Devin Bramhall

Co-host: Don't Say Content. Marketing Advisor. Agency Growth Strategist. Former CEO of Animalz.

Your CEO doesn't hate marketing. They hate that you can't prove that it works.

I know because I've been the marketer pitching brilliant strategies that get shelved and the CEO wondering why marketing feels like an expensive black box.

After 15+ years building content strategies as a marketer and tripling Animalz to nearly $12M ARR as CEO, I realized the real problem:

We're optimizing for activities instead of outcomes. Checking boxes instead of driving growth.

The dirty secret? Most "content marketing strategies" are just glorified to-do lists.

My book "B2B Content Marketing Strategy" shows why "do more marketing" is killing growth and what to do instead.

Now I help companies stop doing marketing and start growing businesses as a fractional Chief Growth Officer.

If you're tired of: 
→ Defending your work instead of leading with it 
→ Following frameworks that feel like busy work 
→ Watching brilliant ideas die in committee

You're in the right place.

I help marketers ask better questions. Not “what content do we need?” but “what does the business need to grow?'"

Get weekly no-BS takes on growth: devinbramhall.com/newsletter

Chief Executive Officer

Every marketer I know has the same story right now. 

You followed the rules, the LinkedIn algorithm changed, your reach tanked, and somehow it's your fault.

So I made a carousel about it.

Shout out to Ashley Faus, Stephanie Trovato, Pranav Suryawanshi, Insiya Bharmal, and Rand Fishkin who inspired this post.

Chief Growth Officer [Fractional]. Author: “B2B Content Marketing Strategy” out now on Amazon

A survival guide for marketers

Madhav Bhandari

I’m a B2B marketer with 12+ years of experience helping startups grow from scrappy beginnings ($2M+ ARR) to category leadership ($20M+ ARR and beyond). I’ve built lean, high-performing marketing engines across both PLG / sales-led companies.Some wins I’m proud of:• As Hubstaff’s first marketer, I helped grow revenue from $200K to $5M ARR in 4 years (now $30M+ ARR).• At Close, I helped break through our revenue plateau and reach 8 figure ARR (now $30M+ ARR)• At Storylane, I scaled marketing to grow our revenue from $2M to $10M+ ARR within 2 years.• At Bonsai (acquired by Zoom), I scaled marketing and tripled our ARR in under 2 years.How I typically drive results:• Building content engines that generate millions in organic traffic• Running demand gen across SEO, ads, dark social, events and influencers• Creating GTM playbooks for new products and categories• Aligning brand, product marketing, and revenue into one motion• Leading bold, creative campaigns that actually get noticed• Using pattern interrupts to stand out in crowded marketsMy strength and philosophy is doing marketing that stands out. I focus on work that drives action and ties directly to pipeline.I’ve helped many scale-ups grow beyond $10M ARR, either as a full-time leader or a hands-on advisor. I love taking on this challenge.I'm open to taking on more advisory roles, especially with martech / salestech companies. If you’re looking for an advisor who's actively in the work and brings practical experience, message me. Thanks for reading till the end!

Head of Marketing

Internally, the Chief Content Officer at Storylane.

My goal is to drive demand for Storylane using content-led initiatives such as video, social, organic search, brand and partnerships. 

Navigating the $1M to $10M ARR journey over the next couple of quarters.

We're spending $3.3M on marketing in 2026 at Storylane (up 10% from 2025).

I've always believed in being transparent with what we do, so here's the full breakup:

→ $1.2M - Paid Ads
Same as last year. LinkedIn $500K, Google/Bing $500K, Meta $200K (new). LinkedIn CPMs up 30-40%. Testing B2C channels to reach B2B audiences at lower cost.

→ $250K - Influencer Program
Cut from $500K. Used only $200K last year. Working great but scaling profitably is hard. Maintaining core LinkedIn portfolio, testing B2B creators on TikTok/Instagram for virality.

→ $550K - Conferences & Events
Up from $400K. Betting big on IRL. Sponsoring, speaking, recording customer content, hosting side events. Good pre/post-event ops. Flywheel is real - brand grows, booth traffic increases, meetings get better.

→ $250K - Community Sponsorships
Down from $300K. Still supporting CMO, pre-sales, product marketing communities. Investing $350K to build our own community instead. Forward bet on owned community.

