May 01, 2025

The Quiet Shift: How B2B Teams are Winning Post-SEO

53 minutes

#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

(05:29) - – Lessons from teaching that apply directly to marketing

(08:29) - – Why Brendan left education and entered the B2B world

(09:59) - – Early agency and in-house marketing experience

(11:44) - – Building a defensible career: audience, trust, and network

(14:04) - – The Growth Sprints model: why retainers don’t make sense

(15:14) - – Content strategy in bets, not buckets

(16:29) - – Why SEO still works and where it actually drives results

(17:59) - – Getting deep on audience, product, and internal dynamics

(20:14) - – What marketers get wrong about internal buy-in

(22:14) - – Real example: what a content sprint looks like in practice

(23:44) - – The power of internal linking and content refreshes

(27:08) - – How Google views internal linking and user signals

(30:08) - – Why technical SEO is often overrated

(33:08) - – Brendan’s hot take: most SEOs aren’t marketers

(34:38) - – Why the “SEO takes 6 months” narrative is flawed

(36:38) - – The problem with traditional retainers and content brief models

(38:08) - – The immortal newsletter: how to mix evergreen + ephemeral content

(41:08) - – Naming the problem, not just the category

(42:38) - – Content should do 3–5 jobs at once: how to prioritize impact

(45:08) - – The real value of competitor and alternatives pages

(47:38) - – How to make content more useful for sales and buyer enablement

(49:08) - – Brendan’s final mindset shift: create content that earns its keep

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Brought to you by:

Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Get a free, personalized 45-minute AI workshop to help you identify the best AI use cases for your marketing team and map out where agents can save you time at optimizely.com/exitfive.

AirOps - The content engineering platform that helps marketers create and maintain high-quality, on-brand content that wins AI search. Go to airops.com/exitfive to start creating content that reflects your expertise, stays true to your brand, and is engineered for performance across human and AI discovery.

Visit exitfive.com/retreat to apply for Exit Five’s first-ever, in-person Marketing Leadership Retreat, March 18–20, 2026 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Join 100 CMOs and VPs of Marketing from companies like like Zoom, Snowflake, Manychat, Bitly, G2, HP, and more for two days of thinking bigger around a trusted group of peers in marketing.

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