Content That Connects: Erin Balsa on AI, Authenticity, and Standing Out

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. I wonder what you're thinking as a content marketer in 2025. It's been just over two years since ChatGPT was launched, and for better or worse, AI generated content has been growing like a weed. According to AI detection startup Originality AI, more than 50% of longer English language posts on LinkedIn are probably created by AI. Meanwhile, many companies are leveraging AI to publish content, even if the quality is, at best, good enough. To me, it feels like the Wild West. We're in the middle of a content marketing gunfight in which humans are battling robots. And that may be an overly dramatic description, but there's no denying that the content marketing landscape is volatile, unpredictable, and arguably fascinating. To make sense of it all or at least offer insight into where we're at and where content marketing is heading, I'm excited to have Aaron Balsa on Marketing Spark. Aaron is a content marketing strategist with House of Bold, which creates bold, high impact content for b to b startups. And according to her website, she puts the boom in your shakalaka. I think that's the first time that I've used the word shakalaka on the podcast. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Erin.

Erin Balsa: Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Let's start with how you got here. Can you walk me through your journey from your early days in marketing to becoming a freelance content marketing strategist at House of Bold? You're currently located in London, but I guess your hometown or your home is in Boston.

Erin Balsa: I started off in college studying marketing at a business school. Unfortunately, for the first year and a half, I didn't take a single marketing class, but they put me through the ringer in terms of macroeconomics and microeconomics and all of these things that I struggled with in really advanced math courses. I was never that strong in math. Good enough to get into a good business school, but not good enough to truly excel at these courses. After about a year and a half and really struggling to have a GPA of about 3.4, it was a struggle. I had to go to the tutoring center all the time. I thought, maybe this isn't for me. At the same time, I was looking at the hundreds and thousands of dollars of debt I was gonna have to pay back. I took a pivot, went to state school, saved a crap ton of money, studied English, which is my real love, writing and reading, and I got my teaching license. So throughout my twenties, I worked in that world. I worked in education, and I worked with children and teenagers who were out of district. So they were in residential programs, facilities, they were incarcerated or at juvenile detention centers. And it was really rewarding, and it was a great period of my life. One day I was 30, and I was at the hair salon getting my hair done, flipping through my favorite local city magazine, and I noticed an ad saying they were looking for an assistant editor. And I thought, wow, that's so cool. I had been blogging for fun on the side of my nine to five for about a year, so I just went and I bypassed the normal application instructions. Instead, I sent a link to my personal blog to the managing editor, and she loved it. And I got an interview, took some writing and editing tests, and landed the job. So my real first experience was magazine journalism. Print magazines were if you made a mistake, you could not just hop on to WordPress and correct your mistake. It was there for all to see, and that was a little scary. So for me, making the shift into digital content was actually amazing because it really removed that level of risk. You could always go and quickly edit a mistake. My husband and I got married. He took a job in the city in Boston, so we moved a little bit further up toward the city. I decided to look for a job in the city. Prior to this, I was living in Providence, which is about an hour commute from Boston. So I started searching for jobs as an editor, and I found something that said a section editor at a content marketing agency in Boston. So I said, I don't really know much of anything about content marketing, but I've managed people before, all throughout my twenties, and I'm an editor. So why don't I just apply? I applied to a job that I was really underqualified for, but they hired me. And I started off by managing a team of 15 full time content writers and really learning by diving in headfirst, or as they say in the tech world, drinking from the fire hose. And I had very little training. I just had to figure it out as I went. Turns out I loved content marketing, and my story really starts from there. After working for three and a half years at the agency and working my way up to manage the entire Boston editorial department, I went in house upon a recommendation from a former colleague at the Predictive Index, a b to b SaaS company. And I, there, built out the content function, got a few promotions over a couple years, and ended up there as a marketing director overseeing a team. Think it was about 12 people by the time I left. It was editorial, which means all the writing that's done for the whole company, as well as video production, graphic design, and digital learning. So when I talk about content marketing, I'm not just talking about blog posts. I'm talking a much more holistic experience, everything from podcasts and videos. At the Predictive Index, we even did a documentary film, and we released it to people that we invited to attend a documentary premiere. That's an important point too. When people think of content, I always say, just don't think of the blog. That's just one tiny sliver.