→ $200K - SEO
Same as last year. Most efficient PLG channel. Used 1/4 last year (LLM SEO uncertainty). Clear on plan now. Goal: 2x traffic, 2x PLG revenue.

→ $200K - Brand + Product Marketing
2x from last year. Highest organic ROI. Product marketing creates content - new use cases, demo automation progress, multi-product future. Brand handles distribution through pattern interrupt experiments, campaigns, AI-led visual campaigns. Building recall, loyalty, education. Building brand for RepX (our newest product).

→ $250K - Outbound
Up from $200K. Took two years to figure out. Last year break-even, end of year very profitable. 2 full time SDRs focused on expansions + 1 SDR agency for net new. Big quota targets.

→ $50K - Partnerships ⭐ NEW
Integration partners - identifying mutual customers and prospects. Groundwork done, partnerships in place. Getting revenue from channel, possibly hiring if revenue grows.

→ $350K - Customer Marketing ⭐ NEW
My big bet. Building our own community through Finer Demos Club and user conference. Customers learning from customers to drive referrals, move deals faster, expand accounts, reduce churn. Expansion is one of fastest-growing segments.

Plus 10% flexibility buffer.

I'm confident this budget will help us get past $20M+ ARR.

Three big strategic shifts:

1. Investing ~$1M (1/3 of budget) on IRL events. Shows how impactful in-person was last year and why we're bullish on it.

2. Building our own community. We've supported communities for years and will continue, but with our large customer base, there's strong need for our own.

3. Brand has unlimited ceiling - it's also something what we're good at. Our brand is now bigger than the demo automation category itself. We'll continue leading with brand.

For other CMOs: where are you increasing spend? What are you cutting? What's your biggest bet?

Curious how your budgets compare.

Pattern Interrupt Marketing book coming soon | Head of Marketing @ Storylane

IMO the AEO playbook is 90% bullsh*t. We wasted 1 year and tens of thousands of dollars figuring this out.

So let me save you the pain.

Everyone's selling you on:
- Citations as a service
- Position tracking in LLM answers
- GEO tools
- LLMS.txt robots files
- Adding FAQs / Q&As to your blogs
- Synthetic Q&A generation
- GEO audits and scorecards
- All this other tactical garbage

It's noise. We tried them all and gave them enough time to work.

It'll make you feel busy. It'll make consultants money. But it moves zero needles.

Here's what actually works:

1. Build brand - get people to talk about you on the internet - talk on social, get your customers to talk on social, do external podcasts, get other people to write blogs/posts about your brand experiments etc.
2. Create content LLMs can't - pulling insights from your actual sales calls, showing your product in unique formats like demo-led SEO, and writing stuff that's genuinely helpful for your buyers. 

That's it. You know, the stuff we used to call "good SEO/great content marketing strategy."

Every case study you've seen of companies killing it in LLMs?

90% of their success = those two things above
10% = the AEO "strategies" everyone's pitching

I know this is a harsh take and people's livelihood depends on this. But please change your services to more around Search Everywhere Optimization (aka brand) and creating content that's helpful for buyers.

Stop overthinking this. Stop buying these expensive tools. Stop chasing the shiny tactics.

Just build your brand and create content your buyers actually need. Like the old days. But better.

Happy to be proven wrong! If that is the case, show me a business that's killing it in LLM SEO with a direct main correlation to a GEO / AEO tactic (with proof pls - for everyone's good).

This week we announced RepX and, with it, the next chapter of Storylane.

For context, we started in 2021 with interactive demos. The idea was simple: let buyers experience the product before they talk to sales. Over time, we became the leader in demo automation - #1 on G2, #1 across LLM results in our category, and our brand search traffic is now bigger than the demo automation category itself, 2.5x higher than the nearest competitor. 

As adoption grew, we realized buyers move across multiple demos when evaluating software, so we introduced our second product Hubs to support that deeper, multi-touch evaluation process.

But leadership in a category doesn’t mean the work is done. If anything, it raises the bar. We’ve always believed demo automation is bigger than just better product tours. There’s still a lot to fix in how software is discovered, evaluated, and bought, and we want to keep pushing that forward.

The B2B website hasn’t really changed in 10+ years. Same hero. Same navigation. Yes, interactive demos are now common, which is progress. But structurally, buyers still have to hunt for answers. If they can’t find them, they’re forced to talk to sales. Most won’t.

