The first marketing team I joined had 15 people. I saw how it operated at full capacity, but I still didn't fully understand what each role actually did. That came later when budget cuts slashed our team down to four.
Overnight, I went from specialized long-form writer to full-stack generalist. My first task: rebuild our brand narrative for a leaner product with a skeleton crew.
That's when I learned to build a content flywheel that turned a handful of flagship assets into months of distribution across every channel. It's a skill I've refined over the years, and it's how small teams compete with bigger budgets.
Here's my process.
Do your research.
While creating Interstellar, Christopher Nolan worked closely with physicist and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne to make sure Gargantua, the black hole depicted in the film, was based on actual mathematical equations from Einstein's general relativity.
James Cameron made 12 dives to the Titanic in 1997 during production of his iconic film. He spent more time with the ship than the actual captain and used the information he collected to create authentic depictions of the ship's interior.
As the writer and director of your brand story, you have to do your research.
Talk to your customers
Start with your power user. These are your happiest customers and the ones with the most success using your product. Amplify those stories and you'll attract more prospects primed for similar success.
At GRIN, our happiest customers ran affiliate marketing programs with low- to mid-tier creators. Why?
For starters, it's expensive to work with big names. REALLY expensive. Most brands simply don't have the budget to even consider five, sometimes six-figure content deals.
But affiliate marketing is performance pay. You only have to pay creators when they make a sale. That makes it an accessible strategy for all brands and unlocks near unlimited potential for scale.
BUT — you can't scale without the right partner. So, the story I told was threefold:
What affiliate marketing is and why it's effective
The pros of partnering with smaller creators over household names
How GRIN supports affiliate networks with roster sizes in the hundreds, sometimes thousands
Telling this story attracts brands with the same circumstances. That's your next generation of happy customers.
Get the most you can from those customer interviews.
Record every interview. Your happiest customers become your case studies.
Their stories become testimonials and their metrics become proof points. That one 30-minute conversation turns into a video case study, a dozen pull quotes for your website, clips for social media, and snippets for sales decks.
One conversation can give you a dozen assets. But only if you hit record!
Survey your customers' customers.
You have to know what makes your customers happy, but it's equally important to understand what makes their customers happy.
At GRIN, we ran an annual consumer survey collecting data from thousands of 18-25 year-olds who regularly use social media, follow influencers, and shop online.
What interested me most was the tradeoff between a creator with 5,000 followers versus a creator with 500,000.
The data told a clear story. Yes, larger influencers have name recognition and create brand awareness. But that's not what makes people buy.
Smaller creators are far more relatable. Their content is rawer and more authentic. People see themselves in these creators in a way they can't with celebrities.
That trust translates to sales.
The problem is you need a lot of smaller creators to move the needle. That requires software that can support a large roster and provide you with everything you need to scale. That requires GRIN!
Other research methods
Customer interviews and survey data are the foundation, but they aren't the only tool. Here are a few other research methods I lean on:
Product usage data: Which features get used most? Which correlate with retention? The numbers reveal what actually drives value, not what you think drives value.
Review audits: Read every G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius review. And your competitors', too. You'll find candid takes on what people love, what frustrates them, and what's missing entirely.
Competitive content analysis: Audit your competitors' blogs, case studies, and messaging. Where are they weak? Where is the conversation missing? Those gaps are your opportunity.
Focus groups: If budget allows, get 8-10 people from your ICP in a room together. They'll tell you things they'd never say in a one-on-one interview. The group dynamic surfaces truths you can't get elsewhere.
Write the story.
No one likes stale marketing copy. I would never write like I'm working on a B2B fantasy novel, but I find it helpful to put myself in that frame of mind sometimes.
The hero
This is your customer. More specifically, this is the person who uses your product every day.
This is Frodo.
Frodo is stressed because Gandalf, his CEO, has just stopped by his hobbit hole and given him the impossible quest. Frodo must do influencer marketing with a bootstrapped budget and he must succeed.
The villain
Our little Frodos encountered many obstacles along their journey but spreadsheets, as it turned out, were the most satisfying to overcome. Without them, Frodo could never consider scaling an affiliate program because he would just be stuck doing busywork the entire movie.