Mark Evans: It is interesting when you look at the journey of many marketers. A lot of them never went to school for marketing, never aspired to be marketers, and somehow found themselves as marketers. I was a newspaper journalist. For many years, I loved being a reporter. It was a very exciting way to make a living. Never thought of myself going to the dark side of PR or corporate marketing. It seemed not like the right thing to do or the thing that I didn't wanna do. Somehow, along the way, I fell into the world of marketing. The the message here for a lot of people is that you never know where you're gonna end up. Even if you're on a on a career path and that's what you wanna do, opportunities arise, you get laid off, someone offers you a job that you never imagined someone would offer you, and away you go. I like your spirit and your willingness to to apply for things that you may not be qualified in. You've done really well. That's a great, origin story. Wanted to get back to the world of content marketing in 2025. Interested in getting your perspective on the content marketing landscape. AI is everywhere. The number of apps that promise to make writing easy and create content at scale is endless. I'd love to know how AI has changed, or for that matter, has not changed the way that you approach content creation strategically and tactically. And where do you see the biggest opportunities or pitfalls for marketers? That's a loaded question. We can unpack this. But I wanted to get your personal take on content creation and how marketers should be thinking about content these days.

Erin Balsa: That's a huge loaded question. Before AI tools helped anyone and their mother create content, we had a small kind of bottom of the barrel of people who called themselves content writers, who created really low budget, awful content. But now that's happening at scale because people who don't even want to invest the time can just use AI, and they can do it faster. What that means for editorial and articles and things like that and social posts and even comments on LinkedIn. People are using AI to leave comments on LinkedIn right now. Never mind LinkedIn posts and blogs and all that. The biggest thing that I'm seeing is there's even more really mediocre meh kind of content that doesn't get your attention or make you want to interact with it or have any conversations. It doesn't spark any conversations. It doesn't have a soul. So there's a lot of soulless content out there. And I think because of that, people are really going to be more and more hungry for content that helps them trust that it was made by a human, because nobody wants to fucking interact with content made by a I don't want to read it. I don't want to look at comments from it. I don't want to go on to meta in the metaverse and see some fake profile from some fake guy saying, hi. I'm a mom of two, and I like to jog and bake cookies. Shut up. I don't care about that. That shit scares the hell out of me, if I'm being honest. I think that in content marketing, it's gonna be important to have faces behind the brand, faces that people believe in, that they think, oh, this person's actually creating this content. I think it's important to be on video, Because right now, we're not at the point where we can deepfake everyone on video yet. Thank God. So if Aaron Balsa and Mark, we hop on a a video or we film a podcast and it's our voice and we're talking, that's far more authentic, and people are gonna want that more than they would wanna just read some blog post by some faceless company, and they can't really tell if it was written by a human or ChatGPT or any other of the hundreds of tools that are available to write content. Video is gonna be huge. Podcasts will continue to be huge. Seeing people's faces, hearing their voices, as well as in person events. And there's such an opportunity to use content both in promoting the event, both at the event, and use the event to create more content. So it's like a really easy way to get your content engine humming is doing in person events. People love them. Yes. They're expensive. Yes. They're a big lift. But when I think of an in person event, I think of it as like writing up a physical book or coming up with a really meaty research report. That's gonna be the center, the hub of your content engine for bare minimum a quarter. You're gonna be able to squeeze so much juice out of that effort. It becomes really worth it, and it's something that you cannot outsource to AI. I think that is really important.

Mark Evans: Boy, there's a lot of places I could go. But I did wanna focus on something you said about companies or individuals getting credit for creating human powered content, and then playing around with the idea that you could differentiate your content by being very clear, bluntly clear, that it was written by a human as opposed to a robot. Mhmm. For now, you can tell if AI has written something, whereas that may change. But I'm playing around with the idea that companies and individuals will get bonus points if it's handcrafted as opposed to created by a robot. Whether you have a disclaimer that says this blog post was written by human, consumers, prospects, customers will look at that content and go, oh, okay. I'm gonna reward this company or this individual for doing that, for not using a machine. Do you think that will be something that will resonate and help companies establish a competitive differentiation or a competitive advantage?

