Content Strategy & Audience Growth: How to Build Audiences That Actually Care

Content Strategy That Builds Audiences, Not Just Impressions

Here's what I see constantly: teams producing more content than ever, across more platforms than ever, with less to show for it than ever. The content calendar is full. The blog is active. The social accounts are posting. And none of it is moving the business forward in any meaningful way.

The problem isn't effort. It's strategy. Or more accurately, the absence of one. Most organizations confuse a publishing schedule with a content strategy. They're not the same thing. A publishing schedule tells you when to post. A content strategy tells you why anyone should care.

I've seen this from both sides. At Ogilvy and Huge, I built content strategies for brands spending millions on production and distribution. Some of it worked brilliantly. A lot of it was expensive noise. The difference always came down to the same thing: did we know exactly who we were talking to and why they should listen?

When I left agency life to co-found Edges of Earth, I had to answer that question with zero budget and zero existing audience. We built a global following from scratch across Instagram, YouTube, editorial partnerships, and documentary. That experience, building from zero with nothing but story and strategy, is what makes this talk different from the usual conference keynote.

Your audience walks away with a framework for content strategy that starts with audience, not output. Practical, tested, and grounded in real results from both big-budget campaigns and bootstrap operations.

Talk Topics

Every talk is customized, but these are the threads I pull from based on your audience and goals.

Content Distribution: Where Strategy Actually Lives

Most teams spend 90% of their effort on creation and 10% on distribution. That ratio is backwards. I break down how to think about distribution first and create content that's designed to travel. This draws on my experience at Ogilvy building distribution frameworks for Fortune 500 brands and at Edges of Earth getting conservation stories picked up by international press, government agencies, and partner organizations. The tactics are different at different scales, but the principles hold.

Audience Growth: From Followers to Community

Follower counts are vanity metrics. What matters is whether your audience will show up when you need them to. I share the audience growth framework I've used across both agency campaigns and Edges of Earth, focused on building depth of engagement rather than breadth of reach. This includes specific strategies for turning passive consumers into active participants, advocates, and collaborators.

Multi-Platform Strategy: Saying the Right Thing in the Right Place

You don't need to be on every platform. You need to be on the right platforms, saying the right things, in the right way for each. I walk through how to build a multi-platform strategy that doesn't require a 20-person team. How to decide where to invest, how to adapt content across formats without just resizing it, and how to measure what's actually working. This comes from running real multi-platform operations on both corporate budgets and shoestring ones.

Who Books This Talk

This keynote resonates with teams that are past the basics and ready for a strategic reset:

• Marketing teams and CMOs who feel like their content engine is running but not performing. If you've got the production capacity but need a clearer strategic direction, this talk gives your team a reset with frameworks they can implement immediately.
• Growth conferences and marketing summits that want a speaker who isn't recycling the same case studies everyone's already seen. I bring real numbers from real campaigns alongside honest breakdowns of what didn't work and why.
• CMO and marketing leadership offsites where the goal is to rethink the content function entirely. I've sat in these rooms as a consultant, as an agency partner, and as a founder. All three perspectives show up in the talk.
• Startup and scale-up teams building their content and growth engine from early stages. My experience growing Edges of Earth from zero is directly applicable to teams working with limited resources and big ambitions.
• Nonprofit and impact organizations that need to grow their audience but don't have enterprise marketing budgets. I show what's possible with story-first strategy and smart distribution, even when the budget is small.

The Practitioner Difference

Content strategy talks usually come from one of two places: agency consultants who've built strategies for other people's brands, or founders who've built one brand and generalized from that single experience. I've done both, and the combination matters.

At Ogilvy and Huge, I worked across dozens of brands and industries. I saw what patterns hold across sectors and what doesn't translate. I learned how enterprise marketing organizations actually work, where things break down between strategy and execution, and why so many content programs produce volume without impact.

Then I stepped out of the advisory role and became the practitioner. At Edges of Earth, I'm not building strategy decks for someone else to execute. I'm building the audience, writing the content, managing the distribution, measuring the results. When something doesn't work, I'm the one who has to fix it.

That combination means I don't just tell your audience what good content strategy looks like in theory. I show them what it looks like in practice, with the failures and pivots included. The feedback I get most often is that the talk felt honest in a way they weren't expecting from a marketing keynote.

I also do the homework. Before every event, I research your organization, your audience's challenges, and your competitive landscape. The examples I use on stage are relevant to the people in the room, not generic case studies pulled from a slide library.

Past Speaking

Selected content strategy and audience growth speaking engagements:

• Content Marketing World - Keynote on audience-first content strategy
• SXSW - Panel on building audiences for impact
• Web Summit - Talk on multi-platform growth without a massive team
• Advertising Week New York - Panel on the future of content distribution
• Forbes Under 30 Summit - Keynote on growing a media brand from zero
• HubSpot INBOUND - Workshop on content strategy for resource-constrained teams
• Social Media Week - Talk on community building vs. follower building
• Corporate events - Private keynotes and workshops for marketing teams at technology, consumer goods, and media companies

I also run hands-on workshops for smaller groups, where we work through your specific content challenges in real time. These are especially popular with leadership teams going through a strategic planning cycle.