Updated August 7th, 2026
Originally published August 31, 2012
The world of content marketing is full of mystery and intrigue with companies leveraging every possible resource to achieve a competitive advantage.
In the fast changing world of digital marketing, no resource is more valued than the coveted “Content Marketing Secret Agent”.
These covert content operatives perform their customer segmentation, persona development and editorial planning in the dead of night while most marketers are asleep, snug in their beds. While the average content marketer dreams of page views and search engine rankings, Content Marketing Secret Agents are mapping the customer journey, crafting meaningful messages that pull prospects from awareness to measurable conversions.
Few have been able to crack the code of this elite group but if anyone could, it’s the content marketing smarties at TopRank Marketing. We’ve collected some of the best tips just for you.
Yes, that’s right. We’ve collected 29 of the most experienced, knowledgeable and accomplished Content Marketing Operatives to share their secrets with those of us looking for better performance and results. You may be tempted to destroy this dossier of highly valued intelligence before your competitors get to it, but you must resist that temptation.
Consumer brands like Kraft Foods, B2B brands like Intel, IBM and Cisco, industry thought leaders like Jason Falls, Ann Handley and Joe Pulizzi have come together to share one piece of content marketing advice that would send a cold war power into an equivalent state of DEFCON 2. It’s as if we assembled, James Bond, Jack Bauer, Mata Hari, Jason Bourne, Evelyn Salt and Austin Powers all in one room and managed a brain drain of their most prized confidential information.
OK, maybe not Austin Powers, but you get the idea.
We’ve tried to have a bit of fun with this “Secret Agent” shtick in this new series of Content Marketing Secrets interviews. We’re continuing that theme into the advice in this e-book. We hope you enjoy the metaphor and the information which is sound and highly valuable, just like the presentations you’ll see at the 2012 Content Marketing World conference.
The Secret Agents and their Content Marketing Advice:
“Big Data for marketing is a trap – don’t fall into it. You must look at the total spectrum of customer engagement (from awareness to brand evangelism) to appreciate the value of content marketing – so you MUST change your measurement philosophy. Your content and stories are the only differentiator you have left. Hire and invest accordingly.”
Robert Rose
“Three things separate the truly great content creators from the rest. First: The best content creators see their story as the keystone of their communications. They don’t view content as a task or a campaign. They view content as something fat with possibilities in the way we communicate with customers so that they recognize us before and over any other brand. That sounds easy enough, but it’s a huge mental shift for most businesses. Second: The best content creators have a distinct voice. They have developed a point of view that’s unique to the brand-and unshackled from corporate Frankenspeak. A good test is this: If you mask the visual branding on your content, would you recognize that content’s voice as your own? Third: The best content creators take risks. They experiment. And they sometimes fail. As Hugh Macleod says, ‘We were all given the same box of crayons in kindergarten,’ yet somewhere along the line many of us convince ourselves that we’re not creative, particularly in a business context. That sort of thinking limits our full potential as people, and it limits your content, too. Why? Because in a world where every company is a publisher, you’ve got to cut through the din of mediocrity. You’ve got to experiment a little, be a little creative, and occasionally take risks. Fourth: The best content creators have fun! If you aren’t having fun creating content, you aren’t doing it right. That was four differentiators, and I promised three back in the first paragraph. Which I suppose suggests a fifth thing about content: Always, always, always over-deliver.”
Ann Handley
“Your job is to make content that makes your audience say, ‘Holy shit!’ If you do that, you win. Period.”
Jason Falls
“Listen up – this is important. I almost died for this. If you’re a B2B Marketer, LinkedIn should be one of your key channels for sharing content, generating traffic and leads. You probably know that if your content achieves front-page Trending prominence on LinkedIn Today, it can add thousands of visitors a day to your site. To become Trending, your content needs to be shared. OK. So far so good. Well here’s the secret the one thing that can transform the traffic you receive to your content. And you have to promise to keep this a secret. Do NOT post your update onto Twitter directly or through a third-party client. That’s right. Make it a LinkedIn update and then are you listening? tick the ‘tweet this update’ box on LinkedIn. That’s it. The end result is the same for your followers on Twitter – but every single re-tweet will also count as a LinkedIn share, and thus turbo-charge your chances of making it a Trending article on LinkedIn Today. This one process can transform the traffic you receive from LinkedIn.”
