AMA with Melissa Rosenthal, Co-Founder at Outlever

Melissa is a media and tech executive building the future of owned media at Outlever, where she and her team transform brands into the #1 news source in their industry. 

Previously she was CCO of ClickUp, CMO of Insight Timer, CRO of Cheddar, and VP, Creative at BuzzFeed — where she was one of the first ten employees and built the branded content revenue model back in 2010. She's been featured in Forbes' 30 Under 30, Business Insider's 30 Most Creative People Under 30, and many more fancy-sounding accolades.

TL;DR: Melissa chatted with the Superpath community on how to make owned media work, making the business case, and building a brand on LinkedIn at the same time. Three key takeaways: 

Owning the audience > renting space on a channel. Traditional blogs optimize for an algorithm you’re not in control of. Owned media means you’re shaping the narrative and building an owned audience who trust you and come to you directly.

Trust the leading indicators. Are the right people reading it? Are they coming back? Are they sharing it? Are we getting the right ICP voices featured? If the answer to those is yes, the revenue tends to follow.

Start small and then build. You don’t need a whole publication from day one. Start with a corner of your site you can move quickly on. Start newsjacking on LinkedIn. Focus on the overlap of what the industry cares about and where you actually fit, be timely, talk to the right people, and then grow from there.

“There are so many benefits, but the core one is this: you're building an actual owned audience in the truest sense.”

TL;DR: The key word in owned media is owned. It’s a completely different play from a traditional company blog, and that’s because you’re starting with building an audience and a narrative, not an algorithm. 

What's the argument for building a news source vs. a "traditional" B2B content strategy?

There are so many benefits, but the core one is this: you're building an actual owned audience in the truest sense. People are finding real value in the content and coming back for it. That's how you build trust with your readership, and that trust is what gives you control of the narrative you want to shape. It also changes how you get to talk about your own products and services, because now you're doing it inside the context of the industry instead of shouting into the void.

But here's the real reason. As B2B marketers, we optimized for the blog for a long time, and the blog was never building an audience. It was just optimizing for an algorithm.

I get that owned media makes sense for a B2C company or a B2B company like ClickUp with hundreds of thousands of potential customers and 8-figure brand budgets. But have you ever seen an editorial motion work for, say, a B2B company with like 5k target accounts or a small budget? What might that look like, if so?

Yes, all the time. We have a ton of customers across very different verticals, including small and niche ones.

Take one in niche healthcare. ICHRA, for anyone who knows the space. We built benefitsbriefnews.com (for SureCo) and in a few months, it's become the talk of the industry. The target is ICHRA healthcare brokers, a small and specific audience, and getting them talking and turning it into the source of news in that space was relatively easy with this playbook.

That's actually the point I'd push back on. 

A small number of target accounts isn't a reason editorial won't work, and sometimes it’s the reason it works better. When the audience is 5,000 people instead of 500,000, becoming the place they go for news is more achievable, not less, because the niche is underserved and you can actually own the whole conversation. You don't need an 8-figure budget to own a small room, you need to be the only one actually talking to it consistently 😉

My working theory is that B2B content marketing treats the buyer as a job title and ignores that they're a full human being with taste, identity, and cultural reference points — the same insight that made Buzzfeed’s cultural cartography work. Do you think B2B is structurally incapable of learning from consumer media, or is this just a talent and imagination problem?

I think this is so true. A lot of where I'm able to draw from is my consumer and media experience, and it shows up in how I shape GTM and marketing strategies. What I've found is that lifelong B2B folks really struggle to think outside the box that way, especially when it comes to treating buyers as people and not just titles.

When you get pigeonholed into one way of thinking, it's really hard to break free. That's why so many of the best, most creative marketers in B2B come from non-B2B backgrounds. Media, consumer, creative agencies, etc. So to answer your question directly... I don't think it's completely structural (although that may not help), but mainly it's a talent and imagination problem.

“You don't need a separate off-site publication to start. You need a corner of your existing site you're allowed to move fast in.”

TL;DR: Melissa is building the future of owned media for brands, as well as running the playbook for her own company. Her owned media publication, thestateofbrand.com hit 1.5M monthly uniques in three months. If you’re thinking about the nitty-gritty day-to-day operations of how this kind of content strategy could play out for your brand, here are Melissa’s big takeaways: 

• You don't need a separate off-site publication to start. Don’t kill your momentum by biting off more than you can chew, especially if you’re running it solo. Carve out a part of your site where you have the freedom to write commentary and news, then make a LinkedIn distribution plan around that. 
• Narrow your focus. Don’t try to cover EVERYTHING or react to every piece of relevant news. Look for the content that sits at the marriage of what the industry cares about and where you actually fit.
• Lean on person-to-person distribution. If you highlight and talk to key people in your industry and focus on angles that rally that community together, you’ll get natural distribution and traction. Leverage that! 

