Lead Your Company Through Content's Reinvention Era
The future of content marketing isn’t about adding to the noise; it’s about breaking through it.
Our Authority Moat Model transforms your unique point of view into an entire content ecosystem, generating demand and lifting your brand all at the same time.
All of a sudden, content marketing feels like the wild, wild west.
Tactics and channels that worked yesterday are failing today.
But you find yourself still trapped in the content factory, judged on volume, not value, publishing “random acts of content" to chase algorithms even with declining traffic.
Meanwhile, your team is burning out, feeling more like order-takers than strategists, and your content? Your content is more indistinguishable in this crowd of commodity content by the day.
“Thanks to generative AI, every part of our discipline is in flux:
the tactics and strategies that yield great results, the tools and processes
we use to achieve them, even the unit economics that justify it."
-Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, Former CMO of Animalz
This inflection point is unnerving, and the future of content marketing may look blurry to you.
Yesterday, you were in a volume race; now you’re in an authority race — where Transformative Perspective conquers all.
It’s time to hit refresh and fill your Strategy Vacuum — the void left by changing algorithms and SEO’s new rules of engagement, plus a lack of a Transformative POV to guide strategic content creation — with an enduring content model.
Carving Your Authority Moat
We’ve teamed up with our friends at Optimist to put you in the driver’s seat as the architect of your content’s golden age.
We call it the Authority Moat Model.
We help you transform your content program from a prescriptive, volume-based factory into a strategic, compounding content ecosystem built on a transformation narrative that deepens connection with your audience and expands your influence over time.
Our Authority Moat Model turns your unique expertise and worldview into a defensible business asset that drives demand and builds brand – all at the same time.
Phase 1
Define Your Transformative POV
Phase 2
Write Your Transformation Narrative
Phase 3
Construct
the Moat
We begin with an excavation process, discovering competitive narratives and mining your expertise for differentiation:
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Industry perspectives
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Proprietary data
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Customer research
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Unique value propositions
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Frameworks
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Processes
Next, we unpack the full story of transformation. Why is the old way flawed? Why is the new way better? And what will come from adopting this new approach?
This phase is dedicated to building the Authority Moat Plan. We turn your Transformative POV into extensible, campaign-worthy assets for your core audiences that both drive demand and build brand.
Phase 4
Deploy the Moat
Together, we build a launch plan that turns strategy into influence.
The initial focus is taking your Authority Moat to market with a campaign centered around the highest-priority problem or audience segment. This is the first time you’ll plant your flag and start to see your brand’s perspective break through.
Phase 5
Expand & Multiply
Each Authority Moat content asset expands your moat of differentiation and defensible positioning within the market. A fully-formed Authority Moat includes a connected universe of assets derived from your Transformation Narrative. Deploy each asset as a campaign, targeting a variety of audience segments or specific pain points.
An Authority Moat Disrupts the status Quo & gets Your Audience Talking
"'The companies that broke through didn’t start with tactics or even traditional strategy. They started with a story: a clear explanation of what was changing in the market, and why their product existed because of it. Your job as a marketing leader is to define that kind of narrative, and then continuously reinforce it. What’s changing for your customer? What shift are they trying to navigate? And how does your product help them respond.''
-David Gerhardt, founder, Exit Five, former head of marketing, Drift
“When we started off, we were in this mushy bucket of customer communication,” Dave Gerhardt, former head of marketing at Drift explained. Drift was perceived as a commodity in the chat tool market, struggling to articulate a clear and compelling differentiator against its competitors.
That is until its co-founders David Cancel and Elias Torres decided to niche into a sales and marketing application of its solution.
When they did that: “People started to talk about [Drift] as ‘chat for sales, sales chat, marketing chat …’ and we started to talk about it in that way,” Gerhard said. “But it didn’t really take off until we gave it a name.”
Drift then coined the term “Conversational Marketing” to position their solution as a product that let sales and marketing talk to people visiting their websites live – and away from the status quo narrative of helping support teams resolve issues quickly.
Why It Worked
Rather than a branded product name, this term turned an abstract practice into a tangible concept. Drift went all in and built its Authority Moat around it, including a Transformation Narrative, book, and podcast.
According to Gerhardt, once they introduced the term and reinforced it with its Transformation Narrative in late 2017, their growth exploded. The coined model not only differentiated Drift from competitors but also built inbound interest. It’s reported that Drift’s revenue went from $27M in April of 2018 to $120M by September 2021.
Ready to Build Your Authority Moat?
WORK WITH TYLER & Kristen
Tyler Hakes
Principal, Optimist
Tyler is the strategy director and principal at Optimist. He’s been helping startups, agencies, and corporate clients achieve growth through strategic content marketing and SEO for nearly 20 years.
Kristen Rocco
Founder, Bold & Noteworthy Marketing
After 15+ years setting content strategy and leading teams in organizations of all sizes, Kristen now helps B2B clients turn scattered content into category-defining strategy that fuels pipeline, aligns teams, and positions brands as a market leader.
While other content leaders flounder in chaos driven by the seismic shifts of AI, you are driving your brand's story and setting an enduring strategy for the future.
With the Authority Moat Model in place, watch your content build compounding authority and tangible ROI, inspiring trust with your audience in a way that AI never can. And you’ll get all teams finally understanding the value of content marketing because they’re successfully using the playbook you handed them.
We’ll look at where you are today and how the Authority Moat can transform your content strategy for this new era. Then, we’ll help you build the business case for internal alignment and buy in.