The Content Debate: Gated vs. Ungated | Episode 2

Andrew Davis (00:01.998)
All right, welcome back to the 98 % Podcast where data meets revenue. I'm your host, Andrew Davis, SVP of Marketing here at TextUs. On the show, we talk about exactly what drives performance across marketing, sales, the go-to-market motion, not theory, not vanity metrics, real execution. If you listened to our first episode, you already know the foundation of this show. Most teams know their channels work.

What they don't always know is why, how well, and what to do with that data once they have it. And today's episode is a perfect extension of that. Today's topic is one that every marketing leader, rev ops, marketing operations, content strategist, you name it, in the go-to-market space is actively wrestling with and probably has been for some time. Should your best content that you create be gated or completely open? This is the great gated versus ungated debate.

Do you protect your best work behind a form or drive lead capture? Or do you go fully open, maximize reach, build trust, and let the pipeline flow as it should? What actually works in 2025 probably won't work in 2026 as we've learned this year. What actually impacts pipeline, not just demos.

Joining me for today's debate is someone who sits right at that intersection of content, automation, revenue, and the buyer's experience, Kiara Carniewski. Kiara is a seasoned B2B marketing leader with deep experience across content strategy, demand generation.

Kiara Carniewski (01:31.141)
Yes you did. You crushed it.

Andrew Davis (01:43.584)
marketing agencies, customer marketing, really you name it. She's been all over in her roles and in her career. She's worked best at both agencies and in-house and has been helping brands not just attract leads, but actually design buyer journeys that make an impact. Chiara, welcome to the 98 % Podcast. I'm excited to have you here.

Kiara Carniewski (02:02.671)
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Andrew Davis (02:05.744)
Absolutely. So, you know, before we get into this debate that I'm actually pretty passionate about, and it's a debate that we have quite a bit on our marketing team here. Why don't you give us a little bit of background of your story and how you kind of ended up in your account director role and, you know, what have you, what are the big lessons you've learned along the way?

Kiara Carniewski (02:24.025)
Yeah, so very fortunate that I got to start my career in-house in a lot more traditional role of event marketing and traditional media buying itself with television and radio and really work my way through a nonprofit a little bit. then agency is where I have lived professionally for the last six years. So I love it. It's very fun, fast pace, but I'm glad to sit on both sides of the client side of what it's like to work like with an agency and also be the one leading strategy on the agency side.

So the way I like to explain my role essentially is I'm the bridge between here's what the client wants or what they're trying to achieve and here's how we can make it happen. And I'm helping with that strategy, that execution or supporting the team members to make their dreams come true. And usually that's revenue.

Andrew Davis (03:09.003)
Love it. Yeah, revenue is king, as we like to say in our go-to-market teams. As somebody who's worked primarily in-house, almost exclusively in-house and has hired a lot of agencies, ones that you have worked for and ones that you haven't, how many clients do you think you typically meet with on a weekly basis?

Kiara Carniewski (03:28.911)
On a weekly basis, usually I would say around five or six, it depends how extensive that project is. So if they're coming on for something smaller, like just general HubSpot onboarding, that's a pretty quick and easy engagement. But where I thrive professionally is then that relationship building piece to then help with the upsell so that they stay a client long after they get acquainted with HubSpot.

Andrew Davis (03:53.664)
Absolutely. the reason I ask the question is, when you're in-house, tend to sit in this almost echo chamber of your thoughts at times with your marketing team. Because you're all experiencing the same things at the same time. But where somebody that sits in your seat, where on average you're talking to a client every single day, I would imagine the topic that we're talking about today in terms of gating and ungating your content is coming up quite a bit. Is it not?

Kiara Carniewski (04:20.249)
All the time. It's all the time and it has been for years and it's one that I handle differently with every single client because I understand that based on their industry or what the actual piece of content is, is really going to determine what I decide to do, whether it's gated versus ungated.

Andrew Davis (04:37.101)
Absolutely, yeah. And let's level set here for this discussion. When we say gated content, we're talking about content that's sitting behind a form, member access, paywalls, really anything kind of along those lines basically, versus having it kind of free flowing in the example of like a blog post. A blog post would be ungated. I would have a lovely conversation with anybody who did decide to gate their blog posts, if I'm being 100 % honest and want to understand.

What revenue that's driving more than anything else. when we say gated verse ungated, we're talking about are the users and the visitors to your site or to your destination having to provide something to get access to that content. So that's what today's discussion is going to be about. This debate really isn't new, but it has changed in the buyer's journey over the last couple of years. I think it's no secret to anybody that kind of sits in the go to market space that

Go to market has massively changed over the last 18 months. Emergence of new technology and AI, but there's a lot of unknowns out there. And so there are strong opinions, either strongly held or loosely held in those strong opinions that come up quite a bit. What would you say the percentage split is between the clients that you talk to with this in terms of people that are like, yeah, I absolutely.

What this gated content in the other ones are like now is great piece content when everybody read it builds trust.

Kiara Carniewski (06:04.913)
I actually have been very fortunate now to be in a position where I can pull real stats of saying, hey, this is what happens when we just temporarily even ungate a piece and just, just let me throw a test out there and let's craft something that will still get them to get their email at some point in the lead nurture that follows that free content. So I say, hey, let's start with one piece, but that split percentage is probably.

around most folks want to lean towards like 70 % of their stuff gated versus not and I try to taper it back so we can be a little bit more balanced where it makes sense.

