IN CLEAR FOCUS: Kristen Sweeney, founder of B2B content agency Every Little Word, joins us to explore common content strategy challenges and how brands can overcome internal roadblocks. She shares how to identify and empower internal subject matter experts, extract authentic thought leadership, and repurpose content effectively. Kristen also offers practical insights for marketing teams seeking to scale their content efforts without compromising quality.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Kristen Sweeney: Marketing should really be an inside-out exercise. So who are the thought leaders in your organization? They’re people who think deeply about their work, about the industry they’re in, about the future, and they have specific perspectives and opinions. And I’ll tell you, that’s not every executive.
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising, produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. Content marketing has become essential for building brand authority and connecting with audiences. Yet many organizations struggle to move beyond strategy documents to actually creating and publishing compelling content consistently. The challenge often isn’t knowing what to do, but rather how to get it done, especially when it involves extracting insights from busy subject matter experts and navigating organizational dynamics. Our guest today is Kristen Sweeney, a content strategist with over 15 years of experience helping companies communicate clearly, particularly when dealing with complex or technical subject matter. As the founder and CEO of Every Little Word, a boutique content marketing agency, Kristen has worked with over 100 organizations across various industries, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, consulting, and education. Her approach focuses not just on strategy, but on the practical implementation challenges that determine whether content initiatives succeed or fail. To discuss how organizations can bridge the gap between content strategy and execution, I’m delighted that Kristen is joining us today from Tampa, Florida. Kristen, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Kristen Sweeney: Thank you so much, I’m very happy to be here.
Adrian Tennant: Well, let’s start with your journey. How did you transition from being a freelance content writer to founding Every Little Word?
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, so the first and easiest answer is I decided to focus on it. I had been a freelance content writer among doing many other things. I was an actor, I was a yoga teacher. But after my oldest daughter was born, and she’s six now, graduated from kindergarten, It was a good time to take stock and reevaluate. And I thought, “what would happen if I chose to focus on this as the one thing I was doing instead of one of several different things?” And so automatically with that focus shift and where I was really putting my attention and effort, my work started to grow. And then I would say a second milestone was really in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I partnered with somebody on a client project. And long story short, we ended up building a partnership that effectively developed an agency across our two organizations. He had expertise in a few specific areas of marketing and he had a lot of very industry specific expertise. And I, and eventually my team, had all of the content expertise and were able to do that implementation of actually creating the content that was needed for these programs. And so they worked with us to fill the sales pipeline and we were kind of off and running where I had to learn how to be an entrepreneur instead of a freelancer. Pretty quickly there, within six months to a year, I was making hires and building systems. And that was the big transition point.
Adrian Tennant: In your experience, what are the most common roadblocks that prevent organizations from executing their content strategies?
Kristen Sweeney: The first roadblock I would say is that they don’t actually have a content strategy. They have content. They have different pieces of content and they may be unified, maybe even in their heads there’s something, but there’s not kind of a documented plan that can be agreed to across the organization for what they’re trying to accomplish with their content. So that’s number one, is there isn’t a real strategy. And that can create all sorts of roadblocks. It can create a lot of kind of doubt and uncertainty in the organization. And then two is lack of internal buy-in. So especially with the kinds of content we create, we need expertise and collaborators from inside the organization. We’re working a lot with people who are extreme subject matter experts in what they do. And in order to create meaningful and unique content, we need their contributions. So if those folks who are a very vital part of the success don’t understand the purpose or aren’t willing to allocate the time or the effort needed, implementation is going to fall apart. And three, I would say is when it comes to execution, they may not have the right expertise content. I like to say every piece of content is a project, not a post, right? It’s if you were to look in our project management system, everything is, you know, multi steps. It could go through the hands of three or four different people. We have workflows again for every single piece of content, and that’s before it gets to our clients for review. So if you don’t have the experience in creating content, managing projects, it’s not necessarily something that you can just pick up or kind of what often happens is it gets tossed onto somebody as their third job, I like to say. So those are three big roadblocks, no actual strategy, not enough internal buy-in, and they don’t really have the skillset for execution.
Adrian Tennant: Got it. Kristen, you believe that it’s essential to work with true experts rather than just executives. So how do you identify the right people within an organization?
