VP Marketing at SparkToro | Can keep hydrangeas alive in a vase for 10 days

I'm currently VP Marketing for audience research startup, SparkToro. I also send a personal newsletter on Substack, and I'm working on a book due out this summer! (More to come on that.)

I've spoken at conferences like AdWorld, MozCon, and SaaStock. I've guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell University, Stanford University, and University of Washington. In my spare time, I do marketing/content consulting, and I teach Content Marketing 201 on Maven. I'm also a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a former journalist.

Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of my profile to see the top 100 lists that I am not in.

Amanda Natividad

Bani Kaur

Who am I?
I am a content strategist and writer for B2B SaaS brands, with clients like Writer, Jasper, Litmus, Typeform, Shopify and a writer for the SaaS Nordic CEO and Executive Network. I combine design thinking with deep research to create content that doesn’t just inform—it influences.

What I can do for you
1. Content Management
Scaling content is two parts management and one part strategy. You need to keep all your opportunities organized, yes. But you also need to strategize for automation, repurposing, and efficient communication. 

I work with teams to:
✔ Build content calendars that align with business goals
✔ Establish internal processes for research, writing, and approvals
✔ Maintain consistency across formats and distribution channels

2. Research Reports & Thought Leadership Assets
B2B audiences value depth. I have a team of analysts and designers in-house to build assets that cater to both logic and aesthetic. 

✔ Interview your team to distill insights into premium reports, whitepapers, and long-form blogs
✔ Develop original research reports with proprietary data and trend analysis
✔ Structure content in a way that drives direct revenue

3. Repurposing & Distribution Strategies
Your best ideas shouldn’t be limited to one format. I help brands maximize reach by transforming existing content into new, high-performing assets.

Want to talk content strategy? Let’s connect.

Email: hello@banikaur.net

Long form SEO writer

In the span of three years, I've watched my reaction to public-use AI go from pure delight to abject horror.

When ChatGPT came out, I was part of a very small community of writers who were excited. Hell, I was positively giddy. To the point that I didn't even care if it "took away my job". I couldn't say with confidence that ChatGPT wouldn't be able to write well eventually. I was mentally prepared for it to.

So I double-down HARD on interview-based content. I knew I was good at asking questions, so I perfected talking to the C-Suite for a unique POV, customer stories, and multi-expert interviews.

As a result, I was brought in to write content that AI couldn't. And my clients loved both the pieces and the results.

Meanwhile, I watched AI go from novice, to novice + a few new features, to a tech-version of a person who thinks they can bullshit their way through tasks (and life).

I've gone from collecting prompts to being repulsed by brands that use AI-output as is.

Believe me, no one in my life has seen looks of annoyance, exasperation, and horror rolled into one, as much as ChatGPT has.

If you are in any way responsible for producing content, do not start with ChatGPT. It'll start you off on a sub-standard idea, give you the most generic brief, and mimic Gartner's verbiage in the name of strategy.

I anticipate it becoming even harder — and even more crucial — for companies to find reliable content leads and content writers. Strong thinkers over fast producers. Results, referrals, and testimonials will do most of the talking.

If you're in a content-based role and charge of category creation, demand generation, do not rely on AI for strategy or execution. When your goal is to build visibility and trust in a new market, you can't afford to be blacklisted by customers. 

It's not that people hate AI-generated content, it's that they hate their time wasted and their attention directed to bots.

Do not rely on AI for first drafts of even top of funnel content. You can't build awareness with generic ideas that everyone else might also be starting with.
If you must use AI, use it for tasks like finding synonyms, pointing out gaps, coming up with illustrative examples. (And even these tasks require repetitive, smart, and measurable prompting).

How's your journey with AI been?

Content strategist, writer, and Research Report Creator for B2B SaaS in Fintech, Marketing, AI and Sales | Clients: Hotjar, Klaviyo, Shopify, Copy.ai, Writer, Jasper

A project that you’d be perfect for, have availability for, and are excited about getting cancelled has got to be one of the worst feelings as an freelance writer. 