Andrew Davis (06:42.497)
Why do you think the debate is louder now? Verse five years ago.

Kiara Carniewski (06:49.259)
I think so, like a huge, you can kind of think of the way that even just, I know, just stick with me for a second, but the way that we had a lot of currency or the way that you had a lot of prominence was owning land in America. Now that way you capitalize on ownership is digitally. So if you have digital ownership of someone's email, access to their inbox, access to their phone, that is currency, that is power. So we're trying to make sure that we capitalize on.

you know, seeing the way that people interact with us, the way that we can control the messaging behind it and see that, make sure that we're kind of always sitting in front and also not to mention there's so many more messages firing off left and right. And, you know, we want to make sure that they remember our brand, our business, our company, whatever that is.

Andrew Davis (07:37.847)
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that too. And I think, I think it's no secret the velocity of content coming out is much, much greater now than five years ago. mean, five years ago, you had to have a content team of five to put out, you know, 25 pieces of content a month. Now, you know, you got programmatic SEO agencies pumping out content left and right, AI, tools like ChatGPT, Claude.

Kiara Carniewski (08:06.84)
Yes. Jasper. Yes, I think a huge part of that too is how can we make sure we're doing the right thing, the right amount of content? Because really I'm still always going to be a fan of saying quality over quantity nine times out of 10. And is it hitting the right person that I want it to? I know that sounds like a little old school in that way, but I don't want it to hit everybody. I want it to hit the right person that's going to buy. So that's really what.

Andrew Davis (08:06.934)
Jasper, like they're making it crazy, you know?

Kiara Carniewski (08:34.571)
comes down to the meat and potatoes of it all is can I get that right piece of content made so that the person who really needs their problem solved using my product or my client's product or service can solve for that challenge.

Andrew Davis (08:49.612)
Yeah, absolutely. And you said something that really kind of sparks my interest as a marketing leader. You say you'll always choose quality over quantity, right? And I agree with you. Like a good piece of content is more impactful than a chat GPT prompt that's, know, pasted in a document basically, right? There's a use case for a healthy mix of both. But what would you say to a demand gen marketer who's sitting here and going, I don't...

I don't care if it's quality, once they fill out the form, achievement set, basically, right? Like a lead generator who's sitting there going, hey, all I need is a good title, a good thumbnail, and a nice form, and I'm gonna start creating pipeline for my team.

Kiara Carniewski (09:35.373)
I love, I love the energy. So the first thing I'm going to say first and foremost is like, I love that their sites are set on, you know, we're going to shoot for the moon or maybe even Jupiter, but also let's, I'm always going to stay grounded in reality and know that there's a lot of nuance to that because of the, you know, at any given moment, the economic structure of a company could change where we are, you know, as a country versus, you know, there's these bigger ideas that still affect individual businesses and individual roles.

Andrew Davis (10:04.31)
Mm-hmm.

Kiara Carniewski (10:04.399)
So for demand gen, of course I'm gonna say inflated pipelines and putting a lot of energy there is great, but how can we do that? Cause I don't want just numbers there. I want the right numbers so they don't drop off in the end or they do buy and go forward and they weren't ready, prepared. They don't have that user adoption and they back out after three months, forbid, right? So there's always other factors to consider that make the entire experience so much more holistic than just these are.

figures and facts in one pipeline.

Andrew Davis (10:35.424)
Yeah, I agree with that. And, you know, from a revenue standpoint, gated gives you attribution, contact data, follow up automations, clear funnel movement. Like a marketing in ops person is going to sit there and go gate it so that I can do 90 % of the work for the sales team. Right. And a sales team loves gated content because it feels measurable. It feels controllable. Right. You get first name, last name company who's shopping. There's some level of intent shown there.

basically, right? But, you know, quality, quality has that retention factor to it, that trust building factor to it, right? There's an argument to be made that I'm curious to your thoughts on here that, hey, quality content isn't as impactful today anymore. Kind of like what you were saying around, you'll take quality over quantity.

But quality isn't as impactful because there's so much of that velocity of content kind of coming out today that nobody's going to read the whole document. Nobody's going to read the whole thing, right? Like, for example, some of our best pieces of content here at TextUs are not the, you know, 25 page, you know, 2025 SMS engagement report. There's some good snippets in there that you take out and you're like, oh, that is, that's a great piece that I can take back. But really it's the guides.

You know what I mean? They'll read everything in the guides because it's like this is how you do X basically. So I guess there's a definition of what quality is. But from a lead gen standpoint, the sales gen standpoint, they're sitting there and they're going, I don't care. Just get me the lead. And you got content marketers and marketing leaders that saying, well, we have to build trust somewhere. Right.

Kiara Carniewski (12:00.239)
Yeah.

Kiara Carniewski (12:17.593)
Yeah, think so. Great point of just saying quality content does not mean it's longer or it takes more time. Some of the best shit can be pumped out in five minutes just because it resonates, just because you posted it at the right time and it hit the right amount of people. And there's no perfect sequence to that. And sometimes it's, you know, again, it doesn't have to be the thing that took a lot of bodies sitting in a room to make that strategy happen and execute over a span of six months. can be.

As simple as I have a good personality, I see a problem in front of me and I know who it's going to target. So I'm going to post about it on LinkedIn. And while unexpectedly it led to this exact revenue result.

