Content Amplified

In a relationship-driven niche like healthcare IT, the deal happens in the room, not the inbox. In this episode of Content Amplified, Larry Kaiser, Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT, explains why a little over 60% of his budget goes to events and how he stretches each one across his whole content engine. Larry walks through his year at the two biggest healthcare IT shows, Vive and HIMSS, where he runs booths, stage presentations, and sponsored white-labeled receptions that put his team in front of CIOs as the only vendor in the room. He shares how he takes a single filmed event presentation and repurposes it into a blog post, a white paper, and a podcast episode to pull maximum value out of a $25,000 sponsorship. He also makes the case for LinkedIn-first distribution, with 205,000 followers and close to 60,000 newsletter subscribers, because email is dead with healthcare IT CIOs who told him it will never reach them. Plus why he keeps his content roughly 90% brand and 10% individuals. If you spend real money on events, this conversation shows you how to make it work harder.

About Larry

Larry Kaiser is the Chief Marketing Officer at Optimum Healthcare IT, a staffing and digital transformation consulting firm that works with provider organizations on Epic EHR, ServiceNow, Workday, and AWS. He has spent 22 years in healthcare IT, an industry he never expected to stay in this long. Larry got his start as an RFP manager and became CMO about six years ago, hitting nearly every aspect of marketing in healthcare IT along the way.

Show Notes

Connect with Larry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lawrencekaiser/

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The branded voice is losing its grip, and the people inside your company are about to replace it. In this episode of Content Amplified, Nicole Gates, VP of Global Growth at Varonis, makes the case that user-generated content is where B2B marketing is headed. She explains why what works in B2C tends to land in B2B two to three years later, and why AI is accelerating the shift by making buyers more skeptical of brand messaging and hungry for the human element. Nicole shares how she leans into employee advocacy and industry influencers without prescribing the script, pointing to her own sales reps who film videos in their cars talking about the product. She gets practical on AEO and GEO, where LLMs increasingly pull from Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube instead of pay-to-play search. And she lays out where to start: know your story first, build a unique point of view, and find the people already willing to share it. As she puts it, it always comes down to the story. If you are trying to figure out how to stay trusted in an AI-flooded landscape, tune in.

About Nicole

Nicole Gates is the VP of Global Growth at Varonis, a cybersecurity company, where she has spent about four years. Her background spans content marketing, social media, and demand gen across various industries and roles, all of which now roll up into what her team calls growth. She believes the trends shaping B2C marketing reach B2B a couple of years later, and that the next wave belongs to human, user-generated content over the branded voice. Nicole also writes a Substack called Perspective and Pipeline, where she shares her thoughts on marketing, growing a team, and working in growth marketing and B2B.

Show Notes

Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolepgates/
Nicole's Substack, Perspective and Pipeline

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A brand's advertising is its identity showing up in public, and it tells you what that brand is about to do next. In this episode of Content Amplified, Karisa Schroeder, who works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar, explains how to use ad intelligence as a window into what brands are actually doing rather than just saying. Karisa walks through reading a competitor's next move from their creative, spend, pricing, partnerships, and sponsorships, and she expands the familiar share of voice and share of spend into share of message: do you own a category, and if not, where is the white space you can claim. She points to Airbnb at the Winter Olympics becoming the official sponsor of feeling at home instead of the official sponsor of lodging, and she frames brand building as a community you create, telling marketers to make it the party people want to be a part of. She closes with where to start: your own first-party data on the channels you already run, then enrichment to fill in the rest of the picture. If you want to turn the ad world into a competitive intelligence feed, tune in.

About Karisa

Karisa Schroeder works on GTM strategy at MediaRadar, where she focuses on the advertising space. She is in roughly her ninth year in product marketing and has been a marketer for about 15 years. She is well known in location intelligence, where her work centered on segmentation, behaviors, and demographics across the US, and she now applies that lens to advertising. She builds the tools she uses as a marketer every day, and she is a big advocate for connecting with people in the community.

Show Notes

Connect with Karisa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karisaschroeder/

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AI is great at writing drafts, pulling data, and generating variations, but marketing has never really been about that kind of output. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sarah Balli, an external communications specialist who also does content creation, influencer marketing, and streams on Twitch, makes the case for keeping the human element in marketing during the AI era. Sarah explains why companies are looking to replace labor, not people, and why the parts of the job that matter most (taste, timing, and understanding people) are the parts AI cannot do. She likens this moment to when Microsoft Word and PowerPoint first arrived and everyone feared for their jobs, then turned those tools into ways to do better work. She walks through the Wendy's-style real-time marketing example AI can never pull off, how to hold a standard of excellence no matter which tool you use, and what to say when leadership asks whether a $200-a-month subscription can replace a team. If you are trying to figure out where you fit in an AI marketing world, this conversation will help you breathe and get tactical.

