From transactional to differentiated: Why cross-functional relationships are the key to better content

Picture this: You’re walking through the mall (they do still exist!) and you pass a kiosk where a smiling worker waves a tiny envelope of a hair care product made from exotic ingredients you’ve never heard of.

If you’re like me, you pass them with a friendly “No thanks!” I know from experience that those “free samples” turn into a very, very hard sell.

That might sound “so 2008”—but that’s how a lot of content marketing feels these days. A “free ebook” collects your email in exchange for the same 20 stats you could find anywhere—and then gets you hit with 20 follow-ups in 10 days from the inbound SDR. An ultimate guide is really a thinly veiled product pitch. A promising headline leads to keyword-stuffed drivel.

It’s all what we call transactional content: We give customers something (maybe it’s helpful, maybe it’s not), and in return, we get their info (maybe they’re qualified, maybe they’re not).

As SparkToro VP of Marketing Amanda Natividad explains, “Transactional content is written with this approach: ‘People have problems. They want them solved. And the solution is Book a demo today.’ That’s not really how things work.”

This problem starts with small decisions that add up fast and make a huge impact at the company level. 

Content marketers are saddled with the wrong metrics, projects, and priorities. Sales wants a case study (any case study!), demand gen needed an ebook for their campaign yesterday, and the CEO is asking why you’re not ranking #1 for a related (but likely low-impact) keyword.

The result? B2B brands publish more of the same old transactional content, instead of value-driven content that buyers crave, which would actually move the needle.

How do we get out of this spiral? Better cross-functional relationships—and learning from our non-marketing colleagues—will take us from transactional to differentiated content.

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Where we are: The status quo isn’t working

Something’s broken in content marketing, and it’s bad news for content, customers, and companies themselves. Here’s what we’re up against.

❌SEO over genuine value

Ahhh, SEO. The frenemy every marketer loves to hate. Sweet talking the search engines is natural; ranking isn’t completely irrelevant. The problem comes when content marketers get told that SEO is their top or only priority. This leads to keyword stuffing and ill-advised “content strategies” that bring traffic to your site at any cost, even if it’s the wrong traffic.

Ranking well for terms your buyers aren’t searching for won’t move the needle for your business, even if the CEO believes you should be at the top of the SERPs. When Amanda encountered “lowest common denominator” goals like these in the past, she asked questions like, “What does that number-one ranking actually get you? Who is that ultimately serving? If we want to say we’re the best, by which standards and in what situations?”

Rather than grasping at straws to rank for whichever keywords at any cost, content marketers need to:

1. Understand their ideal buyer’s journey inside and out, including what they’re searching for at each stage
2. Optimize for those specific topics and terms while still providing actual value

For those focused on volume over substance, AI further muddies the waters. Sure, sexy new GPT tools might spin up 1,500 SEO-optimized words in a matter of minutes. But when the words are regurgitated, bland, and boring to your audience, you might as well publish nothing at all.

Brooklin sums it up perfectly:

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❌ Leads over more holistic measurement

Too many marketers spend their days tracking leads to prove they’re doing their job. That’s how reports, case studies, and ebooks end up locked away behind a form. Gated content isn’t inherently a bad thing—if what’s behind the form delivers on the original promise or offers genuine value. But content marketers shouldn’t live on leads alone. Lauren Lang gives two reasons why too much of a focus on conversions is problematic:

1. Conversions don’t equal pipeline or purchase intent. A new lead gen form response doesn’t necessarily mean they’re interested in your product or primed to buy.
2. Content marketers create plenty of other content that doesn’t directly drive leads. Most buyers consume multiple pieces of content before buying, which conversion metrics don’t capture. Leads don’t tell the whole story.

Here’s another take: “B2B marketing attribution is a mess,” Brendan Hufford says. By way of example, he cites his journey to sign up for an under-$200 workshop that involved three touchpoints across three channels on two devices over three hours. “And you think we can accurately track all the touch points for a 12-month marketing cycle and three-month sales cycle with an entire buying team?” Safe to say, a lead gen form response is a small fraction of a much larger picture.