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, so I will say I hope that executives are experts in something, even if it’s leadership or management, right? And there are definitely times where what we want to do as part of the program is talk with a leader in an organization about their leadership strategy. That might be, for example, part of a strategy where that company is going to be doing a lot of hiring. And so they want some pieces about their leadership and their culture out there in the world. They want to make that more visible because they want to attract the highest quality and caliber of talent. Sometimes executives and experts are one in the same. But I think what you’re maybe talking about, Adrian, is this idea that sometimes there are these subject matter experts who are buried deep within the organization and they aren’t necessarily the most prominent people. And in that case, we’re often working with those folks almost on background to provide some of the unique perspectives. They aren’t going to be the person who is going out and doing speaking engagements or is posting three times a week on LinkedIn, but we need their insights to understand how does this company actually do things because they’re the people closest to the things getting done. So how we find those people is we ask a lot of questions. We say like, “who is really the person with all the knowledge here and can we talk to them? Who is someone who is close to the client’s problems?” Often that ends up somebody in delivery, right? Salespeople have their own special kind of expertise and their input is really valuable. But in certain cases, some of the content we’re creating, we often end up talking more to folks who are working on a product or delivering a service, and they’re interacting with their clients or customers day in and day out. So not only do they know the work well, but they know the clients quite well also. So I would say those are the questions we ask to try and dig into for this particular asset we’re creating, who is the person we really need to speak with or people in order to get not kind of a glossed over high level overview, but really be able to get into the nitty gritty of the details and how things work.
Adrian Tennant: Of course, not everybody wants to be a star contributor. So for subject matter experts who are hesitant to share their knowledge publicly, how can you help them become comfortable with the content creation process?
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, I think that starts honestly with something that’s very human, which is just setting expectations and helping people understand like we’re in the business of communications and that communications doesn’t just start with an asset we create, it starts with the way we interact with the people we collaborate with. And so helping them understand what is going to be taking place, what is the purpose of this conversation we’re going to have, when they get on a call with us, kind of reiterating, this is why we’re here. This is what we’re looking for from you, preparing them by having some guiding questions in advance. Often what I find is the kind of founder, CEO personality is very happy to speak off the cuff. Other types of personalities want to prepare. They want to know what to expect. They want those questions in advance. So, you know, making sure we provide that for them And then the way that we structure the conversation as well. So typically what we do is we’ll record our conversations, but we’ll say “the purpose of the video is for us to capture every word you’re saying. It may be that we can reuse part of this down the road, but we’d rather you be really candid right now and work through things and not try to be polished. Let’s just talk. Let’s have a conversation.” So all of that expectation setting. And then I think one other thing that I’ve noticed can be really valuable is helping those experts understand that we care about the details. Because a lot of times what often can happen is they sort of self-censor. And we’ve seen this with engineers is really common, right? Not all engineers, of course, but we worked with a large number of engineers, especially in manufacturing, and they’ll say, “oh, you don’t care about those details”. And we’re like, “Actually, we do because you know why? Your audience cares about those details. And those are the things that make what you have to say specific and interesting. So don’t give us the high level because you think we’re clueless and you aren’t really sure. Like we want to dig in all the way down.” And what we often find is that can unlock something because now we’re talking about things that these people really care about. and that they know. And when they understand that you’re invested in that level of their knowledge, not just some surface kind of quotes, often they’ll open right up.
Adrian Tennant: So interesting. This sounds very much like the in-depth interviewing process that we’ll use for qualitative research as well.
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah.
Adrian Tennant: As regular listeners know, we love case studies on IN CLEAR FOCUS. So Kristen, can you walk us through a specific example of how you’ve helped extract valuable insights from an expert, reluctant or not?