Erin Balsa: I don't know if people will believe that. I can go stick a stamp on any piece of content and be like, hey, I wrote it. Nobody really knows for sure. Only know if they see my lips moving or they hear my voice or they see me physically at an event or see footage of me leading a presentation or giving a talk at an event. I don't know if they're gonna believe a label that's on a a blog post or a LinkedIn post saying this was created by a human. I think what is important, the like, low hanging fruit for brands, stop labeling your blog posts from the so and so company team. Stop sending your emails from the so and so company email address. While I'm at it, stop using those fake emails. Everyone knows that when you're saying something's coming from the CEO or someone else at the organization, if it's a newsletter, we know the email we know, like, the naming conventions of emails. So if you have some weird wonky email address, or if you're saying that your CEO is writing the email and you're a company over a 100 employees, that's just so fake and people can read right through that. So authenticity rules. Even if it's someone who's more, like, junior on your marketing team and you're sending the email from that person, That's way better and much more believable than having your CEO of a 100 person company in their fake email address sending a newsletter. People see through that. Stop doing that. And attribute your blog to actual people at your company.

Mark Evans: The other angle that I wanted to explore is video versus copy. You and I are wordsmiths. We've been doing this for a long time. I suspect you love words as much as I do. But as we move forward in this AI world, I wanna pick up on your comment about video creation and whether every single piece of content or most pieces of content that we create should be accompanied by video so that we can actually validate or authenticate the fact that you created this content and people it's believability. People will look at that content and go, oh, Aaron created that because there's a video. Do you think that copy text should be accompanied by video in some way, shape, or form, just to make sure that there's an authenticity label associated with it?

Erin Balsa: I don't know. I never like to make blanket recommendations like that. I think it really depends on who the person is creating the content. So you can build up a lot of trust over time so that you don't have to do that if you don't want to. I know a lot of people who have a lot of trust. They've built a big audience through their hard work and their dedication. If they write a post or a blog, people are going to believe that it's them. They don't need to also make a video. That just might not be worth their time. In terms of a company, I think the same thing is true there. Right? So some companies have employees or leaders or subject matter experts who have built a reputation. They speak at conferences. These are people who are active online. So I don't think they do have to get in a video every single time because they've already put in the work. They have that trust equity built up, and I don't think they need to do it. Now, if I am taking a brand new startup who maybe they don't even have product market fit, or maybe they just found it, but they're still really early in their journey, and they don't have any really known people who are on stage or on podcasts or creating content on LinkedIn, I think that's not a bad idea, honestly. I think that it helps people not only trust that this person is not just outsourcing these blogs to some random agency, this person's sitting down and sharing their experience and taking the time to educate the audience. And the more you see someone's face and hear their voice, the relationship really does build. And it's funny, for the first year or two that I went on a bunch of podcasts, I used to do so many. I barely do them anymore, but I used to do so many. And when someone would finally meet me for a coffee chat or for a discovery call, they would be, like, really excited to meet me because they're like, oh my god. I've been listening to you on podcasts, or I feel like I know you. So people say, oh, podcast, it's not worth the effort because a lot of times they don't result in business. It's a relationship game. Right? So, yeah, that person might not hire you who listens to your podcast, but guess what? They're gonna trust you. They're really gonna like you. They're gonna see you as almost a friend or a mentor. And when someone in their circle asks, Hey, does anyone know who I can hire for X thing? Or, Hey, does anyone know what tool I can use to help me accomplish X goal? They're gonna immediately think of you, their trusted friend and guide and mentor, and they're gonna recommend you. So I think that the voice and the face is really important if you haven't yet put in the the time to build up that trust equity.

Mark Evans: It is an interesting comment about podcasting because I'm always surprised because my blog, I love my blog, but it's a labor of love and the audience is relatively small. But I have been to places where people recognize my voice. Been to marketing events where you're Mark Evans, Art. You know, I go, how do you know that? It's because it's this 1984 kind of stalking thing that's going on. But it you do make a really interesting point there. Going back to your original question, which obviously had tons of threads that we could pull on about the ability of human powered content to break through the noise. I'm gonna be a bit of a devil's advocate, or I'm gonna push back in a very polite Canadian way and say that amid this tsunami of content where AI easily allow content at scale, I believe that breaking through with value added, in quotation marks, insightful content, That theoretically makes sense that if your content isn't crappy, but instead it's really great and it's prescriptive and it's content that you can use right away, that makes sense. But how do you get people's attention? How do you break through the noise? How do you actually get people to discover your content and then consume it? Because I think for a lot of companies, that is such a daunting proposition right now because we've only got so much time. Everybody's multitasking, complaining that their days are too short. So what are your thoughts, and what do you how do you work with your clients to make sure that the content you help them create actually resonates and actually is consumed?