In our Closing the Content Gap Report, 42% of content folks cited leads and conversions as the primary metric for measuring content success at their company. But the broader GTM org was more likely to look for sales and revenue or brand awareness than their content-focused counterparts. We need more holistic metrics and demand creation instead of just capture.

❌ Order-taking over strategic alignment

What’s more impactful for a business: five bland, unoriginal blog posts published to meet an arbitrary quota or one thoughtful, expert-informed or data-driven content piece? Door #2 for the win, obviously.

Yet content marketers often feel greater pressure to churn out a high volume of content rather than to produce high-quality, strategic content. The CEO has a number in their head about the ideal content cadence. Or the content team just has so much on their plate that they have to work at top speed just to get it all done—let alone ensure alignment with other teams.

As communicators and marketers, our job is to serve the teams around us by:

• Producing the marketing materials they need to do their job, and
• Offering strategic guidance and support around positioning and distribution 

A lot of content marketers do the first bullet point without getting to do the second: the strategic work of guiding the business. As Chris Wood, Director of Demand Generation at ActiveCampaign, says, “Content should be the engine by which the company drives revenue. Currently, it is a very transactional function that lacks strategic alignment with the business.” 

When content marketers have a seat at the table, they don’t merely meet needs as they crop up like a game of B2B whack-a-mole. They can better tie content into big-picture priorities and create content that enables the business as a whole.

❌Silos over cross-functional collaboration

In an ideal world, the content team has a clear North Star. Each deliverable they create has a clear strategy and purpose. Every content piece fits neatly with each other like a beautiful B2B SaaS jigsaw puzzle. They create a pillar piece of content every three to six months and socialize that content to ensure it’s meeting multiple needs across teams. A robust research report fuels assets for each of demand gen’s quarterly campaigns, proof points for sales outreach, and months of blogs and social posts.

Here’s the reality as Obaid Durrani tells it: “The biggest problem with modern-day content marketing is that it results in siloed activities.” He goes on to explain how marketers often invest in a blog, podcast, and YouTube channel, but each channel has its own separate topic sources, success metrics, and point person. The result is content without:

• A focused narrative (content pieces that are siloed from each other)
• A strong distribution strategy (content that’s siloed across channels)
• A cross-functional approach to creation (content marketing that’s siloed from other teams)

These silos take a toll on both output and results. But that third bullet is the most important: Cross-functional collaboration is content teams’ best lever for transformational content.

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Where we need to go: Differentiated, transformational content

Sound familiar? You’re in good company. We see some version of the status quo above with just about every client and prospect we talk to. 

So what should we work toward instead? Differentiated content. This is content that:

• Other brands couldn’t replicate
• Addresses the real questions and problems your customers face every day
• Has buy-in from the rest of the GTM org to drive a consistent, content-backed strategy
• Relentlessly offers value

What actually distinguishes your brand from your competition? That’s what drives differentiated content—your leadership’s spiky POV, a unique and well-defined brand voice, or your approach to solving customer problems that other solutions simply can’t touch.

Before you can create truly differentiated content, Amanda says, you need to answer some questions:

1. Who is our ideal customer? 
2. In what situations is our solution ideal? 
3. In which scenarios would someone choose us over a competitor?
4. What are the best things about your competition vs. the best things about us?

“You really need to understand with empathy, Why would a customer choose them over me?” Amanda explains. That answer will spark differentiated positioning and content.

Before working at SparkToro, Amanda ran content marketing for a snack food brand. Their ideal customer was a busy person who wanted to make healthier choices but didn’t know how and didn’t want to overthink it. Amanda created content like one-pot meals and other simple recipes that would meet ideal buyers throughout their day. These pieces started as blog posts and performed well as organic and paid social, all because they considered what their audience needed.

Now, Amanda heads up some of the best differentiated and valuable B2B content out there (imo). From the SparkToro blog to CEO Rand Fishkin’s 5-Minute Whiteboard videos, SparkToro speaks to the questions and problems marketers actually have. SparkToro content stands out because it makes the case for not just their platform, but audience research and better marketing in general.

The lesson? Stop chasing metrics that don’t matter. Start creating content your audience actually cares about—that no other brand could make.