Andrew Davis (12:56.715)
Yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny you bring up LinkedIn. was just talking to a team yesterday about, about content specific and listen, I'm to be honest, you know, inside baseball here for everybody. Andrew's not a reader. I'm not a big SVP of marketing that just reads countless reports and like just tries to understand the market.

Kiara Carniewski (13:12.439)
you

Andrew Davis (13:20.513)
What I do is I try to get a pulse on what's happening in go-to-market, what's happening in B2B SaaS, what's happening at marketing agencies by like, what's on LinkedIn? What are content creators saying on LinkedIn? What are the workflow diagrams that they're creating that they feel are making an impact or the pain that they're experiencing, right? Yes, LinkedIn can be a little overindated with some people that post something with a cliffhanger and you've got to read more and it's a long story. Like myself included, I've done a couple of those as well.

Kiara Carniewski (13:29.016)
Yeah.

Andrew Davis (13:50.382)
But I can tell you, I learned more on LinkedIn when I scroll in the morning while my kids are eating breakfast. Terrible habit, don't do that. But I learned more on that than anything that I've downloaded from a really reputable demand brand or something along those lines that's the longer form content like you've talked about. I've pulled snippets and stuff, but I learned a lot on LinkedIn content simply by somebody going, you know what, that's a really good idea. I'm gonna post that on LinkedIn.

Kiara Carniewski (14:10.725)
Hmm.

Kiara Carniewski (14:17.253)
Nine times out of 10, think a huge part of that too is you're identifying a face to it. It's coming from a person. It's not coming from a brand. So I think one of the brands and businesses I always like to shout out is Duolingo and the Duolingo Owl making that brand. And I understand it's a little bit more B2C, but even just on the business side, when you have someone who can really understand their audience and say, Hey, I'm talking to these leaders, executives, and I am also in that same boat as them.

Andrew Davis (14:30.861)
Yeah.

Kiara Carniewski (14:45.615)
here's this idea, this thing I'm struggling with, here's how I can post it easily. And it might resonate, it might not, but why not post it anyway to see where it lands? But I think a huge part of that comes back to is there's a person actively behind there and you're not feeling like you're being sold to or that you have to do something next, like take an action, building trust, you could say.

Andrew Davis (15:08.427)
You know, I, I, I came up in demand. I, I built my career as a demand gen marketer more than anything else. I tell people that all the time. I was focused on leads versus focusing on brand more than anything else. Right. And as I've moved into the leadership space over the last couple of years, as a demand marketer, I used to roll my eyes at trust. used to be like, no, let, let, let the salesperson build trust. Right. Like let me get the lead and hand it off to the salesperson and let them.

Kiara Carniewski (15:28.677)
EEEE

Andrew Davis (15:38.284)
build the experience and create the experience for this person. I'm just trying to create lead magnets here and create pipeline for my team, right? As I've moved into this leadership roles over the last couple of positions that I've been in, I've learned that if you build trust before it ever even gets to sales, holy cow, is that a way easier process.

Kiara Carniewski (15:57.913)
Huge difference. Yes. Yeah. Cause my biggest thing too was like, yeah, you're having that pipeline built up for your sales team, but how ready were they? And also what's that sales cycle look like? So another thing on the sales enablement side, which is, you know, fundamentally a piece of marketing that I feel like goes a little bit more on notice than it should is how can I also make sales life easier by giving them resources to say, Hey, here's we're closing deals on an average of 90 days.

let's shorten that to 60 to 30. So not only are we getting the most qualified folks, we're also making their job easier by answering all these questions that the prepped lead is already going to have because we know it, we've listened, we've cared. So I still see it as the end goal is sure the sale, the retention, but let's make that back from the first time they visit the site to a loyal, dedicated, you know, customer.

Andrew Davis (16:53.943)
Yep. I always say, a lot, we built a new website as a, as an organization and we launched it in July of this year. And, I said a lot that your website is your curb appeal, just like your house. Right. It's the first thing that people see. It's the first thing that they kind of experience in first impressions go a very long way, basically. Right. I'll be honest, if I go to a website and maybe this is picky, but if there's like misspellings or broken links or anything along those lines,

I immediately am like, what's their attention to detail? Like, what's that gonna be like in an experience, right? And so content on the website, content as downloadable content, content as LinkedIn content, like it builds trust and just putting a little bit more detail into it is really, really important to kind of help accelerate that sales cycle. There are data points out there, I forget what they are, so I don't wanna quote them, but it's like a prospect when they engage with your brand.

makes a decision in like the first 30 seconds of whether or not they trust you or not, basically as a brand. I'm butchering the data point there, but it was like a shocking number. I wish I remember from where it was from, but it was a couple of months ago that I was reading it and it was like, dang, really? Really? Like, I don't even do that with people, you know what I mean, let alone brands.

Kiara Carniewski (17:59.213)
I believe that.

Kiara Carniewski (18:03.781)
Yeah.

Kiara Carniewski (18:11.981)
It's crazy.

Kiara Carniewski (18:16.217)
I feel like you do get an initial gut instinct, but do you not? Like with people, like, this feels good. I'm like, there's something off here I gotta put up more of. I gotta pull the wall up a little bit here. But yeah, no, that I believe with a hundred percent because you also don't wanna make more work for them. There's people, look, being a human, hard enough. also, being a human's really freaking hard in 2025. So now adding the concept of,

Andrew Davis (18:20.875)
yeah!

