The Anatomy of an Impactful Content Marketing Funnel with Contently’s Marketing Head, Joe Lazauskas

Shane, great to be here with you.

I’m a Jersey boy, right over the river. Growing up, I’d look at the New York skyline from the hill above my house, just imagining that, like all Jersey kids, one day I could get my own slice of that island. I’ve been in the city for the last 12 years.

I grew up in Jersey, went to Sarah Lawrence College just outside the city, and then moved into the city after college.

You know, it’s pretty easy. There’s this little short bus called the Spanish Express that goes from my mom’s house into the city in about 20 minutes. When I was a kid, I’d sneak onto that bus, and there was a guy in the back making piña coladas and margaritas for three bucks. That was a big win when I was 16, sneaking in for CBGB shows.

Eventually the bus got more legit. They got their own gate at Port Authority, stopped dropping folks on the street. I think it was a deal with Port Authority: they got recognized as an official form of public transportation, but had to get rid of the margarita machine in the back.

Nah, I was raised by dogs—actually, by a single mom who’s a vet. I grew up in a house attached to her animal hospital, so my “big family” was mostly canine.

Huge dog person—big dogs, golden labs, retrievers, definitely at the top of my list. We always had a lot of rescues, too. I’m a big dog person in general, but I prefer a big, happy, goofy dog. That’s peak dog, in my opinion.

No, I travel so much for work that it’s been tough to keep a dog. I think I’m finally getting to the point where I’m ready for that responsibility. New York is a place where it feels like you stay in a kind of extended adolescence for a long time, but I’m getting ready to commit to a dog soon.

Exactly. They need dog walkers and doggy daycare. I’m also someone who thinks a dog needs a yard to run around in. City life can be tough on a bigger dog, so if it comes to that point, maybe I’d move out to the suburbs, but I’m not sure I’m there yet.

It does feel like there should be a startup for that—like Uber for dogs.

Well, I had a giant shoe-fro and was the lead singer in a punk band, even though I can’t sing. That was about a four-year thing. We kind of got away with it because I wore tight women’s jeans, climbed on top of amps, and hung upside down while singing. People were like, “Ah, that makes sense. He can’t sing because he’s upside-down right now.” We played in a dingy punk club in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and I also played football, even though I weighed only 140 pounds. Sometimes I’d watch the film of my high school games, and it looked like a seventh-grader running onto the field. That’s probably most of the fun facts. Oh, and I wrote a really bad novella when I was 17, which helped get me into Sarah Lawrence. It’d be pretty embarrassing if it ever leaked online.

Yeah, if anyone wants to blackmail me, that’s one way to do it.

No, no one was drunk. It was a straight-edge punk band—no drinking, no drugs, very hardcore lifestyle. And yeah, the DIY teenage hardcore punk scene wasn’t super high-quality. I could do some falsettos when we went a bit screamo, so there are ways to get around not being a great singer.

Yeah, Sarah Lawrence is a liberal arts school right outside of New York. There was a New York magazine cover story about a month ago about a secret cult at Sarah Lawrence—did you see that? Basically, this guy Larry Ray, a notorious New York crime mobster, was involved in a bunch of stuff. He’s the reason the Director of Homeland Security in 2004 had to step down—because of past associations with Larry. The Director had been the police commissioner in New York, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, Larry Ray went to prison, and the year after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence—in the fall of 2010—he got out of prison and moved into Otters dorm at Sarah Lawrence, or so the story goes. It was in the New York article that he basically started a cult with eight kids who lived in that dorm. They all eventually moved to this one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. It’s a wild story, and some of the kids stayed in what ended up being a mini Larry Ray cult. A couple of them got out and were the sources for the article. That’s why Sarah Lawrence has been in the news; apparently Mark Wahlberg just optioned it as a movie.

Is it awesome, Shane?

Yeah, yeah. He’s like this. It’s a crazy story. There’s a really well-written New York magazine cover story by another Sarah Lawrence grad. Larry’s this stocky, polo-wearing, shaved-head guy who basically used classic cult leader techniques—psychological manipulation—to get these kids to do bizarre stuff, including some weird sex acts, and follow him as if he were a deity. He’d have them repair his house in North Carolina or Virginia, then charge them for damages and force them into paying him back all this money. It’s wild. Usually, Sarah Lawrence doesn’t have that vibe; it’s an artsy liberal school just outside the city, sort of like Hogwarts for one of the best writing programs in the country. Now it’s getting a lot of heat for enabling a semi-cult.