Todd Wheatland
“A blank check from the CMO to create content, would be nice! Stories are told by people. Find your dream team: An imaginary copy writer, a wicked creative director, an ingenious editor and a go-getter integrated marketing manager who can bring your campaigns to life.”
Pam Didner
“So, you want to hit it big with content marketing? There is a group of people within your industry who can help you get there. You may already know who they are. They are the people who your target audience looks to for information and guidance. They come in all shapes and sizes and may be labeled as bloggers, consultants, authors, analysts, or social media mavens. These people are your influencers. They have a certain sway over your target audience and they play a critical role in any content marketing program. Collaborating with influencers is one of the top secrets I can share because influencers can co-create engaging content, share it with their audiences to extend the reach of your content, and amplify your story. What’s more successful than that? Get started quickly by identifying a group of 10-20 influencers, engaging with them on social media, and beginning to build the relationship. Enjoy and appreciate the success that follows.”
Amanda Maksymiw
“Lean in now, OK? I don’t want my marketing secret to be overheard. Sure Facebook gets all the glam and the celebrities go ga-ga over Twitter but let me tell you where the real action is: LinkedIn Groups. Wait, wait. Don’t roll your eyes like that. I’m serious. Here are some things to consider about LinkedIn. There are close to 800,000 different professional groups on LinkedIn and these are segmented by topic, industry and even geographic locations. Go to the search field on at the top of the LinkedIn home page and type in the name of your city. You might be surprised by the action there. These groups are important because you can find a highly relevant, highly-targeted, and most important, a highly engaged audience. Devote some time exploring LinkedIn Groups and you will be amazed at the time people spend helping each other, answering questions, and solving problems. I use links to blog posts as a helpful way to quickly and effectively answer people’s questions. With just a little care and time on LinkedIn each week, this powerful platform can be a major source of not just traffic, but engaged readers who are coming to you for help. LinkedIn is the fourth biggest traffic source to my blog and I’ve acquired two major customers and two of my most important strategic partners just from participating in these forums. So when you’re looking for a content marketing edge with a relevant and engaged audience, think LinkedIn Groups.”
Mark Schaefer
“….shhh the password is Swordfish…ya got it? While the quality of the content is certainly an integral part of any program, who is doing the talking can be equally as important. Your influencers’ credibility, expertise, reach and following is the secret password.”
Leslie Reiser
“My secret intelligence agency has informed me that in order to be successful with content marketing in today’s world that you must write a book. A book is your best business card. A book will build credibility in the eyes of your readers and customers and the media. Organize your thoughts together in one cohesive method and deliver them in book form in both digital and print. You can let your audience download it for free in return for their email address to generate leads. Or you can give it away for free and fill the book with calls to actions about your business! Or you can upload the book to Amazon and let people buy it on the Kindle. The word is out on the street that for every 100 print books Amazon sells, they sell 180 digital books. Wow! Your competitors and counter spies in your industry are already working on putting their thoughts into book form. What are you waiting for?”
Jim Kukral
“The Holy Grail of Socializing Your Most Valuable Content. There’s nothing worse than investing your heart and soul into a great piece of content only to have it remain hidden-unseen by the very audience you hoped to attract. I’m talking about the unheard podcast, the e-book without legs, the blog post with lowly single digit re-tweets, the white paper no one is registering for-and the list goes on. How can you get your content seen by others? Assuming you’ve truly developed an educational masterpiece free of hype, people are going to want to share it. But most won’t. Why? Because we’re all lazy. Yep, I said it. So how can you make people’s action step so seamless and so effortless that they’ll gladly share your content with their peers? The answer lies in embedding social sharing. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ all allow you to embed social share into emails, PDF files and of course websites. By placing those share triggers strategically in the right place in your content, people will effortlessly share your great content. And the result? Tons of traffic, valuable eyeballs, buzz and all the other benefits that your content deserves. If you want to see this in action in a PDF file, make note of how the different social share buttons are directly integrated into every page of the Social Media Marketing Industry Report.”