Yeah, there's something shady going on here.

Andrew Davis (18:37.517)
Right.

Kiara Carniewski (18:43.895)
They have to know what they want. So they already know that they have a challenge. How can they solve for it? They have to do this research. They want to buy on their own time. Why would you make their website or something that can help them make you feel like the trusted brand that they can go to just one step harder by not having a working button or a CTA that, that just don't do that. Don't be that person.

Andrew Davis (19:05.549)
totally fair. I should change my behaviors quite a bit, honestly, if I'm being honest. It's a fair point. I'll take that as a nice takeaway for you. There are certain types of content, really deep research, even commissioned research at some point, right? Like for the listeners out there that don't know, like, yeah, there's research done by marketers who write this content, but there's also commissioned research where they'll go out to a provider and...

Kiara Carniewski (19:14.81)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (19:33.07)
and work with them to collect the data so that they can create accurate insights off of that. That costs money. That's an investment from a marketing department. That's an investment from a go-to-market team. Benchmark reports, proprietary insights, anything along those lines. And there's a sense of protecting value there or protecting return on investment where I could totally see a CEO's case or a CMO's case going, no, no, no, no, no, no. I spent.

$10,000 on commissioning this report. Absolutely. We are going to get leads out of this. Absolutely. We are going, we're going to gate this. Um, this, depending on what side of the coin that you are on this debate, like how would you approach that conversation with either a client or a CEO or a C level executive? That's like, no, no. We spent way too much money on this to, to, just hope that we build trust.

Kiara Carniewski (20:26.595)
Yeah, I, and I hear that pain point a thousand percent because obviously the money and the investment that's already been made is astronomical and always every dollar counts in that respect. But I will always say that giving value will equate to receiving value back. So in this case, value, saying if we're giving out some of that money that we invested in the report and giving little nuggets of that wisdom for free and other forms of content, maybe it's not the whole report. Maybe it's

snippet of video which is something in a text message. It's something small to say, hey did you know that we have this information? Does this resonate with you? LinkedIn would probably be the best platform for that because it gets a lot of shock factor and with stats like this. So maybe it's free and they're just perusing information while their kids are eating breakfast and you know they find value and trust from you just sharing those initial nuggets of wisdom and

Eventually it does lead to them wanting to actually fill to get the rest of that info and one thing I will always say and I have told CEO after CEO of different businesses is if someone really wants it They're going to put in their information the person who wants it will fill it out No matter what you don't have to worry about those people what we're going to be talking about here are the folks on the fence who? Probably are really qualified and they're not a hundred percent sure yet if they're going to actually choose you

And really it's what's that currency exchange for them to give you their information.

Andrew Davis (21:59.246)
That's a great point. That's a really, really good point because it's, I said this when we were building our website and putting forms on our website, we have a script, a clear out script on it that says, no, I'm not accepting anything that's like free mail accounts or anything along those lines. And the immediate response to that was our conversion rate will go down. I'm like, well, who cares? They're not real leads, right? If they're serious enough about buying our product, they're gonna fill the form.

Kiara Carniewski (22:23.93)
Yes.

Kiara Carniewski (22:29.039)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (22:29.183)
It's gonna happen. They're gonna put their work email in. They're gonna put a text enabled phone number in. And if they're not, do we really want our sales team chasing Gmail's? Do we really want, right? Like it's, yeah.

Kiara Carniewski (22:38.661)
Right, you don't know that's not worth it. So I always say, you're you never even when something is gated, you there is going to be a percentage of those folks who are going to do it immediately and you don't even have to question it. sales should be stoked about those people. And same with the leadership. And now what we want to do is how can we get net new folks that may have only heard of us once and passing over here and there, maybe they don't know us at all.

How can we kind of build that trust, get our brand in front of them, that loyalty piece to say, hey, we're here, we can solve issues. We care about your day-to-day struggles as a human and how that translates to us solving your problem with whatever we provide you.

Andrew Davis (23:23.821)
Agreed. Where do you see people getting it wrong? Where do you see teams that are just missing the mark when it comes to content, whether it's gated or ungated?

Kiara Carniewski (23:37.573)
I think a huge, the first thing I want to say too is because a lot of companies have come a long way from this, but they considered anything that was a premium asset must be gated. Anything. Even an infographic. I'm not kidding. This was a real conversation. This was something very real. This was real. This is, I have proof. have receipts on this that I could tell you about. So they came in and just said, but this is.

Andrew Davis (23:54.381)
I would never fill the form out for an infographic.

Andrew Davis (24:02.015)
You

Kiara Carniewski (24:06.041)
This is time, energy, and money that was spent for y'all to create, to develop, to get the information of, and that one piece. I'm just like, but think of how we can transform this into something else. This is just as simple as, and again, now we're talking about an example from two or three years ago. Think of how easy it is to make an infographic for free using Canva or all the other different platforms. Throw a prompt into ChatGPT. You can spit out something really amazing within an hour.

that's really the concern is the time and money wasted. But one is thinking that any asset considered or labeled premium must be gated or giving less attention to their blog because they think it's not, it's only going to generate maybe the impressions rather than lead to a customer journey path or an experience to get them to eventually buy because it's free and visible.