Erin Balsa: Great question. I see it in two parts. First is really the content creation. Make sure you're creating bold content that people cannot ignore. And then the second piece is make sure you're getting it in front of them where they're hanging out. So when I think about bold content, for me, bold content has five characteristics. First, it's original, and that's important. Right? Yeah. You just made the point, yeah, really well written. I forget exactly how you worded it, but ultimately, yes, it's well researched. It's well written. It's good content. It's pres oh, you used the word prescriptive. Right? It's prescriptive, so it's helpful. That's great. That's for me, table stakes should be helpful. And a long time ago, that was enough because there wasn't as much content available as there is today. So now that there is a huge number of content pieces on any given topic under the sun so if I want to teach people how to write a thought leadership article, I can't just go and tell them a prescriptive way to write a thought leadership article, because that's been done. It's been done really well and in-depth by many different brands and subject matter experts and thought leaders. Right? So what I need to do is be original. I need to package my information in a new way, and I think that's really important. Originality can also come from an original point of view, which some companies have a strategic narrative. I personally help companies either come up with or refine their strategic narrative so that they have a bold point of view, and then we use that to make a narrative led content strategy, which means we're not just picking random topics based on what the, you know, keyword tool tells us our audience is searching for. We're creating a cohesive story, piece by content piece, so that over time, someone will learn about these these topics and they'll get answers to their questions, but they will get that through our unique original lens because we have a point of view on this topic and this thing that we help people achieve. That's really important. The second piece after original for bold content, So proven. Right? It's great to have a strong, bold point of view and have a really strong, bold strategic narrative, but if you can't back it up with proof, it's just hot air. So there's a few different ways that we can have proof in our content. One is proprietary data and data storytelling.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Erin Balsa: So you might help I might help my client build a research report. Maybe we'll pull data from their product usage, or maybe we'll survey an audience. And then we will stand up a report, and then that will give legs to our point of view. Because if we're saying, we believe that Rubik's cubes should be not plastic, they should be metal. And that's our point of view because we feel that way because we sell metal fabrication. Okay. Cool. But why? Give me proof. So now I'm going to be able to say, we talked to 5,000 children ages 10 through 18, and they told us that they have a hard time with this plastic or whatever the story is. We have data to now support our bold point of view. That was a crazy example. If we were listening, I'm holding a Rubik's cube, which just happened to be next to me on the desk. I have children. So after original and proven, it has to be authentic. You got to be yourself. Right? So if you're an individual, just don't always try to self edit. Right? So just be you. If you're corny, let a corny joke fly. If you're a company, I think it's really important to make sure your content emphasizes the essence of your brand. That means you're not stuffy because you're not in real life. Right? Be the you that your happiest customers see. Be the you that your best partners see. Be the you that your most highly engaged long term employees see. That's what your content should communicate. We've all worked in house. We've had a Slack channel where we support each other, or we share pictures of our cats or our dogs or our kids or whatever it is. What's the personality of the people in the organization? Like, how can we make sure that life and that feeling and that energy comes through your content? Because a lot of times, content's super flat, super boring, super corporate, and I don't really know many humans or workplaces that are really like that. So I think that the content really needs to be authentic to who the brand is in real life. The next piece is content should be novel, and you just asked me how do we cut through the noise. Originality helps. Authenticity helps. But novel is just finding ways to surprise and delight your audience. It could be something as simple as, let me think, an interactive page where they get to see something coming at them in three d, and they get to click a button and take a quiz and interact in a new way that they haven't seen before. That's a good example. I have a ton of examples that I've shared in my email newsletter. There are brands that are doing this kind of stuff. I know Shopify recently did a product update, and instead of just sending a really boring vanilla email like most companies do, They made a whole experience where there was, like, a TV channels, and you could choose to change the channel and learn all about these different product updates. It was super cool and creative and novel. And then the last piece is the most table stakes piece, relevant. So, of course, you can say whatever you want to say, but if nobody cares, nobody's going to listen. No matter how flashy or original or novel it is, they have to care. So the the relevance piece is also important. So to come back to your original question, how can we get people to care, and how can the business make money with content marketing? First, you've got to create bold content, and that's my five pillars for what I define as bold. And then second, you've got to make sure people see it. So you can't just press publish on your blog and, like, hope people come running. I think one of the best ways to distribute content nowadays is social media, YouTube depending on the business, and more importantly, other people. So partner with other friendly companies. So companies that sell into the same audience but sell a noncompeting product, I think it's really great to do a lot of co marketing with them. And I am also big on influencer marketing so long as it's not a transactional relationship because people can see right through that. Partner with someone who actually uses your product and do a long term partnership. So bring them on as an actual partner and not just someone that you're paying a thousand dollars to talk once about your brand.