We didn’t have that in the long term. We do have some anti-cult rules in the handbook now.

Yeah, actually, I just have a bunch of stuff written in Sharpie on my forehead from a wild night, so…

Yeah, so I’m a journalist by trade. I started a new site called The Faster Times right out of school with some folks I’d worked with at Nerve, which was a big sex and pop culture mag in New York in the ’90s and early 2000s. We built it as a sort of socialist business model: we’d pay our writers 75% of the ad revenue they generated, and section editors got 10%. But the problem was, even with millions of readers, display ads paid terribly. So we thought, “What else can we do to make money?”

We launched a branded content studio back in 2010, before most publishers were doing that. We partnered with an ad agency to produce branded content and leverage all our freelance writers. It was around the time brands were first getting serious about social media. They needed to create content and connect directly with consumers, so we saw a clear opportunity. We grew that part of the business because that’s where all our revenue was coming from, and I got into the content marketing world thinking, “Oh, wow, brands really do want to create interesting content—help people navigate finances, or figure out new technology, or understand the future of their industry.”

Then Contently came along. They were in TechStars, one of the incubators in New York in 2011. I realized that was a smarter approach to what we were doing because they had a platform and a network of journalists worldwide—building up from a few hundred to thousands. So I reached out to Shane Snow, one of Contently’s cofounders, and said, “Hey, we’ve been doing this. We have some writers. We’d love to work with you.” Once I sold Faster Times, I came on to Contently as their editor-in-chief to build up the content program or print mag or video stuff or blog, or be their content strategist. And I’ve been there ever since in a few different roles.

Yeah, it was 2011 into 2012. So at the end of 2011, doing well in TechStars got us some buzz, propelled us to get seed funding and a Series A. There are a lot of interesting startups that have come out of TechStars, and it was great for us. At that time, the New York tech scene was still a smaller community, just getting off the ground, compared to now with so much big tech here.

Sorry, I started freelancing there about seven years ago, but I’ve been full-time for around six.

I talked about four keys to great content marketing, including a bit of neuroscience of storytelling. We looked at different content strategy models and how to produce content across the entire customer journey, instead of just seeing it as top-of-funnel awareness, editorial activity—that kind of thing.

No, I’m our head of marketing. I started out as editor in chief, but now they let me run the whole thing.

I mean, who knows? We started an investigative journalism foundation back in the day at Contently, so maybe we’ll use that to dig in. Could be interesting to find out the backstory.

It all started when Donald Trump got elected, and we were really depressed and needed a winter project. We were both in Portugal, speaking at Web Summit during the election, and thought, “We need something to take our minds off things.” So we started working on this book because we noticed there wasn’t a story-driven guide explaining why stories matter so much to humans—how we can learn from the patterns of great storytelling across history, and then apply those lessons to business, life, and especially leadership. Most marketing books feel pedantic or read like white papers, so we wanted something more narrative, light, and fun, while still teaching people the fundamentals of what great storytelling can do for their day-to-day work and life.

I tell a lot of stories in the book about brands that have been successful, but I also break down the four keys to effective storytelling and how to use them for your brand. What’s interesting about beer and wine—and food in general—is that branding originally wasn’t a marketing exercise. It came from wanting to trace the line of production so people would know where a product came from, the quality, what to expect. That lineage and history is at the core of why brands exist.

With something like wine, cheese, or food, people really want to know its origins—how it got from the earth to their plate. That’s less of a factor for, say, a marketing software company. Sure, the origin story matters a bit—like, at Contently, we were started by journalists to help them find high-paying gigs with brands, which is important to us. But our day-to-day content can’t just repeat that story. Instead, we need to address what our audience really cares about.

In B2B, that’s usually pretty simple: if you create content and tell stories that help people do their jobs better, they’ll really like you. They’ll think you’re smart, want to work with you, and feel good about you. In a lot of ways, we overcomplicate what brands actually need to do. At heart, it’s straightforward: focus on the topics your audience cares about, make the stories easy to immerse in, and emphasize the values behind what you’re creating instead of just rolling out bulleted press-release points. That approach is far more likely to succeed.