Quit thinking and writing like a marketer

To get from transactional to transformed content, we need a reset. Forget everything you know about content marketing for a bit:

🛑 Stop “filling requests.” This doesn’t mean that when someone asks for a piece of content, you shut them down. But content marketers have to go from being order takers to collaborators with other teams. Work alongside them, and embrace a strategic role and open line of communication.

‍Chelsea Castle, Head of Content and Brand at Close, periodically asks the leader of each department, “How can we best help you?” This is different from letting other teams come to content marketing to fill a need—it’s a collaborative relationship where everyone has a voice and buy-in.

🛑 Stop thinking like a marketer. Content marketers need to get out of the content bubble to focus on working with, thinking like, and learning from their cohorts on other teams.

As Rosie Campbell recently wrote, empathy is what will rescue content marketing, including empathy for our GTM colleagues. She suggests building it by:

• Involving them earlier in the creation process
• Measuring awareness and revenue, metrics that support the wider GTM function (instead of just leads)

When you prioritize input from other teams, you learn about the challenges your customers are facing and can address these challenges with content as art of the solution. You see which needs and topics span multiple teams, so you can create strategic and helpful content that everyone can use. You gain a better sense of what sets your solution apart so you can differentiate content in approach, voice, topic, and distribution.

What’s more, the Closing the Content Gap report found that other teams want to help with content: 95% of non-content marketers think their involvement in content marketing will make it more relevant and effective. But only half have had a positive experience getting involved.

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How we get there: Learn from and think like your colleagues

The teams you work with every day have knowledge that will help you deliver differentiated content. Here are a few of the skills content marketers could stand to learn from their colleagues.

1. Help like customer success

Your friendly neighborhood CSM answers questions, surfaces requests to the product team, and guides customers to get the most out of the product. In short, they’re here to help. Your content team should be, too.

Amanda says that helpful content starts with taking a hard look at every piece of content you publish. “Can you be ruthless enough to ask yourself, ‘Would I read this if it came up in my feed?’ You have to have some kind of baseline respect for your customer to be able to say, ‘They deserve better than this.’”

Every piece of content you publish should be as relentlessly helpful as your CSMs are:

• Take a zero-click content approach on social. A term coined by Amanda herself, zero-click content provides immediate value in the post, instead of a vague teaser and a “Click the link in the comments to read what we wrote!”
• Conduct expert interviews or capture original data. Produce content that your potential customers truly want to see in the world.

If you aim for SEO and leads alone, you might get those but not trust. If you’re ridiculously helpful, you’ll build trust and probably get everything else thrown in, too.

2. Listen like sales

I’ve learned from sales legend Jen Allen-Knuth that great sellers are great listeners. When a prospect has an objection, they listen carefully so they can address the right problem with their buyer. When they’re chasing a new account, they look for observable evidence of the problem the prospect is facing and share their thinking in outreach. 

Reflect that depth of listening back to the other GTM functions. Don’t take content requests at face value; get really good at understanding your colleagues’ problems. Before you split hairs over deliverable type, get crystal clear about what sales or product wants to accomplish. Why are they asking for this in the first place? Is the problem different from what they think it is? 

Listen to your customers, too. Figure out what buyers are missing from your content and which problems you can solve for them. It should go without saying (but doesn’t) that you have to know who your buyers are before you can speak to them—that’s how you’ll create the content they want to see.

3. Connect the dots like your CEO

CEOs are built different. They’re plugged into virtually every corner of the business, and they use that knowledge to spark ideas, invest resources strategically, and connect teams to each other. This is how Amanda works with her CEO—Rand sets the overall vision and identifies trends and hypotheses, and Amanda creates content about what’s next in light of those trends.

Collaborative content marketers find opportunities to do the same thing. When you notice common themes across teams, bring those teams into the same room, surface their needs, and align their goals. Then, create a content strategy or pillar piece that supports everyone. You can’t be everywhere at once (who knows how the CEO even does it? 😉) but you can connect the dots as you become a content collaboration pro.

4. Research like a product manager

Behind every great software solution is a product team that’s all in on researching its customers: what they think, how they use the product, and what they want to see next. Top-notch content marketing comes from the same place.

