When B2B content feels more like Netflix than marketing: UserEvidence's The Long Game

Hey friends,

You know how B2B content can sometimes be just a bit... boring? Well, it doesn't have to be that way. We can create binge-worthy series too – and this month's example shows how.

UserEvidence ditched the podcast studio and took their interviews to golf courses and ski slopes for 'The Long Game' series. Sure, you could tell an avalanche survival story in any podcast – but when you're actually on the mountain where it happened? That hits different. It's content people genuinely want to watch, not just something they tolerate for the business insights.

Plus, we've got insights on how Exit Five's newsletter gets 40 replies per email (hint: they write to actual humans, not personas), and why telling your employees to get posting on LinkedIn is probably doomed to fail.

Let's get into it.

This Month in Content Examples: UserEvidence's 'The Long Game' YouTube series

What they did:

Forget the usual business podcast polished studio background. Mark Huber of UserEvidence is out there filming real life conversations with marketing leaders while they're doing the activities they love.

UserEvidence created "The Long Game" – a YouTube vlog-style series interviewing marketing leaders about their career journeys, leadership philosophies, and what actually drives growth at their companies.

Each season spans 4-5 episodes, creating an episodic journey that viewers follow from start to finish.

Instead of another talking-heads business podcast, we get the unscripted reality of how the personal and professional lives of leaders really play out – with tons of anecdotes, career stories, and marketing lessons along the way.

The series has run two seasons so far. Season 1 featured Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five and legend of the marketing game. Season 2 saw Mark hitting the slopes with UserEvidence's own CEO, Evan Huck.

Why it works:

1. It’s unique, it’s memorable, it’s not what every other B2B brand is doing. Most business podcasts feel like two people reading from scripts. But when you're in your hometown, walking between ski runs or waiting for someone to tee off, the conversation flows differently. An avalanche story comes up because you're literally on the mountain where it happened. It might be a planned talking point – but it doesn’t feel like it.

2. They centred voices their audience actually cares about. Dave Gerhardt isn't just any marketing influencer – he's someone B2B marketers genuinely follow and learn from. Getting him for season 1 meant their exact target audience would naturally tune in. Then following that with their own CEO for season 2. Evan Huck is pretty well known in his own right, but it also sends a message: we're not just chasing big names, we're also confident enough in our own story and insights to put our leadership front and centre..

3. Episodic structure that makes people come back. We mostly think about B2B content as one-off pieces – a blog, a report, a webinar, done once published. But when you create a series with multiple episodes per season, viewers get invested. They want to see what happens next, more like a TV show than a business podcast. It becomes a recognisable, memorable series – building the brand recognition we’re all looking for.

4. Built-in amplification that doesn't feel forced. There's a big difference between asking a marketing leader to do another podcast interview versus asking if you can come film them playing golf in Vermont or skiing in Jackson Hole. One feels like work, the other feels like an experience worth bragging about. So then when Dave or Evan share these episodes on LinkedIn, they're not just sharing yet another podcast appearance – they're sharing this cool, creative project they got to be part of, and something they genuinely want their audience to see. And that makes distribution a breeze.

5. The format reinforces their core belief. UserEvidence exists to help B2B brands harness authentic customer voices. So of course their content marketing follows the same principle – real conversations with real people, not another polished corporate production. Just like they help brands feature authentic customer stories, they're creating their own content that centres genuine human experiences over polished messaging. The medium is the message.

Yes, the production value is high – this isn't something that every team can knock out with a phone and a ring light. But that’s kind of the point. It’s creative, it’s unique, and it makes sense for UserEvidence’s audience and positioning. It's about finding the formats and stories that genuinely connect with your specific audience.

1. Contentoo's State of Content Teams 2025 report: The shift from more content to better content

Contentoo surveyed 150 content professionals about what’s working for them right now for their recent report. There’s a ton of interesting findings in the full report, but the ones that resonated most with me are:

• Leading teams are measuring activation, not creation. Instead of tracking how much content gets published, they're looking at how deeply it integrates into sales processes and looking for success in how much it supports their sales team. One respondent nailed it: "Content doesn't scale if you're just feeding the beast. It scales if it creates leverage – across sales, onboarding, and product."