Yeah, it’s that balance between long-term and short-term marketing. In our digital age, everything is geared toward short-term marketing—like, the reason we’re seeing so many brands scramble with “digital transformation” is that over the last 20 years, we’ve layered more and more junk onto our websites and marketing programs, trying to solve short-term problems. If your website’s not converting, we don’t step back and look at our messaging or the user experience; we just say, “Oh, add a chat,” or “Let’s throw a pop-up here,” or “We need a marketing automation system that blasts everyone with emails every time they visit.” People don’t come back, and we just layer more of these short-term tactics on top of each other for a quick hit—like, “I got a 3% increase in my clickthrough rate,” or “I got 20 more leads this week.” But we’re ignoring the broader reputation and relationships we’re building through the brand. That’s why content, done well, has so much power: if you produce really good content and provide real value, you first build that trust and community. You’ve delivered something worthwhile, and that’s a better long-term strategy.

Yeah, and then you get marketing teams spending all their time managing stacks of technology piled on top of each other and reporting on how it’s doing, instead of focusing on the customer’s actual needs—understanding the customer, creating a few really good pieces of messaging, and making high-quality content that’ll have an impact. There’s a culture in marketing now of throwing as much stuff at the wall as possible, not caring about all the “spaghetti strands” that fall to the floor and start to smell.

No, but Shane and our founder Joe Coleman were childhood friends from Idaho. Shane and I only became friends after we started working together at Contently, but now we’re super close.

Yeah, I think great stories are at the core of almost every content asset you have—this is super obvious in practice. For example, at the top of the funnel in your blog posts and videos, you need a really good story to convince people to engage with whatever your brand is putting out, instead of all the other noise they have in their social feeds. It also applies to more down-funnel pieces of content we often don’t think about, like case studies. You should be asking, “What’s the real tension here? Who’s the protagonist? How am I crafting a story for my target audience so they see themselves in the client I helped?” What was the challenge they faced? What was the tension between where they were and what could be next? How did they stick their neck out in their career? What different hurdles did they overcome to meet their goal? This also applies to thought leadership. You have to think about the gap between what’s happening in your industry and what could be, then speak about it authentically and in a way that clarifies problems and needed changes. This should come through in something as simple as your sales deck—don’t just list off offerings. It should tell a story about who you are, who your company is, what you really care about, where everything’s headed, and the future you could build with your customers. Stories are everywhere in these things.

Of course, there are types of content marketing that aren’t necessarily story-driven. If you put out an assessment or quiz, there might not be a full story in that. If you create a mortgage calculator, there’s not a story built into it. But however small, these tools fit into the broader narrative you’re telling about what you think people need to care about.

I think there are a few ways to answer this, but some of the biggest keys start with making sure your content is actually good. If you’re not leveraging the best storytellers in your industry—people who can truly compete with what’s already out there—then you won’t break through. You have to say something new. If you’re creating something like “10 Tips for Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses,” and someone can Google 50 alternatives that are equally good, you won’t move the needle for your brand. You need to commit to telling unique stories that can really stand out.

Second, you have to take an audience-centric view of your content strategy. That might sound like a buzzword, but it basically means creating material people are genuinely passionate about. There’s this concept called the “Poly Cause Pyramid of Engagement,” from a British agency called Sell! Sell!—it’s about ten years old now. The top of that pyramid lists the things your audience likely cares about. In B2C, that might be wellness, health, travel, fitness. If you’re in B2B, it’s helping people do their jobs better—maybe getting that promotion, learning a new skill, growing their career. The rest of the pyramid is “everything else,” and they have a fun phrase for it: things your audience is not likely to “give a monkey’s chuff” about. Yet that’s where so many brands start—pushing out their own product messages first. Instead, you want to think about your audience’s challenges: what do they need to move up in their career or improve their lives? Then you integrate your product or offering into that, rather than the other way around.

The third key is seeing content not just as a top-of-funnel activity but something that spans the entire customer journey. A lot of organizations end up with a Jekyll-and-Hyde scenario: the top-of-funnel content is super helpful, but once you convert into a marketing-qualified lead and talk to a salesperson, the tone changes completely. You go from Beyoncé-level content to feeling like you’re dealing with a used car salesman, and that’s a jarring experience for the customer. Marketing should own the full journey, ensuring that same helpful, consultative feel all the way through.