Mark Evans: The distribution part is really interesting because it's easy, relatively speaking, to create content, whether using AI or it's handcrafted. And then if you listen to people like Justin Welsh or Ross Simmons who says create once, distribute forever, sounds great, guys. It sounds like that's basically marketing one zero one. Of course, you wanna distribute as widely as possible. One idea is that maybe where AI could be really impactful for marketers is the distribution side as as opposed to creation. Yes, you can use AI to create content, but there's a lot of work involved to distribute it.

Erin Balsa: Yeah. For sure.

Mark Evans: I could do it for different platforms to say, I've got a blog post, I'm gonna put it on YouTube, and Reddit, and Instagram, and LinkedIn, and X and Blue Sky, but that's a lot of work. That's a lot of manual work. Any thoughts about we could use AI to do that kind of thing? Maybe before you answer that question, maybe go back to the fundamentals of distribution. It's great to put content in lots of different places, but how do you get people to see it, discover it, consume it?

Erin Balsa: The AI question, I have not used it for distribution myself, so I can't speak to any personal experiences. However, I have seen some interesting articles and newsletters from people who have these new suggestions on new ways to use AI. The most recent one I read was by Andy Crestodina, who's over at, Orbit, and it was called, like, the prompt library. And it was, like, 20 or so AI prompts to use AI in all different use cases for content marketing. I believe a few were for distribution. The one that stood out to me, and I actually can't remember if it was in Andy's article or it was in a newsletter called Emily Kramer,

Mark Evans: but it

Erin Balsa: was an interesting use case. And it was saying you could plug in this AI tool, And what it would do is it would go through your sales calls and listen to the questions that prospects are asking on sales calls. Then it goes through your content library, and then it finds content gaps, and it says, hey. A lot of people have been asking about this question. You don't currently have any content on this topic. So I think that I know that's not distribution. That's creation, but that's one of the most helpful ones that I've seen in terms of a prompt. If you can go and set that up, that's great. Gonna remove the manual work there. Distribution, yeah, I would say if that's something that you're responsible for outside of the typical, typical stuff, which I am not one that believes in distributing things on a 100 platforms. I don't think you I don't think the average brand needs to be on X and Blue Sky and YouTube and Twitter and Twitch, and I don't think that's necessarily needed for most companies, especially the earlier stage or series a startups that I work with.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Erin Balsa: I typically recommend pick one or two channels and just get really freaking good at those before you try to spread yourself too thin and do a shitty job. And I worry that these AI tools that say, hey, we have the capability of taking your blog post and turning it into a podcast episode, or we can take your blog post and turn it into a carousel for LinkedIn, but how good are you gonna do it? Do I actually wanna put that out there? It might be better. I might be better off if I don't damage my brand reputation, and I just put out one really freaking good blog post and one really freaking good video that I took the time to make, as opposed to putting out 10 repurpose pieces that some AI made and it's not that freaking good, and it it's not interesting to people. It's not bold. It's not novel. Like, why would I do that just to say, oh, I checked the box. For me, that might be checkbox marketing. Like, checkbox, whoops, we did a Twitter thing. Oh, yay. We we posted from our company x account. Okay. Cool. But does anyone care?

Mark Evans: I've played around with some tools that could take video from a podcast and auto clip it and magically create these user friendly, accessible, engaging video clips, and most of the time, it doesn't work.

Erin Balsa: They suck. Yeah. And that sounds but I've been on some podcasts, and later on, they send me an email, and they're like, here's your, like, three promotional clips. I don't wanna share any of those on LinkedIn. I'm like, really? Out of the whole hour, those are the best three clips that you could give me? Yeah. So I don't know.