9 out of 10 visitors scroll and leave, and you get almost no signal from that interaction.

So we asked a different question: what if the website could talk back?

That’s RepX.

RepX makes your website your best sales rep. It’s a conversational agent trained on your product docs, sales playbooks, demos, and collateral. It answers questions, runs demos, qualifies buyers, surfaces the right resources, and routes sales-ready leads to your team. 24/7.

You can see ours, Lily, live on the Storylane website. https://lnkd.in/eKk675af

The timing wasn’t random. Last week we flew the entire team to Langkawi, Malaysia to plan our multi-product future as we scale to $20M+ ARR. When I look at where we were two years ago - revenue, positioning, how we ship - I’m genuinely proud of the progress.

Landed back yesterday. Still feeling the offsite blues. But very clear on where we’re headed.

I’ll share more soon about how we thought about naming and messaging, how we’re taking this to market, and what we’re learning from the conversations buyers are already having with our RepX Lily.

Genuine question for other CMOs and marketing leaders.

Where do you land on deadlines vs no deadlines, especially for creative work?

Context: the marketing team at Storylane is very creative, and honestly, what we’re doing has worked really well over the last couple of years. I’m not trying to fix something that isn’t broken. But I do a yearly reset on myself and the team to see where we could be better.

As we’ve leaned more into pattern-interrupt style campaigns and experiments, I keep coming back to the same internal debate.

One camp says deadlines matter. Time expands to fill the space you give it. When you commit to a date and work backwards, things ship faster. That’s how we’ve handled big stuff like website rebrands or product launches. We commit publicly, hustle backwards, and get to 95% quickly. Are there mistakes? Sure. But we ship more, learn more, and keep momentum.

The other camp says creativity doesn’t work on a clock. Great ideas don’t show up on demand. They come from thinking, wandering, switching contexts, and sometimes stepping away entirely. If you say “we need a killer idea in two weeks,” you might get something fine, but you might miss something exceptional. Deadlines can narrow the ceiling of creativity.

But I still see some projects stretch longer than they probably should. Sometimes it’s the nature of the work. Sometimes it’s prioritization. Sometimes it’s just day-to-day chaos. Usually the deadline only becomes clear once it comes up in a 1:1.

Right now, I’m mostly in camp B (creativity doesn’t work on a clock). Minimal deadlines. Very simple process. We run the whole team off a shared Notion doc: last week’s work, next week’s focus. That’s it. We review it together weekly as a team. No heavy PM tools.

That simplicity has worked well for us so far. Less process has meant more time to think and create, not maintain tools. But now I’m wondering if that simplicity is something to protect, or a signal it’s time to evolve.

So I’m conflicted.

Curious how others think about this, especially CMOs across different company stages.

Do you put deadlines on everything?
Only on big bets?
Or mostly none at all?

Would love to hear what’s actually worked for you.

A typical website chatbot handles traffic. RepX is built to handle buying conversations.

Most website chatbots aren’t built for sales. They’re built for routing, and that’s an important distinction.

If you look at how most B2B sites use chat, it’s to triage traffic. Answer basic questions. Point someone to documentation. Route to support. Hand off to a human when things get complex. They’re essentially a front desk.

They run on predefined logic. If a visitor’s question fits inside a flow, they respond. If it doesn’t, they escalate. The better ones surface a few helpful links, which is useful for FAQs and basic navigation.

But that’s not a sales conversation.

A real sales conversation involves discovery, context, and judgment. It moves the buyer forward based on what they’re actually trying to accomplish, not just what button they clicked.

RepX was built for that layer.

It’s not meant to compete with chatbots as routing tools. It’s meant to function as a sales tool directly on your website. Instead of matching questions to rules, it reads intent and carries a naturally flowing conversation across text, voice, or even video.

And it doesn’t just reply with text.

RepX can present a product demo in the middle of the interaction. It can pull up a relevant PDF, show a video, surface the right proof point, and share a sales team calendar link when the timing makes sense in the flow of the conversation. It guides the buyer through the experience rather than just pointing them somewhere else.

That’s how we approached it at Storylane. RepX is a conversational sales agent trained on your product documentation, demos, sales playbooks, and enablement assets.

That's the practical difference between a website chatbot and Storylane's RepX. One handles traffic. The other handles buyers. Try it: https://lnkd.in/eKk675af

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