Andrew Davis (25:01.953)
Yeah, I agree. I'm to go on a soapbox here for a second because what you said was something that was really, really important is people giving up on their blog because it's just impressions or it's just traffic, right? It's not going to convert anything. If you're doing go to market correctly, you're still generating intent and interest. And if you have the proper tools in place, which used to be super expensive a long time ago, and now they're not so expensive anymore.

whether it's intent signals or whether it's website insights and whatever it is, you drive somebody to your blog. That's a good piece of content. Not only is are they getting the reference from probably their AI prompt tool, whether it's chat, GPT or Claude or whoever, right? Not only are they getting that and it's linking over in the the AI overviews are picking up on that basically. But if you have the tools in place, you know who that account is, right?

Kiara Carniewski (26:00.644)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (26:01.484)
And so you're not cold calling anymore. You're near bound warm calling. And I was just telling my demand guy this the other day, where I said, hey, listen, we were very focused in 2025 on lead generation. We rebuilt the demand gen engine. Everything was inbound. Our pipeline was like 90 % inbound, basically. It's shifting. And the whole go-to-market motion of any B2B SaaS organization is shifting.

But I told him, said, the important thing to think about is we have the tools in place to where driving impressions and driving clicks and driving traffic to high intent pages is a good thing because we know how to automate the motions and we know how to automate the outreach to get them to move through the funnel. And eventually that click will become a lead, eventually, right?

It's not so much anymore of just looking at a traffic number and converting. And so I would argue against somebody who gives up on a blog or gives up on an ungated piece of content because it's not generating leads right now and say, well, you're doing it wrong. Basically.

Kiara Carniewski (27:08.845)
Yeah, so my one of my more famous stats claim to fame in my professional career and this was done with a client that I very much love and hold close to my heart as we call it the little blog that could was a blog post that within its first year, obviously ungated, generated and had attributed revenue of more than $2 million associated with it because it provided that much value. So if you're doing the things.

Andrew Davis (27:32.874)
Is that like influence revenue or like direct attribution first touch? Holy cow. Okay. I need that playbook.

Kiara Carniewski (27:35.685)
Direct attribution close one deals. girl needs, oh my gosh, no. And that same client, I will say because this stat is very important to me. So that same client, I was with them from when I started over the three years. So my client retention rate was 100 % across the board. So love that. But then their content strategy I developed over two years.

Andrew Davis (27:58.262)
Nice. Congrats.

Kiara Carniewski (28:03.096)
So this is gated and ungated. This is social. This is infographics, blogs, premium assets, webinars, assessments, you name it. The entire content strategy generated attributed revenue of over $37 million in two years. Closed one attributed revenue for that one client in FinTech.

Andrew Davis (28:25.814)
Holy cow.

Kiara Carniewski (28:27.46)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (28:28.982)
What's your content strategy? Can I have it? Can you send it to me? I gotta fill out a form. Wow.

Kiara Carniewski (28:31.009)
Yeah, let me, so you have to fill out a form. Let me tell you. No, I'm kidding. No, just call me. We'll talk about it. It's great. So that's one of my, this is why I am so passionate about this is because I have very clear stats and figures to showcase that success of saying, look, you have to look at the strategy as a whole. This is an example of it over two years, what it looks like. cannot be as black and white and saying,

we gate everything or we don't gate everything and it just is what it is. That's not how life works because that would mean that we really can understand a person inside and out and act them to act so pro-grammatically. Is that a word? We'll see what Kira has to say. Yeah, I was just going to say I'll look that up. I know I mean something. It's just, it going to form?

Andrew Davis (29:14.924)
We can take it. I'll accept it. I'll just right click add to dictionary on that one.

Kiara Carniewski (29:27.541)
But the whole point of that is saying we can't take exact clicks the way that a robot would were human. have, you know, the way that we operate is going to be completely different. So I don't want folks to ever get tripped up on just the one piece. Let's look at the strategy as a whole over six months, over 12 months, over two years and see what results that drives.

Andrew Davis (29:47.758)
Yeah. You seem to be very good at attributing revenue impact to content. Just some of the numbers you're throwing, 37 million. That's crazy good. Right? That's, you should be. I mean, I put that at the top of my LinkedIn profile. 37 million attributed dollars of revenue on my content strategy. Freaking, you know, Google me. Type of thing. That's awesome.

Kiara Carniewski (29:59.853)
Yeah, it is crazy. I'm very proud of it.

Kiara Carniewski (30:07.15)
It's

Kiara Carniewski (30:12.716)
Yeah.

Andrew Davis (30:16.821)
It feels like this is like a revenue debate more than a philosophical debate than anything else. So I've got kind of a conundrum question for you. If you had to choose 10,000 ungated readers with a 2 % conversion rate downstream or 500 gated downloads that sales follows up with immediately, which one do you think that you would take?

Kiara Carniewski (30:45.957)
Probably the first. If I am in, am I in control of the strategy?

Andrew Davis (30:49.835)
Yeah, well, yeah, this is your world. We're just living in it.

Kiara Carniewski (30:51.553)
It's my world. a fictitious. So here's the thing too, because I love, I do have a huge amount of respect for folks who take accountability. And a lot of that accountability means that you understand every part of the person who helped develop the website to that one intern maybe that wrote one blog post one time. Are you going back and checking and updating content as it sees fit to do so?

Are you letting your current CRM folks who already are aware of you and are engaging with you know that this has been revised and updated for 2026, 2025? Are you repurposing things? So I think a huge part of that is just not assuming because the folks that came in this 500 folks sales is going to follow up with them. That doesn't mean it's a yes. So if we could take the ungated folks and influence them of the beginning to end experiences, pure loyalty and trust and just solely.