Your State of Brand newsletter is peerless. Is this the deliverable that your clients get every week, a newsletter with industry-specific original reporting? Who's generating the content for your clients - SMEs, journalists? Where does the content live - client site, external site?

Thank you!  So to clarify, we've only just started building newsletters for customers. That's newer for us. The bigger picture is that there's so much value in just having their sites running as a publication.

The deliverables that come out of this strategy are pretty wide: content pieces, interviews, sales intelligence, competitive intelligence, and a lot more. The newsletter is one expression of it, not the whole thing.

As for who generates it and where it lives, it's a mix of our journalists and SMEs, and the content lives on sites we build and own with the client. 

‍How would a growth-stage B2B company in a technical, niche industry produce a magazine/editorial-style site when there's one content marketer and no budget allocation to hire any help? 

Is there a reason here to create a branded off-site publication, or keep everything in the company's blog/resources area? Plus, how can we talk to our audience more when there are restrictions and concerns about talking to our clients and getting their stories because of things like NDAs, customer satisfaction ratings, etc.?

In this instance, what I'd recommend is carving out a part of your site where you have the freedom to write commentary and news. Something like an "industry news" section where you can react to the things happening in your space. Then build a solid organic LinkedIn strategy around that.

Here's the honest catch though.... a big part of what makes this work is reaction time and timeliness, being fast on the things worth responding to in your industry. And as one person, that's a lot: you're sourcing everything you want to react to, building the onsite portion, and running the organic LinkedIn and social strategy on top of it. So I won't pretend it's not a real time commitment.

But that's still what I'd recommend in your situation. Start on-site, stay timely, and let LinkedIn be the distribution engine. You don't need a separate off-site publication to start. You need a corner of your existing site you're allowed to move fast in.

To answer your question about talking to your customers: the best part of this strategy is that we get around this hurdle pretty well by saying it's just talking to them about what they care about in their world, not the "sign-off" heavy type of work that typically is in a customer case study. Everyone usually feels a lot more comfortable with this style of interview!

Let's say there's that one content marketer (again) running a small corner of their employer's site as a news insights hub. Who does the actual reacting-to-the-news? How do SMEs fit in here?

If you're the only one running it, then the real answer is: it's you. You're the one reacting to the news. The way to make that sustainable is to narrow your focus to the content that sits at the marriage of what the industry cares about and where you actually fit. Don't try to cover everything, cover the overlap.

Then mix it up. Split your time between reacting to news in the space and writing commentary on it. And when you write that commentary, think about how it gets picked up in AI search. Pay attention to question phrasing, because that's increasingly how people and models surface content.

The SMEs fit in through you. You conduct interviews with them, or you proactively cover the work they're doing in their space. They're your source material and your credibility, you just don't need them writing anything themselves.

And again, real talk, this is all challenging as one person. But you don't have to do all of it. Bite off a small chunk, get it off the ground, and build from there.

What questions or criteria would you use to determine what distribution channels to focus on if you were building a new startup publication for an under-addressed market/niche? Either B2B or B2C.

The way I think about it: distribution is finite. So you have to find where those people actually are and work backwards from there. Without knowing your exact vertical it's hard to get specific, but a few things I believe in generally: 

• I'm a big believer in person to person distribution, and network distribution.
• I'd really focus on the news and angles that act as the rallying cry for that community.
• Highlight the notable people in it, and actually talk to them. 

That tends to build in some distribution on its own, because those people share, and their networks follow.

How do you avoid burn out while staying on top of the latest news? There's a good number of journalists who pivot to content marketing to get off the neededthisarticleyesterday hamster wheel.

Honestly, a lot of it comes down to the fact that we've built a whole suite of products to make this possible. Media listening, a unified inbox for interviews, interviewing tools trained off our own 5k interviews, a specific CRM. It takes a huge amount of the manual grind out of it. And then we have journalists internally plus freelance folks who specialize in SME stuff, technical topics, other languages, and so on.

So I'm not sure I'd frame it as burnout exactly. We're not the WSJ, and the model isn't dying in our case, so the framework is just different. The hamster wheel you're describing is what happens when you're chasing the same news as everyone else on someone else's deadline.

