Three Must-Hear Maxims for Building a Content Culture

Some companies publish content that just feels a cut above the rest. The kind you wish you’d created. That teaches you something new. Content that sounds like a real person, not a press release. That kind of content isn’t luck — or even just great writing. It usually points to something deeper: a content culture.

A content culture is an organization-wide conviction that creating, sharing, and learning from original ideas is one of the company’s highest-leverage ways to build trust and influence. You’ll see it not just in what the content team posts, but in leadership priorities, budget lines, cross-functional rituals, and performance metrics. A strong content culture makes it easy to turn your organization’s best thinking and values into publishable content.

I’ve identified three core components of building such a culture, based on our first-hand experience with Animalz clients and others. I’ll unpack each of them in this piece, with the goal of helping you spot the early signals, borrow what works, and build a stronger foundation for your own content.

1. If Your Team Doesn’t Believe It, Neither Will Your Audience

When your team genuinely believes in your company’s values and understands the product, domain, and audience deeply, that authenticity shows up in the content you publish. It's the difference between content that could come from any company in your space and content that could only come from yours.

Write Down What Your Brand Stands For

Doist, the remote-first team behind productivity tools Todoist and Twist, is a great example of a company whose content reflects how it works and what it values. They publish thoughtful blog posts on async collaboration and deep work, and tutorials for specific Todoist use cases, featuring the marketing team, customer experience folks, the CTO, and even the CEO. “What we present publicly is very much aligned with how we are internally. And that feels good,” says CMO Brenna Loury. “We walk the walk and talk the talk.” 

This consistency is intentional. Content is shaped by three brand attributes: trustworthy, human, and affirming. These values, the company’s mission, and Todoist’s product vision live in a clear brand strategy.

Brenna has also worked intentionally to get the whole company excited about that vision. “We’re competing against Microsoft, Google, Apple — all these really big companies,” she explains. “But I think people feel excited about building a brand that’s truly trustworthy, and about showing the human side of the company in a way our competitors just can’t or won’t do.”

Buffer takes a similar approach. “It also means we aren’t chasing trends just to keep up,” says Tami Oladipo, senior content writer at Buffer. “The work we publish, from long-form experiments to short LinkedIn posts, tends to reflect our considered thought processes, which has helped deepen our credibility over time.”

Screen for Genuine Product Interest and Domain Fluency

If someone doesn’t understand or care about your product, they won’t be able to write about it in a way that resonates. Doist builds this into hiring: Anyone Brenna hires for the marketing team needs to be a Todoist user. “You need to be passionate about this space,” says Brenna. “If you feel lukewarm about the product or you don't use it, how can you speak about it in a compelling and interesting and empathetic way?” 

Orgs with strong content cultures also support marketers to keep expanding their knowledge — by pointing them to relevant industry resources, involving them in product training, and sharing insights from customer conversations. When marketers understand the product deeply, it’s also easier to collaborate with design, support, and engineering without constant translation.

2. If Content is Just Marketing’s Job, It Won’t Work

Strong content cultures can’t be built by marketing teams alone. They’re supported by leaders. Fed by subject matter experts. And shaped by rituals and systems that make content part of how the company operates. 

Get an Executive Champion

Without an executive sponsor who understands and believes in content, you’re not going to build a content culture. You might still publish great content. You might even hit your goals. But you won’t get the org-wide support it takes to make content a shared, strategic function. 

Many content programs, especially those focused on education, thought leadership, or brand, take time to show results. In those early stages, you need someone at the top who knows that, believes in the long-term value, and is willing to protect the work through budget, access to subject matter experts, and engagement with the content team. Without that belief, you’ll spend more time justifying your existence than publishing anything meaningful. In the words of Stephanie Losee, a marketing director with experience at Autodesk, Visa, Politico, and Dell: “There has to be either institutional will or a powerful person’s will.”

John Collins, marketing consultant and former director of content at Intercom, explains that Intercom had that buy-in at the top, both from Eoghan McCabe, the CEO, and from cofounder Des Traynor. Des famously wrote the first 93 of 100 blog posts on Inside Intercom. He had set up an RSS feed to Campaign Monitor that auto-sent their newsletter every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., giving him a built-in deadline that forced him to write or source a post each week.

This pattern holds across companies: When founders write the original content themselves for an extended period, the company almost always develops a strong content culture. The act of founders consistently publishing embeds content creation into the company's DNA.

Involve Other Functions in Content Planning

With executive support in place, you can start to involve other teams. Strong content cultures don’t just share a Google doc and hope for the best. “Content, creative, product marketing, campaigns — these four functional areas really need to be deeply, deeply integrated,” says Heike Young, Senior Content Manager at Microsoft. Content teams also need to connect with functions that may not typically work closely with marketing — like product, engineering, customer support, and leadership. These teams hold crucial context: what’s shipping, what customers are asking for, and where the business is headed.

They may also be the ones requesting content or influencing what gets requested. Without regular connection, those requests can pile up as one-off asks, with little shared understanding of what’s feasible or how it all fits together. 

Bring other functions in early and often, through regular planning sessions and shared editorial calendars. During his time at Appcues, Animalz CEO Ty built a simple calculator to help triage content requests. It gave stakeholders clarity on what the content team prioritized (or deprioritized) and why, which made it easier to get buy-in for the plan.