• The human backlash is building. Despite 86% of teams using AI, respondents predict a "flight back to humanity" – teams focusing on "more FUN B2B content" that AI simply can't create. After months of AI-generated sameness flooding our feeds, the appetite for genuine human perspective is only growing stronger, and I absolutely love to see it – let’s get creative y’all.

• The strategic power of saying NO. Several teams found their breakthrough came from what they stopped doing. No more trying to be across every platform or saying yes to every ad hoc request that comes through to us. Doing fewer things, but doing them exceptionally well, is the new strategy. I know this resonates with our team at Ravio – we’re dead set on finding our focus, and then protecting it at all costs.

Read the full report → www.contentoo.com/lp/the-state-of-content-teams-in-2025

2. Exit Five's newsletter philosophy: Write letters to one member of your audience

I loved Grizzle's recent breakdown of how Exit Five built their newsletter – partly because I'm a fan of Exit Five's newsletter myself, but mostly because I love content that reveals the process behind successful strategies, it’s always a winner in my eyes.

One takeaway is that Head of Content Danielle Messler writes each Exit Five newsletter as if she’s writing a letter to one specific reader from their subscriber base. "Today I'm writing for Chelsea. Tomorrow, it's for Amruta, who just started managing an 80-person marketing org."

They get 30-40 replies per email (basically unheard of in B2B), and Danielle reads and responds to every reply. So when she writes for Chelsea, she's not imagining her struggles, she knows them from their actual conversations.

When you write for "B2B marketers" you can easily end up with generic advice that could apply to anyone.

When you write for Chelsea who you interviewed last week and you know is struggling with attribution at her Series B startup, you naturally include the specific details and nuanced perspectives that make content actually useful.

Read the full breakdown → https://grizzle.io/blog/exit-five-newsletter

3. Why "let’s get all our employees to post" rarely works

In a recent edition of the Superpath newsletter, Eric Doty shared learnings from an episode of their podcast about employee enablement.

"Let’s get our employees to create content!" is what Eric calls the ‘white whale of B2B content marketing’ – sounds so simple in theory, yet anyone who's tried it knows it's a nightmare in practice.

The reality is that not every person on your team is going to want to be visible on LinkedIn – or make a great content creator.

Eric breaks down the models that actually work, with the learning of seeking those who are already natural creators:

• Founders – telling the company story and building in public.

• Practitioner evangelists – subject matter experts whose expertise naturally overlaps with the product (like our Chief People Officer at Ravio, where our audience is HR and Rewards teams)

• Operational thought leaders – those existing content creators, who are already sharing their expertise in their space for their own personal brand, not with promoting the company or product in mind.

• Marketer/product evangelists – marketers are great at speaking to the company’s positioning, so can be a great conduit for company messages and content because they naturally know how to talk about it in the right way.

Subscribe to the newsletter → www.superpath.co/newsletter

In content I've been consuming myself news, this month I found "The Nature Of" podcast from Atmos Magazine, and the episodes I’ve listened to have been utterly absorbing.

Brilliant host Willow Defebaugh has conversations with artists, conservationists, thinkers about nature and culture, but calling them "conversations" undersells what they really are – they're deeply personal explorations of what it means to be human during an ecological crisis.

In one episode, photographer Ami Vitale talks about being there when the last male Northern white rhino died – essentially marking the extinction of the species. But instead of making it all about loss and grief, they talk about why love drives conservation work better than sadness does.

In another, musician Maggie Rogers explains how she structures her albums like seasons and why slowing down has made her more creative, not less.

What makes this podcast so beautiful is how it finds the human angles in environmental stories. The photographer who can't stop crying after documenting extinction. The musician who takes breaks because nature does. The activists who somehow stay joyful despite everything they're fighting against.

And these stories clearly resonate – one look at the comments of an episode are enough to make that obvious.

The lesson for content marketers? Look for the human stories hiding in unexpected corners of your expertise. Our audience are humans, and every business problem is ultimately a human problem – the stress caused, the livelihoods dependent on decisions.

These stories can't be manufactured or forced. But when you find them – when you centre real human experience within your professional expertise – you create content that resonates on a completely different level.

What content has caught your attention this month? Hit reply and let me know – I'm perpetually adding to my swipe file and I’d love to hear what you’re adding to yours.

Speak soon,

Tabitha

P.S. If you found this useful, please share it with a fellow content marketer. Word of mouth is how we grow this little community 🫶.