How do you get over it? What are your best tips?

Sharing 2025 in numbers and a nutshell (and the occasional takeaway) ☀️ 

🔥 My biggest win: Had almost no retainer clients graduate. Everyone I signed on retainer at the end of 2024 has stayed with me as we head into 2026. 2 of them have asked to expand the contract with more strategic work. Only one client moved on after our contract ended. 

I also have to note that this is incredibly rare. We can't anticipate, and much less control, how marketing gets budget, when they're looking for contractual support, and who gets laid off. Even though I've made it a point to keep my clients super happy, I've also been really lucky here.

😭 My biggest low: Three prospects I was really keen to work with ALL dropped out in the same month (2 due to internal restructuring and 1 got laid off). I can't even begin to emphasize how excited I was about these projects and had mentally nearly finished the strategy to guide all these pieces. This happened in May 2025 and I'm still not over it. 

I've been working for myself for a long time and I've come to anticipate these lows and now I'm much better prepared for them financially. Doesn't mean they don't sting emotionally. 

🔥 Other interesting metrics (total clients, project, divisions)

👉 1. Number of clients I worked with: 10

This is down by ~50% from 2024 (19 clients) because I chose to work with a select few teams that are squarely in my niche. I passed on from standalone blogs and refreshes and focused more on building up my research report studio. 

👉 2. No. of recurring clients: 5/5 (The rest were standalone, state of industry reports).

This was *THE* metric for me since 2024. When I started the year, I promised myself that I'd focus on building long term relationships and creating systems that delivered more value the longer a client worked with me.

(More on these systems in the coming week!)

👉 Dream clients I worked with: 0 in terms of big industry names. 4 in terms of the exact kind of work I've wanted to do. More strategic, higher impact.

HUGE shout out to my network for the introductions, referrals, and recommendations! 

👉 Average content assets produced for one client: 9 

👉 Busiest month: Feb; 7 clients at once. (This used to be my average number of clients in 2024 and I'm SO glad it's gone down over the other months).

👉 No. of interviews conducted: 38 🤯 

PSA: There's a very strong correlation with brands who create interview-based content and brands with VERY HIGH conversions from content. 

👉 Split of content types:

1. Thought-leadership/interview-based ebooks: 10
2. Product-led blogs: 26
3. Research reports: 17 (up from 6 last year)
4. Content strategy projects: 6 (up from 2 last year) 

👉 Lightest month: September; 4 clients (same month as last year) 

Anything else you'd like to know about my year?

Freelancers often talk about how retainers are essential to their business but retainers are a MUCH bigger win for clients. Let me tell you why (through the lens of my work): 

👉 1. There exists a lot of nuance with writing that you can't codify into a brand guide. How you want paragraphs to flow, how you prefer to use certain words, how your brand defines "wit" or "whimsy." 

When you work with a writer over months, they just get this without you having to explain it. 

This will save you so much time and money because you won't have multiple rounds of edits, you can focus on strategic tasks, and you get almost publish-ready pieces. 

👉 2. I have a brilliant in-house editor (helly Kelly Fiorini) who works on all my pieces for my retainer clients. She knows their brand guides inside-out and also points out stuff like "they changed a sentence like this one to something like this in the last piece."

Again, this means much less editorial work for your in-house team 

👉 3. I build a vision doc for all retainer clients where I document and analyze all their edits over time so they never have to repeat themselves. Headaches saved = money made. 

👉 4. They get first dibs on any additional availability I have and usually those spots get snatched up immediately. This means they can almost always count on support for reports, ebooks, and other quarterly assets. 

Looking for a B2B writer for help with your content strategy and execution? DM me and let's chat!

It’s been a while since I introduced myself and what I do here! And what better time to do it than at the start of the year.

So here we go (with details on how I work with clients): 

👉 1. I'm a content marketer for B2B brands across Sales, Email Marketing, AI and Fintech. I specialize in interview-based, product-led content and original research. 

All of 2025, I worked with clients at the intersection of these niches and formats. 

