Your story is the strategy
A few weeks ago, Sylvia LePoidevin sent me this picture from her Pavilion talk...
(Peep the shoutout in her slide 😊)
I’ve been working with Sylvia for a little over a year now. She's the CMO at Kandji. She first came to be because she wanted to build a media brand, something the company could be known for beyond the product. (In other words, a content brand.)
She knew that meant showing up more.
Back then, she wasn’t posting on LinkedIn.
She wanted to get her voice out there, launch a newsletter, maybe even land a few podcast guest spots (the Exit Five pod with Dave Gerhardt was at the top of her list).
A year later, people now recognize her at conferences. Ones she’s speaking at.
She’s earning hundreds of thousands of impressions on LinkedIn. She’s been invited on a bunch of podcasts (and yes, Exit Five was one of them).
Now she’s on stage speaking about the impact it’s all had. Her second speaking gig in the month of September.
Here’s the part you don’t see in that picture...
When we first started working together, we spent time digging into what really made her stand out. Her experiences. Her observations. Her perspective.
She’d been the first marketing hire at two billion-dollar SaaS companies. She grew up in Africa, moved to the U.S. at 17, and had often been the only woman in the room in board meetings, executive teams, investor updates.
That background shaped how she approached marketing. She was used to starting over. To building from scratch.
That became her premise: The Zero to One Marketer.
It wasn’t a slogan. It was who she was. She builds from scratch. She’s seen what it takes to go from the first marketer to a billion dollar valuation. TWICE.
How many people can say that?
And once she started creating content from that perspective, everything clicked. Her audience saw themselves in it. Others were inspired by it. So much so that they invited her to speak on podcasts and in person events.
That led to more exposure for her and the company she was leading marketing for.
Part of why this worked is because the message wasn’t about marketing tactics. It was rooted in something real. When your content is built from your own earned experience and perspective, you don’t have to fight to be memorable.
The story does the work for you.
That’s the real power of a content brand. It turns what you’ve earned into something others can learn from.
My conversation with Wistia's Chris Savage
Last week, I joined Chris Savage on Wistia’s Talking Too Loud podcast to talk about why content brands are powerful and why the approach works so exceptionally well now.
We dug into the difference between publishing content and building a content brand, and why most teams struggle to make that leap. A few things we covered:
- The core tenets of a content brand — shifting from short-term performance metrics to long-term trust, from consistency of output to consistency of perspective, and from chasing attention to earning it.
- Why so many teams fall into secondhand strategy—building content around keywords, competitor playbooks, or industry clichés instead of their own experiences and insights. (And what that costs them.)
- How content brands (like Wistia, Buffer, SparkToro…) are able to build fans long before they need customers.
- How to use the 5Ps Framework (Problem, Positioning, Principles, Premise, Packaging) to give your content a clear foundation and a point of view people actually remember.
If your team’s putting in the effort but your content still feels interchangeable, this conversation breaks down what needs to change and how to build something people actually follow.