Mark Evans: I agree with your walk before your run approach to marketing channels. The default for a lot of companies, especially early stage companies that are desperate to capture the spotlight, is to be everywhere. And I call that the shotgun approach to marketing. They just believe that if they're on all these channels, then somehow it's a better chance of people discovering them. And my philosophy is it's it walk before you run. As you say, get really good at one or two channels, and and after you've mastered them, then that's great, or you could look to embrace another channel. But the idea of trying to be all things to all people definitely doesn't work. An area that I wanted to talk to you about is attribution, and this is obviously gaining a whole a lot of attention over the past year as attribution becomes increasingly more challenging. You work with early stage b to b, b to b SaaS companies that every marketing dollar counts. So if they're gonna come to you and say, Aaron, we need to create some great content so that we can attract and engage prospects and hopefully convert them into customers, they're looking for you to help them create content that makes an impact, as you see on your website. Mhmm. But how do you measure your success, and how do brands measure the success of content marketing? Obviously, there's different goals that you could have. Some of it's brand awareness, some of that is just is multiple touches, high engagement. But when you're talking to prospects and clients and they ask you, how do I tell if you're if what I'm doing with you is actually working and I'm getting my money's worth? What is the answer? And I know it's different ways to to approach that, but what is what do you tell them in terms of ROI?

Erin Balsa: When I think of how we started off with content marketing and how I started off, it was all about increasing traffic, increasing the amount of keywords, increasing the amount of people who make it to your site, and then click a button to download an ebook. And that's great, and those can be good signals that what you're doing is working. But I think that at the end of the day, what really is important is if you're driving product sign ups, if you're getting people to not only make it through your free product, but are you helping use content in the product journey so that they don't just churn after their free trial, but they actually become a paying customer. People think that content a lot of times is just getting people to click a button, subscribe to an email. Great. My job's done. Someone else will handle the rest. I don't think that way. I think about how content can be inserted at all different points of the journey. Again, I work with a lot of sales led companies, and sometimes they have a hybrid motion. They might have a free trial or a freemium product, but they almost always have a sales team. And, again, a lot of people think content's job is to get them to request a demo, and that's a huge part of content's job, for sure. That's one of the huge metrics that I look at. I look at if we are increasing the amount of high intent handraiser leads. When I start working with a company, I'll say, how many people are raising their hand every month, quarter to talk to sales? Okay. Cool. So now we're gonna be tracking that over time, and we're going to be attributing it to these different content marketing campaigns. But after that, then what? So, yeah, sales, they're awesome. But how can content support sales so that sales is even more successful? What kind of sales enablement can we do?

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Erin Balsa: And that's important too. So I'm gonna try to look at high intent handraiser leads. How many are we getting? Is that number increasing? And then also revenue that content either contributed to as part of the sales cycle or if it was the first touch. A lot of people say, oh, it doesn't count if it wasn't the first touch or the last touch. I disagree. I think that people interact with so many different touch points across the journey that it does matter if they're interacting with your content. I remember one story. We had at my last company, we had set up really sophisticated multi touch attribution. We could see an entire user journey. And I remember seeing somebody had originally I don't know. I think they said, like, social media. It's probably content because they probably saw some sort of content on social media, but we'll say social media. And then what they ended up doing was reading some blog posts, and then they ended up downloading an ebook, and then they ended up downloading a report, and then they just went away. And we didn't hear from them for months. Then we had created another, I think, report, and we placed an ad, like a retargeting ad. The person got the report served up to them while they were browsing. They clicked on the report, then they saw a CTA in the report to interact with our new interactive learning center, and they created an account in our learning center. They took three courses, and then they raised their hand to talk to sales. You could target that. You could tag so many different things. You could give credit if it was first such just to social media.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Erin Balsa: But without content, what is social media even talking about? Without a strategic narrative or a bold point of view, what are they even talking about? You could give some of the credit to the ad because, obviously, that retargeted them. It it helped get in front of them, and you should give some credit to the ad and to social media. But you definitely gotta give credit to the content marketing campaign. And it wasn't just one campaign. It was several. Right? So there was two different reports. There was that interactive learning center. There were the courses, which is digital learning. I think it's really important to understand what's working and not to get too obsessed over who owns the credit, because it's really a team effort, and different pieces need to work together, and you should all be celebrating your success together.