The guide
This is Sam, and also you and your brand. (Sam wasn't really a "guide" per se but bear with me for the sake of the metaphor.)
We had an excellent customer success team at GRIN. Each customer got their own rep and that rep essentially became an extension of the influencer marketing team.
The rep was always there to offer advice and bounce ideas off of. Pair that with a world-class software and our heroes had everything they needed to fulfill their quest.
Publish the story.
I like to publish my findings into three flagship assets:
1. The industry report
This is a collection of all the data you collected in the survey and the customer testimonials and success metrics you gathered during the interview process. This is your long-form narrative with numbers and proof points to back up everything you say.
2. Customer interviews
Turn those customer interviews into full video case studies. These are your real customers talking about why they love your brand in their own words. This content is as good as gold.
3. Webinar
I like to do at least one webinar to go over all the findings from the survey. Bonus points if you can get a couple of your customers to join you. Answer questions from the audience, and if there's time, do a live demo of your product and how it addresses the challenges surfaced during your research phase.
Distribute your narrative.
Once you've created your three flagship assets, you need a distribution strategy that actually gets them in front of your audience. Here are a few of my favorite tactics:
Executive-led LinkedIn campaign
One of my biggest learnings from working in the creator economy: people trust people more than they trust brands. That makes your leadership team one of the most powerful distribution engines you've got.
At Search Party, we turned our co-founders into the faces of the brand. The research came from them, the success stories came from them, and the thought leadership came from them. That helped establish our brand as an authority in the space and caused prospects and customers to trust that we were true partners.
AEO: Seed the narrative in answer engines
Answer engines are starving for original data. When someone asks ChatGPT "What's the average ROI of influencer marketing?" it wants hard numbers, not opinions.
Every survey finding you collected becomes training data for AI. Structure your content for citation: clear data points, proper sourcing, conversational formatting. When prospects research before reaching your site, your narrative shapes their understanding.
PR: Amplify your most compelling findings
Don't let your research sit behind a landing page. We submitted a press release highlighting our most counterintuitive findings, i.e., the stuff that challenged conventional wisdom in the industry.
"New Research Shows Nano-Influencers Drive 3x Higher Engagement than Celebrity Endorsements" is a headline that gets attention. These press releases should promote both the gated asset and the webinar to create multiple entry points for discovery.
The beauty of PR is it reaches audiences you'd never touch organically. Industry publications, newsletters, aggregators — these placements compound over time and establish you as a research-backed authority.
Create your spin-offs.
Any good writer knows you have to set yourself up for the sequels in the first book. This is where the content flywheel really starts spinning.
Your three flagship assets are nuclear reactors. Each one generates enough material to fuel months of content across every channel.
From the report:
12-15 blog posts, each diving deep into a single finding
Industry-specific one-pagers (ecommerce brands vs. DTC vs. B2B)
Use case guides (launching an affiliate program, scaling creator rosters, etc.)
30+ LinkedIn posts for your executives
Infographics and data visualizations for social
Newsletter content (we wove stats into every edition for 3+ months)
From the customer interviews:
5 full video case studies (3-5 minutes each)
20-30 short clips (30-60 seconds) for social media and paid ads
Testimonial quotes scattered across your website
Sales one-pagers featuring specific customer results
Email snippets for nurture campaigns
From the webinar:
Full recording gated as an evergreen lead gen asset
10-15 vertical clips for LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter
Transcript turned into 3-5 blog posts
Q&A highlights for social content
Pull quotes from your guest speakers
Three flagship assets → 75+ pieces of content. And because it's all rooted in real research and real customer stories, it's authentic. People share it. Sales teams use it. It compounds.
This is how you build a content flywheel that doesn't require you to start from scratch every week.
The bottom line: The best marketers work smarter and harder.
Back in the day when my team went from 15 people to four, simply working harder wasn't going to cut it. I had to work harder and smarter.
Nolan spent years researching black holes for one film. Cameron dove to the Titanic 12 times. They built their stories on a foundation of real research, and that authenticity showed.
Your brand story deserves the same rigor. Do the research, build the system, and let it compound.