Technical Communication Quarterly

ISSN: 1057-2252 (Print) 1542-7625 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htcq20

The art of selling-without-selling: Understanding

the genre ecologies of content marketing

Amanda Wall & Clay Spinuzzi

To cite this article: Amanda Wall & Clay Spinuzzi (2018) The art of selling-without-selling:
Understanding the genre ecologies of content marketing, Technical Communication Quarterly, 27:2,
137-160, DOI: 10.1080/10572252.2018.1425483

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2018.1425483

Accepted author version posted online: 09

Jan 2018.
Published online: 24 Jan 2018.

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TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY
2018, VOL. 27, NO. 2, 137–160
https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2018.1425483

The art of selling-without-selling: Understanding the genre

ecologies of content marketing
Amanda Walla and Clay Spinuzzi b

a
UX Research at Facebook, San Francisco, California, USA; bUniversity of Texas Austin, Texas USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Content marketing involves creating content in genres that readers find Genre theory; persuasion;
useful. These genres individually do not persuade their readers to buy a proposals
given product and may not even mention the product or service being
marketed. But collectively, they are designed to lead their readers to a
purchase decision, that is, they sell without selling. The authors examine
how content marketers strategically deploy these ecologies of genres.

Introduction
Developers hate marketing in general: they hate bullshit, they hate marketing-y words, they hate kitschy things.
Being able to think like them and get straight to the point is kind of . . . it’s not your traditional content
marketing, I would say. (Vivien)

At the time she was interviewed for this study, Vivien was a product marketing manager at Atlassian,
a business-to-business software developer that sells expensive, complex, downloadable software that
must be learned, maintained, and upgraded over time. Like the eight other participants in this study,
Vivien faced a problem: How do you market a product to someone who hates marketing? The
answer, though not exactly new, is newly prevalent in marketing circles. Content marketing involves
creating multiple pieces of content—that is, multiple instances of multiple genres—that can indivi-
dually be taken up in multiple activities. The individual pieces of content that Vivien produces (such
as a how-to blog post about a product, a press release about new features, a tweet, a landing page) do
not overtly sell a product or service. But these pieces of content are linked; together, they form a
“buyer’s funnel” designed to lead the audience to buy that product or service. They “sell without
selling.”
Content marketing is a fuzzy label for an evolving field with nebulous parameters. It is, however, a
label that many marketers affix to their practices and that helps to describe a set of widely occurring
online marketing practices. Although its definition and boundaries are debated (Cohen, 2011; Smith,
2012), content marketing generally refers to a method of marketing a product or service by creating
and distributing free informational or entertainment content, especially online. Companies produce
blogs, white papers, social media posts, videos, images, websites, microsites, webinars, and other
content. This content is designed to be valuable or interesting to consumers on its own merits, so
they will consume it willingly. By distributing such content across a wide variety of platforms,
companies build brand awareness and credibility with their customer base and maintain ongoing
relationships by which customers are constantly in contact with the brand, increasing the probability
that they will purchase goods and services. In the pithy words of marketing writer Smith (2012),
content marketing is “storytelling for sales”—storytelling across multiple genres that can each
provide value to consumers. Storytelling is a complex rhetorical task: inventing, writing, distributing,

CONTACT Clay Spinuzzi clay.spinuzzi@utexas.edu 208 W. 21st St., Stop B5500, Austin, TX, 78712-1038
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/htcq.
© 2018 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing
138 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

and connecting networks of content in a variety of genres, media, and platforms. Furthermore,
content marketers are held accountable for their persuasive efforts by employers and customers.
This complex rhetorical work, however, has not been studied much in rhetorical terms or in the
professional communication literature. In this article, we undertake an exploratory study of how
Vivien and eight other content marketers perform this work. Below, we first review the relevant
literature and then describe Wall’s study of content marketing practices. In the Findings, we share
participants’ stories of creating specific content ecologies: which genres they involve, how content is
reused and/or re-represented across genres, how they draw in people from multiple paths, and how
they are connected. We illustrate these stories with examples of the work that Vivien and others do.
Then we show how the narrative of the buyer’s funnel serves as a loose framework for those
ecologies and the genres within them. Each piece of content endeavors to persuade the audience
to travel to a different piece of content. Finally, we dig into the tension of selling without selling, and
how it shows up in participants’ negotiations of genre. This push and pull between providing
inherently valuable content and enticing customers to buy helps to create the foundation of these
marketers’ work.

Literature review
Below, we review the literature of content marketing as well as genre theory in professional
communication.

Content marketing
Althoughg an advertiser could reach a significant portion of the American public with a single
television commercial in the 1950s, the modern media landscape is comparatively fragmented. Public
attention and, consequently, advertising dollars, are split among many kinds of media: television,
print newspapers, online news sites, radio, social media platforms, blogs, online video sources,
e-mail, and more. This multiplicity of media means that people access information from many
more directions. For instance, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism finds that 25% of
adults say that their smartphones are their main source of news, accessing news from websites, social
media platforms, and mobile applications (Newman, Levy, & Nielsen, 2015). What’s more, the
structure of the Internet amplifies this division of attention. Content is networked together with
links that often bypass “homepages” to land directly on relevant information. This preponderance of
doorways mean that web designers and marketers must conceptualize the value of their website less
as a monolithic, hierarchical whole, and more as a collection of valuable, consumable bits.
Thus, to reach the large audiences they desire, companies extend tendrils of content across many
genres and platforms. Many of these sources, though, do not operate like traditional media sources,
in that companies need not buy or rent space to share content there. Companies can share content in
spaces that they own, such as websites, or they can share content on free social networks, such as
Facebook or Twitter. But acquiring and keeping the audience’s attention on such content means
persuading people to visit such websites or pages of their own accord, without the benefit of
unavoidable television commercials or visual advertisements. What’s more, the hyperlinked, inter-
connected structure of the web means that it is incredibly easy to click away from uninteresting or
objectionable content. Content marketing must persuade people to freely consume advertising
content.
Here are few examples of content marketing:

● A law firm created a website about faulty drywall that provided information about the
problems, how to identify problems in one’s own house, and how to contact the law firm to
make a claim.
● A security firm created a video documentary about the writers of the first computer virus.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 139

● A car company created a microsite featuring articles, images, and videos, and allowed for user-
generated content that tells stories about the cars. (“Content Marketing Institute. (n.d.). 100
content marketing examples,” 2013).