We're not really playing that game. We're building the source, not racing to be first to a story that ten other outlets are also chasing.

We had talked a while back (a year or two ago now) and you said you were having difficulty hiring journalist content types for Outlever. How did you solve that problem/how did that pan out? Where do you find your people?

We settled on finding a core set of journos and editors and then creating a bench for the rest. This allows us the flexibility to have the right people working on the right pieces, while still having a core team in place. Working very well for us now!

“Ultimately, if you wait for clean attribution before you believe in it, you'll end up killing the thing before it ever has a chance to work.” 

TL;DR: If you’re trying to make the business case for owned media, here are the core ideas you need to get across:  

• If leading indicators are working, revenue will follow. Don’t kill your shiny new publication before it has a chance to get off the ground. 
• Reframe what you’re building. Traditional blogs optimize for an algorithm, owned media is an actual owned asset that compounds over time. 
• Highlight the comparisons to “rented” space (i.e., ads). Owned media creates an asset with a cost that goes down over time and a value that goes up, instead of a channel you have to keep feeding.

Of course PR-content & revenue are linked, and also, it can be difficult to attribute a news content blog on the website that gets a PR pickup to revenue impact. How do you approach tracking and attribution, especially for things like building trust?

So like anything, there are leading and lagging indicators for whether something is working. You have to trust that the leading indicators are the signal that it's working, and the lagging ones are where it starts converting to revenue.

For the leading side, I'm asking: 

• Are the right people reading it? 
• Are they coming back? 
• Are they sharing it?
• Are we getting the right ICP voices featured? 

If the answer to those is yes, the revenue tends to follow. The attribution gets cleaner over time, but if you wait for clean attribution before you believe in it, you'll end up killing the thing before it ever has a chance to work (and I see this happen often).

So, if I'm a content leader and I want to convince company leadership of the editorial strategy, how do I make that business case? How do I make the math math?

Okay, the business case. Here's how I'd make the math math...

Start by reframing what the blog actually is, because most leadership thinks the blog is an audience play, when it never was. The blog optimizes for an algorithm. It doesn't build readership you own. So the first part of the case is that you're not asking for budget to do more of the same thing, you're asking to build an actual owned asset that compounds.

Then point at the leading indicators, because that's where the early proof lives. Are the right people reading it, are they coming back, are they sharing it? Those are the signals the thing is working before the revenue shows up. Leadership has to be willing to trust the leading indicators, because if they wait for clean linear attribution before they believe in it, they'll kill it before it ever gets a chance to convert. 

The lagging indicator is revenue, and it follows. It just doesn't follow on the same timeline a paid campaign does.

For the actual math, the strongest argument is comparison. What does owned distribution cost versus renting it forever? Every dollar you put into ads evaporates the second you stop spending. A publication you own keeps compounding: the content keeps getting picked up, syndicated, surfaced in AI search, forwarded in newsletters. We built thestateofbrand.com and it hit 1.5M monthly uniques in three months, and the majority of that traffic now comes from sources we don't pay for. That's the part that makes the math work.

You're building an asset with a cost that goes down over time and a value that goes up, instead of a channel you have to keep feeding.

And the kicker for leadership: this is also how you get control of the narrative in your industry and how you get to talk about your own product inside the context of that industry instead of shouting into the void. The audience is the business case. Everything else is downstream of owning it.

You said you work with small brands - how do you make that business case for them? 

It's everything in my answer above, but there's one piece that really helps sell: when we're doing interviews, we're going specifically after the ICPs of the company we're working for. So there's an immediate demand gen and ABM side to this that you start seeing within a few weeks of working with us, not months.

The math usually maths right there. When folks see we're getting their actual ICPs speaking on their own publication, and that those conversations turn into real business relationships, it clicks. That alone tends to pay for itself in a single engagement.

How do you reconcile B2B’s tendency to over-index on product marketing from the foundational (positioning, messaging, content strategy) to the tactical (articles, campaigns, initiatives)? And where so much of success is focused on linear and direct attribution, how do you get clients to shift the way they measure your work and impact?

Honestly, the off-site news positioning helps a lot here, because most of them have never seen anything like it before. It charts new territory, and that sidesteps a lot of the challenges you're describing. When something doesn't look like the product marketing playbook they already know, they don't try to measure it like product marketing either.

We honestly haven't had to fight that battle once. The format resets the expectations for us.

What advice do you have for folks with more creative backgrounds who feel a little "trapped" by the work that B2B leaders typically value more (and who might not see the potential of "riskier" strategies)?