Michael Stelzner
“Content marketing stars are developed through hard work. Forget what your Third Grade Teacher taught you about writing! Build your writing habit like a runner in training for a marathon to get in shape with a targeted goal to become a facile writer. Start writing where the energy is. Unlike school, give yourself permission to begin wherever you want! Edit, edit, edit to get rid of anything extraneous.”
Heidi Cohen
“Content marketing is not just a marketing buzz word; it’s a hugely successful methodology for generating leads and building customer loyalty. It’s using content about the issues the problems customers and prospects are wrangling with to show the value of your product. The secret is to let your customers guide the message – even tell the story. Simple. Right? Then, why do so many marketers miss the mark? Many companies miss because they’re too focused on tooting the company horn. To build great content, you are going to have to spend time with your customers. With these five steps your customers will tell your story and promote it better than you do:Learn your audience’s ‘personality.’ Your customers and prospects are your audience. How do they talk about your product and products like it? Where do they look for information? What events and conferences are important? (If you haven’t found them online yet, search sites like Technorati, Alltop, Mashable and Marketing Profs for some great tips.) Be in all the ‘right’ places. Use your personality research to help you craft a channel strategy for investing your content marketing resources. You don’t want to waste resources building a Facebook page or Twitter account if they’re not actively using that channel. Listen to their feedback. Make your customer the hero. Tell your customers’ stories about they solve problems using your product. Other customers and prospects want to see and read about their successes and failures. These stories assure new customers of your technical support capabilities, stability, quality and craftsmanship far better than any warranty ever could. Give them a stage. Now, encourage them – even ask them to tell their own stories. They are the influencers, the thought leaders. Invite them to post on your blogs. Promote their personal blog posts from your site, social channels and newsletters. Re-tweet their ‘aha’ moments, and include your hashtags. Ask them if they will answer Facebook and LinkedIn group questions about the product. Understand that you must continuously keep these steps in play – like bowling pins in a juggling act. But, the payoff can be huge! Great content builds trust, demonstrates authority and drives leads. It can also help your company stand out. Your customers’ stories can differentiate your can opener from the thousands of can openers on the market.”
Waynette Tubbs
“OK, here’s my secret: This is really not that hard or expensive. The biggest shift required is in changing your business’ marketing approach to one of attracting new customers with great content vs. trying to promote your products and buy new customers with purely outbound marketing techniques. You simply need to put your customers’ interests first! There is still a place for outbound tactics, but when you combine an attraction-based mentality with great content, not only do you begin to see more new customers for less money per acquisition, but your outbound marketing tactics will work better (better content) and your customers will be more satisfied with being associated with a company that appears to put their customers’ interests ahead of its own. So everyone wins.”
Michael Brenner
“What I have found is that nothing pays off like consistency. Well-established brands know this and execute quite well on it, which is why when they try to change their logos or other recognizable attributes there’s a rallying cry of ‘Nooooo!’ from consumers. So too, content marketing requires consistency in voice, tone, publishing frequency and quality of content to be effective. Who are the bloggers I read again and again? Those who are consistently on the mark with their advice, senses of humor and timing. The brands I return to are those who have the same quality consistent service delivered in a very recognizable package.”
Ahava Leibtag
“The most important question to answer is ‘what is your basis of conversation?’ What do you as a brand have to offer that matters to consumers? What are you going to provide them makes them want to come back to you again and again? It’s not as simple as finding a point of difference and a creative hook and trumpeting it across paid media. To be successful in Content Marketing, you have to take the time to get to know your consumers, what s/he needs, and how you can serve that need uniquely and authentically. Once you understand the role you play, all of the other elements the channel mix and the role of channels, the creation/curation of content, etc – can follow.” 16. C.C. Chapman
“That you need to make sure your content has a soul. No matter how flashy or cool what you create is, if it doesn’t reflect the uniqueness that makes you and your company who you are than no one is going to care. Speak human and from the heart ad your content will be much more successful.”