Content, then, includes communicative text, images, video, audio, and other media intended to
communicate with external visitors. It is communicative media as opposed to noncommunicative,
meaning that content does not generally include the HTML code that makes the page function. It is
also outward facing, meant to communicate with external visitors, as opposed to internally with
coworkers. Although the term content may seem to reduce writing to filler of a separate container, in
this usage, content is a useful designator for a larger category of online texts, which are regularly
reused from genre to genre and from platform to platform (see Dush, 2015; for a sensitive discussion
of content as becoming. In professional communication, see also London, Pogue, & Spinuzzi, 2015;
Spinuzzi et al., 2015; Swarts, 2009).
Scholars in marketing and communication have noted that inbound marketing—in which
customers are drawn into conversation with a brand—involves the cocreation of value by companies
and consumers (Ballantyne & Varey, 2006; Locke, Levine, Searls, & Weinberger, 2001; Lusch &
Webster, 2011): “Markets are conversations” (Locke et al., 2001, p. 75): companies need reviews,
comments, clicks, likes, shares, retweets, and many other kinds of consumer interaction to build a
successful marketing effort. This more dialogic kind of marketing requires a different kind of
rhetorical activity than, say, the design of a print magazine advertisement.
Even marketing scholars have not studied content marketing much. But issues related to it
have been studied from several angles within marketing and business studies. Researchers have
addressed the use of user-generated content for marketing purposes (Burmann, 2010; Luetjens &
Stanforth, 2007; Shenkan & Sichel, 2007; Van Dijck, 2009); viral Internet marketing, particularly
consumers’ motivations for deciding to share content (Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, &
Wallace, 2008; Dobele, Toleman, & Beverland, 2005; Ho & Dempsey, 2010; Phelps, Lewis,
Mobilio, Perry, & Raman, 2004; Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003); customer reactions to social
media marketing (Akar & Topḉu, 2011); and the network structure of viral marketing efforts
(Bampo et al., 2008). Within the industry itself, advice abounds about how best to achieve
successful content marketing campaigns, from viral marketing (e.g., Stevenson, 2008) to blogging
(e.g., Singh, Veron-Jackson, & Cullinane, 2008).
Since 2000, however, content marketing has been an important part of a larger movement in
business information production at large, one which has received some attention within writing studies
circles. As the Internet continues to change expectations about information consumption, businesses
now seek to accommodate consumers’ expectations that content be on-demand, modular, and
customizable (Andersen, 2014). Companies now develop “content management” strategies to manage
the production and distribution of “product content, marketing content, technical content, and pass-
through content such as user-generated and social media content” (Bailie & Urbina, 2013, p. 5). In fact,
many companies now consider content to be a critical business asset that builds relationships with
customers and supports “presales,” the series of steps that lead to the customer’s decision to buy. Taken
in aggregate, the content forms a “total information experience,” which requires such careful curation
and management that companies now boast positions such as director of Information Development
and VP of Technical Documentation and Information Experience (Andersen, 2014, p. 127).
Researchers in technical communication have conducted a variety of studies applicable to, if not
about, content marketing. The phenomenon of single sourcing—the reuse of content across multiple
media and locations without editing—has been particularly well documented (Albers, 2003; Carter,
2003; Clark, 2008; Robidoux, 2008; Sapienza, 2004, 2007; Swarts, 2009). Scholars have also charted
the diffusion of technologies that enable single sourcing (Andersen, 2011; Dayton, 2006). One study
has examined search engine marketing (Spinuzzi, 2010). More broadly, scholars have examined the
cultural, corporate, and technological movements that have led to these changes in information
development (Carliner, 2009; Dicks, 2009; Rude, 2009), as well as the rise of distributed work and
140 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

writing (Spinuzzi, 2007; Swarts, 2009). Most of this research addresses technical and product
content, as opposed to marketing content.
An important insight of studies of content management is that rhetorical decisions about
produced texts may be distributed across various actors, including writers, managers, interfaces,
and locations. This distribution of rhetorical decisions may hide the complexity of content marketing
work. Swarts (2009), for instance, says that rhetorical decisions may sometimes be “delegated to the
[content management system]” in single-sourcing, which “masks the complexity of the rhetorical
relationships negotiated by reused text” (p. 158). It is important for this study, then, to account for
the distribution of rhetorical decisions among different workers, genres, and technologies. What
rhetorical actions underlie the technological actions involved in particular content marketing genres?
How do recognizable genres emerge from these technological-rhetorical actions? And what do these
genres tell us about the content marketing that Vivien and her colleagues do?

Genre in workplace studies

To understand content marketing, we must consider (1) its process, (2) its genres, and (3) how its
process and genres inform and emerge from each other. To better understand how content market-
ing works, this article employs rhetorical genre theory as a framework. This theory helps us under-
stand what people are doing when they compose things for professional purposes—such as Vivian’s
blog post about Atlassian products, her press release about a product’s new features, her tweet about
the product, or the landing page she authored for it.

Function/purpose/practice
Rhetorical genre studies defines genre as socially recognizable rhetorical action (Miller, 1984). For
instance, a product review is a widely recognized and relatively stable genre whose purpose is to
evaluate a product based on clear and widely held criteria. However, because genres rely on social
agreement for their definitions, they are only ever stable temporarily. Internet genres, especially
those associated with content marketing, are relatively new and in constant evolution. It can be
difficult to distinguish genres from media, for example. In one instance, Miller and Shepherd (2009)
said that they initially mistook the medium of the blog for a genre; but a blog article can be in the
genre of a product review, a set of instructions, or a news item. In fact, it can hybridize different
genres (cf. Spinuzzi, 2003), as when an instructional blog post also (perhaps surreptitiously)
promotes a product. And a blog—a medium—can contain many blog articles in many different
genres.
Content marketing is a useful site for the study of Internet genres because these genre writers
create these texts for identifiable and goal-driven purposes, goals for which they are held accountable
by their employers. The nine participants did report difficulties in the development of goals and in
gauging their success in meeting those goals, but all of them had identifiable goals.
Spinuzzi (2003) sorts various definitions of genre into the scopes upon which they are applied. On
the macroscopic level, genres describe activity forged by tradition and disciplines. What disciplinary
traditions are carried forth by content marketing genres? How do online content marketing genres
inform sociocultural and disciplinary practice, and how are they informed by it? On the mesoscopic
level, genres are “tools in use” (Russell, 1997, p. 511): consciously employed strategies. How do
content marketers make use of online genres to achieve their goals? On the microscopic level, genres
are the unconscious habits that guide work activities. What are these “operationalized rules”
(Spinuzzi, 2003) in the context of content marketing? What unconscious habits or recurring actions
are employed by content marketers to do their work?

Conventions
The next step in answering these questions is to identify the conventions of content marketing
genres. In describing these conventions, we can learn the recognizable and generic features of these
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 141

texts, and in doing so, we can answer the question, “What makes these texts content marketing, as
opposed to something else?”

Conventions for audience. Genre theory helps us determine how audience affects Internet genres.
To the uninitiated, Internet communication can seem like speaking into a “void,” or speaking
indiscriminately to all Internet users at large. Content marketers must use the technical and verbal
means available to them to create texts aimed at particular audiences, as well as to find and create
audiences. How do they do this? And how does the recognition of a particular audience help form
particular genres?

Conventions for media and technical features. Genres on the Internet emerge from the specific
affordances of Internet technology in addition to the purposes of their audience. Bazerman (1988)
shows how the conventions of scientific essays were influenced by conditions of scientific labor and
the material possibilities of spreading that knowledge. Genres on the Internet are influenced highly
by the web’s network structure: the use of hyperlinks to connect texts, the use of search engines to
organize and rank texts, and the use of purchased advertisements to promote texts. How do links,
search engines, and ads influence the genres and genre conventions used by content marketers?
Swarts (2011) points out that interfaces built for particular uses help inform the rhetorical use for a
text placed into that interface. The formal elements of genre also include formal elements such as
interface elements, forms of interaction, and the technical infrastructure that makes the whole thing
work.
A content marketing blog article, for instance, is likely to include structural elements intended to
operate with search engine crawlers, links that connect the article to other sites, language and design
elements intended to steer the audience to clicking on links. The genre is highly associated with these
particular media and infrastructure. On social media, the texts are displayed with interactive
mechanisms: thumbs up or down, replies, shares, reports of rule breaking. These texts accrue social
interactions, and thus, data. As mentioned earlier, they thus may operate more “conversationally”
than other texts, even if the interactions are not equally weighted in terms of agency. This article
seeks to understand how the formal, technical aspects of these genres work together to produce the
desired rhetorical effects. Although the nine participants do not provide a representative sample
from which to draw conclusions, their interviews do point to some of the important ways that formal
aspects of genre are handled in online persuasion.

How genres work together

Finally, rhetorical genre studies help us discuss how genres can work together to accomplish work.
Genre sets (Devitt, 1991) or genre systems (Bazerman, 1994) have been used to describe how
combinations of genres are used to produce complicated relationships, organizations, and products.
Because content marketing genres do not often operate together in strictly prescribed relationships,
we use the concept of genre ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2003) to understand the ways content marketing
genres work together in loosely related and highly contingent combinations.
In this article, we explore content marketing in terms of genre. We use rhetorical genre theory
because this approach sees genre as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller,
1984, p. 159); genres are recognizable responses or “tools in use” (Russell, 1997, p. 511) implemented to
effect or address that recurring need. In this context, content is the visitor-facing communicative text,
image, video, and audio of the web, and despite the word’s dualistic connotations, the participants had
nuanced approaches to genres that acknowledged the difficulty of separating form and content. They
may reuse utterances in different genres and contexts, resulting in “‘fractional objects’ that draw their
interpretive value from the way they lace these realities together” (Swarts, 2009, p. 131). For content
marketers, content genres like blogs, e-mail, and landing pages are the tools by which they accomplish
marketing. As the study’s participants related, by grouping these genres together in networks, marketers
are able to achieve more complex persuasion. Participants’ customer-facing content marketing efforts
142 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

involve connecting different genres into groups of texts that collectively persuade an audience to endow
trust in the company, and ultimately, to buy products or services. To understand how marketers build
these shifting networks of interdependent genres to achieve their ends, we employ Spinuzzi and
Zachry’s (2000) “genre ecologies” as a framework.