Mark Evans: There's lots of different ways to, as they say, to skin a cat, and lots of different ways that you can measure the success of your content marketing. I started this podcast by asking you a loaded question, and it's only appropriate that I would end the podcast with another loaded question, and that would be to look into your crystal ball and envision what 2025 looks like for content marketing. The AI models will evolve and get better. More and more companies will experiment with AI. More startups will emerge, offering the latest things since sliced bread to create and distribute content. How do you see the landscape unfolding? What are you most excited about? What are you the most afraid or most concerned about?

Erin Balsa: It's funny. When I answer this question or I think about other people's answers to this question, I'm living in this kind of tech bubble where a lot of people that I talk to and learn from and read from, they're all in this bubble of b to b SaaS. And in many cases, we are far ahead of some of the other more traditional industries. I'm not gonna call anyone out by name, but there are other industries who are still gating their case studies in 2025. I don't wanna say that everyone is gonna be creating episodic video content native for social media, or everyone's gonna be creating more zero click content so that people aren't always having to go back to the website or clicking a a link to read content, because that, I think, is a very SaaS forward thing. I think those of us who do work in in SaaS and tech, yeah, we are going to be doing more of that because that's what a lot of the conversations are about. Whenever some people are leading the charge, others will always follow. So I do expect to see more of that in our bubble. As far as the entire industry, I think that there's going to be a wider adoption of proprietary data storytelling now that more and more people are starting to learn about it, and they're realizing that it's not as scary as they might have thought it was. Because it, for me, when I first thought about, oh my god, I'm gonna create this research report. I need to crunch numbers. This sounds like a lot of work. And it is a lot of work. For anyone who's ever done it, it's a lot of work, but it is learnable. It is doable. And out of all the content I create, that's the type that typically drives the biggest business impact. So I think that a lot more companies are gonna learn how to create research reports and do data storytelling, not the dry kind. They're gonna really do it, and they're going to add some personality. Because just because you're talking about data doesn't mean you have to be dry and corporate. You can still have your own brand voice and personality when you do the data storytelling, so I think that might be something that gets more widely adopted.

Mark Evans: I love your comment about the fact that people like you and I are we're drinking the Kool Aid 20 fourseven. And it it is interesting. I was doing a a workshop on content marketing recently to early stage entrepreneurs, and one of the exercises that I did, it it was trying to make an interactive workshop, was to use ChatGPT and come up with a bunch of ideas for content. I said, here's five minutes. You can go away. And so I and so after the five minutes, I came back, and they were blown away. Could not believe that ChatGPT could actually help them do that. And the reality was is they didn't use ChatGPT. They weren't using it at all, so it was all new to them. The lesson was that we just think that these are the tools that everybody's using when in fact, a very small, for now, portion of the population is using them to do things like content marketing. So that was just interesting to me. Yeah. Erin, this has been great. Obviously, would love to get your information about where like, what kind of companies should reach out to you? Mhmm. Where can they learn about about what you do? And, yeah, LinkedIn, your blog, your website, your newsletter, obviously. Give us the sort of the all the details about who should reach JTAP to and how can they learn more about you.

Erin Balsa: Anyone that's interested in content marketing and not just blog posts and keywords, people who are really interested in strategic, full funnel content marketing should reach out to me. You don't have to work at any specific type of company because you can always learn and apply it to your own use case. I think some best practices in marketing, content marketing fundamentals really do apply regardless of whether or not you're working in SaaS or you're working with sales led companies. It really doesn't matter. The easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn, and my name is Aaron Balsa, like as in Balsa Wood. I'm the only Aaron Balsa on LinkedIn, which is very convenient for me. Yes. Thank you, husband. Great last name. And I have a website called houseofbold.com, but I'm actually currently building out a whole new site to go along with my brand new flagship one to one consulting offer, which will be at bland2bold.co,co. And I will have a one on one consulting offer there. I will also have some courses there, including a free five day email course called Bland to Bold, where people can learn about my bold content framework.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Erin, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b or a SaaS company with 1,000,000 to $10,000,000 in revenue and you're looking to jump start your marketing, we should definitely talk about how I can help you as a fractional CMO and strategic adviser. Reach out via email, mark@markevans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit mark evans mark dot co. I'll talk to you soon.