For example, I built Exit Five’s B2B Marketing Salary Report that has 13.5K downloads and counting. It increased organic traffic, newsletter signups and paid membership. 

👉 2. I build content strategies for startups building AI-use cases over their core product or shifting to a B2B audience. I also create LLM-ranking strategies and have had multiple series show up as THE resource in ChatGPT and Perplexity searches. 

For example, I built a refresh strategy for a B2B marketing company that wanted to talk more about their newly launched AI use cases but had a strict budget to experiment with. 

We identified 10 high performing blogposts and 5 new untapped opportunities to rank and updated these pieces with newly released AI features. 

For the 5 new blogs, we identified SMEs and wrote posts with strong, industry-leading opinions. 

👉3. I work extensively with the C-suite for thought-leadership content.

For a year, I was a part of a B2B SaaS mastermind where the C-Suite would bring their challenges and similar profiles across other companies would share what worked for them.

As a result, I have a deep understanding of cross-departmental mechanisms in SaaS and can ask questions that make for an insightful read.

📩 In need of a content partner to support you with similar initiatives? Drop me a note.

"Success" is always a moving goalpost when you work for yourself. A lot of the skills that have helped me land impressive clients and create work I'm proud of are also sticky, nosy things that topple my work-life balance. 

But here are three things that I see as widely unacknowledged success metrics as a content writer:

👉 1. Getting to work with brilliant, kind, and gifted editors. I've learnt so much from my editors, especially:
- Tracey Wallace
- Tommy Walker
- Aaron Orendorff
- Alaura Weaver 🌈♾️
- Erica Schneider

I've compiled lists and lists of their edits and broken them down into common themes. I worked with Tracey 3 years ago but her first few edits still give me direction during the self-editing phase. 

👉 2. Clients who take me wherever they go and refer me to their network. 

I've had lots of clients do that this year. Introduce me to opportunities in their network and even refer me to other teams internally. 

👉 3. Navigating tricky client situations with confidence.

Working for yourself comes with its fair share of scope creep, tricky money talks, and negotiating rates. The 2021 me was terrified of bringing up difficult topics. "What if they never work with me again if I follow up on an unpaid invoice?," I'd think.

But not anymore. 

Business ownership and timidness don't gel. 

I now have the difficult conversations and my clients respect me more for it. 

By these metrics, I'm immensely successful. And even more grateful. ❤️ 

👉 What are some metrics you use to measure success in your journey?

This quarter I'm working on a juicy "ultimate guide" refresh for one of my favorite clients. The original guide was published in 2023 is ripe for a makeover.

And as I'm going through the original version, I realize that the framing needs to change completely because so much of what was imminent in 2023 is already behind us.

We've moved away from the launch of AI to a full-blown AI scaling strategies. We're no longer speculating whether marketing departments will cut budgets or whether the economy is on the brink of collapse. 

Now, had I been a new writer, this project would've been a massive undertaking. 

But because I've been writing for them for over a year, have conducted 15 expert interviews, and created a 50-quote library, I know exactly where to look:

1. The SME list for the people doing the work we're going to be talking about.
2. 15 hours of transcripts talking about each of these topics in detail.
3. My own list of questions from previous interviews
4. A quotes library 
5. A vision document with microanalysed edits. 
6. An editor who knows my client's preferences inside out.

We're still going to be doing a fresh round of interviews to add fresh perspectives and relevance. But when there's a near-immediate launch date to be met, your time-tested writers are going to bail you out. 😉 

I'm now taking booking for ebooks and research reports for Q2, if you're planning on doing one but don't know where to start, give me shout out!

I'm working on a tell-all video marketing strategy guide for Storyblocks and I'd love to highlight advice from some of the pros. 

Video has moved so quickly in the last 2 years, thanks to AI and the subsequent push for deeply human content. I want to interview the industry experts to see what's working, what's not, and what the future holds. 

Who should I be talking to? 👇

I know it's one of the toughest times in content right now (without a light at the end of the tunnel), BUT it's also a time of excellence. 