About Sarah

Sarah Balli is an external communications specialist who also does content creation and influencer marketing on the side. She describes herself as a well-rounded marketer who likes working across a lot of different creative areas. Outside of her marketing work, she streams on Twitch and keeps busy with creative projects.

Show Notes

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-balli/

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Sales sits on the frontier, and they cut all of our paychecks, which is not provocative, it is just math. 

That is the line Andrey Zevakhin uses to make a bigger point: enablement was never meant to be a small team pushing content and running training, it is a company-wide responsibility and a culture. In this episode of Content Amplified, Andrey, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at Zywave, explains how enablement works as a funnel that captures signals from sales and pulls in the right partners, why he refuses to be a Swiss Army knife that slices everything but does nothing well, and how he prioritizes by what directly impacts the top line (unique meetings, win rates, deal size, bookings) over vanity indicators like content usage and certification completion. He reframes content overload as a self-inflicted content strategy problem, and lays out the Legos model: one well-maintained 200-slide master library where the rep's job is to build a story, not pick a deck, and no two presentations should ever look the same. He closes with two shifts: enablement should own revenue culture, not training, and enablement is a company responsibility, not a team.

About Andrey

Andrey Zevakhin is a seasoned enablement leader with 20 years of experience across revenue enablement, learning and development, sales training, and technology evangelism at both global and nationwide software companies. He has built enablement functions from scratch and evolved existing ones, spanning onboarding, continuous learning, coaching, skills verification, and professional development for customer-facing revenue roles. He currently leads enablement at Zywave, an insurance technology provider serving insurance brokers and carriers. He describes enablement as his vocation, motivated by seeing the people he enables succeed in closing deals and driving revenue.

Show Notes

- Connect with Andrey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreyzevakhin/

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Most content teams treat a finished report as a checkbox, when it should be the starting batter. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Pat McParland, VP of Marketing at MetricStream, makes the case for getting back to basics and making every asset work harder. She walks through the ABCDE framework she learned at a former company (Audience, Behavior, Content, Design, Evaluation) and why so many teams skip straight to the design, the video or the ebook, before they have settled who they are talking to and what they want to say. Then she unveils her own Bisquick theory: messaging is the baking mix, and from one core asset like a survey or report you make the cookies, the cakes, the muffins, the infographic, the webinar, the videos, the live event. Pat calls AI the easy bake oven that finally brings the theory to life, and she leans on Claude to turn one asset into many formats. She also offers a caution worth keeping: AI can run a stinky process more efficiently, but it is still a stinky process, so go back to basics first. She closes with her Three Rocks principle for staying focused.

About Pat

Pat McParland is a lifetime B2B marketer with more than 30 years of experience, almost all of it in business information and technology. She has worked at companies ranging from startups under 30 people to giants like Dun and Bradstreet, Dow Jones, and Honeywell, and is now VP of Marketing at MetricStream, a governance, risk, and compliance company. A self-described storyteller who started reading at four and writing books for her dad soon after, she believes the fundamentals of content have not changed in 35 years, even as the tools around them have. She is an enthusiastic daily Claude user.

Show Notes

- Connect with Pat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patmcparland/

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Someone gets in a car accident, Googles a lawyer, and lands on a site that reads like a resume. They are already gone. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Jonathan Murray, Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, explains why trust-based content is winning right now and why polished, AI-perfect content is starting to repel the people it is meant to attract. Jonathan unpacks his core idea that your client is the movie star and you are the supporting cast, the difference between a site that lists your accolades and one that speaks to what the client is feeling, and why ego is the thing that holds most business owners back. He gets specific: the photo shoot that swaps the tie-at-the-desk shot for sleeves rolled up on the farm, why your colleagues are not your clients, the Gary Vee talking-head comparison, his rule to keep content unpolished 70% of the time, and treating AI like an editor-in-chief you trust but verify. If you want your content to sound like a person instead of a bot, this conversation tells you how.

About Jonathan

Jonathan Murray is the Marketing Director at Legends Legal Marketing, a boutique firm that works with law firms across multiple niches and only takes on clients it believes it can deliver real return on investment for. He has more than 15 to 20 years of sales and marketing experience, ranging from door-to-door and retail sales to B2B sales, leading teams of around 50 people, and running his own small-business marketing and social media consulting. At Legends, Jonathan also serves as a marketing strategist and social media strategist. He believes the best content starts with what the client is feeling, not with how impressive you are.