Method
Because content marketing is ill defined and understudied, this exploratory study aims to identify key
issues and variables of content marketing work to help provide direction for future studies of content
marketing. What issues are key to marketers’ understanding of their work? What practices and
genres are key to performing it? Specifically, Wall asked:

(1) What is content marketing? What functions does it serve?

(2) How is content marketing performed? What practices and genres are involved?
(3) How do marketers understand content marketing’s effects? How do they decide when it is
successful? And how does this understanding of success inform the genres produced?

Wall proceeded by conducting an exploratory study of how content marketers understand and
practice their work using a combination of interviews and textual analysis. This study was approved
by our institution’s Institutional Review Board.

Participants
Participants were solicited from among those who self-identified as performing content marketing
on their LinkedIn profiles and who worked in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chosen for its rich
Internet-based industry, the Bay Area was considered likely to yield a fruitful cross section of content
marketers who specialize in digital content. By choosing participants who already use the words
content marketing to describe their work in their LinkedIn profiles, Wall avoided limiting the sample
to a predetermined understanding of what content marketing is.
Interviewees were asked to recommend other relevant participants who also performed content
marketing, and they were contacted using the e-mail address given by the referring interviewee. In
total, Wall interviewed nine participants from seven different companies, including one self-
employed marketer. The small sample size acknowledges that this study is intended to generate
some preliminary implications that can be compared to related literature and from which further
research can proceed.
Not all participants had content marketing or even marketing in their job titles, but they all under-
stood themselves to do some form of content marketing. In Table 1, we list names, job titles, company
type, gender, and years of marketing experience for each participant. “Company type” breaks down
participants’ employers between established and start-up companies, and between B2B (“business-to-
business”) and B2C (“business-to-consumer”) orientations. All but one participant worked for in-house
marketing teams, as opposed to marketing agencies; as an independent marketing consultant, Steve was
the exception. Although we did not ask participants specifically for their ages, about one half appeared
to be young professionals based on the number of years since college graduation.

Data collection
Wall collected two forms of data: interviews and marketing artifacts.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 143

Table 1. Participants.
Name/ Years Marketing
Alias Job Title Company Type Gender Experience
Alessandra Design Historian and Editorial Content B2C start-up Female 2
Manager
Robert Content Marketing and Campaigns Established B2B Male 13
Manager
Steve Chief Marketing Officer Marketing consultancy (self- Male 28
employed)
Vivien Product Marketing Manager Established B2B Female 2
Sarah Marketing, Communications, and Content Established B2B Female 5
Lead
Ly Product Marketing Manager Established B2B Female 5
John Demand Generation Officer B2B start-up Male 6
Susan Content Marketing Manager B2B start-up Female 3
Chris Director of Content Marketing Established B2C/B2B Male 20
Note. B2C = business-to-consumer; B2B = business-to-business.

Interviews
Wall conducted semistructured interviews (Creswell, 2006) of about 45 minutes in person or via video
chat. Participants were asked to describe job duties, their definition of content marketing, the technol-
ogies they use, the genres they produce, the purposes of those genres, and how they interpret results.

Artifacts
Participants were asked to provide portfolios or examples of content marketing efforts (microsites,
blogs, social media accounts, white papers, case studies, landing pages, etc.). Most participants were
worried about privacy for their current jobs and provided limited artifacts. Some opted to provide
artifacts from past employers rather than current employers to ensure the security of their current
marketing efforts. Wall collected 19 artifacts in all, though some of these artifacts are large collec-
tions of content. For example, one artifact was a microsite with more than 40 webpages. Another was
a blog with hundreds of articles.

Data coding
Interviews were transcribed for coding. Coding followed an approach often used in genre-oriented
professional communication research (e.g., Propen & Schuster, 2010; Spinuzzi, 2010; Spinuzzi et al.,
2015; Swarts, 2009). Following Miles and Huberman’s (1994) critique that purely inductive coding
can fail to incorporate the insights of prior theory, Wall used deductive starter codes based on the
interview questions to initially code the data. She then proceeded with inductive open coding
(Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to further categorize the data. She assigned codes per entry (i.e., per
comment or per interview answer), and entries could receive multiple codes. Lastly, she performed
axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to explain the relationships across the codes generated during
open coding. (see the appendix for selected codes.)

Data analysis
Wall analyzed the data through triangulation, determining whether the generated codes appeared
across data types and sources (Creswell, 2006; for examples in professional communication research,
see McCarthy, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, & McLeod, 2011; Spinuzzi, 2010). She compared codes across
a single source’s data. For instance, how does a participant’s definition of content marketing compare
to the understanding of content marketing shown in their work samples? Is their work at odds with
their definition? She also compared codes across data types. For instance, how do participants’
definitions of content marketing compare to each other? Which criteria are shared across multiple
participants’ definitions?
144 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Findings
Here, we explore the interviews and artifacts that Vivien and the other participants supplied when
describing their content marketing practices. Exploring these data in terms of genre yields some
interesting and unusual insights. First, the participants described developing content marketing
genre ecologies that draw audiences in from multiple paths; the ecologies do not require a specific
starting point or a strict sequence of texts to be successful. Second, the participants reported that
even without strict sequencing, these content marketing genre ecologies are designed to persuade
people to move through them in particular directions. Participants use genre conventions, such as
calls to action, to encourage traffic along particular paths. Using the heuristic of the buyer’s journey
or funnel, participants structure content to persuade customers to move from text to text, and
eventually, to purchases. Finally, these content marketing genre ecologies must maintain a double
orientation to selling and not selling, a double orientation that ultimately defines content marketing.

Content marketing as genre ecologies

Based on Wall’s coding, one of the primary content marketing processes that the participants
described was creating ecologies of interrelated pieces of content (coded as “networking content
together”; see appendix). All nine participants discussed this ecology creation; five discussed building
such networks as part of their jobs (as opposed to others whose jobs might be just to supply content
to someone else who would network it). Sarah, one of Vivien’s colleagues at Atlassian, described how
the blog writing process does not end with the publication of the blog post:
We publish it. We’ll definitely tweet it out. We will post a link probably on our Google+ page, possibly on
LinkedIn. If it’s lightweight fun content, which we do a fair amount of, we’ll talk that up on Facebook, too.
Sometimes we’ll do paid ads on those channels. Most of the time it’s just, “Check out this new thing we have.”

Sarah says that the content might then be featured in one of the company’s four newsletters. After
publishing the content, she says, the author checks on analytics weekly, “You’ll see a hump the day it
was published, and then trailing off, and then it’s always fun to see how big a spike did I get from it
being mentioned in the newsletter.”
A single blog post, then, enters into a sprawling genre ecology that includes at least four social
media networks (Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook), the website itself (the blog), and e-mail
campaigns (the newsletters). Some pieces of the genre ecology are preexisting in that the company
already had active accounts or campaigns running through these various platforms, but the creation
of the shorter pieces of content themselves—the status updates and e-mails—is triggered by the
creation of a longer or more significant piece of content—the blog post. All of these pieces of content
are connected with hyperlinks, and Sarah and her team avidly track the movements of audience
members between and among these pieces of content through Google Analytics’ tracking software.
Discussion of this wide variety of content was present in every participant’s interview, reflecting
the diversity of ways in which the Internet makes it possible to deliver content. Some participants
dealt with more kinds of content and some fewer, but no one produced only one genre. Table 2
shows the 23 types of content participants mentioned (coded as “genre/media”; see appendix), and
the number and names of the marketers who discussed them. These 23 types do not encompass the
entire repertoire of genres used by the marketers’ respective companies—just the types mentioned by
participants in their interviews. For example, Sarah, Vivien, and Ly worked at the same company,
but Sarah mentioned social media directly; Vivien mentioned it only in passing (in terms of
generating “tweetable soundbites”); and Ly did not mention it at all.
Eight of nine participants provided examples of their work. In Table 3, we list the number and
types of artifacts collected from each participant.
As Wall analyzed interviews, she used participants’ artifacts as data points to confirm or challenge
participants’ narratives. Blogs were the kind of artifact participants most frequently shared, possibly
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 145

Table 2. Genre and media used by participants.