Andrew Davis (31:41.826)
Mm-hmm.

Kiara Carniewski (31:50.405)
fundamentally giving a shit about them. I can convert all 2,000 of them and then upsell them afterwards too. I'm confident of it because I did it multiple times now.

Andrew Davis (31:59.915)
I was just gonna say, I don't have an argument against you right now. your track record is speaking for itself to where I'm just gonna sit there and go, let her do her thing.

Kiara Carniewski (32:02.777)
No!

Kiara Carniewski (32:08.609)
Yeah, and here's another one too that I also, I actually forgot about this until I went back and pulled up some, cause I'm a big receipts girl. love to make sure that I have some of my wins secured, but for a telecommunications company, a huge, everyone was just talking down on the idea of them having a newsletter. And I said, you know, I, I hear, I, it's so funny too. There was a LinkedIn post yesterday of like,

I only do newsletters for clients because they want to, it doesn't mean that it's going to work. And I love sharing this fact too, is if you're doing things right, as in that there's creative and strategic liberty, you're not just doing a newsletter because you saw this competitor doing it and now you feel like you need to do it right. So within the first 12 months of launching that newsletter, over 100 closed deals and over $90,000 in upsold revenue from current clients that existed in their database.

Andrew Davis (32:48.906)
everybody else is doing it. Right.

Kiara Carniewski (33:05.605)
That's what I'm saying. If people want the money, know, if people want the information, they're going to spend the money. If they trust you and you provide consistent value to them, they're going to invest in you. They're going to trust you. They're going to believe you when you say, it's not just about me making a sale. It's about knowing that we can sell for this problem for you. And we actually care about making your day easier in whatever capacity that your product or service serves.

Andrew Davis (33:05.718)
That's great. That's so good. It's so good.

Andrew Davis (33:34.573)
100%. And as a demand gen marketer, like newsletters over the last couple of years have really come to the forefront of a demand strategy. Like ads, ads are just getting worse and worse and people are over inundated with them. Right? Like we're all on 1900 social media as it feels like we're all on smart streaming platforms that now, you know, what you paid $7 for, you know, five years ago is now you have to get 15,000 ads in between.

Kiara Carniewski (34:03.876)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (34:03.999)
Episodes and stuff and so I'm I'm a big believer that like advertising to the millennial audience in the Gen Z audience Is becoming ineffective every year over and over again, and there are other channels that are driving stronger Trust and stronger impact and newsletters is one of those things whether it's your existing newsletter or a partner newsletter that you partner with But I'm also seeing

increased ad costs associated to newsletters because they know, those publishers know that it's becoming very valuable. But I think there's something to be said about generating either your own newsletter or with a partner that really talks about the topics that your audience cares about and is less salesy, right? Like an ad is headline, sub-headline, call to action, right? Trying to resonate like that. A newsletter is multiple pieces of content, right? So yeah, there

Kiara Carniewski (34:56.579)
Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Davis (35:03.213)
Newsletters, I think, are shockingly given the fact that email is not performing extremely well over the last couple of years compared to what it did back in the late 2000 teens and early 2020s. It's amazing to me how well newsletters are.

Kiara Carniewski (35:22.021)
And I think a huge part of that too comes from as somebody who is perpetually at inbox zero. I might give up that. Oh my gosh. After this recording, we are going to screen share and I'm going to fix your inbox within a few clicks. is Andrew. I am actually going to collapse. Are you joking? Oh man. Okay.

Andrew Davis (35:29.229)
We are opposites.

Andrew Davis (35:37.875)
I hope so, because there's 8000 unread messages in there. No, I'm not. I'm a Slack guy. I Slack and text, believe it or not. Text me.

Kiara Carniewski (35:51.237)
wow. That's, that's so crazy. You just eat, sleep and breathe your brand. my gosh. That's so funny. No, this leads to, and I know I want to save it, but one of the biggest things that I care about too is just honestly is the, also like saying in this case of the newsletter debate is, you know, the product really isn't the hero. It's the customer's need for like connection.

Andrew Davis (35:58.133)
Yeah, 100%.

Kiara Carniewski (36:21.241)
So it's, you're solving the problem. Essentially what like people like to say in a non-professional way would be like, how lazy is your customer, right? Is you don't have to always inspire them. They don't always need this big transformation, but they want the easiest way to get the job done or that problem solved. Whereas newsletters come in as, right, well, they have your trust and you have their attention because you solved for it. Now they want to see the personality and the person behind the curtain because they connect and resonate with you.

And that's where that loyalty retention and just continuation of a positive experience happens way after just the initial sale, first sale, you could say.

Andrew Davis (36:59.884)
The number one example of the best content strategy that I've ever witnessed in my career was HubSpot. HubSpot created endless amounts of free content, whether it was gated or not, right? Whether you were a customer or not created spreadsheets and dashboards and all these, I mean, they gave away their CRM for free eventually at that point. You could put that in your content strategy, right? And they,

Kiara Carniewski (37:10.232)
Yeah.

Kiara Carniewski (37:26.928)
They did.