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, absolutely. So I talked a little bit and I think the engineering example probably is a good one. I have probably dozens of these folks, but there’s one particular company I have in mind where we interacted with some of the leadership. And at a certain point we were interviewing them and you know, you could tell they were kind of faltering, right? They were kind of like, “I don’t have a lot more to give you. I’m not really sure.” And we knew because we’ve run thousands of interviews. that we’re starting to not really get what we need either, right? We’re getting just a little bit of information and trying to stretch that into a content asset and thinking about, is this really going to have value to the end audience? We don’t want to just be checking a box here. And so we started to say, “is there anyone else we could speak with?” And they said, “actually, this engineer of ours, let me just go and get him”, and so because they’re in manufacturing, they’re like in a physical space. And so they bring in another guy and he walks into the room. And I mean, he has no idea why he’s there, except for the fact that his boss just told him like, “Hey, come here, I need you to talk to these people.” And so we introduce ourselves, give the quick rundown of here’s who we are, here’s what we’re doing. And, you know, you can tell he’s just kind of like deer in the headlights. And so a lot of what we’re doing is providing reassurance, right? Like, we’re just here to talk. We’re just here to get your information. Yes, this is being recorded, but it’s not going to like suddenly be blasted tomorrow on LinkedIn. And can we ask you a few questions? And reluctantly, but again, the managers there agrees to do that. And we start digging in. And at first, again, it’s like, we’re getting a few words in an answer, a couple words. And then eventually, we’re kind of like, okay, well, I think he says, “you’re not that interested in that.” And I was like, “actually, no, we are interested in that. This is the thing we care about. And you’re here because we want to understand all of those details.” And so, you know, you can tell he doesn’t really believe us. Right. I think there are two women from our organization. Women are still not that prominent in manufacturing. And he doesn’t know us at all. He doesn’t know we’ve been doing this a long time. He doesn’t know that actually we’ve built up a huge learning curve in this space. And so he starts talking. And eventually there’s and it happens very often. There’s some kind of question that I’ll ask that it unlocks something for them where they say, like, “oh, I get it.” So I think what happened is I compared it back to some other piece of knowledge I had. Is it similar to this? And they’re like, “oh, yeah, it’s similar to that.” Or if they understand, I can use a certain jargon or terms and understand that suddenly you just can kind of see like, okay, this person may not know everything, but I don’t have to explain it to them like they’re three, maybe seven. And really, I think it’s that kind of showing up and being genuine in the wanting to understand what they know, wanting to know what they know, and really caring about that, that helps them feel comfortable enough. So in this case, that person opened up and then continued to show up on the calls every month going forward for our interviews and became a regular part of these conversations and added a lot of depth and a lot of richness to their content as a result.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Kristen Sweeney, founder and CEO of Every Little Word and an expert in content strategy. You believe that authenticity in thought leadership is critical. Kristen, what does authentic thought leadership look like in practice?
Kristen Sweeney: Oh, such a great question. So I would say that it starts with what you do when nobody’s looking. So I’ve been a part of conversations where someone in marketing is on a call with me and we’re, you know, evaluating whether we should work together. And it’s kind of like, This marketing, you know, individuals, I’ve been tasked with like making us thought leaders. And one of my core beliefs is that marketing should really be an inside out exercise. You should be reflecting what’s already happening inside your organization. So what I want to say is like, “great, who are the thought leaders in your organization?” That doesn’t mean they’re famous. It doesn’t mean they post on LinkedIn three times a week. right now. It means there are people who think deeply about their work, about the industry they’re in, about the future, and they have specific perspectives and opinions. And I’ll tell you, that’s not every executive. It’s not. And some people don’t want to play that role, and that’s fine. And my belief is that you should not try to manufacture that. You should try to find the people in your org, even if it’s not the person right at the top or the person who’s ideal, who is going to be a well of information and opinions and perspectives to collaborate with you. Because at the end of the day, it’s going to feel more authentic, as you said, which is really that it’s real. It comes from somebody’s actual perspectives and opinions. I think there’s a lot of thought leadership that, in bigger organizations especially, ends up being company-level messaging and talking points just repackaged over and over. You know it when you see it because it feels like it could have anybody’s name on the byline. It could be written by anyone. And it’s just this executive that they chose to write it. But it’s very divorced from anything personal about them. Sometimes that involves sharing personal stories, but not always. Sometimes it’s your personal opinions. So there are a few different ways that you can do that. But ultimately, I would say it starts with the people who are already thinking rather than trying to force that on someone. That’s not something that’s really going to be effective. You’ve got to find those people and then find the ways to elevate them help them take what’s in their head and create the content that can then be shared with the world. And my company’s mission has been ever since we started is “to share great ideas with the world.” And I’ve thought through and twisted myself up in knots over probably every other aspect of who we are and what we do, but that has never changed for me. That’s always been crystal clear. And so to me, it’s like, start with the people who have the ideas because you can’t manufacture those.
Adrian Tennant: I think we’ve all had the experience of working on projects and discovering there are multiple stakeholders, but they may or may not completely agree with one another about the direction, for example. Kristin, can you share an example of a content strategy implementation that initially faced resistance but ultimately succeeded?
