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Hello Reader!

• New data + template (VIP content) on what editors want to see in a pitch in 2025.
• This week's industry trends
• Must read industry content (pay attention to the AI search report)
• Expert Interview with Jimmy Burt

Thanks for reading,

​Ashley R. Cummings​

2025 Guide to Pitching is here

Tired of sending pitches into the void?

Your pitch is probably broken.

I interviewed 28 editors across marketing, tech, and B2B publications, hand-coding their answers into themes to uncover what really works.

Inside the report, you’ll find:

✅ Data-driven insights into what makes a pitch stand out
✅ The most common mistakes to avoid when crafting a pitch
✅ A starting template of the perfect pitch
✅ How editors actually feel about follow-ups (when, where, and how)

Stop guessing what works and start landing new assignments.

This VIP report is one of the many assets for Content Connect VIP members:

Industry Trends to Know

Brought to you this week by Amanda Natividad's LI:

Must-Read Content This Week

Think smarter, faster: Each week, I share the articles that are shaping where content marketing is going, so you don’t have to dig.

​1/ AI search manual by iPullRank (a must)​

Set aside some time to study this.

​2/ How to use Deep Research for GTM​

Kyle Poyar and Torsten Walbaum share a detailed guide to using AI “Deep Research” for GTM work, showing how it can turn 10+ hours of research into minutes. The post covers prompt best practices, tool comparisons, and five high-impact GTM use cases, from competitive ad analysis to international market assessments.

​3/ Results from analyzing 187 Real User Prompts​

Metehan Yesilyurt analyzed 1,827 real ChatGPT user prompts and found a shift from short keyword queries to long, conversational, task-oriented requests — 75% being commands rather than questions. The data highlights growth in developer use cases, hyper-local commercial searches, and “act as” persona prompts, signaling the rise of agentic search. He outlines actionable strategies for SEOs, marketers, and e-commerce teams to optimize for AI-driven discovery, focusing on structured data, brand personas, task-completion content, and new AI visibility metrics.

AI Updates + Tools To Watch

Don't get left behind: The most useful AI updates and content tools worth paying attention to this week.

Expert Interview | Jimmy Burt

Mini-consulting: One smart expert, one focused conversation that you can apply to your work.

1. Tell me about yourself and your journey into content.

I’m a dad, golfer, and the VP of Content at Good Content, a B2B executive content agency. Whew, I just said “content” a lot.

I got into this world the way most of us do: I got a job out of college I didn’t like, found out about copywriting via my high-school-spanish-substitute-teacher-turned-NYC-creative-director, spent a year putting a spec book together, got denied by 200+ agencies, and then finally landed an internship at a digital shop, where I wore a lot of content hats and fell in love with all the good, bad, and ugly things about it.

Eventually, I found my way in-house at 360Learning, a B2B SaaS in the HR tech space.

I very quickly fell in love with B2B--it’s such a team sport, and team sports are the best. A couple of years ago, 360Learning invested in a thought leadership program, and I took the lead on it, building out the strategy and execution playbook for our key executive. Best decision of my career so far, in large part because it led me to my role today at Good Content. Plus, I just love exec content--it’s a blast because a) it’s personality-driven, b) it brings the entire organization together, and c) it works.

2. What’s something most brands still get wrong about executive-led content?

It’s not so much that most brands get something wrong about exec-led content--it’s that most brands still don’t “get” it, period. I know, I know…go on Linkedin and it feels like everyone’s doing this and if you’re not, you’re already late to the party. Not the case. Like, at all.

In the grand scheme of things, very few brands are actually investing in this motion right now. That won’t be the case for long, and it’ll soon be a common line item on marketing budgets. Does that mean brands need to rush into it or they’ll be left behind? Not at all. But all brands would be better off, long-term, the sooner they start. It’s just like advertising--every brand in B2B should be doing this, all the time. And I think they will be soon. It wouldn’t surprise me if, within 5 or so years, most are running this motion with 1–5 execs.

As for the ones that are currently doing it, the least successful are those who view it as a direct sales play, an immediate pipeline generator. They turn it on for 3 to 6 months, and just when they start to gain a bit of traction and find out what messages are resonating, they turn it off. That kills me.

The most successful brands are the ones that go into this knowing it’s a brand play.

It’s for the 95% of your audience who aren’t ready to buy today. Sure, you can build a nurture/outbound motion on top of your exec-led content--and you should--but this should always be viewed as a long-term investment. If you’re an early-stage startup with a truly disruptive product, you might see healthy ROI on this in a few months. But if you’re a more mature startup or enterprise with big ACVs, long sales cycles, multi-year contracts and a lot of competition, it might be 12+ months. Yet, in those cases, it usually only takes one or two deals to deliver a greater ROI than any other marketing investment.

3. How do you balance speed and quality in a world obsessed with volume?

This might sound like a cop out answer, but I think you can have all three--and we strive to have all three with our clients at Good Content.

I’m not an advocate for volume for the sake of volume. All you end up with is noise. Start with value and typically it’ll lead you down the right path. Plus, we’re working with execs, and the last thing most execs want to do is fill a room with hot air. They’re execs, in part, due to the fact that they have delivered and communicated value exceptionally well throughout their careers. They don’t talk unless there’s a reason to. That approach translates very well into only delivering high-quality content.

The other piece of the equation is content sourcing--where does your volume content (Linkedin) come from beyond 1:1 interviews with the executive? Our approach is to source much of it from high-quality content resources (podcast episodes, webinars, case studies, reports, etc) that we either produce and create or that already exist. That way, your volume content should inherently be of strong quality because it’s a repurposing of an already-created high-quality asset.

As for speed, I think it’s fairly simple. Hire really smart, driven people. Use tools (cough AI cough) to accelerate parts of the process, like pulling out insights from interview transcripts, sales calls, etc. Create an environment where distractions are minimal (i.e., build out strong processes and workflows). And then get out of the way.

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