Ultimately, depending on the problem at hand, there are different ways to frame these ideas. But it’s also crucial to tie your content and marketing goals back to larger business goals. You can’t just look at vanity metrics like page views or shares. That’s all part of doing good marketing.

What’s interesting is “content.” We started out freelance, with a network of tens of thousands of creatives—writers, filmmakers, videographers—connecting them with brands that needed high-quality talent for good content. Over the years, we evolved in two directions. First, we realized things were chaotic for big brands—there was a need for a platform integrating with their CMS, Salesforce, everything, to manage their content. We leaned into that and kind of became more of a SaaS company. Then I was in charge of building our content strategy arm, because we realized, “Oh, we can give brands all these great writers and filmmakers, and an awesome platform to manage everything, but they might not know what they should create or how to map their content to the customer journey, or how to prove ROI to their CMO or CFO.” So we built that out too.

So now we have this three-pronged solution of great content strategy services, a content marketing platform that actually puts all our recommendations into practice, and our content talent network that helps brands connect with top-tier creators in their industry. It’s been interesting to see the industry evolve and to understand our clients’ needs. One thing I’m proud of is our average piece of Contently-created content gets about a 4.85 out of 5 rating from our clients. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to create content people are happy with. Now the next challenge is scaling that up—helping smaller marketing teams within an organization spread what they’re doing to everyone else, so content can become a stronger force within enterprise marketing.

Yeah, it depends on the goal for the piece of content. So our own analytics at Contently are more awareness-focused. It’s basically a little bit like Chartbeat, if you remember Chartbeat, which tracks deep engagement metrics—how much time people spend with their content, how often they return to it, and what their finish rate is. We have this product, Doc Analytics, that gives you that information on PDF content, which no one else in the industry has. But more and more, we find ourselves realizing that no single piece of marketing technology is going to give you the full picture of how your content is performing, right? We’re not going to do that. Google Analytics isn’t going to do that unless you have a really simple conversion flow. Salesforce on its own isn’t going to do that. Marketo on its own isn’t going to do that.

So a lot of our work, honestly, is about helping clients bring all their data from disparate sources into a single data visualization tool—like Looker, Tableau, Domo, or Google Data Studio—so they can get one holistic picture of how their content performs across various KPIs. Because usually it isn’t just one goal, right? It isn’t just an engagement or brand-awareness goal. You also want it to drive leads. Then, we want to see how those leads convert into MQLs, how they become SQLs or ops, and whether any of them eventually turn into deals. If you want to do that, you need data from at least three sources in most cases.

So, you know, I personally think that any marketing technology company that comes in and says, “We have the one metric that’ll solve it all, and these are the only analytics you need,” is BS. It’s total BS. The biggest value I think we can provide is helping our clients use the technology they already have in-house, but setting the right KPIs and presenting it in an easy-to-visualize way that’s also easy to report up the chain to their executives.

I mean, practically, in my day-to-day job, we’d die without WordPress, Salesforce, and Marketo. That’s where all our marketing functions live, as well as MailChimp. But that’s not a super interesting answer. So, I’d say, for more fun strategy technologies that I really like: I’m a huge SEMrush fan for SEO, and SEMrush has better SEO software for your money. I really like Concurred—I’ll give Tom Salvad and those guys a shout-out. They’re a small content strategy AI company out of London, and they have a really cool tool we just started using.

I also really love Quizzer for assessments, which we use both for lead gen stuff—helping us understand what your content marketing goals are—and for fun quizzes like “What media company are you?” One of our most popular quizzes was “Is this headline about Kim Kardashian or Pokémon Go?” When Pokémon Go was big, I took either “Kim Kardashian” or “Pokémon” out of the headline and created a quiz for that. It was shockingly hard to tell which was which, and it probably had no real marketing value for us, but it did get taken, like, 100,000 times.

One of my all-time favorites has always been Dollar Shave Club. I love that video—the story behind it is amazing. Michael Dubin was just an improv comic in New York who had a few marketing jobs. He was at a Christmas party his dad was throwing when he met one of his dad’s shady friends. The guy said he had 100,000 razors in China that were super cheap but didn’t know what to do with them. So Dubin got the idea that buying razors sucks and decided to start a subscription razor company. Because he was a 29-year-old improv actor in New York, nobody wanted to fund him. So he took his last five grand, made that viral Dollar Shave Club video, and that launched his entire business.