Genre/Medium Number and Names of Participants
Blog posts 7: Alessandra, Robert, Vivien, Sarah, Susan, Ly,
Chris
E-mails 6: Alessandra, Vivien, Sarah, Susan, Ly, Steve
Microsite/resource center 4: Sarah, Ly, John, Steve
Social media 4: Alessandra, Sarah, Chris, John
Video 4: Robert, Susan, John, Steve
Landing page 3: Sarah, Susan, John
Ad 3: Ly, Chris, John
Infographic 3: Chris, John, Steve
Seminar/webinar 3: Robert, Sarah, Ly
Slide presentation 2: Vivien, Steve
Podcast 1: Steve
Booth at in-person event 1: John
White paper 1: Robert
“Product tour” 1: Sarah
Website copy 1: Vivien
Press Release 1: Vivien
Objection handling (Prepared language for salespeople to use against 1: Vivien
objections)
Case study 1: Robert
Amplified earned media (Promotion of user reviews, blog posts, etc.) 1: Chris
E-books 1: Steve
Style quiz 1: Alessandra
Magazine article 1: Robert
Sponsored news article (Native ad) 1: Chris

Table 3. Artifacts collected from participants.

Participant Name Artifacts Collected
Alessandra 5 blog posts, 2 social media posts
Robert 1 magazine article, 1 blog post
Steve 1 e-book
Ly 1 microsite (comprising ~40 webpages)
Sarah 4 blog posts
Vivien 2 blog posts, 2 landing pages
Susana 2 blog posts, 1 landing page, 1 video, 1 webpage
Johna None
Chrisa 1 blog (comprising >100 blog posts)
Note. aParticipants who chose to use pseudonyms; to protect their anonymity; we do not directly quote them or represent their
artifacts in this article.

because they were the kind of content that most participants generated and because they are also one
of the most public and easily shared kinds of content.
No one, whether they were primarily a strategist, networker, manager, or writer, was involved
with only one kind of content. Even Susan, who said that her single, exclusive job duty was to
create “customer stories,” created multiple kinds of content with those stories and frequently
discussed how her content was related to other content produced by her coworkers. Five of the
participants said that they had been hired for their writing abilities and subject matter expertise.
However, these specialized knowledge and skills do not translate into specializing in either a
medium or a genre, even for journalists like Susan and Chris who have particular expertise in
news genres. Content creators must wield their expertise across genres and media. Content
marketing, at least for these participants, seems to inherently require collection of different
genres.
We analyze these collections as genre ecologies to better grasp the highly contingent, decentra-
lized, and yet relatively stable groupings of genres within content marketing efforts (Spinuzzi &
Zachry, 2000). Here, we use genre ecology to refer to “an interrelated group of genres used to jointly
146 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

mediate the activities that allow people to accomplish complex objectives” (Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000,
p. 172).
Building these genre ecologies tends to involve reusing texts across different genres and media.
This idea that any significant story, news, or information is automatically proliferated into a genre
ecology by reusing it was common among the participants. Robert described the way that discrete
pieces of information can bloom into a genre ecology:

We start with a series of bullet points, because bullet points form a foundation. What are the five things we’re
talking about? So that, then, gets turned into a blog post. Those five bullet points get written out into a couple
of paragraphs, and each one of those either becomes a video or a blog post as well. You pull them all together
into a white paper. [. . .] The thing is that every one of those stages? You then get to blog about it, tweet about it,
everything. And that’s all content as well. So you can start something like four sets of five bullet points each,
and turn it into 30 [sic] assets.

Steve said something similar about the way that the interviews he conducts can proliferate, “If I’m
doing seven assets from every one of those interviews and I’m doing five interviews, that’s 35 content
assets that are out there in mostly media form.” Asset was a word used by five of the participants
(Steve, Robert, Susan, Ly, and Chris) to refer to a single piece of content. This word points to the way
that content becomes a valuable possession of the company.
Content marketers’ reuse of utterances across various assets shows one way that content networks
get built—interconnected not just through hyperlinks, but through the reuse of utterances that bring
along context, authority, or associations from other texts. Unlike the limited kind of reuse present in
single-sourcing processes, reuse in content marketing seems more akin to the network-building
reuse Swarts saw in his 2009 study, “reuse as a network-building activity accommodates distribution
and coordination that are more ad hoc and spread out over time and space” (p. 129). Swarts (2009)
uses what Law (2004) describes as “fractional objects” to describe rhetorical reuse: “These texts use
borrowed content to highlight multiple voices and to index contexts in which content is empowered,
legitimated, or simply associated with specific acts of interpretation” (p. 131). These participants
often had to draw on nonsales interpretations and contexts, like learning, research, and entertain-
ment, to persuade the audience to consume content willingly and to follow links through document
instances within a genre ecology.
Steve contrasts different kinds of reuse, explaining how his reuse process results in a higher
quality genre ecology: “It takes a lot of planning and stuff like that, so now I have all these different
assets . . . all those pieces you create have to stand on their own, and then you create the e-book on
the back end.” In contrast, Steve says, less experienced content marketers write the e-book first, then
choose to repurpose parts of it: “‘We’re going to take a few pieces out that may or may not work on
their own.’”
The artifacts Steve shared confirm his process: an e-book, five blog posts, and six YouTube videos,
all of which relate overlapping information from interviews conducted with six marketing executives.
The YouTube videos feature recordings of the video chat interviews; the blog posts feature the same
YouTube videos appended with written transcripts, and the e-book provides the executives’ answers
organized by question.
To Steve, repurposed content often feels like “afterthoughts”: “They look like someone trying to
make something out of something else.” To avoid the appearance of “afterthoughts,” Steve conducts
his primary and secondary research with several end genres in mind, so that the information he
gathers can be used to compose in multiple genres. In contrast, Steve says, poor examples of reuse
will create a piece of content in one genre and then reuse pieces of that asset in other genres without
sufficient reframing. Steve and Robert describe what seems to be a first step of assembling utterances
without yet putting them to work in customer-facing genres. Robert creates bullet points, Steve
records interviews. This “raw” information (not truly raw, of course, but stored in an internal,
interstitial genre as opposed to an external one) can then be made to serve different rhetorical
functions when it is used to compose in different genres.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 147

Despite Steve’s critique, marketers do reuse content from prepublished genres, and in fact,
reuse is sometimes expected due to the way that genres are connected. Multiple participants
discussed making social media posts that link to longer pieces of content; they often reused
phrases from the blog title or text to accurately indicate the content that the audience will find if
they click a link. Sarah said that this kind of accuracy can be very important for moving the
audience through networks of content; if the content they find breaks their expectations, based
on the way it was described, they may “bounce” and immediately leave without viewing further
content. Vivien mentioned that she has learned ways to incorporate “tweetable soundbites” in
her blogs so that her content is easier to reuse—and thus connect to other content—for the
audience and for Vivien when she promotes her blog post. By bringing various genres’ conven-
tions to bear on different texts and connecting them through links, then, Vivien and Sarah can
set up expectations for their genre ecologies and then meet them, all to build trust with the
audience.