Andrew Davis (37:29.48)
understood what their customer was feeling as a customer, like on their day to day, not just, I'm having trouble tracking my clients and I need a place to have a central location. Like they were like, yeah, we know, but we got that. Right. But like we get that, like you care about analytics and tracking and you need a system that does that. Don't go spend five days trying to build a spreadsheet. Take this one. Right. guides. Like I remember, I remember back in 2017,

Kiara Carniewski (37:52.58)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (37:58.059)
I was downloading guide after guide after guide on how to build this strategy or build that strategy or go do this template type of thing. And it was just so, so helpful as a marketer working with a pretty bone, a bare bones team and saying, go for it. And I really felt like HubSpot understood me as a marketer and as a marketing team leader to say, like, let's take these pain points that you have and like address them. Don't even care about HubSpot as a product. Like who cares? Right.

Kiara Carniewski (38:25.999)
Right, right, because those folks, are a lot of, and I'm thinking the same timeframe that you are 2017 to 2020 ish, is there were a ton of folks who were still very much in WordPress or in Salesforce. They didn't even know about HubSpot. They never had to use it before, but it was just, it became a reputable trusted figure in the entire community of folks who were dealing with CRM issues, who were dealing with data hygiene, who

wanted to have all of these different facts. And it sounds boring to the folks who don't live in the world that we live in, but this is stuff that you could say would keep people up at night, right? It's how can I make sure I'm making the most of folks in this segment? How can I make sure that I'm showing value as a marketer to my sales team? How can I make sure that we have this marketing and sales alignment so there's no friction within our teams, right? There's a lot of components into that in HubSpot, which is like, check here.

Check there, here's your free assessment here. I have the spreadsheet for you here, a tool, a template kit that you can rebrand yourself. They were pumping content that delivered value and so many folks now, if we're fast forwarding to end of 2025, they're in HubSpot now.

Andrew Davis (39:40.813)
Yep. And they're, they're power users of HubSpot as well. Like, they'll never switch. They'll never change. It feels like, right. I think the thing that HubSpot during that time gave me more than anything else was I knew what we wanted to do. Like as a marketer, you're a very creative individual, right? Like you're thinking about how can I stand out? What are things that I can do that can, that can, you know, get me above the noise of everybody else in my market, right? I know what I want.

Kiara Carniewski (39:43.587)
Yeah, yes.

Kiara Carniewski (39:49.509)
Right.

Andrew Davis (40:09.782)
But how do I translate that on paper to an organization who are not built up of marketers, right? Who are built up of either founders or finance executives or operations executives that don't think like marketers. So I always struggled in what I appreciated from HubSpot's content. So really anybody's content strategy that provided templates was the fact that, hey, I've got this idea in my head and I know how it works in my head and it's working in my head, but it's not going to work in yours.

how can I get this on paper to translate my idea in my strategy versus me guessing what a marketing strategy should look like in a slide deck, right? That was one of the biggest impacts that I felt from that content strategy that told me HubSpot understands me as a B2B SaaS marketer.

Kiara Carniewski (40:46.723)
Yes.

Kiara Carniewski (40:55.653)
100%. Yeah, now we're even seeing that another layer of friction being removed. And at that time they had a huge dominance over search engine optimization. And now that power is kind of coming back to the consumer itself with answer engine optimization. So AEO is kind of the new hot, I don't even want to say hot commodity, but it just, really is a huge influence is do you have the answers to the questions that people are asking?

and throwing out into the massive ether, the void that is the internet. And can you answer and solve for it? And where does your business and your content rank in that value? Let's bring it down to what it really boils down to is what level of value are you providing?

Andrew Davis (41:26.538)
Yep.

Andrew Davis (41:41.197)
Yeah, absolutely. You brought up AEO. you know, let's wrap the conversation up by saying, where do you think content's going? Like where do you think content marketing will be like, let's say 2030, right? We're looking down the road four years, oh my gosh, four years from now, goodness. We're looking at 20, 2030 is four years away. It's four years away.

Kiara Carniewski (41:56.958)
Wait, that actually just blew my mind that... No!

Andrew Davis (42:04.742)
What, where do you think content's gonna go? Like what do you think is gonna, I have an opinion on this, but I wanna know what your opinion, cause you're generating $37 million off your content strategy, right? Like, so where do you think this is gonna go?

Kiara Carniewski (42:13.973)
Yeah.

I hope that it leads to content that is fundamentally a little bit more digestible. think we've made leaps and bounds compared to even the last seven years, but I hope people realize that we don't need to be super extravagant and have a 50 page report to make it something valuable. think I kind of like touched on that a little bit earlier, but I hope people still continue the trajectory of bite-sized digestible content that is really hitting on value answering the questions.

will remain at the forefront. And also I hope that content strategy really resonates more on a less polished. I love the direction of like unhinged content from brands like Wendy. Hello, have you ever seen the social media folks at Wendy's? Hats off to them. They're unhinged. Yes, duolingo. Yes, yes, roast your brand. But if you go on

Andrew Davis (43:06.944)
Gosh, yeah, they're like my favorite. Yes. They roast you. I love it.

Kiara Carniewski (43:15.103)
any platform now, it is all of the companies that are, you know, they're taking that stance of showing their personality. They're more than just a brand and we have to look this way and be buttoned up and professional because that's how we should be perceived. No, people, the whole entire game has changed and people like working with people. And that's what marketing should really be centered on is if you think marketing is not about people, it shouldn't be in marketing. And I hope content really leads that act.

aspect of humanness, more humanness to content strategy.

Andrew Davis (43:45.42)
Mm-hmm.