When Unilever bought them, they paid a billion dollars, even though analysts thought they were only worth around $300 million. The reason Unilever paid so much is the storytelling: every time Dollar Shave Club launched a new product, they did a new viral video, shipped a bathroom reader with every order, and started Mel—an awesome men’s magazine that legitimately competes with GQ. Thanks to those relationships they built through storytelling, they had an absolutely insane exit.

I think they’ve done a great job. Patagonia does incredible documentaries and really lives its brand values—caring about the environment and outdoor passions—which comes across so well. Red Bull is the example everyone uses, but they’ve built a legitimate extreme sports media empire. We’ve tried to work with them multiple times over the years, but they’re very German and hard to get in touch with. Still, they’d be a dream client to work with, in my opinion.

Yeah, I’m working on another book. Can’t announce anything yet, but I have a very interesting co-creator I’m working with that I’m super excited about. Also, Shay and I have a couple of things in the works on the side that I can’t talk about, but I’m excited about those too. So, I basically have no life—I just work a lot, like everyone else in New York. Outside of my day-to-day, there are a couple of side hustles.

You know, I never actually met Larry because he arrived right after I graduated, so I was already causing mayhem in the Lower East Side by the time he got to Sarah Lawrence. One of my friends is this kid Daniel, who’s the main source for the story, and another friend from Sarah Lawrence ran into him in LA, where he was working as a hotel valet. She had just read the story from San Fran and started talking to him, and he said, “I’m Daniel from the story.” It’s wild.

Yeah, so “Laser” is what everyone at work calls me. It’s literally my work nickname. Everyone in my normal life calls me Joe, which you’d think would be reversed. It started when I first worked at Contently. Our old Director of Accounts, Rob, changed my name in Gmail and his contacts to “Joey Laser,” as a joke referencing Jersey Shore—like, “Yeah, Joey Laser from Jersey Shore, going down to Seaside, Heinekens, and Giga Bombs all night.” Then the clients I was working with thought that was my real name, so they started calling me Laser. It snowballed from there. Now everyone calls me Laser: all our clients know me as Laser, and everyone at work calls me Laser—though it makes me sound like a drunk frat boy. Sarah Lawrence doesn’t have frats, so I never had that experience; I was just a writer at a feminist college. That’s my personal brand now, I guess—I’m Laser.

It depends how it sticks and how long I keep it. Maybe eventually I won’t. But will it be a permanent brand, maybe in quotation marks? There are worse nicknames than Laser. I haven’t had any personally, but one of my friends is called “Squeak,” which might be from BASEketball—the South Park creators. So yeah, better Laser than Squeak.

That’s a very 1960s reference, right? How old?

Good question. I took a two-month sabbatical from Contently this winter—after five years, you get a two-month paid sabbatical. I finally took it and went to Honduras, Brazil, and Colombia, which was awesome. I’m a big fan of Colombia, too; I’ve been there a few times. Probably my favorite place that I really want to go back to is Albania. I hitchhiked there when I was 21. I hadn’t seen Taken yet (or maybe it wasn’t out), so I didn’t know it might be a bad idea. But it was amazing—everyone’s super friendly, it’s super cheap, and I had some really weird adventures. It has a special place in my heart.

These days, I travel as much as I can, though I’m doing less now that I’ve switched from being client-facing to running content strategy in-house. It’s kind of nice, but yeah, there are a lot of great places in the world.

Yeah, do a nice little run from Croatia to Montenegro to Albania to Greece. It’s a really lovely Mediterranean stretch.

I’m a huge David Sedaris fan. I’d love to have dinner with him. I’ve met him at a couple of book signings, but those are really short interactions. I also love Jessi Klein; her collection, You’ll Grow Out of It, is great. She wrote for Tina Fey on 30 Rock and a few other projects. She seems more attainable—someone I could actually have dinner with someday. There’s also a writer named Rhys who lives in the French countryside and is very introverted, so maybe I’d put her as a backup in case she’s listening. I’m not sure why Jessi Klein would be on an influencer marketing podcast, but you never know!

I mostly live on Twitter, like a lot of New York media and marketing folks. You can find me there at @joesaskus. My DMs are open, so holler at me.

All right, great. Thanks, Rocky.