I’ve been doing some form of content strategy since before I knew it had a name.
It started with a pop culture website.
Most of what we published was straightforward and observational: a celebrity wore something striking, a movie was coming out, someone said something stupid on TV.
When I could, I tried to make the story about more than the story itself.
So when the site’s owner asked me to write for the commentary section, I couldn’t just riff on an upcoming movie or my last indie show.
I had to find something larger to say.
I wrote about people taking selfies over caskets. I wrote about the emergence of vocal fry.
I tried to predict who would win reality shows based on various factors while everyone else played favorites. I was right twice.
The subject matter was silly, but the instinct was sound.
This could be a job
My first jobs out of school were in customer support.
At an edtech company, our team kept fielding the same question over and over, so I made a how-to video instead of answering it for the umpteenth time.
The video got more than 53,000 views.
Content now looked like a career, and customer support had given me an education I still use.
I learned how to listen for the question under the question. I learned how much the right message can change depending on who’s receiving it.
I put both into practice in an unexpected place: an end-of-life planning company.
The editorial director asked me to write something that would persuade millennials to start thinking about death.
So I wrote about things that made us love being alive—our pets, travels, possessions, and digital lives—and used those as a way into the conversation. Death was the last reason on the list.
Today, there are enough versions of the argument to bury the original around page three.
Brand got under my skin
Brand wasn’t just corporate vapor when I joined the customer success team at an event tech company.
Every customer message had to be technical, empathic, and unmistakably us, often during high-stakes, real-time events hosted by companies whose names you’d recognize.
It was branding bootcamp from the trenches.
I started absorbing what makes a company become an experience people want to be part of: voice, visual identity, and how you make them feel.
The incoming content marketing manager wanted employees to write, so I entered a company blog contest with my first-ever piece of B2B marketing. And won.
I kept writing about event marketing after I left, and eventually came back as a freelancer to keep writing for the brand.
What deserves to exist?
By the time I got into marketing full-time, I was less interested in whether we could make something than whether we should.
I got the chance to test that instinct at a global software company where I built a social-first strategy targeting customer support managers.
It launched—and ended—just before COVID.
It should have had a very short life. Instead, it earned attention, backlinks, and helped generate a closed/won deal.
We should probably work together if:
- You want your content to have a point, not just a spot on your to-do list.
- You believe the best material is usually somewhere inside the business, and need someone curious enough to find it.
- You’d rather publish one idea people remember than ten they forget.
- You enjoy experimentation and making reasonable bets.
- You want AI to make good thinking easier to execute, not easier to avoid.