Julie Fleischer
“Repetition is a good thing. I don’t mean publishing the same piece over and over again, but rather creating a lot of content that comes at a topic from different angles. People need to hear something 7 to 10 times before it becomes an ‘anchor’ thought in their minds and helps them build the confidence to change. Additionally, some angles you take will appeal to a set of your prospects but not others. Using different approaches helps to ensure that they not only see it, but engage with it based on how the approach to the topic resonates with them. I’ve written about many of the same topics for years, and most of the time when I publish something thinking that no one will care because they’ve read it before, the attention and interest is still there or higher than it was in the past.”
Ardath Albee
“I talk about spy equipment in my book, and there is a very important secret tool that people can use in content marketing. This tool is so super-secret, I’m reluctant to share it, even with you. Well, here it goes. It’s a content homing beacon. Every spy needs one. Every content marketer needs one, too. The homing beacon attaches to any content that is sent, fed, shared, tweeted, tumbled, stumbled, or posted. It even works for content that is great. It doesn’t matter if the link is passed around, re-tweeted, or shortened. Our homing beacon will survive almost anything readers can throw at it. The data we can collect is astounding. With this homing beacon, we can understand where visits to our content started, how it was delivered, the date it was sent, the format of the message and much, much more. This is powerful stuff. Read the remainder at your peril! The homing beacon is link tagging combined with a URL shortener. Link tags are special parameters that you tack onto the end of a URL. Google Analytics and many other analytics packages support them. Thanks to these special parameters, you can track the source of new visits to your site. You can see what content brought the visitor and track how many of them convert to leads, customers or subscribers. It’s a powerful way to track content across the Web.”
Brian Massey
“Secret Agent Maserati reporting in here to debrief you on the number one, top secret to content marketing success. Content marketing is not about you, it is about them. The secret to success is to be a giver, not a taker. Create and share content that will be meaningful to your audience, not content that is focused on your own needs. Be relevant. Be real. To ensure content relevance, I leverage data-driven customer insights because: Data builds Relevance & Relevance builds Content & Content builds Communities.”
Sandra Zoratti
“Few people consider Indianapolis as the center of Content Marketing weaponry. But if you are looking for the latest super top secret stuff you probably can’t do better. Covert rendezvous on the circle rival anything the real weapons bazaars of Berlin or Nairobi have to offer. My mission is to find out their best secrets and share them with headquarters….which in this case is Content Marketing World in Columbus Ohio. Dispatch: After scouring all of my sources and learning about some fantastic technology & tactics for Content Marketing Warfare, I’ll have a lot to report when I get back to headquarters. Suffice it to say, the best are often the most obvious and easiest to implement with the right tools. For example let me share on brilliant strategy here and save the rest for when we meet. Use Blog Posts in Outbound Email Marketing. Think about it. Organizations of all sizes are building huge arsenals of content that usually are single use…the blog. Ok, maybe some social deployment as well. But when it comes time for emails, marketers struggle to generate enough relevant content for their newsletters and promotions. Think about it like a two front war. Most blog content is consumed by people you don’t know or first time visitors…most email is consumed by people you already have relationships with. It’s perfect The other and more important issue is relevance in email. Most email marketers have lots of data to target…and they have easy to use tools to leverage that data. Yes we still see mostly irrelevant email marketing. The problem is one of content….. Solve that problem by pulling from your blog and deploying onto the second front… Blogs are tremendous archives of proven content that can be easily leveraged to a brand new audience and not bust your defense budget.”
Chris Baggott
“OK. so, my secret? shhhhh… come close, listen carefully, because its soooo simple you might miss it and I am certainly not the first to say it. BE HUMAN! Toss out the concept of B2C or B2B it should be P2P! People-2-People. It’s about helping, not selling. And to help, you have to connect in a human way. Otherwise, you’re no better than an old fashioned auto-dialer—robotic, disruptive, annoying and lacking in results.”