I'd say start by getting leadership to try a few things that are lower risk to begin with. Softballs. And communicate really clearly up front what the outcomes could be and what the sentiment might look like, so there's no surprise factor.

Once you start stacking a few wins, that's usually what opens the door to taking bigger swings that are further outside the comfort zone. Wins buy you permission (!).

But if it's always a hard no? My honest advice is to move on and find a place that's actually open to experimentation. And a lot of the time, that openness comes from the top down. If leadership doesn't have an appetite for it, you're going to be fighting that forever.

“If you're just optimizing to fit whatever the platform cares about at the moment, you're only ever trading one dependency for another.”

TL;DR: With nearly 50,000 followers on LinkedIn, Melissa knows a thing or two about building founder-led brands, or just showing up on algorithmically-focused channels. But her big advice on LinkedIn is two-fold:  

• LinkedIn has clearly changed. Personal anecdotes don’t print impressions anymore. Instead, focus on newsjacking, or at the very least, building something specific that you can be known for. This is true for independents, founders, and employees. 
• But also: remember that LinkedIn is rented land. Don’t just optimize for a current algorithm that will shift and leave you high and dry. Focus on building something you own also. 

At Buzzfeed, you had a front-row seat to what happens when a platform decides your content model is no longer convenient for them. Most B2B marketers are currently doing the same thing on LinkedIn. What did you learn and could pass on from that lesson?

Yep, all of that is true. BuzzFeed was built on the rails of other channels, and the lesson I learned from that is that the rails are never yours. You're a guest until you're inconvenient.

So the strategy now is moving away from the blog and owning actual readership. The kind of audience that comes back to you even when you're not in their LinkedIn feed. Because here's the thing about LinkedIn: a post about your personal experience might drive likes and engagement, but readers aren't going to go off platform for it or forward it along. It lives and dies in the feed.

The best example of this working is thestateofbrand.com, the publication we built ourselves to show the work we do at Outlever. It's grown to 1.5M monthly uniques in three months. Some of that started on LinkedIn, sure, but the majority of it now comes from everywhere else. People picking up the content, AI search, syndication, email newsletters. It's become a place where people actually want to source their news from, and no one owns that but us. And me.

When it comes to building a founder-led brand, a lot of people — founders and otherwise — report having difficulties on LinkedIn these days (plummeting visibility, lower impressions, etc). How do founders "win" on LI these days? What's changed? What hasn't?

And tangentially related: Do you see any other platforms coming into the limelight as being the platform for founders to build trust and market their businesses? Or does LI still have the lion's share in this regard?

LinkedIn still has the lion's share, no question. But my entire world is spent optimizing for the day that reach is completely gone and LinkedIn has effectively killed its organic reach. I've watched that happen way too many times across my career (specifically the worst at BuzzFeed where it completely killed the company) to not be building for that day now.

In terms of what's working right now, newsjacking is the primary way you build. LinkedIn has clearly changed. It's devalued a lot of the personal anecdotes that used to print impressions. So reacting fast to real news in your space is the move.

But here's the thing I'd really think about: if you're just optimizing to fit whatever the platform cares about at the moment, you're only ever trading one dependency for another. The algorithm shifts and you're back to square one. That's why building something you actually own, a Substack, a publication, an email list, matters so much. You can play the LinkedIn game, you just can't only play it.

On other platforms: not really, not yet. Nothing has taken meaningful share from LinkedIn for founders building trust in B2B. But that's exactly why I wouldn't bet the whole thing on it. The winning move isn't finding the next LinkedIn. It's making sure you're not dependent on any single platform in the first place.

For people who primarily work in the company, not the company (i.e., W2ers), how would you recommend we use LinkedIn as a sort of safety net / insurance?

To me, it's imprudent to turn a blind eye to all the layoffs happening these days. I think we should try and keep some sort of professional appearance on the platform, to try and prepare oneself for the next (voluntary or involuntary) move.

Would you have the same advice in this case, with the newsjacking? But then also building something you own on the side?

I think building something you become known for, whether that’s takes on very specific topics, tutorials or how to use AI in specific ways, etc. Whatever it is, it should be something that allows you to stand apart from the crowd is the best answer I can give. What that is and how it makes sense to where you are in your career, it should map to that in some way!

For more from Melissa: 

• You can follow Melissa on LinkedIn here
• Highly recommend subscribing to the State of Brand, which is essentially Melissa running her own company's playbook.