Genre ecologies as persuasion in content marketing

Within genre ecologies, content not only proliferates into different genres but also becomes inter-
connected in deliberate and persuasive ways. That interconnection is especially important for the
developers that Vivien and her colleagues Susan and Ly were trying to reach—developers that, in
Vivien’s words, “hate marketing in general.” Vivien’s colleague Ly contrasted content marketing with
traditional advertisements:
The more authentic way to start engaging buyers is a multi-touch approach. You aren’t saying, “Hey, I’m selling
this thing.” You’re sort of as a company engaging in a conversation with a given potential purchaser about what
are your needs. [. . .] How do we as a company address those concerns? Through multiple touches, which are
the pieces of content that you’re putting out there. You then prove relevancy and lead that user into more and
more product-specific things.

Steve’s e-book, blogs, and YouTube videos form (at least part of) one such genre ecology. The videos
and blogs contain links to encourage the audience to consume the other interviews and to download
the e-book, enticing them consume valuable, educational materials that are not yet specific to the
company’s product, but which may build positive associations with the brand and keep the audience
in contact with the company.
This kind of persuasive ecology is reflected in the work that Vivien, Ly, and Sarah did at their
company. Marketing was broken into teams for each product, and these team divisions created
natural boundaries between some of the content ecologies created to promote different products. We
can see a confirmatory example of one such genre ecology in Vivien’s work.

Vivien’s launches: A close-up example of a genre ecology

Vivien’s job focused on a specific kind of genre ecology related to launching a product. “The product
I worked on launched every five or six weeks. Every five to six weeks I had new content.” The launch
ecology involved a variety of texts: e-mails, landing pages, product copy, objection handling, press
releases, slide presentations, and so on. From there, Vivien and her team (her manager, her product
management counterpart, and an engineer) created a “story” using a heuristic called “the messaging
box” to decide how it will develop into a set of interrelated texts to achieve their goals. The
messaging box is an internal genre: Marketers identify the salable features of the product and
develop angles for selling those features. For instance, for one big launch, the story was a “workflow
story” that emphasized how the product’s new feature would improve workflow for customers (see
Figures 1 and 2). Then, to distribute that story, Vivien and her team chose genres that were
appropriate. For one, they created a video that used characters, “This is a manager; this is how
she works. This is a team lead; this is how he works.” Vivien also wrote a blog post about the same
features.
148 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Figure 1. The top of a blog post written by Vivien.

Figure 2. Part of a landing page written by Vivien.

 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 149

The genre ecology of Vivien’s recurring launch (Figure 3) is decentralized, contingent, and
relatively stable (Spinuzzi & Zachry, 2000). It is relatively stable in that the launch is repeated, as
Vivien said, every 5 or 6 weeks, with roughly the same components each time. The genres are
familiar and recognizable to the audience—a how-to blog post is an understood genre of information
delivery online—and the platforms on which the genres exist are preexisting, with predefined
audiences to address. The genre ecology of the launch is also decentralized in that the audience
may enter it through various doors, and indeed, Vivien’s team makes the most of that decentraliza-
tion to draw in a diverse audience from social media followers, blog subscribers, e-mail subscribers,
and advertisement clickers.
This ecology is also contingent in that it is not a closed system requiring strict sequences of
genres. A reader of Vivien’s blog post might decide to navigate to other pages that are linked to her
blog post: other blog posts within the same blog, the company homepage, or one of the company’s
social media accounts. The reader may read the text and skip the video, or view the video and skip
the text. Or, the reader might decide to navigate away from the company’s content and consume
something else. Reader are free to navigate Vivien’s genre ecology as they see fit, even though
Vivien’s rhetoric seeks to persuade them to follow particular paths. That freedom balanced with that
persuasive rhetoric is an example of the push-pull of selling without selling even though Vivien is
explicitly writing about a product and encouraging the audience to try it: a dynamic to which we
return later.
Vivien’s genre ecology co-creates value with consumers by focusing on their needs. As Ly said,
they are “engaging in a conversation with a given potential purchaser about what are [their]
needs.” Vivien’s rhetoric in the content instances in Figures 1 and 2 foregrounds a value
proposition that the audience must accept and co-create to receive value: “Take control of your
dev workflow.” The rhetorical emphasis on a mutually beneficial interaction may make Vivien’s
texts more persuasive to her audience than texts that focus on unilaterally delivering value to the
consumer.

Figure 3. Vivien’s genre ecology, functioning as a sales funnel. Most of the genres do not explicitly “sell” the product, but most
include call-to-action links (dashed arrows) that eventually lead readers to the signup page—the end of the sales funnel.
150 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Persuasive pathways within ecologies

To establish these separate pieces of content as a genre ecology, participants connect content with
links. Marketers curate these links thoughtfully and deliberately to create movement in particular
directions.
One common link genre is the call to action (CTA) link (coded as “CTA”; see appendix). (The
specific phrase CTA was used by four of the nine participants, but the idea—references to links
between pieces of content that are intended to convey people from one to the other—was in six
of the nine interviews.) Online marketers occasionally use CTA to refer to any rhetoric that calls
for a specific action, but most often, an online CTA refers simultaneously to the rhetoric that
calls for the action and the mechanism by which that action can be taken. Vivien gives us two
examples: the button in Figure 1 says “Get Integrated” and the similar button in Figure 2 says
“Get started now.”
Such connections function as paths through which potential customers can move. Vivien’s
colleague Sarah explained how her content fits into the greater genre ecology when she discussed
the CTA) that she places in her blog posts.
Usually I choose a call-to-action that matches the content, and if it’s not related to a particular version of a
product that just got released, it will usually just be like, “Go try this.” [. . .] If I write a blog doing a recap of a
webinar that I just gave: one paragraph that hits the high points, maybe throw in a bonus Q&A, like an
audience question that I couldn’t get to during the webinar, and the action there that I want people to take is go
watch the recording.

Sarah initially used “start a free trial” as the call-to-action within her blogs for a while, but eventually
she started to feel “like that was a little too abrupt. I felt like that was asking a little bit too much of
the reader right off the bat.” Sarah then changed her CTA to a “Learn More” button pointing to the
product tour page; after clicking on this button, the audience could learn more about the product
before being offered a link to the free trial. In this way, Sarah changed the route that her audience
could take through the larger content network on the site. Instead of “asking too much” of her
audience, she asks just a little bit each time. After reading a blog post, it’s not a big jump to read a
product tour. After reading a product tour, a reader may be persuaded enough to try out a product
for free. After trying the product for free, the same reader may be persuaded enough to buy it. At
least, Sarah and her team hope that the audience will take this sequence of actions.

The buyer’s funnel

This sense that potential customers can be led little by little toward the buying decision is a common
one in marketing. A concept that arose repeatedly in participants’ descriptions of genres was the
funnel, a marketing model variously referred to as the purchasing funnel, sales funnel, buyer’s
funnel, or conversion funnel. Other models use different metaphors, such as the buyer’s “journey”
or “cycle,” but regardless of the metaphor, this concept was mentioned by seven of the nine
participants (coded as “Buyer’s Funnel”; see the appendix). Four of those seven mentioned the
funnel specifically when they were asked to explain the difference between different types of content.
(Figure 3 shows Vivien’s sales funnel.)
The idea that the buying process can be broken down into various stages, starting with initial
awareness of the product and proceeding through the actual sale, was first proposed by Elias St.
Elmo Lewis in 1898 and further developed by advertising scholars over the course of the next century
(Barry, 1987). The multistep buying process was somewhat controversial among advertising theor-
ists; they debated whether it was useful to concentrate on intermediary steps when sales were
ultimately the only numbers that mattered. In many kinds of traditional media, final sales were
the only part of the buying process that could be reliably measured. But Internet technology changed
this focus: Marketing makes it possible to put numbers to those intermediary steps. As many of the
participants explained, traffic between different pieces of content can indicate movement through the
buyer’s journey.
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 151

