Empowering B2B Marketers through Community Engagement

#242: Content Strategy | In this episode, Danielle sits down with Brendan Hufford, founder of Growth Sprints, to talk about what actually works in content and SEO today and why most B2B strategies are broken. Brendan went from high school teacher to leading content at top SaaS companies, and now helps brands move faster and build content strategies that drive real impact.

They cover:

• Why most SEO strategies are broken - and why retainers make it worse
• The content checklist that took ActiveCampaign from 200K to 240K visitors in 30 days
• Why the most lucrative SEO opportunities are hiding in plain sight
• Brendan’s "immortal newsletter" framework that cuts production time in half while doubling engagement

Plus, check out the checklist Brendan mentioned in this episode here! 

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro to Brendan
• (05:33) - – Lessons from teaching that apply directly to marketing
• (08:33) - – Why Brendan left education and entered the B2B world
• (10:03) - – Early agency and in-house marketing experience
• (11:48) - – Building a defensible career: audience, trust, and network
• (14:08) - – The Growth Sprints model: why retainers don’t make sense
• (15:18) - – Content strategy in bets, not buckets
• (16:33) - – Why SEO still works and where it actually drives results
• (18:03) - – Getting deep on audience, product, and internal dynamics
• (20:18) - – What marketers get wrong about internal buy-in
• (22:18) - – Real example: what a content sprint looks like in practice
• (23:48) - – The power of internal linking and content refreshes
• (27:23) - – How Google views internal linking and user signals
• (30:23) - – Why technical SEO is often overrated
• (33:23) - – Brendan’s hot take: most SEOs aren’t marketers
• (34:53) - – Why the “SEO takes 6 months” narrative is flawed
• (36:53) - – The problem with traditional retainers and content brief models
• (38:23) - – The immortal newsletter: how to mix evergreen + ephemeral content
• (41:23) - – Naming the problem, not just the category
• (42:53) - – Content should do 3–5 jobs at once: how to prioritize impact
• (45:23) - – The real value of competitor and alternatives pages
• (47:53) - – How to make content more useful for sales and buyer enablement
• (49:23) - – Brendan’s final mindset shift: create content that earns its keep

Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.com
Join the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter
Check out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/
Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership

***

Today’s episode is brought to you by Walnut.

Why are we pouring all this effort into marketing just to push buyers to a “request a demo” or “contact sales” button?

Come on, today’s buyers don’t want to talk to sales right away. They want to explore your product themselves, see how it works, and understand its value before booking a meeting.

That’s where Walnut comes in.

Walnut empowers marketers and GTM teams to create interactive, self-guided product experiences in minutes. Embed these experiences on your site, in emails, or anywhere in your funnel to let buyers engage on their terms, from awareness to close and beyond.

That's the beauty of Walnut - you're getting a platform that your sales and CS colleagues can use to showcase the product too.

And the best part? You get real intent data—see which features prospects love, where they drop off, and what’s actually driving pipeline. Demo Qualified Leads are the new MQL.

Over 500 companies, like Adobe and NetApp, use Walnut to drive 2-3x higher website conversion rates and 7 figures in pipeline on a yearly basis. So do you want to drive more leads, shorten sales cycles, and actually show your product instead of hiding it behind another typical B2B CTA?

Go check out Walnut.io. And if you tell them Dave from Exit 5 sent you, they'll build out your first demo for free!