Create Rituals and Systems That Encourage Contribution

At Buffer, ideation happens all over the org. “Our product, customer support, data, and engineering teams are often the spark behind new content ideas,” says Tami. “We’ve published deep dives led by engineers and data scientists... Sometimes it’s a customer conversation that turns into a blog post.” 

Strong content cultures make it easy for people to contribute, even if they’re not trained writers or don’t have much time:

• Make idea sharing low-friction. Buffer runs async idea-sharing threads and shared docs. The content team often acts as an internal editorial partner, helping shape other teams’ thinking into stories the audience will care about. 
• Meet contributors where they are. At Intercom, John focused on adapting to each contributor’s style and schedule, doing whatever it took to capture subject matter expertise. That might mean interviewing someone, editing a rough draft, or jumping into a whiteboard session to draw out the core idea.
• Equip people to participate. At Microsoft, Heike and her team member Daniel Godoy Mondragon have been developing the VOICE program (Voices of Influential Contributors Empowering Microsoft Advertising) to give employees tactical guidance, like filming and editing tips, so folks can turn their perspectives into short-form video content for LinkedIn. The first pilot video earned 2x the engagement of a typical post, and leaders like Jennifer Kattula now post regularly. 
• Celebrate contributions. At Intercom, they gamified contribution. “We used to have league tables of the most-read blog posts to get some friendly internal competition going,” says John. “It was called Project Dopamine — making sure people get that shot of dopamine when they've gone to the effort of creating content.” The Buffer team shares content in team meetings, “so people see the outcome of what they helped spark,” says Tami. 

3. If Content Doesn’t Connect to Results, It Won’t Last

You can't have a lasting content culture when your program can't prove its value. Sure, you might be able to keep your head down and do good work for a while. But you're just one economic downturn — or one scrutinizing CFO — away from having it all scrapped.

Define and Report on Meaningful Metrics

It’s important to show impact in terms that your leadership team understands and cares about. At Zapier, Lane Scott Jones (director of content and corporate marketing) and her team built a conservative, transparent model to connect content performance to business results. They used a last-touch attribution model, only counted blog content, and excluded programmatic pages. Internally, they called it Return on Content Spend.

When they presented the model to their CMO, his response was: “With these ROI numbers, tell me why I shouldn’t give you advertising’s entire budget right now.” Lane got the budget — and went on to build a 30-person content team.

At Square, Mallory Russell takes a campaign-level approach. “Every program, every campaign has its own metrics,” she says. “That’s one of the first things we do. We sit down and write the strategy or the brief that outlines what the goals are and what the KPIs are for that goal.” Mallory shared this in an upcoming episode of the Animalz podcast (out July 22nd).

Recognize the “Soft” Signals of Content Value

If you’ve built a strong content culture, you’ll start to see value show up in ways that don’t always make it into a dashboard. Sales calls where prospects bring up a case study on your blog. Teams linking to the same asset again and again because it explains a concept better than anything else.

During his time at Unit21, Aditya Vempaty had to start limiting how many copies of their book sales reps could give away — demand was that high. At Animalz, we’ve lost count of how many times prospects (or industry peers like Brenna, who mentioned during our interview that she was a fan!) have said they’ve been reading the Animalz blog for years.

You can’t rely on these signals alone, but when paired with strong strategy and metrics, they tell a powerful story about how content is helping the business.

Make Content a Strategic Partner

In companies with strong content cultures, content earns a seat at the table. It supports company priorities by aligning with business goals and helps shape those priorities by sharing customer insights and market signals.

Before even joining Autodesk, Stephanie noticed that Autodesk lacked the kind of original research program that could raise the company’s profile and proposed one during her interview. The hiring manager had already considered the idea, given that teams across the company were commissioning their own research with vendors like Deloitte and IDC. The insights were valuable, but the brand lift went to the research firms, not Autodesk. Stephanie and her manager, Dusty DiMercurio, proposed a shared initiative: the State of Design & Make report. Stephanie’s team took on the KPIs of other departments and used their budgets to produce a single, flagship piece of research. The result was a report program that aligned with Autodesk’s category vision, supported sales conversations, and gave the entire company a narrative to rally around.

At Zapier, Lane and her team spotted strong early traction on content about AI and ChatGPT — before it became a company-wide priority. That signal helped prompt leadership to pay closer attention to AI across product and strategy.

To make that happen, you need fast feedback loops. Track which topics and formats resonate — whether that’s through traffic, engagement, sales mentions, or support conversations. Create systems (a monthly Slack summary, a slide in team meetings, a shared doc) to share those signals regularly with other teams. 

You Don’t Have to Start From Scratch

Some companies will never build a true content culture. If there’s no executive belief in content and no interest in surfacing internal expertise, it’s not going to happen. 

But if the building blocks are there — if your team believes in what they're creating, if you have executive champions who protect the work, if content contributes to measurable business outcomes — then you don’t have to invent anything new. Just follow Tami’s advice: “You don’t need to build a content culture from zero, you need to surface and structure what’s already there.” Start by creating one lightweight ritual, like a weekly “What We’re Hearing” Slack thread where different teams share insights from their department, or a monthly spotlight on any content created with a non-marketing teammate.

Sara Coggin

Sara is an Associate Head of Content at Animalz. She lives in Barcelona, Spain. Connect with her on LinkedIn.