Vivien’s colleague Ly made the same point when she shared how she wields content marketing
“through multiple touches, which are the pieces of content that you’re putting out there.” This idea
of multiple touches, and of leading the user “into more and more product-specific things,” illustrates
not only the importance of connections among content, but also the rhetorical content of those
connections. In “leading” the user to more product-specific content, Ly and her team are persuading
them to follow particular paths between pieces of content.
For instance, Ly spearheaded an educational microsite that she describes as a “top of the funnel”
piece of content. A microsite is a set of webpages that live on a larger domain but is intended to
appear as though it is a separate website. In Ly’s case, the educational microsite existed on her
company’s website, but very little company branding appeared on those pages. It was possible to
navigate the microsite without realizing that one was viewing a company-sponsored set of pages.
(View this microsite live at www.atlassian.com/git.) Git is a widely used, open source version control
system for software development, and this microsite provides tutorials for using it. Ly’s company
creates software that helps teams manage their use of Git, and so this minimally branded microsite
serves as top-of-the-funnel content that educates the customer, generates trust in the company, and
hopefully, leads the customer to consume more product-specific content further down the funnel. As
we discuss below, such top-of-the-funnel tactics often involve providing product-agnostic value to
the consumer.
As noted previously, Vivien’s CTA buttons in her blog post (Figure 1) and landing page
(Figure 2) move the audience forward in a particular way. The blog post features a button that
says, “Get Integrated” at the beginning and end of the post, taking us to the landing page. The
landing page features a button that says, “Get started now” at intermittent points on the page, taking
us to a pricing page. The pricing page in turn features a button that reads “Free trial,” leading the
audience to a page where they can enter their information and gain access to the software.
When Wall asked Vivien’s colleague Susan about the difference between the genres she uses,
Susan used the marketing funnel to explain how the sales process can be broken down into various
types of persuasion. Susan sees different persuasive affordances in different genres. The “sound bite”
from a recognizable company might help new audience members to feel “connected,” whereas
audience members who are more familiar with the company—that is, farther down the funnel—
might be delivered an in-depth “customer story to illustrate exactly how they’ve used certain
features.” Susan’s blog posts and landing pages provide evidence to support this narrative: Each
artifact seeks to persuade the audience to take an action such as clicking through to other pages or
joining a mailing list. Therefore, Susan’s genre ecology is decentralized, with many potential
entrances and exits, but it is still designed with identifiable persuasive pathways. This buyer’s journey
or funnel provides a structure that Susan can use to evaluate her success.

Targeting audiences for targeted persuasion

Moreover, different ways of distributing texts may also serve to distinguish genres by partitioning
audiences. The way in which an audience chooses to access information—or the way in which they
make themselves accessible—can provide a clue to the kind of content (or persuasion) they are
interested in or open to. Susan said that, at Atlassian, e-mails typically go out to preexisting
customers, and thus provide information about how they can more efficiently use a product they
already own. They may be encouraged to try a related product, or to upgrade their current product.
Identifying these audiences can be key to targeting persuasion. For example, John shared one
method of targeting audiences by explaining the concept of the landing page:
You see an ad on Google, or you see a banner ad on TechCrunch. You click on it, you go somewhere. That
destination is typically not the homepage, to give a more tailored message to whatever the place you’re pitching
that ad in the first place, or however you’ve targeted that. And refinement of that is something that we just
spend a lot of time at my current company, in part because we sell a platform with a lot of different audiences.
So we’re starting to verticalize in these spaces, different jobs to be done, to use a term that we like to talk about,
which is like a Clay Christensen thing.
152 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Business theorist Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” (Clayton Christensen Institute, 2014, para.
1) is an approach to audiences that rhetoric scholars will find familiar. Instead of building messages
based on audience demographics such as gender, age, or race, Christensen’s model uses “jobs to be
done” to theorize audiences in terms of the various problems they need to solve. Customers have
“jobs” for which they are “‘hiring’ a product or service” (para. 2). John, then, is explaining that he
creates landing pages to address different rhetorical situations. He can “verticalize in these spaces” to
address the specific situations of a particular audience. In this way, John can customize his content
so that when audience members arrive on a webpage, they see blogs posts or other content that are
more relevant to their interests (“proving relevancy,” as Vivien’s colleague Ly put it). John aims to
persuade the audience to click through and read more. The audience will have entered the buyer’s
funnel.
In Christensen’s model, consumers take an active role in helping produce the value that they seek.
In casting problems as “jobs” for which consumers “hire” solutions, Christensen understands the
consumer–company interaction as an ongoing relationship. John describes himself as spending a lot
of time refining advertisements to reach different audiences with different needs. This refinement
process—testing out different messages to gauge click-through-rates and engagement—helps John
figure out “customized service solutions” for different audiences. Although he may not be inter-
viewing customers or soliciting their feedback, he is seeking out ways to build value propositions
based on customers’ unique needs.

The double orientation to selling and not selling

The network of content acts as a buyer’s funnel (albeit not as linearly as the funnel metaphor
implies) to lead the audience ultimately to purchases. The end of the funnel is a sale. But as Vivien
implied in the quote at the beginning of this article, many audiences do not want to be sold to—so
the pieces of content that lead in that direction largely do not sell directly. Although these inter-
mediate steps could not be measured in earlier media, like print, they can be measured to various
extents for Internet media. This ability to measure makes these intermediary nonsales steps visible
and more important in a way they weren’t before. Content marketing is thus doubly oriented to
selling and not selling; these conflicting logics mutually enable each other. Without sales, marketers
could not fund the production of nonsales content, and without nonsales content, marketers would
find it more difficult to make sales.
To persuade people to move along the pathways they provided, participants often oriented genres
toward not selling. One way is in value-driven, “company-agnostic” content (as Ly put it). In the case
of an educational microsite, Ly believed strongly that agnostic content would be more persuasive to
the audience, and she felt that she was proved right when the microsite was talked up by notoriously
skeptical industry bloggers.
Participants’ primary method of not selling was providing value. At Vivien, Sarah, and Ly’s
company, this value mostly came in the form of how-to content that explained how to use the
products. At Chris’s company, this value came in the form of journalistic entertainment and
information; the company’s content was intended to mimic the look and feel of news magazine
content, with posts resembling news and feature articles. Alessandra’s work at the design company
was similar: She wrote blogs and social media posts intended to make someone feel they were
reading a design blog.
Every single participant mentioned not selling as an important component of their marketing
efforts. For instance, Alessandra aimed to make her company’s blog and social media seem, for the
most part, like a disinterested distributor of interesting design news:
For all of my blog posts, and all of my content posts, I think 95% of them were about something else, so about
something in the interior design world, but brought to you by Tastemaker. So they weren’t about, “You should
use Tastemaker, because we’re really great.” Like, “Hey, we love Charles and Rae Eames; you probably would
too. Check them out.”
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 153