Heather Meza
“FOR YOUR EYES ONLY: Your content marketing mission is to find new talent. Talent that already has an audience (not a big one necessarily, but a high-quality one.) You want to uncover bloggers and photographers, videographers and podcasters. You want to find the people with potential to create great content. People with the x-factor. Your content marketing success over the next five years depends on it. TRANSMISSION OUT.”
Andrew (Drew) Davis
“Find 3 new potential business partners, companies that are in your industry that offer complementary products or services, then proceed to do:a joint webinar (on a topic that is of interest to both of your customer sets) an extended, 800-1000 word ‘evergreen’ type of joint blog post (or guest post on each others blog) a joint press release on your partnership a joint email blast that includes a great offer or free content download that you both contributed to (or each sends out an email blast with information/review about the partner) a joint e-book or white paper (on a topic that is of interest to both of your customer sets). If you did this 10 times in the next year, you’d have 30 new partners, tons of new content to share and lots of added revenue 😉 Go for it!”
Jon Wuebben
“In short: Take it slow. Everyone is quick to tweet, re-tweet, +1, like, follow and friend. In a world where the half-life of content is getting shorter and shorter, the best content wins. The truth is that ‘best’ is still somewhat – subjective. In a world where anyone can have a thought and publish it in text, images, audio and video instantly and for free for the world to see, the best publishers of content are the ones who slow down and take the time that is necessary to build true (and valuable) connections. Ideas spread. Yes. But, ideas spread better through channels of trusted individuals. Trust takes time. So, take it slow.” 25. Marcus Sheridan “Answer every single question you’ve ever received from a prospect or consumer. How?Write each question out in a full sentence form (without pronouns) on a sheet of paper. Come up with at least 50 to start or you’re not trying hard enough. Take each of those questions and make them a title to a blog post. Answer every single one as if you were explaining it to a friend at the coffee shop. NEVER ignore a question. The key to this is the willingness to address EVERY SINGLE ONE.
If a company learns how to be a great listener, they’ll never, ever run out of great content- content that is not only loved by the search engines, but real prospects and customers as well.”
Mitch Joel
“Facebook Ads and content marketing work really well together. You can use your unique content in ads to drive targeted users to your Page and in doing so you can increase your leads and your overall engagement on Facebook. I have done this with my own business and with my clients and have seen some fantastic results!”
Amy Porterfield
“When using videos or Flash tours, offer them ‘for free’ without having to fill out a form or jumping through any hoops. People will almost always watch something before they’ll read something. However, use a viewer that automatically offers them more information about what they have just watched if they will fill out your form (e.g. related white papers). Make this process relatively short, simple, and easy to do. Videos should typically only be about 3 minutes long. Put these videos/tours on every page of your website. This approach has produced more high quality leads than anything else we’ve ever tried.”
Curt Porritt
“The real secret to great content marketing is a focus on creating meaningful and mutually beneficial content that inspires, entertains and informs. Empathy with your prospects’ pain points and goals can provide infinite and actionable content topics, formats and creative angles. Knowing how buyers discover, consume and act on information during the sales cycle along with the ability to extract insight from monitoring and analytics can provide a framework for remarkable content and even more amazing results.”
Lee Odden
“Think big but act small. Your content marketing goals should be lofty, but you need to be incredibly fast and flexible, like a small startup, to really make magic happen. Oh, one more thing. Consistency is the key. Content marketing can’t just be a campaign…it must be a way to communicate with customers over the long term. Content is your promise to your customers. Don’t start and then stop, breaking your promise.”
Joe Pulizzi (Agent 42)
You can view all of the secrets in the embedded presentation below:
Thanks to Content Marketing World for working with us on this project.
Speaking of Content Marketing World, it’s coming up next week! If you’re attending then be sure to check out my session on integrating Search, Social and Content Marketing:
When: September 6th at 3:00pm
What: “Optimize and Socialize for Better Content Marketing”
Who: Marketers who want to attract and engage more business, grow their communities and generally become more awesome
What’s your best content marketing secret?
Share your content marketing secret in the comments below and you could win a free copy of Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing.
