your audience grows. Teach your audience your craft. It's a compounding opportunity.

If you've been reading my posts but we've never spoken, reveal yourself! I'll be at Marketecture Live in 2 weeks. 

Plus, I have an offer for you. I'll ask you some questions about your positioning and will send you a brand narrative after. This is a simple strategy document that can fuel all your content and communications.

Let's get coffee and chat when we're supposed to be watching the content organized by AdTechGod ®️. I have faith he won't smite us.

Public markets in adtech have been rocky. This is partially a narrative problem.

No. 1 adtech comms need right now: a clear, compelling narrative about where AI is taking advertising as a whole — and how you're leading the charge.

No one cares about the ins and outs of your various products. They DO care about big-picture claims re: the future of advertising.

This is a generational moment. It calls for less navel gazing, more visionary projection.

The CEO is always the chief evangelist. As a CEO, you might be thinking, "I don't have the damn time to be chief evangelist."

You're already the chief executive officer. And now I'm asking you to play a huge role in marketing.

Here's the thing — it doesn't have to be a huge time suck. You can do one foundational piece of content per week — and everything else can be extrapolated by your sales/marketing team.

For example, let's say you want to own the topic of audience building in advertising. You do a 30- to 60-minute podcast on it each week where you interview customers, partners, etc. Your team slices it into newsletters, blogs, short-form videos, social posts.

You put in 1-2 hours per week. It turns into an entire executive evangelism content engine so that your prospects feel like the CEO is everywhere owning that topic in-market.

Being a chief evangelist requires effort — no way around that. But it doesn't need to be a full-time job, especially if you have a marketing team.

It should feel to your prospects like you're everywhere, and it doesn't take 5 hours a day to achieve that effect.

You only get to be known for one thing — maybe 2-3 if you're lucky. So, less is more when it comes to positioning.

I'll use myself as an example. My agency really took off when I settled on a 2-item combo: adtech (the niche) and executive evangelism (the POV).

That boiled down to 1 sentence: Joe is adtech marketing guy who helps CEOs step into the role of chief evangelist.

You want your positioning to be so simple, distinct, and memorable that people repeat it back to you. When I meet people at events, they say, "Oh yeah. I follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn. You're the social guy." Or "the guy working with adtech CEOs on marketing."

So, ask yourself whether what you do can be boiled down to one word/concept — and whether it's the concept you want.

tvScientific: performance TV.

Firsthand: brand agents.

Viant: ViantAI.

Don't confuse the market. Keep it simple. And hammer home the same message every day.

That's how you build a distinct brand.

You probably think a lot about the events you're attending. What if you should throw your own?

On this week’s Open Market, Marketecture CSO Sam Khoury joined Eric Franchi and me to answer that question.

We broke down what goes into organizing an advertising event — from developing the right concept and setting attendance goals, to landing serious speakers, structuring sponsorship economics, and deciding who owns ticket and revenue targets internally.

We also get into:
+ How to balance real content and biz dev opportunities
+ What events cost
+ How to make events an extension of your marketing program

Check it out on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your pods.

When it comes to marketing, most CEOs are looking for *the big idea* that's going to go viral or catapult them to the next level.

Good news: You don't need that.

Bad news: You need to share your wisdom with prospective customers 100 times over the course of the next year or two.

Especially in an era of mass media and rapid information consumption, the key is not one big hack. It's building trust over time.

And that's doubly true for most B2B tech companies, which are generally selling to educated buyers over a long period of consideration.

One extraordinary piece of content probably won't make the difference. And you can't be sure what that will be anyway.

100 touches will. So, don't view content as a moonshot. View it as a daily practice. Get out there and share what you know.

taplio

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taplio

The Battle

Brooklin Nash

Joe Zappa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Brooklin Nash's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJoe Zappa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreBrooklin Nash's LinkedIn Performance