AI is pushing brands that care about their readers to be creative and create content that is enjoyable and reference-able. 

In the glory days of content (2021, I'm looking at you), a lot of what I read was an unofficial round up of the top search rankings. The best ones included some cool examples. 

But now? 

I'm reading ebook after ebook filled with brilliant expert takes. Multiple in-house employees contributing to content engines. "Series" style content where I'm actually excited to read the next edition.

Here are 3 ways I've been upping my game to create content that matters:

👉 1. For tool round ups, I've been reading multiple G2 reviews and adding sections on what matters to users. For example, do multiple users complain about this tools customer support? Are people especially excited about the tool's integrations?

In short, answer: what is it that humans are excited about that an AI round-up of the websites features can't convey?

👉 2. Introducing contrarian takes without resolving the tension: if one expert says "its best to follow up at least 5 times on a cold email" and another says "follow up once and stop," I let both takes stay. I just add background so readers can contextualize expert opinions without considering them gospel truths.

👉 3. Try to interview at least one subject matter expert per piece to add authenticity and a human voice to every piece. 

What about you? How are you creating content that goes beyond "AI snippets"?

I've been working exclusively in the B2B SaaS space for and after the initial chaos and reshuffling after AI, I think I'm finally starting to see the dust settle. 

At least the teams I work with, have quite the protocol around AI-use and a strong human-first policy. Here's how I've seen the shift play out and where I think we're headed:

👉 Stage 1 (early 2023): The AI frenzy

Teams were under a strong mandate to do "more with less" and more often than not leadership said that to mean "fire people and replace them with AI tools." This was when a quite a few of my clients requested AI-edits and I spent hours editing generic, boring-sounding articles for them to be 15% better. 

But what I really learnt is that you can't write (and shouldn't publish) anything without a perspective. Even pieces I used to think are "typical TOFU pieces" and can be handled by AI were barely readable when written by AI. 

There's something to be said for better and continuous prompting BUT in 2023 that effort would equate with the effort of writing the piece yourself. 

👉 Stage 2 (2024): The wait

This is when content teams waited for AI slop to show results. Teams were under pressure to publish 10 pieces a week to drive traffic and, miraculously, a lot of them DID publish decent, AI-edited pieces. 

But when everyone is publishing semi-decent AI content, the bar for great becomes higher and the tolerance for poor becomes *considerably* lower. 

Which is what happened. 

Not only did throngs of people NOT flood in to read the AI content, but they were now flocking to AI engines to answer their queries. So the even though content volumes quadrupled, the viable audience halved. 

To make matters worse, the results that AI engines were surfacing or quoting were the exact opposite of the basic, high volume, TOFU blogs content teams were being forced to create. What was ranking was:

- Proprietary research
- Interview-based content 
- Customer stories
- Feature comparisons from In-depth competitor pieces 

👉 Stage 3 (2025): The resurgence of relevant content 

The title is a tad dramatic but I'll stand by it. 

The second half of 2025 is when the wheat separated from the chaff. 

➡️ I saw research reports pull in BIG results. For example, the B2B Marketing Salary Benchmark report I created for Exit Five had over 8K downloads. It also helped them acquire a whole new strata of customers and position themselves as true pioneers. 

➡️ I saw interview-based content get quoted, referenced and remembered. We worked on an in-depth video marketing guide at Storyblocks and that content surfaced in multiple ChatGPT dives and Google searches. 

➡️ But it was the competitor pieces that truly surprised me. These aren't a new play but they've taken on a whole new energy. Multiple #1 features and a conversion rate par none. 

So, finally, after 3 years of panicky plans on LOOP, the smarter content teams have figured out a stance. A play. A direction. 

What are you seeing in 2026? 👇

3 dead simple things you can do today before adding another item to your content calendar:


1. Talk to your customers.
2. Talk to your customers.
3. Talk to your customers.


That's it. That's the strategy.

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Amanda Natividad

Bani Kaur

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The Battle

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Bani Kaur

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Engagements

Likes

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