But while marketers know they need to do audience research, a lot don’t. In the State of (Dis)Content report, the Content Studio found that 41% of content marketers say they’re not doing audience research nearly enough, while 19% say they do audience research just once a month. “Because so few marketers actually do audience research, it doesn’t take much to stand out from the crowd,” Amanda explains. “Go where your audience is hanging out. Consume the content they consume. Talk to your audience and learn what keeps them up at night. Fill in the gaps.”

We’re huge fans of actually running your own original research, too. Create data-backed reports that validate your audience’s pain points or that answer their looming questions about their industry. Be doggedly curious about your audience and their world, and leverage what you uncover to create differentiated content.

5. Problem solve like a developer

Developers build the product that everyone at the company rallies around, so their output is inherently cross-functional—just like the content you create.

While you might not work directly with the engineering team, they can teach you a ton about solving problems.

When a customer reports a bug, they track down the source of the issue. The process takes time and close attention to detail. Emulate that in your content pipeline—if there’s a hangup with the approval or production process, get curious, examine your workflow, and fix what’s broken.

Devs have to consider both the line of code in front of them and the end result. Do the same by considering distribution from the earliest stages of strategy and creation. Which channels will this piece be right for? How can you slice, dice, and repurpose your pillar piece of content? That proactive planning drives efficiency and better results later on. 

“When you think about how you’ll distribute a piece of content before creating it, you construct it in a way that makes it easy to distribute,” says Jess Cook. Distribution-first content has a stronger structure, more a-ha moments, better sound bites, and greater readability for your audience.

6. Show your results like demand generation

Demand gen keeps receipts in the best kind of way. They can draw a direct line between their campaigns and the bottom line to show their work. According to Amanda, this is one of the best ways to step out of order-taker mode.

Let’s say your leadership puts transactional content or goals on your plate. How do you make time for differentiated content? Amanda recommends blocking out time on your calendar as a “cap” on how long you’ll spend on the uninspiring stuff—so you can spend the rest of your week on high-impact work.

“At the end of the day, you delivered on those transactional blog posts within the CEO’s standards and can say, ‘That was your strategy. You said we needed this, and if it’s not driving business results, then let’s revisit that strategy.’” Show the results of whatever high-value, differentiated content you were able to produce to make a case for more of what does work.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention just how important the content-demand-gen partnership is. They need content to support value-driven and insightful campaigns. You need their valuable market data to drive better content. It’s the collab dreams are made of.

7. Tell stories like product marketing

The partnership between product marketing and content marketing should be a no-brainer. Yes, for all the functional and practical reasons, like their inside track on product positioning. But their storytelling skills also make them a powerful teacher. 

• Absorb their ability to simply and plainly describe the benefit and impact in your bottom-of-funnel content.
• Know who’s reading your content and the questions they have just like PMMs know their unique buyers and the problems they have.
• Emulate the product marketing practice of letting your users write copy for you by sourcing social proof from customers or experts about how actionable your latest report is.

At the end of the day, collaboration is about (1) telling the right story, and (2) distributing that story well. Face time with product marketing helps you get those right.

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Want better content? Build better relationships.

Collaboration sometimes gets a bad rap. Many a content marketer has been burned by the stress of having too many stakeholders in the approval process or too many cooks in the kitchen along the way. Those (valid and relatable) experiences can turn collaboration into a bottleneck that slows content production. But when working with other teams is central to your process, you gain a wider view of their problems and priorities before you even start creating, which will almost certainly lead to a better, more efficient result.

Whether you’re on a large, established content team or you’re roughing it as a team of one, Amanda’s best advice for getting sh*t done is this: “Each month or quarter, pick a small handful of high-impact deliverables and deliver on those. From there, figure out how you can repurpose, reuse, and recycle all of that content. Turn a really good case study into social media content, a proof point in a blog post, and a nurture sequence for leads.” Then? You get to equip the rest of the GTM org to use all of the content their input helped create.

This process isn’t easy—it’s arguably a lot harder having AI write another lame, transactional blog post that anyone could’ve written. But the path to differentiated content is actually pretty straightforward, and it’s definitely worth taking. Invite your colleagues to walk it with you, and watch how far you can go.

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We talk to experts across different teams every day to create differentiated content. If you want help getting started, feel free to ask us any questions by scheduling a call or messaging a Beam Team member on LinkedIn.

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