Kristen Sweeney: Yes, absolutely. So there’s one particular piece of a broader content strategy. We have a CEO we work with. She is the CEO of a company that is effectively several brands underneath. And that was a pretty recent change for her. And we were brought in to help build her thought leadership platform. So they have some other folks in marketing. across the organization, but that’s what we were there to focus on. And so we looked at it from an internal and external perspective because one of the things that they’re working on is the company has grown very quickly and she was wanting more avenues to be connected to the entire team. So obviously communication and marketing and content is a great way to do that. It’s a one to many, right? You can create one piece of content and it’s maybe not the same as having 500 conversations with your employees every month, but it is a touch point that you can create. So one of the things we were working on with her as part of this platform, and this was the stickiest one, so I’ll focus on it, was an internal company newsletter. And there were a few different challenges there. One was that initially she wanted to record a video for a welcome message, but not that comfortable doing video. So there was a lot of sort of kept getting pushed back and back on the calendar. Another piece of it was that we wanted to include some updates from the business units. And so this is an example where it’s probably not ideal, but sometimes it happens, where content can end up driving like a operational change inside the business. So when we said, “well, how do we get those business unit updates?” It was kind of like, that’s a great question because we don’t really have a process for that, but I know we need it not only for this newsletter, but we need it for the company. We need this to be established. And so we partnered with the CEO, but also our content champion, who was a very close advisor to her. they had to build that infrastructure internally to get the updates. And the first couple of newsletters, it was like, “OK, wanted to go out on this date. Well, we don’t have everything, so we’re pushing it. Well, we don’t have everything, so we’re pushing it. And yes, I’m working on getting these updates. Yes.” And honestly, there’s a piece of content implementation that I think is underestimated, which is like grit and force of like sheer force of will and a willingness to follow up and be like a dog with a bone about it. And I kept thinking, “I really hope that they can hang on. I hope that they don’t feel like this is too hard. It’s not worth it.” And fortunately, this client is she’s very tenacious, but she also gets it. She knows that things take time and she sees the long game. And by month three, we had everything we needed. Everything went out, published on time. And they had never been able to establish something with this kind of consistent cadence. It had been like a dream for them. So I would say that’s an example where there were definitely some internal challenges. And because of the nature of what we were trying to do, there were a lot of different stakeholders involved who had very different levels of buy-in. But the more we could make things a process, the more we could provide deadlines and say, “here’s exactly what I need you to do”, the more we were able to get everybody to cooperate together. And we ended up actually creating some process documentation for them. So we recently were able to hand that newsletter back to the team and say, “you guys have this now, you can run this internally, but we’ve built the muscle, we have the processes documented, we’ve solidified the structure, we’ve gotten everything up and running, and now we can take that, move it internally, and we can focus on some other things for this leader that we want to be doing with her.”
Adrian Tennant: Fantastic. Train the trainer.
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, exactly.
Adrian Tennant: Kristen, you advocate for repurposing content strategically. What does actionable repurposing actually look like?
Kristen Sweeney: Yeah, so I know that it is very popular. I’ve seen, you know, dozens of posts. It’s kind of an eye-catching hook on LinkedIn, right, to say like, we take one conversation and you should be able to turn it into like 750 assets. And yes, definitely. But I do have a couple pretty strong specific opinions about those things. So first, from our perspective for the kind of content that we’re creating, we are going to always advocate for focusing on a piece of long form written content first. And the reason is building that foundation. One, we find it so much easier in practice to take something that’s already been built, already been well-developed, and then kind of pick it apart. I have trouble honestly seeing, I know there’s some like you put a bunch of posts out on a bunch of different ideas and then you send signals and then you evaluate. I just don’t really buy it, honestly. Okay. This is kind of a topic for another day, but I think that there’s a lot of conversation in marketing and in content around data. It’s numbers, but it’s not necessarily meaningful. If you had a statistician in there, they would be like, “this is all baloney.” And so I think it’s very complicated to imagine that you are coming up with a bunch of different tiny ideas and then trying to figure out how to blow them out. We just haven’t really found that to be effective. What we have found to be effective is take the one big idea you have and flesh it out, especially because a lot of the folks we’re working with, complex ideas, a lot of subtlety, a lot of nuance, a lot of things that require technical accuracy, like you have to get it right. And having the space within a longer piece of content, like an editorial or a byline or a blog post is where you can really make sure you’ve made that idea super clear. Then go consolidate it for a LinkedIn post or something like that. So I do hugely advocate for repurposing, but I like to start with a piece of long form content. The other thing I think the kind of claims of how many pieces of content you can make miss is that when we actually execute, we don’t really execute just a batch of content all at once. We tend to execute by channel, right? So it’s not like you ought to have a social strategy for LinkedIn or an email strategy. And yes, this repurposed content fits into that, but there are probably other things you should be doing. It’s not just, I dropped 20 social posts about this one video and now there’s nothing, and now I’m gonna drop 20 more. You’ve got events, you’ve got other things you’re prioritizing. So the idea is, yes, you should be repurposing and creating new assets from some of your kind of core content pieces, but you also have to weave those into the different channels because just having a video clip is a piece of content, but you haven’t done anything with it yet. So you have to figure out where it’s going to go and where it’s going to be most useful. And I know there’s a lot of folks who would say like, well, channels, that’s just too tactical, but actually it’s not because if your content is not published anywhere, it’s not doing you a lick of good.