Show Notes

- Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathancmurray/
- Legends Legal Marketing: https://legendslegalmarketing.com

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Most marketers believe they have a great story that nobody is hearing, but the real problem is complexity. 

In this episode of Content Amplified, Dory Ellis Garfinkle, Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, makes the case that the way to break through a world of a million messages is to get radically clear on who you are. She frames the marketer's whole job as one question: how do you make something easy to understand and convey it in a way that is impossible to ignore? She backs it with Siegel+Gale's annual simplicity study, which surveys more than 15,000 people across nine countries: 64% will pay more for simpler brand experiences, 78% are more likely to recommend, brand complexity costs companies $780 billion in unrealized annual revenue, and the simplest brands have outperformed the global stock index by roughly 1,600% since 2009. She walks through the US Army return to "Be all you can be" that drove record Gen Z enrollment, and the CVS "helping people on their path to better health" heart icon that lifted same-store sales 5.5% year over year. Listen for her line on what clarity actually costs.

About Dory

Dory Ellis Garfinkle is a career-long marketer who has spent her work at the intersection of brand and growth. She started agency side at McCann and Draftfcb, then led brand-led growth across transportation tech companies including Zipcar, AAA's venture lab, the design innovation consultancy IDEO, and Lyft. She is now Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, a global brand consulting firm, which she describes as coming full circle back to agency life. She believes simplicity is the ethos that wins, and that clarity is not dumbing things down, it is doing the hard work so that your audience just does not have to.

Show Notes

- Connect with Dory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doryellis/
- Siegel+Gale: https://www.siegelgale.com/

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If you don't enforce a standard, you don't have a standard, you have a suggestion.

In this episode of Content to Close, Hoffen Guo, who has sold into aircraft engine giants, run enterprise learning partnerships at Udemy, and now leads 100% cold-calling teams selling to SMB restaurant owners, lays out her "execution floor" approach to sales leadership. Hoffen explains why activity metrics like 120 minutes of talk time and 150 calls a day fool leaders into rewarding busyness instead of behavior, and why most coaching ("book more meetings," "work on urgency") is really just pressure in disguise. She breaks down the hidden revenue cost of letting one top performer freelance off-script, why standards are social contracts that weaken the moment they go unenforced, and how to hold a hard line without micromanaging by separating controlling standards from controlling style. She closes with the one standard to tighten this quarter: next-step discipline, the difference between a happy call and a real pipeline. If you lead a sales floor and suspect your standards have quietly become optional, this conversation is the wake-up call.

About Hoffen

Hoffen Guo started her career in policy and regulation analysis consulting before moving into a business development role at one of the world's largest aircraft engine companies, selling into highly structured, highly regulated, long-cycle enterprise environments. She then joined Udemy's enterprise learning partnership team, focusing on enablement and sales training for partners in emerging markets. Today she works at a SaaS company selling to SMB restaurant owners through 100% cold calling, a motion she calls the toughest combination to sell into. Her through-line: every career move got closer to speed and raw execution, which shaped her belief that activity has to be measurable and execution has to be inspectable.

Show Notes

• Connect with Hoffen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoffen/

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Producing more content faster is not the same as producing content that matters. In this episode of Content Amplified, Adam Haskew, Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, makes the case that AI accelerates your outputs but does nothing for your strategy, and that the gap between the two is where "AI slop" gets made. Adam argues the fix is the unglamorous, old-school stuff most teams skip when they are moving fast: kickoff calls, a genuinely complete brief, and human alignment at the very start of a project, before a single word is generated. He explains why a web page is really the same as an ebook when it comes to planning, why skipping alignment creates a "snowball effect" where small problems amplify downstream, and how about an hour and a half of upfront communication removes most of the noise. He also shares how he owns a brand voice review agent at Redis that every piece of content has to pass through before it ships, and why, quoting musician Nick Cave, AI that has never felt hunger or fear still cannot replace a human point of view. If you are shipping more content than ever but learning nothing from it, this conversation gives you the red flags to watch for and a starting point to fix it.

About Adam

Adam Haskew is the Associate Director of Brand Experience at Redis, where he leads a three-person team focused on brand voice consistency and accurate messaging across the website, print collateral, and trade show materials. He studied English literature and started his career in magazine publishing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, then worked at software companies, an insurance provider, and SaaS companies in the Bay Area before settling into a remote role at Redis. Adam sees AI as a tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for the human judgment that turns content into something worth reading. He believes the best content starts with a clear brief and human communication, then uses AI to execute against that strategy, never the other way around.

Show Notes

- Connect with Adam on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhaskew/

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