Take, for instance, Alessandra’s blog post, “Pantone Color of the Year: How to Decorate with
Radiant Orchid.” This blog post was published on the company blog and on The Huffington Post
as a tie-in article to generate interest for the company. Alessandra’s article features multiple home
décor items with pink-purple hues to inform the audience about a trending topic—the Pantone color
of the year—and to entertain audiences who are interested in decorating. The only mention of
Alessandra’s company is in a line at the beginning of the article, when Alessandra says that
decorators at her company had mixed reactions to the color.
This endeavor to perform like a media or news company is interesting, because consumers expect
there to be a clear separation between advertising content and news content, and those expectations
have become embedded in the carefully impartial style of news genres. Media organizations have
encountered difficulty in maintaining a satisfactory distinction between sponsored content (a.k.a.
native advertising) and nonsponsored content (Lazauskas, 2014; C. Smith, 2014). Although the
audience may be distantly aware that such a division is not as easily held on the Internet, and
though they may notice that the informational article they are reading is on a corporate website or
written by a company representative, the desire for quick, accessible content that is either useful or
entertaining can keep them happily blind to the corporate sponsorship—unless they are reminded of
it by the content itself.
This distinction is even fuzzier in the case of Alessandra’s article, which was published by The
Huffington Post, a news media organization. The article was not sponsored content; Alessandra’s
company did not pay for it to appear. To generate the huge amounts of content it provides, The
Huffington Post must employ the services of a network of writers from all industries, many of them
marketers like Alessandra. In terms of overall content, the article is not selling anything, and it is
published on a news media website. However, the article does link to Alessandra’s company,
Tastemaker, and the article only exists because Alessandra was employed by Tastemaker to write
it. It is thus an example of a double orientation to selling and not selling, as well as the way that these
orientations enable each other.
This double orientation is similarly apparent in an article by Robert, published in an industry
magazine, Electricity Today. Robert’s employer at the time made industrial electrical equipment, and
Robert’s article, “Storm-Hardened Switchgear: How to Protect Electrical Equipment from Mother
Nature,” provides information about the protection of that kind of equipment. This article was part
of a larger content marketing effort that included other content such as a white paper and a video
and succeeded in terms of not selling and selling. Robert related that being published in Electricity
Today was itself a success; because it a major industry publication, the acceptance of the article was a
vote of confidence for the article’s value. But the company also received phone calls (in other words,
leads) as a result of the article. This article thus illustrates how nonselling content can lead to sales.
As Robert explained, it helped to establish his company as an expert in the subject area.
Another way that the participants approached not selling was through content that facilitated the
cocreation of value with audience members. For example, a company contracted Steve to produce an
e-book that would appeal to marketing professionals. He interviewed multiple Chief Marketing
Officers (CMOs) to build an e-book, Straight Talk from CMOs, that shares their opinions on various
current issues in the field. He organized the book around the interview questions, providing the
answers each CMO gave to each question so the audience could easily compare answers and get a
sense of the field at large. In this way, Steve sought to provide valuable expertise in an accessible
style. It is in reading and comparing answers that the audience gains value from the e-book. Lattice,
the sponsoring company, co-creates value with their potential customers by discovering and dis-
tributing content that is relevant to audience members’ unique needs (Lusch & Vargo, 2014). This
e-book does that; Steve or Lattice determines what audience members want to know, either through
guessing or research. The content distribution process can also be a form of dialogue that helps the
company figure out audience members’ needs. For example, if the e-book is downloaded many times
or receives numerous shares, Lattice may conclude that Straight Talk from CMOs is a good
indication of their potential customers’ needs and interests.
154 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

It is the co-creation of value that may help to explain why content marketing is persuasive.
Because consumers must participate in the process of building value by seeking out content,
consuming it, and clicking through to different pieces of a content—in a way that may feel like
research, as Robert pointed out—they take on slightly greater agency in the sales process. Ideally,
content is tailored to help meet consumers’ needs, so consumers may feel they are creating value
within their own lives by addressing their problems using marketers’ proposed solutions.
Participants also spoke about how they positioned content as having potential monetary value by
using language like “bonus,” “free,” or “exclusive.” For instance, Vivien’s colleague Sarah mentioned
that a blog write-up of a webinar might include a “bonus Q&A, like an audience question that I
couldn’t get to during the webinar.” Steve discussed a method of drawing in the audience by
promising bonus content in exchange for an e-mail address.
On the other end of the spectrum, a marketer might have to edge back into selling, just because
an audience might not “buy” a writer’s attempts at not selling. Chris explained, “It’s hard to really
write a blog that comments neutrally about the overall market in that space and be authoritative
because no one’s going to perceive you’re that anyway.”
The best that a marketing blog could do, Chris mused, would be to “put out interesting content
rather than super informative in the journalistic sense.” When he wrote native ads—sponsored articles
posted on news sites like Forbes or CNN—he would “stop deprecatingly, point out the call to action and
be very, like, ‘Well, full disclosure I work for [company name], and blah-blah-blah.’” This disclosure
acknowledges the user’s perception and allays the suspicion that the article is deceptive. Chris concedes
to his audience that he has not “fooled” them in some way. This concession creates credibility.
Vivien’s colleague Ly faced a similar dilemma of credibility. To promote the educational microsite
she developed, Ly contracted two outside developer evangelists to write blog posts on the same topic
as the educational microsite. These evangelists are considered authorities within the developer
community and were concerned that the blog posts posted to the company website would hurt
their credibility. “They were feeling that mismatch of why am I . . . it’s hurting my reputation as an
evangelist to be publishing on a company blog where people are selling things.” In addition to the
bloggers’ concern about credibility, Ly had another reason to be concerned about placing these
articles on the company blog: “I was losing a method of amplifying the amount of traffic that could
go very specifically to the Git microsite [by having them on the company blog instead of the
microsite].” For Ly, the issue of how particular audiences perceive credibility “gets at . . . the
differences between all these different mediums that I have to communicate with people.” In other
words, different genres get distinguished at least in part by the audience expectations that come
attached to them. As rhetorical genre theory tells us, genres are socially recognized forms of address
that store and transmit traditions of interpretation (e.g., Miller, 1984; Russell, 2009).
Content marketers must thus be careful in how they construct content ecologies. In Ly’s case, there
was a mismatch between the evangelist’s posts on the company blogs and the fully agnostic educational
microsite. Ly worried that mixing those two kinds of content hampered the traffic between the two. The
connection between the two kinds of content disrupted genre expectations, making the conflict of
selling/not selling visible to the user. Ly suggests that, in the course of building successful content
ecologies, she must be careful to subsume her orientation to selling with plenty of nonselling content in
ways that are consistent across genres and their linkages. And for Ly, who defined content marketing as
a way to increase organic traffic, hampering traffic is a big blow to her entire enterprise.
Chris counters the complication of the double orientation with two other kinds of content: native ads
and amplified earned media. Native ads are sponsored articles designed to look exactly like magazine or
news articles. The only indication that they are, in fact, advertisements may be a small logo or byline.
Earned media are reviews, comments, blog posts, etc. that are written by people outside the company.
Companies can “amplify” earned media through various means, including linking to reviews from their
own media, or even by paid advertising. Because earned media are written spontaneously by people
outside the company, they carry strong levels of authenticity; they are the epitome of not selling. Chris
uses them to sell by paying for services that will promote those reviews, comments, and posts:
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 155

We’re rounding up all the positive reviews [. . .]. There is the whole content application program where we
invest money to push out things, amplify things without our fingerprints on it. So that you will see like a
positive [company] review like when you’re scrolling down CNN because if it’s in Outbrain, or in Taboola,
you’ll see that. We think that’s very effective.

Susan’s company also made use of amplified earned media; the sales team sent out links to blog posts
customers had written during sales pitches. In this way, customer reviews and blog posts are drafted
into the content marketing ecology by means of advertising software and hyperlinks. Marketers do
not even have to create all their content to use it to sell.

Conclusion and implications

Previously in this article, we suggested that Vivien’s product-focused blog and landing page (Figures 1
and 2) are indicative of the selling-without-selling dynamic, even though they explicitly ask the reader to
try a product. This double orientation shows up in the way Vivien’s team approaches persuasion.
Instead of relying simply on direct appeals to buy, they provide considerable information in a variety of
genres: social media tidbits, juicy blog posts, enticing videos, and educational screencaps. In fact, they
never ask readers to buy directly; instead, they offer more information in the form of a link to yet
another piece of content. Ultimately, they offer friendly buttons that say, “Get Integrated” (Figure 1) or
“Get started now” (Figure 2). By the time customers have, for example, downloaded a free trial, used it
up, and have finally been prompted to pay for a subscription, they have consumed an enormous amount
of content related to the product, up to and including the product itself. This highly engineered genre
ecology is content marketing par excellence, even though much of its content is focused on the
products. The helpful ethos (“Upgrade your development workflow!”) and the ecological structure of
the content make this genre ecology what it is: content marketing.
This double orientation to selling and not selling is thus the defining characteristic of content
marketing ecologies. When taken separately, many pieces of content marketing may seem agnostic;
when taken together, the persuasive pathways within the genre ecology hold it together and expose the
orientation to selling. The tension between these two orientations can be difficult to maintain, depend-
ing on the company. Alessandra’s efforts for her design company, for example, are highly agnostic and
transmit persuasiveness mostly in the form of entertainment. Susan’s crafting of “customer stories” is
perhaps a little more complex in that she must take a journalistic approach to the interviews she does so
that her work in producing those stories becomes invisible. Vivien, Sarah, and Ly’s marketing work
focuses on their own products and yet must still try to maintain a kind of aloofness to court marketing-
weary engineers. In their case, the negotiations needed to maintain orientations to selling and not selling
can be intense. But what makes these ecologies similar are the double orientation to selling/not selling
and the way content is connected in persuasive pathways.
Beyond the specifics, this case helps us understand genres in relation to each other and in relation
to a common activity. Content marketers abduct genres from one activity to another, hybridizing
them and relating them to each other (cf. Spinuzzi, 2003). In doing so, content marketers attempt to
co-create value with customers, a move that has been discussed infrequently in the professional
communication literature (e.g., London et al., 2015). We believe that both aspects need to be
explored more thoroughly in online spaces.

