Conversation
Highlights

What Happens When Your Content Audience Can See Through Everything You Write

Most B2B marketers worry about whether their content is good enough to convert. Stephanie Lottridge has a harder problem: her audience will professionally evaluate everything she publishes.

Stephanie is Head of Content and Comms at Newspack, Automattic‘s all-in-one content management, audience engagement, and reader revenue platform for independent local news publishers. Her customers are journalists and editors — people trained to interrogate sources, catch imprecision, and distrust anything that reads like a press release. In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, she unpacked how she built Newspack’s content and community engine nearly from scratch, and what two years of marketing to professional skeptics has taught her about what actually builds trust in B2B.

Inheriting a Bare Operation

When Stephanie joined Newspack two years ago, the content infrastructure was minimal. There was a newsletter, a set of monthly publisher calls, and a YouTube channel populated with product demo videos. No social strategy. No blog. No community architecture.

“There wasn’t really much of a digital footprint in terms of a social media strategy or building out our blog,” she explained. “The demo videos were very much like getting into the nitty gritty of the how-to and not really higher level — what we offer, or customer stories, or something that a prospect is necessarily going to find valuable.”

The monthly publisher calls were being run as a training and support function. The Slack channel existed but wasn’t being used as a community space. The pieces were there. The connective tissue wasn’t.

The Content Pipeline Hidden Inside Your Customer Calls

The insight that shaped Newspack’s content strategy was observational rather than strategic: the monthly publisher calls were already generating valuable material. Publishers were sharing innovations, working through challenges, surfacing ideas with relevance across the entire customer base. That signal was disappearing after each call ended.

Stephanie built a routing system around it. A publisher innovation surfaced on a call became a newsletter feature, then a blog post, then a customer story video, then LinkedIn content, then booth material at industry events.

“When we highlight a publisher innovation in the publisher calls with our community, how are we repurposing that and taking that into a newsletter and then a blog post — and then are we doing a customer story around it that’s gonna take off in a video — and then how are we repurposing it for something like our LinkedIn channel?”

The mechanism matters here. This isn’t a content repurposing framework bolted onto an existing operation — it’s a restructuring of what the customer call is. The call became the top of a content supply chain, not just a support touchpoint. Every recurring customer interaction a B2B company runs is producing signal. Most of it evaporates. The question worth asking before standing up a new content program is whether you’ve first built a system to capture what your existing touchpoints are already generating.

Marketing to People Who Will Catch Your Mistakes

Selling to journalists means Stephanie operates with near-zero margin for error. The scrutiny is professional, not personal.

“Someone catches a silly typo that I missed — and they’re not afraid to ping you about it directly.”

When she first joined, the anticipation of that scrutiny was genuinely intimidating. What she found instead: the community extended more grace than expected, as long as the effort and care were visible. The bar wasn’t perfection. It was credibility.

This distinction matters for any founder selling to sophisticated buyers. Audiences with high professional standards aren’t primarily looking for flawlessness — they’re assessing whether you take the work seriously. Over-engineered content optimized for zero errors often reads exactly that way: safe, sanitized, and ultimately less credible than something that moves fast and owns its mistakes. The publishers who caught Stephanie’s typos kept reading. They didn’t churn.

Why Repetition Is a Distribution Strategy

With a smaller customer base, Stephanie was initially cautious about over-communicating — repeating the same announcements across Slack, the newsletter, and publisher calls felt redundant from the inside.

“This audience is stretched so thin. They are part of multiple Slack channels. They’re trying to get the news out on the regular. They’re communicating with their community members, with advertisers. So you’re not annoying them. You’re trying to give them the information they need.”

The practical outcome: repetition across channels drove adoption rather than creating noise. Publishers who missed the newsletter caught the Slack post. Those who skipped the call saw it in their inbox. The redundancy was on Stephanie’s end. For the publisher, each touchpoint was often the first time they’d seen it.

This reframe has a direct operational implication for any B2B team managing a small, high-value customer base. The instinct to throttle communication frequency to avoid feeling repetitive is calibrated to the sender’s experience, not the recipient’s. Your customer is not tracking how many times you’ve said something. They’re trying to catch up between other priorities.

Building Community Before You Think You Need It

Newspack’s publisher community started as an operational byproduct — a Slack channel and a call cadence built to support onboarding. There was no deliberate community-building strategy at launch. There was consistency.

“Our founder started this in 2019 and the community started growing as a bonus to it. Now it’s something we’re really using almost as a selling point.”

What made it compound wasn’t a community platform or a formal program. It was a reliable structure: a bi-weekly newsletter, a monthly publisher call, and consistent presence in the Slack channel over time. That structure created a predictable place for publishers to show up. Over time, they started using it to talk to each other — not just to Newspack.

“It is a place for them to communicate with each other and ask each other questions, not just about how to use Newspack, but just in general about things that are going on in the industry.”

That shift — from support channel to peer network — is the inflection point most community-building efforts are trying to reach. Newspack got there not through programming or gamification, but through showing up with enough consistency that the community learned to trust the container. The timing implication is real: this compounded because it was started early and maintained without interruption, not because it was built with a formal launch.

When the Content Strategy Serves More Than the Funnel

Most content teams spend real energy negotiating internal buy-in — pushing product to contribute, convincing sales to share posts, waiting on engineering for a case study. Stephanie described a different dynamic at Newspack.

“I haven’t had to beg for buy-in… it doesn’t just help us, it helps our industry and our publishers.”

Her read on why: Newspack’s content operation is visibly connected to the company’s mission of supporting independent local journalism. When every team member can see that the content serves the publishers and the industry — not just marketing pipeline — participation stops being a negotiation and becomes intrinsic.

The mechanism worth extracting isn’t “have a mission-driven culture.” It’s a framing decision that any content leader can make: when pitching internal stakeholders on a content program, anchor the value to customer and industry outcomes first, pipeline outcomes second. The team that sees content as serving the people they’re building for will show up for it differently than the team that sees it as a lead generation function.

Stephanie Lottridge is Head of Content & Comms at Newspack, Automattic’s platform for independent local news publishers. Listen to the full conversation on Unicorn Marketers.