I think that goes right in line with where I thought it was going to go is my bold prediction of the next couple of years is that people are going to get so bored of AI technology. Because AI is in everything, right? It's in every tool that you're using now. And it's great for productivity. Trust me, that won't go away. But I feel like there's this pendulum swing of use AI for everything. And now people are going to start wondering like,

Kiara Carniewski (44:09.829)
Right.

Andrew Davis (44:15.756)
Was this content written by AI or not? And so I think it's going to be less about brand content and more about human touch, human author content, where I think you'll start seeing blog posts that are like, hey, this blog post was 90 % written by human touch and 10 % tweaked by AI, versus this blog post was written 90 % by AI and 10 % by human touch. Hey.

We're a human first organization, meaning like when you call and you get through our support prompt, you're going to talk to a human, right? We, you're going to be sold to by a human. We're a human first organization. And I think people are going to start valuing that more than anything else. Very similar to like back in 2010, when people were starting to use like auto tree calling trees, right? And it was like trying to solve people's problems. And then they just started promoting after that. They just started, you want to talk to a person.

Kiara Carniewski (45:03.897)
Yes.

Andrew Davis (45:09.526)
Like they would literally use that on commercials. Like you call us, you will talk to a person basically. I think something very similar is gonna happen with content specific to how AI has accelerated it, which is great. But I think people don't like being sold to or talked to by somebody who doesn't have a pulse just like them, right?

Kiara Carniewski (45:14.394)
Yes.

Kiara Carniewski (45:32.217)
Completely agree that comes to the one thing I know your signature sign off question too Which is I've been trying to hold it and not accidentally say it because it's something that I really think is going to help it Do you need to set me up and let people know what the actual question is?

Andrew Davis (45:42.092)
Go for it.

I... No, I don't. Go for it.

Kiara Carniewski (45:50.725)
No. So my hot take always is that the real competitive advantage is personality. A tool, a tactic, it can be replicated, can be copied, it can be prompted for chat GPT, but you can't fake having a personality and giving a shit about people. That's something I've prided myself on pre, you know, AI taking over all of the things. And I think it has stuck with me really well throughout.

whether I've been in-house, nonprofit, agency, any client that I've ever worked with is, she's a human, she really cares about people and it shows and she has a personality and it's just fun. Like I want to make work fun, right? At the end of the day, I'll say on any call at least eight to 10 times a week, you can talk to anyone who's ever known me. We are not saving lives doing this work, thank God. We are not saving lives here. Let's make it fun while we're here at least.

Andrew Davis (46:49.49)
Absolutely. I totally agree with that. Never take yourself too seriously, right? Like we're B2B marketers. We're not saving lives. We're not on the Medevac helicopter or anything along those lines.

Kiara Carniewski (46:54.519)
Yes. Right. Yes.

Kiara Carniewski (47:00.925)
No, and thank goodness because I don't, I am glad that there are folks who are doing those things, but no, this is not open heart surgery. This is not, no one's life is going to be at the cost of me changing my email subject line for a client.

Andrew Davis (47:04.414)
Yeah, I don't think I could do that.

Andrew Davis (47:09.952)
Right, absolutely.

Andrew Davis (47:18.336)
Absolutely. So we'll do the cliche end here basically of like, Hey, what should we do gated or ungated content? Sounds like our answer is depends basically micro pieces of content seem like they're going to be dominating the space in the future. Length doesn't necessarily mean quality, right? AI is good, but it shouldn't be everything basically. and create a personality to your content, create a

Kiara Carniewski (47:29.125)
Mm.

Andrew Davis (47:46.038)
We always say brand voice, right? And everything. So yeah, like there's pros and cons to both of them, but I think it depends.

Kiara Carniewski (47:57.335)
It does depend a thousand percent, but I will say that it's, there's this phrase I heard back and this is like dating myself of my major being in journalism, my master's in marketing, but all news is local. So it always starts somewhere on a local level. There's local, regional, national news, global, that sort of thing. My concept of content would, I would argue actually lean towards ungated because there's something that can pull them in.

It can be something on one of the social media platforms. It could be a video. It could be a reference that was mentioned and you're linked to in another article for that on page SEO, right? And those backlinks can come in out of the ether and help you. But it's really how can you keep their interest, engage them, and how can you make sure that that trust feels at the center of every piece that you're creating and putting out there.

Andrew Davis (48:52.108)
100%. And I will take your advice and stick to the ungated simply because you have the track record to show it more than anything else. I you blew me away with those numbers. I'm not gonna lie. Those are some great numbers. You should be proud of those.

Kiara Carniewski (49:07.204)
I am, yes, yeah, and I came from caring about people.

Andrew Davis (49:12.246)
That's awesome, love it. Chiara, absolutely crushed it. Thanks for joining us on today's podcast. That wraps up episode two of the 98 % Podcast. If this episode helped you rethink how content fits into your funnel, share it with a teammate, a boss, a founder, really anybody in the go-to-market motion, anybody really in your organization that may be interested in growing their business more than anything else.

If you're enjoying the show, subscribe, follow, leave a review. It generally helps us find more operators to help grow their business more than anything else. Kiara, thanks again for joining us. Was really enjoying this. We should do this again.

Kiara Carniewski (49:48.825)
We should, I would love to come back.

Andrew Davis (49:51.102)
Awesome, we'll see you all next time on the 98 % Podcast.

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