Notes on contributors
Amanda Wall is a UX researcher at Facebook, where she serves as a content strategist and performs qualitative
research. She has a PhD in rhetoric from the University of Texas, where she wrote her dissertation on content
management.

Clay Spinuzzi is a professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies how people
organize, communicate, collaborate, and innovate at work. Spinuzzi has conducted multiple workplace studies,
resulting in several articles and four books: Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press, 2003), Network
156 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

(Cambridge University Press, 2008), Topsight (Amazon CreateSpace, 2013), and All Edge (University of Chicago Press,
2014). He blogs at spinuzzi.blogspot.com.

ORCID
Clay Spinuzzi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9629-6189

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158 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Appendix: Data Codes

Selected Starter Codes

Code Description Example

Content Kinds Names, definitions, labels, or other ways that “Instead of just having a blog or thinking of things in a
kinds of content are distinguished from each blog, which blogs are not very well done by and large,
other. what about a knowledge center? In that knowledge
center, you covered a combination of things, original
content that was designed.” - Steve
Goal/Purpose of Projected outcomes, goals, reasons, or “Say, on a certain channel, we’re dealing with white
Content purposes that participants have for content papers…. We have a couple of things, one is obviously
marketing efforts. lead generation. We want to be able to drive leads so their
sales guys can, you know. We also want to inform people
so we’re doing a little bit of the sales guy’s job.” - Robert
Process Procedures, ordered steps, methodologies for “It’s thinking about large industry events that are
developing and carrying out content happening; it’s looking at calendars. Looking at trade
marketing work. catalogs,… to see what’s new in their collection, and saying,
okay, this is what we’re going to write about.” - Alessandra

Selected Open Codes

Code(s) Description Example

Audience Discussions of existing customers, potential “I can check by how much they spend or how
customers, and users/consumers of content many users they have, and how many times
marketing. they’ve used certain features in our product.” - Ly
Collaboration Discussions of collaborative work. “Even the publishing of a blog, publishing of an
email, we have content teams that run the
operations of it. We have to make sure the
schedules fit.” - Vivien
CTA Discussions or examples of Calls-to-Action, in “Usually I choose a call to action that matches
which a piece of content makes a direct appeal to the content.” - Sarah
take a specific action.
Definition of CM Discussions of or artifacts showing how “Reflecting on what is content, it’s everything
participants defined or delineated the practice of from advertisement to a landing page to a blog
content marketing. post to a tweet.” - John
Don’t Sell Discussions of or artifacts showing the principle “And oftentimes, those posts aren’t direct
or strategy of avoiding direct appeals to buy in advertisements for the brand, but speaking to
content marketing materials. something that promotes the brand in some
way.” - Alessandra
Entry to CM Discussions of how participants entered the field “I was kind of curious too because for so long,
of content marketing. I’ve written about companies and with kind of
analytical and sort of a know-it-all attitude, and
now I wanted to see did I know as much as I
thought, so I was curious to go to the other
side.” - Chris
Genre/Media Codes - Blog, Discussions or artifacts of specific content genre “Well, for our blog, that one’s probably the most
social media, email, or media. unique. That’s mostly about trying to gain
landing pages, special thought leadership amongst our target
web docs, microsite, e- audience.” - Susan
books, product docs,
case studies, white
papers, press release,
webinar/seminar, event,
podcast, video, ad
Learning CM Learning to perform content marketing work “I worked with our editorial advisor, too. So she
and/or a particular job role: training, learning helped me kind of refine my voice, and just. So
experiences, formal education. my first few posts, probably for the first month
or two I was there, she would edit all my posts
for me.” - Alessandra
(Continued )
 TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY 159

(Continued).
Code(s) Description Example
Management Discussions of participants managing the work of “Then also carving out time with our developers
others or having their own work managed. who are our subject matter experts who could
validate the content this contractor was getting
out.” - Ly
Metrics Discussions of measuring the results of content “Either cost per visit or cost per lead. That’s
marketing. typically backwards calculated, based upon the
average size of the customer, so [inaudible]
average revenue per account that we’re getting
per year, with some assumptions around churn.”
- John
Networking Discussions of or artifacts showing connections “What’s traffic coming into your website, and
between content your blog, and how many download passes are
people doing now?” - Steve
Reuse Discussion of or artifacts showing reuse of words, “But in creating that PDF, you’re creating 20
ideas, images, etc. in different assets. pieces of content that can then be resorted and
used in other ways.” - Robert
SEO Discussion of or artifacts showing search engine “I think partly due to the fact that it’s good
optimization techniques, or interaction with content, and partly due to the fact that we just
search engines. SEO-ed the heck out of it, it gets pretty good
traffic.” - Sarah
Strategy Discussion of content strategy and its “So like an online seminar for IT professionals
development, i.e. the plan for how content will and…. So, the process of, how do we start with
be chosen, developed, and connected in strategic the topic? How do we choose our speakers?
ways. What kind of a direction do we want to go?” -
Robert
Success Discussion of what constitutes success or failure. “At Company A, which is a much bigger
company, it has like 800 people, I still wasn’t…I
never really had any good metrics for success. I
remember we tossed around trying to drive up
increased page views to the customers’ landing
page, by 30% every quarter?” - Susan
Writing/Production Discussion of or artifacts showing the production “If it’s a longer blog, if it’s a story that I feel like
of content, whether written, video-recorded, etc. we’re really stretching, a couple of pages that will
really make sense and try to figure out the
transitions between them, that could take a really
long time for me. It could be as long as like
seriously a whole day just doing that, or
sometimes…I’ll do them in pieces. Usually with a
launch, there’s a bunch of images and short pieces
of content that needs to be done.” - Vivien

Selected Axial Codes

Code Description Example

Buyer’s Funnel The idea that buyers proceed through Based on “And then if you go slightly further down the
codes: audience, audience’s buying process, funnel, you’ve got people who are already, who
networking, targeting/demographic are trying the product out for free.” - Susan
Networking Content Connecting content together in persuasive “Maybe I just wrapped up these series of webinars
Together networks, creating persuasive pathways. Based on and I need to see how people are interacting with
codes: CTAs, genre/media codes, audience, the follow-up assets that I’m setting them to like
strategy drip feed emails and all that. Maybe I just need to
go back to do some peer analysis of people who
have come in through all these different ways
through the same asset.” - Ly
160 A. WALL AND C. SPINUZZI

Final Codes and Sub-codes

Major Codes Sub-Codes

Artifact codes Reference to company, images, author photo, author credit, summary/table of contents, call-out text,
call-to-action
Audience Audience’s buying process, buyer’s funnel, targeting/demographic
Entry to CM Learning CM, locating self in the field, job duties, background
Genre/Media Blog, social media, email, landing pages, special web docs, microsite, e-books, product docs, case
studies, White papers, press release, webinar/seminar, event, podcast, video, ad
Process Content reuse, content collaboration, contractors, revision/monitoring, image work, interaction with
users, content data gathering, content source, content quality, distributed work, process quality,
reporting, networking content together, SEO, tech work, texts/references, tools, word work