Adrian Tennant: Yeah, so true. For anyone listening who wants to improve their content strategy and implementation, what’s the first step you’d recommend?
Kristen Sweeney: So the first thing is, I would say, “ask yourself if you have an actual strategy. And if you do, revisit it. And if you don’t, that’s where you want to start.” Content strategy should have clear lines tied back to business goals. So business goals, and then maybe marketing goals, and then content goals. content is a subset of marketing and communications that really can touch many pieces of the organization. But in small and medium sized companies, it tends to live under marketing. In some bigger organizations, enterprise, some of this may fall under like a communications team as well versus a marketing team. But really stepping back and saying, “do we have a strategy?” And I will say this, this is something I struggled with early in my career. I did have the strategy, and I thought it was very obvious to people why I was making the choices that I was making. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t obvious to them. And they were the same choices I would have made, but I needed to go learn how to go back and really write out the part that feels dumb in some cases, which is “Here’s what we’re trying to achieve as a business. Here’s how content is going to support that. And now that we’ve all gotten on the same page, here are the specific things we wanna do to achieve those goals.” Again, sometimes it can seem really obvious to the person in the work day in and day out, but just remember it’s not obvious to the people around you. And like it or not, what you’re doing is one very small piece of their day. So they’re not thinking about it nearly as deeply as you are. So that’s one thing I would say is “revisit your strategy. Make sure it’s connected to your business goals very clearly and documented. It might seem like a pain, but it’s worth it in the end. And identify in your org a content champion.” This is so crucial. When we work with clients, we kind of push them toward identifying like, “who is that person?” A content champion for us is someone who Is the main point of contact? Yes, but they should also, I’m going to say have the authority to like boss people around. So this is one of the problems is sometimes if the person who’s doing the coordination and handling logistics, let’s say it’s a marketing coordinator and they’re being asked to kind of wrangle the CEO. If they’re not explicitly given the permission to do that, we’re just going to get like. “Oh yeah, I couldn’t really get the hold of them.” That person has to be empowered to be able to say, “hey, you’ve committed to this. I’m putting 30 minutes on your calendar so that we can make this happen”. Or, “hey, I need to get this review in front of you. When can you prioritize this?” So the content champion doesn’t just email back and forth, they also need to actually be empowered. And I would say without that in the org and someone who really has ownership over execution of the strategy, it can be very difficult to implement on schedule.
Adrian Tennant: Great advice. Kristen, if listeners would like to learn more about you or the services your team at Every Little Word offers, what’s the best way to connect with you?
Kristen Sweeney: I would say to check out our website. So that’s everylittleword.co. And you can also definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m Kristen Sweeney.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Kristen, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Kristen Sweeney: Thank you.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Kristen Sweeney, founder and CEO of Every Little Word. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Google’s Advertising Dominance
02:39: Ari Paparo’s Background and Insights
03:04: The Evolution of Digital Advertising
05:43: The Strategic Importance of DoubleClick Acquisition
07:38: Google’s Three Pillars Strategy
09:40: Dynamic Allocation and Its Impact
10:15: Internal Projects and Antitrust Concerns
12:34: Google’s Conflicts of Interest
19:09: Impact of Google’s Practices on Competitors
21:46: Antitrust Remedies and Potential Breakup
23:47: Key Revelations from the Antitrust Trial
24:54: The Future of Advertising: AI Disruption
26:35: Conclusion and Resources
